You’ve probably seen it, but if you haven’t, check out Google Maps. I would not want to be working at MapQuest right now.
Author: Bryant
Hey, so it turns out they do this new DVD thing every week. Whatta bonanza. Before I get started on talking about this week’s harvest, I wanted to mention that I picked up Delicious Library over the weekend. It is awesome, although I would recommend carefully backing up your database regularly, since I lost a couple of titles in some sort of hiccup at some point. But man, is it awesome. I cataloged 360 DVDs (yeah, yeah, I know) in about two hours of lazy work. Cool stuff.
If you have a region-free player or live in the UK, check out Ping Pong. I missed this at Fantasia, but the buzz is very good. Who doesn’ t like ping pong stories?
Over here, Deadwood is the biggie. It’s the hot HBO series of the year. Timothy Olyphant is one of my favorite actors and I’m looking forward to digging into the series as a DVD set — which is how I watch most of my TV these days.
There’s also a special edition of Raging Bull which I would get if I were still obsessive about commentary tracks. There are three of them here, including one with Scorsese and one with all the writers. There’s also a lot of behind the scenes footage, including a cool-sounding shot by shot comparison of De Niro and the real Jake LaMotta in the ring. Hm, maybe I still am obsessive. You can also get this as part of the Martin Scorsese Film Collection, which meshes nicely with last summer’s Martin Scorsese Collection release. But I digress.
Stephen Fry’s directorial debut, Bright Young Things, ships this week. I missed it in theaters but heard good things; I imagine it’s worth a rental.
If you’re catching up on Oscar viewing, Before Sunset is shipping. Great movie. Me, I have to believe there’ll be a special edition at some point which will improve on this bare-bones disc. I badly want a commentary on this one.
I reviewed Robot Stories back when I saw it at Fantasia. All that stuff is still true. It’s a good movie, although not one I feel the need to own.
Finally, Warner Home Video is releasing an 18 movie set entitled, accurately, Best Picture Oscar Collection. That title kinda says it all.
The Boston Globe has a good article on the Berwick Research Institute’s BRI:AIR show. (Mentioned previously here.) If you don’t buy the Globe, though, you won’t get the stunning picture of my brother. Word to the wise.
Speaking of which, he’s giving a lecture at Design Within Reach this Thursday at 7:00. The subject is studio furniture and designing for big box stores.
Hm. Looks like the Iraq election turnout numbers may be somewhat lower than first reported. Apparently the official number is 60%. Developing, as they say.
Ryuhei Kitamura’s Versus has, in something more or less akin to order: samurai, samurai zombies, convicts, gangsters, mysterious women, zombie gangsters, zombie convicts, cops, and mutants. Most of them wind up fighting each other. I won’t try to list the arsenals; rest assured that if you like guns, blades, fists, or feet you’ll be happy.
There’s also rambunctiously zestful overacting. It’s pretty great.
It’s sort of hard to figure out what else one can say about this movie. It’s not that it’s plot-light — there’s a ton of plot, to the point where some of the plot kind of spills out the sides and runs down the edge until Kitamura remembers to go clean it up. It’s not coherent plot, but it’s plot. There’s also a ton of style; Kitamura loves his electronica and he really loves rotating the camera around a fight scene. The fight scenes are good. All the characters have enough cool to freeze a smallish ocean.
So it’s not that there’s nothing to talk about; it’s more that the volume of the movie is cranked so far up that it’s difficult to talk about it rationally. (“And there were ZOMBIES!”) I liked the movie from the first scene, and I knew I was in for a great ride about ten minutes in after one of the yakuza calmly conducts a science experiment. It’s a long way from perfect; the last half an hour drags a little, and the camera rotates somewhat too much. But it’s a blast of an action movie. It’s easy to see why this made Kitamura a star director (his latest movie is Godzilla: Final Wars, the last Gozilla movie for at least a decade).
Make popcorn first.
