Review

This weekend, leaving my doomed dissertation in a cloud of dust, I scampered off to the cinema in search of escape, if only for an hour or two, from the great yawning chasm of a pain-laden life which can only end with death. Also, pick 'n' mix. I like the little ice-creams best.

For the first time in a while, myself and my partner (for I am a cowboy) chose to see something we hadn't heard any reviews or recommendations of. We had seen the trailer a lot, first a handful of times about eight months ago and then a handful of times more recently. I'm not sure whether the original intention was to release the film a while back and then it got delayed, or whether we're small children who are just supposed to get really, really excited about films with planes in them, but nevertheless there does seem to have been a fair bit of pushing of this film, which from what I can recall from the multiple adverts is called Drunkplane.

Drunkplane stars Denzel Washington as 'Whip' Whittaker, a confident, sharp and talented pilot, whose charming exterior belies a dark relationship with alcohol, drugs and stupid unexplained nicknames. In the face of a sudden and disastrous technical failure which, in the hands of any other pilot, would result in the deaths of everyone on the flight, 'The Whipster' saves the day with audacious yet brilliant tactics (which involve being upside-down and lots of screaming from the co-pilot). He is lauded as a hero, until an investigation reveals he had alcohol and cocaine in his system at the time. Though his lawyer (Don Cheadle, who I can't help but adore since his bizarre turn in Ocean's Eleven) manages to suppress the result of his drugs test, 'Mr. Whippy' must now come to terms with managing his addiction, in light of both his new fame and the investigation which could put him in prison.

Though I enjoyed Drunkplane a lot, I was also a little bit frustrated by it. Like a cat that would rather play with a cardboard box than the toy it contains, it ignored the more interesting elements of its story in favour of the blander bits. The first twenty minutes depicting the crash are brilliant: entirely inaccurate according to any pilots who have seen it, but absolutely nail-chewing and buttock-clenching. This was followed by a vaguely interesting dialogue between hospital patients about death, which led me to believe that Drunkplane might try and venture into intriguing territory. Sadly it all got pretty standard afterwards. A few themes were touched upon - the nature of religious faith in the face of calamity, questions of morality and what makes a 'hero', the pressures of fame - but they were never properly addressed. Instead we got a cardboard cut-out relationship subplot, which seemed to serve no purpose except "we should have a woman in this film because boobs", and a rushed ending which took all the interesting and ambiguous bits from the film and threw them into a big big fire. There was a moment not too far from the end where the film seemed to say "to be honest booze and drugs are fucking ace and you should do them, because they fix everything". That, to me, would have been a far better ending - maybe not correct, but confrontational and surprising. The audience's reaction would have been to think "blimey, I wonder what that was all about. Maybe I should ask myself some questions about deontological dogma and the true nature of ethics". That would have been good. Unfortunately that seems to be too much to expect from Hollywood, because the film was of course wrong-footing us, and swiftly decided to steer back onto the straight and (inevitably) the narrow. Nonetheless I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a good time, but at a time like this when so many Oscar contenders are out in cinemas vying for your attention, I'd say you could make better use of your £8.40 (jesus) elsewhere.

Verdict: da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-DRUNKPLANE!

Don Cheadle isn't finding me funny. That's okay, I entertain myself.

Why I haven't done the DVD review I planned

Two weeks ago I ordered a package from a popular online retailer worth sixty quid and ended up never receiving it. I checked to see if it was at the local depot, asked my neighbours if they'd taken it in, had no luck, chalked it up as 'one of those things' and felt I had no choice but to order the same thing again, after sending the company (let's call them 'Large South American Rainforest') an email on the off-chance that they'd offer a refund. Today I read the response I got, which was quite friendly and informative. Apparently the driver had delivered the package to my address and left it in 'the shed'.

We do not have a shed. There are, however, some sheds in the allotment on the other side of the street. Unless the Timelord himself popped over to our street, in a new biodegradable Tardis made of pine, these are the only structures resembling sheds in the nearby area. I can only conclude that the courier left my items in one of these (presumably unlocked) sheds, on land that doesn't belong to me and has nothing to do with me, without leaving a note or telling anyone.

According to Large South American Rainforest's couriers, a package is considered 'delivered' if it is either posted through the letterbox, or "left in a secure location at the delivery address provided". Now, being a law student, I have a tendency to get overly involved in trying to pin down definitions of words. This is difficult with a descriptive term like 'secure' because it is not a matter of binary, but of degree. We cannot say at what exact point 'not secure' becomes 'secure'. All we can do is rate an object's security, say, on a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is 'in a safe, in an armoured car, guarded by Mossad', 5 is 'on my doorstep', and negative 10 is 'in an unlocked shed on an allotment belonging to someone else and OH MY GOD YOU ARE SO STUPID'.

Unless, of course, you want to argue that the courier was trying to make the package so secure, that it was kept secure even from me. Maybe the courier was so aware of this package's value, he believed even the prospective owner couldn't be trusted with it, and so hid it in a place I would never, ever find it. Maybe I am both victim and criminal, in a tangled conspiracy that goes right to the top of the establishment. Come to think of it, where was I when Kennedy got shot?

At this point, you might say "Unperky, you have been watching way too much TV. Probably something involving mysterious, complicated crimes, such as the Scandinavian cult TV hit 'The Killing'!" Well, you'd be wrong. I haven't watched The Killing. I bought it on DVD two weeks ago and some fucker hid it in a shed.

Mate, I suck.

So about two months ago, I wrote a post on this blog that actually got some attention. Somehow. What's more, the post in question took hardly any effort from me to write. Like lightning from my fingers, like Athene  born from Zeus's brain, like all sorts of bad similes it just came out of me. Unlike this post, which is currently being squeezed out of me like pus. From a stone. Made out of armour. This burst of productivity came as a delightful surprise, because my typical writing process has all the speed and flow of an aging St. Bernard dragging an obese man through a snowdrift.

Rather than capitalise on this newfound attention, I scampered off to eat Christmas food and roll around in snow. I left this page to lie fallow, or to grow weeds, or to whatever the shit happens to fields when you don't tend them. I don't know, I don't garden. I've a few ideas for how to get back into writing again, but it's difficult because I'm still not sure exactly what I want this blog to be. When I first created it I thought "eh, whatever, it can be anything I want it to be" but I'm starting to feel like if I have more of an idea of what its content should be, I'll have more of an idea of what to write in it. Having no parameters at all makes this space seem a lot more intimidating than it should be. Nonetheless, I've a couple of ideas for new posts, and whether they 'fit' or not they'll be here and you can read them and maybe you'll go "hmm" or "yes" or "bullshit are chocolate M&Ms better than peanut ones". You can expect to see them up in the next week, so I hope to see you soon. And tell me off if I'm not writing enough. It validates me.