In the The Years Best Science Fiction 17, there was a story by Alastair Reynolds called Galactic North. Up until that point I had read short stories and no matter how good they were, I never really bothered to follow up and see if the novels from same author were equally readable. After Galactic North, I picked up Revelation Space as soon as I could find it (annoying delays between releases in the UK and US slowing that process down...), and Chasm City soon after.

What's interesting is that the major events of all three of the novels (as well as the upcoming Absolution Gap) barely occupy a couple paragraphs of Galactic North, and pale in significance to the greenfly plague... A few character appear in or are mentioned both in Gal North and Redemption Ark (the conjoiner Rementoire and space pirate Run Seven, respectively).

Redemption Ark is inferior slightly to Chasm City in a few respects, but the treatment of technology and ideas, as well as the space battles, make it highly worthwhile.

I liked the fued between Skade and Clavain, but Antoinette Bax didn't seem that engaging. It's difficult to make anyone a villain, the villains typically have loftier longer term objectives, while the protagonists sometimes sacrifice their people and resources selfishly for others they are personally attached to.

The message Reynolds is trying to make is that at some point every moral choice comes as a conflict between the needs of the present/individual and the future/community- and the closest thing to evil arises from mindless submission to either extreme.

The events pick up a few decades after Chasm City and Revelation Space (which had little overlap, but are tied together here), and hundreds of years after most of the Clavain stories. Mostly it takes place in the Yellowstone system, the Delta Pavonis systems, and the interstellar space lying between. I enjoy tremendously the style of pacing that accounts for relativistic travel- plot lines are intermingled as if they were simultaneous, but really are set up in a way so that the conclusion is synchronised, and the prior events were years or decades apart upon until one set of characters get on an interstellar ship and join the other set.

(spoilers)

One minor disappointment- I would have like to hear about the hell-weapon assault on the Inhibitor device: There's just a throwaway line about the weapons, for all their planet-busting ferocity, having had no effect at all.

The horrors of state-four vacuum are overstated. There are a few other instance like this where Reynolds explains to the reader how horrible something is, and then actually describes it, but the two don't quite match up. I'm reminded of Lovecraft's style, where much of each story is the narrator or characters talking about how (conveniently) undescribable and mind destroying some elder god is, but the payoff where we read a first hand account is something of a let-down. For this vacuum state business, we get someone's life being erased with only others in nearby remembering their existence, and it happens twice almost exactly the same way. There's also reference to whole species being retroactively destroyed, and perhaps are remembered by aliens in neighboring regions of space.

I would have found it more convincing if the state-four vacuum had different effects each time, rather than just the life/species destroying properties. We get one description, and then another on Skade's ship that's exactly the same- couldn't there be something more disturbing (but perhaps similar) caused by alterations to the past? Why does the alteration always involve the death of the experimenters at some point earlier in the past, why not have them having made previous choices differently that don't bring them into contact with the experiment (however more mundane that is, shouldn't it be equally likely?).

I'm not quite sure on the chronology of Rementoire- after he's shot in the assault that kills Run Seven, he later ends up in the mother nest and with Skade etc. and the event of Ark proceed?

(spoilers)

There first two thirds of the movie aren't that interesting. The whole movie seems to be incomplete, and pointless. There's a failure to embed itself much at into the TNG context.

From the previews, I believed the Data like robot was Lor (?) from the series. I'm guessing he died at some point, but a mention of his existence (and fate) would have been appropriate.

Where did this Remus planet and the Remans come from? Where they mentioned in episodes, or made up for the movie? I may look it up later, but as I was watching the movie, I was wondering how I could have heard so much about the Romulans and never of their counterparts.

The early scenes with the wedding are annoying, as are any exchange on the Enterprise where the two characters try to say something clever- or an order is given and the other responds 'Yes sir' and grins in a way that suggests they are practically reading minds. Yes, they have all been serving with each other for ever and know each other's mannerisms and have all sorts of inside jokes- it's painfully obvious.

The washed out color regrading on the first planet landed on is very un-Treklike. It's obvious that now this effect has established itself, it will be frequently overused in the same way morphing was or fancy fonts (in the completely different venue of desktop publishing) were when they were novel. Eventually, most films will opt for a more subtle approach (or already are). It's possible the more obvious color grading comes from a luminance mapping approach, rather than remapping all possible r,g,b or luminance, chrominance, etc. combinations.

The end ship battle seemed clunky initially. I would have edited it down to make the initial exchanges happen much more quickly, so it would not appear the Enterprise was surviving much longer than it should be.

