Just made a scary discovery – I first signed up to It’s Your Turn nearly six years ago! Since then I have lost 62% of the games of Chess I have played on the site, and most of those to my friend penguin.
Ho hum – but then it’s the taking part that counts!
If anyone fancies beating me at chess, send an invite – I’m “jhandley” over there. Probably best to set a 30 day limit for moves.
Thank goodness – the end of 2006. What a horrid year.
Here’s to 2007!
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 other term was wikipediholics, which again absolutely hits the nail on the head. Had the wikipedia been around when I was younger, I’m absolutely certain I would have absolutely addicted to it, and spent a lot of time and energy creating/correcting entries!
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 old to believably act like a teenager than the other way round.
All the usual stuff about the importance of seeing the other person’s point of view and listening to one another was there – possibly laid on a little bit thick. On balane I enjoyed it though. The whole step-dad thing wasn’t done brilliantly – his character seem to drastically change in the last 5 minutes in a way that reeked of deus ex-machina, but that might just be me.
High point of the film was definitely when LiLo came home after getting 2 detentions to disover her bedroom door had been removed. “Privacy is a priviledge, not a right” says her mum. 🙂
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 failing to understand a fairly simple anecdote, but on the other hand a criminal mastermind. Ok, so the latter point is an exaggeration, but I found it jarring none-the-less. By a similar token, there was no real suspense in the film… the opening credits told you what had happened and who did it, the rest of the time was filling in the blanks. Somehow when American Beauty did this it was “wow – how’s this journey going to work”.. when To Die For did it it was “who cares?”.
Her motivation for killing her husband was also flimsy in the extreme, and while her method was believable, and well played out on camera, she really didn’t come across as that much of a psychopath. It was just a bit too hammy for my liking. The two huge stars where Joaquin Phoenix (already a fan of his) and Illeana Douglas, who were the only two people who didn’t look like they were acting. Everyone else could have been on the set of Friends, really.
The ending was very nicely done too – full marks for that. Watch it if it’s on telly, otherwise find another!
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 modest film.
The story picks up from the end of Dogville – Grace and her father are travelling through the US, when they come upon the plantation called Manderlay. Grace discovers a negro slave is about to be beaten by his owners, and Grace intervenes to set the slaves free, as should have happenbed 70 years sooner. The stories follows Grace’s efforts to turn this former slave colony into a free enterprise – no easy task. Her father wants no part of it and continues on his way, although not before leaving Grace with some gangsters and guns (‘power’) to help things on their way.
Where Dogville was brutal and even shocking – very uncomfortable to watch, Manderlay is gentler on the surface, but a lot more challenging. Lars is making a very strong statement about the attitude of white Americans to black people – slave or otherwise – and winds up the films with clips like the beating of Rodney King (which he reminds us was only in 1991).
I won’t say anymore, because I don’t want to spoil it – suffice to say when I’ve watched next year’s offering – Washington – I fully intend to buy the trilogy to keep as powerful and thought provoking set of films.
I don’t know if you remember the old Zanussi ad?
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.