Reviews

So, does the movie look any different from an average episode?

Yes, and no. Thankfully live-action and CG concepts where thrown out years ago and the movie sticks to the 2D animation so well known of the series. Having said that, some effort has gone into making it shine. There is excellent detail work and more shading than in an average episode which gives it more depth. Also, some ‘camera’ work has been added to complete the cinematic experience. There are some breathtaking pans and swoops mixed into the action.

But frankly, who cares when you finally have Homer Simpson on the big screen.

The movie focuses on our favourite dysfunctional American family and the rest of the Springfield characters are pushed to the margins for brief appearances. The movie manages to make an early dig at Fox and Homer makes an even earlier dig at the audience.

The first act is hilariously brilliant. It’s top form stuff from the writers and they revel in the PG certificate showing more of Bart than we’d really care to see and Homer gets to flip the finger at several people over and over again.

After the much advertised “Spider Pig” scene, things slow down a bit as the heart of the story develops which sets up a hilarious and quite thrilling final act.

Excellent stuff!

McCarthy’s most recent work “The Road” led me to this novel.

As I mentioned in a previous review; if you’re not familiar with Cormack McCarthy the first thing that strikes you is his writing style. There are no speech marks, there are no apostrophes and he breaks most ‘classic’ writing guides such as using ‘and’ only once when listing items. His style is like nothing else I’ve read and it’s all the better for it.

You’ll also note that he doesn’t give the reader any clues as to the character’s thoughts or feelings. You get an almost script like reading of the characters actions and words along with short descriptive passages. This is his genius. This is his art. This is why he’s thought as one of the greatest living writers.

The book is set along the Mexican border in Texas during the early 80s. The plot centers on three main characters. Llewelyn Moss a welder who happens upon the result of a drug deal gone wrong while out hunting. Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is an old-fashioned law keeper of the small town. Anton Chigurh is a hit man after Llewelyn.

The book seems to have many themes. Through Sheriff Bell’s monologues which punctuate the book you get a feeling for his despair at the fight between good and evil that he’s losing and his concern over post Vietnam America. He’s aware of the unfocused anger and rage of the current generation.
Llewelyn Moss is an ordinary Joe. His life is turned upside down the instant he decides to take the briefcase full of money. That single action ripples throughout his pond and affects everyone he knows and loves. He is the story of living with the consequences of your actions.
Chigurh is a genuinely scary character. He is driven by his almost fanatical moral compass. He isn’t ‘evil’ in the classic sense but strikes me as being a product of total self belief. He is cold and without compassion but in a twisted way is the most honest character in the book. His sole desire is to find and retrieve the money and deliver justice to the one who took it.

I get the feeling that although the title of the book is taken from a W.B. Yeats poem it’s more inline with the aging Sheriff feeling that he no longer has a place in world. This is brought to a head during a conversation with his Uncle towards the end of the book.

I’ve been mulling this book over in my mind for a few days and want to read it again to understand very facet.

For those who don’t enjoy reading, it’s been made into a promising movie by the Cohen brothers out in the US later this year.

Another Friday and another trip to the cinema.

This week we went to see Vacancy, the ‘horror’ starring Luke Wilson and Kate Beckinsale. I didn’t have particularly high expectations for this film so I was pleasantly surprised when I didn’t hate it.

The film follows the two bickering leads as their car breaks down forcing them to spend the night in a motel run by someone who I can only describe as an evil Ned Flanders.
Imagine, if you will, that Ned Flanders finally snapped after too many Homer jibes then murdered his family and then moved to Nowhere USA and opened a motel and you’ll be on the right track.
The actor who plays the motel owner had all of Ned’s mannerisms perfect and even his outwardly annoying enthusiasm shone through the first act.

The film descends into pretty standard survival-farce once they realise that they’re starring in a snuff film. The thing that most surprises is that it avoids most of the horror cliches. Luke’s character is inventive and creative in trying to out think their captors rather than blithely jump through the killer’s hoops.

The short running time and fresh script keep things nice and tidy. It won’t win any awards but it’s one of the better ‘horror/thrillers’ for a long time. It certainly beats watching stupid teenagers getting minced up by a paint-by-the-numbers serial killer.

Apocalyptic stories fascinate me. Man’s struggle to survive when all is lost holds my imagination. I attribute that to growing up in the 80s when the threat of nuclear war was at its peak and there were dozens of post-apocalyptic tales in book and in the cinema.

