Moonwalk One, the poetic, beautiful, fascinating film about the first moon landing was broadcast last night on one of the Discovery channels. Lost for 35 years and rediscovered about a year ago, it’s a mix of documentary and a sort of film-poem, both touching and informative.

Discovery decided to show the film with introductory and break segments, featuring an anonymous, young, doctor of space, telling us about times he spoke to a mission commander, or that the astronauts were spacemen, and you can see the moon if you go outside and look up. Banal stuff, especially in contrast to the film it surrounded.

Worse, though, was watching something really great, unlike the normal television documentary, only to have a presenter tell you what’s coming up, what you just saw, and what’s on now. Formula television, drab, pointless, half of its time spent pointing to the other half. In a way, it’s surprising, with more and more channels out there, more and more people making films, more freedom for people on the fringes or without a standard film education to take up their cameras and produce works interesting, works unusual, works defective or even imaginative, that we delve deeper into the world of structurally and formally monotonous television. Teenagers and their love triangles, cops and their murders, spies and their double agents, families and their comedic mishaps. All of them walking side-by-side, stopping, turning to face one another, and continuing their conversation in over-the-shoulder-shot-reverse-shot.

Back in the world of 3D movies, Clash of the Titans came out yesterday in Ireland to minimal fanfare. I’m sure it will make several hundred dollars at the box office, and will make some idiots happy, though not many. It’s a dull movie, badly written and full of erratic, disorganised action. It has an obligatory “in-joke” for the three people still alive who saw the original (nobody laughed), and a great scene with Liam Neeson in which he tells the other gods “Leave us!” only to turn to camera and say “Release the Kraken!”, thus highlighting the ten lines of missing dialogue. This is, of course, about the standard one should expect of such a film, it’s a summer blockbuster, and the studio that made it hopes it will be a “tent-pole” picture. That is, one of their big money efforts which will prop their business up for the year.

Over the last few years a few movies have been dual-releases in regular old flat-o-vision, and glorious 3D.  Up,  Alice in Wonderland, Avatar are the most recent big movies to open in 3D. Clash joins them, but unfortunately I think it joins them in a nasty sub-group of 3D: the hastily cobbled together conversion. Films like Avatar, were made and released in 3D (that is dual camera rigs, stereoscopic editing and effects, the full bit). …the Titans appears to have been shot on a single camera, intended for a 2D release and then converted by a team of lackeys into a chimera. Not 2D, not really 3D either.

Dropping my polarized glasses to look at the screen, I could see entire scenes with barely a hair of depth. Everything with people in it seemed flat, the titles and a few of the 3D monsters had depth (see also: acting, characters). The same could generally be said of Alice in Wonderland, another converted feature film. And despite my earlier enthusiasm for on-the-fly conversion to a small monitor for home viewing and for providing the content necessary for widespread domestic adoption of 3DTV, I find the result on the large screen frustrating and disappointing.

As any dullard can tell you, spectacle is at the heart of the Hollywood cinema experience. And 3D promises to enhance that with various buzzwordy traits, like “immersion”, “naturalism”, “edge-of-your-seat-thrill-ride-a-minute”, and maybe “diegesis”. The 3D of Avatar was well realised, and enhanced the experience of watching it. The extra half-dimension of Clash of the Titans, does not.

So why do it? Well, all those films that released in 2 and 3D, made more money per screen for the 3D version. Avatar became the most profitable film of all time partly because more people wanted to see it in 3D, and they paid a few extra shekels for the experience. Audiences, that film showed, are willing to pay more for an extra dimension (wait till Jerry Bruckheimer finds out that there are 11 or more). It came out in November, just when CotT was in production (or somewhere near post), some executive called down to the lackey department and demanded a conversion for super-profits. The problem is, if they continue to do conversions like this and Alice in Wonderland, that add little or nothing to the experience, the 3D cash cow will be killed. Audiences will gradually find little to attract them to the 3D screenings. Hopefully, the lesson has been learned this year and more films will be shot specifically for their 3D release, as it offers a lot of filmmaking possibilities that have yet to be explored.

