movies

Sunday

I haven’t done much this weekend, so I guess it’s a good thing I decided to extend it into Monday, with a day off from work. (Next year, I think I need to actually do something a little more productive with these vacation days.)

Yesterday, I watched Goldfinger — or re-watched, I’m not entirely sure — and tonight I watched Paranormal Activity 2. The latter is decently scary throughout but ultimately something of a disappointment, forcing the connections to the first movie and the “mythology” that one introduced. It — and, judging by their trailers, the sequels — makes the mistake of thinking that story is what was so surprisingly effective about the first movie.

Though I’ll be perfectly honest: the part of me that can sometimes be a wuss about horror movies — the first Activity was maybe almost too effective — was maybe just a tiny bit relieved.

Movie sign

Last night I watched Dr. No. Tonight, I watched From Russia With Love. (I recently bought — well, bought months ago, but it only recently arrived — the 50th anniversary James Bond Blu-Ray set.) And this morning, I went to see Looper, which I really liked.

Beyond that, and reading some Kaleidotrope submissions — I’ve mentioned that the new issue of the zine is up, right? And that you should visit it? — it was a pleasantly uneventful day.

Wednesday various

  • A lot has been written recently about the “film,” Innocence of Muslims, notably its offensiveness to Muslims (and film lovers), the violence that’s erupted in its wake, and the duplicitous nature with which it was made. Now, via Neil Gaiman one of the actresses speaks out:

    It’s painful to see how our faces were used to create something so atrocious without us knowing anything about it at all. It’s painful to see people being offended with the movie that used our faces to deliver lines (it’s obvious the movie was dubbed) that we were never informed of, it is painful to see people getting killed for this same movie, it is painful to hear people blame us when we did nothing but perform our art in the fictional adventure movie that was about a comet falling into a desert and tribes in ancient Egypt fighting to acquire it, it’s painful to be thought to be someone else when you are a completely different person.

  • I’m not quite sure I buy into the idea of Breaking Bad as a “White supremacist fable” entirely — it’s probably true the show doesn’t get the drug trade right, but, then, it’s not really about the drug trade, is it? — but there’s some interesting food for thought here:

    White-washing the illegal drug market involves depicting it like markets wealthy viewers are more comfortable and familiar with, namely those of the farmers market or the local pharmacy. Walter White combines the ostensible moral complexity television audiences demand in a post-Soprano protagonist with a cleanliness that allows him to market expensive cars. The U.S. is still very much a white supremacist country, but classic cowboys-kill-Indians narratives don’t play with wealthy viewers or the critics who help determine those tastes. And Jack Bauer can drive only so many cars. For the credulous viewer who likes to imagine he’s a couple of life crises from being the Larry Bird of meth — and for the people who sell him stuff — White is right.If nothing else, the article makes me want to re-watch The Wire.

  • John Green on self-publishing and Amazon:

    Here’s my concern: What will happen to the next generation’s Toni Morrison? How will she—a brilliant, Nobel-worthy writer who doesn’t have a huge built-in audience—get the financial and editorial support her talent deserves? (You’ll note that there’s no self-published literary fiction anywhere near the kindle bestseller lists.) Amazon will have absolutely no investment in that writer, and they won’t need to. Over time, I’m worried this lack of investment will hurt the quality and breadth of literature we actually read, even if literature remains broadly available.

  • This isn’t new, but: Jonathan Coulton on the future of music, 3D printing, and scarcity:

    This is my bias: the decline of scarcity seems inevitable to me. I have no doubt that this fight over mp3s is just the first of many fights we’re going to have about this stuff. Our laws and ethics already fail to match up with our behaviors, and for my money, those are the things we should be trying to fix. The change is already happening to us, and it’s a change that WE ARE CHOOSING. It’s too late to stop it, because we actually kind of like a lot of the things that we’re getting out of it.

  • And finally, PBS asks, “Can fandom change society?” [via]

“To a new world of gods and monsters!”

I woke up early this morning to take my car into the garage. The anti-lock braking system light has been staying on lately, which is a sign that the system itself isn’t working properly, if at all. Unfortunately, they weren’t able to do anything for me. They reset the system, they said, and I should see how long it took for the light to come back on. They didn’t charge me anything, which is good, because it didn’t take any longer than sitting down in the car and starting the engine.

Of course, I then drove back home, shut the engine off, and then tried again…only to find that the light now went off.

Apparently, it’s something a Honda dealer is going to have to take a look at it. The car is safe to drive without it — it’s not the brakes themselves that aren’t working properly, and another customer at the garage said his Honda’s been having the same problem for two years. But I’ll probably do a little internet research and then maybe take it to the dealer. The car’s ten years old at this point, and well out of warranty, but the ABS is a safety feature that’s supposed to be working.

After that, it was a pretty quiet day, trying to get through lots of Kaleidotrope submissions. I still have over one hundred to go. But every now and then, a really great story will sneak into the mix, and I remember why I’m doing it.

Then this evening, I watched a double-feature of Frankeinstein and Bride of Frankenstein, neither of which I’d ever actually seen. They’re both okay, but Bride is definitely the better of the two movies, ridiculous camp more than horror, but entertaining.

And that was Saturday.