ELLE Review
"Elle" starring Isabelle Huppert

           Director: Paul Verhoeven       

Make no mistake about it, "Elle" is a great film, in the truest sense of the word. It returns substantial dividends over multiple watchings, provokes productive and frequently profound conversations and (no less importantly) fascinating trains of thought. Better than that though, like all true works of art "Elle" does all these things on multiple levels, simultaneously. Like a highly- faceted jewel "Elle" rewards close scrutiny from many angles. Simplistically, "Elle" is the story of  the  female  CEO/founder of a software company which develops and publishes games; as a woman in a very male environment, Elle has developed very thick skin and a self image so armoured that it has become borderline sociopathy. She runs her company the way that Patton ran the third Army. She is either an object of terror or hopeless adoration to the young nerds who work for her.

Unexpectedly (several members of the audience screamed) She is raped, at home, on her living room floor, violently. It is not pretty or "erotic", in fact you should join the front of the queue for castration if you find you like it. So far so normal. In fact to this point "Elle" bares strong resemblances to the standard "cookie cutter" rape schlockers that are almost a fetid genre in their own right. But here "Elle" changes the paradigm; in fact the film grabs it and twists it almost out of recognition, and most unexpectedly, it does it intelligently and with real artistry. Elle does not call the police. After a while she tells her family and friends at a dinner that is rather rich in dark satire for those so inclined. They are surprised by her "no police" stance, but know better than to push their luck by arguing with her. 

So far so good, Elle has gotten her way, but the tension starts to ramp up when she starts getting clues that she is being stalked in her big house with "20-something" windows and its big, dark garden. You can see the skeleton of a conventional thriller here, can't you? But "Elle" has stripped out the conventional from the genre; gone is the handsome and reliable police detective who may be falling romantically for Elle even as he protects her and who can be guaranteed to get the lion's share of the limelight at the climax. Gone are the two uniformed police ordered to protect her "Around the clock" - only to fail (one way or the other) at the last gasp. 

No. Putting it another way "Elle" isn't crap. Elle's  remarkably complicated character is on her own. This realisation is written clearly on her face. It is horrible to see, but she carries on functioning effectively in spite of her fear, in one of the most inspiring characterisations I've ever seen on film. And you can forget the barge-loads of  'gunplay revenge on the man that done her wrong' films that the Americans have been churning out for years - like, for example 'MS.45' aka 'Angel of Vengeance' or more recently 'Nocturnal Animals'.  'Elle' is above all, gloriously realistic, Elle's unique character drives her initial unique decision and as the stresses on her continue, we learn more about her as she learns more about herself and the people around her until to audience is left with a completely faceted and perfectly polished tragic heroine. At the end of the film you feel that you *know* Elle - you may not like her much, but as sure as dammit, you'll respect her, and probably quite a lot and, by extension you may be slightly more forgiving to the hordes of other Elles who inhabit the real world inadvertently (or blithely) offending most of the people they meet, even as reality chews on them and spits them out.

Alex Rieneck

Probably the thing I do most on the internet is look at porn. I don't know that I actually enjoy ity much but I certaibly seem to do it enough, to the point where  to some extent, I actively hate it. I don't mean I'm especially conflicted, convinced that looking at people fucking is "wrong" or Heehee"sinful" -no I just hate how much f(ucking) time it takes up-time when I could be doing something useful like writing or drinking tea or contributing to wesites, or stuff-you know; and to make matters worse a lot of the time that porn takes up is time waiting for the fucking ads to download. and to make matters even worse the ads are just so fucked they make your eyes bleed so you can't even see the porn. The was one ad-and I mean, what fuckwit came up with this? A small yellow-on-black animated gifwould appear saying "my Penis Exploded" the word "exploded would vibrate violently so you got the idea Now *this* is an inducement? Or a warning? I, for one, don't want my penis to explode, I mean, consider the wallpaper! And I find my penis quite useful, and over the years I've grown quite attached to it and I'd pretty sure I don't wan't it exploding-especially while I'm wanking it.I mean I remember all those horror stories from back before they banned firecracker night-back when people were blowing biits and pieces offf themselves and other people with the explosives we lovingly knew as "bungers" -and can you imagine nowadays? Some mad, porn equipped ISIS crazed by Allah and some sort of radish Mullah, wanking under his robes until his penis *exploded*-blood and bodies everywhere- Tony Abbott finding the carnage slightly harder  to describe as the work of a "death cult"considering the way that the casualties have been fucked- and if you're still with me; considering the apocalyptic power contained within his own body- sine he is of course the largest penis in the world

