But as for the "Updates" cell I was talking about.  I hadn't done anything that required its use lately, so I just figured it would be something I'd do on a soon-to-be-revamped intro page.  But if you're wondering what happened to the moblog, well, it's been left to die.  Not by my choice, mind you.  Seems that in my negligence, I didn't notice that Textamerica was going to shut down all free moblogs.  Well, gee, that's swell.  They could have emailed me about this.  And now I can't get my pictures off of there.  Not that it matters, I've got most of them stowed away on CDs.  But still, I think it sucks.

In the meantime, I've established a flickr.  I remember when flickr first came along and I considered switching, but NOOOOO, I had to stay with the same geek site that Cat Schwartz, Morgan Webb, and other G4 (and former G4) personalities were using.  Ha.  I'll make more use of the flickr, I promise.

I will spill your water on the sand
A while back something humorous happened to me, but it was one of those things that was only made funnier because I'd been at work so long that I was starting to become very stupid.  I saw this guy in the store with a t-shirt on that said "FIREMEN TO THE RESCUE."  However, there was a fold in the shirt over the letter I, making it say "FREMEN TO THE RESCUE."  I sat there staring for about ten seconds, trying to figure out why anyone would be wearing a shirt that talks about Fremen.  I loved Dune just as much as any other geek, but even I wouldn't wear it.  Besides, why would the Fremen be rescuing anyone?  Would they ride the worms when rescuing people? 

But I was sort of disappointed to see that it was really about firemen.  I really wanted to ask the guy what it meant, but I just would have felt like an idiot.

WHAT'S IN THE BOX?
COME ON TELL ME WHAT'S IN THE BOX?
Seven was my latest Netflix movie.  I really can't go too far into it for spoiler purposes, in case some poor spaz came surfing his way on over here and was to read, what, in fact, is in the box, and why Brad Pitt seemed so upset about it.  Yeah, it was spoiled for me, too.

Still, Seven is an extremely well-crafted detective story.  It's also incredibly gruesome.  The thing about it, though, is that it's just the right type of gruesome.  When you watch Alien, you cringe to think of how exactly characters get mauled in those dark corners of the Nostromo, but you don't see it happen.  The most disturbing and graphic moments in Seven are not the ones you see onscreen; it's the details that are given to you, and your imagination can take over.  It makes the next David Fincher/Brad Pitt vehicle, Fight Club, look like a madcap romp.  Actually, Fight Club is very funny and I think I might watch it tonight. 

I wasn't sure if I liked this movie until it was over, and it all came together.  (It seems that I've been watching a lot of movies like that lately, doesn't it?)  Fincher has a good way of pacing the film in all the right places.  He'll hit you with an intense sequence, and then give you a somewhat terrestrial scene to take you down.  The final act, though, is just this long, drawn out scene where Pitt, Morgan Freeman, and Kevin Spacey have a great acting showdown.  Part of me didn't want the story to end just because I was enjoying it so much.  But the rest of me wanted it to end as soon as possible because Fincher had made things so tense that I couldn't stand it anymore.  Maybe he should have tried to duplicate this expertise with Panic Room.  Then again, Jodie Foster was in that, so you can take it for what it's worth, eh?

The story is pretty simple.  A village in feudal Japan is under threat of being attacked by a pack of roving bandits.  Some of the villagers then go to town and recruit a bunch of samurai to help them fight back.  The samurai help the villagers prepare to fight, and a great battle soon follows.  All the while, heroes are made, young and old fight side-by-side, a love story blossoms, and there's even some laughs along the way.  

