Inspirational Quotes 79

As Barbara Ehrenreich points out, this attitude must ultimately be founded on the preposterous idea that your state of mind can change the world and overcome the contingencies of life. (Brian Appleyard on positivity in the New Statesman)

My years in college had given me the completely false impression that there were no constraints, that it was safe for an artist to comment on volatile cultural and political issues in public. (Garry Trudeau)

Thirty – the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair. (The Great Gatsby)

If only those who went on about the dignity of work actually respected the dignity of workers! (northierthanthou.com ‏@Brimshack)

I don’t suffer from autism, I suffer from people’s attitudes towards autism. (Tina Brooks @pepperfire)

‘Just be yourself’ was probably first said by a tall, rich, smug, handsome jerk. (Karl Sharro @KarlreMarks)

Through Spock, Leonard showed us that things like compassion, mercy, dignity, wit and friendship were actually logical. (Ronald D. Moore @RonDMoore)

Bede thought the golden age of Anglo-Saxon Christianity had been in the 7th C; Alcuin in the 8th. Nostalgia has a long history in England. (Tom Holland ‏@holland_tom)

Attempting to graft Enlightenment onto existing religions. (Peter Dashevici)

The power of hierarchies is hard to break. (Nick Cohen Guardian March 15)

Love this: ‘People are more vocal against fur than leather because it’s much easier to pick on rich women than motorcycle gangs.’ (Karl Sharro @KarlreMarks)

‘The inevitability of world revolution’ had been postponed. (LRB quoting Eric Hobsbawm on the last communist rally before the Nazis destroyed the movement in Germany)

Thinking you’re going to be famous is “a common desire and belief among the young”. (RS)

I love being unremarkable. (Chinese immigrant, Guardian 2015)

My mother didn’t know how to do some of the most basic things that most people in this country seem to think are intuitive. (Another Chinese immigrant, Guardian 2015)

However, it involved working from home a fair bit and that is where it became incredibly isolating. I lived in a part of north-west London where one needed a family and a puppy to fit in and I had neither. Coming from Toronto, where I had a vast network of friends, I felt like a fish out of water with virtually no social life. (Recent immigrant to the UK, Guardian 2015. So much for the idea that happiness depends on your personality or attitude.)

Swearing with your friends, however, is vital. Done deftly, it can be the first sign of friendship. (Hugo Rifkind in the Tatler)

The savvy spa-goer could build patronage networks, discuss business and politics, peruse marriage prospects, attend parties, and hear all the latest gossip. (hypotheses.org)

Naturally bright, she had sailed through every exam at school, but met her match at Oxford. After years of achieving top grades with very little effort, the punishing schedule of essays and reading lists came as a shock. She graduated, but seemed scarred by the experience. (Lord Steerforth)

You have to love the fact that a lot of people today believe that everything is socially constructed, except religion. (Karl Sharro ‏@KarlreMarks)

More here, and links to the rest.

Movie Clichés (in Quotes) II

Bad things

How to write a horror film:
1. Bad things
2. OR ARE THERE
3. Yes bad things
4. Defeat the bad things
5. OR HAVE THEY
(@TechnicallyRon)

Just once, I’d like a passing bus or train to obstruct someone’s view of the villain, but for them NOT to vanish once it’s gone. #Luther (@danowen79)

Love the bit in Escape to The Country/Bargain Hunt/ Flog It/ Countryfile/Antiques Road Trip where the presenters learn to shear a sheep. (Sathnam Sanghera ‏@Sathnam)

Are there any modern crimes novels with a detective who DOESN'T have an alcohol/drug habit or a problem with authority? (@Lord_Steerforth)


1. Someone lets themselves into their car and you know, just know, that a sinister figure is going to rise up behind them and strangle them. Plausible perhaps at night, but in broad daylight would someone really not notice that there was a person crouching in the back seat of their car?

2.  This is from my great friend Sue (suehepworth.com). In the US Law and Order the police show up to interview a witness at their place of work. Do they give the police their full attention? No: directors don’t like talking heads, so the witness goes on loading their van, polishing glasses or whatever. If they are at home, they will be folding the laundry.

3. Someone – probably a woman – is running through woods. There is wobbly, hand-held camera-work and a soundtrack of crashing through undergrowth and gasping for breath. Cut! The next scene will be the police being called out to a body.

4. Someone’s alone in the house and the door bell rings. They answer the door. Their face lights up: ‘oh, it’s you!’ Cut! The next time we see them they are dead. (Christine Poulson)

That accent is an affront to bad accents everywhere. (imdb message board on Tom Bosley’s “Kentucky?” accent in Murder She Wrote)

Darkness seemed like a two-part story padded out with lots of shots of silently anguished lead characters to fill four hours. (Martin Edwards)

QUESTION: In crappy American disaster movies with a male protagonist, why does the hero ALWAYS send his wife "to [her] mother's in Vermont"? (AlexPaknadel)


Series sound engineer Kate Hopkins said: 'If it's a polar bear on snow, custard powder is usually very popular, with some salt crystals added for a bit of crunch.' The ingredients, she explained, are then mixed together inside a stocking, scrunched up and pressed against a hard surface. Other tricks include imitating the crunch of bones as an animal eats by snapping sticks of celery. Slowly peeling an orange creates the sound of a predator ripping flesh from a carcass. (She explains that most wildlife footage is shot through a telephoto lens, and the technology can’t pick up sound at that distance.) (@MailOnline)

Times review of Britain Beneath Your Feet: “The only downside is the grandiose orchestral gloop of the sort that is usually slathered over the duller species of natural history programme.”

