A relatively quiet month for me, due to a mixture of illness (briefly hospitalised), being away from home, and my computer destroying itself on a daily basis (more of which at a later date). Cinema was also pretty quiet, with no-one going up against the summer blockbusters.

First up is the already month or two old Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift, selected simply because it was starting just after we arrived. From the previous films you know what to expect: some vaguely criminal activity, a wreckless hero with a good heart, a girl causing a feud and, of course, cars rammed with random bits of plastic and awful paint jobs. This film, due to it’s sequel in name-only status (forgetting that cameo), does all of the above worse than ever before; the weak story and dire performances aren’t balanced by some eye candy, the dialogue wandering out of the big book of cliches. Bad.

One of three Luc Besson related films out in the last month is the free-running madness of District B13. Set in a near-future Paris where entire suburbs have been cut off and left to fend for themselves, our hero is trying to live an honest and clean life to which the local kingpin doesn’t take kindly. Events conspire and get a little ridiculous, leading the two lead characters into a buddy action film. All of that aside, the film is really an excuse for Besson and co to show off the free-running skills of David Belle. Leaping seemingly impossible gaps, acrobatics and wall climbing skills abound, and choreography as beautiful as anything from the East with the impact of anything from the West. Fantastic, just to watch.

Finally, the blockbuster of the summer was always going to be the return of Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow. Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest is fun but contrived, bustling but overlong, a film the spirals through a bunch of plots for the sake of giving everyone plenty of screen time, rather than to create a tightly edited film. Half a dozen of the featured characters could easily be excised with no hit to the over-arching plot, and no harm done to the franchise. Despite the wayward scriptwriting, I rather enjoyed the film: it was fun and goofy and a little magical, the areas in which Disney excels. That the series is being stretched beyond the current material is the only concern here.

The clear winner of the three is the visual spectacle of District B13. Pirate’s might be epic, but District will be the film to make your jaw drop.

Podcasts. At first, I thought the idea was a bit terrible: amateurish radio full of self important types who wanted to hear their own voices. Listening to someone read their blog? No thanks.

Then, of course, came the Ricky Gervais podcast. It was suggested, by various people, that I give it a go so I did, and I’ve never looked back. Half an hour of bizarre rants by the incomparable Karl Pilkington, coralled by Gervais and writing partner Stephen Merchant. For the journey to and from work (back when I had such a thing), it was care-free easy entertainment in half an hour.

Despite reading 250-odd sites via their feeds, I can count on one hand the number of podcasts that I listen to. Why? They’re almost always far too long. Unless you are a top comedian or niche commentator, chances are you don’t have the talent to make it worth most people’s while to listen for half an hour. That’s a long time to give up in one solid block. It’s not even that your material doesn’t warrant a listen, it’s just that it requires a great deal of effort to sit down once a week or so for that length of time. There are a few podcasters that I would like to listen to, Dustin Diaz being a prime example, but it feels too much like adding a signficant burden to the already considerable pile of stuff to do, the masses of other media already taking up my time.

The solution? Make shorter podcasts! I, and I’m sure many others, would be more receptive to six 5 minute podcasts a week than one half hour effort. It’s only five minutes that needs to be squeezed in — heck, you can do that while checking your email at work in the morning.

And you know what? It’ll be good for some of you (not pointing any fingers) to show some editorial skills and restraint. Sure, the banter is important, but it often threatens to overtake important messages. Bite-sized is best.

Some gems this month, some crud.

First off is X-Men 3. If you’ve seen the first two, you know exactly what to expect: brainless over the top action, terrible dialogue, and a plot which is poor enough before the fan boys scream at it for being entirely off-canon. The show can be pretty and there are some good moments (exemplified by the under utilised Kitty Pryde) but it is, for the most part, forgettable.

Remakes are hard to do, and classic disaster movies like the Poseidon Adventure are no different. Renamed to simply Poseidon, we get the same premise: a luxury cruise liner is sinking and a small band of survivors want to escape. Despite the plot, this is a film that manages to create some genuine drama and suspense with masterful shifts of water and fate. If you can place the character development as secondary to the spectacle of the journey through an upturned ship, then there is plenty here to enjoy.

From Hong Kong comes a Triad flick, Election. Following the fate of two potential leaders of the triad at the upcoming traditional elections, we see a power struggle fought out politically at first, but quickly turning to violence. An interesting take against the good and bad dichotomy (even the “good” side are bad), the film still does not surpass the sum of its admittedly competent parts.

Thank You For Smoking is a fine comedy about a smooth-talking, tobacco industry lobbyist who tries to balance his job with raising his son well. It’s a surprisingly well cast film, even Rob Lowe comes off well, full of the sort of lines that you will be quoting for months to come if you are the sort of person who does such things. Definitely one to see.

