Twilight Zone Episodes
I am currently enjoying old, sixties Twilight Zone episodes that litter online video sites. These are my top three so far.
A Nice place to Visit (veoh link) is a story about gambler and crook Henry "Rocky" Valentine. Rocky finds himself in a world where he seemingly can have anything he wants.
Right now I want a million bucks in 5 g notes and a chick that won't quit.. I mean, like, stacked, like, like, like beautiful!
Nightmare at 20,000 feet (YT link 1 of 3) stars a pre-Star Trek William Shatner . This episode, trivia fans, was written by Richard Matheson who wrote I am legend and directed by Richard Donner of Superman, The Omen, The Goonies and others.
To Serve Man (YT link 1 of 3) is another classic (and much parodied / referenced by recent cult shows) where large headed aliens, the Kanamites, arrive on Earth on a mission to assist humanity.
I'd still like to rewatch late 60's, paranoid, alien invasion series The Invaders. Hero (and architect!) David Vincent played by Roy Thinnes had a Steve Mcqueen like intensity.
As a child I had nightmares about spotting someone with the 'mutated forth finger', that indicated they were an alien in disguise.
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Great e-cards, and other (zombie?) recommendations
Web
Does anyone send e-cards anymore? Even typing "e-cards" feels slightly shameful, out of date, is it the "e" hyphen....? Anyway, although this takes any pleasant surprise out of any future "digital salutations" I'll send to you, I enjoy someecards so much I thought I'd share it.
Books
Just finished Brave New World (read BNW online if you're that way inclined) by Aldous Huxley. This is an awesome book, which I would shout about more but for the disgusted cries of "What? You've only just read it..!?" that are hailing down on me.
Next.
Film
Revisited Cronenberg's Scanners (was gifted the trilogy and more cult DVD goodness by the lovely people at Sci-Fi London, they keep on giving!) which I had forgotten about bar the exploding head scene which, nerdy child that I was, I freeze framed on my VHS to find the spot where the real guy is switched for the pumpkin head of gore.
Needless to say, there are plenty more goodies in this movie, the freaky, 80's synth sound design, grimacingly tense telepath mind battles, some great stunts (when the school bus busts slo-mo into the record store!) and the ever eerie Michael Ironside playing the Bad Scanner Darryl Revok. Gripping!
For more gore check out an ace short Zombie film, made by our beer crazed Dutch neighbours, Zombeer! It was produced by a very cool friend of mine, and the film was one of six official nominations for the Shocking Shorts Awards, organised by Sci-Fi Channel and NBC/Universal.
Zombeer on Vimeo
Zombeer at Myspace
Dead Set the E4, Halloween Zombie 5 parter. I am just getting to watch on download (no TV and Channel 4 On Demand does not respect the Mac. Arse). Episode One was great. There is a little aside by a housemate in the fictional Big Brother house,"That's the public for you, they're animals" as outside, the eager BB fans are ripping each other apart in zombie fervour. Dead Set at PirateBay
Music
Something sweetly 90's about 4AD's release from Deerhunter "Microcastle". Swirly guitars, echoey fx'd vocals. Pleasing.
Fleet Foxes sound like a sentimental, harmonious, sixties memory that none of us are old enough to remember, but by God, weren't we having a good time?
Johnny Flynn is barely 25, and strangely is related to one of Robson and Jerome.. but he makes nice jangly folk pop. A bit like a boy Laura Marling. Cardigan Kids.
WIRESPOTTING - LATE UPDATE!!
I am about 2 weeks late on this nugget but it's Bubbles! Everyones favourite, lovable junkie becomes someone (er, not watched them yet) in Heroes!!
Labels: films, Heroes, links, music, tv
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TV roundup and WIRESPOTTING special
It's the new "Fall" season and I've been sampling some of the new shows and the new seasons of old favourites. I really do value tips regarding what's out there, so if you're onto something you think I might enjoy, please do drop me note!
