EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

A Couple Of Random Thoughts On Siri

The Voice Control on the iPhone has been broken for as long as I’ve tried to use it. There’s an entertaining random element to what happens when you ask it to dial a number, and it’s pretty much guaranteed that you will not be getting the call you need.* If Siri fixes that problem then there’s a step forward right off the bat. If Siri works as well as Apple claim, then we have a genuine game-changer in all kinds of ways.

My sis-in-law Sandi is blind, and has become an Apple fan over the past year or so on the strength of the accessibility that’s baked into OSX at a core level. She’s excited about Siri for the same reason. A phone that you can use effectively without the need to look at the screen is a pretty big deal. Paired with a Bluetooth headset, there’s no reason for it to ever leave her handbag or pocket. This is a step towards the idea of the hardware vanishing into the cloud. If you can order your phone around, then the barrier between interface and user pretty much disappears, especially if, like Sandi, that barrier has prevented you from using the phone in the first place.

Although, as numerous wags on Twitter have pointed out this week, if the Siri developers don’t put an April 1st eater egg in where Siri will, just once, respond to a query with “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” then they’re missing a trick.

*TRUSTOREE: I once asked VC to phone home, and it responded by playing the Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Equal parts hilarity to creepiness.

Modern English

DocoDom and I have been working together for quite a few years now, and it’s always nice to see some of the material from our archive popping back up on the interwebs.

Dom’s just uploaded the first major project that we worked on as a team to YouTube, and I’m delighted to showcase it here. Modern English is a half-hour show about the mod subculture, featuring interviews with some of the faces of the scene. Enjoy!

Legacy

I’m really not sure how I should be feeling today. I’m sad, of course, as anyone should be where they hear of a life cut too short, when there was still so much left to do. But at the same time, I have to say the sadness is tinged with admiration. The legacy that he has left is one of the most influential on the planet. Even if you don’t own one of the products that made the company that he founded, left and then resurrected, you’re pretty likely to have used devices that he had a major hand in popularising. He didn’t invent the Graphical User Interface, the mouse, or the tablet computer, or the hard drive music player. All he did was make them easier and more intuitive to use. And in doing so, he changed the technological landscape of the late 20th and early 21st century.

His influence is everywhere – in the design, colours and finish of hundreds and thousands of products that he had nothing to do with. In the way we consume music, TV and films. He is the driving force behind one of the most innovative and consistently surprising film studios on the planet. His company could make headlines not just by launching a product, but by allowing rumours of those products to circulate.

I find it impossible to write about him in the past tense, because he’s still around – when I lift the lid of my laptop, when I pick up my phone. He’s part of the technological, social and artistic landscape, and always will be. That’s a legacy that we should all wish for.

The point is, I can write this piece without mentioning his name once, and you all know who I’m talking about.

From Here To Hilversum

I try not to talk about work on X&HT, which is in general a solid rule for most bloggers. But this is too cool not to share.

That cool chunk of Lego is the Beeld & Geluid (Sound and Vision) building, in a leafy town called Hilversum about a twenty minute train ride from Amsterdam. It’s the home of Dutch radio and television, and contains all the archives of getting on for 100 years of broadcast history.

The building is just as remarkable on the inside – five stories high and five deep. As well as the archive, it’s home to a huge multimedia museum. The glass wall here has imprinted pictures of Dutch stars of stage and both big and small screen.

These pods contain the contestants of Last Man Watching, a competition where you watch TV until your brains leak out of your ears. It had been running for about 30 hours when I visited. Loads of people had dropped out at the 24 hour mark. Not a sign of the limits of human endurance – if you make it that far you get a free TV.

It’s a fascinating place, and well worth a trip out if only to marvel at a building that’s like a supervillain’s lair if only they were really into Dutch film and TV.

Of course, it was important to find time for a spot of refreshment before we headed back…

Love And Combat: X&HT Saw Warrior

Fight films are rarely complex. They are the closest the male of the species get to chick flicks – a warm comfortable space where we can bond, laugh and yes, even cry. Fight films are simple, primal things. They are about redemption and escape; from poverty, from a hopeless future. They are also about the things that we can’t escape from; family, and our own worst impulses. Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior does nothing to alter this template, and is all the stronger for it.

Continue reading Love And Combat: X&HT Saw Warrior

TLC’s Cauliflower Cheese

My beloved doesn’t cook that much. I am a kitchen hog, and will happily usher her out of the room while I create culinary masterpieces. She’ll happily be ushered. Let the goon do all the work. But just because she doesn’t, don’t mean she can’t. When TLC picks a saucepan up, the results are always delicious. Last night, after I returned bone deep weary from a working weekend, she put together the best cauliflower cheese I have ever tasted.

