Although I recently gave a disclaimer about my home stereo system, I do enjoy my music. And for the past couple of years, I haven’t loved the way I listened to it. The aforementioned hawt stereo lives with the TV in a little loft space, and the small speakers there can’t really get any good sound into the kitchen, which of course is where I spend a lot of prime music listening time. The MacBook isn’t a bad speaker, but it doesn’t really have the volume or depth to fill the room.

So recently I went in for a Tivoli Model One.

It’s way cool: It sits on the kitchen counter and can easily fill the kitchen with sound — and good, good sound at that. [ Note that the Model One is mono; since my kitchen isn’t really conducive to a stereo setup, this isn’t a problem for me. One of these days maybe I’ll figure out how to rig up stereo there, and might spring for the Model Two. ] All the knobs are big hefty-feeling switches, the cabinet is sturdy, the tuner knob is geared. I tell you, it feels a little weird to write that it feels good to operate this radio, but man, it feels good to operate this radio.

With an aux switch and Airport Express hooked up to the input, I stream to it from either MacBook or iMac. And I can control the whole whiz-bang thing from the table with the iPod remote. It’s like living in the future. I highly recommend it.

A few weeks back I wrote a bit about our new supra-digital entertainment nexus station, also known as The Blu-Raya Playa. After some more time basking in its HDMI greatness, I have a few more reflections that seem, in natural blog law, to require public consideration.

First, a disclaimer: The audio portion of our “home theater,” such as it is, consists of an eight year-old Sherwood receiver that I still maintain is an extraordinarily good buy for 2002, what with its DTS and coax and optical audio inputs and 5.1 downmixing and full LRF support. It’s connected to the bookshelf speakers that I bought in 1994 to take to college, so when I say that the audio from the Serenity blu-ray is totally sweet, you should take my word for it, because I’m not one of those nutjobs who pays $800 for neutrally-balanced balsawood volume knobs.

Right, with that out of the way, the Sony N460 remains a very satisfying little piece of equipment, but I do have a few thoughts about the whole “online digital library” thing.

First, a better remote would be nice. This one’s a little lightweight in heft. Also, for a device that can stream internet music services, a RF remote would be slick — no line-of-sight requirement to make selections. In the dare-to-dream category would be a smart remote with a display to control services like last.fm or pandora from the kitchen. Oooh, iPhone app. Ooooh, iPad app, yes.

Second, every video service is walled off from the rest. Online video is organized by service, not content or category or keyword. I want to aggregate it all up into folders or buckets of some kind. I’d settle for getting this for Netflix only (though being able to roll-up rentals or purchases from Amazon on Demand, too, would be way cool). The current display is just a tile of little tiny cover displays — scrolling through brings up a larger display of title. How excellent it would be to be able to organize all those little pictures of DVD covers, into TV and sci-fi and “serious melodrama” and “re-runs of The Shield.”

Here’s why categorization matters so much: I find I’m really making a library out of the Netflix instant queue, dropping into it movies I’ve been before, movies I’ve heard about, movies I might watch someday, and even documentaries. Previously, the Netflix Instant queue was a list of things tagged, essentially, “I want to watch this.” But having all that material in a device permanently connected to the TV changes that dramatically. It’s not a queue so much as a “I love this or I think it’s cool or I remember watching it in college or I might watch this one day” list. And therefore it’s not a list; it’s a library, and that library needs organizing. And all that stuff? It needs organizing.

The digital mega-library needs organizing, one way or another. Netflix could send category information to these devices, for example, or could allow users to attach keywords; devices could do anything with this information: display tag clouds or let users navigate the categories of video they’ve dropped into the queue, or build sparklines of keyword frequencies or … well, you get it. I think Netflix must ultimately be headed for this kind of system, but its usability will depend on device-level implementation.

