May the 4th be with you at the Hayden Orpheum (the right kind of Hayden)

Last Sunday (May the 4th), we went to see the original Star Wars trilogy on the big screen at the Hayden Orhpeum in Cremorne, North Sydney.

It was a lot of fun, as the Orpheum is quite an old cinema and really embraced the whole Star Wars Day thing. The show started with Darth Vader playing music from the Star Wars soundtrack on a Wurlitzer organ and was followed by a competition for the best Star Wars fancy dress before the films themselves.

(The winner was a very cute miniature Boba Fett.)

I must say, it was great watching the old films on the big screen again. They definitely show their age a bit but it was fun watching with an appreciative audience. The good thing about Star Wars fans is that they are perfectly aware that the films are full of cheesy (if charming) moments, and so there was a lot of applause and occasional laughter at some of the hokier lines and innuendo.

Sitting in a classic cinema watching some classic films did make me realise a couple of things, though.

Firstly, modern cinemas are better. They should be, given how much more expensive they are, but seven hours sitting in an old-style cinema seat really made me appreciate modern “stadium style” seating. (Though I’ve never understood why they call it that, given how uncomfortable stadium seats are!)

Secondly, don’t mess with a classic. The most unfortunate thing of the day is that they did not actually screen the original films - instead we got the “Special Edition” versions.

The last time I saw all three films at the cinema was when the Special Editions were released. At that time, the novelty value masked how terrible the changes actually were. This time, it had been quite a few years since I’d last seen the films and the changes - and how bad they were - really stuck out.

At best they were pointless, such as the extra Tatooine CGI sandtroopers on Dewbacks. However, most of the additions actively made the films worse. Slapstick CGI animals and droids in Mos Eisley, during what should have been a tense scene? Bad. CGI addition of “wonderful human being” Jabba the Hutt in Episode IV? Bad. Making Greedo shoot before (or possibly concurrent with) Han Solo? Bad. Bad. Replacing Sebastian Shaw with Hayden Christensen at the end of Return of the Jedi? Bad. Bad. Bad.

In a way, it was actually slightly ironic that we saw the films in the Hayden Orpheum - the Hayden Christensen replacement got the only audience boo of the night. Why, George, why‽‽

The Special Edition nonsense was not a major distraction, though, and I would still recommend the triple bill on a future Star Wars Day. (Although I think I have my fix for a few years!) The final thing it made me realise is that Star Wars is such a cultural phenomenon, enriched by many of the spin-offs (especially those that take the piss), it really is deserving of a day of celebration.

May the Fourth be with you, always.

Lego, Noah and other movies

Today we went to see The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The adventures of Gustave H, a legendary concierge at a famous European hotel between the wars, and Zero Moustafa, the lobby boy who becomes his most trusted friend.

I won’t give any spoilers here but just say that it's thoroughly entertaining, I really enjoyed it and it’s well worth a watch.

There’s quite a lot of competition at the cinema at the moment, with Captain America (also good) and the Lego Movie (which looks good) among others. One, I won’t be watching is Noah - a movie that I don’t really understand why it was made. If you want to save some money and get the "real" Noah myth, you can do far worse than combining it with another current movie and checking out lego Noah over at The Brick Testament!

As well as the animals going in two by two - dinosaurs included, which should keep the Creationists happy - I particularly like the scene with all the animals crammed into the ark. I’m not sure that even cute lego figures make the story any less horrific, though.

Wallace was not forgotten and Darwin did not cheat him

A while ago, I watched - and really enjoyed - Bill Bailey’s Jungle Hero about Alfred Russell Wallace, the “co-discover of Natural Selection”. (I’m not sure why, like assassins of American Presidents, Wallace always has his middle name used.) It was an excellent two-part documentary in which Bailey retraces some of the steps of Wallace in his epic and life-changing - in fact, world-changing - expeditions through Borneo and Idonesia that resulted in the publication of his joint paper with Dariwn in 1858, On the Tendency of Species to form Varieties; and on the Perpetuation of Varieties and Species by Natural Means of Selection.

