Category Archives: Blog

General thoughts on life, the universe and everything. Stuff that doesn’t fit in the other categories!

Blog

Shooter

This review has taken a long time coming. We saw it a couple of weeks after its initial release — so late that we had difficulty finding a cinema in London that was showing it in fact — but I’ve been sitting on my thoughts since then. Why? Well, as useful and informative as the CRAP Alert system is, not being able to compare and contrast my score to that of the CAP Alert team removed some of the fun. Nevertheless, you can’t wait forever so here is the full review.

“Shooter” starts well. As it begins, “Marky” Mark Wahlberg is a sniper in an operation that, to cut a long story short, goes wrong. The sequence ends with his team-mate dead and a helicopter exploding. Only a few minutes into the movie and it’s looking good on the CRAP scale already!

The film then relocates to US soil a few years later. Swagger (Wahlberg) is brought in to help thwart a suspected plot on the president but is actually set up. The plot, therefore, is his efforts to evade capture by the FBI and prove his innocence.

As luck would have it, not the whole US government is against Swagger. He teams up with rookie FBI agent and his spotters widow and, naturally, the good guys prevails.

Chopper: 81%. As an action film this is where Shooter excels. In one sense the movie is just a collection of action sequences strung together with some plot. There are a couple of exploding helicopters and the sequence where he escapes from a house features burning napalm and plenty of loud blasts.

Relations: 19% There are some tender moments between the spotters widow and Swagger and respect between his and the rookie FBI agent, but this was never going to be the next Titanic. There are some tight T-shirts in places but no nudity.

Amusement: 43%. As an action film, laughs are not the primary aim, nevertheless there are some good chuckle moments. One of my favourites was, “I don’t think you understand: they killed my dog.” And, “We want someone trustworthy. How about the guy with sunglasses?” “You mean Bono?” “Yeah, or how about Nelson Mandela?”

Plot: 61%. The basic plot I mentioned in the introduction. Clearly it’s not the kind of film that’s going to keep you awake at night trying to come to terms with the philosophical questions posed, but it does have some twists and turns. I’m unconvinced that the method of dealing with the “unbeatable” bad guy was the best that could have been done. I’m not even sure it was really in character. Equally, it is far better plotted than most action films.

Overall rating: 51% ((To the untrained eye it may seem like I have just made these numbers up. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The calculation is very complex but I wouldn’t want to bore you with all the details.))

So overall “Shooter” is an entertaining movie and, thus, does pretty well on the CRAP scale. With a complete lack of gratuitous nudity it was never going to be a top scorer but this is a very respectable outcome and if ‘action’ is your thing it does come highly recommended.

Blog

We the undersigned

I found the most brilliant website recently. If used as intended it’s a step forward for democracy, making it easier for people to offer their opinion on subjects that matter to them directly to the Prime Minister. And if not, well, it’s entertaining reading.

I first came across some pretty distasteful stuff calling to ban the practising of the Muslim faith in the United Kingdom. Actually, much of the religious stuff was verging on the comedic. For example, Christian’s are being side-lined in British society. Unless you remember that senior members of the church can still be found in the House of Lords.

There was also a call to ban distasteful views (Ban the British National Party). I don’t agree with that one either — free speech means having to hear things you don’t like too — but at least we’re heading in the right direction.

Best of all are the “comedy” petitions. I have sympathy for the proposer of the petition entitled Give single, employed people with no children a break!, although I’d like to add that married couples without children don’t do terribly well on the tax and benefit front either! My favourite, however, has to be the one that starts “We believe that every child in the UK would benefit from owning an elephant.” I don’t think anyone could disagree with that.

Blog

Merchant Bankers

Citi Sign

I came across this sign while exploring China Town in San Francisco. Certainly in my dealings with CitiBank I have often thought that they were speaking a different language. This sign explains a lot.

(Yes, I know that this is the retail banking arm of Citi, but I didn’t want to spell out what I think of them on a family website.)

Blog

Pet Shop Boys

Pet Shop Boys

We went to see Pet Shop Boys play live at the Hammersmith Apollo on the 6th. It was a great gig, possibly the best of theirs that I’ve seen. This is perhaps the fourth or fifth time I’ve seen them over the years and the first time I’ve not left at least a little disappointed.

But despite the ups and downs of their live shows, they have maintained their prime position in my music collection since at least Actually came out in 1987. That makes me feel old! Of course you can’t really rationalise something that tugs at raw emotion in the way that music often can ((Something that I’ve noticed is that pretty much all of my closest friends are passionate about music. Not necessarily the same kind of thing as me, but they’re all above your typical couple of dozen CDs.)), but that has not stopped me trying to figure out why I keep listening to them ((Such are the perils of being INTP.)).

The closest thing to a conclusion I’ve come to actually relates to something that Scott Adams, the guy that does Dilbert, wrote in one of his books (and blogged about but the link appears to be missing) about drawing successful cartoons. He says that a cartoon should utilise at least a few of these qualities:

  • Cute
  • Naughty
  • Bizarre
  • Clever
  • Recognisable
  • Cruel

I’m not sure that writing songs has exactly the same requirements, but there’s certainly an overlap. One of my favourite recent tracks is “You Only Tell Me You Love Me When You’re Drunk.” The first time you hear the title your reaction might be to think it’s funny. But the music and other lyrics are kind of sad and beautiful. And at the same time it’s almost universally recognisable. We may not have been there but we can imagine what it would be like. Each element might work individually but together they’re a killer combination.

But then, perhaps there is something to Adams’ original list. “I’m with stupid” is pretty cruel if you’re George Bush (funny otherwise); doing the sound-track to an early, black-and-white, silent, Russian film is quite bizarre; posing with a small dog on the sleeve of “Introspective” could be called ‘cute’; and appearing naked in front of the Queen is quite naughty. That last bit is on their album ‘Very’ and not some Jarvis Cocker-eque act of rebellion.

Anyway, back to the gig. I would never have remembered the set list unaided, but I did find a very helpful website that did the job for me. I created an iTunes iMix ((Unfortunately the list isn’t entirely complete. iTunes didn’t have all the tracks in the same format I have, even though I decided against including the original Bobby Orlando version of “West End Girls”!)) if you want to recreate the gig in your own living room:

Blog

So long…

Cornelius Maximus Wilmington the 4th
Cornelius Maximus Wilmington the 4th

This morning a member of the Darlington household passed away quietly in his sleep. Cornelius Maximus Willmington IV was less than a year old. He is survived by our other goldfish, Bob.

Cornelius was never the brightest fish in the bowl, and it’s not like he was up against stiff competition. He often did “Jaws” impressions, his fin breaching the surface of the bowl but terrorising few, and had a tendency to try to eat bubbles rather than the food we fed them every day.

But he was never a well fish. To our surprise, his buoyancy problem is a well known condition. We tried to feed him green peas — the rather odd sounding solution — but Bob would normally get to them first, even if it required pushing Cornelius out of the way and swallowing half a pea at a time.

He’ll be missed. As B said, “Swim off to better places, little dude .”