Movies January 2009

Inglourious Basterds
This movie defies my normal liked/didn't like dichotomy. I liked parts of it... Brad Pitt is a fun actor who also got the show-stealing part. But like all Quentin Tarantino movies, the gore seemed gratuitous. The movie would have been less shocking, less visceral without it, but I guess I'm not the dude who thinks that's a bad thing.

The fairy-tale bit was subtle. When I would later think about some over-the-top aspect of it, I would remember its "Once Upon a Time" beginning, which helped contextualize things. Overall, this was a well-executed flick, accompanied by great writing and fine acting.

Avatar (3D)
After hearing the rapturous stories of the wonders of Avatar in 3D, M and I decided to give it another chance. She liked it a little more this time, but I liked it even less, because it wasn't a good enough story to hold my interest a second time. I got bored and fidgety at one point, went to the bathroom mid-movie, which is practically against my religion. It's an OK movie -- it's just not a great movie. Like Titanic, people have swooned and thrown money at it. Unlike Titanic, I don't understand the furor from primary sources, not just from a disinterested distance.

Samurai Champloo, disc 5
OK, taking breaks between SC discs loses the flow for me. I'm watching them in a row from here.

Samurai Champloo, disc 6
Only 3 episodes? Aw man. I really like this series.

Samurai Champloo, disc 7
Oh, endings. How often you are not what we wished. I secretly wanted this to end like the samurai revenge flick this promised to be, i.e., dead principals like a Shakespeare tragedy. Considering how smart and mature some of the individual stories were, I thought it might happen! But it didn't happen. I really enjoyed the series overall though, and would happily watch it again some time.

Gilmore girls, season 7, disc 6
Skipped a couple of intermediate season 7 discs, because I didn't like the way the season was going. Jumped back in for the last two episodes of the series. It was ok.

30 Rock, season 3, disc 1
Still pretty funny!

King Corn
I've read my Michael Pollen; I've done the homework. This documentary was fair and clean. There is just nothing sensible about American corn growing any more. Everyone involved knows it, but no one wants to be the bad guy and put the brakes on.

I'm complicit. I love cheap food too. This is what we've done for ourselves, and you have to admit, cheap food is pretty awesome. I'm glad to live in a place and time where I get the benefit of astonishingly inexpensive food. But what good is cheap food that is also nutritionally vacuous?

I used to wonder what thing we didn't see coming would kill my generation. Previous generations smoked or ingested lead. It seemed safe enough until we learned more, and found out those things had a hidden awful side.

I don't wonder any more. Because now I know it's high fructose corn syrup. It kills us early, and it will still be 10 to 20 years before that shit is properly outlawed. And it's in so many things you buy at the grocery store, that it's bloody hard to escape.

And since we've ceded a lot of our food knowledge to giant agribusiness corporations, we can't fend for ourselves as well as we used to. And good food is expensive. Problems. Problems.

The 40 Year Old Virgin
Especially after watching the DVD extras, I have to wonder: Just how much of this movie was scripted? Because it seemed like there was a whole lot of improv.

Experience is the best torture.

No! Teacher! I meant to say teacher!

Reading: my shame exposed

Today, as I made another stab at organizing my office, I rounded up several books from the atop the computer and in cardboard boxes and two from a pillowcase (worst night's sleep ever). Then then I did a bad thing to a book-in-progress: I put them on bookshelves.

Putting unfinished books on a shelf is naked capitulation. On a shelf, it's camouflaged with all the other ostensibly read books, to be admired en masse, but not individually reconsidered.

Now that I track my book consumption on Goodreads, the proof is even more damning. I finish 5 or 6 books a year (not counting graphic novels). That's all. I stopped tracking in-process books on GR because they sit in stasis so long. But I purchase more books in a year than I read.

