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Films I saw for the first time in the month of April

11:59 PM / Cinema / No Comments

• Monday, April 12, 2010: ZOMBIELAND (USA, 2009) 8/10
• Wednesday, April 14, 2010: HARRY BROWN (UK, 2009) 7/10
• Sunday, April 18, 2010: BROKEN EMBRACES (Spain, 2009) 8/10
• Monday, April 19, 2010: THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX (Germany/France/Czech Republic, 2008) 8/10

BDs and DVDs I bought or received in the month of April

9:40 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

• Friday, April 2, 2010: CRACKS (BD, Region B, UK)
• Saturday, April 10, 2010: HARRY BROWN (BD, Region B, UK)
• Monday, April 19, 2010: THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS (BD, Region B, UK)

Comments now functioning again

7:21 AM / Web / 5 Comments

Just a quick note to alert readers to the fact that commenting functionality has now been restored to the site. If you attempted to post a comment in the last few days, you more than likely got a submission error. It took me a while to work out what was wrong, but eventually I realised that, when I redesigned the header at the top of the page, I accidentally deleted the reference to the JavaScript file required for commenting to function.

Muchos gracias to ChuckZ for alerting me to the problem. It would probably have gone unnoticed for days otherwise.

I'm still here

8:06 PM / General / 5 Comments

Just checking in quickly to apologise for the total lack of news posts lately. I've been super-busy lately working on revisions for the second analysis chapter of my thesis. That said, I've ordered the remaining two components of my system upgrade (the motherboard and power supply) and am planning to build it this weekend, assuming they've arrived by then.

I'll also be flying down to Bristol on Thursday regarding a very exciting employment opportunity that I'm afraid I can't say anything about at the moment. It wouldn't mean relocating (which is fortunate, as I still have a PhD to complete in Glasgow), but let's just say that it relates to something near and dear to me. Sorry about all the vague hints - hopefully I'll be able to actually talk about it publicly eventually, assuming everything goes well. Wish me luck!

Question for visitors

7:57 PM / Web / 5 Comments

Here's your chance to do something really important. No, I'm not talking about voting in the upcoming election (although that's nearly as important): I'm talking about making a contribution to how this site looks. As you may have gathered, I've made some fairly noticeable adjustments to the way the top half of the main news page looks. I'm currently trialling this to see what people think of it, and if the consensus is that it's an improvement on the previous version, then I'll be rolling it out across the site. (To see how it used to look, just go to any other page - such as the individual entry for this post.)

So, love it? Loathe it? Couldn't give a damn? Your views matter!

Updated Friday, April 23, 2010 at 10:13 PM: As you've probably noticed, I ended up applying the revised design to the whole site. Looks like it's here to stay.

It's taking shape...

2:00 PM / Technology / No Comments

I just need to pick up the motherboard and power supply, and I'll be all set.

(The CPU's outer packaging got a little battered in transit, but that's a small price to pay given that I got it sealed on eBay for £40 less than what the cheapest online retail store was asking for.)

BD impressions: The Baader Meinhof Complex

1:31 PM / BD Impressions / 8 Comments

I knew a little about the Red Army Faction (RAF), a terrorist group which was active in Germany from the 1970s through to the late 90s, but I had no knowledge of the people behind it and never heard the name "Baader-Meinhof" until I saw the Andrzej Zulawski interview that my brother edited for the Mondo Vision DVD release of LA FEMME PUBLIQUE. Zulawski described them as "dangerously horrible", and at least on the basis of Uli Edel's film about the group, THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX, I'm inclined to feel that this is an entirely accurate summary. I don't doubt that the film takes considerable liberties with the truth - what film based on real events doesn't? - but if it stands for anything, the son of one of the group's victims has praised it for showing the RAF for what it really was: a mismatched, disorganised bunch of posers and nutcases whose love of violence ultimately overshadowed any ideals they might originally have had.

What the film does extremely well, especially in the early stages, is to capture the mood which gave rise to extreme left wing groups like the RAF in the second half of the 20th century. As the American theatrical trailer (viewable here) succinctly sums it up, "The children of the Nazi generation have grown up in the ruin their parents created. They vowed fascism would never rule their country again." In his blog, Amm Sam takes exception to this description, pointing out that the trailer provides a rather warped view of these individuals (try applying a similarly romanticised description to Al'Qaeda and see how far it gets you). He's right, and in terms of the personalities of the people behind the RAF, it's disingenuous to claim that they were simply people who were trying to avoid a repeat of the horrors of the past. However, it gives the viewer something approaching an appreciation of why so many ordinary Germans, saddled with the collective guilt of the atrocities the previous generation had committed, felt compelled to side with and condone the actions of a group of indiscriminate murderers. The gang itself consists of a diverse gaggle of idealists, juvenile delinquents and plain old lovers of violence, and any claim to having a single unified goal quickly crumbles as naive idealism gives way to in-fighting, betrayal and self-preservation. (To say nothing of their unlikely alliances with other terrorist movements whose ideologies were so thoroughly removed from their own it's a wonder they didn't blow each other up.)

