Indeed

Fingers crossed, I will be moving into a new place before the month is out.
I saw the washing machine in use with my own eyes when I was viewing the flat, and it is therefore already better than where I am.

They (ie. Sunday paper columnists and such) say that moving home is one of the most stressful things you can experience, and doing it for the second time in a year is having an effect on me. It’s actually easier this time around as I never fully unpacked here, and I’ve been shedding a few items along the way, being ruthless about whether I will actually want to watch a particular DVD, listen to a CD or read a book again – meaning that now I am finally getting around to watching Alias series one.



I picked it up in a sale due to the general recommendations of friends and ex-colleagues, and it’s a fairly entertaining watch, but there’s a problem. I have just watched the Wire season 4 across two days. Seeing as the Wire is possibly the best TV series ever produced, it’s a tough act to follow. It probably doesn’t help that Alias is a slightly glossy big-budget show which revolves around a pretty young lady being a spy, but all of the smirky funny bits, slo-mo, soft-focus ideal-home ‘real life’ scenes, international locales that all look like California and god-awful singer-songwriter moments detract from the experience for me. Maybe it’s my own inability to process the type of show that attempts to be a drama, soap, comedy and thriller simultaneously, whilst others excel at one thing. I guess that’s not actually true, as Firefly is admittedly a mishmash of things, but it excels at its mash.
It kind of tells me that it would be a waste of time for me to ever bother with the likes of 24, so now I’m just waiting until I can get my hands on my next ticket to the corners of Baltimore.
Spoiler! All my problems with the show are illustrated in one scene where Sydney considers that her double-agent mum had her as part of a spy plan, involving looking at photos in her soft-focus apartment delivering a voice-over with what sounds like Enya playing in the background. Pah.
Oh no, wait, a scene with Quentin Tarantino running down a hall to Rob Zombie’s Dragula after using a motion tracker that’s literally straight out of Aliens (and therefore using tech design that looks 20 years out of date) probably pips it.


Lester Freeman shows the team the Deadwood piss-take from season four

-



I went to see the film ‘Rec’ blind, as it were, without having read a scrap of print about the thing before my bum was on seat – all I knew is that it wasn’t from the UK or US, and that it was a horror film that probably revolved around camera POV. (More spoilers for those who need to know.)

Horror films have been using first-person shots to ramp up the tension for decades, with 1978s Halloween springing to my mind from behind the mask of the young Michael Myers, as he commits the deed that gets him locked up. The strictly controlled vantage point and limited peripheral vision of first-person shots all contribute to a build up of fear, in much the same way as tight close-ups and darkness are used to stimulate your imagination about what you can’t see. The Blair Witch Project is arguably the most famous in the horror genre to use the POV of a video camera to the same effect, cutting down the field of vision of the naked eye and doing away with objective shots so that you identify more closely with the situation of the people being terrified. A number of films have used this device since the last millennium (or 1999) when Blair Witch was released, but few have decided to stick to it exclusively, with even 2002s My Little Eye avoiding the problems of exclusively subjective shots by having its action relayed via CCTV cams.
Cloverfield is the highest profile first-person horror since Blair Witch, and Rec was released within months of it, but both find it hard to get around the problems inherent in the device. Scream managed to successfully lampoon the horror film’s descent into genre rules whilst being a decent example in itself, but was filmed before the most recent addition to the list of ‘unrealistic behaviour in the horror genre’ was added to classics such as “let’s split up”: when you are experiencing something creepy, scary or even life threatening, don’t put down your camera as it’s obviously more important to document what’s happening than it is to escape with your life.
To be fair there would be no film where this not the case, but it is a problem that, for me at least, makes it harder to suspend belief and therefore enjoy the movie.
Whilst Cloverfield went the opposite direction to the Blair Witch in terms of scale and spectacle, Rec takes a much more low-key and credible direction, for the beginning at least.
The film follows a TV production crew of two, the presenter Angela and her camera-man Pablo, as they wander the streets at night, documenting the lives of those who work whilst we sleep. During a stint at a fire station, Angela gets her wish to liven up the show when an emergency call comes in and the crew accompanies some firemen to the scene.
Reports of screams from an old woman’s flat have led to the police to ask for the fire service’s help to break in – what they find is a crazy fat lady covered in blood, who shortly attacks and bites one of the police officers before things go to pot. The Police lock down the building and the residents of the apartment block, along with the remaining policeman, firemen and documentary duo find themselves subject to some sort of zombie/infection outbreak. Dead people walk and want to eat the living, and of course the ambitious Angela sees it as the story of the century rather than a nightmare situation, and Pablo doesn’t put down his bloody camera.
Rec doesn’t offer anything you haven’t seen in the multitude of living dead/28 x later offerings, as people carry on as if they’ve never seen such a film before. True, if it happened to us, you probably wouldn’t want to believe it either, but as soon as you did you might decide it was worth a try to start separating heads from bodies. Anyway, Rec ticks all of the boxes of the zombie/hand-held cam sub-genres, including the recent favourite pitch black/night vision scene that we have seen in 28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend and Cloverfield, but the tangent that Rec diverges into basically steals from the Exorcist, as it transpires that the zombie outbreak is due to an enzyme spread by a girl possessed by a demon in the attic.

So Rec is a right little vulture of a film, picking over the carcasses of horror gone before and putting together a Dr. Frankenstein creation of re-animated parts. That’s not to say it’s a bad film, it’s well made and features good performances, and the opening act is great, but there is nothing on offer that you haven’t seen an improved version of elsewhere.
What’s most surprising is not the magpie-like collection of other horror movie shiny things, but the fact that Hollywood has already lined up a English language remake. And not only have they lined up said remake whilst the corpse of Rec has yet to expel its last breath, but judging from the trailer it seems to be a shot-for-shot remake.
Check the trailer out yonder: http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony_pictures/quarantine/

The only feature that would prevent me from immediately dismissing Quarantine in its entirety is the fact that it features Jennifer Carpenter in the lead, who also assumes the role of Dexter’s sister in the TV series Dexter. So it can’t be all bad.

The code of Harry.

After I finished my GCSE’s, I went into the 6th form at my school to study A-Levels. This turned out to be a very bad idea, as I was so disinterested in learning anything there I could barely muster the motivation to turn up. After a couple of rubbish months, I reached an agreement with my parents that I would take the rest of the year off, applying to go and take A-levels at a college where there would be more subject choice and crucially, it wouldn’t be a school.
Both of them doubted I would go, thinking I would become too used to a life of leisure as a teen, spending all weekend with friends and watching films on the telly during the week, but I proved I was as good as my word and went.

In the interim though, I found myself with a lot of spare time, as all of my friends were occupied in the week, my money was very tight as a jobless sixteen-year old and there were only so many films shown on terrestrial TV each week worth watching.

