Salocin

After the dearth of storytelling in 'Clones', how reassuring to see a mainstream blockbuster movie where the characters are more prominent than the effects.

 From the thoughtful and well paced opening through the final decision scene at the climax, this is a film about ordinary people in extraordinary situations.

More than Superman or Batman, Peter Parker is every-guy, a high school nerd who can't talk to girls and is bullied by the jocks.

His insecurity makes him instantly appealing and accessible to the audience, and makes his eventual heroism all the more affecting.

Toby Maguire was perfect casting as was Kirsten Dunst as the girl next door in the wet t-shirt. Willem Dafoe comes close to scenery chewing on occasion but for the most part gives a controlled performance as the obligatory villain.

The direction is competent rather than spectacular but Raimi manages a few shock tricks learnt in his Evil Dead days, and there are some effective and knowing nods to the comic book, notably Spider-man's upside down half-masked kiss.

The biggest disappointment is Elfman's score which never really takes off in the way it should. There is no identifiable theme for the hero which is a shame because the soaring shots of Spider-man negotiating New York's skyline deserve a fanfare.

However, in most respects this is a good, a very good, film which manages to match stirring action with a well told coming of age story.

  

In booking a hotel room in Philadelphia recently, I realised the extent to which customers are often misled regarding the price they pay for the accommodation they receive.

I was desperately trying to find a hotel room in Philadelphia. I only had 24 hours left before I expected to be checking in, and I was getting very worried that I would have nowhere to stay.

I tried hotwire.com who have a great search engine that allows you to choose what price you want to pay, but they were having terrible problems accepting payment from foreign credit cards.

I called up the Crowne Plaza hotel and asked what their cheapest rate was, and was told that I would have to pay $168 per night. Which is fine if you're the Sultan of Brunei, but not if you're looking to finance an MBA in the near future.

Finally, despairing, I went to Priceline's UK web site and offered £35 (about $52) per night for a room in Central Philadelphia. Priceline's system gave me lots of warnings that the actual normal price for a room there is £162 and that I was very unlikely to get anything for so little, especially since I was asking for a 3-star hotel. I ignored all the warnings and pressed the button.

Less than 2 minutes later, I had a room at the Crowne Plaza. At about one-third of the normal cost.

I understand how this works - they're trying to fill rooms, and if they have spare capacity, it's better for their fixed costs if they get some revenue rather than having rooms staying empty. My point is that surely, if the hotel is very empty - or at least empty enough to sell me a room at 30% the normal price - if might be an idea to sell rooms at a cheaper rate directly as well as through companies like priceline and hotwire. That way they might be able to sell them at $70 or $80 per night by trading on their quality, location and name.

What this means in economic terms is that the true price of a hotel room, given the current level of supply and demand, is closer to $50 than to $168, but the hotel chains leave their prices at $168 because - even though this is not the market clearing price - there are some people who are not price sensitive enough to realise they are paying over the odds.

This leads me to believe that even though the Priceline.com business model probably doesn't work very well from priceline's own perspective, it's a fantastic way of ensuring that hotels, airlines and car rental agencies are subjected to market forces to the same extent as consumers.

If you're a Star Wars fan, and you thought episode II was great, then I suggest you refrain from reading what I have to say about it, as you might find it upsetting...

I feel swindled - I want my money back. According to the Sale of Goods Act, an individual is entitled to a refund within 28 days if the goods are not "fit for the purpose" they were intended to fulfil. The reason I didn't ask for my money back as I came out of the theatre in Finchley road was the sneaking suspicion that the extreme pain of the last 3 hours was exactly what Lucas had intended. Seriously, you can't make dialogue that bad by accident.

Let's be generous and start with the positive points...

• It was in colour
  
• It had sound
  
• Yoda fights
  
• Nice special effects
  

I'm being a little unfair : To give credit where it's due, the visual impression the film gives lets you know where the production dollars went, but a good film is going to need a lot more than fancy robots blowing stuff up, and the few amazing scenes that really do take your breath away visually only accentuate the truly painful romantic scenes and ham-fisted exposition of the storyline.

The reason I did not enjoy the film (other than when I was laughing at it) falls into three categories..

Firstly, there are some truly awful bits of dialogue. A character will say something so completely out of sync with what you're expecting that all of a sudden, you're back in the cinema, in a room full of other morons who paid money to be there, rather than in the film, experiencing the actions and emotions on screen. Frankly, the third time Obi-Wan calls Anakin "My young padawan apprentice", I perfectly understood Anakin's desire to sock it to him, and was almost surprised when he didn't. Qui-Gon barely got away with it in Episode I, but it works even less here, even though it is eclipsed by some even worse lines that come at regular intervals throughout the film. You have to wonder if the people on the set were so intimidated by Lucas that they didn't dare tell him how embarassing his script was.

Secondly, the romance scenes are bad. From the moment Anakin and Padme are together, I can't wait for the scene to end, so we can get back to what Lucas does well - vast panoramas, interesting new vehicles and lots of fighting.

Finally, and this is by far the worst part of it all, the exposition of the storyline is ham-fisted and brutal. There is little or no subtlety or skill in the development of the story, and we lurch from one scene to another through a series of painfully-explained developments. It almost feels as if the script assumes an audience so completely incapable of joining the dots in the plot that the characters have to do it for you. At various points along the way, something that you understood the first time is explained again, at length, "for the cheap seats".

Will the film be a success? No doubt. The loyal Star Wars following will ensure that a lot of money makes its way back to LucasFilm, and this will ensure the production of Episode III. What LucasFilm and its erstwhile writers will learn from this is that as long as they continue to get their graphic designers to come up with ever more amazing robots and ships, and the special effects team keep doing an amazing job, the dialogue and storytelling can be as clunky and unsophisticated as they like, the film will still make money.

