Watching A Miracle on 34th Street last night, my wife kept cracking up at Mara Wilson’s ultra-precocious 7 year old. You can’t really blame her. Only John Hughes could have written a child like this:

Kris Kringle: Oh, Susan. Just because every child doesn’t get his or her wish doesn’t mean there’s not a Santa Claus.
Susan: I thought you might say that.
Kris Kringle: Did you? Yes. Well… A house is a very big order–
Susan: And very expensive.
Kris Kringle: And a baby, well a baby takes almost a year to, uh, to, uh…
Susan: nine months. More if the lady’s late. Less if the baby’s a preemie.

The funny thing is, I would bet cash money that she was exactly like this when she as 7 years old too.

In the Assassin’s Creed games, your character, Desmond, spends his time hooked up to a “genetic memory reading” machine, where he relives the memories of his ancestors. You remember Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the way Jim Carrey is forced to travel through his memories to find a safe place to hide Kate Winslet? Well, it’s sort of like that. Except you’re looking for something, not hiding it. And the ‘memories’ all took place at least 500 years ago. At the beginning of the latest game, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, Desmond emerges from a memory of being at his ancestor’s villa in the year 1500, to find himself at the same villa in 2012, trying to get in. It’s his first time to actually visit the place in real life, and he makes a remark about ‘remembering’ a secret passage. The joke being that he’s ‘remembering’ visiting a place he’s never actually visited.

I know exactly how he feels.

Herself indoors was working in New York for the past couple of months. I decided it might be nice to head across for a week once she’d finished up, so we could take a couple of days over thanksgiving to visit Washington while we were at it. I had never been to either place before (West Coast is the Best Coast). In fact, I’ve always said that there are two places in the world I was terrified to visit. The first is Las Vegas, mainly because I’m afraid what horrible qualities would emerge in me (am I a secret compulsive gambler? a huge fan of Cirque du Soleil? Who knows!). The other is New York. I was just afraid of being one of those dopey-faced tourists that look like walking “Mug Me” signs because they’re walking around gawping at the scale of it all,. I mean, it’s completely alien to someone who grew up in a country where the tallest building is only 233 feet tall.

It’s amazing what two months away from your wife will do to your irrational fears.

Something that made it easy for me to get over my fear was the fact that, despite having never been there before, the whole place was so familiar to me. Between all my years playing the various Grand Theft Auto games (Liberty City being the game’s equivalent of New York City), and the general immersion that comes from watching movies and TV shows set in NYC, I never really felt that disorientated. I never got that overwhelming sense of strangeness that usually comes from visiting a new city. I knew how this city worked. I spent most of my time pointing out the various bits and pieces. Hey, there’s the Library from Ghostbusters! Hey, there’s the Getalife Metlife Building. New York City being the default setting for games and movies meant that I had learned the geography of that place by osmosis.

Washington wasn’t much different. Shortly after arriving, I demanded that our very generous hosts drive us 15 minutes in the wrong direction just so I could see the Exorcist steps in Georgetown. This grounded me, gave me a central location to base my understanding of the geography fromAlthough, did you know there’s an Exxon at the bottom? This wigged me out no end. I would have expected a statue to the mighty Lee J. Cobb or something.

The White House was the weirdest of all. We came at the building from the east side, hitting the press area first. Again, having never been there before, I was able to point out certain areas to my wife – there’s the press area, there’s the rose garden. How did I know this? Splinter Cell: Conviction, where your character sneaks through this area to get into the White House and, eventually, the West Wing.

And speaking of the West Wing, I’ve been watching a lot of that show recently, and that’s given me a weirdly intimate understanding of the way the place worksEven if it’s deliberately not a completely faithful reproduction of the layout of the office area. But it had another, stranger effect on my experience of the White House in general. Rather than seeing it as the centre of power for arguably the most powerful nation in the world, for me the White House actually felt more like a movie set, like the Psycho house at Universal Studios – a really elaborate facadeInsert your own political commentary here, you fucking wag.

