Love action

I did have a brief break from animation this week when I saw Harsh Times (good), but then I went and watched loads of fresh, hot anime as it's starting to clog my hard drive...


Black Lagoon is one of my favourite series from the current anime season, but unfortunately it's ended its 12 episode run.
Based on a group of smugglers I the seas of Southeast Asia, it follows Dutch, Revy, Benny and Rock as they deal with neo-nazis, triads, mercenaries the Russian mafia and a dangerous Colombian maid.
Full of nonchalant glimpses into the underworld and intense bursts of violence, whilst BL can'’t help glorify it also looks at the other side, that of regret and emptiness felt by those who lead these lives, Revy at once being the shit-kicking no-nonsense crack-shot and a woman with a horrible past that has helped fashion a cold hearted murderer.
We see through Rock'’s eyes; he was an everyday Tokyo salaryman until he was abandoned after a dodgy smuggling mission went wrong and he decided to throw in his lot with the Lagoon Company on their ship, the Black Lagoon.
In her uniform of tiny cut-off jeans and a midriff-baring tank top, you could be forgiven that Revy was designed to appeal to the typical male audience, but while she does technically tick the right boxes appearance wise it's hard to argue that there are artless aims at titillation when you see how scary her character is, how she has got to the point where human life means little and is easily dispatched if it makes the job easier.
Mostly it's a gung ho actioner but there is a little meat to be had on its bones.

But as every anime must come to an end, new anime will come to fill the gap.

A new series that has just started airing is called Flag. I would give a plot outline, but instead I'll quote from the Wikipedia one as I'm too tired to do a decent job. I did get almost 8 hours sleep last night, but this luxury has made me even more tired. Less woozy, more tired.

"Saeko Shirasu is a 25 year wartime front-line photo-journalist who became a celebrity after taking a picture of civilians raising a makeshift UN flag in war-torn Uddiyana. The image then became an instant symbol for peace. However, just before the peace agreement is achieved, the flag was stolen by an armed extremist group in order to obstruct the truce. The UN peacekeepers decide to send in secretly a SDC (pronounced as Seedac - Special Development Command) unit to retrieve the flag. Because of her connection with the "Flag" photo, Saeko Shirasu was offered the job of following the SDAC unit as frontline journalist. The SDC unit is equipped with a HAVWC (pronounced as Harvick - High Agility Versatile Weapon Carrier) Mecha robot tank."

The story is told through the viewfinder, so we seeShirasu lining up shots and the resultant still image, movies shot on video and via digital cameras and clips of websites and streaming movies, so it's safe to say that the presentation is unique, adding an extra dimension to the act of watching, experiencing a story second hand.
Whilst the focus would be on the perspective of a photojournalist, we also have that mecha element which is always popular in anime. Here, though, in just two episodes we glimpse hints of the psychological toll of piloting hardware that is so efficient in 'neautralising' the enemy.
It's pleasing to have another 'grown-up' anime with protagonists out of their teens, and even if it ends up as a glorified robot suit tale. There is certainly potential to develop into an engaging show, so I'll be keeping an eye out.

My only quibble would be that the innovative perspective and mostly successful CG integration shows up the basic character design even more, which err on the side of realism but still descend into physical caricatures that don't seem to suit the tone of the show.

As for Night Head Genesis, it is duuuuuuull.

-

I went for a check-up at the dentist on Thursday and was happy to learn that my teeth are okay. It was pretty alarming to hear that "8 is fully erupted" until I realised that meant my wisdom tooth has come out properly. Yay.

Elliptical fantasies

Sometimes I find myself getting my existential fear on about the fragility of consciousness.
That our identity, the very essence of our being, is tied up in memory and inextricably linked to our spongey brains.

You don't need to look far for evidence of how easy it is to alter consciousness - any number of drugs including the over-the-counter caffeine and alcohol, along with the cheap and easy option of sleep deprivation, all provide a skewed perception of the world, and therefore change the nature of our interaction with it.

The way we process information and choose to react to it also contribute to our perception of reality - is it a world to be embraced? To be feared? Is it mundane and lifeless or are there sparks around every corner?
Essentially you can boil it down to the hoary old nature/nurture debate when considering what most influences our own dealings with external reality, but it is undeniable that nature - in the form of altered brain chemistry be it with coffee, LSD or a smack in the head - provides a significant potential for perceptual changes.

Today I find myself skirting around pools of this fear thanks to my current psychological instability, brought on mainly via sleep deprivation and the resultant ingestion of caffeine. A wooziness in my world that isn't always there, strange thought processes that I can't seem to finish. I keep waking up in the middle of the night seemingly in the middle of some complicated challenge; I think on Sunday night it had something to do with plastic cards...

In addition to my abnormal mental state is the heightened awareness of the issues - watching A Scanner Darkly was an adequate kick-start, but then last night I went to see Mind Game, a recent Japanese Animated film (and thus extending my Animated Weekend). The plot, such as it is, sees four protagonists stuck in a whale but is relatively unimportant.
It is about ambition and possibilities, about creativity and invention. A breakneck ride that reminded me of the hysterically fast-paced anime Dead Leaves, though with less scatalogical humour and far more ingenuity.
A burst of art styles, it's hard to pin down and certainly doesn't conform to any traditional narrative structures, it's hard to explain and in this state I'm not going to attempt to.

Still, this morning I went to see Thunderball, which reminded me of how charismatic Connery can be. An altogether different sort of film and signifying the end of the current animated cycle, I wonder if this and the possibility of catching up on a bit of sleep will bring me back to more normal perception?

Cowed

Last night I spent about an hour typing up my thoughts on the film Renaissance as part of a big post about the animated films I've seen recently. I was very pleased with it, it had big words and everything, but when I decided to upload an image of the film at the end it crashed my browser and all was lost. So I went to bed.
Trying again today, attempting to upload pics still crashes the browser, so I give up. I am disheartened. Shall I bother to try and remember what I wrote, start afresh or just do something completely different? Technology can be so disheartening sometimes.

