So, this week I've been working in Beijing. I've not had access to Twitter or Facebook or even this blog, thanks to the Great Firewall so I've collected some random impressions here; apologies in advance if this entry is a bit scattered and unfocused.
I learned quite early on in the trip that the Chinese have a flexible and somewhat creative approach to queuing. Just because there's only one person ahead of you, don't make the mistake of assuming you're close to the head of the queue. Before you know it, twenty people will appear, offering exuberant greetings to the person in front of you, who will welcome them warmly into the queue. There's nothing you can do to stop it and complaining will get you nowhere - just grin and bear it.
Beijing Airport is the very definition of chaotic. Always assuming your hotel remembers to send a car for you (mine didn't) it's just going to be one of a thousand pick-ups, so seeing your name in a veritable forest of signs is tricky. In the absence of the car, I had to get a taxi. Getting a taxi at the airport is actually pretty easy; getting the taxi to take you to where you want to go is harder.
If you plan to use a taxi in China, there are a couple of things you must do. Firstly, make sure you have the name and address of your destination written down, in Chinese - this is vital. Your driver won't speak or read English. Secondly, it's very helpful to print off a map showing your destination because the odds are, the taxi driver won't know where it is, so any clues you can give him will save you time in the long run. While lacking a sense of direction, your driver will possess the driving skills (and fighting spirit) of Mad Max. Sit back and if not exactly relax, let him do his job.
Actually, outside of the airport, coming by a taxi in the first place is not as straightforward as you'd imagine. In Hong Kong, taxis are two a penny and hailing one pretty easy. In Beijing, it doesn't seem to be that easy at all. It took me an hour to get one - and that included standing at a taxi rank with six other people for half an hour while several empty taxis sped past, studiously ignoring us.
For the capital of a communist state, Beijing has a surprisingly liberal attitude to traffic rules, with drivers of vehicles of all types taking a fairly laissez fair approach to lanes, traffic lights and one-way signs. Technically they drive on the right but, again, that's more of a guideline than a rule. This can be rather disconcerting until you realise that, fifteen years ago, many people now driving a car were riding a bicycle - the behaviours have just carried over from one mode of transport to the other.
There are still a lot of bikes (I didn't see nine million but there could've been) and a lot of scooters, including the one I saw on its side, wedged under the front of a 4x4 in the middle of a junction. How more people aren't hurt on Beijing's roads I'll never know, given the general free-for-all nature of the traffic.
Once I got there (after abandoning my taxi in a five-lane traffic jam two kilometres long), Tiananmen Square is really, really big and is really, really full of people - at least, it was the other evening when I went. It's hard to convey size - how do I describe a vast space, bounded on three sides by vast buildings and on the fourth by the vast Forbidden City, in a way that communicates the sheer scale and, well, vastness of the thing? Everything in Beijing is on a pretty massive - and massively intimidating - scale. The roads are wide, the pavements are wide, the grounds of the buildings are wide and the buildings themselves are huge but alongside this, just a mile down the road, are tiny ramshackle shops and stalls, narrow streets and small buildings - in Beijing, even the extremes are huge.
I did the usual tourist stuff - took my picture with Mao, of course - but it was an odd experience. I thought there'd be more foreign tourists there but instead I was one of the few westerners around. Consequently, loads of people came up and said hello, asked where I was from, wanted to chat. Now I'm a pretty open and friendly guy but I didn't know their intention in doing this - did they just want to practice their English? Were they just being friendly and welcoming? Were they just curious? Or was there some other, darker purpose?
In situations like that, I get really uncomfortable and conflicted. My natural inclination is to say hello back - ask Mr L and he'll tell you the number of times I ended up chatting to prostitutes in Shanghai purely because when someone says hello to me, I automatically want to be polite and reply. But it's a big city and I don't know the rules and it's possible that some people aren't just being friendly. It made me sad that I couldn't just chat and so I went back to the hotel wishing that I hadn't ventured out.
On the second evening, I went out the the shopping mall next to the hotel, just to have a look around. It was an impressive place, full of Prada, Gucci, Boss and Armani but oddly devoid of customers. Mostly, the place was full of bored shop assistants, just like several brand-new Malls I saw in Shanghai. Now I know that China's economy is supposed to be booming and I'm taking advantage of that - I have work booked through to December - but I swear to god I can't see what's holding it up!
Now I'm back in Hong Kong which, for all its size, feels nice and cozy. I liked Beijing and I'm hoping to spend a bit more time there on my next visit but I guess it's true what they say: wherever you wander, there's no place like home...
Monday, August 27, 2012
Monday, August 20, 2012
Contact
It's 5am and I am, if not wide, then at least awake and have been for the last two hours. I flew back from the UK yesterday - at least, I think it was yesterday but it may have been the day before, it gets so hard to tell with the travel - and I'm suffering from jet lag as my body tries to accommodate the change in time zones.
With me, jet lag manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, I fall asleep instantly and without notice; last night, S and I decided to watch an episode of I'm Alan Partridge. When I started the programme, I was wide awake... I don't remember seeing the end of the opening credits. Something in my body threw a switch and I was instantly asleep. Secondly, I find myself waking up at 3am, thinking it's much later and that it's time to get up which makes no sense at all because 3am here is only 8pm in the UK... but here I am. Awake, staring up into the dark; tired but knowing that sleep won't come for a while yet.
