Paranoiac

Paranoiac (1963) is an odd little film. I'd never heard of it until I saw the DVD in Forbidden Planet a few months ago, and was immediately grabbed by the irresistible appeal of Oliver Reed and Hammer Films on the cover. Dealing with homicidal insanity, incest, class, death and fraud, it's a little bit all over the place. Judging by some of the imagery and and that title, I imagine Hammer were cashing in on the success of Psycho. It's well worth a couple of hours of your time though, if only for the gorgeous black and white cinematography by director Freddie Francis and director of photography Arthur Grant (plus Reed spends most of the film being menacing and drunk, which is always good fun).

What really struck me though were the simple yet effective opening credits – white Clarion over a panning shot of a rocky shoreline (pivotal to the plot). I know it's overused, but when used with some consideration, there's a timeless elegance to Clarion that you just can't beat.

Oscars 2011

With the help of a carefully coordinated irregular sleeping pattern and LOTS of Marks and Spencer flapjacks, Dr B and I managed to stay up to watch this year's Oscars. A few thoughts:

  • Just like last year, trying to to work out how to watch the damn thing was a pain in the bum. Obviously I would prefer it if the BBC got their hands on the show again, but if it does have to be with Sky, they could at least provide some kind of online viewing option. The simple fact is that there are huge chunks of society (shout out to all the fellow renters) who simply cannot get Sky TV no matter how much they want it. In the end, we managed to find a pixelly, stuttery (yes yes, the irony) stream online – and we weren't even sure that was going to work until it actually kicked off.
  • Actually, it would have been great to watch it in a bar or something. Does anywhere in London do that? Or better yet - and this seems SO obvious to me - why don't they broadcast it live to cinemas? I can pop down the road and watch the New York Metropolitan Opera live from the other side of the planet, so why not the Oscars?
  • The Associated Press Red Carpet Star Harasser (didn't catch her name) was woefully underprepared. You've basically corralled a bunch of the most famous people in the world for hour, it should be like shooting fish, so questions like "Are you wearing matching shoes" and "Do you speak Hindi?" aren't really good enough, are they?
  • James Franco and Anne Hathaway were … okay. A marked improvement on Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin last year, even if James Franco did look like an underpowered squinting robot at times. No need for the singing though Anne, no need for the singing.
  • I do miss Billy Crystal though :(
  • Franco was tweeting pics and videos throughout the evening. 'Sup, youth demographic.
  • It was good to see Inception get lots of technical awards, although it doesn't make up for the fact that Christopher Nolan wasn't nominated for Best Director. Did the Academy not watch it or something?
  • Kirk Douglas. Legend. I watched Paths of Glory the other day, and he wasn't exactly young in that, so to see him on stage over fifty years later – and being bloody funny to boot – was a real treat.
  • Celine Dion. No. Wrong. Bad.
  • SO MANY ADVERTS. Not just any old adverts, but American adverts. And as we all know, American TV is just plain weird. Still, nice to see a Diet Coke advert with a Tom Gauld animation.
  • Trent Reznor. In a tux. On the stage of the Academy Awards. Receiving an Oscar. For a film about Facebook. The world is a strange, unpredictable place. (Dr B points out that it's a shame he didn't fit "I want to thank you like an animal" into his speech.)
  • Lots of British winners. Splendid.
  • Toy Story 3 got best animated film, which was to be expected. I'd have quite liked to have seen it go to How To Train Your Dragon though, simply for its good old fashioned pure storytelling, not resorting to Shrekian pop-culture references.
  • "I know, let's give Francis Ford Coppola a lifetime achievement award, but on a separate, untelevised evening. We don't want to take up precious Celine Dion time with that dullard hack. We'll let him walk on stage and wave, but that's all."
  • I will never understand why they insist on using nominees to present (and now actually host) the awards. There are quite a few famous people in that room – it'd be nice to see some different faces. And not just pairings who are there to transparently promote their new films (Brand and Mirren, Downey Jnr and Law), which cheapens the whole thing.
  • According to his IMDb profile, Christian Bale is currently filming something called The 13 Women of Nanjing, which presumably features prominent ginger-beardery. (He also appears to be lined up for an "Untitled Nikola Tesla Project", which must surely have something to do with a prediction I made the other day.)

See also: Oscars 2010 and The Best Animated Feature feature.

The dark side of the U

I just appeared on the radio. Which was nice.

Basically, Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode were chatting on the radio the other day about the most horrific things that have been allowed in a U-rated film. The obvious death-of-Bambi's-mother thing was raised, but then somebody emailed in and pointed out that something far, far more atrocious occurs in Star Wars: A New Hope. Although you don't see the individual deaths, the testing of the Death Star on the planet of Alderaan is essentially the genocide of 1.97 billion people. Crikey.

