The Daily Opinion

Film Review: North By Northwest

If ever there were to be a radio programme called Desert Island DVDs and (unlikely I know but) in the event that I were to find myself one of the show’s castaways, invited on to divulge eight film titles I would want with me on that small sandy speck amidst a turquoise sea, North By Northwest would most definitely be one of those eight. These two hours and sixteen minutes of pure Tinseltown magic have enthralled me many times over the years and I hold an unwavering certainty that they will do so each and every time I decide to view them in the future.

This most spectacular of all Hitchcock’s thrillers can surely lay claim to be a Blockbuster movie years before the term was widely bandied about by the Hollywood marketing machine. It has everything that a rip-roaring edge-your-seat adventure flick should. Even before the MGM lion (uniquely seen here against a green background) has cleared its throat, Bernard Herrmann’s stunning soundtrack sets the mood with its menacing intro of timpani and double bass. It builds quickly into a full-on orchestral frenzy, an unmistakable musical interpretation of a chase which, after all, is the theme at the very heart of the movie.

The opening title sequence designed by Saul Bass is a thing of beauty too and is supposedly the first feature film to use kinetic typography in its title. This is an animation technique that uses moving text to evoke an emotion or idea, in this case, the moving titles against a backdrop of an office building give the impression of a lift (or in U.S. parlance, elevator) going up and down. Watch it, it’s terrific. It’s artful.

The film stars arguably that most debonair of all leading men ever to have graced the silver screen, Cary Grant. Grant plays Roger Thornhill, a New York advertising executive who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and gets mistaken for a government spy and shortly after, a murderer to boot and from then on, he’s a fugitive after the truth to prove his innocence while trying to evade the good guys as well as the bad. I shall refrain from divulging any more detail of the plot and instead encourage anyone who hasn’t seen it to do so very soon because it really is about as fine a mystery/thriller as you are ever likely to see.

The original screenplay was penned by Ernest Lehman who stated that he wanted to write “the Hitchcock picture to end all Hitchcock pictures” and he was nominated for an Academy Award for his efforts. It’s an absolute cracker of a script, full of intrigue and sophisticated dialogue, wit and wonderful locations plus it includes two of cinemas most iconic sequences, one involving a crop-duster plane and the other a climb over the heads of spectacular Mount Rushmore. Once seen, never forgotten.

Hitchcock’s masterpiece it may not be, scholars and critics tend to reserve that particular appellation for Vertigo or Psycho but North By Northwest is not without its share of praise. The American Film Institute rank it highly in many of their 100 Years of… categories and seventh in their 10 Top 10 Mystery films. The film’s name has influenced a music festival in Texas “South By Southwest” and numerous scenes from it have been parodied on TV shows such as Family Guy. The grey suit worn by Cary Grant throughout most of the movie even has its own accolade. In 2006, a panel of fashion experts brought together by GQ magazine named it the best suit in film history as well as the most influential on men’s style. Apparently, it has since been copied for Tom Cruise in Collateral and Ben Affleck in Paycheck.

But perhaps this is delving a little too deep and some of you might say, “Oh come on, it’s only a film, after all.” Nevertheless, only a film it may be, but when a collection of highly talented individuals come together and work as a team they can sometimes produce something extremely worthwhile and having already recommended this film for viewing several paragraphs ago, I will end with the admission that that is how I regard the two hours and sixteen minutes of this movie – extremely worthwhile!

Google Intentionally Collected Private Information From Street View Cars

It seems that Google has again forgotten its own mantra of “Don’t be Evil”, as the search giant has once again found itself in hot water, this time after using unprotected Wi-Fi networks to collect such private data as text messages, emails and names.

A Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report shows that Google knew Street View cars were collecting myriad personal information over two years, despite Google’s claims that it was an accident. The FCC report shows that Street View’s coding engineer not only knew the software could collect “payload data”, but told two colleagues – one of whom was a senior manager – that he had deliberately designed it to do so. However, despite the admission from the engineer, the FCC is still debating whether or not other Street View engineers knew of the collection – although the coding engineer produced a report to the team in 2006 in which he explained payload data would be collected, the team’s defence is that they didn’t read it and thus were entirely ignorant of what was going on, and Google has staunchly stuck to its line that the data collection was “inadvertent”.

