saturn return to sender

Recently seen flicks (with thanks to Enji for the Netflix!):

The Edukators
Smart little film about anti-capitalist 20-somethings who make a big mistake. The heart of the movie is the dialogue between these idealists and a 50-something former-idealist, exposing the tension between conservatism and progressivism. I think it treats both fairly, without a clear bias, which is a rare thing to see. Also the scenery is lovely (and I’m not just talking about Julia Jentsch) and the ending is not obvious. Or wasn’t to me, anyway (though I was disappointed, as the bias does come out then).

300
Saw this in an IMAX theater. Full of gore and throaty bravado and lovely CGI and either (a) a story of courage in the face of incredible injustice or (b) a story about how homosexuals and brown people are less than human. I don’t think the filmmakers had (b) in mind, but it’s hard not to see it that way. It’s odd but the ending credits give an entirely different flavor to the whole movie and if they’d treated the opening credits the same way, I would have approached it differently.

Sherrybaby
Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a mother just released from prison. She struggles to adjust to her new reality. That’s pretty much the story. Gyllenhaal is brilliant; the movie is just okay.

The Day After Tomorrow
I saw this once before and it’s just as ridiculous the second time. But kinda fun, too.

Secretary
While we’re talking Gyllenhaal, I saw this movie again last night (or most of it—it was on Oxygen or something). I liked it more the second time. Again, Maggie is brilliant. I don’t usually like James Spader, but I should give him more credit. He manages to make a confusing character almost entirely opaque. No no, I kid. He does good.

The Promise
Kung Fu Hustle meets Hero meets some CCTV soap opera with CGI apparently done on an Amiga. Sooooo bad. Don’t even bother.

I’ve been extremely geeky lately and I apologize for that. I was reading through some old circa 2004 posts the other day and I was a much more interesting blogger back then.

BUT. Right now svn has me very worried. I added a directory to my local working copy, checked in, but one of my other working copies (namely, the one that’s the actual, live web site) refuses to notice the presence of the new directory. An update on our testing server correctly pulls the new directory, so it’s definitely in the repository, but all working copies report they’re at the same version, yet one of them doesn’t have the new directory. Erm.

[ update: next day, the working copy reported the directory in question was missing ("!") instead of reporting nothing wrong whatsoever. fiddling a little (revert, update, etc) got it to finally pull the directory. so .... i dunno. i guess subversion needs a good night's sleep sometimes? ]

Following a geeky dinner conversation with Eric and Alex, I signed on to Twitter.

It’s true: I tweet.

I’m not so sure I want text messages sent to my phone all day, but I do like the idea of microblogging, so using Twitter, Alex’s Twitter Tools, and Wordpress Widgets, I now have a microblog in my sidebar that pulls from my … *searches for right word* …. tweetfeed.

Widgets are nifty, but the default set doesn’t hook into my theme here very well, so my sidebar is actually half widget and half template. *shrug*

A couple of very slick, stylistically similar animations:

What Barry Says
Master Plan—About the power of Google

Also, both are about taking over the world.

The former is a few years old, the latter apparently inspired by it, and almost seems a parody in comparison. In one scenario, hundreds of thousands of people are dying. In the other, your email is being scanned. But hey! Who knows what evil lurketh?

Anyway, they’re both really well produced. Found while poking around various information visualization sites.