I am a donut

So, it turns out that Berlin is a rather excellent city.  I had the opportunity to visit earlier this week as part of an assignment to the IFA 2015 consumer electronics show.  We were lucky enough to stay a few nights in a very conveniently located hotel and stay a few nights, giving me the rare opportunity to actually get to see a place during a business trip.

This being me, I'll get my gripes out of the way first - the trains, drains and smokers.  The S-Bahn trains are disturbingly British in their tardiness and overcrowding but very un-British in their lack of decent ticket machines - even Germans (assumedly not of Berlin) were struggling and the Messe station had only four machines to deal with hundreds of travelers at peak times.  At least it was also un-Britishly cheap.  As for the drains and smokers, both stink at all hours of the day.  Staring at the awe-inspiring architecture is somewhat dampened by regular gusts of eau de turd and you can't get a drink or a meal out without getting caked in tobacco smoke.

That said, the whole place is an architectural marvel.  It is massive in scale and they aren't shy about mixing large open spaces, parks and huge (huge) buildings.  Everything (other than the smell) is clean and there seems to be a huge amount of construction/repair work going on, giving it a feel of an industrious but culturally packed place.  For a major European city, it is relatively quiet, helped by how spaced out everything is.  The only real visits I managed were to the eerie Berlin Memorial wall and the Bauhaus Archiv, but passing the Brandenburg Gate, Reichstag and various memorials, museums and mix of architectures left me wanting to come back and explore some more.

That and the rather excellent culinary scene...

Say U.N.C.L.E.

So it's been a while, but I've finally got a subject with which to make an addition to this poor excuse for a blog...

The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (typing that out is rather annoying).  I'll admit up front that I do fondly remember the original series from my childhood so any opinion is accordingly biased.  I should also point out that I'm referring to the re-runs, not that I was around in the sixties when the series first ran.

Now, I do also have a soft spot for Mr Ritchie's work, especially the Holmes reboots.  In a lot of places, U.N.C.L.E. is similar in terms of being a slick, enjoyable update on a well-known franchise without too much tinkering to annoy die-hard fans or wreck the magic of the original source material.  The characters are entertaining and the plot is an undemanding spy-movie romp, similar to the warm, engaging Bond movies of old with a few smatterings of slightly cruder humour.

As you learn from the trailers, the plot throws together an American and Russian spy at the height of the Cold War, forced to overcome their animosity and prejudices to defeat a greater evil.  The relationship between the two lead characters is the centrepiece of the film and - as with the original series - is the source of the majority of the entertainment, both in terms of humour and slick action.

That said, the script and the plot don't really do the basic setup much justice and you're left wishing there was just a little more of the excellent verbal sparring between the two leads, or at least more of a differentiation in their styles and wit.  A couple of strong female characters are thrown into the mix to add fuel to the Molotov cocktail, but they don't really get enough opportunity to show off any real personality, beyond being ammunition for the boys to fight with/over.  Sometimes the humour does devolve into slapstick, but at other times it is genuinely inspired, including a high-brow argument over women's fashion.

Rather unfairly, it is actually Hugh Grant's supporting character who gets the best lines and he delivers them impeccably.  Given that he doesn't play a particularly large role in this movie (but don't fret - the setup for a sequel was as blunt as you'd expect), it just makes the lack of similar quantity and quality of wit for the other characters all the more disappointing.  The actors do try their best - Cavill does an excellent job of imitating Robert Vaughn's easy swagger without coming across as an irritating jock and Armie Hammer is a likable, if sadly under-exploited Kuryakin.  But the on-screen chemistry never really gets going and is broken up too often by set pieces labouring their love/hate relationship.  Indeed, the best scene is when all of the forced conflict is cast aside and the two find themselves on the same side.  Granted, this film needs to act as an introduction to their relationship as much as a good story in its own right, but you're left looking forward to the next installment where all of this narrative baggage is no longer needed, rather than enjoying this movie on its own merits.

All of these minor shortcomings are forgivable.  However, the main obstruction to proper enjoyment of what should be a straightforward, gritty buddy movie is Mr Ritchie's narrative device of choice for this season - the bleeding obvious flashback.  This is where a scene is played and then - just as it ends - is instantly replayed from a slightly different perspective, supposedly revealing a hitherto unseen twist in the plot.  Ritchie picks a similar piece of narrative bling in pretty much every movie he's made and uses it repeatedly.  But here - unlike the narrated plot reveals in Snatch or the entertaining flash-forwards in Sherlock - they are incredibly boring and detract from the flow of the movie.  They happen very frequently and the preceding scene is always shot in such a way that you know what's about to happen and dread the five minutes you're going to spend seeing the same scene all over again - only very slightly different.

The plot reveals themselves are also unforgivably lame, in that they are often mundane or you can tell exactly what is going to happen from the preceding set-piece scene - for example, a scene may contain a character issuing orders to someone off the edge of the screen, leading inexorably to the flashback scene where you'll be spoon-fed what was being ordered.  All in all it just comes across looking like the DP didn't plan the shots properly and missed half the action, rather than stylistic flair.  Far from increasing the suspense, these flashbacks wreck the rhythm of the movie, sap patience and feel like they were trying to squeeze more running time out of the plot than it could reasonably provide.