[ update: Boxee may present a partial solution here, as the new version claims to be able to better organize material across services. Not having tried it out for quite a while, I downloaded the current release and gave it a go. I do have to say that it’s really slick, and must faster than the prior version I had used for a while. And there is some hint of cross-service integration: Searching for Chuck for example reveals streams from NBC.com and from Hulu; but searching for Doctor Who, which is represented by half a dozen entries in my instant Netflix queue, turns up nothing, so the integration is at best still only partial. But Boxee does have the most complete overall set of services, so the upcoming Boxee box is most definitely worth watching as an alternative to dedicating a PC to the TV. ]

And the day I can get to all the stuff I’ve queued, rented, and/or bought — via keyword, or actor, or ranking, or genre — without having to back out three menus and find another service? That will be Unification Day, and it will rock. Apple TV, I’m looking at you, though if Sony could do this with some sweet firmware updates to the box we already own, well I’d seriously consider a Vaio. Cross my heart.

Just after Christmas, our DirecTV receiver unceremoniously gave up the ghost. I had been looking into alternatives, and wasn’t encouraged by the lack of incentives for us to stay with DirecTV: In order to upgrade to a DVR, we’d have to pay $200 up front for the new unit (and still wouldn’t own it, as I understand), plus the additional monthly fee. By comparison, a comparable package with Dish Network was substantially less expensive, and they even offer an option to opt out of the 24-month contract — which is still cheaper than our existing DirecTV package.

But that’s not actually my point. My point is that when the first receiver broke, DirecTV promised to send us another one right away, but it would still take several days. And, quite honestly, we were bored now. So we gave ourselves a late Christmas gift: The Sony N460 Network Blu-Ray player (amazon link). Very briefly: it changes everything.

Devices like the Roku have been offered this capability for a while, of course [expanding from initially streaming Netflix, to Amazon on Demand and music via Pandora], and we’ve connected the MacBook video to the TV once in a while for Hulu or a Netflix stream. And more recently there’s a whole crop of blu-ray players that are internet-enabled, with varying service connectivity. Actually having the networked device connected directly to the TV is new to us, and the difference is stunning. I underestimated by a massive degree just how cool and convenient it is to push a button and have a library of streaming content available without screwing around with video cables. The N460 supports Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, Youtube, and a small grundle of additional services, in addition to NPR streaming radio and slacker radio.

Netflix streaming — arguably the headline app — is excellent. Items in your instant queue are displayed in tiled icons on the screen, and it’s a serviceable presentation, though I’d prefer the coverflow-style presentation that Roku uses; the tiles are a little hard to read, and the lack of ability to organize a very large queue might eventually become a problem. Once a video is selected, the streaming starts up quickly and you just go to town (we connected the N460 directly to our Airport Extreme via ethernet cable). Browsing YouTube also works very well (and looks surprisingly good in fullscreen, too), and Amazon on Demand is simply sweet: We rented Star Trek for $3 and got Hi-Def streaming with digital sound. As Doctor Egon Spengler best put it, yes, have some. All of those singularly are super-cool, but as a package it means a new digital on-demand library. I’m still getting a handle on just how big that is for home video.

It’s big.

Oh, yeah, it plays blu-ray discs, too. That’s cool.

Today’s the show is pretty good: zefrank on copyright.

I’m considering a few post-event comments about hosting family for the holidays (Heather’s family, this year, gave us some odd moments of the sort Tina describes, as well as some moments that were wholly unpleasant for other reasons entirely). Perhaps it’s enough to say that, now that the long weekend is over, we need a vacation from our Christmas vacation.

In the meantime, one can’t throw a rock without hitting somebody’s “best-of” list for the year. A few to keep you busy: There’s lane’s albums of the year (good list, but gray on black hurts), Tim Dunlop’s super best everythings list, Chris Lott’s list of lists (movies), the best of 2004 from Mystery and Misery, and the Fingertips Top 10 (included even though it’s not really a “year’s best” list), Salon’s best-of rundown, and of course, the Poor Man: Year in Review very special episode. I’m sure I’m missing some good lists. Any others to recommend?

