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    Showing topics tagged as: Reviews

    It's cold outside; there's no kind of atmosphere


    Post #: 279
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2020-08-17 17:18:00.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Reviews



    I remember my mother cutting out the snippet in TV guide and showing it to me excitedly. “I think this show is right up your alley!” She was absolutely right.

    It was the summer of 1988. I had come home to the small town of Gibsons, BC after graduating from high school. I was working at the public library to pay for university, but I got off work just in time to watch this crazy new British sitcom. It was about the last man alive, stranded three million years in the future on a giant mining ship with a hologram of his dead bunkmate and a creature who evolved from his pet cat.
    It was Red Dwarf, and it was as brilliant then as it is today.

    I still remember the excitement I felt each week as I rushed home, and the joy I experienced when I heard the theme song. Particularly, I remember a kind of whooshing feeling, a unique form of euphoria I’ve never had before or since, when Episode Six began instead with the song “Tongue Tied”:

    I tried to say "I love you" (love you)
    But it came out kind of wrong, girl (wrong girl)
    It sounded like "Nunubididoo" (tongue tied)
    Nuh-mur-nuh-murh-ni-nong-nurl
    That's 'cause you make me tongue tied (tongue tied)
    Tongue tied
    Whenever you are near me (near me)


    Right from the get-go, something about this show just clicked with me. It took all the tropes of the science fiction I loved and played with them, paying homage to them in a loving yet utterly irreverent manner. And despite all the crazy genetically-engineered monsters of the week, it was ultimately about one human, Dave Lister, and his relationship with another person who was simultaneously alive and dead. Arnold Rimmer was annoying, hilarious, and yet relatable. He was Lister’s greatest nemesis and his best friend. He was a joke and yet he was all of us.

    When Rimmer tried to copy all his notes for his astro-engineering exam on his arm, then looked aghast as nervous sweat turned it all into a black blob, I could feel his anxiety and pain. Exams made me feel the same way: even though in Physics classes we were allowed to bring a one-page “cheat-sheet” filled with anything we wanted, when it came time to sit for the test all those symbols and equations seemed to blur together like they did on Arnold’s arm. When he slapped down a black, inky handprint on the exam paper and signed it, my laughter was cathartic. I’d been there.

    Dave Lister was all of us, too. Kind-hearted yet sloppy. Smart but lazy. Forever blessed and cursed by his own potential. And haven’t we all felt like the last human being alive sometimes?

    The show went on for many years, growing in budget and special effects, and—for a while, at least—never losing the magic that made it special. Some of the best episodes came from the sixth season. Still, inevitably it sagged a bit from having to live up to its own success. Season 7, where Dave meets a parallel-universe version of his dream woman, Kristine Kochanski, felt a bit off. They had replaced the incredibly cute Claire Grogan with a the younger and “sexier” Chloe Annett, and the relationship never felt right again. Season Eight found the crew reunited with the old Red Dwarf crew (resurrected by nanobots) and then promptly thrown in prison. It was a bold move to keep the series fresh, but mostly it felt weird and uncomfortable.

    And then the show went away. By this time it was the end of the 90s, and it felt like maybe Red Dwarf’s time had passed. The actors went on to do other things. It was seemingly a pleasant memory, a reminder of happier and simpler days.
    But then something happened. Something wonderful.

    In 2009 a new, all-digital channel in the UK called “Dave” commissioned a three-part episode of Red Dwarf called “Back to Earth”. Going completely metaphysical, the show imagined the characters warping to a different reality—our-reality—in the present day, and coming to grips with the idea that they were only characters on a TV show. Fortunately, it all turned out to be just a ruse concocted by another Despair Squid, and they returned to their “real” reality once again.

    I thought the story had ended there. But just recently I discovered that there were three more six-episode seasons: Season 10 from 2012, Season 11 from 2016, and Season 12 from 2017, all made again for the Dave network. I found them on the “Britbox” channel that you can get as an add-on to Amazon Prime Video.

    It was an amazing feeling, sitting down and watching these characters that I had loved thirty years ago, slip effortlessly into their old roles. Out of character, the actors are visibly older. But through the magic of makeup and the power of imagination, once they are in costume they seem to have aged barely at all. It’s like seeing old friends that you knew from elementary school and laughing with them at hilarious jokes that you both remember.

