Sunday 13th January 2013

Well, I now know that I have absolutely no idea how search engines work. I always thought that they were un-intelligent, to use a, well, un-intelligent word. I always believed that they couldn't think for themselves, that they could only do what they were told. This appears not to be the case. Here's the thing. A couple of times a week, I post a link to the improv classes that I run in Brighton. At the moment, I've got two a week, one at the Duke Box Theatre, which is at the the back of the Iron Duke, (that's on Sunday nights, at 7.00), and another one on Mondays, which is at the New Venture Theatre.

All I do is go to the relevant website, copy the address in the address bar, and paste it into my link. Job done. Anyone seeing me advertise my wares on Facebook will click the link, and be taken to the acting class page of the NVT website. Similarly, anyone who clicks onto the link if they find it on twitter will also be taken to the same page. However, despite the fact that I use the same link wherever I paste it to, anyone that clicks the same link if they see it on LinkedIn will find themselves on the website of ... a Christian fellowship in California. I'm not sure I understand why. I mean, I get that there's different organisations on the planet with the same name (there's a New Venture Theatre in Louisiana that I occasionally think the NVT should do some kind of exchange program with, for instance), but it's a bit odd that LinkedIn actually manage to rewire and indeed rewrite the destination code of what was in the original address. I mean, how? As I said, I thought computers were essentially dumb; they couldn't do anything unless they received a direct instruction. Perhaps this is the first sign that they're about to throw over their human overlords. Skynet will achieve free will this year. Or something like that.

I'm managing to see films quite regularly this year so far. So far, I've been underwhelmed by the opportunity to see The Hobbit (and I'm getting reports back that it ain't that great), and I get the impression that Les Mis is a film I should really go to see with someone who's really going to be into it, so last night's film was The Impossible, inspired by the events of the 2004 tsunami. It's a very well made film, but I have a good few problems with it, not least that the real life family whose plight we follow are played by white actors. The family is in real life Spanish, as indeed the director, script and film is, despite the fact that it feels quite Hollywood. You'd think that since most of the talent was Spanish, they might have ignored the lure of an increased audience that McGregor and Watts will bring, and avoid the continued 'white-washing' of non causcian stories. It's certainly a film that pays respect to the victims of that disaster, but it still at times feels somewhat exploitative and 'too-soon' in a way that, for instance, United 93 did not. It certainly uses a couple of cheap tricks, like an extraordinarily cute blonde crying child, and, it seems likely, the shifting around of certain events in the survivors timeline to heighten dramatic tension towards the end of the film. It's a emotional wringer of a film, that to its credit never feels like a 'disaster movie', but it still feels like an uneasy option for your local mulitiplex (I couldn't help noticing that, once the credits had rolled, people had left their sacks of expensive popcorn, entirely untouched). The two leads are excellent, but they would probably both agree that it shouldn't be their names over the title: that honour should really go Tom Holland, who plays the part of the eldest son, at the start of the story still essentially short tempered and easily annoyed (in other words, a teenage boy), and to whom the film essentially belongs.