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Just one more thing…

Wednesday, May 15th, 2013

As long as we’re talking about Lawrence’s review of General Idi Amin Dada, I have a question that’s bugging me, and I know I have some aviation buffs in my audience.

What are these planes? I apologize for the pictures: they are actually screen snapshots from the DVD, and I tried to get ones that showed the best possible angles. Click to embiggen.

vlcsnap-2013-05-15-17h01m58s204

vlcsnap-2013-05-15-17h03m36s240

vlcsnap-2013-05-15-17h07m18s150

Lawrence suggested they might be MiGs, and I know the Ugandan Air Force had MiG-15s and MiG-17s. But both the 15 and 17 have a really blunt open nose, while these planes have a more rounded one. I don’t think these are Fouga Magisters either, because they lack the V-tail. I believe these are some sort of two seat jet trainer, and they may be French. But I can’t tell, and it really bugs me that I can’t figure it out. Maybe if I’m lucky Tam will see this. For some reason, I’ve also got in my head that the good and great Brian Dunbar knows his planes. And, of course, there’s RoadRich…

Okay. I lied. One more “one more thing”, just because this amuses me, and I’m pretty sure it amused Lawrence as well.

The Suicide Revolutionary Jazz Band

(Okay, one last thing. It irritates the fire out of me that Apple disabled screen captures from DVD Player in the Grab utility. And they don’t just throw up a “You can’t do this” popup: Grab lets you do the capture, but the resulting file is just a checkerboard grey and white pattern. Fortunately, VLC will a) playback DVDs, and b) even has a built-in “Snapshot” menu option. Hurray open source.)

Posted in Apple, Lazyweb, Movies, Planes | 3 Comments »

Linkey linkey.

Wednesday, May 15th, 2013

Lawrence has put up a review of Barbet Schroeder’s classic documentary, General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait, which we watched at his house the other night.

Don’t have much to add to what he says, and I agree with him pretty much 100%, so I encourage you to wander over there and read his review.

Bacon numbers of note: Idi Amin – Bacon number of 3, if you include TV shows. Otherwise, the Oracle of Bacon says Amin can’t be linked to Bacon, which I find hard to swallow. (I checked using both “Idi Amin” and “Idi Amin Dada”.)

Fidel Castro, on the other hand, has a Bacon number of 2. Castro is linked to Bacon through Detective Munch and something called “Marilyn Monroe: Murder on Fifth Helena Drive” which is scheduled for release sometime in 2013.

Posted in History, Movies | No Comments »

Cahiers du Cinéma: I watched Gatsby so you don’t have to.

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Yes, I finally went to see it. Yes, I even sprang for the 3-D version. I run a full service blog here.

tl,dr: Wait for it on cable.

Notes:

      • This is a highly personal reaction, influenced by a lot of things. In particular, I think I have a weakness for 1920′s era flapper outfits. But Elizabeth Debicki as Jordan Baker and Carey Mulligan as Daisy Buchanan are both just…wow. I don’t know how I can put it without lapsing into the vulgar. Perhaps I should just say I would be delighted to take either one (or both) of them out for a cheeseburger and the amusing house red. Indeed, one of the reasons I wanted to post this is so I could link to photos of both young ladies. Ms. Debicki:

        and Ms. Mulligan:

      • Tobey Maguire did not work for me as Nick Carraway. I felt that he exhibited a limited emotional range: either vaguely petulant or slightly baffled. When he did try to express happiness or friendship, he seemed stiff.
      • Jay Z’s music was…well, let me be polite and say simply “not memorable”.
      • The 3-D does not add much to the movie. There are a few neat tricks (the closing credits in particular are kind of trippy in a geometric sort of way), but I don’t believe you’ll miss anything if you stick with 2-D.
      • There were more than a few CG shots in the movie that were so poorly done and so obviously CG that they took me out of the movie. Luckily, all I had to do was wait for Ms. Debicki or Ms. Mulligan to come back on screen…
      • Other than the bad CG, though, there is a lot of lush and beautiful photography in the movie. It is pretty to look at…
      • …but ultimately empty. I think the biggest failure of the movie isn’t in conveying Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy; that comes across just fine. The point that I think Baz Luhrmann missed (along with Craig Pearce, the other credited screenwriter) is that Daisy is an unworthy vessel for Gatsby’s affection. Tom and Daisy are empty, shallow, vain people. Gatsby’s death isn’t the tragedy; the true tragedy is that he brings about his own end through his pursuit of Daisy, and that Daisy isn’t worth it. Luhrmann fails to develop Daisy in such a way that we’re able to see this. Towards the end of the movie, Maguire in his voiceover quotes the classic line about Tom and Daisy being “careless people“, but reading the words isn’t the same as demonstrating this to us.

