This user's comments

Listed below are comments made by brian thomson between Friday, 4th September 2009 and Tuesday, 8th December 2009.

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• I Mark... your homework 2:22pm on 08 Dec 2009 It's a bit weird hearing Mark read out my site user name with my comment: it's a weird made-up word that I use because it's always free, but it wasn't meant to be a "nom de plume"! I see we now have a space for a "real name", so I've used that now, and maybe I'll sound like less of a geek in the future. 8)
• Reasons to be cheerful 11:17pm on 01 Dec 2009 I think the Dr. has another name in kind: Christian McKay in the title role in "Me and Orson Welles" - an uncanny performance. Again, not an exact clone, but close enough, and with the spirit of the character.
  
  PS: Dr. K, if you get to interview Mr. McKay, be sure to ask him how he met Paul McCartney ..!
• Me and Me and Orson Welles 1:06pm on 27 Nov 2009 I had the pleasure of seeing "Me and Orson Welles" at the Irish Film Institute two weeks ago, and loved it, I thought the characters were pretty true-to-life for the period and the business they were in, meaning that the older characters (Orson, Sonja etc.) were a bit cynical and not entirely loveable.
  
  My feel-good film of the year would have to be "The Good, The Bad, The Weird" - the mad Kimchi Western. I don't know any really bad taglines, since I don't tend to pay much attention to them at all!
• Trailer Treachery 6:30pm on 21 Oct 2009 I recently re-watched the classic film "The Big Sleep", and then I watched the trailer on DVD. The trailer advertises the film almost solely on the backs of Bogart and Bacall - a.k.a. "That Man" and "That Woman". It has some action shots, but not even the slightest hint of a plot.
• Big Budget Catastrophes of Pure Joy 6:02pm on 09 Oct 2009 "Steaming hot donkey droppings"? I guess that's me told, then..!
• The Greatest Megabudget Movie Ever Made 7:29pm on 29 Sep 2009 Did I just read someone bad-mouthing Hudson Hawk? I saw it for the first time a few years ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it. That running joke about Hudson's search for a Cappuccino is even funnier in retrospect, coming from the pre-Starbucks era when only Italians and pretentious fops knew what a Cappuccino was ...
  
  "Would you like to swing on a star,
  Carry moonbeams home in a jar,
  And be better off than you are ...
  Or would you rather be a mule?"
• 5Live Review: The Soloist 5:27pm on 28 Sep 2009 This is getting ridiculous. Are you really telling me that the rights are really for UK only, and don't even extend to Ireland? So much for the *World Wide Web*, then.
• Music Lesson 6:47pm on 25 Sep 2009 "I'm not a musician, I'm a bassist". Oh dear ... do I start dropping names like Mingus, Holland, Vitouš, Wooten, or Manring ..?
  
  I'm also a bassist (electric) and it bothers me too. There's always something off about the timing when people are miming on an instrument they don't play. On the cello and other classical strings, for example, notes don't "speak" immediately. There's a small but consistent lag that is an essential part of "classical" timing, where the musicians play behind the beat. Compare this to Jazz timing, which is ahead of the beat, and Rock timing, which tends to be on the beat. When the mimer gets this wrong, or is inconsistent, that's at least part of what gets my goat, even before we get to fingerings.
  
  (I learned this from Tony Levin, a veteran bassist who has worked in all three fields and has written about this here: http://www.papabear.com/site_archive/speech.htm )
• Bring Me My Garmonbozia 4:02pm on 11 Sep 2009 Urgh. Like the good Dr., I'd rather watch a film about cooking, and my favourite of the genre (?) has to be Big Night (1996). I don't remember a single Eating scene in there - it's all about the kitchen, and the chefs fighting over a particular dish: Phyllis (Minnie Driver).
• Northern exposure 8:20pm on 04 Sep 2009 January 1999, the middle of winter, and I was in Canada, on a Greyhound bus from Calgary to Vancouver. Hurtling down icy highways between the Rockies at 80mph, there was a small (CRT) TV almost above my seat at the front of the bus, so had we gone off in to a ravine, that's what would have killed me, probably. The driver started a movie on the TV screens, and I plugged in my headphones to listen.
  
  Would it be something epic, stirring, elegiac, something to accompany my imminent icy, bloody, death? 2001, or perhaps Bergman? No: "One Fine Day", the 1997 rom-com with Michelle Pfeiffer, George Clooney, and some kids. Did it help take my mind off my impending doom? Absolutely. It's still my favourite rom-com to this day, which isn't saying much, but I have seen far worse, or parts thereof.

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