Seventh Annual London Sci-fi Film Festival

This weekend saw me spend about half my time inside a cinema watching sci-fi films, at the seventh annual sci-fi film festival in London. This year's schedule of films was far superior to the previous year, where a misguided collaboration with a horror genre magazine led to half the films being horror films and diluting the sci-fi to where there was little point in taking a trip to watch maybe two films eight hours apart. The schedule this year was perhaps one of the best yet, with a good selection, a good quantity, with sufficient time between screenings to allow for breaks and delays, and the late films didn't require taking a night bus to get home. The organisers are defintely much more practiced now than when they started, and the festival continues to grow.

I met my two festival buddies on Friday evening, outside the Apollo West End, and headed inside for the first of the films that year. Suspension follows a man who after a traumatic event in his life finds that he can stop time whilst still being able to move himself and interact with objects when time is stopped. I was a little concerned that the film would degenerate in to a bunch of effects shots that showed just how clever the effects were to let someone walk around a lot of paused objects, but luckily that concern was unfounded. The sci-fi basis of the film drove the plot instead of being the plot. With being able to stop time the chap drew inappropriate inferences about a relationship, and we follow the results and fallout from his apparently innocent endeavours. It's a fairly standard stalker film overall, but the sci-fi angle adds a neat twist, as well as the suggestion that the pair are coupled in some way.

After Suspension we had a short break before heading back in to the cinema to watch the Russian big budget fantasy film Wolfhound. We were told in advance, with the festival director introducing each film, that Wolfhound was a fantasy film by numbers, with everything you'd expect to see in a fantasy film, all in the right place, and he wasn't wrong. Depending on your point of view, it was either horribly clichéd or textbook filmmaking. I tended to flip back and forth between those two viewpoints, although there wasn't really any time I could fault the film for its production values. Everything looked good, sounded good, and was presented beautifully.

If you like fantasy adventure you really can't go wrong with this film, but there almost nothing new in the plot or characters, from the young child who sees his family and village slaughtered by a villain who can be identified by a tattoo so that he can be hunted down when the child escapes from slavery, to the princess who disguises herself as a caravan guard to avoid capture. Quite why the princess isn't revealed sooner is a puzzle, one that had me wondering if my guess that the boy guard was in fact a beautiful woman in disguise was actually the case, leading me to think that, well, he was awfully cute...

One point that pleased me was that after incidentally rescuing a couple of people from an evil lord the hero didn't automatically join them on a mission, in a D&D meta-gaming moment, and needed a clear motivation to stay with them. However, the ultimate battle was weak, with the evil foe being little more than an amorphous CGI blob that the hero fought by waving a fifty-foot lightsabre in its general direction until the special effects budget finally ran out. I don't think I'm spoiling anything by pointing that out, because it was quite unengaging. The film was perhaps a little long too, but will surely interest anyone with an interest in fantasy films.

The next day saw us get in to London for an early start to a twenty two hour film watching marathon. The first film of the day was 11 Minutes Ago, a time-travel story where a man comes back from the future and accidentally finds himself as part of a wedding party. He can only stay for eleven minutes at a time, but he is compelled to keep returning to the party even after his specific task is complete, and he learns from his first trip that he comes back even earlier than previous trips and has to piece together why he would make such trips when he could travel to any point in time. The forwards narrative of the time-traveller we follow coupled with the mostly back-to-front narrative of the party-goers offers an interesting story that only suffers from some awkward dialogue in places, although considering the subject matter that is probably only because it is a difficult subject to write about without being awkward. Being a relatively cheap independent effort the sound levels in the film are a little off, but the film itself is a good low-budget effort and worth seeing.

