A Fistful of Edits…

We rented a bunch of movies on the weekend, and are slowly working on watching them. We saw Bowling for Columbine this weekend, then watched the special edition of Battle Royale, then watched Returner and A Fistful of Dollars. We still have the Good the Bad and the Ugly checked out from Video Droid, so as soon as I have three hours to spare, I’ll be watching that….

First, Bowling. It was good. While I was watching it. And I still think it’s good, but it’s a good propaganda film. Not a documentary. I’ve read some of the criticisms of the film, and Moore’s response to those criticisms, and there’s some seriously flawed and deceptive techniques used in the film. Some of the editing techniques, especially involving the speeches by Charlton Heston, are outright deceptive, cobbling together lines from speeches that took place months apart, or even suggesting that certain speeches took place much earlier than they did. I agree with Moore’s general thesis in this film, that America’s exceptional amount of violent crime is bred from a climate of fear, I can’t agree with a lot of his methods. He had a good idea that could have been presented fairly and truthfully, and he blew it by playing partisan games. I still like the movie, I just don’t respect it.

Battle Royale and Returner I’ve seen before, in fact I think I wrote about Battle Royale earlier. Returner is like the Matrix meets E.T. meets Terminator, meets Transformers. And yes, it is as good as that sounds. Highly polished production and special effects, and style to spare, but not much more.

A Fistful of Dollars was excellent. There’s lots of creative cinematography and the plot is well-paced. I can’t wait to watch Sergio Leone’s other Man With No Name westerns now. I even want to go back and watch Shane and some of the John Ford/John Wayne films again….

More later…

No Star Wars, Thom

Saw Radiohead at the Shoreline Amphitheatre (aka the Shitline Assitheatre) on Tuesday night. Drove out there with Joey, hoping to get cheap tickets, but we both ended up getting in for around $40. Not much cheaper, but still cheaper than paying service charges. We also showed up a little late, after making a quickly corrected wrong turn in SF and then sitting in the parking-lot traffic from hell for about 45 minutes. But we made it in while they were playing My Iron Lung, about 5 or 6 songs in. I looked up the setlist later on, and we missed some great songs early in the set, but we got to see some excellent renditions of Wolf at the Door, Everything in it’s Right Place, Paranoid Android, No Surprises (the line “bring down the government/they don’t work for us” brought a HUGE cheer from the crowd!), Sail to the Moon, Idioteque, and a really great expanded version of the Gloaming, among many others. There were two encores, the sound was nice and clear (no walls to bounce all the muddy bass off of), but the view was terrible. I couldn’t see the stage at all, and had to rely on the big screens above stage to see what was happening. Good show, too bad it couldn’t have been a better venue.

I think we’re gonna watch Dead Man at home tonight. I’ve been meaning to see that movie forever. Jim Jarmusch film, starring Johnny Depp, with Neil Young doing the soundtrack entirely solo…very very promising.

More later…

Translated and Lost

I went to see Lost in Translation the other night, with Joey. Really, really enjoyed it. Scarlett Johansson was impressive…in Ghost World, she had this air of impatient frustration around her performance that really brought her character to life. Here, she’s playing a much more subtle, uncertain variation on similar ideas. And Bill Murray has become a really refined dramatic actor lately. The scenes between the two of them are understated and melancholy and tense and, above all, real. Oh, and the soundtrack is great (listening to it right now, actually).

I’ve heard some criticism of the film that focuses on what some people perceive as racist humor towards the Japanese, but i really have to disagree. The film is about people who are, if you couldn’t tell from the title, lost in a country they don’t belong in, in a culture they don’t understand, surrounded by a language they don’t know. If the Japan portrayed on screen strikes you as alienating, incomprehensible, silly, or exaggerated, it’s because we’re seeing it through the eyes of characters who are alienated, misunderstood, amused, and unsettled by their surroundings. The scene with Scarlett Johansson’s character sitting on the windowsill of her hotel room, as the camera pans around her, back and forth over the tiny Tokyo streets below, is the best and most visceral illustration of this in the movie.

Anyways.

I’m making it my new project to download all the Bends and OK Computer era Radiohead b-sides that I seem to have lost at some point. I still have somewhat low-quality versions on a burned CD, but I crave quality. Especially for songs like Talk Show Host.

I’ve also discovered the joys of .cbz and .cbr files for downloading comics. I’ve downloaded and read Grant Morrison’s entire run on New X-Men over the last few days, up to and including the big plot twist that has everyone abuzz. Fun stuff. Grant’s an interesting writer, and the only other thing I’ve read by him is the Filth (which just finished….see earlier postings about that title). This has made me actually engaged and interested in a superhero comic book again. Part of it is nostalgia triggered by the quality of the recent X-Men movies, of course.

