House of a Hundred Dragons

(Contributed by Colin Campbell)

Well, that title may be a bit misleading. Actually maybe it should be called something like Basement of 100 Dragons, except it doesn't really sound all that great. How about the Dungeon of Dragons? Hmmm... That sounds a bit too familiar, I might have to get permission to use that from someone. Better not go in that direction. I often think of where I live as the Electric Cave. I picked that up somewhere in my reading. So what about the Electric Cave of Dragons? That sounds a bit too, ah, contrived or something. I looked it up on-line as well and there's quite a few references to Electric Cave and so that idea might have to be kiboshed as well. Now, a plethora is nice, but sounds a bit too snooty. Repository of Reptiles? Hmmm... no I don't think so.

Okay, let's just leave it as 'House of a Hundred Dragons or we'll get precisely nowhere. Now what's next? How 'bout a spiffy quote?

A collection is something that you don't realize you have until someone gives you the third one as a gift.

-me.

I suppose that will work.

I happened to buy my first two dragons many years ago, on the last day of the CNE (that stands for the Canadian National Exhibition for those not in the know) at one of the displays in the Arts and Crafts Building on the Exhibition grounds. They were on sale - discount dragons, as it were. And from that start a collection has grown.

So there's a hundred dragons in my living space. Well I say 100 dragons, and there are, but there are really more than that if you include all the dragon paraphernalia and oddments. So I have not only the standing dragons, but also pictures, post cards, books, a tattoo (yes I have a dragon tattoo as well, I carry it with me at all times), wine glasses, a tea set with cups and a tray, a cookie jar of all things, knife, sword cane, another wooden cane, incense burners, puzzles, et al. Many of these things have been sent or given to me over the years. And, yes, I bought a bunch of them, too.

My first two dragons

There are big dragons (big in the figurine world anyway), some a foot or so in height (or length), although I do have one wall mask that's just short of two feet; and I have many small dragons. The smallest, and not a pendant or anything (and yes I have a couple of those too), is only an inch or so big. (Those interested in metric conversions will have to do the math themselves). I even had a glass dragon made specifically for me by my sister-in-law Linda. Thank you so much.

Dragon wall  mask

They sit patiently on shelves, they adorn the walls, they peek out from on top of the fireplace, they amass on my chest of drawers, and they have even invaded the bathroom. They are of many colours and from many cultures; they appear fierce, cunning, proud, sensuous, powerful, and many fire the imagination ...and above all else they are wondrous and terrifying creatures to behold.

Dragon wall skull

Dragon battle

And how have I managed to get to reach the magic 100 dragons? Well, time helped. As you can tell I've been collecting off and on for years, but I was actually far short of having a hundred. I would like to also say that I haven't really been looking to add to the collection for the last couple of years and so I wasn't really looking. Well, kind of.

Water dragon

Dragon mirror

Carved wooden dragons

This latest frenzy of dragon acquisition had actually started with a recurrent thought. I had often thought that it would be nice to have for my 'collection' a scaled down model of one of those dragon costumes that you see in Chinese celebrations, the ones that have all the guys underneath, snaking their way through the crowds at festivals, accompanied with horns and fireworks. Very neat that. I actually thought it would be cool to have a full sized version of the costume but I haven't got the space or the financial resources to afford to buy one. My 'scaled down' idea first came to me many years ago, but I never saw a smaller version of the costume. Until recently.

Metal shelf dragon

I work as a bus driver in Richmond Hill, just north of Toronto. It has a very high Asian population. I mean that there are many people who live there who are of Asian descent, not that great numbers of them are in a drug-induced perceptually disorientated state of awareness, at least as far as I know. On this particular evening I had parked the bus in the large parking lot of a mall (it's okay, we're allowed to park there) and had gone across the road and into a large Chinese grocery store, The GooDY Mart, looking for rice bread (there's a story there too but this isn't the place for it) while I was on a short break. I didn't find anything remotely like I wanted in the baked goods section, but on one of the lighting fixtures over an open refrigeration unit I saw a golden dragon hanging, it was a dragon marionette.

Dragon marionette

I don't think I ever told you that I have a thing for marionettes as well. I even built one out of bits of flotsam and jetsam that I collected in the whirlpool below Niagara Falls. No foolin'. His name is Cyrino. I even have a Balinese shadow puppet, but that's another other different story. Sorry, I'm wandering again.

As I said, I couldn't hang around in the store for very long, I had to leave and head for the bus shelter at the corner of the major intersection where I was going to do a break relief for another driver (take over his bus while he had a chance to grab some lunch and relax for a half hour or so while I did part of his route). Oh, did I mention that this was just past Chinese New Year in February of this year (2011)? I don't know what the Chinese date for the year might be. I do know that it's the Year of the Golden Rabbit. So I saw a dragon marionette, actually several, used as store displays. I couldn't then stop to inquire about them.

I wasn't able to return to the corner, to the store, until the following week. Same situation as before, only this time I was hoping that all the dragons I had seen last week hadn't been either sold or stored away. I went in, looked, and there it was (or they were, but I had already fixated on one particular dragon). I actually took the thing off the display and after a bit of looking for someone to help me, and a comic moment trying to get the Chinese shelf stockers to understand what I wanted, they called over someone up the chain of command, a manager of some kind. We talked, he brought me and the dragon first to a large display of dragons (actually different from the one I was holding, and not as nice to my mind) and other Chinese New Years decorations, and then on to a cashier. When I asked what the price of the dragon was I was told $14 (during the week I had done a bit of investigation on-line and had seen ones there, again not as nice as the one I saw at The GooDY Mart, going for $27). Sold!

