Lotusblog

I saw a great movie last night thanks to Simon’s recommendation. It was Gattaca. Over at the IMDB website , I found this very interesting trivia:

Trivia for Gattaca
• The name “Gattaca” is composed entirely of the letters used to label the nucleotide bases of DNA. The four nucleotode bases of DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) are adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine.
• Public address announcements in the Gattaca Corporation headquarters building are in Esperanto, an artifical language invented in the 19th century.
• The winding stairs in Jerome’s apartment have a helical structure, like DNA.
• Uma Thurman’s character is named Irene Cassini. Cassini is the surname of the 17th century French-Italian astronomer, Jean Dominique Cassini, who discovered the prominent gap in Saturn’s main rings, as well as the icy moons, Iapetus, Dione, Rhea, and Tethys. The space mission in Gattaca is destined for Saturn.
• Jude Law’s character asks to be called by his middle name, Eugene. “Eugene” comes from the Greek for “well born,” which Jerome is. “Eugenics” (the science of improving the hereditary qualities of a race or breed) is the central theme of the film.
• The Gattaca building (interiors and exteriors) is, in reality, the Marin County Civic Center in San Rafael, CA. It was designed by American star architect Frank Lloyd Wright in 1957. The largest Wright design ever constructed, it was largely built after his death in 1959. The central dome (prominent in the roof-cleaning scene) contains the county library.
• The Marin County Civic Center, filming location of the Gattaca Corporation, was also used in George Lucas’s THX 1138 (1971).
• The FBI agents are called “Hoovers,” a reference to legendary top-G-man J. Edgar Hoover, but also a clever reference to a vacuum cleaner brand. There are numerous shots of vacuums being used to gather DNA evidence.
• When Gattaca was first released, as part of a marketing campaign there were adverts for people to call up and have their children genetically engineered. Thousands of people called, wanting to have their offspring genetically engineered
• The film’s working title was “The Eighth Day”, a reference to the Biblical creation story, which states that the earth was created in six days and on the seventh day, God rested. The original title implies the tampering of man with what God has already made, and “The Eighth Day” is still the name of the center in the movie where the children are engineered, as noted on the DVD deleted scenes.
• The piece played by the six-fingered pianist is based on Impromptu in G Flat Major, Op. 90, No. 3. by Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828). However, the creators did a beautiful job embellishing the piece with additional notes/harmonies so that it “can only be played with twelve[fingers],” as the Uma Thurman character notes.
• Vincent’s car is a 1963 Studebaker Avanti.
• The exterior shots of Ethan Hawke and Jude Law’s apartment is actually the CLA (Classrooms, Laboratories, and Administration) Building of Cal Poly Pomona by architect Antoine Predock.
• The cars driven by the “Hoovers” are Rover P6’s (sometimes called the Rover 2000) built in Britain from 1963 until 1976. They were extremely popular with the police force in Britain where the 3.5 litre V8 engined model was used as a high speed interceptor.

The decade of the nineteen-eighties was responsible for so much of what is good in the world, but similarly, for so much of what is bad. Maybe in twenty years’ time we’ll say that about this decade, too.

But it’s hard to reconcile the fact that Max Headroom, one of the most profound, dark and disturbing TV series ever made was running back-to-back with Webster, Family Ties and The Greatest American Hero. In fact, 20 years on, it’s amazing to see just how much of an influence Max Headroom has had not only on entertainment, but also network broadcasting. Maybe it didn’t actually influence TV network broadcasting in a direct way, but it certainly made predictions and hinted at a future that actually has very much come true. “Embedded journalism”, such as the type we saw throughout Gulf War 2.0, is probably the best example, but as you watch the series, time and time again you see in the fantastic-20-minutes-in-the-future-world things that don’t seem quite so amazing now that we deal with them every day.
In entertainment, you realise the huge debts that SF movies such as the Matrix trilogy and Minority Report owe to our favourite eighties show.

