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I’m pretty sure that I’m almost done with my first place through.  I’m a soldier, no special biotics for me, but I haven’t gotten bored and I’m looking forward to going through again once more before passing the game along.

As a sequel, they avoided the usual problems.  The story is still good and a natural follow up from the first one.  They didn’t dumb down the main character to make him weak so that he could build up again.  Sure, you have the same options as far as learning new skills just like a brand new character, but I never felt like Shepherd was some newbie.   As far as controls and the world, they kept the best things, removed some of the annoyances, but stayed true to what the game was.  A lot of games either take no chances and make the same game twice, or go too far making something new and lose the essence of the game.  Mass Effect 2 remains a space opera story with a first-person shooter / RPG hybrid.  It’s pretty, polished, and a lot of fun.  Mass Effect 2 is a worthy member of an RPG lineage that started back with Baldur’s Gate and company some fifteen years ago (yeah, it’s been that long).

That said, I am starting to take umberage at these Day 1 DLC releases.  I understand the reasoning, but making me download content on the first day is just annoying.  Mass Effect has at least done it fairly well by making most of it free with the initial purchase of the game, but require purchase for anyone borrowing the game.  That’s a little less egregious  than what Dragon Age pulled with $10 expansions out practically before the game was.

I miss Rome.  (The HBO series).  It was supposed to go for a few more seasons.  Watching the second season, you could see they were opening up the story for the war with Marc Antony and the Jewish Rebellions.  The series had a lot of potential in it before it finally got canned.  I read somewhere that HBO was surprised by the numbers they received on the second season, but by the time they had the final count, the scenery and props had already been destroyed.  The delay and the cost was too much to continue on.

Since the series ended I’ve read Gibbons’ Decline and Fall of Rome and few sundry things.  I still miss seeing the history enacted using more modern media.  The stories are just as timeless as anything Shakespeare had going for him and the history has a strange way of seeming apropos.

I Claudius came across my path sometime in the last few weeks.  I still haven’t read the books, but the miniseries (staring a young Derek Jacobi)  was found easily enough.

Knowing enough of the history, I should hardly be surprised, by the sheer scope of the miniseries is impressive.  It follows the titular Claudius, a stammering gimp, from a few years prior to his birth to his death some seventy years (and four emperors) later.  It encompasses everything from Sejanus’ revolt to the jewish rebellions to Caligula’s delusion.  The family plots and betrayals almost become tiresome, they’re so numerous, but despite the moving history and revolving door cast, there is a humanity to the series that was impressive, even more so than Rome.

I cannot attest to the overall accuracy.  The scenery in particular seems wooden and cliche.  The political nuances are sometimes lost and there is no action whatsoever, but Claudius place in a horrific world is even more pronounced  than Octavian’s awkwardness in Rome.  The cruelty and debauchery is much more visceral.  To be truthful, it’s probably a far less accurate depiction than Rome, but I found myself oddly moved by the stammering Claudius trying to survive amongst a panoply of death, madness, and abject bestiality.  I, Claudius makes Shakespeare out of Rome and does a better job than he did.

It’s a rare sort of story and I found myself startled quite frequently.  It’s actually quite profane.  There’s a small bit of nudity and lots of implied violence, but very little is actually seen.  In place of more visual conclusions, the characters react to events that are almost always mentioned in passing.  It only works because the motivations are explored so throughly whether it be madness, greed, or ambitious and because the reactions of those involved are given just as much play.  The intensity of the characters and the lengths they go to furfill their aims is incredibly offputting.  I don’t need to see Caligula disembowel his incestuously impregnated sister.  The event is shocking without it, more so infact, because he manages to rule for quite a while afterwards.  The seemingly endless injustice of the world is perhaps what makes it so different from a modern story.

Further, there is no physical action.  At times it makes the plot plodding, but it also forces the characters to…well…act for one, but also the plot has to be constructed to make everything fit together.  Too many modern stories tell a loose story, but hide the cracks in action sequences.  It’s not that the action sequences are especially unpleasant; I can actually enjoy them sometimes, but they are used to hide grievous plot errors.  In a verbal drama, but those tricks aren’t available.  The character’s have to have motivations and their methods of acting have to have purpose.  The continuity of purpose shows more craft than I’m willing to give more movies I’ve seen credit for.  I might still be reeling from Avatar, as big a block of swiss-cheese as I’ve ever seen, but it seems to be a reoccurring complaint of mine.

