forced to complain

Leaves

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:49:00 +0000

Here's the bloated beginnings of a not-very-short short story I started writing.
I gave up. It's called "Leaves".

Even before I opened my eyes, I felt the presence of the hangover.

They always catch me by surprise; I will have been too drunk to remember that I know what happens when I get too drunk.
I could feel the pressure inside my head.

The thud. The wrestler that clamps hold of my temples. The elephant standing on my forehead.

My jaw ached and cramped.

I wanted to swing it left and right to click it, to test the hinges and see if I could shift the locked feeling. It wouldn’t move.

I knew what to expect when I opened my eyes. Shards of light stabbing my irises like glass shrapnel. I braved lifting my lids slightly. No light. No stabbing.
My body felt like lead. So tired I couldn’t muster the effort to even twitch a finger.

My eyes flopped open wide, briefly. Darkness. It must still be the middle of the night. My gaze darted around blank surroundings. I heard creaking, squeaking. Something moving against something.

You know when you’re at a restaurant and you’re fighting a badly-cooked steak? Sawing into it, trapping it in place with a fork. And then it suddenly shifts on the plate and your cheeks burn with embarrassment at the volume of screech that sets the other diners’ nerves on edge.

An evil “screeeeeeeeek” that turns your stomach and pours vinegar on your nerves.

That’s what I heard. There; hung over, dogged by half sleep, in the middle of the night.

I don’t know why I wasn’t bothered by the sound, but I wasn’t. Sleep cradled me again, as the pressure in my head dulled my senses.

I don’t know how much time passed before I opened my eyes again, but I’m all too familiar with the disrupted sleep too much alcohol brings. The view as I opened them wasn’t familiar.

Leaves. Green and translucent in sunshine.
When we were married, and happy, we had an enlargement of one of our wedding photographs framed on the wall opposite the bed. I kept it there even afterwards. Although it made me sad every morning when I woke, but not as sad as the sagging aloneness that swept over me those first few weeks afterwards, when I took it down and put it away.

That’s what I saw when I opened my eyes every morning. But not now.

Not the usual gloomy surroundings of my room. Not even the makeshift bed of a friend’s living room sofa.

Leaves.

Still no discomfort from my eyes. No stinging shrapnel. That’s good; sore eyes are one of the worst revenges of alcohol on my system. Not such a bad hangover then. But a confusing one. My eyes swept beyond the foliage, and realisation dawned. Reality crashed in.

A U-section steel beam had crushed the whole driver’s side of the car against me. My right arm pinned to my side by intruding metalwork. As the door pillar had distorted, it had swung the top anchor point of my seat belt upwards and behind me, leaving the unyielding strap tight against the side of my throat.

I still felt only a dullness. Surely there should be horrendous pain ensuing from an accident like this?

I grappled with a slippery memory that danced away from me inside my mind. My head was still crushed by a thunderous headache. My jaw still cramping and locked across to one side. There was an overwhelming hissing rushing inside my head. The blood. I paused and could hear my pulse whistling in my ears.

I saw something shifting on the payload of the lorry in front. I’d been dawdling along behind him for half the night, it seemed. He must be lost, there’s no way he should be on a twisting, turning, tiny lane like this. A sodding great lorry in the tight gloom of the night. I felt as though he’d always been there just ahead of me, blinking an occasional deeper red glow from his tail lights as he braked for this corner or invisible dip. I was almost hypnotised by the great rump of the trailer, not needing or bothering to follow my own lights revealing my knowledge of the road, I simply tailed his tail.

Wits jerked alert by motion in front of my eyes. A tarpaulin flapped ahead of me and I saw the shapes beneath moving against one another. In the dipped light from my car I saw a strap snake upwards, snapping, and the vague movement I’d registered became a sudden glint from my lights reflecting, as long grey shapes fell into my face.

Whenever you talk to someone who’s been in a car accident, they’ll always tell you the whole world stalled into slow motion. It sounds like a cliché. I can tell you now that it’s true.

There was something delicate and beautiful about the way the impact shattered the glass of my windscreen. I watched entranced as the web of silver lines fled the point of impact. Like time lapse footage they twisted and multiplied and split.

Fractals.

I watched with newly-capable eyes as the glass opaqued itself into a million tiny safety squares.

Leaves.

When we were married, and happy, we would walk. For fun.

Out across the fields behind the main road, crossing the dual carriageway and into the farmland. Often we wouldn’t get far before we decided it was too cold, and the pub back in the village would call us with the promise of an open fire. Or it would be too hot, and the pub back in the village would call us with the promise of a seat in the sunshine watching the ducks on the river.

When the sun was low and bright it would catch the leaves in a way that tinged them with magic. They seemed to glow with the joy of feeling the sun on their surface, bristling tiny hairs. Chlorophyll dancing in their cells they would hum with the energy of photosynthesis. Pure, bright joy of simply existing. As we walked we shared their delight. Joy at simply existing, together.

I thought of those days as I looked at the leaves in front of my eyes. Displayed and framed by the shattered remnants of glass. A crooked frame, as the screen pillar had buckled, frozen in the act of squirming away from the impact of the first girder.

From the other evidence in front of me I assumed that my car would be a total loss. The plastic of the dashboard gaped in a split before me, revealing wires and foam. The edges of the plastic looked stretched and white, like an old credit card when you fold it back and forth over and over again to make it break. The material of the facia had been forced beyond its limit of conformity. The sturdy steel reinforcement beneath was what supported the steering wheel on its column, in its new, awkward site.

The wheel was still flat and unbuckled, but twisted and pressed against my chest. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it restricted each breath I took to one shallower than my lungs desired.

I flicked my eyes around the remnants of the cabin. Attempting to turn my head resulted in failure, and I began to notice a tension in my neck. My head was in an awkward position, it seemed, and I could feel the plates of bone and twists of tendon against each other, unhappily close together. Still, my jaw would not unclench, the cramp holding it to one side would not release.

Leaves.

Blowing softly. A breeze had sprung up and I began to feel cold. My cheek even more so. Just above the tight-muscled discomfort in my jaw was a sense of great coldness, that side of my face numb and chill.

My gaze lifted from the leaves ahead and I saw the rear view mirror. Amazingly unbroken and still in place against the brow of the window frame. It had moved.

I’ve never suffered from fear of the dentist. Always quite content to endure the vague discomfort a visit entails. I suppose I’m lucky, not to have needed extensive work or fillings. But I always close my eyes in the chair. I tell myself it helps me relax, and gape my mouth as wide as I can; help the man do his job.

But really I close my eyes to hide from the sight of his lamp. A big angle-poise lamp he uses to flood my mouth and see what he needs to see in his little inspection mirror. I don’t like to see his lamp because sitting smugly at the centre is a polished chrome boss, a little touch of chic to lift its design from the industrial doldrums. A chrome boss so brightly polished it mirrors everything beneath. My mouth.

