Saturday, October 21, 2006

Bleary

Eight on a Saturday morning is when you aim to be digging up roads, no? I don't have double-glazing, so they may as well be digging up my floorboards.
Joy and rapture!

Luckily this little video cheered me up a bit : click it
Otherwise I would be thunderous and murderous and stuff.

Last week I saw Snakes on a Plane. It was an average movie, a little predictable, a little amusing, so just as well that it cost me £1.50 at the Prince Charles. See the film was okay, but that wasn't the only performance I was party to.

A little man, very reminiscent of the gentleman above, was sitting in front of me. The warning signs came before the film started, with the man leaving his seat for the lobby, returning to one a row or two behind me before ending up back in front of me, in time for the screening to begin. Then joy of joys, I discovered that he was A Whacko.
Whenever anything mildly exciting happened on screen, this man would jump around in his seat, sling his arm up over his head, let out little yelps or scratch the back of his head in an uncomfortably vigorous manner. It all culminated when he peaked in his excitement and ended up actually talking to a character in the film, warning them of impending snake.
Luckily I was watching Snakes on a Plane so it wasn't deeply involving or remotely complicated, but I don't think it's too much to ask for for my fellow film goers to sit down and shut the fuck up. I'm not in America, I don't want whooping and hollering with my movie.

It kind of makes a mockery of that ad they show nowadays, trying to get you to avoid pirate DVDs and visit the cinema instead because of the experience, when that experience involves suffering the bovine populace mindlessly thwarting your simple desire to enjoy a film.
Cinemas that now charge more than the film will cost to own, double the usual price for drinks and snacks, people turning up about 15 minutes into the movie (and about half an hour after the advertised show times - what the fuck are these people thinking? If they don't want to see it why go at all?!), people deciding that the best place to meet up with friends and catch up is where others want to watch a film, the repetition for months on end of the same run of boring, offensive adverts (the mayfly doesn't use his day of life to the max, it is his lifetime, his perception will be totally different), cinemas insisting on allocating seats when the show is less than half full, and the aforementioned human jackanapes who see fit to inflict their social maladjustments on the long-suffering public.

Why can't the adverts be as good as this - clicky? Or this - clickclick? I'd rather see those a dozen times than another horrific attempt at selling cars.

To counterbalance the unfortunate cinematic experiences, one week at my new job and I feel like I belong there.
Which is nice.

To close, two decent links to arty images - clouds and amazing paper artwork.

4 comments:

  1. One of the problems I have with the Dove campaign, the 'real' beauty one, is when it first ran, they put all over the London Underground these pictures of normal- to ugly-looking women. The next year they did pretty much the same. This year, however, their campaign for 'real beauty' has featured nothing but photogenic women. Women who are all attractive. The one with the streaky red hair showing her armipit? She's hot. That self-esteem academy, or fund or whatever, had a commercial filled with footage of good-looking, if quirky girls. So what is their point exactly? People are born into good looks. They made a mistake the first year in chosing normal to ugly girls, possibly because the 'beauty' part of 'real beauty' wasn't represented at all. Obviously Dove are in the beauty treatment game, so part of their market is the aspirational nature of cosmetics and soaps. Fashion magazines project a high, and sometimes unrealistic standard of beauty, but the truth is very few men and women take that standard seriously. If you feel low-self esteem becuase some dude wants to fuck Sienna Miller and not you, that's stupid, frankly. If that guy wants to fuck an empty-headed, chain-smoking crow with the body of an 8-year old boy, what matter is it what his taste is, when clearly he is a vacuous fuck, not worth your attention? It disappoints me that Dove take this pious stance, when the reality is most of the world is happy with 'real beauty' anyway. We'd been doing that all along. Yes, good looking people can be made to look beautiful via make-up, and normal-looking people can be made to look good the same way. We know that. Not much can be done for ugly people, though, and it seems Dove have realised even ugly people won't buy products with ugly people in the adverts.

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  2. I mainly like the time-lapse, and the way they stretch her neck.

    In other news, it may be stupid to "feel low-self esteem becuase some dude wants to fuck Sienna Miller and not you" but welcome to people.

    And more to the point, welcome to women!
    She'll look exactly the same in the space of a few days and yet one day complain of how fat and ugly she is, and the other she may comment on her hotness.

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  3. You can tell her from me, always hot, never fat.

    But I don't much appreciate her willfully rubbing out the message I wrote on your leaving card.

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  4. I appreciated far too much the use of the wors 'jackanapes'. Also 'Rusty' as I call her has far too much snide sniding going on with people at my work of place...she used to love it there as did you all. don't play.

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