It may be called THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX, but Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibrteu) actually doesn't make much of an impression. The strongest impact comes from the two female leads: young radical Gudrun Ensslin (Johanna Wokalek) and left-wing journalist Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck). The latter, who in many ways serves as our "way in" to the gang, starts off talking about "the revolution" only in theoretical terms but ultimately finds herself wilfully participating in the gang's violent exploits. Gedeck is excellent in the role, which serves as an admirable attempt to humanise the woman without condoning her behaviour, even if the script (by THE DOWNFALL producer Bernd Eichinger) doesn't quite manage to pull off her change of heart in a meaningful way. The breakneck pace at which the film moves (it's a two and a half hour rollercoaster) means that there's little time for introspection, and in the space of a few minutes of screen time Meinhof goes from saying she could never leave her two young daughters to willingly abandoning them to a Palestinian refugee camp. Moments like these, and the seemingly endless parade of different but ultimately interchangeable faces, make you realise just what a massive undertaking the filmmakers have saddled themselves with, and it's not entirely surprising that the human story does ultimately become a little lost.

In a number of ways, I'm reminded of Martin Scorsese's GANGS OF NEW YORK. That might seem like an odd comparison, but bear with me. Like this, GANGS OF NEW YORK was extremely ambitious in its scope and scale, attempting to capture the mood of a specific place during a specific period and weaving multiple narratives about a diverse and often only distantly connected set of characters. Both films threaten at any moment to collapse under their own weight and both are, I'll be the first to admit, flawed pieces, but at the same time quite breathtaking in what they set out to achieve and just how much of that they succeed in accomplishing. THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX is a thrilling, eye-opening and at times shocking look at a group that, despite the carnage they caused in Europe in the latter half of the 20th century, has been subjected to surprisingly little attention by the film industry. Dangerously horrible indeed.

By the way, Christopher Hitchens wrote an excellent review of the film in VANITY FAIR. It's well worth reading.

Image quality: A stupendously good presentation from MPI, a label I hadn't even heard of previously (though having looked them up, it appears that they were behind the "controversial" BARAKA BD and also distribute titles for Dark Sky Films), and one that gets a hearty thumbs-up from me in pretty much every respect. Detail is superb and the compression is for the most part excellent, barring some mild to moderate artefacting that I noticed on a couple of occasions (see Example 15). Owing to the nature of the film itself, which occasionally mixes in archival footage shot on both film and video, the look is somewhat inconsistent, but this should in no way be inferred as a black mark against the BD itself. The audio mix is thunderously good too. 9.5/10

The Baader Meinhof Complex
studio: MPI; country: USA; region code: A; codec: VC-1;
file size: 38.3 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 36.66 Mbit/sec

BD impressions: Broken Embraces

6:14 PM / BD Impressions / 3 Comments

I loved VOLVER, director Pedro Almodóvar's previous collaboration of Penélope Cruz. In fact, I ranked it number 9 in my Top 10 Films of the Decade list. It was the only Almodóvar I had ever seen, which remained the case until watching BROKEN EMBRACES, which reunites him with Cruz to tell another strange, offbeat tale about love and death. VOLVER was a weird little film, and on the surface of it BROKEN EMBRACES seems weirder still, although once the fractured timeline and the relationships of the various characters reveal themselves, it ultimately turns out to be a somewhat more conventional narrative about a filmmaker who falls for a struggling actress.

It's often said that Cruz is a far better actress when speaking her native Spanish rather than English, and based on the evidence, I'm inclined to agree (watch her in Alejandro Amenábar's excellent OPEN YOUR EYES/ABRE LOS OJOS and then playing the same role in the Hollywood remake, VANILLA SKY - there's no comparison). She was excellent in VOLVER and is very good in this, although the film really belongs to Lluís Homar as director/writer Mateo Blanco/Harry Caine (the latter being the pseudonym he adopted after a serious accident left him blinded), who portrays the character at two different stages in his life, before and after a tragedy that has major ramifications for his outlook on life. That said, neither he nor Cruz can quite make the romance that develops between their two characters seem entirely plausible. Perhaps it's down to the fractured nature of the narrative, which jumps back and forth between different time periods, but it just seems to come out of nowhere, and while the pair do have chemistry, something seems to be lacking. I was ultimately left with a sense that Mateo/Harry's relationship with Cruz's charater, Lena, wasn't all that far removed from that of the wealthy industrialist with whom she lives due, we are invited to assume, to his paying for life-saving medical treatment for her father.

