In 1979, the acclaimed French director, Bertrand Tavernier arrived in Glasgow to shoot his latest project - a science fiction film called Death Watch. It was a move away from Tavernier’s best known work - historical drama (Que la fête commence…), crime (The Watchmaker of St. Paul’s), and his scripts which focussed on the complex psychological interactions between characters.

Based on the novel, The Unsleeping Eye by David G Compton, Death Watch centered on a young man, Roddy, who is hired by a TV organization to have a camera implanted in his eye, in order that he may follow and film the last days of a terminally ill woman, Katherine. Tavernier developed this into clever and layered film starring Romy Schneider as Katherine, Harvey Keitel as Roddy, with a supporting cast of Harry Dean Stanton and Max Von Sydow, and early appearances for Robbie Coltrane and Bill Nighy.

For the cast alone should have ensured Death Watch‘s cult status, but it opened to negative reviews, and was quickly damned to obscurity in the growing multiplex world of The Empire Strikes Back, Smokey and the Bandit, Airplane! and Any Which Way You Can.

Tavernier had proven himself to be too clever by half and had made an intelligent and polemical film, which raised issues of the ethics and morality involved in film-making. Tavernier was also presciently examining the affects of Reality TV and Ob Docs, and questioning the role of media intrusion in our lives. Big issues, big subjects, and worth far more than comic book mix parped out by Lucas and co.

Almost entirely filmed in Glasgow, Death Watch captured the city at its most bleak and desolate - its heart ripped-out by unthinking town planners, who wanted to create a container city that mimicked an idealized America of freeways and skyscrapers. Their actions were akin to hacking off the legs of a prize winning racehorse, then entering it in the Grand National. Communities were destroyed, rehoused in high-rise, shoe-box apartments on the outskirts of the city, or scattered further afield in New Towns. The city’s industries were in fatal decline, the docks abandoned, ship-building almost gone. Yet, for all this, there is an inherent beauty to Tavernier’s vision, where Glasgow looks like a martian out-post, while at the same time capturing the mahogany warmth of its mythical Victorian past as the “Second City of the Empire”.
 

 
Previously on dangerous Minds

Bertrand Tavernier’s ‘Death Watch’

 
With thanks to Joseph McKay
 

 
I love what this guy says here.

Plus one!
 

 
Via Glen E. Friedman

 
Well, this certainly looks interesting. It’s a trailer for the forthcoming serial Danger 5, which follows the adventures of an elite espionage unit formed to do battle with Hitler and his gold-munching dinosaur robots. Or something. Even though the setting is World War 2 by way of the swinging 60s, Danger 5 has more than a hint of Garth Merenghi’s Darkplace about it - in fact, is that Matt Berry doing the voiceover?
 

 
Danger 5 debuts on YouTube on November 21st. For more info(including a peak at the Danger 5 Monthly magazine) visit www.danger5.tv.

 
One Hundred & Forty Characters is a project by the brilliantly talented and award-winning photographer Chris Floyd, in which he takes pictures of people he follows on Twitter, including comedy genius Graham Linehan, the ever wonderful Miranda Sawyer, Caitlin Moran and Peter Serafinowicz:

In July 2010 I decided to begin photographing people that I follow on Twitter.  The idea for this came at a moment when I realised I had not seen or spoken to any of my best half a dozen real and actual friends for over a month. Some of those people on Twitter I communicate with several times a week, in bursts of 140 characters or less, and yet I had never met any of them. As we are now well and truly living in a digital age I am aware that this state of being is only going to deepen and the traditional forms of friendship, although they will not go away anytime soon, are going to have to make more room for the new way of doing things.  Where Facebook might be considered as the place in which you tell lies to all the people you went to school with, I had begun to think of Twitter as the place where you tell the truth to all those that you wish you’d gone to school with.  The project rolled on indefinitely for almost a year but when, one day, I counted up the number of subjects to date and came to a number in the mid one hundred and thirties, I immediately knew where this had to end.  So here they are.  My new friends.  140 characters.  No more and no less.

One Hundred & Forty Characters will be on show at the Host Gallery, 1 Honduras Street, London EC1Y 0TH between the 3rd & 17th November 2011.

Check here for details and to see more of Chris Floyd’s brilliant work check here.
 

@msmirandasawyer

“I like this picture because it represents my whole family. Although there’s only me and my son in it, he’s wearing a T-shirt that says Smiley on it, which is my husband’s name; and I’m five months pregnant with our daughter. So there’s four people in there, not just two.

