Ender's Game

I went with Nole yesterday to see Ender's Game, a new film based on a classic science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card. It is set in the distant future, at a time when an alien race of bugs is threatening to destroy the human race.

It reminded me a little bit of Starship Troopers, a film based on a classic science fiction novel by Robert Heinlein that is set in the distant future, at a time when an alien race of bugs is threatening to destroy the human race.

I think Ender's Game reminded me of Starship Troopers because both films are based on classic science fiction novels set in the distant future, at a time when an alien race of bugs is threatening to destroy the human race.

Both films also deal with the impact of war on youth, when young people are called to sacrifice themselves for the good of the human race, which is threatened with extinction by an alien race of bugs. In Ender's Game the young hero is played by Asa Butterfield (from Hugo), and in Starship Troopers the hero is played by Casper Van Dien (from Starship Troopers).

Apart from the future war and the bugs, the protagonists are quite different. Asa Butterfield is the weedy nerd hero Ender Wiggin, while Casper Van Dien, whose very name is like a series of punches to the face, plays the total jock Johnny Rico.

But the similarities return with the tough, overbearing military father figure, who in Ender's Game is played by a growly, scowly Harrison Ford, and in Starship Troopers by a scowly, scowly Michael Ironside.

The other main difference is that Starship Troopers is awesome because it features the tactical absurdity of massed infantry carrying shoulder-mounted nuclear missiles and gleefully satirical fascist overtones, whereas Ender's Game has neither of these things. It takes itself much more seriously, even though the main character never seems to be put in any real danger since all the space battles are fought by remotely controlled drones. Also, the story ends with a shoehorned twist that didn't make much sense.

So, yeah, Ender's Game was okay, I guess. But it mostly made me want to watch Starship Troopers again.

War Horse

This started out as a comment on Vlad's blog, but it got so long I thought I'd just write a blog entry of my own. It's a review of War Horse, which Vlad and I saw over the weekend. Vlad makes a number of good points on his blog that I shan't bother to repeat here. Go and read his review first, and my comments are a follow-up.

First of all, the nonsense about the boring horse that can't even jump I can almost forgive, because I assume that's in the original book and play.

What most annoyed me was the saccharine style Spielberg adopted for the pastoral scenes. I have a lot of admiration for Spielberg as a director despite his frequent lapses into schmalz, but this time he waaaay overdid it.

Take the lighting, for instance. It looked fake, like studio lighting, even in the external shots. Maybe that was a deliberate echo of the stage play, I don't know. But it gave the film an unreal quality that didn't seem to fit the inherent darkness of the material (I know it's a kid's book, but it's still dark).

Please leave me my horse, he fits so well with this pastoral idyll

The father of the hero (to the right in the above screenshot), a Devonshire farmer, was a drunken failure whose stubbornness almost reduced his wife and son to beggary. Now, if rural Devon had been made to look as grim and depressing as it probably was at the time, and less like a biscuit tin, maybe the appearance of this beautiful horse would have meant something. But the whole world looked so idyllic it was impossible to believe that anything bad could happen. That's why I thought Ken Loach would have done a better job directing.

Eeee but tha's a beautiful bird, our Kes

Like Vlad, I was also irritated by the scene of the horse wrapped in barbed wire in No Man's Land. But I was mostly irritated because it was the most potentially interesting and believable scene in the movie. It's not unknown for units of men in the midst of war to form close emotional attachments to animals, as mascots or totems of good luck. So when a British and German soldier awkwardly joined forces to free the horse, and then tossed a coin to decide who gets to keep it, I was really drawn in, and I thought the scene was genuinely poignant and beautifully written.

It just happens that the surrounding two hours were crap.

Roman movies

My bro just started watching an obscure collection of Italian sword and sandal movies from the 50s and 60s.

http://roman-movies.blogspot.com/

Harry Potter review

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 review

I went to see this film yesterday with Moogdroog as I had nothing else to do, except buy some zip-lock plastic bags. Apparently “Harry Potter” is quite popular with the kids these days. I think I read a couple of pages of the first “Harry Potter” book once, but then I put it down and decided to read Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting and Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe and Gore Vidal’s Julian instead, because I realised I’m not twelve fucking years old.

Anyway, this film is directed by some guy whose name I forget. Daniel Redcliff plays the eponymous wizard “Harry Potter”, Emily Watson is a she-wizard, and Rupert Grinch is a ginger wizard. Together they form a kind of wizard triumvirate. Towards the end of the film Emily Watson and Rupert Grinch started kissing, which I didn’t like very much.

“Harry Potter” and his friends are fighting against a villain who was constantly referred to as “you-know-who”, which was annoying, as I didn’t know who. I shall call him nose-face man. He had a pet snake.


