Director: Marc Forster / Genre: Drama / Actor: Khalid Abdalla / Actor: Atossa Leoni / Actor: Shaun Toub / Actor: Sayed Jafar Masihullah Gharibzada / Year: 2007
Child Rape Pakistan Taliban Afghanistan Adaption Coming of Age DVD

The Film…
Though most of the film is set in Afghanistan, these parts were mostly shot in Kashgar, China, due to the dangers of filming in Afghanistan at the time.

The plot of the movie follows that of the novel. It tells the story of Amir, a well-to-do boy from the Wazir Akbar Khan district of Kabul, who is haunted by the guilt of betraying his childhood friend Hassan, the son of his father’s Hazara servant. (cc) Wikipedia

My Thoughts…
Been interested in seeing this film since hearing some time ago about some rather intriguing business surrounding a child actor having to be relocated to another country due to stigma over being involved in this film. All very strange.

Any poop, this film is impressively multifaceted with several parts (separated by many years) and poignant imagery throughout. I cannot knock the film-making, pacing is spot-on and the recreated afghanistan pre-the russians mucking it all up is wonderful to see.

Only problem is I can’t help getting a general air of superiority on the american film makers part, it all becomes rather “oh thank god they escaped that nasty afganistan place to the paradise that is america where they can live in peace and freedom!” ‘Cos like no other country in the world, including ones rather closer to afganistan are free. I’ll give the film makers the benefit of the doubt (and the original author i guess) that this sentiment is un-intended, but I believes its rather naive for them not to see how it could come across that way.

My Rating:90

aka “This Special Friendship”
Director: Jean Delannoy / Genre: Drama / Year: 1964
Coming of Age Based On Novel Child Gay Boarding School YouTube

The Film…
a 1964 film adaptation of the Roger Peyrefitte novel Les amitiés particulières directed by Jean Delannoy. The plot revolves around Georges de Sarre, a fourteen-year-old boy who is sent to a Catholic boarding school in 1920s France. Georges starts a “special friendship”, i.e. a friendship with homosexual overtones, with a twelve-year-old student, the beautiful Alexandre (Alexander) Motier.

My Thoughts…
My word was this film difficult to track down, it doesn’t seem to have ever been released with english subs, at least not on DVD. Believe it or not I ended up watching it on YouTube split into 18 parts. Crazy!

This film has some parallels with Romeo & Juilet. Only where the forbidden factor of their love being entirely different and it is incredibly touching (I say that too often). What probably makes this tragic love story even more affecting is the incredible and joyous charisma of the kid who plays the younger boy. I also feel respect for the older of them for not showing any sign of shame, and for freely talking about his love with a friend of his own age.

The ending kicked the air out of me, twice infact, but I’ll try not to spoil it. Ugh, it all seems so unfair.

My Rating:93

Director: Jason Reitman / Genre: Comedy / Year: 2007
Pregnancy Teen Divorce Adoption Drama Romance Independent Film

The Film…
Ellen Page stars as the title character, a sharp-tongued teenager confronting an unplanned pregnancy. (cc) Wikipedia

My Thoughts…
The great cast really make this film sparkle, or was it the script. Could be both? Wizard. So anyway, I guess Lovely would be the word for this one. Awww, Ellen Page is so…. Well I can’t wait to see what she does next career wise.

But my overwhelming feeling after watching this is, I reeeeallly want to watch some episodes of Arrested Development right now… For the 200 millionth time.

Oh and the adorable asian girl protesting abortion so totally reminded me of Monica Wolf.

My Rating:92

A few weeks ago the royal mail went on strike.

A message on their website reckons that normal service has resumed up and around the country except for london, well in that case Sheffield must have merged with london woohoo! I’ve always wanted to be a londoner.

Maybe amazon have taken advantage of the strike action, or many the royal mail are taking advantage of amazon but something between the 2 sucks.

