Funky_Gibbon

Trollhunter (2010) - 8/10 Norwegian 'found footage' movie about a group of college students who think they're filming a documentary exposing a hunter who illegally kills bears but soon find out that he's actually an employee of the Government who travels around hunting any trolls that wander out of their secret remote wilderness nature reserves and into populated areas. Great film although the ending is a bit jarring and seems tacked on.

American Manhunt: The Boston Marathon Bombings (Netflix) Three part documentary about the Boston Marathon Bombing that's just appeared on Netflix. It was interesting to see how the real events contrasted with the Hollywoodised version of them as they're depicted in the movie Patriots Day , particularly the mistakes and tensions between the different law enforcement services over how they handled it and the loss of control at certain times, as well as the details on how it affected different communities.

Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre - 6/10 Guy Ritchie's latest movie, starring Jason Statham, Hugh Grant, Josh Hartnett and Aubrey Plaza about a team of independent special agents who are tracking down a mysterious McGuffin that has just been stolen and is now being sold for $10bn. Kind of a Mission Impossible-lite movie. The second half of the film is better than the first thanks to some decent action but it's not something I'll go out of my way to watch again.

In addition to those already mentioned, the obvious one would be All The President's Men. Spotlight is pretty much a homage to it. There's also State of Play (although the original BBC series is better) as well as Zodiac and the new Keira Knightley film Boston Strangler.

It's not going to win any awards for originality, or indeed acting, but it's entertaining enough to pass the time when you're wide awake at 3am after the clocks have just changed and you've got many many hours to kill... 😉

Adult animated comedy series with Matthew McConnaughy as a foul-mouthed, secret agent Elvis, fighting crimes alongside his psychotically violent, drug-taking chimp sidekick Scatter. Lots of fun and a fantastic soundtrack too.

How many of them were Americans from Detriot?

They didn't 'insist' on 19%, they asked for 5% above the rate of inflation for 2022/23. Because that would already include the 5% imposed for 2022-23 by the Government that means they were opening their negotiation asking for around 12%. That sounds a lot but in reality it's just asking to be paid 5% more than they were paid in 2021-22, a sum that wouldn't even come close to restoring the nurses' wages back to what it was in real terms before 13 years of pay cuts. More importantly nobody actually expected to get it. You don't go into a negotiation telling everyone the actual figures that you'd be willing to accept. And it didn't take the focus away from any change. The single most important change to the system required is the training and hiring of more nurses to fill the massive hole in staffing numbers that the Government themselves say is required to run a safe service. Fill those empty jobs and most other issues disappear. To do that you need to make the job more attractive to new starters/need to give existing staff a reason not to quit and the most basic way to do that is to pay a salary that doesn't go down each year. That's simple dignity and respect towards your employees and it's something that a lot of public sector staff haven't received at all in the last 13 years. As for the media, most of them were never ever going to report on anything but the Government's line. Nothing the unions could have said or done was going to change the reality of how our partisan media reporting works in the UK.

Cocaine Bear - 7/10 Old-school creature feature horror-comedy about a bear that finds a load of cocaine in the woods and goes on a drug-fueled rampage.

Yeah I think it would have benefited them to spend a bit more time establishing the villian as a threat. Frankly it all went a bit Bond halfway through.

Luther: The Fallen Sun - 5/10 The TV series of Luther had jumped the shark towards the end so it's not a real shock that this film version is quite silly but even so it's entertaining enough. Andy Serkis does a good job of being menacing while having the most ridiculous hairstyle which added 1 point to my score.

I'll show the same backbone as a cat when I only have to walk the distance to next door's garden to get to work rather than several miles and I get to sleep for 20 hours a day.

And 'Esca' means boundary.

Yes I saw that when she posted it on Twitter a few days ago and was saying stuff like how when travelling from London it didn't 'feel' like the North until you reached Leeds. 🙄 The North, the Midlands and the South as we think of them today have ancient origins as they tend to mirror the old borders of the Anglo Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex (Cornwall was its own kingdom which is why the Cornish still feel they have their own identity separate from the rest of the South) Sheffield was a Kingdom of Northumbria border town/village with the Kingdom of Mercia for centuries. Dore is literally named that because it was the doorway between the two kingdoms. People can move the borders of our modern day counties around, create new ones etc but the origins of 'Northern' identity is much older and harder to erase with arbitrary lines on maps.