Category: on the sofa | 影評 | 영화를보고 | 映画レビュー

What does on the sofa mean? So a sofa is a couch in American parlance, or may also be called a settee or chesterfield in other English speaking parts of the world. Its the big chair in the living room that people tend to view their TV set from.

By using on the sofa as a title I wanted to imply content that I had reviewed at home rather than having gone out to watch it at a cinema or attend an event.

I have tended to review material on DVD or Blu-Ray rather than streaming media, usually because I have acquired them with an intent, whereas streaming is more like content grazing, often little more than visual wallpaper for my living room.

This section has been made up of a hodge podge of films, documentaries and anime.

Films that I have seen at festivals or on trips to the cinema are more likely to be in the out and about section. So there isn’t a consistency there in that respect.

I have covered a wide range of content here including

Safe House – a surprisingly good Ryan Reynolds film that isn’t a comedy one
Bitter Lake – I am a huge Adam Curtis fan and his work is the exception that proves my rule about streaming platforms in this section mainly because I can’t get his documentaries on disk
The Raid 2 – which added a bit of storytelling to the mix of The Raid.
The Man from Mo’Wax – a documentary about the rise, fall and reinvention of James Lavelle.
No blood no tears – An excellent Korean heist drama

November 2023 newsletter – fourth time unlucky?
November 2023 newsletter introduction

You’re still reading? Great! Welcome to my November 2023 newsletter which marks my 4th issue.

I am not excessively superstitious – but living in Hong Kong rubbed off a bit on me.

I developed a love of milk tea, found the ‘hit women’ cathartic and am still leery of the number 4.

The number 4 is considered unlucky. In Hong Kong buildings, there is no fourth floor – in a similar way to their being no 13th floor in the UK high rise and office blocks. So I hope that this fourth issue doesn’t bring misfortune.

The clocks have gone back and the sun rises reluctantly over the horizon every morning, disappearing earlier each afternoon, but that doesn’t mean that inspiration stops. And it will be Christmas before you know it.

New reader?

If is your first time reading, welcome to my November 2023 newsletter! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.
- Dimensions of Luxury based on a mix of stuff that I have read from Sense Worldwide, Horizon Catalyst and books on luxury trends.
- Every wondered why its dot com rather than full-stop com? So did I.
- Analysis on IPSOS research on the value to brands of reputation.
- MCN – multi-channel networks. A business type popular in China and Japan is taking a record label approach to a stable of influencers.
- A little bit about the Whole Earth Catalogue and more things.
- The Brand Vandals conversation – reflecting back on a conversation I had in 2012 with Wadds that became part his book Brand Vandals.
Books that I have read.
- Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future by Ed Conway. Prior to working in advertising, I had a background in manufacturing and consider myself reasonably well read, but some of the material in Conway’s book was completely new to me. Its narrative approach reminds me of the vintage TV documentary series Connections presented by James Burke, that can be found on YouTube.
- Beyond Disruption by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. This book looked at non-disruptive innovation. This is diametrically opposed to the way innovation is discussed in Silicon Valley and the mainstream media. More on my view of it here.
- The New Working Class by Claire Ainsley. In the advertising industry, we have an acute perception that we might not understand life outside the M25 as we think we do. I thankfully have friends and family in the North to keep me somewhat grounded from the metropolitan elite lifestyle that I lead. Until I read this book, I didn’t realise how grounded the advertising industry was compared to our counterparts in national politics. That this book had to be written is a damning indictment of how out of touch politicos actually are.
Things I have been inspired by.

Project Gutenberg Open Audiobook project – Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s open-access collection of e-books. Via Matt’s Webcurios newsletter.

IPSOS research video seminar on Unlocking The Value of Reputation. This is the closest I have seen to making the case for earned media activities. The full whitepaper is available here. Thanks to Stuart Bruce for the link!

My friend Ian recommended the Honest Broker newsletter to me and I have found it to be a great read alongside my long time subscription to Bill Bishop’s Sinocism.

DDB Remedy’s meta analysis of marketing science work and academic scientific research on how emotion work for effective campaigns. How The Unexpected and Emotion Work to Influence Behaviour Change – focuses on how surprise when paired with emotion led creative had an increased impact. It all makes sense when you think about the power of salience and distinctiveness in communications; but it’s great to see that someone has drawn the multi-disciplinary research together in a cogent argument.

SEMRush have published a report for 2024 trends in social media platforms: The Vision in a Social Era that is worth downloading and pillaging for ideas that can be sold into clients.

