David Barrie

Princess Power

News just in from Hollywood!

Royalty offers an answer to problems of social mobility.

Disney are about to launch a Visa credit card to help you buy the latest sleepwear and housewares worthy of a Princess, from the line of goods they market out of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Belle and Enchanted, their latest fairy-tale romantic comedy.

The Princess line is worth $6bn annually - yes $6bn - and is becoming the most successful marketing venture ever, Newsweek reports.

So if you want to savor a dollop of Princess Power or scale up as a 'Destination Bride', check out the Princess line of wedding dresses that were launched earlier this year.

And while you're about it, don't forget those glass slippers.

Game cinema

I saw Spiderman 3 the other day.

To all intents and purposes, the film was a ride through a Playstation game.

There were dramatically extended action sequences - much like a single level in a game. The film constantly took us through deep, dark, long corridors and dropped us hundreds of meters down, down, down. The narrative was broken down in to exclusive character sections, rather than intercut character narrative. There
was no time for panning panels across peripheral settings, as in anime.

I noticed something similar going on in Casino Royale, especially the astonishing opening scene, that progressed the chase through endless different landscapes.

If the visualisation of Spiderman was to be a transposition of comic-like-imagery, there'd be juxtapositions of panels, diverse camera shots of a single scene and maybe action forcing itself out of the frame.

Am I imagining this? Is gaming changing the way in which we like our action served up?  Is multi-platform distribution finally having a story-telling impact upstream?

If there is some form of convergence going on, how amazing is that? For alongside working lives increasingly determined by and existing within bandwidth, we're entertaining ourselves not by bathing in the traditional light of cinema but in progressive narratives of digital gaming.

This is England

This is England, British director Shane Meadows' latest film is one of the best films that I've seen in years.

The film tells the rite of passage story of twelve year-old Shaun's holiday off school and relationship with a group of local skinheads.

Oh my God! Skins. Bovver boots. Gorgeous New Romantic teenagers. And  a Jamaican skanker caught between deciding whether he should follow the racist crowd or assert himself.

Oh my God! Sean's loss and urban Nazism's gain is a generation of fatherless men seeking some kind of new nirvana in tin-pot Oi and local tyranny of the estate.

I saw the film on a flight and was the guy without the eyepatches sniffing in Row 12.

First was the fatherless-ness - something I know from personal experience. Then, there was England. England then. Subways. The color of your boots. Eyeliner. Fucked up local tin-pot dictators. And a cynicism and innocent dunder-head dysfunction that never let truth out.  An age of  knee-jerk directionless.

Then there is England now. Gorgeous Paris Hilton-ness. Nu everything. Poles in Middlesbrough. Simon Cowell. Isolated pockets of old England.  New  pockets of Al-Quaeda.

Trash pop culture may at times be shite: our century's version of the disco diva-dom we despised back in 1977. But at least, all the alienation and post-industrial detritus appears to have slipped away.

Today, England may be more like Malibu beach mashed with wall-to-wall beige. We may be tripping on consolidated debt, New Look heels and snazz-tastic dayglo pendants. But at least that sense of dead-end-ness seems to have passed.

Maybe that's why I cried.