Please do not adjust your vision. We are aware of the problems and will sort it out after our teabreak. So that’s sometime tomorrow.

Ta.
The Management

“Normal” service has been resumed.* Carry on as you were.

*(For the more technically inclined who want to know what happened, the thingymajig fell out of the wotsit causing the doodah to shunt the youknow out of alignment which made the spinnything fall off and land in the bit with all the wires. Or something.**)

**(You still want to know? Okay; my host managed to lock access to the temp folder on the server and the MySQL db couldn’t be accessed by Wordpress or PhpMyAdmin or anything. It’s fixed now though.***)

***(Obviously!)

Dir: Park Chan-Wook
Scr: Park Chan-Wook, Lee Jae-Sun, Lee Yong-Jung, Lee Mu-Yeong
Str: Song Kang-Ho, Shin Ha-Kyun, Bae Dun-Na

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is a bleak, morbid, depressing, violent, morally ambiguous and nihilistic piece of work.

I loved it.

A quick recap: Oldboy, Park Chan-Wook’s Grand Prix winning film (as in Cannes film festival and not Formula One, duh!), was one of, if not the best film I saw last year. Sympathy is the first film in Park’s Vengeance trilogy which is concluded in 2005’s Lady Vengeance, recently released on DVD.

I don’t even know where to begin. The story is about a dead mute who’s sister is in desperate need of a kidney transplant. From that premise we end up with a film about revenge (obviously - the clue’s in the title), family, black market organ trading, kidnapping, torture, love and sign language tied in with a socio-political subtext. Well okay, it’s not about sign language, but I’m serious about the subtext.

For a film with such a bleak overtone, Sympathy is beautifully shot. For the most part it eschews any fancy camera work for still, single viewpoint scenes that are supremely complemented by minimal soundtrack, restrained dialogue and highly efficient and evocative sound effects. This tends to make the violence and brutality of the film all the more shocking, although I should stress that this film is neither graphic nor exploitative and Park’s distinctive and effective shooting style refrains from glamourising the explicit content.

Some quite harrowing scenes mean Sympathy is not for the faint of heart, but the soul of the film is that it refuses to judge the actions of the central protagonists. Uniquely for a vengeance thriller, or at least for the usual blockbuster thrillers we’ve become accustomed to, this film lacks either a main victim or an indentifiable bad guy. You won’t find any simplistic moralizing here.

Sympathy for Mr Vengeance is a compelling, stunning and superb film and considerably better than a lot of others I’ve seen recently. You could spend your time in worse ways than sitting down and popping this film in your DVD player. (Plus it’s currently available for £5.99 at an HMV near you. Don’t say I don’t tell you about all the best bargains!)

I’m reading a book called Shadow Divers which is a tale of bravery, courage, death, ambition, feuds, betrayal, discovery and adventure.

And it’s all true.

Two men, John Chatterton and Richie Kohler, have inspirational lives and I can hardly put the book down. I love diving but compared to these two, I might as well be snorkelling in my own bathtub.

It makes me wonder what I could have done with my life.

It makes me wonder what I could do with my life.

Has anyone seen this 1995 film by Gregg Arraki? The soundtrack looks excellent!

Praise be! Lordi win the Eurovision Song Contest. Hard Rock Hallelujah!

(I don’t want to say I told you so but I did tell you so!)

Merk’s a very nice chap although I haven’t seen him since I got lost around the back of Goodge Street a couple of years ago. He asked about films and then turned his comments off so I’m going to post it here instead.

Favourite Horror: The Exorcist
Fave Comedy: Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Fave ’shit but watchable’ Film: Dog Soldiers
Fave Tom Hanks Film: Toy Story
Worst/Most Overhyped Film: The Matrix Reloaded/Revolutions. (Plenty more fit into either of these categories but these two succinctly fit both).

I’m aware I’m not explaining decisions but will if requested. (Oh - and I delight in “shit but watchable” films and could have put any number of things there.)

Now you - either in comments or in your blog as you wish.

