"so battered"

Film Another film archive discovery story, which though not as tenuous or impossible as the Metropolis restoration, shows that the difference between an important film existing or not existing is a simple and strange as the number of prints in existence:

"Almost as quickly as it built a cult reputation, the film [Sara Driver's adaptation of a Paul Bowles short story] fell from view, the victim of a leak in a New Jersey warehouse that destroyed Ms. Driver’s negative. That left her with only one film-festival print so battered that it would barely run through a projector. When museums and art house theaters called over the years asking to show it, she would turn them down, not wanting the film to be seen in such bad shape."

Yet more hope that Marco Polo is still out there. Somewhere.

"an audio diary of his life"

History Art From Analog: 20 Years Of Voice Mail Makes A Movie:

"If there's one thing Mark Craig never did, it was hit "erase" on his answering machine. "When Craig got an answering machine in 1985, he wouldn't erase. He'd just replace the tape and throw the old one into a shoebox. Twenty years later, he had amassed hours and hours of what was, effectively, an audio diary of his life."

The resulting film is just twenty-three minutes but this has the potential to be a valuable social history archive.

"the local village car park in Devon"

Food Potato launched into space:

"The "spacechip" – named Spudnik2 – was then tied to a helium weather balloon with a camera attached and launched from the local village car park in Devon."

Then the Taterians, sensing one of their own was being tortured, sent a rescue mission/invasion force to earth and wiped out the human race.

Elsewhere I review this week's The Sarah Jane Adventures. That is all.

"Whimsical Short Films Unit"

TV The Apprentice production team's early experimentation with Dr Who soundtracks:

"Following on from last week’s shock melange ‘twixt The Apprentice and some incidental music from Dr Who story ‘Daleks in Manhattan’, TV Cream’s Whimsical Short Films Unit has been toiling hard on the predictable flight of fancy that is: Hey! What would have happened if the production team had used some music from old Dr Who on the show?!"

This is a work of genius, especially the second one. TV Cream has offered some utterly vintage work lately.

Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith.

TV Back in the distant past, in mid-October when I was still exactly in my mid-thirties, it seemed as though the production team were taking the brave step of writing out Luke and K9 in an effort to move away from the too easy deus ex machina style story conclusions which have tin-dogged the series from the start. Luke may have stuck around as a dismodied head and shoulders on a flatscreen, making fleeting appearances to justify his continued presence in the introduction ("Boy GEEENIUUUS"), but the stories since have arguably been more thrilling because, with one obvious exception, the remaining attic allies have needed to rely somewhat on their wits, putting the clues together without too many easy answers (even to the point of taking Mr Smith out of the equation for this or that reason) and a fair bit of trial and error.

Which makes me wonder whether Clay and Gareth, in crafting the conclusion to Goodbye, Sarah Jane Smith and this season are being entirely serious when offering a solution that requires the combined effort of Luke, K9, Mr Smith and newbie electronic soap tray Mr White and a return to the worst excesses of previous stories: the kind of easy research leaps Lisbeth Salander would be proud of, action sequences lasting what seems like mere seconds piled one on top of another in which characters shift geographical area in moments and not always through teleportation and a villain that requires the emotional fallout from a fake global terror to be destroy. Epic concepts like Clyde trapped in the orbital golfball which would have been explored over whole episodes in the old Doctor Who (and did in the case of The Space Pirates) are ushered in and out all too soon.

As ever I was simultaneously elated and appalled, especially since the first episode is actually a quite sensitive (well sensitive for this panto) portrayal of Alzheimer’s or at least the stresses of watching a trusted friend or family member getting old. Who of us hasn’t forgotten something or witnessed someone else forgetting something really rather major like the current residency of their son and wondered – are we or they alright? Lis wonderfully demonstrated first the denial to friends, denial to oneself before acceptance and the decision on whether to fight or relent and let nature take its course.

Of course, in the real world none of this is brought about by a milfian temptress in a red sports car with matching couture. Like Samantha Bond and Suranne Jones before her, Julie Graham senses rightly or wrongly (it oscilates) that this isn’t the place for subtlety though she manages in the first episode to just about convince us that Ruby could be a potential replacement for Sarah Jane, cleverly approximating some of Lis’s business (the walk, the stance, the flick of the hair). By the cliffhanger, the needs of the show kick in of course and it's as though Kate O’Mara is in the room (not least because Ruby’s plan, to steal people’s life essences wasn’t a million miles away from the real Rani’s in her first adventure, if you squint).

