The arrogance of Piers Morgan

wow

choice quotes:

"As Muhammad Ali said, it’s hard to be humble when you are as great as I am,”

"I think it’s time the talent fall back and go, ‘hang on a second, without us, you don’t have networks'."

"I am looking to at least double it (his salary of £2m). I’ve got no problem if they take it away from somebody else who feels guilty about this type of thing, because I have absolutely no guilt issues about my salary whatsoever. I think I’m worth every penny."

Anyway, that's what's been annoying / amazing me this morning.

Badverts 2

A second installment of the TV ads that have got on the wrong side of me recently for one reason or another.


Kellogg's Rice Krispies Squares

Not a bad advert in many ways. A simple idea - puffed rice community lives on chocolate volcano - executed well enough with CGI krispies and volcano, obviously aimed at the kiddies to make them pester mum and dad whilst doing the weekly slog round Tesco. What I take issue with here is the accent of the narrator. He's supposed to be from the Caribbean or somewhere in that region. That's what I just about get from the way he mangles the opening sentence anyway. But after that ignorant piece of rice plucks a seemingly innocent flower from the cocoa crater he calls home, the narrator seriously loses the plot. Where the hell is that accent meant to be from? Somerset, perhaps? Maybe Wales? Or somewhere that doesn't actually exist? I'm going to go with box number three please, Noel. I mean if they wanted a Caribbean accent, instead of hiring someone who really really can't do one, why didn't they just go for the much easier and obvious option of, oh, I don't know, hiring a voiceover guy who comes from the Caribbean? But they didn't, and so we get this embarrassing, chewed up, offensive-to-your-ears-whether-you're-from-the-Caribbean-or-Crewe monstrosity of an impersonation. I'm guessing I'm not the only one of this opinion, as the advert has since been changed and now runs with a different voiceover who's supposed to sound like David Attenborough on a nature programme. He doesn't. It's still shit. Not quite as bad, nor as offensive, but still shit.

Mikado

An advert that lies (for me, at least) on that fine line between a campaign that's quite brilliant and one that's just plain wrong. But in so many ways it lands firmly in Wrongville. The advert has almost nothing to do with the product, reducing the snack being advertised to little more than a prop in the story it's telling. This is not a problem in itself, as any self-respecting drum-playing gorilla will tell you. But that means the company, having shunned the more traditional "buy our product because it's great" route, now has no choice but to promote the values associated with their product to make people want to buy it as it fits in with "who they are" and "what they're all about". And what values does Mikado have, according to the advert? Well, that it's "a bit cheeky". A young woman working in an office accidentally sets off the photocopier whilst kneeling on it trying to reach a Mikado stick. Oooh, cheeky.

But it's not. It's really, really not. This isn't Barbara Windsor giggling whilst clasping her boobies in a Carry On film. It's not even a rebellious teenager pulling his already-halfway-to-his-ankles trousers down and xeroxing his clammy posterior. The woman in the advert is wearing a short skirt and straddling the copier, meaning that she's either making copies of her knickers or her, ahem, "front bottom". See why it's not so cheeky any more? But it doesn't stop there. The male co-worker who had previously exited the copying room now re-enters, and is clearly somewehat surprised by what he sees Little Miss Knickers doing. At this point, the makers of the advert make sure that their advert cannot be rescued in any way, shape or form by slapping on the most inappropriate slogan for the scene which we are now gazing upon: "More than a little bit tempting". Fair enough with regards to the woman wanting a Mikado stick, but genuinely alarming when considering its alternative focus. Apparently the values that Mikado stands for are centred around office rape. If that's who you are and what you're all about, what the fuck is wrong with you?


Diet Coke



This one doesn't really need a huge amount of analysis. Annoying vacuous chart pop music. Annoying slogan that's trying to be oh so hip. So, a good start then. We then get a montage of women being, to put it bluntly, twats. Ruining wedding photos, trying to starting fights in bars, pissing around during a coworker's office presentation. And thinking they're hilarious whilst doing it. I could go on and on about how vomit-inducingly irritating all the women in this advert are, but that would be to waste far too much energy on them. Essentially, Coca Cola are saying if you're a woman and you drink Diet Coke, you'll become a complete dickhead. Great ad, guys.


ITV1



So, I'm at the cinema, awaiting the start of whichever film I've chosen to see. The advert starts, and this one comes on. I've not seen it before. So I begin taking it in. As it unfolds before me, I start to consider what it could be for. A new drama series, maybe? Perhaps a charity? I keep watching, still unable to put my finger on it. The advert continues. The kids are walking on a beach, there are homeless people living on the beach - could be about conservation at a fair stretch? Then the kids start doing the whole "throwing stones at the sky to break up the clouds" bollocks. At this point I've given up trying to work out what the hell this advert is for, because I've run out of things that could possibly fit with the colossal amount of pretentious wank that is being played out before me. This advert pretty much ticks all the boxes for being everything I hate. Child actors being annoying - yep, there they are; token foreign-looking kid in a half-arsed, last-minute attempt at diversity and political-correctness - most certainly; lashings of oversentimentality - oh yes sir, plenty of that. And still, I'm none the wiser as to what is being advertised to me.

As the children dance in the sunlight, which they have apparently never experienced before, playing whimsically with a damaged umbrella without a care for the used nappies and hypodermic needles that have likely come into contact with it, Patrick Stewart puts me out of my desperation and reveals that this heartstring-tugging tale is in fact an advert for ITV1. My jaw drops. ITV1? The "brighter side"? Really?! So, the channel that brings us The X-Factor, Tonight (which might as well be named The Daily Mail: TV Edition) and The Jeremy Kyle Show, turning on this channel is like, and I quote, "being able to make the sun shine whenever you want"? This advertising campaign is so ill-judged and egotistical, it's laughable. I can't think of many things that deserve such overwhelming and histrionic praise, let alone self-praise. But ITV1 is somewhere near the bottom of the list. I could go on and on about the things that this advert does wrong, but I'd be here for a long, long time.


That wraps it up for this second entry. Chances for a third installment? Well, that all depends on whether companies and advertising agencies continue to make terrible adverts. So, quite likely then. As always, if there are any ads that have caught your attention and/or got your goat recently, please let me know.

In the dollhouse

Last week, I watched Dollhouse. (Don't read too far down, spoilers there be) WHICH HAS TOTALLY EATEN MY BRAIN. Normally I daydream about sex, or my unfulfilled career as a stunt double/stand-up comic.

But at the moment, I'm daydreaming about Dollhouse and wanting the next series now. One night, I actually fell asleep thinking about it and woke up still thinking about it. The received wisdom seems to be that the first episodes weren't that good, but I actually enjoyed them and found everything compelling. Admittedly, things do pick up dramatically at episode 6, but to me it felt like a natural build up.

I don't really feel the need to empathise with the central character, who has her personality re-formatted at the end of each episode, because there are a lot of interesting side-acts to keep me hooked. It may be because it's such a welcome distraction from the rest of my life that I've found this show so compulsive, but I got through all 13 episodes in less than a week and I'm currently doing the re-watch with commentaries thing and working my way through most of the special features. I'm not sure what I'll do when I get to the end. Meep.

When I was younger, I quite liked Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I recently managed to get round to watching seasons 6 and 7. They were diverting, at times entertaining. Watching them needed doing, I needed to finish the saga. But they were as morphine to the heroin that is Dollhouse. Or Firefly. Maybe I've matured (fingers crossed), maybe Joss Whedon has matured. Maybe Firefly and Dollhouse are just more to my taste. Maybe they haven't been going long enough to get crap (Firefly certainly hasn't). But I think they are both streets ahead of Buffy. And Dollhouse is getting a second series. Woo!

To anyone interested in Whedon's work, I would definitely recommend you check this out. I didn't really have any preconceptions about it and just loved it.

Review Round-Up 7

I've come to the conclusion that, once again, I need to rethink how I put together my film reviews here. Some of these films I saw around a month ago, meaning that more than I would like of some of these reviews is made up of what I wrote on Facebook's Flixter application combined with whatever I can now remember of my reaction to the films at the time I saw them. So, these Review Round-Ups will most likely come to an end in the near future if I can work out how better to get my reviews up here without making the entries too brief or too lengthy.

