Hulu has the full run of Coupling; the British version, not the really bad American remake. Steven Moffat of Doctor Who current fame was the show’s creator, plus you’ve got Jack Davenport and Gina Bellman in every episode. You’ve sort of got to like sitcoms about people who are not entirely angelic, but it’s kind of sweet too.
Category: Culture
Short shameful confession: I’m kind of enjoying the hell out of the Horus Heresy books. Of course this is only because Dan Abnett is quite a competent writer and so on, but excuses aside, big serious people in powered armor are marching across the galaxy and falling to corruption one by one! I have never taken pleasure out of a Warhammer 40K Space Marine book before. Nom nom nom.
We recently cut the cable cord. It turns out that you can get an HD antennae that feeds a Tivo well enough, and that covers anything on Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CW. AMC is the big exception, but it’s cheaper to buy the episodes on iTunes than it would be to maintain the cable bill. I was gonna get HBO in the spring to watch Game of Thrones, and HBO does not do downloads for non-subscribers, but c’est la vie. Also I lose a lot of the NBA playoffs. Thankfully there are sports bars.
Anyway, for the sake of the decision-making process I thought hard about what I actually watch.
Two interesting ebook questions: when will publishers get around to releasing the backlist as ebooks, and who will be the quality gatekeepers in a world of self-publishing? You may think the second question is a moot point, and can be answered by some form of collective criticism, aka Metafilter, but I’m going to throw out some relevant news anyhow.
As I understand it, part of the problem with the first question is that publishers don’t own the ebook rights to their backlist. It wasn’t part of the standard contract back in the dark ages of the 1980s and 1990s and 2000s. This means authors can do it themselves, if they like. Please take a moment to read this post from John Scalzi before continuing.
This summer, literary agent Andrew Wylie realized that he had a bunch of clients who had great backlists which could be profitably released as ebooks without the added cost of involving a publisher. We’re talking people like John Updike, who do not need as much marketing for their backlist as others. So he tried that. Alas, it did not work out entirely well.
However, the (primarily) SF&F agency JABberwocky recently did the same thing. So that’s kind of interesting.
We started a new year of glorious movie-going with Sherlock Holmes. It was better than I expected, but it did not rise to brilliance.
The raw material is pretty raw. Checking — yeah, fairly inexperienced screenwriters who haven’t written anything great; I don’t imagine the script gave anyone a lot to work with. I give the writers credit for knowing their Alan Moore, though. (Blackwood is Gull. Ritualistic killing of women in order to bring about a future in his own image? Been there, read that.) Despite stealing from the best, though, the story was simple and uninspired.
Guy Ritchie is Guy Ritchie. Things explode. On the whole it was a touch more subtle than anything else he’s ever done, which may or may not have been due to the acting. I found his camera work on the frenetic side, and I’m usually highly tolerant of quick cuts. It wasn’t a work of great craft, really. The epitome of this would be the Holmesian fighting style.
There’s a fun bit in the first five minutes where Holmes pauses for a split second, maps the fight out in his brain based on his observations of the target, and then executes. It occurs to me tangentially that perhaps the writers know their Grant Morrison JLA as well. Shades of Prometheus? I may be overanalyzing. In any case, Ritchie gives us the sequence twice: once as imagined, once as enacted. It ought to be great, but it isn’t, perhaps because there’s never any payoff. It’s just a thing, and it’s only used in the trivial unimportant fights. You’d expect him to use it and fail to demonstrate how scary an opponent is, or at least to use it, but nope. It vanishes a third of the way through the movie, never to be seen again.
So obviously and in retrospect unsurprisingly, it’s up to Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. to elevate the thing. Which of course they do. Downey’s Holmes hooked me in the sequence where his need to show off undercuts his friendship, because it’s played for laughs — ha ha, look at Holmes get pissed off and incisive — until he’s actually wrong about a key point. Which leads to bitterness. Which transitions directly into a sequence of self-destructive Holmes. Which is perfect.
I loved this vision of the characters. Holmes is a dangerous, angry, haunted man. Watson is compelled by his friend’s brilliance, and is also pretty dangerous. Ex-army, so he should be. Great work from both actors.
The women have much more thankless tasks. Kelly Reilly’s Mary is surprisingly strong, and is one of I think two characters in the film who ever get the best of Holmes. I think this is absolutely necessary in order to maintain the Holmes/Watson/Mary love triangle, but still, it’s a good bit. In fact, I think she has the edge on him twice. Still and all, it’s a very slight role.
