Monthly Archive for August, 2007

Babylon 5: The Lost Tales – Voices in the Dark

Published on August 24, 2007 in Film. 0 Comments

The Lost Tales

(This is the IMDb review I wrote. I hope to write a longer, more detailed, and even more emotional review at a later date. You know how it is with these things, though, so it might take a while.)

Babylon 5 is probably the best television series ever made. It’s not that I have an uncritical “fanboy” view of it – it just happens to be the most thoughtful, complex, well-written and touching bit of television I have ever seen.

While B5 is not really a franchise, there is a lot of unexplored space (no pun intended) in the B5 universe; space which should allow for some very interesting stories to be told. The Lost Tales is just that. Not another series, or a pointless and unrealistic “cast reunion” thing (as some people would have wanted it to be), but small stories about the characters and the world that we have come to love. An anthology.

Previous outings into the B5 universe (apart from the series itself) have been mixed; In the Beginning was quite brilliant, for example, whereas River of Souls and Legend of the Rangers suffered from bad direction in one case and studio interference in the other.

Voices in the Dark is everything that we could have wanted it to be. Visually, it beats just about everything out there to a metaphorical pulp – both the special effects and the camera work are just stunning. Musically, Christopher Franke outdoes himself yet again, making me wish he’d done the music for Crusade. (Yes, I see the logical arguments behind using another composer for that series. However, the music in Crusade sucks, no matter how you look at it.) But above all, B5 is about the characters and the story, and that’s where the Lost Tales truly shine.

The actors are, as cliché as the phrase may be, simply superb, adding another layer of complexity to already deep characters. Bruce Boxleitner’s Sheridan in particular is just brilliant; the mixture of humour, empathy and authority makes for a remarkably layered and likable character.

The writing is not just fantastic, but thoroughly enjoyable. From snappy one-liners to long discussions of the role of religion in a spacefaring society, JMS has once again crafted a web of words that will be remembered and quoted for years to come, filled with an intense love of humanity and with hope for its future.

Does this sound over the top? It isn’t. I wouldn’t write such emotional words about The Legend of the Rangers or Thirdspace – but when it comes to this first installment of The Lost Tales, I can go on and on. This is the real deal. This is storytelling of the highest quality.

Enjoy it.

P.S. Since writing this, I’ve looked around the net and read some reviews. That was a serious mistake which almost made me lose my faith in mankind. It’s amazing, really – people will claim any kind of nonsense just to attack something that is too intelligent or thoughtful for their tastes. Someone said the episodes were too talky (umm… hello? not everything has to be about space battles, you know) , someone else claimed the effects were bad (and I’m a Norwegian cephalopod), and yet another deluded soul claimed the original series stole liberally from other shows. The last bit in particular just made me shout WTF? at the top of my lungs. If there has been a single original sci-fi series on TV in the past twenty years, it was Babylon 5! That’s not a matter of debate – there just isn’t anything even remotely similar. And don’t say Deep Space Nine, that’s absurd. DS9 is fine, but it’s a completely different kind of thing. Another drooling ghoul claimed Galen’s lines were badly written – when Galen has some of the most astonishingly brilliant lives ever! Maybe it’s because they’re so Shakespearean, and some people think that’s “unrealistic.”

This always happens to B5. Why is it such a crime for a show to be literate and intelligent?

It’s just sad. *sigh*

Beware the Belching Moose

Published on August 23, 2007 in Thoughts. 0 Comments

It’s just so heartwarming to see the mainstream media help raise awareness of global warming. It’s important that people get a clear understanding of the issue at hand, its causes and consequences.

Belching moose add to global warming

OSLO (AFP) – A grown moose belches out methane gas equivalent to 2,100 kilograms (4,630 pounds) of carbon dioxide a year, contributing to global warming, Norwegian researchers said Wednesday.

“Contributing to global warming” – how wonderfully vague. That’s like saying that a kid peeing into a river contributes to a flood.

That is more than twice the amount of CO2 emitted on a round-trip flight across the Atlantic Ocean from Oslo to the Chilean capital Santiago, according to Scandinavian Airlines.

Yes. Only you’re comparing what a moose does in a year to what a plane does in a day. Which, of course, is entirely convenient – since the point is to make us think that global warming is caused as much by nature as by man.

“An adult moose emits about 100 kilograms of methane gas a year. But methane gas is much stronger than carbon dioxide, so to get the equivalent you have to multiply by 21,” professor Odd Harstad at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences told AFP.

