Green Zone is presented as a thriller in which Matt Damon's team are sent into Iraq in the early part of 2003 post invasion, to neutralise the threat of WMDs in locations already highlighted by intelligence reports. He quickly discovers that these reports aren't worth the "packets" they're written on, and questions the source.
This isn't something that the Pentagon official, Greg Kinnear, is particular eager to hear. So instead he goes to CIA operative Brendon Gleeson who is more responsive to his concerns. That's not the prevailing view.
In the meantime, Kinnear has a team of US special forces led by Jason Isaacs who seem to be getting in the way of things.
Oddly, this must be the first Iraq set drama in which, after a while at least, you don't believe that there are snipers and insurgents around every corner and that Damon's team might get it at any moment. That's probably because it is set in the early days of the conflict, with the film suggesting that had another approach been taken, making use of the Iraqi army rather than disbanding them (and all their years of training and action), a more peaceful settlement might have taken place.
There are some lovely set-pieces like the scene set in the tranquil oasis of the Green Zone where various high ranking officials enjoy a beverage at the pool-side in one of Saddam's palaces. It seems to be more like a Vegas hotel than a warzone. Then there's the incredible stash of money that Gleeson's CIA team have at its disposable - millions of dollars sealed in plastic and piled up on the floor in the corner of the room.
Amy Ryan plays a journalist who works for the Wall Street Journal and begins to realise that she's been led astray by her sources who let her publish evidence that was simply untrue.
Overall, a great film. It would have been nicer for the plot to have had one or two more twists, but that'd have made it unrealistic, whereas as it stands, it's incredibly believable. That's not surprising since it's based on the reminiscence's of Rajiv Chandrasekaran.
Quite why certain reviewers - and yes, Peter Bradshaw, I'm talking about you - have rated it so poorly, I simply fail to understand. It's well worth seeing.
One nice touch I noticed is that along with The Guardian, one of whose journalist Greengrass has previously killed in a Bourne film, a report at the end of the film is also emailed to Panorama. Sadly, it can't be emailed to Greengrass's "alma mater", World in Action, because that programme no longer exists on a 21st century ITV. So instead its long time rival would have got this particular scoop.
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I don't often talk about football on the blog, but Arsenal's 5-0 demolition of Porto last night is worthy of recording. The photo above shows Nicklas Bendtner finishing his hattrick from the penalty spot in the 90th minute. But goal of the night must go to Samir Nasri's superb individual goal as he beat three players, dancing around them before scoring from a tight angle.
Arsenal won the tie 6-2 on average aggregate.
Given where I work, there really is no excuse for me not to go to more of the Royal Society's public lectures. So back in January I attended an interesting sounding lecture entitled "The eerie silence: are we alone in the universe?"
The room where they hold the lectures was absolutely packed, and I was glad that I'd turned up in plenty of time. Attendees that I noticed included Jon Ronson (for reasons which will become clear), and Dallas Campbell of the BBC's Bang Goes The Theory. I expect there were a few scientists there.
This year the Royal Society is celebrating its 350th anniversary, and there's a lot going on, so I will try to do more.
But back to the lecture. Professor Paul Davies works at the University of Arizona and is very involved in SETI which of course, is the organisation that searches for extraterrestrial life in the universe.
Is this a mug's game? What's the likelihood that there is someone else out there. Before this lecture, there'd actually been a formal discussion meeting examining what would happen as a consequence of finding extraterrestrial life.
Davies rattled through a lot of the things that we need to consider when searching for life. In some respects, the chances seem very good, but in others, the odds are disappointingly long.
Frank Drake, who founded SETI, came up with the Drake equation designed to determine the number of civilisations in our galaxy. The problem is that to fill it in, there are quite a few unknown variables. And since they represent a probability between 0 and 1, they fundamentally affect N, the number of life sustatining civilisations.
Davies entertainingly quotes Donald Rumsfield in this matter: "There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don't know."
The lecture is available to watch onlineat t he foot of this page.
Davies' book itself digs in significantly greater detail into all aspects of possible extraterrestrials, from the sheer likelihood of them existing, to how we might determine their existance, through to what we should be looking for, where we should be looking, what they might be saying and in what medium. The main problem for all of this is that everywhere is so distant, that communication is rendered nigh on impossible.
Davies even gets into how the news might be broken - basically it's not something that governments have thought about - and what the message might be. He even worries about the effect the existance of life might have on the world's major religions. I'm not sure that the effect would quite be the blow he thinks it would be theologically.