Eye in th Sky Review

I hadn't heard of  "Eye in the Sky" until I found it inadvertently on the "Fliks" App on my phone at about 10am. Helen Mirren *and* Alan Rickman put the film miles ahead of any number of computer generated animals in the desirability stakes and I put my money on a 12.20pm session at the Palace Norton Street without anything in the way of qualms and I must admit without having read any reviews. I figured that any project that could attract two actors of the calibre of Mirren and Rickman had to have something to offer and since the trailer didn't imply the doling out of vast salaries, I figured I could expect a good script, the opportunities for decent acting and, likely, good direction. As it turned out my bet on the desirability stakes paid off, but it was a closer race than I would have expected and had it been an actual race at the finish I might well have screamed myself horse, Or hoarse, of course.

The subject is bloody interesting and pertinent. A remotely piloted drone flies around over a war-torn hellhole of a city. ten thousand miles away laundered, pommaded bureaucrats sit around discussing the most efficient way they can use it to kill people to get what they happen to want. Thats the gist of it, there is some emotional knee-jerk McGuffinry thrown into the mix to get the audience to take sides, but as far as I was concerned the "fact" that the target was planning a suicide bombing and other similar blather rather failed to interest me, instead what interested me was this pack of upper crust  British sociopaths in the true J.G. Ballard vein doling out unexpected death on the other side of the planet and weighing up the benefits against the consequences in the same way that a small company fine-tunes an advertising campaign. 

In fact in that image I am drawing close to what I see as the main flaw in "Eye in the Sky." - throughout the film, the leads never falter in their overpowering respect for human life; voices vibrate with gravitas at the responsibility of their power at blowing the crap out of somebody on the far side of the planet- but there is never much doubt that the targets at the other end of the chain are going to get fucked up - after all, they're a different colour and wear a different kind of hat, and you can't buck those sort of disadvantages- just look at the weight of history. And as far as history goes, just look at YouTube - the people who *really* do this for a living seem to have a  far more exuberant attitude to the job - or at least they did until most of the "offensive" videos were redacted, and "Eye in the Sky" appeared.  In their absence I am left weighing up the bathos of the feature film against the evidence of "Collateral Damage"  (https://collateralmurder.wikileaks.org),  But that "Eye in the Sky" is basically propaganda is neither here nor there, given the tenor of the times it could hardly be anything else, but as propaganda goes, it is restrained, and for the most part keeps its bias almost imperceptible. 

Its a difficult line to tread and it treads it well, as a film "Eye in the Sky" is consistently engrossing withe the acting, skill and direction  of an impressively high standard. Helen Mirren particularly ticked my boxes and I feel no qualms in saying that I gained almost as much pleasure from the sight of her trim camo clad butt as I did from her acting - which is no criticism of the film (or her) but rather an admission of  craven fandom for the great Ms Mirren who has been a movie star almost since before I was old enough to appreciate trim bottoms. Alan Rickman too is here in what will probably prove to be his last work and, rather like Peter Sellers he appears to have performed the rather neat trick of capping a good career that had a lot of crappy films in it, with a good performance in a good solid film though while this is no "Being there" neither is it a "Die with a Stiffie" episode and offers some credibility as a serious work. I have every intention of seeing it again and paying more attention to Alan Rickman and perhaps the script than thegenteel magnetism of Ms Mirren, if, in these benighted times, such a thing is actually possible.

