Friday 9 April 2010

Guttersnipe (n) A snipe that lives in a gutter

I met with the Ugly One and we went to see ‘Clash of The Titans’ in 3D. Remakes are always dodgy territory, especially if one has a particular fondness for the original. For its time the 1981 COTT was an epic mythic spectacle with an all-star cast and a script which gave weight to both the Gods and the mortals.
The CGI and the 3-D gives this version a realistic feel that could only be done with Harryhausen's stop-motion back in the day, but something was lacking. Certainly, the original idea of the Gods playing a form of real-life chess by moving pieces about on a board was a far better concept than this one, where the other gods hardly get a look in, and no name checks, so we're not actually sure what gods they were supposed to be.
Liam Neeson as Zeus seemed to think he would play the part as a bored old glam rock star in glittery armour, while Ralph Fiennes (as Hades) turned his camp meter right up to eleven. All that was missing was a moustache he could twiddle while purring 'Oooooh, I'm ever so evil, I am!'
However, I enjoyed the rest of it, and laughed (no doubt with the other old COTT fans) when Perseus picked up the clockwork owl from the original movie and was told by Liam Cunningham in no uncertain terms to leave it behind.

Saturday 13 March 2010

Courgette (n) An iconic Nineteen Sixties American car which only came in red and ecru. It was the subject of various songs by artists such as Prince, Leonard Cohen and Val Doonican.

Of late, my bipolar obsessions have tended toward the kitchen. I’m working my way steadily through ’50 Great Curries of India’ by Camellia Panjabi.
‘This book will delight, educate and inspire anyone who longs to make authentic curries at home,’ says Nigel Slater on the front cover. He just can’t help sticking his nose in, can he? As people may know, I have an allergy to Nigel Slater.
It may be because he reminds me so much of Alan Bennett that I keep expecting him to say something profound about Thora Hird or the range of rotisserie chickens in Morrisons, but he doesn’t. Nigel doesn’t have a sense of humour, sadly. He just gets inordinately excited about the prospect of eating a courgette while it’s more or less still attached to its parent plant.
Today I made bread; a split tin loaf. It failed to rise to its expected height but is nevertheless very light and tasty. In shape rather than having the aspect of a country cottage with a curved thatch roof, it more resembles one of those flat-topped red brick pubs they build on the corner of council estates.
Then I made a Parsee Red Chicken Curry which wasn’t as red as I’d hoped it would be. I need authentic Kashmiri chillies for that, not the ‘so-called’ Kashmiri chillies I bought from Waitrose. Camellia Panjabi clearly illustrates the difference on page 58.
So, apart from the colour, which ended up being a kind of dark mustard bordering on russet, it was lovely.
This evening we saw ‘Telstar’ which starred Con O’Neill, whom I remembered fondly from a series years ago about removal men based on the film ‘Moving Story’.
It’s a stunning film. O’Neill in particular certainly deserves some kind of award for his performance as Joe Meek, the eccentric record producer who had a studio in his small flat above a handbag shop. Despite the tragic end it’s a joyous and wonderful tale of the triumph of creative genius.
Odd facts emerge from this; two of the guitarists in Meek’s band were Chas Hodges, who went on to be Chas from Chas and Dave, and Ritchie Blackmore who went on to Heavy Rock fame with Deep Purple.

Thursday 11 March 2010

Rudder (n) One who ruds professionally and is an accredited member of the Worshipful Order of Rudders. Unqualified or acolyte rudders are generally known as prehensiles , having not yet been awarded the hensiles necessary for full ruddership and membership of the society.

I wish Ashley Cole would stop texting me pictures of his underpants. It wouldn’t be so bad if he was actually in them.
Today I had to visit another doctor, this time an OHS referral from the underground bunker who had sent me to an address near Liverpool Street in the shadow of the gherkin. That sounds like a good title for a novel, I thought, as I strolled past, ‘In The Shadow of The Gherkin’.
The doctor, a very nice but rather strange and intense individual, pronounced me fit and hale and capable of sustained and intense word processing.
So I left and met up with the Ugly One in the Vue at Westfield, where we saw a 3D Alice in Wonderland in their extreme auditorium. The White Queen is based on Nigella Lawson apparently, which is quite apparent when one watches the movie.
After that a KFC bucket was called for, and we quaffed it merrily, pleased with the way that the day had gone.

