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

11:59 PM / Cinema / No Comments

• Saturday, May 1, 2010: AVATAR (USA/UK, 2009) 6/10
• Monday, May 3, 2010: THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS (UK/Canada/France, 2009) 6/10
• Wednesday, May 5, 2010: THE GOLDEN COMPASS (USA/UK, 2007) 7/10
• Wednesday, May 12, 2010: THE TRANSPORTER (France/USA, 2002) 6/10
• Thursday, May 27, 2010: DISTRICT 9 (USA/New Zealand, 2009) 8/10
• Friday, May 28, 2010: FEMALE AGENTS (France, 2008) 7/10
• Saturday, May 29, 2010: THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (USA, 2009) 7/10
• Monday, May 31, 2010: TRANSPORTER 2 (France/USA, 2005) 7/10

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

11:59 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

• Wednesday, May 12, 2010: THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (BD, Region B, UK)
• Wednesday, May 12, 2010: DISTRICT 9 (BD, Region ABC, UK)
• Wednesday, May 12, 2010: THE HURT LOCKER (BD, Region B, UK)
• Friday, May 14, 2010: WEEDS: SEASON FIVE (BD, Region A, USA)
• Saturday, May 15, 2010: MINORITY REPORT (BD, Region ABC, UK)
• Friday, May 28, 2010: FEMALE AGENTS (BD, Region ABC, UK)
• Friday, May 28, 2010: DJANGO (BD, Region A, USA)

BD impressions: Minority Report

3:57 PM / BD Impressions / 12 Comments

There's a good film buried somewhere in MINORITY REPORT, but it gets lost amid a cacophony of muddled action and information, tasting suspiciously like the cooking of a few too many chefs. It also ends about half an hour after it should, thanks to the emotional and philosophical high point of the film occurring at the end of the second act, meaning that everything which follows feels both irrelevant and anticlimactic. It's impeccably photographed, the production design is exquisite, the performances of everyone involved are faultless (even when trudging through page after page of po-faced expository dialogue) and the CGI visual effects haven't dated unduly, all of which give the film a certain degree of leeway that it wouldn't otherwise have had, but you're left with what my brother described as a "glass ceiling" effect, where it's difficult to shake the feeling that something is holding the film back from being as good as it might have been. What should be the high points feel decidedly muted, resulting in a film that ambles along for two and a half hours without ever providing a single true "wow" moment. MINORITY REPORT is characterised by dull thuds rather than loud explosions, and I found myself reflecting on how strikingly unSpielbergian it all felt. I don't just mean that the plot doesn't revolve around a Very Special Child - it's lacking the sense of adventure and wonder that characterises so many of his best films (whether it's the INDIANA JONES movies or E.T.: THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL). For a director so renowned for tugging at the heartstrings (sometimes to cloying effect), MINORITY REPORT is strangely heartless.

Argentophile alert: in addition to the presence of Max von Sydow, SUSPIRIA's Jessica Harper also has a small but pivotal role in the film.

Image quality: When I first read that Steven Spielberg was being decidedly cautious in terms of allowing his films to be released on BD, I must confess that my initial reaction was "Wow, what a tight-ass." Having now seen what the few Spielberg films released on the format look like, I can only say that I hope he continues to adopt this stance. Of course, the true heroes of releases like SAVING PRIVATE RYAN and MINORITY REPORT are the talented technicians responsible for the creation of the new HD masters and encodes, but the evidence seems to point strongly towards Spielberg being a director who both understands and cares about the home video presentations of his films, AND is in the enviable position of being able to demand nothing but the best.

From start to finish, MINORITY REPORT looks wonderful and is hands down the best-looking catalogue title I've seen on BD. (BRAVEHEART came close, but was let down by the aliasing present during the first 20 minutes.) Detail is astounding, film grain is immaculately retained and the overall effect is one of those presentations where you forget you're watching an optical disc and begin to think you're actually looking at a print being projected. Even the numerous optical shots, with their inherent decrease in overall clarity, look sharper than many entire digital intermediate-derived BDs I could mention. My sole concern lies with a single shot towards the end of the second act, which appears to have been quite heavily degrained (see Example 8). Judging by the increased presence of print damage and the overall texture of what is left of the grain, one potential explanation (and this is just a hypothesis, so don't take it as gospel) is that, for whatever reason, this particular shot couldn't be sourced from the original negative and had to be taken from a lower generation source. Their way, it's an incredibly minor flaw in an otherwise stunning presentation, and one that I don't feel prevents me from awarding the disc the score is justly deserves. 10/10

Minority Report
studio: 20th Century Fox; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 27 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 26.71 Mbit/sec

BD impressions: The House of the Devil

4:44 PM / BD Impressions / 6 Comments

Thought for the day: mobile phones ruined horror movies. Discuss.

Even if you don't like THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL, you've got to give writer/director Ti West one thing: he pulled off the 80s look more or less perfectly, getting not just the fashion, hairstyles and vehicles right but also the colour palette, film stock and lighting. Better still, it's not simply a nostalgia piece. West and his crew were clearly big fans of 80s horror movies and they do everything they can evoke their mood and feel, but it's not done in a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, "we're sooooo 80s" way. Instead, the film takes itself seriously, which goes a long way towards the audience extending it the same courtesy.

There's not actually a whole lot on paper, and to be honest I think West does at times overestimate his audience's stomach for watching his heroine wandering around an empty old house opening doors and peeking into crannies. THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL takes a very long time indeed to actually get anywhere, and while I wouldn't say I was bored - West's highly attuned sense for style and atmosphere, and Jessica Harper dead ringer Jocelin Donahue's engaging and natural screen presence, put paid to that - I did find myself thinking "I hope this is worth it" on quite a few occasions. And is it? Well, sort of. In the final act, the pace and tone of the film change drastically, with more actually happening in the final 15 minutes than in the first 75 combined. It feels a tad anticlimactic, though. There's no big reveal, and in essence exactly what you thought was going on WAS going on.