By the way, did I mention that CotT is a terrible film?

The Wes Anderson is my favourite. But more things should be narrated by Werner Herzog!

Here’s a set of maps from the NY Times, showing Netflix rental habits in various US cities. Note the east-west divide in Washington DC, the popularity of Milk in San Francisco, and Mad Men in Manhattan. It’s an interesting way to look at cultural consumption in relation to social geography, and makes me wonder what else can be learned from mail-order shopping.

So, I went to IBC last week, and walked about the show floor looking at the various bits of technology, weaving between the suits talking about quarterly turnover and the like. The most notable trend that at the convention was the profusion of 3D related equipment, for the creation, editing, and display of that tricky third dimension. While 3D has been the new thing in movies for a few years, with films on a dual 2D/3D release taking more per screening in the 3D theatres (most of these movies are the animated features which are easily adapted to a 3D release). Studios thought that 3D would be the gimmick to lure people away from their TV and back to the cinema, while consumers thought it was another gimmick that would last as long as the previous 3D craze in the ’50s.

What is different this year is the move towards 3DTV, taking the experience to the home, and in many cases, live. 3D sports broadcasts work well, and seem to be the method of introducing 3D and the consequent equipment upgrades, and wallet-gougings, consumers will have to undergo. Several recent events were shot and broadcast in 3D, including last years Superbowl and some of Sky’s football coverage.

The boring engineering and cables stuff was naturally evolving the capacity to handle two simultaneous HD streams anyway (that is, 3Gbps - watch out for the advert and the heavy number content on the linked page). The problems of shooting 3D have largely been solved, although there are some glitches with jitter and field order in 3D video to be sorted out. And the various problems of creation have generally been solved.

What is an unknown is the rate of consumer adoption. And this will depend on the experience of viewing, and the available content. The viewing experience is still a little bit inconvenient, since glasses need to be worn, and the content is the superbowl, a film about dinosaurs, and a Three Stooges movie. The introduction of lenticular screens, for goggle-less viewing, while still in the early stages (as it suffers from low resolution and limited viewing angles) at just a few years old, will soon take care of the viewing problem.

The content problem lies in the fact that for true 3D all that is shown needs to be shot with that in mind, which discounts about a hundred-years-worth of film and television. Since lots of broadcasters rely on repeats to fill their schedules this is a major problem. If TV is 3D only some of the time, many will decide it’s not worth changing their TV or set-top box. I stumbled upon the stand of a research group from Canada showing a box that converts 2D  to 3D on the fly. They happened to be showing Spiderman, played on a normal DVD player and out through their machine, which showed as a very convincing 3D movie on their lenticular display.

The convergence of these different technologies makes 3D in the home a viable proposition, and increases the likelyhood of widespread adoption by consumers in the next five years or so (or whatever happens to be the standard TV recycling time).

So, here is the opening sequence of ‘Soylent Green’, using the Ken Burns effect fully 17 years before ‘The Civil War’. So, it should be called the Soylent effect. It’s a great opening, effective, prescient, and delightfully simple - far better than the film that follows it.

For more interesting credit sequences, though not all the ones I would choose to be in a list of the best, go to Creative Review.

After a morning’s work, I journeyed to the cinema and saw The Boat That Rocked, which I had expected to be a bit disappointing, but it was on at the right time, and there may, I thought, be some diverting aspects. How wrong I was.

“Disappointment” does not do justice to the level of offence caused by this shambling wreck of a film. There are three identifiable story-like substances contained within this film. One sees a ministerial agency attempting to close down sea-borne pirate radio. The second sees a young man come of age after being sent to the ship by his motherm and later starts to wonder about his parentage. The third involves several of the DJs aboard ship generally doing stuff.

Contains “spoilers”, but then, I don’t think you can spoil rotten meat.

