I just watched the new Blu-Ray of _The Shining_, which is fabulous, but there is one point where the new framing affects the film, somewhat.

It's during Nicholson's amazing monologue in the hotel bar, right after he describes how he broke the kid's arm. He tries to rationalize it, "One momentary loss of muscular coordination... a few foot pound per second, per _second_..." And then Nicholson does something really terrifying: he pantomines snapping his kid's arm, and throws his hands up in a fristrated "Whaddya gonna do?" gesture .

With the new framing, this motion's almost lost below the bottom of the frame.

It's a very minor point on an otherwise excellent transfer.

http://vimeo.com/5494280

Homes movies by one David Berry, at a job he had in the mid-1970's, at a special-effects startup for a science fiction movie.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/07/08/the-end-of-men-115875-21503346/

"The end of men? Scientists create sperm in the lab out of stem cells."

Okay, it's not _that_ definite: they've basically created pseudo-sperm by applying acid to stem cells, and they'r eusing the stuff to investigate infertility. And I guess the 'end of men' stuff we see in articles like http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8142104.stm is inevitable (though it is one of my pet peeves, the _obvious joke_.)

So I'll throw the next obvious joke back: if we're not needed to father chidlren, then I guess we don't have to _pay the bills_ or _open jars_ or _raise the kids_ or _kill the spiders_ or _cut the lawn_ or _cuddle_ or _give backrubs_ or even _risk our lives making yer goddamn CHOCOLATE_ (http://abclocal.go.com/kfsn/story?section=news/national_world&id=6906091).

I'd also like to ask y'all to imagine the commentary we'll get once they develop an artficial womb.

When Superheroes Get Old.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/5709426/When-comic-book-heroes-and-villains-get-old-Superheroes-Decadence-by-Donald-Soffritti.html

Yahtzee Croshaw reviews the _Ghostbusters_ game.



Posted for Dr. Venkman's benefit.

I am hoping, really hoping, that during the funeral Michael Jackson comes back to life.

No, not as a zombie from _Thriller_, the obvious joke. No, I mean really _return from the dead_. The coffin starts to glow, and shake. Light scythes out from every atom-thin crack. The lid is blasted away from within, on a column of pure white light, and as the mourners look on in fear and wonder, and the TV cameras strain to keep the light levels down, Michael Jackson rises from the open box in a magnificent apotheosis. He stands twelve feet tall, his plastic surgery undone and his face remade into its true ideal. He is clothed in a raiment of shimmering gossamer, and upon his feet are golden sandals adorned with rosettes. And Michael Jackson rises into the air, his hands apart and open, welcoming all to himself. Behind him, a choir of beautiful castrati sing praises of his name, his music, and his dancing, along with choruses from _Jesus Christ Superstar_. Cherubis twirl ribbons of silk around his head like graceful bumblebees. Just visible in the brilliance, the loving faces of Jesus, Mohammed, Abraham, Buddha and Krishna are seen gazing lovingly upon Michael Jackson.

And as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton rise to stand by his side, Michael Jackson announces, in a breathless voice that is as terrifying as it is comforting, that he has returned from the land beyond this one, purified, sanctified, his torments eased and his self reconstituted into its finest expression, and he is now here on Earth to judge the living and the dead.

I want Michael Jackson to return to life the gaudiest, cheapest, most gimcrack rural-trash spectacle of transcendence imaginable. I want an apotheosis so campy it'd make Joel Schumacher look like David Lean. I want heavenly choruses so syrupy and over-orchestrated, they make Andrew Lloyd Webber sound like Johannes Brahms. I want Michael Jackson's manifestation of power and glory and eternal judgement to make the Catholic Church look like an abandoned Port-O-San.

I want Michael Jackson to come back to life because it'd really fuck with people's heads.

A LOT.

It'd be worth it.

Lots of neato-keen extras, including a whole system of pop-ups that explain all of the military and deterrence stuff that's in the film. And the people commenting include Richard Clarke, Daniel Ellsberg, and Robert McNamara. Ellsberg even reports on how he'd been asked to review the film's rushes on behalf of accuracy and the Defense Department, but Kubrick ultimately decided to not share the goods.

I know most of this stuff already-- there ain't many people who know this movie as well as I do. But it's really sweet. And the film, restored, looks gorgeous.

_The Shining_ and _Dr. Strangelove_ are in Blu-Ray this week, with _2001_ coming later this month. Warners did a hi-def remastering of Kubrick's films. Thing is, they've remastered these for 16:9 screens. And the last time Kubrick approved any transfers, they were for full-screen 4:3 televisions. These are _cropped_, somewhat, butsome accounts have it that the films were meant to be masked to 16:9 when projected.

