Critic Cal

It's been a few years since I last watched The Matrix but Switch's quietly horrified "Not like this" is a long-running household meme for reasons which I have entirely forgotten. The line is from the scene where Cypher exposes himself as a traitor to the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar and, having liaised with the Agents to set up a trap, and shot Tank and Dozer on the ship, begins to pull the plugs on those who are still inside the Matrix. Trinity, on the other end of the phone line, watches helplessly as her friends drop down in front of her... "By the way, if you have something terribly important to say to Switch, I'd suggest you say it now," he taunts. All this, in exchange for the promise of a life of blissful ignorance inside the Matrix. As it does many other aspects of the Christian 'story', the film captures the gut-wrenching bleakness of betrayal pretty poignantly: one of their own ...one with whom they have lived and eaten and bravely co...

Quite what the professional (ahem) activities of Karren Brady  had to do with the anticipated proceedings of an away match in the West country remain a mystery to me even now. Nonetheless, defamatory speculations on this particular theme, resounding to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus, comprised the central substance of the prologue to Swindon vs. Leyton Orient , which I attended, in great earnest, earlier this month. Once the action centre stage kicked off, the accompaniment subsided into the popular and versatile refrain most famously exampled by the 1998 classic Vindaloo : "Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urgh, Ori-urgh, Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urrrgh ... Ori-urgh, Ori-urgh, Ori-urrrgh". I must confess I'm not entirely certain of the spelling. There followed a relatively uneventful twenty minutes or so, but for some mildly rankled recitative between a polite young lady spectator who wished to be seated, and a row of youths in front of her who preferred...

There's this great bit in Brave New World where Helmholtz inadvertently re-invents the lost art of poetry. In a lecture 'On the Use of Rhymes in Moral Propaganda and Advertisement', he introduces a technical example of his own: 'Pure madness, of course; but I couldn't resist it.' He laughed. 'I was curious to see what their reactions would be. Besides,' he added more gravely, 'I wanted to do a bit of propaganda; I was trying to engineer them into feeling as I'd felt when I wrote the rhymes. Ford!' He laughed again. 'What an outcry there was! The Principal had me up and threatened to hand me the immediate sack. I'm a marked man.' 'But what were your rhymes?' Bernard asked. 'They were about being alone.' Bernard's eyebrows went up. ( Aldous Huxley , Brave New World , 1931) Being alone -- or feeling any type of mental or emotional 'excess' -- is some achievement in Huxley's imagined world of r...

[NOTE: I just stumbled on  this article  by physicist and priest  John Polkinghorne  which explains everything I'm trying to say below, but better and with all the right credentials...So go away and read that, and if you are at a loose end afterwards rejoin me for my attempts to prove that I am perfectly amenable to a spot of popular culture after all, if somewhat determined to drag it through a theological hedge backwards.] Old  Cliff 's old classic seemed creepy enough to me [1]  before I discovered (that is, was forcibly encouraged to discover) ' Dollhouse ' -- Joss Whedon's playfully poignant (prematurely cancelled) existential sci-fi about programming people to spec. The premise is pretty stirringly dark: a shady operation hiring out good-looking persons ('actives') who have been imprinted with designed-to-order psyches for all manner of purposes, ranging from romantic liaisons (of varying degrees of depravity) and complex criminal dealings ...

Neo: "I know Kung-Fu" Morpheus: "Show me" Classic. (Shame I can't link to a legitimately-uploaded clip...) When I first got a Kindle and began happily filling it with everything I'd ever had half a mind to read (fortunately my taste for old stuff means much of this is free) there was that inevitable moment where I thought "if only I could cut out the middle man -- wire my brain up and download direct", y'know, like in The Matrix . Now, I'm most certainly not disputing the pleasure of reading -- I'd save a choice selection to linger over the old-fashioned slow way. But there's so much information out there, and so little of it in my head! My computer screen, as well as my Kindle, bears testament to this frustrated greed for "knowledge" -- layer-upon-layer of browser windows, each packed to the edges with tabs, tracing a meandering, tenuously-linked train of thought through history, philosophy, literature, current affai...

Interesting how science fiction so often proves an ideal platform for investigating reality. I guess because we get to set the ground rules ourselves, almost like experimental test conditions. In practice, it is hard to identify one's own worldview; it is hard to be consistent within it; it is hard to coexist with people whose worldviews are different. Science fiction sneaks under the radar of our presuppositions by legitimising a suspension of disbelief. That the world in question is invented removes any ambiguity about the rules under which it operates, supplying fictitious but well-defined premises from which to explore all sorts of interesting 'what ifs'.[1] I was delighted by ' Moon '; as playful and thoughtful a sci-fi film as you could hope for. Plenty deep, but completely unpretentious. [2] A brief synopsis, I suppose, to begin…(see the Wikipedia page for more but there's a fair old number of spoilers in there). Sam Bell is nearing the end of a 3-ye...

' Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ' must surely qualify as a work of genius purely on the basis that it makes sense at all, in spite of a completely nonlinear timeline and the seamless switching between the material world and the world of the mind (both in real and manipulated memory). But Gondry (for whom I've rather a soft spot) manages this so creatively that you are drawn into the twists and turns and get to have a pretty good idea of what the film is trying to communicate at any given point. And on top of that the film communicates a lot . Most obviously it deals with the nature of memory and dealing with the past, raising some interesting questions about how we would respond given the hypothetical option of re-writing our personal histories. But at the heart of it is a simple exploration of character and relationship. Clem and Joel have been left hurt by a whirlwhind romance turned tempestuous, and each (independently) decide to have all memories of each othe...