Four films are on the agenda this week and only time will tell this early in the season whether they are going to be genuine title contenders, gritty battlers hoping for a shot at mid-table obscurity or no-hopers doomed to a season of heartache and inevitable relegation. Please excuse the laboured football metaphors but the best of this week’s releases is set in the world of 1970s English football (all fags, booze and Deep Heat) and I let the mud get under my fingernails a bit.
Based on the 2006 surprise hit novel by David Peace, The Damned United is about the bizarre 44 days in 1974 when mercurial British football manager Brian Clough tried to manage Leeds United. Opinion is divided about whether the possibly mentally unbalanced Clough was actually trying to destroy a team he hated from the inside or whether he had genuinely let his ambition (and competitive streak) get the better of his judgement. The book successfully manages to get deep inside the head of a man who is unravelling under the pressure but the film isn’t as ambitious.
If I could have another life to live, simultaneous with my own, I would probably spend most of it playing