(major spoiler)
The Enterprise colliding with the other ship was the moneyshot, and my favorite part of the film. Even if the rest of the movie is throwaway, this sequence is worth it. It's interesting how a relatively lower-budget Trek film does something so visually novel like this, while the Star Wars prequels suffer from a tremendous poverty of imagination.

To critisize Star Wars further, the prequels only offering is to have more, rather than something different that enormously prohibitive or impossible with earlier technology. More lightsabers, spaceships, explosions, and so on, but nothing really new or exciting as far as I'm concerned. More is better, but it shouldn't be all there is.

There's a certain correspondence to other Trek movies - the Enterprise crashing into the ground, and some sort of weapon ripping a hole through the main part of the ship in another. The attention to detail, and the amount of debris on screen is what impresses me most.

We still get plenty of lame explosions that simply engulf the ship in question. There's nothing more boring than an anonymous explosion that relates no information about about the source of the explosion. Better to have the ship get whole sections torn off, leak gas and chunks of debris and crew into space, spin slowly out of control, and die a tortured death than to be erased cleanly and instantaneously.

The slugfest between the ships was impressive, and the gruesome end of the main villain. The fight between Riker and the Reman guy wasn't that engaging.

I was thinking the last scene would be something with all the crew tastefully naked (from a distance, blurred out, or Austin Powers like) on whatever planet they were originally heading towards celebrating the wedding, but thankfully the filmmakers thought better of that.

Review of previous book in series: House Harkonnnen. This is the final book in the first Dune prequel trilogy. There's another trilogy about the Butlerian Jihad still in progress.

Occasionally stirring, frequently cartoonish and not completely integrated with Frank Herbert's books. The main reason to take this series more seriously than fan-fiction would be the semi-apocryphal recovered notes at the authors' disposal. If those notes were to be published it would be interesting to see how much content originated from the late Frank Herbert- but it's likely that they will have to milk as much out of the franchise as possible before that happens.

The climax seems much too climactic given that Dune makes no reference too them- I would have made it more subtle. A huge disaster for the entire Imperium is narrowly averted, but prophesies never warned of it beforehand nor do histories examine it closely after.

The sandworms are said to literally consume spice. My recollection of the lifecycle depicted in the original novels is weak, but this strikes a false note- I thought the worms produced the spice, as waste, and ate small creatures (microbes even) living in the sand similar to whales in oceans.

Later, Tleilaxu eyes are said to be metallic- this one also seems false: the Tleilaxu are profieient at genetic manipulation, not mechanical work.

One scene was unintentionally funny, and involved the annoying superpowers of the Bene Gesserit: Barely two paragraphs after attesting to Bene Gesserit sexual prowess, there is an unrelated mention of a special knot being tied "that no one but a Bene Gesserit could release without a knife." Perhaps the Boy Scouts were rolled into the Bene Gesserit organization in its early stages, and through centuries of censorship and manipulation their legendary knot capabilities were completely eradicated from public knowledge?

(spoiler)
A Tleilaxi researcher finds a women whose biology serves his evil research, but then has difficulty find more like her. Why not clone her?
(/spoiler)

I launched into The Cassini Division, never having read the author before (except perhaps from short stories in The Year's Best Science Fiction), and read it through in about three days. I'd heard just enough good things- it's modern space opera with the hard-sf edge, and right on the cover is a blurb from Vernor Vinge.

There's a lot of concepts thrown around without the deeper explanation another author might go for (and the book is also relatively short), mainly dealing with post-humans and singularity. Nanotech I accept as a given, though obviously a newcomer is going to encounter a lot of strange stuff- but that's what sf is all about.

(semi-spoilers)

One interesting concept in the books is that the post-humans aren't very enlightened, just very smart and frequently insane or inimical to lesser intelligences- and therefore pose a danger everyone else. One of Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix stories dealt with humans modded for high iq but without fail all going crazy. The virus onslaught that keeps inhabitants of the solar system from using electrical computers has echoes in Chasm City (though there, all nanotech is affected), and the human assimilation stuff is similar to A Fire Upon The Deep. And of course the human visual meme-virus: Snow Crash.

It's not that it's all derivative material (though some of it is)- Macleod approaches it in a unique and exciting way.

I didn't find the 'True Knowledge' info-dump convincing. Maybe a longer novel could have had more compelling material in the story that would support the explanation later on, but it didn't work here. Monolithic belief systems don't really cut it anyhow, perhaps it could be said that everyone interprets the True Knowledge differently, sometimes radically so.

