His answer was Facebook. That and consumer willingness to embrace data plans that let people successfully send pictures without going bankrupt or expiring from boredom while they were about it.

This fact came up while researching an article on camera phone optics for The Optical Society. Another nugget was that one of the foremost developers of a particular technology that seemed tailor-made to suit the camera phone sector, a company I’ve been writing about in one way or another for years, had withdrawn from the fray while I wasn’t looking, brought low by a licensing strategy that looked like exactly the right idea on paper.

Point being: becoming ubiquitous is a bruising business. But it certainly pushes technology forwards.

My feature about some of the optics technology built into camera phones is the cover story of the February issue of the OSA’s Optics and Photonics News, and is also currently an open-access article on their web site.

The annual year-end bun grapple over at Critic’s Notebook brings the inevitable list: Ten films I liked from 2011.

At this rate next December’s apocalypse will be caused entirely by the posting online of more Top Ten Films of 2012 lists than the cosmos can allow.

Updated to add:

I didn’t realise that Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty – that’s Emily Browning above, in the process of applying for the job – never got a review at Critic’s Notebook when it was released in the UK or subsequently when it broke cover in the US. It’s also one of those films that seems to have left the New Model Collective of film reviewers in a bit of a muddle. So for the record, set the Wayback Machine for Things I Wrote Down Last October (now with fewer typos):

Julia Leigh Sleeps Furiously: Sleeping Beauty

None of the many calamitous ways in which the sight of old men queueing up to fondle a comatose Emily Browning could have gone off the rails actually happen in Sleeping Beauty, since it turns out that Julia Leigh is a) a clinician with a painter’s eye for compositions and tones, and b) not mucking about. She’s also not exactly breaking new ground, pulling on threads already tackled in one form or another by Kubrick and Bunuel, and indeed by Jane Campion, whose name on the label seems to have confused those forgetting that Campion’s waded out into frustrated sexuality and the human textures of homesteads before. But not quite like this. To say Leigh scores a bullseye on some complex ambiguities of masculine power and feminine voids is an understatement. Sleeping Beauty is taut as a stretched rubber band, set squarely in the art house wheelhouse with acres of still compositions and sound design to let the mind roam around, but with the tonal refresher of the whole Australian setting and screen acting style kicking in all the time. It’s also roughly as erotic as eye surgery, and anyone detecting actual misogyny or anti-feminism in its sights and sounds deserves a close encounter with the mighty pillow of truth, especially if they’re male. In fact your reaction may hinge entirely upon exactly which side of life’s median line you happen to find yourself.

Leigh doesn’t bother to hide the cogs, so Sleeping Beauty is transparent. Browning is orally penetrated for money in the name of science in scene one and doesn’t get much joy from it, so her half of the agenda is in plain sight from the off. The meatier side comes later via the three old men who queue up for a grope, three fearless old actors whose conflicted and conflicting horrors are only slightly weakened by noticing that one of them was in Mad Max when the world was younger. Some reviewers have detected pretension everywhere, but the film’s only actual tinge of the stuff comes via a long literary monologue delivered straight to camera by Old Man One (the interweb tells me it’s a story by Ingeborg Bachmann), shortly before he bares a bod that looks in need of a thrash with a carpet beater and is revealed to be hung like a dormouse. Not sure that bravery is quite the word for that.

All the rigid lines and staged country-house formality of it keep the focus squarely where Leigh intends it to be: on the minds rather than the bodies. Rachel Blake’s madam is carved from some kind of marble, and if her deportment wasn’t all you needed to know about her then the way her pinky finger locks at precisely thirty degrees while pouring the tea fills in the gaps. Leigh uses fades rather than cuts, the classic metaphor for decay and unconsciousness, and builds them into an Aussie setting with all its body consciousness and free-wheeling machismo intact – states of mind which are then unpicked by Leigh with a laser microscope, in a manor-house lit by southern hemisphere sunlight. Emily Browning’s naked body is on screen so often you almost ignore it, but the varying views and vistas out of the windows she parades in front of at different points in the plot are at least as significant. Look at the framing of her alabaster body among the other olive-skined brunettes and tell me this director isn’t in complete control of mood, tone and perspective.

