My God, It's Raining

An edited version of this rant review appeared on the very lovely Geraldine Clark Hellery’s blog during the build-up to the Nun & Dragon release (*cough* still available! still has a story by me in! *cough*). I thought since Gerard Butler popped up in a post the other day, I’d do the full version on here now that a suitable period of time has passed.

Fair Warning – I do go on a bit about a movie that appeared in 2002 and promptly sank like a fucking rock.

So. On with the show. What’s the deal with Reign of Fire? Is it really a bad movie, or is it a sadly underrated gem?

Awkwardly enough, the truth lies somewhere in between. Things were never going to go well for it. Prior to its release the marketing team made some terrible mistakes in promoting the film, the most damaging being the creation of a poster that made the apparent promise of a helicopter versus dragon dogfight.

There *is* a helicopter in the movie – an Agusta A109 – and I count eight distinctive silhouettes of fully-armed Apaches in the poster. Failure to deliver is the worst crime that we can weigh against Reign of Fire, and it’s not even the movie’s fault.

Poor marketing isn’t the end of the world, but a myriad of smaller flaws combined to drive nail after nail into the coffin of what could have been the definitive dragon/apocalypse film.

The characterisation is weak.

The men are caricatures, with Christian Bale as Quinn, who we meet as an adult (following his VO narration of the dragonocalypse) digging away at the foundations of a castle. Contractual obligations being what they are, he has his shirt off and is working away with a muscular vigour that seems somewhat at odds with the idea that the last of humanity is scratching at the very limits of survival.

“Bad news. We’re out of chocolate protein shakes. Only got cherry and hazelnut left. War is Hell.”

Denton Van Zan (Matthew McConaughey), summoned into the tale by the Plot Gods, is even worse: a grimy, sweat-soaked Techno Viking who demonstrates his tenuous grip on what sanity he has left by leaning forward a lot and fixing people with his boggle-eyed stare.

Whatever you say about Denton van Zan, you’ve got to respect a man who is happy to Wil. E. Coyote himself off a building. Yes, that’s a verb now.

The sole exception is Creedy, played by Gerard Butler, who serves as Jiminy Cricket to Bale’s Pinnochio, a lone voice of (admittedly sarcastic) reason in a world given over to ridiculous idealogical clashes.

The women, by comparison, are non-existent. Alice Krige gets maybe a minute of screen time, including a memorably brilliant establishing shot of her flagrantly ignoring all forms of workplace safety by using a carbon dioxide fire extinguisher underground to flash-chill a can of beer. Added to the fact that her twelve year old son can get on-site and down the work lift with only the offer of a cigarette by way of challenge, the appearance of a dragon can be perhaps read as less a sign of the end times and more a fast-track past the red tape of an industrial tribunal.

Izabella Scorupco appears later as Alex: helicopter pilot, inexplicable Van Zan devotee, and token love interest. What little dialogue she gets is mostly spent in defence of one man, or expressing sympathy for the other. I guess we’re meant to be happy that she gets to fly the helicopter?

“Whee! This is symbolic of my agency! Did you know I’m also a successful singer?”

What it gets right, though, is the thing that should have been promised in the marketing – a post apocalyptic vision where people are just trying their absolute best to cope and survive. In the face of the setup – dragons burninating everything until there’s nothing left to burninate – Quinn has taken the course of action that makes the most sense. He’s gathered as many people as he can, taken them to the most remote and defensible point he can safely reach, and he has started digging. Ultimately, he’s hoping that the dragons will run out of food and the matriarch will go back into hibernation before he does. The fact that she will eventually return is immaterial – the scale of her sleep/wake cycle is so vast that it is – on the timeline of the thirty or so families he’s trying to protect – essentially meaningless.

It’s a great concept, and it’s a shame that more time isn’t spent on it. The balance of people to food and the constant risk and consequences of exposure are touched on briefly in a very satisfying and surprisingly well-handled way. The group that disobey Quinn aren’t rebels – they’re just hungry. As much as they let the collective down, he cannot bring himself to punish them because he understands their desperation. The atmosphere and character of the community shines when it is shown as being just that – a community. By far the most memorable moment is seeing Bale and Butler act out the climax of The Empire Strikes Back to an audience of wide-eyed toddlers (bonus marks for Butler for his reassuring “it’s okay, I’ve still got my hand” wave) and it’s a genuine shame that we don’t see more of it.