Ultimately ranking about a seven on the Zaroff scale you still have to applaud the determination with which Graham sells the Katesh’s gastroschisis state and the boggle eyed notion of a stomach which exists outside an alien’s body, the writers sadly failing to have Clyde suggest it as useful alternative to a gastric band. What I would have liked to have seen would have been a proper battle of wills between Ruby and Sarah Jane the latter having already lost her wits before the former reached ascendancy. Would I be wrong in suggesting that the title character has been even less present this series, mostly falling into her old form of having to be rescued? In nearly ever story this year she seems to have been zapped or put through some sort of mental torture.

Which brings us back to doe in which I also expected the Doctor to arrive for good measure. Whilst its true that both Rani and Clyde also have a hand in the solution, there’s always something slightly unedifying about a character who’s previously had little input on a story charging and saving the day. Perhaps Luke’s still ill-advised scarf is meant to hide the chord which is being used to dangle him in like the original gods that would be brought in at the close of a Euripidian Greek tragedy. Aristotle hated this approach to drama and said so in Poetics where he proposed (radically for 335 BCE) that the resolution of the plot must always spring from the internal actions of the play, a model which has worked for much of the rest of the series.

Or as Hitchcock says, if you show a gun in the opening reel it has to have gone off by the end. What just about makes it saleable (other than the fact that Luke did at least put in an appearance in the first episode) is Tommy Knight’s burst of adolescent vitriol, his character bawling out Rani like a refugee from a John Osbourne play, as though what we’re actually seeing is the result of some whole other unseen narrative which is happening at Oxford, with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as the main villain (a tricky bugger once you’ve reached the middle section). When he later clumsily tells Rani that he loves her, it begins to seem almost exactly like my university experience.

But predictably amid all the shouting and running, the best scene is the quiet moment between Rani and her mum, in which Gita describes quite logically the jealousy of seeing her daughter palling about over the road with this second mother figure and the secret they clearly have between them, Mina Anwar perhaps suggesting, just as she did with the alternative version of the character in The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith that the feckles, flowery, “HELLO SARAH!” version of her character is an act or defence mechanism and that, eep, Gita might have hidden depths which is quite a contrast to Graham’s gurning from across the road. It’s this contrast which has, on the whole, made this series such a joy.

Next Time: I don't know. Time's caught up with us.

The List: 31. Given property advice by property expert Sarah Beeny.

Property Sarah Beeny gave a live chat to The Guardian earlier. I asked:

To which she replied:

31. Given property advice by property expert Sarah Beeny. (sort of)

"official organ"

Games I'd been considering buying a Nintendo Wii in order to play their new Doctor Who game but wanted to wait and see what a proper games magazine thought of it.  Enter Nintendo's official organ.

"Clearly made by people who hate games, sci-fi, and everything decent about humanity."

Oh. Oh well. That saves me a couple of hundred pounds then [via].

"Luke, Vader, Father, David and Prowse"

Film Another example for the file marked "If the internet existed in the 70s".

In 1977/78, David Prowse told a fanzine and later a local newspaper that Darth Vader was Luke's father two or three years before the release of The Empire Strikes Back a story which doesn't seem to have been picked up or carried outside of the relative readerships of those particular organs.

Now, this would have been all over the web within seconds, with Luke, Vader, Father, David and Prowse trending high on Twitter for days.

"I had a similar call the other day"

Justice Webologist receives one of those phone calls:

"Had another call today from a firm telling me that my computer was generating errors caused by malware, which was caused because my security warranty was out of date. I had a similar call the other day, and knowing it to be a scam I asked them which computer was causing a problem, and said that there were over 300 computers in my office and they could not all be faulty. The man that called hung up."

Well worth reading even if you think you're someone who is especially web-literate, if only so that you can help others watch out for the signs.

"for one night only"

Music What I especially love about this, other than Daniel Radcliffe bringing Tom Lehrer back to British television, for one night only, is that he obviously knows it through the same version as me, the Evening Wasted live album and has to stop himself from quoting Lehrer's jokes. "I hope you're all taking notes because there'll be a short quiz next period", "Can we have the next slide, please?" etc.

