Bohemian Rhapsody

“Bohemian Rhapsody”

Queen are a band who’ve been around for donkey’s years and you probably think you know them. At one extreme you might know the song “Bohemian Rhapsody” word-for word and sing it in the shower, or in an annoying falsetto at members of your family when you want to annoy them. At the other end of the spectrum, you might be dismissive of them as a band saying, (as someone did to me this morning) that they were poor musicians, on the basis of a generalised ignorance of the band’s volume of output. The film “Bohemian Rhapsody” addresses these two extremes of viewpoint head-on. It pleases the true fan while educating the ignorant and dismissive to a truly remarkable degree. This film *creates* fans out of unbelievers and fans alike.

All in all, I found “Bohemian Rhapsody” to be an experience very like seeing “blondie” live on stage. I’ve been a fan most of my life, know all their stuff, adore some of it and have gotten used to hearing it playing softly in department stores and lifts, where it never fails to put me in a good mood; which is of course, why they play it. I saw them in the State Theatre Sydney. Debbie Harry was the size of my thumb.

Far from being the muzak that plays in a department store or a lift, Blondie were an utterly tight, almost perfect pure rock band that had the entire theatre on its feet. Bohemian Rhapsody is like that. Its not just a film about Queen’s music its a transfiguration of the band. The film embraces the band’s history and shows Freddie Mercury’s lightening quick evolution from “not Pakistani” baggage handler at Heathrow to officially deified rock god at Live Aid. In doing this in the space of two hours, the film picks up believer and non believer alike and whisks them along creating fans and worshippers in its wake.

Bohemian Rhapsody is a remarkable film, perhaps the best rock music movie I have ever seen. 

Short Story

A Polite Request. 

by Alex rieneck 9C) Alex Rieneck 2018 All Rights reserved

by a“Stop that!” I hate it when you people do that!”
My immediate reaction was that I had developed Schizophrenia and that the voice that seemed to come from the top left hand corner of my bathroom had in fact come from some hitherto neglected but now raucously nutty corner of my brain.
The voice said “Stop that too, you aren’t getting out of this that easily, you aren’t schizophrenic.” Which instantly led me to think that my disease must be more advanced than I’d feared. It was one thing to hear disembodied voices, quite another to have conversations with them.
“Well, if you aren’t a symptom of brain rot, what the hell are you then?” I’d been in the toilet too long, I’d already shit and the toilet seat was starting to hurt my bum. I needed to clean up and go back outside to start getting ready to go out for dinner. This was interesting but it was threatening to take too long.
“I’m sorry, I should have introduced myself but you interrupted me and I snapped. My name in the old Hebrew, is Yahweh. You probably know me as God.”
Oh God
“Thats exactly it.”
What is?
“You called me, you were squeezing that huge torpedo out and you called me; Well you didn’t *call* me, you *howled* me – you know your haemorroids are your own responsibility don’t you? General upkeep is the responsibility of the body occupant; not mine.
*And* you’re still smoking- are you an idiot?”
“So there I was going through some paperwork, and you howl at me to come and watch you scrape out a big shit with too much chilli in it.”
I didn’t mean that!
“Shuttup! You people are always doing that, calling me, or my son down to watch you orgasm into your ugly bloody wives … or children, or altar boys or livestock or whoever. Honestly, some of the things I’ve seen at orgasm has made me sorry I bloody invented it! The Holy Ghost has it easy, no-one ever interrupts him when he’s playing video games to watch them banging away at a glory-hole.”
Oh.
“Now its too late for today, you’ve already interrupted me, but the next time you do a big poopie, could you please, please, leave me out of it?”

I didn’t need to speak.

Journey’s End.(2018) review

Journey’s End

I admitI have never seen or read the original play “Journey’s End” and, given my life history I feel almost embarrassed to admit it. But when I thought about it I realised that as far as modern audiences go – specifically audiences for this film, practically nobody else would have either, 1. remembered that productions of productions of the play are very rare, 2. it had never been on any reading list I’d ever met and 3. though very successful when it opened right after the First World War, it had very quickly vanished in the worldwide PTSD that had the world trying very hard to forget that the war had ever happened. So I decided that seeing the film with the same ignorance that the average viewer would have could well be seen as an asset, rather than a disadvantage, and so I went.