This entry is made up of reviews of films I've seen at the cinema. I'll do another entry soon on the films I've seen recently on DVD.


Ice Age 3: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs
This film felt very aware of the fact that it had two films behind it to develop all of the returning characters, which turns out to be both a good and a bad thing. Good because it means that the foundations are there to start off another adventure with familiar characters without trawling through backstory. Bad because some of the main characters' storylines feel very underdeveloped and almost like afterthoughts as to what to give them to do for this installment. Diego, for example, a pivotal character in the first film, is now placed firmly in a second fiddle position and unfortunately given a storyline that could be written down on the back of a postage stamp. Crash and Eddie suffer a similar fate, although I wasn't so fussed by that. The main storyline itself is the simplest of all the Ice Age films so far, but this is still great fun and enjoyable all the way through. The characters are not tired yet (although I'm not sure if they could all withstand a fourth installment) and the introduction of Buck (voiced by Simon Pegg) is a welcome one who provides real humour throughout. The Scrat skits also get a fresh twist, and are as hilarious as ever.
7/10

Harry Potter & The Half-Blood Prince
Tom Felton stands out in a returning cast that appears to simply be going through the motions, especially during the first half of the film. He brings new depth and believeable turmoil to the character of Draco Malfoy, something that Daniel Radcliffe as the eponymous teenage wizard fails to pull off in this installment. Jim Broadbent is well cast as Horace Slughorn and puts in a strong and charming, if exaggerated and hammy, performance (but what else do you expect from British stalwarts in Potter films?). However, the film overall never grasped my attention enough, with the magical elements underwhelming and the story oversimplified to the point of incomprehensibility at some points (good luck to anyone planning to understand this film without having read the book to fill in the gaps). Ultimately, in no way is this a particularly bad film. There are enjoyable elements scattered throughout, and, from the point of view of someone who has read the books, it is less frustrating to watch than Prisoner Of Azkaban. It's just that, in most ways, it's distinctly average.
5/10

The Proposal
Below average, with all the familiar elements of the rom com formula presented in a half-hearted fashion. Having two capable actors in Sandra Bullock and Ryan Reynolds as the leads drags it up a little, as they do have genuine charm, at times even chemistry together, and you feel they are doing the best with the poor material they have. They're never believeable in the roles they've been cast in, especially Bullock as the bunny-boiling bitch (made even more disappointing if you've seen her in 2005's Crash, in which she plays a similar character with real flair). One truly funny scene and another moment involving '80s hip-hop stand out as small and unexpected islands in a sea of writing and direction mediocrity.
5/10

Land Of The Lost
Feels decidedly amateurish and relies too much on "teenage boy" humour to carry it (I lost count of the amount of jokes about boobs). Will Ferrell is amusing enough, and has some relatively funny dialogue, but for the most part feels as though he's on auto-pilot, making his character of Rick Marshall feel like a watered-down mish-mash of several previous Ferrell incarnations, making for a mediocre and unsatisfying performance. The other cast members are on the whole unconvincing and feel too one-dimensional to be anything more than just adequate human scenery for Ferrell. The plot is paper thin, at times almost non-existent, and large sections of the film leave the characters simply bumbling around aimlessly without any real focus. If you have nothing better to do then you could do worse, but be prepared to switch your brain, and your crap filter, firmly to "off".
5/10

The Time Traveler's Wife
A real mixed bag in many ways. At times the time travel element feels cleverly handled and executed with genuine flair and humour; at others it feels confused, and almost as if the film-makers themselves were unsure of what they were depicting and the rules it is governed by. Eric Bana is excellent throughout, bringing depth and humanity to a role that would be easy to turn into a parody or cliche of the time-traveller archetype. Rachel McAdams is satisfactory as the eponymous spouse of Bana, but rarely shows the range and depth required to make the character feel genuine. Very enjoyable with some truly inspired parts, but at the same time frustrating - many characters feel severely underdeveloped, some to the point of having no purpose in the film whatsoever. Some elements and scenes also feel oversimplified, giving those parts an unsatisfying feel and taking away from the film overall. Considering the film as a whole, Bana is very entertaining and, whilst the plot occasionally lapses into the simplistic and sentimental, the story requires enough brains to make this worthwhile and enjoyable.
7/10

More Trailer Trash

Maybe fifteen months later is too long to do a follow-up entry to a previous post, but to hell with sticking to convention, I'm going to do it anyway. Said previous post was actually inspired by an entry Telf wrote on the varying success of film trailers, and how certain trailers get it wrong. A pet peeve Telf and I share is trailers that don't know when to stop - essentially telling a large part (in the worst cases, all) of the film's story, instead of giving just a taster of what is to come when seeing the film itself. Seeing as I've experienced a couple such trailers recently, I thought I'd share my take on them.

Incidentally, everything below contains potential spoilers (although most of it is based on the content of the trailers alone, so I can't be certain what's a spoiler and what's not. That said, it would be difficult to spoil some of these films more than the people who made the trailer already have)

The Taking Of Pelham 123 (click here for the trailer)
The combination of Denzel Washington and John Travolta initially made this a film I was interested in seeing. However, the more I heard about Pelham 123, mainly about it being just another flat and formulaic action flick, the more my interest wained. I was still curious though, and thought it could be one to see just to make my own judgement on. That is, until I saw the trailers for it. I knew the basic plot of the film, which is where the trailer starts, and where it should end. But it doesn't. So we get the set-up: Washington's introduced as the average guy just trying to do his day job, Travolta as the sociopathic bad guy, whose actions throw Washington unwillingly into the hero role. Standard action fare. Fine, no problem. But hold on, the trailer has more to say. We get a bit more interaction between hero and villain; we find out some of the details behind the villain's motives. At this point I was really hoping the trailer would finish, or at least stop giving away the plot of the film. But it doesn't. It keeps going. We get Washington doing all the hero stuff, including a high speed taxi chase (of which we see a fair amount) where he's apparently taking a large amount of money down to Travolta in the subway train, and even see Washington and Travolta's characters' first meeting. And it goes on. By the time I'd finished watching the trailer, I felt I pretty much knew what happens in the film apart from the finale. If I have to sit through everything before the end knowing basically what's going to happen, then I just won't bother. And that's what Pelham 123's trailer did. It made me just not bothered about the film it was advertising. Good work, guys who made this trailer.

Funny People (clicky for trailery-type thingamajig)
Not quite as serious an offender as the trailer for Pelham 123, but this is a film that I am much more interested in seeing, so my disappointment at its ham-fisted trailer was amplified when I first saw it. This trailer essentially runs around a minute too long. We see Adam Sandler as a successful comedian - no problem. We see Seth Rogen as a comedian just starting out - fine. We see Jonah Hill. My interest is sustained despite this. A film about comedians is enough to draw me in. Then we find out Sandler's character is dying. A twist to add further interest. This looks like a film I'd really be interested in. The trailer continues, drawing me in further, and then when it should finish, it goes too far - Sandler's character recovers from his fatal affliction. A very frustrating fact to include in the trailer, as now when I go to see the film (which I still want to despite my annoyance at the trailer's spoilerific qualities), whenever they make out that Sandler's character is close to death and that it's very sad, in the back of my mind I'll simply be thinking "he's not going to die, so I don't need to worry about that". Essentially, up until the point that Sandler's character is told he's going to beat his illness, the film won't be as satisfying as it potentially could have been as I've had that major plot point revealed to me. Still looks to be a good film, but a shame that the trailer has slightly spoiled it for me already.

There have been a couple of others recently, but these are the ones that stuck out in my mind.

In contrast, the trailer for the new Coen brothers film A Serious Man is what I would define as a very good trailer.



So why is this trailer so much better than those for Pelham 123 and Funny People? Well, it's original for starters. I can't remember seeing a trailer like it before in terms of the way sound and image loops are used. Secondly, it's intriguing - it draws you in without showing you very much at all. I could make some guesses at what some of the film's themes and ideas might be, but I couldn't tell you what the story is. But I do want to know what it is, so the trailer has done it's job. The simple and unostentatious presentation of some of the Coens' previous hits at the end is the icing on the cake. True, not all films are able to do this; but this trailer can, and does it pretty well too.

