By the way, see also August Rush for a movie about the love of music.
    
    
JFK
    This was the director’s cut we watched and boy was I sorry. She had never seen this film and even the theatrical cut is just way too long. But, she loves mysteries and didn’t know much about the whole Kennedy assassination thing and I grew up in the Dallas area, so, I’ve heard it all. The problem is that Oliver Stone always takes forever to tell a story. I can’t even say it is always worth the journey. I think Natural Born Killers is and this one probably is. Obviously, you come to this one for the last forty minutes and have to sit through the first (what feels like) five hours to get to the finale.
    Yes, this is a great film, but I would almost condone invasive studio control over a director’s work in this case :P
    
    
Iron Man
    Meh.
    I am biased, I don’t like action movies. Any movie that you can sum up to someone in terms of “this happened then that happened then this happened” etc. is an action flick. I used to have a practice that, whenever I watched a genre film in a genre I was not fond of, I would make it a double feature so I could compare them to each other rather than compare one to a “real movie”. But, even if I had done that and watched this with, say, one of the new Batman movies, Batman would win hands down.
    Tony Stark was an interesting character and was well-acted, but, all that did was point out how everyone else in the movie is a cardboard cut-out. And, the plot was totally color by numbers. You knew the guy in the cave was going to be dead, you knew Jeff Bridges was going to become the bad guy, this is all typical comic book stuff. Then it was combined with typical popcorn flick stuff – action sequences and pratfall humor, etc..
    A genre film is always predictable but tries to tell the story this time around with enough stylistic and interpretive differences to try to be a replacement for the previous versions and perhaps this succeeds somewhat for the superhero movie – I don’t know the genre very well. But that doesn’t make it a good film – it will be forgotten in fifty years, it leaves no legacy, it will not endure. I read Ebert’s review and just couldn’t believe his high praise for it and he even called it one of the best of the year.
    There are much better films out there that tell a story of a bad man becoming a good man and making his wrongs right and no special effects or suspension of disbelief are required. And they WILL endure, so, if you haven’t seen them, that’s ok, they’ll still be around when you are ready.
    
    
L.A. Story
    There was a day that Terra and I wanted to have a “light movie day”. Nothing deep, nothing to explain or ponder, just entertainment.
    Heh, um, I had a REAL problem finding many like that in my collection. Just to be clear, remember I have a huge LaserDisc collection of all kinds of movies, but most of them are in storage and my DVDs and Blu-Rays are only movies I love. There are plenty of “light” movies in my LD collection.
    Anyway, I love L.A. Story. It is a very romantic love story. But, there is so much more to it – it fits into my category of ‘movies that can’t figure out what they wanted to be’. But, it is another movie I say “watch it until you don’t laugh at the jokes anymore”. Sure, it works great as a comedy (see also American Psycho for a satirical view of L.A. life) but, if you want to get the full impact of the fantasy romantic side of it, watch it until that’s all you see.
    On that note, though, it sort of failed us as a “light” movie because there were more than a few moments that I couldn’t help but pause and call Terra’s attention to something subtle. In that way, Clueless is another ‘see also’ for this one. I know so many teens that love Clueless and don’t seem to see that they are being made fun of. It works so well on the surface level that it is easy to miss the underlying messages.
    There is a scene or two in L.A. Story that seem to be only there so someone could get a cameo (I’m looking at you, Rick-Moranis-as-a-gravedigger scene!), but, there are a couple scenes that are so magical. For instance, when they go for a walk and feel young again, not middle-aged and hopeless, thinking love can never find them again – they now feel so much hope, like they have their whole lives ahead of them all over again. At least, that’s my interpretation of that scene. And I still get teary when she is on the plane to leave and I always hear his words spoken earlier about what he would do if he could to stop her from leaving.
    (I have on my to-do list to make a blog post about movies that make me cry. But not today.)
    
    
Fletch
    This is just a comfort film. I have seen it more times than I can count since I was a kid. I always love Chevy Chase’s shtick. The story is ok, the acting, whatever – none of it is anything special but I love Chevy Chase in pretty much anything. I can sit through a bad movie if it has Chevy Chase in it and this is probably my favorite.
    BTW, this was the first in our “light movie day”, followed by L.A. Story.
    
    
The Matrix
    One of the greatest science fiction films ever made and I stand by that ten years after seeing it the first time. And an action move I actually like – the chase scene at the beginning is so exhilarating and a big reason why I got the game Mirror’s Edge – just so I could live something similar. And, I love the visual style of it – I wish I had a poster of the group shot of them behind the phone, the first time they all go into the Matrix.
    My main complaints with this one are as an action film, oddly enough. The fight scenes should have been done by real martial artists. Watch an old Jackie Chan film – these guys move like old men. In fact, Jackie Chan at his age now, moves faster than these young actors.
    But, this one is full of great science fiction, semi-cyberpunk moments and ideas.
    Oh, I almost forgot, this was the new Blu-ray release we watched and, um, WOW! IT looks absolutely stunning.
    
    Too bad they never made any sequels :P
    
    
So, that brings this post to this month’s bottom line:
    
Was Ready To Re-Watch It As Soon As It Was Over: Almost Famous
Would Rather Re-Watch Any Other Film In This List Than This One: JFK

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1. horror night
2. march movies
3. CHUD.com’s 100 Movies That Deserve More Love

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Magnolia
this may very well be my favorite movie i have ever seen… it is so much more than a film – it is an emotional experience…
i have loved it for years, but, it became even more powerful after being at my father’s side as he suffered a long, horrible death… there are quite a few little details in the film that let me know that pt anderson has lived through watching someone die… what i mean is, there are things i have only seen twice – in this movie and with my father…
i could go on for hours about this film, but i won’t here – i want this to be a concise recap of the month…

Breakfast At Tiffany’s
meh… i liked the character of holly and the performance by audrey hepburn, but, meh…

Ed Wood
probably the only tim burton film i genuinely like and i REALLY like it… not a great film – this one is more personal… what i relate to the most is the cast of weirdos around him – it reminds me of certain times in my own life… so, i wouldn’t defend it as a truly good film or try to get anyone else to watch it – it’s one i would keep on my psp and watch alone when i need to be with friends :P

The Terminal
speaking of my psp, i had never seen this one and watched it in bed one night on my psp and really really liked it… sure, there are some problems with it – it’s another i wouldn’t defend as a great film, but, i think this will be a favorite for a long time to come…

Ringu
never saw it before – wanted to for a long time… i don’t like horror films, but, this one has influenced so much popular media, it is certainly a relevant film… glad i saw it, doubt i will watch it again…
oh, but, i still want to see the american version…

Tristan+Isolde
second time seeing this one, first time for terra… so much great about it, but so much wrong… so hard to sympathize with the characters’ plight… sure, i understand how they got in this mess, but, they should have done the right thing and therefore, i wasn’t feeling too sympathetic… i think the final third or so of this movie was MUCH better than what came before… it got very emotional for me – i was feeling everything going on…
btw, i was suspecting while watching it that this was a big summer release, heavily advertised on MTV :P i just kept thinking how much teenagers must have loved this one and how it seemed to be made for teenagers…

The Night of the Comet
The Night of the Living Dead
this was a slumber party night double feature…
night of the comet is a movie i saw countless times as a kid, so, it is indelibly ingrained in my mind… i have every moment of it memorized and know it too well to hate it… a very bad movie, but, the mall scene and the villain thereof were reason enough to watch it with someone who has never seen it…
as for night of the living dead – haven’t seen it since i was a kid and feel i didn’t miss much… but, again, it is a relevant film – starting an entire genre, so, i don’t regret seeing it…
both were a perfect choice for slumber party night…

Matrix Revolutions
i think the first in the trilogy is one of the greatest sci-fi films ever made and the other two are pretty blah… but, i keep coming back to them every few months just to give them another try… i am totally in love with the universe of the film and want to love all three films…

Delicatessen
i have loved Amelie for years and had heard good things about this one… um, it didn’t deliver… it was as strange and surreal as i expected, but, it just wasn’t that good… i know i’ll watch it again someday, though…

