“The credit crunch is part of the solution. The problem was all the reckless credit that preceded it. You know, when Barack Obama says that credit is the life blood of the economy — he’s talking about consumer credit — it’s not the life blood - it’s the cancer.”

“Massive inflation — which is what we’re gonna get - we’re just gonna destroy the value of our money.”

Such comfort.

[Read more here.]

Contrary to what Wheeler and Feynman may have postulated, to us lesser mortals, time travel have and will always seem inherently paradoxical. The Terminator films completely ignored the paradoxes involved while the more recent Star Trek sidestepped them by calling on a plot device that could either have been brilliant or just plain lazy screenwriting. But the best time travel films have always been the ones that completely embraced the absurdities involved; case in point being the ultra low budget yet supremely brilliant 2004 indie, Primer.

Los Cronocrimenes (Timecrimes) is a lot like Primer even though it descends into slasher territory mid way through. Like Primer, it employs a single timeline albeit one populated by multiple copies of the protagonist. Apart from the usual problems involved with time travel, the fun also lies in figuring out whether to root for the original Hector (Hector 1) or the ones that follow him.

Pulp science fiction rarely gets better.

“What the hell does your boytoy want, Gwen?”

Gwen motioned me to follow her in.

“This is the guy I told you about Stu. He’s the one who wants….”

“Yeah yeah.”

Stu walked in from the toilet, wiped his hands on his khakis and plopped himself on the stained couch. The room reeked of cannabis and urine. There were copies of High Times, Extreme Golf and back issues of comic books I’d never heard of strewn about. In one corner of the room, there were giant stainless steel boxes that had wires going in and out of them. Temperature controlled vaults. Nonetheless, the place was the antithesis of what I had expected. Weren’t these people supposed to be a bit more, disciplined?

Stu sized me up and let out a condescending chuckle. I took that he wasn’t too impressed. I looked over to Gwen who seemed to be showing no emotion. Enter paranoia.

“I told you I wouldn’t sell to any wannabe latte sipping yuppie after last time Gwen. Why do you bring these little fuckers over?”

I tugged at Gwen’s sleeve but she didn’t seem to notice. I didn’t want to inconvenience the man any further. He probably had vegetative substance to get back to.

“He isn’t like the others Stu. Besides, why do you care for what he does with it?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t care what he does with it Lady Guinevere. You do. We all do.”

“We’re not having that conversation again. Stop being an elitist prick and just give him what he wants.”

Second thoughts now. An unemployed pothead was on the verge of putting me through another bout of existential angst. And from the looks of it, it’d take more than three bottles of vodka and a Dario Argento film to fix it.

Stu seemed to be contemplative all of a sudden. He picked his nose and drifted off for a minute.

“Alright, but I don’t have it sweetheart. You’ll have to see this Chinese kid. Peng.”

He turned to me, “And no asswipe, he doesn’t live with his mother.”

Hours later, I was trying to keep pace with Gwen as we raced through dingy streets and shady alleys. Screw Melbourne, this was Australia’s best kept secret. We waited by the Indian restaurant as instructed over the phone. Peng was a lot more like I’d imagined. He looked the type. Dressed in a Green Lantern t-shirt and jeans, he walked over and we shook hands awkwardly.

He seemed shy and didn’t make much eye contact with Gwen. From what I could make of his broken English, he wanted fifty more than we had agreed on. I shrugged and gave him the money. Too exhausted to haggle.

“You very lucky man. You take care of this, okay?”

I tore open the paper cover like an impatient schoolboy. Two years. Two whole years of tracking people down, forging unlikely friendships and promising unusual favors. It all boiled down to this.

I felt Gwen’s hands on my shoulder.

“Now, about that other thing.”

If you haven’t already guessed, my respect for the man has gone down a couple of notches after finding out that the big reveal he had in store for fans of Battlestar Galactica was, “God did it”. Never mind the unresolved story threads, what about the asteroid sized holes in logic? How could a science fiction show be so scientifically and logically challenged?