Once upon a time....

once upon a time, a very long time ago, Apple was out in the dark, benightificated, all it had to eat was the grindings of it's increasingly blunt teeth and the bits of profit it could pick off Newton's head.(That's a JOKE boy! I keep pitching 'em and you keep missing them!) Then Steve came back and squeezed the Apple brand so hard it changed colour and became see-through. He kept on squeezing, longer than was wise some smarties said, until the imacs went all spotty, went"e" and were reborn, as white as ghosts  with a new CPU

In the process, on the shoulder of a wave of multicoloured iMacs, Apple produced the iphone 1 and the world simply shat. In truth it wasn't that wonderful and now five generations later, it'd only be an interesting museum exhibit (and one I'd like to play with but never mind) but the phone was so much in the way of "new" that the world could barely believe it, it was as if aliens had given the human race a pocket-portable wipe-clean internet complete porn machine. With one giant lurch (I would hazard a guess) birthrates dropped, eyesight got worse, emoticons mutated into colour and 3d, people got (It*was* possible!) Even stupider, and Apple shares bulked up, went green, announced "Hulk angry!" and just headed north.

Then Steve Jobs found that herbal tea didn't cure cancer but that Cancer cured just about everything, especially gullible illusions about herbal tea and the hubris of headstrong genius billionaires, and Steve died and the jackals at the other phone companies started feeding on his rotting body. Apple shares started smelling funny, and dropped in value. People started telling me that (for example) Samsung Phones were "just as good as Apple ones" and *standing their ground* even after I vomited on them! Night seemed to be falling again. Then Apple announced the apple watch and it all happened again. The world freaked out, the stock tickers overheated and caught fire, and it was the turn of the watch companies to see their stocks drop in the esteem of our fickle, fickle world.

It's interesting, I bought an Apple watch - it replaced the Pulsar that I could no longer fit on over my dysfunctional left hand, which replaced the Seiko automatic I'd worn for years for no rational reason.  

Review: How to be Single

the strangest thing, I found, about "How to be single" was that I kept getting the title wrong. I had laughed out loud at the trailer several times and my carer and I had started calling the film "the tit-punch film" after a line of dialogue in the trailer - we both knew it wasn't called that, but in the interests of communication we didn't care. We talked it over and I asked the ticket girl at the multiplex for two to "Learning to be Single" and she did a double take and corrected me, giving me tickets to the right film there being, due to some failure, only one film on with "single" in the title. 

The film started, I laughed a few times, true the jokes weren't especially witty but neither were they retarded and I wasn't ashamed to acknowledge the humour with a laugh. The film went on, tracing a indirect course between shallow and rubbishy on one hand and misplaced attempts at depth on the other. The film has a running time of ten minutes short of two hours and by the hour -and-a-half mark I was fatigued, fidgety and becoming crotchety. I  found myself starting to channel Kurt Vonnegut and mutter things like "If they think they can fob us off with *that* as an ending they can take a flying fuck at the MOON!" (I didn't shout "moon" but I may have muttered it more loudly-out of respect for Kurt Vonnegut). In any event I was very pleasantly surprised; the film saved up it's philosophical big guns to the very end and actually moved me to tears in the last few minutes of its running time and better than that  explained its own title in a sensible adult manner. 

It was weird. for about 107 minutes I thought I'd been watching a fairly trite RomCom then I found the reverse was the truth.

jonas the tiger, as a kitten, playing with a small dog. (no way am I spelling chewwahwah :)

https://www.youtube.com/embed/EdCVijVT7Wk

"Carol" Review.

