The Films I've Watched This Year #5

Film What a long week. For various reasons this has been a very long week, mostly due to contracting the man flu late on Wednesday which left things a bit blotto for a few days (which is why I missed Ignite Liverpool the other night) and which I'm still sniffing through.

11.6
Blood Glacier
Sunset Strip
Annie Oakley
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within
Filth
Elysium
Dirty War
Cool World
Beautiful Creatures

Also a bit of a messy week film wise. About the only item on that list I'd unreservedly recommend was tonight's entertainment, Beautiful Creatures, which is an unabashed tribute to 90s supernatural teen films like The Craft wearing Tim Burton's coat and pretending to be for the Twilight crowd but with a far funnier script, hilariously arch and undeniably sexy performance from Emma Thompson and a relatively unexpected bit of experimentation in terms of how it deals with its protagonists which might leave some people unsatisfied in ways that they can't quite put their finger on or people like me who use phrases like "narrative agency" utterly thrilled.  Rotten Tomatoes isn't sure about it, having averaged out at 46%.  But the comments, as is so often the case with films on that site which hover around 50%, are roughly split between people who get it and those who've completely missed the point or already decided whether they'd like the film before they'd seen it.

The second most fun I had this week was with Annie Oakley, the mid-30s biopic-cum-western with Barbara Stanwyck in the title role of the backwoods small game hunter who joined and toured with Buffalo Bill's Wild West show.  Turner Classic Movies has decent appreciation of the film which enunciates its importance within the Stanwyck canon, just two years before her breakout in Stella Dallas.  Although it has a relatively (relatively?) dated approach to race and animal rights, I enjoyed its simplicity and seeing something from the period when directors and cinematographers like George Stevens whose careers began in the silent era were still getting used to sound and the new camera technologies and their relative strengths and weaknesses - here the shows themselves are shot almost like live events and are intercut with relatively stagey character scenes.  We're currently undergoing a similar period of change as celluloid is replaced with digital and similar strengths and weaknesses are equally becoming apparent.

As for everything else?  11.6 is the story of a security man who stole the largest haul in French history only to give most of it back which drags terribly in places but remains watchable thanks to François Cluzet's mesmerising eyes.  Blood Glacier is a German Lovecraftian monster hunt with a few decent scares.  Sunset Strip takes a impressionistic approach to documenting the history of the mile-and-a-half stretch of Sunset Boulevard that passes through West Hollywood via archive footage and staccato interviews with a galaxy of stars (and Stephen Dorff).  Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within isn't as graphically dated as I'd expected but the script is utter wash.  Filth tries to be an Irvine Welsh adaptation which isn't Trainspotting and ends up being an Irvine Welsh adaptation which is an inferior version of Trainspotting.  Elysium and Cool World offer roughly the same story in various ways and Dirty War is Adam Curtis's The Power of Nightmares narrated and reported in the style of This American Life.

If the list looks a bit short it's because I spent most (all) of yesterday ploughing through the second series of House of Cards, but it seems a bit premature for a length review especially since most of you have lives or work on days like Fridays and don't have the time or are just wanting to savour the thing.  I think I'm a bit of a fair weather friend.  Sections of both series are touched with genius and offer some peerless pieces of television in acting, writing and directing terms, and that's especially true of the episode in the middle of this series written by series creator/adaptor Beau Willimon and directed by Jodie Foster.  It's also gratifyingly determined not to stagnate in a particular format, but that can have the effect of creating a certain smushiness in its storytelling across the series, inconsistency in characterisation and tonal uncertainty as its not sure if its supposed to be straight satire ala the UK version or The West Wing with teeth (though its true that The West Wing was often very toothsome).  I'll get back to you on this.

Ballet Attention Span.

Dance You may have heard that archival footage of Margot Fonteyn leading in Sleeping Beauty in 1956 thought lost for years has recently resurfaced at the BBC's archive in Perivale. Seemingly in tribute the BBC are having a season of programmes about ballet across BBC's Two and Four, including the presentation of this seminal performance. Except, um, not the whole thing. The BBC press release is very excited about the whole thing, devoting four whole paragraphs to Fonteyn ’59: Sleeping Beauty which is on BBC Four, Friday 7 March, including this crushing disappointment in the final section:

"As part of the BBC Ballet Season, this reworked for television Sleeping Beauty (60 minutes) is believed to be the first time British audiences will have had a chance to see extracts from the ballet including the illusive Act II since the live transmission in 1959. This rarely seen film will give viewers a glimpse of an authentic 1950s style of ballet, transporting viewers back to the living rooms of post-war Britain. The 95-minute reassembled ballet will be available to view online in addition to the 60-minute BBC Four version."

