Remember that Digital Britain thing? Forget it. The government has

Me on Techradar:

Sometimes we think we’re living in Groundhog Day. “We’re going to cut off illegal downloaders!” the government will cry, before abandoning the plans. The next day, “We’re going to cut off illegal downloaders!” The next day… you get the idea.

Guess what’s happened today? That’s right! The government’s going to cut off illegal downloaders!

If you want to ban a film you ain’t seen, you ain’t no film critic

I was under the impression that a film critic’s job was to see films and then criticise them. How foolish of me! David sends me a link to this lovely piece in, yes, The Daily Mail:

You do not need to see Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (which is released later this week) to know how revolting it is.

I haven’t seen it myself, nor shall I – and I speak as a broad-minded arts critic, strongly libertarian in tendency. But merely reading about Antichrist is stomach-turning, and enough to form a judgment.

…If I were to see Antichrist, I don’t believe for a moment that it would incite me into copycat violent behaviour or make me a danger to others. But it would poison my mind and imagination, with explicit, ferocious scenes of sexual violence that would stay with me for ever.

Isn’t that good enough reason to ban it?

Movie magic

In among the not-entirely-surprising news that the new Lars Von Trier movie is a load of crap, I discovered this gem:

Last week, the Brazilian film Embodiment Of Evil opened in the UK, including scenes of somebody eating their own buttocks and a rat running up another character’s vagina.

Why not take the kids?

Cover me in axle grease and throw me to the sexbots

Sexy robots. Oh yes. Yours truly picks five lady robots, and T3’s Katherine Hannaford picks the boy-bots.

How good is Summer Glau? She’s so good that we’ll happily ignore Sarah Connor’s endless moaning and the fact that Glau is so thin her arms couldn’t contain a Duracell battery, let alone a robot skeleton. She’s gorgeous, and she rocks a short skirt in a way that – thankfully – Arnold Schwarzenegger doesn’t.

With photos, naturally.

Free costs money. Who’s going to pay for it? Er, you

Me, on Techradar:

We’re so used to the idea that everything online should be free that we don’t even think about it.

Of course the iPlayer should give us HD video for free. Of course Spotify should stream music for free. Websites? Free. News? Free. Video? Free. Software? Free.

There’s only one problem. Free costs money, and there isn’t enough of it.

The New Yorker on Watchmen

What a brilliant, brilliant review. Anthony Lane:

The bad news about “Watchmen” is that it grinds and squelches on for two and a half hours, like a major operation. The good news is that you don’t have to stay past the opening credit sequence—easily the highlight of the film.

As David Hepworth writes:

There’s something about a thunderingly negative review that makes it the most exhilarating of reading experiences. It might be as effective as taking a peashooter to a steam engine but the sound of that pea pinging off steel is nonetheless strangely warming. This particularly applies with huge blockbuster films because it helps to remind us that the bigger they are, the more likely it is that they are also absurd.

Walking out of Watchmen

I went to see Watchmen last night, and walked out after an hour – which was gutting, because I was really looking forward to seeing it. But either my memory of the graphic novel is faulty or the film just didn’t work, because at no point after the clever opening credits was I even vaguely interested. Bored, annoyed, embarrassed that I’d persuaded Mrs Bigmouth to go, yes. Interested, no.

Part of the problem, I’m sure, is that I’ve been spoilt by films such as The Dark Knight. Watchmen’s “What if superheroes were real?” thing is no longer a novelty (I know it got there a long time ago, but it’s an old idea in movies now), but where Dark Knight made an effort to do something with the source material Watchmen felt like a shot by shot recreation of the comic. And for me, that didn’t work. Rorshasch’s voiceover sounded hackneyed and adolescent, which I don’t recall it being in the book (then again, I was a lot younger when I read it, so maybe it is). The dialogue was terrible. And as for the acting and direction: wooden and liking the violence a wee bit too much respectively. It felt like I was watching The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy having a wank.

Did you go to see Watchmen? What did you make of it?

Techradar Tuesday: Half-Life 2 The Movie, and a shopping list for Microsoft

The days run away like horses over the hill…

Is Half-Life 2 the future of indie movie-making?

The potential is mind-boggling, but let’s be honest: we’re not quite there yet. The constant fast-cutting in Escape from City 17 can’t disguise the fact that some of the in-game footage doesn’t quite gel with the real footage, the Combine Citadel looks like it’s been glued into the background with Pritt Stick and we’re pretty sure that none of the $500 budget was spent on the script.

Overall, though, it works – and to our eyes it’s no worse than the CGI in the most recent Hulk movie, which cost $150 million to make and still looked like it had been thrown together on a ZX Spectrum by an angry toddler.

Six companies Microsoft should buy:

Microsoft isn’t short of cash, and it recently – and unsuccessfully – offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion.

The idea was to catch up with Google, but the big G isn’t the only firm doing well in areas where Microsoft isn’t. So perhaps Microsoft should widen its net.

From video and music to shopping and social networks, we think these six firms should be on Microsoft’s shopping list.

Fighting piracy by shooting yourself in the foot, #3124

Ars Technica:

High Definition Content Protection (HDCP)—you can’t live with it, but you practically can’t buy an HD-capable device anymore without it. While HDCP is typically used in devices like Blu-ray players, HDTVs, HDMI-enabled notebooks, and even the Apple TV in order to keep DRMed content encrypted between points A and B, it appears that Apple’s new aluminum MacBook (and presumably the MacBook Pro) are using it to protect iTunes Store media as well.

Engadget:

the problem comes in when you realize that the new unibody machines don’t offer a VGA / VGA-to-component output, meaning that you have to connect it to an HDCP-compliant display if you want to see anything. We know, one word in particular keeps coming to mind to describe this fiasco: awesome.

As one Engadget commenter puts it:

Seriously, if you pirate it, it JUST WORKS. No need to spend extra to comply with DRM/HDCP crap.

Four things I learnt on the internet today

“The success of an anti-piracy campaign is measured in the number of hours it buys before the digital dam breaks” and 38 hours is considered a success. The LA Times on attempts to prevent fanboys watching camcorder copies of The Dark Knight.

The crackdown on file sharing may be bad news for people who don’t file share. “…service gets worse as you wait in a queue wondering why your broadband has gone down, while the 50 people in front of you all have perfectly functional internet connections but are wondering if a lawyer is going to show up at their door.” Charles Arthur on the possible consequences of anti-P2P letters.

Apple’s PR strategy is hurting its share price. “Apple, on the other hand, has had stellar financials, huge hit products, and massive growth sales for all its product lines. With those results you would expect Apple to outperform Microsoft.” Comment by Ian Betteridge on Dan Lyons’ post about Apple share prices.

Caffeine is self-regulating and works almost instantly. “Women generally metabolize caffeine faster than men. Smokers process it twice as quickly as nonsmokers do. Women taking birth-control pills metabolize it at perhaps one-third the rate that women not on the Pill do. Asians may do so more slowly than people of other races.” NY Magazine on the wonders of caffeine (via Metafilter).