I think my main impression is that as good as the book is, it's not as satisfying as it could be.

The post-capitalist obscenities were amusing ('shop-off' and references to deviant acts of employer-employee role-playing...).

I've got some of Macleod's earlier novels on hold at the library- I'll probably burn through most of his stuff over the next few weeks. I've got a habit of rapidly exhausting an author's work, but not remembering to pick up new books as I've already moved on to someone else.

Contact aside, The Demon Haunted World is probably the best Carl Sagan book I've yet read. Of course, I've only read Contact. And something from way back called The Dragon of Eden.

At first, the focus on alien abduction and related phenomena was annoying- stuff for crazies and children. But the more Sagan delves, in, the more fascinating it becomes for all the connections he draws to the equivalent of alien abductions from other eras or belief systems.

There's a disturbing discussion of succubi/incubi where a the results of an investigation of a series of incidents at a church (several hundred years ago) is related: The demon who came during the night to violate numerous nuns was also particularly devious in that it chose to disguise itself as the head priest.

The bottom line explanation for pretty much everything inexplicable? People see, hear, and experience all kinds of wierd stuff that never really happened. Memories corrupt easily. Coincidences are over-emphasized, and so on.

President Ronald Reagan, who spent World War II in Hollywood, vividly described his own role in liberating Nazi concentration camp victims. Living in the film world, he apparently confuse a movie he had seen with a reality he had not. On many occasions in his Presidential campaings, Mr. Reagan told an epic story of World War II courage and scrifice, an inspiration for all of us. Only it never happened; it was the plot of the movie A Wing and a Prayer.

(page 314)

Science Fiction

Some interesting science fiction plot generators are thrown out (though probably used many times since alien-abduction type aliens have been well covered in popular media). Sagan asks, what kind of proof would it take for the abduction and related stories to actually be convincing? What kind of proof would we have acquired by now if any of the stories were true? As already established, the impassioned belief of any number of people is not sufficient for the first (and wouldn't make for a very interesting story).

Non-technological Science

The book does not bog itself down with the one set of human deficiencies for too long- there's a particulary interesting passage on the science of primitive cultures. Here, Sagan goes to lengths to show that for practical matters humans have been capable of gleaning truth about the world for a very long time, if only recently methods and technologies were around to vastly accelerate the process.

The !Kung San people from Africa and their almost superhuman tracking capabilities are described: one could recognize another from the same village by their footprints in the sand. If a society places a high value on a certain capability for a very long time, it's members start to become extremely proficient if by nothing else than trial-and-error and of course the passage of all successful techniques to their off-spring.

Witchcraft & The Inquisition

There's a lot of treatment of the Inquisition, and it seems like a fascinating piece of history to read further up on. It seems like an enormous oversight on my part to not know more about it...

The extraorinarily poor methods of that made up the inquisitorial justice system are examined closely, and connections to McCarthy/HCUA hearings pointed out (as they were implicity in 'The Crucible', written during the same era). The exact same damned-if-do-damned-if-you-don't illogic prevails in both places, though it should be noted that by the 1950's grisly repeated torture was not an approved method of interrogation.

Probably if I had stayed in the 'advance' track in high-school I would have been introduced to some of this by now and not think it interesting, as the public school systems has a way of pretty much anything it touches boring and mundane...

A dry and tedious bone of realism runs through Tears of the Sun, probably owing to the influence of Black Hawk Down. It's etraordinarily uninteresting- there's no real history present (just some vague borrowed history that is altered to suit the story, religions swapped, I think), it's realism in the sense of limiting the style of presentation and outcomes of depicted events to the ordinary and mundane.

Take Three Kings, which had a very hard realistic (or hyper-realistic) edge but many competent action sequences, humorous elements, actual history surrouding it, and altogether very engaging.

Tears, on the other hand, takes place in a real country filled with fictional revolutionaries headed by a severely under-characterized 'evil' general, and is in the present/very-near-future. It takes it self seriously without having anything significant to say (or are they going out on a limb to say "genocide is bad!").

The realism is most competent and engaging at the level of tactics and general capabilities of military hardware, but is boring for the mild characters. The action sequence present attritional battles with very little room for heroics (there's one or two instances, but not much). The bad guys come in waves and get mowed down, the good guys fall back while shooting and are taken out one by one- no real surprises or anything clever thrown in.

(begin spoilers)

At one point, the protagonists decide to save what remains of a village, and proceed to kill every enemy soldier there. The soldiers don't ever really notice or fight back, and it would be inappropriate, because I suppose the viewer is supposed to be overwhelmed by the horror and tragedy and moving music. I'm not saying it's not entirely ineffective, it's just not that worthwhile either.

