Author: admin

Sometimes Always Never

by admin, posted in film reviews

With his towering angular physicality, and mildly eccentric obsessiveness, Bill Nighy has come to embody a quintessential cinematic Englishness in a fashion that a previous generation might associate with Alastair Sim or Dirk Bogarde. Sometimes Always Never, Carl Hunter’s debut feature, finds Nighy in good form as Alan, a fastidious sixty-something tailor with a 70s era board game obsession, engaged in a long and fruitless quest to find his eldest son Michael, whom he hasn’t seen since the former deserted the family home apparently after a Scrabble inspired feud. In this quest he is joined with seeming reluctance by his other son Peter (Sam Riley), and as the film opens the pair are visiting a morgue in Brighton to identify an unidentified body which they are led to believe might be the long-lost Michael.

This seems, on the surface, like dark, gut-wrenching territory better suited to Mike Leigh, but Hunter directs the film, from a script by Frank Cottrell Boyce, with a light touch and a note of whimsy that is at odds with what could easily be a fraught family drama.  This whimsical approach extends to the cinematography and production design; even though the film’s setting is contemporary, the set design and props are unmistakably retro as if to evoke the 70s, as if to suggest that the characters, Alan especially, are frozen in a former time and unable to move on and confront an uncomfortable modern world.  Alan, after all, is a bespoke gentleman’s tailor by profession, an occupation that itself belongs to a passing age; the film’s enigmatic title comes from tailor’s parlance describing the convention of utilising the three buttons on the front of a man’s jacket.  Alan’s obsession with Scrabble also suggests a defiantly retrograde world view, with one of his few concessions to modernity being his proclivity to play Scrabble on-line on his grandson’s computer.  This character quirk furnishes one of the film’s key plot points, as Alan comes to believe that one of his anonymous on-line opponents is actually Michael reaching out to him. The resolution to this should not surprise the attentive viewer, but one suspects that it is not the intention.

The distinctive retro style that is intrinsic to Hunter’s visual style seems to extend to the casting of supporting roles.  Tim McInnerney and Jenny Agutter, both actors who seem to likewise embody a bygone age, play Arthur and Margaret, a reticent couple encountered by Allan and Peter in their Brighton hotel who are implausibly engaged on the exact same grim mission as they; Margaret reappears later in the film in an equally unlikely reprise.  And just as unlikely is the unexpected and largely superfluous cameo by Alexei Sayle, which seems tacked on and, while amusing, does nothing to advance the screenplay, which at times seems to meander aimlessly, and is just a trifle too besotted with its own determined quirkiness.

Nighy is an immensely watchable actor, and his presence gives the film much of its energy and impetus even if his quest seems diffident and less than earnest, but notwithstanding his sterling efforts, and despite a promising beginning, the screenplay seems run out of puff well before the end. And thus is the viewer is left to ponder what its ultimate purpose is other than a labored retelling of the Biblical parable of the prodigal son. There are a number of subplots which are frustratingly left as loose threads, such as Margaret’s and Alan’s confused extramarital dalliance, which seems very contrived and quite at odds with all that the audience has hitherto learnt about these characters. Much the same can be said of a tepid romantic subplot involving Allan’s grandson (Louis Healy) and a classmate [Ella Grace Gregoire), just another underdeveloped plot element that fails to cohere into a more satisfying whole.  The film’s denouement arrives in a scene that seems deliberately to evoke Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, but the viewer is left uncertain whether this homage is meant to be ironic, or a sincere pointer to a deeper existential truth that sits oddly with the film’s oh-so-English glibness.

Sometimes Always Never is at pains to create its own unique world which exists at a tangent to reality, but despite some fine performances and a spasmodically wry and witty script, at the end the viewer is left at the end with the impression of an underdone first course, and a dessert course that never actually arrives.

Creating a Table of Contents in MS Word

by admin, posted in MS Office

Using styles, as described here, as a standard policy in your longer, more elaborate Word documents really opens up your horizons, and facilitates the simple creation of many additional features. One of the easiest and most impressive of these is a table of contents.  If you have the foresight to use styles as a standard formatting feature (i.e. Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 etc.), you can then simply insert the Table of Contents field on your chosen page at the beginning of the document and have it automatically compile a table of contents, using the headings and subheadings already present in your document.  This would provide you with an enormous saving of time and effort, compared with the tedious task of having to manually type up your own table of contents in neatly aligned columns.

