Neon galore!

Just came back from the movies with R. We decided on Tron Legacy. I never saw the first movie, but I am aware of its significance in the world of CGI and animation. After some hyperlinking on Wikipedia, I familiarized myself with the world of Tron and with that in mind, and the amazing trailer with music from Daft Punk, I walked through the sliding doors of the Kinepolis and met R at the registers. After some snack-hunting in the Candystore, we went upstairs, to theatre 1, but not before grabbing one of those I'm-never-going-to-go-to-another-3D-movie-ever-again 3D goggles. Yup, that's right boys and girls, 3D has become as unavoidable as getting an STD from a sleazy toilet seat!

I have to be honest when I say I approached the movie a bit sceptical, I mean, I'm all for CGI (if properly executed, that is) and I'm definitely up for a hi-tech fueled adrenaline ride, but it could all go South so very quickly. What I'm actually trying to say is that there were a lot of balls in the air and a lot would be riding on the execution of the special effects. And I'm happy to inform you that all was executed beautifully!

My first wow-moment occured pretty early on, namely with the digitalized version of the Disney logo. I know, I know, but still... It looked pretty effing awesome!

Just you wait until you've seen it all lit up in the movies and with your 3D goggles on!

Then, I was blown away by the bombastic and highly likeable soundtrack. It should come as no surprise as well that I'm downloading the soundtrack as we speak.

Absolutely electrifying...

The next thing that blows you away is your first look at The Grid (the cyberworld father Flynn has created). What follows next is a razor-sharp, high-speed, futuristic trip loaded with breathtaking environments and epilepsy-inducing neon lights. You're in for a treat! - if you're not an actual epileptic, that is.

But there are moments when all these eyepopping visuals fall subject to overkill. For instance, the fight in the bar, near the end of the movie, basically passes by in a brightly coloured blur since it's become increasingly difficult to separate the neon-suits worn by the actors from the neon backgrounds as conjured up by the computer. There's always a good chance this is all due to my slow descent towards utter blindness though - I have like, really bad eyes -, so maybe you shouldn't be too taken in by my opinions.

All in all, Tron Legacy has been a very agreeable experience! If tight flashy suits, lightcycles, perfectly executed finishing moves, Olivia Wilde and a sleek, dark, foreboding hi-tech world rocks your boat, then by all means, climb aboard! - you're in for one hell of a ride ;-) (memorable moment: my first use of a smiley in one of my blog!)

Infinitesimal

Sometimes I feel like a nomad, drifting through this world, never really a part of it. My room a wasteland of clothes strewn around, books thrown on a stack creating a makeshift library, my desk an ever-growing sea of papers, folders, cables, memory sticks and other little nicknacks, furniture that doesn't quite match and a multitude of memorabilia from my life stored away in an ethereal world.

I can sit on a bus, go through life's daily motions and still feel like I'm not actually there. Like I'm somewhere else, though I'm not quite sure where this 'somewhere else' is. I know this might sound quite existentialistic of me, but I hope that some of you can understand this kind of disconnectedness, this sense of permeability, as if you're translucent.

It's happened to me so many times before that I've come to believe this 'flaw' of mine to be intrinsic to my character. Maybe it's all in my head, or maybe it's in my genes. I'm not quite sure which of these I'd prefer. If it was just a condition of the mind, than surely I should be able to relinquish such thoughts, shouldn't I? And if it's a matter of DNA, than I should just abandon all hope now, right? Because until the day genetics crack the human genome, my genes won't magically rearrange themselves to my personal needs.

The curious part about this is the fact that, although it is not the world's greatest experience, I don't altogether dread the feeling either. In a way, it gives some perspective, because here we are, a population just shy of seven billion people, yet we are surrounded by an infinite black horizon which seems to be filled with nothing else but empty rocks and searing hot balls of plasma held together only by gravity.

But what is it that keeps us from floating off this rock and drifting far, far away? Are we connected by people, by the lives we lead, the jobs we have, the steps we take? Or quite the opposite, the steps not taken, the jobs we said 'no' to, the lives we didn't lead and the people who never got to be a part of our lives? What is it then than keeps us from floating away? What is it that makes us stay? 

We are just infinitesimal dots scattered across a 148,940 km² patch of land on a small planet in one of the corners of the Milky Way so it would seem only natural that a member of the human species should feel exactly like this. After all, compared to the vastness that stretches around us, how could we not feel this way? If ever a human being should want to make a difference, he should try to do so on this old piece of rock, right? Because let's face it, the chances of that specific human reaching out into the farthest reaches of the universe and actually make a difference there, seems equally as infinitesimal as he is himself, is it not? 

