Air China

So the reason I had a large gap in my posting recently is that I've spent two weeks out of the last month in China having a holiday. I wont bore you with any clever anecdotes because 1: I don't really have any and 2: you're not read this to read about my holidays are you? Thought not. In short, China's very big and there's a lot of pollution, loads of people, some wicked food and terrible driving. Plus the sights are amazing.

Anyway, I watched 4 films on my various plane trips on Air China in the last few weeks. The selection was very poor and so I had to pass the time watching a couple of films I've just watched recently - 'X Men First Class' and 'Hunger Games', good on an 8 inch screen too it turns out. Aside from the healthy selection of terrible-looking Chinese films for some reason the 'entertainment' system had Citizen Kane. First time I've watched that for over a decade, still as powerful as ever exposing of the ultimate fragility of the so-called elites of society.

The only new film I watched was a twee little British / Indian film called "The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel", starring Judi Dench, Tom Wilkinson, Maggie Smith, Bill Nighy and a series of other well-known British actors. It's all about a group of older people who decide for various reasons to go off to India to seek out a fresh start to life / find somewhere peaceful to die - but they all learn something about life. It's a charming enough film with moments both touching and funny, but more than any of that of all it's pretty boring without any real storyline. I would have liked to like the film more - the cast is awesome after all - but it's a mash up of small story lines, none of which provide enough interest by themselves to make the overall film interesting.

It's a shame that the film experience on Air China was so indifferent, as normally a long haul plane flight is an opportunity to sit back and watch a couple of films I might never normally bother with. Half the films were terrible-looking Chinese cheese festivals that looked like they'd been directly remade from a Hollywood scrap heap, the rest were mainly the original Hollywood versions of said films. They did have Cleopatra as an option - which would have been fun as for years it was the most expensive film of all time adjusting for inflation - but even on a 10:30 hour plane ride I couldn't bring myself to commit to 4 hours of running time. Plus I was annoyed by the control system for the interactive entertainment. There was just one button to move a cursor around a screen and a second button to select options.  Epic fail.

Air China wont be my airline of choice if I fly back there in the future.

My American cinema trip

So while I was away in the States recently I went to a cinema to see a film (obviously to see a film, what else am I going to do in a cinema?). The AMC theatre at the Deerbrook Mall just north of Huston, Texas in the town of Humble boasts an impressive 24 screens and on Friday last week was - along with everyone else in the western world - showing the newly-opened 'Immortals'. A film whose main selling point appears to be its palindromic release date, it was not my choice. But my friends were adamant and I reasoned that experiencing the cinema in America would be something of a cultural eye-opener. Surely there had to be some differences to a UK cinema?

First up was the price. $9.50 for a standard adult ticket, which at current exchange rates is about £6 and certainly cheaper than anything you'd find at a large multiplex in the UK. The current exchange rate is historically (well, for the last 5 - 10 years anyway) unfavourable for British travellers to the States, so in theory it could have been even cheaper.

The film was due to begin at 5:40pm. We got into the theatre at 5:35pm to find that adverts were already playing. At 5:40 the adverts stopped and the trailers began. Again, utterly different from the UK where the listed 'start' time merely warns you of an impending bombardment of adverts into your face. Plus, there were loads more trailers than we ever get in England. So in the end I think there was just as much faff time between the 'start time' and the actual start of the film, but at least over there it's trailers.

The trailed films looked universally rubbish. Loads of stuff that'll hopefully never come out in the UK because we don't jump up and yell "Fuck Yeah!" every time someone squeezes a trigger. This for example.

The US citizens in the cinema certainly did a good job of living up to their national stereotype. Plenty of whoops and yeahs and a round of applause at the end. Pretty entertaining stuff, and while I think that the incessant yelling would get on my tits eventually, as a one-off my experience this was far superior to what we get in British multiplexes.

Oh, and Immortals is shite. A single idea, no plot, ultra violent, token female character, blood splattered bastardisation of Greek mythology. To call it a rehash of '300' is to give it small praise it's hardly worth of.

Glenn Beck

I don't know if many people over here in the UK have heard of Glenn Beck. He is a nutcase right wing conspiracy-obsessed Fox news presenter who has recently been given the sack. Thank Christ for that. Here is John Stewart on the Daily Show (sadly no longer available on More4) royally taking the piss out of Beck's overly-dramatic buddy buddy presenting style and generally applauding his departure from the network.

Indeed. Here for good measure is a clip from Charlie Brooker's Newswipe in which (from ~6:30 mins) he deconstructs Beck's messianic style.



Good riddance.

Monetarist Propaganda

I watched the last 30 minutes of this last night and after I gathered my jaw off the floor I struggled to comprehend the lunatic propaganda that I had just witnessed on the normally-progressive Channel 4. The documentary was a one-sided polemic in which the presenter blamed the latest financial crisis on 'big state' and 'big government'. He held Hong Kong up as a paragon of monetarism, shining a light on everything that works about that tiny city state as an example of the Asian tigers and avoiding all mention of the other Asian tigers who's economies have failed.

