The future of video game movies

I recently read an article by Devin Faraci on BadassDigest.com, where he suggested that we could be on the cusp of finally seeing a good film based on a video game. To my mind he seemed overly optimistic and I have to say I'm not sure the two examples given there will lead to great movies. Splinter Cell especially, the mere announcement of Tom Hardy as Sam Fisher didn't particularly inspire me. Okay so the games have the potential to make either a good action blockbuster or a taut thriller but one good actor doesn't really make a film. Certainly when I heard that the Prince of Persia movie was going to feature Jake Gylenhall and Ben Kingsley I thought they were good choices but it was still fairly disappointing.

It got me thinking about what has been the best adaptation so far but looking at a list of films based on video games, I think I'd forgotten how universally terrible they've been. Even though it scores the best in terms of Rotten Tomatoes ratings, I wouldn't really count 'Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within' among the rest as it's essentially an original story. You're then left in the rather embarrassing position of having Resident Evil and Dead or Alive joint third after the Prince of Persia film. I'd probably be among the first to mock Paul W. S. Anderson's efforts but sadly on a personal level, I actually kind of enjoyed his take on Mortal Kombat back in the day - as a straight adaptation of a game it's probably the most accurate. Given that I wouldn't really rate anything on that list very highly, it feels like the old comic book movies that Devin describes have nothing on games to be honest, where even before breakout hits like X-Men and Spiderman, there were at least reasonably rated adaptations of its leading franchises in Superman and Batman.

So I would say we're really waiting for our first passable game adaptation, rather than being in a situation where plenty of great films are suddenly going to appear. I think an Assassin's Creed film has potential, though but it will take something special to make a truly memorable film. My first thought is that with Michael Fassbender on board, he should play both Altair and Desmond (and Ezio if he comes into it). I really liked how the first few games basically used the same model with a few tweaks for each ancestral character, relying on the voice acting to differentiate them. It made you wonder whether what you saw was totally historically accurate or if it was coloured by the person using it, even if the real reason for doing this was probably just to cut modelling time. I was a little disappointed that the developers seemed to bottle it and start making major changes to the character models in Revelations, at the same time severing this perceived link to the past.

Having the same actor play multiple roles would be a nice nod to its video game roots (and their frequent re-using of assets), while at the same time being a challenge that most actors would relish. It's something that has also been done recently in the Wachowski's take on Cloud Atlas (perhaps stealing some thunder from this idea). I think that there would need to be a bit more depth to the characters of Altair and Desmond though, to either distinguish them or to draw parallels between them more clearly. I've always thought that the games never really clicked with me until Ezio was introduced, giving someone whose journey you actually want to follow.

As mentioned in Devin's article, when translating from game to movie it's important to remember the different strengths that each medium has and I think another way of making the distinction between the two media would be to change how the Animus system works. Since films are missing the aspect of interaction it could focus more on the visual aspects and have the past memories be like a film within a film. Make it more clear that when in the Animus the subject has to be an actor and put in a convincing performance, not just be a passive observer of the action. That would really work well with the concept of real life and virtual reality becoming blurred as you spend more time in the system (a little like Avatar perhaps).

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself in thinking of things to make it a truly great film but I think it's important to aim high, rather than end up with just another passable attempt. Overall I think that Assassin's Creed shows promise because it has a lot of good ideas that could be adapted but that I'm not overly precious about the story, so a film could tread its own path - in fact if the film ended up slavishly following the plot of the games it's probably guaranteed to put me off. The same is probably true of other games that I wouldn't mind seeing as films - Halo is one example where I thought that the combination of the religious zealotry of its alien antagonists, its 'rampant' AI characters and the hidden purpose of the halo device could make for something interesting without directly adapting one of the games. The same could possibly be said for the Mass Effect universe but I think with that series so centred around player choice, there's less of a desire to see one definitive story put on film - and if they went with a male Shepherd it would be wrong!

I suppose the question is how many people really want to see movies based on games. I know that when I was younger there was certainly a feeling that it would see the medium justified but I think I've moved past that and can appreciate their differences. There was also the desire to see some games fully realised in a way that primitive 16bit graphics could never achieve but that's much less of an issue now. When games can look almost as good as a CGI movie, would it be improved in any way by appearing on film with human actors? But if these films are perhaps no longer being made specifically to cater to the demands of gamers, maybe it bodes well for the creation of something worthwhile on their own.

Dust: An Elysian Tail (2012)

I held off from posting my thoughts on this until I had time to finish the game itself but in the end I'm not sure it made all that much difference. My overall opinion had pretty much been formed by the time I reached its final level, so going through the motions of defeating the last boss and watching its ending was more of a formality. It did however coincide with the publishing of an article on Gamasutra with an extensive post mortem of the game, which provided some new insights on the game and eventually pushed me to finish this off.

I'd been waiting for this game ever since I saw its initial trailer, which did little more than showcase the quality of its animation. In some ways it shares common ground with Fez, being a project driven by a single man with a retro feel to it, which at some points looked like it might not see the light of day. After learning all of this, I definitely wondered to myself if its creator would have the kind of focus and broad range of skills necessary to bring it to fruition. It was largely unclear what kind of game it would be to begin with and discovering a little down the line that it was to be a 'Metroidvania' piqued my interest again. As much as I might have enjoyed a linear hack and slash platformer, the knowledge that it would have that exploration element somehow gave me more confidence that it could be something special, if it was aiming that little bit higher to begin with.

So when I finally got my hands on it I was initially overjoyed with it. The controls were tight and satisfying, while the animation was just as good as it had initially appeared. It seemed that for once the universally positive reviews it received were well founded. I was also impressed with some tweaks to the traditional exploratory 2D platformer format, with areas divided up into chunks that could easily be selected from a main world map. It may have detracted from the idea of a huge open world but for someone like myself with limited gaming time it felt very welcome.

I also found it to be surprisingly funny. It might not appeal to everyone but it doesn't so much break the fourth wall as assume there isn't one. It's quite happy to talk about gaming terms with no in game rationalisation, rather than use clunky dialogue which ties itself in knots. I particularly enjoyed being told to "mash the buttons!" and later on having someone comment on how I was flying around the screen. It's also very open about its influences and pays tribute to other games along the way. Knowing nothing beforehand about its 'cameos', unlocking a cage early on presented me with a familiar face and what may well be my favourite achievement for a long time. And Castlevania fans will surely appreciate the fact that you can collect 'Mysterious Wall Chickens' throughout your adventure.

This irreverent humour and clear love for its own influences really kept me going and interested to follow the story. A lot of people have commented on finding it difficult to get over the anthropomorphised 'furry' characters but it wasn't something that really crossed my mind to begin with. Even the stereotypical annoying sidekick has a lot to offer, something that was a big surprise to me - similar to how the new version of Thundercats has created a version of Snarf that doesn't annoy me to my core! I can see why it might put some people off though, especially in combination with the rather simplistic animation of its full screen 'talking heads' and some amateurish voice acting. Interesting to think that it was a last minute bug fix away from not having any voice acting at all!

In some respects I felt that although the game's story wasn't amazing, it was what kept me engaged with the game to begin with, especially as there was little new in the way of skills for a long time. The pace of upgrades was very slow to be honest, I have to say that I was aching for a double jump upgrade from fairly early on and by the time I reached the end I was surprised that I hadn't really picked up anything new, just the basics you would expect from the first half of a Castlevania game. I expected there to be something later on that would become the game's signature final move, but then I suppose that you already had this in the form of the 'Dust Storm' ability. I can see why this was handed out so early on but it did also feel like it brought combat progress to a halt, with no more new combos to learn and no reason to break away from the basic moves that got the job done after this point.

I also felt that this lack of new abilities started to make the game drag a little in the middle. One section that really didn't work for me was a fetch quest across a huge graveyard, going to 4 different mansions. I actually found the presence haunting these buildings pretty creepy but the strict process of it appearing whenever you entered a mansion made it very formulaic and lost its effectiveness. I would much rather have had one huge mansion to explore, with the ghost showing up at 'random' points to keep you on edge. The blandness of the enemies in this area didn't help either - especially when one enemy existed only to create more zombies, teleporting out of the way when trying to hit it with any physical attacks, forcing you to rely on your rather underdeveloped magic attacks.

