I have been and read three reviews about the film Mother! which I saw yesterday and didn’t like. I’m curious as to what it is about the film that was liked so much by the critics.
. . . . I found Mother! an increasingly exasperating experience – a claustrophobic exercise in ghastly black comedy; relentless, ridiculous, and occasionally panic-inducing. Yet give it time to settle, and the labour pains of watching Mother! produce something that you could grow to love.
Apparently this film is an observation of the world as a whole. I did feel claustrophobic, I wanted to see outside, to escape the house, but I will not grow to love it.
Aronofsky’s film is . . . . a fevered allegory of humans versus nature, a grotesque, Goya-channelling creation myth mash-up, a parable of artistic obsession, and a psychological horror set inside an introvert’s worst nightmare.
Well, that’s OK then. If you decide to interpret it non-literally then you can impose any scenario entirely on it. Here’s one for you: it’s an allegory of the life and times of Lady Diana. See, easy. You see what you want to see.
Employing biblical allusions with tremendous finesse and huge ambition, the director unleashes apocalyptic fireballs of condemnation on his targets. These include the control organised religion exerts over women, the cult of celebrity, and the vanity of the male creative process.
So, not about earth but control.
So, I like artistic films. I like clever films. But I did not like this film. Also, Aronofsky made Noah, which was bollocks too!
I’m reminded that Hollywood loves films about Hollywood. Want to win an Oscar? Then write a film about Hollywood. I think one of the reasons critics love this film is that it gives them the chance to place upon it all the anguish, threat and allegory that they learnt about in school.
I went to see Mother! to try and make up for the mistake that was American Assassin. The tide was in and the river was quite still. In fact it has been a calm day here altogether in this part of Kent. As is usual I rated this film on IMDB and you can read a description of the rating system in this communication.
I did not enjoy this film. I watched it to the end just to see what happened and hopefully answer some questions like WHAT THE FUCK WAS GOING ON?
A more accurate title would be “Following Jennifer Lawrence around a house for two hours”.
In the past, when I have encountered a film I hated or didn’t get I have read through reviews and explanations before writing this. Not this time. I will go and look after this is published.
Sometime last week I noticed that the number of tweets I had sent was nearing 10,000. I’m not a massive user of Twitter and a lot of those would be to do with the automatic tweets generated by this website. Every communication I write creates three tweets to catch most time-zones around the world. I’ve just over one thousand communications and so that’s around three thousand tweets.
While keeping an eye on the count I had a few twitter conversations and was pretty sure I had got through the 104 barrier. I can’t see where in the iOS app there is a count so I had to wait to get to a PC to see how many I had done and count back if necessary. This morning I did that and the count was 10,011. The number on the website said 10k but you can hover and see the real number. So, I counted back and I am so very proud. My ten thousandth tweet was:
Being as plain as I can, Ress-Mogg is a cunt. He has antiquated views which he backs up with “faith”.
I am so chuffed. What a brilliant comment to have as a power of ten tweet. In case some of you aren’t sure why I think that, then read this about his comments on gay sex and abortion. You could also read this for his views on foodbanks.
There is a slight controversy here though. I recently requested my twitter archive as I keep a copy for your interest here. Within this there is a csv file which I have looked at and counted the number of rows. It only comes to 9975. So, there’s a discrepancy between my archive and what the twitter website says. I’ll use the website as I don’t think I could have planned my breakthrough tweet much better.
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
Well, given how fictional god is this is more about me asking for there to be light in my house and the lights turning on. Nothing particularly supernatural there. Just fucking science, baby.
My sister has an Amazon Alexa/Echo tower thing and it was actually quite fun to ask it questions and get answers [most of the time]. So, I bought a Google Home. It is a nifty little piece of kit. I don’t think it looks as good as Echo, the home is more organic whereas Echo is quite futuristic looking and flashy lights.
The voice control works really well. It’ll be better when Google becomes better at interpreting questions and answering them. The “tell me a joke” feature is amusing.
Google Home
When I was in the south west I met with a friend and he has an LED light made by Phillips. I am not really one for lights in the house, I lived for years without any lampshades on my ceiling lights, but I like the tech involved in the Philips device. They don’t make the actual model my friend had but they make a similar one. I have a table lamp in the corner of the dining room that I use a lot. It provides just the right amount of light to the centre of the house. I thought I could replace this with a colour lamp. So, I investigated Hue lighting by Philips.