Instead, we are passed over to a traditional Hollywood arc for the final third. Creedy is dispatched in an act of sacrifice that prevents him from picking holes in anything that follows, and Quinn throws every belief he has out the window before flying down to London to fight the dragon.

There’s a saying that goes, no-one ever sets out to make a bad movie, and yet bad movies still get made. In hindsight, it’s easy to see where Reign of Fire went badly wrong. It’s also easy to see where it went right, and could have gone much better. A little less man-versus-dragon and a little more of the human side of things and it could have become a classic.

Don’t believe me? Look at 28 Days Later, which also came out in 2002.

Putting aside the incredibly weak setup (even the most ardent of animal liberators would know that opening a cage to an animal that’s been sorely abused, sticking your face in and smiling at it is a bad idea), it is a brilliant movie about how people try to cope with the end of the world. Yes, there are zombies, but the zombies are not the main event. It’s how everyone else reacts that drives the story forward, and it’s that difference that makes 28 Days Later the classic, and Reign of Fire the almost-ran.

I woke up this morning wondering about how Kung Fu origin stories come into being. There’s always some sort of legend, or a young, unformed talent who does something or witnesses something that forms the seed of their school of kung fu – like the classic Wing Chun story of the nun Ming Na watching a crane fighting a snake and being impressed by the economy and beauty of their movements.*

These stories all invariably take place in the far distant past, with a hazy lineage of teachers stretching down to the present day, or at least until 1970 when suddenly they branch out faster than a pyramid sales scheme.

It amuses me to think of someone in China opening their first martial arts school back in the days of yore** and trying to sell this kind of story.

“How did you become a master of the wandering bun fist, sifu?”

“One day, I was running across the city with a delivery in my arms when I saw a man being attacked by four cutthroats. I set about them, using only my kicks to strike as my arms were full of packages for the delivery. I defeated them, and seeing the man was okay, I ran as fast as I could to deliver the food. The man who was attacked was a city official, and seeing me defeat those men so easily convinced him that I should be elevated from the level of humble baker to master…that is how Wandering Bun kung fu was born.”

“Come off it, sifu! You tripped over someone’s dog four weeks ago and hit your head – when you came to you’d decided to open this place. The only reason they let you, and the reason everyone comes here, is because your wife is super hot and she can make those dumplings that have dumplings inside the dumpling.”

“Yeah…those are pretty tasty. But can we stick with the mugging story? Sounds a lot better.”

Not sure why all this occurred to me…but it did.

*Personally I always found that odd because birds tend to go apeshit over the slightest threat, so unless economy and beauty is a mistranslation of “start flapping its wings like mad, screaming so loud my dog’s ears started to bleed and jumped up and down on the snake until it was not just dead but flat” then there’s something deeply wrong with the analogy.

**unspecified, like a fantasy novel.

Don’t worry – it’s not a diatribe…rather more of a request.

Talking to my brother tonight on the phone, he mentioned having ticked The Graduate off the list of films he should have seen some time ago, but simply hadn’t.  I saw it years and years ago, long before any comparison between Ben and Ross from Friends could have been made (but oh, so very apt – except Ben doesn’t visibly swell as the movie proceeds, oil-sheened skin distending glossily with the pressure of impossible real world riches), and honestly don’t remember the balance of it – but as I recall it’d be a better use of my time to just watch Marathon Man again instead.

So, I started thinking about movies that I should have seen, but just haven’t, and decided to follow that line of thought by inviting the world to suggest ones that I (or indeed my brother) might have missed.  My Lovefilm queue needs a bit of padding out, if we’re going to be honest, and I don’t think Lisa would smile too kindly on me popping the entire collection of Best of the Best movies on there just for the sake of numbers.

One of the first I’ve added tonight is Five Easy Pieces.  It’s a classic piece of 70′s cinema, a story about identity that resonated with the era of it’s creation – a difficult story of frustration and resentment that offers up no Hollywood-style resolution to the question of Dupea’s ill-at-ease rebellion – and yet I’ve never seen it.  I’ve even quoted one of the most memorable scenes – “I want you to hold it between your knees” – and I’ve never watched the bloody film.

