Freckles & Doubt

Mostly my movie-watching life has been on hold lately, because Inquisition. Turns out there is no contest between gaming and watching DVDs: gaming wins. However, apparently the grip of the game loosens a bit when I'm on my, what, seventh or eighth play-through? So I have both gone to the movies, and watched some of the Pile of Unwatched Reproach, which is probably twenty DVDs high, in between navigating a Qunari mage through a by now incredibly familiar Thedas. Leading to a scorecard which looks something like this:

	Big Hero 6. Disney animated thing with cute bulbous robot. It's a cute bulbous superhero film which I thoroughly enjoyed, because it's both cute and science-positive. Also, its deliberate rip-offs of Iron Man, among other films, are hilarious. Bonus cool swarms of evil microbots, cool nerd stereotypes and cool affirmations of non-violence. A-, because fluffy, but relegated to "probable comfort re-watch" pile.
	The Hobbit: Battle of Five Armies. Um. Martin Freeman is still a tiny hobbitoid acting god. Bard wants to be Aragorn when he grows up, and probably could be. Thorin's downward spiral wasn't as heart-rending as I expected it to be, possibly I'm becoming old and cynical. Peter Jackson still suffers from irredeemably self-indulgent narrative bloat and completely inexplicable plot choices, and IMNSHO he stuffed up the actual battle something 'orrible. Wasted Fili and Kili's sacrifice, weird relocation of Thorin's confrontation to unnecessary and rather lame towers rather than the battlefield, and it made absolutely no tactical sense whatsoever. Did he run out of budget for background fighting? Also, no Bilbo shouting "The eagles are coming!", rotten swizz. B-, visually cool but overall strangely uncompelling, Martin Freeman notwithstanding.
	Basil the Great Mouse Detective. This was, weirdly, teaching research, on account of how I'm teaching Sherlock again this year and am becoming unduly fascinated by the endurance of the Holmes/Watson mythic archetype across different iterations. This one has a classic Watson and a rather annoying Sherlock who has surprisingly large numbers of points in common with the current BBC one. Amazing how the tall&thin vs short&solid visual image is retained in so many versions. Entirely predicable Disney film in the slightly less accomplished pre-Aladdin mode. C, but will will show clips in class because the parallels are interesting.
	The Avengers: Age of Ultron. Saw this on Sunday morning (about 10 people in the 9am showing, score!) in sheer self-defence because my Tumblr feed is trying to spoil me. I am entirely unable to say whether it's a good movie or not because my ships and personal headcanons have been so thoroughly Jossed that I'm all quivering with outrage, injury and sulk. I've read a lot of Avengers fanfic, and it turns out I'm really invested in the Avengers as they currently stand, and I want to keep on thinking of them like that, living together forever in Avengers Tower and fighting crime, not with the new team make-up going in the new direction. It was certainly a fun film, visually exciting, good character interaction, amazing fight choreography, but bleah. I decline to assign it a score on the grounds that I'm not reasonable about it. I spent most of Sunday unconscionably depressed and killing things in Inquisition with more than the usual levels of vindictive satisfaction. Phooey.

On the upside, they also gave us the new Star Wars trailer in big-screen 3-D, and it made me weepy. Apparently I'm imprinted on that universe, but also the new images are correctly gritty and feel like Star Wars in a way the prequels-we-do-not-mention did not. A new hope!

Movie club! By age-old (i.e. approximately year-long) tradition this entails two movies linked by a theme. I've owned and been wanting to watch the original Godzilla for a while, but kept on coming up blank on something to pair it with. (Re-make? Aargh. Other daikaijū films? eek! Cloverfield would have been ideal, but everyone else had seen it. I wanted Akira for a "Destroy Tokyo!" theme, but Stv had seen it already.) Finally, as despair set in, I remembered that I also had a copy of Rango which I hadn't got around to watching. Perfect! the theme: LIZARDS!

And, of course, conceptual whiplash of the more neck-bracey variety. Godzilla is a black-and-white Japanese monster film hailing from 1954; Rango just won the Best Animated Film Oscar. And I don't think a chameleon is technically a lizard, anyway¹. However! they were both thoroughly enjoyable for very different reasons, and mature reflection suggests that the common theme could have been Fire And Water, or The Corruption Of Water, or even Water And Control.