I feel a bit bad for the producers because they obviously picked the three young leads when they were about five years old, and none of them has turned out to be a particularly good actor. Emily Watson wanders around looking vaguely fretful, and Rupert Grinch is sort of there and not there at the same time, and Daniel Redcliff stands about like a pouty cornstalk. Sometimes he turns his head to look at things, like he’s been caught in a lateral gust of wind.

There was a bit with a dragon, which was good fun, and a big fight when nose-face man and a load of evil wizards attacked Hogwards Wizard School. As far as I could understand it, which isn’t very far, “Harry Potter” had to destroy a group of things which had part of the soul of nose-face man in them, like a cup, and a tiara, and himself. He died and ended up talking to Michael Gambon in an Apple Store for a while, and then (for reasons that were not clear) he came alive again at a dramatically appropriate moment, had another fight, and won.


Er, spoiler alert.

I quite enjoyed it, on the whole. The CGI was overblown and cumbersome, but that was more or less necessary in order to fill the vacuum left by Daniel Redcliff’s lack of presence. The dialogue was crappy, but then “Harry Potter” is meant for children, isn’t it? Apart from all the violence and terrifying monsters.

In fact the scariest scene of all was at the very end, when the triumvirate see off the next generation of Hogwards Wizard School students at King’s Cross. They are meant to be about 40, and they look like this:


Final verdict: 10/10!!!!11

Eagle

Not long now till the release of the new movie adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff's classic The Eagle of the Ninth! I'm pretty excited about it. Frankly I'm willing to go and see it just for this reconstructed shot of Hadrian's Wall.

This is a photo I took a couple of months ago:


Here's a grab from the movie trailer:

How awesome is that? Pretty awesome.

The Old World and The New World

I was in the university library yesterday evening and bored of reading about monks (having overdosed on St Boniface in Fulda a couple of days earlier), so I sat down with my shiny new copy of Mark Sisson's The Primal Blueprint, in which he advocates a lifestyle founded on a version of the Paleo Diet. I've already been following the Paleo Diet for the past two or three months, with occasional lapses due to moving about and visiting Pizza Hut and suchlike. Sisson certainly knows what he's talking about. I always hated biology at school, but Sisson manages to make the biological basis of the Primal lifestyle both comprehensible and interesting. The main thing is to hunt and kill at least one animal every day - it could be a duck or a cat or an elk or anything else, as long as it can be eaten.

I also got Terrence Malick's 2005 The New World out from the library on DVD, starring Colin Farrell as Captain John Smith and Q'orianka Kilcher as Pocahontas. It is either a piece of sublime cinematic genius or lumbering and pretentious, I'm still deciding. Much of the film consists of long, slow shots of forests, shorelines and meadows, with ponderous internal monologue voiceovers which reveal the surprising truth that north America was settled not by pilgrims and pioneers, but tortured emos:

If only I could go down that river. To love her in the wild, forget the name of Smith. I should tell her. Tell her what? It was just a dream. I am now awake.

Or:

Who are you whom I so faintly hear? Who urge me ever on? What voice is this that speaks within me... guides me towards the best?

Or:

There is only this - all else is unreal.

Or my personal favourite:

You flow through me, like a river.

A line worthy of an Avatard. The New World reminded me a lot of another of Malick's films, The Thin Red Line, which is one of my favourite war movies but similarly strays rather too often into portentous philosophising (the film's opening line, I think, is a dreamy voiceover which asks, What is life...?) and idealisation of the old Western trope of the noble savage living in harmony with nature.

There's also the question of Colin Farrell, whom I do like as an actor, but I'm not sure why he sticks with his Irish brogue in this film when he's supposed to be playing an Englishman. The gaggle of Jamestown urchins also provide a couple of the best moments in the film with their Ken Loach-esque realism, but again, I'm not sure why these diminutive English colonists sound like they were picked up from some Dublin backstreet. Maybe it's because Irish accents sound more Olde Worlde to cinema audiences.

Malick's version of the John Smith/Pocahontas romance aims to be a more a historically accurate retelling of the story, except for the fact that the romance never actually happened; the real Pocahontas was only 10 when she saved John Smith (she's portrayed as 14 or 15 in the film), and the idea that they were romantically involved is a later fiction. The Pocahontas story has always bothered me anyway. There's something weirdly paternalistic and prurient about it which, ironically, is an effective metaphor for the philosophy of colonialism as a whole.

Never mind, New World (aged 15), the Old World (aged 30) is here to look after you

Still, this version is much less offensive and more inventive than Disney's. Although that may not be saying much.

Mark Kermode on Sex and the City 2

When former Trotskyite film critic meets Sex and the City 2 on BBC Radio 2's film review show...

Kermode: I should say right at the beginning of this, you're not going to get a rant about this... My expectations were low, and I have to say they were met. It's ghastly. I've spent quite a lot of time in the last week trying to figure out exactly what it is that is so ghastly, and putrid, and vomit-inducing about Sex and the City 2.

[There follows a 5 minute dissection of the film's plot and themes, including its "horrible" portrayal of women.]

