Films

Time for a review of some of the films I've watched lately.   First up, Letter to Brezhnev.   It's a 1985 film about two young working class women on a night out who meet two Russian sailors.   One of them falls in love, and is determined to see her sailor again after he sails away.   But it's the middle of the Cold War, so she faces lots of obstacles to going to Russia to find him.   The movie ends with her getting on a plane to Russia.   I quite enjoyed this.   I liked the beginning with the two sassy young woman having fun and running wild in Liverpool.   I quite liked how the ending was uncertain, and not a smoochy happily ever after.   The middle was so horrifically cheesy though!   With the two young lovers banging on about stars and destiny.   Ugh.   And the stars looked awful too!   Bad special effects!   But if you don't watch the middle section it's an alright film.   A bit different.

Next, the 1933 black and white live action version of Alice of Wonderland.   I have to say this was almost as bizarre a trip as reading the original book.   Very very odd.   There was a surprising amount of content in it.   As well as using the whole Alice's Adventures in Wonderland "story", they also do Through the Looking Glass, and some other Lewis Carroll elements that had nothing to do with either book, like The Walrus and the Carpenter.   I wonder if this is where Disney got the idea to include it in their version as well.   There are quite a few famous people in this, like Cary Grant, W. C. Fields and Gary Cooper, though sadly none of their perfomances are really note worthy.   I was reasonably impressed by the actress of Alice though.   The special effects, such as Alice growing and shrinking are also pretty good for the time, and I think that on the whole the film captured the madness of Alice in Wonderland pretty well.

And finally, To Rome With Love.   It's another one of those films by Woody Allen set in a European city.   It also has Woody Allen himself in it.   It has several sets of characters and several stories, some in English and some in Italian.   There's a young American tourist who falls in love with an Italian, whose parents are meeting for the first time.   The bride's father (Woody Allen) discovers that the groom's father is an excellent opera singer and is determined to make him a star, however the groom's father and his family are very reluctant.   There's a young newly wed couple arriving in Rome for the first time.   The wife goes to get a haircut, gets lost, and has an adventure.   Meanwhile the husband gets sent a prostitute by mistake and has to spend the day pretending to his family that she's his wife.  The prostitute is played by Penelope Cruz, whose Italian is excellent.   Her performance impressed me.   Then Roberto Benigni plays a nobody who one day wakes up to find he's famous for no reason at all.   Everywhere he goes he has journalists following him and women throwing themselves at him.   At the end of the film everyone forgets about him overnight and his life goes back to normal.   There's no explanation at all given for any of this.   It's a nonsensical little story, but I really liked it.   Whimsical and silly.   And I love Roberto Benigni!   He's so funny.   The last story concerns an American couple studying in Rome.   A friend of the girlfriend's comes to stay and the boyfriend ends up having an affair with her.   In the end the friend leaves him and goes back to America for a film role.   She's played by Ellen Page and the boyfriend is played by Jesse Eisenberg.   Alec Baldwin also plays a role in this story, as a famous architect, the boyfriend's hero.   He spends the story looking over the boyfriend's shoulder and giving him advice.   But I have to say that it's not very clear about whether they ever did meet in real life or not, or whether the boyfriend just imagines him being there from the start.   Bit odd.   I really enjoyed the film though.   It's very funny, and seeing as I love Rome, it's really nice to see it on screen like that.   I thoroughly enjoyed Woody Allen's performance too.   The film is quirky and charming.   Recommended.  

More Fringe Shows

Time to review the other two Fringe shows I watched.   One of them was Panga, written by my friend Sam Siggs.   It had a very interesting concept.   It centres around a 20 something year old woman, Lucy, who's a bit of a mess, and her boyfriend.   One day her mother sends her a bunch of her old toys, and her cuddly panda, Panga (pronounced like that because she had adenoids) suddenly comes to life, as a full-sized talking, walking panda.   At first she's terrified, but very quickly warms to the idea of having her childhood playmate back.   The two of them spend their days playing wild games and getting incerasingly drunk.   The climax of the play comes when Panga tries to kill Lucy's boyfriend.   A fight ensues, and Panga gets his head cut off, whereupon he transforms back into a harmless cuddly toy.   I have to say that I have mixed feelings about this play.   It was staged very well, with plenty of little creative touches, and the acting was excellent.   As I've said before, I thought the concept was very interesting, and it was very funny, but I just feel like the play was missing a message of some kind.   A tangible effect Panga's visit had on Lucy.   Some sort of point to the play.   It just left me a bit confused really.   It was actually quite strongly reminiscent of the film Drop Dead Fred.   It had the same feeling of chaos and mischief and losing control.   Worth seeing, but not Sam's best.  

          



Finally, the Blanks, also known as The Worthless Peons, Ted's band from Scrubs.   They're an a capella band.   I enjoyed seeing them.   The singing was really good, and they did all their famous ones.   It was interesting to see that Sam (Ted) was by far the worst singer amongst them.   The other three were all really talented.   Perhaps I just don't have very much patience, because the filler between songs really pissed me off.   It was just so American and tacky, unfunny and unnecessary.   They also performed a Hallowe'en song, which was very funny, but just gave me the impression that their repertoire is pretty small.   All in all, an enjoyable show, but could have been better.

