My Soul to Take movie review

Perhaps writer/director Wes Craven (Scream, The Hills Have Eyes) is getting too used to this slasher stuff. It's apparent he never flinched during production. Because of this, the audience won't much either.

Plot wise, I feel slightly misled by the opening scenes of My Soul To Take which show a schizophrenic murderer in his final hours. The camera zips around as a man switches between his caring husband persona and his demonically possessed alter ego. The constant angle switches and frenetic pacing means we can't process much of what's happening; a lot of people die, or almost die, something crashes, there's an empty gurney. The beginning is a lot of mind-twisting fun, but it turns out all we really need to know is there was a killer named "The Riverton Ripper" and he murdered a bunch of people -- yes, with a knife, that's right -- and now 16 years later, seven children who were born the night of the killer's disappearance are about to go through a similar experience. After such a dramatic and impacting beginning, though, the plot really just turns into a sideshow for Craven's mystic, symbolic meditations.

In fact, every facet of the movie does. The characters are reduced to archetypes (the religious fanatic, the hot chick, the disabled guy, the jock) and the movie's set in a small wooded town, a perfect breeding ground for tribalism. The premises are all based around the symbolic social structure of the high school cliques Craven's cooked up. Frustratingly, he lets the students hints at some big socio-political ideas, the word "revolution" comes up a few times and morality is the rationale behind some motivations, but nothing is delivered with conviction. Perhaps Craven was attempting to portray the undeveloped 16 year-old brain at work -- an odd mix of symbolic gestures, guess work and budding rationality.

The main formalistic problem with these issues is the movie begins to drift into the silly zone. Craven is comfortable with the subject matter and his Jungian point of view, he isn't treading new ground. The audience has no need to fear or explore for themselves. You'll probably end up laughing more at the movies concluding scenes than be frightened.

But as absurdly as it deviates from reality, My Soul to Take is hard to ignore. It feels like it's laughing along with us at itself most of the time, only to snap into a cold, penetrating stare.
Craven understands he's over-exaggerating our mystic nature, but refuses to let us forget that it's still there.

Despite its problems, I did enjoy My Soul to Take's humorous self-awareness. At least it's a movie that doesn't hide the fact it's trying to be fun and is amiable enough to let you in on it.

"Let Me In" Movie Review

Hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn, or so seems to think Let Me In, originally written by John Ajvide Lindqvist and adapted to the screen and directed by Matt Reeves.

The movie begins with a young girl, Abby, (Chloe Moretz) moving to an apartment complex with an older man where she meets a lonely, 12 year-old named Owen (Kodi Smit-Mcphee). Boy likes girl, but girl can’t quite reciprocate. She’s got issues, you see, namely, she’s a vampire who needs to drink blood to survive and will burn if exposed to sunlight. The film never explains why she has to kill innocent, unimportant characters when drinking their blood; in one scene Owen cuts his hand and Abby uncontrollably turns into her vampire form and drinks the drops off the ground and he survives, but whatever, this logic lapse makes for some creepy death scenes!

The vampire attacks are done in CGI giving a jerky effect to the character, which may be a limit of the technology, but adds a perfect surreal touch to movements. Oh, and this Vampire has incredibly agility and climbing ability. Vampire Abby dashes up the side of buildings and trees to perch eerily on upper branches. All of this is enhanced by excellent cinematography which shoots these feats mainly from a distance and behind. It brought to mind a superhero movie where two random idiots somewhere in New York look up, point and shout: “Look, Superman! He'll save us!” Reeves seems intent on grouping us in with the pack. In this case the students at the school, part of the community that doesn’t quite get how difficult life can be for those that are less fortunate.

Let Me In plays as an interesting anti-thesis to Twilight, where male sexual desire was represented by Edward’s repression of his vampire om nom impulse towards Bella. The Smashing Pumpkins intro: “The World is a Vampire” is an apt description of Let Me In’s angle where Lindqvist sees the vampire as a feminine symbol. Women run the show in this one. “Has your mother been filling your head with this religious shit?” probes Owen’s dad over the phone when in an emotional state, he calls his estranged father to ask if there’s evil in the world. No son, there’s no evil. God’s a woman and there’s only female desire. Good luck with all your problems! Lindqvist reduces male characters to brain-dead servants.

As a horror flick, the movie succeeds in sucking a few creeps out of you. There are genuinely grotesque scenes, see disfigured man / vampire love, and the movie’s pointed thesis gives it enough pretension to not go for the cheap shock-scare.

In the end, Let Me In probably had to be made. Something to counter the manipulative beguilement of the Twilight series, but let’s hope vampires don’t go as crazy over other bodily fluids as they do for blood! If so, it’s going to be a long, long life for that vampire and her kid.

Helping the sick live normal lives

I recently had an interview with Aswin Aristama, a photonics graduate from Algonquin College, about his work on a project known as ROMOBS (Remote objective monitoring of bio-signals). The project's goal is to create a device that monitors a patient's vital signs -- like heartrate, blood pressure, etc. -- even when the patient isn't necessarily in a hospital. In other words they want to create a mobile monitoring device that uses wireless technology to transmit a patient's readings to a remote location where a supervising physician can review the information and then advise the patient if any of the readings are not as they should be.

The project offers exciting possibilities for critically ill patients who would otherwise be confined to a hospital bed. With this kind of technology the patient can go about living a close to normal life, so long as they carry around the tentatively -- and even Aristama was quick to admit -- boringly named "ROMOBS device".

The device works by communicating a patient's vital signs via Blue Tooth technology to a cell phone which it has been linked with. With programming done by Aristama, the cell phone then sends the signal through its company's existing wireless communications network to an assigned doctor monitoring the patient.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Ottawa, Algonquin College and a manufacturing company charged with creating the hardware. Currently, ROMOBS is nearing the end of its first year of work, and is scheduled to take three years to complete.

Aristama's job in this was to program the ROMOBS device and design an application for cell phones that allows patients to both see their bio-signals and to send them off to their doctor.

Aristama and the team's work has payed off so far, having won awards from the IEEE of eastern and central Ontario.

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Exciting news from the world of photonics! Which as a matter-of-fact may not be a bad field to go into. Aristama told me that he believes the photonics industry will get hot soon. The 3 dimensional TVs we've been hearing about will require a lot of work from scientists with photonic's backgrounds

There's a button on my keyboard

There's a button on my keyboard.

It sits on the far left and beside it is a small white picture of Saturn. I assume it's supposed to help me understand the button's purpose

Many nights I've spent staring at the button. I've always been too nervous to touch it. 'What does it do?' I wondered. Will it take me to Saturn? I don't particularly want to go there. Especially not in this clothing.

Today, for the very first time, for your reading pleasure I will push the button.

Curiosity overwhelms me as I anxiously reach for the button.

I click it, it makes a clicking noise. Buttons typically make such a noise; Everything normal so far.

I gasp as a screen pops up on my desktop. Something's loading... what could it be!?

....

My Firefox web browser has opened.

What the Olympics Meant

The Olympic games has become a curious contemporary event. It juxtaposes the idea of global unity with the fervent nationalism of international competitive sport.

Recently, the winter Olympics took place in Vancouver, Canada and our home country exploded with national pride as we watched Canadian athletes take home more gold medals than any host nation ever has in either the summer or winter games. The Canadian Olympic team was aided by the Own the Podium funding program. It was designed to give our Olympians an edge in competition. The money went to things like coaching and technology, designing new snow boards with a plastic plating on top helped Jasey Jay Anderson win gold in his fourth Olympic appearance.

The gathering of different cultures and ethnicity's of the world is an inspiring sight. Attendees at the men's alpine skiing event cheered enthusiastically for the sole Ghana athlete, Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong. Nicknamed the "Snow Leopard", he skied comparatively slowly down the hill and finished near the bottom of the leader board, but was greeted at the end of his run with a welcoming roar from the crowd.

Can two seemingly competing values both be embodied in this sporting event? Nations have often used the Olympics as a coming out party to display their political power. The 1936 Berlin Olympics comes to mind. Even the last summer games in Beijing was seen as a display for the country's rising global might. Are viewers expected to choose between the idea of unity and competition? Very few would be naive enough to see the Olympics as solely a universal coming togetherness of the human race.

To Canadians, this Olympics will be regarded as a success. We won men's ice hockey gold after all. People were partying in the streets after the victory and all the celebrators were filled with energy, and a new sense of pride. Does this mean the Olympics is primarily a competitive event, where each nation is bent on victory? It's difficult to say, but it will be interesting to see where Canadians and the Canadian government invest this newly rejuvenated energy in the near future.


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What do the Olympic games mean to you? Do you agree with my opinion on the conflicting values of the Olympics? Any and all comments are welcome.

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