"Don't look up"

I had no intention of watching this film until I noticed that the Alarmists assume that this film is a parable about politicians and the media ignoring the 'Climate Crisis'.

Having misunderstood* the whole premise, The Guardian gave it two stars, describing it as a "shrill, desperately unfunny climate change satire"**.

Duly heartened, I watched it yesterday and I must say, it is gruesome and splendid. It's basically Dr Strangelove, except with a giant meteor instead of a nuclear war.

* It's quite possible that they are right and the film is supposed to be a parable for the 'Climate Crisis'. If so, the film is an epic fail on its own terms, but succeeds nonetheless because you can watch it ironically.

** For more top-drawer Guardian hand-wringing, read this article.

"Ladies who do"

They showed this film on BBC2 a few weeks ago. I was interrupted while watching, so I set the Freeview box to record it. Unfortunately it missed the last ten minutes, so I've had to make assumptions on how it actually ends.

UPDATE: Derek has found it on YouTube.

Despite seeming really old-fashioned at first glance (filmed in black and white in 1963), it is as relevant today as it was then, and is a good template for all the similar films in the 1980s and 1990s ('Trading Places', 'Pretty Woman' and so on). The surprisingly sophisticated plot has two main strands:

1. The central characters are some cleaning ladies who raid waste paper baskets and pass the information on to 'The Colonel' who knows how to use it for insider trading. They end up very wealthy when the last company on which they took a punt (which had nearly gone bankrupt) turns out to have "valuable deposits" (we assume minerals, it's not made clear) on its land.

2. A highly leveraged and increasingly desperate land speculator (he ends up refinancing at 40% interest IIRC) wants to buy up the company which owns the row of houses in which the cleaning ladies live, evict them, knock the houses down and build an office block on the site. The main character discovers this while doing her general snooping and spying.

The strands come together at the end when the cleaning ladies decide to use their ill-gotten gains to buy out the land speculator and go ahead with the redevelopment themselves. The main character tells her co-conspirators (who are becoming increasingly aware of their own moral ambiguity, having started off as heroic underdogs) that it doesn't matter that they don't have enough money to finance the construction as well: the potential gain is so large that they can get a construction company to do the work 'for free' in exchange for a share of the finished project (now modified to be two blocks of flats with shops on the ground floor).

She actually uses the expression "other people's money" nearly thirty years before the film of that name was released while she is explaining all this, and also explains how you capitalise rental income to arrive at the value of a project.

So all this was common knowledge sixty years ago, and probably had been for centuries. What's changed? Have we learned anything from this? It would appear not, this is how the stock exchange and land speculation work today. Land Value Tax would have prevented all this (apart from the insider trading bit, that's a job for Deposit Funded Corporations).

Film highly recommended, as mildly depressing at it is.

[Adjective] [noun] - film titles in the 1980s

Her Indoors was watching Basic Instinct as I drifted off to sleep yesterday, and it reminded me of something that has been bugging me for the last thirty years.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, a lot of film titles were just an adjective and a noun, it was a fashion that came and went. The cleverer ones were where you didn't know what the phrase referred to until somebody told you, or you watched the film.

Here's a list of The 68 Best '80s Movies Ever Made, according to Marie Claire. I have no idea why they chose the number 68, or why they caveat it with "... Ever Made" (clearly, they're not making "'80s movies" any more, but hey.

Their list includes:

Short Circuit
Lost Boys
Steel Magnolias
Evil Dead
Raging Bull
Full Metal Jacket (OK, that's two adjectives)
Blue Velvet
Working Girl
Weird Science
Mystic Pizza
Risky Business
Top Gun
Foot Loose (OK, that's noun-adjective, but it's my list)
Dirty Dancing

That's one fifth of the list.

Other noteables (maybe they are on the above list and I overlooked them) are:

Rude Boy (the Clash film)
Mad Max
Blue Lagoon
Red Dawn
Black Widow (the one with Debra Winger)
Fatal Attraction
Dangerous Liaisons
Legal Weapon

UK television joined in the fun too:
Cold Feet
Silent Witness

The trend continued into the 1990s and then fizzled out again:
Hot Shots
Basic Instinct
Cool Runnings
Broken Arrow
Indecent Proposal
American Beauty

Nowadays, most films are sequels or prequels or part of a series, so they end up with very long and  punctuation heavy film titles like The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 2 or Deadpool: The Musical 2, or just about any Avengers film, which are all called Avengers: [brief description of plot].

