2012 — 4 July: Wednesday
Judging by the time1 I must have been running on empty last night, since the ghost in the machine decided to set the controls for a full eight hours. Still, it's nice (if faintly unusual) to wake up feeling fully restored. "Open Window" and its extras made for compelling viewing, by the way.
Where's my cuppa?
I idly wonder...
... what the Babel Fish thinks of cold water. I had never heard this particular proverb:
You'll find an interesting piece on AI (such as it is) if you click the picture.
And, thinking of Douglas Adams, I am steadily gathering evidence that Amazon's annoyingly-persisent subsidiary "LOVEFiLM" (sic) uses the Marketing Division of his Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as a consultant. Mind you, today's "Please come back to us" incentive — "3 months for the price of 1" — is exactly the same one they (pr)offered two months ago. You'll have to do a helluva lot better than that, guys. Particularly now that I've voluntarily doffed my broadband (which has only just popped back into life after a brief outage) download cap to save the cost of two pints of beer2 a month.
Were I to describe...
... either David Cronenberg or Jason Reitman as favourite film directors I would be guilty of a terminological inexactitude. For me, a good film can only start from a good screenplay. There certainly should be an interesting story to be told in the beginnings of psycho-therapy (and worse) in Vienna and Christopher Hampton has adapted the screenplay from his stage play. (Plus Kiera Knightley is amazingly easy on the eyes.) Likewise, Diablo Cody also wrote the screenplay for Reitman's "Juno". (And who — having admired the Spandex-catsuited fight between Charlize Theron and Teri Hatcher in "2 Days in the Valley" — would willingly miss this new outing?)
I live in hope.
Lunchtime listening
Having heard her on "RadMac" for a while...
Chew on that Sirius Cybernetics Corp.
It's just struck me — I was humming as I prepared a late,3 light lunch snack — that the chord sequences in Track #7 All the rowboats (great lyrics, by the way) could be mapped on to Mahler's Symphony #1. But then, while I was listening to Natalie Duncan performing a song in the "Loose Ends" studio last Saturday evening, all I could hear underlying it was Pink Floyd's "Shine on, you crazy diamond". Must be the way my AI works.
I have — in all probability, unwisely — ordered copies of a couple of items "trailed" on last night's film, and one I found all by myself (with a little nudge from Jeff Bezos):
- The Book of Revelation
This began life as Rupert Thomson's strange 1999 novel. I had missed the fact that it had been filmed - Battle for Haditha
Nick Broomfield's multi-stranded, multiple point of view look at what may have gone down in Haditha following a roadside bombing in November 2005 - Margaret
Much delayed by legal tussles between director Kenneth Lonergan and studio execs from Mr Murdoch's little media operation. Christa and I very much enjoyed his other film as a director: "You can count on me"
Time (16:34) for my next cuppa, I think.
Later
The Cronenberg was utterly fascinating. A "talking cure" depicted in a "talking movie". No car chases. No explosions (although a book case did crack twice), no fights, no bad language. Lavish attention to period detail. Clearly-recorded dialogue. Crisp, beautifully-framed, scenes. What more could you ask of a film?
Now let's see about the other one. But before that, another cuppa. And, in other news, unwicked Uncle ERNIE has decided to dish out six separate lumps of admittedly minimum-size tax-free goodness in my direction...
Isn't that jolly nice of him? Every little helps.