It’s like something from the Hollywood movie version of Photoshop. i.e. Un-frickin’-believably awesome.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIFCV2spKtg[/youtube]
Are you as gobsmacked as me at how cool this is?
Category: General
Misspent Youth by Peter F. Hamilton (2002)
Long story short: Well loved genius IT/physics guy now grown old is selected first for super expensive (trillions of euros) rejuvenation treatment that leaves him biologically in his early to mid 20s. He shags everything he can, including his own son’s girlfriend. Hilarity, rubber bullets, and teargas ensue. I’m not going to worry about spoilers here because #1 this isn’t a new release and #2…
You know how some books are awesome? I mean really. You’re reading and you think “damn, I’m past half way, I wish this book could last longer.”
This? This is not one of those books. Not by a long shot. Even a few glasses of a decent Australian Semillon aren’t tempering my feelings for this fucking book.
It turns out that Hamilton is completely arse at writing dialogue.
I’ve read other novels of his from before and after this one was published that didn’t suck nearly as much, so I’m not sure exactly what’s going on here. And in fact, that makes it doubly disappointing as I’ve previously felt quite positive towards his work. The Greg Mandel trilogy, for instance, are all pretty good. I liked The Reality Dysfunction, The Neutronium Alchemist, and The Naked God too. And Fallen Dragon is really good (for the genre).
As well as the simply apalling dialog there’s the question of all the dirty sex. It sucks. When I see this kind of excessive boring sex in a novel I can’t help but think that the author was just jonesing for some ass that night. Why didn’t the editor sort it out to save my suffering?
So what went wrong here? I don’t know, but it really does feel like it wasn’t edited. If that’s the case, well it didn’t work for Anne Rice, and it sure hasn’t worked for Hamilton.
Thank jebus that it’s relatively short at just 350ish pages.
There are some really great ideas, but the execution is so bad you really shouldn’t bother.
Die Hard 4.0 (2007)
If you’ve heard what I’ve heard, then you’ve heard that this movie is complete shit. You’ve heard wrong.
It’s not shit, it’s the shit.
Sure, the technical stuff is all simplified to be more movie friendly, and some of it is just complete hooey – for instance, the cell network is down, so the kid hacks the phone to use a satellite network instead. Easy, I do that all the time. No, wait.
(Let’s not forget that even in a movie as techno-fantasy as The Matrix, Trinity used nmap when she hacked a network – P.S. how cool was that? Really cool, that’s how cool. Oh, you didn’t notice? Never mind.)
But here’s the thing: this is the best action movie I’ve seen all year and maybe the best Die Hard movie evaaaaar.
The opening action sequence was awesome, automatic weapons in small spaces are scary, and they do a fairly good job of showing the panicked scrabbling desperation of our protagonists as they frantically try get way from the guys with guns.
(What they didn’t show, and what movies never show, is that a bullet will go right through your fucking house. A fridge is not going to stop a bullet. A wall is not going to stop a bullet. Bits of plaster won’t chip off, you’ll just get guys on the other side of said wall falling over with smoking holes in their meat.)
We all know that McClane is going to get completely FUBAR, it’s one of the deals, his life is completely SNAFU… And so he does.
It doesn’t hurt that Cyril Raffaelli is one of the bad guys. He’s one of the coolest martial artist/stunt men in the world. Too bad he had to get minced.
Kevin Smith has a good role – as a dumptruck – no, I kid, he really challenges his acting chops this time by playing a fat fuck. I reckon he pulled it off. Guess he’s a method actor, huh? Too bad he didn’t get minced. (Would make a lot of sausages.) Nay, he still speaks in his acting voice (you know what I’m sayin’), but his role is actually pretty sweet. (Ignoring aforementioned photogenic version of hacking.)
What do I need to say about Bruce Willis? Not only is he a hot bald man, but he’s a complete bad-ass.
If you like a bit of action, you have to see this movie.
