Category Archives: Reviews

Movie Review: Resident Evil – Extinction

Posted on by LtL


Yes, I have a thing for Milla Jovovitch and will see pretty much anything that she is in because LtL lurves Milla. There is no denying, however, that her last several movies have been pretty bad. Ok, bad. Ok, really bad. Ultraviolet was a wreck of a movie, which I reviewed a while ago and while the first Resident Evil movie was pretty good for its genre, and the second Resident Evil was ok for its genre, this latest, Resident Evil: Extinction is just dumb: no character development, action sequences that have nothing at stake because we don’t care about any characters other than Alice, and no real point to make other than the bad scientist is bad and the evil Umbrella Corporation is evil.

Yawn.

After she joins up with a small, rag-tag convey of folks who are keeping on the run and barely eking out an existence, I couldn’t help but compare certain elements to Battlestar Galactica. Namely, the sense of exhaustion, of bodies being pushed to the limit, of the mental breakdowns due to living in extreme and sustained crisis situations. Nobody in the convoy looked hungry or tired, yet they would have been rationing supplies. There was no sense of urgency about water, yet they were traveling through the desert. There seemed to be no set plans on how to approach new and unknown buildings and potential dangerous situations. I can suspend my disbelief when it comes to zombies, to the destruction of the world because of an evil corporation releasing a virus, to a mutant superwoman who has serious kick-ass attitude and psychic powers . . . but I what can’t suspend my disbelief about is that the convoy could have lasted more than 1 week. Even in the most extreme, odd, unbelievable, far out, or bizarre situations if the characters act like people would act, then the audience can buy into anything. But the moment you have people who are survivers acting stupid, people who are military trained acting like idiots whose only training was a video game, then the suspension of disbelief stops suspending.

Lucky for Milla fans, her next two film projects look considerably more interesting. Slated to start shooting this summer is Azazel, based on a novel by Boris Akunin:

Plot intro (from NY Times): Erast Fandorin, a government clerk turned detective, makes for an unlikely but gifted sleuth in late nineteenth-century Russia. The action opens a few years before the assassination of Czar Alexander II which begins the dark slide to war and revolution. A rich young man has killed himself in Moscow’s Alexander Gardens, having spun a single cartridge in a revolver’s chamber, pulled the trigger and lost at a game said to have been thought up in the Klondike gold fields and therefore called American roulette. The suicide note ostensibly explains the young man’s motive: “Your world nauseates me, and that, truly, is quite reason enough.” He has left his fortune to Baroness Margaret Astair, a British educator famed for her world-wide organization of progressive orphanages, which will shift the action for a time to England.

Not much is available about her other film, The Palermo Shooting , other than she is playing herself and its being directed by Wim Wenders and is currently in post-production. By virtue of the director alone, it promises to be at least an interesting film.

If you lurve Milla as well, Resident Evil: Extinction is worth a rental. But if you don’t have a major, unreasoning, somewhat stupefying crush on Milla, don’t bother.


SciFi Scanner Links to Your Humble Host

Posted on by LtL

SciFi Scanner is AMC’s science fiction blog (yes, that AMC) and Mr. Clayton Neuman was kind enough to link to my recent post about the movie version of Stardust in the Daily Scan for February 19.

SciFi Scanner’s my new best friend and I’m adding them to my blogroll as I type this.

(Link)

Also, the most excellent site SF Signal posted a link as well, for which I’m also grateful (but since I emailed them to pimp myself, I was less surprised). SF Signal is probably the science fiction site I check most often for news and tidbits as they cover a huge range of materials from books, to author interviews, movie reviews, new and rumors as well as linking to an awesome list of science fiction and fantasy authors who blog.

(Link)

My Own Kind of Review

Posted on by LtL


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I just finished reading what has got to be one of the most professional “fan-fic” books ever done. Stephen Brust, author of a number of books including “To Reign in Hell: A Novel”, “Jhegaala (Vlad)”, and “Sethra Lavode (The Viscount of Adrilankha)”, has written a Firefly novel and–here’s the ultra-cool part–is giving it away! It’s called My Own Kind of Freedom and you can follow this link to get your own copy. While it’s not a perfect book, if you are a Firefly fan, I highly recommend it. Brust captures the characters quite well, and is able to offer some depths of history and emotion that the tv series and film weren’t able to go into. In particular, I really enjoyed how Wash’s love of piloting as well as his skill are highlighted through the book. I also loved how Brust brought River’s inner life to the reader, creating a sense of the complexity that she is capable of as well as the difficulty of communicating to those around her. While all the characters were written well, Wash and River shine.

Brust makes no effort to subvert of twist any of the elements from the series or the movie, and allows the story and the characters to fit well into the already established universe. He even brings the Chinese phrases and curses across the media divide . . . and while I think it was absolutely necessary to do so . . . it just doesn’t work very well. The reason the switch into Mandarin worked in the series and movie is that the actors knew what they were saying (even if they might not have said it very well), and the viewer could, from body language and facial expressions and context, arrive at a fairly good sense of what was being said, even if they couldn’t get the specifics. Without hearing the words, without seeing them said by a person, the Chinese phrases in the book are unintelligible to the reader.However, if he hadn’t included them, something would have felt slightly “off” about the characters. All in all, Brust did a good enough job of keeping some of the flavor of the language without beating the reader over the head with the attempt. Fans of Whedon will definitely miss the way Whedon’s invented idioms can sometimes rise to the level of poetry, as Brust doesn’t quite get to that level.

