From Bad to Worse

I'm usually a fairly optimistic person but after today, I'm finding it very difficult to justify this sunny disposition. After yesterdays pre-emptive bout of success, today has brought all of that crashing down to the floor with a total disregard for whoever might happen to be underneath.

I phoned the estate agents this morning to confirm our interest in the house to be greeted by the response, "I'm sorry that property is no longer available." Bugger! panicking, I phone round to confirm that everyone is happy to go with our second choice - a couple of hours later I had this confirmation and phoned up the other agency. "There is a group of people standing in front of me right now signing for that property." Double damn and blast it! Last chance was the third property on the list which was confirmed to be available when I tried for the first house. Another quick ring round to check everyone was happy and I phoned them back within about half an hour. Same response as the last one, the people were signing for it as I was speaking.

So within a few hours, we had lost three houses and were waiting for a reply about the final one. We had seen this on Wednesday and it was a bit of a dump however, they are supposed to be refurbishing it so we wanted to know what was being done before we made the decision. They never got back to us so we booked to see two more places tomorrow morning in the hope that one of them will be half decent and we can sign for it there and then and get this whole debarcle over and done with.

Having been through all of that nonsense, I couldn't concentrate on my work any more and decided to watch a movie instead. The Final Destination (4) came up as one I hadn't seen so I went with that. Being a big fan of the previous three I had high hopes for this last ever in the series. The beginning started well with the title sequence showing the horrific and often comedic (or is that just me?) endings to the lives of the characters from the previous three films. A nice touch I thought and the graphics were pretty impressive as well. Once the film began however, it was downhill from there. I'm still not quite sure what it was but there was definitely something missing from this film that the previous lot had. They had the old guy who tags along with the younger lot and acts as a sort of freaked out mentor, they had the people who ignore the warnings but they didn't seem to have as many people caught up in the event (and saved) as they normally do. By the time they had figured out what was going on, three of them had already died which only left the friendship group and the older man. Then the premonitions were different this time, they all came as visions rather than dodgy clues which was half the fun in deciphering them. They were more of a warning that anything else whereas this lot was real images - similar to the TV show Paradox. I know that some of those would have been added for the 3D rendering to make it worth seeing the film in 3D but that doesn't really translate to home viewing. As far as I know we don't have the luxury of 3D TVs that are commercially available and I'm not even sure the movies will be released in such a format until a) a standard is decided upon and b) there are enough people with the appropriate equipment to play them. There is little point selling 3D films if no one can play them and I don't know if they are 3D compatible. I would first assume that the amount of data that needs to be stored would render a DVD inadequate so that means that Blue-ray is the only way to go and not that many people even have those sorts of players.

The penultimate scene was probably the best bit of the film - the bit that takes place in the mall when both the lead guy (Nick) has another vision and his girlfriend (Lori) has a 'bad feeling'. The strange thing about this is that Nick has a premonition about having a premonition and failing to save them in time. It also seems a little too coincidental that the exact timing of the explosion should coincide with the countdown of the bomb in the movie they were watching. A really bad line from Lori trying to convince Nick to come and see the film when she says "It's in 3D" a reference to this film being shown in 3D and a shameless and unnecessary plug in my opinion.