I was in the pub on Friday evening for Zoe's work leaving drinks. We were in the Holyrood Tavern, which I haven't been in for about 4 years, and on that last occasion it was the Edinburgh Festival and I can't remember much about it - yes, I was pished at the time. I do remember it being about 12:30am and the pub was heaving. I also remember seeing Simon Munnery (weird Festival 'comedian') sitting at the end of the bar, he was reading a newspaper... at half midnight in a pub. I remember thinking "What a tosser!" I later caught a bit of his very strange TV programme and was reassured that he did, in fact, seem to be a tosser. This time the bar was very quiet and civilised and pleasant, in a sticky tabled kind of way. At about 10pm the gathering repaired to Zoe's flat where one of her colleagues took a bit of a shine to me, and not in a good way. The colleague in question was a 40-something lady who kept hugging and kissing me. That has a sobering effect on one, I can tell you! She was a very affable drunk, just a bit... What's the word? Slobbery. Oh well, I later found out the poor woman had to work the next day so all my sympathies go out to her.
On Saturday evening Zoe and I had access to Byron's huuawge store of televisual entertainment. Oh joy! He actually has the pilot episode of The Blackadder which, despite being a huge and almost rabid Blackadder fan, I had never seen. Zoe kindly agreed to watch it with me and it was verreeee interestinck. It's basically the episode of The Blackadder where a aspersions are cast on the lineage of Edmond's brother, the heir to the throne, but in Elizabethan Blackadder the 2nd costumes. Oh, and Baldrick isn't as funny - Tony Robinson must have been born to play that part! Edmond is also the smarmy Blackadder of the second series and not the little slimy Edmond that he became in the first one. It still made me laugh out lound though, and there's a lot more slapstick in it. I'd be interested to find out why they changed from the smarmy Blackadder to the toady one, but then I'm a big freaky nerd that way ;o)
After that we watched a very interesting programme about LSD. I've never taken it myself and, after watching this programme, still have absolutely no desire to but it's one of those things (like killer bees) that makes you marvel and what dumb-asses human beings can be sometimes. Killer bees got loose on the American continent because the scientists studying them left a temp in charge when they all went on holiday and LSD seems to have got rife in the 1960's because the CIA decided to run clinical trials on students. D'oh!! Still, at least the students volunteered. This programme said there was evidence that the CIA dosed unwitting members of the public with it, basically to see what happened and if it could be used as a weapon. Evil. Evil. Evil.
Included in the programme was footage of an experiment that the BBC ran where they filmed a subject while he took a trip. This was not some crusty student they had scraped up, this was a smartly suited BBC presenter who took the drug in his drawing room. It ended up looking like something from Harry Einfield's Mr Chomondley-Warner series but the chap on the trip seemed to be having a marvelous time. He completely lost any 'normal' perception of time and would phase in and out of conversations. At one point he said he simply didn't have the vocabulary to explain what he was experiencing. This seemed to be a common theme with people on acid...
Which brings me to the movie I went to see on Sunday afternoon - The Fountain. I think this movie was on acid, or I wish I'd taken something before going to see it! I say it was on acid because it seemed to want to articulate something very profound but lacked the vocabulary and what came out was pretty incoherent balderdash. Talking of pretty though, baldy star-man Hugh Jackman in his little kung-fu pyjamas was quite pretty - when you weren't sniggering at how ridiculously pretentious those bits of the movie were! (See really bad photo above).
So Hugh Jackman's a surgeon married to a lady with a brain tumour, who's also the (quite barmy in my opinion) queen of Spain and he's also a hairy conquistador, but yet he's a baldy dude in little jammies doing tai chi in the stars and she's a tree... Or something.
I read a review on the IMDB about this one and I wonder what movie that guy went to see. Tellingly, he says a lot about the cinematography and the score but very, very little about the actual content or themes of the film. See above RE incoherent balderdash.
I hate to say it, but I may end up having a soft spot for this film just because it is so bad. So it's official - I'm sometimes a cinematic masochist. The review on the BBC website said it was "...rampant metaphysical codswallop" and I was practically sprinting to the cinema. I only have myself to blame. I'd go with meandering esoteric haddock slap myself though.
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