PhD

That was the year that was

With another year been and gone, now seems like a good time to sit back and reflect on the past 365 days. I've experienced some highs and lows, the lowest of which would undoubtedly be losing my last two surviving grandparents in the space of a few months. On the upside, I feel that I've begun to make real progress with my PhD, which is finally evolving into something tangible, the process of which will no doubt continue in 2009. Otherwise, I can't say that very much has changed for me. I continued to work part-time in my job at the library, with the various rounds of staff transfers mercifully passing me by and life continuing as before. Is it my dream job? No, I should say not, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't go through periods of finding it (and the Great British public) incredibly frustrating. However, all things considered, I can think of plenty other less desirable jobs I could be doing. At least this one is convenient and, all things considered, reasonably well-paid.

 
Zeros and Ones

In relation to the battle between rival high definition formats Blu-ray and HD DVD, last year's annual round-up included the statement "With no end to the format war in sight any time soon, 2008 looks set to be another interesting year." Well, it seemed that I'd barely finished writing those words when the HD DVD camp threw in the towel. To be honest, the writing had been on the wall for some time, but several people, myself included, still adopted an "It ain't over 'til it's over" mentality in the early days of 2008. With Warner's abandonment of the format only a few days later, however, the writing was well and truly on the wall. Within days, the game was up and the remaining HD DVD-supporting majors (Universal and Paramount) were pledging allegiance to the Blu flag. In any event, once the stragglers got up and running, it turned out to be a pretty damn good year for HD content, with some truly amazing transfers seeing the light of day, while the arrival of several high profile titles such as The Godfather trilogy and The Dark Knight, plus the certainty afforded by there now only being a single HD format, undoubtedly contributed to more people taking the plunge and lending their support to the platform.

I bought myself a new computer - a full tower system after my brief dalliance with the world of small form factors the previous year. After relying on my more technologically competent relatives in the past, I was quite pleased with myself for managing to build the whole thing from scratch myself - seriously, deciphering some of those poorly translated user manuals practically requires a diploma in itself. I also upgraded my PC's aged Creative audio system with some nice new Logitech speakers and a veritable beast of a subwoofer. I also ultimately succeeded in going region-free for Blu-ray playback, thanks to SlySoft's AnyDVD HD software, allowing me to use my system as a multi-region HD home theatre PC.

 
At the Pictures

This year, my brother put together a pretty impressive projection system, accompanied by a meaty sound setup, allowing us to enjoy a film-watching environment that more closely approximates the big screen experience. Despite this, however, my overall viewing figures were somewhat reduced in 2008 compared with 2007 (themselves a reduction from 2006). I maintain a log of all the films I watch, and the total tally for 2008 is 128, 67 of which were first time viewings. The increasingly wide array of available Blu-ray titles certainly led to me taking increased risks with titles I hadn't previously seen, but at the same time caused me to be far less likely to tune in to television broadcasts of films. (I watched 56 films on Blu-ray, 44 on DVD and 14 on HD DVD, versus 7 on TV.)

I got the opportunity to see several what might be termed "significant" films, among them the great - 28 Weeks Later, Across the Universe, Atonement, Bonnie and Clyde, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dark City, Eastern Promises, Enchanted, Fight Club, The Fly (the David Cronenberg version), Juno, The Life Before Her Eyes, The Maltese Falcon, A Matter of Loaf and Death, Mean Girls, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Orphanage, Persepolis, The Plague Dogs, Rabid Dogs, The Shining, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Volver, Wall-E - the good - The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Almost Famous, Blow, The Brave One, Chungking Express, La Femme Publique, Grindhouse, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Kiki's Delivery Service, Memento, My Blueberry Nights, Nikita, Resident Evil: Extinction, School of Rock, Shaun of the Dead, La Vie en Rose - the disappointing - 30 Days of Night, All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, The Dark Knight, Doomsday, Gone Baby Gone, Running Scared, Tekkonkinkreet - and the downright dreadful - Freddy Got Fingered, Omen IV: The Awakening and, last but not least, Seytan.

Best film I saw this year? Definitely Atonement. Worst? Oh, come on, do I even have to answer that? I saw Freddy Got Fingered, for god's sake.

 
Bibliothèque

Much to my chagrin, my reading this year was pretty limited. In addition to perusing a number of academic tomes as part of my PhD research, I sat down with The Field of Blood, The Last Breath, Garnethill, Exile and Resolution by Denise Mina, Day After Day by Carlo Lucarelli, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James, Demo by Alison Miller, The Deceiver and The Fourth Protocol by Frederick Forsythe, and Above Suspicion by Lynda La Plante. I also re-read Mercy Alexander by George Tiffin, and tucked into The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins - the latter serving as my sole piece of non-fiction reading that had no direct relation to my PhD. I also started Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John Le Carré, a celebrated classic that I must admit I'm making very slow progress with indeed.

 
Song and Dance

I picked up the following CDs: Atonement (Dario Marianelli), Echoes of War: The Music of Blizzard Entertainment (Eminence Symphony Orchestra), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Pink and the Lily (Sandi Thom) and Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez).

Happy New Year 2009!

Well, 2008 came and went a lot more quickly than I was expecting. I'll be doing one of my usual annual summaries later, but for now I thought I'd do something completely new and write down some New Year's resolutions. In the past, I've scoffed at such practices, believing that, if you want to change something, the best time to do it is now, not when you hang up the new calendar. However, I'm beginning to come round to the notion that, sometimes, we all need an extra little kick to do the things we know we should do but can't face up to, and the start of a new year seems like as good a time as any to make an actual commitment. So, without further ado, here are my goals for 2009, in no particular order:

Write more reviews. Once upon a time, I was quite prolific as a writer at DVD Times. In 2008, however, my output slowed to a trickle. Some of this can be blamed on my workload: I'm researching a PhD and also holding down a part-time job. That said, I could definitely stand to make better use of my free time, so my first resolution for 2009 is to attempt to write one review per week. These might not all be fully-fledged, in-depth pieces like my Wall-E Blu-ray review, which was a massive undertaking, but I could at least stand to write technical reviews of BDs whose DVD counterparts have already been covered either by myself or other DVD Times reviews.