Sunday 7 March 2010

Pilate (n) A Japanese pirate

I hied it off to the celebrity sauna, which I am now renaming The Celebrity Lookalike Sauna. Hugh Firmly-Wherewithal was there today wandering around in some outrageously tight white boxer briefs. I can’t think what he was after dressed like that. It wasn’t wild garlic or rabbits, I know that.
Back home, I cooked my famous Kung Pao Chicken. It normally has peanuts in it, but I had some cashews to use up so I chucked those in. It makes a very good alternative.
There have been several versions of Agatha Christies ‘Ten Little Indians’. The original novel had the ‘N’ word rather than ‘Indians’ and featured, as I recall, a golliwog on the front cover in a pool of blodd, or maybe I’m imagining the blood.
The title has been variously changed to ‘Ten Little Indians’ or ‘Then There Were None’ (which was used when we saw the stage play some time ago). Tonight we saw a version from 1974 with Richard Attenborough, Oliver Reed and Elke Sommer set not on an island but a remote desert hotel. It also featured Charles Aznavour who, upon arrival, headed straight for the piano and began to sing ‘Dance in the Old Fashioned Way’.
‘I hope he’s the first to go,’ I said to the Ugly One, ‘I can’t stand much more of this.’
Nor could the murderer apparently, for within minutes Aznavour was lying dead on the stairs poisoned by a spiked after dinner sherry.

Tuesday 2 March 2010

Prioritise (v) To book someone into an expensive rehab clinic.

We saw ‘Angels and Demons’ tonight. Oh dear! From what I can gather, since I was laughing too much to follow the plot too closely, a Vatican priest had been creating anti-matter with the aid of what looked like some Victorian brass gas pipes, and some of the anti-matter had subsequently gone missing. Tom Hanks was summoned back to the Vatican to help look for it, and track down The Illuminati. They are a kind of Opus Dei Lite, and appear to be behind the theft, some killings, brandings, and the threat to send the Vatican into a black hole.
It wasn’t difficult to work out what was really going on. The real mysteries were how Ewan McGregor could have lived in Italy since the age of four and still have an Irish accent, and why Dan Brown is so bafflingly popular.

Saturday 22 January 2010

Scamper (n) A conman who lives in a tent.

I have seen today how easily superstitions or the concepts of ‘signs’ can emerge within society.
I got up this morning and the Ugly One was watching ‘The Green Man’, a somewhat vintage, although quite brilliant, black comedy starring Alistair Sim and a variety of British talent; Dora Bryan, Richard Wattis, George Cole and Arthur Brough (Mr Grainger from ‘Are You Being Served?’) playing the landlord of The Green Man itself.
Once it had finished I set off for the shops and went to up to Edgware Road to do some shopping. As I got on the bus to go two stops to Somerfield, I noticed that the pub behind me had been ‘The Green Man’. Then we passed a set of pelican crossings which was showing the sign to cross, i.e. the green man, and then, almost immediately, we were upon Marks & Spencer, whose large scale window artwork features a sketch of a man wearing presumably M&S clothing, but who is completely green.
Now, the gullible among us having had such an experience would say ‘Oooh, it must mean something’ and it is quite understandable that they should do so, but why should it mean something?
The randomness of events ensure that generally events conform to the laws of averages and probabilities. However, this also ensures that occasionally coincidences occur, and because our brains are hardwired for pattern recognition we connect those items which have symbolic value. Logically there should be no connection between a pub and an electric traffic sign, but because we have attributed a colour and the figurative symbol of a man to both we create a connection.
Yes, it was odd that this particular movie was shown this morning, but the rest of the green men have been in situ for quite some time, and pure coincidence can sometimes be a delight. There is nothing supernatural about it, and to those of you who habitually say ‘There must be something in it!’ I would ask you to think very hard upon the question ‘Why must there be something in it?’

Tuesday 19 January 2010

Avatar (n) A Peruvian form of bitumen, composed of the crushed bodies of Gardner beetles (Dactylopius Avagardnerus). Gardner beetles were discovered in the Nineteen Forties by Hollywood actress Ava Gardner, who often spent her spare time in Peru, classifying insects and cage-fighting with nuns.

vodka and monsters
wetherspoons. three ninety-nine,
and then ‘avatar’.