Kermode: I'd like to move this on from sex war politics to class war politics... Firstly, you are meant to be engaged with these characters who are stinking wealthy and consumerist beyond your wildest dreams. The main one, the one played by Sarah Jessica Parker, appears to write books, although we never actually see her write; every now and then she goes and sits down and does a little bit of fiddling around. She lives in an apartment with her husband, who in order to be funding this apartment is probably an arms dealer. It's never really discussed where all their money is coming from. And she gets cross with him because at one point he buys her a massive flat screen television, and she's cross that he hasn't bought her a bit of jewelry. And then, because their relationship is a little bit on top of each other, she goes back to her other apartment, which she's just kept on. She has a whole other apartment.

Okay? So they have one lavish apartment, massive television, huge amounts of wealth, massive amount of clothes, walk-in wardrobe that you could put a family in, then she goes off to another apartment that she hasn't been bothered to sell because we're all so wealthy, and then she moans and complains about how awful her life is, and isn't this difficult, I really have to get away from all this...

The point is, why do I care about this character? This is a character who has so much money, so much wealth, that, actually having two apartments, she's still, "Oh god, it's so hard, so difficult, I'm having problems with my relationship." The defining moment for me is: she goes to this hotel which is $22,000 a night, okay, but she's getting it on the free. When they arrive, each one of them is given their own personal exotic flunky who then waits on them hand and foot... At no point does anyone say, I'm sorry, this is just ghastly beyond belief, this is horrible...

The unacceptable facelifts of capitalism

So what happens is, at one moment the flunky she has been given points out that actually he can only go and see his wife once every couple of months because the airfare is expensive. And you expect this to be a moment when she suddenly realises that the ghastly wealth she's living with has a consequence, that there are people around who have less money. But no! This is used as a moment so that she can go, "Oh yes, I have to be away from Mr Big sometimes as well, therefore..." And you're going, I can't believe you have done this! You stinkingly wealthy consumerist, dripping with gold, shoes, blah di blah di blah - he doesn't have enough money to go and see his wife, and what you see in this isn't horrible, staggering inequality of just corpulent, filthy lucre, but "Oh yes, we both have the same issue, which is to do with being apart from our loved one." Point number one, okay?

Mayo: This is the old Trot at the barricades, isn't it?

Kermode: I'm sorry, this is. This was the point at which I starting going, [sings and beats chest] "Then comrades, come rally..." Sorry, okay. As for the rest of them-

Mayo: What was that?

Kermode: That's the Internationale.

[There follows another 5 minute rabid dissection of the film's political and racial offensiveness.]

Kermode: Essentially, the message of the film is this: feel sympathy for people who are disgustingly wealthy, and so digustingly wealthy that they not only don't notice having a spare apartment, not only don't notice losing the income from a job, not only don't notice that one of the people they're employing is so poor that he can only afford to go and see his wife once every three months, not only that, but are also imperialist American pigdogs of the highest order when it comes to cultural imperialism. I mean honestly, I tell you, it's one of those things where you just think, this is a satire, right? ... On the class war politics, it is the most-

Mayo: Yeah, we get the point.

Kermode: Don't say it like that!

Mayo: You did say, "I'm not going to rant", and that was about ten minutes ago.

Kermode: It is just - it is consumerist pornography, it is an orgy of just dripping, you know, just dripping wealth that made me want to be sick.

Mayo: Well, as many listeners have said, if that wasn't a rant, then what is?

Iron Man 2

Being at something of a loose end last night, I went to see Iron Man 2 with Moogdroog, Vlad and a friend of Vlad's. After picking up Vlad and friend from the city (drunk and five minutes late, as usual)*, we stopped by Moogdroog's place and went to the shiny Vue multiplex outside York.

I didn't have high expectations of the film. The first Iron Man was amusing and distracting enough, but to give a meaningful judgment I suppose you need to be a comic book fan, which I'm not; it had explosions and fighting with enough of a trace of wit and irony, at least, to keep it from turning into Transformers. I don't remember much about it to be honest.

This sequel is pretty much more of the same. Lots of special effects, some of them impressive. There were two really good things about it: Robert Downey Jr himself, and the part where psychotic Russian evil genius Mickey Rourke strides onto the Monaco Grand Prix race track and smashes all the cars to bits with his lightning whips. And while the story is uninspired, the dialogue and performances manage to keep enough life in it to last till the end credits.

On the down side, Scarlett Johansson is wasted as a hard-as-nails-and-improbably-sexy-yet-ice-cold female special agent ninja Black Widow. The role is probably necessary as a gender counterbalance to the leering playboy sex-pest that is the central character, but it's not exactly one of Johansson's most challenging roles. Gwyneth Paltrow spends most of the film looking like she's about to cry or be punched in her simpering face. And then there's the product placement, but that's par for the course these days.