Just to finish off, I've seen the trailer for G.I. Joe a few times recently. Not a particularly bad trailer in terms of giving away plot, but the film looks like total dross (and most probably without much plot to have given away). The reason I mention it is that, after seeing it for the first time, I immediately drew one or two comparisons with a film in particular from a few years ago. Those one or two grew to several comparisons on a second and third viewing. And I'm so glad to see that it's not just me who spotted them...



I was actually considering going to see G.I. Joe just in the hope that it is so bad that it's laughably bad, but I don't know if I can manage it now. I think to stomach the whole film I'd be hoping all the way through that Matt Damon was going to crop up and say his name repeatedly in a moronic voice.

Linkables 3/8/9 : Video Extravaganza

For some reason I ended up saving a ton of videos recently, so it seemed only natural to link them all at once:

What could possibly make two already-great genres of music even greater? Combining them! Hence, I give you 80's music + ragtime piano:


Secondly, lest we forget the campy sins of our forbears:


Thirdly, the eternal delight that is Literal Music Videos. There're loads of these out there, so I'll just link a couple, to wet your whistle:



And, finally, just Dara Ó Briain being funny:

Linkables 29/7/9

Somewhat similar to Bambi's post a while back (which I can't find) about telling stories in just six words, but this time it's genre-specific microfiction within the confines of a twitter message.

Dave Gorman on the horrors of being a celebrity in a super-connected age.

Genuinely freaky video apparently showing a dog living without a body- I can't find anything obvious claiming it to be fake, either.

Just never give your laptop to anyone, ok? But you can stick your hand in liquid nitrogen as much as you like.

Two flash games: A simple but addictive space-based mining/combat/tower-defence thing, and an equally addictive (and frustrating) roll-the-dice-and-make-patterns game.

Cool webcomic-in-the-form-of-a-photo type thing. With good astronomical advice.

And, of course, the ever-enticing Babes of the BNP.

Deeper Underground

For those of you who find it difficult to get your head around Shakespearean characters, but easy to navigate the London Underground system, this map from the Royal Shakespeare Company may be of help:



Reminiscent of The Great Bear by Simon Patterson, another inspired (and indeed educational in a pop culture and stuff-it's-good-to-know sort of way) take on the iconic Tube mape.



(Not a brilliant quality image, so if anyone manages to find a better one online please inform me of it).

Patterson's idea sparked off many imitators, especially on the 'net, although most of the ones I've seen so far haven't been too inspired. One of the few exceptions is arguably The Guardian's map of musicians and musical genres (the accompanying article upon which can be found here). Largely though, they don't succeed to the same degree as Patterson's version. I'd be interested to see any other versions of the Tube map people know of, though.

Awareness Test

I was first shown this during a professional development course. I think it's fantastic. Just watch.

3.something

A few days ago was pi-approximation day, and so, in its honour, I present a little script which can be used to calculate the best pi-approximations using not just the day and the month, but also the year...

http://www.thetelf.co.uk/projects/piday.php

Enjoy...

P.S. I'm sure it'll be very easy to break, since I knocked it up in a couple of lunchtimes, so please be nice...

Harry Potter and the Halfway Point

I've just seen Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince I worked a 12-hour day at work yesterday and am knackered so I shall review it thusly:

Characters:
• Jim Broadbent was brilliant. Wonderfully captured Professor Slughorn. Shines out in an excellent cameo as Kenneth Branagh did in the Chamber of Secrets.
• Alan Rickman was very good, but at times Snape still remains a bit too opaque for the audience to connect with what, if anything, he might be thinking. At least he doesn't mince so much anymore. In the first film, I kept expecting him to break into song. He was too camp for words.
• Daniel Radcliffe was a lot better in this film and he has great comic timing, but he still can't pull off the heavy stuff. Tom Felton as Draco Malfoy acted him off the screen in ever scene they had together and held his own a lot more comfortably with Michael Gambon et al at crucial points. You genuinely felt Draco's pain and confusion, though you never really, truly, felt Harry's.
• Maggie Smith, good but just seems like she's going through the motions.
• Helena Bonham Carter, beautifully demented, shame she's not in it more.
• Evanna Lynch, effortlessly weird, sadly underused.
• Rupert Grint, the best of the main three, but it's a shame he's not given more to do besides comic relief.
• Emma Watson, not nearly so annoying and over done as in previous films, though her friendship with Radcliffe's Harry feels like a more convincing one than her supposed romantic entanglement with Ron.
• Bonnie Wright can actually act now. Surprising.
• Voldemort aged six/eight. Not very scary. Doesn't act interested enough in being a wizard. Sounds like a wannabe cockney rude boy. Voldemort aged 16ish, has metamorphosed into someone who sounds like he came from Eton. Charming and intimidating.
• The annoying thing were Fred and George talk in unison the whole time is back. Shudder.


Plot: SOME SPOILERS HERE.
• They go to school. Teenagers do that teenage thing. Large parts of the book missing. Not much takes a long time to happen. Suddenly, Dumbledore discovers a possible Horcrux. They go to look for it. They come back. Bad things happen. The end.
• Random additions such as an attack on the Burrow do nothing to move the film forward. Cutting the final battle at the end makes Draco's flight seem too easy and the film just sort of tails off. It was shame not to include Dumbledore's funeral but it was pretty long as it is.
• The dialogue was at times incredibly well done but at others also incredibly clunky just to fit as much exposition in as possible. There have to be better ways.

Cinematography:
• This film looks brilliant and the whole thing is leached of colour which gives a sombre and foreboding feel to it. It's not quite black and white but it's getting there. A lot of people wear a lot of black.
• Scenes are nicely linked together, with characters, usually Draco Malfoy, appearing in interesting bits of the screen framed in an usual way, propelling us into the next bit of the film.
• The visual effects are all very smoothly done, though the Inferi in the cave scene are not very convincing and the fire seems a little overdone.

General:
• Could have done with a bit less teenage romance. It's funny and well-acted, but the film could have been shorter without it. I've been reading the book again and have come to the conclusion that it's just there to hide the fact that not much happens in this book. Harry does his sixth year at Hogwarts. The end. The book is filler and while this film tries hard not to be, there's not that much it can do to avoid it.
• It can't have escaped the film makers' notice that the particular angle at which they shoot Ron and Cormac McClaggen astride their broomsticks with handles protruding from between their legs is indecently phallic. Seriously, it's not just me.

Conclusion:
I have never been able to understand why anyone would go to see these films if they hadn't read the books. You only know that things are significant because they're so obviously signposted the whole way through and without the background knowledge some of the films big reveals, like the identity of the half-blood prince, make no sense. The plot of the films is strangely paper thin yet also trying to cram in an enormous amount of information, but it's not always the right information. The strange thin and thickness of the plot may be because the pacing is very choppy between ACTION and exposition. I enjoyed it very much and liked the ending and can't wait for the next two. But I know I only like them because I fill in all the details of the books myself. I know I only put up with the methadone of the films because the supply of heroin of new Harry Potter books has long been exhausted.

Badverts

Advertising in its various forms can be inspired. At the moment, on TV at least, it certainly isn't. A selection of the worst TV ads on at the moment:

Confused.com - I think my main bone of contention with these is that Confused.com actually want you to believe that people record themselves on YouTube talking about car insurance comparison websites. Add to that the fact that the people on the ads are at best not very believeable as genuine members of the public, and at worst are annoying enough to make me want to stick a fork through their skull. Especially the guy who gives "hilarious" examples of questions that "other price comparison sites" ask you. Except that they aren't hilarious, just annoying. Fits in with the rest of the advert then.

