Tuesday 24 February 2015

Kingsman deleted scene?


PICS REMOVED FOLLOWING PATHETIC COPYRIGHT COMPLAINT FROM PATHETIC  FILM COMPANY AFTER THEY'D BEEN POSTED ALL OVER THE INTERNET

Some sort of early 70s flashback establishing Michael Caine's Arthur character?

Found on this site,
http://jellyfishpictures.co.uk/jellyfish-portfolio/the-secret-service/
"Jellyfish worked on the VFX for the movie including a complex sequence involving Michael Caine looking 40 years younger"

Must say I thought Caine's character one of the darkest, and smartest things about the movie, and there is obviously a lot more to him than meets the eye.

*SPOILER*

Arthur appears to be one of the 'snobs' throughout the movie, but in his dying breath ("YOU DIRTY LI'TTLE FUCKER") he reveals a working class accent not unlike that of Eggsy, suggesting he has betrayed his background in a similar way to Samuel L Jackson's character in Django Unchained. I wonder if this was suggested during Jackson and Caine's scene together.


Friday 20 February 2015

Agent Carter vs Black Widow of 1946 should be some showdown















You are not watching Agent Carter and The Americans because.. There is something better on !?!

I blacked out in a pub night before last, just after seeing Kingsman for a second time (it gets better). Because I can't get over this bloody flu I'm still stranded in London and had to get car MOTed here instead of Devon.
Would London garage this mean it is more expensive?
Apparently it is £700 in  - I'm sure-  essential break disk replacements.
I am Jack's total lack of surprise.

*Whatever*

What keeps me perky is my favourite tv of the moment, which is so good I'm unable to wait for the entire thing to become available before I watch it. This usually happens to me at the end of long runs series like Breaking Bad. Agent Carter has been instant watching material right from the off. There is enough Internet gushing over this as it is so I'm not going to add to this things already said.

It is actually teaching a creaking old misogynist it's like myself some things about how men relate to women that I wish I'd known long ago. In last weeks penultimate episode Peggy has to come clean completely with her male coworkers. After dealing with 1940s attituades in the workplace for first half of the series she loses it and tears a strip off them all, not just listing their sexist attitudes but categorising them, showing that their treatment of her varies from dismissive to over protective depending on their attitude to her - AND SHE DOESN'T NEED ANY OF IT.

Example : poor office nice guy Daniel Sousa (Enver Gjokaj, even better than he was in Whedon's Dollhouse) gets ripped into for putting her on a pedestal...
I must have hit That button a few times over the years myself. It is the supposed proto feminist angle to Agent Carter that is putting viewers off so I won't lay it on any thicker than I have but a tv that makes you question you own attitudes for the better has to be good.

It's as instructive and funny about the period as Mad Man. Automats, all women boarding accommodation.... It almost seems more alien than 1920s Atlantic City.

And, it's funny. Cast members obviously aren't afraid to adlib and the banter between Carter and Jarvis fizzes like a unlikely cocktail of Fleming and PG Wodehouse. Atwell is obviously adding her own Britishisms, calling out Tony Stark's father as a 'wanker' at one point and breaking the seriousness with classic old school profanity like "Crikey Oh Riley!"
- the next.

The combat is about the best on tv. Actually its about level with The Americans to be fair, which I really should have covered on this blog before now. (Actually I'd probably also be watching that future classic series as fast as I can get hold of it if it wasn't so generally ignored and low profile that I'd not idea it had re-started. I promise to cover it when I get to season 3. Is The Americans the most ignored quality small screen drama ever?)

Here is ..Peggy and Jarvis dealing out bruises in refreshingly period fashion. You feel Bogart would have loved this, music is the very period Peggy Lee - "It's a Good Day"



In what might be Agent Carter's final episode next week she will finally get to face the Black Widow of this era, "Dottie" (chilling performances from Bridget Regan) who has been skillfully built up as a scary superKGB psychopath, trained and indoctrinated from childhood. Dottie is  a character easily recognisable from  the doomed KGB recruits in The Americans in that she's been brutalised since infancy and sleeps handcuffed to her own bed, and easily recognisable as a Marvel character in that she can parkour down the levels of in an open stairwell like Daredevil.

Up against that Peggy's main superpower seems to be that she's ex S.A.S., and is an adorably feminine  total badass. I can't wait.

Aside from the pulp period thrills there is something deeply satisfying about the world buiding here if you are into this level of nerd-dom. History of the Marvel universe is being filled in from Agent Carter, slowly colouring in the background with the care of a landscape painter. Nothing so far looks out of place.
Serial incompetence at Strategic Scientific Reserve obviously leads to formation of S.H.I.E.L.D., less concerned with HYDRA now a new soviet threat, Leviathan, is making its presence felt. Leviathan's girl assassin program obviously leads to Scarlet Johonsenns Black Widow of 2012. If the path of Natasha Romanov from KGB to S.H.I.E.L.D. doesn't follow a similar path to Elizabeth (Keri Russell) in The Americans I'll be amazed.