Its probably for the best if I admit it right up front, from the shoulder, a goodly percentage of the reason that I ponied up the cash for a ticket to see "Carol was simple  prurienc e- I wanted to see Kate Blanchett "do" lesbian sex.- An admission which is rather sad in itself but which I had been able to justify to myself in various ways. The film had excellent reviews, a highly regarded director and was obviously not going to bea cheap perve, either to make, or to watch. In any event "Carol" promised to be an interesting experience, on several levels. First (which I should have expected) the course of true love does not run smooth Carol is in the process of divorcing a creepy bloodless vampire of a man who does his best to derail Carol's new life as much as possible. To give the film it's due I found myself frequently wishing that the character would simply drop dead and let the more pleasant aspects of the plot have free rein, Which is of coutse to bring us back to the core of the film; Carol (Kate Blanchett) a wealthy woman in the process of  a passionless divorce, meets  Therese Bliviet (Rooney Mara) when she serves her in a department store while she is christmas shopping. She is strogly (and beautifully minimistically) attracted to her By "Happy accident" they meet outside the store and inexorably a romantic connection develops between them. This part of the film is simply beautiful; Tentative, kind, light of touch and, from my personal experience, exactly like the first stages of a love affair. It made me feel quite nostalgic for happy times past One scene in particular tickled my fancy Therese (theyoung girl) sits at a piano and pick out a series of what sounded to me like random atonal notes there "proving " an inability to play. Carol, standing behind her listens and says "that's beautiful" with the rose-tinted ears of the early stage besotted. I giggled. I've been there, on both sides of the piano.

Carol's husband embrace's his inner arsehole and starts demanding sole custody of "their" child. This is the 1950's and women who love other women are opressed-disqualified from motherhood by reason of "low morals." Rather late in the day the film has found an axe to grind and grinds it with gusto- but mercifully, not for long. the film ends with long soulful glances that had this romantically amputated reviwer weeping with nostalgia and hope not unalloyed with simple wonder at the intensity of Kate Blanchett and Roony Mara's acting

Do I recommend Carol?Unreservedly- unless you are so sort of Christian/Muslim who has abandoned beauty and humanity for your sociopathic version of the "truth"-not that youu would haveread this far anyway  

the AbbottWock

Twas brillig and the Canberra drones

did gyre and gimbel on their thrones

all mimsy was the Bronwyn

 and the Pilbersek Outgrabe

Beware the Abbottwock my son!

The jaws that lie! the claws that scratch!

And escape the frumious Mirandasnatch 

He took his Caucus sword in hand;

      Long time the manxome foe he sought—

So rested he by the Tumtum tree

      And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in bullish thought he stood,

      The JAbbottWock, with eyes of flame,

Came soundbiting through the media wood,

      And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through

      The caucus blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and  its head

      He threw to the  media pack.

“And hast thou slain the Abbottwok?

      Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”

The Polls chortled in their  joy.

Twas brillig and the Canberra drones

did gyre and gimbel on their thrones

all mimsy was the Bronwyn

 and the Pilbersek Outgrabe

The Clouds of Sils Maria.

I swear, recently I've been exiting the auditoriums of film theatres shaking my head in wonder and disbelief. I feel as if the seasons have become disordered, as if seagulls have taken to flying backwards. Something Weird is going on for the last, I thnk about eight) films I have seen, none of them have been shit! For me, a very firm believer in Sturgeon's Law- (90% of everything is crap) this is roughly the equivalent of picking a quinella twice in a day at the races- in other words dashed unlikely.
Simply the story of "Sils Maria"  is that there is this famous actress well established with a long career. She is asked to perform in a revival of the play that made her famous when she was a young unknown; but there is a catch The play is the story of pair of women who form a younger/older lesbian couple. the younger woman destroys the older by manipulating her into eventual suicide. (in a typical example of recent period anti- gay  melodrama, in a period where gay characters never reached the end of a film aliv. the catch however is that this time around she has been asked to play the older woman- the tragic suicide. Needless to say she has certain issues about acceptance, not the least of which are being forced to confront her own advancing years through the distorting lens of the character she brought to life decades earlier. But, as the man on the old actors home of late-night television says "ther's more"in "reality" a year after the original play ended the actress who played the tragic suicide died in a car accident now decades later the returning star has an entirely superstitious dread that the part may be "jinxed"- despite a noticeable paucity of evidence; But then aren't actors known to be remarkably superstitious people?
If this lead character sounds like a very complicated piece of work from my description here rest assured, she is. in matter of fact the I cannot remember the last time I saw a film as complexly charactered as "Sils Maria"- or as consistently well acted. Juliet Binochet surpasses good by a substantial distance. It is hard to believe that she is acting, she is so natural, but at the same time she is so all-encompassing that she can be nothing but a true star at the top of her form. that said she is very ably supported by a talented cast who seem to exist as a complicated melange of voluble intelligent and witty people. It's been a long time since I have enjoyed the company of a cast so much.The film moves on and ultimately, to my percerption, proved to be spooky in the very best way. As my wheelchair rolled out of the cinema to a drizzly cold Sydney day. I found that I doubted the sunlight. In Hamlet's words "There are more things in heaven and earth Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy

A Tangerine Confussion

I don't normally do this-in fact, I've never done this before. I have never plugged a film before I've seen it. "Tangerine" a true-to-life-drama-about transexual hookers. I couldn't be happier. In fact, I am beyond joy. I am enriched. I laughed out loud several timhttps://youtu.be/ALSwWTb88ZUes during the trailer and I almost cried from pangs of nostalgia. you see, a few years ago, back before I got sick, I moved almost exclusively in the Sydney chapter of that subculture; well, as exclusively as I could manage anyway. I had two girlfriends, one was (and still is) a biological girl, the other a out-and- proud transgender. They knew about each other, accepted each other and for some unknown reason, were prepared to share me. I was head-over-heels in love with both of them (still am). In the daytimes I showed a distressing tendency towards professional journalism, in the evenings we were either in the "la cage a Folle" home of my T-G girlfriend having a loud and raucous tea party or at the other house communing with the cats (our proto children) or watching films or I was out and about touting my reasonably priced rear-end to those whose dickering did not impede their dickering.

Excepting for a blockhead

I just spent the last hour piddling around with Amazon this was a bit of a surprise; one of those "Time just vanishing things" As you may know I have a story available on the Kindle store, and I decided that I should check the stats in a "monday morning- "businessy"  kind of way. It was a bit depressing; rubbish sales, represented by a few paltry spikes on a graph and a lot of advice from snake oil salesmen at Amazon. Jaded, I blundered away from Amazon through my computer to the  story in question and reread it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I liked it. It didn't make me laugh, (but then it wasn't written to be funny) Instead, it kinda creeped me out in a "made me doubt the sunlight" kind of way. I finished it and I was in a somewhat complicated emotional state. - Abit raw from the stats on Amazon and life generally, a proud as a post orgasmic whore on her way home from a freebie orgy, that I had managed to write a story good enough that if I had encountered it in a paper book of short stories, I'd have marked it on the index page, and finally(but not least) creeped out by my own story and, living alone the only place I had to tell the story was this blog. I'd be happier if I lived with a cat.
See you on the flipside