I went to see some films in the last few days. All of these films were animated rather than live action. I saw Renaissance on Thursday. It's a joint UK/France/Luxembourg co-production, and I think there's a French dub as well as the English one that's been released in Blighty.
Renaissance is a dystopian sci-fi police thriller. There have been many similarly themed films, and this is not one of the better ones. The futuristic touches of the evil corporation, the advanced technology and the look of 2054 Paris seem like disjointed impact moments, they shout "look at this!" rather than forming a logical and cohesive future world. And much of the spectacle on offer comes from ideas recycled from many of the other films in this genre anyway, so it all seems a bit ho-hum. The plot only takes a slight departure from the norm, involving a bit of immortality intrigue with it's progeria research conspiracies, but the telling is all so very predictable and there is little here to distinguish it from a bazillion other dystopia flicks.
The main selling point is the visual style, as not only is it fully CGI it also uses a different style, going for a blocky monochrome rather than the usual attempts at photo-realism in a way which no doubt sounded like a perfect fit for the hard-boiled noir element of the film. It's a shame, then, that these visuals don't really elevate the film.
I'm sure a number of viewers haven't before seen particular video game cut scenes that have used this style for years, and indeed the sales for Capcom's Killer 7 in this country (which uses the same visual technique throughout) can't have been very high, but even without the benefit of having seen these already I found I was never fully immersed into the story as the harsh blocks of black and white allow for no grey and throughout the film it feels unfinished, as if there is depth and texture waiting to be added. Shadow no longer becomes a mask of fear, threatening possible menace, but instead offers up a pitch black void in which nothing seems to exist.

In any case, even if the visuals worked the story itself is a little too ho-hum to rise above average. This is not a bad film, don't get me wrong, it doesn't plumb the depths of Casshern's style-over-substance roadkill with a nice coat, but it just isn't anything special, and in the dystopian science fiction genre there is so much competition that it's not good enough to offer little more than a nice smile.
On reflection I think it suffers from similar problems as Final Fantasy:Spirits Within and Sky Blue - trying so hard to produce something with state-of-the-art visuals but not paying as much attention to ther story, Renaissance will be found lacking as the visual bar is raised.

I'd like to put in a picture here, but instead I'll just have to link you to some on the official site. Updated link to trailer: 04.09.13

On Friday I saw A Scanner Darkly. I've been a fan of Philip K Dick's writing for a few years now, so I'd already read the book it's based on, Scanner being the latest in a long line of adaptations including Bladerunner, Screamers, Total Recall, Minority Report, Impostor and Paycheck.
As adaptations go this is very faithful, and does a great job of presenting the world of the druggy, a mixture of bullshitting fun and paranoia. Keanu Reeves is Bob Arctor, an undercover agent trying to infiltrate the drug underworld and find the source of a potent and highly addictive substance named 'D'. The film follows him as he deals with his dual identities, his addict housemates and the distance of his sort-of girlfriend and dealer, Donna.
Dick is a master of the whole dystopia theme, and does Paranoia like no-one. With a fully-formed story, it's left to the actors and director Richard Linklater to bring the film to cinematic life, so happily they've all done a great job.
Keanu's spaced-out and distant delivery perfectly fits a character who is confused about his own identity and increasingly about the world in general thanks to his D habit, woody Harrelson, Robert Downey Jr. and Rory Cochrane are all note-perfect as Arctor's friends, having substance addled conversations and getting The Fear, particularly Cochrane as the twitchy Freck and Downey's Barris is excellent as the deluded yet self-styled expert on many subjects.
Linklater brings the animation to the table, using the Rotoscoping technique that he first utilised to create Waking Life, covering the live action shots in a layer of paint and allowing for the animation to be simultaneously life-like and yet seamlessly introduce the more bizarre elements such as the D hallucinations or the sci-fi elements such as the scramble-suit. The scramble suit is a device that agents wear so that they cannot be identified by anyone when reporting in to the Sheriff's department, as a method of limiting damage from the endemic corruption within the police force. It works by projecting the images of millions of people of multiple ages, races and sexes and altering the voice, and it is this scramble suit that first presents problems for Arctor as he is assigned, as Agent 'Fred', to investigate Arctor, worsening his identity crisis.

As well as the spot-on acting, interesting story and the inevitable conspiracy that is unfolding underneath, the Rotoscoped visuals produce beautiful shots throughout the film.
Where A Scanner Darkly differs from Renaissance can be seen in how the visual style completely fits the story and feel of the film, and the futuristic elements of surveillance tech and the scramble suits and such are totally integrated into the world, they are part of it and not just special effects to marvel at.
A Scanner Darkly is an accomplished film and a faithful adaptation, something worth seeking out.

Then Friday night I went over to the NFT to see a couple of short films as part of their mini-anime season.
First up was Yonna in the Solitary Fortress, a 34 minute 3D CGI effort created by Kengo Takeuchi.
Yonna and her brother Stan both have special powers or something, which has made them outcasts. Stan has moved them to a remote castle to keep to themselves. The Imperial government want to make use of Yonna's powers and so send a young agent to retrieve her, but Stan isn't happy at the intrusion and another devious Imperial agent, Piggott, is already on the scene.
Kengo Takeuchi used to be an animator for the Square Enix Final Fantasy games and it shows. The visual style looks just like a Final Fantasy cut-scene, the plot is weak and the character designs are uninspired. While it is an impressive acheivement for one person to produce, it doesn't stop Yonna being plain boring.

Luckily for the audience then that Negadon : the Monster form Mars was up next. Also a 3D CGI short (of 25 minutes) that took the creator Jun Awazu over two years to make, it is an affectionate homage to the Japanese monster movies of the 60s and 70s.
After making a mess of the Earth, mankind sets about terraforming Mars. A cocoon-like structure is found and brought back, but the ship crash lands and the cocoon hatches, unleashing the levitating crustacean-ish monster Negadon, who sets about on a rampage in Tokyo.
Luckily for Earth the scientist Ryuichi Narasaki began a robot programme years previously. He stopped work a decade ago when his daughter was killed in a robot-related accident, but with the threat of Negadon Ryuichi decides it is finally time to take his giant robot creation for a walk.

