Obviously I’m not American, but even I heard about the shooting of Oscar Grant by the BART Police in Oakland, California in 2009. I was a regular of the Quarter to Three forum at that time and I remember forum regulars who are Bay Area residents being abuzz over the incident. The incident resulted in Grant’s death and triggered huge protests and riots due to how widely amateur videos filmed using mobile telephones and personal cameras were disseminated online.
This film made it into my “to watch” list based on a recommendation from a Broken Forum regular. Director Howard Hawks had an incredible decade in the 1940s, with the poster calling His Girl Friday one of best English-language comedies ever made, The Big Sleep inarguably the best film noir ever and Red River the best traditional western.
This is a course I’ve been meaning to take for a while now but the timing was just never right for me before now. The reason obviously is that this course is taught by Martin Odersky of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. After all, how often can you attend a course for a programming language taught by the designer of the language?
We caught this in the cinema due to my wife’s insistence. I quite liked the first movie. It was standard cartoon action fare but had excellent world-building and some of the best flight sequences ever put on screen. It also helped that the plot, while being yet another retelling of the hero’s journey, is tightly focused and easy to become immersed in.
Vulgaria is the first Hong Kong film to be covered in this blog since I started writing extensively about movies earlier this year, an indication of how rarely we watch them nowadays.I’m not entire unaware of director and writer Pang Ho-cheung’s body of work however, having watched various of his films including the “Love in a Puff” duology.
There were two great science-fiction films in 2013. One was Gravity. Her is the other. Of the two, Gravity is immediately spectacular and impressive, wowing audiences with visuals the likes of which we’ve never seen before. But it will be Her that sticks in your mind and that you will talk about with your friends long after the credits have stopped rolling. With some luck, it could also be a film that reshapes how AI is perceived in the public mind for decades to come.
Some quick notes on my recent trip to climb Mt. Rinjani in Lombok, Indonesia.