My Magical Place: The Conjuring

I've been watching quite a lot of movies in genres I don't usually dabble in because I now live with a crowd of people who aren't into the things I am and because I like to be open minded about things I watch some of the stuff they do and it's been interesting. I found that I liked features like The Great Gatsby (I could never finish the book) and Dark Zero Thirty. Anyway, I also started watching some horror movies like VHS with one of the guys, which eventually lead to The Conjuring. I'm not the biggest fan of horror movies but some of the B-grade stuff like Slither amuse me to no end.

I approached The Conjuring with an almost fresh set of eyes for what it sets out to do. I vaguely remember seeing The Exorcist and other than that my closest experience with this ritualistic, possession stuff is the Supernatural TV series. The story centres around a married couple, Ed and Lorraine Warren (played by Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga), who make their living as paranormal investigators. They help a family who are being plagued by a creepload of spirits in the creepy looking house they've just moved into and invested all their money into. It's not like they can move anyway because the spirits haunting them have some powerful dark juju and can follow them around. They are pretty much screwed, really. Ed and Lorraine come in to save the day and shoot a few videos in the process. I actually enjoyed this movie a whole lot: it's well paced and scares you when you least expect it or when you most expect it and still gets you. It is also very beautifully shot. Every scene is hauntingly beautiful, if that makes sense in this context. The music is also brilliantly done and adds a cool ambiance throughout the scary proceedings. I enjoyed watching The Conjuring and then I found myself lying in bed in the dark later on and I realised my wardrobe looks a lot like the one in the movie... I had difficulty sleeping for a few nights.

I recommend this movie and I suggest watching it at midday.

Just as a side note can we all just step back and look at how Patrick Wilson's hair's combed all neatly in every movie he's in. It's quite eerie.

I was struck by a thought whilst watching this movie with the Christian symbolism used to ward off evil spirits or exorcise them. What are the procedures in other religions when demons and other evil spirits decide to take up residence in your home or body? I know from reading The Historian that Islam has a tradition of vampire defence wards. Someone should tell a story about a demon possession scenario from a Jewish or Hindu perspective.

Audio Slave: Under the Covers

I think I should stop listening to Dia Frampton and Ed Sheeran cover other people's songs because at this rate I'm going to stop listening to other musicians entirely! This whole week all I've been doing is listening to many of my favourite songs covered by them.

Dia Frampton even covers R. Kelly's Remix to Ignition with her band, Meg & Dia, and it sounds super cool. The first time I heard her Dia was performing Kanye West's Heartless and that just won me over entirely. I wanted to marry her and raise 2.5 children and a dog with her right there and there. Well she was way over there in the US and I was over here in SA but still, we could've made it work.

Ed Sheeran is just amazing! I love his music. I'm about that life entirely. I listened to his cover of Bon Iver's Skinny Love and dug it with two spades. Then he also just goes and kills Rihanna's We Found Love. It's also cool that he reminds me of one of my best friends, Chris McWade.

Dia and Ed can sing all the songs in the world and I'll be okay with that.

Dia Frampton - Skinny Love (Bon Iver cover)

Ed Sheeran - Skinny Love (The Sun Biz Session)

My Magical Place: My thoughts on The Hunger Games

Okay, so here I am, over a year later after its release, and I can finally say that I've seen The Hunger Games. I was never really negative about it at any point but I was also not super amped to get to it or anything. It was just there. Waiting. Whenever I'd decide to watch it something else would just pop up -  I'd have to save my family from a burst geyser or something. I almost didn't watch it yesterday either because my DVD player did a thing and I was too lazy to fiddle with it. Luckily my roommate was on-hand to connect his laptop to our TV.

The first time I heard about The Hunger Games and its premise I thought it sounded a whole lot like Battle Royale (which I've also not gotten around to seeing. It's just there. Skulking.) in terms of kids on some island/forest set-up having to kill each other. I'm not the biggest fan of kids killing each other in my movies or books (I still haven't read Lord of the Flies. It's sitting somewhere. Scowling perhaps?) I'm fine with kids killing adults though. That's fine. Anyway, back to the issue at hand. I liked The Hunger Games and think it's a good movie. It still disturbed me highly though. Straight up Mount Everest levels highly. It wasn't that it was graphical in its violence or anything. Something about it just got to me. Good art is supposed to unsettle you I guess.

Kids killing kids (KKK). Okay (K).

Throughout the movie I sat there thinking, Dafuq is wrong with these people? But this shit's happened on numerous occasions in the real world before and is still happening in some form or another right now. Our history as a species is drenched in blood: war, prejudice, terrorism, racism, sexism and a string of other forms of hatred. Mindless hatred is just something we do and we're good at it. Add the spectator element from the movie and that's us right there. We love being the audience on other people's tragedies. We do show some level of sympathy towards others and their misfortune but mostly we view it with a morbid kind of fascination and think how lucky we are that it's not us going through that shit. The Hunger Games made me feel a certain level of shame in terms of how I'd probably just look on if that sort of thing were to happen in front of me. Just as long as it wasn't me it was happening to. I liked the movie but it made me feel really shitty. Then I watched The Hobbit afterwards, which cheered me right up and I could return to my complacent ways...