There were lots of enemies to wade through again when you reach the end of the game but here that is tempered with the sheer amazement of how much stuff is on screen and wondering why your Xbox isn't falling over and crying. Playing through on normal difficulty I found the last boss to be the only real challenge the game had, sadly not in a particularly good way. You had to beat him what felt like one too many times and rather than work out a gradually developing pattern it was more of a case of repeating the same thing while throwing tons of enemies at you to make it awkward. It was a shame how much filler there is to wade through before you can fight him if you go off to clear up some areas after your first attempt, which I found necessary. If you reach the last level and a random attack can still put you in any danger, then I would advise you to go away and grind some more as you are guaranteed to suffer a few hits in the final battle that are completely unavoidable.

So while my initial feelings were of total amazement that this was made by one person, by the end I started to feel it was showing its limitations in that respect. The lack of anything new past the early stages of the game and some degree of padding felt like things that could have been improved with a few more people working on it. But it was also interesting to read about aspects that were cut from the game already, including an additional final chapter, and I think it's probably down to the game suddenly getting a concrete release date that it made it here at all. I could see this being the kind of project that its creator would keep tweaking and adding to until it was perfect, with it never being truly ready in his eyes. What we've ended up with isn't perfect by any stretch of the imagination but it is still an incredible achievement - and should perhaps serve as a reminder that almost anyone can make a game if they're driven enough.

Hebburn (2012)

While there'd been a fair amount of local radio buzz about this show, I only really made the connection the day before its first episode (or rather my wife did) that it was written by a stand up comic we'd seen recently. Written by and featuring Jason Cook, Hebburn is a comedy inspired at least partly by his own life in the South Tyneside town. I went to see Jason as part of a charity night along with a great line-up of other comedians, so not really being familiar with him I made sure to look him up online beforehand. I have to say that some of his previous TV appearances didn't really prepare me for how vicious he could be as part of an unreserved stand up gig - one heckler put down I'll always remember seemed to sum it up quite well: "Shut up or I'll fucking destroy you with words".

Unsurprisingly there was little of this trademark venom here, with his character Ramsey being something of an ineffectual rogue; selling pirate DVDs bought from a kid who had moments earlier decried him as a 'Wazzock'. The show promises to focus on the family of prodigal son Jack (played by another North East comedian Chris Ramsey) and his Jewish girlfriend/secret vegas bride Sarah. Some of the build up to the show described it as being like a North East Royle Family but (and I mean this with no hint of malice) it didn't really feel in the same league as that. While the Royle Family took itself very seriously and you always felt that the characters could be real, this established quite early on that it would be much larger than life and tend to exaggerate some stereotypes in the quest for comedy.

Despite this, I felt that it was most successful when dropping in very well observed little nuggets of real life. As an adopted Geordie Son myself, the immediate warm family welcome for Sarah felt very familiar. As was the assertion that somewhere as close as York was a vaguely exotic 'Southern' place (apparently Liverpool isn't in the North West). Perhaps best of all was the simple resolution to a discussion about helping out with the family, with Jack realising immediately that his father asking for help meant the situation was important enough to just get done, no questions asked.

Vic Reeves (using his real name Jim Moir) was a bit of a revelation to me as the father of the family. I've never been the biggest fan of his brand of comedy in general, so along with numerous reports that he could sometimes not be the nicest person in real life, I had kind of been a little soured towards him. But here he seemed to play the role pitch perfect, reigning in his personality just enough to create someone who was clearly still a joker but knew how to be serious too. I think sometimes you have to remember to try and divorce an actors individual performance from what else you know or expect from them, which suggests to me that he has done very well in the role for me to overlook all of that.

Watching it a day after it aired, I couldn't avoid hearing impressions from the local populace on the radio in the meantime. While it elicited infectious cackles from some, it seemed to draw the ire of the town's local councillor at the very least. I couldn't quite decide what to make of his viewpoint, on the one hand wondering if he had a sense of humour at all but also guessing that even if it had blown him away, he probably couldn't say so publicly. I'm not sure exactly how much I'd agree with his opinion that it just played up to false stereotypes - especially being written by someone from the area, I don't doubt that most characters had some basis in truth. I think it showed enough promise that it would be foolish to dismiss it so early on and given Jason Cook's description of the show as a whole, hopefully the heart of it will be the positive connections that people have - even if he did rather deliberately subvert this by the end of the first episode. Given that I never really expected it to be something I would feel compelled to write about, I think it must be doing something right though.

Picross 3D (2010)

I seem to have backed myself into a corner recently, where I've only really felt like blogging about films or story based games. I've felt at a bit of a loss for what to write about, having seen no new films since Looper and not really playing any big games either. That's not to say that I haven't been playing games at all though, in fact I have been almost completely addicted to Picross 3D. Y'know, that kind of overplay where you try to get to sleep afterwards and end up playing a made up game in your head for about half an hour and then dreaming of cubes...

Console gaming has pretty much been relegated to weekends at the moment, so through the week the only gaming I really do is late at night on my DS. I can't say I've always been a big fan of logic puzzles but ever since the Sudoku craze swept the nation in around 2005, I was introduced to various kinds of puzzles like Slitherlink and Picross. Picross and its variations like Pic Pic/Colour Cross have always been among my favourites as the reward of a hidden picture always felt like the icing on the cake to the logical satisfaction of finishing a puzzle.

Picross 3D takes that concept one step further, revealing a 3D object made of cubes that you gradually chip away. It received great reviews when it first came out back in 2009 and it was always something on my list to pick up but as is so often the case, it became hard to track down a short while after its release. Browsing pre-owned sections and even asking in stores would only lead to disappointment and confused looks. But I eventually set up alerts via Gamestracker.com and CheapAssGamer.com, so when it finally showed up on TheHut.com for just over £20 I finally snapped up a copy. It immediately replaced Puzzle Quest in my DS slot and hasn't left the device since.

There really is very little to quibble about with the game - it does perhaps have quite a steep learning curve, despite a very competent tutorial. I found myself struggling quite early on and wondering if I was missing some essential technique (though I think on occasion I was just forgetting how to deal with rows split into multiple groups). There are points where it can feel like you have to make a guess between two possible cubes but I know that there should always be a logical way of figuring it out.

That's why I normally prefer Picross games to remain silent when you make a mistake, so that you can't just guess your way through the puzzle. Here there are penalties for mistakes but after thinking about it I believe this was necessary given how you chip away cubes. If you realised that you'd made a mistake, how exactly would you go about filling them back in? The penalties also turn it into a completionist's dream, with stars and additional puzzles unlocked by completing puzzles perfectly. So often when I finish a Picross game I will tell myself that I will go back to improve my times but the desire to do so generally fades. Here, the additional stars for completing within a time limit gives you a tangible goal and also a sense of how well you are doing in comparison to the 'par' times.

It's also a game of startling size; while I can wade through most Picross games in a matter of weeks, here I am yet to graduate from the 'Easy' level puzzles, with at least two more levels remaining above that. The 'collections' that each individual puzzle is part of are a great motivator too, pacing their completion just right to keep you hooked and sometimes providing some much needed context to some of the more unfamiliar objects.

About the only other issue I can think of is that I would have liked to see a 'cross-section' view available on all three axis but that's a very minor issue. I would advise any DS owner, puzzle fan or not, to snap up a copy of this while it's currently readily available.

Looper (2012)

This was one of those films where I was keen to see it as soon as possible, scared that I might end up having bits of it spoiled otherwise. After seeing it I'm not sure it's really the kind of film where knowing the final twist or resolution would spoil the whole thing, though I will try to keep my thoughts here as spoiler free as possible. I'd say it's a great all round movie and that the journey through the film seems just as important as the end.

I think I did benefit from knowing very little about it going in though, which kind of felt like the reverse of Dredd, where it's trailer was so on the nose about what was in the film. Here the trailer didn't really give much away other than its basic premise and left me with the impression that it would be set in a time not that different to ours. Instead, it's near future setting portraying a strange crumbling society with a mixture of modern and futuristic elements made it immediately engaging.

