The boss of TigerBot Hesh's Journal

cassielsander's Journal of Words conveying Thoughts

The boss of TigerBot Hesh

[ userinfo | livejournal userinfo ]

[ calendar | livejournal calendar ]

Now that everyone has had a chance to see it... [08 May 2012|11:19am]

[ mood | curious ]

Poll #1839080 Cabin In The Woods ending poll
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9

Given the information available to them in the moment, did the Cabin In The Woods "survivors" make the right decision?

View Answers

Easy Yes

1 (11.1%)

Close, but Yes

2 (22.2%)

Close, but No

1 (11.1%)

Definitely No

4 (44.4%)

I haven't seen this, but need to.

1 (11.1%)

Given the benefit of hindsight, did they make the right decision?

View Answers

Easy Yes

1 (11.1%)

Close, but Yes

2 (22.2%)

Close, but No

1 (11.1%)

Definitely No

4 (44.4%)

I haven't seen this, but REALLY need to.

1 (11.1%)

Feel free to put reasons why into a comment. If you haven't seen Cabin In The Woods then beware the comments to this post, which will probably be full mega-spoilers.

6 missives|dispatch a missive

This is the time to show them everything. [01 May 2012|01:14pm]

[ mood | calm ]

There are a couple things I forgot to mention in my post on Hunger Games...

Another advantage of putting the story on the screen is that, in the last two-thirds, the movie audience is in approximately the position of the games audience. And, unlike in the other big recent voyeurism-to-the-death movie Cabin In The Woods, we have approximately the same outlook on events, hating the game but wishing the players well (while at the same time hoping to see something cool).

Again like Cabin, I like how the film incorporates familiar tropes of its genre (in this case reality television) and shows how they can make sense in an insane situation. Like for instance how the kids rely on the assistance of their fabulous fashion consultant.

I'm sure it's been mentioned, but the number of parallels between Jennifer Lawrence here and in Winter's Bone are pretty staggering, although I thought the WB performance was a lot stronger (having more to work with). She shoots squirrels, comforts her sister, deals with her incapable mother, and volunteers to kill or die for the government. They could have just gone ahead and cast the same mother to seal the deal, though it looks like instead they got her mother from Cold Case.

The movie is growing somewhat in my memory. I remember not liking the first third very much but my mind is editing that part out as time goes on. Which in a way is as it should be; a film that achieves something interesting in some scenes but fails in others has made an accomplishment that a film that is simply competent the whole way through does not.

dispatch a missive

You call that a kiss? [27 Apr 2012|04:19pm]

[ mood | impressed ]

Saw The Hunger Games, figuring I should in order to be part of the national conversation thereupon, and was glad I did.

It does take awhile to find the right way to tell its story. The opening scenes in District 12 mostly told me that it, like Odessa in Friday Night Lights, is inhabited by unfortunate people too poor or ignorant to mount their cameras on tripods.

The Real Film pretty much starts with the training for the big games, and the main character feeling compelled to participate in her own celebrity. Making fun of fakey people is easy to the point of boring; showing why and how someone serious would cooperate with them is potentially fascinating (see also Ridicule).

I think it reached an interesting rhythm wherein although there was some great subjective camera (cinematography note: this need not be the same as shakey-cam) and sound gives you the sensory experience the protagonist is having, while at the same time you have no idea what she's really thinking or feeling, especially once both stress and circumstances are encouraging her to display feelings that may not mean so much in the long term.

Possibly this is a case where the film is better for non-readers, as I imagine some of this aspect would be lost on those who knew more of the internality. I also wonder if my abstract take on the world of the film* might not be better for me than a more specific one from the book, where my critical urge to pick things apart would be more engaged.

There was also an undeniable impact from seeing children kill children in a relatively graphic way, especially with the guileless lack of any pretense that they wouldn't do exactly that.

Even so there are still some rough spots. The tech level seems very arbitrary, possibly including something akin to Star Trek holodeck technology that lets TPTB design & conjure monsters in seconds. I tried not to think about it, with some success.

At the end, I was quite pleased with it as an update of 60s/70s violent social metaphor movies like Deathsport and Rollerball. And it has an actual ending, with amiguities rather than cliffhangers, which I thought was very polite given that they knew damn well there'd be more films (for a counter-example see Compass, Golden).

* - Putting my I'm-sure-wrong take in words in case it's interesting in a Snape-was-Harry's-father / Roach-is-young-George-Smiley way:

It seems like the 12 districts are just the areas that took part in the rebellion, relatively small communities where it would be possible for random pairs of kids to be acquainted with each other. This also makes it interesting that they include both rich areas and poor areas, thereby showing that the rebellion was something that cut across both class and geography in a way that sparks more interest from me than, say, the hints about the Firefly war did.**

** - Okay, to make it perfectly clear: I love Firefly. I just don't consider myself a browncoat.

dispatch a missive

Chem messes up again [23 Apr 2012|06:20pm]

[ mood | impressed ]

Saw The Cabin In The Woods, the new horror-comedy, and was really impressed. Not sure what I was expecting, but probably not something this Joss Whedon-y. Made me laugh, made me think. Mostly the former.