Pay off my student loan. When I did my undergraduate degree between 2001 and 2005, I took out a student loan. Given that I lived at home and was within easy travelling distance of the university, I qualified for the smallest available loan, something which I am now exceedingly glad of, having heard the figures bandied about by some former students (particularly those in the US - yikes!). In comparison, £2,500 feels quite maneagable, and, in any event, payment will be facilitated somewhat by a generous donation I received from a dead relative on Christmas Day (thanks, Gran).

Lose weight. In Spring of 2005, I lost a considerable amount of weight in a short space of time. Unfortunately, some of that has subsequently piled back on, and while I'm far from as large as I once was, I could stand to be smaller. I can also see myself ending up on the slippery slope to becoming a fatty again, something I don't particularly want to happen. I don't subscribe to any particularly outlandish diets: my weight loss system is basically "Three square meals a day, five portions of fruit and nothing else in between." It worked in 2005, and it can work again in 2009. All it takes is a little willpower in the first couple of weeks, and then I don't even miss the crisps, sweets etc.

Watch more films. I saw a number of "significant" films in 2008, some of which I'll list in my review of 2008 post. In general, though, viewing figures were down: I saw a total of 67 films for the first time, a mere seven of which were released that year. I'm not much of a cinema-goer these days - I tend to think it's just not worth the hassle - but I could have done better. I still can't believe I didn't at least go to see Quantum of Solace. I know some people try to watch a film every single day, but that's just not possible from my point of view: as much as I'd like it to, my entire life doesn't revolve around watching movies. I'm not going to make a pledge to watch X number of movies this year, as I surely wouldn't be able to keep to it, so I'm simply going to say "I'll do better."

Post more. I definitely wrote considerably fewer posts for this site in 2008 than I did in 2007. While I wouldn't say I neglected the site as such, I do think I could have written more. While I'm not a believer in posting something every day simply for the sake of it, on far too many occasions I neglected to post a news item that either myself or others would have found interesting simply because I couldn't be bothered. I'm not sure what the solution to this is, but I know some people have a habit of setting aside a specific time of the day for blogging, so that's one possible answer. In any event, expect to see more activity at Land of Whimsy in 2009.

Christmas comes early (long post)

Apologies for the posting constipation recently. I'm currently in crunch mode on the latest submission for my PhD, which is due in early next week and will consist of an introduction to my thesis, covering its origins, key aims and my working definition of what exactly a giallo is. (One of the downsides to choosing such an obscure branch of the movie tree for your research is that, at the start of every article you write or presentation you give, you have to squander precious words or minutes explaining what the hell you're talking about.) Still, despite this being a pretty intensive period, I'm enjoying this phase a lot more than the last one (the literature review), which I felt dragged on for too long without me having a clear sense of direction.

Anyway, I just thought I'd check in to post that I decided to finally replace my PC's ageing Creative Inspire 5.1 Digital 5700 speakers with a spruce new Logitech Z-5500 Digital package as an early Christmas present. I did this for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I wanted better audio than I was currently getting, and, while I knew I could never compete with my brother's setup, at least not without having access to vastly more money and space than I currently have, I decided it wouldn't hurt to go for the best setup I could get my hands on within my current means. Various reviews swung me towards the Z-5500, which, unlike most of the current generation of PC speakers, has the added bonus of including its own internal Dolby Digital and DTS decoders, should I ever want to send it encoded signals in either of these two formats.

[Continue reading "Christmas comes early (long post)"...]

Well, slap my face! The Omen looks great!

So yeah, I ended up shelling out for the no-holds-barred 4-disc super-duper The Omen Collection, containing the original three films and the dreadful remake, instead of staying sensible and just picking up The Omen on its own. The original reason for this was that the 4-disc version was an announced with a release date of September 9th, while the single-disc version ended up being put back to October 7th. Being an impatient bugger, I decided to splash out on the earlier but more expensive release. Ultimately, of course, the 4-disc set ended up being delayed too. Still, for better or for worse, the package arrived today, and, once I'd finally finished the latest draft of my PhD's literature review, I wasted no time in cracking it open and investigating how the films looked.

"Very good indeed" is the answer. I guess the fact that my hopes for the image quality of this film on Blu-ray were not exactly high says a great deal about what a pessimist I've become. Now, before anyone asks, I'm not one of those people who believes that older films can't benefit from the HD treatment: nothing could be further from the truth. It's simply that, in my experience, older films are not always treated with the care and attention they deserve. Imagine my surprise, then, upon discovering that The Omen has been granted a rich, sumptuous, film-like transfer exhibiting few of the artefacts one tends to associate with catalogue titles that haven't been treated appropriately (and Fox, it has to be said, have been prime offenders in the past). It manages to stay crisp and detailed and with a pleasing amount of grain left intact - although it does have the "sharp but slightly diffuse" look of films from that period that were shot anamorphically and with the use of lens filters. Rest assured, though, that it's a pleasant kind of diffuseness rather than the ugly sort you get when the detail has been sucked out digitally. Essentially, it looks completely natural. No Patton, this!

To briefly sum up the other titles, Damien: Omen II looks noticeably softer than the first film, but I suspect it always looked this way. In any event, the original DVD release had the same issue in comparison with its two counterparts in SD. Detail does improve as the film goes on, but it never "pops" and almost looks unfocused at times. The Final Conflict, meanwhile, is a lot closer in terms of its overall look to the first film, although, in our brief run through it, Lyris was quick to draw my attention to some noise reduction artefacts in one of the darker scenes. More details on these titles once I've had a chance to watch them properly.

As for the remake, well, I don't plan on watching it any time soon, but from the brief glance I took at it, it looks to be a pretty good presentation of a recent film. It was one of Fox's first Blu-ray releases, and features an MPEG-2 encode on a BD-25, with the mild compression artefacts you'd expect. It also, surprisingly enough, exhibits less detail than the original Omen, but I suspect that this has more to do with the cinematographic choices than any tampering at the mastering end.

So, thank you, Fox, for transferring the original, a true classic, properly and not Pattonizing it. I never expected it to look this good and, as a result of my expectations being exceeded considerably, I now have a big smile on my face (although the fact that I've reached another milestone in my PhD work might also have something to do with that). And, as an added plus, the original mono tracks (and 2.0 surround for the third film) are present and correct in addition to lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 remixes.

