Monthly Archives: January 2010

The Bens 2010

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I freely admit to nicking this idea from my friend Bob, who has to have regular dialysis and so gets through a lot of films and awards his own annual Bobs to them. So, here are the 2010 Ben Awards, for movies seen during 2009.

The guiding criterion of the Bens is the principle oft-stated by Roger Ebert and repeated by me so often that Bonusbarn now likes to get in there first: it’s not what it’s about, it’s how it’s about it. Also (like the Bobs), as any movie seen is eligible the winner in any category doesn’t have to be new.

Best movie shortlist

Bubbling under: Layer Cake, Valkyrie

The winner: Inglourious Basterds

The judges note: for its sheer panache, exuberance, total in-your-face disregard of history and recycling of Ennio Morricone, it can only be this one.

Best performance shortlist

Bubbling under: Sacha Baron Cohen (Brüno, Brüno), John Malkovitch (Buck Howard, The Great Buck Howard); Meryl Streep (Miranda Priestly, The Devil Wears Prada). All very good, all cursed by the fact that they are in fact so good they could do it in their sleep.

The winner: Christoph Waltz

The judges note: rare as it is for Tom Cruise to get any kind of acting award, he is certainly worthy of consideration for so completely burying his film star persona in his portrayal of the noble but ultimately doomed von Stauffenberg. Quentin Tarantino is good at getting actors you wouldn’t normally associate with the part to turn in a master performance (cf. Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill pt 2) and in 2009 he triumphed with Christoph Waltz, whose name may be on everyone’s lips in his native Germany but is barely heard of outside it; the creator of the charming, slimy, ruthless, highly intelligent, mesmerising Col. Hans Landa – one of the few baddies you actually want to win and then kick yourself for realising that he’s sucked you in too.

Best SF or Fantasy shortlist

The winner: Let the Right One In

The judges note: the only vampire movie it has been worth watching the past decade.

Best animated movie shortlist

The winner: WALL·E.

The judges note: while the other movies on this list successfully used animation to portray real people, WALL·E used animation to ascribe emotions and feelings to a mechanical device that are more realistic than many actors can manage.

Best comedy shortlist

The winner: Brüno

The judges note: awarded even though, or perhaps because, the judges spent half the movie with their eyes shut; and even though he’s done it all before.

Best quirky / indy movie shortlist

The winner: Telstar

The judges note: comedy, tragedy, good acting, excellent music and a faithful recreation of period. The same could almost be said of The Boat that Rocked andStone of Destiny but in the former (fictitious recreation of the Radio Caroline heyday) the tragedy is just a bit too fluffy and nice and in the latter (slightly fictioned-up account of how some genuine Scottish students stole the Stone of Destiny from Westminster Abbey and brought it back to Scotland) you only really care about the outcome if you’re Scottish.

Best crime movie shortlist

The winner: Layer Cake

The judges note: this is probably the role that got Daniel Craig the Bond gig, but here he shows he is so much better than that. This is the movie Guy Ritchie would make if Guy Ritchie could actually make movies.

Best movie featuring Bill Nighy shortlist

The winner: Valkyrie

The judges note: not only does Nighy actually resemble the historical character he plays, but apart from the only occasional trademark Nighy grimace he actually acts the part.

Best previously seen and worth rewatching shortlist

Bubbling under: The Whole Nine Yards

The winner: Master & Commander: The Far Side of the World.

The judges note: one of the very few cases where Hollywood takes rights to a book and improves on the original. They also note that while Paul Bettany is far too young to be Dr Stephen Maturin, this is made up for by the flawless casting of Jack Aubrey, Killick, HMS Surprise and other roles.

Best overcoming of the plot’s sheer predictability shortlist

The winner: The Commitments

The judges note: you have to be brain dead and/or historically illiterate not to work out how any of these are going to pan out, but The Commitments does it with Irish humour and great music.

Best phoned-in performance shortlist

The winner: Clint Eastwood

The judges note: for most of the movie he is, while still very good, undeniably Clint Eastwood doing a post-retirement pensionable Dirty Harry. Then suddenly we get taken by surprise.

Finally, for the record, here is the full list of all contenders for 2009.

Narnian Tourist Board advises: lay off the Turkish Delight

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There’s a school of thought that quite understandably sees snow as nasty slushy cold wet stuff, good only for closing schools, cutting power lines and blocking roads. But there is still a certain something to it: the blurring of all lines, natural and artificial, to smooth white; the token resistance and then yielding crunch of it underfoot. If Lucy had stumbled through the wardrobe into a desert land locked in a permanent drought, the Narnia series would never have got off the ground.