Either way, I like widescreen compositions. Kubrick liked to use wide lenses. I think he favored 27mm for most shots, and the hedge maze shots used a 9mm lens. So the widescreen masking helps the dynamics of his strictly-symmetric compositions and those amazing tracking shots.

I like wide angles as well, if only because they're closer to human eyesight. The lenses that come with camcorders, like my Sony, are pretty narrow in their f.o.v.; I think some marketing study showed that people taking camcorders on vacation prefer to _zoom in_ on things like geysers and amusement park rides and the Colisseum and topless beaches in France. Try using that in a room in your house, filming something as simple as two people having a conversation, and it would look absolutely terrible even if you had studio-level lighting.

(I've been shopping for a hi-def camcorder, but it's tough to pick one. Comparing features, hunting down sample videos on Vimeo for image quality, trying to figure out how to convert 35mm lens specs to video lens specs, whether it could handle low-light situations AND enable decent photography when there's a wide range of illumination in a shot... and them there are the new video data formats, which require new editing software and faster computers to edit the stuff. All of this for a hobby that's made for, well, two short videos about the local park.)

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31670059/ns/health-kids_and_parenting/
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/31670024/ns/health-kids_and_parenting/

"Like Palla and Murphy, many of us who were raised in the 1950s, '60s and '70s are survivors. We were tiny daredevils: sun-blasted, pocket-knife-carrying, bottom-spanked, cow eaters. We ran the streets armed with BB guns, boxing gloves and bottle rockets, wholly unprotected by bike helmets, sunscreen or Amber Alerts. Our houses were filled with the blue cigarette smoke of our cocktail-drinking parents and we believed it wasn’t supper without a mountain of red meat."

" specifically remember riding in the front seat of our baby blue Valiant STANDING UP and watching the scenery. My mom says if she turned a corner too sharp and it made me lose my balance, I bopped her on the head with my baby bottle! I never had a baby seat. I NEVER rode a bicycle with a helmet. I still have a tendency to think to myself "Wimp!" when I see someone riding with one. A typical week at our house meant we ate goulash one night, pigs in blankets the next, spaghetti the next, chicken pot pies the next, fried chicken the next, and there was always a roast with all the vegetables at least once during the week. If beef was bad for us, we should have been dead by 1975."

And now for MY memories. Sitting in the front seat of my dad's car, not wearing a seat belt, and _LEANING OUT THE OPEN WINDOW_ while we drove down a highway. Playing alone down by a creek (which the township used to handle the water reclamation system), and not even thinking about abduction or molestation. Finding sewer culverts big enough to explore. Using houses still under construction as jungle gyms. Eating bowls of sugar and milk lightly dusted with cereal. _WALKING_ to a movie theater with my little brother, to see _A Clockwork Orange_ at age _THIRTEEN_. Going off on my own, armed with a book of Golden Key tickets and a twenty dollar bill, in Disney World.

Man, next to these kids with their structured playtimes and their helmets, I feel like a total badass.

Pearl Forrester's Thanksgiving recipe for Turkey Surprise:

"Bake at 200 degrees for one hour and then rub with a turtle.”

First of all, a collection of dangerous stagecoach stunts performed by the great Yakima Canutt. The final one may seem familiar to you kids who don't know yer cinema history.



Second, http://www.slate.com/id/2221392/, a story about Wycliffe Hill's _Ten Million Photoplay Plots: The Master Key to All Dramatic Plots_, "a byzantine matrix of characters and conflicts designed to create endless plot combinations, was so novel when it debuted in 1919 that the slim guide sold for an eye-popping $5." Yes, it's the first attempt to create "the formula' for a Hollywood blockbuster.

And while reading this article, with its capsulized summaries of storytellijg and plot "methods," try not to think of the "webwork" writing of Harry Stephen Keeler (http://site.xavier.edu/polt/keeler/story.html).

I've read _The Nation_ less and less since most of its better writers have become regular bloggers, like Marc Cooper and David Corn; in fact, the main reason I check their website is to see if Katha Pollitt has anything new. But this month they've become a really good resource.

Fans of the Mark Sanford story will do well to read http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090720/wachter, which puts Sanford's recent publicity into better context. The guy's never been more than a drone, prone to making odd publicity gestures that don't really add anything to the actual political issues he's had to deal with.