As a fan of the first three movies, and especially the very first Star Wars movie, I am disappointed by a film which satisfies the expectations of a special-effects-driven audience at the expense of solid storytelling. I expected it to be bad - one doesn't go to a Lucas film expecting the level of scriptwriting found in "The West Wing" or "The Sopranos", or the storytelling virtuosity of "Jaws". Nevertheless, an opportunity to write a great film has been missed, and had this film been a worthy member of the series that started with "Star Wars: A New Hope", it would have gone down in history. Instead it is another addition to a stable of Hollywood films the quality of which - barring a couple of exceptions - seems to be in terminal decline.

Let us know what you thought of it - you can vote to the right.

Links / Reviews

• Rotten Tomatoes
  
• IMDB Entry
  
• Official Site
  
• Roger Ebert from the Chicago Sun-Times
  
• Mick LaSalle from the San Fransisco Chronicle
  

The most recent in a long line of trials and tribulations of an MBA acceptee - finding a place to live in Philadelphia

As you can probably imagine, it's pretty difficult to find a place to live in a faraway city when you live on the other side of the world.

During the Wharton Welcome Weekend, I visited a number of student houses and found that the kind of place I would like to live in is a "Brownstone" - in Philadelphia (and probably the rest of the US, but I'm no expert), this seems to mean anything that isn't a high-rise.

I find the logic of the housing market a little confusing in Philadelphia. A high-rise apartment costs more to rent than a Brownstone despite being part of a modern, massive housing complex with little or no character and where all the flats are of similar design. The upside is that all the ameneties are taken care of, and one of the big benefits, according to some of the people I spoke to during the weekend, is that the reception can receive special delivery (DHL, FedEx etc) packages when you are out. I can only conclude that Americans receive a great deal more special deliveries than I do and I am left wondering what it is I am missing out on.

There is no question in my mind that I want to live in a Brownstone (character, history, style, more in keeping with my European pretensions etc), and that this is going to have to be in Central city. For this reason, I am about to go to Philadelphia for six days to look for somewhere to rent. This involves a return flight to Philadelphia (the cheapest being via Manchester, would you believe) and six days in a hotel.

Booking a hotel is problematic. I've tried Hotwire.com, which looks really good until you try to pay - at which point it says "What? A foreign credit card? I'd rather have a system failure" and promptly does exactly that.

I found out that most of the people who booked rooms through hotwire.com at $50 per night ended up with either the Holiday Inn or the Crowne Plaza. Seeing as both of these hotels belong to the same group, I call up the reservation line, tell them the problem I'm having, and get told that if I want that price, I'm going to have to book through hotwire, as the cheapest they can offer me direct is $168 per night. It would seem I'm being subsidised by the middleman, or the hotel group in question has a strange set of business practices.

Here's hoping it's all worth it and I find somewhere nice to live for the next 2 years.

UPDATE 16th June 2002...

I've found a place to live in Center City Philadelphia, after much agonising and walking around in circles in Philadelphia for days and days. It wasn't as bad as finding property in London, but it was bad enough for me to be grateful that it's over.

It's been complete radio-silence for the past few months as I prepared to go to Wharton, made the necessary preparations and wrote another website for a company. Now here are some reflections on my acceptance at Wharton.

I was on the motorway in France going to a conference (Forum-21), and the time on my watch passed 1pm, which means 8am in Pennsylvania, which meant my admissions decision had been posted on the Wharton website. So we pulled over, hoping to find an internet point in a motorway service station. This was not to be, I called a friend at work in the UK, and gave him my login and password, and waited.

The first word of the letter, as all Wharton admits now know, was "Congratulations!", and it's hard to say if I was more relieved or more excited. I can't think of many experiences similar to business-school applications. You spend hundreds of dollars on the GMAT, months on essays that disclose very personal features of your character to completely faceless nameless admissions committees, and months worrying about whether your referees are going to write the references at all, let alone write the kinds of things that will get you accepted. Finally, you send the fruits of countless hours of labour off to who-knows-where, and then sit and wait. And wait.

Then comes an answer - INSEAD tell you they are full. Sorry. Would you like to go to Singapore? If not, we can consider you for January entry at Fontainebleau. Great, INSEAD turn themselves into my fallback plan, already things are changing in unanticipated ways.

Then Wharton accept you, and it's hard to say whether the way that makes you feel is excited, or overwhelmingly relieved.

The relief doesn't come from the fear of not getting into an MBA, although that certainly features. Such banal fears are completely eclipsed by the terror that, after having disclosed so much about yourself, your achievements and your motivations, someone somewhere could just turn around and say, "No - not good enough". Rejection based on such a complete documentation of who and what I am would have been tough.

Of course that's all nonsense - rejection from a business school doesn't mean any of that, but given the nature of the effort and the information disclosed during the application process, you can end up feeling as if everything you are is being assessed for worthiness, and I can imagine it being quite a blow to not be accepted. The process you go through when putting together the application sets things up such that a fall will be all the more painful.

After the acceptance, the flow of information suddenly and violently reverses itself, as you find yourself besieged by the school as they switch to sales mode and compete for your presence.

The Wharton Welcome Weekend was a very slick, very comprehensively organised event in which very little sleep was had, and the jetlag was dealt with through copious amounts of alcohol. We discovered various traditions (pizza-delivery "persons" in Philly's university quarters have to have courage to deliver on a thursday night!), were shown the school, and given all manner of motivating speeches.

So I will be spending the next two years in Philadelphia, and I am very much looking forward to it. I expect to have a fantastic time, meeting the most interesting people, broaden my experience and skills - most of all though, without looking to what it will earn me in the future, I think this is where I want to be now.