Catching

It's been a weird week, this one: after months of training courses and travel, I came back from Beijing last week to face the prospect of nearly six weeks without having to be in the training room and definitely no travel. I've managed to all-but fill my old passport so I've needed to apply for a new one - consequently I'm grounded in Hong Kong until the new passport appears. 

Faced with six weeks in the office, the prospect of catching up on all those things I've been wanting to do but haven't been able to get to, what's the first thing I do? Get sick and spend most of the week flat on my back. 

I don't know where it came from but I suspect it has something to do with the woman on the MTR on Monday morning who kept coughing all over me. That's the problem with living in such close proximity to so many other people - it's really easy to spread infections. It's one of the reasons that things like SARS and bird flu are so feared out here: crammed face to armpit with other people, it's hard not to catch whatever they've got. 

It came on pretty quickly and laid me out pretty hard. I don't like taking time off sick - a hangover from my childhood, when the basic requirement for being kept home from school was to have a limb at least partially severed. But there was no way I could go in and, realistically, had I done so, I would just have spread it to other people. 

So, for the first time in about ten years, I had a few days off sick this week and I really enjoyed the break. Watched some Bruce Lee movies, slept a lot, ate next to nothing... as fun as it was, I was glad to go back to work!

On the (re)make

My teenage years coincided nicely with the introduction of home video players in the UK and, in those heady days of the early 1980s - before the "video nasties" campaigns run by the newspapers - pretty much anything was available to anyone, no questions asked.  The joy of that, for me, was that I spent a lot of my formative years watching stuff that I really shouldn't have been allowed to see and I worked my way through a lot of very poor-quality Italian zombie movies as well as the occasional gem from Lucio Fulci although, try as I might, I could never quite get the hang of Dario Argento. That was all a bit too... overwrought for me!

Anyway, one day in 1981 or 1982, I rented a copy of The Evil Dead from the local video store. As I recall, this was prior to the introduction of laws requiring the classification of video cassettes along the same lines as cinema films, so there was no problem with a fifteen or sixteen year old Smithers renting out a movie like that.  I skived off school one bright and sunny (and I can't emphasize the bright and sunny bit enough) afternoon and settled down to watch it.

It's no exaggeration, really, to say that The Evil Dead terrified me.  No film since - with the possible exceptions of The Blair Witch Project and some parts of Paranormal Activity - have even come close to scaring me as badly. I was in the house on my own that bright and sunny (did I mention that?) afternoon and was convinced that I heard noises upstairs and so went to investigate - with a knife from the kitchen, I was that scared.

I was reminded of that today as I watched Fede Alvarez's remake Evil Dead. It was a dull and rainy afternoon and, whilst not quite skiving, I was having a day off work to recover from a bit of an infection.  I was interested to see what it was like and how much to stood up to my memories of the original - which I've never actually been able to rewatch!

My overwhelming impression was of being underwhelmed. The whole thing seemed pointless: it didn't add anything to the original and, as far as I could tell, actually subtracted from it. Whereas Raimi's original had wit, imagination and vision, Alvarez's remake (reimagining? reinterpretation?) lacked any of those things.  It just seemed to have been remade because now it's possible to do things in special effects that it wasn't possible to do thirty years ago.

Is Evil Dead and scarier or effective than The Evil Dead? Or, to ask that question another way, is The Evil Dead any less scary for having been made thirty years ago? Do viewers look at it now and think to themselves that it's so antiquated and the effects so poor that it prevents them being involved? 

A few years ago, I had to study Terence Fisher's 1958 Dracula, starring Christopher Lee.  Do audiences now look at The Evil Dead in the same way I looked at Dracula? As a museum piece - amusing and interesting but in no way as scary as contemporary audiences believed it to be? Is that why it was remade? 

Or was it remade, as I cynically suspect, because this was the most efficient way to get a whole new bunch of cinema-goers to part with their money. No need to invest in any creativity, no need to think of anything new - just repeat something that's worked in the past.

Breaking up is hard to do.

I guess I should have seen it coming. Marx said that capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction and that's probably also true of relationships. The things that were so attractive at first, the things that were exciting and different - refreshing, almost - begin to grate. After the honeymoon period, you begun to notice things. Little niggles at first, minor inconveniences really, but they begin to grow and you notice them more and more. Eventually that ends up being all you can see - it starts to consume you. You look back at your former life, the time before, and start to feel nostalgic. Perhaps things weren't so bad after all...

Don't get me wrong; things were bad before and there were good reasons why I wanted a change. The change itself was good for me and not everything now is bad - there are some things I'm definitely going to miss. Now that the break-up is happening, I'm very sad about it but I know it's for the best. I knew this was all a bit of an experiment and it just didn't quite work out. I gave it my best but, after a while, you have to know when to cut your losses and accept that you were wrong.

If you read this nonsense regularly (and if you do, what's the matter with you?), you'll know that it's been a couple of months since I gave up my iPhone and moved over to Windows Mobile.  Not a long time ago, in the great scheme of things, but enough time to know that, as much as I've grown to love it in a lot of ways, the relationship just isn't working out.

You might ask, not unreasonably, why I'm giving it up if I love it? It's not just because of the limited range of apps. There may be a bazillion apps in the iTunes store but I only use a dozen or so and most (although not all) of those are available for WM.  Sadly, though, they're not as up to date or flexible as those on iOS6: they don't talk to each other as much, they don't have the range of functionality as those on iOS6. Using WM apps is a bit like using apps from 2009; you can see the potential there but you can't help thinking that you've stepped back in time. 

WM itself is, I still maintain, a brilliant experience; I love the live tiles, I love the people hub (such a fantastic idea), I love the Nokia map apps and I love a dozen other little touches about it. But using it is just that little bit too inconvenient. I can't use Memrize, or Flipboard, or Wunderlist, or Instapaper, or Blogger, or the HK Taxi app or listen to podcast playlists... basically, a whole bunch of apps that have become if not essential, then very significant in the way I organize myself on a daily basis.

The phone itself was good; we had no end of problems with S's Nokia 720 (and by "no end" I mean we're still having the problems, even though she's no longer using the phone) but my 920 was a nice bit of kit - I loved reading books on it using the Kindle app and the size was just right for me. The iPhone 4 still feels too small and the iPhone 5 that work have given me feels too light and almost flimsy.  

As I think I wrote before, I'm just so bored with iOS6 (and iOS7 looks terrible from what I've seen) but there really doesn't seem to be any alternative.  There's great promise in WM and I honestly believe that  - with fair luck and a following wind - it could be really strong competition in a couple of years. But not yet, sadly.

So I'm back - resentfully, but for convenience's sake - in Apple's walled garden. But I still look longingly through the gaps in the fence, dreaming of escape...