Best Laugh in Months

Once more George Bush made me laugh out loud. True, it was more ironic than usual, but a good laugh is always welcome.

This time it was watching him try to tell the world that Turkey had to seek a better option that sending troops into Iraq. He said Washington was

"making it clear to Turkey it is not in their interest to send more troops in... there is a better way to deal with the issue".

What a fucking hypocrite.

The best part was that you could see even he knew it. He was practically squirming. In a week when he vetoed $35 billion for sick children in America then requested $45 billion to continue the occupation of Iraq (That's about $14m per hour!), perhaps he was just thinking about how they might mess up their economy. America was never threatened by real terror attacks from Iraq, but Turkey actually is being attacked by Kurds from Iraq. Whatever the rights & wrongs of that situation they have a more defined 'right' to invade than the coalition ever did.

Pity he never thought to look for 'a better way to deal with the issue' when he started his own invasion and took the world one more step along the road to oblivion.

Review: Last Legion

It's good to see that Di Laurentis films are carrying on in the same style as always: crap.

True, it's the kind of crap I like, so it's not necessarily a bad description in relation to their films.

Usually.

In this case, thought I really can't make up my mind about it. It has a good, one might even say great, cast. They mostly do a pretty good job. The fights are excellent and it looks pretty good. Yet I just couldn't settle into it.

There is one big issue I have with this film that I must get out of the way from the beginning. Racism.

It is set during the fall of the Roman Empire to the Goths and supposedly explains the origin of Excalibur (and it sort of does, but I rather preferred the idea of it being a magical weapon bestowed upon the Pendragon line by the sithe, not a really good sword made from bits of an asteroid. That's just personal preference, though). Apparently it all happened rather quickly and around a few short battles. Many of the characters are said to be either Roman or Celtic and these good and noble races are depicted with cast members of all representatives of the latter playing Celts. Apart from Scots because they play the Goths and are played as uncouth, psychopathic, barbarians. For some reason, despite actually being Scottish, many of their accents sound fake. Go figure. Kevin McKidd has perpetrated this oddity in the past. When I first heard him in Grand Theft Auto I was shocked to discover that it actually was him it sounded so fake.

Yet, I'm ambivalent about the use of Scots as the bad guys. Hey, at least it made the villains a discrete racial unit and it meant that many Scots (the usual suspects, mind you) got work out of it.

Ashiwarya Rai is good in it, but - as with almost all women playing warriors - she's just not physically believable. As always her gender is disguised, but you can tell a mile off it's a woman. Frankly, she's just too elegant, beautiful and well-groomed to be believable as a warrior. She still has a really good manicure! And where did they get than standard roman leather breastplate with mouldings in it for her breasts? For that matter, where did the boots with rubber soles come from?

Much of the digital work, again, looks shoddy. I'm beginning to think that this is an artifact of HiDef as it surely can't be every effects house making the same look intentionally. In this case there are shots so badly out of focus they made my eyes cross!


Oh, and Hadrian's wall faces the wrong way. The side with the Roman defenders on it is the Pictish side.

Review: Stardust

With more imagination in five minutes than J.K. managed to give Harry Potter in the entire series this film is just a wonderful tale.

It tugs the heart-strings in the right places without ever becoming mawkish, it has thrilling fight scenes often done in ways you'd not expect to see them. It has modern morality right in amongst the fairy-tale elements and they all blend pretty-well seamlessly. The acting is excellent, the effects dramatic and the scripting sharp and witty.

See it.

Are there no problems for me to gripe about?

Of course there are!

Some of the digital backgrounds are piss-poor. The just don't blend well with the action and it looks like someone went far too heavily on the 'add noise' button in the editor. Ricky Gervais is every bit as tedious as he was at the Diana concert and having two in-jokes which were about as unsubtle as the man himself within the time his three minute first scene took was pathetically self-indulgent. I wonder who wrote them in?

That brings me to another gripe. To listen to many of the comments made about this film you'd think that Jane Goldman gave birth to it herself rather than doing (an admittedly excellent job of) the screenplay. It's a Neil Gaiman story and his imagination knows no bounds. I've not read Stardust but I shall certainly have a look. I have heard quite a lot of negativity about it, though. I'll let you know my totally unhumble opinion.

I'm Back

Finally got the PC sorted out.

Admittedly, since it went online last week, I've spent more time playing Lego Star Wars II than I have in reconfiguring the machine and getting on with the the work I need to do, but hey! I've not been able to game for two months. That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

I've also missed a load of great stuff to blog on and I may get around to talking about some of it soon.

Ish.