You know, I just checked to make sure today isn’t April 1st. Somehow the name Odd Harstad smells of a joke.

With an estimated 140,000 moose roaming Norway’s forests, that is a total of of 294,000,000 kilograms of CO2 per year.

Oh teh noes!!!111 That much! I wonder how that compares to, say the amount of CO2 emissions from gas fuels in Germany in the year 2004. 294,000,000 versus 49,174,000,000. Somehow I think that gas fuels are a bigger problem – and we’re only talking about a tiny bit of the full amount of CO2 emissions in Germany (220596 thousand metric tons).

But Harstad said that was no reason to begin killing off the entire moose population.

How generous of him! Especially since they are such a threat to the environment!

“Moose have very important functions in nature. They are ruminants that eat the grass. If we don’t have ruminants, we have too much grass and that changes the landscape and has consequences for the flora and fauna,” he said.

What is this guy professor of? Professor of Stating the Bleeding Obvious?

Harstad said the figure of 100 kilograms of methane gas was a rough estimate based on earlier calculations for beef cows in Norway.

It’s good to know that people are investing their time and money into important research subjects that will help save the planet.

As is the case with cows and other ruminants, methane is produced from the microbes in the moose’s stomach which help break down the roughage they eat.

It also comes out of the ears of dumb scientists and bad reporters.

Because methane gas is stronger than carbon dioxide, it is considered even more harmful to the environment. Both methane and carbon dioxide are so-called greenhouses gases, one of the main causes of global warming.

And I guess we’re supposed to make an connection, aren’t we? Greenhouses gases are a main cause of global warming, moose and cows emit methane, so the cause of global warming is… MOOSE!

Once Upon A Time

Published on August 11, 2007 in Music. 0 Comments

Inside Myself / Once Upon A TimeHelen Trevillion is not only a wonderful person (and friend), she’s also an absolutely stunning musician. I’ve been complaining for ages that she should release a commercial album – and now she finally has! To add to the fun, it’s a double CD. Oh, and it’s called Inside Myself / Once Upon A Time. That’s all you need to know.

Now all you have to do is to follow this link and buy it. Trust me. It’s absolutely worth it!

Of course you might say that the only reason I’m writing this is to convince Helen to write some music for The Strange and Somewhat Sinister Tale of the House at Desert Bridge, but actually she’s already said she would be interested, and it’s my own incompetence (and lack of time) that is to be blamed for the fact that she hasn’t even seen the demo so far. Me silly.

Seriously, though – my enthusiasm for Helen’s music is not even remotely faked. She’s the real thing: an independent artist with a unique voice (literally and metaphorically). Even if I didn’t love her music itself – and I do – that is something to be celebrated in today’s world of unspeakably boring commercialized crap.

The Last Winter

Published on August 5, 2007 in Film. 0 Comments

We saw The Last Winter because it has Ron Perlman in it, and we love Ron Perlman. We were, of course, fully aware of the fact that he has made more than a few bad movies, but the synopsis for this one sounded interesting.

In the Arctic tundra of Northern Alaska, an advance team working for a petroleum exploration company is engaged in a massive project to exploit the oil resources of the pristine land.

After one crewmember is found dead, a disorientation slowly claims the sanity of the other members of the team as each of them succumbs to an unknown fear.

That does sound good, doesn’t it? It’s like The Thing , only with the potential to talk about the political and moral issues involving oil. And, as the official site tells us, that it very high on the film’s list of priorities:

This chilling supernatural drama is the latest offering from Larry Fessenden, an acclaimed director of intimate horror spectacles, whose trilogy of Horror, No Telling, Habit, and Wendigo, tackle themes of contemporary life- environmentalism, addiction, class conflict, aggression, fear and madness.

The Last Winter will be his boldest, most explicit, most challenging film to date, dealing with man’s insatiable quest for oil in the face of environmental revolt.

And that’s where the real trouble begins. See the phrases I put in bold? That’s a summary of everything that’s wrong with the film.

The plot is as follows:

A bunch of people are in Alaska, about to drill for oil in an area that was previously off-limits for such things. The team consists of the Oil People and the Green Dudes. The Green Dudes have been sent to make sure the whole project doesn’t screw up the environment, but the Oil People aren’t listening to them. But even if they did listen, it wouldn’t do them much good, because environmental conditions are deteriorating and Mother Nature is pissed off. In the end they’re all killed by the Ghost Moose of Doom.

