archive for January 10
Thursday, January 14th, 2010
Matt, Andrew G and I sat down last night to watch the joyous Norwegian zombie movie that you can’t help but love: Død Snø, or Dead Snow.
The film focuses on a group of hapless young medical students having a break in a log cabin in the remote snowy Nordic mountains under which are buried … frozen Nazi zombies!
Obviously Nazi zombies is a great gimmick and they don’t disappoint. They look great with their grey faces and camp evil uniforms. There’s a wonderful scene where loads and loads of them climb out from under the snow and stand there looking fantastic against the white mountain slopes.
The stark white snow is also a good canvas for the copious quantities of blood spilt throughout this film’s many inventive slaughter scenes. Beautiful red on white, splattery and bright.
The film revels in its gore, it’s funny in the tradition of Evil Dead, but with more intestines. Indeed, there’s even a fabulous scene where one young student is hanging off a cliff clutching to an implausibly long length of intestine attached to a Nazi zombie with its eyes bulging and black blood spurting spasmodically as it is impaled around a tree.
Død Snø isn’t a brilliant film, but it is very entertaining, stylish, assured, with a rocking Norwegian heavy metal soundtrack. And it builds towards a suitably silly and gory finale that leaves you with a happy smile on your face.
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Monday, January 11th, 2010
The beginning of 2010 has seen a fair few pieces of bad news hitting home. Times are a little hard and cold right now, like the bitter weather, but the thaw will come.
The small tragedy closest to me and Matt was the death of our dear old cat, Mouse, last week. Over the last six years she’s been a troublesome, demanding but ultimately loving companion. She mellowed out a lot in the last three years, becoming ever more endearing. But I think we were both surprised by how hard it was when the time came to say goodbye.
She had been unwell before Christmas and then went downhill quite sharply, not really eating and getting thin and weak. She was still Mouse and still had her moments, but it was clear she wasn’t going to get better. We took her to the vet for the last time on 4th January.
We were pretty unconsolable afterwards and had to spend the afternoon putting all her things away and rearranging the flat to distract ourselves. It so happened that we had taken the Monday and Tuesday off work, which really helped. The death of a cat is not the sort of thing I would ever request compassionate leave for, yet it struck me what a serious event this can be, one that society may not always respect, though friends have been very kind to us.
Still, the thaw will come.
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Sunday, January 3rd, 2010
Matt and I went to one of our favourite annual rituals today, the Twelfth Night celebrations on the South Bank. We took our own mulled ale (wassail) and helped to drink some old English toasts to the river Thames, the Globe Theatre, and the George Inn on Borough High Street.
It was very cold, freezing in fact, so the Mummers play by the riverside was performed vigorously and in good time!
Wassail to the new year and the new decade!
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