I could be misremembering, but there isn't much reaction to this incident from the opposing general.

It turns out that the good guys are actually transporting and protecting the son of the slain president (is this Campbell territory yet?), who his actually some sort of prince/tribal leader whose presence required to prevent the country (Nigeria) from falling to chaos. So it's not really a democracy? They don't bother to explain that further.

The end reeks of cavalry-to-the-rescue/deus-ex-machina. The formerly restricted jet bombers come and blow every last enemy up. Again, it's no clever ploy by the protagonists, they don't win because of any outstanding capability- they just manage to live long enough for higher powers to intercede on their behalf. I was confused here- no reason is presented (that I remember) for the sudden appearance or the jets, it was certainly not anything the main characters were doing.

I'm guessing by now, after the poor box-office returns of Tears and We Were Soldiers (and even Black Hawk Down didn't do that well, but of course critical acclaim and Academy Awards tend to make up for money lost), there won't be a whole lot more in this vein of high-profile big-budget serious war movie for awhile- and I say good riddance, bring on the hard-R overblown action and mano-a-mano hero versus villain end fights atop moving vehicles/skyscraper etc. Or at least something cross-genre like Three Kings.

Half-Price Books had a stack of old Cinefex's that apparently somebody had up and gotten rid of in one go. I bought most of them, and they're quite good, though can get tedious. Cinefex is film special effects trade magazine, and features every issue a few high-profile movies, I believe after they have arrived in theaters (as key plot points are mentioned frequently). Most of the text is from interviews with the people in charge of special effects units, and the director among them.

I would guess most of the material would make it into a good technical commentary on a dvd, but many of these older movies in the issues I picked up haven't had their 'special edition' come out yet (or I haven't found their special editions in Half-Price Books for $2 yet).

Star Trek

In the first issue, there's a lot of material on Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I've only seen the last 15 minutes of it many years ago, but after reading about it here I may give it a watch.

The huge number of layers that go into a composite shot of a model spaceship flyby or any other effect was really startling- it's in the dozens. One quote told of how the individual layers were shot in 70mm, but after many composites with the other layers the quality has fallen to what would be right for a 35 mm final print.

Another interesting segment on Star Trek was how an entire special effects unit was hired and then dismissed entirely because they weren't performing. The persons interviewed (who did see the project to a finish) are pretty frank about overall disappointment with the movie, but are proud of their work anyhow.

Alien

The most fascinating bits here were about H.R. Giger's role in the production, and his work early incarnations of the alien creature. Initially the face of it was very much like a human skull, but Ridley Scott and others opted to place a translucent shell over the empty eye sockets and rest of the head's top.

There's also mention of Giger's work on the preproduction of the non-Lynch Dune, for which he produced several designs but was never paid.

Ridley Scott mentions toward the end of the article that originally the alien had much more screen time, but after each test audience screening he would cut it down to increase tension and also avoid having the thing look like a guy in a rubber suit.

Unfortunately this mindset wasn't present in the Alien 3 & 4 directors, who put in all those horrible computer generated aliens. Sure it isn't a guy in a rubber suit, but it's still crap. It's quite obvious that a part of the whole alien look is their sheen (lots of vaseline, according to the article)- but in computer generated shots the environmental lighting that would produce the right reflections is extremely hard to do for the composited shots and poorly done elsewhere. Note the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park have very rough non-shiny skins that are much more easy to present convincingly, or how Keanu Reeves wears a dull black outfit in Matrix: Reloaded rather than shiny leather.

Several years ago I tried out panquake (google search: "Do you mean: pancake "), and thought it was the coolest thing ever. A couple weeks ago I duplicated the effect in my own opengl base code and yesterday put up a rough web page describing and showing some screen shots, maybe with executables, full gpled source, and more discussion of the effect later on.

About the same time I was watching some of the extremely impressive Half-Life 2 videos, and being annoyed by the rotations the camera makes because of the distortion of the wide fov. You would tend not to notice when playing a fps, because your attention is on the center of the screen where you'll be shooting, and not near the sides where the distortion is most noticeable.

Eclipse, Eclipse Penumbra, Eclipse Corona

In the year 2020, Europe has been reduced to rubble by clashing NATO and Soviet forces, and in the chaos a security corporation with plans for fascist world domination begins its operations. The New Resistance, rag tag etc. good guys fight them with guns, hackers, and rock'n'roll. Lots of graphic violence and sex ensues.

