Tuesday 27 January 2009

The Damned United

"I want no epitaphs of profound history and all that type of thing. I contributed. I would hope they would say that, and I would hope somebody liked me."
Brian Clough

This is nothing to do with West Ham United but it is a quiet night and I thought I would post the following video. It is the newly released trailer for the upcoming film version of the excellent David Peace novel The Damned Utd. The book is concerned principally with the 44 fateful days its hero, Brian Clough, spent as manager at Elland Road, Leeds, after taking over from Don Revie in 1974. "It imagines Clough exactly as he always wanted to imagine himself: a protagonist of Shakespearean proportion, outrageous, maniacal, big-hearted, vindictive, brilliant, pissed - a Coriolanus of the dug-out," reads the Observer review. "The book takes Clough's voice - that inspired nasal bombast that was once such a feature of British life - and turns it inwards. Peace attempts to see the world as Clough might have seen it; the book is told in a stream of consciousness diary form, a page or three a day for each of the purgatorial 44 days at Leeds, with flashbacks to his triumphs at Derby County a couple of years earlier." In short, it is a football manager's guide to heaven and hell and it is a staggering work of art.

The full Observer book review: The genius of the life of Brian

How it will translate to the big screen is anybody's guess. Directed by Tom Hooper (John Adams, Elizabeth I), adapted by Peter Morgan (Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland) and starring Michael Sheen (Frost/Nixon, Blood Diamond, The Queen) it is due for release March 27. To say I am looking forward to it is quite an understatement.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You are right, the book is a masterpiece and I also can't wait to see the film. Looks good, Sheen is a great character actor, who like DeNiro gets under the skin of the characters that he plays.
May even be a lads night out to see it.

 

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