Movies April-Jun 2009

I had an ambitious plan to talk about the movies I'd watch this year one at a time, and a format that involved putting up movie posters and links to imdb. I also thought I'd try to have something to say about each movie.

But it doesn't look like I'm devoting the requisite giveadamn. Instead, here's what I've seen since about April, in roughly chronological order:

The Matrix
We watched this serendipitously around the Matrix's 10-year anniversary. When I discovered that about a week later I asked myself how it holds up. It holds up OK!

Slumdog Millionaire
We enjoyed this movie, but the end seemed to be a different flick than the beginning and middle. Was that on purpose? Was there meant to be some redemptive switch that I missed being flicked?

Star Trek (2009)
This movie is just as fun as everybody tells you it is.

Tropic Thunder

Bender's Big Score
The first of the Futurama direct-to-DVD movies was OK. I laughed a little, but not a lot.

Frost/Nixon

The King of Kong
A tale well told, but my enjoyment diminished soon after when I discovered that the real story is not as simple as the one told by the fimmakers. See Jason Kottke's discussion of this.

No Country for Old Men
I forgot that this was a Coen brothers movie until M reminded me about 3/4 of the way through. Then it started feeling familiar. Unsettling, funny, and ambiguous. Reminded me of Fargo. The movie sits better when you realize it's about Tommy Lee Jones's character, not about the characters you spend the most time with.

The Beast with a Billion Backs
The second of the Futurama direct-to-DVD movies is more of the same. Good enough.

Be Kind Rewind
I guess the lesson is that even when you take creativity into your own hands, and make something people love, you still get screwed by corporations with lawyers.

He's Just Not That Into You
The movie seems to break some of the rules that the publishing phenomenon laid down. Plus, it wasn't a very good movie. Plus, Mac guy isn't a good actor yet.

Bender's Game
I wanted deeper, more incisive gaming parody out of this.

Shopgirl
I love Steve Martin, even though I'm not always sure why. The awkwardness and depiction of loneliness are funny and sad here. I enjoyed watching this movie.

Up
I cried a little.

Cash for your gas guzzler

Mildly annoyed by this "clunkers" bill the House passed.

The Short Version:

Under the House bill, car owners could get a voucher worth $3,500 if they traded in a vehicle getting 18 miles per gallon or less for one getting at least 22 miles per gallon. The value of the voucher would grow to $4,500 if the mileage of the new car is 10 mpg higher than the old vehicle. The miles per gallon figures are listed on the window sticker.

I spent some time ranting about this and erased it all.

My first reaction is to rail at the perceived injustice. I've driven the same subcompact 30+ mpg car for 10 years without so much as a firm handshake of gratitude. Now suddenly, anyone who drove a 8 mpg behemoth for less time gets cash to upgrade.

I want a reward! I was community-minded when there was little incentive. I want others punished! They need to live with the consequences of their hubris.

But that's pride and greed doing the talking.

I'm trying to learn to be on the side of grace. I want to smile when good is done, no matter why. I've received good things. Why would I want good denied to anyone else?

For those of you playing along at home, this is transformation by the renewing of my mind. And it's surprisingly tricky.

Information: free and expensive

Taken from Wikipedia
Stewart Brand at the first Hackers' Conference in 1984, in the following context:

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.


From me
Information is so valuable that there has to be a way to profit from it. It's just that information's value, when decoupled from a physical medium, is extremely difficult to gauge.

Information is unquantifiable. "Cows go moo." seems like a single mote of information, but fractally smaller bits of information are implicit in that three-word sentence. Like what a cow is. How a moo sounds. Why "go" is an appropriate verb in this instance.

At this level, information is so voluminous, that you can only charge for it in bulk. In that way, all books are like newspapers -- you bundle in important parts with the unimportant parts, without knowing exactly what any given buyer deems "important." You hope people will pay to get the parts that are important to them.

Information is also extremely context-sensitive. Noise to one person is life-saving info to another one. Depends on whether you stand next to a train track, or on it. Which one would pay to hear that whistle?

Don't have a point today. Just thinking.

Bing is worthless.

Microsoft is soft-launching its improved search engine, Bing.com.

I'm happy to say that my name was the second thing I entered to test it out, proving that I am not entirely self-absorbed (but still mostly).

Here's the horrible news. I am neither the top return, nor the dominant presence in Bing search returns. The other couple of internet-active dudes around the U.S. with my name have significantly higher placement.

Google has it right. I generally turn up as the top 4 or 5 entries in Google, based on geek cred. Eponymous pretenders rank farther down.

WTF Microsoft? Things just haven't been the same since Bill left.


Update: Aad't Hart agrees with me.

Tiny Art Director

Just a quick pointer today. Tiny Art Director is is blog site where an illustrator takes art direction from his young daughter. She tells him what to draw, then critiques it when he's done. Funny, cute, petulant, drawings of dinosaurs... what's not to like?

He's got a book coming out too, so add that to your amazon list, whydontcha.

Hijinx: I didn't know I thought that fast

I'm going to a game convention next month. Yesterday the organizer asked me to run Hijinx, the d20 mini-game of cartoon bands I wrote approximately one thousand years ago for Polyhedron magazine.

