San Francisco Holiday

Is it just me or is Rex Reed really angry about something?
Quote:

"With so many amateurs who run what’s left of the defunct studios making bad movies that pander to an easy-to-satisfy youth market, and with so many bogus producers who used to be grocery baggers at the A&P always miraculously raising the money to make more, one thing is certain: No matter how rotten the movie is that you just suffered through, there’s another one on its way that is 10 times worse.

And so I § Huckabees may not be the worst movie ever made, depending on how you feel about such hollow, juvenile and superficial trash as Brewster McCloud, Hudson Hawk, Punch-Drunk Love, Mulholland Drive, The Royal Tenenbaums, Lost Highway, Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Rob Zombie’s House of 1000 Corpses and … well, as they said in Hollywood during the McCarthy witch hunts, the list goes on."

Wow.

So this is crystal country

This is Wong Kar-Wai. If you like movies you should watch movies by Wong Kar-Wai, assuming that you haven't. I'd start with In the Mood for Love, his most recent, but whatever. Wong Kar-Wai's movies are like painted feelings.

My home is the sea

This article in the New York Times magazine, is the worst article I've read in a long while. I don't know too much about statistical analysis. But I've taken basic logic and, while I won't pretend to catch every misleading use of a statistic, quite a number were obvious to me. I find the choice of title particularly humorous... perhaps an irate editor selected it, rather than the author? (Correct if I'm wrong -- and I'm not -- but wasn't "How I learned to love the bomb" a bit ironic?) The accompanying photo by Masood Kamandy's pretty nice, though. My selection for a choice paragraph:

"The autonomists have been losing the public-relations war, but they're trying to fight back. O'Toole has founded the American Dream Coalition to do battle with what he calls the ''congestion coalition,'' his term for opponents of new roads. The autonomists collect stories of smart-growth problems, especially from Portland, Ore., which became planners' poster city by building light-rail lines, eschewing highways and severely restricting suburban development. But nearly 90 percent of its commuters still drive, and highway congestion increased in Portland more than any other American city in the 15 years after the first light-rail line opened. Meanwhile, housing prices rose sharply, making Portland one of the less-affordable cities for home buyers."

I'll leave it up to you to figure out why that might be and how that might contradict the argument of paragraph. (Caveat: I certainly agree that there is value in adding HOT lanes or converting current lanes into HOT lanes.) In not-entirely-unrelated news, the price of oil busted $50 a barrel for the first time.

3 Inch Horses, Two Faced Monsters

I would like to take this moment to provide a public service announcement. Three of the most vital resources on the internet are the Wikipedia, Allmusic, and IMDB. If you do not currently use these things in your daily life, you are making a mistake. Please reconsider this mistake. Wikipedia is probably the most interesting of the three, even though it is not nearly as complete. Perhaps I will contribute to the Wikipedia once I figure out how to do so.

At home on a boat its a fish trap

Saw a couple of movies lately. The best was Goodbye Lenin. The worst was Once a Thief (although it is by John Woo, it is not to be confused with John Woo's Once a Thief, which is not directed by John Woo).

Once a Thief wouldn't have been that terrible if it weren't for the incredibly corny synthesizer music that dominated the movie, which was acentuated by Woo's tendency to slow down the action and throw in romantic scenes between the little love triangle that Jess and I first thought was incestuous, then realized that the two brothers and sister were not biologically related -- they had just grown up together, raised by the same 'father'. The romance scenes were thus infused with a tender, touching feeling that I tried to extend to Jess by making out with her, but she just laughed. I was so hurt, but I was able to console myself by laughing at the music and watching Chow Yun Fat totally kill like a hundred guys while in a wheelchair, even though he could walk, he just confined himself to a wheelchair to prove how totally bad and kill-awesome he is. If you're going to watch this movie, don't permit yourself to watch anything but the final fight scene, where Chow Yun Fat totally kills like a hundred guys while in a wheelchair and then gets up out of the wheelchair and surprises this guy and then totally kills like another hundred guys. With one pistol. Chow Yun Fat is so tough he never runs out of bullets or has to reload.

By way of extreme contrast, Goodbye Lenin is a funny and affecting movie. Some dills from the New York Times or Boston Globe or some other little league outfits criticized it as being an apology for communism, but that's not how it really goes down. I wouldn't want to reveal anything about the plot, because I enjoyed it that much, but its well-shot (always makes a difference to me) and well-soundtracked (in stark contrast to Once a Thief), on top of being crowd-pleasingly excellent in quality of humor and acting. This Daniel Bruhl kid can act. He reminds me of Jake Gyllenhaal, but more subtle. Anyways, I've gotten to where I watch movies for the quality of images as much as for the plot. I suppose I think that plot is better expressed in other ways, such as writing, while film presents some sort of unique opportunity to take a bare-bones plot and infuse it with both the power of live drama and the beauty of photographic representation. I like to emphasize photographic representation. Just look at the picture and see if you don't want to watch it.

Centre for Holy Wars

I was finally able to rent the Ali G show last night, fulfilling a month-long quest. Which made me very interested in reading this article in Slate, about how he manages to fool famous people into giving him interviews.

Run Into Flowers

Jess and I have the most redneck neighbors in the world. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't hold that against them. In fact, I rather enjoy having them for neighbors, despite the way that they only vacuum after ten at night. For a while, I thought that their son (who is probably a sophmore or junior in high school) was really annoying because he listens to music (bad techno, there's this one song he especially likes to play the first forty-five seconds of, it goes like this: thump thump, thump, thump thump, thump, thumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthumpthump) way too loud. But then I realized that he's not trying to be annoying, he's just deaf. I know this because I heard him using Instant Messenger through the wall. Loud. Like it was my own computer.

The great thing about these neighbors is that they are an oasis of redneckiness in the midst of the great pool of John Kerry-loving college students and professors that is Hill Street and Cobbham. There are a bunch of Kerry-Edwards stickers in our apartment's parking lot. One person has a sticker that says "Fight Primetime, Read A Book." Another neighbor went out the other day with a shirt that said "Vote with your head up your ass. Vote Republican." I didn't get to see the front. Personally, I like living in the pool of liberals; I find it refreshing after living on Lookout for three and half years -- but there are times when I need a good George W Bush 2004 sticker, and our neighbors are there for me when its that time.

As photographic proof of how extremely redneck these neighbors are, I present to you the impossible made possible: Despite not having a lawn, they still managed to park their car on the lawn.

Breakfast with Blockhead

I can't bring myself to delete spam when its quoting Futurama.

0078h

Sometimes, it really is that simple.