First tooth!

Amelie has her first tooth coming through! Just a sharp edge of white at the moment. She doesn't seem to be in much distress about it. Just loving shoving things in her mouth. ...and she's still sleeping beautifully...

Grandma and Grandad

Amelie is lucky enough to have two sets of loving grandparents. Sadly, neither lives in Melbourne. My parents flew over from London 6 weeks ago to meet her for the first time. So they have now been here for half of Amelie's life. They have seen her change so much in those weeks - the shape of her face, her physical development, the cute communicative noises she makes. Its been wonderful having them here to share those moments and I know its been an amazing holiday for them.

Its also been nice having babysitters in our city. Claire has been able to go to the gym every couple of days. And the two of us have got out to do some shopping, have a couple of meals, go to the cinema, and even see Steve Coogan at the Comedy Festival.

Saying goodbye to them at the airport tonight is going to be tough. They'll know they won't see their granddaughter in person for another year. But at least they are on Skype - so they will be able to see, hear and talk our little one. Amelie will learn to recognise her Grandma and Grandad on the screen. God bless the internet.

So, Mum and Dad, when you get back and read this... we all love you and miss you.

Happy Easter

Happy Easter from the Easter Bilby... eating the Easter Frog...

...and the Easter Bear...

FILM: Watchmen

I liked the film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's Watchmen about as much as I expected. It was as faithful to the classic comic as it could be while lacking the depth of the original. The themes are all there, just diluted - the twisted psyches of anyone who wants to dress up and fight crime, the threat of nuclear armageddon, the nature of humanity itself - but I felt they were all glossed over. As a result I never cared about any of the characters (though to be fair, Alan Moore hasn't written a genuinely sympathetic character since Swamp Thing).

There is lots to praise Watchmen for, with Moore's story of outlawed, flawed, or retired superheroes returning to investigate a 'mask-killer' that leads a threat to the whole world is still powerful. The characters still intrigue. The effects are excellent and the action is well-handled, if a little over the top. The casting is great and the acting is all spot on. The visual design was OK, with only one nerdy thing bothering me - Rorshach's mask is meant to be clearly black and white, never mixing - this is more about his extreme personality than a costume - but here its a blurry mass of beige and grey.

The real problem lies in the lack of explanation. I sympathise with the writers who had to cut out a hell of a lot. To give the characters - minor and major - the depth they had in the comic, would have required a 6 part mini-series. But if I hadn't read the comic I would have been confused by the montage sequence that glossed over the history of the 1940s superhero team. As I would have been by Ozymandias suddenly having a big purple cat with antlers. Claire (not a nerd) asked on the way home where the heroes apart from Dr Manhattan got their powers. They don't have any, one of the things the book explores is why they just decide to become heroes. But the film shows them punching through walls, slo-mo hovering in the air doing karate kicks, climbing up walls. This might look cool, but it gives the impression they are superhuman, and not the deeply flawed humans they are. [8/10]

I accidentally took my parents to a gay festival...

Claire and I decided to take my mum and dad, who are over from London, out for a drive into Victoria's countryside for a day trip. Our choice of pretty little country towns has been reduced quite a lot by the bush fires, but we happily headed out north-west from Melbourne to 'Australia's spa capital' - Daylesford, and its little sister town Hepburn Springs.
Based around natural springs, Dayleford is a busy, pretty, country town. It also seems to have a disproportionate number of gay men and lesbians in its community. Though a few of my gay friends have expressed an interest in both saunas and watersports I wasn't aware of spas being a particularly gay activity. Its a really nice place. And probably Australia's gayest town.

The number of rainbow flags out this particular weekend gave me the first hint that something else was going on. Then I found a brochure for Chillout Festival Daylesford - this is a 'thousands of topless men in a field, drink, drugs, dance music' kind of festival. This seemed more a 'stay at a hotel, mooch around town, eat, shop at ye olde collectables store, and sit back with a little bit of live entertainment in the evenings if you can be bothered' kind of festival. It blended in to the point that I don't think my mum and dad noticed or cared.

We all had a lovely day out, eating, wandering around the Hepburn Springs reserve (photos above), and Amelie was certainly chilled out.

Peek-a-boo!

