the pod bay door

:: Scanning the Leisure section of yesterday’s NYTimes, I noticed an ad for a movie called Primer, written, starring, and directed by Shane Carruth. I visited the film’s web site, discovering that it includes a review from the NYTimes, written by AO Scott. The film sounds compelling and interesting, and quite the mind bender – Scott describes the movie as “technically speaking, science fiction, but of an unusually rigorous and unassuming kind.” Two amateur inventors create a machine in their garage, “a device that reduces the apparent mass of any object placed inside it by blocking gravitational pull”, with far-reaching consequences. Scott compares the brain-teasing flow of the film to other movies like Pi and Memento. One reviewer has seen the film five times, with Scott advising that “part of the attraction is the tantalizing belief that if you see it enough, you will finally figure it all out.” But he counters with the following:

I’m not sure of that. Having seen it twice from start to finish and gone back over the videotape in search of clues to its meaning, I wouldn’t say that it entirely makes sense. At a certain point, Mr. Carruth’s fondness for complexity and indirection crosses the line between ambiguity and opacity, but I hasten to add that my bafflement is colored by admiration. Mr. Carruth has the skill, the guile and the seriousness to turn a creaky philosophical gimmick into a dense and troubling moral puzzle.”

Ambiguity: “doubtfulness or uncertainty of meaning or intention” (1 of 2 definitions listed); opacity: “obscurity of meaning” (1 of 7 definitions listed). I’m not sure that helps me. 🙂

Also intriguing: the film was shot on 16mm and cost $7,000US to make. Unfortunately for us in Edmonton, I doubt we’ll see a print of the movie before 2005 at the earliest. Until then, watch the trailer here.

:: I’m in Winnipeg. My cousin Barbara’s wedding is tomorrow (Oct 9th, not the 7th). Tonight is a dinner at Tony and Claire‘s house, a veritable feast of Dutch-Indonesian culinary delights, including Nasi Goreng and rijstaffel. Claire notes here that she is cooking for 17 (or 18), and the ensemble tonight includes a number of her friend as well. The edible hedgehog is a durian, resembling some kind of mutated pineapple thingee.

I’ve been sleeping and/or napping a lot here. Probably my body trying to catch up on days weeks months years of lost sleep. I took my folks to see Fahrenheit 9/11 last night. Michael Moore has two new books out, one being The Official Fahrenheit 9/11 Reader, the other being a collection of letters sent to him from soldiers, entitled Will They Ever Trust Us Again?. The latter has received mostly positive reviews on the Amazon site, but the most telling has to be the one written by Andrew Balthazor, an Iraqi war vet, whose writing appears in the book.

:: Speaking of Amazon, I ordered four items today: this, this, this and this. Speaking of this, there is a good interview with and write-up on Paul Westerberg on the CNN site. And another 70s band is reuniting. When the hell is Wang Chung getting back together, dammit!

There seems to be a pop culture explosion of late, of stuff that I’d like to have. I need another nap.

:: With encouragement from Derryl, I saw Shaun of the Dead last night, Sept 30, 2004, thus keeping alive the streak of having seen at least one movie a month since sometime in the late 1970s. It would be somewhere in the vicinity of 320-335 months.

Last year I wrote about having attended the Man-Pop Festival in Winnipeg, on August 29, 1970. I still receive comments on that post, and I’m not surprised, since a Google search reveals that very little is available about Man-Pop on the ‘net, which surprises me, actually. One of the respondents to the post, Geoff Nash, still has his ticket stub. He scanned it and sent me the image, for which I am very grateful. As soon as I opened up the .jpg, it brought back memories, and I realized that somewhere in one of my boxes of memorabilia and curios is my ticket stub, too. Well, to date, I can’t find it, but I’m still looking. In the meantime, click on Geoff’s ticket stub and stroll down memory lane one more time.

:: Sore ribs are better, coughing almost gone away. Thanks for the kind messages.

:: Cindi posted about this on her site. If you’re still not convinced that US Media are in Dubya’s pocket, read about the Big Three networks refusing to air ads for the Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD during “news programming”, because of the closeness of the release of the DVD to the US federal election. From the article in LA Weekly:

ON ANY GIVEN DAY, the major TV networks rarely demonstrate good judgment, much less morality, when it comes to accepting a litany of nauseating advertisements. Hemorrhoid creams. Vaginal ointments. Erectile dysfunction. Army recruiting ads that portray war as a gee-whiz video game. KFC’s claim that fried chicken is the new health food. And, lest we forget, Bud Light’s farting horse during the Super Bowl.

