I'm Climbing Up Those Walls Again

A film as epic as one could ever be. 7 Samurai, hired by villagers to protect their village from 40 raiders, working for only 3 meals a day. A lesson in honor, friendship, and hope. 190 minutes of pure glory (although I think it was cut down for US release. It's a 1954 flick, so entirely in black and white. The action comes bit by bit, and is not over

On a seperate note, I'm finally beginning to cook. I made quesadillas last night, showing off my skill with an oiled pan over flame. *BAM*

Library closes early on a Saturday, and doesn't open on a Sunday. Have a good weekend everyone.

PS. Dad and I are betting Bush is going to be in Iraq for the handover, it hasn't been announced... but he's only going to be 90 minutes away the day before....

Well, as you can see I survived the slug ordeal. I'll post the rest of my journal after this weekend, so you can see the horrors that I endured. I'm also writing a short story that hopefully I'll have finished by then. In the meantime, I've been watching so many movies I feel like Kyle on crack:

The Man Who Wasn't There was a Cohen brother's movie released a couple of years back. Despite loving Fargo, I'm usually kind of wary about the Cohen brothers, because they can make either a really unique and interesting flick, or they can just as easily fish some dead thing out of a canal and try and make a movie out of it.

The Man Who Wasn't There is barbershop noir, filmed totally in black and white, with a plethora of Billy-Bob Thorton voice overs. It's funny how often you hear his voice off screen, for Ed (Thorton) doesn't actually talk much on screen. When he is addressed, he usually pauses for a moment longer than you'd expect, giving his words a touch of extra precision. The story involves a complicated but unintentional murder which is the result of a get-rich-quick scheme the barber attempts. A good solid cast, convincing acting, and Scarlett Johannson made this one a winner, even if it does fizzle out by the end.

Next is Krzysztof Kieslowski's famouse Three colors trilogy. Each movie is meant to portray a different part of the idealism of the French revolution, and each movie is named after the colors in the French flag. They aren't really connected beyond that, so I watched Bialy or White first.

It follows the story of a Polish hairdresser who has just been dumped on the streets of Paris by his unsatisfied French wife (after a quick divorce). Apparently he was unable to perform since they got married, and this was too much for her. She sets her own store on fire in order to blame it on him and to put him on the run. His last attempt to call her results in her forcing him to listen to her have an orgasm over the phone, a torture which finally makes him flee the country in a friend's suitecase.

When he arrives back in Poland he is not content to return to hairdressing (he is an award winner, and is hounded by dozens of middle-aged women), so he turns to the black market. Soon he has enough money to start his own business, and with time, he begins to plan on getting his wife to Poland. To do this, he fakes his own death, leaving everything to her in his will. He sees her crying at his funeral, and so, when she returns to her hotel room, she finds him waiting for her in his bed. After a night of "I love yous" and frantic lovemaking, she wakes up to an empty bed, and a knock on the door by the police. They are there to charge her with her husband's murder.

White is a brilliant dark comedy and revenge plot. It's not a slow paced long winded typical european flick, so give it a shot if you are bored listening to your own language ;-)



Knife in the Water is a famous Polish 1961 film by Roman Polanski
, and I'm afraid I missed the first few minutes. A wealthy couple picks up a younger student on the side of the road, and take him on a days sailing trip with them. The boy is always playing with a switchblade, which unnerves the arrogant husband, who insists on showing off in front of his wife. After getting caught by a storm, they anchor up and spend the night on the sea. The next morning, the man pushes the boy too far by dropping his knife overboard, and they come to blows. The boy, who claimed he couldn't swim, is knocked into the water and believed to be drowned. The husband swims around and eventually to shore looking for him. The beautiful wife stays on board, and soon discovers that they boy has been hiding, as he comes back to seduce her.

It sounds like a simple plot, but it is well filmed, and most of the story is told on the faces of the actors. It's a nice short venture into the unknown.

