Proud to be a Geek: Inside Out review

In another life, I was a film reviewer. I started when I was at university, writing for the Anglia Ruskin student newspaper. That was fun and helped me find my voice. Then I worked for the Cambridge Film Festival; I did some reviews and interviewed the most important film director in Albania (at the time, maybe still) for the festival daily: Kujtim Çashku. That's a story in itself as the venue changed right at the last minute and I ended up interviewing him, along with his wife, his protégé and his wife in the Arts Picturehouse bar! I also got to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 all by myself in one of the screens, which was brilliant but weird. I wrote reviews for an independent film reviewer's website, for Local Secrets and via my Flixster account. You can still read my Local Secrets reviews as they're still on the website. I have gathered them together via MultiURL. Finally I reviewed on a radio show: 209radio which became Cambridge 105; the Bums on Seats team is still going strong, headed up by Toby Miller who occasionally hosts the film quiz at Cambridge Arts Picturehouse; it's on every first Monday of the month.

Miss Potter review

As much as I love films, reviewing them made me lose the enjoyment of watching them and having to go to the cinema to see films I didn't necessarily want to see started to grate. Plus I always took it personally when people didn't like my reviews and reviewers have more power than they know: the power to influence whether someone goes to see a film or not. People can forget that film critics are people with opinions and that's all a review is, one person's opinion. That's why I try to include facts in my reviews, to make my writing less subjective, like with the Miss Potter one above. I think the final straw was Superhero Movie. I no longer go to the cinema unless it's for a film I really want to see, which is only a few times each year, rather than at least 3 times a month. I still blame Bums on Seats for getting me into Twilight, though reading the books, practically devouring them in one sitting, made me disgusted with it. But I learned a lot reviewing, especially on the radio show, and my life is more insular now as I'm not seeing films I might otherwise have passed by; the films I watch are much less broad now. The reviewing did wonders for my confidence, my writing and for my world view.

My fictional library website

My film geekery lead me to take film studies modules at university; I wrote a piece on the trend for making sequels that is as true today as it was when I wrote it. I created a website for my Librarianship degree for a fictional geeky library. It's still up and running! I called it the Abrams' Library after the creator of my favourite TV series Alias, who's done rather well for himself since and proved his geek credentials by directing both the new Star Trek films and the new Star Wars. And my Pinterest page is pretty much taken up by my love of films, TV and books.

My Pinterest page

So it takes a special film to make me want to review it, a film that really means something to me. Jersey Boys was the first in many years and Inside Out is the next film and surely won't be the last.

I must admit, I'm an out and out Disney fan and by extension a Pixar fan. I grew up with Disney; I have only just finished converting my Disney VHS collection to DVD, having received a Disney film each Christmas as a kid from one of my aunties. However this is going to be an objective review, not biased by sentiment. However Disney and Pixar have always been at the top of the animation game, really only rivalled by Studio Ghibli in terms of quality and quantity. Their output has relatively recently veered away from the princesses and fairytales, Brave being a notable exception but Merida is not your typical Disney princess. Toy Story may have started it all, through talking animals, monsters, superheroes and cars. However it was with the space saga Wall-E, a tale of two robots and with an environmental lesson as its theme, that the animation studio started to do something different. It continued with the left of field Up with an old man as its central character. But even by these standards, Inside Out is different.

The Numskulls. Credit: The Beano

When I first heard about it, I was intrigued. I loved the idea of a film which personified emotions and showed the workings of the mind. The premise of human-like creatures controlling us inside our bodies reminded me of The Numskulls, comic characters that feature in The Beano. But where The Numskulls control us physically, Inside Out concentrates on how emotions control us and how the mind works. So even if they did take The Numskulls as inspiration, though The Numskulls writers have said it bares a mere passing resemblance and suggested so in a special cartoon (shown above), they have done something completely different with the idea.

Inside Out may be a kid's film and a Disney Pixar one at that, but there is so much going on, so many references and you can take it on so many levels, I could write an essay on this film. I expect university students will write theses on it in years to come. But I won't, I just want to say why it made such an impression on me. And now it's out on DVD and I've seen it for a second time, I thought it was the right moment.