I’m glad I went: it was, after all, a nice afternoon out at a nice theater. But I can’t recommend purchasing a ticket until The Great Gatsby comes to cable or the discount theater nearest you.

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Movies | No Comments »

Obit watch: May 8, 2013.

Wednesday, May 8th, 2013

Ray Harryhausen. NYT. LAT. A/V Club appreciation. Lawrence. Popehat.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | No Comments »

Week of Gatsby: Day 1.

Monday, May 6th, 2013

In honor of the forthcoming movie, I am declaring this week the “Week of Gatsby” on WCD. Mostly for my own personal amusement.

Today’s entry: The Great Gastby for NES, a browser based game in which you wander around Gatsby’s party, throwing your hat at various targets and searching for the titular character.

(Yes, I am planning to see the movie. Yes, in 3D. “Argo” was the last thing I saw in a theater, and I figure I could use the diversion. Even if it is a pile of crap.)

(And, yes, as it happens, I do like the book. A short defense of it is here.)

Posted in Books, Gatsby, Geek, Movies | No Comments »

Obit watch: May 1, 2013.

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

Deanna Durbin, movie star of the 1930s and 1940s. NYT.

Ms. Durbin had remained determinedly out of public view since 1949, when she retired to a village in France with her third husband.

More:

Ms. Durbin, who gave almost no interviews after she left Hollywood, did send reporters a letter in 1958 that read in part: “I was a typical 13-year-old American girl. The character I was forced into had little or nothing in common with myself — or with other youth of my generation, for that matter. I could never believe that my contemporaries were my fans. They may have been impressed with my ‘success.’ but my fans were the parents, many of whom could not cope with their own youngsters. They sort of adopted me as their ‘perfect’ daughter.”

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | No Comments »

High speed low drag tactical stuff.

Monday, April 8th, 2013

So Lawrence and I watched the latest SyFy channel disaster, “Chupacabra vs. the Alamo” Saturday night at the home of our friends who shall remain anonymous. (Thank you, anonymous friends!)

I’m hoping Lawrence will write a review so I don’t have to, but there’s one thing I did want to highlight.

Have any of you tactical operators given any thought to how you’re going to perform your tactical operations with an iPad (or other tablet) in one hand?

Are iPad operations something that’s covered in training these days? (Karl, I sense a great need.)

Posted in Guns, Movies, Sarcasm | No Comments »

Obit watch: April 8, 2013.

Monday, April 8th, 2013

It hasn’t been a good few days for the movies.

Noted documentary filmmaker Les Blank passed away on Sunday. NYT. LAT. Edited to add: A/V Club (they were late in getting their obit up).

My favorite Les Blank story:

Perhaps his best-known films concern Mr. Herzog, the German director of films like “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Stroszek.” To encourage his student and friend Errol Morris to finish his long-talked-about film on pet cemeteries, Mr. Herzog had said that when it was done he would eat his shoes. The impetus worked: Mr. Morris finished the film (“Gates of Heaven”) in 1978, and Mr. Herzog kept his promise, boiling his leather desert boots in duck fat (and stuffing them with garlic) at Chez Panisse, the celebrated restaurant in Berkeley, and consuming them — partly, anyway — onstage at a local theater. Mr. Blank turned it into a comic, and rather touching, 20-minute film about what artists do for the sake of art, appropriately titled “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe” (1979).

Blank’s most famous film is another one involving Herzog: “Burden of Dreams” about Herzog and the making of “Fitzcarraldo”.

Margaret Thatcher: LAT. NYT. Battleswarm. I apologize if I seem to be giving her short shrift: my feeling is that everyone who doesn’t live under a rock is aware of her passing, and I am just linking to the obits here for the historical record.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits, Politics | No Comments »

Roger Ebert.

Friday, April 5th, 2013

Thinking about what I wanted to write, I came to the realization that I’ve already written much of what I wanted to say: he was a huge influence on how I think about movies (for which I am grateful), his views on what is and is not art were questionable, and many of the political views he expressed later in his life were appalling. (Roger should have spent more time reading Mencken.)

Chicago Sun-Times. NYT. LAT.

A/V Club. Onion. There are several posts at Jimbo’s site, but this one in particular seems to be worth highlighting.

This whole thing is kind of odd, taken in the light of Roger’s April 2nd blog post, where he talks about launching a Kickstarter campaign to bring back “At the Movies”, relaunching RogerEbert.com, and various other projects. I wonder how things went downhill that fast.

