Tag: Film and TV

Wednesday 20th

Posted on by Neal Asher

Now we’re tending not to sit outside on the terrace in the evenings, we’re watching more TV. We pay a minimal amount for Greek TV as part of a council tax that goes on to our electricity bill (the words ‘council tax’ have an entirely different weight in Britain, but I expect it will get to be the same here – the amount of government theft from the populace never goes down). However, what there is to watch on it is limited for us. We don’t know the language well enough to keep up, so we won’t be getting addicted to Greek soap operas any time soon, have just a marginal understanding of the news, and mainly turn on the TV to check the weather forecast. Cookery programs are okay, and a quizz called Fatus Olus during which the questions appear as subtitles on the screen helps us learn the language, lots of American and British series do appear, with subtitles, but our reception of Star, which shows the best films, is crappy, and the commercial breaks are long enough to make a cup of tea, cook dinner and repaint the bathroom. Mainly we resort to DVDs.

This year we had what appeared to be a nice stock of stuff to catch up on: season 8 of 24, the last two seasons of The Tudors and the latest Dexter. All of these have been immensely enjoyable. The 24 was right up there with the best of the previous seasons, though annoyingly one critical episode near the end wouldn’t play; The Tudors is a historical drama I would rank up there with I Claudius, The Borgias and Rome; whilst Dexter, which we saved for last, is as enjoyably gory as ever, though now we only have a few episodes left to watch. Next we’ll start going through The Great War, then after that the well will be dry.

I guess, at this time of year, the news and documentaries we can understand, films, police procedurals, historical dramas and thrillers are what we miss most. Also, since the TV is definitely not what occupies our time when the weather is crap outside, the lack of constant Internet access can be annoying. I’ve considered the various satellite systems both for TV and the Internet, mobile Internet and other options, but the price always seems to be in the region of €50 a month, and reports of the quality of connectivity are not so great, especially where we are. The information age is upon us an accelerating, but still has yet to reach rural mountain villages in Eastern Crete.

Rick Kleffel Review

Posted on by Neal Asher

Nice email from Rick Kleffel:

Neal,

I just did an event with Guillermo Del Toro last night; hosted a Q&A with him at the Kabuki Sundance Theater in San Francisco. I gave him a copy of The Skinner to read, which I think he will enjoy quite a bit. He loves monsters every bit as much as you and I do. Hope you saw my bit on The Technician:

http://bookotron.com/agony/news/2010/09-13-10-news.htm#n091510

You are really kicking ass. I’ll let you know what he thinks of the book when next I speak with him.

best,

Rick Kleffel

I’m thinking that Mr Del Toro might already know my name, since he’s involved in that Heavy Metal movie I provided a load of material for, but The Skinner? Wouldn’t that be great…

The Tudors

Posted on by Neal Asher

We’ve been watching the BBC2 series The Tudors, and thoroughly enjoying it. I have also been considering how much things have changed in the last 500 years, and how very much they’ve remained the same.

Treaties were made and broken faster than Kyoto resolutions and generally they were just an excuse for the upper echelons to go on an extended jolly. Rising members of Court were sent to Europe for negotiations which of course involved lots of big feasts, hunting trips, gifts and the purchase of essentials like jewels and silks and such. Alliances forged throughout all this led to numerous unnecessary wars whose justification most found difficult to fathom. If anyone wanted to rise in Court he had to loudly declare his adherence to current accepted belief, before finding out who to bribe. Corruption, plotting and nepotism were not where they system went wrong, they were the system.

I guess they lived a little more frenetically than we do. You would, wouldn’t you, seeing people dying all around you from unknown causes, and knowing that you’ll be lucky if your own span extends beyond the age of forty, and that’s before taking into account what might happen to you if you step on the wrong toes. Nowadays we at least stand less of a chance of being barbecued for our beliefs, that now being the territory of foreign fanatics rather than the state. And a small lesson to learn from this, and other historical dramas, is that those who rule have always stolen from the ruled, and probably always will. There has never been a time when things were better, and the corruption we see today has a long historical tradition.

Depressing thought, but a good series.

Gridlinked Film.

Posted on by Neal Asher

And the last post reminds me of this, unearthed from deep in this blog where posts are fossilizing, I was an angrier man, the world had less shades of grey, ad nauseum…

Cameron Dadd is an eighteen-year-old freelance graphic designer who lives in the most isolated city on our planet. He does have a small collection, but it’s as yet unavailable online, however, there’s Leviathan here: http://sharpendofreason.deviantart.com/ which, inspired by Cameron’s work, was created by a good friend of his called Carlo – looks like something Dragon put together!

(Of course Cameron is no longer 18, and who knows if this website is still current)

Poster Competition

Posted on by Neal Asher

Phil Edwards over at Live for Films has a little competition running (from which I swiped the picture here):

Just wondering if you could possibly mention the Robocop Poster Redesign Challenge I set up. There have already been a few cool posters.
And bearing in mind art competitions, don’t forget the competition to produce artwork based on my stuff — you’ll find it through the Subminds link down on the right-hand side here.

The Hurt Locker.

