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Mince Pie Fest 2026: Aldi
7 hours ago
Tuesday, 27 November 2007
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
To some, it may look like a typically seedy New York intersection. To others - and you know who you are - it may convey a certain spooky resonance...
More here.
More here.
Is Nothing Sacred?
Comedic actor John Michael Higgins ("Best in Show," "Fred Claus") has been cast in the lead role of an American remake of cult Irish comedy "Father Ted."
According to Higgins: "It's not on Craggy Island, it's a fishing village down on its luck in New England..."
The big question is, will it work? Only a scant few shows (eg. "Pop Idol", "The Office") have made the transition, most have crashed and burned or not even gotten off the ground. Higgins himself is dubious "The English have a very robust history of being unkind about religion. We don't have that in our country, we're frightened of it. It's basically that you guys are doing an Irish joke, and we don't have that. So I'll be Father Ted, we'll see how it goes."
Shooting is scheduled to begin in January.
From here.
Fecking eejits. It's almost enough to make you want to support Blasphemy Laws, if it wasn't for the fact that Father Ted itself is probably blasphemous.
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Sunday, 25 November 2007
Dystopian Myopia
I finally got around to watching the film Children of Men this evening. First impressions? Let's see: "Phew", "Fucking Hell" and "Wow". Those were my first impressions.
I've always been something of a connoisseur of dystopian fiction. I don't know where it began. Maybe it was while reading the classic comic series V For Vendetta at a formative age, or maybe it goes further back. Perhaps it was Judge Dredd in 2000AD, or maybe it was the "Days of Future Past" storyline in the The Uncanny X-Men comic series. This will mean nothing to anyone who wasn't raised on Marvel Comics, but I can still remember how that chilling tale of a dark future fried the circuits of my ten year-old brain. To this day I continue to suffer from an irrational fear of giant purple robots.
Or maybe it wasn't comics at all. Perhaps it was watching the "Mirror, Mirror" episode of Star Trek, the original series from the 1960's (not to be confused with, um, shit). That was the one where Kirk, Bones, Scotty & Uhura found themselves in a twisted parallel universe where the Enterprise was the flagship of a sadistic, totalitarian Empire, their crew mates were evil no-good-shit doppelgangers and Spock had a sinister looking goatee. This story had quite an impact on me, as anyone who's seen the current state of my facial hair will testify.
(I can also remember having some kind childhood epiphany whilst watching the cult 70s sci-fi flick Logan's Run, but I'm not altogether sure that was triggered by the film's bleak post-apocalyptic backdrop and chilling theme of state-enforced population control. It probably had more to do with seeing Jenny Agutter in a skimpy sci-fi skirt.)
As I reached my teens this interest in the genre was fuelled by films like Blade Runner, Fahrenheit 451, Brazil, Escape From New York and Orson Welles's adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. It was also nourished by comics like Alejandro Jodorowsky & Jean "Moebius" Giraud's Incal trilogy and by the novels of Philip K Dick. By the age of 17 I'd read Orwell's 1984 - still one of my favourite novels - for the first time, and have re-read it every other year ever since. In my teens I wrote my A-Level English extended essay on 1984, Huxley's Brave New World and Koestler's Darkness at Noon [which, strictly speaking, wasn't a dystopian novel as it wasn't set in a fictional regime]. At University I managed to indulge myself on dystopian classics like Yevgeny Zamyatin's We after wangling my way onto a course called The Literature of Totalitarianism, despite the fact I was studying History at the time. I wouldn't have got away with that in a dystopian regime, fictional or otherwise.
I even had a stab at creating my dystopian fiction with the small-press comic Stonebroke. It was about a post-apocalyptic bus driver and his one-man war against a corrupt taxi empire. The less said about that the better. Let's just say it was described in some quarters as "Mad Max meets On The Buses".
The reason why I'm telling you all of this now is because I watched the dystopian film Children of Men this evening. I'd like to think my "Phew", "Fucking Hell" and "Wow" were said with some authority.
