This week, I have mostly been:

  • eating eggs
  • watching Dexter
  • having Dexter spoilt for me a little bit by the DVD’s spoilerific menu screen
  • gaining a new found respect for Jeremy Langmead
  • enjoying London, friends and Muji statonery.

OOF

OOF by Edward Ruscha. As it subtly represents the noise that I have to make when sitting down/standing up/lifting things/thinking, I consider this painting to be ultimate artistic expression of the human condition.

Profound, non?

Inside Man

After what can only be described as one heck of a weekend in London, Dr B and I collapsed in front of the telly and watched Inside Man on Sunday night. Here’s a quick brain-dump of filmic thinkings.

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Cinematic potential

Mr Sheen has pointed me towards  bunch of photos of places that would make amazing film locations (including Hasima Island, above). A good location can transform a film into something really special – something that the big Hollywooders seem to be forgetting. Compare the tangible deserts and forests of the original Star Wars trilogy with the blah CGI backgrounds of the prequels, or the creative use of real architecture in Blade Runner, for example.

The real world will always win, my friend, the real world will always win.

Blade

On the surface it looks like a standard comic book action movie, but it’s actually an off-kilter patchwork of oddball moments, like the sped-up Benny Hill car chase, the better-than-Kill-Bill-if-you-think-about-it sword fights, or the genius casting of Kris Kristofferson as Kris Kristofferson With A Shotgun.

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Big

At some point between the last viewing of Big and this one, I became a Grown Up. The fantasy elements of the film are now contrasted by the uneasy reality behind it all …

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The bizarre lineage of the Feltron annual report

I spotted this cushion in Habitat the other day, and it immediately struck me how similar it looked to Nick Felton's latest annual report. Surely no coincidence. I contacted Nick, and it turns out the report itself had some rather odd ancestry: apparently he took this picture of fluorescent moss in Iceland in 2006 and then forgot about it, only for it to resurface in his subconscious in the form of a colour palette.

Moss … annual report … cushion … what a strange world we live in.

This week, my desk has mostly been cluttered with:

  • a small plastic cup half-full of hole-punch holes
  • promotional gift catalogues
  • coffee stains
  • an ewok
  • cables … oh so many cables …
  • a pad of Batman and Robin Fold and Mail stationery
  • paper samples (various weights of 9Lives Offset … I still prefer Cyclus Offset though … which reminds me, Dr B actually made a Cyclus Offset joke the other day. I have successfully infilitrated her mind with my designly ways.)
  • a boot (courtesy of Turn … interesting promotional idea, although it all seems awfully eco-unfriendly)
  • Gym Class stickers
  • calendar mock-ups (all terrible)
  • the business card of Jack Dylan, famous artist.

The many eateries of the University of York, and where to find them

Some things I discovered whilst walking to work this morning:

  1. The University of York has no shortage of eateries. In fact, judging by this sign (sorry, ‘wayfinder’), catering is the primary function of the university.
  2. A sign that points to 16 of what are essentially the same thing, but without any suggestion of how far away any of them are, is fairly useless.
  3. Apparently there’s a difference between a Café Bar and a Coffee Bar.
  4. The University of York smells of goose poo.

This week, I have mostly been:

  • trying to get my hands on copies of 032c and Man About Town, but apparently they don’t exist in Yorkshire
  • grazing
  • trying to work out what to wear with my brown suit (blue or pink shirt/tie? Brown shoes? Or are black shoes acceptable? Can’t I just wear Cons and a t-shirt? No?)
  • listening to Tracy Jacks too much
  • eating the finest steak in York
  • failing to watch The Long Goodbye in its entirety
  • befriending talented actor folk
  • attempting to get the hashtag #whoshouldplaybilbo rolling on Twitter, failing miserably
  • designing some Moo cards at long last (although not for myself … one day, one day…)
  • discovering Mazzy Star, about fifteen years too late
  • playing with my iPhone ALL OF THE TIME.

Blockbuster

It’s blockbuster season. Dr B and I have been to cinema a LOT in the last few weeks, and the quality of this year’s batch is varied, to say the least. Here are some very small reviews (this is where my hard-earned Sight & Sound training kicks in):

Coraline. Fantastic, and my first and only experience of 3D, which seemed to work okay.

Wolverine. Okay until you walk out the cinema and realise it was utter rubbish and has completely wasted several great characters and the X-Men continuity in general.

Synecdoche, New York. Overlong pretentious dullness. Hugely dissapointing.

Star Trek. Lots of fun. More please.

Terminator Salvation. A lot better than expected. Some bits of it actually made me think “hmm, this McG character would actually be a good choice for a new Mad Max film”. Too much growling. As with any time-travelly film, if you think too hard about it, it makes no sense whatsoever.

Last Chance Harvey. Sweet, not very good, but okay. Is Dustin hoffman the only seventy-year-old who can carry a romcom?

Drag Me to Hell. Excellent. One of the best cinema experiences I’ve had in a long time. Scary and fun. Am now scared of buttons.

The Hangover. Quite funny but forgettable. The climactic photo-montage at the end neatly mirrors the photo-montage at the opening of Swingers, the grandaddy of the current “bromance” cycle of films. No more please.

Transformers: Revenge Of Michael Bay. A long stupid mess. See graph above.

So yes, a very mixed bag. Not a classic blockbuster year. Still a few things I’m looking forward to though, including: Public Enemies, Moon, Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Shutter Island, Zombieland, Where The Wild Things Are, The Road, and, just to confuse matters, District 9, 9 and Nine.