There's also a lot of candy for anyone who has seen a horror film made in the past 35 years. Not necessary, just extra.

There are some weak spots, where things don't make sense unless you assume that somehow the movie universe (or at least the locale) is skewed into making things happen the way they do. And there are a lot of unanswered questions. I had no big problem with either, but others have.

It seems like people are being more tentative than they need to be about spoiling details of this film. In my book if something happens in the first scene of the movie, you can talk about it. This isn't something I even thought about until people gave rollick grief about mentioning that James Franco was in Green Hornet.

I guess what I'm getting at is that, if you think it's been spoiled for you, it probably hasn't been, because there's a lot more going on then the first twist. And if you want to know more before seeing it there's some more I can say that I think won't spoil it for anybody.

( But just in case... )

In closing: RUN OUT AND SEE IT!

5 missives|dispatch a missive

When someone said: "Subtlety's not that hard"... [05 Apr 2012|07:04pm]

On an old Battleship Pretension film podcast, one host just said: "It made me laugh and angry." When his co-host confronted him on this he immediately backed down, but I don't know.

Poll #1831630 "It made me laugh and angry."
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 16

This usage is...

View Answers

A. Incorrect.

3 (18.8%)

B. Poetic.

4 (25.0%)

C. All of the above.

4 (25.0%)

D. None of the above.

5 (31.2%)

21 missives|dispatch a missive

Benny's secret history of television [05 Apr 2012|06:47pm]

[ mood | amused ]

I've for some time been addicted to avclub.com 's TV Club, which does episode-by-episode reviews of shows both classic (Twin Peaks, Muppet Show) & new. It helps that I only follow a few shows at a time, but it gives me that "water cooler" feeling I kind of missed.

They're currently doing Star Trek: Deep Space 9 two episodes a week on Thursdays, and I'm following along. A lot of smart people to trade comments with, plus unusually good gimmick commenters, including a Garak ("How splennndid to see so many 21st century humans taking an interest in the little happenings on Tarok Nor...I mean Deep Space Nine, of course...Forgive me, I misspoke."), cantankerous fictional DS9 creator Benny Russell ("I only wrote on the walls because they wouldn't give me any goddamned paper!"), and, very oddly, Babylon 5's solemn alien heroine Delenn ("this Federation will no doubt pay for its easy trust of others...I speak from experience").

The most surprising, even in that company, was "Rappin' Jake Sisko", who alternates self-aggrandizement with stories from his streets. Or rather his corridors & promenade.

Want to know more about him? Read on:

I got synonyms like Data, metaphors like a Tamarian,
A simile assimilator with more game than a Ktarian.
Within one man, I'm a whole Federation
Who can wreck an MC with no hesitation
But sometimes I make peace just to sow some confusion
Sometimes I like the holosuite though it's all an illusion.

He even schooled me with a spot-on real-world art reference that I had just assumed was some obscure Trek character (or a Jedi at the very least):

She's not used to being useless, rather die with her boots on
Just then Winn butts in sportin' a hat by Jorn Utzon.

The photo at the top of the article explains this a little.

2 missives|dispatch a missive

Watching 2 new tv shows: Awake & Smash [26 Mar 2012|02:02pm]

[ mood | impressed ]

Been watching tv lately, which is weird for me. I'll save the How for the end of the post, as it is the least timely element.

The best of the What, however, is Awake, NBC's alternate reality cop show that I heard about in an interview and gave a try. A gruff cop played by Jason Isaacs (most famously Lucius Malfoy) loses a family member in a car crash, either his wife or his son. But he lives every day twice, first with his son dead and then with his wife dead, and the two lives diverge further as time goes on (different partners, different therapists). Meanwhile he solves crimes that have seemingly arbitrary similarities to each other.

I'm liking this a lot. Not so much in an X-Files "figure it out" sort of way as a Mulholland Dr. "ride the buggy" sort of way. It does a lot of unconventional stuff (Isaacs, unlike most protagonists in analogous positions has no wish to solve his main problem), and does the conventional cop stuff in an interestingly abbreviated best-of kind of way.

The pilot is like a meticulous short film, and is still on Hulu, so I highly recommend everybody try it. I had my doubts whether the show would be able to continue with that level of quality, and while it has sort of eased up it's definitely finding interesting ways to play with the situation (for instance having the son's former babysitter be a witness to two different murders). And Isaacs is really great, and the wife & son are played unusually well, to the point that I, like he, don't look forward to letting either of them go.

