I recently watched the first episode of The Strain from Chuck Hogan and Guillermo Del Toro’s novel of the same name. In this review I’ll tell you if The Strain is Strainuous to watch. Now that I got the obligatory pun out of the way let’s get down to business.
The series debuted on July 13 on FX and began airing in Australia on FOX 8 a few weeks later. The appropriately named first episode “Night Zero” was actually directed by Guillermo Del Toro himself which is a testament to how close he is to the series. From the opening shot I could see that the series has a great cinematic value as the aesthetics were beautiful. You can tell that FX has faith in the show as everything seemed so expensive to shoot from a logistical point of view (Wait until I get to the CGI) as the plane inspection scene is a great example. Today no one can film in an airport so they build these sets to look like an airport. That seems expensive already well on top of that they had a bloody massive plane there. From the premise alone I wasn’t a 100% sold because I saw the word “vampire” and since those novels turned films that shall remain nameless killed my love for vampires, I was sceptical. Now that I’ve gotten a sense of what the show’s tone and mythology is, I can say that I will definitely be watch the second episode. These are the vampires I love, they are grotesque and evil, and even the way vampirism is spread is a fresh and more original take on an act that has been beaten to death.
The protagonist of the series, Ephraim Goodweather played by Corey Stoll is undergoing the classic struggle of balancing his job (CDC) and his family. It’s kind of the show’s way of grounding the character and they also seem to suggest that there is a history with his college, Dr. Nora Martinez played by Mia Maestro, which I don’t personally care about. I did however get a kick out of seeing Stoll with hair, but my favorite part was Professor Abraham Setrakian played by David Bradley. This character is such as bad ass, he even has a sword in his cane. The CGI was actually quite good as the creature look realistic and creepy which can’t be said of many other supernatural themed shows. It is reported that FX spent $500,000 on creature CGI alone so I can literally see where the money went. There are a few goofs that took me out of the moment a bit but I won’t get into too much detail (this is a spoiler free review after all). That being said, what the show did right far outweighed the bad.
Overall the show shows a lot of promise and I am curious in the direction it’s heading. The cinematic value is quite impressive for a TV show and with all the supernatural themed shows all over the air waves, The Strain manages to keep its head above water thanks to some real star power (It’s Guillermo). This brings me to a score of a: Watch if looking for a new show.
Monthly Archives: August 2014
#1 Symposium Pandemonium
Oh the good old days when hash tags used to stand for an unspaced phrase prefixed with numbers to indicate orders. I can get nostalgic at times. Anyway I should probably start writing something relevant to the actual title but then again there is the word ” Pandemonium” in the title but I digress. Today’s symposium/Q&A or whatever they call it raised a couple of discussions that made me cautious about every word I type on this blog. With the ever present threat of being sued from an offshore lawyer on my mind I wonder why people even have these outlets when the ramifications for an intentional infringement. I guess it’s the basic human desire to be heard and to have a place within society. Defamation is something that many people don’t consider when posting online because to me anyway, we have a sense of entitlement that we can say anything we want and get away with it because it’s just our opinion. The cause of that sense of entitlement may be because of our exposure to American media because in those scenarios they have the defense of freedom of speech. In our case we have no such thing and neither do most countries. On the other hand we can be critical of something and actually back up our view rather than just clicking caps lock and absolutely go to town with our expansive crude vocabulary. I guess what I took from today’s symposium is that the web is very one sided when it comes to legal matters. As publishers we are solely responsible for what appears on out platforms and if someone is offended or feels that I have committed a breach, I don’t argue with then or else I’ll be paying damages until I’m six feet under. Seriously though people got fined an enormous amount of money and being a student I’m already poor enough.
(I’m testing out a few sign off lines so yea here is one that I might keep or remove)
Let the Chaotic times roll.
Week 3 Reading
The first reading, “Network Literacy: The New Path to Knowledge” by Miles, Adrian first talked about how though may years of conditioning, we developed an embedded knowledge when it comes to the practices of certain tasks such as finding a particular book at the library and quoting that book in an essay. However, this structurally rigid method is at risk of becoming obsolete thanks to the internet. He goes on to suggest that network literacy will become as natural to us as print literacy has been for so many years. That is an interesting thought as it is not unlikely that more and more will become fluent in network literacy as recently schools introduced laptops and tablets as part of their student requirement. This shift in the method of acquiring knowledge may as well help the next generation of students to become network literates. So many years wasted.
The reading by was interesting. Most of my understanding came from the diagrams I looked up but it think I get the gist of it. Single loop learning is basically the realisation of making a mistake and takes corrective action. Double loop learning is the correction of errors made through modifying an organisation’s policies, objectives and underlying norms. This will ensure that the problem is never repeated. But this can also be applied to a person’s learning as how a person fixes mistakes can have a significant impact on the final outcome as well as frequency of errors made.
The reading “The Age of the Essay” by Paul Graham was pretty much confirm what I had felt for years. I always felt that essay writing in high school was a pointless exercise in repetition as. We were told to think deeply about that subject to come up with original ideas, but that’s where the problem lies. Someone somewhere would produce an identical essay to me now matter how much I reflected on the topic because the question is so restricting. The element of surprise is absent completely from essay writing which to me anyway, makes for some tedious reading for the assessor but if that is what they want then a carbon copy of the same essay they read for years they get. In today’s media we seek story lines that challenge and surprise us. Take ‘Game of Thrones’ for example. Those who are familiar with the show are very aware that any character on any given day can die no matter how important and beloved they are. Those shock twists made the show the most popular show in years.