Beds

I like beds, pretty sure that everyone does. For the last three months (the ones that I've been living in Newbury) I've been sleeping on what appears to be a pallet with a layer of foam on top. Now this is actually a kind of bed, it's designed to be from the appearance of it and it would have been reasonably comfortable if it didn't keep snapping underneath me when I'm trying to sleep. Add to that the rusty/rickety old metal frame that barely supported it and I'm not sure that I wanted to sleep on it. In fact first thing I did was take the frame apart and use it as a drying rack and just put the pallet thing on the floor.

Today, however, today I get a new bed. It should have arrived some time around now, but it's running late so I thought I'd share my thoughts with the big, wide, uncaring internet for a few minutes, just to remind me that blogging can be fun and all that. Anyway, I'm told this one (which I'm inheriting for a few quid from a co-workers parents) has a mattress already (otherwise I'm screwed) and is a double that has a single top bunk. Score! I have no other furniture in my room, so that at least gives me a place to put clothes and stuff that I want to keep off the floor. All I need now is for it to turn up, that would be nice.

In other news... well, since yesterday there has been no other news? Rios is open on a monday night now, as a trial run for a month? That's about it. On with the film.

SUPER 8.

Well this was a... mixed film. Don't get me wrong, it is actually pretty good, there is definately a vibe that this is the spiritual successor to ET, but it's almost trying too hard to be the next ET that it forgets that it could be a film all in its own right. If ET were the Cloverfield monster, that's pretty much one way to think of this movie.

It starts out with the death of our central kid's mother. Now that's the thing with the kid actors in this film. They are really good, I mean really, really good at the emotional scenes. When they need to jerk a tear or make you laugh or anything like that, they're good for it. The only downside to them is in the casual scenes, when they appear a bit wooden.

See that's the difference between a good child actor and a good adult actor, kids are good for the emotion, adults are good for the bits when they're sitting around and talking rubbish (mainly because they're jaded and dead inside, so they don't have emotions anymore). It's just a little thing I kept noticing throughout the course of this movie.

Other little things, why does the explosion/crash of the train (the catalyst for the entire plot) take 5 minutes to play out? Why does the alien abduct people and then seemingly kill them if all it wants is to go home? Why did one of the kids get left behind at the camp, just so that the main kid's dad could demand to know where his son is? Why the lens flare?

There are a lot of little things with the movie, but the biggest is that towards the end it really does feel like there's two scripts trying to break free of each other and be different movies. Is the part where the deputy goes all commando and breaks out of the army base entirely neccessary? Is the tearful acceptance of both fathers actually helping to move the plot forward? This, in many ways, is a very typical JJ Abrahms plot, very interesting opening, a few too many 'ooh no, can't let you see that *yet*' moments and then a couple of hasty and half-arsed reveals at the end that just don't cut the build-up that was placed upon them.

This is a good film, but it's poorly put together. That's about as well as I can judge it.

Next up: CONAN THE BARBARIAN (2011).