Movies April 2011

The A-Team (2010)

Good enough at the outset, but problems set in like an evening mist. Ok, so Mr. T having a nonviolence epiphany in jail, this is a nice twist. I don't think any of us expected a real attempt at character arcs. But by the end of the move his arc is... a repudiation of nonviolence? An embrace of killing as a problem solver? Also, at the climax of the movie, Face is doing the planning and Hannibal is doing the lying. Wha wha what? Did some pages get mixed up?

The villains were fantastic though. The theatrical CIA agent and his inept stooges along with the sociopathically professional security contractor were comedy gold -- separately, but especially together in the car. We watched that scene twice.

Date Night

I'm trying to put my finger on what's off about this movie, and I think the problem is a slapdash plot obscured and illuminated (in the medieval monkish sense) by excellent comedians and quality production values. Not good enough to recommend, but not bad enough to hate. You make the call, sports fan.

Movies March 2011

The Wire, Season 1, Disc 3

I like the Wire, but I don't like-like the Wire like everyone else seems to.

Dogs Decoded: Nova

Part of an ongoing experiment where we try to figure out what our dogs are thinking.

Sukiyaki Western Django

Genres collide! Unsatisfyingly!

Futurama, Season 5

Freakonomics

Based on the book of the same name.

Man, Woman, and the Wall

This movie is so Japanese.

The Princess Bride

We watched this, and then watched it again with William Goldman's commentary on. Not too revealing, but now I can say I did it. The dialogue still sparkles in this movie. I've occasionally thought as I watched this movie, that I don't think it could be successfully remade. It's not a just-perfect movie, but the chemistry and joy in its inception and production are non-reproducible. In the commentary, it was flattering to get William Goldman's validation, saying roughly the same thing.

2012

About as dumb as we thought it would be. Yep, about that dumb.

Arrested Development, Season 3

I never watched the whole 3rd season in order, so I decided to do that. Still funny, but the humor was starting to wear thin. As long as I'm heretical about people's favorite shows, I'll say that maybe it's just as well that this show ended when it did. Now it will always be James Dean, and never fat Elvis.

Soul Eater, series 1

Netflix just added a mess of anime, and I've been sampling. So far, this is the only one that's made it past the first episode for me. The story is standard, but the design sense is odd, and there's a pretty readable pattern in the way manga/anime builds stories that I'm trying to internalize. Anyway, it's fun, and the characters seem one-dimensional at first, but the story starts to builds depth into them as it goes.

Being asked for advice

More and more often these days, people come to me for advice, on issues of money management, relationships, and sundry topics. I try to meet these queries with straight face and sober application of experience. But in shallow submergence is an urge to shrug and crane my head looking for someone else with answers.

I'm happy to report that the urge stays submerged. This mastery of the WTF reflex is one of several signs of maturity I've been manifesting in the last year or so.

As a direct result, somewhere in the last 24 months or so, people have started to see me as a guy who knows where his towel is. I can think of three major things that account for this:

1. I got married, and did a good job of it. This makes it seem as though you know something.
2. The askers are generally younger, and did not know me in the near-past when I was more overtly lost and desperate.
3. I am actually sort of getting my shit together.

It's novel to grow up and fill in.

Movies February 2011

Pixar Short Films: Vol. 1

That was fun.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Yet another Terry Jones film that looks wonderful, and has some smashing ideas, and still seems like someone left out a couple pages of crucial exposition before the end sputters in. The guy is so consistent, I gotta think he's doing it on purpose. But Why? WHY?

Cartoon Noir

I love animation, but I guess I have to make an exception for this.

I Am A Sex Addict

The title. The title pulled me into this one when I was sick at home and cruising Netflix one day. It's an autobiographical documentary about a guy who finds out he has a sex addiction. It's interesting to notice where he was embarrassingly self-revelatory, and where he glossed.

Superman/Shazam!: The Return of Black Adam

A misnamed series of four DC universe shorts featuring Superman and Shazam, the Spectre, Green Arrow, and Jonah Hex respectively. Uniformly excellent. In the first one particularly, the creators seem to revel in their freedom from violence censorship that colored most of Warner Brothers' DC animation. I have never seen such loving attention in animation paid to punches -- gut punches, kidney punches, slow-motion punches to the face detailing the spit that flies out of a mouth.

Batman: Under the Red Hood

Remember that story from the comics about Jason Todd coming back from the dead to bedevil Batman? This is that in moving picture form.

Exit Through the Gift Shop

I like street art already, and so I was surprised, because this wasn't that. It was about a guy who knows street artists. A watchable, enjoyable documentary.

Ip Man

A high quality, but not life-changing martial arts movie.

Die Hard

This movie is underappreciated. Not that people don't like it, just not as much as they should. I don't recall watching another action movie with so many twists and visual bits and gags executed so deftly. I want to study the script for this flick. So much to learn.

Movies January 2011

Work and rampant volunteerism took all my giveadamn for the last quarter of 2010, so no formal record of movie watching was kept. I probably watched 900 films a month during that period. No one will ever know now.

But this month, I'm trying again!

The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader

Toy Story 3

Hercules Unchained (MST3K)
These things are less fun watching alone.

The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
Good stuff.

Jab We Met
M and I love it when the local access channel shows clips from Bollywood musicals as music videos. Streets of people dancing, and a guy or a girl singing about chaste love, while moving in a way that is the entire opposite of chastity. delightful! So we looked on Netflix for Bollywood musicals and found this one. Yay!

Improved bewilderment

A consistent feature of my life up to now has been a continual sense of bewilderment. That there is constantly, constantly more going on than I apprehend, or am even able to. This must say something important and dismal about my psyche.

