It's Only a Movie

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Today's movie: The Kovak Box, a paranoid thriller.

Plot: A successful science fiction writer takes a flight to Spain to attend a conference. In his youth he was obsessed with "Gloomy Sunday" - the so-called Hungarian suicide song - and wrote his first book inspired by it. In the book the government has implanted chips at birth into the entire population, that when triggered cause suicidal depression. If anyone becomes a threat to society, they just press a button and the individual kills themselves.

At the conference an elderly fan asks for his autograph. At the hotel, the writer's wife gets a call which plays Ella Fitzgerald's version of the song - and she jumps out of the window.

A young Spanish woman also attempts suicide but fails - at the same time as her boyfriend kills himself by crashing his motorcycle, and several other strange deaths occur. In her hotel room, a man attacks her, incapacitates her with ketamine and tells her she is already dead - but before he can do whatever he wanted to do, he is interrupted and flees.

The woman and the writer team up when she begs him to help her, and they both witness another mysterious suicide. The fan reappears, giving a folder of press cuttings and photographs to the writer. They show he was a disgraced scientist working on ways to control human behavior.

The writer discovers a chip embedded in his dead wife's neck, and the woman sees her attacker. They confront him, and gives them a list of a hundred people scheduled to kill themselves - before killing himself when the chip activates as he tries to remove it.

The writer realises they are being led, as though in a novel, pushed by planted clues and planned incidents to follow a narrative. They find the scientist on his island, and his men kidnap the woman, placing her in the caverns where the hundred people will suicide.

The scientist wants the writer to turn what's happened into a novel - including how he saves the girl and kills the bad guy. The list is the passenger manifest of the flight the writer took to Spain. The passengers jump and drown, triggered by "Gloomy Sunday" played over the tannoy, while the woman survives by swimming underwater - so she can't hear.

The writer finds the scientist, who is dying slowly from a brain tumor. The scientist says when the bodies are autopsied the authorities will find the chips, reverse engineer the technology, and use it. He also says if the writer doesn't kill him to provide a climax for the plot, he'll active the chip in the woman's neck. The writer shoots him.

On the plane home, the writer, having no other way to prevent his first novel coming true, starts work on a sequel, detailing his adventure.


Review: A mad scientist with infinite resources on an island. A popular but fantastical story starts coming true. A villain with a Russian name but a British accent. An immense conspiracy to bring about a simple action by one man. A writer has to become like the heroes of his own books.

Maybe the only way to get away with using cliches like this nowadays is to be "meta" about it - present outmoded conventions as outmoded conventions being self-consciously re-created. Like the serial killer who's motive is a fascination with serial killers, or everything in the Shrek films.

The writer's name was David, the young woman Silvia and the scientist Dr Kovak - though I had to check the closing credits to be sure of the first two. So the characters were not what you'd call memorable.

There was no sentiment clogging up screentime, so the writer got over his wife's death with remarkable ease, and didn't have a romance with the girl he was being manipulated to save. He killed the bad guy (only because the bad guy forced him to) but didn't kiss the girl.

In short, it was completely daft, borderline incoherent, an exciting journey with nothing at the end. The kind of film I'll enjoy once, never want to see again, and wouldn't think to recommend.

I think tomorrow's movie will be...The Exorcist.

There's also the complete first five seasons of "Married with Children", but I'm not that desperate.

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I was wrong about the fish.

There are not in fact five different species of fish in the supermarket. There is mackerel in five different sauces. For twice the price you can get sardines too.

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It took three weeks. Now I'm getting email spam in Bulgarian.

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The is a light switch after all. At shin height under a curtain. I was wondering.

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I've been looking at phrasal verbs, aka multiword verbs aka compound verbs aka multipart verbs. And there are as many definitions as there are names.

These are phrasal verbs:
Give up (quit)
Take over (assume command)
Break down (stop functioning)
Come out (admit)
Knock off (imitate cheaply)
Pass up (decline)
Set to (begin)
Turn up (arrive)

Some writers treat these as phrasal verbs, and some don't:
Trip over
Pull apart
Pick up
Pass through
Stand up
Come over
Climb across

The first group are figurative, or at least highly metaphorical - there's no way you could work out their meanings simply by knowing the meanings of each component word. In the second group, you probably could.

But there's no clear dividing line. To come out (of the closet) is a metaphor, but not a dead one, and to get up does involve a literal "upping" of posture. So the boundary between "verb-particle constructions where the two form a meaning not derivable from either" and "verb-particle constructions where the meaning of the particle modifies the verb" is not clear cut.

Why does it matter? Because if you draw a line between the two groups, there are about a thousand phrasal verbs for students to learn, and unknown thousands of similar looking constructions that they don't need to memorise because the meaning should be fairly clear when they encounter them. If you don't draw a line...you've got a language no one can learn.

There's the small additional problem that the "literal" phrasal verbs of the second group often have several metaphorical meanings. How many things does "pick up" mean? I count four:

* To lift something in your hand(s) - "Pick up your bed and walk"
* To give someone a ride in your car - "I'll pick you up at six"
* To take someone to your place for sex - "At the disco to pick up boys"
* To learn something by observation - "She picked up the language"

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