You will find the Table of Contents command on the far left of the ribbon attached to the References tab:

If you select either of the Automatic Table options (1 or 2) on the attached menu, the Table of Contents field will then go to work to automatically create the table of contents as you watch. 

One of the principal virtues of this feature is the ability to easily update and regenerate the table, in the event that you modify your document after creating the table. If you add new content with new headings or move the location of your document’s content around in a way that impacts the page numbering, you don’t need to create your contents table anew. You can instead simply update the Table of Contents field, and have it automatically regenerate itself to incorporate and take account of any recent document alterations.

You can perform such an update via the right mouse menu, Simply right click somewhere over your Table of Contents and select Update Field. You will then be asked whether you wish to re-create the entire table or only the page numbering. (You can access this action even faster via the equivalent keyboard shortcut, the F9 key):

You can also customise the built-in automatic tables of content if you wish; choose a different style for its appearance and, if need be, specify precisely which Heading styles you wish to include in or exclude from your table.  You can simply select the Custom Table of Contents option from the Table of Contents menu to access a dialog box that presents you with these choices.  You can modify your Heading Style selection via the Options button in the lower right-hand corner.

Like many other fields that are available in Word, the Table of Contents gives you a great method of automating, and then flexibly updating, a key feature of your longer, more involved, elaborate Word documents.

Schrodinger’s Cat: On the Way to Being a “Power” MS Office User

by admin, posted in MS Office, Schrodinger's Cat

Schrodinger’s Cat is the resident mascot and guiding spirit of this blog. Having “survived” , hypothetically of course, Erwin Schrodinger’s (in)famous thought experiment, his new mission is to provide expert advice, tips and solutions for users of the Microsoft Office suite of desktop applications.

A knowledge and mastery of the advice contained herein will, among other things:

give you much greater confidence, and much less frustration. in dealing with the numerous challenges that the routine use of the MS Office will confront you with

enable you to explore and utilise some of the approximately 70% of potential use of programs such as Word and Excel, which goes ignored and overlooked by the average user

earn you the lifelong awestruck respect and admiration of your colleagues, friends and family. (Well, maybe – other factors might influence this, so no guarantees.)

Explore my evolving archive of MS Office knowledge:

Excel

Word

PowerPoint

To read more of the musings and wisdom of Schrodinger’s Cat, go here.

In addition to his other accomplishments, Schrodinger’s Cat is also a dedicated cinephile. This accomplishment is all the more remarkable given that most cinemas today have strict prohibitions on the admission of hypothetical cats. This, of course, is just one of the many overtly discriminatory impediments that our society places in the path of imaginary beings.

Of course, the compensating advantage working in favour of Schrodinger’s Cat is that, being entirely hypothetical, he is also completely invisible, so sneaking into cinema screenings is a relatively straightforward matter.

Feel free to explore his musings and ruminations on these recent cinema releases:

Michael Moore’s exploration, and excoriation, of Donald Trump’s America in Fahrenheit 11/9

Ryan Gosling puts his best square jaw forward in the Neil Armstrong biopic First Man

Melissa McCarthy forges an extraordinary performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me

A tale of royalty and rivalry in The Favourite

Christian Bale disappears into the character of Dick Cheney in Vice

Bill Nighy in a finely tailored role in Sometimes Always Never

Taron Egerton becomes airborne, sometimes literally, in the Elton John biopic Rocketman

Quentin Tarantino contrives an alternative, “fairytale” version of recent American history in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Brad Pitt and Tommy Lee Jones are an estranged astronaut father and son in the sci-fi epic Ad Astra

Sam Mendes follows two young World War 1 soldiers on a perilous mission in a single shot in 1917

Frances McDormand hits the highway and crosses paths with fellow travelers in an anything but typical ‘road’ movie: Nomadland

Harry McQueen and Florian Keller produce contrasting portrayals of characters battling dementia in Supernova and The Father