I don’t mind the dentist when I can’t see what he’s doing in my face.

Wall-E

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 07:57:00 +0000

Well.

I was obviously in a fragile emotional state.
That morning I was reduced to a crumpled, emotional heap to see Peppa pig fall off her bicycle and break daddy pig’s giant pumpkin.

She had no stabilisers on her bike, see?

Daddy pig was just glad she was ok, but it could have been serious.

So, seeing Wall-E that same morning, with a friend and his small daughter was always going to instigate trauma. Pixar can do that – brightly coloured computer graphics whizzing around faster than Pacman, but when they hit the core just right, they can draw you in so much that there are tears.

Wall-E is a little robot far in the future. He spends his solitary days tidying up the derelict earth, compacting garbage in his tummy and arranging it artfully in vertigo-inducing Aztec pyramids. His days are dutifully spent in the company of a planet full of landfill and a faithful little (and seemingly indestructible) cockroach pal. Until the day there’s a mysterious, important arrival to his dirty, dustbowl existence. An arrival whose presence brings a vast importance to his hobby-style collecting and threatens his solitary status quo.

And could, possibly, save the human race from an eternal bone-dwindling EzE-Boy space laziness.

Wall-E is the last dutiful cleaning-warrior. His cohorts have been defeated by armies of rubbish and decay. But opportunity comes for this small dirty hobbyist to score big time amongst the misfits and failures and robo-fruitcakes and space baby blimp remnants of the human race.

Yup. A little robot that looks like a manky pile of air conditioning and binoculars. And ET, kind of. Pixar take the failures and the weirdies and the freaks and the cheesers and – once they render them with their magic brush of universal appeal, they make them heroes.

I snuffled and blinked. I stumbled out into the light with tear-stained trousers. I enjoyed the trailer for "Igor".

I was a mess.

At a small robot that looks like something I used years ago to water the garden with. And can’t even talk properly. Perhaps I’m mentally weak?

Or perhaps Pixar are geniuses? Perhaps they stumbled Indiana-Jones – like into the presence of the holy grail. It’s easy to imbue character into a hunk of anything by exaggerating emotion. It’s harder to do so by minimising everything - action, facial features - and still leave you with the feeling that it's important. Reducing dialogue down almost to nothing, and madcap slapstick hilarity to a beeping flat-line. To show a little metal box endlessly sorting junk – and somehow have it clamber up my heartstrings and twang them up near the top. Up where it really counts. Where I care.

It’s barely worth mentioning that the animation surpasses anything you’ve seen before. Because it always does. When they finish raising the bar, they can cut through it like a stick of rock to find that it says “Pixar”. All the way through.

You can keep your Space Chimps and your Over The Hedge. This is where it’s at.

Unless it's all down to the hormonal whirlwind blowing through my household at the moment. That means everything is noble or sad or just too much.

Maybe Wall-E is just irritating and manipulative and concealing an eco-message to batter us about the head and make us recycle our old toys? Perhaps Pixar are just trying to spin a multi-million dollar merchandised lunchbox profit out of tugging our sympathies here and there? Trying to shift thousands more radio-controlled plastic robots into the homes of the world.

There, now I'm being all cynical. Oh, I'm such a state.

The Sword Bearer

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:03:00 +0000

Before I start this, let me point out that I know I'm sad.

Clear? You understand that?

Right.

I like films a lot. All sorts of films. I forget how I originally heard about this one, but it is very obscure. The Sword Bearer is a Russian film, originally called "Меченосец". Somehow I happened upon a brief plot summary - maybe in one of the endless bizarre foreign dvd sales email newsletters that ping into my inbox.

It sounded very interesting. I looked for information on the IMDB, and there was next to nothing. Even more interesting - nobody much seems to have seen it outside of Russia.

I became mildly obsessed with seeing this film, curiosity being a strong master.

The more I heard nothing about the film, the more I wanted to see it. Eventually I ordered a cheap dvd from Russia. But no English subtitles. So I ended up having to rip the disc and combine it with homemade subtitles I found on the web. Bundled them all together and flipped the resulting avi into an iso - Bingo!

So was it worth all this slightly frightening obsessive behaviour?

Yes and no.

Imagine a film that deals with the story of a single Xmen character, Wolverine maybe. From childhood. Instead of an action film with cool oneliners, this is a quiet film that deals with an insular, almost autistic loner. A man who only wants to find a romantic connection but is always thwarted by his temptation to lash out with a violent power he's known and hated since childhood.

Oddly, nothing much happens during the film. Yes there is a lot of violence, and there is some action. But the distances between the characters make it hard to relate to them, they keep a distance with the viewer too.
I suppose it's a fantasy story, like Xmen. But the protagonist's power only hinders his life. If you knew from your youth that you were incredibly strong, it's likely that you would use your strength to assert yourself in difficult situations. And resorting to violence breeds more violence.

But the film doesn't concentrate on the violence. Its not made 'cool'. There's no explanation given for the 'power'. The plot moves slowly, and is character-driven. Which makes for a difficult watch at times when the main character behaves so autistically.

I enjoyed it, and it was never boring. But I was dissatisfied at the end of the film. Probably only because of my own expectations. Even though I didn't really know what they were.

But that's the gamble of being interested in films just because they sound interesting. Sorry if this all sounds vague, but I don't want to provide any spoilers for anyone who's even slightly tempted to watch this.

I am at the mercy of odd films. I deserve your sympathy, but never your respect.

Saw III

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 16:00:00 +0000

Do you ever sit down to watch a film with a strong suspicion that it's going to be rubbish?

But you're not sure, so you watch it anyway. Because if it is any good, it could be really good.
That's how I ended up with SAw III. [accidental caps lock typo there, but I like how it looks so I'm going to leave it there]

I felt badly let down with Saw. Advance word-of-mouth suggested unbridled horror and inconceivable anguish and torture.

Nope. Carey Elwes looking fat and getting sweaty, and Danny Glover thinking he's in Se7en. Rubbish.

Saw 2 was appalling. Execrable stinking toss.

So I had low expectations indeed for Saw III.

It didn't even reach them.

Nigh-on impossible to watch. Not because of gore or extreme horror, just because it's so ugly and eye-damaging to look at.
Horrible direction. Horrible cinematography. Horrible performances. Unpleasant things befalling unpleasant people. No story, not much script - just desperate torture gags strung together in a mess of poo.

Toss. Toss toss.

I'm fully prepared to cut horror films loads of slack because you can't judge them by regular criteria.

As long as they score for gore that's usually good enough for me. I like all kinds of garbage films and I won't pretend otherwise.

