Dogs Are Barking

Conditions: Relentlessly Overcast

Woof.




If Jean Claude Van Damme has taught us anything, other than that being able to do the splits does not make you look cool, it's that when traveling through time you have to be very very careful not to do anything that might affect future events. A lesson that apparently was not passed on to a certain someone who has been spotted ...in a documentary filmed in the 20's for a Charlie Chaplin movie while seemingly talking on a cell phone.

George Clarke from east Belfast has been puzzled for more than a year by a scene in a film which appears to show a woman talking on a mobile phone.

The unusual thing is that the movie was made by Charlie Chaplin in 1928 - long before mobile phones were invented.

In the eight days since George posted the clip on Youtube - more than 1.5m people have viewed the video online.

- bbc.co.uk/news/

I know, it sounds outrageous, especially due to the not unimportant point that time travel is impossible. But you cannot argue with the fact that the person in the movie is clearly talking while holding a thing against their ear. And as we have all been conditioned to recognise over the last decade, anything a person holds to their ear while speaking is a cellphone. Simple.

You tube clip is here


Film Review: The Town

Ben Affleck directs and stars in The Town, a gritty heist movie about a team of professional bank robbers in Boston. Ben plays essentially the good-hearted bad guy, who wants to go straight but is trapped in this world of guns and money. When he falls in love with a kidnap victim of their last heist, things start to wind out of control. In terms of heist movies that have gone before, there really isn't anything new here. Affleck directs a fairly straight forward film where the stakes gradually get raised with the FBI hot on their heels. The difference really comes in that the ending isn't as bleak as I thought it would be.

It's still fairly bleak, but all things considered, it could have been much worse. Which applies to the whole film as well. Affleck seems to have found an actual director deep down inside, and aside from some occasional odd editing choices shows some good skill at putting scenes together. And acting wise he's putting on a damn good performance as well, trying to desperately find a way out of the life he's built for himself when he finally gets a glimpse of something better.

The film is fairly grungy, however. Boston comes across as a cheap, nasty downtrodden place to live, where everyone can't wait to get the hell out. And lets not forget the overall theme of the movie, something I feel is getting a little lost in all the Affleck praise. This film is about a bank robber, trying to get away with it. Things get out of control, people get hurt and killed. Exactly how is Affleck the good guy in any of this? Well he isn't. It's just the nice smile and big chin that makes the audience want him to be the good guy. So, a nice try. Three twangy accents out of five.


- Peace out

Not Getting It

Conditions: Cold

I Demand An Upgrade!

People are getting more and more intolerant of life's little setbacks, I feel. Example A this week is of a man in an economy seat on a Qantas flight, who decided he wasn't going to take any more.

"The 23-year-old Israeli male passenger, surnamed Ariel, became 'emotional' after complaining about the food and other services," a police spokesman said.

There were reports today the man complained about his seat in economy class.

"He asked to be moved to business class because he wasn't happy with sitting in economy," a passenger, David Peace, told News Ltd.

He then asked to be seated with the pilot on the flight deck, Mr Peace said.

"When that was refused, he said he was going to open the door and get off," he said.

Police said they would not charge the man as he did not cause any damage or harm other passengers.
[...]

The man was understood to have ignored a number of directions from the crew and was sectioned off from other passengers under staff guard until the end of the flight.

He was not violent and no passengers were reported to be harmed.

- smh.com.au/

We've all been there, stuck in a difficult crappy situation for a long period of time. It's tough, I know. But sometimes we just have to keep our cool in the face of unfairness instead of blowing our stacks. Because where's that going to get you other than dumped at the next stop?




Film Review: The Last Airbender

Adaptations can be very difficult to pull off effectively. Distilling the essence of a longer body of work into a 2 hour film requires a bit of skill in knowing what to cut and what to change. And so it is that an adaptation has the added risk of not only being bad, but also being offensive to people who are fans of the source material. I was a big fan of the Nickelodeon show that ran for three seasons and is the basis for this movie, the first of three. Set in a world made up of four nations, where each nation has people capable of manipulating, or "bending" a natural element - Earth, Air, Fire, Water, the new Avatar - the only one who can bend all four elements and is meant to keep the peace - has awoken after being missing, frozen in ice for a hundred years. In his absence the Fire nation has launched a campaign to take over the world.

Prince Zuko, the banished and scarred Fire nation prince, is tasked with chasing after the Avatar. And helping the Avatar are the two kids from the Water nation who found him and will help him travel to the North pole, on his flying bison. in order to learn water bending with the goal of eventually taking on the Fire Lord. Now, this is a lot to explain, and a lot to process. So it should not be that surprising that M Night Shymalan's movie adaptation feels a little rushed, and a little lacking in detail. The characters and the world are introduced very quickly, and the actual process of getting to the North pole, evading Zuko and another Fire nation general, and having the Avatar deal with being away for so long is all compressed down into a too-short period of time. Crucial character moments where the Avatar and Sokka and Katara grow and learn and adapt to their mission are really not given enough time to register.

Predictably, what is given plenty of time is the action sequences where people battle by using Kung Fu moves to hurl the elements at each other. And while these CG effects are pretty good, there seems to be more of a disconnect between the character and the elements than there was in the cartoon. Shymalan's directing choices are also unusual. He does not shake the camera, and I profoundly thank him for that, but in action sequences he wants to move the camera around the characters as they fight each other, which on paper sounds pretty cool. But what I noticed was that it seemed as though the actors had to wait for the camera to get into position before they could make their moves, which seemed awkward and jarring. In the end the essence of the show is there in the movie, but the missing details make it a much more shallow of an experience that it should have been. Two water whips out of five.



- Peace out