Came across a term in the Metro yesterday that I’d not heard before; Google-stalker. Isn’t that a fantastic neologism; you instantly know exactly what it means, but then after a few minutes you think “Hey – I wonder if I’m a Google-stalker when I search for random friends/colleagues.” I quite often try to see if any of my friends from PGL or from uni are evident in cyberspace (usually with no success). I guess Friends Reunited and MySpace are other sites which promote this stalkeresque behaviour – at what point does looking up an old friend become an obsession?
The other term was wikipediholics, which again absolutely hits the nail on the head. Had the wikipedia been around when I was younger, I’m absolutely certain I would have absolutely addicted to it, and spent a lot of time and energy creating/correcting entries!
After a pretty slow start, I actually ended up really enjoying this film. The basic premise is that Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan are mother and daughter, who magically swap bodies on the eve of the mother’s wedding (following the death of the husband/father 3 years previously). That said this is firmly aimed at the young teen market, and has it’s humour and tone pitched accordingly. Nothing too heavy here, everyone!
It must be said that Jamie Lee absolutely blew the socks of LiLo in terms of acting, although I guess it’s an easier ask for a 40/50 year old to believably act like a teenager than the other way round.
All the usual stuff about the importance of seeing the other person’s point of view and listening to one another was there – possibly laid on a little bit thick. On balane I enjoyed it though. The whole step-dad thing wasn’t done brilliantly – his character seem to drastically change in the last 5 minutes in a way that reeked of deus ex-machina, but that might just be me.
High point of the film was definitely when LiLo came home after getting 2 detentions to disover her bedroom door had been removed. “Privacy is a priviledge, not a right” says her mum. 🙂
Perhaps I only like kooky films these days, but I found To Die For a mild disappointment. There was nothing desperately wrong with it, and I quite like the idea of the story unfolding as Nicole Kidman videoed a CV and her relatives gave interviews to the media, both in response to the events of the film.
This probably made up half the film – the other half was the events themselves, told through flashbacks.
The problem was it didn’t really work for me. Nicole Kidman’s character Suzanne Stone simply didn’t hang together very well. On the one hand utterly failing to understand a fairly simple anecdote, but on the other hand a criminal mastermind. Ok, so the latter point is an exaggeration, but I found it jarring none-the-less. By a similar token, there was no real suspense in the film… the opening credits told you what had happened and who did it, the rest of the time was filling in the blanks. Somehow when American Beauty did this it was “wow – how’s this journey going to work”.. when To Die For did it it was “who cares?”.
Her motivation for killing her husband was also flimsy in the extreme, and while her method was believable, and well played out on camera, she really didn’t come across as that much of a psychopath. It was just a bit too hammy for my liking. The two huge stars where Joaquin Phoenix (already a fan of his) and Illeana Douglas, who were the only two people who didn’t look like they were acting. Everyone else could have been on the set of Friends, really.
The ending was very nicely done too – full marks for that. Watch it if it’s on telly, otherwise find another!
Yup, it’s another cracker. Crying shame they couldn’t get Nicole Kidman back (I don’t have anything against Bryce Dallas Howard, but her Grace doesn’t have the fragile beauty of Kidman’s Grace) – not that I’m particularly surprised since I don’t suppose our Nicole would have agreed to a scene were she is in flagrante delicto : lying on her back, naked, with her legs spread wide, filmed from the bottom of the bed….
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Lars von Trier has struck gold again, and the above gratuious sex was only about 2 minutes in an otherwise entirely modest film.
The story picks up from the end of Dogville – Grace and her father are travelling through the US, when they come upon the plantation called Manderlay. Grace discovers a negro slave is about to be beaten by his owners, and Grace intervenes to set the slaves free, as should have happenbed 70 years sooner. The stories follows Grace’s efforts to turn this former slave colony into a free enterprise – no easy task. Her father wants no part of it and continues on his way, although not before leaving Grace with some gangsters and guns (‘power’) to help things on their way.
Where Dogville was brutal and even shocking – very uncomfortable to watch, Manderlay is gentler on the surface, but a lot more challenging. Lars is making a very strong statement about the attitude of white Americans to black people – slave or otherwise – and winds up the films with clips like the beating of Rodney King (which he reminds us was only in 1991).
I won’t say anymore, because I don’t want to spoil it – suffice to say when I’ve watched next year’s offering – Washington – I fully intend to buy the trilogy to keep as powerful and thought provoking set of films.
