November 2006

All shiny and new

This afternoon, faced with an ever-increasing barrage of spam, all originating from different sources but conforming to the same basic pattern, I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type, v3.32 (I’d previously been using v2.661, from around February 2003). I looked into various plug-ins and hacks for adding comment verification and blacklisting, but quickly discovered that those that worked with older versions of Movable Type were either (a) no longer available or (b) more difficult to set up than they were worth. More recent versions of Movable Type include anti-spam measures by default, many of which are highly customisable.

As you can see above, there is now a Junk filter, with a tweakable “threshold” - in other words, you can set just how aggressively it treats incoming comments. Since I upgraded, the level of spam I have received has shrunk to nothing.

As an added bonus, the new version has a much sleeker user interface. You won’t, of course, see any cosmetic changes on the site itself, but, on the plus side, I have some eye candy to look at as I’m typing, so perhaps my posts will be more cheerful than they were before!

There have been a couple of downsides. Due to Movable Type’s notoriously vague documentation, it took me a long time to get everything shipshape - in fact, on a couple of occasions, I became convinced that I’d broken the thing entirely - but trial and error eventually paid off. Still, if you find something that’s not working as it’s supposed to, please let me know.

Additionally, stricter control over tags has meant that I’ve had to make a couple of minor changes to certain aspects of the site. Namely, because of the way the coding works (too complex to get into here), the Monthly Archive pages (e.g. November 2006) can no longer have the month and year on the page title - they now all simply read “Monthly Archive”. It’s annoying, and, bizarrely, categories don’t appear to be affected in this way (e.g. Web), but I’m willing to put up with this in exchange for added security. I’ll keep looking for a fix, though, and if I can find a way of reinstating this (admittedly minor) feature, I’ll do so.

Update, November 17, 2006 10:00 PM: I managed to fix the archive header problem more quickly than I expected. Apparently, the “MTEntryDate” tag can’t be used outside the “MTEntries” container, but the “MTArchiveDate” tag can. You can read more at Daggle.com, whose webmaster discovered a similar problem with the tag (although he was using it for a different purpose).

Nothing but SPAM!

This morning I woke up to find an inordinate number of spam comments on this site (approaching 100). I’ve banned a whole number of IP addresses from posting, so, if you suddenly find yourself unable to comment, email me - whiggles[at]ntlworld[dot]com - and I’ll sort it out.

Update, November 17, 2006 02:25 PM: I’ve now updated my aged install of Movable Type to the latest version, which includes its own built-in and customisable spam-blocking facilities. Hopefully this should cut down on the management hassles. I’ve also unblocked all the previously banned IP addresses… all but one.

Update, December 19, 2006 06:01 PM: Fixed dead link.

Commentary update

I spent a considerable part of today working on my Profondo Rosso commentary, and I’m happy to report that just under 33 minutes of material are laid down. It’s slow going, mainly because I want it to be as smooth and seamless as possible, so I’m going back over as many moments as possible that seem stilted or unnatural and re-recording them. This of course plays havoc with the synchronisation, given that, if the length of an early portion changes even very slightly, it’ll throw the remainder of the track out of sync.

I’m terribly afraid that I’m going to dry up at some point half-way through the track - I am, after all, recording for a 126-minute film (Suspiria, at only 98 minutes, was tough enough), so I’m going to have to dig out as many essays and articles as possible for inspiration. So far, I’ve rubbished Marcia Landy’s book Italian Film (according to her, the murder of the Jewish Helga is intended to make us draw comparisons between this and the Holocaust), slandered Strip Nude For Your Killer and spoken at length about the role of the supernatural in the film. Right now I’m just getting into the juicy stuff, namely women’s rights and arm-wrestling contests. Wish me luck!

Cars

Cars once again confirms Pixar’s status as the premier creator of theatrical animation in North America, and, while this disc is decidedly lacking in terms of extras, the transfer and audio are of a high standard. No doubt this film will see a more impressive release at a later date, perhaps when Ratatouille arrives in Summer 2007. Until then, however, this release should tide eager viewers over.

Pixar’s latest animated feature arrives on DVD courtesy of Disney Home Entertainment. I’ve reviewed the R1 release of Cars, which smells of double-dip syndrome.

HD DVD reviews coming soon

Apparently, DVD Times will soon be able to acquire review copies of UK HD DVD releases directly from Warner. This should mean that I will be able to provide coverage of more titles, including ones that I would not have otherwise picked up.