I liked THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL rather more than this review probably suggests. There's not a whole lot to it, but what there IS is consistently well-made and laced with the sort of atmosphere that most twenty-first century horror films would kill for. If you have any affection for the slasher movie output of the period it sets out to ape, you definitely owe it to yourself to give it a look.

Image quality: A difficult one, this - not just to review, but to encode in the first place. THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL was, true to its low budget 80s aspirations, shot on 16mm and is grainy even by those standards. This is not always particularly well-handled by the encoder, despite the relatively healthy bit rate. Artefacting is evident more or less throughout, to varying degrees of intensity, and the darker scenes do on occasion reveal some very nasty blocking indeed - see the left-hand side of Example 18. This is in spite of what looks to me like the filtering of high frequency detail - check out the ringing visible at the top of the frame.

I've seen threads about the film on various message boards where people have actually questioned the point of buying such a deliberately grungy-looking film on BD, and I have to say I find these debates to be spurious. Of course THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL was never going to be a looker, but the experience is vastly more authentic on BD than standard definition could ever offer... although, that said, those who REALLY want to recapture the feeling of watching an 80s horror movie at home may wish to wheel out the CRT television and pick up a copy of the specially-produced VHS version (the first film to be released on that format since Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE in 2006). 7/10

The House of the Devil
studio: Metrodome; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 21.2 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 32 Mbit/sec

Holy crap - that looks amazing!

2:19 PM / Blu-ray / 1 Comment

Click image to enlarge.

I'm intending to make this tonight's viewing. Three cheers for Spielberg and his high standards for home video presentations!

BD impressions: Female Agents

2:03 PM / BD Impressions / No Comments

Within about five minutes of starting to watch FEMALE AGENTS, I found myself experiencing pronounced feelings of déjà vu. I recently read a novel by Ken Follett called JACKDAWS - an espionage thriller about an all-woman team of agents who parachute into France shortly before D-Day in order to carry out a vital mission which could decide the success or the failure of the Allied operation. JACKDAWS was published in 2001; FEMALE AGENTS was released in 2008. Neither claims any connection to the other. And yet, as I continued to watch I found myself mentally checking off the instances of events and details that were virtually identical to those of Follett's novel. Both begin with a botched attack in which the heroine's resistance fighter husband is shot (killed in one, seriously injured in the other), both involve the recruiting of a flighty bunch of ladies completely unqualified for the task at hand and deceived as to the true nature of their mission... one of these ladies is even a murderer on death row, for chrissakes!

What is the explanation for these similarities? The generous one would be to suggest that both stories were inspired by the same events and/or people. The protagonist of FEMALE AGENTS, Louise Desfontaines (Sophie Marceau), is loosely based on a real SOE agent, Lisé de Baissac... although, judging by her Wikipedia entry, she was not involved in any mission bearing any resemblance to the one depicted in the film. JACKDAWS makes no direct claim to be based on real individuals or events, but the postscript does imply that its heroine, Felicity Clairet, may on some level have been inspired by Pearl Witherington, a British courier who took command of a 2,000-strong guerilla group in Berry. So, seemingly no common heritage, then. I'm wary of accusing FEMALE AGENTS' writer/director, Jean-Paul Salomé of outright plagiarism, but the evidence is highly suspect.

JACKDAWS is not great literature. The prose is often plain to the point of monosyllabic and the characters are too exaggerated and underdeveloped to be taken seriously. It's entertaining, though - a sort of female DIRTY (half-)DOZEN able to turn on a dime from being a bombastic Boy's (Girl's, rather) Own romp to something darker and considerably nastier. It's ultimately an undemanding and engaging page-turner - a sort of DA VINCI CODE with longer chapters, a more engaging protagonist and a (marginally) less ridiculous plot. In other words, an airport novel - appropriately enough, I read most of it during my various journeys back and forth to Bristol. FEMALE AGENTS is considerably more serious in its intentions, with a sombre tone and sense of dignified gravity. That's not to say that it isn't tense and exciting in all the right places, and it certainly manages to avoid the almost pious depiction of SOE agents that characterised most of the films of this sort made when the war was a more recent memory. Still, it's hard to shake the feeling that a more gung-ho, fanciful romp is just itching to get out - and on a few brief occasions it does, such as the improbably elaborate stunt the women pull off as they rescue a captured British agent from a Nazi-controlled hospital.

It's perhaps because it isn't being entirely honest in its intentions that FEMALE AGENTS isn't quite as satisfying as it could have been. In terms of recent big screen depictions of World War 2-era espionage, I still think Paul Verhoeven's BLACK BOOK, ridiculous though it is, is the most engaging. Others, like Ole Christian Madsen's FLAME & CITRON and Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's MAX MANUS are more serious but somehow less gripping. FEMALE AGENTS is far closer in tone (if not in spirit) to the latter two than to Verhoeven's lavish pot-boiler, but at the same time, BLACK BOOK, with its moral ambiguity and characters whose motivations are more nuanced than mere po-faced patriotism, is actually the more complex film and, for all its B-movie qualities, the more intellectually satisfying.