So I got up and listened to this week's episode of This American Life which, if you haven't heard it, was a tribute to the writer David Rakoff, who died recently and was a regular contributor to the show. I was listening to the voice of a dead man, talking about his life, about things that had happened to him and what he thought about them; about moments big and small, told with wit and precision and honesty. Great stories happen to those who can tell them.
One of the stories included was a brilliant tale, told in rhyming couplets, of a man asked to give a speech at the wedding of an ex-girlfriend and his best friend, for whom she left him. In the speech, the man recounts the story of the turtle and the scorpion in which, for those who don't know it, the scorpion kills the turtle even though, by doing so, he condemns himself to death. It is, the scorpion pleads, in his nature; he can't help it. The lesson the man draws from this is that we, as people, strive for contact; we can't help it, even though that contact might do no good or can sometimes even hurt us. It's beautifully told and I do it no justice here - you should listen to it for yourself.
Just as this part of the programme was coming to an end, S woke up and found me on the sofa. Half asleep herself, she wanted me to come back to bed so that she could scratch my back and we could go back to sleep. I lay there looking at her, knowing that it probably wouldn't make any difference. I thought of all the times when people had made offers of help that I knew wouldn't; I thought of all the times that I'd declined offers; I thought of all the times when I had known better and gone my own way. I thought of a dead man's voice on the radio and of reaching out for contact, even if it doesn't always help. And I said yes.
I'm not saying that this is a great story or that I tell it particularly well but it's something that happened - a moment of contact and I'm sharing it with you, another moment of contact. At the start of this piece, I said that with me, jet lag manifests itself in two ways. It might manifest itself that way with everybody but I don't know, because I've never been anyone else. By making contact, by telling the story of your life to millions of people on the radio or in small ways, to a couple of dozen people on this website, we learn more about what it's like to be someone else and, perhaps, more of what it's like to be ourselves.
With me, jet lag manifests itself in two ways. Firstly, I fall asleep instantly and without notice; last night, S and I decided to watch an episode of I'm Alan Partridge. When I started the programme, I was wide awake... I don't remember seeing the end of the opening credits. Something in my body threw a switch and I was instantly asleep. Secondly, I find myself waking up at 3am, thinking it's much later and that it's time to get up which makes no sense at all because 3am here is only 8pm in the UK... but here I am. Awake, staring up into the dark; tired but knowing that sleep won't come for a while yet.
So I got up and listened to this week's episode of This American Life which, if you haven't heard it, was a tribute to the writer David Rakoff, who died recently and was a regular contributor to the show. I was listening to the voice of a dead man, talking about his life, about things that had happened to him and what he thought about them; about moments big and small, told with wit and precision and honesty. Great stories happen to those who can tell them.
One of the stories included was a brilliant tale, told in rhyming couplets, of a man asked to give a speech at the wedding of an ex-girlfriend and his best friend, for whom she left him. In the speech, the man recounts the story of the turtle and the scorpion in which, for those who don't know it, the scorpion kills the turtle even though, by doing so, he condemns himself to death. It is, the scorpion pleads, in his nature; he can't help it. The lesson the man draws from this is that we, as people, strive for contact; we can't help it, even though that contact might do no good or can sometimes even hurt us. It's beautifully told and I do it no justice here - you should listen to it for yourself.
Just as this part of the programme was coming to an end, S woke up and found me on the sofa. Half asleep herself, she wanted me to come back to bed so that she could scratch my back and we could go back to sleep. I lay there looking at her, knowing that it probably wouldn't make any difference. I thought of all the times when people had made offers of help that I knew wouldn't; I thought of all the times that I'd declined offers; I thought of all the times when I had known better and gone my own way. I thought of a dead man's voice on the radio and of reaching out for contact, even if it doesn't always help. And I said yes.
I'm not saying that this is a great story or that I tell it particularly well but it's something that happened - a moment of contact and I'm sharing it with you, another moment of contact. At the start of this piece, I said that with me, jet lag manifests itself in two ways. It might manifest itself that way with everybody but I don't know, because I've never been anyone else. By making contact, by telling the story of your life to millions of people on the radio or in small ways, to a couple of dozen people on this website, we learn more about what it's like to be someone else and, perhaps, more of what it's like to be ourselves.
Friday, August 17, 2012
After the party
So, now that they are over, what are we to make of the Olympics? Or, more accurately, what are we to make of the country the UK seemed to become during the Olympics? Because something seemed to happen to the UK during the last three weeks and, like a lot of people, I'm wondering whether it might have been a permanent change.
I have to make two confessions: firstly, I wasn't in the UK for a lot of the Olympics, so I followed it on Hong Kong TV which is not, I guarantee you, the best. Plus, time differences meant that a lot of the actual events took place later in the day and into the night in HK. But I saw some and I followed it in the online news. The second confession is that everything I wanted to say has already been said - better and far more eloquently than I could have managed - by Jonathan Freedland and I would strongly recommend that you take five minutes to read his article, which you can find here.
So why bother with this post? Because, without wanting to get swept up in the hype, it does feel like something has changed in the UK. One of the reasons I left was because I felt the country was turning into a place that I really didn't like anymore. It was becoming cold and unfeeling; a nasty and cynical place, a place where cheap fame and easy money were glorified. A place that seemed to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. This will sound weak but it just didn't feel like a very nice place to be anymore.
