Be safe, watch out for those crazy amateurs out there. I hope your 2006 is better than your 2005 and if not… fuck it. We’re all dead in 100 years anyway. Parrrrrtay! wooooooo!
If you have any crazy stories or happen to kill someone, you must share.
The WordPress community is very proud to present the next generation of WordPress to the world, our 2.0 “Duke” release, named in honor of jazz pianist and composer Duke Ellington. We’ve been working long and hard to bring you this release, and I hope you enjoy using it as much as we’e enjoyed working on it.
I haven’t upgraded yet. I figure I’ll let the dust settle and some bugs get worked out first. Probably. Maybe. It’ll probably kill my new template I worked so much on these past two days. … not tinkerin taint in my nature… mumblemumble… hey, what’s this button do?
Pi - 4/5
Told you I mainlined the movies in the past day or two.
Anyway, Pi is Darren Aronofsky’s debut (he also did Requiem for a Dream… and nothing since, though it looks like he’s got some projects lined up in the near term). Pi is edgy, shot in high-contrast, grainy, black and white. It follows Maximillian Cohen, a mathematician observing patterns in nature… or in this case the stock market. His theorem is:
1. Mathematics is the language of nature.
2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge.
Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.
As he gets closer to the solution, there are kabbalists and a wall street analyst firm tring to control him. Or are they? Is it real or is it a paranoid delusion? Cohen is sick… it could all be in his head. You never really know. And that’s part of what makes Pi great.
I really don’t mean to be this nice to so many films in a row, but I guess it’s selection bias – I pretty much only have good movies in my collection, so it’s to be expected. I’ll have to increase my Netflix quota o’ crap.
In the Mood for Love – 5/5
In my mega-ass long review of 2046, I mentioned this movie, but wanted to give it an official post, since it’s such a great movie in its own right.
Set in 1962 Hong Kong, In the Mood for Love features Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-Zhen (Maggie Cheung) as neighbors who happen to move in on the same day. Both are married, but their spouses are often absent. Eventually they figure out that their spouses are having an affair with each other. Chow and Su start spending a lot of time together and fall in love… but they never admit it, nor do they consummate it. Because they are determined not to be like their spouses. Eventually, Chow flees to Singapore.
As with most Wong Kar Wai movies, the movie is visually sumptuous, the music stirring, and the acting superb. The chemistry between Leung and Cheung is fantastic and tension-filled. And if Cheung’s cheongsams aren’t a visual metaphor for the constricted and uncomfortable societal rules to which she must abide, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.
In the Mood for Love is everything Remains of the Day wishes it could grow up to be. Beautiful, compelling, smoldering, and romantic. Plus, no ewwww Hopkins factor.
For ghostfinger – you’d love this movie, you must put it on your list. Wong is twice the autuer that Baz is, with none of those fucking jump cuts. It’s also a) in color and b) Chinese, so I’m preemptively cutting off your b&w samurai movie eye-roll.
American Beauty - 4/5
Unlike Braveheart, this movie has aged well. Granted I watched it with the commentary of Sam Mendes rather than the actual dialogue this time, but still. The point holds.
If you haven’t seen it, American Beauty is a tale of life and the beauty therein. Not the superficial beauty, but the beauty of small moments, the beauty of gusts of air, or death, or reality.
The acting throughout is superb and the source material is pretty good as well. My main quibbles with the story is that I find the ending to be trite bullshit (SPOILER WARNING :: the idea of a repressed homosexual southern military man is just too cliche to enjoy. I mean, c’mon, people. :: END SPOILER). This movie made Chris Cooper a name (well, this and Adaptation) and provides some of the strongest performances from Annette Benning and Kevin Spacey’s career.
Of note from the voiceover: I always took Angela Hayes’ (Mena Suvari) declaration that she was a virgin to Lester to be a lie. I thought it was in her character that she would expect that her lover would really want to hear that, so that’s what she said. It had the opposite effect on Lester, of course, but still… a lie, I thought. However, Mendes and the writer Alan Ball said she was speaking honestly.
