Peeping Tom’s Home Cinema – Six of the best: Rugby Union

Not really my code but you gotta anticipate this one. The world’s eyes are on Auckland – apparently. At least that’s what my mates there tell me. Sounds like bloody hysterical media hype to me. Mind you, it’s not like the country has an economy so maybe anything is good so long as it detracts from the social malaise. Mates tell me it’s being presented as the hope of an historic win for the All Blacks. Bollocks hyperbole. Historic meaning that they don’t choke once out of pool play. Like I say, the whole thing is a deflection from a little country going down the economic gurgler. Bread and circuses and all that.

Actually, New Zealand is almost interesting because of rugby union. It’s probably the one country where it’s akin to an everyman’s game. Elsewhere the working classes play league, football (the real kind), AFL, ice hockey, gridiron and the rest of it, leaving rugger for the posh kids or (in Apartheid times) Boers. Not so in the shakey isles – which might explain a lot of boof-heads in the national squad.

Speaking of, a short film that might be a good teaser is the hilarious interspacing of gay porn with a locker-room scene form an ad for the disgusting beer Steinlager made by Peter Wells in the eighties. Excellently subversive with the tag of the commercial a great sing-along “give ‘em a taste of kiwi”. Fucking hilarious.

1. Tom Brown’s School Days, 1951

Basically included because it’s set in the toff school that gave the name to the game. Called punt-about here, it suggests all the brutish thuggery that we’ve come to know and love from the classic tale of the kid bulled by Flashman. Ah, thems were the days when manly men had fags (and we’re not talking smokes). Who says I have no sense of history.

2. The Four Feathers, 2002

This remake (with Wes Bently, Kate Hudson and Heath Ledger) adds very little to the pre-existing story of courage and Empire – which is a nice way of saying colonial oppression almost up there with Zulu Dawn – what a film! Anyhow, the credits roll over a rugby sequence that recalls the Duke of Wellington’s oft-repeated remark that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton (another toff school). There’s a later scene of playing in the Sudan – Huzzah! (Though whether it’s Sudan or Dafur now days would be subject to appeal to the Colonial Office.) But sets up the rugby/battle/stiff upper lip stuff nicely. Mind you, does remind me of the shameful, shameful remarks of All Black Captain Anton Oliver when he seriously likened the dressing room after they were last beaten by the French in the Tournament to what it must’ve been like in the trenches in World War I. YOU ARE FUCKING KIDDING ME YOU DOLT? GET A FUCKING GRIP! Mind you, if Wellington had been wrong then we’d all be Frenchies, huh?

3. Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, 1983

Still dealing with toffs, one of a sequence of genius skits from the Python lads. Following on from a live sex lesson from one of the masters and his missus, the action cuts to the regular rugby match between boys and masters. Immediate excuse for anarchic cruelty and violence on the field. Likely the same metaphor as Wellington but way more subversive.

4. Invictus, 2009

Speaking of Waterloo (and never was the name more apt). Clint Eastwood directs this number based on the South African hosting of the event in 1995. The metaphors shift around a bit though with wily old Nelson Mandela supposedly recognizing the best way to get on board with white South Africans is to be seen to support and promote their sport. Brilliant piece of Realpolotik there and nice take on nation-building and the role of popular culture. How some will watch the film, though, will be a matter of taking sides. Rallying cry for the new South Africa, showing triumph of indomitable spirit, the leadership of the great one (here played by Morgan Freeman – I mean, what other part is there once he’s played God a few times) and the writing a page in history of the captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon, who also shows a spot of rugby talent in The Departed). Bitter travesty for kiwis and persistent claims the squad was poisoned prior to the final. Yeah, yeah what’re they gonna come up with this time around?

5. Alive, 1993

Where Hannibal Lecter meets Lord of the Flies meets Tom Brown’s School Days and with a good line in chow thrown into the mix. Bunch of early nineties himbos (lead by Ethan Hawke) play members of a Uruguayan team that crashes in the Andes and they all end up eating each other. No, that came out wrong. They eat their mates. Better, ho about, trapped on the mountainside for ages so are forced to eat the bodies of their fellow team-members, the flesh having been helpfully preserved in the icy conditions. Stirring stuff.

6. Murderball, 2005

Brilliant documentary about paraplegic rugby players at the World Paraplegic Games. Fuck some of these guys are psychos. Forget aw shucks patronizing bullshit, this film’s a great mix of humour and violence. You’d almost imagine that the Python boys had a hand in it. Bloody outstanding viewing.

Couple of suggestions that didn’t make it because they’re so obscure there were no images on the net. SBW was keen on Old Scores, a wheezing clicheic film about the replay of a New Zealand/Wales match 25 years after the event. Cue geezer insights form writer Greg Magee who just can’t repeat the success of his seventies play Foreskin’s Lament. Other one, very unhappy about this as it sounds by far the best of the bunk: Ymadawiad Arthur (now wipe the spit off your chin) a Welsh-language sci-fi comedy based on a mixup between a national hero form the sixties and the famed King of Briton. Fucking genius, this is why God invented cinema.

Just in case you’ve just crawled out from under a rock and are bemused by this Home Cinema: New Zealand’s hosting the Rugby World Cup. Even enthusiastic mates are prepared to accept that an economy, an election and the soul of a nation rest on the outcome. I assume they mean that the All Blacks need to win. Fat fucking chance.