Category: Entertainment

Nice article from the ever-dependable Marina Hyde in The Guardian today. She takes aim at idiotic celebrities and their idiotic beliefs. OK, deriding celebrities who are full of themselves is rather like shooting fish in a barrel, but she does it with great panache.

Manish, over at Septia Mutiny, discusses the same topic as I visited last week. Apparently, M. Night Shyamalan doesn’t want his films to be released in the cinema and on DVD simultaneously, and appeals to the "magic" of the shared experience in the cinema. Manish holds much the same jaundiced view as I do: The movies are great, it’s the moviegoers I could do without.

So I’m not Mr. Spock then, but at least I’m down in the bottom left corner, where I expected to be…

 

 

If you have to ask who’s George Takei?  then you are clearly not a Trekkie – a fan of Star Trek. Takei is the actor who played the role of Lieutenant Sulu, the helmsman of the Starship Enterprise in its first incarnation. Apparently, at the age of 68, he’s finally decided to come out of the closet. Oh well, better late than never, I suppose.

 

Update: Here’s the interview that Takei gave where he acknowledges who he is. It’s a good interview and he comes across as an honest human being. Go read it.

That’s the question that Diamond Geezer raised on his blog recently. He rightly notes that the time between a film being released in the cinema and it being released on DVD is becoming alarmingly short. It used to be a year, now it seems to be a few months.

 

He argues that we should still continue to go to the cinema (a) because it’s cheaper and (b) because it’s on the big screen. In an ideal world (b) would be true. There can be something magical about the shared experience of the audience sitting in the dark. But too often these days the experience is tainted for me by people talking, eating or slurping huge cartons of coke before tossing them aside. Increasingly, I find myself content to wait a few months (or even a year) for the DVD. Yes, it may cost more initially, but I see some good films being reissued at little more than the price of a cinema ticket. And every time I watch a DVD again, the value increases. I estimate that I’ve seen 30% of my collection at least three times and 40% at least twice. Basically, I’m willing to pay good money for a good DVD secure in the knowledge that I can devote my full attention to it, and not be distracted by my neighbours discussing the charms of the actress on the screen.

I’ve just come across this amazing advert for Honda cars, which I hadn’t seen before. Heath Robinson would have been proud. According to this, there is no computer graphic trickery involved – it is all real. It did, however, take 606 takes before the perfect sequence was captured. The filmcrew’s patience must have far exceeded that of Job.

As if the ringtone wasn’t bad enough, some bastard has gone and manufactured a Crazy Frog doll. Perhaps it will work as a voodoo doll, and if I stick enough pins in it some idiot with a mobile phone playing the ringtone will drop dead? One can only live in hope.

Today’s Guardian has a terrific article penned by Marina Warner – one of my favourite writers mining the rich seam of folklore and the fantastic in European culture. Her article focuses on film makers who have brought their visions of fantasy to the screen. Her list of names is a role-call of directors who I gladly invite into my mind’s eye to rattle the cobwebs and blow a chill wind or two: Terry Gilliam, Tim Burton, Jan Swankmajer, The Brothers Quay.

The news that there are three new films about to be released from Gilliam (The Brothers Grimm), Burton (The Corpse Bride) and The Brothers Quay (The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes) feels like an embarrassment of riches.

The principle of the lever appears to be a concept that is unknown to the most powerful person in the world. I find this worrying.

That’s the new Guinness ad: noitulovE (Evolution backwards). Despite the inaccuracies (e.g. we ain’t descended from flying squirrels) it’s a tour de force.

Ronnie Barker has died. Damn. A comic actor of the highest calibre, who also wrote much of his material. As the obituary in The Guardian points out: There was always a hint of unpredictable bleakness, or even menace, behind Barker’s toothy forensic accountant’s smile. Things were never quite what they appeared to be…

 

Talking of which, one of the other obituaries in The Guardian today was for M. Scott Peck. Bizarre in the extreme, and merely serves to confirm my prejudice against psychiatrists and gurus.

Sony’s electronic dog robot, Aibo, has just had a software upgrade. The press release proudly informs us that Aibo can now blog its own photo diary. Well, I know that “on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog“, but isn’t this going just a bit too far?

Seriously, I have tried to interest Martin in the idea that Aibo’s running costs will be a lot lower than having a real, live, messy dog, but somehow it just doesn’t appeal to him. I mean, think of it – no more bills from the vet, no food bills (Aibo’s consumption of electricity is cheaper than dogfood), no having to take the dog out for a walk in all weathers. It seems just so logical to me. Perhaps I’m not quite human myself.

