Xenon's Seventh Circle

1994 was a big year for me. I went to university, and also got online for the first time. Access was a bit limited to begin with; they were still installing the equipment to properly get the place Netted up. But it was there. Instant communication with the entire world! Okay, okay - a little bit of it, mostly in other colleges. The internet was a lot smaller in those days! But communication, without that troublesome face-to-face nonsense. It was quite the revelation.

Lots happened before I got there though. My local area got turned on its head at the start of that year, when the Fred West saga was uncovered (literally). He'd been murdering young women for years, and burying them in his back garden. One of a number of jobs that I had that year was delivering newspapers, and I had strings of little old ladies sitting by their front doors every day, desperate for the latest bit of news! One of the victims, who had disappeared in 1973, was local, and they all remembered the search that went on for her at the time, in fields round about. That turned into quite the major story - and Gloucestershire was collectively most put out when Harold Shipman turned up a few years later, and Yorkshire stole the "home of the country's most prolific serial killer" title. Granted, it's generally held that West killed more people than was proven, but he's highly unlikely to have hit Shipman's total. Although, do we win on points for having a violent one, when Shipman did it all with a quiet voice and a syringe? A vital point of order, I think...

Happier news in South Africa! Nelson Mandela was elected President in this year, which was good to see. A long, long time coming. Good for two reasons. One, he was the best man for the job - and two, his amazing shirts instantly brightened up any gathering of international leaders. I loved those shirts.

Elsewhere though, it was one of those years. Pretty much anybody I'd ever watched on telly seemed to die in '94. George Peppard! Farewell, Hannibal Smith. Telly Savalas (so long Kojak). And whilst I'm on the subject of policemen - how'd I forget to mention Raymond Burr yesterday?! Cameron Mitchell, who had had a long film career, but who I remember best as good old Buck Cannon in The High Chaparral. And of course Roy Castle lost his cancer battle this year. Nick Cravat and Burt Lancaster both went in '94 as well - together until the end. And Kurt Cobain of course.

John Smith, the admittedly dull leader of the Labour Party, also died this year, very suddenly. I don't know if he would have stood much chance making Prime Minister come the next election (he really didn't seem to have a personality at all), but his death saddled us with Tony Blair. Heaven only knows what might have happened had he lived. Iraq? Afghanistan? It's hard to believe that he'd have gone down that route. But, inevitably, there's no way of knowing that now.

Good year for music. Britpop was well underway. Blur's third album and Oasis's first one both went stratospheric. Pulp's ninety-ninth (or whatever it was) finally made them stars. M People were gigantic for five minutes, and the Manics came out with the critically acclaimed The Holy Bible. Don't know that it was a big commercial success at that point, but it made their name as a band to watch out for.

Lots of big stuff from America as well. REM released Monster, with songs What's The Frequency, Kenneth? and Bang & Blame; Jeff Buckley released Grace, which featured the ubiquitous Hallelujah. Was there a TV show in the 90s that didn't feature that somewhere?! Arguably the big song of the year was Springsteen's Streets Of Philadelphia, from the previous year's film Philadelphia. It won just about everything going in '94 and '95 - and (far more importantly!) when he played it live at the Grammys, he did so with Max and Roy. The E Street Band was on its way back!

( ... )

Argh, 1992. What do I know about 1992?! I do know that Peter's Friends was released. I went to see it, but the projector broke down part way through, so I had to go back the same time next week to see the rest. Fortunately it was worthwhile! I wound up buying the soundtrack (which I recommend). Windows 3.1 came out, although I don't think I got anywhere near it until probably around '94, by which point it was about to be superceded by 95. I didn't start using 95 until about 2000 though, by which time... I sense a pattern. :)

Oh, what else happened in '92? Um. It was a leap year. (Counts, hurriedly). Yes. Definitely a leap year. Bush and Yeltsin spent ages having talks to decide that they weren't going to try blowing each other up anymore, which was quite nice of them I suppose. Clinton got elected. I like Bill Clinton. He plays the saxophone, and likes fish and chips. Does it show that I'm struggling with this year? I really don't remember a bloody thing, except school sucking.