Amelie - cuter than a squirrel

Amelie is getting bigger, stronger and more happy and settled by the day.
She has moved out of the moses basket in our room, and is quite happy in the cot in her own room, decorated with cute woodland animal wall stickers. Gotta love squirrels.

Watchmen - the comic

In preparation for the forthcoming film version, I re-read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's classic comic book, to see if it's as good as I remembered. Watchmen has been described as the 'Citizen Kane of comics'. This is a fair comparison. Both Kane and Watchmen broke new ground in what you could do in their respective medium - the narrative is multi-layered with different viewpoints, the characters are complex, flawed and psychologically-damaged, and the themes and tone are very serious. But also like Orson Welles' film, Watchmen has dated a little (feeling very 80s), and has a few parts you'd just like to skim over to get to the next great bit.
Watchmen is set in the 1980s. But an 80s where Richard Nixon is still US President and costumed vigilantes have been around since the 1940s, but were outlawed in the 70s. Where all but one of these 'heroes' were without super-powers - just a bunch of people with differing motivations for wanting to dress funny and punch criminals - from civic duty, to sexual impotence and repression, to parental pressure, to fascist or nihilistic political views. A world where the one person with super-powers, Dr Manhattan, has God-like power and is used to shift the political balance of the world.

When one former hero - the vile, rapist-murderer government agent known The Comedian - is murdered, the outlaw hero Rorschach begins his investigation. Rorschach is one of the finest fictional characters ever created. A twisted Batman - a detective as demented as he is driven, right-wing enough to make the reader uncomfortable rooting for him, frightening yet pathetic. Dave Gibbons' character design is stunning - a film-noir hat and trenchcoat, with a fluid black and white ink blot test instead of a face.
Gibbons' rigid 9 panel grid layout creates the perfect atmosphere of tension and claustrophobia - you wait for the artwork to explode along with the plot. The plot may be one of the few things that doesn't quite work anymore. The idea of doing something terrible to unite the world as it moves to the brink of nuclear Armageddon seems very much tied to its era. The nuclear fear just isn't as all-pervasive as it was when I was growing up in the 80s with talk of 4 minute warnings and fallout shelters. The threat is still here, but its one of many now, along with environmental, biological, terrorist, or financial disaster.

But Alan Moore knows how to write comics. You gloss over any minor faults, and a couple of those text only pages in between chapters, because you know you are in the hands of a master. You may not warm to any of his characters but you enjoy the way he writes them, and you are dying to know what happens to them. Watchmen is the first and only comic that many people have read as adults, due to its stature as a classic of literature, not just the comic book genre. Its not my absolute favourite, but its absolutely one of my favourites, and has most of the qualities that make me love comics so much.

What to review?

That review of Frost/Nixon will probably be the last film review on the blog for quite awhile. It was our last trip to the cinema before Amelie was born. Those days when Claire was heavily pregnant already seem like distant memories.

Anyway, without a babysitter, or even a gap of no crying between feeds of two hours in the evening, there won't be so much as a DVD watched at our place. So what do I fill my blog with? What do I review? I love reviewing. And compiling lists. I may have to start reviewing my comic collection. That's not an empty threat. That's actually a good idea. And cheap, too. But in the meantime, here's more cute baby photos.

FILM: Frost/Nixon

Peter Morgan, the writer of The Queen, adapted this from his own stage play, and again dramatises a true life event - this time the television interview between Richard Nixon and David Frost. Michael Sheen's Frost is not as accurate as his Tony Blair or his Kenneth Williams, but he gives the 70s TV playboy a realistic aura of arrogance masking lack of talent and passion. Frank Langela's Nixon is the more powerful performance - another mask of arrogance and defiance covering the rage and sadness at being the most hated man in America. The dramatised (ie. made up) scenes of negotiating the interview, and preparing for them like a mental duel are fascinating and funny. Where I get a little more uncomfortable is watching the re-enactment of the actual interviews. These scenes are undoubtedly gripping and tense, but they too are 'dramatised'. The wording and context has been manipulated for dramatic effect despite being on publis record and being seen by millions at the time. It seems a little dodgy to tamper with it. Still, its highly entertaining. [8/10]