BROKEN EMBRACES is an eclectic film. Part romance, part whodunit, part exposé of the film business, it has its finger in several different pies and the various elements don't always come together satisfyingly: when the final scene came around, I was left with a feeling that only part of the narrative was being wrapped up in a meaningful way. It's worth it, though, for the sumptuous photography, the slick sense of pace, and of course Penélope Cruz.

Image quality: An extremely impressive showing from Sony Pictures, and one that if very hard to criticise on any level. The anamorphic photography has a certain inherent softness, but I doubt anything untoward is going on here: this is simply how the film looks. No, it doesn't have the "pop" that many seem to expect from every single BD release, but it looks like unmolested film throughout, and in that regard I can't see anyone having a valid reason to complain. 9.5/10

Broken Embraces
studio: Sony Pictures; country: USA; region code: A; codec: AVC;
file size: 29.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 33.27 Mbit/sec

Just arrived...

4:55 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS (BD, Lions Gate, Region B, UK)

Forgive me another brief political diatribe

1:33 PM / General / 1 Comment

Something rather amazing is happening in British politics. The latest YouGov poll, which measures the public's voting intention for the country's three main political parties, puts the Liberal Democrats in first place for the first time in... well, certain since they actually started calling themselves the Liberal Democrats. Labour are trailing in third place, and for some reason David Cameron and his Thatcherite cronies are actually in second place. One can only assume that their policy of appealing predominantly to people too young to remember what things were actually like under them in the 80s and early 90s has paid dividends for them...

...and yet, even if these current projections did translate into real votes come election night, the Liberal Democrats, despite getting the most actual votes, would still end up with the fewest seats in parliament while Labour, in third place, would still end up with the most. (Have a play with the BBC's election seat calculator to see just how much of a swing it would take for the Liberal Democrats to gain an overall majority. Ditto for the Conservatives - one can, I suppose, be thankful for small mercies.) If ever there was an indication that this country's politics are in need of drastic reform, this is it. The sooner we move to a saner voting system, such as proportional representation, the better.

Source: BBC News

Starcraft II thoughts of the day

10:15 PM / Games / 1 Comment

I've been continuing to participate in the STARCRAFT II beta, generally getting in a few matches each day and playing with different strategies. After a lengthy stretch playing Protoss almost exclusively, I've found myself gravitating back towards Terran, who were my race of choice in the original STARCRAFT. The "human" races often have a reputation for being the least interesting in strategy games, and it's certainly true that the Terrans lack the mystique of the Protoss or the sheer "ick" factor of the Zerg. However, the redneck space cowboys have considerably more in the way of a unique personality than, say, the Allies in RED ALERT, with their southern drawl, hybrid country/techno soundtrack and mobile base mechanic. The latter separates them from the two other races, both of which are unable to move their buildings and are restricted to placing them in relatively pre-determined locations (Protoss buildings must be powered by a Pylon or Warp Prism; Zerg buildings must be constructed on the goo-like Creep). Constructing a new Command Center in the comfort of your existing base and then flying it out to its intended location is infinitely safer than building it in unsecured territory.

The Terrans also have what is arguably the coolest of the new units - a low level ranged unit called the Reaper, which moves very fast and can leap up and down cliffs. Perfect for staging early game hit and run attacks, there's nothing quite like running half a dozen Reapers into your enemy's base via the back door and decimating their line of workers while their combat units are busy guarding the front ramp. Of course, like all units in STARCRAFT II, Reapers have their shortcomings: they die extremely quickly to enemy fire, and if you're quick enough to pull off a surround on them, even worker units can dispatch them pretty quickly. In many respects, though, their volatility is what makes them so much fun to play.

A Reaper attack on a Zerg supply line.

Another really nice addition to the Terran army is the Medivac, which combines the roles of Medic and Dropship from the original game, both transporting units and automatically healing them. Again, this has major implications for back door attacks on enemy bases, and I just finished a very enjoyable game in which I loaded four Medivacs up with a combination of stim-packed Marines and Marauders (a heavy-hitting ground-only unit with an optional upgrade to slow enemy units with each hit) and flew around the map, performing hit and run tactics on my Zerg opponent's various bases until he/she was forced to concede defeat. This so-called MMM combo is extremely popular with Terran players, and rightly so: it appears to be very difficult for an unprepared opponent to counter.

An MMM hit and run attack on a Zerg base.

Another big factor is the change to how terrain works in STARCRAFT II, chiefly detection. In STARCRAFT, enemy units on higher ground were invisible to friendly units on lower ground until they actually attacked, at which point they became visible, allowing the player to retaliate, albeit with reduced damage. In STARCRAFT II, units on higher ground remain invisible and unassailable unless you can either bring in a flying unit or get one of your own units on to the higher ground. Once the enemy is visible, you can attack for full damage. Until then, though, you're basically a sitting duck, as my opponent found out in this game on the ever-popular Lost Temple map (first introduced in the original STACRAFT and remade for both WARCRAFT III and its expansion, and now STARCRAFT II), when I flew some Marines, Marauders and a couple of Siege Tanks on to the raised ground above his natural expansion and proceeded to lay waste to his mining operation, all the while with his large army of ground units simply standing there unable to do anything to stop me. With no flying or detecting units whatsoever, my opponent was completely powerless and simply had to admit defeat.

