disassociated

Applications are open until Monday 26 June 2023 for the inaugural Australian LUMIX seventy-two hour filmmaking challenge. To be in the running, aspiring entrants need to submit a film clip of thirty to sixty seconds duration. From there, ten selected filmmakers will be invited to make a short film three to six minutes long, and will have seventy-two hours to do so. Check the details here.

Virtual community Second Life turns twenty this month, and continues to deliver what it always promised: a second life that’s sometimes better than the first:

While in cities like New York or London you might never own a flat, in Second Life you could design, build and inhabit a mansion.

Bad waitress, an essay by American writer Becca Schuh. Juggling the day job with writing ambitions, we’ve all been there, or maybe, are still there. This is reading for writers in either situation.

Waitressing funded my rent and bills and food and clothes so I could spend the time that was leftover figuring out how to be a writer.

Quasars, are the single most powerful objects in existence, and are the subject of the latest video from Kurzgesagt. Thankfully, the nearest known such object is about six-hundred million light years away from Earth.

As small as a grain of sand compared to the Amazon River, they reside in the centres of some galaxies, shining with the power of a trillion stars, blasting out huge jets of matter, completely reshaping the cosmos around them.

Still from Don’t Worry, I’m Fine, directed by Philippe Lioret.

Nineteen year old Lili (Mélanie Laurent), has returned to her parents place in Paris, France, after a holiday in Spain. She is alarmed to learn Loïc, her musician twin brother, stormed out of the family home days earlier, following an argument with her father, Paul (Kad Merad).

Believing, as twin siblings, they have a close bond, a perplexed Lili expects to hear something from her brother before too long. But her frustration only grows after he fails to respond to her calls and texts. Lili is also disheartened by her parent’s blasé attitude to Loïc’s abrupt departure.

Both her father, and mother, Isabelle (Isabelle Renauld), feel there is nothing they, nor anyone else, can do. They tell Lili the police have no interest, as they see it as a family matter. Lili soon breakdowns under the pressure, and is admitted, against her will, to a psychiatric hospital.

Her spirits only begin to lift after Loïc sends a letter assuring her he’s fine, and just needs some time away from their parents, particularly their father, whom he remains highly critical of. Loïc tells Lili he’s travelling from town to town around France, playing gigs, and working odd jobs, for a living.

As the months pass, letters and postcards continue to arrive sporadically, and a more settled Lili, who is now twenty, begins to get on with her life. But while on a holiday in another region of France with friends, Lili makes a disturbing discovery about the letters Loïc has been sending her.

Don’t Worry, I’m Fine, also known as Je vais bien, ne t’en fais pas (trailer), is a slow burning family drama, and a meditation on the extraordinary, unfathomable, decisions people make. Although the story is mostly straightforward, French filmmaker Philippe Lioret permeates proceedings with the feeling that something is not quite right.

Made in 2006, Don’t Worry, I’m Fine, sees Mélanie Laurent aged about twenty-three, already well established in her acting career. Her heartrending performance here, together with that of Kad Merad, steers this tale of a troubled family towards a final reveal that will leave your head spinning.

Still from Asteroid City, directed by Wes Anderson.

Asteroid City, the latest feature by American filmmaker Wes Anderson, premiered in Australia at the Sydney Film Festival on the evening of Thursday 8 June 2023. While there was much excitement in the lead up to the release of Anderson’s eleventh film, reactions so far from viewers and critics who have seen Asteroid City, do not quite match the pre-release hype.

It’s early days though. The film is yet to commence its theatrical run, and to date has mostly been seen only at media preview screenings, and film festivals. It could be argued these viewers, generally made up of film critics and seasoned film-goers, are a little more particular than wider audiences.

Still, some of the early film ranking metrics are not exactly encouraging. Rotten Tomatoes, the go-to gauge of a movie’s likability, presently gives Asteroid City a score of seventy-five percent. Metascore meanwhile, which aggregates the scores movie writers assign to a film through Metacritic, rates Asteroid City at seventy-three out of one-hundred.

The film’s IMDb rating, based on scores by IMDb members, sits at just under seven out of ten. All of these numbers still make Asteroid City worth watching in my opinion.