Now that’s out of the way, the feature length pilot for Caprica was pretty solid. It answers a few questions that were never tackled in the original series; the most important being  how the Cylons, a breed of intelligent machines, developed a belief system rooted in Judeo-Christian traditions. BSG itself stretched the limits of portrayal of sex and violence on television. Caprica takes it further. To make up for the lack of cool explosions in space, there’s plenty of rather smart expositions on the nature of being and consciousness.

I’m fairly certain Ronald Moore will eventually let us down again but rest assured, he’ll disappoint us in style.

There’s a chapter in The Blind Watchmaker (Chapter 3: Accumulating Small Change) that beautifully showcases the elegance of Darwin’s seminal theory. I’ve been told many times that evolution was only a theory and that it could never be proven or even justified by observation. This chapter, if understood properly, should change people’s minds.

Dawkins takes a rather straightforward approach in explaining Cumulative Selection and goes on to describe (what is now my favorite algorithm ever) The Weasel Program. With this, he illustrates how the common notion that evolution is ‘random’ is wrong and that a given target can be achieved in fewer steps through cumulative selection. All very exciting stuff.

After a very animated discussion with this guy last evening, I managed to put together a very shoddy program in Python that mimicked The Weasel Program (very crudely) only to be sent a much simpler program (in Matlab) by my brother this morning.

It’s sad that despite the beauty and elegance of Darwin’s explanation, an overwhelming majority of people still choose to buy into myths and superstitions espoused by some guy in a silly hat who thinks condoms increase chances of STD contraction.

Strange times, these.

Like most people, I thoroughly enjoyed Jon Stewart’s drawing and quartering of Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last week. It tells you something about the cultural zeitgeist when a television comedian is the one who ends up taking the mantle of journalism.

The episode, despite being immensely uncomfortable to watch, was catharsis in many ways. It was also refreshing to see Stewart finally come down on Cramer (unfortunately, a scapegoat for the real problem - financial news networks) in an expletive laden interview/skewering.

But isn’t that part of the problem? Selling this idea that you don’t have to do anything. Anytime you sell people the idea that sit back and you’ll get 10 to 20 percent on your money, don’t you always know that that’s going to be a lie? When are we going to realize in this country that our wealth is work? That we’re workers and by selling this idea that of “Hey man, I’ll teach you how to be rich”…how is that any different than an infomercial?

…

I gotta tell you. I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game. When I watch that, I get, I can’t tell you how angry it makes me because it says to me, “You all know.” You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was being pulled at Bear and at AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.

How come journalists back in India never hold our politicians’ feet to the fire like Stewart did?

(PS: I did feel sorry for Cramer.)

What are the things we think of as essential in our lives? The answers could be: our children, a daily walk in the park, a good stiff drink, the reading of books, a job, a vacation, a baseball team, a cigarette, or love. And yet life has a way of making us rethink. Our children move away from home, we move away from our favourite park, the doctor forbids us to drink or smoke, we lose our eyesight, we get fired, there’s no time or money to take a vacation, our baseball team sucks, our heart is broken. At such times our picture of the world hangs crookedly on the wall. Then, if we can manage it, we adapt. And what this shows us is that essence is something deeper than any of that, it’s the thing that gets us through. 

…

But those who do not know who they are, are doomed too: individuals who sacrifice themselves for the sake of pleasing others, comedians who stop telling jokes because they find themselves in a humourless world, serious people who start trying to tell jokes because they fear being thought humourless, people in a new situation, a new relationship, a new university, who act against their natures because they think that’s the way to make things easy for themselves.

Whole societies can lose their way through a process of bad adaptation. Striving to save themselves, they can oppress others. Hoping to defend themselves, they can damage the very liberties they believed to be under attack. Claiming to defend freedom, they can make themselves and others less free. Or, seeking to calm the violent hotheads in their midst, societies can try to appease them, and so give the violent hotheads the notion that their violence and hotheadedness is effective. 

[Tip of the hat to The Mute Oracle and Kalafudra]

I stand by what I said - Watchmen is an unnecessary adaptation of the graphic novel. As a piece of visual pulp art, the film succeeds. But as an adaptation of Alan Moore’s ideas, Watchmen is a failure albeit an interesting one.

