shattered

This week has been absolutely horrendous, because we've been trying to rescue a bid and I'm absolutely shattered.

The presence of longer posts this week compared to last week has actually been something of an illusion - I was able to pre-write most of them before the poo hit the proverbial oscillating air redistribution system.

Today's, however, I've literally just slapped together, and I've not a lot of time, so I'll cut it short and then have a really big whinge session next week about what went wrong and why it's all been a bit horrible.

robin hood

Turns out I sort of lied when I said I would only do the one film I enjoyed that we watched at my dad's. The other films we watched were a film called Zathura, which is essentially Jumanji in space (it's deliberately that - the book it's based on is the sorta sequel to Jumanji, and you shouldn't think it's rubbish because I describe that way or because I'm not reviewing it - it was actually surprisingly good - it's just I need to get caught up) and the Russell Crow/Ridley Scott version of Robin Hood.

The reason I wasn't going to review this one was simply because I couldn't remember what it was we watched. A more accurate way to put it might be that it was sufficiently poor that I blanked it out.

The main problem with it, I think, was that it wasn't really Robin Hood.

Now actually the Robin Hood that tends to be thought of as being 'proper' Robin Hood isn't actually the original Robin Hood. The Hood of the original stories was an outlaw who robbed from the rich, but past that everything else, from the giving to the poor to being Earl of Loxley and Prince John and Richard the Lionheart - all that - is actually a later update.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying they should have made that original story, what I'm really getting at is that they've made neither. They haven't gone back to that original source, nor have they made a new version of the more familiar rich-poor-currency-interface story.

Instead they've kind of taken elements and grafted them onto another story. If this were set in another time period and you changed the characters names, it might just have worked. It could have worked in the sense that you'd have had familiar elements that would have been references for you to pick up.

Instead, by calling it Robin Hood, you end up with something that feels like they threw something together around the themes.

It doesn't help that the story lacks any real compelling element to it (and unfortunately relies heavily on coincidence). For example, I'm not sure if it's deliberate, but they seem to be trying to muddy the waters as to who the bad guys are and quite what their motives are. Rather than the simple antagonist of the bad Prince John, there's something here about the French.

It even goes to the extent at the end of having the French invade. Only it's a pretty crap invasion and also... well, it actually looks like the D-day landings as covered by the beginning of Saving Private Ryan. And I mean it properly looks like them - the French apparently had very similar landing craft to the allies in 1945.

Which is a big part of its problem - why are the French even part of it and why are they staging a reconstruction of the D-Day landings in Ye Olde England?

It's just confused and confusing.

Oh, and Russell Crow's accent is all over the place.

nearly there

When I say nearly there, I mean I've nearly reached the target I set before Christmas.

Yes, it's the weekly weigh-in post and I've nearly made the official (well sort of) transition from being morbidly obese to just plain obese! Hoo... ray?

Anyway, the weekly weigh-in revealed a further loss of 3 pounds over the course of last week, which I was pleasantly pleased with. I've worked out that if I loose an average of 3 pounds a week then I should reach my next target broadly on schedule.

My next target is a bit looser than my original target. Basically I want to roughly get to the half way point between obesity and just being overweight by my birthday.

Hmm... This actually seems to be getting more and more complicated to explain without having posted those celebratory posts I was talking about last week. I definitely need to tweak those and get them posted. What I'm hoping is that I can loose the last four pounds I need to this week, hit the target and then post the tweaked celebratory posts next week.

Even if I don't make it this week then it will surely only be the week after, so things should become clearer in terms of what I'm on about with the weight loss targets pretty soon.

For now, what I think I will say is that my main intended target is to hit 18 stone by my birthday. However, I'm rather aware that this year Easter is extremely late - literally the week before my birthday. But also, this year I'm going to the British Grand Prix, which is in July.

The plan to go to the GP was hatched pretty late and has left me in something of a quandary holiday wise. With the lateness of Easter and the extra bank holiday for the royal wedding I'm unsure if it's a good idea to take time off then. See, the issue is that the kids will be off and I imagine a lot of parents will take the couple of extra days need to make it a proper holiday.

But also if I'm now going to the Grand Prix, should I take some time off then? If I do both that won't leave me with a lot of holiday, so what should I do about my usual late summer holiday?

The reason these are important is that my goals and plans were formulated based on Easter/birthday and late summer holiday, but now I have the British GP as another node point.