But ads for the October 5 release of the new Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD?

Now that makes Big Media gag.

L.A. Weekly has learned that CBS, NBC and ABC all refused Fahrenheit 9/11 DVD advertising during any of the networks’ news programming. Executives at Sony Pictures, the distributor of the movie for the home-entertainment market, were stunned. And even more shocked when the three networks explained why.

“They said explicitly they were reluctant because of the closeness of the release to the election. All three networks said no,” one Sony insider explains. “It was certainly a judgment that Sony disagrees with and is in the process of protesting.”

Amazing. Fair and balanced? You bet! Not.

:: Picked up the widescreen edition of the Star Wars DVD set today. Costco is charging $55.59Cdn, undercutting Amazon.ca by $1.30, so I deleted it from my wonderful wishlist. I’ll watch them sometime, don’t know when. Mike sent a note today, reminding me of the time in 1977, when we were a group of sf geeks, and went to see Star Wars (it wasn’t titled Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, until 1981) in Winnipeg:

I was thinking about you and the guys watching SW; when we saw it back in the Grant Park theatre (was it Cinerama?) and went back to your place to debate whether the movie meant the end of sci-fi as we know it.

Amazing how seriously we took that shyte back then. It certainly wasn’t the end of “sci-fi”, but it did have a lasting impact on the movie industry. BTW, in case you missed it, Chewbacca is touring Italy these days.

As for DVDs, their days are numbered. In the Edmonton Journal today, I read about MODS: Multiplexed Optical Data Storage discs, able to hold a terrabyte of information, or 1,024 gigabytes, roughly the equivalent of 472 hours of broadcast film. Research to develop MODS was led by Peter Torok, a photonics researcher at the Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London, which he describes as “the replacement for the replacement technology for DVDs.” Oh, joy. The Edmonton Journal article did have a piece of good news for those of us slow to replace our rapidly outdating home entertainment equipment:

And MODS players would be backwards-compatible with existing optical formats, meaning it could also play CDs and DVDs, said Torok, who conceived the technology with colleagues from the Institute of Microtechnology, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland, and Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece.

The final line of the EJ article reads, “The first MODS products could be ready for sale by 2010.” Er, won’t that give all the other researchers a six-year start to build the technology to replace the the replacement for the replacement technology for DVDs?

:: This month, I will not do something I have not not done before. Did you follow that? What will I not do? I will not see a movie inside a movie theatre in September 2004. This will be the first month I will have not seen a film inside a theatre since, oh, probably the late 1970s. The only two movies I watched this month were on DVD and/or VHS. I’m still dealing with a cough that is annoyingly persistent, and slow to embark on its departure from my lungs and environs. I don’t want to sit in a theatre and cough 300 times during a movie, annoying both myself and everyone near me.

The world, as I know it, will continue, despite the end of the I-saw-at-least-one-movie-in-a-movie-theatre-every-month-since-the-late-1970s streak. Now I know how Cal felt when he sat out that game.

:: My mom is home from the hospital in Winnipeg, resting and recuperating as best she can, trying to regain her energy. It’s been a long four months of dealing with various medical problems. Thankfully she is on the mend.

:: On 23rd Avenue, which is the main west-to-east route near my house, a section of the south side has been resurfaced with asphalt. I love driving on it now, it feels like like my car is moving over a pillow.

:: I saw four movies on the weekend, including Festival Express, Control Room, Open Water, and the original Shaft (1971 version). I enjoyed the three new movies, especially Open Water. I think it’s a great achievement, given the small crew and the budget of $150,000US. The weekend estimates for the period ending 22 Aug 2004, show Open Water at $10,800,000US, which was an increase of 1,109% over the previous week, bringing it up to $13,900,000 as of yesterday. Not too shabby. I wonder if it might set a record for rate of return compared to cost of production.

:: Earlier this year, I bought a Swiffer WetJet. Today I bought the dry land version, along with the duster. I assembled them, and did some dusting. Life doesn’t get much more exciting, does it?