I've always been something of a connoisseur of dystopian fiction. I don't know where it began. Maybe it was while reading the classic comic series V For Vendetta at a formative age, or maybe it goes further back. Perhaps it was Judge Dredd in 2000AD, or maybe it was the "Days of Future Past" storyline in the The Uncanny X-Men comic series. This will mean nothing to anyone who wasn't raised on Marvel Comics, but I can still remember how that chilling tale of a dark future fried the circuits of my ten year-old brain. To this day I continue to suffer from an irrational fear of giant purple robots.
Or maybe it wasn't comics at all. Perhaps it was watching the "Mirror, Mirror" episode of Star Trek, the original series from the 1960's (not to be confused with, um, shit). That was the one where Kirk, Bones, Scotty & Uhura found themselves in a twisted parallel universe where the Enterprise was the flagship of a sadistic, totalitarian Empire, their crew mates were evil no-good-shit doppelgangers and Spock had a sinister looking goatee. This story had quite an impact on me, as anyone who's seen the current state of my facial hair will testify.
(I can also remember having some kind childhood epiphany whilst watching the cult 70s sci-fi flick Logan's Run, but I'm not altogether sure that was triggered by the film's bleak post-apocalyptic backdrop and chilling theme of state-enforced population control. It probably had more to do with seeing Jenny Agutter in a skimpy sci-fi skirt.)
As I reached my teens this interest in the genre was fuelled by films like Blade Runner, Fahrenheit 451, Brazil, Escape From New York and Orson Welles's adaptation of Kafka's The Trial. It was also nourished by comics like Alejandro Jodorowsky & Jean "Moebius" Giraud's Incal trilogy and by the novels of Philip K Dick. By the age of 17 I'd read Orwell's 1984 - still one of my favourite novels - for the first time, and have re-read it every other year ever since. In my teens I wrote my A-Level English extended essay on 1984, Huxley's Brave New World and Koestler's Darkness at Noon [which, strictly speaking, wasn't a dystopian novel as it wasn't set in a fictional regime]. At University I managed to indulge myself on dystopian classics like Yevgeny Zamyatin's We after wangling my way onto a course called The Literature of Totalitarianism, despite the fact I was studying History at the time. I wouldn't have got away with that in a dystopian regime, fictional or otherwise.
I even had a stab at creating my dystopian fiction with the small-press comic Stonebroke. It was about a post-apocalyptic bus driver and his one-man war against a corrupt taxi empire. The less said about that the better. Let's just say it was described in some quarters as "Mad Max meets On The Buses".
The reason why I'm telling you all of this now is because I watched the dystopian film Children of Men this evening. I'd like to think my "Phew", "Fucking Hell" and "Wow" were said with some authority.
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Tuesday, 20 November 2007
To be or not 3D
I mentioned in a previous post that I'd been to see Beowulf at the cinema and enjoyed it tremendously. I didn't get around to saying why I enjoyed it tremendously, but that's because I was interrupted by a phone call. These things happen.
I thought Beowulf was a grand, bold and jaw-droppingly magnificent piece of classic heroic fiction that was epic in every sense of the word. There, that wasn't so difficult. It was a guilty pleasure of a movie that reminded me of why I fell in love with cinema in the first place. Sorry, Rol.
It certainly broke new ground in terms of visual storytelling, but I felt that this was one of those rare occasions where eye-popping CG trickery didn't disguise a weak plot and shonky characterisation but heightened the mood and served the story. Kudos to Messrs Zemeckis, Gaiman & Avary for pulling it off.
Just to clarify matters and put things into perspective, I don't think Beowulf was the best film I've ever seen. It's not as good as - say - Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Breathless, Yojimbo, Luis Bunuel's Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie or Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. But it was certainly the best film I saw last Sunday night.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I saw the 3D version of the film. I hadn't seen a 3D movie since I was a kid, and was somewhat gobsmacked by the advances made in this technology. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but on a couple of occasions I instinctively ducked for fear of getting my eye poked out by a digitally-rendered spear. I'd like to think that this conveys the eye-popping effectiveness of the technique, but I suspect it probably displays the feeble-minded gullibility of my brain. In any case, it probably makes me look like a member of that legendarily dumb Lumiere Brothers' cinema audience who panicked at the sight of an advancing train.