The film is set in Flanders in Northern France in 1918, in the fourth year of world war one. The “Great War” was fought all over world but Flanders was a mincing machine from the very first to the very last. By the time the film starts nobody involved has any illusion left about anything, at all. They hole up in a bunker or dugout some feet below the floor level of their front-line trench and bicker like the contestants of a “Big Brother” house who know that going outside may be very likely to kill them in nasty ways while staying inside is no guarantee of safety either. While a cynic might argue that this would be a better way to run future series’ of Big Brother, it made for good drama in reality, in the original play (Which was a smash hit) and in this film made on the centenary anniversary of the idiocy it depicts.

All-in-all my reactions to the film were mixed. While the original play provided something of a tectonic upheaval to British Drama, the plays of the period were of the “frightfully rightfully” genre of drawing room entertainments. And it didn’t take much to stir up audiences of the time. This resulted in a very well made modern film with excellent photography by Charles Sturridge, where the bones of a rather dated script ghost through the action like, well, a ghost. I kept finding myself thinking that I was glad I wasn’t seeing a stage production, because the whole “box set / blocked action” paradigm coupled with the dated melodrama would’ve probably have had me evacuating the theatre at interval. As it was the tight direction and camerawork, coupled with the occasional gory excursions outside kept me happy(ish) and awake for the entire running length. The other aspect of the production that demands a mention is the historical accuracy and art direction, which is well above reproach and into at least BAFTA territory.  I studied WW1, toured the battlefields of Flanders, and I’ve never seen it done better. Indeed for this reason alone “Journey’s End” should be high on your watch list, because the whole nightmare could happen again at any time for the same disgraceful reasons. (Ask me sometime)

Halloween 2018

**Warning Spoilers**

By any measurement “Halloween”1978 – (God, its been 40 years), is a classic. Directed by John Carpenter at an early peak in his truly amazing form, it was the true Hollywood success story, made on a bus ticket budget, it made Gazillions at box offices worldwide before spawning an equally profitable “franchise” of forgettable sequels which in turn bred in the marketplace into a slew of copycat productions that became known as the “slasher genre”.

Over the last 40 years classifying a film as  a “Slasher flick” has become an insult, simply because so many of the films following in “Halloween’s” wake were, not to put too fine a point on it, shit. The shiny-suit money grubbers behind the titles had developed the idea that all that was required was a few tit shots, some limp soft core porn and some jump cuts of blood on tits as belaboured imagery of retribution for pre-marital sex and, of course, a number in the title so the prospective punter knew what he was getting. 

The original “Halloween” was a very good film indeed made by a truly gifted but hopelessly undervalued John Carpenter. It uses a bare minimum of cheap tricks to generate its impact. The “shock cut and sudden loud noise”technique” is barely used at all and the film instead scares the sh*t out of the audience by the skilful blending of imagery, great acting and brilliant music. Of course there is *some* blood and, because the film was breaking new ground, everyone noticed it and copied it, mistakenly thinking that the blood was “why” the film was frightening. Until the whole genre haemorrhaged itself to death. 

Well, actually not just like the killers in good franchises, the franchises themselves keep popping back up, just when you least expect them to. So, the same week I received an invitation to my fortieth anniversary high school reunion “Halloween 2018” was released. And by golly the film was released on a different world and onto a different me. No longer was I a pimply gangly bluffing my way into “R” rated movies with a doctored bus pass. Now I’m forty years older, fatter, far more self-confident and less gorgeous, confined to a wheelchair as a hemiplegic and have a white skunk-strip bleached into my greying hair (Pepe le Peu is my spirit animal)