Negadon is fantastic, at once knowingly cheesy when aping the style of the old monster movies, it also has a great deal of respect for them and this shines through in the painstakingly detailed look of the film. The future as seen from the 50s is faithfully represented in everything from spaceships to computers, and the CGI work is so good that Negadon looks just like a model from a 70s Godzilla flick. In one scene we see a frog which is so realistic that it's breathtaking, only for the colours to bleed out and take on a sepia tone as the legend "ten years ago" informs us of a flashback.
The film was apparently worked on ten hours a day for two years by Awazu using off-the-shelf computer programmes, and it is an astounding achievement, managing to be funny without descending into parody and providing a neat little self-contained story that completely fits with the old-school sci-fi feel.
I'm not sure if Negadon has been picked up for distribution here but it is currently available on DVD in the US and includes Awazu's two previous student short films.
You can see the trailer on this site.

And that was my weekend of animated tomfoolery.

Update! (04.09.13) That trailer link no longer works but you can go and watch Negadon on Youtube here. (Part one of three)

Jesus Is Magic Is Magic

I've just watched "Tell them who you are", a documentary about the Oscar winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler (imdb entry) made by his son, Mark Wexler.
I admit that I'm not all that knowledgeable about cinematographers, I recognise a few names and consciously recognise fewer styles so it's no surprise I didn't immediately click. He worked on One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Limbo, the fantastic John Sayle's picture.
Where I had heard his name before was from directing the 1976 documentary "Underground", about the Weather Underground Organisation, a radical Left Wing activist group who bombed a number of targets in protest of the US government.
When I initially read about the Weathermen I was surprised at how I hadn't come across their existence before, it was as if violent dissent didn't happen in the US outside protests until the Unabomber and Timothey McVeigh. But that's another story.

Haskell Waxler is quite a character, confident to the point of seeming arrogance, and at first it would seem that the film would focus on his career in movies. It becomes a different beast when Haskell implores his son to make the film about the person, not the career, and we gain an insight into the relationship between Mark and his father, and that of fathers and sons in general.
At once full of glitz with the appearances of dozens of high profile actors and film-makers, the film is down to earth with Haskell's continual reminders of the illusion of cinema - how the angles and editing are all affecting how we are shown the story, and he is anxious of the image that the film will portray. This reminder helps pull you out of the film and think about its construction, the aims which Mark as the creator imbues in it and the fact that its flow is artificial - the events are not merely unfolding in front of the camera while the cameraman passively records it.
It's a very interesting picture and I highly recommend it. Brought a tear to my eye, I can tell ya.


So why is Jesus Magic? Because Sarah Silverman says so.
Jesus Is Magic is a mix of filmed sketches and stand up show, all showcasing Sarah as Funny.
She is funny, it is funny. You may have seen her as the irritated girlfriend in School of Rock or from her version of the Aristocrats, but possibly as "Raving Bitch" in The Way Of The Gun.

Night Head Genesis

New anime shows regularly appear in Japan with the frequency of regular TV series here in the West.
Shows can cover a broad range of subjects for a number of different audiences, but predominantly shows are produced for the young.
Night Head Genesis is one such show, aimed at the Shonen or male teen audience.

A sci-fi show, NHG sets up with an introduction about our brains. We don't use 70% of it, you see, and this is where human beings keep all their special powers. And these special powers are called Night Head Genesis, apparently, as if the name was put up in a competition and won by a 15 year old.
Stupid name aside, NHG takes itself seriously, rigidly sticking to its bleak outlook without recourse to comic relief or the fantasy of tight lycra.

Naoto and Naoya are brothers who seem to have developed psychic powers. Naoto manipulates objects (though destructively, with little control) when agitated with telekinesis, whilst his younger sibling Naoya reads minds via touch. Through brief flashbacks we see how these powers have caused trouble, and how their parents resort to sending them away (at ages 10 and 8?) to what I assume is a government facility 'out in the woods' to look after and study them.
The bleakness of the show manifests in the method of their move from home - the parents drug their children's' melon juice, but Naoto wakes in the car before leaving and terrifies his tearful mother by blowing out the street lamp when he realises what's happening, then being gassed before he can do more damage.

Waking up in their new home, Naoto is angry, taking it out on the canteen of scientists and then the director of the facility, before running off with Naoya into the forest. Before long they reach trees bound with rope, and find themselves trapped by a mysterious forcefield. After a scientist brings them food and asks them to return 'home', the fear she can't help show makes the brothers realise they aren't meant for the outside world.

Flash forward 15 years and we meet Shouko, a strange schoolgirl who we gather predicts the future thanks to her life-saving advice to a friend about canceling a trip that would have involved a road accident. Shouko entrusts a notebook of strange writing to her friend, saying that Elder Misaki (who we glimpse as an animal perch in a Snow White manner) has gone, so now the brothers are free. We then see the brothers, now young men, in the woods once more only this time there is no barrier. They drive away, but after a flat tyre Naoya persuades Naoto to visit a diner, thus ending episode 1. The episode 2 preview, called "Contact", points to things going a bit badly when the brothers are back in public.

NHG seems far too formulaic to go anywhere, the main characters-the brothers-are woefully underdeveloped, sticking with the stock stereotypes of the elder brother trying to be strong whilst the younger is more timid, traits that also fit in with their respective powers.
Strange powers developing in the young and treated as dangerous is such an old idea that it's odd they haven't given an inkling of invention in this episode, but I suppose the target audience of pre-teen boys is less demanding.
There are a number of confusing moments, such as why are the boys left free to walk about the facility if they're dangerous enough to be there in the first place and where did the car come from let alone the question of how they know how to drive it.

On top of these little niggles is the opening scene, where we see the boys in a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, including a sequence of a nuclear-like explosion, which when added to the mention that the boys have been told that they will unleash "minus energy" if they go into the world and that Shouko seems gravely worried about the situation, seems at odds with the fact that Shouko tells her friend that she will live a long and happy life married with kids. A scenario in stark contrast with the possible destruction of a city of 60 million people, but there you go.

At the end of the day Night Head Genesis doesn't seem to offer anything out of the ordinary or more interesting than the many other psychic-power themed anime films and shows, with Akira doing the confusion, isolation and frustration better decades ago, and Elfen Lied handling it with more OTT panache as recently as a couple of years back.
Of course in later episodes NHG may offer hidden depths and there are obviously the hints at a wider plot, but with this first episode there is little incentive to see it through.

