Entries Tagged 'Scrawlings' ↓

I’ve been reading an interesting paper by Nick Bostrom the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University in which he considers the possibility that we’re not real.  That we are living in a computer simulation developed by a future evolution of the human species studying their own origins.

It’s a subject that has to have crossed the mind of every amateur self-psychoanalysist sci-fi fan.  Anyway, the whole subject got me to thinking how long it’s been since I last saw a sci-fi movie that really made me consider my existence.  Blade Runner, The Matrix, Open Your Eyes, even a film I reckon I might the only person anywhere to like AI.  I have a review round-up coming at the end of the month in which you’ll hear my thoughts on Wall:E.  It’s a film I loved and in the tradition of all of the best sci-fi gets you to consider how you live your own life, albiet in basic terms that can be understood by children.

I do like a film that really has my mind racing in an academic sense something modern sci-fi has almost entirely abandoned.  The last film to really do that to me was the amazing Primer.  Anyone care to recommend another film that sent you in loops?

Update:  There is also a reverse point of view The Truman Show disorder (via BoingBoing)

Some talented chappies were given the chance to create original movie posters for some classic cult films in their own vision.  Unfortunately the London exhibition is finished only running till 13th June, but a flickr gallery collects many highlights of the show.  It also offers those with a good chunk of extra cash a chance to pickup a very nice print.  Some of the highlights include Wild Zero, Soylent Green, Metropolis, Logan’s Run, and Rear Window.

via Neatorama

A selection of the posters can be seen here
Exhibition Site here

Jason Copser has managed to create an impressive single thumbnail of the entire Big Lebowski film by taking 1 screenshot every second.  The original Brendan Dawes project that inspired it can be seen here with similar fingerprints for Vertigo, The French Connection, and others.

Via Boing Boing

Link

I disappeared for an awesome week in Budapest but I haven’t been igonoring this place.  I’m off to see the Mist tonight but I’ve also completed the huge task of porting over my many review archives.  Check out my rejigged archive page with a rundown of my full-reviews.

That’s not the end of my forever updating reviewing past.  There’s many more live music reviews, old best of lists, and many many mini-reviews to be added.

Anywho enough about the past, the reviewing future will see prompt reviews of Stephen King and Frank Darabont’s The Mist and in the interests of fairness John Carpenter’s The Fog.

Directors John Landis, Joe Dante, Edgar Wright, Allison Anders, Eli Roth, and Mick Garris give commentary on various classic and not so classic cult trailers.  Seems like a cool project we shall see what comes out of it.

It already introduced me to the wonderful Danger Diabolik.

Here’s some other quality highlights.

Michael Lehman on Beyond the Valley of the Dolls
Dan Ireland on Bad Day at Black Rock
Edgar Wright on the American and International Suspiria trailers

And of course you can watch all of these with or without commentaries.

http://trailersfromhell.com

I’m taking a quick jaunt to Budapest this week and my film time has already been consumed by a music festival at the weekend (no not Glastonbury but on a lovely beach instead) and the football.  So instead I have posted up an enormous batch of old reviews and movie posts, check them out below.

While we didn’t quite get the litany of bad luck that made Morocco such fun India was also hard work for a 2 week break. We got back on Sunday and it’s still soon enough that my jet lag is mighty ripe. Our short tour of the North of India was enjoyable but food definitely proved to be a focus for the trip. Delhi was fairly hectic, touts, beggars, and Jonny’s shit throwing shoe shiner, were everywhere and there was absolutely no evidence of the new affluent India praised on TV. The slums were built on whatever traffic verge was available and conditions were pretty dire. We had pretty damn nice food in Delhi though, nowhere close to as spicy as I’d been lead to believe and pretty lovely in the tummy.

Thankfully Hindu’s drink so unlike going to Morocco in Ramadan this wasn’t going to be a dry holiday. We made our way to the pretty sweet Imperial Hotel (we read John Simpson singing it’s praises in the magazine on the plane over) to try catch some rugby, unfortunately despite the full size poster advertising the world cup, the barman couldn’t find it on the tele (and asked at one point if the football he had up on screen was rugby). But after a chance meeting with a bunch of students from Edinburgh we decided to fly off to the mountains. Unfortunately we couldn’t land the first day so we returned for an extra day of mostly reading our books in Delhi.

