Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Inspiring Films for Writers?

Something in the Air (2012)


I did a post on how The Tenants, the novel and the film, can be inspiring for writers. And I would add that, for artists and for creative types in general, Something in the Air (2012) [French: Après mai] is just as inspiring. The inspirational key appears to be that both films actually show that artists creating and discussing the strife that accompanies the push to create. 

In The Tenants, Lester and Bill are repeatedly shown typing while struggling to complete their novels. And in Something in the Air, Gilles is regularly shown painting, drawing and reading.
 
However, I haven't been able to find any other films with artists as the protagonists that are actually shown creating anything i.e., that are inspiring. A far third on my list would be La Belle Noiseuse (1991) which is about Frenhofer, a former famous painter, who restarts a neglected project after discovering an exhilarating younger muse. But that's about it.

What films have you found to be inspiring?

Wednesday, February 10, 2016

The Undo Button Inventor(s) for the Nobel Prize




I'm convinced that the inventor(s) of the Undo button should receive a Nobel Prize. Can you imagine how much pain, sorrow and frustration the God given Undo button has prevented for writers? 

Join me in starting a petition to have the name(s) of the inventor(s) be nominated for the prestigious award. In the meantime, here's an excerpt from Undo's Wikipedia entry:


History[edit]

The Xerox PARC Bravo text editor had an Undo command in 1974.[1] Behavioral Issues in the Use of Interactive Systems, a 1976 research report by Lance A. Miller and John C. Thomas of IBM, noted that "It would be quite useful to permit users to 'take back' at least the immediately preceding command (by issuing some special 'undo' command)."[2] The programmers at the Xerox PARC research center assigned the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Z to the undo command, which became a crucial feature of text editors and word processors in the personal computer era.[3]
Multi-level undo commands were introduced in the 1980s, allowing the users to take back a series of actions, not just the most recent one.[3] AtariWriter, a word-processing application introduced in 1982, featured undo. NewWord, another word-processing program released by NewStar in 1984, had an unerase command.[3] IBM's VisiWord also had an undelete command.