I am looking forward to the next movie, Catching Fire, I must say. Those Capitol bastards are clearly riled up by Katniss and that Peeta bloke for showing them up a little. Also, how do you go back to a normal life and shit after having to kill some people who you didn't really have anything against, except those 'evil' career tribute kids who were assholes and totally deserved to die... Even though they're kids, you know.

I figure I should read the books but I feel no real motivation to do that so I'll just wait on the movies and see how that goes.

Occasional Letters to Death #2

Hi Dee,

I'm gonna go with Dee because I think you'd like that, what with the whole whimsical outlook that you have on... er... life. Tell me, what's the thing you have with the hotdogs? Now, don't get me wrong, I respect hotdogs as much as the next person but I'm not all that crazy about them. Give me a good boerewors roll on any day (yes, even Tuesdays when I'm ironing my socks) and I'm ready to go. I'm not sure where to but I'll be ready nonetheless. Well, I guess the one thing I won't ever be ready for is meeting you in person - boerewors or not. I've been down with sickness of late and that made me think of you a little. Look, I like you, I really do but I'm just no ready to meet you yet. The thing is that you're very pretty and I'm shy. I wouldn't quite know what to say and I'm usually a guy who knows what to say. Anyhoo, whatever, we'll see how that goes whenever you decide to pop over to get me... It'd be nice if it was later rather than sooner though.


A colleague lent me her copy of Endless Nights and it was quite cool reading about you and all your siblings. I must say that you are fairly patient, waiting for those people who locked themselves away from time on that island. I guess you have some time on your hands though. You must introduce me to Destiny! I think he's my new favourite of your siblings. He likes books (well, the one book but it's the book that contains all the stories ever told) and I like books so maybe we could get along. I have a friend, Sleuth, who's very much like him in demeanour so I can hang with him. Let me know hey. I like that guy. Also, tell Dream to cheer up a bit. He's been giving me odd visions at night of late. I don't mind odd things but lines need to be drawn. I really am not sure why these lines need to be drawn as opposed to painted or embossed but it is what it is. Be a good girl and tell him, why don't ya.

I plan to read more of Dream's stuff but Destiny needs to stop being so passive and also get stuff because I'd be very interested in reading his stuff.

It's been a while since I last wrote you and I apologise for that. It's a good thing that you're so patient. It's Friday over here and so I need to rush off to do Friday kind of stuff like go to the beach or whatever. Mainly whatever. Have yourself a good time hey and I'll write you again soon (the human version of soon, not the Endless one).

Later days,
Charles

My Magical Place: Disconnect Review

“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.” – Charlie Chaplin

If there is one thing you should learn in this digital day and age (albeit not as digital as science and science fiction speculated in the 20^th Century) it’s that social networks will undo you in a matter of seconds if you are not careful. Look at what happened to model, Jessica Leandra Dos Santos on Twitter last year – two racist Tweets out of anger and her modelling career went down in flames. Disconnect looks at how our online activities affect our everyday lives over time.  The film is centred around the idea of how people’s online lives spill over into their ‘real’ lives and how, ironically, being connected via the Internet people have actually become disconnected from each other.

The plot follows the stories of four different sets of characters and contains a number of interconnections between the different story arcs. Disconnect is not the movie I expected from what was revealed in the trailer and I am glad it isn’t. I was expecting a feature with a strong focus on cybercrime in terms of fraud and paedophiles preying on children by means of social media and sinister chatrooms. The latter issue is a very important to address but usually movies deal with it in a manner that freaks viewers out in the same way slasher movies do. Disconnect deals with all these issues in a very human way. The story is simply about people who are drifting further and further apart as a result of being too connected to the communication platforms that the Internet and the technology surrounding it affords. Henry Alex Rubin’s (Girl, Interrupted, 1999) direction is brilliant in terms of how the story is paced and how it develops. Many of the scenes are very quiet and all you can hear is the sound of people typing away on keyboards and when they do talk it’s usually over the phone or via a webcam. All these methods of communication feel very natural to the viewer because that’s how we communicate on a daily basis. Reading a fairly large portion of the movie’s dialogue onscreen as people text each other becomes second nature. The film reaches a dramatic climactic point that you just don’t expect and blows you away for a few seconds – especially after how calm everything has been more or less up to that point.