I thought the real problem was that I ended up feeling rather sorry for the main villain, Rourke's Ivan Vanko. The poor guy had a really tough upbringing in Siberia with his disgraced and exiled father, and all he wants is to exact revenge on Stark, whom he blames for his family's fate. He cobbles together his homemade power suit from what looks like tin cans and bits of twine before smashing up Stark's orgy of wealth and privilege at Monaco. He never really stands much of a chance against the resources of his nemesis, who spends most of the film strutting about like the self-obsessed wanker he is.

I couldn't tell if the film's apparent celebration of fascistic militarism was supposed to be ironic or not. The movie starts with Stark landing on a stage surrounding by fireworks, a huge American flag and a team of dancing girls in hotpants.

Subtle

Jon Favreau is no Paul Verhoeven, that's for sure. The camera pays a little too much attention to the girls not to be salacious. Stark is a great character largely because he is a wanker: born into the millionaire lifestyle like Bruce Wayne, minus the brooding self-importance and tortured emo double-life, plus an unhealthy dose of the arms industry. But are we seriously supposed to identify and sympathise with Stark on this level? Isn't the character of Ivan Vanko, the poverty-stricken underdog driven mad with desire for vengeance, much more tragic and sympathetic? When he isn't killing innocent civilians, I mean.

Spot the wanker

Spot the underdog

Spot the dog

* I mean Vlad was drunk and late, not me.

Ridley Scott's Robin Hood

I have made three big mistakes in my life. The first was riding my bike into a ditch full of nettles when I was eight. The second was taking Media Studies for A Level. And the third was going to see Ridley Scott's Robin Hood.

Russell Crowe was interviewed on Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo's BBC radio show last week and said that Scott wanted to make a new film about Robin Hood because it was ripe for reinvention: once Mel Brooks has made a parody of a particular genre or story, you know it's time to move on. Which is fair enough, I suppose, except that the tale of Robin Hood has been reinvented so many times already...






... there can't be many places left to go with it. Still Ridley Scott, being the cinematic genius he is, has found a new direction which nobody else has dared attempt. He's turned the classic tale of Robin Hood into a cock-eyed shambles.

It's a bold move, and sure to be controversial. Russell Crowe does his part with a remarkably incompetent attempt at a "regional" English accent which meanders quite happily across the Irish Sea and back again several times in each sentence. He and Cate Blanchett also somehow manage to take one of the great historical romances and sap all life out of it. The dramatically pivotal moment when Robin says the line "I love you, Marian", he may as well have been talking to his horse. The rest of the cast isn't bad, but so uninspiring there's nothing much to say about it.

The big problem is just that the film flails about all over the place, perhaps because three writers, three producers (including Crowe) and four executive producers is waaaay too many cooks in the kitchen. I won't be spoiling anything if I say that Robin Hood isn't actually declared an outlaw until the last five minutes of the film; in fact I'll be sparing you the agony of spending two hours wondering when the real story is going to start.

See, I always thought that the story of Robin Hood was about an outlaw who lived in a forest and stole from the rich to give to the poor in the face of tyranny. Very simple, very iconic, which is why it's always been so popular.

Ridley Scott thinks that the story of Robin Hood is about some common archer called Robin Longstride who fought in Richard the Lionheart's army, got put in the stocks, then escaped and pretended to be a knight in order to get back to England to fulfill the dying wish of Sir Robin of Loxley that he return his sword to his estranged father in Nottingham, who then decides to pretend that Robin Longstride is his son, even though he looks nothing like his son, largely in order to contrive some narrative excuse for romantic awkwardness between Robin Longstride and Robin of Loxley's widow, Maid Marian (who isn't a maid at all, since she is a widow), and by some moronic coincidence it turns out that Robin of Loxley's father actually knew Robin Longstride's father, whom Robin Longstride has forgotten about, and says that he was a political visionary who wanted common rights for all men, then Robin Longstride (still pretending to be Robin of Loxley, mind) has some flashbacks in which he remembers the murder of his father by a bunch of soldiers and realises that he is from Barnsdale, and decides to become a great general and hero of the common man by shouting at King John, who then promises to sign the Magna Carta if they all join him to defeat the French invasion, which they do, but then all the people cheer Robin Longstride (who at some point has gone back to his true identity) instead of him, so he gets mad and refuses to sign the Magna Carta after all and declares Robin Longstride an outlaw. Then, just as it starts to get interesting, the film ends.

Basically you pay to watch 140 minutes of exposition. But there's plenty of additional retardation thrown in to keep you exasperated and/or amused.

1) Robin Longstride and his boring bunch of wanker friends decide to pass themselves off as knights after Robin says, "There's is no difference between a knight and an ordinary man except the clothes he wears." Now I'm sorry, but no. It worked in A Knight's Tale because that was a comedy. In this film it is just dumb. For one thing, the knights whose clothes they steal were Anglo-Normans and would have spoken French. Could a modern English yokel pass himself off as a member of the French elite by donning a beret? I think not.