… And along comes Halloween 2018. Its a different world, “blood on tits is as unfashionable as films about white cops shooting back men – even as unfashionable as Mickey Rooney’s “hilarious” performance as a Japanese in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, so “Halloween 2018” takes a very different tack, while essentially having exactly the same plot. It’s a difficult trick to pull but the script and direction actually managed to fool me until some hour or so after I left the theatre. Michael Myers escapes the loonie bin (again) but with more detail this time, and makes a bee-line for Haddonfield and the nearest fornicating babysitter (again) to dole out another lesson in sexual guilt forty years after the original bloody mess. Forty years later Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is no longer the babysitter, she has become a (still gorgeous) grandmother suffering through a hell of post traumatic stress disorder the way  decent American does, shitload of guns, grain alcohol and general weirdness. She is a woman who  does not need a man to protect her – instead with the addition of a three foot iron penis, she protects herself in abandoning the role of damsel in distress, she becomes yet another spruiker for the NRA showing us all, that a state of heavily-armed anti-social paranoia is the only rational response to modern life. And the film lumbers along. We meet Michael Myers in the loonie bin. He is crazier than Hannibal Lecter. He escapes, in a rather similar manner. He immediately embarks on a random killing spree and finds his way to Laurie Strode’s house. She’s had decades to prepare for his inevitable escape so her house is a heavily armoured maze of traps but Michael has the unquantifiable “luck” that assists him and protects him to the point where he is more a force of nature than a simple psycho with a knife. 

In the first film Laurie Strode was forced by the unstoppable into becoming a force of nature herself, in the end vanquishing Michael Myers with the only tool available to hand, she straightens out a wire coat hanger and in one of cinema’s most heart stopping moments, stabs Myers through the eye with it. Loomis appears like the cavalry and shoots Myers. Forgive me, but I find a lone woman trapped with only a straightened coat-hanger for protection, to be more unsettling than the same lone woman in a house full of traps, more guns than a platoon of infantry and a spot of backup bluntly, one was terrifying, the other is pretty much a forgone conclusion, like a dentist with bloodlust hunting endangered bandicoots in a toilet cubicle with a rocket launcher.

Not to put too fine a point on it “Halloween 2018” is the umpty-nineth chapter of the franchise, not an amazing rediscovery of it. If giving the female hero lots of guns and thereby lessening the challenge before her is “empowering” I am a monkey’s uncle. Its not a film anyone should be ashamed of but the director (David Gordon Green) should study the  techniques of the masters, Carpenter & Cronenberg and not insult his audience with “booga -wooga” drek – after the second shock cut, I learn the score and expect the next one. Boredom quickly sets in and I’m left admiring Jamie Lee Curtis and wondering how she makes being a screen queen and film star seem so damn effortless. Final verdict weigh up carefully whether you see this one. 

More Craziness from the Crazy in Chief

Its been all over the news most of the week. The unsightly creature that somehow became POTUS has announced that the U.S will “walk away” from the INF treaty until Russia and China “Come to their senses.” This treaty which affected intermediate range nuclear weapons like cruise missiles (specifically the kind of shit one would be likely to use in a relatively contained battlefield situation or a specific blackmail / strong-arm scenario) has been welcomed as being a return to the cold war and the beginning of a new arms race. POTUS, approaching the mid-term elections, has done nothing to quell the hysteria; indeed he has attempted to fan the flames as best he can with his quite unimpressive appendage; after all right-wingers *LOVE* an enemy and this drama should stop them all watching incest porn on the internet and masturbating and get them all out to vote. So the idea goes, the saggy creature should get re-elected and if down the track some thousands of people get nuked-well, them’s the breaks.

No Care Taken No responsibility Accepted.

Of course it may well work. The saggy creature got elected once, why not twice? At least thats the plan of the saggy creature’s owners – as for repercussions, they don’t give a fuck beyond sucking as much money out of the country (and everywhere else) as quickly as possible. So in the short term their plan will probably work. The Republicans will probably do well in the mid-terms and the new arms race will enrich the industrialists who own Trump. Of course the plan has side-effects. The US simply can’t afford a new arms race. In the 1980’s the USSR went broke trying to keep up with the United States’ military threat. While across the pond, Reagan suffocated the poor with an horrendous tax burden in order to fund the nuclear deterrent that supposedly kept America safe. Now decades later, the US Government, already taxing as much as it can get away with, is regularly shut down by a complete lack of funds anyway. Now Trump and his cronies want to add a new massive expense to the pre-existing trillion dollar debt. They can’t even address the interest on the debt, let alone the capital but they want new nuclear bombs so they say, “not to worry mom, we can afford it.” 

