My Blog

2012-01-28T04:26:00.000-08:00

Better Than Bourne

Haywire is the latest effort from cinematic chameleon Steven Soderberg. Having previously dabbled in everything from glamourous Hollywood crime capers (Ocean's Eleven) to gritty Oscar-winning drug dramas (Traffic) and even a four and a half hour biopic about the world's most famous Equadorian revolutionary (Che), his latest transformation is one that few people would have anticipated. America's answer to Michael Winterbottom, Soderberg is known just as much for his prolificness as he is for the style of his output. But with Haywire he demonstrates a sure hand and is completely convincing as a competent action director.

This is in no small part due to the ferocious physicality and fluent grace of his female lead. Unlike so many of the leading ladies cast as action heroines, who look as if a stiff breeze might blow them over, Gina Carano looks like she could do some real damage. This is probably in no small part due to her training and previous career in mixed martial arts - apparently Soderberg designed the film around what Carano could actually do and, like Tom Cruise, she did all of her own stunts... The only difference being, in the case of Carano, I actually believe the line.

The plot is basic B-movie fare: bad men - a private security contractor played by Ewan McGregor, having a pretty good crack at an American accent for once, and a CIA chief played by Michael Douglas, back to his slimy best - want a political prisoner retrieved and Mallory Kane, played by the aforementioned Gina Carano, is just the woman to do it. Of course, things are not that simple, allegiances are betrayed, doubles are crossed and Malerie finds herself on the run, hunting and being hunted by the bad men who betrayed her.

The heart of the film, however, are its action sequences. When she finds herself in confrontations with regular hoods and mobsters, Navy Seal-trained Mallory is fast and lethal. But it is when she comes up against a combatant of equal capability that things get really fun. When she hits Michael Fassbender in the face, he knows about it. Likewise, when he throws her into a plasma television screen. This is a fight between equals with a delicious subtext, taking place as it does in a Parisian hotel bedroom. Not that this is cartoonish fare - in one sequence Mallory misses the jump between one roof and enough and winds herself in the process. This is the sort of detail that lends what could easily be risible and air of credibility that encourages one to suspend disbelief and enjoy the ride.

Crucially, Soderberg also knows where to find his tripod. For the most part, the fights, along with most of the rest of the action - the running, the jumping, the driving - are shot in wide masters, with only occasional cuts for emphasis. Unlike the Paul Greengrass directed Bourne films, which are edited so frenetically it is often hard to figure out who is where and what they are doing, Soderberg has the confidence to let his stars show us what they can do.

Soderberg also surrounds Carano with a review of recognisable thesps - Ewan McGregor, Michael Douglas, Antonio Banderas, Michael Fassbender, Bill Paxton - handling acting duties. Although, Carano herself is no slouch - an engaging screen presence who looks just as good in high-heels as she does kicking a man in the face - what is not to like?

2012-01-16T14:33:00.001-08:00

Silent Movie

The Artist is already being tipped to win the Oscar for Best Picture and it is easy to see why. First of all, it is a movie about Hollywoodland, the academy always loves that. Secondly it tells the story of the joys and sorrows of a life spent making movies inside the Dream Factory. And lastly, it is a silent film.

One of the things that is most interesting about The Artist is the fact that it is a proper silent film. It is not a 21st century parody or pastiche with tongue in cheek, it is an affectionate recreation of a 1920s era melodrama of the sort that used to be made by Max Ophuls, replete with old fashioned acting and authentic film grammar from the silent era.

Lead actor, Jean Dujardin, is cheesily great as a Hollywood matinee idol, mimicking the movements of silent era icons, who were often far more adapt at using their bodies to express emotion. Equally, Berenice Bejo is cute as a button, playing rising star to Dujardin's fallen idol - she moves like a dancer and her large, expressive eyes convey wells of emotion.

The silent era grammar was interesting in itself because it really made one think about what one was watching. The filmmakers could not rely on any of the usual array of narrative crutches that can normally rescue a mediocre film and instead had to rely on old-fashioned performances, music and cinematic storytelling.

Had The Artist been made 80 years ago, it might have paled in comparison to the cinematic greats of the silent era - Chaplin, Keaton, Lang - but in 2012, a black and white silent film presented in 4:3 aspect ratio is a welcome breath of fresh air and a reminder that there is more than one way to make a movie that works for audiences and critics alike.

2012-01-14T10:59:00.000-08:00

Lost in the Woods

I struggled to decide what I thought about the American re-make of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. I have not seen the Swedish language version, nor have I read the best selling Steig Larsson novel on which the film is based and, quite frankly, I am bored by the politics of Hollywood re-making foreign language films in order to a wider American audience. Best selling books and business decisions aside, is David Fincher's US$100 million follow up to what, for my money, was the best film of 2010 - The Social Network - actually any good?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a very handsomely made film. The photography by Jeff Cronenweth (son of legendary cinematographer Jordan Cronenweth, himself responsible for no small part of the iconic look of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner) creates interiors bathed in a sickly green hue of phosphorescent lamps to contrast with the whites and blues of the Swedish countryside. The music by Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose is discordant in much the same pop-synth way as their work on The Social Network. And David Fincher, as ever, directs with laser targeted precision - all of the shots are framed according to strict rules of Euclidean geometry

The actors are also excellent. Roony Mara is totally committed to what could easily have been a laughable superwoman character - violent, bisexual, capable of doing anything with a computer, but also beautiful and eager to jump into bed with the journalist played by Daniel Craig (more than a whiff of wish fulfillment on Steig Larsson's part there). But thanks to be energy and brio that she brings to the part, Lisbeth Salender is more than just a cardboard cut out; she is a living, breathing cartoon monster/avenging angel. Daniel Craig, who has to play Batman to her Joker, Hislop to her Merton, Watson to her Sherlock is also very good - although, the more he tries to act schlubby (he wears glasses and occasionally gets out of breath), the more one is reminded that he is James Bond.

The actors, however, are faced with a thankless task. The primary problem with the film is its plot, its characters and its uneven tone. The narrative is pretty standard fare. But worse than that, the film readily resorts to the most cliched of conventions without even the good grace to let the audience in on the joke so that they can laugh at it. Struggling to make a character sufficiently sinister? Invoke the Nazis! Can't figure out how to resolve the film's central mystery? Have the killer needlessly reveal himself! Yet the tone is sombre and portentous throughout. (As side note, why is it when Hollywood directors decide to go 'dark', they equate the same with humorlessness? Stanley Kubrick, for one, Alfred Hitchcock, for another, understood that this is not the case, and to sometimes chilling effect).

The film ultimately drowns it in a sea of its own self-importance and, although some moments are more engaging than others, without a gripping story - solving a murder case that happened 20 years prior is not engaging, it's the plot for Old Tricks on the BBC for goodness sake - one's mind starts to wander. Great acting, great camera work, great sets and a director who knows exactly what he wants, cannot save a lumpen story and, unfortunately, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is a case in point.lunarpark.blogspot.com - Lost in the Woods - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, David Fincher, Daniel Craig, Roony Mara, Steig Larsson, Swedish, American, remake, film, review

2012-01-09T13:03:00.000-08:00

Mission Accomplished

Tom Cruise might not be the box office phenomenon he once was, but with US$450 million in the bank and still climbing, he owns the winter. The question that remains to be answered is: does Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol justify these gargantuan earnings?

Cruise certainly has his Movie Star turned up to eleven, much of the credit for which must go to Brad Bird, who brings energy and wit to the film's all important action sequences. (Having made his name directing much-loved animated films - The Iron Giant and The Incredibles, not to mention working on The Simpsons years before - Brad Bird's is one of the most assured live-action directing debuts in recent memory). Regardless of what you think about his private life, Cruise is surely among the most committed actors working in Hollywood, embodying an intensity and a physicality that is all his own - he is undoubtedly one of the best runners on film. Moreover, by the time he turns to camera at the end of this film's pre-credit sequence with the words, "light the fuse", triggering Michael Giacchino's rendition of Lalo Shifrin's iconic Mission Impossible theme, you know you are in safe hands.

This is Ethan Hunt as a man wronged. Imprisoned in a Moscow jail - the film begins with a high-octane escape masterminded by Simon Pegg, who returns as computer whizz and all round good egg Benji Dunn - during which Cruise speaks Russian and scowls with aplomb. Not that the film is all about Cruise. This is a Mission Impossible film and in common with the best episodes in the series (the first and the third, since you ask, this is a team effort. For the time being at least, Simon Pegg is the best person you could cast to play Simon Pegg (and I mean that as a complement), Jeremy Renner seems to be being groomed for stardom and barely puts a foor wrong as William Bradt, the intelligence analyst with a secret, and Paula Patton is alluring and able as Jane Carter, the third and final member of the team, more than matching the boys in the physicality stakes. Michael Nyqvist is not given much to do as the film's baddie but it is nice to see him show up in a big budget actioner.

Above all else, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, lives or dies by the quality of its action sequences, and I am pleased to say that it does not disappoint, with plenty of gadget, fast cars and exotic locations to boot. Tom Cruise hanging off the side of the tallest building in the world - the Burj Khalifa in Dubai - is beautifully photographed and likely to induce dizziness in any who suffers from acrophobia (I looked it up); the car chase through an Arabian sandstorm is equally as spectacular; although the conclusion in a Mumbai car park did remind me of Chicken Run (remember the pie-making machine?).

The story has no depth, but what do expect from a Mission Impossible film. Ving Rhames shows up for old times sake but should have been given a proper part. Aside from that, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol ticks all the Hollywood boxes - precision engineered set pieces, a star with his eye on the prize and, crucially, it is doing the numbers. Welcome back Tom. Nice to meet you Brad. I hope we can do this again some time.

2011-12-23T11:58:00.000-08:00

An Historical Perspective

Niall Ferguson is a Harvard-based historian who has written multiple books and presented accompanying TV shows, which each seem to have caught precipitous waves of popular sentiment upon publication and broadcast – most notably, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (2003), a book about the British Empire viewed as a balance sheet (negatives and positives); The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2008), a book about global financial history, published at the height of the banking crisis; and, most recently, Civilisation: The West and the Rest (2010), a book the West's rise to a position of global dominance and the possibility that it might decline and fall in the wake of emerging powers such as China and India.

Ferguson's contention is that for the past 500 years the most important story in global history has been the dominance of the West (Western Europe and latterly the United States and Australia) over the Rest. Adopting modern Web 2.0 business speak, he outlines the Six Killer Applications or Killer Apps that he believes have assured Western dominance, which the rest of the world has now 'downloaded' ensuring a precipitous increase in wealth and living standards. The Apps or - to adopt the parlance of academia - 'Ideas Embodied by Institutions', seem almost hand-picked to annoy the kinds of right-on Leftists who like to assert that white European (but especially British) and American Protestant Christians are among the most malign creatures to have ever walked the Earth.

The ideas or institutions he chooses are: Competition, Science, Private Property, Medicine, Consumption and the Work Ethic. Some of these were present in other societies at different times, but only in the West could one find all six.

Competition, he says, is what led the comparatively small, poor, warring states of Western Europe to expand eastward to India and westward to the Americas - Britain, Spain, France, Portugal and Holland all had empires - while monocultural China, which was a far more advanced society than any of its 15th Century equivalents, inexplicably retreated, becoming insular.

The Scientific Revolution of the 17th Century owed a great debt to the work of scholars and innovators in the Middle East, which preserved and built upon the knowledge of the Roman Empire, forgotten to the European Dark Ages. But the works of Leibniz, Newton and Spinoza were a distinctly European affair because the Christian church was more open to compromise than its Islamic equivalent. This meant that the printing press, possibly the most important information technology of all time, spread throughout the West in the 16th Century. Ferguson parallels the rise of Prussia, which was at the forefront of modern military innovation, with that of the Ottoman Empire, which rejected the scientific advances and suffered a centuries-long decline.

The chapter in which Ferguson tells us that Private Property Rights were the most important tenant for the founding of the modern democratic state raises a lot of questions. Primarily, why did I not pay more attention during my Enlightenment course? In order to explain the impact that different models of ownership can have upon political outcome he compares and contrasts what happened in Latin America, which was collonised by the Spanish and the Portuguese, with what happened in North American, which was collonised by the British. In doing so he references works by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire, along with numerous documents associated with the French and American Revolutions - all of which were on my university reading list. Now I feel like I need to go back and read them all again (along with Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith) just so I can be on the same page as my more studious peers. Listen to your teacher, kids!

Modern medicine is one of the most important and often neglected benefits of imperial rule, Ferguson tells us. Wherever Europeans went they took their medicines, and life expectancy around the world in the late 19th century doubled as a result. This is a point that can be better understood in the broad swath of history Ferguson addresses, as opposed to in the particular, wherein European regimes did horrible things to native peoples, in Africa, in particular.

Consumption, which Ferguson allies to the Industrial Revolution, was the reason why Britain became by far the most wealthy country in the world in the 19th century he asserts. Expressing his disdain for Marx, he explains that it was consumer demand (as opposed to the subjugation of workers by a malign economic machine) which led to rapidly increasing living standards, prosperity and wealth. He does endorse the excesses of Capitalism or the sometimes overbearing marketing that has come to define it in the West, but posits that it was Capitalism and Consumerism, not state Communism, that gave people financial independence and, therefore, creative freedom and political expression.

This is also intimately linked to the last of the West's Six Killer Apps, something that Ferguson says is now diminishing in the West: the Work Ethic. Provocatively, he links the work ethic to Christian and, more especially, Protestant ideals.

In his final analysis, Ferguson turns his attention to China, now predicted to become the world's largest economy by 2030, and its seemingly symbiotic relationship with the United States. Ferguson's message is clear - the Rest have caught up by recognising the best in the West and we would be well advised not to loose faith in the institutions that have done so much good for the world.

Of course, I am in no position to confirm nor disconfirm any of Ferguson's conclusions. But I find much of his central argument convincing, and want to read more. "A great civilisation is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within," runs the famous quote. I think that we in the West, and, in Britain, in particular, would be well advised should stop beating up on ourselves quite so much. Recognise the problems and try to address them, of course, but stop with the self-flagellation. That is my very simple prescription. If you want a historical perspective, I recommend you read Ferguson's book.lunarpark.blogspot.com - An Historical Perspective - Keyword description

2011-12-23T09:24:00.000-08:00

It Must Be Christmas

The big Hollywood studios are really spoiling us with trailers for their 2012 releases coming thick and fast over the last few days. Anyone would think it was Christmas...

Men in Black 3

First up is possibly the least anticipated sequel of 2012 - Men in Black 3. The trailer outlines the basic plot. Tommy Lee Jones' Agent K has vanished from the present day so Will Smith's Agent J must travel back to 1969 to right what once when wrong, enlisting the help of a young Agent K, played by Tommy Lee Jones' No Country For Old Man co-star and Goonies alumni Josh Brolin.

Excited

Will Smith back doing comedy.
Time travel, aliens, secret organisations - a science fiction universe in which almost anything can happen.
Josh Brolin doing his best deadpan Tommy Lee Jones impression.

Tired

10 years after the last sequel and 15 years (15 years!) since the original MiB, does anyone actually care about this franchise anymore?
Will Smith playing it very safe. An actor in his position surely has the power to take a few more chances. He was reportedly offered the lead role in Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained and the Wachowskis' Hood, a science fiction fable updating ye olde English myth. He said no to those but yes to Men in Black 3.
Not enough of Tommy Lee Jones at his deadpan best.

The Hobbit

After some messing about with Guillermo del Toro in the directors chair, Peter Jackson finally stepped up to helm the inevitable (given the financial success of The Lord of the Rings) The Hobbit movie. Martin Freeman is in my view perfectly cast as reluctant but plucky hero Bilbo Baggins, invited to be part of a rollicking adventure by an old wizard and a troupe of dwarves.

Excited

Ian McKellen as Gandalf the Grey, looking and sounding like it is 2001 all over again.
Peter Jackson's fluid camera, Andrew Lesley's beautiful colour co-ordinated photography and Weta Digital's near perfect integration of models and CGI effects.
Riddles in the Dark!

Tired

Can they really re-create the magic that made the Lord of the Rings work so well?
Just how much of the story are they going to change in order to ensure 'old favourites' - Frodo, Elrond, Galadriel and Legolas (none of which feature in the original Tolkien novel) - can make crowd-pleasing appearances?
Will Peter Jackson have the guts to fulfil on the promise of a Hobbit movie, which is a quite different beast to The Lord of the Rings, or will this be another LOTR sequel in all but name?

The Dark Knight Rises

Christopher Nolan's follow up to the billion-dollar Dark Knight (2008) and his first film since Inception promises to be another big budget Blockbuster with brains. While The Dark Knight was a metaphor the War on Terror - Batman as George W. Bush, Harvey Dent as Barack Obama and the Joker as a terrorist - Nolan's zeitgeist-aping extravaganza seems to want to take billionaire Bruce Wayne down a step or two by confronting him with a violent representative of the 99 percent - Tom Hardy's Bane.

Excited

The conclusion of Nolan's Dark Knight saga promises to be bigger than ever.
Tom Hardy playing a villain.
The story is still shrouded in mystery but as this is definitely the last part in the series, expect high stakes and twists and turns aplenty.

Tired

Another sequel?
Bane, Catwoman and (possibly) *someone else* as well - will the film suffer from the perennial comic book problem of Too Many Villains Spoil the Broth?
Too sombre for a Blockbuster?

lunarpark.blogspot.com - It Must Be Christmas - Keyword description

2011-12-17T13:57:00.000-08:00

Fun For All the Family

Like so many of the best Hollywood movies, Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1987) is a movie about movies or, to put it another way, the art of artifice; Hollywood types, in common with so many others, it seems, like nothing more than talking about themselves.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit is a joyous celebration of the art of the fantastic. Set in an alternative LA reminiscent of The Big Sleep and Chinatown in particular, Bob Hoskins plays a private dick with a drinking problem and an accent somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. A mysterious conglomerate called Cloverleaf Industries is buying up real estate all over town and, oh yeah, cartoons are real. Toon Town is surely one of cinema's most brilliant metaphors for the town that is known to many as the Dream Factory - Hollywood.

The sets, the costumes and the Alan Silvestri score are period perfect. But what impresses most is the speculative logic of the scenario that means, in accordance with their 'nature', toons act in unpredictable and amusing ways. Despite being a wacky knock-about comedy starring pantomiming actors, it is the essential believability of the story, the characters and the scenario that make Who Framed Roger Rabbit stand out from the crowd. From frame one, the film works tirelessly to earn our trust and not once does it lose it.

"My whole purpose in life is to make people laugh", says Roger. "One of these days you're gonna die laughing", says the head of the weasels. One of a million examples of exemplary scenes, shots and standout lines is when Hoskins is cutting through the handcuffs that binds him to Roger, so Roger takes his hand out of the cuffs. "Are you telling me you could have taken your hand out of that cuff at any time", says Hoskins. "No, not at any time", says Roger, "only when it was funny".

A landmark in visual effects upon initial release - audiences were stunned by the verisimilitude of Bob Hoskins and Christopher Lloyd's apparent physical interaction with their virtual co-stars, each individual frame having been painstakingly painted in analogue exactitude - nearly 25 years later, it is the simple storytelling and narrative elegance that mark it out as a landmark in mainstream movie-making. Hoskins performance as the cop who lost his sense of humour when a toon dropped a piano on his brother's head has an unexpected pathose when he is ultimately redeemed by laughter. A laugh can be a very powerful thing", says Roger. Painted in the broadest of brushstrokes but is no less powerful for it, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is Hollywood cinema as it should be.lunarpark.blogspot.com - Fun For All the Family - Keyword description

2011-12-14T07:22:00.000-08:00

Television Review - Black Mirror Episode One: The National Anthem

The Emperor Has No Clothes

There it is. I said it. I feel better. I bet you do too.

I thought I was going to like Black Mirror, penned by Charlie Brooker for Channel Four. The advertising boiler plate told me it was a dark, contemporary, social satire about technology and ideas, set in a science fiction world - all things I like. The show itself, however, is peculiarly uninviting.

Part one - The National Anthem - involves a fictionalised Kate Middleton figure being kidnapped and threatened with execution, lest a proto-Cameron Prime Minister has sex with a pig, live on television. A shocking set up. But there is a twist. Of course there is a twist - Brooker's stated intention is to make something akin to Tales of the Unexpected or The Twilight Zone (twisted stories that invariably end badly). Cameron (I mean, Prime Minister... Michael Callow), cedes to the kidnapper's demands, to the constenation of his wife and the pity of the nation. Meanwhile, Kate (I mean, Princess... Susannah), it is revealed later, is released into a deserted central London. As it turns out, she was not being held by a sadistic murderer but by a conceptual artist, making a point about society's addiction to sensation and screens.

Shocked? Appalled? That is clearly Brooker's self-conscious aim. But there is no point rubbing the audience's nose in grotesquery unless you have something to say. So, what is he trying to say? I'm not sure I know. The show was sold as a 'techno-parable for the Twitter age' but apart from a few tasteless YouTube comments and throwaway lines of dialogue like - 'it's trending on Twitter' - all of the focus is on civil servants in their parliamentary offices and journalists in their newsrooms. I assume we are supposed to see these old media types as 'cast adrift', unable to direct public attention or debate. Except, everybody outside of the corridors or power is depicted as an old media gawper. In an age of media fragmentation, The National Anthem is actually oddly quaint in its depiction of an event that unites a nation around the television.

To hint at the new media response and then ignore it is an odd choice. More so because, when the twist comes, the programme insinuates that the bovine hoards whom we have seen impassively and dutifully watching their screens are somehow guilty or responsible for what happens. Their desire to watch makes them complicit in the heinous act. Those who were in their homes watching the Prime Minister when the Princess was released could have prevented the incident had they had the foresight to, oh, I don't know, go for a walk instead. That is what Brooker seems to want to say. But, as depicted, none of the the goggle-eyed Idiot Box obsessives who stand in for the public in this drama is depicted as a rational, thinking human being. This left me with precious little to which I could relate.

Also, the answer to the central question the film raises - 'Would you watch?' - is a resounding, 'No'. No, I would not watch. Simple as that. So, when it comes to the depiction of the act itself (mercifully off screen) and the dawning horror of the public, I did not feel the film had earned the right to the burden of guilt it seemed to want to impose on me, the viewer.

Some might argue that the entire point of the show is to make the viewer feel uncomfortable, to make them question their assumptions about 24-hour news media and modern communications technology. Except, it didn't do that either. I have plenty of anxiety about networked culture. But far less anxiety about the ritual humiliation of the British Prime Minister on national television... (There's a joke in there somewhere). What am I missing?

Parables typically revolve around very simple stories. That is what gives them much of their power. This one is slightly confused and, possibly, trying a bit too hard to shock. Still, makes you think, doesn't it?lunarpark.blogspot.com - Television Review Black Mirror Episode One - Keyword description

2011-12-11T12:21:00.000-08:00

Narrative Art

The Story of Film by Mark Cousins

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema by Slavoj Zizek

"At the end of the 18th century, a new art form flickered into life. It looked like our dreams. Movies are a multimillion dollar global entertainment industry now, but what drives them is not box office or showbiz; it is passion, innovation. So let's travel the world to find this innovation for ourselves..."

Those are the words that, for the past 15 weeks, have begun Mark Cousins' unprecedented Story of Film, charting cinema's development, right up to the modern day.

Cousins is a terrific film historian - his voice guides the viewer through 110 years of change with gentle assuredness - and his knowledge of international is cinema is clearly second to none (or very few). It is enormously refreshing to watch a film history with a global perspective, one that does not simply re-hash the Hollywood-centred history - Griffith, Chaplin, Film Noir, Musicals, Westerns, John Ford, Easy Rider, Raging Bull, Jaws, Star Wars, High-Concept 80s, Sundance 90s and the Digital Era that followed - with which so many of us are already familiar. Most, if not all, of those elements are featured in the Story of Film, but it is not the dominant narrative. Cousins gives just as much time to films from France, Germany, the UK, Egypt, Iran, China, Japan, Korea, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America - and even I, a film obsessive, was introduced to much that was new. There are no cultural or geographical prejudices, everything is respectfully described by Cousin's warm and generous voiceover, for which I am grateful.

Cousins is particularly good at expressing his enthusiasm visual ingenuity and ideas conveyed via the medium of the moving image - regardless of whether it is an MGM musical made by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, a Samurai movie directed by Akira Kurosawa or a dream sequence imagined by Frederico Fellini.

The documentary does lose some of its momentum as it moves into the modern day. Cousins' ideological preferences will not be to everyone's tastes - The Cremaster Cycle by Matthew Barney (a series of avant garde post-modernist art pieces without narrative or dialogue) are described in detail, whereas The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are dismissed in a sentence. Of course, this kind of selection is inevitable - even in 15 hours it is impossible to include everything that is worthy of comment - but, in the last few parts of the series, as Cousins stretches to find films that fit his 'transgressive' ideal, some of the selections seem less ingenious, more political - Breaking the Waves, Requiem for a Dream and The Rules of Attraction are brutalist dramas that address violent and unpleasant subject matter. But I do not think that necessarily makes them any more authentic than the best of Hollywood fantasy cinema. Our dreams are equally as potent a playground, as Cousins recognises in his championing of the films of David Lynch (Blue Velvet and Mullholand Drive amongst them). In an oddly industrial way, the best of Hollywood's modern digital Blockbusters are as surreal as anything created by Bunuel or Dali.

This contrasts with The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, which is a three part documentary film series presented by Slovenia philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek.

Zizeck draws no distinctions between American and foreign, mainstream and alternative - all forms are equally open to analysis; the dominant ideological position is not what the films themselves projects outwards, but what Zizek reads into them.

Unlike Cousins, with his apparent preference for the authenticity of realism over the abstracted truth of fantasy - the segment on the 1990s is praised as the last gasp of realism, before the digital era arrived to distort our imaginations and by so doing obscure the real world - Zizek posits that no such distinction can or should be made. The real cannot exist without the imagined or the fantasy realm; the two are in constant dialectic with one another, each just as vital, just as important when it comes to elucidating a greater understanding of our culture.

Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Kieslowski, Lynch and Chaplin, among others are put under the spotlight of Zizek's keenly analytical gaze. Hitchcock and Lynch in particular seem rife for psychoanalytic deconstruction and, oddly, Maybe as a result of Zizek's deadpan, Eastern European delivery, it never sounds like psychobabble. Anyone who fails to appreciate the creepy, pychosexual depths of Hitchcock's Vertigo would be well served by watching Zizek describe the disturbing process of mortification to which Scotty subjects Madeline/Judy - he has to transform her into a dead woman before he can desire her fully - then come back and tell me Hitchcock was a director of mere 'entertainments'.

Zizek says that we should take fantasy seriously because it is just as real as reality, and that film is vitally important because it is the best tool humanity has yet created to plumb the depths of our subconscious and analyse our dreams. I think Cousins would probably agree and, unsurprisingly, I do too.

Of course, it is impossible to compare the two films directly. Zizek picks specific films, which enable him to elaborate on his Freudian psychoanalytic theories, while Cousins attempts to encompass the entire history of world cinema in just 15 hours. What I liked most about both, however, was their sense of subjectivity. I certainly did not agree with every point that they made, but the sight of an active imagination, thinking deeply about cinema and looking beyond the glossy surface we all see, was manor from heaven for a film bore like me. Anyone who feels like they missed out on, or looks back with fondness on, their film degree should check out both.lunarpark.blogspot.com - Narrative Art - Keyword description

2011-12-01T10:01:00.000-08:00

Enhanced Network Effects

Mark Zuckerberg is one of the foremost business men of our age. Don't be put off by fact that he is 'only' 27 - Steve Jobs was 21 when he (and Steve Wozniak) started Apple and Bill Gates was only 20 when he co-founded Microsoft. He has created a product that is used by millions of people around the world every day (over 800 million active users, at last count) and is the subject of almost endless commentary and speculation. Cutting through the chaff can seem like a daunting task. But do not worry, help is at hand. David Kirkpatrick's 2010 book (already wildly out of date – ha!) The Facebook Effect: The Real Inside Story of Mark Zuckerberg and the World's Fastest Growing Company is a non-partial and well-balanced account of Zuckerberg and Facebook's meteoric rise over the past seven years – from Harvard dorm room to global dominance.

Growing up

The world's first 'social network' was probably the Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link or WELL, an early electronic bulletin board system or BBS, established by Stewart Brand and Larry Brilliant in San Francisco in 1985, mainly frequented by Grateful Dead fans and a few digitally-progressive celebrities, journalists, and artists like Brian Eno and Peter Gabriel. With the birth of the World Wide Web in 1991, the WELL, which operated a present day Forum sites, was supplanted by a bunch of websites that enabled users to create their own 'profile pages' online and interact in that way - Six Degrees of Separation (which still owns the general 'social network' patent that describes Facebook and all other, similar websites), Friendster and MySpace. Furthermore, prior to the creation of Thefacebook in 2004, universities such as Stanford, Yale and Colombia were already beginning to put their facebooks online (note for non-Americans: prior to Facebook becoming the name of one of the most popular websites in the world, 'the facebook' was the name of a book issued by American universities and colleges every year with the names and pictures of every student). In that sense, what Mark Zuckerberg created was not 'new'. The idea was already 'in the air'.

Others claim that the idea was not his at all. Twin rowing champions Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss (popularly known as the Winkelvii, if Kirkpatrick's book is to be believed), along with their friend and business partner Divya Narendra, famously sued Zuckerberg claiming damages for intellectual property theft. Prior to the creation of Thefacebook on February 4th 2004, the trio approached Zuckerberg to help them to develop a dating website called Harvard Connection (later ConnectU). The book does not go into detail about the case - I was interested to find out that the 52 email and text correspondences referred to in The Social Network film were real - but pretty much sides with Zuckerberg. As history shows, there is nothing unique about the idea of an online social network.

Even Thefacebook was not the sure thing it looks like in hindsight. In the very early days, Kirkpatrick tells us, Thefacebook one just one of a number of projects being developed by just another enterprising student. For a long time, Mark was seemingly even more interested in developing a project called Wirehog – his idea for a P2P platform that would integrate with Thefacebook in order to allow people to share documents, music, movies and whatever else they wanted. Sean Parker, who became part of the company when Mark moved to Palo Alto (Silicon Valley) in the summer of 2004, discouraged further development of Wirehog, knowing that big media companies, with a lot of money invested in intellectual copywrite in the form of films, music and games would use it as an excuse to shut down Thefacebook, which Parker recognised as being vastly more important.

It was at this time that Mark started to fall out with Eduardo Saverin, with whom he co-founded the company, along with dorm room friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes (who, as a matter of interest, went on to co-ordinate Barack Obama's highly successful online campaign in 2008) . The crunch time came when Saverin, for whatever reason, suspended credit being drawn from the company's bank accounts. Once again, the book does not go in detail – apparently, Mark still refuses to talk about what happened between the two – but, over that summer Mark invested roughly US$85,000 of his and his parent's money in order to stop the servers from falling over, as site traffic continued to grow at a staggering pace.

This is the short version of the story told in The Social Network, from Mark Zuckerberg's point of view. One of the things that the film was most wrong about was Mark's desire for Thefacebook (as it was then) to be 'cool'. His vision was far greater than that, even early on. Being cool was what gave Thefacebook its start, attracting vast numbers of the children of America's social and economic elite at Harvard, before going on to do the same at schools and colleges nationwide. The Winkelvoss twins were right in at least one respect – the harvard.edu domain name gave the site both a cool factor and a credibility factor, which was enormously valuable when it came to attracting a wider audience. But, in Mark's, and later Sean Parker's view, Facebook would know it has succeeded when it stopped being 'cool' and instead made itself 'useful' – then everybody would want to be a member. The people at the company foresee Facebook eventually becoming part of the infrastructure of the internet – less of a brand and more like something people just take for granted.

