Pop Culture Junkie

Game Review: Deus Ex: Human Revolution

2012-01-16T19:33:00.009Z

Deus Ex: Human Revolution takes place in a moody tech-noir near-future in which nearly everyone seems to have settled on a yellowish color scheme. And more importantly: people are getting ‘augments’, technical enhancements grafted onto or into their body, which give them special abilities. This is the big moral issue of the era: should people be getting such augments or does it make them less than human somehow? To what degree should it be allowed and regulated? Will it create a new class of humans, leaving the regular folk behind? And as people who have been augmented need to keep taking expensive medication to keep functioning, does this put them at the mercy of big corporations, who could ultimately use them to do their evil bidding? People ponder these ethical questions and – it seems – little else. Overheard conversations, newscasts, strewn about newspapers and e-books almost completely focus on the same topic, which does give it some weight but also makes the game world seem small somehow.

Your vessel through this world: Adam (biblical reference alert) Jensen, a corporate guy with nifty hair, a gravelly, monotonous voice, cool shades and a mysterious childhood, who has been outfitted with augments up the wazoo after a near-death experience. For reasons of gameplay, these can only be activated one-by-one, using ‘Praxis kits’ that can be bought or found, but are mostly earned through acquiring experience points during the missions you carry out to find out what happened to you lost-and-presumed-dead scientist lady lover and to unravel a corporate conspiracy. In turn, the special skills you get help you ramp up for the trickier missions that are to follow. The fun is in deciding on the order in which you activate the augments, which will depend on how you want to play the game. You can choose a stealth approach and try to slip by guards undetected, finding alternate routes. You can focus on hacking computers and safes to find loot, access otherwise closed-off areas or to turn the enemies’ gun turrets and robots against them. Or you can more or less fight your way through with guns ablaze, though this does not seem to be the designers’ favorite mode of play. Even with his protective ‘dermal armor’ leveled up to the max, Adam is still fairly vulnerable to bullets, so any gunfight is likely to take place from behind cover, perhaps ending in a quick sprint to your assailant to knock him out if you are trying to be non-lethal.

Curiously, the boss-fights in the game require that you to have upped your defenses and come packing heat, which is a cold splash in the face to people focusing on stealth. The development of the bosses was apparently outsourced to a different game studio which did not get the ‘multiple approaches should be possible’ memo. Especially the first boss is a real pain, as Adam starts out weak and is barely a match for him at that point. Tip: if you don’t want to have to worry about the bosses, pick the two upgrades for the Typhoon early on, which allows you to send out a 360 degrees shockwave. Two hits of this makes any boss fight an extremely short one; just make sure to conserve the rare ammo for it for bosses and emergencies. And steering clear of spoilers: there is a decision to be made about halfway through the game which will greatly impact how difficult the third boss-fight is. If you don’t want to run the risk of making the wrong choice, look up a walkthrough.

My personal approach: I always started with stealth, knocking out as many guards as possible for the experience points. If I got caught and/or bored I would clear an area with my non-lethal tranquilizer dart gun (looking back, I’d advise the stun gun instead) or the more lethal 10mm, shotgun or revolver. Due to your limited inventory, the game constantly has you weighing exciting new weapons against sticking with the ones you have lovingly upgraded. I stuck to my guns, so to speak. I hacked any computer I could find even if I had a password at the ready, also for the experience points. Then I went looking around the areas I’d cleared for hidden paths. Regularly when I thought I was going somewhere new, I found out I had actually discovered an alternate route into the place I just left. Though you do have to upgrade some of the hacking and stealth skills a little, on the whole it’s best to focus on those that allow you to find these routes, by lifting the heavy objects blocking them, busting through walls, jumping higher or falling down from a height without killing yourself. Also an augment to put on your shopping list early-on is the ‘social enhancer’ which allows you to manipulate people in conversation into doing what you want, which really helps along the main story. Beware: some of the available augments are actually completely useless, so think about the practicality of them before potentially wasting a Praxis.

Stealth can be fairly tricky: the guards have perfect vision, spotting you through windows and from far away, but they lack logical reasoning or the ability to bend at the knees to peek into and/or follow you into near-the-ground ducts or over obstacles. Encountering a barrier, they will hang around nervously for a while and then wander off, going ‘Oh, well – I guess he’s gone.’ Even if you are just barely out of sight in the same duct they just saw you get into and there is a big pile of bodies in front, from panicked guards whom you just kept shooting in the legs until they dropped.

The humans populating the Deus Ex world aren’t the most engaging bunch in general unfortunately. The facial animation and body movements in the – oddly dark – cut scenes aren’t all that great and seem – ironically – mechanical. They are also lacking in the behavioral department: as you go about ransacking credits and supplies from all over the place, the owners of these goods more often than not just blankly stare at you while you do it, even if you just broke into their house. (Oddly, there is no moral consequence to taking other people’s stuff and it even seems expected.) IQ’s in general do not seem to have gone up in the future: passwords are scattered everywhere on little tablets called ‘pocket secretaries’ to the point of ridiculousness and people have taken to letting their credits (money) lie around out in the open for anyone to take. The game designers occasionally poke fun at their own artificialities: you may find an internal memo on a computer stating that employees can only have a maximum of four e-mails on their computer (which is indeed the max you will find per pc) or you’ll come across a pocket secretary containing a password plus an admonishment to the employee who owned it to be extra-super careful with it and delete it straight after use.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a prequel to Deus Ex, a game (which I did not play) renowned for its story. Considering the pedigree, the lack of involvement I felt with the characters was disappointing. And even though it is a large game, the world felt small seen as a whole because of the strong focus on just the augmentation theme and because of the handful of side-missions all taking place just a few blocks away from the main missions. There is a whole lot of optional text to read in the form of e-mails and e-books, deepening the world in theory, but a lot of these are a bit dry, so I ended up just glossing over most of them. There are multiple endings, but rather than these growing organically from how you played the game, you simply pick one on the spot. On the plus side: if you save right beforehand and go back to that save, you can see all the endings in a row. And the ending – no matter which one you pick - does come with a voice-over that acknowledges how you played the game: in my case it told me that I mostly took the moral high road, generally knocking people out instead of killing them. There is no closure to your relationship with the various other characters, however, and considering one of the possible endings, a sequel starring Adam seems unlikely. Also a bit odd is that apparently, no matter what decision you make, the world will end up in the same state 25 years down the road when the story of Deus Ex begins, meaning your decision is ultimately irrelevant.

To sum things up: Deus Ex: Human Revolution is a game well worth playing, no so much for the story as for the atmosphere (featuring moody, futuristic music seemingly lifted straight out of Mass Effect 2) and for the gameplay. The fun is in strategically upgrading and broadening your already ample options to tackle the various missions in the way you enjoy most. Oh, and one last thing: if playing on a console with a hard drive, install it on there, as during the loading screens when playing off the disc, I grew a fair amount of beard.

Game Review: Assassin's Creed II

2011-11-23T09:15:00.009Z

I just finished Assassin’s Creed II, which was released quite a while ago (2009), with two sequels AC: Brotherhood and very recently AC: Revelations) already available. So never let it be said I’m not a year or two behind the ball. But at least this means you can pick up the 'Game of the Year' edition of it, which includes all the downloadable content, for next to nothing. Here goes.

I like games I can dive into, with a high level of immersion. This is a tricky thing when it comes to gaming. Generally it is helped by games keeping their mechanics out of sight as much as possible and just letting you go about your business as – say – an assassin in 15th century Italy. But the more complex a game wants to be, the more it will need to get a little abstract, explaining how it needs to be played and giving the necessary information at the right moments without throwing the player out of the game too much. The Assassin’s Creed franchise cleverly solves this conundrum by creating an extra level of reality within the game world: Desmond is a current-day descendant of a long line of assassins and through the help of a machine which can read *cough* ‘genetic memories,’ he relives key events from the lives of his ancestors. This enables him to learn secrets of the past and gain the skills of those who came before him, to fight an evil organization in the here and now. However, you spend relatively little time as Desmond and are mostly running stealthily along the rooftops and streets of the Florence and Venice of yore as assassin Ezio, offing people who are taking part in an evil conspiracy.

Because you are seeing things through the eyes of Desmond - who is in turn linked to a computer interface - the little map pointing out objectives, the health bar, the shimmering boundaries to the area you are confined to and the special mode of vision which points out your intended victim as well as guards in the middle of a crowd all make some sense within the story. (Even if the gimmick of ‘genetic memory’ in itself makes you giggle like a maniac and the little map-circle on the main screen looks distractingly like it was copied straight out of GTA IV.) Additionally, you can opt to turn off these little helpers if they bother you. The atmospheric music and great visuals which lovingly create various old cities, manage to draw you in and successfully make you feel like you are running around on a clear day subtly slaughtering villains as well as truckloads of anonymous guards, no doubt orphaning many unseen, blameless children.

That’s not to say the game is averse to reality-bending silliness. A few examples: as you are seen murdering people, your infamy grows and guards will attack you on sight. You can greatly reduce your bad reputation by ripping a few ‘wanted’ poster off walls. Not too farfetched so far. Except these posters tend to be a bit hidden because this ups the challenge of finding them for the player. Which – of course - means people wouldn’t actually see them and be influenced by them. And when you manage to slip your blade into a conspirator, time slows down while you have a short heart-to-heart with them as they breathe their last, any nearby guards apparently respecting your right to privacy during this intimate moment, only jumping you once the cut-scene is over. (I also encountered one such death scene after which all the nearby guards had mysteriously evaporated, though I suspect that was a glitch in the game.) The guards in general are a terribly dimwitted bunch, with bad hearing, memory and eyesight – forgetting who you are after losing track of you for a moment and not hearing or seeing you as you eliminate a shouting colleague on a nearby roof, while clearly in their sights.

Also not the best of friends with believability are the little glowing chests with money left lying around everywhere. Assassin’s Creed in particular can’t be blamed for this phenomenon however, as it’s a gaming cliché: resources which would have obvious value to a lot of people just lying around for the taking, be it currency, equipment or health packs. ACII at least limits the free giveaways to money; the other stuff you have to buy from vendors or pick-pocket from your victims. Pick-pocketing can also get you some cash, but it is far more time-consuming and the amounts you get are much smaller than those you get from looking for treasure in unlikely places, so it is hardly worth it. You can also choose to renovate a small town bit by bit, reinvesting what you start to earn by doing so, until more money is constantly pouring in than you will know what to do with.

The main event is clambering around a few beautifully rendered cities like a monkey whose arms don’t ever get tired and who will never miss a jump unless you press the wrong button. The controls for this are fairly intuitive and dependable, though the context-sensitive buttons mean that Ezio may occasionally start climbing a wall or an obstacle during a chase when you get too close to it, instead of running along as intended. And I did spend a good ten minutes at one point jumping around on a balcony, before managing to make my usually astonishingly nimble alter ego grab a wooden beam which was right in front of him, with no other route available to advance the game. There are indoor obstacle courses which apart from the different setting seem lifted straight out of Prince of Persia or Tomb Raider, in which you have to find your way to the top of a church or dungeon by jumping around. These are fun, except – like in the games mentioned – the camera may sometimes decide you are only allowed to see the parcours from one awkward angle which isn’t the best to actually see where you are jumping to. (Fun fact: the Assassin’s Creed franchise evolved out of an idea for a Prince of Persia sequel.)

ACII being a so-called ‘sandbox’ game, you have a fair amount of freedom to do what you please, when you please, apart from ultimately taking on the missions which advance the story. I have to admit I mostly ignored the optional assassination contracts, races and fights as there is plenty of that woven into the main narrative and I was aware that there are two more mostly similar AC games following this one, which would allow me to have my fill. I also mostly ignored the distractingly glowing feathers scattered about to collect: apart from it getting you an ‘achievement’ I couldn’t see how hunting them all down would serve as anything but a waste of time. I enjoyed finding the highest viewpoints, which open up the maps of the various cities and give a good vista. Thirty ‘codex pages’ add up to a giant puzzle and are fun to hunt down and some buildings contain hidden symbols which unlock a short (and ultimately silly) video called ‘the truth’ by way of thematically vague and somewhat obtuse brainteasers. By trekking through various dungeons, you can unlock the powerful threads of Altair, the anti-hero of the first AC game.

The main story missions are fun and just about varied enough, even though the basic activities of killing, platforming and collecting started to feel a bit repetitive near the end, making me wonder if I’ll get bored playing the sequels. The details of the conspiracy – the names and the ways in which they were connected – didn’t really stick with me. Though that meant I didn’t always understand why exactly I was eliminating someone and even though I generally feel bad about doing morally dubious things even in a game, I had no problem going ‘dark’ this time, since that was the entire point. I even offed a pushy minstrel or two, only partly by accident. The various ways you can approach a kill – hire a group to fight with you, hire ladies to distract guards, attack from above, blend in with a crowd as you approach your target – keep things interesting. Oh, and you get to hang around with Leonardo DaVinci, easily the most personable character in the game. Machiavelli puts in an appearance too.

I can recommend ACII as a fun, pretty easy and atmospheric game that mostly allows you to set your own pace. I enjoyed the platforming aspect more than the fighting, despite the occasional tendency to put a timer on you, which can be frustrating given the sometimes willful camera and context-sensitive controls. But no matter where your preference lies, ACII is worth your time. Quick word of warning though: the climax of the story is actually a somewhat silly cliffhanger, serving as a hook to get you playing the sequel. Not so much because of this as because of the gameplay, I’ll definitely rejoin Ezio in Rome for AC: Brotherhood sometime soon.

Ye Olde Television Review: Farscape

2011-11-06T14:40:00.014Z

Farscape is a scifi-series which ran for four full seasons (1999-2003) and then got hastily wrapped up in a mini-series. I’d missed out on the original run but have now finally gotten around to watching the series from beginning to end.

American astronaut John Crichton (Ben Bowder) accidentally drops himself and his space-shuttle through an inconvenient wormhole while on a mission called ‘Farscape’, ending up somewhere quite far indeed. Before he can even get his bearings on the other end of the universe, he is implicated in the death of the brother of a certain Captain Crais, who carries a grudge and uses his authority with the awkwardly named Peacekeeper army to hunt John down over the span of quite a few episodes. John bands together with a group of aliens – this being a relative term of course – who had all been captured by the Peacekeepers and are now on the run on board of a ship called Moya: a ‘live’ ship akin to a space-whale, which has been bonded to an alien to serve as her pilot (who appropriately is simply named ‘Pilot’). There is a blue priestess called Zhaan, who likes to show off lots of her intricately textured skin, has a dark side and is technically a plant. There is D’Argo: a red-faced, passionate warrior with tentacles on his face who resembles a Klingon, but has more of a sense of humor. And there is a small slug-like puppet who floats around on a motorized sled – he’s called Rygel and is a lying, cowardly, greedy little egomaniac who used to be quite a big deal on his home planet until he was deposed. Rounding out the merry little band is John’s love interest Aeryn Sun (Claudia Black): a raven-haired Peacekeeper who despite her dedication to the cause is booted from the Peacekeepers because contact with John has supposedly ‘contaminated’ her. Note to intergalactic organizations intending to establish peace among all species: if blanket xenophobia is part of your statutes and at obvious odds with your main goal, you may need to rethink your basic approach.

Distrustful of each other at first, the group of convicts grows into a highly dysfunctional family in the end even as it loses some members and gains others. The most substantial late addition is Chiana, a white-haired, grey-skinned, playful sex-kitten. Lesser and more temporary ones are a rather hysterical fellow who can commune with the dead (Stark), a red or orange-haired – literally depending on her mood - spoilt brat whose screams melt metal (Jool), a kooky grandma who has a way with herbs as well as spit (Noranti) and a morally ambiguous special agent whose limbs can be reattached after removal (Sikozu).

Farscape presents a large and messy universe as seen through the eyes of astronaut John, full of truly alien-looking aliens with odd habits and cultures. And he doesn’t have it especially easy: after sorting out the wrongful accusation of murder, an ancient alien race decides to plonk the secret to making wormholes into his brain which makes him a target for the deliciously Evil Scorpius (Wayne Pygram), who proceeds to chase him unflaggingly for the duration of the series while wearing what looks to be a very tight leather S&M outfit. Scorpius gets inside John’s mind both figuratively and literally, planting a ‘neural clone’ of himself and making John go insane for a bit. All the while, John and Aeryn circle each other as her cold exterior starts to defrost and their mutual attraction becomes undeniable. But there is always something in their way, be it an emotional issue or a second John Crichton or quite simply death. Can these crazy kids get it together while keeping the wormhole technology – which could be used as a horrible weapon – out of the hands of all dubiously interested parties?

Farscape has a unique look because of the studio behind it: The Jim Henson Company. It was originally meant as a showcase for their creations and some of the scripts had their origin in the design of a particular puppet, rather than the other way around. This means a lot of the aliens look spectacular and there is more variety than you’ll find on Babylon 5, Stargate or Star Trek. However, because the puppets do tend to look as such, it gives the show a deceptively childish first impression. In reality Farscape is fairly adult in a fun and coarse way: bodily fluids of various kinds feature, there is a lot of exotic swearing and the aliens seem to be a kinky bunch sexually, not fazed by variations in physiology or race. Then again, in a galaxy with so much diversity, an intrigued and open-minded attitude seems to make the most sense.

Rather than come up with one potentially interesting idea at a time, Farscape tends to throw handfuls of them at the screen to see what will stick. The more far-fetched concepts make you work hard for your suspension of disbelief and it’s best not to ponder some of the sillier ideas too closely: trying to figure out how Moya the space-whale would actually operate or how she could get pregnant and give birth to an emotionally confused warship, could give one a headache. Farscape is about emotions more than logic: it is the ‘id’ to Star Trek’s ‘super-ego’. This extends to the scripts as well, where character-moments supersede clarity or story flow on occasion. But the fearlessness in trying new things is exciting as a viewer, even if it means you do occasionally sit through an episode which you have to write off as a failed experiment. It’s the price you have to pay for original high-adventure elsewhere.

As is the case with a lot of series, there are episodes which strongly push the overall story arc and some which are relatively self-contained. A not-so exciting sub-category of the second variety is the recurring ship-under-siege set-up, in which Moya and her crew must fend off a threat on the outside or inside of the ship. These stories tend to feature the main cast running around the samey corridors of Moya. A lot. Though a few are done well, mostly you can sense the need to save money powering these adventures, which does make a lot of sense considering how expensive this show must have been to make. The ambition of showing a vast galaxy full of alien creatures while on a tv budget is a lofty one, but can’t have been easy to pull off.

The show originally survived through some complex international funding, season by season, but just as the producers got cocky and took a next (fifth) season pretty much for granted for the first time, the house of cards came tumbling down as the final episode for season four was being shot. Without any closure to running storylines and ending on a massive cliffhanger, it would have been a bad note to leave the universe on. Thankfully, fervent fans managed to make enough noise to get financing off the ground for a miniseries which would wrap things up and could serve as a launch pad for more Farscape. It wasn’t enough of a ratings success to do the latter, but did serve to give a proper, if somewhat rushed, ending to Farscape’s tale of intergalactic high adventure. Even now, years later, there are the occasional rumblings of a web-series or some other form of live-action continuation, but nothing has actually been produced. If you are jonesing for more Farscape after seeing the series, check out the recent comics published by Boom! Studios, which pick up the story where the series left off.

All in all, the show has aged pretty well and the humor, larger-than-life characters and chemistry between the leads – especially John and Aeryn – still stand. The main ‘wormhole’ intrigue does start to wear thin near the end of the series, but doesn’t spoil the fun. If you can get past the puppets which look like puppets and sets which often do clearly look like a set, the series rewards you with many, many ‘arns’ (that’s ‘hours’) of joyful escapism. And with the sight of hunky Ben Bowder running around in leather pants. A frellin’ good time!

The full series, including the mini-series which ended things, is available as ‘Farscape - The Definitive Collection’ on DVD and soon on BluRay.

Television Review: RuPaul’s Drag Race, Untucked & Drag U

2011-09-22T21:32:00.011+01:00

An ex once told me: “You’d make a great drag queen.” Upon seeing my puzzled expression, he added: “Oh, not a convincing one but one of those dignified ones, like Terence Stamp in Priscilla – Queen of the Desert.” Now, many years later, I still do not own a kimono or any kind of make-up and after watching all three seasons of RuPaul’s Drag Race, I am more convinced than ever that I would suck at drag. It takes a certain kind of mentality to do it: you have to crave attention, be willing to risk ridicule and not mind the large amount of time and money that goes into it. Being a drag queen is a whole lot of work, especially if you paint your own face and make your own outfits. It’s a bitch to turn yourself into a glamorous bitch. And you have to have courage to femme yourself up in a world that demands that men are masculine, which strangely seems even more true within the gay scene than outside of it. Likely this is because a lot of gay men feel they need to overcompensate for ‘not being a real man to begin with’. They may appreciate a guy in drag for the spectacle and entertainment value of it, but it’s not likely to be a turn-on. (Fun fact: if two drag queens hook up, which is supposedly a rare occurrence, this is called ‘kai kai’.)

RuPaul’s Drag Race showcases the shiny outer appearance of drag but – more interestingly – also explores the characters behind the façade somewhat. It has been roughly modeled after America’s Next Top Model and Project Runway: each season a group of drag queens is put through a series of challenges, testing their skills at performance, their ability to follow instructions and to work together and their ‘technical’ skills at putting together an impressive look in a short time. They are judged each week by a jury led by the titular RuPaul herself (full name: RuPaul Andre Charles) – who you are most likely to know from the 80’s hit ‘Supermodel (You Better Work)’. Also present are a gay-friendly C/D-list ‘surprise’ celebrity and some recurring stylists: Santino Rice, Michelle Visage, Mike Ruiz and Merle Ginsberg (seasons 1 & 2). Each week, one performer is named the ‘winner’ and two end up in ‘the bottom two’. This duo is then told to “lip-synch for your life”: a final battle to win favor with RuPaul or else risk getting banished. The one who performs better is spared: “Shante, you stay.” The other one has to “Sashay… away.” In the last episode of each season ‘America’s Next Drag Superstar’ is chosen from the final three contestants.

Because there are various equally valid styles of drag, the judgment calls can feel subjective. It’s easier to predict who is going to be in the ‘bottom two’, than to predict who is going to be coming out on top, since a ‘hot mess’ is generally obvious but it’s harder to distinguish between types of ‘great’. Some performers adopt larger-than-life looks and persona’s, putting the emphasis on spectacle, while others seem to strive towards being a professional high-class fashion model and occasionally a performer seems to just want to be a convincing girl. Some have a sense of humor about the whole thing, while others play it straight. Going by RuPaul’s Drag Race’s track-record, the fashion models rule the roost and someone with a strong emphasis on humor like Pandora Boxx is likely to get culled. Since the winner will be representing a company ultimately, as part of the prize, I have a feeling that glamour is an unspoken demand imposed by the sponsors. And speaking of sponsors and plugs: a lot of brand names get thrown around each week on the show. It’s heartening to see that corporate America is embracing drag. Also expect to hear a lot of Rupaul’s music, from the albums Champion and Glamazon for the moment, because – damn – that lady knows how to self-promote, as is evidenced by the fact that she sticks her name in the title of all her programs. She herself stars in the show both as a scarily thin man with a pencil moustache and as a glamorous Diva.

RuPaul’s Drag Race comes tied to a behind-the-scenes program titled Untucked. It shows more of the interpersonal drama happening backstage and adds character. If you just see the main show, you will form a different opinion of certain contestants than if you watch both shows, since more is explained about people’s motivations and background. I am pretty sure that a lot of the drama is fabricated in the editing room though, as happens with all reality television.

But there is a far more artificial third program on RuPaul’s roster, called RuPaul’s Drag U. In this program, a weekly selection of the drag queens from Drag Race – here dubbed Drag Professors at Drag University, where RuPaul is the President and Lady Bunny is the Dean - give three downtrodden women a make-over, to bring out their fierceness, self-confidence and to upgrade their mojo. The women tell their sad story, homilies are said, hugs are given and then the three ladies compete with each other for ‘draguating’ with top honors and some nice prizes. It is an odd concept, since after all the uplifting chatter two people are being sent home a ‘loser’, sort of deflating the niceness. Since the teachers have nothing really at stake apart from their honor, real tension is lacking even though there are some forced attempts at making them throw each other shade. (In other words: making them do or say something to take a rival down a notch.) While during Drag Race you start to have favorites to root for as the shows progress, these contestants don’t stick around long enough for you to care who wins. And generally it tends to be the one with the most depressing story who takes top honors, making the actual make-over seem somewhat irrelevant. Two seasons have been wrapped, but the formula is in need of more fine-tuning, as opposed to Drag Race and its Untucked add-on, which after three seasons run like a well-lubed machine.

One thing is certain: RuPaul has built an empire for herself and a flock of gender bending talent. The Drag Race set-up is a very addictive one, even – and maybe especially – to people like me and my boyfriend who would never dream of slapping on make-up and slipping into a dress, but are fascinated by these extravagant, extravert creations and the sometimes surprisingly shy and introverted people behind them. What I would love to see is a more Real World-like program starring the drag queens from Drag Race; following them on the road as they do shows, getting behind-the-scenes and learning about their day-to-day life. Rather than take away from the mystery, I think the contrast of life on-stage and off-stage would be fascinating. RuPaul, don’t rest on your laurels – there is more to be done. Fashion those laurels into a Caesar’s crown and expand that empire. As a magnificent bitch once said: “you better work”!