Giving the film its due, there is some nice production, decent sets, generally alright lighting and a period-specific use of wide-angle lenses that at least gives the film some stylistic authenticity. That authenticity is as far as it goes. The dialogue is anachronistic. The era of free love has turned into a safe-sex ship. Honestly, DJs, drinking and running amok at sea, and when a woman shows up after weeks of floating about alone, they refuse without a condom.

This is all forgivable, we shouldn’t expect authenticity from light entertainment. What we should expect is, in no particular order: jokes that make you laugh, dramatic tension of some kind, a story structured in any way, good performances, and such like.

The three main storylines do not inform one another and are so shambolically slapped together as to make drama impossible to achieve, the jokes uniformly fall flat (what few there are), and the acting is poor across the board (sad though it makes me to say it of our fellow alumn). Bill Nighy stick-insects his way around the film, half vampire, half Edwardian dandy. His achingly bad fist-pump at the end of the film is like a final insult to your intelligence and your mother. If you were to describe the plot in a sentence it would be “things sort of happen”. The pirates vs. government story is terribly contrived, as is the repeated joke of Mr. Twatt. You heard me, Mr. Twatt, again and again mileage is made of it, and they are long, tough, barefoot-over-hot-coals miles.

Indeed, Twatt could in the final reel could make a connection with the crew of the boat, providing a conclusion to that story and a redemption for that character. Instead, they opt for the not quite, but almost, deus ex machina, and Twatt just disappears from the film, Magic. Indeed, throughout the film the two groups on either side of the protagonal divide only brush against one another once, but the encounter is meaning, and purpose, free.

I’ll skip over the second “story”, cause it’s shit.

The third story, and that upon which the film hinges isn’t a story. It’s just a group of people hanging about, getting into scrapes that aren’t very scrapey (think diseased sheep), mostly having a bit of a laugh. The lows don’t mean much to the characters, including a sham marriage, sexual betrayal, serrupticious attempted rape, public embarrassment, and bodily injury. None of these things seem to matter. It’s just a group having a generally good time and playing some music. If this was my life, I’d look upon it with fondness, but it’s not. It’s someone else’s life, and they’re telling you the story in the pub about the time something almost happened to them, and you’re bored and looking at other people across the bar fiddling with the rim of your glass.

I have become rambling and incoherent with the mental strain of thinking about this film. It’s the kind of cinematic experience that leaves you questioning humanity. I’d best stop here before I need anti-depressants.

Still, some decent music.

The bit with the bear nearly killed me.

I initially thought this was somebody doing a Werner Herzog parody.

But no, it’s the real deal. Although I wouldn’t be surprised if Werner Herzog decided to make an entirely straight-faced Werner Herzog parody and not tell anyone. Link from Matthew Yglesias, who claims that Herzog’s new documentary Encounters At The End Of The Earth is better than Man on Wire, which hardly seems possible.

So, I saw that new Bond film, Quantum of Solace. It is a baffling ferrago, with randomly sprinkled action scenes of limited clarity, and very little character development. Certainly, Bond has changed by the end, but not so much like a human as a light switch.

Anyway, the film has some real high points. The best moment comes when some villains are lounging in their desert hotel when a whirring noise is heard. The dialogues goes something like this:

- What is that?

— It is just the fuel cells General, they power the entire complex.

- Hmm, sounds highly unstable.

Better not hold a lit match close to them, then.

Today, I watched the “classic” British spacefihorror movie, ‘Lifeforce‘. To put it bluntly, this 1985 production is the greatest movie of all time, at least in that it contains all other scifi and horror movies. It has alien vampires; zombies; space-flight; soldiers; masochist nurses; regular nudity; scientists with a grip on history and literature; an institute for the criminally insane; shapeshifting; psychic connections; flashy optical effects; and flying furniture, all wrapped up in neat Golan-Globus package (a sure sign of quality).

