Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll, and Google at TFMA

by Parsley on Mon, 2010/03/08 - 6:23pm Post to Twitter

Andy Serkis as Ian Dury

Film Review : Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll
There have been several music ‘biopics’ over the years, and there seems to be a rash of them recently with Control, Telstar, Nowhere Boy and now this. Who’s next? Elvis Costello ‘My Aim Is True’ or Paul Weller ‘The Ego Has Landed’? I think we must be sitting at a time where all the film commissioners know/like the musicians whose biopics are suggested to them. Being a musician and having an interest in bands certainly seems to be a common ‘hobby’ these days, although maybe now it’s the parental dream, like getting your kid to be a footballer or child star actor.

The biopics may seem inclined to stretch the realities. In Oliver Stone’s The Doors, a recreation of TV footage made Jim Morrison into a brave rebel singing the lyrics that the network tried to ban. In reality the footage shows him decidedly more sheepish. In the film about Stuart Sutcliffe (ex-Beatles bassist) I thought he looked completely unrealistic and more eighties than authentic sixties. Then I saw the original pictures and realised that weirdly he did actually look like that.

Ian Dury had a very London pronunciation and delivery, and an ability to look pretty evil. If he hadn’t fronted a band and been crippled by polio, he would have been the sort of character you’d really prefer not to meet in a dark alley. Apparently several people came off worse for meeting him in real life, including Kilburn&The High Road’s keyboard player Russell Hardy, played with mysterious over importance by Mackenzie Crook.

Of course we can’t all live apocalyptic lives, and no matter how tantrum-prone Ian Dury was, he was not a holocaust survivor, world leader or even a deaf-dumb-and-blind-kid-who-sure-played-a-mean-pinball. This meant that the film had a rather sporadic narrative, but that’s life for you. One of the things that treating disabled people normally means is that you don’t have to feel sorry for them, and whilst Dury was entertaining, he also managed to rub people up the wrong way.

Andy Serkis was a convincing and compulsive Dury. I’m not sure if actors that play musicians really need to sing and perform themselves, but they did in this, and maybe it helped them to get closer to their source material. Whilst it wasn’t too bad on this occasion, I am wondering how many times I will be forced to watch lookalikes sitting in a room humming or strumming a beginning of their famous song in such biopics.

My personal tragedy was that whilst owning a ticket to the Stiff’s Greatest Stiffs tour (in which Dury headlined over Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe and Wreckless Eric), I caught chickenpox and was unable to attend. A little piece of rock history slipped through my fingers…
Overall Review: thumbs up. An enjoyable illustrated songbook of Ian Dury’s life.

Technology Review : Google at the Technology For Marketing & Advertising Show, 23-24/02/2010
Went to this free show at Earl’s Court and learned about Google’s master plans for the world. The first ‘keynote’ speech on the Wednesday featured Hugo Barra from Google telling us about their plans for mobile. Apparently, it’s about taking the fact that a phone has brought bits of technology hardware together (speaker, camera, touchscreen if you’re lucky, gps location chip and microphone) and deciding to bludgeon the available software together in a similar fashion, usually with searching as the ‘glue’.

So speech recognition via microphone is now going to be pushed at translation software, and image recognition by camera is going to be pushed at wikipedia. Take a picture of the foreign menu and it’ll tell you what you’re ordering. Of course the great thing about being Google, is that you can search for the most relevant content that’s out there and push it together without having to make it, although they obviously do own translation software, mapping, youtube and more, that they happily give away free.

So you’ll be wanting an iPhone with that, will you? Well despite the statistics showing that the iPhone’s 11% market share of the phone market creates 65% of the mobile web traffic, Google have decided that there’s a better way, using the HTC Nexus One phone running their Android phone operating system. Good luck with that. Certainly the Google speech recognition worked better on that than it does on my Nokia 5800, although maybe it was better tuned to Mr Barra’s American accent.

My biggest concern with Google is that the great engines of software intelligence are stirring our world like the great Melting Pot in Blue Mink’s song, and turning out ‘coffee coloured’ software applications by the score i.e. homogenising us into knowing about and being capable of exactly the same things as everyone else. At the moment we have more TV channels than we have ever had before, and more advertising on them and it is easier than ever for someone to own a car although very difficult for them to drive without getting stuck in traffic and having nowhere to park. We can all afford international flights these days, but unfortunately we have to fly in the brutish conditions dictated by Ryan Air.

I remember my friend Les’ apocryphal comedic prediction of a stream of Japanese Prisoner fans running an endless procession of Lotus Super 7 cars around Park Lane i.e. as we all gain the means to improve ourselves, we all own exactly the same means and do exactly the same things with them.

Still, Microsoft had a similar vision (a PC for everyone) and it didn’t end there (or really mean something in particular, now that I come to think about it…). Some of this could just get rid of a lot of hassle i.e. If I can just tell the satnav where I want to go without having to type it in. And if it can find the nearest late night chicken and chips to my route home.

Of course that reminds us of the other theme in new software: will the computer do what my friends used to do when I had any? Going to a club used to be a team effort of driving, navigation, ticket purchase and so on. Now I can go with my only friend – my super intelligent phone. You’re never alone with a Google…

parsley.L at virgin.net [http://freespace.virgin.net/alpha.moonbase/garden.records]