Hey, they’re remaking The Matrix with the guy from Van Wilder! I mean, basically. It does look pretty cool, though.

I am back in Boston. I have a couple of weeks before classes start up again, so I think I might find a project to occupy my time until football season starts. I am thinking about [...]

Posted in Movies, Tech, Writing

So I exhausted my netflix discs right before the holiday weekend, and I finished my book (“Kitchen Confidential” is sort of poorly written, but the content is so good that it hardly matters—it’s an interesting complement to Ruhlman’s corpus), and I’m all caught up on rss/livejournal stuff. And there has been almost no news (not [...]

Posted in Movies, Television, Writing 2 Comments »

The blooper reel on the Pirates of the Caribbean 2 DVD is SPONSORED BY VERIZON. The blooper reel. To be honest, I didn’t know what words to emphasize there—the fact that it’s the blooper reel that is sponsored, or that there are ads on the DVD at all. Disney is the worst. Do they not [...]

Posted in Economics and Advertising, Movies 1 Comment »

I haven’t been listening to much new music lately (i.e., in the last 2 years), but I’m doing my best to turn that around. Mostly by listening to music that was a big deal six months ago, or new releases by artists who were up-and-coming five years ago.

I finally broke down and listened to Lily [...]

Posted in Movies, Music 3 Comments »

Excellent.

Posted in Links, Movies

I don’t rate movies based on what I think of them. I rate them based on whether I think I would like similar movies. I do this all the time, rating certain mediocre things as good and rating other mediocre things as awful. It basically comes down to this: I don’t trust their ratings algorithm [...]

Posted in Movies, Tech 2 Comments »

Reihan Salam reviews Netflix’s Watch Now service in Slate. Basically, he sees it as a great concept with some serious technological and content problems to work out. Of course, he also says:

I will note here that my Netflix habits are unconventional. During my early days as a Netflix subscriber, I spent anywhere from 1 to 3 hours a night watching DVDs on fast forward with the subtitles on. Because I read fairly quickly, I was able to follow twists and turns at high speed, thus increasing my cultural literacy in record time. This is impossible with Watch Now. To fast-forward, you grab the slider and drag it to the right, then wait. It’s more like teleporting than running at high speed.

Um, yeah. Most people rent movies to, you know, watch them—not just to get the Cliff’s Notes version. (This also goes a long way to explain why he doesn’t have a problem with the “sub-DVD” image quality—he isn’t watching movies for anything but the dialogue and plot, so who cares how it looks?)

Posted in Economics and Advertising, Movies, Tech

An op-ed by Angelina Jolie. Yes! It’s just a matter of time before she gets her Nobel Peace Prize!

Anyway, whenever I read something like this, I wonder how much (if any) of the writing comes from the celebrity whose name is on the top. I know that people ghostwrite books all the time, but do [...]

Posted in Media, Movies, Politics/Law 1 Comment »