Another article that provides a little more context is this brief item (http://www.thenation.com/blogs/notion/448238/destroying_america_to_save_it) about CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who recently went on Glenn Beck and stated his desire to see Osama bin Laden attack the United States with something massive and destructive and utterly scarifying. Scheuer's a reminder that not all nutjobs fit the usual nutjob format. He'd attracted some notice with a book titled _Imperial Hubris_, which was one of those books that everybody could cite as evidence for whatever their position was.

If you didn't like the Bush Administration, you could cite Scheuer's passages about their fuckups, like not targeting bin Laden, or wasting resources in a war in Iraq. If you _did_, then you could cite Scheuer's complaints that U.S. Presidents were ill-served by the intelligence community, and thus blame the CIA for 9-11 and the war in Iraq, somehow. If you didn't like antiwar activists, or thought of yourself as a hard-headed independent thinker, you'd find comfort in Scheuer's "realpolitik" appraisals... which could always be read as both a call for America to Stand Tall and a call for America to Stay Away from every issue on Earth except for business. No wonder he got along so well with Ron Paul.


And finally, there's Sarah Palin's resignation speech, which was a mixture of two Nixon farewell speeches. There was his 1962 speech that was supposed to be his farewell to politics, whining about how the press "won't have Nixon to kick around anymore." But Palin mixed this up with Nixon's farewell speech to his White House staff, with its digressions on his parents and how no one would ever write books about them. And these are NOT the best models to follow in politics.

What came through the most wasn't genuineness or realism or even being Just Folks. What came through was anger and resentment over _not_ being given the kind of respect she felt she deserved... but which she certainly hadn't _earned_ at all. Palin may have felt unfairly attacked. But to _believe_ this, she'd have had to ignore the kind of attacks that have been going on in Presidential campaigns since the dawn of democracy. Or, even worse-- she may have felt that _other_ candidates deserved to be attacked, but _not her_.

I mean, here's Sarah Palin, governor of the low-maintenance state of Alaska, complaining about being attacked unfairly... in a race where _Hillary Clinton_ is a leading candidate. A woman who was attacked, not only on her politics, but her looks, her desirability, and her fitness as a mother. She was accused of being a man-hating lesbian and the co-murderer of Vince Foster. When she _correctly_ pegged a "vast right-wing conspiracy" (funded by Richard Mellon Scaife) as the source of this ugliness, she was ridiculed as a paranoid. And this was during the eight years when she was only First Lady-- a period where she endured proof of her husband's infidelities trawled not only in tabloids, but through ther United States Congress. She went on to win a Senate seat, conduct _that_ demanding job with a degree of competency, and set up a Presidential campaign with substantial organizational savvy and a national constituency, and has come closer to the Oval Office than any other woman in U.S. history... through a lot of hard fuckin' work. There's a lot I dislike about Hillary Clinton, but she's earned respect.

Compare this to Sarah Palin, who'd done little to earn a place on the ticket beyond charm John McCain. She expected the race to be like her home-state publicity and her Convention speech... and found that life was a lot harsher once you were exposed to people who would be more critical. I don't recall any smears against Palin that even _remotely_ compared to the garbage thrown at Clinton. Calling her "Caribou Barbie" may not be nice, but it's nothing like circulating videotape "documentaries" calling her a lesbian psycho who murders her political allies. Raising questions about deals with Alaskan oil interests is _normal_ and _expected-- and it's nowhere near hiring a creep like Ken Starr to spend millions of tax monies to find absolutely nothing about Whitewater. Jokes about her family's personal life? Palin dragged them all onto stage as photo props, to illustrate the painful choices women have to make... when she wanted to prevent other women from having those choices. So boo fuckin' hoo.

For Sarah Palin to wail about her brief period of fame and public scrutiny, and _not_ have Clinton's experiences as a caution to self-regard, says a lot about her. And it ain't good. It says she's in a bubble where Sarah's the queen of the ball, and the experiences of others just don't matter. It says that she really out to pack in her public life... or spend the next few years here in the lower forty-eight, maybe in a nice big city, getting to see how real people live.

Personally, I'd rather she stayed with the elks.

So, movies, thanks to Netflix Downloads. First up was _The Corpse Bride_, which I mistyped as _The Corpse Bridge_, which sounds like a documentary on the Khmer Rouge. But _The Corpse Bride_ was good, with alla the jolly Edward Gorey stuff we love from Tim Burton, but it felt slight, like a scaled-back draft of _The Nightmare Before Christmas_; something for Tim Burton to kill some time with while he worked on something else. (Which may explain why _Willy Wonka_ was only so-so.)