Seeing as this was the subject's prime venue for communication, we, the Humberside Police, saw it fit to post his last diary entry on his website, so all that knew him might read it, and hopefully give us some indication as to what fate befell him:

Wednesday, June 23rd - Afternoon
There is a growing darkness in my mind. The presence of the silver slime trail sent shivers up my spine when I first saw it. They only come out a night, when their power is at their greatest. Of all the evil things to beset this house, this is the greatest threat that 62 Minster Moorgate, and possibly the city of Beverley itself, has ever encountered.

I will prepare my tools of war for tonight, when I go to confront the evil thing and be rid of it.

--Later
My father has gone to sleep, unaware of what may come tonight. I have turned off the gas fire in the living room and turned out the light. I will continue to prepare in my room upstairs, and wait for the dreadful thing to come out.

Thursday, June 24th - 2:30 AM
My heart is pounding. I know not how I made it up the stairs, but this may be the last entry I'll ever make. Of all the evil tings that this world can produce, out of the site of the Lord, this is the worst a man should ever be meant to endure. I shall attempt to recall events as they happened

At 2:00 am, I proceeded down the stairs armed with only the knowledge of my enemy and a ninja's wit. I flicked on the light of the living room, expecting to catch the brute as he ravaged the crumbs the are scattered around the base of the couch. I wasn't the least bit prepared for what image fell upon my eyes.

There he was, grinning. Well, he would have been grinning if he had been granted a mouth, but his huge bloated form gave the overall impression of a grin. He sat there, fat with his gorged crumbs, staring at me. I was prepared to face him, but to my horror I realized that we two were not the only ones in the room. I looked to the left and right, and discovered, to my horror, that there were three others of his evil and blasted kind with him.

"Be gone foul beasts!" I shouted, at which point the fat bloated one bellowed with laughter.

"Ah, Mr. Collin, so we meet again? Did you enjoy the slime I left in your shoe last night?"

I held up the cross of our lord and savior began muttering the rites of removal, to banish this dark being from the carpet in front of my favorite couch. Again his slimy brown body shook with laughter.

"Fool! You think you god has any power of me? Lord Slug shall never tremble before your pathetic idol." And with that he nodded towards a thin black slug that was next to him. "Marcel, take him down."

The black slug grinned and rushed me with an uncanny speed for his kind. As he was approaching me at approximately 3 inches an hour, I had no time to react when his small black form squished up against the base of my big toe.

Now, I am a man of some courage. I have faced some of the most ruthless villains in my time (and they must have been ruthless, for they were hardly ruth), but I was never prepared for the cold slimy, mostly icky feeling Marcel gave me when he touched my toe. With a shriek easily likened to a 6 year old girl, I bounded up the stairs sprinkling salt behind me as I went, slammed my bedroom door and dove underneath the covers.

My friends, if you are reading this, know that I have always enjoyed our time together, but I am afraid my luck may be out. If you are reading this, then it is likely that the slugs came for me in my sleep, and my slimed body has been tossed over the edge of the Humber bridge... or I have escaped, and am now planning my counter-attack. Farewell! I will attempt to scale the garden wall, but I don't know how many slugs will be waiting for me out there!

Matthew Collin

Finally a movie I probably wouldn't recommend. Last night I saw The Time of the Wolf (Le Temps du loup) a French film which, while never quite telling you how, depicts the demise of civilization. A husband and wife, with their children, arrive at their summer home to find a man, with his wife and child, living there. The squatter seems scared and violent, and ends up shooting the husband of the arriving family. The mother then flees with her two children into the French countryside. There is little food and water, and no electricity. They run into a boy, who, while being intelligent, probably represents the wolf in the title.

After following railroad tracks, littered with dead bodies and burning cattle, they find a rail station being led by a pretty awful man, who basically taxes the fellow residents for staying with them. People in the movie are always bartering, and it is interesting to see how things of great value now, don't translate into useful items when civilization crumbles.