Not Selling Out

Sean Parker, whose experience working with web start-up companies during the dot-com bubble was clearly invaluable to Mark early on, became one of his closest confidants and a trusted advisor. According to Kirkpatrick, Parker was probably the man most responsible for enshrining Mark Zuckerberg at the centre of Facebook's corporate structure, a far cry from the snake oil salesman played by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher's very entertaining but inaccurate movie. Indeed, it was Parker who arranged for Peter Thiel, who had co-founded PayPal and later sold the company to eBay for US$1.5 billion, to become Thefacebook's first 'angel investor'. Thiel put in US$500,000 of his own money to pay for development costs and new server racks in return for an ownership share and a seat on the company's board – a position that Thiel retains to this day.

Facebook's growth attracted interest from all over Silicon Valley and both Zuckerberg and Parker knew, the only way to pay to keep the site running was an investment round of some kind. Typically, that would have meant selling a substantial portion of the company to a Venture Capital firm, which would have supported site the with investment, but which would have probably demanded a rapid move towards monetisation, adult supervision in the form of professional management and an IPO sooner rather than later. Zuckerberg favoured doing a deal with The Washington Post, the CEO of which, Don Graham, believed in the project to the extent that he was willing to invest without making any demands on the future direction of the company – he wanted Zuckerberg to develop the business at his own pace, in the best way that he saw fit.

In the end, Facebook did a deal with one of the biggest Venture Capital firms in the Valley, Accel Partners, but not before Sean Parker had crowned Zuckerberg 'King of Facebook' – he negotiated a deal that gave board seats to Mark, Peter Thiel, Accel Partners and himself, with another seat to be assigned at Mark's discretion – when Parker left the company in 2005, his board seat also reverted to Mark. I feel slightly more comfortable about Facebook knowing that, for the time being at least, Mark Zuckerberg has a whip hand in guiding the company's future direction. As described in the book, he has shown appropriate humility and restraint whenever he has gotten something wrong, and listened to user criticism when it has been appropriate for him to do so.

It is interesting to read about the relatively calm head he kept during his baptism of fire as CEO of a major technology company, listening to and, ultimately, rejecting increasingly extravagant bids to buy the company from Viacom, AOL, Yahoo, and even, later, Microsoft, fighting his corner and winning most of the boardroom battles. The anecdote about the time when he spent four hours at some high-powered event talking to Rupert Murdoch, while the CEO of MySpace (which News Corporation acquired in 2005) looked on, forlorn, gives a little glimpse into the even more elite world (he went to Harvard for goodness sake!) into which Zuckerberg was being inducted.

Privacy

Zuckerberg says that the 'mission' of the company is to make the world more 'open and connected' because he believes that doing so will make the world a better place. Maybe I am naive, but I think he is being genuine. Despite the fact that I am not a billionaire business man living in Silicon Valley, I feel like I have a pretty decent understanding of where Mark Zuckerberg is coming from. We are around the same age and both share similar interests. However, personally, I worry that his heartfelt idealism may be a very convenient way for powerful interests to push an agenda that benefits a few big businesses, over the interests of the millions of people who use Facebook to communicate with loved ones.

I would contend that Mark Zuckerberg has not necessarily thought through his ideas about 'openess and transparency' as well as he might. Just because he believes that a more open and transparent society will be better does not necessarily make it so, and just because more and more people are sharing more and more of their personally identifiable information on Facebook does not necessarily mean that they want the world to be more open and transparent, in the sense that Mark Zuckerberg does. That might sound like a contradiction. But it is not. Mark's seemingly ineluctable conclusion is that more and more people must want to share more and more details about their lives online because they are posting more on Facebook. This is incorrect. I think that the vast majority of people who post frequent Facebook updates do so in the mistaken belief that the information they post is not being posted 'online', as such, but is being distributed amongst a self-selected groupings of friends, family, colleagues and associates. People feel comfortable sharing their lives with people on Facebook because the site is a walled garden. My contention is that these people do not understand the relationship that they have with the company which mediates communication on the site, and would be quite creeped out by the kinds of profiles Facebook can create about them and their lives.

Marketers already deploy sophisticated techniques in their advertising 'messages' as a way of getting inside people's heads in order to make them want to buy things. If we gift them still more information about ourselves, as we do when we use Facebook, it will certainly be used to develop still more sophisticated tools for targeting advertising at individuals. I worry about where that ends and the seemingly subservient position in which it places lowly consumers. The biggest problem with the site is that, for all of its protestations about openess and transparency, Facebook's business activities are staggeringly opaque. The relationship between Facebook, the company, and its most active users is completely asynchronous; users share lots of intimate information about their daily lives – information intended for friends and family – and Facebook logs and stores it all, while we know nothing about the partners with which Facebook shares that information, in an aggregated form, or what those partners then use it for. If openess and transparency is the order of the day, users should request Facebook disclose all such agreements.

Moreover, I have a problem with Zuckerberg's assertion that 'you have one identity' and that having more than one identity is a sign that you lack 'integrity'. I wonder if he still stands by those comments. It was a couple of years ago. Digital commentator and inventor Jaron Lanier posits the question: how would Bob Dylan have gotten along as a quasi-mystical pop troubadour if he still had the nervous boy from Minnesota hung around his neck, like a mill stone dragging him back down to Earth? Seen in that context, I think you can begin to see that re-invention is important, maybe even necessary – especially for young people, who, consequently, also tend to be among the most avid Facebook users. A Facebook identity is a very limited representation of a person and I think that people are diminished when they start to think about themselves in terms of what will look good on their 'Wall'.

Planet Facebook

To its credit, the book does at least address most of the difficult issues. Both Mark Zuckerberg and Peter Thiel talk about Facebook's vision for the internet as a place with people at its centre, as opposed to Google's vision, which in their view, has computers and data at its centre. It is heartening to know that the people who control these very large companies are at least thinking about the implications of their actions. But they are hardly impassive observers.

If Facebook were a country, it would be the third most populous in the world behind only India and China; it already has more active users (note: active users. Not accounts. Not users who sign up and then forget they have done so. But active users) than live in Brazil, Russia and the United States combined. It is not hyperbole to think about the company in these terms because that is the kind of all-encompassing global vision with which the people at the centre of the organisation view the project upon which they have embarked. Google wants to 'organise all of the world's information', while Facebook seems to be aiming for nothing less than total global domination of the social aspect of the internet. Out of the nearly two billion people in the world who have access to the internet, more than 800 million already have a Facebook account – and Facebook is trying to help the remaining one billion or so get signed up as quickly as possible. In Africa, Facebook subsidises handset manufacturers and carriers to make Facebook free for end users – encouraging massive growth (why use email when you can use Facebook to perform all of the same functions for free?) – and in China, Facebook is negotiating with Baidu (the most popular search engine in that country) to develop a Communist Party-approved social network for use behind The Great Firewall.

At its current rate of growth, it only take a little bit of imagination to envisage a future scenario in which Facebook becomes the universal login for the World Wide Web. No more anonymous comments, no more flame wars (or far fewer), everybody would be immediately identifiable online (the same way you are when you walk down the street) and therefore have to account for their actions. That would be a profound change. But also one with enormous appeal to advertisers and media brands, with Facebook at the centre, managing, maintaining and storing all of the logs while 'pushing' updates in realtime to your friends and family – every purchase, every mouse click, every subtle indiscretion shared. Is that a more open and connected world or is it a vision of a nightmarish surveillance state with Facebook as Big Brother? Not that I am saying it will happen, or is even likely to happen, but it is one possible consequence of Zuckerberg's expansionist zeal. The seeds are already being sowed.

Thousands of partner websites use Facebook Connect, which enables users to avoid the tedium of thinking of and remembering yet another password, to login using their Facebook account. A useful service, but also one that gives Facebook still more information about what you do and where you go elsewhere on the web. The Facebook Like button, which is used by million of partner websites is similar. All of this information is not only shared with your friends and family (depending upon your privacy settings) but with Facebook as well (regardless of your privacy settings). The site has faced relatively frequent backlashes, revolts and mutinies whenever it has introduced a new feature which makes sharing either easier or more automatic. The biggest of these was the News Feed debacle in 2006 – News Feed places alerts about what your friends have been doing on the site (and now elsewhere) on your front page and is now, largely, taken for granted. But, every time, users have settled back into a groove and committed to sharing even more information with the site. So, perhaps Mark is right.

Open government?

If you are anything like me, the story of Facebook's rocket-propelled rise probably makes you feel a little bit woozy – seeing the ground beneath your feet disappearing at such a rate of knots is likely to engender a feeling or vertigo. But the signs seem to show that the company is only just getting started.

In terms of revenue, Facebook is still a comparatively small fish in a very large pond. The company's latest estimated valuation is in the region of US$70 to US$100 billion, based on estimated revenues (because Facebook is a private company it is still quite difficult to gather accurate financial data) of around US$3 billion. That certainly sounds like a lot of money, but compared to Google (market cap US$200 billion, yearly revenues US$35 billion), Microsoft (market cap US$212 billion, yearly revenues US$71 billion) and Apple (market cap US$362 billion, yearly revenues US$108 billion), Facebook has still got a pretty long way to go to match the big boys.

We have not really seen a convincing business model from Facebook yet and Mark continues to resist what you might call 'full-scale' commercialisation. But, with an IPO possible in 2012, the company might not have much choice but to put greater emphasis on the commercial side, in order to satisfy the demands of investors on Wall Street. The structures are already in place and, most people seem to agree, the possibilities for future revenue streams are almost limitless. With a slight tweak, Facebook could become the most valuable market research company in the world – forget ratings based on analysis and estimates, Facebook can give you the data; or one of the world's most valuable advertising companies – social signals and the desire to be part of a crowd (the right crowd) are among the most powerful tools any marketer can deploy for building their brand.

In the long-term, however, Zuckerberg is a big fan of taking the long-term view, Kirkpatrick foresees the possibility that Facebook may become something other than a publicly traded stock-holding company. One of the principle 'commodities' Facebook trades in is identity – on Facebook your online identity is verified by the connections between you and your friends, what Zuckerberg has taken to calling the 'Social Graph'. Indeed, Facebook's Social Graph API, which enables web developers to integrate social tools that connect with Facebook's databases, with other websites, is an indication that the company's ambition is to move beyond being just a website to become a 'platform' – part of the underlying infrastructure of the internet, or the Operating System for the Social Web, as some people are starting to say.

So, we are presented with the possibility that your Facebook identity could become your universal digital identity; Facebook has already introduced Facebook credits for buying small tokens on the site because it understands that people feel more comfortable giving their credit card information to Facebook than to another third-party; And Facebook's impact in the social and political sphere is reported almost daily. These are odd situations for a company to find itself in, seemingly more akin to the role of a government – issuing identity documents, guaranteeing currency and exchange, and providing forums for debate. Facebook, already has oblique ties to the highest echelons of the power elite – Chief Operating Officer, Sheryl Sandberg, who played an important role in developing Google's advertising model before joining Facebook in 2008, used to work for US Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, under the Clinton administration, and is now one of the most important people at Facebook. Companies that have to think like countries – is that where we have arrived at?

As the internet continues to grow, it is only right for the people who make decisions that affect millions of people account for their decisions and are just as open and transparent with us as they want us to be with them. Anyone who has a Facebook account or who knows someone who has a Facebook account should read David Kirkpatrick's book, The Facebook Effect – an invaluable introduction to one of the world's most important companies, told with style and grace.lunarpark.blogspot.com - Enhanced Network Effects - Keyword description

2011-11-29T10:44:00.000-08:00

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Mark Stephen Meadows is one of those really annoying Americans who has seemingly turned his hand to everything and is probably just getting started. His story would be hard to believe, had it not been so heavily documented in the form of paintings, books, lectures, websites and US patents. Meadows claims to speak English, French and (conversational) Spanish, as well as C++, Javascript and 'cocktail conversation'. In his own words, he left school to be an artist, got hooked up in early web development – Meadows did graphics design work for Stewart Brand's legendary WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) when it became a dot com in the early 1990s – later worked at Xerox PARC and Stanford Research Institute, had his art work exhibited in Paris, and went on to found a software company called HeadCase. Something of an adventurer, Meadows traveled to Iraq in 2003 and wrote a book about his liaisons with the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka in 2010, Tea Time with Terrorists. He now spends his days varnishing his boat anchored off the coast of Mexico.

Like most Americans, he is not backward about coming forward (why should he be?) and there is a slightly self-mythologising quality about his remarkable career so far. But that is probably just jealousy speaking. There is no denying that the boundless enthusiasm, energy and joie de vivre apparent in such an outstanding CV is intimidating to a wannabe like me. But letting that sort of feeling overtake me is not going to help to accomplish any of the wild schemes I have in my head...

First, I will just review this book.

We, Robot is a travelogue about how technology is catching up with, and in some cases overtaking, fantasy. The book is ostensibly about robots - those humanoid worker drones invented by a Czechoslovakian playwright in the 1920s and as yet not realised - but manages to encompass a surprisingly wide range of technological phenomena. The breathless prose and sometimes stream-of-consciousness-machine-gun-of-ideas style does leave one gasping for air at times, but then you remember, in many ways, this is just an introduction, an overview - you relax and let the high winds carry you.

The book skids between the ethics of drone warfare, and remote control and autonomous weapons systems as embodied by The Terminator; the utility of Jetsons style home cleaning robots; augmentations that enhance human potential such as Luke Skywalker's hand; the odd appeal of sex-bots; and the quest for an artificial intelligence, which hopefully will not 'malfunction' like HAL in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I have not even mentioned Meadows musings on Battlestar Gallactica (the newer good one), the inadequacy of the Turing Test and James Cameron's Avatar - and still more ground is covered in the text itself. It is little wonder therefore that the wanderer does occasionally lose his way, and, although much is learned during those diversions, the book is strongest when addressing the central idea that motivated his writing in the first place.

In an online interview here Meadows says that he wrote the book to 'explore some ethical questions' - and it is in those moments that We, Robot really soars. The book provides an excellent description of the Uncanny Valley, a concept with which anyone who has ever watched The Polar Express or any other Rober Zemeckis directed motion capture animation will already be familiar. People generally feel more and more comfortable around robots that look more human, until, at a critical juncture when the inanimate object looks 'almost human' trust falls off a cliff. Meadows describes the feeling as being particularly palpable when he visited a Japanese engineering and programming genius working on a life-like female droid - the more he looked at the lack of imperfection in her skin, the dullness in her eyes, the lack of vitality in her expression, the stranger he felt.

Meadows also skewers the 'openess and transparency' arguments put forward by large technology companies such as Facebook, Apple and Google, which already collect massive amounts of data about their users via websites and mobile gadgets. Given that I share much of his discomfort at the idea of privacy controls being relaxed and so-called 'openess' becoming the norm, it is heartening to read an articulate privacy advocate who is not a Luddite and who does not succumb to paranoid distortions. 'And why don't we like strangers looking through our emails or chat logs?' Meadows asks rhetorically. 'Because the more information someone has about you, the more control they have over you. And to once again refer to Linda Stone's term , "understanding workers", it is worth noting that as information becomes knowledge, knowledge becomes understanding, your behaviour and your thoughts quickly become predictable. Privacy is liberty.' Spot on!

There is a footnote to a fascinating research paper that details how 'sentiment analysis' on Twitter can already predict likely box office outcomes with (some might think) alarming accuracy. An over active imagination with a tendency towards the dystopian could run away with itself - what else might such massive agglomerations of data help to predict? Who is making those kinds of inquiries? Might the same system be used to 'push' people towards a desired outcome without their knowledge or consent?

The possibilities are exhilarating - both amazing and frightening to think on't.

Meadows own work with artificial personalities informs his thoughts about the implications of mass data collection by corporations with clarity and insight. Like a lot of good storytellers, he posits questions but does not tell anyone what to think. Who owns the personality profiles that companies compile? What should companies and individuals be able to use those profiles for? - so-called 'sock puppets' (multiple accounts controlled by a single operator) deployed to influence debate and promote a particular agenda online - on forums and in comments sections - are already known about and being reported upon. With whom should such valuable data be shared? The questions are massive and, like Blade Runner, seem to approach fundamental questions about identity and what makes us who we are.

There is a lot of detailed research in the book but, as the allusions to fictional characters make clear – more especially the references to pop culture and comic book icons – We, Robot is not and was never intended to be a scientifically rigorous portrait of the current state-of-the art. Nor does it claim to be – in a scene that seems to directly reference William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk classic Neuromancer, Meadows describes stepping out of his hotel in downtown Tokyo, high on prescription medication, trying, in the hazy neon night time, to feel the signs of intermediation between human and robot reality. In my view, a book written by someone who knows a little bit more than the average bear about the kinds of systems that might be heading our way and which takes a responsible view of big issues to do with privacy, the psychology of uncanny valleys and the rights to ownership of our personalities, when used for marketing purposes, would be very welcome. As people try to understand the complicated relationships that are emerging between internet services and their users, these issues are only going to become more important.

Personally, I would love to read a more earnest account of Meadows work in artificial intelligence laboratories, performing semantic analysis and using that data to create natural language processing algorithms. The anecdote about his work heading a team of programmers and linguistic specialists in the design of some 'very intense software' which was able to scrape personalities and regurgitate them to a user - the team 'scraped' Arnold Schwarzenegger interviews and 'When the system was asked what it thought of gay marriage it replied, “Gay marriage should be between a man and a woman and if you ask me again I will make you do 500 push-ups.”' - is terrific. But I wanted more.

We, Robot is half technology dilemmas, half joyful romp through the maelstrom of modern robot tech. Still, if you want an intelligent guide to what technologists dream about, which touches upon, but does not get bogged down in, ethical issues, this one is highly recommended.

Now, you will have to excuse me, I am off to wrestle sharks off the coast of Western Australia, but not before I build a robot Mark Zuckerberg.lunarpark.blogspot.com - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Keyword description

2011-11-22T10:03:00.001-08:00

The Gift of Giving

I came across this very odd article on the BBC today. Apparently, the nation is enraptured by an advert for a department store in which a little kid counts down the days, the hours and the minutes until he can give his parents a present on Christmas Day. You see, he's not counting down the days, the hours and the minutes until he can rip the wrapping paper off of the little red fire engine he has been begging and pleading for since September. No. Not like the little brat that you (dear parents) have to put up with. This cherubim has only goodness in his heart and wants nothing but the gift of giving.

If you believe the PR puff, actual grown-ups, the men and women you see walking around town and who you talk to at your place of work, have openly confessed to crying at the sight of this manipulative marketing claptrap.

Is this where we have arrived at as a nation? Welcome to 21st century Britain, where an advert for a shop has the power to make people weep.

There is no doubt that the 'reaction' has been staged managed very well. When the 'campaign' was being dreamt up in a corporate boardroom, the executives would have probably cried themselves if you had told them about all of the media attention their simple little advert would attract. The 'event' has been planned to perfection by a very shrewd marketing team (and now I am adding to the frenzy), so well done to them.

That, of course, is all boring business as usual and to be expected. What I find more troubling, more strange is the write up on the BBC. The clear, clipped, corporate prose has all of the bland certainty of a copywriter and is akin to something cooked up by the advertising company's own PR department.

To what is the BBC dedicating valuable pixels, in its role as a public service broadcaster? Not a film, a song, a book or a play, but an advert. *sigh*

For all I known, the filmmakers who produced this mini-epic are worthy of the praise and attention their opus is now receiving. I had remained blissfully ignorant of this cultural 'happening' until Charlie Brooker wrote about it in Monday's Guardian. But, why, in this new media age, is an advert garnering such a high level of attention?

The triumph of commerce over culture (or commerce elevated to the status of culture) is bad enough but the clever campaign is still more insidious than that. As the BBC article points out, 'True to anything that becomes an instant hit on the web, the ad has already spawned a number of online spoofs. The most popular take has been to keep the ad but change the music to something from a chilling movie. There is the "Shining" version which features spooky organ music, and the Se7en version which is accompanied by dialogue from the 1995 thriller.'

The sad truth is that these 'anarchic' attempts to 're-contextualise' the advert, by casting it as something other than what it is, are only helping the monster to grow. The spoofers, the spammers and the pisstakers are doing the work of the marketing men, helping the advert to reach a still wider demographic who will associate the brand with the outré and anti-establishment sentiments implanted by their friends. It is little wonder why 'John Lewis chiefs don't appear too bothered by the spoofs - after all, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery', the BBC reminds us, helpfully.

To resist is like fighting against The Blob or a stinking bog, the more you fight, the more slime, the stronger the enemy becomes.

Don't struggle, it'll be over soon.lunarpark.blogspot.com - The Gift of Giving - Keyword description

2011-11-16T22:13:00.000-08:00

The Business Case

Mission Impossible 4 is a fascinating project from a commercial and a demographic point of view.

But is the fourth outing in the highly successful spy franchise the right vehicle to give Tom Cruise the hit he so desperately needs, and does Brad Bird have what it takes to helm a multi-million dollar live-action Hollywood blockbuster?

There is a lot resting on this film - namely, the ailing career of one of the brightest stars of American cinema of the last 20 years and the fledging career of one of America's most talented mainstream movie directors; not to mention the fate of Paramount Studios, which has bet the farm.

Tom Cruise arguably hasn't had a hit since the last Mission Impossible film, five years ago. His sometimes wild and exuberant interviews have also damaged his all-American boy image and his high-profile support of a dubious West Coast religion, fashionable among the super rich, has made him a target of ridicule and derision.

Age is certainly against him - his face has lost much of its boyish quality over the last few years - as is the amount of time he has been at the top. Tom Cruise has been there longer than most - Cruise contemporaries such as Bruce Willis, Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts have been playing middle aged for a while now and although all four are still capable of 'opening' a film, a new crop of stars have already usurped them in the money making stakes. Johnny Depp, Matt Damon and Will Smith. Very few Hollywood leading men have lasted into a third decade without loosing their box office draw: John Wayne, Gary Cooper and Clint Eastwood, all of which were best known for playing cowboys, that enduring image of the mythic American hero.

If an actor like Cruise has an equivalen persona, it is probably the character of Ethan Hunt. Something of a blank slate, who changes his emotional palette based on the tastes of the director and what each episode in the series requires, while also enabling Cruise to show off his (movie star) athletic prowess, hanging from tall structures, riding motorcycles, etc. But Ethan Hunt is hardly an American icon - in many ways he is as enigmatic as Cruise himself who, in an era of 24 hour news coverage, Twitter and Facebook, has remained commendably private off screen. But will the American public still buy Cruise as an action hero?

Brad Bird is also an interest case. Early on in his career, he leant style, class and a sense of cinematic ingenuity to the Simpsons. (Any sequence you remember from seasons one to eight that had a distinctive sense of visual flair, you can be pretty sure he had a hand in). As an animation director, he has made two near-perfect films, one traditional hand drawn animation and the other rendered digitally by a computer: The Iron Giant, a heart-breaking fable about the stupidity of authority figures who think the answer is always military; and The Incredibles, about a superhero family with real world problems who propose the dangerously elitist view that if you work hard at something and you have the talent it is possible to achieve great things. But what of his record as a director of live action feature films? He must have one. Hollywood studios do not let first time directors behind the camera of multimillion dollar franchise sequels with a major star and god only knows how many advertising and corporate sponsorship deals... What do you mean they did?... Oh.

Even the franchise itself is interesting; it has not been completely polished and planned by committee from inception to completion. Like the Alien series before it, while each new episode is clearly part of a continuum, each has had a different director, who has been allowed to bring their personality to bear on the final production. Brian de Palma (Scarface, The Untouchables) was first out to bat and made what I still consider to be the best film in the series. John Woo tried to bring his balletic style of Hong Kong gunplay to the second but, from what I have read, had the film taken away from him in the edit. JJ Abrams did a very professional job with the third film, giving Philip Seymour Hoffman the chance to ham with the best as the evil Owen Davian.

So that is the business case. Will Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol justify that big build up? We'll find out in December.lunarpark.blogspot.com - The Business Case - Keyword description

2011-11-15T10:24:00.000-08:00

The porousness of certain borders

Literary labels are a strange thing. On the one hand they are a useful shorthand, a sign that a genre or style has found a place for itself in the popular imagination. A label can be a badge of honour. It can also be a cage, a way of controlling, codifying or commodifying that which was once beyond the bounds of crude categorisation. I suppose we will always have labels of one form or another. What is really rare, however, is to come across a label that can be applied to a wide breadth of cultural product without diminishing.

Slipstream.

What sort of genre do you think Slipstream is? I bet you already have a hazy notion beginning to form at the outer edges of the spiral galaxy of your imagination - and I would guess that you are unerringly close to a definition. I know because it is the same feeling I had when I stumbled across an article about Christopher Priest's Top Ten Slipstream Novels just yesterday. I had never heard the word before but take it to mean a kind literature, storytelling, painting, filmmaking that might be either surrealistic or realistic but which evokes a peculiar sense of disconnect, a feeling of wandering alone through a hostile landscape surrounded by shadows - some threatening, some amusing - all unfamiliar. David Lynch (Blue Velvet) is Slipstream, David Yates (Harry Potter) is not; Philip K. Dick is Slipstream, Dick Francis is not; Psycho is Slipstream, Rear Window is not (Can you tell I am making up the rules as I go along?)

Then I did what any digital-connected knowledge seeker today would do, I typed 'Slipstream' into Google. Wikipedia tells me: "The term slipstream was coined by Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling in an article originally published in SF Eye #5, July 1989. He wrote: '...this is a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person of a certain sensibility.'" Ha! It had to be someone as smart as Bruce Sterling who created this potent one-word description for such a genre-defying form of expression.

I particularly like the way in which the label captures the porous nature of the genre, which is (in my mind) almost exclusively comprised of 'boundary cases'. Are Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World science fiction or social satire? Is Being John Malkovich a comedy or a drama? How would you categorise the work of Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut or William Burroughs? I would contend that they are all Slipstream.

Slipstream is Atlantis and Interzone, art about and for the people who slip through the cracks in the pavement. But, in another way, it is not really a genre at all, it is the dominant intellectual and social mood of our current era - confusion, estrangement, paranoia. Labels are always contingent but Slipstream seems to embody almost everything I like in fiction - a sense of strangeness, otherness and the peculiar possibility of possibility.lunarpark.blogspot.com - The porousness of certain borders - Keyword description

2011-11-14T10:32:00.000-08:00

When Worlds Collide

I really enjoy it when my favourite authors turn their hands to non-fiction. Something about the combination of journalistic brevity and literary prose, together with technical accuracy and novelistic storytelling, places the writing at the sweet centre of a very scholastic Venn Diagram. One of my favourite exponents of the form is JG Ballard, whose essays and reviews form the basis of an exemplary collection published in 1996 called A User's Guide to the Millennium.

The articles are taken from a wide variety of different publications: The Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent on Sunday, Time Out, New Statesman, The New York Times, The Sunday Times, New Worlds, Vogue and The Woman Journalist – each replete with their own editorial policy and apparent ideology. Read a newspaper or a magazine regularly and you quickly begin to recognise familiar positions and a dogmatic adherence to a certain point of view, to the extent that, after a couple of months, you could probably draft an accurate parody of a typical news story without needing to open the paper. I defy anyone to do the same with Ballard.

Ever wondered what the master exponent of Late Capitalist disaster fiction and social satire made of 20th century icons such as Coca-Cola, Walt Disney and Howard Hughes; Salvador Dali, Casablanca and Richard Feynman; Andy Warhol, the Vietnam War and Star Wars; Shanghai, F. Scott Fitzgerald and David Lynch; or even Nancy Reagan, Elvis Presley and Sigmund Freud? Every single name evokes a world with which to conjure, but when the name of Ballard is thrown into the mix, new and intriguing possibilities begin to emerge, darker but somehow more lucid and more stimulating.

Ballard eschews conventionality, received wisdom and established orthodoxies at every turn. He has no firm political or religious affiliations. As a writer he is no one but himself and regardless of whether you agree or disagree, it impossible to ignore the sense of an independent mind, puzzling out new approaches and affirming new ideas about (sometimes) familiar topics in precise, declarative sentences. Care to guess what Ballard thinks about global branding giant and sugar water seller Coca-Cola? Any Marxist or anti-American might decry the "malign geopolitical influence" that has been exercised by the corporation but in Ballard's more sanguine view the "mind-numbing" efforts of the marketing men dedicated to selling the image of the world's "most refreshing burp" are much more interesting; representing a "certain kind of American cheerfulness, not to everyone's taste but hard to resist”. And what about that glamorous billionaire playboy Howard Hughes - The Richest Man in the World - an aviation pioneer who made movies, dated Hollywood starlets, designed aircraft for the US military and eventually went crackers, holing himself up in a sound-proof room atop of the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas?

I admire Hughes most of all for the casual way in which he closed the door on the world. Lying back on the couch with the blinds drawn, popping pills and worrying about fad diets while watching the 170th re-run of Ice Station Zebra, reminds me in many ways of life today in the Thames Valley. Hughes may well have been more in touch with reality than anyone assumes.lunarpark.blogspot.com - When Worlds Collide - Keyword description

2011-11-10T12:48:00.000-08:00

One Worth Catching

The people in Contagion are probably among the most well organised, well behaved victims I have ever seen in a disaster movie - a smashed window here, a building on fire there but, on the whole, the people who survive the deadly influenza that afflicts the world conduct themselves with commendable sobriety. Matt Damon, in particular, is a bastion of good sense and moral virtue - as one would probably expect. How very different things would have been had the same story been directed by the politically-minded purveyor of zombie gore George A. Romero (writer and director of the Dead movies), to which Stephen Soderberg's film owes some debt.

The biggest difference between the two is the amount of research up on the screen. While Romero's films are almost always allegorical, Contagion takes its cues from pathogen science and viral mutation. The film sometimes resembles the kind of instructional video the World Health Organisation might put out in order to increase awareness (the experts generally agree that we are long overdue a similar disaster), albeit one with a much larger budget than would typically be allocated and an A-list cast.

Personally, I enjoyed the film for its educational quality - apparently the most important measure that governments and other international bodies need to establish in the event of a global pandemic is something called the R=0 (or R-nought); the daily infection rate. An R=0 of 2 means that on the first day 2 people have the disease, on the second 4, on the third 16, then 256, then 65,536...

The film is more concerned with logistics - establishing forums for the distribution of food packets, commandeering sports halls and other public spaces where the sick can be cared for and quarantined, ('FEMA can go over there') - than it is with getting under any of the character's skin (ha!). Soderberg relies on the fact that his actors are all famous faces towards whom the audience will already feel predisposed - Lawrence Fishburne is a solid authority figure, Matt Damon is Mr Dependable, Marion Cotillard is beautiful and French and... was that Elliot Gould?

The one actor who plays slightly against type, and who probably has the most interesting role in the film, is Jude Law's oddly-accented blogger (which former British colony is he supposed to come from?) Law wears a snaggle tooth (his idea apparently), so you know he is not to be trusted but it is his dubious obsession with getting hits on his website that brings the film into the 21st century. The idea of information spreading like a virus is not novel but Contagion does a very good job of illustrating the way in which instant communication globally via the internet enables information as well as misinformation to spread with (sometimes) alarming rapidity. This, for better or worse, is clearly threatening to the established authorities. 'Blogging isn't writing, it is graffiti with punctuation', says Elliot Gould, challenging Law - a funny line but the old media message is implicit: don't trust those horrible new media types, they are just as crass and venal as the established order, if not more so.

Probably the most enjoyable science lesson I have attended this year, the trailer led me to believe I would be getting something from the point of view of the virus (brilliant!). However, I was perfectly happy to watch the institutional point of view - very intelligent people doing their best and just about keeping it together under exceptional circumstances.lunarpark.blogspot.com - One Worth Catching - Keyword description

2011-11-06T12:45:00.000-08:00

Digital Artists

On Monday 31st October 2011, Pete Townshend gave the inaugural John Peel Lecture, named in honour of the great DJ, who was possessed of the kind of obsessive musical mind and sarcastic humour so badly missed on Radio One today. Surprisingly, the ageing rocker used the lecture as an opportunity to talk about the complicated way in which the internet is changing notions of propriety, ownership and the digital rights of creative artists. Even more surprisingly, Townshend made apposite observations about a medium people half his age are still struggling to understand, and no shortage of proposals for rebalancing the asymmetrical relationship between artists and online aggregators.

