Dom Davis (The Blog)

So it appears they have remade Conan The Barbarian. The original was, if we’re honest with ourselves, dreadful as Arny grunted his way through the first 20 minutes before breaking into his stilted dialogue. It was, in fact, so bad it became an instant classic giving us lines such as “To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women”¹. The general consensus of my friends is that the odds of the remake being dire as so close to 1 as to be not worth working out. The real question is: will it mimic the original and be so bad it’s good. Or will it just be shit?

¹A line almost as versatile as “I say we take off and nuke the site from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure”. Between the two you can reply to 99% of Facebook status updates.

Unbeknownst to me the Odeon, Norwich has installed an IMAX screen. I discovered this little nugget of information yesterday when a colleague suggested we make use of said screen to go watch Tron Legacy, in 3D no less. Our plans were somewhat scuppered when we discovered that they were only showing this at 12:15, a time when we’d both be hard[?] at work. No matter, we shall instead be viewing this cinematic delight on a normal screen, but still in 3D.

Personally I’m not so bothered about IMAX for films. Yes, the screen is awesome and, yes, film shot for IMAX is amazing, especially the 3D stuff which has a much greater depth of field, but, unless things have changed, there are one or two problems with normal films.

Firstly the aspect ratio is wrong. Typically a cinema film doesn’t fill the whole of an IMAX screen, so you’re loosing a chunk of the awesomeness. Apparently there are (or there were meant to be) 5 scenes in Tron Legacy that used the full aspect ratio of the IMAX screen, but that’s not the whole film.

Secondly films need to be upscaled to that kind of size and, from my limited experience, this isn’t always done well. Subtle things done to blend in special effects are also now writ large across the scene and are much more noticeable.

Still, it’s been a few years since my last IMAX experience so when the next blockbuster that I want to see comes out I’ll see if I can go see it closer to it’s release date to increase the chance of it being shown on the IMAX screen at a sensible time. Who knows, I may be pleasantly surprised.

Incidentally my iPhone keeps wanting to autocorrect IMAX to iMac

Before I settle down for a snooze (and get away from this god awful film The Zozo is watching) I wish to make a complain about the Playstation Store. My wife, you see, had a hankering for gorn films with fluffy bunnies in them and, since I wanted to snooze, my dislike of… er… rabbits in general wouldn’t be an issue. Movie rental can come via a number of vectors in this house, however, todays chosen method was via the PS3 and the Playstation Store.

For those unfamiliar with the Playstation Store it has white text on light blue transparent boxes for windows that live on a dark blue background. Snazzy looking, but not hugely easy to read on the smaller HD screens such as the ones we have. Not content with this, however, Sony have decided to go one step further this Christmas and put a special ‘Happy Holidays’ backdrop up. One that is of a snow filled scene and, therefore, predominantly white and light blue. Something that really helps the white and light blue test disappear into the page. Now I know they’ve stopped teach useful things like actually being able to program on computer science degrees (it’s true, it’s actually possible to pass some courses with very little programming ability, if any) but I would have thought that they’d have kept the fluffly modules like HCI, or Human Computer Interfaces, which specifically details how to design user interfaces so that people can do basic things, like read them.

I the meantime The Zozo has selected and downloaded some gorn fest The My Little Ponies Christmas Special and I’m going to drink my Beechams cold and man-flu and then die snooze.

So The Zozo decided it would be a good idea for me to watch The Descent as I’d not seen it yet and the sequel is winging its way to DVD soon (not that it’s crap and went straight to DVD, just that we never got to the cinema for The Zozo to see it). The Zozo likes scary films and films with lots of blood and gore in them (she loved the Saw films). I’m not so keen on gory films and I don’t do horror all that well which meant that a lot of The Descent was watched while pointedly concentrating on anything but the television (mainly with The Zozo laughing at me for being a wuss, despite her having the advantage of having seen it before and knowing what was going to happen).

If you’ve not seen the film the basic premise is a bunch of women go caving (there’s a bit more to it but I wouldn’t want to spoil the plot) and it does beg the question: what do people see in caving. Even before the films got going they’re crawling through tiny little passages, half submerged tunnels and pitch black caverns with sheer drops. I’m not sure how this constitutes ‘fun’. Personally you’d never get me doing that (I like my caves to be big, roomy and well lit with easy access to the exit) and if, for whatever reason, I was forced to go into a cave system I’d now make sure I was toting large amounts of firepower… just in case.