The title of the movie refers to the brief period before Ragnarok, and many of the characters are well convinced that the end is nigh. While the movie is visually quite beautiful (although a great deal of it is filmed in the dark, as there is no electricity at all), there isn't much of a story, and you feel like you are as lost as the characters. Unless you are practicing your French, or love the French countryside, I'd pick up Brotherhood of the Wolf instead of The Time of the Wolf and see some awesome French kung-fu instead.

I've been watching a lot of Red Dwarf recently. The library has a couple of tapes from season 7, with that great episode where Ace Rimmer jumps out of an airplane surfing on an alligator, and then takes out an entire German platoon while driving on a motorcycle with just a pistol. The most classic part is when he rescues the damsel in distress he says:

"There be time for talking later... and hopefully some sex!"

Last night I saw the episode where the crew had to crawl through the ventilation shaft, and Kryten said to Kristine:

"He looks at you like a starving man looks at a packet of roasted peanuts."
"What do you mean?"
"He can't wait to rip open the bag and taste the salty goodness!"

Ah well, back to more fun.

If you aren't interested in talking about the state of the world, skip to the picture of a snail, although you'll be missing out.

If you haven't seen it already, try and get your hands on a copy of "The Siege." The movie, which came out a few years before 9/11, is about a New York being hit by a massive wave of Islamic-based terrorism. Denzel Washington of the FBI tries to suppress it, but eventually the Army is called in, and begins to cage up all the Muslim men it can get its hands on, and even tortures one to death. Denzel Washington looks the Army commander (Bruce Willis) in the eye and says:

What if what [the terrorists] really want is for us to herd children into stadiums like we're doing? And put soldiers on the street and - and have Americans looking over their shoulders? Bend the law, shred the Constitution just a little bit? Because if we torture him, General, we do that, and everything that we have bled and fought and died for is over, and they've won. They've already won!

It is of my firm belief that the moment we decided to lower ourselves to the same level as beasts, willing to torture our fellow human beings and shred human rights into little pieces, they won. The moment we decided to hold up hundreds of men in Guantanamo Bay, with no official status, not even POW status, despite the fact that they were part of the opposing force in a war, they won. The moment that Rumsfeld (and this is confirmed) told the Armed Forces to use techniques such as water dunking and sexual humiliation in order to get information from prisoners, they won.

Yesterday a South Korean man was beheaded in Iraq. Since the UK press is a little less squeamish, I got to see him pleading for his life on camera, minutes before they cut his head off. Those men that pose behind him, with their guns and their masks, are animals to the core. They are evil and screwed up in every way imaginable, for you have to be evil to kill or harm a man who is helpless.

Yet that is what we have done as well. We have taken defenseless men, often innocent men (the Red Cross estimates that more than 80% of Iraqis arrested during allied occuption are innocent of any crime), and tortured them. It seems that news is now out that we have been doing the same thing in Afghanistan. It seems that dozens of prisoners in Iraq and Afganistan have died under mysterious circumstances.... under our care. We don't feel any sympathy for these men, despite the fact that they have not been tried and found guilty, and most of them are, in fact, innocent. Innocent men that we are supposed to be liberating. If you believe in the Old Testament's eye for an eye policy, then the beheadings are justified (another reason why the Old Testament is full of shit).

I ask you to feel disgust. We are supposed to be better than these people, but it seems to me that they have accomplished in their goal of making us no better than them. I ask you to feel disgusted at what we have done. You have to feel ashamed that America has sunk this low before we can begin to climb again.

Whether or not you believe the Bush administration actively supported torture, you have to agree that they certainly didn't prohibit it. In fact, late last year, the administartion's lawyers told the President that they were exempt from international anti-torture law, and could do what they wanted.

