Random acts of Ranting – Page 3

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

A short review of Avatar in 10 parts

1) I’m going to find every mother-fucker who tried to convince me I’d like this film and I’m going to punch them in the arm. If they trotted out the “you just have to turn your brain off” logic, I’m going to punch them twice. I turned my brain off, as advised. It was still too stupid for me to actually like it. 2) To be fair, there were some good bits. Many of them recycled from Aliens, the last film James Cameron made that I actually liked. I liked Giovanni Ribbisi’s evil corporate guy far more than I liked Paul Reiser’s evil corporate guy. And Michelle Rodriguez in an ornithopter makes up for a variety of ills. 3) At the end of the first hour, I hoped that this might not be an utter disappointment. The opening is solid, the characters get onstage pretty quickly, the set-up is full of bad naming conventions but otherwise okay. Conflict is established:

PeterMBall 30/12/2009

Madcap Adventures and Distracting Hijinx

Six Things About America That I Tend to Covet

It’s been a rough week thus far (yes, all two days of it) and I’m in a covety kind of mood. I can’t help it, honest. Coveting things is one of those survival tactics that kick in when I’m otherwise unsure of what’s going on in the foreseeable future. And I figured I’d share some of the coveting. A tiny big of it, anyway. It will distract me until my jelly is ready to come out of the fridge and do it’s comfort-foody magic. And so, in approximate order, the six things about America* that I tend to covet: 1) Home-delivered Chinese food that comes in neat folded cardboard boxes. Oh little paper boxes full of wontons, cashew and noodle, how I dearly covet thee. In the fifteen years I’ve actually been eating Chinese food (I started late in life, after some bad experiences in my childhood) I have always been disappointed by the plastic containers in which Chinese take-away

PeterMBall 12/10/2009

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

Twenty-Five Random Thoughts About Writing

Right what is says on the tin – it got inspired by a facebook meme but my natural love of verbage meant it raged out of control. Anyway, this is actually a pretty good summary of what the interior of my head looks like when the subject of writing comes up. Some are me-specific, some a general, and most were written down fast in order to see what the first twenty-five thoughts that came to mind actually were. I take no responsibility for accidents caused if you follow any of these hastily constructed thoughts and give the usual warnings of upcoming writer-angst (it’s been that kind of week): 1) There is no “one true way to write,” but there are several commonly touted pieces of advice that both make sense to me and largely represent an decent list of “things worth doing unless you’ve got a good reason not to.” 2) This list is not one of them. 3) There

PeterMBall 09/09/2009

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Reasons to Watch Speed Racer

The Speed Racer movie fascinates me. Not because it’s a good movie – it’s not – but because it’s made by people just smart enough to do interesting things and just dumb enough to make some very simple mistakes. As a writer, this is a combination that keeps me looking at something, wondering what the hell happened and why it all falls apart. I’ll be honest for a second – Speed Racer should be the kind of glorious failure in the style of films like Southland Tales. The Watchowski Brothers remake has a lot going for it in terms of a really strong aesthetic, a willingness to be stylized rather than naturalistic, and a moderately strong cast. It was never going to be a successful film because the choices they were making ran up against the basic demand for pseudo-realism in cinema, but at the very least it was ambitious and willing to take chances. Sadly, this is coupled with

PeterMBall 02/09/2009

Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

This is a community service announcement

Stop what you’re doing, right now, and go back up your computer. Not just saving your on a zip drive, but actually backing your files up and keeping them somewhere far away from your PC. I usually say this once a year in October to commemorate the computer crash of 06 that complete wiped out about seven years of work, including a bunch of stories and the PhD thesis I’d been working. Like most people, I thought I was safe because everything was backed up on my zip drive. Unfortunately, said zip drive was plugged into my computer at the time, so the power surge that wiped my PC out took the back-ups with me. It was, needless to say, a very bad day. I cried for a while. Eventually I started throwing things. This warning comes early this year because I just lost my second PC in three years. It just went “nope, done with this,” and stopped working