Also included in this blog is WIRESPOTTING in celebration of a large number of ex-The Wire actors getting work.
Season 4: It's always sunny in Philadelphia
More madness from the four friends (and Danny Devito) who run a failing Irish bar. Looks to continue in the same rapid fire, absurd and occasionally offensive fashion. If in doubt, grab these episode to check it out, but have patience as it is a grower: 3.1 The Gang Finds a Dumpster Baby or 2.3 Dennis and Dee Go On Welfare.
Season 1: True Blood
Steamy!! It's all about sex this one, but what fun. Our heroine, post Buffy telepath, Sookie is romancing with sullen Bill the "Only Vampire in the Village". Deaths and murders in the small Southern town continue to test Sookie's faith in Bill, whilst (bizarrely, Aussie ex-Home and Away star) Jason, Sookie's brother keeps having BDSM-style sex with women who end up dead. It's picking up a little speed now after an underwhelming pilot. Love the True Blood titles, by the excellent Digital Kitchen who also created the classic Six Feet Under titles.
WIRESPOTTING: Weary union man Frank Sobotka reappears as weary cop Andy Bellefleur!
Season 1: Fringe
This show looks promising, and JJ Abrahms has stated that it shouldn't be quite as frustrating and fickle as Lost or Alias. Cute, crap actor Joshua Jackson (Pacey from Dawson's Creek) is the genius playboy son of a mad scientist. He and his father (actor John Noble who adds refreshing comedy senility) are recruited to aid a (rather serious) female FBI agent to solve cases on the "Fringe" of science. It's very X Files, and I mean, very X Files but this isn't a bad thing. Does anyone remember 2005's speedily cancelled Threshold, same pretext although less about aliens being the baddies and more likely some sinister company. It is however rather good. They don't spare the blood and guts and seem to knowingly bandy around the silliest pseudoscience which is a good laugh. Lets hope that they don't go too far seeking The Truth as the X Files did. Monster of the week is good enough!
WIRESPOTTING: "Black Skeletor" - Lt Cedric Daniels reprises the suited boss role as Agent Phillip Broyles! Same Same!
Season 4: Prison Break
That wikipedia link kindly explainsThis article is about a television series. For the act of escaping prison, see prison escape.
Back in the USA, our survivors are now a sort of super investigative group seeking some more bogus technology belonging to The Company called Scylla. Mildly more engaging than Season 3 (which, WIRESPOTTING! contained "Bunny" Colvin as top-con Lechero!) . Ex-FBI agent Alexander Mahone (actor William Fitchner) has become my favourite. Nice to see him brefly in The Dark Knight as "Bank Manager", Oh come on, he's great, someone give that man some more roles!
Season 4: Entourage
More throwaway silliness from Vincent Chase, his friends, and the inimitable Ari Gold. Vince is reduced to Sweet Sixteen party appearances whilst E is finding his Indie script may just be the next blockbuster, but without Vince.
Season 3: Heroes
Anyone who hasn't moved on from the dogs dinner of Season 2 will be following the new season wondering if they can put things right in season 3. I'm not convinced that it will happen that easily. Angry-future-Peter keeps skulking around (he needs to die, him and that rubbish scar included as a device so we don't get confused which Peter he is), Mohinder Suresh has become Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, and the most unlikely, Sylar apparently reinvented as a good guy overnight. Nikki/Jessica's actress has been written back in after her character's death last season as a clone. What? A clone? Is this the best you could come up with? It seems Heroes can do whatever it likes (like Lost) and no-one questions it, or expects it to make any sense. Ah well, Clare is still cool, and we saw a glimpse of her in the future looking all cat suity and bad ass. This season is airing both in the US and on BBC iPlayer.
WIRESPOTTING Hardened criminal Marlo Stanfield reappears as hardened criminal with added super powers, Benjamin 'Knox' Washington!
Labels: tv
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This one minute film is almost a time-lapse, lets call it a time-lurch. The Bench in question is in a small park that my flat looks out on.
I filmed the bench on a Saturday at midday for about four hours. It's a fun snapshot of some of the personalities who stopped by in the park.
I like the larger man in the blue shirt who can't quite find a comfy spot and seems to get pestered repeatedly by insects.
The music is a traditional fiddle tune Sally Ann, as played by Dirk Powell.
Video fans may note this stream is hosted by blip.tv a small New York start-up offering a service specialising in episodic video hosting. The layout and organisation of the site will mostly suit podcasts and serials, which may deter the more casual publisher that would currently use youtube.
I acidentally found some photos of their office from 2007 showing the scale of the operation.
Their site is simple and uncluttered, and has optional opt-in advertising revenue. Most importantly - you can upload, and download a variety of different file formats. That means I can offer you a link to my original hi res file and additionally any other ipod / iphone / alternative device versions that I see fit.
DOWNLOAD (640x360: The Bench [Format: h264 mov - Size: 89 MB - Running Time: 1 min.]
Blip are also hosting Michael Moore's new feature length documentary, Slacker Uprising which is being released online instead of in theaters. The movie, which debuts Tuesday, is also going to be available for download on iTunes and on Amazon.
Labels: brighton, links, tv, video
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Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery
Not for the fainthearted, but very interesting. Each programme in the five-part series covers a different branch of surgery. Part one is about neurosurgery "Into the Brain" and shows live brain surgery on a conscious woman.
Not terribly keen on the goofy, posh feller hosting the programme (pictured right), but he's harmless enough.
Into the Brain is now available for four days on iPlayer, or failing that a torrent is also available. Old timers can also buy the DVD.
Labels: tv
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Vampire + HBO!
Could be good! From Alan Ball of Six Feet Under..accompanied by Viral posters in New York
http://www.hbo.com/events/trueblood/ Out next month in the US.
Labels: tv
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How to download DRM-free video from BBC iPlayer
Updated 15th March: Below will no longer work for iPlayer downloads. :( With scripting - iPlayer behaviour can still be mimicked to get the goodies. Read the bottom of the comments for links to alternative methods.
Updated 9th March: Have corrected the bookmarklet which seemed to be getting cut short when you dragged it to your toolbar. Also tested with the Mac OS X and works for me using VLC as the player.
Yes it's true. The new version of iPlayer for the iPhone delivers mpeg4's without the "You have 4 more hours to watch this show", self-destructing DRM of the Windows Media version. They are 480x272 which is decent, and a 45 minute show comes in around 160MB.
You have to jump through a few hoops to download these, but once it's set up it's easy to download whenever you want, so bear with me.
- First you'll want to make your browser appear as if it's an iPhone. I'm working with Firefox, so sorry if this isn't your browser. Download one of the many handy Firefox plugins, The User Agent Switcher.
- After installation and browser restart, add a new User Agent and supply the following information (Tools > User Agent Switcher > Options > Options)
- Description: iPhone
- User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
- App Name: AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko)
- App Version: Version/3.0
- Platform: Mobile/1A542a Safari/419.3
- Now switch to having your browser masquerading as the iphone (Tools > User Agent Switcher -> iphone)
- Fire up an iPlayer page of choice.
- Find out the URL that links to the video by dragging this handy bookmarklet to your Bookmarks Toolbar Folder. iPlayerURL2
- Click the bookmarklet and the the URL you want should appear under the title of the video on the iPlayer page.
- Paste this into a new Firefox tab, the iPlayer site will respond and it will begin to download in your browser. This is a pain, so hit the stop button ("X" in a circle), and instead save the page (File > Save page as..)
- Bingo, your Downloads window should now pop open to show you the progress of the download, and the mpeg4 is yours forever to keep! You will want to download and play them in VLC which is by far the most accommodating of all the players, and is free.
Don't forget to reset your user agent back to default, otherwise you may find you're viewing iPhone mobile versions of web pages.