Wired has a story about an Android app called ‘No Text While Driving’, which is designed to automatically reply to incoming texts when you’re driving. According to the inventor, the reason people text when they drive is because texting is such an immediate medium of communication, and people don’t want to be seen as being rude by ignoring texts. An automatic text to say “Driving. Can’t text” is better than no text at all. Great idea — in theory. The major downside that I can see is that you have to remember to launch the app before you start driving. To me, this seems like a step in the wrong direction. If you’re the kind of person who has enough discipline to remember to launch an application before getting into the car, then you’re also the kind of person who probably knows not to text while driving. In other words, you’re not the audience for this application.

Back in 2004 or so, when I was a happy little sysadmin filling my days with all sorts of nerdy things to keep myself amused, I hacked together something to make my life a little easier. Using Bluetooth, I was able to have work computer detect when my crappy Sony Ericsson phone came into range and automatically start a bunch of processes for me. Some of these were work-related, such as launching my Nagios dashboard and pulling up my to-do list for the day. Others were just for show. Like automatically playing ‘Back in Black’ by AC/DC, essentially giving myself a soundtrack as I walked into the officeThis didn’t last very long – awesome as it is to have your own soundtrack, it’s also incredibly annoying for people working around you. This seemed like the kind of thing we’d be seeing of a lot more, the idea of using your phone as a sort of electronic passport to the computers and gadgets around us.

For example, my car has Bluetooth and is paired with my phone. So wouldn’t it be great if I could hook it into ‘No Text While Driving’ and automatically activate it for me? But wait a second, Bluetooth is, like, sooooooooo 20th century. Let’s go all 2010 on this: GPS. What I’d really love is complete location awareness using my phone’s built-in GPS. By this, I mean being able to define certain GPS coordinates as ‘home’. When the phone realises it’s within this area, it automatically switches on wifi, turns off 3G etc. Likewise, there could be a ‘work’ location, where it automatically switches to ‘silent’ and ‘vibrate’.

I think this would be terrific. Imagine the possibilities! We could mark cinemas as sections where our phones are automatically switched to silent! Our phones could automatically pull up our shopping lists!OmniFocus sort of does this – you can define a location as significant and have it pull up a particular to-do context for that location. So a shop would pull up your “errands” context. It’s genius Then again, when we can’t even be bothered to make the effort to switch our phones manually, then we’re just one step closer to the future predicted in Wall-E.

John Gruber points to an article about the “‘Israelification’ of Airports“, talking about how Tel Aviv airport managed to increase its security without turning it into a major inconvenience for the 99.9999% of us who are flying and who aren’t terrorists.

Here’s something that stood out for me:

The first layer of actual security that greets travellers at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport is a roadside check. All drivers are stopped and asked two questions: How are you? Where are you coming from?

“Two benign questions. The questions aren’t important. The way people act when they answer them is,” Sela said.

…

“This is to see that you don’t have heavy metals on you or something that looks suspicious,” said Sela.

You are now in the terminal. As you approach your airline check-in desk, a trained interviewer takes your passport and ticket. They ask a series of questions: Who packed your luggage? Has it left your side?

“The whole time, they are looking into your eyes — which is very embarrassing. But this is one of the ways they figure out if you are suspicious or not. It takes 20, 25 seconds,”

First, it’s fast — there’s almost no line. That’s because they’re not looking for liquids, they’re not looking at your shoes. They’re not looking for everything they look for in North America. They just look at you,” said Sela. “Even today with the heightened security in North America, they will check your items to death. But they will never look at you, at how you behave. They will never look into your eyes … and that’s how you figure out the bad guys from the good guys.”

What I find most interesting is that while the security checkpoint to get into the gates at Dublin airport has gotten more convoluted — hey, buy a little bag to put your liquids in; take your shoes off; take your belt off; take your laptop out of your bag; bend over and cough please — the actual physical interaction with people before then has been reduced. Traveling with Aer Lingus or Ryanair, the question “Who packed your luggage” has been reduced down to a check-box on a computer screen. It’s a ridiculous carry-over from when we used to be checked in by people instead of computers. Isn’t the point of the question to have a real person gauge your response?