"Cats"

I only go to watch films which get bad reviews because nine times out of ten I am pleasantly surprised and come out thinking "It wasn't that bad, really".  (The last film I watched which got good reviews was "Black Swan" and I would have walked out halfway through if I hadn't been there with Her Indoors who quite liked it. I skipped the two Paddington films because they got good reviews, which was a big mistake on my part, they were both on telly over Xmas and they are great!)

"Last Christmas" is a counter-example, it got mediocre reviews but that's actually a *really good film* in a completely non-ironic way.

I accompanied Her Indoors to see "Cats" (the musical) donkey's years ago, and it was truly dreadful (although again, Her Indoors liked it). With expectations that low, I happily went with her to watch the film version yesterday.

We can file "Cats" along with "Downton Abbey" and "La La Land". Objectively, it is a crock of shit churned out by cynics to fleece an undemanding and unquestioning public. But these films are very well made (camera angles, lighting, sound etc) and if you just sit back, relax and judge it by its own standards (in the rather glorious Odeon Luxe recliner seats), it's really quite enjoyable and I came out smiling.
------------------------
Surprise of the film: there are two-and-a-half actually funny lines in the film. James Corden delivers both-and-a-half of them *perfectly* and I actually chuckled out loud each time.

"Last Christmas"

It being the first day of December, we put up the Xmas decorations, and Her Indoors and I went to see Last Christmas.

What can go wrong, I thought, it was universally panned by the critics as a cheesy, predictable Xmas rom-com, guaranteeing that you'll be pleasantly surprised, i.e. coming out thinking "It wasn't that bad, really".

What they don't warn you is that it is a real weepie tear jerker, I was welling up for the last ten minutes, thinking about my own mortality and the meaning of life and stuff.

Awesome!

Yes, that'll work. I wonder why nobody thought of this before?

From City AM:

The UK film regulator will this week roll out a series of new age rating symbols designed for online streaming platforms.

The digital classification symbols, which will launch on Netflix from Thursday, are designed to help young people make more conscious choices about what they watch online...

I've never bothered putting passwords or doing this age-related nonsense on my computers or on our Netflix and Amazon accounts. If my kids are old enough to hack them, they will be old enough to watch whatever they like.

"Downton"

Her Indoors and I went to see this yesterday.

As I expected, there is no real plot, just a few sketchy sub-plots with tenuous links to each other; the characters are one-dimensional to the point of being caricatures (yet still inconsistent); the film barely questions the underlying social injustices - a couple of the characters claim to be 'republicans' i.e. anti-monarchy without realising that their employer, a large landowner, is a beneficiary of the exploitative monarchical system.

The filming is 'sumptuous', nice camera angles and lighting, beautiful interiors and costumes etc. There was only one crass anachronism, when a self-employed plumber who worked late said "I want to make a success of my business, so I don't just do nine-to-five", and apart from that it all looked historically accurate to me.

It's basically three episodes of the TV series shown back-to-back without advertising breaks.

Yet somehow it grinds you down and I left the cinema in a good mood with a big dumb grin on my face. Strange.

Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse

We've just seen this.

It is a glorious load of confused and multi-layered gibberish, very enjoyable!

"A Star Is Born"

From Wiki and Wiki

Jackson Maine, a protostellar cloud privately battling gravitational collapse and an alcohol and drug addiction, plays a concert in California to try and lose some excess energy through radiation. His main support is gas pressure Bobby, whose kinetic energy balances out the potential energy of Jackson's internal gravitational force.

After the show, the dust within Jackson becomes heated to temperatures of 60–100 K when he witnesses a performance by Ally, a waitress and singer-songwriter whose particles radiate at wavelengths in the far infrared where Jackson is transparent.

They spend the night speaking to each other, where Ally discloses to him that the dust is mediating his further collapse. Jackson invites Ally to his next phase of contraction. During the collapse she sings on stage with him. Jackson invites Ally to go on tour with him, and his density increases towards the center.

In Arizona, his middle region becomes optically opaque first. Ally and Jackson visit the ranch where his father is buried and where Jackson’s density reaches about 10−13 g /cm3, only to discover that a core region, called the First Hydrostatic Core, has formed where Jackson's collapse is essentially halted.

Angered at this betrayal, Jackson continues to increase in temperature and punches Bobby, who subsequently reveals that Jackson’s core temperature has reached about 2000 K, but the latter was too inebriated to notice.

The Hunt for Crimson Tide - alternative ending

After heated discussion, the Captain of the submarine decides to launch the nuclear missiles. Yellow lights flashing, ominous buzzer repeating etc.

Screen prompt: Please enter launch code to continue

Captain reads launch code from slip he retrieved from the safe and diligently keys in: 0101WFRWS

Captain pauses, crosses himself and hits 'Enter'.

