Archives for category: Film

Life and Death In Bruges

21 March 2008 //
1

Bruges at Christ­mas time. A lovely medi­eval pre­served town with a fest­ive spirit and now blessed with two hit men lay­ing low at a quaint hotel. How can one react to this movie? In Bruges is a treat!!

Char­ac­ter­iz­a­tion and the char­ac­ters are superb. Dia­logue is witty and fast paced. The scenery of Bruges is shot mag­ni­fi­cently. There are little 10 second vign­ette shots that work very well. The movie fol­lows the two hit men tak­ing refuse fol­low­ing a botched job. The hunker down to await a call. As Vladi­mir and Estragon, Ray (Colin Far­rell) and Ken (Brendan Gleason) adopt enter­tainly dif­fer­ent approaches to their enforced tour­ism. Maybe its just the Irish way, but I feel some Beck­ett here.

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Categories Film, Irish

An Historian Passes

3 January 2008 //
1

I just dis­covered at the HNN that George Mac­don­ald Fraser, author of the acclaimed Flash­man series of his­tor­ical fic­tion novel, passed away yes­ter­day. gmf.jpgHis rib­ald con­tri­bu­tions to a true appre­ci­ation of the nuances of Vic­torian mil­it­ary and social his­tory will be missed. I have always looked for­ward to the next install­ment of the Flash­man papers. The obits remind that he was author, journ­al­ist and screen­writer. When Octopussy with Roger Moore as James Bond came out I remem­ber think­ing that it had a rather dif­fer­ent feel than other bonds. The Indian scenes were exotic and there even seemed to be a dif­fer­ent pace. Shortly there­after I found out that Fraser had done the screen play and I should have sensed the famil­iar had at work. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Film, History

How Golden Was Her Age?

20 October 2007 //
0

I was finally was able to see Eliza­beth: The Golden Age today and was not dis­ap­poin­ted. This a movie worth see­ing at the theatre.elizabeth.gif The set­tings are sump­tu­ous, superbly shot and Cate Blanchett seems to be able to do no wrong. She is Eliza­beth.
I am stay­ing away from his­tor­ical com­ment­ary here. This is a story for the screen and I appre­ci­ate it as such. How­ever, I will say that I enjoyed the first install­ment ten years ago more. The two install­ments shared the lav­ish set­tings that set Shekhar Kapur apart, but the web of intrigue in the first was much more taut and tense. In the second install­ment, there is far less of ten­sion. Where ten­sion exists, it seems weary or puerile. Rela­tion­ships that may have been mined and explored such as that between Eliza­beth and her cousin Mary Stu­art are left docile and tepid. Mary, who I expec­ted to speak with at least a French accent is unim­pos­ing and a mere dupe (cer­tainly a faint shadow of Fanny Ardant’s Marie de Guise in the first). Although this fits in well with her role vis-a-vis Philip of Spain’s intrigue, this polit­ical and frat­ri­cidal battle between ‘princes who are female’ could have been mined and illu­min­ated the ongo­ing struggle between free-thinkers and Roman Cath­ol­ics. Kapur’s Mary is a stu­pid, unthreat­en­ing vic­tim, and this doesn’t work well — far too simple. Read the rest of this entry »

Categories Film, History

How Does Taste Look?

6 July 2007 //
0

ratatouille.jpgInform­a­tion Aes­thet­ics points to a great back­ground art­icle on the visual rep­res­ent­a­tion of taste in Rata­touille (a movie I abso­lutely recom­mend — great story, superb anim­a­tion). I watched these sequences and didn’t think much about them — but what a great ques­tion : how can one visu­ally demon­strate the sen­sa­tion of taste? Addi­tion­ally, how do tastes sound — the anim­a­tions that Michael Gagne cre­ated for the movie were used as inspir­a­tion for the accom­pa­ny­ing soundtrack. Is this a sign of sens­ory con­ver­gence? That fla­vours will com­bine and pro­duce an entirely new visu­al­iz­a­tion makes abso­lute sense, but how do you account for syn­ergy or for cata­lytic beha­viour. What a won­der­ful chal­lenge to be presen­ted with and to muse about.
There is a lot more to dis­cover at Michael Gagne’s site. His work had appeared in a string of well known pro­duc­tions. Moreover, Gagne is a Québe­cois and Sheridan gradu­ate — so won­der­fully close to home.
I won­der what smell looks like?

