What Movie Are You Watching Or Watched Today?

[Clash Cadillac]

Toy Story 3 (2010)

I bawled when Andy said goodbye to Woody. Silly me. Andy's only an animated figure.

Getting soft in your old age Mr. C?

I find the older I get, the quicker I tear up at the smallest acts of human kindness or stories of adversity, especially if children are involved now that I have a reference point with 2 little "brats" of my own.

[RoddyRuddy]

Toy Story 3 (2010)

I bawled when Andy said goodbye to Woody. Silly me. Andy's only an animated figure.

Getting soft in your old age Mr. C?

I find the older I get, the quicker I tear up at the smallest acts of human kindness or stories of adversity, especially if children are involved now that I have a reference point with 2 little "brats" of my own.

One name is as good as another, hey Joe.

[Mike from Boston]

Toy Story 3 (2010)

I bawled when Andy said goodbye to Woody. Silly me. Andy's only an animated figure.

You're not human if you didn't tear up. After Christmas morning, Andy may still only be an animated figure, but we now have three different versions of Woody, a talking Jesse and an Interactive Conversational Buzz and Woody, which to be honest, Dad thinks is pretty cool. Hope everyone had a great day today!

[philipchevron]

The Royle Family Christmas Special 2010 (BBC)

Last year's show was so ugly, so aggressive and so Ricky Tomlinson-centred that I thought I'd never watch this again. Fortunately, this year the delicate blend of black humour and Manchester-Irish sentiment is back on course. A keeper.

[Guest]

Toy Story 3 (2010)

When the first one came out, at Christmas, a friend's Mother went to buy the figures at Toys R Us, she told the young man helping her "I have a Buzz and now I need a Woody."


We've got: Apocalypse Now, G.W. Pabst's The Threepenny Opera, Sweeney Todd, Sling Blade, Labyrinth, Mommie Dearest, The Aristocrats and beautiful Joseph Fiennes in Shakespeare In Lovestacked up. Though right now it's much more pressing to endlessly loop Ziggy Stardust AT MAXIMUM VOLUME and play on the treadmill. 12 is very fast indeed.

[Shaz]

I'm horrified . . . Where Eagles Dare isn't been shown on festive TV (well, not on terrestrial at any rate . . .) So Jenny Agutter waving her knickers at the train has had to suffice for seasonal traditions/cliches/can't be arsed to reach for the remote control . . . )

[Brian]

The Doctor Who Christmas Special 2010 . Very nice of BBC America to run this on Christmas Day for all of us on the other side of the pond. I came late to the whole Doctor Who phenomenon, starting with Tennant's run, but I must say that Steven Moffat and Matt Smith completely capture everything that makes the show work for me. The Special tripped every emotional wire while successfully adapting A Christmas Carol (loosely) to science fiction. And having Karen Gillan sure doesn't hurt.

[philipchevron]

Self Aid 25th Anniversary Night (BBC)

There are small moments of discrepancy between the Self Aid documentary and the When Harvey Met Bob, (with Domhnall Gleeson as Geldof) which suggest that a reframing mythology is already well under way - some of Geldof's own comments and recollections in the doc appeared to contradict or undermine the fictionalized version. But the basic facts are the same. It was a great moment, not in music history, but in history. At this distance, it looks like it was made in the stone age, so rapid has been the growth in technology and communications, which is why it's all the more remarkable it happened at all. Also at this distance, it grows in significance. As Billy Connolly puts it, never again would people feel so helpless, so unempowered to affect matters of such enormous importance.

I used to speak to Geldof on the phone several times a week from my little cubby hole in the Dublin architects' firm at which I was a poorly paid office boy, using my city centre base and um, office, to launch matters of greater cultural moment, like The Radiators, like Agnes Bernelle's recording career, like my participation in the 1976 Dublin Theatre Festival. I loved his abrasiveness and at one stage believed that everybody in the music business must be just like him. If only that were true.

