It seems Black Snake Moan, a film about Sam Jackson chaining a skinny Christina Ricci to a radiator is getting people worked up already, and, having seen the trailer, it's either an over-the-top satire of something or it's a horribly mis-judged mess, sort of like Starship Troopers with miscegenation in the place of huge bugs. Even the posters are in on it. I can't tell and now I'm vaguely intrigued.
Personally I'm hoping they get the Internet to write the dialogue again so we have SLJ shout "I'm tired of this mofo-ing white-chick tied to my mofo-ing radiator" or somesuch.
Wednesday, 28 February 2007
Tuesday, 27 February 2007
Saying Something Nice About The Departed
This Reuters article, Eulogy sex ban at Aussie funerals, really should have come with some anecdotes, there's got to be a few hilarious stories behind this:
Oh come on! Do tell...
"On not a few occasions, inappropriate remarks glossing over the deceased's proclivities (drinking prowess, romantic conquests etc) or about the Church (attacking its moral teachings) have been made at funeral masses," Pell's new guidelines say.
He said the comments often embarrassed the priest, the family and the congregation and become the focus of the service.
Oh come on! Do tell...
Too Little, Too Late
So, The Departed won best picture, does this mean that Infernal Affairs, a much richer more compact telling of the same story with greater visual flare, is some kind of ultimate achievement in movie making? I'd guess not.
Trust me, I was looking forward to The Departed, Scorsese making a crime drama about an insular community in a big city, who wouldn't be? And after watching it I felt it was a good film, but I had a hankering to rewatch Infernal Affairs afterwards and so I did and so it made me angry. It's simply better on every level, even with the atrocious dubbing work of the English version, Jack Nicholson's performance, rightly lauded as just the right side of scenery chewing, being an almost singular exception. Alec Baldwin also manages to do quite a lot with very little but that seems to be his modus operandi these days. Matt Damon is no Andy Lau and Leo isn't anywhere near being Tony Leung. There's a scene in TD where Leo is telling the psychiatrist just how tortured he is and his voice just goes really, really whiny. You are, I suppose, meant to feel some sympathy, but you just want to laugh in his face and tell the brat to grow a pair. Leung, on the other hand, manages to look tortured and conflicted with just a shrug. The less said about the ending the better, but the moral ambiguity, and hope for redemption, of IA is all but wiped out by a Hays Code ending.
In a review of Silent Hill, Penny Arcade opined:
I feel the same way about Infernal Affairs and The Departed, The Departed is a good film, and may even be the best American film of the year, but anyone who suggests it's an improvement on the original should have their views on movies, any movie, regarded as suspect from now on.
Scorsese seems to be becoming the Hollywood equivalent of Bob Dylan where each new work is hailed as is best since some critical milestone and the inadequacies of his recent work is suddenly exposed by this latest "return to form", leaving a long line over over-hyped mediocore product and disappointed fans.
Trust me, I was looking forward to The Departed, Scorsese making a crime drama about an insular community in a big city, who wouldn't be? And after watching it I felt it was a good film, but I had a hankering to rewatch Infernal Affairs afterwards and so I did and so it made me angry. It's simply better on every level, even with the atrocious dubbing work of the English version, Jack Nicholson's performance, rightly lauded as just the right side of scenery chewing, being an almost singular exception. Alec Baldwin also manages to do quite a lot with very little but that seems to be his modus operandi these days. Matt Damon is no Andy Lau and Leo isn't anywhere near being Tony Leung. There's a scene in TD where Leo is telling the psychiatrist just how tortured he is and his voice just goes really, really whiny. You are, I suppose, meant to feel some sympathy, but you just want to laugh in his face and tell the brat to grow a pair. Leung, on the other hand, manages to look tortured and conflicted with just a shrug. The less said about the ending the better, but the moral ambiguity, and hope for redemption, of IA is all but wiped out by a Hays Code ending.
In a review of Silent Hill, Penny Arcade opined:
"You might have seen people say that this was a good movie, or a faithful representation of the game, and I would urge you to disregard anything those people say in the future about movies or, indeed, any other subject."
I feel the same way about Infernal Affairs and The Departed, The Departed is a good film, and may even be the best American film of the year, but anyone who suggests it's an improvement on the original should have their views on movies, any movie, regarded as suspect from now on.
Scorsese seems to be becoming the Hollywood equivalent of Bob Dylan where each new work is hailed as is best since some critical milestone and the inadequacies of his recent work is suddenly exposed by this latest "return to form", leaving a long line over over-hyped mediocore product and disappointed fans.
Friday, 23 February 2007
Wikipedia: It Ain't All That
People are shocked that that Wikipedia is sometimes wrong. They are also shocked that students are using it as a resource. They shouldn't. QA place called Middlebury has banned citations of it in tests and papers and the Wikipedia co-founder agrees:
Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia and chairman emeritus of its foundation, said of the Middlebury policy, "I don’t consider it as a negative thing at all."
He continued: "Basically, they are recommending exactly what we suggested — students shouldn’t be citing encyclopedias. I would hope they wouldn’t be citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, either.
"If they had put out a statement not to read Wikipedia at all, I would be laughing. They might as well say don’t listen to rock ’n’ roll either."
Wednesday, 21 February 2007
It Passes The Time
It would have passed in any case. Yes, but not so rapidly.
Samegame2: Samegame now with hexagons.
It's a Clickomania variant that manages to be infuriating and addictive. What's more, the presentation is top notch.