Posted on by Neal Asher

Well, we watched the award winning Hurt Locker last night and I have to say that it was … crap. It seemed as if a message was trying to be imparted here but it got lost in the confusion (exacerbated by wobbly camera syndrome) and resulted in the cliche ‘war is hell’. I had no idea of basic stuff like who was the commanding officer, who was being too reckless and who too timid, and the bit about a kid being killed was lost on me. There was no real plot, just a series of Hollywood tropes, scenes that were supposed to be deep but turned out to be puddles. It was a mess, frankly. Why did it win? As ever with any award: politics. If you want to watch a good film in this sort of genre, go buy Black Hawk Down. Don’t waste your money on this.

Wonders of the Solar System

Posted on by Neal Asher

I’ve been enjoying ‘Wonders of the Solar System’ because of Professor Brain Cox’s enthusiasm for science, for his relish of the great things we have achieved in throwing spacecraft millions of miles out to expand the frontier of human knowledge. It’s been good to see some of the newer pictures from that frontier and of course to see the superb graphics created. The program hasn’t really told me anything I don’t know – it’s really a Solar System basics class for those unaware of things like the order of the planets or how many planet Earths you could drop into Jupiter’s red spot, or generally what conditions pertain on each world. But it has seemed to be a return to the good BBC science program untainted by political ideology.
I mean, at one time I used to love Attenborough’s Life on Earth programs, but now I cannot watch them without feeling the urge to throw something at the TV when he delivers his regular-as-clockwork homilies about how we are destroying the planet with our profligate globally warming ways.
The first few episodes of Wonders of the Solar System remained pure enthusiasm and science so I watched with some trepidation when I realised this latest episode was about the ‘thin blue line’ – about planetary atmospheres. I enjoyed the stuff about Mercury’s lack of atmosphere leaving it open to direct meteorite collisions  and vast temperature changes, the stuff about Earth’s magnetosphere protecting it from the solar wind and how deep in Jupiter the pressure turns hydrogen into a metallized liquid. But then, with the inevitability of tax rises on petrol, booze and cigarettes, we got to the greenhouse effect, and Venus.
Cox gave a brief description of how the greenhouse effect works, perhaps annoying the faithful by pointing out how without it we would be freezing our butts of in temperatures 30 degrees lower than they are now. He then went on to say that the temperature on the surface of that world is hot enough to melt lead, apparently because of its CO2-laden atmosphere. I was there rooting for Cox because he did seem a little embarrassed to be mentioning this, and I was hoping he would also go on to point out some of the rather large elephants in the room.. But no, all we got was some nonsense about Venus being in the same ‘region’ of space as Earth. Rather disappointing really.
No mention then of how Venus being 26 million miles closer to a giant fusion reactor called the sun might have some bearing on its temperature. No mention how a ground level pressure of 93 times that of Earth’s might have an effect too, or that Venus receives over a thousand Watts per square metre more solar radiation than Earth. Nope, it’s all those Venusian coal-fired power stations.
I like to think that this was the minimum deal with the Devil Cox could make to ensure he would present the program. I like to think this was the minimum he could say to calm the political demagogues at the BBC so as to enable him to zip off to Africa to experience an English Electric Lightning jet flight straight up at 5 gees to the limits of the atmosphere to observe that ‘thin blue line’, or race across the Namib in a 4×4 to do a small piece about the sands of Mars, or race a speed boat across a lake to gather up some methane whilst talking about Saturn’s moon, Titan.

Anyway, I’ll continue watching the program, and just hope that the homilies are out of the way…  

Heavy Metal Movie

Posted on by Neal Asher

Interesting stuff here from the Heavy Metal Magazine Fan Page:

***

Pre-release Information – A $50 million budget 3D CG animated movie based on the magazine.   This probably won’t have any stories from the first 1981 movie, however like the first one, it will feature around seven or eight different stories.  Each segment will be directed by a different person.  The title to this movie hasn’t been chosen yet.  This current title is just a placeholder. 
Main Crew:
Executive Producer – David Fincher and James Cameron
Producer – Kevin Eastman and Tim Miller
Director – David Fincher (1 segment)
Director – James Cameron (1 segment)
Director – Zack Snyder (1 segment, a story that Kevin Eastman wrote)
Director – Gore Verbinski (1 segment)
Director – Mark Osborne (1 segment, a comedy with Jack Black)
Director – Tim Miller (1 segment)
Director – Jeff Fowler (1 segment)
Director – Kevin Eastman (tentatively 1 segment)
Director – Guillermo del Toro (tentatively 1 segment)
Director – Rob Zombie (tentatively 1 segment)
Writer – Marc Laidlaw (1 segment)
Writer – Steve Niles (1 segment)
Writer – Joe Haldeman (1 segment)
Writer – Neal Asher (1 segment)
Writer – Kevin Eastman (1 segment, a story that Zack Snyder will direct)
? – Jack Black (a comedy segment that Mark Osborne will direct.  No details on how he’s involved, but most likely will be an actor)
? – Jhonen Vasquez (no details on how he’s involved, but most likely will be a writer)

***

I have to wonder about that ‘seven or eight’ different stories – which ones will be kept and which dumped – since they were working with five of mine…