1. Komarr; A Civil Campaign; Diplomatic Immunity - Lois McMaster Bujold. My precious babies have finally arrived after many weeks on the seas, and I can now look lovingly upon my collection of books. After all that unpacking of my worldly belongings, there's nothing I like better than curling up with a favourite book (or two, or three). The above titles are the last three in the Miles Vorkosigan series, which chronicled the life of one Miles Naismith Vorkosigan; a stunted, accidental covert ops operative extroadinaire, better known among his peers as 'that hyperactive little shit.'
Miles is no ordinary person. He is the son of a formidable Admiral (known as the Butcher of Komarr), in a previously isolated military-mad planet with a phobia of mutants. Born with brittle bones due to poisoning from a bungled assassination plot against his father while his mother was pregnant with him, Miles grows up a little warped but survives a painful childhood with a burning drive to become the soldier his father and grandfather were.
The Vorkosigan story actually begins when Miles parents met, both soldiers on opposite sides of an interplanetary war, told in two novels, Shards of Honour and Barrayar. The Miles Vorkosigan series picks up the Vorkosigan family saga in The Warrior's Apprentice when Miles is 18 years old, but I personally favour the later novels when Miles is older, more complex and less of a suicidal lunatic.
As each book in the series reads as a stand-alone, you can pretty much start anywhere along but to get a full feel of the characters, it's better to start at the beginning. Like all Bujold's books, character and dialogue is key and it does not matter whether she sets the story in space or in a fantasy medieval past, you always end up believing in and rooting for her heroes.
If the earlier novels are filled with spaceship hijackings, rescue missions, hostage taking and clone harvesting across galaxies, Komarr and A Civil Campaign narrows the story down to the home and the personal. Having suffered 'an acute case of death' in Memory, 30 year-old retired Captain Miles has finally come to a place where he's embraced his identity and not running from himself and his past. It's a bittersweet lesson to learn but even though he is not the one shooting laserguns anymore, it doesn't mean that there isn't any action in the later novels. It's just a different kind of adrenaline rush.
Film
1. Zombi Kampung Pisang. With a title like that, I could not very well NOT see it, could I? Following in the vein of Shaun of the Dead, Zombi Kampung Pisang is a comedy about the very rural Kampung Pisang being overcome by an epidemic of err....zombification, possibly brought on by some deadly curry from Pak Menawer's food stall. Malay movies tend to get a bad rep, because umm... they are generally bad, with the actors either overacting or mugging it, and terrible scripts. Luckily for my nerves, which were highly irritable the morning I went to watch this film, it was actually funny and amusing. Mugging was minimal, the script was actually funny, the pace was good except for a dip in the midddle. Makeup was atrocious though, the zombies looked like somebody had just thrown a kilo of flour over them, but they were a convincingly murderous, brain-eating bunch with a penchant for dance music, motorcycle wheelies and Liverpool football club. It's not actually scary, more of an old-fashioned slapstick comedy but one that feels fresh and updated. If you miss this at the cinema, get a copy of the DVD when it comes out and have a good night in.
2. Sunshine. My friends usually moan when I drag them to see ‘geeky sci-fi’ films of my choice at the cinema and they usually curse me afterwards for making them waste the precious hours of their lives on some confusing/depressing/weird film. So unsurprisingly, when my friend and I finished watching Sunshine, he was unhappy that his Saturday afternoon was spent making himself miserable.
It’s an interesting premise; the Sun is dying and mankind and planet Earth are slowly heading towards a frozen death, unless eight intrepid astronauts flying on a massive bomb can nuke the Sun into doing its proper job. Warning bells started to ring that this could be a bad movie when:
- for such an important mission, everybody here is pretty young
- for such an important mission, everybody here barring one or two, are complete wusses
- there's a psychologist onboard
Thing is you just know, you so know, you'd- be- screaming- at- the- people- on-screen know, that EVERYBODY will be in BIG TROUBLE as soon as they diverted from their mission to respond to a distress call from the ship that was previously sent seven years ago to nuke the sun but failed. The second mistake was when the ineffectual captain allowed one 'expert' crew member to decide for the whole ship whether to divert from their course or not. The third nail in the coffin was when one person was left alone to do all the plot calculations for their new course. Considering that this was a very difficult and important job, you would expect a second person to double check things. But no, this does not happen. And predictably, everything goes belly up and the ship loses nearly all their oxygen supply. Dun, dun, dun!! Because you just can't have a spaceship movie without people losing their oxygen.
Okay, so the main question is: do they succed in their mission? Second, can everyone get back to Earth alive? Third, what happened to the first ship and crew that was sent, and what made them fail their mission? Aliens? Killer bugs? An acute case of stir-crazy?
It took me a lot of a patience and the fact that I did not want to admit to my friend that he may be right to get through the first half of this film. Things do start to pick up in the second half when everybody starts pulling their thumbs out of their asses and some interesting issues come to the fore. For example, do we lose our personal humanity by taking the life of one person, in order to save the whole of humanity?
In summary, everybody redeemed their stupidity by dying at the end. Ooops, was that a spoiler? Come on, what did you think, that people could actually come out alive in a movie like this?
Music
1. What I've Done - Linkin Park. Oh, look it's a new U2 video..... uh, no it's Linkin Park. I wouldn't say I was a fan of Linkin Park, but they always manage to release a song that I find myself humming along to and fake-drumming on the steering wheel.
2. How To Save A Life - The Fray. I gotta admit, when this first came out, I went, "Fssshhh, another piano-tinkling emo band trying to manipulate the heart strings by singing about saving people's lives. But I like it now, and I try to sing it but I can't quite get the words right.
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