No number.

I thought there were two separate Tom Cruise movies at first – the Mission:Impossible sequel and Ghost Protocol, because there are now so many sequels in the franchise that they’ve started to dispense with the numbering for fear of putting people off.

The franchise is showing signs of becoming long in the tooth, but Ghost Protocol is still the best of the sequels. Director Brad Bird (yes, he of The Iron Giant and Pixar fame) put a stop to trying to be a James Bond wannabe and delivered a fast and frenetic action flick that doesn’t take the super agent/secret spy thing too seriously.

The premise: a misanthropic idealist nutter Kurt Hendricks (Michael Nyqvist) thinks that blowing up the entire world with the stockpiles of nuclear weapons accumulated by the Americans and Russians will rid the Earth of the scourge of humanity, allowing the planet to start anew. (Nevermind that the radioactive half-life will basically make the planet uninhabitable for thousands, if not millions of years.)

Meanwhile an IMF team are attempting to track down and identify a mysterious terrorist codenamed “Cobalt”. After the assassination of one of their agents, they extract Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) from a Russian jail to help. He leads them in an audacious raid on the Kremlin for information, but things go awry and the good guys are implicated in a simultaneous terrorist attack on the building by Hendricks, which causes the Russians to assume that the Americans have declared war and forcing the United States government to put the eponymous Ghost Protocol into effect, disavowing any knowledge of the IMF and cutting off support.

I found it strange that the scriptwriters found it necessary to spell out to the audience exactly why the odds are stacked against Hunt and co. at this point, because you know there’s no chance of them failing. The ideal of an M:I story should be more about showing a situation where we gasp and think to ourselves “how the hell are they going to get out of this?!” instead of being told right from the beginning “it’s impossible, but if you fail the world will end OMFGBBQ!” It takes all tension out of the overarching plot, and relies purely on the visceral thrills to deliver.

Speaking of thrills, there wasn’t much “Impossible” in the movie – all of the gadgets and gizmos showcased are pretty old hat (or at least would be if you stay abreast of science and technology news like me):

• Microsoft Surface
• Gecko Gloves
• Hi-res 3D screens with eye tracking
• Passenger avoidance HUD
• etc.

All of these have been talked about in scientific journals and technology news sites for a while now, so I found myself feeling very “meh” rather than amazed about the whole thing.

But those criticisms aside, the movie feels “comfortable”. It could very well be the rehashing of the old Cold War trope of Russians vs. Americans (has the Middle-East-as-bad-guy finally fallen out of favour?) and the spectre of nuclear war, bringing the M:I back to the era where it originated from. And at the end of the day that’s the point of a franchise, isn’t it?

adfadf

I purchased Stories of Your Life and Others based on a recommendation on a discussion forum, which in hindsight was an odd thing for me to do since I’ve been burned by random internet recommendations before. However, that recommendation came from Amazon.com reviews; this one came from the geeks on the Ars Technica OpenForum, and I should know better than to doubt those guys.

Stories is an amazing compilation of Ted Chiang’s work. He’s probably the most famous science fiction author you’ve never heard of – well, I’d never heard of him before anyway. He only writes short stories, and since his first was published in 1990, he has only written 13 in total (spread out quite evenly across two-and-a-bit decades). The man has won more awards than the number of pieces he’s written, and not just crappy unknown ones either – Hugo and Nebula awards.

Although it’s pitched as sci-fi, it fits uncomfortably with the popular notion of the genre as stories about technology and/or the future. The short stories in this book would be more accurately described as “high-level dreaming” (Wikipedia puts them into the rather unhelpful category of “speculative fiction”).

Themes range from the religious (buidling the biblical Tower of Babel) through socio-political (a drug that allows people to “turn off” the part of the brain that perceives and creates bias towards beauty), to things that people do normally associate with SF (aliens, maths, automata), but his treatment of these topics is unlike anything I’ve ever read before.

Two things that I greatly admire about Chiang are:

• how very far he goes in imagining the worlds that creates, often taking your breath away with the dizzying heights of his imagination, and
• the brevity of words – he writes extremely lucidly and communicates complex topics with an efficiency of words and depth of emotion that reminds me of Ursula Le Guin.

