Poor Dr Jones

Child exploitation, stealing maidens hearts (quite literally!), prolonged campus absences, poor marking record, fraternization with nazis, and wild raving alcoholic rants about snakes, grails and the chinese mafia have gotten the poor professor REJECTED for tenure at university.

At least he has a fourth movie to fall back on.

(Comic) Books vs Movies

No this is about X-men. It doesn't require to much intelligence to point out how much that sucked and disappointed.

I watched V for Vendetta the other day. And I have the privelage of having already read the book before the film. I don't think I'll be able to pull the same stunt with Aeon Flux by watching the original mini-series first.

I wasn't dissapointed, "V" is an excellent film with good cinematography, characterisation
(very hard to do with a masked dramatis persona) and a pretty good story - It's just not the same as the book. The books main creator, Alan Moore, was dissapointed with the film; co creator David Lloyd attributed this to Moore probably going to be unsatisfied with anything but a direct transposition of graphic novel to screen.

I think maybe its a bit like the difference between the XII comic vs the XIII video game. I can't be certain, I haven't read the comics. I once got in trouble for proposing a merge between those two articles, I thought if they both have a title and plot elements the same - they must essentially be the same - after seeing V I think I can understand more that it is simply not the case.

Both plots are flawed in their own way. In my copy of V, Moore himself acknowledges that he approached the ramifications of a global nuclear war rather naively - plus you simply get the fact that the comics were circa 1970s while the movie was moderned up. The calamity was upgraded to biological attack - which two I think in hindsight could be recognised as being treated rather naively. Both the development, and execution and remedy for the biological attacked had several flaws. You can't trust biological elements to be quite so controllable. Jurassic Park: Life will find a way.

I think another flaw in the film plotline is that England doesn't seem to bad off. everything remains sort of middle class - in fact, poor people seem to be just non-existant at all. Fascism can certainly accomplish that (idealistically anyway). The novel managed to highlight the typical hypocrisy inherent in puritan models of governance, while the upper crust maintained a sense of unity and prevalence (which itself was corrupted by the existence of beings such as the Father) - the down and out were still starving, with vice gambling, strip bars, drinking, brawling and prostitution not exactly rare or scandalous.

Also because of the middle-class environment the inhabitants of a post-2000 Norsefire England weren't so intimidated by the government. In the book I doubt the shooting of a pre-pubescent vandal really would've sparked the community outrage it did in the movie. It would be expected, probably served the snotty subversive right. England in the book was still plagued by the sort of anarchy that the movie's US seemed to be. Norsefire in the book was elected because people really wanted it, in the movie it was more they couldn't care less. Maybe apathy was considered a more relevant issue to face by the filmmakers.

The movie certainly feels more relevant to modern society than the book - with more focus on elements like social apathy, media bias, censorship, wars on terror and the morality of rebellion/terrorism. But that said the book's themes aren't exactly irrelevant either.

Friday Night at the Movies

Well, It was Wednesday day, and I watched The Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn. It was actuallly a bit disapointing, ranking number 1 as the better "prequel" version. One and two are essentially the same plot - Ash and his girlfriend visit an abandonned cabin in the woods and release Kandali Demons that kill his girlfriend, and harass Ash and the cabin's other inhabitants. Number two does have the bonus of chainsaw-arm mentally unhinged Ash though. Plus eyeball ingestion. And a runaway hand. Oh and a laughing Deer head.

And even better Evil Dead 2 seems to be the basis of Evil Dead: The Musical. They even have a myspace. And here's a YouTube excerpt.

A Sequel to the Best Apocalyptic Children's Video

C'mon muppets did not get anymore hardcore than they did in Dark Crystal.

I remember the first few times I watched this I got really freaked out by the scene where they try and drain life essences out of the poor little girl elfin. As you generaly do.
And yes, that statement means I have watched this plenty of times.

Anyway somewhere in the interweb grapevine there is mention of a Dark Crystal sequel involving CGI backgrounds to puppeteering.

I change my mind - Labyrinth probably ties for hardcore muppeting, and it has Bowie.

Whatever happened to cool kids fantasy movies like them? Or maybe I just grew up?

*sigh*

SPORE: Awesome game, shit biology

Don't you hate it when a great, I mean abso-lutely great, idea you had, but did not really do anything about, gets taken up by an already crazy-rich superstar in that field. I swear i came up with the idea of creature->civ "life" game that is Spore back in high school.

I found this link in Pharyngula comment to a post about boob physics - unlike boob physics, spore doesn't really have any real science behind it. If anything its supports the anti-thesis of science, Intelligent Design. Fuck! I have to boycott this game on principle alone.

