Ayrton Senna was a Brazilian Formula 1 driver, who became infamous during the 80s and early 90s as being one of the greatest in the world, and for a much-publicised on-and-off-track feud he had with his McLaren team-mate, Alain Prost. During the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix, Senna’s legacy became set in stone when he crashed and died during a race in Italy, provoking racing regulations to be reconsidered and ensuring he would be the last person to die during a race.
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Monthly Archives: January 2017
2016 Oscar Nomination Predictions
Every year Shane over at Film Actually hosts an Oscar nominations contest, wherein we try to guess what films will be nominated. I’ve won a prize in the past, so I persist every year in the naive hope that I can win something again. As usual I’ve seen precious few of the films I’m predicting, but I shall predict nonetheless. Continue reading
My Weeks in Film, 2017 Weeks 1-3
Well this is a good start, isn’t it? I know I’ve let two weeks go by without a weekly post before, but three? THREE? It’s unheard of. Well, it was, but now it’s happened and, given how this year is going, it may well become the norm. The problem was last weekend, when I took on a fairly sizeable craft commission for Aisha’s work. I say sizeable, but that only relates to the amount of work required, not how impressive the finished result was and certainly not in terms of how much I got paid. The job led to far more post-1am bedtimes than I’d intended, and also led to me going to bed with paint in my hair three nights in a row. It’s done now, phew, so it’s back to planning the wedding and not writing reviews. Also, I’ve not had much of an urge to post a weekly piece because I haven’t actually watched all that many films, certainly not any from my lists. In fact there was a period of eleven days where I watched nothing. Not a damn thing. As it goes, in the past three weeks I’ve watched a total of six movies, which might be my lowest tally since I started this blog. And had I not run out of clean shirts yesterday and spent the evening ironing fresh ones, that total would probably be at least one lower. None of this is all that important though. I know what you’re here for, my mini reviews of these films, so here they are:
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Collateral Beauty
Howard Inlet (Will Smith) was a high-flying, smooth-talking New York marketing whizz, until two years ago when his six year old daughter died. He returned to work eighteen months later, but his understandable change of character has left him shut down and closed off to all around him. His work has suffered, and the business he co-owns with best friend Whit (Edward Norton) may go under unless something can be done. After hiring a private investigator, Whit – along with colleagues Simon (Michael Pena) and Claire (Kate Winslet) – discover that as part of his recovery process Howard has written letters to the entities of Love, Death and Time, so the trio decide to hire actors to portray these facets of the world and confront Howard, in an attempt to prove he is crazy so he’ll be forced to sign his ownership of the business over to them.
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What Kind Of Year Has It Been? 2016 Edition
Happy New Year everyone! 2017 has begun, the year that shall not be named has passed, so it’s time to take stock of how well the last twelve months went, and what the next ones have in store for me and my little corner of the internet. As so much has been made of how generally awful last year was, I’ll only be looking at the positives, which is also something of a resolution for me. So, here’s some great stuff that happened to me last year: Continue reading