Tag: Film and TV

Lensmen Movies

Posted on by Neal Asher

The old E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith books are no longer in my collection any more, having fallen foul of one of my general clear-outs, but I do recollect enjoying them when I was a teenager (Lensman and Skylark series). I think I dumped them because I was allowing myself to be influenced by the opinions of others at the time. They were also old, as in ‘astrogator calculates course with a slide rule’ old. It’ll be interestng to see what kind of a movie these will make, since this was BIG space opera:

The internet movie database has the Lensmen movie listed as sometime in 2011.

Writer J. Michael Straczynski said in 2009 he’s finished his second draft for Lensmen, and producer Ron Howard and Universal are happy with it. He said it’ll be very character-based, typical of Howard’s work, and yet the special effects will be cutting edge. And it’ll keep the massive scale of the original novels, as much as possible.

The Babylon 5 writer and Ron Howard? Seems promising…

The Drake Equation

Posted on by Neal Asher

I did enjoy the program on BBC4 last night The Search for Life: The Drake Equation. If you can use I-player then I suggest you go take a look. But what is the Drake Equation? This explanation lifted from SETI lays it out nicely:

Is there a way to estimate the number of technologically advanced civilizations that might exist in our Galaxy? While working at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank, West Virginia, Dr. Frank Drake conceived a means to mathematically estimate the number of worlds that might harbor beings with technology sufficient to communicate across the vast gulfs of interstellar space. The Drake Equation, as it came to be known, was formulated in 1961 and is generally accepted by the scientific community.

N = R* fp ne fl fi fc L

where,

N = The number of communicative civilizations
R* = The rate of formation of suitable stars (stars such as our Sun)
fp = The fraction of those stars with planets. (Current evidence indicates that planetary systems may be common for stars like the Sun.)
ne = The number of Earth-like worlds per planetary system
fl = The fraction of those Earth-like planets where life actually develops
fi = The fraction of life sites where intelligence develops
fc = The fraction of communicative planets (those on which electromagnetic communications technology develops)
L = The “lifetime” of communicating civilizations


Frank Drake’s own current solution to the Drake Equation estimates 10,000 communicative civilizations in the Milky Way. Dr. Drake, who serves on the SETI League’s advisory board, has personally endorsed SETI’s planned all-sky survey.

Moving no from the Drake Equation you then get to the Fermi Paradox:
 
The Fermi Paradox is the apparent contradiction between the high probability extraterrestrial civilizations’ existence and the lack of contact with such civilizations.
 
In this program, I like how these two are covered. Consider how much of the EM spectrum there is to cover, how much our usage of radio has changed in just a few decades (AM to FM for example). Consider too a simple calculation: 100 billion (the number of stars in our galaxy) divided by that number of civilizations above.

Any Human Heart

Posted on by Neal Asher

We finally gave up on ‘Any Human Heart’ last night. This series was given big star ratings and really hyped beforehand and each time a new episode is shown we’re told it is a ‘powerful drama’. It has some excellent actors, great camera work and the sets are good too. However, it’s something we kept watching in the hope it was going to get interesting, and the problem is, at this point, in the third episode, it really should have been getting there. It isn’t; it’s boring.

This is the life story of a self-indulgent loser who is only interesting because of his setting and the people he met. He’s actually the kind of person you’d like to give a slab and tell to get his thumb out of his arse. The role , in fact, rather stretched Matthew Macfadyen’s full ‘drippy’ repertoire. This was supposedly a gripping big-budget adaptation that had all the grip of a pair of rubber tweezers.

So we turned over and watched ‘The nation’s favourite Abba Song’, which was an order of magnitude more enjoyable and interesting. I wanted to see ‘Fernando’ near the top though I did not expect it to win. Unfortunately it came in at number seven. Caroline then waited in the hope that ‘Dancing Queen’ would be the winner because when it was a hit she was precisely as the chorus describes. Her bottom lip was sticking out when it came in at number two, beaten by ‘Winner Takes it All’.

Iron Man

Posted on by Neal Asher

I picked up the DVD of Iron Man in the supermarket about a year ago and have only just got round to watching it. What can I say? It was great fun and, if you haven’t seen it, I recommend you do.

Of course the usual big hole was there: power supply. In this they got round it by ‘genius creates a palm-sized fusion reactor in a cave’. It’s the kind of thing we saw a lot in SF many decades ago but we’re too wise to go with now … or could it be that we’re too cynical and pessimistic? Thinking on this sort of thing let me to You Tube where I note that military exoskeletons are getting closer:

However, note the power cables. Power storage is always going to be a problem … unless of course you actually wear the battery?

Passchendaele

Posted on by Neal Asher

Spoiler alert! Or, not really, because if you watch this film you’ll be tempted to shoot yourself in the foot in the hope of being invalided out of the whole terrible experience.

There’s a saying that war is endless boredom interspersed with moments of terror. If you were to substitute the word ‘action’ for ‘terror’, that would about describe this film.