There are a number of problems with all this, but first the good points. The movie looks awesome. The landscapes are fantastic, well-shot, and at times genuinely frightening. The actors are all really good, especially Ron Perlman and James LeGros as Main Oil Man and Lead Green Dude respectively. The music is very beautiful, and quite fitting. And the film does achieve some very frightening moments. Before one fully understands what’s going on, that is.

It would all work quite well, if – apart from some minor weaknesses, like the characters being too distant from the audience – the film wasn’t so obviously Green. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m very much in favour of protecting the environment. That position derives both from moral issues and from scientific fact. But the position that this film relentlessly hammers in is not even remotely scientific – it’s all about Mother Nature striking back at us (as if Nature was some kind of active being) and about desecrating the land with our evil civilization. At some point the characters have to choose between going to some other Oil People or to an Inuit village (Noble Savage cliché anyone?) but of course they choose the evil Oil People and then die. We get the impression that had they gone for the Mystic Natives, they might have made it. And the movie culminates in the fact that the creatures responsible for killing the characters are… Ghost Moose! I kid you not. At that point, it becomes entirely impossible to take the film seriously anymore.

The film’s values represent a kind of nihilistic humans-are-bad kind of attitude that I find disgusting, and its theme is being treated in such an obvious in-your-face preachy kind of way that it’s just annoying. And the thing is, I agree that climate change is a problem! I agree (as do all respectable scientists) that climate change is the result of human activities! But all this Mother-Nature-is-angry bullshit just pisses me off.

It would have been perfectly simple to make a horror movie about global warming. The ice is warming up. Evil stuff if coming out. Evil stuff eats our protagonists. Fine, there you go – that would’ve been great. That would’ve been scary. The scariest thing about this film is the people who think that Green is a political attitude. (It’s not. The Green Party? Give me a break. You can’t reduce your philosophy to that one issue. Witness how brilliantly that worked out in Germany. Greens in favour of radioactive weapons! Yay!)

All in all: not bad to watch once. Very well-made. Fails on the philosophy side of things, which isn’t a bad side to fail on. Extra points for trying.

Black Sheep

Published on August 3, 2007 in Film. 0 Comments

Commentarium will be back up soon – and much better than before – but for now I’ll just write down a few thoughts about movies I’ve recently seen.

Black SheepBlack Sheep is supposed to be a splatter-comedy in the vein of Bad Taste or Braindead, or, to some degree, the much better (and funnier) Shaun of the Dead . As the title suggests, the movie is all about evil flesh-eating sheepazoids.

Now that’s a wonderful premise if ever I heard one. Seriously. Sheep-related humour goes back hundreds, even thousands of years. Sheep are funny. They’re white, fluffy, stupid, and people do all sorts of nasty things with them. And violence involving sheep, as the Worms games have so wonderfully shown us, is inherently hilarious.

Hilarious is one word which does not describe this film. Sure, there are laughs – about one every five minutes or so. But what comes in between these laughs is rather boring.

There are two reasons for this film’s lack of success, both leading back to one source. The characters aren’t interesting (or even fleshed out) and there is very little creativity in what the sheep actually do (and what is done to the sheep). In other words, the fault lies with the writing. Where are the sheep-related jokes? I counted two (“Baaa-stards” and the sheep-shagging thing). And where in Dog’s name is the sheepy violence? I realize that the film had a low budget, but Peter Jackson’s old films had less money and managed to do more. Since realism doesn’t seem to be an issue, why so little human-sheep interaction? All we get is boring characters that we don’t give a fuck about running from scene to scene, pursued by sheep. There’s some gore, but it’s uninventive and not funny.

Furthermore, it’s not about anything. The film would be so much better if it had an additional level of satire, like Shaun does. If only the religious taxi driver, who shows up at random near the end of the movie, had been a main characters. The religious metaphor of the flock versus killer sheep. Now that’s got potential. Or at least give us sheep as conformity. Sheep as cuteness. Sheep as something. Anything.

Basically the entire film is based on one joke: killer sheep. But the fact of killer sheep isn’t funny. At least not after the first ten minutes of seeing them. What you do with a premise is what makes a film funny or not. And this film does next to nothing.

Even a well-directed film will fail if the script sucks.

All in all: watch Hot Fuzz, or Shaun of the Dead. Or Braindead.

Random trivia: While watching the film, I saw a character reading Michael King’s The Penguin History of New Zealand. I had read Michael King’s Being Pakeha (a fairly interesting book on white New Zealand identity, even though I despise the concept of national identities of any kind) and wondered whether the director, Jonathan King, was related to him. I checked it out on the Wikipedia, and he’s his son. Cool.