The Lost Symbol

The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown.

My first literary review and it's on video!

This was incredibly difficult for me to do, given my lack of a) a decent computer b) decent recording instruments, c) technical knowledge and d) a decent voice.  But at long last i've done it.  I've included the transcript below for those unable to view youtube for whatever reasons.

Video is hosted on www.youtube.com


Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code were a mess of historic and scientific inaccuracies that often broke a more astute reader's willing suspension of disbelief.  But that's not to say that Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons weren't entertaining in their own right.

They both delivered fairly compelling suspense, even if it came at the cost of some factual accuracy... ok a lot of factual accuracy.

But they were pieces of fiction.  They may not have been classics, but they were pretty entertaining to read.  So, how does Dan Brown's new novel, The Lost Symbol, measure up?  Well, let's find out.

It's got all the usual Dan Brown formula: a fanatical enemy, ancient conspiracy theories, a hot female "scientist", an early on bad guy who's actually a late story ally, and yes, it's even got it's share of factual inaccuracies for those hard-core fans who insist that if it's not factually inaccurate, it ain't Dan Brown.

Of course, how much it follows said formula may itself be a criticism of the book, but i'm not going to criticise it for that alone.  No, there's much worse things i can criticise this book for.

For starters, the characters all suffer from the same kind of obfuscating personality flaws that are only present in badly written suspense novels.

Characters will regularly forget to mention details until the exact moment when it would be of maximum shock value.

And i'm not talking small details here, like Langdon forgetting an ancient symbol he once saw.  I mean plot altertering details that no one in their right mind would or could forget short of blunt-trauma to the head.

I feel cheated when an author purposely leaves out critical details that are anything but "ordinary" and then drops them in unceremoniously and expects the reader to be shocked.

The other thing that annoyed me about this book is Brown's fumbled attempts at foreshadowing.

While a skilled writer can subtly hide their plot points amongst the finer details of the story, Brown uses such a heavy hand in his writing it's impossible not to figure things out almost immediately.  Anything that's even slightly foreshadowed is instantly and easily recognized as a critical plot element.

The identity of the main villain, particularly, became so blatantly obvious as the novel progressed that i was stunned, stunned that anyone would treat this as even a remotely startling revelation.  It seems the only way Brown can keep a secret from the reader is to deliberately tell them nothing.

Now that i've got some of the literary points out of the way, let's talk about the facts.

If you've read The Da Vinci Code or Angels and Demons or really any of Dan Brown's novels, you already know that he has a little problem with facts.  In keeping with trends, The Lost Symbol is no different.

For example, one point in The Lost Symbol required Langdon to turn an object 33 degrees, which he does by turning the object to the RIGHT, ie clockwise, which has the desired effect for the plot.

But degrees are measured counterclockwise, so turning the object to the right would be to turn it to negative 33 degrees.  A basic error that would've taken all of 2 seconds to correct.

Ok, now i admit, that's a bit nitpicky and an extremely unimportant point.  But that's just one small example of the errors in The Lost Symbol.  Many more, and i mean MANY more, come in the form of pseudoscientific babble from the field of Noetics.

What is Noetics, you ask?  It's a field one of the characters affectionately describes as "philosophy meets science".

It's bullshit!

I promise you, if you have any knowledge or respect for science or philosophy, you are going to cringe every time Noetics is brought up.

But let's move away from all that crap for a second.  Sorry, i meant Noetics.

Dan Brown also includes some references to wikipedia in his writing.  But just listen to these passages that characters are supposedly reading from the online encyclopedia.

"To ensure this powerful wisdom could not be used by the unworthy, the early adepts wrote down their knowledge in code ... cloaking its potent truth in a metaphorical language of symbols, myth, and allegory.  To this day, this encrypted wisdom is all around us ... encoded in our mythology, our art, and the occult texts of the ages.  Unfortunately, modern man has lost the ability to decipher this complex network of symbolism ... and the great truth has been lost." (pg 407)

...and later...

"According to legend, the sages who encrypted the ancient mysteries long ago left behind a key of sorts ... a password that could be used to unlock the encrypted secrets.  This magical password - known as the verbum significatium - is said to hold the power to lift the darkness and unlock the ancient mysteries, opening them to all human understanding." (pg 408)

Who writes a wikipedia article like that?  Nobody!  Nobody fuckin' writes an article like that!

This kind of purple prose is more likely found in books on astrology or ghosts and goblins or some other form of pseudoscience.  It's certainly not what i'd expect to read on wikipedia or any encyclopedia for that matter.

