Pirates of the Caribbean 3
Posted: Sat 2 June, 2007 Filed under: Reviews(ish) Leave a comment »Hmm, it seems like this is the year of the trilogy. (Well, the year for ‘part 3’s , anyway)
Spiderman 3 is, as I’ve already said, utter abysmal crap. I had higher hopes for Pirates 3 – no idea why, really, but well, I did.
And in that context, I can’t deny, I was disappointed. Whereas the first one (and, to some degree, the second) were fun movies, where you could see that the actors involved had a good time, and where the sheer silliness took over, they still had a decent (if ridiculous) storyline. The third one had the storyline, but it didn’t have the feeling of fun and silliness. More speeches, more drama, more ‘serious’ acting and actors (pronounced actors) – but missing those vital elements of silliness and fun.
In its own right, as a pirate film, it’s still fine, and could probably stand on its own quite happily. (Better than Cutthroat Island ever did, anyway) But in comparison with the first two, it’s just nowhere near as good.
The effects are still stunning, as are a lot of the designs (I still love the design and the intricacy of the Flying Dutchman and crew) – but then, I’m an effects geek at the best of times. But it still doesn’t matter how much money and ingenuity you throw into effects if the film is still basically weak.
Although, as I’ve said, it’s not weak as a stand-alone movie, it is in comparison with 1 and 2. I can watch Pirates 1 repeatedly, purely because of it’s silliness – and the effects add an extra dimension to that as well – but this one I’d happily never see again.
So all in all, yeah, just a bit of a disappointment. And seriously bloody long. Three hours really is pushing it – and even more when the cinema does an intermission as well.
Spiderman 3
Posted: Tue 8 May, 2007 Filed under: Charm School, Reviews(ish) 3 Comments »Well, I’m no Barry Norman or Jonathon Ross, but I can still sum up Spiderman 3 pretty well.
It’s shit.
Shockingly, depressingly bad; overlong, and well, just shit. I guess it was expected. What I didn’t expect was to come out thinking “You know, in the terms of trilogies, and final parts thereof, maybe Blade Trinity wasn’t so bad after all”. And Blade Trinity sucked the balls of dead gorillas.
Spiderman 3 could’ve – hell, should’ve- been done in 90 minutes, just a slam through where you didn’t have to think about it too much, just a powered blitz through the storyline. But no, it’s all got to be so emotional, and there’s got to be a story curve where most of the bits from the previous two get cleaned up and closed off. But we don’t need any of the Sandman (No, not Gaiman’s Sandman Morpheus) sections, although from an effects point of view they’re cool. We don’t need half the shit about splitting up with MJ – and we particularly don’t need that bloody awful jazz-club scene.
The problem with “Peter Parker goes bad” is that he can’t go truly bad, because he’s the ‘hero’, so all he can do is go out and look like Jarvis Cocker without the specs. A little bit emo, nothing special. And utterly, utterly unbelievable. (I know, I know, we’re talking about a comic-book movie. But still.)
In short, if it’d been done in 90 minutes, it’d (probably) be OK. As it is, it’s shit. Don’t even bother.
And Sony? That’s another 2.5 hours of my life I want back, you bastards.
Upgrade
Posted: Sat 21 April, 2007 Filed under: Geeky, Reviews(ish), Thoughts Leave a comment »On the laptop, I don’t have MS Office – instead, I use OpenOffice, and for my email Mozilla Thunderbird, which is a stonking bit of kit, and satisfactorily replaces Microsoft Outlook for everything I do. I keep on considering installing a calendar plugin like Lightning or Sunbird, as it’s now the only thing missing from Thunderbird’s functionality that I find occasionally useful – although obviously not occasionally enough to actually do anything about it.
Anyway, now Thunderbird 2.0 has been released, and I’ve installed it this evening. So far, it’s looking good. A much nicer front-end (which isn’t essential, but does help) with the ability to add tags to emails for easier searching/archiving, updated junk mail stuff, and – most interestingly to me – being able to use browser-style ‘back’ and ‘forward’ buttons to navigate to replies etc. in any specific email. To me, that’s brilliant.
I’ll write more about it as I go on further with Thunderbird. But initially, yeah, it’s definitely a great upgrade.
SatNav – Initial Thoughts
Posted: Sat 6 January, 2007 Filed under: Domestic, Reviews(ish), Travel 2 Comments »Well, in general I have to say that I’m pretty impressed with the TomTom. It’s got some idiosyncracies -including, at one point, directing me through a couple of very dodgy little side-roads in order to go round a church one way when there’s a perfectly good A-road going round it the other way – but it’s successfully navigated us to the three houses we were looking at today.
The set-up of the entire thing was dead easy too, and so far I’ve been impressed with the entire thing. Well, except for those little routing idiosyncracies, of course.
Anyway, that’s the first day of proper use for it, so I’ll write more about it once we’ve got used to it (and used it) a fair bit more.
Londinium
Posted: Sun 24 December, 2006 Filed under: Own Business, Reviews(ish), Thoughts, Travel Leave a comment »Well, we’re back home. Knackered, but it was worth it.
I’ll write more about the St Martins Lane Hotel on Where’s Good (and add a link here when I’ve got round to it – ooh look, there it is) but well, while it was OK, I can honestly say I wasn’t overly impressed. It’s OK – I’ve certainly stayed in far worse – but the overall impression is one that can be summarised as “Trying way too hard”.
Sound of Music, on the other hand, was bloody marvellous. I must be one of the very few people in the world who has never seen the film, so I didn’t really know what to expect – yes, I’ve seen clips, and know most of the songs, but I’d not seen the show in its entirety.
