Round Again

Conditions: Nice, Maybe.

Rights Only For The Cute

Some science boffins have glued some electronic bits and peices to the backs of some cockroaches in order to influence how they move. An amusing experiment, I suppose, but what struck me was a comment near the end of a particular commentary.

While using insects in this way makes sense from a cost perspective there's also a side benefit: El Reg imagines that there will be few animal-rights protestors kicking up a fuss about such experimentation.

It's easy to stir people up over experimentation on cute lab animals such as puppies or primates (no matter if the research is useful or not) but it's the rare person who will worry about the fate of a few cockroaches – particularly if you've recently found one in your food.

- theregister.co.uk

While this may be true, I'm not sure it's right. Science should be entirely blind to the "cuteness" of the animals it's testing (unless that is part of the test) and just focus on the correct procedures. A little professionalism, please.


Film Review: The Expendables 2

It’s not often you can get to watch dinosaurs in their natural habitat, and Expendables 2 provides us with a somewhat unique window into a world thought long extinct. See the Wrinkled Musclesauruses strut their stuff, gunning down a vast horde of “bad guys” while spitting out bad one liners at every opportunity. Stallone, Willis and Schwarzenegger have returned to the unlikely Expendables franchise, featuring a supporting cast of familiar and non-familiar faces. You may or may not remember the first Expendables movie, a somewhat earnest affair concerning a bunch of mercenaries who decide to go free a small island nation in the Gulf from a tyrant and his army of goons. It wasn’t all that great, but it was a somewhat solid affair. The sequel seems to have gone in a new direction.

My initial reaction to the violently amusing bloodbath that is Expendables 2 was that it was a fun, enjoyable film. Things blow up really nicely, there’s some great fight sequences, some pretty good jokes and in-jokes, and we get to watch Schwarzenegger shoot people, which I admit is something I have missed. Jean Claude Van Damme plays the head baddie, and he throws himself into the role as well as he can, going for mysterious but hitting more often just plain odd. The plot concerns him stealing plutonium from a Russian mine in order to ...sell it I guess, and the team is after him.

But really, once you think about it, the plot is just nonsense. Nothing is setup, there’s no answers, there’s not even really a plan. And the characters are basically paper thin as well. Of course I realise the first film was thin as well, but they really did try in that one. This time around, we’re down to transparency. The purpose of the film is to deliver the heroes via a series of action sequences to a big final action sequence. And that’s it. No drama, no redemption, no exploration, just simple violence and one liners. I’m disappointed. I know it takes a lot of effort to wrap actual ideas around a series of action sequences, but we are paying good money to sit in theatres and watch these things, so some effort is actually expected. It should no longer be a surprise to find depth in an action movie, but this one hearkens back to older films both in bad ways and good ways. I think a concern is the attempt to cash in on those older films by having the lead characters make jokes of each other. This kind of thing may be funny, but it doesn’t really help this current film, the story being told. I think I prefer the first one. Two explosions out of five.


- Peace out