Well, that’s easily fixed.

So – what else should I queue up?

OK, so a little while ago I had to go into hospital for a kidney biopsy.  I’m not going to give a blow-by-blow account of the operation itself, which I would list as highly unnerving, nor am I going to detail the six hours I had to lie on my back, not raising my arms, watching daytime t.v.  Lisa has already had to sit through that, and the glassy stare my rant precipitated was a fairly solid indicator that it sucked as potential ‘blog material.

What I am going to say is that anticipation of the event was a mixed bag.  On the one hand, I wasn’t really looking forward to the experience of having a large needle pushed into one of my internal organs, no matter how fine the gauge.  On the other, I was rather looking forward to the offer of “something to calm me”.

I never really got into the casual drugs thing in my formative years, as I was so tightly wound that just the prospect of using an illicit compound paralysed me with fear as I considered all the terrible things that could happen.

So, as an adult, the very reasonable promise that I’d be given something to send me off into another plane of perception was quite tempting.  You have a slight risk of bleeding internally, was the message, and if you do happen to do so, we’ll need to stick a long wire with a bristly tip up a blood vessel in your groin to try and stop it, but it’s okay – whatever happens you’ll be higher than a treeful of monkeys on nitrous oxide.

Sadly, I was cheated on the promising front.  The doctor decided that I was sufficiently calm while discussing both the procedure and the sensations that would be part of it that I didn’t need anything other than the local anaesthetic applied to my biopsy site.  As a result, I didn’t even get the offer of “something” to calm me.  Just a brief warning that, should I move or breathe sharply, it would increased the chance of “suddenly piercing the large artery” and off we went.

By the way, when they stab you a couple of times after applying local, I now understand it’s to check sensation, so gritting your teeth and steadfastly not moving is very very bad because what happens then is they stick the biopsy needle in and you find yourself inadvertantly alerting the doctor, nurses and the corridor outside of your not-quite-anaesthetised state by going “FUCK” very loudly, after which a nurse comes into the room and bollocks both you and the doctor for scaring the next patient who happens to be on a trolley outside.

So that was me in hospital.  No results back as yet, or at least no one has communicated results, which is an entirely different thing.  I’d imagine if it was something terrible they’d get in touch with me sharpish, but maybe I’ll have to phone this week just in case.

I noticed the PC was running a little slow; slow enough to really put me off typing anything because there was a distinct half-second of lag between keypress and changes on-screen. Suspecting the worst, I did a virus/spyware/etc scan and found the system to be clean, my protection up-to-date. I did a disk cleanup, defragged, installed all updates, restarted and…

Blue screen of death.

Pissers, thought I.

Today I spent the entire morning going through the motions of trying to rescue my boot cycle. Five hours later, I gave up, backed up all my writing and pictures to a USB stick and reinstalled Windows.

Stupid machine.

In other news I’m still waiting for my appointment with the renal consultant, which the GP was annoyed that I haven’t got yet. Also, we may have a house to move into! Joy!

I left the flat today (shocking, I know) and took some pictures while wandering round the cricket grounds.

Images after the jump!

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I really didn’t enjoy Grave of the Fireflies.  Enjoy is probably the wrong word to use for a film like this one, actually.  ‘Moved’ is probably more appropriate.  I wasn’t moved by it.

I understand that there are differences between Japanese culture (especially prior to the end of WWII) and Western culture, specifically surrounding the way people maintain pride and honour, but nevertheless I was at a loss as to why Seita, the main character in the film, behaves in the way he does.  I should probably note (before someone else does) that it was a semi-autobiographical novel before being made into a movie, and thus some portions reflect real events, although I don’t know how the novel differs from the movie itself and the particulars of the original history.  Even though it has a link back to reality, the whole thing annoys the hell out of me because of Seita’s increasingly contradictory actions – all of which contribute first to the death of his sister, and then to his own demise.

Basically, it all boils down to his relationship with the aunt who takes him in.  She scolds him for not doing anything; he explains that the steel works he was working in got bombed (but then doesn’t explain why that stops him looking for anything else).  Following an argument about food, which stems pretty much entirely from his unwillingness to say to his sister, “this is all we have”, he refuses to apologise to his aunt and instead goes to live in the wild, taking his four-year old sister with him.