The FCC report explains that: “For more than two years, Google’s Street View cars collected names, addresses, telephone numbers, URLs, passwords, email, text messages, medical records, video and audio files, and other information from internet users in the United States.” The FCC is also claiming that Google deliberately withheld the email in which the coding engineer discussed data collection with a senior manager, and has ordered Google to pay a $25,000 fine for obstructing the investigation by not releasing such information.

The report goes on to say that “Google’s supervision of the Wi-Fi data collection project was minimal … indeed, it appears that no one at the company carefully reviewed the substance of Engineer Doe’s software code or the design document.”

Aside from censoring the names of Google employees, the search giant has released the report in full, with a spokesman saying that: “We decided to voluntarily make the entire document available except for the names of individuals. While we disagree with some of the statements made in the document, we agree with the FCC’s conclusion that we did not break the law. We hope that we can now put this matter behind us.”

While the FCC has said Google didn’t break any laws, and Google wants to move on, such privacy advocacy groups as Electronic Privacy Information Center are demanding further investigation. EPIC’s executive director Marc Rotenberg has said that “Google’s rogue engineer scenario collapses in light of the fact that others were aware of the project and did not object.”

It cannot be proven conclusively one way or the other that Google as an entity did or didn’t know about the data collection, but it doesn’t bode well either way for the company – can users trust a company that either collects their personal data willingly, or one that doesn’t know what its own products and services are doing?

News in Briefs 06/05/12

It was an eventful week in politics as the people of Britain took to the polls once again, even though it was a rather pathetic 32% turnout in the large majority of places. The football season in sport is coming to an end, and we have more idiocy and stupidity from America.

Oh and I enjoyed my trip in Brighton, if anyone was wondering.

Political Oops of the Week

I could go for the easy option and just rip into the fact that the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives were soundly beaten in these local elections, but I’m not going to do that. I’m going to rip into the fact that the Liberal Democrats were beaten in the Edinburgh local elections by a penguin standing six feet tall from Planet Pipe.

His name was Professor Pongoo and he entered the local elections as an independent candidate. But the Liberal Democrats were humiliated when the penguin polled more votes than their party. In fact, Professor Pongoo polled 444 votes, the Lib Dems polled 370, and the Green Party polled 322. Nick Clegg and friends have really fallen from a great height since they entered power in Westminster.

In other news, something utterly hilarious happened as whilst Labour leader Ed Miliband was walking around Southampton, in order to brag how well he has been doing, he was hit on the shoulder by an egg that splattered over his nice new suit. Clearly the message is that you just can’t win when it comes to politics.

The Painful…

This section is brought to us by Italian football this week. Fiorentina manager Delio Rossi was sacked after he beat the living hell out of one of his players.

The incident occurred when he took the Serbian player Adem Ljajic off after 22 minutes. But Adem wasn’t too happy about the Fiorentina manager bringing him off so early so as he walked off he performed an ironic round of applause for his boss’s tactical mastery.

Not going to take this from some scumbag from the former Yugoslavian nation, the Fiorentina manager fell into the bench area and decided to teach him a lesson in pain. Adem was lucky because when his boss was pulled away it looked like he was lining up a punch, and it didn’t look like it was going to be a weak one. But he gained the final victory as the manager was sacked and the Italian press turned in his favour.

…And the Pointless

Have you ever loved a car or motorbike so much that you wanted to have sex with something right after driving it? On a personal note, the answer is never, but for other people I’m not too sure anymore because American Henry Wolf is attempting to sue BMW over this sort of problem.

BMW Bike — Is this the cure for erectile dysfunction?

He’s claiming that a permanent erection has been caused by a motorbike ride through San Francisco, California, which lasted four hours. His main ‘consequence’ according to him is that he is now unable to engage in sexual activity. Now this is quite strange because I would have thought that if you had a permanent erection you would be the perfect person to have regular sexual activity.

For once, the man would be able to outlast the woman!

The so Outrageous that it’s Borderline Hilarious

My first question has to be: “Why is it always the Americans?”