Right from the start I was impressed by Joseph Gordon-Levitt's efforts at channelling Bruce Willis, in the rather measured way that he spoke and acted. Surprisingly I barely noticed the additional prosthetics and make up he had, which have been a stumbling block for others. Even knowing what Willis looked like in his youth, JGL's look still felt like a valid version of him so to speak. Willis too was on better form than I've seen in a long time, even if he gets a lot less screen time than I expected.

Another surprise to me was the film's sense of humour, when I was perhaps expecting something darker and more serious in tone. From the perfectly placed slapstick of someone being hit by an opening door to its almost fourth wall breaking jokey tone when dismissing the need to explain things. I initially thought that its method of sending a message to your future self was amusing but this gradually became quite horrific once you realised how far this was going to go.

This also set out the films own rules for time travel, with changes affecting your instantaneous situation and not taking into account how that would have affected your life up to that point. I think I've had enough arguments about the practicalities of time travel in my life, so while I might have quickly pondered if it's approach was possible, generally I was just happy they picked a method and stuck with it. The film kind of reinforces this point when JGL and Willis finally sit down for coffee, with his older self stating that debating the principles of time travel isn't really important.

I also loved how scenes which were revisited multiple times usually had a slight twist the second time around. Willis' escape from his former self, so familiar now from the trailers, had a great simplicity to it when shown as one take in real time. This also helped to keep things moving when repeated sections in time travel based films can sometimes make things drag.

Despite having some humour, the film does go to darker places as well, especially when it comes to the idea of killing off people who could become 'The Rainmaker' - the film's antagonist from Willis' point of view. Here you could say that there were some similarities to The Terminator but with the important distinction of our time traveller not being an unfeeling robot. The film makes it clear that Willis' actions have an impact on him and I wasn't sure if he is supposed to experience a change in his memories after killing someone, hinting that he is changing his life for the better and forcing him onwards in the attempt to achieve his goal.

When it came to the end, it may have seemed slightly predictable but I felt it was a strong finish and you could tell what the film was trying to say. While Willis initially accuses JGL of being selfish, by the end you can tell that Willis has become the more selfish of the two, blindly trying to restore his life with no care for the consequences. While his younger self could perhaps have resolved the situation differently (I'm trying to stop calling things that a character could have done plotholes), the important thing was that he was now prepared to make sacrifices for others, something Willis learnt much later in life. You could perhaps look at both of them as representing the two sides of the nature versus nurture argument, asking whether the Rainmaker was destined to exist or if his path could be changed.

I'm always unsure of whether to read other reviews before writing my own, in case they influence my point of view too much. For the most part I've avoided anything about this and I'm now quite looking forward to delving into others impressions to see what I didn't pick up on. Even things like its focus on mother and father figures wasn't something immediately obvious to me, which I think shows that it will have a lot of value in repeated viewings. But like Inception, it feels to me that understanding these extra themes isn't mandatory or vital, with your first viewing still giving you enough to appreciate it as a whole and understand its basic premise.

No Love Deep Web (2012)

This review was also posted on ArtFist.org

I sometimes wonder whether the music I like can be affected by the knowledge that others won't like it. I don't think it's deliberate but I can sometimes listen to something and find myself thinking "Oh so-and-so would hate this" and get a rather juvenile sense of enjoyment out of that fact - without actually subjecting said person to the music. And I can probably think of a lot of people who wouldn't like Death Grips.

I started writing something about them a while ago but with the release of their newest album No Love Deep Web via Soundcloud I thought it was time to finish it. While strictly described as a hip-hop group their musical influences come from all over the place, mashed together with an almost Punk aesthetic that suggests a complete lack respect for the rules of music. Their first album/mixtape Exmilitary shows its punk influences quite clearly with samples from Bad Brains, Janes Addiction and the Beastie Boys but also includes more diverse choices like David Bowie and the Pet Shop Boys. Their official debut The Money Store is much more electronic, while still retaining their signature chaotic production.

Tying it all together is MC Ride, who is hard to describe in terms of other artists, perhaps on occasion sounding like Wu-Tang Clan's RZA at his most furious. To someone who dislikes hip-hop I could imagine him seeming like the summing up of everything they think they hate about rappers. I feel confident in saying that there are technically better MCs out there but the simplicity and bluntness of his approach is part of the appeal to me. It all adds up to create very visceral music, where I don't have a clue what most of it's about but I find it very compelling at the same time. It does however put him in the unenviable position of being disliked by hip-hop purists and critics alike.

I don’t often get to spend much time just listening to music these days, so my first few listens to this new album have been during work, where I didn't feel it made that much of an impression on me. This might seem obvious but their previous albums have made it quite hard to do anything else at the same time. After a few more focused listens I think there are a few tracks that are a little more forgettable, or at least they haven't fully convinced me of their importance yet. It also perhaps follows the template of the last album (if you can call it that) and doesn't have as much impact as the new sound of each of their other records.

There's still a lot of great stuff here though, including the opening track Come up and get me. This takes its time setting the tone before any vocals come in and I find it quite strange that it manages to create a different feel each time it comes back to the same repeated sections with lots of filtering. Lil Boy starts off feeling like the kind of simplistic electro that I don't really appreciate but it builds on this to keep it interesting. I particularly like the synth lines that sound like they have digital errors from a dirty CD surface, perhaps the modern equivalent of deliberately adding vinyl crackles to create that period feel? This is something I thought again later during Lock your doors, which seemingly uses digital clipping to suggest that the music can barely be contained in its chosen medium.

Forming half of the album title, No Love is one of my early favourites. It starts with deep synthetic bass drums, which you expect to set the tone before a whole new level of insanity is layered over the top of it. I found myself unable to stop nodding my head to this one, the whole song feels like a sustained breakdown from a metal song. It just keeps coming back again feeling tougher when you think you've heard everything from it, something really enhanced by the addition of live drums as it goes on. I'm not sure if they're supposed to be related in any way but Deep Web comes much later on the album, with relentless bassy synth lines dominating the whole thing, punctuated by Ride's furious yells.

Weirdly enough, I did actually find a couple of songs amongst all this chaos which felt a bit more chilled out than those surrounding them. Black Dice alternates between a relaxed dreamy intro and darker sections with short sharp synth stabs and harsh vocals. Later on, Pop starts with dizzying synths and retro drum machine cowbells and rimshots, switching to these blissfully chilled out sections that remind me of The Future Sound of London. As the track continues they start to morph into a slightly more intimidating feel and on the whole I would say that this is one of the songs with the most progression on the album.

I'm not going to go into detail about the rest but I will at least say that while there are tracks that have kind of passed me by there are still other great tracks to discover, like the madcap cut up drums of World of Dogs. It's final song Artificial death in the west is a welcome change of pace, with the much slower tempo allowing for a more gradual creation of atmosphere, with bass lines that seemed reminiscent of a John Carpenter soundtrack. It's also the only song that seems to come to a gradual end, allowing the album to wind down slightly after so many songs with rather abrupt endings.

Overall I think it's a solid album but it has perhaps had less of an impact on me than their others, not really having a stand out "what the hell am I listening to?" moment that seemed to define them for me. This was probably inevitable though as they start to get into a groove for the kind of sound they want for the group. In a way I feel like I could reach the end of my love affair with them here or start to get into them even more. To be fair I've barely even scratched the surface of their lyrical content (I've always been a 'music first' kind of person) but I've still found their other work pretty compelling while letting the vocals just become part of the music as a whole. So who knows where this album will end up in my estimation a little while down the road.

Doctor Who: The Angels Take Manhattan (2012)

My first piece of disappointment with this episode came even before the title sequence. I'm going to launch straight into spoilers but before the show aired I heard rumour that a certain New York landmark would be revealed as an angel. This sounded like a great idea, with the fact that it had never moved before being covered up by the fact that under normal circumstances there would always be at least one person watching it. Others suggested that perhaps some kind of city wide blackout would finally allow it the chance to move, which the episode would slowly lead up to (or alternatively it would never actually move, remaining a disturbing threat). But in the end there was no clever reasoning, no justification for the entire city missing the Statue of Liberty taking a stroll up the Hudson river, showing that not much thought had been put into it past the original idea. The final words of the opening's Private Detective really sum the whole thing up - "You gotta be kiddin' me!"

