Uh-oh. A French film about livestock. This isn’t going to have a happy ending.
Or middle, or beginning.
I love the stilted human actors, but having several very different-looking donkeys play Balthazar was kinda odd.
Au hasard Balthazar. Robert Bresson. 1966.
Crux
This post is part of the F&C series.
Err… 
mplayer doesn’t want to do screenshots of this fillum? Weird.
Well, I’ll just use my camera.
This post is part of the F&C series.
This is a kinda sadistic film, bur it takes a kinda empowering turn. And everything happens in one small apartment. Mostly in the same room. I kinda like that.
It starts out kinda dicey, but then turns into a really tense and gripping film. The plot, though… Sheesh…
Hepburn is great in this.
Wait Until Dark. Terence Young. 1967.
Ginger Beer Margarita
This post is part of the F&C series.
This film is so 70s! If I didn’t know that it was from 1968 and by Norman Jewison I would have guessed that it was from 1974 and by a very, very restrained Robert Altman. It’s like six years before its time.
The start, at least. The rest is more ordinary.
It could have been the most arty heist movie ever, but then it turns all boring after fifteen minutes or something.
The Thomas Crown Affaire. Norman Jewison. 1968.
Mexicola
This post is part of the F&C series.
Earlier this year I watched one film per year since I was born until now. Then it occurred 
to me that I’m the same age now that my father was when I was born. That’s just too conceptual! Could I watch one film per year from 1968 back to 1922?
Yes!
It’s possible! Although finding films before 1928 that I wanted to watch wasn’t trivial. And there will probably be a lot of Marx Brothers films in the early 30s.
Instead of picking film’s from g_monte’s lists (even though I love his or her’s taste in films), I’m basically going to watch lots of stuff I’ve bought but haven’t watched yet.
Supplemented by some extra purchases to fill out some years.
I now finally have all the films, so let’s roll! Whoo! Films! Old! Films!
tldr: New web site: Goshenite.
I’ve been reading American comics since the 80s. To put that into perspective for you youngsters: That was before Snapchat even existed.
Think about that for a moment.
Anyway, back in those days, Mile High Comics sent out a condensed list of everything all the comics distributors would be selling in three month’s time (including snarky comments), and I scanned through the list (on paper!) and ordered (or subscribed to) the stuff I wanted.
This was very efficient. Scanning lists on paper is something human beans do well.
Then the Internet happened, and everything went s-l-o-w.
These days, there’s only a single distributor — Diamond Comics. They do sell catalogues of everything they sell, but they’re big and annoying and not very scannable. The other options are a few comics shops that list the Diamond data (including Mile High), but they’re all so… old fashioned. Small, paginated lists and a whole lot of clicking.
In my opinion. Mileages vary more than the NOx output from a Volkswagen.
So I’ve just been web-scraping t
hose sites the past few decades to make the data scannable again.
But yesterday I had an idea: What if I were to put that data up on a more modern site that allows for better zombie-like scanning?
Design objectives:
I implemented this today, and you can see the results on Goshenite. The data is scraped from the Diamond web site — I hope they don’t mind. I mean, they’re distributors, so more channels to hawk their wares, the better?
The source code for the scraper is here, and the source code for the web site is here.
(Goshenite is a crystal that kinda looks like diamond. Clever, huh?)
The idea is that you can sit yourself down before your screen, tap happily on “arrow down” and the other keys, and when you see something you might want to buy, you hit “b”. After you’ve done, you hit the “Export” button and you get a list you can give to most any normal comics store in the US, and they’ll order the stuff for you.
Or just send the list to Mile High, which is what I’ll be doing.