The Omen
(20th Century Fox, USA, AVC, 22.5 GB)

DVDs I bought or received in the month of September

• Blow (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• La Femme Publique (R0 USA, DVD) [sample copy]
• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Kill Bill Volume 1 (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Kill Bill Volume 2 (R0 USA, Blu-ray)
• Mean Girls (R2 UK, DVD) [gift]
• Mother of Tears (RB France, Blu-ray)
• Tekkonkinkreet (R0 UK, Blu-ray)
• The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (RA USA, Blu-ray)

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last few days. I've been really busy with PhD work. Hopefully things will quieten down a bit by the middle of next week.

New layout launched!

OMGLOLWTF???!!!11~ No, you haven't come to the wrong place, and no, there is no need to adjust your television set. Just a week shy of two years ago, I launched the ninth design of my web site. It was a design that I was pretty pleased with at the time, and returning to the Movable Type content management system was certainly a relief after bashing my head against the brick wall that is Blogger for so long, but, as time wore on, I began to tire of its rather drag, charmless colour palette, among other things. However, despite a couple of aborted attempts, I never did manage to come up with anything suitable to replace it. Until now.

The other day, when I should have been reading about popular European cinema, inspiration suddenly struck me, and I came up with the design you now see. In addition to the name change - the site is now called Land of Whimsy rather than Whiggles.com, although the old Whiggles.com URL will remain active for the time being - I've made a number of aesthetic changes. First and foremost, the main text column and sidebar are now both somewhat wider than they used to be, which will hopefully make things feel a bit less cramped. There are a number of other tweaks and alterations that you'll no doubt discover for yourselves as time goes on. I should probably point out that this layout requires a minimum resolution of 1024x768, and a reasonably recent browser (you can get Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 here).

At the moment, only the main index page reflects the new design; all the others still point to the old Whiggles.com version 9 layout. As time goes on, I'll be making my way through them and updating them to conform to the new look, but for the time being I thought it best to get at least some of it up and running. If you have any comments on the new look, I'd love to hear them.

A little update...

Apologies for the lack of updates lately. I've been pretty busy lately with PhD stuff, but am approaching my (partially self-imposed) deadline of getting the second draft of my literature review in the can by the end of September.

In the meantime, I've also been devoting some time to putting together a new layout for this site, its first complete redesign in two years. I don't have an ETA yet, and there's no guarantee that the one I'm currently experimenting with will actually see the light of day, but I think it's high time for a change. At the very least, I want something with more interesting colours and a less cluttered layout.

What have I been up to?

It's been nearly two months since I said anything at all about my PhD, and even longer since I actually said anything concrete about what stage I'm at, so I thought I'd give you a brief status report. I've spent the last three weeks frantically pulling together my literature review chapter, and I completed the first complete draft yesterday evening - all 8,900 words of it. To put that into perspective, that's more or less half the length of my entire MLitt thesis from 2006.

In many respects, it still feels as if I'm feeling around in the dark, but an actual direction is beginning to emerge, and I feel a lot clearer now about my aims than I did six months ago. I attribute a lot of that to my supervisor, who has been very good when it has come to pushing me forward and impressing upon me the constant need to remember the bigger picture - i.e. what I'm hoping to achieve with this thesis. When you're working on a project of any length, especially one that will, in all likelihood take me a further four years to complete, it's easy to get tunnel vision and lose track of my goals.

This is why, although I initially found it strange, I've slowly come to the realisation that writing the literature review before anything else was indeed a good move. At first, I found the suggestion that I should do this rather baffling: after all, I'm going to keep on reading new sources almost until the very end of this project, so how could I possibly put together a comprehensive review of the literature at this early stage? The answer is that the literature review, at this point, is not meant to be all-encompassing. Instead, the aim is to identify and present the key arguments, developing a skeleton for the chapter to which I will, as I progress, be able to add more meat. By doing this, I should hopefully be able to have the most important debates, not to mention my aims, in my mind at all times as I write the rest of the thesis.

So far, I would appear to be on track for my intended goal of delivering a second draft of the literature review before the end of September. I don't doubt that I will have some substantial revisions to make to the chapter following my meeting with my supervisor tomorrow, but it feels like I've made a substantial amount of progress in the last few weeks. I've still got a mountain to climb, but I've made it over the first foothill.

A well-earned break

As of 5 PM tomorrow, I'm on holiday. My birthday is on Friday, July 4th, and I've decided to take a week's break to coincide. I have the Wednesday and Saturday of the week off work, and I'm stuffing my PhD work into a dark cupboard. I haven't had a real break from either of my two forms of work since Christmas, so it'll be nice to put my feet up for a while.

We interrupt this programme for a special report

Sorry about the lack of updates lately. I'm currently knee-deep in putting together a paper for the departmental Postgraduate Symposium, which takes place over Monday and Tuesday next week. My presentation is on Monday afternoon, and, while I'm nearing the home stretch as far as my paper is concerned, I want to take the time to make it as good as possible, so I've been spending pretty much all the time I have available on it.

Still, I've also taken the time to hammer out some plans for my new computer. Having weighed up the possibilities, I think I'm going to go with the following:

Case and PSU: Antec Sonata III Piano Black Quiet Mid Tower Case - With 500W EarthWatts PSU

Motherboard: ASUS P5K-E/WIFI-AP AiLifestyle Series P35 Socket 775 Socket eSATA 8 channel Audio ATX

CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 3GHz (1333MHz) Socket 775 6MB L2 Cache OEM

CPU cooler: Scythe Mine Rev-B

RAM: Corsair 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2 Memory Non-ECC Unbuffered

Video card: Gecube HD 3870 512MB GDDR3 OC edition Dual DVI TV Out PCI-E

Sound card: Auzen X-Fi Prelude 7.1

I already have my optical drive (an LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray/HD DVD combo) ready and waiting. Plus, I'll retain my current monitor, audio system, keyboard, mouse and hard drives.

I feel pretty comfortable with the motherboard and RAM, since my brother bought exactly the same models for his machine and both are serving him very well. Plus, I'm an ASUS loyalist through and through and have bought motherboards from them (barring my current Shuttle) since 2002. I decided to go with a fast dual-core CPU rather than spending more money on a quad-core with a lower clock speed. I'm well aware of the benefits of a quad-core system when it comes to video encoding and other CPU-crunching activities, but, when it comes to gaming performance, which will probably be my primary concern, I suspect I'm better off squeezing as many megahertz as possible out of a dual-core system, given how few games take advantage of more than two cores.

Any thoughts on this system? Any suggestions?

Thoughts on The Maltese Falcon, and various giallo/film noir observations

I had my first proper film noir experience today in the form of John Huston's celebrated 1941 offering, The Maltese Falcon. I don't mean by that that it was the first film noir I'd ever seen, but rather that it was the first time I sat down to watch a film thinking "Right, this is a film noir. What does that mean and how does it manifest itself?"

The Maltese Falcon is currently ranked as the 69th greatest film of all time on IMDB, and, regardless of how much or how little faith you put in such lists (personally, I think they're generally of little value), it's tough to deny that it's difficult to approach any film with that sort of reputation, particularly one that's over 60 years old. How do you even begin to comprehend how it would have been viewed at the time of its release, and how do you begin to appreciate its various innovations in that context, knowing full well that they have now been assimilated into the everyday language of film? The answer is that you don't, unless you possess both a time machine and a means of erasing all of your existing knowledge and preconceptions regarding the type of film in question. The Maltese Falcon is very much a quintessential film noir, but it wouldn't have been seen as such in 1941, given that the movement didn't enjoy its glory period until some years later, and it would take even longer for people to begin actively referring to these as film noirs.

So anyway, did I enjoy The Maltese Falcon? Yes, I did - considerably so, in fact, although, as I find to be the case with many films that are considered the greatest of their respective genres or movements, my enjoyment didn't develop into out and out awe or adulation. I found it consistently witty dialogue-wise and at many points engaging, but there were also several moments for me where things began to sag a bit and my interest started to wane. Each time that happened, a plot development would generally show up in a few minutes to regain my attention, but my overriding reaction was "Yeah, this is a really good film" rather than "Wow, this is one of the greatest films of all time!" (Oh, and a minor criticism: I must admit that the continual continuity flubs, mainly actors changing position between shots, kept taking me out of the drama.) That said, I'm pretty sure my reaction to Deep Red was somewhat similar the first time I saw it, and we all know how highly I regard it now.

Anyway, as I've continued reading up on film noir, the similarities between it and the giallo movement have become all the more pronounced. I'm not sure that much, if any, of this comes from my viewing of The Maltese Falcon, but I thought I'd note a few of my observations regarding the ties between the two movements:

- The giallo began in the late 60s as an offshoot of 30s pulp literature, whereas film noir kicked off more than two decades earlier, in the early 40s, drawing on the influence of 10s/20s German Expressionism (for the visuals) and hard-boiled detective pulp fiction (for the narratives and themes).

- For both movements, there is a broad agreement on what constitutes the key iconography, but no single universally accepted definition. In addition, broadly speaking, it is agreed that neither the giallo nor the film noir constitutes a genre. To describe film noir, Alain Silver uses the word "cycle", which has obvious connotations of time, indicating that the movement is part of a specific period, an is echoed in writing on gialli which uses the Italian word 'filone', used to refer to trends and cycles.

- Key traits include moral ambiguity and sexual motivation, often involving a contemporary urban setting.

- Although there are a number of high profile exceptions (The Maltese Falcon being a case in point), the majority of gialli and film noirs tended to be B-movies, with modest budgets and a lack of major stars.

- Both movements seem to have emerged in times of social and/or political unrest:

-- Literary gialli arrived in the 1930s during the rise of fascism.

-- Filmic gialli emerged during a period of intense violence and terrorism in the early 1970s, and following considerable progress in the women’s emancipation movement.

-- The hard-boiled detective novels which influenced film noir emerged in the US during the Depression of the 1930s.

-- Film noir as a movement took off during the aftermath of the Second World War, and its portrayal of powerful, independent women as dangerous (i.e. the femme fatale) can be seen as representative of the fears of a generation of men who returned from war to find that women had entered the public sector in their absence. The vilification and ultimate destruction of the femme fatale can be argued to constitute an attempt to restore 'order' and return women to what was perceived as their rightful place.

- Shared (partial) roots in German Expressionism: Dario Argento, whose The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) is considered to have sparked the main thrust of the giallo boom, has professed to having been influenced by German Expressionism, particularly the films of F.W. Murnau and Fritz Lang.

- In both cases, the 'colour' terminology appears to have been applied retrospectively. 'Film noir', or so says Wikipedia (remind me not to quote that in my bibliography!), was first coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946, and likewise the term 'giallo' does not appear to have been actively used when the films in question were initially released (trailers which do attempt to classify them tend to use the word 'thrilling', e.g. Deep Red). It may be that the giallo movement's literary origins were only noticed and acknowledged later. (Does anyone know? An investigation of contemporary Italian press publications would probably be needed here.)

- Oh, and Luchino Visconti's Ossessione (1943), referred to by some (e.g. Gary Needham) as the first cinematic giallo, was adapted from James M. Cain's novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, itself adapted in the US in 1946 and considered a major film noir.

DVD debacle

Tomorrow, my film noir crash course will begin in earnest, starting with a morning viewing of The Maltese Falcon, which I picked up today during my lunch break. I also snagged The Lady from Shanghai and The Postman Always Rings Twice, so a sincere word of thanks to everyone who suggested titles for me to look into.

I also decided to nab The Black Dahlia to give me a flavour for a more recent take on the noir framework. I've heard mixed reports about it, but I figure I might as well give it a whirl.

I got home to find a package from DVD Pacific waiting for me, containing the Blu-ray release of Bonnie and Clyde and the recent Platinum Edition DVD release of Disney's 101 Dalmatians. I've always had a strange relationship with the latter, since it's one of the few Disney features where I actually read the source material before reading the film, and, perhaps for that reason, the adaptation never really stood up for me. It's a very enjoyable film, don't get me wrong, and Cruella De Vil is one of the greatest screen villains ever created, but the book, for me, just paints a much richer and more appealing image in my head.

