Lego is Cool

September 18, 2009 at 3:12 pm (lego)

10198-0000-xx-12-1Something dropped through my door this morning.  It was the Autumn 2009 Lego catalogue.  On it was a picture of the new model version of the Tantive IV.  Now, until today I didn’t know that it was called the Tantive IV, but basically it is the very first ship you see in the very first Star Warsfilm.  You know, the one with Artoo and Threepio and Leia which gets swallowed up by a Star Destroyer.  And it is so frigging cool that at some point I am going to have to own it.

That’s the problem with Lego.  It’s infectious.  All of this started when I made the mistake of wondering into the Lego shop in Milton Keynes.  I had not played with Lego since my mother forced me to sell my collection before I went to university, and I was curious to see what kind of stuff they sold.  One of the first things that I saw was the massive £350 Millennium Falcon which (whilst more than I am willing to pay for a fucking Lego set!) was utterly brilliant.  I looked around, and saw what other things they sold.  I did toy with the idea of buying one o001f the medium sized toys, but ended up buying two small £10 kits – one a rebel transport vehicle, and one the empire equivalent.  I bought them.

Got home, built them.  I had completely forgotten the thrill of opening the plans, spreading the pieces out over the floor and building it up from scratch.  However, it was all over too quickly, and I soon realised that this fix was not going to be enough.

So I went to the Lego website, had a poke about and found the Digital Designer.  They way it works is this: you download a small bit of software and install it on your computer. It knows what bricks are available and you than then build (virtually) and model using those bricks.  But the best bit is you can actually press one button that tells you how much it would cost to order, and another which enables you to order those parts. 

So I set about trying to recreate old Space Lego toys from my youth.  Although most of the bricks that are available now are not the same colours, I did managed to create some of the simpler, smaller toys from my youth.  However, when I tried to build anything DSC02724larger (like one of my three favourite toys, the Space Ships) my memory was not good enough and I could just not remember how to put them together.

I then tried looking for any old plans online, and found this awesome website, which has… well… everything, arranged in many ways.  And I found the plans of an old toy, built it using similar available bricks, then bought it.  Again, the colours were very different but I had a lot of fun building it when it arrived.  And this is how they got my address and sent me the brochure which is going to coast me at least £100.  Bastards.

So the moral of this story is: don’t buy any toys built on Lego Digital Designer because they will send you brochures that will end up costing you a fortune.

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To Blu or Not to Blu?

June 22, 2009 at 8:57 am (Uncategorized)

I have always insisted that I was not going to buy a BluRay player.  Overpriced, I always said, and a bit pointless.  My most recent DVD player upscales through HDMI, so I made the decision that I was not going to bother.

Sadly, I am a very weak human being, and two things have changed my mind.  The first is that, from now on, Doctor Whois being made in HD, which means that future episodes will be made available on both BluRay and DVD.  If I buy them on DVD, sooner or later I will want to replace them with HD copies.  The second reason was that I saw a rather cheap BluRay player, but by an awesome manufacturer (I am addicted one one such maker, and as this machine was made by them it did help to swing this for me!)

So I bought it, plugged it in, and stuck on a couple of films, expecting to see less difference than I was expecting.  And how wrong I was – my first purchase was Serenity – the big screen version of Firefly and I was genuinely amazed at how good it looked.

Since then, I have bought the first Bond movie (Doctor No).  I have seen some rather obtuse comments on various forums asking what the point is of releasing older films in HD, as surely they won’t look that good.  These people obviously forget how big cinema screens are (and were even in the sixties!) and that film still has something like four times the resolution of BluRay.  Anyhow, I can confirm that Doctor No looks bloody awesome – even though, being the first and cheapest of the Bond movies, there are not that many set pieces or effects.  But the detail in the pictures is awesome – especially the amazing location stuff.

So, I had watched a couple of movies (one old, one new) and the next thing I decided to try was documentary.  So I bought Planet Earth, the groundbreaking BBC nature doc, and I can confirm that this looks bloody awesome as well.  Some of the ariel shots of various creatures and herds roaming about looked just incredible.

So the next thing I will try is some TV.  My DVD collection is mainly TV, and the majority of it old stuff, so there is almost nothing that I will want to replace on BluRay.  (Torchwood Season 1 is about all I can think of).  And my movie collection is rather junior by comparison.   I will replace the classics (Star Wars, Indy, Lord of the Rings and most expensively, the Bonds) but in the main this isn’t going to cost me as much money as I thought.

Must dash – just seen all of Life on Marson BluRay for the same price as the DVD version on Amazon.  As I never got around to buying these on DVD, I think I may very well have to give them a try!