Movie Review: RENT

2011-08-30T14:29:00.004+01:00

I recently saw the movie version of RENT, an adaptation of a Broadway play I did not see. It is about a group of Bohemians in New York at the end of the eighties, trying to keep their head above water and a roof above their head without selling out. Director Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire) filmed it shortly after directing the first two Harry Potter movies but doesn’t leave a distinctive mark. The original play was cruelly spoofed in the puppet-comedy Team America, which showed a musical number called ‘Everyone has AIDS’. And a lot of people in the movie do indeed have AIDS and are on the then new - and fairly toxic - drug AZT but are far from guaranteed to beat the disease. It’s odd to have the word AIDS thrown around so much, when nowadays people have HIV and only get diagnosed with AIDS if treatments fail and they get into more trouble. But then RENT definitely feels like a period piece, set in a time of anger and activism. Its family of friends are angry at corporate America while fighting – and singing – amongst themselves about matters of love and politics.

Saying this may cause someone to come and take my Gay Card away, but I generally don’t like musicals. It’s jarring to have people burst into song for no apparent reason and even sillier when other people start to join in with the singing, knowing the lyrics through some neat trick of telepathy. The cast of RENT does this kind of impromptu group harmonizing with alarming frequency. The sometimes daft and forced lyrics don’t help. (Sample: “Who do you think you are? Barging in on me and my guitar”) And while a musical like Moulin Rouge cuts all ties with reality and moves into a circus-like hyper reality, making it easier to just go with it once you have taken the initial jump, RENT clings to realism uncomfortably. To hear people sing how cold they are, burning precious belongings to generate some heat, only to then topple these burning goods out into the streets as a form of ineffectual though visually interesting protest, seems – well – just stupid. Grittiness and musicals are not an easy mix to pull off.

RENT is considered to be a classic, but it left me feeling decidedly ‘meh’. Most of the melodies didn’t stick in my mind for too long and especially the rockier numbers handed to ‘Roger Davis’, a character seemingly molded after Bon Jovi, left me cold. Actrice Tracie Thoms comes off best and is graced with two of the more interesting songs: ‘Take Me or Leave Me’ and ‘The Tango Maureen’. Of course, music is a matter of taste more than most other arts and maybe on second viewing the numbers would reel me in and get me humming along, but the sometimes daft rhymes and overall lack of a good first impression, discourage taking a second listen.

It seems that the songs get in the way of the story in RENT: building nuanced characters through lyrics is a tricky business and this musical doesn’t quite succeed. The cast comes off as a vehicle for the songs more than a collection of living and breathing individuals, each with their own complex personality and goals. You don’t feel that you really get to know them, the movie just skimming their stereotypical surface. Together with the frequent song-breaks derailing reality, this makes it hard to get involved in the story.

However, if you don’t mind the silliness of someone who is on the edge of death from shooting up heroin – found at just the right dramatic moment by her friends - opening her eyes and going straight into a duet with her star-crossed lover, you may want to check it out.

Television Review: Wonders of the Solar System

2011-08-21T19:42:00.004+01:00

In Wonders of the Solar System, Brain Cox explains things scientists know about the past, present and future of our extended habitat. This series consists of five episodes, each being led by a theme, such as how order was created out of chaos, why we have an atmosphere protecting us or the possibility of life on other planets. It was followed by Wonders of the Universe, which I haven’t checked out yet. I mostly bought the first series on BluRay because I figured it would be informative and more importantly, because it would look awesome in HiDef, along the lines of the BBC Earth and BBC Life series.

Brian Cox is the Jamie Oliver of the scientific world, be it a bit less of a bloke and a bit more of a geek (even though he used to play keyboard for D:Ream, which is of course very cool). He is one of those ‘nice boys’ who would be a big hit with your parents and grandparents. Maybe he is a bit tóó nice even: the wide-eyed, sincere fascination with which he talks about planets and constellations and the physics that hold our universe together is charming generally, but can start to grate when taken in too large a quantity. The words ‘wonder’, ‘wonderful’ and ‘amaayzing’ pop up often and lead to increasing amounts of eye-rolling. There must be a connection between this and the word ‘wonder’ in the title, but I am not sure if he keeps using it to explain why the series is called thusly or if they just figured afterwards: ‘Well, we may as well just stick it in the title.’ In any case, if you manage to get across with images and information how magnificent and ‘amaayzing‘ something is, you don’t need to point it out explicitly every time as well. We get it.

His method of showing and telling: travelling around the world to places which illustrate some force at work in the universe at large, possibly aided by placing some grainy photographs around him for further clarification. Occasionally rocks or condiments may be used to create a facsimile of our Solar System. The worldwide locations make for some beautiful imagery, but you can’t help but occasionally scratch your head at the necessity of it. Did Cox really have to travel to the South Pole to show us what a clear, flat piece of ice looks like? Or to a seasonal flower market someplace exotic to show how having seasons impacts life on our planet? It’s the visual sugar that makes the medicine of information go down, but I could have done with a bit more of the second and a little less of the first, great BluRay images or no.

If you are going for density of information, a book on the Solar System is a better bet – you will teach yourself more in less time. However, if you have some patience, are visually inclined and are looking for an affable, mild-tempered scientist to tell you interesting things about the universe in a slightly dreamy voice while roaming the planet, then Wonders of the Solar System (and likely its sequel Wonders of the Universe) is where it’s at.

Movie Review: Final Destination (Number 1 to Infinity)

2011-08-21T18:50:00.006+01:00

Franchise plot summary: a big accident causes a load of people to die. A teenager has a vision beforehand and manages to save a small group of the future victims. An unseen force then proceeds to restore order by offing these people in a series of creative freak accidents. Rinse, lather, drown, repeat.

It’s not exactly a cheery thought, but the moment we are conceived, our death becomes inevitable. Whether you believe your fate has already been decided for you or you feel like you are in full control of it, your demise is at an unknown point in the future, drawing ever nearer, the form in which it will come unclear. A ‘natural’ death at a ripe old age is what we generally hope for: gently drifting away in our sleep, perhaps, with no Freddy Krueger in sight. But there is always the nagging fear we may be taken out of the game prematurely: an accident or a medical condition suddenly dragging us down and laying waste to our plans for the future. The Final Destination franchise plays on that fear, at least on the more sensational ‘accident’ part of it.

The killer in these movies is creepier than any number of slightly supernatural movie psycho’s with a pointy weapon and an antisocial attitude. There is no corporeal evil and no clear purpose, just an unstoppable force that wants you gone. Call it Fate, Destiny or simply Death – it’s ultimately an amorphous personification of our mortality. In this most basic of terms, the concept behind Final Destination is genius. It takes all the fatal freak accidents you ever heard of and makes you wonder if there wasn’t some kind of ingenious domino effect preceding it. And in a lot of cases, there likely was: cause and effect multiplied by the passing of time can take one cause which leads to a totally unforeseen and apparently unconnected effect down the road (Also see: The Butterfly Effect). Everything seems predestined when looking backwards, tracing back to a cause, though there’s more likely to be a complex network of causes, each with their own causes and so on until the dawn of time. Of course, the domino effect in real life tends to be a lot less sensational than the instances portrayed in Final Destination: a marriage slowly turned sour may lead to a fight in a car, which in turn may lead to a moment of carelessness at a traffic light, a crash and a dead biker who just ended up in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Final Destination gets a bit silly when it tries to detail Fate’s process. There is apparently a very intricate plan for all of us, which gets upset when random teenagers have visions of their impending demise and manage to save a bunch of people. Who is giving the teens these visions? No one knows. Maybe some other force is teasing and challenging Fate or the vision is part of the plan to begin with, something Fate does to amuse himself. Instead of giving all the unintended survivors of the calamity a massive coronary or brain hemorrhage to clean up quick, he starts to set up massively complicated webs of causality, taking out his victims one by one even if he has an opportunity to blow them all up together in the same room by – for instance – planting a gas leak in advance. Since Fate seems to be able to predict the future, offing more than one victim at a time should not be a problem. But Fate seems hell-bent on being unnecessarily creative, varying the way he kills and sometimes even setting up a red-herring set of circumstances, only to strike in a simpler way moments later, like he decided to throw an improv and is trying to keep spectators entertained. In other words: Fate is acting suspiciously much like a screenwriter. The creepiness of Fate as a killer is lessened in the couple of instances where the screenwriter/Fate cheats and gets hand-on with the disaster in the making: visibly turning a screw loose or otherwise interacting directly with the world. He is at his best when totally invisible.

Going by the franchise, Fate seems to be hung up on the original order in which people were intended to die, replicating the order on his second try. It’s a neat way to set up tension in the scripts, but doesn’t make much sense when you think about it in terms of causality, where the original order of dying would be less important to the Grand Scheme than the amount of disturbance any specific survivor was causing. For instance: you’d think Fate would take out that pesky person who was having the visions first. It makes sense that the characters in Final Destination try to figure out the method behind’s Fate’s blood thirst and that they try to make sense of it all is also necessary for the movies to be more than just a string of roundabout executions, even though that is the bloody meat of the story. But Fate always ends up on top and the characters six feet under, like we ourselves will all face death one day and ultimately, inevitably lose.

The Final Destination series may make you a bit paranoid after watching an installment, wondering if mopping up that drink you just spilt will somehow end up killing you. It will also make you ponder death in a morbid way: what is the worst way to go? Getting burnt, eviscerated, decapitated, skewered, crushed, choked, drowned, blown up, run over or ripped apart? The terminating force in Final Destination doesn’t care if you have been naughty or nice, which also seems to be true enough in real life. The amount of pain with which someone checks out doesn’t correlate to their karma: someone who has never done anything wrong may slowly get roasted to death, while a real bastard may get off easy by getting quickly splattered by some kind of blunt force. Bloodiness may be the most disturbing factor visually, but the time it takes to die ultimately decides the amount of suffering for the person checking out. Death is less scary than dying and if you’re going to check out, you may as well do it on the fast track. By the time you’re in your eighties, would you want to start going slowly senile, feeling yourself slipping away or prefer to suddenly keel over from a heart attack? Personally, I am hoping for a gigantic glitter ball to fatally hit me over the head during disco night at the old folks’ home. At least that should give people something to smile about.

Movie Review: Pina

2011-08-14T20:16:00.002+01:00

I am more pop culture than high culture and am allergic to pretentiousness, especially if it doesn’t come with some self-awareness and a sense of humor about itself. I also am someone who appreciates directness when an artist is trying to bring something across. None of this vague ‘insert your own meaning here’ for me, unless the aesthetics are so breathtaking that the meaning doesn’t even really matter. These qualities make me a bad fit for poetry and for most of modern art, be it theatre, music, paintings, sculpture or dance. But the trailer for Pina intrigued me: a movie about dance shot in 3D by Wim Wenders, as a tribute to leader of a dance troupe. Pina Bausch was a dancer, choreographer, teacher and the artistic director at the Tanztheater in Wuppertal. She died in 2009. Being a cultural barbarian, I had never heard of her, but that didn’t stop me from going to see her choreography.

Pina admittedly isn’t the first movie to realize that dance would benefit from the extra dimension to play around with on screen, allowing a projection to approximate the experience of a live performance, but as far as I know, it is the first one aimed at an art-house audience. It feels more intimate than its grand-scale predecessors and doesn’t really have a ‘story’; it is a collection of ‘best of’ fragments from her choreographies, interspersed with shots of the dancers reminiscing about Pina. The viewpoint of the virtual audience isn’t fixed during the performances, stuck to a seat as they would be in a theater, instead the viewers leap in between the dancers and move around, making for a more dynamic event.

To start with the negative, of which I don’t have a lot: there were a few choreographies I didn’t ‘get’. In particular the piece in a large grey room littered with chairs – titled Café Müller – didn’t grab me in either aesthetics or meaning. Unfortunately, this was one of the longer pieces in the movie and considering that the movie overall does end up feeling long, it could have been whittled down a bit to give Pina as a whole more forward momentum. The other on-stage pieces - one with a tribal, earthy flavor taking place on a layer of red sand, one featuring water and a big rock and one which contrasts and plays around with dancers of different genders and ages – hold your attention but feel a little confined in contrast to the pieces that take the dancers outside or at least let the outside world pour in. These pieces are more visually striking and uplifting, most of them shot towards the end of a crisp, sunny day it seems. There is a glass-encased dance studio which shows a bright explosion of leaves just outside and there is a metro on a rail through Wuppertal which is put to great use. Though the movie doesn’t crack a smile for the most part, there is at least one short, very funny sequence in which a woman stomps onto said metro with a pillow.

Overall, I am not the intended audience for this movie methinks, but if you have any interest in modern dance whatsoever, Pina deserves a good, long look.

Movie Review: The Butch Factor

2011-07-05T08:49:00.004+01:00

The Butch Factor does what a good documentary is supposed to do: it makes you think. It does so by asking a complex question, presenting a variety of different, interesting viewpoints and leaving you to form your own opinion. It asks the question: what is masculinity and how do gay men perceive it? Especially for this group it is a loaded question. There is social pressure for a man to be manly, and this can be extra tough on gay guys, as they are not seen as ‘real’ men to begin with. After all, sleeping with another guy is seen as intrinsically girly, especially the ‘bottom’ role if there’s anal sex involved - even though ironically no girls are participating. It makes gays more self-conscious about feminine traits they may have and can lead them to shun their more effeminate brethren for fear of being associated with them and losing the respect of their straight peers. The documentary crew talks to musclemen, sportsmen, regular joes, ‘sissies’ and to a female-to-male transman about what makes a man.

Does a ‘real’ man have to have muscles and physical strength and is that all there is to it? We’ve all seen pumped up guys who look butch right up to the point when they open their mouth and then a purse falls out. There are gay guys who look masculine at first glance but show feminine traits when it comes to body language. Is a real man just a regular guy, doing things a stereotypical straight guy does? Does it necessarily mean getting excited about beer, sports, being hairy and possibly growing a gut? Does it mean not following your own interest, going out of your way to conform to the manly standard, turning away all things labeled as gay or unmanly by others? Isn’t someone who is preoccupied by appearing masculine actually showing he isn’t confident about his masculinity to begin with? And doesn’t that insecurity in itself hurt his ‘butch factor’?

Is it about strength of character? The outwardly most feminine gay men, have no choice but to grow a pair as they can’t pass for straight and have to fend off the aggression that brings out in people. Being regarded as a ‘real’ man is never an option for them, though they have all the required parts and likely have more of a fighter mentality than most men who pump iron. Is your level of masculinity set at birth, something you just are or aren’t and can’t influence all that much? But then: is a transman who has been through hormone therapy and starts acting and thinking like a man not as masculine as the next guy, apart from the genitalia?

There is a lot of shame about femininity within the gay scene; not only do some seem to think that interacting with a feminine guy would suck the masculinity right out of them by association, but a lot of gay men - including the feminine ones - are attracted to stereotypical masculine markers and behavior, passing over the queenier of their kind. Possibly it’s because they are seeking masculinity in others that they fear they are lacking themselves. Then again, there may be something more biological going on, hormones being set to respond to masculinity on a primal level: no perceived masculinity, no arousal. However, that ‘perceived’ caveat is an important one. Is masculinity something you intrinsically are, because of how you look, move, talk, smell… or is it subjective, something you are judged to be by others on the basis of culture? And is it ultimately something anyone should worry about or should we just get on with our lives and be ourselves, regardless of how people perceive us? Watch this very interesting documentary and discuss.

Movie Review: X-Men: First Class

2011-07-03T19:18:00.006+01:00

The X-Men movie franchise has had it rough lately. X-Men: The Last Stand showed a great drop in quality after the pretty good first two X-Men movies: director Bryan Singer had decided to bail on the series after X-Men 2 to direct the very disappointing Superman Returns. He left the reins to Brett Ratner, a man with a reputation for making generic blockbusters and Ratner created a rambling mess of an X-Movie, losing a lot of goodwill for the series. X-Men Origins: Wolverine also underperformed, sinking plans for X-Men Origins: Magneto. The project was morphed into X-Men: First Class.

It shows how the X-Men team first came together in the sixties and how Magneto and Charles Xavier went from being friends to being enemies. In the comics – and in the continuity set by the first two movies - these two were friends for a very long time, but here it doesn’t seem more than a few weeks. It’s symptomatic of how the movie takes the continuity of the previous X-movies, gives cheeky nods to it and then just as easily disregards elements of it. Very funny blink-or-you’ll-miss-it cameos by Rebecca Romijn and Hugh Jackman tie the movies together, but for each bonding moment, there is an incongruity to push the movies apart. By the end of it, I still wasn’t clear on if I had been watching a prequel or a reboot of the X-Men movie continuity.

Magneto is well-served by the story and is acted well by Michael Fassbender. His traumatic childhood in a concentration camp (which ‘borrows’ the first scene from the first X-Men flick) and the ensuing hunting down of his Nazi tormentors make for some of the most interesting scenes in the movie. Maybe Magneto is a bit too sympathetic even, as I think you are supposed to be on Xavier’s side by the end of the story, but you may well end up on Magneto’s. Charles Xavier is entertaining as played by James McAvoy though I have trouble picturing his version of Xavier physically and mentally changing into Patrick Stewart. Other characters of note getting an origin here are Beast and Mystique.

Yes, there are a lot of other characters here as well, but frankly most of them don’t have much of an impact. The X-Men comic universe is a grab-bag of mutants both good and evil, but the grabbing here was oddly random. We get Alex Summers as Havok, in comics lore Cyclops’ younger brother and a much later member of the X-Men, but here one of the first to join with no mention or sign of his elder sibling. We get Banshee and Emma Frost, the sonic scream and diamond form respectively not translating particularly well to the big screen. The sparkly features of Frost never fail to look like an intricate but unconvincing special effect. Darwin and Angel – a different Angel than the one from the first trilogy – have no apparent purpose, are not especially personable and could have been any number of more interesting characters. The bad guys underwhelm: Riptide is mute and occasionally lets rip with bursts of air by waving his hands and Azazel looks like Nightcrawler painted red, which makes sense if you know he will end up being his father, but most viewers won’t know of that comic book connection. Kevin Bacon as Sebastian Shaw – leader of the evil pack – is more smarmy than intimidating.

The sixties’ setting of the movie and the tying in of the Cuban missile crisis are interesting, but certain more touchy aspects of the era – sexism and racism – are conveniently ignored, making it feel more contemporary than perhaps it should. There are the usual plot holes and inconsistencies along the lines of: ‘Hey, if he could do that earlier, how come he doesn’t do this now?’ For instance: Magneto can rip apart a boat with an anchor, but can’t rip a hatch off a submarine and sink it? And why didn’t Magneto kill his main tormentor when he clearly had the opportunity to do it as a kid at the beginning of the movie?

Now, all of this sounds like I didn’t enjoy the X-Men: First Class, but despite the nitpicks I did. I got more excited about it than about Thor in any case. Though it barely holds together in some spots, there is a lot more going on and there is more of an interesting moral grey area, plus the standard, none-too-subtle outsider metaphor to work with. Being pretty familiar but not entirely up-to-date with the comic book version of the X-Men I had fun trying to unravel the messed up continuity and figuring out where they would be going with all these remixed elements. I am curious if they will follow up this movie with a sequel to the prequel – which could be good, if they ditch a lot of the dead weight – or an actual X-Men 4. I would probably prefer that, as it could wash away the bad taste of X-Men: Last Stand and maybe give the saga a proper ending.

Final nitpick (SPOILER): I defy anyone to explain to me how Xavier and Co. managed to escape off the besieged island at the end of the movie.

Movie Review: Thor

2011-06-25T14:30:00.004+01:00

The movie Thor serves as an introduction to the superhero character from the Marvel comics. I don’t know much about him in his print form, so I can’t say how much liberty was taken with him. I do have a feeling he was an actual God though and not an alien from another part of the galaxy who was just seen – together with his extended family – as holy beings by the primitive Vikings, thus making their way into silly Norse mythology. I assume this was done to sidestep any criticism from viewers with a different set of beliefs. (Our current religions are of course a lot less goofy. *cough*)

Thor (Chris Hemsworth) has some family issues. He and his brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) are both up for the throne of Asgard currently held by their father Odin (Anthony Hopkins), but of course there is only one seat to be had, leading to some resentment. When Thor is picked by his father, he spoils things at the very last moment by getting warmongery and impulsive and his father banishes him to Earth to learn a lesson. It’s all very Shakespearian and operatic, so it’s fitting the movie was directed by British thesp Kenneth Branagh, known for filming Shakespeare’s plays and who now gets to play around with pop culture.

On earth Thor meets a rather hot astronomer (Queen Amidala – aka Natalie Portman) who ends up serving as his guide while lusting after his muscled body. There is much ado about a big, powerful hammer called Mjölnir. Meanwhile Loki – further egged on by an unsettling revelation – takes advantage of Thor’s absence and seizes power. Brotherly strife ensues.

Thor is perfectly serviceable entertainment and it serves as a good primer for Thor, who is slated to appear in the upcoming The Avengers movie, directed by Joss Whedon. I saw the movie in 3D and while the fantasy vistas of Asgard look good with depth to them, I have a feeling I wouldn’t have missed much if I saw it in just two dimensions. The movie isn’t without its faults: tension is lacking for one thing. I was never quite sure of the power level of the characters so it seemed anything could potentially happen, making what actually díd happen seem a bit arbitrary. The romantic tension between Thor and Jane is underwhelming and perfunctory; there may be a glowing ember there, but it could have used a lot more fire. Additionally, though the emotional turmoil within Thor’s family is well-handled and played out, the actual fates of Asgard and Jotunheim (don’t ask) that hang in the balance, don’t carry much weight. Despite various shots of a large world, we only meet a few of Asgard’s inhabitants and it seems empty apart from Thor, his family, his four friends and some random people milling about in the background. The potential destruction of icy Jotunheim left me even colder.

Pet peeve: There is an extra scene at the end of the credits, leading into the The Avengers movie and guest-starring Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury, the leader of SHIELD. I was the only person who knew to hang around for it at the screening I was at, tipped off by a review I read. I understand the business reasons for sticking extra scenes at the end of the credits: it’s a great way to get movie-nerds excited, giving them something people not as in-the-know will miss out on. For people who heard about it too late, it may be an added incentive to get the Blu-Ray, DVD or even to go see the movie a second time. (Especially X-Men Origins: Wolverine tried hard to lure rabid fans back for a second viewing, by having one of two extra teaser scenes stuck to the end of each movie print, making it impossible to not miss out on anything the first time around.) I felt pretty stupid sitting there in my lonesome while the lights came up and the guy who was supposed to start cleaning up hovered impatiently in the back corner of the theater. Yes, the extra scene is fun, but it would have been just as fun spliced into the credits at a third of the way in and a lot more people would have gotten to enjoy it. It seems odd to me that someone who wants ‘the whole experience’ is willfully inconvenienced like this.

Temporal nitpick (SPOILER): How come the Vikings knew about Thor and Loki? A picture of the latter flashes by in a book being leafed through. Does time pass a lot slower in Asgard, the centuries flying by on Earth while they grew up just a little more? Or, since they are immortal, are Thor and Loki really old but just kind of immature for their age? And how did the Vikings get to know Loki better than Thor does? In Norse mythology Loki is known as The Trickster while his brother seems to have no clue about his deviousness.

Television Review: The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines

2011-06-19T19:40:00.005+01:00

I really like Noah Wyle, the actor best known for his long run on ER who is soon to be back in the spotlight with Falling Skies, the new Steven Spielberg-produced series. And I love the first three Indiana Jones movies. (Let us not speak of the fourth.) This should make me the ideal audience for the Librarian trilogy, a fairly obvious Indiana Jones rip-off made for television, starring Noah Wyle. However, I hated part one a little, part two a lot and I think it will be a good long while before I feel masochistic enough to check out part three, though I’ve been told it’s better than its predecessors and co-stars that nice lady from Castle.

The Librarian: Return to King Solomon's Mines (2006) - the middle part of the trilogy - is a perfect reminder why I tend to avoid television movies like the plague: mediocrity to the max. The dialogue, acting, sets and special effects are all half-baked. The script consists of lame one-liners, some cheesy emotional scenes, very obvious foreshadowing of things to come, believability stretched beyond repair and too many coincidences; the crutch of any bad writer who dug himself a narrative hole. To sum up the plot: Wyle works as a ‘librarian’ at a place where mystical, ancient artifacts are stored. He is sent out in the field to obtain one such artifact, hooks up with a sexy archeologist and confronts some demons from his childhood. There is perfunctory globetrotting, though most locations seem to be on the back lot of a movie studio.

The story culminates in a large ceremonial cave, with elements suspiciously similar to the finale of Raiders of the Lost Ark. The budget strained to keep up with the script from the beginning and at this point it coughs up the last of its petty cash for some laughable these-looked-snazzy-circa-the-eighties special effects. A ‘big’ adventure like this requires something visually spectacular when it peaks, but Librarian II limps to the finish. The climactic scene involves what seem to be fireworks superimposed on some mountains, to signify stuff blowing up real big. Wyle’s charisma is the only thing compensating for the craptastic nature of the rest of the movie, but even Harrison Ford in his prime would have been dragged down by something this dire. It’s a shame, as Wyle is clearly enjoying the chance to play a cheeky adventurer and is pretty good at it.

Productions like this are an exercise in frustration to watch: you can see what they were going for and how they could have made it work at least somewhat better, given a thorough script polish and a larger budget. As it stands, the time, money and effort actually invested seem completely wasted on a half-hearted product that won’t raise anyone’s pulse. The lesson here is: do something well, or don’t do it at all. This is exactly the kind of generic, inferior movie that life’s too short to waste time on.