While this particular aspect went against everything we already knew about the Weeping Angels (and seemingly served no real purpose), the Angels still worked well for most of the episode. The last episode to feature them seemed to abandon their penchant for sending people back in time so it was nice to see this idea revisited, with the additional caveat that they didn't always have to send people back in time. Mostly they lived up to their usual creepy nature - I could watch almost any situation you could think of where keeping them in view is somehow difficult and find it terrifying. Rory's ordeal with a packet of matches was especially good, even if it should probably have lasted a much shorter time (possibly down to the baby angels seemingly mischievous nature).

How Rory ended up in this situation was a little confusing though, with River Song's sudden appearance in 1938 seeming rather inexplicable. She also initially felt more like her brainwashed incarnation, either being ignorant of Rory's fate or deliberately putting him in danger for no particular reason. You could say that she was just playing up to her pulp novel role but at this point she had no idea she was going to be the star of the story she would write later. It could also perhaps be put down to her inquisitive nature, which lead to her finding herself in the clutches of a chained and weakened Angel.

Bringing the group back together again required a rather ingenious trip to ancient China, which like some of the short trips in the last episode I liked its rather throwaway nature given how convoluted a plan it was. This seemed to be the last great plan the Doctor had this episode though, afterwards seeming almost paralysed by the knowledge of how future events must play out. His joy followed by disappointment at River's method of escape from the Angel was quite believable. I'm not sure I always like the strict view the show takes about pre-ordained events but it perhaps leads to a more consistent universe than one where changing the future constantly splits us into a whole new parallel universe.

However the events that follow see Amy and Rory determined to change his fate, as the Angels plan to trap victims in an endless time loop to feed off their potential life energy. Rory witnesses his future self dying, with his aged counterpart surviving just long enough to see Amy again after years alone (a nice reversal of 'The Girl Who Waited' I thought). In a way I was kind of surprised that this section was still effective given the amount of times that Rory has seemingly been killed off in the past. Needing to create a paradox to break the Angel's cycle, the only way out seems to be for Rory to take his own life, creating the impossible situation of him dying twice. With no guarantee that this plan will work or that they will survive it, Amy eventually decides to take the leap off the building with him, as the Doctor and River look on.

As it turns out they do survive the creation of this paradox but any happiness is short lived, as a surviving Angel zaps Rory back in time, literally setting his death in New York in stone. The smug smile on the Angel's face suggested to me that it knew it would gain a second victim, with Amy unable to leave Rory to die alone, choosing instead to be touched by the Angel and be re-united. I felt that this was always the way Amy and Rory needed to step out of the show, that as long as they were together they could live without the Doctor but sadly I think its implementation left an awful lot of plotholes in its wake. The dialogue surrounding this felt very rushed and confusing, personally I thought that the Doctor meant he could never visit New York again in any time - before taking a jog through Central Park to retrieve his last book page. And there's probably any number of alternate ways that Amy and Rory could have met up with the Doctor, even if he couldn't make it back to New York circa 1938. It has to be said that I didn't immediately think of them seeking him out again though, instead having the opinion that they might take this opportunity to go on and live a relatively normal life.

The question is whether it needed to give that false hope of them surviving the paradox, especially when it had already made the same point earlier about the impossibility of changing your fate once it is known. I think some simple changes could have resulted in an ending that essentially said the same thing but would feel less jarring. Perhaps just have the Doctor reappear in the graveyard after the paradox, with the gravestone now listing Amy and Rory's names together. It's strange that so many of this seasons episodes have been criticized for resolving too quickly, when this one perhaps didn't need this extra twist. I think it would have been better to spend more time on the Doctor's grief and also give a glimpse of Amy and Rory's life in the past, just to highlight that it was more of a bitter-sweet ending to their story. In fact, someone has written an excellent obituary imagining the rest of their story, which may not be canonical but certainly seemed fitting to me.

In the end it seems slightly strange that this episode was such a standalone one. Watching the previous episodes many people picked up on aspects that seemed important but did not have any relevance on the Pond's final exit. For me, the extreme fear the Doctor showed in previous episodes didn't fit right and I'm left wondering if perhaps this season's episodes were not in order from the Doctor's viewpoint. This could actually tie together with him perhaps cheating time and fitting in one more adventure with Amy and Rory - while also thinking about starting up a gang. That's not to say that I think we will see Amy and Rory again, their exit seemed very final and should probably remain that way. If anything it's perhaps been a shame that there wasn't more for them to do this season, feeling more and more like they were being dragged back in to the Doctor's world, when being set up with a nice house and a Jaguar E-Type already felt like a rather natural end to their story last season.

Doctor Who: The Power of Three (2012)

Doctor Who is so often about balancing character issues with the exploration of its sci-fi concepts, while at the same time keeping things moving to create a sense of purpose. In this episode it felt that the danger was so slight and its resolution so simple, that it almost wasn't worth bothering. The plot involved strange black cubes suddenly appearing all over the earth, which seemed to do nothing for an entire year before finally bursting into life. A mysterious villain was shown to be behind it but as soon as their expository dialogue was over and done with, the problem was solved in about 5 seconds flat.

Still, this episode wasn't really about the threat to the earth, the premise was more about spending some time looking at the daily lives of the Doctor's companions. I felt it took a bold step in stating that Amy and Rory have been involved with the Doctor for ten years from their point of view (possibly to fulfil a condition from a previous episode where they see their future selves still together ten years in the future). I enjoyed the simple realities of coming back to a fridge full of yoghurt after the Tardis misses its landing by a couple of months. This is something that has been covered before right back when the show was first rebooted but I enjoyed the relative mundanity of the approach here. This set the scene for Amy and Rory reaching a point where they had to decide which life to choose.

The Doctor's frustration at such a non-immediate threat provided lots of amusement and I liked the fact that he did just pop out of the episode while nothing was happening. When Amy confronted him later about running away, his assertion that he was instead running to see things before the fade away seemed like a great summary of the show as a whole. Ever since reading about the concept of 'The Curse of the Traveller' on reddit I keep coming back to applying this to the Doctor and I couldn't help but feel there is also perhaps a mistaken compulsion to his endless travels, that he will never be totally satisfied.

Amy and Rory are also drawn into a brief time travelling distraction for a few weeks/one night. Given that one of their stops appeared to involve Henry VIII, it seemed likely this was the event mentioned last week about Rory leaving his phone charger behind. I'm not sure if the question of whether this series is in chronological order is important (and just what chronological order would be for multiple time travellers) but it gives the whole thing more of a 'Tales from the Tardis' kind of feel, knowing that this series could be jumping around in time.

I've already seen plenty of mixed opinions on this episode, from those who loved the return of U.N.I.T. to those comparing it to the worst excesses of the Russell T. Davies era. Sadly for me I think that its sudden resolution undid any good work built up before that point, rather than being something I could brush aside. It felt more like an episode of Lost, where so many plot elements were abandoned in a manner that suggested they would never be heard of again. Which is a shame as it could have been brave and run with some of the bigger ramifications but instead went with pushing the reset button. I actually found myself thinking about the consequences of the earth suddenly losing a third of its population and the storylines it could generate, so when this was quickly undone it felt like a lack of confidence in their ideas - especially when the final solution should have at least left the survivors with severe brain damage!

This new and terrible enemy really fell down under closer inspection too, leaving seemingly endless plotholes. Why would someone whose powers seemingly surpassed the Doctor's need to create such a bizarre scheme to destroy the human race? Who were the duck faced guys? Why were they kidnapping people? And did the Doctor leave all of the remaining people to die on that ship? Given the huge danger this race would still possess it seemed bizarre to treat them as if they would never be seen again. I couldn't help but think of the clumsy reasoning behind Mass Effect's Reapers and it felt a little like someone wanted to use that idea but forgot that there are much worse threats in the Who universe than the human race.

When it came to the end of the episode, I was a little surprised by Amy and Rory's final decision to continue their travels with the Doctor. Given that it spent most of the episode hinting at the opposite, I'm not sure I totally bought their turnaround - especially given their earlier realisation that it felt good to make plans they intended to keep (while drinking a cup of tea in bed no less, a lovely little touch of grown up married bliss). It also suggests that they are more likely to meet a tragic end, rather than make the decision to leave - if this incarnation of the Doctor will always seek out Amy then it seems logical that one of them has to leave permanently to break their connection. Next weeks episode is already prompting a lot of speculation as to how their journey will end, here's hoping that Amy and Rory get a fitting send off at least.