Image quality: I have to say, after watching a string of digitally-photographed productions recently (AVATAR, DISTRICT 9, season five of WEEDS...), it was nice to finally sit down and watch something shot on film, with all its depth and texture. The BD of FEMALE AGENTS isn't perfect, but it does look pretty nice on the whole, with pleasing if not outstanding detail. The film has a low contrast look with a strong yellow/green push, which makes it look a little on the sickly side, but I can only assume that this was a deliberate aesthetic choice. Compression, unfortunately, is a little dicey in places - presumably the effect of using a single-layer disc. Grain also seems a little on the mushy side - deliberately reduced, or a side-effect of the compression? 7/10

It's also worth pointing out that, unlike certain other titles from Revolver, this one plays at 23.976 fps, not 25, and doesn't have burned-in subtitles.

Female Agents
studio: Revolver; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 18.1 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 22.25 Mbit/sec

BD impressions: District 9

6:11 PM / BD Impressions / 8 Comments

Once again, I'm somewhat late to the party. Virtually everyone I know has seen DISTRICT 9, and given what a major talking point it has proven to be, having to patiently explain to people that I hadn't actually seen it (followed by the inevitable "Well, when WILL you?") did get a bit old. In the end, though, the wait was worth it: DISTRICT 9 does have its problems, and I don't think it's quite the revelation that many saw it as, but on the whole it's an excellent piece of work and, for my money, a vastly superior sci-fi/human issues parable than AVATAR, released just four months later.

As some have pointed out, this is very much a film of two halves, with the less than subtle apartheid parallels giving way a more straightforward gun-toting action movie at around the half-way point. I've read some reviews that were critical of this shift, but personally I didn't have a problem with it. Indeed, given that writer/director Neill Blomkamp's rather heavy-handed approach to the allegorical material, the shift to a more direct, straightforwardly entertaining mode of storytelling actually results in a welcome change of pace.

I can't say I was entirely convinced by the alien CGI, which at times has a rather stilted quality, but for the most part it integrates reasonably well with the live action footage, and the use of interview footage and amateur camerawork to creates a mockumentary aesthetic is impressively convincing. The digital photography, meanwhile, may not be exactly pretty, but is certainly appropriate given the aesthetic Blomkamp was going for. A solid piece of work on the whole, if not an out-and-out genre-defining masterpiece.

Image quality: Shot in 4k resolution with the Red One camera, in many ways critiquing DISTRICT 9's image quality seems beside the point, because it's such a mish-mash of deliberately degraded documentary footage and more conventional "pristine" material that it becomes hard to pinpoint where intentional flaws end and unintentional ones begin. For instance, it can look incredibly detailed (see Example 14), but this is inconsistent, and wide shots in particular often have a flat, textureless look. I have no reason to believe that Sony's AVC encode is anything less than a faithful representation of the source material - as with AVATAR, any apparent flaws are either deliberate or the result of the technology itself.

District 9
studio: Sony Pictures; country: UK; region code: ABC; codec: AVC;
file size: 22.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 29.09 Mbit/sec

Just arrived...

2:57 PM / Blu-ray / 6 Comments

FEMALE AGENTS (BD, Revolver, Region ABC, UK)

DJANGO (BD, Blue Underground, Region A, USA)

What happens in Bristol

5:04 PM / Television / 6 Comments

On a handful of occasions in the last six months or so, I've furtively mentioned trips to London and Bristol relating to what I rather cryptically described as an "employment opportunity". Having now clarified matters, I'm now in a position to give a little more of an indication of what that means. The terms of my contract prevent me from going into TOO much detail, but I've been told that it's okay for me to tell readers of this site that I was invited on to and am now participating in the 2010 writers' Shadow Scheme programme for the BBC medical drama CASUALTY.

A Shadow Scheme, as per the BBC Writersroom web site, is

basically a dummy run of the commissioning process. Writers are asked to pitch guest story ideas, and given a real serial document from which they are asked to write all or part of a script. Usually they are asked to write two drafts. This script is not for broadcast, but is used by the production to decide whether or not to commission the writer.

Très cool, non?

For me, this is the cumulation of a process which began last Autumn and has, in a rather unconventional way, landed me in a position of having a very real shot at getting to contribute to a programme that I'm very passionate about (as anyone who has read my rants about the show can attest). Last Monday and Tuesday, I was down in Bristol for the initial two-day induction programme, which I attended with several other prospective writers. Obviously I'm not in a position to give a blow by blow account of what the induction consisted of, but let's just say that I experienced what can only be described as a very enjoyable information overload. The Writersroom web site provides an overview of what last year's Shadow Scheme consisted of, and while the specifics of this year's event were somewhat different, the basic gist of it remains largely the same:

Casualty

Also looks for writers with TV experience and a good grasp of structure. Casualty needs writers who can not only handle serial stories and medical procedure, but who can come up with strong and arresting guest stories and who have something exciting and relevant to say about the world now. For the 2008/9 Casualty shadow scheme, writers were given a three-day induction course on how to write for the show, which included a set tour and information about the format and ambitions of the show. The selected writers then pitched guest stories and if these were thought suitable, those writers worked with Script Producer Bianca Rodway and Script Editor Jenny van der Lande to develop shadow treatments and a draft Casualty script. A fee was paid for each part of the shadow scheme.

Sorry for being somewhat cryptic about all of this, but the contract I've signed places some pretty rigid restrictions on what I can and can't say about the process, so in the interests of being safe rather than sorry, I've decided to simply direct you to information that is already in the public domain. I certainly can't tell you about what's coming up in the show, so don't bother to ask!

Anyway, yeah - I thought you'd be interested to hear about this. I'm not a fully fledged writer just yet, and it may very well be that nothing ultimately comes of it (I'm effectively competing with several other writers for a very limited number of commission slots, and this is a VERY competitive business), but these are incredibly exciting times for me and, while I have a lot of work ahead of me, I'm looking forward to every minute of it.