Movie Review: Bear Nation

2011-06-18T20:29:00.003+01:00

I recently caught the documentary Bear Nation at a gay and lesbian film festival. It’s about the international community of ‘bears’ - heavy gay gentlemen, generally furry – but also about their fans and about how they relate to other gay men.The topic fascinated me because of the idea of a subculture within a subculture and because I was interested to see how it would frame the generally very lookist gay scene and the bears’ place in it. Also, I am a fan of Kevin Smith’s podcast Smodcast and a few of those shows featured director Malcolm Ingram (a gay bear himself). For Bear Nation, Malcolm did interviews with bears and admirers and visited various places where bears gather, including a bear convention.

When it comes to the interviews, my feeling is that he got in too close with the camera, to the point where the (literal) closeness gets claustrophobic. I assume he was trying to make the conversations feel intimate and personal, but having the camera right up to someone’s face is mostly just distracting, especially when the face is then blown up to cinema screen size. A bit disappointing was the lack of depth to the documentary: a selection of men within the scene air their opinion and we follow some of them ‘in the wild’, but an outside perspective is pretty much lacking and the documentary seems to be cheerleading the bear scene, rather than giving an in-depth analysis of it. The fact that being heavily overweight could be detrimental to your health, for instance, is pretty much ignored. As is the story of how the really heavy bears got into that shape. Was it a conscious choice, a rejection of the norm or a different idea of beauty? Did it just happen to them and is it now a question of self-acceptance and owning it? However, there are a few contrary thoughts – such as: why are we segregating ourselves and turning away others, when that is exactly what we dislike about other parts of the gay scene? But the overall tone is one of collected opinions, rather than any overarching conclusion.

Several of the bears who are interviewed, have a strong view of the ‘mainstream’ gays, in particular with regards to the ones who are obsessed with cultivating muscle and showing it off. Though the bear scene is said to be more accepting of everyone, appearance not being an issue, there seems to be a combination of bitterness and envy when it comes to gym bunnies who cling to the traditional ideal of the buff or lean and defined male. A few of the interviewees see those guys as girly by definition, not really manly like a great big bear. The documentary registers this opinion but doesn’t point out the lack of logic behind it: there is no correlation between muscles and masculinity, but a big belly doesn’t make someone masculine either, in and of itself. There are bears on display within the documentary who by their existence disprove this ‘bear = inherently masculine’ theory. (Note that femininity is seen as a bad thing here.) Though there is pride connected to being a bear, you still wonder by the end of the documentary if the subculture is primarily based on that pride or based on rejection by the gay mainstream.

I can’t really say I learnt anything new from Bear Nation. I was hoping for a sharper discussion between (especially) gym bunnies and bears, both sides making arguments and pointing out the flaws in each other’s worldview. As it stands, it’s just about interesting enough to stick with, even though some of the points it makes get repetitive and it struggles to fill its 87 minutes. But it is nice to have someone put an often neglected subculture center stage, even if the only real conclusion is somewhat obvious: everyone deserves to love and be loved, regardless of – literally – the shape they’re in.

Gamer Rant: Easy Now!

2011-05-21T12:03:00.011+01:00

Oops, it happened again. About three-quarters of the way through a game I was really enjoying, there was a difficulty spike and I got stuck. Not the kind of stuck where an online walkthrough would help, the kind of stuck that would require dexterity and a very quick trigger-finger or failing that: lots and lots of time and some dumb luck. I tried until irritation and frustration throttled the life out of my enthusiasm and interest, then I took the game out of my X-Box 360 and shoved it among other games mentally tagged as ‘maybe I’ll try it again someday… but probably not'.

The game in question: Enslaved – Odyssey to the West. I picked it up on the basis of good reviews which praised the engaging story, genuinely likeable characters and great graphics, while lamenting the just-average gameplay. And I was really enjoying the experience, right up to the point where I ended up wanting to pitch my controller through my flat screen television. Unfortunately, the same thing has happened to me before, most recently with Batman: Arkham Asylum, where a fight threw one too many waves of mindless minions at me for me to push through.

Of course, it is hard to set a proper, slowly climbing difficulty curve for a game, since you are dealing with a wide variety of players and not everyone is equally skilled. (For instance: I am aware that I am relatively weak when it comes to fighting games.) You are also trying to please people with a range of different mindsets. There are the hardcore gamers who thrive on exploring every inch of a game, replaying the entire thing on the hardest difficulty setting, collecting achievements and extra’s to impress themselves and their equally hardcore friends. These are presumably people with more time than money to spend on new games. On the other hand, I – as a 35 year old gamer working fulltime – have more money to spend than time. I couldn’t care less about impressing anyone when I am gaming and I avoid getting riled up and competitive with complete strangers online. For me, gaming is also about being challenged – sure – but primarily about relaxation, entertainment and immersing myself into an interesting story, with ditto characters and environments and about experiencing novel and diverse gameplay. I prefer a great, short game to a good, long game and I don’t think I am the only thirty-something with this approach to gaming.

The one thing I hate to waste is time. By which I mean: spending it doing something I don’t enjoy. Like replaying a level of a game (or a part of it at least) over and over again. This is why I avoid games I am interested in purely on the basis of reviews mentioning a badly handled ‘save’ system. The kind that forces you to replay a lot or increases the chances of you getting stuck somewhere. I remember the enjoyable Buffy – The Vampire Slayer game for the original X-Box having a tricky series of instant-death jumps too far away from a save point. 90% into the game, my patience ultimately caved and I buried Buffy in a digital graveyard. The world did not get saved. It’s really a shame because something like this retroactively sucks a lot of the joy out of the parts of the game you DID get to enjoy. The story, the adventure feels unfinished. I’ll likely end up passively watching some of the later cutscenes from Enslaved on YouTube instead of experiencing the whole game and recommending it to friends.

Recent games have gotten better at setting up forgiving save systems and now it is time for more game developers to do the same with difficulty levels. It is fairly stupid that you have to select the difficulty level before starting up a game, when you have no idea what the benchmark is. Starting with ‘easy’ would make me feel like an infant and I have beaten plenty of games on ‘normal’ so that is what I tend to go with. However, if a game is deceptively easy at first, only to slam you into a brick wall when the end is in sight, you may be well and truly screwed. Some games like Batman: Arkham Asylum and Enslaved leave you just one option: restart from the beginning at a lower difficulty level. What should be standard is a system like the one employed by – for instance – Dragon Age: Origins: when I ran into a frustrating boss, I simply lowered the bar to ‘easy’ to make it past, then raised it to ‘normal’ again. Did it hurt my pride to do that? Not really. I am an adult: I weighed fun against frustration and made a rational decision on how to spend my time. Did it allow me to enjoy the rest of the journey? Yup, and that’s what matters. Give away all the achievements you want to hardcore gamers for going through the entire game without fiddling with the difficulty level, I just want to enjoy the ride and see how it all ends. As of now, I will be checking to see if a game that seems of interest has the option to fiddle. If It does not, it doesn’t get my money: no more dead ends for me. Life’s too sho

Book Review: Sex at Dawn

2011-05-15T13:35:00.003+01:00

The Savage Love podcast pointed me to the book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá. It takes a critical look at traditional assumptions about men and women and their actual behavior when it comes to sex and relationships. If monogamous marriage is the ideal, then why does it fail with such alarming frequency and make even a lot of the people who stick with it unhappy?

The book provides the following answer: men and women are not naturally monogamous and centuries of being in denial about this has culturally put our psyche and sex drives through the wringer. The authors quite convincingly posit that scientists throughout the centuries have been guilty of ‘Flinstonization’: projecting their opinions into the past and distorting things to make them fit the worldview of their own era, which generally was seen as far superior. For instance: primitive (‘savage’) cavemen were supposed to have lived short and violent lives. Likely not true: since groups of hunter-gatherers had large areas to forage, with a plentiful supply of food, there would have been no need for violence. The short life-span is a statistical distortion caused by adding child mortality into the total average, dragging the life expectancy of adults way down. A very similar thing happened with the calculation of how tall people used to be thousands of years ago: not as big of a difference as is now generally assumed. We did not come as ‘far’ as we may want to think.

The pop culture cliché of a caveman dragging a woman into his cave by her hair is baseless. The authors theorize (again, quite convincingly) that it is far more likely that men and women lived in a sort of commune, on equal footing if not in a matriarchy, in which both men and women had various sexual partners at any one time and raised children together. The fact that it wasn’t clear who the father was in any given case, meant the children belonged to the group as a whole and everyone felt responsible for them. There are some interesting indicators for this. Why, for instance, do men generally last a lot shorter in the sack than women, the man needing recuperation when the woman is just getting warmed up? And why are women a lot more vocal than men, as if to call attention (and maybe further partners) to the activity going on, even if in the wild this would have been at the risk of attracting predators as well? And at the risk of getting too graphic: why are the heads of penises designed to suction out the semen previous partners may have left behind and why does semen have elements in it that would neutralize that of another man while protecting the own team from one that might drop by shortly after? This kind of sperm competition is generally seen in polygamous species.

The coming of agriculture and personal possessions to be passed on ‘within the family’ changed a lot of things and not in a good way: to make sure the children doing the inheriting were not ‘bastards’, women suddenly needed to be controlled, their sexuality vilified or simply denied. Masturbation – a natural and even (by current research) healthy drive – was seen as Evil for centuries, through various forms of rationalization by some deeply twisted ‘scientists’. Reading the chapters about this, you can’t help but feel angry at the physical and mental torture people went through in the name of pious morality.

That’s not to say the authors end the book with a plea for us all to run into the woods and resume living in communes like those we lived in thousands of years ago. Culturally speaking, in any case, we are too far removed from those roots. But they point out that society has expectations that run contrary to our natural drives and that this has to be acknowledged if nothing else. Being honest about our drives and feelings can actually help marriages and save people a lot of heartache.

Example of a relationship going horribly wrong: a woman may fall in love and couple up with one type of guy while on the pill, go off the pill to get pregnant and then find her hormones uninterested in her partner but interested in an entirely different type of guy. Often by this time there will be a marriage and kids to deal with. Meanwhile, her partner may feel frustrated by his lack of sexual variety and lose sexual interest in his wife. Happiness does not ensue.

Sex at Dawn is a fascinating read and I have just scratched the surface in this review. (For instance, I didn’t get to mention that, while lesbians, gays and straight men have a generally pretty fixed sexuality past the formative age, (mostly-)straight women’s sexual response turns out to be highly unpredictable and all over the map. And don’t get me started on the Bonobo’s…) The book is written in a very accessible way and though the middle bit feels just a touch dry compared to the rest, there is humor and a large amount of interesting factoids to keep you reading. (Random quote: ‘Darwin says your mother’s a whore.’) Sex is not always the big deal it is made out to be and confusing love and sex can lead to dramatic complications for all involved. Open discussion is key. So: discuss. This book makes an excellent starting point for that.

Note: The paperback edition of Sex at Dawn will be published in June.

(Written for the ABC Blog.)

Movie Review: Scream 4

2011-04-26T09:20:00.004+01:00

‘New Decade, New Rules’ the poster for Scream 4 claims. But then again, the poster for Scream 3 claimed: ‘Rules of a trilogy: Chapter one sets the rules. Chapter two bends the rules. But in the finale...forget the rules.’ This did not prevent the ‘final’ chapter in the trilogy from rehashing rules all over the place and being the least fresh. Scream 4 promises a reassessment of the current state of horror-movies and there are indeed references to recent humorless, gory horror-porn franchises, like the Saw series. However, in between an impressively ‘meta’ opening (commenting on horror that comments on itself) and a pretty inventive – if not totally satisfying – ending, the viewer gets more of the same ol’, same ol’. Sidney returns to Woodsboro to promote a book about how she got over the traumatic experience of the first three (!) killing sprees she lived through. Cue a killer (or killers) wearing the infamous Ghostface mask, who run(s) around after hysterical teenagers with a sharp knife, slaughtering them if at all possible, occasionally pausing to make menacing phone-calls in a gravelly voice.

The main ‘new rule’ is said to be that ‘the unexpected is now expected’. Which doesn’t really mean much, when you think about it, since it’s circular. Tension is created here as it is in most horror movies: by toying with expectations. There are some set-ups that don’t pay off, some that do and there are some surprise shocks thrown in, all to keep the viewer a little off-balance and enjoying their ride on the rollercoaster. It’s skillfully executed, but it doesn’t feel like the Scream franchise is treading new ground, mixing somewhat predictable pop culture references, with self-referential laughs and violence. Much like in Scream 3, the humor and scares tend to step on each other’s toes, causing some jokes to fall flat and the violence to lack impact. It doesn’t help that the movie fails to make you care about the new characters - who make some amazingly dumb decisions - and makes the returning trio of Sidney (Neve Campbell), Dewey (David Arquette) and Gale (Courteney Cox) less relatable than they were in the original movies. It’s hard to get invested in a horror movie if you don’t actually care who lives and who dies. To its credit however, you do keep playing the ‘who is the killer’ guessing game throughout and don’t feel cheated by the answer.

Considering that the movie seems to be treading water, it’s surprising that screenwriter Kevin Williamson (Dawson’s Creek, The Vampire Diaries) pitched this movie as the first of a new trilogy. It seems to indicate that he still has some new tricks up his sleeve. If so, he’d better start pulling them out in greater amounts for the next chapter or risk the audience getting too bored. The movie had a so-so opening and it’s not clear if he will get the opportunity to spread out the plot in the way he intended to do. What does seem clear, is that the franchise lives or dies with the writer in this case: Williamson was barely involved in Scream 3 and only partly in Scream 4, resulting in a noticeably less tight script, the balance between funny and scary being off in ways that did not seem intended and in the dialogue being less sharp.

The movie is getting relatively good scores on the IMDB from ‘regular’ viewers, who I imagine must mostly be new to the series (so it feels fresh to them) or dedicated fans, sticking by their franchise. In any case, this could indicate there’s more life in the Scream saga yet, as long as it manages to make money.

NITPICKS (very mild spoilers): We have had four killing sprees now, perpetrated by quite a few separate killers, if you add them up. Where did all these people get the training to sneak around without a sound and the ability to disappear into thin air when someone looks away for a second? Is there a Ghostface School of Murder somewhere, teaching these tricks? Why would you go out on the town and get drunk, knowing there’s a killer after you? Why – in gun-happy America – doesn’t any of the victims-to-be grab a gun and just shoot that Ghostface motherf*cker already? Wouldn’t at least Sidney be carrying one around at all time, just in case? And speaking of guns: giving someone who has his/her finger on the trigger of a gun an electric shock, would result in the finger cramping up and pulling said trigger. You’ll see why this is problematic if you go see the movie.

Television Review: Fringe (Seasons 1-3(ish))

2011-04-25T19:14:00.004+01:00

As seems to happen with a lot of series, Fringe didn’t find its footing straight away. It appeared to be a half-hearted X-Files rip-off, with science that stretched believability to the breaking point and with a less charismatic cast. The first episodes focus on the formation of the Fringe team. Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) gets drafted into the Fringe division of the FBI, looking into events that seemingly defy explanation. Borderline crazy scientist Walter Bishop (John Noble) is picked to aid her, who is looked after by his son Peter (Joshua Jackson) and assisted in the lab by agent Astrid Farnsworth (Jasika Nicole). Olivia’s boss, her FBI partner and a shady lady who runs the Massive Dynamic science corporation complete the main cast.

Initially the series jumps from strange event to strange event without quite making connections between them, while awkwardly handling its leads. Tradition seems to demand romantic tension between Olivia and Peter but it’s barely there. Peter and Astrid aren’t given much to do, Walter seems a collection of tics and oddness in need of a personality, Olivia is a little flat and her FBI colleagues don’t register much either. The pseudo-science occasionally leads to prolonged bouts of eye-rolling. Example: in one episode Peter succeeds in playing back sound waves supposedly caught in a slightly melted window, forming grooves like those on a record. He is able to recover an actual conversation this way, while the weary viewer just shakes his (or her) head in utter disbelief.

Just as I was about to bail on Fringe, it hooked me and reeled me back in. An overarching plot, which had previously only had been hinted at, comes to the fore near the end of season one and saves the day. As it turns out, there is an alternate reality that has dubious intentions with our version, for reasons too spoiler-filled to get into. This new revelation is spun in such a way that Peter becomes a pivotal part of the plot and Walter becomes a more complex and sympathetic – if very flawed – character. Olivia’s personality gets fleshed out as well, as she discovers a unique aspect of herself. Alas, Astrid still remains a bit one-dimensional until well into season two; no wonder Walter always has trouble getting her name right. Because of the extra layers that the alternate reality story arc brings to the interpersonal relationships all around, the crew starts to feel more cohesive, almost like a family, which allows viewers to emotionally invest in the series.

I am currently watching the first half of the third season and the set-up is creative and interesting: each week the show jumps from one of the two warring realities to the other. So one week will tell a story in ‘our’ universe, the next in the other, then ours again, then the alternate and so on… It is without a doubt the best string of episodes so far. To the relief of fans, Fringe was recently picked up for a fourth season. It was touch-and-go for a while, as the series is struggling in the ratings; the amount of back-story and the playing around with alternate versions of the main characters is the best part of the series, but may also baffle someone who is tuning in for the first time. It will be interesting to see if the show drops some of the more complicated plotlines in order to survive or will continue along the road it is on, focusing on the dedicated fans. The second route would have my preference, as long as the story ultimately gets finished and is not suddenly cut off, as happens all too often with endangered television series. Fingers crossed that Fringe gets to tell the full story it was created to tell.

Television Review: Supernatural (Seasons 1-5)

2011-04-12T17:55:00.006+01:00

By all rights, Supernatural shouldn't have made it past a first season. It started off wobbly, without most of the mythology that became such a big part of the series later on. Initial episodes were primarily stand-alone, with the promise of a more overarching story. Each week Supernatural would shamelessly rip off the plot of a classic scary movie, cheerfully including various horror cliché’s. Some of these episodes were good, but a lot of them were decidedly 'blah', not hitting any home-runs in the plotting, writing or acting departments.

The set-up: Sam and Dean Winchester (played by Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles) are brothers. As kids - Sam was a mere baby - their mother died mysteriously, or to be more precise: burst into flames while floating against the ceiling above Sam's crib. The brothers were dragged around by their father for years, who - looking for an explanation for the impromptu barbecue - turned into a hunter of demons and other infernal beasties. Sam opted out in his teens and enrolled in college, trying to build a normal life for himself, but at the beginning of the series he is dragged back into the family business. Cue the brothers hitting the road in their soon-to-be iconic Chevrolet Impala, looking for their dad and fighting the good fight as they go.

It's not until season two that things start to heat up - the mythology builds on itself and the cast of recurring characters grows a bit. Though the brothers always firmly remain the focus - the 'tough' wise-ass Dean a little more than his sensitive-but-with-a-major-dark-side brother - they also pick up a surrogate father in the shape of fellow ‘hunter’ Bobby Singer (Jim Beaver), giving the series more heart. By season four they even 'adopt' an Angel - yes, an actual Angel - called Castiel (Misha Collins) who starts off intimidating and ends up frequently hilarious, as he tries to interact with humanity.

Though Supernatural started out generic, it gained a distinct personality as it went (somewhere in-between The X-Files and Buffy - The Vampire Slayer), making it a pleasure to watch. The chemistry between the main cast didn't gel straight away, but grew solid over time. And the series became great at poking fun at its own silliness, mostly by way of Dean's sarcastic one-liners, but also through self-aware and occasionally postmodern scripting. At one point a writer turns up who is writing about the brothers’ adventures in the form of a series of pulp novels called Supernatural. (There is a complicated explanation for this, of course.) Consequently, Sam and Dean end up walking among fans of the book-series, during a convention where everyone is impersonating them. The Winchester brothers also come across online fan-fiction based on the books, labeled ‘Wincest’ - which is a phenomenon that, somewhat disturbingly, actually exists. Use your imagination to guess what it entails. To quote Sam: “These people are sick!” To be fair, the writers of the television series are partially to blame for the erotica, as a recurring joke throughout the series is that the brothers are mistaken for a gay couple. Further postmodernism ensues when the brothers leap into the bodies of two actors (called Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, of course), the stars of a television series called Supernatural. At one point during that episode, actual series creator Eric Kripke makes an on-screen appearance, only to get gunned down in slow-motion.

Over the seasons, the stakes have been raised higher and higher; by the end of season five the Winchesters have both already died at least once, but dying only slowed them down for a couple of episodes on each occasion. Things culminated in a battle between Heaven and Hell, the brothers getting caught at the center of things. It's not surprising to learn that this was supposed to be the ending for the series initially, but Supernatural still did so well it was renewed. Creator Kripke left the show, leaving executive producer Sera Gamble to figure out where to go next. Time will tell if the series has peaked, as it will be hard to beat the dramatic high of seasons four and five. For the moment though, the tongue-in-cheek-yet-serious adventures of the brothers, their substitute dad and the loopy Angel still make for compulsive viewing.

Game Review: Alan Wake

2011-02-11T21:06:00.006Z

The first two words spoken by the narrator & lead of the X-Box game Alan Wake are ‘Stephen King’, which could be a respectful homage ór a plea to the writer to please not sue the company behind the game (Remedy Entertainment) for so obviously feeding off his ideas. In the game, a bestselling novelist with writer’s block and his girlfriend go on holiday to one of those small, typically American towns that reek of Twin Peaks. There are log-cabins, lumberyards, misty forests and – as it happens – there is an Evil force that lives off people’s creativity. Before long, Wake has a memory lapse, his girlfriend goes missing and shadowy figures that seem to have sprung right out of the pages of one of his own manuscripts are after him in a bad, homicidal way. It’s up to Wake to save his lover, the town and even the world, all while trying to retain his precarious grip on reality.

Mood and story are the main event in Alan Wake. It is a very polished game: it looks great, sounds great and it’s as atmospheric as survival horror games get. Like Silent Hill, Dead Space and The Suffering, this is the sort of game that needs to be played at night with the lights off and headphones on. You will be running through dimly lit streets, factories, abandoned buildings and miles of creepy forest and will soon learn to fear the sudden gusts of wind and mist that signal the arrival of packs of murderous, glowy-eyed rednecks, about to pour themselves at you from the shadows. The game is very clear about one thing: light is good, darkness is bad and the first can be used to beat the latter. Battle in Alan Wake entails pointing a flashlight at an enemy to weaken his bad mojo and then putting a well-aimed bullet or two into his head. Bullets and batteries for the flashlight are both in short supply, so some strategy and a little trial-and-error are necessary. There are also flash-bangs and flares, the first one doing a lot of damage in a short burst, the second one clearing an area around you for a while, handy when you’re in danger of being overwhelmed or want to clear yourself a path. Often the bad guys don’t stop coming and your only option is to fend them off while on the run. The game makes clever use of save points: you are constantly rushing towards the next pool of light – beneath a lamppost or inside a building – and reaching one doesn’t just save you, it also automatically saves your progress. Relief all around.

Manuscript pages – possibly written by yourself at some point – can be found all over the place as you go. They describe people you met or are about to meet and situations you already lived through or upcoming ones you hope you will survive. It effectively deepens your involvement in the story and builds tension – like when you find a page predicting you will face someone with a big chainsaw and then hear the dreaded sound start up in the dark a while later, remembering with a shock what is about to happen.

The original game has a somewhat ambiguous ending – which I won’t spoil – and the story continues in two downloadable titles: The Signal and The Writer. Narratively speaking the two just about cancel each other out, which was presumably done on purpose so someone could just finish the main game and then skip straight to the inevitable full sequel without feeling like they missed something in-between. These expansions get a bit more detached from reality and more playful: you can shine your flashlight on words to make them shimmer and transform them into the thing they signify. For instance: if you see the word ‘bridge’ floating about, you can light it up and let a bridge pop into existence. The game gets creative with this concept. At one point you are walking through a minefield of words, most of them trouble, trying to avoid touching them with your beam, at another you are besieged, running among hills that blast apart when you hit the word ‘light’ (or something similar), bathing the area in cleansing light from a nearby lighthouse.

Alan Wake is a great game for people who like a very linear, controlled experience. A sandbox-game this is not: you can explore areas a little at the risk of getting jumped by enemies, but you can’t get too far off course and there is just one way to go ultimately. Ammo is tightly managed: if you succeed in carrying over ammo from one save point to the next for a while – good for you. But the game makes a habit of regularly taking it all away in a cut-scene, forcing you to rebuild your limited arsenal.

Alan Wake takes itself pretty seriously for the most part, though there is room for humor and most of the characters are good for a laugh, such as Alan Wake’s loudmouthed agent Barry Wheeler and two elderly rockstars who used to be in Viking-themed band called ‘Valhalla’. Some of the more artificial gameplay elements stretch believability. Just who has been leaving stashes of guns, ammo, flares, flashlights and batteries all over the place? The game gives an explanation, but it seems a bit half-hearted. Downright silly and pointless are the coffee-thermoses you can find all over and collect. I am not sure who decided those were a good idea, but they challenge realism for no good reason. Speaking of which, there is one glitch in the animation that is scary but was likely not intended to be: the mouths sometimes look freaky when characters are talking. Especially the jaw of Alan Wake’s girlfriend eerily looks like that of a ventriloquist doll, limply bouncing up and down as she talks. Let’s hope they fix it for the sequel.

I am not sure where else they can take Alan Wake. The unique flashlight-plus-gun concept seems tapped out by the end of the game, so a thorough shake-up of the formula would be needed. And I wonder how much more playing with the line between fact and fiction they can do without the plot entirely disappearing up its own backside. But I had a great time experiencing this game, so I’m curious to find out.

Movie Review: In the Name of the King – a Dungeon Siege Tale

2011-01-15T20:50:00.006Z

It has been a good long time since I saw a movie as massively, unintentionally cheesy as In the Name of the King. Lured into purchasing it on Blu-Ray as part of a batch offer, I already had my doubts about a film being marketed just on the basis of the lead having been in The Expendables. But seeing Jason Statham’s hunky face on the cover made me walk into the trap regardless: I’m just superficial that way. After the purchase, I took better look at the director and saw the name Uwe Boll, in very tiny print. It was then that I knew for sure I’d been had.

