movies


7
Aug 19

Thought bubbles, I really disliked the thought bubbles

Wrote a letter today. Who does that anymore? Well, I did, that’s who. I wrote and re-wrote and then proofread and then saved the file and uploaded it. But it was a letter! There were paragraphs and a salutation and everything!

This evening I went for a bike ride today, and once again my mind’s eye was stronger than my legs. I could blame the hills, I suppose, but the route I choose is about the flattest batch of roads available to me. And, even still, if I had the opportunity to ride tomorrow I’d think the same thing: I’ll do the usual and then add on the other usual for a super usual! But then I’d be out there and suddenly that doesn’t feel practical for any number of reasons real or imagined.

My speed has improved a little bit again, so back to average I guess, even as my left foot protests against the effort. The goal, as ever, is to build up many more miles. The usual is fun, fast, conveniently located and (mostly) flat. But it doesn’t add distance. And since I’m using all the flat roads, that means it’ll soon be back to the hills.

Here’s a bit of video from today’s ride. It’s of a new road we tried last week.

It is a lovely little neighborhood. Seems quiet and uneventful. I bet they don’t even need a Spider-Man.

I watched Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse today. Let me just say that Spider-Man was never my favorite. Peter Parker was always wrestling with his conscience and that wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to see in the limited amount of time I spend reading comics. (I was more of a Tony Stark comic fan. Before Robert Downey Jr. made it real, flying from your hands and feet was just cool. Plus the pulp version of Stark always played as more vulnerable than a worrier.)

And while Spidey was never my favorite, and I don’t normally watch a lot of cartoon movies, this was such a great story. It was just as good or better as every one had said. It is hip, it moves fast and it feels like a comic. It doesn’t insult the audience at all. The characters that are supposed to be likable are lovable. The villains are ill-defined, but that’s a complaint you probably never said about them in print, and seems very much a Cinematic Problem. But all of the usuals make an appearance, however brief. There’s some sort of understanding that you already have the gist of the bad guys, but let’s be realistic and acknowledge that people don’t come to these things as a blank slate. Even if they did: bad guy is bad.

Perhaps most importantly, it re-sets Spider-Man as a young character again. The new guy is back in high school, with some new new skills. Surely Sony will be looking to capitalize on this. Assuming they even have the rights, this week. Who can keep it all straight?

Even better, it introduced me to Spider-Noir. Give me a semi-fourth-wall-breaking 1930s Nick Cage Spider-Man show and I’d faithfully watch every sardonic adventure.

Now you may be wondering what this has to do with the letter I wrote today. The marginalia was filed with dangling webs. A sticky stationary makes for a letter that is hard to put down.


16
Mar 18

No wendigos allowed

Here is today’s podcast. And if you’re hungry before you listen, we’ll either solve that problem or give you some ideas. It seems there’s a new kind of meat that may be making its way into your grocery shopping list. I doubt, very seriously, that it will happen, but it is fun to contemplate, as you will soon see.

I went for a run after work, sneaking in a quick four miles around the neighborhood before our dinner with friends. And I told them about this episode. Everyone agrees it is an unusual one, even the guy sitting at the table next to us.

We were at an upscale fancy kind of place, our friend who suggested it promised the best burgers in town. And that’s always one of those things you should follow up on. Because it would be a shame to not know where the best burger in town is, first of all. Plus, the previously nominated best burger in town was merely pretty decent. There was nothing wrong with it, but we went the one time and haven’t been back in 15 months, for whatever reason.

But this place, maybe we’d go back. The burgers were certainly good, if a bit overpriced. But you’re paying, you see, for the pleasure of sitting quite close to the next table over. And those people are paying for that same privilege. So it only seemed right that I should talk about recording a podcast where we discussed what is called clean human meat.

The guy at the next table was a little put off by this. Probably because I was talking about it. Definitely because I was talking about it with a little volume. Hey, these podcasts don’t publicize themselves, you know.

Anyway, we probably stayed at that places for about three hours, on the strength of burgers and fish. And everyone had a lovely meal and time. Our dinner dates work in the library and the art museum, so they have plenty of interesting things to tell us about. And we decided in the course of all of that that there are movies we all haven’t seen, but should.

How do you know which movies those are? It seems like we’d all need the input of someone else on this. But who knows all of the movies you’ve seen? No one, really. So it is down to self reporting. And so we decided on a methodology — because this is what you do on a Friday night in a college town. After much debate and thought, we figured we would self-nominate five films each from the Oscar nominated Best Screenplay and Best Film categories dating back to 1980. So you have to go over those and find five movies per. Mine were:

Her
Grand Budapest Hotel
Lady Bird
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri
The Savages

Elizabeth
In The Bedroom
The Theory of Everything
Get Out
The Post

Next, someone is going to gather all of those in a spreadsheet and we’re going to start watching the common overlaps. There will be popcorn and merriment and, I’m sure, endless critiques.

