Hello!!
I have been forcing myself to have a rest weekend this week, which is really bloody hard for me to do as a bloke who can’t sit still. But, I’ve had a slightly sore leg and figured some rest was sensible ahead of a few days in the country later this week.
That means I’ve sat myself down and refreshed the website for the first time in a while (some of those thumbnails were looking a bit samey…). I’ve dropped the Reviews section for now, because a year in I’ve still not done one, and rejigged the Pictures page so it shows the six most recent pictures from @diningstones. It would cost me something to have more than six, but I think six is plenty. Plus, for anyone really interested, they can click through to the actual Instagram page. I’m quite happy with how it looks. You can see it here: https://www.rahimhussain.co.uk/landing_pages/gallery
I also used Claude to do most of it. It’s still so impressive. These are tasks that would’ve taken me an entire weekend, even when I first made it using ChatGPT Chat as an assistant. Now, I can just tell Fable what I want it to do and 5 minutes later, it comes back, done. It’s very impressive, and it’s not like these were particularly exciting updates - they probably would’ve just been so boring that I wouldn’t have bothered unless I was really bored. So, net positive.
I’ve also committed to writing a paper on the risks of AI on UK critical national infrastructure and done absolutely nothing towards that yet. That’ll change, so watch this space for updates (and bug me if you don’t hear anything!!).
Sitting at home all weekend also means that I’ve read about 300 pages of A Covenant of Water (brilliant book so far, if not a bit recurrently devastating) - but because it’s like 700 odd pages long, I’m barely halfway through it. It follows two groups in South India and I’ve just got to the point where those two worlds become one. There’s also some brilliant bits of literature, which I may or may not share once I’m done. All in all, I’m really enjoying it and looking forward to ticking a book closer to my Goodreads target of 30 books this year. I’m currently on 10, so that feels a bit optimistic, but then also they’ve generally been quite long books and so I do wonder if a page target might be more sensible. Let’s see where we are at the end of the year.
The other book that I want to read after this is The Odyssey, which apparently is actually a poem! I’ve been on a bit of a learning experience with poems recently, which it turns out can basically be as long as the poet wants. This was sparked when I read V by Tony Harrison, which I’d heard good things about and is Andy Burnham’s favourite poem. I thought it was be a page, if that. I then started reading it and it kept going and going and going. I didn’t mind, because it’s a great poem about the conflicting feelings Northerners have between moving away from home for a better life and not wanting to leave everything that made them behind. I’m sure there’s endless literary analysis of it out there, but it’s a great poem and I’d recommend reading it (I read it here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n01/tony-harrison/v). Even if it is really, really, really bloody long.
As, it turns out, is The Odyssey. It’s actually a book of 24 books (I’m not entirely sure how that works, but I think it’s just like parts in books?). Apparently it counts as a poem because it’s written in rhythm (or “meter”). I may have more insightful things to say once I’ve read it, which I’m committing to doing before I watch the film. And that’s not too painful to commit to, because I also really want to watch the film on proper IMAX, for which there are no tickets until September.
That’s because I’m being a bit of a film snob. You can go and watch it this week in a IMAX cinema somewhere in London. But not all IMAX cinemas are made equal.
The crème de la crème is what I’m going to call True IMAX, where the films are shown on a 1.4:1 aspect ratio. This is what the IMAX cameras film on, and so you get to see the full image as intended. Any other cinema showing an IMAX film has a more rectangular aspect ratio, which crops out some of the image at the top and bottom of the screen. Now, that’s not the end of the world. After all, there’s only 41 True IMAX cinemas in the entire world, and so when producing IMAX films, directors are cognisant that most people won’t be seeing the full picture and make sure that it doesn’t take away from the story, even if you lose some artistic expression.
True IMAX screens also often show the film on, well, film. Like a physical strip of film copied from what the strip of film that came out of the camera (with some physical chopping and colour grading in between to make it make sense). Now in practise, that probably doesn’t change your experience very much, but it is a commitment to the craft that I think is brilliant and should be appreciated wherever possible.
So where should you go watch The Odyssey? Well, if you’re not that fussed about seeing the full artistic expression (which is very fair), you can see it anywhere and it’ll be a perfectly pleasant experience.
If you want a bit better than that, but don’t want to go to the pains of seeing in True IMAX (because it truly is a pain, as I’ll come to next), then go to any cinema near you that says IMAX (you can see the full list here: https://www.imax.com/en/gb/theatre/finder). Chances are, those will be the more rectangular IMAX experiences. Still bigger than a normal cinema, but not exactly what the camera captured. A reasonable middle ground, and one you can get tickets to in the next week or so, fairly easily.
But if you really want to go for the full, True IMAX experience, go to either the BFI IMAX, the IMAX at the Science Museum or at Printworks in Manchester. Those are the only screens in the country that can show it in the 1.4:1 aspect ratio that the cameras capture, and is absolutely worth it. But there are basically no tickets at these until September.
I saw Oppenheimer at the BFI when it came out and it was fantastic. It’s even more impressive for The Odyssey because it’s the first film ever to have been shot entirely in IMAX. That’s because these cameras can only shoot for up to 3 minutes at a time, are really bloody noisy and really bloody heavy. Christopher Nolan didn’t want to compromise this time though, and so we get the world’s first full IMAX film. If you’re willing to wait, I think it’s worth going to watch it on the big (big) screen.
Whilst we’re on the BFI, they also do £4 tickets for under 25s, and have a great selection of old films on most of the time. I went to watch As Young As You Feel, one of Marilyn Monroe’s earlier films, during the week and it was a brilliant experience.
Let me know if you end up going, and if you hear someone asking what the deal is with IMAX, forward this onto them!
RH