Zowie Trumps Rose

Source Code is Duncan Jones' 2nd film following on from his excellent debut, Moon, with another interesting, tidy but gripping slice of scifi. Jake Gyllenhaal stars as a US soldier who wakes up in a simulation of 8 mins on a train just about to explode and in a Groundhog Day stylee he must relive the time over and over till he can uncover the bomber and his next target. Despite the average performances this has plenty of pace and there's plenty here to keep you entertained and not consider the plot holes to the very end, almost. I'm sure this more mainstream offering will propel Jones into many future projects and I hope he can sustain the classic-y, 70's moderation he's brought to his first two films.

Mr Nice is the film bio of famed pot smuggler Howard Marks based on his own bestselling book of the same name. Rhys Ifans and assorted cast do a pleasant enough job as the burgeoning specialist grocers and it's an interesting enough tale with dalliances with the IRA, Afghanis and of course the usual Police/MI5 antics but it's pretty simple biopic fare in the end, quite surprising given Rose's interesting previous films anyways it's a cursory romp through Marks' Uni to Teacher to International Herbalist career with very little imagination expended on the telling of the tale. Watchable but not memorable.

Alien Brawling in Tokyo & LA

Gantz is a live action adaptation of a rather bonkers manga/anime about a bunch of peeps snatched at the moment of death to fight against aliens at the whim of one spherical Gantz, a cybernetic arms dealer cum ringmaster. Anyways it's one of the better anime to cinema ventures, certainly better than Mushashi and from what I can remember it follows quite closely the first 6 or so episodes. It's also blessed with a better than average teenage cast and a certain gusto when it comes to gorier side of alien vs human battling with plenty of headpopping, disemboweling and blood letting. Sure it's not the most sophisticated of scifi films and it's got a touch of Japanese strangeness (and cheese) to it but it's a action packed spin on the usual invasion story and I'll be keeping an eye out for the sequels.

While Japan might be able to thwart the usual Alien attack tropes Battle: Los Angeles doesn't even try and treads much more familiar ground with a semi-shaky-cam movie about the Military response to a massive, aggressive alien invasion of the US of A. Anyways Eckhart and co grimace and yell their way through the thinly drawn stereotypes as they spray the Invaders with bullets in a seemingly futile resistance with the usual dwindling numbers, but lo! our hero via a series of miraculous coincidences seems to save the day. The action is pretty good and it's a reasonable enough watch but ultimately this is as B-movie ish as Starship Troopers but lacks the social satire or tongue in cheek laughs. If it's a success I'd expect sequels.

Digital Diversions

Fatbag of Science

APOD have a sweet pic of the Kepler finds.

Waxahachie, could have been the location for a particle accelerator much bigger than the LHC and some nerds have been rooting around the abandoned remains of the project. Reddit.

Really nice job time lapsing some Aurora. Again from the APOD.



Weird vid of Earth geoid, the "shape" of our gravitational field. BoingBoing

Putting out fires with electricity? Guadinar

Ruskies make a space comeback with some lovely pics of the planet and our moon. Gizmodo.

Shitting Spider Trees! Pakistani spiders fleeing the flood are creating unforeseen consequences. Impactlab.

I can't really profess to understanding the whole dark matter oeuvre but apparently some brain circle jerking boffins reckon that dark matter reactions could make planets habitable from within. Knock yourself out at the New Scientist.

Awesome x-ray of some new stingray that someone's just discovered. Neatorama

Space-Time is an illusion - duh. DailyGalaxy

Mmmm Mercury orbital snap from Messenger.

Movie Mumblings

Neil Gaiman's fun, pulpy American Gods is heading for the big screen. Digitalspy.

Bryan Cranston from Breaking Bad is signed up as a villain in the Total Recall remake. Reddit.

World War Z might yet rise from the dead according to AintitCool.

Hollywood's clearly still sniffing the strong stuff with the news Jennifer Garner is going to play Miss Marple in a new version.

Batman will live beyond Nolan's 3rd adventure according to Warner Bros. Den of Geek.

Depp is reprising his impersonation of Hunter S in The Rum Diary.

Howard Stern's remake of 80's classic Porky's hits a legal snag. Moviefone.

Neil Marshall is penning a WW2/Alien invasion flick. Quiet Earth.

