Movie Review: Paranormal Activity

Let's get one thing straight right from the start: this is not a film I would ordinarily have chosen to watch, for two reasons. Firstly it's a horror movie, and although I would class myself, generally, as a horror fan - I've watched dozens over the years - I have to say that recently (and we're talking the last ten years probably) there's hardly been a decent horror film made. At all. In my opinion. They're all either slick CGI'd gorefests, or sick CGI'd gorefests, or just plain boring. The only one I can think of right now, within that 10-year window, that I really enjoyed was Gothica, and I'm not even sure that counts as a horror movie. I just checked and What Lies Beneath just makes it into the ten years, having been made in 2000. So those two, then. Apart from that, no. I reckon the horror genre has lost its way bigtime.

Second reason: it's made in that Blair-Witch-Project, Cloverfield-esque way with the pretend hand-held home camcorder amateur video shtick which, frankly, doesn't work for me at all. If I wanted to watch home movies I could go to any one of a dozen friends' houses and watch their crap. And in many cases their "crap" would actually be way better than this stuff that only pretends to be hand made in some kind of false, arty way that is just irritating.

So I wasn't expecting much, as you've no doubt realised by now. So why did I go? Well, it's Halloween for one. It was a Chorlton Players fundraiser - their first movie night - for two, and I like to support their efforts. And it was a girls' weekend for three. I often feel like we don't "do" much, so when a convenient local opportunity arises to do something a little (only a little) out of the ordinary, I don't like to pass it up.

And why Paranormal Activity? Well there was a choice of movies on offer which was put to a web vote, and this one won. I'll come clean and add that it got my vote too, because it was pretty much the only one on the list I hadn't seen before (alongside such staples as Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, Halloween, and American Werewolf in London, all of which I've seen a thousand times), and I didn't know about the Cloverfield production thing at the time.

I called this a "movie review" and so far this post has all been set-up, so let's get to the review part. It was OK.

What, you wanted more? Oh, alright. For much of the first half I could hardly hear a word they were saying. I think that's another aspect of the faux-home made thing; that they deliberately muddy the sound and mess with the levels so it's sometimes too loud, sometimes too quiet. Or maybe I'm just going deaf. Anyway, that. And it took forever to get started. OK, OK, I get it: there's something weird going on in the house and you're going to try to get it on tape. Jeez, does it really take twenty minutes (or something) to get that message across? Yes, there's some spooky stuff that sets your head tingling a bit, but the hard core frighteners, such as they are, are all in the last quarter (of what is really a very short movie - 86 minutes). I guess it's an attempt to build up the tension, but it's a bit weak. So, on balance, a bit meh, slow and boring for most of the first half, approaching interesting for most of the second half, with some occasional high points.

But fair play, for a film that only cost $11,000 to make and was filmed over 10 days in the director's own house, not a bad first effort. Be interesting to see what this guy is making in ten years' time, when you think how Spielberg got started. At least he didn't go down the gorefest route. I think a slightly less predictable ending would have been better, but it wasn't all bad.

Bloody hell #2

Appropriate, perhaps, to be talking about blood on Halloween weekend, but in this case it's real blood rather than fake blood, and the lack of it rather than the gory surfeit so popular with many of the costumes you might be thinking of putting on at some stage.

I had a text yesterday from the Blood Donor service warning that stocks were low and asking for my help. So I popped along to their website (because I'm one of those shy retiring types who prefers to do things by typing and reading rather than talking to a real person on the phone) to see what was afoot.

As it happened I ended up calling them anyway because I had to register to use the site and their security procedures meant I had to wait to receive my login details through the post before I could do anything useful online, but that's not the point of this post.

No, the point is the headline text that greets you when you visit the blood web site:

96% of us rely on the other 4% to give blood.

What? Are they serious? Don't get me wrong I'm very proud to be part of that 4% but, really? Every single scheduled and emergency operation throughout the UK relies on just FOUR percent of the population for its blood? Crikey. Come on you lot, get off your arses and get on your backs and get donating! Wimps.

