Do you think the editors at Digital Spy actually read what they wrote yesterday.
As headlines go, ‘Bacon optimistic about paedophilia’ is certainly eye-catching, but perhaps not in quite the way they intended.
[Via Lots of Co.]
Anthony Lane’s panning of the film adaptation of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera inspired a MetaFilter thread, which naturally turned into a list of people’s favourite negative reviews.
Perhaps my favourite (courtesy of Fourmyle’s contribution to the thread) is the Flick Filosopher’s attack on Britney Spears’ big screen debut, Crossroads: style and content working in perfect harmony.
CHUD has an interview with Joss Whedon about turning Firefly into a feature film.
Q: Is film more or less stressful than TV?
Joss: Well, it’s been as stressful. I thought it would be less stressful. I thought I’d be golfing in between takes and writing sonnets. Two things have not worked in my favor. One is, although I don’t have three shows to run - and believe me, nothing will ever be as hard as that was - the movie takes up your attention in a way that three shows do. All of the creative energy that you’re usually pouring into telling 20 - 40 stories a year, you’re pouring into one. And you find you need it. You wake up in the middle of the night and you go, “His pants are too baggy!” And it’s important. You have watch everything so carefully because every mistake you make is gonna be forty feet high. Whenever you think, “Well, maybe that’s good enough,” I say to myself, “Cinerama Dome.” […]
Unfortunately I can’t view the live webcasts at the AuroraWebcam site - having tried to view them using several different web browsers, I’m guessing that they just don’t play nicely with the OS X version of Windows Media Player - but even the still images of past displays are a real treat. (As a bonus, there are some really nice shots of ice art alongside all the galleries of aurora images.)
[Via The Sideshow]
One MetaFilter poster wondered what you’d get if you crossed the BBC’s Massive Nature documentaries with Peter Jackson’s adaptation of the Lord of the Rings trilogy:
I watched BBC’s Massive Nature documentary season the other day. The first one was particularly awesome, involving schools of sardine off the coast of Africa following their foodsource, eventually becoming a super-school of megabijillions of fish, which in turn attact super-pods of thousands of dolphins that work together to trap and eat the fish; plus large groups of sharks, sea lions, and gulls. A big, big event.
The commentary for all six episodes are very similar.
And it suddenly struck me during one episode that a fellow could have a blast remixing Lord of the Rings as a Massive Nature episode.
Orcs. Fourteen million Sauruman-bred Orcs. This is the biggest mob of Orcs Middle Earth has ever seen. Today, all fourteen million leave Sauruman’s realm in one mass exodus. It’s the biggest day of their lives. But for some, it will be their last. Because outside lurk deadly predators. [freeze frame matrix-style image of Orc about to encounter an arrow]
So, who will live and who will die? At the moment of impact, what are the odds for each Orc in the horde? Unlucky Orcs may become unwitting Elf-fodder. Every Orc is a potential target - so is there anywhere in the crowd that is safe from attack? In a mob of millions, is life and death simply a lottery, or are can an Orc do anything to increase its chance of survival? To find out, we’re going to travel back five months, when [special zoom effect] this cave stood empty.
Our story begins hundreds of miles from the scene of battle: Sauruman’s breeding caves…
And so on. All read in Sean Pertwee’s impeccable British accent.
posted by five fresh fish at 1:51 AM GMT on December 23
Now that would make for one seriously cool extra for the Enhanced Extended Edition of the DVD box set.
A somewhat belated selection of nifty images:
Now that’s more like it. (See this earlier post for context.)
[Via Slashdot]
Not surprisingly, the producers of the Fantastic Four movie have reportedly been thinking hard about how they can respond to The Incredibles. In itself this isn’t necessarily a huge problem, particularly given that so much of the finale is probably going to involve a lot of CGI work anyway; if you’re prepared to throw the necessary money at your animators, what’s a few hundred more man-hours of animation time anyway?
In a sense, that’s the heart of the film-makers’ real problem: some superpowers - most noticeably the ability to stretch your limbs like elastic - looked much more realistic in the stylised world of The Incredibles than they’re likely to when CGI’d onto footage of real actors. That’s not to say that all superhero films need to be done as 3D animations in future, but you’ve got to balance how goofy your characters will look on-screen against the desire to use actors to sell their characters and their stories through their performances.