Daniel Craig is finally shaken and stirred in his spectacular sign-off from the James Bond franchise in No Time To Die

Denis Villeneuve is the latest filmmaker to attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s reputedly unfilmable novel to the screen in his long-awaited version of Dune

Keanu Reeves as Neo and Carrie Ann Moss as Trinity are given a new lease on life (or something like it) in The Matrix Resurrections

Kenneth Branagh explores his own family origins in the semi-autobiographical Belfast

Baz Luhrmann offers his distinctive take on rock music’s original superstar in Elvis

Excelling at Excel

by admin, posted in MS Office, Schrodinger's Cat

Excel is Microsoft’s “killer app”, an indispensable tool for spreadsheet users from all walks of life. Explore the posts below, my human friends, if you seek to unlock the true potential of Excel:

Create a growth series of values in Excel

Create your own personal Autofill series in Excel to save yourself time and effort in repetitive typing

Add some pizzazz to your spreadsheets with some conditional formatting

Take your conditional formatting a step further

Perform some clever date arithmetic in Excel

Make an Excel page “very” hidden

A “warp speed” shortcut to create simple charts in Excel

Extract data for easier manipulation with Flash Fill

Create and modify sparklines to add some additional visual impact to your spreadsheet presentation

Safeguard and protect your valuable spreadsheet content from sabotage, inadvertent or otherwise, by protecting your spreadsheet in Excel

Add some Validation rules to your spreadsheet to ensure that your fellow users only input valid, correct data in the appropriate location

Word: In the Beginning Was…

by admin, posted in MS Office, Schrodinger's Cat

Microsoft Word was, and still is, the “big daddy” of word processing software, and has always been both the talisman and the lightning rod of the MS Office family.. Microsoft has fine-tuned and tweaked Word over the course of its evolution through many iterations, and this evolution has not always met with universal acclaim. In its time, it has inspired more than its fair share of gnashed teeth and bitter tears. Schrodinger’s Cat acknowledges this, but asks that you explore the posts below, and take the time to explore some of Word’s broader horizons and its true potential.

Some of Word’s critics have declared it, in this hyperbolic Trumpian age,to be the “enemy of the people”. The Guardian’s Jason Wilson agrees, Here’s my take.

And as a follow-up to Wilson’s viewpoint, here is The Guardian’s Alison Flood on the surging popularity of the Times New Roman font as the preferred font, or otherwise, of many famous authors

Use styles to really make Word work for you.

Read all about using section breaks in Word documents – both why and how.

Create a Table of Contents in your Word document by taking advantage of styles

Use this hidden trick to print a list of Word keyboard shortcuts.

Use this handy feature to easily repeat the heading rows in a Word table

Date Arithmetic In MS Excel Made Easy

by admin, posted in MS Office

One very ‘in-demand’ type of calculation in Excel is date arithmetic, which is often an integral part of invoicing or budgeting. You want to display dates that will occur after a given time period in relation to another given date. For example, you might seek to answer a question such as: what will the date be three months from now? And rather than having to manually enter or update the date in question each time, have this calculation built in your spreadsheet via a formula. Here’s how:

Excel’s TODAY function is a simple way of taking today’s date from your computer’s clock and displaying it in a cell in your spreadsheet. All you need to do is type =TODAY() as follows into a cell and press Enter to see the result:

                                =TODAY()

However, the key consideration is that Excel treats all date/time values as numbers, for all calculation purposes, which can complicate your attempt to add another amount to an existing date. For example, if you want to add 3 months on today’s date, you need to be aware that in Excel, the basic unit of a date value is an individual day; which means that, simply adding the number 3 on to today’s date will display the date 3 days from now.  Which would be just fine, if that be your intention. However, to be able to choose which date/time interval to use in your calculation, you need to incorporate other Excel date functions.

