After The Dark Knight became one of the top summer movies of all time, and one of my personal favorites, everyone’s focus went to Christopher Nolan and what he would do next. The man has certainly developed his own style and Inception, his latest, just cements his position as the most interesting director working today. Here is a director that can make a smart, powerful and entertaining summer blockbuster without making the audience feel like they’re being led by the hand through the whole story, which is a rare thing.
Inception is all about the mind and the dreams therein. Leo DiCaprio plays a man whose speciality is to infiltrate people’s minds and extract whatever vital information that’s there, in this case the head of an energy corporation, a man plagued by the death of his father and their torturous relationship that they had; Leo and his other partners’s are trying to plant an idea into his mind so that he will dissolve his company, in so making their rival the only true power in the energy business. This isn’t easy and involves going into his mind and trying to influence him while fighting off his own mental defenses, portrayed as goons with guns.
It’s intelligent and very, very interesting and for all it’s clever, thought-provoking ideas it still manages to have plenty of action and some brilliant set-pieces, including a scene where a train rolls down the middle of a road without any tracks and the money-maker, where a whole city folds itself in half. I was a little disappointed that Nolan went the shaky-cam route with this rather than his steady camerawork of the Batman films. I prefer to see what’s going on in a scene without the editing going past so fast that you can barely tell what’s going on; it’s a modern cinema thing and the sooner they kill it the better movies will be. Despite the shaky-cam these scenes are amazing and just goes to show that CGI has come to such a level that it no longer looks like CGI: it looks real, and when you can imagine whatever you want and have it appear on-screen straight from memory, that is incredible.
Every member of the cast is excellent in this film with DiCaprio professionally keeping it rock solid as the lead. He’s an actor who can really deliver a movie single-handed and even though he’s just a part of an ensemble cast he is the standout.
It is the best movie of the summer so go see it then try to remember your dreams that night.

I downloaded this from the iBook store and read it on my iPhone, something that I didn’t think that I’d ever be able to do on such a relatively small screen, but I did and it was an excellent book, well-suited to the small screen. Tom Reynolds is the pseudonym of an inner London ambulance driver, a man who has written a blog about his daily life and the strange things that happen in said job. This book collects the blog entries into an agreeable collection. They each take just a few minutes to read and they’re perfect for those moments in the toilet where you just need something to read. It became quite addictive, where you just need to read one more–then just another…okay, maybe another and then that’s it. I spent quite a few hours just lying in bed (in the dark, which is really an advantage with a backlit screen like the iPhone’s) reading about all the strange occurences in this man’s job. It’s great fun and makes you learn about what these people actually do who work for the ambulance services and some of the crap that they have to put up with.
Both this book and it’s sequel, which I’m still to read, are available for free on the amazon kindle and the iBook store so check it out.

I think Predator has always been in the shadow of the Alien Franchise, especially with the Versus movies where you know that Alien is always the better of the two in terms of actual films. You can’t argue with the greatness of the first two Alien movies–even if the last two are just so-so–but Predator was good, very good even, but that’s it. Predator 2 certainly wasn’t up to much with Danny Glover being a poor replacement for Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Versus movies, although not as terrible as the critics would have you believe, certainly weren’t up to the Sigourney Weaver quality. Now we have the self-professed sequel to Predator which conveniently ignores the actual sequel, Predator 2. This is back to the jungle, albeit lack Arnie.
A group of trained killers from all around Earth are parachuted into a jungle with no knowledge of what happened for them to get there and it doesn’t take long before they realize that they are on an alien planet being hunted for sport by the titular Predators. None of these characters are particularly bad but there isn’t exactly in-depth characterization going on. Every single one of them is a cliche: huge Russian with a mini-gun, token black guy who I was surprised to find wasn’t the first to die (he’s the second), a uzi-toting Mexican played by Danny Trejo, a man who must be in the front of the cue for all Mexican parts, a death-row inmate complete with orange jumpsuit, a Yakuza, a sniper-rifle toting female and Adrien Brody’s generic tough guy main character. The one interesting character is Topher Grace, an actor who seems to be making his name playing strange and twisted bad guys as he did in Spiderman 3, who is the odd one out of the bunch; he’s a doctor, not a soldier or any other kind of toughened hard-ass like all the rest of them. Of course, he’s not really just a doctor but you find that out eventually.
Predators acts as something of a tribute to the original and it works rather well. Adrien Brody is Arnie in all but name, even if he does still look a bit weedy despite obvious serious gym time and perfecting the sore-throat voice that all these kinds of characters seem to have, and some of the characters are shadows of what came before. There is no one that can match Arnie’s natural butchness or Jesse Ventura’s “god-damn sexual tyrannosaurus rex”. Neither is the script as fun as the original with far too many cliched lines coming from the cliched characters.
The predators themselves are fleshed out a bit from all the other movies, with talk of a blood feud between the predators that we know of and a larger, more viscous breed that has a completely brilliant design. There’s also other alien creatures on the planet and some details of alien plants that helps give it some sci-fi cred.
It’s fun and kind of throwaway, much like the first one, and even if it does repeat a lot of what the original did it still can stand on its on as the second best Predator movie.

