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I'm disappointed that people appear to be (and I could be wrong) lining up to have a pop at SYNAMON already.  

I'm going to try an experiment and not read them for a while and see if it shifts a few prejudices.

I mean imagine if all you'd seen was Coppolla's recent output like DRACULA and JACK and then somebody suggested that you watch APOCOLYPSE NOW and THE GODFATHER?

DREDD: OK but if you got the "twist" early, as I'm sure most people did, it probably left you feeling a little "so what".
 
SYNAMMON: OK enough start to what looks like it will be a story that covers a lot of tried and trusted concepts.  I am so glad that she used her wits (and not an omnitron) to get the singularity through the defence grid. I'm assuming there's some nice reversal coming along to turn the familiarity on it's head. I like the art but a slight inconsistency in tone irks me(some of the elongated limbs make it look cartoony where other panels don't). I really hate throwaway pop culture references like the GET CARTER one - please have the decency to make up your own killzingers. (This gripe also applies to the otherwise excellent Ian Edgington)

DEAD MEN WALKING: I am reserving judgement on this because the opening episode did not grab me at all.  Which I guess is kind of judgement in itself. Actually, this applies a little bit to SYNAMMON above but I guess I just liked it a bit more.  I don't like VUCK and SHIVs.

DURHAM RED: More reserved Judgement. I think this art is a lot clearer than some of Harrison's painted stuff - a good thing.  For me, DAbnett can delight and frustrate in equal measures.  Not everything needs to be clear in the opening episode so long as you've got a nice hook and the mystery of why Red is seemingly alive has me interested.  Just watch out for those omnitron resurrection machines.

FRIDGE MAGNETS: Yay! I'm renewing my subscription!

So it's "OK" and I'm "reserving judgement".  That's not much kudos for an offensive is it.

And the cover sucked.

That's the one - delightful.  I saw Stephen Fry on Room 101 enthusing about her - he wanted to put her in "Room Lovely"

I see the focus of this prog's assault is GIRLS.

Somebody mentioned earlier that they'd belive all this tosh about "strong, female characters" if the parts were written with Kathy Burke rather than Kelly Brooke in mind (somebody post a picture of the delightful KB up please).

This got me thinking - when was the last time we saw an empowered female that wasn't a total fox? Off the top of me head, the only one I can think of is the bird from The Scrap who snarled a bit too much for my liking. So some good points go to Mister S but who can think of any others?

Level six for me. In DIS with the Heretics.

My big problem is I'm not repenting for the stuff I did when I was younger...

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(I'm at work on a Saturday baby sitting some batch jobs so, apologies if this is long winded and overblown - given the film I'm talking about, that's quite appropriate).

Well, I finally got around to renting MATRIX RELOADED on DVD last night and I must admit, I'm quite glad I didn't waste one of my precious cinema trips on it.

How could it all go so horribly wrong?  The original Matrix struck me as a pretty good stand alone film - I didn't see the need for a sequel even though there was obviously a bit more story to tell).

RELOADED, however, seems very much to be full of mad ideas that were probably thrown out of the original for either getting in the way of the story and/or were too hard to film.

There seems to be little dramatic tension in any of the scenes or fights involving NEO as we are pretty much aware that within the matrix, he is a God.  He can do whatever he wants.  So why repeatedly put him in fights we know he'll win?

The fights in the original served the purpose of helping to tell the story (you saw Neo's powers growing, you saw that even Morpheus couldn't take out an agent).  The fights in this seem to exist for no other reason then to get fights on the screen (e.g. the Oracles bodyguard has a fight with Neo "to see that you are the ONE". Why? She's the Oracle, she knows!  He has a fight with a hundred agent Smiths. As the number of smiths increase, my interest in the fight started to wane and the special effects became increasingly poor.  And what was the point of all this? We'd already established Smiths new freedom and abilities? No point - so at the end Neo just flies off like he should have done at the start of the scene.

I didn't like the way that the "army of sentinels" were just talked about for the first hour - we didn't see one for ages. I hate it when threats./battles are just talked about rather than shown (lots of episodes of Star Trek plead "Guilty").

The supporting characters are also pretty poor this time. Larry Fishbourne wanders around acting like the worst kind of John The Baptist and fails singularly to convince me that anyone should believe what he believes. And there's a daytime soap opera feeling attached to the relationships between LINK and his wife ("I'm coming back, honey, you can count on it") and MORPHEUS and NYOBI.

The trip to see the bloke with the comedy French accent also seems to add unneeded baggage and additional bad guys to the story. Sure you get to see the mighty fine Monica Belluci and the great digital zoom between the thighs shot but the Oracle had already told us about the rogue/old system programs and we know that the matrix had made upgrades to the agents so, in theory, we could already have had new and interesting baddies along that route. The KEY MAKER could have been lost/hidden/held by the agents and we could have been spared more cod philosophy in a French accent. I bet Gary really liked that bit.