What annoyed me a little, however, was the degree to which the show seemed to buy into two legends about Wallace and his relationship with Darwin: (1) Wallace was forgotten whilst Darwin took all the credit, and (2) Darwin somehow cheated Wallace out his due recognition. As far as I can tell, neither is really the case.

Perhaps I have a twisted view of things as an evolutionary biologist but, even before this year’s activities in honour of the hundred years since his death, Wallace has not been forgotten. He is still lauded as a scientific hero among evolutionary biologists, with several key insights attributed to him. As well as a bunch of species, he has had geographical features named after him, including the Wallace Line and adjoining Wallacea, and is known as “the father of Biogeography”. There is a reason that Darwin is given more credit when it comes to evolution - he did come up with Natural Selection first and as it was the theory was largely ignored until On the Origin of Species was published. (It’s worth reading an interesting and informative post at Why Evolution is True by Greg Mayer, Why is Darwin more famous than Wallace?) But more credit to one does not equate to no credit to the other.

I’ve also never really understood the big deal about the chain of events that resulted in the 1858 joint publication. If, the story goes, if Wallace had only sent his idea direct to publication when he first had it rather than sending it to Darwin then it would have been just the Wallace theory of Natural Selection. (Except that Wallace did not use that term, so it probably would have been called something else.) Perhaps. But, equally, if Darwin had sent his theory for publication when he first had it, Wallace would never have thought of it because it would have already been a solved problem before he even went to Asia. It seems that Wallace is more lucky than unlucky to be heralded the "co-discoverer".

Then there is the even stronger claim that Wallace was not just unlucky, but that Darwin actively did the dirty and cheated him. Apart from the fact that this does not seem to fit with all the evidence that Darwin was an honorable and kind gentleman (included the friendship between Wallace and Darwin), I always thought that if he really wanted to do the dirty on Wallace then some “accident” could easily have befallen the letter.

Having said all that, I’ve not looked into it deeply and have often wondered whether it really was just anti-establishment conspiracy theories or whether there was more to it. I was therefore very interested to read John van Wyhe’s Guardian piece last Friday, Darwin did not cheat Wallace out of his rightful place in history. The title says it all really and you can (and should!) read the article if you are interested to know more - it’s not very long.

The reason why John van Wyhe’s viewpoint is so notable is that he is the founder and chief editor of the both the Darwin Online and Wallace Online websites and has studied the source material in depth. He has also just written a new book about Wallace, “Dispelling the Darkness:Voyage in the Malay Archipelago and the Discovery of Evolution by Wallace and Darwin” - you can read a review in another WEIT post. It looks interesting.

Is technology ruining the moment?

Like many people, I was at home when the New Year was rung in, so I could only watch the fireworks on TV. They were, it must be said, pretty spectacular (although I actually thought there were too many at times) and I felt a twinge of jealousy towards all those watching it live above their heads.
Jealous, that is, until the camera panned across said crowd and revealed all the upturned faces, staring into the LCD screens of their cameras and smartphones.
Is the memory of the 21st Century human really so bad that we have to try and capture every event and every moment on a digital device, however inferior that would be to the experience itself? (Even the best camera equipment is not going to have a dynamic range or field of vision to challenge the Mark I human eyeball.) I could almost understand it if the event was not being televised and recorded for prosperity anyway. (It's on BBC iPlayer, which is where the screen grabs are from, if you missed it.)

I think I'm going to add another New Year's aspiration:

☑ Enjoy the moment. Learn to recognise when the view or the moment is just too special or breathtaking to be distracted by trying to get the perfect shot for the future.

Hmmm. That's two rants in a row. Must make the next one a positive post!

Merry Christmas (Eve)!

Today, I awoke to the smell of cinnamon buns and fresh coffee. A fine way to start the day! The weather outside is frightful but, sadly, not in a white Christmas way, just in a wet Christmas way. It's cozy inside, though, and listening to Christmas tunes is helping maintain the Christmas spirit.