While driving around at work the other day, considering what has changed, what I've gained in my 39 years, I realized I might have learned to be bewildered better. Not bewildered less, just better at thriving in that environment, like a microorganism you didn't know could live in a scalding geothermal vent. More grace in the flailing, less lost in the confusion.

I feel like the eventual goal is zero confusion. For now, I'm happy with what I've got.

Now we are 39

I've long hated the ambush of the passage of time. In high school, I tried to memorize my class schedule every year, period, subject, and teacher, so I would have a solid framework for reference. I wanted nothing to hang loosely in memory, to surprise or escape attention.

I don't think I retained it fully past college, but even in my early 20s, I would occasionally give it another turn, just to try to rebuild the frame. I haven't tried it in a while. Wonder if I can still pull it up?

Period	Subject	Teacher
1	Latin	??
2	P.E.	Brown
3	Band	Hood/Webb
4	English	Pearson
5	Earth Science	Coe
6	Geometry	Martin

Freshman year is enough to prove a point, I think. Not bad for a few minutes of thought and a quick refresher on HTML tables.
This is relevant because I recently turned 39. And it reminded me of when I turned 29.

At 29, I was wary of letting 30 sneak up on me. I refused to hit that milestone and reel from unexpected realization. So I spent the entire year pretending I was 30. I practiced with thoughts of deferred ambition and mortality.

It worked flawlessly. One year later, I passed the three-decade mark brow unfurrowed by existential consequence.

I was proud of my foresight and small success. Some time later though, it occurred to me that the price for my practice was a year of my life. Essentially, I had two 30s and no 29s -- I hadn't bothered to remember my class schedule for the last year of my 20s.
This is relevant because, as you may recall, I recently turned 39. And this time I've decided to let my 9er be a 9er. A time to look back and forward, but reside only in the time I have.

I am loathe to announce projects here, because most of them never happen. Nonetheless, the limb I shimmy onto now is a project for the remainder of my fast-vanishing 30s: reflection, anticipation, and appreciation for where I am. And as well as I am able, I'll post it here at QT.

It is, as I often say these days, a good time to be me. I hope to be able to talk about why that's true.

Blogaday: A break with tradition

Not committing to my usual tradition of Blogaday this year onaccounta all the stuff I gots to do. I do intend to try to post more often in November than I have in other months of this year though. 

I have tried to increase postings year-over-year here, but 2010 will kill that trend. A little sad about that, but I'm sure valuable lessons will be learned from this, whatever those are.

Blue Like Jazz movie: the hail mary works

A few months ago, I posted about Steve Taylor doing a Blue Like Jazz movie. Gonna do some sudden follow-up on this.

Today, while procrastinating on a freelance gig, I found this article at the Atlantic, Blue Like Jazz: The Quest to Get Christians to Laugh at Themselves. The article compares the Evangelical Christian community's pugilistically earnest film attempts with Jewish and Catholic films, and portrayals in said films. So, ok, interesting.

It also tipped me off to the late breaking news on the Blue Like Jazz movie. I don't really have the time to build this up like this story deserves, but it's a good story, so I'll just cut and paste from the Atlantic article:

After a year of fundraising, Miller—who's written a total of five Christian-themed books and is part of an Obama task force on absentee fathers—was still $125,000 short. He decided to give up. Last month, he wrote a post on his blog declaring the project dead. Blue Like Jazz would not be made into a movie.

But it didn't stay dead for long. Two 24-year-old Miller fans launched a page on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to solicit donations, and within a week and a half, they'd raised enough money to make the movie. Miller and his supporters then set a new fundraising goal: $200,642, so the film would beat wannabe Facebook-killer Diaspora as the highest-grossing project in the history of Kickstarter. Late this week, with just three days to go before fundraising ends and filming begins, the movie surpassed this milestone—as of Friday morning, backers had given a total of more than $203,000.

Holy shit. $200k isn't a huge number in movie-making terms, but the solid gold nugget in the middle of this interesting bit comes later in the article:

The movie's inability to fit into a pre-existing category helps explain why Miller and his collaborators had so much trouble coming up with the money to make the film. "You're sort of pissing off both sides," Miller says. "Hollywood hates it because we don't have our head up our ass, and the church hates it because we don't have our head up our ass."

200k+ worth of Christian-owned dollars said they're tired of movies made by people with heads in asses. That's news, friend. The real test will be how many Christian-owned dollars show up at the theater/DVD outlet. But this is a fine score for a pre-test.

Reminds me that there's an audience for my projects too.

There's one day left to donate at this point. You can still get in on the fun. Only $3000 gets you dinner with Steve Taylor and Don Miller. As a lifelong cheapass, I'd fork out that money if I had it.

Also, just go visit Don Miller's blog because there's some interesting stuff there.

Efficiency is inefficient

If you're going to be efficient about efficiency, you need to be willing to be inefficient about it.

The readiest, most efficient people you know are the ones who live it, efficient at all times, in the smallest things, even when it comes to things that no one but that person will see or interact with. Organizing spice racks and watch collections and papers in stacks and such.

These small organization efforts are secretly, quietly done from force of habit, or, (more gently) for the pleasure of order. They're not done for any serious attempt at precontemplated efficiency gains. And these small efforts take an extraordinary amount of time.

The payoff for putting that much effort into practicing efficiency is that you're ready to organize larger things at any time, appearing very efficient in front of other people. But so much is spent being efficient in matters that don't really matter. There's a diminishing returns, a Planck's Constant of efficiency, below which, any more efficiency actually becomes less efficient.

But efficient people do it anyway.

P.S. This principle also works to anything else you want to be good at.