    

Candy

You've just got to admire Robbie.   He's been going for so long and just keeps turning out so many great songs.   I love this recent one.   Catchy tune, quirky lyrics, original.   Not enormously keen on the video though...

Enlighten Edinburgh

Sorry about the lack of blog these last while.   Christmas, you know.   Now on  with the entry!   Back in March the Edinburgh City of Literature Trust projected quotes from the Scottish Enlightment onto various buildings around the city centre for a few days.   Naturally I went out to photograph it, and it was well worth it!   Here are a few of my favourite photos from it:

This was a giant globe in Charlotte Sqaure with a Geological and weather type video and a James Hutton quote projected onto it.   "A succession of worlds...no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end".   Being a James Hutton fan, I found it quite exciting.

This is the Royal Society of Edinburgh building on George Street, lit up with an Adam Smith quote: "Science is the great antidote against the poison of superstition and enthusiasm".   I have to say this was the best projection for me.   It was so big and bold and striking.   The use of the features of the building was very clever and the whole thing was just beautiful.   The whole project was pretty awesome actually.   A great idea, and well executed.  There were more projections, but the pictures of those weren't particularly exciting.   And so, I shall leave you with this:

Not actaully part of Enlighten Edinburgh.   This a shopfront on George Street.   They project a live webcam view of a beach in California onto their windows 24 hours a day.   Pretty cool, huh?

The Mother We Share

My newest song obsession.   A little more electronica-ey than most of the stuff I've been listening to lately, but still really good.

Books

Once again it's time to tell you about some of the books I've been reading!   to start off, The Qi Book of General Ignorance.   It's the first book published by the makers of the TV show Qi (which I love, by the way!)  It takes well-known bits of general knowledge and tells you that everything you know is wrong.   It's a non-fiction book, written in the style of questions and answers.   I loved this book!   Really loved it.   So interesting!   It made me feel very clever and very stupid simultaneously.   Clever because I was learning cool new facts, and stupid because so much of what I thought I knew is apparently wrong.   There's a foreword by Stephen Fry, and Four Words by Alan Davies.   They read as follows:  Will this do, Stephen?   I'd like also to share with you a more interesting extract:

Q: What's the loudest thing in the ocean?
A: Shrimps.   Though the blue whale produces the loudest noise of any individual animal in the sea or on land, the loudest natural nosie of all is made by shrimps.   The sound of the "shrimp layer" is the only natural noise than can "white out" a submarine's sonar, deafening the operators through their headphones.   Below the layer they can hear nothing above it and vice versa.   Hearing from below can only be accomplished by raising a mast up through it.   The nosie of the collected shrimps amounts to an ear-splitting 246 decibels, which even adjusting for the fact that sound travels five times faster in water, equates to about 160 decibels in air; considerably louder than a jet taking off (140 dB) or the human threshold of pain.   Some observers have compared to everyone in the world frying bacon at the same time.   The nosie is caused by trillions of shrimps snapping their single oversized claw all at once.   Snapping shrimps, members of the various Alpheus and Synalpheus species, are found in shallow tropical and subtrpoical waters.   But it's even more interesting than it sounds.   Video shot at 40,000 frames per second shows clearly that the noise occurs 700 microseconds after the claw has snapped shut.   The noise comes from burst bubbles - not the shutting of the claw itself - an effect known as "cavitation".   It works like this.   A small bump on one side of the claw fits neatly into a groove on the other side.   The claw is shut so rapidly that a jet of water travelling at 100 kilometres (62 miles) per hour squirts out, fast enough to create expanding bubbles of water vapour.   When the water slows down and normal pressure is restored the bubbles collapse creating intense heat (as high as 20,000 degrees C), a loud pop and light - this last being a very rare phenomenon called sonoluminescence, where sound generates light.   Shrimps use this nosie to stun prey, communicate and find mates.   As well as ruining sonar, the sharp, hot intense noise makes dents in ships' propellors.

Isn't that just so cool?   Science rules!   I might share some more extracts in the future, cos it really is brilliant.  

And now, The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald.   Yes, I know, I know, how can I not have read this before?   I think I must be just about the only person in the world who didn't do this book at school, but nevermind.   It's read now.   And it was very good.   Cynical, but sweet, wordy and wistful.   It was somehow very joyful and very sad at the same time.   It vividly conjured up a world that's gone and the twist at the end was a big surprise.   A very well written book.   

And finally, All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy.   Another great book.   It's about two boys who saddle their horses and ride South into Mexico and have lots of misadventures.   I found it a bit of a contradiction, because it's seemingly very rough and ready, and yet also very sophisticated.   The simplicity and sparsity of the dialogue contrasts highly with the wordiness and fluidity of the narration.   It's earthy and polished at the same time.   I loved it, but I will admit it took me a while to get through it.   It's not a light read.   There is quite a bit of violence in it.   It's also largely not in English.   A fair amount of it is in Spanish, so a working knowledge of the language is beneficial to the reader!

   

Spanish Bombs

My song of the week.