Frankly, I don’t buy it. It doesn’t fit the character as we know it (though it puts her in a different light, particularly her grilling Jane on sex with Ricky – I took it as a clinging for control over her formerly compliant “friend”). No one as cruel and as self-focused as Angela (who was aware that men wanted her since she was 12), would not have had sex by then. It’s a form of power and self-adulation that Angela would not have hesitated to use. Anyway, I don’t care what the guy who wrote it says, she’s a loose woman and was lying to Lester and very little you could say would change my mind.
Brazil - 4/5
Brazil is one of the top scifi movies of all time, in the dystopic-humanist scifi section as opposed to the spaceships-n-lasers BOOM! scifi. The backstory behind the battles over the editing, distribution, and release of this film are even more entertaining than the movie itself in many ways (long story short: Gilliam’s American distributor was an exec who cut and recut the film down to 90 minutes and made it into a romance movie with a happy ending. I know, twisted).
It’s a big, shambling mess of a movie. That Brazil is almost a 5 despite of that is a testament to the source material and the people involved with it’s making. The plot relies on too many absurdities and my suspension of disbelief is broken about four or five times throughout. At other times, it seems that it can’t decide whether it’s a farce or merely satirical. As a result, some pieces are aburd in a way that can be appreciated and other are absurd in an eye-rolling way. Not that a movie has to stick to any particular genre, it’s just that when someone’s going “take me seriously! just kidding! no, no, no, take me seriously! again! juuuust kidding! that time. I’m serious now. No, wait, I’m not. Nooooow I am…” it gets tedius.
A film fest of 1984, Brazil, A Clockwork Orange, and maybe City of Lost Children would be a pretty sweet grouping.
Braveheart – 3/5
Not a movie that bears repeated viewings or much scrutiny. I loved it when it first came out, but you can never go home again apparently. The ridiculous gay caricatures and the distorted history really kill it. As if Wallace being a commoner and impregnating Isabelle wasn’t enough, having the battle of Stirling Bridge without the bridge was a mythmaking feat for the record books. Braveheart is also an early look at Gibson’s obsession with torture, blood, and masochism.
Still, it’s a pretty good war hero movie, all things considered.
Talk Radio – 4/5
Stone’s second best work after Platoon. Eric Bogosian, who wrote the original play and co-wrote the screenplay, is great as the outrageous, courageous, rude, and vulnerable asshole of a DJ. The story is largely based on the last days in the life of Alan Berg, a talk show host in Denver who was murdered in 1984 by white supremacists. Powerful and moving.
Stone’s direction only gets annoying a few times… which makes it stand out among the Stone ouevre. More than half the movie takes place just watching Bogosian talk into his mic, and that’s a really hard movie to make exciting and edgy, but Stone and Bogosian manage to do it, so my hat’s off to them.
A great $6 DVD buy.
Dead Calm – 3/5
Works OK as a suspense piece. The silence is used as a wonderful tool. Could have been a 4 or 5 if it weren’t for all the ridiculous deus ex machinas (like the spar locking Sam Neil in the room, or the trite return of Billy Zane). The rape scene isn’t painful enough and is another big knock against it. Almost a 2.
Since I spent most of yesterday camped out working on graphics stuff, I just kept popping in movies for some background noise (after I got burnt out on 8 hours of radio). So… I’m going to do a string of posts related to that. They’ll be different posts for easier sorting and searching later.
I made the sidebar darker (ht, Chartoo), got rid of the nasty robin’s egg blue for the content (it’s a slightly yellow white now) and changed a few other things around a bit. Let me know what you think of the new look, but I’m pretty happy with it for now.
You know, with the warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. What’s that? They’re not investigating Bush? They’re investigating the whistleblowers? Doesn’t this also violate whistelblower protection laws?
The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the leak of classified information about President Bush’s secret domestic spying program, Justice officials said Friday.
The officials, who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the probe, said the inquiry will focus on disclosures to The New York Times about warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Bush to the Rule of Law: fuck you, buddy. I’m the king! Anyone who so much makes a squeak is going to get a Louisville slugger colonoscopy.