I was ‘into’ music back then, and found the now defunct Select magazine a decent periodical to cater to my tastes. It wasn’t too concentrated on any particular style, but at the same time it deviated decisively from the mainstream, nominally dealing with ‘indie’ music when that could be a catch-all term for anything from Radiohead and Pulp to Roni Size and Belle and Sebastian. In those pre-internet days, I would often give a band a go solely on a decent write-up, and discovered a handful of little gems in that way.
Devouring each issue cover to cover, I inevitably came across the pen pal section and with all the time at my disposal, decided to have a go. After placing an ad in the mag, people wrote in response and Select forwarded them to you, so you could then decide who deserved a reply. Over the next five years or so, I kept in regular contact with as many as a dozen indie girls at once, girls mainly as I am a straight male and also because my male friends far outnumbered the female. As a male I frankly didn’t see the point in writing to someone else like me.

The letters were a great way of making friends, of connecting with people over vast distances who you would likely otherwise never meet, and getting to know them far better this way even if you had. I shared tales of teen hedonism, private worries and anguish, hopes and dreams and hazy rambles, I talked people through problems with relationships and family troubles, and shared a lot of my own baggage at the same time. I ended up having serious relationships with two of my penpals (though happily not at the same time) and even today I have a tenuous facebook-based friendship with a (non-ex) penpal, even after about thirteen years.
Writing letters was also an outlet for creativity, with only the limits of the imagination as a barrier to experimenting with decoration and calligraphy and any number of things to entertain both my friends and myself.

As people went off to uni and became more strapped for time, the letters gradually dried up on both sides, but rather than just a sign of a passing phase or the end of an old habit, it also came about at the time when the internet and mobile phones had just started to gain a serious hold on the UK consciousness, the first inklings of the massive part of our culture that electronic communications hold today.

Now that people are able to instantly exchange messages, post their thoughts, photos and videos for anyone to see and can access the internet from anywhere via their mobile and be in touch literally 24/7, the letter now seems a particularly outdated institution, reduced to situations where you might want some official statement or document ‘in writing’, with some physical evidence of its existence.
In these days of Myspace, Facebook, Youtube and indeed blogging, the era of the penpal would seem to be utterly extinct.

And I’m not sure how to feel about it. It can certainly be argued that it is easier to keep in touch with people, and that geographic location ceases to pose an obstacle. It is now fairly straightforward to locate people with similar interests as yourself, and the idea of meeting someone you ‘met on the net’ should feel no less daunting than the days when the entire foundation of a friendship was based on words on paper, but I can’t help feeling like there’s some sort of lack of quality now, an indefinable dumbing down or drop in standards. I’m painfully aware of how the idea all sounds so utterly Daily Mail ‘back to basics’, but I do feel that there was an effort involved in letter writing that is hard to recapture in e-communication, an anticipation in the wait for a reply that has vanished thanks to instant messaging, and some sort of personal, private openness that would be generated when writing one letter for one other person, when poring over what to say and how to say it, that has disappeared and been replaced by e-mail dialogues and monologue blogs that do not become adequate stand-ins for that peculiar calculated to-and-fro that came from letters.

I guess it’s something you can’t help doing as you get older, looking back at how things were and feeling that they were better then.
But then back when I started writing to penpals, we had no South Park. So you can see how I also think some things are much better now.

-

After a good start, season 12 of South Park brought us Major Boobage, an episode that covered urban myths about homemade highs whilst heavily referencing the animated film Heavy Metal, and its predilection for top-heavy ladies. These sequences aren’t much more fun than the dull source material, but the episode scores huge points for the new way to get high at home.


Then episode 4, Canada on Strike! came with ups and downs. Revisiting Stone and Parker’s alternate vision of Canada as a country of flapping-head people who burst into song, it twins a nice idea of Canada striking and no-one caring with a swipe at the cult of internet and particularly Youtube celebrity, ultimately featuring a showdown between some such ‘stars’. Unfortunately your enjoyment will be directly related to whether or not you’ve seen the referenced clips, and a joke in the Canada scenes is repeated far too often, although does pay off a little at the end. Thankfully there is gold in the music video the kids make of Butters to put on Youtube and make “some of that internet money”. “What what in my butt” indeed.



I’m hoping that episode 5 will see the season hit the high notes, and the set up sounds promising as it involves Ms. Garrison deciding she wants to be a man again, and everyone in charge at the school seemingly forgetting what Eric Cartman is like and putting him charge of the class. Seeing as season 12 started with Cartman giving Kyle AIDS, fuck knows where this one is going to go.

How come you and mom don’t sleep in the same bed anymore?

Two hours and three minutes into David Fincher’s ‘Zodiac’, the son of Jake Gyllenhal’s character, Robert Graysmith, asks him that very same question.
The story of an obsessed man letting his relationships with his partner and family slide is a familiar one in cinema.
Broken relationships became more prominent in film as they did in life, with Kramer vs. Kramer perhaps being the most prominent in the 70s as the event of divorce was on the rise.

The subject has always been one of the cornerstones for the conservative argument that society's morals and values are in decline, whereas in reality the means of obtaining divorce have become easier. The likelihood is that the instances of divorce as a proportion of marriages has risen over time chiefly because the law has changed and become more lenient, particularly towards women in terms of assets and custody of any children. Alongside this, the social stigma on unmarried couples has lessened over the decades meaning that it is hard to gain statistics on those who live together as husband and wife and whether they later split up.

Whether divorced parents are worse for a child than parents who remain together unhappily is much harder to measure than raw divorce statistics, and arguably it’s one of the key issues related to the argument for moral decline. Various statistics are flung about related to the proportion of children with lone parents getting involved with crime, but these figures are often taken out of context without looking at the social background involved – the proportion of middle class children with lone parents turning to crime could well paint a different picture.

My parents never married, so yes I’m a bastard, but they still split up. As is usual in these situations it wasn’t a solution that was reached quickly and rationally, instead being preceded by years of arguments that led to a number of evenings when I would sit near the door of my bedroom, wondering what was going to happen.
I’ve never been a very sociable kind of person, even within my own family, so most of what I know happened comes from my own experience – my dad was becoming more and more of a drunk, obviously making my mum unhappy up until the point where she threw him out. He lived in his car for a while, definitely months and possibly over a year, but eventually he got it together and bought a flat a few minutes away from us. Shortly afterwards I went to live with him, leaving my younger brothers and sister back at the old flat with mum as it was too small for us all. I lived with my dad there from thirteen to nineteen, going back to my mums virtually every evening to have dinner with her and the kids. My youngest brother and sister would often come over to stay on weekends, but dad was still drinking and only drank more as time went on, eventually kicking me out of the flat a couple of months before I turned nineteen. Thankfully I had got into university by that point, though, so after a few months sleeping on the front-room floor of my old home I went and lived in halls.

It was hardly the worst of experiences as I was never beaten or abused, but with separated parents living so close and yet rarely communicating I became the go-between as I would literally go between the two homes, having to occasionally absorb the bile that either parent held for the other.
Ever since then the most important thing to me has been security, a home with a sense of permanence, and perhaps this has led to my low ambition as all I’ve really wanted is somewhere I’m happy to return to every day.

