In this book “The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex” Mark expounds his views on topics such as:

• going to the Pictures
• why blockbusters should be better
• the inevitable decline of 3-D
• what are film critics for?
• …and so on

I totally and completely agree with what Mark says about the decline of the experience of going to the cinema, which has turned into an over priced adventure in queuing for massive amounts of crap food, where few poor staff will not look after your needs while there happens to be a film more or less visible and audible rather than a ‘performance’ where the entertainment of the paying public was important rather than squeezing as much money out of them as fast as possible.  Sorry, it seems that reading Kermode increases your likelihood to rant.

I enjoyed this book very much, but I do think it is the sort of book that you will enjoy if you already like Mark Kermode, if you don’t or don’t agree with his viewpoints it might just be a very frustrating read.  I did find the excerpt below which seems to be the first chapter from the audio book, which might help decide if you want to read it….  Even just listening to this first chapter is fun:

by the way, I don’t know how legitimate this video is so it might disappear.

Oh, and Hello to Jason Isaacs!

However, was this going to simply be a gimmick or would there be a genuine movie worth watching no matter what format it is presented in.  Yes, it is a really good movie – a good story, visually captivating, engaging, well acted, funny and with high drama cliff hanging ending(s).

The story opens in 1927 with silent movie star George Valentin at the height of his career, he bumps into an unknown extra Peppy Miller and has a small scene with her.  When Valentin is shown the new development of sound he laughs it of making it clear that he will not be talking in a movie (his reasons are never actually explained until … [can't say - spoilers]).  Soon, the studio moves to ‘all talkies’ with Peppy Miller the new rising starlet and Valentin out on his own.

What follows would indeed be too much of a spoiler, enough to say that while one is on the up the other is spiraling down and how can it possibly be resolved?

Of course this movie can’t be reviewed without talking about it being silent or rather talking about the use of sound.  [BTW this might be spoilers too, so if you are going to see it don't read on]  Most of the film uses a musical score frequently used as it would have been with a silent film, occasionally a song, but twice we are given sound that matches the visuals.  The first time [really this is a spoiler don't read unless you have seen it already]  …. is a  dream sequence where Foley sound is used but Valentin has no voice.  I thought this was fascinating as it sort of gently reminded you of the ‘normalcy’ of sound that as a viewer we had started to get used to not being there.  The scene isn’t too far into the movie so you are just setteling into the medium when suddenly there is audio that matches the action, which of course is ‘normal’ from real life and every other film you have ever seen, but in this context in this film it is out of place and therefore emphacises the lack of sound even more!

In summary, a really good movie, which should be seen in a cinema as really it will not be the same when viewed at home.  Also, there’s a really nice dog!

This is when we meet The Adjustment Bureau, who put small changes and alterations in our lives to make sure things don’t deviate from ‘the plan‘, which is written by ‘the chairman’.  So a spilled coffee, missed bus, etc. can alter the course of your life.  Which raises the question of who is the chairman, does this refer to God, are the Burea angels, do these adjustments remove ‘free will‘.  It is in fact a story of the spiritual search for ultimate meaning, and course for your life.

Do we choose our own path through life or are we predestined to a set path from which no alteration can be made.  What if we do make that step off the path, can it be corrected and put right again?

We both enjoyed this movie very much, it was thought provoking, exciting and engaging.  Another good sign is that at the end I thought it had been a good action adventure with a bit of a love story and D turned and said “that was a chick flick”  – so everyone wins :-)

[the DVD prefix is a new idea for blogging since I'm going to the cinema less but still like to remember my reviews of movies,  I don't plan to write up every movie I watch at home as that would simply take too long, but we shall see.]

GIGS, EVENTS & THEATER…

• May: Milton Jones
• May: Adam Ant & The Good, The Mad and The Lovely Posse
• Nov: The Good Rum Tasting

MOVIES watched at the cinema…

• June: Mammuth
• July: harry potter and the deathly hallows part 2

RESTAURANTS, blogged about…

• Jan: Jamie’s Italian

Holidays…

Feb: honeymoon in Barbados

July: we did a wee tour of England, visiting relatives in Coventry then having a few days in Yorkshire and the Lakes.

