OTB#91: Soy Cuba

I Am Cuba. Mikhail Kalatozov. 1964. ⚅

This is a movie I was completely unaware of, and I don’t seem to be the only one:

It really is a neglected classic.

It’s so weird! Movies this weird don’t usually end up on lists like these. Is it recently rediscovered or something?

I’ve never seen cinematography remotely like this. They’re using a fish-eye lens on a bunch of the shots, and they’re sticking the camera right into the faces of people, so people look distorted and nightmarish. (Especially the Americans, of course.) The camera never stops moving. And this is before the invention of the steadicam so they have to have had the steadiest camera operator in existence. And these are long, long shots.

Ah. Mike Leigh and Gaspar Noé voted for this movie. Makes sense.

It’s riveting. The sheer audacity of some of these shots is breathtaking. Some of them seem impossible to have happened, but they made them happen. Cars, carts, elevators, zip lines… the camera keeps moving against impossible odds.

The camera is moving, and so is the movie.

One technical thing I’m wondering about is why all the greenery comes off as iridescent white in this movie. Some special kind of filter? Anybody know?

Wikipedia has all the information:

Until the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, I Am Cuba was virtually unknown. In 1992, a print of the film was screened at the Telluride Film Festival. The San Francisco International Film Festival screened the film in 1993. Shortly after the festival, three film professionals who had screened I Am Cuba at the San Francisco screening contacted friends at Milestone Films, a small New York film distributor specializing in the release of once-lost and neglected older films. Milestone screened a slightly blurry, unsubtitled VHS tape of the film and then went about acquiring the distribution rights from Mosfilm in Russia. In 1994, a friend invited Martin Scorsese to a private screening. Scorsese was amazed by the film, and when Milestone approached him to lend his name to the company’s release of the film, he was happy and enthusiastic to do so.

And the greens being white:

The film is shot in black and white, sometimes using infrared film obtained from the Soviet military[2] to exaggerate contrast (making trees and sugar cane almost white, and skies very dark but still obviously sunny).

The movie is amazeballs.

And there’s a documentary here. Here’s a pic of the cinematographer and an actor:

Yes.

Today’s drink-made-from-leftover-booze is the escalator.

The juicer I used to use broke down, so I got a Kenwood attachment juicer… think… that I’m using for the first time today. I haven’t counted, but there’s like ten pieces to it? It’s absurd. But nine of them go into the dishwasher, so that’s OK. It didn’t make a lot of juice from three apples, though, so I am disappoint. But perhaps the apples weren’t juicy.

Anyway, it’s deee-lish.

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

Clownin’

I’ve had my servers in my employer’s data room since 1997, but (since that company doesn’t exist any more), I had to make some changes. I had planned on doing some coloc thing locally here, so I bought some semi-spiffy new servers.

But then I changed my mind. It all just seemed too much work: I mean, doing appointments for installing and/or fixing stuff, and I finally just went with renting servers here and there.

So yesterday I went and collected my servers and put them into storage, where they’ll probably remain until they’re too old to be useful and I can throw them away.

But where’s all my serverey stuff now? In the clown.

First of all, I put my WordPress sites on DigitalOcean $5 virtual machine instances. I can’t properly express how easy and straightforward that process is, but this guy can:

Even the API and the docs are so well built that it feelslike a pet project I found on Github. Where is all of the corporate nonsense cluttering up the API? Where is the overengineered factory templates where I have to set up a bunch of services using a totally different API before I can start my first VM? Why are the docs so straightforward and in one place in one format? This hardly feels like enterprise software at all.

Once you get past the slightly cutesy naming convention (“Droplets” and stuff), it’s all so easy and unconfusing. I went with pre-rolled WordPress images, and it comes with UFW firewall, fail2ban and certbot already set up. It’s perfect! And by that I mean, it’s exactly like it would have been if I’d done it myself. Except my image would also have Emacs pre-installed, of course.

(The reason I want WordPress on separate VM instances is that I assume that they’ll eventually be hacked. It’s WordPress, after all; the CMS with the most insane maintenance model imaginable.)