While My Own Kind of Freedom isn’t quite the fix that a new movie or series might be (a boy can hope can’t he?), Brust offers a compelling story and some nice insight into the Firefly universe.

Link (via SFSignal)

10 Reasons Why I Hate the Movie Version of Stardust

Posted on by LtL


“Stardust (Widescreen Edition)” (Paramount)
This was one of the most disappointing movies I’ve watched in a long, long time. Despite the fact quite a few people seemed to enjoy it, Stardust was a mediocre movie at best, and a huge let-down for me after listening to Neil Gaiman’s reading of his book for Audible.com. I want to be clear here: I am not suggesting that anyone’s enjoyment of this movie is wrong per se. What I hope these 10 items demonstrate is that the movie lacks the narrative and character elements that make Gaiman’s work such a joy to read and, especially when he is doing the reading, to hear.

Note: When referring to the movie I will use the name Tristan and when referring to the book I will use the name Tristran. I guess the movie-makers felt that the extra “r” was too hard for the movie-going audience and renamed the character.

Also ——–SPOILERS MOST DEFINITELY AHEAD!——–

1. Victoria

In the real Stardust, Victoria is significantly more of a person as compared to Hollywood’s ersatz Stardust. More to the point, she is not in love with the town asshole and undergoes her own transformation during the months that Tristran is gone. In fact, Gaiman makes it obvious that 1) She never expected Tristran to do anything foolish like go and look for a star, 2) Is terribly sorry about her flippant comments to Tristan, and 3) Is willing to give up her true love in order to fulfill her promise to Tristran. Both Victoria and Tristran are children at the beginning of the story, and both have paid a price in the course of their growing up but, and this is key to Gaiman’s version they both grow up. By removing all of Victoria’s humanity and turning her into a convenient and lazy plot point, her character is erased from the story and she becomes that tired and vaguely sexist version of the “girl who thinks she’s just too good for our hero but will get her comeuppance in the end.” What could have been an interesting, subtle, and challenging role for a young actress has been turned into nothing more than a stereotype. How typically Hollywood.

2. Lack of Imagination

The following excerpts are from Gaiman’s book and describes the fairie market that occurs every nine years next to the town of Wall:

“Eyes, eyes! New eyes for old!” shouted a tiny woman in front of a table covered with bottles and jars filled with eyes of every kind and color.

“Instruments of music from a hundred lands!”

“Penny whistles! Tuppeny hums! Threepenny choral anthems!”

“Try your luck! Step right up! Answer a simple riddle and win a wind-flower!”

“Everlasting lavender! Bluebell cloth!”

“Bottled dreams, a shilling a bottle!”

“Coats of Night! Coats of twilight! Coats of dusk!”

He goes on to write that:

There were wonders for sale, and marvels, and miracles; there were things undreamed-of and objects unimagined (what need, Dunstan wondered, could someone have of the storm-filled eggshells?) . . . He passed a stall in which five huge men were dancing to the music of a lugubrious hurdy-gurdy being played by a mournful-looking black bear; he passed a stall where a balding man in a brightly colored kimono was smashing china plates and tossing them into a burning bowl from which colored smoke was pouring.

How do you show a bottled dream or a coat of dusk I haven’t the foggiest, but if I were directing a movie with this kind of source material I would sure as hell try. The movie takes absolutely no time at all to give us the ambience, the magic of the market, to really take the time to bring the audience into another realm, another reality. The omission of these kinds of details demonstrates a lack of imagination and vision that is apparent throughout the movie.

3. Gender stereotypes on board the flying ship

I’m not going to even get into the whole drag/gender/gay thing that was going on with Robert DeNiro’s character–although I found it narratively unnecessary at best and, at worst, it perpetuated a whole matrix of stereotypes with the flimsy excuse of “well we always new you were a fag but we accept you anyway,” despite the fact that most cross dressers are straight and most gay men do not cross dress so the movie continues the delusion that deviant gender behavior = “deviant” sexual preference. I’m not going to bring up the fact that whenever straight male actors play “flaming” gay characters they tend to be applauded but if actors who take a chance and play fully dimensional gay characters and who are shown sharing intimate moments with another man, then a) a lot of people see that as “risky” in terms of career and b) a lot of people would find their narrow notions of sexuality challenged, so the lesson that Stardust the movie further perpetuates is: its ok to have representations of gay men as long as we are making fun of them in some way and keeping them from being completely human. In fact, I’m equally irritated by the sequences where Tristan gets to learn sword fighting and pits himself against the elements while Yvaine gets piano lessons and learns how to dance. Give me a break! This is not only offensive, but incredible lazy. There is a passage in the book about Tristran being allowed to help out with the ship’s chores, but absolutely no reason to draw such stereotypical gender lines and especially for no good reason. Instead of taking the screen time to develop characters or add in some of the things that filmmaker’s cut from the book, they simply wasted my time with a dumb-ass, sexist montage. Way to go, I’m so impressed.