He refers a lot to Carl Sagan's novel Contact, which of course was later made into a pretty decent film. Sagan took plenty of liberties of course, but the basics are pretty decent.
I really enjoyed the book. It's not too long, and its pretty encompassing. The one area Davies doesn't spend a great deal of time, is the idea that the aliens are already here. This question came up to an extent at the lecture, and Davies doesn't waste a great deal of time examining it, since the proof just isn't there.
Overall, well worth reading.
The book is getting a lot of coverage all over the place. The Times' relatively new monthly science magazine devoted the better part of a whole issue to Davies, SETI, and alien life in general. In particular, there's a chunky extract online to be read (or at least until the paywall goes up). And Jon Ronson, who was at the lecture above, writes about meeting Davies in the pages of The Guardian's Weekend magazine.
]]>By October last year, the final volume of the trilogy had been published and I'd read it apace.
In the meantime, I'd heard that Yellow Bird, the same people who'd produced the recent Swedish version of Wallander, were filming the trilogy. From what I heard, the initial idea was that the first film would get a cinema release, while the second two novels - effectively one big story - would follow as a mini-series on Swedish television.
The success of the film's release in Sweden meant that they re-thought that idea, and instead released the two subsequent films in cinemas too. I believe, but may be wrong, that the eventual TV screenings in Sweden will be extended versions of the films.
Anyway, this is all a long way around of me saying that I've been looking forward to seeing this film for quite some time. When I was in Stockholm briefly last autumn, the first two films were already on DVD, but didn't come with English subtitles, and the third film was opening in cinemas. So I've been impatiently waiting for the UK release.
This weekend, that release is finally upon us after several festival screenings over the last six months or so. This has all probably worked in favour of distributor, Momentum, as the books are now mainstays in the paperback fiction charts. The final book in the trilogy gets released in paperback in just three weeks' time.
So my credentials and the back story out of the way: what should we make of the film?
Well it's actually really done very well indeed. The books are chunky and there's a great deal of plot and backstory to be found in them. So any film adaptation has to, of necessity, cut down on the book a great deal. But this is very faithful to the overall feel of the book.
Key in all this are two strong pieces of casting in Michael Nyqvist as "Kalle" Blomkvist, and especially Noomi Rapace as the mixed up Lisbeth Salander - the eponymous "Girl" of the books' titles.
As the film opens, Blomkvist is personally responsible for libelling a major Swedish industrialist - something that sees him getting a prison sentence no less. But before he has to serve it, he hands his resignation from Millennium magazine and takes on a private commission to look into the background behind incidents that took place over forty years earlier amongst the Vanger family - one of whom may well be a murderer.
The film may seem long at the outset - at two and a half hours - but it speeds along at a fair pace, and is tightly directed. The revelations come thick and fast, and the central relationship is interesting. Salander, in particular, is such a fascinating character, that you want to learn more about her. There are plenty of hints about her background and life that won't be opened up properly until later films. Yet the film works on its own too.
In terms of feel, something of the brooding feel of the Kenneth Brannagh Wallanders is present, and if you've enjoyed those excellent films, then you'll love this.
If you've read the book, then you'll certainly want to see this. If you haven't, then you're missing out on an excellent series of books anyway, and as a whodunnit, it's a cracking story.
I can't wait until I see films two and three...
]]>Vincent Price and The Horror of The English Blood Beast is an excellent play based around the making of Witchfinder General in 1967.
If you've never seen Witchfinder General, then after listening to this, you'll almost certainly want to (indeed it's a shame that BBC2 or BBC4 didn't schedule a screening of the film in parallel with this play). Vincent Price crossed the Atlantic to play the title role of Matthew Hopkins, who genuinely was the Witchfinder General in the 17th century during the period of the English Civil War.
The play is set against the making of the film as the audaciously talented director Michael Reeves battled with Price who at the time was a waning force having relied on a series of hackneyed performances in cheap US films.
Nickolas Grace plays Price with gusto as he arrives on an East Anglian set and slowly begins to realise that he's going to have to do something a bit different to his usual autopilot persona. And Kenneth Cranham is excellent as the sleazy Soho producer, Tony Tenser, who's having to deal with his artistic and bull-headed director, his problematical star, and the sleazy expectations of the people he's pre-sold the film to. In real life, as well as things like London in the Raw (recently released on DVD by the BFI in their Flipside series), Tenser worked on two of my favourite early Polanski films, Repulsion and Cul-de-Sac.
The film was to be Matthew Reeves' last, and it's a shame that he didn't live on to make many more films.
