They baint pretty but they knows the sea

I have no idea why I was watching On The Beach today, I'm not on any kind of quest to watch as many depressing post-apocalyptic movies as I can or anything like that, but this one was a bit more jolly than most, even if the overuse of the tune to Waltzing Matilda made me feel like I was stuck in a lift with the Rod Stewart version of Tom Trubert's Blues for two hours.

I can't build a dresser and pleasure a woman at the same time - I'm not God

Hit and run post as it's now north of 1am where I am, and I have not had a drop of booze, so I'm blaming today's lack of productivity on an equivalent and simultaneous lack of alcohol in my bloodstream.

If I can't find my father a man to kiss and cuddle then I've failed as a son

Been watching the oddly beautiful When The Wind Blows, which juxtaposes humanity at its best alongside the worst we can do to ourselves: "those were the days" opines James of the War years, not knowing his rose-tinted reminiscence is humanity's eulogy, while his wife Hilda's mind is occasionally lost in vivid memories of the past and fanciful flights of fantasy even before the bombs drop.  I can see this in a double bill with Grave of the Fireflies if you're feeling a bit too chipper about the world, the actual holocaust itself is oddly metaphorical as it just seems that things fall apart, and I honestly can't see the like of it being made today as the lack of a Cold War to scare the pants off generations of children and bring home their mortality has caused zombie apocalypses and extinction by bad weather to dominate our fictions, and I get the impression all these scenarios do is distance us from the idea of our own mortality rather than make us face it.

Spill the beans, old man - word beans!

Somehow Blogger managed not to post yesterday, so that's a new wrinkle to look out for in future...

Been playing Tomb Raider today, and it's not much to do with Tomb Raider so far.
I find the actress an odd choice as they were harping on about how much we'd want to protect poor wilting flower Lara this time out and yet I find it impossible to warm to the voice performance at all to the point I've started skipping the cut scenes and care not a jot when she's choked to death in closeup by her would-be rapist, or crushed to death by falling rocks and the camera closes in on her face as she dies, or when she's stabbed through the heart with an axe, or shot to death with arrows, or when she cries and whimpers as I'm trying to play a fucking videogame - there is an odd emphasis on the suffering of your character that I am having difficulty ratifying with the supposed narrative demands of seeing the formative exploits of the character, especially given the character's oversexualised nature.  As presented so far, all we're actually seeing is someone being so abused and brutalised for the entertainment of others that in later life she is destined to become a robber and sociopathic mass murderer, it is all a bit rum to be honest.

We have entered the time when all will turn against us

I was skeptical of the US take on a contemporary Sherlock Holmes like most people because the yanks make nothing but shit tv inferior to our efforts like Top Gear and everything youth-related on Channel 4, and the early details suggested a potential car crash: set in NYC, Watson is a lady, stars Johnny Lee Miller, only knew it had started when someone mentioned he'd turned off a few minutes in because it was shite...
But Elementary is actually okay.  It takes an oddly divergent tack from the UK's Sherlock by not concentrating on Holmes' near-blinding arrogance (as one might expect given the success of shows like House that center on brilliant jerks) and instead on his social inadequacies, making it all very Monk-like at the start and causing me to hold out hope for an episode centering around a chimpanzee in a nappy being framed for murder.
It's nothing spectacular, but there's a confidence to the production that I don't see in stagey whodunnits like Father Brown or Ripper Street, and there's a potential endgame where a lot of what Sherlock does to Watson makes more sense if you assume that he's setting her up to eventually solve his murder, or at the very least to replace him, but the only serious gripe I have is that in one episode I suddenly hit a wall when I thought "when THE FUCK did I start thinking John Hannah in any role was a good thing?"  Spartacus, probably.

It's the world's lamest conspiracy

A low-key final panel - no witty soundbites and it isn't the central character of the book - but barring minor edits, the suspicion I should have redrawn years-old artwork and then doing a cover for it all, this pitch is almost in the bag.  Normal service resumes tomorrow - whatever that may be around here.

That would be really nice if it wasn't coming from someone who'd punched me in the face

Penultimate page on the comic and I'm playing Suits and Dallas catch-up while I work.
Suits has jumped the shark despite an appearance from Wendell Pierce, but Dallas is glossy trash as ever, even if it's hard to see past Larry Hagman's final turn as rattlesnake oil baron JR.  The other plots give it a good punt at getting your dander up and Mitch Pileggi and Faran Tahir always exhude an onscreen presence even if badly utilised - not that they're poorly served here, especially Pileggi's hissable panto villain Harris Ryland who I shit you not straight up gets to steal someone's child and then get JR'd by episode 3 - but Hagman steals it even when he's clearly deflecting the plot and the camera onto his co-stars.  I'm maybe imagining that there's an undercurrent of the character shifting his focus onto the well-being of his family because I'm looking for a bit of salvation and redemption for the old rotter, but either way, it's still moving to see him amble around the sets and just about do so under his own power, working until he literally could not do so any more on the role that made him.