Envirofone - In a similar vein to Confused.com, except that it has even worse production values (which considering Confused.com has made theirs look like YouTube is pretty impressive by Envirofone). The backgrounds look like the makers of the advert have simply picked some generic neon tie dye backgrounds found in a five second Google image search. The people chosen are again painfully unconvincing as average people, and the fact that they've been chosen to appear diverse (the first three being: Asian man, Welsh woman, punk with over-the-top spiked mohican) makes that even more apparent. The worst has to be the bloke who shouts "WONGA!" into the camera in a feeble attempt at a cockney accent, so feeble it doesn't even deserve to be called mockney. Whenever Mr. WONGA! comes on screen I want to dispatch him and every other loser on the advert as quickly and violently as possible. Other reasons for annoyance include the sheer lack of information on the advert, almost to the point of false advertising (so, I'll get £50 for my old Nokia 321o that I used about ten years ago, will I? I highly doubt it), and the fact that the man I assume is meant to be a biker (although I only assume this from his beard, seeing as his accent sounds more like a cross between Seann William Scott and Alan Carr) is wearing a shirt that I own. Bollocks.

John Frieda: Sheer Blonde - The only version I could find on YouTube has a German (?) voiceover in the middle, but it doesn't take away from my point. The whole premise behind this advert is just shockingly bad. Woman with blonde hair interrogated by second-rate good-cop-bad-cop team. The advert has a mainly American feel, and yet the accents and the newspaper clearly point to England as the setting. London, to be precise. The whole thing just feels, well, shit.

Savlon Advanced Healing Gel - I can just imagine the advertising ideas guys at Savlon Towers sitting in the board room agonising over the idea for the new Savlon advert. Then, after hours, maybe days of crap idea after crap idea, they finally had to settle on this as the best of a bad bunch. "Well, some kids might buy fake wounds to pretend they've got injured... I mean, I know my kid wouldn't, but maybe yours... No? Fuck it, let's go with it anyway". It's just rubbish any way you look at it. Not funny. Doesn't make me want Savlon. Twatty little kid in my face on the telly. Interestingly, looking this one up on the 'net led me to find out that it had received ten complaints. Eight of these ten apparently thought the advert "glamorised wounds" - okay, I can stretch to that - "and could be seen to condone knife crime amongst the young". Wait, what? If you haven't done so yet, watch the ad. Spot any knives, among the young or otherwise? Maybe the ad at a stretch encourages bad bike riding, but we don't even see the bike crash, just hear it after watching Twatty ride past and make the leap ourselves. At the end, a bunch of eight-year-olds look at Twatty's obviously fake cuts and grazes in a park. Yep, obviously off to stab someone for their iPod Touch once the sun sets.

As we seem to be receiving such a wealth of toss from the people in TV ad land, maybe I'll make a follow up to this entry. I'm also going to unearth some of my favourite adverts from years gone by and put them up here soon. Feel free to let me know of any other truly bad, or indeed truly great, ads that you see.

Overheard II

On a bus coming into Wimbledon on a Thursday morning. A group of teenage girls discussing where to get cheap designer clothes*:

Girl 1: "Yah, you should go to Ashford."
Girl 2: "I went down Portsmouth. Was well cheap."
Girl 3: "Is Sweden a country?"
Girl 2: "um..."
Girl 1: "Yes, Sweden's a country"
Girl 3: "Then I went Swindon"
Girl 1: "Yeah, Swindon's the town, Sweden's the country"

Girl 2: "I thought Swindon was the country"

* I think this is what they were talking about. I'm not an expert on fashion, clothes or teenage girls, so, really, it could have been anything.

Linkables 10/7/9

First dance? Now that's a first dance...

And you thought you knew how to peel a banana...

Cool visual illusion.

The slightly bizarre new Tango adverts don't get a great reaction everywhere, but personally I really like them. Although the initials of the phrase on the can is either a massive oversight, or some very ballsy advertising.

Possibly not for the faint-hearted: Wikipedia's list of unusual deaths.

Interesting metafilter thread asking for cross-cultural strangeness.

Harry Potter: Not just Christians are against it...

Have a fun weekend now :)

Hell is Virgin Media

So, I finally have home broadband in my new house after several weeks of trying to get it transferred from my old address. I could provide an incredibly detailed account of exactly what happened with lots of description and emotional reflection, but I just can't bring myself to do that. I started writing out a simple blow-by-blow account of my dealings with Virgin Media including dates, but I just couldn't bring myself to finish that either. So here's what you need to know: Virgin Media are the worst company I have ever had to deal with (and believe me, Hayley and I have had trouble with quite a few companies recently). Here's a selection of reasons as to why that statement is true.

• They have given me three activation dates over the past five weeks. On the first two, my account was not activated. The third I didn't want, but they put it in anyway without asking me.
• Told me various things that weren't true about problems with my order, and assured me they were true.
• Cancelled my account at my request. Except that they didn't cancel it properly. So when I tried to get a new account set up with O2 Broadband, O2 were unable to proceed as the line was occupied by my "cancelled" Virgin account.
• Told me (quite rudely) that my account definitely was cancelled even after I told them the technical details O2 had given me. After I refused to accept this, I was put on hold, and then told (rather sheepishly) that the account had now been removed from the line and would take a further 48 hours to clear.
• Sent me two bills detailing connection fees of over £80 each. Told me not to worry, as I would not be charged any connection fees. One then came out of my account anyway, meaning I had to contact Virgin again to request a refund, which was sent by cheque.
• Assured me I would be contacted by phone on several occasions, and never got back to me, meaning I then had to call them. Again. And again. And again.

If Hell exists, for me it will be perpetually trying to sort out broadband for my burning, sulphurous corner of Satan's neck of the woods with Virgin Media. I will never-endingly sit on "hold" listening to their eclectic mix of "hold" music (jumpstyle drum and bass one minute, classical string quartet the next - "Oh, look at us, we can mindlessly juxtapose genres, aren't we cool and down with absolutely everyone!"... No, you fucking aren't). And I will sporadically be put through to a customer service advisor who gives me another date in an endless string of activation dates for all eternity.

If I never have anything to do with them ever again it will be too soon. My advice at the moment is to go with O2 Broadband. Aside from when they could do nothing as Virgin was still ruining my life, they've so far done everything in a straightforward and pleasing manner. That said, after all the trouble I've had, my feeling towards home broadband is currently akin to the feeling one has towards food after having a particularly painful and violent case of food poisoning. If we're still connected in a fortnight with no problems, maybe I'll be back to my former gorging self.

Something for Bambi

And other English pedants

http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/the_way_we_live/article6586237.ece

Linkables 26/6/9

Broken Picture Telephone is the web-based version of the Chinese-whispers-style game where you alternate drawing pictures from a description and describing what you see in a picture until you end up with a transition of images and pictures that ends up miles away from its origin. It's great fun to do online, and some of the results are brilliant. Here are some of the ones I've taken part in so far.

Great message-board addition, with added dinosaury awesomeness...

Speaking of dinosaurs, an awesome and thoroughly confusing Dinosaur comics guest comic.

And by the same guest, MSPaintAdventures. I really like the idea of writing a story based on user-suggested actions, and though he seems to have moved somewhat away from that according to the description on the site, I still found the latest story to be enthralling and hilarious. Your experience may vary, of course, especially if you're not a programmer who enjoys interactive fiction.

Auto-tune the news. Indescribable madness in the key of C. #2 and #5 are particularly fab.

On a more serious note, you can examine what your MP has been splurging on. I take particular delight in noting that my MP spent £3.67 of my money on paper plates. For what dark purpose, though? Those MPs, always up to something...

The main problem with this digital age in which we live? It's no longer possible to impress people with incredible sheep-related stunts, because everyone will insist that it's faked.

BBC readers react to MJ news

9/10 of the most watched news clips...
...and 8/10 of the most read news stories...
...but at least people are still sharing the wallaby story...

A change of profession, perhaps...?

I just took the BBC News Magazine's online GCSE English Literature quiz. I got four our of seven. Oh bollocks.

