Last minute arrangements allowed me to see Toby in Croydon for a few hours today. He aided me in disposing of my old Xbox, trading it in with a stack of games for two shiny new ones, Project Gotham Racing 3 and Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter. As videogame titles become inexplicably longer and illogically complicated, it seems that no game is truly “next gen” unless it is known by an acronym. “GRAW“, therefore, was practically a guaranteed success.
Opposite me on the train to meet Irina for dinner in London were a French couple. They were comprised of a man who looked like a young Jean Reno and a woman who looked like a slightly older Natalie Portman. It was sort of akin to seeing Léon, had it been a romantic comedy instead of a film about a ruthless assassin training a young girl under his protection. Well, okay, not that similar.
Kirsten and I saw The Lake House this evening. I hope to write a review as it would be my first for a pretty straightforward mainstream chick flick. The quirky time crossing premise is a good basis for bringing something fresh and new into the basic long-distance relationship mix — it doesn’t get much longer than living 2 years apart, after all. Yet in my eyes it suffered from two major flaws, one forgivable and one not. Firstly, no effort is made to explain the time-bending letterbox and to do so would be both unnecessary and unhelpful. However the results do not always make sense, particularly when an effort is made to change events. Such things are forgivable if ones considers the time aspect a non-central background element in the larger romance.
The fatal flaw was that through poor, or at least overconfident and self-congratulatory, direction the film’s pivotal revelatory “twist” was made painfully obvious to me about 15mins in. I should stress that Kirsten disagrees and did not discover it until much later into the film (when I believe the filmmakers actually intended it). Perhaps it was due to having seen the Spanish Lovers of the Arctic Circle, which does not share plot but merely vibe in its two lovers separated by forces beyon their control, with an eventual meeting that has a tragic result. Whatever the reason, forearmed with this knowledge as I was, many scenes lost their impact as their outcome was clearly rendered predetermined or irrelevant. This was unfortunate in a film that was almost involving enough to make me forget that Keanu Reeves was trying to act.
16 July 2006 at 3:58 am
I don’t know if I’m the first to say this, as I haven’t been keeping up with the comments on your site as of late, but I think you need a better proofreader. Or a spell-checker. I have found an average of 2 mistakes per entry for the last two months or so.
Shame on you. 😛
16 July 2006 at 2:54 pm
Having tussled with the Spellbound extension several times, I eventually gave up and decided to wait it out until Firefox 2 is released, as it will include inline spell checking.
However, your complaint spurred me on to give it one last go, and I discovered a set of instruction for installing Spellbound in Firefox 1.5.x which work perfectly. I highly recommend it, just remember to select a dictionary in the spell check dialogue box or it won’t find any errors!
Although this won’t prevent all mistakes, it should at least catch most of those annoying typos…
21 July 2006 at 1:19 pm
Speaking of being in Croydon and all, well, are you? Am having a few people round (well, namely Zaki and Guy, and if Rich ever answers his phone, maybe Rich) and the phone number I have for you is so old that, well, you can guess. So yeah, tonight, my place, ring Guy if you don’t have my number. Foo.