The first was released in 1985, so of course the existence of the Soviet Union was assumed 35 years later.

The series is pretty decent, the scenes set in the U.S. reminded me of the John Brunner dystopian novels (Stand on Zanzibar, Sheep Look Up, Jagged Orbit) with a few technological updates as well as the endearing doesn't-quite-ring-true extrapolation of ethnic minority sub-culture.

The references to music are interesting (especially nearly twenty years later), as there are reference to real bands up until the time of the publication date and then (unintentionally humorous) fictional bands thereafter.

It didn't really strike me as cyberpunk, even with all the chips-in-the-brain and hacking, but more conventional mass-market future military speculative fiction instead.

I tore through the first two rather quickly, thinking something along the lines of "This is the WWIII book I've always wanted to write", but the finale doesn't quite do it. It's apparent there's something missing by the middle of the third book- there's always the realization that hits you in a movie or book that it isn't quite what you were hoping it to be, but it's a credit here that the realization comes so late (rather than in the first fifty pages). There's no epic feeling built up that comes to a mighty climax, or the protagonists and villains aren't sufficiently gripping so that their deaths or triumphs are more moving at the end.

Some of this could have been the extreme violence- I like Walter Jon Williams style of slowly building up to a brutal showdown between the villain and protagonist, but here there's just a consistent tone from beginning to end. It gets a little wearisome, despite occasional relief in the form of a few characters observing things from a distance on an island redoubt.

Another problem with the grisly details of war and combat is that the details and the combat sequences themselves are over the top and therefore less moving than something more convincing. The physics and tactics are underrealized, and become progressively less interesting, where an author who had expertise or did painstaking research would have interesting tidbits of information unique to every scene, and some of these would effect the course of the battles. There is a lot of attention to detail, but I would prefer even more.

There's a few too many 'cavalry to the rescue' scenes where the good guys are slaughtered down to the main characters but support swoops in and gets them to safety.

There's a lot of effort to set a grim tone, but sometimes it came across as cheesiness. It's got to be hard to write about fictional concentration camps, Final Solutions, and so forth, and have the action movie m.o. (which has a way of making all of the former more throwaway plot material, even if the author doesn't want that to happen) at the same time, and Shirley does fall short. But few other people attempt anything like this without falling becoming completely pulp, so it's a good try.

Adaptation

Pretty good "let's make fun of Hollywood" combined with "the most self-referential movie ever" stuff. I appreciated the third act, but missed the humor from the earlier parts.

Ballistics: Ecks vs. Sever

The final fight Lucy Liu vs. Ray Park was almost a competent action scene. The rest was horrible, bad editing, bad logic, bad choreography, and of course everything you'd expect to be bad (stories, characters, etc.) was also bad. Lucy Liu's character does the bad-ass pose every ten seconds, but they forgot that for that to work you have to have the character do something cool and then get a shot of them all tense in their fight stance or whatever. She's so cool she doesn't have take cover when fired at. And the other bad-ass move, the quick clip changing for instance, looks incredibly slow and unpracticed when I know in the script there's probably a lot of lines about how much a smooth professional she's supposed to look like.

Windtalkers

Boring.

I thought I'd give it a shot on the strength of his earlier movies (MI:2 had some cool scenes, and I even liked Hard Target, and of course all the Hong Kong stuff). There's a lot of very amateurish and experimental looking camera moves where you'd expect super smooth gliding action: The camera will sit at one distance, then zoom in cheesily or abrupt steadicam forward for the dramatic close up annoyingly.

The sequence with Christian Slater and the other code talker guy near the end was decent, but I was asking myself why I was bothering to watch and web-browsing the rest of the last half.

Trapped

Rented this because the previews promised a lot f
Thrillers like this usually work by setting up a situation with ordinary people where the audience can easily map their emotions onto themselves, and sympathize and predict some courses of action taken by the characters- and after the film creates those expectations, it can manipulate and turn them on their head in surprising ways.

There isn't much of that kind of logic here, just a series of threatened or realized violent encounters with some verbal abuse wrapped around them.

The plane's instant fall at the end seemed wrong- and weren't the flaps on the wings down? (which means the stunt pilot was obviously nosing the plane down, rather than falling out of the sky due to lack of airspeed)

There's a sound effect of police sirens at the end, which clearly have an echo to them that would be right in a city with lots of acoustically reflective buildings around- but the last scene is in the middle of a highway with expanses of forest on both sides.

