The Architecture Of Morality

The Natalie Situation

Okay. So there was I, the doyen of singledom, out on a date. With a girl. That I liked. How did I get there? Well, as with the whole Alison debacle, it was down to Andrea. She got me to ask Natalie out (not that Natalie from earlier in this blog, but another Natalie - it seems to be a ridiculously comon name among the younger generation, like Clare was among my peers) and we ended up going to Newcastle together on the 23rd December. We looked around shops. She had a little bit of Christmas shopping to do. We did that. Had coffee (I paid). Almost went to the pictures (there was nothing on at a reasonable time). Talked about bands (she's into heavy thrash rock) and what have you. Didn't kiss, didn't hold hands. But that's fine. She's the shy sort. I was happy enough just talking to her. We got the bus home together, she got off at the Mow. I said goodbye, we said we'd see each other later. Saw her the next day when she came into work, exchanged a few words. I texted her on Boxing Day (I had intended to text her on Christmas Eve but I kinda forgot about it and texting Christmas Day - I thought - would seem a little weird and verging on the loony). She never texts back.

I'm still waiting for the reply. She's been in the shop plenty. Said hi, been pleasant enough. But not a word about my text. In fact, after being quizzed by Andrea (you've got to give my boss points) she said I'd never been in touch with her. Then the other day Shaun was talking to her and she was, apparently, saying something about how she wants to get to know me better, blah, blah, blah. Well, what better way to know get to know me than to actually reply to my texts and go out with me? I don't know. Andrea is now firmly of the opinion that she's a bit of a freak and while I still do fancy her (she was in the shop the other day and I couldn't help but stare at her arse) I just don't have the time or energy into chasing after someone who blatantly doesn't know what they want. I'll keep you updated.

School Reunion

Christmas came and went like it most often does with a faint air of disappointment and malaise. Got most of what I wanted, barring a dressing gown. Clare and Richie got me Mass Effect despite saying they hadn't (and leading me to almost buy it for myself the previous Friday) which is occupying most of my 360 time at the minute. Doctor Who was good. Christmas Eve at the pub (the Beamish Mary this year) was not as drunken and revelly as usual, but was a nice catch up. The big surprise this year was a Burnmoor Primary School reunion which was arranged over facebook (ah, the wonders of modern technology - it makes you wonder how people stayed in touch before the internet and how it's made shows like Cilla's Surprise Surprise almost completely redundant. Lost cousin in Australia? Just log on to Facebook, he's probably on there. You can friend him, fight his vampire and poke him all in the space of five minutes). Despite a massive response on Facebook in the end only Blades, Emma, myself (obviously), Gemma, Jav and Mesh turned up. Now Blades and Emma I still see regularly enough (although not nearly as often as I would like) but I haven't seen the other three since we left 6th Form, possibly even - in the case of Mesh - since we finished our GCSE's and it's a sobering thought to realise that that was eleven years ago now. Gemma is back up home after living away whereas we've just lost touch with Mesh and Jav. It was a lot of fun, more fun than I thought it would be. I was approaching the evening with a sense of anticipation but also dread (mainly due to the possible attendance by people from my past who I would rather stay buried, but who didn't, in the event, turn up anyway). There was still my ever-present depression at the evidence that these people, who are the same age as me and went through so many of the same formative experiences (I mean, I remember Jav's terrible homesickness on our first night in France during the top year juniors and I remember spending the night at Mesh's house - he was one of the first people I knew who got Sky and I became obsessed with Clarissa Explains It All, this was back when it tooks years - not months - for shows to come across from America) have made so much more of their lives than I have. Jav is living with someone in their own house. Gemma has been married and divorced (and is far fitter than I remember).

The only black note on the evening is that when we got home, Emma texted me and told me she could tell I fancied Gemma. Very true. She's emminantly fanciable. I then went on to state - not in a self-pitying way, I have to say - that she would never go out with someone like me. This whole conversation (which was reprised at the weekend following a trip to the beach to celebrate New Year before everyone went their separate ways again) descended into Emma basically trying to convince me that there's someone out their for me and me wallowing in a pool of misery wondering why - if there indeed was someone out there for me - hadn't I found them yet? Later, after the beach, Emma claimed that I fancied everyone (blatantly not true) and how was anmyone to know that they were special if I was perving over everyone anyway and that I should go for someone in my league. Which is a polite way of saying that I'm too ugly to attract someone like Gemma and that I should set my sights a little lower on someone uglier and more desperate.

None of which I agree with, by the by. I've never gone for any of this league bollocks. You're attracted to who you're attacted to. It's got nothing to do with leagues or anything rational. Beauty, as the age old adage goes, is in the eye of the beholder. And anyway, foregoing any of the 'superficial' arguments for the minute, I know I'm not fantastic looking, but I'm not too bad.