August:  CLANkidz not always seen as a holiday, but still it isn’t ‘work’ and it is in St Andrews so I think it counts

Other Highlights:

Feb: I got Married, D’ moved into my small flat and we began our married life of bliss.  The reality is that it is difficult to find a balance in everything when married, it hasn’t been easy but it has been a lot of fun.
Also, in Feb, as mentioned we went to Barbados and I found a new interest – Rum!
Oct: Put my flat in Woodlands on the market and it sold within three weeks
Nov: After looking at a lot of places we bought a house in Scotstoun
Dec: Moved into the new house, filled it up with clutter immediately, then had Christmas parties.  What a good month!

We moved into our new home on the 2nd of December and only a few weeks later hosted Christmas day for 9 of my lovely family, six adults and three children, including them all sleeping over so no one had to worry about driving.

This is the first time I have cooked a Christmas meal for many years, first time for this many people, first big meal in this house and first time using everything in the kitchen.  So I might have been a little stressed and a tad over prepared.  I decided to go for doing the lot from scratch and created the spreadsheet-of-doom to tell me when to do things on the day (this more or less worked for keeping things in order but the timing of each stage quickly went out the window and the estimated time of sitting down became “when it is ready”

First up, and made in advance was swede and cardamom soup, which I think worked really well but was perhaps a bit too heavy considering everything else that was to come.  Then the Turkey, which I bought from a local butcher, broke down into joints and cooked like this link – it lied by the way and took much longer than the time given to come up to temperature.  I also used that last link for a method of making the stuffing.  Along with this was the gravy, bread sauce & cranberry sauce, sprouts with bacon and chestnuts, roasted carrots, parsnips and potatoes and, of course, bacon-wrapped chipolatas.  Everything else, puddings, drinks, snacks, crackers, etc… were provided by my wonderful in-laws.

If you follow the links above you will see they are all youtube videos of the various recipes, and not all from the same chef, although I did stick to just two (with some tips from elsewhere).  By and large this was good because I like general pointers rather than strict recipes but a few time this was a little sketchy as not many quantities are mentioned in these videos, either to indicate how many the recipe is for or how much of any ingredient to use.  However, I worked it out more or less and everything sort of worked.

Cooking Christmas Lunch really isn’t that difficult and certainly not as difficult as I decided to make it for myself by not taking any shortcuts.  However, the lessons learned from this year might be as follows:

• Jointing the turkey myself was a faff and not worth the extra effort just to get some bones for stock and a little brown meat.  A crown is enough for anyone and at a push turkey legs can be purchased fairly cheaply.
• Scottish Free range organic… all nice words but this bird did have a lot of taste so I think it was worth it.
• bread sauce is easy to make
• cranberry sauce is even easier to make
• gravy was a bit of a hassle because I was waiting for the bones and juices from the turkey – not sure this was much better than if I have prepared it fully before hand, then I could always just use the bones and juices later for stock or gravy for ‘left-overs’.
• you can’t have enough chipolatas, especially with children at the table.
• sprouts can be made almost edible by adding lots of other stuff to them

Above all, however, I think it is important to remember to have some really nice bread for the turkey sandwiches later on.

Today we move to our lovely new home for ‘smug-marrieds’ and out of my one bed flat in Woodlands after 10 years in the area.  Time for the final reflection on living in this area.

Sounds a bit pious now, but I certainly felt ‘called’ to live in this area because I was already attending church here.  St Silas is very much what is known as a ‘gathered congregation’ i.e. with people traveling from all over to attend rather than mostly living in the area.  But at the time I was involved in youthwork in this community and wanted very much to live hear.  The problem then was finding a place I could afford because this isn’t a cheap area and there aren’t many one bedroom flats, so I would have to try to afford something bigger than I needed.

It took me well over a year of looking to find where I’ve been for the last 10 years and it has been good.  I’ve done a lot of work to the flat, but really it is all about the location.  It takes me about 40 min to walk home from work (faster if I walk home with Ali) and that walk takes me past two cinemas that certainly in the past I frequently stopped for an early showing.  There is a bus stop just on the corner, the underground it 5min walk, Kelvingrove park is 2min walk and the church is 1min 26sec walk (if not in a hurry). Not to mention the resturaunts, pubs, cafe’s and small shops all around!  This really is a nice area to live in.