This always struck me as a very clever slogan, instantly sticks in the mind because of the whole rhyming thing, and always made me think Yes, Zanussi apply cutting edge scientific methods to produce the very best equipment. It was always right up there with For Mash Get Smash.
It was only yesterday, as I looked at our ageing washing machine, I realised that appliance doesn’t actually mean “the application of” at all.. it is in fact a noun, meaning (in this context) a machine performing a domestic role. This The appliance of science becomes a description of the machine itself!
I suspect the clever marketing folk at Zanussi fully intended both meanings (or indeed may have even intended the single meaning that it’s taken me a good 15 years to grasp, in which case you could say their slogan failed dismally). I guess at one level it’s good marketing, in that I still remember the advert… but it hasn’t made me any more likely to buy a Zanussi appliance – good old Which helps me out when making those sorts of decisions!
I’ve started a more structured weight loss program now, partly as an offset against Christmas, which is usually a weight-gain time! Actually no, it’s not just for Christmas; I’m trying to reverse the steady increase of the last 5 years!
The particular spur this time is that I went to buy trousers, and my waist size was 4″ bigger than the last time I bought trousers. I refused to buy them on principle (I’m such a woman!!), but it did feel like a line had been crossed. The other line that was crossed is that we bought some funky new scales that calculate your BMI (Body Mass Index), and mine was 25.3, which means I’m clinically overweight (the boundary being 25). Of course having an exact figure for overweightness is a nonsense, and I’m not worried from a medical point of view, but I don’t like being/feeling flabby.
So my weight then was 80.1kg (although this was with clothes, to be fair) – last night’s score was 77.9kg (without clothes), which probably means I’ve managed to shed 1 kg or so in a week or two, which is probably a bit too fast, actually…
My diet is simply cutting out snacks between meals – my weight shot up when I started my new job, mainly because there’s a constant supply of biscuits by the kettle, and a chocolate shop across the road. I walk (fast – enough to build up a sweat a bit) for over an hour a day in total, and might even re-instigate press-ups and crunches if I get really excited.
My theory of dieting is very simple – eat too much and you’ll put on weight, eat less and you’ll lose it. I’ve got an active enough life-style to cover the exercise part I reckon, and cutting out the biscuits has already turned gradual weight gain into gradual weight loss. We’ll see.
What’s gone wrong with James Bond? Firstly let me make it clear I’m not a James Bond purist. I have never read a novel by Ian Flemming, and I fully appreciate that Casino Royale is probably the closest Bond has ever been to Flemming’s character. I guess second place goes to Timothy Dalton in something like “Licence to Kill”, but – let’s face it – he pretty much sucked as James Bond.
What is Bond about? He’s the real-man super hero! The man all men wish they were, and all women wish they could be with. He can drink, smoke, fight, get poisoned, and still save the world and get the girl. He can shoot like no-one else, ski, fence, parachute, fly planes, drive anything faster and better than anyone else. Shirley Bassey had it right – “Baby you’re the best”. Oh yes, and he’s suave, sophisticated; never shaken or stirred!
And what is a Bond film about? Crazy “not even close to being believable” stunts, mad chases over air, sea, and land (and space, come to that). Super evil meglomaniac baddies who are going to kill us all. Weird and inventive ways JB is about to be killed before miraculously escaping at the last minute. Amazing gadgets for getting out of any tight squeeze. Let’s face it, Austin Powers hit it bang on the nose.
So why are they turning him into an ordinary joe public who happens to be paid by the British government to kill people? “Licence to kill” shouldn’t mean you can top anyone you feel like. And it really shouldn’t mean you are sent with the sole aim of assassinating some particular person that Tony considers undesirable.
So take Goldeneye. Brosnan’s Bond does a great bungee jump off a dam. Get’s inside the facility, and finds someone sitting on the loo. What does he do; knock him out with a swift upper cut while hanging from the ceiling. What would Craig’s Bond do? Almost certainly shoot him with a silenced gun, just for being in the way. Of course the latter option is the sensible thing to do if you’re breaking into a heavily guarded military bunker – Brosnan’s guard will wake up sooner or later and raise the alarm. But it’s not the Bond thing to do.
It’s one thing to shoot someone who’s shooting you – kill or be killed – quite another to ask M whether she wants “a clean kill or a warning shot?”.
