If you think R21 is the strictest classification a movie in Singapore can receive, think again. The Oscar-nominated drama The Kids Are All Right has been rated R21 and has also had an additional condition imposed on it. The Board of Film Censors (BFC) says that it can only be released on one print. This is likely to be the first time an R21 film will be screened under such a condition outside of a film festival.

Further down the news article, it was explained that the Board of Film Censors issued a letter earlier this week to the film’s distributor, Festive Films: It stated: ‘The majority of the members [of the Committee of Appeal] agreed with the board that the film normalises a homosexual family unit and has exceeded the film classification guidelines which states that ‘Films that promote or normalise a homosexual lifestyle cannot be allowed’.’ In addition, the committee said the fact that the film is allowed for release in Singapore at all was already a concession. It said: ‘Imposing a condition of one-print serves as a signal to the public at large that such alternative lifestyles should not be encouraged.’ – ibid

Firstly, can/should the civil service create additional rules at whim? Secondly, why is the idea of two gay persons raising a family considered something to be defended against?

Singapore’s film censors had restricted the showing of a lesbian-themed, Oscar-nominated film, in a move that shocked the local cinema scene, a media report said today

The Board of Film Censors rated The Kids Are All Right as category R21, applying to “films that may contain adult issues, themes and more explicit scenes”, and limited its release to one single print, the Straits Times newspaper reported.

The US comedy drama directed by Lisa Cholodenko about a lesbian couple that meets the man who fathered their children received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Motion Picture and Best Leading Actress for Annette Bening.According to the board’s film classification guidelines, “films should not promote or normalise a homosexual lifestyle”.

There is something almost religious about Kurzweil’s scientism, an observation he himself makes in the film, noting the similarities between his goals and that of the world’s religions: “the idea of a profound transformation in the future, eternal life, bringing back the dead—but the fact that we’re applying technology to achieve the goals that have been talked about in all human philosophies is not accidental because it does reflect the goal of humanity.” Although the film never discloses Kurzweil’s religious beliefs (he was raised by Jewish parents as a Unitarian Universalist), in a (presumably) unintentionally humorous moment that ends the film Kurzweil reflects on the God question and answers it himself: “Does God exist? I would say, ‘Not yet.’”

Transcendent Man is Barry Ptolemy’s beautifully crafted and artfully edited documentary film about Kurzweil and his quest to save humanity.

Transcendent Man pulls viewers in through Kurzweil’s visage of a future in which we merge with our machines and vastly extend our longevity and intelligence to the point where even death will be defeated. This point is what Kurzweil calls the “singularity” (inspired by the physics term denoting the infinitely dense point at the center of a black hole), and he arrives at the 2029 date by extrapolating curves based on what he calls the “law of accelerating returns.” This is “Moore’s Law” (the doubling of computing power every year) on steroids, applied to every conceivable area of science, technology and economics.

What is important in Zuckerberg’s story is not that he’s a boy genius. He plainly is, but many are. It’s not that he’s a socially clumsy (relative to the Harvard elite) boy genius. Every one of them is. And it’s not that he invented an amazing product through hard work and insight that millions love. The history of American entrepreneurism is just that history, told with different technologies at different times and places.

what’s important here is that Zuckerberg’s genius could be embraced by half-a-billion people within six years of its first being launched, without (and here is the critical bit) asking permission of anyone. The real story is not the invention. It is the platform that makes the invention sing. Zuckerberg didn’t invent that platform. He was a hacker (a term of praise) who built for it. And as much as Zuckerberg deserves endless respect from every decent soul for his success, the real hero in this story doesn’t even get a credit. It’s something Sorkin doesn’t even notice.

Zuckerberg faced no such barrier. For less than $1,000, he could get his idea onto the Internet. He needed no permission from the network provider. He needed no clearance from Harvard to offer it to Harvard students. Neither with Yale, or Princeton, or Stanford. Nor with every other community he invited in. Because the platform of the Internet is open and free, or in the language of the day, because it is a “neutral network,” a billion Mark Zuckerbergs have the opportunity to invent for the platform. And though there are crucial partners who are essential to bring the product to market, the cost of proving viability on this platform has dropped dramatically. You don’t even have to possess Zuckerberg’s technical genius to develop your own idea for the Internet today.

