Tag: movies

The Color of Magic

This
DVD is actually two episodes made for TV of the Pratchett
novels The Color of Magic and The
Light Fantastic.

Like Hogfather,
which was made a couple of years before The color of
magic, it’s very faithful to
the
book, and very inventive visually. This is unsurprising
because Pratchett himself was involved in the production. (He
even had a bit part in The color of Magic.) Not
everything in these movies looks the way I’d imagined it when
I read the books, but you aren’t going to find images that are
explicitly contradicted in the books.

I was watching with two friends, one of whom is also a
Pratchett fan, and the other hasn’t read any of his books. The
non-fan gave up and went home before the end of the first
episode. I had been wondering even before that happened whether
this movie was suitable for someone who hasn’t read the books.
Not that the books aren’t confusing and inexplicable in places,
but readers of speculative fiction are more used to that than
watchers of movies.

Also, although these were the first two books Pratchett wrote
about Discworld,
they probably aren’t the best place to start even for a reader.
I got started with Men
at Arms, based on my principle of getting the longest book
on the library shelves at the moment, when I don’t have better
advice about where to start. When I loaned Bonnie one to start
with when she was first in the hospital, I picked Maskerade,
because of the music and overweight prejudice themes,
although when she liked it, I brought her Hogfather
pretty soon afterwards.

In general, the reason to start this series somewhere in the
middle is that Pratchett did get better. The later ones depend
an awful lot on character and plot development earlier in the
series, but the middle ones not so much, because there’s a lot
less character and plot development in the early ones.

So if you’re a Pratchett fan, you’ll probably enjoy these
movies. If you aren’t, watching Hogfather might
give you some idea of whether you might want to be one, but
you probably shouldn’t bother with The color of
Magic until you’ve read at least some of the books. In
general, reading the books is better than watching the movies,
good as they are.


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The Amazing Mrs. Palin

I didn’t think until this morning to connect Sarah Palin to the
tv show The
Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which describes a supermarket manager
who becomes Prime Minister of Great Britain.

The New York Times has an article
this morning
about the ways the Republican establishment attempted to advise
her on how to become one of them. The quote that struck me was:

Mr. Malek [described earlier in the article as “a longtime Republican
kingmaker”] said he told Ms. Palin that “You have got to set up a mechanism so you can return calls.”

“You are getting a bad rap,” he recalled saying. “Important people are
trying to talk to you. And she said, ‘What number are they
calling?’ She did not know what had been happening.”

I am someone who frequently tries to organize people whose desire
to be in touch with the world isn’t ardent enough to have forced
them to organize the possible ways of getting in touch with them
so that there’s a reliable way to make contact. That “What number
are they calling?” sounds really familiar. You have work phones
and home phones and cell phones and email addresses and fax
numbers, and nobody could possibly check all of those all the
time, so if you hear that someone has tried the wrong one, you
tell your informant what the right one this week is. And I can
see where kingmakers aren’t used to dealing with
people like this. In my part of the world, even successful
organizers on a much lower level than the ones who run campaigns
for Governor are better organized about how to tell people how to
get in touch with them than this.

As I remember the TV show, Mrs. Pritchard does have some
trouble adjusting to living in the middle of the mechanisms set
up so that a Prime Minister’s phone calls get returned and
commitments get recorded. It’s part of the unreality of the
format that it’s a temporary adjustment difficulty that gets
wrapped up in a 50-minute show. But it’s also part of the
portrayal of Mrs. Pritchard as an unusually intelligent woman that
she does realize the necessity of the mechanisms.

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This is England

This
movie is about a 12 year old boy who is temporarily
recruited into a skinhead group in northern England.

It’s very well-done. I could have sworn I smelled the pot
during the scene where they all get high and sit around
giggling.

It’s also fairly unpleasant to watch a fair amount of the
time. So watch it when you’re in the mood for that. I realized
I was when I was browsing through the channel guide and it was
on one of the stations I don’t get, so I logged on to Netflix
Watch Now.

