Farewell Don, Peggy, Roger, Pete and Joan. Especially Joan. This week’s Mad Men season four finale means we’ll have to wait the best part of a year for our next wallow in the glamour and drama of 60s Madison Avenue. And that’s tough, because Mad Men is a show that completely absorbs its viewers, the kind of show that makes sitting on the sofa in front of the telly seem like pretty much the best thing in the world…

Read the full story article over at Sabotage Times.

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I have a Facebook account, obviously, but I very rarely use it. (Yes, that’s why you never got a response to that friend request…) And when I heard they were making a Facebook movie I was less than enthused. The story of a privileged geek inventing a website that I don’t really use? No, I thought, no thanks.

But then I found out that Aaron Sorkin had written the script, and that David Fincher had directed it. The West Wing was one of my favourite TV shows, and Fight Club one of my favourite movies. So, it transpired, I had to make a date to see The Social Network. I wasn’t entirely disappointed. Read more…

Film

Inception is essentially a heist movie that takes place inside someone’s head. Leonardo Di Caprio is an expert in ‘extraction’ – the technique of entering subjects’ minds via dreams and stealing their thoughts. As the movie begins, he’s hired to perform the apparently much trickier task of ‘inception’ – placing an idea into a subject’s mind.

Di Caprio’s character, Cobb, assembles a team of experts and sets about the labyrinthine process of infiltrating a dream within a dream inside the mind of the mark, played by Cillian Murphy. The stakes are high. If Cobb succeeds he will be reunited with his family. If he fails, he and his team face being trapped in some perpetual dreamlike state from which they won’t be able to wake.

What follows is a complex and confusing journey into the puzzle that is the human mind, with Cobb and his team switching back and forward between reality and multiple layers of dreams, allowing director Christopher Nolan to deliver a brainbusting series of plot twists and big ticket visuals. Read more…

Film

Pretty Bird is the rocketbelt caper movie definitely not based on my Rocketbelt Caper book. It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2008, received some pretty bad reviews, failed to find a distributor, and eventually got a straight-to-DVD release in the US a couple of weeks ago. A copy finally landed on my doormat this week. Worth waiting for? Absolutely not.

I should emphasise from the start that I had no involvement or contact with anyone involved in the production of Pretty Bird, so I when I say it’s one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen I’m doing so from a (thankfully) detached position.

Pretty Bird is pretty bad. Perhaps not M Night Shyamalan bad, but still pretty woeful. But my overriding feeling after watching it was one of bafflement. Pretty Bird is just so odd, so half-hearted, so dull that it’s hard to figure out what exactly it’s trying to achieve.

The meandering first hour sees quirky entrepreneur Curt (Billy Crudup) recruit rocket propulsion expert and super-grouch Rick (Paul Giamatti and moustache) and chequebook-happy bed salesman Kenny (David Hornsby) for an unspecified scheme that is eventually revealed to involve building a rocketbelt. Read more…

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