The Reel World In Trafalgar Square This Thurs/Fri
Feeling blue because all the stuff you want to see in the London Film Festival has sold out? You're guaranteed a seat at London Loves - if you bring it yourself. The fifth year of these unique free screenings in Trafalgar Square offers a chance to step back to the future this Thursday with High Treason and The Fugitive Futurist, two sci-fi oddities offering visions of London today as conjured in the 1920s (both with live piano accompaniment). But the biggest treat is Friday's wonderfully idiosyncratic selection of 15 archive films celebrating more than a century of life in London, including a 1904 documentary made for nostalgic expat Londoners in Australia.
To read more go to Metrolife.
Bond Book Franchised To Thrill
The Man With The Golden Touch, by Sinclair McKay (Aurum, £18.99)
This marvellously entertaining tome, subtitled 'How the Bond films conquered the world', sets out a blatant cash-in-on-the-new-movie mission to uncover the top secret formula that's kept the Bond franchise so successful for 45 years.
To read the Metro review click here.
TV Tonight
James Bond: The South Bank Show
ITV1, 10.40pm
With Bond fever sweeping the country, The South Bank Show has clips from The Quantum of Solace, punctuated by interviews with Daniel Craig, Sean Connery and Judi Dench alongside assorted producers and stunt co-ordinators. When the Berlin Wall came down, many thought it would be the end of Bond. Not so. The latest incarnation is more physical, more ambiguous and a whole lot nastier. This is a post-9/11 Bond, where the lines between good and evil have become blurred and not even heroes are safe. "I wanted to add the idea that he could go down," Craig says. Asked by Melvyn Bragg (above, with Craig) if he was worried about typecasting, Craig doesn't seem bothered: "It genuinely is a high-class problem to have," he says.
India Successfully Launched First Moon Mission Today
We mentioned in the UK news yesterday it was scheduled to launch and early this morning the Chandrayaan 1 spacecraft successfully blasted off smoothly from a launch pad in southern India ready for a two year exploration mission.
The rocket doesn't have any astronauts on board, but has special robotic equipment to make a 3D map of the surface of the moon. Onboard the spacecraft is a special probe that will be placed on the surface of the moon to gather information. The mission is expected to cost 3.8 billion rupees, which is 45 million pounds!
Last month, China became only the third country in the world to independently carry out a spacewalk.
Watch the video here:
Travel Reading Now A Lot Lighter
If you love reading books when you're on the go, you'll love the new Reader from Sony. It states it was Invented especially for book lovers, but I think it's a really great new technology for every Londoner, who in their thousands read books on the tube, bus and train, even those who spend over an hour on the commute from all over the UK.
Reader is the best way to enjoy the new generation of electronic books (or "eBooks"). Slim and compact, it lets you store and take stacks of books with you wherever you go. It's as simple and absorbing as reading a real paper book without having to choose whether you take a packed lunch to work or your book, you can now that both!
To read more click here.
The Guardian's Five Scariest Films
●Frankenstein, James Whale's chiller from 1931.
'Such a powerful film, it is used in another great work, Victor Erice's 1973 Spirit of the Beehive.'
●Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 masterpiece.
'It scared me stiff.'
●The Blair Witch Project, the 1999 surprise hit from Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez.
'One of the most profitable horror films made a virtue of looking like a home movie.'
●Pan's Labyrinth, Guillermo del Toro's fantastical thriller from 2006.
'Del Toro is a masterly director and behind a new school of horror film-makers.'
●La Zona, Rodrigo Pla's 2007 study in paranoia.
'About the gated communities people live in to keep out the hordes.'
To read more from The Guardian click here.
To see their list of the 5 Scariest Books, click here.
Star Wars R2-D2 Whizz Watch
The Whizz Watch may be the perfect holiday gift for kids, geeks or the watch collector in your life. The R2-D2 Whizz Watch is a remote control toy combined with a digital watch.
The watch has an integrated IR control and a separate 2-inch tall character that is wheeled. The character snaps onto the watchband when not in use and when the wearer wants some RC fun, the character can be unclipped and controlled with the IR controller.
To get one click here.
Check Out Fidget For The Latest Games News
Lucasarts announces its second attempt at a Star Wars online RPG.