Now Russia is broke. Trump, a man who is commonly assessed as having the same grasp of economics as a house brick, will send America broke too. 

What will happen then?

Putin will step in and take control and from a global perspective, I think that this will be the best possible outcome for the world.

First Man

I had very mixed feelings about paying to see ”First Man” but I did anyway. You see, its a subject I have taken very seriously my whole life, and although my method of embracing the space mania has changed over the decades the mania itself has remained as emotionally charged in me as it was the day I walked to kindergarten wearing my “space-helmet” of a cardboard carton with a hole for my head and another hole for the plastic covered window – I looked out through the fogged plastic that had once been part of a shirt box (the best kind) and I saw a boy the same age as me being led down Livingstone Road Marrickville by his parents (only my father was with me), this boy too, was wearing a “space-helmet” but he was walking along aping the exaggerated slow motion walk of the Astronauts in the low gravity of the moon.
I looked across the road at him in the bright morning sunlight and I thought; “He looks stupid” but I thought it quietly, kindly and above all I knew exactly why he was doing it, and probably most importantly I conveniently forgot that only minutes earlier I had been doing it myself. All in all this complicated realisation may well have been the first truly adult thought I had in my life; in retrospect it certainly feels like it. 

When I got to school, the playground was full of little men wearing space helmets and walking in far lower gravity than the girls or older boys were stuck with. The feeling of wonder, of humanity being a unified mass of individuals capable of being poetically united has never left me. If I’m strange, then so be it; I’m all the better for it.
Then along comes Hollywood. Was Hollywood going to bugger up the greatest story of the 20th Century the same way Peter Jackson rendered “The Lord Of The Rings” – as big budget run of the mill sword and sorcery tosh? Hollywood has a real gift for making the good stories into wide screen retard-o-rama, where any and all conflict is solved by people shooting each other, or indulging in bare-knuckle fisticuffs and glass breakage. In my jaundiced cynicism I could see Armstrong’s story being made more acceptable to mainstream audiences in Trump’s America by the detailed depiction of Armstrong’s early career as a bootlegger in a high powered car – hilarious chases where Armstrong’s iron nerve outdistanced the crooked Sheriff at every turn in the twisted Bayou roads. Or would Hollywood embrace the latest fad of the American peasantry  and have the astronauts see mysterious alien structures on the moon – but conive to keep it secret; **even though the whole moon trip had been faked anyway?* 
 
I was somewhat sure that the subject would be safe from the worst excesses of American idiocy since the shyster conspiracy theorists are still in the minority even if they probably count the president among their number. But in the time I had before the film, I concluded that it would most likely be a hagiography, a biography where every aspect of the character was suffused with the golden tones of respectful diffidence.
I was very pleasantly proved wrong on all counts “First Man” is a very good film in its own right; It is a very good in depth portrait of a very complicated man, who, to make matters difficult, appeared to be anything *but* complicated. General Patton was a loud, brassy, highly flamboyant character and was portrayed true-to-life by George C. Scott. Oscar gongs rained from the sky. Armstrong wrapped himself in the test pilot’s mantle of olympian cool to such a profound degree that  he made the leap from test pilot to astronaut that is covered so perfectly in Phillip Kauffman’s “The Right Stuff”. He excelled as an astronaut and by remarkable talent, crazy dedication and a generous helping of pure bullshit luck survived three of the worst U.S. space program almost fatal accidents; (Apollo 1, “the flying bedstead” and Gemini 8). This imponderable luck was probably that saw him rise in position in the crew to be commander of Apollo 11 and that mission to be the first landing. In reality, Armstrong was engaged in a rather nasty fight with Buzz Aldrin, who thought that protocol meant that he should be the first to step on the moon. In its only break with the truth the film ignores the way that Armstrong pulled rank and at the very last gasp took the reward for himself, and so by ignoring the issue, the film unforgivably further sidelines Aldrin from history in its quest to present its subject more simply and positively. In fact it is not until the very last shot in the film that enlightenment arrives, and not at all in the way I expected, except looking back on that plastic visor of my youth, perhaps I should have. 
 
