Land of Whimsy tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2009-05-20://2 2013-06-19T19:40:29Z Movable Type Pro 4.25 BD impressions: Zero Dark Thirty tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3908 2013-06-18T11:52:56Z 2013-06-18T11:52:56Z The film: I enjoyed but wasn't blown away by Kathryn Bigelow's previous film, THE HURT LOCKER. I didn't fully engage with the characters and ultimately found it rather slight in terms of overall substance. ZERO DARK THIRTY, detailing the hunt... Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com The film: I enjoyed but wasn't blown away by Kathryn Bigelow's previous film, THE HURT LOCKER. I didn't fully engage with the characters and ultimately found it rather slight in terms of overall substance. ZERO DARK THIRTY, detailing the hunt for Osama bin Laden, constitutes a step up on pretty much every level. The protagonist, Maya, is, as I understand it, a composite of various real-life operatives, and Mark Boal's script is pleasingly free of unnecessary back-story. Jessica Chastain's performance, with her steely-jawed demeanour and piercing gaze, sells you on the character's drive without requiring some sort of childhood trauma. It's her film through and through, and she brings the character to life to the extent that she is a constant presence, even when she's off-screen for lengthy stretches of time. It also helps that she has a completely unique look which invariably makes her the most interesting feature of any given scene, instantly standing out from the cavalcade of Identikit grey-suited, grey-haired men. The character brings together the various disparate strands of the hunt, giving what could have felt like an overly sprawling and unfocused narrative a sense of purpose and real drive.

It's difficult to discuss this film without acknowledging the controversy surrounding its depiction of torture. While I can understand why the scenes of Jason Clarke's interrogator beating a prisoner and subjecting him to simulated drowning (among other acts) angered a number of viewers, I can't help feel that that anger is misplaced. No-one in their right mind would nowadays attempt to deny that the CIA carried out these (and worse) acts of barbarism, and Bigelow's approach to the material is sufficiently free of manipulation that she neither condones nor condemns it. Indeed, I'm actually slightly surprised that the CIA, who apparently had considerable power to veto aspects of the script they deemed unacceptable, were happy to be shown in this light... unless, to this day, they genuinely see nothing wrong with this type of behaviour, which is always possible. Regardless, while no film is completely free of an agenda, I'm inclined to feel that those criticising ZERO DARK THIRTY would be better placed expending their energies criticising the multitude of other, far more mendacious Hollywood movies that routinely fellate the security services in exchange for access to the latest helicopters and gun toys (cf. Bay, Michael).

I was thoroughly gripped by ZERO DARK THIRTY and consider it an early contender for my favourite film of 2013. 9/10

Image quality: There's really nothing I to say against the image quality on this disc, which is superlative every step of the way. Shot on the Arri Alexa, ZERO DARK THIRTY doesn't exactly look filmic, but has a clean look that supports Bigelow's unflashy, no-nonsense style of filmmaking. Detail is superlative in the close-ups, to the extent that the dreaded phrase "demo material" seems appropriate in terms of showing off just how crisp a 1080p image can look. There is a low amount of noise visible throughout most of the movie's duration, particularly apparent in the darker scenes. While it doesn't look entirely like film grain, it gives a pleasing sense of texture that would otherwise have been lacking. There are no issues to report with the encode. 10/10

Zero Dark Thirty
label: Universal; disc country: UK; region code: ABC;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.85:1; source format: ARRIRAW

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]]> Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3907 2013-06-10T18:55:22Z 2013-06-10T18:55:22Z These here captures are from Italian label Lucky Red's recent release of Elio Petri's Oscar-winning INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION, and if more 1970s Italian films looked like this on BD, I'd be much happier. The BD is derived... Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com These here captures are from Italian label Lucky Red's recent release of Elio Petri's Oscar-winning INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION, and if more 1970s Italian films looked like this on BD, I'd be much happier. The BD is derived from a 4K restoration by Colorworks in collaboration with Cinetica di Bologna at L'Immagine Ritrovata, with funding provided by the Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation, The Film Foundation and Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
label: Lucky Red; disc country: Italy; region code: B;
codec: AVC; aspect ratio: 1.85:1; source format: 35mm (3-perf)

