Saturday, May 10, 2014

Movie Review ... Bad Neighbours

 

 

neighboursA line from a famous Australian soap opera says: ‘everybody needs good neighbours’. It’s when they turn bad we have to worry.  Several tales of neighbourly disputes have made headlines providing morbid fascination.  ‘Bad Neighbours’ charts one such calamity.  An updated version of ‘Animal House’ with a pinch of ‘The Burbs’ thrown in, it valiantly attempts to wring much comedic potential from its premise.

Young married parents Mac (Seth Rogen) and Kelly (Rose Byrne) are looking forward to suburban bliss.  With their newborn daughter in tow, they begin their parental lives in a charming house.  Unfortunately a mob of party-goers move in next door led by Teddy (Zac Efron).  Boisterous and loud, their lurid manner quickly grates.  Determined to restore peace, Mac and Kelly resort to any measures necessary to bring order to their patch of paradise.

For any comedy to work there has to be likeable characters with which audiences can engage.  Unfortunately ‘Bad Neighbours’ hardly has any.  Whilst Mac and Kelly’s domestic situation initially draws knowing laughs, their increasingly nasty antics irritate.  You actually begin feeling sorry for Teddy and his gang despite their boorish behaviour.  The various ways the trio settle their arguments are reminiscent of the ‘Home Alone’ series as each set-trap becomes increasingly outlandish.

The performers try their best with Rogen and Efron making good use of their characters.  Efron strongly compliments Rogen’s exasperated parent even if he spends most of the film shirtless.  Director Nicholas Stoller keeps the momentum going despite endless comedic crudity.  Very little wit is seen as ‘Bad Neighbours’ aims for the lowest humorous denominator.  This type of comedy has fans that lap up the lewd and very rude mirth with ease.

‘Bad Neighbours’ features a litany of naughty neighbours many would want to avoid.  In spite of its vigilant vulgarity it raises some chuckles with the character’s behaviour easily making one consider moving house.

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Movie Review Rating out of 10:  5

Movie Review by Patrick Moore

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Patrick Moore's Movie Review is an alternative look at movie releases in Australia.

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A Cliff Robertson Moment

 

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Autumn Leaves (1956)

Directed by Robert Aldrich

Shown: Cliff Robertson

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Mother’s Day Cup Cakes

 

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Trivia Bits 10 May

 

  • Giacomo Bove, an Italian explorer (1852 - 1887), was icebound in the Arctic Ocean, shipwrecked off Tierra del Fuego and fever-stricken on the Congo River.
  • Traditional Argentine chimichurri sauce green in colour used for grilled meat and is made from finely chopped parsley, minced garlic, olive oil, oregano, and white or red wine vinegar.
  • To be called "Blue Stilton", a cheese must be made only in the English counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire and Nottinghamshire from local milk, which is pasteurized before use and have delicate blue veins radiating from the centre.
  • Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar was awarded the Order of Australia in November 2012.
  • Wolverines belong to the animal family of Weasel – Mustelidae.
  • New Yorker, David Karp, created the blogging platform Tumblr which allows users to post multimedia and other content to a short-form blog. Users can follow other users' blogs, as well as make their blogs private. Much of the website's features are accessed from the "dashboard" interface, where the option to post content and posts of followed blogs appear. Tumblr was founded in February 2007.
  • The bone in the human body that is also known as the femur is the thigh bone.
  • Set and filmed in the gold rush town of Ballarat, in Victoria, Australia The Doctor Blake Mysteries is an Australian television starring Craig McLachlan in the lead role of Doctor Lucien Blake, who returns home to Ballarat in 1959 to take over his late father's general medical practice after an absence of 30 years with Doctor Blake is a keeper of secrets and a solver of mysteries.
  • The Baltic States include Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania which gained independence from the Russian Empire in the wake of World War I, between the World Wars, the Baltic states also included Finland.
  • The 2003 film Harvie Krumpet was narrated by Australian actor Geoffrey Rush.

