back-lot or quadratura

Berlin’s film museum, the Deutsche Kinemathek, is celebrating the work of set-builder and stage-crafter Sir Ken Adam, who conceived some of the most memorable, iconic and colossal cinematic backdrops of the past fifty years.  Adam’s vision of the White House War Room for the Stanley Kubrick classic Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb even had the newly-elected real-life, Hollywood president convinced that was the command-and-control centre he’d inherit when he took office. Adam created the atmosphere of epics like Ben-Hur, several James Bond films and other cult movies.  Quadratura is an Italian term used to describe the technique that applied perspective and foreshadowing to flat surfaces to create the illusion of depth and space. 

purity of essence or always/never

This day marks the fiftieth anniversary of the release of Stanley Kubrick's master-work Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned how to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which the New Yorker celebrates with due fanfare for its prescience and enduring relevance.

Though dismissed as unimaginable at the time of its premiere, it has since been revealed that a single individual could easily initiate a nuclear launch autonomously. Though the risk and compromise was clear, the consequences of allowing an assault to go unanswered, unrequited seemed far more risky. Beyond fail-safes, the film also of course offered critiques on doom's-day devices kept secret and thus useless as deterrents, which were very real for both superpowers, however guarded. There's no fighting in the War Room, gentlemen.

context clues or you see, it's OK. he saw it on the television

Mental Floss featured an interesting round up of eleven creative interpretations of classic films that's a bit above the caliber of the investigative work my friends and I did watching a VHS cassette of Three Men and a Baby one frame at a time to catch a glimpse of the tortured ghost stage-hand that was caught on a millisecond of the released version of the movie, but still rather implausible though well-constructed. The alternative reading that struck me the most was theories on the Stanley Kubrick film The Shining. I had heard the suggestions before that the movie was a veiled allegory of the director's views of the Holocaust or the genocide of the aboriginal peoples of the Americas, a significant departure from the book on which its based, but over all not a very compelling argument.
As the author of the original novel posits, however, all writing is a confession although it is not always clear what one is owning up to—though in this case, the author admitted that he had had some dark thoughts about his family when they got on his nerves, the article, referencing a documentary called Room 237, debuted during the Directors' Fortnight of last year's Film Festival at Cannes, entertains the idea that the changes in the screen-adaptation were the esteemed director's secret confessions for his part in the mock-up, staging of the Apollo Moon landings. Conspiracy theorists and Moon-landing deniers have found all sorts of supporting evidence, including, the sweater that Danny Torrence wears bears the Apollo 11 rocket, the lunar mileage was about 237,000 miles—hence the warning to avoid Room 237—and the distinctive hotel carpet pattern that Danny races his Big Wheel across bears some resemblance to the launch pad for the mission. An awful lot of the iconic scenes only come from the film—the wave of blood from the elevator, the ghost twins in the hallway and the writer's block expressed on dozens of typed pages. It seems like a pretty far-fetched explanation and one can surely find hints like these anywhere, if they support one's thesis. What do you think? Do you think there are such admissions lurking in the subtleties of gaffing and artist license?

the whole point of a doomsday machine is lost...if you keep it a secret

While there is word that US government computer systems are set on blocking access to this newspaper for fear that soldiers and bureaucrats might become a bit more informed or inadvertently participate in spillage (network-hygiene, it's called), undeterred by this potential loss of readership, the Guardian is reporting on how the former number-two in rank of the US Army leaked to journalists the methodologies behind an open-secret, admitting that the American cyber-offensive colluded with Israeli forces in order to sabotage Iran's nuclear programme.

To show that Justice can be a slow and deliberative process for one's own, these events first unfolded in 2010. This disclosure, unsourced beforehand, was a major scandal for both prosecuting governments, although all involved employed some very bellicose rhetoric—regardless what was behind the words, and instigated a regular witch-hunt among the press-corps and individual reporters were harassed with less indiscriminate and sweeping (not protected by the herd for protecting their sources) tactics in retaliation. These heavy-handed techniques, trying to out the sieve, resulted in a pointed diminishing of US standing in the eyes of the rest of the world in terms of press freedoms and transparency. Intelligence did not trickle down but came in a torrent from the top of the Pentagon, it seems. Deciding autonomously to share manoeuvres is of course a perilous and potential compromising choice, and not without the hubris that one sees the big picture, but the officer's rationale, while not all would agree it was right or sound, held that such weapons were not very useful as a deterrent if such abilities are kept incognito.