A Protoss player with no detection laid low thanks to my terrain advantage.

In case you couldn't tell, I like this game. A LOT. Is it the greatest strategy game ever created? I suppose only time will tell, but for the time being I have no interest in playing anything else.

BD impressions: Harry Brown

11:15 AM / BD Impressions / 15 Comments

Generally speaking I try to avoid politics on this site, since I think it's fairly safe to assume that people come here for my latest impressions on films and BD transfers, not who I'm going to vote for in the upcoming election (although, in case you're wondering: the Liberal Democrats). However, with a film like HARRY BROWN, politics are pretty much impossible to avoid, as the plot seems to have been culled from the pages of the Conservative Party manifesto. The world portrayed in HARRY BROWN is, I suspect, what the Conservatives would like us to believe the whole of the UK looks like, in spite of the country's murder rate last year being the lowest in 20 years, with a drop of 5% in overall reported crime compared to the previous year. We are repeatedly told, on rather slim evidence, that this country has lost its way, and while I won't for a moment pretend that crime isn't a problem, the notion that we've fallen into anarchy and that things were infinitely better in the "good old days" (whatever THOSE were) strikes me as nothing more than fantasy.

(Incidentally, the film's star, Michael Caine, recently came out an openly backed the Conservatives, which I can't say was much of a surprise to me given the film's leanings.)

HARRY BROWN is often described as a British GRAN TORINO, and the similarities are readily apparent. Both revolve around an elderly former soldier living in a crime-infested area who, fed up with the situation, decides to take matters into his own hands. The differences lie in the ideology. Whereas GRAN TORINO effectively undercut Clint Eastwood's DIRTY HARRY image by ultimately refusing to have the character pick up a weapon and go around blasting away his neighbourhood's problems, Harry Brown is more than happy to torch a drug den (after killing the two resident dealers), threaten to kneecap one youth and shoot at least three others to death. I get the impression we're meant to see him as a man pushed to the edge and driven to commit actions he would normally abhor, but something about the ease with which he slips into the role of ultra-violent vigilante undermines this.

Morally, I find it all rather suspect, but at the same time there's a lot to admire in the film. It's very nicely shot and manages to maintain a palpable atmosphere of foreboding from beginning to end, and when all said and done there IS something rather compelling about watching a pensioner taking on some of the most disreputable examples of humanity. Michael Caine is terrific as the eponymous Harry Brown, and the supporting cast is comprised of a number of very capable performers, including Iain Glen, Liam Cunningham and Emily Mortimer, although the former two are playing characters that are too thinly written to make much of an impact, while Mortimer is stuck with the most thankless role in the movie: a buttoned-down detective who must simultaneously serve as Harry's foil and represent the counter-argument that the filmmakers seem to have little interest in airing.

So which film did I prefer? On the one hand, HARRY BROWN provides a sense of catharsis that GRAN TORINO, for obvious thematic reasons, denies the viewer. On the other, GRAN TORINO is a far more optimistic film. The moral of HARRY BROWN, fundamentally, is that the world is filled with scumbags and the best of dealing with them is with a bullet in the head, while GRAN TORINO is considerably more egalitarian. Divorced from its underlying message, HARRY BROWN is a rather effective piece of work, but eh... it all seems a bit mean-spirited. Maybe I'm guilty of over-analysing it, but I suspect HARRY BROWN is aimed less at the sort of people who actually live on estates such as the one depicted in the film and more at the sort of Tory-voting Daily Mail readers who lament how society has gone to pot while tucking into the Sunday roast.

Image quality: This is a very impressive-looking disc from Lions Gate. According to IMDB, HARRY BROWN was shot in Super35, but I find that very hard to believe, as the image looks nothing like film and at times suffers from many of the problems that tend to blight digital photography, namely heavy noise in darker scenes and "tizzing" around high contrasts. Detail is very impressive, and I can't fault the encoding on any level. Contrast is a little murky, and while I suspect that this may have been intentional on the part of director Daniel Barber, the fact that there are numerous fades to dark grey rather than to black leads me to suspect that some elevation of the blacks may be occurring. On the whole, though, I was rather pleased with how the film looked. 9/10

Harry Brown
studio: Lions Gate; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 26.6 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 37.06 Mbit/sec

