A definitive list of things that are wrong with Zatoichi

A definitive list of things that are wrong with Zatoichi

• At no point does the protagonist carve a Z in someone’s torso. There are a lot of two-slice shots, but never the elusive three.
  

Great Words In Science Number Two: Winding (number)

Great Words In Science Number Two: Winding (number)

A lot of people’s view of topology stops short at “a cup of coffee is a doughnut”, and that’s a perfect place to stop, because it seems like nonsense/obvious to pretty much everyone. The people that start asking about why, if we have some magic substance that you can transform between one thing and another, you can’t stick holes in it, are often treated as not getting it. They are the people to watch.

This is most of science - the twin questions “How is this like that?” and “How are this and that different?” Super extra hard science may involve three things.

An visual way of looking at it is that every space is viewable as a table(a plane) with some or none spikes sticking out of it. A loop of yarn (a path) can be threaded around on the table, and you can move it around as you want, but if you can’t lift it off the table, you can’t change a loop that goes around a spike once to one that goes around it twice.

This is topology’s refinement/reversal of the questions - is thing1 the same as thing2 in the same way as thing3 is the same as thing4 Vs if these things are the same, how many ways can we write the rules (”You can’t lift the thread from the table” = “You can’t push holes in the mathematical playdough”)?

The winding number is just what it says, the number of times that a loop winds around a spike, the irreducible part. The city I walk around in is a big table with hundreds of spikes. Through habit, there must be buildings around which my life has a winding number in the thousands.

A Weekend Out

A Weekend Out

Tokyo Story

The 50s Tokyo = 30s America theme extends to the pastoral music, all strings and harps. I hadn’t thought about the harp as such a classic “domestic bliss” signifier, but that it is.

Lost in Translation

Bill Murray’s character seems resigned to the fact that he’s in his version of hell, but it’s his choice that put him in a position where he’s surrounded by people who have no interest in his interest. Scarlett Johansson is there through not making choices.

American Splendor

A straightforward indie romance, disguised as a biopic. Paul Giamatti sets up a character within five minutes of scowling and slouching, and spends the rest of the time shading the details in. Repeat for the other characters. If you still respect misery, this is a film you will love.

Paycheck

On Paycheck

A Mighty Wind

People talking up Eugene Levy’s eye-popping twitchy role in this amaze me, but Catherine O’Hara will break your heart, and the rest of the film is either funny or touching.

Peter Pan

Maybe not an innovative movie, but an absolutely pitch-perfect one. The shot near the start where the aunt’s comforting hand on Wendy’s shoulder looks like the aged claw of death is worth the price of admission, and the rest of the film lives up to it.

Big Fish

The attitude towards our hero’s romantic rival reveals a very un-Burton lack of imagination, one that fills the movie with lukewarm water, and lets it set out two morals at once: Stories make life interesting, AND Life is pretty interesting. Neither of them are evident in the movie.

Cold Mountain

Giovanni Ribisi and Jack White look like they might have actually paid money to play southern hicks during the Civil War. But eventually the run of wacky guest stars falters, and we have to get back to the unconvincing love.

Love Actually

A triumph of craft over art, but God what a triumph. The dialogue is sharp (and pleasantly sweary), the acting consistently great, and the bits where the knife goes in are the more keenly felt because of the goodwill all around. By the time the ending shots start hammering your buttons like International Track and Field, you might well not mind at all.

On Paycheck

On Paycheck

• Paycheck exists entirely in ActionMovieWorld, where software engineers have martial arts training as part of their job, and CEOs pack guns.

• It’s a little unsettling to watch Paul Giamatti in this directly after seeing him inhabit Harvey Pekar in American Splendor. Not because the characters are so different - Shorty is the same kind of schlub except with wildly varying facial hair - but the immediate impression is “What’s Harvey Pekar doing in this film?”
• Early on, it becomes clear that the musings on the nature of fate in the source material have been converted into an excuse for the total lack of suspense in the modern action film.
• After this realisation, it’s a lot easier to enjoy the film as a series of puzzles, and try to guess the answer before it appears.
• Following on from the spate of videogame movies, it’s nice to see a movie that appears to be based on one of the old LucasArts adventure games.
• It’s on the whole easier on everyone for Ben Affleck to be told that he has fallen in love with someone than to actually see him incomprehend his way in.
• Chase locations that incorporate elements blatantly stuck there for the chase: good. Chase locations that are empty except for those elements: bad.
• John Woo - still bringing the doves.

I hope

I hope Magnus is being straight-up in professing joy about Paul W.S. Anderson, but whether or not, there’s an angle worth noting here. Before Aliens Vs. Predator was a film (but after it was a comic and a fan-joke) it was a video game. And Paul Anderson’s Resident Evil is one of the only two video game movies to be as entertaining as the video game that spawned them.

This is, in fairness, partly due to the the fact that the original game made a brilliant virtue of necessity by treating the PlayStation loading times as a source of constant! terror! as every transition between two different prerendered scenes became a slowly opening door. Cheap scares, but cheap scares that still work as well as they did in Roger Corman’s The Pit and The Pendulum. Survival Horror games of this sort should translate fairly directly into horror films, due to their commitment to scare.