At the very least, the above passages would be litered with "citation needed" tags if not a banner declaring how much in need it is of a massive clean up effort by a more skilled writer.

I don't know, it's like Dan Brown just said to himself, "well, people know i don't fact check anyway.  I may as well just make up whatever i want."

As for the ending of The Lost Symbol, it has got to be the most unsatisfying ending of any of the Dan Brown novels i've read.

While Angels and Demons and Da Vinci Code at least had some feeling of climax and resolution, The Lost Symbol just doesn't.  All the suspense just kind of ends and Brown painfully just walks Langdon and the reader through the last bits of the book tying up all the loose ends out of obligation.

Even the way he ties up the loose ends is unsatisfying and if you're like me, you'll probably just think that the entire adventure was one giant waste of everyone's time.

The Lost Symbol is easily the weakest of the "Langdon trilogy," but, if you read Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code and liked them, you're going to read it anyway.  You're also going to see the movie, because this book, as you'll see, was definitely written to be made into a movie.

Overall i give this book 3 symbols out of 5: a C-.  But bear in mind, that's only when comparing it with other Dan Brown novels.

Paranormal Activity

A guest review, by Saphin

Saphin's given me permission to put it here and edit it lightly (i want to keep it mostly intact).  Given my lack of activity lately, this should bridge the gap between my last review and my next one (which is coming soon, hopefully).

This movie invoked so much ire in me that it MUST be reviewed PROPERLY somewhere!

A quick synopsis:

A young twenty-something couple, Katie and Micah, have just taken the plunge to move in together and they notice they're being haunted by a ghost demon. Katie is interested in terrified by these paranormal activities which have never happened before been happening since she was 8. The couple hire a paranormal investigator psychic who tells them he can't help them so Micah and Katie Micah decides to take matters into his own hands and get rid of the ghost demon himself.

You'd be amazed how many others reviewers got simple things like the plot summary WRONG.

If you want to watch Paranormal Activity, spare yourself and watch the trailer: you'll save time, money, and still see everything that's worthwhile in this movie. Half the movie i was on the edge of my seat.... because i was waiting to see the cool shit that happened in the trailer.

There's not much to this movie, so there's not much to say about it - the movie is THAT unremarkable! Like all Hollywood horror movies, it overuses shock tactics like loud noises and sudden cuts to scare you. The ending felt very unnecessary and there's often a lot of build up to nothing. Also, could they at least TRAIN the actors to use a camera properly? They give them a nice fancy HD Camera so they can shoot the entire movie out of focus and blurry. Is that were their $11,000 budget went? An HD Camera and two no-name actors? They couldn't spare a few extra bucks to teach them how to run a camera properly?

Reviewers are hailing Paranormal Activity as "the scariest movie of the year" and it deserves that title. It IS scary that someone thought investing $11,000 and 7 days on this crap would be a good idea.

This movie embodies everything that's WRONG with the industry these days: unoriginal concept, cheap to produce, and absolutely abysmal writing (if any). No need to pay a camera man, let the actors hold the camera! No need for lots of actors, 3 people is enough!  Audio? Who cares if its whack! its supposed to be psudo-documentary! Writers? who needs 'em!

Its a clever idea every once in a while, so I'm happy that the market isn't saturated with movies like this (after all, how many Blair Witch Projects do we need?[Editor: i'd say one is too many]) but it just smacks of "bottom line budget" film making. I guarantee this will kill the industry. But then again, people seem to LIKE the bottom of the barrel crap Hollywood is churning out these days, so who knows.

Unfortunately i can't say it was a total waste. I am aware that I'm overly offended by this tripe but I'm more upset that I bought into all the hype. It's not a bad movie, but it's not a great movie either. There were a few moments I found myself expectantly chuckling and fewer moments still where I was startled (mostly thanks to loud noises and my sensitive ears).

Capitalism: a love story

So, this review is coming a little late, but late is better than never i suppose.  You may disagree, but that's why i'm the blogmaster.

If you've seen a Michael Moore movie before, you probably know what to expect.  Given his fame, he does tend to "preach to the choir" as it were.  If you don't already largely agree with his views, there's very little chance you're going to see his movies.

It's going to be a challenge to separate out the review from the political persuasion.  I guarantee that each and every review out there that i've read reviewed Michael Moore, not the movie.  While liberal reviewers praised the message, conservative reviewers whined about how much they hate liberal messages (and liberals in general).  I'll try to avoid this idiotic attitude, but i'll air on the side of a liberal view-point, if only because if you're a conservative, you're not going to see this movie anyway, no matter how good or bad it really is.  Hell, i'm willing to bet that if it cured CANCER, the staunch conservative would still rather die than watch Michael Moore.

