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Amazon review

[My review of Do As I Say (Not As I Do) : Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy]

What is a book? It’s not merely ink and paper, what makes it a “book” is that it imparts information.

Schweizer could have written such a book. He could have called it “Do as I say (not as I do): profiles in media hypocrisy”. He could have profiled hypocritical media blowhards of all kinds, and put his investigative journalism skills to good use.

Instead, he chose to write a book which makes plain at first glance that it is hopelessly politically slanted. As such, the information in the book is immediately suspect. It’s like reading a book about the history of World War II that pretends the war started in 1941 when the US joined in, or an oil industry environmental report on Alaska that doesn’t mention that it’s a wildlife refuge: you immediately know that the credibility of the book is near zero because of its blatant bias.

Hence–and this is the key point–Schweizer’s book will only be read by those who already take it on faith that liberals are all hypocrites. They already (think they) know that Michael Moore employs only Aryans and that Al Franken strangles kittens. In short, nobody who actually reads this book will gain any knowledge from it; it will merely reaffirm that which they already know and believe.

Therefore this is a book, but at the same time it’s not a book; it has the form of a book, but even if every fact in it is accurate, it will impart no knowledge to anyone, trigger no discourse, contribute nothing to the sum total of human knowledge. Frankly, Schweizer could have just set up an Amazon payments ID and had right wingers send him money directly, and avoid wasting so much ink and paper.

Myst 4

[Very minor puzzle spoilers.]

As a piece of graphic art, Myst IV should win awards. Unfortunately, as a game it leaves rather a lot to be desired.

The most immediate problem is the speed–or rather, the lack of it. While my computer was comfortably over spec and could easily handle scrolling the screen around even with all the effects turned on, each transition to a new location involved the game freezing for a few seconds while it loaded in the next set of graphics. Usually the delay was around 4 seconds, but sometimes it was as much as 10 seconds. That’s not too bad when you’re somewhere you’ve never been before, but when you’re wandering from place to place trying to solve puzzles spread over a world, it gets tiresome very quickly.

The second problem is that even as of late 2005 and 3 patches, the game is buggy. I couldn’t persuade the mangrees to do their thing, even though I had resorted to a walkthrough and was sure I was doing what it said. I tried saving the game, quitting, restarting and loading, and suddenly the puzzle was solved. If I hadn’t been working from a walkthrough and hadn’t known the game was misbehaving, I would likely have wasted hours unable to solve that puzzle for no good reason.

The puzzles themselves aren’t as satisfying as earlier Myst games, either. Some of them make no sense at all–like stroking a snake to make a machine work. Others don’t quite work right, like the slider puzzle on the gate, abruptly making you conscious of the fact that you’re not dealing with a real physical object, but instead with a computer simulation that has extra constraints that wouldn’t be there in the real world.

In Riven, the puzzles were carefully woven into the worlds; the machinery mostly had a good reason to be there. Myst IV is more of a throwback to the original Myst, with elaborate locks in arbitrary locations, strange apparently pointless mechanisms, and worlds in an initial state that really doesn’t make sense except as a way to throw puzzles at you. To make up for this you’re given an amulet which is basically a clue machine, a rather blatant plot device which again destroyed the feeling of being in a real world.

The puzzles are also tough. When you’re forced to resort to hints, you should always think “Aha, yes, of course, I should have got that.” In the case of one of the Myst IV worlds, I still didn’t understand what was going on even after reading the solution. Combine that with the click (wait wait wait) click (wait wait wait) slowness when wandering around, and you have a recipe for frustration.

Still, the music was great–easily the most impressive soundtrack of a Myst game so far. But that wasn’t enough to overcome the defects and keep me immersed in the game.

If you’re a Myst fan, you’ll buy this anyway. If you’re not, I’d suggest that you steer clear of it and get one of the other games in the Myst series.

Timeline

My Netflix queue contains over a hundred items. As a result, it’s often the case that by the time a movie appears in my mailbox, I’ve completely forgotten why I wanted to watch it in the first place, or even what it’s about.

This was definitely the case for Timeline. I can’t think why I would have put it in the queue; I’m not a big fan of anything mediaeval, I’m not wild about director Richard Donner‘s previous movies, and Michael Crichton has written some pretty cheesy SF.

