Monthly Archives: August 2008

This week, so far, I’ve seen 3 movies at the cinema, two of which provided the perfect lesson in contrast between special effects handled well and believably and, well, not.

First off, though, I feel obliged to encourage all of you to go check out Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging – or at least all those of you who can remember what it’s like to be a teenager.  I have to admit I didn’t have high hopes going into this one, but K wanted to see it and so we decided to take our niece along to check it out (having a nearly-teen niece is a great excuse for watching flicks you feel like you shouldn’t be seen at).  To my complete surprise, I absolutely loved it.

It’s incredibly honest and true, with just the right amount of whimsy without making itself over-the-top of unbelievable.  If you remember what life was like when you were struggling for the guts to ask out that girl you fancied, or struggling to make that gorgeous guy realise you existed, this is totally a movie for you.  But it goes beyond simple teen-dom to encompass the battles that parent’s fight, too.  Being stuck in a weird age-group that’s no longer teenager, but not yet a parent, I found myself more than able to sympathise with both sides of the arguments.

As opposed to the majority of teen movies where controlling, embarrassing parents are the clear-cut bad guys of Teen freedom, this paints a much more subtle picture, showing the adults as they really are – just people who used to be kids trying their hardest to do what they think is right and make sure that they bring their children up properly.  Yes, their embarrassing and occasionally misguided and hurtful, but you can see that it’s all with the best of parental intentions and never just to spite the kids.

It must be said that the film is helped massively by a fantastic cast.  Some of the girls can be a little drama-school-y, very well spoken and enunciating carefully all the time, but nonetheless convincing in the majority of what they do.  Alan Davies proves that he’s more than just a comedian who did Jonathan Creek and the rest of the adult cast round out the film nicely.

The two effects-heavy films of the week provided a stark contrast not just to Angus, Thongs, but also to each other.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army is a fantastic, fantastical sequel to the original Hellboy.  Directed again by Guillermo Del Toro, this time feels very different as, off the back of the inimitable and remarkable Spanish-language Pan’s Labyrinth, he’s been given a much more free-role to create the monsters and the world he wants to create.

The effects work in this film is stunning.  The majority of the creatures are created with a combination of practical (ie – man in suit or puppet) effects and the more common and oft-overused (see below) CGI effects.  What’s remarkable, especially to someone like me, for whom CGI and effects in general are often such a bug-bear they ruin the movie (see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull), is that it is almost impossible to see the joins.

So photo-real are the CGI effects that, similarly to The Dark Knight, it is hardly possible to spot the when they are using practical on-set effects and when they’ve resorted to CGI.

On the other hand, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor is very much the other end of the scale: stacked full of CGI which looks, funnily enough, just like CGI.  How the producers haven’t learned their lesson from the execrable effects at the end of The Mummy Returns is beyond me.  The first Mummy movie made a real effort towards photo-realism and although it looks slightly dated now, was something of a bench-mark and a wonder at it’s time.

This time round we have to contend with an almost 100% CGI Jet Li doing all kinds of craziness.  I understand that most of what they did they couldn’t do practically in terms of shape-shifting and such, but there are much simpler things they could have done to help sustain the audiences suspension of disbelief at least a little longer than the first shot of a sequence.

Practical make-up effects are undoubtedly making a come back as producers and studios realise that audiences are growing tired of the artificiality of CGI that is being churned out at speed in a lot of movies, but there are still a large amount of films using poor-quality CGI thanks to rushed post-production periods enforced upon them to hit their release dates, which are often set before the film even starts shooting.

What frustrates me about the current crop of CGI-heavy, story-poor movies is that the effects houses that are working on them are very, very good at what they do.  But the truth is that they can’t work miracles.  They are artists and you have to give them sufficient time to finesse their artwork before you put it on display.  Like all art, if it’s rushed, it shows.  While that may be fine for a Jackson Pollack, it doesn’t work when you’re dealing with supposedly photo-realistic bad guys who are supposed to be able to scare you by making you believe they exist.

And don’t even get me started on the Yetis…

Today has been a pretty impressively brilliant day.

It was another Harefield appointment, my first in six weeks after MC told me that it was a bit pointless coming back until they had clear data on whether my CMV had retreated for good or not.  So he had sent me away with instructions to send in bloods every 2 weeks to keep a check on things and that if I hit the 3 month mark with no adverse effects or without showing anything above a zero on my CMV then he’d take me off the Valganciclovir I’ve been on since May and see if my body will cope without it without submitting to CMV again.

Seeing him today with a month-and-a-half of clear results, he was suitable pleased and happy for me to drop my Valgan and continue with everything else, albeit being very much more aware and careful about the first signs of CMV infection, necessitated by the fact that CMV can very rapidly kick-start rejection of the not-very-good kind, which could do my serious damage.

That said, though, he came out with something I wasn’t expecting to hear at all.  Although I may feel like I’ve had a fair number of blips, he thinks I’m doing incredibly well and – going by his experience of CF patients post-transplant – thinks I now stand a better-than-average chance of 5-year survival.

