Woah! TV TV TV! Going to Perth was like a television overdrive. My poor little iPod is packed with episodes of That 70s Show and Stargate SG-1. And then I return to more new Alias episodes… And then Mum and Dad finally get me the complete Yes, Minister. To think that at one point I was downloading Smallville.

The cheque… remains problematic. Canadians are nice, but difficult to contact, irritatingly enough. So I don’t have my $1,500 on the way any more, in a guaranteed sense. However my savings have almost reached 20″ iMac level anyway, so nothings getting between me and iMackey goodness.

In politics, I notice Labor have switched from one loser to another to lead the party. I use the term ‘loser’ in a factual way, not in a derogatory one, especially since Howard was a loser several times before he, well, won. Frankly, I don’t get politics. Is Beazley really the best they can do? For that matter, is Howard the best we can do? Where are all the charismatic, intelligent Australians?

Apart from me, I mean. I know where I am.

When a show starts getting crummy, I don’t normally expect it to get good again. Angel season five is probably an exception to the rule — but there were a few other mitigating factors in that instance: the loss of Charisma Carpenter, the reduced budget. Also, the season finale of the previous season was really good, and suggested that happy times might be returning.

The last episode of Alias, as you might remember, was a load of highly over-complicated cow dung, so I wasn’t expecting much good from the upcoming season. Until I read that J.J. Abrams kind of agreed with me about the last season, and had brought in some old Angel writers to help fix things up. Then I was hopeful, and as it transpires, my hopes were well-founded.

This premiere is better than recent Alias in almost every way imaginable. The thing that most commonly irritates me about Alias is the way you finish an episode and almost immediately forget what the hell everyone was supposed to be doing. Sure, you remember the set pieces and the good dialogue, and the Marshall scenes, but not what was actually going on. Well, I don’t, in any case, and I feel it’s because ultimately the story-telling in an average Alias episode isn’t considered as important as the character development. A bit of balance in this area is something that this episode delivers on. The goal of APO[ftn] in this story is reasonably simple, and their method of getting what they want doesn’t involve too many insane scenes of exposition setting up an almost completely irrelevant action sequence.

Well, alright, the action sequence is kind of irrelevant to the main plot, but it was cool, and flowed reasonably well. And involved a samurai sword.

The genius of the episode, however, is in the set-up. Let’s face it; Sydney working for the CIA was getting a little dull. Being a double agent is cool. Being a single agent gets a little straightforward. Especially when you’ve got evil double agents wandering around, it makes the good guys look simple and stupid — something that often happens in adventure drama, which is a shame. Your more exciting good guys are devious, involved protagonists, and they’ve found a way to push Sydney and Co. back into that model. Two words: Black Ops.

Alright then, at first, black operations sound a little daggy. But the CIA has decided that it needs a deniable unit who can do all the things that they, with their every move restricted by government pressure,[ftn] cannot. And so the CIA begins the SD-6[ftn] reunion tour (plus Vaughn). You don’t mess with what worked in the past when you have a comeback tour, so who’s in charge? Arvin Sloane. The man who had Sydney’s fiance killed. The man who had Dixon’s wife killed. The man who pulled Jack’s daughter into the spy industry under his nose. He probably did something bad to Vaughn[ftn] and Marshall too, but I can’t remember. The organisation is called APO, named after the “Authorised Personnel Only” sign on the grubby door leading to their ultra-secret location.

So suddenly, Sydney and her friends are really cool — wearing casual clothes, lounging around, breaking the law for the greater good. Your typical maverick behaviour. And they pull it off quite well. The odd group of characters assembled over the last few years now become a slick team of secret agents, and having them all working together and never having to deal with many CIA extras greatly enhances their coolness.

There are a few dodgy aspects to the episode, of course. The resolution to last year’s cliffhanger smacks too much of the real world of unavailable actors affecting the fictional world, with a touch of “we made this up during the season break” about it as well. The show also pushes the sex button a few too many times in the first half. Having Jennifer Garner in white lingerie is enough to sex up an episode — to then cut from this to her running and jiggling down a street made me feel somewhat patronised. It’s not like I can’t focus on a TV show without breasts to show me the way. In plot terms, the CIA choosing Sloane to be in charge seems a bit stupid, despite how good it feels in the narrative. But ultimately, this is the best season premiere I’ve seen in ages, and one that completely revitalises the series. Awesome.