OB

I may have ranted about this before (although I've checked, and I can't put my finger on the post at the moment), but one edition of the evening news last week really brought it into sharp focus. The problem? Outside broadcasts as a way of lending faux "realism" to news items. It does my head in on a regular basis, but on this particular night we were treated to three in quick succession.

Coverage of the inquest into the London Tube bombings? Let's have the reporter standing outside Aldgate tube station.
Wayne Rooney possibly leaving Man U? Stand outside Old Trafford.
Reporting the latest on the Government Spending Review? Stand outside Number 10.

WTF? The BBC have just had a 5-year licence freeze imposed and are supposedly wringing their hands trying to work out how to save money. Well apart from the obvious - cutting the salaries of prats like Graham Norton, Chrisses Moyles and Evans, et al - you could start by bringing these reporters in out of the cold. It adds a sum total of zero importance, content, or gravitas to a news report to have a reporter on location if all they are doing is standing and talking to the camera. They may as well be in the studio. They'd be warmer, happier and more relaxed. The viewing public wouldn't be subjected to that annoying satellite delay between the anchor handing over to the reporter and the reporter hearing that handover and starting his/her report. And most importantly in these straitened times, the Beeb would save a whole bundle of cash.

I don't know who thought up the idea of OB as a generic news coverage staple, probably someone with a vested interest in increasing the number of OBs, but it was a bad idea right from the off and it should be stopped. Now.

Kindle Edition

November's book club selection, voted in last night, is The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks. Many thousands of reviews of this online, it was highly controversial and acclaimed when first published, it's been around for 25 years, and it was a runaway winner in our monthly poll, the other choices only managing one vote each. Sounds like it will be a cracking read, if a little... grim... in parts.

So here I am on Amazon first thing this morning, putting in my order, rather disturbed to discover the following...

Formats:
Kindle Edition £4.51
Paperback £4.75

Huh? You're telling me all that paper manufacture, typesetting, print run, ink, cutting, binding, packing into boxes, shipping to the distributor, storage, shipping to the store, that is no longer necessary because of "the wonder" of Kindle... all that... translates into a retail saving of 24 PENCE???

Good grief.

Not that saving money is the main reason for buying a Kindle, but I'd have expected a bigger differential. At that rate and assuming I went for the non-3G version, I'd have to buy 455 books before I'd made back the outlay. Something which, at recent rates of purchase, would take about 20 years!

Book Review: The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

The book club member doing the choosing for this month is a fan of detective fiction. I know this on account of the fact that every one of her three choices occupied that genre. I dunno where these fans of a certain genre get off, foisting their preferences on a largely unwilling membership. You'd never catch a science fiction fan doing that.

I think the voting went so massively in favour of The Suspicions of Mr Whicher because it's based on a true story. Personally I'd have preferred Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone. I saw it dramatised on BBC Children's telly when I was a boy but somehow never got around to reading the book. Anyway, this is what we were stuck with, and as it turned out "stuck with" is the right way to describe it.

I wrote "based on a true story" above but it would be more accurate to say the book recounts the true story. More or less verbatim. With just enough additional prose to tie all the pieces together, it assembles the facts from newspaper reports, police notes, eye witness interviews, court transcriptions and such other information as is attainable through research, and then presents them chronologically with minimal interpretation and virtually no embellishment. What I had thought would make the book interesting and unique - the fact that it represents itself as the first true detective story (at least insofar as it occurs fairly close to the formation of Scotland Yard, when detectives were first invented) and the beginning of a cultural icon that remains popular to this day: the mystery of a murder in a locked house with multiple occupants - actually didn't help to make the story compelling at all, for me.

The Kent family - a complex set up involving a large number of children and step-children along with the master of the house, his second wife (originally the nanny) and their coterie of servants - go to bed one night and wake up the following morning to the discovery that one of them - the youngest - has been taken from his bed and murdered.

