Mr Omneo Blogs…

Oh dear, I’ve been very slack in keeping on top of the blog lately.  If you’re a regular visitor here you’ll know this, I go through periods where I blog endlessly and then silence.  No news is goods news my old Gran used to say but the fact of the matter is there is lot’s to blog about but not so much time.  This is partly a problem of my own making as I always feel a blog should be more than a  few words, crudely thrown together to make a sentence with a couple of said sentences joined together higgledy-piggledy to make a paragraph and these aforementioned paragraphs….you get the idea? Read the rest of this entry »

The good thing about keeping a blog is I have somewhere to rant every now and then.  It makes no difference that nothing is likely to result from said rant but it gets it out of my head and that’s good enough for me.  I warn you in advance this is a long post so make sure you’re settled before continuing and with that out of the way, here goes…

I ordered a box of cigars from a company in Switzerland on Friday 15 January, I’ve ordered from them before so they were not unknown to me.  I received confirmation of my order and notification that they would be posted to me on the next working day, on Monday 18 I received a further email saying the package had been sent together with details of the Swiss Post tracking number, I logged on the next day, Tuesday 19 January and there it confirmed that it was in the system. So far, so good.  Then it all went wrong… Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday I mentioned Spike Jonze’s gorgeous looking film I’m Here, a love story featuring 2 robots living in Los Angeles.  Spike, in addition to being a film writer, director and producer is also co-founder and creative director of the news and culture website VBS.TV, you may recall I mentioned their recent Vice Guide to Liberia.

VBS.TV have a new feature coming out on 12 February which is a love story of an altogether different kind.  Swansea Love Story is about the largely unreported heroin epidemic in South Wales. The film takes an intimate look at the lives of a gang of young addicts, their families and their surroundings. It also examines how unemployment, the breakdown of the family and the nature of love contribute to the dilemmas faced by a group of young people.

The film is co-directed and produced by Vice UK’s editor Andy Capper and Mike Leigh’s son, Leo and was filmed between Spring to Winter 2009 after Andy and Leo made contact with a gang of young addicts through the SANDS drugs agency.

Focussing on Amy & Cornelius, Lee & Leanne, Clint, Kristian and Wills; Andy and Leo following them around their daily lives as they struggle to get money to buy drugs, alcohol and for places to live. During the course of the film, characters get clean and relapse, they fall in and out of love and you get to meet their families and drugs workers.   You also get to meet their drug dealers as well as members of Swansea’s mining and docker community who talk about how the city has changed.  In place of industry there are bars, strip joints and cheap booze outlets and racial tension often spills over into public protest and violence.

Here’s a short trailer for the film which will be released over 6 days from 12 February 2010 only on VBS.TV

Stop me if you’ve heard this before.  Boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl move in together, boy and girl grow old together in Los Angeles.  Sounds pretty familiar doesn’t it?  Well, perhaps it’s missing the obligatory boy and girl break up but get back together in time for the closing credits scene but other than that it sounds pretty predictable.

However, if I tell you that the film is a 30 minute love story by film maker Spike Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are, Human Nature, Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak) you may not be too surprised to learn that the film in question, I’m Here, is actually a love story featuring two robots.  Yes, robots fall in love too! Read the rest of this entry »