My italics. So having found and having availability of the whole ballet at least in this version in some form, BBC Four have decided their television viewers wouldn't want to watch the whole thing and produced a sixty minute version instead. Yes, the 95 minute version will be online (and hopefully that included the iPlayer app across the various platforms) but at what point and how did the discussion go about deciding that an audience watching television, and the audience watching this programme, would prefer to see this sixty minute presentation instead of the whole thing?

This American Valentine's Day.

That Day Yesterday's International doodle on Google's homepage was this cute if otherwise entirely pointless chocolate box interactive thingy but in US visitors were treated to a special episode or Act of This American Life in which Ira introduced clips of people talking about falling in love hidden behind love hearts. Here's Google's take and at TAL's website Ira explains why they did it:

"I’ve been a fan of Google Doodles for a while (though I only recently learned they had a name and that name is Google Doodles). I liked that they seemed able to do anything on their homepage — a crossword puzzle, a Dr. Who video game, a tribute to Saul Bass, a Les Paul guitar or a fully functioning Moog Synthesizer (with its own four-track tape recorder). It’s interesting that in this big global company, with millions or maybe it’s billions of dollars in computer servers everywhere, and all this tech and engineering, they have people doing something for their biggest product – their search engine – that’s so... handmade. And idiosyncratic. This Doodle is their first foray into documentary storytelling and I hope they do more stuff like it. I hope they reach out to Wes Anderson and Laurie Anderson and Anderson Cooper and artists whose names are not Anderson as future collaborators."

Ira mentioned the Doctor Who game. Good god, imagine what an episode of This American Life about Doctor Who would be like: "Act III: I have a fixation with the Monoids..." that sort of thing.

Ellen.

People The comments underneath the YouTube version ironically provide a good illustration of many of things Ellen Page says in her speech and what has and no doubt will be missed even though she says it in so many words is that in coming out at her age she's risking her career or at least severely limiting, even further, the kinds of roles she's likely to be offered in the future.  That's why this is brave.  She's challenging Hollywood and the audience to be different this time.

Flappo Bird.

Games As per usual because I don't have a smart phone, I didn't discover Flappy Bird until it was taken down. Lucky I can still play, albeit in the Atari 2600 version:

"With the introduction of the mobile app "Flappy Bird", a simple game of keeping a bird flapping through obstacles grew into a worldwide phenomenon, earning upwards of $50,000 a day in ad streaming during the game. The developer, Nguyen Ha Dong, surprised the world when he announced that he was pulling the application down, citing discomfort with the addictive nature of the game. In its wake, a variety of clone games arrived, and this Atari 2600 port serves as another one, albeit with a completely different approach and on a much simpler system."

I am a leaf on the ... ack ....

Cartoon Cocker.

Film The Playlist offers this trailer for the Criterion Collection edition of Wes Anderson's The Fantastic Mr Fox featuring an animated Jarvis Cocker, which oddly enough is less animated than the real thing.  Click there for information about the extras and whatnot.

The Prince of Jutland explained.

Gabriel Axel, the director of Hamlet reimagining The Prince of Jutland died recently and The Guardian has an obituary which includes this nugget about the production:

"Prince of Jutland (1994), shot in English in Denmark, was a risible effort to retell the story of Amled, drawing upon the 12th-century work that inspired Shakespeare's Hamlet. The starry cast - Helen Mirren, Kate Beckinsale, Gabriel Byrne and Christian Bale – struggled against bad dialogue and cinematography. There was some excuse for its failure, because Axel fell ill during the editing process and was unable to complete post-production work. In the US, Miramax acquired the rights, re-cut the film and eventually released it on video in 1998 under the title Royal Deceit."

Which explains many of the film's problems, though as you can see from my old review, I really rather enjoyed it, especially the moment when Bale eats a tree.

This Blog Post (***).