For some reason, Glenn Reynolds is very interested in the Volcker Report, which implicates the UN in corruption involving Iraq’s food for oil program, but hasn’t said a word about CNN’s report that the US condoned Saddam’s oil smuggling.
About that election — I gotta say, it looks like it went better than I thought it would. The final results won’t be in for another week or two, but the preliminary indications look solid in terms of turnout, and I’m glad for that.
In retrospect, I should have specified the necessary turnout for each major ethnic segment of Iraq; the biggest problem I see going forward is that the Sunnis stayed away in droves. I’m hearing 20% turnout. That rekindles my worries about civil war in Iraq; a lot depends on whether or not any Sunni parties are included in the governing coalition. No party won a 2/3rds majority, which is the majority needed in the National Assembly to elect a President, so there will be a coalition. Who will the members be? That’s the big question.
Meanwhile, Turkey is still nervous about the Kurds. If the coalition winds up including the major Kurdish party, chances are that the price will be more Kurdish autonomy. Turkey would really hate that.
And, finally, it’s worth remembering that Sistani continues to be the big winner in Iraqi politics. He’s the reason they’re having elections now, rather than a complex series of regional caucuses out of which would come a constitution. Also, the Shia alliance is endorsed by him personally. He’s clearly the key political figure in Iraq at this point. Hope he stays healthy.
I report, fanboys and fangirls decide. Hey, this is the second in quick succession after Brad and Jennifer — does that mean there’s a third to come?
So, the legions ask, what should I be looking out for on DVD this week?
Well, the Babe Family Double Feature DVD is out. I’d be a little leery of this, although I liked both the Babe movies — it appears to be one DVD, so picture quality may suffer. Still, a cheap way to get two good movies.
DVD of the week is the Chariots of Fire Special Edition. It’s about time; this was previously only available in a full-screen version. It comes with commentary, screen tests, making of documentaries, deleted scenes, and so on.
I’m not going to buy the Karate Kid Collection, but I’ll sleep better at night knowing it’s out there. This appears to be new pressings — at least, the Karate Kid DVD has a bunch of extras, including a commentary by the director and the stars, which didn’t exist on the old standalone DVD. The other DVDs don’t have any such extras, though. I’d talk about how this set will ride on the coattails of Hillary Swank’s Million Dollar Baby, but I’m laughing too hard. “Sweep the leg!”
Hm, Ray is out. There are a bunch of editions, so choose wisely.
Bill Murray’s serious acting career probably started with Where the Buffalo Roam. Which was his third significant movie, so it’s not like his recent stuff is really a change of pace. He’s such a mensch. Anyhow, this DVD may or may not suffer from the same screwed up soundtrack as the Anchor Bay DVD release. (They didn’t get the rights to the original music and substituted pablum.) We’ll hope not.
Finally, there’s the complete run of some TV series called Wonderfalls that they tell me was good. All I know is that you could go over to the Borders in the Cambridgeside Galleria and buy a copy right now, cause it’s on display a day early.
Some notes on Apple’s new word processor/page layout software, Pages:
It is a decent enough word processor for pumping out text; it is a consumer-class page layout program that won’t fit the needs of anyone doing serious layout work. It’s been driving me nuts, trying to get stuff done in it. You can’t put borders around an in-line paragraph. You can put borders around a text box, but it’s all or nothing: you have four borders or none. You can’t shrink table row heights to an arbitrary size; there’s a fairly widely spaced point beyond which it will not go. You can’t delete a single page in the middle of, say, a newsletter. You can’t shuffle pages around.
All that said, it’s good consumer-grade stuff. You can do some fairly flexible things with layouts, including columns with individually controlled widths, multiple different column layouts on a single page, different headers/footers for even and odd pages, and so on. So it’s not a total loss, and it’s as good as anything for just writing in. But don’t expect to be formatting books in it.
For ten bucks less, you can get Nisus Express. Mellel is only forty bucks. On the other hand, for the $80 you pay for Pages, you also get a top-notch presentation program in Keynote.