virtualeconomics

Books and films of 2008

This has been a strange year for popular culture - more than half of the best books I've ever read came to my attention (not necessarily came out though) in the past twelve months, but I've barely seen one decent movie.

The year started well with The Lies of Locke Lamora, a Christmas gift I read as soon as I got back to London in January. It pulls off a new genre crossover, as far as I'm aware, pitching a Sting-like heist in a fantasy world. Its morals and pacing are all Flashman, the backdrop is as rich as New Crobuzon.

Then in February my dear friend Serena bought me All My Friends are Superheroes for my birthday, a book which is little short of perfect. It is far too short to really count as a novel, is the sweetest, silliest love story I've ever seen, and if you can spare just an hour of your life to give it a try you won't regret it for a moment.

Some time in April I read The Road. My review of it is here. A staggering book, still probably the best I've ever read.

Summer saw me finally get around to The Time Traveller's Wife, under the mistaken belief that my friend Dan had chosen a passage from it to read at my wedding (he actually chose his passage from To Say Nothing of the Dog, he assures me, which I still haven't read). Still, it was an extremely happy mistake and hugely enriched an already magical holiday that roamed through Cornwall, Devon and bits of Somerset.

And honourable mentions should go to Soon I Will be Invincible, to the first of Garth Ennis's The Boys (though not the second and third, which are just awful), to Warren Ellis's Fell (which, as apparently predicted even by collaborator Ben Templesmith he seems to have got bored of after only a handful of books), The Rawshark Texts, and surprisingly to the tenth and final volume of Y: The Last Man (though not the first nine, which are weak, which begs serious questions about why I kept reading the damned things, but it was worth it for the end).

In films I've seen only three this year even worthy of comment. First, Doomsday. I cannot believe this film got made. There's this girl, right, and she has a glass eye which is also a camera, a fact which is elaborately set up and then never mentioned again. Some sort of virus has eaten everyone in Scotland, except actually they're fine but have chosen to regress their societies either to an absolutely bog-standard cyberpunk cannibal dystopia* or a bloody silly medieval fantasy in a castle. And there's a car chase between a vintage bentley and some Mad Max extras. The whole thing is incoherent, meaningless and quite astonishingly bad - worthy of some sort of special award for Attempted Cinematography. American Gangster was the only really good film I saw this year, and even that was just a remake of The Wire. And Wall*E, which I looked forward to all year after the brilliant viral marketing they did for it last year, was clever, probably far too clever to really be worth it. Wall*E for me was mainly about pulling a sort of intellectually satisfying but dramatically grating metafilm trick, in that the movie is really well-paced, moving and enjoyable until the humans turn up, at which point it becomes a grotesquely ugly, garish farce. Sure, the central message of the piece is that humans screw everything up, but did they really need to make two movies - a good one about a robot and a bad one about people - to make that point? Perhaps.   

*spoilers? Seriously, are you even paying attention to this review?   

Breaking (shoe) news

Oh Yahoo...for the love of god stop trying to pretend you're a news source by "breaking" news about the sudden success of the guy who made the shoe that was thrown at George Bush. Yes, you've spotted a thing we read on Marginal Revolution on Saturday afternoon. Well done, I suppose...but news it ain't.

Hamlet

Offtopic thing review: opening night of David Tennant's Hamlet at the Novello Theatre.

It is not, as others have said, the Hamlet of a lifetime or even a generation (though it is very good I have seen a lot of very good Hamlets and this one merely makes it into my top five). It is patchy. But there is much to like.

Tennant is superb and more-or-less carries the performance (an exact reverse of my expectations, which were that the token celeb would be propped up laboriously by the RSC). Patrick Stewart is inexplicably lacklustre - it is hard to believe the same actor gave such a magnificent Macbeth only a year ago, and he seemed at times to be almost playing a different interpretation of the play to the other actors. (His "give me some lights" (III:2), on which intonation for me the whole play hangs, is merely wearied.) Some of the effects are the best I've seen - when the ghost exits (I:5) he does so through mirrored doors so Hamlet is left staring at his own reflection and the audience rightly left to doubt the reality of the encounter. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are treated throughout as the absurdist comic foils they were made by Stoppard rather than as Shakespeare's originals, which was charming. And the (few) omissions are very well chosen - the last few lines by Fortinbras which are commonly permitted to spoil the denoument and Hamlet's reference to Nero which makes too explicit the misleading oedipal sub-plot in are both better left out and were.

So it's good; very good in fact. Branagh's in Stratford was better as spectacle, though Tennant's portrayal of Hamlet's arc from antic to true madman is much closer to the Hamlet I see in my mind's eye than Branagh's. One student production I saw at the Old Fire Station in (probably) 1997 was better in almost all respects but ran for perhaps five days and is presumably remembered now by no-one but the cast.  

Finally, a note about the theatre. They clearly had no idea the scale of the thing they were taking on when they booked this production; when we first tried to buy tickets (and my wife stood in a queue outside for a few hours in hope of same) they seemed to have made no efforts to scale up for the demand, and last night they seemed to have learned nothing from this, with a veritable mob of attendees milling outside the tiny doors. And the Waldorf Bar was reduced to chaos because someone had chosen this of all evenings to train a new barman in the various skills of taking orders, pouring measures, operating a till, making change and, err, speaking English.

Lies, damned lies and actually just more damned lies

I am overjoyed by the proposal contained in the Queen's speech to subject benefit claimants to lie detector tests. Not that I have any particular axe to grind with benefit claimants, nor any real hope that that lie detectors are more than pseudoscience - I'm just delighted by the precedent it sets that it is acceptable for dealings between citizens and the state to be monitored by lie detector where there is a reasonable expectation that one party is lying at the expense of the other.

So I look forward to extending this precedent to all my dealings with the government: with my local authority ("so you're quite sure I need to pay this bill again even though I paid it last month and you seem to have simply lost the cheque?"); with the police ("just hold this wire officer while you tell me precisely what law I'm breaking and under what authority I am being detained"); and of course PMQs and all other Commons debates ("so these weapons of mass destruction, Tony. Really sure?") 

Ad targeting via YouTube

Everyone loves stories about mistargeted online ads, especially when the culprit is Google. Today, Google-owned YouTube (which long-term readers may remember I simply use as a radio station a la Pandora by picking a song in the morning and then either running it on endless repeat or taking one of YouTube's recommendations for what to play next) has apparently decided that my musical tastes are gay enough to target GayParship ads to me. Possibly I shouldn't find that as funny as I do. (Alternatively Killers fans might like to note that of late I've been listening to "Read my Mind" on endless loop, which is presumably what Google's entertainingly inaccurate targeting was based upon.)