Netherbeast, Inc. was presented at the festival couple of years back under a similar name but as a short film. It was well-received and expanded in to a full-length version, with the likes of Dave Foley, Judd Nelson and Robert Wagner starring. The film is more fantasy than sci-fi and the comedy is nicely scattered through dialogue, characterisations, and occasional background objects like the motivational poster declaring that 'Communicating is key to communication'. The overall plot is fairly standard, but the subject matter gives the needed twist to keep it fresh and there are other little twists throughout the film that makes it enjoyable and fun to watch and recommend.

Before the next film started the festival director had a treat to show us. With the next Bale/Nolan Batman film being released soon there has been a viral campaign in the works, where about a dozen prints of the trailer were released that had been scratched up, supposedly by the Joker, and released to cinemas. After these trailers had been shown the Joker would run through the audience and hand or throw the scratched-up film to someone in the audience. As it turned out, the one copy of these trailers outside of the US was shown around the corner in Leicester Square the previous Monday and the chap who got the copy of the trailer was in the audience for the next film. He had gratiously given the trailer to the festival coordinaters and they were happy to show it before the current film, so everyone there got a surprise showing of one-of-a-kind trailer for The Dark Knight, which was rather splendid. The new film looks as good as the previous one would suggest, and the Joker couldn't look more suitable to the role.

With the special trailer out of the way everyone settled in to watch the anime Vexille. The basic plot is that a covert US unit is to infiltrate the electronically hidden and entirely insular Japan after some terrorist action suggests something far more sinister at foot. There are mechs, gunfights, big explosions and races so fast your eyes will water, and it is a thoroughly enjoyable film that although not entirely unpredictable pushes all the right buttons and employs some wonderful characterisations. Even without the good film behind it I would still have recommended seeing Vexille just for the animation. It may not be the only film to employ whatever techniques and technologies that it does but it's the first I've seen that looks as visually incredible and stunning as it does. It must be entirely computer animated, considering the fluid movement of, well, everything in every frame, including the dynamic lighting effects. The level of detail presented is mind-blowing. Initial scenes take place in a snow-covered landscape, and the snow on the ground moves as you would expect snow to move, and the snow falling is not simply a single layer of flakes falling separate from the rest of the animation but it looks like each particle is a flake in its own space.

It's not just the backgrounds that benefit from this level of detail, every item or character is rendered with amazing clarity. The antangonist sneers from behind dark glasses with such subtlety yet distinctness that you could be forgiven for thinking he was a human actor. Individual characters do not lose their individuality just because they are in a crowd or not the focus of attention in Vexille, with each character, even in large crowd scenes, constantly in some separate motion, and characters can be seen to be shifting as they breathe even in wide shots. And when the audience is offered a point-of-view shot from the end of a gun barrel that is being pointed directly towards us the hand that holds the gun and thus the gun itself subtlely shifts around as if the person holding it is a person and not animated face on a body. This attention to detail is simply staggering, and combining it with the fluidity of movement that allows the speed and agility of mechs to be shown at full speed without any animation artefacts, offering an awe-inspiring view of what it can be like to run around a corner at fifty miles per hour, results in a wonderfully crafted film that simply has to be seen by anyone who enjoys animation. I have to get this on DVD when it is released, even if it won't be quite the same as the glorious 35 mm print we were shown.

Chrysalis had been shown as a trailer before a couple of films that we had been to already, and it was a little confusing. When we were looking at what films to watch I was under the impression that Chrysalis was a French production but the trailer had an English voice-over. It was clear from the first section of dialogue that the film was indeed French, and the trailer seemed to give the wrong impression about the whole point of the film as well. The trailer didn't make the film look bad, but it did make it look almost like a different film. I'm not sure what I can write about the film without giving too much away, much like the trailer, but it deals with identity through the eyes of a plastic surgeon who nearly loses her daughter in an accident and a gritty Interpol officer who has to cope with a new partner. It's an interesting story and the sci-fi aspect again helps the plot along instead of being the plot. The only drawback to the film is that the colours are so dark and muted throughout that it is almost like watching a black and white film, without much of the white. It was reassuring to exit the cinema to see colour again, although I suspect the almost-sensory deprivation nature of the colours helped the film along in its own way.

