I saw the best film ever made last night. No two ways about it, no competition, you can argue from now til hell freezeth over about the runners up; Godfathers and Star Wars and Gone with the fucking Winds, but ‘Vice’ is just… brilliant. And who’d’a thought??

It’s about Dick Cheney. Who? Yeah, we all know the name, but… errrr… American… political… who knows? Who fucking cares?? Well as of last night I do. I care deeply. Not so much about the man as about the movie. And about Christian Bale, who plays Dick, from his 20s to his 70s, piling on the pounds, losing the hair, but heh; we’ve seen make-up before, we’ve seen Robert Di Nero pile on the muscle in Raging Bull, nothing spectacular there. But Bale is beyond brilliant. As really, he always is. Like his cousin, Gareth (well, they’re both Welsh, most Welsh people are a bit inbred, he must be a cousin somewhere!) the man is a genius. Not with a ball at his feet (though he may be) but with a script in his hand.

Yet this movie is really about Adam McKay. He’s the geezer wot wrote, produced and directed it. And I learned this morning (God bless IMDB) that our Adam used to be the lead writer on Saturday Night Live, the incredibly long-running comedy sketch show which catapults brilliant comic talent to the A-list. Like Chevy Chase, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Eddie Murphy, Steve Carell; all former SNL alumni. So I’m guessing that to be the head writer, you gotta be at least ‘reasonably funny’.

And Vice is way more than ‘reasonably funny’. But in such a dry way that you’re barely aware when its being funny, it just is. That magical ‘light touch’ which, along with irony, is usually just not part of American artistry. Ok, so the script is brilliant.

But its the direction that makes Vice so amazingly special. It moves from past to present, from harsh reality to positively surreal, in the flick of a camera, never losing the path of the plot for a second. It’s powerful, even scary (George W Bush being president is scary enough, once you learn who Dick Cheney really was as the ‘quiet, unassuming’ V-P, it gets scarier still).

In case you missed it; I LOVED THAT MOVIE. Go see it. You have time just after Spurs play at Palace today, before you sit down to read about West Ham and Arsenal and Brexit and all the other disasters in the Sunday papers.

Happy Sunday

A xxxx