fine whine

Jessica and I watched Ocean's 12 today (for free, no less) and I must say that it was a fun movie. There's a moment in it where a plane is landing and the camera is at something of an unorthodox angle, but I could tell that the cameraman or director or somebody was getting a kick out of shooting that way. Everybody is having fun in the movie, even the bit players with cameo roles (so who is Robbie Coltrane, anyway?) get to have their kicks.

But first, as I mentioned yesterday, here's a list of ten eleven of the movies I most enjoyed watching last year, in vaguely chronological order. It's no coincidence that more than one of them are from B-Fest. They're not all recent films, and in fact only three were made in years starting with "200". I'd try to make a ten worst list too but I'd get too hung up on dissing Northfork and Brainscan to come up with the other eight.

So, with no further adieu, ten eleven movies I really enjoyed watching in 2004:

• Diner
• The Killing
• Robot Jox
• The Monkey Hustle
• Billy Liar
• The Spanish Prisoner
• The Cooler
• The Untouchables
• Chopping Mall
• The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Shaun of the Dead

And now, back to Ocean's 12. Like I said, it was very enjoyable. Even the guy who did the score was in on the fun. There's a scene in the last third of the movie that is racuously underscored (although the music is what drives the scene more than the action) with a piece that sounds very, very similar to the Iron Butterfly 18-minute opus "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida", and in a cool way. I can't be sure if it was parody of homage, as the original is pretty much a classic self-parody and I find myself needing to wink a number of times just to think of the layers of it all.

But it was clear, beginning to end, that everybody was having a blast, even if the changes in typeface (and the random italicization) were a bit disjointed. Check it out if you enjoyed the first one, and even if you were only lukewarm on it, still give it a shot. Particularly if you can get in without paying like we did.

I don't usually fall in for these so-called memes, but this one caught my eye. The idea is to take a list of the top one hundred movies as rated by imdb users and bold the ones I've seen.

I'll use the list that Kheryn used, though I cannot find a corresponding list on imdb. As mentioned above, I've bolded the ones I've seen. I've even linked to some that I've mentioned this year.

1. The Godfather (1972)
2. The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
3. The Godfather: part 2 (1974)
4. LOTR: Return of the King (2003)
5. LOTR: The Two Towers (2002)
6. Schindler's List (2002)
7. Seven Samurai (1954)
8. Casablanca (1942)
9. LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
10. Star Wars: A New Hope (1977)
11. Citizen Kane (1941)
12. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
13. Dr. Strangelove (1964)
14. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
15. Rear Window (1954)
16. Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
17. Pulp Fiction (1994)
18. The Usual Suspects (1995)
19. Memento (2000)
20. North by Northwest (1959)
21. 12 Angry Men (1957)
22. The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966)
23. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
24. Psycho (1960)
25. Amélie (2001)
26. The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
27. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
28. Goodfellas (1990)
29. American Beauty (1999)
30. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
31. Vertigo (1958)
32. The Matrix (1999)
33. City of God (2002)
34. To kill a Mockingbird (1962)
35. Once upon a time in the West (1968)
36. Apocalypse Now (1979)
37. The Pianist (2002)
38. The Third Man (1949)
39. Paths of Glory (1957)
40. Taxi Driver (1976)
41. Fight Club (1999)
42. Spirited Away (2001)
43. Some like it hot (1959)
44. Double Indemnity (1944)
45. Das Boot (1981)
46. The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
47. Singin' in the rain (1952)
48. Chinatown (1974)
49. L.A. Confidential (1997)
50. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
51. Requiem for a dream (2000)
52. All about Eve (1950)
53. M (1931)
54. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
55. Seven (1995)
56. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
57. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
58. Rashômon (1950)
59. Raging Bull (1980)
60. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
61. Alien (1979)
62. American History X (1998)
63. The Sting (1973)
64. Léon (1994)
65. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
66. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
67. Life is Beautiful (1997)
68. Touch of Evil (1958)
69. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
70. Finding Nemo (2003)
71. 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
72. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
73. The Great Escape (1963)
74. Modern Times (1936)
75. A Clockwork Orange (1971)
76. Amadeus (1984)
77. On the Waterfront (1954)
78. Ran (1985)
79. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
80. Annie Hall (1977)
81. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
82. Jaws (1975)
83. The Apartment (1960)
84. Braveheart (1995)
85. High Noon (1952)
86. Aliens (1986)
87. Fargo (1996)
88. Strangers on a Train (1951)
89. The Shining (1980)
90. Metropolis (1927)
91. Blade Runner (1982)
92. The Sixth Sense (1999)
93. City Lights (1931)
94. Donnie Darko (2001)
95. Duck Soup (1933)
96. The Great Dictator (1940)
97. The General (1927)
98. The Seventh Seal (1957)
99. The Princess Bride (1987)
100. Dogville (2003)

So there you have it. I've seen 70% of the greatest movies (as of when this list was compiled). Surprisingly, I've only seen exactly 10% of the worst 100 films.

I keep meaning to come up with a list of ten or so of the movies I most enjoyed watching this year, but I'm still not ready with that. Perhaps tomorrow.

So today I was bouncing between so-called radio.blogs and I stumbled across a catchy track called "Perfect bore" by a band called Extra Extra. Oddly enough, the band doesn't seem to exist outside of a website and this one track that I streamed. As for Allmusic, Django's, Amazon and so forth: nobody's heard of the group. Apparently I have imagined them, or they are just really, really independent. Which is unfortunate, since their music is kinda catchy (though I know it's dangerous to judge based on a single song) and I'd like to find more.