I went to college but all they found were rats in my head

How do we remember our past? Do we see it as it was or relative to how we are now? It's inevitably tainted by the experiences we've since had, and the way our lives now are, so the past is truly a foreign country.
Smells and songs trigger memories for us, give us flashbacks. But do we recall scenes or feelings?
The way a summer day felt back in the mid-80s, in the attic with the dust streaming in the sunlight and the radio struggling up the stairs, on a lazy Sunday afternoon back when I had the time to be bored. Is it what I did or the ambience that I remember?

It's these feelings that come back to us, these are our recollections whilst the facts are another type of memory altogether. I remember getting a 'B' for my Psychology A-level-I remember what the building looked like and the weather and chatting outside with friends I no longer see, but I don't remember the paper, the questions. The facts are separate and have been whittled down to the grade.

Where does the past go and why is it that bits of it get stuck somewhere inside us and bits of it drop out or decay? Every moment is the past, once you have the time to think about it. Every fleeting second watching us age. We yearn for unpleasant or arduous experiences to fly by, but the fun never lasts, always over before we know it and soon we are 20, 30, 70.
Time certainly appears to pass more quickly as I get older, perhaps because of the growing realisation that the time really is finite - then it drips through the cracks.

Is anyone ever satisfied at what they do with their time? Whenever I enjoy what I'm doing, I get a gnawing at the back of my mind, an anxiety about how this enjoyment is only temporary and will be replaced with other, less appealing engagements. And then it's never as enjoyable. Which is a right pain in the arse.

Still, you gotta laugh, eh?

Shiny

If you pay any attention to adverts then you will have noticed that Film Four is now free. The satellite/digital channel run by Channel Four and stuffed with movies.
When it was originally launched it was touted as a specialist channel, somewhere to go for alternative films, classics and world cinema, so it's odd that the majority of films that gain a mention in their current hyperdrive are more geared toward the mainstream.
I can't complain about having access to a film channel for free (seeing as I get digi-telly bundled with my broadband) but I hope that they don't stray toward the more obvious side of alternative in order to placate the providers of advertising revenue. Lost In Translation is hardly undiscovered.
Pah.

Anyhoo, seeing as I own the DVDs for the opening night's line up, I neglected trying out this wonderful source of free flicks until today. When I saw Topaz.
Not known as one of Hitchcock's classics, this is presumably due to the fact that where his other films might instill fear, excitement or tension, Topaz dishes out generous helpings of boredom.
Pushing uncomfortably close to two and a half hours, Topaz succeeds in making the run up to the Cuban Missile Crisis a ho-hum occurence. The main characters struggle to gain anything more than a periphery hold on your attention, which can partly be attributed to the actors treating the grave political machinations with all the seriousness of stomach cramps.
I didn't like it.
Where I said "generous helpings", I don't wish to imply that Topaz reaches previously unheard of levels of boredom, or in any way drags itself out of the humdrum chains it is mired in, rather it is merely dull and unexceptionally so. The kind of film that plays on a sunny sunday afternoon and fails to hold your attention.

In summary, I'm glad it was free, three cheers to Film Four.

Higurashi, or Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, is an anime show currently airing in Japan. A boy moves to a small village with his family, and becomes involved in a curse which sees people die every year after a religious festival. Beginning as a cutesy tale of a young boy moving to town and making friends with lots of cute and chirpy girls, it quickly descends into a mire of psychological horror and gore, with a complex time-shifting plot that possibly implicates the whole village into a conspiracy involving human sacrifice. Higurashi is something to look out for, assuming it gets licensed and released over here, that is.

Segmented eyes

It being summer, as you may have noticed recently, the time came again as it does every year for the ants to bulk up and grow wings.
Yes, that scourge of the skies, the flying ant, saw fit to pop above ground a couple of days back and infest the outdoors in the way only it knows how.

I freely admit that I am not the biggest fan of the insect kingdom, I don't seek to destroy them at any given moment and am content to remove them from my immediate living space. Most species I don't have a problem with and merely seek to avoid a situation wherein they might explore my flesh, although I do have a soft spot in my heart for moths, in that I fear them and their hideous, paper-wing ways, flying at my face in their desperate attempts to reach the moon, or whatever it is they do.
Even moths I avoid smushing and try and trap them to chuck them outside, after all they smear across surfaces like creatures of sand and dirt rather than blood, and it's never a pleasant thing to see.
But the flying ant is a signal to head indoors and close the windows. No other insect seems to manage the same complete lack of co-ordination, with what amounts to no sense of direction or of any surroundings at all, blindy flying into any nearby obstruction in a way most other airborne invertabrates seem to avoid.
Were this heinous offence not sufficient grounds for damnation already, the flying ant flaunts its hideously bloated body upon the eyes of all, in a way no insect should this close to the arctic.
Truly these creatures are worthy of the term "beasts".


If you like flying ants, feel free to comment detailing the rationale behind your filthy perversion, along with relevant past traumatic experiences that may have led to this incorrect thinking, so we can protect our children.

-

You may have seen ads for Coke Zero recently. I'm told there are TV campaigns though I haven't seen tham myself. Could they be as corny as theone of the singing woman handing out Cokes? Chances are high. I have seen the printg ads, and the ads on the sides of buses, and this afternoon a colleague arrived with two crates of 150ml "fun" size cans to share out, no doubt as part of the avaricious media barrage. Opinions were divided by those who liked it and were surprised, and those who thought it vile. Those who liked it did so as it tasted more like Coke than Diet Coke, which it truly does, but seeing as that taste is of rusty metal death I don't understand the approval. Needless to say, I did drink a couple, but in my defence I ran out of 'mineral' water and my workplace stopped supplying water coolers months ago, leaving us with the tepid and slightly sinister tasting tap water.
Anyway, remember that you heard it here first, or would have done if you did. It's looking to be more of a success than Tab Clear at least. Avoid it!