WOMEN'S advocacy group Aware's plan to distribute a set of DVDs of its dramatic extraordinary general meeting (EGM), held in May 2009, has hit a snag.

The Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware) has not been able to distribute the DVDs, as it is appealing against a requirement that it needs a government licence to do so.

The MDA has, in the meantime, given the DVD an M18 rating - meaning it should be seen only by those aged 18 and above.

Mr Smedley was such a private man that none of those friends had known in advance that he had planned his own assisted suicide at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, where he drank poison and died on Dec 10 last year. A few days after Mr Smedley's death, his close friends found individually-written letters from him in their post, telling each one how much they had meant to him.

They were in for a greater surprise when they were joined at his memorial service by Sir Terry, the author and campaigner, and the BBC crew that had filmed Mr Smedley's final moments. Unknown to all but his closest family, Mr Smedley invited Sir Terry to accompany him and his wife Christine, 60, to the clinic in Switzerland. Moments before he died, said Sir Terry: "I shook hands with Peter and he said to me 'Have a good life', and he added 'I know I have'." When a clinic worker asked him if he was ready to drink the poison that would end his life, Mr Smedley said: "Yes" and added: "I'd like to thank you all." After Mr Smedley died, said Sir Terry: "I was spinning not because anything bad had happened but something was saying', A man is dead... that's a bad thing,' but somehow the second part of the clause chimes in with, 'but he had an incurable disease that was dragging him down, so he's decided of his own free will to leave before he was dragged'. So it's not a bad thing."

Of all the people who downloaded a pirate copy of the film about 20% came from the US. This means that roughly 100,000 Americans have downloaded a copy online through BitTorrent. Now, IF all these people bought a movie ticket instead then box office revenue would be just 0.5% higher. Not much of an impact, and even less when you consider that these “pirates” do not all count as a lost sale.

downloading a camcorded movie could be compared to downloading a low quality bootleg of a concert. People who download these are collectors, passionate fans, or just curious. But in no way do these bootlegs seriously hurt concert attendances.

Over the last three years, 35 researchers contributed to the Media Piracy Project, released last week by the Social Science Research Council. Their mission was to examine media piracy in emerging economies, which account for most of the world's population, and to find out just how and why piracy operates in places like Russia, Mexico, and India.

Their conclusion is not that citizens of such piratical societies are somehow morally deficient or opposed to paying for content. Instead, they write that “high prices for media goods, low incomes, and cheap digital technologies are the main ingredients of global media piracy. If piracy is ubiquitous in most parts of the world, it is because these conditions are ubiquitous.”

When legitimate CDs, DVDs, and computer software are five to ten times higher (relative to local incomes) than they are in the US and Europe, simply ratcheting up copyright enforcement won't do enough to fix the problem. In the view of the report's authors, the only real solution is the creation of local companies that “actively compete on price and services for local customers” as they sell movies, music, and more.

But not all documentaries take such a novel approach. Randy Olson, a marine biologist-turned-filmmaker at the University of Southern California, is a harsh critic of what he sees as a very literal-minded, information-heavy approach within the environmental film genre. Well-intentioned environmental documentary filmmakers are just “making their same, boring, linear, one-dimensional explorations of issues,” said Olson. “The public’s not buying it.”

The problem may run deeper than audience tallies — after all, An Inconvenient Truth currently ranks as the sixth-highest grossing documentary in the United States. However, a 2010 study by social psychologist Jessica Nolan found that while the film increased viewers’ concern about global warming, that concern didn’t translate into any substantial action a month later.

To move a larger audience to action, Olson advocates a shift from the literal-minded world of documentary into the imaginative world of narrative.

It now appears that, in Belgium, it's acceptable to film the dead from Waterloo but not from WWI.

Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer, anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths, as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.

somewhere in the late 1990s or early 2000s, the emergence of new technologies re-structured, violently and forever, the nature of the author, the reader and the text, and the relationships between them.

Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it. Optimists may see this as the democratisation of culture; pessimists will point to the excruciating banality and vacuity of the cultural products thereby generated (at least so far).