yonmei

10:43 pm: What I did today
I went to Stockbridge Sunday Market via Eildon Street and Inverleith Park. I haven't walked down Eildon Street in years: my great-aunt used to live there. The new owners have planted a hedge in what was Aunt Margaret's garden, which lets them sit by the sunny wall sheltered from direct gaze by the street: it's a very specific and local hedge, because (I presume) they don't want to block one bedroom's view of the firework shows...

I went on through Inverleith Park, which has a pond on which several grown men were playing with toy boats. (There was a cluster of them by the bank, with their controls, looking very grim as if a toy boat was Serious Business. I suppose it might be, if the boat was attacked by a swan.)

There were rumours that Artisan Roast was going to be at the market, but they weren't, so I bought myself a plain and an almond croissant to eat in the office later (but I shall try to resist in future: they aren't making any reductions whatsoever given they're selling their pastries from a market stall, and good though their croissants are, they're not £3.30 worth of good...), and had an excellent lunch of Stir-fry Yaki Udon noodles from HaraJuku Kitchen. There is nowhere to sit down - the market is just a cluster of stalls along Portgower Road, which runs from Inverleith Park to Comely Bank - so I sat down on the pavement with my back against a sunny wall and managed my chopsticks quite nicely, considering I am way out of practice. (For years, I thought I didn't like "Chinese food": it was only after friends asked me to meals at Chinese restaurants that I discovered what I don't like is the state a stir-fried meal gets into when it's stored in little foil boxes for half an hour to an hour and then eaten steamy-soggy, greasy, and luke-warm.) I suppose I could have walked back to Inverleith Park without my lunch getting too cold: next time I might do that, if they're still there next time I go.

So then I walked back via the river path to find out what was going on at the Car Free day on the Shore.

What there was, actually, was even less than Stockbridge Sunday Market: a pen had been put up for a five-a-side football game that looked uncomfortably like a cage match (I suppose they really did need the cage wall on the side by the river, or they'd have lost their football sure as fate) and a set of stalls about energy conservation on the other side of the bridge. One of them was giving away free hessian ILoveLeith bags, so I got one, and another was letting you have a free glass of freshly juiced apple juice, if you cycled for about a minute or so per glass on an old bike that was set up to power the apple juicer.

...and then I went on to the office where I brewed myself up some coffee, ate my croissants, and watched Evita while I did data processing work for several hours. I took a break between five and six when I walked up to ScotMid and bought myself some tea, because the chip shop across the road was beginning to sing wistfully to me in its siren way, and when that happens, I should probably eat something more sensible.

But I got almost all the data processing done. It's got to be all done for the 24th. Yes, that's Thursday. I have too much to do, and if I got the bulk of it done on Sunday, I could half-watch half-listen-to a movie while I did it.

I first saw Evita when it was a musical in London in 1982: my drama class went on a three-day trip to London during which we saw an alarming amount of theatre, including Evita, The Cherry Orchard, and Barnum. Plus one play we got unexpected tickets for, because (probably) it was so awfully bad. I forget what else we saw. Of the three big evening plays, the one I remember vividly is Barnum: though the songs from Evita stuck with me longer. It was odd: I vaguely knew what the plot must be from having read more history of South America since than I had then, but I don't think I ever really followed the plot of the musical till I finally saw Madonna's film. I'm interested to find that the film doesn't name Che until the credits roll up the screen and you finally (if you didn't already know) find out who Antonio Banderas was playing. (The film does not pass the Bechdel Test. The only conversation two women have is between Evita and Peron's previous mistress, and since it's a conversation in which Evita is telling her she's getting dumped, it doesn't count.)

I also got an e-mail from my sister about next weekend: she's coming up for a visit.



Tags: eating some delicious food, edinburgh, films, just my life really, lunch, walks, work

08:03 am: Movies for the weekend
I mean to go to District 9 this weekend, and I re-watched Night at the Museum last night. As I noted in comments to ruthi, it's a lovely film of the classic sub-genre Cute Daddy Becomes His Son's Best Hero, and yet we haven't had a Cute Mum Becomes Her Daughter's Best Hero since Aliens II. (And yes, I know Ripley wasn't Newt's bio-mom. And they killed Newt off for Aliens III. Bah.)

