GODLESS WEDNESDAY: Ricky Gervais

Ricky Gervais appears on the cover of New Humanist magazine where he is very explicit about his godlessness.

Here's a delightful excerpt from the interview but you should really go there and read the entire thing:

Did you lose your faith or never have any?

I used to believe in God. The Christian one, that is. (There are a few thousand to choose from. But I was born in a country where the dominant religion was Christianity so I believed in that one. Isn't it weird how that always happens?) Luckily I was also interested in science and nature. And reason and logic. And honesty and truth. And equality and fairness. By the age of eight I was an atheist. (That word shouldn’t even exist. It shouldn’t be needed. But it does. And it is.)

You studied philosophy at university – which philosophical idea has turned out to be most useful?

A few spring to mind. Bertrand Russell said, “No one gossips about other people’s secret virtues.” That became more profound once I’d become famous. Ha Ha. And I love “There is no god higher than truth” – Mahatma Gandhi.

I wish there were more celebrities were open and honest about their atheism or agnosticism.

FILM REVIEW: Tinker, Sailor, Soldier, Spy

I saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy at the Landmark Theaters E-Street Cinema in Washington, D.C. with some co-workers. I had never read the John Le Carrré’s classic bestselling novel on which the film is based or seen the classic BBC adaptation starring the great Sir Alec Guinness but I had heard a radio interview with Gary Oldman  which intrigued me.

The basic outline of the story is about the search for a possible Russian double agent at the very top echelons of the British Intelligence Service (called M.I.-6) in the mid 1970s at the height of the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Bloc. There are four main suspects, codenamed (you guessed it) "Tinker," "Tailor," "Soldier," and "Poor Man" with "Beggarman" being the codename given to the main protagonist portrayed by Oldman, whose character's name is George Smiley.

The movie is set in London in the 1970s and the filmmakers have taken their charge very seriously, meticulously re-creating a 1970s workplace with a striking lack of racial or ethnic diversity, ubiquitous smoking and inappropriate social situations. Watching the movie in 2011 one is also immediately struck by the lack of technology we take for granted: no computers, no cell phones (not even cordless phones!), no satellite/GPS technology.

The investigation into the mole involves a lot of examination of papers and starts off incredibly slowly. For the first ten minutes of the movie there is almost no dialogue and almost no action to speak of. I believe the film makers are trying to put the audience in the position of the characters where both groups are starting with no information and trying to piece together what is going on from various cues and small, disconnected bits of information.

In fact, communication and the movement of information (or intelligence) between individuals is a central theme of the film. Multiple times, a question is asked of one character to another and the director cuts to a different scene without explicitly depicting the answer to the question being given. The audience is required to infer the answer to the question from subsequent scenes and actions by the characters. This is similar to how Oldman's Smiley has to infer the answers to questions he has about the motivations behind the actions of his four "old friends" who are now his main suspects for betraying their country.

Oldman's Smiley is a quiet, horn-rimmed glasses and tweed-jacket wearing middle-aged British bloke. He looks more like an accountant than an international spy with a license to kill. Most of the "action" per se is in watching Oldman's reactions as he doggedly chases the truth and he sifts through the responses people are giving him to his questions. However, as the movie unspools the pace accelerates faster and faster, like a ball of twine rolling down hill. The audience has to pay more and closer attention to keep hold of the thread.

The rest of the cast is also stellar, featuring John Hurt, 2011 Best Actor Oscar-winner Colin Firth, Inception's Tom Hardy and PBS's Sherlock Ian Cumberbatch.

Title: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Director: Tomas Alfredson.
Running Time: 2 hours, 8 minutes.
MPAA Rating: Rated R for violence, some sexuality/nudity and language.
Release Date: December 9, 2011.
Viewing Date: December 16, 2011.

 Plot: A.
Acting: A.
Visuals: B+.
Impact: B-.

Overall Grade: (3.5/4.0).

Godless Wednesday: Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011)

This week on Godless Wednesday we are commemorating the untimely passing of Christopher Hitchens, who has been the public face of godlessness for a decade at least.

Here's an excerpt of part of an obituary of Hitch from Slate magazine:

Born in Portsmouth, England, in 1949, Hitchens studied at Oxford before launching his journalism career in the 1970s with the magazines International Socialism and the New Statesman. In the early 1980s, he emigrated to the United States, where he was a regular columnist at The Nation for two decades before parting ways with the liberal magazine after proudly disagreeing with its editors about the Iraq war.

Hitchens won the National Magazine Award for commentary in 2007, the same year that he became an American citizen on his 58th birthday. Foreign Policy named him to its list of the top 100 public intellectuals the following year, and Forbes magazine labeled him one of the 25 most influential liberals in the U.S. media in 2009, a distinction that took some by surprise given Hitchens's vocal support of George W. Bush's war on terror.

