A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

classicaljunkie and I caught a double feech at the Brattle two weekends ago: The Magnificent Seven followed by The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. We hadn't seen either before, and enjoyed both.

TMS seemed to be a restored print of some sort. The film looked bright, colorful and all-around excellent for being nearly 50 years old, but the moment there was any sort of visual transition (like a cross-dissolve from one scene to the next) it abruptly turned into murky crap. I wondered why the restoration techniques don't seem to work on the transitions, or maybe it was just like that all along.

I didn't know (until the instant I saw him) that Yul Brenner's killbot character in Westworld was clearly a parody of his own character in TMS. This made me kind of sad to know, even though I was a fan of Westworld when, like many college students in the 1990s, I thought the gawdawful media of the 1970s was the best ever. (Because it was very ironic to think that, and possession of a great deal of irony is very important at that age.)

I still don't understand the scene where the craaaaaazy kid (the Mifune stand-in) gets intel on the bandit gang by just wandering right into it and talking to their leader. At first I was like "uhh, what, so he's a spy for the bad guys?" But then he goes to to good guys and is like "o hai I just talked to the bandit leader." There's an implication that los banditos took him as one of their own because he had cleverly disguised himself by, er, wearing a sombero. But during that very same scene, one of the bandits is reeling off the names of gang members who got killed during a failed raid earlier that day, which itself would imply that they all know each other fairly well, which would seem to spoil that fairly weak excuse. Buh? I dunno.

TGTBATU was silly and enormously entertaining, though it was a recently assembled super-extendo cut that felt about a half an hour too long. I liked it more, though I have less to say about it. Can you believe I haven't seen the previous "Man with no name" films? Gotta go back and watch em now.

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We saw The Thomas Crown Affair last weekend. The 1990s remake is one of the junkie's favorite movies, so I'd seen that one, but neither of us had seen the original. It's... yeah, it's just not as cool, and it's clear why the remake kept the core interesting concept (the wonderfully perverse romance between the titular gentleman-thief and the insurance agent sent to investigate him) but ditched the particulars of the frame. The 1990s Crown is not just an art thief, he's also an art reverse-thief, and how cool is that? The 1960s Crown just hires a bunch of thugs to rob banks for him, and they do this through violence, waving guns at people. It's just brutal and uninteresting, by comparison.

I liked the comic-panel graphics and the music, though.

Mislaying my Palm shoots my whole schedule to Cucamunga and back. I raced to the Brattle, where I now sit typing, only to discover that this film doesn't start until 4:30.

I haven't knowingly been this early to a film since I went to go see Batman 12 years ago. That would have been in Ellsworth, at the Maine Coast Mall. (I think that's what it's called. It's the one with Pop's Chowder House in it.) I can't even remember who I saw it with, if anyone. My dad? Shrug.

Meant to do lots today, but hit only some of them, due to timing (maybe I will rename my consultancy (is that an actual word? Mac OS X's text editor red-underlines it) to "Late Start Productions" or something) and circumstance. Here is a little map. Imagine little prog running like Little Billy from the family circus all over a map of Cambridge, leaving a dotted line behind him as he gets into all sorts of trouble.

• Walked to Central, took the T to Davis Square. Relaxed with coffee and new Ursula K. Le Guin novel at the Diesel for a half hour or so.


• Walked to O'Reilly, intending to pick up my own draft copy of The Book. Peeked in the window, and saw only my cupped-face reflection. The office was dark! I had forgotten that the whole joint's on an involuntary two-week vacation. Foo. I had also wanted to chat with Jon about my latest grad school adventures, and print out some evaluation forms to present to the evaluaty types who work there, but it was not to be.


• Walked to Porter and took T to Kendall to make a 1pm appointment with my friend's boss at the MIT LCS. Thought I knew which building the LCS was, but I was wrong. Last year, when Noah (the friend in question) gave me a mini-tour of the campus, he pointed to a very tall building that had a giant metal ball on its roof and said: "There's the earth sciences building, with that big radome." I remembered radome, because not too long before that I was playing the PSX game "Metal Gear Solid", the endboss of which is a giant robot that you must destroy in parts, the first of which is its radar-encasing radome sphere, a word I had not heard before then. So in my mind, the connection was made: Noah == LCS == radome. After finding a phone and making two 50-cent calls to Noah, I was set straight, and the meeting occurred as planned.


• Having been once again reminded of my lack of a cell phone, I wanted to go to the phoney place, now that cthulhia had explicitly shown me where it was. But: no time!


• Had to T back home to fill out the long-delayed account-change forms for the house cable bill to my name, then tape them to the door for the former housemate to later fetch and complete, and then I


• scooted up Putnam to Harvard Square and the Brattle to see Little Otik. Once again told myself to restart my media log website.

Things went on their own from there. I met, uh, the skull-clown-nose person whose name I am too lazy to look up, visiting from SF, and after hooking up with some other locals we ate stuff at the Cambridge Common and then saw a Jim's Big Ego thing downstairs. The concert was... very.... long. It was one hour longer than Fellowship of the Ring. If it was all Jim, and half as long, and with less drunk people shouting drunken comments standing 5 feet behind me in the crowded venue, it would have been perfect.

As it was, I was happy that the evening's audience-participation thing was Napkin Poetry (where Jim does a scat riff on bits of doggerel that people write on cocktail napkins and then pile at his feet), which was different than the one I saw last time, Celebrity Deathmatch (where Jim and the band improvise songs about fighting various entities that the audience suggests (and which turns into a love song at the end)). Jim saves a few of the napkins that he reads through to make a final refrain when he's done, and two belonged to me and Karl -- my "That wasn't chicken" and his "Gravy floats". So, we felt that we had won.

The opening act was sort of lame. I can't remember his name, but he has built himself up around being "anti-folk". I suppose I felt the same way about him as I do about evangelical atheists. Why are you telling me this? I don't care enough about God or folk music to connect with either of you, I guess.