August All At Once
Well we're near the end of August and I've still not been back to work. The balance is all over the place (ha!); some days I think I'm actually okay and things are going well, then the very next day I'll be feeling sick as a dog as the world spins around me. It's really hard work, staying in all the time, although I have had some company and I don't just mean Archie! Yes, almost fortuitously, the past couple of weeks have seen the Olympics and they've made ideal background TV to keep me company. As you may or may not know, I love the Olympics anyway, hell it's the two weeks every four years that I absolutely adore sport (although still not soccer, it's got no place as an Olympic sport!). So I've seen the UK win lots of medals in the sailing and the cycling, hell even a few in the pool, and then completely dry up once the second week started and the track and field began. It was however a truly spectacular event, and despite everything I've said and written about China and it's human rights abuses somehow all that seemed to fade away with the beauty of the opening ceremony. Everything seemed to run like clockwork (as it would, communist country after all), and the presentation, the scale, everything was just stunning. Even before the games had finished our representatives are saying well obviously China is going to be the last of the games as spectacle, our intentions are much more modest. How the fuck is that possible? It's the OLYMPICS, there's nothing modest about them whatsoever, it's the fucking world gathering to celebrate sporting achievement. I'm already nervous and embarrased about what we're gonna do. I mean the Chinese opening ceremony was really spectacular, a wonderfully choreographed extravaganza depicting the history of China. What the hell are we gonna do? Is it gonna be as spectacularly misjudged as our recent Eurovision entries? I suspect it'll be some god awful attempt to appeal to some focus group, rather than honest artistic expression. And the venues... all they're talking about is legacy. Well, excuse the fuck outta me, but "legacy" isn't gonna be something that's visible during the games, or to the world at large. Certainly I can see the importance of providing something of use to the people left behind, but on the other hand they knew what they were bidding for when they did it, so it shouldn't be a surprise when they need to construct another stadium in London! Unless we didn't really want to win and were just applying to look ambitious, try and make all the other countries jealous, which actually wouldn't surprise me in the slightest now that I've written it. And why London anyway? It's not like it's exactly poorly served with facilities of every kind, why not something more central like, say, Birmingham! Fucking London, has to have everything...So yeah, the dizzy. Well I've been given these exercises to do which will supposedly make it go away, but so far they're really rather unpleasant. Couple that with the fact that I'm supposed to sleep upright for the first couple of days after I've done them and I'm really not feeling all that bright. I can fall asleep in a chair with the best of 'em, but god forbid I should have to do it while propped up with a pillow mountain in bed.
So what else've I been up to? Not a lot to be honest; tried to read as much as I can to keep my mind occupied, played some video games when I'm up to it; the appalling thing is that there's not much I CAN do in this condition. Still haven't seen The Dark Knight, which somehow seems both a terrible crime and also terribly unimportant. Even though I've little idea of the overall story, I've kept myself as spoiler free as I can, I somehow feel like I've already seen it, know it. Which is weird. Each day just drags on, they melt seemlessly into one another, one pointless expanse of time blending into the next with little to differentiate one from the next. It's been great.
I have caught up on a few horror flicks though, Alexandre Aja's remake of The Hills Have Eyes, which is extremely effective and true to it's source material, and with the same wonderful bleakness of Craven's 70s original. So that was good. Wolf Creek however... I've heard and read so much about it, I was expecting something really special and it was just another redneck movie. Now hell, don't get me wrong, if I have a favourite horror sub-genre it's probably the redneck movie, I just expected this one to be a little more creative, perhaps more extreme in it's tortures, whereas it plays it all according to genre rules and really doesn't surprise or shock in any particular way. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it, 'cos I did, I just expected more. My favourite new horror though has to be KM31, a Mexican horror which was a lovely mix of ghost story, j-horror style and Mexican folklore. It also has a fantastically ambiguous ending, which I thoroughly enjoyed. Check it out if you can.
And that's that.
1 Comments:
Is KM31 gory?
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