The Punisher War Zone Movie

Fingers crossed…

Tartan

Ouch:

Long-running world cinema distributor Tartan Films has gone into administration, with all 22 of its staffers made redundant, according to board director Alan Partington.

Partington was unable to give any more details about what will happen to Tartan, which was established more than 20 years ago by owner Hamish McAlpine. He said he was hopeful of a swift resolution of the administration and that more details would be announced soon.

The company, which recently shuttered its U.S. arm Tartan Video USA and auctioned its 100-film library to film print and advertising financing company Palisades Media, has been in trouble for some time…

Christian and Tony Benn

I think the last time I posted something of Christian’s it was his piece on refugees in Jordan. We’ve hung out together a lot since then and even though I practically live on the Internet I still can’t keep up with his output. The guy is a machine.

I’ve seen first hand how easily he completely disarms people and gets them to open up to him. I’m more of a blunt instrument and do ok, but Christian has a gift for this. Couple his talent with all the tech he carries and the social media platforms he straddles and he’s at the very top of his game.

Tony Benn’s not too bad either.

In that short interview he sums up what I’ve been trying to get through to people for years.

Great post, Christian. Outstanding.

Something Whedon this way comes

Not one but two slices of Joss Whedon on the way. Dollhouse is the much talked up kickass girl series ala Buffy meets Alias with a little bit of Bionic Woman by way of Joe 90:

I loves me some Whedon, but I already feel like I’ve seen this, bemoaned its early cancellation, bought the DVD box set and am now waiting for the movie. If anyone can super-bitch slap me from left-field though it’s Whedon so I’ll put the over familiarity down to a weak trailer.

But this one has me super excited from the get go:

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Read more about it here, but if you’re interested in not only how new media disrupts the old, but also more importantly how to adapt to the new creative landscape that’s fast approaching then you may wanna keep a close eye on how Dr Horrible’s Sing-along Blog fares…

All you need is a girl and a gun

A few months ago I saw an extended trailer for the new Pixar movie WALL-E and it immediately stood out thanks to a barrage of visual gags and an animation style that was both stunning and beautiful. I’ve been eager to find out if the delight I felt in watching the snippet would carry through for the whole movie. The image that I took away that evening was the rusty battered robot hanging on with one arm to a spacecraft in flight while allowing his free hand to wade through an ice field:

There’s been a lot of talk online comparing WALL-E to Short Circuit (which I hoped was lazy linking as the robot in that movie is about as endearing as a lump in the testicle), but as I watched that little guy hanging onto the ship I was immediately hit by memories of The Black Hole and more importantly Silent Running.

I was really looking forward to seeing it.

I got my chance at a press screening last night and as soon as it started I felt all those expectations and the NEED to see a good sci-fi movie taken out of my hands, pushed to one side and given a little reassuring pat on the head. Any worries I had simply fell away as Pixar gave me far far more than I expected.

WALL-E is by far the best movie I’ve seen this year.

I’ll go further and say it’s the best thing to come out of Pixar to date and has given me renewed faith in what can be done with technology in a medium that at its heart is about delighting the audience in a very old fashioned way. This story of a love sick robot and his accidental adventure that changes the lives of those that he bumps into (often literally) should be an easy target for a cynical bastard like me. But the little guy won me over immediately and in the same way that Harold Lloyd did when I was a kid.

By far the most interesting Pixar creation so far and what’s best is that he’s teamed with a for once formidable female lead in the sleek, smooth (and just a little bit deadly) Eve.

At its most basic level WALL-E is about an old school SONY tape deck trying to win the heart of an Apple iPod.

I dare any geek not to love that concept.

I have a lot of time for movie robots*. One of my first websites was nothing but movie robots, and Huey, Dewey and Louie from Silent Running are way up there. Whenever anyone talks about the wonders of 2001 A Space Odyssey I drag them back to reality by pointing out that Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 eco space movie is the real wonder. The relationship between Bruce Dern and his renamed drones is something that got under my skin at an early age and WALL-E has more than one nod to that movie.

I’m going to see WALL-E again as soon as it opens on the largest screen I can find and ideally on a weekend afternoon when the place is filled with kids. For all the joy an old nerd like me got out of it WALL-E is also a brave family movie that dares to swap obvious voice talent for some real story telling. It’s something I’ll be returning to here once everyone else has had a chance to see it.

I hope it makes a fucking fortune.

*Not as much as this guy. Check out his home built Dewy. If I was working on something like, I don’t know… the remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still for example… I’d probably drop him a line.