Now that twenty years or so has passed, maybe we are due for a revival. If the movie companies are happy to spend tens of millions making movie versions of TV shows like Starsky and Hutch and Charlie’s Angels, then surely they could do us all a favour and make a Max Headroom movie. The only thorny bit of this plan, is that we all know how much the movie would suck.

I just watched Fahrenheit 9/11. It was classic Michael Moore, but on steroids. The first half of the movie (I was going to call it a film, but let’s face it, we all know it’s really a movie) was so well crafted and assembled I was completely held captive. I couldn’t do anything.
The second half seemed to have a bit too much combat-in-Iraq/grieving-US-and-Iraqi-families but by the end it was all back on track and very tightly wrapped up as a very powerful propaganda package. Talk about precision guided weapons!

Initially, I feared it was going to be a “Republicans are bad, Democrats are good” type of message that was to be incessantly drilled home, but it was not. Republicans are bad, Bush is bad, war is bad and ignorance is bad were the main points (and make no doubt that they certainly were hammered home)- but given that this movie is going to be seen by your average Joe Walmart-shopper, I am not so sure that that they will be able to draw any conclusions and figure out what they should do. Maybe that’s what I like about this movie- it doesn’t condescend to tell you what to do, or what to think. It makes you sick, it makes you sad, it makes you really angry and then just fades away leaving you and your conscience to work out what to do.

Everyone should see it. At the very least, every US citizen should see it.

OK OK. I know how terrible Brown Bunny is. I just read this review (in addition to the others I have read since it was first screened at Cannes).
My favourite line in the review mentioned above is the line that “…the 5 day road trip (seems to be) happening in real time…”.

But, I still really want to see it. The trailer which you can find somewhere online, is actually pretty darn good, I thought. If that is the style of the film, then I reckon it’s gonna be pretty darn good.

Anyway, it can’t be any worse than a lot of the films I saw during my university days. Having said that, I can’t think of one film that was stand-out bad. Scott, Tim, Claire? Fancy reminding me? I know there were some. I remember leaving the cinema fuming. I even remember leaving a cinema during a film. Just can’t for the life of me remember what film it was.

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Several days after this post, I received the following message from Tim:

…..Pedro Almodovar’s High Heels. We got the hell out of the cinema after
10 minutes. Otherwise all of the bad films have left my memory. There were heaps
though.

He’s right. I remember leaving the cinema feeling as though we had been personally cheated and crossed. I can’t remember what I hated about it, but the bitter taste stayed for some time. I just read about High Heels and now I kind of want to give it a second chance.

Should I? Shouldn’t I?

I’m on a train, heading back to Osaka from Kyoto. Just finished watching the movie “Minority Report”, and I have to say, I was pretty impressed.

I seem to remember it getting a pretty bad rap when it was released and a lot of my friends gave it a pretty lukewarm reception, but I really liked it considering it was a huge spectacle with lots of famous people in it. The future aspect of it (of course, with it being set in the year 2054, there was a heavy future aspect) was what most excited me. Silent highways, personal propulsion devices, retina scanners all over town, targeted advertising, talking holograms in shops like the Gap welcoming you back and trying to get you buy more tanktops (or whatever it was you bought the last time you were there). That sort of stuff can *only* come true, surely.

Anyway, I am in a bit of a panic. I have to make pizza dough when I get home, prepare a lasagne, clean my apartment (this is a major job… Take a look at the first post of this blog to get an idea of the state it is in now) and do some work-related stuff before 20:00. I also need to go to the supermarket to buy more ingredients too.

I am listening to the latest Strokes album at the moment- and for a first time listen it is pretty good. I guess this also means that something so familiar the first time you hear it becomes tired pretty quickly. I hope not. It would be nice to have this kicking around the heavy rotation playlist for a few months.

I ate pasta with a salmon cream, but I had forgotten just how sick I feel after eating cream.
I feel kind of sick. I ate pasta with a salmon cream, but I had forgotten just how sick I feel after eating cream. Anyway, as I contemplate whether to throw up or not, some other things that crossed my mind were as follows:
1. Youth is everything
2. Donnie Darko is amazing
3. Blogs are great- but only if practiced daily.