My idea was totally unfeasible, because it was to be based on actual science. Which means you have to wait around about 300, 000, 000 hours (with the speed ramped up to cheetah) just before that first non-living self replicating protein forms in a proto-biotic soup. While I'm sure a small clique of maybe under 100 evo-devo scientists might appreciate the algorithms behind that, I doubt it would win as many brownie points as literally "playing god" to the universe. I mean Black and White sucked, yet it sold millions based on the promise of that alone.

Spore has no biology behind it. Biology is undoubtably the most fundamentally simplest of the three core sciences (chemistry and physics) - yet all sorts of media, and computer games the most continually manage to fuck it up big time. Just look at the reality of Spiderman (be sure to watch the directors cut). I mean gene splicing, radioactivity, and killer viruses sound cool and fancy - but it doesn't give you a liscence to just make shit up.

I think the biggest biological blunder I have seen by far (if we sort of allow absolute fantasy like Resident Evil "regenerative anti-ageing cream that just happens to turn you into a zombie" pass by) was Carrie II: The Rage, where the new carrie's telekinesis powers are explained because she shared father's with the original carrie - fair enough - but because it was a recessive trait on the Y chromosome. Hang on. Carrie was a chick, right? What is she doing with a Y chromosome, let alone two of them to allow the expression of a recessive trait?

*Sigh*

I think Snakes on a Plane probably had some of the best biology in film going for a long time.
That really says something bad about biologists' role in Hollywood.

...

anyway, back to spore. It looks good. But amazingly prone to catassing. I just started a free trial of WoW, and while it is awesome and great - it is sufficiently repetitive and tiresome to encourage breaks. And I applaud Blizzard for acheiving this without sapping the sould out of gameplay. There really needs to be legislation against making games to complex or interesting. It's just a Catch 22 of keeping people grounded in reality.

Apart from being too good, having crap biology, Spore also suffers from unfeasibility if it tries to go permanently online to share content. What steps towards n00b protection will there be? I don't want to start a new world, raise a craeture to tribe level, and then have it anhilated because a twelve year old twit who has reached UFO comes over and razes my civilization to dust. Will there be PVP limitations - that sort of impinges on the whole "playing god" pitch. I want to have that right to raze insolent n00bs. I am immature as a twelve year old, razing peons is fun.

This could be solved, by keeping the game offline - or allowing semi-private servers - but then it won't really be massively multiplayer.

Succinctly, SPORE, looks too good to be true, but lets see how it works out. But don't connect it with biology, whatever you do.

Watch Out: Falling Stars

Tom Cruise is no longer sailing so smoothly. This is a GOOD THING.

Apparently Paramounts boot-up-the-arse is part of a bigger scheme to get big time stars a little more grounded. This too is a GOOD THING.

Stardom these days has gone a bit too far. And in the end people are realising that it's not worth it anymore.

Down with the capitalist overlords!

Hopefully this will translate into less power to Hollywood, more indie films, and cheaper cinema prices.

Regardless, we all know that a quicker to implement solution to Hollywood woes is an Ultimate Showdown.

Snakes on a MutherFucken Plane!

[warning this mutafucken blog entry may use muthafucken course language]

Wow!

This was movie that would have to try supremely hard to fail to deliver what its title advertised -
and boy, does it deliever muthafucken snakes on a muthafucken plane!

Not only does it have muthafucken Samuel L Jackson, it has hardcore Aussie, Nathan Phillips, as the unlucky targets of some crazy Korean gangster's attempt to stay out of jail. If you pay attention it's actually a social dialogue on the fate of children in single-parent families - but you are generally too mutherfucken busy watching out for those muthafucken snakes on the muthafucken plane.

SoaP lives up to expectations as utterly ridiculous and unbelievable, is chock full of product placement (Sony muthafucken Playstation saves the day), stereotyped characters, one liners, and of course lots of snakes and lots of violence - actually it exceeded my expectations on the gore level - some of the worst muthafucken injuries are not caused by the snakes. You do have to practically wait the entire movie for the "muthafucken snakes on a muthafucken plane" line though. But it is worth it.

It's definitely better than muthafucken Anaconda.

One of the girls I went to see the movie with has to fly to muthafucken Bermuda today. Good muthafucken luck.

I'm
disappointed that this muthafucken news story about a SoaP prank, turned out to be a hoax.
But the truth, that a rattlesnake actually snuck into the theater all by itself, is actually scary and freaky enough as it is. If you found a snake in a SoaP theater, you'd freak out, but you'd expect it to be a muthafucken prank. That the snake just got in tehre by itself is muthafucken creepy.

Muthafucken.