Story and the Writer. Andrew Ondrejcak. 2020.
So, this is a short you can watch on Youtube. Swinton does the voiceover… which is pretty oddly recorded. It’s very dry, as if she’s just talking into her phone or something. Which is a wasted opportunity.
And… when you’re doing this sort of thing, your performers had better be fascinating. And they’re not.
I do like the graphical elements in the first bit.
This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.
What We Do in the Shadows: “The Trial”. Taika Waititi. 2019.
Oh, OK — this is the TV series based on the movie? I saw that movie at the Sundance Film Festival! (I know! How hoity toity!) I think I gave it a… five? a four? on the score cards. It was fun, but kinda clunky here and there, if I remember correctly…
But this is the TV series, which I haven’t seen, and Tilda Swinton is supposed to be in this episode, so I’m watching it now, for this blog series.
[two minutes pass]
OK, so it’s still the same concept: A reality show slash mockumentary about a group of vampires living in… New Zealand? Yeah, I guess that concept’s got legs… “The Office, but with vampires.”
And that boss guy from The IT Crowd is playing the head vampire!? Was he in the movie? I’m re-watching The IT Crowd at the moment… (The first season is pure, sheer brilliance — possibly the best sitcom ever. I laughed and I laughed. I’m watching the second season now, though, and it’s a very different beast: The humour is mostly cringe based, and it’s a lot more sentimental.)
[eight minutes pass]
Now Emacs reminds me: I did try watching this TV series. And my stomach reminds me why I dropped it during the first episode: The shakycam is nauseating. I mean, literally. I’m getting nauseated watching this. It’s not a very shaky shakycam, but it’s panning left/right/up/down all the fucking time, and it’s EUUUURGH.
Perhaps drinking some rum will help…
Anyway, other than the nausea, it’s pretty funny so far. Most of the humour is still generated by the incongruous concept itself (“The Office… but with vampires!”), which seems a bit lazy. I mean, this is the seventh episode? There should be more jokes.
Kristen Schaal is totally owning this episode, though. She’s the best vampire ever!
[one minute passes]
Wow! That dance! Brilliant!
And… it’s not on New Zealand any more, but on Staten Island. Makes sense for an American TV series.
[the end]
Well, this is a bit difficult to throw the die on. If it hadn’t been for the er “cinematography”, I would totally watch the entire series: This episode was funny! I know I said that it didn’t have any jokes beyond the concept itself, but there were some really funny bits in here. And that’s Waititi himself as one of the vampire judges? He was funny, and Swinton was hilarious. But… when you can’t watch something without getting physically ill (yeah, the rum didn’t help), it’s… you know.
This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.
I was reading this blog article today, and it reminded me that I hadn’t implemented MTA-STS in that mail server setup script I put together the other month.
MTA-STS isn’t really… vital… for running a mail server, but I guess it’s nice to have, and it’s easy enough to add. It does mean that the script makes your MTA run a web server, too, which may or may not be something you want to see happen.
As mail-tester.com says:
While adding this, I thought as well that I could try the script on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (it was originally written for the previous LTS version), and I’ve tweaked it so it works on both.
I’ve also made the script output all the DNS stuff you have to twiddle into a DNS BIND file suitable for usage directly (if you’re using BIND), or for importing into the Cloudflare DNS console (if you’re using that):
Uhm… I think that’s it.
As usual, the code can be found on Microsoft Github, and comments/fixes are welcome.
Go forth and throw off the Gmail shackles!
Uncut Gems. Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie. 2019.
[twenty minutes pass]
Oh deer.
This is the Adam Sandler Oscar bait movie? To ensure getting nominated, you have to have some sort of health angle, so it starts with a colonoscopy (it is Sandler, after all) and some possible cancer, before we go into full-bore New Era of Quality TV doing Death of a Salesman (which means that everybody is from New Jersey and that all these morons are shouting at each other ALL THE TIME).
If you were to design a movie to annoy me, this would be that movie.
I don’t recalling it actually winning any Oscars, though…
But it did win a bunch of other awards — perhaps the Independent Spirit Awards are the most significant…
Well, perhaps it gets less annoying…
GAH! IT GOES ON FOREVER!
Well, re-roll the movie…
[ten minutes pass]
I wondered when they were going to introduce the bitchy wife. I should have made a bet.
[twenty minutes pass]
I can’t take any more of this. One hour of watching uninteresting morons shout at each other is all I can take. I’d rather get my teeth cleaned.
Is this the only movie in this blog series that has broken me? I think it may be. And apparently I’m not missing much of a performance:
This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.
The Dead Don’t Die. Jim Jarmusch. 2019.
[five minutes pass; i.e., I watched the titles]
Wow; this movie basically has everybody that’s famous. It’s not just Jarmusch’s normal troupe (although many of them are here), but a bunch of random famous people. I’m assuming they called his agent or his agent called them and they said “sure!”
Appearing here for free, I’m assuming.
[wtf; forty minutes pass?!?!]
I thought that was like ten minutes.
I’m so totes engrossed in this movie… I’ve been a Jarmusch fan since forever (I saw him once on the streets of New York! squee!), and this is just such a Jarmusch movie. It’s basically a goof on Night of the Living Dead: Nothing’s very serious; it’s all just done in fun, even the really grisly bits (and the political bits).
It’s like… if you designed a movie to appeal specifically to me (and you weren’t French), this would definitely be the movie to make.
The “name” actors are definitely having fun here (although Chloë Sevigny seems to be participating in a totally different movie than everybody else), and the newcomers are delivering, too. I love the two threesomes — the hipsters, and the peeps in juvie. Just amazeballs.
(I’m typing this because I had to take a pee ‘n cocktail break.)
[the end]
The pacing, the way the actors deliver their lines… It’s just like er Down By Law or any of the early Jarmusch movies. Adam Driver in particular — I’m wondering if he studied those movies like hard and is just going “how would John Lurie do this scene” and then doing that.
But it’s not just a goof, of course. Just like Romero’s Night of the Living Dead was a movie about racism, this is a movie about Trump, and just as despairing.
It’s a really well-made, funny, knowing movie, so I was expecting everybody to hate it.
And I was right!
*phew*
This post is part of The Tilda Swinton Project.
