Entertaining

This week being a down week - no deadlines - the traditional 'Training Sessions' have commenced. Not, however, the usual kind, where I get to sit with whoever thinks they need to learn something while everyone else dosses about. Oh no, this time, everyone gets to train someone.

In some cases - most notably one of our Ukrainians - the very idea of them training someone else fills me with a kind of dread rarely associated with anything that might happen in an office environment. Maybe I'm overreacting... Maybe I need to lighten up... but the prospect of people whose grasp on the software we use is shakey at best teaching others how to use said software is just a recipe for disaster.

But I concede that I just don't have time to do it all myself... and telling people I'll teach them QuarkXpress or Photoshop or Illustrator, and then failing to do so because I keep having to do other things - which does happen, even when there are no deadlines - is probably worse than seeing them offered dubious training.

Today was also a half day... because, hey, there's nothing much to do till the week after next, and my boss had been talking about going to the Rude Brittania exhibit at the Tate Britain for a couple of weeks... and, by the by, the movie of 80's Saturday Early Evening Television staple The A-Team opened today.

So, in my boss's words, we experienced opposite ends of the cultural spectrum in one evening.

The exhibition was fantastic, and not just in comparison to the disappointingly tedious Exposed at the Modern. This show had focus. There was a point to it beyond the self-indulgence of any artist (though, to be sure, there were some pretty self-indulgent works around). Plus we got to see the two 'fighter planes as Art' installations... I honestly don't consider the 'work' the artist has done to have greatly improved - or in any way affected - the artistry of the aeroplanes themselves. They are beautiful machines. Painting a Sea Harrier (jump jets removed, strangely) as a harrier - feathers on the wings, beak on the nosecone - and displaying it in the harrier's characteristic nosedive is perhaps faintly amusing... The bodywork of the plane - the combination of form and deadly precise function - is the real art.

Rude Britannia, meanwhile, charted the rise of everything from satirical cartoons to 'naughty' postcards, and their development into the likes of Spitting Image and Viz. It was quite fascinating, and probably deserves more time than we were able to give it on the first sitting. Some of it was hilarious, some of it was bewildering... definitely worth another look sometime.

Westfield was the destination for our movie this evening, in their long-delayed multiplex cinema. It's the first time I've seen a movie there and, in the main, I was impressed (never even consider going near their toilets, though... Some cinemas are bad, so I tend to avoid them all, but my boss found a real horror story going on in the ladies').

The movie does just about everything you'd expect - almost non-stop action with a very light plot, crazy stunts, and the kind of twist that smart-mouthed teenagers who can't keep their gobs shut will happily blurt out, spoiling things for everyone else a fraction of a second before the movie presents its own revelation. The cast is pretty good - Liam Neeson generally being watchable, Sharlto Copley continuing his rise to Hollywood stardom (expect him to appear in a RomCom soon), and the other two leads being more than adequate for their parts. The story is nothing new or daring - it brings the team together, presents the reason for their courtmartial, follows their escape and eventual revenge/redemption... before carting them all off to prison again, just so they can escape for a second time.

The presentation was intriguing - keeping away from any echoes of the TV series (destroying BA's van in the opening few minutes, just after introducing the character), it had large captions splashing over the screen to introduce its characters (somehow missing the name Templeton when introducing Lt 'Face' Peck, unless I missed it in all the comic book stylings), and slipped into starkly halftoned images for the outro, which covered the same old ground as the TV series' intro.

It was a lot of fun, and a very entertaining way for the cinema to shift popcorn... and, sometimes, that's all a movie needs to be.