I certainly didn’t pick it based on reviews. The movie got a complete critical savaging; you’d think it was Battlefield Earth 2 from some of the comments:

“No film in recent memory has cried out this much to be mocked.”

“Timeline may not be the dumbest movie to be released this year. But it’s certainly not for lack of trying.”

I find it interesting that there’s a massive disparity between the critics’ reviews, and the average rating given to the movie by ordinary people. I think the critics are way out of line on this one. If you want to see a really excruciatingly bad SF movie, one that’s so wildly implausible it makes Timeline look like an episode of Scientific American Frontiers, consider The Core. That stinking piece of cinematic excrement got way better reviews from the pro critics than Timeline, which tells me that there’s something seriously wrong with the critics’ sense of judgement.

[Spoilers follow, if a movie as badly reviewed as this can be spoiled.]

There’s one criticism that leaps out as wildly inappropriate:

“It looks like cheesy ’60s television, with paper-thin characters and crummy special effects that wouldn’t even have made it in the last season of Star Trek.”

—Stephen Whitty, NEWARK STAR-LEDGER

Since I’ve had the benefit of watching the documentary extras on the DVD, I can reveal that there really weren’t any special effects in the movie. They got the special effect of medieval trebuchets launching projectiles by actually building a bunch of full-size trebuchets and having them launch flaming projectiles. They got that unconvincing effect of a castle blowing up by actually building a full-size castle and blowing it up. The people fighting in a burning smoke-filled courtyard? Well, they set the courtyard on fire, then had a bunch of people fight. The metal swords? Yes, they were made of aluminium, but they were still actual metal swords. And so on.

Make no mistake, there are a lot of grounds for criticizing this movie; but physical verisimilitude isn’t one of them. Still, let’s get a few of the valid criticisms out of the way.

First the plot. It’s easy to say that the foreshadowing is heavy-handed and the outcome predictable, so let’s put some numbers to it: I worked out the major plot twist and knew the basic outline of what was going to happen 12 minutes into the movie. (I jotted a note of the time.) Really, as far as the story goes there’s nothing you haven’t seen in dozens of episodes of Star Trek—right down to the two red-shirted security officers who get killed almost immediately, and the anachronistic object found on an archeological dig. (At least this time it’s not someone’s head.)

Then there’s the medicine. My history teacher (yes, the one who’s now in jail) always used to say that if you did travel back in time, the first thing you’d notice would be the stench. Yet somehow, disease is never a factor in this story—the peasants all look clean and healthy, and today’s bacteria and viruses, with their 600 years of evolutionary head start, fail to impact the people of the past in any way.

Then there’s the language issue. The heroes take back a French guy to help them talk to the locals. The trouble is, we’re heading to the 1300s, when English looked like this:

Love is a gretter lawe, by my pan,
Than may be yeve of any erthely man.
And therfore positif lawe and swich decree
Is broken al day for love in ech degree.
A man moot nedes love, maugree his heed,
He may nat fleen it, thogh he sholde be deed,
Al be she mayde, or wydwe, or elles wyf.
And eek it is nat likly, al thy lyf,
To stonden in hir grace, namoore shal I,
For wel thou woost thyselven, verraily,
That thou and I be dampned to prisoun
Perpetuelly, us gayneth no raunsoun.

I’ll let you extrapolate to French. Maybe you can piece together what most of the above is saying—but speak it? With passably correct pronounciation, good enough to fool knights on the lookout for foreign spies? I don’t think so. Yet nobody in this movie, whether English, French, Scottish or (god help us) American, has any significant trouble understanding anyone else’s accent or vocabulary. Which is a pity, because the situation could have been so much more tense and menacing if they had. I mean, why use authentic medieval costumes of sackcloth and leather, and get genuine heraldry from England, if you’re going to have medieval French people speak modern English with a modern French accent?

Finally, there’s the essential countdown to doom caused by technological limitation. You’ve seen it in countless Bond movies (and movies based on Michael Crichton stories), but let’s overlook the cliché. Instead, let’s think about the fact that a team of half a dozen engineers somehow manage to rebuild a destroyed multi-million dollar computer-controlled time machine, one which it took years of research to construct. And they do it in under 5 hours. In reality, they’d still be installing Windows XP Service Packs by the time everyone got permanently stranded in the past.

