Caboose

Yesterday I watched the film, today I found the site of the organisation that looks after the fence.

It’s not as big as it used to be, the name has changed and it’s mostly to keep emus out these days.

The latest part of my campaign to get out more was a free members’ preview of Rabbit-Proof Fence at the Arts Picture House.

I thought they had really taken advantage of the scenery and found some fantastic actresses to play the parts of the three aboriginal girls taken from their families to be trained as servants. Kenneth Branagh did a very good job as the Chief Protector of Aborigines, a well-meaning but misguided bureaucrat.

Deborah Mailman also appeared, she’s one of the stars of The Secret Life of Us, one of my favourite TV programs. Sadly Channel 4 are only showing it on their E4 digital channel at the moment. I’m waiting patiently for it to return to normal TV.

Just one thing I noticed: is it just me or does the language spoken by the Aborigines in the film not sound a lot like the Ewoks from Return of the Jedi? Is this possibly where the Star Wars people got some inspiration from?

Went to see Beth Orton (alternate site) in concert at the Cambridge Corn Exchange last night, fantastic. Wasn’t too keen on the support act, Ed Harcourt, but Beth was amazing.

I had been a bit worried that her voice wouldn’t come through well live, but it did. The mixture of old and new songs was good, the band were great, on the whole a very pleasant way to spend an evening. We just caught the final encore, ‘I wish I never saw the sunshine’ with Beth alone on stage, an excellent way to finish off.

I was surprised by how teeny she looks on stage after reading lots of interviews going on about how tall she is. She seemed quite nervous and shy doing the links between songs, although later on she told a few very bad jokes.

Albums:
Trailer Park
Central Reservation
Daybreaker

Looking at the stats for my site I’ve come across some very strange referrer strings.

Why are what look very much like porn sites referring to my site?

Very odd. My pet theory is that it’s some kind of weird advertising scheme, using fake referrers. Anyone else got any ideas?

Just found Blog HotorNot, most other people probably found it ages ago.

Five years ago today I waved goodbye to Grimsby, as well as to my family and set off for two years in Antarctica.

It really doesn’t seem that long.

Might scan in some of the photos later, if I can find them.

Found this at The Onion.

Also Chemists honour Sherlock Holmes, or should that be “Royal Society of Chemistry desperately seeks publicity”?

I joined the Heffers video club today, I got a bit fed up with Blockbuster on Mill Road only stocking the current Hollywood stuff. As my first video I got 101 Rekjavík.

About all I can say is it passed a couple of hours tolerably. Like the life of the main character it doesn’t seem to go anywhere and I was quite surprised when I read the IMDb entry to find that it’s supposed to be a comedy.

Maybe I was just in the wrong mood for it. I tend to be quite forgiving of films I don’t like, prepared to give them another chance. The only exceptions so far have been Volcano and Event Horizon.

Volcano was the last film I saw in the UK before going South and was one of those group decisions, where you all end up seeing the film none of you wanted to see.

Event Horizon was just unforgivably bad. If they had just copied a bit more of some of the films it’s derived from it would have been better, or at least so-bad-it’s-funny. Instead it was just dire. People walked out in the middle of it.

Today has been a pleasantly lazy day, got up late, wandered into town, wandered around town and had lunch at the Arts Picture House bar.

I recently joined up as a Friend of the Picturehouse so I’ve get to see a couple of films for free. Pretty much on a whim I decided to watch AKA.

It’s not a very happy film, which suits me as I tend to prefer dark or miserable films. The plot summary on IMDB doesn’t do it justice, there’s more information on the film’s site and at Picture House Cinemas. Several of the reviews miss out the point that the writer/director, Duncan Roy, based the film on his own life.

The director’s technique of showing three frames side by side, often different versions of the same scene, was intrusive at first but soon I didn’t notice it, in much the same way as subtitles. It worked really well to show how the characters could have different perceptions of the same events.

One slight technical problem I noticed was that it looked like it was being projected from a video projector rather than film and there was an irritating background buzz.

Wandering along Mill Road today I noticed that one of the estate agents had its window boarded up. In the middle of the board was a small sign:

It was not a brick
Somebody jumped/was pushed through the window
He wasn’t seriously injured
Due to the size of the window it will be some time before it is repaired
We are still open for business

(or something like that, my memory isn’t great).