Category: movies

Labor Day

Things I did this weekend:

  1. Watched four bad movies, with RiffTrax commentary.
  2. Finished reading a very nerdy Star Trek novel.
  3. Read a few random comic books.
  4. Backed up my desktop PC with Macrium and my Mac with Carbon Copy Cloner.

And that’s really about it. I didn’t go anywhere, or do anything particularly productive or useful. I’d been running a number of vaguely interesting and variously ambitious plans through my head over the last few weeks, ranging from NYC museum visits to flying to Atlanta for Dragon Con, but I decided to punt and just relax. I made one half-hearted stab at watching a Pluralsight video, but I couldn’t get into it. I feel a little guilty about that, but at least I didn’t just give up completely and binge-watch NCIS all weekend. (That has happened. But not recently…) And I did manage to hit my Apple Watch activity goals every day, I think, so there’s that.

Doctor Strange

One of the nice things that usually happens whenever Marvel or DC release a new superhero movie is that they reprint some old comics featuring that particular hero. Also, Comixology generally runs a sale discounting some old books featuring that hero. I’m a fan of Doctor Strange, so I’ve been keeping an eye on this.

Marvel has recently released a gigantic Doctor Strange Omnibus: impressive, but expensive. It’s a hardcover reprint of the original Lee/Ditko run. Then there’s a new Doctor Strange Epic Collection. This volume collects some of the comics from the late sixties and early seventies, including work by Barry Windsor-Smith. I haven’t bought either of these, but I might pick up the Epic Collection.

The book I’m most excited about, though, is a new collection of P. Craig Russell’s Doctor Strange work, Dr. Strange: What Is It That Disturbs You, Stephen?. Russell has long been my favorite comic book artist. This book includes the 1996 one-shot that shares the same unwieldy title as this collection. I think I still have a copy of it, but it’s nice to have it in a collection too. It’s a really good story with great art by Russell. It also includes Russell’s 1976 Doctor Strange Annual, which I used to have a copy of, but probably donated when I was getting rid of most of my collection. The 1996 story is basically a reworked version of the 1976 Annual, but really it’s a whole different thing. It started out, I think, as a project to reprint the Annual with some additional pages, but it wound up being a whole new story with completely new art and a new script. So both stories are interesting to read. The rest of the book reprints a hodgepodge of stories that were either penciled or inked by Russell. They’re a mixed bag, but a few of them are interesting, including one with art by Russell and Marshall Rogers, one of my other favorite artists. I bought this book at my local comic shop, for the full $30 cover price, as soon as I saw it. (It turns out that I could have gotten the Comixology version for only $15, but it’s nice to have the hard-copy version.)

Meanwhile, Comixology is running two Doctor Strange sales this weekend, one on single issues and one on collections. I’ll probably pick up two or three of the collections that I don’t already have.

Oh, and hey, the movie seems to be doing well on Rotten Tomatoes, so I should probably go see it. Maybe tomorrow, if I can talk myself into leaving the apartment.

 

Civil War

I went to see Civil War yesterday afternoon. (I took a half-day off from work.) I enjoyed it a lot. I like that the Marvel film universe has matured to the point where they can just throw a bunch of heroes into a movie and not feel like they need to recount everyone’s back story. The film is loosely based on Marvel’s Civil War series from about ten years ago. (I was surprised when I checked that and realized how long ago it was. Time is just flying by…)

I had read that series, and some of the tie-in books, when they came out, and I had mixed feelings about the event as whole, though parts of it are quite good. In particular, I liked J. Michael Straczynski’s Spider-Man tie-in. There’s a really good sequence that’s referenced in the movie, though in a different context and with the dialog coming from a different character. There’s a good article about it here, with the original comic pages included.

Spider-Man is included in the film, on loan from Sony, which is kind of neat but also kind of ridiculous. There’s an article from the LA Times about how this happened, and how hard it was to arrange to “borrow” the character from Sony. Spider-Man’s appearance does actually add something useful to the movie: the perspective of a new, young, hero who hasn’t interacted with all the “big shots” in the Marvel universe, like Cap and Iron Man. And of course some typical light-hearted Spider-Man banter.

The movie is quite long, almost two and a half hours, but it holds up pretty well over that length. I think that’s a little too long for a superhero movie. A tighter two-hour movie would have been better. It will probably work well on home video though, where you can pause it and take a break, or watch it in two or three sittings.

Kurosawa on TCM

Earlier this week, TCM had a little marathon of Akira Kurosawa movies. I caught them all with a WishList search that I set up when I first got my TiVo Bolt. I’m still really liking the Bolt. I don’t think I could go back to the cable company DVR, and I hope I don’t ever have to. TiVo might get acquired by another company soon. If they do, hopefully they’ll keep making new hardware and supporting their existing hardware.

Pee-wee’s Big Comeback

I just finished reading a long NY Times Magazine article about Pee-wee Herman, and his new movie. I was a big fan of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, back when it was running on Saturday mornings in the late 80’s. It aired from 1986 to 1990, which roughly matches up with my years in college, but I don’t remember watching it from my dorm room at all, so I probably only caught some of the episodes, possibly in reruns, during the summer, when I was home and had time for TV. (Which means I should probably buy the Blu-Rays, and watch all of them. Or just add the show to my Netflix queue.)

