fine whine

(for posterity, this is)

Jarlsberg? Great stuff.

It's a good cheese for crackers.

Seriously, though, why is it that wherever I turn I run into a homage to Casablanca? This probably all started last weekend with a shotgun showing of Overdrawn at the memory bank, as seen on MST3K. That video's a pretty direct rip of the Bogie classic, and even starts up the film in a couple places, WB logo and all. Yesterday I watched Neil Simon's Cheap detective, billed by Blockbuster as a follow-up to Murder by death (about which I have previously written. The only connection I see between the two Neil Simon films is Peter Falk as Sam Spade. Well, that and the messy ending -- neither movie seems able to end cleanly. So many plots and characters pass through the proceedings that a conclusion without a big mess is just about impossible.

The last Neil Simon movie I saw with a decent denouement was The Sunshine boys, but that could be due to the cast of characters numbering in the single digits. But I digress.

Cheap detective takes a bunch of bits out of the old Warner movies (not like Dead men don't wear plaid does, literally) and turns it into a clever spoof of the whole Sam Spade/Dashiell Hammett oeuvre. It makes them its own, though, and I think I'm sure to recognize more bits here and there as I watch more old films.

But that's not the end of it. I've been watching series at a time of the BBC sci-fi show Red dwarf, and the very first episode of the fourth series lifts a great bit of the ending, wholesale. Sure, they say "we'll always have Parrots" but it's there, somewhere.

The "Parrots" bit really is brilliant, I must say.

So today is wednesday. The week is half over, and the month is half over. This being September makes the latter half of this year half over (I think).

That said, Saturday can't come soon enough.

Microsoft PowerPoint is a program for creating slideshows and presentations. It is not, as apparently some think, a program for creating one page documents and posters. That is what Word and Publisher (and their better competitors) are intended to do.

Thank you for you time.

Not that I was looking, but I think I might have found the first example of the use of capitalization to indicate shouting online in a movie, in the 1997 intellectual drama Contact, based on Carl Sagan's book of the same name. I have not read the book, but I highly doubt that Carl was thinking about IM systems and 'netiquette back when he wrote it.

Anyway, in the film, Jodie Foster's character Ellie Arroway is having a real-time chat session with the cryptic billionaire John Hadden, currently floating around on Mir. She doesn't know it's him, though, and asks "Who are you?" He replies cryptically with a classified document to which he probably shouldn't have access. Confused and probably enraged, she then asks "WHO ARE YOU?"

I've been so conditioned as to immediately see the emphasis there; I can't not see it anymore. My suspicions are that this is deliberate, from somebody in the know and not just the flippant decisions of a production designer.

I am, naturally, seeking prior art, or some sort of confirmation.

I realize that this is both likely blatantly obvious and also a question nobody would consider pondering. This matters not to me.

Jessica and I were wandering around the neighborhood, talking about jobs and stuff, when it came to me that there is no obvious verb for 'what epidemiologists do' (epidemiologe? I don't know how it would be spelled but it sounded right for a brief moment), nor technologists, dentists, or any other -ists that came to mind. I came to wonder if there were any -ists at all that were based on a verb form in the manner of the -ers and others out there, and couldn't think of a single one. Could it be that this is some sort of definitive rule without exception, that rarest of beast in the rules of English grammar? Could it?

For a good ten or fifteen minutes I contemplated this -ist phenomenon. And then I mentally shelved the whole thing, lacking any new insight.

So if you have any thoughts on the matter, please leave a comment. This matters to me. A little.

As another aside to yesterday's Straight story story, Harry Dean Stanton, who played Alvin's brother Lyle in the film, is still alive and acting. He just finished a small role in the Wilson Brothers' The Wendell Baker story, which looks to be perhaps a pretty decent film.

Owen Wilson is probably the best-known brother, and I just saw him in that travesty known as Starsky & Hutch. Actually to call that remake a 'travesty' is akin to calling being beaten to death with one's own brutally amputated leg a 'flesh wound'.

Not that I'm bitter or anything. I'm no longtime fan of the show, having first seen any of it in March of this year. The first season DVD set was a nice introduction to a show that deserves more respect. Certainly more than is given it in the movie that recasts Starsky and Hutch as buddy-movie stereotypes and tries to inject in-jokey humor that was probably a blast for the actors but only drags a bad movie even more for the rest of us. To have made the partners a laughingstock in the movie world is a fitting finishing touch on what the filmmakers did for the whole project in the real world. As for Vince Vaughn, woo hoo for him and the whole bat mitzvah thing. At the movie's release, much was made of him playing the part as such (for reasons better left unknown) but to me he's just playing the same part he's played before in, oh, Swingers, Made, and Old school. Nothing to see here, folks, keep moving.