Psychology Clash Magazine, which I recently began following online, has decided to revise how it provides a score with their reviews. The change isn't massive, they'll still be making things out of ten, but it's the justification for those scores which is changing at of their April issue. Along with the guidelines, they've posted a long read asking various journalists just what the marking system with a review means to them and the context within which they decide on how to reduce the couple of hundred words they've otherwise prepared to a series of numbers or stars.

 The general consensus seems to be that there isn't a consensus, other than there's a variance in audience expectation between marking something out of five or ten and that essentially everything in the middle is ignored so there's a temptation to overmark if the thing is worth listening to even if it's also a bit average (or pretty much what Clash themselves have done with the new Katy B album) (which is a disappointingly generic concoction) (though I do like the cover).

Applying this to film, I have considered giving marks to the texts featured in what's turning into my weekly review post. I think over the years I've become pretty adept at being able consider exactly where a film is on that scale, not least because both Lovefilm and Netflix implore me to do it. If we look at the films I watched last week:

Lovestruck: The Musical (**)
Mademoiselle C (***)
Sketches of Frank Gehry (****)
The Girl (****)
Hank: Five Years from the Brink (****)
Man of Steel (**)
Calendar (****)
Rapture-Palooza (***)
Uncertainty (****)
Mike Birbiglia: My Girlfriend's Boyfriend (****)
The Wolverine (****)
Red 2 (***)

You'll notice I didn't award any of them with a single star - some of the dance numbers in Lovestruck: The Musical are pretty good even if the music's anodyne and the performances in Man of Steel are just enough to keep it watchable in the middle. There are no five stars simply because none of them bend the envelope in the way that something like Gravity or Inception does.  To offer some archival examples, When Harry Met Sally is a five-star film but Sleepless in Seattle is not. It's a four. Shrugs.

Here are Clash Magazine's new guidelines and the points are pretty sound especially in relation to music.  They will never give a new album a ten because it has to be a game-changer and sometimes such things take a while to seep into the zeitgeist.  Most of the time I really good record will get an eight or nine with everything below a six considered average or worse.  Interesting they're cautious about zeros because "if an album exists then it’s achieved what so many don’t: creation."

Could you apply similar rules to film?  I think it's a bit more ambiguous, actually.  The difference between film and most music is that so much of it is an industrial creation and the commercial imperatives are different.  There's a lot more work involved if a filmmaker wants to more obviously put their personal stamp on the product, especially now, in comparison to most musicians, though I understand that there still can be many hands between the recording studio and iTunes which is why I used the word "most" before the word "music" there.

I'm post critic, I suppose. Having spent years trying to watch everything award four or five stars in Empire Magazine or five stars at least in The Guardian and nominated for various awards and seeing some terribly average fare anyway, I've eventually come to the conclusion that most films are probably, actually worth watching and if you're a film fan that you're just as well going with your own taste because it'll never quite match everyone elses.

Rotten Tomatoes is a pretty good guide but it can be muddled if a film is under reviewed or the reviews are poorly researched. Uncertainty languishes at 50% largely because the splat piece writers failed to notice what it was trying to do structurally even though I think the filmmakers managed to capably communicate that within the film.  In some ways, I wish as in some other professions, film reviewers had to go through some kind of training before they were allowed to write.  But I would say that.

To an extent I've stopped reading reviews before seeing films anyway so that I can greet all of them cold.  I still listen to Kermode but I've largely forgotten the detail what he said by the time I watch the thing anyway.  These days, I tend to go with curated options like making sure you see everything Artificial Eye, Criterion or Eureka releases because they tend to know what they're talking about or keeping up with various directors and actors whose work I've liked before, in other words, what people tend to do anyway.

‘Like an avatar?’

TV If I hadn't been working I would certainly have been at the Cornerhouse in Manchester yesterday to see Jeanette Winterson interview Russell T Davies. Luckily Paul Magrs did have a ticket and has posted some of the flavour:

"Russell was explaining the idea of ‘Mary-Sues’ to Jeanette, who’d never heard of them. It was all about how people are being put off from writing before they even start by online bullying in writing forums. People – women, mostly – were being accused of creating ‘Mary-Sue’ characters.

‘It’s a pejorative term, apparently. For when people use a version of themselves in the fiction.’

‘Like an avatar?’

‘Yes, exactly. And they’re being told they shouldn't be using them in their stories.’