"The Corner" on Amazon

Ages Of Adeline Review

I guess I should say right at the start that I saw "The Ages of Adeline" very largely by accident. It was a Thursday (last Thursday as a matter of fact; my day out. It was fornicating down with rain. Neither of us wanted ti get wet... so we decided to go to the movies snd after some serious trolling of IMDB decided that "Boy's Choir" was the best choice of the paucity on offer. We didn't count on the effect that the rain had had on the roads howver and unexpectedly, well, somewhat expectedly found ourselves at  outer reaches of Randwick, in the theatre foyer while it pissed down with rain outside. "Boy's Choir" had started twenty minutes earlier. The "Randwick Ritz is a multiplex"Adeline started in 45 or so minutes> I suddenly switched to "Plan 2 from outer space; and we went for coffee and lunch while waiting for "Adeline" to start. to be blunt, it wasn'y that hard a choice. I'd read a bit about the film in the car on the drive over and the whole premise of the film interested me; besides liking the central idea of the film rather a lot(someone coping with immortality in modern society) the premise was pretty similar to something I'd already written and Bluntly, I was interested to see how someone else approached aspects of the same subject and, possibly more to the point, I felt it was a really *big subject to communicate in 100 minutes of screen time  , so there was a kind of sadistic interest in watching the film. It was a last-minute choice but one I approached with some appetite. true, my appetite was partly mechanistic, almost to the point of cannibalism, but I was ready to be entertained and I figured that it was all up to the scriptwriter to do that. as the lights went down in the auditorium I was happy. As I said before, the idea of how Adeline becomes changed so that she becomes immortal and stops ageing while everyone around her grows old and dies is a fascinating one but it is complex-to explain it inferentially, by cinematic action, the way someone like, say; Hal Ashby might would take up so much screen time that there would be little time for anything else. It was predominantly this that I was interested in. Instead, I was blown away. the film thros the putative "rule book" out with the bath water it has been soaking in. The script takes the core issue of the film, treats it as pure science fiction and bombards the audience with an information packed narration that is so filled with "scientific" goobledegook that I didn't have time to laugh. The audience is simply tol all the flapdoodle necessary to the plot and left to deal with it.The vast majority of the film's running time is then free to devote to the interesting stuff.I was astounded by the audacity of the technque to the point where I almost wanted to stand up(!) and applaud. Frankly Scarlett. I was impressed!To go into the film in any depth from this point would probably create inadvertent spoilers; Suffice to say that as far as "lovey-dovey"tearjerker type chick flicks go, I enjoyed it. I didn't cry, and was not overtly moved to but at the same time I was pleased that, as such films went, it was not overly manipulative. I was interested and impressed by the parallel the film drew between Adeline's predicament and "normal" people and the life of their pets.It was a poignant and telling analogy and one of many thingss that raised "the Ages of Adeline" above the common ruck of cinematic product. I found it moving intelligent, thought provoking, and well worth recommending.

EndGame - Samuel Beckett

EndGame Review

SydneyTheatreCompany

7:30pm. 7May 2015

Director:Andrew Upton

Writer: Samuel Beckett

Hamm:Hugo Weaving

Nagg: Bruce Spence

Clov: Tom Budge

Nell: SarahPerse

The setting appears to be the interior of one of those deformed stone watchtowers on some damp Northern coastline. It appears that the expansiveness of the exterior functions more as a barrier to escape than an environment to inhabit causing a claustrophobic atmosphere that has taken years or decades to surpass simple cabin fever and become a kind of societally stratified balanced madness. The inhabitants of the castle exist as a kind of diseased bickering muddled mini- society which can be taken as symbolic of our "normal" society as a whole, (or not) depending entirely on whether the interpreter has an axe to grind. Suffice to say the characters are "Hamm" (Hugo Weaving) who spends the play ensconced in a comfortable armchair (which may be seen as a throne) (or not) and who orders everyone  about. He describes himself as senile, so he may be seen as a king. His especial servant is “Clov" (Tom Budge) who runs hither and yon about the stage at every beck and call and being far more mobile than the rest of the cast, is responsible for the physical comedy. Its a big job, Mr Budge is on the move for the entire play scuttling from one side of the stage to the other. His main prop is a twenty foot ladder and I lost track of the number of times that he climbed it, all the way to the top; after carrying it across the stage from one side to the other. No housepainter works so hard; I pitied him and wondered that at the end of the play he seemed to still be word perfect, even as he glistened with sweat. Actors delight me. 

Hamm is a less likeable character; he sprawls backwards in his chair bossing Clov, bellowing when he thinks it will achieve his purpose; bribing Nagg with sugar plums when shouting fails. In short Hamm is every inch a king, but not the phantasy monarch of king William and Kate - he is more the nasty reality of King Rupert (Murdoch) himself the unvarnished face of power itself. 