But.  Living in a tenement needs some degree of neighbourly civilized behaviour and I think this is becoming a rare thing in my experience of Glasgow.  In my 10 years here I have only gotten to know 2 neighbours to any great extent and I wouldn’t say either of them were friends.  Most of the flats in my block (and every flat that surrounds my one) is now rented out, presumably to students or newly qualified professionals.  They appear to have no consideration or comprehension of how much noise is too much, or when is too late to be shouting and screaming in the close.  They also appear to be unable to grasp the simple process of putting rubbish into black bags and leaving them in the correct place, any old carrier bag more or less outside seems to be fine.

Other than neighbours who actually live here we also have the problem of passers by after ‘kicking out time’ in town.  Thursday to Sunday you more or less get used to, but ‘special events’ like Halloween, New Year, etc. this place can be like a war-zone.  Obviously, getting home when drunk is a noisy affair, that requires much shouting, singing and falling over, but every weekend someone has to use our close door as a toilet (not just number 1s either), traffic cones – or anything that is out and not tied down will be flung in random places in the street or put on top of cars, windscreen wipers and wing mirrors are fair game as is running along the tops of all the cars in the street.

Which means that while there are many things I will miss about living in Woodlands I am ready to move to somewhere where ‘grown-up’ live and where I hope people will have some more respect for themselves and their neighbours.  Even if it does mean a longer drive to church :-/

Deciding the areas was the most difficult part of all this.  We needed to be south of the Clyde or close to the Clyde tunnel for Danar to get to work.  South side would be more tricky for me to get to work being either bus or car and underground, while some of the houses North of the river were close to the rail line that would take me straight to the office in about 15min.

With these criteria we started to give over our weekends to driving at break-neck speed across the city to quickly look around people’s homes trying to find interesting things to say – often all I came up with was “that’s a good size”.  The map here shows all (I think) of the places we viewed with the red ‘x’ (difficult to see I know) marking where we have ended up,

We saw some nice houses, a lot not-so-nice, some wrecks and some fairly sad places that were obviously someone very old had died recently.  We viewed a new town house called river-view that you couldn’t see the river from, and a house with plastic floor and wall decor.  We looked at new-builds and older properties.  Detached, semidetached, bungalows, conversions, anything…

In this process, we saw only one property that we put in a ‘note-of-interest’ only to be told that it had already gone under offer.  This was disappointing and we did keep phoning up that estate agent to ask if things had fallen through, just in case – is that wrong?

However, on Tue 4th Oct when we accepted an offer on our flat and it all became a lot more real. Two days later we had three viewings arranged, one of which we thought was OK and probably worth a second viewing.  The next day we found out that property was actually going to closing – so we decided to put in a bid, did some negotiating and got it.  The rest as they say is history…

It took a few months to get organised, throwing even more stuff out or hiding it with parents and friends until the flat was clear(ish) of clutter and in a condition that we thought would help to sell it.  In the mean time we started tentatively trying to figure out where we wanted to move to and what type of property we would like but perhaps that is for a different post.  We had to decide on who to market the flat through, and the main decision appeared to be whether to use a solicitors firm, or an estate agent (who often also have solicitors).  To be honest I’m still not entirely sure what the difference is but from viewing lots of properties and from our experience of selling I would highly recommend going with an estate agent rather than a solicitor.

The actual process of selling the flat was (in retrospect) fairly straight forward.  We had a visit from the estate agent, an estimated valuation, then parted with some money.  Then a surveyor comes in to do the home report stuff, from which we get the actual valuation, and then a price is agreed for it to go on the market.  At that point you sit back nervously and wait for viewers.

The current economic climate is not great for selling property.  The market is apparently very slow, the media tells us there are no first time buyers, the banks aren’t lending and no one wants to buy at this time.  However, we were selling in a prime area of Glasgow – Woodlands.  The property here tends to move faster, due to proximity to the Universities and City Centre.  So we hoped it wouldn’t be on the market for months or years as we keep hearing about.

In the end we had a fairly steady stream of viewers which just meant having to keep the place tidy for them.  After only two and a half weeks we had two notes of interest and then a verbal offer came in.  This drove us to go to closing and accepting an offer just three weeks after putting the flat on the market.  Happy days!