The 2010 Hugo ballot contained a novella by James Morrow called "Shambling Towards Hiroshima", which featured Hollywood history, rubber monster suits and plots against the Japanese, and if I loved the story at the time (which I did), I love it even more having actually seen the film. Godzilla is one of those wonderful cinematic archives which makes you realise from moment to moment exactly how far film-making has come in half a century, at the same time as it ineradically demonstrates the power and precision with which the older tropes, conventions and special effects draw you into the film. (And how frequently black-and-white frames are starkly poetic). It was slow, clunky, alienating as much in terms of Japanese body language as the different pacing and storytelling, but it's a thoroughly worthwhile watch if only because it's one of the few examples I've met of unabashed allegory that isn't actually annoying. You have to realise quite how terrifying atomic bombs and their implications actually are when they're enacted on three levels simultaneously, two of them metaphorical. Also, it's enormously refreshing to watch scientists being respected and instantly credited instead of being silenced in the name of politics. And the special effects are surprisingly effective. The slow, inexorable, stumbling advance of the monster is somehow more terrifying than anything fast-moving, and Tokyo burns.

I could babble enthusiastically about Rango's extended pastiche of Westerns which is also a devoted love-letter, its pitch-perfect musical score (the music is genius), its brilliant voice cast, its frequently extremely beautiful visuals, its rapid-fire humour and continual film reference (the recreation of bits of the X-wing assault on the Death Star is extremely happy-making), its plethora of beautifully eccentric desert-creature characters, its ecological message, and the extent to which its animators were clearly having a blast. But I don't need to. I can sum up the film, and the indecent amount of pleasure it gave me, in two words. Mariachi owls. The chorus and commentary of the mariachi owl group caused me to lie on the sofa and giggle hysterically until jo&stv became quite concerned. No, really. Mariachi owls. Go and see it. Also, it's incredibly self-concious about narrative construction. Basically I was doomed.

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¹ Edited to add: no, wait, Wikipedia says they totally are lizards. And have "parrot-like zygodactylous feet", which is a curiously wonderful phrase. I love chameleon feet. Like little alien paws.

You probably all know about the Kickstarter project to make an animated film of Neil Gaiman's short story "The Price". At time of writing, they are $4000 away from their total, with just under 24 hours left to go. If they don't make the total, no-one pays anything.

This is a wonderful confluence of three of my favourite things, namely Neil Gaiman, cats and animation; it's also a lovely crowd-source opportunity, and the animation is beautiful and creepy in all the right ways. I've pledged $50, which nets me a copy of the DVD. This is nothing in the greater scheme of things. Nor, given the itsy-bitsy-teensy-weensy nature of this blog, is this post going to achieve much in the way of vast crowds rushing to add their mite to the whole. But it might inspire a few of you to toss a few dollars their way, and every little bit added to what you've got, makes just a little bit more. Think about it. (You need to join Kickstarter, but you pay via Amazon).

I really hope this one comes off. It could be amazing. And it's one strike in the defense of the democratic creation of beautiful films, and one in the eye for the corporate-driven dreck habitually perpetrated by Hollywood.

I do like slightly off-the-wall and incongruous subject lines, and it's a rare thing indeed when a movie provides me with such in its title, entirely without my intervention. I missed Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs on circuit when it was open, which is annoying as I think it might have been even more fun in 3-D, but I have to say, vegging out in front of it last night with (a) my currently favourite rice-tomato soup, (b) a horrible dose of glandular exhaustion and gosh-someone-punched-me-repeatedly-under-the-jaw-again, and (c) my mother, was pretty darned fun.