Maybe it's good to feel this kind of translusency every once in a while. It makes us realize how valuable these precious years are in this world and how important it is to be the best version of us to make sure that this old piece of rock actually remembers us. And if for some reason, the rocks can't seem to hold on to a thought, than we should try to enstill such thoughts in the minds of the people around us, so we - and by 'we' I actually mean I - can try and come back down to Earth, instead of floating off. Maybe then, I can actually stay.

Fly me to the Moon

We live in momentous times. Only one year short of 2012, a year heralded by many religions as the 'End of Days' or at least the end of life as we know it.

A few years ago, I took a liking to Geography, not only because we were learning about plate tectonics, which I find extremely interesting, but because I realized that there were extraordinary things happening all around us. Things that might be some sort of prelude of what's to come.

Disaster movies always know how to draw a crowd (with the exception being Disaster Movie itself, which is a spoof of course) and maybe they attract that much attention because we secretly want to see this world shake up and break down? But why are we so gung-ho on seeing this world perish when all around us efforts are being made to ensure this planet's survival? Fuel alternatives, green energy, solar power, recycling, call it whatever you like, but there definitely is a fenomenal interest in keeping this little blue gem shining as it once has.

By way of a link posted by G on Facebook, I came across this site that maps freak occurences in the weather and in earth's activities. Now I know that there are hundreds if not more of these sites circulating the web and I would've looked at them all, but since this one seemed to fulfill my immediate quest for these worldwide catastrophes, I saw no reason as to why I should look any further.

In 2010, nearly 300.000 people were killed by natural disasters. The American heartland has experienced a record freezing point; minus forty degrees Celsius. 2010 has been the hottest year to date. Sixty-six earthquakes were registered in Belgium in 2010. A new supervolcano, the Campi Flegrei, threatens to lay waste to all of Europe upon eruption. Haiti sees itself confronted with a cholera epidemic, with infected numbers rising to 400.000 by 2011. The list goes on and on.

Are we on the fast lane to global extinction? Or is Mother Nature just experiencing one hell of a vicious period? And will these disasters worsen or will this rock settle back into equilibrium?

I for one am a firm believer in 21.12.2012 (judge me however you like) and so I believe this situation can only get worse, although I remain to be optimistic. I mean, surely we can't all die on that faithful Friday? Surely this world won't meet its on a Friday night? Can this so-called God of ours be that cruel and filled with irony? I suppose we'll have our answer within less than two years now, won't we? And if by then, we're all still here, in one place, without floods, without quakes, without massive tectonic displacement, we'll be quite alright and we can safely say we can live to see another day. And if not, well, there's always the Moon we can try out?

Death of a country

There I was, waiting in the freezing cold for a bus that seemed to have dropped from the face of the earth. At that moment, between quiet desperation and outrageous fits of discontent, I realized something: Belgium is very much dead.

The final stanza of he poem 'The Hollow Men' by T.S. Eliot reads:

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

This is the way the world ends.

Not with a bang, but a whimper.

And it struck me that the same could be said about our - once - fair country. It seems to me that everything within the borders of this nation is slowly, but surely dying. We are a country without a government, and we have been so for over 200 days (and counting), our monetary deficits keep swirling downwards (although in all fairness, it is a global recession), there is a serious kink in our educational system, a public transportation system that lies completely in shambles and the list goes on and on.

Everywhere - or at least in my immediate surroundings - streets are being broken up and left in that state for months at a time. Maybe a sad reflection of our broken spirit? We keep building houses and office buildings even though there is no way that the people who actually need a roof over their head, can afford to stay there. We suffer through endless delays and uncountable senseless acts of crime. We seem to be doing everything to maintain the illusion that we are still a thriving and well-managed country, when in fact, we only have to tune in for the seven 'o' clock news to realize this country is going to hell and we're gaining more and more momentum every day.

I've always known my future must lie somewhere else than in this godforsaken place and for the better part of my life, this country has done nothing to prove me wrong, how could it, really? What have we got going for us? Is our obligatory vote that praiseworthy? Are our pittoresque cities so alluring? Do we run that tight a ship? Sadly, the answer is 'None of the above'. The more I continue to be tortured by buses with a constant tardiness, dreary weather, boring cityscapes and desperate prospects, I become increasingly convinced that I should very much like to leave this place behind and never look back. Just run away and make my fortune somewhere else.