"these are forbidden words"

Film An entertainingly freewheeling interview with Christian Bale in Esquire during which the journo takes the actor to task for the format restrictions he's been handed:

ESQUIRE: Sometimes the ground needs to be prepared. And you've laid down these onerous rules on me — all I can do is a Q&A.

Actually, these are forbidden words that you are reading right now. Bale is in the habit of requesting that his media interviews be printed in a Q&A format. He also prefers to conduct them at the same five-star luxury hotel in Los Angeles, and makes it known that he dislikes personal questions.

BALE: You don't like that?

ESQUIRE: No! I don't like being told what to do.

BALE: I'll tell you why. Basically, it's somebody who got stuck having to interview me who really wants to be a novelist, so they're writing these novellas and I was like, "It's not true, that didn't happen, they just made all that up! Why don't they just go ahead and be a novelist instead of bothering with interviewing me?"

ESQUIRE: So you want to be perceived accurately, but you also don't want to give any details. You realize that those two things contradict each other.

BALE: No, it's simpler than that. I want to be able to just act and never do any interview, but I don't have the balls to stand up to the studio and say, "I'm never doing another interview in my life!" So I tip my hat and go, "Okay mister! All right mister! I'll go do the salesman job!"

Though Esquire attempts to turn his restriction against him, Bale does have point.  Sometimes interviews are more about the writer than the subject.  Jon Ronson's five minutes with Justin Bieber manages to get the balance just right.

Review 2010: Call For Entries: The Opinion Engine

It's that time of year. Again.

Each December, as some of you will know, I try to write (or ask you to write) a series of posts grouped around a single theme or mode. Sometimes these are epic projects that cover the entire month, otherwise it's simply something to fill the days between Christmas and New Year.

This year I want to try to be epic. Again.

What I would like is for you to suggest topics for me to offer an opinion about.

Could be anything. Something cultural, a film, a book or some music. A current affairs story. A person. A concept. Even just a word.

You can be as specific as possible, phrase the suggestion as a question. Or simply a sentence or a title.

There are no restrictions although I reserve to the right not to use it or to ask you to come up with something else if I simply can't find the inspiration or feel as though I've covered it already somewhere in the past nine and half years of my blog. Unless I've changed my mind. I do that a lot.

Some readers will notice that this is a variation of what happened in Review 2006 though with slightly less restrictions. You could have a look at that if you're looking for ideas.

You will of course receive credit for your suggestion and links to your website/twitter account/anything you're trying to publicise.

I want to try and post something for every day in December so will have to start writing now so that I have something "banked".

You can contact me through the usual virtual channels:

EMAIL

TWITTER

FACEBOOK

Thanks.

names people have thought i am called (a complete list) (probably)

Life In approximate order:

Stuart

Stewart

Ian (a lot) (seriously, even when I've sent them an email signed with Stuart) (I mean I know I ostentatiously use my middle name on occasion/always but it's weird how people's eyes seem to scan to Ian ignoring the bit before it)

Simon

James

[inspired by]

"generally genuinely repentant"

Food Since the story seems to have moved on - oh you web and your short attention span -- I've not seen this first interview with the editor of the now notorious Cook's Source linked anywhere else.  So here it is, largely covering the narrative from her point of view and with that still prevalent approach some parts of the media has to the social web as slightly mystical unapproachable land:

"Bogus Facebook pages purporting to be run by Cooks Source have posed a particular challenge for Griggs because they have dragged some of the magazine's advertisers into the fray with harassing emails and phone messages. A handful of advertisers have parted ways with the magazine, while others remain skittish, the Gazette learned. Griggs said she has had difficulty contacting Facebook administrators to get the situation under control."

She sounds generally genuinely repentant though I suspect the single comment underneath will probably sums up the web's reaction.  One other quote worth mentioning simply because I can't quite bend what's left of my brain around it. Does she have a point?

"She questioned how a chef using a recipe he or she finds online for profit in a restaurant is any different from a magazine publishing one found online."

An apology has been posted at their website.  This seems like another occasion when something which might otherwise have stayed relatively local even a few years ago became larger than any of the people involved thanks to social media. 