It started with and all too brief action sequence during which a small squad of Canadian soldiers attacked a German machine gun nest. This action was sort of okay, but slightly silly. For example I don’t really see an experienced soldier stabbing one of the enemy through the forehead with a bayonet. There’s too much of chance of it sliding off.

After this, our hero wakes up in a hospital in Canada where he is already in love with his morphine-addicted nurse. We then get 80% of the film taken up with an endlessly tedious love story, with subplots involving the nurse’s asthmatic brother, her and his German ancestry etc. The real bad guy here of course is a British immigrant in the role of a recruiting officer – a guy who looks precisely like how the propaganda posters of the time depicted the ‘Hun’.

I sat there smoking, got up to make some tea, drank some tea, scratched my balls, checked the clock. I was holding on in the hope that this would get back to the battle the film was purported to be about. It did get back to the battle, about ten minutes from the end. We got a bit of action, and it was completely spoilt by a rescue scene resembling Jesus plodding his final route to Golgotha. Oh yeah, then we got the death scene that was supposed to leave us sobbing in our cocoa, but by then I was pulling wool balls off my socks.

Bathetic drivel. Don’t watch it.

Cannabis Factory

Posted on by Neal Asher

Just posting this here because this is our local town, in fact Caroline used to work nearby this building at one time. I snaffled this from the Essex Police site. But then, this is not as close as the big cannabis greenhouse discovered in our village. Seems to be a common criminal occupation in Essex and, when in a Dengie 100 pub you mustn’t ask why you saw an aeroplane landing without lights on a local field. But it’s a crying shame that they’re destroying all this. They should legalize it and tax it. We need the money.

More than 8000 plants with an estimated street value of £2 million were discovered during a raid on an industrial unit in Heybridge near Maldon on Tuesday, November 9.

Nine purpose built rooms housing 280kg of skunk plants in various stages of growth and a sophisticated set up of lighting and hydropnic equipment were uncovered at a former print works in Hall Road.

Officers estimate the factory will have cost in the region of £250,000 to set up and may have been involved in supplying drugs across the UK and possibly abroad.

The factory also included its own electrical substation which had been illegally linked directly into local mains power supplies.

It is the largest ever discovered in Essex and is thought to be one of the biggest ever uncovered across the UK.

4.8 Trillion National Debt.

Posted on by Neal Asher

4,800,000,000,000

If you stack £50 notes on top of each other, one after the other, the stack would need to be over 6000 miles high to achieve that amount. If you threw £50 notes out of a window at a rate of one every second, it would take you over 3000 years to reduce that stack to zero. Martin Durkin came out with various neat little analogies during Britain’s Trillion Pound Horror Story, like, for example, Chancellor Osborne’s spending cuts being the equivalent of trying to empty a full to over-flowing bath, which is still filling from the taps, with an egg cup. He also came out with some plain statements of fact, like, the debt for every man, woman and child in Britain is £77,000, and growing, like, if you sold off every house in Britain that wouldn’t pay it.

He also tells us in simple terms how we got into this position what with politicians buying votes, spending on crap, borrowing from the future to saddle future generations with debt. By politicians, who all agree that monopolies are a bad thing, creating state monopolies, like one of the biggest on Earth, the NHS. And he has a neat counter to the claim that any other option would lead to in-it-for-profit medical organisations. Do we refuse to buy our next car from Toyota, our next flat screen from Samsung or our next loaf of bread from Asda because they are all in it for the profit? Would we instead prefer state-manufactured products like the wonderful stuff produced by the soviets?

Of course, the Keynesians, Guardianistas and other daft socialists would claim, ‘But it’s not that simple!’ It is. You don’t spend what you haven’t got, and you don’t keep borrowing when you’re already heavily in debt. Simples.

Another target is welfare, the dole, how we are paying people to sit on their arses and remain in poverty. Last year the welfare bill was larger than the tax collected, which is unsustainable madness. Durkin tells us that the public sector in Britain is now bigger than the private sector and is a bloated parasite sucking up wealth, killing its host. If this continues the money will die and, really, before we get out of that there will be blood on the streets.

But there’s a way out and it is quite simple. Slash the public sector by half, make welfare a limited net and not a lifetime one, privatize the NHS and get rid of all those non-jobs because, when the figures are totted up, all those state jobs we regard as essential are filled by about 2 million employees, whilst on top of them are 5.5 million bureaucrats. Slash taxes to 20%, flat, nothing else, and paid only by those earning above something like £15,000 a year. Don’t, for example, tax someone on £15,000 then feed the tax back to them in benefits after the pointless bureaucracy created for the purpose has taken its cut. All of this would instigate an almost immediate regeneration, as it did in Hong Kong, the tiger economies and China (which incidentally has a public sector about half the size of Britain’s).

It’s not going to happen, however. Because the public sector is now 53% of the economy, and most of those working in it are not going to be turkeys voting for Christmas. It’s also the case that a large proportion of the population doesn’t have a clue about economics, and have thought processes that end at ‘money from the government’ and cannot stretch to ‘but the government has to get its money from somewhere’. Many don’t realise that every time the government does some ‘quantitative easing’ it’s actually taxing them yet again. Many don’t understand that whilst money will never run out, it can soon enough end up being valueless.

