Category: movies

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.

Father’s Day

In honor of Father’s Day, here’s a re-post of a quote from How Green Was My Valley, that I originally posted a few years back:

There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy. Green it was, and possessed of the plenty of the Earth. In all Wales, there was none so beautiful. Everything I ever learned as a small boy came from my father and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday.

Philip Marlowe: Product of a Hard-Boiled Time

From “Murder, My Sweet“:

My feet hurt, and my mind felt like a plumber’s handkerchief. The office bottle hadn’t sparked me up, so I’d taken out my little black book and decided to go grouse hunting.

via Philip Marlowe: Product of a Hard-Boiled Time : NPR.

I’m pretty sure my mind has felt like a plumber’s handkerchief on occasion too. In fact, it may feel like that right now…

old DVDs

So I have a bit of a tendency to buy DVDs (and now Blu-Rays too), and then not watch them. I’ve got quite a few piled up. I haven’t really been buying many new discs though, so the piles aren’t really getting bigger, which is good.

Today, I picked one out and watched it — MirrorMask. It was really good! After watching it, I went to Amazon and looked it up. I don’t even remember buying it from Amazon, but apparently I did, because there’s a banner across the page saying that I bought it in April 2006. Wow. I had no idea how long I’ve been letting this stuff pile up!

Buster Keaton

I went into NYC today and saw The General at Film Forum, as part of their all-day Buster Keaton marathon. I would have liked to have seen one or two more films while I was there, but I didn’t want to stay in the city all day. I first became a fan of Buster Keaton when I was in college, a long time ago. I haven’t managed to see more than two or three of his films though.  I really need to rectify that. I think I should try to find time to watch Sherlock Jr. soon.

Charlie Chaplin

I was flipping through channels this morning, and landed on TCM right as the final scene in The Great Dictator was starting. That final speech is great:

We think too much, and feel too little.
More than cleverness, we need kindness.

And so on. I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t think I’ve ever seen this whole film, all the way through. I’ll have to see if it’s coming up again on TCM and set up my DVR to record it. Either way, that final speech is worth watching and re-watching.

After I originally posted this, a friend pointed me a Roger Ebert article on this film. It provides some necessary context for this movie, both in terms of Chaplin’s career, and the larger historical context. He mentions that the film “comes to a dead end” with this final speech, and that it “deflates the comedy and ends the picture as a lecture.” True enough, I guess, but I kind of like it.