Yesterday Bergman, today Antonioni.
I watched The Passenger for the first time a couple of weeks ago. The FT obit seems not to rate it, but I enjoyed it more than I expected to. Great Nicholson performance. No sequence in it is quite as mind-blowing as the end of The Eclipse but it is easy to watch, due to a good plot.
Tyler Cowan wonders whether blog comments will survive. Will another form of conversation replace them? He thinks not, but some time ago Technorati’s Dave Sifry predicted
conversations on the Internet would eventually all revolve around every individual having a blog, each individual posting her own thoughts on her own blog, and blogs cross-linking through mechanisms like trackbacks and blog search engines
Contrary to what Tyler implies, this model should allow for the same reading experience, with comments listed below the original post, even if the commentary comes from posts on other blogs.
Tagging is not necessary, as I understand it. Trackbacks (aka pingbacks or linkbacks) make it work.
Unfortunately, trackbacks don’t seem to have taken off, whether due to the technical problems of handling them or due to spamming.
I was going to add this as a comment on Tyler’s site, but will post it here instead as an experiment.
If anyone reading Tyler’s site ever reaches this post, I would appreciate a one-word comment, to prove that trackbacks, linkbacks or similar mechanisms work.
Newsnight’s deputy editor has been defending a package on Gordon Brown made by Jamie Campbell, which showed a pair of events out of chronological order.
Having watched the film, it seems to me that the meaning is at least somewhat affected by the order.
More to the point, Jamie Campbell’s packages to date have not been a great fit for Newsnight. They feel like a different sort of documentary-making. They are akin to the work of Louis Theroux or, before that, Nick Broomfield. In this type of film, the film-maker is part of the story. The interviewer becomes a character. We begin to doubt the interviewer’s own motives and sincerity.
I can see the editorial need for a roving reporter taking the maverick approach that Michael Crick once did. Crick has had to tone his approach down now that he is the programme’s political editor.
However unless Jamie Campbell can work in a different style, his approach feels wrong for Newsnight.
