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.