movies

Monday various

  • I watched George Romero’s The Crazies this weekend. While it was interesting, I think I like the movie that John Seavey describes more than the one I actually saw:

    It’s not a particularly cheerful movie; this is Romero at his most nihilistic, during the Vietnam era, suggesting that maybe insanity is endemic to the human condition and if we really were being driven mad, we might not notice the difference. But it’s also clever, tense, and filled with some haunting and evocative imagery, and it has some good acting from the principals. I recommend it.

    Still, I can’t in all honesty not recommend the film. It’s maybe not Romero at his very best or most polished, but it’s never uninteresting.

    I wish I could say the same about the trailer for the remake, which looks a lot more like just a generic zombie movie.

  • You stay classy, Gore Vidal. [via]
  • “Beaten stiff competition”? Oh, I see what you did there, you naughty thing. Who’s the best Bad Sex writer now?
  • “Come to New York: your chances of getting killed here have gone down significantly!” [via
  • And finally, speaking of New York… [via]

Saturday leftovers

  • Michael Schaub on being an English major:

    I remember being an English major at a Big 12 school in the mid-’90s. This was an agriculture- and engineering-heavy school where liberal arts departments were isolated in a building that permanently smelled like paint thinner. Whenever I’d tell people I was an English major, they’d look incredulous and say “What are you going to do with that? Teach?” Like in the same tone you’d say, “What are you going to do with that? Trade blowjobs for meth?” Good times!

    I was an English major at a pretty agriculture- and engineering-heavy school myself, so I know the feeling. Even my undergraduate advisor told me, “You know, you really can’t get a job with this degree.” (My advisor within the English department was a lot more encouraging, but I met with him all of once, the day I declared, and he left Penn State around the time I graduated. So take from that what you will.)

  • Are you now, or have you ever been, a Lovecraftian horror? [via]
  • Will we be telling our grandchildren (or even our children) about this thing we used to call “fish”? [via]

    While the climate crisis gathers front-page attention on a regular basis, people–even those who profess great environmental consciousness–continue to eat fish as if it were a sustainable practice. But eating a tuna roll at a sushi restaurant should be considered no more environmentally benign than driving a Hummer or harpooning a manatee. In the past 50 years, we have reduced the populations of large commercial fish, such as bluefin tuna, cod, and other favorites, by a staggering 90 percent. One study, published in the prestigious journal Science, forecast that, by 2048, all commercial fish stocks will have “collapsed,” meaning that they will be generating 10 percent or less of their peak catches. Whether or not that particular year, or even decade, is correct, one thing is clear: Fish are in dire peril, and, if they are, then so are we.

  • Sorry I missed this around Halloween (and by dint of not living in Chicago), but I think a zombie-preparedness fitness class is a terrific idea!
  • Has xkcd been watching the Penn State Monty Python Society’s Mall Climb?
  • Ken Jennings takes the logic of Pixar’s Cars maybe a little too far.
  • Speaking of Pixar, this Pixar opening parody is pretty great. [via]
  • Imagine if the producers of FlashForward had gone with Robert J. Sawyer’s original concept and made the Large Hadron Collider responsible for everything that happens? Imagine how laughable the show might seem then. [via]
  • I’ve never been remotely tempted to buy a bootleg DVD, despite an abundance of them on the streets of Manhattan. Still, their cover art can be pretty delightfully bizarre. [via]
  • NBC sued over font usage. Really.
  • Well, Coldplay does kind of put me to sleep anyway… [via]
  • According to a recent survey:

    Almost half of British consumers have lied to their friends about seeing a classic film to avoid the embarrassment of admitting ignorance of great movies.

    I’m reminded — as it seems I often am, often enough that I should probably get around to reading the book — of the literary parlor game described here, where everybody one-ups each other with all the books they haven’t read. (The “winner is an American professor who, in a rousing display of one-downmanship, finally announces that he’s never read Hamlet.”)

    For the record, of the “top ten classic films people most lie about seeing,” I’ve seen all but one of them. Can you guess which one I haven’t seen? [via]

  • I often find it a little ridiculous what parts of the internet they do and don’t block in my office: blogger.com, but not www.blogger.com; twitpic.com, but not Twitter itself. We have a YouTube channel, for instance — I’d link to it, but there’s nothing there right now — except I can’t visit it at work, even when I’m working with our UK team to upload video to it. Glad I’m not the only person who thinks these policies are a little outdated:

    As I’ve said a whole bunch of times, the “competition” for those of us in traditional media industries—book publishing, broadcasting, newspapers and magazines—is no longer other book publishers, broadcasters, or newspapers and magazines. Instead, our “competition” is now the plain fact that, even if you stipulate that 99.9% of the for-free internet is worthless nonsense, the remaining 0.1% is large enough to absorb anyone’s attention full-time for the rest of their life. For anyone with an internet connection, running out of interesting things to read is completely a thing of the past.

  • This is probably the subtlest Rickrolling I’ve ever seen. [via]
  • And finally, Birds on the Wires [via:

    Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Thursday various

  • Giant Crack in Africa Will Create a New Ocean. Of course, it’ll be in a million years or so, but still. [via]
  • I’ve been impressed with Geist ever since Heather got me a subscription to the magazine — to the point that I didn’t think twice about renewing my subscription, even as I let my New Yorker subscription lapse again. I like the magazine not least as physical object, so I was a little dubious about the idea of a digital edition. But I think this has a certain goofy charm; it certainly replicates the turning of magazine pages better than the typical e-reader. Check it out — and maybe even consider subscribing!
  • I’ll admit, when I DVR a television show, I usually fast-forward through the commercials. Isn’t that the purpose for which the technology was first marketed? Apparently, I’m in a very small majority: nearly half of all DVR users don’t skip the ads. [via]
  • Now that he’s been elected New Jersey’s governor, I think Monty Python definitely should sue Chris Christie. [via]
  • And finally, though you’ve probably seen this all over the place, Joss Whedon’s open letter to The Terminator owners. That’s four zeroes after the one!

Friday various

  • Mark Evanier on skepticism:

    I just like skepticism and wish we had more of it in the media. In fact, I wish we had more skepticism of the skeptics since despite what some skeptics seem to think, going against the Conventional Wisdom doesn’t automatically mean your wisdom is correct.

    I was very briefly a member of the (I think now defunct) Penn State Skeptics Society. I attended a meeting or two, and later went to hear James Randi speak when they brought him to campus. But the fervor with which some people embrace skepticism — or maybe more accurately angry cynicism — has never sat well with me. I think agnosticism and atheism are defensible positions, but some people approach them like True Believers and dismiss all other arguments out of hand. Which, it seems to me, is usually what they accuse the other side of doing.

  • Tomorrow morning, beginning at at 9 AM EST (and for the next 24 hours), Netflix will be streaming The Wizard of Oz for free to anyone (with or without a subscription), in honor of the film’s 70th anniversary. I’m not sure why 70 years is a particularly significant milestone, but the film holds up remarkably well, I think. [via]

  • Barack Obama has one amazingly consistent smile.

  • What do you buy for the Elder God who has everything? Why not Cthulhu Cologne, “Scents inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu Mythos”? [via]

  • A finally, thinking about printing the internet? Um, don’t. [via]