Good lord, insane weekend, made slightly more insane by the fact that I'm trying to type this while a large, fluffy, ginger hobbit attempts to sit alternately on my lap, my wrists and my keyboard. Friday night was movies, of which more anon, and Jewel Tavern, which is now in St. George's Mall and still makes damned fine Chinese food in large quantities. Saturday was the very relaxed, very pleasant, rather drunken wedding celebration of librsa and first_fallen (the drunkenness is all Carlo's fault, him and his shooters, pshaw), with the chance to see all sorts of people I haven't seen in weeks, months or years. Saturday night we broke out another bottle of wine and my new DVD copy of The Middleman, to which we are satisfactorily addicting the Evil Landlord at suitable speed. This morning Michelle abducted me for lunch in Kalk Bay, with champagne. Tonight sven&tanya fed us enormous quantities of lamb. Tomorrow I roll gently into work, almost certainly still drunk, at an advanced hour, and will probably proceed to achieve not much until the fog has cleared, which I confidently predict it'll do around Tuesday. This will be just in time for supper with jo&stv and then book club on Thursday. Memo to self, must really go back to the gym.

Friday night's movie was Up, in 3D, and I cannot recommend it sufficiently highly. Pixar are damned good at what they do, and what they do here is refreshingly lateral, unexpected and at times moving as well as hilarious. Apart from the 3D, which is still magical and actually used with commendable restraint, it's a very good script. The whole thing is slightly off-kilter, galloping off in mad and unexpected directions; the main character is an old man, the main plot doesn't really resemble any Hollywood cliché I can think of, and the whole is leavened with offbeat humour and very human pathos. The initial sequence covering the main character's life with his wife is particularly lovely and extremely lump-in-throatish; the dogs are hilarious, even, or perhaps particularly, to a non-dog-lover.

Where I think the film most succeeds, though, is in its purveyance quite simply of fantasy, in the sense of humdrum existence transported suddenly into colour and excitement: the house and all its rainbow balloons is an extremely potent symbol of uplift, escape and possibility. The slight off-the-wallness of subsequent events is thus perfectly in keeping with what is effectively wish-fulfillment, the happy embrace of the impossible as a fantastic antidote to the mundane. Bonus points for magical floating-balloon-house scenes, Cordon Bleu dog chefs, the Cone of Shame, a randomly demented villain, and Kevin, the giant chocoholic bird who takes on a beautifully-animated and highly endearing life of its own. Above all, though, this is about dreams: how vital they are, how compelling, and how they aren't about what you thought they were about in the first place.

In the Department of Middlemania, Episode 6 is a bit thin on pithy exclamations, although I'm partial to "Holy onions!", "That's dirty pool, I'll clean his clock!", "That really steams my clams!" and "Chocoholics Anonymous!" The episode made me very happy by being intensely rude about boy-bands and plagiarists, and supplying, straight-faced, the phrase "A duck's life hangs in the balance". This show, how I do love it.

Memo to self: must get back to knitting, I stumbled over all that lovely crunchy green-and-gold banana fibre in my stash drawer this morning. Only not on the edge of any cliffs.


In other news, my father is be-computered, ADSL-empowered and email- and web-functional, with only one trip home to collect a fresh keyboard, and two phone calls to the helpline (ADSL needed to be enabled by Telkom, and the smtp address on the documentation was WRONG!). The Imaginet helpline guys are pleasant, concerned and know their stuff. Unlike the bastards at Café Viva, whose latest iniquity was discovered this morning: somehow in the course of their futile investigations they managed to break off a connection in the DIN socket for the keyboard. Now it won't take a DIN plug at all, hence the trip home for my old USB-fitted keyboard. All the DIN/USB adaptors in our house went, alas, in the wrong direction. There's the techno-jinx for you.

There's still a significant portion of my psyche which seems to operate at about age 8, particularly when confronted with anything in the "oooh" category - the magical, the unreal, the not quite possible. Magicians elicit this response, as do fireworks and parkour, and now, apparently, so does 3D animation. I've never seen a 3D film before (bad film critic! no biscuit), and Coraline on Friday night was a truly amazing experience productive of a great deal of "oooh"ing, wriggling ecstatically in my seat and a sort of suspended wonder.

