I recently finished David Simon and Ed Burns’ book The Corner, a piece of extended reporting about life around a Baltimore drug corner. There’s one thing about the way they write it which really gets me: every so often they’ll have a section explaining the absurdity of the situation they’ve been talking about, how futile [...]
One of the best films that I saw at the EIFF this year was Errol Morris’ documentary Standard Operating Procedure about Abu Ghraib. It takes his usual approach: a series of interviews with those involved with limited narration. Here the most prominent interviewees are Lynndie England and Sabrina Harmann, together others who were either directly [...]
One of the things I keep noticing in Q&A sessions for documentary films is that some people seem to have a hard time relating to the people they see on screen as being actual people. Today I watched The Order of Myths at the EIFF. The film is a documentary about the Mardi Gras celebrations [...]
Clearly most of the people working to extend the lifetimes of copyrights and other licenses just aren’t ambitious enough. I wonder if the relevant lobbyists are going to argue for compliance with the Egyptian law once it comes into effect.
I saw Tell No One a week or so ago. It a very good film – a nice thriller, very well put together. I recommend it. That’s not the thing that makes me happiest about the film, though. The thing that makes me happiest is that two of the characters are gay and in a [...]
Sadly, the attempts to control distribution of those numbers aren’t being done using copyright but are instead being done using the DMCA. Exactly what that law was intended for. Update: Just to emphasise, if you want to complain about something then the first place to start is with the laws. Get in touch with the [...]