My tweets

• Mon, 13:12: @dovercastleinn except it was closed when i arrived. On the way back now
• Mon, 13:38: Still chilly on the coast
• Mon, 15:25: Just coming into Faversham and then a bit of a wait til Teynham bus .Wonder if Spot got his Paul Weller cd
• Mon, 17:55: On the way to Canterbury
• Mon, 22:17: In Faversham awaiting last train to Teynham
• Mon, 22:20: @dovercastleinn couldn't resist a sneaky vino then ?
• Mon, 22:32: Train delayed and arriving here at three mins past midnight
• Mon, 23:42: Ok @DoverCastleInn arrived safely back. Tim was in bed already so might watch a film on the hard drive.
• Mon, 23:49: @DoverCastleInn thanks i will, the one i saw at the Gulbenkian "Haywire" was good too
• Mon, 23:52: Why minimum pricing on alcohol will not work http://t.co/hXLlUBLC

The Haywire Code Correspondence

Last night I was at the Gulbenkian cinema at the University of Kent, Canterbury to see the thriller “Haywire”, a sub Bourne Identity rogue agent movie. The film was good in parts but with moments of over-long moments of moodiness.

It is summed up best by a review in the Guardian -


A star is born. Well, almost. Gina Carano is the 29-year-old mixed martial arts fighter Steven Soderbergh cast in this star-studded thriller after seeing her on TV. She plays an ice-cool government agent called Mallory who, in accordance with ancient tradition, "goes rogue". When she's beating someone up, Carano is crackingly good – reminiscent of action queen Cynthia Rothrock in her prime – with some breathtaking fight sequences and free-running stunt manoeuvres.

She stomps the living bejeepers out of Channing Tatum, Michael Fassbender and Ewan McGregor, and the fights are awe-inspiringly real looking. But there are only about three or four such moments, and the rest of the film is taken up with pretty boring moody location work in various cities. What Carano needs to do is get Jackie Chan to produce her next movie so she can get violent every five minutes or so.

I also went over to Margate earlier to do a vist at a tourist information centre, It is right next to the Turner , but for some reason that was closed. So when I got back very late last night I watched a ripped DVD of “Source Code” which I found a much more thrilling and boggling film drenched in the tropes of the sci-fi genre. Infact, worthy of a Philip K. Dick novel.

Source Code is a terrifically exciting and hugely enjoyable sci-fi thriller, written by Ben Ripley. For pure entertainment, there's nothing around to touch it.

Source Code is about conspiracies, altered minds and altered states, far-fetched in the most elegant and Hitchcockian way, and the sheer outrageousness of it all is muscular and streamlined. The film is about modified reality and inner space, and there are points of comparison with Christopher Nolan's Inception. But the world of Source Code seems to me more interesting, and more able to incubate real drama, real suspense and even some real humour.

At its centre is Colter Stevens, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a US army helicopter pilot who has crashed in Afghanistan. When he comes to, he finds himself in civilian clothes aboard a crowded commuter train arriving slightly late into Chicago on a glorious summer morning. He appears to be in someone else's body: that of a suburban teacher. Opposite him sits Christina (Michelle Monaghan) who behaves as if a brief nap has merely interrupted their highly flirtatious conversation, but she is then increasingly alarmed as Colter, wild-eyed and panicky, demands to know what is happening and what is going on.

After eight minutes, a catastrophic event then hurls Colter back into a situation that is in some ways even more perplexing. He is in uniform, injured and immobilised in what appears to be part of a wrecked military aircraft. Is this real? Or is it the train that's real? Through a video monitor, he must communicate with a woman who is evidently now his commanding officer. Goodwin, played by Vera Farmiga, treats him with the same unreadable solicitousness as Kevin Spacey's robot-voice did with Sam Rockwell in Moon.

Without consenting, Colter has evidently been dragooned into a new mission using futurist technology known as "source code"; he has been brought back from Afghanistan – or has he? – and ordered to relive the past eight minutes on a Chicago commuter train over and over again until he discovers vital information. Ripley and Jones show how each metaphysical go-around discloses more clues; each makes Colter fall for Christina a little more, and each makes the thought of losing her seem more unbearable.

The movie is clearly indebted to the Hitchcock of North By Northwest and Strangers on a Train. But it's also a particularly tense and fraught kind of Groundhog Day, and just as in that film, repetition endows banal, forgettable events with an eerie familiarity and inevitability.

