fine whine

Looking up at my shelves of DVDs, I see the results of a lot of poor decision making, misjudgment, and silly impulsiveness. And the occasional good film.

I could count them now, but what would be the point? At last count they numbered close to two hundred, but there's really no need to quantify them exactly. We're talking about art here, right? It should be a matter of quality, not quantity.

I didn't always think that way, I suspect. For a long time I was important to me in some way to know, to a single digit's precision, how many movies I owned on optical discs*. That, in itself, wouldn't be so significant if I hadn't spent so much time, and to some degree, money on acquiring so many of them with such frequency as to need websites and a Palm Pilot to accurately count my collection.

My rationale for buying many of them, collected together on the same shelf, oddly enough, was that I couldn't otherwise see the movies easily. I speak primarily of my thirty-odd Criterion Collection DVDs, which, back in the early years of the twenty-first century, were rare and exotic, but primarily rare enough, such that a person could conceivably be able to own, or at least watch, every one of them. Back in those days I aspired to be such a person.

Prior to college, I'd watched movies, but more or less in the same fashion as any teenager with little else to do than opt for the easy out when looking for something to do with friends. My friends weren't the sort to regularly see things opening weekend, so I'm sure to have missed out on some briefly popular turkeys, but at the same time I do recall seeing more than a few movies in an otherwise empty theater.

For some reason, a year after I'd started college I started taking a greater interest in movies. Part of it may have been that I was a projectionist in the student center, but I approached that more as a social opportunity and a job than as some gateway to becoming a cinephile. The beginnings of my DVD question had nowhere near as lofty a goal, to be sure. An avid bargain-hunter, I stumbled across an un-refusable deal to buy movies for a quarter apiece... from the notorious low-rent film studio Troma Entertainment, well known to fans of messy splatterfests and cheesecake exploitation flicks, and entirely unfamiliar to me. Not knowing anything about the movies (though I'd heard of The Toxic avenger, the cornerstone of their catalog) I picked some twenty of them, more or less at random, paid a higher-than-necessary shipping charge, and patiently waited two to three weeks for the box filled with movies I had no way to watch.

I didn't have a DVD player, you see. My dorm didn't even have a DVD player, though I think some of the more students with more well-to-do parents did. I certainly wasn't going to hang out in somebody else's room to experience Rabid grannies for the first time.

This was a bit before I was known, by some, for having a taste for bad movies.

The Troma movies were bad movies. I may well have overpaid, even without considering the shipping. But they were more than just eighteen randomly selected movies (two had been out of stock and they sent VHS tapes I quickly traded away as substitutes). They were an excuse to buy myself a DVD-ROM drive, so I could at least play movies on one of my computers.

There was a brief time when I had more computers in my dorm room than DVDs. And such was still the case when first my eighteen discs arrived, unfortunately. The only one that mattered, though, was the one inside which I installed my first-ever DVD drive and its accompanying hardware decoder--computers not being powerful enough to decode the digital movies on their own back then--and could consider such a shrewd move because the real players were still hundreds of dollars more.

Also, I had no television, so I saved the money not buying that too.

Once I bought the drive, I was able to finally watch the movies, and it wasn't long before I realized I needed some better movies in my collection. A co-worker of mine did me the favor of having a couple of the discs stolen while he borrowed them, and I replaced those with a few "real" movies I bought on eBay.

The online auction site quickly became my primary source for new and used DVDs. My early purchases were less than consistent - I bought The Matrix and Contact around the same time, even though I was less than impressed with the former and didn't particularly need to watch the latter another time. I think I bought The Matrix because everybody who had a DVD player owned it. I'm fairly certain I bought Contact because it was an early example of a studio's labor of love, as it contains considerable supplemental features including an unprecedented three commentary tracks.

I was a sucker for supplemental features. I think it was their appeal that prompted me to buy my first Criterion Collection movie. It was Terry Gilliam's Brazil, about which I'd only read, and generally the DVD set itself was lauded more than the film. So I bought it, the first of many movies I bought hoping I'd like them, and as with almost all of them I was quite right.