Cakes for Mother’s Day

 

 

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Prelude to Mother’s Day

 

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Quotables 10 May

 

MORE_THAN_WORDS

Friday, May 9, 2014

A Cliff Richard Moment

 

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Trivia Bits 09 May

 

  • World known award wine growing area, the Barossa Valley is 60kms northeast of Adelaide, South Australia.
  • The Jetsons is a 1962 to 1963 animated television comedy produced by Hanna-Barbera with the cast including George Jetson, his wife Jane and children Judy and Elroy.
  • The character Alice-Miranda Highton-Smith-Kennington-Jones was created by Award winning Australian author Jacqueline Harvey as an idea for a picture book but it soon became apparent that this perpetually positive seven-and-a-quarter-year-old had a lot more to say.
  • The 1958 novel All the Rivers Run was written by Nancy Cato who was an Australian writer with more than twenty historical novels, biographies and volumes of poetry published.
  • Starsky & Hutch is a 1970s American cop thriller television series, consisting of a 70-minute pilot movie and 92 episodes of 50 minutes each broadcast between April 30, 1975, and May 15, 1979 with a plot about two Southern California police detectives: David Michael Starsky (Paul Michael Glaser), and Kenneth "Hutch" Hutchinson (David Soul) usually tearing around the streets of fictional "Bay City, California" in Starsky's two-door bright-red Ford Gran Torino.
  • The original bass player for The Beatles was Stuart Sutcliffe.
  • The Australian outback Oodnadatta Track which runs from Marla to Marree in South Australia is 617kms in length.
  • There are seventeen UNESCO World Heritage sites in Greece including Temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae, Old Town of Corfu, Medieval City of Rhodes, Archeological site of Delphi and the Acropolis, Athens.
  • The main vegetable ingredient in the Sicilian dish caponata is eggplant.
  • With 102 islands, Lake Urmia, Iran's largest lake in northwestern Iran near Iran's border with Turkey, is too salty to support fish.

Quotables 09 May

 

real_as_a_dream

Thursday, May 8, 2014

A Cleo de Merode Moment

 

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Trivia Bits 08 May

 

  • The Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats is a collection of whimsical poems by T. S. Eliot about feline psychology and sociology which were collected and published in 1939. The poems formed the basis of CATS the a musical composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1980.
  • In the 2011 Canadian/British animated children’s television series Mike the Knight, the name of Mike’s sister is Evie who is voiced by Erin Pitt in North America and Jessica Hann in the United Kingdom.
  • St Mark’s Basilica is in the Italian city of Venice and has only been the city's cathedral since 1807, when it became the seat of the Patriarch of Venice, archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Venice, formerly at San Pietro di Castello.
  • The oldest library in Australia is the State Library of New South Wales starting as the Australian Subscription Library in 1826.
  • The porticoes of the Great Colonnade at Apamea in the Orontes River valley in northwestern Syria were paved with mosaics along the full 2-kilometre (1.2 mi) stretch of the avenue.
  • Plisse is a lightweight fabric with a permanent stripe produced by treating it with caustic soda.
  • The lyrics for "Puff, the Magic Dragon", the Peter, Paul and Mary song, were based on a 1959 poem by Leonard Lipton, a 19-year-old Cornell University student. Lipton was inspired by an Ogden Nash poem titled "Custard the Dragon", about a "realio, trulio little pet dragon."
  • Walter and Skyler White are characters in the TV series Breaking Bad.
  • A Klondike bar is not a gold bar but is a dessert generally consisting of a vanilla ice cream square coated with a thin layer of chocolate and was introduced in the early 1920's with the first recorded advertisement on February 5, 1922 in the Youngstown Vindicator, Ohio. Six original Flavours were available in 1922 all with chocolate coating: Vanilla, Strawberry, Chocolate, Maple and Cherry.
  • It is on the sport of Golf that a mashie niblick, an early wooden club, was used up to the 1940’s and was replaced by the No 7 iron.

Quotables 08 May

 

learn_to_nurture

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

A Claudia Cardinale Moment

 

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Trivia Bits 07 May

 

