A weekend at Derby’s ID Fest on behalf of Little White Lies produced, among other things, a close encounter with Brian Blessed. The great man’s firm belief in Flash Gordon as an enduring example of the mind at play is tough to dispute while he’s in full flow, and not all that easy to pick apart after he’s gone. Consideration of the issues raised involved reacquaintance with 1980-model Ornella Muti, which is the equivalent of reopening old wounds.

Another larger than life presence was Ken Russell, thanks to the festival showing three of his movies and screening The Debussy Film as well. Paul Sutton, biographer and advocate, took the opportunity to put the boot in to the establishment figures whom he felt had damaged Russell over the years, which was pretty much all of them: “The British film industry and Hollywood are run by categorical idiots and imbeciles. By the end of Russell’s first professional year, 1959, he had made seven amazing 35mm shorts; none of which are available to the public since the BBC are assholes.” And much else in similar vein. Sutton’s in-the-works five-volume Russell biography has apparently been funded by John McTiernan, which sounds like a great trivia question in the making.

The folks at ID Fest felt that this was the year their event entered a new and more ambitious stage of its development, and it showed. A festival round-up is now online at LWLies.

Since shining a laser pointer in the general direction of an aircraft pilot seems to be the jape that won’t go away, optical filters that can limit the dazzle are in demand, and the military are just as interested in them as commercial airlines – probably more. Filters usually work by blocking the particular laser wavelengths used in your average pointer, but a better approach might be to block incident light based on its power instead. KiloLambda showed off a wide-band filter that uses a layer of carefully manufactured nanostructures and exploits their non-linear optics to block laser light when it passes a designated power threshold. Below that, the filter stays clear at all wavelengths; above it, transmission is either limited to a certain value or blocked completely.

Nanstructures are also the key to a scintillator material made by the applied research arm of Georgia Tech, a cerium-doped gadolinium halide material cast in a glass that scintillates when hit by incoming gamma-rays. If the nanoparticles used can be held below a certain size, and about 20 nanometers or so seems to do it, then the scattering of the scintillated light which can bedevil any kind of accurate reading is drastically reduced. Plus a glass or glass-ceramic material is much easier to handle than a fragile scintillation crystal. Plenty of room for improvement in the resolution, though.

And away from DSS: further work on retinal implants, a topic that has now entered the watch-lists of TV news producers everywhere. The principle of restoring sight to someone suffering from a condition like age-related macular degeneration hinges on the fact that it’s the photoreceptors in the retina that have died, not the neurons behind them. Implants to take over the job of the receptors and fire the neurons when light hits the retina are well past the status of pipe dreams, but there are a wealth of problems – not least among them, how to power the array of photoreceptors while it goes about its business. A group from Stanford University, applying scrupulous logic, think the answer may be to build an implant which draws its power from the same incoming infra-red light which brings the visual data, and their lab trials suggest that they’re on the right lines. Not quite a solar-powered retinal implant, but not too far off. Not a bionic eye either, although Steve Austin is the gift that keeps on giving for headline writers on a deadline.

Joss Whedon’s debt to the 1980s Keith Giffen and JM DeMatteis approach, for the kind of writing that has since become linked to him by name, has never been more clear.

The whole all-you-can-eat green-screen approach, whereby any time the camera pans round behind someone to show what they’re looking at they’re clearly looking at the insides of a warehouse in a far-off and cheaper state, must truly be a dead loss if a DP as great as Seamus McGarvey can’t figure out a way to make it breathe.

Needless to say, if Janet van Dyne eventually turns up in this flavour of the Marvel Universe and carries on like this, I am going to have some kind of coronary incident.

