Wine

Rory Sutherland writing in The Spectator a week or so ago maintained that "most wine is actually rubbish". He thought people liked to talk about wine but didn't really know much about it or even like it. What about some wines having astronomical high prices while others are quite cheap: isn't there are difference in the quality? He says: "One winemaker sent the same wine to a competition under three different labels. One was rejected by the judges as 'undrinkable', another won a double gold award".
I have to say I'm in some agreement with Sutherland. In the past twenty years or so of drinking wine, mainly red wine, I have to say I have had only two bottles where I have said: "Mmm, yes, this is very good." One was a Chateau neuf de Pape given to me by a friend, the other I bought for a special occasion in a wine shop in Cardiff - don't remember what it was. Mostly the wine I drink seems much the same. I take no notice of what it says on the bottle - matured in brandy barrels etc - I just drink it. Sometimes it's quite palatable, sometimes just bearable but mostly it's very ordinary with no great 'lift to it except, of course, the lift that comes from the alcohol in it.

Mud

Jeff Nichols, writer and director of the film "Mud", when asked by a reporter on the New York Times what the film was about, replied "It's Sam Peckinpah meets Mark Twain". It isn't. In many reviews Mark Twain is mentioned with particular reference to "Huckleberry Finn" (no other mention of Sam Peckinpah) but the film has only a passing similarity to the novel: it's set in Mississippi, on a river, yes, and is about a boy who makes friends with an outlaw,yes, but it's theme is not of the world of Twain. Again, a critic wrote in today's newspaper, summing up the film with four stars: "Down on the MIssissippi, two boys discover Mud (Matthew McConaughey) in an adventure of the Hucklberry Finn kind".
It's all a bit troubling since this film is of a superior kind to most movies and its story has very little resemblance to Twain's book.
While on the surface it is an adventure - a boy of 14, Ellis, and his friend, Neckbone, meet an odd guy living rough on an island; he has shot a man over a woman and he is being chased by a gang recruited by the dead man's father and brother, two rather frightening people; he's also being chased by the police, in league with the father; the boys decide to help Mud because Ellis feels that Mud's devotion to the woman he loved, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon) is so genuine, greater for example than that of his own mother and father who are breaking up etc. - but while it is an adventure, it is also a study of a boy's beginning of an understanding of what adult love is, how chancy and unstable it is: Ellis finds he is surrounded by deceit and game-playing - even Mud's and Juniper's affection is not the deeply held love Ellis felt it was.
Great performance by the boys and by McConaughey.
But the film's too long by at least half an hour.