4. Conflation of violence as manliness

The movie explicitly states that it is about seeing Tristan go from being a boy to being a man. How does he do this? He learns to fight. In one early scene, he is handily beat down by the town asshole and then toward the end we see him beating, not only the asshole, but by killing the three bitches . . . I mean witches as well. The book is about growing to manhood as well – only Tristran learns to be a man by coming face to face with the consequences of his actions, with the realization that the journey is the destination, that love is not like it is in the storybooks. The scriptwriters and director of the movie seem to have no sense of imagination, no really love of story because the best they can come up with is to rewrite the end of the story so that we can watch a tedious action sequence that teaches us nothing about ourselves. A sequence that is wholly designed to feed the stultified imaginations of several generations grown up on the sickly-sweet pap of Hollywood stories instead of stories that mean something.

5. Lack of chemistry between actors

There’s not much to say about this except that Charlie Cox and Claire Danes have as much chemistry as an acting student is taught in a BFA Acting program. If you listen to Gaiman’s audiobook of Stardust, you’ll get more chemistry between the two different intonations he uses than between Cox and Danes.

6. No Costs

Look, Tristran’s hand is burned. And not just burned like you burn it on a saucepan while cooking, his whole hand was immersed in flames and burned really badly. We are talking scarring, 3rd degree type burns. Gaiman describes Tristran’s hand: “The skin was shiny and scarred and he had little feeling in the fingers.” Growing up, completing a quest, saving a star . . . all of these have consequences. Fairy tales are, often, about the consequences we face for our actions and somehow the movie just skips this whole element of the story. Yvaine’s leg isn’t broken upon falling to earth, Tristan’s hand is miraculously and completely cured, we don’t see the Unicorn killed, beheaded and used by the Witch Queen to bolster her failing magic powers. A story in which the “good guys” don’t pay any kind of price the worst kind of pandering to an audience because it is simply unnecessary and makes the story less compelling. If Tristan had to deal with the fact that he bore permanent scars and damage to his hand, if Victoria saw his damaged hand when he returned to Wall, if Yvaine had to struggle with the pain of a broken leg in addition to the harsh reality of being brought down and out of the sky, then the audience would feel even more more invested in the characters. We would have more to root for, more to sympathize with and the filmmakers would have more, and more interesting, moments to dramatize.

Additionally, and this is an even more important point, life doesn’t let anyone off the hook. Good stories, magic stories, true stories, no matter their genre, reflect what it means to be human. And to be human is to experience, among other things, pain and loss. When you take those away from a story, as this movie took them away from Gaiman’s story, you are left with a husk of a narrative, devoid of a center. Devoid of a heart.

7. Time frame

The film crams all of the adventures into a week while the book occurs over months. The choice to abbreviate the time-frame is related to the “no costs” problem and contributes to the fact that the character’s don’t really seem to actually grow and mature over time. Oh sure, they tell us that they have grown up, fallen in love, etc., but the movie spends absolutely no time showing us organic and true relationships. One week does not a quest make. This time frame also makes the world of the movie small and insignificant if you can journey all those leagues in a handful of days – we should feel like the world beyond the Wall is vast, varied and impossibly beautiful and dangerous. Instead, aside from the antagonists of the movie, the world beyond wall is more like spending your holiday in a well preserved, pretty but tame National Park.

Is it hard to really communicate the passage of time in a movie? Sure. And to do it in a non-cliched, non-cheesy montage is even harder. But the writer and director obviously didn’t even want to try, they simply avoided the whole issue by providing a quick fix and making sure, making crystal clear, that we were only watching a weeks worth of time. If the narrative happened over a longer period of time, the relationship between Yvaine and Tristan could have been better developed; the growth of Tristan from a boy to a man could have been given more attention; the scope and grandeur and just plain oddness of Fairie could have been shown. In short, we could have enjoyed a much more interesting movie if the filmmakers had taken the time to understand how quests work in stories. And by stories I mean good stories, not the pale, anorexic stories that Hollywood continually pawns off on an audience so hungry for magic and for stories that they’ll even accept these paltry scraps: small bits of moldy narratives that choke as they go down, but are enough, barely, to keep our imaginations from total death. Yes, I include Stardust amongst those barely edible scraps.

9. Una

“She was one of the folk from Beyond the Wall, he could tell at once from her eyes, and her ears which were visible beneath her curly black hair. Her eyes were a deep violet, while her ears were the ears of a cat, perhaps, gently curved, and dusted with a fine, dark fur. She was quite beautiful.”

As with Victoria, the movie removes all that is interesting and powerful from the depiction of Una, casting her as a victim through-and-through. Yet in the book, she is shown to be responsible for gaining her own freedom and, after she is free, of becoming quite as willful and powerful as her brothers. In a sense, she actually seduces Dunstan and bears Tristran as part of an involved and subtle plan to achieve her freedom. This sense of agency is stripped from the character in the movie and she is left, like Victoria, with no sense of human (or Faerie) dimension. Just another disposable female character with no depth and no power. Although, I guess I should be grateful that the filmmaker’s even bothered to keep her in the story since they totally erased Dunstan’s human wife and the woman that Tristran thought of as Mother while growing up, as well as Tristran’s sister. Basically the movie strips the female characters down to the absolute minimum and then strips away most of what is interesting from the women left in the story. Let me be clear, you don’t have to spend a lot of screen time on these, admittedly secondary, characters to give them some kind of dimension and agency. All that is needed is a clear vision of the overall story and how all of the character’s fit together and a commitment, through both the writing and the direction, to making all of the people in your universe as rich and complex as possible. This movie does not make such a commitment.