Chrysalis was the last regular film of the day for us, and because two of us were sticking around for the MST3K all-nighter it was also the last regular film of the festival. The all-nighter is a tradition from the first London Sci-Fi Film Festival, where four related films are shown back-to-back from midnight in to the early hours of the morning, and for the past few years one screen has been dedicated to showing Mystery Science Theatre 3000 episodes. The combination of really bad films with sardonic voice-overs from robots and a cinema full of sleep-deprived fans creates a fabulous atmosphere and really adds to the experience. Again, we were offered a treat, this time in the form of a Rifftrax film. Whereas MST3K generally only gets old and low-budget films to mock, because the producers need permission from the rights-holders to screen the film, Rifftrax needs no permission as it is an entirely separate audio track and this allows them to make fun of any film they want. This meant that the first film presented in the all-nighter was the Rifftrax version of Battlefield Earth, and apparently it is the first time in the world that a Rifftrax has been presented in a cinema.

Along with Battlefield Earth we also saw MST3K versions of Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders and The Creeping Terror. They were all pretty bad films, and bad in their own special way, with Battlefield Earth being the most unforgiveably bad, to Santa Claus Conquers the Martians being the most understandably but also unintentionally silly. Impromptu naps were taken through some of the films, but no great loss of narrative structure or character motivation was ever lost. The last film ended at around eight in the morning, and we all stumbled out in to the morning sunlight and made our zombie-like journeys home for some sleep.

The Seventh Annual London Sci-fi Film Festival was a fun, interesting and throught-provoking collection of genre films that I would be unlikely to see in any other forum, and was another excellent weekend of film watching. I hope that next year's event is just as good, although we may not watch so many films as well as booking an all-nighter next time, we're getting too old.

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Tags: 11 minutes ago, batman, chrysalis, dark knight, film, mst3k, netherbeast inc, rifftrax, sci fi london, suspension, vexille, wolfhound

Crossover Games City of Heroes advocate

My application to be a City of Heroes advocate for Crossover Games has been accepted. This gives me access to various extra resources in an effort to get the game running perfectly under CxG. I downloaded the latest nightly build and had a quick session in City of Heroes. The game still crashes at regular intervals, which is frustrating as I have to reload, log-in, and reset my camera's viewpoint every few minutes or so, and this quickly becomes too much of a chore.

The game seems entirely playable except for these crashes, so I hope that there is some information I can help provide to uncover why they happen and how to prevent them.

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Tags: advocate, city of heroes, crossover games

Portishead: 3

The NME had a glowing review of Portishead's third album recently, which piqued my interest. Their first album, Dummy, is excellent, their second is much bleaker but still good, and this third album is supposedly even better. That it comes many years after their previous release makes it more interesting.

Then I saw an advert or two for the album on TV, and I find myself no longer wanting to get the album. It's not that I have no desire to buy music that seems destined to become popular, but it's the way the album is being presented. The advertisement didn't promote the music as much as the brand recognition of Portishead the band, appealing to those who remember them on purely emotive terms. It no longer seems to be about buying good music if I get the album, which was the impression I got after reading the NME review, I now feel like I will be buying conformity. It's as if I'll be fulfilling an erroneous sense of duty as a consumer, or buying an item solely so I can engage others in conversation about it. I buy music because I want to listen to it, not so that I can feel validated by others who make the same choice.

This impression I have is not anything against the band, or indeed the album itself, as it could be as good as the review indicates. But the marketing makes me feel that this isn't the musical cream rising to the top but something as yet unindentified being pushed and forced towards the top. If a brand is being pushed how much can I trust a review, particularly in times when opinions can be bought if not directly then by the threat of withdrawing advertising money? It's a shame that marketing tries so hard to sell things to people who don't want them, as it will also deter some legitimate sales. Hopefully, I'll hear some of the new Portishead album on the radio or elsewhere and be able to make up my own mind, and if not then maybe it isn't that good to start with.