It was knackered old Britain, no longer the head of an Empire, trying to punch above its weight, lost for a role in the world, clinging to a vision of what used to be. For a long time, it seemed to me that the UK had a strong, clear narrative: it was the world's greatest trading nation; then the world's foremost technological and industrial innovator; then the leading Empire; then the bulwark against fascism; then the land fit for heroes; then... what? We always seemed to be looking back to a golden age and I was tired of it - I wanted to go somewhere with a future.
Of course, I'm perfectly aware that all this is just my perspective, which means it says at least as much about me as it says about the country. But now, I wonder whether things have changed. I wonder whether, as Freedland puts it, 2012 might have given us "a glimpse of another kind of Britain. A place which succeeds brilliantly... a place where money and profit are not the only values... a place that reveres not achievement-free celebrity but astonishing skill, granite determination and good grace..."
Before the Olympics I was, I confess, very cynical about the whole thing. I thought it would be a shambles, a national embarrassment. I thought it would be twee and country pubs and warm beer and thatched roofs and the Royal Family. But it wasn't; it was far from all that. Instead, it was forward looking, incorporating the best of the past but in an irreverent way that was somehow still respectful. Aware of the past but not bound to it.
And, watching the Opening Ceremony - belatedly, three weeks after it was broadcast (thanks to the BBC, another institution we can be proud of) - I felt something that I hadn't felt for a long time: pride in my country. Not in a jingoistic, "my country is better than yours" kind of way but just a recognition that we, as a nation, have got it right in the past, we have achieved great things and (whisper it do) we could achieve great things in the future.
So, as I set off back to HK, maybe I'll hold my head a little higher; perhaps we're no longer the "plucky little Brits" who always seem to lose. And perhaps, if this has been a permanent change, the chances of me coming back one day have improved, just a little bit. And I know you were all hoping for that, right?
I have to make two confessions: firstly, I wasn't in the UK for a lot of the Olympics, so I followed it on Hong Kong TV which is not, I guarantee you, the best. Plus, time differences meant that a lot of the actual events took place later in the day and into the night in HK. But I saw some and I followed it in the online news. The second confession is that everything I wanted to say has already been said - better and far more eloquently than I could have managed - by Jonathan Freedland and I would strongly recommend that you take five minutes to read his article, which you can find here.
So why bother with this post? Because, without wanting to get swept up in the hype, it does feel like something has changed in the UK. One of the reasons I left was because I felt the country was turning into a place that I really didn't like anymore. It was becoming cold and unfeeling; a nasty and cynical place, a place where cheap fame and easy money were glorified. A place that seemed to know the price of everything and the value of nothing. This will sound weak but it just didn't feel like a very nice place to be anymore.
It was knackered old Britain, no longer the head of an Empire, trying to punch above its weight, lost for a role in the world, clinging to a vision of what used to be. For a long time, it seemed to me that the UK had a strong, clear narrative: it was the world's greatest trading nation; then the world's foremost technological and industrial innovator; then the leading Empire; then the bulwark against fascism; then the land fit for heroes; then... what? We always seemed to be looking back to a golden age and I was tired of it - I wanted to go somewhere with a future.
Of course, I'm perfectly aware that all this is just my perspective, which means it says at least as much about me as it says about the country. But now, I wonder whether things have changed. I wonder whether, as Freedland puts it, 2012 might have given us "a glimpse of another kind of Britain. A place which succeeds brilliantly... a place where money and profit are not the only values... a place that reveres not achievement-free celebrity but astonishing skill, granite determination and good grace..."
Before the Olympics I was, I confess, very cynical about the whole thing. I thought it would be a shambles, a national embarrassment. I thought it would be twee and country pubs and warm beer and thatched roofs and the Royal Family. But it wasn't; it was far from all that. Instead, it was forward looking, incorporating the best of the past but in an irreverent way that was somehow still respectful. Aware of the past but not bound to it.
And, watching the Opening Ceremony - belatedly, three weeks after it was broadcast (thanks to the BBC, another institution we can be proud of) - I felt something that I hadn't felt for a long time: pride in my country. Not in a jingoistic, "my country is better than yours" kind of way but just a recognition that we, as a nation, have got it right in the past, we have achieved great things and (whisper it do) we could achieve great things in the future.
So, as I set off back to HK, maybe I'll hold my head a little higher; perhaps we're no longer the "plucky little Brits" who always seem to lose. And perhaps, if this has been a permanent change, the chances of me coming back one day have improved, just a little bit. And I know you were all hoping for that, right?
Saturday, August 11, 2012
Why not?
Many years ago - probably about 25, give or take - I went on holiday to Devon. We stayed at a glorious little bed and breakfast place, which had its own organic farm. It only had three guest rooms and everybody that was staying met for dinner at the same time, around a single, large wooden table. We stayed for three or four nights and met some very interesting people - one of whom I still remember, even now.
I don't remember his name and I have only a vague recollection of what he looked like but I do remember that he was about the age that I am now and, like I did at the time, he worked in financial services. We got to talking and - god knows how the conversation took this turn - I confessed to him that I wanted to wear a three piece suit to work but I was afraid of what people would say.*
I've forgotten his advice but the conversation stays with me, even now, because of what it says about me, rather than about him or his advice. There I was, an apparently functional adult, outwardly mature enough to get married (although, as it turned out, not quite mature enough to stay married) but inwardly too scared even to wear what I wanted. Because I was afraid of what people might say.