What annoys me is something like Saw III taking itself soooooo seriously and pretending it's giving a treatise on the human condition - when really it's just tangling hapless goons up in cruel machines and telling them they're learning a lesson.

I wish I could un-watch it and spend that hour and a half on the Devil Wears Prada instead. Again.

The Dark Knight

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 22:40:00 +0000

You know that Heath Ledger is dead.

Even if you mostly avoid the News, you know. You may even know that Christian Bale’s temper got the better of him in London recently, and a family barney ended with him sticking one on his poor old mum. Allegedly.

So it should be pretty hard to watch The Dark Knight without a vague awareness of these things. I anticipated feeling an additional layer of poignance to the Joker’s dementia. Extra ka-blooey to Batman’s ruthless punch-ups.
But all this baggage disappeared from the outset, as the film shows itself to be that strangest fish of comic-book adaptations: a proper, serious drama.

Director Christopher Nolan has achieved a gritty, involving feel that calls to mind JJ Abrams Mission Impossible III, and the hard-edged re-tooling of the Bond franchise. Where Batman Begins climactically descended into bombastic effects lunacy and exploding scale models, The Dark Knight holds its nerve and serves up a complex tale of real people in the real world, forced to deal with an aggressive agent of chaos. With Batman in it.

The film resembles Batman himself – grim-faced, dark, complex. Not pulling any punches. Little punctuations of jokey levity do little to brighten up the tale. It counters the teen-angst love life problems displayed by super-heroics like Spiderman 2, with a grown-up realisation that a masked vigilante who punches people in the eye is not all that much different from an insane criminal.

This seems to be a theme Nolan aims for with his screenplay. Circumstances skew our view of others’ actions. Batman more than any other ‘hero’ is not so clean cut. His motives and lack of boundaries muddy the water, and he yo-yos from menace to saviour to just conflicted billionaire – and back again.

Performances are uniformly very good. Action is first rate, but not fantastical, with demolition and pile-ups replacing death rays and psycho mad-gas. Hand-held camerawork grounded in the immediacy of Bourne, immediately grounds you in Gotham too. And some astonishing CGI convinces, even as your mind fails to overlook that it is CGI.

A fine crime drama, revealing the conflict between what the Law allows to be done, and what needs to be done to uphold the Law. With Batman in it.

Pulling a Shatner

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 08:13:00 +0000

David Caruso is almost as much of a "master" of inappropriate pauses as Tony Blair and William Shatner. But where he can beat them both is in a fine application of sunnies -

oh, and watching to the very end may cause loss of grip on reality.

Layer Marney

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 20:11:00 +0000

A rare thing happened at the weekend.

Somehow, I managed to squeeze my Sunday really tightly, and wrung out several hours of free time. An ordinary Sunday is always full up, probably even before I’ve got as far as the Wednesday before.

We bunked off our regular church service, which otherwise accounts for the whole morning, and determined that this Sunday was going to be different. It was going to be a pocket-sized family holiday.

We had a roast lunch, at the sort of time that normal people might have it (not 4pm like usual). Then piled the family into the car and roared off in the direction of family leisure and fun. For the purposes of our micro-holiday, the destination was to be Layer Marney Tower. Bravely dismissing forecasts of wet weather, we dressed as though this was going to be summer.

Shorts, the lot.

The Big Boss upstairs smiled on us too, even though we had skipped the visit to his house that morning. Beautiful summery sunshine. Warm, clear air. And a cooling breeze just often enough to prevent the sweats if over-enthusiastic with the little man’s Pop.

Layer Marney was very pretty. The gardens were varied and relaxing, but more casual than ornamental. Gardens shouldn’t be over-zealous, and all that flower-Nazi ornamental gardening gives me a pounding headache. Especially in the sun.

The Tower was impressive, stairs spiralling way up, and empty rooms on the climb to the top. That’s good too, because no one wants to feign interest in dusty old cabinets of tat, when we all just want to rush to the roof to feel the vertigo and see how high up it is.

There’s a little tea shop in the visitor centre there. I didn’t go in, because I don’t like tea. And I didn’t feel like a cake. But I did see the tea girl a couple of times as she waitressed stuff about out in the courtyard. And I thought it was Melanie from 1995.

Melanie was the girlfriend of Barry. When I met them, they came as a single entity “BarryandMel”. Barry came to be a good friend, but Melanie didn’t. Because I found her selfish and shallow and wilfully thick. She believed the world owed her big time, because she had a gigantic big chest.

I dated her little sister for 3 years.

So, when I thought the tea shop girl was Melanie, there was a messy collision of all these thoughts inside my head:

1. Did I see her well enough to be sure that I recognised her? You can’t just go sneakily staring at women you don’t know. I reckon it would creep them out.

2. Melanie always wanted to do something glamorous, like beauty therapy, or topless modelling, or hooking some minorly wealthy fool into thinking she was a) beautiful, and b) worth all the horrendous grief. Why is she selling little cakes at a stately home?

3. If it is really her, do I want to acknowledge that I know her anyway? She was a right cow back then.

4. I’m 12 years wiser and very different from the bloke she knew. I’m a youth group leader. I’m here having a miniature summer holiday with Mrs and our little boy. Maybe her life has changed direction over the intervening years too and now she’s not obsessed with her own boobs and freeloading into a WAG lifestyle.

5. Do I give a toss anyway?

I didn’t buy any tea to strike up a conversation. We just went home.

Two Will Smiths

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 18:55:00 +0000

There are two different Will Smiths. There’s the one who uses a gun in his movies, and there’s the one who doesn’t. The only difference between them is that the one who doesn’t have a gun, doesn’t have a gun.

I used to think that there was more to it than that, maybe a judicious use of effing and jeffing would distinguish the gun-totin’ Mr Smith. But having watched “Hitch” I can confirm that no-gun Smith, the romantic lead and goofy comedy flump, isn’t above a well-placed four-lettering either.

And don’t even talk to me about the serious actor Will Smith that we got in “Ali”. That doesn’t even count as Will Smith at all. Even with the Fresh Prince starring and Michael Mann behind the camera, “Ali” was an ordeal of drear to wade through. I had the chance to watch it for free on the back of the seat in front, when I was flying to Mexico City. It was so uninteresting that I turned it off and looked out the window for two and a half hours instead. At 32,000 feet.

At night time.

“Hitch” is a romantic comedy. The kind of thing that Will Smith has done a million times – could probably do in his sleep. Except hang on, he hasn’t done a romantic comedy before at all. So why does it seem so familiar? How does Smith seem so at ease with this stuff? Because we all are.
You don’t need me to tell you, but I will anyway, that Hitch is a date doctor – a mysterious consultant who will coach a hapless and love-struck bloke into a customised opportunity to show the woman of his dreams what a cool and desirable catch he would be.