Posted in Audio, Personal | Comments Off on Portishead: 3
Tags: advertisement, marketing, nme, portishead

No jam

The new extra lane on the M1 has been opened both north- and southbound for the northern half of the expansion project. What a difference it has made! Before this morning, I have never seen southbound commuter traffic moving at anything less than a crawl for a few solid miles, but today it was flowing freely.

This bodes well for when the whole project is completed, which is due at the end of the year. It should make a massive difference for anyone who travels on that stretch of the motorway, saving time and energy, and relieving stress.

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Tags: motorway, roadworks, traffic

My head aches

I have another headache. Or maybe it's the same one from yesterday evening, subdued temporarily by some paracetamol and rearing it's ugly head again. I don't know why, but my headaches simply won't go away without taking some pills. No matter how quiet or relaxed I make my environment the headache will never abate, just slowly increase in intensity until I surrender to the tablets.

Maybe I should play some Headache Music on my iPod.

Posted in Personal | 2 Comments »
Tags: headache, ipod, pain, torpedo boyz

Motorbike vs. ambulance

Heading home from work yesterday I encountered the sadly familiar sight of slow-moving traffic on the motorway, as it edged its way through the roadworks for ten miles or so. I have about six miles to travel through it before a contraflow section allows me to break away from the M25 traffic and move a bit more smoothly. When the traffic is moving so slowly as it was yesterday afternoon I will filter through the traffic, between the outside lane and its neighbouring lane.

As I started cautiously filtering my way through the traffic I noticed, around three-quarters of a mile ahead of where I was, blue flashing lights. I wondered if this meant there had been an accident up ahead that would cause even more delays than normal, particularly once I realised the emergency vehicle was an ambulance. The traffic was moving in fits and starts but was constantly moving, so the likelihood of a traffic-stopping accident having happened ahead was slight. Even so, the blue lights continued to flash and the ambulance was having to pick its way through the traffic in much the same way I was. I wondered if I would catch it up at some point.

The ambulance had the advantage of being an emergency vehicle, compelling motorists to get out of its way, and few people object to the flashing lights and horns of an ambulance. The same is hardly true of motorbikes. Not many motorists see bikes before they are passed, although most that spot bikes are kind enough to make some room. I haven't really tested whether flashing my lights or sounding my horn would help me get through traffic, but I am not about to try as it would presume that I, on my bike, have some inherent right to get through traffic quicker. I know that this just isn't the case and sometimes I have to bear jams with car drivers, so I don't try to force people to make room for me.

It might seem that the width of the ambulance compared to a bike would be a disadvantage, but as it was heading south it was travelling on the resurfaced and mostly open section of the motorway with its lovely wide lanes. This meant the ambulance could almost filter through most traffic in the same way I was, with motorists squeezing to the sides to make room. I still had an advantage there as I didn't have to rely on motorists moving to one side before I could fit through the gaps. However, the ambulance knew when motorists had seen it approach, as the cars got out of the way, making for safe passage past the cars as fast as they moved out of the way. I had no such luxury, as I couldn't guarantee that motorists had seen me or that cars wouldn't be changing lanes as I approached, so even though I needed less room to pass I had to limit my speed more.

I almost caught up with the ambulance by the time I reached the contraflow section. There were two vehicles between me and it when we both joined the contraflow, and that number would have been one less had an idiotic motorist not decided to sneak past a van that had moved out of the way of the ambulance. Whilst it was interesting to see how my bike fared against an ambulance in heavy motorway traffic I was a little concerned about actually catching up with it. I probably wouldn't have been able to pass it, and not really wanted to, and following directly behind it would have been borderline illegal as well as rather dangerous should people move back in to their lane fully without checking to see if anything was behind the ambulance.

