Ian Wallace is the author of ianwallace.com, and virtually nothing else. He likes to do things, but doesn't do so very often. He lives in Calgary with his fiance and a MacBook.
I just finished putting together this arrangement for The Wine Shop's monthly e-mail newsletter, which is called Wine Sediments.
I previously designed this layout for their weekly newsletter as well. It's called Wine Buzz.
I'm trying to go for a bit of a separation between the two since they have mostly the same audience. Sediments is basically a digest verion of Buzz, so I decided to make Buzz a little more fun and Sediments a little more serious. They both have some tweaks pending, both in terms of layout and content.
The wait is over. I'm a big Die Hard fan. You internet folk can have your Chuck Norrises (Norii?) and your Jack Bauers but I'm a John McLean man - yippee ki ay, motherfucker.
I love practically everything about the Die Hard movies.
I love the increasingly-insipid titling scheme, by which the name of every sequel has used "Die Hard" as a verb, rather than properly as an adjective or noun. They nearly fumbled the ball by calling the latest movie Die Hard 4.0, but decided on the raw patriotic power of Live Free or Die Hard instead.
I love how John McLean always winds up as the only person capable of dealing with the situation at hand, no matter how unlikely that might be.
I love how John rants outloud to himself, and how he mockingly repeats the reassurances of whatever idiots got him into his current mess.
I love how John can readily use any weapon or vehicle he encounters, deftly.
I love how John never takes a moment to clean up, getting bloodier and grimier in every scene.
I love how John McLean just kicks every fucking ass that needs to be kicked, until everything is hunky-dory again.
Live Free or Die Hard earned my love by lovingly handling all those elements. The movie's plot was taken from a short story, around which the Die Hard stuff was molded, and the effect could have been disconcerting and disastrous, like in Oceans 12 - another movie which had franchise elements shoehorned into an existing story. But it plays perfectly well in this movie, with ruthless cyber-terrorists as worthy an adversary for McLean as any other dirtbag.
After all, the plot allowed the casting of Justin Long as this installment's sidekick-of-the-moment: Matt, a young, hip hacker with a heart of gold who was tricked into aiding the cyber-baddies with a crucial crack. Per the formula, it's McLean and Matt against the world for the majority of the flick, as they always-just-barely make their way through Washington D.C.'s crumbling infrastructure and a few squadrons of terror-types.
The one disappointment I had with the movie was the performance of Timothy Olyphant as Gabriel, the film's major villain. Olyphant isn't a favourite of mine, but I won't say that he did a particularly bad job; I just couldn't take him seriously as the movie presented him. Gabriel is a disenfranchised former intelligence agent, righteously bent on exposing America's weaknesses for her own good, and Olyphant doesn't convey the gravitas of the character in any way. He's just too young and pretty. Live Free or Die Hard needed its own Alan Rickman, William Sadler or Jeremy Irons - gritty, sinister actors that the audience can love to hate.
Olyphant's casting, along with that of Long, are clearly attempts to make the movie more youth-friendly and this scheme is largely successful - there's a higher and more relentless energy level to the latest installment, with a more visual choreography to the fights and set-pieces. In particular, a fight inside a cooling shaft and a freeway chase scene seem inspired more by Casino Royale than the previous Die Hard pictures.
What more can I say? Even Chelly said she dug this one, so you should probably check it out.
Next is already out on video, because it didn't last very long in theatres. When I saw the first trailers for the movie, I was pretty dubious: Nicolas Cage as a dude who sees the future? Jessica Biel as his monkey-faced love-interest? It's hard to know whether to groan or barf, right?
I was compelled to watch the movie because the story was written by Philip K. Dick, the acclaimed sci-fi author whose novels and short stories have resulted in films like Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly. The best Dick movies manage to preserve his skillful blending of situational sci-fi with believable drama, but even the worst adaptations usually still offer up a few exciting chases and some funky technology. Next belongs somewhile near the middle of the pile.
Nic Cage plays Cris Johnson, able since childhood to see ahead into the future - but only his own future, and only ever two minutes ahead. More interested in a quiet private life than anything else, Cris uses his ability to "wow" tourists with a low-rent magic show in Vegas and earns extra cash from slot machines and blackjack - not gambling at all, with his edge. As the film starts, Cris is shown waiting at the same coffee shop, twice a day at 8:09 for weeks, because he had a vision of meeting Jessica Biel's character there at that time of day. It's the first time Cris has forseen something more than two minutes ahead, and he has no idea why.
On the day that Biel's character actually arrives, Cris is on the run from Julianne Moore's FBI agent who is determined to exploit Cris' ability toward finding a terrorist cell with a stolen nuke.
The plot that follows is predictable in a some regards, but also delightfully surprising in others. There are some genuinely terrific elements of Next: Cage capably captures the essence of man tired of being harassed because of this ability. He runs from the FBI not because he doesn't care about the terrorists, but because he genuinely doesn't believe he can help with his ability's two-minute limit. He's world-weary, bored and just wants to meet his mystery woman and get on with things. The action set peices in Next are rather awesome, and it's fun to watch Cris use his ability to deftly handle situations that leave everyone around him scrambling. And when Cris really cuts loose late in the film, his abilities are demonstrated with a visual-effects trick that's smart and coherant but not over-explained.
