dretblog

More Short Reviews

adding to my list of short movie reviews, here is one more. i agree that it once again is not really a shining example of the art of making movies, but at least it is one with vin diesel. even though he is a terrible actor, he has one of the most beautiful voices ever heard, right along with that of jim jones jr. and michael clarke duncan. so here's the review (from the onion):

• babylon a.d.: it's the end of the world, and vin diesel has a mission to perform. and if you can make any more sense of babylon a.d.'s plot, then you probably wrote it.

Short Movie Reviews

finding out whether a certain movie will at least not make your brain hurt can be a pretty challenging task. movie reviews can help, but they need to be short to be helpful. these are my two favorite movie reviews from the new york times, quoted here in full length:

• spiderman 3: dear god, please let this be the last one.
• babylon a.d.: matthieu kassovitz, the director of this futuristic action movie, has described it it as pure violence and stupidity, but that makes it sound better than it is.

i think these reviews are as helpful as it can get. you have to spend only 10sec to strike one more candidate from the list.

it must be interesting to be a movie critic, but it also can be pretty painful. in particular when you have to suffer through all the mainstream garbage that the studios are focusing on these days to play it safe.

Helvetica

i just watched Helvetica, a documentary about — surprise — the typeface Helvetica. it's very well done and really entertaining, my favorite screen shot is shown here, a really wonderful skateboard design! (the film is really not like that, i probably picked the most controversial image possible.)

what i particularly liked about the film is that both sides are being heard: the helvetica fundamentalists who think that typefaces should be neutral and that legibility is of utmost importance and that helvetica is the way. and on the other hand the designers who think that typeface should be specific for a job and that the ubiquity of helvetica calls for a bit more variety, but of course sometimes overdoing it.

what i missed was a bit more context. the film nicely describes helvetica's history and how designers felt about it during various trends in the designer world (and i for my part am very happy that the grunge design phase is over now). but the film only very briefly mentions Arial and does not even mention the whole issue around how to make money with typefaces. and the film also does not mention more modern fonts, such as Univers, which do have some success and simply are not as widespread because you don't get them for free on your mac...