Hostel, the movie

I have been putting off to go and see the movie as I heard it was pretty grim, people have been sick in the movie house, others have walked out, unable to face watching it...

But, last night FG insisted we go. I thought, okay, let's do this thing. It's Orange Wednesday, even if the movie sucked ass, it would be about a fiver or so down the drain = not too bad.

Along with other grown ups - the movie had a strict 18 rating - we waited in the dark, giggling and wondering what we have let ourselves in for.

The movie starts like any other roadtrip movie - American kids in Amsterdam with their mate Oli from Iceland doing drugs, doing girls...then they get locked out of their hostel and another dodgy chap lets them into his room. He tells them of this uber cool place in Slovakia where its just girls, girls, girls...

Of course, the boys go off to Slovakia and they have a good time. I am getting a bit bored now as nothing untoward has happened. No inkling of blood or gore...or anything. A good few cinematic "in jokes" as they have Tarantino music in the background and some of his movies playing on random TV's in the background as the boys go through their adventures.

Eventually!!!! After you have seen about fifty girls get their boobies out, things start going wrong. Oli disappears. No one knows where he is. He sends a text to his mates though - I am going home - it says. I want to go home too, I think to myself, but stay as I love the area they are shooting the movie in. Fantastic village. Then the gaumless friend disappears and the cool one, Pax, is left on his own...

And then, that is where the trouble begins. He gets shown the "art" show by one of the girls they have hooked up with, who turns out to be in on the plot - touritsts get killed for sport. Depending on your nationality, you are worth either $25,000 or less. Being American, poor Pax gets dragged off to be chopped up by a maniac. The maniac is German and has paid a lot of money to kill Pax. But Pax begs in German (how odd, someone can speak a European language!!) and the man feels guilty...so he calls a guard and the guard shuts Pax up by sticking this S&M ballstrap thing in his mouth...Pax starts throwing up when the German cuts off his fingers with an electric saw. Grim, but doable. The German starts worrying that Pax is going to choke on vomit and die on him...so he removes Pax's ballstrap thing from his mouth...turns away to get his electric saw and lo! he slips on the vomit and the saw cuts him in half as it lands on him.

Pax makes his escape...or does he?

The last part of the movie is the best part - the gory part. And, I can put my hand up and say this as I have been indoctrinated by FG in the world of gory slasher movies, it wasn't so bad, at all. In fact, it had a fantastic ending and the entire cinema audience were crowing and laughing and doing high-fives in the end.

So, clocking in at 94 minutes, Hostel is an interesting cultural experience with a bit of blood and gore thrown in at the end to shake everyone out of their complacency. I did enjoy it and no doubt it will be one of the dvd's FG will own.

BUT the coolest part of it all, was watching the gory bits and knowing that Greg Nicotero did the special effects. He harks back to Frightfest and he is genuinely a fantastically funny and cool guy - we met him a few times and he is so enthusiastic about his work, that it gives us a silly sense of pride as everyone went "eeeeeew" at some parts, knowing how Greg and his team probably spent days working out the goriest way of doing that scene.

Good fun - not as bad as some that I have seen, with a lower R rating.

I am so excited!

I am on holiday today and tomorrow - as I left work yesterday the strangest feeling came sloughing off me...it was a feeling of sheer reckless abandon. For two whole days I was legitimately able to stay away from work. **titter**

I have tidied the little house - well, as much as I tidy as FG is the true Monica around the place, but, I hasten to add, in a macho non-apron wearing way - and have worked a bit on the old story stored in the new toy.

Oh happy day. I sit here, looking out into the lush green garden and am amazed how life has sprung forth in so few days. Last week this time, our garden looked like shyte. Now it looks like - well shyte - but it has a lot more green in it. We even have new grass coming up in places we thought was arid. Or frozen, at least. Just goes to show what a bit of rain does and a few days of temperatures in double figures.