I was so pleased in my purchase I showed it to the driver whose break relief I was doing. He mentioned that he had once been into dragons, didn't have the space for them in his new place, asked if I might like to have them, maybe buy them. I said I'd be interested.

The next week, same corner, same break relief, same driver. When I took over his bus he didn't mention anything about the conversation that we'd had last time. I didn't push it. I figured that if he was interested in passing on his dragons, then fine, if not, if he had reconsidered, then that was fine as well. When I brought back the bus to the stop he got on and then asked me if I was still interested in his dragons. I said yes. He mentioned then that he also had something else that was kind of special. He also said that it wasn't really practical to bring all of them into work (we have different shifts and it would be difficult to meet and to put them in my car, also I think that he just wanted to see them and show them off for a last time) so could he bring them over to my place.

A couple of days later he brought two boxes over to my place and down into the, ah, dungeon. He put the first box on the table and opened it, removed a bunch of paper that was serving as packing material, and then unwrapped six figures: four dragons and two wizards. He then started opening and unwrapping the second box and it contained a dragon chess set (again something that I had long wanted, thought was cool, and didn't think I could see my way to affording). I gave this driver some money for the brood, a sum that I won't mention but seemed to satisfy him and that I thought made this a good deal for both concerned.

Dragon chess set

In the end I had to rearrange a bit of the collection to make room, that's how the new dragons ended up taking over the bathroom (with a couple of additions of similar pieces from my previous hoard). The dragon chess set I set up on my dresser. It's very cool.

In about a week I did a count of all the figures I had (and it wasn't always easy to keep track, some of the dragons are very elusive) and, voila, the magic one hundred was reached. The chess set alone has the 32 men (and women, don't forget the queens) and 4 corner dragons that hold up the glass board itself.

So I live with a bunch of dragons, a hundred or so of them. It's a peaceful enough coexistence, they seem to put up with all my idiosyncrasies, I put up with theirs. And to be honest, in spite of what I just related, I'm really not looking for any new acquisitions, but if something comes up, well...

- Colin

Really BIG paper towels, that is.

In order to further the eventual goal of putting something on my blog I gave several of my dragons a bath today ("I'm ready for my close up, Mr. DeMille."). I had a veritable dragon wash assembly line going. They are currently drying on paper towels on the table.

From a recent Colin Campbell e-mail

Is it just me, or does everyone get e-mails like this?

By way of explanation...my friend Colin collects dragons.  Sadly, not on the scale of the one reclining in the tub at the top of this posting, but his apartment has a definite draconic flavour in its decor due to the various scaley statuettes that he's found over the years.  Hey, Colin - I know that I tend to make gentle fun of your infrequent additions to your blog, but even so, maybe a piece on the joys of dragon ownership might be a good guest posting for here rather than there.  We'll talk.

- Sid 

Yes, I do the opening quote thing in e-mails, too.

"So the hours are pretty good then?" he resumed.
The Vogon stared down at him as sluggish thoughts moiled around in the murky depths.
"Yeah, but now that you come to mention it, most of the actual minutes are pretty lousy."

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy

I recently pulled my 1979 paperback copy of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy off the shelf to look up a quote from a Vogon guard for an e-mail to my friend Colin, and to my sharp amazement I realized that the apostrophe was missing from the title.  "Hitch Hiker's" is possessive on the spine, the back cover and the inside content, but somehow they screwed it up on the front!

But, let's be fair, it took me 32 years to notice...

- Sid 

In case some of you ARE psychotic bellybutton fans...

Sucker Punch manages to be simultaneously incoherent, woefully misguided and downright insulting.

Matthew Turner

ViewLondon

A great movie if you are a psychotic fan of Emily Browning's bellybutton.

Bob Grimm
Tucson Weekly

I feel I should get some kind of recognition for disliking Sucker Punch almost a full five months ahead of the rest of the world.  To be fair, I haven't seen it yet, but if I had doubts based on the trailers, the reviews that I've read strongly suggest that a full two hours is not going to improve my opinion. In fact, the reviews that I've read strongly suggest that science fiction now has its own version of Showgirls.

And, frankly, it doesn't look like that great a belly button.

- Sid 

We're definitely sorry for all the slash fiction.

I'm not Spock.
But if I'm not, who is? And if I'm not Spock, who am I?

Leonard Nimoy, I Am Not Spock

In an odd coincidence, this week saw the 80th birthdays of two of science fiction's best known faces:  William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. 

It's impossible to deny that it's been a difficult path for both of these actors: Star Trek may well be the most frightening cautionary tale in existence in regards to typecasting. No doubt every actor who is offered a part with the potential for the same degree of role identification must take a moment to wonder if they will suffer the same fate as the cast of Star Trek.  And over the years that fate, that astonishing identification with the roles of Kirk and Spock, has been a burden that both Shatner and Nimoy have struggled with, railed against, returned to, joked about, profited from, and, I think, ultimately accepted.

But let's have a science fiction moment here.  Let's imagine an alternate time line where Star Trek never happened.  Where would these two men be today?  Would William Shatner be performing King Lear as his swan song after over fifty years as a fixture on the Shakespearian stage at Stratford in Ontario?  Would Leonard Nimoy have pursued his interest in photography to the exclusion of his acting career?

