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.)