Then there’s the acting. Yes, some of it is pretty bad, but what do you expect? It’s a Hollywood action movie. Trying to believe that Paul Walker is Billy Connolly’s son is like trying to believe that Keanu Reeves is the spawn of Sean Connery, but we can probably write off that lousy piece of casting as a market-driven attempt to appeal to the teen and early 20s audience who liked 2 Fast 2 Furious.

More troubling is the complete inability of the cast to make us believe they have a convincing enough motivation to step into an experimental time machine and go through a wormhole in space that they’ve been warned will rip them into electrons so that for a moment they won’t even exist. In the documentary, Richard Donner mentions that in Crichton’s book the technological detail and the characters arguing over what to do ran to around 100 pages, but that they managed to condense it down to 5 pages of movie script. Well, yes, I guess technically all the essential plot points were left intact, but…

Enough negativity! Because if you can somehow look past all that, it’s really not that bad a movie. The medieval detail is well done, and there’s something about real buildings and tunnels and mud and thatch, something about real explosions and smoke, that computer graphics still can’t duplicate. The pacing is evenly fast, so you don’t get bored, and there are some satisfying moments.

So in summary: it’s some painstaking attention to detail that really belonged in a better movie. Sadly, it was stuck into this overgrown B-movie instead. It’s an enjoyable but mindless couple of hours, basically a mid-point between The Messenger and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. And I promise you, it’s better than The Core.

Deer oh deer

Some time ago I read about someone who gets lots of review copies of books set to her for free, because she writes good reviews of them on Amazon.com. I thought at the time that that was pretty cool. It made me wonder just how much I’d have to review to get free stuff, and whether my reviews would all have to be breathless Joel-Siegel-style enthusiasm.

I got my answer. Amazon and Disney sent me an advance copy of the new remastered DVD release of Bambi to review. Yes, Bambi. I can only assume they didn’t pick me based on what I’ve reviewed in the past. Either that, or they noticed I’d been browsing for books and movies about skunks, which would be worryingly efficient of them.

Anyhow, I watched the movie and reviewed it. Hey, why not? Ignoring the plot, the animation is beautiful, and I’m a sucker for anything with a cute animated skunk in it.

So when my RSS aggregator picked up on a review on filmcritic.com, I decided to take a look, just to see if my conclusions were the same as other reviewers. Let’s just say that the guy who wrote that review clearly hasn’t watched the movie since he allegedly saw it as a kid; not even the first five minutes. How can I tell? Well, Bambi is male. He’s referred to repeatedly as the new young Prince of the Forest right at the start of the movie. Bit of a giveaway, that.

I know it’s crazy, but I kinda feel that movie reviewers ought to watch at least part of the movie. I can understand book reviewers not finding time to read the entire book in every case, but come on, how much effort is it to watch “Bambi”?

Meanwhile, I could get to like this Amazon reviews thing. Maybe next time they can send me something from the other end of the tastefulness scale. There’s a new unrated edition of Orgazmo about to be released…

A.i.

We finally got to watching A.i.: Artificial Intelligence. We’re probably the last people alive who haven’t seen it, so I trust you will allow me the indulgence of a few spoilers in the course of my criticism.

Let’s start with the big issue: the movie has the most egregious deus ex machina ending I have seen in years of movie-watching. It’s so hideous that it could be used as the canonical example when educating future generations of movie makers in what not to do. Apparently the ending was part of the Kubrick script for the movie, but Spielberg gave it that final saccharine twist. I’d like to think that Kubrick would have seen sense and removed the whole thing, like he did the original pie fight ending to Dr Strangelove.

A.i. is supposedly some kind of tribute or homage to Kubrick…but of course, the problem is it’s hard to pick two directors whose styles are as dissimilar as Kubrick and Spielberg, unless you start talking about (say) Errol Morris and John Waters.

Visually, there’s really nothing Kubrick to see. The fight with the bike gangs is a frenetic MTV cut-up, rather than a sequence of smooth menacing tracking shots. Even when David finds rows of boxed Davids, and Spielberg finally tries to use a Kubrick-style tracking shot for effect, he keeps the camera too high and the result is merely tedious. In fact, it brought to mind the groundbreaking camera work of Ed Wood, as lovingly recreated by Tim Burton.

