From Overheard in New York:
A record company assistant is flirting with an older music executive. She asks: Do you have a girlfriend?
He responds by holding out his hand with fingers extended to show his wedding band.
Assistant: You have five girlfriends?
Ain't It Cool News provides yet another high-quality review of a forthcoming comic book adaptation: Neill Cumpston on Sin City.
I totally camed in my pants.
I’m going to write a bunch more shit, but that’s what this movie sums up to. That’s my blurb, if EL MARIACHI guy is reading, also. If you use it on the poster, it’d be cool to draw a gun with a hard-on saying it. But put a “C in a circle†thingie next to the gun ‘cause I’m writing a movie about it (as a comedy). The title is BONER GUN.
SIN CITY is based on this bad-ass comic I haven’t read all the way through by the guy that did BATMAN ALL PISSED OFF back in the 80’s. The comics were all in black and white, except some of them have color, so that’s how this film is, too. It looks all drawn but also filmed at the same time. Usually it’s blood that has the color, except sometimes it’s red, and other times yellow, and a lot of times it looks like spooge or a milkshake or both. Which is okay ‘cuz at least there’s a lot of it.
Also, I guess it was a good idea to film it mostly just black and white ‘cuz that probably saved a bunch of money and that’s how they could afford the bad-ass cast they put together for it.
[...]
Dear god. There's much, much more in that vein if you follow the link to the full review. But really, why would you want to?
LetterJames is a very clever site which overlays the text of your choice on one of a range of images.
Nothing very clever about that, you might think. What makes this so neat is that it applies the text photorealistically: if you choose the image of the girl walking along the beach, it'll make your text look as it it's written in the sand with a sharp stick.
Another site to keep in mind the next time I'm looking to produce a new site header image.
[Via Apothecary's Drawer]
The Periodic Table of Rock. Where else will you find Fatboy Slim, Shania Twain, Frank Sinatra and Craig David rubbing shoulders?
[Via The View From Here]
As modern-day big-budget action movies go, Constantine has everything you'd expect: an epic storyline, a lead actor with a track record in this sort of film, some seriously expensive SFX work and a couple of decent character actors in minor but showy supporting roles. The trouble is, in this case the mix doesn't quite gel. Keanu Reeves does an OK job as a world-weary freelance exorcist-cum-magician, but he's outshone by Rachel Weisz as a police detective whose twin apparently commits suicide and Tilda Swinton as an androgynous angel with an agenda. (I should note that Weisz's character's accent wavers a bit, but she's sufficiently appealing in the role that this didn't bother me one bit.)
To my mind, the biggest problem with any story where all the major players have supernatural powers and where divine (not to mention satanic) intervention is not merely likely but positively guaranteed is that it's hard to care much about the details of the story because you're well aware that whatever "rules" anyone mentions are strictly provisional. It's a case of following the characters as they go from one incredible situation to another, and hoping they'll explain why what just happened turned out to have been somewhat less than impossible, contrary to what we'd been led to believe. In a TV series you can swallow this, because over 22 episodes or more there's plenty of room to establish the basic rules and turn breaking those rules into an exceptional event. With just two hours to introduce the base scenario, introduce the characters, inject some conflict and resolve the whole thing there's clearly no time for all that. If the story moves along quickly enough and the actors are sufficiently compelling and the special effects work shows us spectacles we'd never imagined and the bad guy(s) are entertainingly evil this could still be pretty entertaining, but that turns out not to be the case here. The whole story plods along and we follow in the wake of the main characters, but there's no real pay-off. At the end one character makes a huge sacrifice in an attempt to save the day, but it turns out that they don't have to pay the price after all. It's all rather frustrating.
For the record, my lukewarm reaction to the film has nothing to do with the fidelity (or lack thereof) of the film to the comic book character of John Constantine. I have read a little of Hellblazer (specifically, Hellblazer: Rare Cuts, a collection of stories from various points in the comic's history) and first met John Constantine in his guest appearance in an early story in Neil Gaiman's Sandman, but I have no particular affection for the character and simply don't know enough about the character's history to say whether the film's story is a faithful adaptation or not. What it clearly isn't is a particularly entertaining night's viewing.
Palm users in search of a decent basic task management package might want to take a look at Progect, an open source package that looks perfect for those of us who need something more capable than a simple To-Do list but can't justify paying for a full-featured package.
I've only been playing with it for a few hours, but so far it seems to be a pretty capable little package.
[Via PalmAddicts]
If you can't bear to say goodbye to your beloved cat or dog (or cow or horse!), you could always have it made into a Pet Pillow.
It's the shipping instructions that get to me:
Please freeze your pet immediately upon passing to insure there will be no hair slippage. Double bag to insure no freezerburn. Ship packages ONLY on Monday's do prevent carrier mishaps. All frozen animals must be shipped next day air to insure against spoilage. Incase of large animals please call for shipping instructions.
I wonder if UPS and Fedex do a special line of padded envelopes for frozen animal cadaver transportation.
[Via MetaFilter]
Richard Hoagland has been looking very closely at the images of Iapetus returned by the Cassini probe. He's come up with a thoroughly original explanation for that odd ridge around Saturn's second most interesting moon.
(When I say "thoroughly original", I do of course mean "completely nutty." I'd as soon believe George Lucas built the damn thing as a prop for Episode III.)
[Via MemeMachineGo!]
