Hooray – my alarm has gone off for the last time until next Friday! 🙂 Well, actually, we’ll probably need it in order to to make it to the 8am service on Monday morning, which will probably mean leaving the house at the same time. Come to that, I’m sure our little human alarm clock is going to work his magic most mornings. Bosh var. But ANYWAY, the point is no more work, after today, for a week (and even then it’s only a day). Yippee!!

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

I don’t know if you remember the old Zanussi ad? Zanussi – The Appliance of Science 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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]