Sunnys

Foxy got these as a must-have in the searing Tokyo heat and blinding sun. I tried to tell Ali that maybe sunnys for a baby are not such a good thing, but apparently Foxy won't open her eyes outside unless she has her sunglasses.

I'm not so sure it's wise to be filming the baby in Grandpa's overstuffed smoking chair. The thing is probably covered in carcinogens. Yes, I have a fat baby. It's entirely due to the high quality, enriched breast milk that Japan is producing these days. I'm okay with that, and so is Foxy.

Peaches are Sour

Here's a more recent clip of Foxy. As you can see, she has grown a lot since the previous video.

Foxy's Tokyo Debut

I'm so fed up with Blogger's new video upload feature that I've gone ahead and opened a Youtube account to post up a clip I've been waiting two months to do. Blogger and Youtube are owned by the same company. You'd think that Blogger would ask for some help on this instead of dicking around and around. The thing that made me hesitate about Youtube is that I don't want perverts and the like to be embedding my videos on their sites. Oh well, que sera sera.

Any of the more recent videos since I left Japan are on Photobucket, but Blogger in it's infinite wisdom returns an error every time I try to link to the page. Fuckers

Update: It seems that I don't get any more security with Youtube than I had hoped for from Photobucket. The Youtube embedded video stalled or took some ridiculous amount of time to start so I've gone back to the original plan of using Photobucket clips.

Meister Jäger

I don't usually do this, but it was really vivid and kind of funny. I had a really cool dream on Friday night, and I think it had something to do with the fact that I had seven shots of Jägermeister on an empty stomach before going to bed. Or maybe it's got something to do with DMT. I got to pretend to be a potential client and my boss was going to have to get me to sign the contract. I remember quite clearly that I was a tough sell. The best part was that I got to critique her sales pitch. I think that was in the dream because of what happened in the boardroom earlier that day. Not such a crazy dream up to that point, but then it morphed...

Into a street festival, among other things. The Ukrainian Church a few blocks down the street had been overrun and was now a very organized crack dealing operation. But the neighbourhood was actually improved. Just up the street where I saw a corpse shortly after it got hit by a car, a crosswalk was now installed and there was now a pedestrian-only mall with an arcade kinda like they have in Japan. There was a nice glass-fronted drug store on the corner where the hardware store used to be and before that it was a hair salon, except it's never been any of those things in real life - it's always been a pawn shop. And the community police station across the street from the pawn shop was something else in the dream too.

This is how weird my dreams get. Maybe not the fact that they are so intricate, but the fact that I can remember all this stuff even when I'm awake. Back to the street festival. Two hippies from Nascimiento Brazil came up to me and told me that they wanted to write me a poem. Tudo bem was my response, and they asked me how I knew Portuguese. I told them how, and introduced them to Bobby and Sissy. These guys were so impressed that Bobby and I were twins they decided to make the poem very special for the both of us.

Cut to Grandma Tzipi's old condo in Rio de Janeiro. Grandma Tzipi figured Miami was a little too passé, so she went one step better and bought a home away from home in Rio. I still remember it, back when they made condos big enough to live in. There was the telltale sunflower shag carpet, and the tangerine formica countertops in the loo. It was here that the two hippies decided to reveal the poem. Everybody was there, including my new boss. More on her later. The hippies apparently found paper and pen to be rather limiting, so when they brought out a bus tray filled with water and floating blocks nobody was surprised. One hippie held the tray while the other read what was on the blocks and tipped them over as the lines continued to the other side of the dice blocks. I don't remember what the poem said, but I do remember that the hippies had written a symbol on one of the blocks which they said meant lol, and that the audience was supposed to laugh out loud.

My new boss, my dream boss that is, not my real one is quite a bit younger than me and for some reason I had to know her age. In real life, I'm not bothered about having a younger boss but I guess on a subconscious level maybe the opposite is true. Anyway, we played the age game. She guessed mine and got it right. I totally overguessed her age, and then underguessed it. I had lots of questions for my new boss, like why the person I replaced still gets to use a company cell phone, but I don't. Then something weird happened at Grandma Tzipi's condo. I'm not even sure what you call it, but I think it's something that happens at a bachelor party. It wasn't a lap dance, I think those are pretty straightforward, but my new boss was acting totally inappropriate especially since she knew I was married and my wedding band was in plain sight. How did a poetry reading turn into a bachelor party? Why are these things happening in your dead grandmother's beachfront condo? These questions might sound weird, but not necessarily disturbing. But how about that Sissy was there? Why is Sissy in your dreams Dax, watching you do bachelor party type stuff? Why is she constantly telling you about Ali? Because she's my conscience. It took me a few minutes to figure that stuff out after I woke up, but if you think about it, that's pretty cool. Knowing that there's always going to be somebody looking out for you, even though you hate it, it's pretty cool.