Take the whole premise of the film – in Casino Royale, Bond is basically trying to stop someone who finances terrorism. He’ll be on to benefit fraudsters in the next film, I reckon. Or perhaps he’ll break a paedophile ring? While these are noble causes, and quite possibly what our Government should be spending time and money trying to sort out, it’s not what Her Majesty’s Secret Service do. He’s 007 for goodness sake, not some PC Plod in Scotland Yard.
What’s the most exciting sequence in the film? JB trying to stop someone blowing up an empty prototype place because the terrorist banker will make money on the Stock Exchange if it is blown up. Come on people!
My final complaint is that people really die. Not cartoon deaths, but “head being held in a sink of water until they drown death”. Or “falling down 5 storeys and landing on the ground” dying. You actually get the impression JB enjoys killing people. In fact, he’s really not that much of a good guy anymore.
I guess this is probably heathly – James Bond has always made espionage and assassination seem glamorous, even desireable. The message is you can drink, smoke, sleep around, and kill people without any side-effects to your physical or mental health. But the whole genre is so clearly over-the-top ridiculous escapism that it doesn’t matter so much. But if this is way Bond is going, I’m going to miss him.
Hooray, another film for the “loved” pile. What a fantastic piece of work. Rave rave!
The story follows Evie (an awesome Natalie Portman), an ordinary-ish girl who gets caught up with a modern day Guy Fawkes (the ‘V’ of the title). You know I don’t even know where to start describing it. The film opens with a split-screen of Evie and V getting ready to go out – Evie putting on makeup, V putting on his mask and cloak. Did I mention the mask? By modern day Guy Fawkes, I meant someone who dresses up as him, wears a Guy Fawkes mask, and plans to blow up parliament.
Except we’re a number of years in the future – democracy doesn’t exist anymore, and the country has definitely gone 1984 / Big Borther under the ruthless Supreme Chancellor. There’s been a world war somewhere along the way too. Everyone lives in fear of the “fingers”, who are basically the SS.
Evie is caught breaking curfew, but before the fingers take her away, V turns up and kills (or at least disables) them all. He then takes Evie to a rooftop, and proceeds to blow up the Old Bailey. Turns out that V is a terrorist come freedom fighter, who wants to topped the government, blow up Parliament, and give power back to the people.
Actually, this isn’t the opening sequence – the opening sequence is of the original Guy Fawkes being caught trying to blow up Parliament, and hung. Remember, remember the 5th of November…
All the main characters are fab, V, Evie, and the police inspector who’s trying to catch them. The plot and script are both excellent – full of surprises, wonderful character development, and the sense that probably justice has been done by the end of the film. V himself is certainly a constant surprise, and has an unending stream of great lines. Perhaps my favourite – V is in a underground tunnel with one of the head nasties, and about 10 soliders armed with automatic rifles. V says that he’s going to kill the had baddy with his bare hands, after which the exchange goes?
Baddie: “That’s not going to happen – we’ve got guns, all you’ve got is your knifes and fancy karate moves”
V: “No, you’ve got bullets – and the hope that after you’ve used them all I’m not standing, because if I still am you’ll all be dead before you can reload.”
Fab line. Actually pretty much everything V says is fab.
If I say anymore I’m in danger of spoiling the film – but it captured the feel of the Big Brother state brilliantly, and V has to be one of the best heroes/villians I’ve seen for a long time (beats the pants of Daniel Craig, for example). Incidentally, Stephen Fry puts in a very good turn too.
My conclusion: Watch it. Tomorrow. No, actually make that today.
Well. I don’t want to write another downer review, but I have to admit I was a little bit disappointed with Casino Royale. Actually I was a lot disappointed. The opening sequence (before the titles) is normally one of the highs of the film, but this was a bit of a damp squid. I plan to write a fuller blog on why I think James Bond has gone all wrong, but suffice to say a flashback sequence of him making his first two kills in order to gain ’00’ status didn’t interest me. In fact, I can’t even remember exactly how the opening sequence went, and I only saw it a couple of days ago.
The titles and music also left me cold – a singularly unmemorable theme tune (by the time we’d left the cinema I’d forgotten it), and bizarre sort of playing card based montage of people being knocked off.
The film picked up pace a little with Bond chasing down an African bomber (who seemed to be a re-incarnation of Sonic the Hedgehog, as he could run up vertical steel girders, jump down liftshafts, dive through ventilation shafts 10ft off the ground, and leap tall buildings in a single bound. Ok, I made that last bit up, but it really was like a comic book chase. They definitely should have got Jackie Chan to advise on how to do stunts like that properly.)