Matrix Reloaded
see above…

bottom line:
best i saw this month i had never seen before: The Terminal
worst i saw this month i had never seen before: probably Ringu

since i didn’t do posts for february or january and i don’t feel like going back right now, i’ll give the bottom lines for those months, without comments… maybe i’ll come back and do full posts another time…

february bottom line:
best: August Rush
worst: What Lies Beneath
even better the second time: The Dark Knight
amazing performance in a blah movie: tie between Capote and Being There
also loved: Wit, Primer, Rushmore
still great after all these years: Barefoot in the Park, Mr. Hobbs Takes A Vacation, Rear Window

january bottom line:
best i had never seen: The Darjeeling Limited
best i saw all month: Lost In Translation
worst: The Haunting
awesome beginning, all downhill from there: The Happening
most surprising disappointment: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (i used to LOVE this one and was so sorry i chose it for our slumber party night – we were bored!)
much much much better than i remembered: The Incredibles

ok, let’s do this again next month :)

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(btw, i’m typing this up on my phone, which has no cut/paste… not the best way to write, but it’ll have to do and if you continue to read, you’ll have to be ready for some stream-of-consciousness disorganization…)

i watched this on the recommendation a few months ago of Tara, a good friend whose opinion when it comes to emotional movies i very much trust… she was right about the power of The Notebook so when she said similar things about August Rush, i knew she would be right… and, of course, insisted she not tell me a single thing about it – i just took her word for it…

but, as i watched, i was doubting my trust in her… it took awhile for me to get sucked in… the film is dreamy – not surreal, but fantasy to be sure and not a strictly straightforward narrative and i was a little confused initially… but, after awhile, i began to see it as more like a dream i was having and stopped trying to keep the story straight and just let it move me – carry me…

it is a story of a miracle…
i think that says it best – a miracle happens and this is the telling of the events leading up to it…
what happens is an impossibility or at least a great improbability… this is a fairy tale, a fable – and any objections to what happened i might have were less important to what it meant and how it made me feel… it is a very emotional film… and the last twenty minutes or so, it just kept repeating in my mind: “follow the music follow the music”… music is the spirituality of the film – the religion of the three key characters… music is the meaning in their lives – not simply the only thing that matters to them, but the only thing that CAN matter, the only thing that is real… and each of them has someone who doesn’t have music the way they do and is trying to harness their music for their own ends… the girl’s father, the guy’s brother, and “Wizard” in the boy’s life… the characters “need music more than food” and each has someone who needs food more than music and has – or tries to have – control… only when each follows the music are they free… alive… and neither of those words describe it – their relationship to music transcends human understanding… it is The Cause, pushing their existance forward… without music, they are just humans… and when they follow the music, they can arrive at what they were meant for…

and, the movie ends on just the perfect note… the moment of nirvana – of destiny completed – and the mood was not destroyed by words… the writer/director/whoever made the very wise choice to not have anyone say anything… we already knew the facts they would tell each other, so why ruin this flawless moment? we can imagine what happens next but there isn’t even a need to imagine – when people ride off into the sunset, there is no next day, that’s why it’s a romance… their whole life has been leading up to this moment and the maker(s) of the film doesn’t ruin it – you just wake up from this beautiful dream…

i absolutely must watch this again because i’m not certain how i will feel about it a second time…
i know the kid’s performance is great, the overall pacing is pretty good, the photography is beautiful, the use of music and sound design was superb (i hope this is available in dts), but as i said, it did take me awhile to get truly sucked in… i said to terra as the credits rolled that it is a flawed masterpiece, but a masterpiece just the same…
i have been really wanting to see films by female directors after being so moved by Sophia Coppola’s Lost In Translation – knowing that a female director will convey emotion in a completely different way… and this is certainly the most unique film i have seen in years and i truly mean that…
but i wanted it to make me cry and it didn’t… i wanted it to take my breath away and i had to settle for awe… there were a lot of smiles i had in the third act as i saw it all coming together, but it was undeniably predictable… that is probably the wrong way to say it… the hopes and dreams we share with these three came true! so, no surprise is not a bad thing! but, i knew they would come true and what was amazing was the miraculous ways they did come true… it is a rare film that can make me not only suspend disbelief but put my focus purely on the emotions of the film and this accomplishes it… but i’m almost embarrassed to be so moved when i can think of some of the flaws…

so what i am hoping for above all else is that i will see nothing but greatness on my next viewing…

SEE ALSO:
…Searching For Bobby Fischer for more on people trying to possess someone’s gift
…A.I.:Artificial Intelligence for another character/performance like the boy

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peter sellers was absolutely amazing – he played the role perfectly every moment, too much would have made us feel he was something less than a person, too little and he would have come across as just disinterested… i poked around a bit at the various things that have been said over the last thirty years about his performance and it has been well-covered, so, i’ll skip right to the stuff i can’t forgive…

but, before i go on, let me say that i am keeping this film and will surely view it again – but pretty much only for his performance…

my objections are simple to state – i just didn’t believe it… i didn’t buy it that these people didn’t catch on… is there a reason that the director wanted me to catch on to? maybe, but, if so, it is buried deeper than i was able to look…
this movie kept calling to mind some cartoon i saw many many years ago… somehow, a dog ends up like president of a company or something… i have scoured the net, trying to find info on this cartoon, hoping to embed/link it here, but i just remember too little… anyway, he is in some kind of power – we are talking probably nearly 20 years ago i saw it, but it was something like he was in the right place at the right time, maybe accidentally got human clothes on him, but one way or another, they made him president, all his growls and barks and grunts somehow twisted by them into what they thought they heard or wanted to hear or whatever… i remember two details clearly – the first is that they ask his name and he growls something that sounds like “rawelf gawagrrr” and they ‘repeat’ back Ralph Gallagher… and the last is when something happens that everyone suddenly figures out his true nature and someone shouting “HE’S A DOG!”… the whole incident is carried along by this device of them misunderstanding what to us are clearly dog noises as mumbled speech and we are laughing at them for not noticing the obvious fact that he is a dog…
well, in this movie we have the choked “Chance, the gardener” becoming “Chauncey Gardiner” and did the doctor figure it out at the end? seems so… but, there certainly was the attempts at being a whistleblower – not quite a “HE’S A GARDENER!”, but, i just couldn’t get the similarities off my mind… and i saw a cast of fools all focused on a very endearing character who who would have been much better off in a better written movie…

so, i’m sort of saying that it just kept coming across the same way… like it was intending to be only a comedy… which is a shame, because the first half hour or so, i was totally hooked in… i guess it was when he tried to change the channel on the would-be muggers that i started being concerned…
which, by the way, i have been thinking… so, he watched tv for all those years but didn’t learn how to use a phone? or that you can’t change the channel on real life?
ok, so, maybe that means, in his deficiency, he saw it for years but never internalized it… like it was a meaningless blur… he detailed to the two in the beginning his room and bathroom – down to the details of his tub, his toilet, his sink, and showed them his garden and perhaps that was all that was really real to him? the rest was something unreal and so he had no point of reference even with all that input? ok, sure, i could see that… of course, he had tears in his eyes in one of the last scenes… and i’m not going to be too quick to jump to any “well, see, he is now becoming aware of the world” because if he had that ability, one would think he would have clicked into something many years earlier, even if it was only a response to something on tv…

hmm…
i just don’t know…
then, of course, the very last thing that happened and i don’t even have much in the way of theories yet… i’d like to read around what others have said over the years…
but, since i had a hard time recognizing a pattern pointing to any kind of other meaning, i fear it meant nothing coherent at all…

i can’t help but think about the meaning of it all, but, i’m not certain that the director deserves for me to think about it… there was so much in there that just seemed to be no deeper than some comic effect… like the bedroom scene – you know, he “likes to watch”… i can’t come up with any reason why that was important – i think it was just meant to be funny… and i kept feeling that way about many other scenes… trying to find some reason to look for meaning and just not finding one…

i will go so far as to say that i think if peter sellers had not played this role, this would be a completely forgettable movie… i know that’s the case for me anyway…
say whatever about who or what he was, why he was or why he was the way he was, what it all means, or whatever, i don’t see that it will change my mind that WHAT HAPPENED just is not believable and i find it very hard to be moved by something i cannot believe…

ok, i am not gonna go back and edit this at all or even re-read it… i keep telling myself that i should force out a couple paragraphs every time i watch a movie and i have to start somewhere and if i go back and read it, i will change things and then decide it was a bad idea to even post – best to wait for a movie i can write something meaningful about or i will add three more paragraphs that are equally disjointed and that will only make it worse, so, i’m just gonna hit that publish button…
(i’m much fonder of this post…)

oh, i have had this “see also” thing going for years when i watch a movie, so….

