Back in the saddle

I usually do SO the courtesy of waiting until he is out of the country before watching a horror flick, but having lost my nerve so badly earlier this month, and he needing to work in the kitchen all evening, I figured two stout walls between us would do the trick.

This time it was Ghost Ship. Salvage crew finding a luxury liner derelict these forty years, no apparent reason why, gradually being picked off one by one by . . .

And I was fine. Time to admire the inventiveness of the opening scenes (eeuw! very bluggy!), to enjoy the splendid art direction, to envy some of the stunts that Julianna Margulies got to do, to jump at doors inexplicably slamming shut, to gasp when, instead of seeing his own reflection in the mirror, he sees something else, to shudder at the . . . you get the idea.

I'm so happy I have my nerve back! Just look at the time, I'm the only one downstairs in the single pool of light cast by the monitor, and I don't even feel the need to, just in case, check over my shoulde . . .

Ya gotta love the underpants

Of course I enjoyed it. Frank Miller graphics, a risible telling, and a complete misrepresentation of the facts. Yum.

No kidding though, the thing was wonderful to look at. The slo-mo, the fast-mo - obviously a quote, if not a direct steal, from the Green Wing technique. Some images of violence glossed over, some, especially a couple of head shots (!), lingered over. The dialogue of the 300 themselves very snappy (as per the original comic), the dialogue of events back home jingoistic and semantically null. Queen Gorgo (GORGO! No wonder no-one actually spoke her name in the nearly two hours of movie!) did a splendid job of looking like Lucilla in Gladiator. And Xerxes was divinely decadent.

Imagine my irritation when, as is my custom, staying in my seat until the last credit has rolled, I spot credits for 'Transsexual 1', 'Transsexual 2' and 'Transsexual 3' WHAT! I missed them! Now there's nothing for it but to buy the DVD the minute it comes out and go through the thing in slo-mo. This could take a while - maybe I'll get a take-away. Oh - and the much-vaunted girl-on-girl action? Half hearted, half baked, half arsed. Nothing to fax home about.

Go see it.

TNG

It is my . . .how shall I put this (there's this line, see? Between not causing offence and downright dishonesty) fortune? Lot, Fate, Doom? to be peripherally involved in the raising of some children. Three of them, BBG, 8, 4, 3. (Between you and me, I suspect the G might very well have been a tad unforeseen, but hey, she's cute.) Every so often their mother feels its all a little much, and I get to take a turn.

But oh my, how rubbish am I at children. You'd think I have a lot of interests and skills that might usefully be passed on to the next generation, and I do. Gardening, music, basic carpentry, not to mention Reading, Riting and 'Rithmetic. Today, Easter Egg making.

I had moulds, three colours of chocolate, icing syringes, and pastry brushes. Oh, and an overwhelming lack of patience. The little blighters just wouldn't do it right. Honestly, I didn't mind not getting to the pan of boiling water because some pre-school pate was in the way, or spitty little fingers poked into the melting chocolate (I did quite enjoy the yells of pain though - honestly, if I've told them once, I've told them a hundred times . . .) or even a certain randomness in the thickness of the layers of chocolate. But somewhere in the vicinity of the mould would have been nice!

I kept tellin' 'em, Not like that, like this! I kept tellin' 'em, watch how I do it! Then I told them to bugger off. In a nice way. The younger generation? There's just no telling them. Ptcha.

I did buy quite a lot of Geomag (it was on half-price sale) on the grounds that a) it is fun to play with, b) if they swallow a ball it will come out the other end no problem, and c) if they swallow a bar it will show up nicely on the X-ray. But guess what? They don't even know how to play properly with that.

300

Some movies just have to be seen NOW. Not next week, NOT on DVD (though you know you will pay full whack for the DVD the minute it comes out) and most certainly not on telly. Ugh. And this is regardless of the reviews they have had.

