Your Dumpster with Grafitti is not a Character
I’ve become used to hearing people refer to various inanimate details of a film as being a “character,” and I’ve been content to more or less take them at their word. However, in watching one of the astonishingly pretentious bonus features of Children of Men I heard a production designer claim that the overall production design was a “character.” This will not stand.
In Hitchcock’s Rebecca Manderley can be said to be a character because the house is supposed to be a symbolic incarnation of Rebecca. Similarly, you can say that the country, the land itself, is a character in westerns and movies like Lawrence of Arabia, because it presents obstacles and blessings and forces characters to react. For the same reason, the sea might be said to be a character, and naturally ships like the Nostromo in Alien or the Enterprise in Star Trek can be said to have their demands and quriks etc.
The production design in Children of Men might be said to express the bleak outlook of a society without children, but that doesn’t make it a character unless the goddamn Club Obi Wan in Temple of Doom is also a character because it reflects the zeitgeist. By these standards, the two-headed quarter in The Dark Night should get a Best Supporting Actor nomination.
Time will tell.
8/22/2008
I don’t float like gravity and I have a cavity
In light of these facts, I bought a Diet Mountain Dew, figuring it couldn’t possibly be as bad as I remembered.
I was wrong and re-amazed that there are enough people losing bets to keep this drink in production.
Maybe the orange concentrate in real Mountain Dew has too many calories, so not only is DMD trying to simulate sweetness, but also citrusyness. And for some reason they threw in some wintergreen, so Diet Mountain Dew tastes like when you brush your teeth and drink juice, only all in one beverage.
I now feel like I’ve already brushed my teeth and had juice. Next step is pancakes and bacon, completely negating any theoretical caloric or dental hygienic gains from drinking a diet soda.
Its like the man once said “Dew or Dew not. There is no try.”
4/27/2008
AmeriKKKa’s Most Rockin’
Could the photo do any more to undercut the headline?
When I see a picture of a guy like that I expect some description of what is actually happening in the photo.
Obama’s Pastor, shown here dancing with Uma Thurmon, says he isn’t divisive.
Rev. Jeremiah Wright bitch slaps Katie Couric, calls for unity.
Rev. Wright rocks “Bulls on Parade” on Expert, but admits that there are two sides to every story.
4/15/2008
This Machine Kills Dreams
Recently, mostly due to stress, my mind has been overrun with clever turns of phrase. Just now, for no reason, the phrase “This Machine Kills Hipsters” sprung forth from my noggin. I google the phrase to see if there is a lucritive market for this phrase on bumper stickers, and obviously there is because there is year old picture of such a bumper sticker on flikr. Bastards.
A couple weeks ago, I was on the Muni and the phrase “Kind Hearts and Bayonettes” jumped into my head. That is an awesome turn of phrase, needs some subject matter, but wow is that clever! Some guy at Sight and Sound certainly thought so, and two years ago he used that phrase as a title for his article on films about the IRA. Limey twat!
The only thing I can make into crappy merchandise now is my old standby.
1/29/2008
This post has the narrowest appeal imagineable.
I recently bought a Sandisk Sansa mp3 player. I installed Rockbox on it to play ogg vorvbis files and found that my audio program, Amarok, still couldn’t use MTP to transfer ogg files to the Sansa because USB support isn’t yet implemented in Rockbox so I have to boot into the standard Sansa firmware, which I think tells Amarok to quit trying to stuff it with oggs.
Happily there is a fuse interface calledmtpfs that allows you to copy files to the Sansa without much trouble.
To make my life even easier I wrote a bash script that will 1) Make a mountpoint called “sansa”; 2) Mount the mtp device to that mountpoint; 3) Unmount and delete the directory when you are done.
It is an ugly hack of a script, which is why I hid it after the jump.
Enjoy or ignore (depending on your interest/need)
Read the rest of this entry »
12/24/2007
A Word On Cloverfield
There are three weeks before it comes out and I am already sick of this film. Therefore I offer these two resolutions:
1) I will not see the movie in the theater, even if the movie turns out not to be a piece of shit being hyped to the moon and released in fucking January because the producers are trying to buy the gross.
2) If the monster isn’t Cthulhu or Apache Chief I am mailing a turd to said producers.
Together we can make a difference.
11/21/2007
A New Record?!
So for lunch I had a turkey & bacon sandwich (not spectacular), then for a nice snack I had some beef jerkey, then for dinner I had the last few chunks of TJ’s frozen chicken nuggets and janapeno shrimp. If I can work in some tuna and venison I will have consumed every common food animal in a single day.
Oh crap, and calamari too.
This is still doable. Totally doable.