CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: The Science Behind Pixar's Inside Out

Movie still via Vulture.

"Ever since Pixar began showing previews of Inside Out, critics have been raving about its stunning animation, beautiful soundtrack, and creative portrayal of protagonist Riley's inner world. Daphna Shohamy, a researcher at Columbia University’s Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute, appreciates Pixar’s latest movie for a different reason: She believes it has potential as an educational tool.
“I’m excited that people will learn from this movie about how malleable memories are,” she said. Shohamy was part of a group of scientists the filmmakers consulted during the making of the movie, and she explained a few things Inside Out can teach us about memory and the brain." Read full article in Vulture. E.T.P. 4'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo via BFI.

"The best films of the year – the overground, the underground, the widely released and the still emerging, from oldtimers and first-timers – as chosen by 112 of our international contributors and colleagues." Read full list in the BFI website. E.T.P. 6'

Photo via Film Reference.

Open Culture has compiled in its platform 8 Free Films by Dziga Vertov. "We offer a roundup of all the Dziga Vertov movies currently viewable free online, a collection that allows you to watch and judge for yourself whether he and his collaborators succeeded in making a dent in what he called “the film drama, the Opium of the people.” Despite the thoroughly low-tech nature of these pictures, even by documentary standards, you may find yourself moved after having watched them — not necessarily by the Soviet causes he sometimes extolled, but by his cinematic rallying cry: “Down with bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios. Long live life as it is!” Have a look at a couple of films and access the links in Open Culture. E.T.P. something between 10' and 9 hours.

Photo via NPR.

Nice review of Venezuelan director Mariana Rondón's latest film Pelo Malo in NPR. "Pelo Malo" means "bad hair" in Spanish. It's a term that is commonly used in Latin America, and it's also the title of a new Venezuelan film that tackles racism and homophobia . . . Pelo Malo is a rare look into identity politics among Latin Americans, where racism is often a taboo topic. Despite the taboo, director Mariana Rondón says, the term "pelo malo" is common currency. "The origin of the term is very offensive. It's very racist. But it's also true that in Venezuela, we are so mixed, that in every single family there is someone with ... 'bad hair.' We joke that the second most profitable industry, after oil, is hair straightening. Because everyone here wants to have straight hair." Read or listen to the full article in NPR. E.T.P. 4'

Photo via The Conversation.

Russia has seen a surge in such performance art actions while individual liberties have been rapidly diminishing. Performance art has often been used in ways that resemble protest and so it’s unsurprising that it is often perceived as hooliganism. But these very dramatic and public forms of art are actually connected to a long line of performance traditions in Russia that date back to the revolutionary era. Read Chopped earlobes and the long history of political shock art in Russia by Amy Gryzbel, lecturer in History of Art at University of Aberdeen in The Conversation. E.T.P. 5'

Whilst Oxford's dictionary word of the year was vape, which is new okay, but is very much meh, Dictionary.com's one was exposure, which I though it was more interesting. This is why: "In 2014, the Ebola virus, widespread theft of personal information, and shocking acts of violence and brutality dominated the news. Vulnerability and visibility were at the core of the year’s most notable headlines. Encapsulating those themes, Dictionary.com’s Word of the Year for 2014 is exposure." Read full article in Dictionary's Blog. E.T.P. 5'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Kenneth Goldsmith stands in front of 10 tons of printed paper from his exhibition “Printing Out the Internet” at a Mexico City art space in 2013. (Janet Jarman/For The Washington Post) Via The Washington Post.

So, Kenneth Goldsmith, author of one of Uncreative Writing, one the books that basically made my MA dissertation, is now offering a course in the University of Pennsylvania called Wasting time on the Internet, a course where "distraction, multi-tasking, and aimless drifting is mandatory."

I honestly think this is a long-overdue experiment, but of course, I am an active advocate of wasting time on the Internet, of procrastinating and making it meaningfully, and that is what this space is all about. Of course, opinions vary and I've read all sorts of articles of lovers and haters, this is logical because Kenny G is very well known for being a professional radio provocateur, for his controversial point of view on writing, creativity, appropriation and plagiarism in the digital era, and of course, for trying to print out the Internet. Also when it comes to wasting time on the Internet, everyone has an expert opinion, right? But, are we?

Emma Brockes points out in The Guardian (E.T.P. 3') that "the question of whether the huge, distracting influence of online time-wasting has a good, bad or irrelevant impact on our creative output is so new that there aren’t any definitive answers, yet. But it is starting to be studied."

The purpose of the course, Goldsmith said to The Washington Post (E.T.P. 5'), "is to have the students write something good at the end of the course, as a result of all that forced distraction. Goldsmith says he hopes the distraction will place his students “into a digital or electronic twilight,” similar to the state of consciousness between dreaming and waking that was so prized by the Surrealists."