So the book unravels as a series of events, observations on various character traits of the players, a little bit of history of each as far as it's relevant to the story (and, later, straying into aspects totally irrelevant), in a way that I found almost entirely unprepossessing and worthy of only the most marginal interest. I suppose it didn't help that I'd worked out who the murderer was by about halfway through the first chapter, and only the small question of finding out whether or not I was right kept me going. Once again the book's sleeve is full of reviews calling it "absolutely riveting", "brilliant" and "gripping" but naturally the publishers aren't going to print sleeve notes revealing it to be "boring", "tedious" or "terminally dull" are they?

The author makes no attempt to heighten the mystery, or represent the chief detective - the eponymous Whicher - as anything other than a methodically plodding introvert with about as much charisma as a bowl of porridge, whose previous "successes" as a detective uniformly arise from his habit of deciding who did it and then badgering them until they confess. I begin to see who the TV detective Columbo was based on.

The "revelations" about the private life of the Kent family are dreadfully predictable and once the murderer has confessed and been imprisoned the book degenerates into a chronicle of how that prison time is spent, and what happens subsequently to all the other detectives, lawyers and family members over the next (would you believe it?) hundred years. The whole work could easily have been shortened by a third, which might have helped the crawling pace of the narrative. In the end the only positive thing I can find to say about it is that I was surprised by the ending - but only because it came much sooner than expected, the last quarter of the book being made up of footnotes and bibliography.

Good morning! This is your early morning call

Sunday. 7.45am. Not the time of day (or even day of week) you'd normally expect to receive a phone call from your mother. Especially one that goes: "I tried to call you yesterday and got a message saying 'the number you have dialled is not recognised' so I thought you'd emigrated to Canada and not told me."

Closely followed by the recently popular "I thought I was going to have to change my will."

Not sure if this is deliberate, but there's been an awful lot of talk of changing wills lately. As if the spectre of the loss of my (almost certainly enormous - *koff*) inheritance will be enough to make me toe the line and behave in a more dutiful fashion (by her reckoning).

Sheesh.

First Scrape

It was a bit of a shock to have to scrape the car on the first frosty morning of the season last Thursday, but even worse this morning as temperatures hit -2°C and the scraping was correspondingly more vigorous and knuckle-numbing.

There's only been a few years of my life (I could probably work it out exactly... hang on... *stares at fingers* ... 7) when I've enjoyed the luxury of a garaged car in the winter (and then only after a massive clearout and shelf- and wood store-building operation) and the benefits of that luxury were more than outweighed by the drawbacks in the end (!) but on mornings like this I must admit that a small part of me hankers after structural automotive protection of some kind. Even a car port would be enough to keep the frost off. Probably.

Commercial-Time

I've been trying to work out why I found the adverts on Canadian TV so intrusive and irritating. Canadian Broadcasting limits advertising to 15 mins per hour on commercial channels, but "only" 12 minutes per hour on "Specialty" channels. However those numbers apply to real commercials - i.e. those advertising product. From my admittedly brief exposure, it doesn't cover trailers. And it doesn't excuse the extremely annoying habit - something we don't have in the UK - of running the same ad twice in the same break - sometimes only 30 seconds apart - or running very similar ads, such as hair care products for two different types of hair, which have almost identical wording, serially. The worst we ever get is a repeat of the last few seconds of an ad - these agency types have learned their lessons about the way memory works - to "fix" the product in viewers' minds, but these almost always run at the end of the ad break, separated from the original by up to three or four minutes.

One evening I finally managed to watch a movie from beginning to end. Aliens. It was scheduled to air over three hours, which given its posted running time on IMDb of 137 mins leaves 43 mins for ads - 14.33 per hour. But they're not evenly split. The first hour felt almost like UK television. The first break didn't come until 20 past the hour, and the next was twenty minutes later, each one showing only 3-4 minutes of ads. I should have been wise. As the film continued, the frequency of breaks increased, to the point where the last half-hour of the film suffered three breaks of five minutes each.

