Paul Haine | Tales from the city
All articles by Paul Haine
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A few minutes with the Nintendo 3DS
I only had a vague interest in the 3DS, having abandoned the DS platform some time back. Passing a shop that had a demo unit, I figured I should at least check it out. Could the much-vaunted glasses-free 3D effect bring me back to Nintendo handheld gaming? Spoiler alert! No.
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Notes from the Regent Street Apple store iPad queue
I had ordered an iPad online but the delivery date wasn’t for a full month, which is bullshit. What’s the point of being a fat, entitled Westerner if I have to wait a month for something? As I was passing the Regent Street Apple shop I decided to see if buying one in person was possible. This was two days after the launch so I’d imagined the masses would have dispersed, though the hundreds of thousands of March 26 protesters might have taken the opportunity to stock up as well.
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Nopi, a new Soho restaurant by Yotam Ottolenghi
Nopi is a new restaurant in Soho by Yotam Ottolenghi. Normally I wouldn’t care about a new restaurant in Soho because an important part of being a hermit is not giving a shit about new restaurants in Soho, but I’d recently purchased a new shirt with an actual collar and buttons and shit so it seemed like a good opportunity to test-drive it.
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Metro 2033 is a double-hard bastard
Based on the novel by Dmitry Glukhovsky, Metro 2033 is a first-person shooter set in the Russian Metro after a nuclear holocaust has made the surface of the planet uninhabitable. I’m not big on first-person shooters — I’m a lover, not a fighter — but the subject matter of Metro appealed to me so I gave the game a go. Sadly the game proved to be — for me, at least — almost comically challenging.
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Black Swan fails to impress
Black Swan, its cast and crew apparently scheduled to be showered with Academy Awards and such, is the second Aronofsky film — the first being The Wrestler — that’s left me wondering what everyone else is seeing that I’m not.
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Trailer for Spartacus: Gods of the Arena
The prequel series to Spartacus: Blood and Sand starts on January 12th. I’m looking forward to this — Blood and Sand turned out to be gratuitously enjoyable.
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The Walking Dead
A typical episode of The Walking Dead is pretty much how I’d imagine a real zombie apocalypse would be; incredibly boring for about 90% of the time, teeth-grabbingly exciting for the remaining ten.
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Review of The Secret of Kells
Remember when you were off sick from school, and because it wasn’t during an official school holiday, the only thing on TV was day time television and S4C? If you were lucky, Channel 4 would be showing some animated films from eastern Europe or somewhere; they smelt vaguely of education but at least they weren’t Pebble Mill. Later in life, you would discover that you’d seen Jan Švankmajer’s Alice and would feel quietly smug. The Secret of Kells is one of those films.
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Babylon 5: A retrospective
By and large, Babylon 5, the SF show created by J. Michael Straczynski during the late ’90s, is almost indefensibly poor. I say this as a fan; of the main series, at least a third of it is borderline unwatchable. Of the spin-offs and made-for-TV films, I have nothing good to say.
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Breakfast at Côte, Highgate
Côte is a chain of restaurants serving decent French food and is where you go when you feel that you’ve out-grown Café Rouge. A branch recently opened in Highgate so I thought it worth documenting now it’s within easy walking distance.
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Trailer for Battle: Los Angeles
Alien invasion in Los Angeles. Looks nice and explodey.
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Trailer for The Secret of Kells
Loving the art style for The Secret of Kells, an Irish-French-Belgian
production based on an illuminated manuscript from around the year 800. -
Trailer for Winnie the Pooh
I don’t care if this is a children’s film, Eeyore cracks me the fuck up.
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Trailer for Cowboys & Aliens
This looks so wrong and yet so right. Harrison Ford and Daniel Craig star in this adaptation of the 2006 graphic novel of the same name. On a related note, Daniel Craig is really looking like he should take the Yul Brynner role when they remake Westworld.
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The morality of Fable III
Fable III is not a game with many shades of gray. By and large, the decisions you face always have a heavily-signposted ‘good’ or ‘evil’ option with nothing in between. It’s a cartoonish, black and white view of the world and the consequences are largely the same each time: pick the good option and the people will love you, but at a high economic cost which later translates to a high human cost. Pick the bad option and you’ll be hated, but lives will be saved in the long run. It’s a paternalistic perspective that treats the general population as children, who may lash out at being treated severely but ultimately aren’t capable of seeing that it’s for their own good.
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Edgar Wright and the videogame aesthetic
The videogame film adaptation has a sorry history. Street Fighter; Super Mario Bros.; almost the entire filmography of Uwe Boll. That the barely-passable Tomb Raider with Angeline Jolie is generally seen as the pinnacle of the game to film transition speaks volumes.
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Why I like the rumours of Jon Hamm being the next Superman
Mad Men star Jon Hamm has recently been rumoured to be taking on the role of Superman in the upcoming Man of Steel, to be produced by Christopher Nolan and written by David Goyer. I would never have thought of Hamm myself but now the idea is there, it seems perfect to me.
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The Eighth Doctor
Having eventually enjoyed the modern-day RTD-helmed reboot of Doctor Who and what is arguably its second modern-day reboot in the form of the fairytale-style Moffat and Smith series, I thought it was worth giving the failed 1996 reboot a second look to see why it never made it.
In a nutshell: it’s because it does almost everything wrong.
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Slavik Anishchenko's Synthetic World
Slavik Anishchenko’s Synthetic World, part of the Philips Parallel Lines project.
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Viktor Mayer-Schönberger's Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger examines how humanity has used technology to augment human memory over the ages, and how we are now entering a period where technology gives us near-perfect memory through digital archives. He argues that this is an abnormal situation for our societies, and that we ought to be finding ways in which we can facilitate forgetting rather than remembering.