If you need a boost to your own Christmas spirit, my recommendations are White Wine in the Sun by Tim Minchin for music (proceeds to the National Autistic Society) and Miracle on 34th Street (1947 version) for movies. I watched the latter for the first time over the weekend and really enjoyed it, which surprised me somewhat, I must admit! (It manages to avoid be over-schmaltzy.)

And if that doesn't work, here's one of our cats (Arthur) wearing a Santa hat:

A fan fixes Star Wars (Machete Order)

Like many of my generation, I am big Star Wars fan. I watched the original films more times than I care to remember and many more times than I care to admit. I probably went through half my teenage years able to recite the entire script to Star Wars (or A New Hope if you must) - including sound effects. I played Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game (the original one) and kicked ass at X-Wing on the PC. I was a Star Wars nerd.

Also like many of my generation, I was less enamoured by the prequels when they came out (although I should have seen the warning signs in the Special Edition trilogy - Han Solo shoots first for crying out loud. Grrrr. (Let it go, Rich, let it go...)) The Phantom Menace in particular was pretty terrible, however much the fan in me tried to be convinced otherwise. I really wanted it to be good. But it sucked. Darth Maul was pretty cool (except his death, which was pretty lame,) but the young Anakin was terrible, Jar-Jar Binks was really terrible, Midi-chlorians were beyond terrible and, perhaps worst of all, the whole script was a shocker. The only good thing about Episode I was the number of fantastically therapeutic spoofs it has spawned, especially at the hands of Robot Chicken (e.g. here and here). Well, that and the poster with the young Anakin and the shadow of Darth Vader.

My own fix to The Menace was to watch the DVD and just fast-forward all the bits I really didn't like, which was basically every time Jar-Jar or Anakin were on screen (except the pod race, which had good sound effects). This, and excising the Midi-chlorian scenes, actually works surprisingly well at turning The Phantom Menace into something quite watchable (and shorter) even if the already weak plot of that particular movie is watered down further still.

Rod Hilton on his blog, Absolutely No Machete Juggling, goes one further and has a plan for fixing the series with The Star Wars Saga: Introducing Machete Order His recommendation:

"Next time you want to introduce someone to Star Wars for the first time, watch the films with them in this order: IV, V, II, III, VI"

As well as re-ordering the films to safeguard some of the plot twists that the prequels ruin mightily, he excises Episode I altogether.

"Episode I is a failure on every possible level. The acting, writing, directing, and special effects are all atrocious, and the movie is just plain boring. Luckily, George Lucas has done everyone a favor by making the content of Episode I completely irrelevant to the rest of the series. Seriously, think about it for a minute. Name as many things as you can that happen in Episode I and actually help flesh out the story in any subsequent episode. I can only think of one thing, which I’ll mention later."

I won't go into the rest of the reasoning here but will instead recommend that you scoot over to Rod's blog. It's an old post (November '11) and quite long but if you are a fan (or were) and you've not come across it before, it's well worth a read. I've not yet tried out Machete Order myself but will be remembering it should I ever need to introduce someone to Star Wars in the future.

Surely it's time to have more disabled presenters on TV?

So, the Paralympics has drawn to a close and, apart from the occasional annoying advert break, Channel 4 have done a pretty good job. The Channel 4 broadcasting team have been particularly good, I thought, with a good mix of familiar faces and less familiar disabled presenters.

For me, Alex Brooker and Danny Crates were particularly good - the former for general entertainment on The Last Leg and the latter for his boundless enthusiasm during the track and field events. (I really liked the American dude in the wheelchair too but I can't find his name on the Channel 4 site and my memory for names is shocking! [Update: I have committed the cardinal sin. His name is Jeff Adams and he is Canadian. Sorry Jeff!])

I thought Jimmy Carr made a very honest and inciteful comment during his appearance on The Last Leg. He said something to the effect that it had taken him two or three days of watching the games before he really saw past the disabilities and just the sport. I felt something a bit similar with the presenters too. I don't see that many disabled people in day to day life and so at first I found my attention drawn to Danny's missing arm, or Alex Brooker's "hand issues" but, after a couple of days, all I saw was really great presenters making entertaining TV.