I don’t know if inspired was the right term to use but I noticed 2023 Girlguiding Girl’s Attitudes survey thanks to a former colleague of mine from the start of my agency career. This is a survey that the Girlguiding movement has run over 15 years. Having freelanced on Dove’s ‘Real Beauty‘ campaign back in the day, this one statistic stood out to me.

If I were the Dove UK brand director at Unilever, this chart would be pinned to my wall or have it as my laptop wallpaper. You can read the full survey here.

It isn’t just a UK problem as this article on American teens gives more food for thought: What It’s Like to Be a 13-Year-Old Girl Today – The New York Times. It will be interesting to see if the Nike x Dove Body Confidence initiative makes a difference.

DeBeers is returning to its ‘A Diamond Is Forever’ campaign. The print campaign image is beautiful with a great use of negative space. DeBeers is spending 20 million dollars on media in the US in China. In the US, I think this makes total sense.

DeBeers

I don’t know how well it will work in China? There isn’t the mental model built up in west over decades around the campaign theme. While the wealthy in China realise that diamonds are recognised as a store of wealth – the guo chao mindset may see gold (and possibly jade) jewellery favoured by at least some younger consumers.

This has been exacerbated by a decline in the number of marriages by just under 11% and a trend to prefer gold has an 18% reduction in diamonds sold in China over the past 12 months. In the meantime the sale of gold has risen by 12%.

I look forward to seeing how the campaign goes.

According to Numerator, online retail platforms will be the big winners from Christmas shopping. The news for the food and beverage services sector isn’t so great.

Finally ‘Knowledge is Power with Kidney Disease took me back to 1988. Rob Base has remade It Takes Two for Bohringer Ingelheim in the US to highlight the linkage between kidney disease and type two diabetes. The message is poignant as Base’s creative partner DJ EZ Rock died in 2014 and suffered from diabetes.

Producer DJ EZ Rock was responsible for the hype backing track based around Lynn Collins ‘Think (about it)’ and backing vocals from Rhonda Parris. (Parris has a short-lived recording career, releasing just one solo single No, No Love – a bit of a proto-House banger heavily influenced by freestyle if you like that kind of thing). Those that knew also had the Derek B remix of It Takes Two, with a heavy kick drum underpinning from a Roland TR-808 drum machine.

Things I have watched.

It’s cold and dark and I make no apology for my films being unapologetically escapist and and entertaining to try and counterweight the drab conditions. I do have some standards through and got material for this November 2023 newsletter.
- Zerozer ozero – follows a single drug deal between the Mexican cartel and the ’Ndrangheta. However things don’t go according to plan, so as the conspiracy unfolds we get a walk through the international drug trafficking trade across Latin America, Africa and Europe. This was done as a limited series, but I watched it as a boxset. It is directed by Stefano Sollima who did the Sicario films and Subarra.
- Novembre – A French fictional dramatisation of the government response to coordinated terrorist attacks in Paris at Stade de France and the Bataclan concert venue through to the Saint Dennis raid that resulted in the death of police dog Diesel, which trended on social media with the #jesuisdiesel hashtag. Jean Dujardin shows the range of his ability as an actor from the comedy of his OSS117 film series, to the deadly seriousness of this film.
- Diva – I originally watched Diva as part of the Moviedrome series of curated films introduced by Alex Cox. At the time Cox personally disliked the film due to it being ‘a film of style’ rather than narrative. I loved it and revisited it on Blu-Ray. It was sharper and I got to appreciate the Vladimir Cosma soundtrack with its mix of opera, classical music and avant-garde compositions.
Alex Cox’s introduction to Diva for the much missed Moviedrome film seasons that used to run on BBC 2.
- The Continental – Amazon Prime Video has some great tentpole content and The Continental adds to this. It’s a prequel of sorts to the John Wick universe and starts with a beautifully made feature length pilot. The action would find it hard to live up to the John Wick films, but the impeccable soundtrack manages to surpass them. The alternative past New York of the film has similar vibes to shows like Pennyworth and Gotham.
Useful tools

Better Miro, Mural or Figjam alternative

I have started using Milanote as an alternative to Miro for personal projects. Like Miro it has a mix of templates to get you started. There is an iPhone app and a native Mac app, so you don’t have to rely on running resource hungry pages in your internet browser of choice. It might even replace Omnigraffle in my personal software stack for some of the tasks that I do.

The sales pitch.