He argued that 'content aggregators' like Apple were like 'digital vampires', taking a 30 percent cut of the profits while doing none of the work. 'Music publishing has always been a form of banking in many ways, but – in cooperation with record labels – active artists have always received from the music industry banking system more than banking' he said, before suggesting that Apple could and maybe should be doing more to develop and promote new artists. Apple has taken over the 'distribution' and 'banking' roles previously occupied by music labels, but does not yet provide the creative support or nurturing environment aspiring artists need. 'Why not?' asked Townshend.

Townshend also expressed his concerns about digital piracy:

Whether the public listen or not, creative writers and musicians should get paid if their work generates money by virtue of its mere existence on radio, television, YouTube, Facebook or SoundCloud. It's tricky to argue for the innate value of copyright from a position of good fortune (as I do). I once suggested on a forum that people who download my music without paying for it may as well come and steal my son's bike while they're at it. One woman was so incensed that she tried to argue that she was still supporting me as an artist by 'sharing' (my parentheses) music with others who would eventually filter down some cash in some form or other to me, that would pay for my son's bike – and she was not, in any sense, a thief or a criminal. I think she was in a kind of denial. Cutting the body to fit the cloth rather than the correct way around.

Some of the less kind commentators online described Tonwshend as a 'dinosaur' for expressing such an antiquated view (in place of antiquated read: 'unfashionable'). Of course, it is very easy to attack a millionaire rock star for complaining about theft, but that is to ignore the fact that there was actually some substance in what he was saying. This was not a preening, rock star winge, Townshend was expressing legitimate concerns about the uncertain future for artists who want to make a living out of recorded music in a digital world in which copying is not only ubiquitous but socially de rigueur.

This put me in mind of Cory Doctorow and Jaron Lanier, both of which have interesting things to say about creativity online, offering alternative prescriptions for how creative people might try to take control of their own destinies once again.

The Doctorow doctrine

Cory Doctorow is right when he says that 'there is no future in which hard drives get smaller smaller, less capacious, more expensive, harder to use, harder to find. There is no future in which networks are going to be harder to log into, slower, more expensive'. He is also correct about the intrusive and ineffective anti-piracy schemes developed by corporations, which take skilled software developers years to develop and are broken by teenagers in minutes. DRM or Digital Rights Management is the euphemistic term given to a proprietary standards that limit the 'terms of use' for any song, game, music or book purchased in a digital form. When you buy a printed book from Borders, Waterstones or your local independent or second-hand book store, you are free to loan the book to whomever you want and can even sell it on when you are done reading. An e-book purchased from the Apple iBooks store, on the other hand, can only be read using Apple's proprietary software ajustify certainly do not have the right to sell it or loan it to someone else. What you buy is license, nothing more, and you, lowly consumer, would do well to remember that. Also, just in case you are thinking about reading your iBooks copy of Neuromancer on your new Amazon Kindle – its all digital, right? – forget about it; you are locked into whatever 'ecosystem' you use to make your purchases.

Effectively, you no longer own the book or indeed the device that you use to read it, which, because it is 'tethered' to the manufacturer or the software maker (inevitably a very big company), will only grant a 'licence' to read, watch or play whatever you 'buy' from their online store, and even then, only provided that you agree to comply with an arbitrary set criteria that the company reserves the right to change on a whim. It is a lot like being told that you are only permitted to read your newly purchased hardback by Neal Stephenson under a certain type of lamp, while sitting on a certain type of chair. Indeed, two years ago, thousands of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to find their e-book copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four replaced by a voucher for the Amazon Kindle Store. The company that had sold the e-book did not have the rights to do so and so Amazon had taken remote control of all of the devices that had purchased the book (whose devices are these again?) and deleted the digital file. Oh, the irony!

As such, Cory Doctorow's 'no-DRM' stance is laudable. DRM is intrusive and annoying, not to mention doomed to failure. His contention therefore is that because bits are only going to get easier to copy and DRM utimately abstracts people's understanding and control over their own devices, artists should adopt a freemium model, giving their work away online in order to promote their work in other media, which can then make money. He tells us that his experience of giving stories away online (DRM free of course) has been entirely positive – quoting Tim O' Reilly he says, 'The big problem for any artist isn't piracy, it is obscurity' – and I can see the logic in that. But what are the prospects for someone trying to get their foot on the first rung of the ladder, given that digital content is already freely available online and that digital may soon be the primary means of distribution? Giving away a free e-book in order to promote the physical artifact assumes that there will always be a market for ink on paper – books, journals and magazines. This is far from certain – last year, e-book sales in the UK surpassed paperback sales for the first time. What happens to the artist who has been giving their work away online when print is no longer a viable source of revenue?

The second implicit assumption is that, provided the work is good, people who read the first few chapters of the e-book will still want to rush out and buy a printed copy. This might be true if your name is Cory Doctorow. But what if you are an aspiring writer or artist looking to make a name for yourself? I worry that potential readers will be less likely to support someone they have never heard of before, to whom they have no loyalty or alligence. I understand that Cory Doctorow's first novel was released simultaneously in print and online under a Creative Commons License, but were his first published stories given away free online? Or did he make a name for himself in traditional print media and by doing so acquire a publishing deal? I think that form of propriety might be important and worry that without it the possibilities for people who wish to earn a living as creative artists will be diminished. I would be quite happy to be proved wrong, but I am sceptical.

Lanier's lament

Indeed, what Cory Doctorow proposes may be practical in the short term, but it is hardly the digital revolution people had hoped for; overturning outdated, outmoded structures and replacing them with something vibrant and new. The music charts are still dominated by artists signed to major labels, independent filmmakers still rely on major distributors for financial support, and the publishing industry is hardly awash with talented individuals making a name for themselves by giving their work away on the internet. With a few high profile exceptions – Radiohead's 'pay what you want' gimmick for the initial release of their album In Rainbows – the internet has so far proved almost wholly ineffective as a medium for nurturing new talent. I am sure that there are people out there doing interesting things, but they are not breaking into the mainstream in anything like the numbers one might expect. The 'advertising-supported' and 'freemium' models that have emerged online only replaced one set of guardians with another and do not point the way towards a credible future in which millions of independent artists are free to create.

The internet seems to have become an advertising vehicle for corporations and artists working in other media. For the time being, artists who find an audience online can still earn money for the work they do on the printed page, on films and on TV. But what happens when the internet becomes the primary delivery system for all of those different media? It is a question that needs an answer. It is wholly conceivable to imagine world in which those potential revenue streams no longer exist and, if people cannot agree to pay for digital content, artists will be either impoverished or reliant upon the patronage of rich bakers – most likely corporations. In other words, it will be very much like the world in which we live today, only with less freedom and power for creators, instead of more.

Some of those who believe in the internet as a force for positive change are concerned by this apparent trend. Jaron Lanier, the' father of virtual reality' and an early internet pioneer, has been very vocal about the unforeseen consequences wrought by the 'open and free' culture movement. By making web 'content' (an awful Web 2.0 coinage that in itself seems to diminish the hard work of creators) free, you deprive it of value and thereby create the odd circumstances in which people who profess to love music/film/TV/books feel entitled to 'share' what they do not own on BitTorrent sites. As Pete Tonwnshend said in his talk: 'We now live in a digital world in which the only absolute is work by the hour. Lawyers, accountants, doctors, nurses, plumbers, painters, truck drivers, farmers, pilots, cleaners, actors, musicians – they all get paid for work done as a clock ticks. Creative work is not like that. Any one of the people listed above could create a method that would help other people to do their job in their place... However, if someone pretends to be me, or pretends that something I have created should be available to them free (because creativity has less value than an hour's work by me as a musician in a pub) I wonder what has gone wrong with human morality and social justice.'

*CLARIFICATION* The entertainment or 'copyright industries' that bleat about the need for more censorious laws to limit internet piracy are barking up the wrong tree and should be opposed. Their plight is really a side issue in a much wider debate which I am attempting to address. Large movie studios and record labels are perfectly capable of defending themselves. As far as I am concerned, what happens to the copyright or 'cultural industries' is less of a concern than what happens to Culture and Creativity per se. What we should be aiming towards is a system in which people who are motivated by passion and the desire to innovate have the freedom to do so and it is my contention that the most effective way of granting people that freedom is to devise a way for them to make money from their efforts. We need to make a distinction between the big guy and the little guy because whereas big business can stand the losses, when people pirate the little guy, they are reaching into his pocket and robbing him of his ability to support himself through his art.

Pete Townshend was himself guilty of perpetuating an unhelpful myth about artists in his talk when he said that his 'inner artist' 'don't give a shit about making money'. The only artists who 'don't give a shit about making money' are those who already have enough to live comfortable lives. We should all be so lucky. Money is never the primary motivation for the creative artist, but that does not meant it is not important. An artist who cannot make money from their art has no choice but to do something else to earn their keep, which inevitably distracts from their creative endeavours. Creative freedom and the time to create – that is what I am about. It just so happens that money enough to live on makes those things a hell of a lot easier. *CLARIFICATION ENDS*

The tricky part is, of course, working out how to utilise the communicative power of the internet to enable artists to earn enough money to be free to create, while also reaching an appreciative audience. As Pete Townshend correctly identified in his talk:

What creative people want is to know their music has been heard. They would prefer a response that was constructive than a positive or negative review. They would prefer expertise to opinion. They would like to know the public if they had a chance to hear the music, also had a chance to make up their own minds. They would prefer that in the long term the public were willing to pay for their music. But looking at the John Peel model what is clear is that just knowing there was a chance the great man would listen, react and offer the music on air, for whatever reason, was enough for budding musicians and bands.

That is where we must be going. Musicians need to be heard, to be judged, if possible to be paid, but also allowed to believe they had more than a single chance to get a hit. Software systems that offer this model will survive and prevail – loved and embraced by musicians of every sort – whatever happens financially.

Ted Nelson's network

As I have already said, I am sceptical about the idea of giving digital copies away away for free; there probably is a place for a certain among of that, but it is not a long term solution. Jaron Lanier's proposes that we look back to the work of early internet pioneers as a means of inspiration. He say that we need to rediscover the idea of the internet as a globally distributed peer-to-peer network connecting people directly to other people. In the globally networked system envisioned by Ted Nelson in the 1950s, there was substantially less machine intermediation and just one logical copy of every digital file – much the same way as there is on iTunes today (there are back-ups and the file is cached on local exchanges, but as far as the user is concerned there is only one logical copy), and instead of being free (as in gratis) users had to pay to access content, sending micro-payments zipping back and forth between the various participants. This proposal probably seems even more radical today than it did at the time because now people know what the internet is and it is nothing like what Ted Nelson envisaged.

Certainly Ted Nelson' ideas raise as many questions as they answer, but that to me is their great strength. The Ted Nelson scheme might not be ideal, but neither is the current status quo. Parts of the internet need to be protected: namely, its openness – anyone who can pay the nominal fee to own a domain name can post online. Wereas other parts should be being questioned: the medium's apparent inability to make money for all but a chosen few – the companies that Jaron Lanier refers to as 'The Lords of the Clouds' (Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, etc.). Above all else, the Ted Nelson model reminds us that we options; there is nothing inevitable or natural about the internet and its inherent biases. By imagining an internet different to the one that we have now, we can look again with fresh eyes and imagine how it might be made better.

The debate about the future of the internet and content online needs to move beyond polarising debates that insist people make a choice between one extreme (open, free and, as Jaron Lanier fears, an impoverished middle class) or another (closed, controlled by corporations, with spying everywhere, all the time). The current debate seems to needlessly reflect the binary nature of computer systems, whereas what we should be striving towards is a network that protects the freedoms of citizens and places people at its centre, enabling them to profit from the contents of their hearts and minds.

My prescription is very simple. The internet is surely an ideal medium for various forms of direct distribution, so, the people who read, watch and listen to the articles, books, films and music that other people create and post online should pay them for it? Ta dah! What is wrong with that?

Sources:

Pete Townshend's John Peel lecture

Cory Doctorow's talk at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2007

Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget (2010)
lunarpark.blogspot.com - Digital Artists - Keyword description

2011-10-31T07:18:00.000-07:00

Reality Fiction

Thrilling Wonder Stories is the modest title of an annual event (now it its third year), this year hosted by Liam Young (Tomorrow's Thoughts Today) and Matt Jones (BERG London) at the Architectural Association in London. I attended the event on Friday and left brimming with new ideas, full of a renewed sense of idealism about what is possible in film, art and storytelling.

The future may not be what it used to be but, maybe, just maybe, great cities of yore – London and New York – still have a special part to play in a 21st century society defined by a globally networked capitalism that is dissolving physical space and making location increasingly irrelevant. There may be no maps for these territories but, as we strive to find our way through this shadowy new topography – a transparent 3D chess board extending to infinity – the intersection where storytelling and technology meet is likely to provide an invaluable light in the dark. The story, which has shaped understanding for thousands of years and is arguably the ultimate human technology, still has the power to remake the world, offering opportunities for transformation, renewal and a sense of genuine, Vaclav Havel inspired, hope.

Part One – Worlds of Wonder: Far From Home

The first speaker in this celebration of storytelling and technology was Christian Lorenz Scheurer, a Swiss concept artist who has lent his talents to everything from Hollywood movies, animations, comics, paintings, video games and theme parks, as well as some very elaborate, very secret building projects in Beijing, Moscow and Dubai. He described his creative process as an attempt to investigate The Anthropology of the Imaginary – asking questions about the sorts of people who live in the world he is trying to imagine and using that information as his guide. He said that he liked working on movies and video games in particular because they allow him to be like Gustav Klimt, designing architecture, creatures and fashion.

Having recounted his early years in Hollywood, calling up major studios and asking to speak to Tim Burton and Steven Spielberg, he talked about his work on a succession of successful failures and failed successes, including Fifth Element, Titanic, What Dreams May Come, Dark City, The Matrix and The Day After Tomorrow. Then he got bored with Hollywood, he told us, and went to work in Japan on Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which was a five year project and a massive commercial flop, but also a Petri-dish for other's successes – without that project, no Gollum, no Avatar, he said.

In Hollywood, of course, the right image (and all of his art was absolutely beautiful) is worth a lot of money, not to discredit George Lucas in any way, Lorenz Scheurer told us, but it was probably the dozen or so Ralph McQuarrie sketches and paintings that got Star Wars its green light, as opposed to Lucas' 20 scribbled pages of story outline. He also described working on a painting of the Sentinel robots for The Animatrix, which the Wachowskis described as looking like a ball with 'eels of made out of quicksilver' moving around it, burrowing into the earth – a thrilling reminder of just how powerful words can be in the right hands.

Then the conversation was joined by a representative from SPOV, an agency that works on CGI animation sequences for TV programmes, games and movies; and Gavin Rothery, who worked as concept artist on Moon, directed by Duncan Jones. Rothery gave some interesting insights into the processes involved in working with old fashioned models which, in combination with a bit of CGI magic, can still be transformed from a children's toy pulled by a piece of string into a credible lunar rover on the surface of the moon. There is a good reason why film's like 2001: A Space Odyssey, the original Star Wars, Alien and Blade Runner still stand up to this day.

This led onto a conversation about the difference between good science fiction and bad science fiction. Good science fiction is almost invariably the kind that creates some rules and then sticks to them; it is when those rules are broken that an audience looses its ability to suspend disbelief – an ethos that is as true of the narrative as it is of the design. In the original Star Wars films, Liam Young reminded us, none of the vehicles have wheels, whereas on the prequels there are wheels and, as a result it doesn't look like Star Wars. It is that extra three or four percent attention to detail that makes all the difference when you are asking an audience to invest their emotions in something fantastic.

All three contributors agreed that one of the best things that any designer or storyteller can do when they have the freedom to create almost anything is to put some limits on it. This principle was well illustrated (ha!) in another set of pictures Lorenz Scheurer showed us from his first film project, an unmade Belgian science fiction movie called Rax wherein the director set three criterion for his fantasy world; no nuts, no bolts, everything has to be steam powered and everything has to be made out of ceramics.

In storytelling in general, but in science fiction in particular, so much inspiration comes from playing the childlike game of, 'What if?' What if Gaudi was not run over by a tram but had carried on building the Barcelona he envisioned in his head? Might it have looked something like this?

A welcome reminder of the vast amount of honest effort and endeavour that goes into creating movies, regardless of the final outcome – something that is well worth keeping in mind when assessing the final product. You can rest assured, almost every detail you notice and many that you don’t has been thought about and sweated over by talented artists and technicians whose sincere intention is to make something that enables people to suspend their disbelief and become emotionally involved in the reality of the fiction.

Behind the Scenes – Blood, Guts and Hydraulic Fluid

Andy Lockley, visual effects artist at Double Negative (he was keen to stress the difference between special effects and VFX, which are frequently confused, he said), who has worked on such films as Captain America, The Dark Knight, Inception (for which he won an Oscar) and upcoming The Dark Knight Rises, was the first person to speak on the second panel and for copyright reasons all of the live feeds were turned off and recording of any kind prohibited. ‘Don’t even remember’ he said. For that reason I am not sure how much I am allowed to say about his contribution, but, I think I am on safe ground saying that he spoke about the different approaches taken by some of the different directors he has worked with and was particularly enlightening about his working relationship with Christopher Nolan on Inception and the Batman films. Apparently, Christopher Nolan's approach to special effects and the fantastic is always tempered by what he calls, 'our disappointing reality'. Every explosion, every effect, every car chase in a Christopher Nolan film has to have that slight sense of 'disappointment' because that is his experience of reality, a useful safety lever that prevents his films from veering too far into the realm of the impossible, one suspects. Lockley's advice to aspiring artists, designers and creators was 'don't think you know better than reality, always copy things, always have reference and make things dirty'.

The next person to speak was Gustav Hoegen, an electronics engineer specialising in animatronics work on films, who has lent his expertise to such diverse projects as Clash of the Titans (2010), The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) and, perhaps most intriguingly, the new Alien prequel Prometheus. He demonstrated how he turns biomechanics into mechanics, imitating life through engineering and, while conceding that he is never going to be able to compete with computer special effects – 'I am quite intimidated by it to be honest', he said – he did a great job of explaining how his practical effects differ; being present on the set, improvising, thinking on your feat, no time to plan, ‘hand shaking as you try to wire something in’ – animatronics is very much an old-fashioned discipline.

But not quite as old-fashioned as what followed.

Taxidermy!

Not the Victorian kind with specialist chemicals, preserving agents and delicate dis-and-re-assembly, no, a live, do-it-yourself taxidermy demonstration by a wonderfully bonkers woman called Charlie Tuesday Gates, who told us that she found most of her specimens by the side of the road and has nothing but scorn for vegetarians (being a vegan herself). She proceeded to skin a dead rabbit – a lot like ‘peeling an orange’, apparently – a sight I definitely did not expect to see when I woke up that day. While she did so she regaled us with the kind of barmy anecdotes one might expect from a woman brassy enough to start doing taxidermy as a hobby and then end up making a career out of it – a welcome intrusion of ever-so-quirky in-your-face humanity.

Following that madness, Vincenzo Natali’s disembodied head joined us, speaking live via Skype from his home in Toronto. He spoke about his predilection towards science fiction, the life-changing experience of watching Star Wars aged eight and his ambitious plans for new movies based of JG Ballard's High-Rise and William Gibson's Neuromancer. He expressed his view that Ballard's books were more akin to surrealist paintings than traditional novels and also dropped some fascinating insights about his approach to adapting Neuromancer. He said, in its simplest form, he sees it as a heist movie which gets a bit more complicated in the final third, and, given that Neuromancer is 'almost not science fiction anymore', he plans to shoot most of the movie on location, adding a few augmentations in post production. The real challenge of course will be realising cyberspace, but, unsurprisingly, he wasn’t giving anything away with respect to that.

Part Three – Strange But True: When Robots Rule the World

This third panel started with a swarm robotics demonstration in which two dozen or so small, cylindrical bots with sensors on the outside and embedded micro-controllers and motors on the inside gradually manoeuvred themselves into a pattern as determined by a light source. It was a modest demonstration of a very powerful programming methodology to do with designing redundant systems (not all of the robots can succeed), which prioritises the aims of the many over those of the one.

Dr Roderich Gross from the Head of the Natural Robotics Lab at the University of Sheffield continued the robot theme with his presentation about some of the more sophisticated swarm robotic systems currently under development in the laboratory; before Philip Beesley, an experimental architect, joined the conversation to give a very detailed, intellectually engaging talk that I am sure will have thrilled and enthused any architects present. I enjoyed it but cannot pretend to have understood it in its entirety. The concepts he was describing and even his way of talking about them was very much a new world for me. What he seemed to be proposing was a more interactive and socially engaged design methodology, which might act as a counterpoint to the essentially alienating approaches promoted by thoughts about Euclidean geometry and Platonic solids. Fascinating stuff somewhere between architecture and installation art, including references to material properties and structural mechanics, alongside allusions to 17th century paintings, theology and philosophy. A very pure design aesthetic and ethical framework intended (I assume) to provoke thoughts about how sensors and interactive elements might be incorporated into the built environment by looking at the problem from an alternative perspective, outside the typical run of the mill.

This talk ended on a fascinating note, with the contributors being questioned about the ethics of their research, Beesley expressing his concern about the very fine line between an interactive architectural element imbued with threat and one that is soothing and encourages calm.

The Heart of the Matter

The last panel was comprised of Julian Bleecker, who wanted to tell us why just because something is not sold in Walmart, it does not mean it is not real; Kevin Slavin, who spoke about how algorithms are taking over Wall Street, motivating people to level mountains and terraform the Earth itself in order to install faster fibre-optic lines; and Bruce Sterling, who disarmed everyone by telling us that the only things that really provoke wonder are things in nature such as the size of the universe and the age of the earth, before exhilarating everyone with a story about the most thrilling and wondrous sausage he could imagine – specifically, a radioactive Chernobyl Przewalski horse sausage shot by a bunch of bored Ukrainian teenagers, rendered by a DIY butcher and eaten by one Steve Jobs on a business trip to Moscow – a Gothic High-Tech story that chimes with the fevered times in which we are living.

That was the precis for the epic conversation that followed. Unfortunately, I had to leave early and did not catch it in its entirety, but what follows are some of the provocations I might have contributed if I had the balls and the microphone.

Despite its success, and it was a big success, at the centre of the event was a contradiction that was never directly addressed in a wholly satisfactory manner. Namely, the perennial struggle between art and commerce. Maybe the problem is intractable but it is impossible to ignore the fact that it is Hollywood and big business that fund fantastic concept artists to create visions of other worlds; it the military-industrial complex that empowers scientists to undertake swarm robotics and advanced artificial intelligence research; and it is the voracious demands of the market that are incentivising physicists and mathematicians in New York and London to develop ever more advanced derivative trading products and algorithms which, once they are unleashed, nobody understands.

So, on the one hand, it is global capital that makes these thrilling wonder stories possible, but, might the efforts of the very brilliant people who create the art, engineer the robots and programme the algorithms be better directed? In spite of the massive amount of money, effort and man-hours that go into designing and developing Hollywood films, the finished product is rarely as evocative as the concepts that precede it – as Lorenz Scheurer conceded, Hollywood producers invariably demand that whatever fantastic science fictional city he has created become New York. As mentioned by Liam Young, the most advanced robots in the world are invariably produced for the military, which uses them to destroy – we know that drone attacks are already alarmingly commonplace in Pakistan. And, as Kevin Slavin told us in his talk, the algorithms, which are already responsible for 70 percent of trades in the US, are already making their way into executive roles, abstracting information and replacing human agency, producing 'information without an author'.

There was a brief refutation of the idea that a concept only becomes real when it can be productised or marketed. Julian Bleecker proposed that concepts themselves, as realised in paintings, films, animations or good ol' fashioned words on a page, are real because they fires our imagination and make us think about what could be – a thrilling defence of authors and artists that needs to be made even more vigorously, I think. He said that every time we apologise for presenting something that is not 'real', we are submitting to a capitalist ideology that is just plain wrong. In order to illustrate his point, Bleecker, who wrote his PhD (signed by former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, no less) about the social and cultural power of the 'special effect', told us a story. It was a true story about how Samsung's lawyers used the poster for the film 2001: A space Odyssey, which depicts an astronaut standing on the surface of the moon holding what appears to be a wireless touch screen information device, to defend a copyright lawsuit brought by Apple. The lawyers argued, with a straight face, that the idea for the product was in existence prior to Apple's patent and therefore, Samsung had not breached intellectual property law; in effect, Apple had stolen the idea from Stanley Kubrick and his collaborators in the first place! This is ironic for a number of reasons but most especially because the same corporations that prompt us to think of artistic and design endeavour as 'not real' in the first place are the first to assert just how real these things are when it suits their interests. My question therefore is, what is the alternative? How do we create a society in which art is valued as much as product? Does the change have to come from individuals asserting their own standards or does there need to be some sort of institutional change? Is such a change possible and, looked at from a broader perspective, is it necessarily preferable?

The second questioner wanted to know the panellists thoughts about how one might express the very complicated ideas under discussion to a child. He drew upon Kevin Slavin's previous comments – if chess is an analogy for war and Monopoly a crude metaphor for capitalism, Code War (a 1984 computer game in which the players duel with algorithms) is not metaphor or analogy at all; it is real, being played out on the world's stockmarkets and elsewhere – saying that, despite their sophistication, he could still teach chess and Monopoly to an eight year old, but, he could not do the same with Code War. What tools might one use to introduce a child to the ever-changing world in which we live? Slavin said that computer games are a pretty good start, drawing our attention to their sophistication by making the comparison that all he had to play with when he was a kid were six dice and 52 cards. The question, I didn't get the chance to ask is, what games? There were a lot of people keen to give their props to computer games throughout the event and, much as I can understand why, if we are honest, computer games are not nearly as good as they ought to be. In fact, computer games are a good example of an industry that has been coarsened by an industrial-marketing machine that requires a certain type of game. In the early years of home computing, games were quirky and idiosyncratic – Lucasarts adventure games, Microprose strategy games, Codemasters sports games – designed to appeal to a small number of discerning consumers. Now that computer games are big business they have been homogenised beyond all recognition, boxed off into just a few categories. World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Halo, and a few other Blockbuster titles dominate the market. 60 percent of games produced are first-person shooters of one kind or another. Where are the rich new worlds of creative possibility we are all being promised? When you think that there are more possible moves in a single game of chess than there are grains on the entire planet – there is some thrilling wonder for you! – Call of Duty, in spite of all of its aesthetic sophistication, starts to look a little bit weak, a bit tame. The graphics (which are beautifully rendered by very skilful people I'm sure) have improved exponentially, but the actual game mechanics have not advanced far beyond Space Invaders – pointing a target at a screen in order to shoot and kill things. I agree that computer games have enormous potential, maybe even more than modern day movies, but they are not there yet.

Unfortunately, it was at this point that I had to leave – I very much wanted to hear from the sound effects and music panel that was going to follow. I would also have very much liked to have asked the panel, if cynicism is the wrong response because it leads to inaction (and I would agree with that 100 percent by the way), what is the right response? What do we need to do to motivate ourselves and others to take effective action? Because surely the status quo, moulded by powerful interests beyond our control – supernational corporations, unaccountable media moguls, oligarchs and even algorithms which 'decide' what information we see and what information we don't – has to change. The Occupy protesters might be incoherent and hypocritical, but their demonstrations stem from legitimate concerns and frustrations about perceived inequalities and cronyism. Where are our jobs going to come from? Where are the opportunities for those with talent to rise to the top, based on ability as opposed to money or class? The forces of global capitalism seem to be fighting against us, and bankers, politicians and journalists at the top of society do not seem to be being held to account.

In brief, the event left me buzzing with ideas, questions left unanswered. In a world in which creators and innovators have seemingly been pushed to the margins in favour of a market friendly corporate blandness, it was great to see something that wanted to celebrate the imagination, the power of dreams and the magic of storytelling. The next part is probably my job.lunarpark.blogspot.com - Reality Fiction - Keyword description

2011-10-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

Make Believe

I don't think I have gone into a Blockbuster movie with as much good will towards the characters or the fictionanal universe being portrayed since I went to see J J Abrams' Star Trek reeboot in 2009, nostalgia stemming from a clear childhood recollection of the reruns of the 1960s TV series that used to be broadcast on BBC2 on a Friday night. My affection for Tintin, on the other hand, is derived from a more hazy childhood memory of the cartoon series that used to be broadcast on Channel Four, very early on Saturday mornings. In my, possibly inaccurate rememberences, the 1990s cartoon series about the bequiffed Belgian boy reporter and his dog called Snowy was a perfect mix of styles and tones, with just enough adventure to keep things exciting, just enough humour to keep things light, just enough mystery to draw you further into the narrative and just enough threat to keep the action exciting. It was perfectly pictched.

In my particular case, however, I probably have more of an affinity for the earlier films of Steven Spielberg. Indiana Jones and The Last Crusade was the first film I ever fell head over heels in love with, prompting my five year old self to hang off of the end of our sofa as if I were Indy, about to be thrown from the grill of a rapidly swerving truck. Films produced by Steven Spielberg, such as the Back to the Future series and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, also played an important part in forming my boyhood imagination. These films, which I still love, share the tone of playful seriousness I remember from the Tintin cartoon serial - 'we are not taking ourselves so seriously that we cannot laugh at our ourselves and our peculiar predicament, but, ultimately, the quest upon which we have embarked is important and the outcome matters, good should triumph over evil'.

So it was with hope that I noted Spielberg would helm a new Tintin project. But with some trepidation also. Isn't Tintin a bit of a retrograde step for a director who has made important films about heavyweight subject matter such as World War Two and the Holocaust? Shouldn't an artist of his stature and talent be working on films that are less to do with escapism and more to do with overcoming the inequities of a cruel and lonely universe?

Moreover, I was worried about whether or not a major Hollywood studio, or Spielberg himself, for that matter, would have sensitivity enough to faithfully recreate the old fashioned, romping, and distinctly Euopean sensibility of the orginal source material, on the silver screen. The early trailers were not particularly promising, I thought. But then I saw this and decided I would be going to watch the film on its opening day:

I need not have worried. Spielberg won over my inner cynic in moments and, I am happy to report, his first foray into animation is an undiluted pleasure. From opening titles to closing credits, I was captivated by The Adventures of Tintin: Secret of the Unicorn, a sugary, caffeinated concotion, with sweet-waffles on the side, which leaves you hungry for more.

Few directors understand how to manipulate cinematic space as well as Steven Spielberg. The film is a masterclass in action movie directing and how to tell a story with a camera. Spielberg's use of 3D is excellent, his natural tendency to make use of both foreground and background suiting the medium perfectly. Almost every shot has multiple threads running through it, whether it is a visual gag, an easter egg or an important story point.

Furthemore, the freedom enabled by the digital animation and motion capture process means Spielberg's camera has never been more mobile. Panning around foggy Parisian streets, taking in perfect Lawrence of Arabia-inspired vistas, and rushing around bustling Morrocan souqs and market stalls, showing us sights we could never experience in any other way. No one else directs action with the same sense of kinetic energy without disrupting the viewer's sense of geography or geometry. It is a joy to behold Spielberg indulging in such unashamed showmanship, streching his legs, running out of breath, tripping over himself, as he rushes headlong at the boundary of his own talent. There is more visual ingenuity in Tintin than many a jobbing director manages in their entire career.

For a long stretch in the middle of the film I was thrilled by the spectacle, gripped by the peril and laughing at the slapstick, all at the same time. Tintin is inquisitive and full of daring-do, but by no means is he a conventional hero - how many American action films will you watch this year in which the hero announces with gusto, 'I know exactly the place I can find out!' before the film cuts to a scene in a library? Haddock is a gutsy trier who keeps getting it wrong and is full of pathos - surprisingly the film never shys away from the fact that he is a drunkard. Daniel Craig clearly relishes the chance to play a baddie, replete with villainous falcon sidekick. And Pegg and Frost are great fun as the identical English nincompoops, Thompson and Thompson, who, when they are not bickering like a pair of Star Wars robots, are falling over, but still managing to come out on top.