If nothing else, Spock and Kirk gave Nimoy and Shatner an opportunity to leave a mark on our society that very few pop culture figures can match.  I think it's fair to say that, thanks to Star Trek, these two men have probably done more to popularize the exploration of space than all the NASA missions put together.

Bill, Leonard - on behalf of all of us, thank you, and, well, maybe we're all a bit sorry too. But still, thanks.

- Sid

P.S. I strongly recommend I Am Not Spock, Nimoy's 1977 autobiographical examination of his life before, during and after playing the role of Spock on television.  There's a sequel entitled I Am Spock which I didn't find to be as interesting, but feel free to read both.

Grunts.

The belief that one Marine was better than ten Slopes saw Marine squads fed in against known NVA platoons, platoons against companies, and on and on, until whole battalions found themselves pinned down and cut off.  That belief was undying, but the grunt was not, and the Corps came to be called by many the finest instrument ever devised for the killing of young Americans.

Michael Herr, Dispatches

I need you to be my little Marine. (To a 13-year old boy after the death of his father.)

Sergeant Nantz (Aaron Eckhart), Battle: LA

Everyone who knows me is fully aware that I have very simple and/or criteria for moviegoing:  aliens and explosions.* For the purposes of flexibility, elves and similar fantasy characters are considered to be equivalent to aliens. On that basis, the recent release of Battle: LA (aka Battle for Los Angeles, at least in the early previews) is an obvious gimme in terms of suitability, so off I went yesterday afternoon for a couple of hours of extra-terrestrials and fireworks.

Alas, nothing is ever that simple, and as always Plot rears its ugly head, demanding some discussion of the movie as a piece of unrealistic military propaganda.

Battle: LA is a war movie stripped to its basics: we are presented with a quick overview of a gallery of characters, all members of a squad of Marines, who are almost immediately thrust into combat with an implacable alien enemy.

In this case, the alien invaders literally come from nowhere: a meteor cloud is detected a mere four hours from impact from Earth, and the resulting coastal impacts are distinguished by deceleration, something that most meteors don't manage to pull off.  As this would suggest, they aren't actually meteors, so it's not a huge shock when it's revealed that these are really alien spacecraft staging a co-ordinated assault on planet Earth.

As the aliens emerge from the surf, they are revealed to match the standard alien invasion profile that we all know and love:  they're physically unattractive, completely merciless, have no interest in negotiating, and want our water.  Of course, as you'd expect, they're also worse shots than Imperial Stormtroopers or first generation Cylons, and are happy to leave important strategic targets virtually undefended.

Initially I had high hopes for the movie - there's a great scene where Aaron Eckhart, who plays a staff sergeant with combat experience, decoys an alien drone and destroys it single-handedly.  Upon his return to the bus being used by his squad to ferry civilians to safety, he is ashen-faced and shaking, a far cry from the standard sort of action hero one-liner followup to a life-threatening situation.  There's also a brief exchange between two of the Marines where one of them speculates that the enemy troops may be just as scared and confused as they are.

Unfortunately, these are isolated moments of realism and empathy in what quickly turns into a chest-thumping testament to the Marine mythos. Having succeeded in rescuing the civilians at the self-sacrificing cost of several of their own, the remnants of the squad leave the rescue copter to reconnoiter behind enemy lines in hopes of discovering the alien's aerial drone control center.  They succeed in finding the control center, which is astonishingly lightly defended considering that it's a crucial military target, and call in a laser-guided missile strike to disable the center and give the Air Force back control of the air. 

In an episode strongly reminiscent of a computer game challenge, the Marines must fight off the alien troops for two minutes while the missiles home in on the laser marker.  They then attack a massively superior force in a head-on assault, and drive off the presumably disheartened aliens as they retreat following the destruction of their control center.

The Marines then return to their base to receive kudos from their peers as the rest of the armed forces launch a massive assault to sweep the aliens back into the ocean. But, of course, rather than rest, the squad joins their tireless sergeant as he reloads his weapons in preparation to join the fight once again.

I have nothing but respect for people who have chosen to enter military service and risk their lives for their countries, but I think that when making that choice, they should be fully aware of the real possibilities of what that choice may cost them.  Battle: LA offers a virtually bloodless testament to the invulnerability of the Marines, but even more of a testament to the incompetence and inconsistency of their alien foe.  This movie shows that soldiers only die when they sacrifice themselves to save others, that the enemy is faceless, cowardly and stupid, and that the good guys will always win regardless of the odds facing them.

I would have loved this movie when I was sixteen. Sadly, I'm not sixteen anymore. 

- Sid

 * Anyone who knows me well knows that I also love romantic comedies but refuse to see them in commercial release because I usually end up crying at the end, soft-hearted fool for love that I am.  Frankly, it disturbs my amour propre to come out of a movie wiping tears from my eyes.

 

To be fair, she's a Star Wars fan.

Fun will now commence.

Seven of Nine, Star Trek: Voyager

The cruise portion of my 50th birthday trip is now booked, and on Saturday Laurie gave me a large glossy brochure detailing the various wonders available on the ship which will be moving us about the Mediterranean for seven days.

"We'll be travelling on Voyager," she said, and then gave me a strange look after my resulting burst of laughter.  (Let's not forget that Laurie has never watched very much television, let alone any of the Star Trek: Next Generation spinoffs from a few years back.)