2) British people laughed at Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves because the film had Kevin Costner land at Dover and walk in one day to Nottingham via Hadrian's Wall. In this film, an entire fucking army gallops non-stop from Nottingham to the south coast via what looks like the Lake District or Snowdonia.

3) The beach set-piece battle at the end is stupid. Having hundreds of horsemen charging through the surf looks impressive in the trailer, I admit. But really, the battle is such an obvious attempt to make a medieval version of Saving Private Ryan's D-Day scene that I was laughing through most of it. They have the same frenetic, handheld style, the same blue-grey washed out colouring, even some shots are almost identical, except with bows and arrows instead of machine guns.

French coast, 1944

English coast, 1199

4) The stupidest moment in the entire film is when Maid Marian, being a modern, liberated twelfth-century woman, turns up at the final battle riding a war charger in full armour and proceeds to hack her way through the French army, because, as we all know, medieval warfare was nothing more than sitting on a horsey and waving a sharp thing around at random. By this point I wasn't even surprised to see Friar Tuck also in the fray. My standards of logic had fallen so low that seeing a middle-aged, overweight, drunkard clergyman slaughtering professional soldiers made perfect sense.

It's a pity, because a couple of weeks ago I went to see a largely ignored historical film by Alejandro Amenabar (director of The Others) called Agora, starring Rachel Weisz. It was a dramatisation of the life of Hypatia, who was a pagan female philosopher in Alexandria at the end of the fourth century, a time when it was a bad idea to be a pagan female philosopher anywhere. The film chronicled her earnest pursuit of reason and scientific truth while the world around her was being torn apart by bloody street fighting between pagan mobs and militant Christian monks.


Agora was trying to be intelligent and interesting, and mostly managed to do both. It also had something useful to say about the nature of religious conflict. It got a mixed reception because critics thought it was too highbrow, which it wasn't, provided that when you go to the cinema you're prepared to have one or two brain cells excited instead of having all ten billion numbed into oblivion by explosions and punches and stabbings and penis jokes. All of which Robin Hood has in abundance. Thanks, Ridley, for lowering the collective IQ of western civilisation another couple of points.

Clash of the Titans, or not

I was going to watch Clash of the Titans today but I decided not to because almost everyone on the planet seems to think it's a heap of crap. While I'm a firm believer in working out my own opinion about stuff, I also believe in succumbing to peer pressure when the only (half) dissenting voice left is Roger Ebert, whom I have never forgiven for the nasty things he and Gene Siskel said about David Lynch's Dune.

The BBC's Mark Kermode, on the other hand, was not remotely impressed.

If you've seen the trailer, you're pretty much seen the film, but without the headache-inducing thunderousness of watching the film itself. So: the script is terrible, the acting is completely wooden, the romantic element is boring and uninteresting, and the interaction between the human characters is totally without merit.

It also provoked a five-minute rant against the retro-fitting of blockbusters to the new trend of 3D, one of Kermode's special hates, which ended thus:

So what you're left with is the headache-inducing spectacle of watching something made in 2D, converted into 3D, badly written, ploddingly played, with some big monsters, which, incidentally, through the miracle of 3D are made to look smaller, because that's what happens when you watching 3D, going "Oh, for Heaven's sake - can we STOP THIS NOW."

I'm not big on the 3D thing either. I once saw a reissue of The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 3D which didn't work because my eyes appear to be broken, so I what I actually saw was The Creature from the Out of Focus, Bluey-Greeny Lagoon. And I saw Avatar in 3D, but I felt it only worked in certain kinds of shots, such as when the camera was in a cockpit and you were looking out over the jungles of Pandora. Most of the time, like Kermode says, especially with very tight or very wide shots, 3D simply ruins the sense of proportion, making stuff either too big or too small.

And I'm also happy to boycott the new Titans because the 1981 original is one my favourite childhood films, as a well-worn VHS tape at home will testify. I always preferred it even to Jason and the Argonauts, which opinion I understand is a minor heresy among Ray Harryhausen fans.

Apart from not going to see a film, I have little else to report. I'm writing an article about Anglo-Saxons which is becoming more and more racist. Specifically, I think Dorchester-on-Thames was ethnically cleansed in the fifth century. Not that I'm saying this was a good thing.

Avatar review

1 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

this film made me cry!!, 27 Mar 2010

By

J. Clay

This review is from: Avatar [DVD] (DVD)

i'm only puting 1 star for this film because when i saw it at the cinema it made me CRY! i havent cried so much at a film since i saw new moon, honestly this was the most amazing dilm ive seen since new moon. the only thing that would make this film better is if they someow crossed it with new moon so you could have BELLA and EDWARD togehter on pandora, they could live in piece in harmony with Nature and with each other, there are no werewolves or bad vampires on pandora are there!

really this film gets FIVE STARS!

