Classic movies + more things

1 minutes estimated reading time

Watching classic movies and TV with my Dad. Some of the classic movies we watched I hadn’t seen since I was a child like Ice Station Zebra. Watching them with him now as an adult was a different experience and we discussed the relative merits of the plot as we went along. As a child, my Dad had bid me be quiet so that we didn’t miss any details.

  • True Romance – Tony Scott on direction, Tarantino on the script and great grind house cinema moments with a Sonny Chiba triple bill.
  • Ice Station Zebra – my Dad is a big fan of Alistair Maclean’s books, this is one of the better film adaptions of his books with Rock Hudson taking a starring role. Looking back on this now, it is the proto-Tom Clancy book. Confrontations with with the Russians, a tech gizmo and a Jack Ryan type figure who always does the right thing. Like Maclean’s books Clancy focused on pace rather than character building and character’s died at a steady tempo.
  • I worked my way through series one of The X-Files and was impressed by how fresh many of the episodes still felt. The tech looked old but the storytelling wasn’t. It was twenty years since I had last watched it. Then I was at college and watched each episode on the postage stamp sized screen of a Casio TV-100B handheld television that got me through college.

a16z Podcast: Writing a New Language of Storytelling with Virtual Reality | Andreessen Horowitz – or why 2016 is going to take a good while to bring about the compelling content for VR to take hold as a mainstream consumer product

Louis Vuitton casts video game character in new campaign – Dazed Digital – interesting logical progression from their series 3 exhibition earlier in the year. Interesting how luxury brands are taking the transition to digital in new directions