If you’re wondering why your twitter/facebook feed has been exploding with cheese jokes, it’s because the Irish economy is so completely boned and the Irish government so completely bone-headed that they’ve decided that the best way to ease the burden is to distribute free cheese to the poorI’ve been saying for a while now about how much the economic and political background of Ireland in 2010 resembles the economic and political background of France in 1789, and I’ve been wondering if we aren’t going to see a similar bloody, violent revolution. But let’s just get this straight, once and for all: Marie Antoinette never said “let them eat cake”. Clear?.

53 tonnes of cheddar, to be exact.

This is a dreadful, badly thought-out plan. Worse, it’s just so unimaginative. The poor people in Ireland don’t want cheddar, they want jobs.

Know who wants cheddar? Expats.

Every time I go back to Dublin, someone in Rome asks me to bring back some cheddar. And tea. Because it’s impossible to get any kind of cheddar in this city. It’s like unicorn tears. And on those strange occasions when it can be found, it’s not strange to be charged more than €25 per kilo. And people pay it, because it’s cheddar. Even if you don’t eat it yourself, you can use it to barter favours from other people, like prison currency.

So, Irish government, here’s what I’m suggesting. Take the 53 tonnes of cheddar, divide it up and ship it out to your embassies around the world. Charge, say, €20 for a kilo. This will probably rake in about a million or so – a small chunk out of the €6 billion that needs to be saved in the next budget, but is now really a time to be turning your nose up to an easy million bucks?

Also, I’ll get some cheddar. It’s a win-win situation.

Nowhere Boy is like a case-study in how not to make a biopic.

Granted, it’s a tough genre to pull off well. Rather than just presenting a straight documentary, with a litany of facts, you’ve decided to dramatise events, to make things more entertaining. Biopics are documentaries with jazz-hands. Except there’s a huge temptation to allow your film to become little more than a series of narrative checkboxes and what Mark KermodeVia Jon Ronson calls “chubby? Hmm…” moments. These are the sequences where the filmmakers use the viewers’ knowledge of the subject to sprinkle delightful moments of irony over a scene. It gets its name from a mis-remembered scene in The Karen Carpenter Story where Karen reads a review of one of their singles which says “and the chubby drummer kept time”, to which she says “chubby? Hmm…”

If you were to take the John Lennon element from Nowhere Boy, what would you be left with? A trite and badly-told Dennis the Menace story with some terrific actors doing their best with some dreadful material. Essentially, it’s “rebellious child with troubled family background escapes through music”, a story you’ve seen a thousand times already. Try pitching that story without John Lennon’s name attached and see how far you get.

The only thing Nowhere Boy has going for it is the John Lennon aspect. The first meeting of John and Paul! The first gig by the Quarrymen! And so on. All of which feel like 50-year old, heavily embellished anecdotes filtered through a Beatles fan’s fever-dream. At times, it feels like director Sam Taylor-Wood is so keen to tick these narrative checkboxes that he completely ignores their effect on the larger story. Worse still, the best things about the movie — Ann-Marie Duff and Kirstin Scott-Thomas’s heavyweight performances — completely put the rest of the cast to shame. Aaron Johnson really does his best in the lead role, but next to these two, he just comes across as a third-rate Lennon impersonator.

Skip this movie and just check out the Beatles Anthology instead.

Halloween is my favourite time of year. What’s not to love?

I mean, you get to bust out the tog 90 duvets and lounge around on the couch watching scary movies all night. Plus, I love the dressing up.

Okay, I’m probably getting a bit old for it now, but I think it’s great that there’s one day a year where grown ups can act like idiots and play dress-up. A couple of years ago, I came up with one of my better Halloween costumes: a mad scientist. If you know me, you’ll know that half-assedness is my forté and I tend to leave most things unfinished. Not with this costume; I put a lot of effort into it and nailed it. I dyed my hair snow white, got a giant white lab-coat, some huge black rubber gloves, a massive pair of welding goggles. Then to top it all off, I spent the whole night drinking blue WKD from an Erlenmeyer flask. I mean, have you any idea just how god-awful blue WKD tastes? I’m not sure what Smurf piss tastes like, but I’d bet it tastes a thousand times better than blue WKD.