Film critic and writer David Thomson talked to Robert Birnbaum of The Morning News about Hollywood, the Biographical Dictionary of Film, Nicole Kidman, and the perils of easy nostalgia:
There is a great danger in easy nostalgia and just laying claim to it because you were alive then. Sometimes it’s difficult not to do that. When you are writing about those things, I think you need to see that there is a generation that came alive at the time of say, Star Wars and it’s very natural and proper that young people think that the most important movies ever made were the movies they first saw. Every generation needs to think that and that’s proper. And that means that in time the older films will get a bit more distorted and a bit more forgotten. Going back to this whole question of whether these films were works of art or just works of entertainment – a lot of them were just works of entertainment. If they don’t survive, they don’t survive. There are lots of novels that were bestsellers in the 19th century that no one reads or has heard of anymore and it may be that a lot of the films I treasure will go that way. I think a few of them are going to last beyond it and that some of them still look as good as anything.
Linux Sex Positions. Includes Forking the Code, Mounting the Hard Disk and (ouch) Piercing the Firewall.
[Via Bifurcated Rivets]
Matthew Baldwin responds to Men's Health's 30 hottest things you can say to a naked woman with the 30 least hot follow-ups to the 30 hottest things you can say to a naked woman.
Men's Health #13: "Can we do that again?"
Defective Yeti #13: "Can we do that again? I forgot to hit record on my camera."
Look at my button down striped shirt! Fucking look at it! Classy guy.
[Via 13 days from monday]
I defy you to watch this video of Norwegian band Hurra Torpedo's live cover of Total Eclipse of the Heart from beginning to end without once thinking of Animal from the Muppets.
[Via MetaFilter]
The New York Metro has a long, highly entertaining article by Bill Zehme about the efforts of Mike Nichols and Eric Idle to come up with a stage version – a musical, yet – of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Even as American entertainment fell sway to this foreign infection (Saturday Night Live debuted, under deep influence, in 1975), the Pythons themselves – five Brits, who were Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin, and one Minnesotan, Terry Gilliam – had quit television as a whole, shifting group focus to the very occasional film. Of the five they made, Holy Grail was the first of any consequence, shot over five weeks on a £200,000 budget around grim Scottish castles. "It was just cold and wet and miserable," Idle would recall. "It was fucking awful. It was no fun at all. I don't think there was any fun."
Seized with the fond memory, Idle burned to relive the magic. As chief flame-keeper among the Pythons—all of them somewhat crotchety, except for Chapman, fifteen years dead and less crotchety—he had long seen much merit in adapting for the musical stage the tale of stoic Arthur, his nincompoop Knights of the Very, Very Round Table, and their oft-detoured anticlimactic search for the Holy Grail, which ended onscreen with multiple arrests for the murder of an impaled narrator. In his newly published memoir, The Greedy Bastard Diary, Idle cites the timeless allure of the film: "It's endearingly silly. It has a freshness and a simplicity which is rare. I think it has some of the same charm as A Hard Day's Night: young men ignorant of what they are doing but supremely confident about doing it." Plus, there were already three songs in the movie, and, he also realized, "several points which seem almost to demand a song: ‘I'm not dead yet!' ‘Run away!' ‘I fart in your general direction!' Well, a Python song, anyway." (Incidentally, each of these immortal utterances from the film turned play is emblazoned on souvenir buttons presently on sale in the Shubert lobby. Collect them all!)
Would it be considered sacrilegious for me to note that I much prefer Life of Brian to Holy Grail? Now there's a film that cries out for a Broadway musical adaptation.
Oh yes, one more fabulous quote from Eric Idle which I have to point out:
[People] are starting to say, 'How do you feel about being told that this show is politically incorrect and in questionable taste?' And Eric said, 'Proud and a little aroused.'
That's the spirit!
[Via Amygdala]
Paul Ford has posted a lovely terrific essay about his cat:
I rename my cat every month; this month his name is Abraham Lincoln. He talks to me for hours at a time, and when I do not give him the love he deserves he enters the bathroom, finds a spot in the bathtub that resonates perfectly, and screams until I give in and call for him. Then he trots over and waits to have his ears scratched. In this manner he is fully actualized. He has a dread disease, FIV, which slowly kills him. The other day he turned to me as I worked and said "mrgnao"; then he vomited fully and without reserve into the pair of pants I'd left on the floor. [...]
Go and read the whole thing. You won't regret it.
Sylvester Stallone is the latest celebrity to launch their very own magazine in the States. Matthew McKinnon is not impressed:
Everybody knows you can't judge a book by its cover, but this magazine? Most definitely. Here is Sly, in its own words…
"Stay in the Game Past 40"; Be Your Best at 40, 50 & Forever
Sly's longest article, "Staying in the Game" (page 74) parrots the mag's tagline. Writer Sam Borden describes boxer George Foreman in his lead paragraph: "Maybe he had a hint of man breasts and maybe his trunks looked more like some sort of freakish silk parachute, but it didn't matter in the 10th round." A summary of Foreman's 1994 knockout victory over young lion Michael Moorer follows. Problem: Big George, shown glowering in his boxing shorts beside a subhead that says "Ageless Iron Man," looks disturbingly similar to The Thing from Fantastic Four.
[Via Blog of a Bookslut]
I'd pay good money to get my hands on a legitimate copy of the blooper reel Peter Jackson showed earlier this week.
[Via Betsy Devine]
Another day, another cool tool putting Flickr images to new, funky uses. Colr Pickr allows you to select a colour, then pulls out a selection of images matching the particular hue you chose.
I have no idea how this works, but it's utterly hypnotic.
[Via collision detection]