Everything Dies

Gah! I had the almost perfect machine for schlepping around the apt while cleaning, and then it goes and does this:

Rebooting seems to help… sometimes. One out of five reboots it seems to come up alright again, but if I flip the orientation it goes back to that state again.

It’s an HP Spectre x360, according to dmidecode… Anybody know what’s up with this? Loose wires? Firmware updates? GPU settings?

I imagine there is a setting in the nvidia configuration utility: “[ ] Don’t shake the screen like you just don’t care” and I just have to tick that.

Right? Right?

Right.

Perhaps I should start looking for a new laptop…

Century 2000: In The Mood For Love

In The Mood For Love. Kar Wai Wong. 2000.

The last time I saw this film, it looked completely different!

2046 was more like this film, only much more mannered. This film has nerve and emotional depth. I watched the Anthony Bourdain Hong Kong show the other week, and he mentioned that this was his favourite Wong Kar-Wai film, and I can totally see why.

It’s such a romantic vision of Hong Kong. Almost mythological in the picturesque details.

And the story is a pretty loopy, interesting conceit. He goes all in on the emotional content, but avoids being obvious.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Innovations in Music Distribution

I was at a jazz concert the other week, and I was looking at the CDs and stuff the musicians had brought to sell.

Adam Pulz Melbye had brought a shrinkwrapped bass string:

With a Bandcamp download code. (Censored above.)

I just had to buy one! Genius!

It’s weird that I haven’t seen anybody doing something along these lines before… It’s like a souvenir from the concert, but it’s also a way of selling music.

Century 1999: An Ideal Husband

An Ideal Husband. Oliver Parker. 1999.

How weird. I can’t find the DVD for this film, or any of the other four I ripped on the same day… I must have… put them… somewhere..

But. Hm. what’s the expression to describe this… “Aggressively pedestrian”? “Excessively standard”?

Ever single shot here is a shot you’ve seen, down to every detail, in half of every British period comedy/drama for the past quarter century.

When the cinematographer and director are no help whatsoever, it falls upon the actors to try to charm their way through the schmaltzy soundtrack into your heart. And I think they give it their best effort. Minnie Driver is great, and so is Julienne Moore, and Rupert Everett plays Rupert Everett.

But it’s Oscar Wilde, so there are tons and tons of witticism and a fun plot. It’s really entertaining watching Wilde’s clockwork intrigues tick tock into place with such precision.

This blog post is part of the Century series.

Century 1996: Star Trek 8: First Contact

Star Trek 8: First Contact. Jonathan Frakes. 1996.

Oops! Another Star Trek film. I guess my stacks of DVDs were pretty light on 90s films…

I remember this as being much better than it is. It’s got the best Star Trek villains, the Borg, but somehow this film manages to strip away many of the things that made them scary: Their unrelenting, impersonal drive for assimilation.

Instead we get a time travel thing with lots of Rikerian humour, and they’ve made the Borg be personified by one evil woman, and that’s just not as interesting.

But it’s easier to write lines, I guess, when you have an eeeevil character instead of an impersonal, implacable collective.

That said, the film looks very nice, especially on bluray, and there are several scenes that have nerve. I’m just… disappointed.

This blog post is part of the Century series.