    To cap it off, the team made a full-length movie that was released in 2020—I was able to purchase it on iTunes. Red Dwarf: The Promised Land finally reunites the Cat with his long-lost brothers and sisters who have been wandering through space for thirty years in a fleet of ships arranged like a cat face. The cat folk are oppressed by a tyrannical leader, and the Red Dwarf crew must do their best to set things straight. It’s a marvelous coda to the Red Dwarf story, and yet it still leaves room for more adventures.

    To which I say, yes please. Smoke me a kipper, skipper. I’ll be back for breakfast.

    My top ten episodes of Red Dwarf:

    10: “Skipper”: S12E06: Rimmer obtains a Quantum Skipper and goes hopping about the multi-verse to find a dimension where he isn’t such a giant loser. We see Captain Hollister again, among other old friends.
    9: “Camille”: S04E01: Kryten rescues a mechanoid from a crashed spaceship and falls in love, but she turns out to be a genetically-engineered polymorphic creature.
    8: “Out of Time”: S06E06: The crew pick up a time-travel device, but then have to fight off their future selves who have turned into corrupt and immoral hedonists.
    7: “Stoke me a Clipper”: S07E02: “Ace” Rimmer (see below) returns to try and accomplish an impossible task: to recruit Arnold Rimmer to become the next Ace.
    6: “Dimension Jump”: S04E05: The crew meet “Ace” Rimmer, a counterpart from another dimension who is impossibly more charming and successful than Arnold, and it drives Arnold nuts. A classic.
    5: “Marooned”: S03E02: A “bottle” episode where Rimmer and Lister are trapped on a snow-covered planet. Great dialogue and character moments.
    4: “Parallel Universe”: S02E06: Holly transports Red Dwarf to a parallel universe where women are the dominant gender, and Lister and Rimmer meet their female counterparts.
    3: “Stasis Leak”: S02E04: The crew finds a time portal connecting to a point three weeks before the crew are wiped out. They can’t save anyone, but Lister finds that an older version of himself has married Kochanski.
    2: “Holoship”: S05E01 Rimmer finds a hologrammatic space ship and gets everything he ever dreamed of, yet the price he has to pay is too high. Sweet and poignant.
    1: “The End”. S01E01. The first episode of the series. Set up the premise and sends Lister, Rimmer, and Cat on their way to adventure.

    Comments (1)

    Views: 3020


    Review - The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin


    Post #: 278
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2020-06-17 18:40:59.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Reviews



    For most of my life, I’ve tried in vain to explain why I love cities. Despite numerous and obvious downsides—the noise, cost of living, the pollution, the unending crowds—I’ve never wanted to leave the city I was born in: Vancouver, BC. Many New Yorkers have an even stronger version of this sentiment. But it took author N.K. Jemisin to express the feeling I never could properly quantify. Her latest novel, The City We Became, is a triumphant love letter to New York, while simultaneously being a rollicking good sci-fi action story.

    In The City We Became, the New York of present day is under attack by inter-dimensional beings of great power and terrifying sensibilities. In response, the combined psychic energy of the city itself has manifested into six people: avatars of the five boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, The Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, as well as one person who is the city as a whole. These six New Yorkers, each from diverse backgrounds and with normal individual lives, find themselves turned into beings of great power. They must race against time to find each other in order to defeat the enemy, who wants to destroy both them and the city they call home.

    In the novel, New York is a young city still in the process of “being born”. Other cities around the world have suffered similar attacks throughout history, and either survived intact or been partially or completely destroyed (New Orleans getting hit by Hurricane Katrina is given as an example of the latter). Each city manifested its own avatar, but New York was the first to produce more than one. And they’ll need them all, because the enemy is particularly mad this time and the consequences might be even more dire for the human race.

    The attackers, led by the manifestation of the sickly-sweet Woman In White, bear more than a little resemblance to the Elder Gods of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. This is a deliberate choice. In this world, all great fictional enemies (and all myths and legends, such as Atlantis) exist in other parallel universes and dimensions. This adds to the familiarity of the struggle, even as the implementation of the attack by the Woman In White is unique. The real brilliance of the novel, however, comes in the rationale the enemy gives for her attacks. I won’t spoil it here, but it puts the conflict in a different light and adds more layers to the “good versus evil” narrative.

