I must admit, when Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was first announced, my heart sank. Do we really need yet another film version of such an iconic story? Like many I’m getting a bit tired of the recycled tat we get in cinemas these days and would rather see a truly original story. Surely AI hasn’t grasped us yet to the point where we can’t come up with new ideas?
Despite being in his eighties, David Cronenberg doesn’t appear to have settled down yet to make family-friendly films. His last film, Crimes of the Future (2022) caused the entire audience to leave my local cinema until I was the only person left in the theatre. I therefore wasn’t expecting an easy ride when embarking on The Shouds, his new venture, knowing it revolves around technology which allows people to watch their loved ones’ bodies decay in their grave. A nice and cheerful film to watch on a rainy Sunday afternoon, right?
I recently spent a weekend on the Norfolk Coast enjoying the beach, the sunshine and copious amounts of ice cream. As usual I spent much of my days (when I was not eating ice cream) on long walks. Norfolk has some great long distance walking paths, with the Norfolk Coast Path a firm favourite of mine, and I find myself returning to the prettiest sections again and again. This time I also explored some terrain more inland and racked up over fifty kilometres over the weekend.
To accompany me I brought a very appropriate book that had caught my eye in the library. Windswept: Why Women Walk by Annabel Abbs is part memoir (about Abbs own mixed feelings about walking) and part biography of several famous women who walked. The rota includes Simone de Beauviour, Gwen John, and Georgia O’Keeffe, and I was curious to find out more about their lives and the role walking played in it.
Wes Anderson’s latest has dropped, and we all know what that means: endless discussions as to whether he’s become a parody of himself, is choosing style over substance, etc, etc, etc.
For people spending their valuable time arguing these points, I have one piece of advice: you don’t need to watch his films. You certainly don’t need to like them. It’s okay. You can go and watch something else.
If you have a job where you deal with lots of different projects it can be hard to keep track of all strands and not overlook important issues. Especially if you’re constantly confronted with small but urgent bumps in the road it can be easy to lose track of the bigger picture. This, obviously, can cause major problems later on.
Luckily, there are ways to avoid this. Here are some simple tips and tricks that work for me.
“We really need to track this information. Can you create a spreadsheet so we can start logging this please?”
Sounds familiar? For many it does. “Death by Powerpoint” is a well-known expression but we might as well add “Fatigue by Spreadsheet” to it.
Don’t get me wrong, spreadsheet and Excel have their time in place. But if Excel is your go-to solution when you need to gather, manipulate and present data, is it always the best tool for the job? Or is it just the one you know?
A 3,5 hour-long film about a Holocaust-surviving architect may not sound like the best way to spend your Saturday evening. Yet The Brutalist captured my imagination in a big way and, almost a week after I saw it, still haunts my memories.
If there’s one horror trope that’s been used to the point of exhaustion, it’s the vampire. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could come up with an original vampire story after Interview with the Vampire, The Lost Boys and, god forbid, Twilight.
Robert Eggers therefore seems to have taken the sensible route of not trying to come up with an original story. As any vampire-afficionado will know, Nosferatu is a reworking of a story that first existed as a silent film, and then as a remake in the 1970s. Even though I wasn’t expecting anything new, I still went to see the film as soon as it came out.
Data and coding are buzzwords at the moment: skills people tell you you’re supposed to have without explaining how and why they would be useful. However, even if you have zero interest in coding chances are that knowing a bit more about data analysis will help you in your role. If nothing else, you may find it interesting.
About a year and a half ago I started learning how to code, inspired as I was after meeting some very skilled creative coders. The journey that followed has, so far, been equally exciting and challenging. Unsurprisingly, trying to learn something new and alien can be fiendishly difficult at times, especially when you’re also juggling a full-time job, a martial arts practice, and learning two human languages. Luckily there are some good books around to help you manage the long and winding road.
cococatani 