More on the Dahlberg revelations.

TV After yesterday's discussion of the Dahlberg revelations (still trying to keep you spoiler free), I discovered (via io9) there was a previous occasion when the MARVEL universe crossed over with television. Guiding Light was a US soap opera which was broadcast from 1952 until 2009, preceded by a 15-year broadcast on radio and in 2006 ran a storyline in which one of the characters gained superpowers which continued in the comics themselves albeit for eight pages. Comic Book Resources had a set visit. Inevitably the whole thing now floats around on YouTube.

We Need To Talk About Steve Rogers.

Film Or more accurately I do. I was going to wait until the weekend, but the whole thing is still fresh in my mind's eye. So if you are planning on watching Captain America: The Winter Soldier at any time in your life and frankly why wouldn't you, it's a very strong entry in an epic superhero franchise, then stay away. I'll even put a Scarlett Johannson song, or Scarlett Johansson singing a cover version of a Tom Waits song in between this and the next block of text so your eyes can look away.

Removed: article.

Information This article has been removed because it was launched earlier when I had a strop on. The Guardian's G2 feed is back up. The main film RSS feed seems to carry all of the content. Global All's still broken though.

The Guardian doesn't seem to care about their RSS feeds any more.

Technology Over the past few days I've been rationalising my RSS feeds into some semblance of order. Part of the process was unsubscribing from all the various Guardian feeds so I could resubscribe to their main wire all feed and create some filters. It didn't go well, so I sent some emails to their userhelp department to see if they'd noticed:

Hello,

I subscribe to the Guardian All feed and it's recently changed so that instead if "Guardian Global" in the label it says "Latest news, sport and comment from the Guardian / The Guardian" before the title of the post. This means that in my rss reader it all but obscures most of the title now - see accompanying screenshot.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/rss

I don't suppose there's a chance you could snip the feed title back down to something like The Guardian All, the old Guardian Global (which I appreciate isn't perfect), The Guardian Wire ala The Atlantic or NYT or just simply The Guardian at the front?

In case you're wondering when Google Reader went down I began to subscribe via an rss to email service called Blogrtrottr means I can filter the feed in Gmail which cuts down on duplicate content from subscribing to different Guardian feeds simultaneously. :)

Take care,

Stuart.

Deciding that it might be easier to just subscribe to individual sections again I went for the G2. Oh, uh, oh:

Hello again,

I've just attempted to subscribe to the G2 rss feed and it resolves back to

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/rss

Which is *everything* :(

Take care,

Stuart.

No reply. But it was the weekend so that's understandable. What about if I tried to subscribe to tones? The following email was subjected, "Film feed now too"

Essentially it looks like all the "all" feeds are resolving to:

http://www.theguardian.com/uk/rss

And anything else rss isn't providing full content, just snippet view without such things as author details. The whole thing seems to be broken. :(

Any ideas?

Take care,

Stuart.

Yes, I know, the emoticons.  But I find the whole process of communication uncomfortable at the best of times.  Finally received a reply just now:

Hello Stuart,

Thank you for your feedback.

We feel that the best experience of Guardian content can be found on our websites and apps, and those of our partners. The change in our RSS feeds, linking back to theguardian.com, reflects this.

People who use RSS to read our content offline on mobile devices can use our suite of apps to continue to enjoy the Guardian, no matter where they are. Find out more at www.theguardian.com/mobile

Kind regards

User Help
theguardian.com

Sigh, that's that then. I did reply:

Hi,

Ok. But what's the point in having a link on the website to an RSS feed marked "film" if it just resolves back to a feed which dumps all content from the whole website into that feed? What's the point in having RSS feed links at all in that case?

Please see my other two emails for more on this.

Take care,

Stuart.

Not sure what more can be said on this really.

Revisiting "The West Wing"

TV Saved for later, this Q&A at the Institute of Politics of Harvard University:"The West Wing's Bradley Whitford ("Josh Lyman") joined moderator Lawrence O'Donnell, MSNBC host and former writer and executive producer of The West Wing, for a panel discussion on the making of the popular political drama. They were joined by Janel Maloney ("Donna Moss") via video conference and Richard Schiff ("Toby Ziegler") via telephone."

"Spasm! Spasm! Oh, God, here it comes... lactose intolerance!"

Film This BFI celebration of the Eiffel Tower on the occasion of its 125th birthday misses one of my favourite of its appearances in film, in Lawrence Kasdan's French Kiss in which Meg Ryan during her imperious phase and Kevin Kline with an outrageous French accent chase around Paris for reasons too complicated to describe here as is typical of a caper film.

One of Meg's character strands is that she hates Paris and because of that, the obligatory view, of the Eiffel Tower, eludes her, even though we the audience are constantly seeing it, behind her in street scenes or in reflections.  Like a ghostly presence it stalks her and we know as soon as she sees it, the romance and beauty of the place will finally engulf her.

Sadly, I can't find any relevant clips online so you'll just have to go and watch it. Here's Kevin Kline singing La Mer from the soundtrack instead. Oh for the mid-90s when a film like this would still be green-lit:

Cineramarama.

Film 360 Degrees of Historical Immersion, or how to make a narrative film for a circular screen:

"If the audience can look anywhere, how do we force them to see what we want them to see? Can an audience follow a narrative this way? How do you tell a story visually without a frame? There was a time when I did not know the answers to these questions. That time has passed.

"I recently finished Post Production on a 360 degree film for The Civil War Museum in Kenosha, WI. Produced by BPI and entitled "Seeing the Elephant" (a term Civil War soldiers used to describe the experience of battle) the 11-minute show was created to honor all the men from the Mid-Western states who fought for the North during the Civil War.

"The story follows three men and their experiences in the Union Army - the endless monotony of marching and training and waiting punctuated by the horrors of battle. In "Seeing The Elephant," the 360 degree theater is not simply a novelty; it is another tool to completely immerse the audience in the story and the world. Hopefully, they leave with at least a small idea of what it was like to be in the middle of a Civil War-era battle."

Cinerama gets its other 180 degrees.

Letters from America Lost and Found.

Radio Back in 2012, Paddy O'Connell presenter of BBC Four's Broadcasting House put out an appeal for any listeners who may have missing radio recordings at home which led to a man in Newquay contacting the programme to explain that he had many hundreds of old episodes of Alistair Cooke's Letter To America. Here's the audio of Paddy visiting the man with a list and discovering that many, many of the episodes missing from the archive were sitting in an attic.

Now it turns out, he wasn't the only one and a dairy farmer also had many hours of episodes in his shed which he only unearthed because of an impending government inspection and the need for a clearout, and collectively it's led to 650 lost episodes having been restored to the BBC archive.

They're in the process of being cleaned up and there's a voluminous post about the work here which will be of some interest to those of us who miss the extensive articles the Doctor Who restoration team used to produce about their achievements.  Sony’s Soundforge 10 in case you're wondering.  No sign of Mark Ayres.

The whole lot should be on the BBC website some time this year but highlights have already been posted, yet I think I'm going to wait.  With so much of the past soon to be restored, the marvel will be in hearing the epic sweep of history.  Makes you wonder what else other people have lying around...

Brian Cox meets Brian Cox.

People Actor Brian Cox meets Professor Brian Cox. After having been mistaken for one another for years, even to the point of apparently being invited to events when the other was expected, the two Brian Coxes hadn't previously met. Now here they are bumping into one another live on camera at the Empire Film Awards (on YouTube).

Liverpool Hopkins Waltz.

Music As The High Definitive explains: "On November 7, 1964, Sir Anthony Hopkins composed a waltz in the green room of the Liverpool Playhouse. In the video above, he hears it performed for the first time in public by world-renowned violinist and conductor André Rieu at the Belvedere."

Who's Bossktume?

Film Sometimes Recycled Movie Costumes unearths some real treasures:

"This space suit was first seen in the 1966 episode of Doctor Who, entitled The Tenth Planet on Earl Cameron as Glyn Williams. [...] The exact same costume does, however, appear in the 1980 film Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back on Alan Harris as the Trandoshan bounty hunter Bossk."

You all presumably already knew this, of course. The photographic evidence is undeniable.

The Films I've Watched This Year #11

Film Missing from the bottom of this week's list is the BBC's adaptation of Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes which went out on Boxing Day in 2007 and sits in sort of a grey area because it was theatrically released in the US and even has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 100%. Due to their increased production values thanks to digital cameras which produce images indistinguishable from "film" and increasingly starry casts, single dramas on television are becoming an increasingly grey area when it comes to defining their status as "films" or "tv movies", especially since the old "Screen" and "Film Four" strands dissolved.

So even though I can't put Ballet Shoes below, it has all the elements. The cast is starry, Emma Watson gets an "and" with, well, just look at the imdb page.  People like me will of course straight away notice that we're in Journey's End territory as Marc Warren, Yasmin Paige and Lucy Cohu appear bringing together all three corners of that period in the Doctor Who franchise.   Much of the action occurs in an old house on Earls Court and theatres and the photography, for all its mid-noughties BBC drama aesthetic, really captures the musty period atmosphere.  Well worth tracking down, though I think my off-air copy with all the Christmassy trailers and bumpers (for Torchwood Season Two) is probably the best.

The Shooting Party
Primal Fear
Me and You
Grabbers
Diana
The Missing Picture
House at the End of the Street
1 - Life On The Limit
Peacock
Battle of the Sexes
In a World...

Bit of a raggle taggle week all told but there is something of a thematic through line about the class struggle if you really want to look for it, though its tenuous enough for me to not really bother with here other than to wonder if, as an old film studies lecturer used to joke every film is about Vietnam, every film is about the class struggle too, but I've argued continually that every film is about politics so that just encompasses everything so we don't end up learning anything.  Actually now that I come to think of it, all of these films are about politics even Grabbers if you want to take the line that everything which happens on the island is as a consequence of running law enforcement on a shoestring in rural areas.

The name which presumably sticks out is Diana.  I've seen the Diana film now so that some of you don't have to and honestly, it's not that bad.  Oh no I mean it's bad, but if you try to ignore that it's a true story about real people it's actually a pretty decent romantic tragedy version of Notting Hill covering many of the same themes about an ordinary man attempting to date the most famous woman on the planet, and the most famous woman on the planet trying to have some glimmer of an ordinary life.  Essentially it's at its least interesting when it's trying to recreate the iconic Diana moments or sledgehammering in portentous moments of pretentiousness.

Looking about as much like Diana as, to be fair, Helen Mirren looks like the Queen, Naomi Watts nevertheless manages to convince us, if not as Diana, as royalty at least with a real sense of presence and glamour, aided by direction and photography which continually keeps her at the focus of attention in scenes.  Naveen Andrews also manages to balance the poisoned chalice without spilling it too much and I suspect if like Citizen Kane, this had been about fictionised figures in a different story the reception wouldn't necessarily have been as hostile.  But nevertheless this is about Diana and it's a pity that its many virtues have been obscured by the politics of its existence.

This week's J-Law film was House at the End of the Street, the third wheel in 2012, the year which also brought Silver Linings Playbook and The Hunger Games.  It's the kind of film an actress like her makes between massive franchise projects either as a favour to someone or to remind themselves what it's like to act against real rooms rather than green screens and dayglo sets.  It's an old fashioned genre picture with a few surprises, not least that, friends, Elizabeth Shue is playing parts like Jennifer Lawrence's concerned mother now.  Of course, I also want to see J-Law in a remake of Adventures in Babysitting.  She'd rock.  But she'd rock in anything.

Speaking of which, Ellen Page turns up in the determinedly weird Peacock, as a waitress who does tricks in order to pay for the shitty trailer she shares with her son.  But the focus is Cillian Murphy as a bank clerk who after the death of his mother  has experienced a split personality syndrome in which he begins to share his body with a woman that everyone assumes must be his wife.  The director calls it a psychological horror and it really is as the two personalities fight for supremacy in a story which seems designed for the films studies circuit and a dozen college papers about gender identity comparing and contrasting a very conventional mis-en-scene with the entirely unconventional content.