Which got me thinking about The Empire Strikes Back (as most things do) and I worked out quite how inappropriate the U rating is for that film as well. In summary (and this is what I put in an email that Mr Mayo kindly read out), the film contains:

  • the disembowelling of (and encampment within) an animal that has died of hypothermia
  • someone being shot and then trampled under gigantic mechanical foot
  • one freudian dream-decapitation
  • a couple of death-chokings
  • the severing of one arm and one hand
  • somebody being frozen alive
  • a character essentially attempting to commit suicide (but is lucky enough to be saved by some space-guttering and a TV aerial)

    and

  • one disturbingly incesty kiss.

I'm sure there are other things, but really, that is one twisted U-rated film, isn't it?

Millenium Falcon

Love this print by Berg, available from Editions of 100. Sometimes I wish I hadn't thoroughly dismantled my old Falcon to see how it was constructed, to get a better understanding of space travel and typical intergalactic cargo vessel capacities … but it sure was a fun.

Anyway, you just can't beat a bit of Star Wars toy-stalgia combined with a couple of smashing bulldog clips. Geek heaven.

All those comments will be lost in time, like tears in rain

So I've been running the redesigned Swiss Cheese and Bullets on Squarespace for a couple of weeks now. I've imported a LOT of old posts(dating back to the heady days of nought-four), entwined my wisdomly tumblr, made a big reading list(disclaimer: it makes me a very small amount of money) and generally got everything working in a ship shape and Bristol fashion. 

One thing I'm still getting used to is the presence of comments. I've lived a fairly comment-free existence for the last couple of years, thanks mostly to the Fisher-Price nature of Tumblr, so it's nice to be getting a bit of discussion on here again. However …

I know this sounds all "I remember when t'Internet were now't but fields as far as eye could see", but when I started blogging years ago, comments used to appear as comments, under a blog post in a comments section. That's where people commented. These days the majority of responses to a post happen on Twitter. Don't get me wrong, Twitter is the bee's knees, and I love the instant conversations about little things that ebb and flow on there throughout the day. It never ceases to amaze me how remarkably insightful people can be in fewer than 140 characters. But due to its ephemeral nature, those comments and exchanges quickly get buried under a thousand new tweets and are basically lost by the end of the day.

It'd be nice to just grab them and staple them to the post in question. I'm sure there are tools that allow this (I'm particularly interested to see what Pushnote can do once it's Safari-friendly), but as far as I can tell, not in Squarespace. Fingers crossed a solution presents itself soon – I'm sure I'm not the only one with this problem.

Anyway, thanks for all the kind words and links and responses to my ramblings, no matter where you leave them!

A maze of dangerous tangents

"One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real."
— William Gibson

The human brain is often simplified to a simple problem-solution machine (usually by lazy writers and journalists), when in reality it is constantly abuzz with a multitude of tangential micro-thoughts and wonderings, no matter the situation. The mind is complicated and messy and in a permanent state of diversion.

I remember seeing Daniel Kitson on stage a couple of years ago and he traced a spider-diagram in the air depicting his typical thought process. No matter what the situation was, his brain would always spend a split second considering otters.

And so it is with the web. It amazes me sometimes the route I'll take from A to B, A usually being an email, tweet or RSS post that reminds me to do B. A typical journey between one and the other will offer so many hyperlinked distractions, that I can end up forgetting where I was going in the first place. By the time I'm back on course, I've angrily tweeted about a couple of things, added something to my wishlist, discovered a new magazine that I have to buy, reconsidered my choice of spectacles, commented on the latest cast addition to the Dark Knight Rises, added a dozen things to my bookmarks and, on at least one occasion, accidentally signed up for a right-wing fundamentalist Christian newsletter.

A lot of the time I don't even end up at B at all. B has been forgotten about completely, and I'm now at J, usually with the cursor hovering over a Buy Now button and a puzzled look on my face. How did I get here? What was I doing? I appear to be holding the contact details of my dentist in my hand, so why the heck am I about to spend £60 on a toy cargo ship?

The web is a maze of dangerous, expensive tangents. As an analogue of the human brain, it is unsurpassed, and it's forever growing vaster and more complex and intertwining itself with our ways of thinking. And we are growing ever more lost and quaint. Might as well enjoy it while we still understand it.

Now go watch some otters.

Games

"A design should have some tension and some expression in itself. I like to compare it with the lines on a football field. It is a strict grid. In this grid you play a game and these can be nice games or very boring games."

— Wim Crouwel

An open letter to Tom Gauld and Duncan Jones

Tom, Duncan,

I don't know if you're aware of each other's work, but an insistent voice in the back of my head keeps telling me that it imperative that you collaborate on a small but perfectly formed Moon comic.

Duncan, you already have the story and the tone and the look sorted out. You can pretty much get on with editing Source Code, or whatever it is you're up to at the moment. Tom, you've got an excellent science fiction aesthetic, tinged with humour and loneliness, that would serve the story perfectly. Like a glove. Like a big padded spaceman glove. See him up there? Tell me that isn't Sam Rockwell. And I'll be gosh-darned if GERTY isn't from the same production line as one of your many robots. 