I am curious to know what my fellow Europeans will make of the film, and more especially what any Belgians will make of the film. There is a very strong British contingent, both in the film's cast - Jamie Bell as Tintin, Andy Serkis as Captain Haddock, Daniel Craig as Saccharine, Toby Jones as Aristides Silk, and Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the Thompson Twins - and behind the scenes - the film was co-written by Steven Moffat (Dr Who), Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead) and Joe Cornish (Attack the Block). Has the character and the style of the story been overly Angelcised? It is very hard for me to judge.

The one criticism I have is that John Williams does not give us a recognisable theme to walk out whistling. But that is a minor gripe. For pure spectable and popcorn-munching entertainment - the kind that only Hollywood makes - Tintin beats all comers. Bring on the next one!lunarpark.blogspot.com - Make Believe - Keyword description

2011-10-22T09:32:00.000-07:00

Critic Proof

Holy Flying Circus is a confused and confusing programme. Parts of it are good, but other parts are embarrassingly bad. Judged as a comedy, it is not really funny enough, and, judged as a drama, it is not serious enough, skirting around issues it propounds to address. Ostensibly a film about the controversy that surrounded the release of the Monty Python film Life of Brian in the UK in 1979, detailing the Python's battles against religious groups such as Mary Whitehouse and The Festival of Light, and culminating in a television debate between John Cleese and Michael Palin on one side, and the Bishop of Southwark and Malcolm Muggeridge on the other, the programme struggles to find the right tone.

One of the best jokes is when the television producer putting the debate together imagines the Pythons, dressed as devils, facing off against a couple of Christian bishops, asking, 'What have the Christians ever done for us?', to which the reply comes, 'A moral code, sympathy for others and a way of thinking about the world that counterbalances some of the evils of capitalism'. The Pythons reply, 'Of course, a strong moral code and sympathy for others. But, apart from that, what have the Christians ever done for us?' That is a good set-up, and all Python fans know what is coming next - except, it doesn't. The sketch peters out at this point, one of the bishops pathetically suggesting, 'Hot cross buns?' It is that odd mixture of bold ideas and lukewarm execution that is probably the most frustrating thing about the film.

Moreover, the actors all portray persona rather than characters, making empathy almost impossible and robbing the film of the pathos it seems to aim for at its finale. These are not people, but comedic cyphers, so, why should I care? Michael Palin is the Nicest Man in the World and John Cleese is the Most Angry and Obstreperous Man in the World - both have their moments - Eric Idle is obsessed with money, Graham Chapman is a gay who smokes a pipe, Terry Jones is a speech impediment and Terry Gilliam is a haircut. There are moments when the film, playfully and cleverly transcends the diminished world it portrays, using cheapo, drama school ‘special effects’ – when Cleese and Palin transmogrify into Thuderbirds/Team America style puppets in order to fight, propelled through the air by actors wearing black leotards – but such moments are fleeting.

Another nice touch is when a newspaper seller chastises John Cleese for his hypocrisy, saying that Life of Brian would have never been made about the Muslim prophet Mohammed, to which the anachronistic response is, ‘This is 1979! Britain is a country with a Judeo-Christian heritage and culture and Life of Brian stands as an allegory for the stupidities of all organised religion. If say in 32 years time,’ he continues, ‘there are two million Muslims living in Britain, representing four percent of the population (‘ACTUAL STATISTICS’, the film flags up helpfully), the situation might be different, but it isn't, okay?’ Too often though, the filmmakers confuse controversy for crudity. One sketch about the 'BBC Head of Rude Words' is seemingly there as an excuse to wrench in as many swears as possible. 'This is a list of the words the sample group found most offensive,' begins an uptight grey man, speaking in a cut-glass English accent, 'C***', 'Mother******', and so on and so forth. Given the lack of censorship of these words on television today, a scene satirising the stupidity of the upper-class twits who want to censor them seems oddly redundant. The scene might have been funnier if, instead of simply reciting the usual suspects as if they were actually shocking - which they are not because, as the film is so keen to remind us, time and time again, this is 2011 and not 1979 - the actors had read out a less obvious list of ‘rude words’.

The biggest problem with the piece, in fact, is that, for all of its supposed satire, it is really quite conventional. Viewing Life of Brian today, it is hard to see what all the fuss was about, it is just a very funny film, not to mention the fact that it is widely adorned by the establishment - the BBC and BAFTA, as well as Mums and Dads up and down the country - all the sorts of people who were once so ‘offended’ by it and the last people you want on your side if you are aiming to be subversive. Indeed, Holy Flying Circus, is oddly conservative in places, the film's moment of catharsis coming when Michael Palin (the most sympathetic and rounded character in the piece) wins his mother's approval - 'I do understand why you made it son,' says the same actor playing Palin, dressed in drag. Palin, who has been having weird anxiety dreams - 'better lay off the cheese' - can rest easy in his bed once again, safe in the knowledge that everything is okay with the world because his Mummy does understand him.

The film is also too reverential of the Python's themselves. The actor portraying John Cleese explains to camera that his portrayal of Cleese as a self-important and obnoxious contrarian who squabbles with the rest of the troupe simply because he can, is not intended to denigrate Cleese in any way; he is simply playing a comedy version of Cleese’s Basil Faulty persona and he is sure the real Cleese is a very nice man indeed. Yes, I understand that, I thought, I understand perfectly well that what I am watching is drama, not documentary. This is like the Penguin guide to post-modern irony and precisely the kind of concession the Pythons never made themselves; theirs was an unapologetically intellectual brand of humour – and, if you didn’t know who John Kant, Martin Heidegger or Arthur Schopenhauer were, sometimes, you weren't going to get the joke.

However, no self-referential, post-modern comedy-drama would be complete without national treasure Stephen Fry as a smug, all-seeing, all-knowing God, who makes allusions to everything from contemporary BBC cuts to Frankie Boyle jokes about Olympic swimmer Rebecca Adlington. The levels of irony are layed on so thick the film sometimes seems to be attempting to make itself critic proof – as Fry remarks, consolingly, at the film’s conclusion, 'This will probably form the end of some heavy-handed BBC Four drama.'lunarpark.blogspot.com - Critic Proof - Keyword description

2011-10-19T07:57:00.000-07:00

More Thoughts on British Cinema

Prompted by this article on British film in The Guardian, which asserts that its 'Golden Age' is now.

What is a British film?

Is a British film one with a British theme, setting or subject matter? Is a British film one that is made by a largely British cast and crew? (In which case something like Alien would qualify). Is a British film one that passes the UK Film Council's Cultural Test, thereby qualifying it for tax rebates? Or is a British film something more nebulous, a feeling or an aesthetic more than a category? Maybe none of the above.

As for the British film industry, and its supposed renaissance, that is something else entirely. British films nowadays tend to be one offs that, generally speaking, do not make money. Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, the Ian Drury biopic starring Andy Serkis, cost about £2 million but took only around £500,000 at the British box office; and The Scouting Book for Boys (stark but good), a little gem, which cost about the same, made only around £40,000 at the British box office. Stats via the BFI website. Do these films make their money back on DVD or through television licensing? I would be interested to know. Because if the films are not making a profit, they can hardly be expected to support an industry.

Britain has a film industry in the sense that a lot of American films are made here and we have some of the best behind the camera talent in the world working here. But a British film renaissance? First we need to make films that find an audience and make money. I don't know what the magic formula is - Film Four couldn't make it work - but if the profits are not coming back to Britain to be re-invested in British film then we can hardly claim to have an industry.

To that end, some of the examples given in the article are questionable. Harry Potter is about as British as James Bond (Irony! Both being owned by American studios), The King's Speech was a UK/Australian/French co-production with a token amount of money coming from the UK Film Council. And Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy was a British story financed by a French distributor in the form of Studio Canal.

Where are the British distributors (like Studio Canal) which profit from and support national and regional productions? In the past there was Ealing, Hammer and The Carry On films, which were an industry unto themselves. What are their modern day equivalents? I would be interested to know.

This post is part of the British Picture series, in which I am trying to figure out what constitutes a British film.

2011-10-18T07:36:00.001-07:00

The Quiet One

Martin Scorsese's documentary about the life of George Harrison is a three and a half hour marathon, but the film making is so exquisite and feelings of goodwill and love for Harrison expressed by the contributors so profound, it never feels any more taxing than a leisurely evening stroll. Watching most of a film is an unsatisfying experience at the best of times, but there is something really grating about watching most of a very good film. Unfortunately, in this case, time was against me.

This is a sumptuous film though. I watched it with a smile on my face almost throughout. But it is clearly made to appeal to people of a certain age, who enjoy sitting down in their favourite armchair with a nice chocky bicky and reminiscing about how 'wild' they used to be. One sequence in which an old friend remembers the first time George and John gave her and her husband lysergic acid and they watched the sunrise - 'Sitting in an Engligh garden waiting for the sun,' she says - is almost satirical in its Middle Class pretentiousness, the woman describing the trip as if it were a nice country picnic.

Living in the Material World is an idealised and sentimentalised version of the George Harrison story. All of the talking heads are captured by Oscar winning cinematographer Robert Richardson's loving camera, older faces bathed in the warm, forgiving light of magic hour - even the faintly alarming Phil Spector looks presentable, a clear testament to Richardson's talents as a cinematographer.

Certainly, Harrison had no shortage of celebrity friends and admirers, many of which appear in the film - Paul McCartney (who comes across particularly well) and Ringo Starr are both prevelent, as are Harrison's window, Olivia Harrison, his son, Dhani, and his ex-wife, Pattie Boyd. Eric Clapton is good humoured but reflective, Tom Petty, Yoko Ono, Eric Idle, Ravi Shankar, a giggling Terry Gilliam and a surprisingly insightful Phil Spector also feature. Indeed, Harrison had so many celebrity friends, some are notably by their absense, Bob Dylan and Jeff Lynne, in particular.

Some of the best moments, however, come from the non-celebs. His two older brother's recollections about their childhood growing up together in a two-up, two-down in Liverpool and their opinions of one of the band's first performances at a family wedding (prior to Hamburg) - John Lennon poured a pint over one of George's older female relatives when she started playing pub songs on the old Joanna between sets - have a down-at-heel authenticity that the rest of the film does not and could not have. Harrison prided himself on being a down to earth kind of guy, so it seems - one of his favourite pass times was gardening - and Ringo, Clapo and Macca are no preening, self-important starlets, that's for sure, but, now I think on't, I could have done with more from the brothers and their ilk. We hear Harrison's wonderfully deadpan letter's home during the crazy days of the Beatles - 'We were late leaving, so when we got around to the other side of the building the cars were completely smashed in, the roofs pressed against the seats. 20 girls had to go to hospital. Eventually we made our getaway in an ambulance' - but what did his family think of his success? How did their relationships change when Harrison became part of the biggest rock n' roll group of all time?

Thankfully, not everything makes for comfortable Sunday evening viewing. The film of his life closely tracks the trajectory of his career - the fun, frenzy, chaos, creativity, frustration and finally disappointment of the Beatles, followed by one great solo album and a so-so output after that, with a lot of Indian mysticism in between. The rawkus days and nights in Hamburg at the Reeperbahn, playing massively energetic rock n' roll, hanging out with Astrid and Klaus and having his 17 year old eyes opened to a wider world outside Liverpool. There is also some fantastic early concert footage with decent audio - I had always assumed these performances had been lost to the sound of thousands of screaming teenage girls - and the band sound great! Tight, punchy, brilliant singing. This part of the film, about the mad merry-go-round on tour is a real treat, capturing both the excitment and the trauma of being idolised in such an extreme degree.

Things slow down and get much quieter as we are taken into the studio. Sir George Martin does his usual respectable, classically trained bit about how Decca was a comedy lable and even he didn't think much of what The Beatles were doing when he first heard them. But, he tells us, he warmed to Harrison right away because when he invited them into the recording booth to listen back to what they had been doing so that they could tell him if there was anything they didn't like, he was the first to quip, 'I don't like your tie for a start'.

Most of the major incidents in Harrison's life are discussed as they might be between old friends, skipping over narrative details and getting right to the meat. This is fine for an audience that is already familiar with the story, which, for the most part, I suppose they will be, but it may leave some other people confused. Those who did not know that Eric Clapton broke up Harrison's first marriage by wooing Harrison's then wife may find that particular thread hard to follow. Plus Harrison's drug habits and infidelities are only hinted at. His second wife, Olivia, tells us that it was sometimes difficult living with a man who found it so very easy to bring women under his spell and we are left to fill in the blanks. In other words, short shrift is given to the personality flaws (we all have them), which might have painted a truer portrait of the man, had Scorsese's intention been different.

There are hints that Harrison had a strong sense of humour (Eric Idle describes his decision to fund Monty Python's Life of Brian because 'he wanted to see it' as 'the most expensive cinema ticket in history') and joyous (as opposed to Lennon's caustic) wit, there are hints of the betrayal he must have felt when one of his best friends (Eric Clapton) stole his wife, and there are hints about the hole he was trying to fill with religion. Small cracks are allowed to emerge, and those are golden, but, ultimately, the mask remains unbroken. When I went into the film, I knew that George Harrison was the quiet one who got religion and Indian spirituality and stayed mates with the other three. This film did little to undermine or subvert those pre-conceived ideas.

What makes the film worth watching, however, are those little moments, the glimpses behind the mask. 1) Macca wins a thousand credibility points for his reminisences of the boy he went to school with who had a fantastic haircut - longish hair fashioned into a spectualar quiff - which one of his friends described as looking like a "fookin' turban". Harrison's hair was immaculate. 2) Phil Spector's shrewd commercial sensibility picking My Sweet Lord as the first single off of All Thing's Must Pass - Harrison was worried that it was too overtly religious, he wasn't sure he wanted to make that kind of a statement - Spector reassured him, 'It doen't matter. That is a hit record'. 3) Eric Clapton's laughter in response to the recital of an incident when George left the band during the recording of the White Album and Lennon said, 'Why don't we get in Eric?' 4) And Harrison's dawning realisation that he wanted to write songs as well as play them, 'I figured, if John and Paul can do it then anyone can.'

I don't think I am being unfair when I say that George Harrison is not as interesting a character as Bob Dylan (the subject of another epic Scorsese documentary, No Direction Home), or even John Lennon or Paul McCartney. Still, I can hardly recommend this film highly enough. I was entranced. An affectionate portrait of an artist finding his own way, asserting his force of personality in the midst of the massive pressure cooker that was The Beatles. As McCartney correctly states, whenever he hears people talk about the Beatles without George or without Ringo, he always puts them right - 'The Beatles was a square, not a triangle or any other shape. Remove one of those corners - John, George, Ringo or me - and the whole thing falls apart.'

Check out your local art house cinema to see if it is playing near you and if not, look out for it on BBC Four or BBC Two some time in November. I will certainly be watching it again, and not just to catch the end.lunarpark.blogspot.com - The Quiet One - Keyword description

2011-10-12T11:30:00.001-07:00

What's in a Name?

Movie titles are important as they are generally among the first things an audience knows about a film that gives some kind of clue about what to expect at the cinema. What a film is called can have a profound impact on audience expectations and when those expectations are not met it frequently leads to disappointment, as we are witnessing at the moment with the particularly daft case of the woman in America who has brought a lawsuit against the makers of the new Ryan Gosling movie, Drive, because it does not contain enough driving.

The meaning of a movie's title is also quite often lost in translation. The first James Bond movie Dr No was reportedly released in China under the slightly confusing moniker of We Don't Need a Doctor, John Travolta's high school musical Grease was released in Argentina under the title Vaseline and in Germany the Zucker Brother's farce Airplane! was sold to audiences as The Unbelievable Trip on a Wacky Airplane, which is surely conclusive proof that the Germans do have a sense of humour after all!

So, having established that titles are important and that a different title can radically alter people's expectations, we come to the case of Martin Scorsese's latest, family film The Invention of Hugo Cabaret, or should that be Hugo Cabaret, or maybe just plain Hugo.

When I heard that Martin Scorsese was making a kids film I was intrigued. Watching someone with that kind of creativity, artistry and vision turn their talents to something new is always interesting. Even though he has been simmering somewhere below his experimental boiling point for some time now, who knows, maybe a nice new model railway is exactly what little Marty needs to get his imagination firing on all cylinders once again.

The film's premise, again, sounds promising. Based on a novel about an orphan boy living in the walls of Gare du Nord station in 1930s Paris, the boy meets one time filmmaker and magician George Melies, the director of such silent film classics as A Trip to the Moon and Conquest of the Pole, who is in possession of a wind-up boy. Scorsese is a well known cineaste and the perfect man to expound the pleasures and delights of the films of one of the early pioneers of fantasy film making. Add to that what sounds like the most surreal set-up he has had to work with since After Hours, which is a very good thing indeed, and this is staring to sound pretty exciting. What fun might Scorsese have playing in the same sandbox as Caro and Jeunet – Delicatessen crossed with Taxi Driver, but for kids (is that possible? You get the idea), who wouldn't want that?

However, when the trailer was released, what we got was not The Invention of Hugo Cabaret, it was not even the less quirky but still slightly strange Hugo Cabaret, no, somewhere in the midst of the production and marketing maelstrom the film had undergone a personality transplant. The Invention of Hugo Cabaret, an offbeat, febrile fantasy, had metamorphosed into a heart-warming comedy-adventure for children of all ages called Hugo, in 3D.

Hugo, unlike The Invention of Hugo Cabaret, is a title that does not inspire or imply anything, it is asinine, dull, timid, and nondescript. It is a blank slate onto which an audience can ascribe whatever attributes they desire. Or none at all. Hugo is hiding a personality very well or hasn't even got one, whereas Hugo Cabaret is clearly an oddball. That is why the name was changed, I am quite sure, and that betrays a dogmatic, slavishly establishment view of what audiences want (nothing with any sort of character!), which I find very disappointing.

The trailer itself is little better. Beautiful crane shots and Steadicam work guide us through a majestic 1930s train station that will look lovely in 3D, but the main action seems to consist of Sacha Baron Cohen falling over, avec the usual trailer cliché of 'inspiring' verbs and adjectives. The same barf-inducing quality is shared with the film's poster, which depicts a large key, sprinkled with fairy dust, inviting audiences to 'open a doorway onto a world' or 'step inside a magical kingdom', or whatever. Because, ultimately, the campaign tells us, Hugo is a window onto whatever wonderful world/forgotten childhood you want it to be.

We will find out what the film is like in December.lunarpark.blogspot.com - What's in a Name? - Keyword description

2011-10-11T11:59:00.000-07:00

Trailer Trash

Maybe it is my age, my political leanings or the fact that I have seen too many films and have an internal cliché siren, or, maybe, just maybe, Hollywood movies really are getting worse. Regardless of the reason, the sad fact of the matter is, I find it almost impossible to suspend disbelief in Hollywood superhero movies any more. The special effects, the costumes, the big name actors, all of these things, even the presence of a writer/director with massive geek credentials, are simply window dressing for the corrupt practice of taking children's cartoons and comic book stories and injecting them with growth hormones, causing them to mutate into hyperthyroid franchise pictures.

Hollywood studios do not make movies any more, they manage intellectual properties. There was a time when they did make movies. However, they gave up that difficult but noble endeavor, which can result in failure as well as success, a long time ago, having affixed themselves to a model that guarantees their films make money. Throw enough money, enough stars and enough special effects at the screen and no matter what else the movie is, no matter how obvious, how stupid or how boring, people will still buy tickets and even cue around the block to have their intelligences insulted, time and time and time again. Maybe I was naïve to think that there was ever anything more to it, but the fact that Hollywood studios are content to serve up the same conformist, market-tested drivel time after time because that is what makes money, seems so transparent now, it cannot help but diminish the magic just a little bit. All too often the movie is merely the centrepiece for a globe-spanning, multi-media, multi-platform advertising event, with franchise and merchandising tie-ins for everything from hamburgers to clothing lines, lunch boxes, action figures, soundtrack albums, credit cards, boats, planes, trains and small Latin American countries.

The Avengers, which brings together characters from four of Marvel Studios (now owned by The Walt Disney Company) most successful franchises – Iron Man, Captain America, The Hulk and Thor – for what promises to be the biggest superhero movie to date, is already generating the kind of fervour among the online geek community, which I occasionally frequent, more normally associated with a religious cult.

I cannot, will not and am not judging the film on the strength of the trailer alone, it is just that right now what I associate with this particular property has everything to do with strategic co-ordination of triangulated cross-media promotional strategies and nothing to do with the movie itself. From the scant footage shown, it is clear that Joss Whedon is a better writer than he is a director; Robert Downey Jnr is given all of the best lines (and delivers them with sarcastic aplomb), as one might expect; Chris Evan's pure hearted Cap is almost certainly the real hero of the piece and, my guess is, will finish the film by making some kind of honourable self-sacrifice to save the world. The dialogue is nicely spiky and irreverent, but the sets and the costumes are too clean and the shot compositions pure television. Now, we will have to wait and see. Can The Avengers restore my faith in Hollywood superhero films?lunarpark.blogspot.com - Trailer Trash - Keyword description

2011-10-09T08:57:00.000-07:00

A Long Shot

Released in 1973, The Day of the Jackal, is an Anglo-French co-production starring Edward Fox as an unnamed killer who attempts to assassinate former French President Charles de Gaulle. The film tapped into a rich seam of political discontentment and public mistrust of government institutions at the time, as depicted in films like The Conversation (1973), All the President's Men (1976) and Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978). Unlike those films however, The Day of the Jackal is a traditional thriller wherein order is threatened but ultimately justice is seen to be done. Not to say that there are not a lot of entertaining ambiguities along the way

The film begins thusly: "August 1962 was a stormy time for France", intones a dispassionate commentator in perfect 'BBC English'. "Many people felt that President Charles de Gaulle had betrayed the country by giving independence to Algeria. Extremists, mostly from the Army, swore to kill him in revenge. They banded together in an underground movement, and called themselves the OAS." What follows is a faithful recreation of an attempted assassination attempt planned by Col. Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry. This is the historical basis for what follows, which is pure fiction.

The Jackal himself is an implacable but dapper professional who wanders around the great cities of Europe - Rome, Paris, London, Vienna - wearing a cravat and blending into the background regardless of the scenery. Whether he is negotiating in seedy back alleys in Genoa, buying supplies at a bustling marketplace in Rome, or seducing a wealthy heiress in a high-priced hotel just outside of Paris, he is in total control. Meticulous planning and professionalism are his defining characteristics, nothing is left to chance. But like any respectable Englishman, if there is one thing the Jackal cannot abide it is bad manners. Rudeness, lack of grace, or the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol (as William Gibson might say) are sufficient grounds for a stern look from most English gentleman. The Jackal, a trained killer, just takes that same principle a few steps further.

The meticulous planning in the first third of the film is interesting but it is when the brilliant detective deputy commissioner Claude Lebel (played by Michel Lonsdale - one of the few Frenchman in the film) is hired by the French Minister of the Interior to track and catch the killer that the film kicks into high gear. The cat and mouse game between the Jackal and Lebel is an exquisite piece of narrative clockwork, the Jackal like a predator stalking his prey as Lebel narrows his search in ever decreasing circles.

For a film featuring spies, spying, assassination plots, terrorists, torture, several murders and a revenue of police, intelligence agents and border guards, probably the most violent scene in the the film is the one that features an exploding watermelon. Anyone who has seen the Zapruda film will undoubtedly be reminded of the devastating impact of the bullet that killed 35th President of the United States John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. And even though we know that French President Charles de Gaulle survived all of the numerous attempts on his life, the film certainly makes you wonder - just maybe the Jackal, as written by Frederick Forsyth, could have got away with it.

The post is part of the 'British Picture' series.lunarpark.blogspot.com - A Long Shot - Keyword description

2011-10-06T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Remarkable Life and Career of Steve Jobs

This morning I woke to the news that Steve Jobs had died. Such an important figure in the history of computing and entertainment, his story is rich in twists and turns, ups and downs, business success and human drama. Jobs was indeed a pioneer worthy of the attention he is now receiving.

The pioneer years

Steve Jobs was one of the truly great business leaders of this or any other era. Co-founding Apple Computer Inc. in 1976 with engineering buddy Steve Wozniak, 'the two Steve's' were central figures in the home computer revolution (truly a revolution) that started in the 1980s and accelerated throughout the 1990s. The Apple II, designed, developed and largely programmed by Wozniak (there is something very romantic in my mind about the idea of one man in a garage literally building a new computer from scratch) was the first to introduce the WIMP (windows, icon menu, pointing device) style of GUI (graphical user interface) to the mass consumer market. In 1999, British writer and director Martyn Burke made a terrific American made-for-TV movie about the one time rivalry between Bill Gates of Microsoft and Steve Jobs of Apple, as both companies fought to capitalise on the technology developed at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Centre). My thoughts on Pirates of Silicon Valley can be found here.

After the launch of the Apple II there was the Lisa and, in 1984, the iconic Macintosh, which promised to show why '1984 will not be like 1984'. In an audacious gamble, Jobs hired Ridley Scott to direct what was then the most expensive television advert ever made and then, undeterred by the conservative Apple board which refused to finance screening the ad, Jobs proceeded to front half the cash (the other half came from his friend and partner Steve Wozniak) to buy a $400,000 half time slot at the 1984 Super Bowl. The advert went on to the garner countless awards and set the groundwork for Apple's Creative Outsider brand image.

An unexpected detour

Then the Steve Jobs story took an odd turn. First, Wozniak quit Apple because he disapproved of how Jobs was managing the company, encouraging rivalries to develop between teams of engineers working on different products. Then, John Sculley, whom Jobs had hired from Pepsi just two years earlier (Jobs famously asked Sculley, 'do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or come with me and change the world?') had Jobs fired from the company he had himself co-founded just nine years earlier. Jobs had just turned 30.

F. Scott Fitzgerald said, 'There are no second acts in American lives'. Far from becoming despondent however, in 1985, Jobs, ever the optimist, established NeXT Computer, which, although it was never very successful from a commercial perspective, is widely regarded as having layed the groundwork for a wide range of subsequent innovations in the home computer market. Also, Tim Berners-Lee was working on a NeXT computer at CERN when he designed and developed the first programs for what would become the World Wide Web.

Arguably the best investment of Steve Job's illustrious career was the $10 million he paid for the Graphics Group (George Lucas needed the money to finance his divorce), which was the computer animation division of Lucasfilm that had worked on various early CGI effects shots in collaboration with Industrial Light & Magic – the Genesis effect in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan and the stained glass knight effect in Young Sherlock Holmes. Later renamed Pixar, in 1995, the studio made the first ever fully CGI animation film, a visionary act that requiring the sort of daring it is hard to imagine in a post-Toy Story world. Much like Snow White before it, the first ever fully hand drawn animation motion picture, which Walt Diseny produced in spite dire warnings from all concerned, Toy Story was a masterpiece and Steve Jobs faith in John Lasseter and his fantastic creative team venerated. Jobs always had impeccable taste.

Today Pixar is arguably the most successful movie studio in the world, with no 'flops' and a long string of unqualified hits – Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life, The Incredibles, Wall-E and Up, to name just a few. In 2006, Disney bought Pixar, making Jobs the largest single individual shareholder in the The Walt Disney Company, with more stock than even Roy Disney.

The success years

In between times, without its visionary founder and principal creative driving force, Apple struggled throughout the 1990s and in 1997, when Jobs returned to his spiritual home, was actually on the verge of bankruptcy.

With Jobs back on board, the company was transformed. Job empowered creative individuals such as the brilliant British designer Jonathan Ives to create attractive and appealing consumer products, starting with the iMac in 1997. The first all-in-one PC, the computer hardware was all housed inside a monitor which was itself designed with a colourful translucent shell first issued in Bondi blue. The iMac was the first in a long line of market defining, sometimes re-defining products, launched during Jobs' second era with the company.

In 2001, Apple created the MP3 as we know it today. With around 200 times more storage than its nearest competitor at the time and the iTunes library at its centre, the iPod was not the first instance of Apple releasing a product that was well ahead of the competition. But it was Jobs ability to package and explain what was then quite a complicated concept, without condescending, that made the difference. What followed in 2007, however, was nothing short of another revolution.

The show (because that is what it was) began with a landmark announcement in Apple's corporate history, one that it is all too easy to gloss over, but one which, in retrospect, was truly a declarative statement of intentions. Apple Computer Inc. was to change its name to the more pithy and statuesque moniker of Apple Inc. This was a brand coming of age, but only a teaser for the main event.

The Apple keynote delivered by Steve Jobs in 2007 was a masterclass in presentation and the power of misdirection in storytelling, Jobs establishing and subverting expectations time and time again, leading his audience on a merry dance. Product launches are never that much fun, but it was part of Steve Job's genius (a word I do not use lightly). At first, he declared that Apple would be launching three revolutionary new products – an MP3 player, a phone and a computer. Then he said it again: an MP3 player, a phone and a computer – it sounds silly but the audience actually gasped as they watched all three merge into a single black rectangle. 'We call it iPhone'. Welcome to the world of the modern smartphone. And in 2010, Apple and Jobs did it again with the iPad, his unerring gift for giving people products that they can be passionate about, and presenting those products in such as way that they become must have items. Few technology events can have ever garnered as much mainstream media attention as the Apple iPad launch.

Denouement

Apple and Steve Jobs were selling a dream, of course, but such was Jobs' personal charisma, his wit and his charm, his belief was infectious; people wanted to share in it. With Steve Jobs at the helm, there is little wonder why Apple came to engender such cult-like devotion from its fans. Jobs was unlike any other big business leader or corporate CEO, wearing trademark black polo-neck and jeans, he was Steve; a master communicator and compelling storyteller. Despite all of the success and the accoutrements of wealth and power, there was something very human about Steve Jobs - and I don't think it was too big a secret why that positive energy comes across so clearly even in what might have otherwise been quite dull corporate presentations. Steve Jobs made his living doing what he loved, he believed in the products developed by his companies and he was genuinely enthusiastic and positive about the creative possibilities and avenues for individual expression and art enabled by computer technology. He had a dream and he fought to live that dream. One of a kind. Possessed of a special kind of magic. Edison. Ford. Jobs. RIP Steve.lunarpark.blogspot.com - The Remarkable Life and Career of Steve Jobs - Keyword description

2011-10-03T07:52:00.000-07:00

Payback

The Debt is a split-narrative movie. In the first, set in 1965 East Berlin, three Mossad agents - Rachel, David and Stefan - are sent behind the Iron Curtain in order to capture a Nazi war criminal so that he can face trial in Israel. In the second, set in 1997 Tel Aviv, Rachel is the subject of a book written by her daughter all about her heroic exploits 30 years before; David is a psychologically troubled loner; and Stefan is a high-ranking official in the Israeli government. To say much more would be to do the film a disservice. This is a thriller after all and the twists and turns of the plot, of which I knew nothing before I entered the theater, are worth preserving.

For my money, this is everything that Tomas Alfredson's Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy promised to be but wasn't. An espionage thriller with a period Cold War setting; the stakes are high and the emotional conflicts instantly relatable. The three comparative naifs that we are introduced to in 1960s Berlin are convincing spies - physically strong, bright, assured and effortlessly confident speaking both German and English - but all three also have believable motivations for being involved in the murky world of espionage in the first place. As guardians of the Israeli state, their goal is to bring a known criminal to justice, though, of course, this being a Cold War spy thriller, things quickly get much more complicated.

I am reluctant to say more lest I divulge anything that might spoil the film. Just to say, the script is wittily written, John Madden, of Shakespeare in Love fame, is a very competent director (here I mean that as the highest possible compliment - telling the story expertly while not drawing any undue attention to his role behind the camera), and among a cast who deliver uniformly excellent performances, Jessica Chastain is the standout - brave, alluring, vulnerable, sensitive, sad and cast in steel.

If it is playing in a cinema near you, seek this out ahead ahead of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. A small film that packs an unexpected punch.