For my real servers, I went with Hetzner. Because it’s in Europe. My main server (my MTA and all my pet projects, of which there are many), is in Helsinki, and runs at €87 per month. Of that, €53 is the disk, which is a weird pricing model, since disks are inexpensive, but I guess that’s how they make money? It’s a physical server, because if it’s a VM, it’s probably hacked already, what with all the new Intel bugs that shows up every two weeks. The Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz server itself is just €34…

For the news.gmane.io server, I had to go more expensive. It’s a tradspool NNTP server, which means that every article takes one file. This is rather slow on spinning rust, so I had to find a configuration that could do that over an SSD RAID. Total cost of that is (+ 189 114 86) => €389 per month. Because it’s a AMD EPYC 7551P 32-Core Processor with 132MB RAM. A two core machine with 16MB RAM would have been fine, but Hetzner doesn’t have that in their lineup. This server is in Germany.

Hetzner seems fine. Getting the machines built and installed to my specifications took a day or so; if you can use one of the standard configurations, you can get one on the hour, apparently. The web interface is old-fashioned and clunky, but it gets the job done. DigitalOcean has a much better web.

But what about backup? I briefly considered just rsyncing everything home, and that would have been no problem. The problem is that if I ever need to use that backup, my upstream is teensy, so re-establishing a new server out there somewhere would take forever. (The Gmane spool is about 5TB.)

So I needed backup somewhere, and I chose OVH, because they’re another European company… and their interfaces are pretty primitive. For instance, when installing the initial image, it was all stuff like:

and

which would hang for hours until I reloaded the web page. It doesn’t give you a lot of confidence. But, what the hey, it’s just backup, anyway. And it’s $175 per month.

And… I just tried logging on to the OVH web site, and it said my credentials were invalid. And then when doing password recovery… I’m not getting any email (after waiting for 15 minutes).

*sigh*

So, no, I wouldn’t really recommend OVH much, but the server itself works fine, and I get about 200Mbps when doing backups from the server in Germany to the OVH server in London. (Gotta be spread out geographically! For no reason!)

None of the servers seem to have any hidden bandwidth fees or anything, which is definitely not the case with the big American players (AWS and the like), where figuring out how much it all is going to cost is a full time job.

Having physical access to the servers definitely feels a lot safer: If I screw something up and the servers then won’t even boot, I can always fix that if I have physical access to them. If I screw up these servers, I do have some limited console access (the Helsinki Hetzner one seems to require that I have somebody there physically attach something to the server first!), but it’s definitely not the same as having access. So having very up-to-date backups is the name of the game, so that I can move to a new server fast-ish if the old one it unrecoverable. The Gmane news spool has continuous backup of the articles (they’re being fed out to the backup server with a couple of seconds delay), so nothing should be lost there, but it’ll take some time to rsync it all to a new server, I guess.

Anyway!

Modern life, man.

OTB#91: L’Année dernière à Marienbad

L’Année dernière à Marienbad. Alain Resnais. 1961. ⚅

I’ve seen this at least a couple of times before. The last time was in 2015 according to Emacs… I regret not rebuying it on 2K. It’s such a beautiful film, and I’ve got it on a windowboxed DVD, so the resolution is like nil by nought. And the transfer isn’t particularly good either; there’s a lot of horizontal judder from seemingly worn-out sprockets. Or just bad machinery.

And the subtitles are YUUGE.

OK, for any subsequent movie I’ve seen before, I’m rebuying it on 2K. Gotta have more of dem pixels.

ANYWAY.

Rewatching it now, I do understand why it’s not #1 on this list. It’s hypnotical and dreamy and wonderful, but it’s so close to being risible. Just a slight tweak, and it’s a parody of French art cinema.

I still love it. The roving camera, the humourlessness, the theatricality, the literariness of it all.

Brilliant.

Here’s the cocktail for this movie.

It’s tasty! But then I always like cream/citrusey things.

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

OTB#91: Le Samouraï

Le Samouraï. Jean-Pierre Melville. 1967. ⚃

I have apparently bought the Spanish version of this, but fortunately there’s also a French soundtrack. But no English subtitles! Subscene to the rescue! What would we do without pirates? Just watch Michael Bay movies?