A few thoughts on Mass Effect 2

11:59 PM / Games / No Comments

I was very impressed by MASS EFFECT, BALDUR'S GATE creator Bioware's rabidly successful foray into the world of highfalutin space opera. I didn't think it was perfect, agreeing with those who accused the developers of railroading the player too much, presenting a limited set of choices rather than allowing the player to develop a truly unique character and experience an open world. On the whole, though, I thought Bioware had succeeded in creating an immersive, compelling action/RPG that, unusually for a computer game, took itself seriously and attempted a decidedly cinematic style without coming across as completely ridiculous.

MASS EFFECT 2's plot picks up a few weeks after the end of that of its predecessor, and initially not a lot appears to have changed. The graphics look virtually identical, and while you have the option to create a new character from scratch, players are strongly encouraged to import an existing MASS EFFECT character, which allows for some continuity in the form of key events from the previous game (significant decisions, characters living or dying) being carried over into the new one. I already had a MASS EFFECT character who had completed the game, and chose to import. My experience of the game might, therefore, be somewhat different than for someone who either created a new character or imported one who had made choices other than the ones I made. (It's worth pointing out that this feature assumes that your copies of both games are on the same system. There's no way to import an Xbox 360 MASS EFFECT save file into the PC version of MASS EFFECT 2, or vice versa.)

Prior to the game's release, a big deal was made out of a trailer Bioware released showing the player character, Commander Shepard, being killed in action. Shepard does indeed die, and this occurs within the first five minutes of the game beginning. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Shepard doesn't remain dead for long. She (you can play as either sex, complete with an almost insane level of facial appearance customisation - I went with a female character, primarily because the female voice actor has considerably more personality than her male counterpart) is resurrected two years later by the shadowy Cerberus organisation and, thoroughly in their debt, becomes an unwilling gun for hire, investigating a series of alien attacks on human colonies.

This provides a good example of the sort of railroading I referred to in MASS EFFECT, which remains readily apparent in the sequel. All Shepard's instincts should be screaming at her not to trust Cerberus, a rabidly pro-human, anti-alien terrorist organisation. We met them in the previous game, and a thoroughly nasty bunch they were too. And yes, the dialogue choices allow you to have Shepard voice her suspicions or outright antagonism towards them. When it comes down to it, though, the game gives you no choice but to work for Cerberus, and all Shepard does to suggest that this doesn't sit well with her is make a few grouchy quips about the situation. A true open world game would allow you to flip the bird at Cerberus' shady goons or indeed slit all their throats, but MASS EFFECT 2 isn't that type of game. It's primarily concerned with telling a well-crafted story with strong visuals and full dialogue vocalisation, and in the process it sacrifices a lot of the freedom that earlier Bioware games like BALDUR'S GATE provided.

And it IS a well-crafted story. Shamus Young, a gaming blogger for whose opinions I have a lot of time, wrote a rather critical three-part analysis of the game's plot, but while I agree that his observations have merit, my overall impressions of it were considerably more favourable than his. My biggest complaint, personally, is the decision to kill Shepard off, bring her back to life and then promptly forget that either of these two events ever happened. Narrative-wise, you could cut the death and resurrection entirely and it would make little difference. It just seems a bit cheap to me. (Then again, perhaps I should be careful what I wish for. We could have ended up with Shepard indulging in navel-gazing and depression of Buffy Summers proportions.) The plot has something of a SEVEN SAMURAI feel to it, with Shepard traversing the galaxy, assembling a rag-tag team of fighters to embark on what is more than likely going to be a suicide mission. Every one of these prospective team members is interesting in some way (well, with the exception of Jacob, who fulfils the thankless role of "stolid military man"), and I actually found myself becoming genuinely emotionally attached to a couple of them. Some of the best characters, though, turn out to be the least likeable, particularly the volatile "Jack", who lends real depth to the overused "damaged, angry outcast chick" stereotype. (Special mention must go to the voice actress, Courtenay Taylor.) The game forces you to make some difficult decisions about who lives or dies, and during the final mission, I found myself doing everything I could to ensure that as many of them survived as possible.

You'll notice that, so far, I've talked about MASS EFFECT 2 primarily in terms of its plot and characters. That's because these elements are both the game's greatest strengths and the ones that leave the greatest lasting impressions. Remove them, and the cool sci-fi setting, and you would ultimately be left with a fairly generic third-person shooter. The ratio of narrative to action is roughly 50/50, but whereas the original MASS EFFECT applied a fairly conventional role-playing template to both components, the Item management is non-existent (not a bad thing at all, given how cumbersome the original's inventory system was), the skill system has been pared back to a handful of core abilities, and generally speaking the level design is fairly linear. While you'll find the odd hidden chamber with safes to crack or weapon blueprints to snag, by and large there is only a single path from beginning to end, meaning that the emphasis is on combat rather than exploration. The combat is fun, don't get me wrong, and at least on the PC it controls very nicely (the typical WASD keys and mouse combo), but you're never in any doubt that it's the narrative that's keeping you going: you find yourself anticipating the next dialogue exchange rather than the next boss encounter.

That's not necessarily a problem. Some of the greatest games of all time have been plot-driven - PLANESCAPE: TORMENT springs to mind. However, on some level I do lament the loss of some of the more RPG-like elements of the core gameplay. Compare this to Bioware's DRAGON AGE, released only a couple of months later, and it inevitably starts to look a bit lightweight. Perhaps, though, that's the wrong approach. Viewing MASS EFFECT 2 in these terms means viewing it as a simplistic RPG. Consider it an unusually complex, plot-based action game, though, and it suddenly starts to look a whole lot more impressive. I like RPGs a great deal, but I like action games too, and MASS EFFECT 2 actually manages the impressive feat of providing the player with around 30 hours of gameplay without it ever getting boring. Imagine playing UNREAL or QUAKE for 30 hours straight - it would be tedium personified. MASS EFFECT 2, though, despite adopting a fairly rigid formula of "plot, run and shot, plot," and so on, sucks you in purely because the story and characters give you a reason to care about the action component.

