Watchings

20 January 2012 • watchings
tags: cinema, control, death, dystopia, fantasy, fiction, humour, love, politics, television, tv series

• Drive (2011)
Nicolas Winding Refn

• Sherlock, Season 2 (2012)
Mark Gatiss & Steven Moffat

• Black Mirror (2011)
Charlie Brooker

• The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
Billy Wilder

• Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)
Edgar Wright

• The Pillow Book (1996)
Peter Greenaway

• Point Blank (1967)
John Boorman

• Kick-Ass (2010)
Matthew Vaughn

• The Last Enemy (2008)

Noises can tell you everything

7 January 2012 • out of context
tags: noise, quotes, sound, television, tv series

Sherlock Holmes: There’s going to be a loud noise.
The Woman (Irene Adler): So what?
Sherlock Holmes: Oh, noises are important. Noises can tell you everything.

Sherlock, A Scandal in Belgravia (season 2, episode 1)

Watchings

8 October 2011 • watchings
tags: capitalism, cinema, comedy, documentaries, drugs, economy, humour, love, music, noise, perception, politics, sound, television, tv series, vampires

• Half Nelson (2006)
Ryan Fleck

• Lars and the Real Girl (2007)
Craig Gillespie

• Sound of Noise (2010)
Ola Simonsson, Johannes Stjärne Nilsson

• The Shock Doctrine (2009)
Mat Whitecross, Michael Winterbottom

• How I Met Your Mother, Seasons 1-6 (2005-2011)
Carter Bays, Craig Thomas

• Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008)
Nicholas Stoller

• True Blood, Season 4 (2011)
Allan Ball

• The IT Crowd, Seasons 1-4 (2006-2010)
Graham Linehan

• Drive (2011)
Nicolas Winding Refn

Watchings

6 March 2011 • watchings
tags: activism, apocalypse, capitalism, cinema, consumism, control, copy, data, documentaries, economy, music, politics, sound, television, tv series

• The Walking Dead (2010)
Frank Darabont

• Sound in Context (2009) [watch]

• The Social Network (2010)
David Fincher

• Remington Steele, Seasons 1-5 (1982-1987)
Robert Butler and Michael Gleason

• The Eye of the Heart (2003)
Mark Kidel

• Artscape – Stephen Vitiello – Listening With Intent [watch]

• The New Sound Of Music (1979) [watch]

• SYGNOK & The War For Radical Computer Music (2011) [watch]

• The Future of Art (2011) [watch]

Listenings

25 February 2011 • listenings
tags: minimal, noise, podcasts, radio, television, tv series

• Ficción, televisión y series [listen]

• Immersion : Three (2007)
Steve Roach

• Swift Machine (2005)
Gilles Aubry, Antoine Chessex and Torsten Papenheim

• Spin (2010) [listen]
Hatori Yumi

• Transrapid (2002)
Alva Noto

• Bektop (2010)
Kabutogani

Watchings

26 January 2011 • watchings
tags: anguish, apocalypse, chaos, comedy, conscience, death, documentaries, drugs, electricity, fiction, humour, television, tv series, uncertainty, zombies

• Arduino The Documentary (2010) [watch]

• Dead Set (2008)
Charlie Brooker

• Misfits, Season 2 (2010)
Howard Overman

• Sherlock, Season 1 (2010)
Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat

• Dexter, Season 5 (2010)

• Breaking Bad, Seasons 1-3 (2008-2010)
Vince Gilligan

• Sons of Anarchy, Season 3 (2010)
Kurt Sutter

• How I Met Your Mother, Seasons 1-5 (2005-2010)
Carter Bays and Craig Thomas

• The Big Bang Theory, Seasons 1-3 (2007-2010)
Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady

Pastiches

26 January 2011 • out of context
tags: books, cinema, fiction, quotes, television, tv series

“En efecto, casi todas las series son muestras de puro bricolaje, es decir pastiches de referencias tomadas de aquí y allá, provenientes de películas, de otras series, de cómics o de obras literarias, una colección de alusiones, homenajes, plagios, guiños, etc”.

Manuel Delgado
Deconstruyendo “Lost”. I

Inmorality

15 December 2010 • outer
tags: drugs, fiction, freedom, live, quotes, television, tv series

I’ve always been a TV addict, at least in certain sense. Once T. W. Adorno said “I love to go to the movies. What I hate are the images on the screen”, and I could say something similar. I love to watch tv. What I hate are the images on the screen… and the shows… and the stories… and… and… and… In fact, the last time that my TV was switched on was on July, and it wasn’t even me who turned it on.

Anyway, the truth is that I watch a lot of TV, but just TV series. I’ve never been really interested in reality shows, sports, the news, documentaries, etc. I only like TV ‘fiction’ —everything is fiction, of course, but that’s another story.

In the last years, TV series have change a lot, now they are much more explicit, and even daring, but there are some TV series that most people see as quite extreme or ambiguous that in fact are really moralist and reactionary. Take Dexter, for example, in which the hero is a serial killer. This may sound radical for a mainstream TV show, but the truth is that Dexter is an avenger who takes the law into his own hands (a typical topic in American TV series and films). This idea is anything but new, it’s pretty lame and right-winger.

Some friends have discussed with me about Dexter because they don’t agree with me, but in one of the last episodes one of the main characters of the season (a girl who has been brutally raped) make this statement:

“I had imagined a totally different life for myself too. I always did everything by the book, you know? Go, go, go. Never stopped to think. There was high school and college and graduate school… Owen. We were gonna get married at the house that I grew up in. On my wedding day, I tried on the dress, and I looked out the window at the backyard where the aisle was, and I saw everything that that aisle was leading to, babies and matching dinnerware. Sunday barbecues. And I couldn’t breathe. I had to get out of there and find something more. Then everything happened, and I actually thought, this is what I get for trying to live my own life.”

And the moral of the story is… O_O I can’t believe what she is saying! When I watched that episode I remembered another statement from Misfits, a British TV series:

“We’re young. We’re supposed to drink too much. We’re supposed to have bad attitudes and shag each other’s brains out. We are designed to party. This is it. Yeah, so a few of us will overdose or go mental, but Charles Darwin said you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs. And that’s what it’s all about, breaking eggs! And by eggs, I do mean, getting twatted on a cocktail of class As. If you could just see yourselves! It breaks my heart. You’re wearing cardigans! We had it all. We fucked up bigger and better than any generation that came before us. We were so beautiful! We’re screw-ups. I’m a screw-up and I plan to be a screw-up until my late 20s, maybe even my early 30s. And I will shag my own mother before I let her or anyone else take that away from me!”

And the moral of the story is… Misfits is funny, cheeky and politically incorrect, Dexter NO!

Watchings

24 October 2010 • watchings
tags: animals, brain, cinema, comedy, conscience, death, documentaries, drugs, fantasy, fiction, hallucinations, killers, love, mathematics, murder, music, nature, particles, perception, politics, science, sound, space, television, time, tv series

• Fringe, Seasons 1-2 (2008-2010)
J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci

• Человек с киноаппаратом / Man with a Movie Camera (1929) [watch]
Dziga Vertov

• Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly

• The Ghost Writer (2010)
Roman Polanski

• El Abecedario de Gilles Deleuze. A de Animal (1988) [watch]

• Some Like It Hot (1959)
Billy Wilder

• Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Sidney Lumet