I've just struggled through Horizon: The Trouble with Space Junk. Struggled not because of the incidental music... but because of the stupid cliched movie sound effects. Computer screens that go zeep because that's what they do in real life, obviously. A deep rumbling accompanying the view from space - I guess there's a crack in the window making wind noise. Dodgy video connections with pictures that break up and make a crackling noise, because they do that all the time, of course.
(GH)


It also suffered from the insistence of so many similar shows before it – not least the BBC’s Restoration series of a decade ago – on conjuring tension where none existed or was required. Arbitrary deadlines were announced without context or explanation – Six weeks! Seven days! – and the Trust’s experts proved more than happy to play along. (Daily Telegraph on Restoring Britain’s Landmarks Oct 2015 Nick Paget on Twitter: “So much repetition means each quarter almost repeats itself.”)

Whose idea was this 'dramatic 90 second intro of absolutely no benefit to anyone' that begins every single beeb documentary now? (Douglas Murphy ‏@entschwindet)

More in love with production values than the story (quite a common BBC flaw at the moment). (Past Offences)

Talking at the camera while driving, unable to say anything at all without walking, presenter talking to himself from a thousand yards away in a crowd, presenter ending every scene by walking briskly out of the picture... (RI)

Wait wait. There *is* a black guy in Steve Jobs...He plays a security guard. (@redsteeze)
I bet he's a Wise Old Security Guard, who says a Few Well-Chosen Words that give the protagonist a Fresh Insight Into His Life. (Damian Counsell ‏@DamCou)

Though the characters age only 25 years or so in the course of the story, by the film's end they are seen doddering around like nonagenarians. (zeusdvds.com on the film of O’Neill’s Strange Interlude)

Reed Richards is soon snapped up by a sinister governmental agency (yep, them again) and set to work with a kindly paternalistic physicist who speaks only in gnomic pronouncements (“We are stronger together than we are apart”)... [There’s a long sequence where the cast pretend to build a teleportation device] and no, the mid-montage scene of the gang chillaxing with Chinese food, and laughing uproariously between mouthfuls (I’d swear they’re just saying: “Rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb”) doesn’t help, conveying only the sense that this film is treading water until the cogs click together with such uninspired inevitability that a deranged gibbon who’d been force-fed a couple of Thor movies could probably have done a better job. The gibbon, unfortunately, was unavailable, so we’re stuck with Reed and the Von Doomettes travelling to a rocky volcanic other world (laziest art design ever — like the planet Mustafar from Revenge of the Sith, only duller) and getting infected with super-energy that, for reasons known only to a select bunch of comic-book hierophants, makes Reed bendy, Sue invisible, Johnny fiery and Victor kind of nutty... (Kevin Maher on Fantastic Four, Times 2015-08-09)


From Renault Clio adverts to Hollyoaks episodes, running into a wedding, tears streaming, clutching a telegram or skidding down the aisle on your knees is one of those great cultural tropes that almost never actually happens in real life. Thank God. (thedebrief.co.uk)

Is there any chance we could never again make Russian movies with British actors who speak in silly fake Russian accents? (Lexi Alexander ‏@Lexialex)

From 100 things you can learn from classic Who, imdb message boards:
7. Don't touch any green glowing stuff when you're down a mine.
11. Massage therapists’ uniforms is the chosen fashion wear for humans going into suspended animation in 'The Ark in Space'
16. The Master with the entire Earth to choose from always launches his crazy power schemes in Britain directly under the nose of the Brigadier and UNIT.
29. If you're a small-minded greedy person who wants to exploit aliens in some way for money, you'll be first in line to die.
31. A lot of alien dictatorships can be overthrown within a day or so.
37. A nuclear power complex with an output enough to power all of Southern Britain can be blown up or bombed without any Chernobyl style fallout.
42. At some point in the future humanity will revert to using magnetic tape computer storage and cathode ray tubes.
51. Pretty much everyone you meet in your travels through space and time initially wants to kill you.

I'm trying to avoid the "classic" counselling photos: trees, waves, stacked up stones, bees, lips, ears, handshakes... (Tina Weston)

Holding his head like a silent movie actor registering anguish. (7 1/2 Cents, Richard Bissell)

I could have lived without the flimsy costume drama interludes. Elizabeth... seemed to spend most of the episode in Richmond Castle, drinking wine and chilling with her pet monkey. Philip II of Spain was portrayed as a bureaucratic weirdo who ran his empire from a tiny cell and who did “I-am-definitely-a-creepy-megalomaniac” things like covetously fondle a globe by flickering candlelight. Also, I’m pretty sure he had a stick-on beard. (Times stand-in TV critic, June 2015)

You're like wossname in GoT who lets his prisoner think he's escaped, only to recapture him. (Lisa Carey ‏@msleedy)

More here, and links to the rest.