There's been a lot of talk about how to carry forward the momentum from these Paralympics and part of the solution seems quite simple to me: put more disabled people on TV. Not because they're disabled - because they're great TV presenters. If Claire Balding, Jonathan Edwards and Iwan Thomas can co-present sport for disabled athletes, then there's no reason why Danny Crates and Ade Adepitan cannot co-present sport for able-bodied athletes. And The Last Leg team of Adam Hill, Alex Brooker and Josh Widdicombe are welcome on my screen any time!

Olympic Highlights III: the BBC pundits

If there is one slight reservation that I have going into tonight's Opening Ceremony (beyond the possibility of Boris Johnson representing Britain again), it's the fact that Paralympic TV coverage has gone to Channel 4. The BBC did such a good job that it's going to be hard to follow.
It's not just the fact that the coverage itself was awesome, although it was: at various points I was watching events on my iPhone or (on occasion) my computer at work as well as the 3 normal BBC channels and 24 x 24hour HD channels that were broadcasting sports of various kinds. I also warmed to many of the presenters and pundits. (Some annoyed me, it is true, but this is a highlights post!)

For some people, I suspect that Gary Lineker was an odd choice for one of the anchors but I actually thought it was very appropriate in the spirit of sportsmanship and fair play. Here is a man who, despite playing at the very highest level in three countries, maintaining a games:goals ratio of less than 2 at club and country, winning the 1986 World Cup Golden Boot (despite being cheated out of a semi-final place by that goal from Diego Maradona), winning the English Golden Boot three times (for three different clubs) and being the second-highest goalscorer for England of all time, never picked up a yellow or red card. He has his critics (who doesn't) but I thought he did a fine job and even followed him on Twitter for the duration of the Games. (He clearly got a genuine kick out of meeting the athletes and being there to see their achievements. I've stopped following now because it's all back to football and my Twitter feed is full enough already!)

Other notables for me were former jockey Claire Balding, who did a great job for all the equestrian events, John Amaechi covering the basketball, and Ian Thorpe given punditry for the swimming and general Aussie opinion. (In the true "Inspire a Generation" spirit, Ian Thorpe even managed to fit in an impromptu swimming lesson at Tooting Bec Lido before heading back Down Under.) Then, of course, there was Sir Steve Redgrave: Olympic legend and all-round top chap.
The stars of the show (athletes aside!) for me, though, were the Athletics team and, in particular, Michael Johnson. Not only was he the perfect straight-faced foil for the unabashed partisan British exuberance of Denise Lewis (also great) and Colin Jackson but he also seemed to know a lot about the sport. This was a man who had clearly done his homework but not so that he could come out with ridiculously irrelevant statistics like too many commentators; his comments were always informative and interesting.

One situation that particularly stood out for me was the short piece they did on the proverbial question of why black athletes dominate track events. I'm not going to go into the arguments about this here, other than to say that (a) there is a really nice post at Further Thoughts for the Day about this issue and (b) Michael Johnson also presented most the arguments covered in that post. I was impressed, anyway.

Fingers crossed that as the BBC pass on the torch of coverage to Channel 4, the latter are able to match the former's quality of coverage, even if the quantity of coverage escapes them.

The cursed cliff-hanger and the cost of Capitalism

For any CSI fans out there who have not yet seen the series finale of series 12 (the one with Ted Danson in it): don't! Not yet, at least. For, as with so many TV series these days, it ends on an irritating cliff-hanger that we have to wait who-knows-how-long to find out what happens.

Now, of course I know why they do this. They want you to watch the next series and what better way to suck you in than by leaving everything hanging and needing a resolution? Well, I'll tell them what better way... just make a good series that has engaging characters and plots, wraps up the pressing story lines in a satisfactory fashion and leaves enough open ends in long-running plots to make us want to watch more - like a good film leaving things open for a sequel. If you want to go for the suck-us-in suspense, then run some trailers before the series starts with some exciting hints of what is to come.

Ending a series after what is explicitly the first part of a two-part episode, on the other hand, is not good. Suspense and intrigue do not grow with time - quite the opposite in fact. The longer the wait, the less we end up caring. The emotional investment is diminished, not enhanced.