But “Hitch” is an odd film though. It wants to be an easy-going romantic comedy and follow all the rules of the genre. So you get personable Will Smith as Alex “Hitch” Hitchens, and personable Eva Mendes as Sara the gossip columnist. A mutual attraction, followed by a script-manufactured conflict between them – put in place to be happily overcome for a delightful finale that re-affirms our belief that love will out in the end. It tells me that everyone is a nice person really, once you take the time to find out a little bit about them.

But then, slightly on the quiet, it also plays with our understanding that it is a bit of fluff, and deals in a few odd cards. It’s not Farrelly Brothers or anything, but there is some nasty-tasting stuff just under the gloss here. How about extreme food allergies. Funny? Maybe here, where, hey look, Will Smith’s sticky-out ears have swelled up even bigger and his eyes have gone all shut. But acute food reactions tend to be anaphylactic. People die.

Then you’ve got poor drippy little sidekick Casey, Sara’s best friend. A hopeless romantic, fragile and needy. Let’s get her virtually date-raped by a misogynistic scumbag so objectionable that Hitch has already threatened him with violence in a restaurant. Does bashing someone’s head into a table count as “threatening with violence”? I think so. Then there’s the colourful little background detail that Sara’s great-grandfather was a notorious murderer, known as “the butcher”. That lines up a couple of good gag opportunities.

The real treats in Hitch, and I’m happy to admit that there are some, are subtler than the standard genre fare. Kevin James character Albert is terrific. Like some kind of fat anti-Joey Tribbiani, he uncools with gleeful abandon, collapsing in on himself in embarrassed gawkiness. He’s more like a small child than a grown up, playing at being serious and adult but delighting in dancing like he’s wearing hot pants in a rap video.

Badly, but with massive enthusiasm.

Albert is smitten with Allegra Cole, a hugely rich beauty with attendant media interest. She’s played by Amber Valletta, the former supermodel, who’s probably very used to attendant media interest. I’d only seen her act before in Transporter 2. Her acting abilities must be extensive, because in Transporter 2 she’s convincingly not very attractive. No mean performance when your first career consisted of this.

Hitch himself (as is romantic comedy law) becomes smitten with Eva Mendes’ Sara. There’s a little bit of out-clevering between them, but it’s fun to watch, not irritating. But something bothers me about Eva Mendes. This is the role that Jennifer Lopez would have played when she was still Jennifer Lopez the actress, not J-Lo the all-encompassing poke in the eye. And it’s the exact role that Eva plays again in the fabulously daft Ghost Rider. But she has a harshness to her that doesn’t sit well with a romantic genre confection like Hitch. The film makers must have spotted a steeliness to her eye that suited the guileful and witty Sara. But they overlooked the manly set to her jaw and beaky face. I have utmost respect for any actor kissing her in a film – it must be like catching an axe in your mouth. Or getting too close to the TV when Bruce Forsyth is on.

So I didn’t warm to her really. Except in one scene. The scene that took Hitch from the level of harmless, and for me, lifted it to that place where moments of pure movie delight reside. The place in my head where John McClane’s "yippee-ki-yays" are stored. Where the zombie on the beach in Dr Butcher M.D. has his head ventilated with an outboard motor. Where Chief Brody says “we’re going to need a bigger boat”. Where all the genius moments go so I can look at them later.

And that one scene is a dance. Sara dances with Hitch with such big-calved, unselfconscious, stompy, Fresh Prince stupidness that I can't help but smile. It’s so much fun it should be on the DVD out-takes not in the actual film.

Giant hatchet chin or not, I love her for that.

Arboretum

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 00:17:00 +0000

Children of Men

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:04:00 +0000

You know that uncomfortable feeling that creeps up on you, when it occurs to you that something you’re wearing is really inappropriate? Not like a boob tube is inappropriate (and they always are), but like tuxedo is for swimming, or socks are for sandals.

I was lengthening the garden behind the house a little while ago. Gaining an additional three feet of goldfish graveyard by clearing away reams of blackthorn from the hedge. Blackthorn is ferocious stuff, for a bush. After only a few minutes work, my shins looked like Amy Winehouse. All scratched up to bits. So you might think my inappropriate clothing choice for hedge-clearing was shorts. Not so.

I was wearing flip flops.

It transpired that flip flops were a pretty stupid thing to wear, once thorns started poking through into my feet and twigs attached themselves to the underneath, by stabbing.

It was this experience, as much as it was down to the directorial skills of Alfonso Cuarón, that captured me fully into the plight of Clive Owen’s character while I was watching Children of Men. IMDB summarises the film like this:

In 2027, in a chaotic world in which humans can no longer procreate, a former activist agrees to help transport a miraculously pregnant woman to a sanctuary at sea, where her child's birth may help scientists save the future of humankind.

But it’s not the plot that made Children of Men so remarkable.

I should point out at this stage that I am not a fan of Clive Owen. He almost spoiled Sin City for me, and that was full of guns and Mickey Rourke, and prostitutes in their pants. I’ve always thought Owen was just a bit dull, with a plain face and a forgettable demeanour. A bit tossy. And something about the back of his neck bothers me.

However, these qualities (except the neck thing) are intrinsic to why he works so well as the audience’s focus during the course of the story. If we’re honest with ourselves, we’re all a bit dull, and if faced with true jeopardy we would all rather hide. I’m not Bruce Willis, and neither are you. We are regular men and women in the street. Clive Owen isn’t Bruce Willis either, and in the opening moments of the film Owen survives by literally being in the street, and not in the coffee shop shockingly blown up by terrorists.

This is the world of the movie, one in which society skates drearily about on the top of a deep pool of anarchy. With no children, and no perceived future, people have stopped bothering with tomorrow. Stopped bothering with one another. London of 2027 is populated by people forlornly killing time until it all just ends.

Owen is Theo Faron, a low-level civil servant office nobody. Like an arsey student, he’s grown up and sold out to the man, getting on with trudging through life and dulled to the possibility of change. Keeping his head down to stay out of trouble.

But trouble finds him. Faron doesn’t so much agree to transport a pregnant girl, as glumly realise that the caring father he used to be never went away. His ability to protect and help was only hidden under the years of drudge and hopelessness. Children of Men is a science fiction film on the ideas plane, an action film on the visual plane, and an exhaustingly fraught thriller all the way through.

I was amazed at the sheer battering my nerves suffered watching this. Cuarón’s handling of action sequences is breathtaking. I suppose we should have guessed he had the right stuff when watching his grim version of Harry Potter. The violence of the film is depicted in a way that is so fresh and involving that my hands were sweating and my innards were thumping in my chest. My eyes copied Faron’s as he frantically scanned the scenery for any survivable options. Even more so than Saving Private Ryan, or A Very Long Engagement, or even Starship Troopers, the conflict sequences in this film cause you to truly question how anyone ever survives a sustained gun battle.