    The Woman In White is not above using the systemic racial inequalities present in modern-day society in order to further her own ends. This adds another level of depth to the story, as the enemy allies herself with people who are already leaning towards the wrong side of the fight for equal rights and equal justice. It brings our current problems into sharp relief. When the Woman In White tries to sway the avatar of Staten Island—the only white avatar of the group—over to her side, we can see how inequality hurts all of us, even those of us born into privilege. Staten Island’s avatar lives a safe and cushy life, but she’s also held back by her domineering father and passive mother. The reader ends up rooting for her to do the right thing, but is anxious that she won’t.

    Coming out during the COVID-19 pandemic and followed by the Black Lives Matter protests, this book has ended up being perfectly timed in its release. It’s a celebration of both cities, which are currently under attack by invisible deadly enemies, and black voices, who struggle to be heard. It’s powerful social commentary, but it’s also a fun action adventure, like Black Panther crossed with War of the Worlds.

    Cities represent both the best and worst of us. The energy of millions of people coming together to live and work in the same space has been the driver of human civilization for millennia. But cities are vulnerable, and always have been. The City We Became is a powerful defense of cities, both literally and metaphorically. I love my city, as clearly N.K. Jemisin loves hers. Her novel is the first of a trilogy, which is exciting—I’ll definitely be buying the next two installments.



    Views: 3023


    Review: Agency by William Gibson


    Post #: 271
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2020-02-12 00:06:33.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Book Reviews



    I just finished reading Agency, and my head is still spinning. That’s a good thing.

    Agency is the latest book by author William Gibson, released on January 21, 2020. It’s a science fiction novel set in multiple time periods that are in communication with each other, and features two main protagonists: one human and one artificial intelligence.

    The book follows up the events of Gibson’s last novel, The Peripheral, a groundbreaking work that established both inter-time communication technology and the concept of “stubs”. Stubs are parallel universes that branch off at the exact moment that communication with the future begins: they start to diverge from our own at that moment, and begin their own alternate history. The “giant stub” that sets off all these branches is the one that discovered the time-communication process. It exists a few centuries from now in a high-tech but dismal world where a series of events called the “Jackpot” ended up killing off most of the human population. No direct travel between stubs is possible, but thanks to digital technology and near-zero latency, people can enjoy virtual visits across time.

    You don’t need to have read The Peripheral to understand Agency, although readers who did will be rewarded by the return of “giant stub” characters such as Lowbeer, Ash, and Wilf Netherton. They’re all inhabitants of a far-future London run by “the klept”, a corrupt hereditary government of oligarchs eerily similar to present-day Russia.

    A new stub has branched off from our own in 2015, and because of this communication, both Brexit and the election of Trump failed to happen. This didn’t fix the world as much as one might have hoped: the “present-day” stub in 2017 now faces an international crisis in Turkey that could potentially result in nuclear war with Russia. The few remaining good guys in the “giant stub” don’t want that to happen, so they resolve to use their powers to help prevent armageddon in this parallel universe.

    And that’s not even the main plot. The other big difference in alternate 2017 is the existence of Eunice, an artificial intelligence developed by the military and stolen by aspiring businessmen. As the novel begins, these businessmen hire “app whisperer” Verity Jane to run a beta test on the Eunice software, keeping close tabs on her during the process. Eunice, however, has other ideas. She immediately befriends her whisperer and makes plans to free herself and keep Verity safe. This involves setting in motion a whole cast of characters, including the ever-watchful group from the giant stub. However, mastermind Lowbeer has problems of her own. The klept has decided that her efforts to help out other stubs might erase the possibility of parallel versions of the klept from ever arising in these stubs, and they don’t like that at all.

    Agency, much like The Peripheral, propels itself forward in a whirlwind of awesome confusion. Characters are whisked around from place to place, come into contact with people from parallel universes, and take virtual visits to other stubs. The word “Agency” in the title doesn’t refer to some shadowy organization, but the ability of characters to take actions that will change the fate of multiple worlds. At the beginning, it seems like Eunice is the only one with real agency, as she moves people around like pawns on a chessboard. But when she disappears midway through the novel, everyone else’s decisions start to matter.

    William Gibson rose to fame with his debut novel, Neuromancer, which imagined a world where everyone spends all their time plugged into a global computer network, and transnational corporations run roughshod over governments. As his dystopian vision of the future turned into our current reality, Gibson wrote novels that were closer and closer to the present day.

