(no subject)

EGM got a bunch of kids together to review really, really old games here.

Niko: Hey - Pong. My parents played this game.

Brian: It takes this whole console just to do Pong?

Kirk: What is this? [Picks up and twists the paddle controller] Am I controlling the volume?

John: I'm just going to do this [twists the paddle controller as rapidly as possible].

Tim: John, don't do that. You'll die.

Andrew: This is a lot like that game. Um, whatchamacallit—air hockey.

Sheldon: Except worse.

Andrew: Blip. Blip. Blip. Blip.

Becky: I don't even see the point of having sound on this.

Andrew: Wow. The score is tied. It's so exhilarating.

Brian: I saw a documentary on this. The game was so popular in arcades that it got jammed up with quarters.

John: In this thing? [Points to the Pong game console]

Tim: I would never pay to play something like this.

Bwahahahaha

Your soul is worth £7756. For your peace of mind, 86% of people have a purer soul than you.

Check yours here

Keeeeel Beeeell

Saturday - UGC - 17:50 I shall be seeing Kill Bill.

Also present will be Erin, Ed, Lilian, Hal, Khi, Meredith and Hugh.

Anyone else who wants to, feel free to book a ticket here.

Review

Finding Nemo

Time Travel

I wrote this for the film discussion board when T3 came out and I came across it again recently. Don't think I've LJed it before.

There are two kinds of time travel - either the past can be changed or it's permanently set.

If the past is inviolate then everything has to tie itself back together at the end and it turns out that by trying to avoid their future people have in fact merely caused it to occur. These tend to be cleverly written and leave you shouting "No! Don't do that! You'll just end up stopping yourself killing Hitler!" at the screen. My favourite version of this is the Heinlein short story "All you zombies" in which a character ends up being both their own mother and their own father through a delightfully complicated series of events.

If the past is changeable then either you end up with paradox ("my name is Inigo Montoya! I killed my father before I was born! Now everyone in the audience has a headache!") or parallel timelines ("So, Kirk1 came back from future1 and told Kirk2 not to do it, which means that our future (Future2) is now safe for all mankind. Shame about Kirk1's future.").

It seems obvious to me that the original Terminator is a "past is inviolate" story, in which everything ties together at the end. The second film is a parallel timeline story, in which terminators come back from Future1 but are successfully destroyed, causing Future2 to come into existence. T3 is a mixture, in which the existence of parallel timelines is a given (Arnie says as much) but the future is only postponable or twistable, not entirely escapable.

The real question, of course, is "What was that computer virus that was infecting everything?"

(no subject)

A cool rant from someone else on the Film Review board at work

Okay, I'm getting cross now. First up, Ichi the Killer - lovely film, last five minutes make no sense at all, and several major plot points end up completely unresolved.

Suicide Circle - lovely film - last 20 minutes make no sense at all, and several major plot points end up completely unresolved.

Ring - boring film, last 15 minutes make no sense at all, introduce a *massive* deus ex machina and several major plot points end up completely unresolved.

Dark Water - rubbish film, last 15 minutes make no sense at all, and several major plot points end up completely unresolved.

Yes, there's a lot of review sites out there that seem to say that this is how the japanese audiences like their films, but as a stylistic technique it gets real old real fast. Maybe western audiences like a little more 'closure' in their films, some kind of handle on whodunnit (or whatdunnit). All I know is that if I see one more film like this I swear I will stalk and slaughter the director, all the while screaming "It was ME! Do you see? ME! *I* did it! I'm the villain!"