Generally the book is a good read and the history of external memory — going from ancient libraries to today’s massive archives of email — is interesting but I took issue with two instances where digital memory caused problems for people.

The first case is of Stacy Synder, a 25 year old mother of two from Pennsylvania who was denied a teaching certificate after Millersville University authorities discovered a photo of her entitled ‘Drunken Pirate’ — wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup — on her MySpace page. Synder was accused of encouraging underage drinking, and the authorities claimed that her behaviour was unprofessional and could either offend or encourage her students if they visited her page. You can see the photo and read more about the case here.

The second case is of Andrew Feldmar, a Canadian psychotherapist who was barred from entering the US as he had done many times before after a border guard discovered an article Feldmar had written for the interdisciplinary journal Janus Head in which Feldmar mentioned that he had researched LSD during the ’60s. You can read the original article here and coverage of his being barred from the US here.

Mayer-Schönberger suggests that both of these are examples of how modern-day digital memory can have a negative impact on the individual, implying that if we had in place a system that allowed people to ‘forget’ parts of their digital past (removing them from the view of others) then both Synder and Feldmar would have been ok. But from my perspective as a liberal European, both of these examples strike me more as examples of American Puritanism than anything else.

Digital forgetting wouldn’t have helped Synder because the photo was current, or at least from the recent past. What caused Synder’s problem was that the authorities she worked for believed that she could be a corrupting influence simply by being seen drinking; absurd in a society where drinking alcohol is legal and can be widely seen in advertising, television, film and at social and sporting events. Trying to hide this from the underage (which in America is a staggering 21 years old) just makes it more appealing, not less.

Nor would digital forgetting have helped Feldmar because his comments were from an academic article for a publically-available journal. Certainly Feldmar couldn’t have anticipated widespread internet usage when he wrote his article but when the journal archives were made available online it only became a problem when he bumped up against an overzealous border guard empowered by post-9/11 stricter immigration legislation.

Feldmar fell victim to a one-size-fits-all immigration policy that defines a drug addict as one who has taken any illegal drugs at any time, and again must therefore be considered to be a corrupting influence that should be banned from US society unless they consent to costly annual reviews. Synder was unfortunate enough to have conservative superiors that believed the young could somehow be protected from the depraved adult world if only they could hide it from them.

Perhaps Synder would have her teaching certificate if she hadn’t posted her photo online, and perhaps people today should take note of the Feldmar case and start thinking about future decades, but is that a healthy attitude? Mayer-Schönberger references the Panopticon, a model prison designed to make the prisoner unaware of when they were being observed, and would thus be less likely to commit transgressions due to fear of observation. In Delete it is at least acknowledged that this would be a terrible model to apply to society but I don’t believe that deletion is a healthy solution either.

Mayer-Schönberger proposes various technical solutions but they generally involve DRM systems (unpopular amongst consumers and irrelevant to anyone determined to bypass it) or a populace committed to limiting, on a per-transaction basis, how long their personal details are retained by any other individual or organisation, all of which strike me as unlikely to take root outside a minority of privacy advocates due to the added cost in time and mental effort and the low visibility of any benefit.

It is more likely to me that society will just adapt to having all this extra information around. This clip from American author Dan Savage is worth listening to, in which he talks about the moral outrage caused in some circles by ‘sexting’, and compares it to the moral outrage over smoking pot. He points out it used to be that if you were outed as a pot smoker it was a career-ender, but then over just two decades it’s become far less of an issue, citing various Presidents and their various admissions or non-denials on the subject. He suggests that in a similar space of time, people’s youthful transgressions published online forever won’t be an issue because in the future, everyone will have them and everyone will be in the same boat; that it is essentially a generational problem that will solve itself.

This strikes me as a healthier attitude to take.

It got me thinking about our digital music. I abandoned all my CDs some years ago just before I moved to London, having spent at least two years before that buying a CD, taking it home, ripping it to my iPod and then listening to it. The CD had become a bit redundant.

I don’t value my digital music collection in the same way I valued my CD collection. My CD collection had a character of its own, coming through from limited edition packaging to scratches caused by the cheap CD player I owned at university.

My MP3s, however, are disposable, an anonymous collection of files on a hard drive that I can delete without thought because I know that if I need them again, I can always find them online.

Whenever I listen to an MP3, it’s the same as when I last listened to it because digital music doesn’t degrade. But what if it did?