I did love the movie. The attention Criterion had lavished on it, providing not only Gilliam's cut, but also the butchered studio version, struck me as very promising for the future of DVDs, and quite possibly set me on my path of seeking films that ended up a little outside of the mainstream.

More immediately, though, it made me want to make more of the Criterion Collection part of my collection.

In retrospect, had I known I could watch pretty much any of them, as well as a whole lot more important movies, by visiting the school library, I might've saved a lot of trouble.

For that matter, had I not been too cheap to pay the buck or two the town library charged for borrowing their discs, I might not have 'needed' to spend twenty bucks a pop (on sale) to buy my Criterion discs from Borders.

Seems a bit silly, that, when I think about it now. Especially for how many of them I bought without having seen the movies first. I'll never know if I'd consider myself a fan of the movies of Luis Buñuel if I hadn't bought Criterion's Discreet charm of the bourgeoisie for its interesting cover art and good price (considering it was a double disc).

I did the same, more or less, with the movies of Jacques Tati, when I bought Mon oncle, though I can't recall quite why I had done so, though I am of course now quite happy I did so.

Those were not the only films I bought for less than rational reasons. I bought several movies (Repo man and the original Wicker man among them) because they came in unique cases.

That's how I ended up seeing Akira for the first time, in fact. I'm almost suprised now that I never picked up other limited edition tin-cased movies like Supergirl, attributing that to either sheer chance, or perhaps some tiny bit of common sense.

Shiny collections also caught my eye. I bought Fox's collections of the Die hard and French connection films, and was yet again pleasantly surprised to enjoy them.

For every French connection or Conversation (also purchased unseen!) I own, though, I've got an Antitrust or a Swordfish.

Along the way I picked up about ten movies from BMG, picked as much based on value for the money as for me wanting to own (or see) them. That's how I finally got to see most of the movies of Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy being a Criterion disc, and one of the most widely available, I already owned it). BMG also fortuitously introduced me to the TV series The Prisoner, a series I am proud to own even now as it is available for free to watch online.

As I write this I keep glancing back up at the shelf. I can only wonder how many other collections feature The Prisoner alongside Knight Rider and Boston legal. When I started writing this I meant it to be a rumination on what I could possibly do to begin culling the collection of stuff I don't really need to own (like the forgotten Killer elite pitting rival hitmen Robert Duvall and James Caan against each other, or my Dutch imported Raging Bull (special edition) or Things to do in Denver when you're dead, neither of which really do much for me, but neither of which are playable to most normal people here in the US). I meant to touch a little on how I ended up with multiple editions of Highlander and Starship troopers and The meaning of life, but somewhere along the way I seem to have lost track of what I was doing.

Which, now that I think about it, is as good an explanation as any for many of the discs being up there on those shelves.

* For the sake of sticking to close to a single line of reasoning, I'm not going to even mention my large laserdisc collection.

I realize the last entry was pretty bad. You may have noticed something of a slower pace to the entries published here, if you still drop by at all. It's true, I'm writing less, and apparently when I do, in fact, write something, it's a bloody mess.

Yesterday's rambling, well, whatever it was (read it here, if you haven't already) was written over the course of something like four months, and I no longer have a real idea of when I first considered tackling the topic of movies ripping off other movies. It was the top draft on a pile that is getting smaller, due more to me deleting the ones I either can't remember* or no longer feel as strongly compelled to write. There may still be others, dredged out of the past (I do have this charming story, partially written, about losing my mobile phone in New York City from December 2005) but the pickings are getting leaner.

The entries directly preceding yesterday's also aren't samples of my best writing. I'm beginning to suspect that in order to really produce something of quality, consistently, I'd need to produce a much greater quantity.

Well, when I think about it like that, it just makes sense.

I'm out of practice. November marks the annual National Novel Writing Month and, as usual, I have that deep-seated desire to give it another go, to finally 'win' it by writing a 50,000 word book in 30 days.