"Students will be required to stare at the screen for three hours, only interacting through chat rooms, bots, social media and listservs. To bolster our practice, we’ll explore the long history of the recuperation of boredom and time-wasting through critical texts about affect theory, ASMR, situationism and everyday life by thinkers such as Guy Debord, Mary Kelly Erving Goffman, Betty Friedan, Raymond Williams, John Cage, Georges Perec, Michel de Certeau, Henri Lefevbre, Trin Minh-ha, Stuart Hall, Sianne Ngai, Siegfried Kracauer and others." Reads the description of the course in UPenn website.

You can read more about it in Motherboard (E.T.P. 4') and Dazed Digital (E.T.P. 3') and/or read more about Goldsmith's work in Monoskop.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing. Credit Jack English/Weinstein Company. Via The New York Times.

The Riddle Who Unlocked the Enigma. Charles McGrath on "The Imitation Game", the new movie inspired on Alan Turing's life that will open Nov. 28. "Turing, a British mathematician, is now widely credited with helping to develop the theoretical underpinnings for  modern computing. He was also a war hero of sorts,  largely responsible for cracking the notoriously difficult Enigma code, which the Germans used for virtually all their military communication in World War II. Churchill believed that his was the single biggest contribution to Allied victory.  

But Turing, obsessed with ciphers all his life, was himself a puzzle and a bundle of contradictions.  He was famously eccentric and antisocial, more at home with numbers than with people. He was also forthrightly gay at a time when homosexual activity was illegal in Britain, and in 1952, he was convicted on charges of indecency.  Instead of prison, he chose to be chemically castrated, and two years later, at the age of 41, miserable over the changes the hormones had wreaked in him, he bit into an apple laced with cyanide.  His death was almost certainly a suicide, possibly even a re-enactment of a scene in his favorite movie, "Snow White" though his mother insisted that he was just sloppy with chemicals, and to this day there are conspiracy theorists who believe that he was assassinated by MI6, fearful that he was a security risk." As the producer of the movie said, definitely a story that needed to be told. Read the full article in The New York Times. E.T.P. 7'

Image via LRB.

Ben Jackson via the London Review of Books tells the story of what happened the night Proust met Joyce? "In one of his recently published letters to his wife, Véra, Nabokov gives yet another version of the legendary encounter between Joyce and Proust in 1922. The various accounts of the meeting (many of them collected in Richard Ellmann’s Life of Joyce) disagree on almost everything, though it probably happened at a party given by the writer Sydney Schiff to celebrate the opening of Stravinsky’s Renard in Paris on 18 May. According to one version of the story, Joyce arrived drunk and poorly dressed; Proust, draped in furs, opened the door." Read full article in London Review of Books. E.T.P. 3'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo via Dazed Digital.

"Michael Fassbender is one of the most in-demand actors working today, but although he plays the eponymous character in Frank, he spends most of the film in disguise. Quite a departure from his member-swinging days in Shame. Cast as an avant-garde rock musician – inspired by comedian-musician Chris Sievey's alter ego, Frank Sidebottom, Fassbender's famous mug is hidden under a papier-mâché head for almost all of Lenny Abrahamson's offbeat dark comedy. The film gives the 12 Years A Slave star his craziest role to date. We talked to him about Frank the character and being scared shitless by the Shakespeare play that actors dare not name." Read full Article in Dazed Digital. E.T.P. 6'

Photo: Lost River via The Guardian.

So many movies, so little time! The Guardian shared his list of key Cannes 2014 films to look out for. "The 67th Cannes film festival opens on Wednesday with new movies from Mike Leigh, Ken Loach, Ryan Gosling, David Cronenberg, Abel Ferrera and more." Have a look at this top 25 in The Guardian. E.T.P. 8'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo: Evening Standard/Getty via The New Yorker

Adam Gopnik reflects in the New Yorker how it seems impossible to revision the literary history of America, or even the very magazine he writes for "without being reminded of how inextricable the drinking life and the writing life—or, to put it more bluntly, alcoholism and art—once were. From St. Clair McKelway to Dorothy Parker and James Thurber, and from Ernest Hemingway to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Sinclair Lewis and beyond, it was not long ago that if you wrote you drank, and if you weren’t drinking it was because you were drying out." Drinking used to be regarded as a complement to the act of authorship writes Gopnik. Read Writers and Rum in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 8'

Photo: Still from the 2nd Episode of HBO Girls, via The New Yorker.

