This Movie Kicks Ass!!!!

 

Friday Film Review .... I know it is late, & there are two reasons for this.  The first is that I was concerned for some friends who live in Haifa, Israel in the path of the Inferno,  and secondly that I did not want to show disrespect for the 42 lives lost in that fire .... 42 Israelis died trying to save Arab prisoners who would have died in their cells in that fire (whether wild or deliberately set) and the Arabs showed their gratitude by dancing in the streets of Southern Haifa when finding out about those Jewish deaths, as even more Jewish lives are put at risk to curb that fire, even now! 

 Sooooo .... MAJOR Blog on that whole situation tomorrow, when I can view it through more dispassionate eyes.  I have some tremendous cellphone pictures to post!

Anyways ....  in April of this year I saw a movie I was initially unsure about at the Cinema .... I adored it so much I purchased it as soon as it became available on DVD.  That Movie was "Kick Ass"!!

  I've long been a fan of Comics, read 'Marvel' as a kid, & it was quite the highlight of my week.  I wore out the pages of my favourite ones I read them so often, and Spiderman was my favourite Superhero!  He had a secretive, stealthy Superhero status but at heart was just a boy.   A teenage superhero with no gadgets or mentor, (just life itself),  lots of vunerability & a powerful sense of  responsibility.    Although a super hero, he was spared none of the slings and arrows of ordinary life ~  he experienced difficulties with friends, family, sweethearts and employers. Peter Parker's powers enabled him to do good, but not to improve his own lot in life, he was a super-hero with all the problems of being a geeky teenager who became  "your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man." 

As originally depicted by writer Stan Lee and artist Steve Ditko, Peter Parker,  bright & imaginative, but nonetheless an alienated adolescent, was just like the typical comic book reader. He misses appointments, catches the flu when he needs to fight, forgets to put film in his camera and has trouble paying the rent. In short Spider-Man was "the superhero who could be you."

Kick-Ass is the story of an ordinary New York high schooler named Dave, played by Aaron Johnson (no, you haven’t heard of him), who one day decides its time someone in real life tries to be a super-hero. He orders a wetsuit for a costume, styles himself “Kick-Ass,” and goes out to beat up criminals like the vigilantes in his beloved comic books. The result?  He gets his ass kicked.

Dave takes lengths to inform the audience that there’s nothing unique about his history, that he hasn’t made this choice because criminals killed his parents or because of any other defining tragedy. However, the film’s undertones make the point that Dave has in fact experienced something of a tragedy ~  the 21st century American childhood, just like Peter Parker!  Dave’s environment is run down, commercialized, and drawn into the information age to the point of being soulless. He walks through a metal detector in the entrance to his school and gets repeatedly mugged on the way home from the comic shop. His crush Katie (Lyndsy Fonesca) works at the needle exchange, and his widower father appears completely defeated by life. It’s no wonder Dave wants to bring some idealistic comic book justice into his world.

He finds out, however, that the world of Kick-Ass by no means lends itself to idealism. He gets hospitalized after his very first attempt at playing hero, and his successive ventures don’t go much better, other than making him into a Youtube sensation. The movie works best when it’s tethered to reality like this, exploring what would really happen if somebody in our world mimicked comic books.   But he soon learns that he is not alone, as the father and daughter duo of Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz) take him under their wing. They are off to destroy the drug kingpin Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong), the man responsible for undermining their quiet family life. When it looks like Kick-Ass and his companions will succeed in shutting him down, the mobster gets his eager-to-please son (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) to help destroy these do-gooders once and for all.