I don't even recall if I wrote more than a paragraph last year, and barely more than that the year before. Back in 2004 or 2005 I actually made it to the thousands, not by much, but I think I ended up starting a second story entirely to do so. As much as reading my 50,000+ words from 2003 amuses me, I cannot in good conscience call it a novel, or even a book, in any conventional sense, though I do still hope, someday, to settle on a title and cover for it, and send it to a print-on-demand shop, just so I can own something that at least looks like a book I've authored. So the great American NaNoWriMo novel still eludes me.

And see, I've rambled again. Given my recent output here, I can't even delude myself into thinking I'd be capable of starting a novel, let alone finishing one worth reading. What I need to do is get back in shape, as it were. If there were a writer's equivalent of the retired boxer, atrophied and tired, needing more than just the determination and a rediscovered hunger for victory for one last bout against a seemingly unbeatable challenger, well, maybe somebody could finish out this extended metaphor in some satisfactory way.

It's too early for me to give up on this year's novel. It'll take some effort to get myself to the mindset to try to tackle writing it, but if I try a little harder around here, I may just have a fighting chance.

Of course, I need to think up a story first.

* I still have many an unpublished entry where I recorded merely the date and the system ID of the post that would've been published that day (and likely written several days or weeks later), though I've deleted over a hundred such drafts over the last year or so. Someday I'd like to have the number of drafts back at zero. That's probably a more realistic goal than writing a novel, and an attainable one at that, since all I'd need do is select them all and delete them, in a fit of defeatism at not finishing them properly.

Three months ago* I watched two foreign films, though they were not totally unfamiliar to me. They shared a title, Ghajini, and a plot.

You see, they're both about a guy. He's the CEO of a growing telecom company, but finds himself thinking less about business and more about love when he meets a wonderful, outgoing girl who constantly surprises and delights him. She's a model-slash-actress who hasn't taken on any substantial roles, and he's letting her believe that he's also trying to break into show business or modeling. She's not the only person being fooled - in fact she's lying to the whole country, claiming that some telecom CEO has fallen in love with her, and the two are dating, even as she's more or less dating, unknowingly, that very same guy.

So, we can tick a few things off already - mistaken identity and a love story, love under false pretenses, even. Given we're talking about a Bollywood and a Tollywood movie, here, there are a few song and dance numbers, too.

But I neglected to mention something in the plot. The girl gets into some trouble. You see, she's got a heart of gold. she goes out of her way to help people, and incurs the wrath of some gangsters when she helps out some women on a train who would otherwise be headed for a life of slavery or worse. They come after her, murder her, and almost kill the guy, who happened to be nearby when the thugs show up. He was about to come clean about his deception, too. So the guy's beat up pretty bad, and the blow to his head left him with a terrible malady: he can't hold any new memories in his head for more than fifteen minutes. In order to keep track of anything he carries around a Polaroid camera that beeps every fifteen minutes for him to take a picture and record what's going on, who he's with, and what's he's doing. He has covered his body with tattoos with all the important details he knows about the girl's killer, and he's working on tracking him down for vengeance.

Oh yes, I know what you're saying. Polaroid didn't make a camera with an alarm, that's just ridiculous!

Or were you thinking the plot sounds awfully familiar. It's obvious that this Ghajini is inspired by Chris Nolan's Memento. Both of them are - remember there are two films here.

The one I watched first was the Bollywood one, starring Aamir Khan (better known for his starring turn in the period cricket blockbuster Lagaan). It dispenses with some of the more clever mechanics of Nolan's film, namely, showing scenes in reverse order, and adds cliche Bollywood touches like the songs and extra hour of love story, but the result is nonetheless enjoyable. With all its similarities, some would consider it a complete rip-off, even with those differences. It's more accurately considered a remake.

But it's not a remake of Memento. It's a remake of a remake of Memento. It was remade first in Telugu (Tollywood instead of Bollywood), and up until the ending, the two films are very, very close.

Without giving anything away, the two endings are different enough to make seeing both of them worthwhile.

But it's a fair assumption many people outside of the India wouldn't watch one of them, let alone both, due in no small part to the connection to Memento.