In my defence, whilst the questions are all regarding potential GCSE English Literature texts, the quiz is just that - a quiz with multiple choice answers - and not an examination. You would never find a multiple choice question in a GCSE English Lit paper, nor would you find a question which gives you one mark for a "right answer". Of the three I missed out on, only one will I hold my hands up that I should have got it right (the one about Much Ado About Nothing). One I missed because I've never read Jane Eyre, and another because in my view there was more than one "right answer", and it just so happened that BBC Bitesize defined the other one as "right". Essentially, it felt more like a recollection of facts about GCSE Literature texts than an examination of actual understanding, which is what literary study is all about. The question on Of Mice And Men I also felt as an English teacher and graduate was open to debate on which answer would get me a mark. I might write more about the purpose (if any) of the quiz at a later date, but as I'm at work at the moment I'll leave it at that for now.

Anyway, have a go yourself and see if you know more about English Literature than I do.

Also, I should have teh interwebz back at home from this afternoon (finally... *pained groan* [not necessarily from missing the 'net but from the hassle of actually trying to get my account transferred to my new address]), so my entries here should hopefully increase in frequency.

Ryanair

God I hate them.

Part of me wants to leave this post there but I feel I should give some sort of motive. So here's an example of why a part of me hopes that their offices burn to the ground and all the wings fall off their planes, possibly plucked by some righteous, loner, school boy, god plucking wings off flies.

Last night we were booking tickets for a family holiday to Spain. The flights aren't really that cheap anyway and then you come to all the additional costs:

Quite annoying - £20 to take up to 15kg of luggage (and woe-betide you if you take more). Luggage, what exatly is in their hold otherwise? I mean, they have bought standard model planes, which presumably have exactly the same hold capacity as every other airlines planes. I can only assume that their holds are somewhat empty because everyone flying with them is wearing as much clothing as possible with as big a piece of handluggage as possible, trying to squeeze into hot, tiny seats.

Also annoying is the card handling fee - £20. £5 per passanger, per flight (two people on returns). I am still only going to be paying once, and presumably they're not going to re-run the transaction at every check-in to take my money gradually. The only card on their list which wouldn't attract a fee is the Ryanair Creditcard, although I wouldn't be surprised if it charged you both to pay for things with it and to then repay it, after all having computers that can run electronic transactions does cost money and is a luxury that more frugal card holders can manage without.

Most annoying however is the £20 charge for online check in. Again, £5 per passanger per flight. This is charging me to save Ryanair money because now they won't need to have a lady waiting to view my passport, and take my bag. Although wait, you will because I'm taking a bag. Maybe that was what the bag charge was for. Anyway, in notes to the side of this is the following warning: If you don't check in online (and print out your bording cards) they will charge you £40 per passanger per flight to provide you with bording cards. Surely part of the cost of a flight should include the right to actually get on the flight? The thing here is that if the flights had just cost more and there had been the option either to pay more for non-online check-in or the option to save by taking online check-in then I wouldn't be annoyed.

Rant rant rant rant rant.

Anyway, basically I find their whole philosophy of getting you to pay extra for every tiny item you want in addition to just having a plane with fuel and a pilot just so that they can claim low prices is wrong. Especially with costs that aren't actually optional and don't appear to bear any resemblance to the actual cost involved. This is a style of business that I don't want to succeed, There's no reason Ryanair can't be cheap and profitable and still act in the reasonable way all other airlines do.

So I pledge that other than this flight (which was forced by family things) I will not fly by Ryanair*.

*Unless of:
- peer / family pressure
- no other option on a particular route
- Ryanair change of policy

Linkables 11/6/9

How to teach a child to argue.

The story of a longboard rescue.

Charlie Brooker on the BNP

How to start something big from nothing at all, just by standing out.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Who knew?

Report on getting computer-generated nonsense accepted to "peer-review" journals.

And finally, would you go into space if it meant standing on a 15km tall inflatable ladder?

Linkables 28/5/9

How to be persuasive.

How to open a suitcase with a pen.

In a move that will interest basically nobody, I link to a video of a ridiculous goal.

As seen in various TED talks, Gapminder.

LyricsWiki, for song lyrics without having to trawl through random unreadable and potentially dangerous "lyrics" search results.

Who to vote for in the upcoming European elections.

And finally, a game in which you play a cowboy riding a giant sperm.

"Have you ever been raped?"

NB: This post is more a series of connected thoughts than a coherent argument. I was just struck by some links between random areas of my life.

For a long time, I never referred to myself as a feminist. I preferred to say I was an egalitarian, as I believe men and women possess some different and some similar characteristics but you should never assume someone's gender automatically determines their actions. In addition, just because a man may act one way and a woman another, it doesn't mean that either course of action, or the characteristics that lead to them taking it is more valuable. Societies are unequal when acting in a certain way or displaying a particular characteristic is seen as preferable and normal. Being egalitarian seemed to confuse people, so I eventually gave up and started calling myself a feminist.

I never subscribed to the argument that, physically, women could ever be as strong as men. It can happen, but from all the time I've spent fighting men in Judo, I know it's not that common. But, as a woman, I can move faster, I'm more flexible. And depending on the build of the man I'm fighting, I can be stronger. In short, everything is relative. If my technique is better, I can win. If I fight more intelligently, I can win. In Judo, it's possible, because strength is not paramount. In boxing, however, I would never feel comfortable fighting a man in a proper fight. They'll always be able to hit harder than me, because more of their body consists of muscle. A certain amount of power in the punch comes from your legs. My legs are bigger than most guys I've boxed with, but I store fat there, they just have muscle. Where they have pecs, I have breasts. They don't tone up so well, even if I wanted them to. Unless I all-out body build, I reckon a bloke the same weight and height as me will always hit harder.

It seems I'm not the only one who has noticed this unwillingness to admit the differences. In his latest, really excellent A Point of View", Clive James points out the importance of democracy to feminism by celebrating the election of the first four women MPs to the Kuwaiti Parliament. You have to install RealPlayer to listen to it, but it really is worth it. He gently criticises those feminists in the West who think liberal democracies are not liberal enough.

He makes the point that where violence holds sway, rather than argument, women are always worse off. Even when violence is not the ruling force, you can't argue away the differences. Listening to this broadcast in the car on the way home, a lot of thoughts that had been swimming idly around in my head like lazy tadpoles suddenly coagulated into a shoal of thought with some purpose.

Mainlining The Wire on DVD lately has frightened me because, for the majority of characters in it, death is a constant threat. I know they exist in a world that is a) not necessarily real and b) not mine, but it reached the point where I started feeling the only reason I was alive was because no one had decided to shoot me yet. I haven't done anything to deserve being shot, that I'm aware of, but the frequency of death in the show brought home how fragile life is. There are not many female characters in it, but it does show at times that, give a woman a gun and she can murder indiscriminately with the best of them.

I also recently finished watching Firefly and the last two episodes gave me pause for thought. In the penultimate one, a band of whores fights attempts by a local man with money to try to steal a baby from one of them. They are presented as legitimate business women refusing to kneel under the yoke of a male oppressor. Again, give a woman a gun and she can murder, though this time discriminately, with the best of them. It's all relative. Guns take away the advantage of strength. Clive James makes the same point.

In the final episode, a bounty hunter lands on Serenity and breaks into the ship. He knocks out the captain and sets about disabling the crew in one way or another. In a truly horrible scene, he says to Kaylee, the ship's female mechanic "Have you ever been raped?" in the same way you might say "Have you ever eaten Thai food?" It got me thinking, if someone spoke to me like that, discussing it casually, making it sound inevitable, what would my reaction be? Would I fight them? Would I acquiesce? Patrick and I had a discussion a long time ago about whether we'd be murdered or raped. As I recall, he could come to a definite answer. I really couldn't.

The bounty hunter even says at one point "Men are always stronger than women. Yet it takes a woman to make a child, what's that all about?" No one answers him in the show, but thinking about it, perhaps I'd say you don't need the same kind of strength to make a child as you do to kill someone. It's all relative.

Clive James mentions in his broadcast how some of the first female MPs in Iraq were murdered by men to make an example of them. In a situation like that, when someone tries to kill you, they're frightened of what you represent. Change.

