Doktor Kisses

Thoughts on Scott Pilgrim Vs The World

2010-12-16T21:44:00.004+02:00

I love Edgar Wright. Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, and Hot Fuzz are all marvellous things.

Scott Pilgrim is about a character who's absorbed video game culture, and largely processes the world in those terms. For Wright, this is largely going back to Spaced territory. I'm a video gaming nerd. This should be a home run. So the fact that this mostly didn't work for me was a major disappointment.

My problem with the movie can be summed up with two words: Knives Chau.

Knives Chau is a seventeen yearold high school girl. Scott Pilgrim is dating her, which is like totally a major scandal because he left high school like thirteen years ago*. She's charming, bubbly, naive and immensely likeable. He's dating her because it's nice and easy after the horrible breakup he suffered. If you've ever been on that end of a relationship you should already have a cringing realization of how horrible a dick he's being to her. This dickishness is cemented when he meets Ramona Flowers, the girl of his dreams -- literally: there's a subspace highway through his head, which she makes use of for her job as an Amazon.ca delivery girl -- strings Knives along because breaking up is totally like hard and stuff until he bags Ramona and leaves Knives adrift in a terrible black frame of despair.

This is as good a point as any to point out that Scott Pilgrim makes no sense as a whole except at the metaphorical level. Scott Pilgrim has to fight Ramona's seven evil exes to be able to continue to date her. Scott gains the Power of Love, causing a sword to burst from his chest to fight an Evil Ex -- read: emotional baggage from previous relationships. This makes no sense in the real world, but on an emotional level it makes perfect sense.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yes: Knives is likeable. She is far more likeable than Scott. Scott hurting her makes him immensely dislikeable. Now, in a comedy, having a dislikeable protagonist is not necessarily a problem. For one, a sufficiently charming actor can make you root for a character in spite of the dickishness. Alternately, we could simply be treated to watching the dick suffer at the hands of the Comedy Gods.

Michael Cera is not the actor to make Scott likeable. He can be a likeable nerd. A likeable asshole nerd? No. And the movie expects you to care about Scott's fight against the seven evil exes for Ramona's love. Worse: Scott and Knives have some chemistry. Scott and Ramona have none. If we had a hopelessly doomed relationship abandoned in favour of a promising one, I'd might still sympathise with Scott. Instead, we get the opposite.

In the end of a romantic comedy, which is approximately what this is -- CAUTION this is a major SPOILER coming up; if you haven't seen the movie, read along at your own peril -- when the secondary romantic interest sends the hero towards His True Love with a stoic "I'm too cool for you anyway" and your immediate reaction is "Damn right you are!" instead of "AWWWWWW" it is a major fucking problem.

Another problem is the fights against the seven evil exes. I hate to embarass myself like this, but I am as gay as Scott's awesome gay roommate has ever been for fellow Bushmill's loving sexy Irish redhead John Rogers, and his post on how to write action is as relevant as ever.

To summarize: action scenes are suspense scenes that require action to resolve. If there is no suspense, they should reveal character. If you can't do that, deliver exposition. If there's none of that, you're utter shit. Scott Pilgrim is to fight seven evil exes. So the first ex delivers exposition on the role of the exes. We've already established that the movie plays by no real-world rules, and we've no ways of discrning's if Scott's in danger or not. Besides, do you really believe anyone except the seventh would present a reasonable challenge? No, me neither. The fights slightly reveal character, but by revealing slight bits of Ramona's backstory, and ultimatey Ramona's a bloody cipher, nothing but an object of Scott's desire. If Scott is to earn his redemption, and redeem himself in my eyes, the fights need to make him face horrible truths about his dickishness. They do not. This means I was mildly bored, watching a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Sure, there was an occasional gag in there, but not enough to justify the screen time.

I am being horribly down on this, but it is inevitable, since the movie's emotional core and central conceit falls completely flat. But really, I love everything except he central characters. Kieran Culkin is brilliant as Scott's cool gay roommate, and his droll delivery of lines frequently salvage scenes that should be moribound. The movie's full of energy. The visual style is splendid. I love that Brie Larsen -- who plays the evil ex that broke Scott's heart -- actually sings the vocals to Metric's Black Swan instead of miming to the song. I love Kim Pine, Scott ex-girlfriend and his band's drummer. I love Knives Chau. I love that the movie turned me on to Metric:

I love everything except the central couple. There's a hollow vacuum where the movie's heart should be, and there's nothing the ancillary details can do to overcome this. I can't actually love the movie. And this breaks my heart.

*Actually, he's 22. Admittedly on dodgier end of things, but not quite Lolita territory, in case you were worried.

Dragon Age: Witch Hunt

2010-09-15T20:24:00.008+03:00

A three step guide to making your customers feel ripped off with your DLC:

1) Re-use your environments from the base game and expansion. (No, using origin stories environments who most players the might not have seen does not make this better.)

2) Make the battles piss-easy and uninteresting. Dragon Age had some wonderful tactical battles in its repertoaire. Any given random encounter in the main game will pose more of a tactical conundrum than the entirety of this combined.

3) Make the entire selling point of the DLC -- meeting up with bitch-witch supremo Morrigan -- take all of five minutes, and not resolving much of anything except in the vaguest of terms possible.

In a way, I can sympathize with the problem of developing new, bite-sized chunks for a game like Dragon Age. The appeal lies in the long game, developing your character over time and watching your choices play out. A couple of hours worth of satisfying content has to be much trickier to develop. But there's really no excuse for the lazy reuse of environments and terrible fights in this. Just...fuck off. It's particularly egregious when it's released on the same day as Lair of the Shadow Broker -- Mass Effect 2 DLC -- which similarly intended to resolve another character arc left hanging, but did so in a very satisfying manner, and showcased some fantastic new environments while doing so.

Recent Observations of Moving Pictures

2009-08-24T21:41:00.006+03:00

The Brothers Bloom

I adored Brick, writer/director Rian Johnson's previous film. It was basically a love letter to Dashiell Hammett, a modern day film noir. Only set in a high school. It sounds unworkable, but it sold it beautifully, and managed the tricky feat of being very funny while still never winking at the camera.

Enter The Brothers Bloom. Convoluted tale of crime? Check. Anachronistic pulp aesthetic? Check. The signs are good.

So why doesn't it quite work?

Rinko Kikuchi nearly steals the show as the almost-mute Bang-Bang. Rachel Weisz is ditzy and adorable. Adrian Brody is put-upon and vulnerable. The actors all do their part.

The problem is in the plotting. The main characters are con-artists, and there's a bit too much knowing self-awareness there. And soon you become aware that everyone is being jerked around by Stephen Bloom and his preternatural planning ability. Including the audience.

It's just a bit too clever by half.

(Also, I don't know if I've been broken by too many movies slavishly adhering to the three act structure, but there's something wonky with it there. But let's not get too nerdy here.)

Public Enemies

The story of America's most famous bank robber and the FBI agent that hunted him down seems tailor made for Michael Mann, who's made a career out of depicting duels between men on different sides of the law.

Alas, this will go down as one of his mediocre pieces.

Not from lack of acting caliber though. Depp and Cotillard in particular are great, as is Billy Crudup as J. Edgear Hoover. A lot of the actors are short-changed by the script though, Christian Bale in particular has very little to do except being the grim humourless lawman. A lot of the elements, like the other big bank robber in the yarn, Baby-Face Nelson, feels very undercooked.

Somewhere, there's a half an hour longer cut that fleshes everything out and lets all the elements breathe properly.

His stylistic tics steer him wrong this time. He's been going for a glossy, high-saturation look since at least the Miami Vice/Manhunter days, so him embracing digital photography is in many ways a natural development. Much like the rest of the movie though, there's plenty of times when it just doesn't work. For every moment that feels like you're right there, there's another where the cinematography goes all high-contrast, ultra-digital and just throws you out of the scene.

It's a Michael Mann movie, so it's still worth seeing, but it's a bit of a disappointment.

Duplicity

He's a spy, she's a spy. They work for competing corporations, fighting over a new top secret formula. They have an affair. But wait! She's actually using him. But wait! They're really in love, and they're working together for one of the sides. But wait! He's really...you get the idea.

It's reasonably likeable fare. Clive Owen and Julia Roberts are decent enough leads, and Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson are clearly having fun as the dueling CEOs. But after a while, you get tired of the constant reversals. Like Brothers Bloom, it suffers from too-clever-by half syndrome. And while it does have a stronger throughline in that we're constantly focused on the Roberts/Owen relationship, it's not nearly as charming or stylish as Bloom.

Crank 2

In a way, this was the most remarkable film I've seen lately.

But not in a particularly good way.

In the first Crank, Jason Statham had to keep his adrenaline up to prevent a poison from killing him. And then he fell out of a helicopter with the guy who poisoned him. Fin.

Well, no. It made money, so he miraculously survives and gets snatched for harvesting his miraculous organs. This time around he has to keep electrocuting himself to prevent his spare heart from stopping until he can get his real one back.

The first Crank was immensely stupid, and pretty funny. This one's immensely stupid, grotesque, rancid and mad.

At one point, Jason Statham gets so electrocuted he imagines himself as a child on a talk show. Geri Halliwell is his mother. Then he's electrocuted to the point that he imagines himself as Godzilla. That's the sort of lunacy that should make you cackle with glee, but instead you feel soiled. Part of it is the camerawork, which is the worst sort of ADD-filmmaking, and somehow makes every frame feel ugly.

The other part of it is the stuff like a man cutting off his own nipples for little discernable reason. Or a stripper getting shot in the breast, blood and silicone pouring out. And the movie expecting you to laugh at this.

Oh yeah. It has a bit of a problem with women. Every female character is either a whore or a stripper, or an old woman that Statham has to rub against to generate static electricity. Because that's hilarious.

Either this is writers/directors Geraldine and Naylor extending a giant middle finger for having to make a sequel against their will, or it's them vomiting their id all over the screen. In any case, you find yourself unable to look away, but really wishing you could.

The words "seduction community"

2009-08-18T22:49:00.004+03:00

Catching up on Penny-Arcade and the associated newsposts brought this to my attention.

I wish it hadn't.

I'm not one to get moralistic about who people choose to have sex with; if some people who met five seconds ago choose to get it on, that's fine with me. It's only if the power dynamics get iffy that my hackles get raised.

The "Seduction Community" is basically selp-help -- with the all of baggage that brings -- where the objective is to form you into a grade A pussy hound, downing women like gazelle on the savannah. Learn to use Neuro-Linguistic Programming for speed seduction! Love Systems will teach you the secret of Same Night Lays!