Uwe Boll is known for his ability to make bad movie adaptations of game franchises, such as Bloodrayne, Alone in the Dark and Far Cry. They are said to be generic and uninteresting at best, hilariously bad at worst. He once famously challenged his unflagging critics to take him on in the ring and settle their score man-to-man, apparently believing he could prove the quality of his work by punching a critic in the face. To be fair, based on his reputation I had always avoided his movies like the plague and had never given him a fair shake. But going by this movie, I should just have taken other people’s word for it and spared myself two hours of low-budget mediocrity. The whole project is po-faced, misjudged and wobbly in all aspects from acting and script to special effects. Even the passionless soundtrack conspires to makes things drag.

In the Name of the King – a Dungeon Siege Tale is based on a Role-Playing game I know nothing about and stars Jason Statham as Farmer, whose day-job is evident from his name. He has a son and a wife, but not for long, as soon they are both taken from him by the ‘Krug’, who look suspiciously like Trolls and were probably renamed to sound less generic. The Krug have a silly semi-gorilla walk with corresponding sounds, unconvincing bodysuits and never let you forget that there must be an actor inside, feeling very bad for himself. There is a magical mastermind pulling the Krug’s strings (the ever-evil Ray Liotta) and his plan is to take over the land by getting rid of the king (a strangely tightfaced and overly made up Burt Reynolds), with help from the king’s weakling nephew (Matthew Lillard, better known as Shaggy from the Scooby Doo movies). Not to spoil anything, but Farmer stops him. The end.

I have left out some other characters like a magus/magician (the elsewhere admirable John Rhys-Davies) and Farmer’s daddy substitute (the elsewhere fantastic Ron Perlman), but then none of them is especially memorable and they remain firmly 2D, if not 1D. One or two of the minor characters even risk travelling into negative space. It is the script’s fault that people don’t really say the things that would make the most sense in any given circumstance and that what does come out of their mouth sounds stilted, but since Boll is the producer and director, blame still lands on his plate. Watching the movie, I kept being tempted to reach into my television, yank out the script and do a quick rewrite. I also wanted to rewrite the beginning and get rid of a ‘twist’ that was probably intended as gritty and shocking, but really is just severely emotionally misjudged. It sets the wrong tone and shows that the makers are in denial about making a goofy fantasy action movie.

Even though In the Name of the King is very long and feels like it, somehow it doesn’t get around to putting in all the information you need to comprehend what is going on. For instance: there is a baffling group of semi-ninja warriors that just appear in the middle of a battle – on two occasions – without set-up or explanation afterwards. If only Boll had tightened up the story, got rid of some unnecessary characters and scenes, cut out about 30-45 minutes and used the extra budget to invest in a dialogue polish and better special effects… This might have enabled them to make the fight scenes look like more than just a live roleplaying session in the woods. On the other hand, this would probably have meant we would have had to do without the awesomely silly tree-people who swing around on vines and are able to use them to attack people by way of unconvincing computer graphics.

It’s a mystery how Uwe Boll keeps getting the chance to make more movies. There always seem to be people willing to invest some money in his projects – as a tax write-off, perhaps - and some actors willing to spend time hamming it up and chewing the low-budget scenery. I don’t understand why all of the at least somewhat known actors I mentioned didn’t take one look at the script and at Boll’s reputation and ran in the opposite direction. The sounds of agents getting fired must have been everywhere during and after the filming. Beefcake Statham fulfills the stoic hero part as best as he can, given the circumstances, but is a lot more fun in movies where he has a sense of humor than in flicks like this and The Transporter, where he is typecast as a frowning, one-note action man.

To end on a positive note… uhmm… well, I guess some of the computer-generated vistas are actually quite nice and the Blu-Ray picture quality is crisp and clean. That’s pretty much all I can come up with.

Despite this movie being a massive commercial flop, a sequel starring Dolph Lundgren is in the works, once again directed by Uwe Boll. God(s) help us all.

Television Review: Castle (Seasons 1 & 2)

2011-01-09T19:45:00.006Z

Castle is like a box of chocolates. Not one of those where you don’t know what you’re going to get – far from it - but rather one filled with that one special kind of bon-bon you can’t stop eating ‘just one more’ of, even though it’s empty calories and it will make you feel bloated afterwards. (Yes, I’m gay.) It’s a very entertaining but very formulaic quirky crime-solving series, closely related to Bones and Psych.

In a rather precarious and unbelievable set-up for a continuing series, famous pulp-thriller writer Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) starts shadowing NYPD detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic). He has recently killed off his cash cow of a main character and is basing his new one (‘Nicki Heat’) on her. He is connected to people in politically high places and to keep them happy, the NYPD is allowing him to follow her around apparently indefinitely. It’s stated that he wants to make all the details in his book ‘authentic’ and this would explain why he needs to be around 24-7 for months on end. As time management goes, this is not the most efficient way of going about things, but since Castle helps Beckett unravel the tangled narrative behind each crime – there are no straightforward murders in this precinct - he proves useful and they grow ever closer.

Their cheery witticisms while hovering over a dead body can come across as somewhat insensitive, but playfulness is what this series is about. I doubt the NYPD deals with things like ‘death by gargoyle’, frozen corpses left lying around and naked, handcuffed, dead ladies covered in caramel sauce on a regular basis. If you are expecting hard-boiled and realistic, you will be disappointed. Though during the first couple of episodes Beckett states a few times that most crime shows are removed from reality and that Rick Castle will now experience how an investigation ‘really’ works, the series is soon employing shortcuts for the convenience of the plot and making your eyes roll. Investigations that would take a huge amount of time get magically condensed and after a complicated intrigue has been brought to light, there is always some evidence to support it – as luck would have it - even though it is often circumstantial and a prosecutor would have a tough time getting a conviction. This doesn’t matter much, as generally the killers are all too easily pushed into a confession. These groan-inducing moments that not only stretch believability but sometimes even fold it into an entertaining balloon animal, don’t spoil the fun, but you start to wonder about some convenient narrative crutches: when will murderers learn not to use their perfectly traceable credit-card to buy stuff they will use for their kill or in the vicinity of their prospective victim around the time of the murder?

The average episode follows this predictable structure: body gets found in odd circumstances - cute scene with Castle in his very expensive loft with sweet daughter and/or cohabitating eccentric mother – he gets called to the murder scene - he and Beckett interview a succession of suspects, buoyed by revelations, imagination and ever-present snippets of evidence – until a slightly more well-known tv-actor than the other interviewees/suspects from the first part of the episode turns out to be the killer. Engaging characters and dialogue keep the recipe from growing stale. Castle’s family set-up is on the verge of being too cute, but generally manages to charm you into submission. The ‘will they or won’t they’ romantic vibe between the two leads also keeps things interesting, though the series doesn’t seem to be in a rush to move this plot-point forward. Sensibly, perhaps, as series from the past have proven that there is really nowhere interesting to go once you couple up your leads (*cough* Moonlighting *cough*). Sure, you can have them get together and break them up maybe once and then still keep them circling each other, but the audience will lose patience. Did anyone really still want Ross and Rachel to even be on the same screen towards the end of Friends?

Nathan Fillion steals the show as a charming wise-ass, the kind of role he seems born to play, whether he turns out to be a space cowboy, a supervillain or a pulp fiction writer. However, the rest of the cast is equally game and a pleasure to watch. If you don’t mind the occasional ‘yeah, right’ moment and can appreciate fun shows that aren’t all that intellectually nourishing, the Castle crowd is a good one to hang out with. A warning about the whistled tune at the beginning of each episode: after watching a couple of episodes in quick succession, it might get stuck in your head. Forever.

Review (sort of): Mass Effect 1 & 2 (X-Box 360)

2010-12-26T18:37:00.007Z

I have always been fascinated by interactive storytelling. I remember being a big fan of the Fighting Fantasy books by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone as a wee tyke. These fantasy or scifi-themed books would allow you to choose your own adventure, along the lines of: ‘If you want to check out the spooky hovel on your left, go to page 235. If you would rather head into the ominous cavern on your right, go to page 42.’ Looking back on it, it was pretty much just a paper version of the text adventures you could play on your pc. You’d be running around on a lofty mission with death lurking around every corner: a bad choice, a bad roll of the die, or just plain bad luck could have you flipping back to the last page you remembered going to before you ‘died’ (for this reason, I kept a meticulous cheat sheet with all the pages I’d visited). There were several endings for each adventure, both good and bad. At some point there was even an adventure which featured two books that crossed over and could be played with a friend. That sort of interactive complexity totally blew my mind.

If I had come across Mass Effect at that point in time, I think I might have died of shock. Mass Effect is a computer game trilogy of which the first two parts have come out so far (part one in 2008, part two in 2010). They aim to tell a complete story – a space opera in which you save the galaxy quite a few times - spread out over all three games. Unique is that you can carry over your self-modeled character from one game to the next and that the choices you make in one part of the story affects how the story will unfold in the sequels. Games with multiple endings and meaningful choices are nothing new, but in combination with the sheer size of the universe and the amount of malleable characters in it, it can’t fail to impress: it’s interactive storytelling on a massive scale. Interesting is the amount of optional story spread all around. You can talk to any number of people (or aliens) with interesting things to say, deepening the world around you. Or you can ignore most of that and just shoot things.

Admittedly, I have found that in reality BioWare (the company behind the games) cheated a bit: no matter what choices you made, you will end up ultimately in the same set-pieces with changes (major or minor) to dialogue and cut-scenes. Game 1 (minor spoiler) makes you choose between two team members: one lives, one dies. In game 2 you have a scene with the surviving one, but on a grander scale, it doesn’t matter much which of the two made it there. The attitude and dialogue options you get from certain characters may vary, but not in a very consequential way. And the main set-up for the second game, regardless of what happened in part one, is fixed: get enrolled by a morally dubious organization, gather team for vital mission, gain loyalty of team members (optional), upgrade ship and team (optional) and lead them on said ‘suicide’ mission. You can do all this following the way of the Renegade (a ‘goals justifies the means’ bad-ass) or as a Paragon (a morally upright goody-two-shoes): the difference is mostly in the dialogue, not in the follow-up. However, if you left certain characters – minor or major - alive in the first game, you might come across them in the second one and have a chat. They will ‘remember’ how you handled them during that first encounter.

If you skip the upgrades and loyalty missions, things will end badly, so although this is optional in theory, you sort of have to do both. But then, rushing through the game would be missing the point in any case: the emphasis on story and immersion is what makes Mass Effect special. The game tries to make the main missions have an urgent feel to them – the clock is ticking for the universe after all – but somewhat counter-intuitively, you have to ignore that push in the back and take your time to bounce from one side-quest to the next as much as you can, until the next ‘main story’ mission ends up being the only thing available to you. Given how rich the created universe is, the action parts can come off as filler in-between narration. There’s enough variation to keep you entertained, but the ‘beats’ of a mission tend to be the same: bits of story in between moments when you end up in large spaces with a puzzling amount of stuff lying around for no other apparent reason than to serve as cover for you while you fight off various baddies. End with a slightly larger confrontation and an emotional climax, then on to the next mission. A lot of the fun is actually in the random detail, such as overhearing ridiculous conversations, buying a pointless ‘space hamster’ or giving a ringing celebrity endorsement to every single store on a space station for a little discount until you hear your voice echoing everywhere: ‘I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite store on the Citadel!’

Mass Effect has run-and-gun as well as RPG elements to it. The first game required a lot more inventory and ‘stats’ management than the second one does. As an adult with limited time, I greatly appreciated the boiling down of the concept to just the best bits: characters, action and adventure without too much micromanagement. I also appreciated Mass Effect gaining more of a sense of humor in the sequel, after the slightly too clinical part 1. The third one will apparently follow the same approach as part 2. I hope that the total of decisions you made in the first two games will have a bigger impact this time around. Ideally, not just the cut-scenes and dialogue but also the set-pieces leading up to the big climax(es) will be variable. However, I have a feeling that the tight production schedule of games would preclude the development time needed to make two essentially different second-halves for Mass Effect 3. In any case, it will be at the top of my to-buy list. While I appreciate the slightly geekier, RPG-driven sprawling stories and the atmosphere of a choice-heavy game like Fallout 3, Mass Effect 2’s sleeker, more polished approach to epic storytelling is – for me – the direction more games should be heading in. Should you dive in, make sure you start with the original Mass Effect though: things heat up in the sequel, but it’s just a waste to miss out on the beginning of this continuing story.

From Bored to Board

2010-11-30T12:45:00.002Z

Games at the ABC, board or otherwise, by Steven
(written for the American Book Center Blog)
Reading is a great way to spend your free time, but can be a bit solitary. Gaming with others makes for a good change of pace, but a lot of digital gaming systems like the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are focusing on online multiplayer games, so you still end up at home alone. More ‘gezellig’ is definitely inviting people over for some face-to-actual-face time around a table. Instead of cussing each other out over a microphone, you can eat, drink and be merry, while having a game experience together. There are different group dynamics you can go for: in some games you compete or actively try to trip up other players, in others you work together to achieve a common goal. So even if you are not particularly competitive, you can still have a good time with a board game.
Pandemic is a good example of cooperative play: you have to band together to stop a disease from spreading across the globe and dooming humanity. Surely a noble way to spend an evening.
There are a lot of games, with a broad range of themes, to be found at ABC, both in The Hague and on the first floor in Amsterdam. Some of them don’t require a board, just cards you can carry around with you for a game on-the-go. Our selection ranges from games that are easy to pick up and play in a couple of minutes to complex games that can last three hours or more. The last category (containing games like Arkham Horror and Battlestar Galactica – the board game) requires a bit of a time investment when it comes to figuring out the rules, but makes up for that by depth of play and these games can really drag you and your gaming group into a particular world.
If you are a bit daunted by the amount of games on offer, not sure which one to pick, you can of course ask our ABC crew for advice, but there are also sites that can help you find a game to suit you and your particular group of friends.The main site to go to for information is BoardGameGeek. They rate games, feature reviews and game session reports by players, have tons of themed ‘geek’ lists, post alternate rules if the original ones for a game are ‘broken’ and give vital statistics on a game, like: average play time, recommended amount of players, recommended age and so on.
There is also plenty to watch on YouTube: video reviews of games and tutorials for games, for people who find it easier to learn how to play this way than to read a manual. There are also flashy official trailers to be found for some games, if you want to hear the sales pitch. The most ‘present’ of reviewers is Tom Vasel, who has his own site The Dice Tower and a podcast. Seated in front of a wall of games, he gives articulate opinions. Another well-made YouTube feed of note, apart from ‘thedicetower‘, is ‘boardtodeathtv’. Additionally, there are somewhat less polished enthusiasts like ‘Grudunza’, ‘snicholson’, ‘theboardgamefamily’ and ‘Kerbster76’.
Currently in stock at The American Book Center are English versions of classics like Scrabble, Risk,Settlers of Catan, Monopoly and Carcassonne, but we also have games you might never have heard of:
Apples to Apples: A word game matching noun cards (i.e. “Abraham Lincoln”) to cards with adjectives (i.e.”frivolous”)
Fluxx: The card game with the continuously changing rules!
Munchkin: A very funny card game take on role-playing games.
Ticket to Ride: Connect your two train end destinations and try to monopolize as many routes as possible in the mean time.
Battlestar Galactica: Play as one of your favorite Battlestar Galactica characters and help save the last of humanity from the Cylon attacks. But who among you is secretly a Cylon themselves?
Axis & Allies: The World War II strategy game.
The following titles aren’t in our online database but should be in stock or available to order: Taboo,Zombie Dice, Harry Potter Hogwarts, Pandemic, Dungeon Quest, Arkham Horror and many others.
We also sell a lot of different Dungeons & Dragons guides, which help you set up a roleplaying session. And there are card sets for the well-known Magic: The Gathering card battle system.
If you can’t find a game you are interested in at our stores, ask at the register (first floor in Amsterdam or at The Hague), as we might be able to order it for you. If you want to get in touch with other gamers, come visit one of our game nights, visit Ducosim , join the Netherlands Roleplayer’s Guild or have a look atthis list of clubs.
Drop by on December 12th and game on!

Book Review: Under the Dome

2010-11-09T16:04:00.004Z

Dome Spells Doom for Dum-Dums

Stephen King’s latest, Under the Dome, is a massive literary achievement, at least in actual size. At over a thousand pages, this book can sprain wrists over a prolonged reading session and fracture skulls when wielded with evil intent. It’s not King’s longest work, at least if you count his multi-volume Dark Tower saga as a continuous story, but it’s a long-term commitment for the reader all the same. On the American cover, thriller writer Lee Child blurbs: ‘The Best Yet, From the Best Ever’. While calling King the ‘best ever’ is in the realm of outright silly hyperbole, the question remains: is this King’s crowning glory?

Well, not quite, but at least it comes within a Green Mile of being it. The concept is as follows: an invisible barrier – a ‘dome’, if you will – plonks down over one of those small, typically American towns King loves to write about. From there on, things swiftly proceed to hell in a hand basket. After the first death toll (a plane and multiple cars crash into it, people and animals get sliced in two), unwise behavior of people under pressure soon leads to more fatalities. Then the semi-permeable barrier starts to cloud up because of pollution, the temperature slowly begins to rise under it and the clock is clearly ticking for all those who are trapped.

The major catalyst for most things Bad are selectman/used car salesman ‘Big’ Jim Rennie and his son. The first stops at nothing to gain control over the town as soon as external authorities are cut off, the second is just plain psychotic. The most important players on the side of Good are former military man/cook Dale Barbara and Julia Shumway, owner of the local newspaper. They have to find a way to counter ‘Big’ Jim, while at the same time figuring out what is keeping the dome in place and how to make it go away. Complicating matters, especially in the second half of the book, is a meth lab which also ends up getting locked in.

As almost every review has pointed out – a little gleefully – Stephen King must have been annoyed when this exact concept (‘small American town caught under see-through dome’) played out in The Simpsons Movie for laughs. King has claimed that it doesn’t bother him though, as the execution of the idea was completely unlike his version. King definitely came up with it earlier: 25 years ago he already took a stab at the first chapter for the book – which he actually used this time around, mostly intact – but he gave up because he didn’t know how to make it work.

He does make it work this time around, though it’s not a complete success-story. First, the good. As always, King’s prose should come with racing stripes painted on the side. You are sped along, invested in the characters and interested to see what will happen next. There is always something exciting going on, so you don’t really ‘feel’ the length of the story, except in actual weight in your hands. There is the occasional duff, awkward line or simile but those are quickly passed by and forgotten. All of this is true of most of King’s books, whether he is going for straight-up horror or something more cerebral and literary. The basic set-up of Good versus Evil while under the assault of some overarching bad situation is also typical King. There isn’t a whole lot of moral grey area in the book: people are pretty much bad or good, with only a few stragglers lingering in the middle. Interestingly, there are a lot of Jesus-lovin’, Bible-thumpin’ hypocrites on the bad side.

As a deeper allegory for the True Nature of Humanity or for global warming, Under the Dome doesn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye. King cheats too much with the specifics of the town that is portrayed. When it comes to keeping the action going, he probably was wise in having someone truly, insidiously Evil under the dome to speed up the decline of civilization, but psychologically more interesting might have been a slower slide into decay of a more morally ambiguous crowd. He cheats on the environmental aspect by having a meth lab complicate things, instead of stewing people in a prolonged local simulation of global warming. More grey area and a longer time-frame could have made for a more profound – if slower – story.

A general criticism of King tends to be that the denouements of his books don’t live up to the skilful build-up. Unfortunately, the same goes for this one. Without getting into specifics or spoiling too much: for a large part of the book, things seem to be building up to a direct confrontation between Rennie, Barbie and their respective posse. Though there are some scuffles and casualties, the two main men never really face off. The ultimate explanation for the dome is also a bit vague and silly but ultimately irrelevant to the meat of the story: human behavior under extreme circumstances.

Is it the best of King? Probably not. I prefer him a bit more creepy and my personal favorite is still It, which scared the pants of me, admittedly when I was a lot younger. And he has written books with more depth to them. But it is definitely a very entertaining read and should not be passed up by anyone who fancies sinking his mind into a big chunk of blood-speckled suspense.

Television Review: Death Note

2010-09-26T19:16:00.004+01:00

I have seen some great anime movies (Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, Grave of the Fireflies, etc.) but anime series have never really appealed to me. There must have been some I watched as a kid, though none I can actually remember much about. As a grown-up, I think it was mostly stuff like Pokemon and Dragon Ball that made me steer clear of the genre. They seemed too dumb and meaningless for someone who’s past puberty. When I think of those series, I picture a lot of close-ups of distorted faces – disfigured by intense emotion or possibly constipation – with energetic lines around them, meant to convey fast motion while in slow motion. Dragon Ball in particular seems to use the ‘soap’ formula for telling its continuing story: it tells a very intense story at a frustratingly mellow pace. Interior monologue and hysterics get in the way of forward momentum; it’s like someone is trying to tell a story, but the brakes are on.

Out of curiosity and to test my own prejudice, I recently decided to try out an anime series. Thematically there are a lot of anime aimed at ‘mature’ audiences like me, featuring extreme violence and more gratuitous, kinky nudity of the female variety than a gay guy like me could possibly endure. But I was looking for something with a little depth to it, like most of the best anime movies have. Googling around, I found a series that was in the ‘top favorite’ list of a lot of anime fans: Death Note.

Death Note is about a very intelligent but morally misguided student (Light Yagami) who finds the Death Note of the title. This is a notebook in which demons known as Shinigami write down the names of people who are to die. Shinigami’s Western equal would be the figure of Death, minus a scythe, plus a notebook and with an odd fondness for apples. Because Light has found the Death Note, he automatically becomes the owner of it and the Shinigami gets tied to him. The Death Note is governed by all sorts of interesting – though somewhat random – rules for the series to play around with. (For a listing, look here.) The basic rule is this: if you write down someone’s name in the notebook, he or she will die of a heart attack unless you specify a cause and time of death. Light ambitiously sets out to rid the world of Evil with it, offing criminals all over the place from the safety of his bedroom. He makes his intention known publically under the adopted identity ‘Kira’. His intent may seem noble, but pretty soon Light is corrupted by his own power and he starts to dream about having all of mankind cowering at his feet. His morals get trampled even more when he starts killing authorities who are on his trail.

Enter ‘L’. He is the leader of a special task force, formed to hunt down the enigmatic mass murderer Kira. Because L has figured out that Kira needs to see a face and know someone’s name to kill him, he stays hidden until he has put together a posse he can trust, among whom happens to be Light’s father, a police inspector. The plot thickens even further as a second Death Note pops up and a second killer starts imitating Light.

L is actually the most interesting character in the series in both looks and personality. He is lanky, barefoot, a bit awkward socially, has a weird way of sitting on a chair and is always eating something sweet. He can seem cold and uncaring, because reasoning and intellect rule over all else. The series is at its strongest in the beginning, when L and Kira are basically playing a lethal game of mental chess. Both are trying to outmaneuver each other, to get each other to make a fatal mistake and reveal himself.

The close-ups that annoyed me in anime do feature in Death Note and especially in the beginning it’s indeed the initially feared interior monologues that are driving the narrative, more than action. It actually works here though: the story doesn’t get boring, because the stakes are life and death and the cat and mouse game is very engrossing. Bu it does start to get obvious after a while that the chase is being stretched out too much. New factors are thrown in that distract from the basic set-up and dilute it. Some of the mini-arcs within the bigger arc are entertaining seen on their own, but disrupt the overall pacing.

About two thirds of the way into the series, there is a massive, daring twist. Unfortunately, it’s one that doesn’t pay off and one the series never fully recovers from. It loses momentum and for the last few episodes I found my attention wandering too much. I am not entirely sure if the plot became more convoluted towards the end, or if I just missed pieces of exposition here and there because I zoned out. The finale itself is satisfying even though the last part of the route there is a little logistically foggy and unbelievable. The ultimate fate of the main characters seems fitting, but doesn’t surprise, as there was a certain inevitability about it long beforehand. Without spoiling too much, the ending reveals the whole series to be a tragedy, so don’t expect people to end up skipping off into the sunset.

Even though Death Note lingers for too long and the series should have been cut by about ten episodes out of its 37 episode run, it would have been a tragedy squared if I’d missed out on the first two-thirds of the series. It works as pure entertainment, but there are also some interesting musings about morality and the finality of death. ‘Carpe diem’ seems to be what it boils down to: appreciate your life while it lasts. Give it a look, if only for proof that the pen can truly be mightier than the sword!

Television Review: The Vampire Diaries

2010-09-19T19:13:00.004+01:00

I blame True Blood for getting me into The Vampire Diaries. My boyfriend needed a vampire fix in between the all too short seasons of True Blood, so we decided to add The Vampire Diaries to our watchlist. Though I carefully sidestepped the Twilight movies and have managed to avoid any amount of novels starring werewolves and vampires, I have ended up following ‘Dawson’s Creek with Fangs’, as some might call it. It is based on a series of books by L.J. Smith, which I will never read, and was developed into a series by Kevin Williamson, who also created the Creek series and wrote the first two Scream movies. His trademark is well-written peppy dialogue with a lot of wordplay and pop culture references. The episodes he writes himself do indeed feature that, though the average script for the series is noticeably less sharp.

