British Politics and Gojira

TY, huffpost

Over the next 48 hours, I'm expecting the inevitable surge of political posts and blogs from my friends. Why? Because the United Kingdom Independence Party has done exceptionally well (relatively speaking) in the European Parliament and local elections, despite having dropped some interesting news bombshells over the past few weeks. On that last one, feel free to check the crime statistics; White British tends to commit a hell of a lot of them.

So rather than wax lyrical about something that the media's going to pound into your face for the next month or so, let's talk about motherfucking Godzilla - specifically, the critical reception. Spoilers are inevitable, but I will try to mark them out.

Did you know the Sun did a double page
spread of the tsunami with GODZILLA on it

I'm a huge fan of summer blockbusters; they're big, stupid and visually beautiful, and Godzilla was no exception. Kaiju films are something I know plenty about, but the bug never really bit me until Pacific Rim came out. Everything from the soundtrack to the visuals clicked into a big, stupid, visually beautiful 2 hour beat-down featuring one of my favourite British actors, Idris Elba. I could wax lyrical about it.

Instead let's talk Metacritic, and the lowly 62 score Godzilla has at time of me publishing this blog. Noah has a higher score at 68 for crying out loud. It's not all bad; a user score of 7.5 is nearer the mark but in a film as brutally faithful to the source material as Godzilla 2014, something's amiss here.

It’s always fun to watch scaly, skyscraper-size behemoths lay waste to civilization, but a bit more human drama wouldn’t have gone amiss.

Tom Huddleston from Time Out New York is clearly demented in his review, stating "It’s always fun to watch scaly, skyscraper-size behemoths lay waste to civilization, but a bit more human drama wouldn’t have gone amiss." Tom Huddleston seems to have missed the giant lizard memo. I admit the human factor suffers from World War Z syndrome, in that the expansion to silver screen has cast aside the individualism, but I'll throw Huddleston a bone here. The real fault is that the human drama is a bit shit. The main actor, Aaron Taylor-Johnson, is out of his element and the superb first thirty minutes highlight the problems; you can hand that to Bryan Cranston and Ken Watanabe. The latter does an excellent fly-catching impression with his mouth, but dammit if he can't nail those one liners. There's certainly enough drama, and while it meanders through good and bad the collective result is 'it'll do'.

The classic Gojira. Less hench.

Only the very weakest or strongest material goes for the throat

On the other end of the spectrum, there's the similarly recently-escaped-from-Bedlam Richard Corliss who drops a real hum-zinger, stating that "Edwards’ Godzilla dawdles toward its Doomsday climax; the movie could win a prize for Least Stuff Happening in the First Two-Thirds of an Action Film." Fuck me Corliss, I'll admit Alien was a tension-filled nightmare fest but it took its sweet time getting there, and so do many films of top-notch calibre. Equally, I can see what Corliss is on about. The human drama and the Kaiju drama don't mesh neatly, if at all. There's a nigh-obsessive gunwank occurring throughout the film with the American military masochistically getting slaughtered and rendered totally impotent. That's fine, but it's not a plot device except in the weakest of films (i.e. Battle Los Angeles).

What about the users? Well, the repeated rant is that Godzilla doesn't get to the point.

So what the fresh hell is going on? My guess is a two-pronged problem. There's a thing in DJing that's considered to be the fine art of keeping a crowd tense for that one amazing tune by constantly dropping in key bits of the song. Pendulum's Blood Sugar introduction, Psy's Gangnam Style's op, op-op - you know the kind of thing. You tease the crowd so when they get their inevitable payoff, it's all the more cathartic. You see the same thing in horror; build tension, build tension, false alarm, build tension, scary thing, rinse and repeat. Only the very weakest or strongest material goes for the throat.

Giant mechs, always a hard act to follow.

The problem is that Godzilla 2014 is ballsy because of this. Major spoilers COD4 style, It kills Bryan Cranston within 15 minutes. It does insane tension builds and then says 'fuck you, it's a seagull', and it hints and hints at an epic fight 3 times before it actually occurs. I admit, it's not the best fight, but dropping in the classic fire breathing thing? Sublime, awesome, and totally unexpected. It takes real skill for that to work, and to be frank, it misses the mark. Major spoilers over. 

This is what makes Godzilla both subtle and borderline arrogant; it takes an approach to tension and development that is incredibly slow boil that fails to appease (and in a way, pander) to audience expectations of immediate wish fulfilment. Yes, Godzilla takes an hour to appear but when he does, it's all the more powerful. Pacific Rim could pull off starting big because it could always go bigger - plasma cannons, swords, heavy ordnance, more robots - but in Godzilla we're all waiting for one thing; the Mutos and Godzilla to duke it out. Whether the time taken for that to occur is worth it is down to you as an individual - I'll admit the first 30 minutes of the film were by far and away the strongest, but it was a good ride nonetheless. If it were up to me, I'd have gone the much creepier route and made the Muto way, way more powerful and concentrated on the human thing to the extreme, making it encompass the classic force-of-nature Gojira material - then an insane fight to finish. But hey, there's always Godzilla 2, right?

Oculus Rift; A Wrathful Ramble

Right, it's 8:30am and I've been up since 10am yesterday. I've got an essay in by 1pm today that I haven't proofed, smoothed out the critical references or even finished but hey, blog time!

So, the Oculus Rift. Being an amateur dev I have a few things to say about the Facebook acquisition. For those who don't know, the Oculus Rift was/is set to dominate the VR market, showing everyone the folly of 3D and bringing us wonderful on-your-face virtual reality with modern technology. That's the ability to move your head and have that motion tracked in-game, with the additional tech benefits of high frame rates, low latency and high resolution. Check out this demo of the old version one model running with Team Fortress 2.

Then about a week ago, Facebook decided to buy the Rift and the internet threw a collective shit-fit. Putting aside the massive ethical issues - the Kickstarters who funded the original project seeing their investment moving in a direction they didn't pay out for, Facebook's highly questionable background in development, and the big questions revolving around advertising - it placed a pretty large downer on the bubbling enthusiasm that had been merrily chugging along since day one of the Rift's announcement.

Simply put, I find the idea of Facebook buying the Rift beyond belief. There's a Guardian article that raises some ok points, but it's the comment section where things really shine. Arguments are thrown back and forth, positives and negatives, PCGamer did a thing on it along with every two-bit game journalism site I'm sure. The positives and negatives seem to boil down to 'Facebook has loads of money' and 'Facebook is shit'. I'm inclined to the latter. As QuestionableTea puts it on the Guardian,

I feel like a lot of people aren't too annoyed that they sold out, its just that they sold out to facebook. A sell out to AMD/Valve/NVidia or even Google would probably be welcomed.

Right on the money, QuestionableTea. AMD and Nvidia are the biggest GPU manufacturers on the planet. They know hardware and they know it well, and have the raw capital and software skills to back it up. Nobody could have integrated the Rift's hardware better, or helped with software iteration (though considering my current drivers on my rig, debateable). Good old fashioned manufacturing manpower.

Valve? They've been working on some alright hardware for the past year. Both the controller and console/PC thing look like they need work, but it's Valve. They're software kings and don't you forget it. I maintain that the biggest reason for Half-Life 2 taking so long to come out was that they spent most of that time creating the world's first proper bumpmap shaders - in-house.

Hell, 'even' Google? They've dominated the search algorithm scene since 1998 and have pushed into hardware, software, cloudware, they're made operating systems for crying out loud. Google is where good tech goes to get better. Like the Apple of ten years ago, what Google lacks in innovation it makes up with sheer damn willpower and a thriving skillset.

What does Facebook have? Well, they bought WhatsApp and Instagram right? Two massive content sharing and communication platforms just like Faceb- oh. Ohhhh. Well, they're rich anyway right? Right guys? Oh who am I kidding they may as well have hired Peter Molyneux

Checking Your Sources - Part One of Two

Let's start with a nice introductory piece. See this picture? Funny, amirite?

It's another one of those 'justgirlythings' parodies that's currently doing the rounds. To put it in a nutshell, poor old justgirlythings has been posting shitty items and concepts under the pretense of it being 'girly' for some time now, and it's so open to parody it's silly. It doesn't help they've been running out of ideas lately; take for example this gem. Or this one. Stay classy, tumblr.

So that picture up there? Well it derives from a very particular, old but well-known album that also happens to be doing the rounds right now - a photographer documenting his wife's decline and ultimate death from cancer.

Yep, still funny, amirite? Go check your sources. We'll be back after the break to discuss why this matters.

Red Nose Day

There is a grim cynicism surrounding Red Nose Day in the UK. With Comic Relief having just visited our screens, there is an acute awareness in a time of severe cuts and economic concern that ultimately, despite 25 years of donations, the money is being poured down a pit. With a record £75 million raised last night, the UK has never been more generous - or critical.

This is an understandable viewpoint; huge swathes of Africa are still suffering from diseases eradicated in the West decades ago, while something as simple as a mosquito net is nigh impossible to come by. Other more developed sectors suffer from a horrific inequality between the rich and the poor, while failed governments use their brutality to keep a broken population in check. In terms of landmark change, Live8, Red Nose Day, and many other charities and telethons aside have failed to change anything and forever will fail to change anything. Despite 25 years of giving and half a billion pounds, the UK has not been revolutionised. Africa has largely been changed by political maneuvering.

However, this is a hugely reductive statement to make - Red Nose Day is not about changing the system, from shaking up a nightmare of human need that sits next to thriving nations like South Africa, Nigeria or Algeria, because it knows it never will. Red Nose Day is about changing individual lives; not out of some moral obligation or colonial guilt trip, but because we have the means to make a few small changes, and if that's all that can be achieved, then so be it. Red Nose Day will never save the world, and the money it earns is dumped down a hole never to be seen again - but it will make all the difference to several hundred thousand people in a continent of a billion people.

It is easy to be dismissive of Africa as a lost cause, but with many nations now proudly generating considerable GDPs despite political turmoil, it is not that simple. Anyone who does five minutes of research could find it is a continent as diverse as Europe or America, in topography, geography, politics and society. To dismiss it as a 'lost cause' is as productive as not giving £5 because it 'won't make a difference, and it hasn't in 25 years', because Africa, like questioning the effectiveness of giving to Red Nose Day, isn't that simple.



NB; there are many other issues with RND besides whether it's worth it, but I'm not addressing them here.