Monte Carlo

Fear not, am sharpening my quill.

Ravenshrike, I've not seen the movie yet, but from the reviews I've read I'm beginning to form an idea. And that is Miller fell in love with the Furiosa character, making a conscious decision to use Max as a foil to launch her into the franchise. Max is big enough a presence to do it. It wouldn't be the first time during the creative process a secondary character became a muse, nor a 'secondary' actor stealing the lead's thunder (I give you Alan Rickman, who does it in virtually every movie he graces). Maybe Charlize is just an ultra-hot Alan Rickman. LOL. This, given Miller's age and bona fides, strikes me as a more likely reason why Furiosa is such a big deal in the movie than some sort of SJW conspiracy (and I'm one of those people who acknowledges the ability of SJW types to launch a conspiracy when it suits them). Just a thought.

I am a writer. Although I am English, and therefore use the language as God intended, I do write American syntax occasionally. I also love FO:NV. How much is there to do? Can help but not if its a gazillion words. Furthermore, do you want proof-reading or editing?

Hardy is an interesting actor and he keeps getting better. Give him ten years and he'll be very, very good indeed. I *loved* him in Inception. He was one of the best characters in it.

Aram, just out of interest would you mind sharing the titles of the older action movies you reference in your (splendid) review?

Having said that, Rhona Mitra is one of ours, and is proud of her role as a Geek Goddess. We love her too.

You are all welcome.

It's a bit like Top Gun. You can enjoy it as the most touching story of unrequited Gay love ever told (it makes The Liberace Story look like SAW) or enjoy it as a piece of jingoistic, Soviet-baiting aviation porn.

As someone sick to the back teeth of bloody superhero movies, I hope not.

The old-skool geezers wipe the floor with the Wheedon / Bay generation. I like it.

Sorry to derail, but the whole Ripley / Alien conversation sort of shoots and misses the point. By a mile. Alien has strong themes that are particularly relevant to women - pregnancy, rape, violation, motherhood and the strength required to manage (and finally triumph over) them all. Ripley has to be female. Aliens 2 (the best of the series) wouldn't make any sense if she wasn't. It's only because in 1979 the idea of a powerful female lead was so revolutionary that this is at all controversial (which is why Alien is so important, and why cinema / popular culture will be forever in debt to Ridley Scott). Please return to Mad Max, I haven't seen it yet. I'm hardly SJW of the year, but Alien is the best type of proto-feminist cinema. Sisters are doin' it for themselves without having to bash, traduce or make facile points about men.

I'm not going to be lectured to by Scandinavians. It's utter apples-and-oranges. You can't even begin to compare the socio-economic and cultural underpinnings of Scandie Social Democracy and what happens in the UK. Cradle-to-grave statist, high-tax coalition government obviously works for Scandinavians. That's great. It won't forever, in a globalised world.

The media show the 'best bits.' There will be a crowd of, say, two thousand, out of which fifty act like tossers. I'm more worried about the Judge Dredd 'Block War' style riots like the ones we suffered in 2011, TBH. Middle-class protestors are predictable and fundamentally harmless. The Mob, OTOH, are a different kettle of fish. That is definitely driven by an almost nihilistic level of wilful stupidity, and it worries me much more than the misguided capering of Jasper and Arabella with their Guy Fawkes masks.

Alternatively, it's a sign of bien pensant idleness and stupidity, by a small hardcore of idiots who come out and play twice a year. Most of them are middle-class kids. The remainder aren't even worth dignifying with argument or analysis.

Oooh Seveneves by Neal Stephenson is out very soon too.

Some historical mystery fiction... Philip Kerr - The Lady from Zagreb (reading it right now) Alan Furst - Night Soldiers, Midnight in Europe and Spies of the Balkans (whipped through these in two weeks) and to mix stuff up, Angles of Attack by Marko Kloos, a little military science fiction.

Er, we're committed to an in/out referendum in 2017. It's happening.

I like to think it means my comment was, er, piquant.

^ It's mainly only top-end properties that are an issue, and predominantly in London / SE England. Although Chinese investors like buying up large swathes of buy-to-let housing stock. 'Prime' central London is overwhelmingly Russian and Middle-Eastern now. Upper middle-class English people are having to live in ghastly, hitherto unexplored postcodes that don't have an 'S' and a 'W' in them.

He got more votes than the SNP and Lib Duhs combined, yet won only one parliamentary seat. It's another nail in the FPTP coffin, I suspect.

That's logical, Hiro, but perhaps unfair on foreigners. Many of whom probably treat older property with more respect than the locals (q.v. France, where expat Brits lovingly restore old Gites while the locals happily live in box-shaped monstrosities). IIRC Australia has a simple one per cent tax on foreign property acquisition. I think it should be locally-administered so councils / towns can decided how much external investment they want / need and local people can vote on it.

You could have put a NSFW or obscene material warning on this post, Wals.

What? Whhhaaaatt? The Rainbow Nation isn't a harmonious melting pot of fairness, a jubilee of hope? You're kidding me, right?

Which is also true of political parties in the first place. They've (re-)inflated a housing bubble, allowed most of our capital city to (continue to) be sold to Russian mobsters, and engendered the creation of a great number of zero-hours jobs. They've cut government services and failed to make savings from it. So no, not really. But no British government has done a good job since the War. We have property in London and when I visit the capital and stay there two things that most local people talk about are Property prices in London are very expensive and only foreigners can afford them There are many Arabs and Russians who are now effectively buying up London My argument to this would be The market determines the price of a particular property based on numerous factors like location. Is it the governments fault that a flat is that expensive in Chelsea? Its a global world, can you really prevent wealthy people from other countries from investing in areas like property? How would you reasonably prevent this? You do what most other countries do and impose a property tax on foreign nationals. Although, Bruce, it's lovely to see you embrace Globalised, low-tax ideology when it turns out your family own a multi-million pound property in one of the most expensive Boroughs in the UK. Like most left-wing SJW types, you've never had an opinion you couldn't afford.

I thought this article was a clever anti-SJW type trolling. But no, it's serious. Wow.