... about programming, growing up in the 1970's and 80's, games, science fiction, working in a charity book shop, films, spending too much time watching television, living in Basildon and Essex, and whatever else emerges from my fevered imagination. If you're reading this, it's your fault you clicked on the link: I am not responsible for your actions.
Although I have it on DVD, I watched Apocalypse Now through LoveFilm. It's the original edit, not the redux, but no worse for all that.
Willard's journey up the river and his confrontation with the enigmatic Kurtz marked the end of an era in Hollywood and nobody made films quite like this again.
Changing Names
Mr. Glitz has changed his name to...Mr. Glitz. You can't really have a new name without a new badge, so...:
LoveFilm have recently updated their apps such that the films download a lot faster and more reliably, so I've been watching a lot more movies.
Brooklyn's Finest
This is an American cop movie starring Don Cheadle, Wesley Snipes, Ethan Hawke (who once signed one his novels in Chelmsford!) and Richard Gere.
The movie follows the paths of three different policemen: a burnout seven days until he retires (Gere); a desperate family man who hits on the idea of robbing drug dealers (Hawke); and an undercover cop and having divided loyalties (Cheadle).
Although an excellent crime drama, it does suffer from having too many stories to tell. The burnout story could have been left out and more effort put into the other two stories, but each of the stories could have made a decent movie all by itself. Cheadle stands out for me as the conflicted undercover cop, but the others are all excellent, despite their limited screen time.
Angels and Demons
This is the adaption of the book by Dan Brown, whose name is a curse on the lips of every second-hand book seller:
If The DaVinci Code was silly, this is just ludicrous. I just wanted the bomb to go off - right in the middle of Vatican City, half way through the movie, so I didn't have to sit through the rest of this waste of celluloid. I hope it bombed.
Satrapi was co-director of the film, so what you see is pretty much as the books tell it. It's also a sad film as her family suffered terribly in the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war and she ends up leaving Iran forever, but it is a story about freedom and what it costs. The rendition of "Eye of the Tiger" was beyond funny.
Amongst the usual flyers in my e-mail in-tray was an advert from Waterstones regarding World Book Night. I don't usually pay too much attention to these as, like the Booker prize and it's ilk, it's not what everyone reads. I scanned down the list and noted that Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, was on it, as well as my brother-in-law's favourite author, Martina Cole, with her novel The Take. Also included are A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens and Sense and Insensibility by Jane Austen. All very well, I thought, until I spotted my all time favourite book in the list: The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks.
I suppose most gamers will like it for the title alone, but it's certainly Banks's best (Use of Weapons comes close, and The Bridge is his other masterpiece, but he's not done anything that great in a long while: Surface Detail was dire!).
Anyway, the deal is that you get 24 copies and give them away. I'm not giving away my first copy (1st edition paperback) nor my signed copy, but if you want one, I'm more than happy to send you one on the day, which is 23rd April.
In 1972, a film was made using statements from the Winter Soldier investigation:
This was a public investigation, not Congressional or formal in any way, into atrocities of perpetrated by U.S. and allied forces during the Vietnam War. This was in the wake of the My Lai massacre, which was reported as an isolated incident. Winter Solder demonstrated that, although an extreme occurrence, these atrocities were "SOP" (Standard Operating Procedure) and by no means unusual.
This all seems like ancient history: it took place when I was about seven years old, but a new Winter Soldier project has been set up, both in America and Europe (but not the U.K., strangely) to document Afghanistan and Iraq.
For Christmas, I got Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger on DVD:
Thor has got quite a few positive reviews, mainly because Kenneth Branagh has directed it, but there's nothing particularly exceptional about it, for a Marvel movie.
I thought it was well done, in particular the special effects, but seemed a bit one-dimentional (yeah, okay, it's Marvel, but Iron Man 1 wasn't like that). Saying this, it could have been really, really bad and maybe Kenny was just the right guy to do it?
More fun, perhaps, was Captain America: The First Avenger:
This is getting back to what the super hero comics were all about in the first place, kicking seven bells out of the bad guys. It's worth remembering that a lot of the early super heroes were created by Jewish cartoonists (Jacob Kurtzberg = Jack Kirby; Stanley Lieber = Stan Lee; Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created Superman; Bob Kane, or Kahn, who created Batman) so Nazi's are a natural enemy for super heroes.
As an aside, the flying wing used at the end of the movie by the Crimson Skull is based on real designs for an "Amerika Bomber" by the Horten brothers and others.
A Budgie for Christmas
And someone bought me a little budgie:
Made from resin, but a nice little addition to the menagerie.