Speaking of writers, also in The New Yorker, Sasha Weiss analyses the evolution of Lena Duhnam's character, Hannah, in the first two episodes of the new season of HBO Girls. Weiss highlights how the show dramatizes the formation of a writer's consciousness, in this case, Hannah's. An interesting reading, if you are a fan of Girls of course, pointless otherwise. Read full article in The New Yorker. E.T.P. 6' (Spoilers alert).

Image via The Telegraph.

 And to close this section: Oscar nominations! This past Thrusday the movies, documentaries and shorts nominated for the 86th Academy Awards were announced: "12 Years a Slave," "American Hustle," "Captain Phillips," "Dallas Buyers Club," "Gravity," "Her," "Nebraska," "Philomena" and "The Wolf of Wall Street" received top honors as the nominees for Best Picture.

Lovely Cate Blanchett will be competing with Amy Adams, Judy Dench, Meryl Streep (of course) and Sandra Bullock in the Lead Actress category, while Christian Bale, Bruce Dern, Chiwetel Ejiofor and Leonardo DiCaprio will compete against a surprising performance of Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club, if you haven't seen this one, go ahead and book your ticket. Another surprise, Jennifer Lawrence receives her 3rd Oscar nomination. Really? I mean... really? Hope the Academy does (unsual) justice and recognises the superior performance of Lupita Nyong'o. Anyway, read full list of nominees in the LA Times. E.T.P. 5'.

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Steven Soderbergh in Venezia via Open Culture.

For a reason that I don't understand Open Culture published a list of every movie, book and play that Steven Soderbergh watched, read or attended during the year 2009. There is a lot of material, and it's amazing procrastination time, so if you want to have a look and ponder if you could have a nice time having a pint with Steve, click here. And just out of curiosity, do you also keep a viewing log? E.T.P. 6'

Photo: The Procrastinator (some) Times.

Storytellers have more fun, writes Refe Tuma, in Medium: "if we look at the interesting people in our lives, I think we’ll find few of them have climbed Mount Everest or broken a wild mustang. Most have never wrestled an alligator or gotten embroiled in a covert operation. Most haven’t seen a whole lot of real excitement. So, what makes them so compelling? Interesting people often lead surprisingly ordinary lives, but they are not ordinary. What sets them apart is their ability to tell a good story." Read full story in Medium. E.T.P. 5'

OUR WEEKLY PROCRASTINATION

Photo Warner Bros/Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar via The Guardian.

As we said in last week's To Do List, Sunday was the perfect day to go and see Gravity, so we went to our favorite local cinema and the experience was mindblowing. In my opinion this is the first truly justified use of 3D in a movie. I really don't like 3D movies, it's exhausting and I usually ended up with a major headache, but Gravity, oh yeah I even would see it in 4D or 5D. Andrew Pulver, of The Guardian, seem to have had his mind as blown as mine so he wrote an article called Gravity and other films that changed Hollywood for ever. Read it here. E.T.P. 5'45''

We also visited the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition in the National Portrait Gallery where we had the chance to see "sixty new portraits by some of the most exciting contemporary photographers from around the world". We loved the winners, spectacular portraits of course, and Man with Owl and Lucy by Deana Kolenčìkovà and Fabio by Andy Massaccesi. More info here.

VICE Video Panel @ Old Blue Last.

Finally, we attended a couple of events part of the Internet Week Europe: The Evolution of Video in the Digital World, produced by BBC Worldwide Labs; VICE Video Panel, by VICE, of course; and The Future of Journalism, produced by Protein®.

The first event was alright, there was a lot of talk about what is happening in the digital video world from different perspectives: brands, personalities, YouTube, interactive video producers, but the conversation was focused in the present of video, what is happening now. Just at the very end Louise Tullin, Marketing Director of Unruly Media, mention the importance of emotional triggers to send messages across, and that in her opinion next year's emotional trigger will be exhilaration.

VICE's forum was really really interesting, they were the only ones with a strong focus in the content being created and not only in the platform (maybe because they've always got the right platform); in the they way they tell their stories and how they manage to transmit not only information but also an experience (practicing immersion journalism, something they really know how to do); and in the fact that they know that young people is interested in the news, as opposed than everybody else that think they have to be tricked into stop watching cat videos and start paying attention to the world.

Finally, The Future of Journalism forum was a discussion again mostly platforms and share-ability, and less about the kind of content you are creating, although at some point Martin Belam, from Us.Vs.Th3m said that obviously "you can't design your way around uninteresting content". I think that's the key. Simon Hinde, Director of journalism and publishing at LCC, also made some interesting reflections about the new skills that the journalists have to learn, a mix of curation and entrepreneurship and branding (for themselves), and what it means to be a journalist in a world of commoditized news.

All in all a great day. Thanks Internet Week!