He suggested that Hong Kong is a beacon of prosperity and that Britain needs to emulate it if the nation is to return to the 'glory' years of the 18th and 19th centuries. One presumes that by Britain's 'glory years' the presenter isn't talking about when there was no NHS, no right to vote, no women's suffrage, no state pension, child labour, endless wars on the continent, rotten boroughs in parliament, disease, back-breaking hard work and short life-expectancies. I guess he means some kind of rose-tinted view of buccaneering British conquistadors forcing trade agreements on Indian and Chinese natives, waving a Union Jack around on the battlefield and rolling in pound notes in some kind of Jane Austin upper-middle-class fantasy. Just what I don't need.

The documentary produced a long line of vox-pops (exclusively city types and people sitting on right-wing think tanks) who told us that the ONLY way to repay the debt was to reduce taxes, release controls on business and downside government. This brazen hypocrisy on the part of those who created the financial meltdown is so ridiculous and it astounds me how few have challenged it. The program talks of a 4.8 trillion pound national debt in terms of a household debt, the presenter uses the same disingenuous arguments as the government and deliberately misconstrues the truth by equating a national economy to one of a family budgeting its incomes and outgoings. He parrots the government's line about treating this debt as something that has to be paid off by managing outgoings, rather than something that is dealt with by investing in Britain's economic future.

I was heartened to discover this morning that the presenter of "Britain's Trillion Pound Horror Story" is the same guy who recently has produced similar documentaries denouncing environmentalism and fear mongering about genetic engineering. Not a man who's grasp of science is the finest then. But I wonder how many of those who watched this program will go out of their way to discover the presenter's history of misinformation and lies. Few I suspect. However, while programs like this can find a place on a serious television channel during prime time the government's lies about its 'necessary' cuts will continue to be the mainstream.

Toy Story 3 - Is isn't Inception!

I went to the cinema with the intention of watching Inception last night. As has been the case on a couple of occasions recently, the queues at Winnersh Triangle Showcase were out the door and - for the first time I can remember - the film I wanted to see was sold out.

For this I blame a number of factors. Firstly, the world cup. The world cup has generated a backlog of blockbuster films which the distributors had been reluctant to release until the football was finished. A couple of weeks after the final and we now have a choice of all the films people would normally have been watching over the month of June. Secondly, Orange Wednesdays. Despite only ever having an Orange phone I have only recently started making use of the 2-for-1 offer they run on Wednesday. This was because in the past I was convinced that I would rather pay full price and have an enjoyable experience at the cinema than get a discount and have to fight against the texting chatting masses. I think that after last night I'm going to return to my previous opinion and avoid cinemas on Wednesdays altogether (apart from the Bracknell Odeon - which is relentlessly empty).

I commonly don't make use of 'offers' like the Orange Wednesdays (or Tesco Club Card points) because it is self-evident that the organisation providing such offers is making a return on them somewhere, and that consequently I am (or someone like me is) getting screwed at some point down the line. It has been pointed out to me that this might be something of a paranoid fantasy, but last night offers hard empirical evidence. By using the Orange Wednesday offer I joined the throng of humanity trying to get into the cinema on the cheap and ended up seeing a film that I probably otherwise would have waited for on DVD. Since I am definitely going to see Inception in the cinema at some point the net result is that Showcase cinema has squeezed money out of me. Even if I had arrived at the cinema earlier and got into see Inception last night, the theatre would have been packed to the rafters with pick-n-mix-toting teenagers more interested in their latest apps than the film. Net result: I enjoy my cinema trip less and Showcase increase their margins. Either way we all lose.

Call me a grumpy old 30-something paranoid Luddite if you must, but no more Orange Wednesday for me. What they need to do is get the other mobile phone companies to provide similar offers on different days and spread the load out a little bit. O2uesday anyone...

The upside of all this was that I got to see Toy Story 3. Rather than being a rather feeble excuse to generate a bit of extra revenue out of an old franchise by making a 3D version of it (I saw the 2D version and can't think of any bit when I wished it was in 3D), Pixar have done rather well. Like the original, Toy Story 3 follows the adventures of a group of toys trying to do their best for their owner - the now grown-up and soon off to college Andy. The films are renowned for being funny and poignant with fantastic digital imagery - the third instalment certainly delivers on both of those. I am convinced that if Pixar wanted to make a movie that looked 'real life' they would be able to, but they retain the cartoon appearance because it looks cooler. There are a couple of awesome visual sequences, most notable in a tip towards the end of the film, where the technology they use to generate these images has clearly moved up a level since the original 15 years ago.

The Toy Story films were always very funny, and some of the best laughs come in the interaction between a Barbie and a Ken doll. Some great throwback material to the heyday of those toys for anyone who can remember it. I do hope though that the appearance of a Barbie doll as a toy wasn't some kind of expensive product placement - that would sadden me, the last thing the cinema industry needs is Pixar selling out.

It's not all about comedy and effects though. As with all of Pixar's films there's a great story that's intensely sad and uplifting. Although it doesn't touch the emotional rollercoaster of last year's 'Up', Toy Story 3 is about growing up and moving on. The toys, Andy, and Andy's family all have to cope with Andy becoming a man and moving off to university. To be fair to them, Pixar have done a lot more with this second sequel than simply re-hash a lot of old gags. They've created a rather good film.

Also, the short that comes before the main feature - 'Night and Day' - is charming and funny; a nice touch from Pixar there. So Toy Story 3 was a good film, but it wasn't Inception. I've got a very busy few weeks coming up now with house moving and a couple of holidays, but I'll squeeze it in somewhere.