Something cheerful

I need cheerful news.  I'm struggling to find it.

Let's see:  * I thought the Mission Impossible 6 trailer looked pretty good - although you realise that Cruise has set ridiculous tough standards for topping the last movie's stunt sequences when you see him dangling off a helicopter and think "meh, hanging onto the outside of the military transport looked scarier."    But don't worry, I'm in the cinema in the first week of release.

*  Chris Hemsworth was being interviewed on Sunrise this morning.  He does seem to be a ridiculously nice guy.   Of course, he's an actor and spends months away at a time - you would have to fear that one marriage for him will not be enough.   No, no, I'm trying to be cheerful, I forgot.

*  Yes, I have started to worry that I have spent years drinking my hot drinks while they are too hot:

Very hot tea can raise risk of oesophageal cancer, suggests studyCombined with excess alcohol consumption, scaldingly hot tea raises relative risk fivefold, says Chinese researchers

Wait - that's not cheerful at all.

The search for cheerful will continue...

Update:  again, not cheerful - how that Cloverfield 3 movie that I had hopes for (Chris O'Dowd as an astronaut notwithstanding) has appeared on Netflix and is getting uniformly bad reviews.  Dang.

Update 2:  this does make me happier - when a female who used to like Tarantino films finally realises something and downgrades her opinion:

When I watched, white knuckles gripping my laptop, the footage of Uma Thurman's car crash on the set of Kill Bill, it struck me that Quentin Tarantino has been revealing himself to us through his art all these years.

It was only a day or so before Thurman's revelations that I had been discussing the writer/director's work with a filmmaker friend and we both realised we'd cooled on his shtick considerably, for two main reasons: his obsession with the N-word, and his obsession with sexualised violence.

While chatting to my friend, I copped to enjoying Tarantino's latest film, The Hateful Eight, largely for the spectacle of its 70mm cinematography, but that I also agreed with New York Times critic A. O. Scott's description of the film as "an orgy of elaborately justified misogyny". On reflection, it really did seem like Tarantino had designed the chamber piece specifically to explore one woman's abuse at the hands of seven men.

Then, I remembered how Harvey Weinstein himself had waved off accusations of Hateful Eight's misogyny, calling it "fishing for stupidity". ...

....no matter how Tarantino might defend his blood-spattered back catalogue as pro-woman or true cinematic equality, violence in the QT pantheon so often seems to be, with a few exceptions, something done by men to women. ...

Now, I'm not about to accuse QT of dreaming of cracking a gun butt over a woman's head (The Hateful Eight), scalping her (Kill Bill), murdering her in his muscle car (Death Proof) or branding and whipping her (Django Unchained). Indeed, plenty of people have called Tarantino a feminist director specifically because of his plethora of female characters and willingness to treat them just as badly as their male counterparts.

But a theme, as it were, has emerged: Tarantino loves to put his female characters through hell. We know now, from Thurman's account of his on-set behaviour, that he also likes to do the same to at least one of his actresses in the name of authenticity in performance.