A little investigation reveals that the United Federation of Planet's farthest flung explorer and the Royal Caribbean Cruise Line's floating hotel are very nearly the same length, with the USS Voyager measuring in at 1020 feet, and the Voyager of the Seas coming in at 1128 feet.  It's an interesting comparison, because very often it's difficult to get a sense of scale for the various starships, battle stations and orbital platforms that one sees in science fiction movies and television shows.  To be honest, I expected to discover that USS Voyager was considerably smaller than its aquatic namesake, and the information that they're the same length considerably alters my impression of the starship based on my actual experience of cruise ships.

Someone has already attempted to sort out the various questions of scale in science fiction - take a look at Jeff Russell's Starship Dimensions site for an impressive comparison of the various ships, shuttles and suits from over the years.  (Apparently there's a noteworthy difference between the observed size of the Imperial AT-ATs in The Empire Strike Back and the height listed by Lucasfilms.)

For myself, I've now got an entirely different expectation for the cruise:  I see Captain Janeway standing resolutely on the bridge as we dock at Cannes, Neelix manning the breakfast buffet, and, of course, there's the titillating prospect of bumping into Seven of Nine in the gym.  What more could a science fiction fan want?*

- Sid

* Actually, that's not as strange as it sounds.  (Okay, it's almost that strange.)  If your dream is to spend a few days in the Caribbean with some of your favourite Star Trek actors, your dream can come true.  Visit http://www.startrekcruise.com/ for more information.

 

Happy Birthday to...us? Me? It?

Today marks the 4th birthday of The Infinite Revolution.  Gosh, how times flies...

According to the stats provided by Google™, which apparently do not include anything before May of 2010 (lord knows why), TIR has enjoyed 6,842 page views over the last ten months. I wonder what explains the meteoric rise in interest which I seem to have experienced according to the chart on the Overview page?

Regardless, if I'm getting that many page views, I'd like some of you other visitors to leave a comment now and then!  It seems unfair to put all the pressure on Chris, Colin, Dorothy, and Laurie.  Step up to the plate, world!

- Sid

P.S.  Although, I do have to express my sincere gratitude to the four people listed above for their ongoing interest.  Thanks a lot to all of you.

 

The End of the World (as we know it.)

I’ll get trip insurance in case Europe collapses before we embark on our cruise. You never know.

- Laurie Smith

I'll be turning 50 this year, and to celebrate this milestone I've decided to take a three-week trip to Europe.  For part of the journey, I'll be joined by the tanned and toned Laurie Smith, who agreed to make a guest appearance provided that we do a cruise around the Mediterranean. In spite of some initial misgivings (I've had some negative cruise experiences, as some of you know) I looked over the options for ports of call and so forth, and now I'm on board, so to speak.

Ms. Smith is taking care of cruise arrangements, and when asked if I wanted trip insurance, I refused, on the basis that if I miss this trip, there will be far larger problems in my life than the cost of a week on the Med.  Her reply is the opening quote.

At this point in time, the theme of a post-apocalyptic world has been solidly established in our cultural matrix via novels, games, movies and comics.   We all know what it would be like, whether caused by a thermonuclear exchange or lack of gasoline: governments cease to exist, society falls apart, it's every man for himself, despair prevails, and eventually it's nothing but cannibalism, filed teeth, bad tattoos, odd bits of armour made out of car tires and spikes, and everyone gets mohawks.

Would they? Really? Why? Could there be a disaster on a such a scale that it would actual overwhelm our civilization's ability to repair itself? (Or at least to provide decent haircuts.)

Maybe yes, maybe no. We've had some oddly telling incidents in recent years. For example, I visited New Orleans a year after the hurricane blew through, and there were places in the city and along the coast, as above, that had an uneasy resemblance to sets from an after-the-war science fiction movie. Even today, over five years later, they're still cleaning up derelict houses in one of the best-known cities in the United States.*

The Russian city of Chernobyl is now a ghost town, and could easily be the poster child for anyone who wants to show how a city looks 30 years after The End. Haiti a year post-earthquake? People are still living amidst, and in some cases in, piles of rubble while agencies attempt to make any sort of headway in the process of cleanup, let alone rebuilding.

I realize that all these examples are isolated one-off events rather than disaster on a planetary scale, but that makes the slow recovery time even more noteworthy. These are pins in a map, surrounded by an entire planet's worth of options in terms of technology and helping hands, and yet the process has taken place at a snail's pace, or, in the case of Chernobyl, not at all. Now imagine a global catastrophe: big meteorite, nuclear war, rogue disease vector, whatever you like, I think we all have our favourites.

Personally, I see the global pandemic option as the most plausible.  Imagine a slightly mutated version of Ebola Zaire, airborne rather than transmitted through infected blood, a slow enough killer that victims have enough time to spread the contagion around the planet before starting to bleed out.  How would the world handle a crisis of that magnitude? 

Who knows? Maybe we'd make the unfortunate discovery that civilization, like any other artificial structure, falls apart when you get rid of enough of the foundations.

- Sid

* My reaction at the time was that something must have gone horribly wrong in the United States. Can you imagine a city having to rely on volunteer labour and church groups to rebuild itself during the Eisenhower or Kennedy eras?

 

Surprisingly, Amazon.com DOES have this one.

3 Seconds Before Explosion DVD (NTSC Region 1)
Three Seconds to Explosion connects Nikkatsu’s “mood action” yakuza gangster films of the 50’s and 60’s to the studio’s subsequent kinky 70’s “pink films,” and is a primer in the tough, super-cool world of “no borders” exploitation cinema Nikkatsu style.

- From the Diabolik DVD catalogue.