Jeannette looked appalled. ‘But what else do you have?'

Updated Later On Twitter, James Henry makes a valid point, though:

Russell T Davies kind of gets what a 'Mary Sue' is, but misses out the critical bit: http://t.co/UV7DRsfCqX
— James Henry (@james_blue_cat) February 10, 2014

… which is that a Mary Sue is a stand-in for the author who is better than the main characters at *everything*, and is loved for it.
— James Henry (@james_blue_cat) February 10, 2014

To which Eddie Robson added:

@james_blue_cat They miss that it specifically comes from fanfic: you write yourself meeting your favourite characters and they love you.
— Eddie Robson (@EddieRobson) February 10, 2014

At which point I link backwards to some of my own fan fiction featuring "James Perry" meeting B’Elanna-Torres off of Star Trek: Voyager... (posted here over a decade ago...)

"Feminists don't have a sense of humor"

Music Back in 2008, Nellie McKay's TED "talk" consisted of a short set of her songs including the above, Mother of Pearl. In the prevailing maelstrom on Twitter, it's desperately disappointing in gender embarrassment terms to see just how many of these lyrics I've seen said in all seriousness by men @ women as though they have any right too and when they're criticised for it saying "I'm entitled to my opinion."  No, no you're not.

The Films I've Watched This Year #4

Film Now that these week in film reviews are becoming the regular occurrence I didn't want them to be, I'm starting to think about what I'm going to write which is why these film reviews are becoming the regular occurrence I didn't want them to be.  But the upshot of that is I'm becoming more of an active participant again, not simply grazing through things which is somewhat where I was drifting towards, now really trying to decide once again if the filmmakers achieved what they set out to do.

Lovestruck: The Musical
Mademoiselle C
Sketches of Frank Gehry
The Girl
Hank: Five Years from the Brink
Man of Steel
Calendar
Rapture-Palooza
Uncertainty
Mike Birbiglia: My Girlfriend's Boyfriend
The Wolverine
Red 2

The makers of Lovestruck: The Musical certainly did what they set out to do. It's a jukebox television musical in which a peroxide blonded Jane Seymour drinks a magic potion which makes her thirty years younger with the face of Chelsea Kane so she can sabotage her estranged daughter's wedding by seducing the fiance because said offspring is supposed to be the star of the broadway show she's producing.  It's rubbish, of course, but it does have the spectacle of Seymour singing and dancing to a cover of Lady Gaga's Let's Dance and luckily it's just during the opening credits so I've essentially seen the rest so you don't have to.  As to what possessed me to watch in the first place, you can blame the genre games posts for which I'm researching the next entry.  Oh and that it's on Netflix and I'm trying to get my money's worth.

But for all of that, it's not as rubbish as Man of Steel.  Stop raising your eyebrows.  At least Lovestruck: The Musical is honest about what it is and fulfill the viewer's low expectations.  Man of Steel manages to take one of the most iconic and celebrated characters of the past century and put him at the centre of a poorly structured, badly written, routinely directed, ill-conceived dirge that's depressing to watch largely because having made some money at the box office it's become the basis for what Warner Bros will be doing with DC's characters in the cinema for the next decade.  It is to Superman what the Leakley Bible would have been to Doctor Who had that been pressed into service as the basis for the US TV Movie with Paul McGann.

Oddly, it's a very well cast film.  Henry Cavill looks suitably heroic, Amy Adams can do the screwball comedy that's central to Lois, Larry Fishburne's a fine Perry White.  But none of them really get to do the things they're very good at because Snyder's decided that to underscore that this is a mythic character he must be backed by a ton of mythology most of which is the kind of doggerel Lucas would turn his nose up at and overburdens a character far too early in his story.  Superman can be an angsty character to be sure, the burden of power, last of his species, at its core this story is The Front Page or His Girl Friday with male journalist gifted with super powers and his partner a sharp tongue, something no previous incarnation of these characters, especially in the cartoons across the years has forgotten.

