Broadchurch 3

It may be that I'm out of step with many, but I am not enamoured of Broadchurch 3. Apart from the police duo and Beth Latimer there isn't a character to really like. They're all slightly odd embittered people, many of them up to suspicious activities. As snippets of how a major incident affects all the people within the community this series is  puzzling. Unless the underlying theme is rape in all its manifestations, the various snippets we get - such as Hardy's daughter's problem - become distractions. Yes, it may be telling that a policeman's daughter is silly enough to make pictures of herself available and the male teenagers seem obsessed with catching porn on their computers - and yes, the policewoman's son is guilty as hell - but is this a reflection on society in general, or the fact that even police personnel don't take note of what their offspring are doing? Computer porn certainly seems rampant in Broadchurch, with Trish's husband and nearly every other male involved to some degree.

 I'm not even sure that Trish the victim is quite what she seems, and there are so many characters who could have been the perpetrator of the crime that it seems silly to try and guess, much less work it out. With so many possibilities, the rug could be pulled from under our feet at any time. We may not have even "met" the rapist. Now that other ladies have come forward with complaints, the rapist may not be a Broadchurch inhabitant at all.

While the acting is very good, the weakness (for me) is the storyline. I think the only way this series can conclude is if the rapist actually confesses and tells all, because there doesn't seem to be any route of discovery otherwise. Almost everything could be a red herring, or it could be a real clue. I think I will be glad to have it all sorted on Monday night.

Die Hard 4

A wine cooler and a bucket have been pressed into service to hold the flowers that keep arriving. People are so kind!
More than usually at the mercy of the tv schedules these days, I recorded Die Hard 4 and sat down with high expectations to watch it.
It is hard to convey the growing sense of unease it gave me. The spirit of heroic adventure pervading the first John Maclean movie degenerated into a comic strip cartoon within the first few feet of film and I half expected the BIFF, BANG, KRUNCH explosions to litter the screen. I grow weary of 30-year old teenagers who rush into supposedly complex situations, size them up in a split second and start pushing buttons - the correct ones, mind you - to avert the catastrophic explosion that will blow them to kingdom come if they get it wrong. I worry for the state of society when it is OK for a determined cop to career down a motorway in a juggernaut hurling innocent road users to certain destruction but who demands that the entire united states airforce must be deployed to save the daughter of that same cop. Promise me! he cries, ramming another innocent victim against a motorway pillar. I despair of films that show villains bouncing off concrete buildings and falling out of helicopters without so much as a bruise, or leaping gymnastically (and impossibly without a springboard) around lift shafts and turbine rooms.
And surely jet pilots are trained not to blow up civilian infrastructure including motorways in case they kill hundreds in pursuit of one man? Let's hope so.
One has to wonder what films such as these teach young people today.
Certainly not kindness, nor selfless bravery to save others. I could possibly have argued the John MacLean of the the first film wanted to save his wife and the people with her. But this hard-bitten version of the hero went on a rampage and it wouldn't be going too far to say he caused more damage and loss of life than the villains.

Etiquette

I bought a couple of little mementos of my visit to Britannia - one of which is a small book called 'Hints on Etiquette and the usages of Society' published for the first time 150 years ago. Did you realise that etiquette is "the barrier which polite society draws around itself as a protection against offences the law cannot touch - a shield against the intrusion of the impertinent, the improper, and the vulgar - a guard against those obtuse persons who, having neither talent nor delicacy, would be continually thrusting themselves into the society of men to whom their presence might (from the difference of feeling and habit) be offensive, and even insupportable."

This is going to give me hours of amusement, I can tell. Did you know that "well-bred people arrive as nearly at the appointed dinner hour as they can. It is a very vulgar assumption of importance purposely to arrive half an hour behind time; besides the folly of allowing eight or ten hungry people such a tempting opportunity of discussing your foibles."

I'll never be late for anything again!