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 machine performing a domestic role. This The appliance of science becomes a description of the machine itself!
I suspect the clever marketing folk at Zanussi fully intended both meanings (or indeed may have even intended the single meaning that it’s taken me a good 15 years to grasp, in which case you could say their slogan failed dismally). I guess at one level it’s good marketing, in that I still remember the advert… but it hasn’t made me any more likely to buy a Zanussi appliance – good old Which helps me out when making those sorts of decisions!
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 scales that calculate your BMI (Body Mass Index), and mine was 25.3, which means I’m clinically overweight (the boundary being 25). Of course having an exact figure for overweightness is a nonsense, and I’m not worried from a medical point of view, but I don’t like being/feeling flabby.
So my weight then was 80.1kg (although this was with clothes, to be fair) – last night’s score was 77.9kg (without clothes), which probably means I’ve managed to shed 1 kg or so in a week or two, which is probably a bit too fast, actually…
My diet is simply cutting out snacks between meals – my weight shot up when I started my new job, mainly because there’s a constant supply of biscuits by the kettle, and a chocolate shop across the road. I walk (fast – enough to build up a sweat a bit) for over an hour a day in total, and might even re-instigate press-ups and crunches if I get really excited.
My theory of dieting is very simple – eat too much and you’ll put on weight, eat less and you’ll lose it. I’ve got an active enough life-style to cover the exercise part I reckon, and cutting out the biscuits has already turned gradual weight gain into gradual weight loss. We’ll see.
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, fight, get poisoned, and still save the world and get the girl. He can shoot like no-one else, ski, fence, parachute, fly planes, drive anything faster and better than anyone else. Shirley Bassey had it right – “Baby you’re the best”. Oh yes, and he’s suave, sophisticated; never shaken or stirred!
And what is a Bond film about? Crazy “not even close to being believable” stunts, mad chases over air, sea, and land (and space, come to that). Super evil meglomaniac baddies who are going to kill us all. Weird and inventive ways JB is about to be killed before miraculously escaping at the last minute. Amazing gadgets for getting out of any tight squeeze. Let’s face it, Austin Powers hit it bang on the nose.
So why are they turning him into an ordinary joe public who happens to be paid by the British government to kill people? “Licence to kill” shouldn’t mean you can top anyone you feel like. And it really shouldn’t mean you are sent with the sole aim of assassinating some particular person that Tony considers undesirable.
So take Goldeneye. Brosnan’s Bond does a great bungee jump off a dam. Get’s inside the facility, and finds someone sitting on the loo. What does he do; knock him out with a swift upper cut while hanging from the ceiling. What would Craig’s Bond do? Almost certainly shoot him with a silenced gun, just for being in the way. Of course the latter option is the sensible thing to do if you’re breaking into a heavily guarded military bunker – Brosnan’s guard will wake up sooner or later and raise the alarm. But it’s not the Bond thing to do.
It’s one thing to shoot someone who’s shooting you – kill or be killed – quite another to ask M whether she wants “a clean kill or a warning shot?”.
Take the whole premise of the film – in Casino Royale, Bond is basically trying to stop someone who finances terrorism. He’ll be on to benefit fraudsters in the next film, I reckon. Or perhaps he’ll break a paedophile ring? While these are noble causes, and quite possibly what our Government should be spending time and money trying to sort out, it’s not what Her Majesty’s Secret Service do. He’s 007 for goodness sake, not some PC Plod in Scotland Yard.
What’s the most exciting sequence in the film? JB trying to stop someone blowing up an empty prototype place because the terrorist banker will make money on the Stock Exchange if it is blown up. Come on people!
My final complaint is that people really die. Not cartoon deaths, but “head being held in a sink of water until they drown death”. Or “falling down 5 storeys and landing on the ground” dying. You actually get the impression JB enjoys killing people. In fact, he’s really not that much of a good guy anymore.
I guess this is probably heathly – James Bond has always made espionage and assassination seem glamorous, even desireable. The message is you can drink, smoke, sleep around, and kill people without any side-effects to your physical or mental health. But the whole genre is so clearly over-the-top ridiculous escapism that it doesn’t matter so much. But if this is way Bond is going, I’m going to miss him.
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 Fawkes mask, and plans to blow up parliament.