At the time of my transplant, I was quoted statistics saying that 73% of people make it through the first year, and within that 27% that don’t are included people who may die on the table or suffer serious post-operative complications.  Once you stretch the survival period to 5-years, the odds stand at 50/50, but MC now believes that for me the benchmark can be shifted from 50/50 at 5 years to 50/50 to make 10 years.

Another decade of life is better than I think many of us dared to hope.  I said before my transplant if I’m given just six months of a new life I’d be happy.  Time enough to play with my Godsons, experience the things I’d not been able to do for breathlessness and lack of energy, learn to do things on a whim again.  Having slipped past that stage back in May, albeit in the middle of a CMV/EBV attack, I’ve felt contented with my lot, whatever is thrown at me next.  To know now that there’s a very real possibility of a future worth planning for is too incomparable for words.

I’m aware every day that someone, somewhere has lost someone they loved very dearly.  I just hope I can make enough use of the extra time I’ve been given to show them what a truly wonderful gift they have given not just me, but my family, too.

Today we spent another brilliant day in the company of K’s cousins Agi and Tibi, over from Hungary for the week for a break fomr their competely hectic work lives.

Last weekend we had taken them off on a tour around MK, taking in the sites of the snowdome, Borders, bowling at the MegaBowl and dinner in the Hub.  Today we went off to be proper tourists and see Shakespeare’s birth place.

We arrived in the late morning and immediately set about seeing what there was to see.  I’ve only been to Stratford one before, when I was in my early teens and probably not all that interested in tatty mementos and old buildings – certainly not interested enough to remember it at all.

This time, though, I was much more aware of what I was there to see, which was largely old buildings and tacky, tatty mementos.  Not to mention the world’s largest collection of shops, pubs, clubs, amusements and activities with “Shakespeare” in their name.  There is a serious lack of originality to Stratford, which is ironic (or fitting, depending on your perspective) considering it’s place in the story of Britain’s Bard.

Rather than pay through the nose to stand in an enormous queue through some fairly attractive gardens before spending 5 minutes being herded through an old house that’s only claim to fame was having a playwright born there, we instead opted to jump on the hop on, hop off bus tour of Stratford, which would take us outside the city limits and off to Anne Hathaway’s cottage.  And yes, we were looked at strangely for jumping on a bus whose intention is for hopping, but we like to be different.

The Hathaway’s cottage, quite apart from being a lovely old building in a beautiful countryside setting, is fantastic entertainment.

The “tour” of the cottage (which actually has, I think, 6 bedrooms and lots of other things too (you can tell I was listening hard, can’t you?)) consists mostly of one man standing in the parlour explaining the history of the time and about a dozen English phrases which were coined from habits of the time, including “cold shoulder”, “stop-gap” and “turning the tables”.  This lead, rather unwittingly, to a running joke between us for the rest of the day about how certain phrases came about.  Hence the phrase “running joke”. (well, it was funny at the time).

The majority of the “tour” – and it really does have to be placed in inverted commas – is taken up with the guide explaining that, essentially, Shakespeare would never have lived there and may have visited while they were courting, although it’s not certain, just a decent supposition.

Bill Bryson’s Shakespeare, his slim volume on the life of England’s greatest poet (again, depending on your views), is esstially a collection of all the published wisdom on Shakespeare through his life and amounts to a slim non-fiction novel explaining that we actually know absolutely nothing about Shakespeare whatsoever.  In fact, there are only three point in Shakespeare’s life when we know with 100% certainty where he was – the day he was born, the day he got married and the day he died.  The rest is all pure specualtion and guess-work.

Hopping back on the bus (doing it the proper way this time), the heavens had opened and forced us onto the lower deck.  After five minutes riding down there, though, I decided it was too much like a normal bus ride, missing as we were our knowledgeable and informative personal guide from the first bus and reliant instead as we were on a pre-recorded, barely-audible audio description which semed to mostly cover sheep, the most enlightening section of which anounced that Warwickshire in Shakespeares time was a farming county, as opposed, we surmised, to the now infamous Buckinghamshire pole dancing county.  Unimpressed as I was and seeing that the rain had stopped, I shepherded us on the the open-top upper deck where we all coated our butts in fresh rainwater from the seats, whilst giggling like schoolgirls all the way back into town.

Following a late luch at a pub surprisingly not named after anything Shakespearean, we crossed the road to a large carousel K had spotted on our way past.  After spending 5 minutes larking around on pogo-horse which disappointingly failed to pull a Mary Poppins and leap from their confines off into a fun, colourful world of animated penguins, we all began to get somewhat bored and spent the follow 5 minutes of the seemingly endless merry-go-round wishing we could just jump off.  Tibi did manage to switch horses mid-stream though, which was pretty impressive and not unentertaining.

Strolling back through Stratford towards the car, we stopped in at various little shops and authentic-looking buildings which have now been turned into banks, coffee bars and Woolworths.  Sad, but sadly not uncommon.

After getting home and dining with K’s ‘rents we had jsut enough time to have a gander through Agi and Tibi’s pictures of the week (including todays) before we shot off home and clambered into bed for an early night before busy days tomorrow, K at work and me back down at Harefield.