Honestly, I think the writer and director were simply not up to the task of adapting such rich source material. While I’m focusing mostly on the representations of women, I don’t think any of the characters in this movie were very interesting.

10. The Ending

In the movie, Tristan and Yvaine gone on to rule Stormhold (with no mention that they go off for years having adventures alone and let Una rule the kingdom) then it’s off to the sky to be a pair of stars together. Oh how fucking sweet.

Give me a break. There is no power in this ending. No life. It is not fairy tale ending, its mere pablum, a sickly sweet ending that has all the narrative punch of an inch-worm going up against a heavyweight champion. The proper ending is the one given by Gaiman in his book: Yvaine lives a long, long, long time (she’s a Star, something the movie really doesn’t bother to incorporate into her character and merely uses the fact at convenient plot points) and people die much much sooner than a Star. So yes, Yvaine and Tristran go to Stormhold, they have a long and happy life together and rule well. But then he dies because that is the nature of being human. She lives on, alone because that is the nature of being a star brought down to the earth. The beauty of that ending is that we are giving both a happy and a human ending. Happy because they meet, have adventures, fall in love, have more adventures and live life together. Human because nothing lasts forever, and certainly not life. The movie is white chocolate (which has no chocolate in it, no soul) while the book is a bittersweet, dark chocolate that balances sweet and sugar with the complexity and depth of the bitter cacao bean. And let’s be honest, the book isn’t that bitter. It’s certainly nowhere near a 78% cacao chocolate bar and far closer to the semi-sweet chocolate that brings more to the table than milk chocolate but leaves you with a mostly sweet experience.

A movie that can’t even attempt to get to semi-sweet status, especially with such strong source material, is simply not trying. Shame on them.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend this movie to anyone who love Neil Gaiman’s work. Even for those unfamiliar with the source material, I would urge them to skip this movie. There is nothing there: no truth, no beauty, no magic. Just tired old cliches, one-dimensional characters and a story that sinks rather than soars.

For a story that soars:


“Stardust” (Neil Gaiman)

2 Quick Reviews: 300 & Casino Royale

Posted on by LtL


300 brought a violent comic book to violent life, but with a stylization that actually undercut the violence. The severed limbs and the flying droplets of blood were done so crisply, with such precision that there was nothing real about any of the scenes. A sense of fabrication underlay all the violent scenes. And strangely, as a meditation on bravery, the film fell flat. I think because you never get the sense that any of the 300 felt the pain that they were enduring. Their muscles never quaked and shook from exhaustion, their bodies never seemed to feel the cuts and the bruises, the missing eye, the open gash. So, in they end, their sacrifice, their tenacity and determination never had the chance to mean anything. If you don’t feel the pain and the exhaustion, then pushing past the pain and exhaustion means little. Even for an action flick, 300 felt, ultimately, hollow. Additionally, the subplot of Leonides’ Queen and the machinations of a corrupt Spartan was tiresome and rife with cliches and the notion that they had to turn her into a “whore” was simply sad and displayed a lack of imagination.

It was, however, worth seeing and probably seeing twice simply for the artistry of the landscape and the background which were almost entirely CGI and which were used to excellent effect in creating a completely consistent and beautifully rendered world. The action scenes work well and are thrilling to watch, even if they don’t have any emotional impact. The acting is, umm . . . fine. No, really, I mean for what they had to work with it was just fine. Just don’t expect to really feel anything for any of the characters, at least not in any real and visceral way. But ultimately I don’t think that is the fault of the actors. The structure of the story and the direction don’t lend themselves to making connections between the viewer and the characters.

Overall, I would watch this if you are in the mood for an action movie that is visually fascinating, but with the knowledge that, even as action movies go, there’s not a whole lot more than some incredible CGI and fun fights.


Casino Royale was the first Bond film that I’ve actually wanted to see since The Living Daylights – and yes, I know that there are lots of Timothy Dalton haters out there, but I submit that he was a much better Bond than Roger Moore, and that the Dalton films had an edgy quality that was lost with the urbanity of Pierce Brosnan. Don’t get me wrong, I like Brosnan as an actor and fondly remember Remington Steele and would have loved to have seen a young Brosnan play a young Bond as he transferred from Naval Intelligence to his 007 status. But that film fell through and the past several Bond movies have strained credibilty in their stunts and have just been shoddily written. Now we have Daniel Craig playing a much more rough and tumble Bond and the film style is a bit grittier, the story structure not as completely caught up in the cliches of the previous 19 films, and the acting is decent, with Craig being given a rather juicy role in this version of Bond and getting to play a range that is a bit wider than a lot of Bond films.