There was the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert of course, but I wasn't able to watch that. A rock concert in tribute to a member of Queen was not going to happen with my father present. Happily he was out when it got repeated. Whether that was Christmas '92 or '93, I don't recall, but it was one of the two. Springsteen put out a pair of (E Street Band-less) albums, but I was still cross with him for sacking them, so I don't think I paid much attention. Being (mildly) less ridiculous nowadays, I've got over all of that, but I still think those two albums are rubbish (sorry Bruce). Except for Human Touch and Better Days. Least said about 57 Channels (And Nothing On), the better. What were you thinking, Bruce?! About the same as the British public were thinking, when they elected the Conservatives again this year. 1992! If they'd waited one more year, I could have voted. And I'm not trying to make out that this would have made any difference to the outcome, especially given Britain's rubbish first-past-the-post electoral system, but at least I'd have felt like I could have helped. I still don't know who I would have voted for though. No Greens then, at least locally. Never could quite believe in Neil Kinnock, and Paddy Ashdown irritated me. Safe Tory seat here, so it's irrelevant anyway, but dreams are nice.

What was I watching in 1992? That's usually a safe subject. It was the year that Between The Lines started. I love that show. Still good. That first series is a humdinger, although I do still prefer series two. And there was The Good Guys (which I alone seem to remember, with Nigel Havers and Keith Barron swashbuckling their way about. With swords! There were definitely swords in one episode at least). And there was Sam Saturday, which I'm definitely alone in remembering, about a policeman. (It was a nickname - he was Jewish, so they called him Saturday. Because...? Saturday could just as easily be for Catholics. Anyway, I liked it at the time). And the BBC caused national panic airing Ghostwatch, in which Mike Smith and Sarah Greene, with Michael Parkinson just to make it all look extra believable, pretended to discover ghosts in the suburbs. It was brilliant. They were banned from showing it again. Some people have no sense of humour...

( Music! That's something that I do know something about. )

1993 is far less of a struggle. Though that's not necessarily a good thing.

Two of my siblings got driving licences in 1983. Mobility! For a little while anyway. Mobhanded about the countryside, in a wobbly van roughly the colour of cowpats. It had a dodgy handbrake, was religiously opposed to reverse, and it wasn't a good idea to open the passenger window - and it definitely wouldn't have passed any modern emissions tests. But it moved. We went to see Superman III in it. Not a great film! I liked it at the time though. The woman being turned into a walking computer actually seemed pretty scary back then. Saw Return Of The Jedi too - believe it or not, my first Star Wars film. I was mostly wondering who the Jedi was, and where he had been, but it wasn't a bad place to jump in at, Ewoks notwithstanding. Still waiting for a Han, Chewie and Lando spin-off though!

Otherwise, this was the year that saw The A-Team, Simon & Simon, Remington Steele, TJ Hooker and Knight Rider all hit British shores. Folks, we have reached peak eighties telly! As long as I live, I think I shall always be a bit confused by shows that don't have shoot-outs, cars flying randomly through the air, and heroes locked in warehouses that are suspiciously easy to break out of. This is clearly the default state of television. They don't even bash heroes over the head and tie them up in car crushers anymore. Might mess up their hair, I suppose. Although if AJ Simon can manage with his fuzzy mop, you'd think anybody could. 1983 was also the year when we got the Bo-and-Luke-free season of The Dukes Of Hazzard. Bit baffling back in those days, when we couldn't get on the internet to find out what the bloody hell was going on! Still, they came back soon enough.

Music wise, I suppose 1983 was the year of Wham!. They'd had a song out the previous year, but they had about three hundred in 1983, and my sister never stopped singing them. For the first time, when she was singing something I actually didn't mind. I've always been a fan of Wham!. I should probably be embarrassed to admit that, but I'm not. Otherwise, Keith Harris and Orville singing Orville's Song proved to be the only thing that would stop my baby sister from crying whilst she was teething. Please forgive us, but we bought the bloody thing, thereby helping them climb dangerously close to #1. I can still sing it. Unbelieveably though, it's not the worst song to hit the charts that year. Rene & Renato probably win that, with Save Your Love. (I'm not posting a link to it - just believe me).


( ... )

I'm not saying much about books, am I. Just imagine an endless waterfall of Willard Price, Franklin W Dixon and Enid Blyton, and you won't go far wrong. Also anything remotely shark or dinosaur flavoured. This led to me attempting to read Jaws when I was staying with my grandparents.

Yikes. The book is a lot naughtier than the film...!

Jeepers. I watched Arrow, because it was a Constantine crossover. (Everybody's crossing over lately. Sleepy Hollow just did it last week, with Bones (which, it turns out, is awful). And now Constantine with Arrow (which, it turns out, is awfuller). Don't even try to tell me that that isn't a word. It totally is). How does Arrow get to be on its fourth season, when Constantine didn't even make it to one full one?! It was like watching amateur hour. Still, it did show up nicely how great a character John Constantine is. I shall now procede to sulk in the corner over good TV that doesn't get what it deserves.