Blue Underground re-releasing select Italian horror titles in 2007

Source: Fangoria

Blue Underground has announced that it will reissue a slew of Italian horror titles previously released by Anchor Bay on February 27. Dario Argento’s DEEP RED and INFERNO, Mario Bava’s SHOCK, Lucio Fulci’s CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD and DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING and Armando Crispino’s AUTOPSY will come with the previous disc extras and be available for a limited time only, each priced at $14.95.

Hmm, could be good, could be not. The optimist in me would like to think that these releases will feature brand new transfers and rectify some of the problems with the earlier releases - e.g. the frozen end credits for Deep Red, the lack of original mono audio on Deep Red and Inferno, the lack of subtitles on all of them - but the pessimist suspects that these are just the same discs repackaged. The almost identical cover art, and the very low recommended retail price, certainly don’t bode well.

Still, this might be a good opportunity for me to pick up a copy of the currently out of print Don’t Torture a Duckling to replace my copy which disappeared in the post this summer. And, if it gets more people to watch these films, so much the better. You know, if Blue Underground (or does Anchor Bay still have the rights?) has any sense, they’ll release a full blown 30th Anniversary Special Edition of Suspiria in 2007, to coincide with the release of Mother of Tears. And, while they’re at it, they can include the original 4-channel audio mix instead of the bungled monstrosity on the current DVD.

Whiggles gets a new music machine

A few days ago, I mentioned that I was considering retiring my Creative Zen Micro MP3 player in favour of something with a higher capacity. I didn’t expect to act on my intentions quite so soon, but a sealed, unused Sony NW-HD5 (the same player my brother uses) was up for auction on eBay, so I figured that this was too good an opportunity to pass up.

The HD5 was only available for a few months, but it has a number of benefits over your average MP3 player. First of all, it has actual buttons rather than a finicky iPod-style touch-pad. Second, for such a small and reasonably-priced machine, it has an impressive capacity of 20 GB and a battery life of around 40 hours (using the proprietary ATRAC format for audio encoding - yes, Sony once again has to do things differently from everyone else). Most importantly, however, it is considered to have the best audio quality of all the MP3 players tested in a round-up by CNET, whereby the participants were blindfolded and made to try each player without being told which model it was (the gimmicky and over-priced iPod predictably ranked last).

Personally, I’m looking forward to being able to have my entire music library stored on one device again. It’s quite annoying to have to keep swapping material on and off my Zen due to its meagre 5 GB capacity. Hopefully it’ll arrive before too long.

Update, December 19, 2006 06:02 PM: Fixed dead link.

Giallo whimsies

This morning I received a copy of La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film from Amazon.com. Billed as “the first academic study of the giallo film in English”, this 196-page book is the work of Mikel J. Koven, a film and television studies lecturer at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, who was good enough to send me copies of two of his giallo-related essays back when I was writing my dissertation. These chapters, it would seem, have been appropriated into the book, which attempts to discuss these films from a vernacular perspective - in other words, studying them from the point of view of the audiences they were originally aimed at rather than getting all caught up in notions of “quality” and “art”. (Most critics and academics tend to reject these films, and their study, because they don’t consider them high-brow enough.) I’ve only read the first one and a half chapters, but so far it seems like excellent stuff, and is the sort of study that the giallo genre sorely needs.

Oh yeah, and yesterday, I recorded the first 10 minutes or so of my Profondo Rosso commentary. I did three passes at it, but eventually came to the conclusion that, without a precise script, it’s very difficult for me to produce something that can actually be listened to (way too much “umming” and “awwing”). This morning, therefore, I rewrote what I’d recorded in script form, and will hopefully start recording from the start again tomorrow.

The Waif of Persephone

Do yourselves a favour and check out this amazing clip from a superb-looking animated film being developed by Nick Cross, a former Spumco alumnus.

Ready, set… go!

Yesterday, I received a review copy of the Region 1 release of Cars, the latest Pixar Talking Picture. My brother got the limited edition Australian tin box release for his birthday, and a side by side comparison reveals that there isn’t a great deal of difference between the two. While neither are as eye-poppingly crisp as the excellent PAL release of The Incredibles, they’re definitely both better than the disappointing transfers afforded to Finding Nemo, and stack up reasonably favourably against the transfers of the various other Pixar DVD releases. Expect a full review at DVD Times within the next week.

PS. It seems that I have a fan. A fellow calling himself “Nick Jordan” (presumably not related to the fictional television character of the same name) has left me some of the most delightful feedback. He is, it would appear, a huge fan of both my site and my Suspiria audio commentary, and can hardly hold his bladder at the thought that I am about to undertake another. You can read his charming commendations here and here.