Anyway, it was absolutely great. On a techie front, the set is stunning – the way scenery changes and moves is brilliant. The rest of it, cast etc. is great too – well worth the price of the tickets, and definitely something worth seeing.
Secret Millionaire
Posted: Thu 30 November, 2006 Filed under: Getting Organised, Reviews(ish), Thoughts Leave a comment »Last night, on Channel 4, I watched one of the best (in my opinion) bits of TV this year. Made by the same people as “Faking It” (which was another of my long-term favourite series), “Secret Millionaire” each week takes one multi-millionaire and puts them in a scenario way outside their normal environment.
In last night’s programme (the first of the series) Ben Way was in one of the most deprived parts of London, the “Murder Mile” of Hackney, volunteering to work in the local youth centre, the Pedro Club. In an area with one of the highest percentages of under-16s in the country, this is the only youth centre, and it was really awesome to see how much they did with so little.
The kicker for the programme, though, is that these (in general) self-made multimillionaires are also looking at where their donations could have the greatest effect, the most benefits, and be appreciated the most. And it makes for great TV, when Way came back at the end of the ‘volunteering’, fully suited and booted, to give cheques to the people he’d decided needed it the most, or would benefit the most.
OK, he “only” gave away £40,000 – but to the people involved, those amounts could’ve had an extra zero on them, for the impact they made.
For me, though, it was also seeing that at the end, Way is still going back to the Pedro Centre, and is still heavily involved. To him, it wasn’t ‘just’ a TV programme – this was something where he learned about other people, got involved, and stayed involved.
Maybe I do live in an altruistic bubble, where I believe that people should work better with each other, and yes, maybe I am a bit of a hippie about some of these things. But this was a programme that kind of reaffirmed those ideas in me, and it was great to see something on TV that was about something rather more altruistic, touchy-feely, and generous than the great majority of current mainstream programmes.
Well worth the effort of finding it, if it’s repeated – alternatively, the next episode will be next Wednesday, on Channel 4, 9pm.
The Travelodge Rant or Mistakes I have made (Part One)
Posted: Tue 3 October, 2006 Filed under: Customer Services, Reviews(ish), Travel 1 Comment »Well, I can honestly say that booking myself into the Travelodge this week was a mistake. An epic mistake, in fact. OK, I can write a lot of it off as “a learning experience”, which roughly translates to “Things I intend to only ever do once in my life”.
Put it this way – I now understand why they charge you upfront for the rooms. If they left it ’til the end of the stay, they’d be losing money.
Obviously, I understand that the entire thing is a business, and thus is there to make a profit. I’ve been in the hospitality business, and have been strongly considering going back into it in the long run. But that’s a post for another time. However, running a profitable business doesn’t – well, doesn’t to me, anyway – mean gouging every available penny from one’s customers. It also doesn’t mean “annoy the shit out of them with stupid unnecessary stuff”. Oh, and it does mean “get into at least the 20th century”.
Bear in mind, this Travelodge that I’m using is brand new. It’s been built less than four years – and I think, only in the last couple of years. But because of the “gouge as much as possible from customers” ethos, they still try to charge a minimum of 50p per minute for phone calls. And more if they can get away with it. Calling a local-rate 0845 number that should be dead cheap? 50p a minute please. Calling an 0800 (or whatever the bloody code is now) freephone number? 50p per minute, please. Yes, even freephone calls are charged. So internet access is chargeable, and at rates that would’ve been extortionate five years ago, let alone now.
I just don’t understand the ethos. If you let that kind of stuff go through, it’s not costing you anything as a business – and in fact it’s going to increase your business, as people will stay there because it’s allowing through the internet access without gouging you for it. But oh no, instead they’ll charge through the nose for things that people usually now take for granted.
In the same context, I don’t really get the “charge extra for breakfast” ethos either. The place I stayed last week was a flat rate, including breakfast (although still no internet access – can’t have everything) and still cost less than the Travelodge’s room-only rate.
Oh, and when you get to the room, you have to use your key-card to turn on the power, lights etc. And it turns on the bloody air-conditioning too. Not that I normally object to air-con. But in October? Is it really necessary? It’s incredibly loud too – and you can’t turn the fucking thing off. I spoke to reception about it, and got told “No, it’s not something you can turn off. It’s automatic”. (It turns out that there is a way to do it – if you have a spare card, or piece of plastic, or use the cardboard wallet the keycard comes in, fold it in half, and slot that down the left-hand side of the slot. Apparently, this turns on power etc. without activating the air-con. I’ll be trying it tonight, you can be sure) The only other way to turn it off is to pull out the keycard from the power box. Which, of course, means you don’t have any power or light. That’s OK when you want to sleep, but not during the evening!
Ah yes, power. For a hotel only built in the last five years (at most) you’d think they’d take things like power-points into consideration, wouldn’t you? But oh no, Travelodge don’t want to waste power costs on nasty things like customers. So there’s precisely one available power socket in the room. Nothing near the beds, it’s over on the desk. How tight-fisted can you get? Of course, you’re not going to want to , I don’t know, charge up a mobile phone overnight. Or use a laptop. Well, you might – but you can only do one at a time. And you won’t be able to charge anything overnight because – yes! – you’ve pulled the power card, so that the fucking air-conditioning doesn’t keep you awake!
In short, Travelodges are probably fine for a one-night stay, as just somewhere to crash and burn. For a prolonged stay, they’re just fucking horrible – and will try to charge for absolutely everything. Needless to say, I won’t be staying at Travelodge next week…