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A few months ago, in a plush office in BBC Wales…

“So Russell, what’ve you got planned for the season 2 finale?”

“Cybermen v the Daleks”

“Sounds big.”

“It is, we’ll have an army of 5 million cybermen.”

“Wow. How many Daleks?”

“Four”

“Four?”

“Yep. Ah but don’t worry when it comes to it, they have a box that has millions more inside.”

“A box with millions of Daleks in?”

“Yes. They’ll open it just when they need it.”

“Won’t that seem a bit convenient? A bit Deus Ex Machina?”

“Deus Ex what now?”

“It’s when you introduce something useful to the plot near the end of a story just so you can wrap it up more easily.”

“You mean like we did with the season 1 finale?”

“Er yeah. So we’ll have millions of Daleks fighting millions of Cybermen – sounds exciting, epic.”

“Well yes but they won’t actually fight.”

“Won’t fight!? Why not?”

“Well let’s face it, even with CGI we don’t have the budget, we’ll just imply the battle with a little trash talk.”

“Trash talk?”

“Yeah you know – Cyberman says ‘we’re gonna get you cos we is bad ass’, Dalek says ‘nah we’re gonna get you cos we’s badder and you guys are nuthin’ – that kind of thing.”

“…?”

“Trust me it’ll work. It’ll imply the whole big battle.”

“O-kay. So how does the Doctor finally defeat them?”

“Giant hoover.”

“Giant hoover? That’s not very Sci Fi.”

“Well I haven’t worked out the exact techno-babble yet but it’ll be something like ‘inter-dimensional breach into void-space’ or something.”

“Ri-ight.”

“Oh it’ll be very impressive. Just as the millions of new Daleks are coming out of their box they’ll all get sucked into oblivion. Daleks. Cybermen. All gone.”

“Isn’t that a bit Deus Ex… *sigh* never mind.”

“Plus it’ll be quick. Over in a few minutes, maybe less.”

“So let’s get this straight – Daleks appear, trash talk with the Cybermen…”

“…to imply the big battle…”

“…imply the battle right, then they get more Daleks from their box and the whole lot are sucked in the void – and it’s all over in a few minutes?”

“Yes”

“So what are you going to do with the rest of the episode? The other, I don’t know, 20 minutes or so?”

“We’re gonna milk the emotion. Jackie and Pete. Rose and the Doctor. Build up the cloying sentiment and milk it. Milk it until everyone up and down the land is retching with the sickly sweetness of it all. Milk it until they can’t stand it any more. And then you know what?”

“What?”

“Then we gonna milk it just a little bit more!”

“What about Rose does she die”

“‘course not.”

“Aren’t you worried people will feel you’ve cheated them by saying she dies when she doesn’t?”

“Do I look bothered? …hey that gives me a great idea for the guest star for the Christmas episode…”

M. was blue last night.

No not sad. She was blue. Something not quite right with her webcam.

It’s Easter which means it’s been a long weekend.

In more ways than one as it turned out.

Firstly M. is away so I’ve not spoken to her for what seems like ages (i.e. last Wed) and that makes things seem lonelier.

However what I’m really going to talk about here today is the re-build of my laptop.

Friday night I was frustrated at how long it was taking to download something so I experimented with Bittorrent instead. It was much faster for that particular file and so I was pleased. However, later my computer started behaving oddly. I can’t remember all the symptoms now but the screen wasn’t redrawing properly, mail kept crashing and attempting to restart and failing. So I took the decision to back up my files and re-install. I figured I’d got one of the rare cases of a Mac virus and this was one way to kill it.

Backup took a while. Actually my hard drive was pretty full and I needed to archive some of it – so I wrote about 5 or 6 DVDs. The rest – mostly mail and iTunes – I copied to my external USB hard drive. I then re-installed OS X wiping the hard drive and went to bed in the early hours leaving it running the software update overnight. It took me several hours the next day to get things the way I wanted them. It took me ages to correctly set up popfile so it could connect to my gmail account (the answer is to use version 0.96 of the perl package IO::Socket::SSL. rather than the latest available). Then when I’d got it all nearly done, I was re-installing my newsreader (tin+leafnode) and messed up the /etc/passwd file and the Accounts System menu wouldn’t work. So…

I started again. This time the thing that took longest was actually re-importing the mail. Most of my mail was still on the server so I could just re-download it. This caused popfile to classify it as ‘unclassified’. I then went in and created some “buckets” (mail categories) and manually re-classified my mail. Except that half-way through I decided I didn’t like the buckets I had, deleted my mail folders, created new buckets, allowed popfile to re-re-download the mail, then manually re-classify (did I mention there were over 1,000 messages). Finally I deleted the mail again, re-re-re-downloaded it, this time to have popfile classify it correctly. That whole process took about 4-5 hours.

Then I had to re-install other applications, Firefox, this LJ program, restore my iTunes backup (and reauthorised this computer), get tin and leafnode working (this time I didn’t mess up the account but it took me a while to realise tin wants a hostname not an ip address otherwise it fails with a SIGBUS). Oh and copied over my other backup files.

It’s now all more or less back to how I like it. More space because of the archiving I did. I need to set up my RSS feeds again.

One interesting thing about it though is that a lot of the time something like this takes is down to me wanting to have things a certain way and not being prepared to give up until I get it working that way. I don’t really need my gmail account to be downloaded to my local machine. If I do, I don’t really need it to go through popfile.

Things are better today. I still feel down, depressed, scared and anxious but I feel like it’s under control.

I watched the end of Solaris. It was slooow. Quite good but the DVD was acting weird. I had it on English dubbing but every so often it switched into Russian with English subtitles. So that was distracting. It was well shot though.