Other video games essentially have a goal of triumph of some kind, which is entirely untranslatable to the screen: it isn’t you up there, it’s some actor. The traditional example here is “Raiding tombs fun, watching Angelina Jolie raid tombs no fun”, but this lets that trainwreck of a film off far too lightly.

This also only half explains the genius of Paul Anderson. Fighting games are an obvious exception to the above rule: we don’t have to feel involvement with the fighters in order to enjoy people beating the crap out of each other. But the right balance between laying out the labyrinthine plots and sending them up is hard to get. Double Dragon and Street Fighter both screwed up differently in 1994, and then a year later Mortal Kombat hit exactly the right note, thanks to the direction of, er, Paul W.S. Anderson. So, it’s clearly vital that he directs all video game adaptations ever. Someone should tell the producers of next years’ Alone In The Dark, Resident Evil: Apocalpyse, Crazy Taxi, Deus Ex and 2005’s Spy Hunter and Bloodrayne.

The blessed teeny

The blessed teeny brings to out attention that science has finally caught up to the Simpsons, with the creation of Tomacco (with potentially fatal results!).

(The link also bring up one of the strengths/weaknesses of the Internet: references to news stories can spread around the world before the source material can switch up from horrifically “wacky”)

Ed note: Don’t believe everything you see in print!

Andrew note: th-that’s my point! Also, let’s see your link, then.

New robots can perform somersaults, complex martial arts moves.

New robots can perform somersaults, complex martial arts moves.

“There are challenges in terms of mechanics still, but the biggest gap would be in intelligence,” he told New Scientist. “One of the key things we are looking at now is developmental robotics, where a robot learns.”

So, where better to turn than monkeys?

Today, technology has taken the first uncertain steps towards mankind’s brightest dream: the Powerpuff Girls movie. I feel privileged to be alive.

I saw Insomnia recently

I saw Insomnia recently on DVD, and it’s a well-made film that manages to quieten both Robin Williams and Al Pacino. The Christopher Nolan connection becomes obvious after you’re told about it: To Pacino’s insomniac detective, awake for days on end in Alaska, every scene is like the segment of Memento that starts with Leonard running, uncertain as to whether he’s chasing or being chased. And they both feature a moment where our bewildered hero feels solid ground beneath his feet for a second and strikes out to make a difference, trusting to… something.

One the highlights is a car-ride near the end, when Pacino is completely losing it, everything blurring and snapping. It reminded me of Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem, a horror/adventure game on the Gamecube. Rubbish colonated title aside, it’s a distinct improvement on the usual Resident Evil cobblers: The story is proper Cthulhoid monsters from before time, and is told via a series of flashes back through time, which both provides varied locales and reduces the incentive towards ammo-hoarding safe gameplay. Besides the health gauge and ammo, you also have to keep an eye on a magic meter, and your overall sanity. The last one is the real fun, and it’s arguably worth playing the game with as little sanity as plausible to watch the effects that happen. Sudden appearance of monsters, impossible spatial anomalies, and at one point the “end of demo” screen. Like in Insomnia, they only distract you for a second, but they slightly derange for longer. For long enough.

The British Film Industry

The British Film Industry (aka Richard Curtis) has been doing pretty well by knocking out “Hugh Grant vs a Pretty American” films for ten years now. The new one, Love Actually, looks a bit different, partly due to the decision to do without the big American co-star (Laura Linney being a poor substitute starwise for Andie MacDowell, Julia Roberts or Renée Zellweger, though possibly a better actress).

The filmmakers seem over-anxious to assure us that this is still Best of British/Those Wacky Limeys, to the point that the first 30 seconds of the trailer are clips from Four Weddings, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’ Diary. The cast is equally overegged: the new (Keira Knightley), the old (Bill Nighy), and a lot of the usual suspects (Thompson, Firth, Rickman and of course Atkinson). And they’ve all got equal billing in what’s worryingly subtitled “The Ultimate Romantic Comedy”. You will like it. You will!

The annoying thing is, you probably will. Everyone involved seems to be doing what they do best, and five seconds at the end with Hugh Grant indicate he can still just make Funny out of nothing. Like some sort of actor or something.

(it’s not clear whether the name change to Love Actually Is All Around is “remember the good times” gone mad, or just a practical joke played on the IMDB).

I don’t think the Star Wars drought

I don’t think the Star Wars drought (presumably dating from Jedi Knight, the high-water mark for FPSs before Half-Life), lasted quite as long as Magnus does. The 2001 PS2 game Starfighter was a fine space fighter game, in the tradition of their older X-Wing and Tie Fighter series, with control simplified for console use.

It does face the question of what makes it a Star Wars game as such. There’s no cameo from any character from the films. This is on the whole a good thing - the books and comics are already slicing the main players’ lives up into infinitely thin strips of time to have wacky adventures in. Even Kyle Katarn, star of Jedi Knight, got “fleshed out” (mechanically recovered) in a trio of graphic novels.

There’s also no lightsabers (fair enough, they’re in space) or force powers (though they get tacked on for 2002’s Jedi Starfighter). But a few minutes’ play suggests that the most essential element of the universe is the sounds. The noise of laser fire in space is enough to convince you that this is a Star Wars game.

As was the case in Jedi Knight: Seeing Stormtroopers and shooting them up is fine, but to cut them down with a lightsaber that sounds right, and then take their gun and hear it fire is the real spine tingling moment. That, and discovering that the damn things really can’t shoot straight.