I wanted to like this movie more than I did. I liked Craig a lot, and the scene where he comforts Vespa after she see him kill two men: the two of them sitting in the shower, fully dressed as the water runs down and she weeps, is probably one of the more affecting scenes in the entire Bond series. But the cutesy “this is how it all began” element (his choice in drinks, his choice in car, the quip “I’m the money” followed by “Every penny of it”) were too forced, too wink-wink-nudge-nudge for a film that was trying to eschew some of the typical Bond film habits. The ending was a bit too pat, the “Bond falls in love” sequence wasn’t really earned and felt tacked on. Like the story demanded it but hadn’t quite prepared the characters for the emotional arc and therefore, the death at the end didn’t feel as tragic as I think the filmmakers wanted it to feel. Overall, and especially if you ever liked James Bond (even if you haven’t seen any of the latest films), I do recommend checking this one out. I finished wanting more of Craig’s Bond, interested in seeing what they’ll do with the character next and so am glad he gets another crack at it.

But

and this is a really bit “but”

Quantum of Solace has got to be one of the absolute dumbest names for a movie in the history of movies and even more so that is it a Bond movie. It had better be an absurdly good James Bond movie to overcome a title like that, that’s all I’m saying.

Some New Stuff: Mini Reviews

Posted on by LtL

“Mstand Laptop Stand By Rain Design” (Rain Design)

Ever since I got my Macbook Pro, I was using the box it came as a stand when I sat at my desk. It raised it up enough for use, but not quite enough for comfort and it was an inelegant solution. Plus, I lost a great deal of desk real estate to the box itself, which made the surface pretty much useless for writing letters, or filling out forms, etc.

I had been eyeing the MStand for a while now, but the earlier versions of it (in fact the one pictured above) had a solid lip that completely blocked the lid button, so when you went to open the computer you had to lift it off the stand. However, new ones have been reengineered–i.e., they’ve had a divot of about 3/4 of an inch across cut out of the lip that keeps the computer on the stand. Real world pics:

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Conclusion: while a bit on the pricey side, the elegance and deskspace that the Mstand offers is worth it and I highly recommend it if you use a laptop regularly at a desk.

“Jabra C820S Active Noise Cancelling Stereo Headphones” (Jabra)

I came across an amazing deal on these noise canceling headphones on Buy.com the day after Christmas: $50 and free shipping. Now, I have a decent pair of Ultimate Ears Super.fi 3 earphones which have been a life-saver on the subways here in NYC. The Super.fi’s do an excellent job at blocking outside noise and have a decent, albeit not terribly rich, sound. However, I was never able to get them to keep a good seal in my ears using the rubber tips, despite trying all of them at various times. I do get a consistent seal with the foam tips, and have been using those for the past year or so, but those need to be disposed of every few weeks or so depending on, you know, how dirty your ears tend to be. In short, I am glad to have them, and because of their small size I am sure there will be times when they are my earphones of choice.

But I gotta say, I am really psyched I came across the Jabra’s on such an excellent sale. While they don’t block out sounds in the same way as the UE earphones–these create soundwaves in opposition to the surrounding noise and thus cancels the sound, whereas the UEs simply block sounds because they fit into your ear canal–and so don’t block the most egregious subway and city street noises to quite the same extent, the richness of the sound and the superb noise canceling ability in places like coffee shops, airports, or even your own apartment is stunning. You flip the switch on and it’s like the rest of the world fades away, far away and you are left with your music or your audiobook playing very intimately and closely and with a richness that earphones can’t match (at least at a sub-$1000 level). Sometimes I find myself using them in my apartment even when J is out and there is no other noise but my own music, simply because they isolate me from the world in a way that helps concentrate and/or relax.

Other cool aspects of these headphones are that they still work when the AAA battery that powers the active noise cancellation is dead. I guess the Bose equivalents to these are twice the price, and can only work with active noise canceling on. Additionally, the cable that goes between the headphones and your audio source is not built into the headphones. Instead, there is an 1/8″ jack in the left earcup that you plug the cable into. Which means that if you wanted to just cancel out ambient sound and give yourself a quiet place, you can do so without having to figure out what to do with the cable. I also find them to be highly comfortable and have no problems wearing them for hours at a time. Even with a AAA battery, they are light and the foam padding around the ears is the perfect size, at least for my head & ears.

While I wouldn’t have bought these at their stated retail price of $179 – I would definitely buy them at around $125 and am hugely glad I found them on sale. I’m enjoying them right now, listening to Water’s Edge from the album “Sweet revenge” by Ryuichi Sakamoto.

Conclusion: I can’t compare them directly to their Bose competitors, but I love these headphones. If you are in the market for noise canceling headphones, definitely give these a try, especially if you can find a good deal on them.

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Review: 28 Days Later – Beware, Spoilers Ahead

Posted on by LtL

“28 Days Later (Widescreen Edition)” (Danny Boyle, Toby James)

When I first saw this movie on the big screen, with my friend Natalie – I was really impressed. The scenes of empty London in particular were stunning in a movie theatre. Overall I felt that the ways in which Boyle created tension were compelling. Rather than depend on spurious surprises, Boyle created an atmosphere where significantly less happened that one might expect . . . and every time something didn’t happen, our fears were heightened to an even greater extent at what would happen next. One of the first films to utilize a they hyper-kinetic style that has since become de rigueur in horror films–you know the style, that choppy, frames have been cut kind of look to things like 30 Days of Night etc. At the time, it was gulpingly fresh and got your heart pounding with fear and energy. That the “zombies” were infected and damn fast gave the film a flavor unlike most “zombie” movies. Between the facts that there was actual character development, that the look of the film was intriguing and fresh, and that Boyle’s thematic statement about rage was, if a bit heavy-handed, at least somewhat thought-provoking, I genuinely enjoyed the movie.

