Louisa Mellor Jun 19, 2017
BBC Radio 4 will scratch your sci-fi itch with a whole season of programming including Ray Bradbury, Kafka, and original comedy and drama…
Escape the rapidly unfurling dystopia outside by tuning into a season of sci-fi on BBC Radio 4. Dangerous Visions, the BBC’s yearly dose of classic and original sci-fi radio programming, returns this week… with a difference. The nation being sorely in need of a laugh, Dangerous Visions 2017 has made the decision to include some comedy alongside the existential nightmares.
See related Pokemon Go has already made $14m
First up on the comic side of things is a version of Kafka’s absurd satire The Metamorphosis starring Tim Key, Tom Basden and Felicity Montagu. Alongside that is original dystopian comedy Perimeter, a tale of two siblings living in a city divided by an enormous electric fence, written by and starring Liam Williams and Josie Long.
A new reading of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is joined by two original dystopian dramas, Siege and Culture. The former is a three-part thriller telling the story of the Far Right coming to power in 2020 France, while the latter is a vision of the world in which antibiotics have stopped working and the lives of those without medical insurance are decided by the shadowy ‘Quartermaster’. Finally, there’s an adaptation of Arthur Koestler’s 1940 totalitarian nightmare Darkness At Noon.
The season kicks off on Saturday the 24th of June with Kafka’s Metamorphosis at 2.30pm. Here's a short clip to whet your appetite.
All episodes will be available to listen to on BBC iPlayer for a period after transmission and the full listings can be found here.
BBC Radio 4...
BBC Radio 4 will scratch your sci-fi itch with a whole season of programming including Ray Bradbury, Kafka, and original comedy and drama…
Escape the rapidly unfurling dystopia outside by tuning into a season of sci-fi on BBC Radio 4. Dangerous Visions, the BBC’s yearly dose of classic and original sci-fi radio programming, returns this week… with a difference. The nation being sorely in need of a laugh, Dangerous Visions 2017 has made the decision to include some comedy alongside the existential nightmares.
See related Pokemon Go has already made $14m
First up on the comic side of things is a version of Kafka’s absurd satire The Metamorphosis starring Tim Key, Tom Basden and Felicity Montagu. Alongside that is original dystopian comedy Perimeter, a tale of two siblings living in a city divided by an enormous electric fence, written by and starring Liam Williams and Josie Long.
A new reading of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is joined by two original dystopian dramas, Siege and Culture. The former is a three-part thriller telling the story of the Far Right coming to power in 2020 France, while the latter is a vision of the world in which antibiotics have stopped working and the lives of those without medical insurance are decided by the shadowy ‘Quartermaster’. Finally, there’s an adaptation of Arthur Koestler’s 1940 totalitarian nightmare Darkness At Noon.
The season kicks off on Saturday the 24th of June with Kafka’s Metamorphosis at 2.30pm. Here's a short clip to whet your appetite.
All episodes will be available to listen to on BBC iPlayer for a period after transmission and the full listings can be found here.
BBC Radio 4...
- 6/19/2017
- Den of Geek
It has won over critics but this tasteless film teaches us nothing and merely indulges the unrepentant butchers of Indonesia
The Act of Killing won the documentary prize at the Baftas last week and is the favourite to win the much-coveted Oscar. I watch many documentaries on behalf of the BBC each year and I go to festivals. I'm a doc obsessive. By my own, not quite reliable reckoning, I've been asked by fans to show The Act of Killing on the BBC at least five times. I've never encountered a film greeted by such extreme responses – both those who say it is among the best films and those who tell me how much they hate it. Much about the film puzzles me. I am still surprised by the fact that so many critics listed it among their favourite films of last year.
For those who haven't seen the film,...
The Act of Killing won the documentary prize at the Baftas last week and is the favourite to win the much-coveted Oscar. I watch many documentaries on behalf of the BBC each year and I go to festivals. I'm a doc obsessive. By my own, not quite reliable reckoning, I've been asked by fans to show The Act of Killing on the BBC at least five times. I've never encountered a film greeted by such extreme responses – both those who say it is among the best films and those who tell me how much they hate it. Much about the film puzzles me. I am still surprised by the fact that so many critics listed it among their favourite films of last year.
For those who haven't seen the film,...
- 2/23/2014
- by Nick Fraser
- The Guardian - Film News
Rewind to 2008 when an important conversation took place. It was a conversation between two Scots that would deliver a shock to the system, and shake up the cinematic social consciousness with a bold and courageous piece of filmmaking. It was the moment that writer-director Jon S. Baird threw his proverbial hat into the ring, and started out on a five year long battle to bring Filth to the screen.
“I said to Irvine, “Look I would like to do it. I don’t want to do it as a social realism piece, I want to do it as a heightened sense of reality, and pull out these big comedic moments whilst retaining the darkness of the character; but certainly with a sense of humour.” He just responded to that and so that way back in 2008 was the start of discussions. As far back as that we started talking about doing this film.
“I said to Irvine, “Look I would like to do it. I don’t want to do it as a social realism piece, I want to do it as a heightened sense of reality, and pull out these big comedic moments whilst retaining the darkness of the character; but certainly with a sense of humour.” He just responded to that and so that way back in 2008 was the start of discussions. As far back as that we started talking about doing this film.
- 2/10/2014
- by Paul Risker
- HeyUGuys.co.uk
Neal Ascherson, the Observer's correspondent in eastern Europe in the 1960s, on the furtive world of the cold war spies
When I pull up memories of the cold war, the first thing I remember is a silence. The big steam-hauled train would come to a halt at Griebnitzsee, the last station before the frontier of West Berlin. Then a profound, infinite silence would fall, broken only by the soft, regular gasp of the locomotive's compressor, and sometimes by the crunch of jackboots pacing along the snowy platform. Even the passengers would speak only in whispers. They were forbidden to leave their compartments and look out of the corridor windows. The world seemed to have stopped turning.
