Like mother like daughter

A predisposition to develop frizzy hair in a humid climate is apparently hereditary. Hear is the back of Amelie's head on the Gold Coast. That hair is straight in Melbourne.

Looking cute in spots or stripes is also hereditary.

Best albums of the 2000's

I love a good end of the decade list. These are my 20 favourite albums of the last 10 years (at least they are today).

1. Nick Cave - Lyre of Orpheus/Abattoir Blues
2. Kings of Convenience - Quiet is the New Loud
3. MIA - Kala
4. Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand
5. Bloc Party - Silent Alarm
6. Jarvis Cocker - Jarvis
7. Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock and Roll
8. Antony & the Johnsons - I Am a Bird Now
9. The Panics - Sleeps Like a Curse
10. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Fever to Tell
11. Arctic Monkeys - Whatever People Say I Am…
12. The Strokes - Is This It
13. Magnetic Fields - 69 Love Songs
14. TV On The Radio - Dear Science
15. Johnny Cash - American IV: The Man Comes Around
16. Amy Winehouse - Back to Black
17. Arcade Fire - Neon Bible
18. Goldfrapp - Felt Mountain
19. Klaxons - Myths of the Near Future
20. Lambchop - Nixon

A lot of great music had to be squeezed out to form this list. Though I'm inclined to think the 90's were a better decade for music. If I put together a similar list for the 90's, I'd be a lot more emotionally engaged with the choices. That said, the 20 records above are all killer, no filler. Well, apart from Danny Boy by Johnny Cash, but he was dying, so let's give him a break. And the obvious filler on the Magnetic Fields album, but that was kind of the point - if you don't like one song there are 68 more to please you. Interesting that no artist appears more than once. No-one pulled off the job of wowing me twice.

Amelie likes birds, not beaches

We spent Amelie's first Christmas up on the Gold Coast with Claire's parents. This is Burleigh Heads, viewed from our 6th floor apartment.

That silhouette above is a kookaburra that came to visit. Amelie liked it. Here's a close-up.

What she didn't like was the beach. Or more precisely, sand. I think she she disliked the feel of it on her feet, the fact you can't brush it off, and the difficulty of standing up on it where you've just learned to stand.

She enjoyed the holiday once we decided to stick to Victoria time, instead of adjusting to Queensland. Amelie made this decision for us by waking up at 5.00am every day. But that is a beautiful time to walk down to the the sea.

FILM: Weekend (1967)

Jean-Luc Godard made some wonderful films in the 60's, and I'm sure Weekend had quite an impact at the time with its sexually-explicit dialogue, graphic violence, and stream-of-political-consciousness narrative. We follow a nasty middle-class, money-driven couple on a drive to the country, who encounter revolutionaries, philosophers, farmers and cannibals. It has a very nice tracking shot through an angry traffic jam. It was probably so influential that it became the template for every cliched film student project ever made - it makes no sense, it lacks humour, character, emotion, plot, or anything to hold attention. It was probably never designed to be a piece of entertainment, but even as an exercise in chin-stroking, watching Weekend is a hard slog. [3/10]

Licenced to Drive

I passed my driving test! At the third attempt. I knew could pass, as I only failed the last one on a stupid error - I sped up to 60 kph when I saw the '60' sign instead of waiting until I passed the sign. Technically speeding. Deserved to fail. But I didn't bother with any more lessons between that test and the 3rd one.

The first half went really well and my reverse park was flawless. The tester was about 15 years younger than me, which made me think "who are you to judge my driving?" Then I forgot to indicate when he told me to pull over to add the scores in the first half, and I realised there was plenty to judge in my driving.

But I passed. The chief criticism was driving too slowly. Something I need to work on, but when you fail one test for speeding you tend to overcompensate. Only driven once since getting my licence, bu I know I'll get better through the next year with practice. Claire did remarkably well in her go at being a passenger inher own car. We've both got some learning to do - fun times!

FILM: The Wrestler (2009)

Darren Aronofsky's beautiful film about an over-the-hill wrestler is painful, emotionally and physically as you watch Mickey Rourke pull staples out of his skin, lamenting his fall from greatness. Rourke is amazing as Randy 'The Ram' Robinson, living in a trailer park, estranged from his daughter, and working by day at a supermarket deli counter. The only lights in his life are the friendship he has with a stripper (Marisa Tomei) and reliving his glory days at night, on the local wrestling circuit. These are men who do it for the love of it - it being put on a leotard, sharing steroids, and choreographing some severe punishment for each other. When a heart attack prevents him from doing the one thing he loves the film becomes truly tragic, as he fumbles his attempts to reconnect with daughter and is drawn back to the ring. [10/10]

Amelie - these are a few of her favourite things

Thought I'd catch up on some things that Amelie enjoys doing. Here she is...
...reading...

...hula-hooping...

...playing tambourine...

...gardening...

...and her favourite, riding her bike!

FILM: 500 Days of Summer (2009)

A romantic comedy that aims straight for the heart of indie kids who are too cool for Kate Hudson or Katherine Heigl. The Garden State market, basically. But this is not in the same league as that funny, touching, Shins-career-launching film. Zooey Deschanel is neither interesting or likable as flighty Summer, Joseph Gordon-Levitt is more interesting but still unsympathetic as Tom, whose relationship with Summer is counted in days, and shown to the audience in non-chronological order. The supporting characters are all cliched, the 'offbeat' script is not off enough to be be funny or engaging, and referencing Belle & Sebastian and The Smiths in the script does not make it more entertaining. [3/10]

FILM: Milk (2009)

Society, and Hollywood, have caught up with the themes of sexual freedom from Gus Van Sant's early arthouse films, allowing him to give the full mainstream feel good drama treatment to the biography of Harvey Milk. Sean Penn is excellent as the warm, vulnerable and driven gay rights activist, playing his love affair with Scott (James Franco) with real humour and tenderness. Milk becomes a San Francisco councillor in the late 70s, protests against the right-wing Christian lobby, and is murdered by disturbed colleague, Dan White (Josh Brolin from No Country For Old Men, great again). Some of the recreated events seem a little cliched, and if you've seen the Oscar-winnng documentary from the 80s - The Life and Times of Harvey Milk - it lacks depth, but overall it is moving, uplifting, and beautifully acted by all. [8/10]

FILM: Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Quentin Tarantino's World War II adventure is suspenseful, funny, brutally-violent. The opening scene with Christopher Waltz as Col Hans Landa, the 'Jew Hunter' interrogating a farmer hiding Jews, is unbearably tense, reminiscent of Lee Van Cleef's entrance in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, but with Tarantino's trademark length dialogue in French. Suddenly we are jolted into humour - very dark, very funny scenes of Brad Pitt's 'Basterds' troop of American Jewish soldiers striking fear into the Germans as they scalp their way through the Nazis in occupied France.

What makes this different from other wartime adventures is the way it casts the Jewish characters as the heroes - not victims or noble survivors, but violent kick-ass warriors like 'The Bear Jew', or in the case of the Melanie Laurent as Cinema manager and Jew-in-hiding Shosanna, transforming (with a little help from David Bowie on the soundtrack) into the terrible, beautiful spirit of Jewish vengeance in an amazing scene that changes the end of the war in a way that will leave you wishing that was exactly how the Nazis did get their comeuppance. [9/10]