After two double Smirnoff and Monsters (Monster being the new Red Bull, or, as far as I could tell, the old Red Bull called something else) the Ugly One and I donned our 3-D specs for ‘Avatar’ at the Shepherds Bush Vue.
It was marvellous, despite the fact that the lead female character looks like a blue Katie Price. I was particularly impressed that the US produced a film blatantly demonstrating the US tendency to muscle in on other cultures when there might be a profit in it. Particularly telling was the phrase from the brutal American general, ‘We will fight Terror with Terror!’ which has the strong and repellent whiff of George Bush about it.
The 3-D was outstanding, and this is probably the first film that uses 3-D intelligently rather than a gimmick. I did have to laugh at the use of the word ‘Unobtainium’ which is a phrase coined many decades ago in SF circles to describe those rare metals which the heroes of the works of authors such as John W Campbell and EE ‘Doc’ Smith used to discover on far flung planets, and which could not be found anywhere else.
Rather than hand them back, I kept my 3-D glasses. I paid for them. They are mine.

Friday 11 September 2009

Pollard (n.) A noisy bird, common to the North of England, noted for its incessant raucous calls and gaudy plumage. It is reported by Northern twitchers to be on the decline as it has not been spotted as regularly in recent years.

I had to go back to hospital today for a CT scan. It wasn’t as scary as I thought, although I had to drink a litre of water beforehand and then get injected with iodine, which gave me an odd warm flush.
Later, I met up with the Ugly One and we hightailed it to the Vue at Shepherds Bush to see ‘District Nine’. I was very impressed with this film, which attempts to break the mould of the mainstream SF film. Stylistically it looks very different to other contemporary films, beginning as a collection of Tv media clips showing the arrival of a space-ship above Johannesburg which is housing a population of dispossessed aliens. In some senses very similar to Alien Nation, this movie goes further, demonstrating a xenophobic attitude from the outset where the aliens are settled in a segregated township, where their superior technology is milked by Nigerian gangs who pay them in catfood.
It is, pretty obviously, a thinly-veiled comment on racism and segregation, made all the more chilling by the complicit attitude of the media and the government.
It is not, surprisingly, a depressing film, and rattles along at a fair old pace, mixing action with comic moments, following the transformation, both physical and ideological, of the central figure, Wicus, a kind of South African Rob Brydon.
Refreshingly, the cast are all ‘unknown’ actors and without exception do a sterling job. No doubt, had Hollywood taken this on as a major project we’d have had it set in Nevada with Nicholas Cage as Wicus and William Hurt as his evil father-in-law. It would have been all the worse for it.

Saturday 22 August 2009

It is my habit of a Saturday morning to catch up with ‘Days of Our Lives’. Philip ‘Wet-Lettuce’ Kiriakis has returned unannounced from his marine training, and has grown a completely new handsome head. Gone are the sharpened cheekbones and the wimpy body. The new Philip is a much chunkier monkey.
‘You look so different!’ said Belle Black, a little obviously.
This was clearly an omen of some sort, since later, I wandered down Shepherds Bush Market with my camera and found an elderly Indian Michael Jackson, complete with white glove, red trousers, gold jacket, sunglasses and headphones, dancing around the market stalls singing ‘Billie Jean.’
Could Michael possibly have faked his own death in order to fulfill a lifelong dream of singing his way between Uxbridge Road and Goldhawk Road?
I took some pictures of him, and the attentive audience he somehow gathered, and also one of the nice man who sells the suitcases.
Later, we had Canelloni, while we watched the new revamped X-Factor. No one likes the new format in which an audience sits in on the auditions. Four hundred thousand viewers were lost apparently, which should tell Mr Cowell something.
Later, we watched one of my favourite films, ‘The Blood Beast Terror’, but as this was an American DVD it appeared on the film under its US title ‘The Vampire Beast Craves Blood’.
I’d forgotten that it appears to be full of Carry-On style innuendo.
When Peter Cushing arrives at a lecture of a famous moth expert, he is informed that the lecture has already started.
‘Ohhh, I’m sure he won’t mind if I slip in at the back!’ purrs Cushing, in a suitably Kenneth Williams-ish fashion.
The film is probably the first to feature evil moth people, in this case, Wanda Ventham, whose transformation to a big flappy man-eating moth is so good it incorporates a large Victorian frock.
Marvellous stuff!