Also, not all the iPlayer content is yet available yet as the service was only launched Friday 7th March. I'm not sure if the BBC was meaning to release DRM free files, so this information may not be useful forever.
Thanks to PainInTheTech for the User Agent info, and Irregular Shed for his discovery of this iPlayer "feature".
Here's The Sky at Night playing in VLC on a Mac
Labels: Mac tips, tv, windows tips
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Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Ahhh, Harrison Ford looks good! What a relief. Here's a slide show from IMDB of production stills. His co-star Marion (Karen Allen), the hard drinking bar owner from Raiders of The Lost Ark looks almost unchanged. Raiders of the Lost Ark was released in 1981, making her 27 years older. I want her skincare regime/surgeon/diet of stemcells.
Remember handsome Jan-Michael Vincent from Airwolf? The same can't be said about him. At 64, 2 years younger than Harrison, he's not quite so fit and well. This youtube video from last year of JMV makes me not want to drink alcohol ever again. It's so sad I won't even embed it on this page.
Other links of mention are the new HBO show In Treatmeat with Gabriel Byrne as a psychotherapist, bound to be another storming success.
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Gone in 60 Seconds or I made a BAFTA one minute film
It's been raining for so long. However, it's sunny today and shortly I shall avail myself of this computer and take a stroll to the beach, kicking pebbles, perhaps sighing deeply, looking for all intents and purposes like a wistful dreamer, thinking big thoughts. Or that's the image I wouldn't mind projecting. So quickly on to an announcement. This New Year I made a one minute movie with a friend. It's nominally for a competition between Bafta and Orange (who love to promote themselves as film sponsors) and asked amateur film makers to submit a one minute piece on the theme "Unite". Yes, an unpleasant brief, but one we tackled with agnosticism. With about 2 weeks to write something, cast, shoot and edit it, especially over the Christmas and New Year period, we really surprised ourselves. A few story ideas came and went - mostly due to logistics and cost, and we fixed on a simple if slightly contrived story that we thought we could fit into a minute. Shot in a day, and captured and edited in a day, we managed to get it onto the website with mere hours to spare. A great learning experience, there are a few things I would have done differently - but all in all for getting a story across in a minute, I'm pleased. The film will be on the website until the end of January, please feel free to have a look and of course, give it 5 stars. No registration is necessary, and if you're reading this I'm hoping you are utterly biased and happy to cast aside your honest critical judgment to make me look good. It's called Simply Delicious, watch it here. The movies will be judged by the local film councils at the end of the month and a number of finalists (depending on quality and number of entrants) for each region will be put forward to a public vote. In the unlikely case our film survives the selection you can bet you'll hear from me again. (Note 28th of January is the day the public voting officially opens, votes before that are purely for show). Thanks to all the people we roped into helping us, "It was amazing to work with you guys. Such vision, dedication... " Apologies, we've slipped into my Bafta speech. Oh and very very quickly (the sun sets at about 4 o'clock) some TV/DVD tips. The Wire Season 1: Fantastic HBO series about Narcotics agents on a case in the Projects of Baltimore. I have been slow to chase this up, but it's got some brilliant writing and characterisation and also great insights into drug culture, and police procedure in the US. More on this when I have finished the series. Pushing Daisies Season 1: By Bryan Fuller of "Dead like me" a light comedy, drama about a man who can bring things back to life. Pure eye candy if you like the kitsch, re-invented 50's styling, however not terribly funny or deep. Think Tim Burton (mostly Chocolate Factory/Edward Scissor Hands) in a Desperate Housewives, voiced over style. Doesn't work quite, but a good effort. 5 Easy Pieces Loving my 70's movies at the moment. Awesome performance by Jack Nicholson, and although it's a long (2 hour) film, some scenes make it worth the effort. The angry woman who hitches a ride in particular, bedraggled dark hair, on her way to Alaska because it "looks so clean". She complains incessantly of how "filthy" man is, followed repeatedly by "It makes me so angry, I just don't want to talk about it". Great stuff. Also Jack Nicholson's character mocking the peculiar walk of his relative Carl (incidentally played by Ralph Waite who will forever be John Walton Sr of The Waltons) during a game of table tennis. It rings so true I wouldn't be surprised if it was improvised. A word of advice, I enjoyed this as I hadn't read a synopsis of any sort, and the film is one I believe is best enjoyed in ignorance. 0 comments
Bionic Woman trailer!