I am reminded of when I saw The Negotiator at the cinema. It was a good, engaging film and reached an exciting climax where one of the characters had a gun trained on another and we did not know if he was going to pull the trigger... and then the projector broke. The lights came on, the machine got fixed and fifteen or so minutes we got back to the action but, by then, the suspense was already dead. I was still interested to see what would happen but I cannot say that I really cared any more. And that was fifteen minutes, not fifteen weeks!

The chances are, we'll already know roughly what's going to happen before Series 13 even starts - the promotional footage or press releases of who's signed on for another season are bound to give it away. And another interesting plot will be ruined by the desire to make money. Actually, no. Not to make money - to make more money. It's nothing more or less than selling out - compromising your art for money.

And herein lies the problem with seeing Capitalism as the basis of "Western civilisation". The bottom line is always the bottom dollar. It seems increasingly unlikely that decisions for the public good will ever be made if they are not also the economically most sensible. I'm all in favour of competitive markets and personal finance but that doesn't mean that the rich should be able to do whatever they want nor that the ultimate worth of something is financial. There are things that you cannot put a price or value on - happiness, integrity, pride, education - and they sometimes mean that decisions should be made based on quality and not cost (or, in the case of TV, income). I think that The Olympic "Legacy" is a prime example of this.

And that is why I will always have a bit of socialism running through my veins. Sometimes, we all just need to suck it up and take one for the team - and sometimes we need protection from the fat cats that ruin it for the rest of us just to line their pockets. I just hope we get a government that feels the same way before the NHS and British Universities are ruined for good.

Game of Drones: decline of a masterpiece

If, like me, you are a fan of the TV series "Game of Thrones" and if, like me, it made you want to rush out and buy the book, I have two things to say:

1. It is a fantastic book and one of the best I have read for some time. It is full of interesting characters, plot twists, and intrigue. It is really well written and hard to put down.

2. Don't start reading it!

I finally made it to the end of "A Dance with Dragons" a couple of weeks ago and it was great. Great to finally make it to the end, that is. It's just getting so boring.

Like I said, the first book is fantastic. The second book is good two. Characters develop. Plot lines are established. Interesting possibilities are set up. It's all looking good.

Then, it all starts to go a bit wrong and I am not really sure why. I can't quite work out whether George R. R. Martin buys into the "Epic" business a bit too much, sees the success of the series as a license to print money, or just loses control of the characters.

Either way, the books get longer and longer, the plot more and more convoluted, and I find myself caring less and less about the characters. Worse, more and more of the characters that I do care about either get killed off or sidelined and forgotten about or have all of their endeavours and previous plot twists ultimately lead to nought. Ironically, it actually reminds me of an American TV series - it starts well enough to get you invested and sucked it but then gets progressively more and more pedestrian as they try and find ways to string it out long enough to reach syndication.

I still hold out some hope that (a) Martin know where the series is going, and (b) it's not all going to be some big Matrix-style let down once we get the answers, but the last couple of books do not fill me with hope. Coming full circle, what hope I have actually lies with the TV series. This has already taken a few short-cuts to avoid some of the complexity and I cannot believe that a TV audience will have the patience for all the subplots that ultimately go nowhere and unnecessary back stories for minor characters that appear in the books.

I think Martin would have benefited from learning from (still) the master of the genre, Tolkien. A complex world full of myths, legends and history is a great thing but you do not need to visit it all in the same set of books. The Lord of the Rings works so well because we follow the fates of a handful of key characters against a vast backdrop - we don't also follow the individual stories of all the important characters that appear as part of that backdrop.

A Song of Fire and Ice does have some clear heroes and villains but there is such a disproportionately small amount of the text devoted to them, it's easy to forget. Flawed heroes are all well and good but you don't want so many flawed heroes, neutrals, and bad guys with redeeming features that it's no longer clear who you should be rooting for. Perhaps, the idea is to let you choose who you want to support but, for me, that's like reading history, not fantasy.

