Billy's blog

You might have noticed that blogging is slowly picking up again after a bit of a gap, partly inspired by dug helping me to get the site reorganised.

In the old days, I used to talk about films I'd seen. There have been an awful lot of awfully good movies recently. Earlier in the year, I saw The Diving Bell and the Butterfly free of charge, thanks to those nice Time Out people. I remember when the book came out and everyone was talking about it. I'm not sure what my image was but I never got round to reading it. What a mistake. The film is incredible and it inspired me to start reading French again, since it's a fairly short book and of course easier when you've just seen the film. I then read it in English so I've had three goes at it now.

In the past couple of weeks, I've been to see three films which were all great in different ways.

Wall-E gave me that special feeling of being in a noisy cinema full of giggling kids which falls completely silent when the film begins, and of course we're talking about an opening twenty minutes with practically no dialogue. The film then does lots of different things to you, lots of allusions for those in the know (I only partly follow them), and a winning mix of despair and hope, culminating in an unmissable, beautiful and positive end-title sequence.

Last week, I had a few hours to kill waiting for a train in Sheffield and crossed the road to the showcase cinema. It was toss-up between the Julian (Diving-Bell) Schnabel film of Lou Reed's Berlin and Mamma Mia You know which one I went for, right? I cried non-stop through the whole thing. As it finished, the woman behind me said 'That was a real feel good, wasn't it?' which I found myself both agreeing and disagreeing with.

But I think the winner of the absolute-must-see-movie-award has to be Man on Wire which we saw last night. Absolutely incredible, and working on your mind in so many different ways afterwards. You have no choice but to see it in the cinema before it disappears. How long till it appears on a double bill with Man on Fire I wonder? Has anybody made Man on Tire yet?

B-)

(Remember to see the film before you read or listen to any reviews but ...)

Following his recent mockery of Simon Mayo for pronouncing the first 'a' in Indiana Jones in the same way as posh people pronounce the 'a' in 'bath' (my hypothesis is that this might be to do with foreign word pronunciation, btw), I was really pleased to hear Mark Kermode starting his review of Wall-E by pointing out not only that it is not pronounced the same as 'wally' but that in fact anyone who's seen the film will find it hard not to say it in the same way as Wall-E himself does, before carrying on to talk pronunciation for large parts of the programme.

B-)

Very busy weekend with all the hospital action and lots to do before I head off to a conference next week, but I managed to stop off at the cinema and catch Wall-E on the way home. It was great and did make up for the 40 (yes 40) minutes of waiting around through out of focus adverts with the lights on (the brightest spots of which were the trailer for Madagascar 2 and the groovy Pizza Hut advert). Wish I hadn't read a review (don't click unless you've seen it!) before I saw it though. There was also an excellent short called Presto before the main film.

We had a quick bite with Holly and Anna on the way home and now we've just watched Toy Story which is still as good as it was the first time.

It was fun to go from the latest Pixar to the start of it all. I remember finding the cgi animation slightly weird when it was new but now we're so used to it that even the early one looks normal.

On a linguistic note, I'm a bit shocked at how many people are pronouncing 'Wall-E' as 'Wally'. Sigourney Weaver assured me on the radio it should be Wall followed by E rather than 'wally the word you use in England'. But the terrible 'please don't watch pirate movies' ad introduced him as 'Wally' and even Philip French told his readers that it's 'pronounced Wally' today. To be fair, it's not 100% clear given the way Wall-E pronounces other words in the film.

B-)

It's been a hospital-filled weekend. Mike had a double (that's two!) hernia operation on Friday so I visited him on Friday evening and again today, with Kiloh's A&E visit in the middle of the sandwich yesterday. Mike is sore but getting better. Meanwhile Ohna had to go the local hospital with Kiloh today to sort out the fracture clinic appointment. No appointments available before Kiloh goes on holiday on Thursday so Ohna will be sitting with her hoping in the waiting room all day on Wednesday. There's a possibility that she might need an operation since it's a delicate and still growing part of her wrist. We hope not but there's nothing to do but wait and see. Meanwhile she's trying to keep her fingers from swelling by holding her arm up and wiggling her fingers.

B-)

We finally managed to persuade Kiloh to get on her bike for the first time in ages yesterday. We caught the train and then had a lovely cycle to a really lovely party at Sylvia's. We were just arriving at the station for the train back when she did a sudden stop, flew over the handlebars, and broke her wrist. B-(

Hope we can get her back in the saddle soon,

B-)

We had a really enjoyable workshop at Middlesex last week, on pragmatic stylistics. There was a nice friendly and positive atmosphere among a group of people with different ideas about pragmatics, about stylistics and about pragmatic stylistics. I guess what everybody shared was an interest in working out how texts communicate effects to readers. All of the talks were clear and engaging and gave everyone lots to think about.

We've just launched a new website on pragmatic stylistics where we'll be publishing news and discussions and other things that people think would be useful.

Let me know if you want to join in,

Billy