Note that this is entirely different from the Judy^3 situation. Here, we have whisteblowers being investigated for their whisteblowing of an ongoing felony. There, we had reporters complicit in carrying out and covering up the illegal activity. Entirely different. Unless you’re a wingnut, in which case the former is illegal and the latter noble.
Update: as Keith notes, this is probably nothing more than partisan political posturing (which was my thought as well, but I did not include in my half-assed post). Frankly, I think this entire issue is going to blow up in Rove’s face. Everything is a political problem to this crowd. Taxes? Politics. Social security? Politics. Invasion of Iraq? Politics. The laws of the United States? Politics. They’re convinced image == reality, and if they confuse the image enough they can define their own reality. Even inside courtrooms, apparently.
What will they do when the investigation comes back with findings that the “leakers” were protected whistleblowers, and thus the preznit, are felons?
CNN hires racist/compulsive gambler Bill Bennett as a political analyst. Yes, the “drug czar” Bennett. Yes, the same Bennett who said:
you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down
Nice, CNN. I’m sure the Stormfront people would like a show too.
We’re doing all we can to get Iranian agent/convicted embezzler/neocon love stud Ahmed Chalabi a seat in the Iraqi government. Seriously, this is ludicrous, y’all. The administration is trying to create another Thieu, but even if Chalabi got to power, I think it’s obvious he would be far more of a Diem.
As a fuel crisis deepened in Iraq, the government replaced its oil minister with controversial Deputy Prime Minister Ahmed Chalabi, whose poor performance in the Dec. 15 elections was a setback in his recent attempt at political rehabilitation.
The oil minister, Ibrahim Bahr Uloom, was put on a mandatory, month-long leave. He had previously threatened to resign over the government’s recent decision to increase gasoline prices sharply, a move that has outraged motorists and sparked attacks on gas stations and fuel convoys.
Tell me if you’ve heard this before – man of the people doing the people’s work, is principled, and righteous. Man is backstabbed by duplicitous foreign power and replaced by foreign power’s chosen boy.
“He has proven himself quite capable and experienced in dealing with all aspects of Iraq’s energy sector and is well-qualified for this position,” a U.S. official said on the condition that he not be named because he was commenting on an Iraqi government decision.
There may only be 14 stories in this world, but I, for one, am getting tired of this one. And enough with the bullshit anonymous sources that just happen to always be spinning the administration line. Hi Karl!
Finally, check out Chalabi’s “support.”
Based on preliminary results from the December elections, Chalabi received 8,645 votes in Baghdad, well below the threshold a top U.N. official suggested this week would be required to win a seat.
Moussawi said Friday that Chalabi could still end up in the parliament, depending on how officials interpret a technical detail of election rules relating to how remaining seats are allocated after each party meeting a specific threshold is awarded its seats.
“There is still confusion, even today at the election commission, about this, but we are hearing the party will have at least one seat,” Moussawi said.
In a city of nearly 6 million, Chalabi was only able to get less than 9,000 votes. That’s amazing, and speaks to great length about the neocons’ and administration’s divorce from reality.
Have no fear, Chalabi, I’m sure Moussawi will magically find your seat in parliament for you.
Site seems to be working and looking pretty good in Firefox. There’s still something going on with the CSS in that piece of shit browser that has 75%+ market share (otherwise known as IE), which is adding list items where there shouldn’t be any, and pushing the entire thing down if I turn on the calendar. Grr. I can figure it out eventually, but it’s late, so I’m going to bed.
Also, for whatever reason, the address bar in Firefox 1.5 does not update with “http://cmoore.com/” when you click on the root. Sub-pages and categories work, just not the root URI. That part works in IE though. I’ve noticed this behavior on a few other sites.
The formatting is pretty hosed on the pages too (like the $$hop @ Cmo, etc.). I’ll have to re-examine the CSS for why I’m getting no whitespace.
Because I know someone is going to ask, the chinese characters at the top is an idiom – da qi wan cheng… great minds mature slowly. That’s my excuse for finding the shocker so darn funny, and I’m sticking to it.
Comments and feedback on the new look welcomed.
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