Today's most glaring surrender was New Ideas From Dead Economists. I received the book for Christmas two years ago. Every few months I would read the next chapter, having largely forgotten the contents of previous chapters. I've liked what I read, and now I even know what Malthusianism is, why it keeps coming up, and why people use it as a derogatory term. That's come in handy!

But the book ultimately failed to penetrate the atmosphere, and has now settled into far orbit on the shelf, where I'll probably only ever look at it again through a telescope.

This week, I started a strange new enterprise, reading The Tower of the Elephant by Robert E. Howard via Project Gutenberg. I've read very little so far, but I wonder how having a browser window open will fare compared to books piled up. I wonder.

Update: Finally started and finished in one sitting on Feb 3.

Pink Noise

I found SimplyNoise, a site that plays and allows you to download white noise, pink noise, and red/brown noise.

As a result, I also discovered the Wikipedia page for colors of noise, a concept of which I was not even aware, so hooray for learning.

I've been listening to white, pink, and red/brown noise all day, and I've concluded that I'm not a dude who benefits from having these background noises. I can feel my brain pick up speed after I turn the noise off, like turning off the AC in your car--you didn't even know it was a drag it isn't anymore.

But I understand other people are really helped by various colors of noise, so I'm glad they exist!

Movies December 2009

Gilmore Girls, season 7, disc 1
We had heard that this final season of GG takes a quality nosedive due to a lack of Palladinos. This wasn't bad, but it was missing something that I haven't homed in on.

I Am Legend
I had read the meh reviews, but I like sci-fi apocalypse, and Will Smith can be entertaining, and what the hell. On viewing, both M and I agree, its deeply stupid parts mar the whole. Not terrible, but not an experience for willful repetition.

Gilmore Girls, season 7, disc 2
This is where the show gets the worst of all fates... mediocre. Not bad, just miserably average.

Samurai Champloo, disc 4
Good, but Mugen's background story was confusing.

G.I. Joe Resolute
I watched this about three times, studying it. It was built for the Web, in segments, meaning that in addition to telling one large coherent story, it had to tell 7 or 8 coherent miniature stories within that had their own matryoshka doll structure and cliffhangers. The initial setup is so fast and choppy you really don't know what's happening the first time you watch it, but the rest of it flows well enough. It makes perfect sense that they got a comic book writer to do this (Warren Ellis). He's already wired to do this.

The anime stylings were gorgeous, and from the extras I learned a new term for this kind of IP: "military fantasy." Well done, lads!

Sherlock Holmes
Much better than I thought it would be! It was more of a reverse caper movie than a mystery, but man, mysteries are dang hard to do well in film. This was just fine. I like a kinetic self-absorbed genius Sherlock Holmes. And I like most things Guy Richie does. So not only did I not mind the liberties taken, I enjoyed them.

Avatar
Here's my tip from my Lucasfilm days: When advanced press spends a lot of time talking about the technical wizardry behind a movie, it's probably because that's the movie's strong suit. M hated this movie so hard, but I thought it was ok, except that every single thing that happened was as predictable as gravity. There were some fun comparison to Aliens--particularly matching Carter Burke up with Parker Selfridge.

Eh? Separated at birth? Eh? Eh?

John Mackey on corporations as do-gooders

Part 54 zillion in a series of musings about capitaltruism, an excerpt from a New Yorker article about John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods:

[Mackey] "...This is a paradigm that has polarized our country and led to bad thinking. It’s holding the nation’s progress back. It’s as if there were a wall. And on one side of the wall is this belief that not-for-profits and government exist for public service, and that they’re fundamentally altruistic, that they have a deeper purpose, and they’re doing good in the world, and they have pure motives. On the other side of the wall are corporations. And they’re just selfish and greedy. They have no purpose other than to make money. They’re a bunch of psychopaths. And I’d like to tear that wall down. Human beings are obviously self-interested. We do look after ourselves, but we’re capable of love, empathy, and compassion, and I don’t see that business is any different.”