I am planning a nice dinner tonight - I will amble down to the shop a bit later on to go buy ingredients...I shall visit Delia Online for inspiration. FG jokingly said "roast leg of lamb, roast potatoes and veg" and laughed in a hopeful way. Maybe I do something less time consuming.

And oh! Tomorrow night we are off to our very first musical evening which wordweaver invited us to. It is at a pub in Balham and we are just so genuinely thrilled we are going - it is the first time that they are using this venue and if its a success it will become a regular "thing". It will be an evening of song and music - we will be the appreciative audience. I promise to give it a write up on Sunday once I have recovered from the Con we are going to over in Oxford.

A busy few days but what is genuinely nice is the fact that the weather is warming up. I don't have to stay inside shivering. Instead the pup and I will go walk the park a bit, I think. To get out of the house and experience the incredibly strong wind blowing the winter weather away.

Off I go to do...you know, holiday things.

Remember, remember the 5th of November...

V: This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is it vestige of the vox populi, now vacant, vanished, as the once vital voice of the verisimilitude now venerates what they once vilified. However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin van-guarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition. The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive, not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous. Verily, this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose vis-à-vis an introduction, and so it is my very good honor to meet you and you may call me V.

We saw V for Vendatta on Sunday afternoon in a mercifully quiet and local Odeon here in Beckehnham. There were maybe ten people in all. Grown-ups all, people of a certain age...okay, dammit, they were all late twenties, early thirties, maybe even older. My point being this:

This movie is not a kiddies flick...a teenager smooch movie or one of those made for action junkies. It is a fantastically satirical and bleak look at a an alternate Britain under the the leadership of an odious man called the Chancellor. V's story, and that of Evey (Natalie Portman who is way too pretty to be allowed out of her house) is heartwrenching and beautiful and stark and scary all at once. Yes, I will admit it. I sobbed at the end - like I usually do. I am a big girl's blouse.

The fact that 98% of the film was shot on location in London gives it a genuine feel for the city. The street scenes in Trafalgar Square and the big screens over on Piccadilly had my hair standing on end - I walk past these places every day so it was really a shivery moment to see them on screen...reflecting a totalitarian big brother government. It really made you think.

V's character played by Hugo Wearing (Elrond in LoTR and Agent Smith in Matrix) absolutely shockingly shines as the mysterious V. I have never read the graphic novels so I had no idea what to expect. I think this was a good thing as I had no preconceptions about the movie, at all. I was utterly swept away by it. I would love to go and see it again as there are so many different things to watch - the nuances and the sets and scenery. It really makes on think that what would have happened, at that one point in history, that crucial turning point, if something had gone the other way. How easily the world could have been turned on its head.

Good stuff. I enjoyed it thoroughly. Five out six stars.

The most money I have ever spent...

...barring shelling out some dosh for our zooty little car! (random googled picture above).

After procrastinating and humming and ha-hing and worrying...I have done it. A brand new toy for techie geek Liz:

Its stats are:

Intel Pentium M 740 Processor 1.73GHz
533 MHz FSB
2 MB Cache
1024 MB RAM
60 GB Hard Drive
Double Layer DVD RW MultiDrive
12.1" Brite Display
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
128MB Intel shared graphics

It has more memory and power than both my old desktop PC here at home and the one FG is on at the moment, on the other side of the room. It is tiny. It can fit into my handbag, in its protective sleeve. I am in love.

I feel as if I am a Gentleman who loves Musicals who has just met Ginger Rogers. In other words, I feel giddy.

Off I go to touch it, feel it, talk to it.

My precious. My own...

Music on the move...

Last year I got a lovely unexpected surprise from FG - a belated birthday present in the shape of a Creative Zen Touch MP3 player.

I am a techie geek. I love gadgets. I was in heaven. I toodled off, ignoring him for the rest of the evening and went about playing with my new Toy. 20,000 songs = 20GB memory. Stunning stuff!

