Django

The D is silent

We saw Django Unchained. Yet another great idea from DLL, even if it's hardly going out on a limb. Tarrantino films don't disappoint.

The unchaining happens early on, and then there's loads of sharp talk, dark humour and violent mayhem. The locations are beautiful, the light changing as the story goes through the seasons.

I have not read any reviews. Danny Baker tweeted his wife's opinion of the critics' collective opinion. Not really dependable, she said, but in a more Tarrantino-esque profanity-rich way. I did hear a short radio item about Samuel L Jackson playfully trying to “get his interviewer to use the n-word”, and the film is littered with these, including references to the nigger cage, and a mining company throwing dead slaves into the nigger hole. Anyone with their knickers in a knot about the language used in a film might be better off publicising and protesting the continued use of people as an expendable resource through exploitation and a twisted pursuit of financial gain at whatever cost. There's still mining, sugar and cocoa, Chinese extraction companies, a long list of the very wrong, going on while our politicians debate the size of Mars bars and why Warrington Council ran out of salt during the snow.

I don't like censorship. Something deep down tells me it is a bad thing. Bad, fatally flawed, ineffective. One of those things that is so unwieldy and ponderously impossible to operate that even were it sensible it won't work and isn't practical. As it isn't sensible in any case, the idea should be on the 'rubbish idea' pile and left behind for the rubbish idea it is. Try this: who do you know that you would 100% trust to be the arbiter of what your kids and you should and shouldn't be exposed to, and when. How do you apply that to soldiers, to firemen, to ambulancemen dealing with trauma in real life? How do you moderate their exposure?

That said, whatever you think about censorship, this is plainly and patently ridiculous: DLL is seventeen. Very shortly she'll be eighteen. Why does getting her in to see Django go from a criminal operation planned and executed down to the last little detail one day, to a right the next? Absurd

A nice Andy Murray

Our favourite takeaway. So special, it has it's own timezone. The film was two and three quarter hours long. BLISS placed the order for twenty five past seven. We left the cinema at half past, had to walk back to the car and drive about twenty minutes. “This time” I thought, “we must've finally nailed it”.

Nope. Still a twenty five minute wait, with two “two minutes, they're just putting it all together” progress reports along the way. Oh, and just a garlic and a chilli naan short when we unpacked the bag. I committed heresy. “Should we go somewhere else?” Apparently we shouldn't. BLISS's right. They get the food spot on. That's the important thing.

Snow

More snow on the way. K's new bed didn't arrive (no delivery drivers, depot about fifty miles away). Our road remains low on the gritting pecking order. As in not on it at all. Should be interesting if there's a drop in temperature as well as more snow. It's uphill at either end, and I'm awful in the snow (BLISS would say the 'in the snow' is redundant).