The Adjustment Bureau

Last night I was watching a movie on television called Book of Blood, directed by John Hamilton. It's based on two short stories by Clive Barker ("The Book of Blood" and "On Jerusalem Street") which were the frame story for Clive Barker's six volume Books of Blood short story collection. The film is set in Edinburgh and concerns a professor of parapsychology (Sophie Ward) who is investigating a house that is supposed to be haunted and has been the scene of several violent deaths. With the aid of a supposedly psychic student (Jonas Armstrong), she sets out to investigate. It turns out that the house is an intersection on the highways of the dead, and that they don't take kindly to what they percieve as mockery and before long the experiment spirals violently out of control. The movie is actually pretty dull. It follows the plot of the Clive Barker stories fairly closely, but there isn't enough there for a feature length movie, so it's fairly obvious that they were trying to pad out the run time. Also the stories are fine in print, wehre they are like the frame for a collection of short stories, but on their own they don't work as well. The movie was obviously made on a very low-budget, and is shot so murkily it's difficult to see what is going on at times, and there are some really bad computer special effects. Also the opening scenes give away a lot of what happens in the end.

Today I headed out to the Cineworld cinema to see The Adjustment Bureau, directed by George Nolfi, and very loosely based on the short story "Adjustment Team" by Philip K. Dick. It's about a New York political candidate (Matt Damon) who falls for a ballerina (Emily Blunt). However, it turns out they were never intended to fall in love, and a sinister organisation known as the Adjustment Bureau, who control and manipulate the course of individual lives and human destiny according to a pre-determined plan, are determined to keep them apart. It was as much a romance movie as it was a science-fiction fantasy thriller, but it never really managed to blend the different genres together. It's still quite enjoyable in places though, and Matt Damon and Emily Blunt are very good in it. Both of the movies are reviewed over at Permanently Weird.

I stopped off for some groceries on my way home. I have to say that I am really not a fan of romantic movies. Some I like, though (some of my favourite movies are Before Sunrise, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Juno and Garden State). I have never really experienced romance myself, and it never really seems to make a lot of sense to me, and I have ruled out dating and romance and whatever until I've emigrated and become successful.

I've ordered the first couple of volumes of the graphic novel series Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo. I've wanted to read them for years, since I first saw the movie in 1994, but the books were very expensive but I found out they were available on Amazon and so decided to get a couple of them.

All sympathies and best wishes, of course, to the people in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami.