Monthly Archives: October 2009

In Defense of Hoarding

Over at Minimal Mac (a terrific site that everyone should read, even if you’re not a Mac user), they recently pointed to a metafilter comment about the dangers of coveting possessions. The commenter suggests that the best way to beat any hoarding impulses we might have is to simply adjust the way we look at things.

> All of the computers on Ebay are mine. In fact, everything on Ebay is already mine. All of those things are just in long term storage that I pay nothing for. Storage is free.
> …
> The world is my museum, displaying my collections on loan. The James Savages of the world are merely curators.

It’s a lovely sentiment, and one I really wish I could get behind, except I’ve just got one little problem: Me. Or more specifically, people like me.

What do I mean by this?

I recently found a stash of old PlayStation games that I thought I’d lost. There are some real gems in there. PaRappa the Rapper, BeatMania, Final Fantasy VII. All great games. Will I ever play them again? Probably not. I’m having enough trouble keeping on top of new releases to ever really go back and play old games. So why don’t I get rid of them?

There were a finite number of copies of PaRappa the Rapper published. Taking into account losses, breakage and the effects of time, this number is constantly decreasing. Now, if I was to send my games off into the æther, there’s the strong possibility that they’d be picked up by someone like me: a pack-rat who can’t bear to let anything go. So not only would I be losing my own copy of PaRappa, itwould also mean there is one less copy to “take out of storage”. Eventually, there will be no copies of it left on eBay. Or at least, it would be so rare as to be only available at a completely unreasonable price.

The storage thing is a nice (if slightly smug and self-satisfied) analogy, but it just doesn’t work in the real world, because it assumes an infinite supply chain. Besides, I’d always prefer to be the curator, actually caring for these things, rather than a cold, distant absentee owner.

(My wife will probably beat the shit out of me for this post.)

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Brain Dump – October 23rd

Here’s some stuff that’s been clogging up my starred list in Google Reader for too long.

When it comes to bonkers films, Russia is the new Japan:

Hosting your Windows 7 Torrenting Party

“When you Marry” – they don’t write ’em like that any more:

It is not uncommon for one or both parties to experience feelings of guilt or revulsion, to the mutual distress of both parties. For other couples who have anticipated great thrills in the first sex relations, there is sometimes disappointment – reality doesn’t live up to expectations

Monkey Island 2, in 3D:

Photobombing could be my new favourite thing on the internet.

Technology got you down? Squarepixelz is hosting a bunch of old tech documentaries. I love watching these – everyone’s so hopeful about the possibilities of technology.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine, in 30 seconds:

You know This American Life? “That show by those hipster know-it-alls who talk about how fascinating ordinary people are?” Well, here’s every episode of the This American Life TV show: Season 1 Season 2.

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The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Last night, through an amazing and unexpected string of good luck, I ended up at a special screening of Terry Gilliam’s new film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus presented by Gilliam himself.

I should probably point out that I’m a huge, huge fan of Gilliam. To the point that I’ve said that I want to be buried with my Criterion Collection edition of Brazil. So bear with me if I start to nerd out a bit.

I thought Imaginarium was terrific. After The Brothers Grimm and Tideland, which were both dark, heavy films, this is a return to the lightness of his earlier films. Don’t pay attention and you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a sequel to Time Bandits. Or maybe The Fisher King. Or maybe even The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. And hell, while I’m at it, there are a few shots there that made me think Gilliam has already cast Christopher Plummer in the lead of his currently-in-preproduction The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. This film shines a spotlight on the leitmotif running through all of his previous work: the idea that imagination and invention can break the spell of monotony cast by the drudgery of ordinary life.

At this point, I should probably try to summarise the plot. Isn’t that how these things work? But in Gilliam films, this is easier said than done. And to be honest, I think this is the kind of film that works best when you come into it blind, rather than with a bunch of preconceptions about what the story might be. Or don’t. Read everything you can, if you like. Just go and see it. But before you do, just let me say that Tom Waits is incredible as the Devil ((Although I think this is slightly lazy, obvious casting, considering what a great job he did as Kneller in Wristcutters: A Love Story)), and Lily Cole is a surprisingly good actress. And the rewrites following the death of Heath Ledger work so well I’d bet that in 30 years, people will barely know they weren’t intentional. Like the malfunctioning shark in Jaws, sometime restrictions bring out the best in us.

There’s another aspect of Imaginarium that highlights this too: the special effects. Before CGI effects really took off, Gilliam was forced to limit himself using physical effects, which had a tremendous… well… physicality to them. Unbridled, his fantastical CGI dreamworlds look amazing and expansive, but they feel paper-thin. When people first enter the Imaginarium, they start in a pantomime forest, with cardboard trees which may have looked cheap and ridiculous, but they at least felt real and believable. As they moved further into the Imaginarium and hit the CGI-heavy landscapes, it made me wonder whether Gilliam made the right choice in prioritising epic verisimilitude over whimsy. Especially considering the film’s message of liberation through imagination.

One thing I should probably point out, which no-one has mentioned so far, is the similarity between this film and Angela Carter’s novel, The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman. Both are about unbridled imagination (and the potential perils thereof), but also, and perhaps more crucially, both are about identity and choice. I dunno, maybe I’m completely off-base with this one, but I could have sworn that one of the gravestones in Imaginarium had the name “Dr Hoffman” on it. Or maybe my eyes were just playing tricks on me.

(Update: Over on imaginariumofdrparnassus.com, Dave Warren, the film’s art director wrote in (in response to a link to this review – whoa) to say that the actual name on the tombstone was “Bob Hollow”. That solves that, then.)

The film opens theatrically at the end of the month and I’ll be keeping my eyes open during this scene when I go back to see it again. For me, every one of Gilliam’s films improve on repeat viewings. Gilliam told Mark Kermode that his preferred tagline for Tideland was “Tideland – It’s a different experience the second time!” I’d bet a tenner the same thing is true for The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus.

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Nanowrimo

We’re over halfway through October. You know what that means: it’s time for my annual resolution to actually participate in this year’s National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)! I mean, it’s not like I don’t have enough on my plate, what with college, radio work, design work, Italian lessons and my most thankless of jobs as house-husband. Why not try and write a novel too?

Part of what used to squash my plans in previous years is the fact that I had nothing else to do. And this is dangerous. There’s that old saying about “ask a busy man a favour.” The theory being that once you get the ball rolling, getting things done just becomes second nature. If you’d asked me to do you a favour before, I would have said “sure, no problem”, gone back to playing Xbox, and given you a half-hearted apology two months later when you ask me why I didn’t do what I said I would. I say “half-hearted” because, inside, I’d be thinking it was partly your own fault for asking me to do something in the first place.

Not this year.

The other thing that used to always catch me out was the lack of an initial idea. As romantic as it might be to go into this thing completely blind, just putting fingers to keyboard and seeing what happens across 50,000 words – automatic writing on a massive scale – I just don’t think this is the way I work best.

Again, not this year.

This year, I know exactly what story I want to tell. I’ve got an idea that I think I can stretch across an entire novel. It’s just a matter of getting it out. Quickly.

The only thing standing in my way (apart from college, radio work, design work, Italian lessons and my duties as house-husband) is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which comes out right in the middle of November. I’ve written before about how addicted I am to the first one (250+ hours) and I’m genuinely quite scared at what might happen when this new one comes out. Would Whitney Houston be appearing on X-Factor now if she knew that crack PLUS was going to be released in a few days? Hell no. She’d be off getting ready for her year-long crack vacation.

Who knows, maybe it’ll work and I’ll be able to pull it all off. I’ll just have to prioritise, hard. Ask a busy man a favour? Sure, right after I finish this game.

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Berlusconi Fights Back

I really don’t want this news story to go unnoticed, because it is amazing.

> ROME, Oct 17 (Reuters) – Italian magistrates and the opposition are up in arms after a television channel owned by Silvio Berlusconi shadowed and secretly filmed a judge who ruled against the prime minister in a bribery case.
>
> Days after Judge Raimondo Mesiano ordered Berlusconi’s holding company to pay 750 million euros in damages to a rival, the media mogul’s Canale 5 channel aired a video of the judge taking a walk, smoking and getting a shave at the barber.
>
> Dubbing the judge’s behaviour “eccentric”, a narrator points to him smoking the “umpteenth” cigarette, calls his turquoise socks “strange” and says: “He’s impatient … he can only relax at the barber’s”.
> …
> Some magistrates are debating a “turquoise socks” protest, while others have been collecting signatures for a letter of support for their colleague, Italian media reported.

(Via Reuters)

Wow.

I have absolutely no idea how this whole Berlusconi thing is going to play out. Will he be forced from office? Will it all be forgotten about? Fuck knows. I do know that when both sides are as completely batshit insane as this (turquoise socks protest!), the next few months are going to be very, very entertaining.

Well, for those of us who have the safety net of this not being our permanent home, at least.

