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?

After one listen through, some bits grabbed me but others made me yawn. “Nod Your Head” is a great tune but some of the lyrics had my eyes rolling. Maybe I just need to give this album a little more time to grow on me.

I love ketchup-flavored potato chips. They are a rare find outside of Canada or the north-midwestern United States. In fact, I’ve never seen them beyond British Columbia or a now-out-of-business deli in Corvallis, Oregon that baked its own chips.

So imagine my surprise when my wife and I stumbled upon these in, of all places, a liquor store just two blocks up the street from us in San Diego.

Now I think I have to reevaluate my opinion on the existence of God.

I’ve been spending the day or so after watching The Anarchist Cookbook trying to decide whether I like it or not.

The movie is a satire surrounding “Puck,” a young fellow in Dallas who hangs out with a group of squatters calling themselves “anarchists”-some hippies, some stoners, some merely escapists. They loot, they run an anarchist bookstore collective, and they conceive plots of civil disobedience against evil corporations and institutions of learning. Their ideals are put to the test when a new guy, Johnny Black, comes along to tell them that they’ve just been pissing in the wind and need to take real action-and he waves the movie’s namesake book above his head as their new bible. Yes, Johnny proves to be a bad seed, willing to go way beyond the others’ level of lawbreaking in order to further his own idea of anarchy. As he slowly smothers and takes control of the gang, Puck has to decide how to save them, and along the way gets a chance to dip his toes back into the lukewarm water of corporation-tolerant society and re-evaluate his beliefs.

Real anarchists have griped that the characters in this movie aren’t real anarchists. Well, it’s a satire, so no archetype in this movie is the real thing, whether it’s an anarchist, a Republican, a militant redneck, a neo-Nazi, a middle-income parent, or an office drone getting their pick-me-up at the nearest Starbucks on the block.

The characters and situations were just interesting enough to keep me sucked in and wait to see how it all played out. But ultimately I think the writing was just too trite and the acting too histrionic at times—waking the viewer out of disbelief every so often just to say, “Hey, aren’t we clever and satiric!”

I could see little nods to other favorite movies of mine throughout: Clerks, Tapeheads, Trainspotting, etc. Maybe that is this film’s trouble—it knows what made other films fresh and original but doesn’t know how to be original itself. (It didn’t help that it also occasionally reminded me of Saturday afternoon TV specials.)

Ultimately, the central message of the movie, if indeed it had any, was lost on me.

...it seems fitting (in a perverse way) that I’m giving a Peanuts-related product a rating of “wishy washy.”

The biggest disappointment with this cocoa for me is how little it tastes like s’mores, in spite of its name. It just tastes like a very sweet cocoa.

Nevertheless, it takes a lot to make a cocoa bad. This is definitely not bad. And, on the plus side, it appears to have no hydrogenated oils, which even these days is a difficult quality to come by in a cocoa mix.

Short is viewable on the AtomFilms website. (Adobe Flash is required.)

A cute little fantasy romance. Modern-day cinephiles will find this one a little corny, but lovers of classic movies are more likely to enjoy it.