I don’t mean an iTunes plugin that adds a randomised layer of hiss to your audio, faking the analogue effect. Imagine if your MP3-playing device ‘wore’ down your MP3s the more you listened to them. Just as in the past when your vinyl would scratch up and your cassette tapes would warp and stretch, the music you listened to most of all would take on a character unique to the listener. Does your device come with motion sensitivity? A regular bump in the road could translate to a slight skip in the track. Does your device come with GPS? If you’re listening to music on the coast, lets get some sand in the track. If the weather is wet, add some moisture.

Over time, maybe your personally-wrecked MP3 would no longer be listenable. Of course, you could always get another MP3 to coexist with or replace the one you’d worn down from playing so much. But the one you wore down would be yours, infused with a sense of place, of memory, of time. Nobody else’s would be the same.

So, I start with the entire, goddamn planet and whittle it down from there. There are many places I would like to visit: Italy, Spain, Iceland, most of the US, some parts of Canada and Cornwall to name a few. The initial list can be easily trimmed with the introduction of just two simple facts:

1) I only speak English
2) I am a coward

Now, while I’m dimly aware that there are places in the world where English may not be the first language but where natives will speak it anyway, often more fluently than I do, I’m also pretty sure that to increase my chances of finding myself in such a place I also increase the odds of finding myself amongst other English people, which in turn makes it more likely that I’ve found myself in a tourist trap and will end up eating steak and kidney pie and mash while sweating away on the Côte d’Azur.

I like to go off the beaten track, I like to find the more obscure and interesting bits of a city, but I can’t do that in a foreign country because, as noted above, I only speak English, and I’m a coward. Case in point: I spent a day in Paris a year ago or so back, and I was so intimidated by the throngs of Parisians at every pavement cafe that I was only able to eat from a greasy burger van that had a sign up reading “WE SPEAK ENGLISH” and I didn’t have a coffee until I was back in the Eurostar lounge. I actually made one, faltering attempt to buy a coffee while in the city, finding one totally empty restaurant/bar (which, now I think about it, was probably not a sign that great coffee was served there). The conversation went like this:

ME: Umm…parlez vous Anglais?
WAITER: Ah, non, je suis désolé.
ME: Umm…ok…un café s’il vous plaît?
WAITER: Ah, I am zorry zir, we only serve cafe with a meal at ze restaurant. Per’aps you may ‘ave better luck at the cafe across ze road or zere is anuzzer further down ze street.
ME: Right. Thanks. I mean, merci.

Ok. That’s your idea of not speaking English, is it?

Anyway, the point I’m making is I’m rubbish at being in a city where English isn’t the native language. This excludes a pretty big chunk of the world, but as I’m trying to whittle down my holiday destination list, that’s ok. Still plenty of world to go.

The next thing I do is start filtering by distance, because I can barely stand to be among the human race for 20 minutes on a bus, let alone several hours on a plane. I wrote recently about how I had to abandon the tube, partly due to the sensation of being trapped. On a plane, I can’t imagine how I could be more trapped, short of being in fucking space. The only way you’re getting off a plane early is if it nosedives into the ocean or never actually leaves the tarmac.

So that excludes even more of the world. The whole of Australia, for instance, and the entire west coast of the states. This still leaves the east coast of the states (just about — seven to nine hours on a plane would really be pushing me to my limit), but this is when I start filtering by cost, and I’ve been as yet unable to find a way of visiting New York in comfort without blowing half of my life savings.

I could probably do it on the cheap, by flying Easyjet or something, but I don’t think me and Easyjet would work well together. Call it a hunch.

I’m now basically left with the UK as my destination. Well that’s ok, there’s plenty of country out there I haven’t seen. So I start trying to visit St. Ives, and then discover it’s a six or seven hour train journey to get there from London which I think is taking the piss, so I don’t go there.

Then, with only days left before my holiday starts, I give up entirely and go and spend a few days in Oxford.

From the Iron Man series we’ll see Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark and Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow. Chris Hemsworth will play the role of Thor after appearing in his own film, directed by Kenneth Branagh. Chris Evans, formerly of The Fantastic Four, will star in his own Captain America film as well as here. Ed Norton sadly won’t be reprising his role as Bruce Banner; instead we’re getting Mark Ruffalo, a dependable character actor. Jeremy Renner, most recently of The Hurt Locker, will be turning up as bow-and-arrow wielding Hawkeye. Samuel L. Jackson, already cameoing in several of these films, will appear as Nick Fury.