Someone once told me that my biggest problem was I wanted the world to love me. I disputed that at the time and I still do - I think I have way bigger problems than that - but the sentiment is true: I do want the world to love me. It bothers me when people don't like me. I don't think that's particularly unique. I'm willing to bet that a lot of people feel the same, to a greater or lesser extent.
A week ago, I posted a piece wondering why I was continuing with this blog, because I said it didn't feel "safe" anymore. I guess that, when I parse that statement, what I meant was I had a strong suspicion that people who didn't like me were reading it. In fact, I began to suspect that people didn't like me because of what I was writing. And that left me not feeling safe.
Since writing that piece, some of you have been kind enough to contact me and offer words of encouragement and I'd like to thank you for that. The question I asked in that piece was "why?" After giving it some thought, the answer that I've come up with is, "why not?" Brilliant, eh?
Why continue with this blog? Because, quite honestly, I enjoy writing it and some people enjoy reading it. So, some people might not like what they read here. Some people might believe that I'm being selective or dishonest. I know I'm not and to them I say, with the greatest of respect, "screw you; go and read something else if you don't like what you see here." I'm not forcing you to waste your time here. I'll continue to burble on for as long as I want to and for as long as people stop by and read the stuff I write. And, despite what other people might think, for once that's enough of a reason for me.
*By the way, many years later, I finally bought that three piece suit and I wore it. Lots of people really liked it. And I looked good... ;)
I don't remember his name and I have only a vague recollection of what he looked like but I do remember that he was about the age that I am now and, like I did at the time, he worked in financial services. We got to talking and - god knows how the conversation took this turn - I confessed to him that I wanted to wear a three piece suit to work but I was afraid of what people would say.*
I've forgotten his advice but the conversation stays with me, even now, because of what it says about me, rather than about him or his advice. There I was, an apparently functional adult, outwardly mature enough to get married (although, as it turned out, not quite mature enough to stay married) but inwardly too scared even to wear what I wanted. Because I was afraid of what people might say.
Someone once told me that my biggest problem was I wanted the world to love me. I disputed that at the time and I still do - I think I have way bigger problems than that - but the sentiment is true: I do want the world to love me. It bothers me when people don't like me. I don't think that's particularly unique. I'm willing to bet that a lot of people feel the same, to a greater or lesser extent.
A week ago, I posted a piece wondering why I was continuing with this blog, because I said it didn't feel "safe" anymore. I guess that, when I parse that statement, what I meant was I had a strong suspicion that people who didn't like me were reading it. In fact, I began to suspect that people didn't like me because of what I was writing. And that left me not feeling safe.
Since writing that piece, some of you have been kind enough to contact me and offer words of encouragement and I'd like to thank you for that. The question I asked in that piece was "why?" After giving it some thought, the answer that I've come up with is, "why not?" Brilliant, eh?
Why continue with this blog? Because, quite honestly, I enjoy writing it and some people enjoy reading it. So, some people might not like what they read here. Some people might believe that I'm being selective or dishonest. I know I'm not and to them I say, with the greatest of respect, "screw you; go and read something else if you don't like what you see here." I'm not forcing you to waste your time here. I'll continue to burble on for as long as I want to and for as long as people stop by and read the stuff I write. And, despite what other people might think, for once that's enough of a reason for me.
*By the way, many years later, I finally bought that three piece suit and I wore it. Lots of people really liked it. And I looked good... ;)
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
Chindōgu
Language is a wonderful thing - there are, I understand, studies which indicate that learning a different language can even change the way in which we think. One of the great things about being open to other languages is that you sometimes come across a word in another language which has no direct equivalent in your own, and yet is perfect for describing a situation.
Schadenfreude is usually the obvious example - a German word for the dark joy we sometimes feel in the troubles of others - but there are others. My favourite is l'esprit de l'escalier, which is French for thinking of the right thing to say ten minutes after you needed to say it, but you might like gumusservi, the Turkish word for moonlight reflecting off water, or mencolek, the Indonesian word for tapping someone, from behind, on the opposite shoulder, in an attempt to fool them. This week, I've been coming across almost endless chindōgu, which is a Japanese word for stuff that isn't exactly useless but which doesn't really have a use.
I'm back in the UK this week, sorting out my house. All my stuff is going, broadly speaking, into one of three piles - stuff to ship to HK, stuff to store in the UK and stuff to get rid of. The stuff to store pile is basically the "I don't know what to do with this right now so let's put off making a decision because it's too hard pile" while the get rid of pile breaks down into two - stuff to give away and stuff to throw away. What all of this entails is a huge amount of sorting and decision-making and the realisation that I have an awful lot of chindōgu.
A lot of it is stuff that I've kept because I thought it would be useful at some point - mostly training or reference materials, paperwork, etc. Problem is, I haven't looked at most of it for at least eight years, so it clearly wasn't all that useful. (And excuse me while I attempt to quiet that voice in the back of my mind that, even now, is saying "But it might be useful. One day.") A lot of it is stuff that I've kept because... well, I didn't want to throw it away and that's usually because it had some kind of emotional attachment at the time.