  • The Nanny is an American television sitcom originally broadcast 1993–1999, starring Fran Drescher as Fran Fine, a Jewish Queens native who becomes the nanny of three children from the New York/British high society.
  • In 1994, Scottish pop rock band t Wet Wet Wet had a hit with the song Love is All Around which was used on the soundtrack to the film Four Weddings and a Funeral.
  • The Dutch warship Koningin Regentes, her sister ship De Ruyter and the protected cruiser Zeeland bombarded the city of Denpasar, Dutch East Indies, on 16 and 17 September 1906.
  • The novel by Lee Child on which the 2012 movie Jack Reacher starring Tom cruise is based is One Shot.
  • Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief is a 2013 non-fiction book about Scientology written by Pulitzer Prize-winning American author, screenwriter Lawrence Wright.
  • The tallest and heaviest species of penguin is the Emperor Penguin, endemic to Antarctica, reaching 122 cm (48 in) in height and weighing anywhere from 22 to 45 kg (49 to 99 lb).
  • The name of the constellation Camelopardus comes from the Latin word for the animal giraffe.
  • The children’s character Bookaboo is a world famous rock puppy and legendary canine drummer. But Bookaboo has a little problem. Bookaboo loses his 'bojo' (his rhythm) and can not play unless he's been able to share a book with someone, hence his famous line "A Story a day or I just can't play".
  • The tango is performed in 4/4 time and is a partner dance that originated in the 1890s along the Río de la Plata, the natural border between Argentina and Uruguay.
  • Winning the most Wimbledon singles tournaments during the 1980’s was Czech American tennis player Martina Navratilova winning a record nine times.

Quotables 07 May

 

learn_predict

Tuesday, May 6, 2014

A Claude Rains Moment

 

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Trivia Bits 06 May

 

  • Iconic American actor Charles Bronson was born was born Charles Dennis Buchinsky north of Johnstown, Pennsylvania on November 3, 1921.
  • The ball game Lacrosse originated in America where it was originally played by Native Americans it was known by several different names, depending on the tribe, including "bagataway" or "the little brother of war" in the Ojibwe language, and "tewaarathon" in the Mohawk language.
  • Popular boy band Boyz II Men had a hit in 1992 with End of the Road.
  • Small town sheriff's deputy who awakens from a coma to find the world overrun with zombies, Rick Grimes, portrayed by English actor Andrew Lincoln, is a character from the 2010 premiering American post-apocalyptic horror drama television series The Walking Dead.
  • Timber from the leadwood tree, a protected tree in South Africa, burns very slowly and is often used for nightlong fires intended to keep animals at bay.
  • The Bahamas have the internet code .bs.
  • Linguicism is the unfair treatment of an individual based solely on their use of language.
  • Playing Wladyslaw Szpilman in the 2002 movie The Pianist was Adrien Brody an American actor and film producer.
  • Jezebel is mentioned in the Biblical Book of Kings and was a princess the daughter of Ethbaal, King of Tyre (Phoenicia) and the wife of Ahab, king of north Israel.
  • Amharic, a Semitic language, is the official language of the African country of Ethiopia.

Quotables 06 May

 

accepting_yourself

Monday, May 5, 2014

A Claudette Colbert Moment

 

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Trivia Bits 05 May

 

  • Calligraphy is made up from two Greek words kallos "beauty" and graphẽ "writing".
  • British produced situation comedy, Please Sir!, was created by writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey and featured the actors John Alderton, Deryck Guyler, Joan Sanderson, Noel Howlett, Erik Chitty and Richard Davies running for 55 episodes between 1968 and 1972.
  • Noted Australian singer Tina Arena was born Fillipina Lydia Arena.
  • The animal aye-aye is a lemur, a primate native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth and a special thin middle finger to fill the same ecological niche as a woodpecker.
  • From the 1961 Atlantic hurricane season, Hurricane Carla ranks as the most intense U.S. tropical cyclone landfall on the Hurricane Severity Index with a category 5 ranking.
  • Two cheeses, Stilton and Double Gloucester, are combined to make English Huntsman Cheese.
  • The 2010 Carnegie Medal was awarded to Neil Gaiman for the book The Graveyard Book.
  • Apollo 17 was the last Apollo mission to land on the moon.
  • The umbraculum is a symbol representing the religious leader of Roman Catholicism – The Pope. The Umbraculum from the Italian: Ombrellino, "little umbrella", is a historic piece of the papal regalia and insignia, once used on a daily basis to provide shade for the pope. In modern usage the umbraculum is a symbol of the Roman Catholic Church and the authority of a pope over it. It is found in the contemporary Church at all the basilicas throughout the world, placed prominently at the right of their main altars. Whenever a pope visits a basilica, its umbraculum is opened.
  • The fish, Tuna, is featured in the 2010 Australian documentary TV series The Hardliners with long-line tuna fishermen at the heart of the action-packed high seas adventure showing a unique breed of men who risk their lives every day chasing lucrative, high-grade wild tuna off the east coast of Australia.

Quotables 05 May

 

Be_who_you_are

Sunday, May 4, 2014