Stories of Your Life and Others is both the last book I finished in 2011 and also the best one, and I hope that through this first GeekReads book review of 2012, more people will be introduced to this great author.

Some of these cities aren't in the movie, but why let that get in the way of a good acrostic eh?

Back to the review: Contagion is one of those ensemble dramas a la Crash featuring a host of big names in several simultaneous but separate plot threads. First we have Mitch Emhoff (Matt Damon), whose wife Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) contracted the disease while on a business trip to Hong Kong, and seems to be the main carrier for the disease. Beth dies and Mitch – who is immune to the disease – finds himself dealing simultaneously with grief, caring for their daughter, and protecting themselves from the madness of civilised society collapsing around him in the panic caused by the outbreak.

Next is Dr. Ellis Cheever (Lawrence Fishburn) as the head of the US Center for Disease Control (CDC), and his field agent Dr. Erin Mears (Kate Winslet). Her role is to investigate and contain outbreaks of the disease in the US, with the difficult task of motivating action in the face of apathy and government bureacracy.

Third is the agent dispatched by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to investigate the source of the virus, Dr. Leonora Orantes (Marion Cotillard). In Hong Kong, she gets involved with a few members of the local police force who are fanatical about protecting their relatives in a small rural village.

Lastly we have Alan Krumwiede (Jude Law) – who comes up with these names!? – as a cariacature of the “citizen journalist”, a crackpot who believes that the whole thing is a dramatic conspiracy by the drug companies to improve their share price.

The glue holding them all together here is the threat of a global disease epidemic – tracing the paths of the very many activities that happen in such a scenario. It’s a surprisingly robust cinematic exploration of what would happen in the event of a major outbreak of a severity equal to or greater than that of the SARS “bird flu” outbreak or the more recent H1N1 variant. I have it on good authority (one of Jenny’s medico friends) that the portrayal of the medical profession at least is quite accurate.

The movie portrays many different perspectives on the story from a purely neutral perspective, not deifying or demonising any particular side. Even the odious government bureacrat doesn’t get her well-deserved comeuppance, as one would expect, and characters that don’t deserve to die, do. Overall, a very interesting intellectual diversion from the usual movie-going fare.

Ooh, a low angle shot with the sky in the background. It's a drama then eh?

Steven Spielberg’s latest, War Horse, is based on a play (which in turn is based on a book). Considering the central character is a horse, I’d be curious to see how they pull that off on stage – do they use a real horse? The story is a pastiche of human events intertwined with the life of Joey, the horse of the movie’s title.

Spielberg’s adaption feels like a faithful recreation of a play. That is, there’s a very clear delineation between each of the movie’s sections, and like some stage-to-screen adaptations (e.g. Chicago), the main difference is that the backgrounds and props are real instead of stage contrivances.

Not being a history buff, I found the movie’s depiction of certain aspects of World War I odd – why did the English charge the Germans on horseback with swords, when guns clearly existed (and were used enthusiastically throughout the rest of the movie)? But being primarily a horse biography rather than a war flick (which I don’t normally like), I quite enjoyed it.

The themes were often quite depressing – the movie endeavours to show that the war was hard on people on both sides – but there were times when attempts to lighten the mood seriously threatened the film’s credibility. One scene featuring a pesky goose wandered dangerously close to Babe territory, and you almost expect the animals to start talking.

There’s also a very close resemblence to the 2005 foreign film Joyeux Noël, but I won’t spoil the particulars of that for you.

If you like horses, there’s probably no question that you’ll like this movie and should go see it. Likewise if you enjoy dramas. For everyone else, this is probably a DVD rental.

The missing text for the bottom three pictures are "Weeny", "Whiney" and "Schmoe"

Onto the review. Horrible Bossees doesn’t so much have a plot as a framework on which a number of jokes are hung. These range from mildly annoying to genuinely amusing. My guess is that the movie was a contrivance allowing the screenplay writers to give themselves carte blanche to have a bunch of suburban middle-class white men to make inappropriate social comments.

