Ians Ramblings Ian's ramblings, daily, ish

Politics

What is going on in this country? Why now are the two minority parties trying to cobble together some kind of 'joke like' frail government to avoid facing up to the fact they lost the election.

Couldn't we have another general election? Given the current mess I can't help but feel the electorate would really get behind one party this time.

Even if proportional representation had been the method of the day, the Liberals would still have lost, why do they have any say in anything? less than 3 in ten people voted for them.

It's a horrendous mess, I am not even comfortable with the Liberals pushing their policies to the forefront in coalition with the Conservatives, let alone Labour..

If Labour had any sense at all they would step away from this mess and have nothing to do with the Liberals. This will be a time of very unpopular cuts, and would be even more unpopular if the Scottish and Welsh manage to slither their way out of them by holding Labour to ransom.

I think Labour put themselves in a much stronger position for the future of they conceded defeat to the Conservatives and rejected any coalition with the Liberals.

I think the Conservatives have made a very good offer in only conceding a referendum on voting reform, because lets face it, there won't be any change given the tiny numbers of Liberal votes.

Ouchh!

Finally had my wisdom tooth out, not had any dental work done before so was quite a shock hehe. Ah well it's done now and I am chilling at home watching some classics starting with the original Italian job, probably then good ole great escape

Blogger to wordpress re-write

This may not be the best way to achieve this, but if you have set up some nice permalinks on your wordpress blog and have previously imported your blog from Blogger and want to maintain your links.

I set my permalinks to match my old blogger links i.e year month and blog title first, then I set my apache directory re-write rules as I have described before. Finally I added the following to the re-write

RewriteRule (.*)\.html[\/]?$ http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/ [P]

Just above the Rewrite conditions and re-write rule generated by word press. It just means that requests to the old flat HTML postings are properly re-directed to the new permalink postings.

WordPress FTP Logindaten falsch

Just incase you are getting this error message when submitting a post and get confused by the drama queens such as http://wordpress.org/support/topic/352761 you should just check your recently installed plugins.

In my case it was the "Really static" plugin which basically writes your postings out as flat HTML. It is a fairly dirty little plugin, but a great idea, it may be fine once it is totally set up, basically just don't have it activated unless you have it all set up correctly.

Raising Victor Vargas

I know this posting is effectively out of date at the time of writing, but I only just discovered this exceptional film.

If you have't already seen it, it is basically a 'slice of life' drama / romance based in the lower east side of Manhattan in New York City against the backdrop of the Hispanic community and the glowing orange sun of summer.

Raising Victor Vargas

Incredibly intriguing and captivating, I found it impossible to turn away once I began to watch. I am usually one of the harshest critic0,s but to me this film was just brilliant, strange as this may sound I could almost smell the air and feel the textures of the locations.

From a cinematographic I thought there was great use of light and texture. From the orange glow of the summer light, down to the plastic wrapped couch all had a distinct air of realism to me.

From a character perspective I thought the notion of Victor Vargas as almost the glue that connects the story was quite inspired, each of the other members of the family having a more complete background simply caused greater intrigue in the main character himself.

Beyond that, having known someone just like the grandmother and having been on the receiving end of just such a situation, I can say the situation felt particularly realistic. The awkwardness, the accent, the cooking and even down to the comments made felt so authentic to me.

I think this film worked for me because I began to watch it with no expectations and found it completely immersing and brought back memories of teenage emotion, well worth a watch.

Ian’s Short Film Roundup

Another little posting about films, in advance I do realise I am a very harsh critic on films and have no actual knowledge about films but here goes anyway

I watched both "Drag me to hell" and "Layer Cake" this weekend. Starting with Layer Cake I thought over-all it was great, totally believable performance from Daniel Craig and better in terms of the smoothness of the stories twists and turns and complexity than both 'Lock Stock' and 'Snatch'.

Layer Cake

The only thing that bothered me after a while is that it seemed to basically be the exact same story as Carlito's Way, even with the appearance of a Benny Blanco style character who eventually even goes on to carry out the exact same final role.

As for "Drag me to hell" well its yet another gross out waste of film really. It's tedious in parts and overly vile in others, with poor acting throughout particularly the performances of Alison Lohman and David Paymer and carried barely by the performances of Lorna Raver, Dileep Rao and Justin Long.

Drag me to hell

I think the only reason it isn't languishing in the 5 star region on IMDB is because it is an attempted return to 70s / 80s style horror. I should also say at certain points it's cringingly grinding and slow and obvious actually prompting me to want to fast forward through the bits I had already out-thought to get to the next bit of mild interest, particularly the dinner scene and the scene where the button is dropped in the car.

Ah well at least one out of two is not too bad really. At least I got the chance to chill out today while it snowed heavily outside watching "Three men in another boat" far more civilised and amusing and relaxing.

Wolfman 2010

Wolfman

I went to see the new Wolfman film this evening at a great and rather retro 70s / 80s style cinema which was just right for a bit of a nostalgic cinematic experience.

Initially before seeing the film I was really hoping it would be somewhat of a tribute to the 1941 classic, playing off scenes and lines from the older rendition. I was glad to say I was not disappointed at all and thoroughly enjoyed it.

It seemed to maintain an constant visual style throughout, a grey, misty very English look to almost every scene very reminiscent again of the earlier classic.

Some of the cinematography particularly the journey of the three parties back to Talbot Hall, Lawrence Talbot, Gwen Conliffe and inspector Abberline was great. Especially as it moved from one shot to the next between each of these characters, not requiring any dialogue but clearly portraying their convergence on a common destination.

Another great set of scenes were after the asylum escape sequence throughout the streets of Victorian London lots of attention paid to the architecture of the time and whilst there was alot of CG it never intruded on the overall stylised look.

(Warning Spoiler)

Overall I really enjoyed the film, I must say the fighting between more than one wolfman was not my favourite part but overall everything worked brilliantly.