Sunday 2 August 2009

Today I intended going out but in a crazy act of spontaneity, stayed in instead.
I cooked one of my signature dishes, Willow Chicken in Black Bean Sauce, while the Ugly One set up a new toy; a combo turntable and tape-deck that plugs into the computer and can therefore convert vinyl and cassette sound to mp3.
Science is marvellous.
Later we watched ‘Dead Silence’ which is one of those films about ventriloquist’s dolls that should really form a subgenre of their own. All in all it wasn’t too bad, and the dummy(s) were suitably well-made and creepy.
I’m also still enjoying ‘The Wire’ very much.
Radio Four irritated me somewhat as there is a move within the station to allow atheists and Humanists to have a voice on ‘Thought For The Day’. The religious broadcasters are against the idea, as they feel that having people broadcasting common sense and logic to ordinary people would no doubt bring down the government and destroy the very fabric of society, not to mention the binding agents that hold the universe together and underpin the very building blocks of reality.
‘We can’t have that sort of thing going on,’ said a Born Again Christian lady. ‘Who knows where it would all lead?’ For one thing, I suspect, Christians might only be born once, and that would cause chaos for just about everyone.

Saturday 1 August 2009

I got up early and took some pictures of the Polish decorators across the road, having their morning coffee.
My tooth was aching still, but despite this I ventured out to work for a couple of hours. As regular readers will know, I work in a secret government bunker in Brixton, so secret that it’s not even in Brixton. We just tell people this to put them off the scent. This does have the benefit to the people of Brixton of visitors arriving to find the secret government bunker and therefore providing revenue to local shops and businesses as they wander about trying to locate me.
This evening we saw ‘A Mighty Wind’, a film made by the wonderful Christopher Guest (whose most famous work has to be ‘This is Spinal Tap’) in which he reunites the Spinal Tap members as ‘The Folksmen’, a folk group of the Sixties who are invited, along with some other folk bands of the time, to attend a reunion concert in tribute to the recently deceased man who made their careers.
As always, the end result is oddly brilliant, particularly as the music is so apt, so subtly funny and so well done that it could fit unnoticed into compilation records of the era.
The comedy is more gentle than that of ‘This is Spinal Tap’ but the film is no less funny. Highly recommended.

Thursday 12 March 2009

The Ugly One and I went to see ‘Watchmen’ this evening, which wasn’t at all what I was expecting. At three hours, it’s a bit of a lengthy experience, and a decent enough movie although I have to confess I fell asleep half way through and missed about ten minutes of the narrative.
I can’t say it was a successful production. The camerawork was excellent, as was the use of music. The director chose to use popular music tracks slotted in throughout the movie, and I was a bit surprised to realise that I have all the albums from which the tracks were taken (with the exception of ‘Unforgettable’, which was used to great effect juxtaposed against a scene of excessive violence at the outset).
What it lacked was coherence in the internal logic of the film. I have not read the graphic novel on which this was based, but can see it working in that format. Transferred to reality, the viewer begins to wonder at the mixture of ordinary humans dressed as superheroes, and those who do have extra-human qualities. What, for instance, is the nature of Rorschach’s mask? Wikipedia tells me that the mask is made from a material made by Dr Manhattan, but this is not made clear in the film (unless it happened when I was asleep).
The ‘human’ superheroes are superstrong and superfast, with no explanation as to how this came about.
One can see this working as a miniseries directed by someone like David Lynch, who is well-used to incorporating surreal incongruities into his productions, but as a singular movie it tries to cover far too much ground with little room left to develop the individual characters.

Saturday 15 November 2008

After a quiet day shopping for chicken for a Thai green curry and painting a picture of my husband asleep on the sofa, our friend Robert arrived and talked his way through the X-Factor.
Later we watched the new version of ‘The Hulk’, sadly without Eric Bana this time, who had been replaced by a somewhat less hunky Edward Horton, and Arwen Eveningnews from the Lord of The Rings. Tim Roth played a soldier who was injected with some modified Hulk juice and turned into a Hulky lizard beast. Being English, he was therefore evil under the rules of Hollywood blockbusters, and it was up to the Hulk to defeat his ghastly Englishness and save the day.

Thursday 31 July 2008

On our DVD rental list was a film called ‘Bug’ which we imagined might be some low-budget horror about man-eating insects rampaging through a motel and destroying all in their path. After half-an-hour of nothing much happening (the lead character is an abused woman who works in the local lesbian bar and makes friends with a man her friend brought back with her. Harry Connick Jr popped in as the abusing ex-husband and popped out again.
It turned out not to be a monster-bug film at all, but a Lynch-esque exploration (based on a stage-play) of psychological control and one woman’s spiralling descent into madness.
It’s actually very good in parts but sometimes veers off into moments that seem to be either parody or comedy, although strangely, there are very few laughs in it.
Still, I felt cheated. I wanted man-eating bugs tearing down walls and roaring or hissing or clicking (which is what movie-makers seem to think giant bugs sound like).