PeterMBall 28/08/2009

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Some Ideas About Ideas

So I’ve been thinking about where ideas come from lately, because I keep seeing this idea floating around that explaining where they come from is somehow secretive and difficult to do. I didn’t get that, the hesitation thing, because I’d always thought the ideas were kind of simple to explain even if no-one was asking me to do so. Then I got interviewed for the first time and realised how hard it is to come up simple, easy answers off the cuff, and there’s petty good odds that if I had been asked the idea question (which, thankfully, I wasn’t) I would have resorted to some kind of “writers hate that question” rhetoric on the basis that it’d stall for time while I thought up a decent answer. So, as an in-case-of-emergency measure, I figured I’d work out an answer before I needed it. And my explanation goes a little like this: Imagine an equilateral triangle. Put “confluence” at one

PeterMBall 05/08/2009

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Female Appreciation Month

So the erstwhile editor of Twelfth Planet Press, Girliejones, has dubbed this month Female Appreciation Month in response to the all-around sausagefest that was the Triple J Hottest One Hundred of all Time*. Being a fan of female musicians in various genres, my immediate thought was “sure, I’ll be in that” and I went and pulled about thirty-odd albums out of my collection to serve as my listening for the coming month. All involve either female singers or female songwriters. Being the utter High Fidelity loving nerd that I am, I’m trying to resist the urge to blog at you about the absolute awesome of every single album on this list with top-five lists and random gushing. I may well break at some point. Until then, you’ll probably see a theme running through the Friday Youtubery posts. And I should be rocking out with a month full of XX chromosomal goodness. *This list, incidentally, has completely cured me of this lingering desire

PeterMBall 14/07/2009

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Death Race

So last night I watched Death Race, which disappointed me by being adequate for a film built around stunt-driving rather than the dire mess of a film I was hoping for. Cars went grr, machine guns went bang-bang, there were explosions everywhere, and the most interesting aspect of the story gets his head caved in by a passing machine-gun barrel travelling at 90 mph far earlier than he should have. Exactly the kind of stunt-porn I needed last night, really – dumb enough that I could shut down and watch it, with enough blank spots in the plot that I’m still thinking of ways to redo the story and have it make sense twelve hours later.

PeterMBall 21/06/2009

Conspicuous Acts of Cultural Consumption

Dancing Monkey One: Watch The Middleman, you bastards.

A steady trickle of blog topics rolling in response to my offer to be a Dancing Monkey this week (though most come, as most of my comments do, through the livejournal feed). Pushes my thoughts in interesting directions, it does, with enough random writerly nonsense included to keep me going for a while. Logically they should happen in order, but I’m going to start with something relatively easy (because it’ll feed into a couple of other topics folks have suggested). To whit, Adam demanded “a public rave about the awesomeness of The Middleman.” This I can do, with bells on and a cherry on top. I can’t, apparently, do it without swearing and unleashing hate upon the world. Consider yourselves warned. My rave starts thusly: Go and watch The Middleman in whatever form that’s available, you fuckers, because the fact that they’ve only made one season of this show makes me cry. You should know before I go any further that I’m not a fan

PeterMBall 24/04/2009

Writing Advice - Craft & Process

Because PIL had it right

I’m slowly coming to terms with the fact that I am, essentially, a person that wavers between the frivolous and the downright irate (and even the source of my irritation is essentially frivolous, when you get right down to it). I realise this because a week ago I made the decision to stop being lazy, and part of this was making a list of all those things that I keep meaning to blog about without ever getting around too it. It’s a big list, too – over the last couple of years I’ve had a lot of ideas pass through that have captured my imagination and had me thinking “hell, yeah, I really should say something about that.” The net result of this is a half-dozen files on my computer which contain the beginning, and even the middle of posts, but never really catch the feeling of being something I’d put up on the interwebs. So today I’m giving in

PeterMBall 21/04/2009

Tag: Random acts of Ranting

A short review of Avatar in 10 parts

Six Things About America That I Tend to Covet

Twenty-Five Random Thoughts About Writing

Reasons to Watch Speed Racer

This is a community service announcement

Some Ideas About Ideas

Female Appreciation Month

Death Race

Dancing Monkey One: Watch The Middleman, you bastards.

Because PIL had it right

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