Press up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, a, b for pussy.

If you're unaware, the basic idea of Neuro-Linguistic Programming is to hack language and social cues in order to get people to do what you want. In reality, it's a bunch of pseudo-scientific tosh dressed up in fancy language, more accurately summarized as sales technique.

Picture it if you will: a jolly bunch of travelling salesmen, gathering to share tips, slap each other on the back, and improve their oily craft. Only instead of selling insecure, unassertive people stuff they don't need, they're selling insecure, unassertive people fucks they don't want.

You don't have to be Feminist McRage for that thought to make your blood curdle.

The internet might be a magical place where dreams come true in the form of mpeg files, but before it existed, I didn't have to go to sleep with the knowledge of people coming together all over the world to celebrate and reinforce their pathologies instead of having their delusions ground away by a world filled with people outside their little circlejerk.

Sure Is The Risk Made

2009-08-18T21:35:00.005+03:00

It seems like only two years ago that wily young man Conelrad put out a lovely lp of ambient/shoegaze noise filled with nuclear paranoia. And now he's at it again:

Yes, an entirely new, entirely free album. On the first couple of listens, it's been just as good, if not better. Go get it here.

Words. On the internet.

2009-08-18T21:29:00.003+03:00

I'm drunk; here we go.

Gomorrah

2009-02-13T22:12:00.007+02:00

A courier carrying money to the families of imprisoned gang members. A middleman and his apprentice facilitating the illegal dumping of countless tons of toxic waste. Two teenage wannabe gangsters obsessed with Scarface. An even younger boy going from observing the clans' drug trade surrounding him to a participant. A tailor making haute couture for a pittance in a blackmarket factory. All lives inextricably tied to the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia.

Gomorrrah isn't a movie that bothers to spell things out to its audience. After opening with a seemingly unrelated massacre in a solarium, it heedlessly plunges into these five story threads, and observes them with a documentarian's eye. Even when the director pulls out obvious cinematic tricks like completely killing all the sounds in a scene, it never ceases to feel authentic. Small wonder, since it's based on journalist Roberto Saviano's exposé that landed him in police protection when published, and has a completely convincing cast compromised of local amateurs. (Some of which have apparently since been arrested for their ties to the Camorra.) It's grungy, gritty and thoroughly unglamorizing of its subject matter, with violence shockingly casual and ever-threatening.

The movie gives a good sense of the poisonous web of crime and corruption that permeates everyday life in Naples, but the complete dedication to the characters' viewpoints comes at the expense of clarity with regards to the bigger picture, both within the mafia and society at large. Saviano's book, for all it's flaws and tendency to ramble, never shied away from pointing out the way the Camorra's operations fit into the greater economy. And inside the movie itself, there's a war brewing within the clans, a splinter group of malcontents causing tension and an increasing bodycount, which initially seems to come completely out of left field. That is, until you remember the massacre that kicked off the movie an hour earlier.

Still, Gomorrah is an easy recommendation to make for anyone who doesn't mind their crime movies filled with uncomfortable amounts of real life.

Escape From City 17, Part 1

2009-02-13T20:53:00.005+02:00

As someone who greatly enjoyed Half-Life 2, this made me smile. Youtube's low fidelity helps the bits cribbed from the game blend in better, but it's still pretty nifty, especially considering it was put together for $500.

...and we exhale, and roll our eyes in unison

2009-01-20T21:20:00.002+02:00

Goodbye to that ignorant, venal, criminal fuck. But credit where credit's due, that was quite a legacy:

Today's recipe is liver, darling

2009-01-03T18:42:00.002+02:00

A new year, and along with the customary Don't Be Fatty McFatass, You Fatty resolution, there's a corollary Cook Properly, You Lazy Bastard resolution.

My first go was at that unfairly maligned organ, the liver. I know, I know, I've suffered through the same school kitchen horrors, and the Finnish maksalaatikko (approximately liver casserole, if we consider casserole a superset of all things thrown into a pan in an oven) is an abomination, but when properly done, liver is bloody delicious. And like so many other dishes, what is needed to do it properly is bacon*.

It is also extemely easy. You will need:

Bacon
Onions
Liver
Spices

Chop the onions and sautée them together with the bacon in a pan over medium high heat, until the bacon is done and the onions translucent. Remove. Quickly rub your spices onto the sides of the liver - I went with simple salt and pepper, but there's no reason you can't get more exotic - before tossing into the pan to fry in the bacon fat. Be careful not to overdo it, liver should preferrably be a little bit pink inside.

Aaand - you're done!

Well, you'll need something to serve it with as well, unless you fancy an all-protein diet, but I'll leave that up to you. I went with potatoes and lingonberry jam.

If you're a closet alcoholic like me, you can also grab that bottle of red wine and use all the flavour in the burned bits in your pan to improvise a red wine sauce. Brown a bit of flour to get your basic roux, add red wine, and boil off while loosening the bits in the pan until you have a consistency that pleases you.

Just make sure the bottle's a screw top, otherwise you'll *have* to drink all of it to make sure it doesn't spoil. And that way lies intoxication, madness and posts on the internet.

*If you think you've spotted a conflict between resolution A and corollary resolution B, you're mistaken. Bacon is a vegetable, and vegetables are good for you.

Cansei de Ser Sexy Is My Hot, Hot Sex

2008-12-23T10:46:00.004+02:00

So I get home after a week of too long days and too little sleep, tired, cranky and with a fierce desire to drink, and announce this to the world by misquoting lyrics. Lyrics I annoyingly can't quite place, so I set out to track down the source. Not a hard thing to do, since I know the Gillen is responsible for putting it in my head, and quickly find Brazilian party rockers CSS with Let's Make Love and Listen to Death From Above.

And then I watch it again. With wine then beer then more then again. And again. And again. And all desire to hear Marilyn Manson wail about spiders washes away in a rush of nonsense lyrics and bouncy synths. It's impossible to stay miserable listening to it. It's fucking brilliant. And thanks to the wonder of the electric internets, the entire album is swiftly purchased and secure on my harddrive, and it's almost as good throughout.

There's some throwaway songs on there, and bits of it are in Portugese but that shouldn't turn anyone off in the slightest, because there's an overwhelming sense of playfulness and fun driving the thing, even on the angry parts. And even when the lyrics are in English rarely make sense. Meeting Paris Hilton is borderline incomprehensible because Pixie-like vocalist Lovefoxxx (yes, Lovefoxxx) pronounces beach and bitch identically. And when they do make sense , they're ridiculously punny, like "suck, suck, suck my art-hole" on the spiteful Art Bitch.

They're also rather naughty, which can only be a good thing.

Really, you should go give them a listen.

Quantum of Solace

2008-11-10T22:22:00.004+02:00

Remember Casino Royale? Of course you do. It was a fantastic reboot of the Bond franchise, cutting away the camp of the later Brosnan movies, and Daniel Craig creating the definitive Bond by sweating, bleeding and being hit on the balls a lot. It could've used a bit of trimming, but overall it left me really excited about Bond for the first time in a really long while.

Quantom of Solace completely pisses that away.

Let's pause for a brief wanky beret moment. Closure is the act of observing the parts but perceiving the whole. Filling in the blanks. Everytime you move between panels in a comic, or an edit happens in a movie, you're relating the frames spatially and temporally, as well as extrapolating from the visual elements in the frame. This takes brain power, and audience involvement. Knowing how to use it is absolutely key in visual storytelling.

At some point, someone had the idea of making more agressive use of this, sacrificing clarity in favour of getting in close and giving a more impressionistic view of action sequences in the hope that it would increase audience involvement. And you know, people complain about shaky cam a lot, but I'm fine with it when in the hands of a skilled director. Remember the Tangiers chase in the Bourne Ultimatum? Ten minutes of Bourne running after Desh, Desh closing in on Nikki, and the audience completely pinned to their seats.

Marc Forster is not a skilled action director. So he just throws a bunch of frenetic edits of moving bits at the screen, without little regard for establising spatial relation, in the mistaken hope that we'll mistake the confusion for excitement. There's a particularly egregious sequence kicking off the film, a car chase where it's fucking impossible to make out who's chasing who until it's over and you realise that Bond was in the car in the front becasue he's still moving and the car behind crashed.

This is a problem when the movie is 90% action. It's even more of a problem when the script gives the action sequences little purpose other than being loud, noisy padding.

Oddly for a movie that literally picks up an hour after Casino Royale, it has little interest in what made that movie good, or the fraught emotional state Bond was in at the end. Oh, there's some lipservice about how angry and hurt he is, but anytime there's danger of a real character moment, the movie panics and hurtles along to the next action sequence as if slowing down would put it in danger of being accosted by rape-goblins.

It's a real pity, because Daniel Craig is still as great in the part as ever, Judi Dench is in fine form, and Olga Kurylenko is a good Bond babe, but the script doesn't put them to good use. The only weak link among the principals is Mathieu Amalric as the hilariously ineffectual and unmenacing villain.

It's not worth writing off the rebooted franchise completely yet, but they'll have to do a lot better next time around.

At least it's better than Max Payne, which has an appealing performance by Kurylenko for all of her five minutes of screentime, and then goes back to being completely useless, lumpen pap. You'd think it wouldn't be too hard to get a pulp tale of revenge for murdered loved ones up to acceptable standards, but alas, the video game movie curse struck again.

Hello again blog

2008-11-06T12:20:00.000+02:00

It's been a while, hasn't it? No, contrary to appearances, I did not disappear into a crippling WoW addiction. I rode out the trial and left it at that. I was just being lazy again.

The apparent irony of that last post was pretty funny though, wasn't it?

Even if it wasn't true.

I have to admit that I sometimes feel a slight temptation whenever I walk past a retail copy of WoW though. It's a very polished game, and Azeroth has a lot of sights to see. And I can definitely see why people get stuck in it. There's always a new little reward. *ding* You reach a new level. *ding* You get a new spell. *ding* You find a nifty item. *ding* You learn to make a better sandwich. *ding* You fi- *ding* Y- *ding* *ding* *ding*

It's a constant barrage of little happy pills of accomplishment.

It still can't escape the fundamental rubbishness of the genre though; the inability to affect your world meaningfully, all the while maintaining that you're super awesome one chosen hero of singleplayer rgps. But you can't fool me. I possess cleverness and functioning retinas. I can see that those nasty critters I genocided the minute before spawned back and nothing changed.