Continue reading TLC’s Cauliflower Cheese

Play The Game, The Game Plays You: X&HT Saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

A note, before we begin, on the vexed question of remakes. I’ve already been caught out once this year by taking a stand against them, and came close to missing out on a film that may be in my Top five for the year. I should know better. There’s no such thing as an absolute rule. Everything on this blog runs according to the Pirate Code. I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.

Continue reading Play The Game, The Game Plays You: X&HT Saw Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

The Tale Of The Scorpion: X&HT Saw Drive

You think you know this film. You already have your references in your pocket like a deck of cards. Two-Lane Blacktop, maybe Vanishing Point. Bullitt, of course. Walter Hill’s The Driver, for sure. If you’re clever, William Friedkin’s To Live And Die In L.A has been slipped into the stack.

The pre-title sequence does nothing to change your mind. Throbbing synths, a heist, a chase. A nameless driver, expressionless, almost wordless, dressed in a retro silver jacket with a scorpion on the back. Even the titles are done in hot pink Brush Script. You’re guided towards Risky Business, After Hours. It’s 80s kitsch done with flair and style. Nothing more.

And then, just when you think you’ve got a handle on it, the damn thing keeps changing gears on you, accelerating away, upping the game. The film wrongfoots you at every turn. Moments of heart-glow tenderness are matched with scenes of shocking violence. The bad guys are worse than you think. But the plan they concoct, the engine of the film, has a fatal flaw. No-one really knows the driver. Which means that no-one really knows what he’s capable of. And that scorpion on his jacket isn’t an affectation. It’s a plain-as-sunrise warning.

You won’t see a better slice of LA noir this year. Newton Thomas Sigel’s cinematography is dripping with hot gold and sky blue. NOT teal and orange, let me stress that – this is one good looking film. Ryan Gosling has the driver nailed. He wears a mask, and when it slips, when the cracks start to show, that’s when the fireworks start. Albert Brooks has finally figured out rule number one: comedians make the best villains. The real star of this film? Los Angeles herself, dolled up in cheap diamonds and lurid stripper-chic. The driver knows every inch of her, and doesn’t understand how cruel she can be at all.

Drive takes all the assumptions you have about driver films and flips them over. This one really is about the journey as much as the destination, and believe me, it’s one hell of a ride.

You think you know this film. Trust me. You don’t.

Two Mornings

In the South of France, docoDomsy sets up a time-lapse shot before a day on his promo project for Mas De Calage, a local winery.

Meanwhile, I take my place amongst the flood of people pouring through London Paddington, facing another day at work.

Torch Song: The high camp of Torchwood: Miracle Day

NewImage — Why act when you can overact?

Caught the last episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day last night. It’s a series that, while riddled with flaws the way Swiss cheese has holes, I found myself enjoying. Once you stop trying to take it seriously as a genuine exploration of a Big Idea and buy into the high-camp, wildly gesticulating opera of the thing, then it becomes a far more palatable option. Let’s face it, if the show really wanted to show us the effects of a world without death, you’d be in for a much grimmer prospect.

I loved the way Lauren Ambrose and Bill Pullman both got the tone. Ambrose in particular, who I adored as Claire in Six Feet Under, really went for it, all hair and bug eyes and shrieking. The script even got a joke out of it, as she was smacked around by Gwen while the show built up to it’s Really Big Explosion. “How much lipstick can someone wear?” Well, in this show, there’s no such thing as too much.

The fanboi rollcall of ex-Trekkies and genre stalwarts simply added to the hilarity. Look, it’s Q! With a beard! Nana Visitor still looks like an alien even without the nose-thingy!

Look, come on. You couldn’t take it seriously. It was clever of Russel T and his co-conspirator Jane Espenson to move on from the bleakly adult themes that Children Of Earth had explored so effectively, and try something more over-the-top. And dear gods, they did it. Immortality, brought about through a magic tunnel through the earth that was somehow the physical manifestation of the soul of the planet. You couldn’t do that on Hollyoaks. The show became a manic, globe-trotting whirlwind of crazy ideas, big ‘splosions, gore, sex and tantrums.

Gwen Cooper has changed too. No longer the audience’s eyes, ears and questions, she’s a superspy now, a stone killer whose secret base just happens to be a terraced house in Cardiff. A woman whose mothering instincts include shoving a Glock into the face of any threat to her daughter. To be frank, she’s the reason I kept watching. She took the hysteria and bombast around her and made it, if not believable, then somehow bearable.

Everything’s geared up for another season, with a Buffy-style Big Bad in the shape of the Three Families and another immortal on the planet. Will we get one? Well, viewing figures in the UK have tanked. But Starz, who backed the show in the States, have form when it comes to pushing out high-concept, high-camp genre shows. This could be the start of something faaaabulous.