He went on, “We’re trying to do good. And we’re trying to make money. The more money we make, the more good we can do.” By this, he had in mind not the traditional philanthropic argument that more money earned equals more to give away but, rather, that a good company—that is, his company—which sells good things and treats its employees, shareholders, customers, and suppliers well, can spread goodness simply by thriving.

This was a variation on what he calls “conscious capitalism,” which some people, smelling an oxymoron, or worse, snicker at. His idea is that business should have a higher purpose—that, just as doctors heal and teachers educate, businesspeople should be after something besides money. It may be an easier argument for a grocer to make; he feeds people, and if he feeds them properly he heals and educates them, too. But it borders on humbug when you apply it to, say, Wall Street. Consciousness, as it relates to capitalism, is in the eyes not so much of the beholder as of the capitalist.

via Kottke.
Read the whole article at your leisure.

Yuletide Existentialism

I've just finished the checklist, and now I'm certain that we have every physical object we need in this household. Everything necessary for a full and healthy life is contained in this building. We also have many of the things we want and enjoy on top of that.

Now what?

If I can't answer that question, what was I collecting shit for in the first place? Why have a thing if you have no purpose for the thing?

Why does everyone else roll their eyes when I start talking like this? Am I missing something obvious? I'm willing to be the dumbass if someone will just explain it to me slowly.

I don't want to go all Charlie Brown Christmas Special here, but if it's about Jesus, then where the fuck is Jesus? I didn't see a lot of him on December 25. I saw a bunch of people open boxes of crap they didn't need or even want all that badly and act delighted about it. And I participated. And I felt dirty about it.

I'm a pretty miserable Jesus follower. But it's funny that I seldom feel like a miserable Jesus follower when I really am being miserable at it.

I'm done with this mealy-mouthed Christmas shit. I always feel a little sick and disconnected going into Christmas, and I'm not doing that any more. I'm not going to play along next year. I don't know what I'm going to do, and I hope I don't alienate my wife in the process, but I don't have the stomach for make-nice any more.

Trust in the Lord

I am told that God loves us, and rescues us from our sins and enemies.

But God also leaves us to suffer the consequences of our insistent foolishness, and to suffer other people's foolish consequences as well.

This is one reason why I don't trust God. Even when I ask him to save me, he might not. How can I trust that?

Consignment

Every once in a while, someone sees something you got and wants to talk to you about combining your thing with their thing. Maybe they want to hire you, or perform with you. In college, the student ministries director thought I'd be perfect to preach in Guam for a summer.

These propositions are a little magical. They mean someone looked at you and saw merit and wanted to risk a little something on you.*

Historically, I stumble all over these offers. I get self-conscious and either back away thinking I can't live up to it (cf. Guam) or freeze up when called to produce (cf. lots of other things).

But this year, I told myself the next time one of these offers came I would grab it with both hands.

At Art Shop this year, a consignment shop owner, Square Peg Artery near Rittenhouse Square, was cruising the aisles looking for talent. We talked, we traded business cards, and she followed up.

It's not a big opportunity, but it's big enough to start with. I'm learning marketing with my bare hands, and this is another round of class. Get the product out there. Make money if you can, lose it if you must, but get eyeballs on your goods.

I'll try real hard not to fumble this one. And if I do, I damn well mean to learn something from it.

The picture, by the way, is of a monster available at the Artery. Swing by their store at 108 S. 20th St and take a look around while you're out xmas shopping.


*Precluding scammers and the deluded. Those types are usually easy to spot if you're doing due diligence. I'm talking about the genuine article here.

Your New Flying Car

This is not your new flying car, the post title is totally misleading, I don't know who wrote that.

But it strikes me as an eminently more doable flying car than the plane-like things people try to pass off as flying cars. Anything that requires you to think about a mile ahead will not become mass market. The ramifications of momentary inattention are too dire.

But something sort of helicoptery, I could see that for taxis and getting around Rio de Janeiro and such.