Wondrous Oblivion

A movie review, permitted by virtue of its cricketedness. I saw Wondrous Oblivion last weekend and have some comments from a "Mike on Cricket" perspective. Firstly, most of the cricket related bits (which in actual fact is most of the movie) are pretty good. Frank Worrell seemed stately and Gary Sobers had a big toothy smile. The one glaring error for a movie set in 1960 was the appearance CLR James' "Beyond a Boundary". At one point Dennis (Delroy Lindo) waves a battered old copy around and quotes a paragraph. The movie was clearly inspired by CLR's beautiful analysis of social attitudes, the West Indies and cricket - but unfortunately the book was not actually published until 1963.

Although I enjoyed it, the film was not entirely satisfying from a movie-fan perspective either. I liked the slightly unexpected ending, but otherwise it might as well have been called "Billy Elliot bats it like Beckham". Not that this is neccessarily a bad thing, its just that compared to "Billy" and "Bend it" I thought "Oblivion" was slightly lacking. Despite a bit more overt magic (courtesy of David - Sam Smith - and his animated cricket cards), the mystical spark which elevates a good movie to the realm of the great was missing. Don't get me wrong though - I did think this was a good movie. Perhaps it was just not as good as it could have been.