As a followup to my post on the Solomon Kane movie, I have just finished the online purchase of an All Regions DVD version of the film from a distributor in New Jersey. Actually, the term "distributor" might be insulting, I gather that the happy people at Diabolik DVD don't think of themselves in those sort of mainstream corporate terms. But, credit where credit is due, if you're looking for something that you KNOW Amazon.com would never stock in a million years, these guys probably have it. 

But what in the world is a "mood action" yakuza film?

- Sid

 

The Mark of Kane.

The whole thing started with one of those odd leaps for which the internet has become famous. You know, those The Carpenter and the Walrus moments when you're looking at shoes and ships and sealing wax and end up doing a search for cabbages and kings?

In this case, it started on one of those list sites, the ones that show you galleries of "Disney for Adults" or tell you "The Top 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Sperm".*  I honestly don't remember what the list that caught my eye was dealing with, but the keynote image was from the movie adaptation of Solomon Kane, and it occurred to me that although I knew that a film version had been in production, I'd never seen the results anywhere. Surely it must have been released by now, I thought.

So off I went in search of Solomon Kane.

For those of you unfamiliar with the name, Solomon Kane is perhaps the second best known creation of pulp author Robert E. Howard - his best known, of course, being Conan the Barbarian.  Unlike Conan, Kane's adventures are set in the more familiar historical venue of Elizabethan England, although many of Kane's adventures take place in Northern Africa, where he fights vampires, zombies, and (of course) nameless things from before the dawn of Time.  

Solomon Kane, as described by Howard in Red Shadows**, the character's August 1928 Weird Tales debut, was:

A tall man, as tall as Le Loup he was, clad in black from head to foot, in plain, close-fitting garments that somehow suited the somber face. Long arms and broad shoulders betokened the swordsman, as plainly as the long rapier in his hand. The features of the man were saturnine and gloomy. A kind of dark pallor lent him a ghostly appearance in the uncertain light, an effect heightened by the satanic darkness of his lowering brows. Eyes, large, deep-set and unblinking, fixed their gaze upon the bandit, and looking into them, Le Loup was unable to decide what color they were. Strangely, the mephistophelean trend of the lower features was offset by a high, broad forehead, though this was partly hidden by a featherless hat.

That forehead marked the dreamer, the idealist, the introvert, just as the eyes and the thin, straight nose betrayed the fanatic.

This fanatical idealist, armed with rapier and flintlock, appeared in twelve short stories and three poems, and like Conan made the leap to comic adaptations many years ago.  On that basis, it would seem only a matter of time before the movie world turned its gaze upon this grim Puritan righter of wrongs, who at least offers script writers a bit more depth and complexity than his barbarian colleague.

However, as with Conan, there's always that possibility that the character might have suffered in translation, so I decided to look for an evaluation copy online before investing in a DVD or Blu-ray version. A little casual investigation revealed that the film had premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009, which seemed like more than enough time for a few bootleg versions to have made their way to the Internet. Now, normally in these situations one is spoiled for choice, and in a way, I was, but not in the usual way.

First I downloaded what turned out to be a very nicely dubbed Russian version, passed on innumerable French and Spanish copies, then found an English version which, although it weighed in at an acceptable 1.2 GB, was a terrible copy made by shooting the screen of a TV set, and finally found a reasonably good English version - which lost sync on the sound about an hour in. Then there was the French version subtitled in Korean...

Okay, obviously something is up here.

Having booked the day off in an attempt to use up vacation time from 2010, I decided to bite the bullet, trot over to FutureShop on Broadway and satisfy my curiosity by purchasing a copy. Or so I thought. Nothing on the shelf in either the DVD or Blu-ray sections, not even a Solomon Kane divider.  Okay, so off downtown to HMV. Nope, not there, either. Just on spec, I checked the downtown FutureShop - nothing again.

With a bit of a frustrated frown, I returned home to purchase a copy online, only to discover that there was nothing on either amazon.ca or chapters.indigo.ca.  Ironically, you can buy fifteen different versions of the movie poster on amazon.ca, but not the actual movie.  Amazon.com had a DVD version, but only in a European region code, nothing that would play on a North American player.

Subsequent investigation revealed that not only had there not been a North American theatrical release, the scheduled Region 1 DVD release date of June 2010 seemed to have come and gone without result as well. I also discovered that the movie was produced in a co-operative British-French-Czech effort, which might explain why North American distributors had turned their back on it as a "foreign" film, in spite of good reviews, acceptable box office, and noteworthy DVD sales overseas - in fact, Solomon Kane was the top selling DVD and Blu-ray disk for its first week of release in the UK.

My impression from the various downloaded versions was that although unfortunately the plot of the movie version isn't derived directly from any of the original Howard stories, the film admirably captures the spirit of the character. Unlike most heroic fantasy movies, it takes itself completely seriously - there are no bumbling sidekicks, no slapstick humour, and lead actor James Purefoy offers a convincing and believable portrayal of a man who has attempted to redeem himself by turning his back on violence and returning to his faith, but who abandons that attempt in order to save an innocent.  If I had to sum it up, the creators of the movie handled their material with respect, which is not a statement I'd feel comfortable making in regards to 90% of the fantasy movies that I've seen (Peter Jackson's treatment of The Lord of the Rings being an obvious exception.)

And maybe that's the reason for its lack of acceptance in the North American market. Fantasy and science fiction author Ursula K. LeGuin once wrote an article entitled Why are Americans Afraid of Dragons? in which she talks about what she sees as a basic American distrust of fantasy, or at least of fantasy as an aspect of adult life, which would go a long way to explain Van Helsing, The Scorpion King, or the Conan movies, with their self-conscious nudge-nudge-wink-wink approach to the genre.