Supposing Hollywood were to suddenly have a brainstorm and start producing films that passed the Bechdel Test (Night at the Museum fails it - there's two women, one of whom is actually v. interested in the other one, yet they never get to speak to each other) who would be cast in these films? What classic two-male-roles films would we see being made with two women in the central roles, and who would they be?

(I'd love to see a sci-fi ditzy genius saves the world with the help of her daughter, who has all the academic respectability her mother lacks: Barbra Streisand as ditzy genius, Gillian Anderson as her daughter, Nichelle Nichols as the President of the United States... and if Beatrice Arthur were still alive, I'd cast her as the Chief of Staff.)

Who would you cast? What are your film ideas for these Movies Hollywood Will Never Make? Not just films that scrape a pass in the Bechdel Test, but films with two starring roles for women who talk to each other through the film, plus several major supporting actor roles, all played by women.




Tags: feminism, films

07:08 am: At the Worldcon: Day Three
In order to do Saturday justice, I would have to spend at least an hour writing it up. I do not intend to do that, because I plan to be dressed and out of the house well before eight, and while this morning I was the first of the three fans sharing it into the bathroom for a shower, that still doesn't leave me enough time to write up Saturday from my notes. (And I don't plan to take my laptop to the con, thankyouverymuchforasking.)

The panels I made it to were "Bluff Your Way in SFnal Linguistics", "Death, Illness, and Disability", "Writing the Other" - at which RaceFail09 got discussed, and I made my most incoherent and inaudible contribution to discussion (which still burns me...), a panel on "Lost" which I sat through half an hour of eating lunch with ide_cyan, listening to the sentences and not understanding a word, "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over", "Aunts in Spaceships", a buffet dinner at the Maharaj restaurant, "What Our Things Say About Us", and finally "Brewing and Distilling In Extreme Situations".

Five out of seven of those panels were both intellectually stretching and fun - this is what I go to conventions for! To have a good time by thinking! - and the other two were fine. ("Aunts in Spaceships" was not intellectually stretching, which as an intellectually stretching aunt made me sad, but on the other hand it gave me lots of ideas about "Writing Gender" this afternoon.)

I took notes. Sketchy notes, but I hope to be able to write them up Tuesday. Hm. Maybe. ... *worried hopeful*

So I'll post the photos of costumes, and see what else I have time for...

( Costumes! )

Tags: films, photos, worldcon

10:36 pm: Le weekend: and watching AI:AI
I'm extending the weekend with TOIL tomorrow for Pride last Saturday. It's time I took it. But. I have spent a weekend doing Not Very Much, not even housework.

I have a bunch of things Not Working at the moment: my landline is not working properly: one of the TV boxes is not working (which I suspect is probably Bob's doing, since she used to like to sleep on it: on the other hand I've had it since February 2004, so it wouldn't be impossible that it's just stopped working) and neither my VCR nor my DVD player are working properly (I suspect with both it's the remote controls rather than the players, but the problem with modern technology is that once the remote controls go, the boxes are no longer very usable: and my broadban Internet connection is dead - though Virgin Media were making noises about how "our engineers are aware of the fault and fixing it!" I'm posting this via my T-Mobile dongle. (Also, though this is hardly on the same level of Not Working, two of my cute baby dragons died - and again after they'd had enough clicks and views to grow up. Bah.)

I am watching AI: Artificial Intelligence, and thinking about the Keptverse. (Which is, if you haven't been following, the AU North America in which debt and birth slavery exist - and in which it is legal for parents to sell their minor children into slavery, developed by poisontaster.)

The first half hour or so of AI:AI is about Monica, a woman who cannot get over the death of her son - because technically he isn't dead: he's deep-frozen, in stasis. So her husband buys her a very expensive toy - a mecha, a humanoid robot, shaped like a small boy, with the functional capacity to be bonded permanently to its owner - to thereafter behave as if it had an emotional attachment to its "parent". Which does, in fact, console the woman enormously - she can love and play with her mecha "boy" . But then the woman's son can be awakened and cured.

...and it turns into the story of a Pinocchio. The toy who wants to be a real boy. Which the real son makes clear to the toy by having his mother read the story to him. (Also, of course, because the film-maker wouldn't count on an American audience remembering Pinocchio unless it was associated.)

