More Kirk

It seems like once you get started with Kirk Douglas, you can never stop. I’m watching Brian De Palma’s The Fury, starring Mr. D. This time around he’s not wearing leather or furs, he’s wearing trunks! Rolling around in sand with another man (his son), jumping from hotel windows, shooting traitorous people with an assault rifle, the works. Amazing. (Though the movie is P&S, which is weird considering that last week’s Soylent Green wasn’t.)

Cheap cinema

The founder of Easyjet is going to apply the same method into cinemas. From the Guardian article titled ’There could be a fight’:

Here’s how it will work. The pricing structure will begin at 20p. You will log on to easyCinema.com. There you will find three options. You can either select the movie that you want to see – and find the dates on which you can see it, and at what price – or you can select the day on which you want to visit the cinema, and find out what you can see on that day, and for what price. Or you can come to the site with a budget of, say, 50p, and find all the shows that you can see for 50p or less. It’s a very seductive method.

Brazen promotion of this one business aside, this looks like a good idea to me. Haji-Ioannou has clearly thought the process out (where to cap prices, how steep the pricing curve should be, what are the biggest liabilities, how to legally force the distributors into co-operating etc) and deserves his shot at fame. I only hope he can get it to work, so we all could enjoy cheaper movies in the future. I’m sure Helsinki could support one of these theaters; after all, there’s already a few art house cinemas there.

Republican quotes

Debbie Riddle, a Texan representative quoted in The Guardian May 16 2003, p. 16:

Where did this idea come from that everybody deserves free education? Free medical care? Free whatever? It comes from Moscow. From Russia. It comes straight out of the pit of hell.

Then just for good taste a story about Ann Coulter, who once wrote in her column:

The rich are the ones who pay taxes, so of course an across-the-board tax cut helps them the most. As soon as the poor start paying their fair share of the tax burden, they’ll get a tax cut too.

Atta girl!

Review: Welcome to Sarajevo (€ € € €)

A touching movie. A cruel, yet still life-affirming movie. A movie about Sarajevo. Welcome to Sarajevo, directed by Michael Winterbottom, is all that and more.

Basically this is a story of Sarajevo, although the first half of the film concentrates on the way foreign journalists face daily life in the besieged city. Gradually the focus shifts onto the citizens themselves, as we are introduced to old people dying in indiscriminate attacks, young men trying to make a living any way they can, helpless babies being born into this world without a choice, random executions, people chosen for slaughter because of their names – all the horrors are shown unflinchingly.

Last year’s Oscar winner, No Man’s Land, tread similar ground but I prefer Winterbottom’s version. The powerlessness of the onlookers, the guilt, the suffering are all there on the silver screen. The viewer is forced to confront the issues, and no easy answers are provided. As Woody Harrelson’s reporter says: Welcome to the 14th worst place on Earth.

The movie shows Winterbottom experimenting with mixing drama and documentary, using actual news footage in the middle of reconstructed situations. The combination works well, as the horrors of reality cannot ever be really conveyed by fiction. Winterbottom went on to fine the technique later on in 24 Hour Party People which mixes the two seamlessly.

Based on a real story – those dreaded words – and made by outsiders, Welcome to Sarajevo manages to overcome those obstacles and is easily one of the most important movies of 1997 (the year of La Vita é Bella) and obligatory viewing for everyone.

Rating: € € € €

More Army perks

I finally got round to watching the promo video they sent me. My favourite bit is possibly the geezer who says We learnt to march, which was quite interesting.

Shower skills

I’m trying to master the art of taking a shower while chewing gum. Unfortunately I’m not quite there yet, as I’ve got a slight soapy taste in my mouth.

The most demanding part is putting soap (or washing detergent or whatever it is you freaks use, it’s none of my business anyhow) on your face and scrubbing it. In order to succeed, one needs to simultaneously breath through one’s nose while not inhaling water and keeping one’s mouth shut but still chewing uninterrupted.

I think I could make a career out of this.

Hetero holiness

Case number 1: Ali G as Boris, the Austrian fashion TV reporter asked some fat American male in a ”Pro-America Convention” what the man thinks about freedom. Obviously the obese git was all for it. Then Boris told him that in Austria freedom meant he could walk down the street holding hands with his boyfriend. ”Well,” the hick said, his overweight facial features horribly contorted, ”I’ve got no problem with what you do in the privacy of your own home.” That’s good ole American freedom for you.

Case number 2: From The Guardian Weekend’s Reader’s letters column: To claim that straight culture has absorbed a gay practice and ”grafted it on to heterosexual couplings” is wishful thinking. Never mind the fact whether you disagree with the original claim (men pay more attention to women’s butts) or not, but does he really think there’s some sort of gay illuminati out there trying to bend good, straight people into illicit homosexual acts?

Word 59: Gravamen

Also, as I recall, the gravamen of Hill’s – lying – accusations against Thomas was that he asked her out on a date.

gravamen (n) : the grievance complained of; the substantial cause, of the action – source: The Guardian Weekend May 17 2003, p. 19

Old DVD commercial

I still chuckle at the thought of those old DVD commercials that appeared on rental videos in the late 1990s. They praised the picture and sound quality of DVD and to prove this point, they also showed samples of DVD footage. Apparently the viewer was supposed to look at those images, recorded on a VHS tape, and notice the difference. I sure would like to know who thought of that idea.

FA Cup final

Today’s the day. The Beeb started broadcasting at noon even though the kick-off is at 3PM. Basically they’ve cleaned the whole afternoon’s programming to make room for football and football accessories. During this time we, the viewers, were treated to live aerial coverage of, err, the teams arriving to the stadium on their buses (think OJ Simpson’s escape attempt), a parody of 24 where the FA Cup was stolen, footballing poetry and such.

Sonja’s note: think if Yle did all this with ice hockey SM-liiga finals.

Our original plan was to go into a pub to watch the game. We would’ve had to leave at noon as every pub all around the UK is packed (quite understandably), but somehow the plan changed and we stayed home.

I brought my state-of-the-art hifi-system to the living room and plugged it into the telly. Makes those thumps sound more satisfactory. About halfway through the match our telly started acting up, loud bangs of static noise made it quite hard to concentrate on the programme.

The first and last 30 seconds were the most interesting with Thierry Henry’s near miss and Southampthon’s desperate last-minute corners. Close but no cookie.