Shot in 2008 but not theatrically released until 2010 and only now turning up on dvd, my guess is that audiences have had problems suspending their sense of disbelief that despite his extraordinary performance when Murphy is in the female role of Emma, none of the other characters, not one, realise that he's also her husband.  As a big fan of Shakespeare I was less bothered, happy to along with it even when Page meets both of them at opposite ends of the same scene, but it is an occasion when an actor, writers and director take a big risk on something like this and don't quite succeed (see also Lars and the Real Girl).  Starry cast here too; Susan Sarandon play's Murphy's boss's wife.

[spoilers]  Both House at the End of the Street and Peacock are slight companion pieces in that they riff on Psycho and particular Norman's relationship with his mother, with gender identity issues as the fallout after the death of a parent.  The former is especially on the nose with its final shot of the antagonist looking directly into the camera after the big reveal, but Peacock is arguably Psycho with a happy ending as the false female identity simply wants to offer benevolence in general, apart from the approach she takes in dealing with her other self.  Yes, that's pretty hideous.  Actually, let me retract that.  The doctor's speech from Psycho resonates throughout.  Nope, not happy at all. [/spoilers]

Me and You is Bernardo Bertolucci latest, his first since The Dreamers and he's still in thrall to the French New Wave, though it's Truffaut this time rather than Godard.  Effectively resurrecting Antoine Doinel's character from The 400 Blows, making him affluent and trapping him a basement with Penny Lane from Almost Famous (an unfair description probably given that it's based on existing material) it oscillates manically between lyrical and boring and a general gloomy sense of the director having a go at making a film about young people for young people without really knowing much about them.  Which is odd when you consider Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers which are entirely the opposite.

The Missing Picture was an unfortunate way to start the day on Wednesday, but only because of the subject matter, not the film itself which is a passionate, enthralling approach to explaining exactly what it was like living under Pol Pot in Cambodia in a way that hasn't hit me quite as strongly since Simon Groom visited the graves on Blue Peter.  As Shoah demonstrates, the imagination can be a powerful tool when trying to capture the visceral feeling of what real life horror can be like and The Missing Picture is at its most powerful when director Rithy Panh replaces the contemporary footage, however important a discovery that is, with his small carved representational figures and dioramas.

Not that I mean to diminish that archival footage, some of which is extraordinary considering the source and the fact of its existence.  There's a similar sense in the two sport films, both of which have archive footage throughout but used in contrasting ways.  In 1 - Life on the Limit (a title which demands a colon but blokely doesn't have one) its part of a barrage of rapid cutting sometimes showing explosions and fatalities from different angles and not always television coverage.  In Battle of the Sexes, long periods of the match are shown via on court 16mm footage allowing us to enjoy the flow of play, cutting between two different camera angles as the ball passes across the net and into the rackets of the opponents.

 1 - Life on the Limit is fine, as it goes, even if it can't quite decide what it's about.  On the one hand it wants to be a wizzy history of F1 with dozens of interviews with all the major players, but tries to have a central thread about the development of safety in the sport cataloguing the many deaths which have occurred on the track and can never quite resolve itself between the two.  The topics are pointedly interconnected, of course, but unlike Senna or Rush it assumes the viewer is already a fan and its dizzying watching all of the names and faces flash past with barely enough time to notice that Damon Hill's gone grey or appreciate the chronology of events and the structure of the various seasons.

By contrast, Battle of the Sexes, in concentrating on one thing and explaining it's importance as a thing in history is just about perfect.  As well as a sport documentary, it's also a strong documentary about the feminist movement in general with archive footage of Germaine and a long soundbites from Gloria Steinman.  It's impossible not to see contemporary counterparts to the chauvinist Bobby Riggs, though I imagine now he'd probably spend his time sniping on Twitter rather than making a show of himself on television.  What the film doesn't cover is how he came back at the age of 67 and challenged Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver to a doubles match.  They beat him too.

But my film of the week, if I have those, is inevitably In a World..., Lake Bell's romantic comedy about voiceover artists which questions why so few of them do movie trailers.  Featuring plenty of members of the industry most of whom fortunately act too, the real surprise is how Bell utilises that industry as a back drop for a story which is really about sisters and fathers and family.  As with the best films, there's a moment about ten minutes before then end when you realise you don't want it to end because you're enjoying the ideas and characters so much not least Bell who if there's any justice will have a long career making these sorts of things.

Part of me wonders if Bell wouldn't have been just as well to make the idea into a series for HBO or Showtime or Netflix - there would certainly have been enough material of at least six half hours.  It's episodic enough to hint that it might even have begun life as just that.  Which sort of puts us back at the beginning because sometimes the "film" and "tv" boxes aren't clear and material which works well in one could be treated equally well if not better in the other.  When Eva Longoria wanders through playing herself entirely happy to have the piss taken out of her for her rubbish attempt at a cockney accent, you kind of wish you could see other "stars" being given the same treatment on a weekly basis...

Nobody Does It Bextor.

BBC's Drama of the Week is Hamlet.

Just a quick note to say that Radio 4's Drama of the Week podcast is episode one of Hamlet.

You can download it here.

Hopefully the other four episodes will go up too, but they've been known to only include a single installment of series.

Vinyl Video.

Art Vinyl Video was an installation at FACT Liverpool in 2003. Vinyl Video was created by artists Gebhard Sengmuller, Penny Hoberman and Julia Scher and within the space resembled a boutique record shop. The premise was that in a parallel dimension, the home viewing format of choice was black and shiny and through a technological miracle, analogue moving images could be played from an LP. Miraculously it worked and in this moment between dvd and streaming had a real buzzy element as you took the disc from the shelf, cued it up on the turntable and watched the blurry faces of what resembled a pirated tenth generation copy of The Web of Fear: Episode One or at least something from the dawn of television. Ironically, a few years later, the creators uploaded this advert for their wares to YouTube and it offers a real flavour of what they accomplished.

Dazzle Ship.

Art Upcoming between July and October at Tate Liverpool, in association with Liverpool Biennial and the Maratime Museum is Dazzle Ship:

"14-18NOW, Liverpool Biennial and Tate Liverpool present a joint commission by Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez. Cruz-Diez will paint a contemporary version of a ‘dazzle ship’ with ‘dazzle’ camouflage in partnership with Merseyside Maritime Museum. The “Edmund Gardner”, a historic pilot ship situated in dry dock adjacent to Liverpool’s Albert Dock will become a new public monument for the city."

"‘Dazzle’ painting played a vital role in the protection of British navel and trade vessels during The First World War when it was introduced in early 1917 as a system for camouflaging ships. This ‘dazzle’ camouflage was employed to optically distort the appearance of British ships in order to confuse the German submarines who were threatening to cut off Britain’s trade and supplies. The optical illusion imposed by the ‘dazzling’ made identifying the direction the ship was travelling in difficult for the enemy submarines, meaning that calculating an accurate angle of attack was near impossible."

The Independent has further coverage.

The Feeling Listless Soundtrack 1.0: Jesus on a Greyhound.

Written by Shelby Lynne & Glen Ballard
[from: 'Love Shelby', Universal, 2001]

I'd just started university and I was traveling home for the first time by train. I wasn't happy. Even a month in, I was feeling homesick and university was nothing like I had expected it to be - also I was so inexperienced at life that I didn't feel like I'd made any of the right decisions - everyone else was making friends and I wasn't meeting anyone. Or so I thought. Anyway, I was sitting there and I must have looked like a wreck. This girl sat down beside me, and asked me something about when the train would reach Liverpool. I told her I didn't know - that it might arrive in two hours and made some joke about lateness. She laughed. We started talking. And it was easy. And she was listening to me. She was asking about my philosophy on life, what was important to me. It was the first time in weeks I'd talked about anything deeper that which A-levels I'd done and which University I went to. She made me feel like what I was telling was interesting, meant something. At the end of the journey we finally talked about the course stuff. It turned out she was a trainee psychologist. Apart from being a nice person, she knew all the right things to say. Damaris gave me her address and I never saw her again.