Let's be clear about something, though: 3D films are a gimmick. In fact, they're one of the oldest gimmicks in the book. Before the film started there were trailers for a remake of Journey to the Centre of the Earth [in 3D] and a re-release of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas [also in 3D - yay!], so it looks as though this particular gimmick is about to make something of a comeback.
Which is fairly interesting, to me at least. When 3D movies were first introduced in the 1950s- along with CinemaScope, Cinerama, Scratch-O-Rama and a veritable plethora of audio-visual snake oil - it was at a time when cinemas were losing vast chunks of their market share to a troublesome upstart medium called television. Hollywood film studios and cinema chains feared for their future and were desperate to find new ways of delaying their impending Ragnarok and of getting bums back on seats. Now, half a century later, those same industries once again believe they're losing vast chunks of their market share to another upstart medium and are just as desperate to halt and reverse the arse-to-seat attrition. And just as the 1950s studio chiefs and cinema owners tried to find new gimmicky enhancements that couldn't be duplicated on a humble black and white telly from Radio Rentals, their modern day equivalents are digitally-tweaking old gimmicky enhancements that can't be duplicated on a humble laptop screen.
Alphonse Karr knew what he was talking about.
I thought Beowulf was a grand, bold and jaw-droppingly magnificent piece of classic heroic fiction that was epic in every sense of the word. There, that wasn't so difficult. It was a guilty pleasure of a movie that reminded me of why I fell in love with cinema in the first place. Sorry, Rol.
It certainly broke new ground in terms of visual storytelling, but I felt that this was one of those rare occasions where eye-popping CG trickery didn't disguise a weak plot and shonky characterisation but heightened the mood and served the story. Kudos to Messrs Zemeckis, Gaiman & Avary for pulling it off.
Just to clarify matters and put things into perspective, I don't think Beowulf was the best film I've ever seen. It's not as good as - say - Citizen Kane, Vertigo, Breathless, Yojimbo, Luis Bunuel's Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie or Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan. But it was certainly the best film I saw last Sunday night.
As I mentioned in my previous post, I saw the 3D version of the film. I hadn't seen a 3D movie since I was a kid, and was somewhat gobsmacked by the advances made in this technology. I'm embarrassed to admit this, but on a couple of occasions I instinctively ducked for fear of getting my eye poked out by a digitally-rendered spear. I'd like to think that this conveys the eye-popping effectiveness of the technique, but I suspect it probably displays the feeble-minded gullibility of my brain. In any case, it probably makes me look like a member of that legendarily dumb Lumiere Brothers' cinema audience who panicked at the sight of an advancing train.
Let's be clear about something, though: 3D films are a gimmick. In fact, they're one of the oldest gimmicks in the book. Before the film started there were trailers for a remake of Journey to the Centre of the Earth [in 3D] and a re-release of Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas [also in 3D - yay!], so it looks as though this particular gimmick is about to make something of a comeback.
Which is fairly interesting, to me at least. When 3D movies were first introduced in the 1950s- along with CinemaScope, Cinerama, Scratch-O-Rama and a veritable plethora of audio-visual snake oil - it was at a time when cinemas were losing vast chunks of their market share to a troublesome upstart medium called television. Hollywood film studios and cinema chains feared for their future and were desperate to find new ways of delaying their impending Ragnarok and of getting bums back on seats. Now, half a century later, those same industries once again believe they're losing vast chunks of their market share to another upstart medium and are just as desperate to halt and reverse the arse-to-seat attrition. And just as the 1950s studio chiefs and cinema owners tried to find new gimmicky enhancements that couldn't be duplicated on a humble black and white telly from Radio Rentals, their modern day equivalents are digitally-tweaking old gimmicky enhancements that can't be duplicated on a humble laptop screen.
Alphonse Karr knew what he was talking about.
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Many Small Worlds
I've liked the band Eels ever since I listened to their Beautiful Freak album ten years or so ago. I've never seen them live, but they're touring now so I might try to catch them.