Except we’re a number of years in the future – democracy doesn’t exist anymore, and the country has definitely gone 1984 / Big Borther under the ruthless Supreme Chancellor. There’s been a world war somewhere along the way too. Everyone lives in fear of the “fingers”, who are basically the SS.
Evie is caught breaking curfew, but before the fingers take her away, V turns up and kills (or at least disables) them all. He then takes Evie to a rooftop, and proceeds to blow up the Old Bailey. Turns out that V is a terrorist come freedom fighter, who wants to topped the government, blow up Parliament, and give power back to the people.
Actually, this isn’t the opening sequence – the opening sequence is of the original Guy Fawkes being caught trying to blow up Parliament, and hung. Remember, remember the 5th of November…
All the main characters are fab, V, Evie, and the police inspector who’s trying to catch them. The plot and script are both excellent – full of surprises, wonderful character development, and the sense that probably justice has been done by the end of the film. V himself is certainly a constant surprise, and has an unending stream of great lines. Perhaps my favourite – V is in a underground tunnel with one of the head nasties, and about 10 soliders armed with automatic rifles. V says that he’s going to kill the had baddy with his bare hands, after which the exchange goes?
Baddie: “That’s not going to happen – we’ve got guns, all you’ve got is your knifes and fancy karate moves”
V: “No, you’ve got bullets – and the hope that after you’ve used them all I’m not standing, because if I still am you’ll all be dead before you can reload.”
Fab line. Actually pretty much everything V says is fab.
If I say anymore I’m in danger of spoiling the film – but it captured the feel of the Big Brother state brilliantly, and V has to be one of the best heroes/villians I’ve seen for a long time (beats the pants of Daniel Craig, for example). Incidentally, Stephen Fry puts in a very good turn too.
My conclusion: Watch it. Tomorrow. No, actually make that today.
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 how the opening sequence went, and I only saw it a couple of days ago.
The titles and music also left me cold – a singularly unmemorable theme tune (by the time we’d left the cinema I’d forgotten it), and bizarre sort of playing card based montage of people being knocked off.
The film picked up pace a little with Bond chasing down an African bomber (who seemed to be a re-incarnation of Sonic the Hedgehog, as he could run up vertical steel girders, jump down liftshafts, dive through ventilation shafts 10ft off the ground, and leap tall buildings in a single bound. Ok, I made that last bit up, but it really was like a comic book chase. They definitely should have got Jackie Chan to advise on how to do stunts like that properly.)
Then James Bond decided to blow up or kill half the Nigerian Embassy (which we could possible write off as a silly rookie error – but it’s James Bond we’re talking about!). In fact the film is riddled with him making utterly stupid mistakes (being spotted tailing someone, giving himself away by clearly showing an earpiece, etc.) that it wass just annoying. Ok, so he’s new as a ’00’, but I always thought the ’00’s were the Secret Service equivalent of Top Gun – you have to be the best of the best just to get in.
Anyway, the plot meandered around with an ever mounting body count, and mild confusion about who was who, and who was really behind it all. Each time someone was set up as the “big baddy”, someone else soon replaced them as the even bigger baddy, normally without ever have been introduced before. Or perhaps they had? All too often it seemed to be a deus ex-machina: Bond’s in a pickle, let’s introduce a random new factor to save him.
In the end all the characters were pretty weak, I thought. There was no meglomaniac invincibility, no super baddy – just ‘normal’ gangsters and terrorists. And, if we’re honest, for a lot of the film JB fell into both categories. Oh yes, and all the characters took themselves far too seriously.
The script was ok – a couple of good one liners here and there. My biggest complaint is that there was nothing silly. Everything that happened (apart from Sonic) was basically believable, or at least required minimal suspension of disbelief. Where was the bungee jump from a dam? Or a car turning into an aeroplane? Or a speed-boat chase across water and land? Where was a car chase in a 2CV? Come to that, where was any sort of significant motorised chase – nowhere (although there was an impressive car crash). That said, JB didn’t manage to sink a building in Venice, which was quite cool.
Actually, the whole film was pretty brutal, and again this wasn’t something I either enjoyed or thought was necessary. I know it’s meant to be “the birth of Bond” and all that, but still..
