Author: Mosh

Wall Street 2 / Made in Dagenham

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

Two-film Saturday again. I popped over to the Cineworld in Edinburgh to chill out and forget the world for a few hours. First up on today’s list:

Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

“Why don’t you start calling me Gordon?”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Young upstart financier finds himself engaged in corporate corruption, and engaged to Gordon Gekko’s daughter.

Oliver Stone returns, bringing the iconic character of Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) back for a second airing some 23 years after the original. Wall Street was, and still is, an iconic piece of film-making, exposing all that was wrong with the financial world at that time. This sequel attempts to do the same, focussing on events of the last couple of years.

The films kicks off with Gekko being released from prison while his estranged daughter Winnie (Carey Mulligan) is shacked up with a fledgling financier, Jake Moore (charisma vacuum Shia LaBeouf). The bank Jake works for starts to crumble, his mentor and boss Louis (superbly played by Frank Langella) tops himself and Jake finds himself “teaming up” with Gekko in a bid to find out what happened to start the whole mess.

LaBeouf is the odd one out in this film as he’s capable, but just not that great. Given his past roster has included being eye candy for girls in the awful fourth Indiana Jones film, and the teen-kid from both Transformers movies it does surprise me to see him in a “serious” role. He’s OK as far as it goes, but just doesn’t really carry it off that well.

Douglas is, of course, excellent. Slimey, sleezy… and you never quite know if he’s being genuine which does lend itself well to the plot. Langella, as I mentioned, was superb – probably the best actor in the film.

It’s a tad under two hours long, but manages not to flag right the way through and the story carries on right until the very end with little “fluff” hanging off the plot. Having said that, there are few major surprises as we go through other than the very end which is – in honesty – a little weak.

Perhaps not as powerful a film a the original, and mainly as we are now as a public somewhat more informed of what happens in the financial world. After the revelation that was Gekko’s first appearance we have discovered that sharks like that aren’t just movie characters and villains in books. On the flip side, it makes things all the more believable.

The reviews I heard on the radio yesterday weren’t all that favourable, but I enjoyed it. In fact, I think I’m going to try and find a copy of the original to watch. It’s been a long time and I’d like to compare them.

Made in Dagenham

“Unskilled, my arse!”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Company pays peanuts to women, they go on strike, **** hits fan, world is changed.

Based on the real events of 1968, Made in Dagenham follows the story of a couple of hundred female workers who downed tools and forced first the world’s largest motor manufacturer, and then the British government to change the law relating to sexual equality.

The film begins with the gears already in motion, the women threatening to turn off their sewing machines unless they are given a better pay grade. On their side is foreman Albert (Bob Hoskins) and he drafts Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins) in as a right-hand-woman. They also allegedly have the support of the union, characterised by the slothful Monty Taylor (Kenneth Cranham).

Meetings go from bad to worse, and the women walk out causing problems further down the production line as the new “Escort” has no seats to fit into it. As the situation blows out of proportion, men are laid off, factories close and Ford execs are shipped to the UK to try and deal with both the workers and our government.

Top two cast members for me have to be Richard Schiff (Toby from TV’s The West Wing, looking surprisingly young without a beard) as one of the execs, and Miranda Richardson as then First Secretary of State  Barbara Castle. She really does bossy and shouty very well, and I confess I can’t see her without thinking of her as the Queen in Blackadder II.

The story twists and turns with both high and low moments. The women’s demands increase from “a bit more cash” to “equal pay” back in the day when women were routinely paid a fraction of the amount that men were for the same work. Council estate hardship is compared to posh house luxury as Rita befriends the wife of one of the factory bosses (played by a damn hot Rosamund Pike), giving another facet to the story as women’s domestic suffering is also highlighted.

There’s a fair bit going on here and on the whole it’s played in a lighthearted way, but it’s a fantastic story boiled down to a little over ninety minutes. How close it is to the actual events is down to the historians to tell me, but it’s a very entertaining dramatisation and I’d highly recommend it. Another victory for British cinema.

Related articles
Enhanced by Zemanta

Vampires Rock

VAMPIRES ROCK
Vampires Rock

Thanks to the wonderful Nicola, I became the lucky owner of two tickets to see Vampires Rock when she couldn’t make it to the performance. I’d heard mention of the show, but wasn’t sure what to expect. Wendi was the first to shove her hand up to grab the extra ticket and we headed to the Edinburgh Playhouse last night to see it.

First up, £4.50 for a drink in the bar. Ow. Wish I’d spotted the Wetherspoons next door earlier! Secondly, if you’re getting tickets for the Playhouse and can do so, get them direct in person from the box office. I picked up three for Spamalot and they worked out at £3.50 per ticket less than using Ticket Master, plus they accepted my student ID, plus they were offering a wider range of seats than I seemed to be able to choose from on the website.

Anyway, the show. It’s a simple affair, much more of a musical show with little bits of performance than the other way around. The stage set is a simple, stationary one and the volume’s cranked way up.

