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Movie Review : The Avengers

Andrew — Tue, 15 May 2012 10:48:19 +0000

When I first heard about Marvel’s crazy idea for a multi-film franchise I thought it was one of the silliest ideas I had ever heard. But somehow, without really trying to, I have managed to see all of the prequel films that build up to this film’s main event, so I guess full credit (and box office returns) must go to the producers – the whole thing has been managed rather well.

For those keeping score at home, here is what I thought of the prequels:

Iron Man – excellent.
Iron Man 2 – disappointing.
The Incredible Hulk – not terrible but forgettable, I preferred the Ang Lee version.
Thor – extremely loud and silly, but watchable.
Captain America – even more silly, but took the premise and ran with it to entertaining ends.

Astonishingly, none of these films were aggressively stupid in the way that even the best superhero franchises tend to become after a while. So I had high hopes for The Avengers.

Hopes that turned out to be completely justified! The Avengers tells the story of all these guys finally meeting and eventually (spoiler alert) teaming up. As an adaption it is a great success, I am not sure the plot follows any particular existing story but it adheres much more strongly to conventional comic book structure than the typical film plot. All the explanation of who these characters are and where the came from has been neatly dealt with in previous films so The Avengers can get straight down to business.

The script is clever and Iron Man’s quips are as witty as ever. The story is simple, but appropriate for the material. Personally, I could have stood to see more Hulk (the new guy playing him nails it, but there isn’t enough time to flesh out the changes he is going through), and less Captain America however these are minor quibbles. Almost every detail is perfect.

Highly recommended if you like this sort of thing.

The Seven Realities of Social Networking

Andrew — Tue, 08 May 2012 09:36:17 +0000

Every few months the same complaints about social networking sites appear in the press. Lack of privacy and control over who sees what is a common point of point of editorial hand-wringing. While these concerns are valid, directing them at social networking sites is misplaced, and shows a lack of understanding of the relationship these sites have with the public.

This post is an attempt to state clearly the realities of the situation. I am using Facebook as an example, not because Facebook is particularly bad, it is merely the most popular. Google Plus, MySpace, and even services like LinkedIn all share the same properties.

Reality 1: You Do Not Have a Facebook Page

No really, you don’t.

Facebook has a page on you. You occasionally log on and add more information to Facebook’s page about you, but neither the page nor the data is yours. You gave the data to Facebook when you posted it.

This is not a necessarily a bad deal. In return for maintaining Facebook’s page about yourself, you get a platform to broadcast your doings and to see Facebook’s pages about your friends and family. I don’t know about you but I enjoy both these activities and participate willingly.

Reality 2: You Are Not a Customer of Facebook

No you aren’t.

Facebook’s customers are the advertisers that buy advertising on the site, and the marketers that pay to access to the fantastic demographic data we have all provided. They are paying Facebook for this service, you are not paying anyone for anything.

I know you enjoy using the site as it is, but don’t get upset when Facebook decides to improve things for itself or its customers. The customer is always right, and you are not a customer. You are the product. Facebook gets paid providing access to you.

Reality 3: Facebook Owes You Nothing

They certainly do not.

You may have been a loyal Facebook user, diligently posting photos of your cat and that batch of cupcakes you made last month, but that doesn’t mean anything to Facebook.

You have, in fact, cost Facebook money. Server farms don’t grow on trees.

Each time you view a page or update your status, Facebook wears the cost in electricity and CPU time. But don’t worry, Facebook is willing to bear the burden to provide a better product to its customers.

Reality 4: Your Privacy is Not Facebook’s Problem

If you have uploaded something to Facebook then it is public. That is the whole point of Facebook. Sure there are privacy settings, but they just mean that Facebook makes a small effort not to show things you have marked private to random people. Nothing stops other people from re-posting the photo of you at the Christmas party, or even just printing it out and sticking to your car. If you had wanted it to be private then you wouldn’t have put it on the Internet.

Likewise, if one of your friends tagged you in a photo that you don’t want to be associated with (a common source of privacy issues), that is not really Facebook’s problem either. You have a problem with your friend.