see also: Meet Joe Black

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so, let’s say my friend jennifer tells me i absolutely must see The Unbearable Lightness of Being or Pieces of April or Garden State… ok, i trust her taste – she has good taste… she knows my taste – she loves Silence of the Lambs and i don’t, i love American Beauty and she doesn’t… she knows me well enough to be pretty accurate about what i will like and, if she says i will love some film, i trust her…
AND SINCE I TRUST HER, I DON’T WANT TO KNOW A THING…
just give me the title, i don’t want to know what it is about, i want to go in completely clear minded… i don’t even want to know if it is a comedy, romance, western, nothin’, i trust you – just give me the title…

and there are some directors that i have seen enough of their work to know they do good, pretty much every time… so, i don’t want to know a thing…
Darren Aronofsky, PT Anderson, the Coen brothers are three great mainstream examples… i have pretty much loved everything they have done, so, when i know there is a new film coming, man… i spend month avoiding reviews, dodging trailers, steering clear of conversations, etc…. it is really hard sometimes…
of course, within a year, all three let me down… The Fountain, There Will Be Blood, and No Country For Old Men really left me scratching my head… they all deserve more viewings – i never make up my mind about a well-made film after only one viewing, but, i unreservedly love Aronofsky’s previous two films, and only PT Anderson’s Hard Eight was less than breathtaking – his others were nearly perfect, and while i would not say the Coens acheive perfection on a regular basis, i always like their films much more on a first viewing than i did NCFOM…
i will add that Pixar really let me down during the same time period, too, with Ratatouille… sure, it was beautiful, but, the hair-control thing stretched credulity to a breaking point and i thought the story as a whole was kind of insipid… weakest Pixar offering ever, i said at the time and still do… but, i still avoid any info about every Pixar film and they more than made up for it with Wall-E, which is nothing short of a masterpiece…

imagine if you went to Spiderman (blech) and had no idea what the movie was about… or Wall-E or Alien or The Notebook… i didn’t know anything about From Dusk ’til Dawn when i first saw it and nothing could have prepared me for the last half :P

annnnyway, there are so many films/movies out there that i know all about, i read the review sites, i hang out at the message boards and read the discussion, i listen to the podcasts, sure… but, there are the people who i trust and i try to do the impossible with their work and know absolutely nothing, but life is too short and popular media is too pathetic to “blind buy” everything, which is why i am always keeping my eye out for directors i can trust and people whose taste i really trust…

“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.” – W. H. Auden

yeah, that’s the stuff Terra and i watch on our “slumber party night” on friday nights – movies to eat junk food to… when i know i have a trusted source of exceptions to the rule, i want as pure an experience as possible…

so, i haven’t lost all trust for Aronofsky, i’ll still go see The Wrestler (and i’ve avoided finding out anything), but as i said on twitter a little bit ago, he needs to win my heart back, i’m going to be guarded after what he did on our third date… and i know i’ll like There Will Be Blood a lot more the second time… as for No Country For Old Men, some Coens films only work once you know the rules of the universe the film takes place in… and i could write a whole lot about that… i even really like The Ladykillers – the one no one else does, it seems – but, i had to see it a few times and get comfortable in the setting before the characters made much sense to me… and that could describe most of their films… they create self-contained mini-universes and, if you expect the rules of the real world to apply, the films don’t make sense… sure, all art does this to some extent, but, the Coens are one (of many) example of this idea taken to a sky-high extreme…
the thing that bugs me, i guess is that i didn’t see any juice in NCFOM… let me explain… i said i like The Ladykillers, but it took me a few viewings… while i didn’t like the film, i liked some of the moments and a lot of the dialogue… i kept putting it on while i cleaned house and such, just to catch those things enough times to really get them in my mind, since i had every expectation that i wasn’t going to see the movie again after these few viewings…
see, i was sucking the juice out of the orange and then was going to throw the orange itself away…
but, next thing i knew, i loved the movie, even though that wasn’t my intention…
so, when i watched No Country For Old Men, there was no juice to make me want to come back and suck out… i can’t think of anything i want to go back and see for fear i never will again… that being the case, it may not get the chance to grow on me like The Ladykillers and a couple of their others have…
but, i will still go see their new one, Read Before Burning…

when did this turn into a post about the Coen brothers???

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so, it got me to thinking about what i WISH i could change them to and i came up with a couple ways of looking at it:

since i have a large movie collection, one way i thought was in terms of what i might say about a film as a collector:
5 = “I own every release ever put out on LaserDisc, DVD, and Blu-Ray”
4 = “I have the Criterion DVD, is there a Blu-Ray release date yet?”
3 = “I’m waiting to come across it on sale”
2 = “I have a badly compressed file i downloaded off BitTorrent sitting on my media server, but that’s good enough”
1 = “It’s been on my NetFlix queue for months…  Near the bottom.”

and, being a home theater enthusiast and loving to watch movies with people, i was also thinking of how i might rate movies as a host, so to speak, if someone were to suggest watching a certain movie:
5 = “Great idea!  Here, have the best seat!”
4 = “Sure, it’s been too long since I saw that one”
3 = “Um, ok, that’s cool, but make sure you’ve looked at everything else first”
2 = “Hmm, well it’s in the sell stack, but, I could dig it out if you really want to see it”
1 = “WHAT???!!!  NO I DON’T OWN THAT!!  WHAT DO YOU TAKE ME FOR?!  GET THE HELL OUTTA MY HOUSE!!”

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so, to hear i could actually be witness to or even be on set for the filming of “No Country For Old Men” could not have struck at a better time… the article mentions that “Filming will take place in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Las Vegas starting in late May.”…

i don’t get starstruck about much, but, this would do it :P

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most people know what i have to say on this subject, but, i will point out that it is important to remember that “video games” (i prefer something more like “the current generation of popular interactive entertainment“) are still growing up and the truly great artists are yet to emerge, even if we see a few pioneers… this is much like film was in the 40s and 50s, where many movies out there were trying to capture the stage experience on film, bringing broadway shows to those who could not go to broadway shows, for example… few people yet knew what to do with this “new artform”… but, flash forward to the late 1970s and we enter the age of the blockbuster… and today, there is no shortage of cinematic visionaries…
we will someday be at this point with interactive entertainment… and, even in the present, if one hears the phrase “video game” and think of a joystick, some bleeping, shooting aliens, or maybe munching blinking dots, they are at least twenty years behind in their understanding of the subject…

and i am now going to digress and move onto the links before i start getting into lists of examples :P

04 December 2005 – Next Generation – Why Ebert Was Right

rogerebert.com :: commentary
Dec6,2005 :: Gamers fire flaming posts, e-mails…
Dec8, 2005 :: The Art of the Game 2
Dec14, 2005 :: The Game of Art 3

blog: scanners :: Jim Emerson / January 23, 2006 > Kojima: ‘Games are not art’

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but, he clearly loves movies so he can’t be all bad…

and, speaking of movies, he points out that he teaches “Humanities and Film at a local middle school“… WHAT?!! how come they didn’t have that in MY day? i’d be hangin’ with Aronofsky right now!
or something…

anyway, after reading a few posts, i like his writing, i deem him interesting, i’ll add him to my “Looking At” list and keep an eye on him for awhile…

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• September 24, 1999
  Salon Arts & Entertainment | In with the out crowd

  “One of the most promising new series of the fall season.”

• September 28, 1999
  The Eyepiece Network: The Darker Side of Those Not-So-Wonder Years: High School

  “Because of its insistence on aiming for realism, Freaks and Geeks has a thin veneer of bleakness”

• October 8, 1999
  TeeVee Archive – Fall ’99: “Freaks and Geeks”

  “Let’s get this out of the way up front: Freaks and Geeks is [...] a show that has a snowball’s chance in hell of surviving to see its second season. Locked in a brutal Saturday night time slot by an apparently uncaring network, adjecent to series utterly unlike it in tone or substance, and brining a light touch to a TV line-up populated with the crude and the crass. Doomed. Gone.”