There will be no human meat.

Happy weekend!

More! On Twitter, on Instagram and more podcasts.


5
Dec 17

And now a few Twitter notes about different mediums

More on Twitter and on Instagram.


20
Apr 17

An engagement, and a movie

So this happened in the studio the other night:

Tonight: In honor the Little 500 races, which take place tomorrow and Saturday, we are tonight watching Breaking Away.

The Yankee has never seen it. I grew up with this movie. It holds up pretty well, even if the race now seems like the weakest act of the movie.

This part is true. The part where Dave picks up the young woman’s book and chases her down has that nice little chase sequence through the campus (which isn’t shown in a logical linear order, of course). When he turns right, by the greenhouse, he’s going on to 3rd Ave. We drive that road regularly and it also seems a miracle no one gets hurt there on a regular basis.

Hey, look! That’s our building!

Here’s a slightly different perspective of Franklin Hall:

That tree is also not there.

That scene plays a lot different to me now. The whole sequence there is perfectly touching.

We’ll be at the real thing this weekend. The women’s Little 500 is tomorrow and the men’s race is Saturday.


11
Jan 17

Notions of time

I was going to write more, but the day got away from me. The days all get away from us from time to time, even as we know the days are always going some way or another. That’s the thing about us, we can seize the day, occasionally, if we are so inclined. But we can never grab the day and hold onto it. Not for very long anyway. I assume this has something to do with how our brains perceive time. We’re flowing through it, or it is flowing around us or some thing or another and the net you are holding isn’t woven with small enough mesh. Or some such.

But, hey! I did entirely rework a page on the site you’ll never see! And I found two or three things there that I need to fix. It is an administrative thing and you don’t care at all. I might not, either, but I started it long ago for reasons that probably didn’t make much sense then and probably mean less now. But I have it under control. For a time.

Also, I have added new images to the top and bottoms of the blog, here. As you might have noticed those are rotating images, built with a bit of code that offers the viewer a random image based on numerical sequence. Presently there are 81 headers and 81 footers. They all have varying heights and they are all 900 pixels wide. So I’m staying with this format for a long time, I suppose. I’ve been with this format for a good long while, as well.

I’ve been watching HBO-produced biopics. There was an Lyndon Johnson movie based on a play and then a two-parter on Winston Churchill that I’ve started. They are both interesting and probably have some accurate anecdotes, and they compress years of civics lessons into two-hour capsules. But try as I might, I see Anthony Mackie and Frank Langella rather than Rev. Martin Luther King and Sen. Richard Russell. Bryan Cranston fills out LBJ pretty well.

But I don’t know that you can really portray LBJ’s in a PG environment. The trailer was really good, I felt, so I watched it. The movie was worth seeing if you like political pieces or period pieces. There were a few really quite powerful moments. I think it captured the best parts of the worst parts of a hard, challenging time.

Stephen Root was J. Edgar Hoover. He is great in everything and there’s one little moment he has that nods at all of the things the cinematic audience we’ve learned about Hoover in recent years. Which makes me think of this in much the same way as we do comic book universes. Except, of course, this was real life. The most fake thing was the makeup they put on poor Josh Lyman to try to turn him into Hubert Humphrey. Should have spent more time on that.

I was half-listening to the Churchill story (turns out this is a BBC-HBO co-produced project) when I heard Lena Headey. Nothing takes you out of the 1940s like an accidental Game of Thrones reference. The problem is that these sorts of films always come off as cartoonish, either in a harsh way or in a soft focus, after school special sort of way:

I’ve been running indoors. Someone left the door open and Canada is cooling all of outdoors so we’ve been at the track. The track is a fine three-lane affair. Eight laps to a mile, only slightly better paces. It is made from special grade painful cement designed to hurt old joints, I think. But it looks like this outside:

outdoors

So it is a trade off. Eighteen miles in the last couple of days. And now it’ll be a few more days before I set off again. Hopefully outside, where my stride is sometimes better.

The nicest part about being inside, after avoiding hypothermia, I mean, is that my running app can’t cope. For the first three miles or so it things I’m running at a world class pace. I am not running at a world class pace. Also, it thinks this is my course:

map

That is not my course. My app is just going through a modern art phase. It takes no time at all to imagine that is an aggressive effort.