Take it from me, “First Man” is a bloody marvellous film, and should be seen from the first frame, in the middle of the front row, with the sound up loud. You don’t need a box on your head though. Not until Mars. See you then! 
© Alex rieneck 2018 All rights reserved

Ladies in Black

 

The trailer for “Ladies in Black was remarkably successful -at least around the people I know who saw it. It seemed that everyone, and I mean everyone who’d seen the trailer also wanted to see the film. Of course all were reasonably educated anda Admittedly  all lived in Sydney Australia and were (almost ) able to remember the ttime the film was set; Sydney in the 1950’s) Thrreby fitting a fairly accurately targeted demographic.

““was lucky enough to see the film at a preview screening. I paid for my own ticket. unfortunately that day I was severly sleep deprived since the night before I hadfallen out of bed and had to be lifted off the floor by Paramedics at 3am. While I suffered no physical damage worse than bruising “Ladies in Black” was such a mellow film with pleasant musical score that I found I could not stop myself dozing during the first half. I admit this in the interest of transparency. The second half is louder and maintainedits holdon my attention more effectively The conflicts between the characters are resolved neatly and with a maximum of socio-political  fashionability and normal respectable romance blooms All in all “ladies in black leaves very little taste in the mouth, either good or bad, since it must be said, it is as bland as1950’s Sydney actually was. Almost exclusively white English- speaking proletarians deluding themselves that they were middle class, eating fried steak as often as possible and washing it down with beer, in a city with only one coffeeshop (re-created in the film) and no culture big enough to see with a magnifying glass. In other words,a place so remote almost rural, so set in it’s ways as to be almost a living death. I didn’t live through this period in Sydney, being born just after it ended, but my parents did, and being cultured Europeans, woulften tell me of European coffeehouses- bread that wasn’t white sliced paste and the wonders of the continent 14,000 miles to the North. “Ladies in Black brings this period to life, with what looks to me to be great accuracy; The coffe cups at Repins are printed with the name of the establishment undoubtedly accrately; I’m sure that if I’d ever been there the blast of nostalgia would have been almost too strong to cope with The entire culture of Sydney at the time is recreated

And, without too much effort it is possible to see how that culture morphed into this one and (of course) how the present day is preferable to “olden times I say “of course” because without doubt “Ladies in Black” is a “feel good” genre piece and serves as a rather loud object lesson in how life has improved over the last five-or six decades -for certain segments of society.since the late 1960’s the societal position of women and blacks has markedly improved; largely at the expenser of white males. In all cynicism it is hard to see how a film with the political backbone could fail to be at least respectably successful in today’s political climate; And qualitatively speaking , it is

Free ShortStory

Payday Prescription

by Alex Rieneck

Copyright (C) Alex Rieneck 2018 All Rights reserved

<BNote; This story is free to you, the reader to read and hopefully enjoy. You may not repost this story anywhere else, in any form, without the prior written consent of the author No other evil shit is allowed either; If you are in any doubt send me an email and I’ll try to set your mind at rest. Within reason, of course

It was a gift. Looked at another way, it was Christmas. Either way, it was payday. I watched the ambulance grow smaller as it made its way down the driveway. By the time it got to the gates it looked like a highly detailed toy. The kind I had grown up with. When it got to the road and turned towards town it put on a impressive display of needlepoint lights. Its siren was the tiny hysterical scream of a distant old lady. After awhile I noticed I was breathing again.

It was probably her heart again – she’d looked pretty grey on the stretcher; not a panic attack, they don’t take you to hospital for a panic attack, no matter how rich you are. I’d find out soon enough. And it didn’t matter much. But I had to maintain a certain demeanour on the way back to my room. Servants do talk. One way or the other, even robot ones do. Three, the Butler, was fussing with the knick-knacks on the dresser just down the hall when I came out of the library. The yellow shaded wall lights reflected on his smooth cream enamel head. I was struck by how good it looked silhouetted against the Burgundy brocade wallpaper. It turned and regarded me blandly with its round black eyes. I felt a momentary flush of guilt, even though I hadn’t actually done anything.Yet.