[Self-indulgent “me-too” post follows]

With much midnight fanfare, Halo 2 was released a couple of days ago. Because I recognize the time-wasting peril of owning either modern computers or a gaming system, I took note of the news at Penny Arcade, but didn’t rush out to buy it. I had never played the original Halo, but certainly had heard the hype. The last time I had any serious first-person shooter action was at a LAN party a couple of years ago, playing Half-Life (to which I was about three years late, too).

So it was with great pleasure that I got to play a few games of Halo 2 last night with my cousin, who is in grade seven and is usually only allowed to play X-Box on weekends, and who sharply put me and my mumbly thumbs in our places (The controllers have like fifteen buttons! When did that happen?) While I couldn’t compare Halo 2 to the original, I can say that the game is a real kick, especially on my cousin’s big TV with surround sound (I’m going to hang out at his house more often). Once I got the hang of walking and chewing gum at the same time (the “select” button blows bubbles), I was dropping baddies with style to burn. Lots of fun.

And then the party patrol came and told me that my ride home was leaving, so I had to leave my cousin to hold that bridge on his own. Next time, we’re totally going to bring down that big flying goon with the laser cannons.

If Elvis and JFK were alive, what would they want to say to their families? What would they regret about their lives? Could they drop the hammer on the soul-sucking mummy haunting their decrepit nursing home?

Bubba Ho-Tep, which we rented tonight from our favorite local movie store, takes on all these questions. (And, how are Elvis and JFK alive, anyway, and why are they in nowhere, Texas? Any why is JFK black?) While it has a few creepy moments and a couple of brief bits of action, Bubba Ho-Tep isn’t gripping as a monster movie. But what’s really fun and frequently oddly touching about it is the way it presents Elvis (played channeled by Bruce Campbell) and JFK (Ossie Davis) as old men who know their time is just about up.

Seriously now, don’t let the proximity of “Bruce Campbell” and “oddly touching” throw you off. The movie is smart enough to play these two completely straight. There’s no wink and nod that “Elvis” and “JFK” are just senile old men, and there’s just barely a hint of the if-chins-could-kill of many of Campbell’s roles. Elvis has a bad hip, fears he has cancer, and is treated like an infant by the staff. JFK has a sharp suit and a genuine red phone, but sees infirmity coming. Both of them are lonely and thinking of the things they might have done differently throughout their lives. When the mummy shows up they see their last chance at dignity.

The film is a lot of fun to watch: Although Elvis and JFK take themselves seriously, there is plenty of humor. Watching Elvis threaten to put his moves on the mummy (awkward kung fu posturing and all) is a kick. And, in the moments where Elvis and JFK reflect on what went wrong and how they wish they could have been better parents, well, you really believe in their regret. As Campbell says in the “making of” bit, it’s just about the best Elvis-mummy-redemption flick around.

Extras: I’m not much for buying DVDs (though as a Blue Blazer Regular I do have my copy of The Adventures of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the 8th Dimension), but the commentary track with The King on this one might make it worth the price. Campbell watches the movie as Elvis. He talks about indigestion, noisily eats candy bars, and reminisces about his old movies. (“Never had any naked ladies in those old movies. Pretty psychadelic, though, I tell you. Here, watch this; this is where it starts to get really spooky.”)

Also, this is the first Bruce Campbell movie that Heather has managed to stay awake for. There may be hope for her yet.

Not too long ago I mildly lamented my lack of a mobile digital lifestyle. I was thinking partly of a summer that involves a lot of travel, in the form of two or three cross-country trips and a couple of long drives. Several times I suggested to Heather that maybe all that travel would be a little easier, a little more fun, with a portable music player. After all, radio’s just no good in the car anymore (with the exception of the community radio station in Bishop, Calif, which broadcasts a seemingly-endless stream of very local news: Congratulations to Mary-Jo Prentis who just made the jay-vee softball team over at Valley Junior High; the school board voted to fund a new storage building, so the new lawnmower will have a roof over its head. I love that station for making the long drive up the east side of the Sierra a little shorter.) and the right casette tape is never handy. Further, since our home tape deck broke a couple of years ago, our selection of college-era mix tapes, once meticulously labeled and catalogued, has become rather dusty. Traveling with CDs poses a similar problem: Our ancient portable CD player (a high school graduation gift to me in 1994) is unreliable, and besides, the right disc is never around when you need it.