BD impressions: Dumbo

9:24 PM / BD Impressions / 2 Comments

I like all the Walt Disney classics (by which I mean the ones produced while Walt himself was still around) to one degree or another, but I can't help wishing he'd made more like DUMBO. Whereas the likes of FANTASIA and BAMBI threaten to buckle under their own pretensions, DUMBO, sandwiched between those two more ambitious projects, succeeds precisely because of its lack of pomp. To paraphrase Disney animator Eric Goldberg, they didn't set out to make great art, but in the process succeeded in doing precisely that. At a brisk 64 minutes, DUMBO doesn't outstay its welcome for even a second, and there is not a single frame of this simple but deeply satisfying movie that is not a joy to behold on every level. Whether it's the straightforward clown slapstick, the hilarious dialogue of the crows, the tugging at the heartstrings of Dumbo's separation from his mother or the "Oh my god, what the hell IS this?" of the Pink Elephants sequence, DUMBO is absolutely captivating and one of THE most enduring films of all time.

Image quality: A mixed bag, as with every single one of these overzealous Disney restorations. In their attempt to completely scrub the image of grain, the technicians have created an image that superficially looks very clean but completely lacks the texture it should have. I can only imagine what the outcry would be if a live action film of this vintage was processed to this extent. The look is inconsistent, with some grain creeping through, usually in isolated quantities in certain parts of the frame. Example 17, for instance, shows some grain creeping through, albeit in a rather bastardised form, in the sky between the crow's beak and body. Likewise, Example 6, taken during a flash of lightning, mangles the image something rotten, with the grain that sneaks through becoming thick and clumpy while the rest of the image turns to processed much. This is admittedly a very extreme example and is by far the worst instance of NR gone wrong that I came across in the film, but it's a solid demonstration of the dangers of letting this sort of automated "enhancement" tool go unchecked. I award DUMBO a slightly tepid 7/10.

Dumbo
studio: Buena Vista; country: UK; region code: BC; codec: AVC;
file size: 17.2 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 38.61 Mbit/sec

By the way, on the subject of noise reduction, the 7.1 remix on this BD suffers from an excessive amount of the sonic variety, creating what my brother refers to as "musical noise", resulting in a low "tweeting" (or "space monkey", as iZotope RX's help file describes it) sound in the background. Because Disney neglected to provide the original mono mix with this European release, I have no idea whether or not it would also have been affected. We'll have to wait for the US release (currently unscheduled) to find out.

BD impressions: Zombieland

1:24 PM / BD Impressions / 7 Comments

It's good to be back; to be back is good. After nearly a month with no way of watching movies on the big screen, I'm glad we picked ZOMBIELAND as the first film to watch via my brother's newly repaired AV receiver. Neither of us were particularly massive fans of SHAUN OF THE DEAD - I didn't dislike it or anything, but I didn't consider it the masterpiece that everyone else seemed to, vastly preferring Edgar Wright's follow-up, HOT FUZZ - but it did give birth to the (ugh) "zom-com", and as such ZOMBIELAND owes a massive debt to it. However, while SHAUN OF THE DEAD knowingly referenced the conventions of the zombie movie sub-genre, ZOMBIELAND's humour is derived more from the characters themselves than from name-checking clichés. Don't get me wrong, that's not to say that it isn't funny - it IS, often gut-bustlingly so. In particular, there's one extended sequence which I absolutely refuse to spoil for you... although if you've heard anything about the film, you probably know what it is already, because nearly every viewer and reviewer seems to find it necessary to spell out precisely what it is. I myself went in already spoiled, thanks to a wise-ass (who shall remain nameless) on one of the forums I frequent telling every man and his dog just what that sequence consisted of and just what a surprise it was to him. Yeah, thanks for nothing.

That said, even though perhaps the biggest laugh of the movie was spoiled for me, I still had an absolute blast with ZOMBIELAND. I was particularly impressed by the performances of the four leads, who essentially carry the movie for its duration (there are only a couple of other speaking parts). Woody Harrelson is always a hoot, and while Jesse Eisenberg inhabits the same awkward dweeb role as in ADVENTURELAND, it's not a bad role for him. He certainly seems less self-conscious about it than, say, Michael Cera, whom one tends to associate with these parts. Of the two leading ladies, Emma Stone gets the most to do, but twelve-year-old Abigail Breslin, probably best known for her role in LITTLE MISS SUNSHINE, continues to impress with a performance that belies her age... and I refuse to believe that the sight of a pre-pubescent child running around with a shotgun blowing the heads of zombies can ever get old.

