Tonight’s selection

Not bad, not bad at all.

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whoa

thx auan

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I <3 static

(via geneticmutations)

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Restraint, Optional

Watching the 70s movie “Zombie” today, I’m realizing that a lot of horror movies are very similar to porno, except that the Main Event is a stalk-and-gore tension/release sequence instead of sex.

Most of them have a difficult time constructing believable scenes outside of the Main Event, to speak nothing of scenes that might actually serve or advance the plot. Usually those snippets refer very directly to the Main Event itself, and any plot development is usually explication, not action.

This is, of course, generalization. Not all horror movies are like this; the good ones usually transcend the genre like all good works of art.

Falling Standards

The “Psycho” remake with Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche is not, and never will be, an American Movie Classic.

They used to show real movies on there, like Cat On a Hot Tin Roof, or Rear Window. Now it’s whatever shit’s cheap enough to get.

Observations

First:

The Wikipedia entry for “film producer” is quite possibly the most boring, depressingly corporate crap I’ve ever read on Wikipedia.  For this reason, I volunteer that the word “producer” or any verbial or adjectival variant of it be wiped from the credits of all movies, except where that word is preceded by “post”. And really, it should be called “post film” or “post filming”. Production is the act of creation. Doing little digital fixups and atmospheres is part of making the damn movie, not what happens after the movie is made. After the movie is made, we all fork over $10 like little idiots and sit and watch it.

Maybe I’m wrong, and that Wikipedia entry is way off-base, and the job titles like “Associate Producer” and “Co-Producer” are not as blandly hierarchical as they sound. The article is flagged for lack of sources.

Second:

Sphere by Merzbow always puts me in a nicely focused, relatively peaceful place.

Third:

95% of all blogs are abandoned (according to the New York Times). Sad. I don’t doubt that the statistic is high, but you have to agree the New York Times has reason to paint the majority of blogs in a terribly amateur light.  Otherwise, they won’t be able to start charging for news (like David Simon suggests).

Authenticity: a shared value

From a co-worker who couldn’t take it anymore:

In protest of the way that the layoffs were handled, there hypocrisy laden announcement, and in solidarity with the PEOPLE that were let go, I will not be working one more minute for [my company’s parent company]. Most of the people I have met at [my company] are the greatest, truest, and most talented people I have ever known. I will miss seeing you all on a daily basis immensely. Work hard and do your best, but not out of fear for your job, do it for yourself. There are many things that one can derive accomplishment from, a job well done is very high on that list, but the greatest and most elusive for many of us would be to always KEEP IT REAL.

And… [my company’s parent company] had me censor this broadcast message to all employees in our office. I thought the query used to do so was very telling (particularly the LIKE part):

select * from messages where message like "(to all%solidarity%" and when_added >= '2009-05-20 22:00:00';

Tit, er Tin Man

I thought, “Eh. I’m being too judgmental. Not all Sci-Fi channel miniseries can be totally terrible.”

“That Dune miniseries wasn’t all that bad. It was way more faithful to the the book than the David Lynch movie. Even though it wasn’t as visually inventive or campy.”

With this self-denial tucked at the front of my palate, I watched “Tin Man”, the Sci-Fi Channel’s miniseries revision of L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”.

If the bleary end of that sentence didn’t make it clear, this was a terrible decision on my part. I want those 6 hours back.

Now understand, this Tin Man was sneaky. I looked at the cast list: Zooey Deschanel, Alan Cumming, Richard Dreyfuss… not exactly lightweights. And I am a big fan of the Fairuza Balk-starring “Return to Oz” film–it combined just the right amount of psychodarkness with the same childish awe as the books on which it was based. This series seemed to adopt the same general idea.

Alas, this miniseries did stupid shit like randomly start sentences with “alas”. It also proved that decent ensemble acting calibre cannot make up for a ridiculously wooden script. Zooey Deschanel is darling incarnate to self-effacing ex-hipsters like myself, but her listlessly-written “DG” character, despite being the ostensible Christ placeholder, evinced about as much depth and strength of character as a fencepost. Bet you can’t guess what “DG” stands for.

Maybe these actors realized how inane the writing seems, and thus gave their phoned-in performances to avoid putting too much of themselves into the frankly cheesy script.

And it’s not just the writing. During a scene in which Dreyfuss, the retooled Wizard aka “Mystic Man”, staggers around in a cantina and shares his “vapor” addiction with a nightclub-sized audience, I realized what had been bugging me about the look of the series. The visual design seems to be a haphazard potpourri that resulted from a producer or director’s request that the art director and production designer “make it look funky and cool, you know, really hip. But also dark.”

