It’s all piling up on the top of/tipping off the kitchen cupboard. Having a passionate interest in baking can be a bit impractical when you don’t have much storage space…

When Adventureland opened, some critics and bloggers commented on how Eisenberg was “the new Michael Cera“, who played the not dissimilar sensitive guy character in Mottola’s previous film, Superbad. Such comments, however, are kinda reductive and kinda insulting to both these actors. They’re not the first actors play the senstive guy and they won’t be the last. Jason Biggs got a bit stuck playing senstive, virginal guys in and after the American Pie movies, for starters, and maybe one could trace the archetype back to Ben Braddock.

That said, it certainly seems easy to get typecast if your look and acting style hit certain notes, and these two do have a similar screen presence, even right down to interchangeable occasional semi-jewfros. Cera played the senstive nice guy in Juno, and then again in Nick And Nora’s Infinite Playlist – an East Coast, high school graduate, lessons-in-life romantic comedy that’s actually closely comparable to Adventureland.

Both Cera and Eisenberg do seem to have been essaying the same skinny senstive chap a lot, and vying for similar roles, but the latter is in no way the “new” former. He’s American and five years older for starters (born 83, compared to 88), and made his feature film breakthrough in 2002’s Roger Dodger. The Canadian Cera, meanwhile, appeared on ‘Arrested Development’ on TV from 2003 to 2006 and made his movie breakthrough with Superbad. I’ve not seen Zombieland yet, but a friend says Eisenberg is still stuck in the sensitive guy role, even if he’s stepping outside the romantic comedy framework to instead fight zombies.

Talking of fighting, Cera gets his chance to break the typecasting with Scott Pilgrim Vs the World, his current project. This movie is based on a series of superb, off-beat comics by Canadian writer-artist Bryan Lee O’Malley. I’m seriously hoping that Edgar Wright, the co-creator of Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz not only manages to make the leap to North America, working on a movie without his regular collaborators (Simon Pegg, Nick Frost – who are instead working with the aforementioned Mottola on geeks-on-a-road-trip-meet-an-alien movie Paul), but also manages to translate Scott Pilgrim to the screen. Scott is an unusual character – he most certainly is not a stock sensitive guy. In fact, he’s kinda insensitive – he’s a law unto himself, oblivious to many social niceties, but irresistible to woman, somehow, and totally cool with a stream of girls. He’s not the sensitive virginal guy holding off for the right girl. Though in the book, he meets the right girl, and has to win her over by fighting  her “seven evil exes”. Wright has real challenge to understand this unusual character and bring him to the screen – especially if he’s got the baggage of all Cera’s sensitive guy previous roles.

With them both having played so many similar roles, but now both progressing by actually having to fight stuff, it does beg the question: who’d win in a fight between Eisenberg and Cera. Maybe someone needs to write a movie with two sensitive nice guys vying for the same girl who have to resolve their differences by manning up, and having a scrap. A proper scrap mind, no girly hair-pulling or pinching.

Elder is such a weed of a tree it’s good to get something useful out of it, in our case elderflower cordial in the spring, and elderberry cordial now. The plums I use in my friend Nadia’s excellent plum sauce recipe. It’s like a slightly spicy, fruity ketchup and well worth a try if you have a plum tree, and if you’re like me and don’t much like fruit in its natural state.

Nadia’s plum sauce (Word file).

As an aside:  is foraging a totally white middle class activity? Its best known exponents are the decidedly middle class (nay posh) celebrity chef likes of Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Valentine Warner and Thomasina Miers. While we were picking blackberries in “waste” land near our home in south London, the local black teens just stared at us like what we were doing was just plain weird, and the only other pickers we saw were a white middle class mum and her young daughter.

Before the industrial revolution moved populations to urban areas, and before the post-WWII industrialisation of farming, surely foraging for free food was an activity most people undertook? Particularly poorer people. And even today, it’s not like foraging needs to be some kind of alternative, posh rural activity, as we proved with our two kilos of blackberries (we could have got loads more) and two kilos of wild plums, all picked from plants and trees in publicly accessible urban areas. It’s a bizarre situation.

Saturday:

(Thanks to Ceri Thomas for the photo – and for holding the brolly while I flipped burgers…)

Still, at least we had plenty of cake:

Will the leak ever get fixed or will hundreds of litres of water keep pouring down the pavement?

I realise language is fluid, but come on: this is just ugly, dumb and wrong. It’s institutionalised illiteracy.

The Children, being a lesser release, was in Empire 3, a pokey little auditorium up some stairs. The size wasn’t the problem though. Everyone shuffled in and found seats in the dark, with only the bright green glow of the Exit sign and the light from the adverts playing on the screen to light the way. This darkness was perfect for watching images on the screen, but not ideal for finding seats before the main feature had even started. Then when the feature did start, the lights suddenly went up, so much so that I could see reflections glinting on the bald head of a chap two rows in front. It was rubbish. Especially for a horror film.