There was a bunch more messed up stuff in the dream too like the fact that I had a broken leg and had to drag myself around the neighbourhood on chucks. That might have something to do with the corpse I saw. There was other stuff like the time of day. At some point the street festival turned from day to night. And there was something about latchkey kids too but I can't that stuff into the narrative.

¿Qué?

I have to say that my new job is a welcome change in some respects and a baptism by fire in other respects. I started last Friday, and had a half day so that I could meet the people I'll be working with. That was actually a special request on their part because someone was going on hols starting Saturday. It was pretty much a waste of time. Half the company was already on holidays, and I would have been better off starting on Monday after everyone, except that one person, had come back.

My boss, who was described to me by the recruiter as a dragon lady, is nothing of the sort. I was a little disappointed (because I like dragon ladies so so much!), but she still expects me to work my butt off. She has a tendency to digress, so we spent pretty much all of Friday afternoon talking in her office.

Monday, I met the person I am replacing. She couldn't handle more than two months of the work, so she quit. She spent half of Monday not explaining things to me because she never learned how to do them herself. Tuesday I was all on my own except that I got to spend a little time with my supervisor. Probably too much time by the way he acted. He only works 4 days a week, so I'm pretty much on my own on Fridays. That's bitten me in the ass once already. My supervisor has only been on the job for 3 months, so he's not quite crisp yet but he has a prior history with the boss. They used to work together at another company. My supervisor believes that he has a very strong moral compass, which has forced him to two jobs before ending up with the old boss again. That may have led him to quit one the jobs, but it sounds to me that he quit the second job on account of laziness. With a really thick Hong Kong Cantonese accent, he explained to me that he quit his last job because he didn't want to serve as a payroll back up. He basically told his boss to find someone else. Nice try! He's so hard to understand that we basically take twice as long to get anything done than if I did everything myself.

Wednesday, my boss thought it would be funny to speak to me privately in her office. I fully expected to get the axe, because this was so important that this couldn't be discussed at my cubicle, directly opposite the coffee machine and right next to the photocopier. She wanted to discuss my job scrip. She asked me if I would be willing to do switchboard relief for no rise in pay. The cute little smile on her face was the only thing preventing me from jumping across her desk and ripping out her pixie cut one hair at a time. Why would you take time out of your very important day to arrange a special meeting with the temp just so you can ask him to answer a few phone calls? Aiyah!

Thursday was the day that I caught up on some old billing. I think I did pretty well, except that rather than look over the entire oeuvre my supervisor would only find the first mistake and bring it back to me to do over. See, the English language is a pain in his ass. He'd really rather someone else did the reading for him. I am in fact the only native English speaker in the Finance Department. Which came back quite oddly the next day to bite me in the ass. What's new? But I still haven't finished with Thursday. The point is that rather than correct all the problems at once, I had to do the invoice over like eight times. At the end of the day I figured I'd spend a little overtime to catch up on some of the stuff that had just come across my desk. My boss came by to use the photo copier and said, "You still here? You got to go home. You really got to go!" Some slave driver. Until the HR manager gets back, they can't sign me to a contract so they've got me on an hourly rate. She wants to save a few bucks and keep the overtime until after I sign the contract. We understand each other on that point, and she's very open about the fact that she'll work me like a dog after Labour Day.

Onto Friday. I arrived that morning to a nice little note on my desk from my manager saying that she wanted to speak to me about the invoices I had prepared the day before. Later on, when she had time we talked about the things she didn't like. She mentioned that the invoices are supposed to be very specific about what we are billing, and I knew that. In fact, that's exactly how I had prepared the invoices the first time, but my supervisor had told me specifically NOT to prepare this batch of invoices in that manner. I explained to her what had happened the day before, and then she asked me if I had received an e-mail from my supervisor. I did receive an e-mail about pay stubs from my supervisor. She asked me to read it again. Nothing in the header about revised invoices. Way way down deep somewhere near the bottom of the e-mail was a little note about the invoices. Either my supervisor is a complete idiot, or he did that on purpose. I'm new, so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt. That means he's a complete idiot. We'll have something to talk about tomorrow. Then my manager talked about some other bullshit that quite frankly should be the project manager's problem, but apparently I have to check that shit too.