Welcome to the cheap seats

I don’t watch a lot of TV anymore and I certainly don’t sit there with the remote in hand looking for something to watch like I did as a kid. The stuff of interest I can find online (and usually torrent) while things outside of my usual remit normally get mentioned to me via Twitter. With homegrown stuff this means I can have a quick look on the iPlayer to make up my mind if a show is worth torrenting.

I’d use the iPlayer a hell of a lot more if it didn’t have the dumb one week only* rule attached to most of its content. Although it’s growing on me slightly since this morning when I noticed that the thing goes all the way up to 11. Dangerous joke that though when the iPlayer is so very reminiscent of Spinal Tap’s Stonehenge…

Being without my Macbook did mean that I regressed slightly and spent at least one evening last week trying to find something to watch. Needless to say it was all swill, but that made the BBC4 documentary Truly Madly Cheaply all the more enjoyable when I stumbled across it half way through. Matthew Sweet even got to dress up while hanging around a mock cinema in between the clips of mostly forgotten British B movies ala Alex Cox and Moviedrome.

Now if only the Beeb had the balls to give us a full season of this stuff instead of pasting so much of it into a single 90 minute slot. Fair play for following the doc with Psychomania, but out of all the films mentioned that’s the one that’s had the most screenings. I still have a video copy from when Cox showed it as part of Moviedrome and it gets dusted out at least once a year.

Sweet makes a good argument for re evaluating these lost gems while at the same time teasing the audience with the stuff in snippets. If the Beeb wanted to give the iPlayer a run for its money it should pull out the majority of the films mentioned and have them available online or at the very least organise a season of the damn things. Chucking Sweet an extra couple of quid a month and asking him to blog about the movies would mean I wouldn’t have to Google this shit and end up reading about it over on The Guardian instead.

I’d much rather watch Harry H Corbett menace cover girls while wearing bizarre eyewear than just about anything currently being pushed at me by the Beeb.

*You can watch the doc here, but only for 5 more days (unless you torrent it or have something handy like Snapz Pro X to hand).

“Sounds like an old friend is gone…”

The saddest line in any wikipedia entry has to be “This article is about a person who has recently died”.

Good news

The woman dressed as a dollhouse has been sighted:

This can mean only one thing…

I have my Macbook back.

Thank. Fuck.

Fruit Fuckers and clown crotches

Not being a gamer I’m not a huge fan of Penny Arcade, but I respect the “two douches from Spokane, Washington” behind the strip. I was re-reading an old copy of Wired and found an over view of the strip, its creators and the (then) forthcoming game Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode I.

What jumped out at me about the story was that Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins had no idea what they were sitting on even after they realised they were getting a million page views a month. Now it’s around 55 million page views a month. That’s staggering.

Happily now that the guys are creating their own games they’re still working outside of the more regular model and doing things their own way. The game, which seems to have more in common with Lovecraft and robots than the strip is released on a number of formats via episodic download only. Interesting.

“This isn’t a licensed deal like you typically do with a game,” says DeYoung. “Mike, who does all the art for the comic, is doing all the concept art. He has designed the characters and their look, designed the look and feel of all the levels in the game. Jerry has done all the writing, so that includes authoring the cut scenes, writing the overarching story, and writing all the interactive dialog. It’s authentic PA humor.” (via)

Gaming for me right now is too much of a time suck, but I’ll probably download the 1st episode because I’m interested in seeing if the guys have managed to pull it off. Normally anything that’s licensed (from a movie, a TV show or a comic) is fucking awful for a number of reasons. I’m really interested in tracking how something that is pushed into the world with a little love fares better than the usual crap that is rushed out to fleece the fans.

Limbo

Jess and one of the cats conspired to pour herbal tea into my Macbook and the soggy fuck has been in the bowels of the Apple Store now for over a week.

This displeases me muchly.

I’m been hovering between Jess’ Macbook (which hates me) and my battered old Alienware (which overheats like Angelina Jolie in an orphanage), but mostly I’ve been out of the loop and scribbling more on paper. Some of that I’ll transfer here via Spinvox. Some of that I’ll undoubtedly pick up a year from now and go ‘huh?’

Last week I attended a talk at the Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University in Leicester given by Andrea Saveri which really had my head spinning. More on that later. Friday was another great Tuttle - fallout from the Seesmic/Phreadz fallout (storm in a teacup), a LOT of people to catch up with and nicely rounded off by Toby and DT discussing the Cool Curve.

All this stuff is slowly coming together… now I just need my Macbook back.

The photo is Jess showing off her old school geek credentials…