Missus Dom and me have an arrangement: one of us gets to pick a movie and then the other picks the next one. I squandered my turn on Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, and I’m still wondering if Eddie the Eagle would have been a better choice…
Some of you might remember Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards: the British ski-jumper who entered the 1988 Winter games at Calgary. Eddie had very little going for him aside from iron gonads and a ‘must try’ attitude. He didn’t do very well of course, but the world loves an underdog, so for most of 1988, the world loved Eddie the Eagle.
So much so, it appears, that someone decided that a biopic based loosely around Eddie’s adventures at the Calgary Games might be a bit of a seller.
Classic Neil Gaiman: the everyday blended with the bloody weird. The Ocean at the End of the Lane could be a fairy story, maybe even a children’s story, but the sinister overtones and the occasional adult theme might possibly tip things over into the adult category… maybe. It’s a very simple story, about a young boy living in Sussex as part of a fairly standard nuclear family. His life isn’t all that exciting: he’s a bookish outcast at school and his only real friend is Lettie, the supernatural being who is as old as the universe and happens to live on a farm close to his house…