So, if you want to read some good fantasy, read Lord of the Rings. If you want to read A Song of Fire and Ice, my advice would be to wait until the last couple of books are written and we know whether the massive investment of time is actually worth it. There are still a few directions that I could see it might go in that would end on a high. In the meantime, you can just watch the TV series!

Nice one NASA (and Kudos, Curiosity!)

Today, I got up at 6.30 to watch the Mars Rover, Curiosity, come in to land on Mars. Despite it's terrifying landing strategy, Curiosity made it! I've got used to tension and seeing some celebrations over the last few days with the Olympics but watching the NASA control room on NASA TV as they received signals of progress was pretty emotional.

If ever there was something that epitomises why I choose to put my trust in the accomplishments of science and the ingenuity of mankind, this has got to be right up there. To be honest, I'm not sure what blows me away most - the fact that I live in a world where science and technology enables us to remotely land a robot on Mars, or the fact that I was able to sit in my dining room and watch it live on my iPad!

The tension mean that I was a bit slow on the screen grab, but here is a shot from just after they received the first actual picture from Mars - part of Curiosity's wheel. You can see it in the background.

Well done, NASA. Well done, America. Well done, science and engineering geeks!

Olympic Pride - the great BBC!

On a day that is looking like it will result in a possibly unprecedented level of Olympic medal success for "Team GB" (it's amazing that does not grate with me any more!), I thought another post of Olympic Pride was in order. As with my previous Olympics post, this is not about pride in my nation's atheletes, though. Instead, I want to give a hat-tip to the BBC.

The IOC seem to have gone out of their way to commercialise the crap out of the Olympics, which caused a lot of irritation during the build up. It is also obvious from some of the forum comments that I have browsed that this is still a big problem for some people - particularly, I think, for those in America who have to put up with what sounds like awful TV coverage by NBC.

At times like this, I realise just how lucky I am to live in the UK. Not only do we not have any time zone problems (well, except having to work during the day!) but we also have the perfect antidote to IOC commercialisation: the BBC. 24 HD channels of Olympic coverage, subscription free and advert free. Fantastic stuff! Actually, it's really more than this as the 24 HD channels are in addition to the normal BBC channels.

Possibly for this reason, I am enjoying this Olympics a lot more that the last two. Beijing always seemed very distant and there is definitely something to be said for sport being live. I know that, in theory, highlights should be more exciting as they are edited to show you the more exciting bits but, for some reason, it never seems to work out that way (for me) for Olympic events. (Except maybe the football and hockey.) I think it is the drama of seeing the underdogs and the atheletes who get personal bests and are pleased with sixth place. In 2004, I was in Australia during the games, which meant that not only was there a time zone issue but the TV stations I had access to were only showing events featuring Australians. For these reasons, I am definitely enjoying the Games much more this time around.

The other factor, I think, is Twitter. Not only has monitoring Twitter allowed me to enjoy the Nerdlympics but it also turns out to be a great way of catching up with the excitement of the day's events. Because people (and BBC Sport) tweet things as they happen, you can really capture a sense of the excitement, even if you are catching up with events a few hours later due to chores such as having to go to work during the day. Dara O'Briain's discovery of volleyball has also been fun to see develop!

As an added bonus, due to the childish nature of my sense of humour - and the necessary brevity of tweets - the BBC Sport feed sometimes throws up some mental images that make me smile. Favourites so far are references to Rebecca Adlington starting defence of her "800m Olympic crown” (that's a big crown!) and, more recently (and disturbingly):

"Watch South Korea's Ki Bo Bae take women's individual archery gold in a dramatic sudden death shoot-out."

Are they allowed to do that?! It certainly would be dramatic!

So, well done BBC (and Dara O'Briain) and keep up the good work! Another tweet has just alerted me to how good the BBC Sport app is, so I'm off to check that out now!

Another River Cottage veg success

Tonight, my lovely wife made another recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's Veg Every Day cookbook. Two recipes, in fact: Coconut Leeks and Carrot, Cashew and Orange Salad. Happily, the recipes for both are available on the Channel 4 website (just click the links) as the series accompanying the book (or is it vice vesra) is currently showing.

