Sunday 23 March 2008

Halleluia!

B

ut otherwise, I have always thought Easter Sunday the dullest day of the year. It's the day everybody has gone home (to see the 'rents, as Callum would say), and the shops are closed and all you have are the movies you rented yesterday. In the profile of Alan Moore I linked to on Friday, it says: "He believes most modern films are not only artistic failures but "probably detrimental to modern culture." And I agree.
So what did we have to watch?
Firstly Elizabeth; the Golden Age. 'Comic book' is the default genre for the modern movie. I was able to persevere with the historical inaccuracies of this one up to the moment when Queen Elizabeth turned into Galadriel and the Sir Walter Raleigh into the Sub-Mariner. I can guess how it ended but I don't care.
There is an implicit understanding with regard to the pop singer biopic, and that is that the viewer will accept that the subject had more talent than you and me, and was the idol of the multitude, but only if it can be shown that he/she lived a life of unremitting misery, half caused by circumstance and the rest by his/her self. thus Walk the Line and the present subject, La vie en Rose, about Edith Piaf. I didn't make it to the end and I don't care.
We did take Monty for a walk on the beach. Drove for an hour then discovered we forgot to bring his leash. I went into a gas station (as the Americans would say) and had a choice between ten meters of string and one of those elastic jobs with the hooks at the ends for fastening your luggage to the roofrack. Inexplicably I bought the string and missed out on the comic possibilities of the other. Damn. Even my timing is off on Easter Sunday.

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6 Comments:

Blogger James Robert Smith said...

Here's a weird one.

A few weeks ago some pals and I went waterfall wandering in the high country here in North Carolina. We were at a waterfall called Silver Falls. Above that one, up a very steep and rugged trail is the aptly named Upper Silver Falls that most people don't see because, well, the trail is very steep and rugged.

One of my pals had brought his wonderful dog along (Saucony the borwn Labrador retriever) and the neat retractable leash that he uses when she's near a road. As we were near neither road nor strangers, he put the neat retractable leash on a stump at the base of the trail (keep in mind we were way out in the woods). When we climbed back down from visiting the Upper Silver Falls, the leash was gone. We searched everywhere, beginning with the sawed off stump where he'd left it so that it would be easy to find. On the ground. Around the stump. On the trail. Went back to Silver Falls to see if somehow we'd all grown daft and had actually left it on the rocks there.

Finally, we were left to conclude that it had been stolen. Simple as that. Either a raccoon or a bear had carried it off, or some hiker had decided to visit the falls, seen it, and walked off with it during the brief few minutes we were up at the higher falls.

Only in the USA.

For the rest of the day we ended up using a shock cord (as we call the things you described here in the States). You would have had much more fun with the shock cord.

23 March 2008 at 20:15:00 GMT-5  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"...one of those elastic jobs with the hooks at the ends for fastening your luggage to the roofrack..."

tartan straps?

23 March 2008 at 22:13:00 GMT-5  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Octopus straps! Or "ockie" straps, they were called when I was at school, and used for keeping bags on bikes and suchlike.

Be much more fun on a dog. But would sting a lot more than a rubber band if one end was let go at full stretch.

24 March 2008 at 02:26:00 GMT-5  
Blogger Matthew Adams said...

hmm, I actually thought ockie straps were now banned in australia since they have the lethal ability to remove eyeballs and such when mis-applied... terribly glad to hear they are still for sale.

In regards to movies becoming more comic book like, I always thought that legolass (have no clue if I spelt that right) in the lotr movies was the perfect sequal to the first spiderman movie. The second and third spiderman movies dont count as sequals as they just use the same script, and just change a few names here and there. They should have been called spiderman 1.5 and 1.8.

24 March 2008 at 04:44:00 GMT-5  
Blogger Aaron White said...

'...most modern films are not only artistic failures but "probably detrimental to modern culture." '

Well, maybe most Product films. Most comic books are artistic failures, but that doesn't negate the form. Sometimes I hope that online piracy will suck all the profit out of the industry so the money boys will give up on it and leave it to the people who make movies out of a drive other than the profit motive.

24 March 2008 at 11:42:00 GMT-5  
Blogger spacedlaw said...

At least Monty enjoyed himself (or at least I hope so).

24 March 2008 at 13:18:00 GMT-5  

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