"Wide awake behind closed eyes"

Sound Tim Parks on the search for true silence:

"It was humiliating. Wide awake behind closed eyes, struggling to focus on tensions I couldn't find, the words went on and on. Now I was remembering a bad review from years before. Word for word! I writhed. Until finally, the obvious occurred to me: all that noise in the world outside serves precisely to drown out the noise in our heads. To reach any deep silence we must tackle this inner noisiness first."

The only time I ever seem to enjoy a near-silent world is late at night when all the sound I can hear is the distant ticking of a clock, the hum of a freezer and perhaps the cooling fan of my PVR recording something on BBC Four. Sadly, I'm also too tired to enjoy it for very long. Unless some drunk people are shouting in the park outside, then I'm wide awake.  And swearing, probably.

Elsewhere I've review this week's Sarah Jane Adventures. Not my best work, I'm afraid, I'm a bit burned out this week. I also nearly jumped out of my skin when I heard the Nazi call Clyde what he called him (I can't repeat it even in text). Can anyone remember the last time that word was used in a kids sci-fi entertainment show?

Lost In Time.

TV One of the story ideas for the new series of Doctor Who which I’ve coveted over years but is unlikely to happen is for a good old fashioned pure historical, one in which the only sci-fi element would be the Doctor and his plus one. I know these were largely curtailed in the 60s due to poor ratings, but the contemporary twist would be that the TARDIS team and the audience after decades of conditioning would assume that a monster or some other fantasy element is the cause of whatever mischief is, but in the end historical truth would assert itself. In other words, a reverse of The Time Meddler.

While we wait for Moffat or his successor to come to his or her senses, Lost In Time is an entertaining stop gap, with enough historical exposition to keep Lord Reith’s ghost from haunting Mark Thompson for a couple of nights at least (or at least until Strictly’s on and the poor John’s grave rolling begins again). It’s also one of the more blatant homage’s to the classic series, The Key To Time season retold in just over fifty minutes. Oh how Russell and Rupert Laight must have chuckled as they made sure one of the objects was an actual key. It’s just a pity Lalla Ward wasn’t available or willing, probably.

But this is an episode filled to the brim with homages of one form or another not least in the figure of the Shopkeeper, who appears from Mr. Benn, casting the team out to the various points in time, albeit without a new choice of fancy daywear. Cyril Nri tries his best with a part that mostly replicates the cast of Trial of a Timelord in standing around commenting on the stories and offering some much needed cliffhanger acting when required. Who is this mysterious figure, one of the Trickster’s lot or something else? Perhaps there's another Shopkeeper out there holding the balance of power, their constant Sinden/Davies-like rivalry a cosmic version of Never The Twain (but fighting over the health of planets and moons rather than a cheap bit of Carltonware or a mahogany table).

Each of the three yarns also looks towards other fictions. Rani’s story, though based on fact has the beating heart of a Philippa Gregory novel, putting a recognisable human face on a historical queen. Demonstrating that a quite complex drama can still be told on the BBC in a couple of rooms, a cast of few and some entertaining corsetry, this neatly describes the events leading up to the scene in Paul Delaroche’s painting The Execution of Lady Jane Grey which hangs at the National Gallery, actress Amber Beattie sympathetically portraying the doomed young monarch rather misused for religious point scoring.

Given that for some younger viewers the second world war is as distant a memory as the Nine Day’s Queen, perhaps we should be cautious in welcoming Clyde's story, Theories abound on whether the Nazi’s did indeed land on England’s mainland shore as depicted here and in its anticedents Went the Day Well?, The Eagle Has Landed, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, um, The Curse of Fenric. But the exposition is clear enough to explain that Thor's so-called Hammer is changing history so instead let’s just give a cheer for what is a really ripping boy’s own adventure of the kind which seem all too rare now and no I didn’t see that coming. I did indeed yelp.

Sarah Jane’s segment is almost pure Sapphire and Steel, with just a pinch of Moffat magic and a public information film from the 70s. Arguably the weakest of the three, it does still have a peachy performance from Gwyneth Keyworth as a Charley Pollard alike and the random casting of Lucie Jones from last year’s X-Factor as the kind of figure Princess Superstar warned us about. The problem is perhaps that this the story with the least direct jeopardy for the main character (apart from returning hime obviously), though at least kids might get the message that its dangerous to play with matches.

