|
|
“I thought only black lads were drug dealers … and Mexicans?” interrupts Galway Garda Sergeant Gerry Boyle as the visiting (black) FBI agent Wendell Everett is delivering his briefing. I groaned as I watched this clip before being persuaded to go along and see The Guard.
However, my fear that this would be In the Heat of The Night played for cheap laughs was entirely misplaced. It is a light, whimsical film with an outstanding performance by Brendan Gleeson as the eponymous policeman who has a touch of the Lieutenant Columbo about him – outwardly simple with an underlying depth and intelligence.
The villains too are multi-dimensional. Whilst undoubtably ruthless they are also capable of discussing the writings of various philosophers as they drive through the night, and in this I was reminded of some of Vincent and Jules’ conversations in Pulp Fiction.
It’s a fantastic, funny debut by writer and director John Michael McDonagh and I look forward to seeing more from him soon.
… and many others, when Shôn and I met up again yesterday to reminisce about our working holiday in USA.
It has been thirty five years, no less, since we last saw each other. Mary Kay from Cleveland had stumbled across my 1976 diary posts and got in touch last week. This prompted me to find Shôn who is now living less than half an hour from me!
It was an almost surreal experience. We were the same people; we shared the same vivid memories of Cleveland and our road trip. Yet we have more than half a lifetime of not knowing each other. Neither of us has entirely escaped the ravages of time, and we are now both clean shaven. So we don’t look the same as those two students way back then.
It was nice – a bit like rediscovering an old pair of shoes at the back of the wardrobe. Shoes which are familiar, easy to slip on, yet which feel strange. Comfortable but different.
Carol from Cleveland is visiting the UK soon. It would be great if there was a way for the three of us to meet up once more.
In the interests of sexual equality the word ‘actress’ has been phased out. One word for one profession. But why didn’t we phase out ‘actor’ instead?
I think it’s now time to purge the English language of other gender distinguishing words. Let’s stop saying ‘he’ and ‘she’. Let’s just choose one and dump the other. ‘He gave birth’ sounds strange now, but at one time, so did ‘She is an actor’.
Pretentious, bloated, self-indulgent twaddle. Beautifully shot, though.
I upgraded to Internet Explorer 9 this morning. It looks nice – lean and uncluttered. A really cool feature is that you can easily open two tabs next to each other. So you can for example highlight a piece of text on a website and drag it into an email you are composing.
So far so great! Then I opened up Google Calendar, to receive this message:
Your browser does not support all features of Google Calendar. If you are having problems, try Google Chrome.
Why have Microsoft made something which doesn’t play nicely with Google Calendar? Or have Google made their Calendar deliberately incompatible with IE9?
Whatever the reason, I would like these two internet superpowers to sort it out please.
This morning I threw out pieces of stale bread for the birds. A short time later, one of the pair of magpies which have built a new nest high up in the tall trees flew down. It swaggered over to the bread like a corpulent ringmaster. Picking up a piece the bird carried it over to our birdbath, dunking the bread in the water before devouring it.
Deliberately induced road collisions (‘crash for cash’) are on the increase, apparently. Criminals cause a crash typically by braking hard and unexpectedly in front of the victim’s vehicle, and profit from the resulting claim for damage and personal injury.
This dangerous and illegal practice exploits the fact that the victim cannot stop in time to avoid hitting the vehicle in front. In other words, it can only succeed when the victim is driving in an unsafe manner. As Rule 126 of The Official Highway Code says:
Drive at a speed that will allow you to stop well within the distance you can see to be clear.
If all motorists obeyed this rule perhaps there would be no incidents of ‘crash for cash’.
The apocalyptic natural disaster in Japan has been compounded by the enormity of the sinister nuclear threat from the crippled power plant at Fukushima Daiichi.
These appalling events, still unfolding, gave rise to an entirely trivial observation on my part about nomenclature. They measure radiation dose in sieverts, temperature in degrees, length in metres, power in watts, and so on.
The seismic energy released by an earthquake, however, would be expressed for example: ‘magnitude 9.0 on the Richter scale’. Well, you wouldn’t say ‘a distance of 1500 on the metre scale’ or ‘the temperature reached 22 degrees on the Celsius scale’. So when it comes to earthquakes, Why don’t they just say ’9.0 richters’?
A sprinkling of silly gimmicks including a Domino’s pizza box, hand held desk fans and such like fail to lift the stodgy, leaden, inanimate production of Carmen now showing at the Lowry in Salford.
If you want a modern take on Bizet’s 19th century tale of steamy sexuality, jealousy, and violence check out instead Carlos Saura’s 1983 film which (like Karel Reisz’ The French Leuitenant’s Woman) tells a story within a story.
It’s 12 hours since I watched Animal Kingdom. A small whisky and a night’s sleep have helped restore my pulse rate but I don’t know if somewhere in my brain one or two of the dwindling stock of precious cells have turned a funny colour and permanently ceased to communicate with the others.
Don’t misunderstand me – this film is
… more →
|
|
Bookmark with:
What are these?