Footnotes

1. I’ll explain later in the review. If you read footnotes in the way I do, though, I’ve probably already explained it and this bit is redundant.
2. Subtle semi-real world references in this episode, which I like.
3. The evil terrorist agency masquerading as the CIA which Sydney previously worked for, destroyed in season 2.
4. Though, having Sydney’s fiance killed is probably a good thing from where Vaughn’s coming from.

Glad that’s over. Now it’s time to get down the serious business of 2005. There’s some plenty of gaming to be done. I had a dream in which I bought Metroid Prime 2. It’s clearly a portent telling me to buy Metroid Prime 2, which I shall do. Such a shiny cover. The DS is being released here in 32 days.

Dungeons & Dragons Online will probably be released at the end of this year. It’s looking pretty sweet.

So, we went to the bank today to finally try to bank the $1500 Canadian security deposit for the Banff flat. Previous attempts with Matt, Andy and I in different states have met with failure, but with all of us in Perth, we thought we had a good shot. So we drove over to the Commonwealth Bank, without the cheque.

Twenty minutes later, we went to the bank with the cheque, a distinct improvement. Previously, the Cockers had been told that we’d all need to open a joint account in which to cash the cheque. Today we were told that yes, we’d need one of those, but we’d also need a whole bunch of assets with the bank in case the cheque was dodgy. So, no, you can’t have your money. Try next door.

And so we did, afraid that the curse of the cheque would follow us. But they said yeah, sure, we can send that to our friends in Canada who’ll bank it and send the money back to us and put it in Andy’s account. Just sign the back of the cheque.

The moral of the story being that Commonwealth Bank really suck. Or possibly that you shouldn’t count your chickens until the money’s in Andy’s account.

But these new funds will help greatly in buying all the shiny new Apple stuff released today. Well, actually I’m still after my iMac, which is slightly cheaper now, but there was a lot of surprisingly cheap stuff out. An even cheaper flash-drive iPod — the iPod Shuffle — and the Mac mini, a teeny little reasonable-spec Mac. Apple released their own Word Processor/PageMaker kind of program too, but I really don’t use word processors enough to bother with that. Sad, as it’s the most affordable thing Apple have released for a while.

Ah, don’t mind me indulging myself. It’s not too long until March, thankfully…

I saw a deeply tragic thing the other day. Coming home from work a shade early, just before peak hour, I saw two snails starting to leg it across the footpath outside the train station. They weren’t quite in the middle of the pavement yet, but come 5:30 they were going to be half way.

Those snails are dead, man, dead.

Ahem.

Hands up who can’t see the Heart in I ♥ Huckabees properly! I just booted up Mac Firefox and it was having issues. While we’re on grapefruit minutae, if anyone decides to start commenting again, I recommend doing so with a gravatar. Basically they’re little avatars that you can use on any website that supports them. So now there’s an email field when you’re making comments. But your email doesn’t get published or anything.

Hmmm… Important stuff…

I’m leaving for Perth on Tuesday, which should be excellent. Perth is a magical land where people swim and play games and sail and bum around. And American television has begun again, so all is right with the world, except for all those disasters and wars and stuff.

Oh great. It’s a new year so I guess I’d better accomplish something. Hmm. What to do. In the meantime, I am coming to Melbourne on the 28th of Feb at 15:10 by aeroplane.

What I need is a whole bunch of people to donate money to me which I will then use to help the orphans of the tsunami by kidnapping them and selling them as slaves. Would you rather be free and dead from starvation? I thought so. Send me your money now to help these poor kiddies. Please make cheques out to ‘The Andrew Cares Adoption Agency’

Let me make it clear from the start. For me, The Story of the Weeping Camel is the best movie I saw last year, and by quite someway. In fact I would say it is without doubt the best Mongolian film I have ever seen. Admittedly there aren’t many around but what they lack in quantity they more than make up in quality.