Mostly and lastly, the movie took itself seriously.  I suppose this is always my complaint.  There seems to be a certain brand of flippancy and I’m not sure when it started.  Plenty of movies are gritty, but that doesn’t make them serious per se and I’m not using serious in quite the normal manner.  A movie like The Dark Knight is serious, in a sense.  It is a ‘gritty’ remake in that it’s meant to be realistic and plausible, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s about a man dressed like a bat.  And that’s a good movie.  Something avatar is basically just CGI porn with a story tacked on, but the stories it’s serious in the slightest.  The character’s are not made plausible in the slightest and the whole thing hangs on a few lines of motivation given at the beginning of the film.

I don’t miss visual or logical seriousness, but emotional serious seems so terrible lacking.  The movies that go for the more introspective angle always seem to flop on wasted melodramatics or postmodern humor.  There is little room for drama, which I will define as a realistic appraisal and reaction to an event, which does not necessarily have to be plausible.  Dark Knight is actually quite close in that sense, but somehow I just can’t make it fit.

Rome and I Claudius fall more in line with Band of Brothers in that character’s react and respond based on their reactions, but they are more constrained.  The victim does not therefore have the motivation to become more than they really could.  No one is so smart or rich or powerful than they can bend the realities of a world built to be intrinsically unfair.   Good does neither wins nor loses on any grand sense, but a story is told, with both the good and the bad being rewarded as it fits the story.  Moral engagement with moral neutrality.  That is my final definition of seriousness and it is a startling thing to see on film.

No more babbling from me.  I just hit 1000 words and that’s morally devastating.  No reason to right half so much.  Until next time, adieu!

I watched the 1992 version of Dracula.  Not going to lie, I’m disappointed.

I should have known better.  Vampires have gotten worse year by year since the damn book was written.  I’ve never seen Nosferatu, but it was supposedly fair.  The Bela Legosi version is the classic that ‘created’ the vampire, and since then a few dozen movies, mostly of terrible quality, have solidified the quintessential, archetypal, infinitely cliche vampire.

Anne Rice ran with the idea and made a twisted cross between Bram Stoker, Lovecraft, and cheap fantasy.  Still, she probably created the best vampire beyond Stoker himself.Since then, vampires have apparently become impotent effeminate soap opera wood.  It’s a terrible fate for a creature, a character, that feels like it should have a much more profound life.

It was my fervent hope that Francis Ford Coppola’s version of the Dracula legend would get it right.  Maybe it’s dated, maybe it just didn’t click.  One way another I finished the movie feeling that it was hit everything at a 45 degree angle.  It had so many things right and so many things unforgivably botched.

Easy criticism: Keenu Reeves should never act.  East Response: Gary Oldman should have a part in everything.

Beyond the casting and the now-hokey visuals, my criticism is really with the plot.  It started off brilliantly.  Vlad went to the crusades to defend the church and came home to a dead wife, dead and damned from suicide.  I think there was room to explore the back story more, but the initial scene is probably the best in the whole movie.  Seeing the Vlad storm out of a bloody alter captures the quintessential curse of the vampires.

From there the plot can’t decide what it wants to follow.  It bounces from a burlesque horror in Transylvania, a comedy of manners in England, an adventure film, and a goofy action flick without really concentrating on any one of them.  Why did Dracula go to England?  The reason was to find Mina, his wife reborn.  That is clarified later, but given that’s the main inspiration for all the plot that  follows, it seems that angle needed to be emphasized instead of an obscure (and itself poorly narrated) real estate deal in England, that obviously preceded the film, as concerned by Renfield’s subplot.  Why did he need land in England if he didn’t know about Mina yet?  Who knows?