“How is my Grandmother?” Three held my gaze for almost long enough for me to feel it was being insolent.

“Your grandmother is on the way to hospital in an ambulance Master Praester.”

“I know that Three, I asked *how* she was, not where. Did the Ambulance people say what the matter was?”

“No, young Master, the Ambulance officers were not forthcoming on the subject, but I have the direct contact numbers for the ambulance and the hospital if you’d like.” With a faint whirr a small card protruded from the slot in the centre of its chest; I pulled the card away fro the slight grip of the rubber rollers and examined it. Standard blank white plastic. A faintly embossed flower pattern that was slightly more gloss than the surrounds. A gold reader chip.

“Thank you Three, I will ring directly.” I could see convex images of the yellow shaded lamp reflected in Three’s black button eyes.

“Master” with a faint complexity of servo motors Three turned away from me, to continue to dust knick-knacks on a table no-one ever looked at. 

My room is tiny and has only one window looking out over the overgrown wasteland that was once farmland, then a bomber airfield in World War Two and which was now under enforceable reclamation by nature. The rotting control tower showed up as a black smudge against the pale moonlit fields of weeds. Two skeletal hangars hulked against the deep purple of the sky, black-and silver in the competing light sources. I liked moonless nights best, when the stars were so bright it seemed you could grab them by the handful.

I dragged myself away from my window and engaged with my machine. First I activated the cloaking applications to their maximum power; now it would appear to outside watchers that I didn’t exist – or if they knew contrary to that, and they certainly wouldn’t see my face pressed into the visor-bowl lit in the strange corpse light of the reader lenses – if they tried that, their best efforts would just bounce off, and I would be notified by a discreet message. My cloaking is based on freely available warez, but I have substantially re-written and strengthened it. I knew I could rely on it. I had to be sure of that. I was entrusting it with my life. 

In a matter of moments it appeared that “I” was a Point-of-sale terminal at a small privately-owned paint-shop in Helsinki, Finland. The foundations laid, I started to build my Byzantine  edifice. I became a public access terminal in a book-library in Bremen, in the process bouncing one of the librarians, a sandy-blonde woman on the brink of menopause out of her search for erotic Graffitti in Pompeii” into an apparent system crash due to an ethics oversight intervention. She was terrified. Still, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. It was a pity about her though, the sight of her face remained burnt into my mind, an afterimage caused by emotion rather than by light. I, too, sat back from my face reader, my eyes popping slightly as they left the slight suction of the socket cups. At some time in the future I’d probably look her up, see what I could find out about her. If she proved promising I might even pay a visit.(**) But first things first; first I became an Admin machine in a largely derelict air-base that formed a remnant of the military posturing of the old Russian republic. The machine was seriously obsolete, packed with payroll and assignment information from January through October, 2049 – information that might have been of interest to some historian type – I don’t know; I wasn’t as soon as I realised that the machine was also the main controller for the flight simulator system. I was lost, well, not literately, but I performed several airstrikes on some place called Syria, at mach 3 and zero height. It was a very good system, on one pass I even heard rubble bouncing off the airframe as I flew through a debris cloud.

It was hard to stop. By the time I dragged myself away and jumped to an old quantum machine in Pasadena and from there to the St Maddenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge, they’d already stabilised her and she was prepped for surgery.The Maddenbrooke system was quite new, only a matter of two years, but the security wall was old and its placement was badly conceived. Using a chunk of code from the Russian flight simulator was easy enough; to me it appeared that I’d flown through a tunnel into an irridescent city but to the security ware I appeared as “Huh?Whazzat?”. The system itself, once I was in, was simple enough, a standard Meditech Surgical Physician with full licensing to registrar level. She’d already been diagnosed as having suffered a mild heart attack, with mid to severe blockage in one artery. The DocBot was going to sedate her, slow her heart and insert a stent via the best availableartery in her groin. Perfect. One quick glom over her medical records changed her from”allergic to procaine [yes]”to allergic to procaine [no]”. In short order the DocBot anaesthetised the stent insertion point with procaine – and thendidn’t react quickly enough when her heart went into spasm and stopped, ten seconds later. The human re-sus team happened to be busy with another coronary in the geriatric wing,  and were unable to run the length of the hospital to get to her in time. 

