DVD of the Week: Insurgent

As the Hunger Games series winds to a close, the powers that by over in Hollywood continue to hunt around for a big-ticket replacement franchise, with a lot of casualties on the way. As a card-carrying member of "really not the Target Audience" I haven't watched too many of them, but I was entertained enough by Divergent to watch the sequel, Insurgent, as our saturday night movie this week. As is the way we do things now, apparently, it is to be followed up by an adaptation of the third book, Ascendant, split into two parts, so you can pay twice to find out how it all ends. But first, we have to maintain enough interest to get us that far. 

TV Review: Gotham, Series 1

Back when I did a post about Arrow and Agents of SHIELD, I commented that I was trying to round up all the superhero themed shows that we'd been watching over that season, to try and draw some final curtain around them. Which meant that I'd sort of forgotten that we'd been watching Gotham. Part of me feels like that could just stand as a review in it's own right. But Gotham is a strange beast,  born from a strange concept. If Arrow is the show you get when you want to make a Batman show, but aren't allowed to, Gotham is it's Dark Mirror, the show you get when you don't want to make a Batman show, but feel obliged to have him hang around in the background. 

Movie Review: The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

I must admit that I am one of the people for whom a little bit of me died when they announced that Peter Jacksons adaptation of The Hobbit would become a new epic trilogy. Two films, I could see, but three, with a load of extra stuff added to make it a "true" prequel? I'm not sure I signed up to that, in my heart. But you know what? I enjoyed An Unexpected Journey, when many didn't, for all it was overlong and meandering. I liked the smaller scale, the bumbling, un-epic nature of it's Company. And then The Desolation of Smaug fixed a lot of those problems anyway, with more pace and focus and maintaining a sense of fun and intimacy that made it easy to ignore the more earnest stuff over in Dol Guldur. Going to the cinema just after Xmas to see a Hobbit film has become a tradition too, so we were always going to go see The Battle of the Five Armies, and to be honest I was looking forward to it. It's a shame then, by my review can be summed by a long, disappointing sigh. 

Siiiiiiiigggghhhhhhhh

DVD of the Week: About Time

It feels like ages since we managed to sit down on a Saturday night and watch a movie, something borne as much from the Autumn rush of new TV as anything else. We've managed to keep up with four - four! - new seasons of superhero telly, plus Doctor Who and my own obsession with Strictly Come Dancing, but this week we finally managed to settle in with the latest DVD we've had from lovefilm, which been gathering dust from October. This turned our to be About Time, the lastest offering from Richard Curtis, promising to be an extremely middle-class rom-com with a smattering of Time Travel Shenanigans. 

DVD of the Week: Les Miserables

If I have a shameful movie-going secret, it's that I am a crier. There is a substantial list of movies that make me cry - not just the ones that get anyone with a soul, like the opening of Up, but even blatantly manipulative stuff like Titanic can leave me all wet-faced and sniffly. Some of it is to do with music, I think, which just makes the problem worse. So it was with some glee that I was lent Les Miserables in the firm knowledge that music + pointless tradgedy = me turning into a puddle. I think I made it about half-an-hour before choking up and it was all downhill from there.

DVD of the Week: The Expendables 2

I quite liked The Expendables. I mean, its dumb as a rock, but it was dumb fun. So we rented Expendables 2 because, well, more of the same right? Well, its sure still dumb. To be honest, I'm not sure I can face reliving it to write it up properly, but for prosperity, here's my comments from my Twitter Feed as I endured it. When the best moment is Chuck Norris doing a 10-year-old "Chuck Norris gag", you know you've got problems.

TV Review: Young Justice

Cartoon Networks Young Justice has been cancelled after two series, and when it was announced a couple of weeks ago, there much sadness at it's passing. Warner Animation Studios have an excellent track record with handling the DC universe, dating back to the 1990s Batman series and it continuations as far as Justice League Unlimited, and a number of stand-alone projects along side it. Young Justice, focusing on the side-kicks of the great and the good  (at least to start with) always felt like a strong but risky choice, and I can't help but feel that at the root of its demise is a difference between what the network expected, and what it got.

Rant: On Gaming and "Growing Up"

I've written a few versions of this post but I can't make it work without feeling clumsy or "about me". So this is the best I can do.

There has been a lot of press recently about the levels of casual misogyny prevalent in areas of internet "culture", both on the gaming front - for example this horror - but also the in the bear-pits that appear "below the line" or articles wherever they are posted, especially if its a female writer "daring" to question the status quo. And there is a lot of rubbish spouted that it shouldn't be taken seriously, or its free speech, or that its a legitimate "gamer culture" position to expect boobs in all your computer games and if they're attached to a character with say, dialogue, then we should be grateful a developer has gone the extra mile.

What makes it worse is that a lot of this gets characterised as "women vs trolls", and it shouldn't be. It should be "decent people vs Trolls". Because I'm a straight, white, middle class man, and I have all the privilege, and I'm bloody sick of the dreadful way women are generally presented - and treated - in games and around gamer culture, and I'm certainly tired about how the debate around this is conducted.

