Posters

Last night I was watching the 2009 Swedish movie version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, directed by Niels Arden Oplov, based on the novel by Stieg Larsson. The movie tells the story of a disgraced journalist, Mykael Blomkvist (played by Michael Nyqvist), who works for the controversial Millennium magazine. He accepts an assignment from an extremely wealthy and powerful industrialist to investigate the mysterious disappearance of his beloved neice over forty years earlier. The industrialist is convinced that she was murdered by a member of his family, and he wants Blomkvist to go over the evidence to see if anything was missed in the previous investigations. For help, Blomkvist turns to expert computer hacker and investigator, Lisbeth Salander (played by Noomi Rapace). However, as they get deeper into the investigation, it becomes clear that someone will stop at nothing to prevent them getting to the truth. I thought it was a really good movie. I really liked the Stieg Larsson books, and the movie was pretty faithful to the source. It's reviewed over at Permanently Weird. There is an English language version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo starring Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara due for release in December this year.

Usually I go over to my parent's house on Sundays for my lunch, but I went yesterday. The reason for the change was that my parents were going out for lunch with some of their friends today. I went out and got a few posters. One of them was a painting of Batman, taken form the comics rather than the movies, the other was a kind of gothic style painting of a vampire woman, and the third was a "How to Identify a Zombie" poster. I've got them on the walls now and they look really good.

Back home I had a Tex-Mex Platter for my dinner, which I had got yesterday. It's basically pieces of chicken, ribs in barbecue sauce, potato skins filled with cheese and mushrooms in breadcrumbs with a little pot of garlic sauce. It was really good!

The Bad Lieutenant

Today was another day off from work. A True Blood T-shirt that I had ordered on Monday came in the mail today so that was really good.

Later on in the morning I went up to the cinema to see The Bad Lieutenant - Port of Call: New Orleans, directed by Werner Herzog. The movie is set in New Orleans several months after Hurrican Katrina and tells the story of a police lieutenant (played by Nicolas Cage) who suffers from severe back pain after saving a prisoner from drowning. The lieutenant now has a severe drug problem and is a very reckless gambling addict, resulting in him owing the bookies thousands of dollars. Adding to his problems is the brutal murder of an entire family of five in an apparently gang related execution, a teenage witness that he has to guard, and finding someone to look after his dad's dog. The film is neither a sequel to nor a remake of the controversial 1992 Abel Ferrara film Bad Lieutenant, which starred Harvey Keitel. This one is a good movie and often darkly humerous with Nicolas Cage doing one of his best, and most unhinged performance in the title role. The film is possibly one of Herzog's most mainstream and accessible films, although it does have plenty of his unique touches, such as filming the investigation into a car crash from the point of view of an alligator. Ferrara himself was apparently furious about the idea of the film saying about the film-makers: "I wish these people die in Hell... I hope they're all in the same streetcar and it blows up." Herzog claimed that he had no idea who Ferrara is and had never seen any of his films. After the premiere Herzog said that he would like to meet Ferrara saying: "I have a feeling that if we met and talked, over a bottle of whiskey, I should add, I think we could straighten everything out." Personally I thought that both of the movies were good in their own ways. They are completely different.

On my way back i stopped off and bought a few posters for home and also the DVD of Rashomon, which should be really good.

I'm back to work tomorrow for a day and then it's the weekend.

Piano in the House

Last night I listened to a radio adaptation of The Twilight Zone, it was presenting a story called "Piano in the House", about a bitter theatre critic who buys a player piano for his wife's birthday, however the piano has the power to make people admit their deepest secrets, and the critic's plan to use it to humiliate his friends at his wife's birthday party very quickly backfires. It was pretty good, and it was a very faithful adaptation of the TV episode.

Later on I was rearranging the posters that I got on Sunday on my walls, and I came across some old catalogue that was stuck between the radiator and the wall and which had obviously been there since before I moved into this place four years ago. It was just kind of odd to find. I watched a pretty good documentary about the writer Douglas Adams (who created The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

Today it was a really dull day at work, as usual. However, there was a meeting of the trade union about proposed cuts in pay. The meeting took about an hour.

Monty Python

Last night I watched a documentary called Monty Python - (Almost) the Truth: The BBC Lawyers Cut. It was about the history of the "Monty Python" comedy troupe, set up to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series. A lot of people go on about the six members really hating each other, when from what I've heard and read, they really got on pretty well. There were arguements about what sketches were or were not included in the series, Terry Jones apparently used to get frustrated about the technical limitations of the TV show, and John Cleese left at the end of the third season to do other things, but it just seemed to be what you would expect from a group of talented witers and performers who all had their own ideas. It was funny though. I'm quite a big Monty Python fan so I knew most of it already. I remember I was eleven when I first saw the show and I really didn't find it funny at all. I didn't get the humour and the animation sequences just completely freaked me out, but when I saw it again four years later I thought it was hilarious. I used to have the video game for the Amstrad as well. That was the funniest video game I have ever played. You had to go through this "Name the Cheese" mini-game to get to the main one, and then you played this character going around this world styled around the TV animation scenes searching for the four pieces of your brain, which had run off and split up. Along the way you had to eat cheese and defeat killer Keep Left signs and attacking dead parrots by shooting fish at them. Also when you least expected it, the Spanish Inquisition would show up to torture you with comfy chairs and soft cushions.

