I saw Collateral last night. Very good indeed. Tom Cruise may be the star of the show – he does a decent job of being a slick, cocky bad guy instead of a slick, cocky good guy – but it's Jamie Foxx whose performance makes the film work.

Once Cruise starts his night's work Michael Mann, one of the more reliable directors working today, ratchets up the tension and never lets go. Some of the cinematography of neon-lit night-time Los Angeles is strikingly beautiful, but for my money the best-looking scene involves the absence of light: a scene where Cruise slips in and out of the shadows in a darkened office building, with only his silhouette occluding the lights of neighbouring buildings in the background to give us a clue as to where he is and what direction he's heading in.

All in all, Collateral is a very good, nicely executed thriller. Looking back I have just one plot-related quibble: there's a pivotal moment where a tablet computer's display survives some pretty severe punishment so it can reveal an important clue to a character who catches a look at the screen, and it just isn't plausible that an LCD screen would have survived unscathed. However, by that time I was so hooked by the story that I let it pass. Collateral isn't my favourite Michael Mann film – that would be The Last of the Mohicans – but it's as good a film as I've seen this year.

The A to Z of excuses is part of the uk.railway FAQ.

Non-UK readers might find some of the excuses listed somewhat difficult to believe: trust me, they're all too credible. I'll admit that I've never personally encountered the line

Rat self destructed whilst chewing through signalling cables.

as yet. But on the other hand, it's fair to say that

We apologise for the late arrival of the train at Norwich. This was due to a delay.

sounds all too familiar.

[Via feeling listless]

Fellow RSS addicts might like to know that the Guardian has made newsfeeds available for several categories of their online content, from Football to Books to their Guideblog. The full list can be found here.

I'd dearly love to have been a fly on the wall when Jeremy Paxman read the latest bright approach to rendering Panorama palatable to a prime-time audience. Matt Wells in today's Guardian spills the beans:

Panorama, the world's longest-running TV current affairs programme, needs a "touchy-feely" overhaul because it has become "too distant, demanding, difficult and didactic", according to a briefing document prepared for the BBC executive in charge of the series.

The "creative brief", leaked to the Guardian, sets out a plan to restore the series to peak time that includes recruiting presenters with "warmer" faces, such as Fiona Bruce. The Newsnight presenter, Jeremy Paxman, would be used for more "analytical" subjects.

Storylines from EastEnders could be used as subjects for the programme to tackle in an attempt to make it "more accessible and enjoyable". [...]

Oh, come on! A hard news and current affairs programme is always going to be hard-pressed to compete for ratings with whatever combination of soap opera, light entertainment or feature films the commercial channels choose to deploy in prime time. The point of public service broadcasting is sometimes to put out programmes that educate and inform even if your ratings take a hit. I don't doubt that the tabloids in general, and the Murdoch press in particular, will have a field day if a prime-time Panorama causes BBC1's ratings to take a dip one evening a week. The proper response is to point out that at least BBC1 is trying to put out a regular current affairs show in a prominent timeslot, not to find excuses to shoehorn a soap opera storyline into the script.

The story of Hero begins when Nameless, a minor prefect from an obscure province, shows up at the court of the king of Qin. The warlord of Qin is engaged in a bloody quest to conquer the other Chinese provinces and unite All Under Heaven. Nameless claims to have killed the three assassins who have made it their mission to kill the warlord of Qin. He bears the assassins' weapons as evidence of his triumph, and is invited into the presence of the king to explain how he accomplished this astonishing feat. The story which Nameless relates is retold from a couple of different angles over the course of the film, as we are made to understand that there may be much more going on than we'd thought.

Director Zhang Yimou orchestrates a fabulously colourful, beautifully depicted story of love and hate and honour and deception which is a treat for the senses and the intellect. The amazing martial arts sequences are inevitably somewhat reminiscent of those in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but that's no bad thing: who could seriously complain at one more historical epic packed with spectacular and heart-stoppingly beautiful martial arts scenes?