You can use functions such as YEAR, MONTH and DAY to break a date value down to its constituent components, and then add your chosen value to the appropriate component.  You can then use another of Excel’s date/time functions, the DATE function, to compile these individual components (year, month and day) into the desired date result. Let’s consider the example below, assuming that cell B3 contains the current date and the adjacent cell C3 contains a number of years. The YEAR function will extract the year from B3 as a separate individual value, and you can then add the required number of years on to this value specifically.  In the result cell, you can then incorporate the YEAR function along with the DAY and MONTH function as parts within the DATE function to calculate the desired result, as seen below:

In this way, you can manipulate date values in Excel to produce the desired type of elapsed time measurements, and this method should produce this result:

Not as simple and intuitive as it might be, but it works!

Conditional Formatting in MS Excel 2: Highlighting Trends

by admin, posted in MS Office

Conditional Formatting in Excel can be used in a variety of ways that can go far beyond simply adding an extra visual emphasis to your important values.  For example, you can use it to give pictorial expression to the trend created by a data series in a spreadsheet. This option can be found further down the main conditional formatting menu, and you can apply it in one of three ways:

  • Coloured Data Bars
  • Colour Scales
  • Icon Sets (symbols)

If, for example, you wanted a visual representation of the differential created by the trend in a series of monthly results;  you can do this by applying your choice of Data Bars to the range in question.

The extent and degree of shading in each cell is determined by the value it contains, compared to the other numbers in the same range.   The higher numbers in the trend exhibit a much higher degree of shading than do the lower ones.  This gives you a method of visually portraying the trend in these numbers, giving your spreadsheet much greater impact than just displaying the bare numbers alone on the screen or page.

If you find that the coloured data bars don’t quite do it for you, there are two other alternatives available on the same menu:

You could go with colour scales, whereby you can represent the same trend with entirely different colours for the higher, lower and in-between numbers. Or you could instead go with Icon Sets and display different symbols such as flags or arrows alongside numbers at different points in the trend.  With any of these choices, you can add a crucial extra visual dimension to your spreadsheet’s presentation.  Which can be particularly useful if you find yourself reporting to a person who sees many spreadsheets in the average day, so much so that they blend together in one homogeneous Excel-y mass.  Conditional formatting is a surefire way of making your spreadsheets stand apart from the crowd!

This assumes ,of course, that you want your spreadsheets to command this sort of attention. And one assumes that you do, at least occasionally, otherwise why would you be reading this post?

Should you wish at a later stage, to edit or modify these conditional formatting rules, you can do so as with any rule – via the Manage Rules option on the Conditional Formatting menu. This dialog box contains both Edit and Delete buttons.

(Bear in mind that you cannot delete conditional formatting via the usual Delete key on your keyboard; this will clear the contents of cells, not the formatting.)

Conditional Formatting in MS Excel

by admin, posted in MS Office

An effective way to that little bit of extra pizz-azz to the presentation of your Excel spreadsheet is conditional formatting. This allows you to emphasis important values and make them stand out visually from the rest of your spreadsheet, as well as making this characteristic part of the overall design of the spreadsheet, rather than just doing manual formatting cell-by-cell after the event. You can define and attach a rule to an entire range, such as a row or column, and thus format whatever values might occupy that range in a standardised way if they meet your chosen criteria.

For example, if you have values that you want to measure against a relevant benchmark or threshold, you can then choose a format such as font, bold, italic, font colour, cell colour, border (or any combination thereof) and those values will accept that format whether they occupy that range currently or in the future.  You need simply to highlight (select) the range in question, and then go to the Home tab and select Conditional Formatting.  If you intend to measure the values against a pre-defined benchmark, the best option is to select Highlight Cell Rules from this menu.  The sub-menu for this option allows you to select a comparison (i.e. Greater Than, Less Than, Between etc). For example, if your threshold is 4000, you can then ascribe a format to values that are below this number via the menu on the right.  See the example below:

This will give cells that contain numbers that are less than 4000 a dark red font colour set against a light red background.

Should you wish to modify this rule, with either or both a different criteria or format, you can do so via the Conditional Formatting Rules Manager, which can be found by selecting Manage Rules… from the foot of the Conditional Formatting menu:

You can modify the rule(s) you have defined via the Edit Rule… button at the top of this dialog box.  Note that you can also delete rules via this dialog and create new rules as well, as an alternative method to doing so via the Conditional formatting menu.