I don't know much about Sony Animation; I never got around to seeing Surf's Up, although the trailers looked amusing, and I didn't really have high expectations of this - in my mind I think their films are linked with abysmal non-Pixar/Dreamworks efforts like Hoodwinked and Happily N'Ever After (ritual ptooey!). The animation seems a bit plastic at first glance, and it has very much the frenetic, clever-clever self-consciousness of much worse films. But it also offers surprising levels of warmth and wit, particularly in the tiny details, as well as a rather good and slightly unexpected voice cast (Mr. T? what's with that? Bruce Campbell? and NPH playing the monkey?), and an ultimately subversive and rather pleasingly evil-minded anti-consumerist message, in the most literal of terms.

I'm entertained by how high-profile the Mad Scientist trope has become in contemporary popular films - Dr. Horrible, Igor, and now this. I'm lecturing on Frankenstein at the moment, and the parallels are lovely to watch. In the modern iteration, of course, Mad Scientist Geek Accidentally Creates Monster, Saves World, Gets Girl, which lacks the tragic sweep of Scientist Creates Monster, Goes Mad, but beats the hell out of Muscular Jock Gets Girl, Saves World, which is now so last century. Geeks are clearly in, as are nerdy girls capable of polysyllabic techno-babble. I knew it! - polysyllables make the world go round, and are incidentally also hot.

Most of all, however, this film is clearly the Seekrit Attack Plan of an evil ascetic vegan cabal. It will make you take up dieting. It will cause you to wish never to allow food to pass your lips ever again. The animated images of giant storms of hamburgers, showers of syrup, spaghetti tornadoes and the like are initially amusing, and become slowly and inescapably horrible even while occasional moments (the jello palace, the ice-cream snow fields) are magical and beautiful. There's a fleshy, orally-fixated visual scare tactic at the heart of this film, and as a nasty poke at over-indulgence, entitlement, junk food, excess and waste, it's exceptionally pleasing. It's a flawed but actually extremely amusing film, and I had fun watching it. Also, the bit with the animated roast chickens is both hilarious and self-consciously disgusting, and caused me and my mother to crack up simultaneously. We apparently share a low, reprehensible passion for slapstick. Genetics will always get you in the end.

Oh, dear. My Imaginet geeks have failed me. Even arm-wrestling their tame Telkom guy, the one who apparently knows what he's doing, was insufficient. All he could do was to instruct me to return to start, do not collect re-wiring, please phone the original order helpline (and he gave me the wrong number) with the original description of the problem, the one that didn't work first time round, and start the weary round again.

So I did this yesterday. With my Seekrit Weapon. I have now tried logic, calm rationality, searching questions, patiently pointing out the imbecility of the system, irritation, rage, abuse, accusations and slamming the phone down. This time, dealing a crippling blow to a hundred years of feminism while suffragettes sobbed, I waited until the first stupid objection ("this is a fault, not an order, this is the order line, phone the fault line"¹), and burst into tears. The slightly hysterical sobbing, interspersed with hiccuping attempts to explain exactly how many hours I've spent on these bloody helplines trying to log a call, eventually backed the poor operative into a corner, where he eventually overrode stuff, circumvented the bit where I'm supposed to be the account holder, and finally gave me a reference number and a date when the technician will come round to do a complete rewire, all while rather helplessly enumerating how many rules he was breaking to do so. I feel dirty. But triumphant. To such depths does the monstrosity of Telkom bring us. It remains to be seen whether the technician actually arrives next Thursday, but I'll prep a supply of tissues and a fainting couch just in case.

Nonetheless, despite the need to once more mud-wrestle the Telkom pig, I've actually had a lovely couple of days. I was abducted for drinks and supper on the Camps Bay beachfront by Michelle and Stef last night, which was pleasingly drunken and attended by a magnificent pink and gold sunset and rather wayward conversation. (They may or may not have got me onto the subject of fan fiction, which is always dangerous, because I start using words like "demographic" and "paradigm" and "narrative wish-fulfilment", and have to be sternly suppressed with more booze). The whole seems to have been sufficient to give me, once I staggered home and fell into bed, an extremely vivid and detailed series of dreams which were, I suspect, actually an episode of Supernatural or something. Small town in the American woods is invaded by the weird shape-shifting hicks from a hidden farm somewhere, who wake up and tramp into town, where they proceed to grow giant arms and knock down whole buildings, or slime up buildings as amorphous sheets so they can stalk small girl children and eat them. The Big Daddy of the family was a sort of giant muscular lizardy thing. I think by the time I woke up the entire town was either dead or assimilated. No Sam or Dean to intervene. Clearly where the scriptwriter went wrong, but I have to say, my subconscious has a superb cinematographer.

