I haven’t been to the flicks for a while on account of having only a bicycle for transport and now, not even that. As much as I’m sure the public transport service in Nottingham is quite proficient, I have an aversion to buses that’s as irrational as a fear of spiders.

But given that it’s silly season in cinema-land, I’m planning a fair few nights out over the next couple of weeks to catch a few brain numbing movies. I’m sure I could find some intelligent art house affair like The Edge of Love or Female Agents (it’s French so must be arty) but no, I’m going to stick with mainstream popcorn flicks. So what am I planning to see?
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So then, Doctor Who. The Stolen Earth. Far be it for me to break a habit and speculate about next weeks season finale, I’m stuck on a train, going to be very late to work and have just watched selected highlights again on iPlayer. This is going to be spoilerific (in terms of what we’ve just seen , not in terms of what may or may not happen next week) so if you don’t want to know anything, stop reading now. Really.

Right now.

If you carry on after the jump then you’re going to be sorry.
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Idle thoughts (and associated spoilers) about 28 Days Later.

Just about all of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s not-a-zombie film is told from the point of view of the protagonist Jim (Cillian Murphy). The only part that isn’t is the prologue where we see some animal rights activists break into a primate research laboratory and unwittingly release the Rage virus. It introduces us to what’s taken place and we see the effects of the virus. When we meet Jim for the first time - 28 days later - we know more than he does about what might have taken place.

But what if the prologue wasn’t there? What if the film started at the point where Jim first woke up? Well, it would mean that the clever way the title of the film is used as a super would be lost. So let’s go back 28 days from that point - what if we were with Jim when he had his bicycle accident and we saw him being taken into hospital, be treated and find that he’s in a coma. Then, 28 days later, he wakes up to an empty world. If we stuck with his point of view all the way through then the discovery of a deserted London would be as much a mystery for us as it is for Jim. His first encounter with the Infected would be the first time we saw what happened too.

So why am I thinking about this? It’s related to the scene in the sweet shop after Jim gets rescued by the two survivors and Selena (Naomie Harris) starts wittering on about what happened in one of the dullest pieces of exposition I can recall. The only person that this tedious coverage of recent events benefits is Jim because we, as the audience, should already be able to work out what’s happened by putting 2 (the activists unleashing the rage virus) and 2 (empty streets of London) together and getting the answer which is 4 (rage virus unleashed, everybody dead or, as we’ve just seen, infected). But if we had been with Jim then while the exposition scene may still have been dull, it would have at least been more relevant because we would want to know what’s going on as much as Jim does.

What do you think?

So I was just dithering around with a possible new theme for this site (again? Yes, again. For about the billionth time in the last two years) when I once again stumbled across a little oddity with Internet Exploder which has led me to ask the following question:

What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fucking fucking fuck?

So I’ve got this image, right, and it’s 1240 pixels wide, right, and I put it into a webpage. If I view that page in Firefox I get an image which is, not very suprsingly, 1240 pixels wide. If, however, I view the same page in Internet Fucking Explorer, it’s about 1.25x the size. It’s made the image bigger.

What. The. Fuck?

I don’t know why I’ve never really noticed this before either. I spend most days building websites at work and comparing them in two browsers but maybe it’s because I’m concerned about functionality more than appearance in those cases (plus they generally look absolutely awful which really is nothing to do with me).

I’ve read that this is to do with IEX automatic image resizing which can be switched off in the options but the test I’ve just done hasn’t actually done that. So the question I have is, how do I get around this problem (don’t tell me to use Firefox or I will be unkind to your dog - this is about making sure the site is multi-browser capable) but ignoring whatever setting a viewer might have in their options?

This has been way under my radar but it looks mighty purdy and somewhat entertaining.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog is an online musical extravaganza developed by Joss Whedon and his brothers Larry, Curly and Mo (or Jed, Ned and Ted)¹ and starring fascist poster boy, Neil Patrick Harris, Han Solo wannabe (and long time non-blogger), Nathan Fillion and the ever lovely Felicia Day (who had her own success with The Guild, an award winning online comedy series that is well worth watching - especially if you’ve ever dabbled in the world of MMOs.)