Birthday cards, notes, small gifts, photographs, souvenirs, even items of clothing. All untouched and unseen for years but all carrying (sometimes tiny, sometimes large) sentimental weight. Basically, a series of emotional land-mines that I've spent this week accidentally tripping over.
Don't get me wrong: I'm very happy at the moment. Moving to HK, despite the price that I've had to pay, was the right decision for me. I regret aspects of how it happened and some of the consequences but I don't regret the basic decision to move. But this week has been like a trip down memory lane to all those times when life was very different and could have gone a different way - if this person hadn't left, if that relationship worked out, if that job had panned out the way it should...
Not all of the associations have been sad - I came across some things that made me cry from happiness to be reminded of them. But it's been hard not to spend some time looking at some of this stuff and wondering what might have been, had different decisions been made, different paths taken.
Possessions possess, they say; I'm keeping some stuff but I have no doubt that it does me good to let a lot of it go. For too long I've carried it around from home to home, never needing it, just holding on to it - perhaps metaphorically as well as physically holding on to the past. It's chindōgu, stuff with no use, and it's time to let it go.
Now if I could just do the same with all that useless stuff in my head...
Schadenfreude is usually the obvious example - a German word for the dark joy we sometimes feel in the troubles of others - but there are others. My favourite is l'esprit de l'escalier, which is French for thinking of the right thing to say ten minutes after you needed to say it, but you might like gumusservi, the Turkish word for moonlight reflecting off water, or mencolek, the Indonesian word for tapping someone, from behind, on the opposite shoulder, in an attempt to fool them. This week, I've been coming across almost endless chindōgu, which is a Japanese word for stuff that isn't exactly useless but which doesn't really have a use.
I'm back in the UK this week, sorting out my house. All my stuff is going, broadly speaking, into one of three piles - stuff to ship to HK, stuff to store in the UK and stuff to get rid of. The stuff to store pile is basically the "I don't know what to do with this right now so let's put off making a decision because it's too hard pile" while the get rid of pile breaks down into two - stuff to give away and stuff to throw away. What all of this entails is a huge amount of sorting and decision-making and the realisation that I have an awful lot of chindōgu.
A lot of it is stuff that I've kept because I thought it would be useful at some point - mostly training or reference materials, paperwork, etc. Problem is, I haven't looked at most of it for at least eight years, so it clearly wasn't all that useful. (And excuse me while I attempt to quiet that voice in the back of my mind that, even now, is saying "But it might be useful. One day.") A lot of it is stuff that I've kept because... well, I didn't want to throw it away and that's usually because it had some kind of emotional attachment at the time.
Birthday cards, notes, small gifts, photographs, souvenirs, even items of clothing. All untouched and unseen for years but all carrying (sometimes tiny, sometimes large) sentimental weight. Basically, a series of emotional land-mines that I've spent this week accidentally tripping over.
Don't get me wrong: I'm very happy at the moment. Moving to HK, despite the price that I've had to pay, was the right decision for me. I regret aspects of how it happened and some of the consequences but I don't regret the basic decision to move. But this week has been like a trip down memory lane to all those times when life was very different and could have gone a different way - if this person hadn't left, if that relationship worked out, if that job had panned out the way it should...
Not all of the associations have been sad - I came across some things that made me cry from happiness to be reminded of them. But it's been hard not to spend some time looking at some of this stuff and wondering what might have been, had different decisions been made, different paths taken.
Possessions possess, they say; I'm keeping some stuff but I have no doubt that it does me good to let a lot of it go. For too long I've carried it around from home to home, never needing it, just holding on to it - perhaps metaphorically as well as physically holding on to the past. It's chindōgu, stuff with no use, and it's time to let it go.
Now if I could just do the same with all that useless stuff in my head...
Tuesday, August 07, 2012
Cutie Honey and the end of the world
I like films. I like the medium, I like what films can do, I like the way films do what they do. I like films. But as I look back over the posts I've written about films, you might get a different impression, as I never actually seem to write about films that I like, so I wanted to be clear: I like films.
Exactly what film I'm going to like is sometimes difficult to predict. Some films that I think have my name written all over them - say hello, Prometheus - turn out to be pants. Other films that I should hate, I turn out to love - I'm genuine in my affection for The Core and Lifeforce, even though I know how truly and utterly terrible they are. Some are growers while others hit me straight away. So rather than bitching about a film I didn't like, I thought I'd rave about a couple of films I saw recently that I do like.
One that hit me straight away quite recently is a film called Cutie Honey. No, it's not what you think. I can say that with total confidence because, no matter what you think it is, it's not like that. It is, in fact, completely indescribable, which isn't going to stop me trying but does mean that, even if you read the following paragraph, you won't be any closer to actually understanding what Cutie Honey is.
If you imagine a live-action cross between the Powerpuff Girls, Power Rangers and the most bizarre, drug-induced dream you ever had, then you might be close. It's the story of a super-hero who... oh, never mind; the story isn't important (and doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny, anyway). The fact is, even though everything about this film is wrong, it all adds up to so much more than the sum of its parts. It's funny, oddly touching and seems to have been made with so much love, energy and humour that it's impossible to dislike: it's an Andrex puppy of a film and I highly recommend it.
