Looking Out To Sea

We did eventually see something in the Edinburgh Film Festival, though it was pretty last minute. We saw WALL·E on the last day of the festival at the midday screening at the Filmhouse.

The audience was full of parents and little kids. I was fully expecting to see someone from my work there. It was exactly the intersection of geeky interest and child-friendly that I’d expect to draw my colleagues, who all seem to have kids. But no!

The film was great though. It managed to take the central character of a robotic can crusher and create a romance. Pixar’s ability to create emotion and expression never ceases to amaze. Not to mention our own ability to fall for their animated charms as if they were real people.

Also, contains the most intelligent cockroach ever to appear on the silver screen.

Saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls on Saturday. Spoilers if you follow the link…

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Helen cooked liver for tea this evening and, ulp, I didn’t like it. I feel quite ashamed. It was a bit embarrassing because we’d invited my mother for tea as well. Oh well.

The two of them have gone out to watch a Hunting and Gathering — Helen got the book from her at Christmas. Tis a French film (and a French book). I’m trying to catch up on some code that I’ve been writing in dribs and drabs for the last week. It’s moving slowly.

I can hear the grindstone calling.

(You gotta shout the headline like Bruno! Bruno! to make it sound right.)

On Friday night we saw Juno, which was given the kind of advertising which would normally put me right off. Yet again. They did this with I Am Legend. Is there some conspiracy to make films appear even more rubbish than they actually are? I suppose it isn’t over-hyping them, at least.

Thankfully this one’s had a good word-of-mouth reputation so I was actually quite keen to see it. It’s great! Ellen Page is fantastic as the main character and the dialogue was something else. Occasionally you listen to some on-screen dialogue and it just seems so completely different and fresh and real. Tarantino can do it, as can Joss Whedon. And if this film is anything to go by, Diablo Cody has it too. It’s also got some great music. There’s a brilliant cover of Sea of Love playing over the birth scene.

It’s also been interesting to see the political reactions to this, which have been highly contradictory. The abortion lobby seem to view it as anti-abortion and the anti-abortion lobby are too freaked out by the horror of strong female characters and intelligent individuals making their own decisions to notice. Everyone is projecting their own imagined fears onto the movie… which is pretty much the same as people do in real life.

Just finished Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, adapted from a set of books I know nothing about. But it was some fabulous high-camp silliness against Gothic scenery. I’m half-inclined to root out the books, but maybe I’m a bit old for them nowadays?

In other news, I tried to watch the DVD on my monitor using Helen’s laptop, but it seems that Apple no longer supply video adaptors with their laptops. So we’ve got an old one that fits the iBook but not one with a mini-DVI connector. I am not best impressed — surely they don’t mean for laptop owners to spent £15 extra to use the video out port? What’s the point of having it if you can’t just plug things straight in?

On Wednesday night we saw 4 luni, 3 saptamani si 2 zile — ‘4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days’ — the story of a woman helping her friend get an illegal abortion in communist Romania in 1987.

I’m not sure what to say. I can’t really describe the great laughs you’ll have while watching. It’s a very numbing film. Don’t watch it for a first date?

Meanwhile, this is the 35th anniversary of the legalisation of abortion in the US, a law that the current crop of Republican candidates will be sure to repeal as part of their headlong rush to take the US back to the Middle Ages. Not that things are all rosy here — due to a strange quirk of jurisdiction our own abortion laws don’t apply to Northern Ireland. It’s still illegal to obtain an abortion there in most circumstances.

But if you want to see some gritty it’s-grim-oop-north drama about trying to get an abortion against the laws and norms of the society you live in, check out ‘4 months, 3 weeks and 2 days’.

There are only so many books that a single person can read and — despite sayings to the contrary — I admit to deciding whether or not to read a book by its cover. You have to discriminate somehow, right? Some covers are good and some covers are really bad. Some covers are really good but seem to repel all the same. I remember seeing this cover with a monster on the front, for a book called I Am Legend, every time I went into Waterstone’s shop, nestled somewhere on the shelves that house the scifi/fantasy stuff.

It’s a really arresting cover but it somehow never managed to pull me further in. Maybe it really was too scary. Anyway, I think I’ll have to re-evaluate. I’ve just seen the Will Smith version of I Am Legend and had a good read of the relevant Wikipedia pages. It seems this is the third explicit film adaptation of the story. There have also been numerous other adaptations and stories heavily influenced by it. All that time and I didn’t know.

It really is amazing how bad a trailer can make a movie seem. Even films I enjoyed immensely (like Stardust) have made me cringe during the trailer. And stuff that seemed really good in the advert (like Shoot ‘Em Up) has turned out to be utter dreck. Why are trailers never representative of the actual movie? This is all to say that, from the trailer, I would never have seen I Am Legend at the cinema. Clips of Will Smith riding around in a fast car with an assault rifle and loud music just seemed so… well, Will Smith, to be honest. And more Wild Wild West than Independence Day, too.