The biggest surprise to me in this movie was that it wasn’t completely farcical.  The commercials made it seem like maybe a bit of a tongue in cheek violent romp through the park, but it in fact has a serious side.  Aaron Johnson plays squeaky-voiced Dave with gusto, especially considering the British actor played a New Yorker~ and well. Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who will likely spend the rest of his career trying to outgrow his role as McLovin in the brilliant Superbad, coasts through Red Mist on his geeky charm. Thirteen-year-old Chloë Moretz, who’s also playing the controversial child vampire role in this year’s American remake of Sweden’s Let the Right One In, displays wit, grace, and guts befitting a much older actor. This girl is definitely worth keeping an eye on. Her role made news for its adult nature ...  she cusses and kicks ass with the best of them, and people can’t take that coming from a little girl. It’s refreshing to see a kid get to hold her own against the baddies. Nicholas Cage puts on his goofball persona as Big Daddy, unnecessarily adding an earnest and stilted quality to the character. Mark Strong bared his chops as a villain in last year’s Sherlock Holmes, and shows once again that evil doesn’t have to mean sombre.  He gave the movie a much-needed edge of danger and reality to keep the story grounded.  

 

Because there was definitely some flights-of-fancy awesomeness going on, most of it surrounding Hit Girl.  She was the real star of this film, and Moretz played the part brilliantly, flipping between excited daddy’s-little-girl, teasing kid, and all-business superhero putting down roomfuls of grown men.  Some of the best death sequences I’ve seen since Shoot ‘Em Up came with her pointing the gun.  Also one of the best-filmed shoot-out scenes I’ve ever watched.  It’s in a room that is completely dark, and it has four different motifs to keep the long ~ it was about 4 minutes ~ shoot-out interesting.  First she puts on night-vision goggles and goes into a video-game first-person-shooter look.  Then she uses a strobe light to make herself a hard target and we see what it looks like to be staring down at death in that form.  Interspersed with these two styles are camera shots of empty blackness punctuated by flashes from the various guns.  Finally someone lights a fire and she uses the strobe as a decoy, and we watch her come up from the side in strobe effect. And all of this was overlaid with one of my favourite pieces of cinematic music from the last decade, the intense, building, and dramatic ”Sunshine, Adagio in D Minor” from the Sunshine soundtrack.  Awesome!   

She Swears as well, & she cracks jokes about the mayor having a sky signal that “looks like a giant cock” and ends one of the shoot-outs with the line “show’s over, motherfuckers” before she takes out the camera.  But all of this is in keeping with her character as the beloved and well-trained daughter of a dangerous man bent on revenge, and I personally found her most Awesome.  And if you have enough time to be outraged by a pre-pubescent girl saying a few one-syllable words, then I’d respectively suggest finding worthier concerns. 

For Dave, it's a question of empowerment ~ and possibly, getting a girl (Lyndsy Fonseca). On the other hand, Hit-Girl is all pint-sized power and knife throwing, automatic weapon wielding efficiency ~ and she's a 'tween'. She has the steely eye and swiftness of a highly trained killer and yet,  that's not all she is.  When we learn how she came to be such a foul-mouthed fighting machine, the truth is upsetting,  and we realize we care!
 
Add in Cage doing his best Shatner/Adam West riff, Strong as a despotic villain, you've got the makings of a stand-out celebration of all things caped and crusading. Vaughn understands that nothing beats the battle between good and evil told in an energetic and exciting manner, and he constantly delivers the splashy, stunt-filled goods. Moretz is destined to be singled out, as much for her salty language as her battle skills, but without someone like Vaughn behind the lens, making us believe in her abilities (and her sobering backstory), it would seem artificial. With him, Kick-Ass is so not that.

  Kick-Ass is one of the greatest post-modern superhero movies of all time, to rank alongside the realism of Christopher Nolan's amazing The Dark Knight and the historical reinvention of Alan Moore's Watchmen. This tale of teen angst and scuba gear self-actualization is ultra-violent wish fulfillment at its very best. In the hands of Layer Cake's Matthew Vaughn, we get the requisite action flourishes and over the top stylized set-pieces. But there is more here than just gunplay and delusions of masked vigilante grandeur. Kick-Ass contemplates the reasons behind such foolhardy individual choices and argues that, sometimes, it's more heart than head which guides them.   I am a huge fan of director, Matthew Vaughn who previously did Stardust and Layer Cake.  I love how he took the gritty violence of layer Cake and combined it with the fantastical of Stardust and made an honest to Goodness original, entertaining comic book adaptation.   It’s a dark movie, darker by far than the marketing would lead viewers unfamiliar with Millar’s work to expect.  