As casts go, that’s pretty huge, and pretty talented. It isn’t surprising that Norton dropped out — he’s a talented man but he does like to control the films he’s in; he refused to do any publicity for Leterrier’s The Incredible Hulk after disagreeing over the removal of several scenes, so he’d be unlikely to play nice with such an ensemble, and an auterist director like Whedon is likely to want to put his own stamp on proceedings more than that of any one of the stars. This is a cast that will need some wrangling.

Truthfully, I’m more interested in the concept of The Avengers than I am the actual film, because something of this scale just hasn’t been tried before, and I like it, and am more forgiving, when people try new things. For years now any comic adaptation has existed more or less in its own universe, apart from the occasional knowing wink to the audience: a reference to Gotham City in Bryan Singer’s Superman, and a reference to Superman in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. These are nice little gifts to the fans, but nothing more.

Marvel, though, are playing a longer game. Beginning in Iron Man with Captain America’s shield and Samuel L. Jackson appearing at the end, then packing The Incredible Hulk with references from start to finish. Iron Man 2 contains references to Thor. I expect Thor will contain references to something else. As noted above, referencing other comics isn’t a new thing but here Marvel are trying to get filmgoers used to the concept of a coherent, contained Marvel universe. To comic fans, it’s nothing new, but to the cinema-attending public it’s a new idea.

“When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say yes!”

I expect that the hardest part is how they’re going to convincingly mix the supernatural with the technological. Magic and science co-exist happily in comics, but on film it’s going to be a much tougher sell. Every other character in the film is scientific in nature or origin: Iron Man is a product of engineering and financing; Hulk of genetics and radiation; Captain America of biology and chemistry. While the physics of these characters may be questionable, each has been, or will be, very clearly presented as being part of our world. There’s never been any suggestion that there are actual gods in this universe.

I’m hard-pressed to think of a recent successful comic adaptation where the source of the lead’s power was supernatural. What has there been? Catwoman, with Halle Berry resurrected by cat breath? Ghost Rider? Spawn? The Hellboy series successfully mixes folklore and fairytales with scientific realism but even then, the first film was pretty medicore (the second was much better though). Blade, maybe?

I’m not saying that having a supernatural element in a superhero film ipso facto makes it a bad film, but I am saying that there’s yet to be a proven success. Maybe that will be Thor. Branagh’s attachment is intriguing but even then his biggest film so far has been his middling adaptation of Frankenstein back in the ’90s, so I’ll be approaching this one with caution.

Regardless of how Thor works out though — and, seriously, this is a hard sell — how they’re going to get him in the same film as Robery Downey Jr. will be an even bigger challenge. Any smirking, sneering or incredulity on the part of the other stars and the film will be undermined. We, the audience, are going to have to believe that Thor, Loki and Odin are as much a part of this universe as Tony Stark is, so for us to believe, everyone in the film has to believe as well.

I look forward to seeing how they pull this off and I hope that they do, if for no other reason that it might encourage D.C. to do the same, and we might get to see something like this on screen.

That isn’t to say that Inception isn’t marvellous; in fact it’s a masterpiece both technically and structurally. Trying to keep up is like trying to watch several different films at the same time while your brain is chewing a massive toffee, but if you can keep up then it’s an intellectually rewarding experience.

From a technical perspective, it’s stunning. Some have complained that the dreamscapes aren’t actually all that dream-like but I’m happy sitting in Nolan’s mind, all neat, straight lines, precision explosions and literal metaphors rather that than some godawful Christopher Columbus-style world of smeared, bright colours and Hollywood surrealism and My First Freudian Analogies. Ever listen to somebody else tell you about their dreams? It’s fucking boring, most of the time. I want to dream like Nolan dreams, where everywhere looks like Chicago and feels like a Michael Mann film.

The visual effects — attenuated slow motion, variable gravity, folding landscapes, Ellen Page — are worth the price of admission alone. The most impressive set-piece you may have already seen in the trailer; Joseph Gordon-Levitt fighting in a hotel corridor that’s seemingly rotating out of control. I had a big, dumb grin on my face for most of that, and I’m not a man generally given to grins of any kind.

Structurally as well, the film impresses. The bulk of the film takes place across three dreams, nested within each other, each running at a different speed. The resulting effect is like watching an hour long finale that leaves you breathless when it ends, and it actually does make sense (more or less). I’m not sure the timing was quite as precise as it could have been but when it all comes together it’s the filmic equivalent of watching a Rube Goldberg machine.