The characters run the gamut.  Among the samurai, there's Kambei, the veteran, Katsushiro, the young apprentice, Gorobei, the faithful right hand man, Shichiroji, Kambei's old friend, Kyuzo, the quiet and intense swordsman, Heihachi, the optimistic one, and Kikuchiyo, the wannabe.  These are all the same kinds of characters we've seen along the years in action flicks, but this is likely the first time they've been used together.  In fact, there's so much in this movie that's been used in other action/adventure films since then that it's hard to keep track.  I'll use the Star Wars movies as an example.  George Lucas loves Kurosawa's work, and Seven Samurai might be his favorite of the bunch once you've seen it.  For instance, in the first scene, one of the characters utters the phrase "We farmers are born to suffer.  It's our lot."  Sound familiar?  Perhaps a golden, British droid said much the same thing a long time a go in a galaxy far, far away?  Funny thing is, that's always been one of my favorite Star Wars lines, and now I realize that it's not even an original.  Another trademark that Seven Samurai would start was the concept of looking for your heroes early in the film and getting them together.  When some of the villagers head to town to go find some samurai, it's much like the Cantina scene.  Hungry samurai and dudes with fast ships and wookiees in tow have a lot in common, I guess.  Of course, you have the samurai, their robes, their swords... and the Jedi, their robes, and their lightsabers.  Even Yoda mimicking Kambei's head-rub in Episode III... a lot of similarities and little homages abound. 

Even anime has a lot to take from this film on its own.  I'm not the biggest anime fan around, but I've seen my fair share.  Kikuchiyo has probably inspired a character in every single anime I've ever seen in my life.  He's big, carries a large sword, is generally goofy, but is committed and usually ends up proving himself in the end.  Also, he's too damned lovable not to want in your movie. 

But there's plenty more to go around that Seven Samurai helped revolutionize.  The use of slow motion, camera movement in establishing shots... I can go on and on.  I just added The Magnificent Seven to my list to see how it works as a Western, and also because Yul Brenner and Steve McQueen kick too much ass to be in the same movie.  I bumped it up to number two on the list (for some reason, I want to see Seven really bad).  I also added other Kurosawa classics like Roshamon, Yojimbo, and Ran. 

But still, it's Yankee Stadium.  After the national anthem, a B-2 stealth bomber did a flyover.  It was probably the single coolest thing that I've seen all year.  Cooler than Superman Returns.  The pitching matchup was Josh Beckett for the Sox and Chien Ming Wang for the Yanks.  New York jumped out early thanks to a two-run homer by Robinson Cano, but that would be all we could muster for the afternoon.  The Sox fought back the rest of the day and managed a 5-2 win.  They won three of the four games in two days. 

There were a lot of Red Sox fans, and they seem to be the only people who are taking the rivalry seriously these days.  The Red Sox have finally won a World Series, and this year has been sub-par for them.  Sure, there's been a lot of injuries, but the fans are already starting to forget that in 2004 they were champions.  It's back to the old "woe is me" attitude as the Yankees have been working their way to the top without any problem.  Sure, the Yankees have had injuries, too, but they've held strong thanks to guys like Melky Cabrera, Cano, and Wang.  They're the new generation that's gonna serve as the next core of the team, the same way Jeter, Posada, Williams, and Rivera have been. 

Also, I may or may not have shown up on the Diamondvision screen.  There were dudes in front of us with a sign that said "CY WANG" and taped it on the overhang of the tier section.  I was sitting behind them and I'm not sure if I was on the screen or not... the foul pole was obstructing a clear view of it.  But I will tell you who WAS on the screen... Adam Sandler.  Finally, a trip to Yankee Stadium and a confirmed celebrity in attendance (other than Rudy Giuliani, of course).  We were treated to a pre-taped baseball trivia video in which Adam quizzed us on what his grandmother had to eat at his very first baseball game (answer: 5 hot dogs, 7 knishes, 12 beers, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich).  Then they cut to a shot of him in the stands.  Hooray!

After the game, we all headed to Little Italy for dinner.  I had penne in vodka sauce with broccoli and a very nice Barbero, excellent on all counts. 

It was great to get to see Fran again.  Even though it had only been two weeks since I'd seen her, I was really missing her.  She already had plenty of great stories to tell about her new friends and almost-dead goldfish.  It was also great to see Grandma and Grandpa... I hadn't seen them in a long time while everyone else had seen them before I had in recent months.  I owe them a weekend, much like a few other people here and there (the Fitchburgians and my niece are included). 