The editing challenge of running these three distinct stories next to each other is carried off well, even better perhaps in cutting between distinct timeframes than The Hours or Julie & Julia and without their direct plot connections. On reflection, both of those films would have clearly benefited from a fez wearer offering a running commentary to his parrot ("She's running out time! There's no way she'll manage to cook all of those recipes in a year! Why do they all look like Meryl Streep?" "Sqwark!"). The trick is in giving Clyde the majority of the action beats, balancing the pacing and having using the old hyperlink cinema trick of matching the shapes of shots in different locations.

What also ties the episode together is the willingness to, for want of a better phrase, “go there”. In both of their stories, Rani and Clyde are the victims of discrimination. If Rani’s is the same kind of euphemistic public school insult endured by Martha Jones during Human Nature, the Nazi’s description of Clyde is absolutely shocking, especially for this timeslot. The strong way that both of them deal with it is how role models are made, both Anjli and Daniel motivated to give some of their best acting of the season (last week’s near two-hander accepted). Too late sadly for forthcoming dvd documentary Race Against Time, but a welcome detail nonetheless.

Another excellent story then in what’s turning into what might be the best series yet, despite the Fordist Rentaghost influences. Continuity buffs will also be pleased to see, thanks to that newspaper clipping, we finally have a date for when these episodes are happening, contemporaneous with broadcast and so definitively after The Big Bang and so confirming the reset of the extra year which was a legacy of Aliens of London all those years go, although as I’ve just discovered it's all a bit of a mess anyway since The End of Time is apparently supposed to have “happened” in 2009 before Planet of the Dead and The Eleventh Hour in 2008 when Saxon was in power (breath). Yes, I know, the silence, the cracks, the time war, the Faction Paradox ...

Next Week: Speaking of which, the Earth wasn't as defended as we thought judging by the weaponry.

"If I let some sentences be short that's a formal decision."

TV At the Illuminations blog, John Wyver reviews Matthew Collings's latest arts series Renaissance Revolution. I like it. It's a good review, especially since it opens like one of my Behind The Sofa things by writing in a faux-Collings voice:

"Hi. That's Matthew Collings. Hi Matt. Matthew makes films about -- art. He knows a lot about -- art. He's pretty good. I like watching him. He's just been on BBC Two talking about -- the Renaissance. He talked in three films called -- Renaissance Revolution. The films are pretty good. I like them. I'm happy that the BBC commissioned them. I like the BBC. A lot."

I've not had a chance to see the shows yet (this is the week that Doctor Who series fnarg has been released on optical disc) but John's post puts it right at the top of the list. What John probably wasn't expecting was for Collings himself to leave a rebuttle in the comments in which he takes umbridge at the notion that the films are too polished:

"I constantly agonise about the relationship between images and words. If I let some sentences be short that's a formal decision. They were longer at an earlier stage of the script. The musical ideas in the series are my own, based not on whimsical perversity but personal association, which I could indulge, because the BBC has a blanket rights agreement on a very wide range of material. Again the tie-up of music, words and pictures involves endless experiment and change."

Until I see the films, I can't really say who I agree with. What I will say is that Collings's comments are well worth reading in and of themselves in offering an insight into the difficult production process of presenter led arts documentaries.

the US equivalent of Liverpool's Liverpool Direct

City Ordinance 311 is the US equivalent of Liverpool's Liverpool Direct, an enquiry and information service for local government, but on a much wider scale. That scale allows better analysis of the data gathered and in this long article with diagrams for Wired Magazine, Steven Johnson investigates what that information suggests about New Yorkers and their needs:

A data-driven approach to urban life makes sense, because cities are in many respects problems of information management. But the problems take various forms, depending on whether you confront them as a public agency or an ordinary citizen. Governments want to know where the messes are so they can prioritize cleanups. But for city dwellers, the challenge takes a different shape, because we need to know which resource we should use to satisfy our present need."

The phone line was instrumental in solving their Maple Syrup mystery.  By mapping were the biggest concentration of phone calls were coming from and the time of day, the location of the source revealed itself quite naturally.