Not bad but

I just watched the first episode of Prosperity, the new RTE drama from the lads what wrote and directed Adam and Paul on the RTE website. I will hold off saying anything about the show itself until I have seen a bit more, but fair dues to RTE for sticking it up on the web for all to see. They do seem to be taking the internet seriously, and doing a decent job of moving content online.

The prosperity website also has interviews, images, background info on the cast etc and you can watch an episode with commentary from director Lenny Abrahamson and writer Mark O’Halloran. It's not bad but.

Jesus to Jobs: you were wrong

I find, sometimes, that there can be a lot of good stuff in the bible. You can, like, learn from it.

Take, for instance, the recent kerfuffle around the price of the iPhone. It was released in a fanfare of publicity in June this year and put on the market at $599 for the 8GB model. This sold like hotcakes for a few months until everyone who really, really wanted one, had one. Apple then cut the price to $399.

This prompted a load of customers (and bloggers) to loudly cry unfair and accuse Apple of taking advantage of them. Sample quote taken from New York Times story:

“I just felt so used as a consumer,” he said. “They hyped up the iPhone for six months and built up our expectations, and then they grabbed our extra $200 and ran.”

Steve Jobs originally said tough crap, but given all the bad publicity Apple eventually agreed to give a $100 apple store credit to anyone who had paid the original price.

This story from Tennessee's Decatur Daily (I am a regular reader), goes to the Bible's parable of the workers in the vineyard to argue that those who complained were wrong to do so and Jobs was also wrong to back down. Here is Matthew 20:

For the Kingdom of Heaven is like unto a man that is a householder, who went out early in the morning to hire laborers into his vineyard. And when he had agreed with the laborers for a penny a day, he sent them into his vineyard.

And he went out about the third hour and saw others standing idle in the marketplace and said unto them, `Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right I will give you.' And they went their way.

Again he went out about the sixth and the ninth hour and did likewise.

And about the eleventh hour he went out and found others standing idle, and said unto them, `Why stand ye here all the day idle?'

They said unto him, `Because no man hath hired us.' He said unto them, `Go ye also into the vineyard, and whatsoever is right, that shall ye receive.'

So when evening had come, the lord of the vineyard said unto his steward, `Call the laborers and give them their hire, beginning from the last unto the first.'

And when they came that were hired about the eleventh hour, they received every man a penny.

But when the first came, they supposed they should have received more; and they likewise received every man a penny.

And when they had received it, they murmured against the master of the house, saying, `These last have wrought but one hour, and thou hast made them equal unto us who have borne the burden and the heat of the day.'

But he answered one of them and said, `Friend, I do thee no wrong. Didst thou not agree with me for a penny? Take that which is thine and go thy way. I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?'

Or, to put it another way, them's the breaks.

Scaredy Cats

Two articles I came across recently online that show how people have a tendency to worry about advances in technology, even when there is no reason to, and when this new technology can bring benefits if we just let it.

The first is from Spiked and is called Mobile phones are safe, but lets panic anyway. Spiked editor Brendan O'Neill argues that lots of people, egged on by journalists, want to believe that mobile phones are dangerous. This is despite a series of scientific studies which show that there are no short to medium term dangers from mobile phone radiation, and no evidence showing long term damage either.

O'Neill points out that even scientists themselves, when publicising their results, are careful to say that although they can't find any dangers, they can't be sure they are 100 per cent safe. And even though nothing is 100 per cent safe, newspapers then react with headlines such as ‘Mobile phones don’t cause cancer in the short-term. Long-term, who knows?’ (London Times).

The second is from Reason magazine and looks at whether organic food is healthier, better for the environment or nutritionally superior compared to food grown on large farms using pesticides or organic modification. According to the science, its not.

Key quote from the Reason story:

"Look folks, eat all the organic food you want. Just don't be fooled into thinking that you're doing something good for your health or for the health of the planet. You're not."

