MirrorMask

/ movies

I could have easily missed MirrorMask if I hadn’t been trolling through the Chron’s review section, and I’m glad I didn’t. I only know Neil Gaiman’s work by reputation, which is very strong, so when I did notice this, I was eager to check it out.

Despite starting off at a circus, the movie’s opening is surprisingly drab. It quickly settles down into the visually imaginative dreamscape I was vaguely expecting–though I’d have no way to really expect what I did see, it being altogether fantastical. At its core, the movie turns out to be a fairly conventional coming-of-age story. But it’s the visuals that make it very much worth seeing.

Good night and good luck

/ movies

Saw Good Night and Good Luck recently. Excellent movie. Beautiful to look at in black and white, the story is taut and told in punctuated chunks, interspersed with old kinescope footage; all together, it gives an interesting look into the ways life was different about fifty years ago. Appropriate to its subject matter, it has a sort of eyewitness, journalistic quality. George Clooney is clearly more than a pretty-boy actor, and while David Strathairn makes a believable Murrow, Clooney is a hell of a stretch for Fred Friendly.

The movie is not remotely subtle about the messages it is laying out–there are several–but they are messages that are worth telling.

It was especially interesting seeing the movie at this exact moment in history, when a right-wing government that is suspicious of its own citizens is just beginning to fall into disarray.

And my pretty countryside had been paved down the middle

/ Austin
Construction machinery for SH130

Rode out FM 969 to Webberville today. Saw this and moaned “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.”

Any road construction around Austin is going to be controversial, and SH130 is no exception.

Originally sold as a bypass for I-35 to allow long-haul truckers to speed past the congested parts around Austin, even TxDOT claimed it would yield only a 4% reduction in traffic on I-35.

The notion that this is really intended as a bypass–if it was ever taken seriously–is clearly off the table, as it is clear that there will be an interchange here, about halfway to Webberville. There’ll be another one on the other side of Manor as well.

There are a lot of smaller and organic farms out along this way, but suburban-style development has already encroached. This is going to speed that process along and help kill another one of the things I like about living in Austin: being able to ride my bike out into the countryside.

pictures

/ personal, technology

iPhoto is bundled with every new Mac, but I never really bonded with it. The way it maintains photos is grossly inefficient, and it doesn’t deal as gracefully with batch processes or metadata as I’d like. I always used Graphic Converter for that stuff, but I have to admit that it isn’t great for just organizing photos.

From time to time, I’d read that people using the current version of iPhoto found it much improved–indispensable, even. And with a 250-gig hard drive, I could tolerate some inefficiency. So I decided to give it a shot. Thanks to the Keyword assistant and Flickr export plugins, I can use iPhoto with a tolerably efficient workflow. I’ve managed to import, tag, organize, and upload a lot of old photos to my flickr account–check ’em out. More to come.

the Corpse Bride

/ movies

Saw the Corpse Bride yesterday. I can’t remember the last time I saw two claymation movies in a row, and both this and the Wallace and Gromit movie had Helena Bonham Carter as voice talent. Weird.

I have to say, it’s pretty amazing what they can do with a few lumps of clay. These characters were more emotionally stirring than many of their flesh-and-blood counterparts, and managed the neat trick of making the dead seem charming (and much more lively and colorful than the washed-out living Victorians), something that would be impossible with live-action. The quality of the animation was also astonishing, and apparently achieved through unprecedented meticulousness. It occurred to me partway through that the whole thing could have been done as computer animation, and indeed, it wouldn’t be a bad use for CGI, which has gotten good enough to have entered the “uncanny valley” when rendering humans, but should be more than up to task rendering caricatured claymation characters. Still, I can imagine some subtleties would be lost along the way, and for all I know, it wouldn’t save any time.

Almost all Tim Burton movies have a fairy-tale quality to them. This is no exception, but what is different is that it is apparently based on an existing folk tale

Mnumerimonic

/ language

I knew a woman once with the nickname “Sproidy”–she was given this monicker because the letters on the dial of the phone could be used to spell that. I occasionally find myself using this trick in reverse when I need to invent a numeric passcode or the like–I pick a convenient word, and work out the numbers on a phone dial that correspond to it.

There ought to be a name for words and numbers created using this trick, of using numbers to generate words, or vice-versa. Since these are generally used as an aide-memoire, I kind of like “mnumerimonic.” Another possibility might be “numerinym,” though that would only make sense for to words generated from numbers.

The Colbert Report

/ tidbit

The Colbert Report started off with a bang last night–Gwen and I were laughing so hard our sides hurt. You don’t get that very often with TV. Most of the talking-head news shows are bad enough that they should defy parody. Colbert manages anyhow.

Colbert’s guest for the opening episode was Stone Phillips. This was especially apt: Some years ago, the Daily Show aired a special episode–that is, old clip retreads–all introduced by Colbert. He did the whole thing in an unmistakeable and dead-on Stone Phillips impersonation. Phillips, who I’ve always considered an empty shirt who only gets work because of his reassuring voice, was a good sport, and comported himself admirably throughout the gravitas face-off.

Serenity

/ movies

Saw Serenity with Gwen yesterday. I’m a fan of the original TV series “Firefly” (though I only became one after it was cancelled), so it’s impossible for me to know how the movie plays to a newcomer audience. It’s also impossible for me to discuss the movie without spoilers, so this will continue after the jump
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