Perhaps the worst thing, though, is that Spielberg just can’t seem to avoid the temptation to try and make every single story into a kid-friendly movie. Thus a male robot prostitute suddenly takes David to visit the cartoon head of Albert Einstein, voiced by Robin Williams, which we’re told is conveniently situated in the middle of the biggest red light district on earth. No, that’s not the noise of Stanley Kubrick spinning in his grave, it’s just the whirling pulleys as my suspended disbelief comes crashing to the ground.

In the original script, the mother’s an alcoholic, and the robot kid inadvertently feeds her problem when he keeps making her Bloody Marys just the way she likes them, in a futile attempt to get her to love him. Yeah, that would have worked. What doesn’t work is making mom a nice mug of coffee. Not even if you whirl the coffee containers around in an inexplicable fashion in the middle of the shot. But problem drinking is an Adult Situation, so we can’t have that in a Spielberg movie.

Yes, it’s a fairy tale, but I’m old enough to remember that fairy tales used to have wicked witches and evil monsters in. C’mon, Mr Spielberg, I know you can do better.

Review: Battlefield Earth

We just found the time to watch Battlefield Earth. As I mentioned a while back, this movie is allegedly worse than Xanadu, which I had rated as the absolute worst movie I’ve ever watched. So, how does Battlefield Earth compare? Well…

The first thing to note about the movie is that the entire thing is shot in tilt-o-vision. Every single scene has the camera at an odd angle. Not just slightly, either—we’re talking 30 or even 45 degrees. The only rational explanation I can come up with is that they were unable to find enough people willing to work on a Scientology-backed movie, and ended up employing a cameraman with one leg.

If you think about the process of moviemaking, you’ll realize that there’s a major problem with shooting at odd angles: it makes it really difficult to edit the material seamlessly. As a result, what you get in Battlefield Earth is a funhouse maze of cuts. One moment John Travolta is sloping to the left; we cut for a reaction shot, and when we cut back he’s sloping to the right.

Once you get into a fight scene, of course, you’re continually trying to work out what the hell is going on—are they going to leap on the enemy from above, or are they hiding at ground level? Can the guards see them or is that piece of machinery in the corner of one of the shots supposed to be hiding them? Just working out the geometry of what’s supposed to be happening is taxing. Perhaps that’s just as well, because it’s the only mental stimulation you’re likely to get.

Sometimes the effect of the sloping is just comical—like in the opening scene, where it seems as if the primitive humans are so regressed that when they put up a tent on a hillside, they drive the poles in perpendicular to the ground; or later on, when John Travolta bangs his head on a piece of scenery getting up, but it looks as if he slid down into it.

The fascinating thing is that at some point, someone must have sat and watched the early rushes and thought “Hey, this is great, yeah, let’s do the entire movie like this.” They spent enough money to make the special effects look good, but somehow couldn’t find the cash for a tripod.

Another thing that apparently seemed like a good idea, is that every time something exciting happens the movie goes into slow motion. Gunshots, explosions, individual punches in a fistfight, people jumping off stuff—all slowed down. It’s like watching the movie with an eight year old kid playing with the remote control. Yes, I found slow motion fascinating, back in 1980 or so.

The acting? Oh, the acting is competent enough. I mean, this is sci-fi, so you can overlook the Shakespearean scenery-chewing whenever an old human guy talks about Our Great Heritage. Everyone even manages to act with bits of string dangling from their noses, because that’s what someone in props decided the breathing masks ought to look like.

Anyone can make a crappy movie by putting crappy actors in it. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Start with an award-winning screenplay; hire Tom Cruise, Keanu Reeves and Ethan Hawke; drop them into the mix, and watch them work their magic. What impresses about Battlefield Earth is that they’ve made a film where everything else is awful, but the acting’s not bad.

Let’s talk plot.