Both recipes are delicious and feel very wholesome as well as being very tasty. The coconut leek dish is hearty and, with rice, makes a perfect main dish for dinner. Carrot and cumin is an excellent combination and with the orange too, this is a very fresh and light salad that I am looking forward to having again. (Leftovers for lunch, yay!) With the weather brightening up, the start of BBQ season will be upon us before we know it and this would make an excellent side salad. Bring on the sun!

BBC Planet Earth/Blue Planet - Deep ocean creatures

Thanks go to the Why Evolution is True website for highlighting this video. Amazing footage of some weird and wonderful critters. (Planet Earth and Blue Planet are separate series, for those (like Michael at WEIT) wondering.)

Polar bear dimwits should cut Attenborough (& BBC) some slack

Yesterday, I read something in the "i" that made me angry. For anyone who has missed it, presumably by misfortune of not having access to BBC, Frozen Planet is an amazing series, with spectacular footage and Sir David Attenborough at his narrative best. But, it seems, not everything on the show was quite as it appeared. Some of the polar bear footage of mother and newborn cubs was shot in a zoo.

No, this is not what made me angry. It seems that, for some strange reason, this revelation - revealed by the BBC themselves on their website - has cause furores in some circles, with cries of deceit. The Arts Editor of "i", David Lister, sticks in his own oar, saying: "An explanation on the website is simple trickery. The explanation for a television programme must be made within that television programme." The only insight provided here is that David Lister is a man with a very poor sense of perspective. Apparently, "i" stands for "idiocy" or "ignorance".

The show features a "Freeze Frame" section at the end, where they show some of the behind-the-scenes action getting the footage. For anyone paying any attention, it is blindingly obvious that the footage of animals is sometimes used out of context to aid the narrative. It would not be anywhere near as interesting otherwise. But this is not deceit, or "simple trickery", it's just good film-making. Don't tell David Lister, but some of the action used time-lapse photography - the sun didn't really speed up and circle the Earth in a few seconds.

Seriously, folks! Anyone who takes umbrage at this and thinks it should have been somehow made obvious in the program has missed the point of nature documentaries big time and doesn't deserve the genius of Attenborough and the BBC wildlife units. Ridiculous.

PS. More great polar bear stuff from the BBC here.

Resident Evil Afterlife versus The Walking Dead: Special Effects can't buy style...

...and bad acting alone does not make a villain.

Last night, I sat down to a bit of a zombie marathon, to catch up on a bit of missed TV that isn't quite to the taste of my wife, who is away for the weekend. To be fair, I can't say I blame her, especially where some of the films are concerned.

First up, though, was a couple of episodes of The Walking Dead, series 2. I've never been a fan of the supercharged high speed zombie but the "walkers" are good old school lurchers and shufflers. The more complete specimens can run a bit but nothing superhuman. Well, nothing more superhuman than being walking dead, of course. Furthermore, the non-superhumanity extends to the walking living too. OK, so the police guys and crossbow dude are a little more accurate with their weapons than I suspect is realistic (and their survival begs the question as to why more army marksmen didn't make it) but these are well within the "suspend disbelief" range.

Because the characters are believable, you care about them. Their struggles may be quite small (each episode) but that makes them more real. When a horde (or herd?) of zombies appears, they don't whip out pairs of firearms and fire of multiple head-shots whilst flying through the air or running up walls; they hide, or run away. Because you care about the characters, there is real suspense and after a couple of episodes I felt the need for some light relief, hence my next choice...

This was the latest offering from the Resident Evil series to make it onto the small screen, Resident Evil: Afterlife. Let's compare and contrast this with the Walking Dead, for a moment. The two are loosely based on the same general premise: nasty virus turns the world's population into zombies while a group of survivors try to continue being survivors. The Resident Evil zombies are also mostly lurchers. Mostly. This is where the similarity ends, though.