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Yeah, no

As you’d expect, being a stranger in a strange land, I often find myself talking to people who aren’t native english speakers. I’ve learned that there’s a definite knack to having a conversation that crosses a few language barriers. Talk slowly, taking a lot of care to en-un-ci-ate ev-er-y syl-lab-le. And throw in a lot of hand gestures, too. They always help.

What doesn’t help is when you’ve got a verbal tic that must be incredibly confusing for the person listening to you. In my case, I have an awful habit of starting sentences with “Yeah… no.” My wife pointed this out to me a little while ago and now I can’t help but notice that I do it all the fucking time.

In my mind, though, it makes perfect sense. What I’m actually saying is “Yes, I hear, understand and appreciate what you are saying but no, this is not the case.” And it gives me extra time to think of a proper response. But to an Italian person listening to me, I probably sound like a babbling lunatic who is deliberately going out of his way to confuse them. English is confusing enough without me throwing a spanner in the works. For example, did you know there are roughly seven different ways to pronounce “ough” in the English language?

Although I’ve been getting less bummed out by my tic since I started noticing how many other people have it too. You’ve no idea how happy I was when I heard Joe Cornish say it on the Adam and Joe podcast. Famous people do it too!

Still, it doesn’t help me with my own problem. Maybe I should just start speaking Italian to Italian people.

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Glee

What does it say about me that an hipster indie film like Away We Go — a film which seemed to be tailor-made for people like me — completely failed to move me, despite the fact it was violently tugging at my heartstrings for the better part of two hours, whereas populist, cliched fluff like Glee had me bawling in 42 minutes?

It ends with a slow clap, for fuck’s sake. I am completely powerless against the slow clap.

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Eden Lake

Director: James Watkins, 2008, 91′
IMDB Keywords: Lake, Young Couple, Lost In Woods, Bleeding To Death, Bicycle

Sometimes it feels like my life is just a series of stupid decisions, strung together with crippling anxiety. For example, there’s the time we went camping in Tuscany. It was probably my favourite camping holiday yet – we pitched our tent on the beach. Not ‘beside’ the beach or ‘near’ the beach. We were on the beach. The waves were breaking not ten metres from our tent. It was stunning. Beautiful in almost every way. Except I couldn’t get to sleep. I was a bit restless and thought that watching one of the movies on my iPod Touch would help lull me to sleep. And so, instead of watching something like The Jerk or Anvil, I decided it would be a great idea to watch Eden Lake, a horror film about a couple who go camping on a beach and get brutally terrorized by a bunch of ASBO kids.

See? Stupid decision. I didn’t get any sleep that night.

It’s not like it’s a flawless movie. Even horror movies have a breaking point when it comes to coincidences – the screaming victim just happens to run into a cave which just happens to be the home of the big scary monster. Eden Lake gleefully ignores this breaking point and keeps layering coincidence on top of coincidence. Towards the end, Eden Lake actually felt as if it was taking the piss. Either the filmmakers didn’t get the memo regarding the suspension of disbelief, or they’re implying that this couple are the two unluckiest people in the world.

I’ll tell you what though, they’re definitely two of the smuggest, most self-satisfied cunts in the world. And this is where the film plays a blinder.

They’re so overwhelmingly unbearable that I actually started to wish them bodily harm. It’s a horror film, so you know they’re going to suffer and so I was kind of look forward to that bit of the movie. When all the bad shit starts happening, I felt better. It’s catharsis. Establish the heel, make them suffer, and everyone goes home feeling as if everything is right with the world. Did anyone go to see House of Wax to see Paris Hilton escape unhurt? No. They paid good money to see Paris Hilton get a pole thrown through her head. It’s catharsis, and everyone (including Paris Hilton, I bet) knows it. But Eden Lake isn’t quite like that, because it doesn’t stop there. It just keeps pushing through into a new level of discomfort that few films have taken me to. The brutality is so unrelenting that it’s hard not to feel bad for hating these people. I mean, I just wanted to see them get a few cuts and scrapes. Nothing that would leave any kind of permanent scar. And the film goes so much further. It was kind of like when everyone was all “Saddam Hussein was an evil dictator who should rot in hell” and then they saw the video of his hanging and then they were all “Oh.” Eden Lake is like that. Only with less genocide.

And I don’t think that I can finish up without mentioning Jack O’Connell, who plays the leader of the ASBOs. He really is the star of the show, completely believable and terrifying. He basically plays a more sociopathic version of the character he played in Skins, which makes me think that he’s either a great actor who is in danger of being typecast as a grotty teen, or someone the police should genuinely keep an eye on.

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