I also have a predilection for stories that explore the love between a father and his son. I don’t know whether I’m seeking to consolidate my own childhood experiences or its because Debbie and I are on the cusp of starting a family and I’m trying to weigh up the kind of father I’ll become. Tales and stories from other’s experiences and imaginations may help me shape my expectations; to give me a compass to follow.

I’m sure brief psycho-analysis could find the link between the two genres but in the mean time I was delighted when I come across a tale which combines both elements.

Cormack McCarthy’s “The Road” chronicles the journey of a man and his son as they struggle to survive in a dying world. The fate into which the world has fallen is never fully explained. Everything is dead or dying. Ash and snow fall from the sky to cover what the great fires have destroyed. One can easily imagine a nuclear winter or at least a self-imposed disaster.

If you are new to Cormack McCarthy then the first thing that will strike you is his sharp and sparse writing style. There are no speech marks. There are no apostrophes. There is nothing so bold as a colon or as pompous as semi-colon. This makes the text feel fresh and precise. His intelligence isn’t in multi-syllabic words but in structure and verse. Make no mistake, this is an easy read but it’s a piece of literature that will studied in schools in our own future.

The story picks up a good few years after this disaster. The unnamed man (”Papa) and his unnamed son (”the boy”) are trying to travel south where it may be warmer. There is virtually nothing left; not mankind nor nature. The few scattered people are either emaciated solitary travelers wrapped in stinking, filthy rags delaying their own inevitable death or gangs of men reduced to cannibalism to survive. The infrequent towns and cities are either burned to the ground or scavenged of everything useful.

The tale probes the love the man has for his son. Total and unconditional love. The powerful bond that every man should have for his child. In the bleakness of the dead and the dying the child is the man’s sole light. He tries to shield him from the brutalities of existence and the reality of delaying an inevitable death. Can the man die knowing his son will have to live on alone and without hope?

The man is often haunted by his dreams. Dreams of blue skies and green grass. Dreams of his wife before she took her own life so she couldn’t exist in such a world. The boy is born after the apocalypse and has no knowledge of what the world was like.

The book is intentionally repetitive which builds up the emotional impact of their relationship. McCarthy is at his best when he probes the painful nature of existentialism. He allows his lead character to poetically reflect on many things such as morality:

Do you think that your fathers are watching? That they weigh you in their ledgerbook? Against what? There is no book and your fathers are dead in the ground.

On how to give comfort when there is nothing left to give:

He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and dull despair. The world shrinking down about a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believe to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The scared idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever.

On how pointless it is to survive when there’s little hope:

He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

And on being stalked by Death:

The black shape of it running from dark to dark. Then a distant low rumble. Not thunder. You could feel it under your feet. A sound without cognate and so without description. Something imponderable shifting out there in the dark. The earth itself contracting with the cold. It did not come again.
What time of year? What age the child? He walked out into the road and stood. The silence. The salitter drying from the earth. The mudstained shapes of flooded cities burned to the waterline. At a crossroads a ground set with dolmen stones where the spoken bones of oracles lay moldering. No sound but the wind. What will you say? A living man spoke these lines? He sharpened a quill with his small pen knife to scribe these things in sloe or lampblack? At some reckonable and entabled moment? He is coming to steal my eyes. To seal my mouth with dirt.

The genius of McCarthy is in his writing. His prose so bleak you can feel the pain through the pages. His efficient description so powerful you can envision every word. A tale to end every tale.

This is an emotionally heavy book with an inevitable ending. There is no plot twist. There is no escape. The beauty isn’t in the plot but in the writing.

One can easily allegorize God and Christ but I think that’s too literal. Certainly the child carries a terrible burden and acts compassionately to those who would harm him but I think that simply displays the innocence of youth. For me, the book is a rite of passage under the most desperate of circumstances. An exploration of living without hope of salvation. Where man’s own destruction all but proves that God cannot exist.

Warning. Here be Spoilers. Kind of.

Alright, I’ll do my best to not give too much away, but I may mention a few things which may spoil your enjoyment so if you really don’t want to know anything, click away now!

So, the cinema threesome (that’s me, Debbie and Debbie’s sister Jacqueline) descended upon our local mulitplex for the advanced showing of “Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End“. This is arguably this year’s most anticipated film and possibly the biggest film ever.

Does it live up to its hype? That depends on the type of film you expect to see. If you are looking to be immersed in a believable alternate world with logical rules and sound principles then you’ll probably come away feeling disappointed. If you’re after a pop-corn munching blockbuster with jaw-dropping special effects, implausible set-pieces and more swashbuckling than you ever thought possible then you’re in for a treat.