Renfeld was excellent, both visually and in direction.  They might have said why exactly he became the vampire’s servant, or explained why his struggle only seemed to start in the last thirty minutes, but he emphasized better than any other character (Helsing included) the power of the vampire.

The scenes with Lucy are also powerful.  They suffer from age and a certain lack of subtlety, but the Victorian eroticism is played with nicely.  England was a good mixture of modern and stately, seedy and mysterious.  It is a suitable haunt for the vampire once he arrives, but then he ruins it by jumping through nonsense montages.

What I’m really getting at is that the quintessence of Dracula was never really touched upon.  The first half of the film focused on a rare sense of eroticism that was never explained or explored.  Did Lucy fall for Dracula due to her promiscuity?  Presumably, but if that’s true than you can’t blame it on a dream later.  If her actions are responsible for her date than she must make her choices unhindered and with full cognizance.  The book managed this, but the film botched it.

The second half of the film spends too much time letting Anthony Hopkins chew the screen as Van Helsing.  Van Helsing is an awkward character either way.  He is an expert on Dracula and too many shades a double of Sherlock Holmes.  If Dracula is truly this absolute horror than having Van Helsing as a fearless knight ruins the whole creation.  Van Helsing, at best, can be a knowledgeable book expert who is faced with something far beyond his capability.  That scenario preserves the vampire’s mortal horror and gives the quest an emotional tension that cannot be grasped otherwise.

In reality, the real exploration needs to be of the vampire himself.  Many films have concentrated on vampires who must have flesh, but are equally repulsed by what they have become.  That is one angle, but I prefer the vampire who either wishes to freely grant his gift to those who would have it, a seductive vampire who has no need of force or especial guile.  Alternatively, the damned vampire is adequate, though harder, I would think, to capture.  The damned vampire is one who has come to his fate through crimes that could not be punished through death alone.  This is Satan as a vampire, a creature who suffers for their own pride.  This is the vampire that may be destroyed by love, ala Nosferatu.  The seductive vampire’s destruction is really only satisfactory through starvation.  If his victims can be convinced his gift is not worth having than the vampire has been rendered dust.

That is my mind on the matter.  The imagery was so great and Dracula, the film, tried to hit so many elements, but I found it lacking through and through.  With such a powerful character and such a vibrant story, I genuinely hope this recent fad of androgynous boy-thing vampires goes away.  It is a sad fate for the children of the night. What sweet music they might make…

Christmas Eve: Moon

Day After Christmas: District 9.

District 9 is another science fiction movie that I let fall off the radar. On at least three separate occasions I almost might have seen it. After striking out, I let it fall by the wayside.

It’s a gruesome bit of work, but probably the most intelligent ‘alien’ film to come…ever? It’s certainly a far cry from Independence Day, Men in Black (the first was actually somewhat clever), or the wretched Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds.

District 9 is a ‘documentary film’. It follows Wikus van de Merwe, a low-level beurocrat responsible for moving a prison camp of aliens, called prawns, from one district to another. Twenty years prior the alien invaders landed above Johannesburg, South Africa. They were removed from their floating spacecraft and placed in camps, which have become crime-filled and unruly.

District 9 is as much a criticism of privatization and apartheid as it is an ‘alien’ film. It is an immensely difficult film to watch, but for all the right reasons. Wikus van de Merwe has his life thrown to pieces over the course of a short, but frenziedly two hours. It is bloody and gruesome, but its one of the few films where I think that gore is actually necessary. It makes Wikus’ trials all the more powerful and the conclusion that much more relevant.

Again, I want to avoid giving away too much, but it’s not an invasion film, it’s not gun-porn, it’s not a touchy-feely allegory, or an action film. It is a film with aliens, but it is not a film about aliens. The closest approximation would be a film about humans might treat aliens, or really how we treat anyone, ourselves included.

For being a fairly low budget affair, the imagery is phenomenal. The spaceship…looks like a spaceship. The aliens are slightly, ever so slightly, cartoonish, but only a little bit. The characters beyond Wikus don’t have much screen time and they’re all basically heartless bastards, but anything more complex in the way of villainy would have required a novel, not a film.