Is Solomon Kane a brilliant fantasy movie? No, not really, as far as I can tell it doesn't rise very far above its roots in 1920s pulp fiction. But it's a serious fantasy movie, and that if nothing else should deserve a little recognition.

- Sid

* Just for the record, I was there for "Starcraft II Wallpapers".  Frankly, I feel that I know all that I really need to know about sperm, thank you.

** Available as a free download at:  http://manybooks.net/titles/howardrother07Red_Shadows.html

 

This, That, and the Other.

Just some quick updates regarding previous postings.

Whatever book that's from.

Okay - the pivotal scene at the end of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where the dragon fights the giant sea serpent/leech from Edmund's nightmares at the Isle of the Dark, where they've gone to find the last of the seven magical Swords of Aslan which will allow them to dispel the evil and rescue the islanders who have been sent as offerings to the Darkness? Very well presented in the movie version, I thought - which is probably good, considering that it doesn't have the least connection with the original text.

Doctor Who: The Next Generation?

"New teeth - that's weird."

David Tennant's first line as Doctor Who.

Ex-Doctor Who David Tennant is now engaged to girlfriend Georgia Moffett*, the woman who played his cloned daughter in a 2008 episode of the show and who is the actual daughter of another ex-Doctor Who, Peter Davison.  And they're expecting a baby. Forget new teeth, David, this is weird.

Fame is where you find it.

Writer and ex-coworker Annie quit her job a few months ago in order to work full time on her young adult fantasy novel.  Wow, imagine if she turns out to be the next J. K. Rowling and people flock to the posting on my blog to read her first interview!

Meh - somehow I doubt it will be enough to get me onto Oprah.

Fun for the whole family.

I somehow missed the movie adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's grim post-apocalyptic masterpiece The Road when it was in commercial release, and had some difficulty finding it at a reasonable price after its release to DVD. (Odd how some movies never seem to get onto the 2 for $20 shelves at HMV. For example, District 9 has just now come down in price as well, but I'm debating going Blu-ray for that one.) However, as part of my holiday gift certificate purchases, I found a cheap copy at Amazon.ca and dropped it into my shopping cart.

Without reprising the plot, let's just say that the movie beautifully (if not completely faithfully) captures the desperate, nihilistic tone of the novel.  Okay, maybe "beautifully" isn't the right word here, but you get the idea.

If you can't say something nice.

And finally, words cannot express my pleased astonishment at having received a comment from Scott Francis, the author of The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America, on my posting about his book. Good thing my comments were positive!  But I think that it would be a salutary experience for everyone who's put their opinion of someone else's work online to have the object of their criticism reply in person. 

- Sid

* By the way, Ms. Moffett has huge geek cred - in addition to being a Doctor's daughter, The Doctor's Daughter, and the Doctor's fiancée and the mother of his child (perhaps his daughter), her mother, Sandra Dickinson, played Trillian in the BBC TV adaptation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.  As they say in Wayne's World, "We're not worthy..."

 

Virtuality 2: Fallout 3

Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until they learned how to put some dirt in it?

William Gibson, Disneyland With The Death Penalty

To my surprise and disappointment, I've just reached the conclusion of Bethesda Softworks' Fallout 3, the current version of the Fallout game franchise.  Based on my reactions, you might think that I didn't enjoy the game, but my surprise and disappointment were at the fact that the plotline of the game had reached its climax - in my mind, I was far from finished playing. 

In the first post in this series, I mentioned virtual realities and the fact that millions of people now spend a lot of time immersed in some digitally manufactured world or another.  For the last couple of months, I've been one of those people as I crept through the wreckage of Washington DC in 2277, and wandered the blasted landscape that surrounds it.

Fallout 3 is set in a future that results from an alternative America, an America that seemed to have stopped developing culturally in the middle of the last century.  There's a 50's aesthetic to everything: buildings, weapons, robots, even hairdos.  It's especially noticeable in the wrecked cars that dot the landscape, which explode if shot, leaving behind a legacy of radiation - apparently they're powered by uranium rather than premium unleaded.  This design aesthetic is matched somewhat by the cultural feel of the game, with its rampant anti-communist sentiments and reliance on justice from the end of the gun.

In this world, it's a war in 2077 with the Chinese communists which has led to the downfall of society. The player controls a character who has been raised in a fallout shelter, Vault 101, but who leaves at the age of 19 to follow his father out into the unknown radioactive world outside.

And that was the part of the game that impressed me the most, the almost endless blasted wasteland that the area around Washington has become.

For any readers who are unfamiliar with the basic first-person shooter paradigm, the action generally takes place in what is generally referred to as a dungeon-based system, derived from the venerable Dungeons and Dragons tradition. It's basically rooms - admittedly, rooms of differing sizes and dimensions, with stairs or hills or elevators or windows or walls, but essentially rooms.  You walk in HERE, and you exit THERE.  Games like Halo have expanded the landscape, but essentially one follows the path laid out by the designers.  You kill everything in the way, find the exit, and you're on to the next set of rooms, never to go back.

Fallout 3 has its share of "dungeons" in the form of caverns, subways and buildings, but they're all part of a huge area known as the Capitol Wasteland.  The Wasteland is a vast, sprawling interface between locations, marked by burned buildings, collapsed freeways, pools of toxic radioactive waste, giants scorpions, and the occasional distant thud of a boobytrap explosive being triggered.