If you want to enjoy Next, however, you'll have to overlook a few things. First, Nicolas Cage stays true to form with this role and gives Cris a number of personality quirks that are far more distracting than they are necessary to the character. So Jessica Biel's motivations in falling for Cris are utterly unfathomable, given Cage's just-plain-weird portrayal. Biel's monkey-like face is also a little off-putting. And Julianne Moore is dreadful. Her FBI agent barks every sentence, looks constantly constipated and doesn't display a lick of personality aside from a two-dimensional "cold, hard bitch" routine. What may have been a genuine attempt to portray the agent as brusque and business-like only comes across as flat and passion-less. I like to blame director Lee Tamhori, who has never gotten a really decent performance out of an actress. Monica Potter was limpid in Along Came a Spider and Halle Berry was laughable in Die Another Day - add Moore and you've got three actresses who have turned in tremendous performances for other directors. Perhaps Tamahori didn't give Moore enough time or takes to explore the character, or maybe Moore was just phoning this one in, but the result is a jarring note whenever her character is on screen.
Back to the positives, the absolute best part of the film,aside from Peter Falk's cameo, is the ending. I won't ruin it, but it's safe to say that there are not many films with an ending as gutsy, surprising or head-scratching as Next's. Keeping Dick's ending basically intact probably went against a lot of Hollywood instinct.
The movie represents a solid effort, and is a bit of a hidden gem, given it's theatrical reception. Check it out, why not?
Lucid TV is an inexplicably-named webcomic that I've been reading for a few months now. It's a little bit Red Meat and a little bit Cynanide and Happiness; it's extremely dark and dry with a retro feel to the artwork that really sets off the tone of the comedy.
Having nothing to do with TV, but still rather lucid, the comic is about doctors doing often-extremely-inappropriate things. There are no pesky characters or drama to get involved with, just a random cast of random medical personnel and patients enacting the most disturbing little vignettes.
Here are a few of my favourites to get you started:
1408 is a horror/suspense film - a genre I don't typically enjoy. I suppose I stay away from horror flicks primarily because they freak me out and leave me lying in bed at night trying to think of anything other than bleeding walls, mutant cave dwellers or shadowy witches. But I also tend to dislike them because they aren't usually built around characters. I like a nice developmental arc and some snappy banter in my movies, but it's a rare horror-movie character who learns more than "I shouldn't have gone in there." during the course of their screen-time, and dialogue usually trends more towards "desperate" than "snappy".
Spoilers ahead.
The film-makers behind 1408 addressed all my concerns without even talking to me first. Based on a story by Stephen King, the movie is built very simply, with only one major character and one major location. John Cusask plays Mike Enslin, the author of a series of books on famously-haunted places. Mike is estranged from his wife following the cancer-related death of his young daughter a few years earlier. When Mike hears of room 1408 at NYC's Dolphin Hotel, a room in which dozens of guests have died - some horribly - he insists upon staying a night inside it. As the Dolphin's manager, Samuel L. Jackson adamantly refuses Mike's request, sharing stories of over 56 deaths and other gruesome events from within 1408.
Mike doesn't believe in the supernatural, having never encountered any signs during all his previous research, and eventually talks the room key out of the manager. Dictating into his ever-present voice recorder, Mike starts the night by touring the 3-room suite, and everything seems perfectly mundane. As any reader can guess, things go quickly to hell, and Mike begins to experience a number of horrors, trapped within the room. These sequences are quite shocking and exciting in the traditional horror-film way, but the real meat of the movie is in the flashbacks to Mike's history with his family.
Fundamentally, Mike is a skeptic. He believes in what he can see and touch, and has never been able to accept supernatural ideas like ghosts, life-after-death or God. In one scene we see him attempting to comfort his dying daughter with stories of Heaven, clearly skeptical himself. Mike experiences quite a lot that he cannot explain within room 1408, and tries hard to convince himself of a rational explanation. But eventually he accepts the reality of the room's supernatural nature and becomes the first person to escape it.
Convinced that he has just encountered something truly from beyond realm of human understanding - with proof, in fact - Mike is able to acknowledge other supernatural possibilities, including heaven, and finds a measure of peace in thoughts of his daughter.
Spoilers end.
The best thing about 1408, in my mind, is the subtext of Mike's search for the supernatural. It isn't discussed explicitly within the movie, but I found it clear nonetheless. The story is classic Stephen King, with every element of the story tied to same emotional core, and it works as well in 1408 as it did in The Stand or Stand By Me. John Cusack is alone on screen for about 85% of the film, but his performance holds up easily, by turns sardonic and frantic. Samuel L. Jackson's role is really a cameo, but he embodies it perfectly and he and Cusack provide the tight, darkly comic banter I long for.
All-in-all, 1408 is a suspenseful horror with smarts and significance. I recommend it equally for adrenaline junkies and fans of human drama.
In 2003 I decided to stop blogging to ianwallace.com because a co-worker of mine at Star Choice somehow discovered the site, and I didn't feel I could blog freely. After all, my particular brand of sardonic, sarcastic and profane commentary has a tendency to rankle the uninitiated, and I doubted it would make any great impressions with management if they were to hear about it around the office.
There were all kinds of things I could have done to continue blogging in peace, but instead I put up a fake DNS-error page, and let my natural inertia take hold. Over the years, I've regularly considered resurrecting the blog, but never experienced the proper convergence of time, energy and inclination.
I'm not completely sure that I have now, either. But I'd like a forum for the random thoughts and random links I want to share with friends, and I saved myself the trouble of a re-design by selecting a pre-made template.
Don't expect much, and feel free to suggest and complain to your heart's content. I'll try to keep things interesting.