-

It's late so I'm off to play a bit of Gun before bed. Games update is that I'm only missing Black from my 'to get' list, though I am keeping an eye out for a cheap Tomb Raider. The new one.
Gun is like GTA, but in the Wild West, except much, much smaller. It's good fun while it lasts though, so off I go to shoot people in the head, but it's okay because they are bandits and varmints, and I am true of heart.

Let's go over this one more time

The art of cinema is now over one hundred years old, providing entertainment for generations of people all over the world.
After all this time, are we really running out of ideas?

It is often said that there are only so many stories to tell, and these are just regurgitated over and over again in different fashions. True enough, boy meets girl has been covered, but this doesn't stop people trying to tell their own version, just as you don't give up living your life simply because it's not totally unique - other people get up and go to work, meet friends, watch TV, share a fascination of early thirteenth century Hungarian pottery, for example.

But the idea of a limited number of basic story structures does little to excuse the insipid occurrence of the re-make.
There are economical reasons to support the re-make, simply being that if an idea was successful before then it can be again, but rarely do people consider the opinion that if you remake a pre-existing success, the inevitable comparisons are going to be that much harsher. By all means re-do flops or interesting films that didn't quite gel, but deciding to cover old ground rather than create something new just seems lazy and stupid.
A case could possibly be made for the director-as-artist, seeking to honour their favourite works like recording artists doing a cover, but a film is so much more of a collaborative effort and involves so much more work than recording a song that this idea smacks of selfishness and again a lack of creativity.

To give an idea of the prevalence of this epidemic, this is a smattering of re-makes made in less than ten years:

Assault on Precinct 13, Adventure of Greyfriars Bobby, Amityvill Horror, The Haunting, Phantom of the Opera, When a Stranger Calls, Taxi, Godzilla, King Kong, Stepford Wives, Ghost Ship, Anna and the King, Pink Panther, Ladykillers, Longest Yard, War of the Worlds, Around the World in 80 Days, Moulin Rouge, Psycho, Omen, Time Machine, Oliver Twist, Italian Job, Dawn of the Dead, Manchurian Candidate, Freaky Friday, Ring, Ring 2, Grudge, Dark Water, Bourne Identity, Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Fun With Dick and Jane, Alfie, House of Wax, The Hills Have Eyes, The Fog, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Poseidon Adventure, Flight of the Phoenix.

This has always been an issue in Hollywood, but it does seem that more recently the remakes have been escalating in number like a disgusting self-replicating alien slime. With the Wicker Man on the way and remakes of Oldboy and Infernal Affairs planned, it would seem like the problem isn't going away.
Often the impetus appears to be that film makers see a film and wish they made it, so rather than try harder to make their own decent films they just decide to put their own spin on what they liked.
Often the reruns of Hollywood fare will be of films made decades ago so that there is sufficient distance, temporally as well as stylistically, so that the remake doesn't feel completely redundant. But more recently the success in the West of the East Asian film industry has led to remakes of films that have barely made it into the cinema, often in an insidious attempt to Americanise the films for a broader Western audience rather than the smaller audiences that are prepared to put up with subtitles.

Bah.

In more bad film news, I continued my sideline interest in director's cuts, extended versions and such today.
Bladerunner is arguably the most famous to be treated with differing versions, and with the advent of DVD it has been increasingly popular to provide one or more alternate versions of movies, everything from painstakingly restored classics such as The Wild Bunch to the "Extended cut by design" releases of current comedy and horror pics exploiting the home market with promises of "the version not seen in cinemas".

It is always interesting for fans to see what could have been, whether in these cuts or from deleted scenes, and it was with this mood that I watched the Daredevil director's cut. I'd seen it before and thought it a bit crap, but this version was a big improvement, developing the characters and fleshing out the storyline, almost making it a good film. Still not great, but the newer cut is a noticeable improvement.

So how is this more bad film news? Today I watched the extended cut of Underworld. I didn't notice any extensions, apart from a brief snip of Scott Speedman's Michael telling Beckinsale's Selene how his wife died.
I did notice it was still crap. To be fair I remember quite liking it when I first saw it, but what I probably liked was seeing Kate Beckinsale in skintight leather.
No, I did like that.
And I liked Bill Nighy as the elder vampire Viktor. Nice bit of hamming and not taking himself seriously.
But the film itself is one in a long line of the "bullet-time copycats", films that feature a large part of slo-mo combat and a stylised 'dark' mood, most recently rearing up as Ultraviolet and Aeon Flux.
A lot of effort has been spent on creating the style and mood of Underworld, but it still manages to be anonymous and homogenised, similar to dozens of such films with a neo-gothic feel.
The story does have a smidge of potential, but like Aliens vs. Predator this doesn't automatically make for a good film.
Selene is meant to be a battle-hardened killer of werewolves who out of nowhere gets doubts and falls for some guy seemingly based on nothing but him being a but hunky and having floppy hair. It's meant to be set in 'Europe' but may as well be in an alternate-America, with nothing indicating any sense of place. Said floppy hair Scott Speedman is crap, his character has little to do but it's still crap. The double-crossing Kraven is played by a low-rent Travolta and is also crap, in fact the only other lights aside from Bill Nighy are the bloke who used to be in Desmond's and Michael Sheen.

Gah, I can only shudder at the thought of what Underworld Evolution is like, but I still have that morbid curiosity about it.
Oh, and Len Wiseman, the director of (only) Underworlds 1&2 is the guy who married Kate Beckinsale soon after she split with Michael Sheen. They all worked together in Underworld 2. Ouch. And Wiseman is in talks to direct Die Hard 4.
Great.

Ah, I've just changed the settings so that anyone can leave a comment. So if you wanted to laugh at my eyepatch without having to go through the annoying registering thing, now you can. In text. Like hahahahahahhahaaha!

Who are you?

ID cards.
Do you know what they're for? It seems that the Identity Cards Act was passed on the 30th March. I remember it being blocked at the House of Lords a number of times, but it finally slimed through.
Despite all of the reasons why the Lords sought to block it, the New Labour government has been particularly enthusiastic about getting this off the ground. Why?

