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.