Dredd (2012)

This review was also posted on ArtFist.org

When I found this film a little disappointing, I felt very alone in my opinion - especially given how much I wanted to love it beforehand. All around me critics and fans were praising it almost universally, with only a few negative knee-jerk reaction reviews that didn't feel like they matched my opinion either. In writing a review of it, I felt like I owed it to the film to really think about why it didn't work for me and to be clear that I didn't think it was a bad film either.

My first thought was to look at the impact of its initial trailer, which created a fantastic atmosphere, perfectly mixing in Skream's remix of Bulletproof. It also encapsulated the whole plot pretty well and perhaps left you with the feeling that there would be few surprises. I'd also watched pretty much every preview clip available, including some of the gory slo-mo scenes, which may have ended up having less impact. One thing that actually seemed to be missing in the cinema was how the blood effects were so over the top that they managed to extend right out of the film frame (highlighted in this preview clip). The final film is also perhaps different in tone than the trailer suggests, with some of the rather clichéd exchanges highlighted in the trailer coming off much better in the final cut. There was also one reasonably big surprise remaining, which I was glad hadn't been spoiled by anything.

Another consideration is just how much I was anticipating the film. For a long time it held a 100% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, only toppled from this position when the Daily Mail decided to wade into the argument. All this lead me to expect something truly spectacular, when its modest budget should perhaps have suggested that it would be more grounded. That's not to say that its low budget affects its execution much, more perhaps the scope of it seeming quite limited. It was also very slow and methodical in places, being less about non-stop action and imaginative set pieces and more showing the Judges taking the best tactical approach possible to deal with threats. I think that this was a totally valid choice and highlights how rigidly they would have been trained but I could certainly see a lot of people drawn in by its rave reviews being disappointed by this approach.

I have to mention the 3D as well and I wasn't impressed that I had no choice but to see it in this format. While some of the long shots gave a great sense of scale and the slow motion looked amazing, the rest seemed like a mess to me. I doubt it was the film at fault but there was lots of ghosting, parts that looked the wrong depth, reflections on my lenses and of course the discomfort of the cheap plastic glasses gradually pressing into my nose. For this film in particular I would have loved for it to have been able to use 3D only in those big scenes where it worked, with the more fast paced scenes being 2D. I've heard of a few people refusing to watch it in the cinema at all though, which seems a bit extreme and I'm glad I put up with the mild discomfort to show my support for it.

I'll be honest and say that my own experience of the comic book character is pretty limited, which is something that I'd like to rectify but is another possible reason why I felt underwhelmed by it. Other than reading the odd issue in the distant past and hours lost browsing wikipedia articles, the only book I own is a collection of stories leading up to Necropolis, which I mainly bought in the mistaken assumption that it would feature Judge Death. It's actually been interesting to go back and read it again, as I found some similarities between it and the film. A lot of it focuses on Dredd evaluating a different rookie Judge and even features a fight scene while the rookie is in handcuffs. It also mirrors the ending of the film, with Dredd failing his rookie in the book without any concrete reasoning, while Anderson gets a pass in this film despite actions that could have been an instant failure.

I think overall I was just expecting a little more from it on many levels. It's a rather shallow film in terms of any political subtext to it, when I was perhaps expecting something more satirical along the lines of Robocop or Starship Troopers. Its complete and utter committal to an unquestioning portrayal of the Judges is one of its strengths but it also feels like it has little to say on the issue and has become a sticking point for those writing negative reviews. The irony of a right wing paper complaining about 'a fascist dream of a policeman' was certainly not lost on me, seemingly showing a staggering lack of self-awareness. I definitely think that it could have stood to say a little more, though having Dredd be much more human at this early stage may have made the whole thing fall down. Giving only the merest crack in his armour to show he's still a human being is just enough to suggest it could be explored more in future movies.

It was also surprised by how deranged Lena Headey's gang leader Ma-Ma appeared on film, which was strange when there is a prequel comic that shows her in a... well not exactly a more positive light but you certainly get a better idea of how she reached this point. But the film is what matters and I think it missed an opportunity in portraying her as an insane sadist, which just made her seem unrealistic. I would have liked to have seen her as more of a desperate figure, going to any lengths to protect the empire she'd scraped together - at least giving some impression of why she'd become so extreme. It could have also focussed more on the cyclical nature of violence and how the Judges can never bring an end to it. The harshness of the Judge system should sometimes seem unfair and not just make the audience feel it was justified in removing a truly evil villain. I would say that on the whole the comics were aiming to expose just how flawed the kind of justice some people want is. The ending might have felt more meaningful when Anderson lets one of the gang go because she feels he is a victim, if we had also seen Ma-Ma as just another victim in a sense.

Despite all of this, I still think it's a great accomplishment and it feels like the best version of Dredd we are ever likely to see on screen. Details like the body armour feel totally right in the final product, despite plenty of people, myself included thinking that the proportions looked a little off to begin with. The distinctive design is very pragmatic and I feel like that's a good way of describing the film as a whole, which perhaps doesn't quite feel like it could encompass some of the weirdness found in the comics. Even though the writer of the film has talked about potential sequels eventually leading to aspects like the Dark Judges, I'm not sure I could see the two fitting together. It's this that makes it difficult to decide whether this is best served remaining as a standalone film or if it can still be a jumping off point for more films. There's certainly a lot more to draw from without bringing in more fantastical elements, which has me interested in reading some more early Judge Dredd stories to get a feel for what might inspire them. Hopefully I can watch it again at some point in the future, with less pressure or expectations on it and appreciate it for the bold, strong film it is.

Doctor Who: A Town Called Mercy (2012)

I'm probably not the world's biggest western fan and other than Firefly and 'Gunmen of the Apocalypse' from Red Dwarf, I can't think of many times that Sci-Fi and Westerns have mixed well. From the glimpses given at the end of the last episode, it looked more like the latter - especially with the Gunslinger looking somewhat like Kryten. Overall I think I was looking forward to this episode least out of the three so far, so while it may have surpassed my expectations I'm not sure how good it was overall.

It started off well though, with the Doctor happily throwing himself into the wild west with that goofy charm we love him for. I couldn't help but think of Drive to begin with and half expected him to come out with 'Toothpicks are cool'. I enjoyed the line about 'Keep Out' signs being more of a suggestion and the slightly cheesy request for 'Tea, the hard stuff', which just brings you back to its innate Britishness, no matter the American focus here.

This episode seemed to highlight two running themes of this series, the first being people looking for 'a doctor' not 'the Doctor'. I'm not sure if there is more to this or if it is just trying to be clear that the universe at large has now pretty much forgotten him. The other seems to be the Doctor's growing lack of mercy and while I didn't have a huge problem with it last week, there is a big difference between not pulling someone out of a spaceship seconds before it's destroyed and holding someone at gunpoint.

Other than Batman I can't think of many other heroes more averse to guns, meaning I can only think of another couple of times he's even held one in the new series. The first was Chris Eccleston picking up some kind of alien ray gun to take down a Dalek (but even then he found he couldn't go through with it). The other is Matt Smith again, where he used a gun to destroy a gravity globe in 'The Time of Angels', which was enough to shock a lot of fans when it was shown out of context in trailers.

I'm not sure whether there is something building here related to the first episode or if Amy's assertion that he has just been alone too long is correct. It also felt to me like someone wanted to shoehorn in the Doctor holding a revolver for a Western episode, without considering whether it felt right. I was much more impressed by the stand-off against the townspeople later, where despite wearing a gun belt the issue was resolved with words instead of bullets.

I've largely been trying to write these updates based on my immediate thoughts but having some time to reflect on this it did seem rather weak on the whole. The final showdown between the Doctor and the Gunslinger looked great but what followed was pretty silly and made some dangerous assumptions about how the Gunslinger would react. You could say that none of the episodes so far have had a really strong ending with the Doctor creating an ingenious solution but here I think it was exacerbated by there not being much going on for large portions of it. I'd wager that if I hadn't decided to write about each new episode that this one wouldn't have remained on my mind for long, even if I still enjoyed it at the time.

