Specimen Days

One Magic Christmas is a 1985 American/Canadian Christmas fantasy film directed by Phillip Borsos. It was released by Walt Disney Pictures and stars Mary Steenburgen and Harry Dean Stanton. It was shot in Meaford, Ontario with some scenes in Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada. Harry Dean Stanton was one of my favourite actors who sadly died in September combine that with Mary Steenburgen and I had to watch this rather old Christmas film. Ginnie is not in the Christmas spirit at all and you can’t blame her, her husband has been out of work for six months, they are being evicted from their home after Christmas and she works as a checkout assistant in a supermarket where she has a miserable boss. Money is tight and she sees other people struggling without the wherewithal to make ends meet. Lurking in the background is an angel tasked with bringing her the spirit of Christmas. Enter, Harry Dean Stanton looking more like a serial killer than an angel. The children in the story are like so...

 The Magic of Cinema For as long as I can remember films have enthralled me. The first film I ever saw was Tom Thumb in 1958. A decade before that one of my all time favourite films was made and twenty five odd years before I saw Tom Thumb some of the most amazing films ever made at played to audiences. In 1946 a book was published in the USA that was a runaway best seller and a two years later the film version was on our screens. It was to be the third and last pairing of Cary Grant and Myrna Loy in the charmingly gentle, “Mr Blandings Builds His Dream House.” It’s seldom shown these days and hard to track down at a reasonable price on DVD. Remastered and released in 2004 it has been a treasure in my collection that never fails to reward me. Stifled by a small apartment in New York they buy a ruin in Connecticut and are gently fleeced by the country folk. Not a great plot but the house is finally built. By this time Myrna Loy was ceasing to be a draw at the box office, ...

If they locate Hell in a kettle in Hull and discover two plus two makes £50 then you will get some idea of the asinine concept of the film “Upside Down.” A long time ago in the Golden Age of Cartoons they invented a rule called the plausible impossibility. This allows a cartoon character to run through wire and then fall apart like sliced bread. That’s a plausible impossibility. You can’t just do anything and get away with it, it has at the very least to make some sense. Many decades ago I was at a film club and we were watching a Jean Luc Godard film. After a reel change everything was upside down in long traffic jam. For some fifteen minutes a character walked from car to car with no dialogue, such strange cinematic effects are perfectly possible in Godard film it was only when the subtitles came on everyone realised the film had been inserted upside down. There is no such excuse for this film. I watched it because it said Sci Fi, romance, star crossed lovers and starred Kirsten...

Sometimes I can be very stupid and stubborn, I get an idea into my head and won’t budge. I guess I take after my Grandfather who long before I was born insisted he didn’t like tomatoes till it was discovered he had never tasted one. After his first bite he fell in love with them. And so I have to confess for thirteen years I have refused to countenance watching The Polar Express. I didn’t like it. Quite how I can justify that opinion having not seen it is best left to others to explain. I sat down and despite frustratingly numerous interruptions I saw it all over four hours, more than twice as long than the actual film. At its heart is a simple moral tale of a young boy learning about himself on Christmas Eve when he is on the cusp of not believing in Santa Claus.  Tom Hanks plays numerous roles in this strangely filmed story, a mix of animation and live action filmed as animation. If that sounds weird watching it will make it clear. The train journey to the North Pole and...

There is something great about being able to watch a British Christmas film as they appear to be few and far between. If you throw in a bit of porridge and Jim Broadbent then you have an enjoyable film called Get Santa. The plot is delightfully playful with Santa (Jim Broadbent) crashing a new sleigh in London and ending up behind bars. This innocent old man has to survive. However help is at hand! Rafe Spall recently released from the same prison manages to get the barber, the excellent Stephen Graham to offer help to Santa while he is inside. The results are hilarious. Meanwhile Rafe Spall and Kit Connor (his on screen son) set about trying to get everything sorted out. I’ll tell you no more about the plot except to say it works well and is delight. When you have children it’s hard sometimes to know whether they ought to watch such a film if they still believe in Santa. This is a safe film totally watchable from that point of view yet hugely enjoyable for adults as well. Unl...

Three things I didn’t know this time last week. Nantucket is the name of an Island. Whale Oil was what once lit our homes. Moby Dick was based on a true story. I’ve never been interested Herman Melville’s story, Moby Dick, nearly 900 pages is long slog of a read when the story doesn’t interest you. In 2000 Nathaniel Philbrick published his non fiction book “In the Heart of the Sea” which tells the true story that inspired the novel, Moby Dick. This film is about the true story of the sinking of the whaling ship, Essex. It was rammed by a sperm whale and sank and what follows is a horrific story of the struggle for survival that ensues one thousand miles from land. The story touches on the horrors of surviving, of cannibalism and courage. For once the emaciation you see is real as the actors survived on between 300 and 600 calories a day in order to get their bodies to look like skeletons. The acting is superb. The visuals of the sea, the storms, the whale are breathtaking. It ...

Sky Soundbox the first two  hours. Packaging is very superior on par with Apple products. Opening the box the first thing that strikes me is the weight of the Soundbox, wow. There is nothing here that gives a wow feeling it is just a big heavy black box. Everything you need apart from the box is cleverly packed away and is sheer joy as it unfolds as you pull it up to reveal all the connecting cables. Set up was simplicity itself. Take the pink HDMI cable from the back of the Q box and slot it into the back of the Soundbox, next insert the supplied HDMI cable into the other HDMI slot and back to the Q box. Next connect optical cable from box to optical on TV. Then switch on! The remote controls the volume but you can set up your Q remote to control the volume. Go to Home button>Settings>Setup>Remotes then choosing the Bluetooth remote it brings up the option for setting up the sound system, choose Sky and all is done. The remote has a source button and this...