I've been a fan of Frank Miller for a while now - All the Dark Knight stuff, Ronin I thought was great, and I was grabbed by Sin City until I started wondering whether he had gone just a tad overboard. Does this happen to all comic greats? They stay anchored in their early days while writing for existing characters, but as soon as they cut loose they go all weird? Alan Moore for example? Watchmen and V for Vendetta scaled fresh heights, but Lost Girls sounds a bit dubious to me.

Though it has to be said that my acquaintance with the world of comics is madly out of date. I used to be fed choice tidbits, given the cream of the crop, without having to wade through all the garbage, until I discovered that my old friend and supplier had been cheating on my even older friend, his wife. This all came out about ten years ago, and I still can't look him in the eye. So my knowledge of comicdom is stuck around the mid-nineties.

But I digress.

Joe Queenan wrote a cracking review of 300 which makes me want to see the picture all the more. It seems the movie makers have wandered from Herodotus even further than Miller did in the comic, so I don't know whether to rejoice that the events at Thermopylae will have a whole new audience, or cry that the original story has been so thoroughly hi-jacked for dubious political ends. I don't know what they did to the text, but I sure hope they bought it dinner first.


ps Yay! Threshers are doing it again! The coupon is only good until 1st April though, so hurry along here for your copy.

Just a Quickie

Can't chat long, I only have half a mouth. Dentist. Ptcha. Was it in 10 that Dudley Moore did the thing with the two wine glasses, one to drink from, and the other to catch the dribble? Maybe Arthur. Oh, and just how did I lose that filling? Flossing, that's how. So, when the dentist, temporarararily filling the Gaping Void, said 'Don't floss', oh how I laughed.

ps I borrowed the bloody book and finished it in the early hours of Monday morning. Phew. So yesterday it was back to Chasms for me. Anybody got something for cultural indigestion?

pps Google, it say 10.

Desperation

I have been waiting and working towards this climax for six weeks. SIX WEEKS! I kid you not. It's been hard going - I've had to concentrate on this to the exclusion of all else, and to be quite honest, I can't remember any other book taking me quite so long to finish. Tomalin's biography of Sam Pepys, it was. Actually, and the reason why I am gnashing my teeth with desperation, still is. Having got to within striking distance of the end (and the good thing about a well-researched piece of non-fiction, is that the end comes a good deal sooner than you expect, because of the references! Took up a good half-inch at the back of this book, they did), I carried it with me wherever I went, just on the off-chance of reading a sentence or two.

ANYWAY. Pepys's health fails, he moves out to the country (Clapham!), he snuffs it! (Ahhh). He's autopsied (ugh) and the provisions of his will are explained, and . . . .

Dunno. Lost the bloody book, haven't I.

Severance

So, SO was in Bucharest at the beginning of this week. (All that way for a two-hour meeting, but he gets to charge them for two days of his time. I know - madness.) My pleasure, when he is out of the house, is a good horror movie. I bought myself Severance, and settled down, late in the evening, alone in the house, for a rare treat. I lasted twenty minutes.

Twenty. Minutes.

I bottled. Totally funked it. Twenty minutes! The screeching violins had barely got up to speed! A few moments of handheld camera (cue creepy music) from inside the bunker, and I hit the off button so fast I still have the bruise. I may never play guitar again. (Well, that's actually true, but mostly because of not practising because of idleness, not my over-dexterous use of the remote control.)

I clearly needed broad daylight for this, and preferably an inappropriate hour. So, yesterday, by 9:30 I was sitting on the sofa in front of the TV and d'ye know, I really enjoyed it. Oh yes, it was indeed drenched in gore, and I had to watch half of it from behind the sofa, but the funny bits were very funny indeed. Tim Macinnerny did his usual hapless tosser, but this tosser was far more than usually hapless - splendid performance. Laura Harris I've only seen twice before, once in 24/2, where she metamorphosed from Demure Essence of Femininity to steely-eyed ruthless terrorist from the Middle East, and The Faculty, where she metamorphosed from Demure Essence of Femininity to gigantic drippy-toothed alien from the planet Hell. This time around, DE of F to machete-wielding balls-for-breakfast go-to gal from the office next door. She does it so well.

