James Cagney is remembered too often as a caricature (e.g. “You dirty rat!”, a line he never uttered). This movie is an excellent example of his work and shows how skilled an actor he really was. If my memory is correct, this was his first starring role.

Until I saw Wall-E, I never would have believed that a sweet, family-friendly, Disneyesque love story could be combined with a darkly humorous, dystopian sci-fi movie—and work. Yet it does, and outstandingly so. Pixar’s best movie ever, at least until the next one.

Watch this to find out why gas prices are getting so high, and why things will get a lot worse before they get truly awful.

I downloaded The Slip yesterday and finished listening to it today. It’s better than With Teeth, still not as good as The Downward Spiral (but then, I don’t think Trent will ever top that one). But I like it a lot. And, hey, you can’t beat the price!

My favorite tracks are “Letting You,” “Echoplex,” and “Head Down.” But I’m betting “1,000,000” will get the most airplay (after an F-word-ectomy for the FCC).

NIN may be the highest-profile artist yet to make a music album free—in both the “beer” and “speech” senses. It’s under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us ). Thus you have Trent’s permission to make copies, remix, etc., as long as you don’t try to resell it.

Best of all for audio geeks, you can download it in MP3; lossless, CD-quality FLAC or AIFF; or full-on, uncompressed, 96-kHz, 24-bit WAV. Sweeet.

http://theslip.nin.com

My wife had to stop watching when it got too depressing in the middle. I didn’t feel motivated to continue because I was somewhat disappointed with it. Comparisons to Napoleon Dynamite are apt, only the characters in this movie are twenty-somethings and even less likable.

“The Girl Who Was Death” may be the most forgettable Prisoner episode of the whole lot.

“Fall Out”—talk about going out with a bang. Crazy. I mean really, honestly, what-was-Patrick-McGoohan-smoking crazy. Wish they didn’t have to get canceled and forced to put all of their eggs in that basket, but still… marvelous. It may be the most memorable episode of grown-up television I watched as a child.

Firesign Theatre fans should look for Phil Proctor’s cameo in the second episode.

The Story of Stuff is a Flash-based, 20-minute short that ties in with a larger website. Maybe it is a bit ironic to be mentioning it here on a site called “All Consuming” when it talks about all of the problems with our culture of consumption. But it does a good job of covering a huge topic in 20 minutes. Those who have seen An Inconvenient Truth (I haven’t) probably won’t learn anything new, and those who dismiss left-wing calls to action out-of-hand will probably dismiss this, too.

This is the newest movie to be added to my mental list of personal favorites.

Everyone in the cast—Will Ferrell, Emma Thompson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Queen Latifah, Dustin Hoffman, Tony Hale—was fantastic. The story is weird and funny but sweet and haunting at the same time.

Geeks will like it for a couple of reasons. The first is obvious from the very opening moments of the film. Harold Crick (Ferrell), an IRS auditor who is a math geek, is so obsessive that he counts his steps and toothbrush strokes, mentally overlays geometries on everyday objects, and sees tables and regulations dancing around his head as he does his work. I think most geeks—computer, math, or otherwise—can relate to this (including myself and a number of visual-effects geeks who were interviewed in the extras).

The second is very subtle; my wife first noticed it, and the more we dug into it, the more obvious it became. There is an overarching theme of self-reference and self-similarity, which relates not just to the idea of a story folding in on itself (like a snake eating its tail), but also to a very interesting area of mathematics—and Harold Crick is a math geek! My wife realized that two character names, Eiffel and Escher, were after famous people (an architect and an artist) whose works had self-similarity figuring prominently in them. As I looked at other characters, more names jumped out—Hilbert and Pascal, both mathematicians, both of whom made contributions in the mathematics of self-similarity. After some digging, I discovered that Cayley (“Cayly” in the film), Mittag-Leffler, and even Crick were also names of mathematicians. Very interesting. Wikipedia’s article about the movie has more about this, including another mathematician’s name, Kronecker (the name of the bus route Harold takes to work every morning!).

So any geek should definitely see this movie, but I think even non-geeks will enjoy it (maybe writers and bakers in particular).

I can remember a time back in the ‘90s when I lived in Seattle, and a director’s cut of Color of Night was brought to Seattle at Richard Rush’s insistence. The studio didn’t like it, but he stood behind it, thus the test screening before a Seattle audience. I didn’t get to see it, but I heard it was very well received. Unfortunately, the studio decided to go ahead with their own cuts, and as expected, it was derided by critics and tanked at the box office. After its theatrical release, I can recall a radio commercial for the video trying very hard to make it sound good, and I think it used the word “sexy” five times in the 30-second spot. Embarrassing.

I see that now there is a “director’s cut” on video; I wonder if it really is the same one that people in Seattle saw?