"Why do you obey me?" Hamm asks Clov, “Is  it because you love me?" "I loved you once", replies Clov, getting  a titter from the audience who interpret the line as reference to some past homosexual pecadillo that has left Clov "unmanned" and effeminated, fit only for service. As far as that goes, the one service which Hamm truly desires is the most poignant and happens to be the one which Clov sadistically(?) withholds.  At one point Hamm exclaims "if you must hit me, don't beat me with the dog - use the Axe!" Hamm is apparently very old, and wants to die, but can't, giving rise to one theory I have heard, that these three characters are already dead, and the surreal place they occupy is hell. but then as I said earlier, ”EndGame" is surrealistic and symbolic, a horse which may be hitched to a variety of wagons, some undoubtedly unintended by the author. 

The  performances (particularly Hugo Weaving’s as Hamm and Tom Budge as Clov) are flawless, and Bruce Spence beaming up at the world out of a garbage can is not something I will soon forget - nor will I try to.  Sarah Perse does rather better than can be expected with the little that is available to the character of “Nell” - But Beckett does not seem to write for women.- For most other playwrights “Nell” would probably be  a lynchpin character perhaps even the bone of contention, the lone woman between three men - but with Beckett she is anything but that. Instead existing merely as a kind of inferential proof that the male characters are not necessarily homosexual since they have a putative outlet for any profane lusts which may disturb them. Beckett is a strange writer. interesting, but strange. 

I unreservedly recommend this production of “EndGame” by the Sydney Theatre Company. The perform

Off the Roll

Pages, now don't get me started about pages. WTF happened to "Pages?" Oh yes, Steve Jobs died and without his pointy-toed boot/rump steering technique, the once adequate ship veered off course, filled with water, started wallowing in heavy seas and suffered an embarrassing series of slow speed mutinies by disinterest. most of the managers made their hair go all pointy with product and then took to the boats. They were last seen contentedly fishing, and living  frugally off their retirement savings. In the meantime, the application they were meant to be developing as a flagship of the Apple Mac, was largely ignored, went to seed and started growing,and quickly became firmly rooted.as "the most beautiful Wordprocessor, everI can still remember Steve Jobs introducing Pages  "the most beautiful Wordprocessor, ever-to dutiful, but faint praise, after all, the"faithful" had already been through the mill with Word" and could be forgiven for thinking that there was no such animal as a beautiful word processor-still less a tame one and probably not one that wasn't a vermin-ridden varmint either. to paraphrase Mark Twain "when I hear the word(s) 'word Processor', I reach for my revolver."Then on the big centre screen, the master showman started putting 'Pages' through its paces-and the crowd's heart's melted."you wanted a picture in the text? Plonk! Pages wrapped the text intelligently around rhe picture."move the picture? The text flowed seamlessly around the picture as he dragged it around the page

The death of iMovie, and its rotting Doppleganger corpse.

Another Post, almost straight away! I'm a workaholic and on fire! I need to build up a back blog! More seriously, my first entry, by way of being an introuction did not get down to the serious business of this blog which, as I see it is providing the kind of trenchant criticism that Apple sorely needs and Steve Jobs pointy-Toed right shoe and acid tongue can no longer deliver. In this world of time servers, second raters and mealy mouthed apologists for timeservers and second raters and their apologists I have decided to regurgitate myself back out of the wodwork and start throwing lumps of wet excrement at worth targets- wittily, hopefully accurately and with the unique and hilarious use of imagery that has seen me making a complete guts of myself at some of the finest court tables in Europe. But while it is unseemly for me to brag of having entertained my way into fine vittles at for example the table of the Marquis DeBerriberri, it would be dishonest to let the reader think that I have not on occasion, entertained myself into a businesslike slap in the face and a pleasant but lonely stroll home, in the wake of the last bus. Such is Journalism, indeed, such is life; The days of journalists being issued their own minisubs in which to escape are long past.