Old Creative Writing - Out of Control

Another piece from my school days, a few years on from the last one and I think it formed part of my GCSE coursework. It's titled Out of Control and again it's presented with original spelling mistakes and teachers comments/corrections in red...

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It's a well-known fact that when someone has a good idea someone else will eventually copy it. Take the Roboticops of 2147 for example.

opening has impact

In January of 2147 the police of America finally decided that putting officers on the beat was now too dangerous. Instead, they created the Roboticops programmed to stop crimes, protect innocent people and generally keep the peace.

↓ effective sentencing

People laughed at them first, claiming that they looked like floating dustbins; the laughter stopped abruptly however when they found out how the Roboticops kept the peace. Anyone seen committing a crime was shot. Almost immediately after the Roboticops came into service people complained that people who had a criminal record were getting away with the punishment so they re-called all of them and their programming was changed to include anyone with a criminal record. A lot of people died in those first few weeks but people started to accept them and any programming bugs were reasonably quickly ironed out. Soon the police force was almost completely robotic which also got rid of the problem of officers being bribed.

In the February of the same year cyborgs started to commit crimes just about the same time that lots of homeless people began to disappear. The homeless people were the least of the police's problems as they were having a tough time stopping any of these cyborgs and those that they did manage to stop seemed to automatically self destruct. Organised crime was now robotic.

Total Recall (2012)

This review was also posted on ArtFist.org

I'm not sure if it's significant that my wife and I didn't discuss this film at all when we walked out of the cinema. She was very tired and it was a reasonably late showing for us but we would normally have at least asked each other whether we liked it. That initial reaction you have walking out of a cinema is often the most honest, no matter how long you mull things over later but I think if I had been asked at the time I would have had difficulty responding.

I knew I was always going to have trouble with this film being a fan of the original, but I can't honestly say that it's turned out horribly. The design of this messed-up future earth was astonishing and managed to induce that slight shudder of vertigo on numerous occasions. As implausible as it may be to have a lift that can travel through the core of the Earth in around 17 minutes (requiring an average speed of around 28,000 miles per hour), it was executed very well. Weirdly it felt like Mass Effect was one of its biggest design influences, especially when it came to its armoured robots. I felt that it was pretty lazy having no British or Australian accents given they were supposed to be the main world powers but I can let that slide too. I was just left feeling that it was a bit of a waste to go to all of this effort and then tell the exact same story as the original, I would much rather have seen something else set in that same world.

I also can't deny that there were some good action sequences in this, which varied between the unbelievable and more grounded, well thought out sequences that took note of the surroundings and allowed the viewer to follow them through. For example I liked Kate Beckinsale's slide towards a descending lift in the hope of making it through the door, only to miss it but still land in the lift due to the top previously being ripped off. In a sense both the original and this are good examples of a typical action blockbuster of their day but no matter how well this version does in some areas, the original is just so much more interesting because of two areas in particular that this film just doesn't seem to get.

Firstly, it misses out on any kind of proof that Hauser/Quaid (Colin Farrell) was originally a bad guy. The video message left to himself by Arnie in the original made it very clear that his old self was very different. Without something like this I think it detracts from the idea of how we define our own identity and whether our past has any bearing on what we do in the future. Here Brian Cranston's Cohagen might just as well have been lying to Quaid to mess with him, there was no real confirmation that there was any point to it.

I felt that without this to focus on, you start to see more plotholes creep in - why did they go to this much trouble? Why didn't they just capture an actual resistance fighter and implant the fake kill switch information in his head? And just how did doing this help them track him down again once he went to the resistance? Why were they annoyed he'd gone to Rekall and started this whole process when that was what they wanted to happen anyway? All criticisms that could be levelled at the original film too but they don't seem to stand out as much and can also be explained if you take a particular view of the original...

That being the idea that it was actually all in his head and he never made it out of Rekall. Here I felt there was no real ambiguity over whether it was in his head or not, other than some lazy tacked on echoed phrases and a wistful look at a Rekall sign at the end. By opening with a very clear dream as a memory, it really feels like there is no doubt that these are real repressed memories in this version. There are also few cuts in the Rekall sequence that could make the audience believe they have missed something, it seemed very clear to me that the Rekall team had not yet done anything to affect his mind at all.

The genius of the original version is that every single action ties into the idea that it's all in his head. Arnies dreams for example are not of former events but a nightmare about dying from a lack of oxygen (in a very unrealistic manner). He has never actually experienced this and that dream goes on to form the climax of the film. Discovering this theory makes watching the original again a very rewarding experience but here there is not really anything clever that would be enhanced by a repeat viewing.

All of this added up to a film that I felt like I'd totally checked out from by the end. When Quaid escapes from the guards and manages to land on 'The Fall' unopposed I should have been ranting about its lack of logic but I just couldn't force myself to care. Having a final fist fight with Cohagen at the end also felt really out of place as he had done nothing to suggest he could even last 30 seconds against Quaid throughout the rest of the film. When this film was first announced sources suggested that it was going to be a re-interpretation of the original Philip K. Dick short story 'We can remember it for you wholesale'. As implausible as that sounds if you've read that very short, jokey story, it would still have been preferable to see something crazy and different than the bland retread we ended up with.

Doctor Who: Dinosaurs on a Spaceship (2012)

With a title like that, there's really no one who could cry spoilers over a vague description of this episode. Its straight forward title perhaps suggested that this was going to be a less complicated episode on the whole, with that kind of fanboy pleasing charm of combining two favourite nerdy interests and seeing what happens. It added a little more to the mix by beginning with the Doctor rounding up a 'gang' of followers to assist, including Rory's dad Brian played by Mark Williams of The Fast Show. Queen Nefertiti and big-game hunter John Riddell also joined the group, adding some welcome variety to his companions origins.

Just why there are dinosaurs on this spaceship is gradually revealed and I found it a rather satisfactorily logical reason, despite the over the top premise. Though while I initially thought that the ships creators would be the 'one species' that was not acclimatising to life aboard, the true reason for their disappearance was a little simpler than that. This was quite shocking in a way and made the focus of the episode sharply clear - a genuinely evil villain in the form of a black market trader named Solomon.

I wasn't exactly expecting it to go this way, with Mitchell and Webb showing up to voice a couple of comedic robots that felt like a mixture of something from the pages of 2000AD and an english version of the squabbling bots from Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen... okay, not sounding like the best of references but they generally worked for me. What initially appeared to be yet another sinister character aware of the Doctor amusingly turns out to just be someone looking for any doctor - but the tone immediately shifts as he shows his readiness to cause harm to others to get what he wants - which probably seals his fate from the get go.

There was no misunderstood enemy here or someone doing the wrong thing for noble reasons, just someone out to make a living any way they could. In a way this felt quite refreshing and he of course also provided the moment most likely to upset children this episode. That's not to say that the whole thing was very dark, on the whole it was a lot of fun as the title kind of suggests. The Doctor spent most of his time with Rory and his Dad, leaving Amy with Nefertiti and Riddell, who had some great lines together. Amy clearly being a fan of Nefertiti and bluffing "Yeah, I'm a Queen", while dismissing Riddell as someone she'd never heard of because "maybe people who go around killing defenceless animals don't go down in history".

They also all had a part to play at the end of the episode, which isn't always easy. Amy teams up with Riddell to hold off a horde of feathered Raptors, showing no qualms about taking them down once they find some tranquillisers. While Rory and his dad end up piloting the spaceship in tandem as it required two users of the same gene pool. I actually quite enjoyed how it ended, making a clear statement that here was the Doctor on unforgiving form. I wasn't really a fan of David Tennant's extreme pacifism while Russell T Davies was in charge, which lead to so many episodes requiring a peaceful solution, so it was great to see immediate justice dealt to Solomon here.

I've seen people suggesting it wasn't really like the Doctor to leave him to his fate but I think there have been plenty of past examples of him being less merciful. You could even look at how he happily blew up a room full of Daleks in the last episode and you have to ask is there really any difference to the Doctor between a human who destroyed an entire race for profit and a race of beings engineered to destroy every race in the universe? He may look human but I think it's important to remember that he's not and doesn't tend to take sides based on species so why should he care whether someone is human or alien if they are completely unredeemable?

