Posts Tagged ‘Book’

The Design Museum London

I’m a bit late posting a picture today because I’ve been trying to decide which one to use.  I took myself off to London last week for a few days and during the day went a little bit crazy and took quite a few pictures.  I wanted to use one of the Design Museum as it was one of the places in London I really wanted to visit.  I’ve wanted to go there since it opened in 1989 and so the Designs of the Year award exhibition was a great excuse to go there.

Originally it was going to be my first stop on a walk along the Thames however I reversed my walk and started at Tate Modern so I could pick up a ticket at The Globe on the way.  By the time I got to Tower Bridge my feet were telling me to go no further.  I almost gave in and did the Tower Bridge museum instead.   I persevered and I’m glad I did because the entrance fee was worth every penny.  Unfortunately afterwards I wasn’t really into the idea of taking a lot of photographs of the building so I had to go for the best of the four I took.  I’ve not really done the building any favours.

The exhibition included some really interesting work.  The folding plug should be a massive success for Min-Kyu Choi.  I had six chargers and six plugs with me for just a short break.  The folding plug would have saved me so much space.  The Kyoto Box, Soma and GINA Light Visionary Model all stand out in my mind a week on.  The L-E-D-LED-L-ED was immense fun to interact play with.  The Panda Eyes were scary but really fun.  All of the work made me think and after walking about 7km (excluding distances inside buildings) in the day that was a pretty amazing achievement.

One of my favourite bits of design wasn’t in the exhibition: The exhibition catalogue.  It’s a compact post card sized book about a centimetre thick with an entry and its description on facing pages.  The simple white cover with the categories depressed into it with the title block forming a square at the bottom left corner.  Best of all it was only £5.  I can flip through it when I want and get inspiration from it.  As a contrast the heavyweight tomes that the Tate Modern had for the excellent Exposed exhibition:  Beautiful, hard backed and £30.  Travelling light by train made it a book too far.   I’ve just noticed I can get it cheaper from Amazon than the Tate but still what I’d really have liked was something more like the one from the Design Museum.

Fanstastic Mr Fox is probably my favourite Roald Dahl children’s story.  So today I decided I’d go and see it at the Odeon in Liverpool 1 and crossed my fingers they’d not treated the source material as a slum clearance job it like Disney did with Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Given the source materials brevity it’s unsurprising they had to pad it to make it up to feature length.  The core story still sits at the heart of the film but a additions at the start and the end along with some padding in the middle brought it up to its 87 minutes.  While none of the additions were bad the incomprehensible sport seemed to me to be a joke forced a little to hard.  On reflection and a quick reread of the original story the ending is probably, saddly a little two Hollywood.  Maybe something less action orientated and closer to the heist movie theme that works so well earlier on.  They were almost there but not quite.  One last big job to break into a highly secure supermarket knowing it was a trap might have worked.

George Clooney and Meryl Streep had a lot of work to do and both delivered good performances.  Willem Dafoe’s take on the rat made his my favourite character of the film.  It was completely different from his Raven Shaddock performance in Streets of Fire (1984) but just as distinctive.  Part of me wonders what his take on Mr Fox would have been.  If you need someone to nail that kind of bad guy he’s still got it.  Michael Gambon was another exceptionally fine choice for Bean and while I had to check on IMDB Brian Cox was another fine piece of casting.

The animation style reminded me of Jill Bennetts illustrations in the book and was very well done.  Unfortunately it wasn’t quite up to the standards of say an Aardman Animation but was by no means sloppy.  Somehow Aardman’s work looks more cinematic and less like some of the eastern European animations of the 1970′s.  However maybe that was the look they were trying for in which case they nailed it.  Anyone with the resources or time to do stop animation deserves a great deal of respect.

Ignoring my gripes about the way the original material was expanded I’d say it was a very enjoyable 87 minutes.

I saw it on the first showing of the day in a screen which I thought I had to myself till someone else left from the very back at the end.  Odeon really need to get on top of their cleaning because if the cinema is dirty for the first show of the day what hope is there for the later shows?

I picked up a lot of Alistair MacLean novels as reprints at a local book shop a few years ago and enjoyed a lot of them but there were a few gaps. So when I spotted Floodgate going for 75p in a charity shop I thought I’d fill the gap and give it a go.

The opening is strong enough: terrorists flood Amsterdam airport and later breach other dykes to demonstrate their capabilty. The hero Detective Lieutenant Peter van Effen takes on the job of stopping them – hes well connected, an excellent detective, a master of disguise, a crack psychologist and an explosives expert.

That is the first problem with the book – he’s just too good at everything. Very quickly he’s the cat playing with the mice who are the criminals who don’t realise he’s toying with them till he can get them all in the bag at once. Pretty soon after that all the real jeapordy goes out of the story and soon after that the villains start to get painted as misguided, unfortunates and the victims of others. I kept reading thinking their might be a twist or an interesting climax but when the final confrontation comes with just a few pages to spare its over very quickly and with a whimper rather than a bang.

So Alistair MacLean’s Floodgate will be going to find a new home at a charity shop soon.