I don’t get it.  Why couldn’t he apologise?  Why can’t he go out and look for work; even the meanest, most menial tasks to bring something to the table?  If he’s so concerned about that, why does he end up stealing?  Isn’t that worse than having to suck it up and eat humble pie?  It annoyed me so much that I completely refused to accept the film’s message about the personal consequences of war.  Everything that happened to them after their mother died might well have been irrevocable, but Seita didn’t exactly put a lot of effort into preventing it.

I am being productive.  I promise.  However, the story I’m working on took a bit of a dark turn and I needed a break for some light relief.

Where do I turn?  The internets, of course.

Following my previous call for a “see who can find the most disturbing search term that leads to this site”, I had a browse through the recent searches to see if there were any significant entries.  No such luck.  Apparently there’s a new and improved version of Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook and every single cheating bastard in the universe has apparently clicked on a link to this site off a variation on Googling for “Bejeweled Blitz Cheat”.

The winner has to be “can bejeweld make u ill”, though.  To give that one worried browser an answer: yes, yes it can.  I don’t play it and I’m fucking sick of it already.

What else?  I continue to be bombarded with spam comments, although not so much since I banned a whole bundle of Russian IP addresses.  Also, I’m not sure if it’s just sloppy advertising or they’re peddling fake drugs but it’s spelt V-I-A-G-R-A.  Come on, guys, show some nous at least.  It’s just tiresome and from the general experience of dealing with spammers, if I was made King of the World tomorrow I’d spend a serious chunk of energy hunting them down and having them spayed as an example to everyone.

So, what else.  I read a bunch of Charlaine Harris novels; Grave Sight, Grave Surprise and Ice Cold Grave.  They’re pretty enjoyable for stuff in the mystery thriller genre, much better than the Lee Child book I read.  It covers the same sort of plot points – there is a murder in Hicksville, the outsider with unusual talents can’t leave until it’s solved – but I much preferred Harris’s style to the clipped, macho, trying-too-hard tone of Killing Floor (“He was a cop.  A tall one.  He looked tough but I could take him.  I can take anyone. ” – I’m paraphrasing, of course).

That said, whoever is doing the proofreading for Gollancz needs a slap.  I really don’t mind spelling mistakes, but when things like attribution errors (early on in Grave Sight, the waitress appears to drink Harper’s coffee), gender shifts (Detective Young turns into a man at least once in Grave Surprise) and just general continuity breaks (Mariella, Harper’s younger sister, is eleven in the first book and nine in the second) creep in it really starts to niggle at me.

In a similar vein, I was willing to let slide the Swiss-cheese nature of the Malazan Empire until Steven Erikson started wittering in the preface to Ian C. Esselmont’s shared-universe novel Night of Knives about how scrupulously they had maintained  a complete history of the world, which is, in the face of the overwhelming contrary evidence of his novels, complete bunkum.

Granted, Harris makes no such similar claim, but with an author as successful as she is I would have expected someone at the publishing house to flag some really basic and obvious copy errors before they started the paperback run.

So, Lisa picked up a really nasty cold at work, from one of the new starts (a tech, I think) who decided that he had to martyr himself in order to show willing at the new workplace, and thus spread the germs around.  I was going to lay into him here over that, but in earlier, more naive incarnations of my current self, I’ve done it a few times, even to the point of being sent home because no-one wanted some of whatever I’d got.

Anyway, the upshot is that Lisa has been off sick, and I’ve been here with here all the time, so it’s just a matter of incubation times before I myself succumb to similar symptoms (Ouch – note to self: watch the alliteration.  It’s OK though, I can just blame it on the germs).

Whenever she’s ill, she gets into a cycle of wanting to keep active (because apparently you should try to be up and active while getting over a cold) and do things, but she’s often too tired and sore and grumpy to work up the motivation to do anything at all.  So far the solutions have included breaking 160k on Bejeweled Blitz, and breaking into her season 1 set of Gossip Girl.

I was going to find a link for Bejeweled Blitz, but googling it just links to primarily sites explaining how to hack it for incredibly high scores.  Apparently using other people’s script to cheat at games is a kind of “meta-game” where you pretend that it’s actually you hacking into the game, like someone might do in a movie.  Really, it’s just cheating, something as old as dirt, but if you use a cool word and pretend you’re totally the master  of what it is you’re doing when you follow a page of instructions to install a couple of lines of script, then it’s apparently alright to ‘blog about how cool you are.