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Dollhouse

May 19, 2009 at 9:45 pm (dollhouse)

dollhouse-tv-series-official-poster-mq-01-2582cThis evening, I watched the first episode of Dollhouse on the British SciFi channel.  (And yes, it is still spelt like that over here!)  I honestly hadn’t planned to, but the (surprise) news that Fox have renewed the show for a second season made me a little more interested.

  As you may or may not know, Fox and (specifically) Joss Whedon have a history of failed potential – and yes, I am thinking specifically of Firefly.  Now, those that know that I an involved with the UK Firefly podcast (Sending a Wave) might be a little surprised by what I am about to say.  You see, I don’t think Fireflyis all that great a series.  (Heresy, I know!)  I’m not saying it’s bad, it isn’t, but the thing about all TV shows that Joss Whedon has been involved in is that they are slow burners.  If you are mad enough to watch the opening season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer you will know that actually, it wasn’t that good.  It was not until the second season that the show really found out where is was going and discovered the format that made it the hit that it deservedly was.

  Sadly, we will never know if the same is true for Firefly.  The series was mucked about in the schedules, and then cancelled about half way through the opening season.  The groundwork in Firefly excellent, and I truly believe that had the series run to a second season, it would have blossomed in the way Buffy did – perhaps more so, because arguably what we have of Firefly is much stronger than the opening season of Buffy ever was.  Firefly posed a lot of interesting questions, most of which will never be answered.

  Which comes to why I basically never intended to watch Dollhouse.  I was really, really sure that the show was not going to move beyond that first season, and I will be honest I didn’t want to be in the situation where I invested time and thought into the show, only to find that it was wasted.  (Not that this happened with Firefly, I discovered that long after both it and the movie Serenity were distant memories).  I remember a similar situation a couple of years ago when I watched the first two or three episodes of Drive, which started really well.  I remember then hearing that the show had already been cancelled, and I just stopped watching it, even though there were a handful of episodes still to watch.  What was the point?  We were never going to know!  It is really frustrating.

  So, with the news that there was going to be a second series of Dollhouse, I decided that I would do a u-turn and give the first a go.  It is not that I ever thought it would be a bad show, I just didn’t want to like it then lose it.  Of course, the fact that it has a second season literally means bugger all – look at what happened to the potentially excellent Tru Calling.  (Was that Fox?  Can’t remember, but it wouldn’t suprise me).

  The episode itself was rather weak, but I have it on good authority that by the end of the season I will be crying out for more.  The first episode did what it has to do – it set up the premise, but in a rather uninteresting way.  I am very keen to see the original opener, which was never shown as some clown af Fox didn’t like it.  (It is on the Region 1 DVD, if it is on the Region 2 version, assuming it gets one, I may well take a look).

  But at least it looks as though we will get a run of at least 26.  And with the news that Chuck has also been given a third season, it looks as though the future is looking okay for US shows.

  Must watch Chuck sometime.  It’s supposed to be excellent!

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How much change?

May 17, 2009 at 11:52 am (david tennant, doctor who, doctor who series 5, matt smith)

Doctor 11As pretty  much everyone must realise, the tenure of David Tennant as the Last of the Timelords is almost at an end.  We have three more episodes to look forward to – The Waters of Mars (which has no confirmed airdate yet, but everyone is guessing November) and the final two parter, the title of which we don’t know yet, which is rumoured to be going out over Christmas and New Year.

But then what?  The series has successfully built up a large number of characters that we have seen on several occasions.  We have Jack (as well as the Torchwood crowd), Sarah Jane and her mob, the companions and all of their families (from Mickey to Wilf) all having helped to populate Doctor Who with familiar characters over the last four (five?) years.  And it’s not like we are going to be allowed to forget everyone, because it rather looks like most of these characters are going to turn up again in the final story.

It’s comfortable.  The closest Doctor Who has been to an ensemble cast before this was the UNIT years of the Pertwee era, although then we were talking a handful of characters compared to what we have now.

Now, I may be wrong, but the new production team are going to want to stamp their own mark on the show, and it has been suggested that we won’t be seeing these familiar characters any more.  That, coupled with a new Doctor, a new TARDIS interior and exterior (apparently it is going to look like an actual Police Box, not the oversized thing that the Doctor has inhabited for the last five years) means that after the final Tennant episode, everything that we are familiar with will be gone.  And that worries me a little.

There has never been such a complete change in the show ever before (apart from when the new series started, and the sixteen year gap made that necessary).  Even the Troughton/Pertwee regeneration, which seemed like a radical change, still relied on a familiar setup – we had met the Brigadier on at least two occasions the previous couple of years, so there was something familiar to help the viewer get used to the change.