I've also been watching Smash, NBC's Glee-for-grown-ups about the making of a Marilyn Monroe musical. This is a much mixeder bag. The pilot was pretty appealing in terms of portraying the genesis of a musical from the glimmer of an idea to the first audition, but didn't have time to do much else (including the music) very well. Since then the content of the musical itself has gotten much better (which makes sense in-universe) and some of the worst parts have fallen away, but each new subplot is about 50% likely to be a clunker, such that increasingly all the best stuff is in the rehearsal room proper. They could have saved money and just limited the whole thing to that one room, which would be very theatrical.

I'm going to stick with it, though, both because the in-show music is good (the out-of-show is getting more juke boxy) and actors like Anjelica Houston & Jack Davenport are great to watch. And the main conflict (two actresses competing to play Marilyn) is working better than expected in that the "villain" one is turning out to be quite a human being. This might have happened accidentally but it works. I think it's all still on Hulu as well, so anyone interested can catch up, for now.

Kind of happy these are both NBC shows, as the musical Tina Fey / Alec Baldwin NBC ad has made me aware how much goodwill I still have for that network and how it's actually kind of warranted.

And now, the How. I've bought a usb-to-antennae device for $50 that lets me hook up my laptop to a digital antenna ($10) and use Windows Media Center (built-in to Vista & 7) as a sort of TiVo, with online schedule and the like. Very fun results so far. Have been recording a bunch of not-on-dvd stuff like 60s Batman & Green Hornet, skimming Jimmy Fallon for the best parts of him and The Roots, and getting much-better-than-Hulu quality of the new shows. And if I want the big screen the XBox 360 can stream shows directly off the laptop (though this works best with ethernet rather than wifi).

There are reception holes: for instance no CBS at all (digital broadcasting is effectively all-or-nothing). But Awake has me covered as far as cop shows and that's pretty much all CBS does, right?

6 missives|dispatch a missive

Maybe "Welcome, cassielsander" would be better? [19 Mar 2012|05:41pm]

[ mood | quixotic ]

I'm sometimes a little perplexed when Livejournal says:

"You're logged in as cassielsander. Go have fun!"

Perhaps in my mind it sounds too much like:

"You've found a stranger's credit card. Go have fun!"

1 missive|dispatch a missive

They are ugly, but they are beautiful [15 Mar 2012|03:21pm]

[ mood | impressed ]

rollick dragged me out to see John Carter recently, the big budget sci-fi adventure movie that may be tanking horribly. I'd been in no hurry to see it due to the generic-looking trailers, but I liked it A LOT. It's an old-fashioned adventure story that completely swept me up in its crazy reverse-Superman story.

Of course, "old-fashioned adventure" could also be read as "frightfully un-PC exotofest littered with corpses and made-up words", and yeah that's true too. But I think it was the first adventure movie to really grab me since Life Aquatic. Harry Potter gets me on an emotional level, and Lord Of The Rings on a more intellectual one (kind of detached due to seeing the story in so many forms), but neither gave me the simple thrill of just wanting to see what the characters were going to see, what they were going to do, and how they'd get out of their next predicament.

There's also some classic tableaus. Between the torn-shirt hero, ubiquitous chains, enormous monsters, and yellow background pallette, there are many shots that look like a Tor book cover come to life (for me that's a good thing).

And as to the reams of made-up words, I was able to keep pace with them enough that, while I couldn't actually repeat the name for anything, I would recognize it when a character brought it up. Serious YMMV here, though, especially if you saw Thor and couldn't get past the fact that characters would say "Jotunheim" without giggling.

But yeah, thought it was a blast, minus a couple plot problems that didn't occur to me until days later. And while the ending is good enough, I'll be sad if Andrew Stanton doesn't get to continue the series. Maybe if he agrees to make "Finding Nemo Again" or perhaps "Wall-E 2: Lazy E".

Rol was also the direct impetus for me seeing Trust, in which Clive Owen is a Chicago-suburbanite dad whose daughter gets severely cyber-stalked (not the Hal Hartley classic of the same name).

I really resisted this one, because the details sounded disturbingly like those of De-Railed, in which Clive plays a Chicago-suburbanite dad who gets into sex troubles. That film was the worst kind of alarmism and really one of my least favorite films period, and I figured shifting the victimhood to the daughter and adding an internet angle would just make it worse.

As it is, I have to say it's pretty good. Clive's performance seems off in the first half, playing "normal Dad", but once things go south and he starts turning into "psycho Dad" he gets more believable and the film makes a lot of very interesting choices of direction. Also Viola Davis figures in, and it turns out she's a pretty good actress believe it or not.

It's no classic, and it definitely skirts the sort of sex-negativity and "kid's can't be trusted" stuff you'd expect, but all at least in support of messages other than that the audience is justified in their prejudices. (For instance that, in some ways, 17 year-olds are not mini-adults, communication is fragile, and sexual expression can have different effects on different people.)

So yeah, two films I didn't especially want to see, and that kind of contradict my politics, but both recommended if you think you'd respond well to their merits.

4 missives|dispatch a missive

Premature Nice [13 Mar 2012|03:59pm]

[ mood | amused ]

from a discussion on the film podcast "Battleship Pretension" as to whether they've peaked:

T: I'm saying we should have quit, a long time ago.

D: Well, we're not gonna quit. And you listeners can help us to not quit...

T: Nice!

D: ...help us by not quit to send us, help us to quit, not to quit by....

T: I said "nice" too soon.

D: ...help us keep doing this by donating...

dispatch a missive

Someday you're gonna tell me what you had on him. [13 Feb 2012|03:19pm]

[ mood | impressed ]

Saw The Ides Of March, George Clooney's film about the dirty world of presidential primary politics. Liked it a lot; especially the acting (always a focus in actor-directed projects):
"Ryan Gosling does a good intense job" is one of those things I probably don't even need to mention, but he does one.
Evan Rachel Wood dances the line of "healthy young sexual being who knows what she wants" and "barely-grown woman unable to handle her drives" very well, suggesting that one person could easily be each of these on different days.
Philip Seymour Hoffman & Paul Giamatti are pretty much perfectly suited as crusty political operatives on opposite sides of the election.
Clooney himself really sells his candidate character, a guy who people innately trust even as he says crazy things and makes terrible decisions, both publicly & privately. (At least I hope the things he says were supposed to be crazy.)

It's square in that "middlebrow jaded political drama" category with stuff like Henry Fonda/Gore Vidal's The Best Man, doing it with wit and a lot of mood but without going into the clever show-offiness of something like Tracy&Hepburn's State Of The Union or Aaron Sorkin's West Wing. I like both of those a lot and find the repartee brilliant (and many critics compared this film unfavorably to Sorkin), but sometimes there's something to be said for dialog that conveys information without calling attention to itself.

It also avoids being like Robert Redford/Michael Ritchie's The Candidate, in that it's got much more thrust and less of that 70s naturalistic drift. I have a lot of respect for the 70s way of doing things, but I enjoyed this much more.

Ides Of March does try to go for for a couple pretty deep points, and maybe doesn't quite make them (still turning it over in my head, probably going to see it again). But if nothing else it's a nice sexy middlebrow piece for smart people who want to relax but not have their intelligence insulted. And the world could use more of that.

Also in that category, btw, and similarly disappointing some people's expectations: A Dangerous Method, David Cronenberg's Freud & Jung thing. I'm a Freung fanboy from way back so this was candy for me, but even without that factor I think it manages to take historical characters, put them in interesting situations that kind of link toegether, and then get out without wasting too much time on tangents. Not a hugely high bar, but one a whole lot of biopics don't reach.

(And if Keira Knightly's character happens to get consensually spanked by Michael Fassbender in a couple really well-shot scenes, I am capable of repsecting that on an esthetic level while awaiting the next conversaion about subconscious drives.)

2 missives|dispatch a missive

Over And Over...Again [25 Jan 2012|05:36pm]

[ mood | curious ]

With the Oscar nominations out, I've been looking excessively closely at the nominees, but for the most part NOT with an eye toward the horse-race of snubs & odds & pity-noms, but rather theme-of-the-year.

Last year may have been the first year that I really detected a theme, and it was because of the excellently edited montage of Best Picture nominees shown right before the Oscar was awarded. It was criticized as un-egalitarian as between the nominees, but I think it was pretty amazing how it teased out strong themes of struggle, family and sacrifice out of ten of the most diverse nominees in Academy history.

I won't go into these because the clip does it better than my words could.*

So it's probably half because of that I'm seeing themes in this year's nominees, though I have heard remarks about two or three at a time from various critics in their year-end summaries.

My theory is that this year's movies are all pretty strongly about the conflict between the past and the future. To wit:

THE ARTIST: Actor resists the onset of sound filmmaking.
THE DESCENDANTS: Clooney must decide on how to handle both the development of inherited Hawaiian royal land and his immediately family's past actions.
EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE: Child tries to come to grips with 9/11 and delay the departure of his father from his life.
THE HELP: Haven't seen it, but I'm speculating there's the tradition of segregation versus the progress of integration.
HUGO: Again didn't see it, but from what I hear there's a fair amount of looking back & forward regarding the film medium and the individual histories.
MIDNIGHT IN PARIS: Literal (or perhaps literary?) time travel, retreat from and confrontation with the modern world.
MONEYBALL: Changing the way baseball is played forever, against the resistance of tradition, and breaking a lifetime streak of disappointment.
THE TREE OF LIFE: How did the beginning of the universe lead to where I am now?
WAR HORSE: Literally, animals coming to the end of their use as combatants, metaphorically, something more universal about the diminishing role of the living being in warfare.