I initially bought a starter pack with E27 connectors on the two bulbs. The expensive bit is the bridge to the home network. There is no need for it to be as expensive as advertised so Philips have added a premium to that device. The individual Hue lights are a reasonable price as long as you want white. The colour devices are expensive, I think.
Philips Hue Bridge
So, it turns out that most of my ceiling lights are bayonet connectors, not E27. I wasn’t sure where to put the new bulbs! I ended up putting them in the kitchen. So, I had to get some bayonet fixing LED bulbs for other areas of the house.
Now, the main lights in my house are voice or app controlled. The lights up the stairs and by the backdoor along with the bathroom light are still manual. There’s a fan attached to the bathroom light so that one probably can’t go wireless control and the others aren’t used much. I did get the colour lamp for the dining room.
Corner Lamp
The lamp can be any of the 16 million colours you can get with a 256 graduation of each LED. You can use the app to load a photograph and match the colours from that picture. It’s a good piece of kit. I also believe it can be used to match colours on a television to add mood lighting, but I don’t have a Philips TV and won’t be getting one.
The lights don’t have to be light controlled. The switches still work. If you turn the lights off [at the switch] and then on again the default position is On-100%. This means other people can still use your house if you need them to. They might feel silly talking to Google to get the lights on.
Oh, it did take over an hour to get Google Home to register the Hue Bridge. That was largely because the iOS app has a problem and it only really works via an Android device [this is forgivable given Android is Google]. I was using an online chat help window to figure out how to connect the two systems. The person on the other end of the line was helpful and patient. Especially as I had to download a new app on the Android tablet which, in normal circumstances is easy, but my Play Store had been not been working correctly for a few months. I had to roll back the Play Store software to then be able to download the Home app. This is what took the hour. Google Help were really good and everything is now connected.
It’s still odd asking someone to turn the lights on. I still forget now and then, espeically when leaving a room and I automatically physically turn the light off. Then I wonder why it’s not connected to the network when I get home!
I am looking forward to the some lights turning on automatically when I get home. I’m also looking forward to my parents being in my house and then lights turning on when I come back from the shop or wherever!
I am currently working on the Raspberry Pi I have installed in the loft as a web server and aircraft spotter. It’s been a while since I mentioned it here. I thought I’d just chuck up some images.
Aircraft Tracked
This picture gives an idea of how many aircraft can be tracked at once. Be aware this was early on a Sunday morning.
Radar Splat
This splat shows how far away aircraft are detected. Please note I am not where the blue dot is, that would be quite weird. The smallest locus is up to 9,999 ft, the green is 10,000 to 19,999 ft, the purple is the 20,000s and the red is above FL300.
So, I went to the cinema to watch American Assassin. It was that or Mother and I plumped for stupid action. I rated this film on IMDB, as usual, and there’s a communication that deals with my rating system here.
Sometime back I started using the Strava app on my phone as some friends were using it and they weren’t on Map My Run. The Strava app has the ability to use a photo taken as the main picture in the saved area rather than a map. I think it looks quite good and I have been trying to take a photograph whenever I am out running.
Having spent a weekend in Bradford for the Infest music festival I also got time to wander around the city and soak up some of its heritage.
While driving from Keswick to Bradford via Kendal I passed a road direction sign saying:
Bradford
Bingley
This amused me no end as most of you will know the Bradford & Bingley was a building society that was taken over by a bank [I think]. I had not realised they were the names of places. This maybe due to their advertising being based on two bowler hatted characters called Bradford and Bingley.
This area of the UK is lesser explored by me. I spent a week near York but didn’t actually go into York so this was a chance to find out about a northern industrial town.
On Saturday morning we needed some liquid latex and so used Google maps to find a shop that would hopefully sell some. It was in a shopping centre. On the way we passed the town hall.
Town Hall
This was actually quite pretty and built using local stone as a lot of the city was. The drive into the university the day before had highlighted that this city, while once great, wasn’t that great and had suffered a lot of economic depression. There were many boarded up buildings and run down areas. The overall tide is turning though as new shopping centres pop up in the centre, but the long term economic benefit of these doesn’t seem useful to a town. They might make the locals think the centre is nice and it looks good but the vast majority of money spent there will leave the town and head to corporations elsewhere in the world. A thriving shopping centre is not the economic boon to a town I suspect locals think it is.
The Kirkgate Shopping centre looked like a 60s build. While walking there I think we went past five Greggs shops. I get it that they are quite cheap but I’m not sure that’s a good sign. The Joke Shop in the market area of the Kirkgate sold liquid latex along with cheap sex toys and bongs. A funny little shop with an odd clientele.