The size of the film its biggest attraction and its biggest problem. All too often the plot is put aside for the film to move forward. The writers make up get-out-of-jail clauses regularly (”a pirate-wizard did it!”) and add to pirate mythology to suit their needs. This often leaves you scratching your head at large chunks of pirate-babble (”There are nine pieces of eight which were used to bind her to her human form!”). Characters throughout the trilogy are killed off and brought back with flippant disregard for logic or sentiment which removes any emotional gravitas from the script. You stop caring about them if you know that they can be restored with a little bit of mumbo-jumbo and an old map.

Rules set up in the first and second films get undone with regularity, too. Davy Jones can’t step foot on land but for one day each ten years! Well. Unless it’s a little strip of sand and he’s in a bucket of water. Duh.

The plot itself also gets muddled up when the characters continually switch sides, switch allegiances, and back-stab each other more times than a room full of Norman Bates. This often leaves you concussed as the plot-guns fire more often than the iron on The Black Pearl.

But. And this a Jennifer Lopez sized but. It really doesn’t matter because the film is just so bloody awesome. This is not a big and clever film. This is about blowing the seven bells of shit out of boats in the most spectacular fashion possible.

The actual momentum of the film is non-stop. It’s bum numbing 168 minutes long but you don’t really notice as you’re constantly thrilled. Johnny Depp is outstanding as the slightly drunk and slightly camp Captain Jack Sparrow who is a little darker and a little more driven than his Wild-E-Coyote slap-stick antics of the second film. Geoffrey Rush is superb as Captain Barbossa and the rest of the cast don’t miss a beat. Orlando Bloom is given significantly more to do and rises to the occasion. Depp and Rush share some memorable scenes as they continually try to out-do each other to genuine comical effect. Oh, and Bill Nighy is brilliant as Davy Jones.
Special mention must go to Lee Arenberg and Mackenzie Crook as the hilarious Pintel and Ragetti who are at the beating heart of the films moments of levity. These two could easily do a spin-off series or movie.

You have to watch this on the big screen to appreciate the effects. They are absolutely flawless. Every wrinkle and drop of rain is rendered perfectly to Davy Jones’ squid-like face. The final set-piece is one of the finest in cinema history. It’s Pirates v England in a whirlpool. Guns crack, wood flies, bullets whizz, Captain Sparrow leaps, swords clatter together and a marriage takes place. It’s a breathless exercise in what you can achieve when money isn’t an object.
There are some artistically beautiful moments where the director gets to flex his creative muscle. The scene where Lord Cutler Beckett gets his comeuppance will make the hairs on the back of your neck stand when the music swells and… well, you just have to watch it.

Buckle your swash, find a comfortable seat, put aside your skepticism and enjoy one of the more entertaining films in recent history.

Ever since Apple teamed up with Nike, in what can only be described as a huge marketing gimmick, to produce the imaginatively titled “ipod+nike” I’ve been contemplating purchasing the system. I’m not a huge running nut but I do around 20 miles a week (4 sessions of 5 miles) on our treadmill. Now and again I lack the motivation to really enjoy it. When you’re really tired, or the twinge in your knee has returned it’s easy to consider not running. The Nike system appeals because you can upload your data to the nikeplus website to track your progress and compare yourself to other runners.

However, there are two problems:

The first is that you need an iPod nano. There doesn’t appear to be any hardware reason for the sensor only working with iPod nanos but rather it’s a shrewd move on Apple’s behalf to sell more nanos. I guess they figured that exercise can be the nanos niche. I own a 3G iPod that was a gift from Debbie a few birthdays ago so I’m reluctant to retire it just yet. As it’s the 20gig model and contains my entire iTunes library (10gb), I use it on long journeys via my car stereo and when travelling to the US. A nano won’t have the storage I need.

The second is that you have to purchase Nike running shoes at around £70 a pair. I’m extremely reluctant to change my shoes. I currently run in a pair of Asics Gel Kayano XI which suit me well. I don’t want to switch to a pair of trainers that I’ve not tested first. Anyone who runs will stick to a shoe they find comfortable.

Fortunately, I came across a website which has ‘hacked’ the sensor into his own running shoes. It’s an extremely low-fi hack that seems to work based on his tests and the feedback of others. You simply stick a bit of velcro on the sensor and place it between the tongue and laces of your shoes. You can then configure the sensor to adjust for the different placing as the Nike shoes have a cut-out in the sole for the sensor.