2011-10-02T03:56:00.000-07:00

I am the Passenger

Declaration of interests: I do not drive, I frequently use public transport and I especially like trains.

Drive launches off the starting grid like a Formula One racing car... No... Drive puts its foot on the accelerator and doesn't let up... No, not that either...

Starting my review of a film called Drive with a half-baked car metaphor would be cheap and obvious, and I am not going to be tempted into it... Ironic commentary about whether or not I should start my review like that, on the other hand, is self-reverential and cool...

Levity aside, the first ten minutes of Drive are brilliant. A man known only as Driver looks out at a neon-lit cityscape while, in voice over, he sets out his terms and conditions. He speaks in a calm, authoritative but surprisingly high pitched monotone: "If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place, I give you a five minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes and I am yours no matter what. One minute either side of that and I'm gone. I don't sit in while you're running it down; I don't carry a gun... I drive. You won't be able to contact me on this number again." Then, the man, until now only identifiable by the golden scorpion sewed into the back of his white leather jacket, steps away from the window, throws a mobile phone down onto the motel bed, picks up a heavy sports bag and leaves.

Had the film fulfilled on the deadpan promise of that opening and the getaway that follows I would now be raving about a new classic. Unfortunately, it does not. What starts out as pulp noir, morphs into romantic fairy tale, gritty crime pic and, finally, ultra-violent avenging angel fantasy - and all sense of verisimiltude gos out the window.

What the film lacks is any sense of character. One look at the similarly stylish, John Huston crime film, The Big Sleep, and the difference is obvious. Humphrey Bogart and Laren Bacall did not play well-rounded characters one might recognise from everyday life; far from it, they were larger than life and rejoiced in their pulpy origins. Character does not have to mean Ken Loach or Mike Leigh; Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane are good enough. Drive, however, seems confused by that distinction. There are too many boring scenes. I suppose that when Driver carries his love interest's groceries into her apartment, bests her six year old son at a staring contest and then lingers to enjoy a glass of water, there is supposed to be some sort of frison or undercurrent. But the scene is entirely domestic and doesn't have the zing or sparkle to elevate it above soap opera. Take this exchange:

Driver to Irene, 'Thanks for the glass of water'.
Irene to her son, 'Say bye'.
Son to Driver, 'Bye'.
Driver leaves.

Now compare that to this exchange in The Big Sleep:

Vivian, 'So you do get up, I was beginning to think you worked in bed like Marcel Proust.'
Marlowe, 'Who's he?'
Vivian, 'You wouldn't know him, a French writer.'
Marlowe, 'Come into my boudoir'.

Now I know that Driver is not supposed to be a wise-cracking private dick but the point still stands. Also, I know it may only be an aesthetic difference, but I don't really like the vogue for middle aged gansters who wear bad tracksuits; I much prefer the well-tailored low-lives we used to get in films like The Godfather, which at least maintained the pretence that there was more going on in their lives than merely violence. But therein lies the film's biggest probelm; everything from the plot (part The Driver, part Taxi Driver) to the look and style of the gangsters (The Sopranos) to the look and style of the violence (Gasper Noe) seems to be taken from somewhere else. What results is a film that is so derivative, so self-concious, so pleased with its own sense of self-awareness, it is perilously close to disappearing up its own exhaust pipe.lunarpark.blogspot.com - I am the Passenger - Keyword description

2011-09-26T13:41:00.000-07:00

The Spy Who Came in From the Heat

Adapted by Graham Greene from his own source novel, Our Man in Havana is a Cold War comedy with a 'fall of Empire' subtext. Directed by Carol Reed, who famously collaborated with Orson Welles on The Third Man (1949) and later won Best Picture and Best Director awards for Oliver! (1968), it could have only come out of Great Britain.

Cuba. 1959. Months before the revolution.

Alec Guinness is an effeminate vacuum cleaner salesman who dotes on his attractive young daughter and wants nothing more than to earn enough money to send her to an expensive finishing school in Switzerland. So, when an English gentleman, carrying an umbrella, propositions him in a bar room lavatory, he agrees to co-operate with whatever clandestine activities the mysterious stranger has planned.

I know what you must be thinking, and it isn't that. Well, not quite. The English gentleman is a British Secret Service agent who wants Alec Guinness to be his Man in Havana, providing social and economic intelligence for Queen and country. That other thing is certainly simmering just below the surface though, which, for a film made and released in 1959 is risqué to say the least.

The film is a comedy of the absurd, ridiculing British superiority and British manners. How many American films can you name in which officials are unable to distinguish between the East and West Indies and are complicit in intelligence fraud so as to avoid egg on face?

No. American spies are invariably roguish, ultra-bright MIT, Harvard and Stanford graduates fighting against the inequities of foreign despotic regimes, and, occasionally, their American equivalent; close kin of David Duchovny's Fox Mulder in the X-Files. That is unless they are appearing in an Oliver Stone film. But even his films were post-Vietnam, post-Watergate. For a film made in the 1950s to poke fun at its national institutions in such an uncompromising manner was truly radical, and, I would argue, uniquely British.

The post is part of the 'British Picture' series, an explication that genuine British cinema is one with a radical and pioneering spirit. A far cry from the bonnets and floppy haircuts with which British cinema is all too readily associated.

2011-09-25T10:32:00.001-07:00

The Revenger's Tragedy

Alex Cox's 2007 'microfeature' Searcher's 2.0 is currently available to watch on the BBC iPlayer and I personally recommend that everyone who has the chance take the opportunity to watch it before it disappears on 1st October.

Alex Cox is a unique voice in British cinema. An eccentric writer/director who makes most of his movies in the United States and is one of a very rare breed of genuinely independent filmmakers who has zero involvement with the big six Hollywood studios (more on which, later). Excepting his UCLA Film School project Edge City/Sleep is for Sissies, Cox's first feature film was cult favourite Repo Man (1984), starring Emilio Estevez as a 'punk' kid inducted into a seedy underworld populated by hoods, gangsters, spooks, aliens, conspiracy nuts and a mad nuclear scientist driving around LA with a neutron bomb in the trunk of his car. It was the critical and commercial success of his next film, however, Sid & Nancy (1986), about the drug-addled relationship between Sex Pistols 'bassist' Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, which brought Cox to the attention of the Hollywood producers he would later alienate.

The suits even offered Cox the chance to work on one of their big budget star vehicles, a film about three hapless actors mistaken for the heroic gunslingers they portray on screen who are then tasked with protecting a Mexican farming village from a gang of vicious banditos. Cox asked if he could rewrite the script. The studio refused. The Three Amigos (1986) (heard of it?), directed by John Landis, starring Steve Martin, Chevy Chase and Martin Short, went on to be one of the highest grossing films of the year. In its stead, Cox made Straight to Hell (1987), a spoof Spaghetti Western starring Joe Strummer, Shane McGowan and Courtney Love, which tanked.

What happened next was probably the decisive moment in Alex Cox's career. With six million dollars in financing from Universal Studios, Cox set about making a film about 19th century American filibuster William Walker, a man who invaded Mexico and declared himself President of Nicaragua shortly thereafter. Cox gained the support of the Nicaraguan government and the Catholic Church for his film which drew direct political parallels with contemporary American interventions in Latin America, specifically CIA funding of the Contras and other anti-Sandinista rebels. The notoriously conservative film establishment reacted badly, Cox alienating just about every Hollywood money man in the process.

So, that is the background.

Searchers 2.0 itself is a comedy drama about two out of work B-movie actors who travel across America to Monument Valley in order to enact revenge on a sadistic screenwriter. The film contains numerous allusions to 1956 John Ford classic The Searchers, about a racist Confederate war veteran called Ethan Edwards (John Wayne in one of his best and most daring roles) and his search for his young niece and the Comanche tribe which abducted her four years earlier. The 2.0 part is a reference to the fact that the film was exclusively shot on digital video, to which end, Searcher's 2.0 is an effortlessly contemporary film, littered with references to George W. Bush, unemployment, Naomi Klein, popular culture, paranoia, drugs and automobile mileage.

Not nearly as explosive as some of Cox's earlier efforts, Searcher's 2.0 is a melancholy film about two older men who find a sense of purpose in their morally dubious quest for revenge. Not to say that the film is pretentious or preachy. There is violence, swearing, surreal dream sequences and dry humour, everything is shot through with Cox's Spaghetti Western/punk sensibility and the occasional pomposity of the characters is consistently undermined – Cox has a definite knack with oft-kilter framing and memorable lines.

Be warned, the film is not a 'Film Film', to coin a very clumsy phrase. You would do well not to expect any big plot twists or sympathetic characters. The 'handles' Hollywood movies typically rely on in order to engage an audience are notably absent and, while trusting people to engage their brains might seem risky, it is also much more rewarding in the long run. The film is very cine-literate, it makes constant references to other movies and consistently breaks the 'fourth wall' with characters talking direct to camera; there are long explications about the best screen actors of all time, what constitutes a great film western and the role that revenge dramas play in a civilised society. The film's dialogue is wonderfully deadpan, closely mirroring how people actually speak, as opposed to how they speak in movies, whether they are reminiscing about old times, ordering food or pontificating on the meaning of life, the universe and everything.

A rare treat.

This post is part of the 'British Picture' series.lunarpark.blogspot.com - The Revenger's Tragedy - Keyword description

2011-09-20T13:26:00.000-07:00

A British Picture

According to bequiffed British film critic Mark Kermode, "Ken Russell's mum used to have this phrase; 'Is it a British picture?' And what she meant by that was, 'Is it full of people doing the washing up, in black-and-white, in Ealing'"

British cinema was frequently caricatured as a damp, drab, kitchen-sink counterpoint to more exciting and glamourous Hollywood fare. But while Mrs Russell was simply reflecting the dominant view of the time in which she was living - the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s - nobody today has the same excuse.

The question, 'what is British cinema?' is harder to answer than one might think. Is a British film one that passes the UK Film Council 'Cultural Test'? Is it a film that is made in Britain by a British cast and crew using British money? Or is it something else entirely? One thing I know for sure is that the kind of films which tend to be trumpetted as examplars of British cinema - either period/costume dramas, films about the royal family or films starring Hugh Grant - present a nostalgic, soppy, sentimental view that I, as a Brit and as a film fan, find faintly embarrassing.

If we are going to compete in a competitive cultural landscape, we have got to put our best foot forward, and I would argue that the best of way of doing that is to champion the work of the many maverick direcors who have given British cinema a unique voice, not found anywhere. The likes of Powell & and Pressburger, David Lean, Alfred Hitchcock (before he moved to Hollywod), Lindsay Anderson, Nicholas Roeg, Mike Hodges, Stanley Kubrick (I'm claiming him), Terry Gilliam (yes, him too), Alex Cox, Danny Boyle, Michael Winterbottom and Shane Meadows. Ken Russell himself, of course, made the kinds of films that aim a cannonball at the rigging of the British cinema establishment, splintering it into a million little pieces . Tommy, The Devils and The Music Lovers, among many others, are all filled with sex, violence and Catholic imagery.

While British cinema rarely has the polished sheen of its trans-Atlantic cousin, like that sweater your grandmother knitts for you every Christmas, you almost like it all the more for its baggy, ill-fitting, hand-made charm. It is precisely that sometimes ramshackle quality that I want to celebrate, by bringing to people's attention films that are perhaps less widely known, in the hope that I might reinvigorate and reclaim the phrase, 'A British Picture'.lunarpark.blogspot.com - A British Picture - Keyword description

2011-09-16T16:08:00.000-07:00

Spy Games

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is a fabulously well made film. You cannot fault it for technical proficiency or period detail. It has a stellar cast: Gary Oldman, John Hurt, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Benedict Cumberbatch, Toby Jones - French distributor Studio Canal has clearly spent top dollar on the sets, the cars and the clothes, and Swedish director Tomas Alfredson is still riding high on the wave of critical adoration that made his previous film, Let the Right One In, a crossover hit in 2008.

Maybe I didn't do the film any favours by literally reading the book this week.

Maybe it is unfair to compare the film with the television series, which is widely acknowledged as a classic of the format.

But...

and it is with a heavy heart that I say this, I was disappointed.

Probably I built it up too much in my head - the laudatory quotes and five star reviews on the poster certainly didn't help - but that is how I felt.

Trying to be fair, maybe I need to see it again. I was disappointed by the film version of V for Vendetta the first time I saw it, but now consider it to be an interesting and entertaining piece of work in it's own right.

So, where to begin?

The cast, which looks so good on paper, like a football team struggling for form, never quite 'gels'. While Gary Oldman is invisible inside the role of George Smiley (made famous by Alec Guinness ) - not for a moment do you think you are watching the same man who played Dracula, Sid Vicious or Drexl Spivey - some of the British 'made for TV' actors are harder to take seriously. Kathy Burke as love-starved spy madame, Connie Sachs is particularly incongruous, but Sherlock Holmes, Caesar, King George the Sixth and Trigger fair little better. Benedict Cumberbatch, who was terrific as Sherlock Holmes in Mark Gattis and Steven Moffat's modern day updating, doesn't seem to have the stomach to play Peter Guillam, the man who heads the Scalphunters. He fails to exhibit the sort of steel one might expect from the man tasked with marshaling the troops amongst the meanest of all the MI6 divisions, the others of which are no shrinking violets, of course. Whereas the actors in the TV series were all clearly grown-ups, with the exception of Oldman and Hurt, the actors in this film come across like children playing dress up.

But boy do they know how to dress. Every haircut, every mini skirt, every corduroy trouser is recreated in painstaking period detail and (one assumes) accuracy. If only the kind of care and attention given to the popping of a Trebor mint in the mouth had been given to the script, which, all too often replaces Le Carre's colloquial aphorisms with crude and banal explanation. It is perhaps a minor point, but I don't think there is a single swear word in Le Carre's 1974 book, nor in the BBC's 1979 TV series, so why the need to add them in now?

What was subtext in the book and TV show is rendered as supertext in the film. Characters all too often explain what they are thinking and how they feel, as opposed to letting the audience figure it out for themselves. In the TV series, the threat of violence said so much more than a throat hacked open or a disgorged corpse lying in a bath tub of it's own blood, entrails spilling out over it's legs.

The ironical and ultra-bright Oxford and Cambridge graduates who run London Station, as well as the field operatives who are trusted to undertake missions all over the world, are shown to be just as crass and inept as the man next door, which was certainly not the case in the book. Not to say that the characters in Le Carre's novel are incorruptible automatons. Far from it. Many of them were much more deeply damaged than those depicted in the film, but all of them were at least logical and clever people with complex and contradictory motivations. Here, however, sensibilities are coarsened and subtleties ironed out, in order to make them more palatable for mainstream consumption.

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that this is a European film with a European sensibility. Funded by the French, directed by a Swede, it never seems to take the idea of British Intelligence very seriously. There is no sense of context given to what are, on the surface at least, trivial matters. A more rigorous film might have started with some sort of newsreel footage, explaining that the Cold War was real, it was earnest and it was a very high stakes game. The ideological battle between the West on one side and the USSR on the other mattered because there was an absolute difference between the two. That is important. But one doesn't get the sense that the filmmakers really believe it, which is odd given the seriousness with which the director handled the fantastic subject of vampires in his previous film.

I went into this film with the best will in the world, anticipating something really great and wanting it to work for me too. Regretfully, I came out disappointed, even though the critical consensus tells me what I watched was a masterpiece.lunarpark.blogspot.com - Spy Games - Keyword description

2011-09-12T23:24:00.000-07:00

Strictly No Originality

Winter is coming and television schedules have a very familiar look, largely because we have literally seen it all before. The BBC is playing host to yet another series of celebrity love-in/bitching contest, Strictly Come Dancing; ITV is home to yet another series of Simon Cowell’s sickly sentimental/vicariously vicious singing contest, X Factor; and, for reasons that are wholly commercial, Channel Five has decided to resurrect that moribund format, Big Brother.

This is the kind of thing that gives me nightmares. I take film and television much too seriously and I worry: is this the best that we can do? Is culture going to move forward? Have we really run out of ideas? Do the people who watch these shows actually enjoy them or are they the unwitting victims of a 21st century form of mass hysteria, propagated by a media industry that wants nothing more than to keep people docile in order to manipulate them into buying yet more of the same product? I just don’t know.

Not that lack of originality is only a prime time television problem. 2011 will see the release of more film sequels than any other year in recorded history (27, if you must know). Moreover, far from being subject to the ‘law of diminishing returns’ that previously governed Hollywood sequeldom – prior to around 2000, movie sequels were expected to make roughly 2/3rds as much money as their immediate predecessor – cash-ins on existing properties have never been more popular. Presently, seven of the Top Ten Highest Grossing Films of the Year, and nine of the top twelve, are sequels, spin-offs or remakes. Are producers giving audiences what they want (the films’ success would seem to indicate that they are) or are consumers simply being forced to accept a narrower choice?

Certainly, ‘established properties’ are the order of the day in Hollywood. We have already had films based on a Hasbro toy range (Transformers) and another based on a Disney theme park ride (Pirates of the Caribbean). A film based on popular children’s board game Battleships (Battleship) is already in the works and Ridley Scott is rumoured to be circling around a possible Monopoly movie. Expect films based on Captain Planet, Thundercats and Masters of the Universe (I am not joking), followed by Hollywood adaptations of The Samurai Pizza Cats, Captain Bucky O’Hare, Bill & Ben and Muffin the Mule (I might be joking).

I am reminded of an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which the crew is trapped in a time loop, the only escape from which comes when they avert the destruction of the Enterprise. I think our situation is similar, although I would suggest an alternative prescription – the opposite, in fact. In order to escape, we may need to destroy the Enterprise. Figuratively speaking that is.

Before we get to the possible cure, however, it is important to ensure that we have correctly diagnosed the symptoms. Part of me is tempted to offer a purely Marxist analysis. The list of conspirators who might be involved in a deliberate plan to perpetuate a miserable media mediocrity is almost endless – Simon Cowell, the Murdochs, the BBC, Twitter, Facebook, the Google guys and Bruce Forsyth, to name just a few. But that is far from a satisfactory explanation. The diagnosis I would tend towards is both simpler and more complex. Certainly, money is an important motivation and while consumers continue to buy the product with which they are presented, major studios will continue to serve up more of the same. If people stopped going to watch the likes of Transformers 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 4 and Fast & the Furious 5, things would change. And, who knows? Maybe some original content would be produced. Crucially, however, I think the people who are making the film, TV and music that the rest of us have to either endure or ignore are just not that good. Simple as that. They are doing the best that they can, they simply lack the talent or imagination to produce anything that communicates any sort of meaning.

To those who might suggest that I am imposing elitist criteria on subject matter that doesn’t ought to be taken so seriously, I respond thusly: if elitism means setting standards that distinguish one piece of work from another and posits that it is possible to create films or programmes that are distinctly better or worse than others in terms of their ambition and their artistry, then you can call me an elitist and I will wear that badge with pride. However, it is also instructive to look at how what we mean by ‘mainstream’ has changed in recent years and, specifically, over the last 10. In what I think was 2003, there was a feature in Empire magazine in which the writers were encouraged to debunk a piece of received wisdom: one contributor argued Forrest Gump was a more deserving winner of the 1994 Best Picture Oscar than fellow nominees, Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption, while another espoused the virtues of Flash Gordon and denounced Star Wars as farcical trash. Those were fun, but one contribution really stood out. It stood out at the time and now, 10 years hence, it appears increasingly prescient. He or she (I can’t remember) argued that while Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings were both good films in and of themselves, they risked providing an inappropriate template for mainstream movie making that Hollywood producers might find it difficult to resist. Both were fantasy franchises which meant that, not only were sequels possible, they were expected, even demanded, from the outset; and both were well over two and half hours long, breaking from the previously accepted notion that any film aiming to attract a mass audience needed to be under two hours. Crucially, both The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter were massive, massive hits. Now, look at the Hollywood product we have today and tell me you do not see a connection. Superhero franchises with countless sequels and no end in sight, filled with unnecessary sub-plots, in-jokes and baggy storytelling, all as a direct result of abandoning the rigour involved in keeping the running time down.lunarpark.blogspot.com - Strictly No Originality - Keyword description

2011-09-05T05:54:00.000-07:00

Debunking a Legend

With two (uncredited) adaptations already - The Last Man on Earth (1964) and The Omega Man (1971) - an uncharitable person might be tempted to ask, 'What is the point of yet another film based on Richard Mattheson's 1954 horror classic I am Legend?'

Let's examine the facts.

In 1997 Mark Protosevich's action-oriented script was slated to set the apocalyptic-future template for Ridley Scott's (Alien, Blade Runner, Gladiator) take on Mattheson's dark tale of loneliness, isolation and loss, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the leading role. But with Scott and Schwarzenegger both coming off of big-budget flops - 1492: Conquest of Paradise and Last Action Hero respectively - the studio balked at the projected cost of US$100 million-plus and insisted Scott cut back.

After four months of pre-production - set designs, storyboards, CGI and make-up tests - Scott walked. A Jerry Bruckheimer/Michael Bay (Pearl Harbour, Transformers) helmed production, came and went in the early 2000s and Guillermo Del Toro passed up the opportunity to direct, just before going on to make Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. The film was eventually green lit with Francis Lawrence (Constantine) installed as director and Will Smith as its star.

Despite being the first film to carry the I am Legend moniker, what finally hobbled off the studio lot in late 2007 is a weird hybrid creature, bearing only a passing resemblance to the book. Yes, humans infected by a virulent strain of vampirism hunt the Last Man on Earth, but that is pretty much where the similarities end. The rest is based on Ridley Scott’s groundwork. But, with the best will in the world, Francis Lawrence is no Ridley Scott. Nor is he Richard Mattheson. And, without their vision, I am Legend is just another vampire film.

Will Smith tries hard to convince in what is ultimately a very silly role - both a pharmacological doctor, experimenting to find a cure for the virus that infected 99 percent of the world’s population; and a high-ranking military officer, more than capable of taking care of himself in a post-apocalyptic landscape inhabited by creatures that want nothing more than to eat him alive. Smith is certainly not the Robert Neville of the book: alcoholic, scared, brave, resourceful, lazy, disciplined and boderline insane. Indeed, there is little room for any of that kind of ambiguity in the film. Not to mention the confused feelings of sexual attraction and repulsion Mattheson’s Neville feels for the female vampires in the book. The films steers well clear of that kind of murky territory.

Ironically, if I had to choose a performer who might be able to support an entire feature film with only a dog as support, Will Smith might well be that actor. But here he is constrained by a script that leaves no room humour and forces Smith to play things entirely straight, leaving little room for his trademark charm. Not that this would be a problem if the film carried the psychological weight of the book. But it doesn’t. This is a problem given that it also lacks the light-touch of the best of mainstream entertainment.

Not to say that the film is dreadful. It is just dull, plodding, non-descript, which, with source material as good as this, might leave one wondering, ‘What is the point?’ US$585 million later, I think we have our answer.lunarpark.blogspot.com - Upcoming Events - Keyword description

2011-08-10T23:27:00.000-07:00

Upcoming Events

Given my constant complaints about the mainstream rubbish we are frequently forced to endure, it probably makes sense for me to share my thoughts on what look like some of the more interesting (though, admittedly, still fairly mainstream) upcoming films.

1. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

An adaptation of John Le Care's downbeat Cold War spy thriller about a Soviet mole discovered at the heart of the British intelligence community. Financed by the French (£30 million from Studio-Canal), directed by a Swede (Thomas Alfredson, whose previous effort was the brilliant and glacial, Let the Right One In), and with a stellar British cast that includes Gary Oldman as George Smiley; recent Oscar winner Colin Firth; the best Sherlock Holmes since Jeremy Brett, Benedict Cumberbatch; and soon to be Batman villain, Tom Hardy; personally, I can't wait.

2. The Ides of March

George Clooney plays a super-slick Presidential candidate to Best Actor nominee, Ryan Gosling's, image consultant and media fixer in what is being pitched as a spiky and abrasive comedy aimed at adults. When the pair fall out Gosling starts fixing things for the other guy. Based on Clooney's previous directorial efforts (the excellent Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Good Night and Good Luck and the less good Leatherheads) this is definitely one to watch.

3. In Time

Justin Timberlake (recently excellent in The Social Network) and Amanda Seyfried star in Andrew Niccol's (The Truman Show, Gattaca, Lord of War) take on a hackneyed old science fiction plot, the utopian future fantasy. Set in a world that sounds like part Logan's Run, part Repent Harlequin! Said the Ticktock Man,, in which people are genetic engineered to stop aging at 25 and then have to 'earn' more life, my guess is that Timberlake and Seyfried might try to escape from said oppressive regime.

4. Contagion

An all star cast - Matt Damon (MATT DAMON!), Marion Cotillard, Lawrence Fishburne, Kate Winslet, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law - pursue and are pursued by an enemy that they cannot see, or taste or touch - a virus! The none-more-prolific, Stephen Soderberg, is threatening to quit filmmaking once this one is done in order to focus on his painting. I, for one, hope he reconsiders.

5. The Guard

In cinemas now! The second biggest film in Irish box office history, it has been in the UK box office top ten for the past five weeks on the strength of its Irish box office receipts alone. Don Cheadle's uptight FBI agent is teamed up with Brendon Gleeson's cynical Irish policeman in order to investigate a drug ring in the Irish Republic. Profanity and bad taste ensue! The first film from John Michael McDonagh, the brother of the man who in 2008 brought us the similarly themed In Bruge.

Please be aware this blog post contains forward looking statements.
lunarpark.blogspot.com - Upcoming Events - Keyword description

2011-08-10T05:31:00.000-07:00

The World According to Google

Ever wondered what goes on inside Google? Why would you? It is only one of the most important companies in the world right now. Well, if you have, and even if you haven't, short of getting a job at the big G, Steven Levy's In the Plex: How Google Works, Thinks and Shapes our Lives is about as close as a non-MIT, Stanford or even Cambridge graduate, such as myself, is likely to get.

Having already read a couple of books about Google (What can I say? I'm a geek), I can safely say, In the Plex is by far the best. Levy himself has some form in this area. A contributing editor to Wired magazine for nearly 20 years, he also wrote the definitive text about the early years of the computing industry - Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - detailing everything from MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club (the first people to call themselves 'hackers') to Bill Gates and Steve Jobs innovations in the home computer market in the 1980s. That's PCs young people. Ask your parents.

Levy was given unprecedented 'high-level' access to Google executives, as a result of which the book has more details about how and why certain decisions were taken than any other. It also includes extensive interviews with the triumvirate known to Googlers as simply LSE - Larry, Sergey and Eric. That is, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the computer science graduates who developed the Google search engine in a Standford dorm room while studying for their PhDs, and Eric Schmidt, the former Chief Technology Officer at Sun Microsystems and slick Silicon Valley veteran, brought in by Google's early venture capital partners who insisted Page and Brin have some kind of 'adult supervision'.

The book's description of the company's early years are some of its most interesting. Apparently, the name 'Google' arose out of a misspelling of 'googol', the mathematical name for a number followed by 100 zeros (I thought these people were supposed to be super-geniuses?) It was also during these years that the company's corporate culture was solidified, its famed 'Don't be Evil' mantra arising out of an early meeting. The image of a Silicon Valley start-up working out of someone's garage, buying cut price furniture from bust dot-coms, growing at a fantastic rate and making up rules as they went along was Google at its best and, occasionally, at its worst. Even during those early years, Larry Page's enormous ambitions and boundless cyber utopianism was a cause of conflict with those who failed to appreciate his vision and (whisper it not), maybe even disagreed with him.

That anarchic spirit is really at the heart of Google and has played an important role in its tremendous growth over what is still a very short period of time. Both a strength and a reason to give some people pause, Google's has always preferred to act first and ask questions later, to push the boundaries of acceptability before backtracking when a more cautious public alert the High Geeks that they have taken things too far.

Levy details Google's rise from singular research project to globe-spanning megacorporation with the kind of clarity and surehandedness one would expect from an experienced journalist. The algorithm begat the search engine, the search engine begat the aution-based advertising model, the auctioning-based advertising model begat a massive infrastructure, which in turn spawned Gmail, Google Docs, Google Chrome (web browser), Google Chrome OS, the Android mobile ecosystem and onwards into cloud computing, realtime voice translation, computer vision, artifical intelligence research and self-driving vehicles. And those are just the 'big ticket' items. There is also Google News, Google Maps, (the controversial) Google Streetview, Google+ (the newest social network on the block), even Google Books (an incredibly ambitious project which has so far scanned in excess of two million books, but which is now mired in legal difficulties), and Blogger, of course, where this post is hosted... I could go on. No, seriously, I could.

What the book revels in and what I suspect many people have yet to realise is just how vast Google has become. More than just a search engine? You better believe it! The numbers are mind boggling. Last year Google earned revenues in excess of US$22 billion and, though it tries to keep such things as secret as possible, it is estimated that Google now operates in excess of 24 data centres worldwide filled with over one million servers and all connected via the world's most expansive fibre-optic network. Google is believed to own more fibre-optic cable than any other company on the planet; Google is investing massive amounts of money in renewable energy to lower the price of power at its data centres; and Google recently bid on the latest next generation mobile bandwidth auction in the United States and was only narrowly beaten by telecoms giant Verizon.

The extent of the founder's ambitions (Larry Page in particular) are covered in detail, as is the much publicised corporate culture at the Googleplex, where staff enjoy free catering as well as gym, swimming, massage and games facilities - also free. Then there is the much lauded '20 percent time', wherein Google engineers are given license to pursue projects not directly related to the company's main business activities - major innovations and revenue generators such as Gmail and Google Maps apparently arose out of '20 percent time'. This, a reflection of Larry and Sergey's background in academia and their desire to run Google like a university campus, an intellectual playground for the supersmart, replete with all of the toys they could ever want to play with - every project team has access to their own server racks and Google's enormous data sets.

Not that the book is without its flaws. Ethical dilemmas with globe-spanning significance, related to information ownership, computer security and individual privacy, of the kind which Google face every day, are somewhat glossed over, Levy tending towards the not particularly salutary 'trust us, we're Google' viewpoint, espoused by the company's founders and top executives. Legitimate concerns about the scope of Google's power and influence are addressed to some extent in a long chapter about Google's troubled relationship with the Communist Party of China. But issues to do with potential abuses by governments and corporations in democratic countries are given short shrift, almost as if they are not significant. Even though recent outrage about the extent of mobile phone tracking by Google, Apple and others seems to suggest otherwise. Personally, I am quite sure that there are yet more privacy timebombs waiting to go off, once the general population is made aware of the extent of the data collection and user profiling undertaken by major internet-based companies.

Then there are the enormous amounts of data Google collects - four billion searches every day and what could possibly be more intimate than somebody's search history? - fears, dreams, desires, all confided to the magic genie of the search box in the mistaken belief that no one is watching? Meanwhile, behind the curtain, Google is performing semantic analysis of emails and search queries in order to aggregate and mine that data and deliver 'better' search results with more 'targeted' advertising. Who's interests is that in? Google is a publicly traded company after all, answerable to its shareholders, with an ultimate obligation to improve its bottom line. If that coincides with the well being of its users, all to the good, but should the interests of its users diverge from those of its shareholders, there is no telling whether or not Google will continue to do the 'right thing'.

Ultimately what the book left me thinking was just how much fun working at Google sounds. We are all confronted by the effects of some of the big issues Google is dealing with every day, but who wouldn't fancy setting the terms of the debate and the criteria to which everybody else has to respond?
lunarpark.blogspot.com - The World According to Google - Keyword description

2011-08-08T06:46:00.001-07:00

Check Mate

When the US and USSR faced off in 1972, there was more than just national pride at stake. The world looked on with hearts in mouths, waiting to discover which one of these nuclear superpowers would triumph in the ultimate test of deductive reasoning and strategic logic. I am of course talking about the contest between American chess prodigy Bobby Fischer and defending champion Boris Spassky in the 1972 World Chess Championship, as depected in Bobby Fischer Against the World (now in cinemas).

Chess might not sound like the most promising topic for a feature length documentary to most people, but most people would be wrong. 'Most people' made Transformers: Dark of the Moon a global box office hit. Chess is brilliant! Chess grandmasters are intellectual gladiators, doing battle in the theatre of the infinite. There are more possible moves in a single game of chess than there are grains of sand on the planet and the number of possible unique chess games is more than the number of electrons in the universe.

Still not convinced? Bobby Fisher himself was no ordinary chess player. Winning the US Chess Championship at the tender age of 14, Fischer went on to win the tournament eight more times, before being invited to face off against Russian grandmaster Boris Spassky. The USSR had made chess Russia's National Sport and, in 1972, had won 23 consecutive World Chess Championships. However, Richard Nixon's White House was so determined to humiliate the USSR by beating it at its own game, when Fischer threatened to pull out of the match on financial grounds, Henry Kissenger himself called Fischer to tell him, 'You should go'. Archive footage from a major American news network shows the anchor announce stories about Watergate and Vietnam, before first turning to the state of the World Chess Championship in Reykjavík'.

The film is filled with fascinating insights and anecdotes such as these, Fischer brilliant but tormented, driven but self-destructive. His dedication is most evident in his apparently tireless physical fitness regime, preparing for the match as if he were Rocky, about to go 12 rounds against Apollo Creed. Harry Sneider, one-time bodyguard and trainer to the stars, recalls Fisher telling him he wanted to be able to bury the needle on his grip-metre. He then had to explain to Fischer that the world's strongest man had never achieved such a feat, only for Fischer to quip back, 'When I shake that little Russian's hand, I want him to feel it!'

The final third of the film, following his victory, traces Fischer's sad decline into anti-American, anti-Jewish conspiracy theorist. If the filmmakers are to be believed, without chess to sate his intellectual appetities, Fischer's brilliant brain started to eat itself, spiralling ever deeper into Illuminati/New World Order nonsense. Then, in 1992, Fischer made his perenial victim fantasy a reality by staging a rematch with Spassky in the former Yugoslavia, then in the midst of a bloody civil war, in direct violation of UN sanctions. The US State Department immediately issued a warrent for his arrest and called on him to return to the United States to face charges. Fischer was latter broadcast on Filipino TV on September 11th 2001, laughing at the 'big-bad empire' getting one in the eye. Fischer was, in many ways, his own worst enemy.

Arrested in Japan in 2004, Fischer was eventually granted citizenship and thereby sanctuary by Iceland, the scene of his greatest ever victory. He showed some signs of getting his life back together - he was playing chess again - before he died in 2008. The film ends with his friends' lament that Fischer abandonning chess at the age of 29 was akin to Michaelangelo or Beethoven never being given the chance to complete their masterworks. A fascinating portrait.

2011-08-04T02:58:00.000-07:00

Revenge of the Nerd

How do you make a patriotic, pro-America action-adventure in an era of perceived American imperialism? Take the action back to World War Two, of course. Captain America: The First Avenger - named in anticipation of Marvel Studios' upcoming Avengers movie, in which El Capo teams up with Thor, Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk - is styled after the man-on-a-mission matinees of the 1940s, which once inspired George Lucas to create an archealogical adventurer called Indiana Smith (true story). The film succssfully evokes the spirit of a bygone era - a time when men were real men, women were real women, and superheroes were genetically enhanced one-time super weaklings.

That particular reversal is an invention of the filmmakers, and it is to their credit. In the comic book, even before he became Captain America, Steve Rogers was a six foot five inch, 220 pound Olympian athlete. By recasting Rogers as a plucky 90 pound asmatic with deluions of adequacy as a soldier, Joe Johnston (the director) and his cohots have wrestled the superhero movie out of the arms of the bullies. More precisely, the filmmakers have created a character, in the form of Chris Evans' shy but determined Cap, to which all nerdy boys with a penchant for power fantasies can relate. His bashful romance with British Secret Service Agent Peggy Carter (played by Hayley Atwell) is endearingly sweet and his motives for going to war shamelessly well intentioned.

Adding to the fun-factor are a brace of talented character actors who revel in the chance to play broad. Stanley Tucci as the German scientist who developed the Super Soldier serum before fleeing to the United States to escape the Nazis; Tommy Lee Jones as the disapproving but ultimately noble General; and Toby Jones as the oddly-accented accomplace of Hugo Weaving's Red Skull - a man who is too evil even for the Nazis.

The story itself is rather thin on the ground - the Red Skull is harnessing the Power of the Gods to hold the rest of the world to ransom - and the action is a bit too predictable, but in an era of cynical cash-ins with no artistic value what so ever, it is hard to argue with the promise of two hours of jolly escapism in the company of a likeable lead.

2011-04-24T09:49:00.000-07:00

iSpy

No one who has been paying any attention will have been surprised to learn that Apple monitors and tracks the way in which people use its devices. The terms and conditions to which all iTunes users subscribe explicitly state that Apple reserves the right to monitor how people use its products, gathering location, text, audio, video and contact data, in order to improve its services.

What has surprised some is the slipshod fashion in which Apple has acted with respect to data security. Storing detailed geophysical data with precise timestamps in an unencrypted file on every iPhone is irresponsible in the extreme and indicative of the lack of care large corporations take in protecting the privacy of individual users.

Last year, Google ran into trouble when it became clear that as part of its StreetView project, the company had also engaged in extensive WiFi snooping. The UK Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, initially accepted Google's claims that it scanners had not picked up anything valuable, before being embarrassed by his European counterparts who took this intentional breach of personal privacy much more seriously. Upon reopening the case it was discovered that, contary to Google's prior assertion, it had indeed hoovered up whole emails, passwords and other personally sensitive information. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) subsequently declared that this constituted a "significant breach" of the Data Protection Act. However, there was no further investigation into the internal working practices that lead to a Fortune 500 company "mistkenly" collecting payload data from unencrypted wireless networks. This was an ugly situation, the response to which was far from adequate.

In the case of Apple, the situation is much, much worse. An iPhone is a personal computing device, capable of gathering intimate information about a person's movements, their relationships with others and their private day-to-day activities. What we have to ask and what the Apple incident should bring to public attention and scrutiny is: how much information should Apple and other such mobile computing companies (including Microsoft and Google) be allowed to keep about their users and share with their partners? What regulations need to be introduced in order to limit the commercial incentives that are leading successful internet companies to adopt ever more intrusive business models which demand users hand over ever more of their sensitive (not to mention highly valuable) personal data.

One argument put forward by those that defend this manner of flagrant intrusion into people's private lives is the 'freedom to choose' defence. Nobody forces anybody else to sign up to Facebook. This is, of course, true. However, I would question whether or not the people who sign up to services like Facebook, or who use smartphones, are aware of, or have understood, the amount of information the service provider collects, or the extent to which they are volunteering to be spied upon. I would go so far as to venture that the majority of the people who sign up to use these services would be quite creeped out by the detailed user profiles corporations such as Apple, Google, Facebook and others, keep on their users.

What can be done? Certainly, I have been deeply heartened to see that Privacy International is already preparing possible legal action against Apple in several of the countries. I think it is important that this kind of flagrant intrusion into people's privacy become a much bigger issue. People in power need to know that this is not good enough and that we (the users) will not stand for it. There should be incentives (possibly commercial) for companies that respect and protect user data and individual privacy. And privacy, as a whole, needs to be taken much more seriously by individuals, organisations, corporations and governments. The technologies that are now remaking the world threaten to incalcate us in a permanent surveillance society. But before Silicon Valley companies take us too much further down a route that prioritises their interests and possibly not the rest of society at large, we need to stop and think about the kind of world in which we want to live, because to shrug and say, "This is just the way things are; how else do you expect a for-profit corporation to behave?" is simply no longer good enough. This is too important and something has to change.

2011-03-29T02:32:00.000-07:00

A Call to Action

Science fiction writer, journalist, futurist, visionary, Bruce Sterling, calls on 'Millennials' to unite, go out there and make the world the better place they know it can be:

Part 2 and Part 3 are both available on YouTube.

I think he means us, you know.

2011-03-15T14:28:00.000-07:00

The Social Network

I just bought this on BluRay and, having rewatched both The Social Network and Inception, I now feel that I am in a position to say, by a hair's breadth, The Social Network was my favourite film of 2010.

In another close run thing, The Social Network score just tips Hans Zimmer's (also excellent) Inception score to the post as my favourite movie soundtrack of 2010. I am listening to Trent Reznor and Atticus Rose's beautiful, hauting (now Oscar winning - unbelievable, Oscar got something right!) score, as I write this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SBNCYkSceU&feature=related

Taking it back to the start

When I first heard about the idea for this movie I thought, that is it, they've given up, Hollywood has completely run out of ideas, what a nice little 20th century endeavour cinema was, it was fun while it lasted. Then I started to read about who was involved in what was disparagingly dubbed 'The Facebook Movie' - David Fincher of Seven and Fight Club (dark, introspective movies with something to say about modern America) and Aaron Sorkin, the man who created and wrote much of The West Wing (one of the best loved modern American TV series in recent memory). This piqued by interest but did not assuage my concerns.

As time went by, my opinion softened and I started to think that maybe we would get a Wall Street for the modern age, a cheesy, zeitgeisty snapshot that would age badly, but which might encapsulate some of our early 21st century concerns. Then, when I saw the first full length theatrical trailer (which unexpectedly premiered in front of Inception, opposed to online (ironic, huh?)), my expectations skyrocketed - and the film delivered.

The combination of Fincher's cold, existential outlook and Sorkin's warm humanism is superb. The characters are all posessed of the kind of sassy intellect Sorkin has always used to portray the relentless over achievers he likes to write about, but each character is made to seem naturalistic in the setting Fincher creates. His directoral style is less showy than it has been in some of his previous films, but no less bravura, with rapid editing and subtle special effects work which focus our attention on story and characters.

Excepting the vast quantities of money involved and the fact that facebook.com is now one of the world's true phenomena, the story itself might seem a little slight. But, the performances, once again, draw you in. I recognise versions of all of the people portrayed from my own time at university. Quite a different experience to the one that Mark Zuckerberg enjoyed at Harvard, but also not different in important ways which Fincher captures perfectly. The way the film plays out, one almost gets the sense that it could have been me (you) and my mates (your mates) who invented the world's most popular website (in 2010, Facebook overtook Google as the most visited site on the net) and ended up suing each other for hundreds of millions of dollars after the big boys - high priced lawyers, silver-tongued entreprenuers and venture capital firms - got involved.

Crucially, all of the actors are the right ages and the film's casting is spot on. Jesse Eisenberg plays Mark Zuckerberg as brilliant, arrogant and aloof. British Actor and soon to be Spider-Man, Andrew Garfield, plays Eduardo Saverin (Mark's former business partner and, according to the film at least, his 'only friend') as a deer in the headlights who maybe should have known better. While Armie Hammer brings nuance to the twin roles (pun intended) of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the genetic clones who claim that Mark stole their idea. The most surprising turn, however, is that of Justin Timberlake (yes, that one!), who is smarmily brilliant as geek idol Sean Parker, the man who helped to create Napster at the tender age of 19, and who now owns a seven percent stake in Facebook.

The one reservation I have is that the film is so beguiling, so fantastically executed as a piece of laser-targetted drama, some people are going to mistake this fiction for fact. Moreover, some of the changes the filmmakers make to the real life story are worse than irksome. The misoginist views shared on Mark's blog, near the start of the film, are not his own, and the decision to ommit the fact that the real facemash.com was a site that rated both women AND men according to their hotness, has more than a whiff of character assassination about it. The portions of Mark Zuckerberg's livejournal blog (still available online) about coding, on the other hand, are preserved word for word and are truly fascinating. The fact is, there was no need to invent in order to make the story more interesting. Indeed, there are far more serious charges regarding the errosion of personal privacy which the filmmakers might have layed at Mark's door (words for another time), but instead, they choose to pursue the faux Hollywood idea that he created the site to impress/spite his ex-girlfriend.

Putting those reservations to one side, however, The Social Network truly feels like a story for our time. And when I say our time, I mean our time, us, the people who are Mark's age. We are starting to move out into the real world and becoming political actors in it. Big, bold, scary (in an an oh-my-god-the-money-and-the-global-implications sort of way), for better or worse, this is the world we are living in right now.

2011-03-06T10:00:00.001-08:00

The GFC

To those of you trying to better understand the recent global financial crisis (GFC), I highly recommend you read this book:

And watch this film:

Whoops: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and Why Nobody Can Pay is a non-fiction book written by a British novelist about the events leading up to the global financial crisis in 2008. It provides an excellent introduction to obstruse banking terms, such as collaterised debt obligations (CDOs) and credit default swaps (CDSs), and, just in case you are particularly financially ignorant (as I am), a beginner's guide to balance sheets, equity, leverage and securitisation as well. Written by a novelist, as opposed to an economist, the book is firmly rooted in a recognisable human reality, where intellectual arrogance, free market economics and lots, and lots of money, combined to create a heady mix that led some people to conlcude what we were witnessing was 'the end of boom and bust'.

However, where Whoops! emphasises the Pythonesque absurdity of it all, the principal register of Inside Job is one of bitterness and betrayal. Perhaps it is significant that Whoops! was written by a British novelist, whereas Inside Job was made by a group of American filmmakers.

The main purpose of the film seems to be to expose some of the lies (or, pieces of recieved wisdom) that have grown up around the global financial crisis. And, to my mind, it has three big whoopers in its sights.

The first: no one saw the crash coming and the ensuing crisis was unforeseeable.

The film tells us that the FBI were briefing about systemic fraud and improper accounting in the financial services industry as early as 2004; and, in 2005, (then) Chief Economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Raghuram Rajan, published a paper - 'Has Financial Development Made the World Riskier' - in which he surmised that financial deregulation and incentive structures (read: bonuses) had substantially increased the likelyhood of a "full-blown financial crisis" or a "catastrophic meltdown." Still, nothing was done.

The second:

The people responsible for the crash - senior banking executives, government regulators, credit ratings agencies and economic researchers - were not aware of the risks or the broader implications that their actions would have.

According to the film, these people were not only aware of the risks but complicit in esculating said risks because it was in their own self interest. Basically, bankers and traders were allowed to play fast and loose with other people's money and excessive risk taking was rewarded.

And the third:

It was a systemic failure, part of the culture and so we do not know exactly who was respondible.

Inside Job points the finger directly at several individuals, many of whom now occupy senior positions within the Obama White House, implicating them because public policy is not something that happens by accident.

All interesting stuff and well worth checking out for yourself.

Now, what are we going to do to try and avoid the same thing happening again?

2010-08-25T07:44:00.001-07:00

A Gallic Flavour

The Illusionist is a movie that is part animated love letter to the city of Edinburgh and part melancholic reflection on the death of music hall. The film tells the story of the eponymous illusionist, an old man who travels from his native Paris, to London and then Edinburgh, trying to make ends meet, even as preening rock and rollers make his act look increasingly archaic. Accompanying him on his travels in the historic city is a young girl from a remote Scottish village who believes his magic is real.

Their inability to communicate verbally casts the pair adrift in an almost entirely wordless world, occasionally punctuated by shouts and shrugs, where camaraderie and friendship is expressed through a magic trick or two. Based on an original script by French screen legend and physical comedian, Jacque Tati, the story has been given a new lease of life by idiosyncratic hand-drawn animation specialist Sylvain Chomet, best known for making Belleville Rendezvous.

This film is much more naturalistic, opposed to stylised, and the characters much less grotesque. The real star of the show is the (literally) watercolour rendering of Edinburgh, which anyone who has visited the city will recognise immediately, one stunning sequence pulling back to reveal the city in panarama, including the castle and the glass roof of Waverly station. Occasionally the film’s relentless melancholia does tip the balance unfavourable in the direction of tiresome, but only occasionally, and at 82 minutes long, it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome.

Given the film’s music hall setting, there is plenty of room for quirky characters, all with a decidedly Gallic flavour: depressed clowns, tragic-comic ventriloquists and a rabbit-out-of-a-hat companion who provides many of the film’s best laughs. But, though there is some room for comedy, the film’s overriding tone is one of sadness, loss and nostalgia - sadness for the loss of innocence and nostalgia for a bygone era that maybe never was.

2010-08-25T06:56:00.000-07:00

Through the Looking Glass

Cypher is the best ‘based on a Philip K Dick story’ Philip K Dick never wrote, which in itself is very Philip K Dick. Dick is the man who wrote the original short story that became Minority Report; the novel that Blade Runner is based on (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?); and the novella that inspired Total Recall (We Can Remember it for you Wholesale).

What none of these movies managed to capture about Dick’s work and what Cypher captures perfectly, is the sense of the paranoid amidst the ordinary and the banal. Minority Report Blade Runner and Total Recall are all set in fantastical future cityscapes, whereas Cypher is set in an inane corporate background of press conferences and industry exhibitions.

Jeremy Northam plays bored worker drone, Morgan Sullivan, with quiet aplomb and is understated in his transformation into alter ego Jack Thursby. Lucy Lui is better than she has ever been as flame-haired femme fatale Rita (named in honour of Rita Hayworth, star of Gilda and numerous other film noir.)

One of the things to look at for is the film’s subtle use of colour, which start our almost monochrome and becomes gradually more vibrant as the mystery deepens and the action progresses. This twisty-turny espionage thriller, with a science fiction twist, was wrongly passes over at the time of its original release. But in the wake of Inception it is surely due a second lease of life, especially in light of the recent announcement that writer director, Vincenzo Natali, has just been hired to adapt and direct William Gibson’s cyperpunk masterpiece, Neuromancer.

2010-08-09T12:57:00.001-07:00

This is not normally a place for reposting links, but...

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/08/google-verizon-propose-open-vs-paid-internets/all/1

Say hello to Internet 2.0!

2010-07-18T02:59:00.000-07:00

Infinite Dreamscape

"Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference, between the dream world... and the real world?"

I'm going to keep this brief. Inception is the new film from director Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight), starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The less you know about it before you go into the theatre the better. I had very high expectations and, unbelievably, they were fulfilled. Inspired by the slew of 'edge of reality' movies that came out around the end of the last millennium - The Matrix, Dark City, eXistenZ, The Truman Show, The 13th Floor, and, to a certain extent, Nolan's own, Momento. Not a remake, or a sequel, or a comic book adaptation, Inception is the first truely original screenplay of the summer, and all the better because of it.

Leonardo DiCaprio's performance as tortured hero, Dom Cobb, gives the laberythian plot an emotional centre, proving beyond any shadow of a doubt that he is among the best and most interesting actors working in Hollywood today. With Shutter Island, earlier this year, and The Departed and Blood Diamond before it, he is certainly on a very srong run.

I am sure there will be quite a few people that don't get or like this film, and I can understand that. It certainly isn't an easy watch, and if you don't care to engage with its fantastical premise, of course it is easy to sit and sneer... Those people, however, are wrong. The film is layered and dense, but never just for the sake of it, and if you want cinema to have ambition, you've got to be willing to engage your brain.

My hope is that Inception will be a massive hit. My hope is that this is just a beginning, putting pay to the idea that the only films that people want to watch are dumbo action unspectaculars about CGI robots. This is Blockbuster filmmaking as it is supposed to be. Congratulations to Chris Nolan and everybody else involved, their imagination and daring are something to be commended.

2010-05-10T12:35:00.001-07:00

The New British Cinema

Something very exciting is happening in the world of British filmmaking and I’m slightly worried we might all be missing it. If we don’t make the most of this opportunity it might not come again. Not for a very long time.

Get me started on the subject of blockbuster films and will likely you will be entering into an hours long conversation (monologue) in which I will tell you that the genre in question has been getting progressively worse for the past ten years, increasingly dominated by sequels, remakes and revivals. Coming to a screen near you in 2010: Iron Man 2, Let Me In (an American remake of the peerless Swedish vampire chiller, Let the Right One In) and The A-Team. Not to mention films based on theme park rides - Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean series - and favourite toys from the 1980s - Mattel’s Transformers! My contention is that surely we are approaching some kind of cultural zenith at which point the masses will rise up and demand we return to stories with plot and character and something more profound to say than, ‘buy a ticket! Everyone else has!’

And before you finger me as the snob or the elitist that I am, I would counter by saying, yes, I am. and proud of it. However, the fact remains, I am big fan of all kinds of films, including many, many blockbusters. When blockbusters are done well they can be just as good as any other film. And I have nothing against films that aim to achieve mass appeal and make a lot of money (Avatar, despite its numerous flaws, was my top film of 2009). But I remember a time when blockbusters were allowed to tell stories too - Star Wars, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters, Jurassic Park, Crocodile Dundee... And that’s just off the top of my head.

One possible way of avoiding the rut of rotten Hollywood product we currently have to accept is simply not to watch it, and in this regard, we would not be better served. For anyone who has had the time or the inclination to notice, smaller films really have been picking up the slack. The past six months have been awash with independent cinema worth watching, much of it British! Unfortunately, the audience - that is us - has not been doing its part. We are still truding along to watch useless and pointless bloackbusters, knowing the entire plot before we see the first frame and already bored. Lured in by massive advertising budgets and slick special effects, while much more edifying fare goes largely unwatched in neighbouring screens.

The films I would like to bring to your attention offer a mixed bag of genres and styles, some of which have enjoyed moderate success, others of which have struggled to find an audience. Starting off with one of the successes, November 2009 saw the release of Terry Gilliam's, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus. With a production budget of around US$30 million, and a total worldwide box office gross of US$60 million, this adventurous flight of fancy actually made money. 100 percent profit is not bad in most people's book. And certainly the film was an artistic success - even if it didn’t quite fulfil on the imaginative promise of a Terry Gilliam film starring Heath Ledger about a fantastic battle of wits between good and evil, it still hinted at the possibility that possibility is something that still exists in 21st century Britain.

Another notable success among the slew of British financed films that have made it to our screens in recent months which I have to mention, is Kick-Ass. An alternate take on the superhero genre - a geeky kid enters a world he is totally ill-equipped to deal with and flounders amid a colourful low lives and genuine costumed heroes. The film cost US$30 million to make and has so far taken over US$70 million at the box office.

There has also been a bunch of equally interesting but less financially successful fare. The fact that these films are unable to find an audience and that they fail to make money cannot fail to be an important part of the reason why Britain has no sustainable film industry to speak of (in France there is a ratio of 1:1, foreign to French films, which, despite the impressive recent round-up of British films descibred herein, we are still nowhere near matching. The Scouting Book for Boys is a superbly well-crafted low budget gem of a movie about a teenage boy and a teenage girl living in a Suffolk caravan park and the complications that arise when one of the goes missing. Made for a lowly £1.7 million, the film has only taken £80,000 at the box office, in no small part due to its very limited release in select ‘art house’ cinemas. Meanwhile, a similar fate has befallen the Andy Serkis starring Ian Dury biopic, Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, which has about as much joi de vive as one could hope for from a film. Estimated to have cost in the region of £2 million, after 14 weeks on release, the film has taken less than £900,000 at the UK box office.

Several more recent home grown films I have not seen are equally worthy of mention, including Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s Cemetery Junction; best Picture nominee, An Education; and Roman Polanski’s latest, The Ghost.

All of these films share a commonality in terms of their divergence from the typical American blockbuster. They also represent a diversity of vision that is sadly lacking in the mainstream, offering alternate viewpoints, which, for anyone who watches films wishing to relate to and identify with the characters portrayed on screen, is a very good thing ineed. So, keep your eyes open, and buy British! It doesn’t always work out - Perrier’s Bounty was a definite miss - but it offers a far more appealing idea for the future. I don't think that anywone can seriously say they want to travel any further down the CGI blockbuster cul de sac.

2010-04-26T11:24:00.000-07:00

Arguments Against PR (and an extended dialogue on silly Green Party policies)

Is proportional representation really a good thing? I am sceptical. The problems I see are as follows:

1) Constant coalition. It is much more difficult (near on impossible?) for any one political party to win an overall majority. To my mind, this would not necessarily mean giving power to the people, as it is often argued PR would - every vote counts, and so on. At the moment, you vote for a candidate because you like their policies, or you really dislike opposition policies - that party then has a mandate to govern. About right so far? Under PR, no party wins, so no party has a mandate. Instead, policies are vetted by a process of ‘horse trading’, which the public is excluded from, during which politicians decide amongst themselves what policies to adopt and what to drop. Now, how is that more democratic? To me that sounds like a system laid open to corruption and destructive self interest.

2) No more local MPs. With FPTP you vote for a party, repsented by an individual - and you know who that person is before the election. With PR you vote for a party and then politicians decide who to install in what position, after the fact.

3) Smaller parties. Sure, the Green Party would have a seat, and I think that would be a good thing (Although, I am thoroughly disappointed by their 2010 manifesto. I thought they had moved beyond being a one issue party to a legitimate parliamentary force. But their recent manifesto seems to say otherwise. Granted I have not read the whole thing, and I will likely be pilloried (maybe rightly so) for throwing my hat in the ring when I don’t have all the facts. So be it. First, the Greens want to raise the national minimum wage to £8.10. Small and medium sized businesses would be crippled! Second, they want to introduce a non means tested £170 state pension. Yes, the state pension is too low but the Greens proposal to address this is to give much more money to poor and rich alike. Eh? Where is it going to come from? £116 billion in tax rises. I can’t help feeling this displays either stupidity, on their part, or contempt for the voting public. These policies are unenforceable, and very disappointing from a party that I thought was looking like an interesting, progressive alternative. Anyway, rant over and back on the other side of the bracket I’ll return to the subject of smaller parties getting seats under PR). The BNP would also have a seat or two, and do we really want that? That is all. Maybe it wouldn’t make a lot of difference. Who knows?

There are a couple of other arguments I can’t call to mind right now, but, is that a fair reflection of PR? Or have I completely missed the point?

2010-01-13T11:27:00.001-08:00

Reasons to be Cheerful

Rambunctious, rhythmic and raw, ‘Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll’ is all your mind and body need. Andy Serkis limps on stage and we are hurled into the whirlwind world of Ian Dury of Ian Dury and The Blockheads in a film that recalls the same Best of British energy that make music hall, skiffle, pub rock, The Kinks and Dizzee Rascal, truly unique.

Dury was the kind of unconventional pop success that image-driven shows like X Factor and Pop Idol have made seemingly impossible. Contracting polio at the of eight, abandonned by his father, Dury refused to let his disability define him. His withered left hand and left leg were part of his charm as a performer, his obviously love of wordplay, lyrical dexterity and caustic wit were the stars.

Above all else, he was his own man - and that is the personality that Andy Serkis captures on screen. Not to say the film is any kind of reverential tribute. This is Dury at his best and worst. Warts and all and all the better for it, spilling over with the restless energy of the working class artist.

The Blockheads music, rerecorded especially for the film, gives it its pulse, but stella performances across the board gift the film its heart. Serkis is ably supported by Olivia Williams and Naomi Harris as his wife and his lover, and Bill Milner is excellent as Dury’s conflicted son, Baxter.

The films moves at a ferocious pace, never dwelling but always taking the story forward. If you have any interest in British music or British films, like 24-Hour Party People, Backbeat and Telstar, this film is well worth your time. Highly recommended.

2009-12-29T07:57:00.000-08:00

Top Ten

You may have been reading a whole bunch of 'best of the year lists' recently - or you may not have. For what its worth, here is my list of the best films of 2009:

1. Avatar

Yes, it is that good. I have a few problems with its pacing (it gets a bit bogged down in the middle) and its tone (slightly on the sentimental side, but hey, I can go there), but if you happen to believe that cinema is about taking you to new places and showing you sights you had never seen before, Avatar succeeds - and then some. The special effects are truly out of this world (sorry - couldn't resist) and the money it has made probably means that 3D is here to stay, at least a little while longer. However, one still fears the formula this might prompt executives to follow. What makes Avatar work is what cannot be replicated, the personal vision of the director, James Cameron.

2. Moon

First time Brit director Zowie Bowie - son of David - or Duncan Jones to his mates, revives the science-fiction-about-ideas genre, from the late 1970s and early 1980s, for at least the duration of this film. By turns mysterious, eerie and brutal, this love-letter to the science fiction Jones watched as a kid manages to bring something new to the party, in no small part, as a result of a bravura performance by Sam Rockwell.

3. District 9

More science fiction and another first time director. This story about an alien encampment on the outskirts of Johannesburg, with its obvious political conotations, is probably a more origanal vision than Moon, with another terrifically tortured central performance. The film misses out, however, because of its formulaic ending - when films are this good, I tend to demand even more.

4. Let the Right One In

The unlikely story of a picked upon pre-pubescant Swedish boy and the girl next door, who, while she looks normal enough, is in fact an ancient creature of the night. A somber European take on vampire mythology which makes the swaggering American Twilight saga look very tame indeed.

5. Star Trek

Star Trek in the 21st century is young, shiny and exhuberant. Not as demanding or challenging as some of the other films on the list, but in terms of pure spectacle and enjoyment - I love it.

6. Inglourious Basterds

Yes, its baggy. Yes, its too long. Yes, its over-indulgent. Guys, its a Quentin Tarantino movie! This is the guy who reminded us movies are allowed to be fun, back when things were getting all Sundance-serious. And he has made a World War II movie as only he can, with instantly iconic characters, dialogue, and oh-so-clever set pieces.

7. Telstar

One that most probably missed. Telstar tells the very strange true-life story of Joe Meek: a gay, half-deaf, record producer - with an ear for the cosmos and an obessesion with the occult - who worked on some of the biggest selling pop records of the lat 1950s. A uniquely British story, written and directed by Nick Moran - one of the leads in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - in the vein on 24-Hour Party People. I, for one, am looking forward to more highly-imaginative but ever-so-slightly drab British musical high-jinks with Andy Serkis portrayal of punk legend, Ian Drury, in Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, coming in the new year.

8. Slumdog Millionaire

Cast your minds back to the now foggy reaches of early-2009 and there was just one film to rule them all - the tale of Mumbai slumkids who defy the odds to arrive at a happy ending. As a somewhat-squeemish liberal westerner, I still feel uncomfortable unpacking some of the film's cross-cultural baggage, but its hard to deny that the experience itself is one hell of a ride.

9. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Overshadowed by the tragic death of its leading man, the film never quite fulfils on its promise. But it is still great to see another Terry Gilliam film made largely on his own terms. For a story about hope and damnation that features the devil as a character, it never really theatens the audience's sensibilities enough. But, as a story about the adventurous possibility of the imagination and the importance fantasy in a modern context, I would still recommend it to anyone.

10. A Serious Man

The Coens rarely dissapoint. Apart from with Burn After Reading. That was rubbish.

Now, I know for a fact there are various films I have not seen that I would have liked to, and I probably missed a few gems as well. But, of the stuff I have seen, this is the best of it.

2009-07-25T13:01:00.000-07:00

The Men Who Stare at Goats

This is a book about American military intelligence, written by a British journalist. It is mainly concerned with how 'new age' or 'hippie' ideas in the 1960s were co-opted by the American military establishment, following the trauma of the Vietnam War.

The book makes a lot of wild accusations, often based solely on the testimony of its interviewees. Not that this need necessarily be a problem, but a lack of commentary from Ronson is, because it leads to a confused tone. Is he a sarcastic Louis Theroux type 'journalist' or is he genuinely sincere?

As such, the best parts of the book are those that are easiest to substantiate. For example, I had no idea that the widely reported blasting of 'Barney the Dinosaur' music at prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, was fist introduced to the public as the 'funny' story at the back end of the news - a sort of, anyone with young kids knows exactly what torture is! And, they can't be treating the prisoners too badly if this is the kind of thing that they were getting up to. Except we all now know that what they were doing was very bad indeed, as the photographs that got out at the time reveal.

The bits about Jedi Warriors, Psychic Spys, and one unfortunate General's attempt to walk through walls, are all put pay to the idea of one of the Generals at the start of the book who says, "We do not experiment on each other. It is not part of our culture." This was the quote that stuck with me as the details within the book proceeded to undermine him time and time again.

All in all, an odd read. I don't think I really learnt anything about military intelligence or people who have that kind of mindset - I have always suspected them of being rather strange. So a decent book, but it would have been nice if it were a bit more authoritative.