I need to have a think about it all.

iron man 2

There seems to be a great tendency in comic book film to produce over-complicated sequels.

The first film in a comic-book franchise always has to cover the origin story. If the hero has powers, it generally has to show how he got them, or otherwise show how he got to his default 'hero' position. This isn't universally true - in X-Men most of the heroes already have their powers, but even their you get some origins or at least explanation of what mutants are.

But essentially, origin stories are covered by part 1. Because this will take up a good chunk of the story, there will only be enough space for one villain.

Now when it comes time for the sequel, we've already had the origin story, so there's now a big chunk of time free for an extra villain or two - right? Well yes, but the problem is it's actually really complicated to do multiple villains, not least of all because villains also need origin stories.

What I'm driving at is that there's a tendency to overfill sequels with villains, rather than come up with a proper, emotionally involving story for the hero. So, a good sequel, like Spiderman 2, only has one villain - Doc Ok - but has an emotionally engaging story for the hero to replace the origin story. A bad sequel, like Spiderman 3, crams itself so full of villains that the hero's story dwindles to nothing and all those villains get short-shrift too.

Iron Man 2 somehow manages to not have too many villains, but at the same time still somehow manages to have too much stuff into it that it doesn't really work. The problem here, though, seems to be forcing too much into the hero's own story.

So you've got him being killed by his chest energy thing, giving up control of his company, running some sort of weird expo thing, exploring his relationship with his dad, being recruited (ish) by Nick Fury to the Avengers, developing his relationship with Pepper and even being responsible for world peace (!) ... and the list goes on. They've crammed the film so full of stuff for Tony, that all of it seems to get short shrift.

And the villain ends up feeling like an add-on simply because they needed an excuse for some special effects. This is especially annoying when you consider that the idea of the villain is closely linked to his dad. It could have been so much more involving.

But what adds insult to injury is that the most interesting thing about Tony Stark - his drinking problem - isn't really even there. Well, it's sort of there, but it's not clear. I think the problem was that they wanted to hint at it, but because it had to be a U/Pg film, they couldn't really include it properly.

So yeah, to be frank, it ends up being a big old mess, even to the extent that the sharp wit that runs through the first film is a bit lacking in this second film.

Shame really, because it looks great and the acting's great - the plot just doesn't quite work.

bits and bobs

Kind of a bits and bobs weekend this last weekend.

Which was good - after last week's huge physical exertions I didn't really fancy doing anything much. I got my hair cut, which is good, dumped a load of cardboard at the local tip and did some shopping and a load of ironing and those were pretty much all of the fixed tasks I had to do.

The rest of the weekend was pretty much spent watching telly, walking and scanning while watching anime.

I seem to be getting a bit of a backlog of telly shows and I was initially puzzled as to why, but I think it's to do with the time of year - there's always more of interest to me on during winter - and the fact I'm spending a lot of my time scanning. As discussed last week, the new scanning process is a lot slower, so although I'm spending a lot of time doing it, I am only proceeding at a steady pace with the actual scans.

I must confess I'm in two minds about this. A part of me thinks the results are sufficiently better that I should keep going, another part of me thinks that I'm so far behind that I should dust off the old scanner and use it to get caught up.

To give you some idea of the scale of how far behind I am, I need to scan one more nyan type and then I'll be a third of the way through 2010. In other words I'll still have 8 months of 2010 and everything so far from 2011 to do just in order to catch up to the present day.

Of course it's bound to take several months to get through them - more at my current pace - so that will add quite a few mags onto the back end.

I dunno - really am in two minds. Which I have to confess aren't helped by the fact that, in order to use my old scanner I will have to buy a new heat sink for my old computer. Due to what can only be described as a double-header of stupidity and incompetence, the old heat sink is both knackered and doesn't fit into the case my old machine ended up in anyway.

Trouble there is we're talking seriously old bits of kit. That does actually mean the heat sinks I looked at were really cheap, but also most of the models weren't actually in-stock.

I'm also rather worried that the photstitch thing seems to be really erratic, especially when it comes to posters. A lot of the magazines give away large posters and two of them - megami and nyan type - are almost nothing but posters. With the A4 scanner I have to break these up into at least 4 bits and sticking these together seems to cause real problems for photostitch.

I've a horrible feeling the best solution is going to be to scan magazine pages via the new method and posters via the old. That way I'll either be able to scan them as one like I used to or do them in halves so that only 2 bits need stitching together.

So yeah, decisions to make.