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With modern eyes we now see them as ugly, primitive-looking things affiliated with old plastic cassette tapes and perhaps somewhat related to those equally-redundant computer floppy discs. How quickly technology has progressed from the days when having variable fast-forward and rewind speeds (fast, double fast, Triple Fast!) on VCRs warranted praise and worship, and how stubborn I was when DVDs first came out, adamantly insisting that I would never (ever) convert, clinging desperately onto my collection of VHS movies with their inconsistently-sized and ripped cardboard covers and maintaining passionately that being able to record from TV was basic a human right. And indeed, by not making recording a standard feature on DVD players haven’t we all turned into JB Hi-Fi bargain pile-raiding uber-consumers, needing to own entire series of shows and collector’s editions of movies when we could have easily taped them for free?

Well anyway, before I allow the nostalgia to forever be replaced by the progress of DVD and Blu-Ray user-friendliness, here are several of my fondest childhood and adolescent memories of VHS.

- Frequently getting the tape – the actual black/brown physical tape – caught inside the VCR and needing to manually wind it back in with a kitchen utensil that would fit (usually the handle end of an egg beater) after pressing that little square button to open up the latch to straighten out the crumples.

- Memorising the times of certain favourite scenes of movies, e.g. 1:10:05, and playing a game where I’d rewind or fast-forward to as close as possible to that exact timepoint, taking into account the slow-down speed of my fast-running VCR and trying to estimate how long before or after that point I would have to press Stop.

- Pressing Pause and seeing the image stretch and struggle on old CRT TVs, hoping the tape wouldn’t burn or melt on the hot metal VCR heads after leaving it for too long.

- Getting fined at the video store for not rewinding movies upon their return and watching the staff at Video Ezy and Civic Video utilise those sports car VHS rewinder machines, objects made specifically for rewinding purposes. Oh, how those rewinder manufacturing companies would have shaken their fists in anger during the DVD takeover.

- VCR head cleaner solution and the awful smell of alcohol, needing to wait an hour for it to dry in order for your video to be watchable. Hiring ‘The Specialist’, starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas and Sharon Stone (which constituted an all-star-cast back in the 90s) and having the tape snap inside the player when I was too eager to watch it after cleaning, and then making up a story at the Video Ezy saying that the tape itself had screwed up my player and getting a Free Hire voucher in return. I still feel guilty about that (but hey, free movie), and apologise for the bad taste in films.

- Those useless, generic stickers that came on a strip with every blank tape, with the little letters of the alphabet, the ones displaying the length of the tape, 90, 180, 240, 300 minutes, whether the mode was LP or SP, and various label stickers of different sizes and shapes for placement all over every edge of the tape. These stickers were all so very pointless, but I enjoyed making patterns out of them before realising that some of them peeled off inside the VCR upon pressing Eject, no doubt further contributing to the potential fire hazard of the device.

- SP vs LP recording. Taping football matches, including the football World Cups of 1998 and 2002 in their entirety on LP 300-minute videos (which meant a massive 10+ hours of terrible quality), with a gigantic stack of videos. All labeled and covered garishly with those aforementioned useless stickers.

- Taping over previous recordings and seeing their long-forgotten remnants lingering around either behind the image of the  most current recording – etched into the tape like an image burnt into one’s retinas, my favourite being old Disney cartoons hanging about as the background to a Schwarzenegger movie – or watching them reappear after a short period of static at the very end of the tape, usually consisting of old TV shows and ads with antiquated channel logos and bad hairstyles and fashion.

- Having tapes get stuck in an old, malfunctioning VCR, and needing to ‘trick it’ into allowing the ejection to take place by unplugging the power cable, plugging it back in, turning the VCR on and quickly pushing against the stuck tape to force the annoying thing out. Luckily no electrocutions ever occurred during this process.

- Eventually upgrading to a good quality VCR with a dial that allowed you to watch scenes frame-by-frame, especially useful for bone-crunching football tackle analysis in slow-mo and reviewing in awe the shattering of the T-1000 in Terminator 2. There really was something special about watching those paused, overworked images covered in tape static on the TV screen and hearing the groans of the VCR motors with each and every frame advancement and reversal.

- Before the advent of subtitles in DVDs, incorrectly guessing movie quotes due to bad accents/acting commonly found in Jean Claude Van-Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone movies. Having never had the desire to repurchase Universal Soldier on DVD, I still to this day do not know what JCVD was saying at the end after the fight with Dolph Lundgren – “Ironed?” “I wronged?” “I ronned [sic]?” “Eire rammed?” None of my guesses ever made any sense in the context of that scene, but then again, what was I thinking watching that rubbish in the first place anyway?

