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Movies Reviews

Review: Angels & Demons

Angels & Demons

Angels & Demons is a good but flawed thriller that revolves around the quest of Robert Langdon a Harvard University professor to unravel a plot to annihilate Vatican City by the secret society called the Illuminati using antimatter stolen from CERN.

I think that this is a very good adaptation of Dan Brown’s book and is my opinion an improvement over the book. The film is an action packed and pacey thriller whose main flaw I feel are due to the source material. As a sequel it is also an improvement over the movie of The Da Vinci Code as there is significantly less standing about and spieling off of expository bits of dialogue. Also where the end of The Da Vinci Code seemed to fizzle out to nothing Angels & Demons has a very explosive finale.

The one flaw with the pacing of the film is that the structure of the plot with rigid deadlines to be met means that variations in pacing become noticeable where one hour between events passes quickly the next hour can pass much slower.

There have been a a number of changes made in the adaptation which tighten up the story. There is much less set at CERN although it looks like that they really did film the LHC there. the character of the Camerlengo has been altered slightly and is here portrayed as a Northern Irish priest by Ewan McGregor. The character of the Hassassin has been changed to become more of a mercenary than a zealot.

The acting is excellent with McGregor and Mueller Stahl as stand outs amongst the cast. Tom Hanks reprises his role as Robert Langdon and is more believable as an academic turned reluctant action hero than Nic Cage in the similar National Treasure.

This is a far less controversial film than some Catholic organisations might have you believe, the premise of the story is this supposed battle between science and religion but this is merely misdirection. The Vatican and the Catholic church come out of this relatively unscathed, they were guilty of the persecution of scientists in the past most notably Galileo but they haver admitted their mistakes in that regard already.

To conclude this is a good thriller and is a fun ride that is best enjoyed with your brain turned off.

Categories
Politics Terrorism Uncategorized

9-11, 7/7 UK Terror Laws May Be Scaled Back

UK Justice Minister Jack Straw today signaled that some of the terror laws enacted after 9/11 and 7/7 may be scaled back. The announcement is the first indication that Labour ministers want to scale back counterterrorism laws, amid growing consensus that recent powers have gone too far.

Categories
Surveillance Uncategorized

America’s growing surveillance state

The Obama administration isn’t just watching rightwing extremists. It’s watching us all – and we should all be concerned

read more | digg story

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Uncategorized

Maths can be fun – if only it’s taught properly

Mathematics should be one of the most useful subjects children learn in school – yet thousands leave school each year unable to use simple mathematical methods. Or, worse, they are traumatised by their experiences in maths classes. However Maths can be fun – if only it’s taught properly.

I think Clifford Stoll is the kinda guy that can make mathematics fun for the typical student.

Categories
Reviews TV

Lost 5.16 & 5.17 – The Incident

We finally get to meet Jacob, not only is he real but he has intervened in our Oceanic 815 survivors lives at crucial moments in their pasts. White shirt, and he’s joined on the beach to see the arrival of what is possibly The Black Rock by a man who wears a black shirt presumably he is Jacob’s dark counterpart.

Rose, Bernard and Vincent are alive and living a happy peaceful life on the island away undetected by both the Others and the Dharma Initiative. Being together is all that matters. It’s always something with you people.

In my experience the people that go out of their way to tell you that they are the good guys are almost always the bad guys. The circle of ash was broken and so whoever was constrained to the cabin has escaped. They believe it was somebody other than Jacob which suggests that it was the man in black which means that it was not Jacob that spoke to Locke and therefore the others may have been following the orders unwittingly of Jacob’s nemesis.

Jacob resurrects Locke after his ‘fall’.

It is about love. Rose and Bernard. Sun and Jin. Love eventually triumphs over adversity. “Your love is a special thing”. Jacob speaks excellent Korean, in addition to English and Russian (?).

We finally get to see the accident in the operating room that formed the basis of the story that Jack told Kate in the pilot episode where he overcame his panic and was able to repair the damage he’d caused. Interestingly it seems the reality of the situation doesn’t quite match Jack’s perspective, he believes that his father was undermining him when in fact Christian was genuinely helping him to overcome his panic and believe in his ability to operate.

The Oceanic survivors are there on the island for a reason. Jacob it seems is playing a long game and is placing his pieces for the final showdown with his nemesis.

Again with the love theme. Juliet loves Sawyer so much that she would rather that she never met him than worry that she might lose him.

Hurley is a great barometer for establishing other character’s intentions because he is so open and has no agenda which means that people tend to be open and honest with him. Hurley and Jacob’s conversation in the taxi cab shows Jacob to be a good man.

So that’s how Pierre Chang lost his arm!

Heartbreaking to see Juliet die.

Richard knows what lies in the shadow of the statue, what he says in Latin apparently translates to “He who will protect/save us all”. Does that mean Jacob? The man in black has manipulated Ben into killing Jacob but it seems that Jacob was expecting it and that although he’d prefer Ben not to carry out the act he is sanguine about it.

