I was at a concert the other day, and as usual, I checked out what wares the musicians had to sell in the interval.
And there was this box:
… with a card inside:
It’s USB!
Isn’t that great?
It conducts light really well, so that if your USB hub has a LED, it looks all purdy and stuff.
(On the USB drive was an album of Melodies & Fragments .wav tracks and a bunch of .mov and .mp4 files with visual components, as well as a 40 minute live show. It’s great! Sten Sandell 4 ever!)
Jaws. Steven Spielberg. 1975. ⚂
This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.
I assume this has been voted the 75th best movie of all time by directors is because of the technical qualities.
I mean, nobody can argue against how effective the “doon duun” scary music is. It’s beyond perfect. And everybody loves that effect where he pulls the camera away while zooming in.
But… but… He did film on location? Right? Why do all the street scenes look like they’re on set?
The plot is… stupid?
Roy Scheider acts like he’s in a made-for-TV movie? Right?
Is E.T. on this list, too? Gremlins 2?
I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t get it. It’s a really scary horror movie, but there are many really scary horror movies.
Heh. Quentin Tarantino voted for this movie, and… the other ones aren’t familiar to me. Oh, the director of Dumb and Dumber voted for this movie.
OK, I may be somewhat unfair here. Sure, the movie is really boring when nobody’s in the water, but the scenes in the water are really tense and scary. Sure, the acting is atrocious, but it’s genre appropriate. There’s some good shots in here: The cinematography is more than adequate. So I think if I saw this in a different context I’d be enjoying this a lot more, but it just seems weak coming just after Un chien Andalou and Pierrot le fou.
While in theaters, the film was said to have caused a single case of cinematic neurosis in a 17-year-old, female viewer. Cinematic neurosis is a condition in which viewers exhibit mental health disturbances, or a worsening of existing mental health disturbances, after viewing a film. The symptoms first presented as sleep disturbances and anxiety, but one day later the patient was screaming “Sharks! Sharks!” and experiencing convulsions.
Us humans certainly amuse ourselves.
ANYWAY, you could easily cut an hour of character development from this movie. The drunken scene on the boat seems interminable.
I’m still surprised at how many of these liqueurs haven’t gone off since I last used them, which was… two years ago? So far, I’ve only had to get rid of two of them, and one was an egg liqueur, so that’s not surprising. The Bikini Martini has blue curacao, which is also just 20%, but what’s not alcohol or water there is probably sugar, so perhaps it’s not surprising that no little critters (fungus, bacteria, amoebas) can live in there.
The cocktail’s OK.
This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.
Pierrot le fou. Jean-Luc Godard. 1965. ⚅
I did not re-watch this movie for this blog series, but you can read about it here.
This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.
Un Chien Andalou. Luis Buñuel. 1929. ⚄
I have never seen this, but I’ve seen shots from every scene from this movie in various articles over the years. So I knew when to hold a pillow before my face, and I still haven’t seen That Scene.
This is Luis Buñuel’s famous exercise in épater la bourgeoisie, or course, but I’m surprised at how narrative it is. It’s fascinating.
I did not know that it was only just fifteen minutes long, so I barely had time to make a cocktail:
Slightly strange recipe: Sketcher’s Pet.
But it’s OK…
This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.
Chinatown. Roman Polanski. 1974. ⚄
I’ve seen this before, but I was like… twelve. The only thing I remember is the shocking ending.
This is like a proper mystery movie! With lots of detecting and conspiracies and stuff. I did not remember that at all. Very moody.
Nicholson is great, of course, as the somewhat embarrassing gum shoe. I’m amazed that Polanski spends virtually all the movie on the plot: This leaves very little time for “character development” (i.e., people sitting around moaning about their childhoods). Instead we get everything through the action… it’s so well done.
Love the expressive but almost unnoticeable cinematography.
Oh, the knife geek is Polanski himself? Well cast!
The movie is a bit gimmicky, I guess, but the ending still packs an incredible emotional wallop. The saddest ending in a movie ever in the history of movies. EVER!
Oops spoilers.
In the leftover booze series, we have the BBC. The Hennessy really isn’t very good, is it?
And… it tastes kinda harsh.
This blog post is part of the Officially The Best series.