How to avoid the sun when it’s 32°C (90°F) outside and you really don’t want to risk burning again

Yep, it was something of a scorcher over the weekend down here in the southeast of England. But those of you who know that my superhero super power is to turn into Lobster Man (thanks, 4D!) as soon as the sun takes his hat off will understand why I needed to keep a low profile.

So what to do when the sun prevents you from venturing outdoors. No, this isn't that sort of site, you know (not yet anyway, but who knows what might happen if and when desperate measures are needed).

Wife (ever obliging when I must remain indoors) and I turned to the gift of television to entertain ourselves. That is, once we'd got bored of working and had done about as much blogging as one can reasonably do before the realization that it's taken over you life and turned your brain to mush. (Actually that last bit is a tad unfair, since "studies" apparently show that blogging increases your IQ. I imagine that's probably true, but the fact that I read it on Blogger leads me to at least be uncertain until I've done my own investigating.)

Apart from the copious amounts of Big Brother and footie that had to be consumed, we also had a couple of movies from LoveFilm sitting on the side costing us money. So I'll put some notes here about what they were and how they were.

First up was an Italian movie, The Consequences of Love. I'd heard quite good things about this. Unfortunately I was disappointed. The concept was good, and the ending was good, and there were even some good bits in it. I chuckled a couple of times (although it's not a comedy; I just laugh at everything). Wife has a theory that Italian films are all head and no heart. That's often the case. Shame. To be fair, though, there is a lot of good stuff that has come out of Italy in recent years, but often these films star young actors in the lead roles - people like Luigi Lo Cascio and Giovanna Mezzogiorno (pictured here for no good reason) are good names to look out for.

Next up, it was Candy Minx country and - about 17 years too late, I know - Jesus of Montreal. Having recently (ish) watched both The Barbarian Invasions and The Decline of the American Empire by the same director, it seemed the right time to give this old movie a go. I loved The Barbarian Invasions; I found it really quite stunning, and I'm glad I watched it before The Decline of the American Empire, even though it is the sequel and should have been watched after. Why glad? Because Decline suffers the same problem as Jesus of Montreal: looking old before its time. And of course, movies of that period (mid- to late 1980s) often also suffer from what I call Michael Mann syndrome, with terrible terrible incidental music à la Miami Vice. Indeed, I had to reach for my air guitar on more than one occasion.

That said, Jesus of Montreal was quite fascinating; at least for the first 90 minutes. It started to drag a little then. I was still going with the flow, but out of the corner of my eye I noticed Wife reaching for Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide to check the running time; I knew right then that we'd lost her. Still, as I say, good till then. The ending not so great. And a couple of scenes just weren't that well directed. In one in particular, the two actors seemed as though they were playing in totally different films, so incompatible with one another were their performances.

So one duff film with a good ending, and one good film with a duff ending. To paraphrase Maurice "Bosco" Boscorelli (right) in Third Watch, "together they make one good film".

Then, at last, the Survivor tape came out of its box and restored our faith in videokind...