Among them, coverage of an address from Bruce Carlson, director (possibly former, by now) of the National Reconnaissance Office. Viewed by a visiting European, the back-and-forth over funding and priorities within the US intelligence community is endlessly fascinating. But I hadn’t realized that the NRO also tracks orbiting satellites and takes action when there’s an imminent collision among all the circling hardware. A man who can say “Every other week or so I manoeuver a satellite around”, is one with an interesting desk. As you might expect when the holder of this post addresses an open meeting of international delegates, there was a certain amount of frostiness in the air; forty-two minutes in, someone asked a question about the potential usefulness of the NRO’s info to human rights organizations, and Carlson more or less adjourned the meeting on the spot.

Also a keynote from Franca Jones of the White House science policy office, who made the point that there’s room for much more joined-up thinking when it comes to gathering data on climate and habitat, and a clear connection between having that kind of info on hand and the ability to predict things like cholera outbreaks. Biosurveillance still has an almighty image problem though, starting with the word; expect “biosensing” to feature in a larger font.

And a discussion between military strategists and venture capitalists about why the military needs new kinds of infrared sensing technologies. It is still jarring, nearly eleven years after the game most visibly changed, to hear a man from DARPA comment that “our mission is changing, but our sensor technology is not,” although here too you wonder if the discussion would have been quite the same behind closed doors and away from international observers. None the less, the sentiment that changes in warfare can be good for the progress of technology and the balance sheets of private companies is hard to argue with, even while quietly wishing for a different kind of world.

One of the few positive, thoughtful outliers amongst the wave of early negative BATTLESHIP reviews: blogs.indiewire.com/criticwire/out…

I said it made more of an attempt at storytelling than the average Transformers film, true. But I also suggested it pipe down with the ridiculous noise and get off my lawn forever; so there’s that. I’m still figuring out whether its quoting of the Pink Panther is radical or risible.

But how’s this for an odd place to find a claim to posterity. The way the film uses its double-amputee veteran, and for that matter the calls it makes on the soldier-actor involved and the presentation of his disability, is worthy of a serious look. Or at least, of something more than dismissal as a further helping of tub-thumping jingoism, served up for a particular constituency that’s squarely in the film’s dugout. Not that it isn’t kind of that too. But let’s give the film the benefit of the doubt; partly since it has quite the sense of humour, and partly since so much else about it is doubtful as hell.

All this and Village People references in the Battleship review over here, at Critic’s Notebook.

On the opposite side of the moon: Carol Morley’s film Edge deals in fragments from some well-mined seams of English drama. Tea-cups and stoical suicides and wry monologues about heartbreak are the currency. The director films the daylight scenes at a calm, considered distance; and then starts cutting at a rapid click, swiping back and forth between the parallel stories in the middle of the night at a much faster pace than a Play For Today would have dared back in the old days. The technique adds as much cinematic juice to the story as it can stand, wisely or not. The design and textures in the production are a different matter; Edge is a fine entry in Awful Wallpaper cinema, and the ratty outfits speak volumes. So does Nichola Burley when she loses her temper, which luckily happens in her films a lot.

The review of Edge is here, at the same venue.

The film makers never actually bring up the name of Alan Moore, but they hardly need to. The man’s shadow will loom automatically over a film in which a historical literary figure adopts contemporary mannerisms and lands himself in a tale so self-reflexive that it feels like its own graphic novel. The fact that The Raven also manages to look a lot like a cross between From Hell and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, filmed in the well-known Baltimore suburbs of Belgrade and Budapest on sets lighted by the output of one small firefly, and by the man who made V for Vendetta to boot, just makes the wizard of Northampton’s presence more palpable.

Any resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe is coincidence, but Mr Cusack can still get the acting job well and truly done. The review is here over at Critic’s Notebook, and yes, once I realized that “Nevermore” rhymes with “Alan Moore,” one thing led to another.

Meanwhile…

Four thousand miles east and forty-five years later, Georges Duroy rides again in the new version of Bel Ami. This time the general air of Now is more considered, since these are actors with distinctly modern ways of going about their business, and the plot’s interests in desert wars and press corruption are kept on the boil between all the un-corseting and de-girdling.