I watched the end of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which was very good and surprisingly faithful to a very difficult book for a TV adaptation. It's the kind of show that probably wouldn't be made these days, because it is so sedately paced, so you need to give it time and patience to work.My parents had returned from holiday on Friday and so this morning my Dad came round and we went along to the Ocean Terminal shopping mall, where we had a muffin and coffee at Starbucks before going back to my parent's house. My Dad had to go away early because he had some Golf coaching to do. The latest issue of Sight and Sound magazine had arrived. There was a really interesting article in it about the recent wave of vampire movies. It actually gave me afew ideas for this year's NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). There was also an interesting article in one of the Sunday newspapers about Stanley Kubrick's unmade film about the life of Napolean, which he had managed to fill 88 boxes with thousands of pages of script, notes, designs and photographs for the film. Kubrick himself joked it was "the greatest film he never made." For lunch we had some sushi to start and then chicken and mashed potatoes in white wine sauce, followed by marshmallows in chocolate fondue.

After lunch, my Mum and I went out to town to look through the shops. I got some new posters and a graphic novel called The Sandman - Volume Seven: Brief Lives written by Neil Gaiman. Which means that I now have seven of the twelve main volumes in The Sandman graphic novel series.

I got home at around quarter past five and spent about an hour and a half putting up the new posters.

Training Course

The posters I got on Sunday were the Watchmen logo of a smiley face with a dash of blood on it, and another Watchmen movie poster featuring actress Malin Akerman as the Silk Spectre and the slogan "I Am Used to Going Out at 3AM and Doing Something Stupid". The third poster was a kind of gothic fantasy photo art print called Arabesque by American artist Erica Leighton.

Later last night I was watching The Wire which is currently slightly over the halfway point of the second season.

I had to be out early today because I was starting a training course at work. The course is a three day one about a new computer system that they are installing. It was quite nice, with longer breaks and lunchtimes. Also, since I was working off the clock, I managed to get home over two hours early.

Voices From the Grave

Last night I was watching a one-off special show on TV which listed the funniest moments from Fawlty Towers. Later on I listened to an episode of Voices From the Grave on the radio. This week's episode was called "Middlewitch" and was about a town in North Wales under the influence of a deadly ancient curse. It was pretty good with some pretty scary scenes in it.

It was a long and pretty frustrating day at work. One good thing is that I'm pretty much on training courses for the rest of the week so that should be quite nice. Also I think that the training course on Friday morning is going ahead. From what I've heard the Friday morning one is a lot of fun and I'll have the afternoon off.

I put up my new posters last night. It took a lot of time to arrange them all (I got three new ones yesterday) but it was worth it because they do look good on the wall.

Hannibal

Yesterday evening I was listening to an episode of The Price of Fear, which was a radio series from the 1970s of one off half hour radio horror plays hosted by Vincent Price. This one was about a fake medium who has a shock when she comes into contact with real spirits. Later on I was also listening to a series called The Game is Afoot, which was a three hour long cleebration of Sherlock Holmes on radio, and consisted of six half hour plays from various eras of radio from 1945 to 2004. They were really good.

I finished reading the novel Hannibal by Thomas Harris last night. The story takes place several years after the notorious serial killer Dr Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter escaped custody and is now living under an assumed name in Venice. However the police and the FBI are not the only people hunting Lecter, so to is wealthy sadist Mason Verger who barely survived an encounter with Lecter but was left hideously disfigured and hooked up to a life support machine. Verger has a horrific revenge planned for Lecter and to capture him, he plans to use the disgraced FBI agent Clarice Starling, the only person known to have gotten close to Lecter, as unwitting bait in his trap. The book follows two previous Lecter novels (Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs) however this novel is less of a psychological crime thriller and more like a darkly comic tragedy. It's well written, suspenseful, witty and very gruesome.

This morning I went along with my Dad to the Ocean Terminal shopping centre. We had a scone and a cappuccino for breakfast and then went for a walk around. I got a few new posters. For lunch Dad and I went along to the Gourmet Burger Kitchen where I had a Cajun Burger and some Budvar beer. After that we went back to my parents house for awhile before going home. My Mum is on holiday in Spain for a week.

The Weekend, At Last

Last night went pretty well. We started off in Frankenstein's (the Frankenstein-theme bar), and then went on to about three more places afterwards. The night out was because Jackie was leaving the work. There were four of us there, Jackie, Alan, Michele and myself.

This morning I went out and renewed my bus pass and bought a couple of cards (a birthday card for my dad and a card for my gran because she hasn't been well). I also got a couple of posters advertising the film Grindhouse, apparently although it's advertised as a Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino double bill ("Together in One Smash Explosive Show") according to the poster, the films are going to be split up in countries outside the US, which means there'll be longer cuts of the films internationally but without the fun of a kind of double feature presentation.

I spent this afternoon cleaning my place. It took all afternoon, but it looks pretty good now. I took a break to watch Doctor Who of course. It was a really good episode this week, with them arriving on a disabled space-ship with 42 minutes before it crashes into the sun.