Mononoke, eye candy, and John Doe

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Well, seeing as how my life has one very happy coincidence that payday and video release day both happen on the same day every week…Tuesdays are my usual day to go out and get movies. Picked up quite the trio today, too. Here’s the scoop:

Princess Mononoke: A very impressive anime film that was released in Japan in ’97, and just hit the U.S. this year. I’ve never been very big into anime — I enjoy it, but there’s very little of it that I pick up — but even without seeing it, the unanimous good reviews that Mononoke got were enough to get me to add it to my collection. I just got done watching it, and was quite impressed — a good choice for my third anime DVD. Breathtaking animation, a very well-written story, and if you choose the English dub, a great translation by none other than Neil Gaiman. Well worth it, I’d say.

The Cell: Okay, okay, so if you take the time to really study it, it’s not that great of a movie — a contrived and predictable plot, with acting that occasionally has a tendency to push the limits of medocrity. However, for someone like me who’s always been fascinated with movie effects and visual work that veers towards the darker side (H.R. Giger and Dali are two of my favorite artists) and good audio mixing, this movie is an absolute treat to watch. Visually astounding every time you enter the dreamscapes of the characters, and an aural experience that is as much a treat for the ears as the visuals are for the eyes. Now, if only that much creativity had been put into the plot….

Se7en: While David Fincher is one of my favorite contemporary directors (he’s the director of Se7en, The Game, and Fight Club), I’d yet to pick up this movie, as the only edition out until today was a early “flipper” disc — the movie broke in the middle, and you had to flip the DVD to the second side to finish the movie. Well, thank goodness for New Line, because today marked the release of an incredibly extensive 2-disc special edition of Se7en — disc 1 for the movie and four commentary tracks, and disc 2 for a ton of supplementary material. This one will take hours and hours for me to go through — just the kind of release I like!

So, that’s it for this week. Between those three, and working my way through season 2 of the X-Files, I’ve got enough to keep me a couch potato for days lined up. Too bad I’ve got this silly thing called a job to get in the way…ah, well — since it’s the job that lets me indulge my movie collection, I guess I shouldn’t whine too much, eh?

[From Usenet: 12.19.00 0228]

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[Note: This was originally a post to the alt.culture.alaska Usenet newsgroup. I’m including it here for completeness. Originally archived here.]

Hey all –

Just a quick note that I’m working on starting a new website tracking local Anchorage musicians, who’s playing where, things like that. Features on the site include a calendar of events, downloadable .mp3 files of some performances, and a BBS. I’m mainly focusing on underground/alternative stuff, from punk to rave to urban, but tend to wander all over the place depending on what information I get to post.

Feel free to stop by and take a look sometime…

http://djwudi.dyndns.org/akevents/

Thanks! :)

Mulder, Scully, Carey Grant, and Max Schreck

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Just thought I’d put up a quick note of the new movies I picked up this week…I may start doing this from time to time as I add to my already extensive collection. This weekend I picked up two that had come in while I was off on vacation, then one today that we rarely get into the store, so I figured it was worth grabbing when it showed up.

X-Files: Season 2: I’d never seen any of the X-Files until just a few months ago, when I picked up the Season 1 box set purely on the strength of what I’d heard people say about it. Have to say, I’m glad I did…one of the few downsides to my policy of not watching television is that I do occasionally miss out on a show really worth watching, and X-Files is definitely one of those. I got really sucked in to Season 1, and the show just keeps getting better. So far I’m 4 episodes into Season 2, and realizing that I’m going to have to wait until March for Season 3 is really starting to hurt.

His Girl Friday: This has been one of my favorite classic comedies for a long, long time. This adaptation of the play The Front Page with Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell moves at a mile a minute, and is absolutely hilarious through and through — this is one comedy I’d recommend without reservations to anyone. Just make sure you can listen quickly, this is one of the fastest moving films I’ve ever seen.

Nosferatu: This is the one that I grabbed on a whim, as it doesn’t appear in the store very often — the original 1922 version of the classic horror film Nosferatu. This is almost a legendary adaptation of the Dracula story, and I’m currently really looking forward to the upcoming film Shadow of the Vampire, a highly fictional (but fascinating looking) account of the making of Nosferatu, starting John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe. If you haven’t seen previews for this one yet, track them down….

And that’s it for my post-vacaition binge…thank goodness I get paid on Tuesday, there’s another good batch coming in then!

Back again

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Okay…back again, new and improved. Or something like that.

Got in (late…damn airlines) from my vacation last night, and am currently enjoying my last actual unscheduled day, as far as I know. I may not be on the schedule at Suncoast this weekend, but this being the Christmas shopping season, I’m not betting on that, and just working on the assumption that this is my last “day of rest.”