Anything more to be said? Well, it looks and sounds great. The Unreal Engine-powered graphics are excellent, and the game performs extremely well. The voice acting is probably the best I've ever heard in a computer game. That may not be saying much, and there are definitely weak moments (both the voice actor for the male Shepard, Mark Meer, and special celebrity guest Martin Sheen give spectacularly lifeless readings of their dialogue), but by and large the effect is impressive. It runs without a hitch, and I didn't experience any of the problems with getting multi-channel audio to work that plagued the previous game for me. I have a sneaking suspicion that STARCRAFT II: WINGS OF LIBERTY will end up being my Game of the Year 2010, but I wouldn't be surprised if MASS EFFECT 2 turns out to be my runner-up.

Do you read me?

8:42 PM / General / No Comments

Sorry about the total lack of posts recently. This past week has been the busiest I've experienced in a long time, and to be honest I haven't had a chance to watch any BDs or come up with any other material worth posting. I was down in Bristol between Sunday and Wednesday, and then on Thursday and Friday we had the annual post-graduate symposium, at which I presented a 20-minute paper on my ongoing giallo research. Things will hopefully return to normal next week, with both droughts (this site's posts and the current weather) coming to an end at roughly the same time.

Just arrived...

10:31 PM / Blu-ray / 6 Comments

MINORITY REPORT (BD, 20th Century Fox, Region ABC, UK)

Just arrived...

10:31 PM / Blu-ray / No Comments

WEEDS: SEASON FIVE (BD, Lions Gate, Region A, USA)

BD impressions: The Transporter

11:04 PM / BD Impressions / 11 Comments

Q: What's funnier than Jason Statham trying to act?

A: Jason Statham trying to do an American accent.

At least he makes up for his lack of skill as a thesp with his physicality and apparent willingness to try pretty much anything. As a writer/producer, Luc Besson has hit on an action movie formula that actually works extremely well, and THE TRANSPORTER adheres pretty strongly to it, but it's not his finest hour. While it's loud, fast and silly in the ways that you would expect, it lacks the the gung-ho violence of TAKEN, the ludicrous excess of DISTRICT 13 or the martial arts razzle-dazzle of DANNY THE DOG (although it's worth pointing out that Pierre Morel and Louis Leterrier, who between them are responsible for these three films, worked on THE TRANSPORTER as cinematographer and art director respectively). Still, though, it's silly fun and I don't think it's trying to be anything more. I've rented the other two TRANSPORTER films as well and will be getting around to them in due course.

Image quality: Remember the early days of BD, when it was being compared very unfavourably against HD DVD in terms of image quality? Discs such as these undoubtedly contributed to the impression of BD as being the inferior format. The delay in getting dual-layer discs replicated reliably and the proliferation of MPEG-2 encodes drew a lot of scorn, but a title like THE TRANSPORTER probably wouldn't have looked any better with a high bit rate AVC encode. This is a miserable-looking disc, lacking definition and baked with noise reduction. And my God, that ringing! It's perhaps not as bad as the US AMERICAN PSYCHO release, but it certainly isn't far off. 4/10

(Note that an underwater sequence at around the middle of the film appears to have been photographed in standard definition. This does not influence the overall score given to the image quality.)

The Transporter
studio: 20th Century Fox; country: UK; region code: B; codec: MPEG-2;
file size: 16.4 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 25.49 Mbit/sec

I never thought I'd see the day...

2:38 PM / General / 5 Comments

Liberal Democrats in Number 10 - my God, did I go to sleep and wake up in some fantasy dimension?

I find myself in a rather bizarre situation in which the outcome I wanted least - the Conservatives in power - is combined with the outcome I always wished for but never truly believed would happen - the Liberal Democrats in power. When I woke up on Wednesday morning to find that Nick Clegg had been appointed Deputy Prime Minister, rampant glee took over momentarily and I forgot, for a moment, that one of my reasons for voting Liberal Democrat in the first place (though not, I hasten to add, the only reason) was out of a desire to keep the Conservatives OUT.

Clegg and his new boss, David Cameron, are making a big deal out of this "Liberal Conservative" coalition, and ignoring for a moment the fact that that would appear to be a complete oxymoron (think "Vegetarian Carnivore"), I am for the first time in my life feeling cautiously optimistic about the political situation in this country (and under a primarily Conservative government too - maybe I really DID wake up in another dimension). I don't for a second believe that there won't be squabbling and infighting. The ties of this partnership are going to be stretched to their absolute limits, and you only have to look at the manifestos they published in the run-up to the election to see that, while they agree on many issues such as civil liberties and the environment, they are also bitterly opposed on others, most notably Europe, immigration and political reform. Still, I've been taking a look at the coalition agreement that was published yesterday, and I'm genuinely amazed by just how many LibDem policies that the Conservatives previously opposed have made it through. (The BBC News web site has a handy breakdown of the winners and losers for each of the various key issues.)

Really not bad at all for a party that came third in the popular vote.