Resident Evil

Best movie of this bunch except for Adaptation. I really liked the clean metallic contrasty look of most of the shots, though the computer effects were pretty weak. The structure is extremely video game like (go figure), with simplistic goals and obstacles and even a boss monster. (I thought Bourne Identity was like a video game for similar reasons)

There is a cheapness I associate with lots of guns being fired (muzzle flash is relatively cheap) but not many things getting shot (squibs and other little explosives and those paintballs that make the sparks being extremely complicated, time consuming, and therefore expensive). My high standards require every bullet shown fired to have a shown bullet hole, but I could be a little unreasonable about it.

A sequel is due in another year- I thought the movie did poorly at the box office, but maybe it was just profitable enough for another go? www.the-numbers.com says it cost $30e6 and made only $39e6, where the usual rule of thumb is that a movie only gets half of the box office and advertising usually isn't figured into the budget- but maybe international gross and video sales made up for it?

I caught a little of the Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez commentary, at it was extremely entertaining- they were talking about random things or making fun of the movie or interrupting the director when he's going on about special effects (there's also a technical commentary if you want to hear those details and be rid of the actors)

The recent versions of Opera have really improved my web browsing throughput. Gestures have been around a while, but I really like the new 'Open all folder items'. I made a folder full of webpages I find interesting that are updated frequently, and once a day or less frequently I can just open them all up and plow through. It requires a lot less thought and energy than specifically remembering to go to each individually and laboriously clicking on each link in the bookmarks menu in succession. I find that I can keep track of a couple dozen pages this way rather than just slashdot and one or two others.

Pages that aren't updated frequently aren't too problematic, it's easy to see the contents are the same and close the window- it gets tiresome if this goes on for a few weeks with no update, so it would be nice if the web browser could automate this and check for updates itself before bringing up a page. There could also be different prioritization and queueing schemes, where if you get bored of browsing through the usual one day the unseen (but loaded) pages would come up first the next session.

It's like an inbox for web pages.

One feature that should be added to the gestures and 'back' buttons is that the browser should recognize that going 'back' from a newly opened window should mean either closing the window or flipping to the window that spanned the new one. I'll be browsing, unaware that I'm in a new window and all of a sudden find the back button has hit the wall and doesn't work anymore. It's too much effort to make that realization and then close the window with a different action.

Why Autobiographies Suck:

Essentially an autobiography is the last place you want to go to actually learn the facts and history of a person and the events they were a part of. The authors usually assume the reader is aware of the events, an their book just explains their reasonings or feelings during them. Autobiographies are extremely self-centered, by definition I suppose, and it hurts that the writers aren't that professional.

It is also fustrating whenever an author says they cannot remember what happened in a certain instance- why not call up an old friend and figure it out, or look it up some other way? This is the another central failure of autobiographies: a fundamental laziness where the author assumes that they are competent to write about something simply because they were witness to it or it is about themselves (however remote in the past it was), and do not do the most simply consulting of any other records or other people to verify.

Gandhi: An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments With Truth: With a Foreword by Sissela Bok

Knowing basically nothing about Gandhi, it was wrong for me to pick this book up and read it and expect to get much history out of it. Gandhi himself says many times he's skipping the history because it would take up too much room and at the end he says directly his life after that point was so entirely public there's no point in him writing about it. I think another problem is that this work was originally written in an episodic fashion for printing in a periodical in India, and not intended for a western reader nearly a century later to pick up and run with.

There is a lot of interesting material here: The central aspect of diet to Gandhi's focus on eliminating passion (for sex and many kinds of food) from his life. There is a lot of material on medical techniques that are sound extremely crackpot, although he at least knew cleanliness was a big factor in reducing plague and rightfully went out of his way to educate people's in India and South Africa about proper waste disposal.

The poor people had no objection to their latrines being inspected, and what is more, they carried out the improvements suggested to them. But when we went to inspect the house of the upper ten, some of them even refused us admission, not to talk of listening to our suggestions. It was our common experience that the latrines of the rich were more unclean.

(From XXV: In India)

Quote on public institutions:

Institutions maintained on permanent funds are often found to ignore public opinion, and are frequently responsible for acts contrary to it...I have no doubt that the ideal is for public institutions to live, like nature, from day to day. The institution that fails to win public suppport has no right to exist as such.

(IV: The Calm Before The Storm)

On God:

I see, with the eye of faith, in this circumstance the hand of the God of Mercy. Let no one cavil at this, saying that God can never be partial, and the he has no time to meddle with the humdrum affairs of men. I have no other language to express the fact of the matter, to describe this uniform experience of mine. Human language can but imperfectly describe God's ways. I am sensible of the fact that they are indescribable and inscrutable. But if mortal man will dare to describe them, he has no better medium than his own inarticulate speech.

