Now THIS is comic book style. Gruesome, gritty, noir, lots of gravelly voices, the sparkling rain lashing down at an angle against the silhouette of a very wide-shouldered man, blood bursting from bullet wounds whilst the hero soldiers on, bent cops and benter cops, bad guys that are so recognisably evil that you feel no remorse when their limbs are hacked off or their head pummelled into a puree.
Oh yes, there is violence present. But it’s “stylised”, which means that it’s so far fetched as to be a little bit ridiculous – I personally found the shark scene in The Beach to be more disturbing.
Clive Owen is pretty mediocre, and most of the female actresses do their duty as broads and prostitutes, but Bruce Willis, Mickey Rourke and Benicio Del Toro are all fantastic, with their compulsory identikit gravel voices. Elijah Wood also puts in a great performance as Brodo Gaggins, the halfling hobbit with spirit.*
Bring on the sequel, I say.
*Not really – more of a (highlight for slight spoiler) bespectacled psychopath with cannibalistic tendencies and great powers of stealth (spoiler ends).
UPDATE: Another thing that occurred to me: Brittany Murphy. I don’t think she’d ever read a comic book before. She was most incongruous. I expect that after the film was finished and she saw it for the first time, she probably sighed and said “Oh, so THAT’S the effect that I was supposed to be going for. Doh!”

24. No Logo by Naomi Klein
This is a worthy educational tome about global corporate domination, that is required reading for my job; I found it interesting because I could relate it to the reports I read every day. I also learned what an Export Processing Zone is, and why they are bad things.
It was pretty heavy-going, though; and really very putdownable. I don’t generally read a lot of non-fiction, and I started to yearn for something that didn’t labour the point quite so much.
Also it’s quite out of date by now, which I know in particular from some of the examples given about factories where women are forced to have abortions, pre-teens are making shoes, people are routinely fired for refusing to work overtime. Perhaps my clients just choose good factories, but I haven’t seen an audit that was quite that bad, yet. Although my colleague did today come across a factory that employed monks, who are paid in food because they won’t accept money; hard to assess whether they are receiving minimum wage.
Celebrated the end of the book by watching Supersize Me, which is about both corporate and personal greed, and would certainly put us right off McDonalds, if we ever ate that sort of junk in the first place.
3/5

They really do. And here’s why:
1. Hidden tracks hark back to the days before LCD displays. These days, people can see how long each track is. If they are playing the CD on the computer, or as sound files, then they can see a full track listing. How curious that the last song is 13 minutes long… the hidden track is not really hidden, making it… a track.
2. An increasing number of people are converting their CD collections to MP3s, so that they can benefit from the portability and convenience offered. Hidden tracks force them to either waste (admittedly expendable) megabytes of storage space on silence or rip to WAV, open the file up in a wave editor, and chop it up into two separate files.
3. When listening to a CD in the car, who wants to sit through eight minutes of silence? No-one, that’s who. It’s easier to skip back to the first track than to fast-forward to the start of the “hidden” track, so that’s what you do. Not only do you miss the “hidden” track (despite knowing that it is there), but your attention is also diverted from driving while you are hammering that button. One day someone will have an accident while skipping tracks, and if they live in the USA they may attempt to sue the producer of the CD. Maybe. I’m just tossing the notion in there.
4. It’s not big.
5. It’s not clever.
I’m going back into retirement now. For how long, I really don’t know. Toodles!