In two scenes you will wonder how the action seems so unremittingly intense, with barely a second’s room to catch your breath. Then you suss that they’re done in one shot. Or at least with invisibly hidden edits. One shot scenes, with tanks and motorbike crashes and bullet hits and explosions and complicated dialogue and Clive Owen running about in the murk looking like he’s about to need a new pair of trousers.

Faron spends a large chunk of the events not quite ready for what’s happening. He tumbles ineptly from one ambush to another, inadvertently tangled up in violence and double-crosses. He constantly wears the look of a man who knows that he doesn’t really know what’s going on. He bluffs his way to action hero status just by having quite good instincts to survive.

Even if he does steal the only car that won’t start properly. Fails to get answers to important questions from dying friends. And discovers too late that he’s the only one who came to war wearing flip flops.

That’s why I was inexorably drawn in. Because Clive Owen runs around dangerous places wearing flip flops and keeps hurting his foot.

And I can relate to that.

Kicking it Old School

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 09:17:00 +0000

You know how sad I was feeling for Kerry Katona the other day. Up to a point. Well, the papers listed in quite some detail all the celebrity trappings that got pinched. Included amongst all the crass, wealth-announcing celeb tat were both a Playstation 3 and an Xbox, and other, undefined “gaming machines”. What these might have been, and why they weren’t fit to be identified to us proles I don’t know.

But if I was Mr Nintendo, and I found out that one of them was a Wii, then I might get right narked at my publicity people for not ensuring that the world knows Kerry used to own one of my Wiis. A lot of effort goes in to the battle between next-gen home consoles, and it must be wasted effort if a busy mum and housewife like Ms. Katona hasn’t got a Wii for her dozens of different-fathered kids.

Surely Wii is the way to go when you’ve got small children? Playstation 3 and Xbox are all about the stupendous graphics on display and the massive destruction you can wreak in all sorts of very violent first-person shooters. Better for bigger children, or even grown-ups.

But Wii is the one for jumping about like a fool and smashing household fittings when the controller flies out of your hand pretending to play tennis. Gaming is all about fun, and fun is all about leaping all over the place and bashing stuff up. In the purest terms of having fun playing video games, PS3 and Xbox are no real advance over the old school classics that swallowed all my pocket money 10p’s when I was a little boy.

They were so simple in concept and technology that you could pick up the gist of them in four seconds flat – and simplicity is the key to the classics still playing wickedly today. The classic-est of the lot was Pac Man of course, and oh look, here it is:

Pull through, badger

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 14:42:00 +0000

I live in a small village in the countryside. Less than 2000 people live here. We have all the amenities we need - a chip shop (finest in the district), a Chinese takeaway, late-night convenience store and a fancy dress hire shop.

Because it's a small village, with a small number of inhabitants, and surrounded by fields and nature, we see a lot of wild animals. A few days ago there was a little hedgehog snuffling merrily around my garden shed. Sadly, I found it dead on the lawn the next day - I had to clear it away with a spade, because of the fleas.

As I come home in the evening, the fields either side of the road are just brown with bunnyrabbits. No walk down to the local pub is complete without my wife's exclamation "rabbits!" when she spots them hopping and playing in village gardens as we peep over peoples' walls.

We see squirrels, foxes, wood pigeons, hares, cuckoos. All of nature's delightful diversity is here, just on the doorstep. But the only badgers I have ever seen have been all run over in the side of the road.

This angers and saddens me immensely, because I reckon badgers are like Britain's version of small wild bears. The badger is truly a majestic-looking creature - best as I can ascertain from many experiences of flattened ones. A muscular, powerful beast. Predator and devoted family mammal. With a special black and white stripey head. They are both exterminator of wild vermin, and wise old iconoclast of "Wind in the Willows". But I've never seen a live one. Rubbish.

Stupid car driving village dumbos.

So in this post, Forced to Complain acknowledge badger majesty. Our unprepossessing little bear (not a real bear though), we salute you!

I have drawn a little picture to help badgers feel a little bit better about getting run over all the time. Although I know that animals don't go to heaven because of their lack of souls and everything, I like to imagine a little treat in store for road casualty badgers in that special place soulless creatures go to -

Mum's gone to La La Land

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 12:57:00 +0000

I was having a look at the newspaper today, and was confronted with a front page of Kerry Katona pulling a face. Admittedly, this is not a rare occurrence and lately the only way to see her not pulling a face is to watch Iceland adverts on tv.

However, this face-pulling event coincides with a news report yesterday that she's been all burgled. At sledgehammer point too. When I heard the breaking reports of this robbery on the radio news in the afternoon, I couldn't help but feel huge sympathy for her - robbed in her own home.
I was burgled twice several years ago and it was awful. You know that feeling that gradually builds up when you think your girlfriend might be going to break up with you? And then when you're right, and she does, there's the sensation that some complicated structure deep in your stomach has been demolished. All the fragile, delicately balanced pieces of relationship crash down into a pile of rubble, and your whole insides feel cold and poorly.
That's what it felt like when we got home from the pub to see that the little window in the top of the front door was smashed. I knew with total certainty that we'd been robbed.
I was absolutely furious that some lowlife cracker thought they were more entitled to my stuff than I was. The police were no help either because apparently, for fingerprints, they like to use their own special dust that they bring with them. They couldn't use all the dust we already had, just lying around.

It's never like that on C.S.I.

And it's even worse for Kerry Katona, because she was menaced by hairy great balaclava urks. So, I had sympathy for her on being burgled. But then a funny thing happened as I looked at the newspaper. All my sympathy began to melt away, and I just began to feel cross that there she was again, pulling a face in the media. Albeit this time for a half-decent reason. But any and every occasion, there she is pulling a face. Look:

winning "I'm a Celebrity" on telly

announcing another pregnancy

delighted to be getting married again (to Dobby the house elf, evidently)

If you're anything like me, you've been laughing at the irony of those Iceland adverts for ages. Poor Kerry displays that slightly fraught, mums-are-heroes, hassled-but-getting-there stoicism. Corralling ADHD kids and gripey relatives and still getting four hundred sausage rolls and a gateau ready in time for the do.

But we all know it's not really like that for Kerry. Like a Poundland Victoria Beckham, she's parlayed modest ability, not-so-much looks and a successful girl band jump-start into a career of being just a celebrity version of the ordinary girl she used to be. I'm fed up with reading about this new relationship, and that break up, and this drug problem, and that barney with fat Brian out of Westlife about their kids. Lots of regular people go through a higgledy piggledy life. And lots of celebrities do too, without seeking validation by everyone else knowing about it.