Matthew Broughton has obviously done a fair amount of research in writing this piece. Anyway - go away and spend an hour with this terrific play.
When you've listened to it, you really will want to get the excellent DVD which is very reasonably priced, although at time of writing it seems to be proving very popular.
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The weekend's nearly here, and I've put this up early so you can plan your Friday's viewing.
This time around, I've used the medium of multi-coloured Post-It notes!
As ever, best viewed large.
PS These images on Flickr seem to get far more views than anything else I put up. So please do comment here or on Flickr if you're a regular reader because, aside from a few friends and colleagues, I've really no idea who's looking at them.
]]>Quite why anyone would read the Daily Star I'm really not sure. My lack of understanding of the Star is dwarfed by the reason anyone would read the Daily Express. I just don't understand why anyone would read that rag whatever your opinions. I don't particularly like The Sun, The Mirror and certainly not the rabid Daily Mail. But I can appreciate that they all do their respective job well, which is why I fail to understand why anyone would read the inferior versions offered by Richard Desmond's business.
That's all as maybe, but I was intrigued by the 'el cheapo' ad which basically featured a Daily Star logo and a voiceover. The advert was persuading you to read the paper on the basis that "The Daily Star is Britain's most successful newspaper."
Goodness. Who'd have thought?
At the bottom of the screen was a source for the data:
"Source: ABC. Based on circulation increase Jan 09-10."
This is true. Well at least it's true that the Daily Star (cover price 20p nationally) is selling 10,842 more copies than it did in the same month last year, whereas The Sun (20p in the southeast, and northern England) and the Daily Mirror (45p nationally) have both lost sales. And, to be fair, the Star is - remarkably - the only newspaper of any quality to record a year on year circulation increase.
But that's an interesting definition of "successful".
Here's how the last year's sales look:
Source: ABC
So despite being a cheaper product, the paper is still firmly rooted in third place amongst the popular tabloids.
Is the advert misleading? Surely not...
]]>Running at just under ten minutes, it's a remarkable document dating from 1903, and one that had very nearly been completely lost.
Read more at the BFI's website which has some detailed background about the film's origins.
]]>These ads are vile. They prey on the desperate. They're not really just hoping for Elizabeth Duke and TV shopping channel fare. They want your heirlooms. Then they'll send you a cheque with a measly offer knowing that cash in the hand works so well, that in most cases you'll cash the cheque and accept the deal.
In my local shopping centre there's a gold cashing "booth" which is essentially a stand peopled by a couple of surly looking late-teens/early-twenties who sit in front of a laptop staring at Facebook. I'd love to know how much training they've had in basic jewellry valuing. Perhaps they just pop the items in a bag and mail them off themselves?
I was also really disappointed to see that WH Smith has done a deal to place a pile of envelopes outside some branches of its outlets ready for customers to grab.
Gold prices may be quite high at the moment, but what I do know is that you're not getting the best prices from these guys. Survey after survey has shown that you're better off elsewhere. Probably your old-school pawnbroker.
I thinking the gold cashing people have just become my most hated advertisers, just after the loan consolidators and ambulance chasing lawyers (who featured in a fascinating, if shallow, Cutting Edge last week).
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I'd never been to the BBC's Maida Vale studios. But this evening I was off to them to see the BBC Concert Orchestra playing the world premiere of Jonny Greenwood's new piece as Composer-in-Association (not Residence as the notes claimed) - Doghouse.
A deluge of rain gave a nice soaking to the hundred and fifty or so people queuing outside the studios just before we were let in.
There was a full programme recorded live with a Radio 3 presenter - Sara Mohr-Pietsch - introducing pieces or back announcing them as we heard them. Conducting was Robert Ziegler who I think has worked a little with Greenwood on this.
The selection of other music we heard was eclectic to say the least. It's probably a fair reflection of the kind of music that the BBC Concert Orchestra plays regularly. So we heard some 40s and 50s pieces with their soaring strings from films of that period. But we jumped around quite a lot. So we heard Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo, a piece from Angelo Badalamenti's Blue Velvet, an extract from the score to Limelight, apparently composed by Charlie Chaplin himself, and a piece featuring extracts from Frank Waxman's score to Rebecca. There were also pieces by Robert Farnon and Angela Morley.
