Ged Carroll

Blog

  • Out and about: Chasing the Dragon

    October has been amazing month of cinema releases for me. The last I am going to write about is Chasing The Dragon. Hong Kong cinema is considered to be in its death throws. There are small independent films of course, but its far from its hey day with production houses known around the world like Shaw Brothers, Golden Harvest or Media Asia.

    Mainland productions have the money and many technical experts and directors now work across the border. Korea has come on in leaps and bounds taking up the overseas arthouse audience.

    There aren’t many new stars coming through, even in Chasing the Dragon; character actors and main stars are largely industry veterans since the 1990s. However, Chasing the Dragon gives me some hope for the Hong Kong film. Its an unashamedly Hong Kong film focusing on the economic boom of the 1960s and mid-1970s. It is a technical tour-de-force. Much of the Hong Kong shown in the film from old Wan Chai to the Kowloon walled city only exist in fading photographs. So much of it was green screened in instead.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adj5dtSKF8U

    It is probably too local for a mainland audience to fully appreciate the nuances and historical references. It shows a Hong Kong on the ascendancy, rather than suffering under a century of shame. It also holds up an unflinching view of British colonialism with its rampant individual corruption.

    A modern British audience would have very little idea of how serving British police officers at all levels and government officials were central cogs in the corruption. Eventually the stench got to much when chief superintendent Peter Godber was found to have over $600,000 US stashed away.

    Andy Lau plays ‘Lee Rock’ a clear analogue of Lui Mo Lok (呂慕樂) a corrupt policeman known as the The Five-Hundred-Million-Dollar Inspector by Hong Kong people. In some respects one can view Chasing The Dragon as a reboot of the 1991 film Lee Rock II where Lau played the same character through the same time period. Chasing the Dragon adds verve, detail and taunt storytelling to the mix.

    The film is being shown at the Odeon in Panton Street.

     

  • Thelonius Monk + other things

    Thelonius Monk

    The soundtrack to my week was this three hour programme on the music of jazz musician Thelonius Monk. Thelonius Monk has 99 albums to his name, excluding compilations, many of which were live concert performances rather than studio recordings. He was known for his improvisation and was one of the found fathers of bebop.

    KCRW put together a great tribute to Thelonius Monk that hits all of the high spots that I know of in his career, that was cut short at the age of 64 in 1982.

    Sailor Moon + syphilis – two concepts I never thought I would utter in the same sentence

    Only Japan could successfully leverage a much loved children’s TV and comic book character to try and reduce syphilis infections. It was interesting to hear that the creator of Sailor Moon was a pharmacist who saw the urgency and need. Quartz alludes to Shinjuku – the entertainment district being the epicentre. Japan like its neighbours has seen an increase in foreign sex tourism from other Asian markets.

    This is solely down to a larger Chinese middle class who visit prostitutes for bonding business relationships (sharing knowledge of each others transgressions builds trust). There is also macho posturing to reinforce hierarchies and subjugate the sex workers. They also go for pleasure when they’re on holiday. Basically, they’re absolute scum.

    Japanese hi-fi enthusiasts

    Great short film by the Wall Street Journal about obsessive Japanese Hi-Fi buffs. I love the extremes that they go to in order to get the best sounds.

    Uniqlo Danpan

    A Uniqlo campaign is always something that I look forward to and Uniqlo Danpan is no exception

    Volkswagen

    Interesting effort to move the discussion on around the Volkswagen brand from Dieselgate. The reality is that Dieselgate will be with us for years as it rolls through court cases and is cited with regards the need for electric cars.

  • Great Scud Hunt + other news

    Great Scud Hunt

    What the Great Scud Hunt Says About War With North Korea | War Is Boring – pretty grime reading. The Great Scud Hunt was a key aspect of the Gulf War. The Great Scud Hunt pitted allied special forces units against the Iraqi army which had scattered its Scud launchers across the desert. The Great Scud Hunt was important to stop Israel coming into the war and fracturing the alliance against Iraq. it was also to prevent scud missile attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure and cities. Despite the terrain being reasonably flat and barren, the allies weren’t as successful the Great Scud Hunt as they would have liked. By comparison North Korea is mountainous and covered in vegetation making the job orders of magnitude harder. North Korean missiles could target the US, Japan and the whole of South Korea. 

    DD-ST-92-07789
    A relic of the Great Scud Hunt – a missile being examined after having been shot down in the desert by a Patriot missile

    Economics

    3D printing a threat to global trade | ING – Research report with hyperbole

    Legal

    INMA: Pros, cons of EU’s General Data Protection Regulation for publishers  – GDPR could lead to a reduction in programmatic ad spend because advertisers will struggle to measure whether their ads lead to purchases, according to Eric Berry, CEO of TripleLift. There’s uncertainty about how the law will be enforced, but if users have to give consent to individual publishers, demand-side platforms, and attribution vendors, the attribution companies won’t have enough data to make accurate measurements

    Luxury

    Supreme Said Close to Deal with Carlyle | Business Of Fashion – was the Louis Vuitton deal just rolling out the carpet for private equity interest?