Heather looked at me sternly when I suggested an mp3 player. “Remember my job at the non-profit?” she asked me. She didn’t need to remind me of my own gainful employment as an apprentice to an institution of higher learning. “I have an old cassette player. You should take that on your trip to Massachusetts.” And she was serious.

I resigned myself to my fate: AM radio, top-40 hits, The Airport Network, silence. Until last week, when Heather, who loves me dearly and understands me the way nobody else does, collaborated with my parents to get me an early birthday present: A third-generation 15gb iPod. I can’t say yet whether it will increase my productivity, as I’ve been too busy reading ipodlounge and checking out 3hive and reading Salon’s Wednesday Morning Downloads to perform an evaluation. However, I can tell you that it kept me content and busy grading papers on three legs of my trip out east last week, kept me company during the airport closure at DFW, and is a thing of utter industrial design beauty. The backlighting, it makes me swoon.

The iPod is not without its problems, however, the most notable of which is that I seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time looking very seriously at the Powerbook and shopping for hipster shirts so they’ll let me into the Apple Store. Okay, I haven’t bought any new clothes, but man, have you seen the lines on the Powerbook?

I admit with pride that I can be somewhat zealous about grammar. (In fact, I have been accused of it by some.) So I was quite taken with Louis Menand’s review of the fifteenth edition of the Chicago Manual of Style when I first read it last fall. Manand begins with a discussion of the “moving target” of citation styles, ranges to the consequences of computerized composition, and considers some of the ins and outs of an inconsistent and intricate written world. [Aside: Is it just me, or does The New Yorker web site lack a search feature and any obvious links to archives? It took me forever to find this article again. In the meantime, I discovered a PDF copy of the Manual of Style first edition. Neat.]

Ever flabberghasted at my students’ persistent confusion of “its” and “it’s” (Possessive. Conjunction. Why is this so hard to understand?), I think I might enjoy Eats, Shoots, and Leaves, by Lynne Truss. But damn if this isn’t the most annoying book review I have ever read.

Update: I know, it’s some kind of internet axiom, like Godwin’s law, that any post discussing grammer or punctuation will be rife with errors in grammar and punctuation. I proofread this, but I’m sure someone will find something with which to quibble.

Cinematic Happenings Under Development has a list of 100 mostly-forgotten films that’s worth a scan. Reading through the list is fun: Saw that one … hated this one … should see that one again … missed that one. A select few good entries from the list:

• In the Mouth of Madness: We rented an awful lot of movies during my summers in Walla Walla, and this was one of them. Has some truly creepy moments (an old crone riding a bicycle on a lonely road at night is a lot scarier than it sounds).
• Equilibrium: The back-story of the film isn’t very original (In a dystopian future in which art and emotion are made illegal so as to preserve social order, a special breed of cop hunts down and terminates deviants with prejudice. The film seems heavily influenced by This Perfect Day as much as by Fahrenheit 451.), but the sterile city and its post-holocaust surroundings are imagined vividly. There’s some dorky computer graphics but also some snappy (and surprisingly violent) fight choreography. However, the ending is dumb. Stay for the final fight sequences, but quit when our hero enters the control room.
• Nothining to Lose: Better let the CHUD guys talk about this one: “Tim Robbins and Martin Lawrence as a comic duo either sounds like brilliance or the catalyst for Armageddon and thankfully Nothing to Lose hits closer to the former.”
• Top Secret: What, this is one the list? Doesn’t everybody already know that it’s funny?
• Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead: I have a friend who passionately hates Andy Garcia and everything he stands for. This is a movie that I liked, but was disliked intensely by others with whom I saw it. Now that someone on the web whom I have never met agrees with me, I am redeemed. Besides, Warren Zevon’s song of the same name is good, so that’s quality by association, right?
• A Midnight Clear: This is a great movie about a group of young soldiers sent to establish a post in an abandoned house in the wintertime. Great performances and beautiful photography.
• The Tailor of Panama: Another film staunchly disowned by everyone who saw it with me. And by “staunchly” I really do mean in the strongest terms possible. I think the words, “You never get to choose the movie again” were invoked. Several times. Still, I liked it right up until the ending, which sucked—I think there must have been more there that was removed in editing. The result is a choppy, abrupt ending that didn’t match with the preceding buildup.

