If a car company were to try to remake this series of TV adverts for the Isuzu Gemini (NB: 17.8MB Windows Media file) today they’d no doubt employ lots of CGI, plus a ton of quick cuts and a bunch of close-ups of the sexy models who were supposed to represent the average driver. Somehow, it wouldn’t look half as impressive as doing those stunts with real cars did. (Admittedly, the soundtrack would probably be greatly improved.)

That said, I realise that they must have used some mechanical assistance to achieve some of those four-cars-spinning-in-line-abreast shots. And don’t get me started on the bouncing-off-the-boat sequence at 00:02:14 – that boat’s superstructure must have been heavily reinforced, not to mention the cars’ wheels shod with an exceptionally bouncy rubber compound.

[Via MetaFilter]

Bryant Frazer’s essay on Richard Stanley’s horror films reminded me of Dust Devil, which hasn’t shown up on terrestrial TV in about ten years – I think it aired once on Channel 4 in 1995 or thereabouts.

I don’t remember the plot in any sort of detail, but I do remember Dust Devil as one of the most eerie, atmospheric horror films I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be available on DVD or even VHS other than in Canada, according to the IMDB.

The Planetary Society’s Emily Lakdawalla brings us The Year in Pictures: 2005.

As you’d expect there are several shots of Mars and Saturn that are worth a look, but I think the most exciting images are the pictures of the surface of Titan from the ESA’s Huygens probe’s landing almost a year ago, simply because they’re showing us somewhere we’ve never seen before.

Joe Queenan’s friends keep sabotaging his reading list:

Several years ago, I calculated how many books I could read if I lived to my actuarially expected age. The answer was 2,138. In theory, those 2,138 books would include everything from “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” to “Le Colonel Chabert,” with titles by authors as celebrated as Marcel Proust and as obscure as Marcel Aymé. In principle, there would be enough time to read 500 masterpieces, 500 minor classics, 500 overlooked works of genius, 500 oddities and 138 examples of high-class trash. Nowhere in this utopian future would there be time for “Hi-Ho, Steverino!”

[...]

[I am sure...] I am not alone when I state that cavalierly foisting unsolicited reading material upon book lovers is like buying underwear for people you hardly know. Bibliophiles are ceaselessly engaged in the mental reconfiguration of a Platonic reading list that will occupy them for the next 35 years: First, I’ll get to “Buddenbrooks,” then “The Man Without Qualities,” then “The Decline of the West,” and finally “Finnegans Wake.” But I’ll never get to “Finnegans Wake” if I keep stopping to read books like “The Frontier World of Doc Holliday.”

Time management is not the only issue here. There is often something sinister about the motives of those who press books onto others. The urge to give “Elwood’s Blues” to someone who already owns unread biographies of Franz Schubert and Miles Davis smacks of sadism; the books serve as a taunt, a gibe, a threat, an insult. It is as if the lender himself wants to see how far another person can be pushed before he resorts to the rough stuff. [...]

[Via feeling listless]

Andrew Baio reports the sad tidings that Suck.com is no more. Worse yet, there doesn’t seem to be a complete archive anywhere.

Damn.

Grady Hendrix explores the extras on the DVD release of The Dukes of Hazzard:

[How] can anyone watch The Dukes of Hazzard special features and not be convinced that this is the most important movie of the 21st century? The 30 minutes of deleted scenes make it obvious that, like Orson Welles, director Jay Chandrasekhar had his masterpiece defaced by a spineless studio. What has been left on the cutting-room floor includes Seann William Scott’s cry for environmental responsibility (“Coal produces trace elements of arsenic and mercury. This produces sulfuric acid, which is responsible for the formation of sulfuric aerosol and acid rain.”); an anti-fur message; a push for the legalization of marijuana; and a plea for man-on-man love. In these lost scenes, the Duke boys take every opportunity to tackle each other and fall to the ground, tickling and teasing in their tight blue jeans. Could there have been a Brokeback Mountain if these two kissing cousins hadn’t paved the way with their locker-room antics?

Johann Hari’s article on New Labour’s dismal record on workplace health and safety legislation makes for depressing but unsurprising reading.

I’d only disagree with Hari on one point: like a lot of critics of New Labour, he personalises the issue by pinning all the blame on Tony Blair. It might be that Blair has personally directed that Labour’s manifesto promises be watered down, but Hari doesn’t make that case in his article; he simply quotes snippets of Blair’s stump speeches and assigns blame for the climbdowns to Blair. Prime Ministers end up talking about all sorts of policy areas, especially during election campaigns, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they took all the detailed decisions regarding those policies.