I have no idea how the law constrains the incidence of ads. My Aliens experience would suggest that rather than being a rigid per-hour limit, that "15 minutes per hour" is an average. Being allowed to relax the grip of ads in some hours only to tighten it fiercely later, destroys any enjoyment.

I used to think I'd be able to live in Canada. That I'd actually quite enjoy it. But if I ever had to, I don't think I'd be watching any live TV. I'd be PVR-ing everything and spending a lot of time with my finger on the FF button!!

Used Dust Collectors

One of the most depressing aspects of our recent trip to Toronto was discovering how devalued an extensive array of "collectible" plates can become over a period of 30 or so years. It's not the intrinsic value - or lack of it - that depressed me. I hardly gave a second thought to the money side of it. What I found much more upsetting was how easy it is for someone, even someone of above average intelligence, to be convinced by well-meaning friends that something is worth collecting, and will appreciate in value. And thinking how disillusioned he must have been as the reality of their value slowly dawned.

eBay is saturated with these things, more often than not being offered at around 5 dollars (for something that could have originally cost anything from 50 to 150 dollars) and with no bids. To be sure of a sale at the best price, collectors are forced to keep all the original boxes (I found three large cartons full of them in the garage) and paperwork. This paperwork, tricked out in full Reader's Digest or Franklin Mint stylee, declares their "certification" of being part of a "limited edition" the limit, in most cases, being a run of 150 firing days. Imagine how many plates a modern ceramics factory is capable of churning out in 150 days and you'll get an idea of just how limited these editions were. Or not. Even with all the appropriate certification and authentic packaging the value, 20-30 years on, is on average less than a quarter of what you paid, assuming you can find a buyer at all.

I did eventually find a dealer who advertised that they were prepared to take on plate collections from estate sales. I emailed them a list and received a reply a couple of days after returning home, to the effect that they were already "fully stocked" with those items.

I did enjoy one moment of delicious irony though. While I was searching for some idea of how to get rid of the collection in the simplest way that would maximise the return, one of the pages I ended up at carried an ad for used dust collectors. Lower down I found a second ad, this time for "quality" dust collectors. Yes, I thought, I'm clearly in the right place.

Pensions again

At a time when I'm feeling particularly sore about my own pension - having had it ripped out from under me after 33 years by a company that took years of "pension holidays", and variously used the fund to pay off criminally negligent senior executives and to bankroll redundancy programmes - here comes a Panorama expose showing that I wouldn't have been much better off in a privately-held scheme.

Panorama: http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2010/10_october/04/panorama.shtml

Pay in 120,000 over 40 years; lose almost 100,000 in fees and commissions.

How is it even legal to have 80% of your money taken away from a pot that is supposed to look after you in your retirement? Why are the fees so high? Because the average length any particular share is held is now one year, and buying and selling the porfolio contents - the "churn" - attracts bumper brokerage charges and fees. And then there's the bonuses to pay, even if the fund hasn't performed well. And finally - surprise surprise - many of the investments involve kick-backs to the fund managers, incentivising them (see how effortlessly he invents new verbs!) to leave your money in under-performing investments because they pay the biggest bribes.

Yet another example of how the financial world stinks, and lines its own pockets at the expense of the ordinary guy struggling to put enough by to be comfortable in old age. Is it just me, or is this kind of thing becoming WAY too common these days?

The absurdity of following

Bearing in mind that we've recently been to Toronto and, as always with holidays, have therefore been spending more time "out and about" than usual - shopping, drinking, eating, watching the unfamiliar TV - it's as if the culture was thrown into a kind of relief by virtue of it being (only slightly, agreed) alien.

Somehow the brand names on the clothes, the celebrity magazines telling you how to be like someone, the adverts exhorting you to drink the same vodka, or coke, or juice as your "hero", all seemed more than usually visible, and definitely more than usually intrusive.

Isn't it the ultimate in sad that there are people who really believe aping the products that someone successful uses will give them their life or in some ill-defined and abstract way make the wannabes more like the... bes?

Free advertising, reflected cool. It's all shit, really.

