IIIIIIIII’M BAAAAAACK
For the past week I have had no interweb and so was unable to make either of the two blog posts I planned to. So he are two blog posts in one \o/.
First: it wouldn’t be Christmas without the films.
I have the strangest feeling…
I went to see Deja Vu with a few friends in the Tottenham Court Odeon. The amount of posters that are on the London underground and other places around show a nice explosion and Mr. Washington as the lead. This film is supposed to be a crime/action/thriller/sci-fi with some romance thrown in for good measure. Jerry ‘CSI’ Bruckheimer is the producer on this one, which should make for a good film, and there is a clear echo of CSI here. The director is Tony Scott (Domino, Man on Fire), which probably explains the amount of ads for this film. I’m not generally impressed by Tony Scott’s films, and this is no change.
The start sequence is played out with the usual camera panning, helicopter shots, and yes, a big bang. Not exceptionally surprising seeing as it’s on every poster and trailer for this film. So if you weren’t sure this was a Tony Scott film, the first sequence should confirm it for you.
We then seem to get Bruckheimer’s control for about half an hour of CSI-esque work from Washington who manages to find a way that the case can be solved. CSI is one of the best shows on TV at the moment, and this half hour is rather entertaining. Denzel is roped into a ‘Top Secret’ FBI project to help them with this investigation. We are then shown the reason that this film is called Deja Vu, not because of the story line, but because I’m sure I’ve seen this film before. Man falls in love, man is obstructed, man tries to overcome obstacle.
We are then ‘treated’ to Denzel in a rather large Hummer driving around New-Orleans after a car that isn’t actually there. This is quite possibly the worlds first split-screen car chase.
Washington’s character then convinces these FBI agents to tell him the true nature of the technology that they are using. Here follows a rather quick burst of physics, worm holes, and a description of time as a piece of paper. Most of the explanation would require a rather in depth knowledge of physics to fully understand. The rest of the audience just nod along.
This technology is then used to bring the evil terrorist man to justice and Washington gets the girl, which is the natural end to this average crime/action/thriller/sci-fi/romance film. Alas, no. The film continues with an end sequence that opens up far too many plot holes regarding alternate universes, altered pasts and the whole ‘why am I still here’ complex. If the film had ended after 90 minutes then it might have been classed as a ‘good’ film. However as it is, Deja Vu can’t be classed as good. A bad film, this isn’t, but worth the price of a ticket? No.
However, this week I also went to see Pan’s Labyrinth (El Labertino Del Fauno), from Guillermo Del Toro (The Devil’s Backbone [El Espanzo Del Diablo], Blade II). It has been described as this generation’s Citizen Kane by Mark Kermode. Quite how anyone can put that weight on the shoulders of a film and expect audiences to believe it and feel the same is beyond me. However I have to agree, he is right.
I haven’t seen a film this good in the cinemas for a while. Whilst, as a Star Wars fan I have to say that Episode 3 was a really good ending to the saga, it wasn’t a really great film. Pan’s Labyrinth is clearly the top film this year, and quite possibly for many years.
It is set in the dying days of the Spanish Civil War in 1944. It is the tale of a girl, Othelia, whose mother is pregnant with the son of a military captain. Othelia is a reader of fairy tales and, as most children, believes in fairies and the other creatures from her books. On her way to meet her new father, the captain, the car is stopped as her mother isn’t feeling to well. This is where she wanders from the path and meets a fairy.
Those who remember and admired the flawless integration of CGI in The Devils Backbone will see the same here. Del Toro is a master of films and this is a definite show of his abilities.
As the girl arrives she meets her new father, and finds the labyrinth of the tale, and a faun above the entrance. It should be noted that the faun is never named, and only the English title references to ‘Pan’, the Spanish title is simply ‘The Labyrinth of the Faun’.
So as not to completely ruin the story I won’t go on about the plot, but let’s just say that as it develops the ending retains some of its shock factor. The film is in Spanish with English with subtitles. If it is on at a cinema near you I advise you to seek it out and watch it. If it isn’t appearing near you, wait for the DVD and buy it, it is far too good to be missed.
MTFBWY
And secondly, I was requested to make a ‘political’ post at some point, and here it is, a little delayed.
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and UN resolutions
It has been requested that I make a return to political postings, and so I thought I would use the recent UN resolution regarding Iran and its nuclear program. Before I start I would like to state clearly that I don’t want Iran to possess nuclear weapons, but, rather, this is to make a comment on the way that the UN chooses to operate.
Just to fill those who are out of the loop, the UN has passed, unanimously, sanctions against Iran banning import of nuclear materials, freezing some of their assets and banning Iran’s Uranium enrichment program. Russia fought to remove some of the more serious parts, but it still stands. Iran have stated many times that it only wants these materials for civilian power. They have stated that they will continue with their program, and that they believe these sanctions to be illegal
The UN has a fair amount of power. If they so wished they could keep a close eye on Iran’s use of the materials and see if any nuclear weapons were created. There is always the problem that they could miss something and Iran would become another power in the world with nuclear weapons.
I find it rather ironic that the American representative announced the passing of this resolution. America being the country with the most active nuclear warheads, is the ones bringing these sanctions. The country that launched the first nuclear attack on its enemies, sorry, they weren’t attacks. I’m not sure how many people are aware of the fact that the launch of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were illegal. The way that the Americans got around the UN on that case was to class them as ‘real world tests’. America was revealed to store its warheads in railway carriages near cities, that also breaches UN regulations, but that appears to have been ignored.
The UK isn’t exactly in the clear. We test our weapons in a bunker somewhere under the Lake District, we carry out nuclear materials around on train, and we have breached the UN limit on the amount of tests we can carry out. Yet again, we have yet to have the UN come down on us.
I’m spotting a pattern here. Maybe the UN is just failing to check up on the way that certain countries are working with nuclear materials. Maybe UN inspectors should go and check up on the US, UK, Russia and the other nuclear states, just to see what they find. They didn’t find anything in Iraq, maybe they’ll find something interesting in America. If they do who will invade to destroy these WMDs?
One final thought to leave you with, around 1961 in America security combinations were placed on Minutemen nukes as a safeguard. However the Strategic air command didn’t take this step very seriously. They did use a code, but like some people do with personal padlocks, they chose the factory setting of ‘00000000’. The Minuteman launch officer at this time, Bruce G. Blair PhD, said of the launch checklist that it ‘in fact instructed us, the firing crew, to double-check the locking panel in our underground launch bunker to ensure that no digits other than zero had been inadvertently dialled into the panel.’ The codes were changed in 1977. This period was part of the Cold War.
MTFBWY
