postarchitectural

Zach showed me Le Dernier Combat last week — it came after us all watching the also-excellent-but-very-different Riki-Oh. Watching a hyperviolent prison-fu movie at midnight is something, and it makes watching a movie with no dialogue at 2am that much more refreshing.  

I took a few screencaps after I watched it to remember some of my favorite shots. This one above, as a group of people pull the canteens off of the miner. 

This one, as the protagonist walks through the environment lit only with a couple torches.

The surreal quality of cooking a dinner on a stovetop with a backdrop of revisited cave paintings.

And looking through the manhole.

There are a lot of amazing things happening in this movie, and it makes me think about those “it’s not what it is, it’s what it isn’t” sort of sayings. Black and white, only sound, no dialogue. After souring on Luc Besson after Angel A last year and watching Watchmen a couple weeks ago it’s good to return to this sort of minimalist approach to film. It’s still highly visual — it has to be — but there’s something poetic about the shots and their confidence to stand alone, without a terrible soundtrack, without overwritten dialogue, etc…

It’s gearing me up for watching Time of the Wolf this weekend, hopefully Haneke doesn’t disappoint.

Almost there.

The Last.fm Spirals project was something I did over the summer, after mucking around with the iTunes visualization earlier in the year. It’s been broken for a while, so I’m posting some screenshots here until I fix it.

The idea behind the project was to explore trends biased based on time. Last.fm keeps track of your top artists every given week, month, or year, so the Spirals project just needs a valid username to generate the graphic. 

The images are also posted to a tumblr site, where now a few thousand of them live. They can be embedded into Last.fm profiles, etc. It’s sort of great to look at a whole collection of them. The more artists someone listens to, the more varied the colors get, and the more volatile a user’s top 10 is every week, the more the peaks and valleys get. 

Playing with Instamapper for the iPhone

This was my contribution to the song chart meme.