I say "station", but nobody except uniformed frontier guards boarded the train at Griebnitzsee. No passenger left the train here – voluntarily. Very occasionally, the pacing of jackboots would change to the hustling of several feet,...
When I pull up memories of the cold war, the first thing I remember is a silence. The big steam-hauled train would come to a halt at Griebnitzsee, the last station before the frontier of West Berlin. Then a profound, infinite silence would fall, broken only by the soft, regular gasp of the locomotive's compressor, and sometimes by the crunch of jackboots pacing along the snowy platform. Even the passengers would speak only in whispers. They were forbidden to leave their compartments and look out of the corridor windows. The world seemed to have stopped turning.
I say "station", but nobody except uniformed frontier guards boarded the train at Griebnitzsee. No passenger left the train here – voluntarily. Very occasionally, the pacing of jackboots would change to the hustling of several feet,...
- 9/10/2011
- by Neal Ascherson
- The Guardian - Film News
The deaths hence of Iti Mrinalini are laden with self-indulgence, big philosophies and prophecies. Somehow in between, life slipped through. This is the reason why the film and the deaths within it almost always fail to connect. The tragedy of absence – in individual and in collective society is narrated in thin air and dissolves.
Death is a paradox – it announces an absence yet it is profound and revered in religions. It is a bonding which marks a distance – between us and within us. This relativism of death makes it an abstraction of separation – intrigues longing and masquerades as permanence. Death therefore essentially links memories to absolutism and in turn rejects itself. In Hindu philosophy of re-birth and the circle (and cycle) of life, however, death is only a beginning of a new life, and memoirs don’t hold much significance as such since anyway only the soul changes the body...
Death is a paradox – it announces an absence yet it is profound and revered in religions. It is a bonding which marks a distance – between us and within us. This relativism of death makes it an abstraction of separation – intrigues longing and masquerades as permanence. Death therefore essentially links memories to absolutism and in turn rejects itself. In Hindu philosophy of re-birth and the circle (and cycle) of life, however, death is only a beginning of a new life, and memoirs don’t hold much significance as such since anyway only the soul changes the body...
- 8/9/2011
- by Amitava Nag
- DearCinema.com
He's traded the one-liners for novels and screenplays, but while he can't stop telling jokes – about being a Jew or a bloke – writing has helped him find peace
Say what you like about David Baddiel but you can't say he's lacking in ambition. Take the novel to which he's currently putting the finishing touches. "It was sort of inspired, a bit, by the death of Saul Bellow. And the character is a kind of slightly deliberately absurd, um …" – a pause, a testing of the water to see if he can get away with such a long word and not sound too pretentious – "concatenation of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Arthur Koestler."
The Death of Eli Gold is "about the idea of the Great Man, and how I think that is dying. That notion of men who could live their lives in the most brutal way possible, especially towards women – also children,...
Say what you like about David Baddiel but you can't say he's lacking in ambition. Take the novel to which he's currently putting the finishing touches. "It was sort of inspired, a bit, by the death of Saul Bellow. And the character is a kind of slightly deliberately absurd, um …" – a pause, a testing of the water to see if he can get away with such a long word and not sound too pretentious – "concatenation of Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Arthur Koestler."
The Death of Eli Gold is "about the idea of the Great Man, and how I think that is dying. That notion of men who could live their lives in the most brutal way possible, especially towards women – also children,...
- 7/24/2010
- by Aida Edemariam
- The Guardian - Film News
In the new issue of Entertainment Weekly now on newsstands, you’ll find a story written by yours truly in which I geek out on my new TV obsession, the ABC sci-fi drama FlashForward. If you’re new to the show, here’s what you need to know: On Oct. 6, the planet blacked out and for 2 minutes and 17 seconds, and everyone on earth saw a brief vision of their respective futures. The saga’s center is FBI agent Mark Benford (Shakespeare In Love’s Joseph Fiennes), who during his brief quantum leap saw himself investigating an elaborate conspiracy behind mankind’s perplexing power nap.
- 11/20/2009
- by Jeff Jensen
- EW.com - PopWatch
The title The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books That Shaped The Cold War is the only sensationalist thing about John V. Fleming’s unique literary history. Fleming exhumes a handful of bestsellers that laid the mental climate for the Cold War; Arthur Koestler’s Darkness At Noon is the best remembered, but it’s only the start of Fleming’s ambitious book, which digs deep in rediscovering a whole forgotten genre: the personal anti-Communist novel and memoir. “In writing about four books I have naturally had to read some hundreds of others,” Fleming understatedly notes in the introduction. The research shows ...
- 9/3/2009
- avclub.com
Is the universe deterministic, or random? Not the first question you'd expect to hear in a thriller, even a great one. But to hear this question posed soon after the opening sequence of "Knowing" gave me a particular thrill. Nicolas Cage plays Koestler, a professor of astrophysics at MIT, and as he toys with a model of the solar system, he asks that question of his students. Deterministic means that if you have a complete understanding of the laws of physics, you can predict with certainty everything that will happen after (for example) the universe is created in the Big Bang. Random means you can't predict anything. "What do you think?" a student asks Koestler, who says, "I think...shit just happens."
He is soon given reason to doubt his confidence. (From this point on, there are spoilers.) "Knowing" begins 50 years ago with a classroom assignment; grade school children are...
He is soon given reason to doubt his confidence. (From this point on, there are spoilers.) "Knowing" begins 50 years ago with a classroom assignment; grade school children are...
- 3/23/2009
- by Roger Ebert
- blogs.suntimes.com/ebert
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