The three eponymous bosses are extreme cariacatures of treacherousness, libidinousness, and nepotistic…ness. Each is paired up with one of our hapless heroes: Nick (Jason Bateman), Dale (Charlie Day) and Kurt (Jason Sudeikis). In a style reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz – lacks a certain je ne sais qua that would allow him to escape his situation. It’s in these dire straits that the trio half-jokingly formulate a plan to assassinate their superiors, and the movie takes a turn for the better.

Enter Jamie Foxx as a shady hitman. The scenes with him in it almost justifies the existence this movie (to say nothing of Jennifer Aniston’s, um… appearances – whatever you choose to read into that word).

What makes the movie border on intolerable is the way that Dave’s whiney voice increases in pitch throughout the whole movie until by the end his screechings give Chris Rock a run for his money.

Kevin Spacey, as Nick’s boss Dave Harken, did well with what he was given; he plays the snarky bad guy with ease. Colin Farrell’s talents were completely wasted (har har) in the role of drug addled Bobby Pellitt, Kurt’s nemesis, and Aniston tries desperately to reinvent herself as a sexy middle-aged woman, although she has obviously had herself cosmetically altered to have the body of someone much younger. Still, her acting was as unmoving as her gravity defying bosoms, and as wooden as the nether regions of those who watched this for its smut potential.

Watch this one if you’ll be happy for 15 minutes of genuine belly laughs to justify the other hour-and-a-half of crude, lewd, “dude” humour.

Note: it's plain talk. Not plain speak or plain writing, because that would be... complicated.

Not long after I started with Access Testing, a job came along where a client asked for a readability assessment. Being the resident word nerd, they asked me to take a look into it. The client was a government department, so they were obliged to make sure that their website content was accessible to a wide range of people. The client mentioned a “Flesch-Kincaid” score, which I’d never heard of before. So after hitting up Google for the goods, I learned about readability tests. After pitching some samples of how their text could be improved, we didn’t hear anything else from the client, and so the issue was dropped and I forgot all about scoring text for reading ease and grade levels.

Fast forward 4 months. Jenny and I are looking through a little second-hand bookshop in Balmain, and she comes over to me with a book and say “I think you’ll like this – it might help you with your writing.” It was called The Art of Plain Talk and cost a grand total of $4. “Why not,” I thought, and bought it along with a few other things, without thinking too much on it. It wasn’t until I started reading, when the author started talking about his formula for measuring readability, that I figured out this was written by the Flesch from Flesch-Kincaid.

The book definitely lives up to its title. It’s the most readable book I’ve ever read on a learned topic, evidenced by the amount of time that it took for me to finish reading it (i.e. not much) – I’ve taken longer to read novels of a similar size. The most interesting thing about this book is that it was written in the 60′s (and my copy seems to date from that era too) and the examples that the professor gives are curiosities in themselves, being a sample of the writing and media of that time. More evidence of the author’s skill: I rarely bothered to read the examples of “difficult” text because they seemed so tedious. Then again, I didn’t bother to do any of the exercises either.

The real challenge will be to see whether my writing has improved as a result of it. I know in my mind that I have to untangle some of the sentence structures that I’ve become accustomed to writing, but it’s a hard habit to break.

—-

Just for fun, the Flesch-Kincaid score for the above:

Grade level: 11 (bad)
Reading Ease score: 51 (Fairly difficult)

I don't recall even seeing any posters for this movie. Just picked out this one at random.

Everett: I’m with the FBI.

Kid: What? Behavioural Science Unit?

Everett: No, Narcotics.

Kid: Bah, drugs.

The picture is strangely accurate, unlike many book covers which just go for an "interpretation" of the book's contents

Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife is one of my Top 5 favourite books of all time. If you know me then you’ll know that this is no small accolade, especially considering that I’ve been consistent about this for more than a few months. I don’t keep “favourites” easily, so for me to still be speaking favourably about TTW means that it has taken a place in a very small and elite group of things.