Which wouldn't be that big a problem if your genociding the evil critters was fun, but WoW's combat is neither visceral nor tactically challenging enough to make it entertaining. It's easy to do the math and see how an engagement will end the minute it starts, and then it's a dull couple of minutes to execute your plan. Unless of course an angry bear spawns in behind you, and then you die, because you're as fierce as a soggy kitten and can't handle angry bears in addition to the other enemies, and the camera refuses to let you spot their filthy spawning hides before you pull aggro. And then you swear copiously, while wondering why you're supposed to put up with this on the promise that it gets better after the first 20 or 30 levels.

Which leads you to putting the box back down in the store and move on to purchase other, more appealing games. Like Fallout 3. On which there will be many words later.

Unless shiny things happen.

You can't trust those shiny things.

This cannot possibly end well

2008-08-23T14:27:00.003+03:00

Yes, I installed the free WoW trial. Sometimes you just get curious, and jam a needle of heroin into your eyeball to find out what's so great about it, y'know?

"What is it with you and women?" indeed

2008-08-09T14:58:00.004+03:00

I defy anyone remotely familiar with Frank "WHORES" Miller to not burst out laughing at the latest trailer for his adaption of Will Eisner's The Spirit:

Random art appreciation moment.

2008-08-06T10:52:00.005+03:00

Just to get that last piece of nastiness out of the way, here's a man who's clearly played too much Silent Hill. Or at least shares fetishes with those games.

1. Sexual Harassment 2. ???? 3. Children!

2008-08-05T08:48:00.004+03:00

I have prejudices against Russia. In a way it's only natural; Finland and Russia have had a bit of a rocky history so it's only natural I'd absorb some level of distrust through osmosis. It's not something I'm particularly proud of, and I try to be aware of it and not let it cloud my judgement too much.

I really wish they try to help me out sometimes, y'know? It's got to be a two-way thing if we're going to make this work, and it's just not going to get any better if complete scumfuck things like this continue to leap at me from the headlines.

The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia's history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

"He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word," she earlier told the court. "I didn't realise at first that he wasn't speaking metaphorically."

The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

"If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children," the judge ruled

Phonogram: The Singles Club b-side

2008-08-04T09:04:00.005+03:00

Perennial bad influence and former professional beard grower Gillen is teaming up again with Jamie McKelvie, professional drawer of hot punk girls, to bring the world the second series of Phonogram.

As with the first series, they're starting to hype it by releasing one-page comic "b-sides".

Like so:

The first series, which you can still read the first issue of here, if you scroll down a bit, was quite good, so this should be one to look out for if you read comics that don't feature pervert suits.

And if you like hot punk girls.

Some Dark Knight or other

2008-08-02T17:01:00.002+03:00

Everyone has been going gaga over this one, partly fueled by Ledger's explosive performance and his subsequent tragic demise, with critics showering praise all over it. It's the new Godfather, the new Citizen Kane. Two and a half hours of orgasmic bliss for nerds.

Alas, the truth is far more disappointing. It's not even as good as Batman Begins. (Which admittedly set the bar pretty damn high.) It's merely a good, albeit overlong and messy movie, with some excellent performances.

The main problem with the movie is that it's too crowded. The Joker, Harvey Dent and Batman are one too many characters for the movie to develop comfortably, and the need to cram them all in there makes the movie rush from scene to scene without ever letting you pause for breath. It never feels like a two hour movie, but on the other hand you hand you walk out of the theatre feeling like you've just been run over by a truck. And frankly, even though Aaron Eckhart does a pretty decent job, Harvey Dent isn't nearly as interesting to watch as the Joker. Ledger's nihilistic sociopath will probably go down as one of the great villains of all time, the movie lights on fire every time he's on screen, and every time the movie breaks from him and his escalating reign of terror you just want him to get back on there. Cramming Dent's arc in there was a mistake.

At which point people will go: "How can you say that, you charismatic sexpot you? Surely you must see that Harvey Dent is essential to the story and illustrates the war Batman and the Joker wage over Gotham's soul?" And while that is a fine idea, it doesn't really work dramatically. Nolan needed to find another way to make that point, and write a leaner screenplay. Or at the very least have the decency to resolve everything at the same time, instead of first tying up the Joker's thread, and then limping to a weak confrontation with Two-Face.

My other chief complaint is how coy it is with the violence. The Dark Knight lives up to its name; this is a very dark movie in tone, and the Joker is one terrifying antagonist. It has no business pretending to be anything but an R/15 certificate movie, and sometimes the need to cut as much as humanly possible get it past the censors really hurts scenes. I'm not asking for gore for the sake of gore. While everyone will remember the Joker's brutal magic trick, which gets by fine on implied content, there's also bits like the first time he tells the ever mutating story about his scars, in a scene which builds and builds and builds, and then dissipates with an odd cut to a body slumping to the ground. Sometimes you need a visceral punchline, even if it's through everything *but* the knife that causes all the screams and blood, but this is a luxury the studio couldn't afford. Because apparently relying on adults to pay for a blockbuster is fucking impossible.

There's plenty of other nits to picks, such as the trip to Hong-Kong being extraneous, the Two-Face make-up being too over the top for the grounded take on the Batman mythos, the sonar system being goofy, etc, but in the end it's still an entertaining, if flawed movie, and I don't want to keep ragging on it for too long. It's still well worth seeing.

It's just not as good as it should have been.

Stray Rounds

2008-07-06T01:52:00.003+03:00

West Baltimore. Another turfwar over drugdealing rights. A neighbourhood woman hears the first gunshots, and with practised routine she grabs her toddler and ducks into her bathtub. Bullets might go through those cheapass walls in the projects, but enamel as well? Not likely.

It's incidental detail like this that makes The Wire about the best show on television.

Pity her nine-yearold didn't have the same practise with gunfights and caught one of those stray bullets though.

Busted Wonder

2008-06-24T20:47:00.004+03:00

Is a graphic novel by Kieron Gillen and Charity Larrison that's finally complete after quite a long time in the making. It's about fairies and circuses and other things eleven year old girls like, but also how if all you want to do with your life is unrelenting mediocrity and to buy more shoes you'll get exactly what you deserve. Or something.

Anyway, it's very good and the pictures are lovely and the fairies are mostly nice even if they sometimes wear hats consisting mostly of blood and it's free so you should definitely go read it. Yes.

What do you have against science, Wired?

2008-06-24T17:58:00.005+03:00

I thought we spoke about this before, but you persist with the silliness: "The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete"

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

The big target here isn't advertising, though. It's science. The scientific method is built around testable hypotheses. These models, for the most part, are systems visualized in the minds of scientists. The models are then tested, and experiments confirm or falsify theoretical models of how the world works. This is the way science has worked for hundreds of years.

Scientists are trained to recognize that correlation is not causation, that no conclusions should be drawn simply on the basis of correlation between X and Y (it could just be a coincidence). Instead, you must understand the underlying mechanisms that connect the two. Once you have a model, you can connect the data sets with confidence. Data without a model is just noise.

But faced with massive data, this approach to science — hypothesize, model, test — is becoming obsolete.

...

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: "Correlation is enough." We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

*sigh*

No. No, it's not. Data without a model *is* just noise. The value of a model is that you can make predictions with it. You can't do that with just data points, you have to connect them in some way. Even if you're only making inferrences from correlation, you're still creating a model. The hypothesis is the model. From it you make predictions, which you test. This is often how things start in a proper scientific investigation. Someone notices an interesting correlation and studies it further. You're just skipping the testing phase, relying on lots of correlation being sufficient instead.

Why do you refuse to learn how science works, Wired magazine? Is it because you fear that too much critical thinking will expose the singularity as a pipe-dream, that you won't get nerd-raptured away?

Come on. We can work through this together, if you'd only tell me why.

Indiana Jones and the post of too many words.

2008-06-22T21:33:00.005+03:00

...or at least more words than something that unremarkable deserves.

Yes, the new Indiana Jones movie has been out for a while now, and people of discerning tastes have uniformly let a great disbelieving moan of "That's *it*? You waited twenty goddamn years to make a sequel, and *this* is what you came up with?"

In other words, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is a bit rubbish. Not horribly, appallingly rubbish. Because let's face it, Spielberg is still behind the wheel, and even though I don't have any particularly great love for him as a director, he's still too skilled a craftsman to let projects spin out of control like it were a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, even when he's doing bad work. It's just a bland, sodden mess that has had all spark ripped out of it through endless rewrites. Which isn't good enough for any movie, and least of all an Indiana Jones movie.

The terrible script is doubly a shame, because having gotten my grubby paws on the draft by Frank Darabont (Shawshank Redemption, non-movie nerds), which everyone but Lucas liked and was set to go into production until he put his petulant foot down, there was a much better movie about to be made. Which is just further proof that Lucas is in dire need of people that will thwack him on the nose with a rolled-up newspaper with a sharp "No!" when his creative impulses misfire.

Judging by his creative output during the last twenty years, this would lead to Lucas' permanently walking around with a raw bloody stump in place of a nose. Crows circling him, waiting for an opportunity to rip strips of flesh from the raw pulp.

I am fine with this.

Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

Darabont's draft is hardly perfect: there's some hokey giant creature sequences that have little payoff except another gag about Indy's fear of snakes, it's too long, with too many bit characters, and the alien macguffin is still firmly in place. And for all its nods to the other movies, there's some very odd implications for the overall mythology of the series.

(There's also the very fundamental problem that Indy is a pulp hero rooted in the thirties, before colonialism had fallen out of vogue, and when the line between archeology and plundering was very fine indeed. Aliens and the a-bomb all go very well with the fifties, but the fifties don't go very well with the kind of character defined by the previous movies. To which you might reply that this is Character Development, but I am fine with my b-movie heroes not changing. I don't need to see them re-connecting with family so Spielberg can work out his daddy issues. Just stride in from the dark, kick ass, and stride back into the unknown with a tip of the hat thankyouverymuch.)

But for everything that's wrong in Darabont's draft, it's so much of an improvement over what wound up on the screen. The biggest improvements are arguably combining Cate Blanchett's and Ray Winstone's characters into the treacherous Yuri, and not reducing Marion's character to a cute background detail, but having Indy's attempts to win her away from her husband (yes, she's married here) be a prime motivation throughout much of the movie. A lot of the events are similar, except when they're more exciting, but the connective tissue is so much better, with coherence, character motivation and logic. And the aliens are evil shits instead of benign all-knowing, vomit-inducing borefests, and their skeletons aren't randomly magnetic.

