Dear Microsoft Word,

Please stop underlining any sentence you decide is written in "passive voice." Not every sentence has to be the literary equivalent of a pushy used car salesman.

No love,
Spoofie

I've had the novel Jumper in my possession for a while, and read it soon after getting down here to Florida. I'd been interested in the movie when I first saw the previews since the basic concept was an appealing one, but had read reviews recommending that one read the book instead. So I did, and it was utterly fantastic. I had trouble putting it down, and the older sci fi books I've been reading since have been disappointing because I miss reading Jumper. That's how much I liked it. But, having read it, I decided to get the movie from Netflix and see what they'd done with it. I knew it wasn't going to be great, but I figured that with such good source material, it had to at least be watchable, right?

Wrong. Completely awful. I absolutely loathe this movie. Couldn't even sit through it without getting my computer out and writing a review explaining how much I hate it to distract myself.

( here is that review )

In other news, I'm still working on that paper. This was my break from paper writing, and in retrospect it was not worth taking.

"I've been waiting for that for years--thanks, David!"

Okay, so I'm thinking that this convention is probably the most awesome thing I could possibly do next summer (yes, even if the DW folks don't show up again next year). There go whatever savings I get scraped together from next semester's full time job already. And it's probably a bad sign that I'm thinking that one reason to go to UCLA rather than one of the schools in New York would be that I would be in the right state for Comic Con (assuming I live out there year-round, though, which I may still not).

I've been reading baggage regulations for three different airline companies, looking up policies on leaving luggage at different places in London, and having a pretty good time making fun of Heathrow's security FAQ with Mom. I am deeply amused by the notion that these questions are indeed frequently asked. Anyway, this is one of the most patronizing FAQs I have ever read.

My favorites were, at first, the questions about what one could bring on a plane--not only is there a question about whether or not one is allowed to carry any reading material or children's games onto the plane, but apparently British question-askers believe that whether baby formula is diary- or soy-based will determine whether or not it is allowed on the plane. Also, I found a loophole in the whole no explosive materials thing: the answer to the question of whether or not one can bring a sandwich or crisps on the plane for one's child is "Yes, crisps are fine and sandwiches with any type of filling are also permitted." Any type of filling? *strokes chin, has evil laugh*

My very favorite, however, is a very special question filed under "Exceptional Items": "How can you assure me that there will be no terrorists on my plane? I would also like to know what checks you make on all the staff working at the airport – how do you know there are no terrorists working in security? Or smuggling bombs on planes via the food that is put on to the planes?"

I bet this is the most frequently asked question of all, verbatim.

Dug out ye olde movie quote meme again. Let's get this one circulating around the flists one more time.

Come on, it's been more than a year...that's long enough, isn't it?

1. Pick 15 of your favourite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them for everyone to guess.
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
5. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search functions!

( quotes under the cut. warning: some bad words included NOW WITH HINTS )

I'll give everyone a day or two to guess before I start adding hints.

So agenttrojie started an "I Love the Whole World" rewriting craze on metaquotes, and I decided to get in on it with a version for film students - or at least critical studies students.

Inspirational posts are here and here.


I love photography
I love the zoetrope
I love the Latham loop
And the kinetoscope

I love film history
And all its gadgetry
Boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada

I love Cahiers
I love Bela Balasz
I love Munsterberg
And Soviet Montage

I love film theory
What is Cinema?
Boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada

I love realism
I love Expressionists
I love illusions
And all the plot twists

I love that whole world:
The moving picture show
Boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada, boom de yada

When I agreed to watch Death Bed: The Bed That Eats with my brother, my expectations were pretty low. Low-budget indie horror films from the seventies tend to be, with rare exceptions, badly-paced, drawn out snoozefests with inexplicable plots and awful characters.

This is one of those exceptions.

Death Bed is a shining example of a writer/director (George Barry, who is not credited on IMDb as ever having made another movie) taking extremely limited resources and turning out a film that is not only watchable, but highly engaging. The sets are minimal, the special effects are often extremely unconvincing, and the acting ranges from decent to downright awful (there is a flashback in which a gangster character being eaten by the bed says "I'm being eaten alive!" in a strange, matter of fact way while shooting his pistol in the general direction of his own crotch, viewable in the first part of this small collection of clips). The concept, at first, seems not just unreasonably bizarre but incapable of supporting an entire film.