What brought this to mind, though, was something I read, about Warner Brothers taking out a full page ad in The Times of India. They were threatening legal action against any movies made "either in English or Hindi or other language, having a similar script, screenplay or story line or character sketches or interplay of characters or sequence of events" to Benjamin Button.

That struck me as a little bit odd. I know it's fairly common for there to be Bollywood movies borrowing pieces, or plots, or sequences of events from popular Hollywood movies (and, heck, some that aren't so popular*. I remember watching Partner and wondering how they could've gotten away with such a close ripoff of Hitch.

Well, it turns out in that case some legal action was threatened, and there may well have been some sort of settlement. But it made for some interesting quotes:

Producer Parag Sanghvi:

Seven hundred films are made every year. Can all of them be original?

Director David Dhawan:

It’s rubbish. How many producers can they sue? Five hundred films are made here that are inspired by Hollywood films.

I can't imagine Sony and Will Smith lost out on too many rupees from Indians paying for a version of their movie, in the local language, rather than buying the DVD of Hitch. But what do I know?

I do know that Hollywood producers work through official channels to secure the rights to remake popular foreign movies, and can get in trouble when they don't.

But, from an artistic standpoint, what's the harm? Is the original film somehow damaged by the existence of the copy? Did Johnny Cash's excellent rendition of "Hurt" in any way diminish the artistic merit of the Nine inch nails original?

Where do you draw the line? Innovations get copied. Watch a movie like Citizen Kane or A hard day's night or any number of groundbreaking films (hell, even The matrix. Sure, you can think back on other movies that have copied those techniques. Sure, some of the derivatives are equally as interesting, if not better. But does it make the originals any less great?

Well, maybe not The matrix. Influential and great aren't necessarily always the same.

* At least I think it was over three months ago I had the idea. That's when I'd dated the draft, but sometime in between I lost my train of thought, as well as the motivation to write the article. All that I'd written was "Ghajini, Ghajini, and Memento. Also, Coming to America." and I've tried to remember what I meant to say about them. Looking at the dates, that's when I'd just watched Coming to America, and the other two, two weeks previous.
** There is, from what I have read, a Bollywood remake of Who is Cletis Tout?. I recently also enjoyed Maalamaal Weekly which bore eerie similarities to Waking Ned Divine.

I don't think I've ever bought a book for somebody else*. For that matter, I don't buy myself many books, and generally the only ones I buy I either:

• never end up reading, such as Naked lunch or A salute to cheese
• have already read, and enjoyed, and entertained the notion of, but never have actually gotten around to loaning them to other people or re-reading them myself, like Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with occasional music or Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves

So, cheap or rare children's books for Natalya aside, I don't buy many books. I read a lot of them, however, and what started me thinking about this was a brief aside in Nick Hornby's Shakespeare wrote for money wherein he mentions he recommends a good book to buy for new mothers (Beth Ann Fennelly's Tender hooks: poems). I read that (Hornby's book, not the poetry), and thought for a moment if there were any people I knew that I'd give a book as a gift, and then, thinking back, tried to think if I'd ever given one. Again, I can't think of ever buying a book for somebody I didn't already know liked or wanted that book.

What's wrong with me? Lots of people buy lots of books for people. I read a lot of books, and I know a lot of people who read books, and for some of them I can even reasonably gauge if a book I've read would interest them.

I don't mind recommending books, in fact, after I've enjoyed a book, I rather enjoy telling people about it, like, say, when I mentioned to skippy that Paul Melko's The walls of the universe is a fun read with good characters and a great story, even if the book leaves the possibility of a sequel open.

Come to think of it, I'm the same way with movies. I have no reservations pleading the case for an underrated, or overlooked hidden gem of a film, but I haven't found myself actually giving those movies to people. Perhaps I'm happy to merely point people in the right direction.

Maybe it's the fear of rejection. Merely giving somebody a pointer to something leaves the responsibility for actually obtaining that book or movie, and that transfers some of the negativity onto the person, and off of me, if it turns out to be less than enjoyable. After all, it's not like I'm the one who bought the book.