Then J and I watched it several weeks ago and her reactions, specifically to the end sequence after Jim has slaughtered the soldiers, made me rethink my reactions. While I was busy half-heartedly defending the movie from charges that it devolved into annoying sexual stereotypes, I started to think that J was right and that the end sequence, were Jim saves the women, then wakes up to a cozy little cottage and the women at the sewing as a cop-out and decidedly unsatisfying.

The DVD extras made it all clear though, that the filmmakers released the movie with an ending that actually works against the thematic intent and the alternative endings are significantly better from an artistic and story point of view. Basically, in every other alternative ending (and the DVD includes three, two of them actually filmed and the other storyboarded with narration from Danny Boyle and his writing partner/producer), Jim dies.

And with the inclusion of one other deleted scene–where Jim is actually running with a pack of the infected as they break into the building where the military has set up base–those endings tie everything together: the films begin and end with Jim in a hospital works incredibly well in terms of the visuals and the fact that Jim deliberately taps into a murderous, homicidal rage in order to save Selena and Hannah and pays the price brings the thematic issues to an elegant endpoint. As the audience identifies with Jim, we understand the “rightness” of his actions when he kills the soldiers, after all these are the men who were going to rape a woman and a young girl. Jim, however, gives up his humanity in exactly the same way that Major Henry West (Chris Eccleston) has when he promised Selena and Hannah to his men. Jim may do it in a noble cause, and he may do it only temporarily, but he lets the fire of murder course through his blood and does not simply rescue or even kill, but murders a number of the soldiers with a bloodlust that clearly links him to the infected. The audience, because we identify with Jim, become complicit with his violence. In the theatrical release, both Jim and the audience gets to indulge in this bloodlust fantasy with no consequences. In the alternative and filmed endings, however, both Jim and the audience pays a price for the violence enacted. His death is what fulfills the movie. Even if we feel that Jim had no alternative, his actions become that much more tragic, that much more affecting. Additionally, we are left with two women who, after trying to save him, are left to survive on their own and, as Hannah takes a pistol into her hands, hefts its weight and contemplates Jim’s dead body, the astute viewer will have no doubt that if anyone can survive an infected England, it will be these two women.

Beyond the artistic merit of the movie–and if you don’t mind horror, suspense and violence I do recommend this movie–all of these raises an interesting set of considerations. Namely, with the possibility of multiple endings to movies, with the increasing expectations of deleted and alternative scenes on DVDs, where lies the “real” or “authentic” movie? For me, the alternative ending of 28 Days Later that ends with the women walking down the hospital corridor as the door shuts behind them is the “real” ending to the movie, even if it isn’t the one that was seen by most people, including myself until the DVD extras. The alternative is real in an artistic way, it satisfies my aesthetic sensibilities to such a degree that the “real” ending seems false and inauthentic. Indeed, I wish there were a way (and I guess I could do this for myself by using some video editing software), to watch the film with my favorite ending instead of having to see it as an extra feature. I would, when sharing the movie with someone, like them to see the ending I think of as superior.

If the author is dead, are we now seeing the death of the text? Or at least the text that makes any pretense toward authority? Or, if not a death of text, a mutation of text? Text as multi-headed hydra? And not in any post-structuralist reader-as-author-of-meaning sort of way, but the text as always containing iterations of itself, like fractal math. Chose your own adventure kind of stuff. I came up against this issue when working on my Aliens paper (yes, still waiting to hear about when the book is going to actually be published!), and using Cameron’s extended cut instead of the theatrical release as my text. But in the case of Cameron’s movie, the alterations merely fleshed out and illuminated his thematic arcs, while in 28 Days Later, the various endings change the thematic meaning of the movie in significant ways.

While I have seen other alternative endings or deleted scenes with a major impact on what I thought of a movie, the alternative endings on the 28 Days Later DVD create the greatest level of dissonance between the movie I watched and the movie I created in my head after watching the extra features. If you have seen this movie before, in the theatre or without watching the extras, I would highly recommend watching it again and immediately watching the alternative endings after the movie’s end. If you haven’t seen it at all, I would still recommend watching it and the DVD extras. Even if some of the surprise is gone, I stand my by original reaction to seeing it in the movies: it is a fascinating movie to watch and certainly worth your time.

And by the way, I would be really curious if any of you have experienced other DVD extras that radically changed how you understood or viewed a movie. Drop a comment with what the movie was and how the extras changed your opinion or thoughts. Feel free to play fast and loose with the spoilers if you’d like. I’m never one to get picky about knowing about the plot or characters before seeing a movie.

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Review: Canon Pixma MX700

Posted on by LtL

Cnwk.1D Sc 32590817-2-300-Ovr-1 It’s been a long time since I’ve invested any but the most minimal amount of money in a printer. And, as a result, I have spent the past several years dealing with my printers instead of simply using them. The other night, I got fed up with the HP PSC 1510 All-In-One that I had bought sometime in the past year, through Craigslist, for $40. It goes through ink like a . . . printer hungry for ink, the flatbed scanner is slow and can’t scan-to-pdf directly . . . indeed, the scanner was mucho unhappio with Leopard in general. I had wanted to do a serious cleaning of the file cabinet by scanning old school papers, some old stories, etc. And I couldn’t.