As you might've guessed, I'm anything but a patriot. I guess it has never been in my nature to be a true Belgian. And perhaps it never will. I want to say that this bothers me, but it doesn't. It really doesn't. Why would I want to be a part of a country that is flatlining? Maybe other people can't hear it, but I can't stop listening to the monotonous, irritating sound of a country that is beginning to whither and die (if you'll excuse me the Resident Evil - Extinction-borrowed quote).

PS3, I love you

I thought, with the end of the January exams drawing near, I should pay a little visit to the Game Mania website and see what kinds of new goodies they've got in store. And let me tell you, 2011 is going to be a mouth-watering year for me and my fellow gamers. The time of Atari's Pong seems so long ago, it might just as well have occured in the Stone Age. When you see the kinds of games that are now (or will soon be) available to us, you cannot help but marvel at the technical wonders us feeble humans have managed to conjure up.

Let me paint you a picture. Or in other words, let me tell you on what I'll be spending my money this year. Frankly, I don't know where to begin. There's Uncharted - Drake's Deception (of course), Crysis 2, Bulletstorm, Homefront (for those of you who loved Red Dawn - and Apocalypse, Now!), MotorStorm -Apocalypse, DC Universe Online, Brink, inFAMOUS 2 and on and on the list goes.


Because sweating in the desert, raiding tombs, killing evil mercs, ...
has never looked so damn good.


A "catastrophically beautiful" full-blown war in a decimated New York City.
Who wouldn't be up for that?


Big effing guns, big effing monsters and a not-so Goody Two-Shoes vocabulary.
Sounds like my kinda game.

A United States brought to its knees, crippled by a brokedown economy,
and blasted with a lil' EMP from North Korea, with love.

Racing with really cool cars in a real-time really-devastated city?
Bring. It. On.

Becoming a superpowered being and consequently, the savior or annihilator of Earth?
Don't mind if I do...

Civil wars, flooded earths, crazy people, intelligent SMART system and id Tech 4.
Oh yeah. I'm there.

Death by electrocution.
Sounds like a perfectly good way to go.

So give me something to believe

Anybody even remotely familiar with the whole teenage drama television format knows about the basic plot structures that haunt such shows. There are the couples who you'll know end up together, because that's the way it's supposed to be, that's the way it should be, but somehow, producers and storywriters alike, tend to stretch this already paperthin relationship out for two seasons or more. A striking example of this can be found in the Gossip Girl series. The show starts off with Serena, Blair, Nate, Chuck, Dan and Vanessa (actually, she only shows up halfway through the season, but details, friend, details!). So anyways, Serena hooks up with Dan, Nate struggles to choose between Vanessa and Blair, the latter of which has caught the eyes of the young Mr Chuck Bass. For the next two seasons or forty-shy episodes, these love triangles will continue to evolve, break up, reforge and break up again, until finally, midway through season three the happy couples are finally united. (To find out who ends up with who, I suggest you view the series, or, Wikipedia them!)

Unfortunately, a series like Gossip Girl has the side-effect of portraying love as something completely bouleversé. Lives are built up, only to be brought down again. Hearts are filled with love, only to bleed out later. It makes you wonder if these writers draw their art from life or from nature? And if from life, it is a faithful representation? Because if so, we humans are pretty shitty lovers, aren't we? 

Deny it as much as we want to, a sad lovestory always sells better than a happily-ever-after, need I bring up the box-office numbers for Titanic or even Moulin Rouge? As much as we want to believe in fairy tale endings and blissful marriages, there's a deeper and darker part of us that preys on the total destruction of hope and erasure of love from what, for all intents and purposes, is considered to be a fictional character. That way, the audience can always leave with the though that their life is nowhere near as complicated and that, despite how bleak their future might look, there's a good chance some fictional Dick or Jane who have it inifinitely more to endure than we ever could.

Romance, or at least, what passes as romance on-screen seems to has lost much of its appeal, to me. I mean, I know all the old sayings such as 'You don't know what you've got 'till it's gone', 'Some of the best things in life, are the things that are right in front of you', 'True love' and all that other sensible stuff, so why is it, that when people watch television shows, the ratings start to steadily drop when the drama stops? Isn't that what love is about? Being devoid of drama? Having Ariadne'd yourself out of life's labyrinth of emotional dead-ends and ever-winding paths? The reverse seems to be true. Romance is just the start of things to come. The beginning of the end, if I were to be a cynic.

