Daily Diary

I, replicant

Posted 29/01/2008 by The Daily Diary

In the week Hollywood celebrated the Oscar nominations but mourned the loss of Heath Ledger, a new cinematic star was streaking across the firmament.

A hearty Diary shout-out to multitalented Herbert Smith partner Chris Fanner, who took time out from financing the Groucho Grill deal to ‘Make a Difference’ to what could have been just another Herbies drinks do without his ace intervention.

The leveraged finance legend showed how much easier it is to slip from one character to another than it is to slip out of Dentons’ partnership covenants with a one-man interpretation of sci-fi classic Blade Runner.

For reasons your correspondent cannot quite recall, Fanner wowed the crowd with extraordinary renditions of hunky cop Deckard, played by Harrison Ford in the onscreen version, and psychopathic android (or ‘replicant’, in the movie’s parlance) Roy Batty, played by peroxide-topped former Guinness frontman Rutger Hauer.

Few who saw Fanner mime hanging off the edge of a skyscraper with several broken fingers will ever forget the spectacle, while his tear-jerking reading of Hauer’s farewell monologue was especially poignant.

However, Fanner would do well to remember, as Batty did, that “the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long”.