 So what’s in it for Spider-Man fans?   Well, besides the connection of the creators involved, Spider-Man is referenced several times. The most overt reference is made when Dave is contemplating revealing his identity (and his heterosexuality) to his love interest. He declares that the difference between Spider-Man and Peter Parker is that Spider-Man “gets the girl.”    To really enjoy this film, you have to have a heavy appreciation of cynical irony and juxtaposition,  the running theme through the Spidey domain is turned on it's head here .... "With no power comes no responsibility",   yet Kick-Ass ends with an inspiring image of our heroes leaving the final battle, all responsibility executed well.

 The music used was well-chosen throughout.  As I mentioned, they used a John Murphy piece from Sunshine.  I also picked out more Murphy from 28 Days Later, and some Ennio Morricone from For a Few Dollars More, along with pop music that complemented scenes either by being humorous (“Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley) or emphasizing the attitude of a character (“Bad Reputation” when Hit Girl is hitting it).  This was a movie that was intentionally referencing other pieces of popular culture, which is only fitting when the storyline is based on someone trying to make a piece of that fantasy culture real.  This Movie KICKS ASS!!!!!

A French Faux Pas!

I had a conversation recently with a friend who is a fellow Zionist,  & in the course of that conversation it emerged that he had never heard of Ilan Halimi, or of his brutal murder which emphasised both the anti-semetic nature of French society and it's increasing Islamisization.  So, my surprise aside ... here is his story!

 The abduction and murder in Paris of a young Jewish man by a gang of Muslim immigrants calling themselves 'the Barbarians' shocked the whole of France, Europe & me in 2006, when it occurred.  The leniency of the sentences handed down to it's perpetrators shocked me even more.  The French State, perhaps in a bid to shake off possible anti-semetic assertions, vowed to appeal this  in the case of 14 of the 25 gang members.   Since then .... Silence!
 

The murder of a 23-year-old cell-phone salesman, Ilan Halimi, took place over three weeks, during which he was tortured while his captors tried to extract a ransom from his family.  Halimi was lured to his death by a woman he had met in his telephone store. They met up late on the night of January 20th, 2006,  in one of Paris's southern suburbs, Bagneux, on what he thought was a date.  The next day, his parents received an e-mail telling them their son had been abducted and would be released on payment of about $540,000. In order to convince Halimi's parents their son had been kidnapped, the abductors borrowed a trick from Islamist kidnappers who abduct Westerners in the Middle East  ~ They sent a picture of the young man being threatened by a gun and holding a newspaper to prove the date and time.

More e-mail demands and pictures of Halimi were sent to his parents in subsequent days. The family reported the kidnapping to the Parisian police, who advised them to begin bargaining with their son's captors. There were telephone calls too .... Ilan's uncle, Rafi Halimi, reported that "the gang phoned the family on several occasions and made them listen to the recitation of verses from the Koran, while Ilan's tortured screams could be heard in the background."  At one time the abductors agreed to lower their ransom to about $120,000, then even dropped their demand to $60,000.  According to a police source, "This behaviour was very different from what is usually expected from abductors motivated by greed."    Both the judge in charge of the investigation, Corinne Goetzmann, and the French attorney general, Pascal Clement, said that a principal motive of Halimi's attackers was anti-Semitism. Under French law, racial or religious prejudice or hatred is an aggravating circumstance in a trial for murder.  