Yellow lights continue flashing

Screen prompt: Incorrect launch code. Please enter launch code to continue.

Junior Officer #1, nervously: Permission to speak, sir?

Captain: Granted.

Junior Office #1: I think that those are capital letter "i's" rather than digit "ones", and if you look closely, the second "O" is rounder than the first one, so I think it might be a capital "O" rather than a zero.

Captain, keying more carefully: 0IOIWFRWS

Captain looks carefully at the screen, holds up the slip of paper for a last check, hits 'Enter' again.

Yellow lights continue flashing.

Screen prompt: Incorrect launch code. Please enter launch code to continue.

Junior Officer #2: Permission to speak, sir?

Captain: Yes, what is it?

Junior Officer #2: I don't think those are ones or capital "i's". They look to me like lower case "L's". And if you look closely at the "S" at the end, it could well be the digit five, it's a bit smudged.

Captain: Why the fuck did they print the launch code in san-bloody-seriff? Don't answer that!

Captain, turning to Junior Officer #1: Go on, what do you think? Digit "one", capital "i" or lower case "L"? And is that a capital "S" or the digit "five"?

After several minutes of earnest discussion, the Captain keys in very slowly, repeating each key stoke out loud: 0-l-O-l-W-F-R-W-S.

Captain compares the screen with the slip of paper for several minutes, finally closing his eyes and hitting enter, while muttering "Boom!" under his breath.

Yellow lights continue flashing.

Screen prompt: Incorrect launch code. For security reasons, your account is now locked. Please wait 24 hours before re-entering launch code or contact your software administrator.

Junior Officer #1 to Junior Officer #2, under his breath: I told them we should have stuck with Android.

Junior Officer #2: Yup. Fucking Apple! Jeez...
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Cut to US and Russian Presidents, standing beaming on the steps of the UN building, shaking hands and taking credit for having averting Armageddon.

The Breakfast Book Club

From Wiki and Wiki:

Four women have attended a monthly book club for thirty years every Saturday morning in 1984.

Each comes from a different clique: pampered Vivian, who owns and builds hotels; recently widowed state champion wrestler Diane; geek Sharon, a judge who has been single ever since she divorced her son's father; outcast Carol, who had a successful marriage to Bruce that has recently lacked intimacy; and delinquent John Bender.

They gather in the school library, where assistant principal Richard Vernon instructs them not to speak, leave their seats, or sleep until they are released at 3:00 p.m. He asks them to read Fifty Shades of Grey and leaves, returning only occasionally to check on them.

Viewing it as a wake up call, they decide to expand their lives and pass the hours by talking, arguing, and smoking marijuana.

Reader's Letter Of The Day

From The Metro:

Fatting up Damian was unacceptable

If director Ricky Tollman needed an actor to play overweight, scandal-hit former Toronto mayor Rob Ford in 'Run This Town', why didn't he cast an overweight one?

'Fatting up' the slim Damian Lewis, however successful, is no more acceptable than having a white actor black up to play Othello.

Geoff, Stockport

I just can't decide if he's being serious or satirical...

"The strange phenomenon of twin films" - an excellent list of short lists

Steve McIntosh at the BBC has done an excellent list of my favourite kind of list, one with two things on it.

Films about a comet/asteroid hurtling towards Earth at an alarming rate, threatening the existence of the human race released between May and July 1998?

Films about the eruption of a volcano threatening the life of locals released between February and April 1997?

And so on.

Lex Luthor bought the houses on the other side of the road...

... but he couldn't get sign off for nuclear weapons from Health and Safety, so engineered a few high tides instead.

"The Three Stooges Outside Ebbing, Missouri"

From Wiki and Wiki:

In the town of Ebbing, Missouri, Mildred Hayes is grieving the rape and murder of her teenage daughter, Angela, seven months earlier.

Angry over the lack of progress in the investigation, Mildred hires three slapstick comedians, called: "MOE", "HOWARD", and "LARRY". The veteran comics upset the townspeople, including Chief Bill Willoughby and Officer Jason Dixon, the latter being a racist and a violent alcoholic with no sense of humour.

The open secret that Willoughby suffers from terminal pancreatic cancer adds to everyone's disapproval. Moe, Howard and Larry are harassed and threatened, but to her son's chagrin, she stays firm about keeping the physical farce going.

"The Darkest Rush Hour"

From Wiki and Wiki:

The film commences in May 1940, on the last day of British rule in Hong Kong in late 1997.

The opposition Labour Party in Parliament demands the resignation of Detective Inspector Lee of the Hong Kong Police Force for being too weak in the face of the mysterious crime lord Juntao.