Just What You Need
I had, in the previous week, been discussing “seaside” joke shops with Penguin and we wondered if there’re still places that sell joke fingers and snappy chewing gum. I was glad to have found this little shop.
Centenary Square
After a nice breakfast we wandered back the University and music and escape.
The Sunday morning meant that I wanted to have breakfast and also see the Science and Media museum. It’s possibly even a “national” museum. Just Googled that and yes, it’s a “national” museum.
Firstly we went to the Cathedral to have a look and it was “churchy”. There were some historical aspects that were interesting but I wasn’t that bothered. Little Germany was close by and we wandered that and saw the mural dedicated to a band of socialists.
Power To The People
The Waterstones in Bradford is in the old exchange building and very grand. A lovely space and ideal for selling books where those hushed tones of a library abound.
Waterstones, Bradford
Then the science and media museum. It was free and we wandered the history of photography which was pretty good and had a very lot of cameras. A lot of the older exhibits were reproductions, which I don’t like so much but, I understand why they are like that. We didn’t go into any of the temporary exhibitions and maybe that is where the value is in this museum but most of it was a bit boring and shit. As I explained previously that could be because all the museums I’ve been to before this are in this nation’s capital and large and big. I’ve also seen museums in Washington DC, maybe they aren’t representative. Overall I was disappointing by the museum there wasn’t a lot of science [none] and media was underwhelming.
Bradford seemed a little sad to me. A once majestic northern industrial town / city that has suffered and only now seems to be rejuvenating using shopping centres and little else. I hope it changes constructively, there’s a lot of glossing over the cracks when financial investment isn’t done correctly.
This morning [just, it was an 11:50 showing] I went to the Rochester Cineworld Cinema down by the Medway’s edge. Earlier in the day I had run along a stretch of the tidal Medway and also the non-tidal part above Allington lock and then later I found myself parking alongside the river but on the western bank.
I went to see It and after the film I rated it on IMDB, you should see this communication as it deals with the ratings system.
Before the film started there were trailers for a weather disaster film called Geostorm. This looked absolutely terrible. The timing of the trailer with its gratuitous floods and storms was pretty poor given Harvey and Irma this month. Another trailer for a horror film was called Jigsaw and I couldn’t give less of a shit for watching it. I’m not a horror movie fan. Mostly because they don’t scare me, I just think they are stupid. Then there’s a film trailer with an interesting guilt start which I thought should be called “We should have gone to Vegas” but was really called The Ritual. That looked hilarious too. AND there was a trailer for a modern Flatliners!!!!!! Along with The Lost Boys, Flatliners is one of the seminal films of my teenage years, it scared me senseless! The new film looks just ok.
IT
I’ve read the book a long time ago. I’m not sure I could tell you a great deal about it. Certain things stick in the memory but who knows? I also watched the original TV series with Tim Curry as Pennywise and remember it being good. I remember the adult characters but not a lot else.
This film turned out to be chapter one. You can’t do a Stephen King film in two hours. Especially It. Mazza and I once watched all of The Stand on video back in 1994/5 and that was a whole evening job, six hours I think. Good but long.
I recall the book being about the adults remembering the summer previously but I could be wrong about that. The overall set up was good. The film was good. Jump scares are boring. For a truly terrifying experience there needs to be a film with little incidental music. As it was so long ago that I read this story I don’t know how faithful it was to the book. It served memory well. Apart from the child orgy.
In the book there is def a thing where Beverly Marsh has sex with all the survivors of the experience. I think it happens in the barrens. It’s written in a very sensible way. This film version avoided that. Maybe the 1990 version did too!
I would be tempted, if I had the time, to go back and read the book or watch the last version of the film. The book is significantly more detailed. But then it would be.
The second half of my summer break was spent wandering the Lake District and attending the Infest music festival in Bradford. I had a very good time and did a lot of driving. I am quite convinced that my wheel balance is out very slightly for speeds above 70 miles per hour, there’s a fine vibration there but it’s not that often you can go faster than that here in the south east of this country.
I wasn’t deliberately keeping an eye on my fuel consumption as life is too short to worry about that. Life might be considerably shorter in future due to excessive fuel use but owning Bora Horza Gobuchul gives me a slight advantage in the smugness over non-hybrid drivers.
Consumption
This image shows that over this trip I did just over a thousand miles and returned a fuel consumption of 59 miles per gallon. That’s not bad. It’s a shame Bora Horza Gobuchul doesn’t report in litres per 100km which I think I prefer, but goodness that won’t catch on, it’s waaaay too European.
