Posts Tagged ‘Review’

I’ve been lazy and didn’t do a post for last week’s Doctor Who, Flesh and Stone.  So this week I’m doing a read one (post) get two Doctor Who reviews.  I’ll come to The Vampires of Venice soon but first Flesh and Stone and then at the end the Crack and River Song.

Second parts haven’t been the new Who’s strongest stories.   Fortunately Flesh and Stone worked from start to finish.  The escape by jumping onto the crashed space ships gravity.  Having the Doctor use a gun as a tool to engineer the escape was a nice touch.

Amy’s spooky countdown was a nice play on the old countdown timer gimmick.  The solution to the Angel inside her was clever and created another problem.  That in turn set up the problem of her escaping from the angels and the crack with her eyes closed and walking like she can see.

The end of the episode caused complaints but nowhere near the same scale as the last episode.  Interesting that the it’s a kids show and must be pure and nice with nothing adult mob didn’t even come close to the you spoilt our episode mob for numbers of complaints.

The Doctor had some nice snappy dialogue.  He also got some nice monologues.  Really liked the lines about the plan not being ready because he’d not finished talking yet and about having to trust him because he doesn’t always tell the truth.  Personally I’d have left the nanight off his climatic comment about them having forgotten the gravity of the situation.

The Vampires of Venice:  This week we got fishy, venetian vampires.  I was hoping for the return of the haemovores from the Curse of Fenrick but it wasn’t to be.  Lots of fun plenty of running around, an explosion, a sword fight and action but also a good building tension through the story.

The location worked wonderfully.  The set dressing was beautiful and costumes.  And there were the vampire girls.  They made up for the lack of haemovores.  Will the buxom, vampire girls get complaints to the BBC?

Overall, although I enjoyed it, I’d say The Vampires of Venice frothy a bit light.

Both episodes gave us more about the cracks.  Flesh and Stone revealed the danger of the cracks as they destroy people so they never existed.  Is the crack following Amy?  The crack unwrites time.  The crack can be fed to slow it down.  The Vampires of Venice was more of a teaser than a revelation with the bits about silence.

Who is River Song?  Who did she kill?  I’m not convinced by the idea that she’s the Masters wife or that she killed the Doctor.  The hints have been too broad and too obvious.  If either of those were true I doubt Moffat would have given such big clues away already.  Unless its more complicated and there is another layer to unpeeled below the hint.  A twist or two yet to be revealed.  Will she be back this season or are all the hints setting up for the long term?

Review of Clash of the Titans in the style of the film.

Story OK but a bit like it was cobbled together for twitter.

Looked good. Nice costumes and props.

Mix of solid and good special effects.

Sound seemed a bit lacklustre.  Might have been the system in the cinema.

Gods were great.  So was Olympus.  Would love to have seen more of it.

Were the hunters written to be played by Omid Djalili and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson but they couldn’t get them: now that would be a double act I’d pay to see.

Nothing to say about Sam Worthington.

Felt like he needed to have screen time with someone to raise his game.  Needed to be a bit of a bigger hero even if he was being man rather than god. Ok so I did have something to say. Lol.

Could they cram a couple more cameos in?  The religious nutter could have been played by Russell Brand.  Andy Serkis as the Kraken?

Yeh “Unleash the Kraken”.

Soundtrack felt it had fallen off the back of a lorry (the one gladiators’ soundtrack was on just with the wailing woman turned down to 4 from 11).

Who was who? Most only got a name check when they died.

Not very epic. Needed more flesh. Maybe longer than 106 minutes.  More Greek legend for the SMS generation.

Despite all that enjoyed it as popcorn.

So one episode and he fixed it.  Fixed the big problem I had with the RTD Doctor Who.  RTD can do fun.  RTD can do pulp.  RTD can do adventure.  RTD’s plots sometimes relied on an unforshadowed solution at the end. Steven Moffat shows you don’t have to throw logic out the window to do it.  The Elevent Hour’s plot held together right up to the end. It did all the other things too.

And did it without the TARDIS or, by the end, a sonic screwdriver.