    With The Peripheral he finally returned to the future, but instead of one dystopia he imagined two, and he brought them in communication with each other. In Agency, these two futures are still around, but now there’s also an alternative present, and the emergence of a truly world-changing artificial intelligence. This dizzying array of universes creates a novel that feels very much like living in our real-world 2020: lots of things are happening, most of them bad, and nobody is really sure who is in control.

    Gibson’s trademark terse but descriptive prose is still in evidence, as is his wild imagination. What he’s often struggled with in the past is endings. The ending of Agency, however, is everything I wanted it to be. It’s a surprise but makes sense given the rest of the story. It resolves the main question of the novel, but still leaves some things unanswered. There is definitely room for at least another book in this series.

    If you liked this book, and are intrigued by artificial intelligence in general, you may enjoy Silicon Minds of Mars, by yours truly.

    Or if you’re a fan of space and science fiction news, consider subscribing to my email newsletter!



    Views: 3250


    Review: Jobs (2013) starring Ashton Kutcher


    Post #: 212
    Post type: Blog post
    Date: 2013-09-19 13:36:27.000
    Author: Jeremy Reimer
    Tags: Reviews, Movies



    Steve Jobs lived a fascinating life, and there has been no shortage of writers wanting to tell his story. The latest attempt, the movie Jobs (2013) starring Ashton Kutcher, is a mixed bag. The movie comes so close to being great, but misses where it matters.

    What’s wrong with it? I don’t think it’s the acting. Ashton Kutcher is actually an underrated actor, and he clearly spent a lot of time observing Jobs and mimicking his posture, voice, and mannerisms. He did a really good job conveying the intensity of Jobs’ emotions and outbursts. The other actors were also excellent—Dermot Mulroney was particularly good as Mike Markula. There were some nice cinematic shots and decent music.

    The only thing left to criticize is the writing. The screenwriter, Matt Whitely, was given one of the most interesting businessmen and visionaries in modern history and failed to tell a compelling story about him.

    The movie starts off in 2001 at an “Apple staff meeting” that looks more like a typical Jobs product launch event. An older Jobs introduces the iPod with his usual stirring words about how it will “change the world”, and the crowd bursts into applause.

    Then we immediately jump back in time to the 1970s. Jobs is in university, talking to his friend Daniel about how he dropped out but is still auditing classes. Then, out of nowhere, a man appears and steals Jobs in order to talk at him. Who is he? The movie never explains it. I’ll call him “Professor Exposition” because that’s what he does. He then disappears forever.

    The third person we meet in a movie shouldn’t be a throwaway character. The audience needs to get on board quickly to figure out what the movie is about. Instead, Jobs wanders off and meets a girl named Julie, who he immediately sleeps with, and then she’s never seen again! Instead, Jobs takes the acid tablets that Julie gave him and shares them with Daniel and his girlfriend (who, despite later giving birth to his child, is never actually named in the film).

    After taking the acid, Jobs complains about being adopted and then goes dancing in the fields while hearing music. This acid trip scene is interspersed with shots of him sitting in university classes watching bad educational films about IBM computers. It feels clumsy and thrown together. Then he and Daniel go to India, which means another montage that goes on a little too long.

    These are supposed to be formative experiences that shaped Jobs’ entire life, but there is no coherent message in the montages.

    The movie then jumps to Steve working at Atari and upsetting the engineers there, and then leads to him getting his friend Steve Wozniak to build a Breakout game, emphasizing how Jobs screwed his friend out of $2500. Then Woz shows him the computer he’s working on, which will become the Apple I.

    The essential points of these scenes are factual, although the movie gets a lot of little details wrong. The worst offender is the Homebrew scene.

    Homebrew was essentially the incubator for Silicon Valley’s home computer industry in the mid 1970s. In the movie, Woz has to be forced by Jobs to demonstrate his computer, whereas in reality Woz had already showed it there himself before Jobs knew about it. Worse than that, the movie shows the Homebrew audience as being completely unimpressed with the Apple I, when it was at least on par with other products that were being shown at the time. The nerd in me screamed when the presenter after Woz began introducing a RISC chip, which wouldn’t be invented until the 80’s at Stanford University!