The film follows a family of subsistance farmers living in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert and surviving off the sheep and camels they keep. We meet the eight or so family members covering four generations at the start of the camel calving season. All is going well until the last calf of the season, a rare white camel, is born. After a particularly difficult delivery it is rejected by its mother. The main focus of the rest of the story is the family’s attempt to get the mother to accept the baby. So once again in a movie I am reviewing, it is not the dramatic plot which makes this movie so rewarding. Rather it is the way writer-dircetor Byambasuren Davaa so beautifully depicts the simple lives of these people.

There are many scenes of the family’s daily lives: eating meals, herding the animals, tantrums by the children. The interesting, and very effective, choice was made to only subtitle that dialogue which is important for advancing the story, meaning there are long stretches where we have no idea what is being said. This stops the viewer being distracted by the subtitles and allows them to truly be absorbed into the family’s world. After all, until we discover a Babel fish, this is what being in a foreign world is like. So instead we only get the feel of what is happen and it is left to the imagination to work out what is going on.

Like most people living a subsistance life, the family is extremely close to the land on which they live. We see some beautifully shot scenes of the barren, empty landscape but also get a sense of the potential for Nature to release its fury when a severe sandstorm hits. These are deeply spiritual people and we witness several of their ceremonies designed to ensure their continued survival in these harsh surroundings as well as hearing some of their beautiful traditional songs.

What conflict there is in the movie centres around the two youngest boys, Dude and Ugna, are sent to the nearest town to find a musician able to perform the Hoos ceremony to get the mother camel to accept its calf. Ugna is the true star of the film, a beautiful, happy, inquisitive child who overtakes Ivan from The Return and the young monk from Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter… and Spring as best cute little foreign kid at outshining all the adults in his movie. This is his first time outside the family’s isolated home, and his first encounter with such things as television, video games and ice cream. He is immediately enchanted by TV in a way which is hard for us to appreaciate, begging his parents to buy one suggesting it is only a matter of time before their lives too are overtaken by the West.

The Story of the Weeping Camel is what Davaa and co-director Luigi Falorni describe as a narrative documentary — a mix of documentary and drama with some scenes being true documentary with the camera and director being merely observers while others are re-enactments and are loosely directed. Since the likes of Michael Moore long ago did away with the idea of a documentary objectively capturing events as they truly occurred, it isn’t worth worrying about greatly especially when the results are as beautiful and as moving as this. This is a simple movie about people living a far simpler life than we can comprehend, but done so well that by the end of the film the life of a Gobi desert camel farmer will make more sense than any other life you could think of.

This is a funny, crazy film. I loved[ftn] it.

I’d love to just post a review like that. But then I wouldn’t have the length to have a cute picture of Naomi Watts.[ftn] And so, I must continue.

Let me first discuss the word “oddball”. I don’t like it,[ftn] but it gets used by a lot of people and so becomes a handy label. This is what most critics might call an “oddball” movie. Personally, I prefer the words “interesting” and “surprising”, but some people are just funny. Anyhow, if you find yourself liking these sorts of films, this one is a near-perfect one. Often, in your more interesting film, the pacing suffers and things get a bit weary or overly worthy. Huckabees never fell flat for me — there’s always something amusing happening, and it never stays still for very long.

The story is a cross section between a environmental struggle[ftn] against the huge retail chain ‘Huckabees’, and the philosophical struggle between two groups of existential detectives. The director, David O. Russell, previously made the fantastic Three Kings — a movie that perfectly balanced the line between seriousness and wit. In Huckabees, there’s not as much call to be serious, and the film spends very little time being so.

Albert Markovski is an aspiring poet trying to lead an incensed community group against the destruction of local greenery to make way for a new Huckabees store. As the film opens, his biggest problem is a peculiar coincidence, which he goes to a pair of existential detectives to solve for him. Due in part to their interference, but also due to charismatic Huckabees executive Brad Stand, things get wildly out of control very quickly.

