Yesterday's News

Top Twenty

fazzinchi — Mon, 06 Aug 2018 11:53:57 +0000

Last night, Mrs F and I popped down to the local IMAX to catch up with the twentieth instalment in the MCU movie franchise, “Ant-Man and the Wasp”. Coming, as it does, hot on the heels of the superhero overload presented to us in the all-together-now Avengers blockbuster from the spring, Ant-Man 2 faced a difficult challenge to find its identity as it sits between that cliffhanger of cliffhangers at the end of Infinity War and its conclusion in Avengers Whatever next year. Mild spoilers ahead, natch.

It’s a great film, played predominantly for laughs, which Paul Rudd can do in a wonderfully endearing and natural way. However, he doesn’t stand as the solo star of this film because it’s far more of an ensemble piece than may have been expected. Scott’s far less estranged family and particularly his daughter, Cassie, along with Hope and her parents, Hank and Jan, give the movie more a family vibe than perhaps any of the other 19 instalments in this series. Even the main villains of the piece have a father/daughter vibe that reflects well against the Scott/Cassie and Hank/Hope relationships.

The film ties back to the consequences of Ant-Man’s last appearance in Captain America: Civil War and plugs the gap between that and Infinity War very well. Rather than ramping up the stakes to world or cosmic implications, which is a path that similar sequels have sometimes trodden, the narrative of the wider MCU goings-on have forced Ant-Man into a lower key setting where what is at risk are the protagonists themselves and the unfortunate San Francisco residents and tourists who are caught in the wake of the inevitable car crashes and fights.

As mentioned, we saw this in all its 3D IMAX glory, and the story really lent itself to the format exceptionally well, with all the shrinking and expanding effects looking great in the additional dimension. Of the now-traditional MCU mid and post-credits sequences, the first one is definitely worth staying seated for, but the second one, not so much. All in all it’s a worthy addition to the Marvel canon, matching, perhaps exceeding, the original Ant-Man. The outcome of Infinity War 2 is probably going to go a long way to determining whether or not we’ll see a third outing for the Scott Lang gang but I get the feeling that there is another story to be told at least.

You Oughta Know

fazzinchi — Sat, 04 Aug 2018 16:07:00 +0000

So, back on Friday 13th July, I fulfilled one of those ambitions that sits on my as-yet unwritten bucket list when I went to see Alanis Morissette perform live for the first time. As a little bit of personal background to this night out I need to take you back to 1995. I was 24 and, having left university three years earlier, I was finding my feet in life: living with my parents whilst still coming to terms with my rejection of the faith in which they had raised me, stubbornly girlfriend-less and getting some reasonable money from a job that never really satisfied me. In all that self-absorbed, woe-is-me, first-world inner turmoil, I never really cared or gave much thought to the world around me and the real problems that other people might be enduring. I must’ve been a nightmare to be around. My musical tastes of the time were painfully middle of the road, I’d never really given much thought to exploring beyond whatever happened to be on the radio at the time, and a glance at my paltry CD collection would have revealed as much with a largely male-dominated catalogue of nothing too noteworthy.

One lazy Saturday, browsing the shelves of the local Our Price store, I spied the cover of Jagged Little Pill and for reasons I cannot recall, I just thought I would ‘give-it-a-go’. It sat in the bag for the best part of 24-hours, a spur of the moment purchase, forgotten as soon as I’d got home. And then I remembered it, popped it in the CD-player and from the first blast of the harmonica on “All I Really Want” I was hooked. I remember getting to the end of that first track and just pressing the back-button to listen to it again. And again. And again. It was raw, heart-felt, heart-breaking, angry, joyous, and lyrically unlike anything I’d heard before. If anything, the confrontation of it all unsettled me. The first line of the album is, “Do I stress you out?”… well, yes you do Alanis, but I like it. It was the first time I think I’d ever been challenged by music, and it was a challenge I was happy to accept. Eventually I let the disc spin on to track two and, bugger me, “You Oughta Know” might’ve been even better. Jagged Little Pill was one of those seminal albums for me where each track is stunning and the whole thing changes your life just a little bit. It made me a feminist before I even understood what feminism was.