It was great to collaborate this month with my Hong Kong and Shanghai-based friends at Craft Associates on a prospective exciting new project. Now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my November 2023 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
November 29, 2023
October 2023 newsletter – 3rd time’s the charm
October 2023 newsletter introduction

As I write the October 2023 newsletter. it’s getting noticeably darker outside earlier, but the sunrises reward us with a wider variation of colours. And we all have Halloween to look forward to. This is the third issue and I am still finding my way writing these things. I hope that the third time’s a charm, but I will let you be the judge of that. You can read the earlier ones here.

I looked into where the phrase ‘third time’s a charm’ came from. Apparently it comes from Old English Law, if a prisoner survived three attempts at hanging and survived, they would be set free.

You can find my regular writings here and more about me here. Let’s get it started!

Things I’ve written.
- Climate despair – how NGOs and companies are failing young people in the way they talk about climate change and what they can do to change their communications to increase active participation in reducing the degree of climate change.
- Technopolarity – how technology is subverting the power structures of elected governments and instead empowering the likes of Elon Musk.
- Clustomers – how Intuit MailChimp’s ad campaign, whilst clever, might reinforce C-suite misconceptions around marketing and advertising
Books that I have read.
- These 38 Reading Rules Changed My Life – RyanHoliday.net – whilst its not a book, it does contain great advice for readers
- Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg. Fogg’s simple model for understanding individual behaviours has helped drive everything from health campaigns to online services. Tiny Habits how consumers and businesses can help foster behavioural change, one tiny habit at a time. More on my review of the book here.
- The long awaited Mick Herron book The Secret Hours did not disappoint. It’s from the Slow Horses universe, but not a Slough House story per se. More than a nod to Boris Johnson’s stint as foreign secretary and prime minister. I will leave it at that rather than give you plot spoilers.
- China A History by John Keay. Keay’s book was recommended to me by a number of people. In 535 pages he attempts the impossible in terms of covering China’s history as a civilisation through the start of Xi Jinping’s first administration. It’s a dense read – it’s well written, covering the complexity of history well. The current communist government is barely a footnote (ok exaggerating a bit here), but it puts things in perspective.
- Spain A History edited by Raymond Carr. The book highlights the notable trends, intellectual and social, of each particular era in its history. Roman rule created the notion of ‘Spain’ as a distinct entity. The chapters on the Visigoth monarchy, Moorish Spain, the establishment, an empire, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, all chart the cultural, political and economic arc of Spain. It then goes on to explore 19th century liberalism and the pivot during much of the 20th century towards authoritarian rule, followed by a return to democracy and onwards up to the 21st century. My favourite chapter was about the Visigoths, which was a period I didn’t know much about prior to reading this book – the author did a particularly good job of bringing the Visigoths to life on page.
Things I have been inspired by.

Halloween. I have been looking forward to the holiday for at least a month. Growing up in an Irish household with rural origins, I had an appreciation of the changing seasons and loved the traditions around Halloween, especially tales of the fairy forts and the banshee. It’s also a big money earner, in the advertising world allowing for interesting tactical executions that couldn’t otherwise be attempted. Outside advertising, ignoring increased food sales, a third of consumers will spend 51 – 100 USD on putting together their own costume, or buying one off the rack. The most hardcore 10% of those surveyed admitted to spending 250+ USD.

I was not into costumes, instead I look forward to the most is my Mum’s barmbrack. For the first time in a few years my Mum baked a few barmbracks and sent one of them to me. It’s a Halloween tradition. The barmbrack itself is a spicy fruited bread with a texture somewhere between brioche and and a pan loaf. Traditionally, the brack would contain a ring or trinket, which would turn up in a random slice.

When I was small, commercial bakeries still used to have a an aluminium ring that looked like it was from a cheap Christmas cracker contained wrapped in greaseproof paper baked into the brack.

Downloadable recipe PDF here (Dropbox) or here (Google Drive) if you fancy baking your own over the weekend.

While we’re on the subject of food, Hope & Glory’s collaboration between Lick paint and Heinz ketchup for a ketchup shade of wall paint creates talkability, though I wouldn’t be buying it for my own home.

Buoyant Bob – I am stil not sure if Buoyant Bob is a social object, a brand, both or something else. Buoyant Bob was a successful entry into the US cannabis marketplace. The brief in the campaign was to work around restrictions in cannabis advertising and show it as the most fun brand in the space.

Buoyant Bob was released as a single: retail takeovers, vinyl records at dispensaries, and fans sharing Instagram Stories using “The Man Who Got So High” all followed.

OnlyWatch – an auction in Geneva in aid of research Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy features one-off luxury watches from all of the major Swiss timepiece houses. Some of the entries are unique colour ways but Bulgari went the extra mile with their Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Marble. Their watches are already well known for being some of the thinnest timepieces available. A tourbillion is a demonstration of the watchmakers art. The one in this watch is just under 2mm thick – that’s just over double the thickness of a credit card for a moving mechanical assembly. And then they managed to cover the entire titanium case and strap of the watch in marble and make a marble dial – without making the watch any bulkier than its usual ridiculously slim case. It’s not something I would wear even if I could afford it, but I am in awe of the ingenuity.

Bulgari for OnlyWatch – Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Marble

Finally Dentsu Health published a great must-read byline on how media and entertainment can aid health equality. More here.

Things I have watched.

I got to see The Boy and The Heron early at the BFI London Film Festival. You won’t get any plot spoilers from me here. Official release is December 26 in the UK, December 8 in Hong Kong. It’s Studio Ghibli, what else do you need to know?

General Magic – a great documentary about a Silicon Valley start-up of the same name.. Back in the early 1990s General Magic was as visionary as Apple and as hyped as WeWork. If you’ve ever worked with a start-up or care about technology give it a watch. More on my thoughts here.

The Pentagon Papers – Despite this being a made-for-TV film, James Spader does a great job of playing Daniel Ellsberg; the RAND researcher to gave the materials to the media. In terms of pacing acting and storytelling, I would put this on a par with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman’s film adaptation of All The President’s Men.

Tampopo is a beautifully shot Japanese film with comedic moments that tells the story of a widow, her son and their ramen shop. More on what I thought of here.

A relatively modern Halloween tradition in the Carroll family has been watching It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown – recommended for young and old alike. While my Dad and I usually end up watching The Crow later on. If you want more classic horror, then you could do worse than watching the livestream by the Creature Features show.

Useful tools

ITV Adlabs and Magic Numbers recovery budget planner

Pretty much essential to look at if you have responsibility for UK media spend at a brand. This allows you to examine various scenarios and see likely outcomes based on media spend. More here.

Google bundles generative AI and LLM with search

I downloaded Chrome especially to try this out, it looks a bit more mature than Bing’s initial integration of ChatGPT. Go here to give it a try if you’re a Chrome browser user.

Post-It Z-Notes

You’re workshopping something with clients or thinking something through on your own – Post-It notes are key. The own brand ones can vary from really good to useless, so spend a bit more and get proper Post-It notes. In fact, I’d advise that you go one step further and get Post-It Z-Notes. The notes alternate sides in terms of where the ‘sticky end’ is and if you lift them from the pad you get a ‘Z’ before they peel away. They come away effortlessly and work brilliantly if you have them in a desk holder.

Foldable wireless keyboard

At the start of my career, I used to have a Palm PDA ( personal digital assistant – think a smartphone, without the phone and communications bit). I also had a long commute to Luton on a daily basis. I got a lot of reading and writing done thanks to a ‘Stowaway’ foldable keyboard made by a company called Think Outside. The company no longer exists, but the desire to be able to turn my iPhone into a simple writing tool lives on. Recently, I have been using this foldable Bluetooth keyboard. It folds up, can be used on a train seat table or even an economy class aircraft seat and recharges easily. The keyboard isn’t the usual rubbery mess that you tend to get in a lot of these devices. It’s one fault so far is that it feels flimsy, but I have already got my money’s worth out of it in just a few months. I fire up the iPhone’s notes app and get to work. I can then edit and refine once I have a bit more time on my Mac at a more convenient time.

The sales pitch.

Now taking bookings for strategic engagements or discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my October 2023 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. DON’T FORGET TO PUT YOUR CLOCKS BACK BEFORE YOU GO TO BED ON SATURDAY. Let me know what you think or if you have any recommendations to be featured in forthcoming issues.
October 25, 2023
Tampopo
I first got to see Tampopo at the 051 Cinema in Liverpool. It was a comedy, it had new wave vibes and I knew I could watch it several more times without getting bored. When I went to college a lecturer screened clips of it to emphasise the importance of observation as a market research tool – a lesson that has stuck with me to this day. Decades later I get Tampopo on Blu-Ray via Criterion Collection re-issue.

The print is way richer and better than what I saw a few times in Liverpool and it still holds my interest.

Ramen western?

Before we get into the film I want dispel the idea of the ramen western. Every magazine review you see of Tampopo will use the term ‘ramen western’ which was apparently coined by publicists during its international release. It’s a lazy phrase in the case of Tampopo for a number of reasons.

Yes, one of the protagonists has some clothing that might evoke the image of a cowboy, but that’s like writing the entire film from a few curated still images. The clothing is more about evoking the rugged individuality of a truck driver, in a largely conformist society. Their neckerchief is more about lorry cabs having no air conditioning at the time.

The best spaghetti westerns like A Fist Full of Dollars actually were adaptions of Japanese films. In the case of A Fist Full of Dollars, it’s the retelling in western setting of the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo. So the Ramen Western reference is basically saying ‘it’s a Japanese interpretation set around a neighbourhood restaurant of an Italian plagarisation of a Japanese chambara film classic’.

The reality is that Tampopo is more complex than the simplistic ramen western label would have you believe.

Juzo Itami

Director Juzo Itami was an auteur: actor, script writer and director. Tampopo was his second feature film and he would eventually direct eight more. Itami’s later films courted controversy with him being attacked by Yakuza members. His eventual suicide is widely believed to have been staged by members of the Goto-gumi to prevent a film that discussed the gang’s links with the Soka Gakkai buddhist movement.

Back to Tampopo

Tampopo revolves around food as art and food is also the MacGuffin for the film. In the main story, a widow is struggling to manage her ramen shop following the death of her husband the cook and shop owner.

A jobbing truck driver and drivers mate stop to eat and get sucked into a quest. The widow who is named Tampopo (Dandelion), the truck driver and driver’s mate to make great ramen and rejuvenate the fortunes of the shop.

So if Tampopo isn’t a ramen western, what is it?

The simple answer would be an action comedy revolving around a ramen shop and the art of cooking. But there is so much more in the film.

There is a second story about ‘the man in white’ which has heavy overtones of French new wave cinema and features a basket of European food fit for a decadent picnic. The fourth wall is broken and one of the characters speaks directly to the audience, adding an additional layer of complexity. We are both audience and (minor) character. Over new wave vignettes in the film include:
- Salarymen having a meal at a French restaurant
- A women’s etiquette class on how to eat spaghetti silently in the European manner
- Supermarket staff stopping an older woman with a compulsion to squeeze food
- A con man uses an elaborate meal to lure a mark into an scam
- A woman breast feeds her infant
Torakku Yarō

There are references due to the plot structure to the idea of the ronin – the unattached samurai helping out common people in the plot structure. But just as important the film references Japanese culture around that time. There is a clear parallel between Tampopo and a series of trucking related comedy films that were made from 1974 – 1979. Torakku Yarō (トラック野郎) roughly translates as Truck Guys or Truck Rascals. It is a series of ten films made over a four year period to cater for the popularity of the genre.

The plots were standardised.
1. Truck driver falls in love with woman he meets on the road.
2. Truck driver through his actions actually helps her fall in love with another man.
3. Truck driver ends up going on a quest to help reunite the star-crossed lovers under some sort of time restriction.
In this case cooking ramen is substituted for the ‘other man’. The connections don’t stop at the plot structure, one of the main characters Pisken is played by Japanese Italian actor Rikiya Yasuoka – who appeared in the first instalment of the Torakku Yarō series.

Torakku Yarō itself was based on an earlier series of comedies called Otoko wa Tsurai yo (男はつらいよ): translated as It’s tough being a man. 48 films were made in this series from 1969 to 1995 based around the same formula.
1. Tora-san falls in love with a woman
2. Tora-san argues with his extended family
3. Tora-san’s love of the woman is not reciprocated and he leaves heart-broken
While the humour may not fully come out from Tompopo, it’s a visual tour-de-force with great acting and a distinctive vision behind the film. I look forward to rewatching it again in the future.

More film reviews here.
October 6, 2023
General Magic

General Magic has a reputation of being the technology equivalent of the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls, but it ended up going nowhere. I never got to see the device in person, it was only available in Japan and the US. It’s as famous much for its alumni, as it is for its commercial failure.

This is captured in a documentary of the same name. For students of Silicon Valley history and Apple fan boys – the team at General Magic sounds like a who’s who of the great and the good in software development and engineering.

General Magic started within Apple with a brief that sounds eerily like what I would have expected for the iPhone decades later.