My guess would be a majority of people still think that radiation from mobile phones is probably dangerous and that eating organic food is good for your health. Why are these ideas so widespread despite the evidence to the contrary? I dunno.

O'Neill goes on to argue that there is a general irrational fear of new technology running through society, which is not just causing us to worry a little about getting cancer from mobiles but use them anyway (or cause us to spend a little extra on organic potatoes), but is actually stopping us from taking full advantage of benefits of modern technology to do things like spread information and provide cheap food to people who need it.

Key quote:

"This fear of mobiles is likely to be doing more damage than mobiles themselves, certainly in the here and now. While we can be fairly sure that mobile phones are not damaging our health, the precautionary principle is harming society: it is slowing down new technological developments, stunting investment in newer and improved forms of communication, and spreading fear and queasiness amongst the population."

Them's the breaks.

my picture

Hallam Foe

I went to see Hallam Foe in the IFC over the weekend. It was a most interesting film. Very, very unsubtle and fast moving, and rollicking along through a series of some most unlikely events involving lots of sex and selfishness to a surprisingly satisfactory end which left me, well, satisfied.

The plot is simple enough, with sword of Oedipus hanging all over it. Hallam is just after finishing school, but he is far from grown up yet. Hallam's mam died in a boating incident a few years back and he is having trouble coping. He retreats to a tree house on the grounds of his rich architect father's rural Scottish almost castle, and uses binoculars to spy on locals doing it in the woods.

In the first act his older sister, possibly a steadying force, departs for Australia, and his new step-mom, formerly his Dad's secretary Verity (Claire Forlani!), definitely an imbalancing arrival, arrives. Hallam suspects Verity (great name!) of offing his mam to install herself in the almost castle, and is fairly blunt about his suspicions, calling her a prostitute in an amusing scene in a fancy restaurant.

Verity is well able for this though, and confronts him in the first of a number of the mildly disturbing when you think about it mother / son encounters that run through the film. Hallam leaves for Edinburgh's mean streets, which are wet and dark and where he is mistaken for a rent-boy. He is a resourceful sort though, and soon finds another replacement mother figure in the shapely shape of a HR manager in a swanky hotel.

That is about enough of the plot, but there is plenty more, even if it is never over surprising. Jamie Bell as Hallam, is likable and believable as the slightly unhinged but sympathetic hero. Ciaran Hinds is understated as Hallam's ineffectual Dad. Sophia Myles is a nice mix of sweetness, vulnerability and tight business skirt as Hallam's Mom number three. Forlani, who I last saw in the 1990s in Meet Jack Black and more memorably in Mallrats, is fine as the bitchy, sexy, nasty step-mom. Ewen Bremner has a small role as a bell hop with a surprisingly thick Scottish accent.

Hallam Foe is only about an hour and a half long, and the plot unwinds quickly and straightforwardly with characters not spending too much time thinking about consequences of what they are going to do. The film is very funny, with Bell showing a good sense of comic timing. He will be a star, methinks. The soundtrack - with Scottish indie groups from the Domino label like Orange Juice, Sons & Daughters and, well, Franz Ferdinand standing out - is top notch (film won best music, as well as independent jury prize at Berlin 2007).

The real star of the film though is director David Mackenzie, last seen (by me) in gritty but intellectual drama Young Adam, which had Peter Mullen, Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton in a love triangle on a barge. This is another literary adaptation, from a novel by Peter Jinks (never heard of him), but it is more whimsical and the style is more showy, but not too much so. Some nice touches, such as close-ups of eyes and hands and also sweeping vistas of night-time Edinburgh roofscapes, set an intimate, slightly off-kilter tone, that fits the story very well. Sexual acts and actors of various sorts tie the story together and Mackenzie's presentation of these is skillful.

Recommended. And if you don't take my word for it you can check out Nic Roeg's approving letter to Mackenzie on Hallam's blog.

