prog: (Muybridge)
[livejournal.com profile] 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.



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.
prog: (Default)
This review of Inland Empire jibes well with my feelings about the film.

It is worth seeing if you want to be exposed to some really overpowering, if often abstract, film art. I've had the chance to sleep on it (with a lovely NYE party in between somewhere as well) and I've decided that it is so. I'm glad I saw it.

Just keep the running time in mind. I know I would have been less distracted and impatient if I knew when it was going to end, since the structure of the film's latter, nightmarish major section contains no conventional cues that things are heading towards a climax, let alone a resolution. (At least, none that tell the truth.) I found myself looking at the Brattle's purple-lit wall clock more often than I would have liked.

Yes, it's probably not playing in any theaters anywhere at this point; I caught it on the last day it was held over at the Brattle. But I might like to see it again on DVD later.
prog: (coffee)
Lesson one was a success... frittatas made and eaten. Yum yum. I am looking forward to further education in the magical [livejournal.com profile] magid multitasking method.


I have finally been reading the D&D3E Player's Handbook (maybe 18 months after purchasing it) and absorbing the new rules. The only things I knew for sure going in (picked up from overhearing local and online conversations about the game) was that multiclasses are wacky, clerics can use swords, and everyone loves that one illustration of the half-orc girl. (Seriously... that's one of the first facts I picked up from alt.sysadmin.recovery chatter when the book was brand new, and just last week, two separate individuals (both girls themselves, though not necessarily half-orcs) said to me, "You know what's my favorite illustration in the new book?" And I said: "Yes, I do.")

I read the book now because N&M's friend Justin is trolling for new players. I might end up being a cleric, as usual. However, in a departure from the unremarkable cure light wounds-slingers that typically sullied my character sheets throughout the 1990s, I have a fairly nifty character idea, inspired by a minor character from The Sandman.

Looking forward to trying these rules out... it sounds like a lot of fun, and this group will, from what I know of the probable players, have the play style that I like... role-playing without role-playing. I like cooperative storytelling with friends, guided by a clever GM and a capricious set of dice. I don't like to see ordinarily sane people writhing in pretend drama and making me feel weird.



Saw The Sweet Smell of Success tonite at the Brattle, the first film of their Monday Nite Noir series. It had Tony Curtis and some other famous fella and was from 1952. I really have to either repair or replace my Palm so I can start taking notes in movie theatres again. These were the only lines that stuck in my head:

"If you're funny, then I'm a pretzel!!"

"I'd like to take a bite outta you. You're a cookie... filled with arsenic!!"

Also one guy had his career ruined after being framed as a COMMUNIST POT-SMOKER!!
prog: (Default)
Happy new year, friends. I hope that things go well for all of us.




My NYE event this year was a Freak House thing. I seemed to give at least one person the impression that I was not having any fun, because I was very quiet and still for most of it. This was, in fact, not the case. Very rarely am I not having some sort of fun, even when it's not obvious, which is probably most of the time.

I tend to shut down all social processes outside of interested observation when people around me are talking about things I don't know much about. During these times I am afraid that I confuse real life with a TV program. A good TV program, mind. Something interesting on the Discovery channel, OK? Yes.



I look good in black, but will from now on make a conscious decision not to dress in nothing but. I think that makes me stand out too much.

I need to find more green or green-like articles of clothing.




I had a funny dream the night before last that involved [livejournal.com profile] tahnan finally conceding that the word omnivore didn't have the same primary meaning that he had been insisting on for quite a while. He wouldn't budge in his convictions until a sufficient number of people came forward with references to the word's primary meaning of "one that has the ability to consume both animal meat and vegetation" versus the meaning that he was defending, "one that does consume both animal meat and vegetation".

(This does not reflect reality, as far as I can tell.)



Picked up he Jan-Feb Brattle schedule from the Diesel today. This lineup looks really good! (I was sub-impressed with the Nov-Dec one.) Lots of 1950s American film noir, to which I feel I have been underexposed. I'll pick out the movies I am planning on seeing and list them here, in the near future.



Relatedly, I have installed Wiki software on my TiBook, and find that I really like it. Even though I am the sole user, thus obviating the world-writable aspect that counts for 51 percent of Wiki's point, the ability to very quickly create densely hyperlinked Web pages, with far less effort than it would take me to create an maintain a collection of static text or HTML files, lets me perform brain-dumps in a joyous fashion. These dumps are then actually navigable and extensible later on, which is something that on-paper notebook-scribbling can't offer. I think I will use Wiki as a true brain-extension for a long time to come.

The only feature it's missing, in my opinion, is a way to add artwork easily. You can drop in URL-fetchable images easily enough, but I mean that I want to doodle a doodle onto a Wiki page as easily as I can in a notebook. And here, of course, is yet another project idea. Hold on a sec while I make a page about it.

The Wiki software is Use Mod, by the way, the same program that the Freedom Tracker uses.

WRT Freedom Tracker: I read a couple of chapters of "The Wiki Way" last night and got some good ideas for meta-information I should add to the website, in order to encourage participation and exorcise newbie-fear against Wiki's unusual philosophies. (For example: note that all information is backed up, and there's an on-line, easy-to-use diff and version-control system, so you shouldn't be paranoid about people maliciously erasing your edits.) I shall do this shortly, and then proceed with the soft-launch, with wider announcements a week or so later. yep Very exciting.



Over the last week I have been developing what might be my first dot-com idea. Which is to say, I have an idea for a web application that sounds great on paper and that nobody else has done yet and would take more capital to launch than I am comfortable spending on a hobby project.

That said, it might be really cool, and I could spend the money if I can really convince myself of the project's worthiness. Mmh. For the time being I'll just cram my ideas as they are now into the Wiki, because I can.

Wiki wiki wiki.

friday

Dec. 29th, 2001 11:24 am
prog: (Default)
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.

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