So, see the film for those reasons. Don’t see the film expecting to care about anybody in it though, because in that respect you could be watching any standard heist flick. DiCaprio assembles a team of the best in their fields — the chemist, the architect, the token Brit — then the heist is discussed and planned and executed. It’s standard stuff bolted on to a non-standard framework. We don’t get to know much about these people, and have very little sense of what’s at stake for any of them; ultimately they’re just one-note faces.

I felt let down by the ending. Without going into specifics, it felt cheap and lazy and potentially undermined the entire film. What’s presented is ambiguous, but it was enough to irritate me. It’s a notion that I’d hoped Nolan would avoid as it turns up in almost every film and book I can think of that covers alternative realities but, there it is, and in a film that felt so fresh it was disappointing.

Still, that was roughy 30 seconds out of more than two hours, so best not to focus too much on that. Inception is still likely to be the smartest film you see this year and it’s nice to be blown away by a film that doesn’t demand 3D glasses.

The bulk of Eli takes place in and around an unnamed town, ruled over by the tyrannical leader Carnegie (Gary Oldman, as himself), that offers us one of the few glimpses of post-apocalypse civilisation — naturally it involves a lot of violence, guns and the amusing bartering of pre-collapse commodities such as bottles of shampoo and lemon hand-wipes for precious water. These are staples of post-apocalyptic fiction — what was once common and of no value becomes highly-valued and rare — but such staples are hard to avoid and at least help us to understand how radically life has changed for the survivors.

At any rate, this world looks the part; instead of the ash-choked land of The Road, The Hughes brothers give us a sun-drenched world, bleached and parched, where even the blind wear sunglasses. I’m not criticising The Road in this respect — a world suffocating under nuclear fallout is as plausible as any other destroyed land — but the world of Eli fits more with our current, real world apocalypse predictions — that of a cooked Earth, rather than a cold one.

Denzel Washington is Eli. He walks the land, protecting the last known copy of the Bible with his implausible yet entertaining ninja skills, trying to take it somewhere west. He tells people that he’s been charged by a voice to deliver the book somewhere and we’re not given any reason to believe that he isn’t on a bona fide Mission From God — his ability to take on large gangs of heavily-armed men without breaking a sweat and escape from locked and guarded rooms is never rationally explained so we have to believe that he’s essentially blessed with divine protection. Fair enough, I suppose.

Mila Kunis’ character is unrealistically beautiful, but then so is Mila Kunis so while I’m happy to let that slide, it’s still a little distracting when in this dry, dead world she walks around looking as if she’s preparing for a desert photo shoot.

Generally the film delivers a satisfying blend of action and pondering. Where Eli falls down is in its idea that the salvation of the post-apocalyptic world can be found in the cultural detritus of the previous civilisation; this isn’t an idea I’m comfortable with. The notion that if, after the End Times, we can just get everyone reading Hamlet and listening to The Magic Flute then civilisation will attend to itself is just simplistic, arrogant and paternalistic – i.e., it wasn’t the culture that was at fault, just the people.

The idea that it’s the Bible itself that will help kick-start civilisation again also sticks in the throat if you’re not a decent, church-going American, particularly as the notion that the Bible may have been the cause of the apocalypse is mentioned. This idea is never explored beyond Carnegie’s insistence that the book isn’t just a book but a weapon; Eli himself never dwells on it — he wouldn’t, he reads it every day without fail — but it’s an interesting idea that could have been fleshed out some more. This idea forms the crux of Leibowitz but Miller also takes that idea to its logical conclusion — restoring the previous culture just ends up bringing humanity back to another apocalypse.

All that to one side; I also need to mention that nobody blows up a truck quite like the Hughes brothers, and that Frances de la Tour and Michael Gambon make a couple of charming cannibal cameos.

New Super Mario Bros. Wii felt like a rehash of every previous 2D Mario game, particularly the DS version. Everything about it felt crusty: the soundtrack, the visuals, the levels, the structure, the save system, the mind-numbingly easy end of level bosses. I sailed through the opening worlds, feeling all the time like I’d played this game before. I had. I played it on the DS.