Browning’s bravery in doing this thing is beyond question, and at least her style looks a better fit with the actual story here than it was in Sucker Punch. But the dilemma that always hangs around screen portrayals of shallow characters applies: casting someone who’s not a born firebrand might suit the story, but dents the film. Browning is obliged to downplay so far she’s practically planted in the ground, swinging between being a hollowed-out void to strangers and a conflicted bitch to people she knows. She comes across as an emptier vessel than the investigation underway can really use. Faced with a cameoing Amazonian brunette I’d not seen before named Mirrah Foulkes, whose six-foot black-clad face-decorated usually-topless frame glides around as if following lines of magnetism while she radiates the kind of air that could lead a man to his doom, Browning seems lost for words. She wasn’t the only one.

The challenge in covering Bristol’s Encounters Film Festival, once you’ve calculated a route to Canon’s Road that doesn’t actually involve Canon’s Road on a Saturday night, is to accept the inevitable: A festival report that attempts to describe everything screened at a short-film festival would have to rumble on for a week. Even one limited to just the films you actually like will have a commissioning editor reaching for the migraine pills.

Little White Lies gave me space to rave about a few, but leaving out the ones that wouldn’t fit was a chore. No room to mention Tony Grisoni’s The Pizza Miracle, with its fake slice of black and white Italiano called The Madonna of the Eels and the looming silent presence of none other than Ray Cooper. No space to giggle at The External World, David O’Reilly’s spasm of animated lunacy on which a year’s worth of catchphrases can draw. Darren Kent playing a lad allergic to sunlight in Sunny Boy and blurring the lines between acting and reality completely; the young actress in Burn My Body who did the same thing from the exact opposite direction; Luke Treadaway looking very harassed in Man In Fear (“I’m being hunted by a conceptual artist.”/”Is he threatening to drop a pickled shark on you sir?”)… All gone, washed away by the editing tide.

The Little White Lies festival report about the ones that survived the edit, including the film in which Chloë Sevigny does something remarkable with her face, is posted here.

An Encounters interview with animator John Kricfalusi circled the runway for a while but has now landed over at Critic’s Notebook.

Just for comparison’s sake an earlier Encounters report from a few years back is online at the same place, this being the one in which my admiration for Rebecca Hall really kicked in.

There’s a large pile of caveats. Concentrating on the year-on-year figures helps avoid the headache that reading the sequential numbers causes; heavy industry is still more inclined to put money on the table than the technology sector; exporters will fret that the Eurozone and US economies are heading in different directions again, although probably not as much as Europeans will. But most vendors are still optimistic, the latest stage of the ride that’s as unrelenting for them as it is for the analysts asking about it.

So I asked an analyst about it. The latest of my regular chats with Mark Douglass of Longbow Research about what’s going on is now posted online at Optics.org.

Albatross is a sprightly attempt to goose some life into a template from which most life has already fled. Miserable married men have been seen losing their footing over precocious young girls who forget to wear bras since the invention both of movies and of bras; and this one does it in an English seaside guest house, a venue already pre-loaded for farce. Sooner or later someone’s going to leap into the broom cupboard when their spouse comes round the corner, and sure enough they’re dressed as the Pope at the time.

Most of the goosing comes from the actors, vivid and surprisingly cosmopolitan bunch that they are. Director Niall MacCormick has a lighter touch than Brit-coms usually have to withstand, and a while back he cast Andrea Riseborough as Margaret Thatcher so safe to say his instincts for performers are habitually spot-on. This is a lucky break for Albatross, since the actual plot and its Be Yourself moral, arriving courtesy of sad grandparents and snotty upper class twits, provides hardly any goosing at all. After seeming determined to grab an odd bunch of ingredients and charge up a particularly British sit-com cul-de-sac just to see what happens when it hits the wall at the end, the film decides to settle for a nice cup of tea instead.