I'll end this complaint with my goals for the 2 people that read this:

1. Support the granting of POW status to prisoners, so they are covered by the Geneva convention prohibiting torture, etc. Saddam Hussein himself has been granted POW status, but not the everyday Iraqi citizen arrested during the war.

2. Pay attention to the findings of the 9/11 commission, for they are revealing, bit by bit, what is actually going on in the world.

3. Notice that while our troops aren't dying as much in Iraq, we are ceding control of cities to the people we were initially fighting. So instead of winning the war, we are giving it away to the insurgents (all the public sees is a drop in troop casualty rates).

4. As you learned as a child, treat others how you want to be treated. Tell others what you think about US torture and "ghost prisoners (those without a status)". Rumsfeld told the armed forces to keep some prisoners off the books so the Red Cross couldn't find them. Tell other people what you think about this. Discuss it. Learn. Grow. Evolve. Be a better person than we have been over the past 3 years.

Pay attention, and we may just win this thing yet.



Now, the title may be a bit confusing, as it mentions a slug. Besides the president, you probably haven't read about a slug yet. Well, here we go:

We have a slug or snail problem. Last month, my dad would wake up in the morning and find a slug/snail trail on the ground. He found a hole in the wall he thought it was coming in through, and sealed it up. This happened again when I arrived, but he found that hole as well and sealed it up.

This morning I woke up and went downstairs to the living room, to find silver slime trails all over the place, including in and on my shoes! This constitutes as an attack on my homeland, and I will defend it against this slug menace.

I'll launch a plan of attack, which will involve getting up in the middle of the night and suprising the little bastard. I'm not going to kill him, I'm only going to remove him from the premise. I'll draw up a plan of attack tonight and will try and scan it to show you what I'll do.

Last night I finally saw This Is Spinal Tap, which is a great fake "rockumentary" in every way.

"So what's so special about this amp?"
"Well, normal ones go up to 10, but if you look here, you'll see that all the knobs on this one go up to 11!"
"What does that mean?"
"Well, normally, you get to 10, but then you've got nowhere to go. In our performances, we go up to 10, and then we can give it the extra ooomph we need!"
"Why not just increase the power of 10 and go up from 9?"
"....but these go to 11..."

I also watched Max starring John Cusack. The year is 1918-19. Cusack plays Max Rothman, a wealthy Jewish German who has just returned from WWI sans an arm. He used to be a painter, so now he sets up a popular modern art gallery. He meets a young painter who was also in the war. The young painter's name is Adolf Hitler. Max tries to get Adolf to channel his passion and anger into his painting, but an officer in Hitler's regiment is attempting to convince Hitler to embrace politics. It's a very well done film, while maybe not completely historically accurate, but it does a wonderful job at portraying a young (30) and confused Hitler, trying to decide whether to embrace art or politics.


On a final note, I'm reading Bram Stoker's Dracula for the first time. It's really good for 19th century horror, although sometimes you want to shake the clueless characters and yell "she's got holes in her fucking throat, I think maybe you've got a VAMPIRE on your hands mate!" Finally Van Helsing shows up, who has a little sense (Van Helsing is an old Dutch scientist, not a huge hat and jacket wearing walking stake machine like Jackman). If you enjoy horror in the vein of Frankenstein or Island of Dr. Moreau, then I recommend it.

Well, and words.

The sexy Page 3 girls
Now, the reason all of us aren't really smiling is because the bloke taking the picture couldn't figure out my camera, so we had been standing there for an annoying length of time, so he snapped it when no one was ready.

The Page 3 girls with some other guys
You see, there is a big international Football (soccer in the US) match going on in Portugal, and so people are waving these St. George flags to show their support.

My return to Trocadero


Bumper cars in Trocadero



Wardour Street

...which I fell in love with at night.


Sam "The Man" Fisher

He then promptly broke my neck because I had spotted him.


Just a field just outside the city centre (UK spelling) of Beverley


The tracks that lead from Berveley station


The country route I run along.

Me


Money