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

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • Kurena by Kurena Ishikawa

    I first heard Kurena Ishikawa on a video that a friend of mine showed me of her performing at the Blue Note Jazz Club in Tokyo. Ishikawa played double bass and played a stripped down version of Michael Jackson’s off the wall. It completely changed the atmosphere of the original song. In Ms Ishikawa’s hands…

  • Bruce Mau + more things

    Bruce Mau I spent part of the bank holiday weekend reading and finally managed to tuck into designer Bruce Mau’s signature book MC24. For those that haven’t heard of him Bruce Mau is a Canadian designer and academic. He founded a brand design agency: Bruce Mau Design which is now part of marketing combine Stagwell.…

  • Citadel

    Amazon have launched a new TV series to stream called Citadel. Citadel seems to be their spring tent pole TV series. The series is produced by the Russo Brothers. The Russo Brothers are responsible for four of the Marvel films up to Avengers Endgame. My favourite work by them is Welcome to Colinwood, a remake…

  • Moviedrome

    Alex Cox One of the cultural things that most defined the 1980s for me was the Moviedrome series of films on BBC 2. Late on a Sunday night, audiences were introduced to films by film director and academic Alex Cox. Cox had a singular vision and an encyclopaedic knowledge that he used to showcase the…

  • The Mattei Affair + more stuff

    The Mattei Affair The story of Eni I went down a rabbit hole when investigating a post that I have in draft at the moment and discovered The Mattei Affair. I got to find out more about Eni – one of Europe’s oil supermajors. Even though I had worked in the oil industry at the…

  • Vintage Tomorrows + more news

    Vintage Tomorrows I got a chance to watch the Vintage Tomorrows documentary the other evening. It was interesting that it had a range of practitioners such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling in it. Cory Doctorow gave some of the explanations of the culture. There were a number of things that Vintage Tomorrows just scratched…

  • On the sofa: The Man from Mo’Wax

    The documentary The Man from Mo’Wax was something that I’d been looking forward to watching for a while. James Lavelle made his name as the guy at Honest Johns who was the go to guy for Major Force Records releases. Major Force was a Japanese hip hop label that featured the likes of These were…