Reviews:

A. Vlad says: Nice attempt, troll.

Mr J. A. Hetherington says: An opinion is one thing... but REALLY?! There are no words.

Lee J. Simpson says: Are you for real?

Chapman says: Worst. Review. Ever.

*

I'm amazed that these comments were all made within a few hours of submitting the review last night. There's a lot of Avatards lurking about Amazon, clearly. To be fair, though, people only have to click on my profile link and look at my other reviews to see that I'm obviously a troll with nothing better to do.

Apart from abusing Avatar fans, I got a job at Durham starting in October. It's left me in the weird position of having July and August free without any work or research planned and I'm trying to work out how to fill them. My ideas so far include one or more of the following:

1) Going on an intensive French course somewhere, probably Lyon

2) Going hiking

3) Sitting at home watching Deadwood

4) Renting a cottage in Donegal through July

Re. number 4, I'd aim to get a place with 2 bedrooms so anyone out there who fancies a summer break in the west of Ireland could come for a week of their choice and we'd share the rent for that week. (The cottage would be about €400 per week.) So if that tickles yer fancy get in touch; if I go ahead I'll need to find somewhere pretty soon in order to book a whole month.

It's a good day to die

Starship Troopers 3 is one of the biggest mistakes ever committed to celluloid, but this song makes it worthwhile.

Oooohhh yeah

Killing two turds with one stone

Now there isn't much that Vlad and I agree on, but there are two things which have exercised our combined ire recently.

1) The existence of Avatar fans.

I don't mean people who saw the film and thought it was okay, who were impressed by the effects but not much else. I mean the hardcore fanbase which has sprung up in the last couple of months and is spreading on the internet like bubonic plague. Unsympathetic souls have christened them "Avatards".

First of all, this review explains why the film is overrated, dull and manipulative.

Yet it's just the sort of thing that seems to suck people in. Using a highly scientific method of measuring internet opinion, I typed "avatar is shit" into Google. It got 24 million hits. If I type "avatar is awesome", it gets twice as many. That can't be right.

There are Avatar forums devoted to dealing with post-Avatar depression - for people who are depressed, I should add, not because they just paid good money to put on some silly glasses and be bored for two hours, but because after being sucked into Cameron's cliched and preachy utopian fairytale they find themselves unable to deal with the imperfections of the real world.

And while the film has its share of normal fans, there are some who regard it as a life-changing experience, a call to arms for social and political revolution. It's basically provoked a crude form of environmental activism for people with short attention spans and a penchant for blue faces.

Personally I don't see how the derivative "alien" culture of the Na'vi (another pet hate: arbitrary use of apostrophes in alien or fantasy names) can inspire anyone but the most feeble minded. Honestly. It's a hokey mush of noble savage clichés and a language that any skilled linguist could bash out over a weekend.

Worst of all, now my toes curl in embarrassment every time I hear someone use the phrase "I see you". Thanks, Cameron. You've spawned another generation of confused sci-fi nerds whose idea of personal fulfilment is to waste their time learning to live a pretend culture and language, as though Star Trek didn't already fulfil that need. Tolkien, as a professional philologist, constructed his fantasy languages for his own half-secret personal enjoyment. He never expected that anyone would take the trouble to learn them.

2) U2, especially Bono

Vlad has already covered Bono's latest insult to humanity, i.e. his continued existence. U2's 2009 tour helped the band reap over $100m last year and involved perhaps the largest physical expression of arrogance ever made by any rock band, including U2.

Compensating for something, Bono?

One would think that a band which was able to impress people with its musical skill wouldn't need to resort to stuff like this. What's Bono going to do next, rebuild the Pyramid of Cheops on the banks of the Liffey as his burial tomb?

I gladly concede that U2 has had some good moments. Sunday Bloody Sunday is a decent protest song, and I think With Or Without You is a beautiful ballad. But they've produced no more than you'd expect for a band which has lasted three times longer than Napoleon's empire and produced a dozen more full-length albums than he managed. As the saying goes, you throw enough shit against the wall, some of it's gonna stick.

The best you can say about them is that they haven't got any worse in the last thirty years, but that's mostly because they haven't developed at all. There's a simple test. Listen to their 1980 debut album Boy, and then listen to 2009's No Line On The Horizon, and try to identify any meaningful progression apart from the increased pretension of the title. The same echoey guitar riffs, the same warbling vocals, the same vacuous lyrics.

Being unable to expand into new creative areas in all that time, apart from regular forays into whatever they judged to be cool at the time (pacifism and Americana in the 80s, techno in the 90s, themselves in the 2000s), must be indicative of a serious lack of talent. But then U2 has always been mostly about impressing people. They are like the golden boy who is a little too eager to prove himself to his parents because he knows, deep down, that he isn't really all that golden.