Inside Out

As with all Disney and Pixar films, Inside Out is for people of all ages, from the youngest, to the eldest. Everyone will see something different in it. But a child could watch it year on year and get something new out of it as they get older; it shows how we change as we grow up. I hope they don't do a sequel with Riley as a teenager, though the short that's on the DVD is great.

The film has a very slight plot and is essentially about how moving house affects a young girl: Riley. Inside Out shows how the five main emotions that rule her head determine her actions: Joy, Sadness, Fear, Anger and Disgust. When Joy and Sadness are accidentally ejected from Riley's control room along with the core memories that define her personality, they go on a journey through her mind to return to save Riley from being overtaken by her fear, anger and disgust.

Imagination Land

For children, a lot of the film will go over their heads, but they'll love the vibrant colours, Bing Bong and the other characters. For older kids though, it will help them understand how emotions work, control you and how they act together. It helped me and I've done a lot of self-analysis over the years! Inside Out has been adopted by mental health experts, sufferers and charities as a way to explain mental illness. It has helped children to understand their mental problems and parents to explain to their children theirs. This is a brilliant thing. The film was created as a way for the writers to explore the changes their children were going through to become teenagers. I think it was such a hit because Americans loved it as they're used to therapy, for our less self-analytical nation it has impact, but in a more subtle way.

Inside Out is really inventive and detailed, showing you the train of thought, imagination, long-term memory and even abstract thought, excelling at showing you how memories can change, how by remembering things later in life it can colour the memory, particularly with sadness; nostalgia literally means homecoming pain or ache. Memories are really what this film is all about. What happens to our memories as we get older. The story of Bing Bong, the childhood imaginary friend is heartbreaking.

Bing Bong

I think it hit me hard thanks to my years of anxiety and I wish they had showed less of Joy and Sadness and more of the others, especially Fear. The only other way they could have improved it is by doing more of what they showed during the credits and during the stand-out scene at the dinner table, inside others' heads and not just Riley's. But the bittersweet ending is wonderful.

Basically, I urge everyone to see it and you'll probably get something different out of it to me!

Thing 10 – Everything is open, nothing is set in stone

Everything is happening for me at the moment; I have a full-time job as an Information and Library Assistant at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, a job I've managed to keep for about two and a half years now, I’m learning to drive at last after years of putting it off and I’m about to start a distance-learning MSc in Information and Library Studies in September at Aberystwyth University. It has all fallen into place all of a sudden after coasting through life with nary a thought of the future. I thought I had all the time in the world, just "with the cares of the world" right in front of me instead of far behind. My boss finally encouraged me enough to give me the confidence to apply for the MSc and it has all happened so quickly. In researching where to do the course, I settled on Aberystwyth as it seemed to me to be the best, had a great set-up and many Cambridge librarians have gone there. It just so happens by complete coincidence that our summer holiday, which was booked over a year ago, was a mere 18 miles from where we were staying. I didn’t realise until afterwards! So I organised a visit, spent a long morning there getting my own private open day basically and I now feel a lot happier about the whole thing. I also fell in l
ove with Aberystwyth. But how did I get here? How come I'm studying again? How did I become a library assistant?

The short answer is I don’t know. But in trying to rationalise it, I will go through in chronological order, bear with me as it’ll all make sense in the end, it did to me anyway. I do tend to live in my own little world most of the time; for those of you interested it's like the world on the other side of the mirror in the Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus where I can stumble upon anyone from people out of my past to fictional characters such as Sydney Bristow from Alias: dream-like, surreal, dark, technicolour and magical. I left full-time education five years ago, wow has it been five years? I graduated from Anglia Ruskin University with a BA in English; I adore reading, literature and books so it was the natural choice, plus it was my best subject. One of my teachers said I was like Matilda: long dark hair, painfully shy and always had my head in a book, yet hopefully with the same intelligence, imagination and spirit. I may have done English, but I also picked and chose modules in drama, film studies and creative writing, whatever interested me. I always tried to choose the juiciest fruit from the tree of knowledge and even those seemingly out of my reach. I fell off branches a few times trying to do just that, but least I tried; the bruises always fade and never leave lasting damage. I am a writer at heart and on top of everything e
lse I’m going to start writing the novel I have had in my head for many years now. I may have left it too late and it may be too much to take on alongside everything else, but committing yourself to something for a few years makes you realise all the things you have not yet done. My time management has never been the best and I'm an all or nothing type of person, so at the moment it's "all" but I've had months and months of "nothing"ness.