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Got any other stories? I’d love to hear about your own personal favourite VHS memories =)

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*Spoilers*

George Clooney regularly plays that guy many of us secretly wish we were: suave, well-groomed, handsome, charismatic, confident – in other words, the Oceans Eleven Clooney – or for that matter, simply that general image we have of George Clooney with those aforementioned qualities, devoid of any discernible weaknesses or personality flaws. Certainly he has also played roles where he is paranoid,  troubled, even ‘kooky’, but regardless of the odd exception which has seen him gaining weight or growing a beard for certain parts, there’s that marked disconnection between the audience and him and his characters – where its particularly difficult to even picture him wearing anything other than a suit or even just with a different hairstyle. In fact I’ve often wondered whether he’s been ‘doing a Hugh Grant’ this whole time by simply playing himself in most of his parts – where the on-screen Clooney is almost inseparable from his celebrity persona.

In Up in the Air it comes as no surprise when he initially appears to fit the bill again – a sharply dressed, handsome, confident, silver-tongued devil. But as we delve deeper into this character of Ryan Bingham – a ‘corporate downsizing expert’ who has prioritised professionalism and self preservation above all else and has micromanaged to a clockwork efficiency every little last detail of his working life spent mainly at airports and within planes and hotel rooms and who is, as a result, completely detached from remorse and emotional reality – we see something we haven’t seen before; the polar opposite of what George Clooney stands for and what that overall image of George Clooney is. A vulnerable human being.

Bingham comes across as very similar to the character of Nick Naylor in Thank You For Smoking, also directed by Jason Reitman, the former a professional firer of people with zero empathy and the latter a pro-tobacco spokesperson, the both of them unscrupulous champions of capitalism who we ought to really hate but somehow, through those innate snake-like charms of theirs, manage to win us over with a surprising likeability. The main difference between them is that in Up in the Air we catch a glimpse of the life Bingham has left behind and the pain caused by the ramifications of his choices, concealed behind that all-too-familiar smiling Clooney exterior.

This is a film many of us can relate to. It deals with the pursuit of a career and the security of a salary versus the dreams that may not pay off and which we may well never achieve. It explores the trade-off between excelling in what you need to do and not doing the best you can in what you want to do, and vice-versa. We are confronted with that awful fear in the back our minds that there is an extremely high probability that our lives will probably not turn out the way we wished, and how powerless we are to truly prevent ourselves from harm. We see human fragility in the face of love and pride, where a compromise needs to be made and where something usually needs to be sacrificed.

All of these worries are present in the characters in Up in the Air: dreamers and cynics, sometimes a bit of both. Bingham’s love interest in the film, Alex, shares the almost exact same lifestyle but ends up affecting him profoundly. The young hotshot Natalie Keener believes in true love and the importance of seeking it, refusing to even imagine life without it and disagreeing with Bingham’s outlook and the emotionless prerequisites of the horrible nature of their work. These characters impart their beliefs on one another, but the one who ‘learns’ the most from it is Ryan Bingham who, as a downsizer whose life philosophy all along has been to reduce the load of his own emotional baggage while reaching his life target of 50 million frequent flyer miles, eventually comes to terms with the harsh reality that he has, consequently, made redundant his own opportunities of truly living. The scene where he is required to give a potential future brother-in-law advice on the importance of marriage – a decision he has up until then personally staunchly opposed – exposes a hypocrisy he can’t help but self-deprecatingly acknowledge and yet, through this, we feel a strange empathy for him, a character who is seemingly heartless, and see how even the most rock-hard stubbornness can still be swayed. Bingham is heartbroken in the end, but the fact that his heart was able to be broken at all really solidifies his character.

And that’s what really got me in this movie. Far from being depressing, there is a hope that’s revealed through Ryan Bingham: the moment he accepts the flaws of his own beliefs and comes to terms with the pure fact that life cannot be lived alone coincides with the audience’s discovery that, instead of constantly being that guy we wanted to be, this time round George Clooney is playing the guy who kind of reminds us of ourselves. We might not have that exact same external charm or the trademark grey hair or display such confidence in public speaking but inside, we all feel the same things, and that’s what makes Up in the Air hit home so convincingly and accessibly on a human level.