So I found myself at the Hammersmith Apollo twenty-three years later. The lights dropped, the audience jumped up, the band started up their intro music and then Alanis bounded on stage, flawlessly blasting that harmonica again before launching into “All I Really Want” once more. One of my favourite artists and one of the greatest gigs I’ve been to.

Enough about me, let’s talk about you for a minute
Enough about you, let’s talk about life for a while
The conflicts, the craziness
And the sound of pretences falling
All around, all around

Share If You Agree

fazzinchi — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 12:40:24 +0000

So, as you can see, I’ve started a new blog. It’s not my first attempt at blogging but it’s my latest shot at trying to have a place I can call my own online. With the dawn of Web 2.0 all those years ago, when websites turned from glorified libraries with pages of fairly static information and transformed into something much more interactive and richer where users became creators, relationships formed and commercial activity began, I think I had a view of a brave, new world on the horizon. A place where communities could thrive; where freely available information would democratize knowledge, where debate and interaction would be fun and accessible and a new age of enlightenment could be forged. Twenty years later I’m sat here with hate-speech, trolling, revenge porn, a clandestine dark web, fake news, the rise of extremism in all its nasty forms and the world’s most popular social networks farming our data and selling it to the highest bidder. Where did it all go wrong?

That’s not a rhetorical question, by the way. I just cannot understand it. When I meet people around and about in real life, whether at work, in the pub, on the street, or at an event, I see all types of humanity. I’m not saying I like 100% of them but in general they all seem okay. They have friends, love their family, try to do their best, and by and large interact with the rest of the human race with a modicum of decency. So who are these people hiding behind their keyboards sending nasty tweets, spreading hate, and sharing messages of intolerance. Is it the same people alone with their darker thoughts? A disenfranchised underclass? A brainwashed collective of the quietly angry? And in response, what do we do? Well, for my part, I’ve started this blog. I’m not trying to change the world or even change anyone’s mind. It’s just a place for me to be unrestricted, unconfined by 280-character limits or likes or shares or retweets. Just putting a few words online and trying to make sense of it all and wondering where it will take me.

Image: Shutterstock/PhotographyByMK

Are You Sure?

fazzinchi — Thu, 02 Aug 2018 11:01:20 +0000

There was a large family who lived in a house and, after many years of living there and many conversations about whether they should move somewhere else or stay where they were, the family patriarch decided to have a family meeting to decide once and for all whether to leave the house or not. At the meeting, the family voted. To leave or to stay. Some of the family were too young to vote, and some couldn’t decide so didn’t bother voting at all. However, of those who did have their say, more than half of them said that they should leave to find somewhere better. So, they went to their local estate agent and told them that they wanted to move. Preferably, somewhere with bigger walls to keep the undesirables out, somewhere away from the interfering resident’s association with their annoying rules and regulations, and somewhere that they could save £350-a-week off their taxes. The estate agent said not to worry to and to leave it with them.

Some time later the estate agent came back to the family. “We’ve found you a new house”, she said. “It’s further away from the centre of town, so it’s quite inconvenient and the local services aren’t anywhere near as good as you have at the moment. It’s certainly going to be more expensive than you’re used to as well, and that £350-a-week saving just isn’t going to happen. You’ll be aware that the resident’s association won’t be around to help you with any local issues, so you’ll be completely on your own. On the plus side, you’ll be able to build the walls as big as you like but that will probably put people off wanting to come and work for you”. The family started bickering with one another as usual, before a few of them said, “Can we have another family meeting just to make sure that this is really what we want to do?”. “Oh no”, said the estate agent, “you don’t get any say in this whatsoever. You’re moving out next year”

“But we were told lies about what the benefits would be!” … “Don’t care” replied the estate agent. “But those of us who wanted to leave outnumbered those who didn’t by such a small number, it wouldn’t have been enough to change the constitution of dad’s local golf club let alone to make a huge decision like this!” … “Not my problem” she huffed. “But none of us knew that leaving would turn like this!” … “La-la-la. I’m not listening”.

[Photo credit: BEN STANSALL/AFP/Getty Images]