( Review cut at egadfly's request. )

Phooey. I've just accidentally ordered two copies of the DVD of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a movie for which I have an extreme, guilty, swashbuckling-Victoriana passion despite its almost total lack of actual merit. Free copy going to the first person who asks. (In Cape Town, preferably, so I don't have to send it all over the show).

One of the starlings in our road has learned to make car alarm beeps. When I left the house this morning he was sitting in the tree doing that obnoxious "gosh it's dawn wow yay happy!" thing that birds do (and what's with that? Somewhere in human civilisation we went badly wrong if we can no longer muster the enthusiasm birds do for a new day). His usual "twootle fweeple tweet twee" pattern mutated when I hit the alarm button to unlock the car, to go "twootle fweeple tweet BEEP!" - he had the artificial tone perfectly, I thought for a moment my remote was madly unlocking mother's car parked in the road outside. He repeated the BEEP pattern a couple of times, in a companionable sort of way, and then went back to the "tweet twee" one. I'm not sure why this sort of thing makes me happy - possibly simply because starlings are cute and cheeky, but also because I like to think that not all aspects of human civilisation are necessarily bad for our non-human co-habitants.

So, as the subject line somewhat laterally suggests, mother and I went off to see WALL-E last night. ( Vague Commentary Follows. )

Incidentally, if anyone else caught the rest of the re-enactment poodles bit on the credits for Presto!, please let me know, it's driving me crazy. Teh Internets know not of it. In addition to the initial "Civil War Re-enactment poodles" box there was another one with "Re-enactment poodles" plus two adjectives, and I cannot remember the adjectives. Magnificent? Spectacular? Phooey!

I celebrated the completion of the thrice-damnéd progression coding yesterday by not only tripping, falling and buying some David Bowie, but by finally taking myself off to see Ratatouille. I'd got out of the habit of weekday-morning movies, an error I shall attempt to rectify: seeing a film with three and a half other people in the movie theatre (one small child, well-behaved) is bloody near ideal, as far as I'm concerned. Having an inner Scrooge, and all...



Ratatouille is an interesting film. It's written and directed by Brad Bird, who did Incredibles, which I have grown to like over time in my usual wayward fashion, and the film certainly represents his characteristic purveyance of a far more adult take than is the norm in animated storytelling. But it's a strange choice of movie setting and plot in a lot of ways. I honestly don't think the kiddie audience will be able to access a lot of the film, which is firmly situated in the incredibly pressured and snobbish world of French restaurant cuisine; while the main character, the rat Remy, is an endearing and expressive little creature, his desire to be a chef doesn't really speak with any directness to a child's experience. I'm also not sure how far the film's setting will appeal to a mainstream American audience: the French milieu, while slightly caricatured, is quite lushly and approvingly depicted, which is worlds away from the classic Disney tendency to animated othering of exotic cultures.

I suppose what all this seems to be saying is that this film, paradoxically given its success, isn't made for the average audience. The gradual drift of mainstream Western culture away from actual cooking and into prepackaged meals means that a lot of the film's detail will not really resonate with an audience, other than the small fraction of serious foodies. (And it's bloody rude about fast food and convenience food). I, of course, loved it: the kitchen and cooking are depicted the loving detail, and the animation process gives both reality and an idealised gloss to beautiful copper cookware, proper chef's knives, high-quality ingredients, artistic plating and the dexterous speed of a professional cook at work. A lot of attention has been paid to the food in artistic terms, and it's beautiful. It's also authentic; apparently the animated team spent months in various French kitchens, working with professional cooks, and agonising over the precise shade of lettuce and how to depict authentically rotted veggies.

To me, then, the film was worth seeing just for its depiction of cooking. The rest of it - well, shrug. It's a cute story, the classic underdog following his dream in the face of all odds, and has some reasonably standard feel-good elements: peripheral love story, the resolution of a father/son relationship, and a somewhat tongue-in-cheek and agreeably hokey provision of nasty villains, sad and ultimately redeemed villains and evil lawyers. Oh, also lost heirs, deathless car chases (by scooter and rat paws) and a mad old granny with a shotgun. The story was fun and not quite predictable, which I do appreciate in a movie these days, but I found it slightly slow-paced. Ultimately, though, that just gave me more time to perve the kitchen scenery.

