internet
Nick Hasted
As an elegiac score plays, bails of early editions of the New York Times are bundled and tossed into a fleet of vans, which roll out into the dawn city streets, to distribute the news. The conviction shared by many in this documentary about the paper is that the vans will soon look as quaint as the last of the horse-drawn hackney cabs. The ritual of late-night editorial agonising over stories before the presses roll, and newspapers themselves, are equally under threat. The New York Times’ possible death, as much as daily life there, is director Andrew Rossi’s theme.He focuses on the Times’ Read more ...
ash.smyth
Question. How do you kill off a TV character whom, just a few episodes ago, you and your fellow scriptwriters went out of your way to render immortal? How… and why? Over two short seasons and one Christmas special, the writers of the BAFTA-winning Misfits (Best Drama Series 2010), marshalled by Howard Overden, have proved themselves singularly adept at coming up with plot devices that justify, narrative-wise, well, pretty much anything, and thereby leave the field wide open for their surrealist brand of comic pikey super-heroism.As you may or may not recall, the super-(and-not-so-super-) Read more ...
joe.muggs
“It's like an advert for American Apparel,” said my companion a song into the set – and she had a point. The elegantly poised electropop of Little Dragon is so sharp, so cool, so impeccably internationalist in its outlook and presentation that, taken in small doses, it would be perfect for any brand targeted at affluent hipsters. But while their antics on stage, and especially those of singer Yukimi Nagano were admittedly a brand manager's dream at any given moment, over time they proved to be something much more interesting.'Pleasingly for a crowd so dressed up, they appeared extremely Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Do you know where your teenagers are? If they're smart, they'll be somewhere watching Trust, the sophomore directorial effort from actor David Schwimmer that turns out to be as deftly compelling as it is unnerving. The depredations of the internet are there to be pondered at the current ENO/Nico Muhly opera Two Boys, and they make for even scarier fare in a drama about a social network - namely the family - that starts badly to fray once the parents realise that they can't police their 14-year-old daughter online.Schwimmer's film bears no relation to the 1990 Hal Hartley movie of the same Read more ...
igor.toronyilalic
Nico Muhly had one humble aim for his first opera. He wanted to create an episode of Prime Suspect, he told me last week. "A grand opera that functions as a good night's entertainment." There's no doubt he's achieved that. Two Boys, receiving its world premiere last night at the English National Opera, is as gripping an operatic thriller as any ever penned. But is there more to the work than that? The opera tackles the great themes of our age: the internet, youth corruptibility, sexual coming of age. And while Muhly's music deals with these with a humanity and wisdom that opens many more Read more ...
Jasper Rees
In films featuring computer whizzes, there is always a key scene in which, to illustrate the whizziness, a star actor bashes on a keyboard at implausible warp speed. The Social Network is the first major film to respond to the drama inherent in the internet boom. (What’s next? Google in China: the movie? Tehran: the Twitter Revolution?) But it’s one of The Social Network's unremarked attractions that a movie starring computers has no truck with fetishising geekery.As the cast and writer Aaron Sorkin bend over backwards to explain in the DVD extras, this is not a film about Facebook. It Read more ...
emma.simmonds
With its finger-on-the-pulse tagline, “Welcome to the anti-social network” and respectable credentials, Chatroom is an intriguing prospect. It’s based on an acclaimed stage play, directed by the visionary Hideo Nakata (Ringu, Dark Water), with a script by Enda Walsh (Hunger) and populated by a cast of bright young things including Aaron Johnson and Imogen Poots. However, this cyber-thriller offers precious few thrills and is hampered cringingly by an absolute lack of authenticity. It is, as its title and tagline suggest, an exploration of the chatroom phenomenon, focusing on five teenagers as Read more ...
graeme.thomson
So, did they play all the singles? Well no, not all of them, given that they’ve released 26 of the buggers in the past year alone, frisbeeing one out every fortnight in the sort of kamikaze experiment contemplated by only the truly inspired or the slightly desperate. Ash, on the evidence of last night's gig, might just be a bit of both.In one respect this immensely likeable band provide a window into the future. Having kicked around since the mid-1990s with no little success, after being dropped by Warner Brothers in 2008 they decided to go it alone. Setting up their own label and website, Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
McDonald's (the hamburger people) are rarely acknowledged for their contributions to the arts, but without them we may never have witnessed the meteoric rise of composer Eric Whitacre. When he was 14, he heard a casting call on the radio for a McDonald's TV ad, persuaded his mother to drive him into Reno, Nevada to join the throng of hopeful teenagers, and ended up making a brief appearance in the "McDonald’s Great Year" commercial.This didn’t propel him up the yellow brick road to Hollywood, but it did net him $10,000 in royalties, with which he bought an ESQ-1 synthesizer and a Drumulator Read more ...
neil.smith
Success has many parents, the old saying goes. And that’s certainly the case in David Fincher’s new film, an enthralling dissection of one of the great success stories of our age. When Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg devised a putative version of the Facebook website in October 2003, he can not have imagined it would spawn a global phenomenon with more than half a billion users. Nor could he have predicted it would result in a sea of litigation that would pit him and his company against both aggrieved former friends and slighted foes alike.Of course, there’s every chance the version Read more ...
joe.muggs
It has been reported today that Google - via its Blogger and Blogspot services - has been closing down popular music blogs and wiping their archives without warning, citing copyright violation by those blogs who post downloadable mp3s of the tracks they review. While hosting copyright material may not by the letter of the law be legal, it seems that this heavy handed approach completely ignores the subtlety of the "grey economy" that exists between bloggers and a music industry which knows full well what a valuable promotional tool they can be - and it appears to be yet another example of how Read more ...
gerard.gilbert
If I wanted to be solipsistic about this, I could say that the opening episode of The Virtual Revolution, the new BBC Two series about the changes wrought by the internet, is also the story of theartsdesk.com. It certainly felt personal at times. But then we print journalists, now launched together into cyberspace, are but one (very important, naturally) sub-atomic particle of what is variously described here as "the fastest change since the Industrial Revolution" and "the most exciting development since Gutenberg".That Gutenberg remark was made by disenchanted Twitterer Stephen Fry – just Read more ...