Again, this is sci-fi, so we’re not expecting perfection, but a little attention to plausibility would have been appreciated. OK, so mankind was enslaved by an alien race who wiped out all our defenses in just seven minutes, it’s now the year 3000, and the remaining men and women live as scattered nomadic tribes in a post-apocalyptic wilderness. I can buy that. What I can’t buy is an alien race advanced enough to have teleportation technology, who still communicate by carving their messages into cast metal plates.

These aliens are smart enough to travel across intergalactic space—but dumb enough to give a spaceship to a bunch of humans who have already tried to escape several times, set them down in the middle of nowhere, and leave them alone for two weeks to mine gold. They have advanced surveying sensors which can locate gold seams in the unpromising geology of North America, and they know all about our history, but somehow they missed the fact that Fort Knox was sitting there filled with gold the whole time—oh, and the dying human guards conveniently left all the safe doors open too.

The humans find a military flight simulator that’s still in perfect working order after a thousand years, and the electricity’s still on too. Yeah, right. The non-literate humans use the flight simulator to learn how to fly a Harrier jump jet in combat conditions, in only seven days. Mmm-hmm. And then they find an entire fleet of armed and working Harrier jets, also totally undamaged by an alien invasion followed by a thousand years of neglect.

A giant glass habitation dome has a bomb detonated on its framework. Every single pane of glass shatters, yet somehow all the shards stay in place. Then a hero flies a hoverplane into it, and the entire thing explodes. Ohh-kay.

I’m not trying to be picky, I just really see a few minor implausibilities. Well, let’s be honest, huge gaping plot holes. It is, as more charitable reviewers have said, “a little unbelievable“, like a 50s sci-fi B-movie is a little unbelievable. Unfortunately, L.Ron wrote the book in the 1980s, and it’s a safe bet that Travolta did his best to make sure the great man’s masterpiece was translated to the movie screen with plot intact.

But all that aside… Is it worse than Xanadu? Well, yes and no. Xanadu has plenty of moments where I found myself cringeing with embarassment for everyone on the screen. However, Battlefield Earth impresses with its constant level of awfulness. It avoids being bad in all the easy ways, yet sustains a steady wretchedness for almost two hours. It’s an amazing achievement, and I wish the MST3K team were still around to give it the review it really deserves.

Battlefield Earth vs Xanadu

The SciFi Channel is showing Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 starring John Travolta, and the ReplayTV is recording it. Normally I don’t watch TV-broadcast movies, but in this case I’m prepared to make an exception, because the only reason I want to watch Battlefield Earth is to see if it’s truly as awful as almost every single reviewer says it is.

If you believe IMDB, Battlefield Earth rates 2.4 out of 10. The worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life is Xanadu, and the IMDB voters give that 4.3 out of 10.

Xanadu is a musical about Greek gods returning to California and opening a magical disco roller rink. It has a lead actor who cannot even begin to act, for whom this was his finest hour. It has special effects which would have be charming if they were filmed in Super-8 by Mike Jittlov, but are just jarringly cheap and unconvincing in something that was supposed to be a major motion picture. It is so awful it make me cringe with embarrassment for the people who appeared in it; it forever soiled my enjoyment of a couple of perfectly good ELO songs.

So, can Battlefield Earth be significantly more awful than that? I’m very skeptical. I will, of course, post an update when I get around to watching it.

Ratchet and Crack

I went a while without posting anything significant, because I’ve been busy with various things…

First was the PC building project. I’m still tweaking and adding stuff; at the weekend I got S.M.A.R.T. support installed, so the hard drive will monitor its status and the number of underlying errors it finds and corrects. When I log in, I’ll get a summary of the latest weekly report. The idea is that if the hard drive is about to fail, I’ll have plenty of warning and time to get a replacement hard drive and move the data across. I’m not planning any significant backup scheme, as after all I have the CDs as backup for all the MP3s. (No RIAA subpoena needed here, thanks.)

Another big chunk of my time has been spent playing Ratchet and Clank. It’s a gorgeous confection of a game: challenging enough in places to be almost frustrating, but not quite; and the rest of the time it’s a real joy to play. It uses the same game engine as Jak and Daxter, which allows for very detailed 3D worlds and open-ended exploration, with no significant load times.