(Yeah, so I took the friendgirl to see this movie like two weeks ago, but for whatever reason – possibly I was movie-reviewed out after the festival – I never published to the site. Please forgive the Jackie Harvey’ing.)
Nothing says Modern like Computer … Tape.
From the back cover of The Müller-Fokker Effect, a book I read a long, long time ago, and happened to spot in a book store recently.
Some days I’m all about the Bs.
I had a very B’ish afternoon out with OfficeGirl. Books at Hard to Find in Ponsonby, burgers at Burgerfuel, and finally beers and billiards at the Ponsonby Snooker Centre. (Ok, I confess we didn’t actually play any billiards, but ‘a couple of games of pool and a few games of 9’ doesn’t have so much as a single solitary little ‘B’.)
You know what else starts with B? That’s right: Beaten. It turns out that OfficeGirl is a shark.
It’s good fun hanging out with new friends. (Old friends are smelly. I’m talking about you, smelly old friends!)
Startrek Nemesis? More like… A Big Ol’ Pile of Crap, uh, Nemesis.
[flv:https://morganavery.nz/media/didijustsaythatoutloud.flv 320 240]
Don’t worry, you’re only losing your mind. You’ll hardly miss it.
Beware the mighty stache.
Ladies, don’t be afraid. That feeling in your cockles? That’s the pure animal magnetism being generated by my stache. Clinical studies are so far inconclusive on the long term effects of exposure to the stache, but early results indicate only a very slightly elevated risk of monsterism.
To me, now, you are but filth.
It was a weekend for cleaning the house, and generally getting a lot of little things done.
No dirty laundry though, my Chinese Laundry lady takes care of that for me. My hands smell of bleach and fake green apples, and are wrinkled from washing dishes. The walls and counter tops in my kitchen sparkle. (Or at least they would if I didn’t live in an old unrenovated flat with formica counter tops. So no sparkling, but they sure are clean.)
Last night I rebuilt the carburettor on the little scoot. It’s a very bad sign when you find a stinking mix of rusty water & petrol in the float bowl. I drained off most of the petrol in the bottom of the tank, but on reassembling the bike today it didn’t start. I fear the petrol has become contaminated. I’ll have to drain out and completely clean the tank, and probably dismantle the carburettor again. I enjoy doing mechanical work, but it’s messy and smelly, and I have both plenty of cash and far better things to do with my time so perhaps at some point this week I’ll just decide the Scootling guys can do it for me and give them a call.
It’s a fun little bike, perfect for my commute. Though I know I should be walking, after all I did take this flat – which, I must say, doesn’t entirely agree with my aesthetic sensibilities – just so I could be nice and close to the office.
I was offered a 1986 Honda VFR700F, in slightly better condition, but otherwise just like the one I owned 7 or 8 years ago – so from well before the disaster – it was very tempting, in fact so tempting that if I had anything even remotely resembling good parking, I would have gone for it. I loved that bike, it was a monster in carefully constructed red, white & blue sheep’s clothing.
The only bike I ever felt comfortable enough on to break the double ton. Man, now that’ll make your hands shake. So much fun.
Perhaps best kept for those few years in your late teens and early twenties when you have no brain in your head, when you think you’re fully grown but are utterly wrong. Those heady bullet-proof days. The days for driving too fast, drinking too much, and shagging so many people they all just turn into a fast whirling blur of half-remembered faces with long forgotten names.
And then you hit about 25, your brain finishes maturing, and you realise that contrary to appearances, you were still a child.
I just don’t quite know how I managed to pull off some of that shit and live.
A few years later, I see people, of varying ages, who still indulge some of these behaviours, and I just feel sorry for them. (I’m sure everyone knows a friend who likes to speed just a little too much? Or who always drinks half a dozen more beers than everyone else? Or who is a filthy slut with a rotting crotch?)
Still, I think it would be nice to be the child I was at that time, just for a while. But how do you avoid getting lost?