[spoiler zone]

Imagine if instead of a twenty-minute action sequence that looks like the work of someone with Thor-envy, we had instead greeted Lois and Clark in the Daily Planet doing their thing before the latter has to go off and do something super before a flashback structure kicked in layering the origins and explaining who Zod is.  Yes, it's somewhat Superman II, but at least  the core elements would be in place and the audience would have something to latch onto.  There's actually nothing wrong with taking narrative chances like making Lois aware of the secret identity or killing Jonathan Kent, such things are in the air and should be.  But you shouldn't forget, just as the makers of The Wolverine or Red 2 don't, which genre you're in and there's nothing wrong in having a few action sequences which focus on heroes being heroes and fun.

[/spoiler zone]

Three personality led documentaries this week.  Mademoiselle C follows Carine Roitfeld, the former editor-in-chief of Vogue Paris as she launches a new fashion quarterly in a fluff piece which makes The September Issue look like The World At War but does at least have the spectacle of Karl Lagerfeld pushing a baby stroller around an office.  Sketches of Frank Gehry is the late Sydney Pollack's fascinating investigation into the architect's working methods which funnily enough has a similar structure to the fashion film but has the bonus of featuring people with something interesting to say about their subject.  Gehry was a fairly middle of the road architect until his decided to take a risk in his mid-sixties and revolutionised the business.  There's a lesson for all of us in that.

Director Joe Berlinger's Hank: Five Years from the Brink is also a lesson.  Having enjoyed Charles Ferguson's The Inside Job I was weary about what looked for all the world like a reposte to that earlier film (which effectively doorstepped the bankers who perpetrated the financial collapse of 2008), the cinematic equivalent of the subject of a newspaper column writing an open letter in rebuttle.  There is an element of that, especially in the latter stages, but away from the footage of Senate hearings (which also appears here) we're presented with a very complex figure who's portrayed as being caught in a whirlwind during which he was forced to make decisions he really didn't want to in the face of (surprise, surprise) the Republicans in US government who didn't understand why he needed to take those decisions.

Hank's an interesting example of interview film.  It is a documentary but the only two newly shot interviews which appear are with Poulson and his wife, the rest of the story explained through archive news footage and intertitles.  Yet it remains solidly cinematic thanks to the editing techniques and rich musical score that grips like a thriller.  Hank isn't afraid to enunciate his personal failings, about how a personal misunderstanding led to him accepting the job of Secretary of the Treasury and how he sometimes overestimated the intelligence of some of the people he had to deal with.  He's clearly exasperated that the systems which led to the financial collapse are still in place and his attitude is that it's not about whether it's going to happen again but then.  So actually it's a horror film too.

As per the opening paragraph, I had expected to say Calendar was my favourite film of the week.  Mislabeled as being released in 2013, this 1993 art film by Atom Egoyan, like the Poulson documentary utilises just a limited numbers of types of shots to tell its story about the dissolution of a marriage.  Egoyan himself plays an egotistical photographer who's tasked with visiting Armenia and photographing churches for the eponymous calendar.  But the only parts of the country we see, apart from brief VHS recordings, are through the viewfinder of his camera as his wife, who's also acting as translator falls in and out of love with their driver and guide.  These are intercut with shots of the photographer at a table in his apartment on a series of dates with European women.

What makes the film spectacular is that with just this limited amount of shots, Egoyan's able to weave a story which is lucid and compelling.  There are mysterious elements throughout, the significance of which he slowly reveals and there's a genuine sense of being in control of form and of trusting the patience of the audience and treating us with some intelligence.  Come to think of it, Calendar is probably also an art house example of a romantic tragedy, what with its unhappy ending and its flashback structure which twists back in on itself.  It's certainly leavened a bit with comedic moments usually of the "lost in translation" kind which are often very funny as the photographer finds his inability to understand Armenian is becoming the problem and cause of his ensuring irrelevancy.

No, my favourite film of the week was Uncertainty which is just extraordinary and which you probably haven't heard of.  I certainly hadn't when I saw it in a charity shop last week, buying it on the strength of Joseph Gordon-Levitt being on the box, the quote from The New Yorker.  Well, and indeed then.  Uncertainty is a genre experiment in which the same couple, Gordon-Levitt's girlfriend played by Lynn Collins, find themselves on opposite sides of New York in parallel storylines, a family drama and a paranoia thriller running concurrently in seemingly different realities and we see how they react to each.  In other words, it's Melinda and Melinda, Run Lola Run or Sliding Doors with even wider genre extremes and sense of experimentation which makes it sounds like an intellectual exercise like Calendar and to some extent it is, but Gordon-Levitt and Collins's chemistry also keep it grounded.

