Shed 2a

I have a mate who's deadpan humour is equalled only by his astounding knowledge of
world history. For example, not many people know the level of detail of the jacobite rebellion, or the Wat Tyler revolt as he, and yet still work in IT (I told him, "forget IT, use your knowledge for good, young paduan, wear plaid and/or corduroy and represent
Fragfest college, Oxbridge on University Challenge", but he ignored me... wise, he is not).

Anyway, when you have a close interaction with people like this, you pick up certain traits and concepts. One of his favourite concepts is cultural osmosis, the idea that you pick up tidbits of information just from living your life in a given culture.
This information is not learnt in the traditional sense, but soaked up like a sponge, just by living. For example, we all have general knowledge, i.e. trivia that we can't seem to identify where we got it from, we just "know it", such as knowing the words to "Maybe Tomorrow" by Terry Bush, and knowing that it comes from the TV series / film, "The Littlest Hobo". You're not sure why you know this, you just do.

As part of my ongoing cultural osmosis, I learnt a very interesting fact today ( and this has been verified by http://www.amazingstoriesthatarealmostcertainlytruewethink.com (well, actually, Bill Bailey's 2001 show "Bewilderness")), and that is that in the 1960s, Buckingham Palace was moved (for "security" reasons) to behind the Authorised Personnel Only door in the little chef on the A1 near Leicester.
In it's place, stands a shed. But, not just any shed, no sir... but a shed with a
holographic cloaking device, allowing it to pass for the real Buck Palace.

MI6 know this shed only as "Shed 2a" (Shed 2b, of course, being the
real Buckingham palace). A further bit of information for those shed-trivia-hungry
blog readers out there, is that the shed is really a Malmesbury 400GL with optional twin gabling.

This will probably stay with me for life. I hope it does for you as well.

Viruses, closed systems and Bill Bailey.

Well, it's been a while since I last posted, and for that I apologise whole-heartedly, but it's been a bit hectic at home. To say that for the last couple of weeks it's been like a plague-pit in the household would be an understatement. I suppose it's the problem of viral / bacterial infection(s) and closed systems, really. Kids go to nursery / mums and tots group, pick up god knows what, the office has air conditioning and the worse feng shui I can possibly imagine ;-) I think you get the picture.

Anyway, back to the posting. I'm a big fan of most stand-up comedy (with the exception of Jimmy Carr!), my faves being Eddie Izzard and Peter Kay, although I'm partial to Lee Evans and Jack Dee as well. One comic which I never really got into, although I thought he is ace in Buzzcocks, is Bill Bailey. However, all that changed recently with the purchasement of his 1996 Bloomsbury Theatre show on DVD,
Cosmic Jam. What an astonishingly funny show, a combination of "rock opera" ("Insect Nation" : investigating what life would be like if insects ruled the world),
and hilarious cockney music / rock fest (yes, really...). It's not often that I say this, but it was hilarious. It also gave him a great forum for showcasing his cracking skills with both the guitar and the piano, didn't actually realise just how
good he was at both instruments really. The DVD also has a bonus disc of a 2001 show ("Bewilderness"),which I'll watch asap. Highly recommended.....

The other thing I've finished watching, finally, is all five series of Angel. I don't mind saying that this is one american TV series I simply can't get enough of. True enough, there's some weak episodes, but that's going to happen with any long-ish running TV series (yes, even Torchwood... ;-)), but thankfully they're in the minority. The long running story arcs are brilliant scripted and executed (Joss Whedon has to take the credit here), it's gritty, dark, yet witty and it's far enough away from the Sunnydale teen-angst to make it amazingly watchable. I'm just sad that
there's only 5 series, and what's more... no more Charisma Carpenter as Cordelia.....

Nochnoi Dozor

Almost in an effort to prove that vampiric tendencies and the battle between good and evil isn't just confined to Sunnydale or Los Angeles, the acclaimed Russian director, Timur Bekmambetov released Night Watch, a movie adaptation of the russian novel of the same name by Sergey Lukyanenko, and starring, amongst others, the popular russian actor, Konstantin Khabensky.

It is the first in a trilogy, the second in the series released in russian cinemas in early 2006, called Day Watch. However, it has not yet been released in the UK.

The plot goes something like this. Two types of "other" (vampires / shape-shifters etc. etc.) exist, the "lights" and the "darks", and a delicate truce exists between them (and has done for a while, blah blah). This truce is maintained by both the "night watch" and the "day watch", kind of good and bad police forces each ensuring the other side obeys the rules of the truce. However, the most powerful "other" ever conceived is born in Moscow, causing a flurry of activity to try and "recruit" this boy over to which ever side he chooses.