I'm not a religious man. On the rare occasion anyone asks what I am, I tell them I'm a Non-denominational spiritualist, which is a nice catch-all term which gets a laugh and covers all the bases. What it actually mean, I think, is that believe there is an order to the universe, that everything happens for a reason, and that everyone has the right to look at it their own way as long as it doesn't impinge on their own freedom (which leaves the extremists out in the cold I'm afraid). The reason I believe this is because on a few occasions I have felt really awful, my self-esteem as low as possible, on each of these occasions I seem to have met someone like Damaris who has listened and made me feel that life isn't so bad, that in fact it is worth living. I've done it for other people. These aren't random things. That's what I like to think this song is about.

[Commentary: Surprisingly, this isn't the only song called Jesus on a Greyhound.  If this had happened now, perhaps we would have swapped Twitter names or simply friended each other on Facebook.  Back then, and this would have all happened in 1993, the internet in the UK was still something people didn't easily have domestically.  But I like that there's this person who looms quite large in my past who I only met once, whose name I've always remembered, presumably because it's so unusual.  Damaris Bonner.  Perhaps she'll google it some day and find this entry and I can see thank you properly.]

The Feeling Listless Soundtrack 1.0: An Introduction.

Roger Sanchez - Another Chance on MUZU.TV.

Music Back, back in the day, over a decade ago when, before this blog matured (or became a bit rubbish) it was brave enough to do things like have its own soundtrack which would be sent out to people in the form of mix cds as prizes and that sort of thing. Some of you might still have yours. It was essentially a collection of what were then, and this is over a decade ago, favourite songs and other autobiographical choices which seemed like they evoked what the blog was supposed to be about as if the blog has supposed to be about anything.

Because it was a blog soundtrack, along with the track selections, I wrote a series of entries evoked by the music or else I simply borrowed something which had already been written either for the blog or earlier. As part of the ongoing project to collect together this ephemera back here, I thought it would be fun to repost each of the entries here, with the music too perhaps with some commentary [in square brackets].  I can't imagine there are many surprises and most if it is fairly mainstream.  But consider this a flashback to more innocent times.

The Krazyhouse in Washington.

Art In 2009, Dutch photographer and videographer Rineke Dijkstra visited The Krazyhouse in Liverpool on Wood Street for an art piece. Now that art piece is to be displayed in Washington for a few months at the Corcoron Gallery of Art:

"The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nikky, Philip, Dee), Liverpool, UK is a four channel video installation by Rineke Dijkstra, created in 2009 at a popular dance club in Liverpool. It presents in sequence a group of five young people in their teens and early twenties dancing and sometimes singing along to tunes they selected themselves. Dijkstra met her subjects at the club and invited them to perform their choice of music for her video camera in a special studio that she had built in a back room on one of the dance floors. They dance while a DJ plays live mixes of their selections and their friends watch. One of the most important portraitists working today, Dijkstra’s style produces an uncomfortable, almost confrontational realism rather than a snapshot aesthetic. She draws nuanced feelings from her subjects that are quite poignant. In The Krazyhouse, the selection of music, type of dance and mimicry, and the choice of dress all come together to evoke a social spectrum that speaks to the time and spirit of its location. While the kids’ selections of music and dance are diverse, each one seems both self-conscious and lost in the moment looking for some way to transcend their daily lives and make an impression for others."

As you might expect this isn't its first appearance having previous turned up in retrospective exhibitions at The Guggenheim and The MMK Museum of Modern Art. Here are videos from each which include interviews with the artist and glimpses of the video:





There are some screenshots on Pinterest too.

Benedict Cumberbatch to play Hamlet.

GUARDIAN: US to stop bulk collection of phone records #TomorrowsPapersToday #BBCPapers pic.twitter.com/oen5gSH0xJ
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) March 25, 2014

I'll add a link to The Guardian's article when it's republished. It was up earlier thanks to an embargo jump.

Updated  26/03/2014  Here's a link to The Guardian's article now that it's been republished.