Links of interest...

Gemma Files on Zero Dark Thirty:

As ever, Bigelow always manages to always frame things for maximum impact and wring incredible suspense out of even the most foregone conclusions. I keep seeing that last track through the post-”Geronimo, for God and country” wreckage of bin Laden’s hideout, where she makes sure that the team’s one Muslim member is the person who gets to see all the broken heads and shot-out eyes up close and personal. And Maya, in her last appearance, sole passenger on a troop transport plane, crying because she doesn’t know where she wants to go, and probably not being entirely aware of it. So basically, what I’m saying is fuck you, fellas; whoever ends up getting that Oscar this year needs to know both that Bigelow is the motherfucker who found this place, and that this is the one to beat.

N.K. Jemisin on Gamefail bluescreen:

It’s obvious the game developers didn’t think much about how the characters in their xenophobic fantasy world would logically react to having a foreigner and a woman — and this is definitely a patriarchial, xenophobic culture — as their much-lauded savior. I don’t think the developers thought much about the characterization for this game at all, let alone on a level that acknowledges the impacts of race and gender and other socioeconomic factors, and their intersections, on worldbuilding. But here’s what’s irritating: the game pays lip service to these issues, even though it doesn’t engage with them on a deeper level.

The comment thread on Where Are The Older Women? is still going strong at 110 comments: lots of useful recommendations and hardly a troll in sight. Which makes me rather happy.

Anyway. Spent yesterday and last night hanging out with a friend who's heading off soon to Brussels to intern at Parliament. We mainlined The Dark Knight Rises (not awful), Resident Evil Retribution (awful: has not even the vaguest glimmer of plot) and Dredd (AWESOMESAUCE), about which probably (possibly) more later.

Now I must get my arse in gear and do more with my day than merely move shelves around...

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Oh, wait. I forgot to log Wednesday's exercise. Mile in 12:00, treadmill; 10K exercise bike, 29:00. Some weights.

Mass: 103.5kg.

Films and things

When I finally sat down to watch Dredd on Thursday night, as the culmination of a seven-hour skiffy film marathon with whitewaveraven - after The Dark Knight Rises and Resident Evil: Retribution - it blew me away. Especially in contrast to Dark Knight, with its hype and massive budget and (intermittent) acclaim.

(Let us not speak of Resident Evil: Retribution. I had not expected much by way of logic or plot from the franchise's fifth installment, but I expected more than we got - and what we got did not even string its action-scenes together with a minimum of coherence. Also, the black guy dies. Pointlessly.)

My response to The Dark Knight Rises is, essentially: WHY SHOULD I CARE ABOUT BRUCE WAYNE'S MANPAIN? Or Alfred's, or, for that matter, Det. John Blake's. Visually, thematically, in character and artistic terms, it's incoherent: it doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up. There are some visually striking scenes and excellent point-counterpoint of noise and silence, but at one and the same time it is trying to be too clever and not nearly clever enough. And Christian Bale is not strong enough, in terms of presence, to sell a descent-into-torment-and-triumphant-return - especially not when Dark Knight doesn't know whether or not it's about PEOPLE OF GOOD WILL (read: cops) TAKING BACK THE CITY, or a single masked avenger's crusade against another, worse, masked avenger. It does not develop character, is what I'm saying - in fact, the only character who has a discernible arc is Anne Hathaway's Selina Kyle/Catwoman. Hathaway does brilliantly with the part - her rueful expression, half-defiant, half-apologetic, as she tells Bale's Batman she's deliberately led him into a trap to save herself is entirely marvellous - but the film doesn't actually give much to Kyle/Catwoman. Her arc takes place in the background, the overlooked places: the cat burglar who wants to leave her record behind her and start fresh, unwillingly persuaded first to assist Bane and his gang of psychopaths and then to assist Bruce Wayne/Batman to stop the GIANT NUCLEAR BOMB...

...I'd watch a film of the events of The Dark Knight Rises from the perspective of Hathaway's Kyle. It might be a much more interesting, less ultimately predictable affair.

(So our takeaway: pointless manpain and fascist/ubermensch ideals? DO NOT WANT, sez I.)

But Dredd. Dredd knows it's a film set in a fascist dystopia. Dredd is an SFnal shoot-em-up, but also - as glvalentine said back in September - a study in bleakness. It doesn't present a contrast between law, as personified by the Judges, and chaos in the form of criminals: under the surface slick of words, there is no contrast. Just two competing systems of power-maintenance-through-terror, meeting through the middle ground of violence.

Stylistically gorgeous, pared-down, excellent in its characterisation of its women - it doesn't quite pass the Bechdel test but it's far more feminist that Dark Knight, which does, and gives its women much more room - it has a coherent core. It's dystopic and everyone in the film knows it, but it also has empathy for every single one of its characters: even for Kay, the unrepentant drug-dealing murdering sexually violent henchman of Ma-Ma - to me, it seems the film characterises him as having made himself into the hardest, nastiest bastard he can be, because otherwise he'd be victim, not victimiser. (On the other hand, the fact that he's the only person of colour with any depth of characterisation at all is rather disappointing.)

Lena Headey is brilliant as Ma-Ma, world-weary druglord, and so is Olivia Thirlby as Anderson, the rookie Judge that Karl Urban's Dredd has for her assessment - her last chance to make it as a Judge - when they get trapped in Ma-Ma's locked-down super-slum. Thirlby's character has the shiny idealism scraped off in the course of the ever-mounting body-count... but retains enough to say, bitterly, on letting one criminal - coerced into his crimes - go: "Maybe that's the one difference I will make."

Anyway. A film I really enjoyed. One out of three ain't bad, right?

PS: I've never read the comics for either Batman or Dredd. So there's that.

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Congratulations to the many souls mentioned in the Locus 2012 Recommended Reading List - although with no love for Range of Ghosts or Adaptation or Some Others I Could Mention? I think it to be... incomplete. (And bloody hell, Larry Niven is still writing things? I was... rather under the impression he had been deceased.)