It is also a film which works best without much in the way of prior knowledge so I don't want to go into too much detail.  But if you'd told me Scott McGehee and David Siegel, the directors of Bee Season (the Richard Gere explains Buddism scene still haunts me) were capable of producing this I wouldn't have believed you.  It sounds derivative, but McGehee and Siegal pointedly and directly reference all of the above mentioned films (there's a moment about catching trains for example) as well as Kieslowski in identifying each of the storylines with colours that are forever visible within the mise-en-scène.  This is complex, exciting, rich film making of the kind which seems designed to be the stuff of film criticism papers but thanks to weak distribution found itself ignored.

In other words, I'm probably predisposed to love it.  For hours afterwards I found myself saying things like "Ooh, ooh, ooh.." as I noticed some of the clever, clever directorial and writing choices.  As well as the self-awareness, as the stories intercut with one another pieces of exposition about the characters are revealed in one story become vitally important in the other.  Gordon-Levitt's character has all the narrative agency in the action section of the film, Collins in the family drama and although that looks initially like genre stereotyping, the way it's done could also be seen as genre commentary.  There's also the climax of the film which truly lives up to the title.  There are amazingly cheap copies available at Amazon and its rentable at Lovefilm.  Yes, indeed, recommended.

Dawn of the Rise of the Battle of the Conquest of the Escape Beneath ...

Nature You've probably seen this already, but it's hilarious, so here it is again. It's staff at Ueno zoo in Tokyo practising their drills for capturing escaped animals:



Presumably I'm the only one who was reminded of Mark Wallinger's performance and video piece, Sleeper (2004-2005) which appeared at the Turner Prize exhibition at Tate Liverpool way back when:



Hidden from view in Tokyo, the ghost of Joseph "everyone's an artist" Bueys is making a slow hand-clap.

"they pay no attention to poetry"

Film The YouTube channel Cinema Sins might catalogue the odd mistake in blockbusters, but Moveguide, profiled by The New Yorker is a faith-based review website which catalogues actual sins as the Bible would have it. Unfortunately, like the Bible, it's a bit consistent in its approach, as noted by Jeffrey Overstreet, film critic for Christianity Today:

"While Movieguide ignores movies that don’t originate in Hollywood, Overstreet began to understand the depth of the relationship between filmmaking and religious themes as he uncovered works by Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, and Wim Wenders. “Movieguide has no tools whatsoever to read those movies, because they pay no attention to poetry,” he said. In Baehr’s ruthless inventorying of every filmic occurrence of sin, Movieguide often renounces movies that might contain meaning for a faith-based audience. Overstreet points to “No Country for Old Men” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” as two films that illustrate Christian theology but were condemned out of hand by a Christian press preoccupied by violence and cursing. “Of course, they give glowing reviews to the ‘Narnia’ films and to the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy solely because they’re the works of Christian authors. But ‘Pan’s Labyrinth’ is proof positive of everything Tolkien and Lewis and L’Engel wrote about faith in art.”"

All of which said, they bloody love Gravity.

"She's got the kind of look that defies..."

Film With Gravity soon to be released on shiny disc and hopefully receive the best picture award at the Oscars, The Guardian has an interview with Alfonso and Sandy. Eyebrows have been raised and I've seen some bemused commentary on the number of nominations and awards Bullock's received generally from people who're a bit uninformed about the production process. Perhaps they should read this piece about what an average day for the actress was like on the set:

"Bullock's working day on the shoot sounds more like a complex medical procedure than an acting gig. She describes it as a "morose headspace". She was strung or strapped inside the lightbox for up to 10 hours a day. She was usually in complete silence, save for instructions coming through an earpiece, and observed only by a camera on the end of a robotic arm. It was as if she was acting in total privacy, she says: "The only people I'd see was if someone came in to adjust the rig or fix something. Everything else was behind this black curtain on this vast black sound stage. Often I would just stay in whatever apparatus I was in because it was too long to get in and out of it. You learn to zone out. I don't know if meditation is the right word but it was that principle. I would either play music or just close my eyes and stay where I was – until the end of the day where you'd put your own head back on and go outside and have the benefit of sunshine."