Capitalism: a love story examines the mixture of capitalism (the economic system) with democracy (the political system).  While it's true that these are very different systems, most people in the western world have largely come to accept the two as one and the same, or at the very least, 100% compatible.  In his movie, Moore attempts to examine how closely related they truly are and see if they truly are as compatible as we in the west take them to be.

Now, if you're a typical conservative movie reviewer, this is as far as you're going to get into the movie: the by-line.  After this, you apparently start claiming Moore to be advocating some kind of Stalinist communism.  Of course, Moore never says this and it seems to even be the case that he's in favour of capitalism, albeit a more mixed economy version than is currently practiced in most westernized societies.  I'm not going to go into the details here, 'cause the movie does that just fine - it's the anti-Moore reviewers who seemed to have missed the movie in lieu of their own tired points.

Most of the movie is spent focusing on the human side of the equation.  Moore showcases cases of pure corruption that were allowed and indeed encouraged by an economic system that, as profit-driven economic systems often do, only care about the profit margins.

Moore does a particularly good job of exposing the corrupt idea of "dead peasant" insurance, in which corporations secretly take out life insurance policies against their employees in order to turn a profit in the event of "unforeseen" deathes.  Some of these come in the form of even hoping for employee suicides.  Given the increased prevalance of "fast paced, high preassure" work environments (go on, check any job ad), one is left to wonder if some of these suicides are more than tragic accidents.  Of course, speaking as one who's seen fellow employees having mental breakdowns because of increasingly unreasonable damands placed upon them, i think it's more than mere speculation to say "yes".

Since Moore's not a numbers man, like myself, he spends much more focus on tugging at emotional heartstrings of his audience.  Unless you're minds been rinsed and lathered in ideologies or you have a heart of stone, there's a good chance much of this will affect you.  Regardless of your political persuasions or what you think of Moore, it's not easy to watch families being thrown out into the street, often illegally, because they can no longer afford the mortgages or second mortgages they were talked into getting by bankers looking to make short-term profits.

A (short) aside: critics often cite the borrower as being in the wrong for accepting a mortgage that they cannot possibly pay, but this fails the capitalistic litmus test.  If the banks are lending money it is they, not the borrower, who is responsible for this judgement and they, not the borrower, who takes the risk in lending the money.  A truly capitalistic society would allow the banks to fail and the borrower to screw the lender - the market's punishment for poor decisions.  Yet who got the bail-out and who lost their house?

Now there's a lot more to Moore's movie than just the above, but i really don't know how to talk about it all without just rehashing his cases in my words.  There is classic "Michael Moore" moments of sensationalism, but there's also some good points hidden for the more cautious and discerning viewer.  That being said, not all his arguments hold any water.  The religious talk, particularly, does nothing for me, but i at least understand where he's coming from with it.  The purpose is to appeal to the religiously inclined in the theatre which, according to wikipedia, is a full 76% of Americans as of 2008.

So, is Moore's film any good?  Well, it's entertaining, but only if you agree with him.  He makes the case against "capitalism = democracy" quite well, but he's by no means the first person to do so.  Not only have others done this, but they've done it better.  The Trap by Adam Curtis (reviewed here on this site earlier) is much more poigniant and telling, but has a much narrower argument to make.

Ultimately, you'll only see this movie if you agree with Moore anyway so i can only rate it in terms of other Moore movies for you:

Better than Farenheit 911 and Roger and Me, not quite Sicko or Bowling for Columbine material.  I give this 2 "invisible hand of the market" thumbs up (out of 3).  Let's just call that a B- (yes, i'm aware it's not actually a B).

Surrogates

Bruce Willis in his biggest role yet: playing two different versions of Bruce Willis.  Now, i know there's a lot of Bruce Willis fans out there who think he's a great actor, to them i can only ask, "have you seen Armageddon?"  I'm still pulling splinters from my eyes for that one, though admittedly it wasn't just Willis who gave them to me.

Surrogates, so i'm told, is based on a comic book series.  I'm not surprised to learn this since hollywood's long since run out of original ideas.  I swear this is the product of inbreeding, nepotism and "networking" that keeps the same talentless hacks employed perpetually while effectively stonewalling any new blood.  But i'm just bitching now.

So, about the movie?  Surrogates is a suspense-thriller, sci-fi, action type movie.  Sci-fi because it's, ya know, robots, action 'cause there's some decent action and suspense because the entire driving element of the film is the solving of a crime and mystery before "bad things happen".