Moving On

The biggest news in my life at the moment, and the thing which is occupying most of my non-working time, is the fact that I'm moving out. To the flat above the shop. Brad is moving out this month and Iput my name down for it, along with Shaun, because I couldn't really afford it by myself (I could pay the rent and all the bills but I wouldn't be able to buy food). It's a good thing. I'm finally getting my own place, so I'll have freedom and be able to do whatever I want to do. Not that I'll be having women over every night simply by virtue of having my own flat, but it feels good, to know that soon I'll have my own space and I won't be answerable to anyone. Going to work will also be a doddle and there's a night bus which runs between Chester and Newcastle that would facilitate proper nights out.

I feel like I need this. I'm going to be twenty seven in just under five weeks. Thirty is just around the corner and I'm too damn old to be living with my mother. Strictly speaking I'm too damn old to never have had a proper long term relationship. Which reminds me. Valentine's Day. Fuck. There is a certain someone who I was going to send a card to but Andrea quietly pointed out to me that I have no real reason to believe that she even likes me that much, let alone fancies me. One drunken boob flash might be enough to give me a crush on her, but it might mean nothing to her. God knows. So, it looks like I'll be having another lonely VD. But it can't get worse han last year with my text to Stef and her non-reply leading to my ten mile trek around the wonders of Co Durham, culminating in a trudge through the woods at the back of Penshaw Monument in the middle of the night, when it's pitch black only for me to go into work the following day, find out she had no credit on her phone but that she didn't want to go out for a drink with me anyway. And don't get me started on her slow puncture 'I'm sorta seeing someone' bollocks rejection, because I know for a fact she wasn't seeing anyone. A couple of weeks beforehand I made some subtle investigations into her relationship status.

It's just me. I'm constantly attracted to women who treat me like crap. I mean, take Alison. I really thought we had something - there was talk of holidays and stuff. I gave myself (emotionally) to her more than I had thought possible. And then she goes and dumps me by text not once, but twice. The first time because she thought the age gap was too much and the second (the text received when I was in Oxford with Blades waiting for the coach to London, leading to a night of drunken bitterness with Blades, Amy and Ali in Maida Vale, public urination following a large Sprite from McDonald's and a conversation with an equally drunk lesbian on the Tube - I spent much of that day wandering around in a daze, ready to burst into tears at any point, I had to sit down in Tate Modern because it was all just getting too much for me. Blades, for his part when I confessed this to Amy said that I'd seemed okay all day - there's something to be said for being taciturn) because she thought I was more serious about the relationship than I was but which, I think, can be traced back to a very late night conversation over the phone - possibly involving some small measure of phone sex, I don't really care to remember - which, when we were saying out goodnights, an 'I love you,' slipped from between my lips. She said nothing for a few seconds and then said 'I don't know if I can say that yet...'. What blissful irony, being that it's usually the man who hides his feelings. Which leads us to...

You Can't Get There From Here

Why did I tell Alison I loved her? Was I being honest when I said it? Well, it just came out, and I'm of the opinion that if something slips out like that, then it's generally meant. Like a Freudian slip (which always reminds me of Meg Ryan in D.O.A., back when she was still young a cute - well, this is supposed to be a film-y blog, I have to get some stuff in somewhere otherwise it's just my boring-ass life). But the truth is, I don't know. She dumped me soon after so all my feelings for and about her are messed up. But I think the intent was there.

And you know why? I think it's because I've been without anyone for so long (before Alison my last experience with a woman was a couple of fumbles with my sister's friend Karen back when I was living in Gateshead - three and a half years separate those two women and there's a mammoth gap of eight and a half years between Sarah and Alison) that I latched on to the first person who showed me a bit of attention. It's a long tradition with me. I've always crushed on people who were nice and compassinate to me, and it's gotten so bad now that most of the time I can't tell the difference between a girl just being nice and them fancying me. Mostly I think they're just being nice. Take Stef for instance. The very first shift we ever worked together, in the dim and distant past of October 2006. We got on great and when I had locked the shop up, before we went to our respectives lifts, she hugged me. Hugged. Me. Let us pause for a second to let that sink in. People generally aren't very tactile with me. My mother isn't a touchy-feely person and neither is my sister. I like being touched though and I like touching people. Emma would probably, at this point, interject with some smart arse remark about groping, but it's not about groping, it's about contact with other living beings. It's about know, on a physical level that you're not alone in the universe, which is something I feel an awful lot.

I would, at this point, point out the wonderful irony that my relationship with Alison ended because I told her I loved her and that my relationship with Sarah ended because I couldn't tell her that, but it's late and I'm already fucked off enough as it is. And, to be honest with you, it's my life, and as much as it might resemble a French farce or one of the pretentiously grim student films where nothing ever actually happens, it's my fucking life and I'm sick of it.

Peace out.

