(no subject)
My first impressions of Québec City (after a night's sleep) are chiefly that it is very cold and very wet. I say that as a Scot currently living in Manchester. Very cold. Very wet. Probably unfair of me, I know, but bloody hell was today unpleasant. We did the walk to the conference centre today to make sure we could find it and work out how long it would take us for when things kick off tomorrow. In doing so, we discovered one of the important things which, in hindsight, should have been obvious and another which is just annoying as an outsider.
The first thing is that we didn't extrapolate all that we should have done from the fact that the conference centre overlooks Québec's Old Quarter. Québec's historical walled bit is, as was so often the case, built on the side of a soding great hill. The conference centre overlooks it, literally. Well, it would were the Hilton not blocking the view. Out hotel, on the other hand, is marginally above the floodplain of a small river. Forty minutes is a long time to walk uphill, and a knee-and-hip-and-calf buggering trip back down again afterwards. The second bit is that as a Brit, you immediately notice that Québecois roads are extremely wide. It takes a little longer to notice that the city blocks are actually really rather small. The net effect is that you spend an awful lot of time crossing the road in a country with bloody anti-Jay walking laws. When you're squinting into the lashing rain, waiting for permission to cross, the annoyance factor is significant. There's also the odd thing in that the time allocated to cross a road seems to be utterly arbitrary. You press a button (or wave your fingers under a sensor which provides no feedback at all) and wait for the orange hand to turn to a white cartoon man walking and a countdown of the number of seconds remaining. These have thus far ranged from eighteen seconds to sixty five seconds for not appreciably different widths of road, and there seems to be little rhyme or reason about it.
Still no luggage, as it happens.
Right, film reviews. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is a film along the lines of Van Helsing in terms of plot and special effects. The major difference is that this one makes Van Helsing look restrained and understated. Here we have witchhunters with weaponry a mere hundred or more years in advance of their surroundings (and they get points for joking about this themselves in the film), obeying laws of physics perhaps better described as vague guidelines. Well, maybe they're self-regulating? It works for banks, after all. Yeah. This movie is silly. The silliness gets interupted at a few moments by monologues to advance the plot, but it usually picks up again rather swiftly, and we go back to silly fantasy violence. Yes, lots of gory, over-the-top, utterly ridiculous but rather fun fantasy violence. This film is, in general, best described as the film equivalent of good eighties metal, daft and aware of it, but having to much fun with the codpieces and the screaming solos to care. There are a couple of dodgy bits (The diabetes thing was, well, just out of place. Easily ignored.) of which the only really irritating one was the cheerful restatement of the old Hollywood (and everyone else's, especially White Wolf) favourite device that evil people are ugly and marked by their sins, whereas good people are beautiful and sexy and, and that you can tell good from evil by examining the teeth. So, in conclusion, this film is much like a firework display set to Alice Cooper. Sure, it's over soon and doesn't contain anything you've not seen or heard before, but you had a great time and it entertained.
9 is a very short title. It's an animated film about ... about some tiny golem puppets, animated in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to save it. The woo-woo is strong in this plot, with a huge chunk of mysticism and "science is soulless and destructive, exept when it's really simple because then it's innovation bringing joy and wonder and light", but frankly compared to a lot of the drek out there, it's not that bad. The real joy is the art direction. The designs, the way scenes are framed, the style ... the whole film is utterly beautiful. Probably also terrifying to small kids, by the way, because it's also extremely creepily done. The baddies are to the lead characters (sack-cloth puppets, essentially) what the Cenobites are to humans, and to be honest pretty unpleasant (in an oddly beautiful, if grotesque, way) to humans too. They do their job very well. I can't really summarise the plot (unlike H&G:WH, there is actual plot) without spoiling it, but this film I really do recommend highly. If you can, watch it.
Ech. Right. t'other two can follow later. I'm knackered.
The first thing is that we didn't extrapolate all that we should have done from the fact that the conference centre overlooks Québec's Old Quarter. Québec's historical walled bit is, as was so often the case, built on the side of a soding great hill. The conference centre overlooks it, literally. Well, it would were the Hilton not blocking the view. Out hotel, on the other hand, is marginally above the floodplain of a small river. Forty minutes is a long time to walk uphill, and a knee-and-hip-and-calf buggering trip back down again afterwards. The second bit is that as a Brit, you immediately notice that Québecois roads are extremely wide. It takes a little longer to notice that the city blocks are actually really rather small. The net effect is that you spend an awful lot of time crossing the road in a country with bloody anti-Jay walking laws. When you're squinting into the lashing rain, waiting for permission to cross, the annoyance factor is significant. There's also the odd thing in that the time allocated to cross a road seems to be utterly arbitrary. You press a button (or wave your fingers under a sensor which provides no feedback at all) and wait for the orange hand to turn to a white cartoon man walking and a countdown of the number of seconds remaining. These have thus far ranged from eighteen seconds to sixty five seconds for not appreciably different widths of road, and there seems to be little rhyme or reason about it.
Still no luggage, as it happens.
Right, film reviews. Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters is a film along the lines of Van Helsing in terms of plot and special effects. The major difference is that this one makes Van Helsing look restrained and understated. Here we have witchhunters with weaponry a mere hundred or more years in advance of their surroundings (and they get points for joking about this themselves in the film), obeying laws of physics perhaps better described as vague guidelines. Well, maybe they're self-regulating? It works for banks, after all. Yeah. This movie is silly. The silliness gets interupted at a few moments by monologues to advance the plot, but it usually picks up again rather swiftly, and we go back to silly fantasy violence. Yes, lots of gory, over-the-top, utterly ridiculous but rather fun fantasy violence. This film is, in general, best described as the film equivalent of good eighties metal, daft and aware of it, but having to much fun with the codpieces and the screaming solos to care. There are a couple of dodgy bits (The diabetes thing was, well, just out of place. Easily ignored.) of which the only really irritating one was the cheerful restatement of the old Hollywood (and everyone else's, especially White Wolf) favourite device that evil people are ugly and marked by their sins, whereas good people are beautiful and sexy and, and that you can tell good from evil by examining the teeth. So, in conclusion, this film is much like a firework display set to Alice Cooper. Sure, it's over soon and doesn't contain anything you've not seen or heard before, but you had a great time and it entertained.
9 is a very short title. It's an animated film about ... about some tiny golem puppets, animated in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to save it. The woo-woo is strong in this plot, with a huge chunk of mysticism and "science is soulless and destructive, exept when it's really simple because then it's innovation bringing joy and wonder and light", but frankly compared to a lot of the drek out there, it's not that bad. The real joy is the art direction. The designs, the way scenes are framed, the style ... the whole film is utterly beautiful. Probably also terrifying to small kids, by the way, because it's also extremely creepily done. The baddies are to the lead characters (sack-cloth puppets, essentially) what the Cenobites are to humans, and to be honest pretty unpleasant (in an oddly beautiful, if grotesque, way) to humans too. They do their job very well. I can't really summarise the plot (unlike H&G:WH, there is actual plot) without spoiling it, but this film I really do recommend highly. If you can, watch it.
Ech. Right. t'other two can follow later. I'm knackered.