Review of The Departed

Martin Scorcese's The Departed is not very good. Bloated and full of "performances" by "actors", it's more like a vanity project than a well-directed, moving or interesting film. Plot holes the size of Mark Whalberg's head, plot twists that serve no function other than to fill up the hours, and really dodgy editing make this 3-hour-long plonker a definite non-contender for the Oscars (but don't take my word for it -- Hollywood, after all, did nominate Kiera Knightly for Pride and Prejudice). Jack Nicholson plays Jack Nicholson playing a bad guy (set to pantomime speed); Leo DiCaprio squints and sniffs a lot; Matt Damon incorporates Christian Bale's American Psycho; and Martin Sheen is starting to look like my grandmother.

Scorcese shows he's run out of ideas from the start, when the first song to come up is the Rolling Stone's "Gimme Shelter" -- a track he already used in Casino. From there, the usual American mafia cliches abound -- this time transposed to the Irish community in Boston. Tough guys, undercover cops, drug busts, police surveillance... it all feels a bit tired and shodily handled. I've seen better C.S.I. episodes.

It's not the worse three hours of your life, but you could definitely do better.

Blairite Bullshit

According to Labour MP Jack Straw "Muslim women who wore full veils made community relations difficult. He said he would prefer that women did not wear them because they acted as a 'visible statement of separation and difference'." Tony Blair agreed with him. [article]

And yet, here's Tony Blair also agreeing with devout Catholic Ruth Kelly, the Communities Secretary, that a new bill intended to give lesbians & gays equal rights to their straight counterparts should be blocked (her spin is that it's just "a delay"). And why? Because it makes faith-based organizations (i.e. Christians) uncomfortable having to deal with gays as if they are normal people. In other words, it's not OK for muslims to be different, but please let's not start treating queers as equal to us. [article]

I want to fill this post with very dirty words.

Tea in Lewisham

I travelled to south London this afternoon, into the heart of Lewisham, to hang out with three girls (co-workers), eat cake, drink tea and talk about NaNoWriMo. I got the three of them hooked on the idea of writing a novel in November, and now they can hardly talk about anything else.

When I arrived, the hostess was spreading whipped cream on the cake and dropping strawberries onto it while the other two sat on the floor reading tarot cards. I picked up a copy of The Seven Basic Plots from the floor then rifled through the french novels neatly arranged on the bookcase.

We gossiped about people at work; laughed at our presumptious plot lines; talked about our favourite novels; and did a little writing exercise I learned from Writing Down the Bones. They laughed when I told them my novel would be a re-working of Kafka's The Trial with a pinch of Heat magazine. Well, either that or the story of a very powerful family that owns a cinema called "The Alabama" and a vineyard in France (a sort of homage to the many Sydney Sheldon novels I read as a kid as well as the TV series Dallas.) I need to make up my mind soon.