“A tiny computer, a phone, a very personal object . . . It must be beautiful. It must offer the kind of personal satisfaction that a fine piece of jewelry brings. It will have a perceived value even when it’s not being used… Once you use it you won’t be able to live without it.”
Sullivan M. (July 26, 2018) “General Magic” captures the legendary Apple offshoot that foresaw the mobile revolution. (United States) Fast Company magazine

The opening sequence tells you what the documentary is going to lay out. Over carefully curate images of Silicon Valley campuses, Segway riders and the cute bug like Google autonomous vehicle a voice talks about success and failure. That failure is part of the process of development. That General Magic has a legendary status due to its status as precursor to our always-on modern world and while the company failed, the ideas didn’t.

The genesis of the spirit of General Magic goes back to the development and launch of the Macintosh with its vision of making computers accessible. The team looked around the next thing that would have a similar vision and impact of a product. The Mac had got some of these developers on the front cover of Rolling Stone – they were literally rockstars.

You get a tale of dedication and excitement that revolved around a pied piper type project lead Marc Porat, who managed to come to the table with a pretty complete vision and concept of where General Magic (and the world) would be heading. The archive of footage of the offices with its cool early to mid 1990s Apple Office products still amazes now. The look of the people in the archive footage, make my Yahoo! colleagues a decade later seem corporate and uptight by comparison.

Veteran journalist Kara Swisher said that she started following the company because it was ‘the start of mobile computing, this is where it leads’.

What sets the documentary apart is that it tapped into footage shot by film maker David Hoffman who was hired to capture the product development process. The protagonists then provide a voice over of their younger selves. Their idealism reaches back to the spirit of the 1960s. You can see how touch screen screens and the skeuomorphic metaphors were created and even animate emoticons.

I’ve never known a development process with so much documentary footage. Having been in this process on the inside, the General Magic documentary portrays a process and dynamics that haven’t changed that much.

The ecosystem that the startup assembled including AT&T, Apple, Motorola and Sony made sense given the ecosystem and power that Microsoft had behind it. It’s hard to explain how dominant and aggressive Microsoft was in the technology space. Newton came out as a complete betrayal and John Sculley, who is interviewed in the documentary comes across worse than he would have liked.

The documentary also has access to the 1994 promotional film where General Magic publicly discussed the concept of ‘The Cloud’ i.e. the modern web infrastructure – but the documentary doesn’t dwell on this provable claim.

Goldman Sachs was a key enabler, the idea of the concept IPO set the precedent for Netscape, Uber, WeWork and the 2020s SPAC fever.

In a time when there is barely one thing changing the technology environment, General Magic were pursuing their walled garden of their private cloud and missed the web for a while. Part of this is down to their relationship with AT&T.

The documentary covers how project management dogged the project. Part of the problem was perfectionism was winning over the art of the possible and not focusing on the critical items that needed to be done. The panic of having to ship.

It’s about getting the balance between ‘move fast and break things’ versus crafting a jewel of a product.

But shipping wasn’t enough, the execution of shopper marketing and sales training was a disaster. The defeat was hard given the grand vision. But the ultimate lesson is that YOU are not representative of the mainstream market.

The documentary post-mortem featuring thinkers like Kara Swisher and Paul Saffo points out the lack of supporting infrastructure, that would take years to catch up to where General Magic’s Magic Link had gone. Paul Saffo uses a surfing analogy that I had previously read in Bob Cringely’s Accidental Empires about catching the right wave at the right time.

John Sculley over at Apple made similar mistakes to the General Magic team which resulted in him being fired from Apple. Sculley makes the very human admission that being fired from Apple took him about 15 years to recover from personally.

IBM Simon

The documentary gives a lot of the credit (maybe too much of it) to General Magic as the progenitor of what we now think of as smartphones. The reality as with other inventions is that innovation has its time and several possible ‘inventors’; or what author Kevin Kelly would call ‘the technium’. This is the idea that technological progression is inevitable and that it stands on the layers of what has gone before, like fossils found inside rocks several foot deep. For instance, IBM created a device called Simon which was ‘smartphone’ which sold about 50,000 units to BellSouth customers in the six months it was on the market. Motorola – who were a General Magic partner also launched a smartphone version of the Apple Newton called the Motorola Marco in January 1995 and there are more devices around the same time.

Reality is messy and certainly not like the clean direct line that the General Magic documentary portrays, even the Newton was only part of the story.

The Wonder Years

I was thinking about what I liked so much about the General Magic documentary. I immediately thought about it reminding me of my falling in love with the nascent internet and technology, which then bought me to the start of my agency career working with Palm (the company that eventually helped kill off General Magic’s product ambitions) and the Franklin REX which came out of sychronisation pioneers Starfish Software.