Fortunately today was a public holiday, so once I'd cleared the dream-fogs I trundled off to see How to Train Your Dragon in 3D this morning. What a sweet little film - really an object lesson in how to take a hopeless cliché (boy makes friends with Wild Creature, is redeemed, saves day) and infuse it with life and charm. The kid's personality and dialogue are lovely; the 3D is magical without being intrusive, the dragon-flight bits, particularly the end battle, are dizzying and beautiful and bloody marvellous, but overall the strength is in the dragons themselves. Toothless, the main dragon, is a completely endearing mix of puppy, kitten and wild creature, and the incredible variety of other dragons is wildly inventive. (And frequently hilarious: I cracked up completely when I realised how neatly they'd pegged the dragon types to the howling stereotypes of the kid gang - small fat kid to small fat dragon, skinny twins to the two-headed serpentine one, spiky-haired punk dragon with attitude for the girl sidekick. Also, the fat kid's D&D geekery with reference to dragon abilities caused me unholy in-joke glee, to the complete bewilderment of the nice family sitting next to me). It was a lovely way to spend a morning - absolutely no surprises, but considerable pleasures. One for the DVD collection.

This week I have to fight Home Affairs to renew my passport. I console myself with the thought that they can't possibly be as incompetent as Telkom.

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¹ If you phone the fault line they say it's an order and please phone the order line. I tell you, Kafka has nothing on these guys.

Memo to self: must get back to knitting, I stumbled over all that lovely crunchy green-and-gold banana fibre in my stash drawer this morning. Only not on the edge of any cliffs.


In other news, my father is be-computered, ADSL-empowered and email- and web-functional, with only one trip home to collect a fresh keyboard, and two phone calls to the helpline (ADSL needed to be enabled by Telkom, and the smtp address on the documentation was WRONG!). The Imaginet helpline guys are pleasant, concerned and know their stuff. Unlike the bastards at Café Viva, whose latest iniquity was discovered this morning: somehow in the course of their futile investigations they managed to break off a connection in the DIN socket for the keyboard. Now it won't take a DIN plug at all, hence the trip home for my old USB-fitted keyboard. All the DIN/USB adaptors in our house went, alas, in the wrong direction. There's the techno-jinx for you.

Phooey. I've just accidentally ordered two copies of the DVD of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a movie for which I have an extreme, guilty, swashbuckling-Victoriana passion despite its almost total lack of actual merit. Free copy going to the first person who asks. (In Cape Town, preferably, so I don't have to send it all over the show).

One of the starlings in our road has learned to make car alarm beeps. When I left the house this morning he was sitting in the tree doing that obnoxious "gosh it's dawn wow yay happy!" thing that birds do (and what's with that? Somewhere in human civilisation we went badly wrong if we can no longer muster the enthusiasm birds do for a new day). His usual "twootle fweeple tweet twee" pattern mutated when I hit the alarm button to unlock the car, to go "twootle fweeple tweet BEEP!" - he had the artificial tone perfectly, I thought for a moment my remote was madly unlocking mother's car parked in the road outside. He repeated the BEEP pattern a couple of times, in a companionable sort of way, and then went back to the "tweet twee" one. I'm not sure why this sort of thing makes me happy - possibly simply because starlings are cute and cheeky, but also because I like to think that not all aspects of human civilisation are necessarily bad for our non-human co-habitants.

So, as the subject line somewhat laterally suggests, mother and I went off to see WALL-E last night. ( Vague Commentary Follows. )

Incidentally, if anyone else caught the rest of the re-enactment poodles bit on the credits for Presto!, please let me know, it's driving me crazy. Teh Internets know not of it. In addition to the initial "Civil War Re-enactment poodles" box there was another one with "Re-enactment poodles" plus two adjectives, and I cannot remember the adjectives. Magnificent? Spectacular? Phooey!