Update, December 19, 2006 06:03 PM: Fixed dead links.

Yes, I will do another commentary

I’m going to record another audio commentary. I’m posting this now because I figure I’ve been stalling for far too long, and that if I’ve actually said I’m going to do it, then there is at least some chance that enough people will bug me about it to make sure I actually get it done. Then again, it didn’t do much good the last few times I said I was going to do this…

Anyway, I’ve decided this time that I’m going to do Dario Argento’s Profondo Rosso (Deep Red to all you Neanderthals out there!), for a few reasons. First of all, I wrote an essay on it earlier this year, so I have some existing material to work with. Second of all, I want to cover myself because I’m not sure I’ll have enough material to talk through an entire film, so I’ve decided to go with a title that I feel is iconic enough that, if need be, I can turn it into a discussion of the giallo genre as a whole. Profondo Rosso is regarded by many as the ultimate giallo, and it’s also one of the few titles that pretty much anyone with an interest in the genre will own, so I figure it’s a safer bet than going with something pretty obscure like Death Laid an Egg or The Black Belly of the Tarantula.

I’d really like to make this one a little more freeform than before. I was listening to my Suspiria commentary (available here) recently, as well as the provisional material I recorded on Tenebre and A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, and I found them far too stilted for my liking. It’s obvious that I’m simply reading from a script, so my intention this time will be to have a selection of topics to cover, an attempt to basically pull a discussion out of my ass on the spot. How successful this will be remains to be seen - I’m not exactly a confident speaker, and my ability to improvise and come up with wacky anecdotes on the spot is not exactly great - but, having listened to a whole bunch of audio commentaries, including those by both filmmakers and critics, I’ve come to the conclusion that the non-scripted ones are the easiest to listen to.

Wish me luck! (And hope that I actually finish this one.)

Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on usable as PC drive

Source: Xbox-Scene

Apparently, Microsoft’s upcoming HD DVD add-on for their Xbox 360 console will also be usable as an external PC drive, provided you can get a hold of the requisite driver. It’s probably all a bit dodgy, and I’m sure Microsoft, Toshiba et al won’t be thrilled by this development, but it’s certainly a very tempting proposition, given that the £130/$200 add-on is likely to be considerably cheaper than dedicated PC HD DVD drives for some time.

Update, November 12, 2006 12:11 PM: Unfortunately, it looks as if playback from the drive is extremely unlikely. Apparently, it was hard enough just to make the file structure readable.

Man to Man with Dean Learner

And once again it’s shit. By my count, that’s two complete duds, one mediocre and one slightly amusing.

No back-door region coding for Toshiba

Source: Lyris Lite

It’s official: Toshiba does not intend to patch the region-free HD DVD playback capabilities of its players now or at any point in the future. Simply put: if you buy one that can play HD DVDs from any territory, it will continue to be able to do so until the day it dies, with no “fixes” being sneaked in via firmware updates. Many people in the AV community expected this to be the case already, although the news that Samsung had surreptitiously disabled the multi-region DVD capabilities of its Blu-ray player via a firmware update disguised as a bug fix had given some people cause for concern.

Music mania

Two CDs I ordered from Nettwerk a couple of weeks back arrived yesterday: Silence and Passenger, both by Canadian singer/songwriter Tara MacLean, from 1996 and 1999 respectively.

I don’t remember where I first heard about Tara, but I vaguely remember seeing her name bandied around in the same sentence as Sarah McLachlan, which, as it turns out, is quite appropriate. Apart from originating from the same country and being published under the same label, their sound and subject matter are very similar - so much so that, if you like one, I’d say it’s pretty much a given that you’ll like the other. These two CDs seem to be quite difficult to track down - they’ve presumably gone out of print, or were never released in the UK in the first place, so I had to go straight to the source at Nettwerk to get my copies. Amazon.com seems to have both in stock, though, so your mileage may vary.

Oh, and I seriously need an MP3 player with a larger capacity. My Creative Zen Micro has served me well for the past two years (almost), but I think it’s time I looked at the alternatives. The 20 GB (that’s four times the space I have on my Zen) Sony NW-HD5 seems to constitute the best combination of audio quality and functionality, but unfortunately it has long since been discontinued and seems to fetch extortionate prices even second-hand. We’ll see.

Nightfall: the story so far

I’ve now been playing Guild Wars: Nightfall for a little over a week, so I thought I’d offer up some opinions on it.

