Scream 4

Last night I was watching a TV show called Awfully Good Ads which was about TV commercials that are so bad that they are funny. Some of them were really terrible. I fell asleep on my couch again. On Fridays I get up much earlier than usual, and I tend to stay up quite late so I often end up pretty much crashing out. Today I went out to see Scream 4, directed by Wes Craven. The movie opens on the tenth anniversary of the murders from the first film, when two teenagers recieve taunting phone calls and are then brutally stabbed to death by a "Ghostface" killer. The following day, Sidney Prescott (played by Neve Campbell) returns to town to promote a book and becomes involved in the murders. It wasn't a bad movie at all. I was kind of doubtful about it because it was coming out eleven years after the last Scream movie, but it was fun. I loved the Scream movies and I used to watch them all the time. The movie is reviewed over at Permanently Weird.

Psycho

Last night I was watching the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho. The movie tells the story of a real estate secretary, Marion Crane (played by Janet Leigh), who steals $40,000 from her employer and sets off to drive from Phoenix, Arizona to California to meet her boyfriend. On the way she stops off at the remote Bates Motel and meets the shy, slightly odd owner and manager Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) who tells her that he lives with his elderly mother in the creepy old house overlooking the motel. Marion decides to relax by having a shower before bed, however that proves to be a big mistake when Mother pays a visit... It's a really good movie, and is probably one of the most famous and influential ever made. It's been imitated, parodied, spoofed, remade, discussed and commented upon endlessly since it's release, but it is still powerful and striking and also at times very funny. It's reviewed over at Permanently Weird.

I had a pretty quiet day today. I went out and got some milk and a couple of magazines (a TV listings magazine and a copy of Total Film). I also saw a bit of a 1994 comedy called Airheads, directed by Michael Lehman, about a bunch of metalheads who hold a radio station hostage in order to get their band's single on the air. It really does not seem like such a long time since 1994 when that kind of music was so popular. It was pretty funny, even if it seems pretty dated now.

The African Queen

Last night was pretty quiet. I was reading my new comic-books that I bought yesterday afternoon. One that was interesting that I had got kind of at random was Li'l Depressed Boy, about a human-sized living ragdoll who behaves like a kind of teenage hipster and his attempts to date a kind of punk girl (all the other characters in the book are human, and the act that the main character is a living ragdoll is never commented on and seems to be seen as neither unusual or surprising). The humour and style is very similar to the Scott Pilgrim books.

Today I had a quiet morning, and in the afternoon I went out to see a re-release of the 1951 movie The African Queen, directed by John Huston. The film is set in German East Africa in 1914, at the outbreak of the First World War, and involves an English missionary (played by Katherine Hepburn) whose brother died after a German raid on the village where they were working. The very prim and proper missionary teams up with a tough, rough-and-ready captain (played by Humphrey Bogart), who captains a small run-down boat called the "African Queen". She demands that they sail down a long and extremely dangerous river in order to sabotage an enemy gunboat. It's a really fun film and very entertaining. It was one of my Gran's favourite movies. She pretty much loved anything to do with Humphrey Bogart. The movie is reviewed over at Permanently Weird.

The national census forms came this evening, so I filled them out on the internet. It saves time that way.

Shame the Devil

Last night I finished reading the book Shame the Devil by George Pelecanos, who is probably best known as one of the writers on the TV show The Wire. The book was published in 2000 and tells the story of the botched robbery of a pizza parlour which leaves several people dead, and the robber's return two and a half years later to get revenge on the cop who shot dead his brother. Like all of Pelecanos' books it is set in and around Washington D.C. and deals with themes of violence, betrayal, loyalty, family, friendship and the difficulty of doing the right thing in a violent world, as well as classic American cars, basketball and soul and funk music of the seventies. It's a good book and recommended for fans of crime novels and thrillers. There's a review on Permanently Weird.

It was the start of another week at work today. It was a pretty dull day. On the way home I stopped off and got a mince pie with fries for my dinner.

The Girl Who Played With Fire

Last night I finished reading the book The Girl Who Played with Fire by Stieg Larsson. It's the second part of the Millennium Trilogy which began with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and concludes with The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest. In this book a young journalist and his student girlfirend, who were both writing an expose on prostitution, are found murdered in their home. The chief suspect is enigmatic computer hacker Lisbeth Salander. The target of a nationwide police search and media frenzy, the only one who seems convinced that she did not kill the couple is journalist Mikael Blomkvist who races to prove her innocence and find the real killer before it's too late. It's a good book actually. Personally, I preferred it to the first book, but they really have to be read in order. It's reviewed over at Permanently Weird.

Later on I watched a TV show called Dirk Gently, which was loosely based on the novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams (author of Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy), it's about a private detective who uses the "interconnectedness of all things" and quantum physics to solve his cases and how an investigation into a missing cat becomes a bizarre tale involving time travel and murder. I enjoyed it. I thought it was really funny.

Today was a pretty dull day at work. I was only working for six hours. I'm now off work until the 31st December.

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

Today it was another average and fairly long day at work. I left shortly after five and I was pretty much the only one left in the office.

After work I went along to the Filmhouse cinema to meet up with my Mum and to see My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, directed by Werner Herzog, at the Film Festival. The film was produced by David Lynch, and set mostly in San Diego, where a young man, Brad (played by Michael Shannon), has just murdered his mother (Grace Zabriskie) with a samurai sword at a neighbour's house. After the murder, he holes himself up in his house with a shotgun and two hostages. A homicide detective (Willem Dafoe) attempts to unravel the man's motives for his crime with the aid of Brad's fiancee (Chloe Sevigny) and friend (Udo Kier). Their stories, shown in fashback detail Brad's increasingly bizarre existance since his lfe was changed during a traumatic visit to Peru a year earlier. Apparently based on a true story, the movie has many touches of both Herzog and Lynch. It has plenty of strange humour, such as Brad describing his pet flamingoes as "eagles in drag" and strong performances and a memorable soundtrack. Occasionally it meanders a bit but the movie retains a strange power. According to Herzog the intent of the film was to make a horror movie without any explicit blood and gore but with a "strong mounting sense of dread". One interesting thing about the movie, which may have been due to Lynch's influence, is the amount of coffee that the characters drink, and they make a big deal of it. The main charcter even has his "special coffee cup".

After the movie we went along to Pizza Express to meet my Dad. I had doughballs and garlic butter to start, and then a Four Seasons pizza, basically it's a pizza devided into quarters witha different topping on each quarter: cheese, mushrooms, pepperoni and anchovies with olives. It was really nice.

Back home I finished reading the book "Yippee Ki-Yay Moviegoer!" Writings on Bruce Willis, Badass Cinema and Other Important Topics by Vern. Vern, no second name given, writes movie reviews for the Ain't It Cool News website, and the book, as the title suggests, is a collection of reviews and essays on films. They mostly concentrate on action movies but there is a wide range of movies covered. The reviews are mostly well-written, witty and intelligent, although one thing that I did notice is that there was a lot of grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, presumably partly due to the fact that they were taken from websites.