But it was deeper than that. The Silicon Valley portrayed in the General Magic documentary wasn’t the dystopian hellscape of platform firms, generation rent, toxic tech bro culture and ‘churn and burn’ HR culture. Instead the General Magic documentary story represented a halcyon past of Silicon Valley portrayed in books like Where Wizards Stay Up Late, Fire In The Valley and Insanely Great. Where talented people motivated by a fantastic vision thing, with a user centred mission worked miracles. The darkness of fatigue and god knows what else is largely hidden by a Wonder Years TV show feel good nostalgia. Maybe it gives us hope again in the tech sector, despite Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Cook and Elon Musk? Maybe that hope might inspire something great again?

Marc Porat’s personal tragedy and Tony Fadell’s business failure brings a hint of the real world through the door. The documentary uses Fadell’s link with the iPod and iPhone as a point of redemption, resilience, perseverance and vindication for General Magic.

There’s also a cautionary tale full of lessons learned for new entrepreneurs, who often get the vision thing but forget about the details. More on General Magic here.

More reviews here.

October 2, 2023
The Killer
The media environment that drove the popularity of The Killer

Before talking about The Killer, it makes sense to talk about the media landscape. The late 1980s and early 1990s was when consumers first started to buy video films rather than only rent them. Retail video sales had been pioneered in the UK by the music labels who sold video albums and recordings of live performances.

The prices of films suddenly became much more accessible. Not cheap, but the price of a couple of CD albums at the time. Consumers were becoming more film literate. Curated series like:
- Moviedrome
- The Incredibly Strange Film Show
- Son of the Incredibly Strange Film Show
- Jonathan Ross Presents for One Week Only
These series were our film studies lecture theatre with Alex Cox and Jonathan Ross as our tutors.

Young people’s expectations and interests expanded. Video companies started to address market needs. At first, video packaging was influenced by the rental market. The rental market needed display cases that would have hundreds of people handling a box. Durability and keeping things hygienic was the primary concern. But companies realised more consumer sales with nicer packaging. Companies like Tartan and Artificial Eye looked to people with niche interests.

The video rights for these films were cheap and there was a ready audience to watch them. These cheap film rights were already well known, fuelling US grindhouse cinema in the 1970s & ’80s. So they were the ideal vanguard to get consumers to build their own video library.

Magazines sprang up to address the need for consumer reviews. this included Anime UK, Empire (seen as the serious film buffs read), Shivers and The Dark Side.

The Killer and I

The Killer was one of a number of videos that I had bought at the time. It sat by my VCR (video cassette recorder) alongside Hard Boiled and A Better Tomorrow. All three were released on the ‘Made In Hong Kong’ video label. I also had a copy of the Japanese anime opus Akira. My collection was rounded out with a few spaghetti westerns including Keoma The Violent Breed. The westerns were released by Aktiv as part of The Spaghetti Western Collection. These were films that made a real impact on me and that I watched again and again.

I was blown away by the visual experiences that both genres offered.

Over time I have been building up my library of Blu Ray and DVD disks and managed to reacquire a copy of The Killer. Last week I watched The Killer for the first time in a few years.

The perfect confection

A perfect product is a mix of the right ingredients prepared in the right way for the right time. In the mid-to-late 1980s Hong Kong cinema was reaching its cultural peak.

The original Hong Kong poster for The Killer

The Killer is made up of layers. These layers were driven by a mix of:
- Visionary directors
- The febrile atmosphere in the run-up to re-colonisation by the Chinese communist government
- A deep bench of talent
- Hong Kong itself
John Woo – visionary director

Depending whose article you read on John Woo, you will get a number of different influences mentioned with regards to John Woo’s works of this period. This film has all of them on screen at once. John Woo is a Christian, and you see a lot of these motifs in The Killer‘s imagery and settings including the iconic church shootout.

There is a stylistic nod to French new wave films directed by Jean-Pierre Melville like Le Samourai. Gun-fu was influenced by Japanese yakuza films with their honour code and no-holds barred violence. Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honour and Humanity series exemplified this genre. The pacing of his films owe much to Japanese chambara films like The Seven Samurai and classic Chinese novels.

The reality is that the Triads were seldom rule bound or honourable isn’t allowed to get in the way of a good story.

A combination of an appreciation of westerns and the works of Melville, with being in Hong Kong during the late 1960s and early 1970s meant that Woo entered the film world as a young script supervisor for Cathay Studios. He became an assistant directors at Shaw Studios. By the mid-1970s he made kung-fu films with fighting chereographed by Jackie Chan.

In the mid-1980s he had a chance to pivot and take more creative control, which resulted in A Better Tomorrow.