Poor Kerry still carries a chip on her shoulder, of failed aspiration to be a Page 3 girl. Continuing aspiration can be seen all over the internet, but only look for it if you want to see Kerry trying to be on Page 3. I don't think she's ever got over that scorned feeling. That's what's driven her mad.

To state the obvious, it's being mad that makes it all so much worse. I can think of a few situations where being mad would make things feel a lot better. If you're going to be a serial killer, perhaps. But I can think of more where it wouldn't.
Poor Kerry got to be topic of conversation at work this morning - which is what she would've wanted of course. But you wouldn't want to be thought of as "but you wouldn't, would you?", just because we all think you're mad. It's not that she's unattractive, easily the second best looking one off of Atomic Chicken. After ginger Natasha. Which is further proof that if you really know how to work it, ginger is the way forward. Kerry has quite a pretty face - it's not like she's Jordan or anything - but it's always squashed into a desperate, look-at-me-I'm-deranged grimace. That damaged and mental vibe is guaranteed to knock a few points off your phwoar score.

I suppose hindsight would suggest that the Iceland ads aren't that ironic at all. When she's running around, freaking out about the pies and scrabbling to maintain her sanity. In her eyes you can see the fear that she might flip and batter one of the rent-a-munchkin infants. Or take a cake dish to the face of an elderly actress playing her auntie. Unless that really is her actual family. The horror.

And there she is all over your paper. Again.

what a bargain - that can't be what she was hoping for

The Hidden Menace

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 15:50:00 +0000

I was in the pub last night with some people from my House Group, and the Vicar. Pub conversation ebbs and flows over a broad range of topics, as you well know. But I was a little taken aback by something that my friend said while we were talking about moustaches.
She has very dark hair, almost black. And so, apparently, does her brother. But when he grows a beard it's ginger. A small revelation perhaps, but I was startled and delighted by the idea. How brilliant would it be, I thought, to have a red moustache?

Pretty brilliant, I reckon.

So the story goes, my friend and her brother have a secret ginger gene. A gene that doesn't manifest itself by rendering you properly ginger, but by hanging over your head the threat that you could have ginger children. Or a ginger beard.

As an aside here, I should point out that I am not anti ginger. It's just that now I'm privvy to the worry that some people could experience if they aren't ginger, and they would prefer their children to be not ginger too. Statistically, red-haired children get bullied at school more than any other colour, probably.
I don't really spare much thought for the colour of hair, or for the style either. Mine is just short. I let it get on with things. But I love the idea of being able to grow a red beard. Then you could be like a pirate or something. And they're really cool right now.

I think red-haired girls can be very attractive too. I used to like a girl at university who had red hair - her name was Rachel. We once had a blindingly furious row about gun ownership, and that was the end of those possibilities. She thought guns were very bad, and I just wanted to be annoying.

I'm going to guess that ginger is a recessive gene, which would mean that if you wanted to avoid ginger offspring you would be walking into a minefield. There is no way you would know if both you and your partner concealed the red chromosome. A red-haired baby could sadly open you up to years of jokes about ginger milkmen.

Even musing on this since yesterday, I don't really see why so much of the world has an issue with red hair. I've managed to bury the hatchet with Mick Hucknall, and he had red dreadlocks. That's like having red hair, but squared.
But the world does have an issue with the orange when it's applied to peoples' heads. Just look at Yahoo, or these sites. Blimey. As with so many things, it's just a few apples that taint the barrel for all the others. That take it just that little bit too far. Lots of girls dye their hair to mildly impersonate the red, with a strawberry blonde or auburn effect. But going beyond that, to the invisible eyelashes and freckles that join up, is what upsets the intolerant.

Sadly, too many overlook the huge variations of God's splendid creation. He gave some of us red hair to help make us the individuals we are. Look how happy and successful we can become. Embrace the red, rejoice in the orange!

And grow more beards.

Incidentally, not ginger, but very cool is this.

Heroes

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 08:43:00 +0000

Television again.

I don't watch a lot of television, but what I do watch, I make a point of seeing. Perhaps only a handful of shows make my list, and although I will often interview a new programme, they rarely get the job. Like 'Shark'.

So it's a funny time of year right now, as most of my programmes have finished their current run and I have months of desolate telly icecap to look forward to. No Lost, no C.S.I., no Top Gear - all gone. But there is a show that wormed its way onto my schedules without ever quite being any good. Heroes.

I think we all thought Heroes was going to be like a tv Xmen. All powers and awesome. But it's just turned out to be an endless parade of "should be a good one next week". And the good one never comes. A whole bunch of problems wind me up about this show, but I think the real stumbler is the writing.

It's nothing like as clever as it thinks it is. With only one more episode in this series still to show, I can be confident that I'm not going to get a surprise anywhere during that final hour. I can know this because if the writers were able to muster up surprises, they would have used them before now. The whole plot so far has just been soaked in water to make it all swell up and fall to bits.

Look at the cast:

They're a barrel of laughs. Now, I know they will have been asked for serious faces for this, but they look like they're about to cry, or blow off. Check out the bloke on the end, all long wistful hair.

Here he is:

Bless him. You can forgive him for looking all Bohemian and arty, because in the programme he is a Bohemian artist. And a bit of a knob. But does he have to have quite such an unenthusiastic expression on his mug? If even he isn't looking forward to what's going to happen during the series, it doesn't exactly bode well for us poor viewers either.

To be fair, he didn't have all that much to look enthusiastic about, as he was haunted by visions of the future in which his head was cut open by a super-powered serial killer and his brain taken away. Unfortunately for Mr Isaac, our lady-haired man, his visions had an uncomfortable degree of prescience to them. And he did meet his appointment with doom, pinned to the floor with paintbrushes through his joints (like, ow!) whilst super-killer cut the top of his head off.

In the interests of making a point, I cropped the main picture of the cast up there to eliminate an element that I figured might make the programme seem more exciting. You can see that element here. Enjoy.

Peas with Everything

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 07:00:00 +0000

A lot of people have problems using English to communicate out of their mouths. At work, I regularly suffer on the receiving end of speaky problems.

There're people who use massive swearing, just to lengthen their sentences. Emphasis is acceptable - it's what swearing was invented for after all. But surely it doesn't all need to be?
Every phrase is full of effing or jeffing, as if conversation is paid by the word. What are you going to use when something extreme needs to be described? Made-up words? Magic words? French?

A variation of this is employed by people who don't have enough to say to justify the importance they feel should be accorded their speech. Then their sentences are peppered with cliches and random conjunctions. If you shook their speech from one corner, and all the useful, descriptive words flew off, you'd be left with a big mess of "you know obviously as I say of course you know so to speak in a way obviously".

Most of this stuff contains no discernible meaning at all.