I set about correcting the invoices, when my boss came to be about ten minutes later in a panic. Why she came to me I'll never know. As I said, there are quite a few different languages spoken in my department. At any given point on Friday there were two native Spanish speakers, plus a guy who had spent several years in Latin America and spoke Spanish pretty well. She could have gone to them, and they had even offered to help, but instead she requested my assistance with a conference call. I had no background on the situation, and my boss clearly had no idea what the difference between translating and interpreting is, nor an understanding of what was required to handle an interpretation by conference call. We got through it, and it was brutal, but then she decided to rip me a new one. Maybe she smelled blood, because she only did so after someone else tried to get their pound of flesh. I really didn't appreciate the way she acted. After we left the boardroom, she apologized for putting me on the spot like that and admitted that the guy who tried to make me cry had no business doing that. The rest of the day went pretty well, but I didn't get anything done.

Superbad

If you haven't seen this movie yet, wait for the DVD. Don't get me wrong, it's not one of those movies where you wish you could have 2 hours of your life back. It was funny, I personally guffawed at several points in the film, but there was much repetition. If you like hearing words like cock and pussy needlessly over and over again, then this is a movie for you. Starring Michael Cera and Jonah Hill as Evan and Seth, the two attempt to bootleg alcohol for a party that night. They recruit their friend Fogel, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse and his fake ID for the task.

Seth and Evan are separated from Fogel and the adventure begins. Seth and Evan take a journey that I can honestly say represents the average teenager's party experience. I myself, not really a party person in highschool, did everything that Seth and Evan did at some point in school, including getting hit by a car. The thing is, they do it all in one night. Fogel's journey is less than realistic, and surely was written as such to add humour to the film. Without it, the film would be just a high-school level Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Interestingly enough, David Krumholz makes guest appearances in both movies, each time getting high. Writer Seth Rogen guests in the movie as an idiot rookie cop, and Rogen's dad (I think) makes a quick appearance as an irate parent.

Rogen and co-writer Evan Goldberg claim that they wrote this movie because they felt they could write a better movie than an unnamed movie they watched as teens. I strongly believe that movie to be American Pie. Neither film is a particular standout in terms of originality, but I would say that American Pie was better. If Rogen had said something like "My friend and I were watching a movie and we said to ourselves that we could write a movie like that one, but based on personal experience", I don't think expectations would be so high. Taking one look at Jonah Hill, I forgot that he was supposed to portray Rogen. Instead, I was reminded of Avi, a kid I used to spend summers with in grade school. He was pretty straight laced and he used to cry a lot. Imagining him in the movie having grown up a little during high school to be a tough-acting fake Seth made it even funnier on a personal level.

Interview in My Underwear

It's been so up and down these last few weeks, really the worst roller coaster ride I've ever been on. Had to cancel a trip to an unfriendly nation because I'm not sure I can attend a friend's wedding with my wife when it actually goes down. Last thing I need is for my daughter and me to be detained because we carry the wrong passport. But really, Cuba doesn't care anymore. I know that, but nobody told the State Department. Maybe there was a fair amount of melodrama connected to that. After all, I am meant to be Randy's best man or something, and had left large amounts of blood spatter around the flat the night before. The blood was much darker and stickier than usual. Must be the oranges. Pain is the cleanser! No matter, all my tea towels are red for a reason. Tomorrow, Randy and I are going to see Superbad so maybe we'll be able to discuss a trip to Havana.

The anger is all because of a temp job I started last Tuesday. I really hit it off with my supervisor. My totally hot supervisor, but that's a totally different problem altogether. She worked me like a dog nosebleeds and all, and I did everything she asked me to do and more. Everybody liked me, at least that's what they told my recruiter which is why I was really confused when my supervisor told me to pack my shit on Friday afternoon. She didn't seem too happy about it, and my recruiters were caught totally off guard, but they've been working hard for me. Sometimes you have to smack them around a bit, but they eventually remember that they're supposed to recruit, and find something for me. I know who they work for, but I'm not afraid to push my weight around a bit (all 11 stone of chiseled sun kissed goodness) and make them think they work for me.

