Category Archives: reBlogged

Stuff from all my other blogs and journals

reBlogged

Blood

Blood posterAnother film I saw at last year’s London Film Festival. Which was in October. And I last wrote about a film I saw then in… January. SO IT GOES. I made no promises. Once again, something of a list and bear in mind this is a film that I saw once nearly 6 months ago (saying that though, I saw it 6 months ago and it made enough of an impression that I’m writing about it now).

  • When I sat down in the cinema to see this film, I admit, I couldn’t remember what the hell I was seeing. It was a film called “Blood” – that much I knew from the ticket. Other than that? Not a clue. Blood is the kind of title that could mean anything, though in this case I think it refers to the familial relationships within the film. In the Q&A with the director Nick Murphy after the film, he described it as like a Greek tragedy and I’d agree that it has that kind of scale and timelessness. The fact that this is a drama involving policemen is pretty much secondary to the relationships between the characters and their reactions to events.
  • The character development and the relationship development is well-paced. As it should be.
  • To digress a bit, you know how in Romeo and Juliet, there’s that moment in Act 3, Scene 1 where it’s all a bit “HOLY COW” and everything changes? The impact of that varies from production to production and depends, I suspect, a bit on how familiar you are with the play. I’m guessing that if you know a bit about this film, but not necessarily all the detail and maybe not this point (even though it’s probably the pivotal moment in the film)…uh. Lost track there. MY POINT, now that I’ve got here, is that Blood has a moment where I could hear the entire audience kind of think “Holy S***” – it’s got that kind of impact. Which I really liked.
  • MARK STRONG. Ok. This film has a lot of really good actors in it. A lot of them and all really good, who have done other work that I’ve really enjoyed. Paul Bettany gives the best performance that I’ve seen him give in like….anything I’ve seen him in (in fact, this pretty much confirms that I would want him to play John Constantine in a Hellblazer film). MARK STRONG THOUGH. I LOVE MARK STRONG. Well. Maybe not love him per se, but his work. My favourite thing is when he plays a normal person rather than an out-and-out villainous character (like in…Sherlock Holmes and…stuff…he’s good at it, but y’know). I think that sometimes it’s easy to forget that Strong can absolutely kill as a not-villain. Well, not literally ;).If this was a romantic comedy, I might have swooned. As it isn’t, I only swooned a bit at his character’s competence. That and that one scene where he’s wearing a shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Sorry. I have a pulse and he’s Mark Strong.
  • What else? Well, last year I saw a heck of a lot of films, but out of the films that came out in 2012, that I saw, Blood was the most awesome. You can see my list here. Blood beat Red Tails, Avengers Assemble, The Hobbit, Dredd, Argo and…lots of other really good films (also, obvs, the not so good ones but whatevs). I gave it 4.5 stars out of 5 (I don’t really rate many things 5 out of 5) and my end of year thoughts were as follows:

    Yes, technically this film is released next year. I don’t care. In fact, this film is so good, I’ll probably go see again next year and put it high up on next year’s ratings too. The cast in this film is astounding. I love Mark Strong. I love Paul Bettany. They are both spot-on in this film (“spot-on” has pretty much become my go-to end of year saying). The relationships between the characters are rightly at the heart of this film and that’s what makes it so good. Forget that it’s a police drama. Forget the totally amazing HOLY COW moment. How the brothers related to each other and their father. How they related to their colleagues. Everything. Best film.

  • Mark Strong and Paul Bettany, man. JUST LOOK AT THEM.

    Mark Strong and Paul Bettany in Blood

    It really doesn’t hurt that they’re nice to look at.

  • Aside from Mr Strong and Mr Bettany being stone cold foxes, the setting is nice to look at too. So there’s that. If you needed something other than the plot and acting and all.

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reBlogged

Albums of 2012

4. Cory Branan – Mutt

Released 22/5/2012
I only got this for Christmas, but since I only apparently bought 4 albums in 2012 that were released in 2012, this is at number 4 in the list which seems kind of high for an album that I don’t think I’ve listened to enough to make a decision on how much I like it. On the other hand, 4th place is also last place. I dunno. I need to listen to it more.