The movie juggles the three genres with varying levels of success.  The action is mostly decent, the sci-fi is omnipresent and the suspense is, at times, simply thrown in to make the audience say "i didn't see that coming", with little or tenuous relevance to the plot.  These aren't huge points and i openly admit i'm nit-picking, but i'm kind of sick of seeing "twists" thrown into stories just to make me go "wow" (which i seldom, if ever, do).

For the most part, though, i think the film is entertaining enough.  The premise is that everyone, save a few thousand people, now has a "surrogate", a personal robot that they use to interact with the world while keeping insulated from perceived and actual dangers and hide in anonymity.  Basically, it's like the internet of today, but with robots!  This point is driven home in the opening sequences when a hot blond surrogate is revealed to be controlled by a fat, middle-aged white guy.  Shocker, right?

The surrogates are said to protect their "operators" from any danger (as that is, indeed, their purpose), so naturally, it's not long into the film when an operator does in fact die and the chase is on to find the how and why.  Enter Bruce Willis, a cop (always a cop) whose sense of justice naturally runs deeper than anyone elses.  His job is to find out how this is even possible and catch and bring the criminal to justice.

While initially i was intrigued by the fact that a weapon could be used to kill an operator through a surrogate, somehow the film thought that this wasn't as interesting and the focus instead switched to "who built it" with the "how it was possible" being hand-waved away.  I won't lie: this saddened me since the latter has a much more obvious answer.  I won't tell you "the who", but i'm sure you can guess it without any clues at all.

I'll spare you all the details of the movie, but suffice it to say that Bruce Willis will solve all the problems and invariably learn along the way that life is much better experienced in person than through a compu... surrogate.  Unfortunately the ending is nothing but a contrived coincidence and no amount of whiny fandom reasoning will convince me otherwise.

Ultimately, the movie's not bad.  It very much is a dumb action movie, despite what it and its fans might say to the contrary.  I give it 7 out of 10 surrogates.  That's a (low) B.  B for Bruce Bwillis.  It's probably more of a 'D+', but that has no cleverness to it... just like Surrogates.

End of the Line

Now, i'd like to talk a bit about something else, if you'd allow me.  I wrote this post not drunk on booze, as i usually am, but on pure anger.  You see, every time i think i've seen the absolute epitome of human stupidity, some asshole, or more likely group of assholes, will invariably come along and prove me wrong.

My bank had recently moved to a new location and i was going there to beg... er, apply for work.  While there i noticed something interesting.  Usually, the line in front of the tellers is guided by velvet ropes and other throw-up barriers.  This is because banks provide impossibly slow service and they need to regulate the line that will undoubtedly form.

I always hated these velvet rope thingies because if you came into a bank and no one was there, or worse, one or two people, you'd have to walk through this stupid little maze to get to the tellers.  So imagine my surprise when i saw that instead of that, i noticed a mat on the ground that followed a specific path and had arrows on it instead.

"Huh," thought i, "that's pretty neat.  It's less obtrusive and easier to navigate, but still conveys the idea of what should happen should the line get too long."

As i stood in a separate line waiting for service myself, the line slowly grew from the 2-3 people to about 15 or so.  Unfortunately, as more and more people entered the bank, instead of following the obvious intent of the mat, they formed a simplistic, linear line that lead to, and crowded up, the entrance of the bank itself.  Bea-fucking-utiful.

Now, you can concoct all the bullshit reasoning you want, there are two (and only two) reasons why this happened:

1) people are too fucking stupid to understand what arrows on a mat mean.

2) people are too fucking lazy to walk the extra few steps to form the line properly.

Any other reason you concoct i guarantee is covered by one of those reasons.  Whether it be some BS about "pride" or whatever the fuck you're thinking, it's either stupidity or laziness.  Period.

Now, you might be saying, "Tipz, you're getting worked up about nothing."  To you i say, NO!  I'm not getting worked up about "nothing," i'm getting worked up about the obvious stupidity of the human animal.  Those stupid velvet roped mazes banks and others use to manage lines are a way to corral you and keep the unruly ignorant masses organized.  They were designed because the banks felt they couldn't trust people to be smart enough to manage themselves with something as idiot-proof as "ordering" without fucking it up.  Well, i guess they were right and when the bank does bring back the velvet rope maze, to the inconvenience and chagrin of us all, you knuckle-dragging douchebags will have only yourselves to blame and you'll know that i'm blaming you, too.

...

I know what you're thinking: did i go on that rant for nothing, or was it just for that stupid picture?