The film follows the exploits of a single member of the "night watch" (i.e. the "lights") as he tries to protect the boy from the various vampires and shape shifters that exist everywhere (as they do in reality of course).

The plot itself is definitely the "see the outcome coming a mile off" kind, but that doesn't detract. It's an excellent film, and one of those foreign films, like Crouching tiger, hidden dragon and House of flying daggers before it, that is better watched (and i've seen both versions now) with subtitles rather than the english language dubbing (unless you can speak fluent Russian of course, but I can't). That's not to say the dubbing is bad, however, it isn't.

All in all, an excellent addition to the vampire DVD collection, one which, I might add, only adds weight to my theory of "increased vampire attractiveness" (which I blogged about earlier), in this film, vampires are definitely stylish.

Beyond Cyberspace (aka Hollywood's interpretation of Computing)

I would like to put it on record that I like The Lawnmower Man, a 1992 film starring Pierce Brosnan and Jeff Fahey. Supposedly based on an original Stephen King short story (although, Stephen King does not recognise this, since he deems it too far away from the original source), the film wasn't actually that bad. Okay, so it suffered from the "Hollywood" idea of computing, i.e. big flashing red and yellow login pages with enormous "ACCESS DENIED" images, but the story itself
did carry it somewhat.

Now, there are many words in the english language but, however, not one of them can truly convey the absolute feeling of despair while watching the sequel, Lawnmower Man II. I think it would be grossly flattering if I called the film an absolutely pile of
horse manure. This incarnation starred Matt Frewer (yes, of Max Headroom fame, and more recently, Eureka) as Jobe (the eponymous "Lawnmower Man"), and Patrick Bergin as the good Doctor Benjamin Trace.

This is the plot (in a nutshell... it almost seems like a waste of blog ASCII going on too much about it) : Set about a minute after Lawnmower Man I, Jobe is resurrected and (again) is improved by Virtual Reality (VR) to be an absolute genius again. Enter Dr Benjamin Trace who invents a pyramidal chip which can (somehow) enable access to any computer system.

The rest is mind-numbingly obvious, blah blah blah... access to all systems, blah blah blah.. The £2.99 I paid at Morrisons for the DVD is about £3 too much.

But, what does fascinate me (and I suppose more so since I work in IT) is the public "face" of computing from a Hollywood point of view. I've come up with the following requirements for whenever a computer system is shown on a blockbuster film, it's always made to these specifications :

1. Login screens have to be in red or yellow with the words "PLEASE LOGIN" in bright green letters.


2. Failed login attempts should be met with a bright-red "ACCESS DENIED" page, and always with an accompanying female voice repeating it.


3. Once access has been granted (usually at the last possible second), then navigation through the computers "memory" (this term is intentionally kept woolly) should be either by a 3D city-scape, or via geometric shapes which only fit together in one way, thereby unlocking the information in the "file" (again, term kept intentionally vague), or indeed via green random ASCII characters falling down the screen on a black background.

Anyone who's even vaguely knowledgeable about computers are usually sat there wondering... "where do I get this software from?".

I'd therefore like to maintain a list of all films have computers which follow these specifications.

Here's some to start us off :

• Lawnmower Man (I and II)


• Wargames (and all done via acoustic dial up modem as well, cool....)


• Jurassic Park (the classic line, young girl navigating a 3D cityscape trying to find the "file" she's after, quotes the classic line "This is UNIX... I know this!". Honestly, love, you'll have to tell me what flavour of UNIX you're used to!


• Swordfish (ha ha ha, 'nuff said.)


• Matrix (original, "Reloaded" / "Remixed" / "Rejuvenated" (or whatever the hell the sequel's are called. (yes, I do know that they're called "Reloaded" and "Revolutions", I was being facetious)). Yeah, right, Cypher, you can see that text floating down the screen and understand it can you... clever boy.

Any more examples of complete computer related hollywood idiocy?

Sos Fantomes II

Well, as promised, I've just finished watching Ghostbusters II. Okay, it's nowhere near as good as the first one, but i'd truly forgotten just how funny it is.
Again, the "guys", i.e. Bill Murray, Dan Ackroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson, are
in fine form, with some excellent humour injected by the supplementary cast, i.e.
Sigourney Weaver, Rick Moranis and Annie Potts. Peter MacNicol (a.k.a. "him out of Ally McBeal") also makes an appearance as the rather bizarre Dr. Janosz Poha. The supreme casting of the film, though, must go to Wilhelm Von Homburg, a 6' 3" german boxer / actor (who, unfortunately, died in 2004) as Vigo the Carpathian, 15th century ruler of "Carpathia", a fictional place assumed to be in the Carpathian Mountains.