Best Beloved made it to work safely by bus and reports “10 perfectly formed snowmen symmetrically placed on the steps of the Martyrs’ Memorial, wearing sunglasses.” Sadly I have no picture of this. The two men in her life are at home due to closure of school and workplace so at least I’ve been able to take other pics to chronicle the event.

Albert muses that it’s better than pigeon poo, anyway.

Abingdon School manages to look even more like Hogwarts than usual.

Some of the inmates pupils have applied their privately-educated braincells to building an igloo.

I walked into town for the sake of it and bought a paper at West End Newsagents. The manager couldn’t contain his delight that the new under-cutting, business-stealing, utterly unnecessary WH Smith was closed, unable to hack it in a mere 12 inches of snow. That’s why Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers rather than a nation of chain store staff. He was correctly identifying our strength.

Medical mirth

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To make the long winter evenings at InsanelyRun fly by, I very unprofessionally started to keep a file that I called Cheap Giggles: turns of phrase from our books that got passed around the office to crack the occasional smile on the face of the hard worked, badly managed staff. Here are some of them …

  • “Difficulty in extracting prostatic fluid experienced by practitioners as well as the undesired infelicitous mode of the massage also led to its ill-starred fate.”
    – an author laments the sad decline of the science of prostate massage
  • “I made an effort, when not taking Nystatin, to correlate my balanitisoutbreaks with sexual contacts and my wife’s vaginal yeast infections.”
    – from a book on prostatitis. Everyone should have a hobby, eh?
  • “I have been on medical leave of absence and was unable to obtain another good set of stained prostatic fluid.”
    – ibid. What a disappointing break it must have been.
  • “Does your bladder problem make you feel depressed?”
    – from a questionnaire in a book on urogynaecology. (our Production Manager’s answer: “no, I’m pissing myself”)
  • “Urine loss during provocation can be significantly decreased by crossing the legs.”
    – ibid.
  • “The loss of anal contents during intimate times can adversely affect a woman’s quality of life.”
    – ibid, chapter on faecal incontinence. I feel an expression featuring negative faecal content and Mr Holmes would be very appropriate at this point.
  • “In geographical terms, Australia is the driest continent on Earth. Regrettably the same cannot be said for the state of its inhabitants.”
    – ibid, chapter on the prevalence of urinary incontinence in Australia
  • “The appearances of internal sphincter can be described as being analogous to the white meat of chicken breast as opposed to the red meat appearance of the external sphincter.”
    – ibid. Never let this man carve your chicken.
  • “Stripping of veins is very stimulating”
    – book on anaesthesia.
  • “… patients who do not like to sit on public toilets and hover instead …”
    – yet another book on incontinence
  • “Antigen-pulsed DCs are capable of stimulating a response simply by injection into naive mice.”
    – book on prostate cancer. Presumably clued-up mice refuse to be injected.
  • “I would suggest that Figure 2 was seen as an alternative to Figure 3, although Figure 5 could perhaps appear in addition to Table 4 which contains additional data not reproduced in that table.”
    – covering letter for a submitted chapter on prostate cancer, just making everything clear.
  • “… the higher incidence of prostate cancer in blacks may partly be due to the lower age of first sexual intercourse and the higher number of sexual partners, both of which are thought to be associated with a higher risk of prostate cancer.”
    – our contribution to racial awareness, from the first edition of a book on prostatic diseases that predated me. We cut it from the second edition.
  • “Many of the authors in this book were pioneers in endoscopic techniques and had to boldly go where no endoscopist had gone before”
    – introduction to book on endoscopy.
  • “Art illustration of best positions for colonic examination”
    – legend for figure in ibid.
  • “Vaginal hysterectomy was successfully performed — it provided relief to the patient and was an exhilarating experience for the operator.”
    – book on hysterectomy
  • “Vaginal hysterectomy is the least invasive route after all, one is using the portal designed by God.”
    – ibid.

Another cheap, easy target form of humour was devising insults based on actual medical terms:

  • You imperforate anus!
  • You capacious vagina!
  • You pancreatic pseudocyst!
  • You incompetent cervix!
  • You pathologic clot!

And finally, some interesting organisations that really do exist (or did, 10 years ago):

  • Erectile Dysfunction Alliance
  • Serious Hazards In Transfusions
  • Superficial Bladder Cancer Working Party
  • The Hospital Infection Society