Album review
Doves
Kingdom of Rust

An album title is important. It is our first introduction to the music to come, to the emotion that follows, to the philosophy in which we will get lost. It reveals a great deal about the band’s thought processes, the album’s theme and even, to an extent, the musical style.

Strangeways Here We Come, for example, is the perfect title to introduce us to the Smith’s album of uncertainty and aloofness and the melancholy prison in which we find ourselves when love goes wrong. Songs In The Key Of Life (Stevie Wonder), It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (Public Enemy) and Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (Smashing Pumpkins) are similar examples that offer wonderfully descriptive precursors to what lies beneath the sleeve notes. More…

Bill Maher preaches the gospel of “I don’t know”. He’s an evangelist of doubt. A sermonizer of rationality. A missionary of questioning. And like his opponents, the evangelical fanatics, religious zealots and the dogged clergy, his views are seldom supported with fact, seldom open to serious debate and never given in an accepting forum.

Yet, this doesn’t make Religulous (a portmanteau derived from religion and ridiculous) a bad documentary. It certainly doesn’t make it an unentertaining one. But it does make it flawed, perhaps even stripping it from documentary status to comedy. In fact, even though Religulous deals with incredibly important and very real issues around religious bigotry and religion’s blind, unquestioning, violent threat to peaceful society, it is fair to say that it is indeed as much of a documentary as director Larry Charles’s previous movie, Borat. More…

Embrace

His hands
Emboldened by a moment’s hesitation
A second’s surrender, in which
the awkward juxtaposition
of what he’d always imagined
with what he’d never dared
hung heavy and sultry in the surrounding air
Those hands
That slid up and around
And around and over
In that moment
Snuck
under
More…

I love self-help books. They make me feel warm and fuzzy and motivate me to change my life. They let me know that everything is OK and that although I have many faults, I have never exploited the weak and desperate, the lonely and confused, the struggling and needy by writing a book that I claim is well researched, scientific and authoritative, but is really abusive, esoteric, new-age charlatanry.

The latest book to help me feel good about myself is Throw Out Fifty Things: Clear the Clutter, Find Your Life by Gail Blanke, a professional “motivator”. Blanke’s motivating, life-altering premise is that stuff is just “life plaque” holding us back from achieving our true potential.

Phew, deep… More…

Does cinema need another dimension? As far as I can tell, it seems to be working perfectly well with the two that it has.

My scepticism of this new dimension, which is nearly upon us, is not born from a clichéd fear of change, or a dogmatic clinging to tradition, but rather comes from a concern for the future of storytelling, scriptwriting, dialogue, and cinema rooted in emotion and not simply visual stimulation.

This dimension revolution is unlike the two previous ones cinema has undergone (sound and colour) in that it demands the changing of storytelling to fit the mode of production. All cinema is created and moulded by the technologies which create it and storylines adapt to this. However, 3-D’s raison d’être is in the highlighting of the visual, in making objects move from the screen and into the theatre. This is not like the introduction of colour and sound, which aided storytelling, enhanced the story, but didn’t create a new vehicle upon which entire movies would base themselves. The introduction of colour, for example, did not create a dimension for filmmakers to exploit – tempting them to fill each film with rainbows, and a kaleidoscopic array of flowers and colourful objects. More…