Before Doghouse, Mohr-Pietsch interviewed Greenwood and Ziegler about the genesis of the piece, and its meaning. Then we heard the 20 minute or so piece which I felt was somewhat different to the other pieces we'd heard. Trying to describe it here would be difficult, but if you're familiar with Popcorn Superhet Receiver, which would become part of the awesome soundtrack to There Will Be Blood, will give you an idea. This is more challenging fare. Indeed it seems that this piece will inform the soundtrack to a forthcoming Japanese film, Norwegian Wood, based on the novel by Murakami.
Anyway, in a couple of weeks, you'll be able to hear as it's broadcast on Afternoon on 3 on Friday 19 March at 2pm.
]]>There were lots of callers on Victoria Derbyshire's programme this morning, with Martin Kelner and John Myers also making appearances (there's feedback throughout, but Kelner and Myers are on at about 1 hour 26 minutes in).
But it's on Twitter that there's really been a reaction. Here are the trending topics on Twitter as of a few minutes ago.
OK - that's in media-luvvy London. What about the UK overall?
And worldwide:
(To be fair, this is before most of the US has woken up. Still a strong showing though.)
The comments are coming in thick and fast.
The Facebook group is going great guns:
And you can add a Twibbon to your avatar:
Then there are all the comments on the various news sites, blogs and forums.
Is all this too much for a station that fewer than 700,000 people listen to on a weekly basis? (Still nearly 200,000 more than The Times sells, as has been pointed out on Twitter, referring to The Times' editorial that said the BBC is closing "a few radio stations that no one has ever listened to.")
Maybe. But almost certainly not. That's the point. It's loved by those who listen. Yes - there's a feeling that if as many people who are already missing it, actually listened to the station, then it wouldn't be facing this threat. In the same way that if as many people who said they missed John Peel after his untimely death actually listened to him on Radio 1, then he wouldn't have been shunted into the small hours.
But any station would kill for such loyal and vocal listeners. How many other stations could genuinely garner such an outpouring?
[Note: As ever, these are my opinions, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.]
There were lots of callers on Victoria Derbyshire's programme this morning, with Martin Kelner and John Myers also making appearances (there's feedback throughout, but Kelner and Myers are on at about 1 hour 26 minutes in).
But it's on Twitter that there's really been a reaction. Here are the trending topics on Twitter as of a few minutes ago.
OK - that's in media-luvvy London. What about the UK overall?
And worldwide:
(To be fair, this is before most of the US has woken up. Still a strong showing though.)
The comments are coming in thick and fast.
The Facebook group is going great guns:
And you can add a Twibbon to your avatar:
Then there are all the comments on the various news sites, blogs and forums.
Is all this too much for a station that fewer than 700,000 people listen to on a weekly basis? (Still nearly 200,000 more than The Times sells, as has been pointed out on Twitter, referring to The Times' editorial that said the BBC is closing "a few radio stations that no one has ever listened to.")
Maybe. But almost certainly not. That's the point. It's loved by those who listen. Yes - there's a feeling that if as many people who are already missing it, actually listened to the station, then it wouldn't be facing this threat. In the same way that if as many people who said they missed John Peel after his untimely death actually listened to him on Radio 1, then he wouldn't have been shunted into the small hours.
But any station would kill for such loyal and vocal listeners. How many other stations could genuinely garner such an outpouring?
[Note: As ever, these are my opinions, and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.]
Murray, you will recall, was "our man in Tashkent" - British Ambassador to Uzbekistan. But he was also a loose canon in terms of how the Foreign Office saw him.
The book was excellent, and this version from Hare was a great listen. David Tennant played Murray, who certainly lived life to the full, despite his failings. The play has a strong narration, but it's delivered believably by Tennant, and I was gripped, even though I knew the overall outcome.
Murray's rambunctious blog is always worth a read.
]]>As well as this, there's likely to be cuts to other expenditure particularly on the web as well as cuts to imported programming, BBC Blast, BBC Switch, and sports expenditure.
If this proves to be the case, then I believe it's a sad day for several reasons. First of all, it's a sad day for people who will inevitably lose their jobs, if this report from Patrick Foster turns out to be accurate.
It's also a sad day for digital radio. While there will be (and indeed - to an extent - are) commercial replacements for some of what the Asian Network offers, that's not necessarily the case for 6Music which, while serving a niche, provides a much needed reason for people to buy digital radios.
Shouldn't I be happy working for a service that crosses over to some extent with 6Music? Not at all. The very existence of that service lead people to to discover digital radio and thus the ability to discover other services. One less major brand is never a good thing. Perhaps there'll be opportunities for services like Xfm or NME, but I'm really not sure.