Notes on a trip to Toronto

I've been away. We've been away. I did have access to a puter during this hiatus, but I didn't feel much like blogging (apart from that piece about Bob Edwards), and to be honest I haven't felt much like it since we got back (a week ago last Tuesday - October 12 - in the early hours of the morning. Jet lag? Maybe, a little. Holiday? Maybe, a little. Blogging can feel like work at times, which since I still entertain aspirations to be a full-time writer should probably be classed as A Good Thing, but who wants to work when they're on holiday? Especially when there's all that Coronation Street, EastEnders, Casualty, X Factor, Strictly and Spooks on the PVR that needs catching up with?

I wouldn't want to give the impression that we spent the whole of our remaining six holiday days in front of the TV. No, we went for the occasional walk. Did a bit of grocery shopping. Had lunch. But there was an awful lot of telly, it's true.

I think I might have been in awe of the raw *quality* of it all. After 12 days of Canadian TV I was starting to feel a bit like a vegetable. After being in a pressure cooker. And then a blender. And having been forced through a sieve. The chance to watch some British TV was like stepping into cool water after the burning heat of the desert.

So I made some notes in here while I was there (hence the title of this post) about my general impression of things that have changed in the five or six years since I was last in Toronto. Some of these will eventually be fully fledged posts in their own right. What remains in here is just jottings really.

The Americanisation of Canadian news - oh my GAAAHHD. I don't ever remember it being so breathless and repetitive. Maybe I was watching a US cable channel. Can't remember. Actually a lot of the really bad stuff I sat through WAS American. Endless sport, gameshows where the contestants are forced to clap incessantly like performing seals (Wheel of Fortune), adverts repeated twice in quick succession in the same break, breaks five minutes apart.

The litter. We've had this problem in the UK for as long as I can remember, but I always had this mental image of Canada being *clean*. I don't know if they've had to cut expenditure on street cleaners, or whether the younger generation is going the same way as much of England's youth - dropping their drinks cans and candy wrappers as soon as they've consumed the contents, no matter where that happens to be (I drove behind a carful of youths the other day, who seemed to think it was great fun to continue scouring the inside of the vehicle for bits of rubbish which they then dumped out of the windows) - or a combination of the two, but the streets around where we stayed were definitely besmirched. 

Cigarettes behind the wall. Apparently they've passed a law now preventing the display of tobacco products in corner shops, newsagents, convenience stores, etc. So instead they have row upon row of little grey plastic shutters behind the counter, which the cigarettes hide behind until the shop keeper rescues them at the request of the customer. I'd be interested to see the statistics on what effect this has on smoker numbers and consumption.

Maybe I'm getting old, or maybe the reason for our trip hung over our entire stay, leeching out much of the fun, but whatever the cause, this time round, I found Canada lacked a lot of the magic that I've come to expect from it.

Congratulations to Robert Edwards

Bob Edwards' pioneering work into in-vitro fertilisation began in the 1950s, and its first fruit "ripened" (in the form of "test-tube baby" Louise Brown) in 1978. He must be delighted at today's news that he's been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine, but I have to ask: why has it taken more than 30 years?

I suppose it could have been worse. At least the Nobel committee didn't leave it until he was dead, like his research colleague Patrick Steptoe. Their story contains all the traditional elements of small guys with a vision fighting against opposition from all sides - church, government, scientific establishment, holders of research funds - and not giving up in the face of continual adversity.

Ralph Waldo Emerson famously said "Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm" but enthusiasm is only one facet of success. An even greater ingredient is tenacity. Something Edwards and Steptoe had in spades, and which is embodied in many other well-used quotes. My personal favourite is good old Thomas Edison and his approach to inventing the electric lightbulb. He didn't view his (perhaps apocryphal) 10,000 unsuccessful attempts as failures, but merely treated each as a discovery of one more way that didn't work. A stepping stone to eventual success.

So whether your particular challenge is getting a book published, or buying a house, or finding a job, or trying to manage the estate of a deceased relative makes no difference. Just keep on keeping on.