Vacation was great. Saw tons of family, got to hit some clubs in the states (man, does Anchorage bite!), hung out with some friends who’ve already made it down to Seattle, and generally had a very nice time. I am so looking forward to moving out of state next year — didn’t really want to come back from Seattle, but somehow I didn’t really think that either my jobs or my roommates would appreciate me just disappearing like that. Damn responsibility…when did I have to grow up?

In any case, I’m about to head out and pick up the X-Files Season 2 DVD set and spend the evening vegging in alien land. What fun, what fun!

Quick update from Seattle

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I’m actually still in the midst of my vacation, but while sitting here at a friends house checking e-mail, I figured I might as well take the opportunity to get a little updating done here. If nothing else, just to get something changing on here to assure people that I am alive, and have survived my travels so far.

I’ve stripped out the last of the manual updates from this mainpage…from now on, all updates and archives of old posts should be handled by this CGI script — assuming I’ve got it set up correctly.

Which may be a pretty big assumption…we’ll see.

In any case, I’m back in town this Thursday, so things should start getting back up to speed sometime around then. See you all soon….

Vacation time

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I get a vacation! :D

I’m going to be gone for the next three weeks, so updates to the site are going to be sporadic at best. If I can get a chance to get to a ‘puter and do things like check mail and check the site, I will, I just have no idea whether I will or when.

For the curious, this is a big family trip to go see the relatives. I’ll be in Florida for about the next week visiting my grandparents on my mother’s side, after that a week in Indiana visiting my grandmother on dad’s side, and then we’ll be in Seattle for a little under a week before we come back to Alaska. I should be back up here around the 14th of December, so life should return to normal around then…at least as normal as it ever gets.

So, until then….

Colophon

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Just a minor change here — took the machine/server/system info box out of the sidebar and created a colophon for the site. Since this isn’t really of major import to most people, it’s not linked in the main Contents listing, but is available through the links at the bottom of the page.

Parallax1

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Went out to catch Parallax1‘s show tonight. Very cool, they’re a great bunch, and keep doing very interesting stuff with their music.

Not much other than that…stayed up to late chatting at VI again. Ah, well — one more day of work at Suncoast, and then I’m officially on vacation for the next three weeks. It’s about time!

NewsPro up and running

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Okay — looks like this is up and running. Rock on. :) From now on, I’ll be using this script to update the main page of the site, rather than diving into my main HTML file every time I need to throw some little thing up here.

I’m really beginning to enjoy actually running my own server more and more as I dive into the tricks I can play…

[From Usenet: 2.18.99 0000]

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[Note: This was originally a post to the alt.tv.star-trek.voyager Usenet newsgroup. I’m including it here for completeness. Originally archived here.]

  1. THE MUSIC WAS LACKING BIG TIME! Music is a powerful tool to help a movie have depth, feeling and emotion. The music could have been so much more deep and could have added so much more to the feeling of the movie.

I’d have to watch it again (hurrah for VCR’s) to really make a judgment, but there was at least one instance where it really caught my ear. During one of the shots of the shuttle approaching the borgplex, there were a couple low, twangy notes like someone plucking two of the lower strings on a piano. Caught my ear mainly because the last time I can remember hearing that theme used was in ST:TMP as the Enterprise is making its entrance into V’ger. Visually similar shots (though the one in ST:TMP was much more visually impressive (okay, and about half an hour longer) than VOY:DF’s borgplex entrance), good use of old themes. Which brought another thought into my feeble little brain. In advance, please forgive me if this has been hashed and re-hashed many times over in the past, I just subscribed to these groups after watching VOY:DF.

Has anyone ever thought much of the possibility that the planet that transformed the Voyager probe into V’ger was the Borg home planet, before they got to the point of striking out on their own and assimilating everything that sneezed twice in their general direction? The general purpose seems to be very similar — it’s not that big a step from “learn all that is learnable, collect all the possible knowledge in the universe, then merge with the creator” to the Borg’s assimilation of other species and knowledge bases into their own. Additionally, it was hypothesized in ST:TMP that the Voyager probe had fell through a black hole to this ‘machine planet’, been repaired/reprogrammed there, and sent away. Mix in a little time distortion along with the black hole, and V’ger could have been sent on its voyage back to Earth long before the Borg advanced to a point where they could move out on their own, and still have time to fill its databanks and make it back home. Just a thought…would be interested to hear if others have explored this line of reasoning. Would love to see it explored in a show at some point, but that may just be fanboy drooling (grin).

Incidentally, what happened to all the knowledge that V’ger transmitted to Earth?

And while I’m at it, I suppose I could throw in the Transformers homeworld/Borg homeworld parallels, too…. Are there any? Probably…I’m just blowing smoke out of my ass at this point, but if I can think of it now, it’s probably been beaten to death before now…