This is how far I’ll go. I looooooove halloween.

On the other hand, I hate the sexification of Halloween. I hate this bullshit of girls dressing up in a red bikini, putting on a pair of plastic horns and then – bam – that’s their costume. A ‘sexy’ devil. Or a ‘sexy’ angel. Or a ‘sexy’ nurse.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate it because I’m against half-naked women. NOT NEARLY AS MUCH AS I’D LIKE – AMIRITE?! HIGH FIVE! I just object to the sheer laziness of it. I can’t believe I have to say this, but having tits doesn’t give you a get out of jail free card when it comes to putting a bit of effort into a costume. Tits aren’t like a note from home saying you’re excused from P.E.

What I’m saying is: Put a bit of fucking effort in, ladies

Now, think of all the things that a girl could take from Star Wars and make ‘sexy’. It’s a real short list, right? Slave Leia, obviously – I don’t know a single guy who that doesn’t work for, on some level. There’s also Oola, Jabba’s dancer from Return of the Jedi. Oh, and I guess Padma from the prequels could work too, at a push. But after that, it’s a real sharp drop-off. After this, we’re talking Aunt Beru and Yaddleand if the idea of Yaddle Milk doesn’t make you sick to your stomach, you’ve got issues.

Know what I didn’t put on this list? That mangled-looking dude from the cantina who’s all “MY FRIEND DOESN’T LIKE YOU… I DON’T LIKE YOU EITHER”. Know why I didn’t put him on here? Because he’s a mangled-looking dude. Know who else isn’t on this list? Chewbacca. Know why? Because he’s Chewbacca, for fuck’s sake.

Still, that hasn’t stopped the makers of the “sexy Chewbacca costume“, which is my new limit for trying to make something sexy that clearly isn’t. I mean, who are you trying to score with a costume like this? Furries? Inuits?

Try harder, girls.

Bill Murray at the Spike TV Scream awards. “It doesn’t mean anything. It’s the only thing I had that was clean“.

You know what, Damon Lindelof, co-creator of Lost? I think you’re right.

Or, at least, half-right. Here’s my theory of what the final episode of Mad Men will be: A fifty-something year old guy will wake up in a hospital, having fallen into a coma in 2007. A doctor will come in and say “Oh, Mr. Draper, you’re awake!” Except it’s not Don Draper.

It’s Bobby.

Everything we’ve just seen has been a coma-induced memory/fantasy.

Seriously, next time you sit down to watch some Mad Men and Bobby comes on screen, pay close attention to him. He’s either a dreadful actor or the the best actor on the show, because once you’re thinking the entire show is taking place in his middle-aged comatose brain, that kid is even creepier than Glen. And that kid is pretty fucking creepy.

Of coure, maybe all this is just me trying to convince myself it’s okay to be watching (and enjoying) a soap opera.

We’re five days into October and I haven’t watched a single fucking horror movie. Which makes me wish I was back in Ireland because I could set all that right over the course of a weekend, because it’s time for Horrorthon 2010Of course, I could set that right over the course of a weekend myself, but watching 29 horror films in five days on your own is pretty tough going.. Here’s this year’s programme and some useful links:

Thursday October 21st

20.45 Paranormal Activity 2 imdb trailer
22.45 The Pack (La Meute) imdb trailer

Friday October 22nd

14.00 Carrie imdb trailer
15.50 The Night of the Hunter imdb trailer
17.30 Shadow imdb trailer
19.00 Island of Death imdb video review
21.25 Primal imdb trailer
23.00 The Apple imdb trailer
00.30 Finale imdb trailer