It's important for the Conservatives to make this work, for the simple reason that in the event of the LibDems walking, they would immediately find themselves in the position of being a minority government with a very tenuous mandate to govern the country. I suspect it's even more important for the LibDems, though. For years they have lobbied for our unfair and archaic voting system (First Past the Post) to be replaced with something more democratic and representational of the popular vote. Under true proportional representation or even a less extreme system like the Single Transferable Vote (or indeed the Alternative Vote that seems currently to be on the cards), coalitions would become more common, or indeed the rule. It's therefore vital for them to demonstrate that they can work successfully with a party with whom they have a great many ideological differences.

Election 2010 results: actual seats (left) and what they would have looked like under proportional representation (right). (Source: BBC News)

At the next election, I suspect the LibDems will lose many voters, who will view any deal with the Conservatives as a pact with the Devil. While I myself have no great love for the Conservatives, and personally think David Cameron comes across as a shifty, insincere weasel who will say anything if he thinks it's what people want to hear, I won't be one of them. This is not the outcome I expected or even wanted, but I'm willing to give it a chance. Already, we can see from their published agreement that both parties have been willing to make concessions, with the LibDems seeming to have a calming effect on some of the more ludicrous Conservative policies (most notably their refusal to even consider electoral reform), and vice versa (the LibDems' anti-nuclear power stance, for instance, or their rather odd plans for an amnesty for illegal immigrants who meet certain preconditions). And, when it comes down to it, I have to ask the LibDem supporters currently in a huff over the party's deal with the Conservatives what they would have preferred to happen. The way I see it, the only viable alternative would have been for Clegg and co to stomp off in a huff and get NONE of their legislation through rather than some of it. In my opinion, they've made the best of a less than ideal situation.

And so the Labour party skulks off to lick its wounds and find itself a new leader. In a way, I actually feel rather sorry for Gordon Brown, a distinctly uncharismatic individual who seems to have been made the fall guy (both by his opponents and the Murdoch-controlled media) for every single problem in this country over the last thirteen years. Again, I'm no fan of New Labour, but I do hope, when the dust settles, that people will remember the good the previous administration did rather than merely the bad. Civil partnerships, reductions in crime rates, the minimum wage, peace in Northern Ireland (and others highlighted in Brown's speech at the 2009 Labour Party Conference)... really not that bad a legacy to leave.

Just arrived...

6:01 PM / Blu-ray / 13 Comments

Picked up the following at HMV today at a decent discount:

THE HOUSE OF THE DEVIL (BD, Metrodome, Region ABC, UK)

DISTRICT 9 (BD, Sony Pictures, Region ABC, UK)

THE HURT LOCKER (BD, Lions Gate, Region B, UK)

BD impressions: The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

7:29 PM / BD Impressions / 16 Comments

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS is typical Terry Gilliam: imaginative, unconventional and downright frustrating. I've only seen a handful of the man's films, but I can't recall ever liking a single one of them unconditionally. For me, they all contain moments of audacity and greatness, but before too long they invariably fall apart, collapsing under the weight of their own aspirations.

Of course, DOCTOR PARNASSUS will probably be remembered first and foremost as the film that very nearly wasn't to be, given Heath Ledger's untimely death mid-production. Interestingly, however, for all its problems, Ledger's death, and Gilliam's solution to the problem of losing his mid-actor before the shoot wrapped, isn't one of them. In fact, the use of Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell to complete the film is actually rather an inspired choice. (Although I must confess that I didn't realise the man I was watching was Depp rather than Ledger until about half-way through his sequence. Law and Farrell, on the other hand, are far more instantly recognisable.) Still, the biggest revelation in terms of the cast comes in the form of Lily Cole, a most unconventional-looking model, as Dr. Parnassus' daughter Valentina. As I understand it, she had no prior acting experience, but she comes across as a complete natural, and I predict that she has big things ahead of her.

On the whole, though, I feel inclined to suggest that DOCTOR PARNASSUS might be most charitably described as "interesting". It doesn't really work as a whole, and the over-abundance of CGI gives the film a fakeness that it could have done without. Gilliam badly needed to sell the film's fantasy worlds as tangible, believable places, but instead they simply come across as synthetic and oddly weightless. Say what you like about AVATAR (and believe me, I did), but at least James Cameron was able to create a convincing alternate world. Then again, he had eight times the budget to work with...

Image quality: For pricing reasons, I decided to go with Lions Gate's UK release of THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS rather than the US version from Sony Pictures. In retrospect, this was a mistake. While there are undoubtedly some positives in this image, they are overshadowed by what I believe is the worst compression I have ever seen on an AVC title - yes, potentially even worse than that of THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE and THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS' NEST. Virtually every image below suffers from noticeable artefacting. This is not deliberate on my part - it's simply down to the fact that this is what most of the film looks like. Skin takes on a smudgy appearance, fabric degenerates into sludge, and grain takes on a stucco-like effect. Many of the wide shots fare absolutely dreadfully, with close-ups generally looking a bit better. It's not as if it's a particularly long film, and the bit rate seems pretty high, so we can't claim that the film was starved for space. It looks simply to be a case of good old fashioned bad encoding, and as such should have been rejected out of hand. 5/10

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
studio: Lions Gate; country: UK; region code: B; codec: AVC;
file size: 30.7 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 35.93 Mbit/sec

Welcome to Blighty

8:45 PM / General / 3 Comments

How anyone can take seriously a system that allows a result like this is beyond me.

Source: BBC News

Starcraft II beta invites

9:38 PM / Games / 8 Comments

Today's your lucky day (potentially). I have two invites to the STARCRAFT II: WINGS OF LIBERTY beta test to give away to those whom I deem worthy. In order to participate, you must have a Battle.net account (don't worry, it's free).

For a chance to win one of these keys, reply to this post with a poem about why you deserve it. The two people who write what I deem to be the best poems by 8 PM on Friday night will be the proud recipients.