Not 100% air-tight, but strikes me pretty hard nonetheless, given that I didn't pick the list. Admittedly, this is a pretty common theme; Social Network or Toy Story from last year could have fit. But many of the rest less so.

So, just a thing that may be on filmmakers/the Academy's/America's/The World's mind just now.

* - The opening montage is pretty cool too, if less pointed. To the extent it has a thesis it's more like: "Wow, movies are cool, and in a lot of different ways."

3 missives|dispatch a missive

Rare Day O' Movies [23 Jan 2012|12:41pm]

[ mood | pleased ]

Stuck sick at home alone on Saturday so did some movie catch-up.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011) is the story of a little boy who tries to complete a silly quest that his Dad set up to try to make him interact with people more, before dying on 9/11.

The first half I was unsure about, because obviously it's pushing some very big buttons, is very quirky, and the kid is extremely earnest (and possibly slightly autistic). But the individual interactions were well acted by a murderer's-row cast (Max Von Sydow, Viola Davis, Jeffrey Wright, John Goodman, Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock) and when the character reaches his emotional crisis a little over half-way through* it really grabbed hold, and didn't let me go until way toward the end.

Subtlety and good taste and the like are nice to have in movies, but an even better thing for me is unironic emotion that really reaches me, and here it did. I cut it some of the same slack I cut Lovely Bones for trying to tell a story that cuts against a lot of people's instincts, but it didn't need it quite a much, because it wasn't as ambitious metaphysically and was more consistently presented.

Electra Luxx (2010) is the "world's most unexpected sequel" to the tiny film Women In Trouble. Both are female-ensemble dramedies about sex & relationships. A lot of people at the time wondered who this was made for; turns out it was me. I hope the rest of you weren't unduly inconvenienced.

The first film's theme seemed to be women messing up each other's relationships (mostly with men) for a variety of motives, this one is about helping each other strengthen or create relationships (ditto). The plot is even thinner, but I had had a good time hanging out with a lot of well-played characters I knew as they talked about things I don't often talk to women about (or anybody really).

In addition to the half-dozen or so returning actresses there are a couple additions: Malin Ackerman (probably recruited on the Watchmen set by Carla Gugino) and an uncredited Julianne Moore. The men are all new(ish), and definitely seem like the ones a committee of actresses would choose to be in an R-rated romance with (Timothy Olyphant for the edgy-competitive love interest, Joseph Gordon-Levitt for the lovable if prurient nerd, and Angel/Mad Men's Vincent Kartheiser for the hot guy you kind of hate).

Note though that it is very much a sequel, and if you didn't see or didn't like Women In Trouble this probably won't work well for you.

Bright Young Things (2003) is Stephen Fry's adaptation of Evelyn Waugh's book of life amongst sophisticates toward the end of the interwar period and beyond (even though he didn't know precisely what form the war would take). It starts out very satirical and crazy, mirroring the mood of the characters, and I found it hard to take hold of anything to care much about. But by the end, the film, the characters, and the world really had all matured together, and I liked it quite a bit.

Also worth seeing for having one of those Diner / Outsiders / Mean Girls "everyone in this movie became famous" casts (James McAvoy, Michael Sheen, Emily Mortimer, David Tennant).

For completeness' sake, I'll also mention Closure (2007), a very British thriller starring Gillian Anderson as a cougarish executive who seduces the very young voyeuristic man that installs her new alarm system and then runs afoul of a bunch of serious Straw Dogs-style rural hooligans.

The first half has an extremely unnatural pace and gets by largely as a hothouse of perversities. The second has to pay the checks the first one wrote, and comes up with some fairly interesting ideas about people not realizing that the things that drive them crazy might drive other people differently crazy. But it all came out a bit too unbelievable and silly for me. So even though I can respect what it was trying to do, it remains mostly a curiosity with the main attraction being Gillian Anderson's nothing-held-back performance (which is something more than nothing).

* - This reminded me a lot of Ed Norton's I-Hate-New-York meltdown in 25th Hour, and serves a similar purpose. But hey, if you're going to steal something for your post-9/11 movie, you might as well steal from the only other good one.

dispatch a missive

Cass's Very Cheap Tech Corner [19 Jan 2012|06:04pm]

[ mood | indescribable ]

I have recently joined the tablet revolution in ALMOST the cheapest possible way, so I'm writing up my experience in hope it may benefit those thinkin' 'bout it.

My main impetus was to get my Economist subscription paperlessly. The Economist is a great newspaper but it's almost always more than I can read in a week, so I have to then manage a bunch of half-read issues which I don't want to throw away because there's almost certainly something fascinating I haven't read yet. Proposed solution: bits instead of trees.

So I wanted this, and I wanted it cheapish, which meant an android rather than iPad. I tend to lose and break things, and that doesn't even factor the possibility for someone actively trying to steal something of mine because I don't carry around $500 items as a matter of course. I wanted this to be priced such that if something unfortunate happened to it I could be philosophical.

I quickly learned that there are a million trade-offs on the low end of the tablet market, so it would be necessary to create my own floor.

Things I demanded of my prospective tablet.
ECONOMIST ANDROID APP. This is the cool way to get it, Kindle has another way which is apparently lame. But it turns out that not all android devices can run all apps, and the low-end ones do not have access to the "Android Market", the Macy's of app stores. In practice this meant my device would need access to GetJar, a mid-level app store.
U.S. SELLER.
NO HACKING NECESSARY. Apparently a lot of people install non-recommended versions of Android on their tablets to make them do stuff. Maybe I will too, but I wanted the option to not.
7 INCH SCREEN. This only came from a series of things I didn't want: I didn't want it to be as small as a phone, I didn't want it as big as a netbook. In practical terms, that mean 7".
GOOD WI-FI. Because otherwise it doesn't feel like The Future.
PRETTY GOOD TOUCH SCREEN. Was prepared to use a stylus if necessary, but it had to at least have a rep for functionality.
WEB, EMAIL, IM. Because, although I don't envision relying on the tablet for internet access, I'm sure it'll come in handy sometime.
EXTERNAL MEMORY. I'm sort of addicted to using Micro-SD cards and the like.

I found one that matched my needs: the COBY KYROS 7012 for $100 (online from Best Buy). I actually could have gotten it even cheaper, but I decided getting it from a big chain to whom I could easily return it without shipping it back was worth a few dollars.

Turns out it does everything I needed (which is lucky, because I was never able to 100% confirm before that it could run the Economist app, just that it had access to the GetJar app store which carried it). But in focusing in like a laser on the critieria above, I left some things behind.

Things I didn't get with my Kyros:
ANDROID MARKET. The one place you can get just about every commercial app. With a combination of GetJar & Amazon, I can get an app for just about any functionality I want. But without the AM, you never know if you'll be able to get any specific app you may hear about.
LONG BATTERY LIFE. I don't know if there's a color tablet out there with a really long battery life, but if so this isn't it. A few hours of active use does it in, and sleep mode probably drains it in a few days. So I tend to power it down a lot, and intend to use my b&w Kobo for actual book reading.
DOUBLE-TOUCH SCREEN. Apparently this is a cool thing, and I can certainly see how it could make navigation easier; maybe my next device. As it is, I manage pretty well after having run the Calibration utility a couple times.
CAMERA. Never actually chose to not have one, just didn't check on the model I bought. Don't miss it; there's always my phone, not to mention netbook or actual camera.
3G. Don't know how many offer non-wifi wireless internet, but mine certainly does not.
DOESN'T CHARGE FROM USB. This is the one place where I call: "Lame!" Doesn't everything charge from usb now? Guess not. But the usb port does have certain compensations, below.

Having played with it for a while, I've gotten a few pleasant surprises.
If has a flash player, so I can watch online videos through the browser or (better) through the included YouTube app.
It runs World Series Of Poker HD, so for $2 I got all the game-playing I really need. (GetJar has Angry Birds for free but I haven't tried it yet.)
It runs Perfect Viewer, an app that can read cbr & cbz "comic book files". This is a place where having a 10" screen would be handy, and where not being able to run some apps from the comic companies means it's harder to get legal free stuff. The Kindle app did get me some, though.
KEYBOARD CASE!!! This isn't that big a deal on a practical level, but cool in concept. It turns out that that usb port can support external devices, so for $13.95 (free shipping) I got a fake-leather case that not only protects the device (from me) but also can plug in and turn it into a little laptop. There's even a little stand thing. Since there's a form-factor involved, each generic case only works with some generic tablets, so I was lucky to find one that fits the Kyros so well.

So, it's been a month now and I've been getting my Economist electronically, and getting it hot off the press on Thursday evening (rather than in the Monday mail), which is way cool for a weekly news publication. Haven't used the Kyros for a lot besides this, mostly the occasional (offline, no-stakes) poker game, but it's been fun to have. And the keyboard is something that you don't use 99% of the time but then are REALLY glad to have when there's a long message or complicated url to type in.

My one gripe is the whole idea of automatic screen rotation, which the Kyros does pretty well when except when laid flat, but I turned it off. Couldn't there just be an onscreen button to "rotate screen", rather than guessing? Luckily the Economist app defaults to portrait when reading which is what I generally want.

I'd be happy to answer any questions, about the Kyros or other things I discovered during TabletQuest. For the record, if the Kyros hadn't worked out I probably would have grabbed a Nook Tablet for $250 or a Kindle Fire for $200 (everyone seems to say the Nook has better software & hardware to justify the $50, but if you have Amazon Prime the Fire gets you free content that might make it the better bargain).

4 missives|dispatch a missive

Fear presides over these memories, a perpetual fear. [19 Jan 2012|01:21pm]

[ mood | impressed ]

After a reminder / recommend from my friend Danya, I recently read The Plot Against America (2004), Philip Roth's strangely personal alt-history of a United States where Charles Lindbergh defeated Roosevelt for president in 1940 on a platform of peace. It is narrated by a character fortuitously named "Philip Roth", a child born in 1933 who tries to cope with fears either genetic or contagious.

I'm not sure exactly what if any goal Roth-the-author had in writing this, but the part I most value is putting the reader inside a paranoid* situation while remaining just distant enough from it to see that the paranoia, though justified, is not entirely reflective of reality. And that it's very much easier to choose which theory is your favorite than to establish which one is the most factual.

The twists and turns mirror facets of recent issues like the Rwanda genocide, the Iraq invasion, 9/11 truthers,, etc. nearly as much as the WW2 setting, and that's to the good I think given how hard those issues can be to unpack.

That said, there's also a good history lesson, with I think most of the happenings either taken from our own past or things that just as well could have happened here. Anti-semitism is a focus, of course, but there's also the easily forgotten lesson of how yesterday's pacifist can become today's warmonger, and vice-versa, if today's war carries a different ideological tinge than yesterday's war did.

The thing often missing from books like this is good characters, and the ones here feel real to a fault. The nine-year-old (most of the time) protagonist is endlessly frustrating, but it's largely because he is so reflective of things we hoped to leave behind forever when we turned ten.

One place where the story is problematic is in its treatment of the time after the main action, both in terms of how the book ends and how that future is referred to throughout the book. These come together to drain some global tension out of things, but also make their own point: that people will have their good days and bad days as far as the snap decisions they make, but in the long term they will act like themselves.

This idea would be somewhat antithetical to the alt-history industry, and full-time A-H-ers like Harry Turtledove probably put a lot more research into butterfly effects and tipping points. But for all the creative cleverness of such writers, Philip Roth uses characters, words and scenes to carry a power I haven't seen in A-H before.

* - And I use the term paranoia advisedly, as the book shows that although the characters are paranoid about a thing that others are actively trying to bring about, the paranoia can still be destructive. And this even though, as David Mamet put it in Homicide, the things that the Jews specifically are paranoid about often, by sheer coincidence, end up happening.

** - The book also provoked insights into groups like the Birthers, Tea Partiers, and Occupiers, which I found unsurprising until I realized that they didn't exist yet in long-ago 2004.

dispatch a missive

Fake Anti-Science Talk [17 Jan 2012|04:36pm]

[ mood | amused ]

Still finding the More Than One Lesson Christian film podcast funny when they wander off on tangents:

"So I will give it the old college try, and I may fail. As I did so often in college. Which isn't true, just in my Math class. Which, who needs Math?"

"Scientists."

"What?"

"Rocket scientists. What, you think you can Art your way to the Moon?"

"I don't see why not. It's all magic anyway. There's no Moon!"

"What, just smoke and mirrors?"

"Exactly. What we call the Moon is just a big mirror up there."

"And the clouds are..."

"Smoke."

[Actually kind of relevant in an episode (#51 - Exit Through the Gift Shop) which mourns the passing of Christopher Hitchens and knocks both Religulous and Expelled for how little they really contribute to their respective sides of the religion / science debate.]

2 missives|dispatch a missive

Between you and me, Lucetta, she's an alien. [06 Jan 2012|03:58pm]

[ mood | impressed ]

Finally saw the 2010 film Stone awhile back. It's a thriller in which Ed Norton is a convict up for parole, Robert De Niro is his parole officer, and Milla Jovovich is Norton's wife, who he shoves into De Niro's path in hopes of getting some leverage on him.

There are several predictable paths a movie with this setup could take (and still be a good movie), but this one eschews them all. We start off seeing a younger version of De Niro*, the obvious good guy, do horrible things to various family members, and find that he's grown into a middle age man a little bewildered at how everyone assumes he's an okay guy. And Jovovich, seemingly destined to be either a femme fatale or a slut with a heart of gold, teaches a kindergarten class with seeming honesty and competence. Meanwhile Norton, shopping around for a religion that can pass the time and look good on the De Niro's report, gets involved in a rather insane-sounding but kind of beautiful new age movement about how the whole universe is made out of sound.

And that's pretty much the movie. There are various characters for the three to bounce off of (especially Frances Conroy as De Niro's acclimated wife) but it's really about the excellent performances of the three leads, who each yearn to really know the others while keeping themselves secret. But even though they eventually see each other at their best and worst, they never can quite figure out what the others, or possibly even themselves, are after. And we viewers, with an even more niscient perspective, can't do much better.

This could be tremendously frustrating, but I found it kind of freeing and real. Plus it's got a nice tagline: "Some people tell lies. Others live them." Although, given the track record in the film, I would make it something more universal, like: "Sometimes we tell lies. Sometimes we live them."