An interesting point about this release is that, whereas the recent re-releases of The Jungle Book, The Aristocats and Robin Hood (and the upcoming The Sword in the Stone) were all matted to an aspect ratio of 1.75:1, 101 Dalmatians retains the open matte 1.33:1 format favoured by every prior home video release, something which pleases me greatly considering how borked The Jungle Book looked when matted. The behind the scenes documentary for 101 Dalmatians, contained on the second disc, mattes the image to a widescreen ratio, with disastrous results, and watching it made me thankful that Disney have opted for a full-frame presentation for this release. I mean, take a look at the image below and try to imagine how you might matte it without completely destroying the composition:

Hopefully there will be a full review at DVD Times in the near future.

On the up and up

This morning, I had a meeting with my two supervisors to discuss my PhD progress. Primarily, we were discussing a written piece that I had submitted, as well as my aims for the next six months. I came away feeling both more positive and more negative than I had beforehand, mainly because it became clear to me that I had, until now, essentially been working without a plan, doing a bit of reading here and a bit of writing there without any concrete goals. This was pretty much spelled out to me when my supervisor asked me to define my thesis' unique selling point, and my response was more or less "Um... er... well, my aim is to... er... sorry, let me just think... um... how should I explain this...?"

So, as a result, I'm a bit down right now because it feels as if the work I've done so far hasn't been of a great deal of use, and I now see myself with a lot of work ahead of me as I get up to speed again. On the other hand, the meeting was extremely useful not only in terms of revealing to me what I was doing wrong, but also in terms of showing me what I should do to put things right. I now have a definite plan of action for the next four weeks:

- Week 1: read up on film noir literature and watch a couple of key films. One of my supervisors suggested film noir as being a useful point of reference due to the similarities he perceived between it and the giallo movement (not necessarily in terms of its themes but more as a body of films born out of a literary movement that can't be classified in traditional genre terms), so that will be my first port of call. I know next to nothing about film noir barring what little I've read so far, so this should prove to be interesting.

- Week 2: check out some of the dissertations that have been written by other PhD candidates in the department. It occurs to me that I have little, if any, idea of what one of these actually looks at, and with that in mind it's not entirely surprising that I've been flailing about like a blindfolded chimp with a pencil in his teeth, to quote The Simpsons.

- Week 3: get my hands on a copy of Dimitris Eleftheriotis' book Popular Cinemas of Europe: Texts, Contexts and Frameworks. He was the course convenor when I did my MLitt and I remember this book, from what little I read of it, being very clear and well-written. I also aim to spend Week 3 (and, if necessary, the beginning of Week 4) deciding on an actual title for my dissertation, setting down my key research questions, putting together an initial outline (with a preliminary timeline to take me through to 2010) and a brief bibliography of key texts.

- Week 4: meet with my supervisor again to discuss my progress and set the next deadline.

On balance, I feel considerably better about this project than I did this time yesterday, if only because I now feel I have some idea of what I'm doing and have agreed a plan of action with my supervisors, to the extent that the three of us seem to be on the same wavelength. It's disheartening to discover that a lot of what you've been doing hasn't been much use, but I suppose that's the way things go sometimes. If nothing else, the 11,000 or so words that I've churned out since October have got me back into the frame of mind required for academic writing, something that had been a little rusty after taking a year out.

PS. Can anyone recommend me a couple of good film noirs? (Or is that films noirs, or films noir?)

How ya doin'?

Apologies for the relative lack of posts recently. I've been quite busy of late, finishing up a piece of written work for my supervisor (who is now back from maternity leave) and also filling out a six-monthly progress review report. I'm going in to university tomorrow to discuss this, among other things, but I just thought I'd swing by to fill you in on the latest.

First and foremost, the reason for the garish logo attached to this post is that I am currently typing this from inside Windows Vista. Yes, I decided to give it another go, primarily because (I kid you not) I want to be able to play the snazzy new versions of Solitaire and Spider Solitaire. Well, okay, the fact that the whole operating system looks really nice did sway things in its favour too. In any event, before long I'll probably be picking up a DirectX 10-based video card in order to enjoy supported games, and I'm sure that, within the next year or so, the Windows-based port of Halo 2 will no longer be (pretty much) the only game to require Vista. More importantly, Vista-compatible drivers and software are now available for my USB TV stick, which, back in May, was one of my main reasons for opting for XP. In any event, I've been using Vista on my laptop since I got it back in October, so I figured I might as well standardise my computing experience™.

I have, however, kept open the option of switching back to XP if I feel the need: back when I set this machine up last May, I wisely prepared for a rainy day by only formatting 40 GB of my 80 GB primary hard drive. Tonight, I formatted the remaining 40 GB as a new partition and installed Vista on to that, retaining my install of XP on the already existing partition. It must be pointed out that I'm a complete luddite when it comes to operating systems: it took me ages to finally let go of Windows 3.11, for instance. In fact, I'm pretty sure I still had it installed on my computer as a dual boot with Windows 98 at one point. That said, I've got a good feeling about things this time round. Vista is slick and smooth and pretty stable, and driver support does appear to have matured somewhat in the last 10-12 months.

That said, I'd be lying if I said everything was plain sailing. That old bugbear, Creative Labs' shoddy sound card driver support, reared its ugly head. To briefly explain, Creative's support for their legacy products in Vista is notoriously slipshod, and my ageing Audigy (that's the original Audigy, from 2001) is about as legacy as they come. Anyway, fed up with this sorry state of affairs, a fellow named Daniel Kawakami began creating his own Vista drivers, reinstating features that Creative hadn't bothered to port over from their XP drivers. All well and good, and you'd think that Creative would have been pleased that someone was doing their work for them, and for no charge. At the very least, they could have bought him a tankard of foaming nut-brown ale. But oh no - instead, they slapped him with a "cease and desist" demand, deleted all his posts from their forum, and as a result suffered an unenviable backlash from a fan community already monumentally pissed off at them for their third-rate support.

To cut a long story short, Creative finally realised that what they were doing wasn't making them the most popular people in the business (their plummeting stock was probably the final nail in the coffin), and they relented, reinstating Daniel's posts and telling him he was free to continue distributing his drivers, barring the ones that were infringing on other companies' intellectual property.