Image quality: Reference. 10/10

Zombieland
studio: Sony Pictures; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 22.9 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 37.49 Mbit/sec

Oh, this really takes the cake

3:28 PM / Technology / 2 Comments

Yeah, really fucking descriptive, Mr. Computer. As it turns out, my laptop's hard drive is kaput. Over the last couple of days, I'd been noticing that its performance was steadily decreasing. This morning, assuming that the fault lay with my installation of Windows, I used the included recovery DVD to restore the drive to its original factory settings. About 50% of the way through the process, I got the informative message you see above. I rebooted the system, only for it to fail during the POST, with the following message:

Pri Master Hard Disk:S.M.A.R.T. Status BAD, Backup and Replace

Well, what do you know? It's a Seagate. Quel shocker, to quote GINGER SNAPS. The funniest part is that Seagate's own proprietary disc diagnostic tool, SeaTools, wasn't able to detect that one of its own hard drives was close to collapse. It gave the thing a clean bill of health less than half an hour before it hit the skids. I'm currently waiting for ASUS's tech support department to get back to me, though I'm not sure where I stand as regards the warranty given that I bought the machine second hand on eBay. I would assume that it's transferable, but you never know. If they won't replace it free of charge, perhaps it's time to bite the bullet and replace it with an SSD.

Being without a laptop is something I really don't need right now. I have to turn in a revised chapter of my thesis in less than a month, and I do a lot of writing in my room, which is quieter and less distracting for important work than using my main rig downstairs. Luckily I still haven't got round to selling my old VIAO, so I'm currently in the process of dusting it off and installing the necessary software. Of course, the main reason why I replaced the VIAO in the first place was because its battery was giving up the ghost, so it's absolutely useless in terms of portability.

Good thing I didn't keep anything essential on the laptop drive, eh?

Just arrived...

6:12 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

HARRY BROWN (BD, Lions Gate, Region B, UK)

Described as a British GRAN TORINO, I've wanted to see this for some time, ever since I first heard about it and its, erm, divisive message.

Good news, by the way: my brother's AV receiver will hopefully be returned on Monday, meaning that we should be able to start actually watching BDs and I should be able to resume my BD Impressions features before too long.

A few words about Starcraft II graphics and performance

8:23 AM / Games / No Comments

The original STARCRAFT was locked to a resolution of 640x480 with a 256-colour palette and, if memory serves me correctly, the sole graphical option was a toggle for something called "colour cycling". In contrast, STARCRAFT II presents you with a dizzying array of options, controlling everything from voice chat functionality to the complexity of the physics for your units' death animation. The minimum resolution is 1024x768, and you can effectively run the game at any 4x3, 5x4, 16x9 or 16x10 resolution upwards of that. You can either tweak each graphical setting (shaders, terrain, etc.) individually or use one of four broad presets (Low, Medium, High and Ultra). I run it at my monitor's native 1920x1200, with anti-aliasing disabled and anisotropic filtering set to automatic, and generally speaking found that I got pretty pleasing performance with the settings at High (my one additional tweak was to enable reflections, which by default are disabled at High). Just to remind you of my current system specs:

• CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400, at 3.61 GHz
• RAM: 4 GB PC2-6400 DDR2-RAM, at 800 MHz
• Video card: ATI Radeon 3870 512 MB, at 860 MHz (GPU)/990 MHz (VRAM)

For me, "pleasing performance" is basically something in the region of 40-60 fps. Any higher doesn't count, as my monitor's refresh rate is 60 Hz and I have v-sync enabled to avoid tearing, while any lower feels a bit too choppy for my tastes. Your mileage may vary, but STARCRAFT II is such a fast-paced game that a smooth frame rate is, in my opinion, absolutely vital. (Thank Beelzebub that Blizzard didn't cap the frame rate to 30 fps like EA did with COMMAND & CONQUER 3 and RED ALERT 3.) On my system, things became a bit too choppy at Ultra, although to put things in perspective, I've seen my brother play plenty of Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games that run considerably slower than STARCRAFT II with everything maxed out. If you can tolerate the current generation of consoles and their tendency to lock most games to 30 fps (I can't), you may be okay with the sort of performance I was seeing at Ultra. I should point out, though, that even the Medium settings look damn good, with the higher settings generally just adding a bit more gloss and shine.

Of course, given how long I've waited to play this game, I want nothing but the best for it. My goal, with the new system I'm putting together, is to be able to play the game with everything maxed out and a decent amount of anti-aliasing at a near-constant 60 fps. I have a feeling that this is going to be my go-to game for years to come (or at least until DIABLO III comes out), so it makes sense for me to build a system on which I can enjoy it to its fullest potential. Of course, I suspect that an overclocked Core i7 930/overclocked Radeon 5850 combination will give me performance to spare, meaning I can also enjoy considerably more demanding titles like never before. It's first and foremost about STARCRAFT II, though, and provided I can achieve my goal of full details and a consistently high frame rate on that title, then I'll be satisfied.

I've included screen captures of each of the various settings menus below.

Graphics options.

Sound options.

Voice options.

Gameplay options.

Social options.