Selling the flat suddenly made the need to decide where we were going to move to much more urgent……

He smuggles a letter to his solicitor asking him to lodge an appeal with the US Supreme Court.  Mike Fiske, a clerk at the Supreme court investigates and is killed, Rufus Harms escapes, his lawyer is killed, another clerk is killed…  John Fiske (an ex-cop lawyer and estranged brother to the first victim) starts to investigate further and eventually uncover the full story.

I struggled at first with this book as so many different stories were spun out and it took a while to draw them together.  However, the characters are well written and believable and once the plot gets going there are plenty of twists, and suspense.  The book also has a lot of insights into how the Supreme Court works – or at least I assume it is accurate, so it was interesting.

I don’t think it would be possible to guess ahead of time what the final twist was that put Rufus Harms in prison, but that doesn’t really take away from the interest of the plot.  A good read.

In the few months since then I have been doing some serious ‘research’ into some different types of rum and different ways to drink it.  So far I would say, if it’s clear mix-it, if it’s dark try it straight first.  I still think this isn’t a bad ‘rule of thumb’ but tonight I discovered a lot more.

The Good Spirit Company 23 Bath Street, is the best shop I’ve found for Rum (other spirits are also available), and tonight was their first evening Rum Tasting.  Having never been to a tasting of any kind I wasn’t sure how it would work but it was very straight forward, informative and above all tasty!  We had 6 Rums to sample and here are my initial thoughts on each one..

1. 10 Cane (Trinidad) £31.50 – a very light, easy to drink Rum. almost too light.  The alcoholic burn dissipated very quickly from the tongue and throat leaving no after taste.  I thought at first this might be a good choice to introduce someone to rum without it being too harsh.  This rum is made using the first press cane juice, which is unusual and makes it a fairly smooth drink.
2. Mezan Caroni 1991 (Trinidad) £39 – this had an interesting history that I can only vaguely remember.  Something about the distillers closing down after making this so it is running out (I think).  I found this had a harsh first taste with a lot of burn in the mouth but then a strong woody flavour, as I went back to this glass through the evening I found it increasingly like a bonfire aroma and the taste grew on me.
3. XM Millennium 12 Year Old (Guyana) £43 – it turned out to be the most expensive bottle of the evening and at first I found it very harsh.  However, that was my very first impression of Rum back in February, as you feel this burn in your mouth travel down your throat and makes you catch your breath.  The XM had a touch of vanilla taste and a subtle sweetness but with a good punch to it. This was a demerara rum, I’m still not too sure exactly what that means.  It had a touch of toffee or darkness which was very smooth and easy to drink.  Certainly by the end of the tasting this was my top choice.
4. Foursquare Spiced (Barbados £21.50) – the cheapest bottle of the evening, the only one from Barbados, the only Spiced Rum and one of the easier ones to get hold of in other off-sales and supermarkets (though I would suggest supporting independent shops like The Good Spirit Company if you can!!).  I’ve tried foursquare spiced a few times and have to say the spice taste is very subtle – I could just about pick up the nutmeg flavours but really this is an excellent lightly spiced rum, and at least on the first pass through our tasting this was my favorite.
5. Appleton 8 year old (Jamaica) £23.50 – Perhaps after four rums I had lost interest, but I really struggled to think of anything to note about this one.  I’ve heard of Appleton, it is a major brand but there was just something too harsh for my taste in this rum.  Apparently the Jamaican rums do tend to have more of a kick to them but this just didn’t rock my boat.  The only note I made was :-(
6. Smith & Cross Navy Strength (Jamaica) £30 – a second Jamaican rum and our last for the night, but we were warned that most of the rums presented were around 40% alcohol content, this one was 57%!  A gentle sniff confirmed that this Rum was going to have some impact so I, like many, added a splash of water.  This didn’t help!  The rum was close to undrinkable for my taste – I did try, several times(!) and there was a nice rum taste in there somewhere but it was overwhelmed by the straight alcohol content.  Not for me.

The tasting itself was a very good evening, personally I would like to know more background and knowledge about Rum making, history, etc. but there was enough to keep it interesting.  The choices of different tastes was fascinating in that each glass on its own smelled like Rum, but each one was different with its own subtle tones. We took advantage of the 10% discount on the rums included in the tasted by getting a couple of bottles (3 & 4 above), and had a great and very different evening.

Most interesting factoid from the evening: Rum ages tree times as fast in the Caribbean as it would here, so a three year Rum might be equivalent to a 9 year old Whiskey.