Core of the series are Damon and Stefan Salvatore, brothers who were both turned into vampires in 1864 by the evil vixen Katherine, who happens to be the spitting image of Elena, a girl the siblings both meet and fall for in current day. There’s an explanation for Elena and Katherine looking the same, but let’s just say it’s complicated. (And let’s overlook the fact that the age difference between the Salvatores and their love interest is pretty damn creepy when you think about it.) This all happens in Mystic Falls, a town where the brothers own a mansion in which they lurk around moodily, from the first episode of the series onwards. There is a love triangle between the brothers and Elena, of course, and there is a lot of angst and romantic entanglement among the whole teenage (but really in their twenties) cast. At first the vampires seem to be the only ones out of whack in a fairly normal world, but soon there are witches, vampire hunters and rings that revive you if you die. Werewolves are also likely to put in a first appearance soon.

The series has two main narrative problems: the stakes seem low even when they are high (accidental pun there) and the series hasn’t figured out how to keep its main, popular bad guy around in a way that’s believable. To start with the first problem: those back-from-the-dead rings are a lazy narrative cheat, not to mention a somewhat silly one. In a recent episode, it was suggested that the reviving would only work if something or someone supernatural was involved in the wearer’s demise. So a vampire could twist your head around and you’d die for a bit and ultimately end up just fine, but if you’d trip and hit your head on a coffee table, you’d be toast. Apparently. A couple of times already, the writers have made a spectacle out of killing a main or regular character only to have them – ta-daa! – sit up with a jolt a couple of scenes later, none the worse for wear. That really takes the edge off the threat of mortality. Admittedly, some deaths in the series did take and some people stayed in the afterlife, but watching a death scene with the initial thought ‘Meh, maybe it won’t stick anyway.’ dulls the dramatic impact. Call it the ‘Comic Book Superhero Revolving Door of Death Syndrome’, as also seen on Heroes, where it was part of the decline of the series. The origin of these magic plot-device rings has not been revealed yet, but then the same goes for the rings the Salvatores wear to be able to walk around in daylight, thankfully not glittering Twilight-style as they do so. I wonder if an enigmatic mystic jeweler will soon be putting in an appearance.

The second problem is Damon (Ian Somerhalder), the cool, morally ambiguous and funny ‘bad’ Salvatore brother who gets all the best lines. There’s no doubt he is the most entertaining character and it’s clear he should be kept in the series, but he has done some fairly unforgivable things and been forgiven nonetheless. When one of the leads just mopes around for a couple of episodes when Damon kills (or at least tries to) one of their friends or relatives, you start to wonder why you as a viewer should care, since even the people on screen don’t seem to mind that much. The cast in general seems a bit too blasé about innocent bystanders falling by the wayside at least partly because of their own actions and the emotional impact of a life lost, doesn’t last much beyond a single episode. The good guys come off as irresponsible for letting a loose cannon like Damon run around and even go so far as to hang out with him in a semi-friendly way. The writers are pushing him out of the ‘bad’ zone and into a moral grey area lately, to make his prolonged presence believable, but he still takes the occasional detour across the ‘evil’ threshold. To make him too good would ruin the character, but somehow he needs to be forced into being a relatively good boy for the long term, against his more evil nature. Hey, it worked for Spike from Buffy: The Vampire Slayer, even if it took first sticking a chip into his brain that prevented him from hurting humans and then giving him his soul back. For The Vampire Diaries a witches’ curse might do the trick, as I think in this series vampires still have their soul.

Hopefully The Vampire Diaries will find a proper place for Damon and do away with cheap gimmicks that deflate the tension. The series is unlikely to stick in the mind after it’s all done and dusted years from now, but it makes for entertaining, if highly disposable, viewing.

Television Review: Medium (Seasons 1-6)

2010-09-14T21:00:00.003+01:00

Medium is a guilty pleasure for me. Not because it is necessarily badly written or produced but because it is less edgy than the stuff I generally go for. To sum up the concept: psychic mom Allison Dubois (played by Patricia Arquette), her loving husband Joe and their three wholesome daughters deal with complications caused by mom’s gift, as she uses it to help Phoenix law enforcement solve crimes. In early episodes the emphasis was on the crimes, but over the course of six seasons the home front has been gaining more and more screen time. This is just as well, as the cases tend to be a bit formulaic and in Medium, home is really where the heart is.

Pretty much every episode starts with Allison waking up in a shock from a dream related to a crime past, present or future. Sometimes the dream is a simple fly-on-the wall observation of the act or of moments right before or after, but you can be sure you’re not being given the full picture. The perpetrator is rarely clear and the visions are often remarkably tricky and subjective, setting up a twist for the writers to pull out of their hat for the final act of the episode. It seems that Allison is meant to prevent further crime on the basis of the dreams, but the rules that govern them are confusing and inconsistent. It’s not really clear why the spirits don’t just spit out what’s on their mind but prefer to peel back the layers on their message bit by bit, in a series of dreams. Allison also sees the occasional ghost. These ghosts seem to know what’s coming up in the future from their vantage point, guiding or manipulating her one way or the other. Why these ghosts have it together more than the ones reaching out through her dreams is not explained. She also has the occasional vision when hearing someone talk or when holding an object. But this apparently happens only when a case would be dead in the water otherwise. In early seasons, it was stated that Allison’s power rarely - if ever - gave her insight into (or affected) people she knew personally, but as the focus of the series shifted to her family, so did her visions.

The more you watch Medium, the more you realize the modus operandi of the afterlife is molded to the needs of the plot of a specific episode. This makes the tension feel artificial, as you are aware you are being pretty blatantly manipulated by the writers. Additionally, once you have watched a bunch of episodes, you tend to get wise to what information is being distorted or left out early on. You’ll end up seeing the twist coming long before Allison does. Of course, the viewer has the unfair advantage of knowing Allison is in a television series, being moved through a plot, but figuring out the truth long before she does – time and time again - does make her seem a bit slow on the uptake.

Allison works on her cases with district attorney Manuel Devalos and detective Lee Scanlon. Neither of these characters is given a lot of depth or heart and mostly they serve to regurgitate plot points. Devalos is a straightforward, moral man who lost a daughter and truly loves his wife. Scanlon is a taciturn, rigid guy, with limited emotional range and commitment issues. Neither of them overflows with charm. They have odd lapses in skill, sometimes forgetting about fingerprints or DNA evidence which you realize – once it is revealed to you how a crime really happened – should have been found earlier on in the investigation.

The true fun is to be had with Allison’s husband Joe (played perfectly by Miguel Sandoval) and the three daughters, who are moving through their growing pains as the seasons roll by and are dealing with the psychic abilities they inherited from their mom. The eldest is sensitive and all about boys and make-up, the middle one is willful and goofy - more frogs and snails than sugar and spice – and the youngest one is quiet and shy (so far). Having kids on a show who are charming and funny without being obnoxious or precocious is a pretty rare occurrence and Medium has nailed it. My personal favorite is the middle child, though a friend of mine disagrees and gets irritated by the ‘funny’ one, so personal mileage may vary. Joe is also someone you care about, as he tackles his unusual home life with an entertaining and believable combination of pragmatism, humor and worry.

What makes the show work is the contrast of this charming, happy family with the big, bad outside world in which horrible crimes occur. In a sense, the writers hold the family hostage, constantly threatening to have something happen to one or more of its members. It is an empty threat, because they know it would destroy what works about the show if they carried through on it, but you still care because the characters are so damn involving. Occasionally the show can feel a bit static, because nothing really changes within the family as the crimes-of-the-week are solved and forgotten.

The creator of the show is Glenn Gordon Caron, who also created Moonlighting. There aren’t that many similarities between the series, but there is a feel for funny-but-realistic dialogue that carries over and a willingness to experiment playfully with the format of the show. Oddly, there is a ‘real’ Allison Dubois with a husband and three daughters, an alleged psychic on whom Caron based the series. She has written a couple of books about the role she played in solving various crimes, though the police denies having worked with her. This by itself doesn’t discredit her, as law enforcement can’t exactly go to a jury and admit their evidence was gathered by way of a psychic. But a lot of the stories she tells in the books were also discredited by regular people who were involved in them. She is somewhat aggressively dismissive of skeptics and has stated that the portrayal of her family in Medium gives a fairly good impression of her home life. If that is indeed the case and she does indeed have dreams and visions like the ones in the series, she might want to ask those in the great beyond to stop being so damn cryptic and give her something to undeniably prove her powers once and for all.

Book Review: ReWork

2010-07-10T09:16:00.003+01:00

Opinions are like a Box of Chocolates

Life is full of opinions, advice and people of the opinion that they are giving good advice. Many veterans from the world of Big Business feel the need to share their knowledge, to help others and – of course – to sell books and cash in on them with speaking engagements. The biggest obstacle they run into: the ambitious professionals they are trying to inform, are too busy working late and climbing ever upwards on the career ladder to make time for someone telling them how to do things differently.

The best way to tackle this problem: deliver the information bite-sized, be to the point and make it look like something someone could enjoyably inhale within one or two lunch breaks. It famously worked for Spencer Johnson’s bestseller Who Moved My Cheese?. Marketing guru Seth Godin also has a couple of very successful books in print, using the same principle: Free Prize Inside being his first and The Dip being a recent New York Times bestseller. Godin’s books are indeed fun to read, but then you would expect so from a writer whose whole career has been built around connecting with an audience.

New kids on the business book block are Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, with their title ReWork. They are no strangers to writing, contributing to Signal vs. Noise, one of the web’s ‘most popular’ blogs, and they follow the nugget approach, with success. On top of their writing accomplishments, Fried and Hansson are the founders of 37signals, a ‘trailblazing’ software company with an unusual structure: there are a relatively small amount of employees, spread out over different countries, working across time zones. Every once in a long while, everybody meets up in person to touch base. The 37signals work ethic is interesting: overwork is frowned upon, Facebook and YouTube distractions are okay and the time spent in meetings is kept to a bare minimum.

Their book is a rapid-fire of ideas. Some examples: don’t always try to grow bigger on principle, as it might be bad for your company, don’t always do what the customer wants and don’t stress yourself out about skipping ‘good’ to get to ‘great’ straight away.

You might want to reread ReWork after the first time you finish it, as you are likely to zip past the various concepts só fast that a lot of them won’t stick with you. Beware that some of the ideas likely won’t be applicable to you: the book flap makes it seem like the book will be highly useful to everybody. However, it’s mostly geared to people who are (thinking of) running a business, and a few points are specific to the software industry. For instance, 37signals institutes long periods of ‘alone’ time, so people can work on projects efficiently, without distractions from colleagues. There are plenty of jobs however, where communicating with colleagues and customers makes up a large part of the actual work.

While the writing is nice and lean, the book – in its hardcover edition – has been injected with some steroids it seems: large margins and space-wasting but not terribly useful illustrations make the book unnecessarily bulky. It was clearly done to make the book look more appealing, but feels like overkill. Rest assured however, that it’s not overcompensation for something lacking in the content department. Fried and Hansson themselves appreciate a good writer: ‘Writing is today’s currency for good ideas’. They advise to always hire the better writer, in case of doubt, the thought being that someone who can express his ideas clearly is a precious commodity, as it also indicates a clear mind. They would definitely hire themselves on the basis of this book.

Book Review: Sh*t My Dad Says

2010-07-10T09:06:00.002+01:00

From Wit to Twit - Dads Say the Darnest Things

Twitter is becoming more and more entangled in popular culture. Not only are Classics like Romeo & Juliet and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off being relived there, there are now also phenomena that originate on Twitter, but make their way off there, into other media.

Case in point: Sh*t My Dad Says. From Twitter to book to television series; it’s a strange route to take, but none the less, that’s the route the Sh*t My Dad Says phenomenon will end up taking if the series gets off the ground. William Shatner would end up playing Sam Halpern, author Justin’s dad, a smart-yet-crude curmudgeon with a nifty turn of phrase.

How did it all get to this? When Justin had to move back in with his parents because of an unfortunate break-up, he decided to start Twittering things his dad said. Surprisingly quickly, his account went viral and spread all over Twitter. Inspired by this, HarperCollins decided to publish an accompanying book by Justin. It is a character study of his father, from Justin’s perspective, as he grows up. Each chapter describes an interesting ‘father event’ and is followed by a selection of his quotes. The short stories call to mind David Sedaris, but often lack the finesse and a twist. It’s a bit sad to say, but the most entertaining bits are still the quotes. Such as: ‘The dog is not bored. It’s not like he’s waiting for me to give him a f*cking Rubik’s Cube. He’s a goddamned dog.’ Or: ‘I’d say I was gonna miss you, but you’re moving ten minutes away, so instead I’ll just say don’t come over and do your f*cking laundry here.’

Still, if you are a fan of the Twitters and want to know more about the man behind the mouth, you should definitely check out Sh*t My Dad Says.

Sam’s response to all the hype around him is typically blunt and practical: ‘What do I give a f*ck? I don’t care what people think of me. Publish whatever you want.’

Book Review: Keith and the Girl's What do We do Now?

2010-04-27T18:17:00.003+01:00

For all your rude but effective relationship advice

There’s a new relationship guide on the market and it has a bit of an attitude, as the subtitle indicates: smart answers to your stupid relationship questions. Not for those devoid of a sense of humour, clearly. The writers of What do we do now? are themselves a couple and they run one of the biggest podcasts out there: Keith and the Girl. They ‘air’ five free podcasts per week, each one with a run-time of somewhere between one and two hours. Topics are varied: news, celebrity gossip, personal experiences and relationships, all given a comic spin. It helps that within the varied supporting cast there are a lot of stand-up comedians to join in with entertaining banter.

The show is known and loved for being very un-PC while having its heart in the right place. N-words, F-words and plenty of other bad, bad words are regular visitors and it may take listeners a couple of shows to figure out that there’s no reason to take offense here, as it’s all coming from a good place. You might not always agree with the opinions that are being aired, but if you get riled up about something, there is room for discussion on the message boards at the Keith and the Girl site. Time difference permitting, you can even sound off and give feedback during the taping of the shows in a live chat room.

KATG has been keeping itself alive and running with the help of sponsors and merchandise sold through the site, but has now branched out into the publishing world with their book full of ‘modern advice for modern couples’. The book is divided in chapters by topic (In-Laws, Money, Sex and Kink, etcetera.). After a short and personal preface on the subject at hand, Keith and Chemda (aka ‘the girl’) reply to conundrums presented by their listeners. They do this separately, sometimes disagreeing with each other and getting into a discussion. The playful tone is apparent from page one, with Keith gate-crashing the introduction by his editor and berating him. Soon after, Chemda ‘speaks up’ for the first time:

Keith: Hey, baby! When’d you get here?

Chemda: They just edited me in, I guess.

Their advice tends to be funny, broadminded and blunt. As with the opinions on the podcast, you might get rubbed the wrong way from time to time, or just disagree, but you’ll easily get over that because you’ll find yourself smiling for much of the rest of the way. If the dynamics of relationships interest you, then this is a lighthearted sounding board for your own thoughts on the topic and a good book to read with a partner and discuss.

A sample chapter can be found through this link. Also check out a video promo for it. If the book tickles your funny bone, remember there are also over a thousand very entertaining free Keith and the Girl shows to feast your ears on, available through iTunes and the KATG-site. What do we do now? Now we buy the book.

Comic Book Review: The Walking Dead Compendium

2010-04-27T18:06:00.004+01:00

The Walking Dead might just be those WITH a pulse…

The Walking Dead Compendium, which was released last year, collects the first 48 issues of an ongoing, gripping and moody comic book series, which deals with a doomsday scenario involving zombies. Not the fast-running, overly aggressive kind as seen in recent pop culture, but the old-fashioned, lumbering, dumb kind, that will – however – still rip you apart, given half the chance. They roam around in hungry herds, attracted to noise and movement but solitary ones may also pop up out of nowhere for a fatal surprise.

The Walking Dead has a large and mutable cast of characters-who-still-have-a-pulse, with frequent additions as old friends and foes fall by the wayside. The ‘lead’ is Rick, a policeman. In the first issue of the series, he wakes up in a hospital-bed from a coma, after having been shot in the line of duty. The siege on humanity is already well underway at this point, the cause unknown. Rick heads out to find his wife and son, hooks up with other survivors and turns into a leader of sorts, trying to keep everyone alive and out of despair.

The dynamic between the survivors is what makes this book tick. It’s not so much brain-eating that takes center stage but the effects on the human psyche of a global disaster, with no clear hope that the situation will ever get better. Some people go crazy, others commit suicide, or let their base instincts take over and prey on the weak, while a few soldier on and try to live their life with some semblance of normality. Disagreements about the best way to survive lead to aggression and in-fighting. As you might suspect, this isn’t a very cheery book, though there are some bright spots now and then to alleviate the grimness and there is always enough tension to keep you glued to the page, wondering what happens next. No one is safe in this comic and even long-time favorites may be given the axe – or more likely the ‘chomp’. Author Robert Kirkman has stated that even Rick may die at some point, the book going on without its (former) main character.

Kirkman started out this series with the pitch: a zombie movie that never ends. He was left wondering ‘What happened next?’ several times when the credits started to roll on undead classics and decided to come up with his own answer. Now nearing issue 70 of the series, there is still no explanation for the downfall of civilization as we know it and no end in sight. It’s a testament to the strength of Kirkman’s storytelling that you don’t feel annoyed by this lack of an explanation. Providing one might take away from the feeling of being overwhelmed and out-of-the-loop, and the reason would likely be somewhat silly in any case. The artwork suits Kirkman’s story well, being somewhat coarse and gritty: Charlie Adlard has been the artist from issue 7 onwards. Tony Moore did the much cleaner, detailed traditional artwork for the first 6 issues but had to bail due to time constraints.

The Walking Dead is currently in production as a television series by Frank Darabont, director of The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. It will only loosely be following the comic book series in terms of ongoing plot though, much in the same way Dexter – the series – only somewhat resembles Dexter – the books. So there is no excuse to miss out on the Compendium: dive into it as a primer to the characters and to just wallow in some good and moody storytelling. And rejoice, the credits won’t be rolling on this story anytime soon.

Book Review: Gay Travels in the Muslim World

2010-02-21T19:12:00.003Z

Gay identity is denied in most Muslim countries. That there are men and women within those areas who primarily love people of their own gender is a biological certainty. But most of them would not label themselves 'gay' or 'lesbian', they would see the attraction as just one small aspect of themselves that they try to fit into their lives while adhering to what is expected of them by friends and - especially - family. Family is very important, both caring for the current generation as well as raising the next one. Getting married before you are thirty and having children is the only accepted way to live in many places. Not doing so could lead to loss of honour for you and your family. This means that most gay love and lust takes place behind closed doors and isn't acknowledged even while everybody around knows it happens. As long as there are no witnesses and it isn't talked about, everybody can pretend that no social mores are being broken.

Considering that gay sex is officially frowned upon and even punishable by death in many Muslim countries, the casual intimacy between men is one that will surprise many tourists. Much more than in Western countries, men are likely to be seen touching each other in a physically intimate way or even walking around the city hand in hand. The 'Western' gay identity threatens this way of interacting with each other by making it look suspect and threatens the entire family-oriented society. It introduces new options and choices that could upset the basis on which the society is built. Gay Muslims may start to question things and realise that the way their heart is pulling them does not have to point towards certain doom, but could lead them to a happy, if alternative, family life.

Gay Travels in the Muslim World is a series of autobiographical short stories, edited by Michael Luongo. It gives an impression of the Muslim world as described above. The majority of them deal with contrasts and conflicts between Western culture and Muslim culture, from varied perspectives. Most of the stories were written by Western visitors, one or two by people within the culture. The style, tone and attitudes of the writers vary, and while some of the tales are likely to annoy you, you will find a couple that are touching and interesting. I liked the story of an American who starts a long-distance romance with a Turk, only to find out he is married and has children. Rather than break up with his long-term lover, the Turkish man integrates him as an 'uncle' into his family, where he is lovingly accepted.

Not all stories are sweet though; in several of them, local men desperate for money and tourists desperate for sex with locals meet each other on a sharp and uncomfortable knife's edge between two cultures, using each other for selfish purposes.

All in all it is an interesting collection, well worth a read for anybody interested in this different perspective on gay identity. And if you want to take a more academic look at the topic, you may want to pick up Unspeakable Love - Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East.

Book Review: Wishful Drinking -Toasting Princess Leia

2010-02-21T18:56:00.004Z

Carrie Fisher bares not-quite all in a funny memoir

Carrie Fisher's life was always an autobiography waiting to happen. As the daughter of the eccentric Debbie Reynolds - of Singing in the Rain fame, among many other roles - and singer Eddie Fisher, she grew up in a Hollywood family under great public scrutiny. Carrie compares their level of public interest to the Brad Pitt & Angelina Jolie merger. Ms. Reynolds was soon dumped by Mr. Fisher for a certain Ms. Taylor, first name: Elisabeth. A merry dance of Hollywood relationships ensued, her parents making their romantic way among the famous and powerful.

Carrie meanwhile, landed a certain movie role that she would never live down, no matter how hard she still tries: that of Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy. The silly 'buns on the side' hairstyle and golden bra from Return of the Jedi haunt her to this day. She embarked on an ill-fated relationship with Paul Simon and then on an equally doomed relationship with a Hollywood producer who left her for a man, but not before gifting her with a much adored daughter. During all of this, she battled with what was ultimately diagnosed as bipolar disorder, and accompanying drug and alcohol problems. Oh, and I see I forgot to mention that one of her best friends died at her home one night.

Considering the large amounts of interesting material at her disposal, it is surprising how relatively thin the autobiography is that has finally hit bookstores: Wishful Drinking. When you also take into account its large black and white photo's and illustrations in combination with a large font size, it's no wonder that you will be able to go through it in a couple of hours. There are plenty of quotable lines to keep you entertained, but the book stays frustratingly close to the surface, skipping over interesting topics while hinting at untold depths. She allows the readers into her life, but only so far. She is admirably open, however, about her bipolar disorder and addiction problems. In fact, the reason for writing the book is supposedly that she is going through voluntary shock treatment to handle her condition and wants to capture her memories while she still has them.

Wishful Drinking apparently ties in with her one-woman show of the same name and it seems a little more could have been done to convert it into a 'proper' autobiography. There are jumps back and forth in chronology, certain events being referenced a couple of times in different chapters and some of the jokes are repeated. With references to Sarah Palin and the financial crisis, the book does feel fresh, but it gives the impression that it was rushed to the printer without a good final polish. Her writing is less tight than in her previous works, the most famous one being the semi-autobiographical novel Postcards from the Edge. Often Wishful Drinking reads like a speech that has been transcribed: too much spoken language and not quite literary. Still, for anybody curious about Princess Leia in the real world - or Hollywood in any case - it is good for an entertaining couple of hours, even if you don't learn much about the behind-the-scenes at the Star Wars movies. But I did come away from reading this book with the knowledge that according to George Lucas, there are no bras in space. Which is important to know.

Movie Review: Wanted

2010-02-17T18:28:00.003Z

Wesley Allan Gibson (James McAvoy) is a bit of a loser, to put it mildly; broke, working a soul-deadening job and too wimpy to confront his friend about regularly boinking his girlfriend behind his back. To his considerable surprise, he suddenly and violently gets drafted into a fraternity of assassins for paternal reasons. He didn't know his father when he was growing up, but he turns out to have inherited dad's ability to speed up his heartbeat, allowing him to experience time as if things around him are happening in slow motion. This device is used to great aesthetic effect throughout the movie, by showing the most outrageous action scenes at a crawl, giving the viewer a chance to chuckle at the fantastic absurdity of it all. The 'cool' dial is cranked up all the way to eleven. It almost makes you overlook the complete lack of stealth in the approach of the assassins, who are causing merry mayhem and riding around on metro trains without any regard for witnesses and security cameras.

Wanted is definitely a case of style over substance, but puts up such a strong, full frontal assault of it that you are likely to give in. You will smile as a car bowls over a bus and then drives off the side of it. And you will shake your head appreciatively when a lethal bullet is followed backwards in time across a cityscape to land in the gun that fired it. Winning the gold medallion of 'cool' in this movie is Angelina Jolie. I am far on the gay end of the Kinsey scale, but seeing her in this movie made me slide considerably towards the middle. She is ridiculously sexy, gliding across the screen in supreme femme fatale mode.

The phrase that kept going through my mind while watching Wanted was 'collateral damage'. The killers in this movie operate under the philosophy that by taking one specific life they are presumably saving many others. But they are not too concerned with the lives of any number of bystanders when the bullets and cars start flying. Even the good guys have landed a fair amount of innocents in the morgue by the time the end credits roll, and none of those who survived seem too concerned about that. Death is also being dealt to characters who simply seem misguided, without giving them a chance to reassess their situation. This is understandable in a movie that needs slow motion gunfights and therefore cannon fodder, but it makes the killing seem completely random for the most part.

The movie was based on a graphic novel written by Mark Millar. He has said he will not be writing a sequel to Wanted in comic book form, but one or more sequels are sure to hit the movie theatres, hopefully bringing back its few surviving assets.

Wanted, 2008. 110 min. Director: Timur Bekmambetov. Starring: James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie, Morgan Freeman.

Movie Review: The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

2010-02-17T18:23:00.003Z

The Mummy Trilogy doesn't seem to know when to quit. First of all, there wasn't any need to make it a Trilogy, discounting a financial one. Though the third movie attempts to freshen the formula by moving the action to China, it still feels too much like the previous two entries, in particular like the bloated special effects fiesta that was the second movie. It has been a while since I saw parts one and two. I remember that I found the first one charming, with a nice balance between action, romance and humour, while the second one was just a lot of noise and computer generated motion. It was okay as popcorn movies go, but did it really warrant another sequel, which recycles these thrills while piling on the silly pseudo-mythology?