I’ve been following Pee-wee on Twitter, and his blog is fun too.  I’m looking forward to the new movie, which is being released directly on Netflix. The trailer looks promising!

No More Ziegfeld

I’m really disappointed to hear (from this NY Times article) that the Ziegfeld Theater is closing. I haven’t been there in a while, but it’s a great theater and I’ve seen some great movies there, including Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm.

As this post on Cinema Treasures points out, this leaves only one single-screen movie theater left in Manhattan, the Paris. I’ve seen a few good films there too, including Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, which was quite an experience.

It’s sad to see so few big movie theaters left, since the experience of seeing a good film on a big screen is so much different from seeing it on a smaller screen in a multiplex, or on a TV screen at home.

As much as I appreciate venues like Film Forum or the theaters used by the Film Society of Lincoln Center, they just don’t compare to big old theaters like the Ziegfeld.

Monty Python

I went into New York today, and saw a couple of Monty Python films, as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. I saw Life of Brian (which I hadn’t seen in many years) and The Meaning of Live, which is a new documentary, mostly about the final Python live shows from last year.

Life of Brian had a Q&A afterward with John Cleese and Terry Jones, and Meaning of Live had a Q&A with Cleese, Eric Idle, and Michael Palin. So, now I’ve seen all of the (surviving) Pythons, except for Terry Gilliam.

It would have been fun to go to the Holy Grail screening last night too, but that one was pretty expensive. The Q&A for that one had all the Pythons, though, plus John Oliver, so that would have been awesome!

Seeing these films has made me think about the value of humor, and realize that I’m really not getting enough of it lately. On my way home, I picked up the Weird Al guest-edited issue of Mad Magazine, so that should help restore some balance. (It’s been many years since I picked up an issue of Mad.)

Thanksgiving weekend

I spent Thanksgiving day with a friend’s family. It was a good day, but pretty loud and chaotic, which is to be expected when you put sixteen people (including three small children) together in a house on Thanksgiving.

I spent Black Friday home alone, working on some personal organization. I almost managed to update the map on my TomTom GPS, but hit a snag when the new map was too large to copy to the device. That led me on a wild goose chase that ended when I found a notice on the TomTom site that said they were aware of the problem and working on a solution. But it was a fair amount of wasted time. (I’d thought, at one point, that maybe they’d purposely made the new map file just a little too large, to force people with older devices to upgrade to newer ones, but apparently it was an honest mistake.)

I also continued my work on getting stuff out of Backpack and into Evernote. I’m almost done there, and I should be able to close down the Backpack account soon. I’m getting enough stuff into Evernote now that I’m starting to think about how I’m organizing things, and what kind of adjustments I should make. I read the book Evernote Essentials yesterday, and also listened to a podcast with a lot of Evernote tips, so I could hopefully stimulate my brain a bit and come up with some good ideas on how to best use Evernote. I found both the book and the podcast helpful, though there weren’t any earth-shattering revelations in either of them.

I had a page in Backpack titled “GTD”, and I was using it to keep, basically, GTD-related lists, like a “someday/maybe” list, a “waiting for” list, project lists, and stuff like that. But I stopped doing anything resembling a weekly review quite some time ago, and I haven’t really been keeping up the lists. So, for instance, one list item was to use a $10 Best Buy Reward Zone certificate before it expired… in 2011. So I’m not entirely sure how best to clean up and re-structure those lists in such a way that I’ll be more likely to use them.

I really like the general idea of consolidating as much stuff as I can in Evernote, and cutting down on complexity a lot, eliminating OneNote, Backpack,  DevonThink, and whatever else I can. But I also noticed that Things for iPhone and iPad is free this weekend, and the Mac version is 30% off. So maybe keeping my GTD stuff in Things would be a good idea, while using Evernote for reference material and archives. But Things doesn’t have a PC version, or a web version, so I’d only be able to access it on the Mac and iOS. Which probably isn’t really a problem, given the way I’m using my computers these days. (Also, “Things” is a horrible product name, and tends to produce a lot of irrelevant (but amusing) results when Googled.) I’ve already downloaded the iPhone and iPad versions, and have played around a bit, and like what I see. I’m planning on downloading the trial version of the Mac software today, so I can see if it’s going to work for me or not.

Meanwhile, I just ordered two 500GB Samsung SSDs, for $189 each, with the general idea of replacing the old-fashioned drives in my MacBook and ThinkPad. I’ve been meaning to do this for some time now, and I kept putting it off. But I keep hearing, over and over, from friends and random internet sources, about how much difference an SSD will make, so I finally had to go ahead and do it. So next weekend’s project will likely be replacing either the MacBook or ThinkPad drive. Or possibly both, if I have enough time.

I’m also thinking about going to NYC to see The Imitation Game, the new movie about Alan Turing. I don’t think I’ll talk myself into doing that today, given how cold it is outside right now. But maybe tomorrow, if it’s a little warmer.