(As for the Fitchburg crew, I'm still not sure about a visit this weekend for Darryl's birthday.  I gotta see what I'm working on Sunday first.)

Greg's back in town
Just a quick word of warning to everyone that Greg is back and we intend on getting into football playing form in time for Thanksgiving.  We shot hoops yesterday, too, and I pretty much had to re-learn how to shoot a jump-shot.  I'd go into it, but it's kind of embarrassing.  I used to have mad ups like Dee Brown, yo.

BOOMSHAKALAKA

In a few minutes I'll be heading down to New Jersey to pick Fran up at school... and tomorrow meeting Grandma and Grandpa at Yankee Stadium for Yankees vs. Red Sox!  Be back that night.  In the meantime, here's Tom Cruise.

I am ready for the football
I'm happy it's football season again.  Last night, I tried to watch some of ESPN's much ballyhooed Monday Night Football double header premiere.  Well, I was more or less listening to it.  I was helping Dad set up his new laptop and I had to resort to using both computers to try to download Flash Player (it took over an hour to get a 1.3 megabyte file).  So during the Vikings/Redskins game, I noticed that there wasn't any play by play going on.  Instead, I'm hearing the commentators talk with Jamie Foxx about football movies.  This is understandable because he was in Any Given Sunday, where he and Al Pacino yelled at each other a lot.  But then they start talking about Collateral, which came out two years ago, like it was important.  Jamie then begins to give far too many props to then-costar Tom Cruise.  All the while, a perfectly exciting football game was being played.  A touchdown was scored, a fumble was recovered, and big plays were made the entire time this conversation was being held and were mentioned as afterthoughts.  The camera was even on the booth half the time!

You know, everything Phil Mushnick says about ESPN and the NFL are true.  It's not about the game, it's about the egos of Chris Berman and the rest of their overpaid and obnoxious sportscasters.  It's not about the team, it's about two or three big names (usually overpaid and obnoxious players, mind you) and the other 40 or so guys wearing the same shirt.  That's why the Patriots still don't get much national time on TV... they're free of the Terrell Owens-caliber jackasses (we just traded Deion Branch for even THINKING of going that route) that gain that attention. 

I actually miss the likes of Marv Albert and Bob Costas these days. 

Eraserhead is a pretty weird movie you guys
My last Netflix movie was Eraserhead, David Lynch's first movie.  I have interest in Lynch's work mostly due to his reputation for being mind-bending as well as technically sound.  I'd heard plenty about Eraserhead due to both of these qualities, as well as the fact that the Library of Congress found it to be "culturally significant." 

I wasn't disappointed with it because I couldn't understand it.  And I don't mean that I'm too stupid to understand it, it's just that it's so bizarre as not to be understood.  In fact, I think "bizarre" is an understatement.  It's like a weird foreign film, only entirely American.  There's tons of symbolism, but the symbols are so abstract that you can hardly formulate an idea of what it all means when you put it together.  There's moments that you think are supposed to be funny somehow, but you can hardly get out a chuckle because it's just far too dry.  I remember George Lucas saying of THX 1138, "It's a funny movie.  It's just too dry for most people, I think."  And party of me even agrees with that statement.  But THX was a movie with a set genre.  Eraserhead doesn't even belong in a category other than "weird art/student film."  There's a plot, but it's hard to comprehend as a real "plot" until it's over, and even then you wonder, "Now, what just happened here?"  I think the best way to describe it is a full night of sleep with interconnected dreams, with each act in the film a separate dream.

