Zero Hours of Skepticism

Zero Hour is a show in which a skeptic gets wrapped up in a conspiracy. Yep, they went there.

So many movies have the skeptic come up against the supernatural and caves in their skeptic belief because they are faced with evidence of the supernatural. There are two points that need to be pointed out: 1) they believe because they have evidence. Guess what? Most skeptics would and should! What gets annoying is when they start believing for entirely personal reasons. "I got the feels and now I believe in the Gods!!!!" Yeah, that doesn't work, and just has a strawman skeptic anyway of 'if you felt with your heart, you would totally give up asking for that pesky physical proof'. No.

Oh, and point 2) it's fiction! Of course there's the supernatural, because it's FICTION!!! It's not real! And that's the only way we can have the supernatural, 'cos we ain't got any in reality.

Anyway, this modern day skeptic gets caught up in a conspiracy involving clocks, Nazis, the church, and the return of the apostles in clock form or... you know what else works well in fiction? A decent believable story. Beside bad strawman skeptics, this fails decent plot interest to. (Oh, and Albert Einstein is involved too... um...)

The other characters are one dimensional too. The FBI agent with something to prove. The assistants who are going to get up in bed with each other. The wife who is there to be a love interest draw. The psychopath that is leading them all on the chase. They are just as badly set up as the lead. And none of them work waiting for the plot to develop them.

I might keep watching out of fatalism, but will not be surprised when it gets cancelled... and I'm totally not surprised this got pulled.

[END]

Read more!

Killing so Softly

The most obvious point about this movie is that it stars Brad Pitt. The other thing is that it really wants to be a better movie than it is.

Some guys pull a stick up job on a card game joint, and the big people don't like this, so they call in Brad Pitt to come along and clean it up. Which basically means killing everyone involved....

...and that's about it. It's a "character piece", which means there is a lot of sitting around talking big and very little actually doing. And also not a lot of point to this. This movie is tied into the time of the financial crisis, and tries to compare what is happening at that level with the small world of these crooks, which is sledge hammered in at worst and at best... without that, there truly is no point to what is going on.

Andrew Dominik, writer and director, is very much in the style of Coen or Tarantino, only not as well. Probably that lack of point thing, I mentioned. Aside from Brad Pitt, he has some other big names to help out, James Gandolfini, Ray Liotta, Richard Jenkins... and yet...

If you have some time on your hands, you could do worse, but then you could do better.

[END]

Read more!

CENSUS!!!

Because I have to, I will now talk about the Census. If you are in New Zealand, then you have to fill it out. And note that applies to everyone in New Zealand, regardless of being New Zealandarian. And if you are New Zealandarian but not in New Zealand, then you don't fill it in. And technically it's where you are at midnight, so if you want to pull a Wizard...

This raises the point about Census Population versus Residential Population. The Census population counts all the people in New Zealand at one point in time. (There is undercount and such, which is why we also run the Post-Enumeration Survey in a few months, to try to estimate the number of people we missed, and anyone we counted more than once because they were excited about filling out forms.)

Then there is the Residential Population, who is everyone who usually lives in New Zealand. And you can guess, there are differences. Census includes visitors, and Residential includes people temporarily over seas. (In fact, I know someone who is popping over to Australia this afternoon, and so will not be counted for tonight.)

Currently, we take the Census, make some shrewd corrections do to our estimates of people who were overseas, or not counted, and remove those who aren't residents, to get to our Estimated Residential Population.

And this count, broken down in all sorts of ways, will underlie a lot of policy and statistics in the years until the next Census.

So yes, it is important. And, if you are reading this, why not fill it out online (if you haven't already), and save your form collector a trip to your place.

[END]

Read more!

The Hunted Troll-house

I admit I watch some bad movies. This one was so bad, it isn't even on IMDB! At least, not as one movie. It is actually three shorts jammed together, with a common theme of dolls, and all associated with Charles Band. Fast forward wasn't enough to get through this, so I skipped as well.

The Protectors (renamed) starts us off, set in a castle. Which contains a family and helpers that are crazy. And a film crew comes in that are actually robbers. And there are dolls infesting the place that drive everyone crazier and there's stupid killing, and... it's a complete mess.

Dangerous Worry Dolls (2008) is set in a female prison. One of the prisoners gets raped, so tells her concern to a Worry Doll that then gets in her head and makes her kill everyone. The only thing I'll point out about this is that Worry Dolls are actually a thing.