But bloggers and influencers who have seen early screenings, are distinctly mixed in their appraisals. Swara Salih, writing for But Why Tho?, thought Asteroid City’s biggest problem was none other than Wes Anderson:

What gets in the way of Asteroid City’s success as a narrative was Anderson himself. The writer-director’s insistence on meta commentary results in what could have been one of his most ambitious and groundbreaking films that instead collapses into a narrative mess.

Ali Naderzad, a film writer at Screen Comment, was at odds with Anderson’s trademark saturated pastel pallet, which he suggested worked against the film:

“Asteroid City” is a visual feat of a movie with little in the way of substance, in fact, this might be the most contrived Wes Anderson film I’ve watched. Scarlett Johansson, Tom Hanks, Liev Schreiber and Adrien Brody star in it, which adds heft but the photography is helliciously rendered in saturated pastels and so it’s weird.

Zornitsa Staneva, a staff writer at Tilt Magazine, was critical of Anderson’s penchant for constantly featuring oversize ensemble casts:

Does Wes Anderson invoice based on the number of Hollywood names stuffed in his distended cast? Is Wes Anderson blinded by narcissism to the extent that all he cares about is having a foot long list of cast credits, held tenuously together by a pretentiously self-referential vanity project?

On the flip side, Ben Rolph, writing for AwardsWatch, described Asteroid City as more of the same from Anderson, which was a good thing, albeit a touch more melancholic than usual:

With an explosion of pastel colours, precise camera moves and a whimsical script, Asteroid City is Wes Anderson operating at his best, still doing his usual quirky thing. His latest is another testament to the ongoing power of his one-of-a-kind, special style of filmmaking which here develops to become more mature and melancholic as a family deals with some serious issues.

Finally, Michael Walsh, who was in attendance at the premiere screening at the Sydney Film Festival, was likewise upbeat:

Quirky, offbeat and existential, Asteroid City is yet another darling little feature from the whimsical Wes Anderson that unites a stacked cast, consummate craftwork, and a surprising story that elicits good laughs and deep questions about life, purpose and legacy to deliver one of Anderson’s more character driven and emotionally resonate films in recent memory.

Anderson has an unconventional style of storytelling, which is something to be thankful for. While not all of his titles have one-hundred percent agreed with me, so far there’s not been one I’ve disliked. Asteroid City remains a film I’m hanging out to see.

A few days ago Apple unveiled its much anticipated spatial computer headset device, Vision Pro. According to Apple, the product is “a revolutionary spatial computer that seamlessly blends digital content with the physical world, while allowing users to stay present and connected to others.”

This assertion is borne out by American Apple/tech blogger John Gruber, who briefly tried out a test version of the Vision Pro, on the sidelines of this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC):

First: the overall technology is extraordinary, and far better than I expected. And like my friend and Dithering co-host Ben Thompson, my expectations were high. Apple exceeded them. Vision Pro and VisionOS feel like they’ve been pulled forward in time from the future. I haven’t had that feeling about a new product since the original iPhone in 2007. There are several aspects of the experience that felt impossible.

If you have even the slightest interest in the Apple headset, I suggest you read Gruber’s article in full. While the device is capable — or eventually will be — of doing all sorts of things, including offering an almost immersive movie watching experience, the rendering of (could we call them) fantasy scenarios caught my eye:

Then, a dinosaur — a velociraptor-looking thing, seemingly about 9 or 10 feet tall — approached the “portal” in the wall and came halfway through into the room. I was invited to stand up from the couch and approach it. […] The dinosaur was not pre-recorded. It reacted, live, to me, keeping eye contact with me at all times. It was spooky, and a significant part of my own lizard brain was instinctively very alarmed. I got extremely close to the dinosaur’s head, and the illusion that it was real never broke down.

