musings

I saw a couple of movies on Friday night – Million Dollar Baby and Constantine.

Million Dollar Baby, despite all appearances, is not a boxing movie. It’s dressed up like a boxing movie, it walks like a boxing movie, and it talks like a boxing movie. It’s not a boxing movie but rather a movie about a boxer. Like Mystic River before it, there are no special effects, no fancy camera work, no flash. Just a simple story, told in a straight-forward fashion. Long lingering conversations allow the characters’ personalities shine through, and sometimes there are just silent scenes that are more revealing than any dialogue could allow. Million Dollar Baby is mostly a quiet, contemplative movie, that plucks at heartstrings but still can make you laugh. It’s not a flashy movie, but like Hillary Swank’s character, Maggie, it’s got a lot of heart.

Constantine, on the other hand, is all flash. A lot of my friends told me that if I could get past the fact that it was based on Hellblazer it was a pretty decent movie. I wouldn’t go that far, but it wasn’t terrible. I’ll skip all the bits that have been changed from the comic and treat the movie as standalone. The high points: Tilda Swinton was marvellous as the archangel Gabriel, Rachel Weisz looked like she actually believed her role, and Djimon Hounsou, as Papa Midnite, was the king of cool. The low: Hell is Los Angeles, only on fire. Really. I suppose that’s better than the cheap Nine Inch Nails video vision of Hell that was Event Horizon, but really, it was pretty lame. The half-skull demons were also rather less than intimidating. Aside from those two, the special effects ranged from pretty okay to really impressive. Of course, the impressive effects were all hiding in the background, so you had to be paying attention to see them. Reeves was, unsurprisingly, pretty wooden. The story was convoluted, and the dialogue often utterly vapid. Despite that, however, I kinda liked the movie. How often do you see a Hollywood action movie where the hero doesn’t walk off into the sunset with the girl?

After I’d added the AudioScrobbler and flickr feeds, I realised that the right column of my blog was just too long, and decided to go out looking for a new theme. I found almost exactly what I wanted in Viewfinder Design’s Three Column Darkess theme. The theme failed for me in a couple of ways, though, and I just had to fix them. First, the formatting didn’t agree with me – I didn’t like where different modules got placed on the page. That was easy enough to fix. Harder to fix was the more, IMO, compelling issue – the layout was jello. Now, my old theme was ice, but that was something that always irked me. I think web sites should look right no matter how you resize the browser window. I always found it irritating to find a web site with a 4cm wide column of text that ran 80 screens long, regardless of how wide I made my browser window. Thanks to this page by Craig Saila, I found out how to modify the Viewfinder Design page to make it liquid. I’ve got a fixed minimum width (I believe it’s 600 pixels ; if you’re trying to view this site with a narrower window then you’ll have to exercise that horizontal scrollbar) but aside from that, the site should always reflow to use as much of your browser as you give it. As always, comments are welcome.

One of the blogs I read faithfully (thanks to the lazy-web-reader’s boon, RSS) is Warren Ellis’ blog. This afternoon I saw a post about a song called Red Paper by Theory Anesthetic.

It’s a fantastic song ; so are the other three songs that are up there. They’re worth repeated listens. This, however, is a pain ‘cuz they’re streaming only. Streaming through a custom Flash application, no less. Rogue Amoeba Software to the rescue! They’ve got an amazing little bit of software (Mac only, sorry ‘doze and Linux users) called Audio Hijack Pro (there’s a non-pro version as well that’s cheaper) that lets you capture audio streams and save them. I can now listen to Theory Anesthetic to my heart’s content. Audio Hijack Pro did exactly what I wanted, and I was able to dive right in and just get it to work ; no muss, no fuss, no fights. I’ll be buying it for sure.

(Of course, I’d rather buy the music, but I couldn’t find any info on how to do so.)

Why did I wait so long to get a Flickr account? Flickr is amazing! And they provide your photos as an rss feed too, so I was able to find a WordPress plugin that grabs the most recent photos from my Flickr feed and stuck them in my sidebar. Too cool.

Fettdog’s Musical Version of Jeff Wayne’s The War of the Worlds is about the most amazing audiobook/radio-drama ever. Richard Burton’s grandiloquent tones over modern music – Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, All Saints, Duran Duran, Ride and others works in a way I’d never thought possible. You have got to check this out. I guarantee you won’t be sorry.