I'm not really sure what my conclusion is, except that I don't want to need a gun to defend myself. Being a feminist or an egalitarian or whatever I am can some times be difficult in a liberal democracy, because it can be hard to distinguish between the important things to get upset about and those that can really just wait. I know for certain that I'm very lucky. I think the TV episodes made me uncomfortable because they made me realise just how cocooned and special my liberty is, compared with a lot of other women out there. I wish there was more I could actively do to help them.

Cutest Video Ever!

I challenge you not to awwwww at it.

Business Challenge

Watching the Apprentice last night (I know, it's all I talk about nowadays*) I decided it was like a business-oriented Scrapheap challenge. When someone actually wants to build a go kart (or a trebuchet, or a speedboat, or any other Scrapheap-type contraption) in the real world, there are lots of steps to go through - materials and suppliers need to be sourced and researched, schematics drawn up and experts consulted. But for the purposes of entertainment, these considerations are put aside, and the competitors are encouraged to build something without the necessary materials and time that will almost certainly not work particularly well. But then that doesn't matter, as there's nothing riding on it, and it's just a bit of fun.

So then, contrast with the Apprentice where there is ostensibly something riding on it (how much, or how little is open to interpretation), and where it is supposedly "business" skills that are being tested. Like scrapheap challenge, then, the tests are done without appropriate materials or time, but there is none of the sense of friendly competition about it (because the Apprentice is real and serious, dontchaknow), and the results of the tests are given huge importance. Imagine if the winning team in scrapheap challenge was offered an engineering position at Ferrari? That wouldn't be fair, of course, because why does building a war machine that happens not to fall apart quite as quickly as your opponents' qualify you for anything (other than perhaps a humorous trophy)?

In the same way, I find the idea of putting together a pitch to rebrand a Kent town in two days flat with no experience, expertise, resources or time to be a pretty strange way of testing business nous. Someone who could well have done the job brilliantly in reality might fail on the task for any number of reasons beyond their control - factors provided by the context of the task and the structure of the program.

Clearly, this is true of any interview (or indeed any situation in which someone's ability is judged), but for a show that is constantly reaffirming that it is testing "business" skills, it relies an awful lot on standard reality-tv task tropes. In scrapheap challenge, the teams spend 5 minutes choosing what to build, and then hours building it. Throughout, the smallest problem can scupper a team's (possibly badly laid) plans. Rather than being a test of engineering skill (in as much as an entertainment program can be any kind of real test, naturally), it is a test of ingenuity and luck - no bad thing in itself, of course. Eventually someone comes out on top, because their machine, made out of different parts, to a different design happens to do better. It's entertaining, but it's not particularly rigourous. In a real engineering situation, there would be research, feedback, and, if a plan was obviously going wrong, the chance to put back the deadline in favour of quality. Obviously none of this matters, because scrapheap challenge isn't pretending to be a rigorous test, it's a competition, and competitions can rely on luck.

The Apprentice, on the other hand, is supposed to be an interview - a specific test of ability in which the most able person comes out on top, but is structured like a casual competition, where luck plays enough of a role to keep things entertaining, with rules that benefit some over others. Anita might be a brilliant businesswoman, but we'll never know, because she got a fraction of the time available to the other interviewees to show what she could do. You might be able to learn something about someone by putting them in a high pressure situation in which they might easily do everything right and still come out on the losing team, but doing it twelve times doesn't necessarily give you the person with the best business mind.

In last night's episode, when Sir Alan asked what the cause of the failure was, a response of "we were given no time at all to do a job we're not experts at, without the possibility of research or feedback, we had to go with the first idea we came up with, and with a small pre-set team, we lacked the specific skills required for portions of this task" would not necessarily have been out of place. Essentially, with so much restricted by the framework of the competition, there's no way of telling success-by-skill from success-by-circumstance.

My real problem with the Apprentice, of course, is not that it has this structure, since it is welcome to have any structure it likes, but that I feel it is making claims to rigour and accuracy that it cannot possibly deliver on given the constraints present in the program. And so no matter how entertaining I find the buying and selling and marketing-speak, I can't ever quite get past the idea that they may as well be building giant crossbows out of car parts.

* it's pretty much 100% of the broadcast TV I watch these days, and hence, I like to believe, this kind of indulgent blog-focus is allowable.

Linkables 13/5/9

Snatch Wars

Fast paced word-creation game.

Article busting some of the myths behind which side of the road particular countries drive on.

Victorian riddles, and surreal re-imaginings of them.

From New Scientist: 13 things that don't make sense.

Type a word or phrase and get back a picture and caption at milk information. Sometimes garbage, sometimes strangely perfect.

Where are you in the movie?

In the beginning...

...Wolverine was a little boy called James with a tendency to shoot bone claws out of his hands when particularly enraged or upset. He had an older brother called Victor who grew his finger nails long when the violent urge was upon him. It is said both brothers fought with animal-like ferocity and a strength inhuman. They discovered early on their limitless capacity to cheat death and regenerate their physical substances and fought in many wars. The endless killing became the consuming passion for older brother Victor and hence, the two brothers found themselves facing execution at dawn by a firing squad for the murder of a senior army officer.

Having come through this unscathed, the indestructible siblings caught the attention of a military scientist by the name of Colonel William Stryker...

So begins X-Men Origins: Wolverine, one of the better movies I have seen in the cinema in recent months, though this verdict may be slightly influenced by the fact that the last three films I saw were The Boat That Rocked (amusing, if sexist and with a plot so thin it would fit with room to spare between the testicles of a gnat), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (too long, somewhat boring, apparently shot mostly in a sepia-like colour palette for no good raisin and ultimately unsatisfying) and Marley & Me (let's not even *go* there).

I really enjoyed this film. It was perhaps a little long and at times felt unfocused, with the reveals of several plot twists coming a little thick and fast on each other towards the end. But these late additions nicely resolved various earlier sections of the film which seemed inadequately explained.

After the car crash that was X-Men 3, the motivations of this film's characters was much more realistic and considered. Although one wonders if, having made a man indestructible, the top military dudes really thought sending another mutant after him with a couple of guns was going to do the trick? It did provide a stunning action set piece for the film, but predicated on a completely ridiculous starting point. Still, don't let that stop you enjoying it.

Hugh Jackman obviously wanted this project to succeed because he's listed as one of the producers and he does work as the lynchpin of the story although Liev Schreiber's character, that of his brother, at times steals the show and could have done with a bit more elaboration. As this is the explanation of why Wolverine is as he is, it's wrong to expect the swaggering Logan we know and love, but at times he is just a little weak. And when he says he's going to kill everyone, there's not always enough weight behind the threat. There are, however, a lot of cool fights scenes and either impressively ripped/manicured/made-up men pounding seven kinds of hell out of each other at regular intervals. The final two-way fight between three people on top of a nuclear power plant stack is gripping and well-realised.

There are some nagging threads to this film. At one point Wolverine is with an elite gang of mutants working for the military. Their powers are never really explained. One guy is really, really, really good with guns and jumps about a lot. Same for another dude, but swords are more his thing. Yet another guy just punches things. HARD. When Wolverine is re-visiting them later in the film to find out what's been going on, their knowledge about the TOP SEKRIT military stuff seems is patchy and inconsistent one minute and briliantly on the money the next. Having said all that, there are some pleasing nods to the films that preceded it in the making, which helps when tying all the threads of the story together. I've never read the comics or watched the cartoon, so don't know how annoyed to be by all the non/canon and continuity stuff. All I can contribute on this level is that's amusing that a character as fey as Gambit is played by someone called Taylor Kitsch. If that really is his real name, I salute him.

Also, stay in the cinema until the end of the credits for a tease of what's to come. There are two apparently. But I missed the last one because my fellow cinemagoers were getting impatient.

I'm not one to rate things out of ten, but that's what people seem to do on this blog when reviewing films, so I give it three bananas, a bottle of fairy liquid and four chupa chup lollipops. Go see it. It's dark, fun, well-acted by a skilled ensemble cast and lots of buildings get seriously damaged. Rock on.

Getting along famously.

I was sitting in a restaurant yesterday with some friends, discussing the Apprentice.