But for all that, George Barry managed to put together a film that somehow works. It has a snappy pace and, very importantly, the action and the backstory are explained very clearly throughout the film (except for the ending, which gets a little vague). This is accomplished through the presence of the artist character - a ghost trapped behind his own painting across the room from the bed, where he receives the inedible belongings of the people the bed has eaten, has flashbacks concerning the bed's history, and repeatedly informs the bed of how much he hates it. It is perhaps somewhat unfortunate that he is the only proper character in the movie (interestingly, he is played by two actors - this is possible because he never speaks aloud, allowing him to be voiced by someone other than the man who provides his visual representation). The rest tend to be lacking in personality or history, though there is a strange set of sequences in which one of the girls is set up as if she's going to be our heroine, complete with internal monologues, before she falls victim to the bed. There are a lot of internal monologues in this film though, lending it a sort of dreamy quality. When characters do speak aloud, the deliverance of the dialogue still tends to seem distant, almost abstracted, leading me to believe that the poor acting might have actually benefited the film by keeping it at a strange remove from reality.

Predictably, Death Bed uses its subject matter as a jumping-off point for inclusion of seventies sleaze (it's a seventies movie about a bed that eats people - how could it not include an orgy that ends in the deaths of all involved?), but it's portrayed surprisingly cleanly (don't be surprised to see some nudity here and there, though). Sex is a factor in the story - a very large factor - but its portrayal onscreen is clearly not where Barry's interests really lay when he made this film. The "orgy" in question is depicted by a bunch of people sitting under the blankets and waving their arms to give the scene some movement - hardly the sexiest of orgy portrayals.

Death Bed is surprising because not only is it a fun film (you know the instant you see the bed downing a bottle of Pepto-Bismol that it's definitely okay to laugh at parts of it), but it's also surprisingly artistic. What might have been nothing but laughs a la the Pepto-Bismol sequence works surprisingly well as a serious dreamworld of shifting themes and tones.

If you looked at the title and thought it sounded at all interesting, see it. As George Barry says in the introduction to the film on the DVD (which you must also watch to get an idea of the history of the film and of the personality of the man who made it): "You might as well give it a try."

So here's the deal: The Film-makers' Coop is being evicted from the space where they have had their archive and their offices for about nine years for the sake of a new project headed by one Alanna Heiss, who just plain doesn't seem to get that kicking these guys out is a move that could bring an end to this organization. As of now, they don't have the funding they would need to support relocating thousands of 16mm prints and a massive paper archive. Articles about the situation are here, here, and here.

At this time the Film-makers' Coop is often the only resource available for exhibitors in need of prints of rare independent works, or for independent filmmakers in need of some form of distribution. As at least one of the articles mentions, in some cases the Coop possesses the only known copy of a film. Losing this resource would be a massive blow to organizations like TIE, who rented films from them for their 2008 fundraising event, and also any museums wanting to expose the public to alternate cinemas.

Here's the part that requires effort on our part: going to this page and sending a message to NY Department of Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin asking for support for the Coop, either in remaining where they are or in moving to another location. Even if you're not into experimental film, think of the potential loss in terms of art history. No way should we lose this collection just because some nitwit wanted to start an online radio station.

Please spread the word to your flists and to any relevant communities, too.

1. Reply to this post and I'll assign you a letter.
2. List (and upload, if you feel like it) 5 songs that start with that letter.
3. Post them to your journal with these instructions.

agenttrojie gave me M:

( oh boy! )
...I need to go do homework or something. This is ridiculous.

I'm hoping to do my book and movie reviews sometime this week, but it hasn't happened yet. There's a lot of other stuff going on right now.

Anyway, on Tuesday in women and film we watched Letter from an Unknown Woman, which is a melodrama that's apparently still pretty popular with certain audiences. It's what was known as a "women's film" or "weepy." It came out in 1948, and it really pissed me off. A proper review will be forthcoming, but in the meantime, I would like to present you with my own little Letter from an Unknown Woman In Five Minutes. And yes, this does contain spoilers, since I'm going over the entire story. I personally wouldn't recommend that you see this movie anyway, but if you're really into angst and self-sacrificing love and all that nonsense and actually want to see this thing, you might want to steer clear.

Basically, it goes like this. Stefan, a former virtuoso pianist, receives a letter the night before he is to take part in a duel. In it, Lisa relates her story, starting out with a statement to the effect that she is probably already dead as he reads it, and that she has always been his. Always. So we go into the letter and see the story unfold.