Good luck!

Cool runnings

5:31 PM / Technology / 4 Comments

Q: What happens when you have a hefty video card that generates a great deal of heat directly under your hard drives?

A: The hard drives get very hot indeed.

Despite findings by Google which suggest that high hard drive temperature is not as likely to lead to failure as is commonly believed, I wasn't particularly happy about SpeedFan reporting disk temperatures of 60 degrees Celsius after a 20-minute match in STARCRAFT II. Unfortunately, my case doesn't have a built in hard disk fan of its own, and the place where common sense would dictate that you fit one - the space between the front exterior and interior - is taken up by a dust filter. To make matters worse, the drives themselves are packed very close together in order to leave ample room for me to thread the video card's PCI-E power connectors through the lower part of the case. This, as you can imagine, only makes the heat problem worse. The picture below gives a good indication of the sort of layout I'm dealing with:

(Yes, my cable management is lousy. I know. I'm not very good at advance planning.)

The solution was to attach a 120mm fan to the left hand side of the hard disk stack, blowing air towards the disks. My Noctua NH-D14 actually comes with two fans - a 140mm one between the two heatsinks and a 120mm one clasped on to the right hand side. You can run the cooler with one or both fans (or neither, if you're feeling particularly daring), and the various reviews I've read suggest that the difference between one and both fans amounts to little more than a couple of degrees Celsius. (Given the thing's size, many people with particularly tall RAM modules find that they have no choice but to remove the 120mm fan anyway.) As it happens I'm actually using the included adaptor to throttle the fan speed to 900 RPM in order to further reduce noise levels, and my CPU temperature has yet to go above 45 degrees (it's currently idling at 30, with SpeedFan reporting that the cores themselves are at around the 24-25 mark).

Therefore, I decided to simply shift the 120mm fan from the CPU cooler to the hard drives, and the result has been an average drop in hard drive temperature of about 15 degrees. They now idle at between 30 and 40 degrees (and the temperatures are continuing to slowly drop as I type this), and a half-hour STARCRAFT II match raised them to around 45. I'm more than happy with this state of affairs, particularly given that I didn't have to buy any new equipment.

My PCI sound card is now back in the system, by the way. I've decided to simply live with the issues I described previously regarding my video card's less than ideal power management system. I've come to the conclusion that I only actually need the card to run at full power when playing games, so my solution has been to create two hotkeyed power profiles: minimal power and full power. The majority of the time, I run on minimal power, with is perfectly adequate even for decoding high bit rate AVC, so I simply have to remember to tap ALT+SHIFT+2 (my hotkey for full power) before starting a game. Should I have to do this? No, and I dearly hope that future driver or hardware revisions from ATI will fix the latency issue that occurs whenever the card changes its power settings. In the grand scheme of things, though, it's an extremely minor inconvenience.

BD impressions: Avatar

8:19 PM / BD Impressions / 9 Comments

I see no point in making all the predictable "DANCES WITH SMURFS" and "POCAHONTAS II" jokes that I'm sure you've all heard a hundred times before. Yes, AVATAR's script is incredibly derivative. Let's move on.

Unlike just about everyone else on the planet, I didn't see AVATAR in the cinema. The BD was my first introduction to it, and as such, I've "only" seen it in 2D. Opinions vary wildly on whether or not this actually makes any difference. Some people claim it's a completely different experience in 3D; others say it's not that big a deal. The latter point of view was summed up quite succinctly by a work colleague who, when I asked if she'd seen it in 3D, replied "Well, supposedly."

So yeah, that's my proviso: I haven't seen AVATAR in 3D. You may (or may not) wish to bear that in mind when I say I wasn't exactly overwhelmed bit it. It's technically impressive for sure (even if the Na'avi designs are spectacularly goofy), and has some well-choreographed action scenes. I can't say the narrative resonated with me one bit, however, and quelle surprise, it's a good hour longer than it needed to be. I always say that films need a damn good reason for continuing past the two-hour marker and this one, with its flat, uninteresting characters, clichéd "technology vs. nature" narrative and general lack of anything of interest except for its technical advancements and a few genuinely stunning images, didn't seem to have one. I actually felt myself getting droopy eyelid syndrome on a few occasions during the final hour, as action sequence after action sequence unfolds, serving no apparent purpose except to pad out the running time.

Can I understand why many people were enthralled by AVATAR? Absolutely. Am I one of them? Absolutely not. I actually went in with a sneaking suspicion that I might end up hating it - none of the trailers or EPKs I'd seen had done anything to convince me it was a film I would enjoy - and was rather relieved that this wasn't the case, but for me the pleasures it offered were rather limited and I can't see myself watching it again any time soon... in 2D OR 3D.

Image quality: I confess that I find it very hard to objectively rate BDs of films that have been photographed digitally, because all too often the artefacts that are inherent in the photographic process itself bear a striking resemblance to those of a poorly encoded BD (or one derived from a poor master). There are no two ways about it: the live action segments of AVATAR look pretty underwhelming. The computer-generated material is much better, and I believe that the quality of the encode itself can only be objectively measured by ignoring the live action entirely and concentrating solely on the CG. But then, of course, you're still left with the problem that the live action footage - a significant portion of film - looks rather unimpressive, regardless of precisely WHY that is. I don't doubt that AVATAR will be many people's new demo disc of choice, and I completely understand why, but if I wanted to show off the format's capabilities, I would be more likely to put on something film-sourced, or at least something like ZOMBIELAND or THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, whose digital photography is much less underwhelming than this.

