Two thumbs up from Lorena Bobbit, I assume.

"Wet...t-shirt...wet...t-shirt..."

Jerry O'Connell's last words as porn producer Derrick Jones, Piranha 3D

Let me start with a bit of background, setting the scene as it were.  As previously mentioned, I have a very good friend named Laurie: she has a BSc and an MA, speaks four languages, is a knowledgeable fitness professional, an afficionado of Shakespearean theatre, an expert ballroom dancer, and a member of Mensa.  Regardless, she cheerfully decided that Piranha 3D was the must-see movie to start the Labour Day weekend.

For the most part I don't agree with the concept that something can be so bad that it's good, but to my astonishment Piranha 3D manages to go through some kind of black hole/looking glass/time warp and come out the other side as a horrific, disgusting, but entertaining film.  I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it "good", but it more than delivers on everything that it promises.

And what does it promise?

Blood and boobs in 3D.

P3D is only marginally acceptable as a topic for this blog, although there is a vast precedent of 50's and 60's semi-science fiction films based on the same basic premise.  A seismic disturbance opens a chasm between a lake in Arizona and a hidden subterranean lake located immediately below it.  This pocket of water has apparently been sealed since the Pleistocene Epoch, creating an Darwinian pressure cooker for the development of unspeakably savage prehistoric piranha - old school piranha, if you will - that are now free to seek fresh meat.

Nice boat shoes!

Meanwhile, up on the surface, Spring Break has started, and the lake is filling with hordes of drunken bikini-clad babes as a porn producer arrives to shoot his latest magnum opus...do I really need to explain any further?

I really have to give full credit to all the creative parties involved in this production. Piranha 3D is utterly without presumption or ego - they set out to make an over-the-top horror film with less fabric holding the plot together than in most of the bikinis used, a film whose only reason for existence is to show half-naked bodies and hungry aquatic horrors gnawing away at them, and they succeeded beyond any possible dream of success. 

No opportunity for three-dimensional excess is ignored in this film.  3D breasts, full monty 3D softcore lesbian underwater nudity*, 3D vomit - and then the killing starts.  Detached 3D eyeballs drift through the water, flesh is graphically stripped from 3D bones, faces are chewed off (and in one exceptional instance pulled off when a young woman's hair gets caught in a propellor) and endless gallons of blood cloud the waters of the lake**. 

And of course the capper, the top, the capo di tutti capi - the severed penis scene, wherein Jerry O'Connell's character is savaged by the fish and then dragged out of the water, horribly maimed, nothing but bones and sinew from the waist down.

"My penis..." he gasps.  "They took...my penis."

Cut to an underwater view as a severed - I hesitate to say dismembered - 3D penis drifts by on the current, only to be snapped up by a hungry piranha.

And then...burped out again.  What more could you ask of a movie-going experience?

- Sid

* A phrase I never thought I'd be able to use in my entire life, let alone in this blog.

** Let's hear it for the Internet - apparently it's actually about 400 gallons of blood.

Collected.

This week I was introduced to a serious science fiction and fantasy collector by a well-meaning mutual acquaintance.  Like me, he was initially introduced to the genre by his mother, but in his case he inherited a substantial library of classic material from the 30's and 40's in magazine and book form.  And like me, he has several thousand in his collection, but he peaks out at about twice the size of my library.

And how does he store his beloved collection, you ask?  Big plastic tubs.  He fills them up, "squirts in a little bug spray", and there they are.

Sigh...

In many ways, I love my little library.  It's been a source of entertainment and even education over the decades and it's expanded both my imagination and my horizons.  As books have worn out I've done my best to replace them with the same vintage, but in some cases I've ended up with reprints or different editions.

And that's never bothered me.  Books last pretty well, but they're still ephemera in a lot of ways.  Pages tear and yellow, covers fray at the edges, bindings fail, and I accept that as an unfortunate fact of life.  But at least my little collection has been read and enjoyed, rather than hidden away in some sort of miserly fashion.  It's the content which has always been important to me - the fantastic ideas, the startling concepts, the amazing fantasies - rather than the bits of paper that held the ink.

If through some fluke of fate I somehow ended up with the same collection as the one owned by the gentleman I met on Thursday, I think that my first impulse would be to start opening bins and reading - carefully, yes, but still turning pages and touching covers.  Why would anyone want a library that looked like this?

- Sid

Conception.

"You mind telling your subconscious to take it easy?"

- Ariadne, Inception

Although I didn't eat any dinners alone during my trip to Toronto, my afternoons were pretty much my own time. As such, I overcame my long-term aversion to Leonardo DiCaprio and trotted down to the Scotiabank Theatre on Richmond Street to see Inception.

The concept behind the film is simple enough - a professional thief is hired to insert something rather than steal it. The difference in this case is that rather than diamonds or money, the thief in question steals information from people's minds while they're asleep, and he and his team are attempting to place a foreign idea into someone's head, against the active and deadly resistance of the subject's subconscious mind.

It's difficult to avoid comparisons to the Matrix films, there's a similar combination of layered realities and surrealistic environments.  Inception also raises echoes of Memento, writer/director Christopher Nolan's staccato masterpiece from 2000.  But in many ways, Inception is more of a strange science fiction equivalent of Ocean's Eleven or The Italian Job, a sort of fast-talking hit-and-run heist flick set in REM space rather than Las Vegas.

As such, the actors faces some odd acting challenges, such as pretending to be fast asleep in the back of a speeding van while it dodges gunfire, flips over, and crashes through a guardrail backwards.  Regardless, everyone in the ensemble cast does a good job of dealing with the film's odd combination of shootouts and slumber.

His ability to feign sleep aside, Leonardo DiCaprio has matured well and is well en route to overcoming the legacy of his early pretty-boy days.  He gives the role of dreamthief Dom Cobb a sort of brooding, almost depressed desperation which is completely appropriate to the character.  Ellen Page is also growing nicely into her talent, although I have to think that in the long term she may face some issues.* 

Inception isn't perfect, and it doesn't hold up to stringent analysis in some areas, but overall I found it to be an entertaining and clever piece with some interesting concepts.  I was intensely impressed by the carefully ambiguous and beautifully timed final seconds of the movie. It's rare that a five second difference in an ending would completely alter if not ruin a film, but in this case the conclusion is timed to a razor fine line.

The unfortunate part is that since seeing the movie I've heard several people explaining - or trying to explain - the ending to someone. Sigh...it must be disappointing to Mr. Nolan that he took a break from Batman movies to make a smart little science fiction flick, and people don't get it.

My only real objection to the basic concept is that I doubt the ability of even the subconscious mind to populate a world with varied and unique projections of people and places. I think that we're very much creatures of repetition, pattern and cliché, and as such it's difficult for me to accept that anyone would be able to create a world of such detail and complexity that it would be accepted as real. Frankly, I suspect that most of us would end up with something more like those endlessly repeating backgrounds from Fred Flintstone's living room.

- Sid

* With the best will in the world regarding her abilities as an actress, Ellen Page is well below the height limit for success in Hollywood. Good luck with that, Ellen - if Tom Cruise can make it, so can you.