Searching for them reminded me of my quest for more information about the britpop group Space. Talk about a common name. I have two of their albums, Spiders and Tin planet but neither is very recent and I am pretty sure they'd done something lately. As was the case with EE, the usual suspects turned up very little in the way of new music from them. However as I was traipsing around Times Square two weeks ago I bumbled into the massive (well, at least multi-story) Virgin Megastore, in which I discovered Space's Suburban rock 'n' roll in the imports bin. That's odd, I thought, I've never heard of this album, and apparently so had nobody else save for the store. Go figure.

So anybody with any better information about Extra Extra, please feel free to drop me a line. Anybody wanting to listen to them can drop by here and hear it with radio.blog's nifty little flash player, but I can't be sure how long it will stay in the playlist.

I have heard rumblings of some more remakes working their way through production, namely The pink panther, The wicker man and The longest yard. Why, Hollywood, why?

Speaking of things that are repeated unnecessarily, apparently we are out of power again, and the whole neighborhood this time around. Were I a more spiteful person I'd say it serves them right for blatantly shining their holiday lights and porch lamps while the cursed few of us huddled in darkness. I'm not spiteful, though, just rather angry that despite the fact that I live within the outerbelt of a rather large city I can't depend on my electric company to keep the juice flowing nor my city to plow the streets around mine. The last major snowfall and freezing rain was last Thursday, for Pete's sake!

But I'm not looking to dwell on the crappy events that are far out of my control. Instead, I'd like to point out that Steve Martin as Inspector Clouseau in an upcoming Pink panther could well be very, very bad. I'm envisioning the Steve Martin of late who put in an appearance in (another 'toon-ish outing) Looney tunes: Back in action and there he was very, very bad. As for Nic Cage in a redone Wicker man (I'm not looking to see if he's slated to be the inspector or somebody else in the production), I'm not even going to try to think of that.

I don't know anything about the new Longest yard, and there too I'll likely stay in the dark, interjecting it only in conversations about bottoms of barrels.

So today I still have no power. Last night Jessica and I slept over at the nice and toasty warm house of some friendly neighbors which which we had previously exchanged probably half an hour's worth of words. We chit-chatted for for much more than that last night, watching the various networks (on cable, woo hoo) reveal the same information over and over again about the bleak forecast and the varying hundreds of thousands of people in Ohio also without power or worse. They all seemed to have the same fifteen minutes of footage of one pole on fire and a car spinning out and so forth. Really exciting stuff.

Tonight we're crashing over with Scott and Carina and Tayler and Tyler (and Xanth and Ezra and Simon and Echo) and we also brought our cat too. I feel bad in that we're somehow infringing upon their Christmas stuff, but also recognize that now that all of the hotels and motels are full of the other 199,998 people also missing power we're going to need to impose on somebody's Christmas somewhere. I hate this. Pardon the pun, but I feel so powerless without my electricity and whatnot.

To add insult to injury our phone service has also died out. I'm going to assume that the problem lies outside our walls because I really, really, really do not want to pay the phone company seventy one bucks to tell me that something inside our house is broken, which is probably a problem I could fix if I had more than a flashlight to see by in the cold, dark basement. Even worse than that was the fact that Jessica was trying to talk to the electric company at the time.

Oh, by the way, thank you AEP for sending us your Christmas card, er, I mean bill today. Jerks.

All we know now is that we might get our power restored by sunday, two days from now, but only in their estimation. They've brought in crews from all over the country and yet the total number of people without power doesn't seem to get any smaller as the days go by. Either things are getting worse or they have no real clue how many people are freezing this holiday weekend. Hopefully they're too busy doing the repairs to keep good statistics, but realistically they're unorganized bastards who cannot adequately repair a faulty system.

To be an engineer and caught up in this is just worse. I'm envisioning ways to improve things at times like this, such as a battery-powered answering device or cordless phones. I'm thinking that the fact that electricity is coursing mere inches away from our dead lines should mean that somebody could splice our line into the working ones. I'm sure some of our neighbors would be more than willing to spare a couple kilowatts here or there to keep us and our cat from being icicles.

It's so clichéd, but I find myself really hating the whole Christmas thing this year. I thought having my transmission fail at seventy miles an hour in the middle of the highway after dark on Christmas Day was bad enough, but that's nothing compared to this. And it's not even over yet.

I feel like a schmuck, too. Being a typical guy I wasn't quite prepared to give Jessica her presents and in fact had planned to take a long lunch today or yesterday to drop by Target to grab a couple more things for her, but somehow was unable to do such in light of the whole evil-storm-from-hell thing. I didn't even have her stuff wrapped.

Merry Christmas? Don't get me started about Christmas.

I had an unorthodox wake-up this morning. Moments after Jessica's alarm sounded at 5:30am there was a loud explosion and the room lit up. The two were synchronized so I knew it was close to the house, and despite being groggy and tired (and in the dark, as the power was now out) I was able to guess, correctly, that the transformer for my house and three neighbors had exploded.

We bundled up and trekked over to our neighbor's, after a brief look at our backyards, and talked about the tree limbs that had fallen in hers on her power lines and set the tree on fire. Well, it was sparking at least. The continuing freezing rain probably kept any worse blazes at bay.

So I'm bundled up in my bed, burning the juice from Jessica's laptop battery to post this. We're under a so-called level two snow emergency, so I'm not going into work. I don't want to mess with the roads or manually working my garage door or anything like that. It's not that there isn't a huge pile of work for me to do, but I'm just not going to risk it. The house is already down to 54 degrees and soon I'm going to need to do something about the water in the pipes, whether it be turning it off and running it out or just trickling. There's still a little time for us to figure that one out.

So, um, Merry Christmas everybody.