dysphoria.net Back (Again)

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Yeah, the wee server which was running dysphoria.net finally gave up the ghost at the very end of January (it was an ancient, recycled desktop machine and the disk—and probably most of the rest of it—was a bit dodgy) and I only got around to setting up its replacement tonight.

The replacement is a tiny, silent home server, about the size of a hard disk. I’m wondering if it’s up to the task now, since it doesn’t seem to be the fastest thing in the universe.

Anyway, I’m blogging again, and for that you can be thankful. Or whatever.

X-Men: The Last Stand

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You know, I was really disappointed by this film.

The first two X-Men films transcended comic-book franchises, or sci-fi, and were Good Films™. They were good films because Brian Singer is an excellent film director. (Based on the experience of the first two X-Men, and the new Superman movie, I’d go to see anything he did now.)

This one, directed by Brett Ratner, just isn’t as good. It rides the coat-tales of the previous two, but is just a big summer blockbuster, with characters couldn’t care less about and lots of explosions. Continue reading →

The Da Vinci Code

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A competently put together film (as you’d expect from Ron Howard), with adequate performances (as you’d expect from Tom Hanks). Not exactly an acting masterclass, except in adequately ambling through a mediocre film. My fellow viewers reckoned that the dialogue was hideously creaky (though I didn’t notice so much). The story is very daft, but… I quite enjoyed the whole experience.

Really it’s a pretty faithful adaptation of a book which had lots of interesting ideas, and a brilliant hook of a story, and was told in barely adequate prose (with hideously creaky dialogue).

As it is so faithful, and also because it condenses a novel-sized story into a 2 hour film, the film really lays bare the shortcomings of the plot. It is such blatent tosh when one sees it being played out with real live people on the big screen, and apparently with a straight face. The story is revealed for what it is: a crossword-puzzler’s secret wank fantasy, where the future of Western Civilization hinges on the hero’s ability to do anagrams. It just doesn’t hold up very well. Continue reading →

Charlie Brooker is a poetic genius

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I just rediscovered Screen Burn, the column Charlie Brooker writes for The Guardian. (You may have seen the book of the same name, which is a collection of some of the early columns.)

He reviews television, sortof, through a haze of poetic vitriol. Anyway, I just pissed away a glorious 45 minutes catching up on Charlie Brooker’s unique and side-wrenchingly funny mind bile. A sample:

Terrible thing, anticipation. For instance, if I locked you in a room and calmly informed you through a hatch in the door that I planned to return in an unspecified period of time and beat you insensible with a car jack, chances are you wouldn’t enjoy the intervening hours very much, even if I’d left you a couple of magazines and some battenberg cake.
Screen Burn, Charlie Brooker, The Guardian, 15 April 2006

I love the bit about the battenberg cake.

If you’re not convinced, try a quick column or two for yourself. You’ll like it, I promise.
If you like it and need a stronger fix, why not try TVGoHome, his original irregular series of faux Radio Times pages? It’s a brilliantly creative satirical stab in the face of contemporary TV, which even now is being minded by desperate TV execs for new programme ideas. It’s available from all good book shops, in case you don’t like reading things on the Internet.