It's cool! And Katee "Starbuck" Sackhoff is a baddie! Go NBC, can't wait to see this one! Watch trailer
Labels: battlestar, tv
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Moving Pictures update and the Muppet Show curse
I really, really want to meet Simon Pegg. What he finds funny is what I find funny.. Spaced, Shaun of the Dead and now Hot Fuzz, we need more talent like this in the UK.
Although Hot Fuzz has the feeling of being "loads of the cool ideas that didn't fit in Shaun of the dead" it's still a cracking laugh, poking fun at the English in the way only an affectionate native could. It's a slow starter but picks up pace after the first half an hour. Perhaps it's 10 minutes overlong at just over 2 hours, but it doesn't necessarily drag. My favourite bits include the way in the small village of Sandford, they constantly mispronounce "London", the somerset PC whose mumblings have to be interpreted, and the mention of "brain freeze" over a Cornetto. Brilliant cast that we've seen in all the other Wright/Pegg outings, and it really looked like a load of fun to make. I was surprised at the inclusion of some hilarious death scenes too (now we know why villages always want to Save the Church roof). I also enjoyed the pacey editing style of Chris Dickens (same editor on SOTD and some Spaced) who IMDB tells me has just completed editing Ringam Ledwidge's first feature Gone. Ringan incidentally was a half decent commercials director so that film is on my to see list.
Manly
Also watched the first 3 episodes of The Dresden Files showing on the Sci-Fi channel, from the books by Jim Butcher. Took all my will power to stomach the cheesy lines and the too-handsome-to-be-straight stubbled features of Harry Dresden himself, Paul Blackthorn who apparently is both English and was the grim reaper in a Virgin commercial. Bizarre. However - this genre bender is standard fare at the moment. It's old fashioned Mike Hammer private investigations, including the required VO ("Sushi, that's what my ex-wife called me. Raw fish") mixed with the ever popular fantasy, magic, good versus evil world used in Buffy, Harry Potter or Charmed (lets hope less of the Charmed influence!). First couple of episodes were a bit awkward, but by the third you could see there would be some longer arcs that might get interesting, and Dresden had a heady encounter with an attractive lycanthrope, which managed to reel me in. It's not as smart as Buffy, or as prettily vacuous as Charmed, but somewhere inbetween. I'm holding out on a judgement untill I've seen more.
Before I forget, and it was some time ago, I made a special effort to catch Children of Men, the pet project of director Alfonso Cuaron. SFX / Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB like this movie. My friends like this movie. This according to all I have heard should have been my film of last year, but it really didn't work for me.. Clive Owen doesn't do that much really.. struggles a bit, apologises to some fighting rebels, delivers some flat lines in his mystery accent.. the supporting cast fail to do just that, and I found no-one in the whole film that I related to or cared about. So, the somewhat bleak end was actually a huge relief for me. Oh, some kudos is due for the excellent scene with almost no cuts where Owen in a small car in a wooded lane gets ambushed. That was cool, and exciting. But that was it.
Last words: Someone stop Michael Caine (born Maurice Micklewhite, trivia fans) from overacting, please. He's was bearable in The Prestige, and he always done a fine job of doing Michael Caine style characters, but in Children of Men, we are supposed to believe he's some kind of eccentric aging hippie. No he isn't - and he can't do accents other than his own. After people have guested on the Muppet show, it's hard to see them as anything other than caricatures of themselves. Mark Hamil, Dudley Moore, and Steve Martin are also victims of the Muppet Show curse.
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