http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwSNRlNUNEI
I don’t know where to start.
The cheesiness?
The ham-fisted direction?
The clichéed, era-by-numbers styling?
That’s probably the worst part: an ad supposedly about style that is utterly devoid of any.
Now that, Alanis Morissette, is ironic.
Great advice from the man behind Calvin and Hobbes (thanks, G).
Untranslatable words (thanks, S).
Brilliant Spike Lee doc on Michael Jackson’s Bad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkXbybLw7AE&feature=player_embedded#t=981
Ace stuff on The Big Lebowski.
The shooting of Heat (the above come from the amazing cinephilearchive tumblr):
Depth of field and its importance to the greatness of movies (thanks, G).
Star Drunk: the drinken sci-fi film (thanks, J):
Camera on helicopter blade (thanks, G):
Terry Gilliam teaches you animation, Monty Python style (thanks, T):
Catleidoscope (thanks, M).
Wonderful comic strip (thanks, G).
Selfies in serious places (thanks, J).
Dude pisses on lava (thanks, G):
Girls with Mesut Özil eyes (thanks, A).
Fracking explained (thanks, G):
Collaborating with a 4-year-old (thanks, A).
Very funny Yahoo answers (thanks, G).
Hilarious Japanese dinosaur prank (thanks, J):
Stunning abandoned stuff (thanks, G).
Here are a few lists of the best movies of the 80s.
I’ve always thought that it was a slight decade, cinematically speaking, and that seems borne out by those lists, many of which include popcorn movies such as Robocop, Predator and Ghostbusters.
I love Ferris Bueller’s Day Off as much as the next person, but I’ve never been able to consider it a great movie, in that way that, say, Raging Bull is great.
For me that decade is where enjoyment and quality parted company quite cleanly, giving us the enormous fun of the aforementioned titles (plus Die Hard, The Terminator, Back To The Future, E.T., etc.), but leaving us wanting in terms of greatness.
If you look at the two decades that bookended the 80s there are so many riches that it makes any 80s list look slight by comparison:
The 1970s: The Godfather, Taxi Driver, Dog Day Afternoon, Apocalypse Now, Annie Hall, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, All The President’s Men, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange, Harold And Maude, American Graffiti, Aguiire: The Wrath Of God (and many, many more).
The 1990s: Three Kings, Boogie Nights, The Silence Of The Lambs, The Age Of Innocence, Schindler’s List, Goodfellas, Unforgiven, Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, LA Confidential, Se7en, Short Cuts, Fight Club, The Three Colours trilogy, etc.
But the 80s?
Full Metal Jacket, Raging Bull, The King Of Comedy, Do The Right Thing, Blue Velvet (I haven’t seen Grave Of The Fireflies, which appears on many of these lists)…
Then you drop down a level to movies like Platoon (a little too surface; bad performance from Charlie Sheen. Ditto Wall Street), Amadeus (too slick), The Last Emperor (too long and boring), Jean De Florette (is it great?), Spinal Tap and Airplane (not as funny as I remembered them)…
Anyway, that’s just my somewhat damning opinion on an entire decade of movie making.
What do you think?
Hey, I like to chuck the word genius around willy-nilly as much as the next guy, but in this case I think it’s worth acknowledging just how amazing a creation Alan Partridge really is.
I missed the whole radio thing, but from The Day Today onwards I’ve found him to be one of the funniest, best-observed, most perceptive comic inventions of our time.
He’s 22 years old now and I struggle to think of any character that has developed through their career in many different stages like Alan has.
There was the fantastic Knowing Me, Knowing You, I’m Alan Partridge, Anglian Lives and several others, culminating in the recent Alpha Papa movie.
Of course, a single joke could never last this long, so he’s adapted to different circumstances over the years and we’ve lived that along with him. Contrary to surface appearances I believe that we don’t so much think of him as a gormless twat, but more as one of us. When he says ‘Smell my cheese!’ in desperation to the controller of BBC1 we recognise that situation where circumstances have conspired to leave us watching our dreams disappear. But whereas we would just sit and watch sadly, Alan goes further and part of us envies him for not letting it go.
If you watch this Armando Iannucci interview you discover that they didn’t deliberately give him awful taste; he actually likes some quite ‘cool’ things. They didn’t make him come from a comedy daft town like (as was most appropriate in the 90s) Milton Keynes; he comes from Norwich, which is sort of sad and pathetic, yet at the same time neither of those things.
This is where a character gains longevity: he’s not so much a gag as a real person with well-rounded believability, and that’s why he can develop in new areas.
One of which is the Alan Partridge app, which plays chunks of his Morning Matters digital radio show interspersed with your own music collection. The Partridge bits are very funny, but there’s another odd layer of humour that happens when Kanye West songs become part of his show.
Here’s another interview with Armando Iannucci on the subject.
I put that up on this blog about three years ago.
I then received a stern email from someone threatening legal action if I didn’t remove it.
But if it’s been on Vimeo for two years they must have chilled out about it.
I hope.
There’s an interesting book doing the rounds called Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir (actually, I have no idea if it’s interesting or not; I’ve read no more of it than this review).
It suggests the following: It’s not that foolish choices make you poor; it’s that poverty’s effects on the mind lead to bad choices. Living with too little imposes huge psychic costs, reducing our mental bandwidth and distorting our decisionmaking in ways that dig us deeper into a bad situation.
Apparently asking people to contemplate a £1000 car repair bill reduces your IQ by 13 or 14 points.
But… ‘Their most arresting claim is that the same effects kick in – albeit not always with such grave implications – in any conditions of scarcity, not just lack of money. Chronically busy people, suffering from a scarcity of time, also demonstrate impaired abilities and make self-defeating choices, such as unproductive multi-tasking or neglecting family for work. Lonely people, suffering from a scarcity of social contact, become hyper-focused on their loneliness, prompting behaviours that render it worse.’
Right… So anything you’re short of makes you so fixated at the shortfall that you become crap at making up for it. I don’t know if the reverse is true, but I suspect it might be: if you’re good at something or have loads of it then you’re more set up to acquire still greater amounts. Those who are able to find girlfriends, write songs or get fit with ease will continue to do so because they have no paralysis of doubt, nor do they need to spend so much of their brainpower working out how to do something they already know how to do.
The review continues…
‘Scarcity ends up reaffirming one of the oldest truths: that what really explains the world is its division into haves and have-nots. The clear message to those with resources – money, time, or anything else – is to resist the urge to judge those without them. If you faced the same scarcity, Mullainathan and Shafir demonstrate, you’d make the same mistakes. Indeed, in some area of your life – if not your spending, then your work/life balance or your diet – you’re almost certainly already doing so.’
Well, that’s just a version of another clear truth: if you were born with the genes and circumstances of anyone else on the planet you’d be doing exactly what they are doing, and that extends to child molesters and traffic wardens.
There but for the grace of chance…