I was excited for this movie like no other in a while and maybe that’s what caused my slight disappoint in it. There wasn’t any huge problem that totally destroyed the movie, it had all the required elements to make a satisfactory summer blockbuster, but I couldn’t help but feel deflated. The first disappoint was the lack of AC/DC. When you release an album called Iron Man 2: AC/DC you would expect, I assume, there to be lots of AC/DC but there are only two tracks in the whole movie and when they are so suitable for the light and airy style of the movie this seems pointless to me. There are certain moments in the movie, especially the car scenes with Downey Jr. that shouted out for some AC/DC but instead you get some generic and bland rock stuff. It distracted me, although it probably didn’t help that I had listened to the album so many times that my mind had programmed itself to believe that I would be hearing constant AC/DC which just felt like a big tease.
Scarlett Johansson is just gorgeous. Every scene with her oozes sex appeal and she just classified herself as probably the biggest sex bomb in movies today. Downey Jr. is still effortlessly cool and funny but dripping those elements of alcoholism into the story, most likely leading up to the whole Genie in a Bottle story from the comics, felt out-of-place. It didn’t suit the whole lightness of the movie but, still, Downey does a great and very commendable job. Mickey Rourke, who just looks and acts like himself with an so-so accent, is fine as the baddie but not really used very much. When he loses his first battle to only end up in prison and then doesn’t do much else for the rest of the movie it felt like he didn’t really serve a purpose. This point in the movie also bookmarks the part where nothing of real interest happens. Although I like a good, slow drama as much as the next person the story was just not strong enough to make that hour in the middle of the movie that consists almost entirely of talking and plot exposition interesting enough to keep my attention. Dare I say it, I was actually a little bored. Although the actors do a fine job it just wasn’t suitable. It’s fine when it’s interspersed with some Iron Man fights but that didn’t happen. Iron Man barely features at all with the movie focusing entirely on Downey’s fall into alcoholism and the creation of new suits at Hammer Industries, with Rourke’s russian baddie heading the charge.
Sam Rockwell, an actor criminally ignored for far too long, gets to totally steal the show as a rival weapons dealer to Tony Stark but he feels like another character that is little used, with the just the feeling that this is just the set up for the next movie even saying in his last scene that we haven’t seen the last of him.
The whole movie just feels okay and, if anything, really just a big advert for the future Marvel movies, in particular The Avengers movie. There’s also a Captain America reference and a really good Thor one if you can be bothered to wait till after the lengthy credits sequence.
It’s good, could have been better though. Oh if you’re going to release a soundtrack for a movie please make that the soundtrack for the whole movie.