• October 29, 1999
  freep.com – Give ‘Freaks’ show a chance to shine

  “We have a homework assignment for the weekend. [...] All you have to do is watch “Freaks and Geeks” [...] Despite rapturous reviews from most TV critics, the low-rated “Freaks and Geeks” (no. 82) is teetering on the brink of trouble.”

Warnings

• February 10, 2000
  IGN FilmForce: Transcripts of FilmForce’s Chat with Paul Feig

  [and be sure to go back later and follow the "Related Articles" link on this page for many many more interesting-looking pages than i felt like counting]

• February 21, 2000
  Marylaine Block – My Word’s Worth – Freaks and Geeks: reminding us what adolescence was like

  “Network execs who haven’t figured out exactly who its natural audience is are letting it die because they don’t know when to run it and how to promote it. They obviously think that because it’s ABOUT adolescents, this show is FOR adolescents, but it’s not.”

• March 6, 2000
  salon :: Give “Freaks” a chance, By Joyce Millman

  “[Y]ou will say “How come nobody told me this was so awesome?” And I will gently remind you that I (and every other TV critic in the country) have been telling you exactly that since September. You could have listened. But, no.”

• March 23, 2000
  TeeVee Archive – Freak Out

  “When it comes to the untimely, undeserved demise of Freaks and Geeks, i will blame you. Because you didn’t watch.”

Cancelled

• May 12, 2000
  LA Weekly – Too Good and Weird – The Happy Life and Inevitable Death of Freaks and Geeks

• July 5, 2000
  CNN.com – Entertainment – ‘Freaks & Geeks’ leaves NBC with three-hour finale

• July 8, 2000
  Final ‘Freaks and Geeks’ will air tonight on NBC

• July 11, 2000
  Geeks win… and lose – Final episodes of cancelled show take their timeslot

  [and keep scrolling the page for earlier stories about the show from may 24th, march 22, and two stories from sept 25, 1999, the premiere...]

2003 – The Petition

• Feb 1 rec.arts.tv: Freaks and Geeks DVD official petition
• Feb 12 17,518 signatures
• Apr 2 17,518 signatures
• Jun 3 24,601 signatures
• Aug 1 27,435 signatures
• Dec 3 35,923 signatures

And It Actually Worked

• January 15, 2004
  tvshowsondvd.com – Official Press Release: April 6 is the day!
• January 27, 2004
  listology – “The Freaks & Geeks Limited Edition 8-DVD Set is now available!”

• Jan 29 39,180 signatures
• Feb 7 39,213 signatures

2004 – Satisfaction

• TVZone – The Freakiest: Henry interviews producer of the new Freaks & Geeks DVD

• DVD Verdict Review – Freaks And Geeks: The Complete Series
• DVD Talk > Reviews > Freaks and Geeks: The Complete Series (8-Disc Fan Edition)
• washingtonpost.com: Bonus Points
• USATODAY.com – DVDs resurrect ‘Freaks and Geeks’ and everyone in between [incl. interview with Paul Feig]
• The Onion A.V. Club | Video Freaks And Geeks: The Complete Series
• RUTHLESS REVIEWS: TV – Freaks & Geeks – Whoa… Good TV?
• dvdmg.com – Freaks And Geeks: The Complete Series [incl. synopsis of every episode]
• selectflicks – “Dodgeball is Kind of a Stupid Game” ["There is a single spot on selectflicks.com reserved for a televison show, and this is the one."]
• eye – Don’t look back
• dvdmg.com – Freaks And Geeks: The Complete Series (Limited Edition Yearbook)
• tvdvdreviews.com — Freaks and Geeks: Deluxe Collector’s Edition DVD Review
• IGN DVD: Freaks and Geeks – The Complete Series

• Freaks and Geeks Panel at ComiCon 2004
• Blogcritics.org: Freaks and Geeks vs My So-Called Life

Today

• Sept 26 40,298 signatures

More Stuff/Info/Links

• Talk to Us [The Official Freaks and Geeks Message Board, home of the revolution]

• imdb.com – “Freaks and Geeks” (1999)
• Freaks and Geeks@Everything2.com
• RetroWeb Classic Television: Freaks and Geeks
• ~welcome to mckinley high: freaks and geeks fan site~
• Yahoo! Directory TV Comedies > Freaks and Geeks
• Google Directory – Arts > Television > Programs > Dramas > Dramedies > Freaks and Geeks
• Open Directory – Arts: Television: Programs: Dramas: Dramedies: Freaks and Geeks

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The true cost of free iPods – Engadget

Boing Boing: Lucas put malicious Xbox trojan on Star Wars DVD
Star Wars DVD Grosses $115M

Google Search: star wars holiday special
[not only do i remember the fam rushing home so my brother and i could watch this over 25 years ago, i have always rather vividly remembered a couple moments from it (like the stormtroopers searching the wookie kid's room), and the images at these sites were so familiar i found myself saying "oh yeah, i forgot about that part"... yet i have trouble remembering my own phone number...]

ICQ Chat Request

A visual history of spam (and virus) email
The Spam Weblog

Boing Boing: Fave music site: Oddio Overplay

Play the PlayStation Portable — in Japan – Engadget
[um, yeah, i'd probably like to play with that... btw, best pics of the PSP i've seen yet...]

Guardian Unlimited Film | Features | Ruined by R ratings
[something of a history of not-safe-for-network-tv language in movies being dubbed for broadcast...]

NetRatings: Broadband users a majority in U.S.
[i somehow missed this news until now...]

The Making of a THX LaserDisc

Cities Collection [via RefDesk's SotD]
This NASA site offers outstanding astronaut photography of cities taken during space-flight.

craigslist – Gorgeous 2br Penthouse on Las Vegas Strip [sigh]

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this is just about the dvd/transfer quality, not about any changes to the movies (there are countless sites for that)… nor comparisons to the laserdiscs or “did they fix [insert notorious problem] yet?” stuff (short version is sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t, again, there are many sites out there that cover that issue)…

if you want a full review, google it, there are plenty out there…

anyway, here is what i saw…

star wars

colors are very oversaturated- at times it is so bad, it reminds me of the old tnt colorized movies

things change colors in the frame sometimes- see c3po in the first desert scenes and the rocks in the background when the tusken raider jumps onto the bantha

and is that really bad edge enhancement where the dunes meet the sky as the camera pans early in the first desert scenes?

audio does REALLY funny/awful things- mainly dialogue, starts with leia before tarkin

empire strikes back

looks very good, hella better than star wars- but, the colors are also a little oversaturated on this one

return of the jedi

looks largely untouched, replete with matte lines, bad colors in some matted shots- in fact, MOST of the matte shots look really bad

again, a bit oversaturated colors

the image is not as sharp and clear as the other two- even grainy at times

probably the worst looking of the three

the empire strikes back is the clear winner here… it looked and sounded pretty much excellent…
the first movie had the really bad color issues and the sound was downright horrible in spots and return of the jedi had so many unfixed terrible-looking matte jobs that it was quite distracting…

btw, that sound issue on the first film is widely reported and seems totally inexcusable, i would have to pop in a laserdisc and see if it sounded that bad before… but, i sure don’t remember it sounding like that, yet i DO remember where a couple audio problems have always been, such as “into the garbage shoot fly boy!”, which still sounds just as bad as it always has… so, i feel pretty safe trusting my memory on this one, star wars has never sounded so bad…

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ours have been pre-ordered for quite some time, just waiting for launch day, with a gift certificate given to us for just this set, so, george technically got none of our money…
besides, we still treasure our near-mint Star Wars Trilogy Definitive Collection LaserDisc Box Set of the original theatrical cuts of the films, and even have the Star Wars Trilogy Special Edition LaserDisc Box Set, the now intermediary 1997 versions, also not available on dvd (even though, with all the dumb stuff added in ANH and the dumb stuff already there in ROJ, only ESB is worth watching, but, VERY worth it)…

anyway, on to the links…

Digital Bits DVD Review – The Star Wars Trilogy
May The Force Be With You – Star Wars Trilogy DVD Media Day [plus a forum thread]
IGN – DVD: Star Wars Trilogy
dvdforum.nu – dvd, film & hemmabio [Region 2]

and just some other things i came across today…

American RadioWorks – Witnesses to Terror [RealAudio format]
Poynter.org – Covering the Attack

