Can you imagine going to see a movie, in which there was some post-apocalyptic dystopia, a nightmare world, like in Mad Max or Escape from New York, some place where there are no dentists, where teeth are all black and crooked and drunks and wild men roam the streets, shouting, screaming, pissing everywhere, fighting, all dark and disfuncional, and yeuch? Can you imagine that. And then, at the end of the movie you emerge into Golders Green, or Stamford Hill, maybe Hendon or Brooklyn, and find it filled with ultra-orthodox Jews in black hats and long side curls?
Well last night I had the exact opposite of that. I watched a film about chassidic jews in Jerusalem, the rather brilliant ‘Into the Void’ and came out into the post-apocalyptic dystopia that is Kilburn High Road.
Drunks pissing in doorways, winos shouting their unintelligible rubbish at innocent (that’d be me then) passers by, all was darkness and a nihilistic hellhole of a shitworthily dysfunctional wasteland.
We are quite blessed in my part of London with lovely little art-housy independent movie-houses (because there’s so many pretentious fuckers like me around here who would ‘die for a sub-title’). But sometimes you have to venture a little further out to find what you want to see. And then you have to ask:
What the fuck has happened to Kilburn High Road. Ok, it was never Bond Street, never aspired to Knightsbridge status, but it has just degenerated into the underworld. What they need is a Starbucks; the key to civilisation. The impoverished riff-raff aren’t prepared to spend £9.30 on a super-skinny-soya-latte-mocha-vomichino-with-extra-decaf-shot-and-caramel-zucherinos, even if they knew what the fuck one was. And the yuppies would come flooding to this beacon of yuppiedom and force up house prices so the rabble have to move to… well, probably south London or somewhere befittingly evil.
Anyway, yes, the movie.
Wonderful study of orthodox jewry which is charming, funny, weird, bizarre, odd and heart-warming. Its a kind of un-love story that makes you happy. And I’ll say no more as you’ll all be flooding to Kilburn to see it soon to see it for yourselves. Very soon cos its hardly gonna rival The Frikkin Hobit in the multiplexes.

Ok, off to a funeral.

Not very happy sunday

A xxxx