Anyway, finally getting to the point of this diatribe, aware of the shortcomings of Creative's official drivers, it was Daniel_K's drivers that I initially downloaded and installed. Everything was working fine until I attempted to play a DVD in PowerDVD. For those who don't know, I use SPDIF audio output for my DVD playback, bypassing the sound card and letting my external receiver decode Dolby Digital and DTS streams. The only problem was that, as soon as I attempted to play a DVD, I got an instant Blue Screen of Death - the first BSoD I've ever had on this PC incidentally, which really didn't get my Vista experience off to a great start. I eventually gave up trying to fix the problem and simply uninstalled Daniel_K's drivers, putting the official Creative ones in their place. Now, I know these drivers are crippled in many ways, but I'd rather live with their shortcomings than not be able to watch my DVDs the way I want to, so I'm just going to live with them. When all said and done, though, I hope the Daniel_K debacle and the public backlash will convince Creative to get off their flabby backsides and write some decent, fully functioning drivers for Vista. As it is, they are currently the only thorn in my side when it comes to my usage of Vista. (Of course, I'm sure I'll discover some additional niggles as soon as I post this.)

Anyway, until tomorrow, folks, when hopefully I'll be able to get back to posting news on a more regular basis. There have been some interesting developments recently which really need to be posted about, including an impending increase in the European import limit to a whopping €150, which is sure to please anyone who enjoys value for money. The times they are a-changin'.

Eye slicing never looked more lovely

I was browsing through some of the reviews at HorrorDVDs.com the other night, and I suddenly noticed something: Another World Entertainment's release of Lucio Fulci's The New York Ripper has a really nice transfer. Personally, I always appreciate it when a review includes full size screen captures, because it means that, whatever the words might say, I can trust my own eyes and have a fairly good idea of what the transfer will actually look at without having to put a whole lot of faith in reviewers whose credentials are unknown to me.

Today, while doing a bit of shopping at Xploited Cinema, in the form of the Italian genre cinema book Esotika Erotika Psicotika, primarily for my PhD work, I decided to bite the bullet and order this, my third copy of Fulci's notorious Video Nasty. It's not my favourite of Fulci's films by a long shot (I still maintain that A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is his best work), but it's unjustly maligned and is, if not in the "very good" category of gialli, at least in the upper echelons of "good".

Thank you for the screenshots, HorrorDVDs. You've just earned Another World Entertainment another sale!

Academia dissected

Earlier this month, I wrote an off the cuff post expressing my frustration with what I perceived to be academia's obsession with penis symbols. I wrote that after trawling through a particularly turgid chapter on the Italian horror film written by Maggie Günsberg, who seemed intent on collapsing the entire movement into a series of phallic and vaginal icons. Now, of course, I don't think that this obsession with male members extends to every corner of academia, and, as a part-time academic myself, it would be a little hypocritical if I tarred everyone with the same brush.

With that proviso out of the way, I want to take the time to point out an utterly hilarious parody of a psychoanalytic academic essay that I came across today. The subject matter is 2 Girls 1 Cup, a video circulated all over the World Wide Web that has gained some level of notoriety since it first appeared around last October. If you're not aware of it or its content, then I suggest you read the Wikipedia entry on it rather than actually seek out the video itself, but, if you're feeling lazy, the premise is this: two women take turns vomiting and shitting into a cup, then perform various acts which involve the aforementioned waste being transferred from the cup (and each other's various orifices) into their mouths. Delightful. Yes, I've seen it, and no, I haven't been the same since.

Anyway, read the essay. It is, quite possibly, a work of demented genius. I just wish I could read the last three paragraphs, which you can just make out on the opposite side of the paper.

Update, February 21st, 2007 09:42 PM: You can read the entire essay here (thanks, Lyris).

What is it with academics and penises?

I'm currently reading Maggie Günsberg's Italian Cinema: Gender and Genre as part of my PhD work. At the moment, I'm making my way through her chapter on horror cinema (which concentrates on the "pure" horror films of the mid-50s to mid-60s, barely even mentioning the giallo thrillers of the early 70s in which I'm interested), and I'm wondering if I'm the only person who finds it disconcerting that so many academics specialising in Film Studies seem to see penises everywhere. Particularly when discussing horror films, any object that is long, cylindrical and/or pointy is interpreted as a phallic symbol. (Likewise, the narrow corridors of the old houses that so often appear are invariably described as "vaginal" and their decaying state, plus their frequent use by evil spirits, proof of these films' misogyny.) Sometimes it's understandable - there are only so many ways one can interpret a lesbian character having a spear thrust into her nether regions and out of her mouth in Mother of Tears, for example - but most of the time, it's bordering on the ridiculous.

Maybe it's just me, but would it not be fair to suggest that, if you see willies everywhere, then perhaps you're just a wee bit immature?

The Giallo Project #9: The Frightened Woman

Alternative titles: Femina ridens; The Laughing Woman; Director: Piero Schivazappa; Starring: Philippe Leroy, Dagmar Lassander; Music: Stelvio Cipriani; Italian theatrical release date: August 24th, 1969

Note: this review contains a number of major spoilers.

"From an aesthetic point of view, your position is perfect. You form a long, supple, curving line against a series of upright lines. You're feminine like that!" - Dr. Sayer

Well, nearly five months after my last entry, I finally decided to stop prolonging the inevitable and get this project started again. A can only apologise for the extended delay, and hopefully future updates will be a lot more frequent than they have been so far.

Initially, I wasn't sure whether or not to include this film in the Giallo Project, given that its affiliation with the form can only really be described as loose. However, I think that it does share many elements with the "woman in peril" domestic thrillers that Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino and Umberto Lenzi were known for during the early days of the movement, so in a sense it would be wrong to ignore it just because it doesn't fit the template of the typical giallo. The plot essentially concerns Maria (Dagmar Lassander), a reporter, who accepts an invitation from the enigmatic Dr. Sayer (Philippe Leroy) to visit his apartment on the pretext of giving her some files for a paper she is writing. Maria discovers too late that Sayer is in fact a lunatic who believes that women will take over the world and render men redundant unless something is done to curb their emancipation.