( VIENNA, SOMETIME IN THE LATE 1800's )

I keep itching for an excuse to switch from doing homework to watching more Jeeves & Wooster. Am trying to pace myself, though, and also to actually do some of my homework this weekend. I didn't wake up until one in the afternoon again today, which was pretty lame. I get what should be a sufficient amount of sleep during the week, but then when I get a chance (or even when I don't) I find myself sleeping for ten or twelve hours at a time. I remember hearing that excessive sleeping is a symptom of depression, so that's not a good sign. I don't want to be depressed - not because of the stigma attached to that, but because it would be so incredibly inconvenient. I should probably go exercise or something, since that seems to help, but it's hard to get the motivation stirred up for it when I really don't like exercising (it's boring).

In other news, I have at least finished my Russian workbook chapter, and deleted my Elfwood accounts (they hadn't been updated since high school and I was tired of getting emailed flames for artwork I'd forgotten I'd even done). That's about it, though.

The only other news is that I've started drawing a lot in women and film, since we're not allowed to have laptops in that class. Give me a notebook and a lecture, and it's drawing time - the only reason I don't draw all over my Russian notes is that there's a constant demand for participation. I'm uploading the latest page of drawings to devART as something to put in scraps, since it's very rare for me to update there anymore. Sometime I should go over to Fanart Central, grab all the pictures I still care about, put them on devART, and delete my FC account as well to make things all tidy and centralized.

Here's the new submission.

I'm currently sitting in the newly remodeled reference area of my university's main library. Finally, after an entire semester of having the airiest, most pleasant part of the library walled off and unavailable, it's back with new furniture and the wall knocked down between the old study area and the new reference area. It's quite shiny.

In other news, I wanted to post about a poster I saw up in my old freshman dorm, Cheyenne-Arapaho. I didn't read the entire thing, as most of it was about the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes and in very small print, but I did notice the very large
Chey-Ho
written on it, crossed out like that. I read the relevant part of the display, and it was an entreaty to students to both refer to the hall by its full name and to spell that name correctly (i.e., not "Cheyenne-Arapahoe). I don't remember the reason for them being so excited about making sure no one put an 'e' on the end, though I can sort of understand just wanting people to spell it right as a matter of principle (even though the common spelling of 'Arapahoe' is with an 'e,' as in Arapahoe County, Arapahoe Libraries, Arapahoe Avenue, etc, so heaven knows why they decided to go without and then got all surprised when Colorado natives went around spelling it wrong).

Anyway, matters of spelling aside, under the big crossed-out "Chey-Ho" the creator of the display went on at length about how the hall was named for the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, and how it was "disrespectful" and "offensive" to shorten the hall's name to Chey-Ho (pronounced "Shy Hoe"), and haven't we done enough to these poor people already without being flippant about their tribes' names, and anyway Cheyenne and Arapaho are two separate halls, donchaknow (that's news to me!).

I contend that this is just an example of someone getting their panties in a bunch due to the fact that we, the people of Boulder, live in an idiotically hypersensitive little bubble, and that to ask the students to refrain from using an abbreviation is nothing short of completely moronic.

#1. When students use the term "Chey-Ho," they are referring to the Cheyenne-Arapaho residence hall, not the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. If it is disrespectful to abbreviate the names, I would like to point out that it's probably also disrespectful to hyphenate them into one name in their full forms, as it implies that the two are homogenous, and each tribe worthy only of having half a building named after them (a side note: the building was formerly named for a single man, but renamed later due to the fact that the school administration concluded that his war heroism against the Native Americans was not heroism after all).

#2. Chey-Ho is not two halls. It has only one office, one mail room, and one building name (made out of two names). Yes, it is structured to have an East wing and a West wing, but never has one been referred to as "Cheyenne" and the other as "Arapaho." Furthermore, several other halls have the same structure (they seem to have built a bunch of cookie-cutter dorms in the middle of the last century), and each of those buildings is only one hall. If Chey-Ho is two halls, then so is Libby.

#3. If one is violently opposed to the idea of a name being shortened or used in a flippant manner, it's probably not a good idea to use that name on a university campus. After all, when given the choice of what to name the then-new grill in the UMC, CU students of the '70's chose to name it after Alferd Packer, the notorious cannibal. Furthermore, the School of Arts and Sciences is often referred to as "the School of Arts and Crafts," and Kittredge West (another residence hall) is almost always referred to as "Kitt West," and sometimes even jokingly called "Kitt What." Isn't that disrespectful toward that hall's namesake?

#4. The matter of the reason behind the abbreviation. Cheyenne-Arapaho is just too long. You can't dump freshmen in a building with a five-syllable name and expect them to refer to it by its full name every single time it comes up. "Chey-Ho" is a catchy alternative - quicker to say, and easier to write. Is it any surprise that it has caught on as a nickname? This comes back to reason #3: if they were so desperate to never have it shortened, perhaps they should have chosen a name that didn't call out so loudly for an abbreviation.