There has been a stupid amount of controversy about Kick-Ass which I think is just a wee but unwarranted. First off, the whole point of the movie featuring an eleven-year girl who murders and swears; this is not a normal eleven-year old girl, she has been trained to kill since the age of five by her father who has been trying to get some payback on the man who sent him to jail on a false accusation. This girl has not had the normal upbringing so she doesn’t react in the normal way that young girls do so, obviously, she doesn’t act the way that you would expect. And, yes, she tells a room full of thugs that they are all cunts before murdering them all and stealing their drug money but it’s all done in the best taste.
Okay, maybe it’s not exactly the best taste; actually, it’s all in really bad taste but that’s the main appeal of a movie such as this. It’s all decidedly non-politically correct and that makes it very cool, especially for people who are in to comic books which this movie is a very large pastiche on but with a real-world element. What if normal people tried to become superheroes? I’m just after watching Unbreakable which covers much in the same sort of area but whereas that movie tackles the subject in a very serious and dark way with a man who has superman-like abilities, Kick-Ass goes the outlandish comedic route and does it superbly with normal people without powers.
I laughed throughout and the violence isn’t as extreme as many people have said, all of which happen in a very outlandish fashion with music to suit the cartoon-like action. Nicholas Cage especially deserves high praise. After being in so much crap for years, National Treasure movies aside as I actually rather enjoyed them, he finally gives a performance like the old days. Yeah the guy probably jumped at the opportunity to play a superhero being an obsessive who even named his son after Superman (Kal-El I believe he’s called) he really is good in this as is everyone else. From the guy playing Kick-Ass who gives just the right of meekness with bravery without totally ripping off Tobey Maguire’s Spider-man which his character follows the story-line of quite closely. The girl who plays Hit-Girl is superb in a role that would have been hard to pull of for most young actors. The idea of such a young little girl being a killing machine with a foul mouth would have looked ridiculous if played by the majority of the awful young actors in movies at the moment but this girl is just great and manages to act the innocent when it’s needed. Only problem I had was with Mark Strong: not that he was bad, it was the opposite really, but he seems to be turning up as the bad guy in every movie and I’m just started to get a sense of deja-vu. He plays a great bad guy, no doubt, but when I see him in the trailer for Robin Hood while waiting for this to start where he seems to be playing a bad guy again it would just be nice to see someone else in the role, that’s all.
It’s funny and very crass but that’s what makes it so brilliant. Go see it.

After downloading Ur by Stephen King to my iPhone using the Amazon Kindle app I really had to wonder how fast technology is going. It is racing ahead of us and with the Apple iPad coming out soon to the UK I have to realize that I simply can’t afford to keep up with it. I’ve been tempted by the Amazon Kindle but having to order it from the US site and still having to browse an American catalogue puts me off. Why should I have to see everything in dollars? It just feels wrong. So I’ve yet to jump into the e-reader Market but a lot of people have and one of those people is, apparently, Stephen King, a man who always seems to be willing to try out the newest things especially in writing. He made available a story that you could only read through the Amazon Kindle, a story about an Amazon Kindle that arrives on the doorstep of a man who quickly realises that this is not the normal Kindle at all but just some kind of weird inter-dimensional creature of a Kindle. It gives access to books written by authors who may have died but in another dimension they have kept on writing. This Kindle gives access to those books.
It’s an interesting story and I could just hear King’s mind going around and around imagining stories that Hemingway and Shakespeare may have written if they had lived for years to come. I don’t know how it is to read on a Kindle itself but on my rather small iPhone screen it was surprisingly good and easy to read, which I didn’t expect. Well worth checking out.

Heechee Rendezvous is the third in the series of Heechee novels by Frederik Pohl and so it follows the same character, Rob Broadhead, a man who, in the first novel–the often considered classic Gateway–made his millions from the Gateway, a space station filled with alien ships that can take a man anywhere in the universe, the problem being that you don’t where that part is or if you’ll survive the trip. He made his riches but in the process left the love of his life to die. The first is excellent, perfectly setting up a sense of intrigue and mystery about the Heechee, the unknown aliens that have created Gateway but come the second book he starts to explain things in far too much detail. Part of the first book’s elegance was that so little is known about the Heechee but once he starts explaining stuff it ruins the illusion. Yeah, it’s all part and parcel for sequels to start giving answers to the question but that’s why the first book was so good, because we didn’t know very much about them and to then not only explain them but to show them interacting with others of their kind, that kinda ruined it for me.
Problems from the second book are still here in the third. I had so many questions relating to the second book that just weren’t answered and neither are they answered in this one, but I did get answers to questions that I didn’t want to know the answer to, something that proved annoying.
Pohl is a good writer and this does touch on greatness at time but it never really reaches the height of the first in the series.