At least it was an asset in the "adversity" department. "My situation was somewhat like the situation the character was in," she says, laughing. "There's no one around, you're frustrated, nothing works, you're in pain, you're lonely, you want someone to fix everything for you but they can't – all those things I was feeling."

Tokyo Sky.

Fashion When she was a teenager, Jennifer Sky, the model and actress whom most of us will remember for Cleopatra 2525 or Marc Evan's My Little Eye spent a summer in Tokyo attempting to bolster her career. It was, judging by her account at Buzzfeed, awful. Now she's written an autobiographical eBook recalling the period as a cautionary tale about the industry:

"When Jennifer Sky was 15, she was offered the chance to spend a summer working as a model in Japan. For a girl from rural Florida who spent hours poring over fashion magazines, it seemed like a dream come true. But soon she found herself all but abandoned in an unfamiliar city, attempting to navigate a ruthless industry on her own and waving goodbye to childhood on the boozy margins of Tokyo’s expatriate scene. In Queen of the Tokyo Ballroom, Sky recounts the summer that changed the course of her life—and left her still sorting out the consequences two decades later."

There is an excerpt on the Buzzfeed interview but the whole thing is available on UK Amazon for a very reasonable £1.86.

CGI Pat.

TV "Get ready for one of the world's most beloved characters as you've never seen him before..." Yes, in some cheap looking (though probably quite expensive) dayglo CGI rather than the always beautiful stop animation. I'd be interested to know if the latter was ever even considered. This looks rubbish and mores to the point is another example of the creative cliff which children's films have fallen over, all of that voice talent, some of which sounds like its doing some good work, in service of yet another film about a talent programme (cf, one of the Shreks) and with what actually sounds like the Karaoke Sauron himself, basically advertising for his portfolio.  One of the lectures I attended at university talked about how properties such as this go through a process of "normalisation" which tends to remove any sense of individuality.  Well, here's that process in all its glory.

Delpy's Road.

Film Julie Delpy's next directed film is a period drama which sounds really exciting:

"The film is based on a story by Delpy and Stephen Hamel. Hamel is producing through his Company Films banner along with “Her” producer Vincent Landay.

"The film is set the early days of silent films and the automobile industry and follows a family of Vaudeville performers embarking on a cross-country road trip from New York to Los Angeles while making a motion picture."

The exciting part is that lately we haven't had a decent period road movie as such because of the sheer cost of setting and resetting that many locations which is odd when you consider how much of a road movie, depending on the route taken, is in an open wilderness where the only elements you necessarily need are costumes and a vehicle.

Model eats designer bag on New York City subway.

Science Fiction: New Death.

Art Well, then.

"A major contemporary science fiction exhibition will be at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) in Liverpool between 27 March – 22 June 2014."

"Artists including James Bridle, Jon Rafman, Ryan Trecartin, Mark Leckey, Karen Mirza & Brad Butler and Larissa Sansour will present works which explore how technology is creating new ways of living (and dying), of fashioning identities and the growth of cult-like communities; making our everyday lives feel increasingly like science fiction."

"China Miéville award-winning British science fiction author (Perdido Street Station, The City & the City) has produced a new series of short texts which will be visualised in the galleries. These texts have inspired the narrative of the exhibition which is presented as a deconstructed movie set, with the curator as director, artists as actors, Miéville as scriptwriter and acclaimed artist collective The Kazimier as set designers."

Three Seashells.

Film Typeset of the Future collates and identifies the various fonts which appear in science fiction films and begins its trawl with 2001: A Space Odyssey (via kottke). The writer is also handily transcribing chunks of text glimpsed as the people of the future or as is the case with that film, the past, go about their business including bathroom arrangements. Here is what to do if you need to go to the toilet in 2001. In zero gravity:

"This toilet is of the standard zero-gravity type. Depending on requirements, system A and/or system B can be used, details of which are clearly marked in the toilet compartment. When operating system A, depress lever and a plastic dalkron eliminator will be dispensed through the slot immediately underneath. When you have fastened the adhesive lip, attach connection marked by the large “X” outlet hose. Twist the silver coloured ring one inch below the connection point until you feel it lock."

That's just the first step. The "adhesive lip" sounds uncomfortable to say the least.

Incidentally, elsewhere, someone has explained how the three seashells must work in Demolition Man (probably not safe for work - contains graphic line drawings).