Andrew Stern (Nurses, 2007) wrote a good story that will stay with you for a while after seeing the movie and the ensemble cast delivers some good performances. The initial story is that of Kyle (brilliantly played by Max Thierot), an underage chatroom worker who meets a reporter, Nina Dunham (Andrea Riseborough), in one of his chatroom sessions who wants to help him leave that world behind by sharing his story. The question, though, is does he need her help?  There is the story of teenagers, Jason (Colin Ford) and Frye that deals with the issue of cyberbullying and its outcomes. Ben Boyd (Jonah Bobo) is the victim of the cyberbullying by the two boys and the plot also centers on the fragmented lives that he and his family lead. This arc of the story deals a lot with loneliness as one of its major themes. Jason Bateman (Horrible Bosses, 2011) and Hope Davis (About Schmidt, 2002) play Ben’s parents and Frank Grillo (End of Watch, 2012) plays Jason’s father. The last story is that of a couple, Cindy (Paula Patton) and Derek (Alexander Skarsgård) who have become distant from each other as the result of having lost a child and how they cope with having their credit card details stolen online as a result of them spending so much time on the Internet in an attempt to find refuge from their problems. These stories are all cleverly and subtly interwoven throughout the movie and at times you are given glimpses of how things could have gone in another direction instead of the one the plot follows. Things could go horribly wrong or they can go right.

I enjoyed Disconnect a lot. It’s a very apt story in our digital age and hits home with its message. I highly recommend that you go see it.

Horses and Getting Back On Them

Now that I think about it (I've been putting this off), moving down to Cape Town at the drop of a hat has been quite a mission. Most of my experiences for the last three weeks have been new to me: new job, new location (this is still not settled yet), new people, new Apple Mac to get used to at the office (I still want to throw it out of the window) and some other things I can't think of now. All this means that my routines and structures have been thrown out of the old window.

Road down to the Promenade, Bantry Bay

I've been very into gym but that's on hold now till I finally move into the place I'll actually be living in in the Gardens/Vredehoek area. I tried setting up some sort of routine but between living in a guesthouse for a week and now a backpackers that's failed miserably. Running's been my only salvation in terms of exercise even though my plan was to kick up the gym thing a notch and tone down on the running. But I need some sort of outlet and running along the Promenade for the first week in Cape Town and now having discovered a mountain route near Observatory has been and continues to be very scenic. My diet's also shot to hell! I've been living on cereal and take out food for three weeks and I've only cooked once. First of all I'm very lazy to cook, I've been busy and lastly it's a waste for me to go stock up on groceries when I am going to be moving in a few days time. I try at least make the food I eat be clean in terms of nutrition but it's not working out all that great.

Running route in Newlands Forest

Having a new job that I spend most of my day at actually doing things (and adjusting to speaking Afrikaans all day) also means that my freelance and recreational writing pursuits have been benched for a while. This has been upsetting me the most as I was starting get my writing out into the media world and people were responding positively to it. This morning I told myself that it's best to accept that till I move to Gardens and get settled in my writing will be on hold. I think I've even managed to convince myself to look at it as a little holiday. I was looking forward to covering some E3 news for Xbox 360 Gamer SA and that didn't happen but hey! It's the gaming industry and till the Xbox One and Playstation 4 actually do get released there'll be lots of news to dig up for speculation's sake.

I'm a movie fanatic and even that's taken a knock. I still haven't seen Star Trek: Into Darkness and Man of Steel :( and I had the time this last weekend but then I was broke from just living in good ol' Cape Town. I'm even sad about things like Oblivion (Meh, Tom Cruise) and After Earth (Yay, Will Smith).

My bookworm ways haven't deteriorated to naught at least and that's a good thing. When all else fails in my life there's always J.R.R. Tolkien to read more about. I'm reading Tom Shippey's Tolkien: Author of the Century and after getting passed the rather tedious Foreword I'm enjoying the book. Everything by Tolkien and about Tolkien is food to my soul and I happen to be in possession of a very ravenous soul.

That's more or less what's happening with me and it's amazing and frustrating all at once. As Fall Out Boy (those amazing boys) would say, let the good time roll in case God doesn't show.

Settling In

I'm a hobbit at heart, soul and feet. I love food, warmth and comfort. I tend to dislike new experiences and new places because it means I have to take some time getting used to them and I feel weird during that whole process. My Tookish side, which is to say my adventurous side sees me through such times and when I am at the other end I'm not sure how I got there but it feels like home.

I arrived in Cape Town last week Sunday to the most dreadful weather possible! It was just hail and wind that threatened to sweep me off of my feet. The city was still very beautiful though and I couldn't wait to explore it and get to know it. I lived in Bantry Bay for the first week, near the sea and that was lovely! I got to run along the coast and watch waves when I came from work. Some really nice folk even took me to Stellenbosch to do some wine farming over the weekend and that was just beautiful. I'm earnestly considering moving to Stellenbosch for a while after getting to know Cape Town intimately.

Work has been nice and confusing at times but I'm getting the hang of it and will be a rockstar at it. The people are uber friendly and Afrikaans so my Afrikaans brain is kicking in full force and I will be a chocolate boertjie very soon.

I've moved again, to a backpackers in Observatory this time and it's an odd experience living with so many people from so many different countries. I got to talk to some cool people though and that's great.

That's me still getting the lay of the land and laying down a framework for the future :).

Audio Slave: Slaughterhouse's Our House, My Battle Song

"Rap is the only thing that I was ever really bad to the bone at
Guess I'm similar to gangrene when I'm angry then I'm
Hulk Smash, so much passion but no compassion
If eyes are the windows to the soul
Then it's broken glass and there's no trespassing"