Dear Mr Wonka
Please find enclosed a copy of the Health & Safety Risk Assessment as compiled and completed by this department following our lengthy visit to your Wonka Bars confectionary processing plant.
I have highlighted numerous instances of glaring and severe safety failings that the management and general staff at your facility seem to be aware but ignorant of and I have therefore made appropriate recommendations that should be implemented immediately.
Yours sincerely
Food Standards Agency
HEALTH & SAFETY RISK ASSESSMENT – WONKA BARS CHOCOLATE FACTORY – FINAL DRAFT
1. A railing should be installed around the Chocolate River to prevent slips, trips and falls and a minimum approach line should be clearly marked and adhered to in order to avoid contamination from any un-authorised personnel.
2. A guard or grill surrounding the opening to the chocolate extraction pipe (which leads to the Fudge Room) should be installed to ensure that no foreign objects are able to pass through the opening and move up into the pipe.
3. Operating staff and accompanying visitors should be warned of potentially harmful flashing images and strobe lighting during the Chocolate River boat ride. Passengers should also be made aware of the disturbing nature of some of the images shown during the ride and a British Board of Film Classification age restriction certificate should be sought.
4. The Three-Course-Dinner Gum should not be deemed suitable for human consumption and distributed to staff or visitors until a separate report is completed by the Food Standards Agency. Until this report is complete and the necessary actions taken based on the findings no further production of this product should be allowed to continue.
5. There should be easily accessible emergency stop switches and entry/exit panels along the vertical length of the ventilation shaft in the Bubble Room. This is to ensure that, should any members of the Wonka Bars staff or visitors be unnaturally elevated after consuming the company’s own Fizzy Lifting Drink, they have appropriate means of escape and/or shutting down the rotary blades that are to be found at the top end of the shaft.
6. Clear and visible warning signs should be displayed in the Chocolate Golden Egg Sorting Room advising visitors not to approach or climb onto any of the equipment, including weighing scale-like structures, without proper supervision. Particular attention is to be paid to the hazardous and un-guarded garbage disposal chute hatch/bay which leads directly down to a regularly-fired incinerator.
7. Under no circumstances should any visitors be allowed entry to the Wonkavision studio and to gain access to the input stage or transmission array. Any and all future transmissions made within the Wonkavision studio should be supervised and countersigned by the factory’s Health & Safety Officer and the factory duty manager.
8. The Great Glass Elevator is to be grounded immediately until an inspection by the Civil Aviation Authority is completed and the aircraft is deemed airworthy. After inspection of your plant this department was unable to find a dedicated exit point for the elevator and I strenuously recommend that one is opened forthwith so that future launches do not interfere with or damage the plant’s superstructure.
9. All factory staff including, but not restricted to, the team of Oompa-Loompas should be subject to a full and extensive Criminal Records Bureau check before commencing employment at the Wonka Bars confectionary processing plant. Care should be taken not to allow any staff to be put in a position where they are left alone and unsupervised with any children or vulnerable adults who may visit the plant on open days.
END OF REPORT
Saturday, 7 January 2012
Tuesday, 3 January 2012
The Tree Of Life – film review
Experiencing this film is like watching a Catherine Cookson drama on mute whilst drinking heavily… although, to the best of my knowledge, Catherine Cookson dramas haven’t got quite so many dinosaurs in them.
The reclusive Terrence Malick returns with a much less direct and linear cinematic piece about, well, I’m not quite sure. If you break it down it’s a simple coming-of-age story about a boy who grows up with a short-tempered authoritarian father and eventually begins to rebel against his very ridged, buzz-cut upbringing. But the opening half-hour or so where we learn one of the boy’s brothers will eventually die (aged 19, long after the childhood events that provide the load-bearing centre of the film) and are then treated to an astonishingly well imagined and visualised version of how the universe and Earth began serve to unbalance the delicate story that’s being set up… if indeed there’s a story at all. Malick’s ever-moving and often un-obtrusive camera makes the viewer feel like the eye of God peering at events from the sidelines and we feel moved to intervene at times. It’s an exhaustingly sombre and lyrical film and will test the patience of most viewers, especially as there’s no real conclusion of sorts or explanation as to what’s just happened. It just sort of… happens.