One of the elements that continues to fascinate me with films such as these, and indeed was one of the driving forces in my decision to undertake a PhD on the subject, its their strange air of ambivalence towards violence, modernity and sexuality, to name but a few. After 87 minutes of Dr. Sayer berating women for their desire to be "socially and sexually self-sufficient" and lamenting the possibility of a future in which such a state should come to pass, I'm still not sure where writer/director Piero Schivazappa stands on the issue. The film came along at the height of the women's liberation movement, and as such it's tempting to see this as the knee-jerk reaction of a filmmaker who, like many men in the 60s and 70s, was growing increasingly paranoid as a result of women's burgeoning independence. Obviously, Dr. Sayer is completely insane and unstable, but it wouldn't be the first time a director used a lunatic to convey his message. The matter is also muddied considerably by a plot twist in the final act which turns the tables, presenting Sayer as the victim of an entrapment scheme cooked up by Maria and another woman. Still, it does conclude with what seems to be a completely sincere call to arms for women not to take any crap from men, so frankly I have no idea!

Whatever Schivazappa intended, the film is clearly an exploration of control. The majority of gialli that feature a female protagonist can be broken down into simple stories of a helpless woman falling into the arms of her handsome rescuer: it's the ultimate male fantasy of the Good Man saving the damsel in distress from the Bad Man. The difference, here, is that there is no Good Man, only one man and one woman, with the roles of victim and aggressor becoming increasingly blurred as the film progresses. At one point, Maria asks Sayer why he is holding her against her will when he could have all the women he wants. The answer is that he isn't interested in a woman who is with him by her own choosing: he has to break her will, to give her no choice. This is why Sayer reacts with such horror to Maria's suicide attempt: his desire for control over her is so strong that he can't bear the thought of her dying on her terms rather than his. In the shifting power dynamic between the two characters, meanwhile, there seems to be an implication that man wants to enslave woman but is ultimately utterly dependent on her. Sayer is obsessed with his own virility, continually exercising, checking for grey hairs, and so on. Of course, the ageing process is something that can't be stopped, so perhaps Schivazappa is saying that any attempt to resist the tide of change is ultimately futile. I don't know, and that's part of why I find this film so interesting.

Above: Woman's path curves while man's is straight and regimented?

Whether all this theorising and analysis interests you is beside the point, because there is plenty of visual aural and eye candy to satisfy even the most ardent theoryphobe (did I just coin a new term there?). It's beautifully shot - that much is clear even on the horribly faded and blurred copy I watched, where every shade of colour seemed to be a muddy brown - and incredibly late 60s in its styling. The characters seem to live inside a surrealist painting, one populated with art deco architecture and furniture, and even a fascinating vagina dentata contraption, one large enough for a man to step inside and be swallowed by. There is a fascinating contrast between the classical paintings that adorn Sayer's workplace and the anarchic, tripped-out world of his bachelor pad. Likewise, I'm intrigued by the manner in which Sayer is continually associated with rigid, straight lines while Maria is shown in the context of smooth, flowing curves. Intriguingly, this aesthetic is also used to highlight the shifting balance of power. At the start, while Maria is Sayer's prisoner, she is frequently framed within or partially blocked by horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines, whereas later, as the nature of the captor/captive relationship is altered, the framing and architecture become more freeform.

I'm ultimately not entirely sure how I feel about The Frightened Woman. It's a visually arresting and often thematically interesting piece of work, but it does strike a few bum notes, among them Maria's readiness to forgive Sayer for locking her up and abusing her mentally and physically when she discovers that this is the first time he has ever done this to a woman (although even this is muddied by the late revelation that she was actually the one who set out to ensnare him). Likewise, after the reconciliation between the two characters, there is a lengthy stretch in which the film more or less collapses until the final climactic twist is unveiled. Still, it's an interesting, unique piece of work, and Lassander and Leroy do well to carry it across the finishing line between them. This is probably one for repeat viewings, and is definitely worth a look if you haven't seen it before.

Next time, I'll be looking at another fringe case, Elio Petri's Oscar-winning Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion.

The Year in Review, 2007

Well, another year has been and gone. We're all a year older, but probably not much wiser. As usual, I'm going to do a brief run-down of various events and issues that I've touched on in my news posts over the year. It's generally not my style to comment on current affairs, so I won't be saying anything about the murder of Benazir Bhutto, Tony Blair's departure from office or anything like that. This year, I've decided to split things into several sections.

 
Life Itself

Life™ was somewhat different for me this year. The biggest change was, fairly obviously, that, at the end of March, I landed myself a full-time job, working for the NHS on their Smoking Cessation programme. I spent four and a half months working thirty-seven and a half hours a week in an office, entering data and phoning people to ask them whether they had managed to successfully stop smoking, and, while I'm not about to claim that this was the most unpleasant way anyone could ever spend four and a half months, I won't deny that I was extremely relieved to see the back of the place in August, at which point I went into a part-time Library Assistant position at the Gallery of Modern Art. To say that I find this job vastly preferable to my previous one would be the understatement of the year, and that's not just because I work fewer hours.

On a not entirely unrelated note, my application for funding for my PhD was unsuccessful, but my four and a half months of back-breaking (I kid) labour with the NHS was enough to pay for my first year of part-time study, and more besides. I started the PhD, on portrayals of gender in the giallo (following on from my MLitt dissertation on the same area), at the end of September and, while illness in November prevented me from making as much headway as I would have liked, the work that I've done so far has certainly gone a long way towards getting me back into the swing of things, academically speaking, and I look forward to properly delving into my subject of choice over the next twelve months.

 
Zeros and Ones

The big technological issue of 2007 was the ongoing battle between the two rival high definition home video formats, HD DVD and Blu-ray, and the perpetual game of teeter-totter in which each format continued to vie for supremacy, engaging in a conflict of words as much as sales. A war in which what your opposition doesn't have is every bit as important as what you do have, the biggest surprise was undoubtedly Paramount's shock decision, in August, to ditch Blu-ray entirely and concentrate on HD DVD. With no end to the format war in sight any time soon, 2008 looks set to be another interesting year.