The only reason for my state of utter funkhood I can think of is that this movie was populated by people I recognised. Movies like Wrong Turn, (which I saw a couple of weeks ago, on my own, late at night, no problem) where shiny American teenagers wander into the wrong house / forest / country and get sliced and diced, subscribe to the natural order of things. We've seen it a million times before. But not Him from the office down the hall with his leg in a mantrap. Or Her from the fourth floor tied to a tree and . . . Nah. Go watch it.

I hadn't banked on SO actually being in the house at that point, watching me watch telly at 9:30 in the morning, and I've been trying to persuade him ever since that this is not how I usually spend my mornings..

I ♥ Essex

No, I really do. Not urban Essex, but out towards the coast. The roads are pretty poor, but that means that not many people go there. The countryside is not remotely pretty (we have Surrey for that. Personally I've always found Surrey unbearably smug) but it's - I dunno, purposeful. It does a job of work. It's not kindly. And of course it's fuller of history than an egg is full of meat. Romans at Colchester, Saxons at Triplow and Vikings at Maldon. Oh, and Beth Chatto gardens there.

It was Maldon this weekend. The docks are so interesting, and if you aren't in time for an actual trip on a Thames sailing barge you can usually blag a scramble over the deck. If you don't fancy the coastal path (which does need stout shoes) the promenade is a gentle stroll. At at the end of the promenade, at last, hurrah hurrah, is the John Doubleday statue of Brythnoth.

Golly, don't the English love a loser. This idiot had an invading horde of Vikings penned on an island off the coast, reachable only by tidal causeway. All the Anglo-saxons had to do was sit there. But oh no, the vikings ask please to be let off the island, because otherwise it isn't really a fair fight now, is it? And this twit says, OK then.

WHAT!

How the subsequent slaughter and total bloody DEFEAT of the Saxons gets turned into literary gold is a trick only an Englishman can pull off.

Oh and? Nowhere on the statue can you find who it is, or indeed who made it. Go figure.

ps talking about losers, last night, as SO is in Bucharest, I thought to treat myself to Severance - not SO's sort of movie at all. It was 20 minutes before I bottled. Couldn't do it. Maybe I'll finish watching it tomorrow morning, about 9:30ish. Or maybe not.

Blasphemy, Blasphemy, they've all got it . . .

Bugger, no, that's Infamy, isn't it. Never mind. I thought I'd wrap up last post's anguish by recycling the comments. (Neat trick, huh? Bet no-one's ever thought of it before.)

It seems to me that blasphemy is only possible under a limited set of conditions. For a start, you can't blaspheme if you believe. Contradiction in terms. (Could you do it if your relationship with God was so bad all you wanted to do was diss the Deity? That might work.) And neither can you blaspheme if you don't believe. Belief systems become just more stories, as likely to be satirized as any other. (Well, more so, natch, because the reaction is likely to be more pronounced.) I think you could do it if you once had a faith and then lost it. Which would be me, not that anyone in RL knows this. And I suppose you could do it by accident - y'know, one man's enquiry into the nature of faith is another man's blasphemy.

Tim said talked about irreverence, irony, sarcasm and self-deprecation as defining characteristics of British culture. He's right, of course, and the thing about all these is that, in order for them to be understood and appreciated, the audience has to have an understanding of what is being poked fun at. F'rinstance, rhe more you keep up with current events, the funnier the News Quiz is. I used to get a bit fascist about The Sopranos, and wanted every potential viewer to take some sort of test, to make sure they got it, and didn't take it at face value. Therein lies a danger - anybody without a grounding RE hearing a blasphemy will take it at face value, and their understanding / potential faith will be skewed or destroyed. Children would be particularly at risk.

I've only seen a bit of the site in question, but there was one illustration, ironically the one the rector's wife sent back as one which made her laugh immoderately, which struck me as hilarious, but also made me slightly uncomfortable. It's this one. I don't want to blaspheme, I really don't, so I guess if I'm guilty it's because I peddle the stuff rather than cook it up myself.

Yup, still going to Hell.

PS - Dave, where did Jesus use humour, exactly? Absolutely nothing springs to mind.