So I spent a bunch of time online trying to figure out what printer to get that would give me the features I needed and at a price I could justify. The Pixma MX700 had it’s detractors, but seemed like it would get the job done and Staples had a rebate of $40 on it, so the total would come to $159. Seemed like a good deal, and I found myself remember my first color inkjet printer, an Epson of some model or other, and I think it was probably at least $200 and was only a printer. So I marched myself down to the Staples store, discovered that the rebate was only through a Website purchase, marched myself up to my apartment, did a bit more searching and found the Buy.com had the same printer, with free shipping, for only $134.

Score!

I ordered in Saturday . . . no, Sunday. It was here by Tuesday.

Setup: Basically, a breeze. Take the orange tape off all the various doors and trays, insert the printer head (a simple sliding in process), insert the print cartridges (one black, three separate colors and all came included with the printer). Plugged the usb cable into my MBP (running OS X 10.5), installed the drivers and software, set the printer up to operate over LAN, unplugged the usb and plugged the printer into one of the ethernet ports on my Airport Extreme. Finding the printer was pretty simply, as was finding the scanner. The first print job was crooked, so I had to manually adjust the print head – which is not so much manual as pressing a few buttons and comparing a sheet of printed squares to see which has the fewest white lines printed.

Use: Printing wireless is a peach. No problems so far and it’s great to be able to print from anywhere in the apartment. Downside is that there will be a tendency to leave the unit on all the time, which is not a good use of electricity. Scanning is a little twitching on my computer, and I had to download an updated scanner program because of Leopard. Sometimes when I push the scan button on the printer, it will think, attempt to scan, and then do nothing. But when it does scan properly, it’s fast and so convenient. The scanning program automatically creates a folder in your “Pictures” folder and saves scans based on date. With the HP the image folder was buried deep in the hierarchy of HP’s folders, so this is a much clearer and cleaner place to put the scans.

While I haven’t put it through any serious tests, I am very happy with it’s performance so far. I created some graphic intensive thank you cards tonight and the prints, while perhaps not the best in the world, are certainly good enough for my purposes. The layout of the printer itself is intuitive and I love the Auto Document Feature for scanning – can’t imagine going back to a regular flatbed scanner ever!

If you are in the market for a decent but inexpensive printer and want to take a few steps up from “cheap,” and if you want decent printing with very easy and convenient networking, I would recommend the MX700.

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Movie Reviews: Primer & Wilde

Posted on by LtL

Last week sucked. I’ll write more about it in the future, but it was tiresome, annoying and for most of the week I wasn’t getting home before 1 am, and Wednesday I wasn’t home until 3 am. So yesterday, I did nothing but read and watch movies with J. It was probably the first day that I’ve done that in a long long time and it felt good. I didn’t even feel terribly guilty for not doing something constructive, like writing the short story or working on more 10 minute plays or trying to clean out the file cabinet of old junk that I really really don’t need but have been schlepping around with me for years. Today, I went into Manhatten to meet a couple of friends from UMD who were in town for a conference. We had breakfast and then walked around Times Square and then had tea in a diner and I just got home a little while ago. Should be doing laundry, but don’t feel like going back out so I figured I’d write a bit about yesterdays movies . . .

“Primer” (Shane Carruth)

Primer is a pretty amazing film, and not simply because it was made for $7000–although that fact in itself kind of blows you away when you see it. The first time film project of Shane Carruth, Primer tells the story of two men, a machine, and time travel. The premise is simple:

PRIMER is set in the industrial park/suburban tract-home fringes of an unnamed contemporary city where two young engineers, Abe and Aaron, are members of a small group of men who work by day for a large corporation while conducting extracurricular experiments on their own time in a garage. While tweaking their current project, a device that reduces the apparent mass of any object placed inside it by blocking gravitational pull, they accidentally discover that it has some highly unexpected capabilities–ones that could enable them to do and to have seemingly anything they want. Taking advantage of this unique opportunity is the first challenge they face. Dealing with the consequences is the next. (Link)

What makes this time-travel film unique, is that time travel cannot happen without living the time first. There is no free lunch, in Primer. You may have your cake, and eat it too, but only if, after eating it, you go back and back another cake. The narrative can be confounding at times, and at several moments we watched a scene twice to try to wrap our minds around the time travel profundities and paradoxes that were presented. This is not a movie if you are in the mood for light fare, for something that you can simply watch and enjoy. This movie will make you think, and think hard and even then you still may not grasp everything on the first viewing.

While obviously a low budget movie, it never feels cheap. While limited by funds and experience, Shane Carruth creates a thoroughly consistent world. Sure, the cinematography won’t win any awards, but there are a number of shots that are incredibly well composed and framed in highly unusual and visually compelling ways. In many ways, this is one of the best science fiction films I’ve ever seen, and is focused on the ideas and repercussions of science in ways that most mainstream science fiction films ignore. If you are looking for a film that will stretch your mind both intellectually and philosophically, I would highly recommend Primer. Although I would also suggest to watch it with a group of people because I think part of the fun of this film is the conversations you can have after the film is over about the nature of time, existence and the ethical use of power. All said and done, this is a movie that is worth buying and not just renting.

