Today was my favourite Sydney Film Festival 2011 day to date, taking me from Northern Albania to Iran, focusing on family, and the consequences and fallout the actions of adults in conjunction with the culture surrounding them can have on their children.
Author Archives: c0up
Super 8 [spoilers, duh]
Super 8. A fantastic throwback to those kids movies from the 80s we all loved, with the best ensemble cast of the year.
Maybe I’ve just seen a lot of films lately, but I can’t last remember when I’ve so genuinely cared for a bunch of characters, and all credit to Elle Fanning, Joel Courtney, Riley Griffiths, the rest of the ragtag bunch, and J.J. Abrams, for so expertly bringing out the emotion in these kids with his writing and direction. If it’s been a long time since I’ve cared so much for a cast, it’s been even longer since the ensemble cast has largely been kids, and no, I can’t call it unique, but it’s something that has been sorely missing from cinema as of late.
iOS 5. Meh.
I went to sleep last night wondering what Apple would pull out of the bag for iOS 5. Then I woke up to this…
And my reaction was this…
X-Men: First Class [spoilers, duh]
X-Men: First Class. The best comic book to screen origin story I’ve seen, and a more than adequate potion to help erase the farce that was X-Men 3: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.
I had my doubts after the last two failures, and taking it back to the 60s, telling the story of a young Magneto and Charles Xavier and intertwining the story with the Cuban Missile Crisis seemed like an extremely ambitious undertaking by Matthew Vaughn, but all in all, he’s made it work, and then some!
It ain’t easy takin’ your blog with you
Steve Rubel tweeted yesterday that he was ditching his existing blogs, and starting again on Tumblr. I assumed that his reasons for moving would probably not convince me, since he does what he does as a profession, but before he posted his reasons why later in the day, I got thinking about moving from Posterous to Tumblr, and decided to give it a go, since he did get me onto Posterous in the first place.
The results were disasterous, and I learned that blogging platforms do NOT play nicely with each other.
I was shocked at how unbelievably painful it is to even attempt to export your data from one blog to another. There’s no concept of a standard format a blog gets exported into, and right now, WordPress seems to be the only middle man, however cumbersome and handicapped He may be, that can actually pull data from most of these blogs, through plugins they’ve developed that access the APIs, and then spit out an XML file of sorts, parts of which can be read, in various ways, by blogging platforms.
Alien vs. Aliens
You know, for more than half of James Cameron’s Aliens, I was left wondering what all the hype was about.
I’d never seen Aliens, or Alien for that matter, before this year. Yes can we skip the whole “But oh my God you’re such a movie buff, how could you not have seen these classics?”. Trust me, you’d be alarmed at how much of anything before the year 2000 I’ve actually not seen. Moving along…
Everything I’d read about the two films made Aliens seem far superior, yet I finally got around to seeing Alien a month or so ago, and was completely floored [heh, Peter Travers would be proud] by Ridley Scott’s visionary, sci-fi horror masterpiece.
Did you know Grooveshark had a Video Mode?!
Note: This is for Grooveshark paying members only, as far as I know.
I’d randomly posted on /r/groovesharkplaylists a week or two ago about collaborative playlists, and someone replied today, and in browsing the subreddit again, I came across this post on Grooveshark having a Video Mode…
When you have songs in your “Now playing” bar, you will see a song count on the bottom right. If you click on that you get a menu with both these options on it. The video mode displays various YouTube videos that match the current song – very cool
So yeh, I went ahead and tried it, and it does indeed work!
I was thinking lately of how I hardly see music videos anymore since I do most of my listening on Grooveshark, but this is quite the convenient indeed!
Fringe season 3. Rediscovering that LOST feeling [spoilers, duh]
Nine days from now will be the one year anniversary of LOST ending. I wrote about how that void will never be filled, and how there will never be another show as great as LOST, for OH SO MANY reasons, but today, just temporarily, a little bit of Amber in the form of the Fringe season 3 finale filled that void.
I tweeted about it the instant it finished, I rewatched that ending, had about ten tabs open, started looking at the Fringe subreddit, read an out-there, theorising post by Doc Jensen, and well, it felt like LOST all over again!
What I’m looking forward to at the 2011 Sydney Film Festival
The Sydney Film Festival schedule came out today, and I’m pretty excited! It was last year’s Sydney Film Festival that really got me into the film festival circuit, starting with a memorable screening of Banky’s Exit Through the Gift Shop, and since that time, I was lucky enough to be in Melbourne for MIFF, and then had the time of my life at SXSW Film this year.
So, scheduling conflicts aside, and me actually being in Sydney, and able to attend, these are the films [in no particular order] that caught my eye initially…
My mind has been opened to the Holocaust by Maus…
And it’s overwhelming me.
I finished reading Maus a few hours ago, and I can’t stop thinking about it; I don’t think a literary work has ever affected me as much.
Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, by Art Spiegelman, is a memoir of Art Spiegelman listening to his father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, retelling his story. It alternates between descriptions of Vladek’s life in Poland before and during the Second World War and Vladek’s later life in the Rego Park neighborhood of New York City
I’m just going to come out and say it. I’m an ignorant person. I knew about the Holocaust. I knew about Hitler. I knew about Auschwitz. I knew about the gas chambers. And… well, I’ve already crudely simplified it, but, these were events of the past, and had no impact on me. I accepted that they happened, I was disgusted by it, but again, it was just another “fact” or piece of history that I acknowledged.
Then I read Maus, and now the weight of what occured during those years, and the lasting impact it has had on survivors, and the generations after, is starting to hit me. Don’t get me wrong, I am in NO WAY claiming to understand I know how it feels, as I am so far removed from this, but, I will forever look at it from a completely different perspective, and it’s a perspective I am grateful I have gained, and I feel a little less ignorant as a result.
c0up 