Author: Rory

X-Men: The Last Stand is fast, explosive, exciting and thoroughly Marvel-ous (I’m sorry). It excells as a comic-book movie. The action is bigger and deeper than in the other X-Men films. The fight scenes nicely showcase the mutant abilities of everyone present, including Kelsey Grammer (Down Periscope)’s Beast, Shadowcat and several new badguys. Thankfully director Brett Ratner doesn’t continue Brian Singer’s habit of showcasing each mutant in turn, as if they were queueing up to take part in the fight like bond villain henchmen.

But action, even in an action movie, is not enough to make a film. The Last Stand‘s plot has a stronger foundation than the previous films too. For people who don’t live in the centre of the Hollywood hype machine as I do, the basis of the film is that the American government has developed a cure for mutancy. Some mutants who want to fit in welcome the cure. Others who define themselves by their mutation are opposed to the idea of a cure. Think of the outcry if someone was to develop a ‘cure’ for homosexuality and you get some idea of Magneto (Ian McKellen, Last Action Hero)’s position in this film. So there’s definitely a challenging issue to deal with in this plot.

Unfortunately the focus of the film is split. Partly it tries to tackle the ethical issues surrounding the cure, in particular the divergence in the stances of Magneto and Professor Xavier (Patrick Stewart, Death Train). But much of the film’s length is devoted to the second story of Phoenix, the personification of Jean Grey (Famke Janssen, I Spy)’s subconcious. An attempt is made to promote Phoenix as the big threat of the film, and the emotional climax does revolve around her. But for me it fell flat. For whatever reason I just couldn’t bring myself to care about that character, because I never cared about Jean.

That unsympathetic central character aside, X3 is brilliant. It’s so good that I’m going to see it again tomorrow. It lives up to the expectations set by the first two, and it goes in some daring directions. (This is the bit where I don’t tell you about the fact that *spoiler*, *spoiler* and *spoiler* are *spoiler*ed, and *spoiler* and *spoiler* get *spoiler*ed).

If you just want the one-line review: Beast == teh cool.

I’ve spent the last 40 minutes watching The Return of Optimus Prime, thanks to this fantastic index of cartoons on YouTube. Oh, to be six again.

Just a couple of links I thought I’d post before my browser finally crashes (I’m using a Firefox 2.0 alpha and that has been running for over a week):

• A collection of surrealist paintings by Rob Gonsalves. This guy’s work was described as being similar to Escher. Personally I see more of a Matisse influence. Either way I’m happy, as those are two of my favourite artists. The seventh painting (the one with the bridge that turns into sailboats) is my favourite.
• An interactive Flash piece of infinitely recursive photo-montages. Keep zooming in on the montage until you get to a single constituent photo. Then keep zooming because that picture is a montage too.

Brick is the best new film I’ve seen so far this year. I have no idea who else will like it. It’s so unique in style that I have trouble thinking of any movie to compare it to. I can’t just say it’s like foo only darker, or like bar but edgier. It’s like Star Wars, only less about an inter-stellar rebellion with pseudo-religious overtones and more about a highschool kid investigating the murder of his ex-girlfriend.

I expected that the California highschool setting would make it more accessible. That setting has been used a lot to present the classics to a modern audience (including Ten Things I Hate About You, also featuring Joseph Gordon Levitt, which was based on The Taming of the Shrew), so it seemed reasonable to think it would be used for the same purpose to modernise the private detective genre. But in Brick director Rian Johnson clearly had no intention of making any concessions to accessibility, whether in style, in plot, or in the film’s strange characteristic dialogue which is is laced with Johnson’s own invented slang. Brick is farther removed from those valley-teen comedies than you would think possible within a medium.

Initially I wasn’t sure I was going to like Brick. I don’t know whether the pace was off at the beginning of the film or if it just took me a few minutes to adjust to the unfamiliar setting. Whatever it was, thankfully it was very quickly sorted out so I could get properly engrossed in the film. And engrossed I got, I have to say. I’ve been singing Levitt’s praises for longer than most people have known his name, so I’ll hopefully have a few opportunities for "I told you so"s if anyone else actually watches this movie. Which you should. Now. Go.