On February 11th, four days after the abductors stopped communicating with the family, Halimi was found, still alive, not far from a railway line at Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois, about 15 kilometers south of Bagneux.  He was naked, handcuffed, and bleeding profusely. He was incapable of speaking. His entire body ~ or "80% of it," according to police ~ had been butchered.  He died of his wounds on the way to the hospital, just a few minutes after he was discovered.   The head of the fire department who was called to the scene, a man with decades of experience, almost fainted when he saw the victim.  The last thing Youssef Fofana, the lead torturer,  did was slit Ilan's throat,  twice, and pour a flammable liquid on him to try to set him on fire.  But this did not burn him to death, because Ilan walked for perhaps one hour, trying still to find a way to live.  This was at the culmination of three weeks of torture.

 

Three weeks of unimaginable torture. Three weeks. So many clues. So many guilty animals partaking in the continuing torture in their "homemade concentration camp."   Twenty-three people participated in torturing Ilan. Another twenty were involved indirectly. The custodian of the building gave them the key to an apartment where they said they wanted to "keep someone." ??????

French journalist Guy Millière reported that  "the screams must have been loud because the torture was especially atrocious: the thugs cut bits off the flesh of the young man, they cut his fingers and ears, they burned him with acid, and in the end poured flammable liquid on him and set him on fire."

Horrible tortures. Horrible torturers.  One of the torturers would go to work at a TV station every day and come back to partake in the torture. The girls who lured Halimi into the trap knew he had been kidnapped. They knew Youssef Fofana, the leader of  'the Barbarians',  was extremely violent.  They knew Ilan was still in his hands three weeks later. All they had to do was make an anonymous phone call to the police. No one would have known.  They did not do it.  No neighbour thought to say to the police that something strange was going on in their building.   The police told the family not to say a word.  The Jewish community was not warned when prior attempts to kidnap Jewish men had failed.  The Jewish community was not warned before the successful attempt. Even the one member of the gang who dropped out because he was shocked by their violence did not call the police.

There are precedents of Islamist terrorists luring young non-Muslims to their deaths, often over the Internet offering the prospect of sex or romance. A few years ago an Israeli teenager near Ramallah, Israel, was murdered after falling for such a ruse.  Also,  the French police released a photo-fit picture of a young woman who had acted as bait in other similar kidnappings cases as well as Ilan's.  The woman, identified by police simply as "Audrey L"  has been involved in several "honeypot" operations before but had never quite realized what they were all about???   Her close friends,  who recognized her from the police picture,  persuaded her to surrender,  but she was given a suspended sentence for her involvement!    The French attorney general believed that Halimi was targeted "because he was Jewish and thus, as a Jew, presumed to be rich."  One teenage gang member admitted to having put out a cigarette on Halimi's face "because he didn't like Jews." 

French government and law enforcement have done everything in their power to obscure the Islamic Jew-hatred that led these Muslims to commit this crime.  The corrupt media, aligned with the jihad forces, has long blacked out the truth about 'Halimi's homemade concentration camp' and the inconceivable horrors that were suffered by this French Jew, chosen by Islam's soldiers for unimaginable torture.  They covered up the religious aspects of this depraved barbarity.  Law enforcement did as well.   No one said anything about the Qu'ran's statement that the Jews are the Muslims' worst enemies.  No one referenced Muhammad's words ~ "The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say, 'O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.'"   Never was there heard anything about the Islamic tradition that says: "When judgment day arrives, Allah will give every Muslim a Jew or Christian to kill, so that the Muslim will not enter into hell fire." 

Ilan Halimi was a victim of terrorism.  Islamic terrorism!    

Anti-Semitism in the Muslim dominated suburbs of Paris and other French cities is all-encompassing.   As Nidra Poller related in The Wall Street Journal,   "One of the most troubling aspects of this affair is the probable involvement of relatives and neighbours, beyond the immediate circle of the gang [of kidnappers], who were told about the Jewish hostage and dropped in to participate in the torture."