For another re-hash (I expect a 'remake' to stay closer to the source material) we go next to the straight-to-DVD Ripley's game. It's somewhat based on the same Patricia Highsmith novel that spawned Wim Wenders's The American friend (with Dennis Hopper), but this time around Tom Ripley's been reimagined as much older and a fair bit more sophisticated. This also has little to do with Anthony Minghella's The talented Mr. Ripley, its roots lie in a different Highsmith novel. Back to Ripley's game, we have not Dennis Hopper nor Matt Damon but John Malkovich in the titular role. He does pretty well in a role that seems well suited to him, having played everything from an addlepated moron (Of mice and men) to an evil genius (almost everything else). The movie is a bit slow and a bit sad but is worth picking up if it's on the library shelf, for Malkovich and Highsmith fans if nobody else. I've checked out the novels but haven't slogged through them yet.

Third in the sort-of trifecta of remakes, rehashings or re-imaginings is the 1999 Dark Castle House on haunted hill. I'd seen it a couple years ago and wasn't too impressed (or scared), but having seen it on the shelf at the local entertainment resale shop for under three bucks I decided that the few noteworthy scenes were noteworthy enough to part with less money than it would've cost to rent the disc.

I'd like to plug said resale shop, as I like it and would like them to stick around for a while. It's called Buyback, and can be found at the intersection of Cleveland Avenue and Dublin-Granville (161). The store's something of an experiment by the CD Warehouse people, but the prices are more resonable (if not quite rational, as some discs are marked at $1.51 or $0.01 or $2.43 or $7.52 and others at $9.99 and so on). If you're in the area, certainly drop in and buy something.

Back to the film, though, I'm not so willing to recommend it as readily. I've mentioned it before as a movie with a couple interesting moments and having re-watched it, stand by my opinion then. Watching it again, even with the commentary, didn't add much to my opinion of the film. But I did re-watch it recently, and it seemed to fit well with what I am writing. Let me know if you want to borrow it, by the way.

Linking House on haunted hill to X-men (1.5), another film I've previously seen but not mentioned before, is Famke Janssen. I'd seen this in the theater on first-run with some buddies, but not Jessica. This time I brought it thinking that she'd like it, and she at least paid attention to it. I'll let her weigh in with a comment, hint hint. We'll watch the sequel soon enough, I suspect, as I am number one on the reserve list for it at the library. As for me, I think it's a pretty decent movie, going in with little knowledge of the universe as I did. I'm not among the fanboys who demanded more naked blue woman screen time, either. Frankly I thought Mystique looked somewhat nasty.

I don't know of any way to link X-men with Jim Jarmusch's Ghost dog: the way of the samurai (and I'm not going to try) other than that I enjoyed both. Ghost dog is a better film, though in nowhere the same league, action-wise, despite its subject matter. The most recent Forest Whitaker movie I'd watched was David Fincher's Panic room (which cost me $1.86 at Buyback) and I'd like to track down more of his work if these two films are any indication of his capabilities. He carries Ghost dog effortlessly, and for that matter everybody gives a good turn, particularly the stage actors playing mobsters. The little touches really add to the film, whether it be the boss's favorite cartoons or the delightfully repetitive conversations between Ghost dog and his French-speaking, ice-cream selling best friend. Neither understands the other's language, but both end up at the same conversation one way or another. I've reserved the soundtrack from the library hoping to get more of the score than the actual songs, but overall the beats and whatnot were rather quite appropriate, or at least not too distracting. This is a movie well worth watching.

Not so worth watching was Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. I guess I wasn't paying enough attention, as I didn't notice that it was done as a near-seamless realtime composition. To me it was just long and relatively dull. It struck me a play on screen, down to the small set and obviously fake backdrop. For all I know this was Al's aim in the first place, but it made for a disappointing movie. He's capable of far better, and in all optimism I can only hope that he was able to leverage what he learned in making Rope to the making of his other better films. Jimmy Stewart was all but wasted as the only actor I recognized. Skip it.

I tried to watch The deer hunter but only made it through the first two hours. It just wasn't my cup of tea at the time, but since I've only got about one hour left of it to watch it shouldn't be too tough for me to finish some other time.

And not too long ago I watched Levity with Billy Bob Thornton and Kirsten Dunst, but I don't have enough to say about it at the moment to write a sentence not beginning with 'and', let alone an entire paragraph. Sorry.

And in other movie news, Altman's Secret honor, a little film starring Philip Baker Hall as Nixon, is being released as a Criterion Collection DVD. This means that I can stop chasing the laserdisc of it on ebay.