You can't help who your parents are, and that might have had something to do with it. There are hundreds of thousands of Hallmans, possibly millions around the world but I guess it is a small world. A certain relative has a reputation in the mining industry, and depending on whom you ask, it's good or bad. To his credit, he told me to quit as soon as he heard where I was rocking the payroll. By the second day, people were nosing around asking if I'm related to so and so. I played coy because that information can be prejudicial. The job was crap anyway, but it threw me for a loop because I did nothing wrong. In fact, I did everything right. Oh well, I'm pretty sure my supervisor was fired shortly after I left.

Which brings me to the interview in my underwear part. Friday afternoon, I ripped my recruiter a new one and happened to stop by his office for an explanation. The slack-jawed gay porn top reject stared vacantly into the distance as his supervisor went into damage control mode and fobbed me off onto another recruiter. The new guy had the perfect job just for me. Because of the client's time constraints, they did not have time to meet in person. This afternoon(!) as I was jumping out of the shower, the phone rang. It was the recruiter:

Recruiter: Dax! Ted! I've been trying to reach you all morning. Do you have a hand phone or something? Where you been man? Partying all night probably, right?

Me: Ummm... Actually...

Ted: Hey listen! Would you be open to a phone interview with the client? They want to wrap this up as soon as they can.

Me: Sure. I've done phone interviews befo...

Ted: Okay! Okay, just a sec. Let me put you on hold and we can conference with the client.

At this point I was still wrapped in a towel, but as the phone played Queens of the Stone Age I threw on some boxers and a form fitting t-shirt my mother-in-law gave me, and wrapped my bloody knuckles in an old Marks and Spencer tea towel. The client threw me some soft ball questions and asked me about my language skills. What that all has to do with payroll is a mystery, but I guess she was just trying to size me up. I was all like, "Hai! It's sooo great to talk with you finally!" Totally fake, or at least that's how I felt. But you want to make the client feel at ease, that way they feel better about eventually paying you a very large sum of money and making your life shit. She was impressed, and if everything works out I'll be back at it again next week. In the meantime, I'll be shifting sheetrock and granite countertops for Enzo and hammering a few nails. It's better than detailing Bobby's Maserati, and Sissy says this is better than bloodletting.

Cops vs. Thugs - Is There a Difference?

I had to watch this one twice and make a chart the second time just to keep up with what was going on. Kinji Fukasaku directs Kenkei tai soshiki boryoku or Cops vs. Thugs in English starring Bunta Sugawara as Detective Kuno and Tatsuo Umemiya as his nemesis Inspector Kaida. Umemiya also starred in Yakuza Graveyard as the yakuza underboss blood brother of the main character. There's a few other characters in the film, but their credits aren't indexed to the characters so it's hard to identify them.

Apparently, this film is based on actual events and that is prehaps the only reason why this film has to be so complicated. It involves three crime organizations: the Ohara organization, the Hirotani organization and the Kawade organization. A city official is tied to the Ohara organization, but while Ohara is in prison the official is making deals with the Kawade organization to help them fix an auction. Tomoyasu the city councilman is not making many friends. The Kawade organization steals some of the club girls who used to work for Hirotani, which starts a bit of a turf war. Det. Kuno is closely tied to Hirotani, a killer who Kuno helped escape several years earlier. The cops in the town generally leave the yakuza alone and focus their efforts on the communists.

After the auction is revealed to have been fixed, the results are overturned and Hirotani is appointed as the trustee of the land. He tries to sell the land for its proper market value, but that doesn't go down well. A new police inspector rides into town and decides that the friendly treatment of the yakuza isn't going to help anyone. He arrests old Ohara and squeezes him to hand over his affairs to the Kawade group. Inspector Kaida decides to vet his squad of any friendlies and an older officer, Yoshiura resigns from the force. He goes to work as a consultant for the city official and pretty much gives away all the Hirotani family secrets. Detective Kuno is a known associate of Hirotani and is scorned by Kaida. When Kaida leads a raid on Hirotani's offices, the friendship between Hirotani and Kuno is ended. Hirotani's men take the consultant Yoshiura hostage and bring the police into a standoff. Kuno goes in and negotiates a deal for the release of Yoshiura and the safe passage of Hirotani's men. As Hirotani is led outside, he pulls a gun on his former friend who trusted him one last time. During a scuffle, Hirotani is shot and killed. Inspector Kaida resigns and gets a job with the company that had the successful bid on the land. Det. Kuno is transferred to a small town and is mysteriously killed while investigating an accident.