I rather think that sitting in our nice warm houses, with our shiny cars outside, with our TVs, computers and mobile phones, with our frequent trips to the supermarket and regular purchases off the Internet, we’re living in a false reality. It’s like one of those disaster movies in which you first see the cast of characters living their daily lives before things turn nasty. The asteroid is drawing closer, the terrorists are finishing the bomb wiring and loading their weapons, the tsunami is just starting to rise over the horizon or, being more relevant and prosaic in our case, the bailiffs are starting up their vans.

I wonder if now is the time to load the loft with canned goods, buy a generator and stock up on diesel, and then inquire of the local hoodies where it might be possible to buy an AK47. I wonder if right now is the time to take out any savings we have and turn them into Krugerrands, before Sterling turns into a poor and slippery substitute for Andrex.

Aftermath — Peter Robinson.

Posted on by Neal Asher

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Being an incorrigible book snaffler at Macmillan I’ve managed to aquire lots of reading matter and it’s not all SFF, as you may have noticed by many of my past reviews. I do seem to be developing a bit of a detective fiction habit. If I can grab a copy of a new book by Minette Walters I will, also Peter James and Peter Robinson. The Inspector Banks book by the last of these I’ve been reading and enjoying, but only in the same way as with Peter James, that is, I need a bit of a break between books to go away and read something else – detective books, set in the same location with the same characters do get a bit samey, a bit formulaic. That aside, they’re still good and I still enjoy them.
So, I had mixed feelings when I found out that there was to be an ITV production of Peter Robinson’s Aftermath with Stephen Tomkinson as DCI Banks. On the one hand I was really glad to see that it was being done with such a heavyweight actor in the lead role, on the other hand I was pissed off because, being in Crete, I probably wouldn’t get to see it until it was out on DVD.
When we got back here I was happy to discover that Caroline’s father had overcome his previous problems in dealing with a DVD recorder and managed to record the two episodes for us. Last night we sat down and watched them and, what can I say, it was great. It had Morse-like camera work, Tomkinson was excellent in the role of the permanently haunted Banks and all the other production values spot on. Damn but I hope this is a success. If it is we could be seeing the start of something just like Morse, or Frost, or Dalgliesh, or Wexford, because there are enough of Peter Robinson’s DCI Banks books to fill up a couple of feet of shelf space. Fingers crossed.   

The First World War from Above

Posted on by Neal Asher
After some quite good TV yesterday, including ‘Stand by Me’ which was a faithful adaptation of the excellent Stephen King novella – an uplifting story completely without the supernatural and whose only horror was the kind we all face or will face – and the Antiques Roadshow, we finally got to what we were really looking forward to.
 

The First World War from Above presented by Fergal Keane ‘examines recently discovered footage and photographs of the conflict. A 48 minute film of the conflict taken by a French airship in the summer of 1919…’. We saw probably ten minutes of that footage and just a few of the photographs, but they were enough. You didn’t need to see a full 48 minutes of towns turned to rubble, and a Moon-like landscape jagged with trenches like cracks in egg-shell. The program was still excellent and still provided a new perspective on that war, for example, German’s giving away the position of their camouflaged barracks by making flower gardens, and paying the price.
The bit that really captured my attention was one aspect of this war I knew nothing about until I read Sebastian Faulks’ book Birdsong: the tunneling war and the planting of mines. During the battle of Messines 19 mines were detonated underneath the Germans. Each of these (I think) consisted of 450 tons of explosive and not only changed the course of the war but the shape of the land. Later pictures showed neat round lakes in the Belgian countryside, surrounded by nice little copses of trees – lakes that are basically graves (like so much of that countryside) but where the only human remains to be found are pieces of bone no bigger than a fingernail.

And on a side note: I now have a better understanding of the destructive power of explosions measured in kilotonnes (since ton and tonne are roughly equivalent). These were about half a kilotonne.

In total 21 mines were laid but two of them were not used, and the British then lost their location. One of them was detonated in 1955 by a lightning strike on a nearby pylon, but wrecking the surrounding area but killing only one cow, whilst the other still hasn’t been found.

 As well as the aerial footage, some of the usual black-and-white film was shown in this: the guns firing, the men going over the top and a particular clip of a soldier carrying his wounded comrade out of a trench. All of these were immediately familiar since, before we came back to Britain, our TV viewing over a few days consisted entirely of The Great War. This series was first broadcast in 1964, narrated by Michael Redgrave, and is still well worth watching. Really, if you haven’t seen it, I suggest you do.

Update: I stand corrected. It was a total of 450 tons of explosives distributed to make 19 (or quite possible 21) mines under the German lines. This means they weight in at between 20 and 25 tons each and, as I noted in comments, was enough to shake the teacups in Downing Street. Then again, all of them went off within seconds of each other. Anyway, this brings me to the conclusion that a half kilotonne explosion would be enough to excavate Hanningfield reservoir, not the village duck pond.