The list isn’t all good, I think. The inclusion of Point Break (Swayze contamination), The Edge (just didn’t buy it), A Knight’s Tale (huh?), and Breakdown (Kurt Russel without Goldie Hawn?) raise some concern. Still, the guys at CHUD are enthusiastic, so check out the list, as there are some definite gems there, and some stuff I’d like to go and find.

Catching up on a little bit of reading this morning. A few interesting bits from around the web:

• Two good bits from Mark Kleiman today. The first is the best-yet comment on Bush’s to the moon and beyond plan:

  Of course Bush is grateful to the space program: What would he do without his precious Teflon coating? And obviously he can’t afford to be cut off from his supply of ideas that obviously came from anther planet.

  But this is even more disgusting than usual. If you’re going to let your scientifically illiterate political advisor staff a huge science- policy decision, you should at least have the common decency to lie about it.

  In another post, Mark notes that he really likes William Gibson’s latest novel, Pattern Recognition. Like Mark, I really enjoyed the book’s accellerated version of logo-laden style. In both Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, Gibson gives us protagonists (Case and Cayce, a similarity he says is purely coincidental) who find themselves benefitting from the near-limitless resources of mysterious sponsors, benefactors who, despite their own power, need the particular talents of the books’ characters. Even with such resources (Cayce’s expense account is particularly impressive), the protagonists are still at the mercy of forces they don’t yet understand. In both books, this generates the kind of paranoid, agoraphobic atmosphere that Gibson works very well with. In Pattern Recognition, however, it’s particularly fun to see Gibson working in a more contemporary world than the dystopian cyberpunk realms of his earlier stories.

  Mark didn’t as much of a kick from Gibson’s Idoru, and I have to agree; up until Pattern Recognition, Gibson was somewhat off his stride, perhaps trying to make the transition from the Sprawl to something else. While I think that Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive were great reads, Gibson’s Burning Chrome collection of short stories is an even better introduction to the diverse and imaginative stuff that Gibson was working on at the time.

• More bad news for efforts to wire Utah’s Wasatch front with a municipally-organized fiber optic network: UtopiaNot is protesting the cost of the project as well as the role of AT&T as the project’s initial service provider, suggesting anti-trust violations in the contract. While I think the UtopiaNot folks have some legitimate concerns with the costs and risks of the project, I remain supportive of municipal projects like this, and I don’t think UtopiaNot’s portayal of the project as a shell game is very honest. That UtopiaNot’s founders are also presidents of competing technology outfits suggests as well that their own interests are not necessarily those of the communities they purport to represent.

• Grand Text Auto is a nice site for all things related to interactive fiction, other types of computer-mediated communication and artwork, and current scholarship on these and related topics. This morning they link to Jan Rune Holmevik’s long and detailed dissertation [pdf] on the development of multi-user online environments. Although the use of MOOs as general-purpose educational tools is the core of the project, the dissertation includes interesting histories of hacking, open source software, and the communities that emerged to use tools like LambdaMOO. Neat stuff.
  

I didn’t get as much time to read this holiday as I usually do. I seem to have spent a great deal of time eating party mix and driving the car. I did get a chance to read Tobias Wolff’s Old School, and particularly enjoyed the Ayn Rand chapter and the novel’s last handful of chapters. The significance of the narrator’s experiences accumulates very subtly, and the story has a nice, graceful arc that sort of took me by surprise.