On the whole it was quite a simple episode but that wasn't necessarily a bad thing, with the only wider issue being the Doctor's concern over Amy and Rory's future. I'm beginning to wonder why he is so apprehensive about losing Amy and Rory, whether he has some kind of insight as to how they will meet their end or if it's just fear of losing more friends. The episode's temporary companions also got a brief conclusion to their stories, with Riddell and Nefertiti ending up together and Brian starting a tour of the world, which reminded me of Amelie. I was actually slightly disappointed that they couldn't salvage the Mitchell and Webb bots, as it would have been nice to see them re-purposed or re-programmed for future use.

English Literature and creative writing

When I was younger, I used to quite enjoy writing stories at school. It wasn't something that came up particularly often though and as time went on I found that English moved further and further away from being one of my favourite subjects. As I moved through secondary school and 'English' became 'English Literature', it felt like there was less of a creative focus and I can hardly think of any pieces of literature we covered that really grabbed me. Even if some of them were legitimate classics, I think the way we were taught to analyse them could probably destroy anyone's interest in them. Books would be picked apart in mind numbing detail, full of analysis like "the blue curtains represent the depressed mood of this character" when it hardly seemed likely to have crossed the writers mind in the first place. Most of the time I didn't really feel like I was writing what I thought of the literature, just parroting the teachers opinions.

What I would have liked to learn more about are things like the fundamentals of writing stories, character motivations etc. which I feel like I've only really picked up pieces of via some unlikely internet sources. It seems pretty funny that I've been most inspired recently by a fictional perverted old man and a 10 foot tall green rage monster... I didn't get the option of taking a subject like Media Studies or something similar when I was at school but I think that would be a subject I would have really appreciated. Hearing from a friend who now teaches and had the freedom to base work around aspects of Attack the Block for example - I would love to cover something like that and I'm sure it appeals to a lot of kids too. Though no matter what the subject, I'm sure the way a teacher approaches it is just as important.

So when I recently had to sort through a huge amount of my old school work (strangely those folders and folders full of Maths and Physics notes didn't seem so important anymore), I was surprised by how little English work I'd kept. I'm not even sure what this short story was - it doesn't have a name, just a heading of "Task 5C" and I think it's the earliest bit of creative writing I have, being from when I must have been about 13 or so. It's presented below as originally written, with all original spelling mistakes intact and teachers comments in red...

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"Thats another dead one." said the young assistant "Perhaps we're doing something wrong?"
"Maybe," said the older scientist. "But we've got more than enough of these stupid mice and rats to find the right formula. Once we've found it we can test in on something bigger like the dogs and cats. We will make millions from doing this my boy, I promise you!"

Good start

The members of A.L.F. crouded into the room. There was about thirty of them and they met once a week to discuss important issues. The leader Frank Adams called everyone around the table and counted how many where there.
"Has anyone seen Mark Mc. Nabb?" enquired Frank without much hope of an answer. Mc. Nabb was always late. He was the rebel in the group but a lot of people liked him which annoyed Frank greatly.
He snapped back to the present when he heard someone thumping loudly on the outside door. He went to open it. As he slowly opened it to see who it was he was greeted by a familiar voice.
"Let me in you fool! Its freezing out here!" It was Mc. Nabb. "You're late again Mc. Nabb!" shouted Frank "And don't call me a fool!"
"Ach, who cares if Im late and if you're not a fool you're an idiot."
Mc. Nabb walked casualy to his seat leaving Frank fuming mad at the door. He tried to calm down and walked slowly back to his seat.
"Okay." said Frank "Has anyone got anything important they want to say?"
One hand was cautiously raised. "Ah Graham! What have you got to say?"
A small man with glasses stood up and looked nevously around him before starting to speak.
"Well you know the laboratory we got shut down because it was testing on animals?"
"Hmm." remarked Frank
"Well its still being used but only at night."
"What!!" came Mc Nabbs voice from the other side of the room.
"This is terrible! We have to tell the police!" cried Frank "Ach, Ya wimp!" Shouted Mc Nabb "Don't go the police, we can trash the place ourselves."
"Don't be such an Idiot!!"
"Eh? What ye sayn?" Mc Nabbs Scottish accent showed through more when he got irritable.
"If you'd have thought at all you would have noticed that you are more likely to be arrested than the actual criminals!"
"Well we've gotta do somethin. We can't just leave em!"
"Okay then!! I'm going to the police!" Shouted Frank before storming out of the room, slamming the door behind him. The room was silent for a few seconds before Mc. Nabb spoke up.
"So who wants to come with me?"

A good idea, Matthew.

 Excellent use of conversation - in

 fact, there is too much of this

 in comparison to description.

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Looking back on that is in some ways slightly embarrassing (you have no idea how hard it is to not correct mistakes and tweak a few things) but at the same time feels like it was written by a completely different person. Someone who obviously had pretty strong feelings on animal testing. I still kind of like the detached attitude of the scientists in the opening - when I first picked this up again I thought it would make a good description of 'expendable' human subjects in some kind of lab test, I guess I hadn't got that dark yet.

It's also interesting that other than spelling, my biggest concerns are with cutting stuff out. Redundant sentences like "He went to open it" and extra words like "fuming mad", would be where I'd start culling. But I think school work tends to build up the importance of word count over being conservative with what you're trying to say. I read an article soon after I started writing again, which illustrated this idea very well - ruthlessly cutting down first drafts into the bare minimum of information required. This is something I'm still trying to apply to my own writing and it can be surprisingly difficult to let go of anything you've written sometimes. Of course there is a place for detailed descriptive prose but most of the time you are trying to create something that is easy for people to read and understand.

I did find some kind of plan for a whole story at the back of the exercise book this was written in. I'm not sure why it was cut short, whether the exercise was only to do so many pages or if I just ran out of steam. The group would go on to raid this lab and attempt to release the animals (though most were in too bad of a state to escape) and one of the activists (I assume Mc Nabb) ends up killing one of the scientists there. I didn't seem to have an idea for an ending or a larger point, so in a way I think it's better that it just became a short segment of a larger imagined story, with the last line hinting that people were obviously ready to follow Mc Nabb (not sure if I subconsciously nicked that last line from Van Damme in the Street Fighter movie).

I've always felt slightly apprehensive about writing fiction again and especially about sharing it with the world via the internet. But if I'm happy to share and critique the ramblings of my teenage self, how much worse could my current work be? Hopefully someday soon I'll feel like taking up the challenge of writing something other than criticism.

Doctor Who: Asylum of the Daleks (2012)

There's something that just feels right about Doctor Who returning in the autumn. Ever since the show was resurrected in 2005, it has usually begun a series run in March or April, with one off Christmas episodes bridging the gap over the winter. To me it's never really felt like a show I wanted to watch in the height of summer - it doesn't seem to suit being on while it's still light outside. So I was strangely anticipating it starting in September this year, knowing that I'd be able to sit down to watch it in at least vague twilight, preferably with a cup of tea and some humanoid shaped gelatin based sweets.

Still, I have always been happy to see new episodes of Doctor Who and going back to it's first rebooted season I thought it was all great at the time - though I've revised my opinion since then. One episode that still remains a high point of Chris Eccleston's tenure however was Dalek. After so many dodgy, clunky outings for the Doctor's most iconic foe, here was an episode that showed a single Dalek as a force to be reckoned with and more importantly showed the Doctor in fear of them. Though pretty much all of that goodwill was undone by the end of that series and now we find ourselves coming full circle again, with the Daleks just as much of a joke as they were beforehand.

So Asylum of the Daleks definitely takes a stab at rectifying some of this and I think it was pretty successful. Though it didn't have me hiding behind the sofa the Daleks were certainly threatening, with good reasoning for why they weren't always deadly. Notably it also showed the Doctor in fear of them again, which I think is important in selling them as a real danger. There were points where it created a brilliantly tense atmosphere, not unlike something from Alien and to be honest in one section I would rather that tension was kept up instead of diffusing it with comedy. Though I did like how that little joke was touched on again at the end.