You can create as many different rules for the same range as you wish, and also produce some more elaborate formatting effects by making full use of the variations available on the Conditional Formatting menu. More on this in upcoming posts…

Vice

by admin, posted in film reviews

In The Dark Knight (2008), the second instalment of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, there is a telling scene where Batman locks himself in a room with the Joker and bars the entrance to prevent any intervention from the law enforcement officials in the next room.  The inference in the scene is clear; the self-appointed vigilante Batman is prepared to use whatever methods necessary to interrogate the villainous Joker, unlike the public officials who are hidebound by laws, codes of practice and the niceties of those pesky constitutional rights.  The film, and this scene in particular, was embraced by many right-wing pundits and commentators as a cinematic endorsement of the Bush Administration’s post 9/11 outlook and philosophy.  This was a philosophy that sought to radically redefine the strategy of the “War on Terror” with a willingness to shed the long-established conventions and pieties of international relations, and resort to extreme methods as a necessary means of engaging and defeating extremism.

The political figure most associated with this policy approach, even more so more than President Bush himself, was his enigmatic Vice-President, Dick Cheney; how ironic is it that the actor who portrayed Batman in Nolan’s film, Christian Bale, is the same actor who now plays Cheney in Vice, Adam McKay’s biopic of the former vice-president and left-liberal bogeyman.  Bale’s is far and away the film’s standout performance; as Cheney, he physically disappears into Cheney’s familiar impassive, humourless, hunched, shuffling presence, including his nuances such as his distinctive clipped, brusque manner of speech. Bale’s is by far the stand-out performance, and a bravura turn in a large and mostly underused ensemble cast, although Amy Adams as Lynne Cheney does well in a thankless role, although she struggles to rise above a screenplay that seeks to portray her as a Lady Macbeth-type accomplice to her husband. Less impressive are Sam Rockwell as George W Bush and Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld.

Overall, however, the efforts of Bale and his castmates are not done justice but what seems an underdeveloped and unfocussed script which hovers uncertainly between outright satire and serious character study.  There are many moments when McKay’s screenplay seems to betray his origins and as a comedy skit writer on Saturday Night Live. Indeed, Bush and Rumsfeld seem more like broad caricatures in one of that show’s politically-themed sequences than fully realised characters in a screenplay with serious things to say.   In large measure, McKay’s film appears to share its DNA , along with is political outlook, with a Michael Moore film, particularly in its scattergun approach and its gimmicky digressions designed to convey weighty abstract concepts in more digestible form. These gimmicks include a scene in an imaginary restaurant, where Cheney, Rumsfeld and their fellow travellers are invited by an unctuous, fictional waiter (Alfred Molina) to select from a menu that includes ‘rendition’, ‘enhanced interrogation’ amongst other dubious options (Cheney’s triumphant declaration is, of course, “We’ll take them all!”) and a scene where Dick and Lynne mull over the wisdom of joining George W Bush’s ticket in a pseudo Shakespearean exchange.  The forced and contrived nature of the transitions between a conventional narrative and these heavy-handed flights of fancy tends to undermine and confuse the film’s impact, especially the mock Shakespearean scene which takes the viewer out of the film and only serves to highlight the comparative paucity of the script.

Perhaps these defects are in some form unavoidable.  Cheney was, and remains, a deliberately obscure and imperviously opaque figure who defies most attempts to gain meaningful insight into his mind or character.  McKay attempts to deal with this challenge by spotlighting a couple of famous public episodes; his invitation to veteran senator and foe Patrick Leahy to, ahem, ‘go forth and multiply’ on the floor of the Senate and the incident where Cheney accidentally shot a friend, Harry Whittington, during a quail hunting expedition.   The latter is seen as a significant indicator of the power and aura that Cheney had managed to gather around himself, so much so that the victim, Whittington, felt compelled to apologize to Cheney, one assumes for the inconvenience he caused by placing his body in the way of the Vice-Presidential bullet.  Another of McKay’s rare attempts to convey some light and shade is his portrayal of Cheney’s somewhat unexpected, albeit understated support of same sex marriage inspired by his daughter Mary’s lesbianism, a stance which caused no small measure of confusion and distress with his conservative support base.