The prevention of terrorism angle remains unproven, with no evidence to justify that this massive operation will make any difference whatsoever. The fact that the most recent terrorist activities in this country were carried out by English and Irish people begs the question as to how being able to check their identity will make the slightest difference. All assertions of the ID card system being introduced to combat terrorism are empty and meaningless.

In terms of dealing with illegal immigration, it is shockingly obvious that the vast majority of people seeking to enter this country whether legally or illegally will not be using British identity documents in the first place, so it is irrelevant how secure or not these proposed cards are in terms of checking these people's identity.

Identity benefit fraud costs an estimated £20-50 million (government source). This figure does seem a large amount of our taxes being lost, but when factoring in the huge (and still estimated) cost of implementing the ID card system, the money saved would not pay off the system used to save it for years, and that is assuming that the ID card system remains fraud proof. The government's own Department of Work and Pensions site puts total benefit fraud at £0.9 billion or £1.5 billion a year, depending on whether you look at their main page or FAQ page, so it's obvious that identity fraud is only a small part anyway.

Identity fraud in total is said to cost the UK £1.7 billion a year and affected 135,000 people last year, a 500% increase since 1999 (Home Office source again). This is an alarming trend, but given a minute to think about it you can take into account that the rise in internet usage in the same period and corresponding rise in internet-related scams (such as e-mail 'phishing' for bank details) are unlikely to be affected by owning an ID card. What is missing in these scare-stories is a proportion of this personal fraud that would have been preventable by owning an ID card (similar to the proportion of benefit fraud we can gain from the figures above - a maximum of £50 million out of a minimum of £900 million in benefit fraud)
The government site does say that the ID card will make you safer online because you can use the card and PIN to verify your details. So, if it all relies on a PIN how is it any safer than the current system of passwords and PINs?

A number of the reasons why this is all a bad idea are listed on the anti-ID card sites, such as No2ID, and along with all the opposition in the Lords, even the London Assembly has passed a motion against ID cards.

Even without an ID card, the government is still pushing ahead to get your details on the National Identity Scheme in a manner of centralising information that has been found to increase the rate of identity fraud in the USA and Australia (source). The card will be the main means to gain access to any services paid for by our taxes, and any errors that happen will effectively cut us off, meaning those not in a position to rely on private pension and healthcare will have serious problems.
The IT systems run by the government and the biometric detail system are both shown to be unreliable meaning the instance of mistakes leading to fines, imprisonment and loss of access will affect thousands if not tens of thousands.

The government has not even attempted to show that this is a cost-effective alternative to solutions to the problems that this scheme is supposed to deal with. At a cost running to at least £5.5 billion in a decade (financial times story) this is an immense bill that we will all have to stump up for, with little guarantee of results at the end, apart from inevitable misery for some of us when we are the victims of bugs in the system.

By far the best site I've seen so far is that of the London School of Economics, collecting its investigations into the issue here.

Now, if it's not going to prevent terrorism, stop benefit fraud, stop illegal immigration (whether that is a problem or not) or stop identity theft with any success, why is the government willing to splash out on close to £6 billion of our taxes?
Who runs the industries providing the biometric technology and all the relevant information technology needed to back up the National Identity Register?
Well, here is a link to the companies that the government has already paid over £20 million (a years worth of the low end estimate of identity related benefit fraud losses) on planning and trials for their nefarious scheme.
Here's a list of companies interested according to Corporate Watch. The Office of Government Commerce took the lion's share of over £12 million in its "Provision of advice and support on benefits management and other commercial issues", of which a hefty chunk went to PA Consulting.
PAConsulting have worked for the Home Office before, advising awarding Capita a contract with the Criminal Records Bureau (which used to be part of the same office with the passport agency. Capita went way over budget and under target despite PAConsulting giving the thumbs up.

One way to avoid the ID scheme for now, would be to renew your passport, as urged by No2ID and the Liberal Democrats who these days seem more like the Labour Party than the Labour Party.
On the one hand renewing your passport will set you back over £50, a bit annoying if it doesn't need to be renewed yet.
On the other, if you don't renew it before September (?) then when you do need to you will have to pay at least £93 for the new version of the passport anyway and may have go through an interview in order to prove your identity.

"The National Identity Register - All Your Eggs In One Basket"

An unctuous residue

Recently I had the misfortune to visit the Budgens outpost in Ealing Broadway; the bright side being that I purchased one of the two remaining bottles of Vanilla Diet coke they had there. There must be a Budgens warehouse out there stacked with the stuff, or a Budgens buyer with a vanilla fetish.
So on to the wholly unnecessary consumption of carbonated beverages. At my local snack emporium I spied a new brand of Coke 'pon the shelves, one the likes of which I never did see afore. Motivated simultaneously by the rancidly humid weather and by a desire to replace the departed fizzy pop close to my heart, I purchased a can and consumed it this evening.

Coke Zero? What the hell is that? It looks like death and tastes crappy too. It seems to be a very belated attempt to match 'Pepsi Max' with the "all the flavour, none of the sugar" idea that rewrites the history of Diet Pepsi and Coke but hey. Coke Zero does have that flavour that Diet Coke is lacking, the flavour I like to call 'Tooth Death". The sort of metallic aftertaste that you get when tasting blood, not something I'd be eager to recreate but I'm not in the soft drink industry.
Can't see any immediate difference in the ingredients, it seems to be identical to Diet Coke so they've obviously done a magicks to it.

Carbonated water isn't a problem, but Phosphoric Acid has many eyebrows raised. There is some association with the onset in osteoporosis - the bone deficiency disease. There are correlations between soft drink consumption and osteoporosis, but it's as yet unclear as to whether the link is direct or due to soft drink consumption replacing that of milk in the diet, or soft drinks being prevalent in the diet of those with a sedentary lifestyle. So, if you sit on your arse and don't drink milk, it may make no difference if phosphoric acid never passes your lips. The jury's out...

The colour additive Caramel E150d gives us this from www.food-info.net/uk : "Side effects are manifested from the use of E150c and E150d, where intestinal problems may occur after ingestion of large amounts. Due to the complex nature of the mixtures, toxicology tests are still being carried out."
: drinking a lot may not be great for you. Like many substances, moderation is best so no news there.
According to the Evening Standard dated May 10th 2004 caramel colouring causes 'behavioural problems' But in their side effect list, so does Caffeine making it hard to ascertain what they mean by the term.