The grower is harder to recommend because, unlike Cutie Honey, it's not a feel-good film. In fact, The Divide is the very opposite of a feel-good film. I won't say too much about it because I think part of the impact comes from not knowing much as you go into it. That's the great thing about it, in fact - it really doesn't explain much of anything at all. Like the people in the film, the audience has almost none of the answers - all we know is what happens. Why it happens, what the background is and so on is a mystery - just like it would be in real life.
Suffice it to say that I loved it, the ending blew me away and the soundtrack is absolutely beautiful. It's not a big budget movie and has all the hallmarks of being adapted from a play. It isn't perfect but it does what it does very well indeed. It created (in me, at least) a growing sense of unease and dread which I haven't really got from a film since the ending of The Mist. If you like a film that makes you feel bad deliberately, then The Divide is well worth your attention.
So there you go, some films I liked for a change, should you be remotely interested. Coming soon, Dredd and the new Bourne movie - I have high hopes...
Exactly what film I'm going to like is sometimes difficult to predict. Some films that I think have my name written all over them - say hello, Prometheus - turn out to be pants. Other films that I should hate, I turn out to love - I'm genuine in my affection for The Core and Lifeforce, even though I know how truly and utterly terrible they are. Some are growers while others hit me straight away. So rather than bitching about a film I didn't like, I thought I'd rave about a couple of films I saw recently that I do like.
One that hit me straight away quite recently is a film called Cutie Honey. No, it's not what you think. I can say that with total confidence because, no matter what you think it is, it's not like that. It is, in fact, completely indescribable, which isn't going to stop me trying but does mean that, even if you read the following paragraph, you won't be any closer to actually understanding what Cutie Honey is.
If you imagine a live-action cross between the Powerpuff Girls, Power Rangers and the most bizarre, drug-induced dream you ever had, then you might be close. It's the story of a super-hero who... oh, never mind; the story isn't important (and doesn't really stand up to much scrutiny, anyway). The fact is, even though everything about this film is wrong, it all adds up to so much more than the sum of its parts. It's funny, oddly touching and seems to have been made with so much love, energy and humour that it's impossible to dislike: it's an Andrex puppy of a film and I highly recommend it.
The grower is harder to recommend because, unlike Cutie Honey, it's not a feel-good film. In fact, The Divide is the very opposite of a feel-good film. I won't say too much about it because I think part of the impact comes from not knowing much as you go into it. That's the great thing about it, in fact - it really doesn't explain much of anything at all. Like the people in the film, the audience has almost none of the answers - all we know is what happens. Why it happens, what the background is and so on is a mystery - just like it would be in real life.
Suffice it to say that I loved it, the ending blew me away and the soundtrack is absolutely beautiful. It's not a big budget movie and has all the hallmarks of being adapted from a play. It isn't perfect but it does what it does very well indeed. It created (in me, at least) a growing sense of unease and dread which I haven't really got from a film since the ending of The Mist. If you like a film that makes you feel bad deliberately, then The Divide is well worth your attention.
So there you go, some films I liked for a change, should you be remotely interested. Coming soon, Dredd and the new Bourne movie - I have high hopes...
Friday, August 03, 2012
Total Amnesia
Sigh.
I keep forgetting that I'm getting old. Well, older - there's life in the old dog yet; but time waits for no man, and so on. While it beats the alternative, it sucks to get older, as I believe the kidz used to say.
I keep forgetting that there's a whole generation (or two, or three) who don't have the same references that I do. There are kids alive and in the world - with jobs and families and everything - who weren't even alive when Elvis died. There are kids out here who only know about the 80s from the 80s revival. There are kids out there who have never known what it's like not to have a mobile phone, 24 hour TV, constant broadband wifi access etc etc.
Now before you write this entry off as an old fart sifting through his memory box, saying that things were better when he was a lad (for the record, they weren't) then let me just say that the world today is a fun place and I generally like it. But getting older has some odd consequences.
For instance, I went to see Total Recall yesterday. I went out of a sense of curiosity for it is a reboot (that's the phrase we're supposed to use, rather than remake, or copy, or pointless retread of previously explored ideas - but I digress) and I wanted to see what they'd done with it, what fresh ideas they'd introduced to warrant this reboot.
Well, let's see: the special effects are good - if you like a lot of lens flare. The future is nicely imagined - although nothing we haven't really seen before in Blade Runner or Minority Report. Colin Farrell is great - but then, Colin Farrell is pretty much always great. So far, so meh, but the big idea, the big difference, the thing that makes this reboot worth doing is that it's no longer partly set on Mars. Oh no, not Mars: presumably that would be too unbelievable. Instead, they've got a big lift (that's elevator, to our American friends) and the lift goes - wait for it - straight through the middle of the Earth.
Yes, that's right - who knew that my all-time second favourite crap movie The Core was actually just doing the preliminary digging for a big lift from the UK to Australia - or from the United British Federation to the Colony. See what they did there? Eh? Do you get it? And, not only is there a big lift going through the centre of the earth but there's a bit in the middle where there's no gravity and everything floats - because they're in the middle of the Earth, right?
And, as if that wasn't enough, at some point you can see lava out the windows (windows!) of this thing and Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel (surprisingly indistinguishable from Kate Beckinsale) actually get out of it and stand on top of it, while it's moving. The diameter of the Earth is roughly 8,000 miles, give or take. The films says the lift takes 17 minutes to travel from one side to the other. So it's doing roughly 32,000 mph, on average. And they stand on top of it. And that's leaving aside the whole pressure/atmosphere thing.