But, watching it, I thought it would be easy - if poisontaster weren't against any fanfic that isn't RPF written in this universe - to write a fannish retake on the film. Because it is a story about slavery - if you can say that an intelligent toy is enslaved.

It's not something poisontaster deals with directly in the Keptverse: and darkrose only indirectly: what if a couple who wanted a child/didn't want one - the same kind of ambiguous emotional state Monica's in when her son is frozen - instead of adopting a baby, bought one... and then got their real child back? Old enough - as Monica's son is in the film - to know that the toy isn't his brother, but something bought for his mother to play with, a substitute child.

I don't think it's a story I want to write: it's very nearly unbearable as it is, and it becomes worse when I think about how it changes if the mecha toy is actually a human who is abandoned. "You won't understand the reasons, but I have to leave you here." - "Is it a game? When will you come back for me?"

Monica drives out of the story then. She is really still so completely emotionally screwed up that she fails in all possible directions to be a convincing character. I mean really: doing this to her mecha toy makes sense neither if she's fully aware it's a mecha, nor if on some level she thinks he's a real boy. Gigolo Joe walks into the story then - a mecha programmed to be the best possible lover, a toy who becomes the toy's parent.

AI:AI is about what happens when you create intelligent machines and treat them like things: in a sense, it already is a Keptverse story....




Tags: fanfic, fannishness, films

09:22 pm: Dragons and Saturdays
Wow, sunrise dragons are pretty: Named him Mistfall Sunrise: you get sci-fi lit-points if you know why.

Watching Superman Returns is weird. I didn't go see it in the cinema. It's odd how Christopher Reeve took over that role.

Still want geode dragons:


Still trying to get another pink dragon:


Tags: dragons, films

12:17 am: Just In Time
I remembered I meant to vote in the Hugo awards.

Quite a lot of the categories, I voted for No Award in 1st place, but still, it's the principle of the thing. I can say I voted.

(I think the only category where I actually was sure I really wanted to give a "1" to one of the nominees, was Best Fan Artist, because it would be lovely if Sue Mason won it. She is ace. She is also a lovely person.)

It feels like tomorrow is a present, because I'm not going to Glasgow after all. There's an Orange march. Not the phone company or the fruits, the sectarians. Ugh. But, it means I'm not working tomorrow! And my favourite literary newspaper arrived, so I can have a leisurely breakfast tomorrow and read it over coffee. Also toast, possibly. I don't rule toast out.

This evening I watched a film where Harrison Ford didn't kill a woman who wasn't his wife. (I'd seen the first half of it yesterday, until it occurred to me that I was going to drop with exhaustion and I could just stick a tape in the recorder and watch the rest tomorrow. The wonders of modern technology.) He did suffering masculinity ever so well. But I liked it.



Tags: films, worldcon

10:55 pm: Jerry Springer: Have I Got News For You
I watched the extended edition of Have I Got News For You with Jerry Springer: it was funny, I love TV when it goes meta.

(I don't know whether Jerry Springer really is that ignorant of British politics or humour, or if he just thought it was funnier if he acted as if he was reacting like that to the lines off the autoprompt. I suspect the latter, but it's certainly more amusing.)

I'm watching a Harrison Ford film I missed when it came out, probably because it sounded really unpromising: he plays a career banker whose family is kidnapped. He was sixty-four when the film was made and he looks it: but it's still kinda fun. For my own particular values of fun.

Tags: films, have i got news for you

02:48 pm: Hey guys? Quest for fire, over.
I went to see Night at the Museum 2 yesterday with Ajay. It was gloriously silly: almost as good as the first one. (The first one had the advantage of our being completely stoned with tiredness.)

Also, the romance of Jedediah and Octavius ("I ain't quittin' you!") is easily the best thing since Blazing Saddles

"Is that you breathing? Because I can't hear myself think! There's too much going on here; you're asthmatic, you're a robot. And why the cape? Are we going to the opera? I don't think so."
"I find your lack of faith disturbing."