You really should catch this film in a cinema rather than wait for the DVD. Sure, you'll enjoy stepping frame-by-frame through some of the fight sequences to unravel exactly how what just happened went down, but you'll miss out on the opportunity to see 30-foot tall versions of Jet Li, Maggie Cheung, Tony Leung and Ziyi Zhang throw themselves across the screen with abandon. Trust me, that would be a terrible shame.

Perhaps George Lucas does listen to the fans after all. It seems the new Star Wars: Battlefront game gives the public what they want.

[Via Amygdala]

Details of the content of the extended edition of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King have been released.

Unfortunately the most interesting question of all – what scenes will have been extended or inserted in the film proper – remain unanswered. I remember reading somewhere that the scene featuring the Mouth of Sauron will be reinstated, and it seems likely that the fifty minutes of additional footage will provide the space to wrap up Saruman's story (albeit not in the way Tolkien did) if nothing else.

There's one commentary track I'm definitely going to have to listen to:

Cast commentary also features dialogue between split-personality characters Gollum and Smeagol (Andy Serkis)!

[Via Slashdot]

It's Sunday, so you know what comes next:

• La Chaldéenne III looks to have a lovely, vivacious laugh. As does krissy, come to that.
• I love this image of the observatory at La Silla – particularly the way the dish in the foreground reflects an image of the night sky behind the photographer.
• Noah Grey's monochrome image of a rose is surprisingly effective. I'm normally a sucker for a nice full-colour image of a flower, but the level of fine detail Grey captures here is something to behold.
• Two cracking images from ssilence: spiderwebs and collateral.

The Story About the Toddler is now up to Volume 18:

[...] In terms of development, Cordelia has been much less of a horrible, screaming, punching nightmare for the last month. When I dare to not give her what she wants, she no longer physically attacks me. Instead, she just constantly repeats her request. "Chocolate? Chocolate? Chocolate? Chocolate? Chocolate? Chocolate? Chocolate? Chocolate?" But this doesn't work. If using this technique to get sex in college never worked for me, I don't see why it should work for her now.

Also, when she does this, it's adorable. This is a tactical error when trying to annoy someone into giving you something. [...]

Jaws in 30 seconds. With bunnies. What more need I say?

[Via dust from a distant sun]

I'd dearly love one of these on my desktop.

[Via 3 Bruces]

Today's Observer included an intriguing article by Tamsin Blanchard about the work of designer/artist/architect Thomas Heatherwick. It was only on reading the article that I discovered that I've seen – indeed, walked across – one of Heatherwick's works, a 'blue carpet' of glass tiles outside Newcastle's Laing art gallery.

What fascinated me was the article's description of a pedestrian bridge which Heatherwick's firm has designed and built for Paddington Basin. The pictures accompanying the article in the print edition didn't show enough of the "rolling bridge" to give me a proper idea of how the bridge looked, and the online version doesn't include any pictures at all. Happily, a little googling revealed this site which hosts a series of images showing exactly how unconventional the bridge is.

Admittedly it's on a pretty small scale, but it's still awfully cool to have a bridge roll up into a ball in order to let a boat pass. If Newcastle's Swing Bridge ever needs replacing, I'd dearly love to see a scaled-up version of Heatherwick's rolling bridge connecting Newcastle and Gateshead.

Apparently characters in The Sims 2 can be found killing time on their computer playing The Sims.

Suddenly I feel like a character in Permutation City…

[Via kottke.org remaindered links]

The pilot of J J Abrams' new series Lost, starring former Party of Five star Matthew Fox and Dominic "The Lord of the Rings" Monaghan seems to be getting mostly positive reviews. It remains to be seen how long the writers will be able to stretch their group-of-strangers-stuck-on-a-desert-island premise, but they look to have made a promising start. Here's hoping one of the UK's terrestrial channels will decide to give it a try, ideally in a pre-midnight timeslot. (Yes, I know, I'm dreaming…)

(I'm posting this here rather than add it to the end of the comment thread about the fates of former cast members on Party of Five to make it easier for Simon – and any other former uk-po5 readers – to spot.)

Most people who care about this will probably have seen these already, but for what it's worth here are the first pictures of the costumes from the Fantastic Four film.