2009-07-25T02:43:00.000-07:00

It Felt Like a Kiss

Put together in his trademark montage style, the film ties numerous story strands together in order to evoke the atmosphere of the kind of world that American power was ushering in in the late 1950s and 1960s. In the absence of Curtis’ trademark voice, narrating the action, subtitles and the rest of the soundtrack - the music in particular, pick up the slack.

As a piece of visual art, it is well worth a watch. But unlike the rest of his work, after about 20 minutes, one does begin to wonder - what is the point of all this? What is he actually trying to say? Maybe it is not as simple as all that, and the film is just what it says it is - “a story”. Maybe the film itself is incomplete outside the context of the live performance it was originally intended to cooperate with.

There are a few funny, strange, interesting little cultural titbits and juxtapositions, but the babyish seeming nature of the narrative is troubling - this happened, then this happened, then this - as is the overall tone. Is this a serious examination or a black comedy? The way that everything turns on a pin with the Kennedy assassination, America losing its innocence, this is something that I have seen peddled time and time again, and I just don’t buy it.

Available for a limited time only on Adam Curtis’ BBC blog, here. I recommend you make up you own mind.

2009-05-14T07:24:00.000-07:00

Back by popular demand

"Second star to the right, and straight on 'till morning"

I don't want to come back to earth, to concentrate on what I've got to concentrate on in order to get my work done, I want to keep my head in that Star Trek space-place and carry on thinking about what happened and what might happen, and what I think about what happened and what might happen.

I don't want to have to write about oil and gas production and exploration in the Middle East, which, when you're sat in an office in Norwich, typing on an iMac, is not nearly as exotic as it might sound. I want to read up and learn about spaceships and new technology, and start planning how I might be able to join Starfleet, when it is formed in the early part of the 23rd century.

Fears that Abrams casting might be more Dawson's Creek-soft that science fiction-hard prove unfounded. The actors hit all of the right notes, playing young, ultra-smart, boundlessly energetic versions of the characters we have all grown to know and love, excited by the possibilities of time and space and adventure and themselves. There are a lot of exclamations in this movie: “I can do that!” “I've never done that before!” Hinting at the characters that they might one day grow into, without ever resorting to parody or pastiche.

The series is so written in pop culture folklore, it seems almost like sacrilidge to start praising individual actors when none of the them (Leonard Nimoy excepted - he is Spock) are played by the original cast members - but praise I must. *SPOILERS AHEAD* Kirk is strapping himself into a seat on a shuttle ready to blast him and the rest of the new Starfleet recruits out of the atmosphere. A less than sane sounding man is kicking and making his voice heard somewhere off screen; a crew member asks the crank to take a seat. You see the vacant space next to Kirk and immediately start thinking about Jasper Carrot and the nutter on the bus. When he sits you don't recognise him, of course, until he announces, "All I've got left are these bones." Dr Leonard McCoy has arrived.

This movie is that thing that the earlier Star Trek movies never were, young and vibrant. The TV show sets the positive future template for this throughly entertaining movie, which re-writes the past, and as a consequence, the future we thought we already knew. Thanks to a rip in the time-space continuam exploited by a Romulan miner out for revenge, Star Trek reality has been re-written. Chris Pine might not necessarily grow up to be William Shatner, Spock might not learn to keep his human side under control - all bets are off, and I for one can't wait to see what happens next in the continuing voyage of the Starship Enterprise.

2009-02-17T09:57:00.000-08:00

The Creatives

I don't know about you, but I've read a lot of articles about the internet (on the internet) in the past couple of weeks. Apparently, the internet (or “web 2.0” as you might have heard it called) is forever changing the way we interact, socialise, think and behave. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are the birth of a new kind media, leading to unparralled levels of interconnectdness, while Wiki and blogs are busy democratising information.

All sounds rather grand when you frame it in those terms, but is it really?

I don't know about you, but a typical net outing tends to mean visiting the same ten or twelve sites, checking my e-mail and... not a lot else... Where is this brave new world I’m being promised? Maybe I missed a meeting.

In a recent article, self appointed, "obnoxious media know-it-all" Toby Young pointed out one of the essential problems with Twitter. It's one big game of follow the leader. You can post things to other people, but unless they happen to be "following" you, you don't get anything back the other way. It’s the computing equivalent of talking to a brick wall – typing at a screen!

It's very easy to argue that I just "don't get" it, but even on the rare occasions that I feel tempted to join in, curious to see if these shiny new "apps" can satiate my futurist desires, yet another mention of Stephen "courdroy-trousers-pipe-and-slippers-and-a-mug-of-hot-coco" Fry, and my dreams of a bright new digital future are crushed under old oak beams of convention. It would be chirlish to blame him personally, 100, 000 "followers" must give one hell of an ego massage.

This feeling of disconect reached its nadir when I read about Cadbury's new £3.7m ad campaign, and the entusiasm it has been greeted with, bouyed by the internet. A robot-sounding corporate exectutive proudly mugged about the company’s “innovative new approach”, starting the "buzz" by “letting the bloggers have it first.” Bloggers, were then, presumably, so flattered to have been approached they proceeded to let the world know about the lastest piece of marketing genius from “the creatives” at Cadbury. (Remember that Gorilla on the drums? That was them too! Wow!)

So, finally, here’s the rub. Where are the power centres in this equation? Are we really hearing a multiplicity of voices, or does the song remain the same? Has a plague of free thinking broken out or are we doing what we're told, for fear that doing otherwise might mean we don't get heard at all?

How the average blogger, with an audience of one (normally themselves), generates any "buzz" is beyond me.

2009-02-11T07:37:00.001-08:00

Word of the Week

Ossify

2009-02-08T05:42:00.001-08:00

Future Shock

We are being watched. Right now, everything I type is being logged, calculated and fed into algorithms designed to help corporations sell me things. At least, that is according to Nicholas Carr, in his book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the world from Edison to Google.

The book is split into two parts. The first is a relatively sober, scholerly account of the rise of so-called ‘cloud computing’ – examples include: Facebook, and YouTube, and Twitter – a basic definition being, an IT service run from the internet, drawing computing power, software tools, or storage capacity from a ‘remote’ source. Blogging is another good example.

Carr talks about the extent to which the internet is used to deliver and then run programs previously run from your desktop. He talks about the massive data centres companies like Google and Microsoft are building in secret locations around the globe, in order to support this new web infrastructure. In doing so he draws parallels between the cuurent move to ‘utlity’ computing and the creation of the electric power grid, highlighting some of the socialogical and economic changes that resulted from electricity becoming something you could just plug into. Carr believes that the tranferr of power from the PC, to ‘the cloud’, will have an equally profound effect on the popular culture.

Then there is Carr the futurist. In this section he paints an increasingly authoritarian picture of what might result from ‘the switch’, as the internet transforms (without a lot of people really realising) from the World Wide Web into the World Wide Computer. Carr seems to want to warn us to remain skeptical, by equipping us with the knowledge and tools we need, to question the authorities that would impose such a change.

In the final chapter things get very strange indeed as Carr reveals the ‘true’ motivation driving Sergei Brinn and Larry Page, the brilliant young mathematicians, who co-founded Google in 1998. What he says sounds ripped from the pages of a science fiction novel, making it exciting, ludicrous and very scary. However, what is fanciful fiction one day is making headlines the next. “Google and Nasa are throwing their weight behind a new school for futurists in Silicon Valley to prepare scientists for an era when machines become cleverer than people,” the Finacial Times told us here on February 3, 2009.

So, given the potential threats to security, ownership, indentity, plurality and dare I say it even spiratuality, the book highlights, it seems odd that Carr should view the change as inevitable. The fact is, the internet can do great things, but that doesn’t mean everything should be on it. For the time being at least, each of us remains the master of our own destiny, we still weild ultimate power over the machines – at the end of the day, we can turn them off.

2009-02-04T04:31:00.000-08:00

Word of the week

Ephemera

2009-01-27T00:35:00.003-08:00

Word of the week

Instantiate

2009-01-16T06:01:00.001-08:00

CATE Week One

Group Challenge:

Avoid buying lunch or snacks from shops or cafes: sandwiches, soft drinks, water, etc.

Make a packed lunch and fill your water bottle from the tap!

Personal Challenge:

Don't buy anything for a day

How did I get on? Well, I set the group challenge so I ought to have done well. This challenge had a variety of added benefits. First of all, there is the obvious monetary saving - roughly five pounds a day. Then, such was the food in our house, I have started eating at least three of my five fruit and veg a day, at work. However, it does mean I miss out on my daily walk into town, and for the first two days of this challenge I ended up sitting at my desk, surfing the internet, all the way through dinner. Friday was half day, so this was not an issue. On Monday I had some books to take back to the library. In warmer climbs I wouldn't hesitate to take my lunch with me outside and eat it on a bench... if I am going to keep taking a packed lunch to work, I need to make sure I get out of the office as well. Around the same time, I started feeling a strong desire to go and get a soft drink, this, as we all know is nothing more or less than a symptom of addiction. That's right folks, if you have a craving for a particular food, you are suffering from addition. Most likely sugar, the crack cocaine of the food world. So, on Thursday afternoon I was suffering from cabin feever and the most pathetic kind cold turkey. Ha!

Achieving my individual challenge was easy. Lying in my bed, Friday evening, last week, (roughly half way through the allotted challenge period) pondering the day I had just had, I realised I had failed to set an individual challenge... So, I set a retrospective one. I would have made it not buying anything for the week, but I had already failed in that, abscent mindedly buying myself a pint of coke at the pub (Seeing as it was at a pub I don't think it counts towards the group challenge - you decide).

... So, who's turn next?

2009-01-13T03:13:00.001-08:00

Word of the week

Alacrity

2009-01-12T07:39:00.000-08:00

James Cameron on the set of his new film, Avatar, standing over one of the film's Avatar chambers.

Empire magazine in running this image in conjunction with an accompanying explanation. It details what an Avatar chamber is, and why it is important to the film.

.... All you need to know is: James Cameron is back making sci-fi. This image alone evokes so much more than the spoilerific ramblings of a witless journalist.

2009-01-10T04:45:00.000-08:00

Word of the week

Entryst

2009-01-01T07:11:00.000-08:00

Forward Looking Statements

Looking at the films slated for release, 2009 is shaping up very well indeed. Whether all of the films mentioned herein jusify the expectation remains to be seen but, for the time being, I’m excited. Hollywood must be running low on comic books to adapt and sequels to commision because they are, once again, daring to make films based on (whisper it) original stories.

Oscar films tend to be some of the most highly anticipated of the year, largely because they play well to the critics who write the pieces that inflame or deflate our appetite for a given film. This year’s lot is no exception – with the Best Actor catagory looking particularly strong. First off, Brad Pitt has an outside chance for his performance gothic-romance, The Curious Case of Banjamin Button, based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, about a man who ages backwards. Arguable, just as strange, is the return of Mikey Rourke in Darren Aronovsky’s, The Wrestler. Both of which face strong competition from Academy favourites: Viggo Motenen (in Good), perenial awards-botherer, Phillip Seymour Hoffman (in Doubt), and Leonardo DiCaprio (in Revolutionary Road).

Portrayals of real-life characters always go down well with Academy voters. This year, Shaun Penn is Harvey Milk, the first openly gay official elected to major public office in the US. Benicio Del Toro is Argentine revolutinoary and counter-culture icon, Che Guevara, in Steven Soderberg’s five-hour epic (being shown as two films in most terratories). Then there is Frank Langella, bringing his Tony Award winning stage performance as Richard Milhous Nixon, 36th President of the United States, to the screen.

In the summer, Roland Emmerich is back to blow things up in near future fantasy, 2012. With a bit of luck, conventional superhero mythology will be willfully exploded by Zack Snyder’s adaptation of Alan Moore’s, highly revered, Watchmen. And, it just wouldn’t be Hollywood if there weren’t a couple of sequels (given that it’s the summer, I think we can let them off). This year we’ve got Terminator 4, which looks far better than it has a right to, and the darkest Harry Potter yet (suprise, suprise!). Along with JJ Abrams retro-revamp of Star Trek to look forward to.

Also expect high quality family fare from Pixar (Up!) and Tim Burton (9). Along with more off-beat visions from Spike Jonze and Wes Anderson, with Where The Wild Things Are and a claymation version of Roahl Dahl’s classic, Fantastic Mr Fox, respectively.

Fighting the British corner. The joker in the pack at this year’s Oscars is likely to be Danny Boyle’s Who Wants to be a Millionare inspired, Slumdog Millionare. Then there is The Damned United, with Michael Sheen (best known for playing Tony Blair in The Deal and The Queen) doing his best Brian Clough impression. And Telstar, a film about maverick music producr Joe Meek – a story I know next to nothing about, but one that I hope might prompt some 24 Hour Party people style pseudo-fictitious Gonzo madness.

Most intriguingly, 2009, appears to be the year that weirdo film god, David Lynch, turned producer extrordinare, helping Alejandro Jodorowsky make his first film in nearly 20 years – King Shot, a ‘metaphysical western with gansters’. As well as acting as produer on Alex Cox’ long mooted Repo Man sequel – Repo Chick, which Cox has said: “will unfold against the backdrop of the credit crunch and the subprime mortgage crisis in the US, where repossessions of homes, cars and other forms of property is at a new high. ‘The repo business has expanded to everything from boats, houses, aeroplanes, small nations...children.”

2009 also sees some of our favourite auterurs working again. Michael Mann is set to re-create Heat in a period setting, with Christian Bale and Johnny Depp, as cop and crim. Quentin Tarantino is set to thrill us with a Sergio Leone inspired vision of World War Two in Inglorious Basterds, and Terry Gilliam will invite us to enter the warped reality of The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus.

At the end of the year we can look forward to 3D motion caputure madness from James Cameron and Robert Zemekis, with Avatar and A Christmas Carol, respectively. Along with Tim Burton, surely a perfect fit for, Alice in Wonderland. And here’s hoping that Guy Ritchie can shock us all and nail Sherlock Holmes

Have an awesome 2009!

2008-12-22T04:03:00.001-08:00

End of the Year Review

Here we are again - a time for goodwill to all men, shameless consumerism, gluttony, and lists – endless lists - remembering, shaping and expanding upon the best and worst of 2008.

First up – films.

The year in film began strongly, with two dark, American tales, both set amongst the desolate, desert landscape of the great plains, duking it out for Oscar glory. No Country for Old Men won Best Picture but There Will be Blood was the better film, largely because of the colosal presence of Daniel Day Lewis.

At one point during the summer it looked as though the The Dark Knight might be hit a hit of Titanic proportions, before eventually settling into fourth place on The Most Successful Films of All Time list. The Dark Knight being the biggest headline grabber in a summer dominated by superheroes - again. Iron Man and Hancock both did good business, but The Incredible Hulk, and superior Hellboy 2, struggled.

Shamefully, all of he above were beaten by the film that this year became most successful film of all time at the UK box office: Mamma Mia!

The later part of the year was harder to define, but it did see the release of what I’m calling the best film of the year, just pipping There Will Be Blood to the post.

Films of the Year (in reverse order):

5. No Country For Old Men

4. The Dark Knight

3. I’m Not There

2. There Will Be Blood

1. Waltz With Bashir

An animated documentary, made by Israeli filmmaker, Ari Folman, about his time spent serving in the Israeli Defence Forces, during their conflict with Lebanon in the early-80s. Folman travels around Europe, talking to other men in his platoon, as he attempts to piece his own memory of events back together again.

Classic scene:

Opon on a troop carrier, filled with drunken, roudy youths, heading into the conflict zone. Set to the electropop of OMD’s Enola Gay (also the name of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb). One weedy young soldier, 19, is puking his guts out over the side, fantasising about a giant blue woman coming out of the sea to rescue him from imminent danger and rob him of his virginity.

Beautiful, strange, scary and poetic, Waltz with Bashir blurs memory and imagination, reality and cartoon, in a way that is only possible in animation, creating a mix that resonates all the more because of it.

2008-12-22T01:47:00.000-08:00

Word of the week

Eidetic

2008-12-21T03:01:00.000-08:00

Hidden

Yesterday was the start of the end-of-year film binge. A wide range of festive treats were on offer including, fun-for-all-the-family romp, A Knight's Tale, and the watered down, but nevertheless enjoyable, film version of Alan Moore's story about a masked vigilatte terrorist, V for Vendetta. My choice...

Hidden, written and directed by Austrian filmmaking pofessor, Michael Haneke. Not exactly tradition Christmas fare, but highly recommended. The story takes what might have been a standard paranoid thiller premise - a middle class French couple start recieving survelliance style video tapes of themselves going about their lives - then uses that as a jumping off point.

Too many films strive for the intellectual gravitas of great literature by adopting literary tropes. Deapite the fact that a silver tongued narrator or florid prose are impossible to replicate on screen. And this is exactly where Hiden excels. Hidden is a film that undestands the language of cinema and is very happy playing in that particular sandbox, exploring ideas about the relationship between cameras and voyeuism, deception and perception; and ultimately, what is revealed and what remains hidden!

What I'll be watching: Oliver Twist, Channel Four, 6:30pm, Today. Roman Polanski's take on the classic Dickens tale.

2008-12-12T09:35:00.000-08:00

Word of the week

Obscurantism

2008-11-05T04:11:00.001-08:00

America

2008-10-27T08:24:00.000-07:00

Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

Salvador Dali has got nothing on these guys!

2008-10-20T05:58:00.000-07:00

I believe it was about this time last year (I can check easily enough) that I wrote a blog about my tendency to start books and never finish reading them. I'm afraid, things have not improved. I have a similar list to post today. Currently on my reading list are:

London Fields by Martin Amis - an audio book so it is very likely that I will finish it.

High-Rise by J G Ballard - I think I've read about 60 pages and the book is only something like 170, so there is still hope. All just a little bit too predictable so far. Why do blurbs have to give so much away?

Spook Country by William Gibson - just started this one.

The Yiddish Policeman's Union by Michael Chabon - The premise for this book is brilliant. Set in a noir-ish alternative reality where Alaska became a safe-haven for Jews fleeing the Nazis during World War Two, a Bogart like figure is our hero. His latests case: a heroin addicted chess champion found murdered in his hotel room. Nothing very out of the ordinary, but as the clues mount, more and more evidence seems to indicate that the dead man may have been the Second Coming.

This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel J. Levitin - a non-fiction book written by a British neuroscientist currently working as a lecturer at a top American university. Having previously worked as a session musician, producer, and sound engineer for artists such as Stevie Wonder and Blue Oyster Cult.

Not entirely sure what the purpose of putting this list on here is. It was just something I remembered I did last year, and it would seem I can't help myself... Finish something!... sounds like a good piece of advice.

2008-09-05T06:40:00.000-07:00

An American Tale

1999. A film about a frustrated computer nerd given god-like powers by his realisation that the world around him is a computer generated hallucination is on it's way to becoming a global phenomenon. Meanwhile, another film, telling the true life story of a bunch of ambitious and driven computer nerds who went out and formed the companies that helped changed the shape of reality as we know it, is going quietly about its business.

ClOSE UP: a young man in his mid twenties, focussed and earnest, stares straight down the camera lens directly addressing the viewer:

“I don't want you to think of this as just a film - some process of converting electrons and magnetic impulses into shapes and figures and sounds - no. Listen to me. We're here to make a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why even be here? We're creating a completely new consciousness, like an artist or a poet. We're rewriting the history of human thought with what we're doing. That's how you have to think of this.”

The camera tracks back to reveal that the young man – one Steve Jobs – is in fact on the set of the Apple “1984” commercial, talking to Ridley Scott, who clearly has other things on his mind: “Steven, right now I'm a touch more worried about getting light on the actress, know what I mean?”

The film is called Pirates of Silicon Valley, a made for TV movie produced by an American network, it tells the story of the rise of the home computer from the point of view of two of the men who made it happen, Steve Jobs of Apple and Bill Gates of Microsoft.

It is a quintessential Americn success story, there isn’t a lot of insight, but so much swagger and brovado. All of the characters are already fully formed when they are introduced to us - Bill Gates is a poker playing mastermind, born for the boardroom, and Steve Jobs is an idealistic hippy who shaved his beard and bought a suit.

Great little lines of dialogue and exchanges are peppered throughout, and little surrealistic touches really bring the technology and the boardrooms to life, creating a palpable sense that what these people were doing was truly groundbreaking and revolutionary.

2008-08-25T06:59:00.000-07:00

A short story I wrote during my lunch break, 20th August 2008

Inspired by a proud mother in Costa speaking her son's exam results down the telephone too loudly.

“Jim was feeling nervous. Since 'the System' was introduced the understandable tension that had once accompanied results day had been replaced by a frenzy that bordered on mania. The entire economy had a vested interest, today's results would determine the future direction of the country.

Exams no longer graded students with arbitrary letters of the alphabet, the System scientifically tested candidate's brains, determining their genetically preordained propensity for certain jobs.

The year it was introduced the System caused a bit of a stir. When it found that, given the opportunity, 80% of candidates would go on to be great artists, the response was unprecedented. Since then however, the results had been far more predicatable, the population seemingly made up of a perfect balance of workers, thinkers, creatives and consumers, able to meet the country's societal needs as determined by business.

The second year test made accommodation for the first year's 'freak' result and yielded a more acceptable overview: a selection of doctors, lawyers, industry leaders, advertising execs, teachers, nurses, bin men, admin assistants, shop owners, shelf stackers, factory operatives and unemployed.

Jim's Dad had not taken the test. He had taken his GCSE exams in 2008, and failed in all but two subjects. He was what, in the olden days would have been called a free thinker...”

That's as far as I got. If anyone would like to find out where the short story might go, post something in the comments page and I will try and find our what happens.

2008-03-19T05:41:00.000-07:00

No Maggie No!

Two days ago I read an article in The Guardian by music critic John Harris about David Cameron's thwarted attempts to have his picture taken outside 'Salford Lads Club'. The story goes that the MP for the area, Hazel Blears, having got wind of Cameron's ruse, dispatched a group of flunkies with placards marked, "Salford Lads Club not Eton snobs" and "Oi Dave - Eton Toffs Club 300 miles that way", to ambush Cameron's photo-op.

Recounting the story at a Labour Party conference Blears announced that she "couldn't resist it" and sent Cameron a picture of herself outside the afformentioned club. They play their games and we try and get along with living our lives.

For those of you that are slightly bewildered by this non-story about a spat between politicians trying to pass itself off as a comment on class-conflict, 'Salford Lads Club' was where Morrissey et al were photographed for the inside cover of The Smiths 1986 LP The Queen is Dead, as if that is meant to mean anything to anyone living in 2008.

Then again, maybe it means quite a lot if you're a middle aged rock writer with a romantic view of a desolate past where dole cues ran for miles, the young and the old were abandoned by an uncaring goverment and the beast called Thatcher ruled with an iron fist! Moreover a place where clear lines were drawn between Left and Right, Conservative and Socialist, Tory and Pinko, wrong and right!

Harris' central agrument is that the new vogue for politicians wanting to appear in touch with popular culture, is damaging the culture’s ability to have something to say, against the government, against the establishment, against authority of any kind. Harris says, "It's as if those songs have been retrospectively robbed of their political charge and rendered kitch - just more stuff to be stuck on the great collective playlist, and shuffled beyond any meaning." I don't think too many people were interested in whether Ted Heath or Harold Wilson were fans of The Beatles or The Kinks, they're supposed to be worrying about more important things.

He singles out the Tory party and specifically David Cameron, complaining that Dave is trying to co-opt 'anti-Thatcher' songs from the 1980s by The Smiths and The Jam, in order to boost the image of his caring, socialy responsible, hoodie-hugging Tory Party.

It's the kind of article you seem to see a lot of, using the facts in a bald kind of way that serves its own purpose and denies the rest. In this case, retrospectively rendering creative decisions political. It imagines popular music as a kind of battle ground, a place for division and taking sides, and "lies that life is black and white".

For my money just about the only thing more dull than a politician talking poilicy is a muscian trying to force-feed people their political views, and a self-righteous critic taking ownership of something that was never theirs is even worse. I think what I am talking about is the difference between politics and Politics. Every action is political, if you care to look at it in that sense. Just as everything is ideological, social, sexual, depending on who's glasses you decide to wear. Most people don’t see things in quite such a polarising way.

Who wants to listen to an earnest, right-on, socialist like Billy Brag whinge about Thatcher? "It says nothing to me about my life." He apparently jumped at the chance to have his picture taken with Gordon Brown, recently. Bragg said, “Yes! At last! I can send a clear message to the Cameronistas that there's absolutely no chance of them fucking co-opting me.” Well, quite, and its this kind of self-important egoism that makes Billy Brag one of the least inspiring figures in music. That and just in case he’s had a complete irony bypass, on the issue of being co-opted - by allying yourself with Gordon Brown, you already have mate.

2008-03-16T17:33:00.000-07:00

Show me the money!

There are no jobs for intelligent university graduates who want to get along and get a job. I’ve been looking for one for far too long. I’ve been unable to get even the most basic office job because I don’t have ‘office experience’, whatever that means. It’s a room, with people, computers and telephones. What else is there to understand? Seriously, am I missing something? It’s not like I’m being picky either. I’ve tried for everything.

Almost all of the advertised jobs I see are secretarial and administrational. Not only would falling into one of these be an appalling waste of talent – though, I would take one right now, of course, you’ve got to get some kind of foot on that ladder, even if it’s one you’ve no interest in climbing (Tim from The Office – ed.) - but I’m never going to get one of those jobs ‘cos I don’t have the legs.

I am very ambitious and would really like to be a writer/film director in the future. Both of which I understand are long term goals. Both of which I am trying to work towards in my spare time. But how do I get a job in between times? (answers welcome!) So I can have some cash, so I can do some of the things I want to do outside of trying to get a job, so I can better myself, move on, move out, move up and repair a fractured sense of self-esteem/self-worth/self-control in my life, my country, my world.

My employable skills: Number one would have to be my writing. I do it very well. I could comfortably supply copy for any of the national film magazines I read. Writing reviews, features, interviews. The same goes for music magazines or newspapers. I have a passion for both. I’ve sent letters to about a dozen of them – no response.

I could do a good job in PR, whether it be for a business to business marketing magazine – I have applied to some of them and, presumably, had my application laughed at. The advert read: “ideal for a literature graduate looking to make a start in the industry.” How I didn’t get an interview for that one is beyond me. I’m the ideal candidate!

I would gladly work in marketing, as much as I loathe the cacophonous noise of advertising that surrounds us at every turn. It still ticks most of my boxes. It’s creative, its working with others, it’s valued, and as one particularly obnoxious commentator pointed out on a recent BBC show about advertising, “”We’re not Communists are we?! We’re all trying to make money!”

Or I could work for the radio. I have some experience working for the university radio station, which I enjoyed enormously.

Moving to another area is not an option. That requires money, which means having a job, which is what I can’t get. It’s one of those viscous circle things.

How does a fully rounded human being go about squashing themselves, their ideas, their individuality so they can go into the world of work and earn a crust? Is that something you need to do? If university is about opening your mind to the possibilities the world has to offer, getting a job is surely about closing it again, or maybe that should be not being able to get a job is about closing it again, cutting off parts of yourself so you can fit into a structure, a time, a table, a timetable. Maybe this is the kind of thinking that’s stopped me getting a job.

Right now I’m mad about this and I’ve got a right to be. I’ve got to hate someone and it’s going to be the government, the job centre, the system, the society, ‘cos it sure as hell is not my fault. I’m doing everything I can. I’m a very intelligent university graduate who can make a success of anything I turn my hand to. I have realistic goals as well as dreams I intend to follow, and I don’t understand why I’m not being given the chance, and just in case there’s any confusion, I couldn’t be more serious.

2008-03-10T06:58:00.000-07:00

Crash!

Watched the 2006 Best Picture winner, Crash, last night and as is so often the case I find myself torn between two opposite points of view. Some people told me Crash was hokey and contrived and stupid and rubbish, others told me it was political and important and intelligent. Ten minutes in I was wrestling with whether I thought it was good or terrible and my conclusion is this….

I think it is a film that asks to be taken as a whole. At times I was annoyed by the lack of a story, wanting a thread to follow, but as the film goes along and the characters begin to intertwine I found myself liking it more. By the end there were enough moments that smacked an emotion punch (and boy do some of them hit hard!) for me to like it… with some reservations.

I feel like a lot of the films problems would have been remedied if it had been better directed. Paul Haggis is a very good writer - he was pivotal in revitalising the Bond franchise with Casino Royale, he also wrote Million Dollar Baby, which makes a very interesting companion piece to Crash. But when it comes to direction, he directs everything in the style of coverage, with slightly wobbly cam, which isn’t quite documentary shaky but isn’t Speilbergian precision either. There is little sense of an eye for telling a story, almost as if the camera is a nuisance rather than a tool. This gives the film a floaty, flimsy quality, which does the lightness of the film’s conceits no favours.

Finally, upon its release, lots of people talked about race and politics in the film, but there was very little talk about the obvious religious subtext. Firstly, the film is set at Christmas; there are lots of Jesus and Mary and Santa figures littered about the place, and the whole film is about ideals concerning innocence, compassion and forgiveness. It is clearly intended as a kind of parable.

In conclusion, if you approach Crash with a cynical, detached, British sense of cool you may well find yourself laughing at the films contrivances. But if you go in with an open mind, willing to receive an American fancy that dares to say, we might just work it out in the end, there is an enjoyable, engaging film waiting to be seen.

2008-03-07T02:26:00.000-08:00

That joke isn’t funny anymore

Welcome to the new look BBC Three, made specifically for you, the ‘yoof’ of today. Auntie BBC doesn’t want to be your stern, finger-wagging, Catholic auntie anymore. This is something far less dignified; your embarrassing uncle, who shows up at a wedding, drinks too much, desperatly tries to be down with the kids, and vomits over one of the bridesmaids.

The tent-pole show in this ‘re-branding’ exercise is Lily Allen and Friends, a sarcastic cackle-fest with nothing to say. It wants to be frank and direct but settles for crude and horrible. Amid nervous smiles and drunken applause Lily Allen strives for incompetence, any conspicuous show of talent or ability might unsettle an apathetic audience.

The BBC3 controller, Danny Cohen, says his aim is "To reflect that it is a world buzzing with new talent… Youth brands today live or die by their openness to the creativity of their users or viewers," Presumably, he’s referring to the point in the show when viewers are invited to send in videos of themselves humping lampposts and mail boxes.

It’s not good enough to claim that shows like this are reflecting society back at us, just showing things how they are. Firstly, because it’s not true and secondly because I think television should be doing more than that. It’s also not good enough to shrug and say, well, it’s only TV. It’s time the people in charge of these things started taking some responsibility for what they produce.

Just a quick glance at the schedules, tonight on BBC Three we have, Freaky Eaters and Bizarre ER - “An angler with a fishing weight buried in his eye socket arrives at A&E.”

When you look at the contempt with which the BBC deals with programming intended for young people its little wonder they want to drink themselves into a hole. Where else is there to go? These programmes are stupid, complacent, and patronising, they don’t offer any sense of ideas, identity, or culture and if this is the best the BBC can offer young people they’d be better of scrapping the whole enterprise, marking it up as a failed experiment, not to be repeated.

2008-03-03T08:37:00.000-08:00

Watched two very different but entertaining movies last night.

“It happens sometimes. People just explode. Natural causes.”

All in a days work for your friendly neighbourhood repo man. Repo Man is that most beloved of all things, a geunine cult classic. Hooray! Not a self-concious wannabe trying too hard to be culty but the real thing: a weird, off-beat, slightly hokey but genuinely original and strange creation. It also happens to have one of the best starts to a film of all time, a brilliant Iggy Pop theme song and punk soundtrack.

A disollusioned teenager played by Emilio Estevez, ‘a suburban punk’, gets fired from his job and happens upon Harry Dean Stantion, a repo man. Estevez soon becomes embroilled in the repo business and is taken under the wing of each of the would be father figures on the lot. They describe to him their philosophies on life, the universe and the repo business. Meanwhile there is talk of an alien invasion, time travel, the CIA and a mysterious car you hope you don’t run into.