Amelia Earhart couldn't possibly have been that bouncy in real life, could she? Also, why didn't the Tuskagee Airmen (in the movie) have names? *looks at wikipedia article* Benjamin O. Davis, Jr., Charles B. Hall. Lee Archer, Robert Ashby, James Sheppard, George Watson?

Still. It was gloriously funny so long as you didn't think about any part of it too hard.




Tags: films

09:49 am: I'm packed and we're leaving Plockton
I don't really have words to say how wonderful the ceremony was yesterday. But at the dinner, afterwards, one of their oldest friends (I mean in age: chronologically, I'm one of their oldest friends, having known RiK for 25 years...) got up and made a short speech about how privileged we all felt to have been invited and to have been there, and then we all toasted them, and it was... well again: no words.

I fell in love with Plockton. I want to come back. If I go downstairs now and pay, I have an hour or more before we actually have to leave which I can spend wandering around and taking more photographs, so I'm going to do that. And we're going to Skye too, today.

Next time I'm going to pack walking shoes and work off these magnificent breakfasts and dinners in walking.



Tags: being queer, films, friendship

08:26 pm: Om Shanti Om: definitely not for pseudos
On Saturday night I went to Om Shanti Om, which I could have gone to see in 2007 except that, well, it was 156 minutes long and it wasn't on in the cinema that's only 10 minutes walk away from me (and this has become a worryingly reliable measure of whether I'll get around to going to see a film while it's still in the cinema). But, last Saturday it was on in the Filmhouse, starting at 5pm, which meant it could take nearly 3 hours and yet I'd be out by 8pm and it would still be broad daylight. Which is what I love about this time of year.

Om Shanti Om is one of those movies where Shahrukh Khan is involved in a romantic relationship with four people. There is the film star with whom he is passionately in love and whom he has long one-sided conversations with standing on a bridge in front of a poster of her latest movie. There is his brother, who is adorable and constantly assuring him that he will be a star someday. There is his mother, who is very sweet about the film star and who sometimes lovingly hits him. (Which is easily the best thing in the world, by the way.) And there is his other father, who is quite lovely and kisses him in an affectionate kind of way and wants him to be happy. (There may be five, if I count the arch-nemesis, who I think may be in love with him in a different kind of way, but only in the second half of the movie, whereas the first four love him in both halves.)

The title of the post comes from the review in OneIndia. It has a completely insane plot, but if you sit back and let the insanity roll over you (like accepting warpdrive and wormholes) it's perfectly simple to understand. There is a red thread bracelet which is blessed by a sage and which actually works, at least sort of. There is leaping into fire and Shahrukh Khan being dorky and speechless and lovable. There is lots of manly kissing and hugging. There is wonderful unison dancing. There is also a bizarre song called Dard-E-Disco, the pain of disco. ( cut for video )

Because I went to the film, I missed joining a demo outside the General Assembly to keep Scott Rennie as minister of the church to which the congregation have called him (the debate started at 7pm, the demo was due to start at 6:30) but the homophobes were outnumbered and the Assembly voted to support the presbytery and against the bigots, so it wasn't like I was needed. (Update: If you have no notion what I am talking about: Ekklesia, The Herald and a fetching little piece in The Times should clarify it for you.)

And tomorrow I am off to Ross-shire. I may have Internet while I'm there, because I have a T-Mobile dongle, but it's just as likely not to work.

Also: it's the Glorious 25th of May. "How do they rise up, rise up, rise up..."





Tags: films, scottish politics

09:22 pm: 24-hour supermarket? with cafe? How long has this been going on?
I walked out to the cafe at Newhaven Landing, if that's what it's called - a new island of high-rise houses in the middle of the Forth, with a single cafe in the middle of it all. (The cafe is in the reception of one of the blocks of flats, and is run by the receptionist: it also sells basics like milk and bread and such. It makes a good target to walk to, but it feels a little pointless: I never walk out to these hi-rises without wondering how long they'll last. I wouldn't buy a flat in one.)

On the way back I noticed the 24-hour ASDA, which is only about 10 minutes from home and has a cafe, which is possibly also 24-hour: I didn't notice any separate schedule of opening hours for the cafe. I walked in and wandered round and did not buy anything, because ASDA sucks, but it was sort of weird to know that if I want washing-up liquid or toothpaste at 3am, I could just walk down to ASDA and buy it.

