So I haven’t yet used this space for my random images yet, as I had once planned. Maybe I should start this trend with these ‘WTF’ beauties (I honestly have no idea):

A quaint little Americanized British university comedy. The quips were funny, the innuendos laughable and The Graduate references hilarious. I may be biased towards liking this film; it’s rare I see a film set in my home town (Bristol) amidst streets and scenes I have walked everyday for 7 years of my life; I’m also a sucker for 80s pop which may have been the reason I was sucked into the Donnie Darko phase back in 2003. I do have to say though, all the best bits are in the trailer, yet it was still worth my £2.50 in coppers. £2.50 is such an excellent price to pay for a film. Don’t expect groundbreaking film making.

On an unrelated note, you can see my IMDB Voting history here.

And so my 35 hour eye-popping 700dpi 6ft by 3ft retina scratching marathon to complete my 4th year poster project presentation has finally ended. It is entitled "CapSense" and thusly covers a "non destructive electrostatic imaging technique for the evaluation of concrete". I am now awaiting it’s final print and I hesitantly look forward to seeing its laminated physicality before I and six other group members are quizzed on the content. I would link you to the PDF that took 90 minutes to generate and 10 to open but it is 1.1GB large; sad thing is, I had to create 3 separate PDFs as the first two came out wrong. Purchasing that 512mb of RAM the weekend before was certainly a subliminally good choice as editing kept up a surly 1.9GB of pagefile that would previously have sent my AMD into catatonia.

(The full version is 12960 pixels across and its scalable vectors give my processor its long desired workout, it was beginning to put on some pounds after all those mp3s and spreadsheets.)

This is the review that led me to seek out this film and I could not phrase my feelings towards the movie any better. It is a review from my site Indie Cult by a friend, Cory Mailliard:

Lodge Kerrigan’s amazing Keane begins with its main character at rock bottom. With nowhere else to go, the audience is left to watch helplessly as he begins to chip away at the concrete to get even lower. Endlessly fascinating but not exactly what you would call entertaining, Keane is the kind of film that will be viewed by critics and masochists only (though I’m sure there’s a considerable amount of overlap).

We find William Keane (Damian Lewis) wandering around a bus terminal, desperately searching for his missing daughter. We are given little back-story, but we gather that she disappeared at this terminal while under his care months before the film begins. Still, he wanders around, asking any stranger who will listen if they have seen his daughter. Hopelessly, he asks a cashier if he remembers selling William a ticket months ago. He will finish the day screaming her name at passing cars before he falls asleep in a ditch.

For such a small, intimate film, Keane displays a surprising amount of momentum. The first half-hour, during which William spends much of the time muttering to himself in a drug-fueled frenzy, is explosive. When a Lynn (Amy Ryan) and her young daughter, Kira (Abigail Breslin), enter the picture—just when we wonder how, exactly, Kerrigan plans to keep up with the film’s tiring pace—Keane changes gears.

The sudden appearance of Lynn and Kira forces a jarring change of perspective. From this point on, the success of Keane depends entirely on how well Kerrigan and Lewis have sketched William Keane. Were he not a truly multi-dimensional character, the audience would scoff at scenes of an obviously deranged William acting as a surrogate father to Kira. It’s telling that despite William’s instability, we never believe that he is a danger to her. There is an amorphous quality to Keane; a sense that Kerrigan is working to constantly redefine the audience’s perception of the title character. The film is restless—constantly approaching from new angles, looking for cracks to burrow into.

Keane is amazing not just because it is a nearly perfect character study, but because it offers a preconception smashing look at illness and depression. Lewis’ performance is fearless—the stuff that awards should be made of. And it’s a good thing, too, because for just a minute there, I was sure Dreamcatcher would ruin the guy’s career.

It is a hard film to watch. That much is without question. But Keane is also a reminder that art was made to plumb the deepest, darkest depths and that when it does so honestly, the results can be both difficult and hypnotizing.