Do Stuff!

I'd been suffering from apathy a bit this week. Not just blog apathy but generalised apathy. But now I've had enough of that and it's time to get off my ass and do stuff!

Okay, so it's not as if I haven't been doing anything. I managed to go to the cinema twice (having started to suffer withdrawal symptoms from not having been for the past fortnight!), discovered that High Street Kensington is the place to go to buy travel gear (I hadn't been there for over 10 years) hence bought the perfect holdall for my holiday and checked out Oxford Street on Saturday whilst it was closed to traffic for it's rather weakly named 'Celebrate Oxford Street - Dress To Impress' day.

I was planning on seeing 'Revolver' but the universal panning by critics (pah!) and people I knew who had seen it (oh dear) scared me off.

So on Thursday, I went to see 'Land Of The Dead' instead. I never used to be that much into zombie flicks but the humorous gory aspects of Romero's films are quite cool.

'Land' was quite good. Not perfect but watchable nonetheless. Plenty of 'cool' gory killings but definitely not scary. If you don't like this kind of film, then this won't change your mind.

Reading between the lines it's about the masses rebelling against the governments and corporations driven by profit that try to control their lives. Just to make it really obvious, at one point the main 'bad man' played by Dennis Hopper, says "We don't negotiate with terrorists" when talking about one of the 'bully boys' that he has created to do his dirty work who is trying to blackmail him.

It could have been made at any time in the past three decades really. So a cool zombie flick but not really pushing the bounds of the genre anywhere new. 6.5/10 from me.

I went to see a completely different movie, 'A History Of Violence' on Friday. At least, this time, the cinema had more than six other people, as had been the previous day.

It was okay but I couldn't help but feel that Cronenberg's direction was a bit off. It's one of those films that you feel you shouldn't not like because everyone else seems to like it. As I said, it was okay but once again, not exactly genre busting. The story was interesting enough but bits of the movie felt out of place. There were a few scenes that felt a bit redundant.

The film was over an hour and a half long and I have to say that I didn't notice. So I guess that it did enough to keep me interested. I'd give it a 6.9/10. Could have been a lot better though.

I'm really looking forward to seeing 'Serenity' this week though, hopefully on Thursday, as I couldn't beg, borrow or steal any premier or preview tickets :(

Anyway movie reviewer bit over. HAHA!


As I mentioned, I popped along on Saturday to check out Oxford Street's traffic-free day. It's another one of those promotional attempts to get shoppers back into London's main shopping street after the events of July and various other factors have apparently knocked loads off the profits of the shops on the street. (Shame!)

It certainly worked in terms of the number of people who turned up. I was there after 3pm and Oxford street was packed to the gills. A few bands were performing on stage in the middle of the traffic-free section and various Z-list celebs were in some of the stores trying to feel important.

My friend, who popped down to London with me, had a good point though when he pointed out that although there were thousands of people packed into the street, practically none of them seemed to be carrying any shopping bags. So I'm not convinced that the shops along the street would really have benefited that much.

In fact at one point when it started raining, loads of us popped into Waterstones, the book shop that faces the main stage. Waterstones were well prepared. They had one security guard on duty and he struggled to keep people away from the entrance as the door alarm was going off non-stop!

Then we got bored of seeing reality-show rejects on stage and tried to head back the way we came. It took us twenty minutes to work through the, now, very compressed crowd. Some fights almost broke out as some people tried pushing a bit too hard!

Policing was a bit of a mess too. A one point there were about eight community police trying to form a chain across the whole street to stop more people getting through to the stage section.
Needless to say that eight against a few hundred doesn't work. Later on, proper London Metropolitan police turned up and sorted things straight away.

Frankly we were glad to get out of there in the end. I'm sure that all that happened was that they weren't prepared for the numbers that turned up around the main stage. Stupid really!

Anyhow, I was happy in the end as I managed to get a decent holdall for my Peru trip and just need to get some US currency now to spend over there.

Thirteen days and counting!

PS: Reading back I realise that I sound really cynical about the whole Oxford Street Event. I think that it probably was a good event so long as you stayed out of the over-crowded areas as I hope that my pictures of the wacky geishas on stilts and spinning teapots show.