Scarlett Johansson’s alien role offers big-screen distraction amid build-up to World Cup

The World Cup is just days away. It’s gonna mean mega viewing hours for me, watching all the action unfold from Brazil. So what better way to prepare than to forget about it all and chill with a quiet afternoon at the cinema before the globe speeds into footballing overload.  A Monday afternoon at Adelaide’s Palace Nova Eastend  did the trick for me. I am a member at the independent chain which is good value anyway. But Monday afternoons are even agreeable at a mere $7.50 per ticket. The Palace does everything from oddball to goofball to mainstream. This week I checked out Scarlett Johansson  doing a star turn in the Jonathan Glazer’s moody, Indy sci-fi/horror offering, Under The Skin. Scarlett plays an alien from another world who takes human form as her voluptuous self and for some reason, drives a transit van round  the bleak surrounds of Glasgow in a Scottish winter asking male strangers if they would like a lift. Would you get into a van driven by Scarlett? What possible dangers could there be in accepting such an offer?  They are not to know that Scarlett is in reality a visitor from another world. But instead of adopting the oft-imagined guise as a green being with antennae, she is a female who seems to be in excellent health. Each Scottish victim is lured into Scarlett’s vehicle and probably can’t believe his luck as she whisks them away to her house.  What follows is not grisly but definitely “out there” as the males end up in a watery grave – or rather a floating limbo.  The final scene unveils what the film’s title is all about. It’s very wacky, weird and wonderful. Dark, damaged and even disturbing. Scarlett doesn’t stray into imitating a Scottish accent. Her character, who is never given a name, just adopts a mid-Atlantic monotone with a mesmerising, eerie stare. She could even be a distant relation of David Bowie’s man from another galaxy as witnessed in The Man Who Fell To Earth, the Nicolas Roeg sci-fi classic from 1976. It would be fascinating to imagine what such space travellers would make of our modern world. Judging by the drivel that’s on terrestrial TV, any men from Mars would probably turn right round and go straight back home. With a non-stop diet of reality programmes covering all bases from cooking to an unexplained obsession with property, the potential invaders would doubtless reason that there were no signs of intelligent life on the planet. And that’s before we get to the banal offerings of seeing a stream of nobodies scream and howl to ruin cover versions of songs in front of panels of C-grade  celebrities. I’m glad I’m old. If I wanted to see a band, I’d go down the pub and watch some proper live music. Some bloke in a pub was wearing a great tee-shirt the other day. It simply said: “I may be old but I’ve seen all the cool bands.” Spot on. And being old means that I wouldn’t have been scared of getting into a van with Scarlett. I used to leap into cars with strangers constantly. And gladly. It was called hitch-hiking. In the distant days of the Seventies, Eighties and even Nineties, it was still socially acceptable to stick out your thumb on the highways and byways of England and get from A to B.  I began in my student days, living in Birmingham. The price of rail travel was out of the question. On a student grant, Alcohol came before travel expenditures. Once I found out where Spaghetti Junction was, it was an easy route either north or south. East and west too, once you were on the M6 and onto the M1 or M5. Just a piece of cardboard with your destination daubed on in visible felt-tip pen did the trick. And I always got there. It was hardly Jack Kerouac stuff but there was a real feeling of freedom and adventure, simply hitting the road to make it to a Rovers game on a Saturday afternoon or head to another English city for a weekend away. I never got any lifts from anybody who looked quite like Scarlett though. In all my years of thumbing I think only a handful of lasses driving alone gave me a life. And every time it was cos of the cardboard sign. “Nobody bad can come from Blackburn”’ I was told by one of the female drivers.  Er,  I dunno about that. There was great camaraderie on the various turn-offs from what seemed like legions of fellow travellers in those days. You just took your place at the end of the line and hoped your cardboard sign did the trick. There were busy bottlenecks – notably Knutsford Service Station heading north and Hilton Park Services going south. That’s because the North and Scotland lay beyond Knutsford which meant lorry drivers heading west to Merseyside or east to Manchester and Yorkshire on the M62 would drop you there. Hilton Park was a dropping point if drivers were going south-west on the M5 or straight on to London on the M1. Alas, with the world supposedly full of bogeymen these days and dangerous deviants apparently lurking around every corner the slip roads of England’s motorways are bereft of hitch-hikers. Newspapers intermittently run features on whether the practice is still feasible. But the writers always seems to get to the destination. I guess they never got dropped on the Stoke North junction. Only one feeder road spelt danger. Virtually no traffic. I learnt the hard way on a rainy Saturday night coming  back from Rovers earning a 2-2 home draw with Port Vale in October 1974. A decent result in those Third Division days. That was one of my first thumbing forays. Luckily, the experience didn’t put me off.  But it was the early hours before I made it the Edgbaston pad. The longest ever wait? A freezing February winter Sunday afternoon after a weekend in Liverpool. The junction of the East Lancs Road and the M6 going south was not a good place to be. Four hours in the one berth. Sundays were bad days because of the lack of lorries and freight traffic. In the end I got a celebrity lift all the way to Brum, from a member of the Scouse folk band, the Spinners. But back to where we came in, with Scarlett. The Scots in her film all got a lift from a famous face but it didn’t work out for them. There will be no chance of hitch-hiking making a comeback after those events. But Under The Skin was a brave move by the actress. Taking on an Indy role when you are a mega-star is a risky decision. She is now part of The Avengers franchise, and was great in Woody Allen’s Match Point. I’m afraid she lost me in Lost In Translation though, with Bill Murray. So cheers Scarlett, for an interesting interlude.  But now the football extravaganza becomes prime viewing. Fasten your seat belts…