dakegra

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Saw Predators last night.

To set the scene – hopes for this were high. This was *the* sequel. Robert Rodruigez! Predators, plural!
That ultra-cool trailer moment where Adrien Brody stops and his head and torso is covered in the triple-laser Predator sights. Laurence Fishburne! Danny Triejo!

WARNING – HERE BE SPOILERS!

It started well – we find our hero (Adrien Brody) unconscious in free fall, waking to frantically try and open his parachute. Pretty tense. He meets up with a motley crew of assorted bad-ass misfits.

The action ticks along nicely. The dialogue is fairly predictable – you could literally tell pretty much what Brody was going to say a line or two before he was going to say it. Still, that can be fun.

The action sequences are also fun, and well done. The only issue I have is that we’ve seen it all before, and better in some cases.

Brody plays a kind of sub- Vin Diesel Riddick from Pitch Black – anonymous hard case who is tougher than anyone else by a mile, quick with the wisecracks. Riddick was more interesting though, and you ended up rooting for him in the end, despite him being a merciless killer.

Same with the other characters – you could essentially line them up and say who’s going to make it to the end, who’s going to get killed off, and more or less in what order. Even the odd-man out was predictably not who he seemed, though I did sort of expect him to be working for the Predators in the end.

The bit which got me though was how few Predators were actually in the movie. That trailer? The one with the dozen or so gunsights?

Not in the movie.

That whole scene, that whole ‘oh. my. god… how on earth is he going to get out of *that*??’

Not there.

I wanted it to be what Aliens was to the original Alien – bigger, badder, more intense. What we got though was just another Predator movie, with a couple more Predators and a different motley group of characters to get killed off.

I wanted to see more of the Predators, more of the hunt, more of the why. I know *what* they do, I’ve seen it before. It’s cool, with the thermal imaging stuff, and the laser sights, and the weapons and stuff, but I wanted… more.

Had this been the first Predator movie, it would have been perfectly fine. As it was, it was just another version of it, with no twists or turns or real surprises. It was better than the AvP movies, but Arnie did it better.

That said, I liked the yakuza guy and his swordfight. I liked Laurence Fishburne. Danny Treijo is always watchable. Adrien Brody looked in phenomenal shape.

Oh, and for those who’ve got this far, a question. Why, after being told halfway through the film that Arnie saved himself by covering himself in mud, did Royce (Brody) wait until the very end of the film to actually do it? Then completely ignore the fact that he was covered in mud (as it clearly didn’t work on the thermal imaging camera) and go for the fire instead, which clearly was his plan all along?

So, in summary, a perfectly ok action flick. Decent acting, big explosions, all your standard Predator fare. I didn’t resent paying my seven quid for a ticket, and was quite happy that I’d seen it on the big screen.

It just wasn’t what it so easily could have been. It’s been set up for a sequel. Now I want my Predators, plural. And *lots* of them, this time.

7/10. Try harder next time.

We were doing some sorting in the garage yesterday and I discovered another two of my old juggling balls. Or rather, what was left of the juggling balls – the mice had clearly been at them and had feasted on their innards.

I’m still not entirely sure how my collection of juggling balls ended up in the garage – I had at least a dozen which I’ve picked up over the years too. My first set (of four) I got back at university, so were at least 20 years old. I then inherited my brother’s set when he moved out of his student house, so there’s another four. I bought myself a lovely bright set at Greenbelt a couple of years ago, which were ace. They weren’t *quite* luminous, but came quite close.

I’ve got sundry others too – the orange ‘stage’ balls, which are big and bright but go flying if they bump together. A set of proper glow-in-the-dark juggling balls. A large luminous one for contact juggling, and my clear acrylic ball which I also use for photography.

So, I need^[1] some new juggling balls. Or, more specifically, thuds. Thuds are those soft, squishy, multicoloured beanbags. Much better for practising, they have a good heft and don’t roll off when you drop them, or bounce apart wildly when the collide mid-air.

I want to get five too – I can juggle three comfortably, and four with a bit of practice to get my eye in. Never quite mastered five though…

Oddballs do some good deals on thuds, especially when you buy several. Trouble is, which colours to get? I like the multi-coloured ones, but they don’t seem to do the semi-luminous ones like in the photo above…

^[1] for a given value of ‘need’, obv

Collective nouns illustrated

via Kottke.org

I like the hush of librarians, though why are they all female? Grr*

* pet peeve, having been a male librarian for some years. Though, on further reflection, it merely shows three people dressed in female clothes. It’s entirely possible that one or more is a transvestite**
** I reckon it’s the one on the right

Surreal news story of the day: Puppy thrown at German biker gang

Now, the headline in itself is pretty off the wall. Someone threw a puppy at a biker gang?

But wait! It gets weirder:

A German student “mooned” a group of Hell’s Angels and hurled a puppy at them before escaping on a stolen bulldozer, police have said.

a. he mooned a group of Hell’s Angels?
b. puppy hurling = bad
c. he escaped on a stolen bulldozer

Let’s look at that last one again. He *escaped* on a bulldozer. Notwithstanding his somewhat foolish, nay reckless initial bare-bottomed insult, followed by a cruel spot of puppy hurling, he then decided to make his escape from a group of leather-glad german bikers on a bulldozer

He actually got away from a bunch of presumably bemused Hell’s Angels, on a large earthmoving machine, which he then ditched and hitch-hiked the rest of the way home.

I suspect the bikers were looking at each other saying “Am I imagining things, or did that actually just happen?”

The puppy is now being cared for in an animal shelter. :-)

Subtitled “onwards, to a new future”. Maybe I should stand for President. :-)