The scenery is marvelous.  The game takes place over time, and so the player sees the Wasteland at all times of the day, from dawn to midnight, and the lighting effects match all of these time perfectly.  If you come over the crest of a hill, the sun will get in your eyes and blind you, and the night time landscape is a flat mix of bluish grey that effectively conceals all sorts of dangers.  Dustdevils swirl over the shattered pavement, and the wind stirs the dried grass as you walk through it.  Streets and buildings are littered with the detritus of the American Way of Life:  lawnmowers, cups, empty bottles, and a thousand and one other items to be salvaged and sold for the currency of choice - bottle caps.

It's not an endless landscape, one does eventually discover the borders, and a critical eye will spot that there is a library of stock elements that sometimes repeat - note the identical mirror-image trees to the left in the picture above.  But even with its limitations, the Wasteland is an astonishing creation in terms of size, variation, and unpredictability.  Roving bands of mutants or raiders can appear at any time, and it's never possible to return to a location without the possibility that the enemies that were disposed of during your last visit have been replaced by new and different challenges.

The other element of the game that really set it apart for me is the moral compass that it presents. From the very early stages in Vault 101, every action and interaction, every choice and decision, has its consequences in terms of karma.  Are you polite or rude at your 10th birthday party?  Do you speak with Old Lady Palmer or ignore her to harass people for gifts?

This approach continues when you enter the outside world and are faced with more significant moral challenges. Most empty houses are unowned, and as such the possessions therein are up for grabs.  Enter someone's home or business, and you can still take things, but your karma diminishes and you may be shot by someone - or you can shoot them and take whatever you want.  If you find a bound captive after killing some cannibal mutants, do you free them or ignore them?

Apparently I'm quite a good person at heart.  I killed hundreds of people, but they were all evil.  I looted scores of houses and buildings, but they were all empty and ownerless.  I freed slaves, refused to become a hired killer, and gave water to the beggar outside of Megaton, the town built around an unexploded atomic bomb - which I defused to save the inhabitants from radiation poisoning instead of blowing it all up for 500 caps.

Having finished the game with a ranking of "Saviour of the Wastelands", I'm a bit tempted to go back and play it again as an absolute bastard.  If nothing else, I'd like to find out what the consequences are - it would sadden me deeply to discover that it really doesn't matter.

- Sid

 

"Like a bird watching guide...only for monsters."

“Last week I was in Virginia. Grayson County. I interviewed a sixteen-year-old girl who’d been assaulted by a bar hade.”

“A what?”

“A bear head. The severed head of a bear. This bar hade, see, was floating around on its own little flying saucer, looked kind of like the hubcaps on cousin Wayne’s vintage Caddy. Had red, glowing eyes like two cigar stubs and telescoping chrome antennas poking up behind its ears.” He burped.

“It assaulted her? How?”

“You don’t want to know; you’re obviously impressionable. ‘It was cold’”—he lapsed into his bad Southern accent—“‘and metallic.’ It made electronic noises. Now that is the real thing, the straight goods from the mass unconscious, friend; that little girl is a witch. There’s no place for her to function in this society. She’d have seen the devil if she hadn’t been brought up on The Bionic Woman’ and all those ‘Star Trek’ reruns. She is clued into the main vein. And she knows that it happened to her. I got out ten minutes before the heavy UFO boys showed up with the polygraph.”

William Gibson, The Gernsback Continuum

Every now and then my sister Dorothy sends me a book.  Now, as I've already said, my sister could probably write this blog (albeit a bit differently than I do) so as you might guess, she tends to send me things that relate to science fiction or fantasy.

However, she's also aware that I already have a fairly substantial stack of books, and although it's certainly not impossible to give me something that isn't there, you're certainly taking a chance if you decide to give me a book in hopes that it's something that I don't already own.

Dorothy has cleverly addressed this problem by sending me things that are a bit odd even by my liberal standards.  As an example, the most current entry in the sweepstakes is The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America, by Scott Francis.

I'll admit that I opened this book with a certain sense of sibling obligation, a sort of "Oh, well, I should give it a look" feeling.  To my surprise, I found it to be an interesting and somewhat authoritative guide to the various "hairy monsters, flying monsters, lake monsters and other unexplained phenomena" that inhabit the continent.

And it's a good solid book, 248 pages of information on creatures ranging from the obviously fictional, like the Sidehill Wampus, a hill-dwelling cat-like creature which has longer legs on one side to keep itself level, to the less explicable Lake Worth Monster, an aquatic man-beast that terrorized an entire beachful of people in Texas in 1969.  There's a plethora of serpentine lake monsters, all sorts of variations on Bigfoot, and any number of frog men*, gator men, lizard men, mud men and even skunk men.

The group term for these creatures is "cryptids" and although I'm a sceptic about these things, you do have to wonder what lies behind the innumerable cryptid sightings, encounters and in some cases attacks that are listed in The Monster Spotter's Guide.  As in the opening quote, are all of these things just semiotic phantoms of some sort, the modern equivalent of being spoken to by the Virgin Mary?  Or are some of them real, things that fall squarely into the Shakespearian "more things on Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy" category?

Personally, I stand my ground as per previous comments:  show me one.  There has to be some reason that all the entries in The Monster Spotter's Guide to North America are illustrated with line drawings instead of photographs.

 - Sid

* Sorry again, Laurie, still not Nazi frog men, these are the anuran variety.