Engadget – The Search Engine Belt Buckle

Terra Nova: Ye Olde Disciplinary Punch-and-Judy Show [reported on boingboing.net as "Narrologists versus Ludologists: battle of the games-academics"]

Movieoke.Net: The Official Site of Movieoke

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Why I hate Microsoft

DTS Online – Consumer – Home Theatre – DVD Title Search

Chicago Sun-Times – Roger Ebert – Movie Answer Man

Museum of Hoaxes – Time Travel Spam
Wired News: Turn Back the Spam of Time

Achaea – Dreams of Divine Lands
IRC Roleplaying – Dungeons and Dragons Games Looking for Players

The Morning News – Tricks of the Trade

SpamTown :: Current Spam-Blocking News And Information
Welcome to Spam Town. We don’t make spam, we learn to live with it.

i may do this more often…

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the article the thread is about strangely declares jane fonda’s barbarella the honor…

personally, my first choice would have to be milla jovovich as leeloo in the fifth element…
also on my list would definitely be zev (and xev) from lexx and padme, the star wars inamorata for this generation…
and, not that i have exactly sat and watched an episode of the show all the way through, but, as an honorable mention, gabriella from xena is cute…
and, though a video game, not only is space channel 5 unquestionably sci-fi (imdb agrees), ulala is unquestionably a sci-fi babe…

/haven’t seen nicole kidman in anything sci-fi yet

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3. 9/11

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first, there is Invisibles…
fun little thing where a frame from a movie is shown with the actors in the frame removed, but with their clothes still standing, ala the invisible man… name the movie…
new group of them every week…
a nice mix of really easy and really tough…

then there is movie trivia on funtrivia.com…
fun site, user-made trivia quizzes, a huge range of topics and specific movies, and it keeps score of how you do to rank yourself with other players… (nothing to download, btw…)
funtrivia.com has a lot more than movie trivia, but, i have yet to try anything else out, too many good movie quizzes…
i am playing as “i_plots” and i cannot figure out a way to link to my stats page, but, it says:

You have played 74
quizzes and have scored 7470
points.

Your score ranks you as # 43,083 of
300,000+
players

You have answered 747 of 940 questions
correctly.
Your accuracy is therefore 79%

You are a Trivia Rookie

Renton: Well, he’s always been lacking in moral fiber.
Swanney: He knows a lot about Sean Connery.
Renton: That’s hardly a substitute!

/trainspotting

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a great article about things that drive us nuts about the dvd industry/format and why we are not giving up on our laserdisc collection any time soon…

for instance, here he adresses a great example of some of the issues at the very heart of the matter…

Digital technology seems, on the face of it, a preposterously inadequate medium for storing movies, and we should gape in wonder that DVDs yield coherent pictures at all, much less the gloriously sharp, detailed images they churn out under the best of conditions. Consider: A DVD stores only 17 gigabytes of data. A two-hour film, transferred to digital data and otherwise untreated, would take up more than 150 gigabytes.
So the data must first be massively compressed, mainly by digitally sampling a frame, then sampling only the information that changes in subsequent frames.
This is no big deal for a scene of someone standing still against a blank wall. But it’s a major challenge for a scene of someone running through traffic surrounded by dozens of flashing lights and moving objects.

while ld video definitely has its own issues, it is NOT compressed and cav laserdiscs even store actual individual frames of film, something no other format does even today…

If a film is old and damaged, the compression machine will “read” random dirt and scratches in the same way it reads motion. If the machine’s operator doesn’t pay attention and make adjustments, or if the machine is subpar, the digitized image will be full of waves, zigzags and other distracting distortions.
Similar problems can plague color or, if it’s a black-and-white film, the gradations of gray. When transferring film from a negative to a print, someone has to practice the fine art of “color timing.” The same thing has to be done, though electronically, when transferring it to DVD. The job can be done well or it can be done badly.
“The main reason a lot of DVDs are so bad,” says Robert A. Harris, president of the Film Preserve, one of the top film-restoring companies, “is that the people making them don’t know what they’re doing and don’t care what they’re doing.”

well, why should they care??? they are going to price these things to sell to any shlub, so, they will not bother… dvd regularly cheaps out, while makers of ld knew they could not sell them at the prices they were asking unless they threw in GOOD extras… Boogie Nights is a great example… criterion paid for the john holmes documentary the film was based on, but when the dvd came around, new line was not willing to pay for it… the dvd was around $30, the ld was nearly $100… but, you get what you pay for… and, right now, many ld collectors are selling off their discs at insane prices, therefore, now is a great time to buy…

Doing a DVD right takes time and money. A good Telecine machine, which transfers film to an image suited for television, costs about $2 million. Use of an outside lab’s Telecine facilities can cost up to $1,000 an hour.
The Criterion Collection, which produces some of the finest DVDs of classic films, routinely takes months to make a digital transfer. Lee Klein, Criterion’s chief technician, says: “If there’s a scratch, we draw it out frame by frame. When there’s 12 pieces of debris on each frame, it takes a long time.”
Most studios don’t bother.
Some simply take the master that was made for laser disc, or even for VHS videotape, and transfer it to DVD. This was an especially common practice in the infancy of DVD, four to six years ago.

and he gives a few good examples in the article of lousy dvd’s, showing the widespread apathy of dvd makers… their attitude is getting better, so, i hope by the time hd-dvd is the standard, they will have learned and can offer a consistently worthy product…

i am NOT saying that laserdisc is necesarily better in every way to dvd, my point is that laserdisc is still a viable format today, for those willing to pay, and should not have been discontinued so early (the last u.s. laserdisc release was in 2000)… many ld collectors out there are already regretting selling off their collection when they are left with substandard dvd’s, or even no dvd release available, such as the theatrical cuts of close encounters and star wars… and those two are great examples because there will NEVER be a dvd release of them…

laserdisc is a format for the serious film lover, dvd is the next vhs, the format for the masses…
what hd-dvd will be remains to be seen…

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it is a gorgeous set, great high-res cover, three discs, the film on three sides, and three sides of extras… in fact, the documentary runs 140 minutes and the movie is just 137… this is the laserdisc upon which the Collector’s Edition DVD is based, (which we also have, of course) and so far as we can tell, it has almost all of the extras that appear on the dvd…
got it off of ebay for just over $20 and it is in excellent condition…

this was the last ce3k item we wanted, we already had the dvd, the CAV Criterion set, the CLV Criterion set, and a couple releases of the inferior “Special Edition” version of the film… and, we also have the collector’s edition versions of the theatrical one-sheet poster and soundtrack cd, both released at the same time as the laserdisc set…

so, this set fills a gaping hole in our collection…

we will watch it tonight or tomorrow, but, we popped on side three (which is cav) and it looks fantastic, you can tell it is the same transfer used for the dvd… released in ’98, dolby digital 5.1, thx-certified, surely this is going to be on our list of the best looking laserdiscs ever made…

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Stanley Kubrick’s films were landmark events – majestic, memorable and richly researched. But, as the years went by, the time between films grew longer and longer, and less and less was seen of the director. What on earth was he doing? Two years after his death, Jon Ronson was invited to the Kubrick estate and let loose among the fabled archive. He was looking for a solution to the mystery – this is what he found

and here are some excerpts giving you a hint of the weirdness within…

starting with a bit of background…

nine years had passed since Kubrick’s last film, Full Metal Jacket. All anyone outside his circle knew about him was that he was living in a vast country house somewhere near St Albans – or a “secret lair”, according to a Sunday Times article of that year – behaving presumably like some kind of mad hermit genius. Nobody even knew what he looked like. It had been 16 years since a photograph of him had been published.
He’d gone from making a film a year in the 1950s (including the brilliant, horrific Paths Of Glory), to a film every couple of years in the 1960s (Lolita, Dr Strangelove and 2001: A Space Odyssey all came out within a six-year period), to two films a decade in the 1970s and 1980s (there had been a seven-year gap between The Shining and Full Metal Jacket), and now, in the 1990s, absolutely nothing. What the hell was he doing in there? According to rumours, he was passing his time being terrified of germs and refusing to let his chauffeur drive over 30mph.

and…

“The good news,” wrote Nicholas Wapshott in the Times in 1997, bemoaning the ever-lengthening gaps between his films, “is that Kubrick is a hoarder … There is an extensive archive of material at his home in Childwick Bury. When that is eventually opened, we may get close to understanding the tangled brain which brought to life HAL, the Droogs and Jack Torrance.”

and then, inside kubrick’s world…

There are boxes everywhere – shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes. These are the boxes that contain the legendary Kubrick archive.