And the penultimate sequence was awful, and didn’t hang together at all. I won’t say too much, so I don’t spoil the surprise, but it really was a “right, so we’re meant to believe that so-and-so is really doing this when we thought they were …”.
And it was such a “small” film. JB was trying to stop a banker who rolled money for terorrists. Big wow.
Despite all of this, I didn’t hate it – as a film it was reasonable. But I have high expectations of Bond films. I don’t go to a Bond film to see a counter-terrorism documentary, or to see the British government employing hit-man to go and assassinate people they dont’ like. I go to see JB battling against the odds to save the world, doing silly impossible things, charming the ladies and using gadgets. Casio Royale had none of these elementsm in my opinion, and is not worthy of the description “Bond film”.
Seems to me that it’s a very good idea to sort out photo albums in a timely fashion. The two main reasons for this are:
You can remember the who/where/when of the photos.
You don’t post-select the photos based on experiences since then.
For instance, a few years ago I went to a wedding and took lots of piccies on my digital camera. I’m finally getting around to printing out the photos from the computer to go in albums – but sadly in the meantime said couple have split up. This makes for a difficult dilemma… Do I put in photos of “the happy couple” (and they were happy on the day) or not?
To not put them in seems a shame on many fronts. The bride looked absolutely radiant, and I took some stonking photos of her. The wedding itself was a lovely day in a beautiful setting. Everyone had a really good time and that shows in the photos. There’s also the whole “documentary” side of life – a photo album is, in same ways, a store of memories, or at least aide-memoirs. Finally, what happens if the circumstances change again? Perhaps they will patch up their marriage, and have the next 50 years together?
On the other hand, it’s a shame to put in pictures of the bride and groom looking lovingly at each other when, in retrospect, clearly something was rotten in the state of Denmark. It’s like a wedding is a celebration of love and commitment, but if it only lasts a couple of years that’s casts a different light on that day. There’s also the thing about who else might look at our albums – should they or any of there friends and family come round and look at out photos, the last thing they’d want is to be forceably reminded of what, I’m sure, is a very painful experience.
My resolution is to try and chart a middle course – I wouldn’t want to pretend it didn’t happen, and all of us there enjoyed the day. But I’ve also avoided choosing photos of the bride and groom being lovey-dovey. This is actually fairly easy, as you can include the staged shots of various combinations of family. There’s a whole philosophical questions here about our response to pain and “darkness”, I guess, which is actually one I’ve been pondering recently… But that’s for another day!
What an interesting and compelling film this was – absolutely hilarious most of the way through, but a very downbeat last 20 minutes or so, and ends really on a bit of a downer.
The story follows Enid (Thora Birch) and Rebecca (Scarlett Johansson) as two social outcasts who have just graduated from high school, and am trying to make their way in the big bad world. Actually it’s mainly Enid’s story, and to be brutal I found Rebecca to be fairly weak. I haven’t yet decided if Scarlett Johansson really is as gorgeous as everyone seems to think she is. So FHM readers apparantly voted her the sexiest woman in the world; not sure I buy it. I’m certainly unconvinced that every boy in the universe would drool over Rebecca while ignorning Enid – Thora Birch has a charm of her own.
Anyway, Enid decides to play a trick on a geek (Seymour – the wonderful Steve Buscemi) who’s put an ad in the personals asking for a woman he met on a plane to get in touch. Enid pretends to be this woman, and arranges to meet at a diner. Of course Seymour turns up, and no-one is there, but Enid finds herself strangely drawn to him – starts stalking him, and they end up becoming friends.
The story was never really the point of this film though. It’s all about observations on life, particularly as an “outsider”. Becky’s transition from outcast to career girl (put far too strongly, but couldn’t think of a better term) while Enid is seemingly happy to remain job-less and prospect-less, hanging with Seymour, sets up a sad tension between the old friends. Then when the woman on the plane does actually get in touch with Seymour, Enid finds it difficult to handle.
In fact, Enid’s life goes completely down the pan, and the last 20 minutes of it go from bad to worse for her. I personally found this a pity. Sure Enid was her own worst enemy, but she could have had one lucky break…
The other major downer about this film was the language, which was awful. At times it seemed like every other word was f*ck or sh*t or “Jesus” or “Christ”. I know I have my own views on swearing and blasphemy, but I found it jarring and un-necessary to keep on with the bad language.