(I can't think why I would, but, you know.)

It's obviously been there for a while, but I hadn't noticed it. I seldom walk in that direction, though.

A couple of weeks ago I picked up a video of the original release of Blade Runner (which I remember still as the last movie my mum ever took me to "for my birthday": my brother came too) because I thought I'd like to watch it again - I've seen the Director's Cut more than once, but I don't think I'd ever seen the original release again. And it was only 50p.

The video was still in its original shrink-wrappings. Okay, I know it wasn't as good as the DC version, but completely unwatched? That's sort of sad...




Tags: films, just my life really

09:32 am: Sisters, volcanos, and work
Had a longish conversation with my sister last night: this BBC article seems rather ironic as a result.

On the other hand, I can't imagine having a conversation like that with any other member of my family, so, well.

In other news, I meant to do some work last night, but Volcano was on, and... I watched it.

It is peculiar how a simply awful movie can become actually watchable because of one actor. (One and a half: Anne Heche wasn't bad either, though her character didn't have much focus beyond being The Scientist Who Is Right But No One Pays Attention.) Tommy Lee Jones made the character he was playing - a divorced dad, his teenage daughter visiting for a week, who is also the disaster manager for Los Angeles (whatever - I didn't quite get it, but then I wasn't paying that much attention to stoopid plot details), and then a volcano erupts. In Los Angeles.

One reason why I did not pay too much attention is because the director really enjoyed doing lots of scenes in which someone hapless falls (or in one instance jumps) into molten lava and burns to death. In fact if you are that close to molten lava you are probably fairly dead already, because the gases are poisonous and the heat is extreme. But scientific realism had evidently had one date with this movie and then moved elsewhere, never to meet again.

But: Tommy Lee Jones did manage to make his own reactions realistic. Which is half the battle. The moment I actually walked out, though (I mean, through to the kitchen to make another cup of tea) was a moment about twenty minutes from the end where I understood that it was inevitable that Tommy Lee Jones's character (and his daughter, and a small boy wearing a metaphorical red shirt) were all going to die. Except, it wasn't the kind of movie where those characters would die, so I understood that after harrowing me nicely over an hour or two, the director had decided to whomp it up by having a Dad Saves His Daughter And Nameless Kid You Don't Care About Really From Certain Death Scene. And I don't like being whomped like that.

In other news, I think my period, which never really got started, has kind of stopped. Franlkly this is just annoying me.

Tags: bloody bloody bloody, bloody job, family stuff, films

11:39 am: I got tired of this crap a long time ago
Last Friday I was sitting in a cinema with a bunch of friends and friends of friends, waiting for The Watchmen to begin.

And then the trailer for Lesbian Vampire Killers came on. And in the space of a minute or two, I was reminded that to most of the straight people in this auditorium, I'm just a target. Not a real person. A straight man with an axe planning to kill lesbians is kinda funny, isn't he? All jolly good fun.

I want this film to bomb and die at the box office. I want it more than I can tell you. I want it to be a massive, multi-million loss. I want the makers to quit. I can't avoid the damn posters, I can't avoid the damn trailer: but I can at least want never to see a sequel in the trailers, on the posters, in the papers.

Trying to protest it: hell, what's the point? Pickets, protesting, letters, public anger: I already know what most of the straight people buying tickets to have fun watching lesbians being killed will say: Lighten up. It's just a joke.

None of the lesbians who saw the poster said that. We shrugged at each other resignedly. It's the kind of thing that happens. The boys throw stones in jest: we die in earnest. The dominant narrative about what lesbians are, what we do, why we exist: to titilate and amuse straight men. By dying, if we can't do it any other way.

The only slash panel I got to at Redemption, the dominant narrative had even got there: two people on the panel, one of them a straight man, who began the discussion by saying he didn't know much about slash but he wanted to know where the femslash was.

And for some reason still unclear to me, the audience of slash fans, any of whom were better qualified to sit on the panel than this ass: we told him.

...five minutes into The Watchmen, the only two lesbians in it had been brutally murdered.

[Update: apparently the only critic who liked this piece of crap was the man at the Sun.]
--




Tags: angry queer, films

10:17 pm: I went to see Moonacre Manor
There are spoilers for the film and for Elizabeth Goudge's novel The Little White Horse, below.