He was a frequent guest on news programs and at public debates, and rarely passed up the opportunity to defend his positions when given the opportunity to do so. He was the author of nearly 20 books, including God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Hitch-22: A Memoir, and Arguably, a collection of his more recent essays that was published earlier this year.

Hitchens remained steadfast in his criticism of religion even in the face of his grim prognosis. In an August 2010 interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, his colleague at The Atlantic, Hitchens made it known that even if he were to somehow recant his devout atheism on his deathbed, any apparent conversion would be a hollow gesture. "The entity making such a remark might be a raving, terrified person whose cancer has spread to the brain," he said. "I can't guarantee that such an entity wouldn't make such a ridiculous remark. But no one recognizable as myself would ever make such a ridiculous remark."

Eye Candy: Daniel Louisy

Daniel Louisy is a Black British model who was a finalist in an international Calvin Klein underwear modelling competition and who has been featured on blogs such as Dark Flex and (of course!) David Dust.

I especially like these black and white images of Daniel. You would never be able to tell he is nearly 6-foot-5-inches!

You can see more shots of Daniel (in color) or follow him on Twitter or Facebook.

Celebrity Friday: Theo James

Every once in a while I am channel surfing and come across the show Bedlam on BBC America. I always stay and watch it for awhile, hoping for glimpses of stunningly gorgeous British actor Theo James who plays Jed. According to his Wikipedia page, Theo James was born Theo Taptiklis in December 16, 1984, which makes him 26 years old.

He apparently has decent role in the next Underworld movie and was recently named a "Star of Tomorrow." Remember where you saw him first!

BOOK REVIEW: Blackout & All-Clear by Connie Willis

Connie Willis is one of my favorite science fiction authors, having written the incredible Doomsday Book (see my A+ review). Last year she returned to the time-travelling universe of Doomsday Book and To Say Nothing Of The Dog with the duology Blackout/All-Clear.

The diptych Blackout/All-Clear was immediately critically acclaimed and became Willis' second book to win both of the top awards in science fiction, the 2011 Nebula award and the 2011 Hugo award.

The books use the assumption that by 2060 time-travel is possible, although due to the chance of changing the future by changing the past, it is mainly only used by academics. The books are set in Oxford University and generally involved graduate students who need to go back in time as part of their "field research" for their studies on particular historical events.

The first thing to realize about Blackout/All-Clear is that it is really not two books, it is one book split into two parts, so you should not expect a conclusion at the end of Blackout. In fact, I would strongly recommend that however you procure Blackout to read it, you should save yourself the anxiety and just get the second half of the book as well, All-Clear.

The main characters are Michael Davies, Polly Churchill and Merope Ward who are sent back into World War II Britain as Mike Davis, Polly Sebastian and Eileen O'Reilly, respectively.

One of the most interesting things Connie Willis does is depict what life really was like to live through the Blitz, one of the most important and harrowing time periods in history, for any civilization. She does this through the seemingly insignificant details of how The War affected everyday, unknown people every day. Of course, what is also amusing and entertaining for the reader is that she also includes people who are famous now but who were not necessarily so famous then (Agatha Christie comes to mind).

Another important feature of the book to me was its depiction of gender. The fact that two of the main characters are women (really barely more than teenagers) in the mid-1940s decades before the equal rights movement allows Willis to really reveal the contours of sexism behind the veneer of polite British society.

One thing all time-travel stories have in common is that they have rules, generally the rule is that the time travelers can not produce a paradox (like going back in time and killing your own father or grandfather before you were born because then how could you be alive to go back in time in the first place?). Willis plays on this fact, and the idea tat no author would ever kill of one of her three central major characters to raise the level of suspense to heart-pounding levels.

In the end, the books end on something of an emotionally manipulative note, but that decision really ensures that readers of Blackout/All-Clear will not forget the experience any time soon.

Title: Blackout
Author: Connie Willis
Length: 512 pages.
Publisher: Spectra.
Published: February 2, 2010.

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A.
WRITING: A.



OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.83/4.0).

Title: All Clear

Author: Connie Willis

Length: 656 pages.

Publisher: Spectra.

Published: October 19, 2010

OVERALL GRADE: A- (4.0/4.0).


PLOT: A.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A+.
WRITING: A.

Ab Fab, Sweetie Dahling!

All the gay blogs are a buzz with the news that nearly 20 year after the first episodes aired in the United Kingdom, the classic comedy Absolutely Fabulous starring Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley is shooting new scenes for a Christmas special episode.

