Day 684

Aka Saturday 15^th December 2018

…completed my new CV, but I couldn’t upload it to my UC page as I couldn’t find the right page, or I could and there just isn’t an option to upload things. Very frustrating!...

…then I watched:

‘The Hurt Locker’, which is about an Iraq War Explosive Ordnance Disposal Team and the experiences and stresses they have had as they near the end of their deployment. This is an enjoyable, great looking film, well directed (by Kathryn Bigelow), well acted (but what would you expect when the cast includes Jeremy Renner, Anthony Mackie, Brian Geraghty, Guy Pearce, Evangeline Lilly and Ralph Fiennes), great script, but you won’t take any new messages away from it. 

It’s the usual story of how being at war/being in a conflict zone becomes dull and just a job after a while, that war/conflict changes you, that you become a little numb to what is a life-or-death situation or it becomes your number one thing and you leave your family to go back to it, to go back or another tour of duty, another rotation. 7/10

 

‘Lord of War’ is a bit like a gangster movie, initially our ‘hero’ is at a bit of a loose end, but then finds the thing that the is good at, starts out in the little league, but soon makes it to the bigs, enjoys the high life for a while, but then it goes crashing down around his ears. It’s just that in ‘Lord of War’ instead of being a gangster, Nic Cage’s thing is selling arms/being a gun runner. Like ‘The Hurt Locker’, ‘Lord of War’ is enjoyable, looks great and has a great cast (Nicolas Cage, Ethan Hawke, Jared Leto, Eamonn Walker, Ian Holm and Donald Sutherland (voice only)) and it’s a joy to watch Nic Cage act. 

But it kinda tells you what you already know, that gun running is bad, that its normally very bad people buying the guys and that there is an amount of Government approval for some gun running. But it does a great job of humanising these issues and of setting out the human side of some world events. It’s one thing to read about a refugee camp being destroyed, but it’s different to see it acted out on the silver screen. 7/10.

‘Riddick’, the third live action Riddick film and is much better than ‘The Chronicles of Riddick’, because it keeps things simple and doesn’t get lost in creating a mythology/universe building. It’s back to the simplicity of the ‘Pitch Black’, a bunch of people stuck on an alien world with vicious creatures about to attack. 

It's well filmed and acted, and yes, there are similarities to ‘Pitch Black’, but enough differences to not be a direct copy, as Riddick as grown (a little) and is a tad more gentle, more human, less self-centred. A fun, sci-fi romp. 7/10.

…and I did the G2 Crossword:

…and today’s crossword takes us back towards the sunny uplands of crossword Nirvana as I only had to cheat on a twelfth of the clues (two out of 24). If only I had known that a ‘noisy, lavish party’ is a ‘thrash’ and that ‘noisome’ means ‘foul-smelling’ t would have been crossword perfection…maybe next week?