Saturday, May 12, 2007

This is a mind friendly post....

I finished and handed in the last of my PGCE course essays yesterday*. This made me very happy. To celebrate, myself and some fellow course members went for a drink, something to eat and of course, a zombie movie. As you do....

I am a great fan of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later so I approached the sequel 28 Weeks Later with a certain amount of trepidation (particularly considering the last film I saw at the cinema was the abysmal Spiderman 3). When I heard that Boyle was not directing, my heart sank until I discovered that the director was the man behind wonderful Spanish oddity Intacto, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. 28 Weeks Later is a very good film; tight, controlled and action packed. It has one of the best opening 10 minutes of any film I've seen for ages. It doesn't pull its punches and has some very unpleasant surprises. The frantic, kinetic camerawork takes some getting used to, but communicates very well the confusion and panic that occurs when the Infected attack.

I heartily recommend 28 Weeks Later, providing you have quite a strong stomach as Fresnadillo has lots of excellent fake blood at his disposal and is more than happy to use it every chance he gets. Especially in one sequence involving a field full of Infected and a helicopter. I was queasily impressed...

Something else that made me happy is this wonderful flash game. Click here.
Created by the people behind the odd wonderful-ness that is Samorost, it is a lovely little Flash puzzle game made to promote a Polyphonic Spree album and as you help the 3 lost members of the Spree, some of their curiously beautiful music is playing. Do mosey on over and have a look.

*My essay was on something called Mind Friendly Learning. I can assure you, the most interesting thing about it is it's name...

Movies
Spiderman 3 *
Kill Bill Vol 1 **
28 Weeks Later ****

7 comments:

Fat Roland said...

I'd forgotten about that Polyphonic Spree game. It's truly lovely and wonderful.

Well done on getting your work finished.

Tim F said...

Isn't all learning supposed to be mind friendly? Or have I completely misunderstood why I was in full-time education for 16 years?

9/10ths Full of Penguins said...

A very good point.

However, you can't have anything simple in teaching, everything must have a name that can be turned into an acronym and then bandied about in incomprehensible sentences.

For example:
"Using MFL in KS3 & KS4 is particularly challenging when taking into account SEN, G&T and parallel pupils"

In such ways do we justify our wages....

Tim F said...

Parallel pupils?

Kids in stripy shirts?

Midnight Candle said...

That "wonderful flash game" is indeed wonderful. Very cute!

Parallel pupils are to challenge the KS3 while MFL is in use, of course. (?) ;)

9/10ths Full of Penguins said...

It is wonderful.

Um.... Not really, good effort though!

Sarah said...

Yup, I loved the polyphonic spree game. Very relaxing.

I have a special horror of zombies, an overactive imagination and a propensity for nightmares (currently all work-related and house-buying-related) so I didn't watch 28 days later, though I saw the coolest advertising for it on the tube - graphic-novel style frames up the escalators. In fact, I wasn't allowed to watch Shaun of the Dead. My husband has a finely-tuned radar for what is going to stop him sleeping.