so, too are the days of the apple Mac having a movie editing program that isn't crap. Seriously, I was watching one of the last Keynotes with Steve Jobs,-there were already rumours that he was sick, but everyone was simultaneously hoping they were wrong and dutifully trying to keep the stock prices up by keeping a stiff upper lip, and- Lo and BeholdSteve says one of the worker droids at Apple buttonholes him and says "Steve; You know how we say noob can make a movie in iMovie in 5minutes?" And
Steve "Yes
Droid"Well, you can't! You try!"
Steve "And you know what? I couldn't!"
(Cue shocked audience laughter)
And there I am, laptop on my lap, mouth open in stupefaction"WTF?!" You see, the day before, sitting in that very chair with the same 12" Powerbook 867mhz on my lap I had used a program of dubious provenance to filch two videos of car crash tests onto my hard drive; I'd cut them into shorter pieces, rearranged them, added credits and music and come up with, as far as I was concerned, a very creditable mashup. Fair enough, from nothing to being on Youtube had taken 33 minutes, but so what? by the time I saw that keynote 12 hours later, it had gathered 7000 views, and as far as I was concerned that worker droid (if he actually existed) was as liar or an intercourse-wit. What was the result of this? Apple wasted resources second-guessing itself on the say so of one Grima WormtongueAnd one perfectly good an functional iMovie got replaced with a horrible directionless Frankenstein- monster abortion that to this day, years down the track I can't get any senseof, or useable output from. I'm probably going to have to buy final cut-I'd like to slap that droid with a fead eel.
 but, all things being equal, the video (at) https://youtu.be/U65Iws4BZqo will have to stand as my testicle-ment of how much I still hate that useless nitwit.

"Well, HAL, I can definitely find things wrong with it"

well people, here  is Alex Rieneck, back to quacking on about Apple Macs again, this time for wages even more paltry than those doled out by Auatralian MacWorld (being a columist pays well enough, but not *that* well, when you take the general wonderfulness of the recipient into account. Different to is that in this blog I am my own boss and not bearing the vast weight of an inert management structure on my shoulders in this blog, (which gets its name(AE-35) from a piece of technology in Stanley Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey"I'll be keeping myself to the same strict guidelines I did back then, for the simple reason that good writers like discipline like word counts, correct spellings and grammar, a minimum of off-colour humour and language, sticking to the subject in hand, and perhaps most importantly, having an appreciative readerhip.Now back at macworld the readership were appreciative. Sadly the ones in the wheelhouse should have paid more attention to driving and less to appreciating what they were reading.Still, who would have expected an iceberg in the balmy south Pacific? Especially a cunningly camouflagued concrete one with a missile silo inside with hundreds of minions to protect the fiendish plot that had been explained only the chapter before?
Certainly not James Bond, that's for sure!And sadly, in 2015 not Steve Jobs either; because he got unexpectedly dead just before the last ad-break; one second he was jumping and ducking through a hail of missiles fired by the deadly Mr Cancer- bouncing up off one of the circular-saw blade onesand getting off his own paltry shot. The crowd was with him! Mr Cancer's health bar was creeping down towards the orange!the Samsung creatures seemed to have been vanquished! and suddenly Steves' sprite was replaced by a badly- animated explosion sprite, that shrank to a single white pixel, and went out. The screen was as dark as the interiors of the shocked mouths that hung open around the world. Slowly the screen filled with bright, false colour, swelling music. An advertisement for herbal tea. Was the Show over? The sewage flow meters emotionlesslessly reported the increase of Herbal tea content in the pipes, and the rest of us were left to muck on in the aftermath. this blog is for the last scarred remnants of the post jobsian wasteland, where everyone can tell those big scarey creatures *Aren't * just dressed up water buffaloes and the Samsung Creatures have shiny white teeth and really do eat peoples brains.