movies

Wednesday various

  • Studios are increasingly stripping rental DVDs of special features. I ran into this over the weekend with The Informant. I’d be very interested in an audio commentary or any other behind-the-scenes material — it’s an unusual movie, based on a very unusual case — but I won’t buy it for that.

  • Incidentally, speaking of The Informant, I was amused by this user comment at IMDB: “…the main character in this film was just bad with the way his thoughts were and thinking the way he did.”

  • Meanwhile, I am not at all surprised that Ridley Scott’s new Robin Hood movie isn’t remotely historically accurate, despite his repeated claims to the contrary. Still, it’s interesting to go in search of the “real-life” Robin Hood. [via]

  • I’m not a big fan of cilantro, but I don’t hate it. Apparently, though, there may be a good reason why many people (like my father) do. [via]

  • And finally, the headline reads Black Hole Strikes Deepest Musical Note Ever Heard. [via]

How I spent Saturday

Today was a pretty good day.

I woke up early to bring my car in for its yearly inspection and an oil change. My father was kind enough to give me a ride over, and then back again later to pick the car up. There used to be a pretty convenient train in the morning that would take you from the mechanic (half a block from the station) back to our station (one block from the house), but the LIRR saw fit to muddle with their schedule and only run trains once every hour between those two stations. So it’s just easier to get a ride.

I didn’t do a whole lot else today. I went for a long walk, and I took a very successful nap, and I played with the dog. I also watched a little television.

I watched another episode from the first season of Fringe — I keep waiting, I think maybe in vain, for it to get better than its pilot, which I watched when it first aired last and didn’t love. It’s not an uninteresting show, kind of a glossed-up X-Files, but right now I’m not seeing a whole lot to make me revise my original opinion of the show.

The second episode of the new Doctor Who fared a little better, though I do think it coasted by a little too much on costumes and set design and ultimately couldn’t hide what was a little thinness in its story. It was clever and fun — and thank goodness they didn’t do that click-click-click what-did-the-Doctor-just-see thing again — but it felt strangely cut short. (There were a couple of minutes at the end that were nothing but establishing shots for next week’s episode.) It wasn’t at all disappointing, but that delightful sense of wonder I felt last week did feel a little under-served by the end this week.

And then I got caught up on the last two episodes of Chuck, while I pulled together issues of Kaleidotrope (which with luck will be mailed out before next weekend is out). I’m occasionally mystified by Chuck‘s difficulty in pulling in a bigger audience — it’s a fun action comedy with some great characters — but if the show has to end this season, “Chuck Versus the Other Guy” was a several steps in the right direction and just a cool episode to boot. (Nice to see Mark Sheppard continuing his plot to appear in every television show on the air. Also nice to see, however briefly, Ida from “The Middleman”.)

And finally, this evening, I watched The Informant, starring Matt Damon. It’s kind of an odd movie, but that’s probably because it was a pretty odd story. I don’t think it’s spoiling anything to say that Mark Whitacre is a fascinating character — if you haven’t already hear the This American Life show about his case and all its convolutions, you should. I thought Damon did an excellent job portraying a man who just keeps lying, it seems, because he just doesn’t know what else to do. It’s actually a pretty fun movie, despite all that, and is more a dark comedy than anything else.

And that, such as it was, was my Saturday.

Peascod’al Activity

The “Forgotten English” for today was the phrase “peascod wooing,” which means…well, let me just give you the quote from W.C. Hazlitt’s 1870 book, Faiths and Folklore of the British Isles:

If a young woman, while she is shelling peas, meets with a pod of nine [peas], the first young man who crosses the threshold afterwards is to be her husband. In Scotland it is, or was, a custom to rub with peastraw [fodder made from pea stalks and leaves] a girl to whom her lover has not been true.

If I’d known it was that easy… This afternoon, my mother suggested I join a singles’ bowling league advertised in the events calendar of a local marketplace newspaper. But apparently I just need to start hanging around women who shell a lot of peas, perhaps surreptitiously walking in and out of thresholds as they do so. I’ve actually been to the “rock ‘n’ roll” bowling this group participates in, not as part of any singles group, but just with friends. It was fun, but as a few people pointed out when I mentioned this earlier on Twitter, if I joined the group, I’d almost certainly find it populated by a bunch of guys and maybe one scared, or more likely bored, girl. And I’m not sure paying to hang out with a bunch of dudes who’d rather be meeting women is really what I want to be doing.

It doesn’t help that the advertisement also suggests, for more information, that one visit the group’s Geocities page.

Beyond that, it was just a really nice day here. The weather was more like early summer than spring, so I went for a nice walk around the neighborhood after lunch. Along the way I listened to Ken Plume’s “A Bit a of a Chat with Bill Corbett, of MST3K and Rifftrax fame. It was a decent interview, and I think Corbett offered some decent writing advice.

