Being unable/unwilling to sleep I find myself with several extra long boring hours a night than everyone else, those dreary morning hours are incredibly hard to fill. There's nothing on TV but the same bit of news on loop, teleshopping and the occasional soft porn movie. I would love to be able to sleep at a normal time but believe me I can't be bothered. It's not that I can't sleep, it's just that aqquiring a normal sleeping pattern would involve lying in my ridiculously uncomfortable bed for like 45 minutes whilst my untired mind gets forced to sleep. I'd much rather stay up until 8AM and fall asleep from exhaustion. I would love to do something constructive with this time but here I am writing on a blog that won't even be looked at, probably.
Ben Willis however found a much less fun but much more productive way to spend the 8 extra hours that should be spent asleep. Ben's an art college student in London and the star of my new favourite movie 'Cashback'. It's about a complex and possibly homosexual hipster that breaks up with his girlfriend and finds that he can't sleep because he's so heartbroken, to fill the extra hours in his life he works the nightshift at Sainsburys. Have you ever tried working in a store? I have, it's like letting someone rip the joy and life from you and not being able to retaliate because
A) You need the money
B) Those shelves aren't going to stack themselves!
Needless to say Ben needed to find a way to cope, he noticed his colleagues all had ways to deal with the oncoming waves of boredom and self-hatred that a Sainsburys employee deals with. Barry and Matt did anything that didn't involve work, these are the jokers of the movie... Well, jokers isn't really word for it. You won't be laughing with them, you'll be laughing at them and their ability to make shallow cock jokes everytime they see a sausage, your everyday shelve-stacking simpletons. Then there's Sharon; Ben's soon to be lover, her coping mechanism is far simpler than the others, just don't look at the clock! A less inventive way of enduring the graveyard shift at a supermarket.
Ben, our lonely store worker finds a new way of fighting the 8 hour boredom shift. Whilst working in the store he would use his imagination and pretend that time had stood still and only he could restart it again by cracking his knuckles. During the period of illusive stillness he would undress the unusually sexy girls in the store and draw them (seriously, I don't remember attractive people shopping in Sainsburys). It's not nearly as perverted as it sounds though, Ben see's beauty in every crack and fold and fully believes that the female form is one of extreme elegence, a belief that was started at an early age when a swedish student that was staying at his house wondered to the bathroom naked. That was the point when Ben learnt what all boys learn during puberty; girls have some sort of power, the power to grab our attention and keep hold of it until they leave the room. Like Holden Caulfield said,
"I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. Girls. Jesus Christ. They can drive you crazy. They really can."
I'm not going to rample about Cashback any longer because I really could go on forever, if you're interested in it then go watch it! It's not so much the movie that I want to talk about but the idea of artistic nudity. You see, I looked at the IMDB reviews I was shocked to see several pissed off viewers that saw Ben as a perverted sex maniac, and that really grinds my gears. At no point in the film did Ben get any sexual pleasure out of drawing naked woman and it drives me crazy to think that some people can't see nudity without thinking 'this is too sexual for my liking'. Nudity doesn't have to be sexual! I can't believe I'd even have to tell someone that, we weren't born with our clothes on for Christ's sake!
Well that's the end of my first post, not the most interesting and I apologise for that.
Ben Willis: I've always wanted to be a painter, maybe have my work hung in a gallery one day.
Sharon Pintey: I've always wanted to meet a painter.
Ben Willis: Why?
Sharon Pintey: I think it might have something to do with their ability to see beauty in everything.