The major downside to this is that the vocals and spoken voices are often very hard to make out. This is a hell of a shame, but at least the music’s spot on.

Ah, the music. Rock legends a-plenty are paid tribute to – Queen, AC/DC, Guns n Roses, Bon Jovi, Meatloaf, Bonnie Tyler… Erm, yes. Hey, who can complain at a bit of Total Eclipse of the Heart? Especially when the woman singing it is ridiculously hot?

Most of the band and some of the supporting cast get a go at leading the singing including an awesome rendition of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believin’. Yes, Journey. For those under 25 years old, this isn’t an original song by the cast of flipping Glee. In fairness, I’m from a generation that thought Ballroom Blitz was by Nuclear Assault instead of Sweet. It could be worse. I could have been convinced Tia Carrere wrote it.

The band and cast are great, although lead Steve Steinman’s accent seems to have got lost somewhere between Transylvania and Blackpool. The girls are gorgeous, and the men… well, let’s just say if I had any less testosterone in my body I’d be at risk of fancying the guitarists and bassist. I swear Wendi was calculating exactly how risky jumping from the balcony would be to get her hands on them.

Vampires Rock is, much as it claims it’s not right at the start, a pantomime of sorts. It craves audience reaction and it gets it. It’s silly, has stereotypical characters, the jokes are cheesier than the scruffy character’s bell end and you’ll enjoy it despite feeling a little guilty about it afterwards.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Don’t pay “Parking Charges”

The post originally located here has been removed due to a threat of legal action from lawyers acting on behalf of the “people” mentioned in it. More details, in a moment, but in the meantime I heartily recommend you visit one of the four mirrors listed below to view the document as it was published. These sites either have their own legal teams or their hosts (unlike mine) deemed the take-down order to be complete nonsense and ignored it:

OK, the whys and wherefores.

The issue I had was with [company name removed so I don’t risk allegedly defaming them]. Their lawyers are M Law. I am hosted on a One&One server.

According to M Law I defamed [company name removed so I don’t risk allegedly defaming them] in the post. They complained to One&One who, due to the fact that “as an ISP Provider, we have legal obligations in accordance with the Godfrey v Demon Internet Limited 1999 case law to ensure that all the defamatory posts have been removed, or litigation will be pursued against us not yourself.”

Do note that the major point here is “defamatory posts”. The post was not defamatory. At most it was allegedly defamatory. No judge had looked at the case, someone had simply complained that I had not put [company name removed so I don’t risk allegedly defaming them] in a good light.

I will not make further comment about [company name removed so I don’t risk allegedly defaming them]. I will not make any statement about them. What I will say is that whatever I do say would be in the public interest as they are a company who many members of the public deal with regularly. The public is allowed to complain about poor service, or quality of goods. If they didn’t then every single reviewing website or publication would be impossible to publish. BBC‘s Watchdog and Which? magazine could not function.

This is what I believe would be the result had the alleged defamation claim been taken to court. Instead, both organisations seem to have jumped the gun and proclaimed me guilty without a trial.

However, it seems that One&One don’t grasp this and neither do M Law.

Further, I don’t want to lose my entire blog which was the threat laid against me if I didn’t remove the post by midday on 25th October 2010.

All of the above is stated fact, at least as far as I have been able to ascertain from the limited information supplied to me by both the solicitors involved and my web host, despite several requests for more detailed information.

I have not defamed anyone with any of the above text. I leave it to the reader to make their own judgement, research as they require and – for instance – do a Google for the relevant companies. I’m sure the evidence will be enough for you to make your own judgements.

It has been suggested by more than one quarter that, in fact, by making a claim that I was (without due process) guilty of defamation, I myself have been libelled. This is something I am investigating. After all, if a newspaper reports someone as a thief, for instance, before the case has gone to trial and a verdict found then the alleged offender can sue.

Incidentally, prior to the takedown order my blog post had been read approximately 40 times.

As of the post being replaced with this explanation, it had 427 hits. Plus the MSE mirror was over 280. And Shelli’s blog hits had trebled.

Several statements spring to mind, but the two choicest are:

OWN GOAL

and

SHOOTING YOURSELF IN THE FOOT.

So that’s why I can’t mention Parking Eye on here any more.

Whoops.

Enhanced by Zemanta

Buried and Takers

Ah, the joys of having afternoon CPD sessions. Not the greatest of fun last thing before the weekend, but it does place me near the local Cineworld. As such, as soon as the lecture was over I drove right along the road and picked up a ticket for…

Buried

Plot-in-a-nutshell: Man wakes up to find himself trapped in a wooden box. Time and air are running out.

Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) is having a bad day. He’s just woken up trapped inside a wooden coffin, buried underground. The last thing he remembers is his convoy being attacked, his co-workers being shot… and then taking a blow to the head.

Oh, and he was in Iraq at the time.