I enjoyed the twist on the new assistant, playing with the fandom with the Police Woman outfit and all the “she’s too young to be a copper” comments I’ve seen. The guest appearances were fun without getting in the way of a new Doctor and a new assistant. The new look TARDIS interior was also pretty cool.

Of course Doctor Who lives and dies by the actor playing the Doctor. Matt Smith has the role down nicely. He had me 54 minutes in with “Hello; I’m the Doctor.” I have admit my favourite Doctors are Peter Davison and Sylvester McCoy. I may not be the best person to ask.

One thing I wasn’t sure about is the new theme and title but they’ll probably grow on me.

Then there was the extended preview for the series. Tasty.

Just back from a night out with some friends for a meal and then on to see Solomon Kane at the Odeon in Liverpool 1.  Before I get to the film good to see that the Odeon seems to have improved since the last couple of times I’ve been there.  The cinema was clean and had enough staff.

Solomon Kane’s plot doesn’t stand out from other fantasy films.  Where it does stand out is setting and acting.  First the setting is unusual: early 17^th century England with a mix of witchcraft, sorcery and puritans.  It’s not history but it is a lot of pulp fun.  I know some reviews have been upset by anachronisms.  Again this is pulp fiction not historic re-enactment.  Stop worrying about the flag being wrong – most of the audience don’t know and would have needed an explanation of who the ships belonged to if they’d flown a flag other than the union jack.  That explanation would have been far more grating and story destroying than a flag being flown early.

Solomon Kane’s cinematography and design is of the mud, rain and dirt school previously used for films like Bother Hood of the Wolf and Plunkett & Macleane.  The CGI is competent and doesn’t distract by being overly flashy.

The action is built up of small scale skirmishes but then, that is more in fitting with the setting.   Anyone worrying about the flag ought to be even more worried about explaining away a major uprising during the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign rather than a little local difficulty.  Sticking with small skirmishes also allows the action to remain personal, focussed on Kane.

As with the plot the dialogue is clichéd peppered with biblical quotes which could have been disastrous.  The quality acting which delivers the lines straight without slipping into camp manages to turn lines like “Hold you dogs!” into pulp gold.  Kane’s West Country accent was also a joy – forget songs about combine harvesters it added yet more flavour to the film.

Solomon Kane isn’t going to be to everyone’s taste.  Reading some reviewes its pulp sensibilities clearly upset some: it play fast and loose with history in a way that upsets those obsessed with the colour of epaulettes on uniforms; it upsets Robert E Howard purists; it upsets big spectacle fantasy fans by being small and personal.

Personally I thought it was a fun film and I’ll be picking up on DVD  and hoping for a sequel.

Short and sweet tonight: I’ve added a page to the Vue section of impworks for the Vue Preview Colour Change Script.  Need to work on my snappy title writing skills.

A little python script for Vue Infinite to change the preview colours of all selected objects in one go.

Download: masssetpreviewcolor.zip (3KB)

Python Code – masssetpreviewcolor.py

I owe the creators of Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire a big thank you. A couple of months back I wrote a script for a 30 minute radio sit com more by accident than intention. I had an idea one morning and seven hours later I had 6,700 words written set in a generic fantasy world. I’d been struggling to work out what wasn’t right with it. Having watched the first episode of Krod Mandoon I’ve now got some pretty good ideas about what not to do.

First Terry Pratchett has produced so much comedy fantasy since 1983 that you’ve got to work hard at it. Its not like Pratchett, with 55 million books sold worldwide, is some sort of secret, niche author that a good chunk of your audience won’t have read. So a wizard who can’t do spells needs something to make them special if they won’t be unfavourably compared to Rincewind. The same goes for pretty much any cliche character you decide to use.

Anachronisms in fantasy settings also need to be clever – be it a character’s with 20th century attitudes or one suggesting going for counselling. Stoppard did it far better in that little known film Shakespeare in Love (Worldwide Gross $279,500,000).

And if you’re going to have a narrator that everyone in the scene can hear you’re going to have to push the boat out a bit and take a real run at the third wall and go way past Up Pompeii or Hustle to make it be funny – its been done before.

