Robert Paterson's Weblog

The Full Catastrophe - Too Many Books - What Kind of man are you...

Three of the greatest lines in cinema all in one scene!

Tears in the Rain - Another view of Remembrance

The great scene in Blade Runner - Does it not tell us of the warrior's death?

Deborah Kerr

My favorite actress, Deborah Kerr. She represents for me a lost world, the England of my youth.

My favorite film of hers - The Life and Times of Col Blimp - her breakthrough film made in 1943 - made by the incomparable Powell and Pressburger. Kerr plays 3 women - all central to who I think she was - brave, cool and loving. The part she played again and again and so well in the King and I.

I feel very old today at the news of her passing. I think I too am a kind of Blimp who looks nostalgically back at a time when your word meant something ....

Accepted - The School You Make Yourself!

My there are some neat small films out that hit the system hard (Idiocracy) - Here David Warlick finds another gem.

"There is a movie in the theaters now called Accepted.  The plot is nearly identical to the 1984 movie, Revenge of the Nerds.  Today, in 2006, slacker, Bartleby Gaines, has been rejected by all of the colleges he has applied to. The obvious culture of his parents’ community is get your child into the BEST university.

Rather than disappoint his parents, Bartleby (played by Justin Long), uses his desktop publishing skills to create his own acceptance letter for a fictitious college, and convinces his best friend (already accepted at the local top-notch school) to build an official looking and functioning web site for the school. His parents are elated, hand him the $10,000 check for first semester’s tuition, and announce how thrilled they will be to drop him off at school.

Now needing a school, he uses the money to lease an abandoned mental hospital, and with friends, (now accepted), cleans up enough of the building to fool their parents. Then, it appears that the web site was more functional than they’d intended, and three hundred entering freshmen show up on the door steps with $10,000 checks.

Then’s when the movie gets interesting, because they decide to start their own college. 

The folks at IMDB love it as well

Humour is so powerful - I am wondering how it will be possible to give films like this a much wider availability than a release. I would sign up for a Movie Club for this type of film. I wonder if an entirely new release system with full length titles could emerge like a cross between iTunes/YouTube/Repertory Theatre that would give the smaller film a much better chance?

I would pay - would you?

Idiocracy - Satire or Prediction?

I picked up a copy of People Magazine today. As reader who has not looked inside the magazine for maybe 2 years I was struck by the editorial changes. I thought I had been reading a 1970's teen fan magazine. While never more than pap, People is now crap. It is all about body image and personal dysfunction. Who are all these "Celebrities"? Why is being anorexic or abused newsworthy or interesting? What is the social impact of this choice?

Is the trend in editorial dumbing down at People a sign of where we are really going?

I am going to get a DVD of Idiocracy when it is available. It seems that the premise of the film - that our society is being dumbed down at an accelerating rate - see my repost of the concern in the UK about the power of our culture to destroy our children - is far from a Satire but a prediction. Here is a review by Nathan Rabin at the AV Club

In Beavis And Butt-head, that devolution is just suggested; in Idiocracy, it's made dizzyingly literal. A perfectly cast Luke Wilson stars as a quintessential everyman who hibernates for centuries and wakes up in a society so degraded by insipid popular culture, crass consumerism, and rampant anti-intellectualism that he qualifies as the smartest man in the world. Corporations cater even more unashamedly to the primal needs of the lowest common denominator—Starbucks now traffics in handjobs as well as lattes—and the English language has devolved into a hilarious patois of hillbilly, Ebonics, and slang.

Idiocracy's dumb-ass dystopia suggests a world designed by Britney Spears and Kevin Federline, a world where the entire populace skirts the fine line separating mildly retarded from really fucking stupid, and where anyone displaying any sign of intelligence is derided as a fag. Working on a sprawling canvas, Judge fills the screen with visual jokes, throwaway gags, and incisive commentary on the ubiquity of advertising—for instance, with the presidential-cabinet member who works paid plugs for Carl's Jr. into everyday conversations. Like so much superior science fiction, Idiocracy uses a fantastical future to comment on a present in which Paris Hilton is infinitely more famous than Nobel laureates. There's a good chance that Judge's smartly lowbrow Idiocracy will be mistaken for what it's satirizing, but good satire always runs the risk—to borrow a phrase from a poster-boy for the reverse meritocracy—of being misunderestimated.

911 - My family

I have two brothers in law who are both actors. Barclay Hope who lives in Vancouver BC and William, Bill to us, who lives in London.

This week, Bill has a leading role in the BBC drama Twin Towers and Barclay has a leading role in the ABC drama The Path to 911.

How strange that both should be involved in similar projects. No guesses as to what I will be doing this Sunday night.

Now I have seen everything - Blood Car

My good buddy Gabe Mandel sends me interesting links all the time. Many end up here. One of the categories he finds for me is extreme stories. Well folks here is extreme!

A trailer for a new movie called Blood Car. It is in the near future Gas is $40 a gallon and a teacher discovers a new fuel - yes blood. You saw it here - thanks Gabe a new view of environmentalism

Advertising - Beware of the Buggy Whip!

This week's results from Yahoo and Google I think demonstrate an important trend in business today.

The traditional media such as TV, Radio and Print, that are being replaced by web direct alternatives, and that use a shotgun approach to advertising are being replaced on the web by context sensitive ads and by sites that tell the truth.

I suspect that we are close to the Tipping Point. iTunes has irrevocably made web delivered music the norm. Sony will do the same for movies. Photography is decisively digital. The iPod has changed our use of music and photos. I am now using my iPod for books as I prepare for a long drive next month. I get my news online. The New York Times has a higher online readership than print. Soon local web sites will eat into the last gold mine of print media - the local newspaper.