Green Zone is one of those movies that has a political message that it wants the audience to know but does it without shoving it down their throats, instead it does it in such a way that it doesn’t really matter whether the audience cares or even understands anything that is happening onscreen. The audience doesn’t need to know anything about the war in Iraq to know anything that this movies touts because it is essentially Bourne in Iraq, with lots or explosions and running around that equals if not betters what the director and Matt Damon have done with the Bourne movies. Yes, there is a political message about war and corrupt governments and it is genuinely well written and interesting but don’t worry if you find all that sort of stuff boring because there are lots of big explosions to look at.

I had read this book years ago while still school age; it was part of my “stupidly mad about everything sci-if” phase and a good inspiration for wanting to write in the field of science fiction because this, I knew even then, was the kind of stuff that I wanted to write about: not just entertaining fluff about aliens and ships in space but something more, something intelligent and, dare I say, thought-provoking. I consequently read a few other books by Frederik Pohl and loved them all but that was it, never read any other ones.
It’s only recently that I have thought again about Pohl, one of those authors who prey at the back of the mind, never letting go. It was seeing the books Gateway, Jem and Man Plus on a bookstore shelf that I thought, hey, I wouldn’t mind reading those again. This might not sound like much of an exciting thing to do but it’s something that I never do. I don’t know how many books I have read more than once but you can count them on one hand. I never watch a movie more than once, any TV show or any game. I just don’t; once I have consumed it then I’m finished with it and on to the next thing.
So re-reading Gateway by Frederik Pohl was interesting, only in the way that it makes me realize that my memory is better than I had realized. On seeing the cover it brought back memories and then reading the story, seeing those characters once more that I had totally forgot about, it gave me something of a fuzzy feeling, like diving into a familiar bed with a familiar woman. It just felt good.
So, anyway, the book is about a man and his quest for riches in a future that has seen the Earth become hugely overpopulated with most of the denizens hungry and poor. Humanity has discovered an ancient alien relic known as Gateway, a hollow asteroid containing roughly a thousand ships that cannot be controlled but will fly the inhabitants of the vessel to an unknown and possibly very dangerous destination. And that’s where the riches come into play because humanity does what it always does when face-to-face with an amazing new discovery: it tries think of way to profit from it. People who pay the company set up to look after Gateway can board a ship and fly off to said unknown destination which has resulted in many deaths but also many riches. If they discover something scientifically groundbreaking and if they especially bring back some kind of artifact then they are awarded greatly and this is what leads to many people trying their luck in order to gain a much better life for themselves, including the main character.
One of the things that struck me about the book was the amount of sex: the main character, Bob Broadhead has a lot of sex with, apparently, just about anyone he sees and even when he isn’t he is talking about it. This doesn’t really serve any purpose and is either just the future that this had become where everyone is very sexually free and open than we are now or it’s just the way that Pohl’s mind was hardwired. Either way I did not remember that being the book that I had read as a child and if I did I may not have even understood a lot of the talk that goes on within the pages.
The story flips between the present life of Bob, one in which he sees his machine psychiatrist and has become incredibly rich by means that aren’t exactly explained but are certainly implied. He’s currently rich and it flips to the past where is poor but is searching fro his riches. So we can figure out how he gets there but the fun is in seeing exactly how it all plans out.
The aliens, called Heechee, are never seen and no one know where they have gone. They quite literally appear to have disappeared into thin air. There are sequels to the book that apparently explain what has happened to them but I personally think it’s better suited that they are left to the imagination, the mystery of what happened to the heechee being one of the major forces that pulls the novel, that and the tortured mind of the main protagonist Bob who is definitely that, tortured. The psychiatrist sessions are a good way of showing just how tortured this man’s mind is. In between asking if he has any sexual desires for his mother he finds out a great deal of things about Broadhead and it makes us learn more about the sort of man he is. The character is compelling and with the whole novel being told in first-person from him we get to know a great deal about him but never truly sympathize with him because he isn’t really that kind of guy. He’s not a nice guy, exactly, but neither is he bad. He has dark thoughts and a bad attitude and the whole story is for his personal quest for fortune. He isn’t doing it for anybody else he’s doing it out of pure greed and although that makes the reader not care about him what it does is make him interesting and when a book is told from the first-person that is the main thing.
Gateway by Frederik Pohl is number nine of the list of great sci-fi masterworks and it greatly deserves it so if you haven’t read it yet check it out and then read it again a few years later because you might notice things you didn’t the first time around.