OTB#59: Blue Velvet

Blue Velvet. David Lynch. 1986. ⚅

I think I may only have seen this movie once before, which is odd, because I love David Lynch. On the other hand, I remember not being … thrilled? by this movie when I saw it. Which was probably on VHS in 1987 when I was 19.

What I remember from this movie is… uhm… Dennis Hopper huffing… something? And… Kyle MacLachlan… being in it? And… “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”

I think that’s it, so I’m watching this from a pretty blank slate.

Oh! De Laurentiis produced it? I guess that makes sense, after the … success … of Dune…

Oh, Laura Dern is in this one! She’s the best American actor of her generation, so it was fun to see her finally win an Oscar this year (for the otherwise unremarkable Netflix movie she was in).

The cinematography on this movie is so weird. It’s 2.35:1, which is wider than most things, and Lynch is using a lens that’s slightly fish-eyed in many scenes (meaning that things go pear-shaped out at the edges). But even more strange is the way the edges of many of the shots fade into blackness… it’s almost as he’s hinting that behind the pedestrian suburban reality there’s… something… darker…

Is that too on the nose? Perhaps it is, but Lynch has never been subtle.

ANYWAY! This was the movie that, I guess, was Lynch’s breakthrough? He’d done the brilliant Eraserhead (but that was too experimental), and then The Elephant Man (which I haven’t re-watched since the 80s, but was a commercial success), and then Dune (which was… Dune), and then this: A movie that has “themes” that can easily be summarised as “Lynchian” (the horror beneath ordinary life)…

Watching it now, I like it a whole lot better then when I was a teenager, but I’m also… going… “is this Lynch’s least best movie?” That is, I think I like everything else he’s done better than this? And this is pretty good?

I guess my objection to this movie is that it seems to flail around a lot. Hopper’s performance is meme-inducing, and the movie seems to give itself over to that, but…

The documentary extras on the blu-ray are really good.

Today’s leftover cocktail Vieux Carré Cocktail uses a lot of leftover stuff.

I normally don’t like all-booze cocktails, but this is pretty good. I think the bitters are what make it.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

OTB#59: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Sergio Leone. 1966. ⚄

Has anybody remarked on the similarity between the first trumpet thing (mow mow moooow) in the theme song and the Sad Trombone thing?

No?

Anyway, this is the first Leone movie in this blog series, and it’s a movie I’ve seen a couple times before. But probably on VHS in the 80s. And then possibly at the Cinematheque in the 90s?

Oh right! This is the movie that Big Audio Dynamite sampled for their Medicine Show:

It’s very hard not to be charmed by this movie. It’s got a boyish mischievousness that’s off the scales. And it looks fabulous, of course, using the wide widescreen to great advantage. The sweaty closeups are iconic. But…

It does go on for longer than you’d expect. It’s a pretty simple story, but Leone goes for Epic Movie, and it’s not a bad sleight-of-hand.

One thing this movie has going for it is a sense of timelessness. I mean, if you watch American western movies from this period, there’s always something that screams 60s: A way of doing makeup; the hair styles; the jargon. And, sure, this couldn’t have been made any other time, but it’s less obvious.

It’s an oddly apolitical take on the US civil war. It’s got the “war is stupid” thing going on, but nothing about what was at stake.

The 2K restoration job here is pretty spiffy.

I’m watching the documentaries included on the blu-ray… and it turns out that they’ve done the restoration based on the Italian cut. Which was longer than the US cut, which means that Clint had never done those lines. So they got him in (in 2002) (and Eli, too) to do those lines now.

That’s way beyond the call of duty for a restoration, and it’s seamless here.

But the restoration guy has also put in offcuts that had also been cut from the Italian version, and one of the scenes (in the cave) I can totally see why they took out. So… this isn’t perfect.

I’ve been lax in doing cocktails for this blog series, because… I didn’t want any cocktails. But time to get back on the horse again with this Singapore Sling (Dale DeGroff’s recipe).

