Watchmen Trailer!

It's out early

Watch it here

Mongol!

This looks way, way cool.

Saturday rapid fire

• Dean Kamen's Robot Arm - simply incredible. Why Kamen isn't America's most highly regarded public citizen is a mystery.
• The liberal media follows me around an takes notes - I had this conversation with some friends last week, it's an odd coincidence. I don't cry at movies but my the movies that come closes are The Virgin Spring and On The Beach.
• More HDR Photography
• Groupware is bad
• Russia's Hypermortality -

  Moreover, a large proportion of the Russian workforce may be too drunk to function. Almost one male death in three is alcohol-related. “The increase of alcohol consumption from 10 to 15 liters and an almost simultaneous increase in mortality suggests the central role played by alcohol to mortality, in average up to 426,000 per year in 1980-2001. Alcohol-related deaths total 29.6 percent of total mortality for men and 17.0 percent for women,” the report says.

• My next project is going to be something like this
  

Ace in the Hole

I finished watching Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole last night. Kirk Douglas stars as a cynical reporter who turns a minor accident into a major tragedy for his own benefit. Excellent work all around.

RIP Ingmar Bergman

Tyler Cowen has a short write-up here. He made two of my favorite movies of all time in The Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, both Symphonies in black and white. All very gloomy and subtitled, but magnificently done. His passing leaves the world without one of the best visual storytellers of all time.

V for Vendetta

I finally saw the V for Vendetta movie and found it soils my memory of the comic. Gone was the grit of Evie, the violent mystery of V, the looming menace of the state. Replacing it was corporate angst, an ocean of improbabilities, and a third rate parody of the Bush Administration. Gone was all the base motivation, the insight into human nature, and a believable origin of the crisis. Instead we got soap opera, pandering nonsense, and an explanation out of a Michael Moore movie.

Somehow they turned a potent story of pure anarchism into a theme of left-wing resentment.

All that being said, it was well acted, especially by Steven Rea, who caught the essence of Finch very well.

The Sniper

I finally finished watching The Sniper, a good film noir from 1952. It's a good tense drama about a compulsive sex killer (who uses an M1 carbine, heh). One funny moment comes after the protagonist burns himself on a stove and goes to the emergency room. In addition to the memorable scenes of doctors smoking in hospitals, it has the line

E.R doc: A man's got no business messing around with stoves, it's strictly a woman's business.

An excellent flick

I just finished Knock on Any Door and was quite impressed. It's quite similar Dead Man Walking in that it explains a path to crime and it's resolution in the death house.

Quote of the evening

From the movie Knock on Any Door

Female Lead: If I were as cynical as you I'd hang myself.
Bogart: I don't trust the rope.

A movie to see

Is the Asphault Jungle from 1950. It's a good noir crime drama, with good acting by Sterling Hayden and a young Marilyn Monroe (playing a mistress, imagine).

One hilarious moment is Hayden, is his classic tough guy growl, complaining that his bookie pointed out that he owed money, or in the slang of the time, "he boned me". As in "He boned me in front of some guy I didn't even know!"

Quote of the moment

I'm watching Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd". Andy Griffith plays a Southern lowlife who stumbles into a major media role, sort of a cross between Elvis and Oprah, with the personality and accent of John Edwards on PCP.

The quote is "Well, he's got the courage of his ignorance, I'll give him that."

The Watchmen movie!

To be made by the director of 300! And the plot is supposedly unchanged, and still happening in 1985. My cup runneth over.

Random snapshot of my brain

Whilst waiting for a program to install I came across this article. Blurb:

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite.

I then had the thought that there is no evidence that nature, though beautiful, likes us. Then I thought of the metaphor that everyone views the environment like it's their grandparent's house. "Oh, everything is so old and irreplaceable, let us gaze in rapt awe and try to be worthy of it someday". Mind you, what we do with it is another story.

Then I was reminded of an Ayn Rand line which goes something like "Technology is man's victory over nature". Then I Googled that trying to find the exact quote. That led me, somehow, to this page about one of my favorite thinkers, Albert Jay Nock. His excellent auto-biography Memoirs of a Superfluous Man is still one of my favorites. Then I started thinking of my other favorite social critics and came up with Eric Hoffer, H.L. Mencken, as well as Nock. All three of them have a distinctive, elegant style which I associate with urban living prior to the fifties. All three of them wrote from cities (San Francisco, Baltimore and New York) and two of them published all their work between 1900 and 1950. I'm also drawn to movies set in cities in that era.

I wonder why those circumstances have that appeal to me, then I decided to write it all down to clarify it in my head.

And there you go.

300

I just got back from seeing 300. It matches the hype. The visuals are stunning, the story magnificently told, the actors all unknown and brilliant. It makes the top five of all time list.

An interesting movie

I finally finished watching the documentary Bastards of the Party, an interesting history of gang activity in Los Angeles from the 40s to the present day. It's not a balanced take and doesn't pretend to be, which is quite refreshing.

One quibble - the historian explaining the rise of crack traced it back to Iran-Contra and the CIA-crack folklore. I've always found this ridiculous. It assumes that the government was that clever (doubtful) and also that no one else would have thought of taking a commodity that sells for five cents in South America and selling it for fifty dollars in the US.

Beyond that though, well worth watching.