(XXI: A Peep Into The Ashram)

So there was a lot of interesting material, but I was improperly prepared to handle much of it and niceties like overarching narrative structure and themes etc. are sorely missed and that lacking makes the reading go much slower. There are probably dozens of good books I should have read first to learn the rudimentary history of British involvement in India and South Africa and all the other context that much of this book is deeply embedded in.

(vague spoilers)

The thieves are all very nice and lack any hard edges, despite being hardened criminals. The whole movie lacks any edge as well, there's nothing particularly exciting or clever.

The Napster joke was old years before the movie came out, but then it comes up again and again and then I was laughing at the stupidity of Seth Green's character continually harping on it. I'd imagine five years from now younger kids might see this movie and say "What's Napster?" The joke with the Jason Statham talking to the cable girl was the only genuine moment the movie had. Of course the stereo thing was done to death by the previews.

Green being able to measure the heights of the trucks backends is redundant- he didn't need to know the heights, just that one was lower than the others.

Being able to take video and turn it into a complete 3D schematic was ridiculous- they should have at least shown the video being processed and large gaps appearing in the model where Theron didn't tape. The cheesy sequence of the car driving through the house made it even worse.

I recall Swordfish had the tech-babble punched up with a lot of references to Slashdot material- here it's all gibberish.

The movie is extremely straightforward- no 18 doublecrosses revealed in the last five minutes like Reindeer Games, thankfully...

I'm sure a lot of other reviews go on about ridiculous amount of screen time the mini coopers get- my thoughts:

Wouldn't having the trunks full of gold drop the backend down when they fly out of the tunnel? The unspecified 'souping up' done to them accounts for them being able do any speedy driving at all, perhaps they put counter weights in.

They never once get dirty or lose their sheen... that goes for all the actors as well.

Mildly amusing, and extremely forgettable.

Good, but a lot of pacing problems near the beginning and especially at the end.

After watching the new Matrix last week, the brevity of the some of the one-note action scenes is almost startling- I would think a significant sequence would be coming on, but the plot has to keep moving and the mutant quickly dispatches the opposing side and fade to somewhere else.

I was sometimes confused as to the nature of Jean Grey's (?) superpowers- a general telekinesis? Perhaps I should watch the first again or consult some internet site.

(spoilers)

Wolverine defending the school and Magneto escaping from his non-metallic prison were immensely satisfying, though the former was way too long coming- an immense number of different plot points came first, necessarily I suppose.

Professor X uses the 'stop' trick a couple times, it was something psychological to freeze people in their tracks (the frozen people continue to breath?) and not remember anything for a short period. Wouldn't the ones in mid-stride or otherwise unbalanced fall over, or do they unconsciously steady themselves and wait to be restored to action?

The jet landing in front of the burnt police cars was probably the worst special effect shot in the film, followed by the scene where water is rushing through the trees. For the first, I suppose brightly lit outdoors scenes are inherently difficult to composite with computer generated imagery (the more diffuse, somewhat omnidirectional lighting of midday would be harder to duplicate in computer), and computer simulation of water physics hasn't quite arrived or it just wasn't worth devoting art resources towards. I don't like the short circuited pay off of that dam-bursting scene- a huge amount of time devoted to showing the dam bursting, but only a couple brief shots of the water actually flooding the area in front of the dam (don't make promises you can't deliver upon in full, in a movie or otherwise).

I think the ending should have reordered things and pared a few others down a bit to improve the pacing: the dam is damaged early on, which should create a sense of impending disaster- but even while the audience is aware the movie often 'forgets' or ignores this upcoming event and has lingering sequences, and every so often a another shot of the dam breaking open further, then some characters carrying on like they had all the time in the world- not because the movie is making a point of their obliviousness. When a suggestion of such magnitude is made, subsequents scene have to be informed by that event and that has to be detectable by the audience.

A better route would have been to have the fight that causes the explosion later, or have a chain reaction of events that are triggered early but only later causes cracks in the dam to appear when the true climax is impending. There are a few other sequences (like Jean about to step outside the jet) where a sense of urgency is present, but a few long shots are presented that seem to ignore it- probably the director thought it was more dramatic that way, but I think he was leaving some critical cues out that would create that drama.

I haven't read any reviews, read slashdot comments, or even talked to any besides the people I saw the movie with the other day, so this is all coming out 'fresh':

Some thoughts on the first Matrix(scroll down).