The first obscenely long delivery time to me was the Orange Box for the XBox 360. It was dispatched on 18th October. It reached my rippling, excitable lap on the 27th of that month. 2 days after my Xbox had expired.

More recently was Heima by Sigur Ros, which I discussed earlier. This beautiful item was pre-ordered by me significantly before the launch. It was shipped on launch, the 5th of November. Woo I thought. Well, I checked the letterbox outside our house every day drooling at the prospect of melting to Jonsí’s amazing voice. I was going mad, it wasn’t until the 10th that I finally received it.

Also, our regular post-woman has disappeared. Which is upsetting because our beloved Eddie really liked her, and she liked eddie. She’s been replaced by some idiot who at first didn’t even know how to use an outside mounted post-box. I reckon she’s a scab and that the royal mail have sacked the strikers.

But what annoys me the most is that the royal mail are now running adverts on the TV, claiming to be the “Peoples post office”. Unbelievable. At a time when we all absolutely loave them they are wasting money on nonsensical commercials. Get your act together or lose your “Royal” crown.

Yeah, so Eddie’s post-woman must have have held to her guns.  She was a hero, a defender of what is right for what should have always stayed a nationalized industry. Yeah, wherever Eddies friendly post-woman is, may you enjoy peace and prosperity.

And I hope you return to S7 soon.

Well I dunno what to write about, but I reckons I ought to say something so I guess I’ll just throw a load of random shite at yerz.

My friend who got married last sunday was someone I’ve known since primary school.  When I was 7 or 8 or some nonesense.  They now live in the South and I hadn’t seem them in years,  only spoke online.  So to suddenly see them at their wedding and being their best mate was mighty weird.  Was supremely fun though.  And although doing a speech was scary frightning I’m glad I did, and all the folk there were wonderful about it, telling me it was great and being all supportive (I think they got the message that I was stressed about it all).

This friend now lives in Woking and the wedding was in some middle of nowhere idealic place near Guildford.  I’ve never been to Sussex before and my god is it lovely down there.  Kind of makes the “north” seem a bit crappy all told.  Another world around there.

I’m rather miffed because i’ve suddenly noticed that lots of jpg’s have somehow had their timestamp  mangled on my mac.  Dunno how but the jpgs underneath my “pictures” folder now have “24/07/07″ as both their created date and modified date.  How the heck am I supposed to know when things were taken now?

Strangely, DNG’s, ORF’s, TIFF’s and PSD’s under the same folder are OK. Gonna take some sorting out.

It’s been a tiny bit damp in sheffield today, or rather, it won’t stop freaking raining!

Rain rain rain, and more foookin rain. And now the weathers gone and done it and started causing deaths, which just ain’t on. People get angry when that happens and they may start shooting the clouds or something, just to show em.

I didn’t get a chance to take any photo’s before the sun went to bed, but if you search flickr for sheffield and photo’s taken today you’ll get the general idea.

It’s crazy really, sheffield seems to have taken the brunt of the rain and it’s all over the news.

Eddie went for a walk close to the park down the road and the area is covered in police and fire crews, and they’ve got dingy’s out. Millhouses park it pretty much covered in water and they’ve closed it off, which Eddie wasn’t happy about and made a bit of a fuss.

It was today that that I had to see my therapist and she was all giddy and a bit weirded out because half of her garden has collapsed, it was on the side of a muddy cliff type affair (I’m sure theres a word for that) and I guess all the rain made it unstable.

Ooooh enom have finally actually read an email I’ve sent them instead of hitting the automatic response button.

They’ve sent an email to circlehosting and cc’d it to me.  I’m 99% sure they won’t get a response but the positive news is that they quoted a 24-48 hour time frame which gives me Carte Blanche to raise hell at 9pm on Thursday.

Also, if I have any more problems contacting enom a commenter(djtalk) suggested opening a free account with enom and using their web based support instead of blindly tossing out emails.  Neato.

Why I must have strange neighbours and a neat way to store your personal info.