The costumes look fine, as does the makeup work on Michel Chiklis, insofar as you can tell from a still image: the real question is how far we'll be able to see his acting under all that makeup. Trouble is, I look at Ioan Gruffudd and Jessica Alba and I just don't see Reed Richards and Sue Storm. But then, Hugh Jackman doesn't much resemble the comic book version of Wolverine (not least because he's about a foot too tall for the part) and that worked out just fine.

The costume I really want to see, obviously, is Doc Doom. That'll be the real test.

[Via Found]

This week brought a bumper selection of articles clustered at the intersection between Digital Rights Management, the plight of the major record labels, and Microsoft's strategy for owning the digital media space. Two pessimistic, one mildly optimistic.

• Writing in LA Weekly, Alec Hanley Bemis sketches a possible outline of A Small New Future:
  

  [...] With the benefit of hindsight, it's evident that 1999 is the year that set the stage for the changes in the biz. 1999 was the year Goldenvoice founded Coachella and the year British concert promoters Barry Hogan and Helen Cottage inaugurated All Tomorrow's Parties as an alternative to corporate music events like the Sprite Liquid Mix tour, the Vans Warped tour and, yes, various Tommy Hilfiger productions. It was the year the RIAA invented the Diamond, a term for albums that sell over 10 million copies. And 1999 was Year Zero for the file-sharing phenomenon, otherwise known as the birth of Napster.

  These are snapshots anyone might note when reviewing that year in music. Together, they form a larger picture. The Diamond offers a window into the corporate record industry's hubristic faith in endless growth. All Tomorrow's Parties was an early indicator of the underground's more modest vision of music as a curatorial exercise. And Napster was the catalyst with the power to set corporate America's overzealous hopes and indie rock's half-baked dreams on the odd collision course playing out today. [...]

• David Weinberger recounts a talk he delivered to a group of entertainment and media industry executives at a World Economic Forum meeting in New York last week:
  

  [...] The conversation doesn't lend itself to detailed retelling. But it sure was fascinating for me. I came away with four overall impressions:

  First, these people are thrashing. They're floundering. They're desperate to find a way in which their organizations still add value. They are in denial but, it seemed to me, they know that there's just about nothing that the market wants from them. For example, at one point someone said, "Content is king." I replied that judging from the content they're producing, marketing is king; that's where their real value is. Further, I said, on the Internet, connection is king. But then they want to know how to "monetize" connection. There's nothing wrong with that, so long as you understand how monetizing it can kill it. The most convincing case I heard for real value was that only Hollywood can afford to make blockbusters. But beyond that…? [...]

  Weinberger's conclusion is deeply depressing: "These are smart people and I liked talking with them. They were willing to listen. Some, in fact, even agree to varying degrees. But they are riding beasts that are in agony, and the Internet will be a sticky stain on the bottom of their massive hooves."

• Looking at the problem from the hardware end, Robert X Cringely follows up an earlier column about Microsoft's attempt to bend the specification of next generation of USB devices to meet their needs with an explanation of why it's not enough to comfort yourself with the thought that some clever Linux programmer will find a way to defeat Microsoft's little tricks:
  

  [...] So what if it takes a weekend to reverse engineer the spec and get those new USB ports running on your Linux box? Well, reverse engineering isn't what it used to be, and this USB gambit is only part of a far grander plan. Yes, a clever programmer or two could probably crack the voodoo inside Microsoft's new USB in no time at all, but doing so would be in violation of the anti-circumvent clause of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which effectively prohibits reverse engineering "security" features. So the guy who wrote to me from Brazil has nothing to worry about, but any American who either accomplishes the circumvention OR MAKES USE OF IT "shall be fined not more than $500,000 or imprisoned for not more than 5 years, or both, for the first offense; and shall be fined not more than $1,000,000 or imprisoned for not more than 10 years, or both, for any subsequent offense."

  If that sounds both draconian and stupid, well, it is. Probably the best response the little guys and gals of Open Source could come up with is to violate en masse and thereby attempt to take down the DMCA as unenforceable. It's a great idea, though I'm pretty sure I'll be sleeping in that day and will probably miss the event, myself. The downside of such civil disobedience is that there is no specified minimum penalty, so if Microsoft could come up with the names and addresses of a million violators (don't think for a moment they don't have that kind of data-gathering capability) and asked the court to fine each of us $1,000, well, we'd be screwed, and Microsoft would be $1 billion richer.