For an example of a band which has developed ten times as much as U2 in half the time, you could do worse than listen to the back catalogue of Wilco. Jeff Tweedy doesn't need massive robot crabs to impress people.

That sounds like a line from a cheap novelette

Moogface came for a visit last week and we went about doing things in Vienna, kicking off an action-packed few days with a craaazy two-hour seminar with visiting medievalist Prof. Philippe Buc at the Institute for Medieval Research. I know how to treat a lady!

Then we took the subway to Prater, site of a big funfair which promised craziness without bounds. Unfortunately everything was closed because it was the middle of fucking winter, something which had escaped my notice. We shuffled about in the snow for a bit and Moogface made full use of the only form of entertainment available by sticking her head in this thing, which killed an hour or so. She is easily amused.

It's probably a good thing that Dizzy Mouse was shut.

But the fun didn't stop with medieval seminars and closed funfairs, oh no! We also went to Latin mass in the undercroft of the cathedral, which was like normal mass except more penitential due to the lack of cushion kneelers and comprehensibility. Mel Gibson was actually standing in the corner inviting people to whip him.

And we watched an old black and white film in a musty little cinema. (It was The Third Man of course, so mustiness is part of the experience.) This necessitated a trip on the Riesenrad, although our plan to re-enact the famous scene from the film was thwarted by the old couple sharing our cabin, and the locks on the doors.

"Or do ghosts only fly by night, Dr Winkel? You got an opinion on that?"

Moogdroog also managed to use some kind of secret healing powers to fix me, or at least I made a sudden improvement on the day of her arrival, which meant I was actually able to take her around the city and we didn't have to stay in my flat watching badly dubbed episodes of Friends and repeats of The Weakest Link, which is about the only show broadcast on BBC Entertainment.

I saw my physio for the last time yesterday and she ran out of things to do to me. With luck I'll be fit enough to try a short run in a couple of weeks. Six weeks of crippledom has taught me two things: 1) be careful when sledging; 2) Vienna is a good place to get sick. There are so many doctors here, chances are your next door neighbour will be one. The doctor I went to was actually called Dr Galen. You don't get any more highly qualified than that. I was half expecting my radiologist to be called Dr Xavier Ray.

Tomorrow I have to go to the Institute for a project meeting to discuss an article I've written for their latest edited volume. It's the first time the people here will be giving direct feedback on something I've written, and I'm fairly shitting myself at the prospect of their hardcore Viennese historiographical faces staring at me.

"So, Herr Dr Clay, please justify your academic existence."

That photo is from 1892 I admit, but the only thing to have changed is the intimidating facial hair. My only consolation is that nobody at the Institute is really an Anglo-Saxon expert, so they might not notice all the glaring historical errors I made.

It's over, it's all over

Gone now.

Apart from watching a snowman disintegrate, yesterday I drew a picture of St Boniface's first monastery at a place called Büraburg in Hesse. It's going to be in Boniface: The Book which is FINALLY finished, or at least it will be once I send all my pictures to the publishers.

I'm particularly proud of the wisps of smoke. The book now has an official cover and everything, which hopefully I'm allowed to put up here.

It won't be published until around autumn if all goes well, just in time for Christmas. Since I get a few free copies, I hope everyone knows what to expect in their stockings this year!

Noel and I went into Brum to see The Road yesterday. If the idea of watching two people stumble through the dead landscape of a nuclear winter with nothing on their iPods except Nick Cave instrumentals appeals to you, as it does to me, then you'll probably like it. Anyway, people who say it's depressing are stupid. It's ultimately much more uplifting than empty celluloid baubles like, say, Love Actually.

The Way of All Snow

I built a snowman on Tuesday as a metaphor for the transience of mortal existence, tracing man's inexorable fall from youth into dotage and ending with the final dissolution into nothingness, or, in the case of the snowman, a puddle.

Day 1

He's proving to be much tougher than I imagined. He started to lean to his left hand side quite early, which caused his left hand to drop off.

Day 2

He continued to lean as though hoping to retrieve the lost appendage, but then his left eyeball (a new potato) dropped out.

Day 3

Now, crippled and half blind, he continues to lean, whether out of determination or hopelessness I know not. I honestly don't know how his head hasn't fallen off yet.

Day 4

On Wednesday I went sledging with Abi, Gem and Jason, which turned out to be my biggest mistake of the week as it triggered a back injury from 2008. Now I'm hobbling about on a pair of walking sticks and swallowing the strongest painkillers money can buy. I don't mind the discomfort as I find that latent physical pain focuses the mind (probably a Catholic thing), but I hope I'm fixed by Tuesday because I have a flight to catch from Gatwick.

Last night, as if the back thing wasn't torture enough, moogdroog and I watched Ed Wood's masterpiece Glen or Glenda, less well known than Plan 9 from Outer Space, but just as incompetent and much more interesting. As a film it's a complete narrative mess. It's not just a car crash; it's like three or four car crashes crashing into each other continually for an hour.