Starcraft II beta first thoughts

11:11 PM / Games / No Comments

I think it's fairly safe to say that Blizzard Entertainment's STARCRAFT II is THE real time strategy game release of the year, if not the decade. It had better be, because we've waited more than twelve years for it.

Just under a month ago, the latest and purportedly final instalment in Electronic Arts' rival COMMAND & CONQUER series, COMMAND & CONQUER 4: TIBERIAN TWILIGHT, emerged as a damp squib rather than the glorious climax to the Tiberium storyline that many had hoped for, with the cost frequently voiced criticisms being excessive DRM and gameplay that deviated so far from the previous titles as to render it unrecognisable as a C&C game (I participated briefly in the open beta test and wasn't particularly impressed by what I saw). I doubt that even the most ambitious bean-counters at EA ever seriously considered going head to head with Blizzard's juggernaut, but it's hard not to suspect that releasing the retain version of TIBERIAN TWILIGHT at around the same time as STARCRAFT II's beta test was a seriously bad idea. After all, while beta keys have been given out in strictly limited quantities, the whole Internet seems to be abuzz with STARCRAFT II mania. Those who haven't received keys have been watching YouTube videos, reading commentary on gaming web sites and forums, and generally just gnashing their teeth at the thought of the lucky bastards who managed to get their hands on an invite. I should know - I was one of them. When I received the extremely pleasant surprise that was an email invite in my inbox this morning, part of me couldn't help feeling as if I already knew the game inside out.

Part of that is down to the sheer level of online chatter surrounding this game. Before even loading up the game, I already knew every unit, every counter... hell, I even knew the layout to every map. However, it's also because STARCRAFT II is very, VERY familiar. In terms of its design, this is easily the most conservative RTS I've seen in a long time, eschewing many of the features that have now become mainstays of the genre - squad formations, terrain advantages, etc. - and instead delivering what feels a lot like 1998's STARCRAFT with a new graphics engine, new units and a few interface tweaks. That's got to be a bad thing, right?

Are you kidding? STARCRAFT was arguably the greatest RTS ever created, refined to the point of perfection and still played religiously to this day... particularly in South Korea, where it's more or less the national sport, despite never having been officially released there. There's nothing wrong with a conservative approach to game design provided it's done well and the underlying concept is solid: to use a fairly predictable example, you don't hear many people calling chess outdated and demanding that it be spiced up with a bunch of newfangled gimmicks. STARCRAFT may not have been around for as long as chess, but as far as computer games are concerned, it's probably the closest thing you'll get in terms of its longevity. I've seen some people accusing Blizzard of taking the easy route with STARCRAFT II in adhering so closely to its predecessor's template, but I'm inclined to think they're missing the point. By foregoing all the distracting bells and whistles of modern RTSes in favour of what is ultimately a minor update to a rule-set that was already well established when its predecessor came out, Blizzard have left themselves with no option but to get it right. If it doesn't re-capture the pitch perfect synthesis of the original game, it has nothing to fall back on. And here's the thing: after spending most of the day playing it, I'm inclined to think they've gone and done it (again).

"Familiar but different" is how I'd describe STARCRAFT II. From the moment you're plonked down on the battlefield, with your top-down view of your Command Center/Hatchery/Nexus and SCVs/Drones/Probes, you immediately feel right at home. Sure, the new 3D graphics engine looks a lot shinier than the old 640x480, 256-colour visuals of the original, and ordering your units around has a noticeably slicker, smoother feel, but it's basically the STARCRAFT you know and love. The interface that occupies the bottom portion of the screen is virtually identical to its predecessor, and while a number of the hotkeys have changed, you can basically get up and running immediately. If you've played STARCRAFT (or any of the WARCRAFT RTSes), there should be no learning curve at all in terms of the basic mechanics. Harvest minerals and gas, create buildings, pump out units, mash enemy. Rinse and repeat. Blizzard's mantra, which they've repeated so many times I'm almost sick of hearing it, is "easy to learn, hard to master", and that sums up STARCRAFT II to a T - something I quickly learned as, over the course of the day, I proceeded to have seven shades knocked out of me by players considerably more skilled than myself.

Arguably more so than the original, STARCRAFT II is absolutely merciless when it comes to unit counters. The "rock-paper-scissors" framework has been present in pretty much every RTS since the beginning of time, but going by the twenty or so matches I played today (a handful against the ridiculously easy computer AI, but the vast majority against actual people) it is especially pronounced here. Immortals defeat Roaches defeat Zealots defeat Marauders defeat Stalkers defeat Reapers defeat Zealots defeat Immortals, and so on and so forth. (The game includes a handy help screen which specifically outlines what each unit is strongest against.) Bringing the right units into battle is, as far as I can see, has far more impact than what you do with them once the fight kicks off, immediately differentiating this from the more micro-intensive WARCRAFT III, Blizzard's previous RTS. That said, I don't want to give the impression that micro is irrelevant: it can certainly turn the tide in what would otherwise be a stalemate, and it goes without saying that, even if you successfully counter all your enemy's units, simply throwing your forces at him/her and putting your feet up is almost always a recipe for disaster. Still, though, it's very much a game of picking the right unit for each situation, and the ability to adapt to each new threat rather than being restricted to a single build/play style is absolutely essential.