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Nicked off the Whatever, this amazing and slightly brutal piece of dreamy, whimsical animation. Music by Kwoon, about whom I know zip.

Apparently I can now also post YouTube video. Soon the entire Internet will be within my grasp!

A thousand words on Tim Burton, in just under two hours. I've been stunned, and looking at the world slightly skew, all day. It's also been a bit of an abrupt transition into the next topic, which is George Macdonald, the Victorian Scottish minister whose Christian fantasies inspired both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. However, having just seen Narnia and re-read the series, I feel somewhat braced for maddened theological allegory.

I am forced to the realisation that the amount of socialising, and attendant house-cleaning, in the last few weeks has been perfectly ridiculous. The madness of Boxing Day and New Year were followed at a neatly week-long interval by the Evil Landlord's combination birthday party and garage-warming on Friday night. This filled the house to the brim with a slightly different assortment of friends, mainly his, obviously. I realise that they are, on average, considerably larger and more male in weighting than the crowd we have in common, and consequently, given all the height and deep-chestedness, create a noise level several turns up from previous parties. The demented neighbour did her usual stint of thunderous, pointed window-banging, swearing and the odd witch-like cackle, although this time she didn't actually sprinkle our back courtyard with her hosepipe. It was a pleasant evening, but, as aforementioned, loud, and full of large people. Other than Friday it's been a blissfully quiet weekend, generally, which was becoming highly necessary. I bunked an SCA event yesterday on the grounds not only of pressing Tim Burton, but the realisation that in my current post-festive state, putting me in a room with anything more than about two other people at once is a sure recipe for someone's kneecaps being gnawed. I enjoy socialising. Up to a point.

Today's perfectly delirious discovery: an actual justification for the existence of Harry Potter. The New York Times has an article on a medical research paper which discovers that the rate of admission to an Oxford emergency room for musculo-skeletal injuries in the 7-15 year age-group drops to half of the norm on the weekends when a new Harry Potter novel is released. The paper is pleasingly tongue-in-cheek in tone, although the science appears fairly real; the authors were interested in the effects of Harry Potter on injury incidence given "the lack of horizontal velocity, height, wheels or sharp edges associated with this particular craze." They conclude that there may be "a place for a committee of safety-conscious, talented writers who could produce high-quality books for the purpose of injury prevention." (I'm quoting chunks because NYT is a login-only site, and you may not wish to create a login.) Given that Rowling is, generally speaking, neither safety-conscious, talented or a producer of high-quality books, I can only regard their hypothesis as speculative in the extreme.

The three-day headache turns out to have been some sort of bug, I have a lovely, racking chest cough that has dropped my voice about an octave, and aching joints. Bugger. On the other hand, it's good to have an Actual Enemy on whom to blame the headache. Not that it bodes well for the week of exam marking I have lined up, but hey. *bode, bode*

I managed to soothe the whole wounded beast this evening by finally watching Belleville Rendezvous, an enormously off-beat and off-the-wall French animated movie of maximum charm, intelligence and laterality. Amazing story-telling with practically no dialogue. So pleasant to experience something non-Hollywood, whimsical without being saccharine, deliberately paced without being slow, beautifully animated, and very retro. Jazz, and old ladies, and frogs, and French mafia, and incredibly cool fun poked at obsessive cyclists. Can't recommend highly enough, in fact. Go and find the DVD if you haven't already. *makes shooing motions*

I struck a blow for Career Paths and Networking and other useful stuff by having lunch yesterday with a lovely professor lady from a New York university, who it transpires, lives in CT for half the year, and dabbles in fairy tale as an aside. It was forcibly borne in upon me that, in fact, in true rarified PhD fashion, there is not actually anyone else in this country with whom I can talk academic shop. She knew most of the critics I only know by their work and e-mail. I may have to add this to my reasons to flee the continent. (1. Weather. 2. Can't talk academic shop. 3....?)

Must take hacking cough off to bed. Evil Landlord keeps wandering into my study after a paroxysm and wanting to know if I'm dying, and whether it's contagious. I shall practice coughing on his feet.