Actually I Mustn't, But I Can Get Away With That
Because I was being poetic. 'Being Poetic' gets you a lot of breaks when you come under scrutiny for logic and common sense.
Now, were I to mention "Daybreak" you would nod approvingly and go "O yes, that film you mentioned, written and directed by the Speirig Brothers".
WRONG!
Dog Buns, THIS is "Daybreak". Art!
PAY ATTENTION WHEN I AM PONTIFICATING YOU!
It ran for one season before Netflix canned it, as the premise was a bit thin, and it went for a jokey tone that is the complete opposite of the miserably depressing comic it's based on. Art!
Yes, he appears to be missing half an arm. Conrad is not a trained medical professional yet I'm pretttty sure things like gangrene, septicemia and gingivitis would result if you don't get proper treatment, especially if you live in squalor as above. Not a barrel of laughs, exactly.
ANYWAY we got off-topic even for me, because what I wanted to cover today is a little experimental. I've played "Daybreakers" and taken screen-shots on my phone, then transferred them to a Blogger page so I can Snip them and post in this Intro. Art!
Variety appears to have seen a completely different film to the one Darling Daughter and I watched.
ANYWAY AGAIN I wanted to illustrate how the directors and production designers utilised the first seven minutes to establish a setting, without bludgeoning their audience over the head with expositionary texts, spinning newspapers and infodumps. Art!
"School Zone 2am - 3am School Nights" lets you know that things have been inverted from our reality. You get to wonder why the children are getting taught at night? Let's carry on. Art!
Hmmmm by now your spidey-senses might be tingling a little. What is this "Outbreak" of which they speak? It implies a disease. Also notice the city street, lit up with bright sunlight, yet deserted. Clearly things have gone agley (that's me being poetic again). Art!
"How a single bat started it all" and again, when you'd expect to see pedestrians riding up and down the escalator (yes that IS the proper word go write your own blog if you disagree) there is nobody. So, we have a world that appears to shun daylight, where a pandemic struck ten years ago, and a bat is the Patient Zero of the case and cause. Hmmmm are we reaching any conclusions yet? Art!
"German blood substitute fails" Bats, blood, a pandemic, nobody out in daylight, are we making any connections yet? Art!
SPOILERS AHEAD!
I WARNED YOU!
I DON'T KNOW WHY I BOTHERED THIS FILM IS 15 YEARS OLD
Yes, the world has been over-run by vampires. They now constitute most of the world's population, and in the ten years since The Outbreak, society has adapted. At least in South Canada, which is where the film is supposedly set, although it was actually shot in Australia. No, things did not fall apart. Art!
This is the 'Subwalk' system, a network of tunnels dug so that the vampires can walk around unroasted, because (as seen in the opening scene) they explode in direct sunlight. Really, they don't sit smoking and gradually turn ablaze, they go off like a
Automated shutters. When sunlight is either detected or anticipated, the shutters come down; when night descends, the shutters ascend. One suspects these are middle-class vampires and the lowly blue-collar ones have to make do with a Venetian blind. Art!
I had to cadge this one from teh Interwebz, my photograph was grotty thanks to the contrast. Here you see Ethan Hawke's character, Ed - or, rather, you don't see him, because he's a vampire and that's a mirror. Let me show you how bad my picture was. Art!
There's a couple of things they don't go into, such as how much stronger and more robust the vampires are than humans, which is an asset. Then, too, there is the fact that when 'turned' the newly-minted vampire is stuck at that age, which must suck a little - do you see wh- O you do - if you're twelve and you never get to grow up, or if you're eighty-five and you have to keep shuffling along.
Would society adapt as thoroughly as it did here? Hmmmm quite possibly, don't forget we recently went through a global pandemic and have seen it off.
Okay, I think that's enough "Daybreakers" for one day. I have more shots, which we can come back to. I can see you quivering with excitement about that.
A Little Fright Music
Back to that list of dystopian or post-apocalyptic books that "Mike's Book Reviews" put up as a list, and onto Number 9: "Planet Of The Apes" by Pierre Boulle. Conrad confesses he's not read it, but did look at the last page, so I know what the Great Plot Twist is. Art!
Your Humble Scribe has seen several of the original and newer iterations of the film and can take or leave them, although a lot of you out there seem to like them. Which is one reason they keep making them. You want a plot summary? "Chimps take over The End".