The strength to this movie is its technical execution.  The most striking element is the soundtrack, a ubiquitous and often non-diagetic stream of ambient sounds that seem to envelop the film's locales.  It's really worth seeing this movie just to appreciate the work that Lynch and Alan Splet put into it.  The cinematography and lighting are also first-rate.  It's a pretty dark film (the DVD even starts with a screen-calibration), so you really get used to low levels of light.  There's a sequence in which the screen suddenly washes white (a great effect in context) and I actually winced at the sudden change.  Now THAT'S effective use of the medium.  My favorite shot in the film, though, is done in almost total darkness, when Henry, the protagonist, wakes up in the middle of the night and goes to his apartment door.  He squints into the black void of the hallway, and the Beautiful Girl Across the Hall's face slowly emerges.  Very cool.

For much of the film I kept thinking that I'd never seen anything quite like it, but then I remembered the Flash animations of David Firth.  Eraserhead is an obvious inspiration, but Firth's stuff tends to be pretty funny.  Even the darkest episodes of "Salad Fingers" still have a creepy wit to them.

Ultimately, as a film buff of my own breed, I'm glad I saw this flick.  I don't think I'll be bothering with a repeat viewing, but it was worth it.  I'm not quite sure what I think of Lynch as a storyteller now, seeing as how until now I've still only checked out The Elephant Man and... well, Dune.  And that's another story altogether, isn't it??

We're going to Jersey?
We moved Fran into college last week.  We all managed to pack into the van and head down with all of her stuff.  The trip was mercilessly easy-going, but then again, I wasn't driving.  If we hadn't been able to fit all of Fran's stuff into the van, I'd have had to take a seperate vehicle, and I think I would have puked from the pace of the driving the closer you got to New York.  After Waterbury, CT, it got pretty hectic. 

So we moved her into her little dorm room at Drew University the next day and said our goodbyes.  We all got emotional, but I knew it wouldn't be so bad seeing as how she got her new laptop and we've all (yes, all of us) been using the miracle of instant messaging to communicate with her.  Last night she had a bout of homesickness, and we all stayed up all night chatting with her, but it sure did the trick for her.  We're still packing up stuff to send her.

The Christopher Nolan Double Bill
My last two Netflix selections filled in the spaces in Christopher Nolan's resume for me.  I'd seen his second film, Memento, and his fourth/latest, Batman Begins, so I queued up his others to see where I rank him among my favorite directors.  The verdict?  Nolan's certainly got some great stuff going for him on the thriller front. 

Following, his debut, is a microbudget noir that Memento owes a lot to.  It's about a young man who starts following people on the street in West London.  He starts to shadow a sharply dressed burglar who takes him under his wing.  The plot begins to really take some curious turns, and because different events in the story are told out of order, you're not really sure of where all of the pieces are going to fall until you reach the climax.  It's very cool, and the actors all give Nolan's script some real pop.  This one is going right up there with Pi and Primer as a great no-budget debut for a promising director. 

The other film was Insomnia.  Nolan took a lot of the qualities that made his first films look, feel, and sound unique and took it to the next level.  I know that's a really cliched thing to say, but it's true.  Following is a grainy 16mm black and white, and Memento is a modern film-noir that qualifies for the indie tag.  Insomnia makes strides towards the Hollywood level.  It starts off with some big, wide-open shots of the Alaskan wilderness that would serve as the basis of similar shots in Batman Begins.  Meanwhile, Nolan's handheld stylings can be found in particularly tense scenes, and David Julyan's distinctive and moody score remains familiar to him even when done by a full orchestra.  The first half-hour seems pretty standard in the police drama genre, but as Al Pacino's detective character begins to lose sleep due to Alaskan midnight sun and the weight of three seperate mysteries brewing around him, things start to turn right back into Nolan's territory.  You start to feel the effects of his sleep depravation through quick hallucinations, loss of focus, shifting framerates.  But he maintains the kind of intensity that his character needs.  Al doesn't get any great roles anymore, but he sure gives them his all.  Robin Williams is also effectively creepy as a suspected murderer.  This ain't Mrs. Doubtfire.  But, he's not Buffalo Bill, either.  Hillary Swank plays another cop, and pretty much anybody could have played the role, but she at least looks the part (read: not attractive).  Great movie, I'm surprised it didn't gain more attention.