"Sunshine"

• Some days before I saw the movie, I had no plan to see the movie Sunshine unless I could find out something about the movie that interested me, of course this was a scifi movie of a fairly large budget and there was not much to read about or see in the magazines of any interest. Actually I had heard a rumour that there's something a bit supernatural in it, but on the other hand, I had never failed to ignore a Danny Boyle movie yet. Actually I had seen the director wandering around a bookshop a year or two back and this did still did not inspire me to see his movies. I don't know what would have happened if he did make Alien Resurrection, but he didn't, so at that point there were no point for me to dwell on What Ifs.

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• well, I was coaxed into watching Sunshine. One reason is that I had no specific desire to single out ignore Danny Boyle's movies specifically although I have a tendency to do so as I notice that none of them in the past had drawn my interest, and well Sunshine had drawn my interest and I would have been a hypocrite if I had failed to see it because it looked visually interesting, and I have seen some scifi movies for even a less of a reason in recent times.

• As it goes, it was was a very visually beautiful film, and I left the cinema very sad that there wasn't much of a story, and no interest for me to explain anything that did seem unexplainable, and maybe there is indeed a problem today with trying to write a new sci-fi movie story of this kind. I switched off my interest as soon as they stepped aboard the other vessel in the movie and never turned it back on again.

• Also I was very critical about the ship and expected it to be better designed if they were going to be going into the sun because one slightly wrong move in the direction it was pointed was likely to cause a lot of problems for the ship. Well, I suppose I don't have to bother watch it again, and I don't have any desire to collect any of the interviews dealing with the movie. This might have been a movie perfect for other people

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• I did see this movie on Tuesday 10th April. Actually I had the intention of avoiding it as I do for some reason avoid anything that Danny Boyle has directed since the subject matter usually doesn't interest me, but the subject matter of this movie seeming to be a big looking scifi movie grabbed my attention and I went to see it with my beloved Jemima, we had decided that it was going to be a complete and utter failure of a movie and our intention was to somehow appreciate the complete failure that we would believe it to be. I admit that it was a beautiful film, but once they stepped on board the other space craft, I lost complete and utter interest in the events that followed and afterwards we were both almost in tears over what seemed like a fact that there was nothing left to make an interesting new scifi movie about these days, plotwise.

• These film makers keep trying and use scripts that seem only half formed and we get things such as failures such as Event Horizon setting the modern standards. Looking for something new, it also didn't help me that I watched "Voyage To The Bottom of the Sea" a week or so ago which dates back from the mid nineteen sixties and featured a submarine crew with the intention of sending a nuclear missile into the Van Allen radiation belt witch caught fire. The plot also involved a man with severe burns who was brought into safety from an iceberg because he had spent so long under the burning sky had gone a step further with his beliefs and turned into a religious zealot who felt that it was wrong for the Seaview crew to disrupt the work of God who obviously wanted to end the world , obviously he wanted to stop the missile from being fired off to save the Earth. Also a mistake costing the lives of two crew members because of an attempt to fix outside the results of some trouble the submarine ran into because of the effects caused by someone's attempt to sabotage the mission led to the saboteur a crewmember having a nervous breakdown and taking his own life. Just too many similarities fused with parts of other movies and maybe I couldn't have done any better. Well, maybe there is a re-occurring religious zealot saboteur who has suffered from horrendous burns to take note of as a figure that will turn up time after time in Western culture as a kind of a bogeyman due to the collective consciousness, or indeed Western society is lucky it, wont have to put up with him in another film again. Another thing about the movie, it didn't help me that the director overdid it for me with his Alien tributes.

• Well, I like a good scifi movie with a director who has a lot to talk about with his speculations in relation to the substance of the movie and couldn't find anything in the interviews of interest other than talk about the use of colour in the movie so maybe what was the real movie for me were the shots of outsides of the space crafts and the rest was just superfluous substance.

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• for some reason had the urge to watch a 1960s movie called Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea the week before, it was a fine movie for it's time, but when I watched "Sunshine" the following week, I was distressed about how three major plot elements seemed very much lifted from Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea and redressed. Myself and the maiden (the most otherworldly Jemima Tryon (also known as Solar Pixy) with whom I watched the movie were very upset by this, it just spelt out that people have great trouble writing really new material. As soon as they got aboard the place where the uninvited guest came from, I just turned off and wondered what I was doing in the cinema watching this film. I could have used my time better painting the toenails of the maiden who watched the movie with me than watching this film at that point.

• But all the exterior shots were very beautiful. I went ahead seeing the movie fully informed that I wouldn't find it that interesting, and as it goes, whenever I see a Danny Boyle photo or see him wandering around a bookshop in London, or even read an interview with him, I'm hit by waves of disinterest (which might be just what Danny Boyle wants from the public, so I could well be playing into his little game there, he had me fooled all along). I think that the title of his movie A Life Less Ordinary did make more sense when I would call it A Lifeless Ordinary. But Sunshine was the first movie of his that I saw, and maybe it might well be the last.