But I make it seem like KotCS's problems is all down to the script, which is not entirely fair. Speilberg's direction is less than stellar. The characters all act like they know they're in an Indiana Jones movie. There's never a sense of danger. The previous ones let humour into the action as well, but there was still a sense that the characters took it seriously, that Indy was just hanging on by the tips of his fingers. Here, the most they manage a wince as they get hit on the balls yet again, and overall there's a very forced quality to the production. Speilberg said at some point that he tried to go back to the filmmaker he sort of grew out of, but the end result is worryingly like watching your parents trying to show they can still can be down with the kids. It just leaves you depressed and feeling embarrassed for everyone involved.

Oh god oh god oh god oh god

2008-05-16T11:23:00.004+03:00

Via Rock, Paper Shotgun:

“I’m working on Beyond Good & Evil 2. We have been in pre-production for a year, and we’re carrying out research as a small team. But for the moment, this is at outline stage, Ubisoft hasn’t given its agreement yet.
We want to be in the continuity of the first: a large variety of play types, lots of emotions in the gameplay and from the supporting characters. This time we are dealing with the future of the planet, the rapport with the animals…”

Beyond Good & Evil is one of those games that should have been bought and loved by everyone, but mysteriously failed to find widespread adulation. Everyone went reaching for the Zelda comparisons when it came out, and not only because our lovely protagonists has a predeliction for wearing green, but instead of traversing some cod-medieval world, you get an alien planet filled with talking pigs, sharks, rabbits and most memorably, rastafarian rhino mechanics. It's about as charmingly Gallic and oddball since anyhing this side of Little Big Adventure. And instead of a lttle fairy-boy, you control an intrepid, charming journalist investigating the abuses of the military controlling the planet.

Why yes, I have a crush on Jade. I'm not ashamed to admit it. You'd have one too, if you'd played it instead of leaving it to wither on the store shelves.

You can start rectifying this lamentable situation by giving the demo a whirl. Or just go straight to hunting down a retail copy.

PS: Ubisoft, if you don't give Ancel a green light, I will BURN YOUR SHIT DOWN. You don't want your shit burnt down, do you Yves?

I am Warren Ellis' slutmonkey

2008-05-13T15:56:00.004+03:00

He commands, I obey:

[REC]

2008-05-09T19:43:00.002+03:00

Shouldn't we be getting fed up with these found footage movies yet? Diary of the Dead, Cloverfield, and now this little Spanish horror flick. Wouldn't it be better if we said "Yes, you're tapping in to the zeitgeist, we're all a bunch of voyeurs. Well done! But Cannibal Holocaust did it almost twenty years before Blair Witch introduced it to the general public, so you're really not as clever as you think you are.", gave the director a tripod and told them make a proper movie instead?

A small team are following some firemen through the night for a local TV show called "While You're Sleeping". Halfway through a very quiet night, they get called to open an apartment. An old woman has been screaming something fierce, and they fear she's had an accident. Once inside, terrible things start happening, and when they make their way down with the first casualties, the building's been surrounded by police and is in the process of being quarantined. They're not getting out.

[REC] hits familiar beats for anyone moderately familiar with the horror genre, but it's genuinely well executed and the actors do a good job with what they have to work with. Being confined to mostly one building and one situation, the script doesn't let them display a lot of range. The most developed character unsurprisingly ends up being the the sassy anchorwoman, and Manuela Velasco has no problem holding the camera's attention. Clocking in at a snappy 80-something minutes, the latter half is almost constantly escalating tension. Aside from some shaky exposition about the ultimate cause of the events, there's very little to complain about here.

So shouldn't we be getting fed up with these found footage movies yet? Well, no. Not when they're this good.

And like every non-English language horror film released lately, it's getting a Hollywood remake. Although unless that footage of military people going in is trailer-specific, they've obviously already cocked it up. Have a Spanish trailer instead:

Iron Man

2008-05-05T16:39:00.003+03:00

Observant readers might have have deduced that I really, really like comics. I'm a lot more ambivalent about the superhero genre, despite - no, because of - its ridiculous dominance of western sequential art. Obviously there's been some great work done in the genre, and you'll have to pry my copy of Watchmen from my cold, dead fingers, but having 90% of the output consist of people wearing their underwear on the outside of their pants really does nothing but stifle the medium.

The recent glut of superhero movies has elicited similarly mixed feelings, although that's more to do with their rather varieable quality than their role in the grand sceme of any industry. Batman Begins? Fucking brilliant, despite the obligatory descent into action in the third act. Spiderman? I never got further than the embarrassingly awful Forrest Gump bit on the bus before switching off the telly. X-Men? The character introductions were mildly diverting, but then the movie suddenly ended. X-Men 2? Aces. X-Men 3? No. Just no. Fantastic Four? I watched it on an airplane, and almost walked out. And I can't be bothered with Superman in any shape or form, except for when Batman beats the snot out of him in The Dark Knight Returns.

Thankfully, Iron Man is definitely belongs in the upper echelon of superhero movies, despite having a host of problems. The plot's another tired superhero origin, there's some serious handwaving going on with the whole shrapnel/heart situation, and the movie seems to attempt some geopolitical relevance before settling on being irrelevant fluff, leaving some of the earlier ripped-from-the-headlines images from Stark's captivity sitting uncomfortable and isolated.

(I don't mind people tackling controversial subjects in movies, and I didn't blink an eye at the suicide bombing/subway stuff in V for Vendetta for instance. But silly as it was, V was resolutely political. I start to squirm a bit when people drop stuff that reminds you of people getting beheaded on camera in fun popcorn fluff. Maybe I'm just getting overly sensitive in my old age.)

But all those objections melt away in the face of Robert Downey JR living it up as an irresponsible playboy (The man has a stripper pole in his airplane! Tony Stark really is a genius.), delivering zingers with impeccable timing, and constructing his Iron Man suit in almost pornographic detail.

Sadly, it occured to someone that this was in fact a comic book movie costing millions of dollars, and they had better get back to the plot and have a big robot slugfet to resolve it because that's what the kids want, and my interest waned. Jon Favreau is a sensible enough director to get the special effects out of the characters' way, but when it comes to delivering enough visual spectacle to amuse in a fight even when the outcome's given, he isn't up to the challenge.

The result's an uneven movie that's usually a ton of fun, mostly thanks to Robert Downey JR's performance (although he has some capable suppport from Gwynneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges) before evaporating in a limp climax, and then suddenly rebounding with a brilliant final scene. I don't know if it deserves quite all the adulation it's getting, but it's more than worth the price of admission.

Still alive

2008-05-05T16:25:00.005+03:00

Although the resolution to keep the posts coming was neither a triumph nor a huge success.

But despite all the evidence that points to me be being incapable of making regular posts, and the fact that I've probably alienated anyone even remotely internet meme-savvy by making Portal references, I'll not done with this blogging thing yet. Maybe the third time's the charm?

Le Fabuleux destin d'Ellen Ripley

2008-03-16T16:13:00.006+02:00

More commonly known as Alien: Resurrection, which I finally watched yesterday. It's also known as the final nail in the coffin for the Alien franchise, forever dooming it to an existance as sub-standard slasher tripe in the form of the AvP movies. It was also the experience that made writer Joss Whedon run away crying to television, where the writers at least have a say over what ends up on screen. Having read the shooting script, and compared it to what ended up on screen, I can't say that I blame him.

Jean-Pierre Jeunet is very much an auteur. He only makes Jean-Pierre Jeunet films, much like Tim Burton only makes Tim Burton films. The problem is that Jeunet, like Burton, has a very warped sensibility that's completely wrong for an Alien movie, and he gives the proceedings a generally absurd feel, especially when it comes to the scientists and military. And thus the general described as "ramrod straight and about as gruff as you would expect" in a scene like this

CUT TO: INT. PEREZ'S QUARTERS CONTINUOUS

He is mostly dressed, still shaking off sleep. He stands at the command console,

bringing up visual. Everything on the screens is smoke and noise.

comes out like this in the movie:

That's not an imposing general about to deal with a crisis concerning a lethal Alien species, it's the school janitor suffering through another prank by some pesky kids. Quite possibly one involving bananas and buckets of urine. It's an endless litany of scenes that are played completely wrong. Turning Gediman, the one sympathetic scientist into a freak that likes to make faces at the Aliens in their pens. Making Vriess a comic relief character mugging for the camera. Casting Winona Ryder. Having the hybrid look ridiculous and make out with Ripley.

Which is not to say that Whedon's script is perfect in every way, especially since Alien is still my favourite and this is more a rollicking action-adventure starring a gang of cool outsiders, Whedon's favourite pony doing its favourite trick again. The cloning stuff is the same hokey nonsense, for starters. (Although to be fair, it's not like there were a lot of ways to bring back Ripley, and given that "Alien 3 was all just a dream" was considered for a while, it could have been so much worse.) But it's pretty solid, features recognizable human beings, has a suitably epic showdown on earth, and the hybrid does not make out with Ripley.

That last point, I feel, is pretty important.

Jericho

2008-03-12T22:54:00.003+02:00

I've been been watching CBS' post-apocalyptic sloppy blowjob to Middle America instead of studying for exams, since my man-crush Rogers has an unhealthy level of appreciation for it. After some eight episodes I can say for all the neat post-apocalyptic bits, evil ~~Blackwater~~ Ravenwood private military contractor (ooh, and a guestspot for my favourite Daily Show correspondent Aasif Mandvi) and clever meta-structure bits television writers get all hot and bothered about, there's so, so much wrong with it. Whenever it should be nasty and gritty, it opts for schmaltz instead, and don't get me started on the horrible, horrible small-town mom (complete with soulful piano plonking whenever she has a heart-to-heart).

But the most eregious misstep is not having enough hot science girl. There's a girl, see. She's hot, and she knows science! Clearly she should be a centerpiece of the show, but instead she goes missing for several episodes at time. And Skeet Ulrich, for whom she has the hots, spends more time obsessing over a some blonde with awful hair he has a Small Town History with when he should be snogging her at every opportunity. Where's your judgment, Skeet? What quality are you looking for in your mate after the apocalypse? Bad hair extensions, or the ability to fix air ventilation by cannibalizing vintage cars?

I'll still keep watching though, and fade it into the background whenever the soundtrack lets me know the soap opera bits will become overbearing. I just like the end of the world and hot science girls too much to drop it, despite its frequent awfulness.

What we need more of is science.

2008-03-07T19:08:00.006+02:00

What we need less of is people who do not understand how science works.