Tony takes me into a large room painted blue and filled with books. “This used to be the cinema,” he says.
“Is it the library now?” I ask.
“Look closer at the books,” says Tony.
I do. “Bloody hell,” I say. “Every book in this room is about Napoleon!”
“Look in the drawers,” says Tony.
I do.
“It’s all about Napoleon, too!” I say. “Everything in here is about Napoleon!”

“Somewhere else in this house,” Tony says, “is a cabinet full of 25,000 library cards, three inches by five inches. If you want to know what Napoleon, or Josephine, or anyone within Napoleon’s inner circle was doing on the afternoon of July 23 17-whatever, you go to that card and it’ll tell you.”
“Who made up the cards?” I ask.
“Stanley,” says Tony. “With some assistants.”
“How long did it take?” I ask.
“Years,” says Tony. “The late 1960s.”

In one portable cabin, for example, there are hundreds and hundreds of boxes related to Eyes Wide Shut, marked EWS – Portman Square, EWS – Kensington & Chelsea, etc, etc. I choose the one marked EWS – Islington because that’s where I live. Inside are hundreds of photographs of doorways. The doorway of my local video shop, Century Video, is here, as is the doorway of my dry cleaner’s, Spots Suede Services on Upper Street. Then, as I continue to flick through the photographs, I find, to my astonishment, pictures of the doorways of the houses in my own street. Handwritten at the top of these photographs are the words, “Hooker doorway?”
“Huh,” I think. So somebody within the Kubrick organisation (it was, in fact, his nephew) once walked up my street, on Kubrick’s orders, hoping to find a suitable doorway for a hooker in Eyes Wide Shut. It is both an extremely interesting find and a bit of a kick in the teeth.
It is not, though, as incredible a coincidence as it may at first seem. Judging by the writing on the boxes, probably just about every doorway in London has been captured and placed inside this cabin.

The fan letters are perfectly preserved. They are not in the least bit dusty or crushed. The system used to file them is, in fact, extraordinary. Each fan box contains perhaps 50 orange folders. Each folder has the name of a town or city typed on the front – Agincourt, Ontario; Alhambra, California; Cincinnati, Ohio; Daly City, California, and so on – and they are in alphabetical order inside the boxes. And inside each folder are all the fan letters that came from that particular place in any one year. Kubrick has handwritten “F-P” on the positive ones and “F-N” on the negative ones. The crazy ones have been marked “F-C”.

“Stanley loved typefaces.” Jan pauses. “I tell you what else he loved.”
“What?” I ask.
“Stationery,” says Jan.
I glance over at the boxes full of letters from people who felt about Kubrick the way Kubrick felt about stationery, and then back to Jan. “His great hobby was stationery,” he says. “One time a package arrived with 100 bottles of brown ink. I said to Stanley, ‘What are you going to do with all that ink?’ He said, ‘I was told they were going to discontinue the line, so I bought all the remaining bottles in existence.’ Stanley had a tremendous amount of ink.” Jan pauses. “He loved stationery, pads, everything like that.”

I suppose that the closer you get to an enigma, the more explicable it becomes. Even the somewhat crazy-seeming stuff, like the filing of the fan letters by the town from which they came, begins to make sense after a while.
It turns out that Kubrick ordered this filing in case he ever wanted to have a local cinema checked out. If 2001, say, was being screened in Daly City, California, at a cinema unknown to Kubrick, he would get Tony or one of his secretaries to telephone a fan from that town to ask them to visit the cinema to ensure that, say, the screen wasn’t ripped.

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so, we have the criterion laserdisc of halloween and a standard laser release of the omen and we watched them both the other night…

first up was halloween, the film credited with starting the “slasher” genre…
and, it was not long until we were wishing it would hurry up and end…
of course, after starman, the thing, escape from new york, and now this, i think we are ready to really and truly give up on john carpenter…

the only good thing i have to say about it is that the music was very good…

one interesting device i noticed was that, as the movie built up to the climax, it seemed to me that the director was intentionally using a lot of shots to show the time of day… no indoor shots without plenty of windows and most shots prominently showed the placement of the sun, like a ticking countdown to nightfall… in fact, at one point, it is suddenly and abruptly night, which gave me a feeling of “it’s night already!? they’re out of time!”…
while this kept me (almost unconsciously) estimating how much time was left, i really could not care less if these people were actually going to survive or not… we were hardly told anything about them, so, they really did not seem like real people, just actors doing what the director told them to…
and, as is always the case, the characters seemed to behave in very unbelievable ways… i know this is a staple of the genre, but, that is one of the things that alienates me from the genre… too much of having to give up reason to follow the story… not that there is usually much of a story… i often hear horror described as a sub-genre of sci-fi, but, to me it seems more a sub-genre of action… any film where you can relate pretty much everything it covers as just “this happened, then that happened, etc.” is an action movie… no concepts to ponder, no characters to get to know better, no reason to care WHY things are happening, most of the time… all of that comes in scarce tidbits, which is why, to be totally coherent, you need a whole series of films… maybe by die hard 3, i might care what happens to john maclaine, maybe by halloween 9 i might know why michael myers killed his sister and all these others…

if they were better movies, i might take that journey…

or maybe i will listen to the commentary on halloween and see if john carpenter can reveal to me the subtle intricacies…

then, with a bad taste in our mouths, we took a chance on the omen…
this one was much better, but, there was very little action, just lots of dialogue and concepts… it was more like a mystery to be solved…
now, i must say i thought the dialogue was very weak… it got the point across, but, there was no personality, no cadence, no art… with good dialogue, you can take a line out of context and, if you know the characters, you can usually deduce who said it… and this is true of life as well… the omen is one of countless movies where you could have mixed and matched the dialogue between characters… the characters were definitely not defined by how they said what they said, they were just telling us what we needed to know to advance the plot… in a movie filled with dialogue, you need more personalized speech to really carry it, or at least to keep it interesting… (cf. david mamet, btw…)
but still, it was a good movie… pacing was good, i was never really bored, the material was great, and the music was superb, even though it was mono… the actors were varied; the kid was great (not that it was a demanding part), the various clergy were good, and the nannies were great, but, too many other parts seemed totally interchangable…

we liked it… it does not go on “the shelf”, but, i will definitely watch it again sometime to look for other nuances… i just don’t expect much from donner in that area…

i just have a hard time calling it “horror”… it was more of a mystery, as i said above… yes, there were horrific IDEAS, but, again, that makes it a movie of IDEAS, not actions…

as far as “horror” goes, we have only really seen a few and disliked most of them… (btw, remember, we pretty much only count what we have seen since we started into the world of dvd and home theater, since we now “see” movies differently than we used to… i have seen literally thousands of movies, but, i know a lot more about movies now and feel i need to give them all another chance…)
i will briefly touch on a few and try to avoid sci-fi horror, like alien, forbidden planet, or event horizon, just to try to prove we are capable of contemplating another genre…

we have seen a nightmare on elm street and wes craven’s new nightmare and only new nightmare was any good to us… i guess because it was likeable even if you scoffed at the genre… hell, it scoffed with you… but, even new nightmare is in “the pile”, not on “the shelf”… it was good once, may be again, but, we are not in any hurry… the next viewing would probably be for the commentary…

poltergeist IS on the shelf… now that is one creepy film… the chair-stacking scene chills me every time… in fact, there is so much good about that movie, i will not even get started lest i go three paragraphs…