    Media

    My new chapter: joining Google to better explain search & help bridge the gap – Danny Sullivan is a great person to fill the hole left by Matt Cutts and more. Sullivan’s status as the godfather of search marketing gives him the kind of authority and audience few others have

    Online

    A Farewell to AIM: AOL Instant Messenger Shutting Down in December – ExtremeTech – wow. The ironic thing is that messenger services could (and should) have been the WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger of today

    Retailing

    How supermarkets choose where to open … and where to close | Cities | The Guardian – even retailers don’t like chavvy areas

    Security

    The Uber app can secretly spy on iPhone screens – BGR – mother fucker…

    Screwdriving. Locating and exploiting smart adult toys | Pen Test Partners – one more security issue to worry about

    Guess what Chinese travellers are bringing back home? VPNs, lots of them | South China Morning Post – exaggerates the volume of desire for unfettered access – outside the intelligentsia, most won’t care

    Yahoo says all of its 3bn accounts were affected by 2013 hacking | Technology | The Guardian – how is this only coming out now?

    Technology

    Why isn’t Apple Pay taking off? | The Drum – and other NFC payment technologies for that matter

    Survey: Facebook (FB) is the big tech company that people trust least — Quartz – its only 1,600 Quartz readers

    High Sierra’s Disk Utility does not recognize unformatted disks | Tinyapps – a lot of a fuck up there Apple, although its now fixed by a security update. Related – Think twice before encrypting your HFS+ volumes on High Sierra | Carbon Copy Cloner – big issue

  • Out and about: Blade Runner 2049

    *** No plot spoilers*** Where do you start when talking about Blade Runner 2049 – the most hyped film of the year?

    Blade Runner 2049 starts up some 20 years after the original film. It captures the visuals of the original film, moving it onwards.  The plot has a series of recursive sweeps that tightly knit both films together which at times feels a little forced, a bit like the devices used to join Jeremy Renner’s Bourne Legacy to the Matt Damon canon.

    Blade Runner 2049

    The 1982 film took the neon, rain and high density living of Hong Kong in the late summer and packaged it up for a western audience.  Ever since I first saw  it represented a darker, but more colourful future. I felt inspired, ready to embrace the future warts and all after seeing it for the first time.

    The new film is a darker greyer vision largely devoid of hope. You still see the Pan Am and Atari buildings of the first film, now joined with brands like Diageo. The police cars are now made by Peugeot. It also captures the visual language of the book, something that Scott hadn’t done in the original to the same extent. In the book, Dick (and the Dekkard character) obsess on how the depopulated world’s crumbling ephemera is rapidly becoming dust.

    Visually the film dials down its influences from Hong Kong, Tokyo or Singapore and instead borrows from the crumbling industrial relics of the west and third world scrap driven scavenging from e-waste in China and Ghana to the ship breaking yards of Bangladesh. The filthy smog and snow is like a lurid tabloid exposé of northern China’s choking pollution during the winter. It paints a vision more in tune with today. Automation and technology have disrupted society, but orphans are still exploited for unskilled labour and vice is rampant.

    Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford do very capable performances. And they are supported by a great ensemble of cast members of great character actors at the top of their game. Dave Bautista, Robin Wright, Barkhad Abdi (Eye in The Sky) and David Dastmalchian (MacGyver, Antman, and The Dark Knight). The one let down is Jared Leto – who now seems to play the same character in every film since his career high point of Dallas Buyer’s Club – I suspect that this is as much a problem with casting as performance. I think he needs to be cast against type more.

    For a three-hour film it still manages to hold your attention and draw you in to its universe without feeling tired. It’s also a film that forces you to think, so if you are looking for visual wallpaper for the mind a la Marvel’s Avengers series of films it won’t be for you.

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  • Mosby + other things

    Mosby

    Mosby is a long haired Belgian shepherd. His owner put together a monologue and some carefully curated footage to come with simply great content. Mosby’s Motto is deceptively simple. I imagine that it required a lot of raw candid footage that was then skilfully edited down into this two-minute video. The copywriting around Mosby also taps into popular themes around YOLO and follow your passion 

    Wrestling vs. rap

    The hyperbole of wrestling commentary with the rhymes of Snoop Dogg, it sounds like a marriage made in heaven right?

    Leica manufacturing

    I am a sucker for manufacturing and process videos. This video by Richard Seymour (not the Richard Seymour, design god and the talented one in SeymourPowell, but a similarly named photographer) on how Leica turns out its M-series cameras

    Verbing Velcro

    Velcro using humour to make a serious point about their brand IP. They challenge that Velcro faces is the degree to which their name ‘verbs’ as Faris Yakob would put it. Think about the way people might label their pet a ‘velcro’ dog because it sticks with them all the time. Velcro has been used as a synonym for clingy. All of this is great for marketing, bad for legal affairs.

    Greg Wilson

    This week I have mostly been listening to Greg Wilson. Wilson was one of the first DJs at The Hacienda and has been doing great productions for the last decade. This mix of early house classics surprised me a little because of his programming style (what he chose to play, the order and how he segued between the tracks). Wilson’s style was much more akin to that of the disco era DJs – it was all about the smooth flow, less about taking people on a journey or driving the dance floor in a more kinetic style and it caused me to re-listen to tracks that I have been familiar with for the best part of three decades. The context of Wilson’s had shifted them so fundamentally. More related content here.