"A man becomes preeminent, he's expected to have enthusiasms. Enthusiams... What are mine?"
I am obsessed, but I reckoned that being obsessed with only one thing is creepy and a little unnerving where as obsessing about a handful of things is good and healthy! Perhaps obsession is a slightly strong word - perhaps its just extreme, and possibly excessive, liking of. Whatever the term here's a little list of things, it's in no particular order and is no way conclusive
Photoshop - I got my first look at PhotoShop (or PotatoChop as it became lovingly known) in 1997 and it was not long before I was putting my friends' faces into movie posters and stills. I loved it from the very start and since then it has been my ambition to make Photoshop as big a part of my life as possible - using it where ever possible in my university work at the time and spending more and more time retouching and doctoring images as a hobby. When I decided to get out of mechanical engineering it was a big influence on my decision to study computer science and specifically my choice of topics and dissertation which was creating and adapting a suite of image manipulation and comparison tools... basically a mini-photoshop imitation being the sincerest form of flattery after all! Since then every step I've taken has been one closer, and hopefully soon I'll be working in Creative Retouching and the dream will have been realised!
Crazy Golf - Mini, Crazy, Adventure or all 3 there is something perfect about small scale golf especially when it involves amusing obstacles! It's a game you can be competitive about but without being overly serious or stressful which is particularly excellent if, like me, your skill at sport comes more from luck than technical ability! I've played on 3 different continents I think the first course I ever played was the one in my dad's home town - made entirely out of concrete - I was distressed to see last time I was there that it has been demolished. As yet nothing has taken it's place, what could?
Tom Gauld's Illustrations - I thought I'd better put the word "Illustrations" in there in case somebody thought I was stalking Tom Gauld, in fact I've never met him and I've never even contemplated camped outside his front door just in the hope of touching him... I have had a short email conversation with him though. All that aside his drawings are wryly amusing and have a charmingly naive and human nature to them. You should check them out here.
Movies - I love films, I love the cinema, even bad films are good. It's some kind of voodoo. I like to think I can identify most films by looking at a random frame or scene regardless of whether or not I've seen it - I'm pretty good at it. I suppose quoting goes hand in hand with films (though not exclusively) I do love to quote and I'll admit it is at times hard to know where the quote ends and I begin (see first line of this post).
Pedalos - I've no idea why pedalos are great, maybe its something to do with the fact that they're mostly useless as a mode of transport and more than a little bit naff. Something about riding a pedalo really implies am intention of doing very little with the day, it speaks of the luxury of time and relaxation! So if you ever find yourself walking near water with me and notice a glazed over look in my eyes I'm probably thinking how cool it would be if we had a pedalo!
Lauren Laverne - Can't put my finger on quite why (possibly her lovely eyes, possibly the cheeky smile) but I've always been a little fixated with Lauren ever since the days of Kenickie, and just look at her now - a host on the culture show! The girl done good! Anyway I'm sure she'd be flattered by the admiration (for want of a better word) and should she ever decide to ditch her family she knows where I am.
Oh yeah and Batman... Oh, and stationery... And photos too... and Raymond Chandler novels.
Wednesday 21 January 2009
Friday 16 January 2009
2008 Film Review
The Good Films are never quite as interesting to talk about so I'll just let you know my top films of the year and throw a few recommendations at you.
So best film of the year is too hard to call so I've chosen 2: In Bruges and The Dark Knight.
The Dark Knight
Unless you've been living in a box you'll know what The Dark Knight is all about so I won't drone on about it too much simply to say that I absolutely loved it, it certainly helped that both times I saw it were on IMAX screens. I've always been a big Batman freak, Christopher Nolan is a genius who had already proved himself to be more than capable of doing a batman film, and the cast was just superb so it was already a recipe for success and it was better than I dared to hope! Highlight for me has to be Heath as the Joker - absolutely mesmerizing, and the opening sequence robbery.
In Bruges
In Bruges is on an altogether lower key - two hitmen (Brendan Glesson and Colin Farrell) are directed by their employer (Ralph Fiennes) to lay low in Brussels for a few days after some event (which is revealed part way through the film). It's an extremely black comedy about life and death, hell and redemption, as things in Bruges start out dull veer into excitement before heading to dangerous. It's excellent to see Colin doing some decent acting again it seems you have to wait years between his good performances as he calls in his performances in Hollywood blockbusters, presumably for the money, in this it certainly looks like he's doing it for the love. Hard to pick a highlight as its consistently excellent and the interaction between the two leads is perfect, Brenden Gleesson is always a pleasure to watch and this is going back to classic I Went Down territory.
Very worthy of mention: Pineapple Express; Burn After Reading; Be Kind Rewind; There Will Be Blood; Son of Rambow; Juno; Iron Man; Frost/Nixon.
Films I somehow missed and must get round to: No Country For Old Men; Gone Baby Gone; Sweeney Todd.
Ok on to the Bad Films. To be perfectly honest I watch a lot of bad films (I watch far too many romantic comedies for a start) but most of the time I'm prepare for the films to be nothing more than popcorn entertainment and that's all I want - I'm fairly forgiving to bad films. That said here are some stinkers I saw in 2008:
I'll start with the worst, Lost Boys 2 - I'm not sure that Lost Boys was what you'd call good but it was a lot of fun and certainly has a place in many hearts of my generation - to anyone who regards it fondly I would issue this warning - Stay away from Lost Boys 2, it's worse than you could imagine! Mind you Corey Feldman is vaguelly amusing to watch as he hams like never before! People who aren't bothered about the original are hopefully smart enough to stay away from the sequel anyway!
Close second has got to be In the Name of the King, all in all it was a pretty bad year for Jason Stretham, lets be fair he's never going to be a good actor but his hard man formula should at least deliver some entertainment, shouldn't it? Deathrace and Transporter 3 using hard man plus car formula were watchable nonsense but poor imitation of earlier hits. In Bank Job he attempted some acting as a cockney hard man (not much of a stretch there) and managed to be almost plausible as a human being, almost. The less said about In the Name of the King and War the better.
Also a pretty bad year for Mark Wahlberg - We Own The Night had all the ingredients of a great movie including a pretty ace looking cast but vered wildly between gritty and realistic and action packed, in the end failling to be either and ending up pretty boring. Marky Mark took scowling to a whole new level in the frankly baffling computer game movie Max Payne, didn't expect much and got about that.
Plentiful "weak, lazy, and generally half-arsed comedy" awards get handed out including Love Guru, Tropic Thunder, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, and Step Brothers.
There were a whole bunch of totally underwhelming films this year, not necessarily bad just chronically mediocre most notably The Day The Earth Stood Still, Hancock, and 21
So a lot of middle of the road rubbish in 2008 rather than anything overtly offensive, I think I may have carefully avoided the real dross. I am incredibly glad to have (deliberately) missed Mamma Mia, Sex and the City, and The Happening.
So best film of the year is too hard to call so I've chosen 2: In Bruges and The Dark Knight.
The Dark Knight
Unless you've been living in a box you'll know what The Dark Knight is all about so I won't drone on about it too much simply to say that I absolutely loved it, it certainly helped that both times I saw it were on IMAX screens. I've always been a big Batman freak, Christopher Nolan is a genius who had already proved himself to be more than capable of doing a batman film, and the cast was just superb so it was already a recipe for success and it was better than I dared to hope! Highlight for me has to be Heath as the Joker - absolutely mesmerizing, and the opening sequence robbery.
In Bruges
In Bruges is on an altogether lower key - two hitmen (Brendan Glesson and Colin Farrell) are directed by their employer (Ralph Fiennes) to lay low in Brussels for a few days after some event (which is revealed part way through the film). It's an extremely black comedy about life and death, hell and redemption, as things in Bruges start out dull veer into excitement before heading to dangerous. It's excellent to see Colin doing some decent acting again it seems you have to wait years between his good performances as he calls in his performances in Hollywood blockbusters, presumably for the money, in this it certainly looks like he's doing it for the love. Hard to pick a highlight as its consistently excellent and the interaction between the two leads is perfect, Brenden Gleesson is always a pleasure to watch and this is going back to classic I Went Down territory.
Very worthy of mention: Pineapple Express; Burn After Reading; Be Kind Rewind; There Will Be Blood; Son of Rambow; Juno; Iron Man; Frost/Nixon.
Films I somehow missed and must get round to: No Country For Old Men; Gone Baby Gone; Sweeney Todd.
Ok on to the Bad Films. To be perfectly honest I watch a lot of bad films (I watch far too many romantic comedies for a start) but most of the time I'm prepare for the films to be nothing more than popcorn entertainment and that's all I want - I'm fairly forgiving to bad films. That said here are some stinkers I saw in 2008:
I'll start with the worst, Lost Boys 2 - I'm not sure that Lost Boys was what you'd call good but it was a lot of fun and certainly has a place in many hearts of my generation - to anyone who regards it fondly I would issue this warning - Stay away from Lost Boys 2, it's worse than you could imagine! Mind you Corey Feldman is vaguelly amusing to watch as he hams like never before! People who aren't bothered about the original are hopefully smart enough to stay away from the sequel anyway!
Close second has got to be In the Name of the King, all in all it was a pretty bad year for Jason Stretham, lets be fair he's never going to be a good actor but his hard man formula should at least deliver some entertainment, shouldn't it? Deathrace and Transporter 3 using hard man plus car formula were watchable nonsense but poor imitation of earlier hits. In Bank Job he attempted some acting as a cockney hard man (not much of a stretch there) and managed to be almost plausible as a human being, almost. The less said about In the Name of the King and War the better.
Also a pretty bad year for Mark Wahlberg - We Own The Night had all the ingredients of a great movie including a pretty ace looking cast but vered wildly between gritty and realistic and action packed, in the end failling to be either and ending up pretty boring. Marky Mark took scowling to a whole new level in the frankly baffling computer game movie Max Payne, didn't expect much and got about that.
Plentiful "weak, lazy, and generally half-arsed comedy" awards get handed out including Love Guru, Tropic Thunder, You Don't Mess with the Zohan, and Step Brothers.
There were a whole bunch of totally underwhelming films this year, not necessarily bad just chronically mediocre most notably The Day The Earth Stood Still, Hancock, and 21
So a lot of middle of the road rubbish in 2008 rather than anything overtly offensive, I think I may have carefully avoided the real dross. I am incredibly glad to have (deliberately) missed Mamma Mia, Sex and the City, and The Happening.
Thursday 15 January 2009
2008: A Year in Numbers
I'll probably do a review of 2008 in words at some point but for now here are some numbers for anyone who is interested:
5000+ Photos*
217 Films, 30 of which in the cinema
30 Years old
27 Buildings stayed in
21 Books
21 Blog entries here
13 Birthday Parties
9 Flights
7 Concerts
6 Countries
5 Blog entries on Things We Know
4 Continents
5 Boat Trips
3 Plays
2 Book launches
1 Stagg Do
1 Rugby Match
1 Wedding
*Everyday in 2008 I took at least one photo, depending on how many photos you can be bothered to look through (366, 53, 12) click one of the links:
Best of the Day
Best of the Week
Best of the Month
5000+ Photos*
217 Films, 30 of which in the cinema
30 Years old
27 Buildings stayed in
21 Books
21 Blog entries here
13 Birthday Parties
9 Flights
7 Concerts
6 Countries
5 Blog entries on Things We Know
4 Continents
5 Boat Trips
3 Plays
2 Book launches
1 Stagg Do
1 Rugby Match
1 Wedding
*Everyday in 2008 I took at least one photo, depending on how many photos you can be bothered to look through (366, 53, 12) click one of the links:
Best of the Day
Best of the Week
Best of the Month
Monday 12 January 2009
Photoshop = Nazi Propaganda?
I don't really want to be excited about Valkyrie but it's hard not to be after all Bryan Singer is one of my favourite directors and the cast is a veritable who's who of excellent actors including Ken Branagh, Terence Stamp, Bill Nighy, Tom Wilkinson, Christian Berkel (if you haven't seen Das Experiment you really ought to check it out), Kevin McNally, and err Eddie Izzard (last seen as a talking mouse). Not to mention Tom Cruise of course who I'm loathed to admit is a pretty good actor if you're prepared to over look the whole weirdy-evil-brainwash-psydo-religion-cult stuff!
The film centers around the attempted assassination of Hitler by his own people during the second world war. For obvious reasons this is a story close to the heart of many Germans and Claus von Stauffenberg is seen as something of a national hero due to the part he played in trying to kill Hitler and hopefully save Germany before it was too late.
Germany doesn't like Scientology and has not recognised it as a religion due to the fact that it has primarily economical interests and as such is a commercial enterprise. In fact the cult has been declared unconstitutional (way to go Germany!) I may be reading too much into this but I should think Germans are very aware of the dangers of cults and brainwashing... Anyway all this bad blood meant that when Tom Cruise was named as the actor to play Stauffenberg, Germany basically told the production company to naff off if they thought they were going to be allowed to film at key historical locations. Scientology 0, Germany 2!
Eventually after much negotiating and, lets hope, lots of money passing hands filming was allowed. This was not the end of the trouble of course - during filming 11 men were badly injured when the side of a truck fell open when cornering at speed and spilt them onto the road. Also a huge chunk of material had to be re-shot after reels of film were wiped!
But the latest and to my mind scariest controversy has not been widely reported. United Artist released a pair of promotional stills - one a profile of the original Claus Von Stauffenberg and the other Tom Cruise in costume and the same pose, and my word don't they look similar! Perhaps they are related some how? No, the original has been altered to look more like the Cruiser! Hopefully you can see for yourself that the image has been altered: its been stretched, making his head shape longer and narrower; the chin has been given the Cruise dip; the nose has been given a bit of a curve (the original Claus has a very straight nose); and finally it's been aged and degraded to my mind a forgivable crime but one which help disguise the other alterations.
