This year everyone has been talking about the Senna documentary, including me. But while praise for Senna has come from F1 fans and non-fans alike, I have been more impressed by another sport documentary from this year — Bobby Fischer Against the World. Chess may seem like an unlikely game to take to the big […]
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Film
Dundee’s Cinematic Abundance
I recently learned about a Twitter account that campaigns against Dundee Contemporary Arts, Dundee’s excellent culture hub in the centre of the city. Typical tweets include: [blackbirdpie id=”124581248428548096″] [blackbirdpie id=”124933453421617152″] I went to see Friends with Benefits a few weeks ago, and it was pretty awful. The highlight is one funny joke about iPads in […]
The Senna film
If you follow Formula 1 online, it has been absolutely impossible to avoid the hype. Films about Formula 1 do not get made often. It is highly unusual for so much footage to have been prised out of Bernie Ecclestone. When you factor in that the film is about Ayrton Senna, a driver who has […]
The art of good guesswork
Over the past year or so, I have become a big participant in pub quizzes. Quite quickly, I gained a reputation among my friends for being reluctant to guess. This is an issue for our pub quiz team, because we have a few major weak areas. Part of this is down to our youth. All […]
The entertainment industry’s wrong turns
Record labels and video distributors had been ticked off by consumers for charging high prices for quite a while. At first the labels got away with it though. This was because they actually added value to the product. They were the only ones who were able to actually deliver the product to consumers efficiently. However, […]
Copyshite
There is a really interesting post about intellectual property and the woes facing the entertainment industry by James Graham. Given that I have been meaning to write about this issue for a long time, I may as well use this as the opportunity to finally get round to it. But first, a couple of notes […]
A surprisingly good Christmas
I hope you all managed to have a good Christmas. I have to say, I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed Christmas so much. In recent years I have enjoyed it just as a nice day off with a big meal. But beyond that I didn’t enjoy them much more than a normal day […]
A good start
In my previous post I wondered if Nick Clegg would do much to enthuse me. Well, in my view he’s got off to a good start. He revealed on the radio that he doesn’t believe in God. What’s more, he seems to have a thoroughly sensible, tolerant approach to the whole religion issue. What a […]
Sigur Rós — Hvarf, Heim, Heima
I was beginning to lose my faith in Sigur Rós a bit. Takk… was a pretty good album, but lacked the oceanic beauty of Ágætis Byrjun, the novelty of ( ) and the experimentation of Von and Ba Ba Ti Ki Di Do. The most recent EP, Sæglópur, contained the most boring output I have […]
Cold, hard facts show up entertainment industry’s scaremongering
Cinema has had a good year. The Scotsman reports: FUTURE-gazers claimed 20 years ago that it would be doomed by the arrival of the home video recorder. And more recently they’ve been claiming that the internet is killing the entertainment industry. So how do they explain the following two paragraphs? But figures released yesterday reveal […]