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]]> A system building we will go tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3906 2013-06-10T17:01:27Z 2013-06-10T17:01:27Z Well, it's that time of the year again: the time when I perform a major upgrade on my main computer and bankrupt myself in the process. Actually, the last time I did this was three years ago, when I bought... Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com Well, it's that time of the year again: the time when I perform a major upgrade on my main computer and bankrupt myself in the process. Actually, the last time I did this was three years ago, when I bought my current Core i7 setup. Since then, I've upgraded a handful of components, most notably the video card, but pretty much everything else has remained the same since May 2010. The reason for this is that, over the last few years, CPU improvements have been, to put it politely, incremental. My current system uses the first generation of i7 processors, code-named Nehalem, and subsequent generations have offered fairly minor improvements in the world of gaming. In terms of multi-threading, power efficiency and video encoding, it's another story, though, and all those incremental improvements do eventually add up. We're now on the fourth generation of i7 processors, code-named Haswell, and having sat out the previous two generations, I now feel the the time is ripe to take the plunge and retire my venerable old (in computer world terms) Nehalem.

A system building we will go

I've gone with an entry-level Z87-A motherboard from ASUS (my go-to company for motherboards for years now) and a Core i7 4770 3.40GHz CPU. I'm under the impression that the overclocking headroom for these processors is basically a lottery so I'm not sure how far I'll be able to push it, but I'm expecting to at least match the 3.7 GHz I'm currently running my stock 2.8 GHz Nehalem at. I'm sticking with my current RAM (plus an extra 4 GB stick to take me up from 12 GB to 16 GB, thanks to the move from Nehalem's triple channel to Haswell's dual channel memory architecture - don't ask), case, power supply, CPU cooler and of course all the various external peripherals. That just leaves the video card to take care of, and as it happens, I'm already in possession of one of these:

A system building we will go

That's right: a GeForce GTX 780. For the first time in ages, I've gone with NVIDIA rather than ATI (still can't quite bring myself to refer to them as AMD). All that raw power was too tempting to pass up, and I'm really glad I made the switch. While the very different control panel takes some getting used to and I do miss ATI's built-in overclocking/power monitoring suite (though EVGA's Precision X is really cool), I've experienced no problems whatsoever, and there's a lot to be said for being able to run the new TOMB RAIDER at 2560x1440 with all the graphical settings maxed out at a pretty much constant 60 frames per second on a single GPU. And in those occasional instances when the frame rate does drop below 60, NVIDIA's unique adaptive v-sync technology comes into play. In a nutshell:

Nothing is more distracting than framerate stuttering and screen tearing. The first tends to occur when framerates are low, the second when framerates are high. Adaptive V-Sync is a smarter way to render frames. At high framerates [i.e. above your monitor's refresh rate], V-sync is enabled to eliminate tearing, at low frame rates [i.e. below your monitor's refresh rate], it's disabled to minimize stuttering. It gets rid of distractions so you can get on with gaming.

It makes such sense that I'm amazed no-one has come up with it before, and I suspect ATI are going to have to come up with their own version if I'm to ever consider going back to them in the future.

For the time being, I suspect this card is somewhat bottlenecked by the limitations of my old CPU. I can't wait to get the new one installed (it should be arriving on Friday) so I can unleash the full potential of this mighty beast.

Oh yeah, and if anyone wants to buy a used Radeon 7950 video card or X-Fi Prelude sound card, be sure to hit me up on eBay.

]]> Giallo goodness tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3905 2013-06-10T16:02:54Z 2013-06-10T16:02:54Z Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com A couple of giallo-themed videos for you to enjoy.

The first is the teaser for Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani's L'ETRANGE COULEUR DES LARMES DE TON CORPS (The Strange Colour of Your Body's Tears), their follow-up to the visually and aurally brilliant AMER. It amazes me that they can generate so much anticipation from a single shot:

The second is LA MORTE È BELLA, a brilliant short film by Daniel Portillo (who posts here as Danno). Like Cattet and Forzani's work, it's heavily giallo-influenced, combining traditional iconography like the black-gloved/hatted killer and fetishistic close-ups of knives with a more modern sensibility. Don't miss it:

]]> About time too tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3904 2013-06-01T19:20:47Z 2013-06-01T19:20:47Z Well, here it is: all 97,257 words of it, completed yesterday at just after 5:30 PM. After I've had a final read through of it, it'll go to my supervisors for their feedback. Then, once I've made the inevitable... Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com About time too

Well, here it is: all 97,257 words of it, completed yesterday at just after 5:30 PM. After I've had a final read through of it, it'll go to my supervisors for their feedback. Then, once I've made the inevitable amendments, it'll go to formal submission. It's not quite the end of the road yet, but I'm looking forward to having quite a bit more free time on my hands in the coming weeks.