First, I would definitely say that this is the best Guild Wars campaign so far. On reflection, Factions is definitely the weakest of the three, due to the fact that you reach the level cap of 20 far too quickly, from which point on there is very little to do with your character other than save up for more expensive equipment and unlock the occasional elite skill. Its setting is also rather tedious, with the action being consigned to a series of never-ending shanty town streets once you leave the island on which you start. The missions are also extremely punishing for solo players such as myself, making partying up a virtual requirement for their completion.

I’m happy to say that Nightfall rectifies all these problems. While the levelling process is nothing like as drawn out as that of the original Guild Wars (where I’d explored nearly half of the world map before hitting level 20), it has been slowed down enough that you don’t feel you’ve accomplished everything as soon as you leave the starting area. Yes, like Factions, you start on an isolated island and don’t progress to the mainland until you’ve completed a series of missions designed to ease you into the game. Unlike Factions, however, the world feels more expansive and open-ended. Yes, it’s true that the narrative progresses in a fairly linear fashion, and broadly speaking you only ever have one primary quest to complete at any given time, meaning that you essentially progress from one mission to the next in an A-to-B manner, but the world itself is less claustrophobic and the locations considerably more varied.

It’s also considerably easier than Factions, at least going by the 11 (out of a total of 20) primary missions that I’ve completed thus far. A lot of that has to do with the fact that, unlike Factions, you never get the feeling that you’ve been thrown head-first into a battle you can’t handle. Instead, enemies are fairly manageable and tend to be spaced out in such a manner that you can fight them on your own terms, rather than suddenly being set upon by massive, insurmountable hordes. The hireable hero characters also play a part, though. These are essentially fully-fledged characters just like yourself that are controlled by the computer. You can select equipment and skills for them, and can manage their stats. They also level up in the same way that you do, and you can buy new skills for them. As such, they’re much more effective than the henchmen underlings that solo players previously had to make do with, because you actually have some control over the way they behave.

This game is well worth the purchase, overall, regardless of whether or not you already own either of the other Guild Wars campaigns (remember, they function as standalone games that can “plug into” each other if you have more than one installed). I’m not sure if the series can sustain another instalment - after all, it’s essentially more of the same with a few tweaks to the pacing, setting and difficulty, with the general gameplay mechanics remaining the same - but if you only pick up one of these games, it might as well be this one. They’ve certainly got the formula perfected to a fine art.

Blood and Bava

Along with Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava is often considered to be part of the holy trinity of Italian horror cinema. In 1963, he wrote and directed The Girl Who Knew Too Much, which is widely considered to be the first ever giallo film, and his influence can be felt in virtually every American slasher film of the 1980s, with his Bay of Blood (also known as Twitch of the Death Nerve) having been ripped off wholesale by Sean S. Cunningham with Friday the 13th.

Despite this, however, I’ve never really been able to get into Bava’s films in the way that I have with Argento, Fulci and other less immediately memorable giallo directors like Massimo Dallamano, Aldo Lado, Luciano Ercoli and Paolo Cavara. Bava is one of the finest visual craftsmen ever to have lived - that much, I think, is undeniable - and the minuscule budgets he had to work with only serves to make his achievements all the more remarkable. I think that he is often let down by his scripts, though. Bava was very much a “director for hire” in the traditional sense: he would turn his hand to anything in order to put food on the table, and, as such, he never claimed a genre as his own in the way that Argento did with giallo and Sergio Leone did with the Western. A lot of Bava’s films, therefore, fail to engage me, because I often get the feeling that he wasn’t truly invested in what he was doing. As visually awe-inspiring as his work is, he often seems to have found himself working with rather generic scripts, and while I don’t think that an amazing screenplay is by any means the be-all and end-all of a film, most of the time I struggle to understand the big deal with his films.

If The Girl Who Knew Too Much was the film that started the giallo phenomenon, it was Blood and Black Lace, made a year later, that solidified many of the archetypes that would be adopted wholesale during the boom of the early 1970s: the masked, black-attired killer; the cast of nubile women being offed; the psychosexual nature of the murders; the parade of shifty suspects, all with something to hide. The narrative, as such, seems a bit derivative, although it must be remembered that this is the one that set the stage for what was to come. It’s not a particularly remarkable plot, though, even taking into account its position as a forerunner to the genre: a series of murders are taking place, the victims all models from a prestigious agency. The usual shifty-looking characters are on the prowl, and, despite dropping like flies, none of the women are particularly eager to divulge what they know. I doubt that this would have been considered original stuff even at the time of its release. Rightly or wrongly, however, it has been retroactively identified as the first ever “body count movie”.