Although I don’t want to retire my iPod, 1gb Nanos are fairly inexpensive these days and the storage will suffice for the few playlists I run to and to host the Nike software.

With that in mind, I’ve ordered the sports kit with a 1gb nano and I’ll let you know how it goes…

Once upon a time I thought it would be a great idea to include my email address at the top of each IPB source code file.

Fast forward three years and three million spam emails and I’m glad I removed it a few years ago. Despite having my IPS emails filtered via the corporate spam filter and using gmail for just about everything else I still have an annoying amount of spam to deal with.

Apple Mail’s built in junk filter does an OK job but I found that it was
junking more and more legitimate email while letting Nigerian scam
emails through just fine.

Thanks to a blog entry by Tim Dorr, I downloaded and installed SpamSieve.

SpamSieve gives you back your inbox by bringing powerful Bayesian spam filtering to Mac e-mail clients. It’s quick and easy to control SpamSieve from within your mail client, and you can customize how it interacts with the rest of your message sorting rules. Other spam filters get worse over time as spammers adapt to their rules; SpamSieve actually gets better over time as it adapts to your mail. By learning from the very messages that you receive, SpamSieve is able to block nearly all of your spam, without putting your good messages in the spam mailbox.

It’s an audacious claim - and one that is backed up by the spam sieve statistics. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and apart from the odd rogue email, it’s done a remarkable job. It works as a plug-in for Apple’s Mail (and can also work as a plug in for Thunderbird and Entourage) and takes over junk mail duty. You can train it with known “good” and “bad” messages and it keeps a log of what it’s up to. You can also add your own entries to its “whitelist” and “blocklist”.

Here’s some statistics collected since the 14th of this month:

Filtered Mail
307 Good Messages
3222 Spam Messages (91%)
201 Spam Messages Per Day

SpamSieve Accuracy
3 False Positives
13 False Negatives (81%)
99.5% Correct

It’s not a free product, but the $25 price tag is more than justified. If you’re using Apple Mail - give SpamSieve a go.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Snakes on a Plane as it’s been something of an internet phenomenon so much so that five days of additional shooting were ordered after the film wrapped to include dialogue proposed by fans.

We (Debbie, Debbie’s sister and I) went to see this over the weekend and we weren’t disappointed. For anyone looking for a high concept film, or a clever twisting plot or even character based acting — forget it. This is definitely a film that you don’t have to think about.

The film takes about twenty minutes to set up the cliched plot involving a throw-away bad guy and That Guy Who Survived From Wolf Creek. The rest of the film involves a plane and snakes. Samuel L Jackson plays the same ‘bad-ass’ character he’s been riffing on successfully since Pulp Fiction and it works well here. Throw in a OCD obsessed rapper who doesn’t like to be touched and you’ve got the dynamics for a good romp.

The body of the film is definitely rooted in “B-Movie” territory with people being bitten in the face, chest and more delicate areas as the snakes weave their way through the plane. It’s all good senseless fun and it doesn’t take itself too seriously as it plays on just about every ‘airplane’ movie cliche you’ve ever seen.

Throughly recommended.

I picked up a Sony Ericsson k800i a week ago and I’m really impressed with it.

The biggest draw is the 3.2 megapixel camera which comes with autofocus, image stabilizer and a built in xenon flash. It’s capable of taking some pretty sharp pictures. It actually gives medium to low end digital cameras a run for their money.
Better yet, you can stick in a memory card micro to extend the phone’s meagre 64mb memory. With a full quality picture weighing in at around 700k it’s not long before you need one. Fortunately they retail for around £20 on eBay which is where I got mine.

Sony Ericsson have teamed up with Blogger.com to enable you to blog right from your phone. Whilst it’s clear that “texting” a long blog is too much hassle, it does allow you to share your pictures immediately and easily. You simply select a picture, choose “Send > Blog” and fill in the title and the body and it resizes the picture and uploads it all via it’s 3G GPRS connection. I’ve got a mobile blog here.

It seems that Sony Ericsson are the new Nokia.

Debbie and I went to see Pirates 2 over the weekend and we both thought that it was excellent.

It’s pretty much vital that you see the first Pirates of the Caribbean film before hand or you’ll be even more lost than I was during the first hour.

I won’t spoil the plot and it’s impossible to write a synopsis of the film without doing so. It’s a very long and sometimes overly complex film that was shot back to back with Pirates 3 due out next May. On the whole it’s easily as good and often better than the first Pirates film.