I think back for a comparison to a point in the last century when the internal combustion engine found the Tipping Point versus the Horse. Before 1914 it must have seemed that the car, the truck and the tractor were complex and expensive playthings that depended too much on an incomplete infrastructure of the odd supply of gas, parts and repair. All the infrastructure was established around the horse. But surely at some time just after the war in 1918, the system tipped. By the mid 1920's the horse as the norm had gone and by the 1930's even those on the road in the great depression used a truck.

In a decade we will look back at network TV, mass radio, the newspaper, the music store with nostalgia the same way as I did in London in the 1950's when our milk and coal were delivered by horse drawn wagons.

Touching the Void - Review

I watched Touching the Void last night. Wow!

First of as a film it was gripping. The true story is about 2 climbers who get into trouble on a mountain in Peru. It is made with actors who re- enact the action and then uses the real protagonists in interview to tell the story. Filmed on location this is one of the most exciting and moving films that I have ever seen. There are moments that are all but unbearable to watch. Not only the brilliant visuals but the eyes and the emotions of the men who relive this before you in interview.

The crisis comes when one of the climbers breaks his leg. They are 20,000 feet up. There is no back up. His friend lowers him down by rope until, at night in a storm, Joe goes over an overhang. His friend Simon cannot hold him and has to cut the rope to save his own life.

The film is about choices. The power of the film extends way beyond mountain climbing and is a powerful set of metaphors for life. Sometimes a friend is in such trouble that they will take you down too. Do you cut the rope? How do you live with this? What do others think of you?

Joe lands on a ledge in a deep crevasse. He cannot climb back up. His choice to accept death on the ledge or to lower himself down into the abyss in the chance that he might find a way out in the depths. It is hard to tell you how gripping this moment is as the real Joe looks at you on camera and you see in his eyes his recall of this choice. Joe lowers himself into the depths without a know at the end of the rope. He felt that if he ran out of rope, dying by falling would be the best way to go!

He finds bottom and then sees a light. He crawls to it and into the day. He is still thousands of feet up, miles away from camp. To get there he will have to drag himself with a shattered leg miles over a glacier and then over a rock fall. The distance and the scale of the task is overwhelming. So he limits his targets to say 30 feet. I will make that 30 feet in 10 minutes. This is how he, with no food and no water, travels for 4 days. All the time he can hear water running under him inside the glacier.

6 days after being cut free, he finds himself delirious in shit. he has dragged himself into the camp latrine. Would Simon have stayed? All hope gone, blinded in a storm he cries out Simon's name. Simon wracked by guilt, knowing his friend to be dead, thinks at first that it is a ghost.

Joe wrote the book after his friend Simon was attacked by the climbing community. Joe never had to forgive Simon. He knew that Simon had had no choice. He also thanked Simon for working so hard and for so long to save him by single handedly trying to rope him down the mountain

As I watched the film, I thought of Beowulf. Our friends can help us and without them, we cannot get through most of the problems that life can through at us. But paradoxically, we find our greatest test alone and in the darkest places. The way out is to go deeper into the dark. We have to break the immensity of the challenge into bits that we can manage to succeed in. Hope is the great driver.

Here is one of the many rave reviews of the book: Amazon UK

Reviewer: (charmsearle@hotmail.com) from Australia
Touching the Void is a truly rare piece of work. Its power lies in the fact that it forces one to reflect on the potential of the human spirit when the will to survive is virtually our only resource.

With precision, grace and humility, Simpson's narrative soars to explore the heights of Suila Grande with Simon Yates. When disaster strikes on the descent Simpson takes us on his distressingly painful and terrifying ordeal down the tortuous slopes of the mountain, deep into the icy jaws of a crevasse and ultimately towards obliteration in his physical and psycholgical encounters with the 'abyss'.

If you have ever wondered what it is like to truly look into the 'void'- to pit your seemingly insignificant will to survive against an indifferent universe in a particularly hostile environment then this book is (hopefully!)about as close as you'll ever get.

Make no mistake, Into the Void is a tale of courage, tenacity, and endurance but it is also so much more. For me it is a wise, humble, compassionate and deeply respectful meditation of mountains and (in this case) men, as well as an inspiring cathartic experience which serves to remind us that as humans, some of our darkest hours give rise to some of our noblest qualities.

Team America - Got to see it

When things are so terrible, humour is required. A great review from Xeni at Boing Boing

Snip
Marionettes playing AK47-toting homeland defenders don't have to do much to be funny. There's a specific kind of physical humor here only possible with marionettes: suspended on visible strings, they amble as if they're drunk in zero-g. During a poignant exchange, one puppet tries to point tenderly to another's heart, underscoring a dramatic line about "feelings." Her clumsy, string-guided hand misses the mark, to great comic effect. And like "Mister Bill," the characters are at their funniest when they're suffering -- tortured, murdered, or spontaneously impaled like sentient little olives on toothpicks.

There are many moments of blow-soda-through-your-nose comedic brilliance. North Korea's megalomaniac dictator performs a reflective, autobiographical musical ballad. Housecats with the voices of rabid panthers maul celebrity peaceniks. Matt Damon's puppet doppelganger cameos as a "Timmy"-esque halfwit whose vocabulary consists entirely of his own name. A computer intelligence network touted as the world's most sophisticated -- and appropriately named I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.E.N.C.E -- speaks in a stoned surfer drawl. If Oscars were awarded for moments of cinematic vomit excellence, The Exorcist would have won 30 years ago; one scene in Team America would make it a shoo-in today. And an explicit marionette sex scene manages to cram in such a dizzying array of positions -- from reverse cowgirl to rimming -- you'll need a copy of the Puppet Sutra just to keep up.