The episode also worked well as a mini-reboot/retcon of the Daleks and I was happy to see the overly mythical status of the Doctor among the Daleks removed (though I'm still not sure about the final lines of the episode). It also introduced a rather disturbing new method of human enslavement, which was especially shocking for the time it was shown. I have to be honest, I wasn't expecting to see Zombie Daleks with eye stalks bursting out of their foreheads...

I hadn't caught all of the mini-episodes of Pond Life before watching this, so I was surprised by how it opened with Amy and Rory's relationship in tatters. On reflection I thought that this was quite a good opening though and after watching the remaining Pond Life episodes it made a lot of sense. I liked the idea that life goes on while the Doctor's away and that it's not always for the better. And that the Doctor's presence can then bring what's important into focus in a life or death situation when things could be left to slip away in mundane daily life.

I kind of wanted to touch on this after Anita Sarkeesian was heavily critical of Steven Moffat's 'disastrous' writing of female characters on Twitter. Perhaps Twitter is not the place for this kind of thing as it doesn't really allow you the ability to go into detail but the idea of Amy now being unable to have children sadly felt all too real to me. As I've learned over time, difficulty in having children is more common than you might think and can easily have an effect on a relationship. In this case having children wasn't really the critical issue anyway - as many people say the biggest problems in any relationship can come from a lack of communication. So in a way the Doctor forced them into a situation where they had to confront each other, rather than allow themselves to drift apart due to Amy's assumptions about Rory's feelings. To extrapolate from this scenario to some kind of awful series finale involving a miracle birth seemed to be overly reaching, though I will eat my words if it does come to pass.

I can't really finish this without mentioning Oswin played by Jenna-Louise Coleman, who at the time I couldn't quite remember whether she was to be a new companion. The knowledge that she will be makes it intriguing to wonder just how she will turn up again and whether she will remain as an intellectual match for the Doctor as she was in this episode. I wasn't sure whether this episode was suggesting that she was naturally a genius or if it was a by-product of her involvement with the Daleks but she seemed like she would hold her own either way and it will be nice to see a companion who isn't from present day Earth. I'm not sure if the Doctor will actively seek her out or whether it will be a case of cosmic convenience, which I think gives just the right amount of intrigue for now in a season supposedly focussing on one off episodes.

Ted (2012)

This review was also posted on ArtFist.org

I've struggled to finish reviews of any comedy films this year, so after seeing Ted I promised myself I would complete one for once. As a formerly huge fan of Family Guy this was a film I was both intrigued and apprehensive about - I wasn't totally sure what to expect from it but had a fair idea of what the humour would be like. I'd also not read a single review of it beforehand - not something I actively avoided so it seems a little weird that there has been relatively little coverage. I certainly enjoyed most of it at the time but some issues sprang to mind as I started to write about it.

Perhaps the best way to describe it as a whole is overindulgent. Despite a strong opening I really felt that it dragged for a while after that, spending too much time on the in depth situation of each character. Sadly I don't remember it being particularly funny either. It didn't really pick up for me until you see Ted in a suit, off to try and get his first job. There was also a section later on that seemed to exist purely to get a celebrity cameo in, which was neither funny to me or moving the plot forward in any meaningful way.

I find it funny that I can pick out large areas to cut when the film itself is just a shade longer than Brave, which felt like a very short, concise film to me. I personally wonder whether Seth MacFarlane had enough experience in telling a story of this length when most of his cartoons are self contained 30 minute episodes. While there have been a few Family Guy stories that span multiple episodes, Ted ends up feeling like everything and the kitchen sink was thrown at it to pad it out. But then that overindulgence has always been a hallmark of his cartoons too. I couldn't help but think back to Family Guy's ridiculously long chicken fight in one particular scene, which managed to go through the feeling that it was much longer than it probably should have been and still come out the other side being funny.

Like Family Guy I also felt that it had an over reliance on pop culture that was very specific to the US and didn't immediately amuse me if I didn't get the reference. Probably my main reason for moving away from watching Family Guy was the realisation that it was starting to rely too heavily on the 'random' cutaway gags and that these generally only made me laugh once out of surprise and didn't really work if you watched them again. You could say Ted took this even further with a random flashback among the character establishing sequences that I didn't find funny in the slightest.

And it makes me feel so old but I also feel like the overuse of the F-word in this was hardly ever funny. Restricted by what you could get away with on a TV network, Family Guy was always pushing against boundaries to see what they could get away with and even the occasional bleeped swear could seem shocking and humorous at the same time. Here it got old fast and I don't think it was just me, I can't recall hearing a single chuckle at an F-word just dropped into conversation but there was plenty of laughter in its more inventive parts. Perhaps I wasn't really there with the target audience since it had been out a while when I got to see it but to me the overuse definitely wore down the impact it could have had if it was used a little more sparingly.

I do feel like there's a good movie in there somewhere and I liked how it approached the idea that Ted could eventually become normal and forgotten about. But there were parts that seemed to hinder the story unfolding as if it was realistic by going so over the top and assuming that everyone is in on the joke. It all adds up to a mixed bag that leaves you feeling a bit unsatisfied. Perhaps I've often struggled to finish comedy reviews as I may have laughed along at the time but not really felt like the film went anywhere or had much to say. Here you question what had really changed about the characters situations by the end of the film but it's played as a happy ending, all problems solved, which just didn't convince me.

People will always say that humour is subjective but I think it can also seem temporary. Like Family Guys one off random gags with a short shelf life, you also had the problem here of seeing a lot of those in trailers. It can be difficult to remember specific funny parts later and even then if I was to try to list or explain jokes it would only lead to them not sounding funny at all. So while I can almost certainly recommend this to people who won't be offended by its humour, I would have just liked it to be a more focussed and consistent film on the whole.

The Increasing Irrelevance of High Street Retail

Arguments about pricing aside, it seems that the one remaining good feature that high street shops have is convenience. You can know all the cheapest websites in the world but when it comes to a Friday afternoon or a Saturday morning and you want something to play/watch for the weekend, then I'd wager most would absorb the extra few quid and walk into a shop to pick up what they want there and then. However it seems more and more often that I can't even achieve that on the high street...

Take the recent release of Darksiders 2, a sequel to a game that I'm still yet to play. With the hype surrounding its release I thought to myself that I'd finally look into trying the original. A search of every available game shop for a copy proved completely fruitless. I didn't even expect to find a new copy but thought I might get lucky in the pre-owned section but alas it wasn't to be. It just struck me as bizarre that I have become so complacent with this state of affairs that I'd pretty much taken a tour of the shops just to confirm my suspicions. Say what you will about high street DVD and book stores but they sure know that when you have an exciting new release, you make sure there are copies of previous and related works available for interested parties to get a few more easy sales.

However later that same day, I came up against a ridiculous inversion of this idea in HMV. I recently caught part of the second Iron Man and while it might not be the greatest film, I felt the urge to watch the whole thing again. Being the only recent Marvel film I didn't have on Blu-Ray there was also that OCD completionist aspect of wanting to fill a gap in my collection. Now while I might not expect to find every film ever made in HMV, I certainly expected them to always have something as well known and popular as Iron Man 2 in stock. But looking around I couldn't even find an empty section for it, which was true for the original Iron Man as well, with dividers jumping straight from Intolerable Cruelty to The Island.

This seemed a little bizarre so we asked the guy behind the counter when buying something else. Looking very apologetic he replied "yeah, they've recalled all of the Marvel films - apart from The Incredible Hulk and others that weren't in The Avengers. They're waiting for that to come out so they can sell them all together". I just chuckled and shook my head, so often it seems those on the front line are as much at odds with the management decisions as the public are. I'm guessing there may be more to it behind the scenes but it just seems so bizarre to negate the possibility of any sales right now to guarantee you won't run out of stock later.

Writing this up has reminded me that I still hadn't picked up either but even on a Friday I can use Amazon Prime to make sure I can get something for the weekend, making that trawl of the shops even more pointless with just a bit of forethought. Though while Iron Man 2 was easy to find it seems that Darksiders is much more illusive, out of stock in most of the places I would normally try. This suggests to me that there's a bigger issue with finding older games in general than just the High Street...