Happy 2010

I hope everyone had a good Christmas and New Year. I've approximately doubled in weight over the past two weeks. Luckily the house is now running out of free chocolate and beer so I'll soon be able to restore vitamin levels. I began today with a breakfast of Shredded Wheat and a glass of apple juice, which left me feeling rather pleased with myself, so I for lunch I had two mince pies, three slices of chocolate log and a bundle of chocolate fingers.

It was supposed to snow in the 'Grove between Christmas and New Year, but it didn't, which was annoying because it seems every other postcode in the country got snow, even too much snow, and poor Kim the Dog was deprived of her yuletide frolic.

For New Year I drove up to see moogdroog, who decided that it would be more fun to spend the last night of 2009 staying in to watch surrealist Czech short films than going into town. She was actually right because town was probably full of people, and people are filthy and annoying.

Personally, I think New Year TV programming should consist of wall-to-wall Jan Svankmajer reinterpretations of It's a Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol.

Over the break I watched three movies at the flicks, but none of them made much of an impression. The Coen Brothers' A Serious Man was good but nowhere near as interesting as The Man Who Wasn't There, as funny as The Big Lebowski or as gripping as No Country For Old Men. Avatar was basically the souped-up body of a Ferrari hiding the engine of an Austin Allegro, but you don't realise until you're half an hour into your journey and by then it's too late to turn back. Sherlock Holmes was most fun of the three, and gets points for being the first Guy Ritchie movie since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels that doesn't make me want to stab Guy Ritchie.

I also read Ian McEwan's newest book, On Chesil Beach, which Dad got for Christmas and I temporarily stole. It was very very good and made me sad.

Back to Vienna next Tuesday. What larks, eh Pip, what larks!

The Patriot

My flatmates are still being elusive. Sometimes I hear noises from their rooms and new dishes on the draining board, so I know they’re not dead.

But neither are they truly alive.

I watched The Patriot at the weekend. It’s not as bad as I’d been led to believe by the man on the street, although I admit this may have lowered the bar to such an extent that the film barely needed to shuffle to get over it.

It wasn’t quite as rabidly anti-British as people claim, that’s for sure. The antagonist, Colonel Tavington, played by a snarling, cold-eyed Jason Isaacs, is loosely based on a real historical figure with the bombastic name Banastre Tarleton, who did indeed lead a company of light dragoons during the Revolutionary War and did do some pretty nasty things such as burning houses and massacring prisoners. He never locked an entire village of men, women and children in a church and burned them to death, but this incarnation is a Hollywood villain, after all. Cut him some slack.

This picture is mostly here to keep Vlad the Impaler happy

Furthermore, other British characters are not quite so evil. Most are even portrayed as decent and civilised, if suffering the natural flaw of all eighteenth-century Englishmen abroad: arrogance. Tom Wilkinson, for instance, who plays the British commander Cornwallis, repeatedly castigates Tavington for his barbaric conduct. “We serve the Crown,” he says, “and we must conduct ourselves accordingly. Surrending troops will be given quarter; these brutal tactics must stop!” Conversely, Mel Gibson’s guerillas commit a few war crimes of their own before they are reined in.

A big problem with the film is that it was directed by Roland Emmerich, the man behind such braindead blockbusters as Stargate, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012. He doesn’t really do subtlety. This isn’t a problem when the main villains happen to be aliens or natural disasters, but some people get tetchy when he bludgeons a historical period with his hammy fists. Ideally Emmerich would be allowed to direct the action sequences, but kept away from everything else.

A lesser problem is the writer, Robert Rodat, who also wrote Saving Private Ryan and is currently working on a movie adaptation of the online RPG World of Warcraft. He’s not that bad a writer, but some lines are like being poked in the ears with hot needles. For example:

Mel Gibson: May I sit with you?
Love Interest: It’s a free country. [Dramatic pause.] Or at least it will be.

Ouch. He also tiptoes around the slavery issue with impressive deftness. The hero, we learn early on, only employs freed blacks on his farm, not slaves. The redemption of the white man is symbolised by a minor character who is a bit racist to one black recruit, but then makes friends with him at the end, so everything is fine.

Black and white, united by their hatred of the British

One might also question why Tavington’s murderous dragoons are, but for a single officer, portrayed as English, when his real-life counterpart commanded a unit composed entirely of loyalist Americans. Presumably having Americans committing atrocities against other Americans during the Revolutionary War would have shattered the delicate mythology upon which the emotional impact of the film depends. (For a drama which seeks to enrich the myth of America's founding by exploring just such ambiguities, I'd recommend HBO's awesome miniseries John Adams.)

Emmerich wouldn't let Thomas Jefferson slouch like this, that's for damn sure

Yet I still enjoyed The Patriot, and having watched and enjoyed it, I’m almost tempted to revisit Braveheart. Although I suspect that it will only appear more moronic the second time round.