Reality 5: Nothing is Really Removed From Facebook

You can check out any time you want, but you can never leave. Removing stuff from Facebook does not guarantee that it will not be accessible. Your data will still exists in uncounted backups, caches, redundant servers and log files. That is not even taking into account the memories of the hundreds of people who might have seen it before you “deleted” it.

If you didn’t want it seen, you shouldn’t have uploaded it.

Reality 6: Facebook Is Not Picky About Who It Deals With

Despite what I have written here, Facebook does at least pay lip service to the illusion of privacy but the same can not be said of the many developers that piggyback on its service to provide apps and games. When Facebook tells you that installing a particular App gives the developer access to your profile, they mean it. You have even less of a relationship with these developers than you do with Facebook. Your trust is a commodity to them, spend it wisely.

Reality 7: Facebook is Not (Especially) Evil

Facebook is just a simple company trying to make its way in the universe. By all means, use and enjoy Facebook without concern (perhaps even “like” this page). But Facebook is not your friend, and they have their own interests to look after. And besides, they take nothing that you don’t give them.

Your relationship with social networking sites will be better if you remember that.

Public Access 5 – Art at the Silo 6 Park

Andrew — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 07:55:55 +0000

The silos in the Wynyard Quarter have been an enigma to me ever since the park was opened to the public. They stand tall but inaccessible, guarding their secrets…

…until now, because some artists have used the space for a funky collaborative project – Public Access 5. Like all collaborative projects, much of it is rubbish but there are some great things to see. The best works involved video projectors wrapping the strange shapes of the silo internals with writhing images.

It is not a big exhibition so you can easily take it in on your lunch break. If nothing else it is a chance to finally see the interior of the mysterious silos. Now I just wish you could climb to the top.

Public Access 5 runs until Friday the 13th of April, 1012.

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Film Review : Attack the Block

Andrew — Mon, 09 Apr 2012 01:19:23 +0000

Somewhere in South London, a gang of inner-city youph are out mugging passers-by when a meteor crashes into a nearby car. When they go to nick whatever is in the busted open vehicle they discover the meteor was inhabited by a strange dog-like creature. So they kill it.

Unfortunately for them, the creature had friends on the way…

Attack the Block is an entertaining take on the alien invasion genre, with the young protagonists fighting off large beasts with flick knives and baseball bats on a large council estate. Unlike most films, the gang is not glamorised and is shown to be pretty pathetic as they flee the creatures on BMXs and scooters, falling back on the few resources available to them. Each character is well rendered, and a lot of the humor comes from interplay between the cast in an impenetrable argot.

The creatures themselves are fantastically conceived – big and scary in a way that transcends the low budget. The way they slink through the smokey corridors (are the lights flickering? why yes they are) is fascinating and Attack the Block doesn’t make the mistake of letting the audience get a clear look.

Some of the best parts of the film are when the gang members’ tough-guy affectations slip and you see hints of their normal existence when they are not out on the streets. But Attack the Block never lapses into social commentary, keeping the focus on the matter at hand – avoiding the tougher gangs, the police, and aliens in more or less in that order.

Suspenseful, fast paced, and funny. Highly recommended.

Film Review : John Carter

Andrew — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 10:27:02 +0000

After fighting in the American civil war (on the wrong side), cavalryman turned prospector John Carter is mysteriously transported to Mars, arriving in a time of great calamity. War is raging here as well, can Carter’s presence change things for the better?

According to some reports the film is a costly flop and I can see why. Up until a couple of weeks ago there was a giant billboard for this movie right next to the train station I walk to each morning, a billboard that made John Carter look like one of the stupidest films ever made. The trailer also looks terrible, and I am not sure why they went with the most generic title possible. I went into the theatre with low expectations.