Apart from the line in Zodiac the reason this has all come back to me is the flat I am in now. Besides the insecurity and anxiety I get from living somewhere impermanent, a place I know that I will soon move from for the reasons I’ve mentioned before, there are the neighbours.
Among the list of inconveniences that come free of charge with this flat – the floor so uneven that I prop the fridge with a piece of wood to stop the freezer unit frosting up in one corner; the leaky cistern; the badly wired cooker – are the noisy neighbours. With two young kids the family upstairs really can’t help being noisy, especially in a building as rickety as this. Judging from my own floorboards I’m sure that I would drive people downstairs mad, if it weren’t an empty shop. However, it’s not really the kids that get to me as they find new and exciting games that seem to involve dropping weights many times their own size from a considerable height and such. It’s the parents.
On a fairly regular basis they have a screaming match with each other, loud enough to make out every single word they say meaning that their kids can too. Except that unlike their kids, I’m not fluent in French (the family is Algerian). It makes me wonder what’s best for them – do they sit in their room in the dark at night, frightened as their parents scream, or have they become accustomed to it now, developing coping mechanisms like the bright-eyed little girls on a recent channel 4 documentary about the state of Iraq, who described how men came in to their home and shot their father in his stomach.
Would they be happier if their dad wasn’t around? It has to be said that each situation is different - I have good memories of my dad when I was little, of going for a walk to the shops at night and going on holiday around England and Wales, but the drink took that all away, or rather his weakness for it and unwillingness to stop. As it’s French for all I know they could be arguing about who loves each other most.
Probably not.

There aren’t any answers here and I don’t have any special insight, but two of my friends have got married and had kids in the last couple of years, so I not only hope that they become part of the statistics of those that don’t get divorced, but also that they never want to.
Love and luck to both those new families.

-

Thankfully season 12 of South Park has started well with ‘Tonsil Trouble’, infecting Cartman with HIV, but it has really taken off with episode 2, ‘Britney’s New Look’, mixing commentary on the cult of celebrity and the menace of paparrazi with Omen and Invasion of the Body Snatchers references. This season has a lack of concurrent sub-plots so far, but in episode 2 there is repeat mention of Butters dressed as a squirrel.
Sweet.

Euthanasia, The Last Starfighter, Monty Python and the Sony PSP

It's getting on for nearly three months since I last posted here, or blogged as is the parlance of our times.
It's a keen indication of the state of my self-discipline; if I get out of the habit of doing something I find it hard to get back into it. Thus I go through phases of watching DVDs, socialising and writing. For example I had a review copy of Exiled, the Johnny To Hong Kong action/arthouse flick, since late 2007, and had already seen it in the cinema, but as many familiar with writing will recognise it's often hardest to get started. Once I finally persuaded myself to knuckle down, I enjoyed it as I always do, and immediately afterward I watched a Japanese horror flick that was gathering dust in my collection and promptly reviewed that too (Exiled link to the right with the others, Premonition will be up in the coming weeks for the benefit of those few who would ever come back after getting this far).

It wasn't just sloth or a vague reluctance induced by fear of failure that curtailed the blogging habit (which was hardly prolific in the first place). In January and continuing on into February, I found myself incubating a lovely strain of the flu which I suffered with for no more than a week, but which led to a lengthy recovery period in which I didn't feel like much of anything. During the Fun Flu Week 2008 I found myself subject to a hair-trigger cough which would induce fits of hacking at the slightest movement and which were impossible to halt at will. I have had the flu (as opposed to a bad cold) once before, and whilst I remembered the woozy, dizzy and weak status that the condition provided me with, the coughing was new and I was mostly surprised that it didn't rend my throat into shreds. As the worst of it passed and I started to slowly get back to normal, I realised that the superhuman coughing efforts had had some sort of effect on the muscles in my torso, resulting in the feeling that I had recently been beaten by a small group of people wielding bats, unless I didn't move or breathe too hard. For a few weeks afterward I was barely able to keep up a brisk shuffle, and I found myself reminded of old age and the fact that, yet again, I shouldn't take my health for granted but instead be grateful for every day that passes where I can see, hear and walk up the road with little difficulty.

Having worked in the retail industry for over a decade, I am painfully aware of some of the more astoundingly petty little grievances that people hold and are unable to put into perspective, so I feel that I always start out with an advantage in terms of optimism over the next man-on-the-street. It's for this reason that I am logically, rather than reactively looking to move out of my flat, photos of which long-time readers will remember me posting at the tail end of last summer. It's not because of the guts of the bath being permanently on display as the landlord hasn't had it fixed. It's not because the toilet cistern leaks or because the upstairs neighbours have noisy kids or because I had to keep taking days off work to let engineers in to look at the washing machine that was meant to have been fixed before I moved in (5 visits and still broken). No, these are little problems that I could easily live with and ultimately do not really cause me any pain or much inconvenience. The problem is that the windows are so badly fitted that when it is windy, the frames emit the sound of an elephant playing a harmonica, loud enough to interrupt anything you may choose to do, including sleep. As having the windows re-fitted would be two tasks, firstly getting the landlord to do it in the first place and secondly having to put up with the sodding building work involved, I'm not exactly mad about the idea. The only alternative is to open the window, which stops the elephant but unfortunately reminds you how noisy it is with the window open.
Ah well, all it means is the inconvenience of packing up, moving on and doing all the admin involved in moving house, daunting from this end but it will all be over a couple of weeks afterwards. Plus, the handy bonus and raise that I recently got a work will make it that much easier to find the next flat.
Which is nice.

Minor inconveniences no.279367: seemingly having no hash key on this bastard ibook.
Minor inconveniences no.283749: having my rechargeable hair clippers run out mid-shave, and realising it doesn't function whilst plugged in.



I'm still having trouble understanding how South Park Season 5 came out on DVD in the UK a few months ago, passing effortlessly under my radar, and no-one thought to inform me.
I have been a South Park fan since the first few episodes, after I realised there was more to it than the gimmicky adverts which ran hourly on Channel 4 for a few weeks before the first screening. I was working at the Bond St. HMV before it moved to the other side of Oxford St. back then, or at least it hit UK TV soon afterwards which would put it at around 1998.
I followed it regularly and bought the series once they were available on DVD, but for some reason they mysteriously stopped at Season 4. The release date came and went for Season 5, and Season 6 didn't air in the UK. Luckily, I first got myself the internet in 2001 so I was able to find episodes that some kind Americans had captured and released on the net, and it was at this point that I became a Big Fan, when they began mixing the skewed humour with detailed pop-culture references and political commentary. It was possible to 'get' the episodes on a number of different levels which made for a satisfying as well as sometimes laugh-out-loud hilarious watch.
The Season 6 episode 'Scott Tenorman must die' became the highlight for me, and began a golden run which remained unbroken for at least three seasons, with only blips in those to follow.
Season 12 has started over in the US, and I am looking forward to some more classics akin to the clash between Heaven and the forces of evil (Best Friends Forever), or the time when the boys tried to send a Killer Whale (Free Willzyx) into space.
But I didn't know Season 5 had been released, and worse still Season 6 came out on Monday, but i can't afford either until I am paid next week.
This is worse than not being able to sleep when it's windy.

Thanks for those of you who read to the end. In case you're wondering, I got out of the habit of socialising about three or four years ago, and I've yet to get back into it.
I blame Davey for coming down to London and stealing all my charm.