It's funny thinking over this in retrospect, because I can't quite work out why I'm not ravingly enthusiastic about the film. I enjoyed it, but not wholly; I loved the cooking bits, and appreciated the animation, but it didn't colonise my imagination in the way I think it really ought to have done. Sad. But see it. It's fun.

Nicked off the Whatever, this amazing and slightly brutal piece of dreamy, whimsical animation. Music by Kwoon, about whom I know zip.

Apparently I can now also post YouTube video. Soon the entire Internet will be within my grasp!

One of the occasional side-effects of what for want of a better word I'll call my academic "career" is the need, now and then, to spend an evening watching strange and unlikely movies. Last night the exigencies of encyclopedia entry formation required me to view two recent Disney films I haven't seen. Yes, this means I sat through Brother Bear*, gritting my teeth, curling my lip, drinking rum, and at intervals muttering or shouting imprecations, among them "patronising colonialist sods", "get a zoologist, dammit!" and "aaargh." It's a crappy little film, full of cute bears, brotherly love, noble shamanistic savages, inspiring pristine vistas filled with Exciting Wildlife, TM, emotional uplift and irritating music. I hated it. (Apart from anything else, it was incredibly short on actual female characters).

Chicken Little, on the other hand, was a surprisingly agreeable little film which suggests that, against the odds, Disney may be slowly waking up to the twenty-first century from their Sleeping-Beauty-like residence in the 1950s. I didn't have much expectations from the new Disney foray into 3-D computer animation, but in fact bedazzling technological skill has always been their raison d'être, and there are some wonderful effects in this one: the sensibility is very much the squash-and-stretch playfullness of the early 2-D cartoon. The animal-town is pleasantly goofy and at times slyly satirical, and while the usual rampant stereotyping is prevalent, the core characters who, predictably, win through, are rather endearingly geeky. Also - and this, given my known proclivities, is possibly the bit I enjoyed the most - the alien spaceships are simply cool. However, the heart of a potentially postmodern and rather entertaining alien invasion degenerates rather limply into the usual Disney family-values clichés, which horribly undercuts the inventiveness and off-the-wall subversive possibilities in the early parts of the film. So, an improvement in terms of postmodern sensibility and wit, but in the final analysis, alas, it's business as usual, and Disney is Disney still.

* Thank the gods, Home on the Range is a Disneyfied western, rather than a Disneyfied folkloric perversion, so I felt able to ignore it. There is a limit to my dedication.

A thousand words on Tim Burton, in just under two hours. I've been stunned, and looking at the world slightly skew, all day. It's also been a bit of an abrupt transition into the next topic, which is George Macdonald, the Victorian Scottish minister whose Christian fantasies inspired both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. However, having just seen Narnia and re-read the series, I feel somewhat braced for maddened theological allegory.

I am forced to the realisation that the amount of socialising, and attendant house-cleaning, in the last few weeks has been perfectly ridiculous. The madness of Boxing Day and New Year were followed at a neatly week-long interval by the Evil Landlord's combination birthday party and garage-warming on Friday night. This filled the house to the brim with a slightly different assortment of friends, mainly his, obviously. I realise that they are, on average, considerably larger and more male in weighting than the crowd we have in common, and consequently, given all the height and deep-chestedness, create a noise level several turns up from previous parties. The demented neighbour did her usual stint of thunderous, pointed window-banging, swearing and the odd witch-like cackle, although this time she didn't actually sprinkle our back courtyard with her hosepipe. It was a pleasant evening, but, as aforementioned, loud, and full of large people. Other than Friday it's been a blissfully quiet weekend, generally, which was becoming highly necessary. I bunked an SCA event yesterday on the grounds not only of pressing Tim Burton, but the realisation that in my current post-festive state, putting me in a room with anything more than about two other people at once is a sure recipe for someone's kneecaps being gnawed. I enjoy socialising. Up to a point.