(Cheers, Jed, for sending me the link!)

I saw Charlie and the Chocolate Factory this afternoon, and it was a delight. I was really expecting a much darker movie that the one I got, but looking back at what a warm and fuzzy movie Big Fish was, in retrospect, I’m not really surprised. The movie is a very faithful adaptation of the Roald Dahl children’s classic – even the musical numbers have their lyrics taken straight out of the books. There’s a fairly minor addition to the story, but nothing that detracts from the feeling of the book. Johnny Depp plays Wonka as a glam-era-rockstar inspired (right down to the requisite androgyny) reclusive genius, and it really works. (Depp’s Finding Neverland co-star Freddie Highmore plays a quietly charming, unassuming Charlie Bucket.) There is one subtext that I don’t recall from the book, though – that Wonka had actually set up the “rotten” children to fail. Maybe it was less jaded eyes that read the book so many years ago, but the movie definitely gave the impression that Wonka knew full well who was going to win his special prize the moment the fifth Golden Ticket was found, something I don’t recall from the book. Still, anyone who enjoyed the book will certainly enjoy this movie. The Tim Burton-Johnny Depp combination strikes gold again.

I’ve replaced MG2 with Jed’s hacked version of it. My primary complaint about MG2 was that it stored all the images in it’s root directory. Jed hacked it so that you skip the upload phase, and just ftp the images into their own directory, and then get MG2 to import the folder. It automagically creates a new gallery with the same name as the directory, and populates the gallery with the directory contents. It’s a sweet hack, and I think it belongs in the main distribution. Thanks, Jed!

Trent Reznor has released Only, the latest single off With Teeth, in Garage Band 2 format. He’d previously released The Hand That Feeds. Both are available at nin.com.

Early last week Paula buzzed me to invite me out to hang with her and Stephanie at the Bovine Sex Club. Steve and I hit the place at about 11:15 and there was a speed metal band playing. They weren’t bad, for a speed metal band, but speed metal just isn’t my thing. Truth be told, every single song sounded exactly the same to me. So, we’re standing there, basically suffering to speed metal, and there’s no Paula or Steph. I called Paula and she, Steph, and Hernan were next door at The Velvet Underground. So we head over to meet them there. Now, the Velvet’s got kind of a cool look on the inside, but the music sucks – I felt like I was in an iPod commercial. No word of a lie, every second song was used in an iPod ad. I was expecting silhouetted dancers to appear at any moment. I like those ads when they’re 30 seconds long and spaced out over many days, but living them one after another is NOT my idea of a good time. Anyway, it was nice to hang with Paula and Steph, but Steph wasn’t feeling well so after a while she decided to head home. We walked her to her car and after she left we decided to try out a place Hernan recommended, Neutral. Unfortunately, by the time we got to Neutral, they’d closed up. It’d been a really dead night so they closed up early. We wound up adjourning to The Savage Garden. Since the closure of The Sanctuary Vampire Sex Bar, Savage has been about my favourite place in Toronto. It’s pretty small, but it has a good crowd of regulars and the music’s always great. After about an hour at Savage, Steve and I decided to call it a night. I’d not been barhopping like that in a long while, and it was a good bit of fun. I’m looking forward to the next time.

… software you’ve been using happily for eons goes out of date? I’d been using a little program called Recent Tunes to update my blog with the song that was playing in iTunes, and using the WP iTunes plugin to update the little Tunes section on the sidebar. It seems that something in Tiger has trashed Recent Tunes ; it only works for the run in which the preferences are created ; on subsequent runs it acts as if iTunes isn’t running at all. Worse yet, it appears to be abandoned. So I’ve switched over to AudioScrobbler, which has the mixed benefit of hooking me up with music that’s similar to stuff I like. I say it’s a mixed benefit because, as I’ve documented here in the past, I’m a music junkie. Knowing about more music that suits my tastes will only inspire me to buy more music. My shelves and my drive space are collapsing under the weight of my music collection, yet I can’t stop buying more. Not that I regret it at all. I can’t imagine my life without my tunes.