So that's my two cents, and then some. I called it Chey-Ho when I lived there, I've called it Chey-Ho for the three years since, and I'm going to keep on calling it Chey-Ho, no matter how many posters they put up to discourage me.

Maybe I should send a note to the administrators.

Maybe I should post movie reviews twice a week if I'm going to do it for everything I see. Or maybe after this week I'll only review stuff I hadn't seen before.

Anyway, here's a pretty good haul for the week. They're just in the order that I saw them.

( Rebel Without a Cause )

( Rear Window )

( The Return of the Living Dead )

( The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl )

( It's a Wonderful Life )

( 101 Dalmatians II: Patch's London Adventure )

If current trends hold up, there could be a lot of movie reviews showing up on here from now on. I should probably find a community for to post them, or put them on Netflix or something or other. I'll figure it out.

Just a quick review today. Again, no spoilers in the review, though they may come up in the comments.

( The Animation Show, volume 1 )

I've decided that I need to start writing mini-reviews for all the movies I see and the books I read. I've been logging both of these in the calendar pages of my planners for several years now, but when I look back at the titles even a few months later I sometimes find that I can't actually remember what the book or movie was about, or whether or not I even liked it. Bad sign for my memory. Anyway, I should probably be practicing writing reviews anyway. Maybe I'll re-join the bookshare comm to post my book reviews (I'm working on World War Z right now, and it's awesome)

I saw two movies today. First, I went with my staff this afternoon to see Bedtime Stories. Then, I went with Ben this evening to see Gran Torino. Can you say "world of difference"?

( Bedtime Stories )


( Gran Torino )

ETA: I forgot to mention that my reviews will not contain spoilers, unless the "spoilers" are in the previews where you've probably seen them anyway. There may be some spoilers in the comments, but if they originate from me they will be hidden with white text so that you have to highlight them to read them. Note that LJ's message notification system will deliver said comments to your inbox sans html markups if you track the comments on this post, so you could get an inbox full of undisguised spoilers if you do so.

The folks over at Berkeley have just digitized the only known footage of Mark Twain, shot sometime between 1900 and 1910. See him toddling around in a stately manner! Thrill as he eats breakfast! Squint at the sadly unrestored film!

No, but seriously, this is pretty much awesome.

For quite a while, I've been unable to load the 'manage subscriptions' page here on LJ and edit what I am and am not tracking. Then, I stopped being able to track anything at all. I put in a support request, and found out that hey, if you keep adding subscriptions without deleting old ones, the page will stop loading - which first stops you from editing it, and then from adding more new ones. After a few days waiting on those insane helpful people who give their time to help with this stuff, I got someone to wipe all my subscriptions so I can start over. Yey! My eljay be working again!

But that also means that hey, all my subscriptions are gone. So if I'm being unresponsive to anything on recent (or not so recent) posts, it's because I'm having to completely rebuild my comment tracking system (and hopefully I'll start clearing it out often enough that this doesn't happen again).

Well, I've finally posted all my super 8 films from fall 2006 (my first semester of production courses) on YouTube, having managed to show one, and only one, at a film festival, where it was nominated for "best bad film" but did not get the prize. Distressing.

I'm going to link instead of embedding because you really need to click on the "watch in high quality" button under the video to get them to look even halfway decent, and I don't know if that shows up on embedded videos. Also, this way I don't feel bad about not putting this under a cut.

The first is the aforementioned nominee at the BFD, Dog Dreams of Autumn. The title was shortened to Dog Dreams by the organizers of that festival, but if you're going to put a pretentious title on something you shot in your backyard with your brother and your dog, you might as well go all the way. By the way, don't ever try shooting something you have to edit in-camera with an animal.

I think that Sick Day was the second film I shot that semester, but I'm honestly not sure. Well, it was the second one I shot, but not necessarily the second one I made, since I'm not sure whether it came before or after the next one on the list.

Seasons was my first attempt at a cameraless/scratch film, and I think it's a fairly good first attempt. Sometime maybe I should upload my new direct film, but I'm kind of thinking of expanding on it and seeing if TIE will show it.

Last but not least is The Making Of, which was, ironically enough, a giant pain in the ass to shoot. Keeping things in focus was never really one of my strong points...but never mind that, just look at the stop motion, which is less wobbly than in Sick Day. We shot several more stop motion shots than appear in the final film, but they came back unusable, either because of exposure or focus.

Is anyone else having trouble getting the 'track this' function to work?