The film is at its finest in the second act, after the vampiress alien escapes London’s space research centre. She stalks the city and environs consuming the life-energy of various disposable characters. However the heroes give chase, as an officer of the SAS; an astronaut; and the Home Secretary, Sir Percy, track her psychic energy (using some telepathy) to the aforementioned institute for the criminally insane, where they beat a confession out of a masochist nurse, hypnotise the possessed director of the institute, and lose the Home Secretary to the hazards of telekinetically-powered flying furniture. Sadly, upon their return to London soldier and astronaut find the city overrun with zombies. What can possibly save the day? Why a little rumpy-pumpy with a she-beast-space-creature, of course.

A mere description of the film cannot do it justice. It has that curious mix of Golan-Globus overreaching, attempting the grand but achieving only the absurd; that peculiar britishness of hammer horror; a healthy dose of classism; proper dispersal of boob; and white polo kneck jumpers. If one wishes to hold onto one’s eyeballs, this would certainly be an appropriate accompaniment.

There are many strange things about Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, but one thing that bothered me at the time was that despite being set in New York, the street scenes sometimes looked strangely un-New-Yorky, and not just because they were filmed on a studio set in Pinewood. Jon Ronson’s recent documentary “Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes” has a partial explanation: Kubrick had thousands of photos taken for the purpose of research, but all of them were of London streets. Ronson discovers this when he finds dozens of photos taken on Upper Street (see here, 5 minutes in), down the road from his house and from mine, and which I walked up and down the length of today. It’s a bit uncanny to see the pubs, shops and cafes you know so well turning up in the files of the world’s most famous film director. What I don’t get is why he didn’t just have somebody go take photos of New York.

It’s a pretty enjoyable documentary overall. The boxes reveal Kubrick’s quirks and obsessions to be alternately alarming and endearing: the bizarre memos instructing a minion to phone up the Met Office to ascertain the barometric pressure for 4am the previous Friday night, the cardboard boxes he had custom-made because the lids on the ready-mades were never ‘just right’, the meticulously scrutinsed newspaper advertisements for his films from around the globe, the accumulation of vast quantities of Rymans stationary (according to Jan Harlan, he would go frequently “go to Ryman’s and see if they had something new”). And if you’re one of the thousands of fans or cranks who wrote letters to Stanley Kubrick, you’ll be glad to hear that he not only kept your letter but carefully filed it and made a note of your contact details in case he needed to ask you to check on a local cinema or perform some other favour. Amusingly, the only thing he didn’t keep was the outtakes from his films, which were incinerated.

Peter Bradshaw watches Mamma Mia! The Movie so we don’t have to:

Everything has been squeaky-cleaned up. It too has a feelgood wedding motif - but there is no irony, no heartache, certainly no paralysing illness, no dramatic plausibility, and weirdly, no hint that the characters know whose songs they are singing; there is no sense of perspective on the music. In Mamma Mia! Abba is everywhere and nowhere. This is Planet Abba or Abbaworld. The characters are forever dancing and smiling and bursting into Abba songs like Stepford cyborgs when you flip the secret panel behind their heads and press the Life-Affirming Behaviour button. An Abba instrumental is even used when the bride walks up the aisle, instead of Handel. And nobody ever says: “Oh for Gawd’s sake, just for a change, can we sing something by the Carpenters?” …

Mamma Mia! ties itself in knots trying to shoehorn in every single famous number, and each time, the beginning of an Abba song triggered in me a Pavlovian stab of pleasure, cancelled after a millionth of a second by a backwash of rage that this soulless panto has done nothing to earn or even understand the good feeling.