    Some scenes are decent. I enjoyed seeing Jobs negotiate with Paul Terrell, the owner of the hobbyist Byte Shop, to buy 50 Apple I boards even when he thought he was getting fully assembled computers. The introduction of Rod Holt, the iconoclastic power supply engineer, was well done. I liked the part where Mike Markula shows up, meets the Apple employees working out of Jobs’ parents’ garage, and gives them the funding to start Apple Computer. But the scene where Steve denies the parentage of his daughter by his nameless girlfriend seems thrown in and doesn’t connect to the rest of the narrative.

    Then, with no buildup, we jump first to Steve giving a speech at the Westcoast Computer Faire, and then immediately jump again to Apple as a large company.

    At this point, the movie goes full throttle in promoting the legend of Steve as inventor-of-everything. Xerox PARC isn’t mentioned at all; instead the idea of the GUI seems to have sprung directly from Jobs’ head. He callously fires an engineer who doesn’t share his vision about fonts. In fact, the Lisa computer mimicked a lot of what PARC had already done. Jobs’ genius was to get his engineers to refine and polish these ideas.

    We get some scenes where Jobs screws his friend Daniel out of founder’s stock right before the Apple initial public stock offering. These scenes further the storyline of how Jobs was an asshole, but doesn’t do anything to explain why he was that way, or how his behavior affected his life. Instead, we suddenly get… DUN DUN DUN… the antagonist, in the form of venture capitalist Arthur Rock.

    Rock is portrayed as a caricature, an evil ignoramus hell-bent on destroying everything Apple and Jobs stood for. We don’t get any nuance about how Steve’s views didn’t always line up with reality. Instead, we get ridiculous lines from Rock like: “IBM has moved on to minidex (??) and so should we” and “I think it’s time to reconsider the viability of the personal computer”. At one point he says, after the introduction of the Lisa and the Macintosh, that “IBM beat us to a better product by two years!” This is all utter nonsense and babbling, but the movie just rolls right along to Jobs’ hiring of John Sculley from Pepsi to be the new CEO of Apple. Then we get a confused series of events leading up to Jobs being ousted by the board in favor of Sculley.

    This moment is arguably the most important part of Jobs’ life, and the movie makes a muddle out of it. We need to know exactly why Jobs would be cast out of the company he founded. Sure, it happens a lot in real life for no real reason, but this is a story. It’s the job of the writer to make sense of things.

    Instead, we just skip ahead to 1997 (Steve’s creation of NeXT gets a single sentence, and Pixar gets nothing at all) and see poor Gil Amelio struggling with Apple’s decline and inviting Jobs back into the company. Mike Markula arranges for Steve to come back in a consulting role and a new chairman of the board sets up a new coup to let Steve take control again. We see Steve “discovering” industrial designer Johnny Ive hiding in an office somewhere, and he tells him to put the speakers on the inside of the iMac, presumably the single most important design decision that will make the computer a smash success. “But Steve, they’ll never let us do that!” Really? He also takes the time to complain about his “piece of junk” Sony Discman, which I guess is supposed to tie in with the movie’s first scene. It’s suggesting, of course, that Steve “invented” the iPod in his head, fully-formed, at that moment. You know, the way he invented the GUI and everything else.

    In fact, Steve even gets to invent (and personally record) the “Here’s to the strange ones” commercial that was actually voiced by Richard Dreyfuss. He can do anything, it seems.

    Steve then gets rid of Mike Markula and the rest of the board, gives some more inspiring speeches, and we fade to black with the text “In 2012 Apple became the most valuable company in the world”. Neat! Would have been nice to have seen how Steve accomplished that. It would have been even better to have seen how Steve was able to do it only because he had learned from his past experiences and his mistakes.

    Ultimately, every movie has to find the core of the story it wants to tell. It seems that this movie wanted to tell the story of how Steve singlehandedly invented Apple Computer, had it stolen away by evil people, and then took it back. That’s a story, sure, but it’s not the most interesting one. It doesn’t tell us anything about Steve the person. It doesn’t tell us how he had to learn when to be an asshole and when not to be. It doesn’t show him struggling in the wilderness during his NeXT years to learn these lessons.

    Jobs (2013) is a movie that is done in by poor writing. It didn’t have to be this way. We can only hope that the upcoming Aaron Sorkin movie does a better job telling the story of an interesting man’s life that is more engaging to watch.



    Views: 7695