Aspartame or E951 according to the Standard can cause dizziness, blurred vision, migraines and brain cancer. Wikipedia has it as : "Aspartame has been the subject of a vigorous public controversy regarding its safety and the circumstances around its approval. It is well-known that aspartame contains the naturally-occurring amino acid phenylalanine, which is a health hazard to the few people born with phenylketonuria, a congenital inability to process phenylalanine. A few studies have also recommended further investigation into possible connections between aspartame and diseases such as brain tumors, brain lesions, and lymphoma. These findings, combined with notable conflicts of interest in the approval process, have engendered vocal activism regarding the possible risks of aspartame."
In the more in depth Wiki entry about the health risks, my favourite of 92 possible adverse affects is that of "feeling "unreal" ".
However much weight any of the studies carry, Aspartame carries with it a malignant air and a dubious past in terms of its approval for the food industry tied up to Republican/corporate machinations.

Acesulfame K or E950 has cancer links in the Standard's report. Wiki has it again under the undecided banner, with the official line being that the agreed levels are safe, with pressure groups claiming that there are cancer links although it seems these effects have yet to be replicated in studies.
One ironic point is that E950 is used a sweetener to replace sugar and lower calorie intake in products. But its consumption had been shown to raise insulin levels which, in turn, can produce food cravings and therefore weight gain. Huzzah!

Sodium Citrate (E331) is listed as an "acidity regulator". Nothing in particular comes up under nasty, it seems it's often used to do exactly what it says - regulate acidity by making it more alkaline.

Worryingly, apart from the soft drink companies not having to list ingredient dosage for some reason, they don't have to list all flavourings and so these come up as "Flavourings including caffeine"

So what have I learnt about what I ingested? Not a lot. Some of the ingredients could have some nasty effects, but then they also could not. Caffeine, however, has some proven results but I doubt that will be outlawed any time soon.

I'd like to go into some films here but that will make for a loooong post, next time (maybe) - sequelitis.

Complex carbohydrates

Watching Factotum the other night was a joy. The story of the writer Bukowski, Matt Dillon played 'Harry Chinaski', a drinker and shirker of work. With his movie-star good looks, it was odd seeing him with the facial blemishes accompanying heavy drinking, burst capillaries spread across the face like sunburn. The film nailed the right atmosphere, a warm, mouldy fog that you struggle through when you wake up drunk from the night before.
In amongst the recurring bottom-dollar jobs and boozed up escapades were fine moments of deadpan humour, enough to laugh out loud. All the acting on offer comes deceptively easy considering how hard it is to fake drunkeness without resulting in the wrong kind of foolish.
A hard film to recommend to anyone on the basis of plot, this is all about life at the poverty line without the earnest desperation that usually clogs up such films. It is good stuff.

Junebug is a different story. I caught this at the cinema last night, the tale of an art gallery owner travelling to Carolina to kill two birds with one stone - courting a potential client and meeting her husband's family.
Junebug is wonderfully acted without a bum note, the writing avoids the obvious and some of the cinematography is unafraid to keep at a mild pace, with scenes of greenery held for that bit longer than many editors would feel comfortable with.

And yet, for all its US indie techniques, this is treading a well-worn path. The conflict between family and career and the old country mouse/town mouse - the sophisticated, travelled and articulate meets the religious Southern hicks, and while it's not quite as straight as that the stereotypes are still well-defined.

So, a tale well filmed and well acted, should it matter if the story is all-too familiar? After all, the love story with or without infidelity is rehashed time and time again, and is still capable of coming across as fresh and new in the right hands. Why shouldn't this apply to the 'meet the parents/fish out of water' tale? Maybe it does, but I didn't really feel it here.
Junebug is a good film, and going into it knowing what to expect will probably mean you'll enjoy it, there's still a lot to make this stand out from the crowd.


In other news, that B2 shop still has Diet Vanilla Coke, so much so that there were too many bottles for the shelves. The use-by on the bottle I bought yesterday was October, so it looks like that will be the ultimate last time I will be able to taste the sickly Cream soda/Coke joy.

Colourless Interlude

Rife.
Speculate.
Contextualise.

Rather than become a massive drain on my precious temporal resource, it turns out my DS only takes up neat little chunks, much like its physical presence. This is mostly due to the games that I've bought for it : Brain Training only lets you do the actual training (maths, memory games, visual tests etc.) once a day so you can't spend that long on it, and Nintendogs is similarly limited, in that your virtual puppy only has the energy for so many walks or contests in one day and back at your virtual flat you don't want to spend that long playing and training it, especially when it decides to forget the tricks you taught it not hours earlier.
I'm not bitter.

So that's my virtual pup, her name is Plum and she usually answers to it. Don't know why the picture's so blurry, dagnabbit, this technical jiggery-hokery just gets me all confounded.
Having said this, my limited time-outpouring into my funky little machine is all set to change on Friday, as Nintendo release the New Super Mario Bros game, and a squillion Nintendo fans rejoice in an apoplexy of Mario-based emotional outpourings.


Could talk again about films what I done seen, but the Christian Right teen comedy Saved! didn't inspire the same enthusiasm in me as did Deathline. Saved! isn't bad, it's just a bit meh. It's okay, quite good in parts, but in aping the high school comedy/drama staple of US West Coast cinema, it suffers from many of the same narrative drawbacks despite the attempt to provide bitey twists. Pshaw.

One item of interest was the impromptu visit to the Wireless fest on Sunday, where the Depeche Mode did do headline. Picked up the tickets last Wednesday and yesterday afternoon I found myself re-living the festival times of a decade ago, in some small way. With the 02 signage pasted everywhichwhere it was undeniably a corporate venture, but as the prices of the likes of the Readings and Phoenixes that I once went to skyrocket, Sunday's little gathering didn't seem so bad. The fact that I cared not a jot for any of the acts but the main made it all the more relaxing - a warm summers afternoon spent trampling round a field of parched straw like grass, surrounded by people all out to enjoy themselves amongst the dozens of festival tat stalls and dodgy food vans. Whilst I'm not a huge Depeche fan, I like a good number of their tunes and they put on a decent show as dusk became twilight became darkness.
It certainly gave me a bit of the festival bug again, but as the last claps and hollers died down and hundreds of people poured out of Hyde Park, walking down the road to catch a bus home was very much different to traipsing back to a disheveled tent past packs of pissed-up teens only to be greeted by a bag of warm, damp bread and smashed biscuits.
Different and better.