A lot of others shuffled and grumbled, but being Brits no one got up to ask about it. One chap might have done, but still nothing was done about the lights, so I went and asked. I met a chap on the stairs who stuck his head and said “No, they’re the safety lights.” Eh? Safety lights now have to be so bright that they reflect on the screen and dull the image? That defeats the object of the cinema experience, where the illumination comes from the image on the screen, and any other light source is a distraction, be it a bright green Exit sign too close to the screen or the light pen of a tiresome numbskull journalist who never mastered the skill of taking notes in the dark.

I toyed with the idea of leaving, but the film was gripping. Indeed, The Children, along with Eden Lake, has raised the torch for quality British horror high for 2008.

Afterwards, the same guy from my row was asking what was wrong with the lights at the ticket counter, so I joined in too. The woman was joined by the guy I’d spoken to before, who may well have been the manager. He said the lighting should have been on similarly during the adverts, because it was required safety lighting. He explained that Westminster Council’s fire officer had recently been round and said all the lighting needed to be increased. So great, Britain’s disproportionate, nannying health and safety culture is now buggering up the cinema experience too. Westerminster is particularly pedantic, one of the worst governing bodies when it comes to health and safety, so this may well mean all cinema experiences in central London are now ruined.

Now, any sensible, logical person knows that putting a sign up by the ditch saying “Beware, ditch” won’t stop people occasionally tripping into that ditch. Accidents happen, full stop. They’re freak, fluke, matters of chance. Legislation cannot prevent accidents happening. In a cinema auditorium, the bright green light of the emergency exit sign is highly visble, even if you have poorer eyesight. And indeed, if you do have poorer eyesight, presumably you’ll be wearing your contacts or glasses if you’ve gone to watch a film. Insisting on bright ambient light during the main feature – the bit you’re paying for – in a cinema is only going to ruin the experience. The manager guy did say they were hoping the redevelop that Empire 3, but if Westminster now insists on X candela that probably won’t help.

These days, many people have big TVs and can control the light levels in their own homes – where thankfully, a health and safety officer can’t knock on your door and tell you to turn on your lights. If people have this option at home, more and more will stay away from cinemas that are themselves now legally required to bugger up the light levels in auditoria and ruin the fundaments of the experience. If, like me, you love going to seee movies in a cinema, where that beam of light is projected over your head onto a screen that by and large is still bigger than most TVs (and certainly our old CRT), creating that unique atmosphere that’s intoxicated punters for more than a century, this is a tragedy.

Addendum:

During the few weeks after I posted this, I went to a couple more central London cinemas, such as the Cineworld in the Trocadero and the Odeon on Shaftesbury Avenue. Neither had lighting as offputting as in that specific Empire auditorium, so either it’s not a Westminster council edict, or if it is, these other cinemas are yet to act on it.

Anyway, that’s not what I meant to write about. There’s something else that’s always really bugged me about the Terminator franchise, about the world of Terminator. I can handle (though not necessarily get my head around) the sundry paradoxes thrown up not just by the time travel theme, but also by the very fact that time was passing between each movie installment, requiring tweaks to the timeline. I can even get my head around the divergence after T2 into the lame T3 and the frequently excellent Sarah Connor Chronicles. Heck, I’m even excited about T4, as finally it’ll get us into the world after Judgment Day. I wrote a big preview of T4, aka Salvation, over here. At this stage, my excitement about seeing armies of T-600s and newly created T-800s and whathaveyou stomping on the bones of humanity is overriding my anxiety over it being in the hands of McG, the man who made the execrable Charlie’s Angels movies.

No, the thing that’s been bothering me is the Terminator HUD. It’s been bothering me for years, but after watching the latest Sarah Connor episode, my brow furrowed again. Look, here’s my point. A Terminator, a real Terminator, not that T-1000 liquid nonsense (sadly revived for the series – bah), is a robot with a computer brain. The data it would receive through its visual sensors, basically some sort of sci-fi camera lenses, would immediately be converted into binary and read by the computer’s central processor. So why then do we have these ridiculous Terminator POV shots where there’s an interface, with scopes and on-screen text? “TARGET IDENTIFIED: JOHN CONNOR. TERMINATE”. It’s ike that on the head-up display of a fighter pilot or gunner, or even like the UI of a computer game. It just doesn’t make sense because, as a digital entity, all the data received by a Terminator would be integrated and processed pretty much simultaenously in the form of binary. Even if you take the justification from within the fiction that the original Terminator designers in the US military needed a UI, surely Skynet would have phased these out?

Sure, it’s fantasy, the HUD is an effective dramatic device and all that, but seriously, it’s silly. The Terminator isn’t using a screen, its lenses are gathering data to be interpreted by its CPU. Robots don’t need a HUD or a UI for crying out loud! The presence of a HUD or UI in the Terminator POV is almost as daft as having them move a cursor around with a mouse.