More later…

The Party Don’t Stop…

Indeed, this weekend has been one long party. Joey came over on Friday night, and hung out with us all, and we drank Coronas and ate pizza and played Fluxx, second best card game ever, until the wee hours, at which point we proceeded to fall drunkenly to sleep on the living room floor. I woke about 4am to the sight of 3 other bodies sprawled out in the living room, but i was too tired to wake anyone else up, and just dragged myself upstairs and collapsed. Apparently, Michelle woke up next, did the same, then Emily did the same. Joey woke up at some point, and went home before we got up.

Then, on Saturday night, it was party time for Emily’s 21st. Phil and Holly made it up from Sacramento, and bunches of folks came and hung out and brought food, and all just generally sat around and mingles and snacked and drank some more. Reed showed up and made us bananas foster, which was awesome and incendiary. Truly yummy. Then we all cruised down to P-town to mingle at Steve-O’s birthday party, where the Righteous Fists of Harmony were playing. I had some Coke with Cafe de Santos liquer, which was awesome, along with some tequila. Then I got to play tambourine during the Righteous Fists’ set, which I bruised my hand and tired out my arm doing. But it was very fun, they played a lot of Velvet Underground covers, so I could actually follow the changes for 90% of the songs.

We cruised on back home and started up a game of Apples to Apples (the best card game ever!), with 8 players. There was some fierce competition between Michelle and I for a good stretch of the game, and there were some really great hands that had everybody clapping and laughing their asses off until 4 in the morning. I’m surprised the neighbors weren’t beating down our door….but after we exhausted the entire deck of green cards, and cycled through the red cards 2 and a half times, we called it quits, with me taking the win.

Then this afternoon was Nicole’s birthday, which was much more sedate, and not entirely sober, but certainly less sloshed than the previous two nights. We mostly sat around, played Star Wars trivial pursuit, and then watched Pump Up the Volume, which is a damn fine movie.

All in all, a pretty damn fun weekend, if somewhat exhausting.

More later…

Kid 606

Caught the Kid606 show at Bottom of the Hill on Saturday night, and it was pretty awesome. For a fuller description, check my EM411.com page.

STILL no DSL at home…probably taking so long because of the long weekend. Sigh. But we did get a lot of work done in the kitchen this weekend, and a little tidying everywhere else. Somehow, my string of Christmas lights have disappeared in the shuffle. Odd.

Sojiro is a little terrorist. We’ve been using the old spray-bottle training technique to teach him things like “don’t chew on cords”, “don’t bite my hands”, “don’t harass the bird”, and so on. I think he has ADD though. He kept jumping up on the table to “play” with Jack Sparrow while I was watching Monty Python, and he ended up getting thoroughly soaked. He’s starting to recognize the “voice of god” that happens when he’s being bad though. Slow learner….

Speaking of Jack Sparrow, we’re pretty convinced that he’s actually a Jackie Sparrow. Oops. Hi/her markings are much more like the female house sparrow in Emily’s field guide. I hope s/he’s not too confused about his/her sexual identity now. Not that s/he’s going to mating with any wild house sparrows….

More later…

Comic Apathy

Today is new comic book day. I don’t think there’s anything coming out that I’m particularly interested in though. It’s been like this for a while. The only regular series’ I’m following now are 100 Bullets (which has shifted into bi-monthly mode while the team does Batman), Vertigo Pop: Bangkok (the final issue of which is out this week or next), the Filth (which is up to issues 12 of 13, and is being delayed until next month some time), and Y: the Last Man, which is still monthly…..hmmm. I think that’s it. Grrl Scouts: Work Sucks is over, Zero Girl: Full Circle is over, I’m waiting for the final Bone trade paperback, 100% is over (after about a 9 month delay!), I’m not sure what Paul Pope is working on, although there’s supposedly some THB material coming out in August (yay!)…I picked up Hip Flask: Elephantmen #1 the other week, and it was interesting, but is the next issue really coming out next year? Pop Gun War is on who knows what sort of schedule…Cerebus is fast approaching it’s end, but I gave up feeding my money to Dave Sim long ago, but not soon enough. Although if I could find a used copy of Church & State II, I’d grab it. There’s some colelctions and graphic novels I might pick up, like Craig Thompson’s Blankets, which looks interesting, or the soft cover Jimmy Corrigan. Maybe Batman: Year One, which is actually really cheap. Hmm. Oh, and Mignola has been tied up working on the Hellboy film, so no new Hellboy for a while. Grim tidings. I need to find some new monthlies that are worth following. X-statix looks interesting, and I dig Mike Allred, but I’m cautious about picking up X-anything these days, despite how good I hear some of the titles are, and how good the movie was. I’ll have to dig around. Maybe I’ll try out the Losers, although my hopes aren’t too terribly high for that.