The beginning of the third entry seems promising. There is the nicely Indiana Jones-esque uncovering of what looks suspiciously like the Chinese Terracotta Army. These scenes reintroduce us to Alex O'Connell (Luke Ford), the son of our couple of intrepid leads from the first two movies. He has aged alarmingly in comparison to his father (Brendan Fraser), who now looks more like his older brother. His mother has also changed; into a different actress (Maria Bello), as Rachel Weisz wisely bowed out of the franchise. That is addressed in an actually funny way, by suggesting that the previous flicks were film versions of two books the 'real' Evelyn O'Connell wrote, which in turn were based on her 'real life' adventures. You follow?

Though the adventurous family seemed happy at the end of part two, Alex is now oddly estranged from his parents, who for their part seem bored to tears in early retirement. When a new adventure beckons, transporting the Eye of Shangri-La to China, the couple eagerly jumps at the opportunity, leading them to run into Alex and to bond together once again through their adventures.

The story starts to fall apart as the action revs up, getting too hectic to give the cast room to breathe and enjoy their characters. The mythology seems to be getting made up on the fly by an over-enthusiastic storyteller deathly afraid of boring his audience. But bored is what I was, as the story failed to pull me in, despite all the plot being thrown my way: "There is this Evil Undead Chinese Emperor brought back from the great beyond and now looking for eternal life. Oh, and what if he controls the elements? And what if he can change into monsters for some reason? Then throw in a few Yeti's? Maybe an army of skeletons?" The writers needed to ask themselves 'why' rather than 'why not' a bit more than they did. Action scenes are strung together with some clunky emotional ones painting the characters in broad strokes and resolving issues the movie did not make us care about in the first place. Most attempts at one-liners fall flat and the dialogue is often wooden to the point where it seems to have been ghost-written by George Lucas. All the charm from the first movie has evaporated by now; let's just bury this franchise and not dig it up again.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor, 2008. 112 min. Director: Rob Cohen. Starring: Brendan Fraser, Maria Bello, Michelle Yeoh.

Movie Review: The X-Files: I Want to Believe

2010-02-17T18:18:00.004Z

The X-Files without conspiracies or aliens - I don't believe it! I watched X-Files regularly up to the point where Fox 'Spooky' Mulder (David Duchovny) was starting to turn into a guest star rather than being one of the leads. What made the series work originally was the core concept of a cynic and a believer investigating the paranormal, working as a sniffed-at-by-colleagues branch of the FBI. The chemistry between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson (as Dana Scully) was phenomenal even if they allegedly didn't always get along behind the scenes. They played off each other well, whether they were being action heroes, being funny or even being romantic. This chemistry unfortunately seems to have somewhat dissipated, going by the second X-Files movie. It's not the only element that is absent from the expected mix: I found myself missing the big-conspiracy-within-a-conspiracy angle that had started to bore and annoy me during the later seasons of the series. There isn't any international travelling, there aren't any aliens and there are no explosions of any kind. Unlike the first movie, the story feels very intimate and small-scale, like one of the stand-alone episodes featuring a case-of-the-week.

Scully is no longer with the FBI but working at a hospital. Her former employers reach out to her to contact Mulder. They need him to verify the authenticity of a psychic (Billy Connolly) who is helping them on a missing person's case, this person being an FBI agent who the psychic claims is still alive. The psychic is a former priest and a convicted paedophile who wants to atone for his sins. Is he working for God, the Devil or is he a con-man? Scully meanwhile has to decide whether to painfully treat a gravely ill young patient of hers or to let him die in peace. During all this, Mulder and Scully try to figure out their feelings for each other.

The location is a snowy town, used to great effect to create a feeling of cold, isolation and discomfort. Colours are muted and dark. The movie is about hope in the face of darkness and doubt, but the feelings it conjures up aren't upbeat, more ones of quiet despair. Apart from a hilarious use of the X-files theme in combination with a photo of George W. Bush and the occasional snarky line of dialogue, there isn't much to laugh at this time around. Seeing Scully defeated and Mulder as a slightly bitter, powerless recluse isn't the welcome reunion you might hope for. I'm all for introspection and reflection, but I expected something different from an X-files movie. More of a sense of fun and adventure.

If the story had been really strong, the movie could still have worked as an arty little thriller in its own right, but it builds on the theme of faith, using a psychic and religion, which means the writer gets a free pass to make unlikely things happen and hint that they were predetermined by a higher power. Which of course they were: by the writer, who is the God of the story after all. There is once instance in particular, involving a mailbox, which had me rolling my eyes. I also didn't like the way in which homosexuality was portrayed, in particular how it was dubiously linked to paedophilia. It seemed sensationalist, random and in bad taste. At least the explanation behind the disappearance of the FBI agent felt suitably X-files: far-fetched and appropriately gross. A short appearance by Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) also made it seem more like old times again for a moment. Here's hoping that in the next movie, they all find a nice big conspiracy to sink their teeth into and get to blow up some stuff real good.

The X-Files: I Want to Believe, 2008. 104 min. Director: Chris Carter. Starring: David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson, Billy Connolly.

A Call to Closure

2010-02-17T17:27:00.005Z

From what I've been reading, serial storytelling on television is once again on the decline. A lot of scripted shows saw sharp drops in their viewing figures when returning this season. Reality tv shows, or what passes for reality on the idiot box, rule supreme. Audiences can't seem to get enough of fabricated conflict and people making a fool of themselves in a desperate bid for 15 minutes of fame. Producers are happy to cater to this need, as these shows are relatively cheap to produce. Shows that have episodes which are relatively self-contained, like those from the CSI stable, have been suffering less. These shows require no real commitment from the viewer: you can watch pretty much any episode and follow the main story without being lost and get a feeling of closure by the end of it, unlike when you watch one episode of - well - Lost, for instance.

So what caused this decline in ratings for serials? Most of the blame has been directed at the writer's strike which took place about a year ago. Supposedly people felt betrayed by the sudden discontinuation or their favourite shows, or just lost interest in them over time. I think, however, that a growing frustration on the part of the viewers is the cause, and it goes back further than the last curtailed season.

My personal experience: once upon a time there were two new shows: Surface and Invasion. I gave both shows a chance, invested my time in them and grew to appreciate them, if not love them. I would have been fine with it if the shows had ended after that first season, but because both of them went out on a cliff-hanger, I felt betrayed rather than just disappointed: someone had just made me waste a lot of time watching a story without an ending or a real point. When the next batch of new series rolled around, I made sure to just tape the first few episodes of anything that seemed promising and check for rumours of cancellation before I started to watch them. This saved me from getting frustrated about The Nine when it was axed and made me pass on Drive, even though that seemed like a very interesting series, starring the deeply charming Nathan Fillion.

My point is: before viewers become invested in a story, they want to know that the people telling it will care enough about it to guarantee that there will be an ending. Due to the fickle gods of circumstance, the ending might be rushed or not the ending that was originally intended, but there needs to be a sense of closure. I don't start reading a book unless I am fairly certain that the author will have a go at wrapping things up nicely in the final chapter. This can also take the form of an intentionally open ending like they used for The Sopranos or Angel (well, Joss Whedon has claimed that it was intentional in any case). Both the creators and the television studios are to blame for the frequent absence of a proper ending to serials. Creators want to draw people back for the new season or when there is a short hiatus and therefore prefer to keep their audience hanging. They might also figure that an unsatisfying ending is more likely to get fans rallying for renewal, should the show be cancelled. Unfortunately, they are probably right about that.

The television studios keep their eye one the financial bottom line: how much does this show cost and how much money is it likely to make us. Going by this reasoning, I am surprised that Pushing Daisies lasted as long as it did: very expensive to make by the looks of it and likely too quirky and whimsical to reach a very wide audience. The 'throwing good money after bad' attitude is understandable: profits have to come from somewhere. But I think that the decisions are being made by a confused industry which is forgetting about DVD sales and a possibility to monetise a series on the internet, by way of (legal) downloads. The studios only seem to look at the initial viewing figures, which are somewhat outdated and not a real measure of a series' popularity anymore, factoring in the new media.

It seems to me that a series with closure, a story with an actual ending, has much more lasting value and is a lot more marketable than one that simply stops. Whenever I spot the DVD set of Invasion in a store, I can't help but think that any buyer will feel duped and betrayed by the - lack of - outcome. I can't imagine that the series would get a lot of good word of mouth these days: 'Yeh, it's kind of slow at the beginning, but then there is a nice build-up and then it is, like, you know, over.' Therefore it puzzles me that not a little extra time and money is put into finishing the final chapter, making the product a much more marketable package after the initial television airing.

I can see that in some instances, such as with Drive, which barely made it out of the gate, this would be virtually impossible. But a show such as Pushing Daisies, like a lot of other serials, had a couple of ongoing storylines which could have been tied together with a bow given the budget for an additional two or three episodes and a notice to wrap things up. Not being an industry insider, I am not sure if it would be wiser to air these final episodes or to only release them on DVD as part of the box set - holding them ransom in a way. Either way, it would make the series as a whole an easier sell

It seems to me that all parties concerned - viewers, studios, creators - would end up happier if a fairly standard clause in contracts for a television series would be that the moment a series is officially cancelled, a budget is cleared to produce two or three additional episodes under the explicit mandate that these should be used to leave the viewer with that sense of closure, the warm, fuzzy feeling of not having been screwed over by yet another serial of which the last chapter will never be told. It would leave people feeling better about the series that was cancelled and create good will towards the studio that cared enough to not leave them hanging. It would also, crucially, make viewers more likely to recommend the completed series to others, making for higher long-term profits.

I am curious to hear what other people think about this and if I am perhaps misinformed about the inner workings of television. Would this work? As a fan of big story arcs that you can invest in for a deeper emotional pay-off, I dó want to keep loving serials. But the television industry is making it hard to do that and I have been tricked too often. Don't make me watch reality tv. Please don't.

Movie Review: Mamma Mia!

2008-08-30T16:23:00.002+01:00

Sophie was raised by her single mother on an idyllic Greek island and is about to get married. She has no idea who her father is. Naughtily reading her mother's old diary, she narrows the gene pool to three guys her mom dallied with twenty years ago and she invites them all to the wedding under false pretences. Such is the unlikely framework for the musical Mamma Mia!, which serves as an excuse to string ABBA songs together. These are often only mildly appropriate to the situation at hand and though some have been edited slightly to fit the story and make sense in context, others will leave you scratching your head in confusion, the use of 'The Winner Takes It All' being a prime example. I saw the Dutch stage version of this musical a couple of years back, and the movie appears to be faithful to its theatre roots.
Watching Mamma Mia! is like being repeatedly slapped about the face with a rainbow while being told to turn your frown upside down. At the beginning you might feel a bit left out of the aggressively cheerful camaraderie that unites most of the cast from the very start. It's like coming sober to a party where the others are already tipsy and well into the swing of things. There are two reactions to this movie: go with it and smile or flee the theatre and don't look back.
It's obvious that the cast was having a ball and their fun is infectious. Not all of them are equally gifted when it comes to singing. Let's just say that you will be glad that James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) never belted one out for his own opening credits. Meryl Streep does a little better, thankfully, as she does a lot more warbling than Brosnan. But the overall lack of polish is part of the charm. Nobody seems to be taking any of it seriously. Some of the dancing is especially over the top silly, never more so than when a row of boys in flippers strut their stuff on a sun-drenched dock. I couldn't help but feel a bit embarrassed for them.
Don't expect the characters to ever fully become 3D, they are all sketches at best and are jumping through the unlikely hoops of the plot. Comedies like this one, which are based on secrets and misunderstandings, thrive on people not doing the most logical and direct thing to solve their problems. A happy ending was obviously unavoidable, but the emotions in play at the climax weren't set up properly earlier in the movie. A small gay twist at this time, which probably wasn't hinted at before to make it a bigger surprise, feels to the viewer like it was made up on the spot. The larger romantic twist was predictable but is unbelievable because the two people who make a major leap of commitment, barely seemed to be on good terms up until that point. But you don't watch this movie for coherence or plot; you watch it to see some fairly major stars bust a move in a dreamily tropical location, while lovingly torturing ABBA songs. And on that slightly off-key note: don't miss the performance at the end credits.

Mamma Mia!, 2008. 108 min. Director: Phyllida Lloyd. Starring: Amanda Seyfried, Meryl Streep, Colin Firth.

Movie Review: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

2008-08-30T16:17:00.004+01:00

I really tried to keep my expectations low for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I had heard mixed things about it, but being a fan of the first three films and even of the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, I could not give it a pass. The plot: Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) now finds himself in the Cold War era - a bit older and greyer but still combining his job as a teacher with his activities as a daredevil archaeologist. To help out a friend, he travels to Peru in search of a Crystal Skull with mysterious origins. Adventure ensues and things get personal.
Certain plot elements were widely leaked before the movie came out and they seemed promising. The return of Marion (Karen Allen), Indy's love interest from the first film, boded well as they had great chemistry and Mutt (Shia LaBeouf) looked set to be a fun side-kick. I sat down with my popcorn and admired the charming fifties setting, with its greasers and anti-commie sentiment. And I watched several entertaining but often amazingly silly action sequences. (Don't duck and cover kids, just hide in the refrigerator.) One of them featured an embarrassingly obvious stunt-double for Harrison Ford climbing through a car. And I listened to the dialogue with trailer-friendly one-liners that were frequently delivered a little too self-conscious as if to say: 'Please quote me on this and repeat it to your friends.'
I could not really get into it. The movie comes across as both homage and epilogue to the original trilogy rather than an equal sequel, though it does give Indy's life an extra dimension it had been missing and a sense of closure. The main story seems a retread in the way it was structured: a lot of scenes recycled and remixed but hitting the same beats. The climax is also predictable in following the Indiana Jones mold, to the point of being boring. The Crystal Skull itself - so central to the story - just looks goofy any time it is on the screen and makes it hard to take all the reverence towards it serious. The previous movies already didn't seem too concerned with believability if it impaired a cool scene, but this entry gives up on the concept entirely. It takes away from the tension, as the heroes can survive pretty much anything and are in no real danger.
Even on a simple emotional level the plot doesn't track: Marion and Indy set aside their differences in no time and reignite the spark, even though neither one cared enough to stay in touch over the years. And it seems unlikely that Marion never let Indy in on a certain little secret she had been carrying around. But then the focus is not on the characters, it is on the silly action sequences and the odd-looking skull. After seeing this movie I don't really know if I would like to see Indiana Jones return. It is a shame; the previous movies thrilled me but with this one, as the end credits started to roll, I looked over at my friends and we shrugged at each other. Just another popcorn movie.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, 2008. 124 min. Director: Steven Spielberg. Starring: Harrison Ford, Cate Blanchett, Shia LaBeouf.

Movie Review: The Ruins

2008-08-30T16:13:00.002+01:00

The Ruins is an isolate-and-kill horror movie, based on an allegedly thick and depressing novel (unread by me). The ending has been fiddled with, so it does not match the one in print and on the DVD there is yet another alternate ending - though mostly just extended. But it is not so much what happens at the end of the movie that interests me, it's more what happened before the movie even started, since that is still unclear to me (see SPOILERS section down below).
A group of six tourists veer off the beaten path while in Mexico, to visit a Mayan temple. There are two American couples, a Greek and a German who is looking for his brother. As you might guess, some or all of these will end up being toast. When they get to the temple, they are accosted by a man who shouts things at them in a language they don't understand. The man's friends show up and before long, the tourists are driven up the side of the temple, which is now surrounded. Their captives stay away from the structure however. The tourists are not allowed to leave, but they are unsure why. Things take a creepier turn for them as dead bodies are found and ring-tones are not what they seem. Their original, bold assertion that American tourists couldn't possibly just go missing without anybody looking for them, gets weakened as they spend a couple of days and nights on the top of the temple. Some of the group start to fall by the wayside.
The Ruins is not for the squeamish; there is some graphic bloodletting, which looks fairly realistic. The actors play it believable enough for you to want to look away. The slowly building despair and exhaustion are also brought across pretty well, making you feel for the characters, even if they are a bit bland and sometimes make really stupid decisions. The ultimate Evil that is propelling the plot, stays a little ill-defined, but manages to make your skin crawl, even as it borders on being laughably silly. All in all it is a capably done genre-movie that will keep you entertained and grossed out for 90 minutes, even though a fair amount of logical loopholes will not go unnoticed (see SPOILERS).

SPOILERS:
Given the explanation for what is going on, why don't the people surrounding the temple just shoot the tourists once they have decided they can't leave? And with regards to containment: what about the spores, which seem to be spreading by air as well? The isolation of the temple is by no means airtight. If the plants are truly that virulent, they would also be spreading further by ground, not stopped by a small strip of salt. Why is the vegetation not actively attacking the tourists up top but waiting until they are (almost) dead? And how did this form of greenery end up isolated within this temple? No explanation is given, and I could not come up with a plausible one. How the plants became intelligent is also not explained, but that's probably a good thing, as any explanation would probably end up being very silly.

The Ruins, 2008. 93 min. Director: Carter Smith. Starring: Jonathan Tucker, Jena Malone, Laura Ramsey.

Television Review: Lost

2008-08-30T16:03:00.003+01:00

Lost is about the survivors of a plane crash who end up on an island where all sorts of strange things happen. As the series goes on, we discover more about the twisty past of the large cast of characters through flashbacks and also - in the 'present' - about the nature of the island. Without spoiling too much: a violent creature roams the woods, people who couldn't possibly be on the island walk around there regardless and a shady corporation has been doing strange experiments there. More than one external force has it out for the survivors and even the island itself seems to have a plan for them, one possibly connected to 'karma'. Most of the drama plays out on a sunny beach or in a sumptuous tropical forest.
Lost is a series you get the most out of by starting from the very beginning, watching as pieces of a very elaborate puzzle start to interlock. The brains behind Lost - among whom creator J.J. Abrams of Alias and Cloverfield fame - are meticulous about drip-feeding just enough new information in each episode to keep you guessing and hungry for more. Considering that they clearly scoff at linear storytelling, it is ironic that all the episodes need to be seen in order to not get - well - lost. Where for the first two seasons or so the stories jumped between the 'present' on the island and the twisty past of the plentiful cast, by now there are also jumps into their future. It is to the writers' credit that you won't often get confused about where you are in the narrative. However, because of a lot of casually referenced back story, you might find yourself scratching your head regularly if you don't tune in every week.
The most regular complaint about Lost is a lack of forward momentum. Because of the trips into the past and several storylines running concurrently at most points, a cliff-hanger to one episode might stay unresolved until a couple of weeks later. Too many lingering reaction shots and a general unwillingness of everybody on the island to either ask an obvious, direct question or give a direct answer can also get on the nerves. Everybody is withholding information from everybody else for sometimes unbelievable reasons. It is an obvious way to extend some of the plotlines and to build tension.
I have to admit that I almost bailed on the series at the beginning of the third season, when the first ten episodes or so stalled: the writers just seemed to be milking for time. Luckily the series soon recovered with a clearer sense of purpose and I can't help but think that the writers' strike actually helped the abbreviated fourth season, with just fourteen episodes. The creators claim to have the whole story mapped out until the end of the series, the next two seasons supposedly wrapping it up. They were forced to speed up their storytelling to end the fourth season at the point they had originally planned, leading to some pleasantly compact episodes.
More and more answers are surfacing about the connections between all the strange things that have been happening in Lost. I am wondering if the next two seasons will be able to tie everything together satisfactorily. It could very well be that the final explanation will end up either being a bit silly or will create retroactive plot-holes. Not until the final reel is out there, will the viewers be able to judge how well the whole thing holds together. Though I generally admire the writing for Lost, the writers have messed up before a couple of times when it comes to believability. There was the foretold death of one of the regulars for instance, which was presented as heroic and necessary, but turned out to be completely avoidable and therefore stupid when the moment arrived. The island appears to be shrinking as the series goes on: by now it seems to take a lot less time to get from one side of it to the other than it did at the beginning of the series. Amazingly, people often tend to just happen to run into each other in the huge forest when the plot requires. And the non-featured survivors seem all too aware of their status as extra's and will pop up, disappear and sometimes die without having much of an impact on anyone. If you saw the season four finale (mild spoiler alert) ask yourself this: why wasn't anybody mobbing the helicopter and why weren't the main characters concerned about the well-being of the other survivors? Oh well, the occasional logical lapse notwithstanding, I will definitely be hanging around to watch the final lap. Here's hoping they don't lose the plot.

Book Review: Candy Everybody Wants

2008-08-30T15:53:00.005+01:00

Josh Kilmer-Purcell is convinced you won’t like his second book: Candy Everybody Wants. He states this in the 'PS' section in the back of the book, which contains some 'behind the scenes' extras. He assumes this partly because everybody will be comparing it to the first book and people will tend to find it either too similar or too different. Also, he has jumped genres, so he fears the public won’t know what to make of it. His first book – I Am Not Myself These Days – was a ‘memoir in drag’, a mostly true autobiographical story, slightly fictionalized under creative license. It describes a time in Josh’s life when he hoisted himself into elaborate and uncomfortable drag outfits and livened up New York’s club scene as AquaDisiac, a character whose trademark was a set of plastic breasts in which live goldfish swam. He drank amazing amounts of alcohol, regularly waking up in unfamiliar surroundings next to unfamiliar people. During the day he somehow managed to function at an advertising agency. Josh then ran into Jack, a male s&m escort who would end up developing a drug problem. The core of the book is their strangely sweet but doomed affair. The tale is very well-written, with ironic detachment and with a sharp wit always at the ready.
Candy Everybody Wants is a novel which, according to Josh, describes his childhood the way he wished it had happened. A young gay kid with Hollywood ambitions finds himself surrounded by a ‘family’ of oddball characters and flirts with fame when he gets cast for a successful commercial. In accordance with Josh’s expectations, I have to admit I liked this book a little less. The story is front-loaded with the introduction of most of the strange cast and then the slightly overwrought plot takes over. The overall feeling is that Josh is trying too hard to be interesting and quirky. The characters either don’t get any real room to develop or are developed in ways that serve the plot first and foremost. It doesn’t help that the main character is self-involved and calculating. This might be necessary for his emotional arc throughout the book, but the change does not go far enough to make him very likeable.
There are some themes that make a subtle comeback in Josh' second book: prostitution, drugs and a craving for attention are present again. But the tone remains light this time and several unbelievable plot twists and coincidences distance the story too much from reality to really worry about what happens to the cast: a ‘deus ex machina’ seems to be lurking around the corner.
It might be mostly my expectations that let me down: I Am Not Myself These Days was an insightful psychological journey that resonated with me and that I might even read again some day. Candy Everybody Wants by comparison is fun fluff that doesn’t delve very deep. It is – however – a perfect book to take with you on a sunny summer holiday. Even below his peak and without see-through breasts, Josh ultimately does not fail to entertain.

Television Review: Doctor Who

2008-08-30T15:38:00.008+01:00

Doctor Who is a British television series about a Time Lord. This is an alien who looks totally human, but possesses two hearts and has the ability to regenerate into a different body - and therefore a different actor - when he is on the edge of death. There used to be a lot of Time Lords, but according to the current run of the television series, Doctor Who is the last survivor of a terrible battle with the Daleks, a murderous race of robot-aliens. He bounces around time and space, accompanied by one or two 'companions' at a time, in an unexpectedly roomy blue telephone box called the Tardis, averting disasters and saving the galaxy. I guess the telephone box was deemed nicely inconspicuous by the misguided soul who designed it. (Since I wrote that, I have been informed by more fanatic fans that this look is due to a malfunction of some computer gizmo or another, which the doctor has been unable to fix.)
The regeneration aspect is a handy one for the producers behind the series. If the actor who plays Doctor Who wants to bow out, the character can be mortally wounded and regenerate. This actually happened after the first series in the new incarnation, when Christopher Eccleston decided to leave, causing 'his' Doctor to morph into David Tennant. (Tennant is still going strong and wildly popular, so don't expect him to change again soon if the producers get their way.) What adds to the fun is that the Doctor's personality is allowed to change slightly to suit the new actor. While in other series it would be a headache to have the lead leave, for Doctor Who it just allows a new dynamic and new stories.
Doctor Who was off the air for a long time, originally running from 1963 until 1989. It was revived in 2005 by Russell T. Davies of Queer as Folk fame to success beyond all expectations. The fan base of the sci-fi series rivals that of Star Trek in their fanaticism, so it was quite an achievement that Russell managed to placate both them and hook a new generation of viewers. I think he played fast and loose with some of the continuity of the previous series, but I can't be sure as there is too much material in the form of novels, radio-plays and episodes for me to wade through.
The set-up of Doctor Who allows near unlimited potential for telling stories: all of time and space are the playing ground. Believability is an issue, as the butterfly effect (small changes have major consequences) gets even more confusing when continuously jumping around in time. The current Doctor Who philosophy is that there are 'fixed' points in time, which have to remain unaltered and other points when things are more flexible and you can safely muck around a little. I am not sure how that would work temporally speaking, but mostly this logic is fitted to suit the scripts. Davies' take on the stories is one of high adventure and big emotions, done with such infectious enthusiasm that you happily suspend disbelief. Granted, especially in the episodes he wrote himself, he really makes you work for that suspension. Major problems are solved or can't be solved because of obscure bits of technobabble, just to set up cool scenes. The rules of what can happen and what can't are often not very clear. When the resulting scenes are indeed cool enough, you won't care but sometimes when they're not, you end up rolling your eyes.
One of the biggest changes Davies made to the original concept was giving the people who join Doctor Who on his travels a background and families to deal with. Previously these 'companions' mostly served as sounding boards - so the doctor wouldn't just talk to himself - or as people to be saved. They would ride along until they started to feel old and then be written out in one quick way or another. The 'new' Doctor has already gone through three companions in the current run, each one giving the stories a new spin. With Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) there was a mutual attraction - a first in Doctor Who history, I believe - Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) crushed on the Doctor and Donna Noble (comedienne Catherine Tate) humorously clashed with him, as an equal. The way in which these companions were written out of the series - for the time being anyway - shows a definite strength of Davies: a great balance of bitter and sweet. There may be despair sometimes in the Doctor Who reality, but there is always hope. The hope sometimes veers into sappy territory, but then it is supposed to be an upbeat series also aimed at youngsters.
The aliens look silly enough to remind you of this target audience. Whether they bring to mind spiders or rhino's or Mr. Potato Heads, the ET's always look like they needed a slightly bigger special effects budget. But at least the producers have the guts to get creative and stray from the humanoid form occasionally. The Daleks - deadly robots with a little alien inside - have traditionally been the most popular of enemies for Doctor Who, but I have never understood why. On the surface they look cool enough - to sell toys anyway - but as killer robots go, they seem awkward and restricted in their movements. When I see their big spaceships and lairs I can't help but wonder who did the construction on it, as they only seem to sport one spindly little gripper in front and something that looks like a toilet plunger.

