Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

Severance is a TV show that is based on a fairly simple premise but takes it to a lot of very interesting places that remain uniquely part of the show but resonate strongly with a string of other things. The idea is that someone worked out a neurosurgical procedure called severance that lets you create a completely separate other personality, based off the original and controllably switch between them. More strictly, it separates the memories of the two but memories help define our personalities. In the show this gives you a working “innie” and an away-from-work “outie” that have no real memory of each other, although each is aware of the other's existence. The innies are rewarded with positive affirmations (often false) about what their outies are like. The workplace is weird in more ways than this. The main group of characters look at numbers on a screen and when they feel odd they sort them into bins and “nullify” them. That is almost exactly how the job is described to the n...

I suppose I should say that I know this film has been in the celebrity gossip that masquerades as news for all the wrong reasons. I know Wilde has been accused of running a terrible lot, Florence Pugh refused to do publicity for the film and the likes. But I try my best to avoid this sort of nonsense, I know of it because it’s been discussed in reviews of the film and the like. So I’m really reviewing the film on the basis of what I saw in the cinema and not the celebrity drama. This film owes, despite what Olivia Wilde may try to make you believe, a huge debt to The Stepford Wives. That’s not to say it’s a remake, it’s clearly an update and the way the robot wives from the original have been updated is even more disturbing to be honest. Where to start with this film, the excellent, the dubious or the bad? Let’s start with the bad. Whoever cast Chris Pine really screwed up. Don’t get me wrong, of that crop of acting Chrises who burst onto the movie scene at about the same time (He...

Given the times, I didn’t watch these matches live, and I didn’t watch them all. When England rack up a record score in all games, I’m not going to spend a couple of hours watching that, sorry Fiji. France v SA. The Bok Women are not the force that he Bok men are. The French women are the force that their men are. Next month the men will clash and it will be fascinating. This match, however, only really had one winner, and Les Bleues duly obliged. 40-5 to France. They really never looked troubled. England v Fiji England are racking up points (14 tries) and extending their win streak record for fun at the moment. Next week they play the only team that has pushed them in recent years, France. Allez les Bleues. Unlike France who looked serene throughout, Fiji took it to England in the first half, then ran out of puff. England scored 10 tries to 0 in the second period and it ended up 84-19. NZ v Australia This was the closest match on paper and on the day. In the first half hour, t...