When I'm sufficiently proud of a facebook post or opinionated about its content it might wind up here.

No Spoilers

I don't regret going to the cinema today. It's such a pleasant childhood extravagance, to go inside on a clear sunny summer's non-school day, and emerge, later, electrified, while it's still light and with hours to go before bed time,

But,

My goodness Independence Day 2 was bad.

Genocide

Part of the parking lot at the entrance to my building is masked off, I went to the office to ask why (in case they were going to block pedestrian access there). She told me it was for genocide.

Now, she was not speaking English well, but she was pronouncing her words clearly. I asked for clarification twice after which it was not polite to press further. It was definitely "genocide", and she mimed waving a stick at me.

The whole thing was so bizarre that it was hours later before I realised: She got the word "germicide" from somewhere, maybe off a bottle of cleaner. They're going to sterilise / disinfecting the entrance area.

Shoe Etiquette

I walked past the outside of a stall selling shoes. There was a shoe on the ground and a clear gap between shoes on the rack, so rather than leave it to be kicked or stepped on, I thought I'd be nice and put it back.

Right?

As I did this I realised that there was a woman inside the stall trying on a new shoe, hence the gap in the rack, and I'd picked up, handled, put away her (old) shoe. And they were looking at me very strangely.

The Ghost

The phrase is "to give up the ghost". Not "its ghost", but "the ghost".

Which implies that the ghost didn't belong to it.

That's unsettling.

Expanding Pants

It's called The Metric Expansion of the Universe. Space itself stretches out with time. Even with no force of any sort acting on them, two particles that are perfectly still, and 1m apart today, will be ever so slightly more than 1m apart tomorrow. Nothing has moved in any direction, there is just more space being brought into existence, everywhere, very slowly, all the time. You may be familiar with the example of two pen marks near each other on a balloon that is being slowly inflated; they don't move but they do get farther apart.

A given area increases at the square of this rate (because it's distance x distance), and a given volume increases at the cube of this rate

(distance x distance x distance).

So for example I, a three-dimensional object, expand with the universe at a higher rate than my approximately two-dimensional folded-flat formal pants, causing me to not fit into them any more. Through no fault of my own. It's just physics.

Best Director

The Oscar for Best Picture in 2018 went to a movie that seems to be a love letter to another director!

In case you haven't seen Guillermo del Toro's Shape Of Water, or Jean-Pierre Jeunet's movies, I'll clarify:

The Shape Of Water has the trademark red/green color scheme of Jean-Pierre Jeunet's movies.

In it, a slim short-dark-haired Amelie-like character who lives alone (as in the movie Amelie, by Jeunet) has a friend, a painter (like Amelie's friend the painter) who is unfulfilled in his life and feels it has gone too fast (like Amelie's father). She sometimes has fanciful imaginings in black and white, like in, well, Amelie.

We see very explicit aspects of her, um, personal sexuality, sort of like the main character as in A Very Long Engagement (Jeunet) (played by the same actress as in Amelie).

Our heroine works in a bizarre place, that I can compare to some of the environments in The City Of Lost Children (Jeunet) and Alien Resurrection (Jeunet).

I shan't give away too much of the plot though I will say that I liked the scene where two main characters' relationship came to a head in a deliberately-flooded bathroom, like that scene in Delicatessen (Jeunet) where the two main characters' relationship came to a head in a deliberately flooded bathroom. Until someone opened the door. In both movies. Which is getting quite specific.

That's just water indoors, there is a scene with our heroine falling into the water at the docks before being retrieved by an underwater person, kinda like when in The City Of Lost Children where Miette falls into the water at the dock... you get it.

Luckily Guillermo Del Toro does bring originality to the movie with his fantastic creation The Merman, a blue oval-eyed non-human aquatic creature played by Doug Jones, who I personally remember best from the movie Hell Boy, where he played the blue oval-eyed non-human aquatic creature.

Hell Boy is by Del Toro, not Jeunet, before you ask.

(I liked the movie by the way!)

Solaris Stories

This movie was made on a tight budget, in difficult technological conditions, in 1972 in Russia, and I can't figure out how some of it was done (search for "Tarkowski Solaris Gravity" if that particular video is taken down, I refer to a part of the movie where there's a scheduled gravity outage during a station manoeuvre).

The stories behind the movie are as amazing as it is. I've just been watching interviews about it.

Natalia Bondarchuk, age 14 in Russia in the mid-1960s, was already a big fan of the book Solaris. At a party she met (the great director) Andrei Tarkowski, told him how great Solaris was, and lent him her copy. That's how he encountered the book.

When he came to make it a movie though, he refused to cast her because she was too young. She auditioned for him so well though, that he recommended her so strongly to a different director, that that director cast her without meeting her.

Natalia, to prove a point, carried herself so well in /that/ movie that Tarkowski when he saw it he cast her back into Solaris without an audition, not recognising who she was.

She plays a central character, Hari, who looks to be in her mid-to-late 30s, the wife of an actor in his late-40s.

She was eighteen.

Honest Food

Imagine an eatery just called "Salted Carbs".
You could have menu sections:

"With Oil"

"Without Oil"

"With Cheese"

Then on the back page the desserts:

"With Sugar"

Inverse Law

The longer you wait for the thunder, the bigger the lightning that you just saw.

