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Hogwarts Revisited

It was great news to hear that Ali Ismail Abbas has been flown to Kuwait and is receiving proper medical care. On a more cynical note, how good it was of Mr. Blair to condescend to ‘comment’ on the situation. But I’m not going to have another war rant…

Monday, I went to buy the video of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. A bit of extra money came our way, and since this counts as extravagance in our current impoverished state, what the hell! We watched it Monday night.

I thought the first HP movie was just okay. This one was a huge improvement, although as each of the books is longer than the last, there was much more condensing. Arguably, the plots also get better, so perhaps a stronger plot suffers less from omission. It was fast-moving and slick. The younger cast were much more polished. Robbie Coltrane was his usual awesome self. The FX were much better, in particular Dobby the house elf… I thought they might mess him up, but he was a wonderful CGI creation, furnished with a wide range of extremely realistic and endearing mannerisms.

Harry Potter 2002
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Movies & Stuff

Movies. We have watched movies. Which was nice.

Thursday night, we finally got round to seeing From Hell. The original Alan Moore/Eddie Campbell graphic novel was one of the few recent comics I’d fancied reading, but I never got round to that either. I don’t know how faithful the movie is. But there are worse ways to kill a couple of hours.

Johnny Depp’s cod Michael Caine accent was perhaps questionable, but who cares? The Deppster is Godlike. *sigh* Acting-wise, I guess the invincible Robbie Coltrane stole the show. I love Robbie.
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I Can’t Support the War

So the war atrocities are well underway. I would prefer to not even think about it, let alone rant about it, but there it is on the box incessantly.

Blair wants us to give our support to this sordid affair. His ‘address’ last night was even less convincing than usual, because he didn’t even seem able to muster his usual wild-eyed fervour. F**k you, Mr. Blair. Whether Saddam Hussein is stockpiling chemical weapons or not, we are the aggressor in this instance—we’re causing innocent deaths, the number of which our official propaganda will never disseminate. I can’t/won’t ‘support’ a cause that produces the hideous carnage we’re seeing all over our screens. I will sympathise with the troops who have do this filthy work; I hope most of them come out of it in one piece.
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