I feel silly complaining about this, because even the worst Mario game is many times better than its nearest competitor, but New — an ironic name if nothing else — was the first Mario game I couldn’t be bothered to complete. After tiring of one lava-based level I resorted to using the in-game autoplay mode to get me past a particularly tricky part, and I realised that I could just leave the game on autoplay for the duration and I probably wouldn’t miss anything. I stopped playing after that, and took advantage of HMV’s “New plus £5 for Super Mario Galaxy 2” offer while the going was good.

On then, to Super Mario Galaxy 2.

Meet the new boss

The first Galaxy blew my mind. Blew everybody’s mind. Sunshine had disappointed some people; coming after the genre-creating 64, Sunshine felt like a misstep. Galaxy was, and still is, incredible. This is all true of Galaxy 2; it has all the same strengths as its predecessor. It’s effectively the same game, just with a few different power-ups and the presence of the overrated Yoshi.

This is the problem. It’s the same game I’ve already played. Different levels, yes, but essentially the same in every other respect; it feels more like Super Mario Galaxy 1.5. I couldn’t ever shake the sensation that I had played the game before, and it ended up feeling pointless. I wasn’t learning anything new from this game; it wasn’t blowing my mind this time. I could have just forgotten the original Galaxy and been playing that for the second time around.

When I finished Galaxy, I’d wondered what Nintendo could possibly do next; the impressive use of gravity and 3D environments, the virtuoso level design – all I really wanted was more of the same. As it turns out, I didn’t want more of the same. More of the same has just left me cold. Playing Galaxy 2 just felt like I was wasting my time.

As above, it seems churlish to be complaining about this. There are more excellent ideas in Galaxy 2, more incredible, mind-bending levels than in most other game developer’s entire catalogue. I’ve had my fill though. Playing Galaxy 2 was like getting through the tasting menu at the Fat Duck, and then waking the next day to find the tasting menu at the Fat Duck was for breakfast. Amazing, yes, but by that point maybe you just want some toast. Some coffee. Maybe some juice.

I worry that Nintendo don’t know where to take Mario next. I’m no Miyamoto, so I can’t articulate what I want to see — I don’t know what I want to see — but I know that I don’t want to see New Super Mario Bros. Wii 2, or Super Mario Galaxy 3. I don’t want to play another 2D Mario game where the opening level is identical to the last three 2D Mario opening levels. I don’t want to hear Charles Martinet shrieking SUPER MARIO GALAXYYYYY again. Or ever, really.

I’m guessing, given that the next DS iteration is the 3D-capable 3DS, that Mario’s next appearance will be there.

Ho bloody hum.

Casey Affleck plays Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford and continues to impress as an actor by turning in his coldest performance yet. Dutifully tipping his hat to the town ladies yet happily stubbing his cigar out on a hobo’s hand, Ford is psychotic, and the film suggests a history of witnessing and participating in abuse though doesn’t attempt to excuse his behaviour for any of it. Affleck is a small, wiry man, but drips menace even when he’s on his best behaviour, and terrifies when he lets go.

Reminiscent of No Country for Old Men (particularly in Ford’s care not to get his shoes dirty) and Blood Simple though lacking both films’ humourous edge, The Killer Inside Me plays more like an updated Crime and Punishment, relocated to ’50s Texas with Ford as Raskolnikov, lazily trying to cover his tracks and casually murdering others in the process while the Petrovich role is split between a number of key players, from other law enforcement officers to union officials. A strong supporting cast, from Ned Beatty to Elias Koteas, tightens the net around him.

Raskolnikov killed accidentally then tried to morally justify his actions; Ford instead kills with purpose and method, but attempts no such justification. The idea that the police have some evidence against him, that there’s some key, revealing fact that he overlooked is a niggle at the back of his mind but it doesn’t ever drive him over the edge; he’s already there.

The Killer Inside Me has all the stylistic trappings and cinematography of most decent modern noirs, but the violence is most likely to be the most talked about aspect of the film; it is as difficult to watch as you may have heard. Limited to a few key scenes, it isn’t the fetishised, stylised brutality that we may be used to from our films, often played as much for laughs as for shock.

Instead, it is hard, unflinching and harrowing. Reminiscent of Gaspar Noé’s 2002 rape-revenge story Irréversible, this level of violence prevents the viewer from ever empathising with the perpetrator, and we can’t grant him the wise-cracking anti-hero role of, say, Lecter, or even Schwarzenegger’s Terminator. Though he narrates the film, we can’t get inside Ford’s head; as much as Ford smiles after the fact, we’re never smiling with him.