But these interludes offer little insight into Cheney’s character or motivations, beyond the familiar, predictable left-liberal characterisation.  It invites the conclusion that Cheney, despite occupying a privileged and massively influential position at the very heart of power, remains a largely unknown, and seemingly unknowable enigma. Vice, despite a being a watchable and engaging retelling of recent history, really falls between two stools and fails in its aspirations to shed any new light on its subject. It is too heavy-handed and obvious to succeed as satire, using a sledgehammer as its weapon of choice when a scalpel would have served better. But ultimately it is also too indulgent, undisciplined and eager to confirm the bias of its target audience to serve any real serious intent.

Perhaps there is a good film to be made about the controversial life and career of Richard Bruce Cheney. But, unfortunately despite its best attempts and some fine performances, Vice is not that film.

The Favourite

by admin, posted in film reviews

Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film, The Favourite, like much of his previous work, is a curious beast indeed.

At first glance it plays as a period piece, a baroque and farcical comedy of manners set in the court of Queen Anne in the early 18th century. This is an impression reinforced by its setting in a sumptuous palace (the real-life Hatfield House in Hertfordshire) full of hidden doors, labyrinthine unlit staircases, shadowy galleries and long, serpentine passageways, which lends itself to eavesdropping, conspiratorial gossip and the sudden discovery of people in rooms in which their presence is undetected or inappropriate.  However, the ornate setting is a mere surface veneer that does little to mask the cynical and profane mendacity, and political and personal malevolence that characterises the royal court.

The film’s main plot point is supposedly the rivalry between Lady Sarah Churchill (Rachel Weisz), Anne’s advisor, confidant and (as the film contends) lover, and her impecunious young cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) who aspires to the usurping of Sarah’s role both in the Queen’s favour and her bed, an ambition that she eventually realises. Whilst this competition between Sarah and Abigail gives the film its chief impetus and energy, the domineering presence is that of Queen Anne herself (Olivia Colman), a physically frail and mercurial character, apt to sudden and inexplicable tantrums, typically  when confronted by the spectacle of others enjoying themselves in music or dance.  The Queen’s court is a perpetually tense, paranoid environment where her servants, courtiers and assorted hangers-on are forced to tiptoe on eggshells for fear of earning her capricious wrath. The script by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara portrays Queen Anne’s court as a cynical, profane, political bearpit, where all friendships and relationships are no more than strategic alliances intended to earn advantage for the principals.  Indeed, the chief motivation for Abigail’s manoeuvring is depicted as being driven less by genuine feeling for the Queen (unsurprising since Anne seems singularly incapable of exuding any genuine warmth or affection) and more by the opportunity that the Queen’s favour would afford to advance her own social standing. The court itself is seen as a dissolute and acrimonious place; the film’s events take place against an unseen but ever present background of war in Europe, and the social and political foment in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution. These events intrude only occasionally into the story, most notably with Queen Anne’s attempts, urged on by Sarah, to gain parliamentary approval for her proposal to raise property taxes on her wealthiest subjects to finance her military adventurism.  Despite the epic events being played out off-screen, Queen Anne’s court is portrayed as dissolute and venal, where courtiers and members of the Queen’s household are more concerned with their own agendas and appetites than with the compelling questions of national destiny being played out elsewhere. 

The film’s defining performance is doubtless that of Colman as Queen Anne; she masterfully injects empathy and even genuine pathos into a role that could easily have lapsed into Blackadder-esque caricature. The script gives us just enough insight into her tragic personal backstory for us to have an appreciation of the deep well of loss and grief that has formed her jaundiced and irascible personality. Lanthimos and his scriptwriters are, for the most part, unconcerned with accurate historical reconstruction; they have taken significant liberties with the many gaps in the historical record, and have not been averse to filling them with what cannot be other than pure invention.  One product of this would also seem to be at least one noteworthy omission; Prince George of Denmark, Anne’s husband and consort, with whom she is known to have had a close and loving relationship, is a character entirely absent from the film. 

But this is a minor quibble with a film whose obvious intent is not to be a painstaking period reconstruction, but an engaging, energetic and irreverent farce which dares to make complex female relationships, however fictionalised, its main subject, and  the fulcrum on which the entire film rotates.