It appears that Ilan Halimi's murderers had some connection to Hamas.   French President,  Nicolas Sarkozy said that police found propaganda published by the Palestinian Charity Committee or the CBSP at the home of one of the suspects. The European Jewish Press reported that Israel has alleged that the organization is a front group for Palestinian terrorists and that in August 2003 the US government froze the organization's US bank accounts, accusing it of links with Hamas.

Halimi's family alleges that throughout the 20 days of Ilan's captivity, the French police refused to take the anti-Semitic motivations of the kidnappers into account. The investigators insisted on viewing his kidnap as a garden variety kidnap-for-ransom criminal case, which they said generally involves no threat to the life of the captive. The police maintained their refusal to investigate the anti-Semitic motivations of the kidnappers in spite of the fact that in their e-mail and telephone communications with Ilan's family,  his captors repeatedly referred to his Judaism, and on at least one occasion recited verses from the Qu'ran while Ilan was heard screaming in agony in the background.  The family alleges that if the police had been willing to acknowledge that Ilan was abducted because he was Jewish, they would have recognized that his life was  "in clear and immediate danger and acted with greater urgency..."

Had the murdered man been a Muslim, or had a Qu'ran been found discarded on near a railroad station (as was a dying Ilan Halimi),  Paris and cities in the rest of Europe would have been burning now.  The gang appears to have been operating since 2004 when they reportedly attempted a series of kidnappings of journalists and known figures, many of them Jews. Most horrifically, the collective sadism which the Muslim residents in the building showed (by not alerting police to the crime),  and the complicity of family and friends of the killers,  is further proof that Muslims are living in a parallel universe, and that exposure to life in the West has not mitigated their murderous Islamist intent.  Halimi's Muslim killers were French born, and behaved in the same way as Al Zarqawi's henchmen in Iraq, or Gilad Shalit's torturers in Gaza.  They were also directly tied to Hamas and targetted Halimi because he was a Jew.

 
IT IS WAY TOO LATE FOR ILAN HALIMI .... IS IT TOO LATE FOR FRANCE??????   OR EUROPE ??????

I want to comment further on this issue, but I obviously need another blog to apply wider lessons or applications as this blog is already long & it would be just too unwieldy to do here!!

An Irish Interlude!!

This is Camille O'Sullivan ~ Irish Girl, Actress & Entertainer.  Enjoy!!

 

Time takes a cigarette, puts it in your mouth
You pull on your finger, then another finger, then your cigarette
The wall-to-wall is calling, it lingers, then you forget
Ohhh how how how, you're a rock 'n' roll suicide

You're too old to lose it, too young to choose it
And the clocks waits so patiently on your song
You walk past a cafe but you don't eat when you've lived too long
Oh, no, no, no, you're a rock 'n' roll suicide

Chev brakes are snarling as you stumble across the road
But the day breaks instead so you hurry home
Don't let the sun blast your shadow
Don't let the milk float ride your mind
You're so natural - religiously unkind

Oh no love! you're not alone
You're watching yourself but you're too unfair
You got your head all tangled up but if I could only
make you care
Oh no love! you're not alone
No matter what or who you've been
No matter when or where you've seen
All the knives seem to lacerate your brain
I've had my share, I'll help you with the pain
You're not alone .....

It's Only a 'Paper Moon' !!

Monday Movie  .... & the News that Ireland is Bankrupt.  It's Official!  The IMF (International Monetary Fund) have moved in to 'take over' the levers of the economy of my native land.   And, over this weekend I wondered just how safe are the really insubstantial funds I still have in my Irish bank account.  Visions of Weimar & the currency run on the Deutsch Mark in the 1930's abound.  So too does the 1929 Wall Street Crash ~ although America is nowhere near the dire financial straits of Europe,  where the collapse of the entire currency seems possible.  I got to wondering what if this happened & I retrieved my money from 'under my pillow' .... just how worthless the piles of paper would become.  Mental images of the Bank Collapse in 'Mary Poppins' popped into my head.  And Steinbeck.  And the American Depression Era.   And I watched the 1973 Movie 'Paper Moon'.  To say I was impressed is the understatement of the decade.  I'm still humming the theme tune this morning.