When I got home, I discovered I had received an early birthday present in the mail. Heather sent me a really great assortment of Canadian literature, a box full of neat looking books I’m eager to dive into. I may take one of them with me on my trip next week to San Jose, since I’m likely to have some down time during the conference — and plenty of it on the plane trips from one coast to the other. (I’m about halfway through Phillip Pullman’s The Subtle Knife, and I don’t expect the remainder to last me through the rest of next week, much less to next Sunday.) Heather also included a Moleskine notebook, for my own writing, which I neglect a whole lot more than I should. She’s a really good writer herself, and inspiring, so I’ll have to make damn sure I make use of the notebook. The whole package was an unexpected delight — you can’t really go wrong sending me a box full of books — and I don’t feel quite so bad about turning thirty-three next week.

Beyond the walk and the weather and the books, I spent some of the day playing episode three of Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Adventures, once I could actually get the installation file to download. And then this evening I watched Paranormal Activity, which I guess was effectively scary to a point, especially on what was clearly such a low budget, but also a little disappointing. And I say that having been a pretty big fan of The Blair Witch Project, to which this movie has inevitably been compared. I think A.O. Scott said it best in his review:

By any serious critical standard, “Paranormal Activity” is not a very good movie. It looks and sounds terrible. Its plot is thin and perforated with illogic. The acting occasionally rises to the level of adequacy. But it does have an ingenious, if not terribly original, formal conceit — that everything on-screen is real-life amateur video — that is executed with enough skill to make you jump and shriek. There is no lingering dread. You are not likely to be troubled by the significance of this ghost story or tantalized by its mysteries. It’s more like a trip to the local haunted house, where even the fake blood and the tape-loop of howling wind you have encountered 100 times before can momentarily freak you out.

It’s effective, and probably was a whole lot more so in the midnight movie screenings the studio promoted it with, but it’s not particularly clever or memorable.

Though there is one moment in the film I really liked. Horror movies of “found footage” like this — like Blair Witch or Cloverfield or Quarantine — often have to make excuses for why a character persists in filming events rather than, you know, running in terror from them. There’s plenty of that here — lots of “put down the camera” and “we need a record of this” talk — but there’s one moment where one character says, “Turn off the camera,” and the other character just does. It’s not an important or eventful moment in the movie, but it’s a nice, realistic little detail that’s often missing from movies of this ilk.

(I think I may have to check out the Rifftrax version all the same, though.)

Anyway, that was my Saturday.

Thursday various

  • Go on, ask me anything.

  • This future of publishing ad — which I’m seeing re-posted everywhere — is clever. And sure, the whole “death of publishing” thing is all in how you look at it. But, at the same time — and watch the video before you read this — I found it a little too gimmicky. Maybe it’s the length, since it is a little too long to be a truly effective advertisement, or maybe it’s that they kind of had to cheat to make the trick of it work. It is clever, though, I won’t argue with that.

  • This isn’t new, but c’mon, how can you resist a headline like Pentagon Looks to Breed Immortal ‘Synthetic Organisms,’ Molecular Kill-Switch Included? [via]

  • Manahatta: same as it ever was, same as it ever was.
  • And finally, John Seavey on George Lucas’ biggest mistake:

    But all that gets lost in the sheer awesomeness of the Jedi. The signal-to-noise ratio is too high–Yoda is a cool Wise Old Master with all the good bits in Episode Five, Qui-Gon Jinn is played by Liam Neeson and Mace Windu is Samuel Freaking Jackson, and the lightsaber is the coolest weapon in the history of film. Everyone takes Yoda’s words at face value–even the authorized sequels, which show Luke trying to re-establish the Jedi in the image of the old order. Everyone assumes that Luke narrowly won his struggle with the Dark Side at the end, but in fact, he did exactly what people do every day. He got upset, he channeled his anger constructively, and then he calmed down. Only the Manichean nutbags who run the Jedi and the Sith think that this is some kind of near-impossible achievement. The Jedi aren’t the heroes of the film, Luke is, for realizing that there’s something more than the false duality that trapped and ultimately destroyed his father.

    That’s the message of the Star Wars films, and it’s a shame that Lucas made it so hard for people to notice.

Wednesday various

  • The very real problem of digital decay:

    Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

    Imagine having a record but no record player.

    Does this mean the people in my office who print out a copy of everything are on to something?

    There’s also the fact that, on a purely aesthetic level, digital archives tend to be pretty boring things. A novelist’s handwritten notes, for instance, are a lot more interesting to future readers than his half-finished draft in Microsoft Word. I think Emory University’s archive of Salman Rushdie’s work — this “access through emulation to a born-digital archive” — is a neat way to address this fact. [via]

  • The writer and editor in me liked this: Sentenced.
  • Fed Up With Lunch: The School Lunch Project — a teacher eats her school’s cafeteria food every day for lunch, with pictures! [via]
  • I don’t know that being able to identify Star Wars figurines with your mouth really makes you much of a fan so much as just a really weird kid. [via]
  • And finally, FutureStates : Play [via]: