In-n-Out Burger -> Chipotle

How did I not make the connection before? Both fit my ideal concept of fast food, and their styles of service (and design, somewhat) are similar. That's why we have print journalism, I guess.

Top 5 Movies: 2000-2004

Charles, who likes to stir up trouble, asked me what my favorite movie was of the last five years. He then expanded the question to the top five movies of the last five years. This could be tough, but I have a list, which shouldn't have too many major omissions. The list says I have watched 111 movies that came out between 2000 and 2004, so the real number is probably 120-130.

I'm working with the following 28 contenders:

• About Schmidt
• A.I.
• American Splendor
• The Barbarian Invasions
• Before Sunset
• Chaos
• City of God
• Crimson Gold
• Distant
• Dogville
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• Ghost World
• Gosford Park
• High Fidelity
• House of Flying Daggers
• Kill Bill
• Lord of the Rings
• Lost in Translation
• Million Dollar Baby
• Mystic River
• Otesanek
• Primer
• The Royal Tenenbaums
• The Secret Lives of Dentists
• Sideways
• The Stone Reader
• Tarnation
• Whale Rider

This list is, of course, not that meaningful because there is no real gap between #5 and #6, and not that great a gap between #1 and #20.

• Distant
• Dogville
• High Fidelity
• Kill Bill
• Mystic River

definition:Blogging

I was reading Anil Dash's post on why he supports Kottke.org financially, and the following seemed to me to be a good definition of the ideal blog, in my opinion:

Blogging isn't about politics, or technology, or food, or design. It's about all of those things, or none of them, or whatever topic catches your eye...

[A weblog] comes from an individual's desire to explore the world and share their discoveries with the audience they want to reach, whether that's a few close friends or the entire web.

Happy Birthday

...to my internet-publishing self. I am now three blog-years old.

Out of Iraq

Harpers.org has a great but demoralizing essay by a former Iraq reporter about his misadventures which included buying a house, having lots of parties, getting scared of being blown up, and finally being forced to leave.

Magazines

As mentioned in conversation to Charles, here is my ordered list of magazines from the summer of 2003, favorite to least favorite:

1. The Nation
2. The Onion
3. Harper's
4. The New Yorker
5. Times Literary Supplement
6. London Review of Books
7. The Economist
8. The New Republic
9. The Atlantic Monthly
10. Spin
11. The Source
12. Rolling Stone
13. CMJ
14. ESPN The Magazine
15. Sports Illustrated
16. Newsweek
17. Time
18. U.S. News & World Report
19. Entertainment Weekly
20. Movieline
21. Weekly World News
22. Maxim, Stuff, FHM

Not included are the comments I made. One note I made was that I thought the popular weekly newsmagazines, toward the end of the list, tried to make people worry about things discussed within the magazine so that it would become a necessary safeguard against the unknown dangers of their environment. I haven't read newsweeklies much lately, so I can't say if I still feel the same way.

You may also note I included two book review publications fairly high. This isn't because they informed me about great books, it's just that I liked reading the criticism and essays.

Full-time Blogging

Apparently Kottke.org is now a professional endeavor. I'll be interested both to see how it turns out and how I am able to keep up with increased content. I find that I'm much more likely to read sites with a manageable amount of information. That's the reason I can't really read the GreenCine blog; there's so much that I don't know where to start if I haven't seen it for a couple of days. Only time will tell, I suppose.

Flash Game

Waxy.org recently linked to this Flash game, called Ball Revamped, which I think you should play.

Film Strategies

I've been thinking for a while about what my strategy will be this summer and beyond for plowing through the great films of the past. My strategy for finding out what new stuff I should see is to read most all reviews and festival reports from Roger Ebert and the New York Times, everything in Sight and Sound and Film Comment, and whatever else I happen upon. There are a few things I miss, but not too many notable new films are neglected in all of those places.

However, I have no good system for older movies. I do have a list of what is now around 750 movies I want to see, but that's impossible to choose from. Kevin is slogging through the AFI Top 100 list, but I don't think I want to get tied down to a list that long. I've considered going back to my History of Narrative Film (Cook) text book, which I think is pretty good, and going through it by chapter and section, watching films it mentions or that fit the category. I'm also tempted to read Andrew Sarris's American Cinema, and go through his auteur directors, which brings up the subject of whether I should do a genre at a time, or a director at a time, or what. We'll see...

Spam Blogs

Apparently spammers have now developed past comment spam and are now creating spam blogs. I'm trying to remember if I've heard of this before, but it seems new.

I was surfing through random Blogger sites and ran across several pages filled with repeating nonsense that all seemed to link to external sources, none of which I visited. This was kind of annoying, but not that annoying since there is no need to visit any weblogs you don't already know or haven't had recommended to you. I would guess it is giving blog hosting services plenty of unwanted information to store and format.

The Shape of Things

As I said to Connor shortly after we'd seen The Shape of Things (we ran into each other as we were walking in), I don't think any of the performing arts at Carleton quite match theater in terms of production values, proficiency, and potency. With most student endeavors, there is an implied sense of amateurism that I don't think exists in the better theater shows.