( one of my favourite books, insanely adapted )

Tags: bloody bloody bloody, books are what i read, elizabeth goudge, films

05:03 pm: Ook: Moonacre
I'm hoping to go to Moonacre tonight. As in Secrets of. It's based on The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge, which was, for about three years about thirty years ago, one of my favourite books in the whole world.

So. Um. I'm kind of nervous, actually.

I hope Miss Heliotrope is as wonderful as she is in the book.


Get your own valentinr

All my dragons have gone flat, so I am removing the post that had them in. :-(

Tags: books are what i read, films, valentines day

11:27 pm: Mmm, cheese bread
I found a wrapped soft cheese at the bottom of the freezer, so I cut off the crusty rind and kneaded most of the rest into the spare piece of dough (there is always a spare piece of dough: it never quite works out trying to make exactly enough for 24 rolls: the difference between flour and yeast in each baking always changes the dough, and this is why the French Revolutionary Government declared it a scientific heresy that bakers were responsible for short weight loaves, and why you can buy bread by the gramme or the kilo in France today). I formed it into four rolls, topped each with a piece of the remaining soft cheese, and baked in the oven till brown and crusty.

OMGdelicious. It was really difficult only eating one. The other three will freeze nicely, though.

I finally got to see The Devil Wears Prada. The novel was an interesting example of "fiction for women", the kind that makes you think about how this culture is for women, and how skillful writers can play on the edge of what-we-accept/what-we-resent to create the best of what we unfondly call "chicklit". I'd heard the film substantially changed the novel, and it does - I suppose they couldn't bring themselves to make Meryl Streep play a woman as dislikable as Miranda in the novel, a woman with no redeeming characteristics. There were a handful of other changes - Miranda pays much more individual attention to Andi in the film, instead of barely noticing she's there, and Meryl Streep delivers the best Miranda lines in style. It remains utterly unrealistic about the fashion industry, with much more prurient gaze at women's bodies: the best part about "chicklit" is that it is unabashedly aimed at women, which films are not.

I finally succumbed and bought the first season of Cagney and Lacey on DVD. There won't be any more after that and this makes me sad: please sign the petition, if you haven't already.

Tags: baking, bread, cagney and lacey, cheese, feminism, films

01:37 am: Tough Guys
Why did no one ever tell me about this movie? It came out in 1986. It's adorable.

I was watching Air Force One with half my attention - it was on, I like watching Harrison Ford with a gun to his head - and then I went through to brush my teeth and then, um, this movie was on. With two elderly guys (Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas) getting up and getting dressed. In a jail cell. Which they had shared for 30 years.

And the rest of the movie was just pure love. I stayed awake to watch it. I don't think I ever saw Lancaster and Douglas act together before, but the chemistry! You just want to rub them together. Well, I do: also, to make mental notes for next year's Yuletide. Already. (Also, from IMDB, it sounds like Lancaster was and Kirk Douglas still is good people... and I finally get why people said "Burt" in The Catch Trap was probably Marion Zimmer Bradley's fictional take on Burt Lancaster.)

I was nineteen when this came out! And I haven't seen it in twenty-three years. Bloody hell. What I missed. There are six other movies they're both in, too...

Tags: burt lancaster, films, kirk douglas, marion zimmer bradley

02:22 pm: Starship Troopers - review (only 10 years late)
I missed Starship Troopers when it came out, because it sounded like the kind of bug-ugly movie I prefer to ignore. But I've read the book, and read Joe Haldeman's fictional reversal of the book, and I spotted it on the shelf at The Forest, and thought, in a guilt-free way, I can pick it up, watch it, and return it.

So I did.

What most of the reviews miss (all the ones I've read so far, except those written by SF fans for fans) is that the movie itself is a conscious narrative. It takes the events of Heinlein's novel, more or less, and condenses them into a military recruitment film for the Federation described in Heinlein's novel. That recruitment film is the movie Starship Troopers.