Next up-- and on right now-- is _Lost Horizon_, the 1937 epic from Frank Capra. It was a huge production for its day, from a best-selling novel by James Hilton. It's about a group of people whose plane crashes in a remote region of the Himalayas, where they find an isolated city that's pretty much paradise on Earth-- Shangri-La. It's practically the very definition of escapism. I forget whether it was a huge hit, or an extravagant failure, but it's one I've been meaning to see for years. Especially since they tried to restore it a few years back.

So far, a half hour in, I'm mainly impressed with how it doens't look like typical Hollywood. The escape sequence in China is surprisingly ragged and chaotic for Capra, and the scenes where the passengers climb out of the crash were filmed in a massive icehouse, so they have realistic steam coming from their mouths when they speak. (I think Welles shot some of _The Magnificent Ambersons_ in the same place.) The set for the lamasery is pure Steamline Moderne, which is _weird_ for a Tibetan lamasery.

I had an odd thought just now. There's a shot where Edward Everett Horton walks into a big room, and it reminded me a bit of a hotel lobby, and suddenly it hit me that _The Shining_ could be a kind of mirror-image of _Lost Horizon_. A nice, big, warm environment, surrounded and isolated on all sides with horrific snow, with heaps of food and little to do... In one film it's the very definition of paradise, and in the other, it drives men to homicidal frenzy.

I'm so cheerful sometimes.

Didn't do much, beyond some laundry, and I've been watching _Down with Love_ with dinner. It's a pastiche of those late 50's-mid-60's battle-of-the-sexes comedies, like those Rock Hudson and Doris Day films or, laterm, Tony Curtis fluff like _Sex and the Single Girl_. Most of the fun, for me, is how they work to capture the styles of those films, and a handful of gags that could never happen way back when: there's a split-screen routine that's a real gem, and a cute bit about Ewen MacGregor's socks and a secretary overhearing a discussion thereof. David Hyde Pierce does the Tony Randall role, and Randall turns up as a publishing executive.

The movie's a tad _too_ aggressive, punctuating the gags with music stings and occasional over-cutesiness. But it's holding my interest.


Addendum: The movie just threw up one of the funniest plot twists I've ever seen. It's funny because it's _impossibly_ contrived.

I don't have it, because services like Direct TV don't let you see _international_ television beyond what's allowed within our borders. So, I can't see Japanese commercials, Serbian talk shows, Brazilian soap operas (where women are _astounding_ to look at).

And I won't be able to see this Turkish game show, where clerics of various religions must compete to convert atheists to their faiths. The show is titled _Penitents Compete_, which ain't exactly right because it's the witch doctors who are competing, not the atheists. (Cory Doctorow notes that it'd be only fair that atheists get prizes if they manage to talk the priests _out_ of their faiths. I agree.)

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/04/reality-show-gives-p.html

There is one really nice thing about having grown up in a suburb in the 1970s, to parents with a limited range of food tastes.

It's really easy to find comfort food. Swanson TV dinners, frozen pot pies, McDonald's hamburges and fries... they're easy to find, easy to prepare, reliably standardized as far as content and taste is concerned.

This is the cuisine of my people.

While dinner's cooking, I've turned on the TV and they're running the remake of _Fun with Dick and Jane_, with Jim Carrey and Tia Leoni. The original, with George Segal and Jane Fonda, and Ed McMahon in a fine supporting role, was kind of a family favorite when I was a teenager. It's not a great movie, but it's perfectly fine, and I was happy to learn that Terry Southern had done an uncredited rewrite. It was also kind of a caper movie, and I love caper movies, and I spent this afternoon reading the last novel of the magnificent Donald E. Westlake, who passed away on New Year's Eve.

So this remake is sort of begging to be compared to better things. And it's really pretty bad. It might have made a decent comedy, given the economy and corporate corruption in the news and much more, and Tia Leoni's one of those actresses who's great at comedy but who's never been cast in anything that uses her well. But I gather than the studio took the story off the shelf because they needed a vehicle in which Jim Carrey could contort himself. So the screenwriters made a halfhearted attempt at being funny, knowing that whatever they put on paper'd be tossed in favor of whatever Carrey came up with.

Bleh.

Got a joke for ya.

"A skeleton walks into a bar and says, 'Give me a beer and a mop.'"

( Read more... )

The bushes in front of my house are overgrown, with lots of weeds, and it was high time I went out there and trimmed the things. I brought out my ladder, and my clippers, and my electric hedge trimmer. I started the trimmer. Took a few quick swoops through the bushes. Realized the trimmer had suddenly died in my hands.

Yes, I'd sliced through my own extension cord with the hedge trimmer.

Next time I use a sword.