Director Rodrigo Cortés has gone for the most claustrophobic film he could. Taking the single-scene premise of Phone Booth and pushing it to extremes, the entire film is located in this one dark location. Reynolds’ is the only face we see, the other characters only featuring as voices.

It’s a great idea for a film, and a brave one for mainstream cinema. It is well filmed with all angles of the box being seen constantly so you really get a feeling for  Conroy’s situation. Reynolds plays the part very well, for someone who apparently has made his way so far with comedy roles. Having said that, the best lines in the film are ones which did get the audience laughing.

It’s not a long film, but it does still feel padded in places. The ending is either superb or awful, depending in your viewpoint as well. I liked it, but one discerning (and loud) voice declared it “a load of *****” as the credits rolled at the end.

Certainly something different.

Takers

“We’re takers, gents. That’s what we do for a living. We take.”

Plot-in-a-nutshell: a gang of robbers push to do one huge job at the behest of a comrade who’s just got out of jail.

What at first looks like a heist movie turns out to be a pretty taught character-driven thriller with quite a few twists and some good back-story. The closest recent film is The Town, but on balance I think I preferred Takers.

As well as a great cast, there are some excellent set pieces including a wonderful near-final shoot out sequence where sound (or lack of it) has been put to excellent use. The central “job” is also very well done.

The sidelines leading off the central plot are perhaps a little fluffy (a detective’s family issues, gang member’s crackhead sister and so on) but they add depth to the characters without detracting too much from the story. They’re also woven into the plot so that they effect events without seeming like hugely improbable coincidences.

A lot of people might not like the fact that Paul Walker is in the film judging by comments I’ve seen about him since the Fast and Furious films. However, he’s more than acceptable in this. Matt Dillon is on the opposite side of the story playing one half of a detective duo (Jay Hernandez plays the other half). Even the cops aren’t all clean, however…

There’s enough meat on this film to fill a mini-series, yet it doesn’t seem to be too much to take in the running length. Definitely worth seeing.

Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta

ACS:Law and other dodgy organisations

Stories are reaching the mainstream news outlets now about the incredibly dodgy workings of ACS:Law. Their name is well known online amongst the geekier members of their community due to their shady tactics of trying to extort money from people for alleged illegal downloads. It has taken the crashing of their website and release of their unprotected email archives to expose exactly how underhanded and (to a large extent) illegal their operation is.

Judging from several reports, they could be facing a fine of around £500,000 for possibly the most serious breach of the Data Protection Act ever seen since the Act was put into force. BT are also in line for a kick in the teeth on that one.

What really got my goat, though, was the contents of the mail archives. They detailed numerous cases where the legal team attempted to force money out of people who they had absolutely no evidence against them. The letters were very much along the lines of the ones I was getting from ParkingEye (which I realise I’ve not detailed on here… that’ll be up soon).

Essentially, the letters stated that the person who paid for the internet connection was liable for illegal downloads on that connection which had taken place. And that if they coughed up £495 chosen as it was below the psychological £500 barrier), further action would not be taken. Otherwise there were threats of possible legal action, courts and so on.

This was, of course, bullshit.

One of the stories highlighted that ACS:Law were only targeting, in the first instance, people they reckoned had downloaded one particular music track, or porn. Any porn. So going for the embarrassment tactic, then.

Has anyone seen Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels? There’s a story given in a monologue that I’d heard of before the film and essentially it is this – to get a lot of cash, advertise something in the dirty magazines. Let’s say, huge double-ended sex toys for men. They’re twenty quid. You don’t have any – you just wait for people to pay you and hold the cash for a bit. Then you send out apologies (“sorry, our supplier let us down” or similar), and a cheque for £20. But the company the cheque is from is called “HUGE SEX TOYS FOR MEN WITH TINY PENISES plc” or something.

Most people will be too embarrassed to cash the cheque and will just write off the £20.

This is the tactic, I feel, that ACS:Law were using. Hit people with a “you or someone in your home was downloading copyrighted filth” charge and a lot of people may well have just blushed, lumped it and coughed up. Indeed, a lot did. Courtesy of the hideous lack of security on ACS:Law’s servers, the credit cards details, addresses and so forth of hundreds of these victims is up for grabs on the internet.

What ACS:Law have done is a mixture of incredible naivete (believing that it’s so easy to link an IP address to an individual) and bare-faced cheek. Reading the emails is, frankly, stomach-churning as you see just how disparagingly they treat their victims.

The whole tone is simply “can we get money out of these people?”. In so far as being a system of punishment, their methods are no better than speed cameras. You’re “guilty” until you can prove yourself innocent by incriminating someone else.

A complete and utter shambles, kicked off by a terrible system that allowed them to jump onto this money-making bandwagon in the first place. It’s only a terrible shame for those who’s details have been leaked that it took such a breach of their privacy for these disgusting tactics to be revealed to the general public.

Related articles by Zemanta
Enhanced by Zemanta