Oops. I didn’t have pineapple, so I substituted … orange.

It’s fine.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

OTB#67: Ugetsu Monogatari

Ugetsu. Kenji Mizoguchi. 1953. ⚂

I read a compilation of Cahiers de cinema (the 50s years) the other month, and one film that was mentioned a lot was this one. I haven’t seen it before…

I haven’t seen it before, and it definitely has it going on. But… there’s a whiff of super-simplified morality play going on (which I’m not against or anything), and it really seems like they’re playing up some Japanese cliches…

Oh, right:

It is one of a number of films arguably more popular in western countries than in Japan. Japanese film historian Tadao Satō remarked that while this film, along with Mizoguchi’s other works of the period The Crucified Lovers and Sansho the Bailiff, was probably not meant specifically to be sold to westerners as an “exotic” piece, it was perceived by studio executives as the kind of film that would not necessarily make a profit in Japanese theaters but would win awards at international film festivals.

Yeah, that is indeed what it feels like: It’s super-simplified for foreign consumption: The actors are mugging it up most of the time, and it touches upon everything you’d vaguely know about Japan if you’re a 1950s French person.

For a 2K Criterion release, I’m not impressed by the restoration job on this. The image is sometimes a bit wobbly, but the main problem is that it often looks like a noisy CGI job: Whenever there’s anything detailed on the screen (say, a field of grass), pixels blip in and out of existence and it looks more like a random noise field. It’s just weird: I wonder what they did wrong… Did the restoration at 8K and then used a lousy algo for downscaling?

ANYWAY. I’m not feeling this silly movie at all. It aims for magic, but it’s an oddly meandering random walk through obvious plot points and stupidity. The cinematography is pedestrian and the actors aren’t very inspiring.

I think the moral of the movie is: Never aspire to anything.

The ending is really affecting, though.

This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.

This Is A Test

This blog has been hosted on WordPress.com for many a year. It has, all in all, been a very pleasant experience: It feels like the uptime has been at least 110%, and most everything just works.

The problems with using that solution is that it’s very restrictive. There’s so many little things you just can’t do, like adding Javascript code (for which I’m sure many people are grateful), or customising the CSS in a convenient way.

I’ve worked around the shortcomings of the platform, but the small annoyances have piled up, and this weekend I finally took the plunge.

The reason for doing it now instead of later was that WordPress.com seemed to experience a hickup a couple of days ago, and I thought that instead of bugging support with the problem, I’d just take it as an opportunity to get moving. The problem was that the admin pages suddenly started taking 15 seconds to load. I checked it out in the browser debugger, and it was the initial “GET /” thing that took 15.something seconds, but only if I was logged in. So they obviously had an auth component that was timing out, and falling back to a backup thing (and it’s been fixed now).

But I clicked “export”, created a new VM at DigitalOcean, and got importing.

And… it failed. It got a bit further every time, downloading all the media from the old blog, but then failed with “There has been a critical error on your website. Please check your site admin email inbox for instructions.”.

After doing that for about ten times (and no email), I checked the export XML file, and what did I find?

*sigh*

So I got a new export file (after waiting 15 seconds), and ran the import again… and it failed again the same way. So that wasn’t the problem after all?

I blew the VM away, started from scratch again, and this time skipped doing the import of the media, and that worked perfectly.

To do the media, I just scripted something do download all the images, and then I rsynced it over to the new instance. Seems to work fine, even if the images aren’t in the “media library” of WordPress, but I never cared about that anyway…

It’s even possible to copy over subscribers and stats from the old WordPress.com instance, but that requires help from the Automattic support people. And I’m flabbergasted at how efficient they are: I had two requests, and each time it took them less than five minutes to do the request and get a response. I’ve never seen customer support, I mean Happiness Engineering, that efficient before; ever. It almost made me regret doing the entire move to self-hosted blogging…

Anyway. This is a test! If this post is posted, the new WordPress instance works.