So, swearing aside, I hugely enjoyed the first 80 or 90 minutes. It was entrancing really, and I kept chuckling to myself throughout this period. In fact the way the dice fell, I watched all of this in one sitting, and the last half an hour or so the next day. So overnight I was still chuckling about bits and pieces in the film, and came back expecting more of the same. The last bit was frankly just heavy and depressing, and the original light touch and humour had completely evaporated. Not that I wanted it to end picture perfect, but Enid’s entire world (such as it was) was torn apart, and left in pieces as the credit rolled. To be honest writing this a day later is still making me sad and ache for her – she wasn’t a bad person, just a bit messed up.
Anyway, I’ll pull myself together enough to say this is definitely one to watch if you like teeny outcasty angsty films (although this a long way from Mean Girls and American Pie – probably closer to Girl, Inerrupted, but funnier). I can’t see I’ll be buying it – with a different ending perhaps, but it’s just too downbeat for me.
I know I’m a bit late in writing about this – been too busy.
So anyway, Sassam Hussein has been given the death penalty in Iraq. No surprise there – the opposite would have been a surprise. But the reactions are still interesting; lots of pictures of people on the streets on Iraq celebrating, for example.
I had it find to see that a death sentence is ever something to celebrate. It’s not a victory. It doesn’t do anything to right the wrongs that were done. It’s not even a particularly good form of revenge, if you’re going to be that base. 5 minutes and the jobs done – compared to the lifetime of suffering some of his victims have to face.
The only good reasons I can see for the death penalty are
It has a certainty of a 0% reoffending rate
It possibly acts as a deterrent
It solves the security problems of keeping a high profile dangerous/hated/loved prisoner safe and in custody
It stops the criminal being a cause (although it does make them a martyr)
It’s far more humane than cooping them up in a cell for the next 50 years
The bad reasons:
There is no such thing as 100% certainty of guilt
It removes any possibility of rehabilitation
It’s based on revenge/retribution rather than forgiveness
It’s not a particularly good punishment for the person involved
As I understand it, it doesn’t particularly act ass a deterrent
It decreases the value of human life – if the state can kill people, why shouldn’t the citizens?
“Justice”, i.e. “an eye for an eye”. Justice in this way simply doesn’t work, in my opinion. Are we saying that Saddam’s life has the same value as x million kurds, so killing him will “balance the books”?
Violence has never been the answer to any of the world’s problems, and while I would say that it’s sometimes necessary (cf the Nazis), it’s never a good thing.
Similarly, in this country we seem to have lost sight of the point of prison. The reasons (good or bad) I can think of for sending someone to jail are:
Punishment – restrict their freedom to make the pay for their crime
Public safety – If someone is going to harm/steal people, the safety of the wider public is more important than their liberty
Revenge – “an eye for an eye” type affair (see above)
Rehabilitation – make them come to terms with their actions being A Bad Thing, and come back in society a better person
Training – criminal masterclasses from the more experienced
Our society today seems to only really be concerned with the first three of these. Lock ’em up and throw away the key. Nicked my stereo? You deserve 2 years in prison son. And I don’t think there’s any consideration of the rehabilitation element. If I sit my boy on the naughty step for doing something he shouldn’t, it’s not to punish him per se, and it’s certainly not out of anger. It’s to give us all a time-out from whatever situation caused the bad behaviour, and give him time to think about the fact he’s upset us or done something wrong. It’s not a pleasant experience for him, I don’t think – but that’s to make sure he understands something is unacceptable, not because I want him to suffer! I guess it’s the fine line between discipline and punishment. Maybe that line’s not even there and I have too many negative vibes with the word “punishment” – but the purpose of the unpleasantness is to drive home the point, not as an end in itself. And the point is to help him be a nicer/better person in the long run.
The difficulty with Saddam is that he would pose a threat and be a de-stablizing influence for the rest of his life, whether behind bars or no. He has made it very clear he sees nothing wrong with his actions while president, and given every reason to believe given half a chance he’d be back in power and doing it all again. And there are people, I’m sure, who would want to see this.
After three reviews on the trot that were – franky – downers, finally a film to get excited out! American Beauty was fab. It gripped me from the opening sequence through to the end credits. It set up a fantastic tension in the opening voice-over that was resolved in the final 5 minutes, but kept me guessing how it was going to resolve the whole way through the film.
