I'm a genius!

I got all the questions right in this quiz I randomly stumbled upon while look at serious news.

Which celebrity is taller?

In My Father's Den

Chocolate! Biscotti! Tacos!

I was doing some random searching around on allrecipes for some stuff to try out and figured I wanted to try these recipes out sometime...

• Lime Chicken Soft Tacos
• Spring Biscotti
• Spring and Leak White Bean Soup
• Absolutely Sinful Chocolate Chocolate Chip Cookies (why say chocolate twice?)

Gonna be some fun times. Especially that last one. Sounds yummy.

Blue Velvet

Just because I can. My flatmate rented Blue Velvet this week so here are some random snapshots from the film.

Seven Days of Robert Altman: Day Four

Day One: M*A*S*H
Day Two: McCabe & Mrs Miller
Day Three: The Long Goodbye

Well, we're now onto the last film of the 70's that I've seen of Altman's. Tomorrow will be quite a leap in time after this. Many consider Nashville to be Altman's magnus opus - this three hour epic film of five days in Nashville. 24 main characters all just living. It's truly an amazing film, one of the few films that feel organic when you watch it. It truly feels like a living breathing thing. The video is one of the songs - I'm Easy by Keith Carradine, though I would have really liked to have used the 200 years song from the very beginning.

Some Quick Film Reviews

Seen a bunch of films over the last couple of weeks. So without wasting any more time...

Thelma & Louise (1991, Ridley Scott)
I now finally understand that Simpsons episode where Marge meets Ruth Powers. This is one of those movies that everyone has seemed to have seen except for me... but not anymore! The film itself was really enjoyable. 8/10

Strictly Ballroom (1992, Baz Luhrmann)
I saw Moulin Rouge! about a month ago which introduced me to the exorbitant Baz Luhrmann. The amazing thing is how effortlessly he pulls it off. This film is certainly a charmer. 8/10

A Mighty Wind (2003, Christopher Guest)
Back in first year I randomly got the poster for this film to liven up the hallway in my hall of residence. There was something about those cheery faces that I felt would unsettle everyone else on the floor. I'm a huge fan of the previous movies (Best In Show, Waiting For Guffman, etc...) and this one was nice while not quite living up to those ones. 7.5/10

THX 1138 (1971, George Lucas)
I've never been a big fan of these totalitarian visions of the future movies. They all seem too 1984ish. A good one though. 7/10

Pret-A-Porter (1994, Robert Altman)
This is the eighth Altman film I've seen and this one just felt like Altman going through the paces. It was him applying all those techniques he's known for but for what? It was funny, had some interesting characters and worked. Maybe I'm just experiencing some Altman burnout - seven of those Altman films I saw this year. 7/10

Scones!

Not doing anything tonight so got out an ancient Alison Holst cookbook and made some Cinnamon Pinwheel scones. They looked a little odd (which all my cooking does - presentation is probably the last thing I care about when I cook) but they tasted alright - which is the important thing. (not saying that presentation doesn't have it's place - if someone plonked a heap of purple mush in front of me then I'd feel funny eating it no matter how good it tasted)

I went for a walk up Baldwin St today - billed as the steepest street in the world but not actually true.

Finally, when I was making dinner some drunk guy walked into our flat. He wasn't too much different from the normal drunk person though he did claim that he would happily drink my dishwashing liquid. Don't think anyone's ever claimed that before. I was tempted to try him out but that stuff's expensive.

Seven Days of Robert Altman: Day Three

Day One: M*A*S*H
Day Two: McCabe & Mrs Miller

Altman's 1973 adaptation The Long Goodbye, based on the novel by Raymond Chandler bombed at the box office. Initially marketed as a straight-up film noir. Elliott Gould as Marlowe didn't convince anyone. With time, it's been more accepted as what it was: a satire. The video below is the opening of the film - it shows many of Altman's characteristic techniques - a warning though - it's ten minutes long.

Selection Effects

Tyler Cowen writes...