Yet in the Bill Murray movie, our hapless hero had all the time in the world, an infinity of time, as many Groundhog Days as he needed, to learn the piano until he was at the level at which he could casually appear to be a brilliant pianist to impress a woman. Making an impression on a woman is not wholly absent from Colter's mind either, but he can't just repeat his eight minutes ad infinitum, because the security situation is pressing and time is running out. Each time he starts again, his own physical condition in the mysterious cockpit deteriorates, and Goodwin and her shadowy boss Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) are keeping secrets from him.

Source Code is glitzy and hi-tech in a 21st-century way, but also has something from an earlier age: it is a story from the Twilight Zone, with hints of Philip K Dick, and traces of the television world of The Prisoner and The Fugitive. With its weird deployment of playing cards in one scene, Jones has channelled The Manchurian Candidate – perhaps specifically through Jonathan Demme's Iraq-themed remake – and the overall effect is smart and to the point.

In its own way, Source Code also aspires slightly to the status of comedy, and Colter's increasingly wan and desperate conversations with Goodwin from his mysterious pod reminded me a little of David Niven's radio conversations with Kim Hunter's June in A Matter of Life and Death – as he plummets to his certain death, Niven's character exploits his prerogative as a dying man to flirt with this radio operator.

This isn't exactly what is happening here, and Colter's affections are engaged with Christina, not Goodwin – but equipoised with the action and thrills, there is a serio-comic sense of fantasy and romance that have been endangered by this terrifying situation in one sense, but in another sense made possible by it. Source Code is absurd, but carries off its absurdity lightly and stylishly. It is a luxuriously enjoyable film. Jones has put himself into the front-rank of Hollywood directors, the kind who can deliver a big studio picture with brains. With twists and turns, and at breathtaking speed, this film runs on rails.

Like a quantum event that can go in many directions this film is in toal a breathtaking fractal hit on the senses.

A Bush Moment

Cousin got his Paul Weller CD yesterday, and played it today. Sounds very good, particularly the reggae dub track. I pricked up my ears listening to that one.

I have been out in the garden this afternoon , soaking up the fine warm sunny weather, reading my book “A Life of Montaigne” by Sarah Bakewell, another on my list of fifty to read in the challenge. Erudite but with clean, direct prose. Brimming with ideas, history, and little jokes. Charmingly organized into non-chronological sections that Montaigne would have approved of.

The football is on as I write but I have been listening to some music, particularly of one fine female voice, Kate Bush.

I only got round to listening to “50 Words For Snow” by Kate Bush in a sustained concentration on it today , which was released November last year. It takes a few listens for its subtle beauty to envelop you , but once wrapped in its warmth, it will not let you go.

Kate Bush is one of those rare gems in music. Every album she releases is a work of art, a conceptual hotpot of ideas, each part of it carefully crafted, sung, written and produced by the same person. She is a true artist, always managing to remain current while being completely different and entirely out of context to the rest of her peers. The music she creates invites us to her own little world, the Kate Bush bubble, a refreshing break from the over-saturated, over-produced, over-rehashed, tired pastiche of what we call contemporary music. In her world, music is still in a state of original creation and personal revelation and this almost presents itself as a romantic, nostalgic way of seeing music.

With a mature artist such as Bush though, there is always the danger that new work will appear diluted and repetitive, becoming a faded icon of what used to be, like many big artists of the past have become. Fear not,she once again does not disappoint. The first track starts simply with her playing the piano, and when her voice comes in you are instantly captivated. You are back again in that bubble, protected and soothed by her unique voice that gently invites you in her specially crafted environment of soundscapes. The whole album is slow and deliberate, there is absolutely no hurry to get to the point or to immediately bombard you with her beautifully created subtle production. It is simple, yet rich. It is Kate Bush effortlessly showing that she is still a rich source of creation. It keeps you wanting for more. And that is perhaps my only 'problem' with this album. I wish it would last longer. Infact, this album has a jazzy neo-classical tone to it.

Kate Bush's back catalogue still remains or is even more relevant and rich as ever before. I hope this will not be the last we hear from her, or that she does not go on a 10 year hiatus again, because we truly, desperately need real artists like her. A new album from Kate Bush still remains a privilege, a faith-restoring gift from a true genius.