Even with all these cinematic rocky roads, there is a core to be found in each one of them. A truth that lies in the hearts of all of us. The search for love in a world that seems to do everything in its power to nihilate such notions. The search for something more ethereal, when all we seem to do is be silly little material boys and girls. So I guess therein lies the challenge: to believe in something more. Not gods, kings or rockstars, just people.

Yes, I know, I've been going on an emotional rollercoaster again with this blog and I hope you weren't too dissatisfied with it, because I can't promise it won't happen again. But hey, if you can sit through all the other lovy-dovy shows, than I think this little blog should be the least of your worries, should it not?

Holly not-so-Golightly

I've had this little list of cinematic classics in my head for quite some time and I told myself that I would make it my personal mission to watch them all - if only for the sake of expanding my almost encyclopedic knowledge of the film world. Some of these movies-to-see were It's A Wonderful Life, Casablanca and either movie with Brigitte Bardot, evidently, I settled for La Vérité. Other movies I must see soon are: Gone With The Wind, Some Like It Hot, An Affair To Remember and The Way We Were. 

I found It's A Wonderful Life to be an incredibly beautiful story of individualism and the sacrifice of one's personal desires for the needs of others. George Bailey perpetually places others before him, not believing in the good deeds that he therefore commits and is unable to see how wonderful life can be. The tale of 'not knowing what you've got, 'till it's gone' is beginning to sound like a broken record - to some of us -, yet you cannot help fall in love with the black-and-white esthetic and the genuine Christmas-spirit feel of this movie.

Casablanca was alright, although I don't know where people got the idea that Humphrey Bogart could act. If all you had to do was steady your drinking hand, look like your trying to solve the world's most difficult equation and speak in a single monotonous voice, then okay, you've got yourself an actor - apparently. Special praise goes out to Ingrid Bergman however, as her almost-porcelain features and tender character was the main raison to continue watching the movie.

And lastly, La Vérité I enjoyed immensly as well. The sensuous Bardot who could hide a small animal in one of her hairdos, knows how to spin a guy round and round her finger until he's completely done for. If ever you should come across it, don't hesitate and see it. If only to gaze at that massive pile of hair, the piercing stare and lips that could squeeze diamonds out of solid rock.

But today's topic is all about a certain quirky, fast-talking, unpredictable, cat-loving and diamond-praising girl: a miss Holly Golightly. For those of you who haven't heard this name before, perhaps dropping another one might get you back on track of Memory Lane: Breakfast At Tiffany's? And if that still doesn't do it for you, then I honestly don't see the point in you reading onwards.

Breakfast At Tiffany's, to me, is all about one's search for identity and happiness. It's a story about a girl who doesn't seem to trust herself and gets by solely based on her good looks and her quick-whipped personality. Set in New York, this vast metropolis is perfect to accomodate Holly's chaotic and fast-paced lifestyle.

The movie starts with her famous stroll across Manhattan, staring through the store windows. The streets of the City That Never Sleeps have yet to come alive in their nigh-permanent gridlock state, but for now, they're beautifully desolate. Entering her apartment, she rings the landlord to let her in because she continuously forgets or looses her keys. Clearly, organized life is completely wasted on her. Her apartment is as ecclectic as her walk of life - an upside down box for a coffee table and a half cut-out bathtub for a couch -, even her cat, which remains nameless - since she feels she has no claim on it -, has adopted Holly's playful and slightly crazy attitude - mind the part where the animal simply clings onto the doors of the closet, quite the vertical delight!

There's something about Audrey Hepburn and the way she portrays Holly that keeps you glued to the screen. Even though at times all you want to do is shake her and scream at her "Why can't you see what's right in front of you!" or my personal favourite: "Damnit woman, marry the man already!", there is no denying the massive heap of charisma that comes with every move she does and every sentence she utters. Her mannerisms, from the way she's holding her foot-long cigaret, to the way she strolls in and out her apartment, up the firescape to greet her upstairs neighbour Paul, with the much-quoted sentence "Fred, darling". As to why she's referring to Paul as Fred and why at some point Holly is called Lula Mae, that's what you'll have to find out when you see it for yourself. And see it you must, because Holly Golightly deserves your attention even if it is just to hear her say her immortal "Darling" line or watch her try and steal something from a 99ct store.

I used to think that calling certain old movies 'classics' was just another marketing strategy to sell movies or some word that was casually being thrown around, but for some cases, I get why they would slap the label 'classic' on the cover. Holly Golightly is not someone you go over lightly, it's something you watch and savour. Like a fine wine, age has done nothing to it, but make it better. You'll see. Just you wait, darling!