My theory about the film is thus (warning: I’ve had to use brackets within brackets to properly annotate my explanations, so prepare yourself for lots of “(this (this))”:
We see a young man’s parents being informed of his death and their initial attempts to come to terms with their loss. From here we see the young man’s brother, who is already dead after drowning as a child, as an adult man (Sean Penn) in heaven (which is represented as a modern day busy skyscraper and hinted at by the man’s lighting of a blue candle in remembrance (I think “blue” represents heaven and goodness)) who’s living out his father’s dream of seeing his sons achieving a successful and wealthy life, even though he’s doing it in heaven. The young man’s brother then tries to reconcile things with his family and father by viewing his and his family’s life, and the universe as a whole, from the start (we even see his father lighting a red candle at one point, assumedly to hint at the fact that the path his father is taking in life (with his family in tow) is leading him to hell and/or damnation) and trying to understand what went wrong, if it went wrong at all. By the end he realises his father was only trying to do right by his family and his aggressive outbursts were only because of his frustration and desire to protect them. Once the man feels reconciled he meets his family as they enter heaven (which is represented by a sun-drenched beach) and a happy, loving reunion takes place.
There, that’s it, that’s what I think.
To me it was never particularly clear which of the three boys dies at the start and it’s never explained how he dies, so I’m guessing it’s all open to interpretation. I think Sean Penn’s character dies when the family are at a lake swimming and the references he makes in heaven to his dead brother are misleading… I think he’s mourning the other members of his family (including his recently deceased 19 year old brother) who are, one by one, dying and joining him in heaven. So basically when the film begins we’re witnessing the second child death and when the grandmother attempts to console the mother by saying “you still have the other two” she’s actually referring to the last boy and the father (Brad Pitt).
Give it a go… you’ll either feel empty or fulfilled by the end.
I also recommend watching it alone without distraction.
3/5
The reclusive Terrence Malick returns with a much less direct and linear cinematic piece about, well, I’m not quite sure. If you break it down it’s a simple coming-of-age story about a boy who grows up with a short-tempered authoritarian father and eventually begins to rebel against his very ridged, buzz-cut upbringing. But the opening half-hour or so where we learn one of the boy’s brothers will eventually die (aged 19, long after the childhood events that provide the load-bearing centre of the film) and are then treated to an astonishingly well imagined and visualised version of how the universe and Earth began serve to unbalance the delicate story that’s being set up… if indeed there’s a story at all. Malick’s ever-moving and often un-obtrusive camera makes the viewer feel like the eye of God peering at events from the sidelines and we feel moved to intervene at times. It’s an exhaustingly sombre and lyrical film and will test the patience of most viewers, especially as there’s no real conclusion of sorts or explanation as to what’s just happened. It just sort of… happens.
My theory about the film is thus (warning: I’ve had to use brackets within brackets to properly annotate my explanations, so prepare yourself for lots of “(this (this))”:
We see a young man’s parents being informed of his death and their initial attempts to come to terms with their loss. From here we see the young man’s brother, who is already dead after drowning as a child, as an adult man (Sean Penn) in heaven (which is represented as a modern day busy skyscraper and hinted at by the man’s lighting of a blue candle in remembrance (I think “blue” represents heaven and goodness)) who’s living out his father’s dream of seeing his sons achieving a successful and wealthy life, even though he’s doing it in heaven. The young man’s brother then tries to reconcile things with his family and father by viewing his and his family’s life, and the universe as a whole, from the start (we even see his father lighting a red candle at one point, assumedly to hint at the fact that the path his father is taking in life (with his family in tow) is leading him to hell and/or damnation) and trying to understand what went wrong, if it went wrong at all. By the end he realises his father was only trying to do right by his family and his aggressive outbursts were only because of his frustration and desire to protect them. Once the man feels reconciled he meets his family as they enter heaven (which is represented by a sun-drenched beach) and a happy, loving reunion takes place.
There, that’s it, that’s what I think.
To me it was never particularly clear which of the three boys dies at the start and it’s never explained how he dies, so I’m guessing it’s all open to interpretation. I think Sean Penn’s character dies when the family are at a lake swimming and the references he makes in heaven to his dead brother are misleading… I think he’s mourning the other members of his family (including his recently deceased 19 year old brother) who are, one by one, dying and joining him in heaven. So basically when the film begins we’re witnessing the second child death and when the grandmother attempts to console the mother by saying “you still have the other two” she’s actually referring to the last boy and the father (Brad Pitt).
Give it a go… you’ll either feel empty or fulfilled by the end.
I also recommend watching it alone without distraction.
3/5
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