Actually no I won't, because there was another reason for posting. The Long, Long Trailer! This means absolutely nothing to anybody, I know, but it's a 1954 film starring Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and is basically I Love Lucy: The Movie. They don't play Lucy and Ricky, but they might as well do. It's about a married couple who buy a caravan instead of a house, and decide to see America before settling down. Of course it's an absurdly long one, and leads to much caravan-based hilarity. It's not as good as I Love Lucy, as the writing isn't so snappy; and also it's a movie, so Desi didn't have creative control. Retakes, for goodness sakes! It's far less fun when you can't see him giggling. Desi knew this; Hollywood apparently didn't. It's still good fun though. All the same, it's hampered by one particular failing. It's in colour. I've seen both Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in colour before, so I'm not hugely traumatised by the experience, but in Desi's case not until his guest appearance in Ironside in the seventies (I love that episode. More than it should probably be allowed to love an episode of Ironside). And seeing them both together, in colour, in the midst of the ILL era, just looks weird. Boy did they want to make the most of the colour, too:


Yikes. And that's a heck of a way to drive a car! Especially when you're towing a forty foot, three ton caravan. I know it's 1954, but they had traffic accidents then too. Although at one point they speak of 35mph like it's a terrifying turn of speed, so possibly they only had really slow accidents. Anyway, sorry. This was an entirely pointless post. But if anybody out there is in charge of television even a little bit, now that we've conclusively proved that Constantine is much better than Arrow, can we have it back please? I'll be very good.* Honest I will.**

Okay, now I shall procede to sulk in the corner over good TV that doesn't get what it deserves.

*whimper*






* This is a lie.

** So is this.

I think I've reached the point where, if I don't post now, I never will. I keep intending to post, but somehow it never happens. Think about it too much, and it feels like I've said everything that I intended to anyway, so why bother? That probably isn't the right way to play this game though, huh.

It has been an interesting few months (using the term 'interesting' in its most flexible definition). For starters the weather has been lending its own special hand. I've been looking after a neighbour's garden whilst she's been away, and that's been unexpectedly entertaining on its own. There I've been every evening, gallantly attempting to water her whatnots, with a gale force wind whipping the stream from the watering can in every direction but down. Seriously, it's like the Keystone Cops do gardening. I should probably have sold tickets.

Elsewhere, things have been virtually non-stop, one way or another. My father had a heart attack back in April - and, being a member of my family, he couldn't do it sensibly of course. Instead he had what appears to have been quite a serious heart attack without realising it. He therefore spent a week and a half gradually losing more and more energy, and getting more and more breathless, until my mother practically frogmarched him to the doctor. Consequently I've been doing even more for them than I usually do - which I don't mind in the slightest, but it all takes time. And also it means yet more gardening, which is definitely not my forté. Why does nobody ever want a bit of swashbuckling done? "I'm going away for a fortnight. You couldn't swing from a rope with a sword between your teeth every evening could you? Around seven thirty?" I don't know that it's all that much to ask. Anyway, they sent Dad home from the hospital eventually, with what looks like his own pharmacy, and every so often a nice lady comes around to check his blood pressure, and steal a bit more of his blood. I think it's for medical reasons, rather than just some questionable hobby. And I say "nice" lady, but I haven't actually met her. I assume she's a district nurse, and I usually expect them all to look like Nerys Hughes (and preferably ride bicycles).

So yeah. I've missed a whole hell of a lot of LJ and DreamWidth lately, although I have tried to catch up here and there. I'm not ignoring anybody, I've just been busy. On the plus side, I managed to swing an extra shift at work, which meant that I got to go see Avengers: Age Of Ultron. Hurrah! Turns out it was the first time I've been to the cinema since LOTR III, and in the meantime they've knocked down the old cinema and built a new one. So that was nice. Or mostly nice. Are they always so bloody loud these days?! During the battle scenes the floor was shaking so much I was half expecting to get evacuated. It was a jolly good film though, if perhaps not quite so much fun as the first one. ( Some minor plot spoilers here )

So yeah. I made a post! There would be the obligatory TV stuff here, but ABC axed Forever because they're cold, unfeeling bastards, and I hate them. Although they didn't axe Agents Of SHIELD, so I don't hate them as much as I might.

Um. I think that's probably it. If anything exciting happens, I shall probably be wrestling with something that I don't understand in my parents' garden, or crying forlornly over cruelly stolen television. Hey ho.