"The internet is changing the scientific method

If all other fields can go 2.0, incorporating collaboration and social networking, it's about time that science does too.

In the bellwether journal Science this week, a computer scientist argues that many modern problems are resistant to traditional scientific inquiry.

"There is an enormous success story for Science 1.0," Ben Shneiderman, a University of Maryland computer science professor said. "But the Internet is changing both the methods we use and the things we need to study. The challenge for the next 400 years is to understand how trust and empathy work."

In an editorial titled, "Science 2.0," Shneiderman argues that studying the interactions between people will be more important than studying the interactions between particles in bringing scientific solutions to big problems like disaster response, health care and energy sustainability.

Listen, here's how the scientific method works: you gather data, formulate a hypothesis, make predictions from said hypothesis and conduct experiments to verify your predictions. Correct hypothesis if needed, and iterate until solid. That's it! If you fuck with that you're no longer doing science and should be tarred, feathered, whipped and judged eligible to only recieve medical treatment from alternative medicine proponents.

Of course, what Shneiderman seems talking about is changing fields of of study, increasing collaboration and all that jazz, but changing some of the methods scientists use is different from changing the scientific method. This is a distinction the people at wired are either too ignorant to grasp, or too concerned with a sexy headline to let it bother them. Either way, they should get a good clout on the head and be sent to bed without supper.

Moving pictures, with occasional music

2008-02-28T22:13:00.007+02:00

Arn: The Knight Templar

Arn is an adaptation of Jan Guillou's bestselling trilogy, covering the first book and half of the second, and the most expensive swedish production ever, clocking in at some 210 million swedish crowns. Clearly wanting to be a big historical epic in the vein of Gladiator and Kingdom of Heaven, it sadly falls short of the mark by a pretty wide marigin.

I haven't read the books, but I suspect the root of the problem is the need to be faithful to the novels. One and a half books is a lot of ground to cover in the space of two hours and twenty minutes, and the inability to cut out stuff and rework it into something more concise leads to a move that feels overlong and rushed at the same time. It's too busy rushing from plot point to plot point without letting the characters breathe in the slightest. Oh, now he's a little kid sent to a cloister, now there's a bunch of political maneouvering, and now he's in (utterly unvconvincing) love, now there's more political maneuvering, oh god more horrible unconvincing love scenes, now he's sent to the middle east to fight in the holy war and whoops the movie's over. In the words of Dr Kermode, it's all just a bunch! of! stuff! happening. In every scene we get images and music that tell us exactly how we're supposed to feel, but the filmmakers haven't got the time to actually make us feel it, nor do the actors' have the ability to pick up the slack.

It's not all bad, mind you. The production design, costumes and cinematograpy are of consistently high quality, there's a pretty neat duel, and I really like the mix of languages. People will start praying in latin, the arabs actually speak arabic and so on. Loads of neat incidental detail like that.

Still, all the production values in the world can't help save the core from being flat and uninvolving. And really, for a movie subtitled "The Knight Templar", we don't get nearly enough knight templaring.

Rambo

Well, this is certainly the most savage movie to come along in a long while. John Rambo is back, and this time he's racking up a biger body count than ever before. There's a semblance of plot about some do-gooder Christian missionaries that get caught up in Burma's civil war, but really, it's an old-fashioned exploitation movie. It's all just an excuse to deliver gallons of gore and shredded bodies to the audience.

Which is fine, I've nothing against gore and violence. But I wish Stallone would've left the all the mubling about this is how the world works and how we're supposed to howl with glee because a peacenik learns to bash people's skulls in with a stone. It leaves a sour taste.

Of course, a loathsome underlying message didn't stop all those Reaganite eighties action movies from being enteraining, but the carnage is too impersonal. There's some feeble attempts to develop a main antagonist in the shape of a pedophile general, but it carries all the force and conviction of boiled asparagus. In the end, you're left feeling momentarily stunned and slightly soiled by the dour, unrelenting savagery, but that's all.

Enchanted

I'm not a big fan of Disney to put it mildly, but this was simply a delight. It starts off as your typical old-school disney movie, albeit slightly with it's tongue slightly more in cheek than usual. However, soon enough the princess-to-be is thrown down a wishing well by the wicked stepmother, and lands in modern-day new york and we switch from animation to live action. There she's taken pity on by a kind single-parent lawyer who exasperatedly tries to reconcile her fairy-tale mentality with the realities of the world while sparks slowly start flying between them. Meanwhile, her dunder-headed bethrothed barges after her, and Susan Sarandon chews an impressive amount of scenery and looks better while showing more cleavage than any sixty year old woman should legally have a right to.

Well, outside of the hag makeup anyway.

It's funny and knowing about all the Disney tropes and winks at the audience without giving in and turning into a smug full-on post-modern Shrek-alike. It's a pretty impressive tightrope to walk, and a lot of credit for its success belongs to Amy Adams for turning a cartoon character that by all rights should be annoying as hell into someone insanely charming. The end goes perhaps a bit more over the top than it should, but all in all it's quite lovely.

The Jacket

Jack Starks died the first time when he was 27, shot in the head by a little boy during the first gulf war. Afterwards, he has problems forming memories and suffers from hallucinations. One day winter day while hitchhiking he's involved in an incident where a cop gets shot. Unable to remember anything but a little girl and her mother who helped out earlier in the day, the crime gets pinned on him and he's sent to amental hospital. There, he becomes the subject of a sadistic doctor's experimental treatment that consists of being put in the titular jacket and stuffed into a morgue drawer. This takes him several years into the future, where he runs into the girl who've grown up into Keira Knightley and informs him that he's supposed to have died within a couple of days of the first time he got stuffed into the drawer.

Right about there is where you either roll with the movie, or start laughing. The whole time travel business is never justified with the even slightest of hand waving, which is just as well. More troublesome is all the paradoxes and plotholes that are even wider than in most time travel movies. But in the end I quite like it, despite all its problems. It's a moody, atmospheric and oddly uplifting mix of horror, drama and sci-fi, with quite solid acting throughout. You just have to be able to go along with it.

It's hard out there for a pimp

2008-02-19T18:17:00.007+02:00

Which is why they need intructional videos:

This is the definitive rulebook for pimping in Atlanta, by the notorious kings of the street who lay it all out for those who don't know. Charles Floyd Pipkins, aka Sir Charles, and Scooby give the real lowdown on what a pimp is all about.

Presumably containing advice on where to get a hold of a the most outrageous hats, as well as handy tips for slapping a ho around, picking up teenage runaways and the top five ways to hook someone one crack cocaine!

Mumblings about funny-books and other stuff.

2008-02-14T17:53:00.009+02:00

During New Year's, when it was time to tell yourself the usual lies about how this year was going to be different, amongst the usual stuff about becoming a sexual tyrannosaurus fearsome enough to lure the cast of Predator out of the closet, and saintly enough to make thousands of virgins commit suicide in my honour, there was a surprisingly strong idea about trying to write more. Sharp writing skills are always useful, but it's hard to be any good at it if you never use them.

This year was going to change that.

Obviously, it has worked out brilliantly so far.

But the year's not over yet, and while I warm up the engines and try to prepare myself for the prospect of updating once (maybe even twice!) a week, here's a few links to some lovely sequential art.

Anders Loves Maria is a cute and often quite funny webcomic romance starring two people in need of a couple of good slaps, and going through the archives will be a very enjoyable way a couple of hours. The creator, Rene Engström is Swedish-Canadian and has the casual Northern European attitude towards shagging and showing rude bits to the audience, so if that sorts of thing offends you, make sure to fire up the outrage machinery before you get started with the first one that's located here.

The Great Love Swami has a new comic coming out via Avatar, which will be yours for free and deliverd in five page instalments, if memory serves. the time to launch is this:

And speaking of Ellis, one of my Christmas gifts was the first volume of Fell, collecting the first eight issues of this seminal series, and I'm still having trouble getting over just how bloody good it is.

The premise is simple: Richard Fell pissed off the wrong people, and as punishment he's been sent from Over The Bridge to Snowtown, where he's one of three and a half detective working on the homocide detail in the worst sinkhole imaginable. Each issue is a self-contained story, with a handful of regular characters and a new grisly crime, inspired by real world circumstances.

There's a hint of Ellis usual speculative fiction in there, since Snowtown is a feral city, a place where the government has simply lost its grip completely, but mostly the stories are straight detective yarns, albeit ones given a surreal spin thanks to Ben Templesmith's scratchy art and the mythical quality of the place - we never get any real names, just Snowtown, and anywhere else is Over The Bridge, making the place seem utterly lost and isolated. The inhabitants have even taken to marking every building with the Snowtown tag, as a protective magic. And there's a wordless, increasingly menacing nun in a Nixon mask constantly lurking in the background.

Fell's is also quite unusual for one of Ellis' protagonists in that he's not a terrible bastard redeemed by a few laudable, strongly held ideals, but a genuinely kind, caring man. The stories stories where that aspect really shines through tends to be my favourites, like when he has to deal with a suicide bomber in a pawn shop, an interrogation with a suspect that goes horribly wrong, and the format breaking closer that concludes with him looking out over his new home proclaiming "None of you are nothing to me", which is about as good a coda as could be imagined to the first volume.

First issue for free here. Go read. There's really no excuse not to.

Holy Shit

2007-12-24T12:32:00.000+02:00

Found via the clever Kung Fu Monkey. I want this in my first person games *now*.

Groundhog Day

2007-12-24T00:08:00.000+02:00

I finally got got to watch this one properly without interruptions, and what a marvelous movie it is. Original premise, tight script and direction that doesn't leave an ounce of fat to trim, and any movie with Bill Murray in it takes an automatic leap in quality. Watching his sarcastic, self-centered weatherman sink into despair and then finally become a genuinely decent man (although the bastard is funnier, it has to be said) from endlessly repeating the same day is simply a joy. It's one of the few genuinely great comedies.

And yet, I find myself strangely morose afterwards. Maybe because the premise lends itself too well to navel-gazing, and that never goes anywhere good. That "Come, Sweet Death" off the misery-tastic End of Evangelion just came up on itunes certainly isn't helping.

Whatever, I'm off to gorge myself on chocolate. 'Tis the season to be jolly, even if I'll have to accomplish it through chemical means.

American politics, how I love thee

2007-12-19T17:09:00.000+02:00

Not only is it the most savage thing outside bloodsports, what passes for political commentary usually manages to make me laugh, cry and shudder in terror at the same time.

