Category: Film
Temples For Machine Gods
Perhaps its not a good thing for conference programmers to reveal their favourite speakers and sessions, but James Bridle's Where The Robots Work was my personal highlight from our programme at FutureEverything 2011. James' keynote explored how cities were reorienting themselves around our emerging information infrastructure, notably how the built environment was now as much…
The Dreamers
My good friend Matt Maude has been shortlisted for the Virgin Media Shorts 2011 prize, with his piece The Dreamers… A woman rises from her bed in the middle of the night. As she crosses the city, we see other sleepwalkers congregating to one place. Matt tells a great story, with few words and some…
Shelf Life
Eventually, Everything is Bits. Even you. And Everything has a shelf life, even shelves. My shelves are experiencing an accelerating half life – a shelfular singularity if you like. Books, photos, movies, music and games now inhabit the clouds, pixellated, digitised and discless. My media genome is now scattered across many heavenly shelves… — Moving pictures took…
Y, El Último Hombre
This week's episode of Lost – '316' – features a gratuitously self-referential shot of Hurley reading Y, El Último Hombre, the Spanish language edition of Y: The Last Man, written in 2004 by one of Lost's current principal writers, Brian K. Vaughn… Nothing's ever a coincidence in the Lostiverse. Hurley is reading the fourth volume,…
Sheffield: Made from Steel
The festivities of last month’s sophomore BarCamp in Sheffield, prompted sponsor Yorkshire Forward to offer a £500 prize to attendees who could best promote the city. We’ve already seen entries ranging from terror karaoke to hypnotic brain loops. So here’s my entry, paying homage to the city’s steelworking heritage, it’s celebrated celluloid child – The…
Star Trek
I should be depressed. I should be indignant. I should be angry. Alongside Bruce Wayne, James Tiberius Kirk was my fictional childhood hero, how can anyone, anyone but The Shat play Kirk?? Oddly, though Batman has been played by countless brilliant, middling and appalling actors, my fanboy-ity for Batman has remained undiminished. But Kirk is…
Boxes + Clutter
This morning I serendepitously came across a review of Peter Walsh’s book on decluttering, It’s All To Much and got the chance to catch More4’s documentary on Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes – each work ostensibly a stark counterpoint of the other. Walsh’s book argues that we generate false relevance by constantly organising things we don’t want…
Quote Of The Day: John Cusack On Jesus…
From the June 2008 issue of Vanity Fair… Who are your heroes in real life? Let’s go with Jesus. Not the gay-hating, war-making political tool of the right, but the outcast, subversive, supreme adept who preferred the freaks and lepers and despised and doomed to the rich and powerful. The man Garry Wills describes “with the…
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
He’s back! I couldn’t help but grin when the first few bars of the Indy theme play over the classically Spielberg-ian shot of a silhouetted Indy pulling on his fedora… ‘Damn, I thought that was closer’. Cute, but funny enough without the dialogue George. Check out the HD versions at Yahoo…
Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis is one of my favorite books and probably the one I’ve most often given as a gift to others. Until today’s post at AICN, I had no idea there was a movie adaptation in production. The short trailer seems to capture the energy, spirit and humour of the book… I can’t…