It’s a film supposedly awaiting a sequel, but it I’m not sure it’s necessary. It’s poignant and startling, similar to Moon in that regard, and another title on my list of Science Fiction movies that aren’t trash.

When did science fiction movies get to be good? Between a Star Trek movie that might as well have been an action thriller, a wave of shoddy, childish Star Wars films, and the assorted dystopian joke-film (read Matrix 2 and 3), I’ve always felt that Science Fiction and Film were too dangerous to mix. Older movies like Logan’s Run were almost good, but either dated themselves very quickly or were just silly to begin with.

Moon, directed by Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s son), is excellent. It’s not kind of good. It’s really good. Good length (hour and a half), good acting, gorgeous, engaging, thought-provoking. Slowly paced, but never boring. Very subtle at times, never too heavy-handed. It’s probably the best film I’ve seen this year.

Sam Rockwell (I know him as Zaphod from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) plays Sam Bell, a solitary technician on a Helium 3 mining station on the Moon. His three year mission is to maintain the station and then go home to his wife and kid. He’s joined by a robot (voiced by Kevin Spacey I think) who helps out with chores around the station.

The film’s beauty comes from the moon and the station itself. Sleek, futuristic decorations correspond nicely against the sheer, lifelessness of the Lunar surface. The rocks between tossed up by the helium miners is just perfect.

I won’t give the story away but Sam Bell gets twice the screen time of most lead characters. *Wink *Wink. The ending is both happy, sad, and intelligent, perhaps the rarest thing of all, science fiction movie, or otherwise. Sadly, Moon was a limited release, but it’s on DVD now. Pick it up.

I finally got around to watching The Queen. It follows the Royal Family and newly elected Prime Minister Tony Blair as they deal with the after math of Princess Diana’s death.

The Queen’s reluctance to engage the media was apparently a rather large story in England. Over here, I don’t recall it being much of a story. It’s an interesting drama though.

The royalty, with a thousand years of precedent and tradition, isn’t often forced to deal with a new phenomenon. The benefit of having royalty is that it puts some institution beyond politics. A president may ‘lie!’ and a Prime Minister may have to defend himself during PMQs, but the Queen is above it all. It’s idealistic and abstract, but I can see why England keeps it.

How then, should royalty respond when one of their former members dies tragically. If Lady Diana had been hated than it would have slipped by quietly, but she was quiet beloved. Her death then becomes an issue of state. The royalty is bound to honor it in some manner simply because the nation grieves as well and they must join.

The acting if phenomenal and they all pretty much look like their counterparts. The scenery is also excellent. Balmoral Castle, the royal vacation estate, is suitably gorgeous for the Royal Family.

All in all, a most fascinating film telling a story that just never drifted my way previously.  Worth picking up or renting!

I finally got around to reading Fahrenheit 451.  Year after year it’s made my list of books to read and year after year I never quite manage it.  There’s a certain small irony in never-reading a book that’s fundamentally about a culture that no longer reads, but there’s only so much time and far too many books.

It’s a scary book.  It’s taken its rightful place as one of the cultural dystopias in the public consciousness along with Brave New World and 1984.  Fahrenheit 451 is a well-known and famous classic so I hardly have any place discussing whether it is a ‘good’ book or a ‘bad’ book, but I do have a place in discussing whether it is proving true.

As mentioned repeatedly before, I work for a Library System.  I do not work at or for any one library, but I manage, in part, the technology behind seventy different libraries.  As part of my job I respond to the technical needs and questions of the member libraries and I periodically attend library conferences where the future of libraries is discussed.

In Fahrenheit 451 book burning is not really the great evil.  It is a natural response to a cultural anomie towards knowledge.  Having a book isn’t a grand crime against the state as much as it is a grand crime against the society.  Pursuit of knowledge is frivolous and dangerous for everyone and so book-burning is a honorable and necessary response.

It is easy to dismiss any dystopian novel if one only attends to the specific evils.  Our culture is hardly going down the road of Alpha and Beta people or Room 101s.  The motivations and causes of the dystopian settings must be analyzed outside of the  fictional results.  Fahrenheit 451 has a number of foundation motivations, media distraction and anti-intellectualism among them, both of which are present concerns in contemporary society.  But is there any basis for this?  As much as we might fear the coming ‘idiocracy’  that doesn’t make it a looming threat.

