h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I didn't particularly get the "Queen Saved Live Aid" feeling from the film, but you're absolutely right, all the performances (with only one or two exceptions) were just fantastic. I particularly enjoyed the "Style Council" (having not expected to) being a real fan of The Jam and thought Paul Weller had gone right off the rails.

Maybe that's another conversation to be had.

I sat and watched "Frost Nixon" last night, interesting....

>I didn't particularly get the "Queen Saved Live Aid" feeling from the film,<

There's a blatant scene where Bob Geldof is fuming about how the money is coming in too slow and they only have £1 million in donations after half the day is gone.* Then Queen come on, they make the place stomp and then suddenly all the telephone exchanges are melting down.

It was pretty blatant.

*Having said that.... I was extremely sceptical that they could only have raised £1 million by 6 pm as the film states. So I checked....(yes you can google this)... and they were right. Which I found particularly stunning as my memory of the Live Aid haul of donations was that was in the hundreds of millions by the end. Perhaps that really is how it went but I seriously doubt the Queen performance was that much of a hinge-point. Though it was for me personally, never will I forget that, having only just got into them and become a mega-fan only the year before.

Am now in Californie. On the flight here there was unfortunately only time for 3 films. I watched Bohemian Rhapsody first. I felt it was a ripping yarn with great music, regardless of the accuracy of the story. The scene where the Queen appearance made the call centre ce alive must have been cut. It just showed that they crossed the million pound barrier whilst Queen were on stage. I enjoyed it, especially as all 4 of the actors were younger, better-looking versions of the actual people.

The other films were Fantastic Beasts (very muddled plot, but fun and good CGI. (not something you will hear me say very often), and Christopher Robin - exceedingly formulaic Disney plot, but I do have a soft spot for Ewan McGregor.

I liked all three films you mention.

I was under the impression Live Aid made 51 Million on the day, but am happy to be corrected. Maybe the figure quoted above was after several years of donations - not sure.

I thought the Christopher Robin film was very skillfully and sympatheticly matched to the original stories and was just a delight in these days of DC Comic overkill.

On the flight back from California (sorry about the typos above; I forgot to take my portable keyboard with me and was thumbing all that on my phone) I watched the following.

-Dunkirk
Boy, are you expected to know a lot about the background of this. It starts in medias res and ploughs on. To be honest, and to my shame, I was a little vague about the events myself, but managed to work it out.

- Mamma Mia, Here we go again (I needed some light relief after Dunkirk and I wasn't going to pay to watch this, so it was ideal that it was on offer). The plot totally confused me (unlike Dunkirk), till I worked out that there were 2 different girls - one was playing Meryl Streep as a young girl, where she first me Bill, Harry and Sam, and the other one was playing her daughter but at the same age. And whilst the 2 Tanyas looked alike, the girl who played young Rosie (Alexa Davies) could not pass as a young Julie Walters in a month of Sundays.

- Juliet, Naked. Never pass up a chance to see a Nick Hornby film. What a lovely surprise to see that Chris O'Dowd was playing Duncan! The kids were all great, too! Very true to the book, which touches on so many points about fandom and fantasy - I think it was a sort of follow-up to High Fidelity.

I like Chris O'Dowd.

Last night I saw "Long Shot," in which Charlize Theron plays a Secret a of State who is planning to run for president. Seth Rogen plays a muck-raking journalist who hyperventilates a lot. Somehow she was his babysitter when they were younger, and now she has hired him to write her speeches. Naturally there will be love scenes.

These two don't belong in the same universe, let alone the same room.

I was very surprised to read in our paper today that"Stan and Ollie" only came out in Germany this week. Although I never really "got" Laurel and Hardy, I have heard such good things about this film that I might try and seek out a screening with the original sound track.

"Stan and Ollie" is bittersweet. It attempts to show the behind-the-scenes interplay between the two actors, at a time when their star was in decline. My favorite Laurel and hardy scene is the one where they are arriving at a western town, doing a sort of improvised dance. Reilly and Coogan nail it. The end is poignant. The two actors had a complicated relationship. Hardy had to choose between preserving what was left of his health and continuing in show business. Laurel was deeply invested in planning new routines for the team. It was a tough choice to make.

I want to see this, I saw some hype for it then watched a long documentary on the pair (I LOVED them when I was young - still do really). Can't get over the fact that Oliver Hardy was called Babe IRL - not sure that would work in the UK.

Babe as a nickname for men seems to be American, and of a certain period that has vanished.

Saw Toy Story 4 today - familiar rollercoaster of action, comedy & emotion. Almost better for adults than children - hard to believe how long it is since the first film came out. I felt TS3 wrapped up neatly, so this was an unnecessary fourth film - but thoroughly enjoyable nonetheless.

It cleverly anticipated critics who might want to trash it.

I've been watching some DVD's which were at the back of the cupboard. Last night I picked out "The Departed". The cellophane wrapping had been removed, so presumably I've watched it at least once already. , but I didn't remember it at all.

Whilst I appreciated the quality of the acting, I thought the story was quite ridiculous - the ending being a series of gratuitous shooting of all the protagonists (all very precisely in the head, with only slightly less blood-spattering than Tarantino would have used).

The film came out in 2006.

Violence played for laughs can be entertaining, though. Jack Nicholson hammed it up as he bled to death.

If you want brains on the floor watch John Wick 2 - Keanu Reeves culls half of humanity in its 2 hr (wish) runtime. Quite ridiculous but very much played for laughs.

I wonder how they manage to train up more kung-fu expert assassins for him to kill in the third one - there can only be so many expertly trained thugs in the world.

Sooner or later they'll have to create kung fu androids.

I don't really want "brains on the floor". I'd rather have a more realistic plot, instead of everyone just getting shot to save the writers having to think up a more lifelike ending.

yeah, that Shakespeare really saved himself some effort by having everyone in "Hamlet" dead at the end.