In an attempt to make Remington Steele last a bit longer (blasted old shows, and their finite number of episodes!), I have been mining YouTube for Robert Young films. I don't think he's terribly well known, but he's one of my favourite actors. America apparently knows him best for a TV show that he did in the seventies, but I've never seen that, and instead know him for the string of above average B-movies that he made in the forties and fifties. Anyway, one of the ones that I've watched is one that I thought might appeal to a few people.

It's called Relentless, and it dates from 1948. Young plays a wandering cowboy trying to clear his name of a murder charge, but underneath that it's like Feminism: The Western (well, okay. Not really). The heroine gets a great speech about how being expected to give up your life to look after a husband is a rubbish goal for a young woman. Usually this would be followed by the hero buying her a dress, at which point she would gasp at its beauty, and realise that actually there's nothing she'd like more than looking after a man for the rest of her life. Oh, the power of a tight bodice and a few frills. In this film though, the hero agrees. She then basically spends the whole film bailing him out of trouble, including one terrific, high-speed wagon sequence, where she gets to be properly heroic (and he doesn't save her once). Then it all ends with her pretty much proposing to him. Sometimes, ye olde movies get it right.

( The film's embedded beneath the cut )

Mind you, just to ram home the fact that old TV and movies do love making us wince, I followed it up with Second Woman, from 1950. Is Robert Young paranoid, or is somebody really out to get him?! It's actually a nice little film for the most part, but about halfway through, when Young is worrying over whether a Mexican waiter has been lurking in his garden, his ex-father-in-law tells him to think nothing of it, because "these fellows all look the same unless you know them". Gee, thanks 1950. There's nothing quite like ruining a movie with a little throwaway racism.

And even that pales into comparison with Western Union. This is a great fun little Western from 1941, in which a baby Robert Young somehow manages to get top billing above Randolph Scott. It really is very entertaining - until, again about halfway through, which is clearly the danger point with these films - they suddenly dig out the crass "Injun" stereotypes. And if they're not agonising enough on their own, they're made even more so by the fact that there are two highly dignified-looking genuine native chiefs in the cast. I know they needed the money back then, but yeesh. What a way to make a living.

So yeah, that's been my week. A holiday from terrifying bouffants, which started out well, but got sinister thanks to creaky old sensibilities. I shall always love old movies, but I wish they loved me a little more in return. Is it really so hard to go ninety minutes without insulting entire civilisations?! Apparently so.

I still like Robert Young though; even when he keeps being in colour. Being in colour when you're Robert Young is just unnatural. Actors can be strangely uncooperative that way.

Just discovered that somebody has posted the 1996 film Different For Girls on YouTube. I encourage everybody to watch it before it gets taken down! It's a film that very rarely comes on TV, and hasn't been available to buy for years (it only had a fairly limited release, and second hand copies tend to go for silly money). It's about a transgender woman who falls in love with an old schoolfriend, who knew her before her transition, and how they gradually build a relationship. Rupert Graves plays the boyfriend, trying to figure out what, if anything, falling in love with a transwoman means for his masculinity and heterosexuality, and Steven Mackintosh is the woman. There was some debate at the time whether it was right to have a man in that role, but it works, and he does a great job. Unusual subject for a film, and worth giving a go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImRUTmktzF4

Doesn't seem to have been posted in particularly high res, but better than nothing.

Disclaimer: Haven't seen it in years! But I do remember it as being well done, and a good exploration of the reality outside gender and sexuality binaries.

Here endeth my five minutes of usefulness.

So, last night I watched The Avengers for the first time. Or Avengers Assemble, I suppose I should say, lest somebody mistakenly assume that Iron Man has been hanging out with Joanna Lumley. He may have been, for all I know. Just not on a screen anywhere near me. Anyway, I was going to bother everybody with my thoughts afterwards, but LiveJournal was down. In a prime example of just how kind I am to the internet, however, I made notes. And now, tonight instead, everybody gets to find out my opinion. I know. Sometimes my generosity impresses even me.

( Beware of low-flying enthusiasm )

I think I've just watched the stupidest film ever. Which is quite an achievement, both on the watching front, and on the part of the movie itself. It's not easy to be the stupidest film ever, given how many contenders there are. This one takes a pretty good shot at the title, though. Actually it takes several.

( And no, it's not 'Plan 9 From Outer Space'... )

Yes, I've been watching movies again. In fact, as it happens, I've been watching another teen, sci-fi, action movie from the eighties. Never let it be said that I learn from my mistakes.

( Robots! Death! Destruction! Home furnishings! )