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Symbolic Forest

A homage to loading screens.

Blog : Posts tagged with ‘film’

In the footsteps of Fox Talbot (part four)

A bit more papercraft engineering

After a few weekends without touching it, I did a bit more work on the papercraft pinhole camera (previously discussed here, here and here) today. I’m sure The Children have completely forgotten that it was supposed to be for them originally.

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In the footsteps of Fox Talbot (part one)

Or, going back to the early days

The Child Who Likes Animals is a great devourer of television, particularly documentaries, and can recite great swathes of the hours of television he has watched. Usually this involves things about his usual interests, such as animals, or palaeontology, or Brian Cox talking about planets. Recently, though he’s rediscovered a CBBC series from a few years ago that has recently been repeated: *Absolute Genius with Dick and Dom*, in which said presenters learn about great STEM figures from history. He was rather taken with the episodes on Darwin (naturally), the Herschels, and Delia Derbyshire;* but became particularly obsessed with the inventor of the photographic negative, Henry Fox Talbot. In that one, Dick and Dom build a pinhole camera out of an industrial-size wheelie-bin, making it into a binhole camera; the episode is worth it for that pun alone. The Child Who Likes Animals, naturally, wanted us to build our own.

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Witchcraft and magic; film and academia

In which we ponder why both serious historians and the entertainment industry were dealing with the same subject at the same time

There’s a lot of pressure on the Symbolic Towers bookshelves at the moment, stacked several deep with books falling off the ends. The pile of books-to-be-read is growing, too, with books arriving on it faster than I can read them. Frankly, the cause is obvious – apart from me not spending enough time reading, I mean. The cause is: shopping trips to Whiteladies Road and Cotham Hill, and to the charity shops thereon. Several are specialist charity bookshops, and all seem to have a better quality of book stock than charity shops elsewhere in Bristol, presumably because of the university being close by. Recent selections have included God’s Architect, a biography of Pugin by Rosemary Hill; 25 Jahre Deutsche Einheitslokomotive*; and a classic historical work from 40 years ago: Religion and the Decline of Magic by Sir Keith Thomas. I’ve just started making my way into the latter, and it has started a few thoughts going round in my head. Not because of the book itself, interesting though it is, but because of other things that have coincidentally come together alongside it.

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Adaptation

In which we discuss the Scott Pilgrim movie, one case of a comic-to-film adaptation that keeps all the spirit of the comic it came from.

Back, back in the mists of time — well, in December 2007 — I posted a review of Scott Pilgrim Gets It Together, the fourth, and at that point, the latest, book in the Scott Pilgrim series by Bryan Lee O’Malley.

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Stranger In A Strange Land

In which we watch some films with sex in

It’s been a quiet month on the site this month, as regular readers might have noticed. There have been plenty of things to keep us busy, firstly; and the hot summer days leave me feeling rather drained each evening, not in a mood to sit down and write something. Not to mention that we spent three successive evenings this week going down to the cinema. We heard that The Cube was showing a mini-season of Japanese “Pink Cinema”. Reading the descriptions in the programme, we couldn’t resist any of it.

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Photo Post Of The Week

In which we compare analogue and digital

It took me a while to catch on to the idea of digital photography. “Bah,” I thought, “you can’t spend hours in the darkroom with a digital photo. And I’ll always need to keep buying more and more disk space.” Both slightly false excuses, to be honest: it’s years since I’ve had easy access to a darkroom, and the disk space doesn’t get burned up that quickly. Generally, though, it was a good thing that I didn’t rush into it; I saved up, until I could afford a good camera, rather than jump in at the cheap end. And I’m pleased with what I got.

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Eternal Youth

In which we go to the cinema

A trip to the cinema with Mystery Filmgoer the other week, to see *Let The Right One In* (or, rather, Låt den rätte komma in) the Swedish vampire movie which has been going down very well lately. As I haven’t seen any Swedish films since I was a student, as usual I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. Raw meatballs? Home-assembly furniture dripping with blood? Bat-haunted forests with man-eating elk?

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Cutthroat

In which we go all grand guignol

Before going off on holiday, we popped down to York to see *Sweeney Todd*, the new Tim Burton version of the Sondheim musical. It contains, as you might expect from a Tim Burton film, a lovely, dark, damp and grimy version of 19th-century London, albeit one with a rather anachronistic Tower Bridge opening near the start.*

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A Big Splash (Or, Films I’ve Never Seen, Part One)

In which we wonder what the filmmakers were thinking

Every time I’ve been to the cinema recently, I’ve had to sit through a trailer for newly-released film *Evan Almighty*. And it makes me slightly uneasy. Because – if you’re lucky enough to have managed to avoid the thing – it’s a lighthearted family comedy based on the story of Noah And The Flood, from Genesis. God comes down to Earth, visits an innocent politician, and tells him to build an ark because he’s decided to do the whole flood thing again.

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Film review

In which we detect a foul-smelling villain

Last night: to the local cinema for the first time in ages, with my friend Mystery Filmgoer, to see Harry Potter and the Empire That Struck Back Goblet of Fire whilst it was still on. As I’ve not seen any of the three preceding films I wasn’t too hot on the idea of going at first; but I have recently read the book; so I thought the film would be an interesting comparison.

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