Author: Justin Page 29 of 65

Here are the Rules of Time Travel Movies:

1. Never watch a time travel movie when you are tired (preferably go back in time to before you were tired);
2. Never watch a time travel movie when your kids keep getting out of bed and interrupting you (obviously you will need to have already travelled into the future in order to avoid this eventuality);
3. Never watch a time travel the night after you have already burned your brain out by having watched Inception the night before (in this instance, travel back in time to before you watched Inception and it is therefore safe to watch your time travel movie with a fresh brain);
4. Never watch a time travel movie while drinking wine (drink the wine anyway, then go back in time to before you drank the wine; then drink some more wine just to be on the safe side);
5. Don’t watch time travel movies at all (but if a future version of yourself appears and tells you not to watch any time travel movies, remember it’s perfectly safe to kill that future self–it’s just the past self that you have to run away in screaming terror from).

Now, where was I …?

For Awesome #Childfree Movie Night tonight I watched Inception … which I’d not watched before. I’ve had it on blu-ray for years, but sorta forgot that I hadn’t seen it and also sorta forgot that I owned it.

It was awesome fun, though it certainly made my brain ache towards the end. I was mostly surprised to find that, at heart, it’s a fairly straightforward heist thriller. That part, at least, isn’t especially complicated. What does get complicated is trying to get your brain to keep track of the dream-within-a-dream-within-a-dream that provides the setting for the heist. Still, if it gives us scenes as great as the hallway fight, then I’m not going to complain about a little bit of permanent brain damage.

It’s Friday 13th, so what else is there to watch for Friday Night Horror than The Little Mermaid?

I joke, of course.

Despite my fondness for horror, I’d only seen Friday The 13th once (and as recently as about 10 years ago, at that), while my friend Seb had never seen it at all. If nothing else, this meant that the famous jump scare at the end completely got my friend. Which was awesome.

I’m not a devotee of this particular franchise (which is probably why I enjoy Jason X so much: I’m not burdened with any sort of commitment to the prior instalments). It’s a fun film, and it’s relatively well made. There are some excellent shots, but there are also plenty of moments that seem like they got them in the can quickly so they could keep moving to the next shot. Also, most of the characters are truly annoying, which makes it a relief when most of them get killed off.

What it does have is a pretty decent twist when it comes to the killer’s identity, and Betsy Palmer has a ball in the role of Mrs Vorhees while assuring the audience that she’s perfectly capable of carving up a summer camp full of teens. It’s almost a shame that they opted for the Jason route for the rest of the franchise.

Today both kinderbesten were off sick from school, which meant a day off work for me too. This gave me the perfect opportunity to get one with some of the clearing up I had pencilled in for the weekend. In the process of this I found some old photos. And, since a picture says a thousand words and it’s getting late, I thought I’d share with you.

First, here’s me as a surprisingly chubby baby.

Next is me being inexplicably sinister at the age of six.

Moving on roughly another six years, here’s how I looked at school:

Probably about another six years later, and here’s how I embarrassed the entirety of the human race as a teenager:

And, just to bring things sort of full circle, here’s the elderbeast obediently and brilliantly recreating what is obviously the standout shot of the set:

I followed up my Fun Night On Twitter with a terrible night’s sleep. My brain was buzzing and wouldn’t let me drop off for a good couple of hours. Then there were dreams and occasional wakings up. Then there was waking up before the alarm had even gone off, followed by not being able to get back to sleep again.

It was not awesome.

I rarely have significant trouble sleeping. I’m definitely not the sort of person who nods off as soon as their head hits the pillow, nor am I completely immune to being woken up by random noises in the middle of the night. However, I still sleep pretty well as a rule: I’d still grade myself an A- for sleep. Consequently, it hits me pretty hard when the proper amount of sleep doesn’t happen. Given that today is a work day, having a lie in is not an option. There are knock on effects. My Morning Shift is the first thing to get cancelled—I don’t get up to write; instead I hit that snooze button like its a morphine drip. Extra coffee helps, but more as a distraction than a restorative.

Unsurprisingly, tired though my body feels, my mental state probably suffers more. Emotions bubble far more vividly to the surface, particularly the negative ones, with less of a shield between me and them. I’m less happy, and more sad (except when the tiredness reaches critical levels, at which point I hit a form of mild hysteria wherein I will chat and giggle incessantly–a phenomenon I have now dubbed inevitibabble). At work I’ll immerse myself in whatever routine tasks I can, which seems to help a lot. At home I’ll give the kinderbesten free reign to entertain themselves, as that’ll avoid any emotionally expensive arguments that I can’t afford.

Eventually, finally, blissfully, it will be bedtime. At which point I will typically find I can’t sleep …

I spent this evening doing something I haven’t done for a long time: chatting on twitter. And it was awesome.

I used to do a lot more of it but, for various reasons, I’ve pulled back from twitter a bit over the last few years. I still post tweets here and there, and occasionally get into a brief tweet-reply conversation, but it’s rare these days that I’ll spend more than a few minutes at a time on the network. Tonight, however, I had multiple chats on the go with multiple people and it really reminded me of the ‘good old days’.