For me, my most significant purchase was that of a Japanese Playstation 3, reneging on my single format stance and embracing neutrality. Personally speaking, the balance continues to lie firmly in favour of HD DVD in terms of exclusive titles (a fact only compounded by the aforementioned Paramount decision), but I can't deny that it's nice to be able to own and watch high definition copies of Casino Royale, The Descent and Ratatouille.

I also bought three additional pieces of hardware: a new desktop PC in May, an Xbox 360 HD DVD add-on drive in July (to replace my clunky and oversized stand-alone HD-A1 player), and a Blu-ray enabled laptop in October. In the case of the latter, my original intention was to use it primarily for PhD work, although, in reality, I've got just as much, if not more, use out of it as a convenient means of taking screen captures from Blu-ray discs.

 
At the Pictures

Perhaps largely due to my period of full-time employment, I watched somewhat fewer films this year than in the previous two years. By my calculation, I watched a total of 164 films, 77 of which were ones that I hadn't seen before, down from 216 (99 new) in 2006. Still, I did manage to see several significant films, including the great - 2001: A Space Odyssey, Babel, Black Book, Black Sabbath, the Final Cut of Blade Runner, Blood Diamond, Children of Men, Full Metal Jacket, Grindhouse, Hot Fuzz, Inside Man, Life of Brian, The Lives of Others, Pan's Labyrinth, Ratatouille, Sicko, This Film is Not Yet Rated, Zodiac - the reasonably good - 1408, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, Brokeback Mountain, Brotherhood of the Wolf, The Bourne Ultimatum, Chicago, Crank, The Game, Hard Candy, Idiocracy, Mission Impossible, Mission Impossible III, Mother of Tears, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Red Road, Syriana, Tideland, Transformers - and the guff - Aeon Flux, Fantastic Four, The Fountain, Futurama: Bender's Big Score!, Hostel, House of the Dead, The Matrix Revolutions, Mission Impossible II, Norbit, Paprika, A Scanner Darkly, The Simpsons Movie and the remakes of Poseidon and The Wicker Man.

Best new film I saw in the year? Either Black Book or Children of Men. Worst? Without a shadow of a doubt, Norbit.

I bought or otherwise received 118 films on disc, 42 of which were HD DVDs, 31 Blu-ray discs and 45 standard definition DVDs. I wrote 44 reviews for DVD Times, down from last year's 66. Of these, 16 were for HD DVDs, 12 for Blu-ray discs and 16 for standard definition DVDs.

 
Bibliothèque

I read the following books: Legion by William Peter Blatty, The Naked Drinking Club by Rhona Cameron, Casino Royale by Ian Fleming, The Day of the Jackal and The Odessa File by Frederick Forsythe, Carrie by Stephen King, The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova, The Red Dahlia by Lynda La Plante, Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin, Almost Blue by Carlo Lucarelli, The Dead Hour by Denise Mina, The Mephisto Waltz by Fred Mustard Stewart, Odette by Jerrard Tickell, Mercy Alexander by George Tiffin, and The Devil Rides Out, Gateway to Hell, Strange Conflict and To the Devil - a Daughter by Dennis Wheatley. Which, now that I think about it, is a heck of a lot more than I'd expected.

 
Song and Dance

I snagged the following CDs: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Ennio Morricone), Blood Diamond (James Newton Howard), Cars (Randy Newman), The Descent (David Julyan), Grindhouse: Planet Terror (Robert Rodriguez/John Debney/Graeme Revell), The Iron Giant (Michael Kamen), Kingdom of Heaven (Harry Gregson-Williams), Mother of Tears (Claudio Simonetti), The Professional (Eric Serra), The Secret of NIMH (Jerry Goldsmith), Serenity (David Newman), This is the Life (Amy MacDonald), V for Vendetta (Dario Marianelli), Veronica Guerin (Harry Gregson-Williams), Why Bother? (Peter Cook and Chris Morris).

 
Well, all in all, I think that's it for another year. Look back on it, it reads a bit like a shopping list with the occasional personal titbit, but I suppose that's the way of things in our evil capitalist society. Anyway, here's to a great 2008 and yet more wanton spending.

DVD debacle

I was out today at university, seeing my MLitt dissertation supervisor for a discussion about my PhD progress, the proceeds of which have left me with plenty of food for thought as regards various avenues that I can explore from now on. While I was waiting for the bus home, I decided to browse the shelves of Fopp, and came away with a couple of books which may or may not prove interesting and/or useful - Best Movies of the 70s by Jürgen Müller and Revolution! - The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s by Peter Cowie. Oh, and I also picked up a copy of Tokyo Godfathers on DVD - one of the few anime films that I really like. Oh, if only Sony had released it on Blu-ray instead of director Satoshi Kon's most recent film, the incredibly disappointing Paprika.

When I got home, I discovered a package from DVD Pacific waiting for me, containing The Mario Bava Collection Volume 2. This is an incredibly generous package, containing seven films (the cover lists eight, but I'm not really convinced that Lisa and the Devil and House of Exorcism should truly be counted as two separate titles, particularly given that Rabid Dogs and Kidnapped have been counted as one in the same package).

I've taken a brief look at all of the discs, and the best-looking appear to be Lisa and the Devil, Rabid Dogs/Kidnapped and Four Times That Night, while the worst-looking are Bay of Blood and 5 Dolls for an August Moon, with Baron Blood and Roy Colt & Winchester Jack somewhere in the middle. A real patchwork of sources has been used, with the transfers for Bay of Blood and 5 Dolls for an August Moon looking suspiciously like DVNR'd versions of the same transfers used for the old Image Entertainment discs (I haven't seen the earlier versions of Baron Blood, Roy Colt & Winchester Jack or Four Times That Night, so I can't comment on them). Lisa and the Devil definitely has a brand new transfer (House of Exorcism looks much poorer, but is anamorphic, unlike the old Image version, so I doubt they are from the same master), while the Rabid Dogs/Kidnapped disc appears to be the same one that Anchor Bay released separately earlier this year.

This is a six-disc set, with Lisa and the Devil/House of Exorcism and Rabid Dogs/Kidnapped sharing a disc each, while, for some bizarre reason, 5 Dolls for an August Moon and Four Times That Night are to be found on either side of a solitary double-sided disc. Weird.

Anyway, looking forward to catching me some Bava, along with some Tim Lucas commentaries.