The Santa (Get Out) Clause

Okay. Christmas. Now, as I quite famously do not believe in God (or ghosts or anything of that nature, despite my love of the horror genre) how do I approach Christmas? It is after all the most sacred holiday in the Christian calendar. Hell, it's the only day of the year that the newsagents I work at closes. The only day. We don't close for Hannukah or Passover or Ramadan - we don't even acknowledge their existence. In fact, by opening on a Saturday, you could say that we are actually mocking the Jewish faith. The only thing that stops it being a big fuck you to Eddie Moskowicz and all his Rabbi pals is that we defy the Christian church by opening on a Sunday as well, and not just for the state suggested times of six hours. No. The only concession we get to respect God is that we close half an hour earlier than during the week. We still open at five in the morning and close at half ten at night. Seventeen and a half hours of God-mocking business.

Now, as I said before, I don't believe in God. I'm not even agnostic. I'm an atheist, through and though, and it isn't an easy belief to hold (coming soon, a discussion of how atheism is a belief and not just a lack of belief). People of the religious persuasion have all the fun of the afterlife to look forward to. Or reincarnation. Or something, whatever. The point is that pretty much every religion holds that death is not the end. When you shuffle off this mortal coil, there's something beyond that. Be it heaven, hell, reincarnation as a goat, Nirvana, whatever. Not believing in God, we lonely, unloved atheists have no choice to believe that once you die, that's it. Finito. It's not an easy thing to think because as human beings, we're so aware of our own selves and our own minds that it's extremely difficult to consider that one day that's it. No more me. There's this very solid notion that somehow the consciousness muct live on. Well, I call it consciousness, religious folk would probably call it the soul - it amounts to the same thing. It's who you are. The essence of your being. The only real difference is that my view of the consciousness is defined primarily through experiences and emotions - memories, essentially, while I'm sure that some, the Catholic church in particualar, would probably like to think of the soul as something that doesn't really change throughout life, tainted only by sin. I could go off on one about Catholicism and its notions of sin and absolution, but I won't. It's a far bigger can of worms than I am prepared to open today.

Strictly speaking, in a purely scientific term, we do continue on after death. One of the first things we learned in GCSE Science was that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Once you get past the mind-boggling notion that the energy we are now expending has existed since the Big Bang (and before, if you subscribe to the theory that this universe is simply the latest in a long line of universes that explode outward at birth then contract together, creating another huge explosion which births the next universe - but quite frankly, I have enough trouble comprehending the numbers that our own universe generates without adding an infinite number of previous universes into the equation) and that energy will simply be endlessly transferred around until the end of time, you arrive at the epiphany that once you die, your body's energy doesn't simply go 'phht', it is transferred to other things. If you get buried, you become fertiliser, feeding the grass and the trees, which in turn feeds animals and so on and so forth. You get cremated (my own personal choice - I'm not keen on the idea of being buried, even if I am dead by that point and so past caring, it's the notion that what was once me will be just left to rot in the ground and it isn't a fun thought) and you become heat and light and sound. There's a poetry to that which I don't think a religous person would really appreciate.

So where was I? Ah yes. Britain is a Christian country. Forget the ramblings of the right wing fascist papers like the Daily Mail with their Conservative fears that the country is going to be overrun with asylum seekers and racist rants about Johnny Foreigner taking all the hard working white man's jobs (another subject not to get me started on, this) there is no way Britain will ever be anything other than a Christian country. Same with America. There's a reason we have a special Christmas edition of the Radio Times and shops like mine close for Christmas Day and no other. Sure, there are other communities within Britain, but they are in the minority and, like most minorities, generally ignored, left alone to get on with their own business on their own time. A shop which closed for Hannukah would get a lot of comment except in perhaps the orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in Gateshead and the like.

And so I celebrate Christmas. Does this make me a hypocrite? Well, strictly speaking, yes. I am one hell of a hypocrite for celebrating Christmas and not actually believing in God or that Jesus Christ was our Saviour. But just as firmly, I am not, because Christmas today as we celebrate it doesn't have much to do with the birth of Christ at all, just as Easter these days is more about chocolate eggs and a giant pink bunny than some guy getting strung up on a cross and having his guts spilled by a Roman Centurion named Longinus. Because, in this day and age, we only want to commemorate happy things. Bad things are generally pushed to one side or remembered only briefly. A one minute silence out of respect for the victims of 9/11, a parade and a one minute silence for Remembrance Day. We had poppies in the shop for Remembrance Day and a whole bunch of kids came in getting them. I don't think they knew what they were for. To them it was probably just some cheap gimmick. Likewise, Christmas isn't about the birth of someone some two thousand years ago in a country halfway round the world. No. Christmas is about toys and snow and time off school if you're a kid. If you're an adult, it's about food and drinking and falling asleep in front of a James Bond movie on Christmas afternoon. All the pledges and homilies that are paraded out at this time of year, all that goodwill to all men crap - well, why don't we be nice to each other all year round? Isn't that what the Bible teaches us? Because, yes, I was brought up in a fairly informally religious community. We got taught Bible stories at school and sangs hymns. At Christmas we went up to the local church and sang carols. It wasn't really until secondary school that we were even explicity told that there were other religions, but even then, there was an implicit implication that they were 'other religions' and Christianity was the default.