then, there is that “m. night” dude or whatever… we have seen both signs and sixth sense and disliked both of them… and there was very little that we found disturbing, creepy, and very very little that was anything like scary… sure, a few disturbing concepts, no action movies here, but, still, they are old concepts and the films really brought very little, if anything, to the genre that we had not seen before…
and, btw, we generally despise surprise endings… in fight club, it explained a lot, in sixth sense, it seemed just a gimmick… (iow, with the former, you want to watch it again more to understand the symptoms better now that you know the cause, in the latter you want to watch again to see if the film is internally consistent with the ending…)
[must've re-written the last two sentences twenty times to ensure it was spoiler free :P]

now, one horror movie we really liked was the others (and, no, not because it had our beloved nicole in it, though that doesn’t hurt it any)…
that was one SCARY frickin’ movie!
i mean, it was disturbing!
and, one of the best uses of surround that we have ever heard…
we were jumping, cringing, hoping that what we knew must happen next would not happen; i think the others, so far, is the only movie to actually put a fright in us…
it was just plain well-directed… the kids, the rules of the house, the cinematography, including the overall look, the time setting, it just starts pulling you in to an alternate reality, so, you already have no idea what to expect and it unhinges your mind from the everyday, emptying it, so it can fill it up with what the director chooses, hopefully freeing you from expectations of normality… like misdirection… and the unfamiliarity
means it will be more unpredictable, which means it has the potential to be scarier… and the director did not disappoint, though, admittedly, the first half of the movie is much much better than the second half…
it is a dvd, not a laserdisc, so there is no “shelf vs. pile” issue (all our dvd’s are in one place), but, if there was a choice to be made, it would go on the shelf…

so, anyway, next in our horror education will probably be clive barker… we have nice laserdiscs of the serpent and the rainbow, hellraiser, and lord of illusions (or is it the frighteners? can’t remember)… i read the great and secret show and loved it (though, more fantasy than horror)… i found it to be very original, creative, and interesting, so i figure i will like more of his stuff… having seen some clive barker long ago, i think it is safe to assume it will be truly horrifying stuff, with more in common with event horizon than the other stuff i have been covering here…
hopefully in a good way…

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i dug this up since it covers the whole original aspect ratio vs. pan&scan thing covered the previous post…

some damn good info and pretty much covers all one needs to know, though, as usual, i am not sure it adequetly explains the point of anamorphic video…

in a nutshell, your tv only has a certain number of scan lines to display the image… and those scan lines cannot come anywhere close to matching the resolution of a frame of film…
widescreen films on video have black bars at the top and bottom, taking up sometimes as much as half of your screen and thus half of those precious scan lines that weren’t enough to properly show film even when you were using all of them…
now, you COULD ditch the bars and use all the scan lines, but, then you lose the shape of the image… in other words, you basically zoom in on the image, but then, of course, you either have to cut off the sides or distort the image, stretching it vertcally…
hence widescreen tv’s and “anamorphic squeeze” buttons on standard tv’s… the proper shape is kept, with little to no scan lines wasted on nothing but black bars…

meh, it might make more sense if you read it again after you read the article at the link… it is not the easiest thing to explain without examples…

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this article is much more optimistic than i am, though, i agree that a large part of the battle is educating the cinematically ignorant…

Last year, something remarkable happened in the world of cinema. Blockbuster Video, the country’s dominant rental chain, announced that from that point on it officially preferred widescreen DVDs to pan-and-scan (also known as “full screen”). For those movie buffs who had been eagerly watching this battle, the news came as a shock. In the fight for the hearts and minds of viewers, widescreen and its film-geek adherents had won an unexpected and glorious victory. Just a few years earlier, Blockbuster had discouraged widescreen DVDs, on the grounds that customers confused by the letterbox format thought they were defective. Now, the chain was conceding what cinephiles had argued for years: that widescreen was the superior way to watch a movie at home, even if it left black bars at the top and bottom of your television screen.

Anyone who scrounged for widescreen tapes during the VHS era will understand the historic nature of the announcement. Back then, widescreen tapes were tucked in obscure corners of the video store. When film buffs advanced the moral argument against pan-and-scan—that it butchered the filmmaker’s vision and cut out as much as half of the picture—they were met by a blank stare from store clerk and casual fan alike.

the rest is here…
How Widescreen Won – The way we watch movies at home has changed. What happened? By Bryan Curtis

(it even mentions laserdiscs and Criterion, properly crediting the format and company with the initial victories in the original-aspect-ratio-vs.-”foolscreen” war…)

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for those not familiar with the concept of feeds, it is a way to gather
content from a site, without going there… this blog of mine has an atom xml
feed, so, you could get my posts in your favorite “feed aggregator” (along
side feeds from other sites), rather than stopping by to see if i’ve posted
anything new or signing up for the email notification…
at livejournal, people set up xml/rss/etc. feeds for various sites, or use
feeds already offered and you can add those feeds to your lj friends page for
a public online aggregator… there are hundreds of choices, everything from
daily comics like garfield and dilbert, to news, weather, movie reviews, all
sorts of stuff…
you just have to see it to appreciate the sheer coolness of it…
since i have few lj friends, i fill it up with these feeds and then i get
stuff from sites i would not otherwise go to everyday, in one convenient
trip… so, you can see the stuff i am interested in and, if you share those
interests, it can make for a good daily visit…

here are the feeds i have on there currently…

some post several items a day, some once a day, some once a week or once a
month, some post rarely, which makes it even handier to have it appear on my
feeds page… and some may be broken, so, i am still waiting for them to post
something…

firstly, i get posts at “syn_promo”, where people publicize cool feeds they
have found or have made…

astronomy photo of the day

ask yahoo
answering trivia and imponderables, using yahoo

blog of death
sort of a big, far-reaching obits page

boingboing blog

coming soon
a movie news site

dictionary.com’s word of the day

engadget
gadget news, reviews, etc.

filmadd
news of movies added to the Internet Archive

filmtease
an unusual movie trailer review site

found magazine’s find of the week
unusual objects people find

aaron swartz’s googleblog
a blog about google

googleblog
the official blog of google.com

penniphile
the writings of penn jillette, mostly new entries to “road penn”

word spy
dealing with new terms, slang, etc. as they enter the language

quote of the day
not as good as refdesk.com’s quotes of the day, but, they have more than one
per day, so it sort of balances out

snopesrecentadd
one of my favorites, posting urban legends as they are added to snopes.com

thinkgeek
various merchandise of interest to those involved in modern technology

and wordsmith’s word of the day

oh, and almost forgot, i also get “ljnifty” where people post various fun
things you can do with livejournal, such as adding feeds to your friends
page…

and i add cool new ones as i find them… and occasionally remove the ones
that get annoying or boring…

anyway, if that sounds interesting to you, as i said, the link is on the menu
on the left side of this page… “My LJ Feeds”
i stop by at least once a day and it is a pretty good collection at this
point, after some tweaking…

now if only i could get scifi.com’s “today in sci-fi history” on there, which
is almost always interesting to sci-fi buffs… (there is a link to this, as
well, over there on the left…)
i would add the fark.com feed, but, it does not have comments links and the
comments threads are at least half the fun of fark…

btw, geez, it seems today is list day on my blog…
admittedly, i am trying to come up with posts to make so i can knock that huge
“april pics” post off the front page…