Categories Aesthetics, Film, Visualization

Because it Made Me Laugh — A lot!

6 June 2007 //
2

hug.gifVideo­Jug pub­lished a won­der­ful instruc­tional video today on how to give a great man-to-man hug. It’s superb. The site provides many help­ful (real) etiquette videos, but and even this one in its way is meant to be of social aid. The terse sub­titles just add to the mirth of this little piece. For a few good belly laughs…

Categories Film, Funny, How To

the Mistress of Spices

12 February 2007 //
0

mistress_of_spices.jpg Here’s a hot movie tip. If you are look­ing for gra­tu­it­ous viol­ence and action stop read­ing right now. Instead, if you appre­ci­ate bril­liantly com­posed shots, being sub­merged in a rich, envel­op­ing, sen­sual, and splen­didly con­ceived story, the Mis­tress of Spices a per­fect movie, espe­cially for Valentine’s Day. Paul­ette picked out this movie on the week­end and I have to admit to being abso­lutely engrossed for the dur­a­tion.
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Categories Aesthetics, Cool!, Film

Of Things Calatrava…

3 February 2007 //
2

tower.jpgI finally got around to watch­ing a doc­u­ment­ary I had pvr’d a week or so ago. The Social­ist, the Archi­tect and the Twis­ted Tower doc­u­ments (lyr­ic­ally I might add) the design and con­struc­tion of the Turn­ing Tower in Malmo, Sweden. I am fas­cin­ated by the inspir­a­tion behind the design by San­ti­ago Cal­at­rava who sought to instill this kin­etic human form to a 56 storey con­domin­ium office tower. The doc­u­ment­ary itself (in a mix­ture of Span­ish, Italian, Eng­lish and Swedish) is a behind the scenes sort of pro­duc­tion, but it cap­tures Cal­at­rava mus­ing about such things as the passing of the sea­sons and the import­ance of cus­tomer ser­vice. The par­ti­cipants deal with attempts to change the design mid-construction to cut costs. The cli­ents muse over the fact that the Archi­tect is so sens­it­ive to any cri­ti­cism, and yet I was struck by how strangely accom­mod­at­ing he seems over what are huge alter­a­tions to the concept. Cal­at­rava is prag­matic, hands-on and remark­ably open — good line: ‘the blood will arrive into the sea’. The engineer-architect is an inter­est­ing mix. This is a fine pro­duc­tion. The pro­ject in ques­tion is an intriguing one, and on which I have grown in appre­ci­ation for (the sub­tleties of the details) with this doc­u­ment­ary. I am more famil­iar with his bridges and the Mil­wau­kee Art Museum pro­ject although I have very often walked through his mag­ni­fi­cent atrium in Toronto at BCE Place. Cost over­runs led to the fir­ing of Johnny Orback, the gen­eral man­ager part way through the pro­ject. Cal­at­rava is frank and blatantly states his belief that Swedes are simply too used to only doing the com­fort­able thing and not being will­ing to risk or do vis­ion­ary things as the GM did. Inter­est­ing reflec­tion son Swedish culture.

I browsed around a bit to fol­low up on the pro­ject and came across this won­der­ful model of the tower itself that you can down­load in PDF form and assemble for your­self. Have fun! By the by, do check out the <a href=“http://www.turningtorso.com/” target=_blank”>official site. Its a fas­cin­at­ing piece of inter­face design in itself.

Categories Aesthetics, Architecture, Film

Speculative Timeline Visualization

13 December 2006 //
0

back to the future timelineOn the sub­ject of impress­ive focus on detail, comes this amus­ing exer­cise…Map­ping the vari­ous timelines in the col­lec­tion of back to the Future movies to allow for the cre­ation of altern­ate timelines due to time travel. This Wiki­pe­dia entry charts the vari­ous char­ac­ters, their ancest­ors and par­tic­u­lar events and attempts to por­tray all the skip­ping around through time in a straight for­ward chart. The author does an great job…this is inform­a­tion dis­til­la­tion extremely well accom­plished. The art­icle is fun in its own right, but the ima­gin­ing of the altern­ate timelines is par­tic­u­larly astute.

Categories Film, Info Architecture, Timelines