Some songs are easier to incorporate than others. Waterloo is saved for the closing credits, perhaps because screenwriter Catherine Johnson didn’t grasp its metaphorical quality, and that she would not in fact need a vast Napoleonic army to troop across the island. But there is one very famous Abba number which is entirely omitted. That is a crying shame. I have an idea for the way in which it could yet be included, should an extra scene be needed for the DVD. There’s a six-year-old boy on the island called Fernando, and caring Meryl Streep suspects that poor little Fernando could be hearing-impaired. She sits the little lad down, takes out a set of drums and bangs them close to his ears; with tears pouring down her cheeks, she sings to him a single, heart-rending question …

He puts his finger on the problem with most of these productions - the songs of the artist in question are everywhere, but there’s no sign of the artist or any songs by anyone else. This was perhaps the crowning failure of Julie Taymor’s jaw-droppingly bad Across the Universe: it was based on the songs of the Beatles but set in a version of the 1960s from which the Beatles, who did more than anyone to define the cultural consciousness of that decade, were entirely missing - as were any of the other leading musical lights of the time, though some of them were dealt the additional insult of being crassly impersonated by one or other of the movie’s characters, with the sole black male actor forced to embody the diluted essence of everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Marvin Gaye at some point or another. If the intention of the film-makers was to permanently erase any imprinted nostalgia felt for the 60s by anyone who wasn’t sentient at the time they did a bang-up job.

Time to get that rifle, I suppose. But it’d be a shame if Chuck was only remembered for the NRA and “Get your paws off me you dirty ape!”. He was a thoughtful and adventurous star and his participation made a lot of un-viable projects viable, most notably getting Orson Welles picked as the director of Touch of Evil. If Orson Welles was a fan and a friend of his, that’s good enough for me. The excellent Wellesnet has an appreciation including interesting extracts from Heston’s published diaries.

This article about Heath Ledger is actually quite good. Like:

But contrary to the binary thinking of the media’s Ledger debate, his drug use doesn’t negate the “good Heath” story line. The arbitrary distinctions between good and bad drugs, and good and bad star behavior, obscure the fact that there likely was no bad Heath Ledger. As it happens, he might have been better off if he had behaved more horribly, if he weren’t so widely adored. An addict’s best hope for recovery is being an intolerable asshole when he’s using.

There’s also a healthy respect for the unknowableness of some people, appropriate to somebody who has just starred in a decidedly fractured biopic called “I’m Not There”. Todd Haynes, the director of that film, says:

What’s so hard about this is that there is not a real character arc—arguably, there never is, no matter how long someone lives.

This is great, but I can’t help wondering exactly how many times Tom Cruise has really got involved in the aftermath of car accidents and what exactly he does for the victims. “Probably just stops them screaming” is Jay’s suggestion.

I thought this was fairly striking - an animated propaganda film made by Winsor McCay about the sinking of the Lusitania. The animation is very stylish and very powerful, quite reminiscent of Miyazaki I thought …

More about Winsor McCay from John Holbo here, and here’s the obligatory Wikipedia page, complete with a fantastic page from ‘Little Nemo’. I like the sound of ‘Dream of a Rarebit Fiend’.

I can’t remember where I found the link to this site, but among its various delights is a selection of Bergman parodies. There’s a full 15 minutes from George Coe and Anthony Lover called ‘De Düva’, which is essentially Wild Strawberries plus the obligatory Death challenge. I’m not really sure where they were going with this, though it did earn them a seat at the 1968 Oscars. In fact, most of the efforts are more interesting than entertaining (French and Saunders give it a decent stab). Maybe people assume this kind of parody will just write itself.

Just been over to Pat and Lal’s to watch The Departed* on their fancy Blu-Ray system**. Now, Pat’s right to point out that he can’t watch Matt Damon without thinking of this, but I still think, here is an interesting actor. In The Talented Mr Ripley and now in The Departed, he played two characters who couldn’t decide whether they preferred the truth or the lie they had so carefully constructed. More than that, in The Departed the Leonardo di Caprio character is conflicted because he is essentially good, while Matt Damon never lets us know whether his character has any such considerations. It’s not clear whether Sullivan has any loyalty, or any morals, or whether he is just more comfortable pretending. If anything, Ripley is even more amoral, and seems to be asking us whether we choose the more conventional lives we lead because we want to, or because we just lack his peculiar talent for deception. And in both films, his character is happiest when putting another act on top of the first, flirting or inveigling or slipping away from suspicion. He makes a difference of sorts, too: I can’t think of another major Hollywood star who would have played Ripley like he did, and I’m not sure the film would have got made without a star like him.

