Month: November 2001 (Page 3 of 5)

Another in an endless series of pop-culture confessions: I went out yesterday and purchased Star Wars Episode I on DVD. And after watching the film at home with the George Lucas et al commentary on, I can honestly also confess that I hate the film just a little bit less than I did when I saw it in the theater. But it became even clearer to me after listening to the commentary track that Lucas looked at the film like a big Erector set. He was so jazzed up about the technology and what he could do with it that he forgot about story, characters, and the simplicity and pulpiness that made the first three films so much fun. Forgetting about the audience is a fatal flaw in any filmmaker, and even more fatal for Lucas, with the most famous movie series in history to follow up. The fact that it hangs together better as an intellectual exercise on video is exactly what’s wrong with the picture.

I don’t expect any better with Ep II. But time will tell.

Actual report on Entertainment Tonight:
“Later, we’ll find out how the latest air disaster in New York delayed Gisele Bundchen’s arrival at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show.”

Oh my sweet lord.

Looks like bloggers will have even more choices of what tools they use to maintain their weblogs soon. In addition to Big Blog Tool, which I’ve promoted before, I just heard about CityDesk, by programming whiz Joel Spolsky. Sounds sort of like Blogger on the desktop – a Windows program that maintains a database of your blog entries, then FTPs changes to your web space. If this is a decent program, it could be the best of both worlds – an easy-to-install system that doesn’t depend on someone else’s crowded server. And as commercial software, the makers will have a financial stake in making improvements and giving tech support. Cool.

(BTW, why not stop by Heather’s new weblog. Always nice to see interesting people starting up weblogs.)

Gratuitous B Kliban cartoon. Enjoy.

I have books full of these, so if you like them, I can post more. I don’t like all of his cartoons – some are too weird even for me. But boy, can he be funny. And don’t we all need a little more humor in our lives?

Dave Winer at Scripting News has a fascinating idea – why not have commercial aircraft stream the flight data recording to some server on the ground? Then if something happens, you don’t have to search for the “box,” and the data is available immediately. Cool idea, I think.

On NPR this afternoon, about this morning’s plane crash:
“A preliminary check of the passenger manifest revealed no cause for concern.”

Translation? No Arab names on the list.

“Why does it look so fake?”
-my mother, reacting to the Star Wars Episode II trailer before “Monsters, Inc.”

I don’t see a lot of really bad movies. My friends say I’m picky, but actually I just have a highly-developed sense of what I’m going to like and what I’m not going to like.

Last night, I rented “Swordfish.”

Truly this is one of the worst movies I’ve seen in the last decade. Stupid, pointless, tasteless, unbelievable, and filled with bad acting. But what amazed me most was the level of in-your-face violence spread with a putty knife across the screen. In the first scene of the movie alone, you get to watch in slow motion as a hostage’s body explodes from the C4 strapped to her back, and the camera spins around as ball bearings also strapped to the hostage whiz by, killing bystanders and making cars explode in flames.

Things go downhill from there.

Yes, I could have (and should have) turned the damn thing off right then. But as each scene got worse and worse, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I was transfixed. Interesting, too, that the plot (so to speak) of the movie had arch-villain John Travolta (!) stealing billions and killing indiscriminately in order to finance anti-terrorist actions. It’s funny that the entertainment industry wants to erase the World Trade towers from “Zoolander,” but does nothing to protect us from this unbelievably violent tripe.

Happy Birthday Matt!
Today is my brother Matt’s birthday. He’s 40. He’s having a little trouble with this anniversary. He would probably be mad if he knew I was mentioning his birthday on my weblog, but he doesn’t read it, so it’s OK. In fact, I once had a discussion with him about this weblog, and he considered it sort of perverse that someone would write this stuff for everyone to read.

The two of us lived together one summer when I was in college and he was just out of college, in Ithaca, NY. We lived in about a fifth-floor walkup, and the last flight was incredibly steep, like Rapunzel’s tower – you almost had to hold onto the handrail to haul yourself up. The apartment was above a stationery store, and I was always worried the giant 3-D pencil they used as a logo would snap off and kill someone in the street below. Matt used to order plain-cheese Domino’s pizzas for dinner – and this was back when Domino’s didn’t even try to make anything resembling food. I also recall we almost killed each other during a fight about the proper way to fry bacon.

Funny the things you remember.

He’s incredibly smart, talented, and funny, and I love him dearly. Have a great year, Matt.

Apparently while in some sort of NyQuil haze I don’t recall, I agreed to have Thanksgiving at my house this year. Words to describe me when I think about this event are: afraid, apprehensive, unsure, twitterpated. Ack!