  But all this fails to look at the big picture from Microsoft's perspective. [...]

  And yes, I know Microsoft aren't the only ones trying to push DRM-enabled media files. But they're the company most likely to engineer a situation where it's almost impossible to view digital mass media unless you're using their software. (In case you're wondering why consumers should care so long as they can play their music and video if they buy 'industry standard' hardware and software, it's worth keeping in mind that apart from anything else Microsoft simply don't write very reliable software. They've even turned the old "If you open this image you'll break your computer" joke into a reality. Do we really want to trust these folks with the future of digital media?)

[LA Weekly article via MetaFilter, David Weinberger post via Dan Gillmor]

Truly, there are some concepts mere humans were not meant to contemplate:

Professor THIDWICK will not meet his class in "Modern American Politics" this morning, or indeed any morning. In partial explanation we offer this note, written by him in the pre-dawn hours:

I begged the Dean not to make me teach "Modern American Politics" this semester. I knew that in order to teach it properly I would have to delve into the secrets of the Bush administration. I knew that I would learn THINGS THAT HUMANS (as we say in these post-sexist times) ARE NOT MEANT TO KNOW. I feared that this would drive me insane–into shrill unholy madness. And so it has.

But up until now I have still able to teach my course. I am proud of that. Far gone in shrill unholy madness as a result of the incompetence, mendacity, malevolence, and disconnection from reality that I am, I could still communicate with my students in English and. Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn! Aiiiiiii!!! [...]

[Via Making Light]

Joss Whedon's work on Astonishing X-Men continues to impress. Whedon clearly loves these characters and is doing a fine job of mixing up the action, the emotion and – of course, the humour. (It's hard to pick out the best line in this issue: how to choose between "Is that dragon thing behind me?", "Do you at least like the costumes?" and "My girlfriend is very weird"?) Then there's John Cassaday's art, which is well up to the standards he set in Planetary.

As it happens, Marvel have posted a Flash-based copy of Astonishing X-Men #1 (scroll down the page for the link) so that anyone who's thinking of diving in can get an idea of what they can expect. For dial-up users it's a horribly slow download, not to mention that the images are much too small for the reader to fully appreciate Cassaday's artwork unless they zoom in to the point where they lose'll any sense of the entire page's flow and layout. Still, anything that might encourage someone to pick up Astonishing X-Men is worth a try. The comic is undoubtedly high quality work all round, a genuine class act. Now that we're five issues into Joss Whedon's contracted 12 month spell on the title I'm torn between hoping he signs up to do another twelve or more issues and hoping that the rumours are true and he's going to be sitting in the director's chair for the X-Men 3 film. Joss Whedon putting a version of the Dark Phoenix storyline on the big screen would be a fine way to wrap up the film series.

<geek>
For all my warm and fuzzy thoughts towards Joss Whedon in general and Astonishing X-Men in particular, I do have one quibble about Astonishing X-Men #5. Can anyone else who read Grant Morrison's run on New X-Men remember it being mentioned on more than one occasion that Emma Frost's telepathy was disabled when her secondary mutation was active and she was in diamond form? If that's the case, how come Emma could take control of the guards while still in diamond form in Astonishing X-Men issue #5? Has this happened before and I just didn't notice, or is it an honest-to-goodness continuity glitch on Joss' part?
</geek>

[Via del.icio.us/feelinglistless]

Steven Johnson's first experience with The Sims 2 was somewhat discouraging.

The Onion hits the spot:

LINCOLN, NE — Frustrated by the logistics of developing a viable mealtime strategy, employees of the Ryodan Consulting Group threw money at the lunch problem Monday, according to branch manager Ryan Leverenz.

[...]

"Our clients know Ryodan for our reputation for prudence and for our systematic approach to problem-solving," said Ryodan vice-president for public affairs Maggie Orville. "From what I hear of their careless lunch-selection process, I can only determine that the team in Lincoln is dangerously out of step with Ryodan's corporate culture."

[...]