She was vegetative by the time they arrived, and all I had left to do was decide whether I wanted to change bedrooms now that I owned the house, and was very, very much richer, even if nobody knew it yet. I pulled my face out of the reader mask with a slight wet pop and the thousands of pinpoint scanning L.E.Ds went out in a pattern that has never made sense to me. In the silence, far off downstairs, someone was knocking at the front door. 

Crazy Rich Asians

At first and perhaps even second and third, glance “Crazy Rich Asians” is a delightfully, tantalisingly *new* taste sensation for  cinema-goers bilious with a gluttonous over-supply of American Comedy-Thrillers and Indian dance-offs. The story of a young Chinese American ( or American Chinese) encountering the giga- rich Sinaporean family of her new fiance is a kind of fairy tale of materialism- the perfect story of a young woman effectively proving that access to her vagina is worth the price she is “asking” for it. Mother-in-law to be thinks that it isn’t her betrothed  thinks that it is. Opinions are divided and everyone seems to have an opinion, and the belief that they have a vote. The brass ring isn’t brass and the heroine of the story isn’t in it for the money anyway-and its upto her to convince some exceptionally cynical people of that.

The thing is, “Crazy Rich Asians” isn’t really new at all. It can easily be seen as “Brideshead Revisited” updated and re-set in Singapore; since it is essentially the same story with “brideshead” being more understandable to Western audience but rather less communicable the the Asin market. As far as I was concerned this was probably the weakness of “Crazy Rich Asians” Bluntly, being a round-eye I found some difficulty telling the characters apart- especially during the set up beginning hours of the film before the script seemed to find its feet and the cast gained sufficient flesh to take hold of my interest. The film starts slow, becomes complicated and pulls itself together in its last half hour. Halfway through “CRA” I was convinced I was having trouble understanding it because I wasn’t asian. By the end I’d decided I had far more in common with them than the reverse.Except, and perhaps quite importantly, that I don’t like that kind of dumpling.

Happy Time Murders

 

  • I’ll say onthing for the”happy time Murders”it has a great traile “Happy TimeMurders” trailerrhttps://youtu.be/CqRanVHR6sU  and I was sold on seeing the film from the first viewing
  • . Better yet, weeks later I discovered that it was a rare comedy indeed in that *all* the funny moments were not in the trailer- in fact the film( an “LA Noir” private detective film where all of the characters are muppets) was almost top heavy in funny bits to the point where I was laughing out loud right the way through; Iit was *that* funny, in fact, I felt quite odd, I seemed to be the only person laughing!was there something wrong with me(aside from the obvious of course) When the film ended, it became apparent that I had been mistaken about people sitting behind me-in fact, the theatre was empty! In a way this was a relief, then what did I expect at the first session in the morning, on a weekday, anyway? In any event I’ve been giving it great word-of-mouth ever since and its as silly as the president so I guess it’ll pick up support as it goes on- though it will deserve it. Sorry.I should try to keep my film reviews, at least free of barbs at that particular loathsome glove-puppet..
  • “The Happy time Murders is a very slick and professional fil, and very funny indeed, all the way through.I recommend it with only one proviso; After we’d seen it, my carer and I were both short-tempered with eachother an had a fiery little spat about nothing. This was totally unlike us and quite unexpected. On reflection, I was inclined to point the finger at the film we’d just seen.Like Joan Rivers, the humours tone is somewhat mean-spirited, and I felt the tone had taken root in us over the course of a 78 minute bombardment of  the the kind of jokes you’d never find in the “Muppet Show”- Which is something of a co-incidence. Since the “Henson” name is plastered all over the end credits.Jim and I presume his daughter, seem to be throwing off the suffocating load of “cute” brought about by a lifetime of “Kermy” Miss Piggy and Fozzie Bear and of course the whole diabetic regugitation of “Sesame Street” this show is “street” too but its all hard street and I say, the better for it. The foulness of “The HappyTime Murders” came to me like a breath of fresh air blowing away the stench of the Industrial rose air freshener that had been used to cover the reek of horse shit.