Like a transcript of John Prescott's speeches. Sentences begin hopefully, but then twist back and crash horribly into other sentences, before getting all mangled up in a pile of wriggling injured words.

But all this stuff is compounded by where I live. Of course, I can't easily spot my own local accent because, to me, that's just what talking sounds like. But I meet a lot of people who seem to use a caricatured exaggeration of how I talk. I can spot them because they add extra letters to the middle of regular words.

Like adding a P in the middle of Chelmsford. Chelmpsford.

Rubbish.

They have pet hampsters too.

Celebrity lookalikes - Keira Knightley

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 14:19:00 +0000

A long train of thought carried me recently to a strange station. Several times, I've tried to watch Domino, a film starring Keira Knightley. The most successful I've been, I got as far as a scene where our Domino defuses a Desert Eagle-laden gangsta face off by offering some poor gangmonkey a lapdance.

Somehow, this worked. But the embarassment I felt watching Keira grinding her bony backside onto this bloke - I was cringing to my very core. I literally shivered with discomfort. Like when you see twelve year old girls, tweenagers, strutting through the precinct, all sexy.

Wrong, and wrong again.

I thought about how I viewed Keira, and why this scene felt so horrid. In the end it's because of the resemblance, not just to a twelve year old, but of these pictures:

garden spade

sexy Hollywood Keira

Mind your brain - ow, it burns!

Poncey Flip phone - an Update

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:52:00 +0000

If you're paying attention, you'll know about my poor little cellphone - and how it gets chucked about just because I am yet to master the complexities of moving my arms properly.

I had a word with Vodafone a little while ago, to see if I could wangle a free upgrade. Because you don't pay for these things - I'm an important customer.

As Heaven smiled down on us, the entire computer system over at Vodafone HQ fell over. Which meant that all their records of my skinflint tariff and cheapo Matalan handset were lost, and they offered me an upgrade based on their average customers' spending. This was highly good news for me as I'm certain I would have otherwise been offered the chance to spend money on a brick with a black and white screen.

A very easily-persuaded call-centre teen issued me a fabulous new SonyEricsson walkman phone. Which I'd already promised to my wife to update her museum piece lead ingot greenscreen phone. Oh.

So my poor old flip is still earning it's money. Trudging through calls and so-called predicting my texts like a doddery old mule with hopeful eyes and a sore hip. It'll get there eventually, but it's a frustrating and smelly experience.

It's starting to resemble the Terminator after he got set on fire and went through that big crushing press. All its metally insides are showing, and the plastic bits have come off.

And I still throw it around by accident.

Remake

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 07:06:00 +0000

If you waste your time by looking at this site, you might notice that the archive is a bit messed up since last time you saw it, with all the posts so far reassigned to the same date.
Also the whole site has had a little bit of a re-design.

That's because I don't really know anything about HTML. Well, I know how to spell it. But what I can't do is understand it at all. So when I dabbled with the code behind these pages yesterday, all I managed to do was delete each post from it's page.

The archive and other links were still there, but the text of the post - gone.

That's because my dabbling amounted to deleting a huge, and clearly important, lump of HTML code from the site template. And because I didn't mean to, I hadn't saved it had I?

So I've had to re-build the whole thing from scratch. Delete the whole site and re-post all the old posts. Balls. That didn't take ages.

And I don't want any comments from geniuses who do know how all this code works. Aren't you clever. But evidently I'm not, and I'm too busy having a life to worry about it now.

So now, Forced to Complain has come to resemble the film Desperado. Essentially, it's a remake of something else cheaper and shoddier, but this time it looks like a bit more time and effort have gone into making it any good.

Or at least less shoddy.

And I don't have Antonio Banderas appearing in it, like Desperado does. However, just to extend the coincidences, there is an appearance by Salma Hayek:

I think she looks like she's sneering a little bit here. It's subtle, but it's there. As if a full-on, whole-face look of contempt has been almost entirely stifled. But a tiny bit of disgust is peeping out round the edge of her smile - just over on the right.

I hope she's pleased with herself. These pictures could end up on the internet or something.

Unless I delete the code by mistake.

The Finest Christmas Film Ever Made

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:41:00 +0000

Die Hard was released in the UK in February 1989. Timing. If ever a film was all about Christmas it's Die Hard.

If you can hijack a building, then that's what the Germans do as a prelude to two hours of sustained, and superb, Bruce Willis-ing.
Nakatomi tower block falls hostage to the clipped accents and waved SMGs of robber euro-terrorists, whose motivation derives from thieving, not from instilling fear.
Although, to be fair, they do plenty of that too - shouting at dopey office workers and pregnant womenfolk, who only went to the office Christmas party to photocopy their bum and get off with someone.
And do some sneaky drugs, if you're smarmy Ellis. Sadly inevitable, when Japanese bankers place important trust in a dude with a beard that shifty.

Fortunately for both the Nakatomi hostages, and us, Bruce Willis' John McClane arrives late at this party, has a row with his missus and loses his shoes. That's all the set up we need for what remains to this day the very finest action movie ever made.

And the finest Christmas movie ever made, remember.

At this point in his career, Bruce is in danger of sliding off down the slope from tv super-success, through wrong headed movie flops, to a big pile of career-over down at the bottom. The genius of Die Hard is giving Bruce the opportunity to be David Addison from Moonlighting all over again. But Addison with guns and a vest, and hair styled by fire.
Freed from the limits of having to interminably romance Cybill Sheppard when she was still soft-focus pretty, rather than just someone's auntie that you can kind of imagine used to be a bit fit.
Romance in the film is resticted to the growing relationship between McClane and Al, a doughnut-stuffing police Twinkie genius, invited to the party by McClane chucking a dead German through his windscreen.
R.S.V.P.
So Die Hard is funny. Smart-mouth Bruce gets plenty of comedy oneliners, his Addison skills meaning they don't clang all over the ground like Arnie's hillarious quips. And refreshingly, McClane's trademark un-cuttable quote means tv showings of the film will be forever sadled with a climactic "motherflipper".
There is true comedy hidden amongst the gunplay too. The pure gold interaction between FBI Agent Johnson and Special Agent Johnson has somehow strayed in from another film entirely. 'Airplane', perhaps. They smirk at and rib each other, casually dismissing everyone elses' plans and immediately taking full control of an uncontrolable hostage situation. Until they explode to fiery death.

But Die Hard is also harsh, with proper violence, for grown ups. I was delighted to see that some slow-motion machine-gunned knees survived the BBFC. As did an unfortunate terrorist repeatedly shot in the knackers through a table. Smashing.