After leaving university, I didn’t have a clue what to do; I had vague ideas of journalism, publishing and even MI5! I blame Spooks. So I went to a temp agency and got a very interesting administrative job at the police station, contracted initially for a month as a data entry processor, but I progressed into various and diverse tasks for a few different departments, and finally lasted seven months as I proved too good to let go, that’s literally what they said. As proof, they couldn’t afford to keep me on any longer in that role, but they offered me another so they didn’t lose me. I got a lot of experience: work experience and life experience; if you want your eyes opened, work in a police station; but I couldn’t take the tension any longer. I’m surprised I lasted as long as I did without having a nervous breakdown. So I had to leave. Directly afterwards, I finished working for Heffers in their classical music shop, my first proper job and one I had for seven years. I still miss it.

I then applied for a job off my own back as a content editor for an online reservations company. We had a great team of people, which is what it was all about for me. From doing that job I discovered Watchmen, Veronica Mars, Freaks and Geeks, furthered my love of anime and made a fantastic group of friends. Thanks guys. I can’t remember if I left there or if I was let go, either way it was due to restructuring. I went briefly back to temp work, but quit because I got another job as maternity cover, after a long interviewing process; the final meeting was a presentation about the functional food industry. I was a research assistant for an offshoot of a development agency. I hated the job, not the actual work, just the place. So to rescue my sanity I left; it was either me or them and let's face it, it was not going to be them. I went after I was due to leave I might add because of the person I was covering's procrastination, which didn’t help things. A few more interviews came and went and then I saw the advert in the paper for my current post. I had always wanted to work for Cambridge University, an institution I have great admiration for and pride in; I'm Cambridge born and bred. That may be the reason why it jumped out at me, seemed to fit, made sense; I don’t know how to describe it except something clicked inside my head. I didn’t have the insight to analyse it further, but I applied for the job more in hope than anything and to my great surprise, I got it.

There does seem to have been some overarching master plan to my career progression so far, just not of my own making. All those previous jobs have been unconsciously preparing me for what I do now. Heffers gave me extensive customer service experience, cataloguing skills and till work. The administrative job is obvious: data entry, office experience, acquisitions, filing, word processing, the list is endless. Working with such a great team of people, the relationships I’ve developed and liaising with the different departments in the police station, civilians and police officers alike, have proved essential to what I do now. Working in a police station isn't actually that different to the world of academia, there are similarities between police officers and faculty; the former needs things urgently the latter wants things urgently... The content editing job is less obvious, but I learnt professional creative writing, web-based publishing, proofreading, accuracy, attention to detail, I even did some editing in foreign languages. I also got to go to the headquarters in Amsterdam which was brilliant. The research job, well, working in a business school requires excellent research skills and that job interview where I had to do the presentation is similar to what our students go through now. I was literally doing what our students do for their projects, coursework and so on. It was also my first experience of databases, introduction to the business world and I was basically paid to search the internet and read newspapers! I also got to play It’s a Knockout on one of the company away days, but that’s a whole other subject.

I have never hidden my love of libraries, I have always felt instantly at home in them, surrounded by books and knowledge; it's simply where I belong. So in reading this, you will now know I have never worked in a library before, apart from a brief stint at school, but I’ve been working towards librarianship without even knowing!

My story is actually pretty similar to Lottie Smith; here is her post via Adventures of a Librarian.