Lee tells Conservative Party advisers that he wants Sang, Juntao's right-hand man as his successor and manages to escape. Sang does not want to become Prime Minister as he is busy recovering numerous Chinese cultural treasures stolen by Juntao.

So King George VI must choose the only other man whom other parties will support: Winston Churchill, whom he presents as a farewell gift to his departing superiors: Chinese Consul Solon Han and British Commander Thomas Griffin, the First Lord of the Admiralty.

My niggles with the film "Wonder Woman"

I tagged along with my family to see Wonder Woman recently. I don't mind the premise of a film being complete nonsense as long as the film itself is internally consistent. This one wasn't, not by a long chalk.

The film is based on Greek myths:
1. They explain that Zeus created mankind in his own image. My daughter reliably informs me that in Greek myth, a Titan called Prometheus created mankind.
2. Wonder Woman is the daughter of an Amazon. She is called Diana. Diana was the Roman goddess of hunting, the Greek equivalent was Artemis. Even I knew that.
3. The mythological Amazons removed their own right breasts so they could aim their arrows better. The ones in the film all have both breasts intact.

Wonder Woman is superhuman, obviously, but not completely invincible. The Germans shoot at her torso/head, and she protect herself with her magic wristbands and a magic shield. At this stage, the Germans don’t do the obvious thing and shoot at her (bare) legs. In the fight scenes in the last half hour of the film, Wonder Woman is prancing about in high heeled boots. They make her legs look longer, but are not really practical battle wear for the mud of the trenches.

At the start of the film, an American spy steals a German aeroplane in occupied Belgium, flies off over the North Sea, through some thick clouds/fog and crash lands in the sea near the hidden island of Themyscira (where the Amazons live). The island is not hidden by a physical barrier, just by the thick fog/cloud. The German ship chasing him appears through the fog/cloud a few second later.
1. Why would you chase an aeroplane in a ship? You’d lose him from sight after a couple of minutes, he is flying at least ten times as fast as you and once he’s disappeared over the horizon, he could turn off in any direction.
2. As he and the ship had set off from Belgium, the island must be in the North Sea/English Channel, one of the busiest sea-lanes/coasts in the world, it seems unlikely that the island would have remained undiscovered for so long.
3. The American spy explains that the Germans who were chasing him are the bad buys and he is with the good guys. One of the Amazons accuses him of lying and points out that he is “wearing the same colours” as the Germans. Not really true – the Germans chasing him were wearing Navy uniforms and the spy is wearing a pilot’s uniform.
4. The German sailors attack the spy and the Amazons. The Amazons line up with bows and arrows ready and they shoot after their general gives the command “Fire!” This is meaningless in the context of an archery battle. The Amazons would have been waiting for the command “Shoot!” or something.
5. Later in the film, they refer to a notebook which the spy stole from the evil chemist. Although the book was underwater with the spy for a minute or two, the ink writing is still perfectly legible.

Lüdendorff is portrayed as the senior German general. He is determined to win the war by any means. He poisons Hindenburg who wants to capitulate. Wonder Woman kills Lüdendorff towards the end of the film. As a matter of fact(s), Lüdendorff was the junior partner of the two, he was very unsure of himself and was the first to wonder whether Germany hadn’t make a huge mistake starting the war and both survived the war.

When the spy assembles his crack team of oddballs to steal the poison gas, he signs up the chap from Trainspotting because he is a crack sniper. Although he carries a rifle with him during the fight scenes and uses the telescopic sight a few times, he never fires a single shot, despite their being times when it would have been the obvious thing to do.

Wonder Woman demolishes the steeple of a Belgian church in order to kill a German sniper hiding in it. The Belgian villagers all cheer, which seems a bit unlikely. Isn’t this sacrilege or something?

During the fight scenes, the band of misfits wander more or less unhindered through enemy lines and then blunder about on a German airbase causing havoc. They’d have been shot within minutes. Wonder Woman has an epic fight scene with Aries on top of a control tower without anybody trying to shoot her.

The poison gas is very poisonous indeed and one shell will kill everyone within a ten mile radius. Apparently the gas is highly flammable. The spy steals an aeroplane loaded with the shells/canisters and flies off. Once he has flow a mile or two, he fires one single bullet from his pistol which manages to trigger an explosion which sets off all the shells/canisters and burns off all the gas a few hundred metres above ground level, we assume harmlessly.