And then there's that scene with the ARCHITECT.  While I applaud the idea that the climax of the film wasn't just another huge fight, having one bloke spout gibberish for ten minutes is still an anti-climax.  And what exactly does he tell us (and this could be a big spoiler but to tell you the truth - it's not exactly clear...)

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 That ZION is a construct as well as the Matrix?. That ZION is just part of the MATRIX? And the MATRIX that people from ZION visit is just a MATRIX within the MATRIX?. That NEO is a programme, much like SMITH and the ORACLE and the KEY MAKER?

Well that's sort of what I picked up - they have destroyed ZION six times and NEO has been through this six times so what else are we meant to think? To tell you the truth, it wasn't particularly clear - the banter was supposed to be clever but most of it was just rhetorical bollocks ("Your first question is most pertinent and most irrelevant?) I was hacked off with the film LONG before we got to this scene so my dislike isn't based entirely on a misunderstanding of what was going on.  I felt this went the wrong side of ambiguous and stepped into unclear.

(MY money is now on everything being a matrix within a matrix and NEO not actually turning out to be the one. The one is in fact MORPHEUS as was hinted at in the original.

The actual ending itself seemed to come at the wrong place. It just seemed to stop with the "To be concluded".  Now the LORD OF THE RINGS films are split into THREE but they don't finish in the middle of a scene.  You get a bit of closure on the story you've just seen and a bit of set up for the adventure that's coming in the next film. That works for me.  I'd heard a rumour that RELOADED was going to finish with NEO doing a high kick and that REVOLUTIONS would start exactly one frame later as NEO's kick hits home. That would have been kind of cool as well. But this ending is neither - it's just, well, stops.  Surely a better ending would have been them setting out from the wreckage of their ship, lost and having to find a way back to ZION.  

There's a lot of great ideas and scenes hiding in RELOADED but it's not worth wading through lacklustre action, "KUNG FU" philosophy and GCSE PROGRAMMING lectures to get to it. I get the idea that the W brothers got so much hype and money from the first one that they forget some basic scriptwriting rules - ditch any ideas (no matter how cool) if they get in the way of the story!

And there's an annoying teen in it - but he'll probably turn out to be the real ONE.

I made a hoax call to the BBC about Doctor Who.

I called up and said "It's a great show, when can we have it back on?"




(Apologies to the great Bob Dillinger).

Yeah, I wouldn't worry about that.

Sometimes you come up with a brilliant insight about 2000AD or Science Fiction or LIFE in General and think "This  will start a great informed debate" and post it and get no response.  The next day, you type the first thing that pops into your head and before you know it, you're up to a hundred posts.

I still think the longest thread I ever managed to get started was because I casually mentioned that I'd just eaten a whole bag of Jelly Babies by myself...

Welcome aboard.

Bounce.

Sorry folks, just selfishly getting this thread bakc nearer the top of the board so that it's easier to see as DREDDCON approaches.

WINDTALKERS was appalling.

But I loved the THIN RED LINE just cos it was so different.

633 SQUADRON was one I loved as a kiddie but now I can't bear it.  It's got an american in it for the usual reason and a terrible climax where said yank seems able to pick out Ack-Ack guns and blow them to bits from a distance of a mile.

And it's probably got a dog waiting for the pilot that owns it to return.

(But what great music).

(And the guy that plays the bearded Mossie pilot has three absoultely stunning daughters in real life. And his son is a great bloke and a good laugh too).

I sense a conspiracy to cover up the real contents.

Did anyone ever see that episode of THE FRIDAY NIGHT ARMISTICE where Armando Ianucci snuck into the Blue Peter garden, dug up the time capsule and replaced it's contents with jazz mags.

Comedy genius. I wonder if we'll ever find out if he really did it.

The first episode of his solo show was absoultely brilliant as well - where he finds out that people don't really know things, they've just been reading of scripts and prompts without him knowing. I recommended it to *everyone* I knew.  Needless to say that every subsequent epiosde was unadulterated mince.

I like the OZ one as well.   They aren't being serious, you know.


The CHILLI COOK OFF stands out as one of the lesserones I've seen.

But like something else I won't go into, the worst Simpsons episode you've ever seen is still great.  

I just wish I didn't keep seeing the same ones again and again.

OH mighty one, do you think Carlos and Arthur would draw some monkeys in hats for me?

Are you allowed weapons? One of my mates was married to Mark E Smith (not Brixie, sorry boys) and suggests that he might like that.