I do know that I have a weird neurosis about receiving gifts, particularly things such as movies, book, and video games that can be purchased many places. Even though it's somebody else buying it for me, I'm almost always certain it cost too much, that I could've found a much better price.

Maybe that gets to the heart of it, then. Perhaps it's just I'm too cheap to buy books and movies. The other purpose, other than to blather on and on without a point, for this very post is to test out a plugin I'm updating for Habari to insert Amazon Affiliate links for books and movies, so that I can make some small pittance of a commission if people decide to buy something. Or if they want more information.

Maybe they'd reserve it from their local library. To be honest, that's what I'd do.

*Two disclaimers on that:

• "I don't think" because I've long known that collectively, the people I know remember more about myself that I ever will, so I've given up on making blanket "I've never ..." declarations.
• As mentioned above, I've picked up many a book for other people, either because it was convenient for me to get for them, or because I knew they wanted that specific title. In that regard, it's no different from picking up groceries, the way I see it.

Challenged by RandyWalker and inspired by John Gruber's post about blocking the DiggBar, I whipped up a quick plugin to do just that for Habari.

After all, why should all the other blog engines have all the fun?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The DiggBar is a new feature that adds lots of great features to pages and sites linked on Digg. And to do so, it shortens the URL (to one starting with http://digg.com/) and loads the target in a frame.

In a frame?! I thought we were done with frames half a decade ago.

There are myriad reasons why this is a bad thing, and not all of them involve Digg stealing revenue, and other sites have covered it better, but in short, it's a bad thing.

So, how can you avoid it framing your Habari site?

DiggBar Blocker

You can download* it here: Current Version.

Unzip that in your /user/plugins/ directory, and activate it in your admin plugins page.

By default, it will provide a brief message ("This site does not support use of the DiggBar.") and a link to the correct page with your URL on it. I also added an option to bypass the nice message, and just reload the target outside of the bar.

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, please leave them below or submit a ticket on the Habari-extras Trac.

* Or view the source here.

Those of you with Facebook accounts likely know what follows.

To everybody else, there's a so-called meme going around to get people to the use Facebook Notes feature that has people writing 25 facts, goals, thoughts, and whatnot about themselves and then 'tagging' 25 people connected to them on Facebook to presumably do the same.

If you happen to be in the former group, feel free to comment there instead of here.

I may have written about some of these things before. None of the below is a boast about my stellar memory.

1. I don't like to pick favorites or rank things in order of personal preference, generally. I wrote this list out without numbers first* and then reordered them several times. To my knowledge, they're not supposed to be in any particular order anyway, but I'd hate to have some sort of preference or priority suggested by them.

2. The backpack I carry every day to work with me is the same one I used in sixth grade. The zipper got replaced once or twice, but that's about it. I now realize that, back in high school, when I used to scrawl slogans and jokes on it atop pieces of masking tape, that doing so was a good thing lest I show up at work with a bag suggesting we "PAVE THE WHALES". Why I also had electrical and gaffer's tape with me as well was not really clear then and even more so now.

3. I once owned the domain name peanutbutterandjelly.info but never got around to doing anything with it before it expired.

4. I've never been entirely satisfied with capitalization. I Really Hate When All The Words Are Capitalized In A Sentence, Or Song Title, Or Headline, Et Cetera. Sentence case, on the other hand, isn't always entirely appropriate either, particularly when it comes to band names. I may go to my grave not knowing exactly how I'd want to capitalize, say, the dysfunctional psychedelic Waltons, or I am the World Trade Center. all lowercase looks immature and unfinished to me, whatsisname cummings be damned.

5. I spend far too much time correcting titles and artists (and capitalization) of my mp3s.

6. Early in my freshman year of college I was threatened with a lawsuit from the RIAA, for operating an mp3 distribution FTP site. At the time the amount being thrown around was $15 million, but fortunately after deleting all of them, giving up my school-provided email for a year, and writing some 'informative' newspaper columns, I was off the hook. They never filed suit. This was before they started cracking down on everybody.