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Clint Eastwood directed films, for me, come in two categories: his best films such as Unforgiven, Gran Turino, and Letters from Iwo Jima are amazingly sentimental, whilst his worst ones suffer from, and this might be a little harsh, extreme emotional manipulation – take the ending of Million Dollar Baby, the overacting in Mystic River, and pretty much the entirety of Changeling for instance, the latter category of which I consider to feature several of the most overrated movies of recent times. So then along comes Invictus, a drama about the 1995 South African Rugby Union World Cup winning team and Nelson Mandela’s input in using the sport to unite a divided nation, which not only throws my two category theory out the window, it also convinces me that Eastwood is capable of achieving something in-between: Mediocrity.

The problem with Invictus is that, unlike many sports films that have come before it, it doesn’t focus just on the sport or the sporting-related drama. It tries to bring together Mandela’s election victory, the man himself and the inspiration he found in prison through the poem the film is named after, the state of apartheid and class in South Africa at the time, as well as the events of the rugby tournament without really concentrating enough on any of the individual elements. It is, in other words, the film equivalent of gathering too many eggs into the one basket or, if you will, a film which tries to tackle much more than it can really handle.

Invictus does have its moments. Morgan Freeman is excellent and the character of Mandela is portrayed affectionately and sensibly with hints of his humanity, humour, and his own family problems amidst the enormity of the task he faced. There is a nice scene where the Springboks spend a day with soccer-loving children in a poor community and the only black player on the team is mobbed. But sadly the story suffers mainly through the lack of any strong leading characters apart from Mandela: Matt Damon’s Francois Pienaar who, as the team captain and the main focus on the sporting aspect of the film, is at the end of the day just a rugby player after all, and whilst there are supporting characters in the form of Mandela’s bodyguards and personal assistants while New Zealand’s Jonah Lomu is represented as the closest “bad guy” character to be found in the movie, none of them are explored enough to make the event feel as significant as it ought to have been. The rest of the cast act only as a means of connecting the few major characters together – the Springboks team in particular have very little to offer apart from uttering filler-speak and nodding their heads in agreement or shaking them in disapproval - and Pienaar’s and Mandela’s families contribute only in speaking minor lines of exposition and shouting in excitement at the final whistle.

The fairytale simply works better as a moment in history documented through word and memory than as a film, which is surprising given that, even without any liberties taken with the actual facts of the tournament as demonstrated in many of the other movies in the genre where last minute goals or touchdowns or home runs or three pointers are scored, the Springbok’s did really win the World Cup as underdogs and they did actually score a last minute drop goal in extra time in the Final and yet none of this hits home as anything remotely exciting. Unfortunately Eastwood has a deliberately slow style which is simply not suited to a story of Mandela as well as a story about a sporting miracle at the same time, when clearly he does not know how to capture the excitement of sport never mind a code of football alien and peculiar to many Americans and the mainstream audience granted how scrum shots are over-elaborated on and drop goals are excruciatingly slow-mo’d. As to the bigger question of whether South Africa’s problems improved as a result of the team’s victory, the film teases you by alluding to it through a close-up of black and white hands on the trophy and spliced-together footage of a celebrating nation but does not expand on what happened next, and what we are left with is an attempt at capturing the state of a country during a single sporting moment when the moment is better felt and experienced and almost impossible to truly capture on screen.

It is by no means a terrible film. Certainly nowhere near as awful or as ridiculous as my favourite bad sports movie Victory/Escape to Victory – starring Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone, members of the England 1966 World Cup (soccer) winning squad, where English and American prisoners of war  in WWII (plus Pele) play the Nazis and win not only the final match but also their freedom. There is however a perplexing and inappropriate scene in Invictus near the end where a South African Airlines plane flies over the stadium to insinuate an act of terror which has no place whatsoever in this movie. Ultimately though we are merely left with a Mandela film which would have been better had it just focused on Nelson Mandela and where the rugby didn’t get in the way, or otherwise a rugby story better left as perhaps a feature article or a story told in a pub or in a school PE class. Fans of the sport and those interested in the former South African president will likely be left disappointed with a final product akin to that of Ang Lee directing Hulk; a talented director better suited to emotional pieces taking on a project that aims for an ambitious goal but skews the kick wide of the mark. And regardless of what the critics say, I still think Million Dollar Baby, Mystic River and Changeling were much worse than this.

The winner will receive a Will Ooi-autographed copy of a picture of Jack Nicholson holding a picture of Heath Ledger, being asked for an autograph