So, were I to not celebrate Christmas, I would probably get a lot of strange looks, especially in the shop where I work as lately the big questions seems to have been, "Are you all set for Christmas?" Out of a sense of mischief I really wanted to reply to some people with some witticism along the lines of, "No, actually. I am Jewish and we don't celebrate Christmas." But such is the assumption that everyone celebrates Christmas and the generally low tolerance for sarcasm where I work that such a comment would probably not go over very well.

Ultimately, what it boils down to is tradition and peer pressure. Tradition because Christmas is something that we've always done - my mother is still fairly religious - and peer pressure because it's just what everyone else is doing. But bear this in mind: Next year my sister is getting married. Now, my sister is an atheist like me, although she probably doesn't analyse her belief in the non-existence of God in the way I do. But she's not getting married in a church. I asked her about this when they first chose the place they're getting married and tying the knot in a church never even crossed their minds. It's probably a good thing. Two of my friends got married in a church in June and I felt extremely weird about being in a place of worship. It probably didn't help that it was the same church we used to go to for carol services when we were at school which was somehwere I hadn't been since I was fourteen, so, coupled with the whole non-belief in God, I had a whole bunch of childhood related issues to deal with.

On a sidenote, I recently mentioned my atheism in passing to my boss. I have to stress the 'in passing' part of it because otherwise it makes me look like a nutjob who wanders rounds telling people about my beliefs and people like that really piss me off. Anyway, she (that is, my boss) said she did believe in God and asked me why I didn't. I admitted that I used to, back when I was young and then I had a whole agnostic period in my teens and early twenties and had only recently come to the conclusion that God either doesn't exist or that he's a sadistic son of a bitch and to be honest, as with my own father, I prefer to believe that he doesn't exist than believe that he does but he just doesn't give a shit. Because my life is generally not fun. It's a hard slog and things that seem to come so easily to other people are like getting blood from a stone for me, and if there's anything that all those RE lessons in junior school taught me (and say what you like about the Bible, from a point of view of being a moral guidebook it's fairly solid, just don't get me started on the plot) it's that if you live a decent life and are good to other people then you can't go far wrong and that's just not my life. For no good reason, I was bullied pretty badly for fourteen years of my life, so much so that I still suffer the psychological scars to this day and I used to justify it by thinking that, come adulthood, I would be the success and the bullies would be the ones who were miserable and unhappy. At the time, it seemed like a good deal. But it didn't work out like that. I'm constantly on the lookout for signs that my life is getting better, even just to the point where it doesn't actively suck all the time, but I just can't see them.

Peace out.

Michael Myers Lives!

So, yeah, Halloween 5. The true nadir of the franchise. Or that might be Halloween 6, but I really cannot be bothered to dig out my video of it (The Curse Of Michael Myers is the only installment I don't own on DVD) and, hey, it's got Mike off of Friends in it, how bad can it be? It's fairly popular on the Internet Movie Database as well, but then, every film has its fans on the IMDb. Even Jaws 3-D. Yes, that's me.

It's a stupid, stupid film. Even leaving aside the wholesale raping of the finale to Part 4 and the sheer idiocy of the fact that some hermit - a fucking hermit! - looks after him for a year this is a movie where when he's locked up by the police, they don't even take his mask off him. Seriously, the guy is sitting there in a prison cell with his mask on. You have to wonder when they took the pictures if they took it off and then gave him it back.

There is one good bit in the movie when Jamie (having miraculously rediscovered the power of speech just as everyone who could interpret her for the audiences benefit bought the farm) is cornered by Michael (in a coffin he has unearthed from one of his previous victims, although why this is I have no idea) and as he pauses, she asks to see his face. He takes off his mask and we don't really see him. It's all in shadow and Jamie says 'You're like me,' which seems to be a remnant of a better script which dealt with Jamie's own homicidal impulses rather than bringing back Michael for a redundant encore.

Halloween H20, spurred on by the adrenalin shot administered to the genre by Kevin Williamson, is a much better film, mainly because it goes back to the essentials of the franchise. Whereas both Friday The 13th and the Nightmare on Elm Street series were both much more about the killer, Halloween is much more about the victims, or the Final Girl. The true star of Halloween is not Michael Myers, but Laurie Strode (well, actually, the true star of Halloween is its cinematography, Dean Cundey is a cinematographer that films like Friday The 13th dream about). And so Laurie returns in H20, twenty years older and wiser. This is a film which attempts to explore the psychological ramifications of being relentlessly hunted by a homicidal maniac. She drinks, she freaks out, she represses her son and manages to fuck up every relationship she's ever had because she's scared. She is, in short, not the star of a slasher movie. She's a survivor of a slasher movie, plunged into another one. The most apposite comparison I can find to make is Ripley in the first two Alien movies. When she chooses to go along with the marines in Aliens, she's facing her fears, conquering them. That's what Laurie does in H20, conquers her fears. Only where Ripley uses a flamethrower and a power loader, Laurie uses an axe.