I have mixed feelings about the Apprentice - on the one hand, it is clearly entertaining and compelling; finding the balance of I-could-do-that-task-better-than-them optimism and that-guy's-a-total-twat judgmentalism that makes Big Brother draw in so many viewers, while managing to avoid the feeling (a feeling I cannot escape with BB) that you're watching a bunch of mentally ill people being poked with a stick. On the other hand, it still feels awfully constructed - it may be "reality television", but it's not real people that we see every week, but the most entertaining facets of carefully selected people, smushed together into a nightmarish caricature of management speak and pressure-based utterances. I'd be lying if I claimed not to enjoy it, but the fact that what we see on screen has been so carefully constructed, edited and synced in order to entertain us, then taking anything other than entertainment away from it would be dangerous. Essentially, it's easy to say "Ben's such a twat", or "What kind of moron doesn't know how to wash a car", but since there's no way of knowing the origins, circumstances and hidden structures of what we're seeing on screen, I find it easier to watch as some sort of semi-improvised social fiction than any kind of actual contest or game.

Anyway, I was sitting in a restaurant yesterday with some friends, discussing the Apprentice, when they both revealed that they watched it while reading along with the Guardian's live blogging of the show.

"Oh", said I. "Is it any good?".

"Oooh yes", said they. "It's done by Anna Pickard. She's brilliant".

"Aha!", I pounced. "She's my cousin!".

So there you are. I officially claim my position as the relative of a famous person, as accredited by this unprompted name-dropping by someone who didn't know.

My cheque, I assume, is in the post.

Linkables 27/4/9

Schadenfreude ahoy at FML. Clearly there's no way of telling whether they're genuine or not, but either way, they're great little dark single-paragraph stories. Some ones that particularly made me laugh/squirm: 1 2 3 4

Australian judge fails at lying.

Mandatory link to GraphJam graph, PictureIsUnrelated picture and FailBlog fail.

I liked the results for questions 15 and 16 on this survey of Washington teens.

Like parkour, but... on a bike?

Flash guessing game.

How to reduce Han to incoherent squeeeeeeeing

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Trailers for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

Not to put to fine a point on it, but Oh. My. Fuck. Watch them full screen. It's fan-bloody-franken-tastic.

It's hard to explain how much these books mean to me. It's not so much the quality of the writing or the plots, both of which went seriously downhill after book four, but the completeness of the universe that JK Rowling created. During some of my lowest points during my growing up, this series gave me somewhere else to go. It was also what introduced me to the concept of online fandom and online interactivity as a whole. For three years or more, I co-wrote online stories on fan forums with sometimes as many as ten other people set in the Harry Potter universe. HP remains the only cultural marker I have ever written fanfic for. And no, it wasn't slash. My friends and I never played the characters in the books, but Hogwarts and its environs was our primary setting and through that writing I found long-lasting and wonderful friendship. I am still in touch with a good few of those people on a regular basis. The majority of our interaction is online, but the beauty of this kind of friendship is that you can always pick it up wherever you last left off.

The films were never as good as they could have been, I think the weight of expectation was always too great and as with the editors of the books, sometimes people just didn't know when to say no to those involved. However, aside from Chamber of Secrets, I don't think they have been truly awful. I certainly appreciated the pick up in pace for Prisoner of Azkaban. I enjoyed Goblet of Fire and have to say I can't remember Order of the Phoenix at all, though I did go and see it in the cinema. I may have to find and re-watch it before July 15. The adaptations always suffer from a lack of plot exposition and over-egging of the action in the final pudding, but I still enjoy them because they are a glorious realisation of a universe that has supported, sustained and encouraged me. Not only do they look fantastic as films, I also love the music which I think is just perfect. And whenever I go to see the films, I'm always carrying the memories of the books into the cinema with me which helps make up any deficiencies.

I think Philip Pullman is an infinitely superior writer to JK Rowling, Narnia will always be my first love, along with the Willard Price "Adventure" books and Enid Blyton boarding school stories, I think Hogwarts as an idea owed a helluva lot to Jill Murphy's The Worst Witch which I read when much younger, but I will always retain a special affection for HP. Now the books have ended, the films are something of a nostalgia fest for me, because my life has moved on in so many ways since that period when every new HP book was cause for serious excitement. On July 15, you know where you'll find me.

EDIT: Just been messing about on IMDB and discovered they are making Deathly Hallows in two parts. Talk about a money spinner. Part of me is delighted by this, but the rest of me feels we could well be in for epic fail.

Snow White And The Seven Recycled Scenes

An interesting video that's doing the rounds at the moment, demonstrating how Disney has "recycled" several of the same sequences in a number of their animated films over the years.



And stories covering the video in The Telegraph and The Times.

My thoughts...

The video, if nothing else, is compelling viewing. It's crafted to perfection, flowing seamlessly from one film clip to the next. The most surprising thing that's come out of this is the reaction from the "Disney fans" (read: people who commented on YouTube). From The Times:

“I feel so ripped off now. All the money I spend on this crap, they could at least come up with some original scenes,” wrote one viewer. “Our childhoods were based on a lie,” said another.

A little melodramatic, maybe? Oh wait, this is YouTube commenters. Maybe not then.

As a fan of Disney, do I feel "ripped off" or that my childhood is now "based on a lie"? Definitely not. The fact that a handful of scenes from a small number from Disney's dozens-strong canon of animated films have used the same animation sequences is fascinating to see, but certainly doesn't destroy the legacy that Disney has crafted. I find it surprising that the broadsheets would report the YouTube commenters as genuine commentators.

Returning back to the video itself, I found it remarkable that the video referencing system was used as late as 1991's Beauty And The Beast, and that the sequence reused was one from Sleeping Beauty, a film over years old at the time. I'll also be interested to see if any further compilations of this technique, from Disney films or otherwise, surface in the near future.

Cinema Scope

When it comes to films, I generally try to keep an open mind. I'll give most films a try and stick them through to the end (I've never walked out of a film in the cinema, and I've been to see some boring/excrutiating/embarrassing films in my time) mainly so that I can form my own opinion of them knowing that I've experienced them fully. Of course, there are films that I can be fairly certain I'll love, and others that I'll have a feeling I'm going to despise, based on past experience and personal taste. I try to go into a film with an open and objective mind, but obviously this can only be done to a certain extent.

I like to have an opinion on a film, no matter whether I'm already placing it within my all-time favourites or hoping my eyes and ears will never be besmirched by having to view or hear any portion of it again, and this opinion is invariably expressed through several outlets. Conversations with others is typically the starting point. These could be simply asking someone I know has seen the film too what they thought of it, or, if I'm speaking to someone I know is a fellow avid cinema fan, a more in-depth verbal analysis. Then there's reviewing films, which falls somewhere inbetween those two scenarios in terms of depth, but also has a separate function all together. I write a review of a film not just to let people know what I thought of a film, but also to record my own feelings about the film for my own reference, and thirdly, to produce a piece of writing that is coherent and engaging - basically, so that it's something other people will actually want to read.

My reviews currently appear in two places. I first write them on the Flixter application of Facebook. This application functions as a scratchpad for my immediate and initial thoughts and feelings on a film, where I usually write no more than a few sentences summing up what I think of it. Initially this decision was made as I became aware that the Flixter app is in no way linked to the Flixter website, and as such there's no storage of my reviews. If the app disappears for whatever reason, as far as I know so do my reviews, so I don't want to lose anything too detailed that I've actually put a fair amount of work into crafting. The primary reason now is because I much prefer my full reviews to appear in my second place: here.

And so, I finally head towards the crux of this entry (yes, there is one - and thank you for sticking with it so far). I've written quite a few reviews, some very basic, others more detailed. But ultimately, whether on Facebook or on here, they all boil down to the same conclusion: a score out of ten. And this is where I often find the greatest difficulty in my reviews. I can ramble on and on about the cast, the writing, the special effects, the direction, and any number of other things for as long as you like. But when it comes to giving a film a score, I often have to work very hard to not make it an arbitrary figure chosen as part of a trite exercise.

