As everyone who knows such things knows, Uwe Boll is a less-than-talented film maker who makes pseudo-blockbuster horror flicks based on computer games. So far he’s produced a trashy zombie gutchewer (House of the Dead) and a trashy scifi-horror opus (Alone in the Dark). Given how bad these films are, I was bemused to discover that another one has appeared on the local DVD rental shelves, by all appearances a trashy vampire action thriller called BloodRayne. Apparently BloodRayne has Ben Kingsley and Michael Madsen in it. Not only that, Boll is currently busy making another film even as we speak! What gives?

Out of curiosity (and because I — atypically — find myself agreeing with… well, everyone … that Uwe Boll’s films are awful), I went to Box Office Mojo to look up the figures (they’re all in US$, of course). Here they are:

2003: House of the Dead — budget: $12 million; worldwide gross take: $13,818,181 for a total theatrical run of 6 weeks.

2005: Alone in the Dark — budget: $20 million; worldwide gross take: $8,170,602 for a total theatrical run of 3 weeks.

2006: BloodRayne — budget: $25 million; worldwide gross take: $3,591,980 for a total theatrical run of 17 days.

Now is it just me or do these figures indicate that there is no way Boll should be getting funding for yet another film? After the first they might have thought “Hey, it’s a profit and he’ll get better.” But the next film’s box office was pitiful and nowhere near a profit and BloodRayne even worse, thus confirming the trend.

So what astute businessman would give Boll even more money to make another disaster? And how does he get decent actors to go in them?

Now admittedly these figures don’t allow for DVD sales. But I can’t imagine that such sales were much to write home about. Alone in the Dark went from full price to bargain bin in a matter of weeks — they’re practically giving them away around here.

Meanwhile gamers seem to hate Boll’s films and are going to them (even out of loyalty) less and less each time. And everyone else hates them, too. No one’s paying money to see these films.

So how come, in an industry where the director of a good film that does mediocre business gets severely caned, Boll can still get bigger and bigger budgets?

Meanwhile, Boll is planning to take on five of his most vocal critics in a boxing match, including Jeff Sneider of Ain’t It Cool News. The bout is scheduled for 23 September in Vancouver and footage of it will be included in his new film Postal.

One of the critics, Chris Alexander, a Toronto journalist with Rue Morgue radio and magazine, commented:

I saw this as probably the most perverse and outlandish PR stunt in the history of film. Uwe Boll is in line with Ed Wood as far as being one of the most inept filmmakers ever…. If I can get at least three hits in — one for each lousy video game horror movie that Uwe Boll has made — then I’ll be happy.

Now, to my mind comparing Boll to Ed Wood is an insult to Ed. Boll’s stuff isn’t quite as naively inept as Ed Wood’s, and they do have some sort of budget behind them. Ed Wood’s films gain cult status from the director’s endearingly profound self-delusion. But forget that! What I really want to know is: what does any of this tell us about the nature of reality?

Michael Standaert has written a critique of Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind novels at nth position (via Arts & Letters Daily).

It seems to me that Standaert has put together an accurate analysis of the novels, purely as novels. Although Standaert declares himself an “enemy” of LaHaye’s evangelical fundamentalist Protestantism, he has restrained himself from arguing against LaHaye’s morality and theology and sticks to the literary.

Overall, there is little difference between characters other than that they are on the side of Good or on the side of Evil. Their actions, thoughts and motivations are one-dimensional. There is no postmodern murkiness, at least on the surface. What these layers of authority achieve is not literature (for lack of a better term), but a paint-by-numbers, soulless, and morally didactic blueprint of right-wing political and religious ideologies masquerading as fiction. The characters are subservient to all the above.

Standaert calls these “anti-novels.”

(more…)

There is a wealth of advice out there for unpublished and emerging writers. Much of it is excellent. Some merely states the obvious. And occasionally there is advice that is so counter-productive that it needs to be marked with big red warning lights. Such an article is Jesse Putnam’s “Submission: A Wannabe’s Guide to Rejection” in The Stranger.

If you want to know the secret to surviving rejection, it’s simple: expect it to happen; don’t take it personally when it does; listen to any editorial comments offered in the rejection but don’t take them as gospel; and keep submitting unless you’ve decided on reflection that the manuscript isn’t up to scratch. There, that’s it. Nothing magic about it.

Jesse Putnam, however, believes in making unreasonable demands and insulting editors for not complying.

(more…)

Something doesn’t add up. Out there in the wide universe, there are two types of massive energy sources: quasars and gamma-ray bursts. Oddly, there are four times as many galaxies in the direction of gamma-ray bursts as there are in the direction of quasars. Astronomers Jason Prochaska and Gabriel Prochter of University of California, Santa Cruz, counted them.

The best current hypotheses are that gamma-ray bursts are the result of huge supernova explosions, and quasars are thought to be the energy released from matter falling into supermassive black holes at the centre of galaxies. If these hypotheses are correct, then there is no reason to expect more galaxies in one direction than the other.

This could be something new and important. Or it could be a statistical illusion from a limited sample size (Prochaska and Prochter had data from only 15 gamma bursts). NASA could soon give us the answer from its SWIFT mission.

