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Monday finds you like a bomb
Monday, 17 November 2008 08:55 amGah. My beloved pea-brain feline Golux is clearly annoyed at the nose-freezing expeditions: she erupted into my bedroom at 6am this morning with a large mouse (or possibly a small rat) struggling feebly in her jaws, waking me from a sound and slightly post-gin-and-tonic slumber, and proceeded to chase it around the room to the maximum possible accompaniment of thumps, crashes and muffled squeaking. By the time I got the rescue mission out of bed the poor mouse/rat creature had expired, presumably of fright, behind the toilet. I am consequently a little frayed.
On the upside, as the Cosmic Wossnames set out to restore balance, I arrived at work at 7am all braced for a day spent in computerless exile while they painted my office, only to find that the super-efficient building manager had come in over the weekend and finished the job. It looks verray narce. He's also taken down the completely useless blackboard from one wall (what was with that, anyway? This office has been an office for all of recorded history, it's never been a tut room - do actual Real Admin People actually use blackboards for anything? I find it most mysterious) and moved the noticeboard to behind my desk rather than its previous exile in a pointless and non-utilitarian corner. This pleases me, although I shall now have to use the board for actual notices rather than for Terry Pratchett and Lemony Snicket posters. On the upside, my efficiency-and-professionalism quotient is certainly rising, any moment now I'll be forced to admit I actually am a Real Admin Person. Woe.
I have to record for posterity the amount of pleasure it gave me to re-watch the original Superman movie over the weekend - I don't think I've actually seen it since it prompted my hopeless ten-year-old crush on Christopher Reeve when it first came out. It's klunky, dated, and naïve; its Krypton sequences feature day-glo white jumpsuits, unconvincing explosions and incredible sexism (Jor-El's legacy to his son is central, his wife is clearly nowhere in the equation), and its alarums and excursions seem rather tame in comparison to contemporary special effects. This didn't stop me from loving every cheesy minute of it. I also realised, somewhat belatedly, just how heavily the Superman Returns reboot relied on the first film: it's a direct and deliberate homage in many ways. Apart from the casting of Brandon Routh as a Reeve-clone, great chunks of dialogue are repeated verbatim (especially Jor-El to his son). Likewise, the recent film simply inflates to grandiose extremes Lex Luthor's obsession with real estate - in the first film he buys up stretches of Californian desert and then hits the San Andreas fault with a nuclear missile in order to turn all his land into expensive beachfront. Kevin Spacey was also clearly channelling Gene Hackman for a lot of it, his body language is identical in parts. Some hopeless retconning, though, the planet Krypton quite definitively blew up in the first film.
Next up, once I have this paper under wraps: the next two Reeve films, and then Superman Returns by way of comparison. Well, darn.
On the upside, as the Cosmic Wossnames set out to restore balance, I arrived at work at 7am all braced for a day spent in computerless exile while they painted my office, only to find that the super-efficient building manager had come in over the weekend and finished the job. It looks verray narce. He's also taken down the completely useless blackboard from one wall (what was with that, anyway? This office has been an office for all of recorded history, it's never been a tut room - do actual Real Admin People actually use blackboards for anything? I find it most mysterious) and moved the noticeboard to behind my desk rather than its previous exile in a pointless and non-utilitarian corner. This pleases me, although I shall now have to use the board for actual notices rather than for Terry Pratchett and Lemony Snicket posters. On the upside, my efficiency-and-professionalism quotient is certainly rising, any moment now I'll be forced to admit I actually am a Real Admin Person. Woe.
I have to record for posterity the amount of pleasure it gave me to re-watch the original Superman movie over the weekend - I don't think I've actually seen it since it prompted my hopeless ten-year-old crush on Christopher Reeve when it first came out. It's klunky, dated, and naïve; its Krypton sequences feature day-glo white jumpsuits, unconvincing explosions and incredible sexism (Jor-El's legacy to his son is central, his wife is clearly nowhere in the equation), and its alarums and excursions seem rather tame in comparison to contemporary special effects. This didn't stop me from loving every cheesy minute of it. I also realised, somewhat belatedly, just how heavily the Superman Returns reboot relied on the first film: it's a direct and deliberate homage in many ways. Apart from the casting of Brandon Routh as a Reeve-clone, great chunks of dialogue are repeated verbatim (especially Jor-El to his son). Likewise, the recent film simply inflates to grandiose extremes Lex Luthor's obsession with real estate - in the first film he buys up stretches of Californian desert and then hits the San Andreas fault with a nuclear missile in order to turn all his land into expensive beachfront. Kevin Spacey was also clearly channelling Gene Hackman for a lot of it, his body language is identical in parts. Some hopeless retconning, though, the planet Krypton quite definitively blew up in the first film.
Next up, once I have this paper under wraps: the next two Reeve films, and then Superman Returns by way of comparison. Well, darn.