It's not censorship to expect civility in debate with people you disagree with. It's not puritanism to object to the ludicrous character designs that most female characters have in games. Its not "political correctness" to expect female characters to have roles other than Princess to be Rescued or (even more shockingly) actually be playable in their own. We shouldn't have to applaud the few examples where strong, fully clothed characters exist because they shouldn't be such a stark exception.

And ultimately, and most importantly, this isn't womens battle - this is everyones battle. Because this is the tip of the iceberg, and underneath the churning waters are battles about racism, homophobia, transphobia, and all  those other bitter prejudices that are on display in the insults thrown around in online chat. Gaming as a hobby moving into the mainstream, demanding acceptance, demanding to be treated like a grown up. Well it has got to act like a grown up, and it's everyone's responsibility to shape what sort of grown up it will be. 

Reading Plans, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my "To Be Read" Pile

First up, the comics world seems to be buzzing with the news of Gail Simone's removal from Batgirl over the weekend. In some ways I don't have a dog in the fight, as I don't read Batgirl (or any other "Big Two" comics) but two thoughts leap to mind. First, firing someone by email is shitty and cowardly, even if they are the tea-boy, never mind one of your flagship writers. Secondly, regardless of the rights and wrongs of the decision, an industry sector with a growing image problem regards female characters and female audiences, should probably think really fucking hard before adding female creators to the list of the disenfranchised.

Anyway, to what I was actually thinking about.

I've been thinking a lot recently about what to read next year. You see, several years ago I had the shock the realisation that I didn't read anymore, and that was a bit of a kick in the self-image. I'd always been a reader, I'd always had a book on the go, and suddenly, I wasn't and I didn't. So in an attempt to force myself back into a pattern, I came up with the idea of reading lists - planning a list of themed books and reading through them (and blogging about them) as a way of getting back in the habit.

So first I picked 12 "Great American Novels", and then I moved onto 20 Crime Novels. After that, I did Fantasy novels - a genre i'd never got on with - and the folks at Geek Syndicate let me post them up on their site, which was pretty cool. After that I did post-apocalypse novels and this year I'd done Horror. The tourism into different genres has been wonderfully broadening and I heartily recommend it. Its too easy to just read the same stuff, and think that's all that's out there. However, now I'm hitting an unexpected side effect of these projects, which is causing me a few problems.

I'd like to read more Hemingway. I want to read all of "The Dark Tower". I should probably give Scott Lynch another go because many of my friends rave about him and I want to make sure I'm not missing something there. I've not read much Science Fiction - my first literary love - for a long time and want to go back to it, but not sure I could do a year of it. I've unread novels by James Ellroy, Adrian Tchaikovsky and David Brin to get through. I'd asked for at least two History Tomes for Christmas.

So, yeah.

I suspect I'll still try and put together a list this year, but one without theme, just an aspiration of books and authors I want to read, books and authors I'd only discovered from the previous years lists. But no matter what I end up reading, the important thing is this: I'm a reader, once again.

Rant: Fake Geek Girls and other such crap.

So, like a turd that just won't flush, the "fake geek girl" debate - although calling it a "debate" honours it more than it deserves - came up again yesterday after this particularly incoherent rant from artist Tony Harris. Twitter and the Blogosphere and so on exploded into righteous fury, and many words have written on the subject. And in many ways it was heartening to see, that this sort of crap is stood up against, and reading through yesterday there was some optimism to be found in the idea that the visceral response is a good sign for geek community being open and inclusive, and y'know, not deep down just a bunch of gynophobic basement virgins with too much access to the internet.

And then the more I thought about, I started to feel genuinely angry about it, because although there are many, many, good people standing up against this sort of behavior, it still keeps happening.

So Farewell Then, Star Wars: The Old Republic

So, over the weekend I cancelled my subscription to Star Wars: The Old Republic. My poor Jedi Knight will now be consigned to live out her days in a freezing cave on Hoth, wondering why no-one had the decency to port her back to the Republic Fleet where at least they have a bar and hot running water. She'll never get through your romance options with Doc and his cheesy dialogue and cheesier facial hair. She'll never get to the end of whatever your personal plot line turns out to be. I almost feel sorry for her. But in the end I just found myself not caring anymore, and not feeling the urge to login and play, and so it is no-more. From reading the gaming press, I am not alone.

So what went wrong? I mean, when we started playing SW:TOR I was really impressed with it, and only a few months later, I'm grabbed by ennui. What gives?

Book Review: Empire in Black and Gold

As anyone who has known me for any length of time will attest, I have always looked down on the Fantasy genre with the reflexive snobbery of a long-time Science Fiction Fan. I was at least partly cured of this after my "Big Year of Reading Fantasy" although I still feel pretty wary of it's tics, tropes and seemingly self-inflicted limitations of what the genre is allowed to be. I'm still more than capable of getting a little snippy about it, but at the same time there is an increasing amount of it on my bookshelves and I came back from the SFX weekender with 3 out of 4 books bought being Fantasy. And its starting to look like my next big reading obsession is a Fantasy series too.

Oh dear, team.