Oh, wow. Alain Delon.

I don’t think I’ve seen any films by Melville? But I like his name.

This blu-ray version looks wonderful. Was Melville one of those “use ‘natural’ light only” guys? Well, not natural lights, but only lights that would be present otherwise? Because some of the scenes are really dark. But wonderfully moody. Noir.

I’m a bit confused as to why this is on the list of 100 best films of all time. I mean, it’s good, but… Is it one of those movies that’s interesting historically, so you have to have it on the list?

Or is it just that Alain Delon is so cool? Because he is. And the flat he lives in is picaresque perfection.

It’s a gorgeous movie; all blue and grey, and it’s Paris, and it’s Delon, but I’m not feeling it. Which is odd, because this is just my sort of movie.

The ending is beyond perfection, though.

I’m so out of practice in making real cocktails. I don’t have any citrus and my fruit press is broken… But I found this all-booze cocktail, that uses two of my boozes (and some wine).

It’s tasty!

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

Officially The Best

I’ve always wanted to watch all the movies on the Sight and Sound list of movies. First of all, it’s a poll taken of working directors, and that in itself makes it interesting. Secondly, the film that won was neither Citizen Kane nor Vertigo, which immediately makes it seem more relevant.

I’ve jokingly referred to the list as “the official list of best movies” in the past, but I’ve come to realise how apt that is, really: It’s a very staid list of movies. Directors do not seem to have very adventurous taste in canon.

There’s no Eraserhead, Tromeo and Juliet, You and Me and Everyone We Know or India Song on this list.

I’m not familiar with all the movies on the list, especially not in the latter half of the list, so I hope there are some surprises in store, and it’s not just Serious Worthy Cinema.

Uhm, writing that, it sounds like I’m going to hate-watch a bunch of awful movies, right? But that’s not what I mean at all. I’ll bet you that every single one of these 106 movies are going to turn out to be really good, and I love Serious Worthy Cinema. It’s just that I hope there are some surprises in here, too.

I have to call out the selection of Bergman movies on this list, though: They’ve chosen Persona (it’s magnificent), The Seventh Seal (sure), Hour of the Wolf (great) and Fanny & Alexander (of course). But no Cries and Whispers!? What?!?! That’s absurd! And again, perhaps, points towards the stodgy selection: It’s a movie with four female protagonists, and that’s what Bergman was interested in most of his career. Three of the four films selected here are more male centred, which is untypical of Bergman, but typical for lists like this.

And speaking of women: I haven’t counted how many films with female versus male directors there are, but I’m going to guess that there’s more than 90% male. Hm… is it possible that Beau Travail by Claire Denis is the only one with a female director?

*sigh*

There’s also the critics’ list, which looks like a straight permutation of the directors’ list (and it has Vertigo as #1), but there are some differences. For instance, it’s got the wonderful Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles by Chantal Akerman, and it’s got Wild Strawberries by Bergman, and Imitation of Life by Douglas Sirk, so it is, objectively speaking, a better list than the directors’.

Whodathunk.

Here’s the number of films per decade on the list:

I think… we can probably guess what the mean age of the voting populace is based on this, eh? 70% of the films are from the 50s/60/70s, with an obligatory nod to the movies from the 20s and 30s that have to be included, and virtually shutting out all other decades.

And, I mean, I’m all for 50s/60s movies, but I’m rather sceptical of the 70s selection.

Anyway, let’s get started… And let’s do them in reverse order, starting with the movies that shared 91st place. And there’s sixteen of them, so we’re starting with the 106th movie.

Oh, and to increase the difficulty setting on this thing, I’m going to go through all the booze I still have from that project where I made one cocktail from each country in the world. I still have a closet full of the stuff, and some of it has probably gone off by now. So I’ll be testing the liqueurs and then using this page that lets you type in ingredient name, and it spits out recipes by the dozen. And I’ll be buying No New Booze. And I mean it this time!

(Well, except vodka and rum. All drinks have vodka or rum and I’m almost out.)