But Helen’s mum wanted to see it and I’m so glad we did. It was completely other than I had imagined. An American 28 Days Later with a half-happy ending, but not so happy you’ll drown in the schmaltz. Unusually for a horror movie nowadays, it didn’t rely completely on ‘fright’ moments. There were lengthy periods of tension which didn’t end in something jumping out of the dark — just in the suggestion that something could have jumped out of the dark.

Besides that, it was the usual mankind-plays-god reaps-what-it-sows not-in-a-good-way story. This time it was Emma Thompson proferring the cure for cancer. It turned almost everyone into aggressive pumped-up monsters who hid in the darkened corners of abandoned buildings during the day and came to feed when the sun went down. Typical of any zombie movie nowadays (28 Days Later, Blade, Resident Evil, even Serenity), the baddies seem to gain +5 Superhuman Strength and +10 Jumping Out At Disconcerting Moments Without Warning thanks to viral infection. They must really eat their vitamins, that’s all I can say.

It’s best not to think too deeply on the (non) science in this kind of movie. Science and Hollywood have never been bedfellows, close or otherwise. Like Helen said, “if he’s going to put on a lab coat, the least he could do is button it up!”. Still well worth a trip to the cinema though.

The story previously known as The Northern Lights. I’m re-reading it now, because it’s been too long and I want to know what the differences are between the film and the book.That’s an important point. I have read the story, but I can’t remember the details. Consequently the film did not seem sacrilegious because I was never sure what was real.

It was excellent, in my humble opinion. I really enjoyed it, no provisos. The daemons were believable and fun to watch. The panserbjørne weren’t so great. It seemed that checking to see if polar bears’ noses actually looked like that was a step too far in terms of research. The noses were decidedly odd.

Sam Elliot as Lee Scoresby was awesome. What a great accent! The best by a long way was Lyra. She really held the whole thing together. I am very excited about the sequels. A lot of people have said it was too fast-paced, though I didn’t get that impression at all. Can anyone comment on what they thought was too fast, or what elements should have been expanded on?

The religion was definitely toned down, that was obvious. There was a clear separation of Magisterium and Others which wasn’t in the book. In the book, it was the Master who poisons the tokay at the start…

Update: It seems the spelling of the name of the armoured bears is very imprecise. In my mind it was something like panserbjorne. The copy I’m reading at the moment (Scholastic, 1998) has panserbørne. Translated (and US) copies add the ‘j’ back in. That’s what I’ll go with, as it seems more linguistically accurate.

Helen and I went back to our home town at the weekend. (The place where the masthead photo was taken.)

On Friday night we went to a preview of Philip Revell’s new work (I warn you, that’s an appalling website he has there and it may not work for you at all). So we’ve got a new casserole dish and a wee jug. We’re putting together quite a nice collection now, as Helen received a set of bowls on her birthday.

We played Trivial Pursuit with Helen’s parents. And Helen’s mum and I soundly thrashed the other two (well, it was actually pretty close, but that doesn’t sound so impressive). My impressive computing knowledge won through in the end, though only because I could remember what COBOL stood for. Damn you Grace!

On Saturday I tried to fix my parents computer. That wasn’t very fun. In the words of that great orator, Ripley, “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure”. I honestly don’t understand how using such infested machines can be better than going without. I’m sure it’s more productive to just pull out the quill pen and the carrier pigeons than fight with Windows spyware one more time.

We went to see The Golden Compass also, which I thoroughly enjoyed. More on that later. I tried again to fix my parents computer on the Sunday but failed, again. I hate that machine.

On Sunday night we went to Haddington to see the Garleton singers do a Christmas concert. It was pretty much all over my head though.

But not wanky French cinema. Just a little romantic comedy which goes by the appalling long-form title of How to Get Married and Stay Single. Or just I Do. Premise was quite simple: middle-aged man doesn’t want to get married, but his matriarchal family take the decision for him and start setting him up lots of dates with women desperate to marry. He decides the only way to put the issue to rest will be to get jilted — so he arranges for someone to act as his girlfriend and charm his family, then fail to show up at the ceremony.

Obviously it doesn’t all go to plan: neither his family nor the “couple” react in the way his scheme had intended. The two-dimensionality of the plot and the character types isn’t a hindrance because the two leads are so thoroughly in control. It’s almost like the flatness of the background brings out the humour of the situation, like the endless variations on the “template” jokes:

“How many members of a certain demographic group does it take to perform a specified task?” “A finite number: one to perform the task and the remainder to act in a manner stereotypical of the group in question.”

Sorry, that was unnecessary. But the film, that was good.