Witness for instance National Review editor Jonah Goldberg's new Liberal Fascism. If the title alone didn't make your eyes spin in their sockets, here's the table of contents:

Cribbed from the ever lovely Sadly, no! which has lots more on this little marvel of a book.

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

2007-11-20T22:41:00.000+02:00

Well, I certainly didn't see this coming. Call of Duty 4, a legitimate contender for shooter of the year? If you'd told me that after I played the demo, I'd have laughed you out of the house. Partly because the level they have you playing is boring, and partly because I didn't much feel like playing a US marine in an ambiguous Middle Eastern country* killing ethnic ruffians given the current state of Mess-o-potamia.

Turns out the demo level is probably the worst in the game, and when taken in the context of the whole game it's not even close to being some horrible rah-rah-rah rubbish. In fact, if you're looking for political commentary in the story, you'd have to conclude that the chaps at Infinity Ward aren't very big fans of the current US foreign policy. Go figure.

The Call of Duty games adhere to the rollercoaster style of game design: the designers craft the levels with a certain path in mind, and by golly, you're going to follow it whether you want to or not. Obvious upside: the designers know where you're going to be, and can craft spetacular set pieces. Equally obvious downside: it can be horribly transparent and immersion-breaking when done badly. It doesn't work here all the time; there's bits where you get bogged down, and the fact that they're constantly spawning enemies at you until you've progressed past a certain point becomes painfully obvious. But when it works, it delivers some of the most powerful moments in gaming in a long time.

There's a level where you play as a gunner in an AC-130 gunship, covering the SAS squad you follow during the majority of the game. You hover over the battlefield and eradicate white dot after white dot on a thermal image, a laconic crewmember calmly calling out targets and commenting on your kills. It could've just as easily been footage from any current war. The effect is just chilling, which is an extraordinary thing for a game to accomplish. Then there's their take on the now so common tram-ride in the title sequence, the end of the US marine part of the story, and a flashback mission set in Chernobyl that were equally jaw-dropping. And there's a really clever thing they do with the tutorial, and a sinking ship and...well, you get the picture.

It's over pretty quickly, around six hours if you're a competent fps gamer, but it's a mostly brilliant six hours of sensory overload, filled with big wow moments. Shooter of the year? Not quite, but you can certainly make a decent case for it.

*Saudia Arabia, unless my map-reading skills have gone to hell. Honestly, why be all coy about it when you're zooming around maps with easily identifyable landmarks in the briefing movies?

Works out in the health spa, muscles glow... (with bloom)

2007-11-16T01:51:00.001+02:00

So I bought new computer recently, and a fairly beefy one at that. A necessary step, or so I tell myself. The old one was getting pretty rickety, and that the new one lets me play all but the most piggish games at 1600x1200 with all the bells and whistles turned on is just an unintended bonus, right? Games like Gears of War, the first to really showcase the xbox 360:s hardware recently made its way to the PC. Pretty sweet.

Except for the fact that they put all that hardware and tecnical prowess to the most hideous use imaginable. Here's a quick question: Which of the following two images is more attractive one? This blockbuster next-gen game...

...or this last generation title that didn't sell nearly as much as it should have?

No, the question is not which one has more pixel shaders firing or bumpmapping or whatever technical wizardy, but which one is prettier. If you voted for the one with actual colours in it, congratulations, you win!

In other words, Gears of War looks like shit.

Now, war is hell and ugly subject matters should look ugly and all that, but Jesus. You'd think they'd let something a little bit vibrant into the palette at some point. Even the blood's so dark it's black.

And it's not just that I don't care for the art direction at all, sometimes that monochrome sludge becomes an impediment to the gameplay as well. It takes you some split seconds longer to see if that's one of your fellow impossibly-muscled-and-manly soldiers, or an evil Locust grunt you're about to blow to smithereens. True, the targeting reticule changes colour over enemies, but given that Gears makes an effort to minimize the HUD in other parts, it's ridiculous that you'd be forced to rely on it for something as basic as this.

It's a real shame, because otherwise Gears does some pretty nifty things. I really like the way the camera dips down and narrows the view when you're running, lobbing grenades is wonderfully precise, and even something as basic as reloading your weapon has been tweaked to add a more strategic element to it. But the fact remains that everytime I load it up, the endless Grimness and humourless (ok, so there's plenty of unintentional laughs to be found) macho bullshit makes me want to play something with puppies and hugs and rainbows instead.

Grindhouse

2007-11-10T19:47:00.000+02:00

Grindhouse, if you weren't aware, is Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's homage to trashy 70's explotation flicks.

Rodriguez' Planet Terror is schlocky in all the right ways, full of gore and bad zombie effects, features an insanely sexy one-legged Rose McGowan rocket-jumping and other bits of z-grade awesomeness. You know if you like this sort of thing, and if you do, odds are you'll love Planet Terror. Plus, Michael Biehn! Awesome.

Death Proof is a fairly fun ten-minute car chase preceded by over an hour and a half of ceaseless, inane jabbering. Now, Tarantino has a way of making the most mundane bullshit sound profound, but a) this requires good actors, and b) this is the most self-indulgent, tedious crap he's penned so far.

It did shit business when it was released as a double feature in the US, so it got split up into two different movies for Europe. This is both good and bad. Bad, because Death Proof got longer. Good, because now you can avoid it altogether. Huzzah!

Beelzebozo the clown, and future Darwin Award

2007-10-11T14:13:00.000+03:00

Now, sit on beelzebozo's lap young 'un, and he'll demonstrate Hulk's special love hold on you.

An Illinois man who worked as a "Christian clown" named Klutzo was arrested yesterday on child pornography charges for allegedly taking naked photographs of young boys at a Philippines orphanage.

And then there's the reverend who liked to get choked

An Alabama minister who died in June of "accidental mechanical asphyxia" was found hogtied and wearing two complete wet suits, including a face mask, diving gloves and slippers, rubberized underwear, and a head mask,

How do you hogtie yourself? That's dedication, now.

Reverse Graffiti

2007-10-07T16:58:00.000+03:00

Brazilian artist/designer Alexendre Orion making street art by scraping off layers of soot from tunnel walls.

What we need more of is science

2007-09-24T12:58:00.000+03:00

Chernobyl fungus feeds on radiation:

Casadevall and his co-researchers then set about performing a variety of tests using several different fungi. Two types - one that was induced to make melanin (Crytococcus neoformans) and another that naturally contains it (Wangiella dermatitidis) - were exposed to levels of ionizing radiation approximately 500 times higher than background levels. Both of these melanin-containing species grew significantly faster than when exposed to standard background radiation.

"Just as the pigment chlorophyll converts sunlight into chemical energy that allows green plants to live and grow, our research suggests that melanin can use a different portion of the electromagnetic spectrum - ionizing radiation - to benefit the fungi containing it," said co-researcher Ekaterina Dadachova.

Oh my god! Stan Lee was right!

US Army develops pain rays:

When turned on, it emits an invisible, focused beam of radiation - similar to the microwaves in a domestic cooker - that are tuned to a precise frequency to stimulate human nerve endings.

It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile.

Because the beam penetrates skin only to a depth of 1/64th of an inch, it cannot, says Raytheon, cause visible, permanent injury.

But anyone in the beam's path will feel, over their entire body, the agonising sensation I've just felt on my fingertip. The prospect doesn't bear thinking about.

"I have been in front of the full-sized system and, believe me, you just run. You don't have time to think about it - you just run," says George Svitak, a Raytheon executive.

Silent Guardian is supposed to be the 21st century equivalent of tear gas or water cannon - a way of getting crowds to disperse quickly and with minimum harm. Its potential is obvious.

Diana Mail though, so grains of salt, etc.

Come on Bennet, let's paaahty

2007-09-21T23:26:00.001+03:00

Commando is the greatest gay movie of the eighties. I just watched it again and could go over it all the way to the ludicrous steam-spurting finale, but there's nothing I could say that ruthless reviews hasn't already put better:

For no apparent reason, Bennett exclaims, “John, I'm not going to shoot you between the eyes. I'm going to shoot you between the balls.” Money shoot him between the balls... But what really sent my gaydar off the chart was the following exchange between Arnold and Mr. Wells:

Matrix: "You can beat me... You want to put a knife in me. Look me in the eyes. See what's going on in there while you turn it. That's what you want to do to me, right? Come on, let the girl go. You and me. Don't deprive yourself of some pleasure. Come on Bennett; let's party."

Bennett: "I don't need the girl -- I don't need the girl!!"

Short of Arnold actually licking Vernon's ass, you simply could not come up with a gayer scene. Seriously, men fucking is straighter. And of course, you can’t spell Commando without “man,” “do” or “personal lubricant.”

Of course, there's no way words can do justice to the hopeless, conflicted longing in Bennett's face when Arnie goads him into going at him toe to toe.

Commando is fantastic beyond words.

On Finnish-Swedishness and alienation

2007-09-20T01:08:00.001+03:00

So I went out to dinner with my classmates today, and amongst all the beer and talk about the virtues of Perl, C#, Python and unit testing and whatnot (I dunno if I've been spoilt by a year abroad filled with wider conversation topics or what, but *one* hour of shop-talk should be more than enough, surely? Or maybe I'm a just a horrible failure of a computer scientist.), there was one bit of genuine insight that struck a nerve.

One of the guys observed about his summer working in Germany, where he was the lone Finnish-Swede amongst a bunch of Finns, that what growing up in the mostly swedish parts of Finland (there's a bunch of them along the west coast, fact fans, especially in the middle part) uniquely prepares you for is being in a place where you don't understand what the hell anyone's saying. Everyone else was freaking out, but for him, it was business as usual.

And it's true, you know. I grew up in a shitty little village where something like ninety percent of the peopulation speaks Swedish. You simply don't need or hear Finnish in your day-to-day life, but unless you're some inbred navel-gazing yokel whose greatest ambition in life is to take over his father's pigsty, you're very much aware of the huge swathes of country where they don't speak like you at all. Point is: you're not 100% at ease in a lot of places in your country, so going abroad is not that big of a deal.

Which I believe accounts for how easily I got by in Japan at the start, despite the dire warnings from various exchange studies booklets. Sure, the customs are different, but the whole bit about only understanding the odd word here and there was just like being ten years old again and going somewhere Finnish, with their strange and terrible language that defies mortal comprehension. You just roll with it.

Or maybe not. I am after all a bit DUNK! after all that beer.