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One third down

I started this project of posting something to my blog every
day on February 25, four months ago. So if it ends up being a one-year
project, it’s one third done.

I have been successful at making a post every day. The only
one that was a real “I can’t post today” post was last Saturday.
And I really was over half way done with a fairly long and
difficult post which I really did post the next day. John Scalzi, one of my
role models for doing this, is known for posting a picture of
his cat when he doesn’t feel like writing, but he’s also done,
“I don’t feel like writing today” posts.

You as readers can tell better than I can how well it’s worked
for entertaining the readers, but there do seem to be some
readers. I started keeping track of how many hits things have
gotten in April sometime. And it looks like even the most
inconsequential posts get a couple of dozen readers, and the
ones that get hit by a search, or have been pointed to in a
large mailing list, get hundreds.

Speaking as a writer, it has done some of what I wanted it to
— I now know a lot more than I did a few months ago how to pick
a subject I can write about in less than an hour, and how to
polish the 20-30 minutes of writing into coherence and then stop
and publish.

I was thinking it would be possible to see what the blogging
has done for my writing by reading the blogs from the Boston
Early Music Festival two years ago
and this
year. Actually, there wasn’t as much difference in quality
of writing as I’d hoped for. The editing was definitely better
this year, and I think I’m more comfortable letting my
personality come out now. The quantity was definitely more two
years ago, but I remember that quantity as being very
difficult. This year I just decided it wasn’t possible to blog
and do 11 PM concerts and do morning concerts, so I just didn’t
do anything in the morning.

One disappointment about the blog as a way to connect with
people is that there really isn’t as much feedback as with the
other kinds of internet writing I do. If you post to a mailing
list or email a friend, it immediately becomes obvious if you haven’t
made your point. If you write a post on your blog, it’s quite
likely that you won’t get any comments at all. But it looks
like my audience has doubled in the last four months, so maybe
if I keep going I’ll eventually get an audience that
comments.

In terms of using the numbers of readers as a guide to what to
post about, it’s pretty inconclusive. It looks like of the easy
categories, the ones about food are read more than the ones
about the garden. The ones about using technology are also read
pretty often, probably because it’s something that people are
used to using google as a way to find answers for.

Another thing I hoped to accomplish was writing about my
experiences being involved in Bonnie’s death. That has
certainly happened more than it would have otherwise, but less
than I expected. This is partly because I still don’t have the
knack of breaking that subject up into small enough topics that
I can make those posts easy ones. Maybe I’ll get better at
it. Or maybe I’ll clear more time for hard posts, but that
doesn’t sound very likely. I’m still in the throes of the Serpent Publications
websiteredesign, and when that’s done, I’ll have to move on
to redesigning this site.

The posts about books and movies are usually pretty easy, and
seem to get read fairly often. For the
most read one, about Little Dorrit, I
took the precaution of taking brief notes over the week or so I
was reading the book, so I ended up with several interesting
things already written. I should try to be more organized about
doing that.

One surprising thing is that none of the people who actually
know me personally seems to read the blog regularly. This
actually makes it easier — I don’t use anyone’s actual name
when I write about them, but I certainly sometimes say enough to
make it clear to someone who knows my friends who I’m talking
about.

So, Gentle Reader, do let me know what you think. If there’s a
topic you’d like more (or fewer) posts about, let me know. If
you’d rather have pictures of Sunny or the garden than “I can’t
post today” posts, let me know. If I’m being completely
incomprehensible about something, tell me and I’ll try to clarify.

Marley and Me

This
film is exactly what you’d expect — Hollywood’s take on a
family’s love for its dog. I enjoyed it.

One thing some critics have said is that the
book is a little bit less of a Hollywood picture of a
marriage. So that might be a good thing to read, some time when
you need an easy read, or one you can get from the drugstore or
airport bookstore.

The end of the movie is a tearjerker, but putting down a dog
you love is a difficult decision, and people should have seen
versions of it in other people’s lives. I thought the John Grogan
character’s verbalization of it was apt: Marley, you tell me when
it’s time. And the funeral where the children write letters to
Marley is beautifully done.

Of course the “world’s worst dog” subtitle is completely
unjustified; Marley doesn’t ever do anything that any dog doesn’t
do. The Kathleen Turner dog-trainer turn is brilliant, but not at
all fair to the dog-trainers I’ve known.

The least well-captured aspect of dog-ownership in the movie
was the other dog-owners in the park — my experience is that you
can get a great deal of support for dealing with a difficult dog
(and they’re all difficult sometimes)
from other dog-owners.

Hollywood doesn’t really try for the kind of accurate depiction
of a lifestyle that some of the European and Independant
film-makers do, but they really should have done better in the
scene where Marley decided stairs are too hard, even to sleep with
the family. He lies down in front of a blazing fire, which the
family is just leaving there as they go to bed. I’m sure this
isn’t what the real Grogan family does.

In terms of my personal situation, Sunny is at the stage where
he doesn’t always hear me come in, but he’s still dealing with
stairs. It will be a major decision point if he decides he can’t,
since I can’t carry him, and our apartment starts on the second floor.

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Blu-ray discs

It took a while, but I finally convinced my new
computer (not the exact model) to play a blu-ray disc. (The problem was that the
system as shipped needed at least two upgrades. It wasn’t
trivial to set up the sound either.)

The picture on blu-ray is indeed better than with a standard
DVD, and I don’t have a problem with paying Netflix an extra
$2/month to get blu-ray discs when they have them.

Unfortunately, the plan is to move this computer upstairs to be
my desktop. I don’t think the old computer is powerful enough to
play blu-ray even if I bought it a drive. So I’ll probably go
back to watching regular dvd’s when I finish setting up this
one.

If I decide after doing that that I miss the blu-ray enough to
buy a player, I’ll let you know. Of course, ideally I would be
able to play the disc on the computer upstairs and watch it on
the TV downstairs, but I think they work pretty hard to stop you
doing things like that. I’ll definitely let you know if I figure
that one out.

In case you’re wondering, the movie I watched was Slumdog
Millionaire. I was a bit disappointed, given how much some
of the people I know had liked it. It was a good movie, with
one likable character, and good acting and photography, but it
was just a Hollywood movie. It was about an interesting
culture, but didn’t really have anything very enlightening to
say about that culture.

The advantage of watching this kind of movie at home
instead of in the theater is
that you can go feed the dog during the scene where they gouge
the child’s eyes out. So it is expecially nice to have the
extra resolution on a movie where there’s one scene you want to skip.

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Revolutionary Road, the movie

I posted about
the book a few weeks ago, and said I wasn’t going to bother
with the movie, but I watched it last night anyway.

It was actually better than I expected. Kate Winslett is
pretty good, although I still kept seeing January Jones from Mad
Men instead. As I expected, Leonardo DaCaprio’s matinée
idol good looks aren’t really right for Frank. And of course,
they don’t have anything like as much good detail in a 2-hour
movie as in a 300 page book.

For instance, the first scene in the book, which really grabs
the reader, goes into a great amount of detail about why the
production of Bus Stop that April stars in is such
a flop in spite of all the hard work that a lot of people did.
The movie skips all that and goes straight to the audience
reaction.

Another scene that’s especially good in the book and left out
of the movie was when April cleans all the dirtiest parts of the
house before botching the abortion.

I wasn’t especially impressed with the costumes and scenery,
but the sound track was definitely an addition.

Michael Shannon,
who plays the mentally ill son of the real estate lady was
especially good in a fairly difficult role.

So on the whole, read the book or watch Mad Men if
you really want period melodrama, but if you’ve done that and
still want some more, it’s not a terrible movie.

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Netflix Watch Now

I put a fair amount of effort after getting my new TV into
having a computer that could use it as a monitor.

I expected to run MythTV on it. I did in
fact once have MythTV set up to record off-the-air shows for
playing later, but I reinstalled because something else wasn’t
working right, and really haven’t felt the
need to set it up again.