And it really is always the Americans when it comes to crazy, religious, anti-gay nut jobs. The latest anti-gay nut job is a pastor from North Carolina, who preaches at the Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville. Sean Harris recently made headlines when he suggested in a sermon that parents should beat their children for “looking gay”

This anti-gay nut job then went even further by claiming that he was similar to Jesus. Last time I checked, Jesus wasn’t a nice person all the time, but he didn’t preach hatred towards gay people. And I don’t even recall him preaching hatred towards anyone really. He turned a few tables in the temples, but he didn’t really hate them. He was the preacher of love, good, and all of that other wonderful stuff.

Yahweh (God), on the other hand, was the vengeful one. However, I suppose that this is just something that will blow over after a while. This sort of thing never stands up for long. Sean Harris seems like a Westboro Baptist Church wannabe really.

A Positive Outlook for the Week

Do you remember when current French president Nicolas Sarkozy acted like a total douche bag to David Cameron when it came to Europe? And do you also remember the rule of what goes around comes around? I do, and it seems to be true as this time next week he could be out of office. It’s quite funny how arrogant he was with his supermodel girl and his power over all of France, and now the world is watching him squirm.

In other news, the Iranian president Ahmadinejad is apparently falling out of favour in his own country. So could we be looking at the end of another tyrant? Although, you shouldn’t get your hopes up as his replacement will probably be one of those cases where everything gets much worse and we all end up craving for his return.

So maybe next week won’t be so bleak and irritating after all…

~ Today ~

Petrol prices just dont stop soaring,
Taxes continue getting higher and higher,
Frankly the way the country is run is getting boring,
Will we ever make enough money to retire?

What is it our govournment expects from us?
To pay for their expensive lifestyle,
The way to earn the cash is to be genious,
To find the loopholes that are worthwhile,

Families struggle to pay the rent,
Makes me wonder how the children are fed,
Soon we will all be pitching up a tent,
Its no wonder peace and harmony are dead!

A Look at BlackBerry 10

With RIM in dire straits but insisting on forging ahead with its own operating system, BlackBerry 10 has been anticipated for some time, and has now had its first public showing.

So what’s new? From a design perspective, it seems that RIM has pretty much had a look at what’s on the market and made a conglomeration of other operating systems. The grid of widgets (seen below) looks remarkably like Nokia’s MeeGo on the N9 and also Windows Phone, while the notification bar and icons along the bottom look intriguingly like Nokia Belle, its latest update to the Symbian platform (both MeeGo and Belle are also shown below for comparison).

BB10 — The grid looks strikingly similar to MeeGo, while the notification and shortcut bars look very similar to Nokia Belle

n9_multitasking — Nokia N9 running MeeGo

While mentioning comparisons with Nokia, it also has to be noted that the hardware showcased for BB10 had no front-facing buttons, much like the N900 and N9. The PlayBook also lacked buttons on the screen, and it’s good to see this approach to phones continuing.

One of the things shown off at BlackBerry World was BB 10’s “flow”. Unlike the approach of Apple, Microsoft and Google, BB 10 does not pause apps or hang them in a suspended state, but rather leaves them running in real time just as they were on the PlayBook. Without a physical button to bring up the multitasking panel (which is used in iOS, Windows Phone, Symbian and Android), BB 10 implements it by having the user hold their finger down and then slide to the right to see the last few apps that were used.

The benefit to a real-time multitasking ability of course is the opportunity to carry out tasks without missing a beat. Whether you’re composing an email or waiting for a video to load, you can do something else and then go back to it without any lag or needing to start from scratch, just like working on a computer. CEO Thorston Heins said that “Everything you have going on keeps running real time in the background. No other platform can do this.” This isn’t entirely true, however. It could be argued that BB 10 will be the only mainstream OS to offer it, but Heins can’t erase from history the fact that Maemo 5 and MeeGo both did and do offer exactly the same thing, and Symbian, one of the largest operating systems in the world, also offers it. So while it’s a very welcome feature indeed, Heins shouldn’t adopt the Steve Jobs path of claiming everything he did was invented by his company.

Another feature showed off was the new keyboard, which is a departure from BlackBerry’s signature physical QWERTY. While it doesn’t look like anything special, it is apparently a smart keyboard by customising itself to how you use it, recommending words it thinks you are most likely to want to use.