There were a lot of things wrong with this movie, and many problems with the first were amplified and a host of new ones introduced. There was one very large and somewhat personal disappointment, though in the whole I tried to see it without many expectations.

(Begin Spoilers)

The largest structural problem is that Reloaded and the Revolution are are one long movie, and not standalone. This makes it difficult to criticize what may be resolved or accounted for in the second half, but my contention is that this incomplete aspect is a failure no matter what comes in the second half.

Many characters are introduced in a long and boring Zion sequence in the beginning, which play very little role later on.

The dance party seen went on way too long and elicited more than a few snickers and laughs from the audience (a lot more derisive laughter occurred during the superman to the rescue moments). The theater I went to often has humorous taglines of their own making: "Matrix: Reloaded" and then "Morpheus Dance Party" underneath it in smaller letters.

All the politics and Star Trek like Councilor-such-and-such addressing the heads of Zion was boring and pointless.

Link's character buildup was mostly overstated, with the exception of the dead brothers from the first movie being mentioned. That was a nice touch.

The Oracle scene was too long, and they should have thought of another word besides 'program' to describe the intelligent in-Matrix entities being discussed, as they use it far too much.

Excerpt:
Lights in Zion begin to turn off.

MORPHEUS: Goodnight Zion!

TINY VOICE 1: G'night Morphy!

TINY VOICE 2: G'night everybody!

3: G'night!

4: G'night!

Etcetera while lights continue to wink out.

The Agent Smith battle was dull, and then increasingly cheesy with the additional Smiths running in through the gates. Neo can fly, so is he fighting all these guys just to see if he can defeat every last one? He can also reach into people and erase them, but that trick didn't occur in this movie at all, thankfully. Smith tries to replicate himself over Neo and effectively incapacitates him for several moments even though the viral-whatever fails- he and his multitudes should have tried all sticking their hands in at once, or having one do the infection while the rest do their best to pummel him senseless. Neo is basically a god, so it's fundamentally uninteresting to watch him fight when the stakes are so low.

The French guy went on talking for far too long and the cake eating internal explosion unfortunately was not the most ridiculous thing happen in the course of the movie. It's not really that interesting the little husband-and-wife spat that enables the gang to get to the keymaker, and should have been pared down.

I first assumed the 'keymaker' title was a metaphor or suggestive of abstract functionality of the character, but no: he's surround by keys and is continues to make them by hand.

It's at this point the movie actually becomes exciting and payoff somewhat, but a good hour has been wasted. My suggestion: have a theater edition with all the stuff pertinent to the next movie heavily edited down and speed towards the serious action, and then a 'prequel/part 1 of 2' edition on the DVD released a few months before Revolution comes out with additional character development for the character who play a part later on. Nobody is going to watch that thinking they would have rather seen some bit of dialogue on the big-screen...

The albino dreadlock twins looked promising initially, but resort to tricks better left in "The Mummy" or a much more intentionally cheesy movie- they can turn semi-invisible and walk through walls? Pretty lame...

The car-chase made the movie, but the problematic agent body switching and albino ghosting really taxed the ability of the movie to provide tension and create real drama. Why didn't the agents jump into this or that person earlier when it would have mattered more, or the albinos turn ghost her or there? Since there are no natural limitations on these 'cheating' abilities, it's hard to get excited.

The money shot was of course the trucks colliding, though there were loud outbursts of laughter when superman/Neo saves the day. Does it get more stupid? Yes, it does:

I said aloud that Neo just needs to fly around the world fast enough to bring Trinity back to life, but he does one better and does reconstructive internal surgery with his finger tips.

The way Morpheus turns out to be a superstitous fanatic was a nice touch, but I grew tired of his labored "I believe" speech at the end. I was hoping the three red-shirts would just drop dead in that meeting room as their ship was destroyed after Morpheus would say something about not everyone surviving the mission, as a bit of off-color humor.

The encounter with the architect goes on too long, but the way the guy has to phrase every sentence gets wearisome.

The biggest disappointment? Not a single attempt to top the lobby gunfight or helicopter rescue. There's very little gunplay at all, as the filmmakers have adopted the m.o. of a Jackie Fan movie: as soon as guns are introduced, a way has to be contrived to get rid of those guns as quickly as possible to make way for yet more hand-to-hand combat. A response to Columbine and related incidents?

They do top themselves marginally, though mostly in quantity and not quality. There wasn't anything jaw-dropping, no 'this is to Matrix as Matrix was to everything before it'.

I probably see it again and try to resolve some conflicted feelings I have about the film, and having gotten these notes down I'll see what the slashdot consensus is.