Yes I could have bought the region 1 DVDs of South Park which have been available for maybe two years now, but I had an irrational fear of my ancient DVD player packing up and not being able to find a decent multi-region player to watch my beloved South Park with. We can't be rational all the time.

And when he found that right box in the attic, he saw that Ted had been devoured by moths.

A New Year means a new season on Japanese TV, and with that comes a new set of anime series.


Armored Trooper Votoms: Pailsen Files is something of a sequel to a remake.
Set in a future where interplanetary colonial wars are waged with the use of slow, stubby mechs, the series kicked off with it’s own take on the Normandy landing. Away from the action, there is some sort of guff going on about secretly trained super-soldiers that may be key to ending the hundred year’s war, but there’s absolutely nothing on offer thus far to stand Pailsen Files out from the overpopulated mech war crowd.
With such ineffectual machines, it’s hard to work out how war in this fictional universe developed into using resource hungry combat suits – it seems to make far more sense to have standard human infantry, but I suppose there could have been a sort of armoured suit arms race – you can’t send soldiers into battle against walking tanks unless they have their own.
It is also saddled with a horrible 80s rock style opening theme.
In a word, so far this show is drab.


Kaiketsu Zorori is about a travelling fox named Zorori who is training to be the master of mischief. With its animal characters, bright, primary colours and loud, clear voice-artist delivery, this show is squarely aimed at the younger audience. In the first episode hour anti-hero meets up with two boar brothers who decide to become his pupils, and sets about a scheme to try and disrupt the marriage of a prince and princess and take her for himself, using a robot dragon, a giant rice cake and lots of slapstick. The art style is reminiscent of 80s classics like Dogtanian and Willy Fogg, but without the nostalgia to back it up this will only really appeal to the target audience of school children.


H20 – Footprints in the Sand is one of many shows about a boy who transfers to a school in the countryside that has lots of girl students. What differs in H20 is that the school, despite serving a village, is a large Victorian mansion style building, and the boy, Hirose Takuma, is blind.
This gives the show an excuse to serve up the bawdy humour common to the genre, with Hirose accidentally touching one girl’s chest and lifting the skirt of another with his white stick.
The harem in this version of the ‘harem comedy’ consists of a clumsy girl, a crazy girl who thinks she’s a spirit, an arrogant girl who has a little gang and the serious girl whom she bullies.
There’s some reason hinted at as to why the serious girl, Hayami, is being bullied, and by the end of the first episode the girl who thinks she’s a spirit, Otoha, visits Hirose in his dreams and temporarily gives him sight.
At this point things could go either way, as all the ingredients are there for another generic harem comedy, but there are seeds which have the potential to develop into something more.


Rosario + Vampire starts as it means to go on, with a schoolgirl riding her bike amongst the cherry blossom, until her skirt catches the wind and you see her knickers.
Aono Tsukune is a 15 year-old high school student. His grades are bad, but his dad finds an entry form to the Youkai academy dropped by a priest, meaning Aono now doesn’t have to repeat the year. On his journey to the school he receives warnings that it’s a terrible place, but when he is bumped into by Akashiya Moka on her bike he forgets all this, as she’s very cute. She also claims to be a vampire.
It turns out that the academy is a school for monsters and that any humans found will be killed on the spot. The monsters are meant to keep to human form and not reveal what kind of demon they are, but it’s still enough to freak Aono out. He tries to flee and is pursued by Akashiya as he’s her first friend, but finds that there are only buses out every month. They also fight an orc along the way who wants Akashiya for himself, but her true vampire form is too powerful, despite only seeming to amount to her hair going white, her face a bit meaner and her boobs swelling against her top.
The show could have made something of the fish out of water scenario, and had the potential for some interesting artwork with such a rich history of Japanese demon folklore, but as evidenced by the poor design of the hulking orc and the dozens of panty shots in the first episode, it’s highly unlikely that Rosario + Vampire will be looking to break the mould.
There are already many better ‘boy meets strange girl’ shows out there so unless you’re a huge fan of anime panties there’s little reason to seek this out.

All in all 2008 has not started off as a good year with which to persuade doubters that anime isn’t all the equivalent of Hollyoaks –predictable, vapid, bland and stuffed with crass titillation.

Thankfully my latest review, of '15' from Singapore, is up over at www.hkcinema.co.uk, there be links on your right.

Happy New Year!

Bullfighting with Bardot

I always new that I'd be robbed one day.

By my late teens, practically all of my school friends had been mugged at some point.
For the most part, nothing was hurt but their pride, giving in to the threats of the bigger, usually older boys that often outnumbered them, but one guy did come in to college one morning with bad grazes up his face after being tackled to the ground in Harlesden.
As the years went by and I met no challenges, I often wondered why I managed to avoid being a victim too.
Did I have some keen street smarts that I wasn't myself aware of? Did my protruding brow and natural composure of dissatisfaction combine to create the impression of a man with slight build with whom you do not want to mess?

Of course I have no idea, and rare was the occasion when I did not consider an attack whilst out and about alone a real possibility. What would I do? Was there somewhere to run; would I fight back; how many would be too many; would I still resist against a knife; where were the makeshift weapons on my journey - the loose bricks, empty bottles etc.
It wasn't so pervasive that I'd call it an obsession, more it was a consideration, one of the many things you think about in the periphery of your consciousness when walking, like checking the road for traffic or glancing at the pavement for dog shit.
Perhaps this perpetual state of awareness helped me avoid trouble?

Then at the end of November the phone rang when I was about to leave for work. As I never get calls in the morning, I thought it may be important, so I picked up to hear a robot voice identify itself with my bank. I proceeded to ask me for security info, and as it wanted nothing too detailed I went along with it. It was when it asked about my recent transactions that a chill ran up my spine. Money out from a machine at the weekend? Yes. Online council tax payment the day before? Fine. 250 Euros withdrawn in Sicily that morning? Fuck!
I got put through to a human who proceeded to go over the details for me. Card stopped, replacement sent recorded delivery. But I won't be home, can they send it to a branch? It takes longer and they'll leave a note so I can pick it up. What about the PIN? I can use the old one as the thieves won't have the new card details. Their fraud division will be in touch about refunding the total stolen £360.
So the card didn't arrive, nor a note to say someone had been round, and a week on I rang them up - it had been dispatched that day so they canceled it and sent a new one, this time to the branch near my work. Three days later I get a letter from a courier company, saying they tried to deliver a card when I was out. It took ten days to tell me this, cunts. A further three days and my card has turned up at the bank - I can use my PIN, right? No, it's been changed. Great. Another five days or so before that turns up at the flat, the morning I am due to leave to see the family for Christmas.
The money was refunded surprisingly quickly, within two weeks of being robbed, but I was left with no access to my cash without going to a bank with a passport and all kinds, and not enough in there to get the presents I wanted to get for my love ones. Because of some virtua-mugging cunt.

It's unlikely I'll ever meet the people that robbed me, and if I did I wouldn't know it, but there were two films released this year that give you an idea as to what I'd like to do:




Have a happy new year!

Desperate ventilation

It's odd to think that I've been a pretty solid internet user for the past six years.
Whilst many battles are waged about what the internet is and what it means, from my own perspective I have to admit that it has made a huge impact on my life.
The ease with which you can procure information made me interested again. That inquisitive spark that led me into the philosphy degree that I gave up on after a combination of death and finding out that it was little more than a specified history course, was lit again and I did more writing and research in a few months than I ever did in three years at university.
I even wrote an article/essay examining the impact of allied bombing campaigns on immigration levels, just for fun.
Ah, those heady days.
Then there were the virtual communities, the coming together of like-minded (but sometimes polar-opposite) peoples under assumed names, to debate the political issues of the day or compare pop culture, usually with copious amounts of arguing.

Nowadays it's mostly swift raids into the web, seeking out a hit of entertainment here, some information about cinema times or where to find cheap games there, but mainly, the internet got me writing, so much so that it feels like it's something I should have always been doing, but somehow got lost along the way. First about politics, then about films as I became disillusioned and stopped trying to keep up.

This blog is a continuation of this trend, an outlet to wax lyrical about whichever topic gains my fancy, whether read or not as I mostly write for my own enjoyment - barely a handful of people are ever likely to read this, after all.

Still, this post isn't really about the internet itself, or what it has done for/to me. Instead, it's an opportunity to link to this video, a great example of what the combination of virtual community and creativity can bring. Every few seconds brings some new idea or great image, and the tune is, for me at least, the kind that stands infinite repeat listens. Every time I come across it I end up watching the whole way through so it's odd I've not thought to seek it on YouTube before.

Enjoy.

Kerry's animal tincture

I have seen lots of films, and I have written about some of them. For some reason I enjoy it, and it makes me feel productive.
I am clearly deluded.

Death Proof:
I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this. After the enjoyable mess of Kill Bill I wasn't expecting a lot from a film that further celebrates the B-pictures that Tarantino clearly genuinely loves, but everything from the sleazy, characters of the first half and it's downgraded, frame- skipping treatment, to the great performances from Russel and the sassy, engaging posse from the second half lends Death Proof a sheen of quality. It revels in its low-rent ancestors but holds together a narrative far more successfully than Kill Bill did, making me wonder what could have been added to the movie post Grindhouse split. All the typical Tarantino tics are there, from the feet to the self-conscious witty dialogue to the visceral action, but there is something more satisfying there this time, perhaps being a benfeit from not having the timeline-jumping tricks of most of Quentin's other pictures.
It's still not as good as he's capable of, but in Death Proof as with Jackie Brown, Tarantino has made a film that shows as much admiration as fanatic adoration for its flea-pit origins.
True, there are a lot of holes to be picked, but this time around they're not so important.

Ploy:
Ploy is very laid-back.
It's evocative of both the odd, slowed-time feeling of waiting with the three main characters all in-between two points, killing time at a hotel, a classic setting for transition, and the dream state that they are all in as they potter about, snatching a few winks of broken sleep.
The dream sequences stand out as more conventional narratives, and all have a stark quality where you often aren't sure of whether the scene is 'really' happening.
Some of the ideas about love and relationships struck a chord with me, and it felt odd that this indie Thai movie should be so astute in its observations, with no cultural difference in these feelings.
It's undoubtedly a slow film, and I know if I'd not slept enough that week I'd have difficuty concentrating, but in the right frame of mind this is a great film.
You probably already know if you enjoy films that are slow and langorious, taking their time to explore ideas and characters, or whether you prefer films that concentrate on the narrative thrust and advancing the plot.
So you probably already know if you'll enjoy Ploy.

Glory to the Filmmaker!:

I've not yet seen 'Takeshis' and know that this draws a lot from it, but for me this reminds me a lot of 'Getting Any?' - essentially a sketch-based comedy movie, with its absurd situations, deadpan characters and broad humour.
Some of 'Glory...' is amusing, particularly the early scenes where we are treated to a series of sketches based on an alternate reality of Kitano's directorial career as he tries to make successful films, trying out different genres and taking the piss out of the road he has taken so far. It does degenerate toward the end as the film concentrates on one scenario and the gags slow down, but it isn't a bad film, even if it is probably Kitano's worst so far.
It's still interesting to get an insight into what he thinks of himself, and have a movie that pretty much explains the reason for its existence.
Looking at the vast range of outlets for creativity that he's been using for decades, it's less surprising that he has decided to direct something way out line with the usual features for which he has become known, and he no doubt knows that a large part of his audience probably would be happy with another Hana-Bi, or even Violent Cop. 'Glory...' feels like he has decided to film his own search for a project, trying to avoid retreading old ground but unsure of where he should go next. It makes for an interesting film, but unfortunately not quite as enjoyable as the narrative films he's made so far.

No Mercy for the Rude:

Like the best in recent Korean cinema, No Mercy for the Rude flits between genres, successfully mixing slapstick humour and taut, serious drama in a film which is more than just a spoof of the 'cool assassin' sub-genre.
It borrows numerous features from other films, the muteness of the protagonist and surrogate family remind me of Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, whilst the sharp contrast between genres that somehow still seem to mesh evokes The Host. The detail of the characters who seem simultaneously exaggerated and authentic, and the settings that are both humdrum and distinct at the same time add up to a finely crafted feature that demonstrates that South Korean cinema is still on a roll, more than ten years on.

Ocean's 13:

Ocean's 13 is weird.
After the exercise in plot periphery that was 12, 13 is all about the heist. From start to finish it is non-stop planning and set-up and damage control, but this time you have something to root for as it's a revenge job.
I'd avoided anything about this before seeing it and so came in fresh, wondering how they could successfully engineer a situation in which all these millionaires would meet up again to risk it all - ah. Nice one.
Very enjoyable, but less depth somehow. Still a lot more impressive than a squillion similar hollywood flicks, and that score is fantastic. Holmes again managing somehow to bring something classy, timeless and inobtrusive yet definitely an essential part.

Ocean's 12:

It's a bit strange how Soderbergh managed to slip this through Hollywood, even with the name stars and the success of the first. Here it's not about the heist at all, it's all about the characters, about quirks, thier interaction. It's a film about moments, and it's really verging on the sublime. I can see why this has had such mixed reviews - from the perspective of the 'more of the same' sequel, this is rubbish, and more like a compilation of deleted scenes, the great little moments that the director loves but had to cut for time and pacing.
Someone else gave it half a star with this little number: "It's like some sort of hellish indie movie the rest of the time"
That's exactly what it is, with some little heist moments tacked on.
Your opinion is really going to revolve around what you expect before you see it.

Time of the Wolf:

There is no redemption and there are no heroes.

Haneke seems to really hate people. It's hard to imagine actually enjoying his films, as good as they are, and time and again it feels like an endurance test that you are compelled to take.
For me, he's always seemed like the classy older brother to Gaspar Noe, less bravado and far more chilling.
The end of the world is nasty and grubby, nothing is explained but it's horribly believable. It makes every other post-apocalyptic film seem like the work of adolescents, but it's hard to recommend a vision so bleak.
Not the best of Haneke's films, but it certainly fits in with the tone that has cut through the Piano Teacher, Funny Games and Hidden like a dull razor.

Conversations With Other Women:

For a film which concentrates largely on just two actors, it's important to get good performances. Luckily, Bonham-Carter and Eckhart are effortless in this tale of lost love. It treats the subjects of infidelity and the motivations behind the actions - the doomed attempt to rekindle the flame, the mixed yearnings - with reverance and skill. There are no easy answers or happy endings, but maybe there don't need to be. Afterwards it's the people I remember and not how it was shot, so the style is perhaps a way to distinguish it from the feeling of a play where this story would easily be at home?
Good.


I also saw The Marine recently, a cliched action vehicle for a WWE man whose name I forget. It is stunningly bland, with little to distinguish it from a bajillion other knucklehead fighty/shooty B-pics of the type that usually go straight-to-retail/rental hell. It's only Robert Patrick's turn as the slightly surreal bad guy that gives this a flicker of substance. It is also quite amusing to watch the star fly into the air in front of explosions in the same way, three times in a row.
Alongside the likes of Crank, this fares little better than that advert where the kid is hit by a car before he becomes a film star.


And for my return to DVD reviews, I have covered the Optimum release of Election 2, which isn't a sequel to Reese Witherspoon's excellent high-school film.
Link to the right!

The New Milk

I could never be confused as a man’s man.
I was relatively short until my mid teens, and even as an adult I have small hands and feet and a slight build. I had a squeamishness of dirt and muck when I was young, a fact often pointed out by my family when I visited my great Gran’s farm, and I’ve never been interested in sports or cars. I’ve only been in one real fight, and that was with my dad, but he was pretty drunk so I don’t think it counts.
I also had little time for beer, as growing up I saw booze solely as a vehicle to drunkenness, and therefore was not interested in the taste of the liquids in question, especially when they tasted of stale dog’s piss. Luckily, my teenhood coincided with the great British introduction of the alcopop, allowing me to sup a tipple without resorting to spirits and mixers, seeing as spirits are absolutely vile and taste like the poison they are. To this day I don’t see the attraction of any alcoholic drink as a drink in and of itself, devoid of the inebriating affects, and I can’t help but believe that teenage boy after teenage boy inures himself to the foul taste of beer and lager as part initiation rite, part peer pressure and part machismo posturing. Thousands upon thousands of men will argue that they enjoy a beer for the drink itself, vast industries and even festivals are devoted to beer as if to underline the legitimacy of the beverage, but how do you argue that you are excluded from social conditioning? “Oh not me, I actually like the taste”.
Even wine, some variations of which could realistically be described as potable, has embedded itself within a vast web of self-conscious maturity, as so-called connoisseurs whip up in a frenzy about the myriad tastes and textures for what is a drunkenness tool. Sure, you may prefer a certain flavour to convey you to the point of pissed, but that’s all it is.

I am probably coming at this with a skewed vision however, as I don’t see the fuss in food and drink and don’t get excited by it. Of course I prefer some tastes to others, but given the choice I could do without the bother of eating. Most of the time it’s a chore that I have to get through in order to continue functioning, and I often put off meals until later because I can’t be bothered with the preparation.
At times I feel like an atheist in a world of believers – I don’t really believe in food.

But that’s another topic for another day.

Ironically enough this topic came up thanks to a flavour that I do enjoy.
I posted last year about the limited edition diet Vanilla Coke, lamenting its demise, when recently I came across a vanilla flavoured Absolut vodka. Of course I have known about flavoured vodkas for years, but as they do not tend to be stocked down the local supermarket, and I haven’t been as interested in drunkenness for some years, I never sought out such a thing before.
I happened upon the stuff while looking for something else, and decided it might be a decent substitute when mixed with diet Coke, with the added value of tipsiness. At this point I had already been on the hunt for cream soda, and specifically a diet variant, to fill my vanilla coke hole, but I had been stumped at every newsagent and supermarket until I came across Sainsbury’s own brand stuff.
Not a match on what I wanted, but it was close enough to bring the memories a touch more vividly to the surface.
Needless to say I set about my Absolut/Coke mixing with some mild excitement, and this is what happened.



Here are the ingredients with which I hope to resurrect the soul of Vanilla Coke, even if it is a shambling, undead version of the glory it once was.

Diet Coke you know, the non-sugar variant of the world’s most widely known beverage after water, and a poster-boy for global capitalism.



The Diet Cream Soda is a Sainsbury’s own brand, and purports to have ‘only natural flavours’, self-consciously jumpiing on the current organic/carbon neutral etc. band wagon. As I’ve said it’s been hard enough to find any Cream Soda, let a lone a diet variety, so it really has no competition in my search for sugar-free vanilla-pop.



Absolut Vanilla is Absolut vodka, with vanilla in it, and neat it’s probably the only spirit I can keep down, but still not an experience I’d enjoy repeating. There’s something perversely enjoyable in the feeling of spirits burning the throat, but being no fan of vomiting I don’t want to take the risk.



First up: Absolut Vanilla with Diet Coke.

This is a hard one, as I don’t want to use too much vodka. True, I’m a wuss, but also too much vodka will make the mix too alcoholic and therefore ruin the desired affect. As it is, even with this small measure of vodka, the taste is evident in amongst the coke, and the vanilla flavour is perhaps too natural, too sweet, to bring back the memories. It reminds me more of vanilla ice cream than vanilla coke, but even then the vanilla taste is still sweeter than a coke float – perhaps because there is less dilution?
Not what I was after, then, but nevertheless an effective way of getting vodka down you very, very quickly.



Second up: Diet Coke and diet cream soda.

As neither of these is likely to be dominant, I feel it’s safe to go for a 50/50 mix as we want both flavours present.
Unfortunately, this tastes just like the Absolut and coke, only without any alcoholic kick. The sweetness is a little softer, but it’s still far from whichever dark chemical the Coca-cola company saw fit to brew up. It probably doesn’t help that I already feel a little tipsy from my one drink, I could probably be out-drunk by 12 year olds at this point.
But no, the cream soda taste is fairly strong and is clearly eclipsing the coke, and yet if I balanced the mixture in the coke’s favour then I risk dwindling the vanilla input, which defeats the whole purpose of this jaunt.



Third and final: Coke overcomes the cream.

A mix more in favour of coke may help, but I didn’t hold out much hope. And actually, it’s just weak, a dilution of each half, this is the worst of both worlds.

Bastard.
For the moment I’ll just have to hope that Coke get bored with their orange variant and bring back the vanilla to its needy public.

And now you can see that, rather than living alone in order to avoid other people, it is more my selfless gift to everyone.

Here’s a Kids in the Hall sketch that I think is relevant at this juncture. Despite tonnes of KITH clips on the ubiquitous Youtube this particular one has been pulled by The Man, so it has to be a link rather than an embed, I’m sorry to say. Clicky!

Girl drink drunk

Eyes that turned my very core to dust

It's been a long while since I posted, a long time to get out of the habit of blogging and writing reviews.

I hadn't realised, not having moved house in nearly ten years, just how time-consuming it would all become, with a solid week of packing before informing the various services and institutions, and then the age-old tradition of negotiating the archetypal hands-off landlord when trying to address a dozen and one domestic complaints.
Suffice to say, I do not take hot water for granted, the easy transportation and convection of this most necessary of liquids is a daily wonder, a luxury to be cherished.

But this a mere blip, a hiatus if you will, for I am back in the game and may yet write something almost witty.

Having said that, Halo 3 finally comes out tomorrow...

My fine lines and dark circles are more prominent

E3 (which I believe stands for Electronic Entertainment Expo) has been the games industry's chest-thumping bandstand for years now, as console manufacturers, publishers and developers all vie for the attention of millions of gamers and their billions of moneys. Often acting as a showcase for the forthcoming games of the Christmas run-up and following year, the E3 ballooned into a braying behemoth, with a swollen attendance level and ever-expanding budget for those behind the the scenes.
After last year's zenith, a number of gaming's big hitters realised that the cash squandered on promotional activities looked set to eclipse any return on investment, especially as game development budgets spiral and margins shrink. They decided that E3 '07 would be a much more modest affair, paring things down to the bone and cutting down the bombast and 'booth babes' in favour of the event's real focus - the games.
Many a net pundit worried about an empty space in the calendar, a dearth of juicy games news that would hopefully be picked up by other international events, but it seems the big three players have merely taken advantage of the current techno climate. With the three home consoles all offering some sort of downloadable content facilities or net access, why fork out for a thumb-fun festival when you can just beam the teaser trailers direct to your potential customers?

Those worried by the E3 shrink should now be fully satiated by the eager ejaculation of electronic elucidations.
The internets are positively plastered with up-to-the-minute soundbites, screenshots and trailers, and indeed it is these trailers that explain the ease with which Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft stepped back from the merry-go-round. Short of demos released for each and every title, the trailer is the best way to give you an idea of what a game may be capable of, carefully edited to get you salivating for more content and the impending release.

There is a lot of promise on the horizon, and a lot of potential for all three parties, but there really is only one game that I am interested in:



Halo 3 got me to buy a 360 recently, picking a machine up when I saw one cheap enough in time for the September release.
Halo got me to buy the original Xbox, despite having played through the game from start to finish on friend's machines.
Halo 2 got me to stay online, shooting at shrill-voiced American teens as the adrenalin coursed through my system and I played into the small hours, feeding off that twitch-game hunger for 'just one more go'.
Despite the repetitive latter act of Halo, the mindless (though fitting) rush of the flood when compared to the cunning of the Covenant and the endurance-testing grind of the Library, Halo has won a place in my all-time top games.
The kind of game you can come back to years later, I have played through some levels of Halo dozens upon dozens of times, with fun melee runs on easy modes and a hard-fought battle against overwhelming odds on Legendary, the enemy AI and precision aiming of pistol fire and grenade lobs still ranks amongst some of the best in the First Person Shooter genre.
Even the cheap-shock non-ending of Halo 2 didn't taint my affection for the series, as I returned again to replay choice sections and try and find those bastard secret skulls.
Alongside the sublime coding, the Halo storyline has a lot of background depth, even if it does sometimes manifest in the trite (the main character Master Chief, is named John 113, which is also a bible reference...). Usual space marine grunt frag-fests barely make an attempt at a coherent storyline, but the portrayal of the alien Covenant's systematic, faith-fuelled eradication of mankind enjoys a substantial background beyond the games, and makes for a passable sci-fi tale (as evidenced in the tie-in novels by Eric Nylund and Wiiliam C. Dietz, The Fall of Reach, The Flood and First Strike. The first and last are pretty good, freed as they are by not being tied in by the in-game plot, but I have not yet read the newest Halo universe book, Ghosts of Onyx).

I have been looking forward to Halo 3 since the second I finished the second game, and despite the possibility for more big flaws as found in the previous instalments, and the surrounding cash-in circus that includes wallets and bags, the Real Time Strategy game Halo Wars, and not one but two different special editions of the game itself (the turbo-bastard edition of which I pre-ordered weeks ago), I don't doubt that I will be hugely satisfied and probably surprised when it finally finds its way into my disc-tray.

I am sold, hook, line and sinker.

The only other E3 tidbit to excite me was the news that Bungie's (for they are the developer of Halo) precursor to Halo, Marathon, is coming to Xbox Live Arcade in a natty enhanced mode. I have been aching to play this since I first heard of it (you can see the historical reference in the title, that Halo later shared with it's use of the Spartan codename for the enhanced soldier you play, and the Mjolnir codename for his armour...more in depth examination of the background to Halo can be found at this excellent site, as well as links to fan art, stories, videos and untold amounts of crap - http://nikon.bungie.org/)

spider spider burning bright

Combien coûte ce chien dans la fenêtre? Celui avec la queue de remuement.

Stuart Harling, currently being tried for the brutal murder of the nurse Cheryl Moss in April last year, is one of the latest figureheads of the unquestioned demonisation of video gaming in the media.
“… the defendant was a "loner and fantasist" who spent much of his time playing computer games and surfing the internet to fuel his interest in serial killers, knives, racism and pornography.”

One year later on the other side of the Atlantic, the murder of 32 people at Virginia Tech University by Cho Seung-hui was blamed on the influence of video games. In this particular case the hugely popular online shooter Counter Strike took the flak, largely thanks to the disturbingly swift cod-punditry by the infamous Jack Thompson. The well-known US anti-games campaigner once again lost no opportunity to bend a tragedy to his motives, flying in the face of a total lack of evidence: Click

The urge to jump to conclusions and strike out at the nearest scapegoat is familiar, and echoes the media coverage in 2004 after the murder of Stefan Pakeerah by Warren Leblanc in a Leicester Park. In this case it was the turn of Manhunt, an undoubtedly violent game by the developers of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, Rockstar. Stefan’s mother, Giselle, called for a ban on violent games as she saw Warren’s alleged obsession with the game as a core factor to his actions, despite the fact that the police discounted this possibility based on the fact that the murder was motivated by robbery:
which is more likely?
This didn’t stop several retailers withdrawing the game from sale in a bid to avoid unwanted negative attention.

This week’s news shows us that this time around, retailers may not even have the choice. The BBFC has rejected Manhunt 2 from gaining a certificate, making it illegal to sell in the UK and the first case of a game being totally banned to my knowledge.
The game has received an ‘Adults Only’ rating in the USA, (presumably equivalent to US cinema’s ‘NC-17’ or the UK’s ‘18’) but seeing as it has been developed for the Playstation 2 and Wii, and both Sony and Nintendo refuse to carry ‘AO’ rated games on their systems, this too is an effective ban on release.
Predictably, multitudes of enraged net-denizens have seen fit to lambaste the actions of the BBFC, and indeed of ‘the Man’, despite obviously having never played the game for themselves. There could very well be sound reasons behind the decision, but I can’t see how Manhunt 2 managed to distinguish itself from so many games for which violence is the sole raison d’etre, particularly the original game. Is it more depraved than Hostel? (a film I’ve not yet seen, merely because it seems like an excuse to see what torture scenes they can come up with, as opposed to something like Jason X which revels in violence and death scenes but does so in such a way that it’s hard to deny at least the attempt at black comedy)
At this point in the 5th generation of consoles, it’s hard to say what the qualitative differences are between gaming and films in terms of their effect upon the audience, but I can’t help but think that this is a 21st century version of the urge to cover up the penises of statues lest they tempt maidens into wanton acts of depravity.