Which left humorous names, which tend to wear thin pretty fast (except some of the ones the Python team pulled off), the silly jokes – in the style of airplane (which made me laugh to be fair) – and the below the belt jokes – which I have no objection to but I prefer them to be funny. Still its a fantasy show so dressing your attractive female lead in leather, make their character just a little promiscuous, say Xena Warrior Princess a hundred times, and hope it will save your ratings (and make sure your male star will go down well with the ladies too).

So I’m going to be taking a red pen to my script and cutting or reworking anything that’s like that and a whole line of jokes about an ass I was thinking of adding are not getting anywhere near the script either.

Maybe it didn’t help that several review I read compared KM to Red Dwarf which builds an expectation. Red Dwarf wasn’t highly polished but it was funny. KM on the other hand was very polished but, at least as far as I was concerned, wasn’t very funny. However I’ll be fair to them the one hour format and it being the first episode might mean it wasn’t their best work. I’ll watch at least another couple of episodes of Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire. At worst they’ll give me some more pointers on what not to write.

I think I need a few extra hours in the day – if I did each of the following would probably be its own post…

Having finished a fascinating book on illegal gambling in the UK in the ’50s I started reading the first volume of Michael Palins’ diaries on Saturday and there a great read…

One unfortunate combination of words set an idea for a humorous, slightly strange Murder Mystery short story idea off and I wrote the first four pages yesterday…

That stopped me finishing the longer game writing project thats so close to having a complete first draft its bugging me…

So I was going to tackle it in the evening but I got an e-mail with an offer from Cornucopia3D for GeoControl2 which I’ve been tempted by for a while. So I ended up playing with that instead…

Plus Kim’s got a new novella out, Flesh and Shadows, with a very cheesy cover but I’ll probably give it a read because despite the cover its supposed to be Science Fiction not Mills and Boon…

Oh and having decided not to take out a subscription to the new version of Pyramid magazine because now its themed of the first six issues I’d only found three I was interested in. So inevitably the latest issue is one I wanted to pick up…

Then there’s the vue video tutorial from Quadspinner I want to write a review of for my Vue News Blog…

I’m just glad that The Wire (which is good but not as good as some of its exponents would like us to believe) is on three nights a week so I know when its finished its time to get some sleep or I don’t know how I’d know to end the day.

But maybe there was a twist of something in the Romulan Ale.

I was pretty happy with J.J. Abrams take on Mission Impossible so I had high hopes for the new Star Trek film. I think I can safely say it didn’t disappoint. The cast played the characters rather than doing impressions of the original actors playing the characters. The effects were impressive. There were lots of nice touches for the fans without making it impenetrable for anyone who hasn’t watched all the gazillian hours of TV series and films plus read the various technical manuals. The plot made sense, which is always a plus point, even though it involved time travel.

It’s late so I’m going to leave it at that. Excellent film.

Update: Dark Dwarf has posted his impressions of Star Trek.

Having finished The Translated Man I felt like reading some more fiction so I’ve just finished reading Kim’s latest novella Consort.
Skipping quickly past the rather cliched cover. Not that its badly done but it reminds me of racks of second hand romance books in charity shops. At least with an e-book its not there on the shelf for visitors to see and you can skip printing that page.

Its not obvious from the cover (which at least means its not a total cliche – no blood – no fangs) that this is a vampire story.
Clearly Kim has gotten past her worries about writing the naughtier bits of romantic fiction. I’ve not counted but I’d say half to three quarters of the pages could be rated on the Scoville scale. We’re not talking Bell peppers either more something in the Tabasco pepper to the Naga Jolokia. Yet somehow Kim manages to keep the plot moving too even in amongst all the main characters hormones. And she subverts her favourite tea related scene into something a bit different this time too.

Back in the 80s the Guardian ran a series of jokes about Amstrad launching weird devices combining different white goods the PC and Tea Maker. I’m wondering if Amazon won’t need to release a Kindle with Fire Extinguisher and integral Cold Shower if Kim keeps putting out work like this…