Movies everyone should see - Holiday edition

Since I've been unswayed by the holidays this year, I've watched quite a few movies this year - here's a partial list

• Anatomy of a murder - Jimmy Stewart at his best
• Dead Reckoning - A Bogart movie I had never seen before - another classic film noir
• Touch of Evil - Charlton Heston as a Mexican Fed (which he pulls off well), and Orson Welles as a fat, sweaty hard drinking cop, which he played well, but wasn't that much of a jump.
• El Mariachi - a bit dated, but watchable
  

All the King's Men

I recently saw All The King's Men, and was quite impressed. It joins the ranks of old movies everyone should see. Basically it's the story of Huey Long, the populist and crooked governor of Louisiana.

Watchmen Trailer!

It's out early

Watch it here

Mongol!

This looks way, way cool.

Saturday rapid fire

• Dean Kamen's Robot Arm - simply incredible. Why Kamen isn't America's most highly regarded public citizen is a mystery.
• The liberal media follows me around an takes notes - I had this conversation with some friends last week, it's an odd coincidence. I don't cry at movies but my the movies that come closes are The Virgin Spring and On The Beach.
• More HDR Photography
• Groupware is bad
• Russia's Hypermortality -

  Moreover, a large proportion of the Russian workforce may be too drunk to function. Almost one male death in three is alcohol-related. “The increase of alcohol consumption from 10 to 15 liters and an almost simultaneous increase in mortality suggests the central role played by alcohol to mortality, in average up to 426,000 per year in 1980-2001. Alcohol-related deaths total 29.6 percent of total mortality for men and 17.0 percent for women,” the report says.

• My next project is going to be something like this
  

Ace in the Hole

I finished watching Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole last night. Kirk Douglas stars as a cynical reporter who turns a minor accident into a major tragedy for his own benefit. Excellent work all around.

RIP Ingmar Bergman

Tyler Cowen has a short write-up here. He made two of my favorite movies of all time in The Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal, both Symphonies in black and white. All very gloomy and subtitled, but magnificently done. His passing leaves the world without one of the best visual storytellers of all time.

V for Vendetta

I finally saw the V for Vendetta movie and found it soils my memory of the comic. Gone was the grit of Evie, the violent mystery of V, the looming menace of the state. Replacing it was corporate angst, an ocean of improbabilities, and a third rate parody of the Bush Administration. Gone was all the base motivation, the insight into human nature, and a believable origin of the crisis. Instead we got soap opera, pandering nonsense, and an explanation out of a Michael Moore movie.

Somehow they turned a potent story of pure anarchism into a theme of left-wing resentment.

All that being said, it was well acted, especially by Steven Rea, who caught the essence of Finch very well.

The Sniper

I finally finished watching The Sniper, a good film noir from 1952. It's a good tense drama about a compulsive sex killer (who uses an M1 carbine, heh). One funny moment comes after the protagonist burns himself on a stove and goes to the emergency room. In addition to the memorable scenes of doctors smoking in hospitals, it has the line

E.R doc: A man's got no business messing around with stoves, it's strictly a woman's business.

An excellent flick

I just finished Knock on Any Door and was quite impressed. It's quite similar Dead Man Walking in that it explains a path to crime and it's resolution in the death house.

Quote of the evening

From the movie Knock on Any Door

Female Lead: If I were as cynical as you I'd hang myself.
Bogart: I don't trust the rope.

A movie to see

Is the Asphault Jungle from 1950. It's a good noir crime drama, with good acting by Sterling Hayden and a young Marilyn Monroe (playing a mistress, imagine).

One hilarious moment is Hayden, is his classic tough guy growl, complaining that his bookie pointed out that he owed money, or in the slang of the time, "he boned me". As in "He boned me in front of some guy I didn't even know!"

Quote of the moment

I'm watching Elia Kazan's "A Face in the Crowd". Andy Griffith plays a Southern lowlife who stumbles into a major media role, sort of a cross between Elvis and Oprah, with the personality and accent of John Edwards on PCP.

The quote is "Well, he's got the courage of his ignorance, I'll give him that."

The Watchmen movie!

To be made by the director of 300! And the plot is supposedly unchanged, and still happening in 1985. My cup runneth over.

Random snapshot of my brain

Whilst waiting for a program to install I came across this article. Blurb:

A North Pole expedition meant to bring attention to global warming was called off after one of the explorers got frostbite.

I then had the thought that there is no evidence that nature, though beautiful, likes us. Then I thought of the metaphor that everyone views the environment like it's their grandparent's house. "Oh, everything is so old and irreplaceable, let us gaze in rapt awe and try to be worthy of it someday". Mind you, what we do with it is another story.

Then I was reminded of an Ayn Rand line which goes something like "Technology is man's victory over nature". Then I Googled that trying to find the exact quote. That led me, somehow, to this page about one of my favorite thinkers, Albert Jay Nock. His excellent auto-biography Memoirs of a Superfluous Man is still one of my favorites. Then I started thinking of my other favorite social critics and came up with Eric Hoffer, H.L. Mencken, as well as Nock. All three of them have a distinctive, elegant style which I associate with urban living prior to the fifties. All three of them wrote from cities (San Francisco, Baltimore and New York) and two of them published all their work between 1900 and 1950. I'm also drawn to movies set in cities in that era.

I wonder why those circumstances have that appeal to me, then I decided to write it all down to clarify it in my head.

And there you go.

300

I just got back from seeing 300. It matches the hype. The visuals are stunning, the story magnificently told, the actors all unknown and brilliant. It makes the top five of all time list.

An interesting movie

I finally finished watching the documentary Bastards of the Party, an interesting history of gang activity in Los Angeles from the 40s to the present day. It's not a balanced take and doesn't pretend to be, which is quite refreshing.

One quibble - the historian explaining the rise of crack traced it back to Iran-Contra and the CIA-crack folklore. I've always found this ridiculous. It assumes that the government was that clever (doubtful) and also that no one else would have thought of taking a commodity that sells for five cents in South America and selling it for fifty dollars in the US.

Beyond that though, well worth watching.

Short 2006 best of list

• Best New Movie - The Departed
• Best Book - Truth Imagined by Eric Hoffer
• Best TV Show - The Shield
  
• Best Old Movie Seen For the First Time - Tie - The Seventh Seal (Ingmar Bergman) / The Testament of Dr Mabeuse (Fritz Lang) / The Big Sleep (Bogart/Bacall). Only The Big Sleep is in English, where as the other two are probably much better off being subtitled. All three are from the 30s and 40s.
  
• Best New Gadget - Garmin Street Pilot - I never get lost anymore
• Best New General Interest Site - DamnInteresting.com
• Best Concert - Prince - though to be honest I didn't see that many in 2006
• Best New Band discovered - Freakwater - I have no idea how I managed to not know about them until this year, they're perfect for me.
  
• Biggest physical accomplishment - Biking the entire Silver Comet Trail - 126 miles - in one day with no rest and very few stops for water and such. It did take forever
• Biggest professional accomplishment - staying in business for another year I suppose
• Biggest artistic accomplishment - successfully finishing two whole songs, and actually doing open mic nights
  

One of the better lines of all time

From the recently seen (by me) Double Indemnity

Keyes: Walter, can I be blunt with you?
Neff: Of course.
Keyes: I'm a great man.

The two funniest things I've seen today

• The wonderful YouTube Series - "Will It Blend" featuring marbles, cell phones, rake handles, etc
• An edited version of Pulp Fiction that contains only the F-word. Surprisingly long. Not safe for work by any means.