Battiness

I can see the choice of Heath Ledger for the role of the Joker in the next Batman film being controversial. Not one of those choices where you go WOW and yet, Heath has gone from strength to strength. He is one of many Aussie actors that I think of as the elite of cinema. I think he'll do a good job and it'll give him an opportunity to expand his range still further.
I also greatly enjoyed last year's 'Batman Begins', directed by Christopher Nolan. I was a fan of the original two Tim Burton films, very dark and creepy as you'd expect from Burton, but then the switch to Joel Schumacher for 'Batman Forever' and 'Batman and Robin' was a big disappointment. So I am full of hope for 'The Dark Knight'. Sadly I'll have to wait until 2008 to see it.

Still on films for a moment, before I left the UK last year, I saw a film at the cinema called 'The Descent'. It was about a group of women friends who go exploring in an uncharted cave system below the Appalachian Mountains. Once down there, and because it was uncharted, lost to humanity, they of course can no longer get out the way they got in due to some freak accident that I can't remember, and then discover the hideous mystery of the caves, people trapped down there long before have evolved into nasty slimy flesh-eating monsters.
Imagine my surprise, when shortly after arriving au Canada, I started seeing adverts on TV for a film soon to be released, called 'The Cave'. This was a film about a group of mostly men who go exploring in an uncharted cave system below the Carpathian mountains. Yada yada, can't exit, slimy flesh-eaters evolved from humans...
Last night I finally watched 'The Cave'. Honestly, they were both very similar and I think some would prefer one, some t'other.
Possibly because I saw 'The Descent' first, because I saw it on the big screen and because I liked that the team was all women, I enjoyed this one more. There were moments when I experienced claustrophobia just from watching the screen. The tension and creepiness really worked for me and the Thelma and Louise-ish ending didn't promise us a sequel as the ending in 'The Cave' did.

While on the subject of women, if you are one or wish you were, take the lesbianity test*. Handle with care, you may find out you're a gay man. If you do, then you should go straight to the BBC website and try out their Sex ID quiz. This is a more serious and scientific test, but still fun and vital to knowing who you are. Have a ruler handy :)

Meanwhile, over at After Ellen* the website was hacked by islamic militants. Do what? I hear you say. Yes, seriously, bigots bloody abound and they hate women, gays, for pity's sake, they probably even hate black people. If they really believed that a fiery hell awaits the women at After Ellen, why don't they just sit back and wait for their god to deal with it? Well yes, yet another rhetoric question, of course I know that their god, like ours, doesn't go around hating people, in fact as with the Christian bigots, the Islamic bigots don't understand their own faith.

A new website, fed up with the likes of BS showing us her airbrushed everything, allows real women to post pictures and stories of their real pregnant and post-baby bods. It's a liberating site and good for them. Women constantly suffer the tyranny of media images.

Finally, as you know, my mate Simmi kindly watches the right-wing press so that the rest of us don't have to. Sometimes it gives her a belly laugh and then she'll tip me off to something that the Daily Nazi has ranted on about. Imagine my surprise when she sent me a link to a Daily Nazi article that was not only written by someone clearly not illiterate and insane, but which made both of us say, 'er, what she's saying is right.' We both agreed with the article writer. We think she's a left-wing mole.
No matter, the press have been patronising us for weeks, continually harping on about things that any human being knows about the war between Israel and Lebanon. Everything this journo says puts things into perspective.

*Thanks Simmi.