By Roy Mathur, on 2013-01-29, at 17:00:00 to 17:18:21 GMT, for Roy's Rocket Radio, Listen
Moving this Sunday coming to a shared country cottage in Kent, so my accommodation costs should be somewhat reduced.
Still looking for jobs.
Doesn't seem like a helluver lot out there, so I might have to take an "emergency job".
At least the snow has gone.
My car, more used to California, really didn't appreciate the snow that much.
One of the many B, straight-to-video, movies featuring a post-Blade-Runner/Night Hawks Rugter Hauer.
Interdimensional villain wants key to all the other dimensions, so that he can conquer them.
Really quite enjoyable film, but I often wonder why Hauer was placed in only a supporting role.
Early appearance by Jack Black who portrays exactly the same kind of characters as ones we are used to seeing in much later movies like School of Rock and Nacho Libre.
Good: Martin Freeman's performance as Bilbo Baggins is a credible impression of everyman, or rather everyhobbit, completely out of his depth, but endeavouring to stay the course despite seemingly insurmountable odds. As usual, the landscape cinematography is gorgeous. It was also great to see Cate Blanchett reprising her role as Galadriel of Lorien.
Bad: I heard Peter Jackson say that there was a lot of extra backstory that he couldn't fit into The Lord of The Rings and so included in The Hobbit. Even if it were the case that there were gaps in the story that needed filling, I'm not sure that I completely believe that there wasn't an element of wanting to cash in with the fans too. My personal view is that there was no artistic justification for expanding Tolkien's small book into about nine hours of film spanning three movies. It's so long, in fact, that although I drank both a Red Bull and about a litre of strong latte, I still fell asleep a few times. The most tiresome parts of the movie were the long marching scenes between places and the agonisingly long riddle scene with Gollum. Also, why do the dwarves sound vaguely Scottish? Why do they act like Klingons? Why is the white goblin just a pale imitation of Calibos from the original Clash of the Titans? What was the point of imitating Michael Bay's awful Transformers style of filming in the fight scene between the rock-giants?
Verdict: All in all, despite the criticisms, it’s not terrible, and the theme of an ordinary person being propelled out of a comfortable armchair and thrust into an adventure is both appealing and inspiring. But it has also occurred to me that, as I watch Peter Jackson's continuing work with adapting Tolkien, I'm being pulled away from the movies and drawn back to the books upon which they are based.
So in this movie, relatively unknown actor Suraj Sharma plays the eponymous; a shipwrecked teenager. The basics are that his family, who own a zoo, attempts to emigrate from India to Canada with their animals, but a storm wrecks the ship and Pi finds himself stranded on a life boat with a tiger. In order to placate the hungry tiger he has to learn to fish, so that he himself doesn't end up a meal.
It's got a frame-type narrative with the older Pi narrating his experiences to a writer looking for a story to write.
The book by Yann Martel, that the movie is based on, already won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 and now the movie seems to be ready to hoover up Academy Awards this year.
One thing that I noticed is that no one seems to have picked up on the similarity of Pi's swimmer uncle's sub-plot to the plot of the movie The Swimmer (1968), which starred Burt Lancaster.
Maybe I just watch too many movies. Anyway, The Swimmer is one of those cult movies you should check out for yourself. That is this week's homework.
Still no news from SyFy! What is going on? Can anyone out there tell me?
I watching Utopia tonight. I am puzzled as to how, after so much damage to his eyes, Wilson Wilson can actually see even the vaguest blur. And, as annoying as the first episode was with all the "Ahhh, ahhh, boing, boing!" music, I am actually watching the show.
This newish, nerdy, violent, comedy-thriller, replete with comic books, conspiracies, and internet geeks is on tonight at 10 on the UK's Channel 4.
Still wading through Stephen King's latest tome about travelling back in time to stop the Kennedy assassination, and making little discernible progress mainly because I'm busy, rather than the book being bad because it isn't.
Just picked this up the day before yesterday. Newish book by Nick Harkaway.
According to the, probably out of context and highly selective quotes, it is described on the cover as "Brilliant" by The Times and "Magnificent" by Ihe Independent.
I'm only fifty pages in, but it's a kind of mystery, action, comedy (for which I have now patented the neologism "macady"), about a London clockwork expert drawn into a sinister conspiracy centred around the usual McGuffin. Hard to adequately describe, but fun so far.
By Philip Pullman.
So, if you picked up Angelmaker in Waterstones, WHSmith, Printemp, Book Court, or Chapters (depending what country you are in), you might also like this short, fun, youth fiction fairytale from the author of The Golden Compass.