Function Creep

2007-09-20T00:43:00.000+03:00

...is an album by one of my internet chums, and a quite a pleasant listen, if you like atmospheric electronic noise in the vein of Boards of Canada and the like, with an added dose of nuclear paranoia. He recommends Target City as a one-song overview of the album if you're precious about your time and bandwidth, and I won't much argue with that, although I'm very partial to DMB myself.

You can get it all for free here, and if you like this you might want to check out the Not A Gun EP as well, especially Early Morning Weatherview.

Spook Country

2007-09-13T16:35:00.000+03:00

William Gibson's a tricky writer for me. I love his books and the atmosphere he creates in them, but I'm rarely sure if he's *actually* any good.

Gibson, for the non-nerds out there, was one of the creators of the cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction. Nowadays he's writing writing about the here and now, but still using most of the tools of he used in his sci-fi days.

Spook Country gives us three protagonists: former singer Hollis Henry turned magazine writer trying to find something to do with her life, the Cuban intelligence trained cultural and ethnic mash-up Tito, who makes his living as and "illegal facilitator", and the perpetually sedated translator Milgram who's been hijacked by someone who may or may not be a government agent. All of them connected to a mysterious container that's been at sea for a very long time, and is about to make landfall soon.

His take on the here and now naturally includes the current fucked up state of affairs in the US. While his corporate dystopias were very much informed by Reagan and his policies, this is by far the most overt political commentary Gibson's done in any of his books, so you get bits like:

"The old man was as American as it got, but in what she thought of as some very recently archaic way. Someone who would've been in charge of something, in America, when grown-ups still ran things."

and casual references to getting shot in the face by the vice-president.

I enjoyed Spook Country, but not to the same extent as say, Pattern Recognition. The mystery of the container pulled me along for quite a while, but the thing that usually holds Gibson's novels together for me is the atmosphere and vision instead of plot and characters, and I suspect the problem here is that I'm a bit too much on the same page. So I'm nodding along instead of going "cool" when he brings up levitating beds and the like, because I remember the story he cribbed it from.

Requiem

2007-09-03T01:50:00.000+03:00

So these last couple of days have been less than excellent. I was going to go on a longwinded account of every sniffle, quivering lip and stoic stare into the middle distance from the moment I looked down on the train to the airport and saw "Vicki" on the side of a plastic bag, causing my brain to go into an endless repeat of the list people I might never see again, to the final kick in the teeth of waking up in my dead-end hometown with not a living soul about.

But bollocks to that.

I've done more than enough such rubbish already, and whining and moping doeth not a dashing gentleman make.

Besides, I'm all better now. Through judicious application of music magic, mainly consisting of Kenickie's Robot Song on endless repeat and assorted dehumanizing industrial music, especially Front Line Assembly's Tactical Neural Implant, as well as a momentarily crippling addiction to Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, I am now returned to my normal detached, cynical persona with none of those moist fleshy bits interfering with my reasoning. Huzzah!

So: onwards! Towards...the future! And whatever happens, there will be no fucking crying.

But first, an ~~illustrated guide~~ one-picture summary of why the last year was pretty damn glorious:

Or, more succinctly

2007-08-22T14:47:00.000+03:00

I know it's over...

2007-08-22T11:33:00.000+03:00

...and it never really began, but in my heart it was so real...

Oh god, here we go with The Smiths again. I'm afraid it won't be for the last time either. Because, you know, moping. I'm back in Finland, and everything is wrong, wrong, WRONG. Where are the naked men running about? Why will there be no more drinking in the kitchen? Where are all the goddamned people? Have I wandered into some post-apocalyptic nightmare? And what's up with the bed? It's all soft, and softness is for the WEAK. And WEAK people start...start sniffling...

Excuse me for a bit, there's some dust in my eye...

Oh bollocks to this. I'm will try to distract the terrible sadness demons on my shoulders by commencing the first part of operation Don't Be A Horrible Fat Bastard, You Fat, Horrible Bastard (more on this later, unless it's an utter failure from the start) and try again later. With pictures! Of semi-naked men!

Unless of course looking at pictures kicks up so much dust in my eyes that I can't see to write.

Sunshine

2007-08-01T17:39:00.000+03:00

So a new movie by Alex Garland and Danny Boyle, the writer and the director that did such a splendid job reviving the zombie genre with 28 Days Later. This time around they're doing sci-fi. And it's a pretty excellent movie, and it feels* like *proper* sci-fi, not one of your lobotomized post-Star Wars space operas. Not that I have anything against space operas per se, but I do prefer my space travel to be dangerous, terrifying and awe-inspiring instead of some blurry lights that happen on the way between the escape from the clutches of the Murderous Space Prawn and the showdown with Dread Admiral Znorf, keeper of the Sacred Cutlery.

The traveling in this case takes place on the Icarus II, where a team of seven is trying to deliver a bomb that will re-ignite the sun, which is dying for some unspecified reason. Keen observers will notice the II there and deduce that this wasn't the first attempt, and wouldn't you just know it, when they approach the sun they intercept a distress signal from the first Icarus. Of course, they decide to investigate, and things start going terribly wrong. Mistakes are made, people start cracking under pressure, and so on and so great. I'm only really familiar with Cillian Murphy and Michelle Yeoh (who's always lovely to see, btw.) but all of the actors acquit themselves nicely.

Things get muddled in the third act, which is a departure in tone from what came before. Garland wants to make a point about God, but his atheist ideas get filtered through Boyle and his catholic upbringing and it's never really quite clear what they want to say. But I could roll with it though. The atmosphere's great, and the use of sfx is marvellous throughout. Boyle uses cgi to give us quiet bits of awe, like Mercury orbiting in front of the sun, as well 'splodes. I approve.

And whatever you do, do not watch the extended trailer unless you want to know all the plot points going in. Why do companies insist on giving away the entire goddamned movie in the trailer anyway?

*This is not saying that all the science holds up. You can pick many nits, if you are so inclined. It's just noting the difference in atmosphere and what it's interested in talking about.

And as sort of tangent: 28 Weeks Later sadly isn't much cop. There's a pretty nice subtext about how your parents will fail and betray you, and some genuinely awesome bits such as the helicopter butchering, but they get lost in too much shaky cam, contrivances, annoying children and disturbing outbursts of misogyny.

And if you're so clever, then why are you on your own tonight?

2007-07-22T09:12:00.000+03:00

Perennial bad influence Gillen rambles about The Smiths, and reminds of precisely how much I love them. Nobody mopes like Morrisey, and with a seriously annoying cold, tons of work that needs to be done and absolutely no motivation, I am in a moping mood.

Not that moping is the be end of all The Smiths' brilliance, Morrisey can be gloriously funny when he wants to, but in the end it's the stingers that serve tragedy rather than comedy that leave the greatest impression. But then, isn't that usually the case?

Anime roundup

2007-07-19T16:56:00.000+03:00

Deadlines approaching, stress increasing, which of course means I turn to increasing amounts of disposable entertainment for procrastination. So without further ado, here's some of what I've distracted myself with, in order of decreasing awfulness:

Armitage III

A sudden craving for cyberpunk made me dig out this old OVA series (later re-cut into a movie dubbed Armitage III: Poly-Matrix, and got a sequel further on called Dual Matrix). Which turned out to be a rather big mistake.

The plot, which turns utterly incomprehensible by the third episode, goes like this: a robot-hating detective named Ross Sylibus is transferred from Chicago to Mars, where someone is killing off super-advanced robots secretly living as humans for some mysterious reason. Arriving there, he's teamed up with one of those hot-pants wearing anime women that have an endless capacity for violence but still need a big man because they're such fragile, sobbing things. She's the titular Armitage, and of course also a robot.

None of it makes any sense whatsoever, but somehow the earth government its evil feminist government is responsible because they take offense to pregnant robots and oh god, who's writing this shit, Nippon Kaigi*? The character moments are there because they are expected, not because they're justified by what's come before. We get Ross throwing away his phone when his boss calls up because he's "Fed up with the system", but nothing that tells us exactly what he's fed up with.

Maybe it was his outrage over being ordered to drop the robot murder investigation and focus on the wave of random, indiscriminate bombings that were killing lots of people that did it.

I'm pretty sure I deserve either an award or a beating for seeing this bilge all the way through to the bitter end.

*Conservative/proto-fascist organisation that screams bloody murder there's any pushes for gender equality in Japan.

Claymore

Clare's a Claymore, a half-demon tasked with hunting down the demons (called yoma) that infiltrate and prey on humanity and...what? You've heard this one before you say?

So it's not the most original of premises, and there's a lot of other things you've before as well, such as fights that care little for physics, plausibility or logistics, lots of talk about power levels and steely-eyed, emotionally stunted killers that reconnect with their humanity via annoying children that stupidly refuse to obey orders and shout people's names repeatedly while crying.

On the plus side, while no Berserk by any stretch of the imagination, it does supply a fair share of blood and violence, subverts some clichés, and gives us the occasional amusingly grotesque image.

I was going to say that it's not terrible, but not much good either, but then a sudden decapitation introduced the main antagonist and got the overarching plot going, and it sort of won me over. So it's a little bit good then, even if it's overly plagued by shounen anime tropes.

Seirei no Moribito

Easily the best of the bunch, although not flawless. Another fantasy series, this one's directed by Kenji Kamiyama of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex fame, although unfortunately, it's not up to those standards. While there's a lot to like in here, such as a genuinely strong and competent older female protagonist, fantastic production values, music by the ever reliable Kenji Kawai and some excellently choreographed close combat, the pace is lacking and the characters so far aren't interesting enough to keep your attention during the slow moments.

The plot's pretty straightforward: a bodyguard name Balsa gets hired to protect a young prince by his mother. It seems a water fiend has laid an egg inside him, and as long as he lives the kingdom's threatened by a drought, and so his father the Emperor has targeted him for assassination. Problem is, six episodes in the immediate threat to the prince was taken care of, and at episode 14 we are just starting to see the hints of a real antagonist emerging. In between, there's just the prince's adjusting to life outside the palace, a slow development of the overall mythology and a sudden blast from the past taking place. I'm not an impatient man, but moving a little bit faster would be warranted.

This one's for Vicky...

2007-07-17T12:00:00.000+03:00

...as well as all other rampant arachnophobes out there.

IT'S every arachnophobe's worst nightmare: millions of spiders on the move, blanketing everything in cobwebs.

The Gippsland flooding has triggered a spider population explosion of up to 30 species, which have taken to the air in the search for new homes.

Yum. Just look at that.

Superheroes? Without capes? Goodness me.