Peter Bogdanovich's 'Paper Moon' is a work by a director preoccupied with Hollywood's classic film genres. This film was inspired by Little Miss Marker (1934), a Shirley Temple vehicle in which the child star won out over an opportunist. Tatum O’Neal was nine years old and had never acted in her life when she played one of the lead roles opposite her father, then superstar Ryan O’Neal, and became the (still) youngest person to ever win an Oscar. Watching Paper Moon, it’s impossible to deny the power and subtlety of her performance, and how it avoids all the traps and pitfalls into which so many child actors fall (she’s been well described as an anti-Shirley Temple). She and Ryan O’Neal develop a brilliant, absolutely convincing rapport throughout the film, whether they’re arguing heatedly about the merits of Franklin Roosevelt or stealing quick glances at each other that suggest there is much more emotional connection between them than either one would ever admit out loud. The acting is quite superb!

Paper Moon is set in the dusty, chalky backroads of rural Kansas circa 1935. It’s a funny-sweet story about hard times and desperate people, and it has a genuine heart that makes even some of its most clichéd moments ring true. Bogdanovich was at the top of his game when he made the film, having just scored with 1971’s bittersweet 'The Last Picture Show' ~ which may even make my list here of Movies I like!  And,  Like The Last Picture Show, this film was at once an evocation of a specific time and place and a commentary on it. And also like that film, Paper Moon was also shot in black-and white, an homage to 'The Grapes of Wrath' maybe,  another classic 'depression' era movie.

Ryan O’Neal stars as Moses Pray, an itinerant con man roaming through Depression-era America trying to make a few bucks off recent widows by selling them Bibles he claims their recently departed husbands ordered for them. He meets his match in Addie Loggins (Tatum O'Neal), a headstrong nine-year-old orphan who may or may not be his daughter (“We got the same jaw,” she declares, and they do). Although Moses is only supposed to drive Addie to the next state and drop her off with her aunt, he learns that she is a quick study and a devious little con artist herself, and, despite their initial friction, they team up into an unlikely maybe-father/daughter grifter team (the fact that it is never revealed for sure if he is her father is one of the movie’s great charms). 
 

Moses’ original mission is to deliver Addie to her aunt, back east in Missouri. But ever the opportunist, he uses her to bait a factory owner in a simple con for $200. Moments later, after Moses has already spent the money, Addie demands it all from him. She threatens to turn him in to the nearest Lawman if he doesn’t give it to her.  A total anathema to a Grifter .... which she has 'cottoned on to' pretty quickly for a pretty little girl.   The Dialogue Rocks!

“But I don’t have it!” Moses says.    “Then get it!” Addie fires back.   

The most controversial aspect of  Paper Moon is the character of Addie Loggins,  a far cry from the roles played by Shirley Temple and other Hollywood child-stars.   Addie is a precocious nine-year old girl who manipulates Moses in the best way possible. Tough in attitude and behaviour, she swears, & worse.  In her leisure, Addie stays in bed, lights herself a cigarette, and listens to the radio. Completely adaptable to changing conditions, Addie saves Moses several times. Moses sells the bible to bereaved widows, whose names he takes from obituaries. Highly intuitive, it's Addie who sets the price for the sale; when she senses it's a rich man's house, the price goes up. Addie has no moral scruples and is not above cheating. She embarrasses a cashier in a department store, implying that she had given him a twenty (actually five) dollar bill.   Paper Moon could have easily become a “cutesy” movie ~ but it isn’t. Addie’s performance could have gone into precocious Dakota Fanning or Haley Joel Osment territory, but it doesn’t.  In long-take scene after long-take scene, Tatum O’Neal remarkably holds her own with her father.   Addie is in nearly every scene of the film.  It’s her point of view that dominates the story. 