Then James Bond decided to blow up or kill half the Nigerian Embassy (which we could possible write off as a silly rookie error – but it’s James Bond we’re talking about!). In fact the film is riddled with him making utterly stupid mistakes (being spotted tailing someone, giving himself away by clearly showing an earpiece, etc.) that it wass just annoying. Ok, so he’s new as a ’00’, but I always thought the ’00’s were the Secret Service equivalent of Top Gun – you have to be the best of the best just to get in.
Anyway, the plot meandered around with an ever mounting body count, and mild confusion about who was who, and who was really behind it all. Each time someone was set up as the “big baddy”, someone else soon replaced them as the even bigger baddy, normally without ever have been introduced before. Or perhaps they had? All too often it seemed to be a deus ex-machina: Bond’s in a pickle, let’s introduce a random new factor to save him.
In the end all the characters were pretty weak, I thought. There was no meglomaniac invincibility, no super baddy – just ‘normal’ gangsters and terrorists. And, if we’re honest, for a lot of the film JB fell into both categories. Oh yes, and all the characters took themselves far too seriously.
The script was ok – a couple of good one liners here and there. My biggest complaint is that there was nothing silly. Everything that happened (apart from Sonic) was basically believable, or at least required minimal suspension of disbelief. Where was the bungee jump from a dam? Or a car turning into an aeroplane? Or a speed-boat chase across water and land? Where was a car chase in a 2CV? Come to that, where was any sort of significant motorised chase – nowhere (although there was an impressive car crash). That said, JB didn’t manage to sink a building in Venice, which was quite cool.
Actually, the whole film was pretty brutal, and again this wasn’t something I either enjoyed or thought was necessary. I know it’s meant to be “the birth of Bond” and all that, but still..
And the penultimate sequence was awful, and didn’t hang together at all. I won’t say too much, so I don’t spoil the surprise, but it really was a “right, so we’re meant to believe that so-and-so is really doing this when we thought they were …”.
And it was such a “small” film. JB was trying to stop a banker who rolled money for terorrists. Big wow.
Despite all of this, I didn’t hate it – as a film it was reasonable. But I have high expectations of Bond films. I don’t go to a Bond film to see a counter-terrorism documentary, or to see the British government employing hit-man to go and assassinate people they dont’ like. I go to see JB battling against the odds to save the world, doing silly impossible things, charming the ladies and using gadgets. Casio Royale had none of these elementsm in my opinion, and is not worthy of the description “Bond film”.
Seems to me that it’s a very good idea to sort out photo albums in a timely fashion. The two main reasons for this are:
You can remember the who/where/when of the photos.
You don’t post-select the photos based on experiences since then.
For instance, a few years ago I went to a wedding and took lots of piccies on my digital camera. I’m finally getting around to printing out the photos from the computer to go in albums – but sadly in the meantime said couple have split up. This makes for a difficult dilemma… Do I put in photos of “the happy couple” (and they were happy on the day) or not?
To not put them in seems a shame on many fronts. The bride looked absolutely radiant, and I took some stonking photos of her. The wedding itself was a lovely day in a beautiful setting. Everyone had a really good time and that shows in the photos. There’s also the whole “documentary” side of life – a photo album is, in same ways, a store of memories, or at least aide-memoirs. Finally, what happens if the circumstances change again? Perhaps they will patch up their marriage, and have the next 50 years together?
On the other hand, it’s a shame to put in pictures of the bride and groom looking lovingly at each other when, in retrospect, clearly something was rotten in the state of Denmark. It’s like a wedding is a celebration of love and commitment, but if it only lasts a couple of years that’s casts a different light on that day. There’s also the thing about who else might look at our albums – should they or any of there friends and family come round and look at out photos, the last thing they’d want is to be forceably reminded of what, I’m sure, is a very painful experience.
My resolution is to try and chart a middle course – I wouldn’t want to pretend it didn’t happen, and all of us there enjoyed the day. But I’ve also avoided choosing photos of the bride and groom being lovey-dovey. This is actually fairly easy, as you can include the staged shots of various combinations of family. There’s a whole philosophical questions here about our response to pain and “darkness”, I guess, which is actually one I’ve been pondering recently… But that’s for another day!