And while H20 has come in for a lot of criticism from hardcore fans (and where it comes to 'comic relief' security guard LL Cool J, I'm right there with them) it does a lot right, including the contentious decision to ignore the continuity for every Halloween film since Halloween 2. It's a franchise reboot that works, because it strips the concept down to the bone and just lets it play out. There's a very low body count, very little blood and, most of all, it's scary. Unlike Scream and the reboots of Elm Street and Friday The 13th which emphasised the comedy, H20 is as old school as you can get, meaning that it's faithful in spirit to the original, which is not something many films can say. I mean, look at the differences between Dr No and Octopussy, or Friday The 13th and Jason X, both of which are two examples of the same franchise separated by twenty years but which, surface aside, are very different beasts.

Halloween Resurrection makes the same mistakes as Halloween 5, retconning Michael's death in H20, putting Laurie in a nuthouse, despite the clear implication at the end of H20 that she'd conquered her demons and then presenting us with a bog-standard story. No, actually it's worse than bog-standard. It's a story that seems to have been written by someone who's just constructed a melange of slasher movie cliches in their head and then vomited them up on the screen. So the old Myers home, which was never that important an element, is suddenly vastly important in the same way that Camp Crystal Lake was important to Jason or that Elm Street was important to Freddy. And with the unforgivable dispatching of Laurie at the beginning of the film, we're left without a decent heroine. Resurrection descends into something its predecessors (even the abominable Part 5) never were; a faceless slasher movie.

As of this writing I haven't seen the Rob Zombie remake of the first film. The trailers look good, but what I've heard of it - that it explains why Michael does what he does - doesn't do much for me. Michael's homicidal rampage was all the more terrifying because we didn't know why he was doing what he was doing. Why did he have an overriding impulse to wipe out his own family? It's scarier if we don't know. If we know, then he just becomes another serial killer wearing a stupid mask.

Peace out.

The Night He Came Home. Again. And Again...

There's conventional wisdom about slasher movies as well. Mainly that the first one is worth watching and then it's a steady rate of decline from then on. Basically, the higher the number after the title, the worse it is, which is probably why after Friday The 13th Part 8 - Jason Takes Manhattan and Halloween 6 - The Curse Of Michael Myers they stopped using numbers and went with just the subtitles so that people wouldn't have any idea about how bad they were intentionally going to be (and, knowing Hollywood, there was probably some debate that if something is a Part 9, then you have to have seen Parts 1 through 8 to have made sense of it all, and in this dubious tactic they might be right, after all, The Golden Compass has just come out at the pictures and half the people I've spoken to have no idea that it's the first part of a trilogy - hell, I know people who went to see The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring and expected it to end).

But, as always, conventional wisdom doesn't have it entirely right. After all, Jason X (or as I like to call it, Friday The 13th Part 10 - Jason In Space!) is the best of the Friday The 13th films, including the first one. In fact, when it comes to Jason and his machete-wielding adventures, in my opinion, the first film is one of the worst (and not just because he's barely in it). In fact, on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst (Jason Takes Manhattan, despite the best comedy decapitation ever) and one being the best (Jason X), the original Friday The 13th makes its home around number 7, above The New Blood and Part 3, but below such alleged franchise nadirs as Jason Lives and the non-Jason entry A New Beginning.

The Halloween franchise is slightly different. I'll take anyone outside who offers up the opinion that the first film in this, the most archetypal of slashers, is not a true masterpiece. It's so great they even teach it on Film Studies courses, alongside such recognised classics as The Searchers, Jaws and Casablanca. The sequels, however, are a very different kettle of fish. Just like no one would ever try to squeeze Jaws 3-D onto a degree level Film Theory course, no case could be made for any of the Halloween sequels, despite some of them being far better than their reputation suggests.

Before I start though, I'm going to say that I won't even be going anywhere near the Michael Myers lacking third entry. While John Carpenter and Debra Hill's idea of doing a 'Halloween' film every year with a completely different story/cast like a cinematic version of The Twilight Zone was a good one, it was ultimately scuttled by the gorehounds devotion to Michael Myers and his William Shatner mask wearing antics.

So, Halloween 2. Still scripted by Carpenter and Hill, but directed by Rick Rosenthal (who has since made something of a comeback directing episodes of Buffy, Point Pleasant and Smallville). It follows on directly from the end of the first film, so much so that you could watch both of them in a three hour chunk if you really wanted to. And it works watching them like this as well. While the first film doesn't offer any real sense of closure, Halloween 2 sees Michael dead at the end, burned up, giving Jamie Lee the chance to move on with her life. Except that she doesn't get that chance. Halloween 2 is actually a good film, very much a Moonraker to Halloween's The Spy Who Loved Me and none of the ancillary characters stand out the way that PJ Soles and Nancy Loomis did in the first installment, but all in all, it's a far better film than anyone could have hoped for.