Harry Enfield - Women know your limits

Wanted to pick some clip to practice adding a video clip to the blog. This is a classic. Look listen and take heed indeed.

Ambassador to be turned into a library

It looks like the Ambassador Theatre / Cinema / vacant building is going to be turned into a library. The Irish Times said yesterday that the ILAC library was moving there. Which is a pretty deadly idea I reckons. The €8m revamp is part of a bigger regeneration of Parnell Square, which, in fairness, badly needs it.

The library is a great idea though, especially as the present ILAC Centre location is so dreary and unwelcoming. Apparently there was another plan to turn the Ambassador into a "cabaret venue" with "traditional Irish enterainment" and food. Which sounds horrible. After a quick google I also came across an old thread on archeire.com where the mayor had called Dublin illiterate, as it lacked a decent central public library, which I thought was funny.

The whole idea of opening up the Parnell Square area is also well overdue. The whole top of O'Connell St could do with a good wash. But this would be a good start I reckons.

Dubai comes to Dublin

Ballsbridge is about to change into Dubai. Or something along those lines according to news of the redevelopment of the Jurys Berkeley Court site in Dublin 4 today. According to the press release...

"The plan includes a new landmark 37 storey tower standing 132 metres, sculpted like a diamond. It will have at its base, a cultural quarter and will be positioned at the entrance to the former Jurys Hotel and be centred on the median of Pembroke Road.

The plan is a mixed use development combining a multitude of facilities for the area - consisting of generous family sized apartments, destination retail, which includes an underground mall, an embassy complex that can accommodate the relocation of some of the 29 embassies currently in Ballsbridge, an office block, a 232 bedroom luxury hotel, an ice rink, a crèche for 150 children and a cultural quarter which will incorporate an art house cinema, a jazz club, art galleries, artists’ studios, music rooms, rehearsal studios and a European Centre for Culture to become a focal point for the work of many cultural institutes."

It will also be next door to the new 'glass tyre' shaped Lansdowne Road. Its about time Dublin got something on this kind of scale I reckons. The shiny video the developers have put together talks a good bit about high density polution and mixed used developments and gives it the hard sell, including a graphic that makes urban sprawl appear positively evil looking, which should not really be necessary but probably is. I imagine the end result will be scaled down a little after a brouhaha of well to do nimby squealing but I hope not. Of course the even well-er to do developers will become even more well-er to do, but them's the breaks.

By the way bringing Dubai into this post is possibly just a means for me to remind you if haven't seen before about the stuff I wrote about the development of Dubai (including world's tallest building the Burj Dubai) for the Sunday Business Post a few weeks back. You can read it here, on my work blog.


The developer's (Mountbrook) website is here.

Dermot 1 Geldof 0

One of my favourite things to complain about is Bob Geldof and specifically the whole Live 8 phenomena a few years back. At the time I did an interview with Jonathan Edgar from Goal where he said the drop the debt campaigners were missing the point. And yesterday I was interested to come across an article on spiked by a Ghanian teacher who is currently touring the UK to promote the new WORLDwrite documentary Damned By Debt Relief. Here is what De Roy Kwesi Andrew reckons:

"I had a memorable discussion at a sixth-form college where Bob Geldof had given a talk just a week earlier. Most of the students who attended had participated in Live8 and Make Poverty History, so they were shocked at my uncompromising swipe at such campaigns."

"When I said that the only ‘mission accomplished’ by Live8 and the G8 meetings in Gleneagles in summer 2005 was to promote and entrench survivalism, interference and low horizons, they were rattled. I outlined the facts about the insidious strings attached to the debt-relief initiative: for example, debt-relief programmes forbid poor countries from investing in the industrial base of their societies, instead demanding that they set up small-scale ‘poverty reduction’ initiatives. This is not only deplorable Western interference in our affairs; it also prevents us from taking leaps forward."