You get hints at this at the beginning, and it's definitely spelled out by the voiceover at the end. Too, if you know Heinlein's novel, you can see the changes the Federation made: Juan Rico's name was kept but he was cast as six-foot-plus soldier type, who barely says an unpatriotic word. (In fact, all of the male soldiers are big-and-hunky-and-handsome, and all of the female soldiers are small-cute-busty. Of course they are: the Federation, making a propaganda movie, isn't going to cast realistic soldiers in the roles.) Ther are clues all through the film - clips from news programmes, the constantly re-iterated "Do you want to know more?" that should hint you're not watching the usual kind of movie.

It is hard to explain, but obvious once you see it - if you see it from beginning to end, and if your mind is open to the idea.

But not one of the professional movie critics I read saw it (or if they did, were not prepared to go out on a limb and say they'd seen it). Given they're writing to an audience that finds The Truman Show a difficult movie to follow, and Bladerunner impossible unless Harrison Ford is telling them what they're seeing, is it a wonder? But then - were they meant to? At least one fannish critic (who, I can't remember now) said back then in a review I then didn't understand, that they thought the director was trying to have it both ways - do a blood-and-schlock movie that any gamesplayer would understand, like, and want to buy the videogame - with a narrative framing device that turns it into an ironic comment on the blood-and-patriotism thinking that's broadcast in the movie.

Kenneth Turan in the LA Times: "But it certainly is a jaw-dropping experience, so rigorously one-dimensional and free from even the pretense of intelligence it's hard not to be astonished and even mesmerized by what is on the screen." (The IMDB, however, does have a synopsis "In a sardonic use of war-effort propaganda vernacular, wholesome young Earth people are drafted by their government's media machine into a jingoistic invasion of a neighboring planetary system. Genocide is their response to the foreign life form's attempts at self-defense; the heroes' individuality is similarly wiped out as they are crushed by the grinding wheels of conformity. A love triangle, and the high school buddies' various paths toward violent glory and bloody tragedy, stitch together the tapestry of irony with grand-scale spectacle." - but this was written, most likely, by a fan ("rhinocerosfive-1") not by a pro critic.)

So what was going on? Did the critics just not spot it, or were they afraid to call it in case their readers didn't, or what?

Tags: films

11:13 pm: Road to 9/11: Letter to the BBC
I watched this "drama" with increasing bewilderment and annoyance, both yesterday and today, when the final part was broadcast.

As far as I can see, the BBC chose to broadcast a piece of Republican campaigning propaganda, which exonerates and honours President Bush, and denigrates President Clinton.

So far from being "based on" 9/11 Commission Report, it directly contradicts it in several places - in particular, the drama claims that Bush gave the order to shoot down a passenger plane before United 93 crashed, whereas the 9/11 Commission Report explicitly says that President Bush and Vice President Cheney did not *discuss* the shoot-down authority until almost two hours after the first hijacking and ten minutes after the last hijacked plane had crashed.

The *whole film* - all six hours of it - was packed with moments like that: dramatic "fictionalisations" - or, not to put too fine a point on it, outright lies - which made it look as if President Clinton had been spectacularly indecisive, and President Bush extremely decisive.

It is simply not acceptable for the BBC to show, on the fifth anniversary of a terrible tragedy, a six hour party political broadcast that makes political hay out of that very tragedy. No matter that the party for which it is broadcast is in another country: no matter that the disaster happened in another country.

It is disrespectful, and it shows the BBC as either gullible or biased. Didn't anyone at the BBC get a review copy and do fact-checking? If it was accepted for broadcast sight unseen, then that was a gullible mistake: if it was seen and the BBC decided to broadcast it anyway, that was an offense against the BBC's reputation for delivering unbiased news.

( And the quick version )

Tags: everybody lies, evil american politics, films, september 11

10:13 pm: Just been to see Pirates of the Carribean
Well, that's three hours of my life (and £6.30) that I won't get back.

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet (probably no one at all, judging by the audience at the showing I was at: I think they were all second-time viewers) don't bother. You can rent it when it comes out on DVD, and you can skip virtually all of the first hour. That's certainly what I wish I'd done.

If you're seeing this on yonmeiongj feed, the spoiler cut is coming now. I almost feel I don't need to bother: (a) it was dreadful: (b) it was boring: (c) did I already say dreadful?

( spoiler cut )

Tags: films, pirates