Duncan, if you're still not convinced, wrap your eyes around The Gigantic Robot. Tom, watch Moon (not for the first time, I'm sure).

The insistent voice (it's starting to sound like Kevin Spacey) is now telling me that I need to go and get myself a KitKat from the fridge. I'd better obey. I'll leave you two to discuss this amongst yourselves.

Thank you.

D. A. Gray Esq.

When designers wore lab coats

You can say what you like about the hulking, hubristic, Helveticous beast that was Unimark, but I do rather like the idea of wearing a white lab coat whilst designing. I’m not sure why – maybe something to do with how much I enjoyed science/institutionalized pyromania class at school. Of course, I think I might be on my own with this one …

“The white coats were Vignelli’s idea. He thought they would give the operation a sense of discipline, professionalism and unity. Unimark’s studio in Milan sensibly lost no time in discarding the garments as ‘facist’. In 1968, when the long-suffering junior designers in Chicago finally decided they were sick of dressing like a convention of pill-counting pharmacists, the era of the lab coat was over.”

— Rick Poynor’s review of Unimark International: The Design of Business and the Business of Design.

Tis a shame. Anybody else want to completely ignore the mistakes of the past and start a neo-fascist design uniform movement? No? Just me?

Update

on 2011-03-07 13:37 by Daniel Gray

From

XKCD

.

Akiko Stehrenberger

Just found this Akiko Stehrenberger interview, in which she discusses the making of the Chuck Close-esque Funny Games poster (not only one of the best posters of recent years, but one of those cases where the poster is far, far superior to the actual film it’s advertising). She’s also the subject of this month’s Creative Review Monograph.

(Yeah, that’s right. Colour. That’s how much I love this poster.)

Tron Legacy

Here be spoilers.

So I was a little disappointed by Tron: Legacy. I can't quite put my finger on what was wrong with it … maybe it had something to do with how serious it took itself, or maybe it was the reliance on the inherently flawed 3D technology. Or the fact that the whole thing took place inside a non-networked computer in someone's basement, completely unattached to the rest of the world (although I would've loved to have seen CLU's entire army simultaneously materialise in that basement). Maybe it was the Big Important Things the characters kept referring to that didn't actually make much sense (like, how exactly was the existence of the girl with the wonky hair and glowy tattoo going to change mankind?). Maybe it was the sense of disappointment after a two-and-a-half year marketing campaign.

Or maybe, just maybe, it simply doesn't matter how much fancy stuff you throw at the screen if you've already occupied the audience's brains with "wait, was that Cillian Murphy? What the hell?".

Still, it was entertaining to see yet another film fall back on that staple signifier of class and intellect – an unused (always unused) Eames Chair in Flynn's big white apartmentcave (see also: Iron Man, House, Frasier, CSI, Scrubs, amongst many others). Of course, quite why Flynn needs so many seats in his pad is unclear – how often does he get to entertain?

Friday links

On printers and the nature of evil

With Apple's new iOS 4.2 (which, if their was any poetry in the world, should be called Tabby or Manx or something to mirror their big cat-named OSX) they've introduced a little thing called AirPrint, which means you can wirelessly print straight from your iPhone or iPad. Sounds good, simple. Except that the printer at the other end of that process is quite probably EVIL. I'm fairly sure that for the last couple of decades, HP have been using printer technology to develop a HAL-like artificial intelligence.

Seriously, almost every single printer I've ever used, at home and at work, is a pile of malevolent horridness (the exception to this being the loud, slow, but utterly dependable printer I had hooked up to my Amiga 1200 in nineteen tickety-four). There's the issue of unfriendly drivers, full-but-apparently-empty "media trays", mysterious episodes where the printer simply can't be found, entirely random ink supply levels, smudginess. I'm hooked up to four printers in my office, all of which can be relied upon to have at least one major trauma each week. Recently, one printer would only print things in sepia, and then fold over the corner of every other page. My home printer simply doesn't recognise cyan ink cartridges, and regularly makes a whispery noise that sounds like a distant gateway to hell … even when it isn't printing anything.

The only joy I get from my printer is that sometimes it'll flash up a warning – "Media Jam!" – that immediately makes me think I'm at a happening at Warhol's Factory.

Unfortunately the printer industry relies on rapid obsolscence and exhorbitantly-priced refills, not on actual effectiveness, so it's unlikely to change. You know that clip from Office Space where they take the printer outside and beat the crap out of it? That clip is almost twelve years old. Nothing has changed. Considering the evolution of computing in that space of time, isn't it just shocking that printers are still the grinding, unfriendly, media-jamming sods that they are?

What we need is an Apple or a Dyson or a Dieter Rams to make a printer that just works (and yes, I know Apple have alreay trudged through this market, but that was all pre-Ive). It really can't be that difficult can it? It's a product that could be sold to every household and every office. If somebody managed to create something that was simple, unobtrusive, functional and cost-effective, they would make a FORTUNE. All it needs is some smart design.

So, are there any smart designers out there who want to destroy evil?