Red Lights - Film Review

 A classic film for lovers of  scepticism, this is a story about scientists debunking stage psychics using a variety of laboratory techniques.

IMDB linky

The story centres around a small team of scientists who, aside from their academic careers, work to prove or disprove the genuineness of people who claim to have psychic powers. Sigourney Weaver plays a college professor who has 20 years' experience in the field. We see her giving lectures about how so-called mediums use tricks during seances - with the buildings power to make the lights go off and on, and use sleight of hand to move the table around, and so on. Weaver's character has strayed away from objective science a long time ago, having never seen a genuine case. Her assistant, played by Murphy, is the technician with all the fiddly bits of recording equipment. He's younger and less sceptical, but she's done a reasonable job of bending him to her belief that there is no such thing as psychic powers.

Along comes De Niro who is clearly based on 1980s spoon-bending guru Uri Geller. He can also apparently read minds, cause electronic equipment to explode and do faith healing. He and Weaver have "history", and he's the only psychic who really has her thinking that her sceptical view of the world might be wrong. Cue arguments within the team, embarrassing TV chat show recordings, spooky psychic events happening all over the place, and the feeling that De Niro really does have powers that he can use at a distance. Several twists make it into an intriguing tale with a surprising ending.

There are some really good scenes where the psychic powers are being analysed under lab conditions. This movie is a good introduction to the science of scepticism.

Poor points in the film include ridiculous over-acting (Weaver sometimes comes across as if she's fighting aliens rather than doing science experiments) and a bizarre love affair that's quite inappropriate, yet has no bearing on the rest of the story.

So all in all not a particularly gripping, or even convincing watch, but it gets you thinking a lot about psychic powers and leaves you with a sense that not all the answers are yet there.

The 9/11 Memorial

The time is approaching for the tenth anniversary of 9/11.
Now you may be thinking that Bin Laden did it, the US government did it, it was the Illuminati, it was caused by negative Earth Energies, it was aliens hell bent on revenge for all that rubbish we broadcast on the satellite TV etc. etc. But, no matter what your theory for who was responsible for 9/11, no one can deny that the deaths of all those people was a massive human tragedy.
People like to mark the anniversaries of tragic events, like deaths, with some sort of fitting memorial. Usually these are designed to bring us closer to the spirit of the dead person or people, for example, going to a place that they enjoyed and lighting candles or singing their favorite song.
Not in this case. Whoever designed this piece of crap decided a little differently. In honour of the thousands of people who died on that day, many in states of extreme terror and pain inside collapsing burning buildings, this person decided that a fitting tribute would be to encourage mourning loved ones to spend their hard-earned cash on some crappy bits of cheap metal glued together badly to look a little bit like the twin towers. Adding in a few candles, it looks a bit like the buildings are on fire.
Brilliant. So this will achieve what exactly?
For the people holding the memorial with this statuette: instead of remembering the happy, positive, fun things about their loved one's life, they just get to relive the trauma of their horrible death, and wallow in their own pain and misery as a result, thus making them less happy.
For the spirits of the dead people - if you believe in them - they will also be quite unhappy about it, I mean they died horribly in the twin towers, so how is an image of them going to be enjoyable or help them reconnect with their living families?
(As an aside, I expect Jesus feels the same way about crosses. If you were pondering returning to the land of the living, would you want to come back to humanity, if humanity had spent 2000 years sculpting images of the device they used to torture you to death?)

For the people who designed and built this hideous effigy: Riches. Current retail price is about $18 from the NY Fire Department, though this will likely increase as we get closer to the anniversary. Manufacturing cost, probably a few pennies, since it was made in some sweat shop in China.

Twilight Eyes - Book review

Dean Koontz's Twilight Eyes is brilliant!
A novel set in a world where some "humans" are in fact strange otherworldly goblin beings, invisible to most of the population but visible to our hero Slim.
From an early age he has embarked on a one man war against these strange creatures, who seem only interested in slowly wiping out humans and thriving on our suffering.
Slim has a variety of psychic powers, as do some of the other characters he meets along the way, so the book is packed with visions, prophecies and other psychic phenomena.
Warning to anyone who is a little sensitive - this is a dark book and there are lots of grim gorey bits. It is not light reading.
The only real problem with this book is that the main character is a little unbelievable. He's only 17 yet appears to have the wit and intelligence of someone in their mid-30s. This discrepancy is commented on in the book, alluding to his very unusual childhood and goblin war maiking him "grow up fast" but this can't explain how he seems to have the vocabulary of an Oxford professor.
Nonetheless a brilliant story that will appeal to anyone interested in the powers of the unknown, alien races and fans of the show Carnivale.