As to the issue of race balance, it's early days at the moment. Just about everyone seems to be playing Protoss, and while I always tend to gravitate towards the most "human" race whenever I play an RTS (Human in WARCRAFT, GDI in COMMAND & CONQUER, Terran in STARCRAFT, etc.), I must admit that, having sampled all three to a more or less equal degree, I had the most fun with the Protoss. I'm not sure whether that's because they're currently more powerful than their Terran and Zerg counterparts, or simply because they're more fun to play, or a little of both (the two often go hand in hand), but something about them just "feels" right to me - which is surprising, as I wasn't all that crazy about them in the original STARCRAFT. All three races have greatly improved mobility options over the previous game, but the Protoss warp-in mechanic, which allows you to convert your Gateways to Warp Gates and instantly warp new units to any area where you have a building or a Phase Prism, is a lot of fun. There's something insanely satisfying about sneaking a Phase Prism behind your enemy's mineral line, then warping in a handful of Zealots and watching them decimate his/her workers in the blink of an eye.

That's about all for now. Time permitting, I'll post some more impressions at a later point, but for now I'll simply conclude by saying that STARCRAFT II seems very promising indeed. I wouldn't class myself as a hardcore gamer by any stretch, and I've not spent nearly enough time with the game yet to be able to make any profound judgements as to its ability to knock its predecessor from its position as the dominant RTS eSport, but so far my overriding impression is that the wait will be well and truly worth it. I certainly can't picture going back to the original STARCRAFT now, and if that's not a recommendation, then I don't know what is.

I can hardly hold my bladder!

8:36 AM / Games / 1 Comment

See you in the internet pipes!

Can Steven Spielberg please supervise more film transfers?

10:32 AM / Blu-ray / 20 Comments

Saving Private Ryan

Minority Report

Seriously, I wish ALL catalogue titles looked this good on BD.

Source: AV Science forum (1, 2)

Szamanka LE cover art and specs

9:15 PM / DVD / 3 Comments

A few months back, I posted the cover art for the standard edition of the next Mondo Vision release, Andrzej Zukawski's SZAMANKA. Today I can exclusively reveal the artwork for the Limited Edition:

The final specs have yet to be announced, but I've been told that the Limited Edition will include the by now customary special booklet and soundtrack CD. In addition to that, both the standard edition and limited edition will include a new video interview with Zulawski and an audio commentary by Daniel Bird and David Mackenzie.

For more information on the film, see the entry on the Mondo Vision web site.

For an idea of the sort of insanity the film contains, check out this clip on YouTube. (Skip ahead to 03:20 for my favourite part.) Don't worry - the DVD won't look anything like as shitty as this.

You know, this sounds crazy enough to actually work

6:02 PM / Cinema / 16 Comments

Who says Hollywood is short of original ideas?

In other irrelevant movie world news, TRUE BLOOD star Anna Paquin is bisexual. Believe it or not, this is considered by some people to be a big deal.

Okay, now I REALLY want to see this movie

6:42 PM / Cinema / 2 Comments

Our dear friend Christopher Tookey, resident film critic at Britain's most popular right-wing crackpot gutter rag, the Daily Mail (and the man who spearheaded a campaign to have David Cronenberg's CRASH banned back in 1996 after reacting with fury to its theme of "sex with cripples" - his own words, folks, not mine), has let rip with a particularly potent flurry of his usual vitriolic bile.

The target this time is Matthew Vaughn's new film KICK-ASS, which, until I read this review, had more or less passed under my radar, but is now near the top of my list of films I must see this year. In the estimation of the ever-lucid Mr. Tookey, KICK-ASS

deliberately sells a perniciously sexualised view of children and glorifies violence, especially knife and gun crime, in a way that makes it one of the most deeply cynical, shamelessly irresponsible films ever.

Yeah, Chris. Sure. Whatever you say.

It just gets funnier the further you read, save for a particularly tasteless moment where the reprehensible Tookey, an ambulance chaser of the highest order, invokes the names of murdered children James Bulger and Damilola Taylor in a cynical attempt to give his slavering rant credibility. Seriously, I know millions of deluded Middle Englanders actually consider the Mail to be a reputable newspaper, but please tell me no-one seriously considers its film reviews section to be anything other than the personal soapbox for a sad, vindictive little toad.

Just arrived...

4:59 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

CRACKS (BD, Optimum, Region B, UK)

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