Of course, it also helps if you have a really good script, actors who know how to work with the material, and an inspired director. We won’t know about any of those factors until we see the finished product.
Malcolm Gladwell reviews Jared Diamond’s Collapse for the New Yorker. According to Gladwell, Diamond’s central thesis is that sometimes civilisations are sometimes just unwilling to adapt to their environment until it’s too late:
It did get colder in Greenland in the early fourteen-hundreds. But it didn’t get so cold that the island became uninhabitable. The Inuit survived long after the Norse died out, and the Norse had all kinds of advantages, including a more diverse food supply, iron tools, and ready access to Europe. The problem was that the Norse simply couldn’t adapt to the country’s changing environmental conditions. Diamond writes, for instance, of the fact that nobody can find fish remains in Norse archeological sites. One scientist sifted through tons of debris from the Vatnahverfi farm and found only three fish bones; another researcher analyzed thirty-five thousand bones from the garbage of another Norse farm and found two fish bones. How can this be? Greenland is a fisherman’s dream: Diamond describes running into a Danish tourist in Greenland who had just caught two Arctic char in a shallow pool with her bare hands. “Every archaeologist who comes to excavate in Greenland . . . starts out with his or her own idea about where all those missing fish bones might be hiding,” he writes. “Could the Norse have strictly confined their munching on fish to within a few feet of the shoreline, at sites now underwater because of land subsidence? Could they have faithfully saved all their fish bones for fertilizer, fuel, or feeding to cows?” It seems unlikely. There are no fish bones in Norse archeological remains, Diamond concludes, for the simple reason that the Norse didn’t eat fish. For one reason or another, they had a cultural taboo against it.
One more book for my wishlist.
How could I resist an article with a title like Star Trek, female orgasms & the mysterious Blaster Beam? It’s about an unusual musical instrument - invented, oddly enough, by a kid who played Captain Kirk’s nephew way back when - which was used to provide a memorable sound effect in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
[Via Nerdfilter]
The European Space Agency’s site publicising the work of the Mars Express orbiter is a bit gimmicky - is a Flash animation of a rotating planet really really necessary? For all that, there’s no denying that the site contains some really striking images of the Martian surface, and tons of facts about the mission. It’s good to see the ESA living up to the standards NASA have set for this sort of site.
[Via MetaFilter]
Let’s all hope that Friday 13 April 2029 turns out to be just another dull Friday.
Based on the latest observations, there’s just a 1 in 45 chance that 7.5e+10 kg of mass is going to spoil everyone’s day. Which would be just a tad more comforting if it hadn’t been a 1 in 63 chance as of Xmas Eve.
[Via MetaFilter]
The Onion’s AV Club surveys the astonishing range of tat their film writers received from eager publicists this year:
Item: A faux-bearskin envelope
Promoting: The DVD release of Brother Bear
Description: Manufactured to contain a press release touting the Brother Bear DVD, and sealed with a metal clip, the furry envelope suggests what an office-supply store might stock in an alternate universe that never developed paper.
Relevance to product promoted: High. Bears are an excellent source of fur for those who can still sleep at night knowing that their comfort means the death of such majestic creatures.
Item quality on a scale of 1 to 5: 1
Though relatively sturdy, the synthetic bearskin is unpleasant to touch and too thick to close easily once opened.
Persuasive power: Poor. If anything, it suggests that Disney was so dissatisfied with the cast of Brother Bear that it had them skinned in a desperate attempt to get its money’s worth.
I’m indebted to Gert for pointing out Bernard Levin’s account of a … memorable … performance of Spontini’s La Vestale:
1979 was The Year of the Missing Lemon Juice. The Theatre Royal in Wexford holds 440; it was completely full that night, so there are, allowing for a few who have already died (it is not true, though it might well have been, that some died of laughter at the time), hardly more than four hundred people who now share, to the end of their lives, an experience from which the rest of the world, now and for ever, is excluded. When the last of us dies, the experience will die with us, for although it is already enshrined in legend, no one who was not an eye witness will ever really understand what we felt. Certainly I am aware that these words cannot convey more than the facts, and the facts, as so often and most particularly in this case, are only part, and a small part, too, of the whole truth. But I must try… […]
Scroll about halfway down the page to locate the rest of the story.
[Via mad musings of me]