Let’s see. How can I express my thoughts about this subject in such a way that it succinctly and exactly encapsulates my thoughts? I sometimes feel that at times like this, my gut reaction and first thoughts are probably the most astute and although it’s a phrase repeatedly found here and often uttered by yours truly, it is probably the most direct.

This is fucked up.

Click on any of the links and read a blog about the daily gaming antics of an XBOX 360 owner. Read about how their gaming score (?) is increasing and about the progress they’re making in Oblivion. It is generally quite mundane and banal stuff.

Now before you deride me for sneering at these lowly and tedious bloggers , I want you to pay attention. Did you notice that the gamers are referred to in third person? Have you actually read the content of some of the suspicously regular posts? These blogs are not by the gamers themselves but are being “written” by their XBOXs. It’s not even a bunch of people
writing from their console’s perspective but is actually information sent from the XBOX to the web. It is giving the machines a voice.

Cool huh? Or is it a little worrisome? Uploading this sort of information is not unusual - Xfire has been doing it for some time. But actually presenting these stats in a blog format is quite original. What’s slightly disturbing is that these posts are better written and more articulate than a lot of blogs I sometimes encounter into
as I occasionally drunkenly stumble across the information superhighway. It also shows that it doesn’t take a lot to automate what a lot of us do (and is also much more informative if you’re into that sort of thing).

Okay, so as of yet an XBOX is unlikely to start ranting about topics close to its electronically pulsing heart or commenting on the social implications of the male gamers cross dressing as female avatars but the next stage would be to add a “personality” to the blog set up allowing some to sound like the Heart of Gold’s elevator and others to sound like Marvin the Paranoid Android.

I wonder if I could get my PC to blog in my place too?

Well, they said it about World War I and again about World War II. But this Invasion will definitely be over by Christmas. Variety report that ABC has not renewed Invasion for a second series.

I can’t say that I’m at all surprised. The concept is not bad but it just didn’t get going quickly enough. It’s all well and good saying it’s a slow burner but this was burning so slowly it was in danger of extinguishing itself. Which it has. I just don’t think they really knew what they were doing and so it didn’t really become much of anything.

I’d call it a shame but I doubt I’ll miss it, despite having watched most of it.

The BBC has an article about why Daniel Brown’s best selling novel is so “important”. It doesn’t tell us anything we haven’t already heard a thousand times about Mr Da V .and his cryptograms but I’m once again amused by the “Have Your Say” comments, in particular this:

The da vinci code is one of the most badly and written books i have ever read, and was at times painful to read, but it is a good story. i suppose getting people reading can never be a bad thing, it’s just a shame they can’t read something a bit more worthwhile, or that the good story couldn’t have been written in better language.

I swear this is just as it’s presented and I haven’t changed a thing. Brown’s book might be appallingly written but at least it doesn’t mutilate English as obviously as this person does.

Random personal fact #1073: I loathe the Eurovision Song Contest. With an absolute passion. It is the one night of the year when you can absolutely guarantee that I’ll be out. It doesn’t matter where, just as long as I’m nowhere in the vicinity of a television.

This year might be an exception and all because of the Finnish entry, Lordi, singing (or is that growling) Hard Rock Hallelujah. Lordi look like reject demons from an episode of Buffy and appear on stage in full make-up, definitely a far cry from the normal spandex clad, vacuuous entrants typical of the event.

Look at them! For their appearance alone they must win! And what’s more, compared to the UK entry by Daz “Geezer, Wideboy, don’t put your purse down coz I’ll nick it!” Sampson with his godawful tune that I was subjected to not long ago (it wasn’t my fault - I was feeding the hatchling and the TV remote was the other side of the room), it is leaps and bounds better in quality.

I hope they not only beat our entry (which absolutely deserves neel pwar) but that they eat the despicable chav’s liver with a some chips and a nice Lapin Kulta.

Even better, the video (below) has zombie cheerleaders (rather than the highly dubious and questionable schoolgirls that Sampson is leching over). Fan-fucking-tastic!

Vote Finland - you know it makes sense.

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