Without new additional services, getting to a digital radio future is harder to accomplish. What's odd here is that arguably Asian Network failed to work with disappointing audiences. But 6Music is much loved by its loyal listeners. It's in an odd position of not having enough listeners, and having low awareness. Yet if it was more popular, commercial services might be much more concerned about it. Is 6Music expensive to run? Yes - almost certainly too expensive. Programming cuts were almost certainly called for. And they're never easy to achieve while maintaining quality.
The Times piece suggests that following service reviews of Radio 1 and Radio 2, this leaves 30-50s free to commercial radio. I'm not entirely sure it's as simple as that. Demographics is only part of it. Will the average 6Music listener immediately depart to a commercial station? Some will. Others will head off to Spotify and their iPod playlists.
Yet all in all, when the pros and cons are weighed up, I still think that this is bad piece of news for the whole radio industry.
Still it's not exactly joined up thinking, with the news coming just days after the BBC Trust's service review reported what 6Music needed to do in the future.
The next question is what actually fills that space? Will the BBC sub-let that capacity to two (or more) commercial services, will other music service expand their bit-rates to fill the capacity? Or will it lie fallow. It's probably too early to say. But what if they undercut D1's pricing!
As for other areas of cuts suggested in the piece? Well there are a few oddities. Does the BBC often outbid commercial operators for imported programming? I know it's often said to be the case, but aside from Heroes, Mad Men and Damages, I struggle to think of much else the BBC shows that originates in the US. And don't get me started on claims about The Wire - a series first shown on a commercial channel years ago.
The US networks and sports rights holders will also hate BBC cost cutting as costs will fall.
I did laugh at the idea that ITV will serve the "teenage" market. Aside from teenagers enjoying X-Factor as much as anyone else, I'm not sure what else they're watching on the channel.
I'm very concerned about the BBC shutting "half its website." Which half is that? The good stuff? The stuff we've paid for from our licence fees? Certainly not the news.
One thing that's clear is that, if true (and we do need to wait for the BBC's confirmation of this), it is poor news management from the BBC. Twitter is already alive with people who work for 6Music wondering how long they have jobs. That's never the way you want to hear about important news.
[UPDATE] I've only just seen The Times' nasty and spiteful editorial. Entitled "Big, bloated and cunning" it seems to love all the usual things like Planet Earth and Life on Mars. Yet these plans "constitute an evasive and artful strategy designed to keep the next government from intervening, while in reality changing very little."
Wow. We shouldn't forget that's coming from a direct competitor of the BBC's in Rupert Murdoch. Seemingly the BBC would just be closing "a few radio stations that no one has ever listened to and websites that few have ever visited."
The Times thinks the BBC should be giving cash back to licence payers. I'll remember that next time my Sky bill goes up.
Amongst other things it once again brings up the selling off of Radio 1: "If the BBC were serious about reform it would consider selling Radio 1 and getting out of the pop music business, which is hardly ill served by others."
Can I just re-iterate to anyone from The Times who might be remotely interested. The sale of Radio 1 would devastate commercial radio closing down dozens of stations. The commercial radio industry does not want to see Radio 1 privatised. Nobody would be able to compete, and vast quantities of commercial revenue would flow to that service leaving others uneconomical.
The BBC is seemingly "the most powerful lobbying and effective organisation in Britain".
And there was me thinking that might be Rupert Murdoch...
[Note: That these are my personal views, and don't necessarily reflect those of my employer]
]]>With enormous topicality, it examined some of the very concerning legal cases that have been brought in British courts surrounding use of libel laws to restrict scientific debate, and effectively silence some of those who otherwise promote remedies for which there are significant questions of efficacy.
This came to a head yesterday when Simon Singh appeared in the High Court in front of three of the most senior appeals judges in the country. He's fighting a libel action brought by the British Chiropractic Association, after he authored a piece in The Guardian nearly two years ago.
If you ever actually visit my site (and aren't just seeing it in an RSS reader), you'll have perhaps noticed the link to Sense About Science. This is an important freedom that we need to fight for.
If you haven't already, you really need to do a few things.
First of all - sign this petition for the reform of this country's unjust libel laws. Even today's Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee report highlights the injustice of this.
Go on - do it now.
For more background on the Simon Singh case, you can do no worse than read the Jack of Kent blog. He has a nice summary of events to date here, and a report on yesterday's procedings here.
Simon Singh had penned a piece in the Daily Telegraph prior to yesterday's appearance, and there was also a good primer in The Times.
Or listen to the programme linked to above.
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