Agency

I really like the low budget popcorn movie Hitman: Agent 47.

I hate when not-quite-human characters are introduced, but then just act like humans (Chappie, Ex Machina, you squandered interesting concept to be boring, shame on you).

47 himself is a human modified to be the perfect assassin, without emotion. The cheap-writing thing to do is make him an emotional character anyway, struggling against his externally-imposed programming so that the person within can triumph over adversity and learn to love.

But luckily no.

The total emotion shown in the entire movie, is a tone of irritation for one sentence in the middle, and a very brief semi-smile near the end. The rest of the time it's cold murder and you need to try to figure out what to make of it. There's no reveal to let you know he cared all along. He doesn't make an angry face while fighting or shooting. However standard an action movie this is (and btw it really is), and however obvious a concept it is to use the kick-ass cold assassin archetype, what they've made is an interesting non-standard but self-consistent character who has his own motivations. Furthermore, he has no interest in explaining them to you. You want to keep watching to see what he does.

Vale Valerian

So, um, maybe too late because it's finishing in cinemas, but if you're willing to take a massive caveat, you should see a hilarious and creative movie, Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets. The second movie in the 5th Element universe (actually the other way around!).

The caveat is: The movie sucks. There's no two ways about it. The lead characters are woefully written and really badly acted. It's just embarrassing. There's also a plot with Avatar-style aliens, and it's even more tedious than Avatar itself. It is bad bad bad bad bad, whatever else I'm about to say, remember that. It's a huge financial flop too. Because it's bad.

So why would I recommend it?

Because the universe is colourful, and creative, and it'll be the strangest thing you see this year, and probably next. Because it gives you a future history of the International Space Station set to David Bowie's Space Oddity. And a chase scene happening in two different dimensions/realities at once. And a shape-shifting alien that looks like Rihanna doing a burlesque dance while morphing between different fetish outfits. And sword fights with trolls. And a mission to steal a jellyfish, in a submarine, with a pirate.

Because I'm sad I missed it in 3D.

That's why.

(Note: I later got a special edition 3D Blu-ray, and ripped it and spent a long time editing out the problems to make a greatly-improved experience. Feel free to contact me if you're interested to see that.)

Rover

"Mr Sandman, bring me a dream,

make him the cutest that I've ever seen.

Give him the word that I'm not a rover,

then tell him that his lonesome nights are over!"

That's 1950s dirty humour I think.

Lost Credibility

"Okay Brad Bird, tell me what you have planned for Incredibles 2"

BB: "Well, we start exactly where the last movie ended, with The Underminer"

"Oh that's a bold choice!"

BB: "Yeah, he'll be there and the family will fight together to defeat him"

"Wow, so the characters have to really pick up as they were, huh. No changes?"

BB: "Heaps of changes!"

"Oh, so how will that work with The Underminer?"

BB: "The Underminer will let audiences connect with the previous movie"

"Okay. ...but you know all the characters are in the poster, and the style is very distinctive, and the movie is well-remembered... uh, will The Underminer be an important character?"

BB: "Nah, he gets away"

"Gets... as in escapes?"

BB: "Yeah, whatever, we don't see him again"

"But you... okay... um... tell us about how we pick up on the characters"

BB: "Well Jack Jack has lots of powers now."

"And what do they represent?"

BB: "Represent?"

"Yeah. Um, Dash is a hyperactive young boy, he was given speed powers. Violet is a teenager at that age of grappling with social angst, she was given the power to be literally invisible and to put up shields. What do Jack Jack's powers have in common?"

BB: "Nothing! Just whatever we think is funny! We'll pick a couple of things and repeat them a lot so that the toddlers in the audience can feel like they understand stuff, but otherwise it's all up to your imagination"

"Uh huh, um...

Uh, this is not what I expec...

... Oh! Violet! How are Dash and Violet?"

BB: "Dash is starting to grow up and understand his powers, and Violet is having girl issues."

"Girl issues? She's also growing up? Learning about being a woman"

BB: "What? No! She spends the movie wondering how to get with a boy."

"Wow. Okay. I'm just gonna keep going here. Bob [Mr. Incredible], he's just like before?"

BB: "He has to bear the weight of keeping the family together! We see him going grey under the stress. In this movie Helen [Elastigirl] has to go do stuff. And Bob knows, he tells everyone that he should go because she's just a woman and he's better, but"

"Woah, what?! He says that?!"

BB: "Nah, one of the editors edited it out. Probably a woman editor. But he hints it strongly though and makes it clear a number of times."

"Okay let's back it up a bit, we might need to edit this interview actually. Jack Jack has changed"

BB: "Yes"

"Dash and Violet have changed"

BB: "Yes"

"Bob has changed"

BB: "Yes"

"But the movie begins with The Underminer, exactly where the first movie ended"

BB: "Yes, it's important to link to the original movie"

"Though The Underminer gets away and isn't in the movie at all"

BB: "We didn't want to tie our hands!"

"Okay. Well, then tell us about Helen [Elastigirl], how has she changed?"

BB: "Huuuge rack!"

"What?"

BB: "We've given her really big tits! Like double what she had last movie!"

"Helen's... Helen's change is to have big breasts?"

BB: "Not just that, we've given her a bigger bootie too"

[Interviewer unclips microphone and leaves]