Unreal cars

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckMdAhmSA0Y&w=552&h=375]

Do you know what really grinds my gears? The current trend for car adverts that don’t actually feature real cars. This Nissan advert is a prime example: a bunch of CGI cars being flung around with no consideration for the laws of physics or the fact the consumer might actually be interested in how the car really handles.

There’s a good reason why advertisers use CGI. They can start work on the adverts before the cars have even been produced, and they have more control over how it looks. However, when that control is mishandled and the physicality of what the computer model is representing is lost, it just looks a little bit pants.

With cars, reality will always win. I watched Mad Max the other day – not a great film (that’s the second one), but the action scenes are thrilling because you’re watching actual drivers in actual cars doing actual stupid dangerous things. Compare that to, say, Gone In Sixty Seconds, in which Nick Cage overactingly jumps a cluster of pixels over another cluster of pixels. Yawn.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAt2-N34dpM&w=552&h=375]

And while we’re on the subject of stupid car adverts, there’s this, which has quite possibly the most desperate unique selling point ever: The cars “look like they’re moving even when they’re not”.

What? No they don’t. If they did, I imagine they’d be something of a hazard. Is this the best you can do? Who even looks for that in a car? “Hmm, I would buy this otherwise perfect car, but when I park it just sits there looking so very stationary. I want people to think my car is ALWAYS MOVING. My friends and neighbours will cower at the ungodly force of perpetual motion at my control!”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ8Zyljf_t0&w=552&h=375]

Now this is a good advert. In fact, not only is it a good advert, I think it should be spliced into the last act of Terminator Salvation, a film that looked like it was moving, even when it wasn’t.

And that is what really grinds my gears. Good day to you.

Tintin, cars, libraries

I always took it for granted that the cars in Tintin looked like, y’know, real cars. Fortunately, somebody has not only realised this, but gone to the trouble of identifying every single one of them (via Graphic Definer), so that we can now appreciate Hergé’s books on a deeper, more designular level. It makes me happy that there are people out there willing to catalogue things like this. Another recent find: a site dedicated to the chairs of The Incredibles. Yes, that’s right, the chairs.

People are brilliant sometimes, aren’t they?

And now something has just dawned on me. You can take pretty much any aspect of my life now – choice of career, sense of humour, the fact I own far too many comics – and trace its origin back to the fact that when I was a kid, Dartford Library had a bloody good selection of Tintin, Asterix and Raymond Briggs books.

So thank you Dartford Library. I didn’t appreciate you at the time, but I do now. (And if you still have those old wooden index card files lying around, I’ll gladly take them off your hands.)

This week, I have mostly been:

  • booking tickets to see Muse at the O2 in November
  • pottering around Kensington, visiting the Design Museum, discovering Princi (amazing bakers in Soho) and generally having a lovely London time with Dr B
  • feeling indifferent about the outcome of the Apprentice final
  • thoroughly enjoying Drag Me To Hell
  • distraught by my hair … what is it trying to do, exactly?
  • listening to some good ol’ Johnny Cash
  • making Dr B watch Mad Max
  • toying with Cargo
  • baby-proofing the flat in readiness for Sam and Sophie’s visit
  • dropularising as much stuff as possible
  • discovering, a whole thirty-one years into my life, that Roy Orbison was not in fact blind. Did everyone know this? Why wasn’t I told?
  • pre-ordering an iPhone 3GS and a lovely Freitag case to go with it. What with this and the Muse thing, O2 have done rather well out of me this week, haven’t they?

Drag Me To Hell

Saw Drag Me To Hell last night with Drs B, G and Mr A. A proper scary-yet-fun movie. I can’t remember the last time I sat through an entire film completely on edge, waiting for the next horrific shock*. It was like a lesson in how to make a really effective film for a relatively small budget – at one point Alison Lohman has a fight scene with a hanky for crying out loud. I just hope that now he’s rediscovered his horror mojo, Sam Raimi doesn’t go straight back to making bloated Spider-Man movies†. More horror please.

* Well, apart from Me, You and Everyone We Know, but that was for slightly different reasons.

† Speaking of Spidey, how crap is it that they missed out the hyphen on this poster?

Eighties New York Comedy Apartment Envy

It dawned on me a while ago that idea of the perfect home has been shaped by the films of my adolescence. I’m sure I’m not the only person in the world to have been diagnosed with the condition known as “Eighties New York Comedy Apartment Envy”. Just think of the amazingness of the abodes in the following and I you’ll understand: Big. When Harry Met Sally. Hannah and Her Sisters. Three Men and a Baby.

Especially Three Men and a Baby.

These are the apartments that have forever haunted my dreams (not that I fantasise about living with Steve Guttenberg, but you get the idea) and shaped my expectations about what a home should be. They are the very pinacle of apartmentology.

And then this appears in the New York Times and messes it all up: Natalya and Eugene Kashper’s minimalist SoHo loft.

Look at it.

Just look at it there.

Is this, or is this not, the most amazing apartment you have ever seen? I need to live there. And if I can’t find a way to finagle my way into the Kashpers’ lives, then the next best option is for this to appear in a New York comedy of some sort. And not the Matthew McConaughey sort, I mean a quality comedy. Something with Tom Hanks or an on-form John Cusack in it, falling in love with Catherine Keener whilst trying to deal with a career or child or mystical enchantment or something.

Maybe I should give my old friend Rob Reiner a call. He hasn’t done anything worth watching for a long time, and I’m sure he must have lots of romantic comedy energy just bubbling up inside him waiting for the right location.

(Via proper diction.)