• But I acknowledge that it might well be hard to make a movie these days, and that Danny Boyle did have an interesting idea for the unwanted visitor that he couldn't get the money to shoot, in terms of glowing interior organs. I suppose also Alien's plot elements were borrowed from past movies and the act of borrowing and redressing elements from Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea is the natural thing to do for Sunshine's script writer, it might even be a brave move. When Sunshine comes out on DVD, there is a possibility that I might buy it for reasons similar to why i bought Event Horizon.

• It's probably a terrible time for new sci-fi ideas.

Twice I Did Not Get To The Hogarth Exhibition

• Probably the most exciting thing that has happened in a while is not getting to the William Hogarth exhibition at the Tate Britain. William Hogarth was a British painter and political satirist well known in the eighteenth century. I admit that I didn't want to go, I didn't find the idea of his work that interesting but twice it happened that I never got there, but each time I was going to go was because of a gathering of friends. The first time it happened, my friends Peter the Painter, Neil Arnewt , Pauline Smalline and Eamonn were all going to go, then Peter reasoned with the fact that he would be in Bournemouth that week at a conference, but could drive down from Bournemouth on that day, which might even mean that he could well miss the whole exhibition if there was a traffic pileup. There weas much discussion about this as Peter tried to work out what he wanted to do. However he decided to not go at all and to spend that day in a greater state of relaxation visiting a town between London and Bournemouth. With that I decided that I didn't want to go because the exhibition content itself did not interest me in the slightest, I felt that I was letting everyone else down but I had not committed myself to going anyway because the idea of seeing the Hogarth exhibition throttled me with waves of boredom from day one and without Peter's presence, there would be less insanity for the day. Peter did actually offer me his ticket, I further said no, and by the time I said no, he lost his ticket and I didn't feel so guilty.

• The next port of call for missing the Hogarth exhibition came along last Saturday when my friend "Humus" Humay (named after the legendary great warrior Humayoun/Humayun renowned for his great tomb) told me that he wanted me to come along with our friend R*. R* was to get me into the exhibition for free since she had a members pass for the exhibition that allowed her to bring another person in with her. The previous day she phoned me up to make sure I was coming along. I arrived at Humay's house and hour early by mistake because I had misread the clock, so I bought him his newspaper at the local shop and had green tea once I got back, allowing him to get up and get going, since he was still in his pyjamas and dressing gown when i arrived at his door. I wondered when we were going to meet R* (I'm not giving the lady's full name but her first name comes from a Goddess featured in the Mabinogion of Welsh mythology) because he had earlier thought she would be staying at his house over night because of the train problems in order to get to the exhibition, but as it went, we would see her at the gallery building itself. I wondered how realistic this would be, since she was prone to last minute decisions that defied my sense of convention.

• We waited endlessly for R* to arrive, we sat outside at the front entrance, she was late, we phoned her on her mobile and she never answered, we assumed she was underground. Humay found himself being approached by a beggar who claimed to have been on the street for six weeks, he wanted money from us, I had none to give and Humay showed some concern about what the beggar wanted money for, he gave an answer that he wanted it for the gas, water and electricity bill, Humay only had a few coppers in his pocket anyway and with that small amount of change, the tramp went off. We waited on and on for R*, we thought there would be perhaps some delay for her with the trains being replaced by buses up beyond Harrow-On-The-Hill station. Humay became worried with concern about what happened to R*, she might have been in an accident. We had a coffee in the café, I drew a portrait of Humay as he read the newspaper , I invented more reasons for Rh* being delayed, maybe she was caught in the underground talking to a hari krishna devotee who was gay or something like that (I think she knew one about a dozen years back). The woman sitting beside us looked at me as I talked, and she burst out into fits of giggling, and then I stumbled on the idea that R* might still be home, and what if one of us phoned her there, and Humay did this, and found that she was still home unaware that she was supposed to come at all

• What happened was that the two of them were going to another exhibition locally in the evening, and she told him that she would not be going to the Hogarth because of the other exhibition, and when she told him the previous evening, they were in a pub gathering, and he was on his fourth beer quite unconscious of much of what was being saidWell, by the time we knew where we stood in relation to R* , we went ahead to buy tickets, and we found out soon that we couldn't buy tickets to go in until about three hours later, so we decided to leave and go to another exhibition elsewhere which we both wanted to go to i could go to for free.

• I did feel some sorrow for Humay because he really wanted to go, and he appreciated the fact that this was a favourite artist of the Private Eye editor Ian Hislop (who incidently I had walked past in a street about a couple of weeks back for the first time and this was also the first time his name was mentioned to me for many years since quite honestly no one had a reason to mention his name to me) and it also seemed that he would not get an opportunity to see this on another day, especially as it was close to the end of the exhibition.

• Indeed the fact that I didn't get there for me was much more important than wanting to go at all.

Synchronistic Manifestion of a Butterfly

Last week I was listening to a recording of a seminar on manifesting financial abundance and there was the basic exercise of closing your eyes, envisioning a butterfly and expecting it to see them everywhere, I was so certain that it would not work for some unknown reason and for the last week, I didn't see a single butterfly, it's not butterfly season here anyway. Anyway about a week ago, I sent a letter asking for some absent healing for my cats from the daughter of a famous healer Betty Shine (now deceased) who has set up an absent healing network during her life time, and she sent me a book of poems by her famous mother and it had images of butterflies on the cover, and that arrived this morning.