Stuck by Cactuses

Sunday sucked so much ass.

Let me back up. So Joey’s movie premiered on Sunday in Modesto. Cactuses, which Joey did audio for (among many other things) and which me and Reed cameo’d in as musicians. 7pm on Sunday in Modesto. Modesto, a little 2 hour drive from Rohnert Park through the middle of nowhere on Highway 12, across a couple forks of the American River near Sacramento.

Except that the second drawbridge over the river, and hour and a half into the drive, less that half and hour from Modesto, was out. For hours. With no alternate route nearby. I drove for an hour and a half just to sit in completely stopped traffic in front of a malfunctioning drawbridge for another hour, at which point i decided to just give up and go home, since there was no sign of the bridge problem being fixed. At which point I hit rush hour traffic coming home on 80. So I ended up driving almost 200 miles, taking about 6 hours out of my day. For nothing. I missed the movie, missed seeing Joey, got absolutely nothing out of the trip except frustration and exhaustion.

Anyways…

I forgot to tell you guys about Jack Sparrow. No, not that Jack Sparrow. The sparrow that Emily’s roommates found, and which we have subsequently adopted and named Jack Sparrow. He’s a baby, and he is super-tame now. He eats formula from and eye-dropper, and isn’t the least bit timid about people. He landed on Tara’s lip the other day! He’s a cute little fucker, and he’s part of our household now. I’ll post pictures. He rocks.

More later…

DVDx

I downloaded DVDx from sourceforge.net last night, and tried it out…looks like I’ve finally found a useful, non-hardcore-geek oriented DVD rip/conversion program. It’s a one step process to rip and encode to .avi or .mpg, and it automatically sets bitrate to fit on a VCD or other specified media size. It takes a while (about 4 hours to rip all 2 hours of Charade at VCD quality), but looks great for something you could leave running over night. I’ve checked quality really briefly, but I’m gonna watch my rip when I get home tonight and see what the final verdict is. Looks promising though. DVD piracy…er….backup, here I come.

The Hunt

Long time, no blogging. Anyways…I’ve been busy. Me and Emily have been looking for houses/apartments/townhouses/whatever. So that’s been annoying and time-consuming, but kinda fun in an odd sort of way. It looks like our household will be the two of us, Keith, and Michelle (not Covell, but Swift…Emily’s ex-roommate). I still need to figure out what Timm is planning on doing, and whether we’ll need to stay at our current place for a while yet. Hmmm….

I just picked up Bjork’s Volumen Plus DVD, and a couple of CD’s (yay! payday!). It’ll be nice to have those Bjork videos, finally. I was thinking of getting the Cowboy Bebop Movie as well, but I’ll think I’ll wait till it’s cheaper or used.

Me and Joey have been screwing around and trying to get the Quattro to work on his new computer. We finally got it to work, after having some trouble with Cubase, so it looks like we might have something reliable to record with, once we start working on our music project(s). We even found new Quattro drivers, so I might be able to get it working on my computer also. That would be nice…it’d mean the money I paid for it hadn’t gone completely to waste.

I got to watch the trailer for Joey’s movie, Cactuses, while I was over there this weekend. It looks really, really cool, and I can’t wait to see it at the premiere this weekend. The trailer I saw was a pretty rough 6 minute trailer, so I have high expectations for the finished project now. And I have a cameo, so that’ll be fun….

More later….

FMTM, Baby!

I just made plans for July 25th. I’ll be at the Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco, watching From Monument to Masses, ?-ziq, HIM, and some other band. Rawk! That’ll give me a chance to pick up the new FMTM album that’s out now. They’re actually playing tonight at Gilman Street, but it looks like I’ll be staying in and watching Adaptation and Punch Drunk Love.

100 Bullets #46 came out this week, and it’s the last issue before the series goes bi-monthly (allowing the team to do a run on Batman at the same time). Some of the plot-thickening that happened in that issue was pretty interesting. I think we’ve got a clearer idea of what Sheperd is up to now, but I’m not really clear on what the situation between Lono and Loop is at the moment. Is Lono still planning on killing Loop at the end of the issue? Does he, in fact, kill him? Is that the meaning of the dead bird in the last panel? If I know anything about 100 Bullets, it’s that you can never count on anything being true unless it’s shown explicitly. And even then, as is the case with Lono, you might be wrong. Good stuff…Although Risso’s artwork is looking a little more cartoon-y and exaggerated in this storyline. Looking at Lono in the first few issues, and looking at him now, he’s become a hulking, cartoon brute, rather than the larger framed, muscular powerhouse.

More later…