Art & Criticism – Page 2

Battletruck — Sci-Fi Sundaze

Published on January 22, 2023Leave a comment

In a post-apocalyptic world where oil is more valuable than gold, a lone renegade saves a peaceful community from a gang driving exotic, armoured vehicles. But this is not Mad Max, this is Mad Max‘s New Zealand, worse budget, worse actors cousin: Battletruck.

A head-on shot of the battletruck with armoured shutters over its windows all in black with menacing lights.

You have to love a movie with a title as straightforward as this. The main attraction is the Battletruck, so let’s name our movie Battletruck. Then the yanks came and renamed it Warlords of the 21st Century which sounds like it should’ve been one of those Italian redubbed in English sci-fi schlockers. If you’ve seen Mad Max II you know the plot of Battletruck. It all starts when the titular truck runs down a horse drawn wagon and discover diesel onboard. Killing one of the drivers, the other one tells the gang where to find a hidden storage depot full of the stuff. The gang’s leader, colonel Stracker decides this would make for a nifty new base. When he orders his daughter to kill the survivor, she refuses and sneaks out that night. Pursued by the gang, she’s saved when the motorcycle riding Hunter comes to her rescue. He brings her to Clearwater where she lives a peaceful life until Stracker and his battletruck attack. It’s up to Hunter to save them all…

Battletruck is supposed to be set in America, but with every supporting role done by New Zealand actors and with it being shot on location there, it makes much more sense to have the story take place there as well. Especially with a cast that looks as if they’d been cast for a socialist realist kitchen sink drama and got tricked into doing a post-apocalyptic actin thriller. It makes for a far more down to earth drama even if it’s the same plot as Mad Max II, when even the weapons are bolt action rifles rather than M-16s or Uzis. There’s a strange vibe to this movie because of those incongruities, which actually made it a bit more interesting than if this had been a schlick fully American production. A minus point is that the acting is often dreadful, though this is more the fault of the American mainliners than the New Zealand supporting cast. Hunter e.g. is played by Michael Beck, better know for his starring role in another futuristic motorcycle extravaganza, Megaforce. The actors playing Stracker and his wayward daugher are not much better. Not that you’re watching this for the action and the movie itself did kept my attention throughout.

Caption: After the Oil Wars...

The setting is interesting. A simple “After the Oil Wars…” followed by an expository news radio message talking about how the oil fields in the Middle East are now either radioactive or ‘still burning’, food riots have broken out, martial law declared in ‘greater Detroit’ and how the exodus from the cities is flooding the countryside where bandits roam but law enforcement is powerless as they’re dealing with the crisis in the cities. Unlike what you’d expect from the phrase “post-apocalyptic” this isn’t set after a full blown nuclear war, but society has still collapsed. It’s a setting Battletruck shares not only with Mad Max but also something like Escape from New York and other eighties sci-fi. A full nuclear apocalypse is too scary, too big for an action movie, but there’s also the feeling that it wouldn’t take that much to collapse (American) society anyway. That whole late seventies to mid eighties period there’s an underlying current of pessimism, the feeling that America is doomed even if the world itself isn’t. Gang violence, recession, losing the Vietnam war, inflation, it all seems as if America is crumbling from the inside and nobody cares. You see that feeling in a lot of near future American science fiction of the period. Not just movies, but also in comics like American Flagg! and Scout and novels like Neuromancer. It doesn’t really fit here because the feel of the movie itself is so very New Zealand, a country with its own problems but nothing quite like this.

A nice little entry into the post-apocalyptic action thriller genre. Not very original, not the best of acting but still worth watching nonetheless.

Your Happening World (December browser tab amnesty)

Published on December 8, 20221 Comment

Here are some interesting articles cluttering up my browser tabs:

Biopolitical Binaries (or How Not to Read the Chinese Protests)

Victoria 3 Players Think Communism Is Too OP — Victoria 3 is a political simulation game that plays like accounting software. And currently, apparently even the game’s numbers agree with the so-called radical left that communism is the most economically efficient government system. Victoria 3 players have taken to the internet to complain that there aren’t any other ways of playing that are better than Marxism.
New dates suggest Oceania’s megafauna lived until 25,000 years ago, implying coexistence with people for 40,000 years — The U-series dating provides minimum age estimates, which means the fossils could be older. But since our estimates are supported by previous accelerated mass spectrometry dating, collectively the data provide a compelling case for the existence of megafauna in Sahul as recently as 25,000 years ago.
Thorsday Thoughts 276 – Thursday December 8, 2022 — While I tend to view Thunderstrike as a continuation of this run, it’s also its own thing. This is the final issue of Thor by Tom DeFalco and Ron Frenz after taking over at the end of 1987. They did two unrelated issues, one an untold story from Secret Wars focusing on Thor and the Enchantress, and one introducing Dargo, the possible Thor of the future. After a one-off by Jim Shooter, Stan Lee, Erik Larsen, and Vince Colletta, the run proper began and lasted for just over five years. It’s hard to sum up those five years in a simple statement, because, if there was one thing constant throughout those years, it was how willing Frenz and DeFalco were to change things up.
Scientists Identify 208 Natural Minerals That Formed From Human Activity — A new study has found that the incredible upsurge of new minerals around the time of the industrial revolution led to the unprecedented diversification of crystals on Earth, eclipsing even the Great Oxidation Event 2.3 billion years ago as the “greatest increase in the history of the globe”.
‘Murder game’ cinema: Rollerball, its precursors and influences — here’s a list of Rollerball related movies I need to watch as well. Recommended fodder for those interested in dystopian sevneties sci-fi. (Some of the less obvious movies on here are by the same director.)
AND WHO DO YOU HIT? Three West German films on familial and economic violence in the Märkisches Viertel — examing and screening several socialist, realistic documentary movies coming out of seventies West-Germany depicting the life in a particular apartment building. Entirely different from the glitzy Hollywood sci-fi of the above list, but you can see some continuity here, can’t you?
My Stepfather Became My Dad the Day He Took Me to My First Football Match — My dad, Barrie, isn’t technically my dad. He’s my stepdad, but he became my dad on 12 November 1988 when Southampton beat Aston Villa 3-1 at The Dell, the club’s dilapidated former home. My birth father had effectively disappeared by then, leaving my mum with two sons, one of whom was football mad. That was the first game of football Barrie took me to.

I especially recommend Tom Williams’ very personal account of the way football brought him and his dad together.

You need to understand both languages — Martin’s increasingly petty translation rules

Published on August 26, 2022Leave a comment

That sounds obvious right? If you want to translate something, you need to understand what’s being said in the original language, then adapt it for the language you want to translate it in, making sure it still makes sense there and hopefully mean the same. More difficult then you might think. Here’s a good example, not taken from anime this time, but from the Danish version of Taskmaster, as presented by the official Taskmaster Youtube channel.

the Taskmaster asks: do you sometimes move down from the purple to the red field

This sentence makes no sense in English. Clearly there’s some Danish expression or saying being used here that’s been translated literally. From context you can sort of guess that it’s about Julie being angry and needing to calm down, but this whole exchange made no sense in the subtitles. I don’t even know if moving from the purple to the red field means she’s getting angrier or more calm. A clear translation failure where the translator didn’t realise this was some sort of expression and therefore didn’t get the meaning across in English. Had they understood this was an expression and understood what the expression meant, they could’ve either used an English equivalent, or chosen to just get its implied meaning across. But they didn’t, so they didn’t.

That’s why just being able to recognise words and sentences is not good enough. You need to understand the source language well enough to know what’s being said, but also what is meant by what’s being said. You then need to understand the target well enough to be able to get the meaning across in a way that both makes sense in it and is reasonably faithful to the original. If you lack the former, you get this mess. If you lack the latter, you get what you see in a lot of scanlations of manga and especially Korean manhwa or Chinese manhua, where the translator recognises the expression in the original but has no clue as to the equivalent in English, so translates it literally and plops down a translation note. (Occassionally you get somebody who does think of the equivalent in English and just plops that in the translation note.)