The film is a lot more complicated than that, but I can barely keep abreast of what I've written even with an org chart. I take back what I said about the Toei strip logo. I thought the music was part of the strip, but that apparently changes with each film. The visual still kicks ass though. The music in this film was typical, and still nice to listen to. No mouth organ though.

Hot Fuzz and Cheesecake

I think I have a problem with food. I guess the popular term is binging. Two days ago, I ate nothing and exercised like crazy. Gotta be careful about that, I am plagued by nosebleeds when I do stuff like that. As soon as I jump in the shower, the blood flows like the Hudson River. Then yesterday I ate nothing until 7:00 pm when I had a footlong double stacker BBQ rib patty at a well-known sandwich franchise. Today, still looking fit from all the training, I went out and bought a cheesecake. A little perspective on the above photo - it's only 4 inches across, and it was good. It wasn't the brick cheesecake that so many restaurants are guilty of serving, rather it was lighter than I expected. I deserved it I guess, after the day I've had. I was hit with a huge trigger today. My new recruiter is a bit thick. When I first visited her, she had me sign a lot of paperwork. A few weeks later, she called and told me that I hadn't signed the paperwork. I asked her to check again, because I knew that I had because I remember putting the wrong date on the forms. She called back and said that indeed, she had located the missing paperwork but that she had more paperwork for me to fill out. I shlepped across town to sign the papers, and when I get there she acts like she's never met me before and the paperwork turns out to be the exact forms that she said she had found afterall. What could I do? I signed the papers and held my tongue. I will say though,that this type of document management makes a global recruiting firm like Robert Half look very, very bad. Not on the surface of course, but something like that is only indicative of larger, more serious problems.

To make shlepping across town more worthwhile, I loaded some photos onto a disc and popped by a print shop to get some prints made up for my luddite friends who don't have computers. By the bye, when is Blogger going to get it's video feature out of beta? My kid is gonna be like 7 or 8 you know, the ugly stage, by the time that happens and then there won't be any videos worth watching.

Anyway, I'm used to triggers hitting my inebriated brain when I'm in the theatre, but I got hit by a huge one today at the print shop while I was quite sober. I'm going to go on record as saying that Asian girls with freckles drive me crazy. The clerk in the shop looked exactly like an ex-girlfriend except that she had freckles and a better hair stylist, oh and a nicer bum. I was dumbfounded, floating between the past and present. I didn't know what to say when she told me that the disc only showed 4 prints when in fact I had loaded several more. I didn't know how to answer when she asked me what size prints I wanted. As the queue grew longer, she grew more impatient. I just told her to do the standard prints and that I would be back tomorrow to collect the photos. I couldn't see straight at that point, and I stumbled up the escalator holding my ticket stubs, she made me order the prints in separate orders, in a ball and shoved them in my front pocket.

I got to the outside of the mall and waded through a crowd of punks handing out flyers. The only thing that shocked me back to the present was the memory that I had seen my ex-girlfriend at the grocery store a few years ago, and that she could not possibly be the same person in the photo shop. Besides, the clerk wore a name tag that was simply not my ex-girlfriend's name. What made all of this more embarrassing from a personal point of view is the fact that I'm married now, and I probably shouldn't be looking at other women. Who knows what kinds of things are in my head? I don't. Because of a curious incident in the hospital nursery when I was born, my brain hides a whole lot of not-necessarily-fucked-up shit in there and then brings it all back like a flood when I least expect it. For legal reasons, I can't exactly say that I was dropped on my head but something similar did take place. Sweating, and suffering from cotton mouth, I grabbed a bottled water from a street-teamer and decided, perhaps wrongly that I needed more sugar. I walked home and waited for traffic to die down and then made my way to the cheesecake shop. I'll be better prepared when I pick up my photos tomorrow.

Hot Fuzz is a movie that I have been looking very much forward to, and I regret not seeing it in first run. When I was in Japan, I would ask for it every time we went to the video store:

"Nani ga? Hatto Fudge? No, we don't have. Sorry, my English is not so good. Edward Wright? So sorry, no listings for that actor. Director? Still nothing. Ahhhh, Furosto? Yes, we have Nick Furosto but not that movie".

