Culture

It appears to be the case that Jandek played at a festival in Glasgow yesterday. Whoa. (Thanks for the pointer, Chris!)

Eric Raymond flips allll the way over into the cult of tradition with a resounding thud (original): “A deadly genius is a talent so impressive that he can break and remake all the rules of the form, and seduce others into trying to emulate his disruptive brilliance — even when those followers lack the raw ability or grounding to make art in the new idiom the the genius has defined.” He then goes on to explain that Picasso, Coltrane, Joyce, Schoenberg, and Brancusi killed their respective fields by being so brilliant. For bonus points, he posits that the problem was caused by the death of the patronage system. You see, once artists were permitted to do whatever they liked, some of them produced deadly work. ...

Boston mob movie trend juggernaut: The Boondock Saints, Snitch, Southie, Mystic River, and The Departed. It’s a small juggernaut.

The Barry Hughart pages (original) are small yet worthy of study; for those who don’t wish to study, well, the original draft of Bridge of Birds is here (original). There, that was easy. (Via Kip.)

I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow again today, and my adoration of Polly Perkins is confirmed. And here’s why. (Spoilers, of course.) First and foremost, she is a woman who stands on her own two feet. Her career is important to her and by all evidence she’s pretty good at it. On second viewing, the triangle created by the skills of Polly, Dex, and Joe is fairly obvious: Polly notices, Dex analyzes, and Joe acts. Time and time again, Polly’s the one who notices things first. She makes contact with Doctor Jennings. She finds the scrap of map that Dex left behind. She figures out that the staff is important. She realizes the purpose of the rocketship. ...

It occurred to me this weekend, while I was contemplating buying a dozen Powers graphic novels, that we’re probably not more than five years away from solving the comics life span conundrum. (Namely, the vast mass of the history of comics is not available for reading; you can’t go back and check out Grant Morrison’s early Marvel Universe work, for example.) But let’s say we live in a world in which all comic book pages exist in digital form, which is a world we may well live in already if that’s a useful step in the printing process. So DC puts up a web page, which allows you to select a comic book title and a range of issues within that title. Click “Buy” and the pages of those issues are assembled into a single file and sent off to the print on demand printer. ...

The extended edition Return of the King DVDs will include (original): 2 disc 250 minute movie cut Commentary by the director and writers Commentary by the design team Commentary by the production team Commentary by the cast (with split personality dialogue between Gollum and Smeagol) Tolkien documentary From Book to Script documentary Designing Middle-Earth documentary Big-atures documentary (?) 2 WETA documentaries Costume design documentary Horse Lords documentary Cameras in Middle-Earth documentary Documentary on completing the trilogy Music documentary Soundscapes documentary 2 documentaries about the end of it all Cameron Duncan documentary Two Cameron Duncan short films, “DFK6498” and “ Strike Zone” Mumakil battle multi-angle feature Abandoned concept: Aragorn battles Sauron feature Photo galleries (2,123+ images) Tracing the Journeys of the Fellowship map feature New Zealand as Middle-Earth map feature That’s a hunka hunka burning DVD. Via Twitch (original).

Anyone know what happened to the blog known as “Frank Booth”? I was really digging his movie writing and then poof up and vanish.

“We’re not Oingo Boingo, but it’s a dead man’s party.” This is a pain for some, because it’s Flash, but here’s what you do: go to the Dead and Breakfast official site (original). Click on the poster. Blah blah lengthy Flash intro which you can skip some of. Stick with it. Eventually it comes through with a menu. Select “Music”. Woo hah! Hit “comin to kill ya.” That’s what I call a country/rap splatterpunk groove, baby.

Criminal, the remake of Nine Queens with John C. Reilly, Diego Luna, and Maggie Gyllenhaal; Ju-on, one of the best Japanese horror movies of recent years; Shaun of the Dead, zombie comedy; Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry doing Evelyn Waugh; and of course the three Boston Film Festival flicks I want to see this weekend. Kontroll is getting mixed (original) reviews (original) from Toronto, but who doesn’t like “ a cute girl in a bear costume (original)?” This is what I get for, um… deliberately rekindling my enjoyment of movies.