Yesterday I was using my iMac when suddenly a bluetooth dialog popped up offering a jpg, I was the only one in the house but still I instinctively scanned my surroundings.  No poltergeist had gotten out it’s PDA.  Still, I nervously accepted it. And that image you see was the fruit.  Very…Odd.  I especially am concerned that judging by it’s wonkyness it appears to be a poster.  So now I’m thinking, is this stuck on my next door neighbours wall?

Even worse I didn’t think I had bluetooth enabled, I’d hidden the menu icon, but obviously not actually disabled the functionality.  Well I have now.

I’ve come up with a neat idea.  Use keychain acess on the mac to keep personal info, like pin codes and shit that you might often forget.  I haven’t read about this anywhere else so I can only presume that i’m either a genius for coming up with it, or there’s some major security based reason for not doing this.

If you open keychain access, which is probably in Applications/Utilities, but it’s just easier to quicksilver it, you can manually add keys.  Click the wee +.  And look, the password box is multi-line, you can write an entire paragraph in there if you wanted.  So go do it.  You seem to need to manually enter your login name and i’m presuming its best not to forget.

Also important, after adding a new one, you need to immediately open the new item and go to the access control tab.  Click Ask for keychain password.  Also, whenever you revisit this item always click “Allow Once”.  If you accidental click “Allow Always” or you discover that it seems to be letting you view the item’s password box without entering the password go back to this access control tab and remove “Keychain Access” from the list of applications.

There’s a list of Categories on the left, but i can’t seem to get them to do anything, my keys always just end up in “Passwords”

Hey, I should have investigated this more before turning to wordpress.  Seems there’s a special item for making notes.  “File->New Secure Note Item”.  Hmm, mind you, unlike the password type, I cannot see a way to undo having accidentally allowed access always.

Written in Buzz with nothing more than my fingers this stark plodder has some bleeps and bendy bleeps and what seems like a particulary untalented drummer in the room.  It’s from 1999.

CashMouse.m4a 

Susan has gone crazy, she’s now jumping up and down, screaming at the TV for being all tied to silly content providers.

Unlike a lot of people in the UK we get our TV via cable. I stress unlike, because from what i’ve always gathered, cable TV is a lot more prevalent in the US than it is here. Over here the 1 satellite carrier (sky, owned by rupert murdoch) is by far the biggest provider of “pay tv”.

But yeah, many years ago our pavements around here in sheffield were dug up and cables strewn underneath them and we ended up signing up to “Yorkshire Cable”, mainly I think, because my folks didn’t like the idea of having a satellite dish on the side of the house.. Some time afterwards Yorkshire Cable became Telewest. And now, just this month has become “Virgin Media”. It’s a merger of NTL and Telewest, who between them took over Virgin Mobile, for no other reason than to be able to market themselves under the Virgin brand. We’ve ended up with a TV service with one heck of an identity crisis.

Actually there’s more than just TV, we get from cable both phone and broadband too. Virgin have overhauled their tarrifs, naming them all after clothes sizes. ‘Cept, the actual meat of these tarrifs are sod all different from what we were getting from Telewest. They’ve been going around shouting about how its a brand new company with bold new ideas. Yeah right.

Today the funniest thing happened. Carreige rights for Virgin Media to show Sky’s general entertainment and news channels are due to expire next month so they have been in negotiation. Sky have been asking Virgin Media for double the price per customer for their channels and Virgin have declined. This now means that come next month we as virgin media customers will no longer be able to watch “Sky One”, once the hallmark of the multi-channel age.

But sheesh, soooo freaking what!! It’s one of the laziest waste of space TV channels around! Not a single piece of original programming, just american imports, which us with broadband can watch at will anyway.

So I say, good on you Virgin Media. You may not be offering us anything new, but out with bad rubbish is a good start.

This is their statement about the whole ordeal. Quite an oddity, because earlier today it was a standard texture page, now all the text is a bitmap for god knows what reason.