A fascinating look at the work and works of Andy Goldsworthy, a British sculptor who is often described as a “collaborator with nature”. His uncanny ability to improve upon an already beautiful natural setting with sculpture that is both organic and elegant is captured even more dramatically in motion picture than in Goldsworthy’s own photography. Because his work is so ephemeral — delicate sculptures of ice melting as the sun rises over a hill, intricate patchworks of reeds balanced tenuously between branches of a tree — seeing a piece come to life and then rapidly deteriorate conveys a much more profound sense of the fleeting cycles of life which Goldsworthy often tries to capture in his work.
Classic sci-fi, if a bit dated by the reverence for the “power of the human mind.” The characters were colorful indeed and even if I didn’t exactly identify with the protagonist, Gully Foyle, I found myself rooting for him and appreciating his cleverness and blossoming understanding.
I’m a fan of Dick’s dystopian visions of the future and Spielberg and company did an excellent job of bringing this particular vision to life. We’re living in the twenty first century now and I see films like Minority Report as an inevitable step toward our transition from memes that have their roots in the twentieth century — space travel, time travel, robots taking over the world — to more modern memes like augmented reality, nanotech and information crime. I didn’t appreciate that, once again, Hollywood has deigned to tack a happy ending onto one of Dick’s stories, but such an annoyance is easy enough to ignore in an otherwise fine film.
Shakespearean drama and Japanese samurai culture go together much more nicely than I could have imagined. Something about the way the Japanese can forcefully shout an entire conversation really emphasizes the sort of high intensity drama that one tends to find in the Bard’s tragedies. Kurosawa really outdid himself with the production of this film; the rugged mountains and wind swept plains provide the perfect backdrop and the colorful costumes lend an almost theatric feel. It’s grand cinema.
Delicious again Peter. Nanotech fairy tales for young ladies, a brilliant combination; eloquently written and full of peculiar ideas. Having now consumed everything in Stephenson’s canon I am left eagerly awaiting his next juicy volume.
Dick had an amazing imagination and no qualms about using it. Though he didn’t devote much effort to creating consistent alternate universes, unlike some of my other favorite sci-fi authors, his stories always use the liberties taken with reality to excellent effect. The Game Players of Titan touches on many of Dick’s favorite subjects: telepathy, drugs, California, and wild, deluded paranoia. Like a piece of improvisational jazz, it toys with its themes, at times harmonizing, other times punctuatingly dissonant. Unfortunately, it also bears another common feature of his books, rather than ending with a bang, it just sort of fades away.
A fine film providing a speculative recreation of a weekend excursion on a yacht owned by Mr. W. R. Hearst. The cast was excellent and I liked the 1920s Hollywood feel. Not exactly a whodunit, not entirely comic, nor overly dramatic, simply well balanced, well executed and well enough described by this point, I hope.
Though a bit too warm and fuzzy at times, 13 Conversations catered to my general affinity for remixed plots and airy musings on the fickle and wonderful world in which we live. Plus, I get an extra kick out of seeing Matthew McConaughey on the big screen ever since I met Paul.