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment »
Tags: ambulance, filtering, motorbike, motorway, roadworks

Tongue flesh wound

I would have hoped that by now I am proficient enough at chewing food that I won't bite my tongue when eating. Alas, that doesn't seem to be the case, as I have a fresh wound from last night's dinner.

This time I did not bite my tongue as such, more the fleshy part of my mouth beneath my tongue. I'm not even entirely sure how that is possible.

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Tags: injury, pain

Bank card nonsense

A couple of weeks back I bought a whole load of tickets for myself and a couple of friends for the forthcoming Sci-fi Film Festival in London. Despite having done this every year since the event started the large purchase of cinema tickets gets flagged as anomalous by my credit card company. Rather than buy them a dictionary so they can look up the meaning of 'anomalous' I decided this year that I would not have the credit card declined and immediately blocked when trying to buy the tickets and instead use my bank card.

This plan seemed to work. The purchase was accepted the first time without any errors and I walked out of the cinema with an envelope stuffed full of tickets. Not only that, but I was then able to make an impulse purchase using my credit card not ten minutes later without having to deal with a fraud office. This was a triumph. Or so I thought.

A few days later I got a letter through the mail informing me that there had been a suspiciously large transaction for cinema tickets made recently. The letter asked me to call the bank if I hadn't made the transaction, but it also pointed out that if I had made the transaction then no action was required on my part. I took this to mean that unless I flagged up the purchase as fraudulent then my bank would assume that everything was normal. It seems I was wrong.

I tried to get some money out of an ATM at the end of last week, some two weeks after I bought the cinema tickets, and although the ATM accepted my card and presented me with the option to withdraw some cash all that happened was my card was returned to me. No cash was spat out and no error messages occurred. I was not terribly impressed. I went inside and told an employee what had happened and I was informed that I needed to fill out a transaction dispute form, and that I would get my money back in seven-to-ten days. This did not fill me with joy. I was then told by another employee, to whom I had been directed, that, quite sensibly, I would have to fill out the form at a branch of my bank and not the one who owns the ATM, but that first I could get my bank to check to see if a transaction had been completed.

I trotted a couple of hundred metres down the road, for I only used the ATM of another bank because it was more conveniently located in the town, and popped in to the local branch of my bank. I got confirmation that a transaction had not been made at the ATM and was happy that I hadn't lost any money, if confused about what had happened. Frankly, I was a little disturbed that the previous bank didn't seem to give any indication that it was possible the ATM was malfunctioning and that they would look in to that. Maybe it takes a certain number of complaints before they investigate such problems, with it being cheaper, or 'more cost-effective' if you like, to stiff a few customers before paying an engineer.

With my card apparently clean and functioning I used the ATM inside my bank's branch. I got the same result as with the previous ATM, and turned to find the employee again to ask what was going on. It was at that moment that I remembered the cinema tickets I'd bought and the letter I'd received. It clearly had lied when telling me I needed to take 'no action', when what it really meant was 'you need to call our fraud department before you can use the card again.' I'll mostly overlook the hassle of being disconnected when I first called using the bank's internal 'phone, and that I had to confirm my identity with half-a-dozen security questions just to be put through to the right department.

Once I was talking to the fraud department I had to confirm my identity. 'I've only just done this', was my quibble, but it seems that the bank's internal systems are not linked for that purpose. That's a shame, because it is possible that the security questions asked are generated from a list that ensures the same questions aren't asked again too soon, and that the previous set of questions almost exhausted all the reasonable questions that I could be asked. The problem is that I pretty much only use the card to withdraw cash from ATMs and there aren't too many other transactions that I can confirm. This was highlighted when, struggling to find something to ask me, the fraud employee asked me what I had used the card for on the internet in June last year. I told him honestly that I had absolutely no idea, what with my purchasing items off the internet regularly and the date he is asking about being nine months ago, and luckily I was able somehow to prove who I was to him sufficiently. I got my card unblocked.