When the game came out in 2003, it met an audience brimming with indifference. A few people loved the humor and the gall of the idea. A few people hated it, and called it wasted space. But mostly nada.

It was my favorite thing I wrote that year though. I'm still grateful to the editor, Erik, who took the big goofy gamble with me, and Kyle, the art director, who made it look pretty good.

But when Kevin asked me to run it yesterday, I froze for a few minutes. Could I even do that? My embarrassing (but in retrospect, obvious) confession is that I never even playtested the damn thing. I wrote 20,000 words on inspiration and deep rules knowledge. Is it... is it even playable? Do I know what to do with Quickenstein's monster? Would I get stagefright? Sometimes I get stagefright!

A few hours later, without any conscious effort, I had a setup, a villain, a plot outline, and a crazy topicality which, I daresay, would make a fantastic new millennium episode of Josie and the Pussycats. Just like that. Inspiration and rules knowledge just showed up again.

So I said yes. Now I have to reread the rules and figure out if this thing is playable in the next two weeks. Loving my goofy ideas helps a lot though.

Frederator cartoons: RHOMBUS!

Seems like a long time ago when my friend, Scott, sent me a link to a cartoon short that circumscribes a 12-year-old boy's mindset so thoroughly, that one knows, intuitively, that only an extraordinary man-child could have created such a thing.

The thing is Adventure Time. I found out today that Adventure Time will become a regular series on Cartoon Network later this year (or early next year).

Faltering laurels I strain to frame around Adventure Time will be inadequate. You just need to see it. Block out the next 7 or 8 minutes for this -- minutes which will surely be among the best of your day.

Since you've got 6 or 7 minutes left on your break, also watch The Bravest Warriors by the same man-child:

Uke cuties on YouTube

Danielle Ate the Sandwich is a cute ukelele player I discovered last year and then forgot about and then re-discovered today.

Below is a video where she covers Hall & Oates's Rich Girl, with a Scrubs breakdown in the middle. It's the kind of enjoyable that slips a smile over your mouthhole, like a reverse pickpocket.

Normally, I am of the opinion that God put YouTube commenters on Earth so that true illiterates have someone to look down on. For this particular video however, NESMonster has fully articulated my feelings by saying, "I HAVE SIX CRUSHES."*

Her original songs are funny and sweet and sad and once I listen to one, it's hard not to listen to more. Just in case you're like me that way, her MySpace site has a whole bunch you can listen to. There's also links to buy her music if you're inclined. I might be inclined.

However, I think I prefer the videos because you can watch her mug for the camera and wear costumes. You also see the backdrop of her trashy, lo-fi apartment. It seems to be an intentional choice, almost an aesthetic. It invites you to imagine things about her life, encourages you to think you're friends.

After watching a couple of Danielle's videos, and thinking you're some kind of Internet pals, you notice there's a well of young ukelele players all in each other's business. They're all handsome and/or pretty, and have senses of humor and are at least decent musicians. And they all seem to know each other, like there's a circle of young, quirky friends having a video hootenanny right in front of you.

It makes me want to join them. It makes me wish I'd decided to be a musician instead of a writer. It makes me want to MAKE.

Here's another one in case you're not going to click through and experience for yourself what I'm describing.

*Because my wife will read this and leave some cryptic comment, let me take this moment to assure her that all six crushes are on her and her alone.

D&D TV?

Hasbro teams up with the Discovery Channel to have its own TV network.

The consumer protector in me cringes at the thought of having a toy and game company broadcasting from its own media outlet. (I'm less bothered about separation of church and state than I am separation of editorial and advertisement in modern life.)

But everything else in me thinks this is such. a great. idea.

I hope it works!

Lucidity is becoming optional

Oh my gosh, have I listened to The Flaming Lips cover of Borderline a lot today. Like, seriously, if I weren't already me, I would have made me turn that off. I watched the video about three times, and then put it in the background while I wrote, and then tabbed back to hit play again every time it stopped.

After about 10 of those, it was time to download it. I just set it on "Repeat One" in iTunes, and it played and played and played. Now, about 10 hours later, I'm singing the Madonna version in my head. What the hell?

My wife is gone for the weekend, and of course I miss her, except that I don't miss her at all because I love having the house to myself. I can retreat so far into my cave that daylight becomes an ironic metaphor that you use to mock people who make the mistake of showing emotion.

Except that there's still 2 dogs I have to pay attention to, because if I don't they poop in the house and it stinks and I have to clean it up. That's when I really miss my wife.

If there's one thing I don't recommend it's getting your hand stuck in a vise. If there's another thing, well you and I both know, there's a lot of things I don't recommend.

I never even say, "Don't do anything I wouldn't do," because that means your only allowable actions are sitting in the half-dark and reading the Internet for 36 hours straight.

Speaking of which, I can't recommend that either, because I've been up for about 36 hours straight now, and you start making choices like listening to The Flaming Lips for about 4 hours in a row, and reading 50 pages of a Jack Handey book, and then leaving a rambling blog post.

Here's the video, if you want to watch it 9 or 1o times too:

The flaming lips Borderline