I had a Boston phase and their first album still strikes me as utter genius. I’m not saying this one isn’t brilliant I’m just saying that I couldn’t tell you whether this album is good or not. I don’t think I’ve listened to it all the way through and all Boston listens are effectively part of a shuffle. It’s not something I deliberately choose to listen to.
Communication number 1936, here’s some shit that happened in that year:
Italy gains victory in Ethiopia.
Alan Turing introduces the Turing Machine concept.
Stress as a biological condition is first recognised.
Not overly sure why I got this! I think I had seen Blade Runner and wanted some nice calming music in the same style. I don’t know. I’m not sure I’ve played it al the way through. Sometimes songs will come on as part of a shuffle and it depends on my mood as to whether I skip or not.
This is communication number 1934. Here are some things that happened that year:
The Japanese invaded Manchuria.
The Philippines is given some autonomous control from the USA.
Yesterday I went to the cinema because I like going to the cinema and there wasn’t really a lot else to watch. The film was being shown in screen 8 and that’s my favourite of them apart from the shitty right speaker which I might have to email the cinema about, but still, a film being shown in screen 8 is a bonus. The traffic was bad heading to the cinema so I missed all the adverts which can only be considered a good thing but I’m experienced enough to know that the film normally starts 15-20 minutes after the advertised time. While checking the state of the tide I decided to take a photograph to illustrate the view I have.
The View I Check Every Cinema Visit
In the picture above you can see the Medway bridges, I wrote about them here, the North Downs and a little bit of Borstal along with boats and things.
Medway Tides – Annotated
I look for the following as I drive along the esplanade.
A – the edge of the mud bank.
B – the little water channel.
C – the “dip”.
D – how high are the boats that are anchored over this side of the river.
Each of those four things and how much I can see or not tell me about the state of the tide. I suspect I probably have spent too long of my life wondering about and looking at this view – who cares anyway?
After watching the film I rated it on IMDB and there’re communications that deal with the rating system but the most important one is this one. At some point after I’ve rated it I tweet the result.
There are going to be spoilers ahead so you should consider yourself warned that I will give away a lot of the film plot points in the next few paragraphs. Overall I actually nearly enjoyed this film. About halfway through I remember trying to work out whether I cared about the main character or whether I was just staying in the theatre to see how it ends and it turned out I actually wanted to know how the person coped. Now, let me point out something I think film makers need to know:
You don’t need fucking pop-scares to make a film scary.
I Parish
It was a touch annoying, for me, that this film could have been a decent psychological thriller and an investigation into a woman’s grief for her husband and yet, for me again, it was spoilt very slightly by the supernatural aspects of it. The big problem for these films and their relationship to me is that I don’t believe in any of that shit and so I just write it off as childish. Let’s get into this in a little more detail:
One way of interpreting this film is that, following a near death experience, a malevolent spirit keeps trying to claim the “soul” he is owed by whispering to the woman’s husband that he must kill her. To avoid killing the wife he loves the husband kidnaps and murders women who looked like his wife to trick the spirit into thinking he had killed his wife. Eventually the husband kills himself to save his wife from being murdered by the spirit through him. The woman knows nothing of this until she discovers some photographs on her husbands phone and computer of women who look like her. She considers killing herself to escape the torture of the spirit who has finally decided to take her on himself rather than act through a proxy. The woman’s best friend saves her and the neighbour sees a dark shadow on a boat.
The upshot of this interpretation of the film is that spirits want what they are owed and are willing to act through someone else to get them even though they can interact with the main person themselves. They are lazy? Or just like contrived plots? I don’t know. The film seemed to want us to believe this interpretation because of the shadow at the end of the film. If the film was written with this in mind then it really opens up many many questions about an awful lot of the film and kind of removes all the mystery.
For me, a better interpretation is that, following her husbands suicide a woman descends into psychological and emotional hell. She discovers some photographs on his phone and twists her reality around to make sense of them. Slowly, she goes mad, including hitting herself onto the mirror and making up stories about finding bodies. She suffers many hallucinations, including some of extreme sexual torture. The alcohol keeps pushing her towards suicide and eventually after deciding that she needs to die to stop her emotional pain she rows out on the lake only to be found by her friend who “saves” her. Now, the film stops at this point but it would have been far more scary and mysterious if this was the acknowledged reality.
I wrote the words “extreme sexual torture” in the previous paragraph mostly because this was mentioned at the beginning of the film and close to the end of the film I found myself wondering where the sexual torture was. I didn’t really see any. There was a statuette thing that the main character found but there wasn’t really any sex stuff. The movie had teased me but failed to deliver. Not that I wanted to see that type of thing. Sexual violence [unless consensual in which case I suppose you could argue it’s not violent] is a horrible thing.
To think the best of this film is to remove all the supernatural and just read the meaning as the complete psychological breakdown of a grieving widow. Humans are complicated enough without adding all that god-shit to everything.
This is number 1933 and so here are some things that happened that year:
I think all I had to say about FFDP I said in the previous communication about them. There seems to be a bit of a dip in quality albums in this area of the alphabet. Or, it’s just that there are a lot of Ts and coupled with my mistake of the “THE” word creates a stretch of albums I’m not fussed about.
