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UK Film Council shuttered

By Asides, Cinema and Current Events

In New Zealand we have a con­ser­vat­ive gov­ern­ment and our Film Commission has just been reviewed. In the UK, the new Conservative-Lib/Dem gov­ern­ment decided to just shoot theirs in the head:

This decision could prove dev­ast­at­ing to an entire gen­er­a­tion of film-makers; for all its ups and downs, the Film Council has got involved with the likes of Armando Iannucci, Andrea Arnold, Lynne Ramsay, Peter Mullan, Sam Taylor-Wood, Kevin McDonald and Pawel Pawlikowski. How much cred­it the coun­cil can take for their film-making is up for debate, but it has at least func­tioned as the con­nect­ive tis­sue between such dis­par­ate talents.

(There’s a sec­tion on the demise of the UK Film Council in The Guardian and more reac­tion at the excel­lent aggreg­at­or Mubi.com/Notebook.)

Sigourney Weaver and the Dogs of 9/11

By Asides

Sigourney Weaver in Esquire’s What I’ve Learned:

I volun­teered to serve food to the work­ers at Ground Zero after 9/11. There were dogs trained to find liv­ing people. The people who worked with the dogs became wor­ried because the day after day of not find­ing any­one was begin­ning to depress the anim­als. So the people took turns hid­ing in the rubble so that every now and then a dog could find one of them to be able to carry on.

“the aurora that is SHATNER”

By Asides, Cinema and TV

Shatner inter­viewed in GQ (via @saniac):

Resistance is futile, of course. You aren’t in Shatner’s pres­ence ten minutes before he reverse-engineers your emo­tion­al state; first, you adopt those con­ver­sa­tion­al rhythms of his—everywhere, the jelly!—and then, by God, you start to feel the enthu­si­asm of your words, an enthu­si­asm inev­it­ably heightened by your know­ledge that this is WILLIAM TIBERIUS FUCKING SHATNER! you are deal­ing with, the most meta, the most absurd, human being in Western Civilization, and you fall in love with that meta-absurdity, the bon­anza of impun­ity and laughs it generates.

When I did The Immortals recently, the dir­ect­or and I had three short­cuts for line read­ings: Clarkson, Blessed and Shatner.

“Not our art, but our brush.”

By Asides

A lovely med­it­a­tion on per­man­ence and imper­man­ance from, of all places, Gizmodo:

She’s made a ghost bike for him, painted a thick-pipe com­muter bike white with spray paint. Going to leave it on the corner, chained to a lamp post. She posts a time on David’s Myspace page, lets her friends know when to gather.

Word spreads. She’s push­ing the bike down the street, sur­roun­ded by hun­dreds of mourn­ers. They saw her mes­sage on his Myspace page. They walk by the bike, toss­ing down flowers and pho­to­graphs and mes­sages to David. She did­n’t expect this.

Joel Johnson writes too well for gad­get blogs. (via Daring Fireball)