No idea when it’s going to be released and only a vague idea of what it’s about - a supervillain (played by Harris), his hero nemesis (played by Fillion) and his probable love interest (played by Day). There will be songs and laughter and love and romance so let’s watch the freshly released trailer and dance:
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I’m not entirely sure what to say about this film apart from WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED TO MY HEAD?

Set in 1980’s Berlin, Possession charts the falling apart of a marriage between Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill (fresh from his success as Damien Thorn in Omen 3). Directed by the slightly wayward Polish director, Andrezj Zulawski, this film has a questionable script, some of the most over-the-top acting I’ve seen in a while and possibly the worst private investigator in the history of cinema. But - and this is a very important but - it works. Sort of. It’s surreal, bizarre, surreally bizarre and, occasionally, bizarrely surreal. Like Eraserhead but with less singing hamster ladies lurking behind the radiator and more tentacles, people going insane and pink socks.

Think of it as a marriage guidance video directed by H.P.Lovecraft and that might stop you wondering who slipped mescaline into your cocktail.

Watch it if you like a splash of weirdness and chaos on your cornflakes but avoid if you prefer order and reason to rule your world.

If it wasn’t for the fact that I have a 2 month old child who would be, let’s see, 8 months old at the time then I would seriously consider applying to be the third person in Ben Fogle and James Cracknell’s attempt to reach the South Pole in December this year.

No, seriously.

I mean how often does a chance like this actually come along? A free place (worth a fuck of a lot of money) in the inaugral Amundsen Omega3 South Pole Race. Okay, the chances of me actually being selected are quite slim mainly down to my fitness levels which aren’t as high as they should be at the moment (although there is 6 months to train for it) not to mention the fact that challenges I’ve undertaken to date are nowhere near the scale of this. But the question I really have to ask myself is “Do I want to spend my daughter’s first christmas away from home in one of the bleakest places on the planet?” Also “How pissed off is my wife going to be if I happen to die?”

It’s just that, well, you know - it’d be a hell of a thing to do.

There’s some as might say that I’m trying to recapture my long distant youth.
And there’s some as might say that I never actually grew up.

There’s even some folk as might say that there’s a time to live and a time to die but you should smoke Elvis Presley’s toenails if you wanna get high!

That’s right, ladles and germs, yours truly has just bought two golden tickets for his next musical adventure in gig land in a months time. A friend and I are boarding the nostalgia train on a way trip to Rock City (Nottingham) to see Alternative punk soul rockers, the mighty, the awesome, the one and only Butthole Surfers. This more than makes up finding out that the Revolting Cocks had recently toured a week after they were in the country which was annoying. It’s difficult to keep up with bands who you think are dead and buried as to when they might tour next - they don’t do anything for a decade and then suddenly turn up around the corner and expect you to know. This time, however, I’m locked, cocked and ready to rock. Bring it on!

Remember: there’s a time to shit and a time for God and the last shit I took was pretty fucking odd!

For some inexplicable reason¹ on Friday I got all proactive. I responded to an advert for short film scripts/treatments even though what I have in the way of short scripts I’ve been saving for me to direct. I also contacted a publishing company to see if the rights for a novel were available. In the case of the producer, I don’t think that’s going to really take off – not from anything that’s been said so far but the substitution of of “You know, I’d like to talk about one of your ideas and see whether it’s something we could take further” with the phrase “I’ve got another idea – what about love, sex, drugs and clubbing in London?”

I’m still assuming that it’s an idea for a story and not a proposition from the producer who, from what I can tell, just happens to be young, Italian and female. I haven’t got back to her yet to tell her that I’m old, married and past it².
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The Exorcist III.

Good or bad? Fantastic horror film or less scary than a visit from the in-laws? If you’ve seen it, what are your thoughts and why?

Go ahead, discuss.