I’ve got the George Clooney/Steevn Soderbergh remake on order so I might wait until I’ve seen that and do a comparison review. (yes I’m aware I’ve still not done my two High Fidelity’s review. Thank you for not bringing it up)

Oh and the observant among you might notice I editted a recent post. I just felt, on reflection, some things are better not blogged.

Also started praying again. Feels weird but seems to help.

If you read my blog please add a comment.

(just trying to see if I’m talking to myself or not)

Today I feel depressed.

I shall get drunk.

I’m watching Solaris (the original 1972 Russian version) which is kinda weird and surreal. I just spent 5 minutes watching traffic. 40 minutes in and we’re only just getting to space.

Still they say it’s good.

More later perhaps.

Title says it all. Why are there so many movies based around monkeys that play ice hockey or whatever. It’s an entire sub-genre. (The parent genre being unfunny comedies)

My friend Iain and I used to play this game where we’d identify movies using the formula X is Y in space. As in “Outland is High Noon in space”, “Alien is Jaws in space” and so on. (You can extend this formula too. “Brotherhood of the Wolf is Jaws meets the Matrix in 16th Century France (honest guv!))

So in that fine tradition (and because every other review I’d read/heard/seen of this movie says it) I give you:

2. Zathura – Jumanji in Space

Well, ok that’s the cliche – But it really REALLY IS! See this movie is based on a book which was written by the same guy who wrote the book Jumanji is based on. And it’s pretty much the same story. In Jumanji a mysterious jungle-themed board game causes wackiness as things from the game come to life and the only way out from the various dangers this causes is to finish the game. In Zathura a mysterious space-themed games causes… well you get the idea.

So same basic idea, but there are differences. Jumanji relies heavily on CGI, which at the time it was made was pretty good, but it looks like CGI. Zathura does a lot more physical effects. It’s baddies – alien lizards called Zorgons – are guys in lizard suits rather than CGI. This seems to work well and it’s less distracting than CGI.

Where Jumanji works a bit better is that the story has a romantic subplot with Robin WIlliams and Bonnie Hunt. In Zathura the central relationship is of brothers who don’t get on initially learning to respect each other. For me at least seeing the couple get together is always going to be more of a draw than that. Having said that, both films manage to deal with these emotional themes without resorting to sentimentality.

Finally I think Jumanji scores in having someone like Williams as a star. Not just in marketability, but his charisma and performance do lift the film.

Overall Zathura is good, not quite in Jumanji’s lead but very enjoyable nonetheless.

Yeah yeah so I didn’t get to those reviews. I had other stuff to do. Mostly cleaning (and believe me the rich vein of metaphor on that one is nowhere near tapped out) but other stuff too. Life is kinda happening and I am in an interesting place – but that’s a whole other post.

So how about those reviews.

1. Why Just Like Heaven is better than Ghost

I guess “because it is” is not really rising to the challenge of movie reviewing now is it? 😉 Still this will be brief (ish).

Firstly there is such a thing as too much Whoopi Goldberg. She’s good in Ghost, she’s funny. But it’s not a subtle performance and it can grate at times.

Secondly the whole tone is more maudlin. In Ghost Demi Moore is grieving the loss of her lover Patrick Swayzee. The film is about having time to say goodbye and let go – with the subplot of who murdered Swayzee. So even in the upbeat parts of the portrayal of the relationship are undercut by a sense of sadness and loss. Which is fine, but for a comedy it’s a bit downbeat. It also goes overboard on sentimentality for my tastes.

In Just Like Heaven by comparison, although Reese Witherspoon is a ‘ghost’ she’s not actually dead just in a coma. So the final act of the movie is about whether or not she can be resuscitated. Not to spoil you but it’s a happy ending. Also whilst Ghost has the letting go of a relationship this is about the forming of one. So we get to see Witherspoon and Ruffalo fall for each other, and whilst there’s nothing particularly innovative about they way they do it, the leads are winning enough for it to be enjoyable.

Finally, there’s that scene You know the one. Unchained Melody. Potter’s Wheel. The only reason we’re not drowning in sentimentality is because it’s overpowered by the bluntness of the sex symbolism. I imagine Ghost’s target audience are wont to shed a tear during that scene and see it as a beautiful representation of Truw Wuv. The rest of us rolled our eyes and said “oh come on!”

Now JLH has a scene which serves a similar purpose. Witherspoon and Ruffalo are sharing their last night together. It’s established they care for each other. Even though she’s a ghost she can sort of feel him, and only him. He asks her what she wants to do with their (potentially) final night and she leads him to the bed where they lay down together and touch their hands together, palm to palm. It’s a sort-of, kind-of stand-in sex scene as it’s an attempt at an of expression of physical intimacy even though they really lack the means. (thereby demonstrating of course that their relationship has reached a level of emotional intimacy).

Now I’m not suggesting that this scene is wonderful or even one of the better scenes in this movie, but it does seem that they went to the brink of something like the Potter’s Wheel scene from Ghost and showed great restraint in going for something briefer and infinitely more subtle. (Perhaps also, I can enjoy this scene because I have experienced non-physical expressions of physical intimacy. I’m thinking of the time I met a close online friend in a 3D environment and felt a sudden surge of emotion as our 3D avatars sat together on a virtual couch.)

Hmm I guess that wasn’t really brief. I’ll do the next movie soon (tomorrow?)

P.S. the thing about the music was that I was listening to a CD I made for M. and so the songs in successive posts reflected that order. I didn’t want to point this out because at that point M. didn’t have the CD.

Just realised something cool about the music. About which I can’t speak until tomorrow.