It is unlikely that one bullet would have been able to do that, even with luck on his side, he’d have to assume that some shells would fall to the ground and kill everybody along the Belgian coast, or at least that not all the gas would be burned off with mass fatalities. That sort of defeats the whole object, seeing as that is what the Germans were planning to do this anyway. The correct course of action would be to fly out to sea north-east as far as his fuel would allow, then land the plane in the North Sea (he has already had practice at this) and hope that it sinks (worry about the environmental catastrophe in a few decades time). This would have had the added bonus that he could have survived and got married to Wonder Woman (they fell in love somewhere along the way).

I had lots of other minor niggles, I’ll probably come back and add to this list later on.

Smurfs: The Lost City of Z

From IMDB and IMDB:

This fully animated, all-new take on the Smurfs tells the incredible true story of British explorer Percy Fawcett.

A mysterious map sets Fawcett, his wife Smurfette, their son Brainy and best friends Clumsy and Hefty on an exciting and thrilling journey into the Amazon at the dawn of the 20th century. They discover evidence of a previously unknown Forbidden Forest filled with magical creatures and an advanced civilization that may have once inhabited the region before the evil wizard Gargamel.

Despite being ridiculed by the scientific establishment who regard indigenous populations as "savages" and dispute the existence of evil wizards, they embark on a roller-coaster journey full of action and danger.

Fawcett and The Smurfs return time and again to their beloved Forbidden Forest in an attempt to prove their case. They are on a course that would lead to the discovery of the biggest secret in Smurf history… until their mysterious disappearance in 1925.

Kong: Gilligan's Island

From imdb and imdb:

During what was supposed to be a three-hour tour to explore a mythical, uncharted tropical island in the Pacific, as dangerous as it is beautiful, the S.S. Minnow is shipwrecked following a typhoon.

A diverse team of scientists, soldiers and adventurers, including the Minnow's blustery captain, his bumbling first mate Gilligan, a millionaire couple named the Howells, curvaceous movie star Ginger Grant, sexy farm girl Mary Ann Summers, and a science professor known as the Professor, unite.

Cut off from everything they know, the castaways managed to survive on a diet of fish and coconut cream pie, and are aided by their trusty transistor radio.

The team ventures into the domain of the mighty Kong, igniting the ultimate battle between man and a seemingly never-ending parade of guest stars who managed to drop by their "deserted" island (including a big game hunter, a movie producer, a mad scientist, a rock band, Russian cosmonauts, foreign spies and a jungle boy).

Nanny McPhee: The Prequel

Although the first-made film in the series is sugar-coated child-friendly nonsense, I imagine that the prequel is a much darker film, highlighting the pretty brutal attitudes that well-to-do Victorians had towards their servants; that men had towards women; and fathers towards children.

The film propably opens with the birth of Mrs Brown's sixth child, which she adores while Mr Brown (Colin Firth) mumbles some rather unenthusiastic congratulations in the background. The doctor tells the parents solemnly that Mrs Brown is not in the best of health and having another child would kill her.

With little knowledge of contraceptive methods, Mrs Brown then refuses to have sex with her husband any more. In his indignant frustration, he forces himself on his under-age scullery maid Evangeline (Kelly Macdonald) every time his wife is busy with the children, which is often.

Seeing this as a possible way out of her lowly station in life, Evangeline eventually learns to accept his advances. It is unclear to the viewer whether perhaps she actually starts to rather enjoy the submissive and borderline violent sex (you have to have a bit of controversy in a film, a bit of feminist outrage is always good publicity, history professors can hit back that this is just what it was like etc).

Mr Brown eventually loses interest in his wife and becomes infatuated with Evangeline who does all sorts of pervy stuff to him. Mr Brown is an undertaker by profession (he actually is in the first-made film), so has a suppressed kinky side as well as access to poisonous chemicals.

Together, the lovers hatch a plot to be rid of Mrs Brown. In public, Mr Brown misses no opportunity to mention the doctor's warning, while privately he persuades his wife to "try for one more child". As an undertaker, he knows just which poisons to use on his wife and how to disguise the cause of death afterwards.

Having established an alibi in advance, sure enough, Mrs Brown becomes pregnant and duly dies in childbirth - largely because of the large doses of poison which he and Evangline have been administering in the final trimester.

Evangeline is keen to be married to her master as soon as possible, but she and Mr Brown agree that it would be rather unseemly and possibly raise suspicions if they are married too soon after his first wife's death. Privately he worries about what marrying a scullery maid who is not yet of age will do to his social standing.

They agree therefore that it would look best if Evangeline goes away for a while, perhaps entering service for another family until she is old enough to marry.

The End.

Those who have seen the first-made film will know that the opportunity presents itself when Mrs Brown's wealthy aunt offers to take in Evangeline to "make a lady of her", so this all ties in nicely.