Although I didn’t get a lot of quiet time to read, I listened to a lot of music, and brought a good chunk of it home with me. A few highlights:

• Genius, Warren Zevon. This is a great collection, better in both song selection and recording quality than the one that fell out of the truck, along with half a dozen other CDs, somewhere in northern Arizona’s back of beyond.
• Radio, Chuck Brodsky. Brodsky is a great songwriter, whose songs range from hilarious to quirky to heartbreaking. I first got into Brodsky via his humorous but bittersweet song about Moe Berg, who graduated from Columbia Law School, played for the White Sox, and was a CIA spy.
• World Without Tears, Lucinda Williams. This was a gift from a friend of Heather’s and it’s great, great music.
• Poet Game, Greg Brown. Brown, seriously, is just brilliant.
• Cowboyography, Ian Tyson. How did Nashville co-opt the “western” in “country-western?” There’s a whole lot of west out here, and it’s not the all-hat, no-cattle junk that Country FM wants you to believe. Tyson is the real deal, as long as you don’t have some irrational distrust of genuine Canadian cowboys.
• Oh Mercy, Bob Dylan. “Most of the Time” and “Shooting Star” are must-haves.

Caution: Potential spoilers ahead. If you’re freaky about that sort of thing, you’ve probably already seen the movie anyway, but if not, proceed with caution.

In almost all ways, Return of the King is a magnificent movie. We saw it with a group of friends on opening night, in a theater packed to the gills with boisterous fans. We were down front, and although I would have preferred seats where I didn’t have to turn my head to see the entire screen, it’s an awful lot of fun to be surrounded by that much excitement.

As in The Two Towers, ROTK’s narrative follows a number of simultaneous stories, but the narratives are stitched together well, to create a tension that rises and falls right up to the conclusion—at least the conlusion of the ring’s story, which is followed by twenty minutes of epilogue.

The films tell a story that’s faithful to the spirit of the original, despite the true fanboys’ continued gripes about the role of Arwen this and the Houses of Healing. That’s not to say that hard-core fans won’t be pleased, or that the movie is free from noticeable flaws: While plenty of the movie is truly—sometimes absurdly—spectacular, some scenes fall a little flat. Still, that the movie captures the grandeur of Minas Tirith and the penultimate, cataclysmic battle, as well as smaller moments in the lives of its many characters is a testament to the care with which the film was made.

Gandalf’s ride into Minas Tirith is brilliant, conveying the grandeur of the city and the gravity of Gandalf’s purpose. The technicians who built the scale model of the city were madmen, every one; sane people could not be so singleminded as to sculpt those walls and litter them with the level of detail that is visible as the camera pans from terrace to terrace, cutting between wheeling views of the city and tight shots of Gandalf and Pippin atop an impossibly fast horse galloping around steep, tight paths. It’s almost ridiculous, how stunning the scene is.

[ As an aside, the film’s landscapes, a mix of New Zealand countryside and matte backgrounds (combined so seamlessly, who can tell the difference?) are utterly gorgeous. The photographers are really, really good. During one sweeping shot of some impossibly pretty grassland, my ecologist wife turned to me and whispered, “We’ve got to go there.” ]

The film is full of spectacle on that scale, spectacle that would seem excessive if not for the fact that it’s just done so damn well and is built upon characters whose very lives are rather spectacular. The charge of the horsemen of Rohan into battle is another scene so thunderous and chilling that you can’t help but be carried away.

Maybe because of this grandeur, the film is better at showing the depth of its characters in small, quiet moments in the middle of raging war than when the same characters are safe at the movie’s conclusion. Save for one scene back home in a pub, for example, the hobbits’ affection for one another seems less, well, affected, when they are surrounded by doubt and fear. Aragorn similarly seems more comfortable (and believable) as reluctant heir than as king. Resolving a ten-hour epic film must be hard, especially when story contains so many threads and characters. If Return of the King has a significant storytelling flaw, it seems to be that the nobility and care of its characters is best expressed during conflict, and that makes the final scenes, the tying up the story’s loose ends, a little too self-conscious, with too many lingering close-ups on Frodo’s face used as shorthand for emotional resolution. Still, when the movie finally concludes with the hobbits for the most part in their humble starting points, it feels like the right kind of ending, and the preceding scenes feel like the right kind of resolution, if not shown in quite a satisfactory way.

