As always, one of the most fascinating things about the Internet is all the little subcommunities that spring up here and there. My latest discovery is Pyroto Mountain (original), which is a fascinating little web game unlike anything else I’ve seen. The framework is an escalating series of trivia questions, but it’s way more complex than that. You start at level 0. It’s really easy to work up to level 6, but then when you try to answer another question you find out that you have to chat a little on the bulletin boards before you can try and climb any more. OK, so you go and post. Sometimes the game tells you that your posts are good — and sometimes it doesn’t. It has standards of spelling and punctuation. Eventually you get to go up some more. ...

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

The Boston Fantastic Film Festival is scheduled (original) and for a second-tier fantastic film festival, this is a very impressive lineup. My thoughts on what’s worth seeing for who will come later, but I do want to note in particular Infernal Affairs and Sympathy for Mr. Vengance. I’m also very intrigued by the Nesbit adaptation, Five Children and It, which stars Kenneth Branagh and features Eddie Izzard as the voice of the Psammead.

It’s so rare that you get to watch a single surrealist coming of age movie featuring a lactation scene, I don’t quite know what to make of a day in which I got to watch two. Although when you think it over, a lactation scene is a fairly obvious bit of symbolism for coming of age, so maybe it’s not so odd after all. Gozu didn’t actually strike me as being as mysterious and weird as the reviews implied, once I’d had a night’s sleep to contemplate it. Minami, the young yakuza who’s ordered to kill his mentor Ozaki and who serves as our surrogate in the languid descent into surreal erotic madness, is a virgin. He feels out of place in Tokyo and he feels out of place in the rural Nagoya. He rejects a couple of offers to initiate him into manhood, including and probably most significantly the opportunity to metaphorically become a man by killing Ozaki. In the end, the transfigured Ozaki makes a man of him in the most primal of ways — the birth scene signifies Minami’s rebirth as well as that of Ozaki. Final significant scene: three toothbrushes sitting side by side in domestic harmony. ...

Gozu is playing down at the Brattle tonight at midnight. Anyone in the mood to see one of the oddest movies of the last few years?

Quick follow-up on how independent voters reacted to Bush last night: Gallup says independent voters preferred Kerry (original) by a margin of 53% to 37%. Hear me now and believe me later! Bush is going to spend the next month firing up his base and relying on voter turnout to win this election. But Kerry still has a better get out the vote operation.

An interesting observation about the Duelfer Report: it lists a bunch of people from France, Germany, and Russia who profited illegally from the food-for-oil program. However, the Houston Chronicle notes that (original) “No U.S. companies or individuals were named, but that does not mean they were not involved. A CIA spokesperson cited U.S. privacy laws to explain why no U.S. companies or individuals were listed.” Well, shucks. I suppose that’s fair, as long as all we bloggers remember that the corruption wasn’t limited to Europe. ...

I’ve heard already twice, listening to the post-debate spin, that Republicans were relieved by Bush’s performance during this debate. That’s telling. It’s not the Republicans Bush needed to relieve; he needed to relieve the undecided voters. I think Bush did a great job of making his base happy, but he simply can’t win unless he can get the same moderate voters who liked compassionate conservatism four yeas ago.

For Matthew (original): Kerry 52%, Bush 48%, Nader 0%. Electoral College: 300 Kerry, 237 Bush.

If you’re curious about Going Upriver, the documentary about Kerry’s time in Vietnam and his protests afterwards, you can now download it for free. Figure at the least you’ll get more footage of his testimony to Congress than either party will show you in soundbites.