3. Jesca Hoop – The House That Jack Built

Released 25/6/2012
Mostly for that one song which is utterly sublime. The whole album is a well constructed work though.

2. Hooray For Earth – True Loves

Released 27/2/2012
I really really like this album, although I didn’t think it was a 2012 album but then I realised it must be because I only went to see White Lies last year and I say Hooray For Earth supporting them. I think. Compared to how they were live (a bit ramshackle and possibly having a bad day), this is almost an entirely different band. But in a good way.

1. The Gaslight Anthem – Handwritten

Released 24/7/2012
Oh man. This album. This album is one of those albums that I could listen to on repeat for days. It’s a beautifully cohesive album too – each song is in the right place, no song is out of place. I suppose since I still listen to CDs and tend to hear songs in the order that the band put them in (for whatever reason that they put them in that order), this is something that I notice. That first listen was phenomenal – when you don’t really know what to expect and you only know the titles for the songs and nothing about the sound or the words or how it’ll feel to listen to each one and then you listen to the whole album and it’s just incredibly pleasing, you know? That.

Created using OnDistantShores‘s Album Of The Year journal generator.

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reBlogged

Review: The Prince

The Prince
The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had been expecting something more dry and boring. The Prince was a far quicker read than I thought it would be. Machiavelli doesn’t bother with flowery terms or dragging out his points.

It’ll be good to see how it compares to Erasmus’ The Education of a Christian Prince

View all my reviews

Originally published at half girl, half robot. You can comment here or there.

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reBlogged

Doomsday Book

Yes. The London Film Festival was last year.  I just didn’t get around to talking about any of the films. What can I say? First up is Doomsday Book in bullet points. All of this  will be  bullet points. I saw 12 films. I don’t know how I managed it. I make no promises about spoilers. I also make no promises about ever getting around to the other films.

  • Doomsday BookDoomsday is a film in three parts.
  • The first part was  kind of a zombie love story, where a put-upon young man gets infected with zombie flu along with the girl he went on a date with. The meat they eat also infects a whole bunch of other people. Basically, it’s a total zombie apocalypse.
  • The second part is about a robot that attains enlightenment – the company that built him feel threatened by his evolution and seek to deactivate him.
  • The third part is about a girl, her family and a giant asteroid that is approaching the planet.
  • The first and third parts have the most funny moments – the second…doesn’t really have anything chuckle-worthy (which is fine).
  • Briefly, the first part was very doomy; the second was quite sad in places; and the third was very heartwarming.
  • I enjoyed all three parts – I think my favourite was the second with the robot because it raised a lot of the same questions that I’ve considered thanks to my interest in science fiction and that were brought up in the “Philosophy of Computer Science” (or whatever) module I did at university.
  • My least favourite was the first part, with the zombies. It wasn’t bad or anything, it just wasn’t as cute as the last part.
  • The third part – with the girl and her family – was a good story to end the film on. It had a good solid resolution and left me with the sort of happy satisfied sensation you might get after eating a delicious cheeseburger.
  • I am going to ramble about the second part in more detail though, since it raises interesting questions. Feel free to stop reading here.
  • I did wonder why it seemed impossible for humans and this robot to live together – why it was necessary that he be deactivated. I suppose the fear is that the robots could replace humans some how, forgetting that idea that we could peacefully coexist. The other thing that I though might get mentioned, but didn’t, was when the  CEO was talking about how the creation was a monster that would threaten its creator someday – no one made the suggestion that the created robot was in some ways no different to a human child. A baby can grow up into a monster and threaten its creators (its parents) but no one uses that as an argument for killing babies.
  • With the reveal that the technician was also a robot (or at least, had a robot arm), I wondered who had created him and how he was able to fit in, assuming that he would never age. What would the reaction be if it was him that was the perceived threat and not this enlightened robot? It’s something that I would have liked to have seen explored further.
  • So if he is a robot, how does that change the perception of what he seems to think of the enlightened robot? Does he act out of a kind of fear for his own discovery? What about the risk he takes in protecting the robot?
  • Then I suppose the disposable attitude towards robots that many of the humans share should be addressed. The girl with the dog demands that the technician  fix it right away (and for free too apparently), but when the repaired dog is not as good as before (and still needing a visit to the proper repair shop), she easily ditches the puppy in the rubbish, despite the hissy fit she pitched when the technician was initially reluctant to fix it. Does she know that he is a robot? Or do the other people who live nearby know? Is this why she has such an entitled and demanding attitude towards him or is she like this with everyone? We don’t know.

