The Bothersome Man is an unusual Norwegian film released in 2006. It was the debut of director Jens Lien and shows an interesting view of life in a soulless city. It is of course in Norwegian but I don’t really mind subtitles. I saw it around a year ago late at night on BBC1 and I don’t think I ever would have come across it other wise. I’m very glad that I did though so I wanted to make sure other people could find out about it.

The film’s protagonist Andreas finds himself in a city with little idea of how he got there. He has is given all the things he needs, an apartment, a job and a girlfriend, yet something is missing and nobody else seems to notice it. The film follows him in his attempt to escape the sterile city and this materialistic life style. Much of The Bothersome Man is metaphoric so I suppose it can be interpreted as you will. Personally it reminds me a lot of the Radiohead track Fitter Happier.

Fitter Happier – Radiohead

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower is a cult coming of age book written by Stephen Chbosky published in 1999. It’s definitely among my favourite books of all time and I wish I’d discovered it earlier in my life. It’s the story of a 15/16 year old boy during his first year of high school. 

The Perks Of Being A Wallflower is written in an interesting format in that it is made up of a series of letters written by an anonymous boy to an anonymous reader. The book opens with this…

“Over time, your face changes. Your face shows emotion, your face shows age, your face shows thought your face shows everything. Capture these little daily moments in a frame, day by day. See and share your evolution, your emotions, your thoughts.”

I’ve been using DailyBooth for almost two months now. It’s a tightly knit online community and one of the friendliest I’ve known. DailyBooth was fully launched on 13/02/09 and it still only has a couple of thousand users. The idea of the site is that you take a picture of yourself using your webcam/upload from camera each day and create a backlog. It’s format is fairly similar to twitter in that users can follow one another and then comment on each others daily photos with text or other pictures. DailyBooth is probably my favourite website and it’s well worth looking into it if you aren’t a part of it already.

Muxtape is a platform for new music. At the moment, it’s still in it’s beta stage only playing their favourite artists. In the coming weeks, it’s set to begin supporting other bands who chose to sign up. The minimalist approach of Muxtape makes it look promising as a future tool for up-and-coming bands. “Muxtape strives for simplicity and believes that music needs a clean, unobtrusive context.” This means no forced advertising on artists pages and muxtape will allow the bands to sell downloads and tickets through the service.  Muxtape are set to grow and are planning to use an API to allow artists to expand the platform. Watch this space.