icon 016 I happened to visit the museum while in Copenhagen for the RAZR launch, and really wanted to write about it. It had a bit of a difficult gestation, though – I wanted to review the museum as a whole because it wasn’t just the building but the overall experience that made me think, but I was asked to cover it as a building study instead. But it came out alright, and I got to chat on the phone with Libeskind himself, which was nice.
I interviewed Ken Adam last week, the production designer behind Dr. Strangelove and Bond films such as Dr. No and Moonraker. Now in his early 80s, hes an amazing man. His iconographic designs in many ways set the aesthetic for the late 20th century, such as his megalomaniac’s lairs and the war room in Strangelove, a great oppressive concrete bunker that’s dominated by huge tactical screens. Apparently when Ronald Reagan got into office in the 80s, he was surprised to see that the real war room was totally different from Kubrick and Adam’s fiction.
I went to a preview showing of John George A. (oh my god: John – what was I thinking?!) Romero’s new zombie flick, Land of the Dead, tonight. It was pretty good, though it wore its politics heavily on its sleeve. The metaphors were laid on very thickly, with talk of Jihad and showing how the little people are fucked over by The Man (i.e. the WASP).
Something that struck me as we watched it was the somewhat uncomfortable contrast between the be-good-to-each-other ethos that lies behind the film and the lovingly rendered gore and the bloodthirsty reactions of the audience (it was a fan showing, naturally) which cheered and laughed as every victim (whether zombie or human) was eviscerated.
I did (and passed!) my driving theory test last weekend. When I did it the first time round a few years ago (just after the theory test became mandatory) it was on paper, but now it’s all by computer, mouse and touchscreen.
It also now includes a second part, the hazard awareness test. It consists of 14 non-interactive films taken from the perspective of a driver in various locations and conditions. It might sound simple - the aim is to identify potential hazards by clicking the mouse - but it’s actually rather confusing. When are you meant to click the mouse? When you see a clue to a hazard (which is how the imprecise tutorial explains it)? When the situation develops and a true danger occurs? Both times?
I’m totally ignorant about new film news, so I’ve only just heard that there are actually two films being made based on the Beowulf. Wow, I had the same idea only a few months ago! Bet they won’t have such great music ideas though.
Ray Winstone is to play Beowulf in one of them, a choice that’s probably informed by his barbarian-esque character in the recent (and dull, despite a good set of actors) King Arthur. The other film, called Beowulf and Grendel, has a load of people in it I’ve never heard of, but appears to have some Scandinavians (if the names are anything to go by), so that will be nice.
I went to visit Rockstar’s London office today to see a new game they’re developing based on the 1979 New York gang war film The Warriors. It looks like a good game, full of Rockstar’s trademark well-judged melding of videogame convention with the rest of popular culture. It’s a street brawler, like Double Dragon or Spikeout, set in dilapidated and dark inner city streets. The combat appears to be fairly deep, with counters, reversals and some freedom over how you tackle the many enemies that can surround your character. AI gang buddies lay into foes too – you can even step back sometimes to get a better overview of how the battle is going and plan accordingly. The atmosphere of the game is nice too. Though nice perhaps isn’t the right word – it mirrors the world of the film well: all peeling paint, rusting corrugated iron and sodium glare off wet streets.
I banged on about how much I like Bleep a while back, so sorry to do so again and sound even more like a Warp sales rep. I just wanted to say that Bleep has a couple of new features. It now has nice RSS feeds to updates and record additions to the main page and individual labels and a tool that allows you to add the Bleep preview player for specific records to your own website.
Killer 7 has finally come out, the last of the four (surviving) new games that Capcom pledged for the GameCube a couple of years ago.
Theyre all amazing games, polished, deep and imaginative, and three of them – Resident Evil 4, P.N. 03 and Killer 7 (the fourth was Viewtiful Joe) – form a kind of triumvirate that explore the concept of the modern shooter.
P.N. 03 was the first to come out. Almost terminally misunderstood, it is about position, timing and rhythm. People think that the controls are sluggish and frustrating, but they’re not. Match the rhythm of the game and you’ll find yourself avoiding enemy fire and sweeping out to dole out your own with elegance and calculated flair. You’re given a precise range of moves – you have to work out the best strategy to efficiently deal with each of the enemy types and win those points.
I went to interview a designer called Matthias Megyeri today at his studio in Hackney Wick. Its a funny area, one of those in-between places that you never really think about. It was strange to see its streets at ground level as I look down on it from the train to Stratford every day.
Megyeri’s studio is in a gated mews of other live-work units. Peering in one of them as I passed on the way in, I noticed a trestle table covered in little painted soldiers that looked rather familar. It turned out that “Young British Artists” Jake and Dinos Chapman have a studio there too. Looks like they’re rebuilding Hell, their incredible boys-own Airfix-style model of Nazis doing unspeakable things with spikes and skeletons that was burnt in the fire in a Saatchi warehouse last year. Megyeri also told me that the editor of Another magazine lived in another of the units.