So it turns out I was right all along. Which is nice. The main gist of the article (entitled You hate being affluent? Then swap with us'), is that people in the 'developed world' protesting about climate change, low cost air travel and increasing industrialisation are doing more harm than good to African countries who need more development, more factories, roads, airports etc if they are to make decent lives for themselves.

Andrew reckons that we should be concentrating on using our brains to discover clever solutions to the problems associated with progress and developments and not sitting in fancy apartments or coffee shops discussing our carbon footprint. Makes sense to me.

The full article is here:

The Road

I finished The Road, the new Cormac McCarthy novel, on Tuesday evening, racing through the last 100 or so pages in one go. It is very, very good.

I got it as a present from my brother Colin who knows I've been a big McCarthy fan since reading Blood Meridian in college, and All the Pretty Horses is another on my top books list. I don't know if The Road is up there, but it is still very, very good.

(quick plot outline - father and son wander across a post-apocalyptic american countryside, scavenging for food in the ruins of houses and cities and trying to avoid murderous mad max style road agents)

Blood Meridian and The Road are quite similar in a number of ways. There is the trail across a bleak American countryside for the most obvious thing. The clearly described violence and death. The beautifully sparse prose. The unjudgemental tone. The biblical resonances. The lack of female characters. The cannibalism. The Road has stunning images of burnt corpses, people starving and trapped underground, the boy swimming in the sea), which are now (metaphorically of course) seared onto the inside of my eyelids.

But where Blood Meridian is primal and, well, bloody, The Road is more detached. It is a much more accessible (read potentially popular) book I think. The father - son relationship is painfully captured and there is much more emotion. People will cry while reading this book (although I didn't. obviously).

Where Blood Meridian was more episodic, The Road is one long build-up, and reading it I was completely wracked with tension. It gets pretty hard to concentrate on what is going on now at times, as you are constantly fearful of what is coming. There are times when they don't eat. There are times when they are hiding. There are times when they have to defend themselves. You are fairly sure that there is not going to be a particularly happy ending and every time the two got separated I was speed reading till they were both safe.

The father and son do not talk much, but when they do you listen. He has told his son that they are the good ones, who are carrying the flame even through this post-apocalyptic nightmare. They don't discuss what this flame might be. They don't need to. It is very, very, very sad.

The Bourne Ultimatum

I just watched the Bourne Ultimatum there on Sunday evening in the Savoy. It was pretty good, I am not normally one for long fights or chases but these were pretty well done. Choreographed, I think is the word.

Bourne III was fairly thought provoking for a present day actiony thriller I thought. Having got half way through the first Bourne book before throwing it away in exasperation, and avoiding the first two films, I was persuaded along to this by the favourable reviews. And I would agree with their gist that it is a bit of a throwback to the 70s paranoia type films with the enemy being big government or institutions. No harm this. I can just about believe that the CIA can control the CCTV cameras in London train stations. Just about.

Also involving from my perspective was the involvement of a Guardian journalist as a key character in the setup. Now I am far from a security correspondent for a top European paper, but still, like, you know. Maybe someday.

Damon's blank baffled but competent face worked pretty well. You believe him when he says he does not who he is. None of the other cast had to rummage too deep either. Julia Style's character was laughably passive, and then just headed off out of the film on a bus, which was funny. Neither Joan Allen or David Strathairn have anything to do. Presume they got well compensated.

But in fairness the supporting cast are not the point. Paul Greengrass is the real star. His film fairly hurtles along, and you are impressed by Bourne's daring and wits. The jittery camera and snappy editing work well. The sequence where the Guardian journo is trailed through Waterloo Station is fantastically well directed and unfolded. The zooming down from directly overhead google earth style on to the streets of Turin, Paris, London, New York etc was pretty damn cool looking. As well as the janey they can see us all the time aspect it also worked well to show that most cities look and feel pretty much the same now, apart from a few details like nice tiled roofs in Morocco or the Arc de Triomphe.

So a thumbs up.