But better a light touch than no touch at all. The very English Jessica Brown-Findlay sashays around the more urbane Julia Ormond as if touching her would set off an alarm, while Sebastian Koch squeezes his oversize Germanic frame into tiny rooms that don’t fit him and simmers with nameless frustrations. Between them they look like the New Europe crashing into a ditch.

My chat with Sebastian Koch is now online over at Little White Lies. Albatross is an opportunity to see this fine dramatic actor stretch his comedic muscles, play the fool a little, and dance a shimmy. So naturally I asked him about Nazis and the Holocaust and Hauptsturmführer Ludwig Müntze.

Trace almost anything interesting in new films back a bit and Alex Cox will pop up at some point. Come on film gods: The man links Ed Harris and Miguel Sandoval with Edward Tudor-Pole and Michelle Winstanley. Let him loose more often.

My main memory of watching Gary Oldman in Sid and Nancy is of wanting to keep perfectly still in case he saw me and took my head off. Seeing him disappear behind the complicated defenses of George Smiley all these years later is like watching a nuclear reactor boil a kettle, but no less engaging for that. Shame that the new version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy decides not to tackle one of the characters that made Smiley’s defenses complicated in the first place.

Some thoughts on Tinker Tailor and the absence of Ann Smiley are posted online over at Critic’s Notebook.

My interview with Céline Sciamma about the film and her obvious encounter with the gods of casting is online here at Little White Lies.

I spoke to Mark Douglass of Longbow Research for Optics.org, and discussed why the clouds were gathering in July even before the storm broke in August. This time it includes words like “clear as mud.”

James Marsh’s documentaries bear all the hallmarks of his parallel career as director of fiction, which is a polite way of saying that his knack for using the techniques of one in the context of the other plays the audience like a harp. Compared to the atmospherics of Werner Herzog or Asif Kapadia, Marsh’s tactics are positively tub-thumping. But in the circumstances, given the film’s clear and proper biases, his decision to let the researchers who inserted themselves into the life of Nim Chimpsky speak for themselves with a minimum of on-screen demonization or ridicule and their dignity intact was surely the right approach. The audience will supply the incredulity when required.

But the point about Nim from a science perspective is that the project’s instigator, the easily mocked for several reasons Herb Terrace, came to realise that he was on a hiding to nothing. At which point that shadow behind the eyes is on full display. A lay audience will see it as just desserts. A science audience may see it as that, plus something rather more illuminating about the price of certainty. Since the trickster god of film distribution has arranged for Project Nim and Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes to come out at the same time, everyone involved should probably be grateful that poor Nim didn’t pick up a jawbone and go to town.

I spoke to Bob Ingersoll, originally a primate studies student and now a tireless advocate for Nim’s legacy and the welfare of animals used in scientific research, at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Our conversation is now online at Little White Lies.

The absence of grit in A Better Life is more about director Chris Weitz taking a thought experiment out for a spin than any lack of nerve. All the space that a story of migrant workers and familial strife would normally fill with hand-held camerawork and hard-core frowning gets used instead for deliberately lush photography of some very un-lush bits of East Los Angeles and a sweeping score by Alexandre Desplat. Much of the rest is occupied by the very fine Demian Bichir, honest self-sacrifice oozing from every pore in exactly the way it didn’t when he played Fidel Castro as a self-propelled agent of revolution in Steven Soderbergh’s Che a while back. Weitz’s tactic of addressing the immigrant experience through colour and music and high production values rather than friction and noise and aggression is clearly deliberate, the work of a man who knows whose shoulders he stands on. So naturally he’s getting some stick for it.

My talk with Chris Weitz about the film and why he made it the way he did is now online at Little White Lies.