Saturday 14 June 2008

when your poetry
is published but amended
it’s not a good thing.

The Ugly One and I went off to the Bush of Shepherds today to their Vue cinema to see ‘Iron Man’.
I was very impressed with it. Robert Downey Jr, following up his excellent performance in ‘A Scanner Darkly’ plays Tony Stark, a suitably complex character; a mechanical genius who inherits a multi-million dollar weapons company and hasn’t thought through the morality of his company’s product, or indeed, the morality of anything.
When he is kidnapped in the Middle East by a terrorist group who want him to build them a Weapon of Mass Destruction he begins to realise the effects of his company’s work.
So, while pretending to build a supermissile, he assembles a powerful iron suit with built in weapons and manages to escape from the cave in which he has been imprisoned.
Returning a wiser man he then discovers chicanery within his own company, in the rather bulky form of Jeff Bridges (who seems to have turned into Goldberg since I last saw him).
He builds a new improved Iron Man suit in order to track down his company’s weapons, which have fallen into the wrong hands.
Thankfully, the terrorists are not the usual arabs, which have been the lazy option for many writers for the last seven years, but a group of multi-national baddies, called The Ten Rings, who have been employing Stark’s weapons to rampage around, destroying villages.
The foreign locations are suitably vague, and could be anywhere in India, the Middle East or parts of Eastern Europe.
As one of the new Marvel films it’s excellent, helped along by impeccable casting and the usual faultless CGI mayhem. If it has any faults, it’s that it is not individual enough. I suspect that in twenty to thirty years we will be looking back at this current period of Marvel film adaptations with the same mixture of fond nostalgia and critical hindsight that we employ with Hammer films.

Saturday 7 June 2008

i’m making pastry.
it’s a kind of alchemy,
transforms in my hands.

The Ugly One and I spent most of the day lounging about and watching TV. I realise that this must seem like nothing new, but it is a bit odd for a Saturday. I’m normally out shopping for exotic ingredients, if not exotic shopkeepers.
We took in ‘Resident Evil – Extinction’ which was more of the same Resident Evil fodder; zombies and mutant dogs. I’m not quite sure why the dogs are so much faster than the zombie humans – who seem to stumble about dazed as if they’d just had a long conversation with Mariah Carey. This time we got zombie crows, and Alice (Milla Jovovich) has developed Heroes powers (though exactly how is not clear).
In the obligatory underground bunker was a young man whose face I could not place, and eventually had to look him up on t’internet.
It was none other than Matthew Marsden. What do you mean, ‘Who?’?
Actually, it took me a while to work out that he was in Coronation Street about ten years ago playing a young mechanic in Kev’s garage. I suspect he might also have had a fling with Sally, but then, who hasn’t?

Saturday 26 April 2008

those seven tired words
‘my legs! i can’t move my legs!’
return to haunt me

There is a certain cliché which turns up in dramas with alarming regularity, sometimes in hospital wards where a patient has been paralysed, or in action films where some character has been shot in the back or pinned to the floor by the body of a large dead carnivore or an Emmerdale tractor.
‘My legs!’ they cry. ‘I can’t move my legs!’
This well-worn phrase was dragged out again this week on Doctor Who, a show not normally prone to sloppy dialogue.
Two soldiers, investigating the nether regions of a factory complex, were confronted by a Sontaran who fired an electrical charge at one of the soldier’s legs.
‘My legs! I can’t move my legs!’ he screamed, unaware of the semiological history of the phrase. It’s something which has passed into the unconscious memory of our culture, transmitted to all of us as a meme and has since no doubt been said many times in real situations of leg immobility.
Its status as a cliché was highlighted in the nineteen-seventies in ‘The Rocky Horror Show’ where, toward the end, the protagonists are held immobile by Frank N Furter’s sonic transducer.
‘My legs! I can’t move my legs!’ cries Brad.
‘My wheels! I can’t move my wheels!’ responds the wheelchair-bound Dr Everett Scott, which tends to suggest that even then the phrase was one which the audience would recognise.
Later, we were treated to the cinematic experience that is Lindsay Lohan in the Golden Raspberry Award winning film ‘I Know Who Killed Me!’ The film won ‘Worst Film, Worst Actress (a tie between Lindsay Lohan as Aubrey and Lindsay Lohan as Dakota), Worst Screen Couple (Lindsay Lohan and Lindsay Lohan) Worst Remake or Rip-off (Rip-Off of Hostel, Saw and The Patty Duke Show), Worst Director, Worst Screenplay and Worst Excuse for a Horror Movie.
Is it that bad? Well, yes it is. Ultimately it makes no sense whatsoever and one is left guessing why the murderer surrounds himself with blue ‘things’ and has a room full of artificial limbs. I’ve seen worse actresses than Lindsay Lohan, but not often in big budget productions.