I am glad to say that the advertising campaign is misleading, John Carter is actually pretty cool. Based on a very old book by Edgar Rice Burroughs (who appears as part of the framing story), its hero is forced into all sorts of action-packed scenes as he bounds around Mars aided by his Earth-gravity adapted muscles. The pacing is excellent, the plot covers a lot of ground but everything is well explained and the film knows when to stop, unlike a certain other human-hanging-out-with-large-aliens-and-horning-in-on-the-princess film I could mention. The characters are only drawn with the broadest strokes, but the ink is colourful and such a pulpy canvas cannot be expected to take a finer brushwork.

A decent addition to the list of watchable popcorn films. Recommended.

White Cloud Worlds at Lopdell House Gallery

Andrew — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 09:30:36 +0000

The Lopdell House Gallery in Titirangi is (somewhat bizarrely) showing works by New Zealand fantasy artists, most of whom seem to work for Weta digital.

It is strange experience to walk around a gallery viewing images that would normally be wrapped around a cheap paperback, or printed on a piece of cardboard as part of a game. In fact, at least one of the artists has done work for Magic The Gathering. I know this because they framed a collection of his cards.

All the work is of a high standard but it has that same interchangeable fantasy style that is common in a genre where most of the work is (I assume) commercial commissions. Despite all the art being from this country there is not much recognisably New Zealand in this art. A few images depict Maori legends, but in a very generically stylized fashion. It is not that the images are bad, just uninspired although thankfully, the exhibition is light on scantily clad warrior-babe cliché. Still, it is a bit of a thrill to see full sized images of fantasy scenes in a proper gallery setting.

White Cloud Worlds is at the Lopdell House Gallery until the 15th of April, 2012.

Book Review : The Quantum Thief

Andrew — Sun, 25 Mar 2012 08:46:23 +0000

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi
ISBN: 0575088877

In the far post-human future, Jean le Flambeur’s consciousness rots in a virtual holding cell, forced to play endless games of prisoner’s dilemma as punishment for a lifelong career as a master thief. The book opens with Jean being unexpectedly broken out by Mieli, who has one last job for him but first he has to retrieve the rest of his memories. Meanwhile, both his erstwhile jailers and a detective named Isidore Beautrelet is doggedly pursuing Flambeur.

Summing up the plot of The Quantum Thief is not easy. There is a lot going on, several different factions are working to their own ends, characters are often allied but secretly sabotaging each others efforts. The setting itself is a dazzling series of fantastic locations moulded by transhuman societies. For instance, most of the action takes place on Mars, where everyone’s perceptions are modified to include gevulot, a mechanism to ensure privacy by simply not allowing actions or events to be perceived unless the viewer has been expressly given the right to see and remember them via a private key system.

In fact, The Quantum Thief contains so many ideas crammed into it that there is not really room to explore the implications of any particular facet. There are no long infodumps of exposition but nearly every page contains mention of some new term or concept and the reader just has to keep up the best as they can. However, The Quantum Thief pulls off a neat trick by playing fair with the central mysteries of the plot – an alert reader can figure out revelations paragraphs before the characters can.

The Quantum Thief is not perfect. Personally I find stories of uploading mind-states, magic quantum machines and post-singularity societies pretty unconvincing, but all scifi demands some suspension of disbelief and The Quantum Thief certain rewards readers who make that effort.

Recommended if you like this sort of thing.

Book Review: The Fuller Memorandum

Andrew — Sun, 18 Mar 2012 11:14:17 +0000

The Fuller Memorandum by Charles Stross
ISBN: 978-0-441-01867-3

Bob Howard is having a bad week. Being an agent for the supernatural “Laundry” branch of the British secret services is tough enough at the best of times, but he has already messed up one mission and things back at the office are getting hairy. Both an important document and Bob’s mysterious boss go missing at the same time, and the list of people who want Bob dead is growing longer by the hour.

The Fuller Memorandum is the third in the Laundry series, but this is my introduction to the books. It is based on the amusing-but-not-quite-original conceit that all the things that Lovecraft and his ilk wrote about actually exist and the British government has a agency dedicated to defending humanity against them and their cultish minions.