The reason why I mention this somewhat tedious factoid is that I just saw a trailer on BBC4 for a forthcoming doc about Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett. It turns out that his father was Hugh Everett - he of the Everett-Wheeler-Graham school of quantum physics.
Robert Anton Wilson's bloody marvellous Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy is what first got me interested in quantum physics. Here's how he described the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model in the appendix:
To put it another way, then, the father of the frontman of the Eels' was the brains behind the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. That's mad, that is. It's positively buggier than batshit.
Incidentally, I first read RAW's Schrödingers Cat Trilogy at about the same time as I was first listening to Eels' Beautiful Freaks album.
Typical, huh?
The reason why I mention this somewhat tedious factoid is that I just saw a trailer on BBC4 for a forthcoming doc about Eels frontman Mark Oliver Everett. It turns out that his father was Hugh Everett - he of the Everett-Wheeler-Graham school of quantum physics.
Robert Anton Wilson's bloody marvellous Schrödinger's Cat Trilogy is what first got me interested in quantum physics. Here's how he described the Everett-Wheeler-Graham model in the appendix:
An alternative to Bell's Theorem and the Copenhagen Interpretation. According to Everett, Wheeler & Graham, everything that can happen to the state vector does happen to it.
To put it another way, then, the father of the frontman of the Eels' was the brains behind the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics. That's mad, that is. It's positively buggier than batshit.
Incidentally, I first read RAW's Schrödingers Cat Trilogy at about the same time as I was first listening to Eels' Beautiful Freaks album.
Typical, huh?
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Sunday, 18 November 2007
Beowulf
Tonight I went to the cinema to see Beowulf. It was the 3D version, so I'm currently suffering from a mild bout of sensory overload. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I thrive on sensory overload.
Beowulf - in case you don't already know - is veteran genre director Robert Zemeckis' CG blockbuster adaptation of the classic Old English poem. Featuring a screenplay by the mighty Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary and a heavyweight cast of motion-captured semi-synthespians - including Ray Winstone, Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie - it's already cleaned up at the US box office and looks set to do the same over here. To the best of my knowledge, big-budget movie adaptations of classic poems are a bit of a rarity; top-grossing movie adaptations of classic poems, though, are rarer still. I can only imagine that Hollywood scriptwriters are now strip-mining poetry anthologies for inspiration. Personally, I'd like to see Disney Pixar tackle Philip Larkin's Sunny Prestatyn, or Dreamworks Animation try their hand at at Sylvia Plath's Lady Lazarus. But that's just me.
Of course, not everyone's going to be happy about this. The other morning, I was listening to a review of the Beowulf film on Radio 4's Today Programme. A guy who had illustrated an edition of Beowulf and an expert on Anglo-Saxon literature dismissed the film as a shallow, migraine-inducing, CGI wankfest. Actually, that wasn't the exact phrase they used. This was, after all, Radio 4's Today Programme. Ever since the Hutton Enquiry they've gone to great lengths to avoid phrases like "wankfest". But that was the gist of it. I believe the Irish poet Tom ["I hated it"] Paulin was talking about it on The Culture Show last night. I can't imagine he gave it a ringing endorsement, though. I imagine he hated it.
Of course, not everyone's going to be happy about this. The other morning, I was listening to a review of the Beowulf film on Radio 4's Today Programme. A guy who had illustrated an edition of Beowulf and an expert on Anglo-Saxon literature dismissed the film as a shallow, migraine-inducing, CGI wankfest. Actually, that wasn't the exact phrase they used. This was, after all, Radio 4's Today Programme. Ever since the Hutton Enquiry they've gone to great lengths to avoid phrases like "wankfest". But that was the gist of it. I believe the Irish poet Tom ["I hated it"] Paulin was talking about it on The Culture Show last night. I can't imagine he gave it a ringing endorsement, though. I imagine he hated it.
Technorati Tags:beowulf, robert zemeckis, neil gaiman, philip larkin, sylvia plath, radio 4
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Saturday, 17 November 2007
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