“I look quite mad in it, which I like too. That crazy, rictus grin: I was hot, and fat, and tired and my son was playing up. The only solution was to turn him upside down and make him laugh. I notice that in another one of the 140 Characters pictures, another small boy is being held in the same way. It’s a default solution for boys, it makes them normal again, like rebooting a computer, or reprogramming Buzz Lightyear to his factory settings.”

 

@glinner

“The beauty of Twitter is that it is only as useful as the person who is using it wants it to be. It is such a simple and flexible service that everyone who uses it does so in a different way. Not only that, but it’s a meritocracy. Not only that, but Karma seems to have something to do with it. If you use it for good, you will be rewarded, if you use it for evil, you will be blocked. As a result, it’s leading to some remarkably civil conversations between ideological enemies. If the inventors of Twitter never win a Nobel Prize, they wuz robbed. Because as far as I’m concerned, they have enabled us all to take a major evolutionary step at a crucial moment. At a time when the human race faces not one but several extinction threats, we suddenly get the ability to talk to one another.”

 
4 more from ‘One Hundred & Forty Characters’, after the jump…
 
With thanks to Trevor Ward
 

 
“We are the ones We have been waiting for.”

The latest message claiming to be from Anonymous to the 99%.
 

 
Are the right wing propagandists at the New York Post actually calling the Occupy Wall Street protesters “shit?” It certainly looks that way.

While some may think it’s just an amusing pun, I think there’s a little more to it than that. The Post, along with many well-off and privileged New Yorkers (I know a few), see the protesters as nothing more than a massive nuisance, human traffic obstacles, clogging up the pipelines of commerce like giant turds. And the cops are just human roto-rooters trying their best to keep the drain clean and the sewage flowing. A day of business lost in New York City comes at a huge price and we can’t have that. No shit! 

 
The UK’s Daily Sport tabloid is on a roll - only a few weeks after delivering the now legendary leader “Gordon Ramsay Sex Dwarf Eaten By Badger” comes this beauty. But what I want to know is - did it hurt?

 
The New York Observer posted this FANTASTIC clip of a Fox News personality (I can’t recall this guy’s name and I’m too lazy to check) getting his ass schooled by a (super) articulate Occupy Wall Street protester named Jesse LaGreca, a man born with a rare gift for gab (and blogging, he’s known as “Ministry of Truth” when he blogs at Daily Kos).

I just can’t imagine how this conversation landed on the cutting room floor, can you? This footage is going to be all over MSNBC, CNN and Current later today.

Fox: Jesse, so Ray, your partner here, your ..

Ray: comrade.

Fox: Your colleague, she’d seen the protests in Greece and Europe and elsewhere. Did you guys take your cue from that? Are you hoping to cite certainly what was a lot of the tension, if not police activity. I know over the weekend there were over 100 arrests and you guys got things fired up. Are you taking your cues from the international movement and how do you want to see this? If you could have it in a perfect way, how would it be?

Jesse: Well I don’t know, its really difficult to answer questions leading to those conclusions. I’d say that we didn’t take our cue leading off of anybody really. It became a more spontaneous movement. As far as seeing this end, I wouldn’t like to see this end. I would like to see the conversation continue. This is what we should have been talking about in 2008 when the economy collapsed. We basically patched a hole on the tire and said let the car keep rolling. Unfortunately it’s fun to talk to the propaganda machine and the media especially conservative media networks such as yourself, because we find that we cant get conversations for the department of Justice’s ongoing investigation of News Corporation, for which you are an employee. But we can certainly ask questions like you know, why are the poor engaging in class warfare? After 30 years of having our living standards decrease while the wealthiest 1% have had it better than ever, I think it’s time for some maybe, I don’t know, participation in our democracy that isn’t funded by news cameras and gentlemen such as yourself.

Fox: But, uh, yeah well, let me give you this challenge Jesse.

Jesse: Sure.

Fox: We’re here giving you an opportunity on the record […] to put any
message you want out there, to give you fair coverage and I’m not
going to in any way

Jesse: That’s awesome!

Fox:…give you advice about it. So, there is an exception in the case, because you wouldn’t be able to get your message out there without us.

Jesse: No, surely, I mean, take for instance when Glenn Beck was doing his protest and he called the President, uh, a person who hates white people and white culture. That was a low moment in Americans’ history and you guys kinda had a big part in it. So, I’m glad to see you coming around and kind of paying attention to what the other 99 percent of Americans are paying attention to, as opposed to the far-right fringe, who who would just love to destroy the middle class entirely.