This is communication number 1930 and I’m kinda trying to beat my “most in a month” record while at the same time trying to keep the quality up. It’s 19 days into the month and progress is good. I’ve got some ideas for longer communications too so maybe they will get written when I have some more time and freedom? Here are some things that happened in 1930:
The existence of Pluto, dwarf planet, is confirmed.
Lili Elbe begins sex reassignment surgeries.
A fire in the Ohio penitentiary kills 320 people.
The last recorded lynching of African Americans in USA.
The Pope stresses the sanctity of marriage, the ban on artificial birth control and the church’s view on abortion [what a cunt].
I got a number of FFDP albums after I saw them at Download and then a location in London. I don’t mind when one of their songs comes on in a shuffle but I am definitely not bothered about playing a complete album. I’m not too fussed by their double bass drumming all the way through complete songs. Chaps, you have to have variation. But then, I’m old so maybe that is the way to go? So, there may be good stuff on here, there may not. I’m also trying to beat one of my previous best communications-per-month totals so that is why I’m publishing a lot this month.
In 1928 some of the following things happened:
Frederick Griffith proves the existence of DNA.
A dam failed north of LA killing 600.
The voting age for women in UK lowers from 30 to 21. Prior to this only women over 30 and with property could vote.
Farnsworth demonstrates the first all-electric television system.
This is actually a really good album in that late 1970s way. I’m glad Jeff has made a shit-ton of money from this. I like the fact that the first Martians land near Jase’s house, also loads of the place names are places I know. But those two things were more about HG than Mr Wayne. Oh well.
Communication number 1927 so in keeping with recent tradition and recognising this communication feels like a “cheat”, there’s not much to it, here’s what happened in 1927, curated by me:
British troops land in Shanghai which is British [apparently].
The UK formally becomes the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
I think I own this because everyone thinks they should own this album. I don’t particularly enjoy Pink Floyd’s music and while some of it is quite good and catchy I find the rest dull and repetitive. Yes, I know, that makes me an awful person in the view of many but I just can’t quite get it. I’ve always felt like this about Floyd, not sure why, you can’t help what you like I guess.
There’s something about “best of” albums that ends up meaning I don’t play them much. I think I buy a “best of” because I know some of the songs and want a few more but I don’t want to be saddled with an album that might be a bit shit. So, I get a “best of” and I hope that I enjoy listening to it. Broadly speaking I don’t enjoy listening to it and I don’t play it that often. With Van Halen I really love the album 5150 and enjoy listening to that all the way through but for some reason having the “best of” doesn’t bother me and I don’t play it. I think my emotional attachment to 5150 belongs with when I first encountered it in my life and it takes me back to the summer of 1988. Live albums are slightly different though and while they are a kind of “best of” they are also different from the studio recordings and so you discover new parts to each song.
This is communication number 1922, so here are some things that happened then:
Snowfall causes a roof of a theatre to collapse in Washington DC killing 98.
Insulin treatment is successfully used for the first time.
Monza race track is opened.
The Barbary lion and the Amur tiger both become extinct in the wild.
After finally recycling all the crap from my garden at the Cuxton dump I went to the cinema at Rochester [not in Rochester, actually in Strood] to see The Last Letter From Your Lover. I noted the state of the tide as I drove to the car park and it was middling, I didn’t know whether it was going in or out but after the film it was definitely close to high tide, so now we know. After seeing the film I rated it on IMDB and then tweeted the result, there’s a whole system to all of that explained in this communication.
I almost didn’t go and see this film. I parked the car and pondered whether I actually wanted to see a romance film and I nearly went home to “waste” a few hours in the current Minecraft world that I have. But, I was here and I won’t have a chance to get to the cinema for a while so I decided it was going to be a positive experience. Upon entering the theatre I scanned the crowd [about 30 people] and I think I was the only man in the room – oh well. I’ve seen other films like that, when there’s been people not like me and me and I coped.
I enjoyed this film. It was a perfectly good piece of artwork and was a pleasant watch. While driving back home I was reminded of my maternal grandmother who went to the cinema quite a bit and she would have enjoyed this film. I remember chatting to her about a film she had seen once and she said it was a good film but there wasn’t the need for all the bad language. She wasn’t that much into swearing which was probably a generational thing? I swear a lot.
This film was focussed on the relationship between two couples spread over time and it was a kind of “love triumphs over all” message. I’m not sure I would have had that as my overall message, I’m not sure that’s a particularly healthy thing for people to think. I don’t think people should dwell too much on lost loves and I don’t believe in “true love”. I tend to think it’s just chemicals and we aren’t “destined” to be with someone, and we aren’t “soul mates” with anyone. I do understand emotional attachment though.
So, here’s my thing: for me the issue with this film was the inequality in relationships that has existed in societal expectations and the Law over the years. We see the 1960s couple at dinner and the MAN tells the wife basically to shut up with her intelligent ideas because she can’t know these things, she’s just a pretty woman. We see this couple argue over divorce and the law and society was so anti-female in those days that really I would make more of this in the film. I have massive issues with inequality that has existed over time and still does exist in our current society. I guess we kind of hope we are the best that we can be but just look around at how people are treated and you’ll see that it’s all a work in progress and sometimes that progress is negative.
Anyway, it’s a nice film. As this is communication number 1921 here’s what happened then:
The Jaffa riots kill about 100 people.
The province of Northern Ireland is created.
Between 100 and 300 people are killed in the Tulsa Race Riots.