Here's the general rule by which I work. A totally average film - one that doesn't particularly do anything wrong, but also doesn't do anything particulary well - will receive five out of ten, roughly in the middle. Films I've given this score include such forgettable fodder as Along Came Polly, My Super Ex-Girlfriend and 17 Again. All films within roughly the same genre, the romantic comedy, which, whilst maybe seeming a little narrow-minded, actually helps me to demonstrate rather neatly what I mean. Speaking objectively, there's nothing specifically wrong with these films. If you have a strong personal dislike for anything involving Ben Stiller, you might score Along Came Polly more punitively than I have. If you're a big fan of superheroes, the treatment that that particular topic receives in My Super Ex-Girlfriend might have a bearing on whether you would give the film anything higher or lower than five. However, those are both highly subjective factors that, arguably, should be for the most part disregarded when reviewing a film objectively. In the end, none of these films are cinematic masterpieces (in itself a subjective label but one that hopefully is generally understandable and relatable), but neither are they embarrassingly bad films. So, they get a middle score.

But there's more to consider here. All three films are rom-coms, and as such adhere to rom-com conventions. You'll find stereotypical characters that include a man and a woman - one of whom will be very good-looking, but neither of which will be "ugly" (unless the person playing them is very famous or a guaranteed box office draw) and one of whom at least is unlucky in love; a "bad" current or former boyfriend or girlfriend; a caricature who is usually the best friend of one of the main characters and provides mainly comedy, etc. Present too will be a simple-to-follow and over-the-top plot that usually involves some kind of misunderstanding or crossed purposes, but resolves itself happily where the "good" people "win" and the "bad" people "lose". It's a format that, to varying extents, all rom-coms follow. This means that it's not particularly challenging to create a successful rom-com as long as these conventions are present.

So does that mean that a rom-com that does all these things should get ten out of ten? Well, no. When a rom-com is made, the people making it to my mind limit themselves in how good their film can potentially be. A standard rom-com, like the ones above, all receive an average score. A rom-com that does things particularly well, or that mixes things up in an interesting way, could gain a score of six. Anything higher than that and usually it will have to stray significantly from, or add significantly to, the rom-com formula. If a rom-com is particularly lazy or unoriginal, or just simply poor in its execution, it'll slip down to a four or a three. Three and below and we're talking about a film that not only wasn't interesting, but was actually physically frustrating or irritating for me to watch. But generally, even if a rom-com does most things right, in the end it'll never reach the heights of an eight or a nine, simply because those making the film have chosen to produce something that isn't challenging, unusual or particularly difficult to do.

It isn't just rom-coms of which this is true. Family comedies follow a different set of conventions, but again a set that doesn't exactly raise the bar in terms of cinema, and I find it very difficult to give them anything more than five or six, even if there was nothing particularly wrong with them. Horror films also follow a formula, and unless they are especially adventurous or out of the ordinary in their execution, again I find it hard to give more than a six.

So, what constitutes a high-scoring film, the eights, the nines and the tens? Films that get eight or nine are ones where the people making them have set themselves a challenging feat. They haven't decided to make something that's been seen countless times before, or something that simply follows a set of easy-to-follow rules. They've attempted to make a film that is more than that, that will stand out as a real achievement. But obviously attempting it is not enough. To get such a high score the film has to actually achieve its goals in some way. The more successful, the higher the score. Tens are pretty much reserved for films that not only do things right and to a high standard, but also have that certain intangible quality, that magical quality, that when I'm watching them, I know somewhere inside me that I'm watching something special or momentous - a film that will stay with me forever. Some films have it, and some don't. Ten out of ten to me doesn't mean I think the film is perfect. What it does mean is that the film sets the bar high in several ways and, in my opinion, it achieves everything it set out to do.

So, this entry's ended up being pretty rambling and sprawling. I've watched a wide variety of films recently, and I started thinking about how I form opinions of films and why I reach the conclusions I do, and it ended up as this entry. I'd be interested to see how others view and review films in different genres, and how different people arrive at the scores that they do. There's a few other people who write film reviews here, so I look forward to any comments or follow-up posts on the same topic.

Review Round-Up 6

It's been too long since I've put some reviews on here, but I've seen a variety of films recently, so it's time for that to change. I said something pretty similar to this at the beginning of my last film review entry though, so I'm not making any promises.

Knowing
Starts quite well with a psychological/supernatural thriller feel to the story, and the first half has a couple of well executed disaster sequences. The film really loses pace and focus in the second half, shifting the attention strongly towards a religious theme and providing a weak and anticlimactic conclusion. Nicolas Cage is firmly on auto-pilot, with his eyebrows set to confused-and-emotional from start to finish. The supporting cast is a mixed bag ranging from average to poor. The writing is sloppy with several poorly resolved points, and a couple just left hanging limp and incomplete. Overall disappointing and not worthwhile.
4/10

Marley & Me
This one should have just been called "Marley", as no one else in the film is well-rounded enough to fill the role of "Me". The eponymous Labrador is the most developed character, with Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston playing things safe and fairly shallow. The rest of the cast are either cardboard cutouts or simplistic stereotypes, adding nothing to the film. Alan Arkin sticks out very much as the exception to this, providing some genuine comedy and high quality acting head and shoulders above everyone else involved. Towards the end the film begins to drag, needing to be around twenty minutes shorter - once Wilson and Aniston's characters' children became more than background characters, I began shuffling in my seat and checking my watch every few minutes. Fairly enjoyable, and at times genuinely emotional (although this may be because I was reminded of times with my own pets from childhood) but ultimately incredibly sentimental.
5/10

Be Kind Rewind
The greatest failure of this film is that it makes far too little of its greatest asset: the amateur remakes of films (or "sweded" versions, as Jack Black's character Jerry names them in the film) that the characters create. As the audience, we're shown these films being made at times, but not nearly often enough, and very rarely do we get to see any of the final products. Instead, the film focuses on a sentimental story that lacks focus. The cast is generally solid, with Mos Def and Danny Glover putting in strong performances, and Jack Black entertaining if going through the motions at times. Entertaining, generally funny with some very silly moments, but in the end it doesn't give enough of what it could very easily deliver.
7/10

Wedding Crashers
With Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn starring, I went in expecting a "frat pack" style comedy. The end result is much more in the rom-com vein. Both leads have done better, and even cinematic heavyweight Christopher Walken gives a half-hearted performance in the supporting cast. Ultimately, this becomes far too predictable and safe, with an incredibly cliched climax. Will Ferrell provides the most satisfying part of the film with a cameo that I wish had been much more. Enjoyable, but not special.
6/10

Over The Hedge
A simple story executed well, but it's the voice talents that really make this film such a joy. Bruce Willis is fine as the voice of R.J. the raccoon; veterans William Shatner and Eugene Levy add credence and give excellent performances; Steve Carell as Hammy the squirrel also stands out in an over-the-top role. Not quite a computer-animated masterpiece, but thoroughly enjoyable and great fun from start to finish, with many genuinely funny moments.
7/10

Monsters Vs Aliens
Chock full of sci-fi and disaster film references, and usually with its tongue firmly in its cheek, this film is by and large a delight. Dreamworks go back to their overall winning foundation of a simple story executed well (e.g. Kung Fu Panda, as well as Over The Hedge, as reviewed above). The main characters, whilst poking fun at sci-fi stereotypes, have personality, and are voiced entertainingly well. The film is laced with genuinely funny moments, in particular those involving the president, as the film is at its best when heading towards the absurd. The animation is also impressive, and whilst Dreamworks is still second to Pixar in computer-animated cinema, the improvement from one film to the next is notable, and the gap in my opinion is closing.
7/10

17 Again
Zac Efron impressed me in Hairspray, and continues to show his leading man credentials in this film, taking the starring role and making it his own. Thomas Lennon also provides some funny, if incredibly unsubtle, comedy as an over-the-top sci-fi and fantasy nerd. Overall, however, this is neither special nor particularly original; the story lacks focus and direction, and none of the characters ever feels as though they have genuine depth. Fairly enjoyable, but ultimately forgettable.
5/10

Estimation Game

Linked in this post in the NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/31/science/31angi.html?_r=2&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1238515272-WtOhNY2U8b6S7OxLbbYEyA

is a pretty fun estimation game; slightly US orientated, but still fun.