Avatar
studio: 20th Century Fox; country: UK; region code: AB; codec: AVC;
file size: 41.8 GB; average bit rate (including audio): 37.05 Mbit/sec

All systems go

2:09 PM / Technology / 3 Comments

Well, my new system is now up and running, and stable to the point that I'm happy to leave it as it is. It's currently overclocked to 3.77 GHz (from the default 2.8 GHz), and while I could go higher it would mean either reducing the memory speed or upping the voltage, and in the interests of keeping power consumption and heat down I don't feel particularly inclined to do the latter. (I believe this is because the memory controller is actually integrated into the CPU on Intel X58 systems.) Not that I've found myself wanting for extra megahertz: it was able to handle a constant 60 frames per second in UNREAL TOURNAMENT III with every graphics option maxed out, even at the default clock speed of 2.8 GHz.

My CPU-Z Validator page:

I was a little taken aback by just how quickly I managed to get the thing up and running. As you probably know from my previous posts, I essentially gutted the entire system retaining the sound card and disc drives but replacing everything else. Despite this, I was able to load my existing installation of Windows and, two minutes later, it had obtained all the drivers it needed and was content to work just fine without reinstalling ANYTHING. Admittedly, I went for the same component brands (Intel CPU, ASUS motherboard, ATI video card), but given that the entire chipset architecture has changed, I was shocked that I didn't have to reinstall Windows. That's never happened to me before. The only real hurdle was squeezing the video card in. The card itself only just fit, and the PCI-E power connectors are on the end of the card rather than on the top, as was the case with my previous card. Because the card was practically touching the case's hard drive column, I had to resort to some unorthodox cable management, threading the PCI-E power cables behind the column and squeezing the connectors through one of the air flow holes.

I did run into a rather unfortunate problem, however, that took me some time to solve. While watching a video on YouTube, I became aware that the sound would click and squeak with some degree of frequency, and on one occasion devolved into such a cacophony of squeals and static that I would probably have blown an eardrum if I hadn't ripped my headphones off immediately. I noticed that the problem became less apparent when I disabled hardware acceleration of Flash (which YouTube uses). A little later, I realised that the same thing would happen infrequently when playing movies in Windows Media Player. The final straw came when I recorded a TV programme via Windows Media Center and discovered that, in the recording itself, the video would glitch and block up every few seconds.

I dowloaded the DPC Latency Checker and discovered that, every time I got an audio or video glitch, it coincided with a major latency spike. I tried everything I could think of. I swapped my audio drivers, I moved both the sound and video cards to different slots. I even removed the sound card altogether and switched to the motherboard's on-board audio device, which had the effect of eliminating the audio glitching but not the latency spikes or the corresponding corruption to off-air recordings in Media Center.

I ultimately came across the solution completely by chance. The problem, it seems, stems from the PowerPlay technology that ATI has built into its current generation of graphics cards and drivers. An admirable idea in theory, PowerPlay automatically lowers the GPU and memory clock speeds when the card isn't being heavily used in an attempt to conserve power. Unfortunately, it turns out that, each time these values are adjusted, a massive latency spike occurs, resulting in the various glitches I described above. ATI doesn't provide an option to disable PowerPlay via its own software, but a handy guide posted on the AV Science Forum shows how to do it fairly easily with minimal text editing. This immediately cleared up all my problems, although personally I'm not over the moon about this solution given that it means running the graphics card at full belt 100% of the time. I suspect the solution is to create two power profiles in the control panel - low and high - and alternate between them depending on my needs. If I end up sticking with on-board audio (doubtful, as I'm particularly fond of the ALchemy software my PCI sound card uses to allow multi-channel audio in legacy games that use EAX or DirectSound3D), then I really only need to disable PowerPlay when it comes to recording TV.

Still, I can't stress enough how happy I am with the system on the whole. It's fast, stable and fairly quiet (it's slightly louder than my previous build, particularly when running graphics-intensive applications, but that was to be expected). See you in the internet pipes!

My system specs as they now stand:

• Case: Antec Sonata III
• Power supply: Antec EarthWatts 750W
• Motherboard: ASUS P6TD Deluxe
• Processor: Intel Core i7 930 2.8GHZ (Socket 1366) overclocked to 3.77 GHz
• Memory: 6 GB OCZ DDR3 1600MHz/PC3-12800 Triple Channel (three sticks of 2 GB)
• Video card: Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 5850 TOXIC Edition, 1 GB
• Optical drives: (1) Sony BDU-X10S BD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive (SATA); (2) LG GGCH20L BD-ROM/HD DVD-ROM/DVD-RAM drive (SATA)
• Hard drives: (1) Intel X25-M, 80 GB, solid state drive (SATA); (2) Hitachi Deskstar, 400 GB, 7,200 RPM (SATA), (3) Hitcachi Deskstar, 1 TB, 7,200 RPM (SATA)
• Display: 27" Dell Ultrasharp 2709W 1920x1200 widescreen LCD
• Sound card: Auzentech X-Fi Prelude 7.1
• Speakers: Logitech Z-5500 Digital (5.1, THX certified, PCM/Dolby Digital/DTS)
• Mouse: Microsoft Intellimouse Explorer 3.0 optical
• Keyboard: Dell Black USB Keyboard
• Printer/Scanner/Photocopier: Samsung SCX-4500W
• Network card: Dual Marvell Yukon 88E8056 Gigabit Ethernet controllers (on-board)
• Network router: Netgear WGR614v6 100 Mbps Ethernet/54 Mbps wireless router
• Digital TV: Freecom DVB USB

The aftermath of a system build

6:48 PM / Technology / 4 Comments

UNREAL TOURNAMENT III at constant 60 fps with all details maxed out is niiiice. More thoughts to follow.

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