2007-07-06T16:03:00.000+03:00

Hurgh. Am tired, cranky and generally unfit for polite company, and nbc hit show Heroes is mostly to blame. (The rest of it lies squarely on my constantly blue-screening lab computer and my own miserablism.) Damn thing kept me up extremely late, leaving me with a little bit over four hours of sleep last night.

The show's conceit isn't really that original, even though it likes to think it is; comics have been doing superheroes without capes for quite a long time now. However, it is *very* well executed. So: evolution in overdrive, people gain strange abilities and have to cope with them, and so on and so X-Men. Except without spandex and racism metaphors and more X-Files. Given the premise, it's quite naturally an ensemble show, which has its strengths and weaknesses. There's no main character that it all hinges on, even though some are clearly more important than others, which promises a bit of unpredictability; anyone could violently exit the stage at any point. On the other hand, when you get to one of the plot threads or characters that doesn't work work as well as the others, you just want to reach for the fast forward button. Everyone will fall in love with the bumbling, nerdy and earnest Hiro, and when you get past the concept of Evil Stripper Mom, her part will start to bore you.

Also: know that Heroes *loves* the classic cliffhanger. You will reach for the next episode the moment the latest one finishes. (Unless of course you don't care for the show at all, but as a Doktor, I cannot be held responsible for your lapses in taste.)

So it appears I am going to learn salsa

2007-06-30T18:44:00.000+03:00

Tonight, I went with Leo and a bunch of other guys to a salsa club. Leo is Cuban, a brain surgeon and generally a marvel of a man, and no less so on the dance floor. I know not a lick of salsa except for what he taught me at the dorm's Christmas party oh-so-long ago, but most of us are in the same boat, no matter where you go with Leo you end up having fun, so that's ok.

At the club, us rubbish people end up feeling sort of self-conscious and awkward, to start with. A frightening amount of people seem to know what they're doing, but enough people kindly take pity on us and impart their wisdom for the night to mosey along quite nicely. Then there's a break. There's going to be a special show, the centerpiece of which is a girl who's freshly arrived from Cuba. It's sort of a welcoming thing for her, accepting her into the salsa community in Osaka and whatnot.

One Cuban salsa show and some spectacularly undulating hips later, me and my non-salsa capable friends look at each other and go: "Yeah. I think I'm going to join a salsa course when I get the chance."

All in all a good night then. I just wish Leo hadn't told us the girl in question was only eighteen.

I feel like a dirty old man now.

HERO, redux

2007-06-29T07:00:00.000+03:00

I've been spending a frankly disturbing amount of time listening to Kermode's reviews at the BBC archives these last days.

What I love about him is that he really gets it; reviews are a guide for the consumer, yes, but they're also entertainment. Reviews don't matter for the big blockbusters, most people look at the trailer and decide to go to the opening night or not. From then on, it'll be word of mouth that makes it sink or swim.

Unless it's the Star Wars prequels, which everyone knew would suck after the hideous Episode One, and then went to see anyway.

(Including me. In my defense, it was only a lot of peer pressure that got me into theatre for the last one.)

Reviews matter more for the smaller films that can't saturate the public awareness beforehand with ridiculous promotional campaigns, but especially for stuff like PotC, they're mostly there for us to argue or agree with. Entertainment, in other words. Kermode, in addition to being knowledgeable and passionate about movies, is one funny bastard. He threatens to become obnoxious at times with his disproportionate hatred for "Orloondo Bland" and Julian Sands, but pulls it off thanks to it obviously being genuine (and frankly, it's hard to argue that Orlando Bloom isn't a charisma vacuum).

I just love the man. Especially when he's wrong.

I have a new hero

2007-06-28T05:53:00.000+03:00

His name is Mark Kermode, film critic for BBC's Radio Five. Why? Well, just have a look at his review of Pirate of the Caribbean: World's End.

I don't care if you love PotC or not (I quite liked the first one myself, thought the second was a bloated mess that went nowhere, haven't seen the last one yet), that's the sort spirit I want to see in a critic.

His spewing of hate on misogynistic shitfest Captivity in the current podcast is equally glorious.

While (sort of) on the topic of musical obsessions...

2007-06-25T10:06:00.000+03:00

I've been listening to Swedish indie favourite turned stadium monster Kent a lot lately, in particular their breakthrough second album Verkligen (meaning Really) which is on nearly constant rotation in my ipod. Maybe it's being off in a strange and terrible foreign land and not getting enough of the mother tongue, or maybe it's this mental connection I have between Kent and Summer. (Which is a bit weird, considering how much angst and darkness there's in their songs.)

Anyway, Verkligen kicked of what's in my mind their golden period, consisting of three great albums: Verkligen, Isola and Hagnesta Hill. While I'd still say Isola is the best one, thanks to superior songwriting and a complete lack of filler material (Hagnesta Hill suffers from being a couple of songs too long, and the filler to worthwhile songs ratio kept on rising with every subsequent album), Verkligen is growing on me. The less than polished production lends it a raggedness and frailty that's missing from the following releases, and the occasional missteps become charming youthful exuberance. It's palpably a work of a young and hungry band. Bits of the same drive exist on Hagnesta Hill, which was their attempt at breaking out in the English speaking market*, but not nearly to the same degree. It goes straight after my (possible misguided) affinity for underdogs, and elevates it that little bit extra in my opinion.

*Both HH and Isola were released in English and Swedish versions. Their attempt failed due to Kent in English being shit.

Well, shit is perhaps being overly harsh, but they definitely lose something in the translation. Observe: first real hit single Kräm, and its tepid English version What It Feels Like. Besides the lyrics being more awkward, the vocals are just dead in comparison, with none of the desperation apparent in the Swedish chorus.

The top five reasons I love High Fidelity

2007-06-25T04:54:00.000+03:00

So after celebrating Midsummer by spending all of Friday night drinking on the roof with fellow expatriate Niko, I was in no state to accolish much of anything during the rest of the weekend except sleep and renew my man-crush on John Cusack, via underrated assassin-comedy Grosse Point Blank and seminal low-key romantic comedy High Fidelity.

Hence, the following list.

1. John Cusack. Always intensely likable even when the character he's playing isn't. Better yet, he can do smart with ease. The over-caffeinated commitment-phobic Rob is the sort of character he excels at.

2. It's about a bunch of elitist pricks ragging on their customers, and feeling superior to everyone thanks to their encyclopedic knowledge of music.

3. The moral of the story is that to find love and happiness, you have to give up. No one's perfect, even polynesian sex godessess have horrible, washed-out cotton panties amongst the lingerie. And that's ok.

4. It's content to just let the humour and story develop from the characters instead forcing all sort of superfluous plot points and artificial crisises into the movie.

5. The scene where the incredibly awkward Dick hits on a girl. Hell, just Dick in his entirety.

Not coincidentally, the "It's not who you are, it's what you like" seduction routine reminds me of Gillen & McKelvie's excellent music-as-magic comic Phonogram. It could just be because they share the same obsessions, but I suspect High Fidelity was a conscious influnce. (Go read the first issue for free, and give Warren Ellis' Fell a go while you're there as well.)

Holy hell, what's up with the date below?

2007-06-22T09:08:00.000+03:00

Testing, testing.

EDIT: Ah, so it seems the time stamp is for the first draft saved instead of time published.

That's not a very clever way of doing things, google.

Starship Troopers. A bit shit, isn't it?

2007-06-16T15:30:00.000+03:00

I suppose I should talk about this Japan thing sometime, but that would take effort, and why exert yourself when you could talk about pop-culture instead of real life? Exactly.

There's quite a lot of Nerd Rage flowing about the internets whenever Starship Troopers gets mentioned. You can hardly bring up either the movie or the book without some put-upon fan of Heinlein wanting to burn Paul Verhoeven at the stake for what he did with the movie adaptation.

I can certainly understand how someone with a lot of affection for the book would feel upset at all the ways the movie differs from the source material.

Verhoeven, while depicting the core values of Heinlein's Federation (franchise has to be earned, the way to earn it is through military service, horrible communist alien scum must die) accurately enough, chose to send it up as the xenophobic and militaristic proto-fascist state it is.

I just can't see why someone actually *likes* the book.

I love sci-fi, not only for the lasers, explosions and big stompy robots, but for the all the opportunities it affords the authors to comment on technology and current social issues. You can stick what you want to talk about under federation star ships and whatnot, leaving it for those that want to look a little bit deeper. Or you can be completely overt with your commentary, cutting loose like it was 1984. What you can't do, is suck.

Johnny Rico rebels against his father, and signs up for military service, for reason's not entirely clear to himself. He then proceeds to fuck up with regular intervals, so a strict, but infinitely wise and well-meaning commanding officer can correct him and steer him on the right track. Occasionally they slaughter vaguely defined aliens, for no other reason than that this is the way of the universe; constant expansion and military prowess is needed or we become wiped by some other race. Sometimes Heinlein will wax lyrical over the virtues of public corporal punishment and executions, but mostly it's a never ending sloppy blowjob to the military.

Starship Troopers is just a hideously dull polemic, populated by paper thin character, and very little in the way of plot. And the writing's not much cop either. The prose is workmanlike at best, and it's painfully obvious that this was intended to be 50's juvenilia. There's a lot of "Why, I...!" and sometimes a "Heck!" or even a "Gosh!" thrown in for good measure.

So there's not much to except general awfulness to distract you from his message, not even explosions. (For something that promises "Military Adventure" on the cover, there's an awful lot of boot camp and lecturing, and comparatively little fighting. If you're going to write military porn, at least have the decency to show us more ultra-violence than sermons about what a moral fucking organisation it is.) Whatever his aspirations towards serious discourse on the meaning and responsibilities of citizenship, it just ends up a repellent militaristic screed. That Heinlein chooses to elaborate on most of the philosophy in flashbacks to Rico's History and Moral Philosophy classes, doesn't help matters much either, since the lecturers are all always Unquestionably Right. They can prove everything they say, see. With math.

To be fair, the actual science in the book comes off as pretty credible (apart from the times they use math to prove political and sociological points, that is). But when the only worthwhile thing about your book also applies to technical manuals, you're doing something very wrong. Heinlein might as well have written a fictional user's manual for powered armour. It would have been a marked improvement.

First post!

2007-06-11T15:21:00.000+03:00

Yeah, so I'm finally catching up with 2002 and this whole blogging thing. I was originally going to chronicle my year in Japan on a blog, but since I'm such a lazy fuck I've never gotten around to it until now, nine months into the grand adventure.

Naturally, I'm procrastrinating.