Month: March 2013

Cover story

I spent some of the day cleaning, some of it watching television, some of it reading Kaleidotrope submissions, some it unexpectedly napping, and this evening watching Argo.

I thought I would be more impressed with it than I was. It’s a decent movie, well made and acted, with some moments of greatness. But I don’t think it’s a great movie, or even necessarily Ben Affleck’s best as director. It keeps juggling tones, and doesn’t always do it successfully, and I don’t think the film is really engaging until the second half, once Affleck’s character actually travels to Iran. And then the film is almost undone again by one Hollywood contrivance after another, manufactured tension that can make everyone involved look silly. And that’s leaving aside the possible historical inaccuracies and other criticisms that have followed the film.

I mean, I liked it, but I did not in any way love it. I can’t speak to its being last year’s “best picture,” though it did win that award. I only saw two of the other movies nominated in that category — Django Unchained and Beasts of the Southern Wild — and I don’t know if either were necessarily better than this. Certainly more daring, more personal. But I did like it, for the most part.

February music

I know you’ve been waiting and waiting to learn what my February mix looks like. Well, wait no longer:

  1. “Friday Afternoon, Op. 7: ‘Cukoo!'” by Benjamin Britten, Choir of Downside School
  2. “You, Sailor” by Erin McKeown
  3. “Inner Ninja” by Classified (feat. David Myles)
  4. “I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight” by Richard & Linda Thompson
  5. “Burgundy Shoes” by Patty Griffin
  6. “Learned My Lessons” by Jenny O
  7. “The Straighten Outer” by Grant-Lee Phillips
  8. “I Awake” by Sarah Blasko
  9. “I Predict” by Sparsk
  10. “Take on Me” by Anni B Sweet
  11. “L’excessive” by Carla Bruni

Also? Sepegal

Last week, I watch Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece, Vertigo, recently named by the British Film Institute and Sight and Sound‘s critics poll as the greatest movie of all time.

This week, I watched Mongolian Death Worm, which amazingly isn’t anywhere on their list.

What can I say? I watched it with friends over Twitter, they’re Canadian, and apparently there’s slim pickings on the Canadian version of Netflix.

In all honesty, it was a lot of fun. It’s a pretty terrible movie, as you might expect, just from the title. I think it aired on the SyFy Channel here at some point, which is pretty much a guarantee of it’s being bad. But it’s bad in some odd ways. There are what might almost be clever lines muddled by bad acting, and there’s bad writing delivered with what might almost be good acting. Also, they say the name of the village, Sepegal, a lot.

It’s a little like Tremors, except not very good. Under the right kind of circumstances, I’d definitely recommend it.

And that was Friday. There was a lot of other work-related stuff, mostly one long report I’m almost finished with, but honestly, the death worms were the highlight of my day.