Quickie Film Reviews: Inception (2010)

Christopher Nolan would like you to know that he liked Dark City just as much, if not more than the Wachowskis did.

Christopher Nolan would also like you to know that he likes On Her Majesty's Secret Service best of all the Bond films.

Christopher Nolan needs a script editor.

Elementary

From this week's Radio Times, on the BBC's new Sherlock Holmes series:

Some viewers will recoil from the very idea of BBC1 updating Conan Doyle's characters to modern London, with [...] a Dr Watson who fought in Afghanistan.

From Wikipedia, on Conan Doyle's Watson:

In the debut Holmes story A Study in Scarlet (published in 1888), Watson, as the narrator, tells us that he had received his medical degree from the University of London in 1878, and had subsequently gone for training as an Army surgeon. He then joined British forces in India, saw service in Afghanistan...

So, in fact, not an update at all. Sigh.

Also Ran

Undying

Oh My God (Literally) (Reprise)

Oh dear.

Seven Years

Crikey. That went fast.

Not Ready

There's a new X-Box 360 out, it seems. They call it the "slim", after the PS2, but it doesn't look much different to me. Anyway, the advert tells us that it has a hard drive, wireless connectivity, and is "ready for Kinect", Micro$hite's more-subtle-than-Sony-but-not-by-much attempt to jump on the Wii bandwagon.

One reason the Wii has succeeded is because Nintendo have reached out beyond video game fandom. Their adverts show actors pretending to be real people, playing the games with their families, and showing how the games work. Simple. Micro$hite's advert doesn't even say what Kinect is, let alone show it in action; I know because I do follow some gaming news sites, but the audience they want to poach from Nintendo are not going to be avid readers of video game journalism.

(Never mind the suggestion that being "ready for Kinect" suggests that Kinect itself is not ready.)

Just showing pictures of the machine, with no indication of what it does, is no good at all. Those weird adverts from a couple of years ago with the drooling idiots with holes in their heads were better than this. But then this is the company who gave their machine a name with no meaning whatsoever, so marketing is obviously not a strong point.

KO!

I cannot understand why this is a PS3/X360 exclusive. There's nothing in there that the Wii cannot do, and given all the Nintendo references in the original books, it's baffling that Nintendo has been left out.

I've been avoiding getting a PS3, but this is pushing me closer.

Anti Intellectualism

I realised two things today: one, that I get a real buzz from talking about "highbrow" subjects like philosophy, science and history, and two, that I'm terrified of talking about these subjects. They're not related; it's not the same kind of excitement/fear you might get from a rollercoaster, for example. No, I get all excited to be talking about this stuff, but then from somewhere comes this fear that I don't really know what I'm talking about, and the people with whom I'm having this conversation are going to know, and it's all going to come to an embarrassing end.

This has all come up because we've got a temp in my office. Ostensibly, I'm her boss, but not only is she a bit older than me, and something in me thinks that authority and age should be proportional, but she's got a PhD and a fierce intelligence, and I feel like some kind of charlatan. She told me yesterday how she worked in shops until her late twenties, decided enough was enough and got herself a string of degrees, and that got me thinking about how I left my degree behind almost ten years ago. This then developed into a conversation about my interest in philosophy, her interest in history, and it all got a bit indulgent and BBC Fourish, but then I started worrying about just how knowledgeable and clever I was, and I clammed up.

I also became quite aware that I was having a conversation, in broad daylight, in front of a room full of people, about the political and social effects of the English Civil War, in particular the change in role for the landed classes, and it made me feel like a right pretentious twit.

So yeah, that was a good day.

The Oncoming Storm

From the synopsis of the finale of the current Doctor Who series:

"There was a goblin. Or a trickster, or a warrior. A nameless, terrible thing, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The most feared being in all the cosmos. Nothing could stop it, or hold it, or reason with it - one day it would just drop out of the sky and tear down your world."

The implication is that this is one of the goodies talking about the big villain of the series, but that rather describes the Doctor himself, does it not?