We made our way some 400 miles north to Leh. A much more pleasant town set at 3500m in the Himalayas bordering Kashmir. We spent another 2 days doing very little were spent trying to acclimatise to the high altitude air. Doing anything was fairly knackering but we managed to make it up to the spectacular palace and catch the local polo final. We also had an excellent meal at the Tibetan Kitchen of dumplings called Momos. The second day and a return visit wasn’t so great, Jonny knew the meal was rough before we’d finished it and left early. It took me to the next morning to feel it (so our encounter with Delhi belly wasn’t strictly from Delhi). This glorious morning was also the start of our three day trek through the mountains. With very little food in us we made it up to the 5000m pass (for me it was barely at that height it was 5 baby steps at a time and a 5mins break to get my breath back). Crossing the pass was necessary because unlike climbing a simple peak not getting over it meant a 2 day return journey back the way we came.

Thankfully on our return Jonny was too ill to make me do the 12 hour motorbike (I’ve never even been on one before) journey along the highest road in the world. So we decided instead to do the 17 hour jeep journey south over the 2nd highest road in the world. A booking cock-up meant we ended up in the boot with 2 other guys, getting stuck in a puddle and a breakdown meant I spent 24 hours in the back of this jeep with 3 other guys knees forming with mine a lovely sweaty spaghetti in the middle.

We had just enough time to do some climbing and enjoy the town of Manali which is definitely hippy camp when Goa is too hot. It was a pleasantly relaxed place but unfortunately home to another dodgy meal for us just to make sure we were basically ill for the entire trip. A quick 12 hour sleeper bus and we were back in Delhi with just enough time to buy some cheap Levis and head home.

Great fun but hard work. Pictures will be up soon.

We had an adventurous trip to Morocco that started with a combination outstanding bad luck and slight stupidity.  I arrived in Morocco with nae cash after my card got swallowed by the machine in Marrakech airport.  Jonny’s flight got delayed so a friendly English chappy had to sub me for my dinner and a taxi ride until JY arrived the next day.

Marrakech is an amazing city, everything worth seeing seems centred round the huge square (Photos start here) Djemma El-Fna in the old Medina.  It was packed with soothsayers, musicians, snake charmers, and even boxers all performing for crowds of Moroccans.  At night stalls opened up all over selling kebabs and fruit juice.  Unfortunately as we arrived in the middle of Ramadan getting a real drink meant a trip to the new town supermarket where they took note of your passport number how many bottles you got and what it was. The hotel was great though, a nice Riad right in the middle of the Medina, with a perfect terrace for reading and drinking said alcohol.  It was completely insulated from the noise from the labyrinth alleyways of the Medina and the square, though not the call to prayer from the loudspeakers at 6.30am, 11am,  3pm, 6.30pm, and 3.30am!

We then made an effort to leave the hustle bustle and get to the countryside, via the climb of Jebel Toubkal the tallest in the Atlas Mountains at 4167m.  We made our way from the town of Imlil until my boots completely disintegrated at 2200m. The soles just fell to pieces.  Luckily we were only a couple hundred metres passed the one and only tiny stall village of Sidi Chamharouch where I rented the boots off this guys feet.  We were then able to continue the rest of the first days trek to the glorious mountain hut which kept us well fed and warm for the night before making the final 900m summit trip.

We then made our way out to the desert, a lucky Swiss couple, were to be our travelling companions on a three day 4WD trek through the Draa valley and the Sahara.  The first day we travelled through the valley full of Kasbahs and palm trees and then a few hours camel trekking made me doubt I would ever walk again.  We spent a beautiful night outside in the desert before meeting up with the jeep again and making our way towards the huge Erg Chigaga dunes.  Jonny managed to get stung by a scorpion that night, and got rushed 70km out of the desert to town so the doctor could suck out the poison.  He was fine the next day though and the ravenous scarabs soon started to make short work of the flattened scorpion.  We returned from the desert to Ouarzazate the centre of the Moroccan movie industry, Gladiator, Laurence of Arabia, Kingdom of Heaven, and Alexander were all filmed here.  We even stayed in the same hotel as Timothy Dalton while filming the Living Daylights (hotels must’ve been slim pickings in 1986).  We didn’t hang about though and made our way across the country to the coast.

Apart from a blowout on the bus this was to be the end of our unlucky streak.  It was the easy life for a few days in Essaouria where we got to do not much but surf, read on the guesthouse terrace, visit the village where Hendrix wrote Castles Made of Sand, and eat great food.

We had just enough time on our return to Marrakech to visit the Souqs, a huge market selling everything under the sun and ensuring we returned to Britain without a Dirham in our pockets, the same way I arrived.