The story is composed largely of a series of loosely connected comical adventures that slowly develop the relationship between Moses and Addie. At one point, Moses picks up a big-breasted floozie (Irish Word??) named Trixie Delight (Madeline Kahn at her ditzy-sad best), and Addie feels so threatened that she has to devise an elaborate scheme to break them up. The last third of the movie involves a protracted grift in which Moses sells a bootlegger $650 of his own booze and incurs the wrath of the bootlegger’s corrupt policeman brother (both characters are played by John Hillerman).

The eponymous Trixie Delight!

 All of this is set against the backdrop of America at its economic worst.   It Looks like a true 1930's Depression era issue.   Cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs did an outstanding job of utilizing high-contrast black-and-white photography and deep focus to make the flat landscape and arching sky feel as gritty and real as true life (the fact that he was not even nominated for an Oscar was a grave oversight).  As it did in The Last Picture Show, the use of black and white also brings us closer into the era, both narratively and stylistically, as Paper Moon looks like it could easily be a John Ford road comedy from 1940. The period details in this film are quite impressive ~ the old cars, the old popular radio programmes featuring Jack Benny, Fibber McGeee, and others. Bogdanovich was a film scholar and historian before he was a director, and he knew exactly how to capture the essence of a bygone cinematic era and still make it relevant to a modern audience. This is a road movie with a twist, that almost makes the depression seem desirable,  even fun!!

Paper Moon works on many different levels. It’s an entertaining movie that can be equally enjoyed for its aesthetic value.   Any little girl, almost as precocious as Addie would just adores this movie.  It truly would be difficult to find more wholesome family entertainment & yet a cinematic venture which retains it's artistic edge.   This movie deserved every accolade it collected!

Sunday Morning Soho !!

 
This is Shane MacGowan ~ Irish Boy, Bawd, Bard, Balladeer ~ with his Best Ballad.  Beautiful & Haunting.   I don't like love songs as a rule, but I make an exception for this (& Oasis's 'Wonderwall').   The lyric "You're the measure of my dreams"  is probably the most Romantic line ever penned, ever,  certainly by McGowan.   And all alleged alcohol associations aside,  his accomplishment here is nothing short of Perfection.  A Poignantly Perfect Paean to Lost Love.  It couldn't be bettered,  could it?

I have always adored McGowan & the Pogues.  Even when he plays the Shambling Drunk.   The man writes some Special lyrics ~ Sweet & Sad.    'A Pair of Brown Eyes'  &  'Haunted by the Ghost'  are some of my favourite songs of  forever,  along with this one.    And Sunday morning does evoke that  "Cloak of Silence".

Originally included on their  Poguetry in Motion  EP, a different version can be found on an expanded edition of the Pogue's 1985 release,   Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.   I possess both.  Both are Beautiful.

I've been loving you a long time
Down all the years, down all the days
And I've cried for all your troubles
Smiled at your funny little ways
We watched our friends grow up together
And we saw them as they fell
Some of them fell into Heaven
Some of them fell into Hell

I took shelter from a shower
And I stepped into your arms
On a rainy night in Soho
The wind was whistling all its charms
I sang you all my sorrows
You told me all your joys
Whatever happened to that old song
To all those little girls and boys

Sometimes I wake up in the morning
The gingerlady by my bed
Covered in a cloak of silence
I hear you talking in my head
I'm not singing for the future
I'm not dreaming of the past
I'm not talking of the first time
I never think about the last

Now the song is nearly over
We may never find out what it means
Still there's a light I hold before me
You're the measure of my dreams
The measure of my dreams

This song has also been covered by Damien Dempsey, Paddy Reilly & Ronnie Drew, who recorded it on his final album   The Last Session: A Fond Farewell.