Alas, I realised today, on the way home that I am bored of my current playlists...so, I have deleted everything off the Toy and am redoing the playlists and copying more music across to it. I did however sync it up so that what I had on there, I had on the PC and vice versa. Now I have to sit and decide on the playlists...I have one thus far entitled:

U2

The others will probably be in the vein of:

Noise (Marilyn Manson, Nirvana, Guns n Roses, Staind, Foo Fighters, Creed, Placebo et al etc)
Gaming (this would incorporate music scores, Enya, Loreena McKennit and some noise, for variation)
Calming (Usually anything I can listen to that is happy background noise)
Girly (Madonna, Anastacia, Milla, One hand in my pocket-girl, etc)

What else can there be, I ask myself.

I remember now:

Music scores (Lord of the Rings, music to Last of the Mohicans, Troy, 13th Warrior, etc...)

I love my player. It is my life-saver on the train so I don't have to be subject to Mr. Businessman phoning his wife or secretary to give them instructions. Or to listen to the jibba-jabba of transfer studens from Smelly Country In Europe who, eventhough they sit opposite one another, have to SHOUT at one another, and then laugh at the top of their lungs, wafting smells of bad breath and unwashed bodies around. Or, my favourite, in the evenings, listen to the abuse hurled from one drunken sotted yob to his maaaaaaaaaayte on the phone or to his maaaaaaaaaaaaaayte on the other side of the carriage.

I realise that they could be dangerous for your health. Girl run over whilst cycling in the middle of the road listening to her iPod, case in point. Maybe she should not have been cycling in the middle of the road...but that is just my opinion. They can be bad for your hearing - granted. But then I would rather be deaf than locked up for beating seven shades of hell out of someone shouting at his mate whilst sitting next to me. They also say it is encouraging people to be more secular, to keep people from talking. Sorry, maaaaaayte, but have you seen some of the things that get to travel on the Hayes line into Charing Cross or Canon Street? No one ever speaks to strangers, why start now? Don't blame people for keeping themselves to themselves - if you don't interfere with others, they don't interfere with you = happy stalemate.

Admittedly, the one thing I hate with a passion is some little twatty person listening to their music so loudly that it "bleeds" from their £2.99 offie-bought earphones. Invariably its badly recorded RnB or rap ripped third-hand from someone else's player.

Oh gods, having just read this I realise something - I sound really old and moany. Time to go listen to Queen Madge and Marilyn Manson to get in touch with my young self.

Again.

Not gone!!!

Dear fans

I have not disappeared into the great void of cyberspace like Neo. I have just not had the time to scribble nonsense on here for a while.

Work has been insane the past few weeks. Here's hoping that it calms down a bit. My desk is starting to crack under the weight of the papers and files. Okay, so I am lying, sue me.

We had a glorious day today - we took Sparrow for a run in the large country park we have up the road from us. Man, it was bitterly cold. I took my 35mm camera with me, with the intention of getting some wildlife shots and some new shots of the pup and FG frolicking (snarf) in the undergrowth.

I think I got quite a nice set of pictures. I felt incredibly guilty as I haven't actually had my camera out in over a year. Which is dreadful as I love taking photos. And I have been told that I am good at it...but whenever do we listen to what we are told? I will have the film developed next week after payday and then post some pics on here.

To prove my astounding photographic skills, I include some of them below for your pleasure:

Wistmans Woods on Dartmoor - the most magical place I have been.

Shot of the Nile from our apartment in Luxor

The weather at present is so odd – bitterly cold with these incredibly blue skies and bright sunshine. It fools you into thinking that Spring is on its way and then you get hit by this wind that slices through your coat. Brrr. But, it is Spring Equinox soon! Which means Summer, for what its worth, and that means braais! Oh the excitement and joy.

Dances around for a few moments. Then slumps down, having just expended all the energy in the body.

Okay, enough from me.

Time to pretend to work so that they can pretend to pay me.