SWIFT is a complex program involving an orbiting gamma-ray detector that signals other telescopes when it picks up a burst. SWIFT captures about 100 gamma bursts a year, but many gamma bursts last only a few milliseconds, and telescopes often don’t have time to align to the source of the burst in time to see anything. To test Prochaska and Prochter’s finding, only 10-20 bursts per year yield useful data, but this should be enough. Within a year or two we should know whether we are looking at an important new finding or a blip in scientific history.

Story via PhysicsWeb.

Stephen Green, director of evangelical group Christian Voice, has refused to join in a panel discussion with Australian comic Jim Jeffries, explaining that: “Freedom of speech doesn’t go so far as being blasphemous. This is a matter of God being gratuitously insulted. God is Almighty and beyond insult.”

How’s that again?

(more…)

A Pungent Rant of Dubious Moral Virtue, Presented Forthwith for the Indignant Delight of all Right-Minded Readers.

Germaine Greer is a stormchaser. She loves nothing better than sitting at the centre of a raging tornado. Indeed, she is drawn to it inexorably. I have heard people accuse her of being a publicity-seeker, but I think it’s closer to the truth that she is a controversy-seeker. She loves stirring the possum. This has made her invaluable to many discussions and debates, but unfortunately the most recent decade or so have not been kind to her.

(more…)

Aristotle says that a hundred-pound ball falling from a height of one hundred cubits hits the ground before a one-pound ball has fallen one cubit. I say they arrive at the same time. You find, on making the test, that the larger ball beats the smaller one by two inches. Now, behind those two inches you want to hide Aristotle’s ninety-nine cubits and, speaking only of my tiny error, remain silent about his enormous mistake.

– Galileo Galilei, Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences (1638)

Note: a cubit is about 20 inches, so Aristotle’s 99-cubit error to Galileo’s two-inch error simplifies to a 990:1 ratio.

This story from Toledo Tales is short on plausibility…

(Toledo, OH) Police and animal investigators removed several dozen Australian wombats from a north Toledo home in what was described as a “failed wombat-fighting ring.”

…but I’ve uplinked because it contains one of the great Australian put-downs of all time,…

“The bastard who sold them to me said they were vicious killers,” said Kensington. “I paid $300 bucks for a pair of eucalyptus-leaf eating retards who just stare at each other with a dull glare.”

…even if it was uttered by an apocryphal Ohioan.

From the August edition of LOCUS, a lovely review by Rich Horton:

Agog! Ripping Reads, Cat Sparks, ed. (Agog! Press / Prime 0-8095-6237-5, $29.95. 284pp, hc) June 2006.

Cat Sparks has produced a series of Australian anthologies through Agog! Press over the past few years. This latest is getting American distribution from Prime, and it’s the best of these anthologies so far.

Geoffrey Maloney’s “‘When the World Was Flat” is an engaging tale of a Faux-Elizabethan “Albion,” a dominant country on a literally flat world. The protagonist, Lord Admiral for the Queen, is dealing with problems caused by the world’s seasonal tilt, his Queen’s unreasonable demands, and a friend’s scientific investigations. It’s all quite tongue in cheek, and plenty of fun. Anna Tambour’s “See Here, See There” is a dark tale of a deformed, much mistreated, young man who attracts the notice of his King, becoming a trusted advisor - with advice, naturally enough, influenced by his harsh life. Margo Lanagan contributes another very dark story, “A Pig’s Whisper”, about two children lured from home by a nasty man, and the unkind world they encounter.

“And Down Came a Spider” is a fine novelette from Simon Brown, about a girl and her father who travel across parallel universes when spiders bite the girl. The father is always hoping to return home to his wife, but eventually the girl longs for a stable universe, as her memories of “home” are less intense. Besides the sad story of people lost in other universes, the differences make sharp points about political and religious oppression. “Rosebuds”, by Tansy Rayner Roberts, is an amusing and pointed story about a girl who falls in love with an enchanted prince - and about her sister, who is rather less sure of the motives and worth of this prince. Paul Haines’s “Lifelike and Josephine” is a fine reductio ad absurdum look at cosmetic surgery gone amok, as a put upon (though himself rather unpleasant) husband finally gets the upper hand, rather creepily, on his ever self-improving wife.

Ben Peek’s “The Souls of Dead Soldiers are for Blackbirds, not Little Boys” is a spooky and intriguing story of a strange war-tom underground realm, and the way a poor family is affected by the invasion of soul-ridden blackbirds. Chris Lawson, in “Screening Test”, examines the ironic impact of a test for a “violence gene” and a program to help those with the gene, as reflected in the lives of a “lost” boy and his equally lost girlfriend. The boy, now an ambiguously successful adult, returns to his childhood slum and tries to find the girl, who didn’t get the same help he got … for a bitterly ironic reason.

Sue Isle’s “Daughter of the Red Cranes” looks at a China devastated by a plague that led to infertility among women and death among men, decades later, as an outside agency tries to help the gangs of surviving women. I’m always happy to see novellas in small press books — this book includes Brendan Duffy’s “World’s Wackiest Upper Atmosphere Re-Entry Disasters”, indeed a wacky story, with a sort of ’50s Galaxy feel (though very contemporary in its concerns), about a grounded pilot and his jealous car in an advertising-saturated future.

There’s plenty more — this is a pretty well-stuffed collection. There are interesting pieces from the likes of Jay Lake, Jeff VanderMeer, and Adam Browne, just to name a few more. The Agog! anthologies have been pretty interesting for some time, but this latest is a step up - one of the better original anthologies of 2006.