Aside from the dinosaur simulation, Gruber also saw an excerpt of James Cameron’s 2022 movie Avatar: The Way of Water. I’m not really a fan of 3D films, I sometimes think they’re an eye-straining gimmick, but Vision Pro sounds like the platform 3D movies have been waiting for:

Cameron shot Avatar 2 with state-of-the-art 3D cameras, and the 3D effect was, as promised, better than anything I’ve ever seen in a theater or theme park. I don’t generally like 3D feature-length movies at all — I find myself not remembering them afterwards — but I might watch movies like Avatar this way with Vision Pro. But even though Avatar is 3D, it’s still a rectangular movie. It’s just presented as a very large rectangle with very compelling 3D depth inside that rectangle.

While a completely different medium from dinosaur simulations and 3D films, the possibilities Vision Pro presents made the book reader in me wonder how, or if, books, or novels, could be consumed on the platform. Books don’t exactly constitute digital content in this context, but still, could the way they’re “read” be somehow augmented, or enhanced, on a headset like this?

Might a book optimised for Vision Pro consumption combine an audiobook experience with visuals other than (but not excluding) pictures or illustrations. “Video” vignettes perhaps? And then audio. What about some background sound? Or might that be something book readers would resist?

While not every novel published would be adapted for Vision Pro — for obvious reasons, cost being one — I can’t imagine ebooks, which one or two people will read on their Vision Pros, not ever being altered or embellished, in some way for the platform.

Book cover of Deadly Game, written by Michael Caine.

At the age of ninety, British actor Michael Caine has turned his hand to novel writing. His debut title, Deadly Game — set to be published in Australia by Hachette on Tuesday 28 November 2023 — quite possibly draws a certain amount of inspiration from some of Caine’s acting roles:

DCI Harry Taylor has no respect for red tape or political reputations — but he’s great at catching criminals. And all his unorthodox skills will be needed as an extraordinary situation unfolds on his doorstep: a metal box of radioactive material is found at a dump in Stepney, East London, but before the police can arrive it is stolen in a violent raid.

With security agencies across the world on red alert, it’s Harry and his unconventional team from the Met who must hit the streets in search of a lead. They soon have two wildly different suspects, aristocratic art dealer Julian Smythe in London and oligarch Vladimir Voldrev in Barbados. But the pressure is on. How much time does Harry have, and how many more players will join the action, before the missing uranium is lighting up the sky?

Copy on the Hachette page describes Deadly Game as hero Harry Taylor’s “first adventure”… does this mean more thrillers written by Caine are in the works?

Montreal based Canadian software developer, and blogger, Julia Evans, dispels some of the blogging myths she believes are putting off people who are considering starting their own blogs. For instance, the myth that more material is always better — in other words, blog posts must be a minimum of, say, three thousand words in length — is a good one:

I appreciate the work that goes into extremely deep dive blog posts, but honestly they’re not really my thing. I’d rather read something short, learn a couple of new things, and move on. So that’s how I approach writing as well. I’ll share a couple of interesting things and then leave anything extra for another post. For me this works well because short posts take less time to write.

Some (so-called) blogging experts seem to believe a certain search engine is on a mission to homogenise the web. They do so by spruiking the suggestion blogs, and the posts published therein, must conform to certain, specific, specifications. Failure to adhere to said stipulations will result in bans, blockings, and blacklistings, or some other equally awful fate.

These sorts of antics are also deterring more people from taking up blogging, or self-publishing, as I still prefer to call it. But pay no attention, I say, and do your own thing.

In ten years’ time Vietnamese born American author Ocean Vuong may not be a writer anymore. For all anyone knows, including possibly Vuong himself, he might be a software engineer by then. Speaking to British journalist, and writer for The Guardian, Kadish Morris, Vuong says he might reach a point where he’s happy with what he has written, and decide to stop:

I may be alone in thinking this, but I truly don’t believe that a writer should just keep writing as long as they’re alive. I see my career not by how much I can produce but by how the work can get me to where I can meaningfully stop and be satisfied with what I’ve done. I’m more interested in stopping well rather than endlessly creating.

Vuong’s titles to date are On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, a novel he wrote in 2019, and Time is a Mother, a collection of poetry published in 2022.

Aside from perhaps being intrinsic to their nature, people possibly remain lifelong writers on account of the difficulty in becoming one in the first place.