When it comes to Roman literature there is also a significant selection effect, namely what later manuscript collectors thought was worth preserving and protecting. Many novels were written during Roman times, but not many of them have come down to us and thus the average quality of Roman literature may look artificially high, just as the average quality of today's literary menagerie looks artificially low.

Whenever someone claims to me that movies today are crap (commonly either snobs or oddly people who actually never watch old films and only watch contemporary films anyway - especially the most stale of today's genre - the romantic comedy) I normally spout out something like that. Though I replace "roman literature" with "old movies" and "manuscript collectors" with "those people who preserved film prints". This effect is magnified with old movies, especially silent films since these movies were filmed on Nitrate film stock which without proper care would degenerate into goo. Provided it hadn't blown up first.

But the market also does this work as well, more films were made back in the pre-television days than now but only a handful of them actually survive. With the digital age upon us, it increases the chances that films will survive into the future. But not all of them, the market will sweep aside those films that were picked up by neither the mass consumer or the critic. With the bad movies gone the average quality of these movies goes up.

The same thing happens with all form of culture - music, books, whatever else there is...

Seven Days of Robert Altman: Day Two

In 1971, a year after MASH, Robert Altman released McCabe & Mrs Miller. His take on the Western. Youtube wasn't very giving with videos. All of them featured Leonard Cohen singing (as he provides the soundtrack) so I decided to give you the trailer.

Another Sunny Day

It's pouring down with rain and hail here... on and off in the typical Dunedin way. I was in the kitchen making my breakfast and my MP3 player had been providing me with sufficient gloomy music to match the gloomy weather. Until Belle & Sebastian's "Another Sunny Day" came on... a perky cute contrast that starts off with lyrics like this...

Another sunny day, I met you up in the garden
You were digging plants, I dug you, beg your pardon

Oh well... the rain has stopped now... again. The sun's even came out for a couple of minutes.

On to the last city!

After months of playing Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas I've finally made it to the last city (of three - this one is based on Las Vegas). Normally, I wouldn't bother posting this but with a bunch of controversy over the latest GTA I couldn't resist. My normal game experience normally ends in frustration as I fail to use my rocket launcher to shoot down a helicopter and end up blowing myself up because I can't aim the frigging thing.

Frustrated, I then go out and run over a bunch of children or force some prostitutes to eat some defecation. (OK, you can't do either thing in the game)

There is a comment on David Farrar's blog that's interesting. It's from a "Fletch" who quotes an interview with a former army guy about using first person shooters as part of training for army, police, etc... Well GTA isn't actually a first person shooter (bar a couple of occasions when you have to go into that mode) - you don't actually have to aim your gun - press a button and it'll happen automatically. Press circle and bullets come out and your target dies. The subject matter in the game is no worse than what you'll find in movies. I think the idea of the "immersion" effect of games is no different to the effect found in movies when you watch them in the right conditions (lights out, no distractions). So why should you attack video games when they are so much more artificial?

Anyway, I actually wanted to take a look at Family First, the organisation that's driving the controversy. Unfortunately they're another one of those organisations that seem to consider family values and christian belief one and the same. I hate these guys, I think if they ever want to be taken more seriously they need to actually divorce themselves from their christian side and distance themselves from the religious right.You do not have to be a Christian family to be a loving family that promotes good values.

These are the people that tried to have Californication banned (they were unsuccessful, though they did manage to get a large number of advertisers to withdraw). I took a glance through their recent news to take a look.

This article talks about a study that showed children watching MTV or BET (does BET even screen in New Zealand??) are exposed to something bad once every 38 seconds. Family First add their position at the bottom.

This material can be viewed free-to-air in NZ on C4 , and also on Sky TV e.g. Juice TV etc. Broadcasting standards in NZ are failing our children.

You can't directly compare C4 with the American MTV! C4 complies their programming from a wide variety of sources. They actually play music videos which MTV hardly does. MTV rather shows "a variety of pop culture, youth culture, and reality television shows aimed at adolescents and young adults" (wikipedia) which includes a lot of shit - shows like A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila that has 32 male and females vying for the love of a bisexual woman (this is actually screened in NZ on Sky on their MTV channel which may hit that mark mentioned before - that channel should be banned not because it's immoral but of the awful progamming). C4 and Juice TV would be nowhere near the "once every 38 seconds" mark that Family First is implying.