In the recently aired and somewhat overstuffed finale to the fourth season, Davies wraps pretty much all of his ongoing storylines into a big bow. He will be around for four Doctor Who specials, which will be airing throughout 2009, before leaving the series. I wonder if he will be starting any new mythology or if he will make the specials self-contained, to give his successor Steven Moffat a fresh start. Moffat penned some of the most popular episodes of the new series and he previously created the UK version of the comedy series Coupling, which had some very inventive storytelling. I will be curious to see in which direction he takes the franchise. The next episode to air will be a Christmas special in December. Before then, do yourself a favour and catch up on the 2005-and-beyond run of the series, even if you didn't like the older episodes. If not for you, then do it for your inner child.

Book Review: When You Are Engulfed In Flames

2008-08-30T15:28:00.004+01:00

(Review written for The American Book Center)

There are not many writers who I enjoy hearing as much as I enjoy reading them. While seated at a reading, my mind will generally start to wander and I will get annoyed with myself for missing part of what is being said. Or I will get annoyed with the author for not matching the narrative voice I heard in my mind when I read his/her book. But I did not have either of these problems with David Sedaris when he visited Amsterdam a couple of years go, to promote his book Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. I had already gotten hooked on in his audio-books a while before meeting him in person at the ABC (The American Book Center) organised event. His voice had preceded him on CD and Live it did not disappoint. There is a dry, wry wit in all his writing that comes across as amplified when read aloud by Sedaris with his typical laconic, laid-back delivery. Sedaris' new book has just arrived in our store: When You Are Engulfed In Flames. While I read it, Sedaris' voice whispered into my ear, giving me a private reading. Soon I will have to look up his audio-book version.

For those who don't know: Sedaris' oeuvre consists of semi-autobiographical short stories. They are 'semi' because he cheerfully admits to fudging some of the facts under creative license, to make for a better tale. The smoking skeleton on the cover is a mash-up of two of the stories from the book. In one a skeleton he bought for his boyfriend Hugh keeps telling him that he is going to die, in another he gives up smoking. Those of you who have read previous books by Sedaris - until recently frequently spotted amidst large clouds of bluish smoke - just gasped at that last bit of information. This story is by far the longest one and also the last one. I won't spoil the details, but it leads him to Tokyo and to the title of the book. The Sedaris family is on the back-burner this time around and more time is spent in France, where Sedaris now lives with Hugh. If you were curious about the writer's present as well as his past, this curiosity will be at least partly satisfied.
Apart from the slight shift in attention, not much has changed in regards to the style and structure of the stories. If you loved previous Sedaris books, you will love this one as well. If you didn't, you won't. And if you've never read Sedaris, then what are you waiting for: come and get some at the ABC!

Movie Review: Rambo (2008)

2008-08-30T15:24:00.003+01:00

It has been a while since I saw a movie that made me feel dirty. And not dirty in a sexy way, but in a moral way. Rambo starts with some documentary footage of real people in Burma suffering, combined with a short history lesson. Then we are shown in a very graphic way how a local infantry unit is killing off civilians in that region. If the movie had developed into a serious treatise on the horrors of physical violence, the scenes would have served their purpose. They succeed at making you very angry and despair at the pointless, horrible torture people inflict on each other in the real world. They will also stir yearnings for justice and revenge, which is of course where Rambo steps in. He has withdrawn into the jungle after the events of previous movies but is persuaded to bring a group of religiously motivated aid workers into the area. Later on, he will be called on to get them out of trouble with the assistance of a group of mercenaries. Rambo is morose and silent a lot and turns out to have some daddy issues. Judging by the end of the movie, he worked those out by ripping people apart with machine guns, cutting throats and in general painting the jungle red. I did not grasp the subtle details of this psychological journey, but then all the gunfire and explosions made it hard to think straight. I assume Rambo must have been suffering from the same problem.
To personify the evil Major Pa Tee Tint, the sadistic leader of the military unit, is singled out. The viewer is presented with lingering shots of him that give us time to beam our hatred out at him. And it is not enough that he is carelessly killing lots of people, there has to be a scene that shows he is abusing young boys for sex. Because mass murder in itself would not be enough for us to want him dead, he has to be a paedophile as well and a gay one at that. I can't be sure if it was intentional that a boy was shown and not a young girl, but the movie sure seems to be playing to base homophobic instincts in its presumably straight and bloodthirsty audience.
There are one or two scenes at the end that appear introspective and seem to suggest there is a moral hidden in the movie somewhere, but I couldn't find one. This was the best I could come up with: violence inflicted by bad people is BAD, violence inflicted by good people is GOOD, but either way it looks pretty damn cool! For future reference: grafting a sensationalist and gruesome action movie onto a real historical tragedy is a little tacky.

Book Review: Infected

2008-08-30T10:11:00.002+01:00

Getting Under Your Skin - Scott Sigler's Infectious Horror Novel

Scott Sigler was annoyed when the publishing world refused to put him in print. So he took one of his 'books' and turned it into a podcast, then a free pdf file and several successful, freely distributed online 'books' later he now finds himself in print after all, thanks to Random House. It turns out that even when people can read a story online for free or listen to it, they are willing to pay for the more tangible version. Sigler fiddled around a little with his story 'Infection' which has been renamed 'Infected' in its paper form. It is a horror novel about an infection that causes bluish triangles under the skin in its victims and makes them go violent and paranoid. Where is this disease coming from? And is there a purpose to it?
The book is initially split three ways. It follows couple of researchers and Dew, a CIA operative, who are all trying to make sense of a series of murders/suicides. Then there is Perry, a fairly recent infectee, who slowly starts to go through some disturbing changes. And lastly there is a gleeful description of the internal progress of the infection, detailed enough to give the semblance of making scientific sense.
Normally this is the sort of story that I would prefer to see in a movie theatre: I don't often find much style or substance in the contemporary horror or action-thriller genre and Infected is a combination of both. Some parts of the book confirmed my bias. The chapters about the researchers are obviously just a way for the writer to bring across information and give an outside perspective on the infection, but the characters don't amount to much. They are given some defining personality traits, but these are ultimately irrelevant. Dew the CIA operative is given a bit more time and dimension, but with his bitter Vietnam veteran past, he skirts close to cliché. The meat of the story - literally - is in following the process of infection in Perry, an ex football player with daddy issues. Sigler takes sardonic pleasure in describing the biological details and doesn't hold back on the gore. I squirmed my way through a lot of parts that involved various forms of bodily fluids and mutilation. There is one part in particular near the end that will make the eyes of half the readership water. When Perry starts having an interior dialogue with the triangles under his skin, things start to feel like a Stephen King novel, which is good or bad depending on your opinion of Stephen King. For me, these were the most interesting parts of the book; a slow descent into madness.
There are some believability issues: I did not buy the fact that Perry doesn't go and get help for his condition earlier on, when his judgement is not impaired yet. And Perry seems to be going through his infection in a different way than other victims, but because we never follow another victim, the difference is unclear.
The ending is open, the possibility of a sequel looming. I am not sure I would read one if it came out, but to fans of gory medical horror I can recommend Infected for a slightly sickening weekend at the beach. Hypochondriacs: steer clear.

We Know Where You Blog...

2008-06-29T14:30:00.003+01:00

Being a very minor figure in the Blogosphere, I don't get a lot of e-mail feedback. However, when I do, it tends to be interesting. In ye olde beginning, with an air of overwhelming optimism, I had started two blogs: my current one and one focussing on gay themes , which is now on hiatus. My first e-mail response ever stemmed from the first article I put up on that blog, a tongue-in-cheek guide to making an effective online profile for dating sites. The e-mail came from an editor at a local, bilingual gay magazine (Gay & Night) asking me if he could publish it. I happily agreed, making a Dutch translation and spinning it off into an ongoing series of articles about dating, relationships and sex for gay men. I will try to convert these into a book at some point (to all publishers out there: contact me if interested).
Next I received a compliment from sex advice columnist Dan Savage about a piece I had written about him on my gay blog. But to be honest: I had pointed him towards the article, which was very positive about him. So that was more of a mutual pat on the back.
Then arrived a puzzling e-mail from a woman in the US, who was looking for a ghostwriter for her autobiography or - failing that - someone who could hook her up with a publisher. Her life story was indeed an interesting one and she managed to condense it into two paragraphs. In rambling, semi-literate English she told me how she had gone to jail for killing her husband, even though it had been self-defence. She defended the act to me as if I was on the jury at her trial and it had obviously escaped her attention that I was on the other side of the Atlantic. I briefly considered pushing her for more details on this juicy story, but in the end I decided that leading on a convicted murderer was probably not a good idea, even if she wasn't on the same continent. I ended up telling her my connections in the US were limited and that she should probably try to find someone local.
Last week I received an e-mail from someone doing publicity for Ocean's 7-11. This is a series of 8 webisodes about the shenanigans of a group of 'North Hollywood misfits', as the press release states. The first part aired in January and the second one goes online on the 28th of June. The series parodies Ocean's 11 while paying homage to the people who made it. The first webisode was picked as a Featured Video by Yahoo and this got the video 30.000 hits within one day. I have taken a look at the first webisode and my one word review of it would be 'charming'. Mostly though, I am puzzled that I was targeted to spread the word about this series. As far as I know, I have racked up nowhere near 30.000 hits in the years I have been online. The makers of the series apparently are fans of my blog - the publicist said so in the e-mail anyway - but I don't think I ever heard from them before. Maybe I am just paranoid but it made me wonder: do I have fans? If so, where are they, as they never call, they never write, they never fax and in general don't make a peep. So someone please tell me: am I really famous but you guys forgot to clue me in? Anybody reading this? Anybody out there? Hello?

Book Review: I Am Not Myself These Days

2008-06-11T21:23:00.004+01:00

I Am Not Myself These Days by Josh Kilmer-Purcell taught me a few things about myself: I would make a lousy drunk and an even lousier drag queen. The irregular hours and lack of sleep would totally derail my tight schedule and the black-outs would also put me off: waking up not knowing where I was, with possibly a naked stranger next to me. Plus, I doubt I would be any good at walking in high heels.
Josh's book is a memoir of sorts - but the names, descriptions and some of the events have been changed to protect the not necessarily innocent. The book describes a highly problematic though at times oddly sweet romance he lived through - barely - with a male prostitute.
At night Josh glammed up New York's club scene in outrageous outfits as AquaDisiac, whose trademark was a set of see-through breasts in which live goldfish swam. Aqua/Josh consumed a fair amount of alcohol on these nights, waking up trashed and confused, only to have to stumble to a day job at an ad agency. Quite how Josh managed to get through the days while seriously sleep-deprived and drunk or hung over baffles me. As a control freak, I almost experienced anxiety attacks just reading about his constant state of restlessness and inebriation. The process of becoming Aqua was tortuous, as was being in her fantastic outfits, the pain leading to more drinking to cope with it. Reading along, you wonder where the drive to do it was coming from. The motivation seemed to be: to prove that I can.
During a night out as Aqua, Josh ran into Jack, a male escort who shortly afterwards moved Josh into his fancy apartment. Jack was fascinated with Josh for being a fuck-up, and he did indeed seem very together himself by comparison, even though he led a strange life. A variety of mostly unattractive men paid him to realise their often bizarre s&m fantasies. Surprisingly perhaps, there was no actual sex during most of these meetings, but still this 'job' was illegal and off the books. Because of that, a big pile of money had to be simply hidden away in a closet: Jack couldn't officially exist. He was also booked occasionally for large parties - with multiple escorts - that could last for days. Some of these parties required him to take drugs, which was ultimately how he lost control and became self-destructive.
Before things took a bad turn, Jack was attentive and romantic to Josh and for a while the drunken drag queen and drugged male escort actually seemed to keep each other in a nice balance. But for Josh, coming home every day meant a possible surprise beyond the front door: there might be a pile of people having sex or a naked man tied up on the floor.
Josh describes these events with ironic detachment, the bizarre becoming oddly normal, sometimes even comforting. I love the style in which the book is written: no-nonsense, unapologetic, but self-aware and with a dry, sassy wit always at the ready. The book is a captivating glimpse into a life that seems to illustrate the Chinese curse 'may you live in interesting times'. Especially if you are uptight like me, experiencing the life of a drunken drag queen is best done vicariously.
A podcast interview with Josh Kilmer-Purcell about this book can be found here.

Television Review: Torchwood

2008-06-08T21:44:00.008+01:00

Torchwood is a spin-off of Doctor Who, a British series that has a fan following as fanatic as Star Trek. It has been around since the sixties and after a long time off the air, it was recently revived to great success under the skilful guidance of Russell T. Davies, best known for creating Queer as Folk (the original UK version). Doctor Who is about a time traveller from another world, who jumps back and forth saving the universe, with blatant disregard for the butterfly effect and on a fairly low special effects budget. In the second season of the current revival, the Doctor ran into Queen Victoria, who set up an organisation to keep an eye out for this strange character. Scrabble players may note that Torchwood is an anagram of Doctor Who. Torchwood quickly broadened its scope to secretly studying all sorts of freaky phenomena and alien encounters. There are various incarnations of the organisation in different parts of England (and - of course - in alternate realities), which are working 'outside the government, beyond the police' according to the opening credits. The Cardiff team stars in this series and they are lead by the literally immortal Jack Harness (John Barrowman) who has his own past with the good Doctor. Then there are: Gwen (a policewoman drafted into the organisation in the first episode), Toshiko (a tech wiz), Owen (a doctor) and Ianto (concierge/handyman).
Torchwood is deserving of the ‘wood’ in its title, both in the sexual meaning and with regards to the acting. When there is a choice between overacting and underplaying, the cast rarely goes for the latter. Worst offenders in this regard are unfortunately the two leads: Jack and Gwen. I like Barrowman, because the actor is an openly gay charmer, known for flashing his apparently impressive naughty bits on set. And there is an anecdote he tells with enthusiasm, about highkicking on stage towards the audience, while he had diarrhoea. Feel free to fill in the messy blanks. But as Captain Jack he often comes over as smarmy where he should be likeable. Actrice Eve Myles (Gwen) has a tough job, as her character has violent mood swings in between episodes and sometimes even within an episode. Gwen is supposed to be 'the caring one' but regularly makes bad judgement calls and can be alarmingly irrational. Nevertheless, Gwen has at least four guys who really, really fancy her over the course of the first two seasons (26 episodes).
This brings us to the topic of sex. There is a lot of it in Torchwood, but it often feels sledge hammered into the plots, as if the writers feel that it is necessary to make the show feel more ‘adult’. But when everybody seems to want to bed everybody else, things start to feel silly. In the second season there is more of a feeling of continuity to the relationships/flings in the series, but there are still the occasional lapses: in one episode Ianto (the pretty boy of the group) is crying over his recently deceased girlfriend, in the next he is shagging - hey, ho - captain Jack, who is his sex buddy. This is all the more bizarre as he was also doing it, in retrospect, while the girlfriend was still alive. And yes: Ianto is bisexual it seems, but then so is everybody else in the cast. All the main characters have had at least one encounter with someone of their own gender. Now, I like to see gays and lesbians represented on television, but it should make some psychological sense and not completely disregard continuity.
Death is also a recurring theme in Torchwood and it ends quite a few episodes on a downer. But the series has an odd concept of an afterlife: there is something, but this something is a vast darkness in which apparently nothing happens. It seems a bit half-hearted as afterlives go. However, death does kick off the most interesting storyline of the second season, starting with the apparent death of one of the main characters. The psychological consequences make for an interesting arc that is actually carried through to the finale.
Torchwood tries to be ‘gritty’ and ‘real’ while telling stories about monsters. In many ways it is the Angel to Doctor Who’s Buffy. It even ‘pays homage to’ Buffy’s concept of a Hellmouth: a pseudo-scientific rationale that is given to explain why so many strange things happen in Cardiff. The link with these series is made stronger by two welcome appearances of James Marsters (who played 'Spike' in both Buffy and Angel) in the second season, as a former lover of Captain Jack. As he jokes in the second season finale: ‘It’s all about sex with you people.’ Ironically, Torchwood feels sillier than Doctor Who, because the latter is a full-on, high adventure science fiction series where anything goes, while Torchwood makes unsuccessful grabs at realism. These only serve to make the moments when major threats are averted with some vague techno-babble stand out more. Frequent and obvious plot holes also make it hard to lose yourself in the stories.
There is a lack of coherence to the world of Torchwood, as if no one has thought the whole thing through, to bring all the elements together. Torchwood is a Top Secret organisation, but as the series goes on, apparently every single police officer has heard of them. They drive around in a big black car, semi-inconspicuous, but the windows aren’t tinted and there are bright blue lights on both sides of the front window, sure to catch everyone’s eye. Are they trying to hide themselves or to stand out? It also does not make much sense that their large underground complex is run by only five people, who are frequently the only ones standing in between the world and total disaster. The series takes a stab at addressing this by saying the Cardiff branch is estranged from the others for unspecified reasons, meaning they are on their own. Why head offices would allow a rogue branch to continue is not clear however and it makes you wonder where all the money for the high-tech gizmo's is coming from. The first season was very uneven but with the second series, Torchwood is becoming more polished: it has more of a sense of humour about itself and better continuity. In the beginning, the characters were just jumping through the hoops of the plot, being made to act in unbelievable ways. But the characters seem to be wrestling control away from the plots and gaining dominance, which is a very good thing. Torchwood is still on hiatus, but I would like to see it renewed, so that it gets a chance to reach its full potential.

Book Review: Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in Man's Prison

2008-06-08T21:38:00.003+01:00

T.J. Parsell has written a book called Fish: A Memoir of a Boy in a Man's Prison which tells the story of the truth behind all those 'dropping the soap in prison' jokes. Parsell was locked up in 1978 for a couple of years when he was a fairly naive 17 year old boy. His family was poor and uneducated and his crime, robbery with a fake gun, was misguided and stupid more than anything else. But even if his crime had been more severe, he did not deserve to be gang-raped early on during his stay and systematically forced into sex throughout his time in prison. Being a 'fish' (a 'first-timer' or 'new arrival' in prison slang) he was an easy target.
Many years after his release, Parsell was the president of Stop Prisoner Rape and he is currently a consultant to the National Prison Rape Elimination Commission. His experience in prison is rule rather than exception; that much is clear from the beginning of the book. Lock a rowdy group of men in together without a sexual release and they turn into sexual predators, the strong preying on the weak. 'Boys' are forced to find a 'man' to protect them in return for sex. This is not loving sex or erotic sex, it is a business-like transaction at best, a violent transaction at worst. If they don't find a man to protect them, they are more likely to be assaulted and raped on a regular basis. Both straight and gay 'boys' find themselves pushed into this role, or 'turned out' (to stay with prison terminology).
Parsell's story becomes more complex, because he was starting to realise that he was gay around the time that he was locked up. Just as he was beginning to be aware of sexual feelings for men, he was forced to act on them against his will. For a long time he still stayed 'in the closet' however, as there are odd double standards in prison. Very effeminate gay men, especially transvestites, are seen as precious commodities, as they are the closest a lot of the inmates will get to a 'real' woman until they are released. But if you are known to be gay, flamboyant or not, it is assumed that you won't mind having sex with pretty much any guy, meaning you are fair game. Following this logic, a heterosexual woman would want to have sex with any and all men she encounters.
Boundaries between gay and straight blur in prison. Most straight men there do not mind getting a blowjob from a guy or being on top and do not consider that to make them gay in any way. They are simply taking care of a basic need. It is a very 'down low' way of thinking. But to be on the receiving end of oral or anal sex or to masturbate a guy would make you gay and would be a blow to your manhood and reputation. Therefore the 'boys' who have been 'turned out', be they straight or gay originally, are seen as fundamentally lacking in masculinity because of what they do. Two 'boys' having sex together would not be seen as a threat to their men because it would be seen, in a deeply twisted way, as 'lesbian' sex.
Parsell's story is well-written and gives a fascinating glimpse into the world of sexual politics in prison. The story gets more complex as things turn semi-romantic with his 'man' and later on in the book, Parsell falls in love for the first time with another 'boy'. Racial relations and well-intentioned but illogical laws also factor into the story. The memoir has a somewhat open ending, stopping at a point that makes narrative sense but leaves you wondering what happened during the last years in prison. There is a short follow-up, telling us what the most important people from the memoir are up to these days, but the last years in prison remain a blank spot. There is also a bittersweet correspondence between Parsell and his first real lover and a short explanation of the reason why Parsell decided to drop his previous career to become the 'poster child' for prison rape.
What I missed was a more extensive update on the state of affairs in prisons these days, many years after Parsell's incarceration. From what he does say however, the things he wrote about still go on, because the guards are lacking in numbers or turning a blind eye and because sexual offenders are not prosecuted. People's psyches are still being violated and not just their minds: rates of HIV infection among prisoners are estimated to be five to ten times higher than outside of prison. Parsell's book serves its purpose both as a gripping read and a call to action. Let's hope that the people in charge will be able to get over their secondhand shame, stop averting their eyes and start facing the problem.

Book Review: Persepolis

2008-06-08T21:32:00.003+01:00

Running from Iran and back again - How do you find home when you don't know where your heart is?

Persepolis tells the story of a smart and rebellious girl who finds herself growing up without a place to call her own. It is the autobiographical tale of Marjane Satrapi, who put it down on paper as a black and white graphic novel and has recently converted it into an animated film. As a young girl, her parents joined protests for a republic in Iran, but when the Shah is finally dethroned and the Islamic Revolution rolls around, things go from bad to worse. A small group of Holier Than Thou's, aided and abetted by a large flock of sheep, force their strict religious beliefs down everyone's throat. All liberal elements are seen as hostile and therefore violently suppressed. Marjane's parents send her to Europe to escape the regime but without any close family to fall back on, she has trouble finding a place that feels like home. When she admits defeat and travels back to Iran, to the comfort of her parents, she doesn't fit in there anymore either. The obligatory veil, the inequality of men and women, the large posters of martyrs all over the cities and the prohibition of free expression add up to a sense of alienation. At one point she is admonished by police for trying to catch a bus because her behind makes 'obscene' movements when she runs. 'Well then don't look at my ass!!' she yells at them in exasperation. They are too stunned to arrest her. Will she stay in Iran, where any exposed skin is assumed to automatically lead to wanton lust, or will she head abroad once again?
Persepolis gives a fascinating perspective on Iran. Rather than a unified country of zealots, there are different groups and opinions within the country, even if they can't make themselves heard. Satrapi humanises the country and manages to make you smile regularly even though her story is tragic at the core, many lives being pointlessly destroyed. She published more graphic novels after Persepolis (which was originally published in two volumes) and after having read this one Embroideries, Chicken with Plums even the children’s book Monsters are Afraid of the Moon have risen to the top of my to-read list.

Movie Review: Untraceable

2008-04-15T13:05:00.004+01:00

Untraceable is an enjoyably crappy thriller, that makes you ponder the validity of the title. The lead is a single mother who works for the FBI, researching internet crimes. She stumbles upon a site on which a kitten is tortured on a live-feed cam, while this is being discussed in an adjoining chatroom. Her boss is not too concerned about this and neither will you be, as the kitten looks obviously but un-intentionally animatronic. Watching people suffer realistically on-screen is entertainment, but animals would just be cruel. When the little sadist who runs the site moves on to people, a media-circus ensues.
His gimmick: the more people visit the site, the faster the people he tortures die. His first victim, for instance, is tied up, cut and fed fluids by drip that keep the blood from clogging, bleeding him dry. The more people watch it, the more fluids he gets: killed by hype and mob mentality.
Tracking the site and pinpointing the origin proves impossible because of some technobabble that the writers of the movie are betting will confuse you, involving switching ip's, servers, bouncy mirrors and possibly string theory. I was duly at a loss to completely follow the explanation, but wasn't quite buying that a site with a live chat-room could be set up in the way described. In any case, the killer turns out to be conveniently local and he is in fact revealed early on, turning the film from a who-dunnit into a why-dunnit. Probably not a
good idea, as the authorities aren't making much headway and the movie stalls a little until some savvy victims start mouthing clues to the camera while suffering and dying horribly. Now there's discipline for you. These clues are followed to great result, by making major intuitive leaps. And of course the hunt turns personal as the creepy killer turns his attention to the single mother and her daughter.
It is a bumpy road all the way when it comes to believability, both in motivations and logic, but it is all done capably enough to go along for the slightly nauseating ride. The climax is a let-down, as the killer suddenly experiences a major drop in intelligence and makes several bad judgement calls. The final shot of the movie was no doubt intended to be cool, even profound, but alas - it looks goofy and ends things with a laugh.

Untraceable, 2008, 100 min. USA. Director: Gregory Hoblit. Starring: Diane Lane, Billy Burke, Colin Hanks.