Two Tales of My City

Sylvan Chomet's The Illusionist is based on a undeveloped Tati project about an out of fashion magician who bumbles around on a search for gigs that takes him from London to the Western Isles and finally settling into Auld Reekie of the 1950's. The stunning watercoloured animations are peppered with little dialogue, mostly burblings, slapsticky humour and a big bucket of whimsy. Chomet's insistence on old school animation is admirable (though by account a quite frustrating experience for those involved) but regardless the overall look is lovely with a familliar wispy/misty light infusing our country and he expends plenty of effort making Edinburgh look rather splendid, with tonnes of archictercural detail and even the Crags get an appearance. Sadly it's gossamer thin and somehow I found some of it's charm gets worn away by the insistence on old fashioned laughs. A beautiful ode to the city but there's barely enough plot to fill it's 72 mins.

John Landis' take on the Burke and Hare story stars a bevy of familiars as well as a couple of half decent leads from Andy Serkis and Simon Pegg and with all the comedy chops involved it's surprising it just isn't that funny. Sure there's some nice comedic murderings and a few good lines along the way but it's laboured with a romantic subplot that sucks up way too much screen time and you need something with such a hackneyed tale as this. Landis focuses on the dark closes and dangerous steps that litter Edinburgh and I guess those are suitable spots for the homicidal bumblings but he lumped for all the most obvious locations. Anyways it's not a terrible film just a really average one.

Entrances & Exits

Enter the Void is a remarkable, deranged hallucination of a film by controversial director Gaspar Noe. The plot centers on a drug dealing 20 something who lives and dies in Tokyo and his post mortem wanderings around the lives of his friends. Gaspar has suffused the film with lurid neon colouring, strobes, demented transition's, CGi drugscapes and disorienting music that will literally blast your noggin in half and the POV meanderings, flashbacks and attempts at re-embodiment by Oscar's consciousness create a bizarrely spiritual atmosphere amid the filth and depravity of the Japanese underbelly. I wasn't a fan of Noe's previous films Irreversible & Seul Contre Tous mainly as the shocking content appeared to have such limited ambition but the darkness, sex, drug taking and violence here seem to be somehow warranted given the film's nature. Anyways it's a dazzling film I'll watch again - next time hopefully in the cinema.


Essential Killing stars Vincent Gallo and sees Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski reunited with Brit producer Jeremy Thomas (their first effort together the enigmatic The Shout is a classic 70's oddity, go see). Anyways Gallo plays an Taliban fighter who escapes during his rendition and attempts to evade recapture while trekking through the Russian countryside. While Gallo's performance is strong and it's filmed beautifully, the paper thin plot and spartan dialogue left me a little bored and the nods towards metaphysics and something deeper fall pretty flat. It shares a particularly odd scene with O Lucky Man, a much richer film odyssey which on reflection makes this seem little more than an experiment in chin stroking.

Paperback Perusalings

A Maggot by John Fowles is a stunning mystery novel set in the 17th century concerning the travails of a wayward son and his companions while on a peculiar Exmoor journey. The story is told through a series of Q & A's, real time narratives and newspaper clippings and for the first half of the novel the plot doesn't really develop much as the events are retold by each richly drawn traveller, it's beautifully written though it did take me a while to get used to the period vernacular. Around the halfway mark Fowles teasingly reveals a much greater ambition however and what appeared to be a simple historical mystery becomes an interesting examination of religiosity and our ever changing social mores spun from a superbly crafted reminiscence of an ambiguous, fortean, experience. It surpasses The Magus to become my new favourite Fowles novel I think but I won't say anymore in case I spoil someone else's pleasure as it's baffling central events are best discovered as the author intended. A fine example of literary speculative fiction.

Banvard's Folly is a nicely written collection of brief biographies of some unusual, failed geniuses that have slipped from history's focus. It's a nice selection of fascinating oddbods, fraudsters and barmy thinkers including Symmes and his search for his Hollow Earth entrance, Rene Blondlot's imaginary N-Rays, Ephraim Bull's Concord grape variety and of course John Banvard himself, a painter of truly ginormous canvasses. Paul Collins' sympathetic portraits of these 13 characters gives each tale an added poignancy and it's a lovely read for anyone interested in the forgotten and the foolish. If you do read n enjoy it you should give Mike Jay's Air Loom Gang or Foden's Mimi and Toutou Go Forth a go.