That’s a minor flaw in a great movie. In the end, it’s easy to appreciate the conclusion to the Lord of the Rings films both as a technical achievement—seven-some years of filming, massive editing tasks, eye-popping special effects—as well as a moving, exciting spectacle. If you have nearly four hours free, give it a try, but smuggle in your own Junior Mints, because they’re four bucks a pop at the concession.

I’m not a big classic movie buff. I’m not even sure what “classic” means when it comes to movies. Come on: I was born in 1975. Basic biology means that I’m pretty fond of The Empire Strikes Back, but it hasn’t made its way to the classic section of my local indie video shop.

Still, I’m fond of a handful of genuine oldies, and I’ve been introducing Heather to a few of them lately. We started with Casablanca a couple of weekends ago. It’s sort of one of the standard stock of classic movies, but that shouldn’t count against it, and the new DVD edition is great. The disc features the theatrical trailer for the film, and it’s quite a bit of fun. None of the “in a world where…” nonsense that populates every contemporary trailer; instead, the trailer directs the viewer to “Thrill!” and “Be Astonished!” Lots of fun.

We’ve also watched A Touch of Evil, which really is one of my old favorites. You have to suspend disbelief to accept Charleton Heston as a Mexican cop, but after you come to grips with Mister Cold Dead Hands saying Que Paso, Pancho? the movie turns the corner. The plot is pretty simple: A prominent border town businessman is blown to bits, and Heston’s cop is drawn into conflict with Orson Welles’ racist, corrupt police captain. The intrigue comes to involve the local drug gangs and Welles’ history of framing his suspects. The film’s photography, directed by Welles, is what really shines. Welles’ cameras move with the action and frame it beautifully, with especially dynamic motion in the final scenes. It’s great filmmaking, despite Heston’s bogus accent and Janet Leigh’s odd performance as his new wife. The contemporary version of the film is a re-edited print put together after Welles wrote a memo critical of the original release. When the memo was found several years ago, the film was recut and re-released, and is now on DVD.

Yesterday we found ourselves with an evening to kill, so we went looking for Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Now that’s a movie: Greed, gunfights, snakes, and banditos. But it was checked out. Who rents Treasure of the Sierra Madre on a Wednesday night? I suggested to Heather that it was our Bizarro-world analogues.

Instead of Treasure we ended up with Secretary, which is hard to sum up, especially knowing that my grandparents occasionally read this site. Here’s the Salon.com review. It’s quite an interesting film, with some good performances.

We had a chance last night to see the new-and-improved
The Two Towers extended edition DVD. I recommend it highly. The special edition includes almost 45 minutes of footage not included in the theatrical release, and this added footage fills in some important holes in the narrative. Rabid Tolkein fans, of course, will love the new footage: The Ents are given a larger role, the character of Faramir is much more elaborated, and the events of the third film are foreshadowed far better, among other smaller but rewarding new bits.

Perhaps more importantly, the new footage makes the story more accessible to non-hardcore viewers. It really is a better film with a stronger story, but the running time is an obstacle for casual viewers. If you are neither a fan of the theatrical release nor a Tolkein purist, you’re not likely to commit yourself to the nearly four hours of the extended edition, and consequently unlikely to get the benefit of its clearer storytelling. But it’s worth it, and not just for the new scene of Pippin and Merry getting all giggly over a little bit of good Hobbit weed.

So check it out, and bring on The Return of the King. I’ll be happy to have the disappointing experience of Matrix: Revolutions washed right out of my mind.

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I’m a sociologist-errant. This site is powered by Textpattern, Joyent and the sociological imagination. For more about me and this site, see the long version.

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