And I also wonder what’s going to happen to RogerEbert.com. My understanding is that Ebert et al planned to move the site to their own servers, and off the Sun-Times site. That’s fine. But I went to the site for the first time in weeks yesterday and realized that I wasn’t all that interested any longer; only one of the current reviews was written by Ebert. Many of the others were written by Richard Roper (who I only tolerated because he was on the same show as Ebert), Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Jim Emerson, and other reviewers who I don’t find interesting. I’m hoping the site stays up as an archive of Ebert’s writing (and it’d be nice if it also archived “At the Movies”), but it isn’t a place I’m going to go for movie criticism any longer.

That’s a little mean, but it is also the truth. Let’s end on an upbeat note. Or two.

They don’t make them like that any more. (Actually, they do, but only for the SyFy channel.)

I couldn’t find their “Worst Movies of 1992″ show online, but here’s their original review of “Shining Through”, which was their pick for worst movie that year (this clip does include the strudel scene):

Someone’s done an IMDB list of all of Siskel and Ebert’s worst movies of the year, just in case you’re interested. A Google search will turn up clips from some, but not all, of those episodes.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits, TV | No Comments »

Obit watch: April 4, 2013.

Thursday, April 4th, 2013

The Chicago Sun-Times is reporting that Roger Ebert has passed away.

Their servers appear to be overwhelmed at the moment, and I have not seen this reported elsewhere. I’m going to give this a bit of time, and will probably have more to say later on.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits | No Comments »

Obit watch part II.

Friday, March 29th, 2013

I missed this one the other day, because of reasons. I also missed this story when it happened, because I was 5 at the time.

Paul Rose has died.

More than 40 years ago, Mr. Rose was a member of the Front for the Liberation of Quebec, or F.L.Q., an extremist group committed to using violence to win independence for French-speaking Quebec. It committed dozens of bombings from 1963 to October 1970.

Mr. Rose was convicted of murdering Pierre Laporte, the Quebec government’s minister of labor. Mr. Laporte was kidnapped by Mr. Rose’s F.L.Q. cell on October 10, 1970, and was found strangled in the trunk of a car on October 18th. Mr. Rose made statements implicating himself in the kidnapping, but “an investigation by a Montreal prosecutor concluded in 1980 that Mr. Rose could not have been present at the killing”. Mr. Rose served 11 years in prison.

Many Quebecers who favored independence from Canada were contemptuous of Mr. Rose and the F.L.Q. René Lévesque, father of the separatist Parti Québécois, which held seven seats in the provincial legislature in 1970 and gained power in 1976, called the members of the group subhuman. The party, which governs Quebec today, received mainly praise for denying requests that the legislature honor Mr. Rose’s death.

Also among the dead, Richard Griffiths. Most of the obits I have seen have concentrated on his Harry Potter role, but his full list of credits is even more interesting: “Withnail and I”, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides”, and “The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear”, along with a lot of TV work.

(I’d kind of like to see “The Brides in the Bath”, simply because the George Joseph Smith case is one of the seminal cases in British legal history.)

Posted in Clippings, Law, Movies, Obits | No Comments »

Random notes: March 21, 2013.

Thursday, March 21st, 2013

Here’s your obit for Herbert Streicher, aka “Harry Reems”, the male star of “Deep Throat”: NYT. A/V Club.

Leaving alcohol, drugs, and pornography behind for good, Reems settled in Park City, Utah, where he got married, embraced Christianity, built a thriving real estate career, and—with the exception of interviews he did for the 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat, and a round of interviews to promote its release—he made a concerted effort to stay as far out of the public eye as possible.

Oh, look! New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is re-thinking his hastily passed and poorly thought out gun control measures! It couldn’t have anything to do with his declining popularity, could it?

The gun-control law, approved in January, banned the sale of magazines that hold more than seven rounds of ammunition. But, Mr. Cuomo said Wednesday, seven-round magazines are not widely manufactured. And, although the new gun law provided an exemption for the use of 10-round magazines at firing ranges and competitions, it did not provide a legal way for gun owners to purchase such magazines.
As a result, he said, he and legislative leaders were negotiating language that would continue to allow the sale of magazines holding up to 10 rounds, but still forbid New Yorkers from loading more than 7 rounds into those magazines.

But gun control works!

A 47-year-old psychiatric patient was beaten to death in a locked shower room at Interfaith Medical Center in central Brooklyn late on Tuesday, officials said, and another patient, a 20-year-old, has been charged with second-degree murder in the killing.

I have not had time to go through all of it yet, but the NYT special section on “Museums” looks interesting. Call this a bookmark.

Here’s the LAT‘s second day article on the Bell convictions.

And if the dam breaks open many years too soon
And if there is no room upon the hill
And if your head explodes with dark forebodings too
I’ll see you in the national recording registry…

(Also: The Ramones first album! “Einstein on the Beach”! “South Pacific”! “Sounds of Silence”! The “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack?)

Posted in Bookmarks, California Über Alles, Clippings, Guns, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Stupid | No Comments »

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