It also shows three composed and seemingly self-possessed woman drawn helplessly into bed with a floppy-haired youth at very little urging, leaving the story open to its most misogynist reading. Robert Pattinson gamely submitting to a fine bout of joyless sex isn’t really enough to balance the books, and I can think of several folk who might hate it, for reasons both warranted and not.

Whether Bel Ami’s tweaks and mannerisms energize the historical-drama trade or leave it looking a bit rootless is a murky question, but all the right texts have been studied. A film that remembers how Uma Thurman is naturally built for period drama is setting off on the right lines, and this one goes on to hire Anthony Higgins and Christopher Fulford for cameos of several seconds each. If only it could have wheeled the three of them into the same drawing room for a shouting match. That review is here, at the same venue .

His answer was Facebook. That and consumer willingness to embrace data plans that let people successfully send pictures without going bankrupt or expiring from boredom while they were about it.

This fact came up while researching an article on camera phone optics for The Optical Society. Another nugget was that one of the foremost developers of a particular technology that seemed tailor-made to suit the camera phone sector, a company I’ve been writing about in one way or another for years, had withdrawn from the fray while I wasn’t looking, brought low by a licensing strategy that looked like exactly the right idea on paper.

Point being: becoming ubiquitous is a bruising business. But it certainly pushes technology forwards.

My feature about some of the optics technology built into camera phones is the cover story of the February issue of the OSA’s Optics and Photonics News, and is also currently an open-access article on their web site.

The annual year-end bun grapple over at Critic’s Notebook brings the inevitable list: Ten films I liked from 2011.

At this rate next December’s apocalypse will be caused entirely by the posting online of more Top Ten Films of 2012 lists than the cosmos can allow.

Updated to add:

I didn’t realise that Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty – that’s Emily Browning above, in the process of applying for the job – never got a review at Critic’s Notebook when it was released in the UK or subsequently when it broke cover in the US. It’s also one of those films that seems to have left the New Model Collective of film reviewers in a bit of a muddle. So for the record, set the Wayback Machine for Things I Wrote Down Last October (now with fewer typos):

Julia Leigh Sleeps Furiously: Sleeping Beauty

None of the many calamitous ways in which the sight of old men queueing up to fondle a comatose Emily Browning could have gone off the rails actually happen in Sleeping Beauty, since it turns out that Julia Leigh is a) a clinician with a painter’s eye for compositions and tones, and b) not mucking about. She’s also not exactly breaking new ground, pulling on threads already tackled in one form or another by Kubrick and Bunuel, and indeed by Jane Campion, whose name on the label seems to have confused those forgetting that Campion’s waded out into frustrated sexuality and the human textures of homesteads before. But not quite like this. To say Leigh scores a bullseye on some complex ambiguities of masculine power and feminine voids is an understatement. Sleeping Beauty is taut as a stretched rubber band, set squarely in the art house wheelhouse with acres of still compositions and sound design to let the mind roam around, but with the tonal refresher of the whole Australian setting and screen acting style kicking in all the time. It’s also roughly as erotic as eye surgery, and anyone detecting actual misogyny or anti-feminism in its sights and sounds deserves a close encounter with the mighty pillow of truth, especially if they’re male. In fact your reaction may hinge entirely upon exactly which side of life’s median line you happen to find yourself.

Leigh doesn’t bother to hide the cogs, so Sleeping Beauty is transparent. Browning is orally penetrated for money in the name of science in scene one and doesn’t get much joy from it, so her half of the agenda is in plain sight from the off. The meatier side comes later via the three old men who queue up for a grope, three fearless old actors whose conflicted and conflicting horrors are only slightly weakened by noticing that one of them was in Mad Max when the world was younger. Some reviewers have detected pretension everywhere, but the film’s only actual tinge of the stuff comes via a long literary monologue delivered straight to camera by Old Man One (the interweb tells me it’s a story by Ingeborg Bachmann), shortly before he bares a bod that looks in need of a thrash with a carpet beater and is revealed to be hung like a dormouse. Not sure that bravery is quite the word for that.