Movie Review: Juno

2008-04-15T13:00:00.002+01:00

Juno just had sex for the first time at sixteen and finds herself with a bun in the oven. What to do: abortion or adoption? Friends and parents weigh in, but it will have to be her choice. And that first choice leads to other difficult choices that have to be made about her baby's future. Going by the plot, you might think this an after-school special, but it is a comedy and a pretty good one at that.
I had heard só many positive things about Juno that I was afraid it would let me down when I finally saw it. But while I do not completely get the hype, it is indeed an entertaining movie. It has a very liberal tone and will no doubt hit a nerve with conservatives. Teen pregnancy being portrayed in an upbeat manner is unusual, though I suppose it would have been more shocking if the story had ended with an abortion. I can imagine concerned parents foreseeing waves of knocked up teens, cheerfully shooting out babies at adoptive parents with baseball gloves. Given the rate of teen pregnancies though, it is refreshing to see a light-hearted take on the subject, maybe lifting the taboo somewhat. Admittedly, the movie is a bit tóó easy-going about what is really a major, dramatic event. The parents are slightly sarcastic but very supportive, as is the accidental father. Juno herself has only two scenes that show the deep emotional impact the situation has on her. The rest of the time she is a wise-ass, as wilfully alternative as the Indie soundtrack that pervades the movie. Her dialogue is often funny but a bit artificial, which keeps reminding you she is a character.
Juno - the movie - never quite feels realistic either; the script is too lovingly, neatly crafted for that. But because of a charming cast, you end up not caring about that. Simmons and Janney are a lot of fun as Juno's parents and Jennifer Garner pulls off a nice and subtle piece of acting, our feelings about her morphing over the course of the movie even though her character remains pretty much the same. There is one scene in particular that is brilliantly done, in which she talks to Juno's unborn baby by way of her stomach. You start out cringing at it but by the end you want to just give her a great, big hug. Especially if you just got accidentally knocked up, don't miss this movie. At the very least it will cheer you up a little.

Juno, 2007, 96 min. USA. Director: Jason Reitman. Starring: Ellen Page, Micheal Cera, Jason Bateman.

Movie Review: Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem

2008-04-15T12:55:00.003+01:00

Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem delivers exactly what was advertised, no more, no less. While the title characters duke it out in a small town in America, plenty of humans - often entirely defenceless - get caught in the fray and are duly slaughtered in a variety of nasty ways. Be it by skinning, beheading by jaws, impregnation or acid spray. And during its relatively short run time, there is indeed plenty of running to avoid all these nasty possible endings. The cast consists entirely of relatively unknown actors, which is more fun in the beginning as you can't guess by star status who will survive and the order in which the victims will perish. As the focus is split over multiple characters, it is also not clear for a while who will be the Sigourney Weaver in this chapter - the smart and tough lady who will end up kicking some butt. Though to be honest, this movie's Sigourney never reaches her full potential and lets a man fill in for her. There are quite a few narrative dead ends in the story, mostly ended by death. The movie is brutal in killing off innocent people, women and children not exempted. Thankfully we are not all that invested in any of them, as not much time is given to make them more than a basic character outline. The dialogue is flat and thankfully sparse and the way the plot flows serves its purpose in keeping the action going continuously and keeping you curious about the next bit of bloodshed.
I am not spoiling anything in saying that an Alien-Predator hybrid appears in this movie, which follows off directly from the end of the previous flick in the series. I guess one would call him an Alienator? Apart from looking unique, I am not clear on the ramifications of this crossbreeding, as the movie doesn't show the difference that much, though it does give the Alienator a neat and disgusting new way to make babies. Much of the inter-species fighting is done in semi-darkness, which is atmospheric as hell, but makes it hard to see what is going on at points.
I will refrain from poking at too many of the holes in the plot, but a couple won't hurt. Why is an empty helicopter left behind conveniently on the roof of an evacuated hospital? How do the Aliens build large parts of a hive in what couldn't have been more than an hour or two? And what is up with the variable gestation time of the Alien embryos? Why does it take so long for those helicopters to arrive later in the movie? Feel free to discuss amongst yourselves. In short: an efficient and brainless scifi horror movie, that has a sequel shamelessly built into the last scene.

Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem, 2007, 86 min. USA. Directors: Colin & Greg Strause Starring:Steven Pasquale, Reiko Aylesworth, John Ortiz.

Television Review: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

2008-04-15T12:45:00.005+01:00

I love time travel stories, even though they generally drive me nuts. The first Terminator movie made fictional sense: something bad came out of the future and this future could not be avoided because - in a sense - it had already happened. When they apparently DID avoid this future at the end of the second movie, the logical thing to happen would have been a total reboot: Sarah back at the diner as a waitress. No Terminators, no son, no nothing. Because those events in the two movies ultimately wouldn't have happened and had been undone, you see? Back to the Future showed this effect at work, Michael J. Fox slowly fading out (though you'd think it would be more like an instant *plop*) when he messed with his past / his parents' future. But that trilogy threatens to make me go off on a long ramble about the butterfly effect, so let's get back to the Terminator saga.
By the third movie, the human-machine war starts - and it seems to be at the forefront of an upcoming new movie trilogy of the franchise. But now we also have the television series, which must be an alternate reality, as Sarah Connor sidesteps her death - as mentioned in the movies - by a jump from our recent past into present day. She is helped by a reprogrammed Terminator, who looks like a sweet girl. This machine is driven by curiosity and cold reasoning, fascinated by human behaviour while letting nothing keep her off her goal of protecting John Connor, the future leader of the rebellion. The fembot is played very well by Summer Glau, who previously showed off her kookiness in Firefly and in this role gets to kick quite a bit of ass. John and Sarah Connor unfortunately aren't all that interesting so far. Sarah is strong and stoic, but lacks charm, while James seems more a surly teen than a potential leader. Their main goal in the series is still to avoid the war which already became a reality in the movies.
There is a fair amount of 'reinterpretation' of Terminator lore here: where it once seemed there were only two models of Terminators - both made in large quantities - there are now a lot of them with different faces. On top of that, I think the first movie stated that only one man and one machine could be sent back in time. The second movie already messed with that statement and this series throws it completely out of the window: multiple machines and multiple humans travel back in time to suit the plot. This makes for major cause-and-effect headaches, such as: doesn't messing with the past on this scale change the future in itself, especially considering the previously mentioned butterfly effect (meaning: any minor change will have major consequences)? And if the Terminators didn't find themselves blinked out of existence after sending the first machine back, why send a second one? Didn't Sarah obviously fail to avoid the war? And why does Sarah want to avoid that future even though it likely means that her son will cease to be? Alternatively, in the case that changing the past doesn't erase the future but results in the creation of an alternate timeline, why bother going after someone in the past who can't affect 'your' reality? Is your head hurting yet?Apart from the special effects budget, I have to wonder why the improved, liquid metal Terminator model has not shown up yet. Is the future saving him as a last resort? And why wouldn't the last resort be sent back to an earlier point in time, as you don't have to be linear when time-travelling? It is somewhat worrying that all this shaky logic is at the core of the plot, but not being discussed. Maybe the show-runners are just stalling to be able to come up with a coherent explanation. The only way to enjoy the series is to let go of all reasoning, just watch the action and not ponder any of it. As it stands, Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles serves as a run-of-the-mill action series with average writing that will need to find a way to stand out from the competition, aside from its affiliation with the Terminator franchise.

Game Review: Phoenix Wright: Justice for All (NDS)

2008-04-15T12:28:00.006+01:00

Phoenix Wright: Justice for All is the middle part of a trilogy of games that were ported from the Game Boy Advance for the Nintendo DS. In all three games, you play defence attorney Phoenix Wright and have to get a 'not guilty' verdict for your clients by doing research, gathering evidence, picking apart testimony in court by cross-examination and by presenting evidence at the appropriate moments. An overarching story serves to string the separate cases together, concerning your colleagues, rivals and friends.
The presentation is fairly simple but effective: in front of backdrops of certain locations like Wright's office, the courtroom or the scene of a crime, characters pop up - drawn in manga-style - who you can chat with. They are fairly limited in their animation, having only a couple of signature expressions each and some standard 'moves' that sometimes make little sense when people start appearing at several locations. For instance, a dignified lady sips a cup of tea, which seems right when we see her at home, but gets silly when she is later seen sipping the same cup of tea on the witness stand. The design is deeply charming however and though the cases might be grim - all of them are murders - the game revels in coming up with outlandish people and funny scenarios. One case involves circus people, another one spirit channelers and yet another costumed television Ninjas. The smart balance of seriousness and oddness is what makes the game so addictive. And though the solution to most of the cases is very unlikely, it does make sense within the context of the game.
At first I was a little put off by how little influence you seem to have on the story. Though there is ultimately a 'good' ending and a 'bad' ending, this is the result of one single decision to be made during the final case. And even here you can just skip back in the story to find the 'good' ending. With the help from an occasional hint from an online walkthrough, there is no way you will not be able to finish this game. So you are pretty much just following along with the story, trying to find the right logical action to advance it. Sometimes you will have to go with a hunch, but often a bit of reasoning will keep you from getting stuck. By shouting 'Hold it!' or 'Objection!' into the DS microphone you can press witnesses on their statements - or you can just push a button instead, so you won't have to embarrass yourself on public transport. You will likely end up always pressing witnesses on everything they say. At best it will further your case and at worst it will give you some amusing dialogue in which you get made fun of. I felt a little thrown out of the games at times, as Wright - who is supposed to be you - can suddenly go off on an unexpected tangent when you present evidence, which you picked for a different reason. Vice versa, you can be on - what turns out to be - the right track but have trouble finding the right combination of testimony and evidence to get your point across. Being penalised because the game doesn't understand you, gets frustrating at points. Another nitpick is that during the investigations, characters have repeated standard replies when questioned about irrelevant people or evidence. These take too long to zap through every time you hit on them. Some of the music - which is tied to specific characters or locations - also gets a little repetitive. The stories and cast are very engaging and there is a lot of fun to be had in slowly uncovering the bizarre truth behind a case, as it twists and turns. Though each of the four cases in this volume will take you one or two long afternoons to get through, you will have trouble putting it down. After I finished, it felt like I just read a good book and I was left hungry for more. Just a tip though: as the story arcs throughout the three games, I would advise playing them in sequence: Ace Attorney, Justice for All and then Trials and Tribulations. The last one seems to be the best one - going by reviews - so the story ends on a high note. A new entry in this genre, especially developed for the DS, has also just come out: Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney. It makes more use of the touch screen and promises to be as good as its predecessors. Look online for the Flash interactive trailer! Court adjourned.

Book Review: Books with Mental Issues

2008-04-15T12:18:00.003+01:00

I seem to have accidentally run into a recurring theme in the books I have been reading lately: mental issues. I am choosing to see this as a fluke rather than a cosmic warning, but it is interesting nonetheless. In Running with Scissors the narrator is actually the most sane person in the book. It is a memoir of writer Augusten Burroughs' childhood. During the seventies, his mentally unstable mother ditched him with her psychiatrist in a messy, filthy house where he ends up having a fling with a paedophile. The psychiatrist knows and approves of this, but then he also thinks God is speaking to him through his faeces. He is a mental patient with a license, diagnosing other mental patients. The book consists of stories starring Augusten's crazy adoptive family and makes you convinced people should have to pass an exam to be parents. The writer was not surprisingly sued by his adoptive family after the book appeared, claiming he made a lot of it up. A settlement was reached, though Burroughs still holds to his version of events. In any case, his memoir is an amusing and at times baffling read.

In Running with Scissors, Augusten's brother is diagnosed as having Asperger syndrome, which is what the writer of the next book I read also has. The title is Born on a Blue Day, which illustrates one aspect of Asperger: synaethesia, a cross-wiring of the senses. People with the syndrome strongly associate shapes and colours with numbers and words. For the rest they share symptoms with people with autism. They have trouble reading people's expressions, need a lot of structure and routine and some of them are capable of astonishing things like complicated calculations from the top of their head, done in seconds. A lot of these people can't live an independent life, but Daniel Temmet is thankfully 'high functioning', so he manages to. Through his memoir he gives some insight into his mind and how it works. It is a fascinating book, even if his writing can get a little dry and I zoned out during some of the bits about numbers. You end up imagining what it would be like to have a brain that works so much more efficient in some ways, but in others handicaps you.
The next book I am reading is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer, which is a novel said to be written from the perspective of someone with autism, specifically Asperger. There is some controversy about this interpretation, so his condition is not official, but comparisons were made in reviews to the autistic lead character from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. Both books are written from the point of view of a sensitive young boy who goes on an investigation and both titles have some drawings and textual experimentation. Extremely Loud is a love-it or hate-it sort of book from what I heard, so I'm curious to see which camp I will land in. I suspect I will like it, as I loved Haddon's book.

But maybe I need to take a break from autism first. Sit down and watch a movie. I hear Rain Man is pretty good...

Book Review: Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star

2008-04-15T11:24:00.003+01:00

Secrets of a Gay Marine Porn Star sounds like the kind of book you would read with one hand in your lap. But this is not the case - for better or worse, depending on your expectations. It is the autobiography of Rich Merritt, better known in xxx-rated circles as Danny Orlis. Rich initially ended up in the news as the anonymous source for a New York Times cover article that made big waves when it was published in 1998. It illustrated the difficulties of being a gay marine with the American navy, forced to live a double life due to their 'don't ask, don't tell' policy.
His real identity wasn't too hard to figure out for people who knew him personally and when The Advocate discovered that Rich had starred in a couple of porn movies while in the service, they did not hesitate in making it public knowledge, causing another scandal.
The book starts at this point in time and then regresses to Rich's childhood, suffering under a highly religious regime at the Bob Jones University. Rich has plenty of material to pick from: a masturbation virgin until his twenties, in denial about being gay until his mid-twenties, his double life with the marines, ill-advised outings into the worlds of stripping and porn, clinical depression, suicide attempts and an addiction to pills and booze.
While there are too many uninteresting details in the book, and a fair amount of pages should have been culled, his story is fascinating even if the style in which it is written won't blow you away. Rich shows himself to be impulsive and eager to please, sometimes arrogant but at other times charmingly open, like when he admits to having had a premature ejaculation problem. By the end of the book he seems to think he now has his life well and truly back on the rails, but as a reader you are left wondering if he could not go off-track again in the future. For the moment things are going well, however: in January he published his first novel: Code of Conduct. Making use of his insider knowledge, he tells the love story of two marines circa 1993, when Clinton was promising to abolish the army's 'shush' policy on gays. It looks to be an interesting and historically accurate read.

Movie Review: Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street

2008-02-25T21:53:00.004Z

Sweeney Todd as filmed by Tim Burton plays like the demented flipside to Moulin Rouge!, sharing the stylised sets, the flashy zooms, the bigger-than-life acting and the overwhelming melodrama. This is not a bad thing. The story: a barber takes revenge on the judge who
sabotaged his marriage, locked him up and took his daughter. He hooks up with a woman who is down on her luck and runs a meat-pie shop. As the movie is based on a Stephen Sondheim musical, lots of singing ensues, while the blood starts spraying and the bodies start piling up. The highlight is a musical number in which the couple goes gloriously around the bend, coming up with a cunning recycling scheme for their victims. Less engaging are the numbers and scenes involving the misplaced daughter and her doe-eyed suitor: insanity and evil-doing proves itself to be much more interesting than innocence and virtue.
The cast is great. Sacha Baron Cohen (aka 'that Borat guy') catches a lot of laughs for his silly performance as Signor Adolfo Pirelli, bending the tone of the movie, but stopping just short of breaking it. Alan Rickman pulls off another sneering 'Snape' performance with glee. Timothy Spall and Helena Bonham Carter make the Harry Potter reunion complete, Carter looking very much like her Bellatrix Lestrange character from Potter world. She does a great job of providing the movie with some much needed lightness and heart as the dangerously loopy Mrs. Lovett. Johnny Depp is intense and single-minded but manages to keep Sweeney interesting and borderline sympathetic. I don't know the plot of the original musical, so I can't say if anything was changed, but the ending as it stands seems fitting. With this much bloody murder going on, it can only end in tears.
There is also a twist near the end that I saw coming a mile away, but not so the two people I was with, so judge for yourself if it is obvious or very clever. The moral of the story is: kids, don't let vengeance ruin your life. Also: don't get shaved by strangers and only eat meat at places you trust.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, 2007, 116 min. USA/UK. Director: Tim Burton. Starring: Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Alan Rickman.

Movie Review: Shutter (They are Around Us)

2008-02-10T15:38:00.000Z

If you're ever visiting an Asian country, beware of vengeful pale women or little girls with runny mascara and long black hair. They seem to be all over the place these days, with a morbid fascination for multimedia. They're making prank phone-calls, showing up in the static on your tv, ghoulishly abusing the internet or haunting videotapes.
In Shutter one of these specimens is getting freaky with photographs and generally messing with the perception of the recently graduated youngsters she terrorises. They might actually be to blame for her current deceased condition - or not. I don't want to spoil the plot and going by this little genre, ghosts don't always need a reason to pick a specific person. Sometimes they are just mean, dead, pissed off and lashing out at whoever crosses their path. In this case, a photograph-happy couple with their own darkroom becomes the focal point for the apparition's anger.
There isn't much new about Shutter. The mood is quiet and morose, the colours are a bit drained and the lighting - or lack of it - is impeccable. Occasionally there is a jump scare with a loud musical cue. The frequency of these increases near the end until both you and the characters get very edgy because any one break in a shot could mean a sudden cut to a scary face appearing into frame. It's only this none-too-subtle 'boo' factor that keeps things from getting boring. There is also a neat, creepy twist at the ending, but it's one of those that does not make a whole lot of sense looking back on the rest of the movie. Mostly recommended if you haven't seen many of these 'creepy girl' movies or if you are next to a date who scares easily and who you want to grab you tight. Shutter is currently being remade in the US, headlining Joshua Jackson of Dawson's Creek fame.

Shutter (They Are Around Us), 2004, 97 min. Thailand. Directors: Banjong Pisanthanakun & Parkpoom Wongpoom. Starring: Ananda Everingham, Natthaweeranuch Thongmee, Achita Sikamana.

Movie Review: The Kite Runner

2008-02-10T15:34:00.000Z

We sell the book (by Khaled Hosseini) at the store I work at, it came highly recommended by reviewers and still I managed to put off reading it long enough for someone to make a movie out of it. I didn't originally go for the book because it seemed to be one of those worthy 'Oprah Book Club' novels in which Big Life Lessons are learned. In the movie version this is indeed the case, but I enjoyed it regardless.
Two boys in Afghanistan (Amir and Hassan) befriend each other and have a strange master-slave dynamic because there is a difference in class status. They spend a lot of time flying kites and there is a competition - which I had never heard of before - in which whoever manages to take down the most other kites wins. This happens by cutting the thread of the opponent's kite, in a way I am still not quite clear on. When something horrible happens after one of these competitions, it breaks up the friendship of the two boys. Amir, the 'master' of the two, behaves horribly to Hassan because of complex but childish feelings. Many years later, Amir is given the chance to redeem himself by rescuing Hassan's son, who has been taken by the Taliban.
The cinematography and the acting are high quality. The movie successfully puts you in a different time, a different place and tells a beautiful story. The only problem is that it tries to tie everything together too neatly, giving the tale a slightly artificial feel. It also leaves one or two interesting aspects of the story untold. But the fact that you would like to find out even more about the secondary characters in a story, can only mean that it really engaged you to begin with. The two child-actors were forced to flee the country after the movie was released. Tragic, but not surprising considering the way the Taliban are portrayed here. It is of course shameful that the Taliban's reputation has been soiled by this movie, as in reality they are of course a warm and cuddly bunch, with hardly any genocidal tendencies at all.

The Kite Runner, 2007, 122 min. USA. Director: Marc Foster. Starring: Khalid Abdalla, Zekeria Ebrahimi, Ahmad Khan Mahmidzada.

Movie Review: I am legend

2008-01-26T21:09:00.000Z

The world gets hit by a virus - a mutation from a manmade cure for cancer - that changes most of the Earth's population into crazed, violent, flesh-eating monsters who can't stand sunlight. Will Smith plays Robert Neville, the last survivor in New York City and maybe the world, a scientist who is dedicated to finding a cure in a little laboratory under his home. He has been at it for a couple of years and is going a bit odd, talking to mannequins he set up around town. Only his dog keeps him company on his trips around town for food, infected test subjects and the occasional dvd. He broadcasts to potential other survivors, calling them to a specific location, but without response. Lions and gazelles roam the streets during the day. At night Neville locks himself into his house as the mutated population comes out of hiding and hunts for their own version of food.
The beginning of the movie impresses the most, vividly painting the picture of Neville's lonely, desperate existence in a desolate city. I am Legend is at its best when nothing much seems to be happening. Later on, Neville gets unexpected company and quite a bit of explosive action ensues. We see the monsters more often and more clearly and that was probably a mistake. They don't look real and especially in some of the crowd scenes, you get thrown out of the movie and feel like you are watching a computer game. The ending serves its purpose in wrapping up the story, but there are also one or two unlikely coincidences that had me rolling my eyes. I would have preferred the movie to stay understated and a bit more 'realistic'. But it can definitely be recommended as a good popcorn movie.

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Back in the Future: 80's Nostalgia

2008-01-06T19:57:00.000Z

It's a great time to be in your early thirties and nostalgic for the entertainment from your childhood. A 'proper' Ghostbusters sequel is in the making, in the form of a computer game, with the original cast providing the voices and the story. The Goonies might get a follow-up in the form of an animated series on the Cartoon Network. And an animated sequel to the The Dark Crystal is currently in production, due for 2009. Manga publisher Tokypop is adding to the fun with two recently published titles: Legends of the Dark Crystal and Return to the Labyrinth. For those unfamiliar with Manga: they are smaller-but-thicker comics in black and white, which have a somewhat shared style of drawing, with a Japanese origin.
One volume has so far been published of the Dark Crystal series, which is in fact a prequel as it takes place before the movie. It's the Gelfling versus the evil Skeksis and Garthim, though the outcome seems predestined. Again a young Gelfling couple-to-be leads the way, making it feel a bit too familiar and I am not sure if the story will be able to surprise me, but it is well-drawn with a lot of detail and certainly worth a read for fans. Return to the Labyrinth is an actual sequel, picking up with Toby - the abducted baby from the movie - now a teen and finding himself drafted to lead the nutball Labyrinth as a successor to David Bowie - sorry, I mean Jareth the Goblin King. But there are hidden agendas yet to be uncovered, and older sister Sarah seems likely to join the fray, going by the end of the most recent volume (#2). The human characters don't look at all like their movie counterparts - likely due to legal reasons - but the silly and rambling tone of the movie is well-reproduced here, even if the humour is lame in places.
Fans of comics will also be able to relive their youth through omnibus collections from both Marvel and DC. Marvel calls their line Essential (Essential X-men, Fantastic Four and so on) while DC has dubbed theirs Showcase Presents. Each volume contains reprints of a lot of old issues in black-and-white. The colours have fallen by the wayside to cut down on costs, but that is a small price to pay for - well - paying such a small price. And as owners of the original issues can attest, comics colouring in days of yore wasn't very impressive yet anyway.
As for more recent nostalgia, I can't resist a quick plug for Buffy: The Long Way Home, the official continuation ('season 8') of the television series now out in trade paperback, written by none other than series creator Joss Whedon. Good stuff and 'entirely pointy'!
(By the way - all the book links here are to the site of the store I work at. If you are abroad, you might find them cheaper locally.)

Movie Review: Hatchet

2008-01-06T19:48:00.000Z

Hatchet is a sweet, romantic comedy in which... oh, hang on, that was Enchanted. As the title suggests Hatchet is a horror move, either a homage to or a rip-off from the overly gory 80's 'classics', most notably Friday the 13th. Is has the 'isolate and kill'-setup: ship a little group of victims off to somewhere remote, where even mobile phones don't work and start bumping them off one by one. This location: the swamps of New Orleans. The group: a little clique of people foolish enough to take a 'spooky' tour through said swamps, lead by an inept guide. There are c-actors you might recognise: Deon Richmond (once that cute little kid from The Cosby Show), Mercedes McNab (whose character - amazingly and hilariously - is even 'stupider' than her most famous one: Harmony from Angel) and Richard Riehle (one of those 'He looks so familiar, but from where?' actors). There are cameos from Robert Englund (Freddy) and Tony Todd (Candyman).
The killer is one of those Energiser Bunny types that just keeps going and going and going, no matter if you shoot him, stab him or set him on fire. A hatchet is indeed used, validating the title, as are various power tools, though mostly this killer likes ripping people apart with his bare hands. There has been a move towards what has been dubbed 'horror porn' lately, in movies like Hostel, Saw and the Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake, which show people being tortured fairly realistically. That's entertainment, folks! This movie consciously spits in that movements face. The gory killings are way over the top and for the most part no effort has been made to keep things believable. The chocolate milk coloured with red dye flies everywhere. My favourite: after someone's arms have been ripped off, this person is then dragged away by his legs and swung around through the air to have his head crushed against a gravestone. Don't you hate it when that happens?
To the movie's credit, time is taken in the beginning to sketch out the characters a little and the actors all seem to be getting into it. Especially McNab and Richmond grab a few giggles as the comic relief. Seeing how the group makes some really stupid decisions, you end up not feeling too bad for the people getting offed. Highlight: 'Hey let's have this person stand guard unarmed and alone with her back to some ominous shrubbery.... What!? She got ripped apart you say? I did not see that coming.'
Ultimately, how much you enjoy the movie will depend on how many of this type you have already seen. It all seemed very familiar to me and I doubt it will stick with me for too long. A sequel seems likely, but then don't they always in this genre?