There, we can be succinct here at BOOJUM! when need be. Next!
The Trainwreck Rumbles On, And On, And On
Yes, we are back to Bloaty Bafune Biffer Boy, whose lawyers came out with some very interesting information on Monday. This concerns the - Art!
Actually it's worse than that, because in New York, anyone like Trump trying to appeal a case has to pay what amounts to a 'bottomhole tax' and in this case he'd need to pay possibly $550 million dollars.
Since mid-February, when it seemed possible that things might not quite work out with Trump's hoped-for judgement of $6.43, his lawyers have been scrambling to find a surety bond company that will underwrite this judgement. They complained loudly about having gone through 4 different brokers, approaching 30 companies globally, and nobody would take them on. Art!
We mentioned this chap earlier in the month: Neil Pedersen, who runs his own surety bond business. He said something that rather stuck with me: that surety bond companies are very conservative and also risk-averse. D J Tango getting a crony of his to approve a $91 million dollar bond seems to have been very much the exception, not a rule. The irony of desperately trying to negotiate with insurance companies to cover a bond for a case of insurance fraud can not have made these businesses any happier with the deal.
And the clock is ticking. DJ Tango has until close of business Sunday to come up with the bond or the cash, after which point the New York Attorney General's office will start placing liens on what used to be his property.
As another talking head on a television clip pointed out, this case didn't transpire in five minutes, it has been running for five years and Trump could have sold property to raise collateral in that time. Why hasn't he? Art!
That's 40 Wall Street, which the AG has her beady eyes upon. It may be that all Pumpkinhead's properties are so encumbered with debt, mortgages and loans that he cannot raise money from them, which he would rather die than admit. Or, he wants to play the Valiant Victim in public, which might satisfy his ego but will cripple his estates portfolio.
Or, as Michael Cohen pointed out, he may be waiting hopefully for Putinpot to sweep in with a windfall at the last minute.
Bring on the wheeliebins of popcorn!
"City In The Sky"
The Doctor, accompanied by a collection of salted meats, is bravely headed out into the Nullarbor Plain, intent on meeting the local dingoes.
‘You can’t do that! They don’t go
looking for humans, the dingoes, but if you go trespassing on their territory
they’ll likely tear you to bits!’
With a wink, tapping the end of his brolly against his nose, the Doctor
grinned.
‘Ah, yes – “human”. I’d be in
trouble indeed, if I were one!’
Turning sharply on his heel, he strode off with his umbrella acting as a
walking stick, stirring up the shallow muddy puddles left in the flood’s
wake. Minutes later he was trudging
across the plains again, headng out into the desert on a bearing of 285° with a
whole clutch of salted kangaroo steaks dangling from his umbrella handle on a
length of twine.
He didn’t know exactly when the dingoes would pick up his trail thanks
to smell or sound, and he didn’t know where their territory began as the wild
dogs’ boundary would be marked with urine-spotted markers completely invisible
to human eyes. It took a good three
hour’s hike before he began to feel confident that he’d gone beyond any normal
human area of activity and into the genuine wilderness of the bleakly
spectacular Nullarbor Plains.
The vista was one of endless, gently rolling plains, spotted with
clusters of rock outcrops, acres of scrubby sedges and grasses and all the
possible variations of red, brown, copper or golden earth tones. Silver, too, where sunlight began to glint
off puddles and patches of marshy ground inundated by his “flyswatter”. Within a few days there’d be an explosion of
colour where long-dormant seeds came to life and sprouted and blossomed.
I think that's the author being all 'poetic' and shizzle.
The Other Trainwreck Also Rumbles On
I did an annotation of a new vlog by Joe Blogs on his channel, which has been hard-pressed to keep up with all the Ukrainian drone strikes against Ruffian petrochemical infrastructure. Given how long the blog already is, I'm not going to add many details in here, but Joe did put up an interesting chart about petrol and diesel prices in Ruffia. They're one of the biggest oil producers globally and yet they've had to ban the export of petrol. What howling - or blazing - irony. Art!
You can see the price of petrol and diesel has climbed sharply since things started very literally hotting-up, in a trend that doesn't reflect global prices. It will be interesting to see how these wholesale prices (which are for tons of fuel) feed through to the average Muscovite.
Finally -
No, I haven't forgotten that we're doing The Mars Volta over in a little musical critique. BE PATIENT!
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