To start with we had 4 days in Moscow which was cool but not long enough to get a proper feel for the place.  I never had a drunken conversation (where neither participant can understand the other) with a Russian and I never got a feel for the food and what was what (My two barometers of cultural absorption).  I barely had a chance to see the basic tourist sites but of special note to visitors is to spend an afternoon doing the metro tour and for a super creepy time visit Lenin.  You come in from the blazing sun into these dark marble corridors at the end of which a guard stands and directs you to turn the appropriate corner (there’s nowhere else to go) you walk down the next one (as indicated by the next guard), and the next (ditto) in near pitch black.  You eventually arrive at Lenin whose raised on a pedestal and in a glass case.  You walk around him in total silence and walk out the other side (down mirror image corridors of the way in) only to be greeted by the blinding sunlight of Red Square again.  When we went it was only me and my sister (the other tourists in our batch had gotten ahead of us) and really felt like the religious experience the communist masters undoubtedly intended.  A disappointment in Moscow though was the Arbat (bohemian artists through the eyes of hard rock cafe and tat sellers) and the Izmailovsky art market (all Baboushka dolls and bearskin hats though the clothes market behind was on a mammoth scale).

Arriving in Tokyo in the searing sun (my poor Scotch-Irish skin wasn’t built for this) and walking round in circles for a few hours trying to find the hostel while making frequent toilet breaks (I intensely regretted eating the Aeroflot food for the next 6 days) was our welcome.  To compound this we went straight to Shibuya for the afternoon, it was an electric neon Disneyland with noise and jingles everywhere.  We made it to a few bars but my tender condition and £5 a pint prices made an early stop to our first evening.  After that night everything else in Tokyo was much lower on the learning curve.

When I eventually saw Shibuya proper it was really impressive (It’s featured as the huge pedestrian crossing in Lost in Translation) there are all sorts of cool shops, restaurants, arcades, etc..  It was a cool place though we had a few good nights the places were difficult to find (Womb was an expensive hard-house club which looked really cool but Vanilla in Rappongi was much cheaper and a bit more of a laugh).  Shinjuku was a slightly more classy place to be (at least till you got to the red light district) and there were again more of the same entertainments available.  Also in Shinjuku though was a huge area of tiny bars serving only 3-4 customers.  We eventually got invited into one of them by a huge African guy (they seem to be the only visible minority in Japan) and it was a much more fun place to be than the larger bars we’d been to before.

Other things of special note are Rappongi which was filled with bars and clubs and the place with a higher concentration of westerners than anywhere else in Japan.  We did have some great nights there though in mostly Japanese places.  The Tokyo subway’s strategy of closing at midnight means you have to find somewhere to be till 5.00am.  A night in the Motown Club (which only played modern cheese) was turned around when we met a group of Japanese girls, my sister has bright blond hair and got the attention of them everywhere she went   Upon leaving the club at 6.00am to the scary broad daylight me and another guy standing outside waiting for the others were harassed by prostitutes thankfully the girls arrived and scared them off at which time we decided to go straight into Karaoke.  The Japanese girls were not impressed at the tourist Karaoke rates in Rappongi and managed to bargain us half price so we made a booth our own till 9.00am while a serenaded them with What a Wonderful World and My Sharona before leading the group in what I thought was a stunning Hey Jude.

Elsewhere in Tokyo, Harajuku was cool on a Sunday to see where the goths hang out, all spectacularly dressed Tim Burton-esque dolly girls and made up witches, not a boring Slipknot or Marilyn Manson T-shirt in sight.  Akihabra and Yodobashi Camera were amazing for electronics with people selling laptops off a table on the street.  The Yamonote line is my saviour for getting round Tokyo filled with great Engrish no-smoking ads.

Forgot to mention the day trips in Tokyo, Nikko was piled high with temples and was worth seeing even if you’re going to Kyoto.  Hakone region needs a full day, unfortunately we got up to late (and found out too late that there was a Shinkansen that could’ve got us there in record time) so only got to see the hot springs which of coursed reeked but the cable car ride was nice.  You’re supposed to get a great view of Mount Fuji from here as well but the weather conspired against us for that.  Also we made it to a festival and humiliated ourselves trying to follow the dances (which were lead by the beat of a half naked drummer) although I think we were getting the hang of it towards the end.

After Tokyo we made the Shinkansen (200mph bullet train) ride to Kyoto.  We had a Japan Rail pass which is only available to tourists but means you can go on all the trains you want for your stay.  The Shinkansen were truly awesome I found myself supremely jealous of them it was like flying 12m above the ground like a scythe through the landscape.  Kyoto was an intense temple and shrine binge, there’s so many it’s difficult to recommend any as I’m sure we missed some great ones.  We did fork out though for a walking tour one day where our guide Jonny Hillwalker (A wee old Japanese guy at least 60 with wispy grey, hair checked shirt, braces, and Armani jeans pulled to his chest).  He took us passed the original Nintendo building, through some Geisha areas, and left is to walk through some really cool alleys and houses.  There seemed to plenty of nightlife in Kyoto but we held off from the debauchery to better try and cram in as much as we could.  We also stayed in a traditional Japanese hotel here which meant no beds and tatami mats.

It was from there a 15 minute (Shinkansen again) ride to Osaka.  We stayed at a great little hostel here called Sumo backpackers.  I was concerned about going to Osaka as I’d heard it was just a big industrial town with no real sights to see.  If there were any sights we didn’t see them as the population of the hostel decided to better see the Japanese nightlife.  On the first night I embarrassed myself with Sake (apparently it’s a sipping drink downing it only gets you looks of disgust) I was told later that it’s only 13% but it went straight to my head I have hazy memories of para-para dancing at a Trance club which involved a group of about 8 dancers standing on stage leading the rest of us with complex hand moves and all sorts.  The next day was obviously lazy watching Lost and Translation and my new Zaitoichi DVD at the hostel as I nursed an apparently broken nose (don’t ask).  The next night we went to a more western club (by coincidence rather than choice) which defied any expensive ideas of Japan by offering all you can drink for the night at £15.

After all the drink etc.. in Osaka we made it out to Nara for the Lantern festival which was pretty spectacular (dunno how good my photos will be) and straight over to Hiroshima.  After seeing a good few Atomic testing videos at another site it was pretty much the opposite feeling to be at ground zero.  Far from awe it was difficult to feel anything but disgust.  When you consider the world’s feelings and effort after the tsunami and then come to Hiroshima to see how people wipe out so many of each other on purpose leaves you pretty shaken.  The museum and peace park are fairly intense starting with the city before the blast then during and then a long section on the human toll.  I’m glad I went though it helps put everything in perspective.

Hiroshima was literally packed full of bars (supposed to number 4000) unfortunately we couldn’t find a single one other people went to (just there on the wrong night I think).  From Hiroshima we went out to Miyajima which has one of the three best views in Japan (there’s a list) the monkey sanctuary was pretty cool as well and some quality food.  The food in Japan was unreal needless to say I wasn’t as enthusiastic about returning to a BLT or sausage supper as I had been on other trips.  I remember in China eating being very difficult and a bit pot luck.  The variety of stuff in Japan was great and there were handy plastic food and picture menus to help you order.  The only bad meal I had was in Tokyo when we went to this place called Lockup.  The whole thing was in a monster theme and we were escorted to our cell by handcuff to the attractive waitress.  I had to order an item at random from the menu that seemed about the right price and ended up with a plate of 5 different kinds of hotdogs not exactly what I was hoping for.  Eating out was cheaper than home as well and we were at restaurants every night.  The Japanese passion for deep-fried also has to be admired and I’m certain I’ll never have sushi I like again until I return to Japan, great stuff.

I have only a few regrets about the trip.  I didn’t make it Nho or Kabuki theatre.  Unfortunately it seemed to be the wrong time of year for Kabuki and Tokyo’s year round show was on Hiatus.  Nho likewise was never in the right place at the right time.  For music I saw loads of small bands round Namba in Osaka and some others at random but never found some great Japanese music to listen to.  I picked up a random punk-pop-ska band cd that was kinda cool (I’d rather have something throwaway and fun than something dramatic but mince).  Unfortunately it will difficult to find the quality tunes now that I’m back since it was a very introverted music scene pretty impenetrable for those without background knowledge.  The final regret is that we never made it North or to the other islands, everywhere we went was supremely busy and hectic I think I would need to go further afield to see some more secluded countryside or villages.  We made it out of the cities to a few villages but there was much more on offer out of Honshu.

I’m still on a Japan high which means I’ll need to see if I can find the original Godzilla again and of course Kurosawa and Ozu.  I even want to see Mr. Baseball again which I remember being pish when I saw it the first time years ago.