Spanish film El Lobo is based on the story of the mole sent to infiltrate ETA in order to collapse the Basque leadership and stop violent action against the Spanish state. We follow the main character from his family life through to militant spy. While some of the progression is patchy at best, the story is decent enough. If you view it more as a dramatised and possibly skewed documentary, then you won’t go far wrong.

On the other hand, if you watch Ultraviolet you will go far wrong. Let me start by saying it’s a candidate for worst film of the year, it’s that bad. The ineptitude of this film permeates through every fibre of its being: the lousy acting, the drunken plot (the term is used loosely), the abysmal lighting, CGI, physical world; everything is wrong. And not just wrong: inconsistent. The only way a film could be this poorly conceived is out of sheer malice.

Finally, Fearless is the final martial arts film starring Jet Li, before he takes more serious roles (how long will it last? Not long). The plot is pretty standard (brash young kung fu kid makes horrible mistake, takes up a simpler life, then returns as a wisened master) but, as always, it’s the choreography that makes the film. The fights are the nuanced masterworks of motion that we’ve come to expect, and with minimal wirework encroaching into the sense of solidity. Though it won’t change the world, Fearless is a solid kung-fu film.

The winner for June is: Thank You For Smoking.

This post has been a long time coming. Originally it was going to be an entire series of posts (remember when I used to post more than 5 items a month? Good times), going into an inane amount of detail, and featuring case studies on every single aspect of the featured subject.

It is about doors.

You might be thinking that I couldn’t possibly be dull enough to fill post upon post with doors. The idea was going to be to examine what is arguably the most common object in everyday human interaction and go into why it is, pardon my French, fucked up so often. I would start with looking at each component (primarily the handle, but any windows play an important part in interaction) and show how they are usually done so badly as to make the primary task of opening a door more difficult for people.

It was to be an opus on how, by paying attention to the task at hand and examining small details, to best design an object. But all you really need to know is this:

Excluding life threatening situations, door design is the single most common bit of bad design. Remember: handles mean pull, panels mean push. Never change this. For large values of never.

Ever have to design a door? Now you know how. Ever need to design a car, pen, website or anything, bear the above lesson in mind.

Yes, it’s late but, in my defence, we’ve been having remarkably good weather these last few weeks. This month there are six films up for review. Onwards.

First up is the suprising Silent Hill; surprising because despite some fairly impressive special effects with which to play (the melting between worlds), the film is incredibly bad. A bad mix of the first two Silent Hill games, the plot doesn’t really know where it is going. The acting is as b-movie as you would expect, with Sean Bean putting in a terrible performance (the man cannot do American accents, don’t make him try). Couple this with a plot unravelled in a haphazard mixture of dream sequences, narration, flash backs and every other bad ploy taken by poor film makers in recent years and you have a film which does not do the plodding source material justice.

Slither is an excellent comedy horror film that finds the right balance between laughs, characters and a hokey plot. Sure, it’s a fairly textbook premise (aliens body snatchers 101), but the spirit of the film is good natured and never tries to be more than that. It won’t be winning any awards, but worth the effort.

On the action front, Mission:Impossible 3 is exactly that: a dumb action film. Arguably better in many ways that it’s fairly shoddy predecessors, this take is handled with more style but the same logical gaps that make the series exasperatingly painful. Hoffman did the best with what he had to work with and Cruise… well, Cruise runs about a bit. Expect to see the same old rope tricks and face changes.

An American Haunting is a schizoid horror film. Set primarily in the 1700s, it chops and changes between wanting to be a ghost story, to something far more pedestrian but chilling, to a ghost revenge story, all bookmarked by a pointless narration in modern times. The desperation of the family comes across as laboured, and the decline of the main characters as expected. Terrible.

Scott Ryan has put together a delightfully offbeat mockumentary in the form of The Magician, the story of a hired killer who is eventually offered a large cash sum not to kill a victim. The subject matter is dark and the humour is too, coming mostly from the bizarre conversations between the central character, has cameraman and would-be victim. Funny, different, good: go see.

The gross-out comedy stuffing is pretty stale these days, but Waiting… is a decent example of serving it well. The guts of this comedy revolve around a simple recurring joke involving male nudity (if you haven’t been introduced to “The Game” then it’s not my place to get you in), but it hits just the right spot. The character development etc are as weak as one might expect but like all films of this genre, it’s about the quirks of the characters as they stand. Not a masterpiece by any standards, but still a fairly stand-up, dumb comedy.

Finally, Down In The Valley stars Ed Norton as a cowboy who finds himself a cowgirl in the sprawl of Los Angeles. Things, inevitably, go wrong and Ed goes a bit off the wall. While Norton puts in a decent performance, the film itself is fairly meandering and badly cut. Dull, turgid, bad.

The winner for May is easily The Magician.