Fox: Alright, fair enough. You have a voice, an important reason to criticize myself, my company and anyone else. But, let me ask you that, in fairness, does this administration, President Obama, have any criticism as to the the financial situation the country’s in…?

Jesse: I think, myself, uh, as well as many other people, would like to see a little but more economic justice or social justice—Jesus stuff—as far as feeding the poor, healthcare for the sick. You know, I find it really entertaining that people like to hold the Bill of Rights up while they’re screaming at gay soldiers, but they just can’t wrap their heads around the idea that a for-profit healthcare system doesn’t work. So, let’s just look at it like this, if we want the President to do more, let’s talk to him on a level that actually reaches people, instead of asking for his birth certificate and wasting time with total nonsense like Solyndra.

GENIUS!!!! I wanted to cheer when I watched this clip. Someone needs to start an effort to draft Jesse LaGreca for Congress, if not a higher office! 

This video was shot by Kyle Christopher from the Occupy Wall Street media team.

More at the New York Observer.
 

 
Via Glenn E. Friedman

 
On Monday, the BBC’s supposed “financial expert,” Alessio Rastani, became the human face of the financial crisis within the space of a single day, when the video of him telling astonished newscasters that he goes to bed every night “dreaming of another recession” because for him, that’s “an opportunity,” went viral in a big way. The following morning, there was speculation that Rastani’s “candid” remarks were all part of an elaborate hoax played on the BBC by the Yes Men, who denied it.

Now, Rastani admits that he is, fact, not much of a trader, he’s more of an, um, in his own words, an “attention seeker.”

“They approached me,” he told The Telegraph. “I’m an attention seeker. That is the main reason I speak. That is the reason I agreed to go on the BBC. Trading is a like a hobby. It is not a business. I am a talker. I talk a lot. I love the whole idea of public speaking.”

So he’s more of a talker than a trader. A man who doesn’t own the house he lives in, but can sum up the financial crisis in just three minutes – a knack that escapes many financial commentators.

“I agreed to go on because I’m attention seeker,” he said on Tuesday. “But I meant every word I said.”

Good to know he’s a man of his word! Not that this new revelation about his resume in any way contradicts what Mr. Rastani actually said on BBC News about how Goldman Sachs runs the world and all that, but we thought you might like to know…

Is a blunt truth told by a liar—even when he’s more or less caught in the act—invalidated in any way? I don’t think so, the truth is the truth, even if, in this case, the messenger is far less than perfect. Everyone, even professional traders, knows what he said accurately describes the way rapacious final stages of capitalism really works. WHAT he said no one seems to hava a problem with!

Hoaxer, liar, blagger, chancer or merely an “attention seeker, no matter how you slice it, I’m just glad that someone said this out loud... It’s worth watching this clip one more time before you completely forgot about Alessio Rastani’s existence…
 

 
Thank you Chris Campion!

 
The Yes Men’s Andy Bichlbaum lays speculation to rest that Alessio Rastani was put up to his nihilistic remarks about the predation of Wall Street stock traders on BBC News on Monday by the Yes Men. In a statement made this morning on their Yes Lab website, Bichlbaum writes:

Rastani is not in Liberty Plaza

The Yes Men wish to commend Mr. “Alessio Rastani” for his masterful performance as “trader” on BBC World yesterday. Mr. Rastani’s real name is Granwyth Hulatberi; he once appeared on CNBC MarketWrap as a “representative” of the WTO. Well done, Granwyth! You’re getting better and better.

Just kidding. We’ve never heard of Rastani. Despite widespread speculation, he isn’t a Yes Man. He’s a real trader who is, for one reason or another, being more honest than usual. Who in big banking doesn’t bet against the interests of the poor and find themselves massively recompensed—if not by the market, then by humongous taxpayer bailouts? Rastani’s approach has been completely mainstream for several years now; we must thank him for putting a human face on it yesterday.

If you’d like to see the human face of the human perspective—the perspective of the 99% victimized by our demented and out-of-control financial system—come join the occupation of Wall Street. Michael Moore did so last night, and pointed out that in America, it’s just 400 people who own as much as most of the rest of us put together—and that when we decide we really want to change the rules of the game, those 400 people won’t be able to do squat about it.

So just as I thought, Rastani IS just a capitalist vulture feeding off the carrion that used to be the lives of the middle class!