Recently in movies Category

Cinemas in the Houston area are a thing of wonder, according to my ICIS colleagues there. For years I have been hearing of a cinema complex in Katy, Texas, just outside Houston, which not only has wide reclining seats, but also tables in front of the seats where waitresses bring you a meal while you're watching the film. Fantastic.

Cinemas everywhere have become vastly more comfortable, but theatres and opera houses, not to mention economy (coach) airline seats, have been slow to keep up. The hard narrow seats in the upper wings of London theatres, where you fight your neighbour for the armrest, are agony even for this snake-hipped Blog.

For those broader of beam, the new recently opened Dallas opera house has been designed by the Norman Foster architectural practice with maximum comfort in mind. During the design process, the architects reduced the number of seats from 3,300 to 2,200.

The architects said that they had found that, like many things in Texas, "the opera-going bottoms that would fill them are broader than they used to be," according to an article in Private Eye.

 (photo: dallasopera.org)

The Blog's "Celebs in Chemicals" category has been a bit short of sightings recently, so hats off to Joe Chang who spotted Jessica Biel, star of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre at the launch of the Dow Live Earth Run for Water  -  at The Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers in New York City.

For more details on the event, see Doris's blog.

Truly the return to the office from holiday has to be one of the year's low points. It's not just the pure volume of email but also the intricate email trails, snaking back and forth with assorted players chipping in. There are always a few token bits of bad news hidden in the midst of it all, and a few things that have gone wrong which never would have gone wrong if you hadn't gone away.

It is as if chaos is always looking for a chance to break out. I am reminded of the way the natural world reasserts itself as soon as mankind turns its back, like the monster trees which reclaim the ancient temples of lost civilisations (as seen in Tomb Raider.)

(Photo Rex)

The Blog is in Edinburgh for the Festival and will be back refreshed.

"A Town Called Panic" (Panique au village), a Belgian comedy movie about plastic toys, previewed at the Cannes Film Festival on Thursday. The review in Hollywoodreporter.com says that it is "absolutely brilliant:"

The main characters are Cowboy, Indian, and Horse, who improbably live together in a town called Panic. They are plastic toys, twisted into impossible positions, which rest on little stands, and it's this fact that provides a great deal of the film's novelty. Various bizarre and even surrealistic things happen to them, as they journey to the center of the earth, get stuck in something that resembles the North Pole, and discover a parallel universe of water that is populated by pointy-headed bad guys who wear diving suits and goggles and look really, really weird.

The jokes come fast and hard, and part of the humor arises from the American accent (in French) and the American slang that the characters use.

I particularly liked this photo of starlet Jeanne Balibar at the film's photocall on Friday, sporting the hairstyle well-known at ICIS as "European hair goes to Singapore and/or Houston."

The cinema was more crowded than I'd ever seen it on Monday. Three screens were showing the new "X-Men Origins - Wolverine" and two had Nigel's favourite "Hannah Montana", so there were groups of teens, mums with parties of girls, couples and seniors, all milling around the multiplex lobby and queuing up for coke and popcorn combos (with free gift) on a grey bank holiday after two glorious sunny days outdoors.

We went to see "State of Play", which is a fine film packed full of enough of the essentials to keep this Blog happy: blogs, newspapers, Russell Crowe, lots of noir night scenes, trickery, betrayal, bad blondes and good brunettes (although no credible love interest) and a few good jokes.

There were no chemicals bad guys this time, but plenty of military baddies (mercenaries only, definitely not US forces) and political villains, and a token cold heartless female boss (easy to spot from her British accent) played by the gorgeous Helen Mirren who, in her limited time onscreen managed to use every single non-American English word which Americans find so endearing, like bloody, knickers and w**ker.

I won't spoil the ending but suffice it to say that everything works out and the newspaper presses roll another day. That's when you know it's just fiction.

For a proper review of the film, see IMDB.