US OPEN 2011: Kvitova Upset 1st Round, Sharapova Survives Scare

2011 Wimbledon champion Petra Kvitova was unable to continue her momentum in grand slam matches, hitting more than 50 unforced errors to lose in the first round of the US Open to Alexander Dulgheru 7-6(3) 6-3. Kvitova's disappointing loss eas the biggest upset of the day as the #5 seed on the women's side departed.

#3 seed Maria Sharapova gutted out her 12th consecutive 3-set match of 2011 against British phenom Heather Watson who seemed unfazed by the 3-time major champ's firepower. Sharapova won 3-6 7-5 6-3.

Venus Williams won her 1st round match winning 6-4 6-2 hitting 1 more winner than  unforced errors, looking in pretty good form even though she had not played a single hardcourt tour match this summer.

BOOK REVIEW: Woken Furies by Richard K. Morgan

The first two Takeshi Kovacs novels by Richard K. Morgan, Altered Carbon and Broken Angels, are pretty amazing, so it's bittersweet to be reading and reviewing Woken Furies, which is billed as the third and last of the series.

Each of the three books featuring Takeshi Kovacs written by Morgan is so different it's hard to call them part of the same series, but they do all feature Kovacs, a hard-bitten, world-weary, brutally efficient killing machine and violent mercenary with his own unique sense of fairness and justice in the very unfair universe of the future.

Altered Carbon takes place on Earth, in a faintly recognizable San Francisco Bay Area several centuries in the future, where Kovacs has been hired by an incredibly rich and old man to find out why he killed himself (or someone made it seem like he did). In Morgan's vision of the future consciousness download technology is  available, but not cheap. So, both Kovacs and the formerly dead man have been downloaded into new bodies (called "sleeves") from their memories stored in their "cortical stack." Morgan's depiction of an Earth of the future dominated by megalomaniacal oligarchs and capitalism run amok is weaved in with a  suspense-filled, violent hunt for the truth of the reason for the mysterious death. Synopsis: Maltese Falcon meets Bladerunner.

Broken Angels is set a couple decades in the future, subjective time, on a completely different planet called Sanction IV. Consciousness can be beamed from one planet (and star system) to another and then downloaded into a brand new sleeve. It's basically a way of virtually travelling at the speed of light. Kovacs begins the book in pure mercenary mode, fighting for the bad guys in a civil war he doesn't believe in . However, he goes AWOL to lead a mission to find and plunder a secret hoard of priceless alien artifacts with a corporate money man and two mysterious strangers he shouldn't (but does and doesn't) trust. Synopsis: Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Alien.

Woken Furies has Kovacs back on his homeworld, Harlan's World, which is 90% covered with water but also orbited by Martian artefacts which rain destructive "angel fire" on any "too large" object which exceeds a vertical distance of 400 meters above the surface. Kovacs is engaged in an extensive campaign of vengeful murder against a powerful religious sect who have rejected the promise of immortality via technology the consciousness download process provides. After saving a woman with advanced implants who was being attacked by some of the more militant members of the sect by slaughtering a half-dozen of them, he discovers that she is the head of a group of mercenaries who are working to decontaminate a nearby continent of abandoned military hardware with artificial intelligence that has run amok. The woman is named Sylvie and she can provide Koacs safe passage from the consequences of his latest massacre.

Kovacs ends up joining Sylvie's "decon" team and is able to get the team out of danger when a raid goes wrong and Sylvie is injured. While Sylvie is off-line she goes through an episode where it seems as if another personality is residing within her. The other personality appears to be Quellcrist Falconer, the most important revolutionary figure in the last several hundred years of struggle against the oligarchal families who run Harlan's World. Falconer has been dead for hundreds of years but Sylvie/Quellcrist appears to be aware of information that only Falconer would know.

Kovacs is being chased by a younger version of himself who is working for the Harlan family for reasons which are some combination of retribution for Kovacs' murderous rampage, a desperate attempt to find and neutralize Quellcrist/Sylvia and suppress any neo-Quellist revolutionaries and a desire to eliminate the competition provided by the "older-model" Kovacs.

All these motives and motivations are portrayed and resolved by Morgan in an engrossing way which is somehow not as compelling as the denouement in Broken Angels. He does make it possible that another Takeshi Kovacs novel of some kind could follow this one, but the author has expressed his desire for this to be the last one and moved on to writing a ground-breaking fantasy series, starting with The Steel Remains.
Morgan has quickly jumped to the top of my list of authors whose work I will look out for, just beneath the likes of Peter F. Hamilton, Patrick Rothfuss and Peter V. Brett.

Title: Woken Furies 
Author: Richard K. Morgan
Length: 480 pages.
Publisher: Del Rey.
Published: May 29, 2007.

OVERALL GRADE: A- (3.75/4.0).

PLOT: A-.
IMAGERY: A-.
IMPACT: A-.
WRITING: A.