What you see with this translation of the Danish Taskmaster in general is something that’s just functional enough to have as Youtube subtitles, but that’s it. A pity because the series itself is hilarious, with a nice group of competitors and a great Taskmaster and assistant. If you like the original, you’ll like this one as well. Having those substandard subtitles however makes it just that little bit harder to enjoy.

Not even leaving language untouched

Published on February 7, 2022Leave a comment

This bit in Marco Roth’s review of several Russell Hoban novels hit a chord with me and made me scrabble in my bookcases for my own copy of Riddley Walker:

Unlike Tolkien’s Middle Earth and its logical Elvish languages, intended to provide an ordered universe for dualistic fantasies of good v. evil, Riddley Walker’s world is our own, warped to breaking point. The pleasure of puzzling over Hoban’s inventiveness is complicated by the horror of the novel’s premise. The hellish aftermath of nuclear winter isn’t funny, and every pun or chopped up bit of language is a trace of this, as well as a game for the reader.

Adam Roberts in his foreword to the 2012 SF Masterworks wrote about being sixteen in 1980 when reading Riddley Walker and “the pervasive, acute anxiety that nuclear war might break out any day”. I’m a decade younger than him and I also remember that fear growing up in the eighties, only receding in the latter half of the decade. It might not be a coincidence that this novel, though started the year of my birth, 1974, was only finished and published in 1980. Roth cuts at the heart of Riddley Walker with this paragraph: nuclear war as a disaster that not just destroys society, but language itself. It reminds me of Threads, which similarly argued that the real disaster of nuclear war wasn’t just the war itself, but the destruction of human culture in its aftermath. My own fears at the time were more primeval, as in just not wanting to die in a nuclear war. It’s only later that I understood that as the true horror of a nuclear war. The threat of the destruction of not just civilisation, but of humanity smashed back to the stone age, its history lost, unable to climb back on.

That’s the difference between Riddley Walker/Threads and most American nuclear holocaust fiction. By the eighties it was impossible to pretend here in Europe that a nuclear war could be survived, let alone won; there just isn’t any place to escape to if the bombs had started dropping. In America on the other hand, with its still massive wilderness, you could imagine surviving away from the cities, rebuilding something akin to civilisation. Whether that would’ve been true is another matter.

Translating the untranslatable

Published on August 8, 2021Leave a comment

English speakers have a fascination with foreign language words that don’t translate easily into their own language, as seen in this New Yorker tweet promoting an article on “untranslatable words” describing happiness:

From “utepils” (Norwegian, “beer that is enjoyed outside, particularly on the first hot day of the year”) to “mbuki-mvuki” (Bantu, “to shed clothes to dance uninhibited”), the Positive Lexicography Project gathers untranslatable words describing happiness.

Which annoyed actual translator Jocelyne Allen greatly:

Auuugh!! Nothing is untranslatable! You translated those “untranslatable” words in this very tweet! They were translated, thus they are translatable! Can we please stop with this stuff before I have a rage aneurysm??

I get where she’s coming from, because it is lazy and dismissive to call this sort of thing untranslatable, when in the same tweet they’re perfectly able to at leasst the concepts behind them. It’s also somewhat patronising, this idea of untranslatable words, there’s always that undertone of if we didn’t invent a word to describe this concept, how important can it be. Othering even, emphasising how strange or silly these foreigners are for having a word for drinking beer outside. So I get the frustration.

On the other hand, there is a difference between having a word for something and being able to describe something. You can describe “utepils”, as that anonymous New Yorker social media person did, but do you grok it the way a Norwegian would? Clearly translating it needs more than just describing it, right, because you can’t just drop in a charmless description like that every time it comes up in your depressing Scandinavian crime thriller. So not untranslatable, but translating it does mean it loses a bit of cultural specificity.