Archive for the 'Films' Category

Busted and Patents

If, like me, you are sick of hanging with Big Willie, and long for something fresher than even the Fresh-Prince could offer, then look no further than my own selection from the brave new world of independant internet only films..

BUSTED: The Citizen’s Guide to Surviving Police Encounters. by Flex Your Rights

A confontation with a cop
“Now you can make this hard or easy on yourself..” - the film reveals a number of methods that police officers use to intimidate citizens into giving up their rights.

This film is utterly chilling in a cringe-making sort of way. Its a sort of “Sliding Doors” for kids growing up in a Patriot-Act inspired police state. The concept is that just because Americans may bend the law from time to time, does not mean they have to give up their constitutional rights.

In the first scene, a mean old highway cop pulls some kids over for speeding and then, we cringe with horror as the nosy cop proceeds to violate all of their 4th Ammendment rights, and in the end busts them for posession of canabis. In the second scene we see how different things might have worked out if the kids knew and stood up for their rights. In the alternate version of the story, they get away with little more than a speeding fine.

The moral of the story is that police officers may intimidate people into not asserting their rights, but a failure to do so is to invite false-arrest and injustice.

Download this film now and give copies to all your American friends!

How Software Patents Actually Work by Gavin Hill

RMS Talks about patents
RMS on the perils of Software Patents…

This is a light-hearted short animated film that asks what might happen if the law changes to allow Software Patents. This may sound like a rather unlikely subject matter for an animation, which is why Gavin’s animation is so brilliant; It communicates the essential issues in under 5 minutes, without getting boring.

Software patents pose a genuine threat to the Open-Source and Free software industries. Patents deprive us of the natural ability to build on the intellectual work of our predecessors. If most software inventions were patented, then act of writing a simple commercial program would be a one-way ticket to patent court. This is because few programmers know which seemingly obvious computing concepts are actually the patented inventions of companies like IBM or Microsoft.

Download a copy now and post it on a CD to your MEP.

A Shark Tale - Rubbish

My solution to the problem of rampant movie piracy is to make films so apalling, they are not worth the bother of downloading.

For example, the brilliance of Pixar’s “Finding Nemo” was in my opinion utterly self-defeating. That film has been at the top of the Bittorrent charts for the over a year. Being at the top of this chart is at best a Pyrrhic victory for Pixar.

If the film had not been so good then fewer people would be bothered to copy it. Surely Pixar realize that the CGI revolution is not intended to raise quality, but to make mediochre concepts (that would be too costly for traditional animation) into feature films.

Of course, it takes a company like Dreamworks SKG to show us how it should be done: The makers of the fairytale sit-com series ‘Shrek’ have come up with a cornucopia of averageness that makes 1970’s Hannah-Barbara cartoons seem like a smorgasbord of imagination. This is animation for tartrazine fueled five year olds. Films like this convince most adults that all animation is rubbish, and has the artistic merit of a discarded Happy-Meal box.

“Shark Tale”, aims for mediocrity and hits the spot again and again, with the precision of a samuri archer. This film was more perfectly bland than even Big Willie’s previous outing .

Will Smith Fish
I couldnt watch much further than this… what did I miss? Probably nothing.

If the MPAA hauled me into court for my many crimes, I will tell the judge that I felt the deepest regret almost as soon as the download was complete. I will tell the judge that my sadness was so utterly overwhelming, that I was forced to stop watching shortly after the bit with the “Will Smith Fish”. Lets hope that this display of remorse moves the judge to end my questioning and I get let off with only a mild prison-sentence or beating. This would indeed be mild compared to being made to watch the rest of the movie.

Should the questioning continue, he would learn that my sorrow was not for my own terrible crimes, but for humanity as a whole; I was crying for the crime of making this film in the first place. The shame of being on the same planet and sharing 99.999% of my DNA with the people who made this film. These for me are much greater causes for regret.

I cannot truthfuly say that the whole film was bad, because I was only able to manage the first five minutes. The moments I saw were a form of cinematic torture; I am sure they play this movie at the Guantanamo Odeon.

In the five minutes I saw, I was apalled by the hideous character design; fish and invertebrates with human faces. I imagine H. P. Lovecraft had nightmares about such things. Perhaps monsters like this do exist in the Sellafield out-flow; however the concept of these talking fish is more of an afront to the dignity of life than anything Lovecraft’s fever’d mind could have invented.

If the Great Old Ones were to return, from their (fictional) starry prison, they would have no need to torment or dement mankind because the animated talking fish will have allready made us into feebrile idiots.

Do children that watch “The Nightmare Before Xmas” grow up gothic?

Tim Burton’s “A Nightmare before Xmas”, is a 77 minute stop-motion, all singing all dancing extravaganza. It the story of Jack Skellington, “Pumpkin King” of Haloween Town, who has grown mealoncholy with his lot as chief scarer. All this changes when he accidentally wanders into nearby Xmas town, a baffling place where everybody is motivated by seasonal cheer rather than ghoulish fear.

Jack resolves to take over Xmas for himself; To him it seems far more fun than Haloween, however the rest of Haloween town do not share Jack’s new obsession.

Jack Skellington

The humor comes from the contrast between the efficient kitch of Christmastown (populated by grinning gnomes), and the misguided enthusiasm Haloween Town’s residents (Vampires, Zombies, Witches and a mad-scientist). Jack’s henchmen are instructed to re-create Christmas, but do so in their own morbid style. Despite this Jack Skellington truly believes that his Christmas will be the jolliest ever.

I intend to show this film to my neice and nephewes, to see if it turns them into goths. Obviously I do not expect this transformation to occur instantly; According to leading film review site Cap Alert, gothication is sure to occur if I expose these young minds to films of a non-Christian nature.

The path of the goth leads from innocent childhood, via social exclusion, past an infactuation with death and graveyards, terminating at black lipstick and spikey clothing is a difficult one to tread. Films that feature the singing undead are not nececarily the inspiration of this particular life-style, but it should at least deliver a more persuasive message than the Sunday School that the children are made to attend.

Will this lovely child grow up to be a goth?

This film is available in all good video shops, and most average quality bittorrent download sites.

Un Long Dimanche De Fiancailles

I took belinda to see the new Audtrey Tatou film ‘A Very Long Engagement‘, which is currently on Limited release in a selection of London’s more louche cinemas. It’s director also produced French quirk-fests; Amelie and City of Lost Children. He also produced the yawnsome, Alien Resurrection, perhaps the most dissapointing film about flesh-ripping xenomorphs. But what can you expect from the man who gave us

The Worst Film of 2004 - I Robot

Why do all stories based on Asimov stories suck so badly? Just in case you were tempted to see the latest hollywood blockbuster film based on an one of his stories, please be warned that “I Robot” is just as you would expect; the suckiest suckfest of 2004. I did not pay to watch it in a cinema, I downloaded it for free… but I still want my money back.

If I had actually paid to see this film I would have been profoundly upset; This film is every bit as unrewarding as Bicentennial man (with Robin Williams as the soppy robot who wants to be a man), however it trades Robin’s shcmaltsy emotion for Will Smith’s childish action oriented bravado.

According to IMDB, this script was in development for more than 5 years before it got optioned by a big studio and I suspect that this task was handed over to a team of teenagers who decided to develop it by striping out any hint of intelligence from the original story; adding a series of robot-themed yet James Bond style action sequences and then peppering it with stale-sounding sci-fi jargon and abundant product placement. In summary, if you want to see Will Smith fight robots, watch this film. If like me, you would much rather see Smith be brutally maimed by robots you will most likely be dissapointed.