Much is commented on Woo’s use of white doves in The Killer and subsequent films. The dove is a Christian motif; Woo also referenced the white and black crows of the Spy vs. Spy comic strip. Finally pigeons and doves were kept in coops on the top of tenement apartment buildings in Hong Kong such as John Woo would have lived in after the Shek Kip Mei Fire burnt down his first Hong Kong home. They also end up on the menu at some of the city’s restaurants.

Doves were also very much an 1980s cultural moment from Blade Runner‘s climatic rooftop scene to Prince. Though to my knowledge Woo never mentioned either of them as influences.

Less commonly mentioned is the scene where the stray cat enters Jennie’s flat; it signals misfortune for the main characters in the film based on Chinese superstition.

The febrile atmosphere

The Hong Kong of the 1980s was a city with a sell by date. It had become a modern well-run city after reaching a nadir in the early 1970s but all that could be easily done away with. Hong Kongers moved freely around overseas Chinese communities in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia. Hong Kong and to a lesser extent Taiwan became media hubs. By the early 1970s, Hong Kong music was being sung in Cantonese around Asia, the films in Asian cinemas and Made in Hong Kong products were shipped around the world.

Prior to 1984, there was a wide range of possibilities from the British muddling through and carrying on running Hong Kong to a Chinese invasion. Generations of Hong Kong emigres moved to the UK, Australia, Canada and America for education or a bolt hole if the worst happened. Post-1984 things became real.

Vancouver’s Hong Kong community expanded during this time as middle class professionals followed the lead of ‘super man’ Li Ka shing and had their families based in the Canadian city while they visited from time to time. It also helped that Vancouver’s inner city core felt like the high density living of Hong Kong, as did the ocean edge.

All this comings and goings meant that Hong Kongers were exposed to a variety of foreign and domestic influences like John Woo, rather than the more pedestrian content available in the UK at the time.

The higher ‘moral’ values of The Killer were a line that connected modern Asia to an ancient Chinese past reassuring stability in a changing world.

Star power – the deep bench of talent.

The Killer was blessed with a strong cast of performers. Chow Yun-Fat had a perfect foil in Danny Lee. Sally Yeh is amazing in her performance as an actress and a musician. Taiwanese Canadian Yeh was already a successful Cantopop artist before acting in The Killer. The depth of talent in Hong Kong was down to the studio system operated by production companies and TV stations. Chow was a product of TVB’s actor training and made his name as a Cantonese television drama heart throb.

Beyond the actors, you had a deep bench of technical talent to draw on such as cinematographer Peter Pau. Pau came up through the conveyor line approach to Hong Kong filmmaking and The Killer was his sixth film. Things needed to be done right first time, because films had very little shooting time in comparison to their western counterparts.

People like Mr Pau are responsible for the professionalisation of the mainland Chinese film industry. The mainland-Hong Kong collaborations which snuffed out the Hong Kong film industry acted as a technical finishing school by Hong Kong filmmakers for their Chinese counterparts. In the same way that coercive technology transfer saw multinational companies train up their competitors.

Hong Kong itself

The Killer is one of the things that inspired me to move half way around the world. Hong Kong’s mix of claustrophobic yet homely flats in composite buildings, neon signage and the constant buzz of the city are something you won’t see anywhere else.

This contrasts with the small town feel of the islands. The Killer managed to shoot in locations like the busy Causeway Bay shopping district, which was done in just three hours.

Just across the border mainland China feels too chaotic. Singapore too neat and ordered. Hong Kong got the mix just right, which is the reason why the anime Ghost In The Shell borrowed so much from the city’s mid-century architecture.

All four elements come together to make a perfect confection:
- Visionary directors
- The febrile atmosphere in the run-up to re-colonisation by the Chinese communist government
- A deep bench of talent
- Hong Kong itself
Impact

The Killer‘s reception in the Hong Kong market was lukewarm at first, due the June 4th incident in Beijing. But by the end of the year it was a respectable 9th in Hong Kong box office earnings. What happened in the international markets was unprecedented for the time. The Killer was shown on the international festival circuit and became much more critically acclaimed outside of Hong Kong than within the city itself.

If you’ve watched a Luc Besson film, you’ve seen a film influenced by The Killer, as have most Hollywood action directors making films in the mid-to-late 1990s like Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… sampled the living daylights out of The Killer.

Three decades on, The Killer still moves me. Given changes that have gone on in Hong Kong, we won’t see its like again.
September 10, 2023