I am learning how to buy my yearly dose of Sci-fi film tickets, slowly but surely. Next year, I know I can use my bank card, but I will need to make sure I have enough cash on me beforehand to last until I can get to a telephone to then unblock the card.

Posted in Personal | Comments Off on Bank card nonsense
Tags: atm, fraud, sci fi london

Guitar set-up, painting put up

I set-up my guitar a little bit over the weekend. I didn't change the action, partly because it is supposedly set at the optimal height already, and partly because I wasn't sure if there was an extra nut I needed to undo or not and didn't want to break anything on it just yet. I changed the string lengths from the bridge so that the fretted note played on the 12th fret was the same frequency as the harmonic note played on the 12th fret for each of the six strings. It probably won't make that much of a difference for the simple practicing that I am doing, but it's good to know that of all the reasons I can be embarrassed over when picking up the guitar one of them won't be because it's set-up badly. I still can't play though, and it's been a whole week since I got it. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

The white colour of the Les Paul is really quite attractive. Whereas the plain black hides the shape a little and seems to hide the guitar the white gives clean lines and some character to the guitar. It really stands out. One thing I have realised is that with the smooth lines and plain white colour, combined with a few simple dials, I have effectively bought an iGuitar. I wonder if that was a subconscious decision or just coincidence.

I also hung the painting I bought up on my bedroom wall. The picture hooks I bought came in a pack of five. I don't know what sort of art lover normally shops at Woolworths but I would have been happy with just the one. The painting looks good above my bed, giving a little colour to an otherwise blank wall.

Posted in Personal | 4 Comments »
Tags: epiphone, guitar, les paul, painting

Motorbike MOT annoyance

I took the day off on Friday to take my motorbike in for a service and to get its annual MOT certificate. Because the bike needed a new front tyre the garage needed to service the bike outside of a weekend, hence the day off for me. On the positive side, this meant that the garage had the whole of Friday and Saturday to get the bike serviced and through its MOT before I needed it again to get to work on Monday.

The service was completed on the Friday, but the MOT wasn't done. I got a call to tell me this and that it would be done early on Saturday, which wasn't a problem. It became more of a problem when I called early in the afternoon to find that it apparently wouldn't be ready before Monday, which seemed to be a communication problem in that the Saturday workers weren't aware that I was promised it for that day and that the bike had already spent a whole day in the workshop. After that miscommunication was cleared up I was assured that the MOT would be done that day and I could pick my bike up within the hour.

Within that very hour was when the real problem occurred. The MOT tester called me to let me know that he had to fail my bike, because the front brakes were binding. When I asked how this was not noticed during the service and, indeed, how a bike that had just been through a service in their garage could immediately fail an MOT before even going back on the road I was told that he was thinking the very same thoughts and would find out. It also meant that, with the bike needing more work, I wasn't going to get the bike back before Monday.

I decided that I would take another day off instead of fighting the roadwork-hampered motorway traffic in a car. With work being rather slow at the moment I didn't think this would be a problem with my boss, and it wasn't. I've had a fairly relaxing day, even though it has involved about nine miles of walking, for various reasons, so the extra day off is nothing more than an inconvenience in some respects and a rest in others. But there is still the question of why my bike failed an MOT after being serviced.

I've already brought the question up twice with the garage, and will do again, just so I get some reassurance that proper procedures will be followed in the future and that I can trust their mechanics' work. It's a good job the MOT for the bike was due, as it enabled the maintenance to be checked before I got the bike back and is making the garage take a more careful look at my bike now, but it shouldn't have to be that way. I'm hoping that this is nothing more than an anomalous occurrence.

Edit: apparently, the reason for the front brake problem not being picked up in the service but in the MOT is because the bike is front-heavy. This makes it difficult to get the front raised during servicing, but when it's put on the rolling road for the MOT the problem becomes immediately apparent. This sounds reasonable, and the garage were working with me and not trying to shift the blame, so I am happy with the answer.

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Tags: brakes, mot, motorbike, service