Unfortunately the product that resulted was a visual design that, while filled to the brim with imaginative details and interesting bits, lacked any semblance of a unifying principle or idea, other than “make shit look kinda bleak”. As a result, any setpieces like the aforementioned cantina, where designers got the chance to cram in a lot of shit, felt incongruous and disorganized. And it didn’t seem like that was what they were going for. There was also a disturbing tendency to use lots of clashing pastels to make things look “fun” or “quirky”. [retch]

Tin Man _really_ starred two major characters:

* traditionally hit-and-miss Sci-Fi channel CGI

* Kathleen Robertson’s tits

The first will be obvious to anyone who’s even seen commercials for such Sci-Fi classics as “Manticore”. While some of the environments are perfectly lush and passable, most of the creatures are laughably bad. One example: the retooled Flying Monkeys, which in Tin Man look more like bigass bats with a monkey mouth.

And how, pray tell, do these flying bat-monkeys enter the story? Well, gentle reader, it just so happens that they pop out of Kathleen Robertson’s tits.

I won’t lie; when I saw Kathleen Robertson’s name among the cast, I figured, “Yep. Gunna be some cleavage there at the least.” And frankly I was counting on said tits making up for Kathleen Robertson’s, um, incredible acting skillz.

Little did I know that my half-hearted boorishness would be transformed to highly hilarious levels of camp. If I thought it were intentionally campy, I’d take back some of those things I said above. I doubt it was more than a ploy to keep nerds’ attention span, however.

Kathleen Robertson plays the revised Wicked Witch, nee “Azkadellia”. When she needs her mammalian hybrid things (I’m referring to the bats, not her boobs) to go out and plug plot holes, she unclasps an already low-cut bodice, the camera zooms in a bit on the linen she’s wrapped in (or assumes a conveniently overhead angle), and a string of tattoos just above her bustline COME ALIVE WITH PLEASURE. Needless to say, the tattoos are some weird-ass vaguely Celtic symbols that look kind of like bats. But man, they glow like radioactive shit and TURN INTO MONKEY BATS. Inventive, right? There are several such scenes.

Overall, I would rather mouthfuck Gary Busey.

Self-reassurance

Today watching the VCU / UCLA game on TV, I saw a commercial for Saturn that disgusted me. The copy went something like:

{with slightly overwrought sense of down-home-iness} “I keep hearing all these pundits talk about how Americans don’t make any cars that Americans want to buy.

[pause]

Well, Saturn makes cars Americans want to buy!”

The copy goes on to intimate that driving a competitor’s car, and then a Saturn, would make the difference very clear.

I’ve known many people, most of them friends, who’ve owned Saturns. Here’s a sampling of a few things that’ve happened to those friends:

* After about 4-6 years, car begins to use/burn oil. As in, all the oil in the pan.

* In less than 5 years, power windows turn into permanently closed windows.

* Two different friends got into accidents that were fairly minor (no one was hurt). Both friends’ Saturns came out of said accidents looking like a shit Popsicle that someone had just microwaved and flung at a wall.

No offense to you Saturn addicts out there (I’m sure there are tons of you, at least as many as there are people dying to mouthfuck Gary Busey), but Saturns are not cars Americans want to buy. They are cars Americans settle for because while they really want a Toyota, they’ll trade 40% of a Toyota’s reliability to reduce the sticker price by 25-35%.

Congratulations, Saturn. You’re the less voluptuous, minorly awkward girl America wants to begrudgingly feel up because Heidi Klum has married an R&B singer with a face like a shark attack and no one can figure it out.

Thumbing the nose.

I work for a company whose computer infrastructure has typically been composed of 90% free (as in beer) Unix OSes–FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, Debian, Gentoo… Now, after an acquisition by another company 7 months ago, they have decided to move (almost) everything (that’s not insanely expensive to move) over to a certain family of software that comes out of Redmond, WA.

I will have more to say about this later, but for now, here’s the product of my sweat:

Uh! double up, Uh! Uh!

I spent a long-ass time trying to get gnome-terminal to work, too (mostly because it has far less annoying “helper programs” than pretty much anything in KDE, or if it doesn’t, they don’t use as much RAM).  No go. I even tried building the damn thing.  Sheesh.

Someone needs to make this shit easy.  Get real, the reason you install cygwin on Windows is to have a good shell at your fingertips, not run X apps, you may say. I know, I know.  But until someone comes out with a shell app for Windows that even comes close to the productivity-enhancing skillz of Konsole or gnome-terminal, I will continue to try and build gnome-terminal under cygwin. Over and over again.  The closest non-X thing I can find for cygwin is rxvt, which is still kind of “feh”-inducing at times (ncurses really brings it out).

One of my co-workers suggested UWin, something AT&T created and then promptly buried on their research site. Supposedly native win32 executables and POSIX-emulation binaries (achieved through a posix-emu dll, like cygwin) can coexist side by side. imagine, dir /w | awk ‘{ print $4 }’. It’s freaky.  I haven’t tried that yet, though.