So tonight, when I’ve cleaned the stove, and vacuumed the carpets, perhaps I’ll have a glass of nice scotch, and maybe a bowl of something special, and remember how great some of those times were, and how glad I am that they are, except for the odd crazy and welcome weekend, in the past.
You’re welcome to join me in reminiscing. And as this took an unexpected turn, and became rather more of a stream-of-consciousness rant than I intended, you’re equally welcome to tell me that I’m completely off base, that it’s not possible to drive too fast, or drink too much, or sleep around like a dirty whore, uh, too much, and perhaps you could even imply that perhaps I’ve been inhaling cleaning product and petrol fumes all day and it’s affected my reasoning?
The Simpsons Movie (2007)
Now with added yellow penis! (How was that for a magical cinematic moment? Pretty good, I thought.)
Very much like a really good episode on TV but longer and … wider.
I’m sure you’ve already seen it, So let’s cut this sho-
Manufacturing Dissent (2007)
Everyone but the most irrational frothing-at-the-mouth Michael Moore fanboy already thinks that he’s a bit of a tool. This documentary goes to great lengths to illustrate just how gigantic his toolhood really is.
When you get into these spin vs. counter-spin fights, it very quickly gets difficult to tell who still has any credibility, and to be honest I don’t know if the filmmakers here do have a great deal. Who are they? Who financed their movie? (“Mostly Canadian Financiers” doesn’t actually mean anything.) Do they really expect me to believe the claim that they intended to make a straight story about Moore, only to discover that everyone hated him? I for one certainly don’t believe this, I reckon they made the exact movie they planned to make – a concerted attack from beginning to end.
Perhaps it’s a cruel misjudgement of their character, perhaps they really are just pinkos who like Moore’s message but don’t like his methods. Perhaps they’re the good guys… It just seems to me that pretending that they were lefty fans when they started is such an incredibly useful marketing gimmick, it’s almost too good to be true.
It’s also kind of obvious, like the big fat credulous idiot archetype we all know and love spouting off some garbage on a C-grade made for TV alien-expose ‘documentary’ like “I’m the biggest skeptic you ever met, so believe me when I say it changed my life to be confronted by the Burhobbit while I was innocently videoing rods and UFOs and government black helicopters”, because that person isn’t skeptical at all, they only said they were so you’d believe their lies.
Everyone already knows that Moore uses the same tactics as the right-wingers, he’s the Fox News of the left. He’s full of spin and half truths and careful editing. But so what? He makes very interesting and entertaining documentaries.
The woman who kept trying to interview him – I guess she was Debbie Melnyk, producer/director/writer – was utterly useless. So completely wet I can completely understand why Moore didn’t want to speak with her. (However, I believe he knew something was up, and that is the real reason he didn’t speak with her. If I was in his position and knew someone was making 90 minutes of documentary attacking me, would I want to speak with them? It’s very hard to say. He knows as well as anyone that it doesn’t matter how well he presents himself in an interview, they can edit it until he looks like a complete creep.)
Some of the interview subjects were interesting and illuminating – I didn’t know about Moore’s career before he made Roger and Me, I still don’t care about it, but it was interesting to see him as a thin dude. (He chocked on the pounds fast.)
Not only is Michael Moore astonishingly fat, but he’s also a giant prick. So he lies and spins and takes quotes out of context? So what! Let’s not pretend that we didn’t already know this.
Do I recommend people watch this doco? If the choice is between this and the abovementioned dross about The Military-Industrial-Martian complex, watch this. If the choice is between this and Sicko, though, choose Sicko – it’s some seriously compelling filmmaking, the likes of which the makers of Manufacturing Dissent can only dream of making.
But whatever you watch, whoever it was made by, don’t be gulled. Not by either side of the argument, you credulous damned fool. No one tells the whole truth, they only tell the truth that makes them look good. Don’t forget this at any time.