Samegame2: Samegame now with hexagons.
It's a Clickomania variant that manages to be infuriating and addictive. What's more, the presentation is top notch.
Be Nice To The People You Meet On The Internet
Because they might track you down and kick the snot out of you:
I can see how that might be a disincentive to flame.
It strikes me, though, that the "online disinhibition effect", as the article has it, might, at times, be a good thing. In essence, they are saying that people are typing things out that they might not say aloud and sending them to the Internet. There are problems with this, as above, but surely it just means that in a new mode of social interaction previous form counts for very little.
It's not the one with the loudest voice or biggest presence that's calling the shots. That is, people who've not had to put up with other people's opinions before are getting frustrated because no-one cares about what they have to say. It's not that the playing field has levelled, the playing field has been changed completely.
One of the suggestions to, er, reinhibit people is to introduce video. Bringing back the old playing field, in effect. On the 'Net when you're just text you look like everybody else, people judge you not on your looks or charisma or whatever, but on the way you write and the way you reason. Put that writer on video and it's not just the message that the medium is passing on.
Flaming is always going to be a part of the Internet, the written parts especially, and a good flame can be good writing too. It's often to Internet discourse what raising your voice is to a pub chat. There are some figures on Usenet who exist just to flame and you can probably find some veteran out there who'll tell you of the great flamewar of alt.*.* in 199*. They'll no doubt tell you or their part in it too. You can look a lot of this stuff up on Google now, it was neither as acrimonious nor as long as the grey-beard thought it was with most of the posts in that particular thread being a seperate argument on the proper recipe for Chili (or something equally unanswerable and, dare it be said, petty), but anyway...
I'm not sure what they're expecting here, but most of my conversations with friends have a tendency to get lewd or rude at some point, I can't see what it should be shocking that this happens when anonimity is brought in to the equation too.
There are many things that the Internet is and isn't and certain areas of it aren't good for the faint of heart or the easily upset or those prone to anger when no-one cares what they have to say. It's meant as a resource for everybody but that doesn't mean that it can or even should please all the people all the time.
Last October, in what The Times of London described as "Britain's first 'Web rage' attack," a 47-year-old Londoner was convicted of assault on a man with whom he had traded insults in a chat room. He and a friend tracked down the man and attacked him with a pickax handle and a knife.
I can see how that might be a disincentive to flame.
It strikes me, though, that the "online disinhibition effect", as the article has it, might, at times, be a good thing. In essence, they are saying that people are typing things out that they might not say aloud and sending them to the Internet. There are problems with this, as above, but surely it just means that in a new mode of social interaction previous form counts for very little.
It's not the one with the loudest voice or biggest presence that's calling the shots. That is, people who've not had to put up with other people's opinions before are getting frustrated because no-one cares about what they have to say. It's not that the playing field has levelled, the playing field has been changed completely.
One of the suggestions to, er, reinhibit people is to introduce video. Bringing back the old playing field, in effect. On the 'Net when you're just text you look like everybody else, people judge you not on your looks or charisma or whatever, but on the way you write and the way you reason. Put that writer on video and it's not just the message that the medium is passing on.
Flaming is always going to be a part of the Internet, the written parts especially, and a good flame can be good writing too. It's often to Internet discourse what raising your voice is to a pub chat. There are some figures on Usenet who exist just to flame and you can probably find some veteran out there who'll tell you of the great flamewar of alt.*.* in 199*. They'll no doubt tell you or their part in it too. You can look a lot of this stuff up on Google now, it was neither as acrimonious nor as long as the grey-beard thought it was with most of the posts in that particular thread being a seperate argument on the proper recipe for Chili (or something equally unanswerable and, dare it be said, petty), but anyway...
Flaming can be induced in some people with alarming ease. Consider an experiment, reported in 2002 in The Journal of Language and Social Psychology, in which pairs of college students — strangers — were put in separate booths to get to know each other better by exchanging messages in a simulated online chat room.
While coming and going into the lab, the students were well behaved. But the experimenter was stunned to see the messages many of the students sent. About 20 percent of the e-mail conversations immediately became outrageously lewd or simply rude.
I'm not sure what they're expecting here, but most of my conversations with friends have a tendency to get lewd or rude at some point, I can't see what it should be shocking that this happens when anonimity is brought in to the equation too.
There are many things that the Internet is and isn't and certain areas of it aren't good for the faint of heart or the easily upset or those prone to anger when no-one cares what they have to say. It's meant as a resource for everybody but that doesn't mean that it can or even should please all the people all the time.
Tuesday, 20 February 2007
Youth Literature is Filled with Scrotums
Or so it seems.
Apparently, some recent book aimed at youths started with a sentence that contained the word "scrotum", this enraged a number of school librarians so much that they pledged to hide the book from the eyes of children (see also the recent Hoohah hoohah).
If the author had just waited just a bit longer to use the word, or so the above linked to list suggests, the only outraged librarians would be those who could be bothered read more than the first page of their books.
To sum up: "[Y]ou won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature."
Via Blog of a Bookslut
Apparently, some recent book aimed at youths started with a sentence that contained the word "scrotum", this enraged a number of school librarians so much that they pledged to hide the book from the eyes of children (see also the recent Hoohah hoohah).
If the author had just waited just a bit longer to use the word, or so the above linked to list suggests, the only outraged librarians would be those who could be bothered read more than the first page of their books.
To sum up: "[Y]ou won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature."
Via Blog of a Bookslut
Monday, 19 February 2007
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