Whereas Walking Dead is all about placing characters in a series of plausible scenarios (given the implausible backdrop), Resident Evil is all about placing them in increasing ridiculous and hopeless scenarios and watching them leap, somersault and spray their way out with automatic firearms. And with the death of suspension of disbelief comes a death of any tension or caring about the lead characters who, even when supposedly stripped of their superhuman powers, all exhibit superhuman powers and are bound to escape essentially unscathed. Actually, I'm being a bit unfair in what I just wrote. Sometimes they use semi-automatic or even pump-action firearms. (Plus, of course, explosives and shiny, pointy things.)

This is particularly sad, in a way, because the computer games upon which the films were based were themselves all about tension, suspense and the feeling of panicked desperation when a zombie horde was approaching. (That and incredibly frustrating controls - a double irony is the one thing you often couldn't do in the games was move and shoot at the same time!)

Perhaps I am getting old but I am sure that action movies used to at least pretend to have a story worth taking an interest in, or heroes worth caring about. If you had to make someone superhuman, you at least created an excuse, such as making him a cyborg from the future, or a "chosen one" that was able to bend the fabric of the Matrix to his will. (Maybe a bad choice as even The Matrix went The Way of The Special Effect with parts II and III.) Now it's all about ever more ridiculous and extravagant uses of "bullet time", all the time trying to ignore the stupidity of a hero that is able to nail a foot soldier right between the eyes whilst in free fall down a lift shaft but somehow manages to lose all accuracy as soon as the main bad guy becomes the target. 

Then there's the bad guys themselves. In certain circumstances, the deadpan emotionless bad guy works really well. Again, think of The Terminator or Agent Smith. Most of the time, however, and certainly the case for RE Afterlife, an emotionless villain just makes a one-dimensional and dull villain. It comes across more as bad acting than bad attitude - more Arnie in Conan than Arnie in The Terminator. 

Perhaps the strangest thing of all is that all these effects don't really impress any more. The Matrix, Inception and others have used all these tricks to great effect in the name of the plot. Employing them for the sake of it is not impressive, it's just lazy. Possibly worse, it actually reduces the impressiveness of the stunts. I could forgive the dodgy dialogue and bad acting in a Jackie Chan movie just to see what Jackie Chan was going to do in the next fight and think "wow"! Can anyone honestly say that, when witnessing a random hero/villain dodging a bullet in slow motion while the camera pans round, they think "wow" rather than "Matrix rip-off"? It is certainly not enough to make up for a lack of coherent story or adequate plot/character development - except (sadly) on opening night at the Box Office, perhaps. It most certainly not enough to get me rushing out to watch Resident Evil Retribution when it comes out. 

On the other hand, I am looking forward to catching up with a few more episodes of the Walking Dead over the weekend.

Dawkins & Darwin - a missed opportunity

I've just watched the first part of Channel 4's "The Genius of Charles Darwin", presented by Richard Dawkins, with decidedly mixed feelings. It had a lot going for it but I can't help thinking that it was a missed opportunity.

Although he doesn't spend much time saying how religion is no longer necessary, Dawkins still wastes a few minutes that would be much better spent, in my view, demonstrating the evidence for evolution. As an evolutionary biologist, I am well aware of the overwhelming evidence for evolution - I deal with it every day at work - and Dawkins mentions it several times but I feel that he dumbs it down too much and refers to it in general terms rather than really giving good examples, of which there are many. I wish he had removed a few interviews with people - trying to get school children to think for themselves, for example, - and shown a few more examples of anatomical, developmental and genetic similarities between organisms and evolutionary transitions.

There is nothing in biology that we have yet discovered that makes more sense in the light of some "design" theory than in the light of evolutionary theory, and there are plenty of things that we have discovered for which the "design" theories flounder while evolution makes perfect sense, but this does not really come across in the program. He talks about DNA but does not show any actual alignments of sequences and explain how they fit the family-tree structure
predicted by evolution but not the independent-origin structure predicted by independent creation - the competing hypothesis of the time. He talks about fossils but doesn't actually show any of the classic examples of form changing through time. He shows animal limbs and a few embryos in a few seconds but could have gone so much further with far more examples of anatomical similarities that simply make no sense without evolution. Ditto developmental genes. And the genetic code. And biochemical pathways. Etc. etc.

Oh well. Maybe the next episode will hit the mark.