"Edgar! E-D-G-A-R you silly bastard". Of course the real reason they couldn't find it was because it didn't exist on DVD yet.

I got to watch it tonight, and it stars the abovementioned Nick Frost, Simon Pegg and Timothy Dalton. There are guest spots by Bill Nighy and an amazingly well disguised Rafe Spall both of Shaun of the Dead. I had thought that this would be one of those films where you see all the funny bits in the adverts, but it wasn't. There were plenty of other funny bits thrown in. There were promos for Balls of Fury starring Chistopher Walken, Patton Oswalt and James Hong, the crusty old Chinese guy you see in so many movies playing the role of the wise master. He was in one of those Revenge of the Nerds films playing pretty much the same role as the one I saw in the Balls of Fury promo. As I watched the trailer, I thought "This is just another Dodgeball, but with ping pong". That was enough reason for me. I'll have to watch it at some point. The second trailer was for Rush Hour 3 starring Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. Chan was on David Letterman last week and he was quite candid about the fact that he doesn't like making the Rush Hour films. Okay, when the lead bad mouths the film, should anyone go see it? Interesting question. Somebody will.

As the film opens, we see a very gaunt Simon Pegg in the role of Nick Angel, the Metropolitan police officer who is married to the job. At this point, I am struck by Angel's resemblance to my former supervisor at the brokerage. How things change! I won't say that we're friends, but we get along a lot better now that we don't work together. Angel is promoted to sergeant and is transferred against his wishes to the country where he is partnered with Danny Butterman, played by Nick Frost. The villagers are very conscious of the fact that they have won the Best Village Award several times and they have no intention of giving it up. At first, it seems that nothing happens in this little town, but Angel is not convinced. Something is always going on. Despite assurances from the squad, Angel discovers that all the accidents in the town might be related. He investigates a little further and determines that the grocer played by Timothy Dalton has killed several people to stop competition coming to the village. Rafe Spall plays one of two slacker investigators who spend the entire film making jokes at Angel's and Butterman's expense. Oh yeah, Butterman's dad, played by Jim Broadbent is the police chief of the village. Throughout the film, there are numerous references to Point Break and Bad Boys 2, two films I have never seen but I did catch a dubbed version of Bad Boys in Japan. Angel's theory about the murders is dismissed. After being attacked in his hotel room, Angel gets on the right track, and discovers that the accidents were actually murders carried out by a group of people, and that they had the blessing of the police chief. Angel is taken out of town by Danny Butterman and is encouraged to go back to London. Angel gets a bee in his bonnet and goes back to the village and clears out the evidence locker, which looks more like Enzo's gun armoury. He decides to take on the Neighbourhood Association, the real killers, on his own. You would think it ends there, after he tears apart the Association. That is why I have to say that the movie was humourous, but then gets really stupid for a bit and then gets funny again overall. There are three false endings to the killers and the fourth one finally puts a rest to it all.

There is a lot about this movie that the writers put in there for their own satisfaction, and that probably stopped the film from being better. For instance, when Angel first arrives in the town, he meets the Neighbourhood Association members at various locations. When he comes back to the town at the end of the film, he meets the members at the same locations. This type of in-joke is only for the benefit of the writers, and actually makes a mess of the shootout. Contrived. The music that plays in Skinner's car as he drives past the accident scenes might be funny once, but twice? Come on Edgar. I also did not like the latex dummies used for the decapitation scenes and the explosion. Very cheap. A cop would never believe that these castings were real, and so I had a hard time believing that a fake cop could act as though they were real.

There are a lot of bits in this film which are nods to other films, perhaps suggesting that Edgar Wright does nothing original, or that he's just a big geek. Many scenes in the film were done in the town where Wright went to school. I don't know what you call that, but I found that to be really soft. Kind of a 'Look at me, everyone! This is where I went to school. See this person? He's my acting teacher'. Geez, if Wright wanted so much attention, why didn't he become an actor?

The things I found most interesting about this film were all the things that the set dressors had to deal with, and the stuff done in post. All the CCTV footage had to be added in later, and a lot of the sound effects were very original. Set dressors are very creative people. Maybe they have some guidance from the script, but a lot of what makes the final cut is based on their own ideas. I was also quite impressed by Robert Rodriguez who wrote some of the score for this film, and only got a thankyou in the credits. Oops, nosebleed.