The film does well and earns an 18 certificate - sticking resolutely to its intention to be both very sweary and very violent, whilst also bashing the Germans. Too often now, our action movies drown in Xbox CGI, and heroes who refuse to pull a face and smack some bloke in the cobblers.
Bruce Willis is so adept at pulling faces, that at several points when his mind is racing to outwit his highly organised foes, he looks like a monkey.

Now that is pulling a face.

And even doing that, he comprehensively acts Shakespearian Alan Rickman clean off the screen. Rickman has been so upset by this that you can plot his spiral into irrelevance in various Harry Potter movies. Although, it is now law that by the end of the seventh film, every single British actor must have appeared in a Harry Potter movie - dead or alive.

Die Hard then. The best Christmas movie. The funniest action movie. The greatest Bruce Willis has ever been. Before he lost all his hair.

Yippee-ki-yay

My favourite film, ever.

Tony Blair = James T. Kirk

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:41:00 +0000

Funny that I should leave this until Blair (cock) has gone off to better things. Better for us I mean - now he's not running the country by lying and lying and lying, and then drawing a line under things and moving on.

And that smile, like he's Mister Fox, and we've got our backs up against wall of the henhouse. Shudder.

Anyway. Did you notice how Blair and Captain Kirk are the same. Not in a "I'll conquer your leader, raise an eyebrow, and love your crazy green women" way though. Blair would have had the lovely Cherie to contend with for that. A woman whose mouth was not only a convincing argument that Hell is a real place, but was also on her head upside down.

No, Blair and Kirk are speech twins.

Pauses fired off at random, as if the speech was delivered with all the punctuation broken off in the bottom of the paper bag. And all the commas and full stops just got sprinkled over the words.

Like salt.

A short explanation of why I haven't posted for ages

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:40:00 +0000

You'll notice a big time gap between my apology to Mick Hucknall, and the last post before it.

I need to make clear that this was NOT because I had nothing to complain about. It was more because I had so much to complain about. But it was so much that it kind of filled up all my time, and meant that I was dealing with my complaints, rather than complaining about them.

Maybe that means they weren't complaints then? I don't know. All I do know is that I was pretty angry about a few things, but I feel a lot better now.

Actually, now I come to remember, one other the things I've been angry about for a very long time is Mick Hucknall. I won't go in to the reasons now, as I've come to quite a good place in my relationship with Mr Hucknall, as you might be able to see from my genuine apology to him.

I certainly feel better now that my opinion of Hucknall has changed from one of thinking he's a self-congratulatory, punch-faced smarm bucket, to a bloke just like me who's excited at being a new dad.

Good on you Mick, well done!

You can't beat a good argument

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:40:00 +0000

And by an argument, I don't mean just a row either. A row is like, "you took all the duvet" or "why am I always doing the washing up?" or "but you forgot to close the front door!"

I'm not talking about that. I mean a proper argument of opposed discussion leading to some realisation of truth. I had a blazing argument with some friends in the pub the other night. A slim point of interpretation over our wonderful Government's recent media campaign to make us drive our cars at four miles per hour - thus preventing all death and allowing immortality to moronic children playing in the road.

It led to a terrific round-the-table ding dong. Fuelled, no doubt in part, by some lagers or something. I had a sore ear, so I had to shout to hear myself above the buzzing in my own head. This made it all even more exciting.

It was almost an anticlimax to realise that we all actually agreed.

But then that's the joy of an argument when opposed to just a row. An argument comes to a conclusion. A row is just two people shouting their opinions at each other while the other one takes a quick breath.

No one ever won a row by anything other than violence or holding up a distainful hand and walking away. Or the true masterclass - "well, of course, you would say that!"

My apology to Mick Hucknall

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:39:00 +0000

Today I have sent an email to Mick Hucknall through the auspices of his official website.

The text of that email is reproduced here for your enjoyment:

Dear Mick,

This is the first time I have visited your website, and I see in the news section that you have become a dad. Hearty congratulations! I too became a dad just a few months ago and it has been one of the most exciting and fulfilling experiences of my life.

I’m afraid I must offer you an apology. I have spent many years disliking your musical output, and also, sadly, yourself. I have no basis upon which I built this dislike of you, but I’m sorry to say that it was a very strong dislike.

It would be easy to try and excuse this by conceding that you can’t like everybody. But I feel that I have no excuses for such dislike, through no fault of your own. I used to take great delight in the story, perhaps untrue, that Martine McCutcheon was sick in your dreadlocks. It brought me joy.

However, I am a Christian man. And I truly believe in the ways I should behave. I try hard to be a good person.

I struggle with the idea that we will love our fellows. But I believe that the prompting of my belief has challenged me that I should offer you the hand of friendship and love. Often we must be taught in the strongest ways to truly learn our lessons. It is thus that I believe I should offer you friendship, and to ask your forgiveness for the ungracious thoughts I have previously held towards you.

I cannot promise that my opinion of your music will change. But my opinion of you is changing.

I wish you peace and joy as you embark upon the adventure of fatherhood. Good luck!

With very best wishes, God bless

I want my money back

noreply@blogger.com (kiloton medicine) — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 15:38:00 +0000

I love cinema.

And I don’t just mean Euro-ponce cinema, but all films. My brain sponges up movie trivia and references, and I spend each day of my life inadvertently informed by an awareness of film.

I’m not mental or anything, like one of my friends who imagines her own incidental music playing as she skips through the day. I just mean I love films and get reminded of them a lot by life. Or vice versa.

And I tend to be the one person in the room who knows who Michael Wincott is, and what else he was in, when someone spots him in Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, and knows his face from somewhere.

I’m not turned off by subtitles, I’m not offended by violence, I don’t feel condescended to by stupidity. I can appreciate multi-million dollar superhero special effects and PlayDoh-faced low-budget zombies.
I just love films, okay?

If you gave me a big Chinese burn to force me, I might admit that what I’m most excited about this minute is the DVD that just arrived of Ryuhei Kitamura’s Godzilla:Final Wars.

So, I have a broad tolerance for quality in garbage. If I can find something endearing and fun in the cheerful eye-popping of Zombi Holocaust, and something heart-breaking and poignant in the season-long punch ups of House of Flying Daggers, then how bad must a film be for me to be furious at it’s brazen rubbishness?

It must be exactly as bad as Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones.

Never have I been so angered by the utter waste of my time and money as I was as I sat through this drizzle of George Lucas’ effluent. How dare you, George, take the magic of my childhood, my treasured memories of Luke and Han and Leia and mash them up into this lifeless burger of Playstation and toss.

Even the ominous hum of a light sabre isn’t fun anymore. All the acting skills hoovered out of a proper cast by a script fit for primary school. I know Natalie Portman can really act, she did in Leon when she was just a little girl. But not in this.

If I ever meet moss-bearded buffoon George Lucas I will ask for my money back.

That's if he doesn't get a punch in the face.