* Which doesn’t add much to the Infernal Affairs original except to say that aspects of American masculinity are seriously fucked up.

**Not sure I like Blu-Ray. It all looks a bit too sharp and over-saturated, like a Gilette ad. Or maybe that was just this film.

PS Here is a wonderful review of The Departed by the great Roger Ebert, who gets right to the Catholic heart of the matter. I love this line:

I am fond of saying that a movie is not about what it’s about; it’s about how it’s about it. That’s always true of a Scorsese film.

Appropriately enough, there’s some good Andy Warhol stuff on YouTube. Pick of the bunch is this:

I quite liked this and this too. And while we’re at it, here’s Lou Reed and John Cale singing about him.

I remember, quite a long time ago, being quite excited by the rumour that Stanley Kubrick was making a film (said to be A.I. at the time, which doesn’t make a great deal of sense now) about a boy growing up by sporadically shooting sequences of the same actor over a period of years. What a concept! And it occured to me while reading this preview of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix that the HP series is probably the only time this extreme time-lapse approach of seeing people grow up in front of you has ever actually been pulled off. Albeit not quite the way Stanley Kubrick would have done it. I’ve only seen two of the films but I wonder what it would be like to watch them back to back when they’re all done? (Apart from ‘tiring’).

Go see the new Julien Temple film about Joe Strummer, The Future is Unwritten. I suppose it will appeal far more to Clash fans, but I thought it worked very well on a human level too. It shows Strummer as ultimately an ordinary enough guy who achieved what he did not because of incredible gifts but because of his relentless energy (”We’re not particularly talented, we just try hard”), charm and unfashionable devotion to his principles. He had a funny kind of moral career in that there was always an idealistic hippy trying to get out, one which eventually conquered, sadly not very long before he died, the punk nihilist and the insensitive git who sometimes screwed over his friends, loved ones and bandmates. Ultimately, no matter how much he tried at times to fight it, empathy was written through him like the words through a stick of Brighton rock.

Here’s the trailer for the film. Much of the soundtrack (which is brilliant, and much more than just Clash songs) comes from the radio show Joe did for BBC World Service in the late 1990s. Copies are very hard to get hold of, but I’ve found four episodes online and have uploaded the first two here if anyone’s interested.

Jayne Mansfield in “Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?” I’m not used to things from the 1950s being this funny or strange.

Marlon Brando interviewed by Larry King

The long-lost classic finally surfaces! I’ve long seen this as a litmus test for YouTube and the Internet at large: all that processing power, information and social networking doesn’t mean much if it can’t bring me Marlon Brando wearing red braces and kissing Larry King.

Feeding orphaned alpaca

Doesn’t get much cuter than this. I’ll be seeing these strange, lovely creatures when I visit the farm in July. And the alpaca.

From the “Er, WTF?” school of journalism, here is an actual New York Times report on the 1942 death of a Brazilian fisherman during the filming of Orson Welles’ aborted documentary It’s All True:

Leading Brazil Raftman Dies Starring for Movie

May 20, 1942 – The New York Times

Rio De Janeiro, Brazil May 19—Mandel Olimpio Meira, Brazil’s most noted fisherman, was drowned today off Rio de Janeiro while starring for Orson Welles film of Brazilian Life.

Mr. Meira, who sailed 2,000 miles on his raft last year to Rio de Janeiro to get President Getulio Vargas’s permission to form a fishermen’s union, was tipped from his raft today during the filming of a battle between a shark and an octopus.

The fisherman swam away from the fighting monsters into a whirlpool, where he was drowned. Two companions were rescued.

Needless to say, this is complete bollocks - Wellesnet has details.