One thing that makes the game fun is the incredible array of gadgets and weapons at your disposal. As you progress you can buy more and more hardware, from everyday mine launchers and blasters to the more exotic remote guided rocket and taunter. (The latter beams irritating sounds at enemies, taunting them into running straight for you.) Later on you get my favorite weapons—the suck cannon, which sucks small enemies into it and lets you shoot them as missiles; and the morph-o-ray, which turns your assailants into harmless farmyard chickens. You can even use both, sucking up the chickens to fire later…

Review: Call of Cthulhu (d20) from Wizards of the Coast

Call of Cthulhu is one of those games that I always wanted to play or GM, but it never seemed like the right time. Either it was out of print, or just going out of print, or about to be revamped for a new version… Well, a single copy of d20 CoC was in Pandemonium yesterday. I picked it up with some trepidation…

This version of Call of Cthulhu is the latest d20 role-playing game rulebook from Wizards of the Coast.

Reading through it, the advantages of a universal system became apparent to me—knowing D&D 3E, I could skim-read through most of the first section and just note the differences.

The design and layout is up to the high standards of D&D 3E, though the artwork is more subdued and the ruled lines are lost. The end result is effortlessly readable. Perhaps it’s my imagination or the effect of prior familiarity, but the combat rules seem to be more clearly set out than in the PHB.

The book organization is clear and logical. Character creation, skills and feats are followed by a chapter on sanity, the major change to game mechanics from those of D&D. An interesting touch is that the list of feats include some psychic feats resembling psionics. The stronger psychic feats have an associated sanity cost, of course. Notes explain how the treatment and understanding of mental illness has varied through the last century, which is a nice touch.

An interesting aspect of d20 Call of Cthulhu is that it doesn’t use character classes. Or rather, there are some character classes in the rules, but they’re just archetypes you can use to start off your character if you want. You absolutely don’t have to have a character class. This should shut up the people who have whined that they can’t use d20 because character classes are a stupid idea…

The equipment section begins with generic firearms rules, then presents optional detail that will probably delight most firearms fetishists—including a dispassionate description of US firearms laws as they have developed over the last hundred years. The weapon tables are comprehensive—those who don’t feel the need for fifteen specific named varieties of shotgun can skip right on to the chapter on magic.

Unlike the wizards and sorcerors of D&D, the hapless investigators of Call of Cthulhu are foolish dabblers in arcane rituals they do not fully understand. Successful spell use is usually associated with temporary stat drain or sanity loss as the strange energies course through their bodies. More powerful spells may lead to permanent stat or sanity loss.

The creatures section presents a few classics of the horror genre, as well as a few Lovecraftian horrors, cultists, and aliens. A later Deities section serves up the False Gods and Elder Gods.

That leaves the setting, of course. One thing I find interesting is that d20 Call of Cthulhu, like d20 D&D, is still somewhat generic. This new CoC has information covering the late 19th Century to the present day, and is adaptable to any kind of setting that involves secrets, conspiracies, hidden dangers, and the paranormal or supernatural. You could easily use d20 CoC to run a campaign based on “The X-Files”, “UFO”, “Dr Who”, maybe even “Buckaroo Banzai”. The book takes a whirlwind tour through the 20th Century, suggesting historical periods and how they might fit with specific horror genres and subgenres; references are made to appropriate movies.

If you like your Cthulhu pure, you’ll probably want to wait until Chaosium produce the inevitable sequence of supplements, which will apparently stick quite closely to the authentic Lovecraft feel. Personally, I’m more intrigued by the idea of a campaign with the feel of “pi” (one of the cited movies).

The book is rounded out with some crossover and conversion material. A list of suggested sanity effects allows you to throw D&D monster manual horrors at your Investigators, and there are suggestions on adding a touch of paranoid Lovecraftian horror to your D&D games. (Gee, like I don’t already do that.) Oh yeah, there’s also a quick conversion guide for those who have Chaosium CoC material they want to move to d20, and a reading list for those who don’t already have lots of twisted ideas for tormenting players.

The only major thing the book seems to lack is a pronounciation guide. Perhaps that’s a safety feature?

In summary: An excellent addition to the d20 game stable. The quality and presentation are excellent, and at first read the accuracy seems good. The system is flexible, and the rulebook provides everything you need—no D&D rulebooks required. By far the best d20 book I’ve seen since the D&D core rules.