Short 2006 best of list

• Best New Movie - The Departed
• Best Book - Truth Imagined by Eric Hoffer
• Best TV Show - The Shield
  
• Best Old Movie Seen For the First Time - Tie - The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman) / The Testament of Dr Mabeuse (Fritz Lang) / The Big Sleep (Bogart/Bacall). Only The Big Sleep is in English, where as the other two are probably much better off being subtitled. All three are from the 30s and 40s.
  
• Best New Gadget - Garmin Street Pilot - I never get lost anymore
• Best New General Interest Site - DamnInteresting.com
• Best Concert - Prince - though to be honest I didn't see that many in 2006
• Best New Band discovered - Freakwater - I have no idea how I managed to not know about them until this year, they're perfect for me.
  
• Biggest physical accomplishment - Biking the entire Silver Comet Trail - 126 miles - in one day with no rest and very few stops for water and such. It did take forever
• Biggest professional accomplishment - staying in business for another year I suppose
• Biggest artistic accomplishment - successfully finishing two whole songs, and actually doing open mic nights
  

One of the better lines of all time

From the recently seen (by me) Double Indemnity

Keyes: Walter, can I be blunt with you?
Neff: Of course.
Keyes: I'm a great man.

The two funniest things I've seen today

• The wonderful YouTube Series - "Will It Blend" featuring marbles, cell phones, rake handles, etc
• An edited version of Pulp Fiction that contains only the F-word. Surprisingly long. Not safe for work by any means.
  

Classic movies everyone should see

• Ivan the Terrible Part II - Quite good, interesting insight into the Russian character and the central role autocracy has always played in Russian history. Visually it's quite stunning too.
• The Seventh Seal - Man's struggle with God and Death come across much more believably in subtitles.
• I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang - Life on the chain gang comes across as more believable than realistic, an excellent piece. The final few minutes are particularly jarring.
  

Quick Sunday rapid fire

• An hourly motel in the sky, more info here.
• The funniest quote I read yesterday is from this blog, to wit

  Every adult must at some point have paused during some slapstick piece of debauchery and thought, "Christ, this is ridiculous". Having testicles is like being chained to the village idiot. Sad, but there it is.

• The famous "What year is it?" essay. What year you compare our modern times to determines your current outlook, pretty interesting. Personally I think it's 1905, and Radical Islam is best compared to the Bolshevism of that period, but all comparisons are, by definition, imperfect.
• The Seventh Seal was an incredible movie
• This is an incredibly cool time lapse movie, regrettably, in QuickTime, but still good.
  

Quote of the moment

"You know the story. Most of my life in jail; the rest of it dead!"
Humphrey Bogart in The Petrified Forest

I continue my way through the classics

And I must highly reccomend Paul Muni in "I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" (1932). A somehwat true story evidently. More info here.

Quite good

So last night, I finally saw Walk the Line last night (finally) and I was quite impressed. A surprisingly good performance by Reese Witherspoon and Joachim Phoenix as well. It does end in the late 60s and leaves a lot of his life uncovered, but that's probably just as well.

White Heat

I just got done watching White Heat for the first time. Not quite a film noir, but still excellent. I recommend it highly.

Saw Sin City again

At the Fox Theater no less, and it remains very good.

On an odd note, I recently (yesterday) ordered a lens adapter, telephoto lens, and a gig of memory from buy.com for the Mighty Olympus C-8080 and for no reason that I can tell it's coming in 3 shipments. Very strange. I've been extremely happy with the C-8080 so far.

Saw Batman

Eric and I saw Batman Begins on Saturday night. I have to say I recommend it highly. They stuck close with Frank Miller's "Year One" series and portrayed Bruce Wayne as a dark, angry figure, with none of the campyness that characterized the television series. Christian Bale performs very well as Bruce Wayne and Batman, the other characters did excellent jobs as well.

The Ras Al Gul character was a bit different, in the movie, he plays more of a spiritual leader (to put it nicely) in the comic book he 's more of a genocidal eco-terrorist. The Henri Ducard role is different as well (at least different that the Joe Hamm story I read.) Scarecrow was extremely well done, and Gary Oldman could not have done a better job.

Missing, curiously was any mention of Batman as the world's greatest detective, though one can't have everything.

After the movie Eric and I had dinner at the Rusty Nail, AKA the Smoking Gun (informally named after the barbecue smoker pictured below.


Of no significant import was the waving man outside of Decatur CD. I don't mention it because of any great significance, but mostly because the photo turned out well.


And that was my Saturday.

Just got Team America

I just picked up the DVD, only the 5th non-instructional DVD I've ever purchased,and I have to say, it was as good as I remembered. It was as vulgar as I remembered too. Actually it was the most vulgar movie I've ever seen, and I've seen Bad Lieutenant. There were only about 5 minutes of deleted scenes, and I'm not sure why they deleted some of them (though many were understandable to get the R rating).

Saw Revenge of the Sith

Mark and I saw Revenge of the Sith, and unlike many of the reviewers I liked it quite a bit, I hadn't seen the previous two but this one stood on it's own quite well. Eric was supposed to meet us but had car problems.

While walking back to the car Mark and I saw this bumper sticker (which was pretty good)



And this car, which is hilarious, inspired by the Napoleon Dynamite movie evidently.

Darth Vader Blogs

at the Darth Side.

Irish Gypsies

Who knew they actually existed, Irish Gypsies are distinct from regular gypsies (or the Roma), most notably in that they are ethnically Irish, but they have a gypsy lifestyle and are only in the UK, US and Ireland. This was who Brad Pitt was portraying the movie Snatch.