Halloween 4, subtitled The Return Of Michael Myers, to assuage any confusion that it was going to be another Season Of The Witch, is also a far better film than it has any right to be. Starring Jamie, the daughter of Jamie Lee's character (Jamie Lee, seen only in pictures here, has been killed in an off screen car crash, Dr Loomis is inexplicably alive, given the ending of Halloween 2 and Michael is more or less fine, despite spending the last decade in a coma) and her step-sister Rachel are our main points of focus here and while you may question the sense in having a slasher film with an eight year old lead, it all works. Unlike most films of this type, the police are called in early (all the more fodder for Michael to work his way through) with none of the usual disbelief and 'cry wolf' tactics that usually pad out such films. The ending, which sees Michael dead (again), also plays against expectations, showing us little Jamie having been pushed over the edge from witnessing her uncle's reign of terror, killing her stepmother, an event which also almost pushes Loomis over the brink. His reaction to seeing Jamie standing at the top of the stairs - he pulls out his gun and goes to shoot her, only stopped by the Sheriff - is also fantastically demented. It's probably the last time in the series that Pleasence gets to do anything enjoyable.

Because by the time we come to Halloween 5, subtitled The Revenge Of Michael Myers, again most probably to assure people that Michael would be in it, Michael is alive, having survived his fall down a mineshaft, taken a swim in a river and stumbled upon the wooden shack of the local hermit. He promptly tries to kill the hermit but falls into a coma. One year later, he wakes up, still at the shack (obviously it never occured to the hermit to take him to a hospital or call the police or anything else that might actually make sense), kills the hermit (at least he pays for his stupidity) and goes after Jamie again, who has been traumatised by the events of Halloween 4 and so hasn't spoken for a year. Now under the care of Loomis at the Haddonfield Children's Clinic, it transpires her step-mother is fine, the kid stabbed her and then, at the end of the fourth entry, she obviously decided it would be best to lay there in the bath quietly as she bled out to provide us with our shock ending. Rachel and her best friend, the annoying peppy Tina, come to visit her and tell her she'll be fine. Jamie uses sign language with them. I vomit.

I have to go to work now, so: To Be Continued...

Down And Out In Bradford

Traditional wisdom holds that most people, when starting diaries, do well for the first few weeks and then tail off. Ahem.

Not that much has happened in my life. At all. But I thought I should tell you all I'm still alive. Still single, as well, but that's not really a cause for celebration.

And there's not really any potential people out there for me. There're a couple of people I like - there's actually one person who I really like - but the liklihood of anything happening there is slim-to-none.

So I come back to my dilemma which is partially why I stopped writing on here in the first place - is this an online blog of my life, or the criticisms of a caustic critic? I just don't have the energy for writing two blobs (I barely have enough energy to do one). I originally thought that I might be able to combine them, but it looks a bit messy. But maybe that's what this blog is - a bit messy.

So, you'll be hearing from me soon. Hopefully.

Peace out.

In Search Of The Human Adventure

There's conventional wisdom in the world of Star Trek, perhaps more so than any other fandom that I am involved in, with the possible exceptioon of James Bond, and even with Bond, you do get the odd rallying cry to the true greatness of Moonraker or Licence To Kill.

Trek, on the other hand, is so rigidly organised that every movie has a set verdict already imposed on it. So here goes:

Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Worthy but dull
Star Trek 2: The Wrath Of Khan - Brilliant
Star Trek 3: The Search For Spock - Unworthy
Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home - The pinnacle of mainstream Trek
Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier - Bobbins, and probably all the fault of Shatner
Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country - A worthy final voyage for the original crew
Star Trek: Generations - Two Captains in search of a plot
Star Trek: First Contact - Brilliant
Star Trek: Insurrection - An overlong episode of the TV show
Star Trek: Nemesis - Shite.

Now, by and large I do actually agree with most of the judgements, with two notable exceptions (and I have been known to watch TFF and enjoy it immensely on occasion, but that doesn't render it any less bobbins). They are The Search For Spock and Insurrection. Both of these films, it has been argued, are like overlong episodes of the TV show, with no real cinematic value. Which is kinda true. It's also true that they both follow on from tub-thumpingly balls to the wall action movie entries into the Trek canon and isn't variety the spice of life? If either TWoK or FC had been followed up by a film which had tried to do the same thing but bigger and better, they would have been doomed to failure. Look at the movie franchises which have tried that: Pirates Of The Caribbean, Batman, Terminator - it's a case of diminishing returns because you can only go so far before it just gets ridiculous.