At this point, just to help you when you read this, you have to imagine that my voice has reached a stratospheric pitch of disbelief. If I was saying this out loud, by now only dogs would be able to register the degree to which I find this ridiculous.
And this is why getting older sucks. Because a whole bunch of people going to see this movie won't have seen the original. They may not even know about the original. Instead of blue skies on Mars, mutants, Johnny Cabs and Arnie as a fat woman they have lots of punching, lens flare and a big lift. It sucks getting older because sometimes you realise that newer things aren't better - sometimes they're just... newer. But it must suck even more to be young because sometimes you don't realise that newer things are just crap and you don't know any better.
I hate to be negative about movies: a lot of work goes into them, a lot of talented people put a lot of effort into them. I hate to be negative about this movie. I liked the original. I like Colin Farrell - he's likeable - and Kate Beckinsale... well, need I say more? It even has Bill Nighy in it (although blink and you'd miss him): Bill Bloody Nighy! I'd watch Bill Nighy in anything! And it's based on a Philip K Dick story - what could go wrong? Apart from, you know, a bloody great lift through the centre of the world.
In short, a pointless rehash of ideas that have been handled better elsewhere; strangely forgettable, considering the title and the subject. Did I see it or do I just remember seeing it? Actually, I barely remember it at all, ironically. Save yourself the money: read the short story, get the original movie, stab yourself repeatedly in the thigh with a fork. Just don't bother going to the cinema to see this.
Sigh.
I keep forgetting that I'm getting old. Well, older - there's life in the old dog yet; but time waits for no man, and so on. While it beats the alternative, it sucks to get older, as I believe the kidz used to say.
I keep forgetting that there's a whole generation (or two, or three) who don't have the same references that I do. There are kids alive and in the world - with jobs and families and everything - who weren't even alive when Elvis died. There are kids out here who only know about the 80s from the 80s revival. There are kids out there who have never known what it's like not to have a mobile phone, 24 hour TV, constant broadband wifi access etc etc.
Now before you write this entry off as an old fart sifting through his memory box, saying that things were better when he was a lad (for the record, they weren't) then let me just say that the world today is a fun place and I generally like it. But getting older has some odd consequences.
For instance, I went to see Total Recall yesterday. I went out of a sense of curiosity for it is a reboot (that's the phrase we're supposed to use, rather than remake, or copy, or pointless retread of previously explored ideas - but I digress) and I wanted to see what they'd done with it, what fresh ideas they'd introduced to warrant this reboot.
Well, let's see: the special effects are good - if you like a lot of lens flare. The future is nicely imagined - although nothing we haven't really seen before in Blade Runner or Minority Report. Colin Farrell is great - but then, Colin Farrell is pretty much always great. So far, so meh, but the big idea, the big difference, the thing that makes this reboot worth doing is that it's no longer partly set on Mars. Oh no, not Mars: presumably that would be too unbelievable. Instead, they've got a big lift (that's elevator, to our American friends) and the lift goes - wait for it - straight through the middle of the Earth.
Yes, that's right - who knew that my all-time second favourite crap movie The Core was actually just doing the preliminary digging for a big lift from the UK to Australia - or from the United British Federation to the Colony. See what they did there? Eh? Do you get it? And, not only is there a big lift going through the centre of the earth but there's a bit in the middle where there's no gravity and everything floats - because they're in the middle of the Earth, right?
And, as if that wasn't enough, at some point you can see lava out the windows (windows!) of this thing and Colin Farrell and Jessica Biel (surprisingly indistinguishable from Kate Beckinsale) actually get out of it and stand on top of it, while it's moving. The diameter of the Earth is roughly 8,000 miles, give or take. The films says the lift takes 17 minutes to travel from one side to the other. So it's doing roughly 32,000 mph, on average. And they stand on top of it. And that's leaving aside the whole pressure/atmosphere thing.
At this point, just to help you when you read this, you have to imagine that my voice has reached a stratospheric pitch of disbelief. If I was saying this out loud, by now only dogs would be able to register the degree to which I find this ridiculous.
And this is why getting older sucks. Because a whole bunch of people going to see this movie won't have seen the original. They may not even know about the original. Instead of blue skies on Mars, mutants, Johnny Cabs and Arnie as a fat woman they have lots of punching, lens flare and a big lift. It sucks getting older because sometimes you realise that newer things aren't better - sometimes they're just... newer. But it must suck even more to be young because sometimes you don't realise that newer things are just crap and you don't know any better.
I hate to be negative about movies: a lot of work goes into them, a lot of talented people put a lot of effort into them. I hate to be negative about this movie. I liked the original. I like Colin Farrell - he's likeable - and Kate Beckinsale... well, need I say more? It even has Bill Nighy in it (although blink and you'd miss him): Bill Bloody Nighy! I'd watch Bill Nighy in anything! And it's based on a Philip K Dick story - what could go wrong? Apart from, you know, a bloody great lift through the centre of the world.
In short, a pointless rehash of ideas that have been handled better elsewhere; strangely forgettable, considering the title and the subject. Did I see it or do I just remember seeing it? Actually, I barely remember it at all, ironically. Save yourself the money: read the short story, get the original movie, stab yourself repeatedly in the thigh with a fork. Just don't bother going to the cinema to see this.