Okay, 59.9 years, really.

 I don't know what the rest of you think about while doing cardio, but my mind goes off in all sorts of directions.  Today's session on the recumbent bicycle led me to the following train of thought.

(There's a bit of a spoiler here, but bear with me.)

In Tron: Legacy, part of the plot is a plan by Clu, Kevin Flynn's digital doppelganger, to take over the physical world.  In order to accomplish this, he has assembled an army of "repurposed" inhabitants of Tron's computer world that he plans to transfer into the real world, presumably by reversing the process that brought Flynn, and later his son, in.

Okay, so far so good.  Now, as we all know, the great debate regarding Star Trek's transporter is exactly how the damn thing would work in practise.  After all, if it converts the people on the transporter pads into energy, e equals mc squared tells us that you end up with the equivalent of a pretty good sized atomic bomb going off down there in the heart of the Enterprise, which has to be a bad idea.

In this case, we're looking at the opposite problem.  Would it not take all of the energy in the Los Angeles power grid to create the mass of a person?    Let's see...Los Angeles uses about 3.9 million KW a year...that's about 10700 KW a day...1 KW equals 3,600,000 joules, so that's 38,465,753,424 joules a day...one pound of mass is about a 10 megaton atomic explosion*...one megaton is 4,184,000,000,000,000 joules...a two hundred pound man would be about 836,800,000,000,000 joules...divide by joules per day in LA...divide by 365 to convert days to years...no, I'm out of my depth here, that can't be right.  I end up with 60 years of the entire electrical usage of Los Angeles to create just one person from scratch, let alone an entire army.

Remember the cascade failure that shut down electricity for the entire North East area from New York to James Bay in 2003?  Imagine Clu's digital forces making their way up the datastream to the basement of Flynn's arcade, as breakers across the state - and the country -  flare white hot and explode under the stress of attempting to feed the creation of physical forms for the invasion force...

But, let's be honest here.  Higher math isn't my strong suit - in fact, after a couple of pints, I sometimes have trouble figuring out the tip for dinner.  If any mathematically inclined readers of this posting would like to take a shot at calculating the energy involved, I will be happy to correct my figures.

- Sid

* There's some fuzz factor there, I found different kiloton yields for a pound of mass online, but ten made the math easier.

Virtuality 1: Tron 2

Wi-fi?  What's that?

Kevin Flynn, Tron: Legacy

I went to see Tron: Legacy last week, and I was surprised by my reaction:  I thought that it was a bit old-fashioned. 

This is an odd reaction to a cutting-edge 3-D CGI extravaganza, and so I came home and watched the original Tron, a comparison which I was certain would establish Legacy as the visual masterpiece that it must be.

Surprisingly, even with its 28 year handicap, I found Tron to be a better movie in many ways, especially when viewed in context.  In 1982, Tron was a groundbreaking state of the art special effects movie, although obviously state of the art has moved on since then, as it always does. But at the time it presented a unique and original view of a digital world, a view which in many ways offered the first metaphor for a visual representation of the world of bits and bytes.

But let's give some perspective to this picture.  In 1982 we were sitting in front of monochrome green CRTs and 8-bit colour displays, listening to the click and whir of single-sided 5 1/4 inch floppy drives. There were only primitive graphical user interfaces:  the first Mac had not yet been released, and the first version of Windows was three long years away.  Tron's special effects were created using systems with 2 MB of RAM and 330 MB hard drives - you can get a smart phone with more processing power now.

In spite of the limitations of hardware - in the end, only a very small percentage of the movie was actual computer graphics -  Tron showed us a world that none of us had ever imagined, or perhaps the world that we'd all imagined.  It represented an important landmark in our first fumbling attempts to establish a metaphor for the digital universe that was beginning to develop. 

So why doesn't Legacy represent an extension of that metaphor?  What's changed?

We have, or rather society has. People grow up in cyberspace these days.  Millions of people spend most of their free time on the game grid, people who operate digital avatars for hours every day.  Most of us neither know nor care what the physical location of anything on the internet might be - for example, I haven't the least clue where this blog is actually stored, nor do I need to.*  We work online, we shop online, we talk online, we date online - let's face it, we live online.

On that basis, Legacy left me with a bit of a "Yes, and...?" feeling.  It's a bit like one of those movies where explorers find a long-lost plateau in Africa which is teeming with dinosaurs.  Technically speaking, Legacy takes place in a closed single-portal system which has been churning away in isolation for over 20 years, 20 years of technological development in the outside world.  The prospect of the denizens of that system attempting to take over the real world is almost comical, like the idea of being attacked by a basketball-sized 8-bit Pacman while walking down the street.

Now, I don't want to make any claims that Tron is the virtual equivalent of Gone With The Wind in terms of moviemaking.  Even at the time, I doubt that anyone considered it as a nominee for Best Movie at the Oscars.  But visually, conceptually, it did what science fiction is supposed to do:  it showed us a "what if" world, a world that didn't exist, but which could exist, which might exist.

Legacy?  I don't mean to suggest in any way that the effects in Legacy aren't well done (or that it's any more deserving of a Best Movie nomination), but their representation of cyber-reality certainly didn't offer a unique view of a digital universe, just a more expensive view of the universe that Tron had already shown us. In fact, the combination of lighting, sets and costumes made it look like nothing more than an extended commercial for the next really big male body wash of your choice.

- Sid

*  Have you ever wondered where Google™, Facebook™ or eBay™ actually are, in the real world?