This gives everyone involved an opportunity to be very entertaining indeed. Dustin Hoffman gets to be an old, grinning hippy type. Lily Tomlin gets to do completely insane things while all the time keeping a completely straight face. Mark Wahlberg gets to go completely nuts at various people, including Nate Fisher from Six Feet Under. Jude Law gets to be smarmy and sarcastic. Naomi Watts gets to be glamorous… at first, and then tremendously funny. Isabelle Huppert gets to be sexy and nihilistic.[ftn] And Jason Schwartzman sits in the middle and does a fantastic job of being the straight-ish guy.[ftn]

I’m not going to say any more about the film. If you’ve seen the trailer,[ftn] you know just what to expect. The script is great, the acting is great, the direction is great, the special effects are great.[ftn] If you like… those films that everyone calls oddball, you’ll like this one.

Footnotes

1. Note that I say “I loved it” and not “I hearted it”. This is because I can speak English. If you catch anyone saying “I Heart Huckabees”, shoot them please.[ftn] You’ll need quite a few bullets from the looks of things.
2. If the subtle trend towards pictures of cute girls in reviews is concerning anyone, please note the parade of ugly people in Andy’s recent Lost review and stop complaining.
3. It’s like “quirky”. Ugh.
4. People with little tolerance for poetry, environmental issues and a few other “left” issues might find aspects of the film irritating. At times I did feel like my opinions on the matter were being taken for granted.
5. That’s probably the word. Tell me if I’ve got it wrong.
6. Albert comes from the Arthur Dent school of characterisation. Although he’s perhaps just a little crazier than Arthur.
7. Best trailer I’ve seen in ages. No big spoilers, perfect idea of what the film is about.[ftn]
8. I’m glad we’ve gotten to the stage where digital effects are being used by more than just the big science fiction epics.
9. And by the by — you wouldn’t believe what a hassle it was to be able to use the heart symbol for the title of this review. There’s extra code in the workings of Grapefruit just to deal with that symbol. So stay tuned for the next computer game turned fiction piece: I ♥ Cortana.
10. Unlike the Ladder 49 trailer which makes you feel like you’ve watched the entire damn film already.

I continue to learn about plane crashes and tropical island survival from this show. The first step will be to involved in such an incident. The plane in Lost left from Australia and I fly in planes that leave from Australia all the time so I’m set there. I’ve been debating the value of being a doctor after a plane crash. On the one hand I could save people’s lives and be a hero, but if I wasn’t a doctor the injured people would die and there’d be more supplies for the rest of us. A tough call. The seriously injured people probably wouldn’t survive anyway. Medical assistance would just stretch out their painful death.

From that last bit you may have guessed that the injured Marshal isn’t doing well.[ftn] He has had the metal in his belly removed but there aren’t strong enough antibiotics to fight his infection.[ftn] The Marshal’s hapless plight highlights the theme this episode: the slow change of the group from following civilised laws to a more survival orientated outlook. Sawyer, while looting alcohol and cigarettes from inside the plane, laughs at Jack’s attempts to save the marshal and tells him to wake up to the fact that they’re “in the wild”. The climax at the end of the episode is a confrontation about what to do with the Marshal. I wouldn’t get too attached to him, if I were you.[ftn]

It’s looking like each episode will focus on a different character past and tell their back story. This episode Kate is the one suffering from a flashback disorder. She’s severely afflicated and spends most of the episode staring into space. It’s a contagious disease with a short incubation period. Her flashbacks leave some questions unanswered so I’m hoping she’ll catch the disease again.

For the rest of the survivors, once the hiking group from last episode return, they start making some long term plans for survival. Shannon is still convinced they’ll be rescued and won’t do anything to help. No one has dealt with the dead bodies; they’re going to stink up the place soon. There’s plenty of other subplots on the boil but they’re too numerous to mention here. On the naked front, there is a backshot of Sun topless.

The episode ends with a cheery music montage and a sudden close up of the bald guy looking evil.[ftn] He’s up to something.

Footnotes

1. Or possibly not. It’s been sometime since my last review about Lost and you may have forgotten the plot so far. To sum up: The Marshal is injured and the prognosis isn’t good.
2. Mr Chemist, I may be involved in a plane crash so I need your strongest antibiotics.
3. He isn’t even given a name, so he’s a goner. Everyone just calls him the Marshal[ftn]
4. The one with a scar over one eye.
5. Unless that’s his name, although I don’t know any parents who’d call their kid ‘the Marshal’.