This week sees the 30th anniversary of the start of Fawlty Towers – unbelievable that it was so long ago… Meanwhile John Cleese continues to franchise himself into new areas. As well as continuing the well-trodden path of advertising (e.g. the Institute of Backup Trauma), he’s now branching out into providing the voice of car navigation systems. We’ve been driving around The Netherlands recently, being directed by the voice of John Cleese: "Turn left in 800 metres – what I would call half a mile, but since that little bastard Napoleon, we’re not allowed to say that anymore…"

Hayao Miyazaki is a brilliant animator. He’s responsible for films such as Sprited Away and Princess Mononoke. He rarely gives interviews, but there’s a good one in today’s Guardian. Miyazaki comes across as a slightly pessimistic observer of the human condition. No rose-tinted spectacles for him, but a clarity of vision and feeling for human foibles that deepen the impact of his characters, not turn them into one-dimensional Disneyesque cartoons.

…even, apparently, that favourite little diversion of mine, The Guardian’s Pass Notes column. Bloody typical, The Guardian wants to reinvent itself in a new format next week, so it ditches one of the few things that I could rely on to lighten my day. No place for a little levity in their trendy middle class cappuccino-quaffing excuse for a serious newspaper any more. Damn them. See, I am turning into Victor Meldrew.

A nice little example of the prestidigitator’s art of misdirection: the Mystical Ball site. Try it – and try and work out how it works.

I’m a big fan of the BBC and public broadcasting in general, but I think they’ve crossed a line here. This is a Wikipedia entry for a made-up pop star that’s being used as part of some kind of viral marketing for one of their "new media opportunities". It pisses me off that an organisation paid for by the British public and supposedly working to a charter to provide quality entertainment feels justified in spamming up a genuinely useful internet resource in the name of PR.

I can’t say who I am, but I do work at a company that uses Wikipedia as a key part of online marketing strategies. That includes planting of viral information in entries, modification of entries to point to new promotional sites or "leaks" embedded in entries to test diffusion of information. Wikipedia is just a more transparent version of Myspace as far as some companies are concerned. We love it (evil laugh).

On the other side, I love it from an academia/sociological standpoint, and I don’t necessarily have a problem with it used as a viral marketing tool. After all, marketing is a form of information, with just a different end point in mind (consuming rather than learning).

It’s Friday, it’s movie night at home, so I decided I would put TCTTHWAHL on the DVD player. When I saw the disc in our local DVD shop, I thought, yes, it’s like drowning in rose-coloured acid, but at some point I want to see this film again.

 

I remember when Martin and I first saw it in a small Art Cinema in Amsterdam. After the film ended, the lights came up, but at first, no-one moved. Finally, our row staggered to its feet, but even then there came no movement to exit the row. We stood there stupified for a few seconds until a quavering voice came from the end of the row: "sorry about this, but we can’t leave because the woman at the end of the row has fainted…" We all knew what she had just gone through and immediately sympathised.

 

It is, as the Dutch version says on the cover: "een gruewelijk mooie film" – a gruesomely beautiful film. Visually, the colour palettes are extraordinary, and the actors magnificent. Whether it’s Michael Gambon spewing obscenties or the unbearable monologue of Helen Mirren on discovering her lover has been killed – the film is a brilliant work of high art.

 

 

The husband has taken himself off to Amsterdam to prepare for the Amsterdam Canal Parade tomorrow (of which more tomorrow or Sunday), so I settled in to watch a film from Thailand: Fai Talai Jone (Tears of the Black Tiger).

 

Well, it’s described as a "bonkers Thai Western", and that’s not far from the truth. It’s as camp as a row of tents, shot in sugar candy colours, with a number of the actors (particularly Supakorn Kitsuwon as Mahesuan) camping it up something rotten. Despite all that (or perhaps because of it) it is a very effective melting pot of the fifties Western, the Spaghetti western, Thai film and fifties Hollywood tearjerkers.

 

The hero and heroine (Chartchai Ngamsan and Stella Malucci as the Black Tiger and Rampoey respectively) play it straighter, although still heavily stylised, and they made me believe in the central love story. Arawat Rangvuth as Police Captain Kumjorn comes across well as the spurned husband, so much so that by the end of the film I felt sorry for him. And I just loved Sombat Metanee as the gangleader Fai – was it deliberate that he looked so much like Charles Bronson?

 

Despite the campery, there are times when the film is dripping with blood a la Peckinpah. But overall, I could take that when it was put alongside the scenes with striking visuals such as the summerhouse in the lake of lotus blossom.

 

The director was Wisit Sasanatieng, and I look forward to seeing what he comes up with next.