[DzM]

At this distance, it looks like it was made in the stone age, so rapid has been the growth in technology and communications, which is why it's all the more remarkable it happened at all. Also at this distance, it grows in significance. As Billy Connolly puts it, never again would people feel so helpless, so unempowered to affect matters of such enormous importance.

I dunno. I've often wrestled with the legacy of the *Aid (BandAid, SelfAid, FarmAid, etc) projects. They've always seemed really self-indulgent for the public. To me they seemed to allow wealthy populations to smugly feel like they were doing some significant by throwing a big party for the weekend, and that that's all that was necessary to fix famine, or address massive unemployment, or shifting economic patterns. In a small way I feel like they contributed to the complacency of the population in times of distress and have led to a mentality that we CAN have it all - we don't have to make sacrifices.

Could just be early in the morning and my Guarana spiked morning beverage isn't working yet.

[philipchevron]

At this distance, it looks like it was made in the stone age, so rapid has been the growth in technology and communications, which is why it's all the more remarkable it happened at all. Also at this distance, it grows in significance. As Billy Connolly puts it, never again would people feel so helpless, so unempowered to affect matters of such enormous importance.

I dunno. I've often wrestled with the legacy of the *Aid (BandAid, SelfAid, FarmAid, etc) projects. They've always seemed really self-indulgent for the public. To me they seemed to allow wealthy populations to smugly feel like they were doing some significant by throwing a big party for the weekend, and that that's all that was necessary to fix famine, or address massive unemployment, or shifting economic patterns. In a small way I feel like they contributed to the complacency of the population in times of distress and have led to a mentality that we CAN have it all - we don't have to make sacrifices.

Could just be early in the morning and my Guarana spiked morning beverage isn't working yet.

Yes. Aid-fatigue came rapidly, and there's a great deal of truth in what you say. Nevertheless, I exempt Geldof's original Band Aid/Live Aid not just because it was the first, but because he was perhaps the only human being on the planet with the skill sets to get her done. Aid-cretinism set in early too, as early as the US section of Live Aid in which even Bob Dylan muttered something about helping those American farmers closer to home who also were dying in their millions. But also, Billy Connolly's point stands, I think. Though it is at least arguable that humanity has never since acted with anything like the altruism and force it realised might be within its grasp after Live Aid or that new forces have mobilised to set us back to our default complacency, the genie has left the bottle all the same.

At the risk of venturing dangerously into the thorny area of cultural differences, it has to be said, and the Live Aid documentary does not entirely shirk it, that the US part of the operation came close to becoming farcical on several occasions, and was damn near sabotaged by the paranoia and vanity of promoter Bill Graham. Creatively too, it's hard to imagine that had Geldof been able to clone himself, the Philadelphia mishaps, like the Phil Collins/Led Zep collision (apparently so toe-curlingly terrible that the Zeps took strenuous steps to prevent its ever being seen again) would ever have occurred either. There's also the metrics which illustrate that Americans believe, with quite staggering erroneousness, that they are the world's most generous per capita charity givers. The scene in When Harvey Met Bob, the fictionalized account of the day, in which Geldof, arriving at Wembley in his assistant Marsha Hunt's car, winds down a window to accept, from a nun, a plastic bag stuffed with banknotes - she knew Bob could be trusted to put them in the right hands - is based on one of many many such incidents which occurred without cynicism at the time.

There were many things I felt were wrong about the whole business at the time, and it is a great shame, in some ways, that those concerns have been allowed to disappear from the history. At the time, many of us felt that by ignoring the popular music of entire continents especially, in this instance, the African continent itself, the cultural validity of the entire project was questionable. And those, and other questions remain. And Geldof, in his favour, has never denied the questions existed, but he did what he felt he had to do, which was trample down all these secondary questions and concentrate singlemindedly on the only one that mattered that day, which was How To Save Lives? But, 25 years on, and with all the caveats still throbbing somewhat, I have to say I was basically wrong. Though myself and the other Pogues were engaged that day in support of the UK mineworkers in their fight against Thatcher, at a benefit concert in Brixton, my over-riding personal memory of that day remains the arrival of Elvis Costello at our soundcheck, fresh from his stint at Wembley, his wrists, hands and cuffs all covered with cribs of the impossible-to-memorise list-song lyrics of the song he had just performed in front of two billion people.