I was into twitter into quite a big way when it first started to get popular, and it’s no exaggeration to say that all of my friends are people I met through twitter. Without twitter I would basically not have a social life.

Sure, Twitter has its dark side, but if you manage it properly it can still be a positive experience. And that’s what tonight was: it was like having a few friends over to enjoy a glass or two of wine and chat about whatever random topics have caught our attention for the day. There was comfort in it, which is something that’s hard to come by on social media these days.

I’ve decided that my house is like a jigsaw. I get everything just the way I like it, then something needs moving: in this case a TV that needs to come out of the guest room.

Where do I put it? There’s nowhere left for it to go.

I have to make a space for it: a proper TV viewing space. But this means moving something else in order to make that space. And then making more space to move the thing into that I’ve just moved from somewhere else in order to make space.

It all worked out in the end–better, in fact, that it was before–but there’s still a cause and effect at play. We rarely leave empty space in our homes. Every corner is used, everything has its place. Moving one thing causes a reshuffling of the deck and you’re never quite sure where it’s all going to land until it’s finished.

Wouldn’t be a problem, really, if furniture wasn’t so damn heavy …

Today we went to Bricktober. It was a relatively spur of the moment decision (i.e. I only found out about it yesterday) but made for a very nice Last Day Of School Holidays treat for the kinderbesten.

LEGO has been an important part of our household—as it has been, I would imagine, for most family households. I used to play with it when I was a kid; I continued to play with it before I had my own kids; now, since the kinderbesten have inherited that fondness for LEGO, I have a house full of the stuff.

Bricktober presents an entirely different level of LEGO: massively detailed panoramas that hardcore fans have put together; custom builds of huge Star Wars vehicles; robotics experiments. You name it—if it’s possible to do it with LEGO, someone at Bricktober has probably done it. Or at least tried.

I left the exhibition full of admiration for what these fans had achieved with imagination, discipline and plastic bricks … and also with one of these:

Today I made the Kinderbesten tidy their rooms. They were relatively obedient but, as with most things involving kinderbesten, the effort to get them doing something is frequently greater than the effort required to do that thing yourself. However, I did exercise persistence and managed to coordinate and motivate the beasts into action upon this occasion.

At one point I did wonder if it was really worth the effort. It took at least an hour to get them to do what was probably about 15 minutes’ work. But we did get it done, and the rooms looked fantastic in the end: so much so, in fact, that I kept popping my head through the doors for the rest of the weekend to admire the change.

And that’s what makes it worth it. I wrote recently about quality of life, and how important it is to take some pleasure and satisfaction from your immediate surroundings. If the kinderbesten can appreciate just a little bit of that, and take a little bit more pleasure from being in their own space, then hopefully it can improve their quality of life too.

It has been quite a year for guarded cinematic expectations.

We had, at last, the first big screen version of Wonder Woman. Released as part of a grim canvas of dreary and uninspiring DC superhero movies, it’s hardly surprising that many people were excited at the thought of a Wonder Woman movie, but also wary of how it might turn out. It ended up being awesome and, rightfully, an enormous hit.

We had Ridley Scott finally doing a bona fide sequel to Alien with Alien Covenant. The trailer may have been great, but the finished movie proved to have far less meat on its bones that the problematic Prometheus and was underwhelming as an Alien movie too.

Then, most recently, Blade Runner 2049: a movie I refused to either get excited about, or assume I would be disappointed by. The trailers proved that the makers had been able to capture the look and feel of the first movie, but it still seemed a long shot that they could capture everything they needed to in order to craft a worthy follow-up.

And yet they did! It’s an amazing achievement. Blade Runner 2049 is a movie that is written entirely in the language of its predecessor (the look, the sound, even the feel) while still providing a fresh experience. It builds on the threads that the first movie laid out, but weaves its own narrative. I can’t think any other sequels (at this moment) that have managed to do this. Aliens and Empire Strikes Back, for example, are excellent sequels but seem to be crafted from rather different DNA than their forebears. On the other extreme, many superhero franchises throw out perfectly good sequels … which typically involve many of the same characters and story beats in an effort to provide audiences with familiarity.

Having had Blade Runner in my cinematic blood for the last 30 years, it’s hard for me to see the sequel without being mindful of the original. Knowledge of the first film certainly enhances appreciation of the second, but I believe Blade Runner 2049 has been built to stand on its own. It reminds me of the ambitious, big-thinking, story-driven science fiction movies of the 1970s: it’s driven by character as much as it is by big ideas, and while the visual effects are stunning, they never dominate the narrative.

It’s too bad it’s not doing that well at the box office. We seem, once again, to be in a time when this style of science fiction simply doesn’t draw the crowds. Or maybe it’s always been this way, and the few films that do make it through are wonderful aberrations. Which is why we end up treasuring them so.

Either way, I’m already looking forward to seeing this one again.