Giddup-a! Geddondown-a!
Swedish only, sorry!
Jag var på ett AddSkills-seminarium om Microsoft Office 2010 idag, och bestämde mig för att anteckna litet om det som skiljer Office 2007 från Office 2010. Read it and weep learn!
Quite entertaining, unapologetic and 1970s-wafting film about a few persons who join a band and fight chauvinism and non-rocking music. Good soundtrack, a few nice effects yet a simple little affair. The manager’s lines are funny, but shows the flaws in the rest of the script. And it is nice to see Dakota Fanning getting out from her little-Hollywood-kid trench.
0.3
A really interesting film with an acutely bizarre soundtrack, about a man, Holly Martins, who arrives in Vienna to find his friend Harry Lime, and instead finds that he has just died. Things don't add up for Holly, who take turns around Vienna to find out the truth: did Harry die by accident or...murder? Twists and turns and overall a very entertaining film.
0.3
Story of a 17-year-old roller derby girl who lives with her parents in a small Texan town; by accident she comes across a flyer for a roller derby in Austin where she goes. She meets an aggressive team of players, falls in love and goes through something akin to what Tina Fey did in "Mean Girls", although this film lacks the oomph that film had. All in all, nice scenery whilst in Austin (despite mostly being shot in Detroit) and some laughs, but not a lot more. Quite entertaining.
0.3
I think this film must have rated as cool when it emerged, in 1965. Mind you, I was born 12 years after that year, so what do I know of swinging London? Caine plays Harry Palmer, an "insubordinate" person who tries to find out the whereabouts of a man, and who's killing people, while cooking and playing Mozart. While Caine's performance is cool, the direction and cinematography is what makes this film; and possibly the fact that Portishead has snatched John Barry's leitmotif for their third album... The contrasts in film, the lighting and the camera-angles are quite Hitchcock-esque. The views from London, the outdoor-shots are definitely worth it all, along with the Received Pronunciation of The Queen's English. In contrast with this, Caine's English comes along as bratty in the extreme. All in all, the story and plot are simple in the extreme. Very spy vs spy. The feel of the film is the good bit, and it's only worth watching to see the form; as for the story, it's quite stiff.
0.3
This film was impressive, but I felt it lacked some beneath the veneer. Unlike directors like Terrence Malick, who presents a simple story and then lets it explode through the viewer's imagination, Christopher Nolan presents the entire spectre and lets it implode. As is, some parts of this thriller are good, and some are commercial and quite see-through.
0.3
Culled from pages 114-115 in “The Paris Review Interviews: vol. 2“, I love the following snippet that tells of how Isaac Bashevis Singer thinks future technology will enable rather than disable the writer.
INTERVIEWER
Some commentators on the current scene, notably Marshall McLuhan, feel that literature as we have known it for hundreds of years is an anachronism, that it’s on the way out. The reading of stories and novels, they feel, is soon to be a thing of the past, because of electronic entertainments, radio, television, film, stereophonic records, magnetic tapes, and other mechanical means of communication yet to be invented. Do you believe this to be true?
It will be true if our writers will not be good writers. But if we have people with the power to tell a story, there will always be readers. I don’t think that human nature is going to change to such a degree that people will stop being interested in a work of imagination. Certainly, the true facts, the real facts, are always interesting. Today nonfiction plays a very big part—to hear stories about what happened. If people jet to the moon, journalists will tell us, or films will tell us, what happened there, and these will be more interesting stories than anything a fiction writer can produce. But still there will be a place for the good fiction writer. There is no machine and no kind of reporting and no kind of film that can do what a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky or Gogol did. It is true that poetry has suffered a great blow in our times. But not because of television or because of other things, but because poetry itself became bad. If we are going to have numbers of bad novels, and bad novelists imitate each other, what they write will be neither interesting nor understood. Naturally, this may kill the novel, at least for a time. But I don’t think that literature, good literature, has anything to fear from technology. The very opposite. The more technology the more people will be interested in what the human mind can produce without the help of electronics.
Crazy farking mormons in Liljeholmen. They used some dandy colours though; maybe I’ll join so I can get them funky crayons.
YouTube have just launched fully-fledged movies. There aren’t many of them, but those that exist, are quite tacky, including a lot of Bollywood films. Here are some of my faves from the entire collection, with IMDb grades:
“Fantasy Mission Force” [Jackie Chan], 4,6/10
“Wheels On Meals” [Jackie Chan], 6,9/10
From the non-embeddable films we have “The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes“, where Christopher Lee hosts an overview of Sherlock Holmes as Arthur Conan Doyle wrote of him, as portrayed on the stage, on radio, television, and in the motion pictures by dozens of actors from 1900 to 1985. So sticky! Lee is – as always – great fun without meaning to be.
Also, you have “Raw Spice: The Unofficial Story Of The Making Of The Spice Girls“! Get back to the 90s…
“Fist of Fury” [Bruce Lee], 7.0/10
Bruce Lee! Wooo!
Not the crack that you put in a pipe
From “The Paris Review Interviews, vol. 2“, page 53:
INTERVIEWER
What is the function of the critic?
FAULKNER
The artist doesn’t have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don’t have the time to read reviews. The critic too is trying to say, “Kilroy was here.” His function is not directed toward the artist himself. The artist is a cut above the critic, for the artist is writing something that will move the critic. The critic is writing something that will move everybody but the artist.
INTERVIEWER
So you never feel the need to discuss your work with anyone?
FAULKNER
No, I am too busy writing it. It has got to please me and if it does I don’t need to talk about it. If it doesn’t please me, talking about it won’t improve it, since the only thing to improve it is to work on it some more. I am not a literary man but only a writer, I don’t get any pleasure from talking shop.
Apparently, Faulkner appeared to have a rather big stick up his behind and saw himself as better than others…
INTERVIEWER
Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after they have read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest for them?
FAULKNER
Read it four times.
…but apart from that, I think he’s right in the sense that you have to find your own way and try not to care too much what others think of your writing. And to end it all:
INTERVIEWER
How does a writer become a serious novelist?
FAULKNER
Ninety-nine percent talent…ninety-nine percent discipline…ninety-nine percent work. He must never be satisfied with what he does. It never is as good as it can be done. Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. Don’t bother just to be better than your contemporaries or predecessors. Try to be better than yourself. An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why. He is completely amoral in that he will rob, borrow, beg, or steal from anybody and everybody to get the work done.
I’m not totally sure I agree, but “try to be better than yourself” seems like a good point.