Saturday October 23rd

13.00 The Amityville Horror imdb trailer
15.10 Altitude imdb trailer
16.50 Phenomena imdb trailer
19.20 Spiderhole imdb trailer
21.00 I Spit on Your Grave imdb trailer
23.00 Birdemic: Shock and Terror imdb trailer
00.30 Siege of the Dead (Rammbock) imdb trailer

Sunday October 24th

13.00 Hershell Gordon Lewis: the Godfather of Gore imdb trailer
15.00 Ed Wood imdb trailer
17.30 The Reef imdb trailer
19.15 Surprise Film
21.10 Amer imdb trailer
23.00 Plan 9 from Outer Space imdb trailer
00.15 Loose Screws: Screwballs 2 imdb trailer
01.30 Blood info

Monday October 25th

12.30 Horrorthon Short Film Showcase
14.15 Video Nasties: Moral Panic, Censorship & Videotape info trailer
15.45 Killer Klowns from Outer Space imdb trailer
17.25 Red Hill imdb trailer
19.10 Gremlins 2: The New Batch imdb trailer
21.10 Monsters imdb trailer

There’s a lot of good stuff on there (and a lot of cheese too). Best of all, it looks like the organisers have done a better job this year of balancing each day so there is at least some semblance of logic behind the programme. So, well done to them on thatBut seriously, Screwballs 2?! Are you just openly mocking your audience now?.

Obviously, being a few thousand miles away and having not timed my trip back to Ireland properly, I’m not going to be able to go to any of these movies (and believe me, I’d love to be going — this is the first time in years I’ve felt sad about missing the Horrorthon). But if I were going, the three films I’d be most psyched to check out Shadow, Amer and Monsters. Having said that, there’s at least three films each day that I’d be very happy to check out.

As for the surprise film… well, now’s the time to start guessing. Given their history of going for Irish premieres and the sub-115 minute runtime, my guess is it will either be Let Me In, Burke and Hare or Saw 3D.

Please, God, don’t let it be Saw 3D.

The New Yorker iPad app is out now. The app itself costs nothing, but the actual issues you buy through the app are $4.99 each. This is reasonable enough. I have a feeling we’ll see more magazines move to a similar model in the next year or so. From a publisher point of view, there are no more worries about printing and distribution costs. From an end-user point of view, there are no more worries about availability. Edge magazine, for example, is a right royal pain in the dick to get a hold of if you’re not living in the UK. With an iPad app, you’re getting all the content, in much the same format, with (potential) access to the entire back-catalogue at the touch of a button, with virtually no footprint for either the publisher or readermy collection of Edge magazine — going back 16 years or so — takes up an enormous amount of space. Win-win.

Except for people who are already subscribers, that is. As Kottke points out:

Current magazine subscribers appear to have no option but to buy a completely separate issue if they wish to read the magazine on the iPad. As a subscriber, what exactly am I paying for if I already have the content in magazine form? Is the $4.99 simply a convenience fee?

One of the things I really liked about David Wellington’s Monster Island was that it was also available online. When I was in work and didn’t have the book with me, I could just go to Wellington’s website and take up where I left off. I suppose the same could be said of any of Cory Doctorow‘s books as well. Although I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, I have a physical copy of Makers on my bookshelf and a digital copy of on my e-reader.

As things like smart phones and e-readers become more and more a part of our everyday life, I would love to see us get to stage where buying a physical copy of a thing — movies, magazines, films — entitles you to a digital copy of the thing as well. We’re sort of seeing this with blu-ray, where a lot of discs come bundled with a digital copy of the film as wellThen again, in most cases, that’s being implemented in such a half-assed, braindead way (where the ‘digital edition’ it comes bundled with is just an access key to download a copy once) it makes you wonder if the movie studios aren’t deliberately sabotaging this effort so they can say “look! There’s no demand for the digital edition!”.

When I was younger, I remember looking at my grown-up relatives and dreaming about when I’d finally be finished with school and start working a 9 to 5 job. I figured that, coming home from work and not having any homework to do, I’d have buckets of free time to play videogames and watch kick-ass movies.

Well, life? I’m waiting.