I found The Shape of Things to be very well written, with a lot of memorable lines, and emotionally devastating. Connor said he could see the end coming, but even so he still almost couldn't take it.

It might have helped here that the characters were all college students in a town like Northfield, so the roles weren't a stretch for any of the actors. The sets were spare, except for the projected still images in the background, and there were only four characters in the whole play, but no more was needed.

The emotional impact might not have been there if the dialogue hadn't been so believable, but most of it rang true, even if some of the cultural references were slightly dated.

I'd probably give the most credit to the guy who played Adam (though all the performances were strong), since his character essentially turns into a different person over the course of the play, yet he seemed totally believable in both identities.

You should go see it this weekend.

Digital Cameras

I'm comparing digital cameras, and the two I'm looking at right now are the Canon PowerShot A510 ($200) and the Kodak DX6340 ($250). I'm currently leaning towards the Canon, because I can't find any significantly better features on the Kodak.

The one main difference I did notice was that the Canon has manual focus if you want it, whereas the Kodak has no such option. The Kodak may have a greater F-stop range with the tele lens, but it has no option for manual flash, which the Canon does (the Kodak only has on or off). The Canon has no internal memory, but comes with a memory card to match the Kodak's internal memory. The Canon is also lighter and smaller. I am familiar with at least one Kodak digital camera, but the Canon doesn't sound hard to use, so I don't think that will be an issue after the first while.

If you have an opinion, especially in favor of the Kodak, you should leave a comment. Also, if you know of other options in a similar price/feature range, you should comment about that as well.

Last Tango in Paris

This was by far my favorite Bertolucci movie (outclassing Before the Revolution, The Conformist, and The Dreamers), but that might be because either I wasn't watching it for class or that I had a good grasp of his auteurist themes.

In the other three movies I mentioned above, Bertolucci explores the relationship between sexuality and politics, and he does that here as well, although the politics are more cultural and personal than anything to do with governments or laws.

Jeanne (Maria Schneider) is the conflicted party here, struggling to choose between conformity (as embodied in marriage, the church, social expectations, etc.) and something radically new. Paul (Marlon Brando), who has been emotionally crushed by his late wife's suicide, wants to be finished with tradition and familiarity (he hates names, personal histories, and anything that would help him get to know Jeanne, with whom he is extremely physically intimate), while Tom (Jean-Pierre Leaud) appeals to Jeanne as the comfortably normal marriageable young male.

There was plenty of biting social commentary, but my favorite was when Leaud's character (who doesn't actually play that big a role) is talking about the "pop marriage," sold to young couples by the ad industry, and how spouses are supposed to play their roles and be happy plastic people. His fiance asks him where lovemaking fits into this act, and Leaud responds with something like, "They go off to a secret place where no one can find them and they act like themselves."

Brando's monologue to his dead wife is probably the dramatic high point, although the final scene beginning at the tango contest has a lot of clever parts. Apparently he ad-libbed most of it, which is even more incredible. I don't know that I've previously seen Brando in anything other than Apocalypse Now and The Godfather, neither of which foregrounds his acting ability as his role does here.

The symbolism of the uniform, such as Jeanne's dead father's military uniform as we see it in several scenes, the matching bathrobes worn by Paul and his ex-wife's kept man, and the call for the police at the end, all fit into what Bertolucci has to suggest about traditional societal roles, which is a lot.

Bertolucci also uses the portrayal of romance in movies as a way to comment on love and sex in society. Tom is actually making a movie about the relationship between himself and Jeanne during the preparations for their marriage. There is also a comment at the end about expressions of love having no place in civilized society, that that sort of stuff belongs in the movies, which relates to Tom's comment about sex for married couples I mentioned above.

From the quotes at iMDB, and the rating of 6.9, I'm guessing a lot of people didn't get much out of this movie other than explicit sex, which is kind of sad. I'm not sure what I'd have thought if I were not, say, a film student with a fairly good knowledge of the director from multiple classes, but I highly recommend Last Tango in Paris. And don't get bogged down in the NC-17 "content," which is well-done and necessary, but there is more to it than just that.

Olympic Hopefuls at the Cave

The Olympic Hopefuls last night were both better than when they played the Cave last spring and better than they are on their pretty good debut album.

It seems like they've gotten a lot more comfortable playing together and they now allow for more variation with their songs. They played three that weren't from the record, and those that were had a lot more embellishment than what I heard last year. They used the keyboards for even better atmospheric effect than on record and the guitars sounded bigger and louder, which certainly didn't hurt.

They were also more dramatic than last time. This was partly because they extended the songs, including more and longer crescendos than you get in the usual three or four minutes per track, and also because they seemed to get louder and more exciting as the night went on. The guitar duelling after "Stoned Again" to close out the set was unexpected, but fit right in with the vibe they had going.

It's hard to say whether their next album will succeed in proportion to how much they've improved as a band in the past year, but if it does, I think it's safe to say they'll be moving on to bigger and better things.