Blog Archive:
Saturday 1st April 2006
V For Va-Va-Voom
I’ve been a hive of activity this month - which is certainly better than actually having hives, a condition which seems to me as being disturbingly akin to having facial haemorrhoids. Ah those heady (pun intended) days of adolescent spots, blackheads and zit cannons...! But enough reminiscing about my youthful skirmishes with rosacea, this blog was meant to be about exciting developments in the world of Me not an FAQ about the greasy universe of dermatitis. Let’s abandon this tangent right now with nothing less in fact than full abandon...
Yes. I’ve been busy. I’ve been productive. I’ve actually got some work done. My poetry portfolio is bursting at the seams with the fruits of my art and just needs a few commentaries written before it can be sent off to the printers to be perfectly bound and then submitted to Uni for marking. I’m very excited. I’m very excitable. Another example of my burgeoning productivity is the creation of a brand new web site by and for yours truly. Wednesday 22nd March 2006 saw the birth of www.brighterwebdesign.com and though no one suitably majestic and awe inspiring had predicted its coming little old me is hoping it will make some sort of significant splash upon the big face of the world. Hey if it just impinged on my bank account in a positive way I’d be pleased. But then I am very pleasable. Oh how I wanted to write "pleasurable" but already I could see the raised eyebrows of my meagre readership quirking higher still in sheer disbelief.
Yes www.brighterwebdesign.com is my all-out attempt to break into the world of web design once and for all and earn myself some extra moolah. Brothers are doing it for themselves. Annie Lennox can kiss my butt. No, really she can. Reduced fee and everything. Hopefully "Brighter" will herald in a new positive age of income, i.e. one where my income outstrips my outgoings by considerably large sums of cash rather than the other way round which seem to be the current state of affairs. Part of this big push toward mercantile supremacy will be an advert in the local Thompson Directory and maybe a few business cards with which to seed the capitalist soil of Leamington’s finest shops and businesses. Seed or salt - I’m not sure which metaphor works best for me. Na ha ha! Cue big twirling of my marvellously handsome moustache in big film villain stylee.
And talking of handsome moustaches... the wife and I went to see V For Vendetta a few days ago and were totally blown away by it. What an incredible film. Without a word of a lie but with words pumped full of hyperbole it was easily the best film I’ve seen in a long while. Everybody can remember their first truly AMAZING film as a kid - the one that gives you goose bumps and inhabits your mind and emotional soul for days afterwards so that you feel like your reality has been permanently coloured by the experience. In my case it was Star Wars and the feeling lasted for weeks; I felt mentally transported to another universe entirely. Unfortunately once you’ve had that first experience it becomes almost impossible for another film to replicate it; to hit the spot in the same way. It’s like the stakes are raised or the goalposts are moved further back and the next film must work twice as hard again to push you over that same precipice into sheer cinematic abandon. It’s been years since I’ve experienced that sense of exhilaration when leaving a cinema - I think the last time was after watching Peter Jackson’s The Two Towers in 2002. How fabulous to have that experience again and damn pleasing to know that people are still capable of making films that can conjure it.
I’m guessing that V For Vendetta will be one of those films that people will either love or hate; there will be no middle ground. For those sad-sacks among you that have no imagination or ability to suspend your disbelief I send you my heart-felt pity. And that in a very small amount. Take this tiny soupcon of sympathy and then get thee to soddery you pathetic soulless worms. For those of you that have fully developed imaginations and the ability to make emotional connections to the machinery of real life I say go and see this film and revel in its visual and verbal ecstasy. This is an incredibly important film - more so given the current climate in which we in the West currently find ourselves: at the mercy of unscrupulous governments who use terrorism and America’s cynical "War On Terror" to sneakily dismantle our personal freedoms and infringe upon our God given right to personal autonomy. V For Vendetta resonates deeply with all of the fear and paranoia that is presently infecting Western society and shines a cold light on the numb brutality that governments, desperate to cling to their over-weening power, will stoop to in order to retain that power. Power to protect us? I don’t think so. As V himself says in the film: "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." And they are, folks. They bloody are.
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