Sigh.
Thursday, August 02, 2012
Why?
In April 1988, Kenneth Williams took an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol and died, in his sleep. Whether it was deliberate or accidental, we'll never know but the last words he wrote in his diary on that day were "Oh, what's the bloody point?" It's a question we've all asked ourselves at some point - perhaps, as Williams seemed to, we've asked it about our very lives, or perhaps we've just asked it about something that we're doing.
I've asked it in both situations. I'm asking it now, about this very thing that you're reading.
When I started this blog, it was my third attempt. I'd failed on the other two, I thought, because I'd tried to be someone that I wasn't. On this blog, I was just going to be myself. Hiding behind anonymity, I felt free to be open and honest and I started writing as therapy, a way of exploring the situation I was in at the time - which felt bleak. I wanted to understand how I'd got there and how I could get out.
The first three or four entries (they're not there anymore, I've taken them down) were very difficult to write but felt cathartic. I paused, because everything felt very raw, and then restarted, changing the purpose of the blog so that I just talked about stuff that interested me, all the while promising myself that I'd be strictly honest - with myself and you.
I saw it as another way of keeping a diary. The fact that it was online, that anyone could read it, was both important and unimportant. It was important because I wanted to feel - as we all do - that I matter, that I was important enough or interesting enough to be listened to. That someone out there cared enough, if only for a few minutes, to listen to what I had to say. It was unimportant because I was just another blade of grass in the field, one more voice amongst so many. I was nothing special and nothing I wrote could be traced to me or any of the people mentioned - I never used their names - and so I felt safe amongst strangers.
Mostly, traffic was directed here from Twitter, another place where I felt safe and where I felt I could be myself. I would check the site stats and feel strangely proud that people - you - had bothered to check out what I'd written - even more excited when comments were written. It wasn't much and you might think it pathetic but it was my own little readership; it was important to me and it made me happy, at a time when precious little else in my life did.
And then my blog was discovered by someone I knew, whether by accident or deliberately, I'll never know. Everything I'd written was seen by someone very close to me, without any context. The honesty that I had tried so hard to maintain was twisted and made to look like manipulation, or self-serving selective recall. It caused a great deal of hurt and upset and that relationship, one I cared about more than anything in the world, looks at the moment to have been irrevocably destroyed.
I took a lot of the posts down; I stopped writing for a while; I locked the Twitter account. After a while, I moved the blog, started writing again and unlocked Twitter but, to be honest with you, it's not the same anymore. I don't feel safe. At the back of my mind, whatever I say or write, I'm censoring myself, wondering if they are still reading this, whether what I write in all innocence, will offend or upset them, will be turned against me again. I wonder if even writing this will make a bad situation worse.
So what's the bloody point? Why keep doing this, why keep writing? I've loved blogging because I love writing but I feel like I can't be myself here anymore and that was a big part of the attraction for me.
I've asked it in both situations. I'm asking it now, about this very thing that you're reading.
When I started this blog, it was my third attempt. I'd failed on the other two, I thought, because I'd tried to be someone that I wasn't. On this blog, I was just going to be myself. Hiding behind anonymity, I felt free to be open and honest and I started writing as therapy, a way of exploring the situation I was in at the time - which felt bleak. I wanted to understand how I'd got there and how I could get out.
The first three or four entries (they're not there anymore, I've taken them down) were very difficult to write but felt cathartic. I paused, because everything felt very raw, and then restarted, changing the purpose of the blog so that I just talked about stuff that interested me, all the while promising myself that I'd be strictly honest - with myself and you.
I saw it as another way of keeping a diary. The fact that it was online, that anyone could read it, was both important and unimportant. It was important because I wanted to feel - as we all do - that I matter, that I was important enough or interesting enough to be listened to. That someone out there cared enough, if only for a few minutes, to listen to what I had to say. It was unimportant because I was just another blade of grass in the field, one more voice amongst so many. I was nothing special and nothing I wrote could be traced to me or any of the people mentioned - I never used their names - and so I felt safe amongst strangers.
Mostly, traffic was directed here from Twitter, another place where I felt safe and where I felt I could be myself. I would check the site stats and feel strangely proud that people - you - had bothered to check out what I'd written - even more excited when comments were written. It wasn't much and you might think it pathetic but it was my own little readership; it was important to me and it made me happy, at a time when precious little else in my life did.
And then my blog was discovered by someone I knew, whether by accident or deliberately, I'll never know. Everything I'd written was seen by someone very close to me, without any context. The honesty that I had tried so hard to maintain was twisted and made to look like manipulation, or self-serving selective recall. It caused a great deal of hurt and upset and that relationship, one I cared about more than anything in the world, looks at the moment to have been irrevocably destroyed.
I took a lot of the posts down; I stopped writing for a while; I locked the Twitter account. After a while, I moved the blog, started writing again and unlocked Twitter but, to be honest with you, it's not the same anymore. I don't feel safe. At the back of my mind, whatever I say or write, I'm censoring myself, wondering if they are still reading this, whether what I write in all innocence, will offend or upset them, will be turned against me again. I wonder if even writing this will make a bad situation worse.
So what's the bloody point? Why keep doing this, why keep writing? I've loved blogging because I love writing but I feel like I can't be myself here anymore and that was a big part of the attraction for me.
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