Peggy Carter will after this be seen in May in her 1960s incarnation recruiting Michael Douglas as Ant-Man, probably not long before Stark senior and his wife discover the truth about S.H.I.E.L.D and are assassinated  in an apparent car accident.

Hayley Atwell looks like has a career for life now, she can appear in flashbacks for various others characters for years and she can return to playing Carter in different eras as she matures herself. I would say though that if they want to cover Peggy Carter in 1940, busting out super soldier scientist Erskine from a Bavarian Castle under the rapidly mutating noses of HYDRA
(as depicted in the tie in comic CAPTAIN AMERICA : FIRST VENGEANCE)

and they want to use Hayley Atwell  - don't keep us waiting.
Marvel's WHERE EAGLES DARE starring Hayley Atwell, Hugo Weaving and Stanley Tucci ?
Please god give me this now.

Monday 16 February 2015

Don't miss the chance to see Kingsman : The Secret Service with a big audience

“I’m a Catholic whore currently enjoying congress out of wedlock with my black Jewish boyfriend who works at the military abortion clinic. 
So hail Satan, and have a lovely afternoon madam” 

- Colin Firth kicks off the incredible Westboro baptist church scene in Kingsman, and probably the most unexpected movie martial arts career ever.



DIAGNOSIS: MANFLU

 - that time when you know you are growing old with the wrong woman -

Now we've got Valentines Day out of the way for another year..

In November I got my flu jab and felt indestructible. I gave blood in December, after that I felt bullet proof.

Well it's about six weeks later and at work I suddenly felt very chilly - then very very chilly. I went home early back to my flat shivering, climbed in the hottest bath I could run and then sat there topping it up with warm water until I felt warm. It took two hours.

Never felt anything like it and for a while thought I had pneumonia, luckily, I hadn't but when the rest of those symptoms and later complications arrived the symptoms did perfectly fit something else -  Adenovirus. It is now nearly a week later, I've just had my first consecutive sick days in about 15 years. Not properly slept in 72 hours and have found, as a non-optional extra, that I have gone onto develop conjunctivitis, which is at least the subject of my favourite Halloowen South Park episode ('Pink Eye').
This is the worst flu I've ever had and I'm lucky to have it now, because if I'd been ten years older I'd be in hospital now or worse.

Luckily I know I can get over it on my own.  I know what I need, and exactly what I don't need.

I think generally if I could fully share my subjective experience with British women with the rest of the  UK male population we would be living in a childless dystopian scifi thriller in a generation.

Specifically my own personal subjective experience of  relationships in the past tells me that the loving care you might hope to get from your British partner when you are ill is likely to be a lot more like "GET OFF YOUR ARSE IT IS ONLY MAN-FLU".

I'm not going to go into the history of the term, or the comedy industry that's grown up around it. Some regard it as a silly joke :

Wouldn't it be great if there was evidence that man flu was an actual thing rather than a fiction born of hypochondria, slackerdom and sexist exploitation?

In my experience it certainly is a real thing, not an aliment in itself but a handy excuse for your supposed nearest and dearest used to have a laugh at your expense when you are genuinely ill. The witless contempt I received from two different long term partners, on two different occasions, both overusing the word Man-Flu, had an even more lasting effect that my actual illness. What made it doubly annoying is that these  two were prize attention seekers who I'd been happy to wait on hand and foot when they'd been ill themselves.

Even if there was a term equivalent to Man-Flu used to describe malingering women, that could be employed without starting an avalanche of sexist controversy - would you use it on your partner? When they were ill? Consider this next time some pampered darling accuses you of play-acting for sympathy.

I don't like being miserable being ill and alone, but as always with being alone - it could be worse.

A 2010 survey by the Office for National Statistics reported on by the BBC World Service suggests that women call in sick twice as often as men do


In my case the watery eyes are conjunctivitis

Sunday 15 February 2015

23/1/15






















Hidden fingers of QMUL

My contract since October has been here at Queen Mary College London. I'm very lucky, last three contracts, for Telegraph, Camelot and this one are among the best I've ever had.

This square is right in the middle of London, between Barbican (see later post) and Farringdon.





This contract has security elements with a high quotient of Mad Science. From 1964 until 1982 QMUL maintained a nuclear reactor, the first to be built for a UK university.


"QMUL-Nuclear-Reactor" by QMUL - Discovery in Science and Engineering 1886-2010. http://www.library.qmul.ac.uk/node/1555. Licensed under GFDL via Wikipedia.