Krishen Greenwell

  • Casino Royale/Parkour


    So how about that new Bond film, eh? That’s what I’m talking about. The past few Bond films, which make up most of what I’ve seen of the series, have kind of put me off — to me, Bond came across as a decadent jackass. There’s little of that in this film. Daniel Craig as Bond is hard, cold and deadly. It’s still Bond — there are plenty of gorgeous women, explosions, and high-end cars. But family friendly? Ah… not so much. The pre-title sequence, beautifully shot in black and white, features Bond destroying a bathroom, ultimately drowning a guy in the sink. Think along the lines of Borne Identity/Supremacy, but grittier.
    Update: Here’s Mark Kermode’s review.

    ***

    The film has a fantastic opening sequence where a bad guy literally runs up a steel beam at a construction site, at one point jumping from a crane to the top of a building (meanwhile Bond plods along after him like a ton of bricks). I got queasy watching parts of it. I’d seen the type of motion the bad guy was using before; it’s a French sport/art/philosophy called Parkour aka Urban Freeflow:

    Parkour is a physical discipline inspired by human movement, focusing on uninterrupted, efficient forward motion over, under, around and through obstacles (both man-made and natural) in one’s environment. Such movement may come in the form of running, jumping, climbing and other more complex techniques. The goal of parkour is to adapt one’s movement to any given obstacle.

    It’s really something to behold. Here’s a few videos:

  • Exposé trick: The tab key

    Note: if you’re running Mac OS X, read on. If not, you can skip this entry.
    So I just discovered a neat trick in Exposé I hadn’t read about before, so I thought I’d post about it.
    It’s actually really simple. So, you know how Command-tab brings brings up a centered list of icons representing your running applications and you can tab to the one you want?
    Well, it looks like Apple engineers thought of a neat way to extend this idea. Bring up Exposé (either via F9 or F10, unless you’ve changed the defaults) — and press the tab key… Poof! All the windows from the next application in line are brought on-screen in a nifty animation. Press tab again to make that application’s windows fade out of view, and show the next application. When you reach the app you want, simply press return or escape, and you’ll be working in that app. Note that the shift-tab trick, to cycle backwards, here works too, just like when you’re command-tabbing. Neat!

Krishen Greenwell