In some ways, it feels more of a Bill Murray vehicle than anything, but
that doesn't detract from the enjoyment. If you suspend your disbelief, and try and control the urge to vomit at the "far too easy to defeat the bad guy" finale, for the whole 104 minutes, then it's a fine bit of 80s nostalgia.

I suppose the whole "15th century tyrant from Carpathia" attracts the interest, to me, because of my interest in the whole vampire mythos. Vlad Tepes (a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler), Prince of Wallachia (now part of Romania), was, of course, one of the sources of the Dracula story.

Which led me thinking about bad guys in general. I'd love to see some "celebrity battles". We've already had Aliens vs. Predator (okay, a bit of a bobbins film, but one up to Predator (sort of)) and Freddie Vs. Jason (very tongue-in-cheek funny, and one up to Jason (sort of)), but what about
some classics we'd like to see? I'm therefore running a bit of a fun idea about
"bad guy battles".

Here are my suggestions with an opinionated probable outcome :

-> Gozer vs. Vigo

Gozer wins by a mile (Sumerian god vs. Carpathian magician, it's got to be one to Gozer here...)

-> Darth Vader vs. Magneto

Difficult one to call this, but it'd go for Vader. True, Magneto could affect the
machinery of Vader, but the force could enable vader to affect magneto even with that silly "i'll protect the wearer from psychic attack" hat.

-> The ghost girl (Samara) from The Ring vs. The ghost woman and boy (Kayako and Toshio) from The Grudge

You've got to go with Kayako and Toshio on this one, it's simply 2 to 1. Also, Samara has this unswerving ability to get trapped in wells all the time, which (I'm sorry to say) is simply not what a cool, rock hard ghost should let happen. I also get the impression that Samara simply hasn't made it into the 21st century yet, still relying on VHS to get her message across, come on Samara, what's wrong with DVD, or even better, a good MPEG that can be downloaded via P2P???

Any more "celebrity bad-guy scrap" ideas?

Die Geisterjager

People who either a) know me, or b) read this blog will know that I like cult tv and movies. On that front, have decided to re-watch some of the older films in my collection that, unfortunately, tend to get forgotten about in lieu of the more recent blockbusters.

Over the last few days, I've re-watched the Indiana Jones trilogy and the phenomenally good Ghostbusters, which i've just finished watching. Okay, by todays standards, some of the effects are a little dated, but it's still a cracking film. I've always been a big fan of Bill Murray, some of his films rate highly in most "funniest films"-type surveys, such as Groundhog Day (although, i'm not even going to mention Charlie's Angels).

It's probably Ghostbusters II tomorrow night, followed by (in no particular order), Blues Brothers and Time Bandits.

Wish me luck.

Silent Hill

Just watched the movie adaptation of Silent Hill, a Konami / Team Silent computer game, available on platforms, such as PC, Playstation and XBox.
It stars Radha Mitchell (the female lead in one of my favourite films, Pitch Black) and Sean Bean, and was directed by Christophe Gans.

The story concerns a family, who's adopted daughter sleepwalks and has nightmares of a place called Silent Hill. To cut a long story short, the daughter and mother end up (via a car accident) in the small town in West Virginia, decimated by coal fires thirty years prior, and long since evacuated. Although, of course, no such town exists in reality, in fact, most of the movie was filmed in Canada (Ontario, to be precise). The mother (and a female cop who also finds herself in the town) then heads out to rescue her the daughter from a bunch of witch-burning puritans, led by a fanatical leader, Christabella (wonderfully played by Alice Krige, she of star trek / borg queen fame).

To be honest, the movie (as is unfortunately the case with computer game adaptations) is far from the best film I've ever seen, but it's certainly not the worst. The effects (mostly physical effects, rather than CGI) are good, even very good in places, some of the scenes are quite eerie, whilst the acting from most of the cast certainly doesn't do them any injustice. It's let down, I suppose, by being a bit, how can I put it?, daft. Even the suspension of disbelief, in places, isn't enough to overcome certain problems, not least of which is believing how a small town police department would be able to keep the "truth" about the events leading up to the major fire from either the authorities and / or the media.

The ending (spoiler alert) lends itself to the "film with a twist ending" genre, in the same style Sixth Sense, or The Others, with all of the town being dead, stuck in a "limbo" of sorts, even the girl, mother and cop, although you don't realise this until the end when the two return "home".

All in all, (as per usual), it's worth the rental fee, and certainly won't be the worst movie you'll see this year.