Mind the doors!

So I've just watched Deathline, the classic British horror from 1972. It's a decent little film, fairly gory considering it pre-dates the Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the infamous horror flicks from the 70s, and it does a better job with characters and building tension than the similarly themed mutant cannibal picture, Wes Craven's The Hills Have Eyes.

Apparently a group of 8 men and 4 women were buried when digging a section of tube tunnel between Holborn and Russell Square in 1892, but the tube company (these were the pre-London Transport days) went bust and couldn't afford a rescue operation. The survivors lived on, had children and feasted on human flesh, as you do.

The film succeeds where many horror films fail, having you empathise with the villain whilst simultaneously being terrified-you get genuine dread thanks to not being able to easily predict what will happen, unlike in so many of the horror films churned out by the dozen since. A long, unbroken shot prowling round the larder/lair of the cannibal murderers is a stylish touch that also shows up many of the horror films of today, its slow pace working to rack up the tension.
The 70s setting is a joy, getting to see bits of London and the hideous barnets worn by the suspiciously old 'students' at the centre of the story, so even aside from the plot itself the film acts as a time capsule curio. Plus, as a london film, it's heartening to note that black people are a normal part of life in London in '72, using the tube and having normal jobs, it's a fact easily forgotten when watching some more recent films set in London.

Like Match Point. I would say see for yourself.

But then you'd have to see it.

But the reason that you should see Deathline is Donald Pleasance. Playing Inspector Calhoun, the copper who takes on the case of a missing Ministry of Defense bod at Russell Square tube, Pleasance is wonderful, a rounded character who is witty, charming, sarcastic, short-tempered and threatening all at once. That a character which would usually be played with one dimension is given such depth is a testament to Pleasance's acting ability, which does not have the chance to shine in his more high profile horror parts-in Halloween and Prince of Darkness, for example.
The sniping at class, relaxed acting and real locations all go toward boosting this film above the bloodthirsty gaggle of 70s horror, in fact the only wooden part is that of the token American student Alex who only ever seems to be able to frown and get annoyed, though to be fair it could be that the part doesn't give much to work with.
I'll give him the benefit of the doubt because Alex is played by David Ladd, who more recently produced A Guy Thing starring Jason Lee and Julia Stiles.

Yeah, Donald Pleasance is really good, the monster/villain is well realised and all-in-all this makes for a very enjoyable movie. Provided you can stomach movies where people die violent deaths.


To avoid confusion, I'll state that this is not a still from Deathline.

Nana is one of many series that are airing in Japan right now.
Two young ladies named Nana fall in love but their boyfriends move to Tokyo. They follow, but decide to be independent which is where they meet and end up sharing a flat. One Nana is a cute girly-girl, all frilly dresses and swoony eyes over pretty boys, whilst the other is a cigarette-smoking goth singer-girl, and each have their pasts, friends and character traits which unfold over the course of the series. Will they find love? Will they be happy without it? I don't know because it hasn't finished yet.
Still, as shows about women finding themselves in the big city it's really good, and thankfully doesn't have the lesbian subtext that mars many other anime series.
Yes, mars.
Once the subtext is written in cleverly and is relevant to the plot, I will embrace the lesbianism.
But so far, no joy and no-go, tittilation for its own sake does not for good TV make.

I was tempted to rant on the evils of free-market capitalism, but then I watched Deathline and here we are.
Still, I know the promise of political diatribes keeps you all coming back.

Mind the doors!

Serious convictions

I was thinking of writing about my renewed anger over the horrible theft of the 2000 USA election after reading more about it in Greg Palast's "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy", ready to draw comparisons to the violent oppression of political opposition in the very places the Bush administration would seek to attack, but then by the time I got home I was too tired so I'm going to write about games instead.

I was going to write about games earlier this week, but I was too tired then. That's tired to the power of four (an extra power over Davina).

So, I like playing games, I like them a lot. I've been playing video games since my ZX Spectrum + back in the day (mid 80s, yes, that's officially the day) I've played with the Atari 2600, Amstrads, Commodores, PCs I wasn't aware had names, the Nintendo NES, Super NES, Gameboy, N64, Sega Master System, Megadrive, Mega CD, Game Gear, Playstation and Atari Lynx, and at the moment I own a Gameboy Advance SP, a Gamecube and an Xbox. With the slow, lingering death of the Gamecube, and to an extent, the Xbox, I've had the opportunity to get a lot of the games I've wanted to play for the systems cheaper than usual. However, this means I buy them when I see them rather than when I've finished the previous game so I now have a stack of unopened games as well as one of opened but unfinished games just taking up space and patiently waiting for the time when I bless them with my firm touch. I don't want to physically count said games as it will prove too alarming, but for a good idea I have a pile of opened Xbox games on my desk that I am in the middle of playing through. The pile includes 23 titles. There's more under the bed.

But why the chuff do I care about your games you now clearly geeky moneky fool?! I imagine you now say to yourselves out loud to your screen. Other people in the room look at you. If there's no-one there then what was that noise!.
Well, it's a human interest story, something comprehensible to all. It's about how I'm stupid.

I'm stupid because despite owning far too many games to probably finish playing them all this year even if I do it full time *breath* I have pre-ordered and will buy, next Friday, the Nintendo DS Lite, the newest iteration of the sexy Nintendo handheld that you touch to make it do things for you.
I know I have too many games, I know that I will spend precious little time using my new sleek black machine, but I'm going to buy it anyway because I am compulsive and cannot be stopped.

Like that, but black. Sexy.

By the way, to complete my ultimate collection I need Black and Rogue Trooper for the Xbox, but only cheap. Should you happen to see them cheap then let me know.
I can't be stopped.

Maybe next time I will talk about political things, maybe next time.