The opening credit sequence is a brilliant slow motion montage set to Bob Dylan’s Times They Are A-Changin’. This establishes the Watchmen universe - an alternate reality where Nixon is in his fifth term, superheroes are real, a giant blue man wins the Vietnam conflict for America and the Cold War has escalated to a nuclear stand-off. The plot follows a masked anti-hero, Rorschach as he tries to uncover clues to the murder of a former masked vigilante, The Comedian.

Visually, Dave Gibbons‘ frames are perfectly translated on celluloid and despite what I feared, the slow motion shots and fight sequences are quite nicely staged when compared to lazy quick cuts prevelant in action films today. The colour palette suits the dark tone of the film. Dave Gibbon’s choice of colour in the book was unlike those of most comics at the time (case in point, Frank Miller’s revival of Batman) and was an attempt at highlighting the absurdity of masked men running around in tights; that doesn’t seem to have been lost on Snyder.

The plot and narrative lean heavily on Alan Moore’s writing and for most part, doesn’t stray away from the brilliant source material. Where the film fails (and disastrously s0) is when it tries to come up with an original alternative for the ending. There is a huge tonal shift in the third act and character motivations are never obvious to a viewer unfamiliar with the book. Honestly, it was downright silly. However, my favourite bit from the book - Doctor Manhattan’s self imposed exile to Mars - was perfectly done. Doc Manhattan is a naked blue godlike being who has since his freak accident (physics lab accident, of course) become detached from humanity. He teleports himself to Mars after learning he may have been the reason his old friends and lovers seem to have developed cancer. This is perhaps the most outrageous and fantastic arc in the book but it fits right in with the rest of the film.

The soundtrack unfortunately is grating and very out of place. Apart from the opening and closing credits, the songs feel like they were picked out of a Greatest Hits collection from the 80s (Cindy Lauper, Simon and Garfunkel etc). Audiences laughed at what was supposed to be a disturbing sex scene only because Leonard Cohen and a church choir crooned ‘Hallelujah’ in the background. Alan Moore would roll in his grave if he were dead.

I walked out with pretty much the same feeling I had after 300. The film is beautiful to look at but is a muddled mess with flashes of brilliance here and there. Zack Snyder may be a devout fanboy but he may have missed out on what Moore really tried to say - there is no civility in civilization. 

6.5/10

Right now, the upcoming Watchmen film ought to be the least of my worries; but I’ve seriously considered not watching Zack Snyder’s apparently faithful adaptation of the seminal graphic novel. You see, a comic geek scorned is a force to be reckoned with.

The first comic book I remember falling in love with was an issue of Batman (a Man Bat story arc) sometime around 1993. Frequent trips to India allowed me to source comics from airport stalls. Ever read the now discontinued and forgotten Thunderbolt? I have. And I remember specific frames from the book. Perhaps it was an escape from my relatively drama free childhood or maybe it was a rite of passage every young boy went through; whatever it was, I never got over the medium.

Third year of college. Holed up in that room, Watchmen convinced me that the comic book was far more than just colourful frames with conversation bubbles. The Comic Book had become The Graphic Novel. Characters had become morally ambiguous all of a sudden, heroes had become fallible and lofty ideals seemed suspicious. The Superhero concept had been deconstructed. Alan Moore joined the ranks of Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Dave Gibbons that of Rembrandt and Picasso. (Oh yes, comic book nerds are known to make wild exaggerations.)

I’ve been reading the book again; taking in every frame, digesting every line and assimilating concepts, some of which still strain my primitive frontal lobe. The book is an assault on the senses like no other; a work that perhaps was best left untouched.

However, I am mildly curious to see how Snyder translates something this complicated. 300 wasn’t exactly a brilliant film. If he does pull it off, will audiences be able to sit through 3 hours of an uncaring superman, an impotent vigilante and a masked anti hero who goes by the name Rorschach?

Tip of the hat to The Mute Oracle.