Grade: A

“Wilde (Special Edition)” (Brian Gilbert)

As a huge fan of Stephen Fry’s, I was looking forward to his performance as Oscar Wilde. It was fine. But as a whole, the movie felt slow, slight and rather boring. There was no real nuance to any of the characters. This is not to say that they were necessarily two-dimensional, but . . . well, actually yeah, they were kind of two dimensional. Despite a talented cast that includes Fry, Zoe Wannamaker, Tom Wilkinson and a small but interesting turn by Vanessa Redgrave, the film feels ponderous and the characters flat. Jude Law brings no real subtlety to the part of “Bosie” Douglas (the young gentleman who could be seen as the tipping point from rumored homosexual behavior to Wilde’s sentence of two years hard labor for indecent acts). If you are a Stephen Fry fan, I would recommend it for his performance, but even then I would warn you not to expect greatness. One of those movies that is neither good nor bad, but simply ok.

Grade: C- (with the “minus” being assigned because there is no good reason why such good actors couldn’t have been used more effectively!)

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Must See British TV

Posted on by LtL

Who should watch: fans of Stephen Moffat’s work (Coupling, Doctor Who), those interested in watching some damn fine acting, and those with an interest in science fiction of the corporate conspiracy ilk.

What to expect: Six episodes of breathtaking acting on the part of James Nesbitt as he plays the duel characters of Jekyll & Hyde, a slightly silly plot that feels very X-files in it’s suggestion of a vast, corporate conspiracy, some questionable sexual politics that blur the whole sex/violence line in stereotypical ways, and some very strong writing (“I love children. Bite-sized people snacks” — Ok, so maybe that’s not the best evidence of Moffat’s abilities.)

Some thoughts: British TV is so much more a writer’s medium than television here. While certain American tv writers leave a strong impression of themselves on their series, Britain has given us Dennis Potter, Stephen Moffat, & Russell T. Davies. Watching Moffat’s work in Coupling, Doctor Who and, now, Jekyll, reveals themes and textures that resonate in all of them, despite the radically different stories that Moffat is telling. Ideas of parenthood, the anxiety of responsibility, and the strength, in the end, of love are repeatedly examined, dissected, and put together in new and sometimes startling ways.

He’s also damn funny.

Ultimately, however, the reason to watch this series is for James Nesbitt’s extraordinary performance. Hands down, his Hyde is one of the best psychopaths on screen.

Who should watch: Anyone nostalgic for the 70s, fans of action/cop shows, fans of John Simm’s performance as The Master in Doctor Who, and those who like shows that tread that “is this real or is this real” line. Oh, and fans of really creepy little girls emerging from a tv set to terrify the hero. And the three people who enjoy existential mysteries wrapped up in cop show clothes.

What to expect: Series one (8 episodes) is the stronger of the two, and showcases DCI Sam Tyler’s reality predicament as he wakes up in the 70s after being hit by a car. Playing on the differences between the technology, forensics, politics, and social attitudes of then versus now, the show paints the 70s as an alien, violent, sexist, and racist world where drinking and smoking are as ubiquitous as police corruption. But, how know, in a good way. The mysterious visions that Tyler experiences are connected to personal tragedy and the first series ends with a paradox that would make even Doctor Who fan’s down a bottle of Advil–possibly with a pint of lager.

The second series is a bit weaker, possibility because some of the jokes become somewhat stale and there is an inconsistency to the character growth of some of the characters. Personally, I also find the ending to be sophomoric. No spoiler’s here, so I won’t tell why exactly, but I think the series, for all it’s overt condemnation of the violent, torture-tactics of the cops, and of the sexist and racist viewpoints espoused by a number of the characters, actually ends on a reactionary note, forgiving people for their sins because, come on, they don’t really know any better and besides they’re the good guys fighting the tough fight.

Some thoughts: I watched the series primarily because I was so taken with John Simm’s performance in the final three episodes of this year’s Doctor Who series–why did they have to go and kill him dead in such a way as to actively preclude Simm reprising the role? He was so freakin’ good in that role, bringing an undercurrent of violence, madness and and overt humor to a role that has, in the past, been primarily one-note. Simm doesn’t disappoint and he plays DCI Tyler with a winning mix of earnestness, detached amusement, anger, fear, desperation and strength. In addition, Philip Glenister as Gene Hunt, Tyler’s boss and mentor in the ways of 70s police tactics (basically, beat people up until someone confesses), is a joy to watch, filling the screen with a bluster and hard-as-tacks swagger that is both off-putting and seductive. Unfortunately, much of the character development in the series happens within an episode and is then forgotten in the next. There is no real arc to follow for any of the characters, rather a series of loops that, while fun, don’t give the series the depth that could have been achieved.

But it is a fun show (at least until the end of the second series) and worth checking out, even if it occasionally goes for the easy solutions to an interesting set of writing and character problems.

Currently listening: Hold Me Now from the album “80′s British Gold (Disc 2)” by The Thompson Twins

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