All the rigid lines and staged country-house formality of it keep the focus squarely where Leigh intends it to be: on the minds rather than the bodies. Rachel Blake’s madam is carved from some kind of marble, and if her deportment wasn’t all you needed to know about her then the way her pinky finger locks at precisely thirty degrees while pouring the tea fills in the gaps. Leigh uses fades rather than cuts, the classic metaphor for decay and unconsciousness, and builds them into an Aussie setting with all its body consciousness and free-wheeling machismo intact – states of mind which are then unpicked by Leigh with a laser microscope, in a manor-house lit by southern hemisphere sunlight. Emily Browning’s naked body is on screen so often you almost ignore it, but the varying views and vistas out of the windows she parades in front of at different points in the plot are at least as significant. Look at the framing of her alabaster body among the other olive-skined brunettes and tell me this director isn’t in complete control of mood, tone and perspective.

Browning’s bravery in doing this thing is beyond question, and at least her style looks a better fit with the actual story here than it was in Sucker Punch. But the dilemma that always hangs around screen portrayals of shallow characters applies: casting someone who’s not a born firebrand might suit the story, but dents the film. Browning is obliged to downplay so far she’s practically planted in the ground, swinging between being a hollowed-out void to strangers and a conflicted bitch to people she knows. She comes across as an emptier vessel than the investigation underway can really use. Faced with a cameoing Amazonian brunette I’d not seen before named Mirrah Foulkes, whose six-foot black-clad face-decorated usually-topless frame glides around as if following lines of magnetism while she radiates the kind of air that could lead a man to his doom, Browning seems lost for words. She wasn’t the only one.

The challenge in covering Bristol’s Encounters Film Festival, once you’ve calculated a route to Canon’s Road that doesn’t actually involve Canon’s Road on a Saturday night, is to accept the inevitable: A festival report that attempts to describe everything screened at a short-film festival would have to rumble on for a week. Even one limited to just the films you actually like will have a commissioning editor reaching for the migraine pills.

Little White Lies gave me space to rave about a few, but leaving out the ones that wouldn’t fit was a chore. No room to mention Tony Grisoni’s The Pizza Miracle, with its fake slice of black and white Italiano called The Madonna of the Eels and the looming silent presence of none other than Ray Cooper. No space to giggle at The External World, David O’Reilly’s spasm of animated lunacy on which a year’s worth of catchphrases can draw. Darren Kent playing a lad allergic to sunlight in Sunny Boy and blurring the lines between acting and reality completely; the young actress in Burn My Body who did the same thing from the exact opposite direction; Luke Treadaway looking very harassed in Man In Fear (“I’m being hunted by a conceptual artist.”/”Is he threatening to drop a pickled shark on you sir?”)… All gone, washed away by the editing tide.

The Little White Lies festival report about the ones that survived the edit, including the film in which Chloë Sevigny does something remarkable with her face, is posted here.

An Encounters interview with animator John Kricfalusi circled the runway for a while but has now landed over at Critic’s Notebook.

Just for comparison’s sake an earlier Encounters report from a few years back is online at the same place, this being the one in which my admiration for Rebecca Hall really kicked in.

There’s a large pile of caveats. Concentrating on the year-on-year figures helps avoid the headache that reading the sequential numbers causes; heavy industry is still more inclined to put money on the table than the technology sector; exporters will fret that the Eurozone and US economies are heading in different directions again, although probably not as much as Europeans will. But most vendors are still optimistic, the latest stage of the ride that’s as unrelenting for them as it is for the analysts asking about it.

So I asked an analyst about it. The latest of my regular chats with Mark Douglass of Longbow Research about what’s going on is now posted online at Optics.org.