“Feed the Idiot Box.”

The other was Spike Lee’s new millienium satire Bamboozled, which deals with reperesentations of black people on American television and in American society.

Damon Wayans plays an uptight, nasal voiced writer who works for a major television network in America. Tired of having his ideas for intelligent programmes about black people turned down, he pitches an idea for a show so offensive he will be fired and released from his contract. He schemes to revive the black and white minstrel show, and to his horror, the show is a massive commericial success, which garners him critical praise and awards too.

It’s an uncomfortable watch and a demanding one too. There is very little direction from Lee in terms of how you should be feeling or responding to the charcaters and the events they are embroiled in. Our hero may not be a hero at all.

The message is simple, as is often the case with satire: there is no such thing as black people, only black people. At least, that’s what I took from it, however, the film so ironical and multi-faceted, I would image, different people’s respones to it will be varied in the extreme.

2008-02-14T05:12:00.000-08:00

Gods and Monsters

There will be Blood is a great film and you get the sense Paul Thomas Anderson (the film’s director) knows it is. Films like this don’t get made in Britian, it takes the confience and moral certainty/superiority of an American to make something with this much attack. It never strays far from the extremely pointed edge, yet you let the film take you there because you know you are in safe hands.

It is a film about a giant of a man, a monster fuelled by ambition and greed. Daniel Plainview is charismatic and articulate, making him an utterly compelling hero, before we are introduced to some of the more troubling aspects of his character, which undermine his worthyness somewhat. It is a film about the will to power and the corrosive effect that can have, a simple idea expressed with clarity and purpose, which sets the film in a great American tradition, think of films like Citizen Kane, Treasure of the Sierre Madre, Giant, The Godfather.

Daniel Day Lewis is so naturally larger-than-life in the central role he fills the screen in way that is rarely seen. This is an iconic turn that recalls DeNiro in Raging Bull and Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange, in terms of pure, vital aliveness on screen. An instance of a special kind of chemistry that happens between actor and character that shakes your expectations of just how powerful cinema can be.

It is also worth noting Jonny Greenwood’s exceptional score, which is discordant at times, lyrical at others, and goes beyond simply punctuating the emotional beats of the action to suggest something more primal.

Finally, anyone who wants to tell you this is a thinly veiled metaphor about America’s reliance on oil is a nit-wit. To saddle the film with such a pat explanation of its themes seems worryingly reductive to me. This is, simply put, a great story about a great character told confidently by a great filmmaker.

2008-01-30T05:21:00.001-08:00

Charlie Wilson's War

Charlie Wilson’s War is the new Tom Hanks vehicle. Based on a true story, Hanks plays Charlie Wilson, a debauched southern senator who seems to spend half his time bedding beautiful women and the other half helping to finance the CIA’s operations in Afghanistan during the Cold War.

As this description suggests Charlie Wilson’s War is a film of two halves and one half is significantly better than the other. The first half is a frothy, fun, brittle comedy with good performances by likeable, recognisable stars. The second half, dealing with the politics, is less well handled. When the Americans decide they will help Afghanistan shoot down the Russian helicopters there is a lot of flag waving and patriotism, which, as a Brit, made me feel slightly queasy. The film could have included more about the wider political context and the repercussions these actions had, which were not all good.

Philip Seymour Hoffman gives a stand-out performance as a rouge CIA agent who helps Charlie get what Charlie wants, for which he has received a deserved Oscar nomination.

2008-01-30T05:21:00.000-08:00

No Country for old men

I need to stop reading reviews. Every review I saw prior to seeing this assured me it was a masterpiece. I should have known then that I was going to be dissapointed. I am increasingly of the opinion that it is impossible to say what is a masterpiece on the instance of its release.

The reviews also harked on about this being a more ‘mature’ film from the Coens. This is a pose critics often adopt when a cult favourite makes something more ‘naturalist’, more ‘realist’, less enshrined in their own universe. But the idea that the Coens are finally ‘growing up’ is absurd. These are men in their 50’s!

So, the film is no masterpiece. What it is is an old fashioned thriller in a period setting (no mobile phones, no sat nat, no internet). It is very visceral, the action is painful and brusing and muscular and there is very little dialogue, but crucially, for me, there is no character development. The acting is great but you never engage with anyone. The filmmaking is of a very high standard but you are never drawn into the story in a meaningful way because you don’t care about the people on screen – you don’t know them. The story itself is oddly plodding, there are no themes that immediatley jump out at you, some might put that down to subtlety and depth, I wouldn’t.

There are things to like here but I was interested rather than engaged.

2008-01-16T14:19:00.000-08:00

Turn and face the strange…

Todd Haynes Bob Dylan biopic eschews conventional storytelling in favour of something more rambling and abstract, as befits the man himself. The story is not drawn from Dylan’s life so much as it is drawn from his songs, though most of the major points that might have formed the basis of a Walk the Line style bio-pic are at least touched upon.

The one thing everyone knows about I’m Not There is that it’s the film in which Dylan’s shifting persona are portrayed by six different people, starting with a young, black actor, then moving onto Batman and the Joker, Richard Gere and Cate Blanchet. However, different and daring as that may sound, what the film lacks, perhaps not surprisingly, is a common voice. There is no thread trying to tie the characters together, or even a Rosebud style Maguffin to unite them. There are no characters common to more than one of the stories, no obvious bleedover where we can see elements of one present in another. They operate as separate vignettes. Perhaps those holes were left there on pupose?

Cate Blanchet has been getting most of the attention and quite rightly so. A statuesque Aussie actress would not be most people’s first choice to play Bob Dylan, but her performance as Dylan’s most recognisable and iconic persona is note perfect. It helps that her section happens to contain many of the film’s best set pieces: a Benny Hill meets Hard Days Night cameo from the Beatles, Allen Ginsberg in a golf buggey and the only straight out musical number in the whole film. Other aspects/actors are less well served. Richard Gere as a reclusive wild west hero called Billy, seemingly trapped in a bizzare fantasy town, hits a particuarly bum note.

As a whole the film doesn’t sow together to form a fully satisfying experience, but there are enough moments to suggest where else it might have gone, before retreating. As a result each audience member leaves with their own impression of what they think they saw. This will thrill some and annoy others. I was entertained throughout.

2007-12-17T09:55:00.000-08:00

Watch Channel 4 Tonight

Tonight, at 10 o’clock Channel Four are showing 2 films back to back, both starring George Clooney. The first is O Borther Where Art Thou? which everybody except me seemed to love. I didn’t catch the fim at the cinema but I bought it on DVD in good faith, safe in the knowledge that it was more Big Lebowski and Fargo than Intolerable Cruelty. Supposedly a comedy, I counted a grand total of zero laughs. I have tried to watch it at least 5 times but hav yet to make it all the way through.

Solaris, on the other hand, is some of George Clooney’s best work. A much underated film which the critics wrongly panned and the studio, pannicked by the reviews, decided to sell as ‘the film where you can see George Clooney’s bum.’ It is in fact a very clever, thought-provoking piece of sci-fi about ideas, which I know are not particualry fashionable nowaddays, but that shouldn’t be enough to stop you.

All I’m saying is give yourself the chance to make your own mind. I’m not going to tell you what to think… On this occasion I’m feeling too lazy.

2007-12-04T02:38:00.000-08:00

In recent months I have developed a rather bad habit of starting a book, not finishing it, then starting another one.

Currently on my reading list:

The Book of Dave – Will Self

Neuromancer – William Gibson – not nearly as mind-blowing as I remember it being when I was 15. Left on pause 50 pages from the end.

Atonement – Ian McEwan – Not started this one yet, but I’ve bought it so it goes on the list

Rip it Up Start Again – Simon Reynolds – just started this one, and early indications are that I might actually finish it having become partially obsessed with the subject matter

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed – Jared Diamond – Very heavy going. I think I’m on chapter 4

Robert DeNiro Biography – John Baxter

David Bowie biography: Loving the alien – Ziggy just met Iggy

Johnny Cash – Not nearly as gripping after 20 pages as the film with Joaquin Pheonix

The Drowned World – J G Ballard

Having made my problem public I hope this will act as a reminder and a spur to finish the books I start!

2007-11-27T00:36:00.000-08:00

Navigating a path between The Godfather and The French Connection

In his review of American Gangster a well known critic described, with some reverence, how Ridley Scott’s latest crime thriller sucessfully wound its way around earlier examples of the genre to position itself in the cannon. But surely you want a new film to do something new? To somehow become more than the sum of it’s influences? How did a derivative genre re-hash come to be accepted as superior entertainment? Like a plate of re-heated afters, you can vaugely make out what the meal might have been but what’s on your plate is little more than lukewarm stodge which, edible as it may be, doesn’t come close to the full flavour of a piping hot main course served fresh out of the oven.

When Sunshine was released earlier in the year Danny Boyle described how it is very hard to make a decent science fiction film nowaddays without invoking the ghosts of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris or Alien, so he decided it was necessary for his film to pay lip-service to these ‘greater’ films. My question is, how did any of the people behind the aforementioned ventures manage to avoid subservience. How were they able to overtake their influences? How did Bob Dylan emerge from the shadow of Woody Guthrie to become Bob Dylan?

American Ganster has the same problem, Ridley Scott seems so entranced by The Godfather, The French Connection, Serpico and Heat, he fails to make it clear where they end and his film begins. What emerges is a watchable but largely bland wander through a potted history of familiar favourites.

The source material provided by the true life story that inspired the film seems far more rich on paper than the story the film provides. For example, all through the film we are given brief glimpses of Russel Crowe’s character, Richie Roberts, studying to become a lawyer, and at the end of the film, having caught his man, we see him prosecute Frank Lucas and get him convicted. The film ends there and we are told, in writing, about Richie Robert’s subsequent move from the prosecution to the Defence Office where his first client was… Frank Lucas. I want to see that story!

2007-10-18T05:38:00.000-07:00

OK Rainbows

I have been meaning to write a piece about Radiohead for a while now, but I always come up short, never quite deciding which angle to approach them from. The first time I knowingly sat down and listened to Radiohead I started drafting a piece about how the band might be as good as the hype suggests were it not for Thom Yorke’s soaring/screeching vocals. Too snivellingly nostalgic or sneeringly sarcastic and never quite pitched where I would like. Following that there was another article I didn’t quite write about how I don’t ‘get’ OK Computer, which wasn’t written around the time Channel Four announced OK Computer as the Numbr One Album of all time.

Now would seem like an ideal time to write something about Radiohead. Something about them pioneering a new form of musical distribution or simply cashing in on the latest marketting gimmick. Maybe something about how everyone should pay £40 for the box set because Yorke and co deserve it or how anyone who pays more than the 35p service charge is a chump. I might write about how the band seem to have perfected their own trick - ‘How to Dissapear Completely’- achieving 5 star reviews without anyone really noticing, putting their music at the centre of an eventless event then watching from the sidelines. Just the same as everyone else.

2007-09-27T08:16:00.000-07:00

FAC 424

June 4th 1976. Manchester Lesser Free Trade Hall. A gig attended by 42 people. Inspired, they would go out and perform 'wonderous deeds'. The band playing that night? The Sex Pistols.

This is the story of Factory Records, as told by Tony Wilson, the man vauguely at the centre of everything the company did. A novelisation, based on a screenplay, based on real life events, written, as fiction, by the man involved in the real life events. As John Ford said, 'when the truth becomes legend, print the legend.'

FAC 51 - The Hacienda, a trendy New York style night club built in centre of Manchester. It ate all the money Factory ever made and became the official home of the 'Madchester' scene in the late eighties, the birth of Rave culture.

FAC 73 - Blue Monday by New Order. The biggest selling 12 inch single in UK Chart history. Factory lost money on every copy sold because the sleeve was so expensive to produce. In other words, the more copies they sold, the more money they lost.

If you know what I'm talking about great, if you don't, that's fine, but you should probably read more.

2007-09-17T05:12:00.000-07:00

In Search of Steve Ditko

Running as part of BBC Four's comics season, last night Jonathan Ross hosted a show about the work of comic artist Steve Ditko - co-creator of Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Ross was on his best behaviour clearly humbled by a subject he feels genuine passion and enthusiasm for. It was enjoyable to see Ross drop his guard and unleash his inner-geek, his undimmed love of comic books a welcome reminder of the joys of a good story, told well, with interesting characters. The show also helped restore some of the mythological power these stories had when they belonged solely to the world of comics, before an endless conveyor-belt of limp franchises flattened them for mass consumption, ironing out their edge, imagination and personality, turning them into 'just another blockbuster'.

Ditko is an odd character. Elusive and enigmatic, he is the Thomas Pynchon of the comic book world, refusing to be photographed or filmed. He is deeply right wing, his views having been strongly influenced by philosopher and sociologist Ayne Rand and her theory of 'objectivism'. After Ditko left Marvel this began to inform his art prompting him to create stranger and stranger characters, such as, 'The Question' and 'Mr. A'. Characters Neil Gaiman described as being in the tradition of “beautiful, pure, American barking madness”. Mr A. a character who operates in a world where "there is white, there is black and there is nothing in between."

And unlike so many of these types of shows the people Ross interviews were interesting individuals. They were people involved in the industry, people with real opinions and a few entertaining and informative words on their subject. This included Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, both great comic book writers in their own write. Along with various other writers and artists involved with Marvel over the years. There was also a surprisingly candid interview with Stan 'the man' Lee, co-creator of Spider-man, in which Ross dared to ask the difficult questions.

Informative and entertaining, presented with real energy and warmth, this was a treat.

2007-08-22T02:02:00.000-07:00

Run Jason Run

Paul Greengrass picked up the Bourne franchise one movie in and ran with it delivering one of the most critically acclaimed blockbusters in years with The Bourne Supremecy. Here he repeats the trick. Those of you not enamoured with the first two there is nothing to change your mind. The rest of you strap in, turn on and prepare for a vicious assault on your eyeballs by Greengrass' trademark shakey-quasi-documentry-car-smashing-knuckle crunching-edit-edit-edit-blink-edit style.

The film is not without its flaws. There is a problem early on with Bourne's motivation. No one is chasing him any more, he is chasing them, chasing answers, chasing his past, so one watches a lot of running and punching and shooting but with little sense of direction, Bourne either running towards or away from the enemy on a whim.

When the characters do sit down for a moment to have a chat it is good stuff, adding a real pathos and weight to Bourne's quest and adding meaning to the chase scenes. In this way the film is well structured, getting better and better as it goes along, so you end up leaving the cinema on a real high. In a summer of dull cash-in sequels this one stands out as a proper film, well worth a watch.

2007-08-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

I'll be back

Rome, 1982, Mr. James Cameron is lying on his back in a hotel room having a fever dream. The dream is vivid, frightening and irresistible. Mr. Cameron would later profess his love of nightmares. This particular nightmare was about a robot and it would prompt him to write "the definitive robot story" because "no one had really done it before."

The imagery arrived in his head fully formed: a metal endoskeleton emerging from flames, piercing red eyes zeroing in on its target. The story was simple, streamlined and practically wrote itself. Largely reminiscent of another film about an unstoppable killing machine that had happened ten years earlier, except this one was gonna get you even if you stayed out of the ocean.

An accident in casting meant that the role, originally offered to Lance Henrikson, went to an Austrian bodybuilder who would later further his plans for world domination and blur the line between fantasy and reality in the early years of the 21st Century by becoming the Governor of California.

A B movie upon release the film found its audience on video, a new technology which was bringing cinema into the home in the early eighties.

It would later become the basis for the most expensive film of all time, T2: Judgement Day, a seminal work in the area of CGI, which, in the early nineties was opening up whole new worlds of possibility for filmmakers, storytellers and artists.

2007-08-02T06:28:00.000-07:00

Spider-pig, Spider-pig, does whatever a Spider-pig does...

The Simpsons finally arrive on movie screens and I'm pleased to say it's a top quality bunch of stuff. Funny, witty and clever in a way recent series' of the hit TV show haven't been. But what really sets it apart is the welcome return of Oscar winning screenwriter James L Brookes. Brookes brings an emotional core to the writing that helps ground the lunacy, giving anchor to the general spirit of playful silliness. The fact that you are occasionally made to care about the characters is what makes The Simpsons better than Family Guy will ever be.

Of course, The Simpsons is a comedy so it needs to make you laugh: sight-gags, slapstick, witty observations, liberal sarcasm, broad satirical swipes at current political hot-potatoes, all present and correct. Sure the ratio is skewed, twenty minutes of spiky (haired) cynicism followed by one minute of family and reconcilliation and all that other good stuff, but when that's been your holding patter for 17 seasons on the small screen its not a habit that's easilly broken.

Which brings us onto the films biggest problem. It's not really a film, structurally, you do feel the gears clunking around the twenty minute mark when they have to expand the format. But in a film that has so many laugh out loud moments its a minor quibble.

2007-06-18T01:12:00.000-07:00

Dark Eye

David Fincher makes dark, serious, brooding films, and just to make certain the audience understands just how dark and serious the films are, he shoots them in very low-light and nobody smiles. This is all right up to a point but why choose to work from such a limited palette time and time again?

Many filmmakers nowadays seem to struggle to find a balance between serious intent and entertainment. What one sees are films that are either very earnest, in a politically correct ‘lets try and understand this’ kind of way, or just good old-fashioned dumb, with a diminishing space in between.

Zodiac is the ‘based on a true story’ story behind the serial killer that partly inspired the first Dirty Harry film. The film is certainly not a bad one and it moves smoothly along its (as is often the case nowadays) overlong running time, but I think it would have benifited greatly from a bit more colour.

2007-04-30T01:17:00.000-07:00

Listen to the Silence

Paul Morley first came to my attention as a panelist on Newsnight Review. I remember him cutting into recent Oscar Best Picture winner and Hollywood didactic, Crash, drawing parallels between Crash and Team America: World Police because they are both about a bunch of liberal Hollywood types speechifying a lot about how racism isn’t a very good idea after all. I also recall him describing Thank You for Smoking as “Hollywood! Disney! Tom Cruise!”

Investigating further I found out that once upon a time he had been a writer for the NME, back when being a writer for the NME seemed to mean something vaguely more than it seems to mean nowadays. I also found out he had written two books. One called Nothing – that sounds a bit bleak, I thought, and another called Words and Music – much more like it. Within days of learning of its existence I found Words and Music hanging around in a local bookshop, smiling out at me from what suddenly seemed like much emptier shelves than when I had first walked in. I bought the book immediately, read it, and somehow it managed to live up to my very high expectations.

But I avoided reading Nothing. I avoided reading it because of the title, which as far as I was concerned sounded more ominous than the notoriously ominous Heart of Darkness, which, by all accounts, as far as titles go, is too poetic to suggest the true “horror” Conrad confronts in the text itself. Nothing is a title that echoes with the indirect incomprehensible infinity of the universe, and the stone gray, everyday banality and certainty of death. I avoided reading it because the blurb eerily promised a book about his father’s suicide, the unhappy parts of Morley’s childhood and Joy Division.

Then I read some of the reviews. Overwhelmingly positive. Many of the people posting described the book as life changing. I’d never read a book I considered life changing. I’ve read some great books, books I love, books I feel better for having read, books I feel have expanded my consciousness, books that I have learnt something from, and in one way or another, by and by, books that have changed my life. But I had never read one I would describe (to anyone else, at least) as life changing. I wasn’t sure I wanted a book to change my life. As Thomas Anderson once said in a movie about reality and machines, “I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my own life.”

The fictions surrounding the largely fictional Nothing at the center of a book written about Paul Morley, his father, Ian Curtis, death and existentialism orbit around a figment of my imagination which at this moment in time has decided to manifest itself in the form of a former NME journalist who once wrote a book about Nothing, which somehow communicated more than the sum of its parts because any book about nothing is really about everything, now, the moment and the infinite moments that are occurring by the infinite bucket load all the bloody time and space. A book that made me understand better than ever what Roland Barthes was on about. To tell the truth through sly, liberating lies and because the world can be a better place because of the imagination, and why not?

Of course I won’t know for sure how good it really is for a little while yet. I need to wait a few days, let the book settle into a more comfortable position and find its place in the natural/artificial order of things inside my head. At the minute its still floating around, knocking into things, disturbing other things, somewhere near the front of my thoughts. What I can say for sure is that I think Morley is a remarkable writer. An enabler, a kind of cosmic key for unlocking the wonders of a more mature and adult imagination and the knowledge that such seriousness and silliness need not, and will not end with childhood if you don’t want it to.

I don’t think I could recommend the book to anyone else, as such, it does get very tough in parts, but from a very personal place I think I can say, Nothing is the first book I read that changed my life.

2007-04-22T03:07:00.000-07:00

What is the Matrix?

After I finished writing my last blog post I realised what I was really trying to say was not what I had written. The problem is not that Hollywood continue to make Hollywood films, it's the fact that other films are not getting screened. Multiplexes, having put almost all smaller cinemas out of business, now insist on showing the same films because those are the films with the biggest advertising budgets; the ones people are told they want to see, and those get shown over and over and over again.

Films I have not had the chance to see in the past couple of weeks:

The Lives of Others - The best foreign language film winner at this years Oscars.
INLAND EMPIRE (capitalisations are his) - The new David Lynch film.
The Namesake - Mark Kermode's film of the week a couple of weeks ago.

Meanwhile Norbit and Mr Bean's Holiday sit atop of the UK box office.

2007-04-20T03:09:00.000-07:00

If it hasn't got a button, it's not worth pushing

In The Times yesterday: “Spider-Man 3 is the opening shot in what Hollywood believes will be a record breaking summer at the box-office.” Dear God no! Please don’t let it be record breaking, that’ll give them the impression that what they’re doing is a good idea. It’ll give them completely the wrong idea about how to move, ostensibly, ‘forward’. Here is the list of films expected to be the biggest box-office draws of the summer.

Spider-Man 3
Shrek the Third
Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Ocean’s Thirteen

Every one of them a sequel!

The Simpsons movie and the Transformers movie fill out the slate. So far, so lacking originality. There’s not a lot else needs to be said (I’m going to continue regardless, of course, but…) the list speaks for itself. When did we let money become the bottom line in everything, (probably it always was) but there are so many more important things to be taken into account when making movies, music, art. Will it sell? Can be and has been an important maxim for making sure what you are making is something that might be enjoyed by other people, to guard yourself, in part, against self-indulgent nonsense. But when did personalising you work, trying to say something, attempting to reveal some truths, at least as you see them, at a particular moment in time, become an anathema to what is considered commercial? Why should stupid sell better than smart? Why should bland be more profitable than innovative? There is no reason, so why do our cultural touchstones seem determined to reconfigure themselves into the shape of a toilet? It’s like the Matrix never happened. Probably the sequels helped deaden its impact. But, there was a film over-flowing with action and ideas, set pieces and philosophy, broad humor and wit, familiarity and invention. Subverting genre as it re-invented genre. You don’t expect every film to be as good as that one or as successful at bringing something new to the screen but you would like to see them trying. C’mon Hollywood, pull your finger out!

I will probably watch Spider-Man 3, because I liked the first two and because Sam Raimi is a proper filmmaker. Shrek 3? The second one was one too many. Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End might be a prophetic title. For all I know the filmmakers know something I don’t. Maybe the Pirates of the Caribbean films are artifacts from an alternate future, a message from our alternate selves attempting to warn us against our continued abuse of god’s green earth. From a universe not dissimilar to the one first glimpsed in Waterworld. The ice caps melted and technology dissolved with them, forcing humans to adapt to lives on board ostensibly old-fashioned galleons where mutant humanoids, resembling creatures of the sea, live and work among us… Maybe I’m asking too much for the most widely watched film community on the planet – namely, Hollywood – to be, at least, in part, at least in touch with the cutting edge, at least. Breaking film up, taking it in new directions, previously unexplored directions, investigating the possibilities of what the medium might be, or could be. Instead, they serve us largely the same old stodge and expect us to swallow it. Then again, why am I wasting valuable seconds railing against what will probably be some enjoyable, throwaway pieces of fluff, the real threat to humanity is Eddie Murphy and his fat suit. He must be stopped!

2007-03-29T03:02:00.000-07:00

A Self-Annihilating Nothing

Klaxons: Myths of the Near Future

Nu-Rave pioneers. The creators of a ‘Whole New’ sound and sub-genre. Strobe lights. Siren horns. Glow sticks. Youngsters with big silly hair who paint their faces and worship at the alter of the Mighty Boosch.

That’s all before you get down to anything as mundane as actually listening to the album. What you find is a cartoon version of the band you think Klaxons ought to be. Sitting comfortably on a shelf somewhere between Ballard, Mika and the Automatic. Or should that be Burroughs, the Scissors Sisters and Franz Ferdinand. Or maybe Pynchon, the Feeling and the Frattelis.

They dare to invoke the names of these legendary authors then make opaque music that has nothing to do with Interzone and everything to do with Ibiza. This is real world from now to infinity. The suspension of disbelief required is too great. I can’t help but see a bunch of middle class English boys making a self-conscious attempt at being ‘alternative’. Maybe that’s part of the joke, I’m just not getting it.

They’ve got the right uniform: it’s all very hip, very now, very ’07, the hair, the colours, the trousers. And they’ve read all the right books. But I hear none of the imagination. You’ve got to say something, or at least convey something and all I hear is a fashionable nothing (which might actually be a pertinent comment on the direction pop music, pop culture, pop in general is headed in, or perhaps always was at. Maybe it’s what you get when you elevate pop to the status of something worth writing, talking, discussing, debating about. Maybe if we ignore it and deride it, put it down, spit on every attempt it makes at relevance, pop (if we’re still aloud to call it that) will rebel with ideas, imagination, wit, colour and invention, the kind I remember, imagine or pretend it once had or has or can/might/could have. But that’s not my job, it’s something the older generation should be doing. Reeling back in horror at the sheer awfulness of it all and boring us with how it’s not like back in their day. I don’t want to sit and earnestly agree with self-satisfied olders. Maybe they’re the ones not doing their job. Helping us by not helping us. But I’m not sure I agree with that either. Maybe I’m too old for all of this. Maybe, the point I think I’m trying to make is that if Klaxons are what’s considered ‘alternative’ these days we really are in trouble, culturally speaking. They’re not nearly angry enough for a start. I see them sitting quite happily next to Franz, Kaisers and Killers. Maybe I'm projecting my own hang-ups onto a band that has nothing to do with any of this. Maybe I hate everything much more than I thought. Maybe it’s that I want to like this because almost everything about it (except the music) tells me that I should. But it still sounds like a beer wearing, football shirt eating, kebab swilling night out on the lash.

Like almost all of the homogenous, interchangeable bands that have been forced upon us in recent years Klaxons sound finished, airtight, seemingly fully-formed and boring as a result. You know the ones. They arrive with their own hermetically sealed ‘sound,’ already mastered, with nowhere to go from there. Where is the journey? A new artist is not the same as a 'New Artist'. It’s all so uniform, just one song from each of them would be enough. I Predict A Riot, Do You Want To, Chelsea Dagger, I Bet You Look Good (On The Dance Floor), Golden Skans, put a fork in it you’re done. Part of a producer’s package, heavily marketable, easily defined, labeled, and placed on a shelf alongside all the other commodity rockers. Maybe I’m too cynical (yes!) but when I listen to Klaxons, I have a lot of time for what I think they are trying to do, but I can’t help but think, “I don’t believe you.”)

Maybe I’m being a bit harsh with all these comparisons. They are in fact the missing link between the Spice Girls and Secret Machines (and anyone familiar with his writing will know I am most definately not the missing link between Paul Morley and Paul Morley, which in itself is very Paul Morley.)

Bottom line: It’s only a first album (though it sounds a lot like a first and last album) and even Radiohead started with Pablo Honey. Of course, all of this so-called criticism (that’s what I’m calling it at least) is a perverse kind of love letter to a band actually worth having an opinion about. While they don’t have the same wit as fellow nu-ravers Hot Chip, at least they’re trying something, which makes them worth several hundred Kooks.

2007-03-27T15:38:00.000-07:00

Maybe Our World is Their Heaven

The Apocalypse is coming! Really? No, it’s not. But beyond that you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise. The way people run on you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s ALL TRUE. The Polar ice caps have melted, the waves are lapping at your doorstep, troops goose step down your street making daily patrols of ‘The Infected Area’, a preacher with a megaphone reads us all our last rights before being blown apart by the neighbourhood suicide bomber (Jim). You brush the human entrails off your shoulder on your way to the shops to pick up the latest hysteria rag from our responsible, respected media betters. On the front of The Sun today: ‘Price William grabs girl’s boob.’ Some of the less informed amongst you might not see how that headline could be heralding the immanent arrival of the Four Horsemen. But believe you me… they’re closer than they’ve ever been before.

Whimsy aside, (huh?) you know the kind of thing I’m talking about. Of course this isn’t exactly a new phenomenon. I’ve been known to enjoy a good dystopia future fantasy as much as the next man, but when it starts leaking out of the pages of J.G Ballard and Ridley Scott’s celluloid can’t contain it, I think it’s time to step back and take another look at what you really see with your own eyes. Talk of the apocalypse is not nearly the fun it used to be, somewhere along the line we let it get serious. Maybe involvement in an unwinable war and a fundamentalist Christian regime in the White House will do that to a nation. But it’s not like we haven’t been here before. Maybe I’m just getting older and becoming more aware of it.

If you tell a lie often enough people will believe it, and I think its high time people stopped believing what they’re told.

2007-03-26T07:08:00.000-07:00

Freedomgate

I hope everybody took time out of busy schedules to watch The Trap - What Happened to our Dream of Freedom. It was the most engaging, entertaining, surreal, real, hyperreal, Lynchian, absurdist, dadaist evocation of the televisual format I have witnessed in many a mile. Documentarian Adam Curtis takes the idea of freedom in the 20th century, as concieved of by Cold War era academics, thinkers, philosophers, economists and sociolagists as his starting point. The rest unfolds randomly naturally from there. A voiceoever telling you 'the way it is, and was a will be' is at the centre, while images from stock footage and news footage and silent cinema and modern blockbusters combine, collide and converge with music from Sibelius, Joy Division and Bernard Hermann. The result is highly informative, deeply serious, insanely comical, totally throwaway, inifinately re-watchable and absolutely essential viewing.

Unfortunately, the final episode, screened last night, was neither the satisfying conclusion I had wanted. It seems as if Mr. Curtis felt compelled, or market forces (that, as he tells us are just one of the things running our lives) forced him to crowbar in a 'message' - a truely pat, bland, simplification I don't even care to remember. That patronising, lecturous tone employed by so many documentary filmmakers is exactly what his extended docu-dream had undermined and satirised so well for 2 and a half hours of its three hour running time. A confused and muddled conclusion opposed to a contradictory and enigmatic one.

2007-01-14T03:47:00.000-08:00

Pan's Labyrinth, (2006) dir. Guillermo Del Toro

Pan’s Labyrinth has been hailed by many as the best film of 2006, and who doesn’t love a good bandwagon when they see one? I would like to add my voice to the growing portion of people calling this film a masterpiece. "The Citizen Kane of fantasy cinema," to quote a well-known film critic.

It is the story of young girl named Ophellia who travels with her pregnant mother to live with her stepfather who is a high ranking military officer in Franco's Spain, fighting a guerrilla war against the communists in the forests nearby. Amid the horrors Ophellia finds herself being drawn into a fully immersive fantasy world where she is a lost Princess who must go on a quest to save the magical kingdom.

Pan’s Labyrinth is engaging on every level. It’s rare for me to be so absolutely transported by a film nowadays, having immersed myself in the regalia of ‘how it works’ for such a long time. Story, characters, images, allowed to unfold uncluttered by undergraduate intellectualism.

A film about innocence and experience, reality and fantasy and the interplay between these elements. The film commits fully to a realistic depiction of the horrors of war, while developing a wholly believable fantasy, with its own enchanting and valid mythology. I advice everyone who is near a cinema where this is playing to go and see it; everyone else should seek out a cinema that is and travel there especially. Exceptional cinema.