According to Wikipedia, each book in the series is written as a pastiche of a different classic spy novelist. This is potentially clever idea, but I found the style really grating in some parts of The Fuller Memorandum. Much of the plot revolves around the interactions between Bob and his equally talented agent wife, but the scenes of domestic comedy did not gel well with unspeakable horror that drips off adjacent pages. The tone was just too uneven for me to really get into the story.

Having said that, The Fuller Memorandum was an imaginative and fast moving read with some neat ideas. There is enjoyment to be had if you can get passed the tone, and perhaps it makes better reading if you have been following the series. Maybe I was just disappointed that The Fuller Memorandum was not more similar to A Colder War, a neat novelette from the same author based on a similar premise but apparently not part of the same series.

Not really recommended unless you like this sort of thing. A Colder War however is recommended so you should click that link right now.

Book Review : Juggler of Worlds

Andrew — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 08:48:07 +0000

Juggler of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M Lerner
ISBN: 0765318261

Larry Niven’s Known Space stories were like crack cocaine to me growing up. A huge, sprawling history of the future filled to the brim with exotic aliens, wacky spaceships and gadgets, and vast otherworldly landscapes was the perfect escapist fantasy.

But most of the Known Space stories were written 40 years ago, and collaborations between aging science fiction authors have a (shall we say) uneven track record. It was with a sense of dread that I picked up Juggler of Worlds, but how bad could it be?

Juggler of Worlds is a novel that retells many of the original Known Space tales (which were already linked) from the point of view of one of the minor recurring characters. In many ways this is a bit of a cop out – no new parts of Known Space are opened up, almost the entire plot is recycled. Rather than huge and sprawling, Known Space seems to have contracted Star Wars disease; there seem to be only 6 people in the entire universe doing anything interesting.

Having said that, as exercises in picking over the bones go this isn’t actually terrible. It has been so long since I read the stories that revisiting them from a different angle is actually a pleasure and the writing has not suffered from being a collaboration, if anything it is better than ever with more rounded characterisations. It still isn’t a great book, and anyone unfamiliar with the original source material is probably going to be lost, but it could have been worse.

Recommended if (and only if) you like this sort of thing.

Book Review : The Man Who Invented the Daleks, The Strange Worlds of Terry Nation

Andrew — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:51:44 +0000

The Man Who Invented the Daleks, The Strange Worlds of Terry Nation by Alwyn W. Turner

Terry Nation casts a long shadow over British television, although only in very particular corners. His main claim to fame (and riches due to canny licensing deals) is that he wrote the first Dalek story for the then new Doctor Who but his career stretches over many decades. Starting out as a comedy writer, he eventually made the switch to drama in the early 60s and never looked back. The list of shows he wrote for reads like a perfect rainy Saturday afternoon’s viewing: The Saint, The Avengers, Doctor Who, and Blake’s Seven, plus all sorts of other thick slices of cheese on toast. One of the last things he did was Macgyver, back when it was good.

This biography is a bit of a strange beast. It is incredibly detailed in some respects, going over each show (and sometimes individual episodes) with the kind of meticulous scrupulousness that only the British can muster.

On the other hand, Nation was a man who entered his chosen profession early, worked hard, made some contacts, and found success pretty early on. An admirable way to live your life perhaps, but not much to hang a great biography on. His childhood is covered in a few pages, somewhere along the way he acquires a wife. His first born child gets a brief mention, but only because Nation wrote a popular children’s book for her. His other child only appears for a sentence or two. There are no serious setbacks along the way, no lost loves, no professional rivals. Just page after page of Nation churning out stories.

And churn them out he could. Almost all his colleagues were in awe at the speed at which he wrote (his secret was never doing second drafts) and the consistent quality of his scripts (his secret was to have a lot of stock scenes that he could “recycle”).

In fact, this biography is a testament the Nation’s approach; like his serials each episode in the book is entertaining but the whole thing is a bit same-y if you consume the whole thing in one go. You don’t even get a chase through dimly lit corridors or a bomb to liven up the plot.

Only recommended if you really like this sort of thing.