Alas, Rachel McAdams is stuck with the “major” female part, in which Irene Adler is relegated to a helpless pawn. For a master criminal, an awful lot of people out-think her, and she needs rather a lot of saving. I was disappointed.
One line review: rompity romp romp romp. I liked it.
I just read the debut novel from Harry Connolly, Child of Fire. It’s urban fantasy/horror with a crime fiction feel: if you’ve ever read a book where a couple of investigators roll into a small town and clean up some corruption for their own reasons, you know the approach. There’s an excerpt available.
I’ll give it a solid B. The plot gets a bit complex in the middle; I think I counted at least four distinct factions in the town, which is sort of a lot. The writing’s good, the protagonists are reasonably interesting, and the world’s good. You can tell it’s designed as a series, with lots of back references to origin stories. There are rules about how magic works.
I like the idea of a secret society — the Twenty Palaces — which ruthlessly eradicates magic. I like the source of magic. Connolly writes good creepy modern monsters. I read someone calling him Lovecraftian, but that’s wrong: he’s mining the same post-modern horror vein as Esoterrorists. The scene where he confronts the source of the town’s problems is pretty darned good.
Susan and I caught the So You Think You Can Dance tour last Thursday. I’m not sure I’d shell out for the season 6 tour, but I had more fun than I expected at this one.
As expected, it was relentlessly full of tweens and parents, with a scattering of oddballs like us. The overall vibe, as Susan noted, was a high end Disney show. I imagine they’ve learned from High School Musical and so forth. The dances, of which there was not enough, were situated in a rather bland pudding of dancer banter. These kids are not in fact trained in the ancient art of standing on a stage and sounding conversational, excepting of course Evan. It showed.
Most of the dances were refined and tuned from the show versions, to good effect. Different intros, better performances, and so on.
Best dances, not in order:
Kayla and Kupono’s addiction dance. It brought me to tears again. Kupono’s overwrought performance style fit the theme and Kayla does vulnerable very well.
Phillip’s solo. He got a full solo; everyone else had a show-style 1 minute solo, but the Chbeeb got a few minutes to do what he does. He got the biggest solo ovation of the night, too (with Brandon as #2 in that regard). His sense of rhythm and bodily control are superb.
Brandon and Janette’s pop contemporary dance. The thievery dance, I suppose you’d say. Lovely and fresh as always.
Biggest surprise:
Randi and Evan’s samba. Of all the ballroom dances to include, that was the second one, after Brandon and Jeanine’s pasa doble? But it was really good. Randi seems a lot more relaxed now that she isn’t competing, and they really rocked it. Randi and Evan were a solid couple and if any couple not named Brandon and Janette was gonna get two dances on the tour, I suppose they’d be the ones.
Biggest disappointment:
No solo from Janette, no Brandon and Janette ballroom, etc. Maybe she was sick? It seems like a pretty glaring omission. I mean, she’s the one person who didn’t get a solo, out of all twelve performers.
In episode 3 of FlashForward:
- The Center for Disease Control requests money from the Department of Homeland Security. In 1991. Which is somewhat prior to the date the DHS was founded.
- The only person in the world who notices all the crows in the world dying during the flashforward blackout is a Nazi prisoner.
- After all the crows in the world die, the crow population magically recovers.
- Approximately every single cast member explains that the world has changed, and we are all prophets, and we know our future, and the world has changed as a result. In case you hadn’t heard.
- Jack Davenport does not appear.
- Dominic Monaghan does not appear.
Sorry, semi-promising new SF show! Your time is up. Anyone still watching can let me know if it gets any better.
John Woo’s new movie, Red Cliff, will be hitting US soil on November 20th. If you are a die-hard John Woo fan, you’ll see it. If you’re a John Woo fan who’s been disappointed by such cinematic masterpieces as Paycheck, you should see it: all reports are that he’s back to form. If you’re not a John Woo fan but you like big historical epics, you should see it. Everyone else: also see it.
Here, have a trailer.
The US version is two and a half hours, which is heavily chopped from the four hour double movie Asian version. Obsessive fans can get the original two movies on DVD or Blu-Ray. Consumer protection warning: the Mei Ah Blu-Ray discs reportedly have a small watermark in the letterboxing.
The Polanski petition doesn’t really cut it. I get the argument — that film festivals should be safe zones, because if you have a blanket policy of extradition then filmmakers from totalitarian regimes aren’t safe there. But no. This is not about free speech, this is about rape. It’s reasonable to make the distinction between types of crime; we do not need to protect rapists for the sake of protecting free speech.