dreaming is free

I dreamt that... shit. I dreamt a long and involved dream that ended with an old lady winning Just a Minute on the basis that she knew a dolphin was a fish, and getting to kiss Nicholas Parsons on the cheek (by the way the new series of Just a Minute which I believe is the 53rd is on the BBC website now, though this week's isn't the best episode ever). I also dreamt that someone got Roger Dean to design something but not in his trademark style, more in the style of a woodcut. But now I can't remember what.

Maybe I didn't dream this at all. Because what I did dream is writing all of my dream down, and thinking 'gee, there's a lot to this dream, it's filling pages and pages and it's all really interesting'. Then I woke up and was majorly pissed because I hadn't written it down at all. I dreamt I was writing it in green biro, incidentally, which should have alerted me to the unrealisticness of the scenario.

What is not free is watching bad DVDs. Last night I drained the dregs out of the local Blockbuster and got Casino Royale, Semi Pro and the most recent Almodovar film. Semi-Pro was the nightly so we had to watch that, and because I am sick for the 53rd time this year (yes, the exact same amount as there have been seasons of Just a Minute), I insisted on Casino Royale first, you know, because sick people like childish things. It was OK. I would like to have had scientobabble explanation of what Bond puts on his face to make it heal so fast, but looking for any special logic isn't going to bring you much joy in that kind of a film is it. Semi Pro is yet another Will Ferrell sports biopic parody. If I had ever seen one of the originals of this genre, if it is a genre which I assume it is, then these might make more sense to me, but why should the makers of these films care about that - after all, I have no particular knowledge of the genre being parodied, yet I have seen all the Ferrell parodies (I think). The only downside to the onslaught of these films is that by the time I came to Semi Pro I wasn't sure if I'd seen it before or not. (Actually there only seem to be three of these films. I thought there were about six.) Anyway, it's, you know, OK, I didn't laugh. I was quite impressed by the 70s disco parody, artistically.

The only time I was moved to comment on the Bond film was the reckless vandalism of an old hand-caned chair. But I did think about it more later. One thing I thought about was the bit where they demolish an old Venetian building in the course of battling over a silver suitcase containing $120 million. I am sure that sometime soon the external shots in that scene are going to look really fake, you know, people in 2020 will be saying 'Despite the truly awful oughties special effects...' but because they're probably still world's best practice and I have never seen a Venetian building collapse I am not entirely sure why they look fake. Perhaps one way around this in the future will be to eliminate the static, impartial camera shot, which looks like a special effects set-up. What do you think my friend?