Actually, I will link one of them.  This is the link I decided to click on from that one Google search, and this is the one that annoyed me.  Hey guys!  You can totally cheat at this game, so why wouldn’t you?

Because it’s Bejeweled, primarily.  On a secondary point, cheating at it so obviously makes you look like a bit of an idiot.  Look at those scores; 92k, 95k, 100k, 101k, and oh yeah, six fucking million.  If you’re going to undermine the game to the extent that the score at the end is several orders of magnitude beyond the norm, you might as well just not bother and instead write little status alerts for yourself.

Bob Somebody just awarded himself 18 billion billion points!  Congratulations Bob!

People are actually more likely to congratulate you on this, if in a cheeky, ironic fashion.  Scoring 6 million at Bejeweled just marginalises the concept of a high score table.  Nobody wants to compete against, or congratulate, an out-and-out cheat.  It’s like those Flixster quizzes; I used to do them, and was really pleased when I did a Back to the Future one in a silly short amount of time (although that does make me kind of sad).  The high score table for that?  Dominated by people who had apparently answered it all in 0.01 seconds.  What’s the point?

Anyway.  Gossip Girl.  I can tell Lisa likes it, because she was up past 1 am, sick as she was, watching episodes of it.  I managed to half-watch two episodes before I found myself too annoyed to stay in the room with it.  I don’t know if I’ve ranted about this before, but I get really wound up by the way a lot of tv shows operate on the premise of general stupidity on the part of the cast.  No one has any foresight, empathy, feels guilt, or does anything remotely human in the show; everything that happens is an emotional MacGuffin, something to move the plot forward.  Look, here’s the Bitchy One!  She’s bitchy!  Ooh we don’t like her but no one except the heroine seems to notice!

I particularly liked how everyone gets over the incident of an attempted rape  really quickly because they want to keep the antagonist as a major character.  “Ooh!  He’s all mean and arrogant, but that’s kind of cool right?” the show is asking us.  Was I the only person watching the second episode going; “wait, what – he attempts to rape someone, and people are fine with this?”  Even the protagonist characters who intervened on the victim’s part seem almost blase about it; after pushing the guy over at a brunch, it’s kind of forgotten.

The reason for all this that is foisted on us again and again by the show is that communication is just not the done thing, so nobody tells anyone anything and the viewer is left to stew in frustration as the plot barrels idiotically forwards under the guidance of a invisible, but still smirking, narrator who sounds exactly like the sort of person I’d throw a drink over at a party, then go to the bar, buy another drink and, if she was still there, toss that one too.

I wonder if this is how Lisa feels when I sit and watch stuff like Band of Brothers?

The Yaris does make me nervous when I drive it. Not simply because it’s new, but for a couple of other reasons. First of all, the gearbox. It’s a lot tighter than the one on the Polo which, after years of abuse, had a range of motion one might describe as expansive. There was a healthy arm movement required on shifting from 2nd to 3rd.

In the new car, choosing second, fourth or sixth (!!!) gear isn’t too bad. Going into first, third or fifth happens a lot sooner than my brain expects it to, though. As a result, I sit with my foot on the clutch going “wait, did I get it in gear?” and then gingerly lift my foot off in horrified anticipation of a terrifying stall.

Every time, it’s just me being weird. I have stalled it a couple of times, but all of them have been, thankfully, from a standing start.

The other thing that scares me is the Optimal Drive engine. When you are stopped in traffic, if you put the car in neutral and take your foot of the clutch (but keep your foot on the brake) the engine will stop, ostensibly improving the car’s fuel economy. Put the clutch back down, the engine fires up again. The scary bit is that it has an internal timer, and if left for more than a minute or so, the engine will start automatically. Not a bad feature, by any stretch of the imagination, but to my mind the judder of the car as the engine starts suddenly feels very much like when the engine stalls, so every time it has happened so far, my brain has gone HEY WHAT THE CRAP and my first instinct has been to press the engine start button…which then cuts the engine.

I honestly would hold up traffic less if I stopped facepalming immediately after such things.

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