Cyberclogs

Well that's my Art of Acting 1 over for now, it was a real good last class to finish on, so I'm kind of sad to see the back of it for now, but I am going to carry on and do Art of Acting 2, and the good thing is most of the people will be returning to it as well so be nice to see some familiar faces again. So that won't be until May, in the meantime guess I will keep myself occupied with Cisco studies among other things, although Cisco certainly isn't as much fun, I much rather recite some funny lines than read about Spanning Tree Protocol just now any day.

The good news is of course that Doctor Who is about to start again on Beeb 1, I hope this series is a bit tauter than the last one as series 2 was entertaining but it was very patchy in places, there were definitely some episodes they could have lost (still beats Torchwood by a mile imho though). But it hopefully looks quite promising the new companion Martha Jones should also provide us with a nice bit of female eye candy, and prove that she can impress us more than she did with her all too brief cameo in Army of Ghosts. Well one way or another we'll find out this Saturday at 7pm.

Well I'm off for a few days this week from work (thank fek!!) and I was up the town in Fopp today and I purchased a few CDs, one of which was The Doors album, Waiting for the Sun, and I put it on my computer tonight only to find it wasn't the Doors at all, but in fact something else entirely!

Turns out the CD contains the album, Music & Me by rapper Nate Dogg, which I've never heard of in me puff before either. This is altogether pretty weird as the CD pressing even says The Doors Waiting for the Sun on it with a full track listing for the album, and instead I hear Keep it GANGSTA, Ditty Dum Ditty Doo, and other erm tracks. What kind of f***ed up shit is this Fopp?!! You can't even sell a CD with the right album on it?!! Ah well. Guess I'm stuck with it now, at least until I take it back.

Well not too much to report of late although I have been buying a few HD DVD movie titles of late, namely the likes of Batman Begins, which is really impressive on HD DVD (looks great!) and others such as Enter the Dragon (also impressive, whooaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Bruce Lee impression over), Mission Impossible 3 (which possibly has one of the best transfers I've seen on HD DVD so far).

So far I've been pretty impressed with High-Def especially as it finally shows off what my LG Lcd TV looks like at its best as opposed to the slightly warm and fuzzy images I get through the scart socket on my TV. There are plenty more to come such as Total Recall, Deer Hunter, The Island, Mulholland Drive, Red Dragon, The Thing, and the Prestige which I'll mention a bit more about next. Must admit though Blu-Ray does have something of an advantage on "new" releases as it seems have its grip on the movie studios such as Touchstone, Fox, Columbia, Sony, etc, it would be a shame to see HD DVD fall short on the format war so soon and even better to see HD DVD succeed so well where DVD did before it.

So I saw The Prestige on DVD finally there on Friday night and I quite enjoyed it although it is directed with a fairly typical amount of melancholic seriousness as we've come to expect from Christopher Nolan (he's sort of the creative filmic equivalent of Thom Yorke in terms of direction, great films but plenty of down moments). But the cast were pretty strong in the film, Christian Bale affected a pretty convincing cockney accent as a master magician (better than Dick Van Dyke at any rate!) with Hugh Jackman competing against him as a rival magician in town, and even better was Scarlett Johansson who's accent was far greater, also Michael Caine was still the definitive cockney. What sets the Prestige up as a good and interesting film for me was the momentum it maintains in keeping you guessing what really happens at the end of the film (much in the same style of the brilliant Memento, ermm except that was in reverse). And when its ending is revealed it really is surprising and quite brilliant, even better than anything M Night Shyamalan could conjure up. In fact Christopher Priest who wrote the novel of the Prestige saw the film and said "Holy shit! I wish I'd thought of that!" at certain moments throughout the film. Just shows you film makers can still surprise you.

Well despite the disruption with the trains I decided to go up to Strathclyde Uni and do my acting class, and I managed to get a train up ok, and I'm glad I went up as it was probably the most enjoyable class so far. The acting exercises were a good laugh and we're all feeling a bit more comfortable with ourselves in the group now. One of the fun exercises was we had to pretend to be someone else and take on their behaviour and walk around in a circle in the room in the same type of way they would. So I pretended to be a middle-aged disruntled catering lecturer in my college, who stomps around grumpily. We also did some other fun exercises which involved two people getting up and conveying a mood by say walking round looking depressed, then a third person would get up and introduce a contrasting mood to the other (i.e. someone jumping around for joy).

Anyway must say I'm really glad I took up the acting classes as its something I've been aching to do for ages and have just kept putting off, so the way I see it is its the best 75 quid I've spent for a while (on a course at least). I might carry on and do The Art of Acting 2, see if we stage plays a bit more, rather than working on movement and exercises. But its all good fun (not to mention a good way to meet some nice looking women, even if they aren't single (who knows?) ;).

In the end I managed to get a taxi home for a fairly modest fee, rather than wait around and get on a bus with some neddy football supporters (no offence), or at least wait around in the pissing rain for an hour on a bus.