Windy day

I went out for a quick blip walk today. It was sunny, with a stiff north-westerly wind driving dramatic clouds across the sky. The light was beautiful, but shooting straight into the sun is rarely a good idea, and the photos I took were as good as I thought they would be, i.e. not very. I have fallen back on some trees I have blipped quite a few times before.

At one point I did encounter a mahoosive spider though. There's no scale in the photo, but its legs were about an inch long. When I got home I googled it, and I am pretty sure it's a wolf spider; the white sphere you can just see protruding from its bum is its egg sac.

This evening we went to see the Coen brother's new film, Inside Llewyn Davis, which won the Grand Prix du Jury at Cannes this year. I can't say I enjoyed it -- there must have been better candidates surely? I've only seen about three Coen brothers films, but a common feature seems to be that most of the characters are idiots. But usually they are likeable idiots. For example Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt were endearingly stupid in Burn After Reading.

All of the characters in Llewyn Davis were idiots, but they were all annoying idiots, especially Llewyn. The only lovable characters were the cats, who did a grand job in trying circumstances. The music was (deliberately) awful too, the worst kind of twee 60s folk -- including Peter Paul and Mary lookalikes (featuring Justin Timberlake), and an entertaining parody of an Irish quartet in matching Aran jumpers. Ironically, hopeless failure Llewyn was the best musician of the lot, and even he wasn't very good. The film is set just at the moment when all these singers were going to be blown away by Bob Dylan -- there's a nice hat-tip to that at the end. They won't be selling many original soundtracks from this film -- although I have just been laughing at an IMDB review which describes it as "music that enriches the deepest trenches of the soul".

So although it wasn't bad enough to walk out of, I don't recommend it. Definitely not in the same league as Searching for Sugarman!