The song was, of course, "All You Need Is Love", and Costello's endearingly hammish solution to a tricky technical question somehow seemed to embody the spirit of the day. The Beloved Entertainer himself may have felt that way too, for I saw him make no attempt that evening to obliterate the evidence.

[DzM]

For sake of clarity I should note that I don't know enough about the actual event (either the sausage itself, nor all the meat that went into the making of the sausage) to have much of an opinion either way. What I do know of it is inspiring - a bunch of talented people with egos larger than the stadiums they were performing in were able to collectively say "what can we do, as public figures, to help Ethiopia?" (and later farmers, the Irish, more farmers, etc). I really thought (and still think) that that is admirable. People from all walks of life should constantly ask themselves how they, with their talents and resources, can help those that are suffering.

Where I get a ambivalent is that I feel (and this is pure opinion) that these kinds of giant events To Save XYZ make the public, particularly in so-called "first world" countries, believe that a big party over a long weekend was all that was really needed to fix a massive problem.

"Widespread famine? I totally helped fix that. I went to that concert that time and POOF! famine all gone."

I feel that a massive unfortunate side effect of these kinds of events was the idea that massive change could be accomplished with little or no sacrifice on the part of the general public, and that this has led to a great deal of the indifference and complacency seen in first-world countries these days.

"I did my part. I tweeted to my followers that we're all flash-mobbing at the red-nose 'For the Children' benefit."

Maybe I'd feel better about these kinds of events if they had a definite call-to-action for people, and their audiences actually executed on that call. "Thank you for rockin' all weekend with us to clean oil sludge from Tranquility Base! Everybody here should now donate one year of their post-tax income, or donate one year of their time doing feet-on-the-ground volunteer work! Fuck yeah! RockNROLL!" and the 300,000 strong audience in unison shouts "FUCKYEAHROCKNROLL!" and then DOES it. Or something.

I think the cold-and-flu medicine is really working awesomely on my brain right now.

[philipchevron]

Also for the sake of clarity, I should stress than my kudos were for the original event and the possibilities it opened up, not for any subsequent imitations.

[NewJerseyRich]

I do remember some of LiveAid day but seem to recall in the end along with FarmAid much of the funds were spent on administative costs and only a small percentage went to the actual cause. Is this recollection accurate?

[Brian Boru]

I remember at the time thinking that Live Aid was a noble and worthwhile effort to raise awareness of, and alleviate, the suffering of the Ethiopian famine victims. I watched large parts of it in the pub with mates and the overwhelming experience at the time was that it was a great show but i don't recall a lot of people going out of their way to donate until Geldof's 'outburst' on the BBC and use of the 'F' word! It did seem to be needed to hit home to people the importance of giving whatever money they could to the cause.
Of course, the passage of time has shown that however well-meaning it all was, a lot of the money unfortunately ended up in the pockets of the corrupt administration of the country rather than feeding those hungry people. That's not to diminish the efforts though, because the vision was a noble one and for a moment in time it really did appear that the world could unite and make a difference.
Oh, and if nothing else it was all worth it for the humiliation of Simon Le Bon!!

[Clash Cadillac]

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader(2010)

Took the whole family yesterday. Honestly had a hard time staying awake. Not sure if the movie moved a bit slow or if it was the 3 bottles of wine the night before.

Tesla: The Master of Lightning

Tried to watch this PBS documentary later in the evening but could not make it through before I fell asleep. I will say this was a very interesting film which I plan to finish this evening.