Today's perfectly delirious discovery: an actual justification for the existence of Harry Potter. The New York Times has an article on a medical research paper which discovers that the rate of admission to an Oxford emergency room for musculo-skeletal injuries in the 7-15 year age-group drops to half of the norm on the weekends when a new Harry Potter novel is released. The paper is pleasingly tongue-in-cheek in tone, although the science appears fairly real; the authors were interested in the effects of Harry Potter on injury incidence given "the lack of horizontal velocity, height, wheels or sharp edges associated with this particular craze." They conclude that there may be "a place for a committee of safety-conscious, talented writers who could produce high-quality books for the purpose of injury prevention." (I'm quoting chunks because NYT is a login-only site, and you may not wish to create a login.) Given that Rowling is, generally speaking, neither safety-conscious, talented or a producer of high-quality books, I can only regard their hypothesis as speculative in the extreme.

That Jo&Stv, they're completely insane. In a good way, I hasten to add. Their page of so-called "Friends" is worth a look, if only for the value of so much lateral in a small space.

The other movie I watched last night was The Day After Tomorrow, as a sort of finger-on-pulse test of the progress of ecological consciousness in the Hollywood machine. While clearly a fairly bad and predicable movie (not for nothing was it made by the same people who did Independence Day), I found some encouraging signs for my underlying and more-or-less continual ecological angst. Obviously, they did the Global Warming Takes Three Days compression, which is inevitable, given the expectations of pace in Hollywood action films; equally obviously, the whole global warming thing was merely an excuse for mucho special effects and cheesy moments of heartwarming human endeavour. Also, Jake Gyllenhaal may just be my candidate for replacing Tom Cruise in the irritating stakes. However! encouragingly, the doom-saying climatologists were the Good Guys, and the Evil American Economy and Adminstration wore the black hats. It strikes me that the only way awareness of the clear and present danger of our rampage through our natural resources will ever impact on the soft and squidgy consciousness of the Average Western Dingbat, is through overstated images of giant waves pulverising Manhattan and multiple tornadoes in LA. Enough movies like that, and the knee-jerk reaction of the led-by-nose consumer might be usefully conditioned into something other than "Kyoto Accord Is For Bunny Huggers." At any rate, some of the annoyed right-wing responses to the film are entertaining... :>

Whee! RottenTomatoes has an ad announcing that Miyazaki's version of Howl's Moving Castle opens on Friday in the US! *does joy dance on tips of toes, setting off coughing fit*. This means I may be able to lay hands on the DVD in the forseeable future! Diana Wynne Jones in anime!

The three-day headache turns out to have been some sort of bug, I have a lovely, racking chest cough that has dropped my voice about an octave, and aching joints. Bugger. On the other hand, it's good to have an Actual Enemy on whom to blame the headache. Not that it bodes well for the week of exam marking I have lined up, but hey. *bode, bode*

I managed to soothe the whole wounded beast this evening by finally watching Belleville Rendezvous, an enormously off-beat and off-the-wall French animated movie of maximum charm, intelligence and laterality. Amazing story-telling with practically no dialogue. So pleasant to experience something non-Hollywood, whimsical without being saccharine, deliberately paced without being slow, beautifully animated, and very retro. Jazz, and old ladies, and frogs, and French mafia, and incredibly cool fun poked at obsessive cyclists. Can't recommend highly enough, in fact. Go and find the DVD if you haven't already. *makes shooing motions*

I struck a blow for Career Paths and Networking and other useful stuff by having lunch yesterday with a lovely professor lady from a New York university, who it transpires, lives in CT for half the year, and dabbles in fairy tale as an aside. It was forcibly borne in upon me that, in fact, in true rarified PhD fashion, there is not actually anyone else in this country with whom I can talk academic shop. She knew most of the critics I only know by their work and e-mail. I may have to add this to my reasons to flee the continent. (1. Weather. 2. Can't talk academic shop. 3....?)

Must take hacking cough off to bed. Evil Landlord keeps wandering into my study after a paroxysm and wanting to know if I'm dying, and whether it's contagious. I shall practice coughing on his feet.