bitdepth

The Coma

“If we wait long enough, something strange will happen.”

I’ve only read one novel by Alex Garland and seen one film where he wrote the script. I loved the film (28 Days Later) and I also loved the book (The Coma). The Coma is the story of a man in a coma. It’s a small, beautiful book that is filled with woodcuts by Nicholas Garland (Alex’s father). I read it very quickly over three nights just before I went to bed. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea since I had a hard time sleeping over those three nights. My sleep was… strange. The novel is subtle and it wasn’t until I was about a third of the way into it that I started to realize what was going on (which I’m not going to tell you). It’s not a big secret, but, like a dream it’s hard to explain and maybe that’s the point. Garland explores what it means to be awake and be asleep and make us wonder about ourselves, how we think and what we are. How much of us is us? What can we lose and still be who we are? How do we define ourselves? Is it how we look, how we feel or how we think? Garland writes very well and I loved the condensed prose that slowly unfolded in front of me. It made me think a lot and sometimes made it hard to sleep. It’s good when something does that.

August 23, 2004 28dayslater, alexgarland, book, review, thecoma

Blogger

I’ve been using Blogger to create a new Screen Arts blog and I really like it. I tried out Blogger when it first started and had a bit of the usual, “that’s too simple for a geek like me” attitude, but it was an important step in the development of the blogosphere. I found In the Beginning: A Video on Weblogs History by Alberto Gonzales that takes us back to 1999 when Pyra was making Blogger and other cool stuff. Google bought Pyra last year and they’ve been revamping and developing Blogger. I was looking for an alternative to Movable Type since the pricing structure changed and I wasn’t sure if I could get all of the pieces in place to continue having the site hosted at work. So I tried out Blogger again and I was very pleasantly surprised. It’s simple and it works well. But the neat thing is how it is evolving. I can audioblog or blog by mail (which I haven’t done yet) and you can also work with Flickr to add photos to the free Blogspot hosting. They also removed the ads from Blogspot and added a toolbar at the top. It’s a good thing to be with Google and I’m hoping that somehow I’ll be able to get a Gmail account soon as well to play with that too. It’s all part of the evolution of a lot of this stuff where it doesn’t really matter where you are or what particular device you are using. Tim O’Reilly talks about it in the IT Conversations interview with Doug Kaye called The Software Paradigm Shift.

August 20, 2004 blogger, flickr, gmail, history, movabletype, pyra, screenarts

Hacking and Making Stuff

Hacking is moving into the mainstream. O’Reilly has their successful “Hacks” series of books and people just can’t resist finding out how things work and making them better. 2600 is now 20 years old and they’re still as relevant as ever (maybe even more now). Lately I’ve been thinking about hacking and making stuff a lot. I listened to the Paul Graham talk about hackers and painters with Doug Kaye thanks to IT Conversations. I have to get Paul Graham’s book, named Hackers and Painters which collects some of his essays together. Then over the past few weeks I found myself looking at not martha and reading about the early 2005 launch of Make from O’Reilly. Make is halfway between a book and a magazine and it’s going to be filled with stuff to make. I’m looking forward to it. This blog runs with the tiny and cool Blosxom Perl script and I’ve been looking at Ruby and the very cool Instiki Wiki which is written in Ruby. People are doing some great stuff with simple technologies. But it’s not only the new stuff that is cool. I also saw someone repair a chair and glue it together using rope clamps. Just simple twine tied to itself and tightened with a wooden dowel. It’s efficient, environmentally-friendly and cheap. I have to start making more stuff myself.

August 19, 2004 2600, blosxom, hacks, instiki, itconversations, magazine, make, oreilly, perl, ruby, wiki

The Manchurian Candidate (1962)

The Manchurian Candidate One of the fascinating things about looking at older political thrillers is to see how the political world of the film has changed. Common knowledge and assumptions no longer hold. Assumptions about race, class, and gender have shifted and our view of what works and what doesn’t changes as well. That being said, John Frankenheimer‘s The Manchurian Candidate holds up very well. I’d seen the remake before the original, and I was surprised at how shocking the original was at times. Firmly set during the Cold War, the film shows a Korean War hero who has been brainwashed by Communists. Angela Lansbury is great as the domineering power behind her husband the senator and her son, the war hero. The cynicism of the film was surprising to me, and I wondered if the film stood out dramatically from other films of the time or whether it fit in to an undercurrent. I checked out what other films were released in 1962 and found “Lolita“, “To Kill a Mockingbird“, and “Lawrence of Arabia“… so I guess that a cynical political thriller kind of fit in to a somewhat controversial view of the world. One of the neat things that I noticed in “The Manchurian Candidate” was that video was used effectively in several places. A press conference features a room full of cameras with Frank Sinatra conducting the press conference. The camera pans across a room filled with cameras to Angela Lansbury standing beside a television showing the press conference as the scene unfolds. The film moves along quickly and while I generally knew what was going to happen since I’d seen the remake, I was surprised when it actually happened.

August 19, 2004 johnfrankenheimer, manchuriancandidate

Collateral

Michael Mann takes a bold step into the world of HD with Collateral. More films are being shot using HD and with a filmmaker such as Mann, who makes films that look gorgeous, is a major milestone. Collateral happens at night in Los Angeles and the pixels look amazing and capture the feeling of the city at night incredibly well. Shot by Dion Beebe and Paul Cameron the content and the presentation are perfectly matched. There is something that I really like about the way a CCD captures low light. It’s the same as the perfect fit of Anthony Dod Mantle‘s cinematography in the DV world of 28 Days Later.
Collateral isn’t about the technique and it isn’t an action movie either. It’s really an existential drama that throws two men together for one night in a cab. Jamie Foxx is great as the cab driver and in an early scene with Jada Pinkett Smith I loved the way all of the parts worked. This is great acting, directing and cinematography all combined together.

August 17, 2004 28dayslater, collateral, film, michaelmann, review

The Manchurian Candidate

The Manchurian Candidate Jonathan Demme has a knack for creating a feeling of uneasiness. He made the amazing The Silence of the Lambs which featured actors looking directly at the camera. It breaks the fourth wall, but it also forces you to identify more with the characters. You’re looking at them and they’re looking at you. With The Manchurian Candidate he does the same thing with the same effect. One of the things that I loved about The Manchurian Candidate is that I was uneasy at the beginning of the film. What was going on? When was it going to start? It’s bold to throw the audience off-balance from the beginning, but it’s perfect to get you into the confused, paranoid mind of Denzel Washington’s character who’s trying to figure out what is going on. A lot has been written about the political aspects of the film, and while they are there, it’s a character-driven story with the focus on the struggle to figure out who we are. The remake is filled with a solid cast who are given the opportunity to shine by Demme. Liev Shreiber is the somewhat blank candidate of the title and he plays the character with a subtlety that strikes a delicate balance between a man who is empty and a man who wants to know who he is. Do we have a choice in our lives? In politics? Who makes the decisions? There are great actors who show up for just one scene, which undermines your expectations. Will they show up again? Are they important or just a red herring? You try to figure it out along with the characters. It’s a film that sticks with me.

August 16, 2004 film, jonathandemme, review

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