Johnny Depp is back with a vengeance and we couldn’t get enough of his slurring, swaying and swaggering Jack Sparrow.
Bill Nighy’s Davy Jones is outstanding. Nighy brings a lot of character to Jones’s CGI face. It’s quite an achievement to see Nighy’s characterizations through the CGI and you get a lot of emotion just through his eyes.
The special effects are grand in scale and very well executed. From the huge set-pieces to the fishy crew of the Flying Dutchman, at no point are you aware of any computer or green-screen work. Compared to the digital rush job on King Kong, Pirates 2 is exceptionally well polished.

It’s not perfect thought. It is a long film and very complex. The first 30 minutes or so are quite confusing as we’re whisked from location to location and from character to character. As it’s shot back-to-back with the third film, you get the impression that Pirates 2 does a lot to set up the last movie of the trilogy. While Depp is fantastic as Jack Sparrow it’s a little jarring to see Depp perform some slapstick routines and pull a few ‘cartoon’ faces.
When Pirates of the Caribbean was written the character of  Jack Sparrow was written totally straight. Depp took the character and threw his own spin on it and it’s that magic that made the first film for me. This time around, it’s obvious (and quite natural) that Sparrow was written with Johnny Depp in mind which loses some of the magic.
Also, the film stutters a little bit when Jack’s not around. Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley do well but they rarely share scenes so you don’t get the chemistry that bonded them in the first film.

They are minor niggles in an otherwise excellent film. You can’t help but be amazed at the sheer size and audacity of the set pieces which include fruit kebabs and giant hamster wheels. Depp and Nighy put in powerhouse performances that raise Pirates 2 from what could have been a bit of a damp sequel.

Roll on Pirates 3!

I picked up a DS lite over the weekend.

When they originally came out, I scoffed at the relatively low graphics capabilities and childish games and waited for the Sony PSP. Having a PS 2 in your hand that can play movies and connect to the internet was a huge pull.

Fast forward from September 2005 to now and I’m slowly getting disillusioned with my black gaming brick. I’ve collected around a dozen or so games and I’ve hardly played ten of them. The PSP really lacks ‘new’ games. It has a bunch of relatively poor ports from the PS 2 that don’t translate well on the smaller screen and one thumb stick. Indeed, most FPS games (Splinter Cell, SOCOM Navy Seals, etc) really suffer with just one thumbstick. We’re used to using one thumbie to look and one to move and PSP designers haven’t really found a neat way to overcome that. Splinter Cell has an awful camera system where you have to stop and hold down a shoulder button to turn the thumb stick into ‘move camera’ which means you’re stopping every five seconds to adjust the camera angle. It makes the game virtually unplayable. SOCOM fares a little better but ends up with a vague auto-aiming system which takes the skill out of the game and you often find yourself shooting at things you can’t really see. It’s just not fun. At all. Actually, it’s boring.

The DS lite caught my eye because of the original games. OK, it can’t push out a trillion polygons a second with high quality surround sound and it can’t display a billion colours and it can’t really compete with the pure power of the PSP. And that’s where it wins, hands down. The DS and the forthcoming Wii have some really cool innovative games which are fun because they don’t rely on pretty graphics alone.

I really can’t state just how much fun they are. The DS touch screen is genius, it’s like having a mouse back. Metroid Prime Hunters is a FPS and it works because you use the stylus to move the camera and use the directional pad to move - just like using a keyboard / mouse combo on your computer. Brain Training is another innovative title; you’re asked various questions (such as basic maths, memory tests, etc) and you write the answers using the stylus or say the answers aloud. You can set up your profiles and train every day and graphs show your progress.

On top of that is that Nintendo ‘get’ multi-player gaming. A lot of the titles have ’single-card multiplayer’ mode where you share a game with up to 15 other players. Debbie and I have calculation battles on Brain Training (no, listen, it really is fun) and spent an hour playing Boggle last night (she keeps winning). I know the PSP offers ‘ad-hoc’ mode but you both have to own the UMD game to play which is great if you have PSP owning friends and get together now and again for multi-player matches but not so much fun for couples who don’t want to buy a single game twice.

The DS may not do internet browsing and it may not play movies and it certainly doesn’t do amazing next-gen graphics but it does put the fun back into portable gaming. You’ve got to feel for Sony. Falling interest in UMD movies, falling interest in the phenominally expensive PS 3 and the stupidity of trying to push another media format (betamax or mini-disc anyone?) doesn’t bode well.

Nintendo is Wii-ing on Sony from a very great height.