Juliet not dead yet and with eight hits manages to set off the bomb and the screen goes white. What the hell does this mean?

Categories
Reviews TV

Lost 5.16 & 5.17 – The Incident

We finally get to meet Jacob, not only is he real but he has intervened in our Oceanic 815 survivors lives at crucial moments in their pasts. White shirt, and he’s joined on the beach to see the arrival of what is possibly The Black Rock by a man who wears a black shirt presumably he is Jacob’s dark counterpart.

Rose, Bernard and Vincent are alive and living a happy peaceful life on the island away undetected by both the Others and the Dharma Initiative. Being together is all that matters. It’s always something with you people.

In my experience the people that go out of their way to tell you that they are the good guys are almost always the bad guys. The circle of ash was broken and so whoever was constrained to the cabin has escaped. They believe it was somebody other than Jacob which suggests that it was the man in black which means that it was not Jacob that spoke to Locke and therefore the others may have been following the orders unwittingly of Jacob’s nemesis.

Jacob resurrects Locke after his ‘fall’.

It is about love. Rose and Bernard. Sun and Jin. Love eventually triumphs over adversity. “Your love is a special thing”. Jacob speaks excellent Korean, in addition to English and Russian (?).

We finally get to see the accident in the operating room that formed the basis of the story that Jack told Kate in the pilot episode where he overcame his panic and was able to repair the damage he’d caused. Interestingly it seems the reality of the situation doesn’t quite match Jack’s perspective, he believes that his father was undermining him when in fact Christian was genuinely helping him to overcome his panic and believe in his ability to operate.

The Oceanic survivors are there on the island for a reason. Jacob it seems is playing a long game and is placing his pieces for the final showdown with his nemesis.

Again with the love theme. Juliet loves Sawyer so much that she would rather that she never met him than worry that she might lose him.

Hurley is a great barometer for establishing other character’s intentions because he is so open and has no agenda which means that people tend to be open and honest with him. Hurley and Jacob’s conversation in the taxi cab shows Jacob to be a good man.

So that’s how Pierre Chang lost his arm!

Heartbreaking to see Juliet die.

Richard knows what lies in the shadow of the statue, what he says in Latin apparently translates to “He who will protect/save us all”. Does that mean Jacob? The man in black has manipulated Ben into killing Jacob but it seems that Jacob was expecting it and that although he’d prefer Ben not to carry out the act he is sanguine about it.

Juliet not dead yet and with eight hits manages to set off the bomb and the screen goes white. What the hell does this mean?

Categories
Computing

The Cuckoo’s Egg mark II – Ghostnet and the researchers that uncovered it

John Markoff for the New York times writes about Ghostnet which is thought to be a Chinese state-sponsored cyber-spying operation and the computer security investigators based at the University of Toronto that uncovered it. Tracking Cyberspies Through the Web Wilderness

It’s like The Cuckoo’s Egg mark II although everyone is taking this discovery a lot more seriously than they did Clifford Stoll’s 20 years ago.

Categories
Comics Uncategorized

Bryan Talbot’s Grandville

From Bryan Talbot who bought us the excellent Alice in Sunderland and Luther Arkwright comes Grandville, his new steampunk fantasy adventure graphic novel which is due out this October 2009. Looks like a brilliantly rendered cross between Sherlock Holmes and Wind in the Willows.

Categories
Movies Reviews

Review: Tarzan

Tarzan

A tie with Greystoke as best adaptation of Tarzan yet although the two films are at the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. Where Greystoke is a bleak, tragic tale of loss Disney’s Tarzan is an uplifting fun romantic adventure.

Of course as with any Tarzan story there has to be the dark events of his parent’s deaths, but it is handled extremely well here it happens off-screen and in a change to the book is carried out by Sabor the Leopard.

The voice acting is superb. Glenn close excels as Kala, Tarzan’s ape mother. Minnie Driver is an intelligent and feisty Jane Porter and Brian Blessed lends his wonderful baritone to the human villain of the piece Clayton.

The animation is brilliant and the backgrounds stunningly beautiful. There will probably be no other adaptation that will be able to portray how at ease Tarzan is at moving through the tree tops of the jungle.

Categories
Movies Reviews

Review: Greystoke

Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes

This 1983 film takes a radically different approach to most previous movies of the legendary character of Tarzan and in many ways is far closer to the original story Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Here we see an intelligent man who despite being away from human contact from infancy is able to as a grown man learn two languages and speak if with a light French accent English eloquently. The story here is not of a rollicking jungle-set adventure but instead focuses on his growing up amongst the apes and then as an adult his struggle to adjust to his “rightful place” amongst British high society as a Greystoke.

This is ultimately a tragic telling of the Tarzan story as John Clayton realises that he can never truly be at home in either environment.
Although he is able to pass within society as a civilized individual, he prefers to “strip off the thin veneer of civilization,” as Burroughs puts it.