Minimalism

Simple ratings for simple minds, or: Why the hell do I have such an enormous backlog?

Don’t waste your time

Rating: €: Black Hole (just plain awful all around), Dead Zone (how can Cronenberg and Walken create such crap?) Flight of the Navigator (KILL ME NOW!), The Frighteners (not silly, not funny, not scary – a mess), Innerspace (the less said the better), La Luna (art or poo?).

Don’t bother, don’t run away either

Rating: € €: Big Fish (pret-taah pic-taahs but where’s the beef?), Get Carter (the 1971 version; grim but a bit too sparse), Good bye, Lenin! (overhyped?), Last Samurai (predictable), Nousukausi (without Summanen they’d have nothing), Play It Again, Sam (too theatrical for a Woody piece), Something’s Gotta Give (Keaton and Nicholson are good but nothing else is), Standing In The Shadows Of Motown (gorgeous music, shame about the documentary), Stand By Me (cf. Last Samurai), Surplus (interesting experiment but nothing more).

Positively recommended

Rating: € € €: Los Amantes del Círculo Polar (a nice mix of fantasy and romance), Arsenic and Old Lace (superb first act), The Big One (Moore’s funny as always), The Eye (plenty of chilly moments), Microcosmos (macro cinematography like never before) Paris, Texas (weirdly unnerving), Rakkaudella, Maire (what a great character study!), School of Rock (predictable but enjoyable), Serpico (quality 70’s police stuff), Village of the Damned (quite a charming oldie scary pic), Wild Bunch (slo-mo blood), Zatôichi (tapdancing and samurais mix surprisingly well after all).

Must see

Rating: € € € €: Aleksis Kiven elämä (talk about rewriting history), Calendar Girls (quite perfect within its genre except for a small slump in the 3rd act), Crumb (how could you not make an interesting documentary when your subject is Robert Crumb himself?), Elephant (chilling), Irreversible (horrible), Jackie Brown (Grier: good, Forster: good, de Niro: his best role since ’95?), Kill Bill vol 1 (better than volume 2…), Kill Bill vol 2 (…still excellent), Koyaanisqatsi (what rhythm, what images, what music!) En kärlekshistoria (I suppose we all agree Roy Andersson is a cinematic genius?), Love Liza (Phil Seymour never fails), Pulp Fiction (do I need to explain this), Reservoir Dogs (weaker than PF, tho’), Shaolin Soccer (never get tired of this), Spellbound (excellent documentary), Les Triplettes de Belleville (best animated feature 2003?), 21 Grams (even better than Amores Perros).

Movies seen thus far this year: 89.

An Ode to Old Computers

Hey Hey 16k

Word 196: Gobbledygook

it first opened, protesters treated Python’s Gospel gobbledygook much like Martin Scorsese’s blistering The Last Temptation of Christ.

gobbledygook (n) : incomprehensible or pompous jargon of specialists – source: Popmatters’ Life of Brian review

Word 195: Multifarious

While the unorthodox conclusion to Wang’s investigative mystery both points to a fundamental difference between Western and Chinese thinking and suggests the crucial importance of what is absent (i.e. China itself, as the shots of water at the film’s end imply), the prime point of interest of Chan is Missing is not the conclusion to the search but the multifarious clues unearthed during the search itself.

multifarious (adj) : having many aspects [syn: many-sided, multifaceted] – source: Stranger than Paradise, p. 113

Word 194: Druthers

I don’t wanna be a journalist. I mean, my hat is off to the guys who go out there and do it every day under a deadline. They’re some amazing people, and I’ve come to be close friends with some of them, especially computer industry journalists – I don’t really know that many straight journalists. But given my druthers, this is good.

druthers (n) : the right or chance to choose [syn: preference] – source: Under Heavy Weather: An Interview with Bruce Sterling

Good things

Come to those who wait, they say. This time they were right: My ex-boss phoned me today and offered me a nine-week stint at KSU. I was a bit dozy but agreed straight away, as this means I need not worry about studying to financially support myself.

Sometimes things just work out. Lovely, innit?

Sleepy heads

”Dozing”

In less than 40 000 words

Cunt: A Cultural History

Geek humor

From Wired News:

If you take a close look at the form Google filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the exact value of its planned offering is $2,718,281,828 dollars, which some would immediately recognize as the mathematical constant e. E, for those not blessed with a Ph.D. and a job at Google, is Euler’s number, which is used as the base for natural logarithms.

A nerd is a nerd is a nerd.

So many pages, so little time

There seems to be no shortage of digital cornucopias. Here’s another one: Making of America, a collection of American magazines from the latter half of the 19th century. They’ve got Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American, and stuff I’ve never heard of (which isn’t that suprising).

The decision has been made: I’m going to download all this, get an IV drip, and spend the rest of my days digging through the volumes upon volumes of free text the ’Net has to offer.