To be sure, ultimately the Prime Minister is responsible for what his government does, but then so are the various secretaries of state at the DTI and – given that much of the argument revolves around the prospect of the government having to spend much more money to properly enforce whatever regulations it might pass – the Treasury. The problem really isn’t Blair himself, no matter how convenient it is for those who want him to go sooner rather than later to pretend otherwise: it’s a combination of New Labour’s determination to prove itself business-friendly and independent of the trades unions, and the weakness of cabinet government since about 1983. Two facts that will become all too obvious should Gordon “PFI” Brown move into No 10 between now and the next general election. (No matter how much you might admire Brown’s formidable intellect, drive and sense of discipline, can you really see him as a member of a cabinet of equals, primus inter pares?)

Actually, I have a second, minor, quibble with Hari’s article. He attributes the phrase “If it’s good for General Motors, it’s good for America” to Ronald Reagan. Reagan might have said that, but as I understand it the sentiment – if not in that precise wording – was first expressed by GM president-turned-Secretary of Defence Charles E Wilson during his Senate confirmation hearings.

Apparently a film adaptation of Pac-Man is in development.

I doubt that even Pixar could make that idea work…

I used to enjoy MSNBC’s The Week in Pictures feature, but a couple of years ago they switched to a Flash format and started rejecting my chosen web browser, so I got used to obtaining my weekly picture fix elsewhere. I ventured back this week to check out their The Year in Pictures 2005 feature and it turns out that MSNBC have seen sense: their site is happy to let me use Firefox to view the slideshow.

Unfortunately they’re still using a buggy Flash interface to present their images, preventing me from posting direct links to my favourite images. My favourite (which is also the leading Readers’ Choice at the time of writing) is the shot of the Buddhist monks at the Pongour Falls (image # 44 out of 49 in the Readers’ Choice list, # 29 of 37 in the Editors’ Choice list), but there are enough striking/beautiful/harrowing/goofy/just plain spectacular images to suit most tastes.

A gallery of Iron Maiden album covers featuring Spongebob Squarepants.

I kid you not.

[Via Making Light]

Other than The Christmas Invasion, the TV highlight of the long weekend has been tonight’s BBC adaptation of Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, a book I read until the covers fell off when I was a kid. Compressing the story into ninety minutes was never going to result in a totally faithful adaptation, but writer Simon Nye did a decent job of presenting the essential plot points and the cast (particularly national treasure Imelda Staunton as Mrs Durrell, Omid Djalili as Spiro and Eugene Simon as the young Gerald) did a fine job of portraying Durrell’s style of broad English comedy without coming across as caricatures.

Interestingly, delving around the relevant Wikipedia entries I discovered that Gerald’s older sister Margo also published a book about the family’s stay in Corfu.

I do believe I may have to dig My Family and Other Animals out again and see if I enjoy it as much thirty years on.

I bookmarked Caitlin Flanagan’s New Yorker article about the print-to-screen transition of P L Travers’ Mary Poppins before the Xmas break, but only got round to reading it this evening. Interesting reading: both the story of Travers’ life and the description of the very different spin Disney’s scriptwriters put on Travers’ characters.

The notion that Disney softened and warped a character in giving him/her the big screen treatment is hardly novel, but it’s interesting to read about it happening to an author who was alive at the time and who had script approval. (Not that that latter point actually made much of a difference, as it turned out. Disney’s behaviour towards Travers at the post-premiere party said it all, really: having signed a contract and taken the studio’s money, a writer has even less power than the screenwriter.)

In fairness, it’s not as if Disney are the only film studio to leave an author feeling as if their story never made it to the big screen. Somehow it just feels worse when they do it, perhaps because kids are liable to imprint upon The Disney Version in a way that adult audiences watching an adaptation of, say, A Sound of Thunder or The Bourne Identity or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep wouldn’t.

My point isn’t that adult audiences demand greater fidelity to the original text – none of the stories I named had the benefit of a particularly faithful adaptation – but that Disney’s tendency to bend even material that had already established an audience in another medium to the Disney house style was regrettable. Perhaps these days this is less of an issue, since Disney no longer have the sort of hammerlock on the young audience’s imagination they did when I was growing up, but I think a faithful adaptation of Travers’ work might have been at least as much fun as the Disney Version. I’d have liked the chance to see it.

[Via PopPolitics]

I love this coffee table made from a genuine 1967-vintage hard disk platter.

[Via Engadget]

If you enjoyed yesterday’s The Christmas Invasion, you might be interested in the episode commentary the BBC have made available for download. (NB: 23.6MB MP3 file.)

For what it’s worth, I found the Xmas special a curate’s egg. Poorly paced, suffering from the need to get the whole regeneration business out of the way and fit in an episode’s-worth of plot, the episode only really livened up once the Doctor stepped out of the Tardis about fifteen minutes before the end; even then, that climactic sword fight looked terribly amateurish.

On the positive side, David Tennant was just fine once he got going, the killer Xmas tree and assassin Santas were a delight, and explaining the source of the snow was a neat touch. All in all, there was plenty to suggest that this March, when the writers can start laying out a season’s worth of storyline, everything will be just fine.

[Via Behind the Sofa Again]