Huh.

I was going to watch Infernal Affairs last night but then I said “whoa, Bryant. Cut back on the noir. There’s been nothing but for a while; maybe it’s time for a break?” In service of purging the noir obsession from my system, let’s get the last two movies I saw at the Brattle L.A. Noir series into one post, shall we? It’s especially convenient since they were a double bill. Sounds like a plan. ...

There’s a blog for everything. Papabile (original) is the one that follows the election of Pope John Paul II’s successor.

Warren Ellis said this in his [newsletter](http://web.archive.org/web/20180719030020/http://web.archive.org/web/20180719030020/http://www.warrenellis.com/badsignal.html/ (original)/) (original): It’s hard to do melody in comics. I’ve been messing around with it for years, trying to duplicate My Bloody Valentine or Pixies effects in comics, and it’s hard, verging on the impossible. I got close to it sometimes in The Authority: there’s a point in an old Dr Feelgood song where Lee Brilleaux yells “Eight bars on the old joanna” and Wilko Johnson’s guitar clangs like a fucking fire alarm for thirty seconds, and I got close to that in the second story arc — just closed my eyes and ran with it and cannibalised poor Hitch. But rhythm is easier. My basic trick is working three balloons or captions a panel, five panels a page. Bang bang bang. Five panels makes the page just slightly asymmetrical, puts a little flourish in there. Drop back to four/four. Nine-panel grid becomes breakbeats, if you cut the text back. Half the toolbox is in Bryan Talbot’s Luther Arkwright. I stole all my pauses from manga. There’s a trick they use, that Scott McCloud explicated best in Understanding Comics — when they pause, they whack at least two of the panel borders out to bleed, so the picture extends off the edges of the page and is no longer contained by gutters or panel flow. It says that, in this panel, time has stopped. Sticks down. Pause. It’s the long second in the back end of my current favourite single, Queen Adreena’s “Pretty Like Drugs,” where the music stops and all you can hear is Kaite Jane Garside saying “Pretty Like Druuuugs” and everything else is frozen around that moment and you stop breathing. ...

Part of a government! Seriously, it’s a good start.

The sterility of the computer-generated backgrounds is as repellent as the archaic gender stereotypes forced upon all the women in Sin City. Soulless excess fueled by unreasonable violence in a fantasy of a world that never should be: pah! Nah, not really. It fucking rocked. You could get bitchy about how Rodriguez just laid the comic book out on the screen, but nobody gets snotty about faithful adaptations of Shakespeare. It’s a high-octane, note-perfect accomplishment. I dunno if I’d call it great cinema, although I think the cinematography and the use of black and white was superb… hm. Maybe I would call it great cinema. It’s easy to discount the look of the film and the skilled use of spot color cause it was filmed in digital. That’s a mistake. Filming in digital doesn’t make beauty easy. Just look at what Photoshop can do in unskilled hands for proof of that. ...

The Brattle film calendar wonders how John Boorman could make a movie as good as Point Blank and then go on to make something as lousy as Zardoz. But come on: Boorman is all about the semi-surreal fractured narrative, and you can draw a clear line from one movie to the other. Point Blank is a ruthless reinvention of the crime movie. The skeleton is pure pulp, adapted from a Donald Westlake book. Westlake has been writing unpretentious genre books for decades, so it’s a good base. But you’re not more than 10 minutes into the movie before the chronology starts shattering and lines start repeating and overlapping and you have to start wondering if it’s a sequence of events or Lee Marvin’s deathbed dream. Trippy stuff. Now I know where Soderbergh picked up the techniques he used in The Limey and Out of Sight. ...

I’m moving back to California. I’m selling all my Satanic gaming stuff. I’m giving up on computers to work at the Brattle. I’ve been purchased by Microsoft. I’m dating Mitt Romney. I’m writing the next Pixar movie. I’m voting Republican. I hate Apple. I’m pregnant! I have a message from the future. I can’t believe I ate the whole Studebaker. I’m putting banner ads on the site. I just found out that I’m Mick Jagger’s long lost love child. I sold my kidney to buy a PSP. I’ve converted your favorite game to D20. I think Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction are in Syria. I’ve written an RFP regarding TCP/IP transmission via prayer. I wanna be sedated. I’m looking into gender reassignment surgery. I’m giving away a wee little terrier with every Netcom account. I got to work today and found a Ferrari in the pond. I can throw a fastball at 176 miles per hour. I’m an MIT research project. I’ve launched a hostile takeover of the Catholic Church. I hear the NBA and Major League Soccer are going to merge. I’m going to be charging $12.95 a month for site access. I am Pope John Paul II. I am Sylvester Stallone. I am Britney Spears. ...

Peerflix sounded really intriguing. It’s a service that hooks up people who want to trade DVDs. You tell them all the DVDs you want to trade, and every now and then someone says “Hey, I want that DVD,” and Peerflix says “Hey, send that DVD to her!” You do so, which earns you Peerbucks, which you can then redeem to get DVDs from other people. It turns out that it’s really emulating Netflix rather than EBay, though. When you send someone a DVD, you just send them the DVD — no case or anything. The idea is more that you’re lending them your DVD (you can even automatically request the DVD back when they’re done) rather than trading. Which does not so much gratify me, since I don’t want empty DVD boxes littering up my apartment. Time to drag ‘em all down to CD Spins (original). ...

Paul Shirley graduated from Iowa State in 2001; now he plays basketball for the Phoenix Suns, a team which is arguably the best basketball team on the planet right now. He’s the 12th man on a 12 man team, so he doesn’t actually play very much. This means, apparently, that he has time to blog. And man, someone needs to sign this guy to a book deal, unless he’s ghostwritten. I hope he isn’t. I’m surprised this stuff is getting onto NBA.com — he’s unrelentingly blunt about the opposition, life as a 12th man, all that fun stuff. ...