7. Also in college I got in trouble with the computer lab guys for hiding rc5-64bit encryption-cracking programs (for science, and a competition, not hacking) on the workstations with processes named like 'ps' and 'grep'. Apparently their long run times and CPU usage were a dead giveaway. I told them I'd stop doing it, and haven't contributed to any distributed computing effort/contest since then, using my computer or anybody else's.

8. During high school I was on the local YMCA swim team. I wasn't very good at it (the best I think I did, other than garnering a 'most improved' trophy, was winning my heat at regionals, once. Afterward, when picking up my ribbon, I learned that I was 31st of 36. Somehow I managed to be in the same pool with the every single swimmer slower than me), and now when I get into a pool I find myself wondering what I'm supposed to do to pass the time.

9. I know I abuse parentheses in my writing, though I would not consider my use of them to be improper (see above).

10. My only home internet connection was dialup well into early 2008. I even played World of Warcraft over it for quite some time.

11. I don't play World of Warcraft anymore, and haven't for quite some time. It stopped being fun when I couldn't play at the same time as my friends and I wasn't finding a dollar's worth of entertainment in it every day.

12. I've found myself to be fiercely competitive when the stakes are low or nonexistent, even to the point of cheating if I know I can get away with it. This does not apply to playing board and card games with people, though. I don't try to cheat anymore - it's no longer fun to win by cheating. I'd rather play and have a good time, then work to make sure I win at the expense of the fun.

13. There is a great disparity between the number of words I recognize, and the number for which I know the correct definition. It's always a pleasant surprise when I go out on a limb and use one I think is appropriate, and it turns out to be particularly good in context. In a recent conversation I tried this with "austere" and it was just right. More than once I've completely misused a word.

14. I haven't bought anything off of eBay in at least three months. This wouldn't be that surprising except that I've probably won some 200 auctions over the last decade there.

15. I claim to never watch TV but can't say that without many caveats. I am fairly current on a small handful of shows, and would like to be so on a few others, but I only ever watch them online. The last time I deliberately watched a TV show at the same time it was being broadcast was the episode of The Simpsons that followed a SuperBowl and preceded the (horrible) pilot of American Dad. I also watch a great number of shows on DVD, and even own a few.

16. I own a couple laserdisc players, and some 100 laserdiscs or so. I haven't watched one in a while, and the number of them that I can't replace with DVDs dwindles every year. I got into them in the month that everybody but Pioneer stopped making them, and picked up a great many of them for a dollar or two. The rest, primarily Criterion Collection discs, were grabbed here and there at resale shops. I don't recall paying any attention to them in the days when they could be bought new in stores or rented.

17. In 2007, on a lark, I willingly and deliberately watched over 60 Bollywood movies. Apparently this makes me some sort of guru in the eyes of the other white suburbanites.

18. I'd like to drive a classic 70s muscle car or two sometime.

19. On the average, I consider myself to be a better driver than most people who consider themselves better than average.

20. I've had two bikes stolen over the years. The second one was even locked to a rack.

21. I think I got the MVP award for Academic Challenge my senior year of high school out of some sort of misplaced pity - I wasn't really that big a contributor to our (less than stellar) scoring. I've never done anything with the corresponding fabric varsity letter other than file it away.

22. I can't help but proofread the things I read, finding typos and other mistakes. Which is all the more ironic because the first time I published this, having read through it a number of times, both #2 and #22 were exactly the same. It's not like I used an apostrophe wrong, but still...

23. As a kid I loved to doodle. Somewhere in the intervening years I lost the ability to doodle new things, and often find myself drawing the same cars I used to draw back then, other than the odd website layout.

24. My handwriting has not improved one bit since seventh grade.

25. The same may well be true for my writing in general - I was an adequate writer back then, from what I've seen since.

(Thanks, Morydd, for being the tipping point in me finally doing this.)

* I originally planned to put "I put two #8s in this list" in the middle somewhere, but fortunately thought of something else to write for that last salacious factoid.