You do get better results from mythtv than you do from
hulu.com, but hulu.com is a lot less trouble, and seems to get
most of the things I want to watch on over-the-air TV.

At the moment, I’m also paying for Comcast digital TV with HD,
which is necessary if you want to watch baseball games or tennis
matches or some of the political debates, but is disappointing as a way to watch movies or tv
shows. You can find things if you work hard enough, but there
isn’t the variety of TV reruns and old movies that you would want.

But if you have a Windows computer hooked up to your TV, and a
Netflix account only a
couple of dollars a month more expensive than the cheapest, and
a fast broadband connection, you
can watch an increasing number of things with the click of the
button.

I had been using it only intermittently until last week, but
last week Comcast sent me a postcard claiming they’d doubled my
connection speed, and suddenly, watching online seems about the
same quality as watching DVD’s.

I’d always assumed that when there was enough stuff available
and the quality was good enough you’d want to watch some movies
that way on the nights you wanted a movie and didn’t have a
DVD. This saves you paying for more DVD’s at a time than you’re
generally going to watch.

But it turns out that what it’s really good for is when you
come home tired and want to watch a comedy for a bit before
going to bed. I’ve been watching the first season of 30 Rock, which I didn’t get hooked on at the
time. It’s really a lot easier than channel surfing on the
cable box (which is unnecessarily complicated), and you get
something you know you’re in the mood for.

It would probably be even more virtuous to not use TV to unwind
at the end of the day, but given that’s what I’m used to doing,
and given I’ve spent all the money anyway, this seems like the
way to do it.

I don’t recommend spending lots of money just to get this, but
if like me you’re paying for a fast internet connection for
other reasons, it might be worth paying netflix and setting up
an old computer so you can do this.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

This
movie is pretty typical of what Woody Allen is doing these
days — Beautiful music and photography, good writing and acting,
an interesting location, characters a bit more individualized than
he used to do.

I’ve only spent a few hours in Barcelona (between trains), and
it was a cloudy day, so I’m not that good a judge,
but it certainly seemed like a good depiction of what the city looks
like. Not the loving detail of the New York brownstones in Interiors,
but probably as good as the London in Match
Point.

As far as the acting goes, Penelope Cruz stole the show in a
fairly minor role, but everybody was pretty good. They seem to be
well characterized without the irritating mannerisms of the
earlier Woody Allen.

The topic of the movie is the characters’ choices between
settling for the comfortable and getting burned by passionate
romance. The most intriguing interlude is the one in the middle
where the two Spanish artists form a ménage à trois
with the American dilletante. Not especially believable, but a
good fantasy, and it doesn’t last long.

So if that sounds interesting, you’ll probably enjoy this
movie. I don’t know of anyone who’s been as consistently as
interesting over as many decades as Woody Allen.

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Last Chance Harvey

This movie was a disappointment. Obviously
anyone who’s a huge fan of either Dustin Hoffman or Emma
Thompson is going to want to watch it. I won’t say we’re
wrong to want that, but really, there are better ways to spend
an evening. It’s slow-moving and in spite of a lot of really
good acting, not really a very convincing plot. You do believe
that they’re attracted to each other, but not that they really
convince themselves to give up their whole lives for each other
in less than a week.

I have a subjective reason for disliking movies where Dustin
Hoffman looks old — I graduated from high school the summer The Graduate came out, so I basically think of
him as my age. This is an oversimplification — the character
in The Graduate has just graduated from college,
not high school, and of course Dustin Hoffman was quite
a bit older than the character he was playing. So he’s actually fourteen years older than I am, but I still think of him as
a contemporary.

I no longer have the problem I had for quite a while after
reading Heartburn by Norah Ephron. Because he
played Carl Bernstein (Ephron’s ex-husband) in All the Presidents’
Men, I kept thinking of him as the person who was so mean
to Norah Ephron. But since the movie of
Heartburn came out, I now know it was Jack
Nicholson who was so mean to Norah Ephron, and that’s really an
easier fiction to sustain.

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