So, I watched 300 last night. I must say it was a real eye-opener: I had no idea that King Xerxes of Persia was an eight-foot-tall black transvestite or that the Spartans spoke with rich Scottish accents. But there were important moral lessons too: cripples can’t be trusted, for example, and freedom can only be defended through total submission to fanatical militarism. Oh, and we should totally invade Iran, since they’re such a bunch of sexually depraved religious fundamentalists, or something.

Oh but it was fun. Village Voice:

Delicacies of dismemberment aside, 300 is notable for its outrageous sexual confusion. Here stands the Spartan king Leonidas (Gerard Butler) and his 299 buddies in nothing but leather man-panties and oiled torsos, clutching a variety of phalluses they seek to thrust in the bodies of their foes by trapping them in a small, rectum-like mountain passage called the “gates of hell(o!)” Yonder rises the Persian menace, led by the slinky, mascara’d Xerxes. When he’s not flaring his nostrils at Leonidas and demanding he kneel down before his, uh, majesty, this flamboyantly pierced crypto-transsexual lounges on chinchilla throw pillows amidst a rump-shaking orgy of disfigured lesbians.

On first glance, the terms couldn’t be clearer: macho white guys vs. effeminate Orientals. Yet aside from the fact that Spartans come across as pinched, pinheaded gym bunnies, it’s their flesh the movie worships. Not since Beau Travail has a phalanx of meatheads received such insistent ogling. As for the threat to peace, freedom, and democracy, that filthy Persian orgy looks way more fun than sitting around watching Spartans mope while their angry children slap each other around. At once homophobic and homoerotic, 300 is finally, and hilariously, just hysterical.

Trust me, this is a great way to start your Monday:

I’ve just watched Luis Bunuel’s Exterminating Angel, and found it agreeably baffling. There’s a great review of it (and Bunuel’s career in general) by Roger Ebert here, which includes this lovely bit:

His firmest conviction was that most people were hypocrites–the sanctimonious and comfortable most of all. He also had a streak of nihilism; in one film, a Christ figure, saddened by the sight of a dog tied to a wagon spoke and too tired to keep up, buys the dog to free it. As he does, another dog tied to another wagon limps past unnoticed in the background.

I think it’s time to say hello to Mystery Science Theater 3000:

Loads more MST3K shorts here.

Dunno what it is about him but I love Alan Arkin. Maybe it’s because he specialises in playing the rational crazy man, which made him a good choice for Yossarian in Catch 22. Not that I’ve seen all his stuff, but my favourite part of his might be in Mother Night, a fairly unknown but fairly brilliant adaptation of the Vonnegut novel.

The delusion, I mean, not the murderousness. From an NYT article on the reaction in Uganda to the film of “The Last King of Scotland”:

The Amin family, meanwhile, is not so happy. Relatives said that the former president, who called himself the “Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea�? and “The Last King of Scotland,�? among other things, was not the madman that Mr. Whitaker portrayed him as being.

“I don’t care what people say,�? said Taban Amin, the eldest of Amin’s more than three dozen children. “Whitaker doesn’t look like my father. He’s too short and his teeth are wrong.�?

As for the festivities on Saturday, Taban Amin seemed a little hurt that he was not invited.

“I mean, we’re family after all,�? he said.

Also, considering that one of the themes of the story is how a smug elite were blinded by luxury and Amin’s shallow pan-Africanist propaganda to the cruelty and suffering under his rule, this makes me a bit uncomfortable:

Ugandans got a taste of Oscar extravagance on Saturday when a public relations firm from South Africa organized a day of over-the-top festivities at the Garden City Cineplex, the only multiscreen theater in the country. There were preparties and after-parties, with Uganda’s elite tipping back Champagne over zebra-print tables and young musicians pounding goatskin drums.

Even Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, made an appearance, strutting down the red carpet, which his security staff had supplied specifically for the event, along with three truckloads of soldiers …