There are also a couple of beautiful shots reminiscent of 2001.

If there was ever an underrated sci-fi classic, this is it.

• Beginners: Mike Mills

(Sure, it wears its twee and hipster sensibilities on its sleeve, but it was sweet, honest and beautiful to look at.)

• Drive: Nicolas Winding Refn

• Kill List: Ben Wheatley

(I was completely blindsided by this perfectly executed, unrelentingly brutal film that transcends genres.)

• 50/50: Jonathan Levine

(I loved that this movie about a cancer patient in his 20s was funny, brilliantly written, amazingly well-observed and moving without descending into cloying sentimentality.)

• Attack the Block: Joe Cornish

(Genre-mashing done right.)

• The Guard: John Michael McDonagh

(The Guard was arguably the most I giggled through a crime-thriller since ‘In Bruges’.)

• Hanna: Joe Wright

• Super: James Gunn

• The Trip: Michael Winterbottom

• Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen

(I’m not going to apologize for loving this film. While it wasn’t anywhere near his best work, it was tremendously enjoyable fluff that only Woody Allen could come up with.)

Honorable mentions: X-Men: First Class, Delhi Belly, Martha Marcy May Marlene, Super 8, Fright Night.

PS: I still haven’t watched Hugo, The Artist and Shame.

(Image from Kill List)

There never was and never will be anyone quite like The Hitch. I’m immensely sad but I look forward to telling my hypothetical children that I lived when Hitchens was alive.

I’ll be drinking a peg or two of Johnnie Walker Black in his memory.

Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the ‘transcendent’ and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don’t be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you. 

- Letters to a Young Contrarian (2001)

Nanoblock kits are a great alternative to Lego kits if time and space are constraints.

I’ve put up a few more pictures here.

It was 2005 when Baker “started to think seriously that climate change was not just about the future but was already happening.” Today, the signs are plentiful. Average temperatures have risen nearly 2 degrees in some areas over the past 30 years, “especially nighttime minimum temperatures,” says Baker, “a tell-tale signature of [man-made] climate change.” Hotter, rainier weather nourishes pests and disease, particularly coffee rust, a fungal plague that’s ascended Colombia’s mountain peaks, which were formerly too chilly for the organism. Heavy rains damage Arabica’s delicate blossoms—the same blossoms that eventually turn into coffee cherries, whose seeds are coffee beans. As heat and pests climb Colombia’s mountains, “the lower limit at which coffee is grown is starting to go up,” says Baker.

…

While climate change’s harshest effects won’t be felt for two or three more decades, “it would not surprise me if one of these years we get a fairly serious drought” in a major coffee-producing country like Brazil, Baker says. “That could cause coffee scarcity for quite a prolonged period.” Coffee production will continue to experience booms and busts, but Baker asserts that “in the long run, people will have to get used to drinking a bit less coffee.”

Bookstores are dying if not already dead. So it was nice to come across this wonderful little hole-in-the-wall vintage book store in Launceston, Tasmania. It’s run by an affable gentleman who told me that most of the books came from estates in and around Tasmania. I found tattered old copies of books gifted to sons and daughters and nieces and nephews. Some were signed and dated as far back as 1912. The place has this really pleasant vibe too; Billie Holiday’s My Man played as I made my way around the store.

The year is 2044. The Great Recession is in its third decade, climate change has taken its toll, poverty and unemployment are rampant and things are just shitty in general. Millions have found an escape in OASIS, a virtual reality platform (a futuristic world wide web, if you will) created by an eccentric videogame designer, James Halliday. Halliday, who grew up in the 80′s and is quite naturally obsessed with the decade (chronocentrism?), leaves behind a will that gives sole control of OASIS (and his sizeable fortune) to anyone who finds the ‘Egg’ – the ultimate easter egg.

It isn’t just young disenfranchised nerds who take up the quest; there’s a shadowy multinational conglomerate (Innovative Online Industries) that has its eyes on the prize too (their plan – take over the OASIS and set up a paywall).

Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One is my favorite science fiction book of all time the year. If you grew up consuming unnatural amounts of media in the 80s and/or 90s, you might really enjoy this book. While most of the videogame references were lost on me, I geeked out at every Buckaroo Banzai and Monty Python mention. Cline’s managed to include an insane amount (and most often, extremely obscure) of shout-outs to pop-culture from the 80′s and 90′s – Blade Runner, Akira, Monty Python, Rush and Back to the Future, being a few .

I’ve read some fantastic science fiction this year but Ready Player One’s the only one I’d revisit.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

There’s a scene in which Michael Caine’s Jasper, an ageing hippie, and Clive Owen’s Theo, the reluctant hero, share a blunt (‘Strawberry Cough’).  Jasper points out that marijuana remains illegal even in a post-apocalyptic world where women can no longer give birth and the government rations out suicide kits (‘Quietus’) to the elderly. At the brink of certain extinction, unreasonable and ridiculous laws will continue to exist.

Children of Men, based on the PD James novel of the same name, finds mankind at a precarious precipice – children are no longer born and the youngest person in the world is nearly 18 years old. Economies have crumbled, war has ravaged major cities and most countries have closed off their borders (a UK newspaper headline reads ‘All Foreigners Are Now Illegal’). What makes this different from other post-apocalyptic fare (Mad Max, The Postman, The Road) is that the film acknowledges a severely broken but functioning system of government that is in place. Public transportation still exists, people still go to work, cosmetics are still advertised and you can still buy a cup of coffee. Personally, I find this more plausible than a scenario in which humans become feral rodent-eating hunters.

Today, when immigration is such a contentious and volatile issue and there seems to be a real food and water crisis, Children of Men can be a little uneasy to watch because face it, the future is bleak and depressing. Tragedies (as the past ten years have shown us) seldom bring people together. Children of Men, however, ends on a very uplifting note.

The film has several contemporary (refugees are rounded up in cages and there’s a scene reminiscent of pictures from Abu Gharib), pop cultural (Banksy, The Libertines’ ‘Arbeit Mach Frei’ etc.) and biblical allusions. Kee reveals her pregnancy to a stunned Theo in a barn and later, jokingly tells Theo that she’s a virgin. If you pay enough attention, there’s a lot to take away from the film. Action scenes are coherent unlike lazily cut scenes prevalent today. There are at least three outstanding long takes that seem nearly impossible to film and the soundtrack is near-perfect.

Children of Men is easily one of the most beautifully shot and visceral films ever made. If I had to recommend one film from the last decade to someone who has never watched a film his/her entire life, this would be it.

A few years ago, in a small village not far from the erstwhile Madras, a respectable and self-admittedly suicidal young man had a ‘divine vision’–or what the kids today would call a bad trip. God, who took time out of his relatively packed schedule (alleviating poverty in Africa and studying the implications of the rise of the Soviet Union closely), convinced this diminutive but sharply dressed man that he had been called on to preach the gospel. Overjoyed by the instructions he had received, he proceeded to spread the good news to anyone who’d lend an ear. As luck (or providence) would have it, not many people asked questions about parthenogenesis, spontaneous cellular regeneration or the second law of thermodynamics being violated.

Against all odds, this man grew quite popular among a sizeable section of people who distracted themselves from their poverty and illiteracy with the very appealing notion of an afterlife. Heaven, they were told, was a place constructed entirely of pure gold. (God, in His infinite wisdom, opted for gold because it was shiny, inert and because you can’t spell gold without god.) Money and adulation poured in and he saw that it was good.

Being a prudent investor, the man upstairs instructed our hero to go forth and establish an engineering college because He, being all-knowing, knew that the promise of a worthless piece of paper would be enough to lure in His children. Religious indoctrination and imposed virginity would be thrown in for free. And lo, the sheep did come.

Years passed and our hero, now a ‘prophet’, amassed enough wealth to buy small islands in the Caribbean. His fame spread far and wide and his sources of income now no longer included just the poor and down-trodden underclass; rich sinners living abroad bought their salvation from him, too. He purchased a number of mansions and a fleet of luxury cars. When asked about the inherent ethical problems with preaching love and humility while riding around in pimped out wheels, he told his flock that the cars and houses were gifts from God. The sheep seemed cool with that.

Understandably, God was a little confused. Had He been talking in His sleep again? Because the last time that happened, someone got nailed to a cross.