Kill (2023): 8/10
I saw this described as an Indian Die Hard on a train, and I can’t improve on that. An enormous extended family of criminals are on an intercity train with the plan of robbing a couple of carriages’ worth of passengers, but there’s two Indian Army commandos also on board. The start of the film has just enough of a story to give some emotional heft to the copious violence that follows. There’s good tension throughout, lots of blood, lots of killing, some funny show-off moments, lots of fighting long after the fighters should already be dead, great fun.
Twisters (2024): 9/10
Anthony Ramos and some people who weren’t in Hamilton (Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell) are chasing tornadoes. They’re big and scary! Exhilarating from the get-go; feelgood country soundtrack; I was in a happy mood for the whole walk home.
One of the subplots is a little cartoonish, preventing me from bumping the rating up to 9.5. But on a rewatch I could tune this out and focus on the parts that I liked, which was everything else.
One thing I wondered was how much water a polymer could potentially absorb; the answer is a lot – 100 to 1000 times its mass in water for sodium polyacrylate.
Sulis 1907 (2023): 7/10
With an English title of ‘The Riot’, this is the story of the formation of a union by workers in the Sulitjelma copper mines amidst efforts by the company to undermine worker solidarity. It builds slowly, then strongly, but I found the conclusion underwhelming and part of the ending cheap; the epilogue text carried more weight.
It’s based on historical events, I assume very loosely.
Stormskerry Maja (2024): 4/10
I’d seen that this was a Finnish production, and was surprised at how Swedish the dialogue sounded; it turns out to be set in the Swedish-speaking Åland islands, which are now an autonomous region of Finland.
It’s the 19th century. Maja starts the film as a teenager, married off to a man she doesn’t care for; I cared for neither character as they settled happily on a rocky island and had lots of children.
These little islands are called “skerries” in English, and there are lots of them:
The Crimean War and some English baddies come and go, people die. It has its moments, for which I can perhaps thank the two-and-three-quarter-hour runtime – if they’d cut it down to size, I might have been bored for all of it.
Pulp Fiction (1994): 8.5/10
Now I want to dance. I want to win. I want that trophy. So dance good.
I saw this on the big screen – Palace doing one of its occasional “retrospectives”, selling enough tickets to put on two sessions. I remember Pulp Fiction being all the rage when I was 10, but I didn’t see it at the time, perhaps for legal reasons. And then I just never watched it as an adult either.
Anyway it’s a very different side of Samuel L Jackson than what we see in Star Wars.
We follow some criminals in a sequence of interlocking stories told out of chronological order. There are plenty of lines I recognised from other people quoting them. Jackson is tremendous; Uma Thurman is great but plays too small a part.
A couple of elements don’t quite comport with modern standards of political correctness. Almost the entirety of the Bruce Willis storyline is… not memorable? It was entertaining enough as I watched it – he’s a cool action hero, it’s fun – but when I think back over the movie, it’s 90% Jackson dialogue and 10% Thurman and Travolta in the restaurant.
I’ve replayed this scene a few times:
“Right here!”
The jukebox soundtrack (is that a term?) is great.
I cannot endorse the drug use.
The film opens with two dictionary definitions of pulp, sourced to the American Heritage Dictionary, New College Edition. I haven’t verified if the definitions are quoted exactly – today’s AHD omits commas in “A soft moist shapeless mass of matter” and also omits “and characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper”. Amusingly, an anonymous user introduced Pulp Fiction’s definitions to the Wiktionary in 2009, and they remain there today, a typo (‘or’ instead of ‘of’) lasting 15 years and counting.
But I am really only writing about this subject because of the pronunciation shown of /'pəlp/. Australian English distinguishes the schwa (also called the COMMA vowel, after the final vowel in that word) and the STRUT vowel – the two vowels in ‘above’ are different sounds. In General American, the two vowels in ‘above’ are differentiated only by stress, and some dictionaries, such as Merriam-Webster, write the STRUT vowel with the ə symbol,
ə-ˈbəv
instead of the
/əˈbʌv/
that Wiktionary gives.
I don’t know what I would have made of seeing /'pəlp/ a year ago. Probably I would have been momentarily confused before quickly forgetting about it. My reaction today is renewed bewilderment that those two vowels have merged in American speech. I’ve listened to American accents through pop culture for decades, I feel like I have a pretty decent armchair linguist’s grasp of vowel sounds, and I cannot for the life of me alieve that most Americans pronounce STRUT with a schwa. I try to imagine an American saying ‘above’, or even listen to pronunciations on dictionary websites, and I just can’t hear a schwa in the second vowel.
To my ear, it would make slightly more sense to use /ʌ/ for the General American schwa instead of using /ə/ for the STRUT vowel, but my brain still rejects it: the schwa sounds too neutral to me for /ʌ/ to be appropriate.
I only learned about this vowel merger when watching Geoff Lindsey videos (one, two) earlier this year. Many accents in the north of England also use a schwa for the STRUT vowel, and here I find it much easier to accept. If I imagine a Lancastrian cricket commentator saying ‘cut’, I can think, “Yeah, that was a stressed schwa.”
But an American baseball commentator saying ‘bunt’? That’s /ʌ/. It’s deeply astonishing to me that I apparently mishear vowels from the globally culturally dominant form of my native language.
(See also xkcd 2907).
Also, I reckon I say ‘polp’ rather than ‘pulp’; my vowels in ‘gull’ and ‘gulp’ are distinct. That’s probably non-standard of me though; Macquarie says /ʌ/ in all cases.