And at the other end, they didn’t just dump UNIT when the new Doctor started.  They featured on and off for the next three years, with familiar characters appearing in most of those.

This is an exctiting time to be a fan; it won’t be long before we start to get pictures of the new Doctor in his new costume, and of course we have yet to find out who the new companion is going to be.  And I can’t wait to see the redesign of the Tardis exterior (I guess it will have to go on location, so we should see it all over the tabloidss.  We may have to wait a little longer for pictures of the interior, though!)

Personally, I can’t wait to see what they do.  But I just hope that something carries over from the Tennant Era into the Smith Era.  I have faith in the new production team – so much so that my initial reservations about Matt Smith have been overruled by my trust in Moffatt – he has seen what Matt Smith can do, and let’s face it they wouldn’t risk a crap actor with such a flagship show.  But they need to give us a small element of continuity to help the audience through such a massive change.  There have been rumours that we will see Martha in the first episode, that would be perfect.  It doesn’t have to be her especially, but the appearance by a character from the current era of the show will help ease the new Doctor and the new show into the public consciousness as a continuation of what has gone before and not something so new that it acts as a barrier.

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“Star Trek” Review

May 14, 2009 at 3:25 pm (star trek)

 ***CONTAINS SPOILERS***Star_trek_11_stadard

I have finally caught this film, and it has created an inner turmoil within me that has left me unable to answer a fairly simple question: is this the greatest bit of cinematic Trek ever made, or so faithful to the original that it actually damages it?

The plot is pretty straightforward (well, as much as a story that involved the intricacies of time travel can be).  In the year 2287 (which is seven years after the events of the previous film, Nemesis) there is an attempt to save the planet Romulus that goes wrong, and it ends up being destroyed.  Spock was part of the team that was involved in the failure to save Romulus, and the after effects cause a black hole into the past.  Spock is sucked through, ending in in 2258.  A massive Romulan mining vessel tries to follow him, but ends up in 2233, where it destroys the USS Kelvin (which just happens to have Kirks parents aboard).  His father dies and his mother survives to give birth to James T. Kirk in the middle if the battle.

This already varies from established Trekchronology, but I don’t mind – the timeline has been changed by the Romulans after all.  So the Kirk in this film is a fatherless rebel.

The Romulan ships tries again, and this time ends up in 2258 whereby they destroy Vulcan to get back at Spock.  Fine, no problems there.

Until the end of the film, of course.  During it, you assume that somehow events will be restored to their original timeline.  But this is the thing that upset me about the film: none of that happens.  So by the end of the movie, the events within it have reshaped the whole Star Trek universe as we know it.

So, this means that none of the events in Star Trek the TV series can have happened as we saw them.  So episodes set on Vulcan.  Spock’s Mother (Amanda, who appears in the original episode Journey to Babel) is dead so we can never see her.  Sarek dies on Vulcan in a TNG episode, but that cannot have happened either.  In short, the events in this movie mean that the events in any series (apart from Enterprise) cannot have happened.  That whole timeline is closed.

I would love to be able to dismiss this as a “parallel univere” but sadly I cannot, as the Spock that has existed through all of the TV shows survives into this universe.  He has memories of all of the events in the original show, the movies, even the TNG episode in which he appeared (there is some great contunuity; it appears that he is still the Vulcan Ambassador to Romulus, as he was the last time we saw him).  But since the universe was reshaped by the Romulans, none of that will actually happen.  So bascially, in 2287, as soon as the Romulan ship travels back in time, that timeline that all of the shows that we have enjoyed ceases to exist.  And I have a problem with that.  To invalidate over 500 episodes of television just to “wipe the slate clean” as it were is going way too far.

If it wasn’t for this, I would have loved the movie.  I have no problem with the redesign of the Enterprise,and some of the casting was spot on.  Zachary Quinto was brilliant as Spock – in fact he overshadowed Chris Pine (Kirk) in the same way that Nimoy did Shatner all those years ago.  Like Shatner, there is nothing essentially wrong with Pine’s performance, but Quinto was awesome as the young Spock.

But, music, effects and performances aside, I cannot forgive the fact that they have destroyed all that has come before.  And, because of the way it was done, I cannot ignore it either.  I know this makes me a sad fan who ought to “get a life” as Shatner once said, but to sweep away the previous shows to tell this story was unforgivable, and for me utterly spoilt the film.  It looks like there is going to be a sequel.  Fine, you watch it.  I don’t want to.

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