I think I will go and see this film when it comes out..
A British film about the life and death of Joy Division singer Ian Curtis, starring a first-time actor, has earned a rapturous reception in Cannes.
Control stars Sam Riley as Curtis and Samantha Morton as his wife Deborah, who has apparently been working on the film since 1994.
There is a Wikipedia page on the film with more details.
The film, An Inconvenient Truth, former US Vice-President Al Gore’s dire warning about the threat of climate change, has won the Oscar for best documentary. Making use of a vast body of scientific data, the film represents a stinging rebuttal to the dwindling and increasingly discredited band of skeptics who refuse to acknowledge the extent of climate change.
Here’s a fun stop motion animation on YouTube with real people done by a couple of guys that took 2 months to film and edit.
Their FAQ says:
3. Nothing is fake and no green screens were used. The only computer animated part was the letters falling on the page.
Congratulations to Shane Jacobsen for winning the AFI 2006 Best Actor award for Kenny!
Yay! Donna now has her own IMDB page as both screenwriter and appearing as herself in documentaries!
Year: 2006
Director: Davis Guggenheim
Media: Film
ID in Amazon: An Inconvenient Truth
Went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” last night and was impressed. Al Gore is does pretty well here, stays (mostly) apolitical and has some nice self-deprecating humour as he tries to get a very serious point across. He knows that climate change is a tough sell in the US where science literacy is so low and the popular press is easily manipulated by lobbyists so he tries to make it all as accessible as possible.
Whilst all the graphs of CO2 levels and temperature variation are extremely persuasive the most emotionally gripping part for me were the photographs of glaciers from different periods demonstrating the massive retreat they have undergone in living memory.
There is a fair bit about Gore (I suspect mainly used as a break from the “hard stuff” of science), but I don’t think it detracted from the film and there was some useful background on how he became involved.
Tags: climate+change global+warming al+gore an+inconvenient+truth
From El Reg:
Speaking in Australia this week, Microsoft Senior Program Manager Steve Riley effectively revealed Windows Media Player 11 will not play HD content from HD DVD or BD sources unless it’s running under a 64-bit version of Vista. According to Riley, 32-bit mode is too open to hacks designed to bypass the optical discs’ copy-protection mechanisms.
Given MS’s current current track record with security, it remains to be seen how effective this push to use the UnTrusting Computing platform will be for this..
According to Riley, the decision to drop 32-bit HD DVD and BD playback from WMP 11 was made because “the media companies asked us to do this”. What’s more, he added, “they don’t want any of their HD content to play in [32-bit] at all, because of all of the unsigned malware that runs in kernel mode can get around content protection”.
So presumably anyone else not MS who wants to beg leave to create an official player is going to have to play along with the media companies attempts to wrest control of your computer from you.
It also probably means that Apple Mac users will have to buy 64-bit Intel Macs if they want to be able to watch this new content and high quality (as I don’t believe that the PowerPC line of processors supports the lock in that Hollywood requires).
With Sony and Toshiba supporting BD and HD DVD playback, respectively, on select PCs running 32-bit Windows XP, playing content from pre-recorded discs may not seem to be much of a problem. But it will become more of an issue once content companies begin enforcing region coding and HDCP compliance for full-resolution output. That may require new software for playback, and the updated code could well meet Hollywood’s demand for 64-bit computing.
Given that I don’t run Windows anyway, the whole question is likely to be moot..
We’ve just come back from our local cinema after watching Tsotsi, a film revolving around the life of a young small-time gangster (the eponymous protagonist of the film, the nickname means “thug”). The main story is about what occurs when he steals a car and finds a baby in the back seat and how that effects him and his life in the townships.
The tag line is “In this world… redemption just comes once”, but don’t go to this film thinking your going to see some heart-warming, gently humorous film - this is raw, hard hitting and very confronting.
It’s also damn good, and will keep you on edge right to the very end wondering what’s going to happen. It’s also very moving, and as the IO Film review very aptly puts it:
If you leave unaffected, or not even the slightest bit teary, then you have no heart.
A very worthy winner of the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.
Year: 2005
Director: Rob Marshall
Length: 155 minutes
Category: Drama
Media: Film
Studio: Sony Pictures
Rating from Australia: M
For our third film in a week we saw Memoirs of a Geisha, and whilst it was a good film it didn’t quite measure up to the previous two (TransAmerica and Kenny) for either of us. Whilst Donna had read the book before I hadn’t, but we both came away with the same feelings that it was a good film but not quite as good as the others.
The acting was OK, but Gong Li as the thorougly malicious Hatsumomo did better than Ziyi Zhang (who played the lead role) who was probably a bit too quiet for me, and Donna felt that the character in the book was stronger than she came across in the film. That seemed to mirror the rest of the acting, some was very good and some was OK.
The settings, camera work and feel of the film was very good and the sound was also well done, but it still didn’t quiet get out of the “good” area into the “great” area, which was a bit of a shame.
As I said, I’ve not read the book, so I wonder a little about why the historical background against which the film is set (1930’s through to 1940’s) is so far in the background. There is a radio announcer reading news at time, but he is barely audible and it was hard to work out what he was saying. There is no feeling that Japan is at war, either in China or in the Pacific until Japanese troops evacuate their town and I’ve got this nagging feeling that this has had to be suppressed because of what happened in China. Manchuria is mentioned in passing a couple of times, but that’s about it.