From the standpoint of libraries, things are not so terribly bad at all.  Library circulation is almost universally up.  The rate, by percentage, has fallen off to an extent, but libraries are hardly flailing.  They are getting more patrons than ever before, more books are checked out than in any time in history, and the number of library resources is growing as fast as our culture itself.

Books, well, physical books are living on borrowed time.  E-books will someday become more convenient, cheaper, and more accessible than any physical book, but is that such a bad thing?  Books themselves were an improvement on fragile papyrus, expensive velium, and immovable stone.  E-books and other digital distribution methods will not destroy books, they will improve books.  Even in this future world, the libraries that Ray Bradbury loved so much, have a place.  Already our library system is setting up methods of e-book distribution.  Our libraries provide public wireless, printing capability, and power for a casual read.  Our current catalog allows for searches of our system to be made anywhere in the world and holds can be placed for later pickup.  Combine the search with a digital distribution method and libraries will transcend any fire that Guy Montag might light.

True enough, libraries are on a point of change and they do not always respond so optimistically, but neither books nor libraries no intellectualism seem to be slowing in anyway.  If anything, the great battles fought over such a nebulous concept are signs of its triumphant success.  The digital age has become both a near infinite source of and a tremendous inspiration to knowledge and any backlash, no matter how loud or vigorous, is little more than dying screams.

I enjoyed Farhenheit 451 immensely.  It is a tremendous work and expertly written, but reading it I could not help but feel that it’s power is lost on me.  Perhaps in the Cold War, when it was written, the sense of doom was greater, but sitting here at a computer, connected to more ‘books’ than anyone ever has been in history, the fear is lost.  Farhenheit 451 was successful.  What it set out to do has already been done.  Every book has been fireproofed and rendered immune.  The ashes that are left mean not a thing.

I don’t think it’s released in the US yet, so I’m not going to review it.  It’s a fun film, but the cut I saw was very long (nearing 3 hours).  I believe the American Name is ‘Pirate Radio’.  Enjoy!

Bad name, but a good movie.  If the name doesn’t ring any bells it’s because it hasn’t been in theatres for 50 something years.  I’m not quite sure how I even came on to it, but it is a good find.

The Big Combo is an old film noir from the mid 50s.  It’s one of those black and white detective films that were all loosely based on the hard-boiled fiction of the 30s and 40s ala Dashiell Hammett.  It’s similar to The Maltese Falcon, but not quite as famous and lacking a certain Mr. Bogart.

It’s a good film though.  The story has some holes in it and the romance is pretty ridiculous, but the imagery is great.  Dark hallways, lots of shadows.  The detective in this case is Police Lt. Leonard Diamond who is trying to break the back of the local Mob syndicate, called The Combination, led by Mr. Brown.  Mr. Brown chews the scenery for an hour and a half, foiling our good detective’s attempts at breaking the mob.  Mr. Brown’s girlfriend, Susan Lowell, however provides a crack in his organization… A side plot has Mr. Brown’s assistant, Joe McClure, a former leader, trying to reclaim control of the Combination.  That, of course, doesn’t end well.

A lot of older films come off poorly.  Either the dialog is stale, the plot too reliant on unrealistic humanity, or the look is just terrible.  Big Combo manages to sidestep that.  The imagery is gorgeous.  Everything is too dark to look fake.  The plot is actually quite brutal.  There’s no helpful neighbor showing up with a solution at the last minute.  As for the dialog,  it’s hard-boiled fiction.  A lot of one-liners, a lot of glares, not much narration.  The whole thing times out around 80 something minutes so it wraps up nice and quickly.

Considering that the theatres are showing off a handful of sequels and bland teen films this week (every week), I was happy to find something a bit more engrossing for my evening entertainment.

The cast of HBO’s Game of Thrones!  Perfect casting by the looks of it, but where are the other Baratheon brothers? And Melisandre?  And Petyr Baelish?

Very exciting!