Sure, that comparison is a bit facetious, but I think it’s worth comparing the cause/effect relationship. The existence of myriad examples of Beatles recordings doesn’t make me a massive fan, despite the fact that I like them. But the person who does take a big shine to the Fab Four is likely to spend a good deal of time and money tracking down all the different recordings they can lay their hands on.
A propensity for violence may not be in the same class of leisure-time pursuits, but it is hard to deny that someone interested in maiming or killing their fellow man is likely to hold an interest in violent games and movies, serial killers, weapons and suchlike. Most of these things are easily obtainable to all, but this doesn’t manufacture more psychos. In essence, the material does not generate the obsession, the obsession leads to seeking out the material.
On the other hand, in a move of heroic audacity, there is the possibility that Rockstar have purposely manufactured a totally OTT version of their game in order to garner reams of free publicity, before appealing to the review boards and submitting the ‘edited’/original version of the game, and then cashing in. This is highly unlikely however, in light of the fact that review copies had previously been sent to critics, offering the chance of highlighting such a scam, and perhaps more importantly the acres of negative commentary over the past months concerning the PS3 is likely to have dampened any enthusiasm for such a risky manoeuvre.

Besides the general criticism of the machine’s price-point, the lack of decent software, the hard evidence of slow sales (in the US in May, the PS3 barely shifted half what the 360 did, and less than a quarter of Wii units, whilst the first week of June saw the Wii outsell the PS3 8 to 1 in Japan) and the backfiring publicity stunts such as the fake fake blog and European God of War 2 launch party, the problems of Sony have been compounded by yet another poorly conceived sideswipe at video gaming.
The fuss over Manchester Cathedral’s use as a setting for part of Resistance: Fall of Man seems particularly bizarre.
Besides the fact that the game is undeniable science fiction, with the violence at the centre of the dispute aimed at the invading hordes of aliens into WW2-era Britain, games have featured real-life backdrops, including places of worship, for years, particularly in the many popular World War 2 shooters and strategy games.
Churches and the Vatican have long been the source of inspiration for many a violent and gory horror film, and it seems bizarre that the Church of England would choose this game at this time to pick a fight.


The fact that it gets mentioned in Parliament highlights the dangers of well-meaning but ignorant people sticking their oar in – yes violent games that are becoming increasingly photo-realistic may have an adverse affect on some young people who might play them (often despite these games being rated out of these children’s hands, blithely supplied by parents who give their kids GTA to shut them up on the one hand, and then open the Daily Mail floodgates with the other), but in the absence of any evidence whatsoever, why should games be treated any differently from movies and music?

Time and time again, otherwise rational human beings completely purge their minds of the idea that their fellow man was quite capable of committing heinous crimes in the days before games, movies and mass literacy, and in no smaller proportion than today.

-

After that more heavyweight fare, you may be in the need of light refreshment, and so I point to this video which shows a gamer in the making:


Also, feel free to have a read of my latest movie reviews, all accessible via the handy links section to the right, newest reviews are from the Duelist on up.
Apart from the viewing of movies, I’ve had my time eaten up thanks to my cave-in purchase of a PS2. I’ve already clocked the very violent, enjoyable and 18-rated God of War, and now I’m a good 30 hours into Final Fantasy 12, so I’m quite glad it’s been a rainy summer thus far.

A sweeping generalisation

Each season dozens of new anime shows are broadcast in Japan.
A handful of these are chosen by the various fansub groups for translation, and are released for download over the net. A further proportion of these titles are then picked up by the anime distribution companies, and then another fraction are picked for UK distribution, meaning that the majority of titles never see the light of day here.
It’s true to say that this filtering process does do the job of filtering the wheat from the chaff, but a lot of great series are never picked up and even those that make it can often take years to reach our island.

For the moment the fansub community offers the best opportunity to catch series that you might otherwise never see in translated form, and as ever this season has offered up a smattering of shows that peak the interest.

Darker than Black is set in the near future, where shadowy government operatives called contractors use their psychic powers to do whatever it is shady agents do, and adopts a straight-faced more realistic tone akin to that found in the acclaimed Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. After a couple of episodes it’s hard to say if this is worth sticking with, but it certainly is ‘dark’.

Denno Coil is also set in the near-future, where cyberspace is integrated into the real world via hi-tech goggles and holographic pets are the norm, but the tone is completely opposite to Darker than Black, focusing on the experiences of a young girl who has to move to a new city and meets a young cyber-detective investigating illegal programs living in hidden cyberspace. The show reminds me of My Neighbour Totoro, with its cutesy animals and the tumbling, giggling little sister to protagonist Yasako, who shouts “poop!” at everything. Despite the initially simplistic style, Denno Coil sports some sophisticated animation.

Claymore is set in the favoured anime backdrop of a generic medieval world of swords and sorcery. In this case, the Claymores are half woman-half demon warriors who travel from town to town, answering requests to despatch demons, or Yoma, who disguise themselves as people in order to have ready access to their favourite food – human guts. The set-up is initially clichéd, but the story quickly picks up the pace and by episode 8 has turned into a shocking and gripping show.
Lots of bloody violence which crucially comes second to the character development.

El Cazador de la Bruja also treads familiar ground, dealing as it does with bounty hunters, and that old “children who have escaped from labs with uncharted special powers and who are on the run from secret organisations” chestnut. In this case the setting is Mexico and our kind hearted bounty hunter forms a female double-team with the escaped super-child. There are flashes between the action as our girls outsmart/fight their pursuers, and the wider plot as we see who we assume to be the man in charge of the super-child programme do his secret organisation thing. It’s totally generic and unlikely to go anywhere particularly interesting, but is polished with a fair amount of charm that keeps it worth watching.


My favourite of the season, though, is yet another entry in the well-worn category of High School rom-com.
Lovely Complex stars the unlikely duo of Otani and Risa, a short boy and tall girl who are unlucky in love, thanks, it seems, to their height, and end up hanging around each other, constantly bickering as their friends pair up around them. They both have a lot in common and it’s clear from the off that these two are meant to be together, but it’s a rocky road.

Lovely Complex manages to mix the comedy well with the drama. You do care about the characters, particularly Risa who realises first that she and Otani could be an item, which is no easy task when the jokes are so prominent. With lots of exaggeration of expression, physical comedy and misunderstanding, Lovely Complex is genuinely funny and highlights the popularity of this genre in the West. Whilst a number of comedy shows mercilessly lampoon popular culture, it is hard to get a lot of the jokes when said culture is unfamiliar. On the other hand the various situations related to love in high school are familiar to most people; the unrequited love, love triangles and the squirming attempts to ask your dream boy/girl out are things that many more people can identify with than Ultraman parodies.
Even though you can barely breathe for anime high-school romcoms, Lovely Complex stands out for me as one of the better examples, and indeed a decent show in its own right.


I would have loved to include a clip from the show as animation is unsurprisingly key in anime, but the only thing available on Youtube at the moment are snippets of the live action version of the show, chocked to the brim with some of the worst acting that you could ever hope to avoid.