Sunday 20 April 2008

mad man on the bus
shouting ‘tutankhamun!’
as if he knew him.

The weather is improving, slowly. I went up to Southall today and spent some time in the park there, which is very nice.
Our double bill for the evening was ‘Hostel II’ which I thought not to be as good as ‘Hostel I’. I’m not sure what the Czechoslovak tourist industry think of it all. It can’t have done them a lot of good. I would feel much trepidation venturing about on my own there with the threat of being carted off to a murderous factory or attacked by feral children hanging over my head.
The second film was ‘Frankenfish’, a low budget yet entertaining piece of nonsense which featured genetically engineered giant fish escaping into the swamplands of Florida and dining on the locals.
I would rather see ‘Frankenfish II’ than ‘Hostel III’ at this point in time.

Tuesday 25 March 2008

getting out of bed
i carry dreams down the stairs
to feed to the birds

Our Festival of The Goddess Estra went quite well. The Wise Woman of Wigan came over to visit on Saturday, having given the SF Eastercon at Heathrow a miss. One of the featured authors there was a Ms Paigan Stone, a name unfamiliar to me. Having googled her, it seems she was sacked from a Christian School for writing vampire novels and selling them on t’internet, which seems a trifle harsh. Christians don’t really seem to have got the hang of this Christian thing at all, even after two thousand years.
Ms Stone is also a singer (a soprano, no less) and has performed in such exalted venues as the Gracie Fields Theatre and the Rochdale Classical Circuit, so I’m understandably well impressed by such credentials.
This suddenly brought to mind Nicholas Cage, whom we watched last night in ‘Ghostrider’. I’m wondering what first attracted the director to the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola as the lead role in this movie, but I guess it’s just the sheer overwhelming talent of the man.
‘Ghostrider’ is the latest in a long line of Marvel adaptations, although I don’t recall ever seeing the original comic.
Anyhoo, the Devil, played with rather apathetic menace by Peter Fonda, is looking for a new Ghostrider, i.e. someone who will sell their soul and become the Horned One’s messenger boy, courier and assassin.
Young Johnny Blaze (played by an actor who looks like he will never grow into the horse-faced bat-eared Cage) signs the Devil’s contract in order to cure his father of cancer, which he does. Unfortunately, his father – an Evil Knievel type stunt rider, fails to get through the hoop of flames and dies, leaving Johnny so full of angst he drives off and leaves his girlfriend standing under a tree with all her worldly goods in a circus bag.
Years later, Johnny (now with fully grown ears and the stretched face) has his own reputation as a stunt-bike rider and is now called upon to do the Devil’s bidding. He is told to hunt down Blackheart (the Devil’s son) and his elemental henchmen, who have escaped from Hell and need to be sent back.
Johnny can now transform at night into a skull-headed burning beastie riding through the night on a skeletal chrome motorcycle which sets fire to the road as he drives over it.
It’s not a bad film, although it would probably have improved immeasurably if a lead actor with some concept of energy had been cast. Cage seems to spend the film looking either confused or stoned. The character only seems to come to life, ironically, when he transforms into the CGI burning-skull-head biker.
Sam Elliott’s very good though.

Saturday 23 June 2007

small seas from the sky
forked fire and cloud explosions
sight/sound not in sync.

The plumber came round to put in a new toilet, which seems to be working ok and hopefully not drowning the neighbours.
I had a pleasant afternoon shopping and then staying home alone while the thunder crashed and the rain poured until later, when the Ugly One returned and we settled down to catch up with some TV and the movie ‘Silent Hill’.
I was a bit surprised to see Sean Bean suddenly popping up with an American accent, and no sign of his Sheffield via Middle Earth Northern drawl.
Bean’s young daughter is behaving increasingly erratically, drawing pictures of witches and crying out the words ‘Silent Hill’ in her sleep.
So, against Bean’s better judgement, the mother takes the little girl and drives off to Virginia, to the ghost town of Silent Hill.
It’s a movie adapted from a video-game, and as these things go, it’s not too bad, if a little predictable. The special effects and the design of the beasties which infest the abandoned mining town are excellent, but don’t expect anything intellectually challenging.