OK, I've completely gone off topic. I hate Family First, we get it. Watch this Daily Show segment on Gran Theft Auto IV.

What movies were better than their books?

Entertainment Weekly has a list of 23 disappointing movie adaptations. I must say, what a useless list. The films on the list could have been joined by hundreds of films - most of these felt like just personal gripes by the writes. Nearly every single movie made from a book is worse than its source material. It's the nature of adaptation. You leave things out, you have to change things, it's what needs to happen. Look at the first two Harry Potter films as examples of films that follow their source material to the letter. I consider them awful. Once they started to change things for the third film onwards that the Potter films became... ok.

Anyway, digression aside. A far more interesting (and shorter) list would surely be which movies are better than their source material? Out of the top of my head, some frequently mentioned ones would be the likes of The Godfather (Pauline Kael described Puzo's novel as trash - though I've also heard it described as a masterpiece. Guess I'll need to read it before passing judgement), Psycho (I guess, didn't Hitchcock buy up all the copies and hide them so he could keep his ending a secret?), Fight Club (Well, I hated the novel - the novelist even admitted that Fincher's ending was better), M*A*S*H (paraphasing Altman, the novel by Richard Hooker was awful - full of racism and sexism), Dr. Strangelove (Kubrick completely changed the tone. The novel (Red Alert) was meant to be completely serious), The Shining (Kubrick again - King hated Kubrick's version and made his own inferior version)... That's all I can think of off the top of my head. Time to search for some actual lists...

This New York Times article from 2005 is interesting... mainly for the introduction.

"Honestly, I much prefer the book," a young-looking François Truffaut says, comparing his film "Jules and Jim" to the novel that inspired it. In an old television interview included on the recent DVD of the film, Truffaut recalls finding Henri-Pierre Roché's 1953 novel in a second-hand bookshop. "It made me sad to think it did something films couldn't do," he said of the book, which mesmerized him. "In a movie, if a woman loves two men, one man is nice and the other isn't."

He did more than figure out how to translate that blameless story of a femme fatale whose love swerved back and forth between two best friends; it became his masterpiece. Truffaut succeeded so well that today it's easy to say: "Jules and Jim" was a novel?

This 2003 blog has a post about it. Another 2003 blog post talks about the Lord of the Rings movies and this cracked article here also has a list.

Seven Days of Robert Altman: Day One

I'm about to write an essay about the late film director Robert Altman - so you should expect lots of writing about Altman on this blog. I find him to be completely fascinating as a director and he's currently my latest favourite director - so far this year I've seen six of his films. With the one I watched at the end of last year that's a total of seven - so I've decided to dedicate this week to Altman and will post a new youtube video every day of an Altman movie.

I start off with M*A*S*H which was the film that broke him into the mainstream way back in 1970. This video has the song that will later become the theme song for the television series... with the lyrics removed of course...

Review: Easy Rider (1969)

I'm currently doing a course about New Hollywood, the period in film history that started in 1967 when the studios relinquished creative control over to the directors. This period arguably ended about eight years later though Wikipedia puts the time of death in 1982 with Francis Ford Coppola's One From The Heart (which I need to see - I missed the screening on Tuesday). When I saw this on the video store shelf - I had to get it out on $1 day.

Easy Rider, always mentioned after the likes of Bonnie & Clyde and The Graduate is one of the earliest films of New Hollywood and you can definitely see the aesthetic of the period shining through here. I feel that the freedom that the directors had is nicely encapsulated by the words of the characters.

However, I didn't really feel anything for this film. It was good, a very enjoyable 94 minutes of my life. Ultimately, 7.5/10

(As a sidenote: reading the Wikipedia section on the production section of Easy Rider makes director Dennis Hopper sound very intense. Not someone to mess with...)