Tabula Rasa lj

Would it be cheating to say Tupelo, which is about Elvis Presley?

Kyla launched her book of poetry, The Land of Bad Dreams a few weeks ago, and now we have a page up with videos from the launch: The Performances.

Here's the introduction:

We saw Neil Marshall's Doomsday last night, which is more or less completely mad. With barely a whiff of credibility it throws a cyberpunk heroine into battles against apocalyptic road gangs and medieval knights, with a bit of Aliens and Twenty Eight Days Later thrown in for kicks. And it works, though it takes a while for the build-up of absurdity to reach critical mass (the precise moment is marked with the song Good Thing, for those taking notes).

I'm not sure it works really well, given the flatness of some of the dialogue and plotting in general, but it rides it through on audacity and good production values.

Speaking of which, I also saw Sucker Punch recently, which actually has very similar goals (cyberchicks vs knights, in broad terms); even more audacious, even less sane, somewhat more tedious. I wouldn't call it good, but it had enough in common with, say, Terry Gilliam to be interesting.

Here are some photos from the (spectacular) launch of Kyla's book this week:

The Land of Bad Dreams

If you're on Facebook, hopefully you've seen Leigh Blackmore's set as well, which is great.

In the meantime, everyone have fun at Conflux. Kyla is heading down their now, and there will be books.

Have just returned from Kyla's book launch / burlesque sword-fighting magic thing. It was awesome. Photos and video to come.

I have only just noticed now that there is a comic coming out called Justice League Dark, featuring the wacky(?) adventures of John Constantine; Shade, the Changing Man; Madame Xanadu; Deadman; Zatanna; Mindwarp and Enchantress. Tha hell?

Last week we watched Your Highness, so in reparation for our sins it was The Big Sleep this time round. I really don't think I followed it all, but it was certainly awesomely cool on the way.

We've just come back from jack_ryder's new experimental-improv-theatre-thing, Tweatre wherein live tweets (in one case, actual spam) get turned into performance. It's on most of this week for those in Sydney.

Likewise, for those so blessed, come along to kylaw's book launch next week, for The Land of Bad Dreams. And by 'book launch', I mean performances by people like Venus Vamp and The Surgical Sideshow, at the World Bar in Kings Cross, so get in quick.

Saw Griff the Invisible this evening -- more Aussie weirdness, this case in the cause of superheroics. Probably best not to delve too deeply (and the trailer on the main site seems to give most of it away), but it was fun, and charming.

I'm going mad. Well, I saw the latest episodes of The Guild and Death Valley, and thought they were pretty funny, which is probably the same thing.

We've just seen The Square, in the fine tradition of weird Aussie crime flicks. Having said that, it all turns out a bit muddled, so lacks the power of some of its compatriots -- but there's some fine stuff on the way. The fact it was shot down in the Woronora Valley near us was also neat.

We've watched the first half of the new Underbelly, after making the (there-is-a-precedent-but-not-for-a-while) step of connecting up our TV receiver. Not quite convinced yet, although it certainly has some style. Putting Mental as Anything in a 1920 saloon seemed to work.

I also spotted K walking down a 1920s street, so that was all good.

More strangeness: last week I saw (500) Days of Summer. I saw 'I' because K took debunked on the flimsy prefix that one of her friends has Othello on (no doubt I should have gone, but am still sickly).

Anyway, the movie is very odd, being not really a romance, and not really a comedy -- it's quite possible I don't really understand these concepts in conjunction anyway. It's certainly interesting, with lots of cool things and quite a few geeky things as well (bonding over the Knight Rider theme, for a start). But the narrative focus was a bit off-putting, and in the end it was more interesting than actually affecting.

Last night we saw Summer Wars, upon recommendation. It's a strange anime of family solidarity and cyber-warfare. From a traditional daimyo homestead, Kenji and Natsuki must defend OZ (ie, the internet if Second Life ever took off) and the world from an AI super-villain called Love Machine.

This mesh of cultures was didn't always come off, but there was a lot of genuine emotion in the contrast, and the battle. As K said, it at least provides as good a justification for cute bunnies battling demons as any; and the human characters ground it all beautifully.

We saw Limitless, which is well made and pretty cool -- though full of frustrating bits where we were berating the main character for being stupid. Given the nature of the movie, that's a bit sad.

Also, this is somewhat unrelated to the movie itself, but I'd just like to note that watching alternate endings (yes, apparently plural) to a movie directly after watching the thing itself dilutes the very point of movie-watching. So, well, I didn't.

I had high hopes for Portal 2 co-op, but we didn't quite make it. We got to test 7 (of 8) in the last category, but then got stuck, and back to the shop it goes. Given the sudden insane timing needed I'm not sure we would have got it in any reasonable time anyway (or there was some other solution I was overlooking).

I'm sure there are many, many other things I'm not finishing, but that will do for now.

We went off to see Dungeon Crawl last night, in one of their rare Sydney shows. Our stoic heroes (the interior decorating orc, the magical-component addicted wizard, the thief who regrets everything and the plumber who regrets nothing) quest to save the villagers of Spiderman Keep. Along the way dire wombats are traumatised, yuan-ti's interiors are redecorated, a boulder is slain by recitation of Twilight and the thief regrets stealing the GM's dice and rolling a 1. She also regrets stealing the villagers from the dragon, and returns them post-haste.

Funny stuff, and certainly an accurate representation of the game. They have more regular Melbourne shows, for those so inclined.

True Blood S3: What a mess. In the last half, the season started getting a nice pace and tension, and then it all collapsed again.

Portal 2 (single player): all a bit linear and stretched, and the final song isn't a patch on Still Alive. But it had some style and the end sequence (especially the turrets) is great.

Buffy S8: da hell. Suddenly it's gone all Lucifer without anyone slowing down enough to provide context or sense. Bad things happened. I think.

We saw Enigma, a Bletchley Park movie about which I didn't know many specifics. It was quite odd to go in thinking it was probably about Alan Turing, and have our dashing young hero chasing skirt all movie. But it had some interesting stuff to say about the war and code-breaking along the way.