Another neat feature introduced was camera rewind, which basically lets you zoom in to a picture and rewind it in time. This means that the user can fix closed eyes or something else ruining a photo.

So how will it fare? BlackBerry 10 looks promising, bringing the software up to par in some cases, and exceeding the competition in others. While it’s a stretch to say that RIM is the only company to have software that lets users multitask in real time, and the design looks more than a little inspired by Nokia’s offerings, it’s encouraging to see a company stand up and continue that trend, acknowledging that with phones being used increasingly like computers, they should act like it too.

The Art of Losing

I don’t want this to sound like one of those ‘I remember when it was all fields round here’ rants, but I do think our modern society is in danger of losing something precious. There’s nothing wrong with the digital world in itself. There’s nothing wrong with a virtual world for entertainment, escapism or even education. The trouble for me is when it starts to dominate every aspect of life. We are losing the tangible world. Yes, that smelly, dusty, world of touching things. We take our five senses for granted and they don’t have as much fun these days.

Take down a book from a shelf in an old second hand bookshop and open a page. Ah, that glorious smell, equal to any rare orchid. Pull out a vinyl from its sleeve and listen to the click of the needle when you put it in the groove. Move characters round and roll the dice on a shiny new board game.

Ok, so we can store six trillion books or whatever on the Kindle and streaming music is easy and we can select the individual tracks we want and so on. We have gained. Of course we have. But we are losing something too. We have even seen the Borders and HMV chains crash. Almost three in four independent record stores have shut their doors over the previous decade. High streets up and down the land are in decline. They were already competing against out of town retail parks before the internet came along. However, certain independent bookshops and record shops still thrive, probably because they offer something different that the online transaction can’t replicate. Staff get to know their customers and it’s an opportunity for shared interests and experiences. Independent video stores will have to offer that same personal interaction to survive against the onslaught of DVDs by post and movies through streaming.

Now, I must declare my hypocrisy. I shop from Amazon. I buy from iTunes. Hell, I’ve even got my own eBook for sale. I’m just as much to blame for the closure of shops as anyone. I’m just as much to blame for our dislocation from reality. Kids growing up today are totally dependent on what they see on a screen. I’m not advocating some sepia-tinged vision of rosy-cheeked children playing with mud pies all day, but come on. If it isn’t on a screen, it doesn’t exist. Six year olds have mobile phones, their TV in the bedroom stops them from getting to sleep and they’re allowed to play their hand-held games at the dinner table. At the dinner table, don’t you know! Digital versions now exist for classic board games, such as Monopoly, Trivial Pursuit and Cluedo.

What warped sense of reality are we living in that we come home to a virtual fireplace displayed on the TV? Mmmm, feel the cosy warmth from those virtual flames. No time to look after a pet because you’re sitting in front of a computer all day? No sweat; just order a wall mounted virtual aquarium or adopt a virtual version of your pet of choice. Your online dog, cat or turtle is waiting for you to bond with it and have lots of virtual fun!

I see a future. Record shops, bookshops…in fact, any shops are a rarity, like quaint olden days museum pieces preserved for the ‘nerds’. The physical world is the domain of social anthropologists. We don’t touch anything. We don’t have to. We don’t even need keyboards anymore; we just talk to our computers and phones and all our devices to get them to work. We work with our screens, socialise with our screens, shop with our screens and play with our screens. In the comfort of our homes, we virtually warm ourselves in front of our virtual fire and we express our sentimental side by seeing to the needs of our virtual pets. Perhaps we’ll have a virtual partner. We can turn him / her off if they annoy us.

I am in the last bookshop on Earth and I’m clutching the very last copy of a first edition David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I can smell that heavenly, musty smell. I can feel the pages that a craftsman lovingly put together. I read the words of the world’s greatest storyteller as he intended the words to be read. But the book turns into an electronic reader and it feels cold and hard in my hands. The weight of lost bookshops and libraries weighs heavily on me and I sink to my knees. Later that day, I relax in the comfort of my living room and turn on my wall display. Selecting from the menu, I tell the device to display the virtual bookshop.

Alas, it will come to pass. We can’t put the genie back in the lamp. The American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, wrote, “the art of losing isn’t hard to master”. Oh, yes. We do it so well.