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ok, so, the story is something like this…

may 25th, 2002, we got a free dvd player… at this time, our tv was mainly
only used for video games and nasatv during shuttle missions, we had a vcr but
didn’t use it for much…
coincidentally, this is also the day we got our first dreameye, so, the dvd
player was ignored…

then, some time in november 2002, someone loaned us three dvd’s (reservoir
dogs, a beautiful mind, zoolander)… we decided to see what all the fuss was
about…
eventually, we bought a couple of our own (fight club, the matrix, wargames,
which is also the first commentary we listened to), later on, we got a
“ht-in-a-box”, then in june of 2003, we started seriously building a home
theater…

just on a whim, back in the first days of all this, we started actually
jotting down each movie we watched… we have continued to add to this list,
every movie we watch, then, at some point, we started dating each entry…
this is all kept in a database that we each have a copy of on our psion…

so, here is the list… there are about 250, a little less or a lot less,
depending on how you choose to count them (different versions of the same
movie, etc.)…

and, btw, i will refrain from adding other comments in the database this list
came from, such as what we thought of the movie, why we saw wanted to see it,
what format and aspect ratio it was in, which ones we own, etc…. you will
also occasionally see one labelled [him] or [her], which means we did not
watch it together… and there are one or two marked with the name of a movie
theater in brackets, which means we actually went out to see it…

the dated entries come first and the rest are alphabetically listed…

2004.05.06 – caddyshack
2004.05.06 – vacation
2004.03.30 – AI
2004.03.29 – the big lebowski
2004.03.29 – mixed nuts
2004.03.26 – better off dead…
2004.02.22 – hard eight (aka Sydney)
2004.02.15 – lost in translation
2004.02.15 – love liza
2004.02.09 – raising arizona
2004.02.09 – star trek 7 – generations
2004.02.09 – time after time
2004.02.08 – back to the future
2004.02.08 – back to the future 2
2004.02.08 – back to the future 3
2004.02.06 – jerry macguire [her]
2004.02.05 – a few good men
2004.02.05 – rush
2004.02.05 – true romance
2004.02.01 – biloxi blues
2004.01.25 – fargo
2004.01.25 – pirates of silicon valley
2004.01.20 – arthur
2004.01.20 – fletch
2004.01.11 – hook
2004.01.08 – the apostle
2004.01.06 – seven
2004.01.05 – the life of david gale
2004.01.04 – alien 3
2003.12.27 – the american president
2003.12.25 – a christmas story
2003.12.23 – it’s a wonderful life
2003.12.21 – lord of the rings 2 – the two towers
2003.12.20 – star trek 10 – nemesis
2003.12.17 – braveheart
2003.12.16 – 28 days later
2003.12.16 – frequency
2003.12.14 – scrooged
2003.11.13 – conspiracy theory
2003.11.09 – alien – director’s cut [amc grand, dallas, theater 8]
2003.11.08 – truman show
2003.11.05 – shanghai knights
2003.11.02 – ed wood
2003.11.01 – matrix reloaded
2003.10.18 – spaceship
2003.10.16 – galaxy quest
2003.10.16 – trekkies
2003.10.13 – Magnolia
2003.10.11 – The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
2003.10.10 – spawn – director’s cut
2003.10.05 – book of shadows – blair witch 2
2003.10.04 – addams family
2003.09.28 – shock treatment
2003.09.27 – event horizon
2003.09.23 – city of lost children
2003.09.12 – the jerk
2003.09.11 – blair witch project
2003.09.11 – stargate – director’s cut
2003.09.10 – 12 monkeys
2003.09.10 – outland
2003.09.10 – psycho
2003.09.08 – from dusk til dawn
2003.09.07 – leviathan
2001: a space odyssey
2010
9/11
the abyss – special edition
Addams Family Values
Akira
alien
aliens – director’s cut
almost famous
almost famous – untitled director’s cut
Amelie
american beauty
apollo 13
as good as it gets
backdraft
basketball diaries
batman
beauty and the beast
being john malkovich
the black hole
blade runner – “director’s cut”
boogie nights
boyz in the hood
brazil
a bronx tale
buckaroo banzai
a bug’s life
the cell
Chicago
chicken run
Citizen Kane
close encounters of the third kind
close encounters of the third kind, collector’s edition
close encounters of the third kind, special edition
clueless
contact
dances with wolves
Dark City
the dark crystal
Darkman
the doors
dr. strangelove
dune
e.t. – the extra terrestrial
escape from new york [him]
eyes wide shut
finding nemo [parks mall amc]
far and away
fear and loathing in las vegas
the fifth element
fight club
final fantasy: the spirits within
a fish called wanda
flatliners
forbidden planet
Forrest Gump
friday
full metal jacket
get shorty
the game
gattaca
ghostbusters
glengarry glenross
the godfather [him]
the godfather – part two [him]
Goodfellas [him]
the grifters
Grosse Pointe Blank [her]
harry potter 1
house
the hudsucker proxy
the hunt for red october
i spit on your grave
independence day – director’s cut
Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Ark
Indiana Jones and the Temple Of Doom
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
The Iron Giant
It
jackie brown
Jacob’s Ladder
Jaws
jfk
k-pax
krull
L.A. Confidential
l.a. story
labyrinth
ladyhawke
the lawnmower man – director’s cut
leap of faith
legend of drunken master
Little Shop of Horrors
Logan’s Run
lolita
lord of the rings – fellowship of the ring
mars attacks!
memento
men in black
minority report
monsters inc
monty python and the holy grail
the mosquito coast
Moulin Rouge
mulholland drive
murder by death
natural born killers
night of the living dead
nightmare before christmas
a nightmare on elm street
the one
oscar
the others
phantasm
pi
pink floyd – the wall
poltergeist
the princess bride
pulp fiction
Punch-Drunk Love
Quiz Show
red dawn
requiem for a dream – director’s cut
reservoir dogs
the rocky horror picture show
Romeo + juliet
the royal tenenbaums
rushmore
say anything
secret of nimh
the seven samurai [him]
Shadowlands
Shanghai Noon
signs
silence of the lambs
Silverado
the sixth sense
Sneakers
south park movie
Spaceballs
the spanish prisoner
Sphere
spiderman
spirited away
The Stand
star trek – the motion picture – director’s cut
star trek 2 – the wrath of khan – director’s cut
star trek 3 – the search for spock
star trek 4 – the voyage home
star trek 5 – the final frontier
star trek 6 – the undiscovered country
star trek 8 – first contact
star wars
star wars 2 – empire strikes back
star wars 2 – empire strikes back – special edition
star wars 3 – return of the jedi
star wars 4 – phantom menace
star wars 5 – attack of the clones
Starman
Strange Days
suicide kings
Taxi Driver
terminator
terminator 2
the thing
this is spinal tap
three colors – white
three colors – red
time bandits
titan a.e.
titanic
Toy Story
Toy Story 2
trainspotting
tron
uhf
unforgiven
wag the dog
the War of the Roses
wargames
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
what dreams may come
who framed roger rabbit

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i know i am still missing a few off this list, maybe quite a few, but, this is
something i was mentioning to someone the other day and wanted to put this
list up, even if it is not totally compete…
i still know most of these movies by heart, could probably quote most of them
beginning to end, and the images and sounds are an indelible part of my
subconscious to this day… (darth vader is still in my nightmares to this
day!)

growing up in a house of hardcore movie interest is an interesting
experience… in our house, movie quotes were almost non-stop, life was
constantly compared to movies… in fact, the staff noticed this when i was
at the hospital with my parents… mom said to one nurse something to the
effect of “we are a movie family. we use them to teach lessons of life.” by
which she means, for instance, i was talking about how magnolia inspired me,
both phil parma and the change t.j. mackey made in his attitude toward his
father were things going through my mind non-stop in the hospital… they
were the inspiration that helped me to keep a better frame of mind through it
all… so, if i want to explain to my mom how i saw my responsibility in that
situation, she would have to watch magnolia…
in fact, my mom’s online handle, for as long as i can remember, is “Ripley”,
the heroine of Alien… and i am sure she would relate ripley as the
embodiment of a strong woman…

my childhood heros were not historical figures or otherwise “real” people,
they were movie characters…

but now, i am straying way off the topic of this post…
back to the list…

btw, very important…
THIS IS *NOT* A LIST OF MY FAVORITE MOVIES…
more than a few of them are movies i cannot stand today…
these are also in no order, except maybe the order in which i thought of
them…
i would also add that it is best to take most of what i said above as not
relating much to the list… most of the “background movies” around the house
were not the deep ones, those demanded too much attention…

and now, a partial list of movies i saw/heard/overheard COUNTLESS times
growing up…

close encounters of the third kind (special edition)

btw, ce3k reigns supreme TO THIS DAY as the one i have seen/heard/overheard
more than any other…

better off dead
ghostbusters
star trek 1-4
star wars
caddyshack
vacation
2010
aliens
raiders of the lost ark
murder by death
wargames
secret of nimh
spaceballs
time after time
the money pit
spaceship
pete’s dragon
cloak and dagger
romancing the stone
fletch

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well, here is Premiere.com’s idea of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time (via Fark)

though, i found fark’s comments thread about this article to be a much better read, with many more suggestions i agree with than premiere’s…

(btw, both fark links above go to the “Avantgo” versions, which is a very nice lite alternative…)

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