So, TSfS and I turn the heat down a little. It's a good thing. It lets the characters breath. As good as FC was, the only character who got a look in was Picard, with his Moby Dick homaging subplot. Everyone else in that film was simply acting out their plot function. I brings the cast of The Next Generation back for the first time since - arguably, the holodeck sequence at the start of Generations. Because no one would have watched the series for the epic space battles and action. As a weekly syndicated series, TNG was amazingly light on action. It was about character. We fell in love with Star Trek (and The Next Generation in particular) because of the characters, not because we turned in each week to see shit getting blown up. That's not what the TV show was about. It's not what the movies are about either. Both The Wrath of Khan and First Contact are anomalies in the ten-film sequence, much in the way that Tomorrow Never Dies is an anomaly in the Bond canon in that it doesn't feel like a Bond film. It feels like a common or garden action movie that just happens to have James Bond as it's hero. The Trek universe of The Wrath of Khan is subtley different to anything that has gone before in Trek and anything that will come after it. Even TSfS and TVH which follow on from Khan take place in a different universe. Not massively different, but enough to ensure that Khan's militaristic Napoleonic era sea battle transposed to space has a unique place. While First Contact isn't as drastic a departure - by this time the Trek universe was much more defined and rigid as it was when Nick Meyer and Harve Bennett were carving out new territory - it still carries with it a different mood - again, it's a much more militaristic Starfleet we see here (and it's ironic that First Contact, made before the start of the Dominion War over on Deep Space 9 is a much more militaristic film than Insurrection, which takes place during the war), emphasised by the new uniforms and the design of the new Enterprise-E. It also rewrites Trek lore to introduce the Borg Queen (and back in 1991, Peter David, that bastion of quality tie-in fiction had to have a disclaimer in his Borg novel Vendetta as it featured a female Borg and - according to Paramount at the time, such things did not exist). In much the same way that Aliens symbolically castrated the threat of the xenomorphs by having so many of them (and having them suddenly so easy to kill, a far cry from the one indestructable alien in Ridley Scott's entry) having a spokesman (or in this case, spokeswoman) for the Borg - giving an enemy whose facelessness was on of its most appealing factors - removed much of the threat and was an all too easy concession to the apparent need for the film to have an identifiable foe who could go up against Picard. And give Data a blow job in the most literal sense.

The Search For Spock is essentially Part 2 of the Genesis trilogy (although Part 3 - The Voyage Home is less concerned with what happened in the previous two films and more bothered about having a good time and delivering its eco-message). Unlike the films starring Patrick Stewart and co, the original series films more or less follow an arc, an arc which is most apparent between films 2 and 4, continuing on from each other as they do. As such, TSfS has a lot of mopping up to do, although why they felt they had to bring back Spock is beyond me. It is, at it's core, an unnecessary action. I know Spock is the most loved of the Trek characters (although McCoy will always be my favourite - while Kirk is the fist and Spokc the brain, McCoy is the heart of the original crew) but having him brought back, and by such an obvious plot McGuffin cheapens the character and robs us of what could have been an interesting new crew dynamic. Picture this: following the events of Khan, the Enterprise crew stay together, the ship being repaired. Taking Spock's place as Kirk's first officer is Saavik, it's obviously command that she's been groomed for when she takes the Kobayashi Maru test and her inexperience would have created a lot of interesting conflict and taking over at the science station is David Marcus, Kirk's son, who was all but wasted in TSfS, aside from the one short scene where he's talking with Kirk over the intercom and he says 'I knew you'd come'. Now, it's fairly clear from the closeness of Saavik and David in TSfS that they have some sort of relationship bubbling over so you have the chance to do what no Trek series did till DS9 did - you can tell stories about long-term relationships and father-son stories. Obviously, this wouldn't work in the conext of the movies because there wouldn't be enough room to develop those relationships to a sufficient degree, and anyway, I'm not here to regret what might have been. I'm here to defend the third film.

And it is worth defending. There's a lot of good in there, a lot of humour despite the rather grim plot, a beautiful restatement of what Trek is all about when Kirk destroys the Enterprise. Now, you have to remember how Kirk felt about the Enterprise. It wasn't just a ship to him. It was his home, his life, hell, it was almost like his lover. How many women did he fall in love with, only to leave them behind because he was more in love with the Enterprise? Exactly. Losing the Enterprise, and losing it in the way he did (especially so soon after losing his son) is - to me - a greater loss than that of Spock at the end of the previous movie. As Kirk himself says at the end of the movie, when Spock has been returned to him, "The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many." He's not talking about Spock's needs there. He's talking about his own. Having never faced death until losing Spock, he's come to realise that the Enterprise means a lot to him, but it means less than Spock does, than David does, because you can't deny that Kirk's actions are primarily motivated by revenge. He blows the Enterprise up to kill the Klingon bastards that killed his son. It's telling that he doesn't even realise what he's done until he sees the hulk of the Enterprise burning up in the atmosphere of the Genesis planet and it's up to Bones to tell him, or to mollify him, saying that he's done the only thing he could do. In essence, The Search For Spock is all about one man's greed and what it costs other people. And that man is Jim Kirk. Picard goes on a similar emotional journey in First Contact. Having been tortured and dehumanised by the Borg, he is prepared to go to any lengths - even sending his entire crew on a suicidal mission - to defeat them. The main difference between the two captains is that Kirk's greed is motivated by a desire to get his friend back - David's death and the destruction of the Enterprise are simp,y two unfortunate consequences of that desire - while Picard, like Ahab, is driven purely by a desire for revenge, and revenge, in the universe of TNG is not something that is tolerated.

Insurrection is, in my opinion, probably the second best of the TNG movies. Nemesis obviously brings up the rear, it's poorly thought out plot, flat direction and basic lack of understanding of the characters/concepts that make Star Trek what it is cripple it and the good in it - and there is some; Riker and Troi's wedding, Dina Meyer as the Romulan Commander, the battle between Shinzon's vessel and the Enterprise - is not enough to tip the balance. Generations likewise suffers. The first twenty minutes or so - the portion with Kirk essentially - is wonderful, but the easy rapport between Kirk, Scotty and Chekov casts into sharp relief the cold formality that exists between the crew of the Enterprise D. Only Will Riker comes across as a geniune human being while Patrick Stewart is crippled by a plot which kills off his brother and nephew and then asks him to be a gung-ho hero, which is impossible, even for an actor of Stewart's calibre. Plus the bizarre decision to introduce elements like Data's emotion chip - which, for an audience who hadn't slavishly followed The Next Generation on television would have seemed out of place at best and mawkish at worst - it's clear that Ron Moore and Brannon Braga (G's writers) didn't have much of an idea about the differences between film and TV. Ironically, had it not been so bound up in the mythology of the TV show, All Good Things..., the series finale, has more scope and potential for action than Generations. And they waste Kirk, in more ways than one. And they got it wrong twice. First Kirk dies by getting shot in the back, then in the reshoots, they killed him by having him on a bridge that collapsed. Kirk should have died sacrificing his life, choosing to die, rather than in some stupid accident. It's no wonder Shatner had second thoughts and resurrected Kirk in the novels.

In many ways, the naysayers of Insurrection are right. It's a story which - Generations aping finale excepted - could have been done as a two parter on the TV show. But does it really matter? There's more essential Trekkiness in Insurrection than in all the other TNG films put together. There's more humour... there's more heart. And that is what Trek was all about, in the final analysis. It's just that the fans expected something a little more bombastic after First Contact - a film in which the entire galaxy was at stake - than Insurrection which is a more personal story on every level.

It reminds me of a comment I read somewhere concerning the deaths of the Tom Baker and Peter Davison Doctors. Tom Baker was better, they said, because he died saving the universe while Davison died saving just one person. In my humble opinion, they got it the wrong way round. Davison was a far better hero than Baker because he was willing to sacrifice himself just to save one friend (and it's telling that Eccleston does much the same thing in the rebooted Doctor Who). Insurrection is much the same. It's not hard to try to save the universe. Saving one person? That's much harder. As Kirk himself says at the conclusion of The Search For Spock after Sarek asks him if the sacrifice was worth it, given the cost of his ship and his son: "If I hadn't tried, the cost would have been my soul."

So it's been nearly a week. And, Jesus, what a week. I mean, leaving aside all the Natalie related issues, we've still got the refit going on at work - the entirety of Sunday was spent transferring stock from the shop floor to the Post Office next door where we're now operating from temporarily or the back stockroom - and that's almost enough to occupy anyone's time. But add to that the Natalie stuff, and you'll see that my brain is pretty well fried.

Because, ah, Natalie.

Yes.

She did indeed come into the shop on Wednesday. More than once, in fact. And every time she came in, she was with Jade and laughing her head off. Never even made eye contact with me, let alone spoke. So I text her when I'm on my way home asking her if I embarrass her. No reply. So I talk with Kelly the next afternoon and she says text her once more, be blunt about it and if she doesn't reply, then call it quits.

Which I did. I texted her on Thursday night essentially saying 'do you like me or not?' and she never texted back. She's been into the shop a few times since then, but has never spoken to me yet. It's funny how these things work out, isn't it? Of course, everyone in the Mow now thinks I am seeing Natalie (and, according to Stacy, she's fairly sure Natalie's got the clap, apparently).

But I am determined this is not going to get me down. Well, not as down as I was over Allison. Or Stef. Or Isabella. No. I got a text off Clare saying her and Richie are going to see Potter 5 with Mark and Tracy, so I'm going to ask Bryony if she wants to go with me. Kinda like a date. Ish. It's a pretty much last ditch attempt to get her to like me, you know, in that way, before I give her up as a lost cause.