]]> Hang on in there tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3903 2013-04-29T21:01:45Z 2013-04-29T21:01:45Z I haven't forgotten about this place, guys. I intend to be back very soon with some actual posts once I've got this thesis done and dusted. I finished the redraft of Chapter 5 (of 7) yesterday evening, so the end... Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com I haven't forgotten about this place, guys. I intend to be back very soon with some actual posts once I've got this thesis done and dusted. I finished the redraft of Chapter 5 (of 7) yesterday evening, so the end is definitely in sight.

See you all at the other end of the tunnel (if anyone's still reading this site, that is).

]]> It's coming together tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3902 2013-02-26T19:47:34Z 2013-02-26T19:47:34Z Slowly but surely. Note: some section titles and all page numbers beyond Chapter 2 are placeholders, but the final structure is pretty much nailed down at this stage.... Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com It's coming together

Slowly but surely.

Note: some section titles and all page numbers beyond Chapter 2 are placeholders, but the final structure is pretty much nailed down at this stage.

]]> Top 10 films of 2012 - #1 tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3901 2013-02-14T00:00:00Z 2013-02-14T00:00:00Z And there we have it - my ten favourite films of 2012, by UK release date (hence the inclusion of the likes of SHAME, which actually came out in some countries in 2011). If you're interested, my entire Top... Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com Top 10 films of 2012 - #10

And there we have it - my ten favourite films of 2012, by UK release date (hence the inclusion of the likes of SHAME, which actually came out in some countries in 2011).

If you're interested, my entire Top 20, as it currently stands, looks like this:

  1. Polisse (France, Maïwenn)
  2. Argo (USA, Ben Affleck)
  3. Skyfall (UK/USA, Sam Mendes)
  4. Prometheus (USA/UK, Ridley Scott)
  5. Headhunters (Norway/Germany, Morten Tyldum)
  6. Killer Joe (USA, William Friedkin)
  7. A Royal Affair (Denmark/Sweden/Czech Republic, Nikolaj Arcel)
  8. Rust and Bone (France/Belgium, Jacques Audiard)
  9. Shame (UK, Steve McQueen)
  10. Brave (USA, Mark Andrews and Brenda Chapman)
  11. Lawless (USA, John Hillcoat)
  12. Carnage (France/Germany/Poland/Spain, Roman Polanski)
  13. The Innkeepers (USA, Ti West)
  14. Ted (USA, Seth MacFarlane)
  15. The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (UK/USA, Peter Lord)
  16. The Imposter (UK, Bart Layton)
  17. Ruby Sparks (USA, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris)
  18. The Muppets (USA, James Bobin)
  19. The Hunger Games (USA, Gary Ross)
  20. The Dark Knight Rises (USA/UK, Christopher Nolan)
]]> Top 10 films of 2012 - #2 tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3900 2013-02-13T00:00:00Z 2013-02-13T00:00:00Z Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com Top 10 films of 2012 - #10

]]> Top 10 films of 2012 - #3 tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3899 2013-02-12T00:00:00Z 2013-02-12T00:00:00Z Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com Top 10 films of 2012 - #10

]]> Top 10 films of 2012 - #4 tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3898 2013-02-11T00:00:00Z 2013-02-11T00:00:00Z Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com Top 10 films of 2012 - #10

]]> Top 10 films of 2012 - #5 tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3897 2013-02-10T00:00:00Z 2013-02-10T00:00:00Z Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com Top 10 films of 2012 - #10

]]> Top 10 films of 2012 - #6 tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3896 2013-02-09T00:00:00Z 2013-02-09T00:00:00Z Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com Top 10 films of 2012 - #10

]]> Top 10 films of 2012 - #7 tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3895 2013-02-08T00:00:00Z 2013-02-08T00:00:00Z Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com Top 10 films of 2012 - #10

]]> Top 10 films of 2012 - #8 tag:www.landofwhimsy.com,2013://2.3894 2013-02-07T00:00:00Z 2013-02-07T00:00:00Z Michael http://www.landofwhimsy.com Top 10 films of 2012 - #10

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