It’d be a surprise for Niffenegger’s follow-up to match, let alone exceed the esteemed position of its predecessor. Indeed Her Fearful Symmetry is not her next Magnum Opus, but if it weren’t living in the shadows of glory, it might’ve been better received. In writing this delayed review, I still remember the book quite fondly despite going into it with a highly sceptical attitude, which means at the very least that it must have been pretty good – even if I didn’t want to admit it at the time.

If TTW was Niffenegger’s attempt at writing science fiction, then Symmetry is her attempt at a ghost story. She takes another crack at dealing with love and loss, but it’s neither as wrenching or satisfying with this setup.

The events of the book begins with the death of Elspeth. She has an estranged twin living in America, but in a gesture with an unclear motive, she leaves her estate, near Highgate Cemetary in London, to her nieces – who are also twins. Enter Julia and Valentina, two teenage girls who have yet to figure out what they need or want in life apart from each other. They travel to the England to work out what they want, and in the process become involved in Elspeth’s life and the people in it. Elspeth herself, meanwhile, has not quite passed on.

Niffenegger spent a considerable amount of time immersing herself in Highgate Cemetary, to the point where she was giving tours (including one attended by her friend Neil Gaiman, which partly informed his The Graveyard Book). So the setting of the book is meticulously described, and thoroughly believable. The characters though, are a little less well realised in comparison, and while the metaphysical contrivance is interesting and imaginative, the author never really seems sure about what to do with it or where to take it, and the story meaders around it from start to finish.

But that aside, Niffenegger still manages to keep you wanting to turn the pages, and before you know it you’ve finished. So even though I was predisposed to being critical of this book, I went along for the ride and found it to be quite enjoyable.

Words Words Words, by David Crystal

What's it about again?

David Crystal is a man passionate about words. He is to linguistics what Richard Feynman was to quantum physics, or Carl Sagan to Cosmology although sadly the study of words and language doesn’t elicit the same emotional tug as the inner workings of reality or the imagination-filling possibilities of space.

Off the back of How Language Works, Crystal zooms in from the macro to the micro, looking at the atomic parts of communication. Like the othe book, he takes the reader on a whirlwind tour in each chapter, showing the enormity of the subject but keeping things light and entertaining, not overwhelming the reader, through the use of amusing anecdotes and interesting trivia.

A much more readable book that the title or topic suggests. Recommended to anybody with even a passing interest in language.

How To Draw Manga Style, by Ilya-San & Yahya El-Droubie

Does anybody else find this picture anatomically disturbing (and I don't just mean her pneumatic chest)?

I picked this up cheaply at the Borders closing down sale and read it in dribs and drabs over last last few months. The text is amiable but dry, and seems to be the efforts of a few passionate amateurs who thought they might be able to make a buck putting something together as cheaply as possible. It shows mostly in the quality of the artwork, which, while competently rendered, seems to have all been sourced from cheap Chinese artists – there’s barely a Japanese name to be found in the book (the odd nom-de-plume of one of the authors – “Ilya-san” – notwithstanding).

It’s one of those books that sits in the awkward “in between” category: too lacking in soul and energy to attract beginners beyond the initial premise, and too simplistic and preachy to be of any use to veterans.

Suffice to say, you won’t be seeing manga-style drawings in my blogs any time soon. I’ll stick to my crude pencil drawings.

This review though, is about I Shall Wear Midnight. It’s going back a bit now – it was released last year. I’ve been tardy with my reviews and it’s been several weeks since I finished reading this, but also because I waited until this was out in paperback before picking it up, so that it would match the previous 3 books in the Tiffany Aching series which I already own (an aside: despite tracking down a copy from the exact same imprint, Corgi, it still turned out to be a different size and shape to the others… geek rage!)

As for the contents of the book, I found it to be enjoyable, but probably less so than the previous ones. Jokes stemming from the antics of the Wee Free Men are starting to wear thin, and because Tiffany is grown up now (in body but much more in mind), some of her charm has worn off.

This series was always aimed more at children, but in Midnight‘s case Pratchett seems to have been bogged down by this limitation, and the result has lost the freshness of the earlier books, and also lacks the wit and sophistication of the “core” Discworld novels.

Unless you’re a perfectionist or die-hard Pratchett fan, you can probably safely give this one a miss.