Demonic Toys (1992) is a terrible movie about toys... which are demonic, and thus moving about. And there's a lady and a hardboiled detective... who are toys, or at least toy sized. (One problem with fast forwarding is that I didn't get the full story. I can survive without that.) Just to show she is willing to do anything, Tracy Scoggins is in this!

Charles Band has been involved with some good movies. Not this though... not this...

[END]

Read more!

Cleanflix

So that was a very interesting documentary, but there's a lot there to unpack.

In Utah, there was a company that edited movies to remove sex and other scenes. Now if a person wants to do that to their own DVDs, fine, whatever. But then to go and sell/rent those movies, ie make a profit off of modified works (and yes they are breaking copyright, no matter how carefully they rip DVDs), then... well... that's illegal. And so they got shut down. And so did the next company. Fine, I'm right with that.

But there's clearly a market for those movies, so Hollywood is being stupid not to cater to it. If they are that stupid, then frankly people are going to take advantage of it to make a profit.

How that fits into the Mormon ethics... I can't say. (And presumably there are Mormons who watched the unedited versions to work out which bits to edit, so what of them?)

But to draw attention to what you are doing? That's stupid too. And it doesn't help when one of the most vocal of the distributors is also getting jailed for extremely dodgy practices on the side, but that's as aspect that not helping anyone. (Although I was continually wondering how many of them said on camera 'I want to watch a clean version of the film', but really wanted to watch the unclean version. I'm guessing a lot, 'cos I'm cynical like that.)

People want an edited, 'clean', version of movies. Fine. People are editing movies. Fine. People are making profit from that. Not fine. Hollywood isn't making them legally either. Stupid. People are idiots all over the place... that's people for you.

Anyway, interesting documentary, as I said, although it's not clear how sensational it being (or wanted to be) at times.

[END]

Read more!

It's not allowed to be a game

Recently I watched TotalBiscuit's take on Dear Esther. And then Downloadable just had an episode on it. In both cases, neither of them wanted to call this a game. Downloadable called it an 'experience', TotalBiscuit just flat out refused to classify it, just saying 'not a game'.

This raises the obvious question of 'what is a game?' (as Errant Signal recently asked). However it's defined (and no-one gives a definition when talking about Dear Esther), Dear Esther is cited as an example of what it is not.

Which annoys me. In one sense... who are you to say this isn't a game? If you aren't even going to give a definition of what a game is, how are you claiming that this isn't? It's just I know it when I see it, which is an entirely subjective meaning and personal opinion, which is no help at all aside from whether or not you agree with the person on other matters and would thus align yourself with their consideration of this. (This also gets into the lack of real meaning of anything.)

The real problem is that this is the heap fallacy: if there was a button to press, would that make it a game? What if you had to find a key in level one that you used in level four to open the gate to the signalling tower? What if there was one puzzle where you had to move a boulder to divert some water? Or you needed matches to light torches? Or had to avoid something slowly stalking after you? Or you had to defend yourself against an attacker? Or you had to run and gun your way across the island to activate a beaker to save mankind?

At what point does this 'not a game' become 'a game'? I'd bet there's no clear cut so you can just get over your distaste that the entertainment you enjoy also includes this piece of software.

(On the other hand, it might just be that I liked the game [YES, I CALLED IT A GAME! DEAL WITH IT!!!] and am just being defensive.)

[END]

Read more!

Second Assimilation^2

And so we have the second volume of the Doctor Who / Star Trek cross over.

There are four issues in this volume as most of them are padding. The first one is Picard padding (with backstory), the second is popping about the universe padding, the third is wandering around a ship padding, and the fourth is climax padding. Really this whole tale could have (should have) been told in half the issues. Oh, and the climax is so typical for Star Trek, it is basically 'push the button to stop the bomb' (only they don't push a button, and there's no bomb, but I did say 'basically').

The artwork is mostly decent, with the paintings of the Doctor and Picard being the most on target. The others... are close. The CyberBorg are hard to distinguish from normal Borg (although that is somewhat the point over Cyberconversion) but some more creative imagery with crossing those two concepts would have been nice.

Despite the obvious sequel set up, I'm not hanging out for it, and indeed if you haven't bothered with volume one, this doesn't inspire me to suggest the set.

[END]

Read more!