 

 

Originally published at half girl, half robot. You can comment here or there.

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reBlogged

On Mass and Moshpits

I’ve thought about this, on and off over the years, and while I tend to be fairly loathe to really get into it about anything to do with religion 1, I figure sometimes you have to gather your thoughts and brain-dump them somewhere.

That and I’ve never been one for paper journals. Child of the internet and all that.

Plus I’ve been reading The Power of Place by Winifred Gallagher which touches briefly on some of the thoughts that I’ve had.

So. What was I thinking about? Mostly, the similarities between the experience of being in a moshpit and of going to Mass. Admittedly,  it is possible that there isn’t an obvious connection. For the most part, I suspect it’s a very subjective thing – which, yes, that is entirely what experiences from my viewpoint are. That’s the thing with personal experience. ;)

To begin: The first proper gig I went to was AFI’s Nightmare After Christmas 2 show at the London Astoria in January 2002 – before that, I’d been to the Reading Festival a couple of times. I would have been 17. It was amazing. AFI were and still are a band that I love with all of my heart – in the way that the bands you love as a teenager stay with you for the rest of your life and for me, it’s not just the music they made then, when I first got into them. I’m lucky enough that the direction their music has taken has coincided with the spread of my own taste in music.

Being there at the front, surrounded by other fans of AFI, was a phenomenal experience. It felt kind of transcendent – like we all had the same joy in our hearts and were all part of the same one thing. Which I suppose we were – we were all in the same crowd, pressed together with all the heat and sweat of the pit, connected by love of the same band. I’ve had the same kind of feeling at other gigs since then – usually when I’ve seen AFI but also at a few Alkaline Trio and Gaslight Anthem gigs. I think there’s something special about the first band to really grab your heart though.

Now, as some of you might know, I’m Catholic. I believe in God, transubstantiation, the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, blah blah blah and all that.  I go to church on Sundays and holy days of obligation. I go on pilgrimage to Walsingham every year 3.  I don’t feel especially religious 4, but I guess to a lot of people I am due to my somewhat active involvement with my faith. On the other hand, I guess since I’ve got a foot in the door, I get to see all the other people on the inside who are far more involved and active and who I would consider as “religious”. Now, that feeling of almost transcendent oneness is a feeling that I sometimes feel at Mass – mostly when singing certain religious songs, hymns or particularly rousing requiem Masses in Latin. It’s a thing that happens.

Now, I’m sure I had a point (other than this whole thing being a bit interesting) back in August when I started writing this post – but I remember that I got interrupted halfway through and it’s been sitting in my drafts ever since. I figured I should at least round it off a little and release it into the wild.

To finish, however, is a comment I posted on Frank Turner’s reddit AMA on a thread where someone was asking about reactions to his atheist hymn “Glory Hallelujah”.

I really like Glory Hallelujah as a song. I also really like singing along at gigs – it gives me a comparable high/buzz to when I’m really into it singing in Latin about death on Good Friday at church or like…a really good worship hymn that doesn’t make me cringe while I’m singing it.

I have discovered that I can’t sing along to Glory Hallelujah. At all. I open my mouth and nothing comes out. I think my brain short-circuits at the paradox.

 

 

 

1 Because, hey, each to their own really, so long as it doesn’t impact negatively on others.

2  Which after a bit of searching is apparently the greatest show that AFI ever did. Or so I am told.

3 This one is a story all on its own, involving the unlikely but apparently somewhat miraculous event of my conception. Probably not one for sharing all the details.

4 There’s probably also a story here where I talk about how atheists/agnostics I know have told me how “normal” I seem for a practising Christian, how with the blue hair etc I look a little unconventional and how my faith, appearance and taste in music are all tied into not caring if I’m like anyone else.

Originally published at half girl, half robot. You can comment here or there.

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