My last prime birthday for six years. I got a guitar, which I’ve been futzing around with since Monday. The bonus three days is because I mostly paid for it myself. Real celebration will take place on Saturday. I took today off college to go to the cinema. Review of Brick will be here soon. I have a feeling that 23 will be better than 22. We’ll see.

If you’re reading Soylent Red with a news aggregator you’re likely to see the last few entries appear as new. This little hiccup is because I just changed my atom feed from the unofficial version 0.3 to the Internet standard Atom 1.0. I also moved it from it’s old URL of /atom/ to /feed/ for aesthetic reasons. I’ve got a redirect so your subscriptions should still work (and, let’s face it, if they don’t you won’t be reading this). I apologise if seeing the last few entries more than once has caused you undue stress.

As I’m occasionally wont to do, I was reading my posts from this time last year, and I came across the musical baton meme. I figured that in light of recent months of purchases and downloads I would do an update.

Total volume of music files on my computer

Last year: 8.2 Gigabytes (3 days 17 hours)

Now: 14.92 Gigabytes (9 days 20 hours)

The increase is due to a prolonged buying spree (I’ve doubled my CD collection since January) and the fact that I took it upon myself to acquire the Rock ‘n Roll Hall of Fame’s 500 Songs That Shaped Rock. I’m still quite surprised that I only had three days of music last year. I would have thought it was closer to five or six days. I’m trying to think of what happened in the second half of last year, but I’m drawing a blank.

The last CD I bought

Brothers & Sisters by the Allman Brothers Band

Song playing right now

Rock and Roll by Led Zeppelin

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

I still struggle on the "mean a lot to me" front. I don’t think I have any particular emotional attachment to any songs. I don’t have that soundtrack-to-major-events-in-life thing going on. These are songs I listen to a lot though.

• Time by Pink Floyd. Probably my current favourite song.
• Tiny Dancer by Elton John. I first heard this song from a recording of Dave Grohl performing it on the Late Late Show (the American one, not the Irish one). I listened to that version repeatedly. I’ve recently got the original version and it’s equally good.
• Jessica by the Allman Brothers Band. The theme tune to Top Gear and one of the best guitar instrumentals I’ve ever heard.
• Dream On by Aerosmith. Okay, it turns out this one does hold a certain significance for me. But it’s also a really good song.
• Alive by Pearl Jam. Play this at my funeral, okay?

Of last year’s five songs, What Would Brian Boitano Do? and The Power of Love have lost most of their gimmick appeal, and it turns out that the song I called Evolution is actually called Line in the Sand. My appreciation for Motorhead has increased since then, as evidenced by my current facial hair (there are no photos of this online to my knowledge, which may be a good thing). Paranoid Android still rules, though I haven’t listened to any Radiohead in a while. I’m going to see them in August. Ditto Everybody Hurts and R.E.M., except for the part about going to see them.

So that’s how things have changed music-wise since last year. Maybe I’ll do this again next year.

According to a Canadian study on coolness, friendliness is the new cool. Researchers found that personality traits that have been traditionally associated with being cool—like detachment, irony and rebelliousness—have mostly been superseded by friendlyness, fairness and thoughtfulness.

Parents will be relieved to know that the popular understanding of cool suggests a Hallmark greeting card more than a gangster orgy.

The study was motivated by the purest scientific ideals of enquiry:

The study was born as a result of a disagreement over the coolness of actor Steve Buscemi, best known for his part as Mr Pink in Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. [Researcher Ian] Hansen thought he was cool because he defied the mainstream, while [other researcher] Dar Nimrod said he was too wimpy and unattractive.

Now it just remains for us to decide if we can rely on Canadians to tell us what’s cool.

Disappointing. My hopes were probably unreasonably high. Nathan Fillion is good, but all of his previous work that I’ve seen has been written by Joss Whedon. Needless to say that few other writers can reach that level of quality, especially in a B-movie horror. Much was made of how funny this movie is, but I didn’t find myself laughing at much of it. It’s entertaining, but no laugh-out-loud funny. Calling it the "best horror comedy since Shawn of the Dead" is very misleading.

Remember in science classes in school when you knew what the result of a calculation was meant to be (the acceleration due to gravity, the speed of light in a vacuum, etc.) so you just worked back from that and from the formulae to invent the "data" that your experiment "measured"? Maybe the more daring among us would eventually have given up on that charade and produced something like the paper entitled Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass.