Frood is putting leftovers in the fridge for tomorrow’s lunch. He’s singing.

“What are you singing?”

“The putting the cous cous salad in the fridge song.”

“?”

“Cous cous salad goes in the fridge, goes in the fridge, goes in the fridge,

Cous cous salad goes in the fridge,

That’s where it goes to sleep.”

If you’re a regular reader of the BBC’s Have Your Say (or even if you’re not); have the same low opinion of the majority of the seething biomass out there that I do, a hefty dose of misanthropy and a need for some amusement accompanied by confirmation that the world has more than its fair share of morons: I can thoroughly recommend spEak You’re bRanes.

10,000 BC

Where do I start?

Where do I even start?

I can summarise this film by saying I had to pretend it was on an alien planet to make it bearable. We start somewhere apparently in Siberia — I mean, it’s called 10,000 BC, right? One naturally assumes that they mean Before Christ. Given the state of scientific knowledge these days one would expect a certain amount of, if not realism, then at least lack of preposterousness.

But no. Our hero first of all goes hunting mammoths in the most ridiculous way possible: anyone hunting mammoths is in it at a cost/benefit threshold. They’re not going to go stampeding herds and then running around between their feet. No. Really. Then slave traders arrive. On horses.

Um. WTF? Slave traders? And since when did they have domesticated horses 12000 years ago? In Siberia? They had stirrups and everything! Oh! And what looked like steel weapons! Not to mention intercontinental trade.

That’s right, folks. Because before long our hero is tracking his girl through the foetid swamps of South America (where they had bamboo!) to which he has somehow walked from the ice fields of Northern Russia. Complete with megafauna, some of which died out around 40 million years previously. After that he moves onto the desert, where he meets the Africans. Who have chilli peppers.

Then we broach full Stargate territory with aliens from Atlantis, despite some proto-Masai and a bunch of pygmies and people wearing stupid hats, all of whom looked like they came out of an Ancient Greek’s Rough Guide to the World; as well as a religious set-up that’s halfway between Aztec and Ancient Egyptian. I was waiting for the tribe that had one giant foot they used as a sunshade.

FFS.

If I’m being kind I can assume that we’re talking the end of the Pleistocene during a period in which the Siberian Land Bridge was in existence, but, but, but…

They had aliens from Atlantis living in South America and stealing people AND MAMMOTHS from wherever the fuck they were supposed to be and then FORCE-MARCHING them all the way to the Gulf Of Mexico. Or something. And then they tied the mammoths into harnesses and made them drag big blocks of stone around in the sort of heat and humidity that would have made them drop dead inside 48 hours.

Plot. Oh plot. Chosen one boy meets chosen one girl and together they bring down the big bad and save the world. Rah. Bullet Proof Monk made a better hash of that tired old story.

I can’t even claim that the effects made it worthwhile because I was too busy gawping at how inaccurate they were. HOW BIG DO YOU THINK SMILODON WAS? They’re called megafauna, not gigafauna. Lead boy did an okay job. Lead girl was a washout. The narration made me want to tear my own skin off and stuff it in my ears to block out the sound of horrendous scriptwriting.

Oh, and oh… The Aesop’s Fables Slave and Lion trope? Just fuck right off. This isn’t Beastmaster, yo.

I can’t find anything on which to recommend this film even if you don’t have a passing familiarity with prehistoric climate, flora, fauna, geography or civilisation (or lack thereof). It was even worse than I expected it to be. 10,000 BC = 100 minutes of suck.

I just saw the men’s 10k Olympic swimmers going through a feed station.

That was awesome!

I have a suspected stress fracture in my right foot and this year’s weather appears to be mostly flooding. So Frood decided our imminent annual camping trip must be a departure from our usual bike-based, lightweight style. It shall be ‘plush’.

To this end this morning (we were supposed to leave today but there are flood warnings for the Highlands) we drove down to Tisos in Leith and purchased ourselves one of these:

I felt an odd sense of betrayal. My lightweight, kit-fetish, gear-geek nature was offended that I should be buying this great hunk of appliance weighing nearly 6kg (which is about 3 times the weight of our tent, and nearly as much as my Pinarello weighs). Why was I purchasing this monstrosity of a stove when right next to it was the Primus Himalaya Omni-Fuel, complete with wooden presentation box: a spider-web light, steampunk joy of a thing that can burn anything you throw at it except possibly yak dung? Why was I turning my back on my MSR Pocket Rocket, nestled so snugly within my MSR titanium mug? Why was I spending what strikes me as being a small fortune to get something for which I also needed to buy a gas cylinder I won’t be able to use with anything else and yet which cost about as much as the stove?

Was I doing this just for toast? I don’t even eat toast! And we have a toasty thing for our other stove anyway!

Dammit, I own a titanium spork!

“We’re going plush camping,” Frood told me. “And you know what else it will be good for?”

Of course! The Dumb Run! Never mind disposable barbies and sossajes: we can do bacon and egg butties on the beach at St Andrews with this! That should see us to the end, even if we are bringing about Armegeddon.

Well, that’s all right then.

In sharp contrast to The Dark Knight, the second of the weekend’s cinematic offerings is one of my favourite films of all time. It sits on my list of top ten films next to other obscure pieces of cinema such as Subway, The Big Blue, Ghost Dog and the Director’s Cut of Alien³. And Death Machine, obviously.

Hardware was made in 1990 by director Richard Stanley, who also wrote the film adaptation of the original story. Stanley went on to make the creepy horror Dust Devil before being fired from the remake of The Island of Dr Moreau (which is probably better for his career than him having completed it). Stanley himself showed up at the cinema to introduce his film, looking like a cast member from The Mighty Boosh and seeming quite overwhelmed by the large audience who had turned out to watch it.

Based on a 2000AD story, Shok!, Hardware tells of an artist’s encounter with the Mark 13 (No flesh shall be spared) cyborg, brought home for her as a Christmas present by her boyfriend Mo (himself slightly cybernetically enhanced) who thinks its a scrap maintenance droid. Found in pieces by a Zonetripper out in the Dune Sea, the Mark 13 — being self-repairing and able to charge itself from any power source, including the sun — extracts itself from the sculpture she has made out of it, puts itself back together and proceeds to tear the shit out of her entire apartment and anything that gets in its way. Including, thankfully, the wibbly wobbly pervert who spends his time masturbating sweatily as he watches her through the longest zoom lens you have ever seen and takes pictures, all while wearing latex gloves.

The story is delightfully iterative: the themes spiral in on themselves, echoes upon echoes like a giant fractal curve. Indeed, there is a fractal curve in the utterly mesmerising death scene, appearing full-size on the screen and swallowing the viewer into its depths. The lens of the Mark 13’s infra-red vision reflects and is reflected in the infra-red of the pervert’s camera watching through her window. The sexual fantasies of the voyeuristic neighbour are turned back on themselves when he finally makes it into her apartment and discovers the blinds are closed: when opening them the Mark 13 plunges its phallic drill bit into his belly and rams its thumbs into his eyes. The heart-stopping beauty seen by Shades in a butterfly as he’s ritually tripping on hallucinogenics is echoed in the fantastical psychotropic effect of the Mark 13’s deadly poison.

Jill the artist is the object of affection and obsession of every other major character in this film, including the Mark 13, resulting in the storyline for each of them weaving around her in the same way that her pet spider weaves it web, and the way all her artwork twines organically around a central hub. Each of them tries to possess her in the only way he knows how, only for the Mark 13 to out-obsess them all. No one wins, not even the robot: Moses gets inside it, echoing from beyond the grave through some link formed with his cybernetic hand while the machine is killing him, telling his beloved about the one flaw that will allow her to kill it.

This is an absolutely stunning movie. The vision of Mega City One is vastly superior to the later Judge Dredd. It has a gritty, believable realism, despite some now rather dated special effects. It has an intense claustrophobia, and some truly gut-kicking moments used apparently casually, which is exactly what gives them their power. The few seconds showing the filthy, crying toddler tied by a rope to her dead mother are skimmed through with as little focus as the two men passing pay the child. It’s exactly the sort of institutionalised desperation and inhumanity that one would expect from such a dystopian future.

Jill, locked away in her penthouse fortress, trapped inside there behind bomb-proof doors with the cyborg from hell that does not want her to leave, reminds us that sometimes the very act of trying to prevent ourselves being at risk puts us in far greater danger than if we’d faced up to our fear in the first place. Shades says to Mo at one point: “She doesn’t have to stick her little toe out if she doesn’t want to. She doesn’t need you.”

But what happens when she does want to get out, and can’t, and Mo isn’t there to help her?

This film is about fear, about violence, about depravity and desperation and weakness. It’s not just a sci-fi shocker. Things are turned inside out and outside in. The danger isn’t outside any more, where it can’t get in: it’s inside, and she can’t get out. A mother lies dead on the landing while her surviving toddler cries by her side: in the news a population control bill has just been passed and people are queuing up to be sterilised. The cyborg has an artifical intelligence that allows it to think and act and plan: it’s Mo’s slavish robot hand that allows him to get inside the machine and force it to speak out about its own vulnerability.

Everything in this film has meaning. Everything is telling you something. Everything from the Gwar video showing on the TV screen as Jill turns a killing machine into art (even though it’s not a Gwar song that’s playing) to the image of the Hindu deity (I need to watch it again and see which deity it is, as I suspect it’s Shiva but can’t be sure) on the wall of Shades’s apartment. This film has, packed into its 90-some minutes running time, more story than you’d find in the average 140 minute epic blockbuster.

I can’t recommend this film highly enough. If you ever get a chance to see it, do so. I had to import my copy from Germany and no, you can’t have it. If you weren’t there yesterday you missed a rare treat: I’ve seen this film more times than I can count and I still found new detail in it with the benefit of the cinema screen.

I’m only sorry it was on too late for me to stay and hear what Stanley had to say about it.

I have two reviews for you today, because I had a heavy weekend of cinema-going.

First up: The Dark Knight. LJ users can skip this by not looking behind the cut. Non-LJ users…. Well. I must be the last person to see this movie so I can’t believe spoilers matter.

It was okay. You know. Pretty much meh. I think it has been over-hyped and under-criticised because it was Heath Ledger’s last film and his performance was supposedly fantastic. No one likes to speak ill of the dead.

It was a good performance, but then it wasn’t a superlative one. It wasn’t the high point of Ledger’s career. It wasn’t the equivalent of Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday, for instance. Everyone knows Ledger could act. I was expecting something original, and the sad fact is that I’ve seen Death Machine.

Let me just take a brief sideways step here: Death Machine is on my list of top ten best movies of all time. I do indeed have a penchant for darkly humorous horror science-fiction, and I consider this to be a prime example. It is, after all, the only film I know to imply a bizarre and tragic accident involving a baby and a garbage disposal unit. One of the characters is called Sam Raimi. It is a rare offering of something dripping with references to the genre and yet doing something that manages to come across as original. It also has a Big Bad in it that’s frankly far more terrifying than bloody Terminator ever was.

In that movie Brad Dourif plays a psychotic genius living in the basement who, despite his lunacy, nearly outsmarts everyone else. Ledger’s performance in The Dark Knight was so reminiscent of Dourif’s in Death Machine that I couldn’t watch it without wondering why in the hell Dourif wasn’t playing the part. He did it first. Ledger obviously took some inspiration from Jack Nicholson’s performance as the same character, but that was a tiny veneer on what for me was Jack Dante from top to toe. Also, to me he didn’t look comfortable in the part. He didn’t ever look as though he’d settled into the role. He reminded me of a cat in a box: little bits of him kept poking out.

And let’s just mention Bale’s voice. How irritating was that? Come on guys. We don’t need an anti-hero who sounds like he has a constant case of bad strep throat.

Eric Roberts, obviously so overblown at being offered a job in something Box Office smashworthy for a change, actually did some acting and tried to pull off his part as a Mafia boss, but did about as believable a job as he did playing the Master in Dr Who (I know, I know, you’ve wiped that from your memory, just like Highlander 2). Aaron Eckhart is still Dr Josh Keyes in my head, burrowing through the Earth’s mantle in a metal cigar tube and defying all laws of physics, for which I cannot and will not forgive him. HE’S NOT A DISTRICT ATTORNEY. HE’S A CRAPPY FREAKIN’ SCIENTIST WHO SHOULD BE SUED BY OAKLEY FOR DARING TO UTTER THE WORD ‘UNOBTAINIUM’.

The plot was… Yeah. Come on. Mafia hiring the Joker to kill Batman because there’s a new DA in town? I found it largely implausible and disjointed and the way it was all stitched together managed to put me very close to that feeling of lots of things going on but nothing actually happening. For me that’s the worst sort of film: all data and very little information. There are films that get away with it because they are sticking precisely to a genre template and the fun is in seeing how they’ll play out a well-known story. These are what Frood and I call Mighty Ducks movies. We watched Balls of Fury the other night, which did exactly that and was great. I didn’t have to worry about the story and could get on with admiring Christopher Walken’s lack of shame.

Then there are films that try to tell a story and yet they don’t have enough of it to fill the time the crew has allotted itself and so a substantial amount of the film is padding. The Usual Suspects was just such a film, the Spiderman films are expert at it and, sadly, The Dark Knight.has gone that way too.

Raise your hand if you didn’t figure out what would happen to the sonar database when Morgan Freeman punched in his character’s name at the end. Raise your hand if you didn’t know the crims on the ferry would make the right decision before the decent townsfolk. Raise your hand if you didn’t realise Harvey Dent was going to end up horrifically disfigured and calling himself Twoface. raise your hand if you didn’t figure out that Ramirez was going to be one of the traitors (Hispanic female cop: bound to be on the take. She’s got a family to support ).

Anyone? No? Thought not.

OK, I’ll admit I was surprised by one thing: that they wasted Twoface with less than half a movie’s worth of screentime. Also, if the Joker was, as he claimed, not a strategist but a dog chasing cars (which I found the biggest disappointment of all because the dog chasing cars metaphor told me exactly how the Joker should have been written and wasn’t) then what possessed him to put so much effort into turning Dent into a walking weapon doing what he couldn’t be bothered doing himself?

The film was overly long for what it had to offer and could have done with having a good 45 minutes chopped off its running time to force the writers and directors to be more sparing and more efficient. There is nothing as delightful as an efficiently told story. Especially in the cinema. I don’t know why the fashion these days is for films well over the 2 hour mark. It’s as if the film-makers have forgotten that value for money lies in the quality of the film, not how many minutes we’re paying for. I’d rather have a great film of 90 minutes than a so-so film of 140, especially because I don’t need to worry about needing the loo before the end or my back locking up in protest at having to sit still for too long.

All in all, an okay effort. Bale did a better job as Wayne in this than he did in the first film: he did a better job as Wayne than he did as Batman. Michael Caine showed his usual ability to throw on any old part and make it look accomplished, although it helps if you can imagine Alfred as somehow having survived the battle at Rorke’s Drift. Gary Oldman looked like he was performing at what we in triathlon circles call ‘recovery effort’. Cillian Murphy popped up to make sure we hadn’t forgotten his character and then vanished again; only to turn up wearing a hat near the end, presumably because they’d confiscated his sack. Maggie Gyllenhaal was a bit of a wallflower, in my opinion. She certainly didn’t simper or scream, however she did somewhat fade into the background, which is odd given that the plot hinged on the critical love triangle between her, the golden boy hero and the dark and dangerous anti-hero (and dear gods THAT one has been done to death in the Cyclops-Jean Gray-Wolverine never-ending saga). The ending was just plain ludicrous. I thought Oldman was going to burst into some tragic opera (which might have meant I could hear WTF he was saying).

Plus points: I got one of the tickets for free because I joined the Cameo membership programme and the volume in the Cameo goes all the way up to eleven. There was a motorbike, even if it would have handled like a barge and no, you can’t do those Parkour style wall-jumps ON A FREAKING MOTORBIKE. I left with the warm, comforting glow of knowing that the Marvel flicker-flack at the start of their movies is umpteen times better than the DC version. The sky-hook balloon looked like a jellyfish, which got me thinking about that film with the flying fish and the egg… Actually that’s a bad thing, because I can’t remember what it was called and I’ll spend all day trying to find out.

If you can forget the hype and go with full awareness that it suffers from the malaise common to so many sequels, you should enjoy it. Just don’t believe anyone telling you that it’s better than the first one. It might be closer to DC universe canon, but I think that made the production team just a little bit lazy.

Wiggle included a little packet of Wiggle-logo shaped faux midget gems with my Salomon Revo Raid, which just arrived at my desk. Amazingly fast given that I went for the free delivery option.

Sweeties!

“No, darling. Letting the moth I’ve just caught go does not mean putting it through someone’s letterbox.”

One of my training things is to run to the gym with my kit and have a session in the pool or of weights or both and then run home again. I also want to spend the winter hill-running (in an all-day, half-run, half-walk and a picnic kind of fashion) and have a morbid fear of getting into trouble and having to get mountain rescue out, only for them to discover that I’m under-equipped. How embarrassing would that be?

The problem is that what is required is an adventure-racing specific pack, and they just don’t make those for women. Girlie-bike packs are now easy to find. Camelback have a great range of packs that’ll carry about 2l of water and enough kit to see you fine all day on a mountain when you’re biking. But adventure racing? No one makes them.

I bought an OMM Running Light last year on the basis that the OMM team probably knew what they were doing and the lightly-loaded jump test in the shop made it a hands-down winner over the Inov8. However, sadly, when running I have discovered that the hipstrap slips up and the only way to keep the pack from jolting around is to tighten all the straps as tight as they go and have the hipstrap around the waist. To be fair the product manual says to put the hipstrap around the waist, but the whole point of packs like this is that they should sit on the hips. Tightening the strap around the waist affects the diaphragm and breathing capacity.

I have thus been using it for short runs but have been under-impressed, on the whole. This has pretty much been my experience when trying to buy running packs. They ride up and don’t sit properly and interfere with my breathing.

Trips to various specialist shops have revealed only that I have a moderately pronounced lumber curvature and a stupidly small waist for my size, which means my chances of getting something to sit where it’s supposed to when running are fairly slim.

Wiggle recently expanded their product range and I was delighted to discover that Salomon have been added to their suppliers. I have a friend who is an anthropologist and expert on Mongolian shamanism — and who also happens to have successfully completed the Marathon Des Sables. She recommended the Salomon Raid and told me that my best bet was just to bite the bullet, order one online and see if it worked.

Hence I have just placed an order for the Salomon Revo Raid. The black one, naturally. I’ll let you know how we get on.

And if this doesn’t work I’ll be looking for further recommendations.