I'm not going to go in to any technical detail but what interests me is the morality of it, as most of you know I'm a big fan of digital art, altering photographs, and of course photoshop. I've always seen it as fairly harmless but this seems to be actually altering our historical record and here we enter the territory of 1984's Ministry of Truth. My worry is that most people are not very aware of Von Stauffenberg, I for one knew little more than the fact he was involved in a plot to kill Hitler with a bomb in a briefcase, and we're naturally going to pick up more knowledge from Valkyrie and probably start to associate Tom with Claus anyway. It would be nice to think that the film will encourage people to learn more about the real history and perhaps people will wonder if Claus looked anything like Cruise - that's certainly the kind of thing I end up wondering about these kind of films - so after leaving the cinema we head home and tap "Claus Von Stauffenberg" into a Google image search - first result is Tom in a still from the film and the second is the two pictures released by United side by side! So all of a sudden the main reference picture for Claus is the one which has been doctored by United Artists (allegedly).
It worries me, photoshop is a very powerful tool and as Stan put it: with great power comes great responsibility! Just because we can do an alteration and get paid to perhaps we still have a duty to question whether its the right thing to do.
Of course these are just opinions I can't prove that doctoring has occurred but I don't feel the need to I would like to believe that (along with a number of others) I am wrong, after all Tom is an actor and really shouldn't need to look identical to the person he's portraying - Joaquin Pheonix did just fine as Johnny Cash despite not looking a great deal like him.
Interestingly this article now has a correction at the top which sounds suspiciously like something that has come as the result of legal bully from United Artists and basically states that the writer of the artical hadn't done their research properly and had overlooked the archive image that United Artists had found and released!
The film centers around the attempted assassination of Hitler by his own people during the second world war. For obvious reasons this is a story close to the heart of many Germans and Claus von Stauffenberg is seen as something of a national hero due to the part he played in trying to kill Hitler and hopefully save Germany before it was too late.
Germany doesn't like Scientology and has not recognised it as a religion due to the fact that it has primarily economical interests and as such is a commercial enterprise. In fact the cult has been declared unconstitutional (way to go Germany!) I may be reading too much into this but I should think Germans are very aware of the dangers of cults and brainwashing... Anyway all this bad blood meant that when Tom Cruise was named as the actor to play Stauffenberg, Germany basically told the production company to naff off if they thought they were going to be allowed to film at key historical locations. Scientology 0, Germany 2!
Eventually after much negotiating and, lets hope, lots of money passing hands filming was allowed. This was not the end of the trouble of course - during filming 11 men were badly injured when the side of a truck fell open when cornering at speed and spilt them onto the road. Also a huge chunk of material had to be re-shot after reels of film were wiped!
But the latest and to my mind scariest controversy has not been widely reported. United Artist released a pair of promotional stills - one a profile of the original Claus Von Stauffenberg and the other Tom Cruise in costume and the same pose, and my word don't they look similar! Perhaps they are related some how? No, the original has been altered to look more like the Cruiser! Hopefully you can see for yourself that the image has been altered: its been stretched, making his head shape longer and narrower; the chin has been given the Cruise dip; the nose has been given a bit of a curve (the original Claus has a very straight nose); and finally it's been aged and degraded to my mind a forgivable crime but one which help disguise the other alterations.
I'm not going to go in to any technical detail but what interests me is the morality of it, as most of you know I'm a big fan of digital art, altering photographs, and of course photoshop. I've always seen it as fairly harmless but this seems to be actually altering our historical record and here we enter the territory of 1984's Ministry of Truth. My worry is that most people are not very aware of Von Stauffenberg, I for one knew little more than the fact he was involved in a plot to kill Hitler with a bomb in a briefcase, and we're naturally going to pick up more knowledge from Valkyrie and probably start to associate Tom with Claus anyway. It would be nice to think that the film will encourage people to learn more about the real history and perhaps people will wonder if Claus looked anything like Cruise - that's certainly the kind of thing I end up wondering about these kind of films - so after leaving the cinema we head home and tap "Claus Von Stauffenberg" into a Google image search - first result is Tom in a still from the film and the second is the two pictures released by United side by side! So all of a sudden the main reference picture for Claus is the one which has been doctored by United Artists (allegedly).
It worries me, photoshop is a very powerful tool and as Stan put it: with great power comes great responsibility! Just because we can do an alteration and get paid to perhaps we still have a duty to question whether its the right thing to do.
Of course these are just opinions I can't prove that doctoring has occurred but I don't feel the need to I would like to believe that (along with a number of others) I am wrong, after all Tom is an actor and really shouldn't need to look identical to the person he's portraying - Joaquin Pheonix did just fine as Johnny Cash despite not looking a great deal like him.
Interestingly this article now has a correction at the top which sounds suspiciously like something that has come as the result of legal bully from United Artists and basically states that the writer of the artical hadn't done their research properly and had overlooked the archive image that United Artists had found and released!
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