It was a film of suprises – as often as not scenes ended up taking a radically different route from the one I was expecting. The characters were also full of surprises, and I think it was quite deliberate that most of them had at least one suprising secret that you wouldn’t have guessed.. or at least not until just before it was revealed.
Basically all the major players had fairly significant character flaws, but still ended up being very sympathetic. You actually feel sorry for the drug dealer, or the grown man who acts out sexual fantasies about his schoolgirl daughter’s friend! In fact the only character I didn’t feel the least bit sympathetic for was Carolyn – Lester’s wife (wonderfully played by Annette Bening)
The story revolves about Lester (Kevin Spacey), a middle-aged sub-urbanite who hates his life but doesn’t care enough to do anything about it. The film opens with him informing us that his life sucks, but that in a year’s time he’ll be dead, and then procedes to tell this story. I had understood that the film was about a man having an affair with a schoolgirl and it wrecking his marriage/life – in many ways this is almost exactly back to front. Lester has a wrecked marriage/life, and his infatuation with said schoolgirl (Mena Suvari, playing Angela, who I didn’t really find all that to be honest) is what wakes him up from his stupor and start making changes. Don’t get me wrong – there’s no doubt Angela is very sexy, but beautiful enough to inspire such obsession? Not so sure. In fact I only really warmed to Angela in the last 5 or 10 minutes of the film – I won’t spoil it by saying why, but by the time the credits came she was a character I liked. The fantasy seems were done really nicely too. You couldn’t avoid the publicity shots of Angela naked except for rose petals – but all those scenes only happened in Lester’s mind, the bright red petals being the common theme. Another nice touch was the seemless slide into fantasy – where did reality start and Lester’s thoughts begin? I also like the fact that, despite being an 18, it avoided the gratuitous/pornography kick. Sure we saw a couple of bare chests along the way, and a bottom one or twice, but nothing explicit. I think it made the film stronger.
Anyway, back to the plot… In the meantime – not necessarily in this order – his wife starts having an affair, his daughter starts going out with Wes – the boy next door (who, incidentally, has been secretly/not-so-secretly filming her on a video camera), he gets the sack, starts doing drugs, and winds up with a naked Angela on the sofa while his wife comes home from the shooting range with a loaded gun…
.. then again, his daughter had possibly hired Wes to kill her dad, said Wes’s father (an ex-marine) has just thrown Wes out, believing Lester paid Wes for gay sex, which didn’t make him too happy…
Thankfully this is a pre-“Lost in translation” film, which means we do actually find out what happened, who did it, and why.. and while there isn’t any resolution of the bigger picture, all the questions the film poses are tied up by the end – and I like films which do that. That’s not to say it’s a staid film. It had plenty of surprises along the way, great acting from everyone, a cracking story.
As for the title? Well, the whole film is really a study of beauty and where different people find it. In furniture, in schoolgirls, in a plastic bag dancing in the wind, ….
One to own? Tough call.. I’m not convinced I’d watch it again unless it happened to be on TV while I was channel hopping. One to watch? Without a doubt.
Extremely disappointed in this film. It had everything going for it – vampires vs. werewolves in a guns’n’bombs age (great concept), Kate Beckinsale in black leather (for those who like that sort of thing), gothic mansions, an at least half-intelligent story, …
So what went wrong?
Well, nothing in the film was probably explained – the soundtrack was so poorly mixed if it was loud enough to hear the dialog it was deafening with the guns (and there were a lot of guns!), everything was shot in dark/grainy/gritty low contrast mode, which meant you couldn’t really see what was happening, and the camera shots were wild and crazy with cuts and changes of perspective, everyone wore the same thing (black), so you couldn’t really tell who was on who’s side, and it assumed an awful lot about vampire/werewolf folklore as background knowledge.
By the time you’d warmed to Selene (our Kate) it was almost the end of the film, and Michael was just wet, I’m afraid. The two decent characters were Viktor (the fab Bill Nighy, who’s still got it) and Lucian, who was the star of the show in my opinion (good one, Michael Sheen). I was sure I’d seen Erika (Sophia Myles) before too – and yes indeed, step forward Reinette Du Pompadour (which itself was one of the better Dr Who episodes).