What does stand out as remarkable, though, is the photography. Even by Bava’s already high standards, this is one incredible-looking piece of work. He originally trained as a painter, and it shows: every frame is expertly composed, with a level of three-dimensionality that sucks you into the world, despite its obviously artificial appearance. It’s obvious that Argento was heavily influenced by this when he did Suspiria 13 years later, and yet the comparisons are somewhat unjust. Whereas Suspiria’s setting could never be mistaken for that of the real world, Blood and Black Lace’s feels authentic despite its deliberate artifice.

In the final analysis, therefore, I can’t claim to be as enamoured by Blood and Black Lace as some, but I appreciate it as a key film partially responsible for spawning one of the Italian film industry’s most lucrative filoni, and as an outstanding achievement in a technical sense. This is definitely a film that deserves to be seen by a wider audience, so that people can appreciate not only where the giallo genre came from, but also the American slasher movement of the 1970s and 80s. Bava definitely doesn’t get the recognition he deserves as a trendsetter.

PS. I’m incredibly grateful to Lee for his copy of the German DVD release of the film, which is vastly preferable to either of the two releases put out by VCI in the US.

Veronica Mars and chums

My copy of the second season of Veronica Mars arrived this morning. I’ve watched the first two episodes, and three things strike me:

(1) The Previously on Veronica Mars… recaps that are meant to occur at the start of each episode have been unceremoniously shaved off, a la the US releases of Buffy and Angel. This strikes me as annoying for several reasons: first, the Season 1 set had them intact; second, just because we have access to all 22 episodes in one box doesn’t mean we haven’t forgotten what happened several episodes earlier; third, it disrupts the timing and momentum, and, in the first episode, results in a noticeable jump in the audio (I’ve no idea whether any other episodes are effective.

(2) The transfers have been improved somewhat since the previous season. Season 1 looked abnormally soft, and the grain pattern caused some noticeable artefacting. Season 2 isn’t perfect - it’s certainly not in the same league as the PAL transfers for Alias - but it’s a lot easier on the eyes than its predecessor.

(3) There are no English subtitles - only French and Spanish. What is this, the dark ages?

All in all, though, I’ve enjoyed the first couple of episodes. It looks like it’s going to be pretty engaging stuff. Does Veronica have to be quite so smug, though? A superiority complex is really not an attractive trait in a protagonist. Look where it got Buffy in her final season…

Asterix and the Vikings

Asterix and the Vikings leaves an overall impression of being one of the better adaptations of the series. We’ve been starved for traditional animation lately, and to see a new film that is not only hand-drawn but also drawn well is a rare treat indeed. Still, if you’re already a fan of the book, don’t expect this adaptation to convey the depth and tone of the source material, although, conversely, it may give you a newfound appreciation for what Goscinny and Uderzo were able to achieve in only 44 pages that the filmmakers struggle to convey in 75 minutes. That said, a new Asterix has been a long time in coming, and I only hope we don’t have to wait another 12 years for the next one.

After a 12-year absence, Asterix the Gaul returns with a new animated adventure. I’ve reviewed the R2 French release of Asterix and the Vikings, which features both English and French audio and an array of extras.

NTL are absolutely useless

This morning, we had an engineer from NTL out bright and early to test the strength of our Internet connection and replace our modem for the second time. Why? Guess. That’s right: we keep getting disconnected, several times per day, and I don’t know about you, but the recommendation of the gentleman Lyris spoke to from a call centre in India that we “unplug the modem and plug it back in whenever it happens” really doesn’t sound like much of a solution.

Like I said, we’ve had the modem replaced before, and it did a fat lot of good. Predictably, the new device had only been plugged in for a few hours before we got our first disconnect - in the middle of a game of Guild Wars: Nightfall, right when I was about to finish a particularly grueling mission. Bzam! There goes an hour’s worth of gameplay. And, surprise surprise, the same thing has just happened again, meaning that I’ve lost another 45 minutes or so of gameplay into the great blue yonder.

What is NTL playing at? We’re not the only ones having this problem, as a quick visit to the NTHellWorld forums will tell you - and yet we continue to get the same old bullshit. “Do you have a firewall running?” “Are you connecting via a router?” “Have you tried rebooting your computer?” Yes to all three, and that’s really beside the point. This is not what I would consider acceptable functionality by any stretch of the imagination, and yet, despite this problem having been with us for something in the region of two years, the dimwitted technicians don’t seem to have any intention of dealing with the problem. Then again, this is the same company that drilled a hole in our living room wall to pass through a cable that was meant to have been inserted at the complete opposite end of the house…