About to book United Airlines to the United States, I thought I’d let any Troppodillians who don’t know of this video, that it exists, and that it’s fun (and it lopped around $170 million off UA’s market cap according to some factoid crazed journalists). And looking it up, I just discovered the other video, which kind of comes with the territory of any video that’s getting to the 10 mil download limit!
And there’s this one which, for reasons that escape me, refuses to be embedded.
Being in holiday mode, my brain is deeply immersed in trivial thoughts, not least who the Australian selectors could sensibly pick to begin the process of rebuilding a competitive cricket team.
However an even more burning question is this: why are there so many cooking programs on TV? It can’t just be that they’re much cheaper to make than scripted drama or comedy. People must actually like watching them. But why?
There’s certainly a moment of harmless if tacky diversion involved in watching the amply endowed voluptuous Nigella figuratively fellate her audience while whipping up tasty comestibles.
I even confess to once watching a couple of episodes of Gordon Ramsey in horrified fascination, though only to find out just how much bullying and humiliation contestants would tolerate in the hope of fleeting foodie fame (the answer appears to be that there’s no limit, otherwise someone would have punched Ramsey’s teeth down his throat years ago).
But with those exceptions, why would you watch a cooking show? And if learning the finer points of domestic chores is entertainment, why don’t we see shows like Poh’s Laundry or Nigella’s Mopping and Vacuuming Titbits? Please explain.
I can finally see the point of Twitter. It lets you inflict isolated thoughts on people that are too trivial or even self-indulgent to merit a full blog post but that you need to share.
The Librarians is the best Australian TV sit-com. Ever. Discuss.
My ideal final episode: Oils Aint Oils appear at the Ferntree Gully Hotel and are joined on-stage by the real Oils including Garrett, but the concert is disrupted by a fire in the ceiling caused by faulty pink batts. Meanwhile …
HT Three Quarks, I enjoyed this wander around the James Bond genre. How can we take such pleasure from such bad movies. It’s a mystery. I liked the essay and don’t dismiss the author’s principal explanation which is Freudian fantasy for boys. But I’m in the demographic he’s writing for – someone who grew up with Bond and the Beatles, so nostalgia is also part of it.
Once I was in some regional town for several nights – not sure what I was doing there – but I went to a James Bond double each night. I came to love the formula. The previous job gets finished up at the beginning of the movie (though this feature emerged later, enabling a big action sequence to begin the movie), bond is given the assignment, part thriller part mystery. He then wanders right into the wolf’s lair. Usually he goes and talks with the most meglomaniacal baddie in the world, has a game of golf or poker with them. Then he wanders into their lair, sneaks around. Somehow no-one shoots him and with a barely maintained straight face starts pulling apart the machinery which, until he wanders into the lair was destined for world domination. I never much went for the sex which somehow isn’t sexy. It was this beguiling and beautiful fantasy world.
Anyway, I wonder what other Troppodillians make of Bond. Oh and the best Bond? Well there’s no question. You’re looking at him just up to your left.
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It’s easier to declare a film a work of genius than to figure out its secret. But I think in the case of Boy, it’s balance. This film tempts you at the start to expect a feel-good movie, but ends up steering clear of sentimentality. There’s menace and heartbreak, but it doesn’t go over the top into numbing social realism. It’s about the clash between fantasy and reality that kids experience, some more brutally than others, but which most of us somehow survive. It highlights what is probably a near-universal experience on the road to maturity — a boy’s disillusionment with his father and the process of re-establishing the relationship on a new footing. Boy’s ride past that particular milestone is hliarious, but it’s credibile enough to be thoroughly jolting as well.
The story is about two brothers who live with their grandmother and miscellaneous young cousins on a ramshackle farm in the Bay of Plenty. Their mother is dead and their father is mostly in jail. Boy is the oldest, and already self-reliant enough to look after the other kids when the grandmother leaves them on their own for a few days. Shortly after she departs their father, like the Cat in the Hat — charming, even elegant in his best moments, and completely irresponsible. He’s destined from the outset to wreak havoc in his sons’ lives, although you sense that he’s fundamentally harmless. Continue reading
I went to see this movie owing to a misunderstanding. I heard that the director had directed Love Serenade and having enjoyed that, and hearing that this movie was good, and wanting to see a movie, I went along.
The premise is, well, dull. A woman and her uncle settle into a barely inhabited island to run a lighthouse. There is one other family on the island with a few kids, and then there are a few other people dotted around on the island for reasons that are not clear.
Miranda Otto is the woman and Barry Otto is her uncle (I think he’s her father in real life). Things go badly with the other family because the wife is a pushy, unpleasant relentlessly unreceptive person who isn’t nice to Miranda. Then Miranda has a pathetic affair with the husband. This ends badly.
Virtually nothing of interest happens, though someone dies. No real connection is made with anyone except Miranda who plays a pathetic, well intentioned but insecure character. We left the cinema after nearly two hours with Miranda going to the dunny in a gale with the walls of the outhouse having blown away. Not sure why we needed to be shown this, not as they say on Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with going to the dunny in a naked outhouse in a gale.
If I were to look for a psychological explanation for why it has been quite well reviewed, I would say that it is perfectly well acted and executed, and there’s a nasty young girl who Miranda meets who is a top notch little actor. Perhaps reviewers flatter themselves that it’s a very ‘quirky’ and ‘real’ film. So is the trip to the dunny, but trust me, nothing happens.
This movie is very very dull. Very very very dull.
Oh and the misunderstanding. The movie I enjoyed was not Love Serenade. It was Hotel de Love which was a lot of fun.
I have it under control. |
I flatter myself I can judge a film from the trailer, but I got it wrong in this case. It looked like a bunch of fancy special effects strung together with some half-baked premise about hacking people’s dreams. I expected tedious chase scenes, endless explosions, and a general spectacle of death and destruction.
Then all of a sudden laudatory reviews appeared (we’ll skip naming names), so I went all out and watched it at the IMAX (not in 3D) to ensure maximum impact. A good decison: the film is a visual feast with a heady Hans Zimmer music score, and demands a huge screen and several thousand speakers to do it justice. Leonardo DiCaprio gives one of his best performances, against some stiff competition: he knows how to draw you into the character’s soul, but he can do Indiana Jones too when the moment calls for it.
As far as the story goes, the first thing to say is that it’s bloody hard work making sense of it all. There were numerous key points I didn’t get until Francis, 13, explained them in the car going home. But we’d both need to see it again to understand everything. And we probably will: a good marketing ploy, to be sure, but it only works if the audience cares enough in the first place.
That’s assuming the story is all graspable. Should we expect these dreams to be fully intelligible anyway? In practice, it appears so — the collaborators who wrote the synopsis on Wikipedia have sketched the plot without resorting to ‘Then, inexplicably…’. I think it’s intended to be explicable too, at least insofar as a series of Escher stairs is explicable. This is proper science fiction, in the sense that every phenomenon and connection is properly thought through. It’s even possible that the film is proposing a science of dreams that makes them intelligible, as a first step to controlling them. Continue reading