Some Monday Musings

I'm afraid that the smut quotient was down this past weekend.  I allowed myself to be distracted by a football match and a Star Trek movie marathon playing on Film Four, (I'm something of a sucker for the first three films).  In fact, it wasn't so much Saturday Night Smut, but Saturday Night Sleaze, as I took in eighties trash classic Savage Streets.  To be fair, this tale of teenage vigilantism had its share of smut, with plenty of bare breasts, school locker room bitch fights and the like.  In an attempt to make up for my lack of  smutty viewing earlier in the weekend, Sunday was spent re-watching a Jesus Franco double bill of Dracula, Prisoner of Frankenstein and Erotic Rites of Frankenstein.  I'd forgotten just how bat shit crazy and bizarre these two early seventies Franco monster rallies were.  That's the thing about Franco - much of his prolific output consists of hastily made and often tedious pot-boilers, but every so often he'd come up with something graced by by the sort of inspired lunacy that tips it over into pure surrealism.  Such is the case with these two films.  I should make it clear that my weekends haven't become cinematic smut fests by design - it's just that I've started exploring a couple of streaming channels that have a fair amount of seventies and eighties sexploitation titles (of wildly varying quality) in their catalogues.  

But getting back to those distractions - if I learned one thing from the England-Ukraine Euro 2020 Quarter Final, it was that I'd be bloody useless in a war.  Not because I'd make a truly crap soldier, (although I would be, thanks to my total anathema to the whole concept of military discipline and rank hierarchies), but because I'm too easily swayed by feelings of sympathy for the opposition.  I'm sorry, I know that I was meant to be rooting for England and should have been rejoicing when Harry Kane put that first goal in, but the camera then panned to two little girls in the crowd, wearing Ukraine shirts and in tears.  I just didn't have the heart to rejoice then, I felt so bad for them.  It was the same throughout the match, as England racked up the goals - the TV coverage kept cutting to Ukraine fans on the verge of tears.  I know that one could argue that it is ridiculous to put do much emotional energy into a football match that you can be reduced to tears when it doesn't go your way, but we all do it and I hate to see people looking that distressed and devastated.  I'm a Spurs fan, I know how it is to have your hopes and dreams constantly crushed, (curiously, I've come to terms with it in other spheres of my life, but when they lose a match, it still hurts).  Perhaps it is my age, but increasingly I ind myself susceptible to such emotional displays.  Then again, maybe I've always been - certainly, small children and animals have always seemed to know how to get around me with the right sorts of pleading looks.