Sunday 9 December 2007

All That Glitters Is Not Gold

I set the alarm for 4am, to catch Ricky Hatton's fight on the radio. Yep, I've been caught up in the hype. However they must have borrowed the organising committee from a dog show because they are running an hour late, so I roll over and go back to sleep. The next time I awake and switch the radio on, I'm just in time to hear him lose in the tenth round. Oh well.

We get an uninterrupted lie-in this morning, well apart from my brother ringing and someone banging on the door trying to get sponsored for a swim. So correction it was VERY interrupted.

A quick 'power' shower which conjures up thoughts of... never mind. Then L goes off to the gym and I take Doggo on the park. After which we meet up at Sainsbury's.

In the evening we go for our weekly film. You can tell it's getting near XXXXXmas as there's not a lot on, so we see the Golden Compass. I'm really not sure I can bear (that's almost a pun by the way) to review this. I did see a review on the internet entitled the 'Golden Turd' and nearly just put up a link to that but here goes...

The story surrounds a very uncharismatic young girl called Lyra, not Lycra as I first thought, who is given a golden compass to help her find a kidnapped friend. This leads to her ending up in an airship with Nicole Kidman, which is traumatic enough for starters, but Kidman is a weirdo who hates it when girls wear their handbags in the house? Then we get 'introduced; to loads of other characters, who mutter about 'dust' and 'intercision' without really convincing even themselves that they know what they're taking about. The only cool bit is that all the characters have daemons, which are animals that are attached to them which represent their souls. These daemons are CGI generated cats, birds, dogs or even tigers. Kidman gets a monkey, enough said. Is it only me that thinks CGI is now so last century? Let's get back to real animals, much cuter.

The funniest bit of the film was when a dog daemon fell off a rooftop but no one else laughed. Although plenty of people laughed at other random points and I couldn't really see why, or was it just because of the bad acting or senseless plot.

Daniel Craig turns up, does a touch of James Bond, for all of about ten minutes, and then disappears again. He isn't the only one; several characters turn up, do a one scene, and vanish. This, unfortunately, isn't true of Kidman, who receives far too much screen time.

Then suddenly they're all tramping off to North Pole because the compass tells them to, to look for the ring, or is that another story? The movie also borrows all the bad bits from Harry Potter, Narnia etc too. There our heroine befriends a giant polar bear, who I think is drunk. I'm trying to get to sleep at this point but for some reason it's not working, it was probably the armoured polar beer fight that disturbed me.



The film is adapted from the Phillip Pullman novel, which I haven't read but seemingly most people who have are appalled at the butchering of the book, apparently the film even ends four chapters back from the end of the book. It was also supposed to be story for teenagers but it appears to have been blatantly dumbed down and aimed at younger kids, which even insults their intelligence. The books have been criticized for being a bit controversial on some religious topics but that must have been dropped from the film or else I dozed through that bit.

Overall a confusing, poorly acted, badly directed mish-mash of a film. Apparently two sequels are due. Oh dear.

With being at the cinema we miss this year's Sports Personality of the Year award. Which is no hardship as everyone know the way to win it is firstly to have no personality and secondly to have totally failed in your sport, although coming second is a very good way to get the sympathy vote. So it's not surprising that the England Rugby team get the team prize for coming second in the World Cup. Quite how the GB cycling team failed to win it after taking seven golds, two silvers and two bronzes at the World Championships I have no idea.

Lewis Hamilton is hot favourite for the main award, naturally for coming second in the F1 Championship but everyone is truly shocked when a true winner wins it. Joe Calzaghe, the world super-middleweight champion and undefeated in 44 fights, takes the award. His father and trainer, was named Coach of the Year.

Lewis Hamilton came second. Ha. Poetic justice.



30 units this week.

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