Also, annoyingly, some of the best action sequences are chopped up and delivered in super-slick, comic-book style frame-in-frame collages.  This simply gets in the way of you enjoying some wanton Hollywood action, all in the name of stylistic faff.

In the design business, this would be form dominating function.  It's just a tribute to the underlying story (not the plot) that an enjoyable movie can still emerge from underneath excessive creativity.

Where's Woolly

Er...so this weekend included a visit to the illustrious TOFT alpaca farm and shop near Dunchurch.  It's a very nice and well put-together setup, especially if you enjoy your crochet, or meeting fluffy, laid-back chaps that look like this.

More photos over in the Midlands gallery.

Only problem is that I'm left with a lingering urge to fire an RPG at something to reclaim some semblance of manliness...

Site feedback

Following the wildly successful launch of photography.garen.co.uk - the first in what will almost certainly be a huge range of Garen branded internet offerings - I've been getting some direct and indirect feedback on the site, layout and content.

It's all interesting and most is actually quite useful, so if you've got anything to add to my melting pot of mods and tweaks, please drop me a note at photos@garen.co.uk.

Orient Express

So it turns out that Shanghai is big (really big), wet, grey and really rather impressive.

Sadly, in the two days I was out there I didn't really get much of a chance to see a lot of it.  This was mostly due to the perpetual fog (it was fog and not the smog I'd been warned about) and torrential rain.  But in the pouring sky waters, it did have a charming Blade Runner air to it and I got to see enough to understand why most other visitors are impressed.

From the view on the 29th (of 60) floor of my well appointed (and surprisingly good value) hotel, I sampled the striking view out over a tiny section of the city, complete with all its neon lighting and graphic displays twinkling, flashing and throbbing away in the evening.  Cranes jutted out of the scenery here and there and the city looked like it was just alive.  Old concrete tower blocks were being demolished while next to them new skyscrapers were rising out of the ground.  Parks were dotted around and glitzy malls and condos mingled with ancient temples and little shikumen districts - it was a bit like a successful game of SimCity, only faster and with better traffic animations.

A telephone's excuse for a photograph

On visual inspection, the people seemed happy, busy, healthy and - in some places - doing rather well for themselves.  And the vast majority were suspiciously young.  I don't know what they did with everyone over the age of 50.

No wonder the US finds this all so threatening.  And - given how massively dependent we in the UK are on our rather easily replicated service industry - how threatened we should probably feel too.

But if they are going to take over the world I have one piece of advice for them - guys, it's an awful lot easier to take the bones out of animals before you cut them up and cook them.


It also got me thinking about how challenging it would be to be an expat stuck out there, mainly due to the language barrier.  More importantly, it got me thinking about how intimidating it must be for anyone to have to come over to the UK for any length of time for work and how it's hardly surprising that if you come from a very different cultural background, your first reaction will naturally be to try and find some semblance of familiarity, be it a segregated enclave or the local Irish pub.

Strange that we find communities of our "expats" in other countries perfectly reasonable but find "immigrants" (the UK media rarely distinguishes different visa types when discussing "foreigners") distasteful.

Padstow Puffins

So the latest little sojourn into domestic holiday delightfulness was the traditional pilgrimage to the lovely fishing town of Padstow.  We managed to go slightly out of peak season, which just means that the choking mass of humanity stifling the place is confined to the centre of town and avoids spilling out into the surrounding countryside too much.  Sadly, it also means the countryside is full of dogs and their owners, along with the associated noise and effluent.

Having thoroughly enjoyed our sea safari up in Oban a couple of weeks ago, we also booked a similar trip out of Padstow, not expecting the wildlife to be on the same level.  While disappointed by the total lack of dolphin and seal activity, we were pleasantly surprised that Padstow has its own (much less advertised) puffin colony, which was happily much more accessible.  If you're down there in the narrow window of the year when they are nesting on land with their colourful "breeding beaks" on, it's definitely worth the trip out.

Having previously trekked along the winding western coast out of Padstow to Trevone, we decided to take the ferry over to Rock and try the east side of the coast over to Polzeath.  We definitely preferred this side, which finds you winding between sand dunes and popping in and out of scenic viewpoints overlooking breathtaking coastline and picturesque beaches, not to mention the fact it's much less crowded.  On the stroll over there, we also looked out onto the island housing the bountiful bird colony we'd drifted contentedly around the day earlier.

Photos are popping up on the main site in their respective folders.  Given the event-based nature of a lot of the recent shots and the volume building up, I'm also going to have a go rearranging the bulk of them accordingly, rather than just splitting by topic.

Journey North of The Wall

As it happens, I was recently drafted to partake in an expedition into the northern wastes far beyond Coventry and out past the wall that was built to keep Mel Gibson and his dodgy accent out of blighty.

With any luck, the photographic ore that was unearthed on said voyage (nuggets below) should soon be loaded onto this internet, ready to be refined by the grinding commentary of an adoring audience.

Following that, hopefully I'll soon also be getting a proper photography website up and running.  But fear not - if you're the other person reading this, the blog will be linked to it directly.  One hopes.

Tschuss.