Voder-Vocoder

Saw today that Battlestar Galactica “Razor” was nominated for the 2008 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form. I wouldn’t call a 104 minute film “short,” even if the abridged version premired on TV before it was released on DVD. I also noticed that I still hadn’t watched it, even though the Netflix DVD was sitting on my desk.

So I watched it. Four nested flashbacks. Yeah, I’d vote for it, were I a voter. Although I did like “Blink.”

Netflix keeps a record of what you’ve rented. That makes reviews easier:

===THE YEAR IN RENTAL DVDs 2007===

Hot Fuzz - loved it. May have to buy it at some point.

Stranger than Fiction - was okay. Don’t need to see it again.

Reign Over Me - liked it. Kind of depressing, but good.

Black Snake Moan - still can’t decide on this one. It may be a horrible movie, but I watched the whole thing.

300 - eh. Too full of itself.

Heroes: Season 1: Disc 1 - didn’t like it. Uninteresting characters. No narrative hook.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - not so good the second time through.

Howl’s Moving Castle - very good. Can’t believed I waited iuntil this year to watch it.

Who Killed the Electric Car? - I want an electric car.

Shopgirl - Eh. Clair Danes needs to play a new charater once in a while.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - don’t need to see this one twice. Was okay.

Children of Men - good movie. A little depressing.

MirrorMask - okay.

The Queen - okay.

Borat - awful. Had to send back mostly unwatched.

Running with Scissors - not that interesting.

Seven Years in Tibet - I liked it. Don’t need to see it again.

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts - well done. I recomend it. But don’t need to see it again.

Clerks 2 - unnessisary sequil.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai - I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it before. Wonderful.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby - Eh. Not that great.

The Island - I liked it. Good movie.

Saw The Beach on late night TV. Would have been a better movie if Leo had died in the end.

New movies I want to see:

A Scanner Darkly—I am not a big PKD fan, but I have never failed to enjoy a Philip K. Dick movie adaption (Blade Runner, Minority Report, Total Recall, Paycheck).

Clerks II—Guilty pleasure. I can probably wait for this to come out on DVD, but if I get bored, I might catch it in the theater.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend—This looks bad, but it might be good.

Movies I’ve seen so far this summer:

X-Men 3—The new director did not do nearly as badly as he could have done.

An Inconvenient Truth—Definitely worth seeing. If you are unwilling to shell out a few dollars for a ticket, you can download the presentation itself.

A Prairie Home Companion—This was a really slow movie that didn’t really go anywhere.

Superman Returns—It felt like a Superman movie. That’s all I really wanted from this one.

Dead Man’s Chest—In adventure stories, the coin of the realm is strangeness. Think of the Barsoom stories.

(source)

Everytime I go into my storage room in the basement, I get spider bites. New plan: I’m getting as many boxes out of there this evening as possible, and leave the big stuff for much later. Then I avoid the basement.

[hal@lensman]$ time-till-I-leave-town.sh
Time until Mon Jul  3 09:00:00 CDT 2006:
3747726 seconds
3.7477 megaseconds
6 weeks + 1.3764 days
43.3764 days

[hal@lensman]$ cat ~/bin/time-till-I-leave-town.sh
#!/bin/sh
DDAY=”Mon Jul  3 09:00:00 CDT 2006″
SECONDS=$(( $(date -d “${DDAY}” +%s)-$(date +%s) ))
MEGASECONDS=$( echo “scale=4;$SECONDS/10^6″ | bc )
WEEKS=$( echo “$SECONDS/604800″ | bc )
DAYS=$( echo “scale=4;$SECONDS/86400″ | bc )
EXTRAS=$( echo “scale=4;$DAYS-($WEEKS * 7)” | bc )
echo “Time until ${DDAY}:”
echo “$SECONDS seconds”
echo “$MEGASECONDS megaseconds”
echo “$WEEKS weeks + $EXTRAS days”
echo “$DAYS days” ; echo “”

I saw Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers on Saturday. If you liked Hero, then you will probably like this one a little better. Ther story is a bit more tight. If you hated Hero, then I don’t know what you would think of this one.

Again, it has beautiful cinimatography. Again, the plot has twists and turns. I liked Ziyi Zhang’s performace in this one a lot.

In the last three years, I have rented maybe one movie on VHS. The only reason I keep my VHS player is to play my original-edition Star Wars trilogy (which will never be availible on DVD).

I’ve been striving to simplify my system. I’m getting close to the ideal:

Gone are:

• Tape deck
• VHS (It can be plugged into the TV if I need it.)
• DVD player
• CD player

I would someday like to replace my big computer case with a tiny Shuttle computer, my CRT TV with either a LCD screen or a projector, and my amplifier with something smaller.

Home is behind, the world ahead,
And there are many paths to tread
Through shadows to the edge of night
Until the stars are all alight.
Mist and shadow, cloud and shade,
Away shall fade ! Away shall fade!

—Tolkien(*)

(*) In the movie Return of the King the original word of the walking song were altered. “Mist and twilight” became “mist and shadow.” Lines line “Fire and lamp, and meat and bread,/And then to bed! And then to bed!” were left out because they were not sufficently moody.

I like the movie version.

Noone liked Matrix Revolutions. I did. It was great.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 used 450 gallons of fake blood.

Dead Alive used over 1000 gallons of fake blood.