* - It's Enver Gjokaj, aka Dollhouse's Victor. He really can adopt any personality!

dispatch a missive

Top 10, I guess [05 Jan 2012|05:42pm]

[ mood | uncomfortable ]

So it's January, and that means top ten films. I had more trouble than usual assembling the list, because some of the most interesting films of the year were either full of flaws (Hannah, Immortals, Another Earth), or lost their way as they went along (Unknown, Perfect Host), while many of the best-constructed genre films (MI:4, Fast Five, Tower Heist, Friends WIth Benefits) didn't present anything to interest me beyond their ingenious trope-delivery systems.

So rather than try hard to come up with the objective best of the year, I'm just going to make a "films I'd most want to watch again" list, which is another thing entirely.

So here goes:

1. Drive. The best '80s film of all time.

2. Tabloid. It has to be a documentary, because otherwise no one would believe it, and there wouldn't be the same thrill of trying to guess the truth.

3. The Arbor. A truly innovative doc (actors lip-synch to interviews with the survivors of a young British playwright's imploding life) with more drama than any of the fictional films I saw this year.

4. Beginners. An unabashedly quirky concept (adult son coming to grips with elderly father's newly-announced homosexuality) uses extremely imaginative techniques to portray his quest to understand different times, genders, and people. A lot of imperfections, but it's so achingly personal I had to cut it some slack.

5. Submarine. Much more abashedly quirky, in that the young main character & narrator knows that he lives in an era where people are growing sick of young main character narratrors. But still manages to spin some freshness out of the difficulty of relating to people and how pop culture can help, hurt, or simply color it.

6. Young Adult. This is a grower. I spent most of the film basically slack-jawed at the main character's amazing (but entirely credible) awfulness. But as with previous films such as Shutter Island and Black Swan, I found a buried lede at the end that makes me think of the whole thing a lot more positively.

7. Green Hornet. I have no history with the character, often dislike Seth Rogen, have had my problems with Michel Gondry even, but put them all together and it was a fun time that I'd love to repeat.

8. Thor. This mixed the epic and the fun for me, in a way that could easily have become cheesy but somehow wasn't. There's one big story cheat that banishes it to the lower half of the list, and probably smaller ones I've forgotten. But I've been a sucker for this kind of thing since the old Flash Gordon serials and this, unlike them, manages to not be completely dumb.

9. Sanctum - Its appearance here is as big a surprise to me as to anyone, but this formulaic, 3D, underwater caving disaster film manages to do the right things at the right times to keep me from thinking too much. Plus it features the ultimate beacon in the murky depths of filmmaking, Richard Roxburgh (the Duke from Moulin Rouge, Stalin's Australia-conquering son in Children Of The Revolution, M from LXG, Dracula from Van Helsing).

10. Certified Copy - I've never seen a film depart so little from its initial premise (a boutique owner shows her italian town to a visiting artist) and yet pack in so much more than that premise would seem to indicate. Full of mysteries that may not even be capable of fitting together, but I'd love to give it a try.

Honorable mentions: The Skin I Live In, Tyrannosaur, Contagion, Harry Potter 7.2, Captain America and the second half of War Horse.

10 missives|dispatch a missive

Dude, they HAVE a Koran [17 Nov 2011|04:31am]

[ mood | amused ]

More from More Than One Lesson:

Amidst an argument that Christian films don't have to have bad plotting...

Host: Okay, I need an example...what's a bible story with a really well thought-out arc?

Guest: Noah?

Host: Ah- OW. Thank you. We are now your go-to place for biblical construction humor.

And another, this time re: Book Of Eli

Host: So apparently God sent Denzel Washington all that way, but what he was carrying was just another piece of the elephant.

Guest: Hey that's pretty good.

Host: What?

Guest: Pieces of the elephant means....

Host: Blind men! You're right, that WAS brilliant.

Guest: Humility, Tyler.

Host: That's Best Podcast Nominee Tyler to you!

1 missive|dispatch a missive

You will experience discomfort specific to your gender. [16 Nov 2011|01:45pm]

[ mood | impressed ]

Just realized I never gave my thoughts on the recently released Immortals, the Greek mythology movie from Tarsem and the people who arranged the craft service for 300.

Said shortly: it is the most beautiful B-movie fantasy ever made. It's very squarely in the "go on an implausible quest in which you gain & lose companions" category with Krull and the old Hercules & Sinbad movies. But it adds breathtaking (and sometimes very disturbing) visuals from the guy who did The Cell and The Fall, and Mickey Rourke as a dude whom grief has driven to tear the whole universe down.

So pretty much see it or don't based on whether that thought appeals to you. But one thing I promise: unlike another recent film on a similar subject, this film contains titans. And they do some really awesome clashing.

11 missives|dispatch a missive

navigation

[ viewing | most recent entries ]

[ go | earlier ]