Some favourites to share:

Around when I mentioned The First $20 Million a while back, I thought I'd take some time to think about some favourites I have in the filmographic world. I finally got around to finishing that.
Maybe we have similar taste. Or maybe you just need something to watch and figure my suggestions are as good as any. In any case, here's a list, in no particular order:

Matilda

Based on a Roald Dhal young adult novel, this is the story of Matilda, a telekinetic 6 1/2 year old whose life kinda sucks. How it sucks and what makes it better is, of course, your choice to pursue.

The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest

A young man quits his job as he finds it unfulfilling and goes to school at MIT hoping to make the world better or some such thing. The "coach" of the robotics team doesn't like him, so saddles him with the trashcan project of the PC $99. The young man and a trio of other.... less than desirable guys tries to make this happen, and save it in turn.

What Dreams May Come

A Robin Williams film. The man loses his children, and then dies. As he tries to navigate heaven he learns some unpleasant things about his wife's fate, and tries to rescue her. This film is visually stunning, and makes you want to believe in an afterlife.

Memento

A questionable choice, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. It is one of the only films I've seen that pulled off the backwards narration thing. A piecemeal film to say the least.

The main guy has amnesia that resets as soon as he is distracted from a thought. He is trying to figure things out and find the murderer of his late wife.

My Neighbor Totoro

An animated movie from Japan, written by Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl's Moving Castle, pretty much every anime movie that became popular over here). A father moves with his two girls to the country side, I think to spare them some of the grief of their mother being ill (cancer?) and probably for cost. The girls meet some forest spirits (Totoro) and have fun with them while exploring the area around their house and school.

Silence of the Lambs

Anthony Hopkins is in this, which immediately makes it watchable for me.

Serial killers, FBI agents, psycho thriller. Yup, my kind of movie.

Surveillance

FBI agents, serial killers, psycho thriller. Did I mention this is my kind of movie? Some FBI agents were called in to help with a brutal murder that happened in the country side. No one is telling the truth, and the murderers are pretty twisted. (But in the way I can relate to, if that doesn't scare you) It also helps that I guessed the killers in the first ten minutes, which made it surprisingly more enjoyable.

Avatar

You've probably seen this, or at least heard of it a half-dozen times.

An alien world is being mined to the degeneration of the locals, big fight, romance blahblahblah.

I wnet into this movie thinking the story would suck, but it would be visually amazing, and maybe I'd hear a bit of professional conlanging.

I was pleasantly surprised, not disappointed and thoroughly disappointed respectively.

An okay story, very good visuals, but not enough dealing with the conworld/lang.

Minority Report

Future-y sci-fi-y. The police figured out a way to catch criminals before they commit a crime (which seems great for emotional attacks like the first one shown. Can you imagine living with that sort of guilt?) Tom Cruise then has to prove his future-innocence.

Lucky Number Slevin

Very neat with lots of twists and retribution. Good if you like figuring out who did what when.

Set in sorta present (kinda past) maybe '99-2000? With some set in the '70s. Some dude is trying to live his life, borrowing his friend's apartment, when he gets caught in a gang war. Then things just get loopy.

Shutter Island

Another one with lots of twists. Some police officer is on a creepy island that houses an asylum for the criminally insane, back in the '50s. He slowly works out more and more odd things about the hospital, conspiracies and plots. His life might be in danger.

The SAW series

It is gory, yeah. But it is less of a horror movie than some. Some guy is trying to mete out justice in the most violent ways possible. But the why and the who keep changing. So lots of twists there too. Eight movies that got compressed into seven (including SAW 3D). Everything is very well planned out, obviously from the beginning. the last few seem a bit rushed.

Rango

Bit different tone here =P

Animated.

This lizard (chameleon, Johnny Depp) finds himself suddenly in the middle of desertville, nowhere. As he finds a place to stay, he also finds trouble and plots and hilarity. It is a kid's movie after all.

Surprisingly enjoyable.

Sucker Punch

The most recent thing I've seen in theaters. About a girl pressed into an asylum by her abusive father, who presses for a lobotomy to keep her quiet.

Lots of good music, though the movie itself is a bit ridiculous. Has a very good ending though.

Pacing in filmography

Today I watched Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland followed directly by Eminem's 8 Mile. And I noticed something. While the two movies are obviously disparate, there was one thing that really stood out to me, and that was the timing between the two movies, the pace and how it lent itself to the narrative.

Alice in Wonderland lets you just float and trail along for the most part. There is no real force in any direction, just the most minor hint of a push forward.

8 Mile comes at you like a bullet train to the back telling you that you either go forward of get run down.

That push and drive is something that really kept me in the movie, despite my interest waning near the middle. They throw thing after thing at you, questions of a sort, and then hold a gun to your head asking you to answer them. Which is kinda neat. It makes you feel involved in the film and important.

The only problem with a push like that is that, as media consumers, we are accustomed to being brought down from a high slowly. Led there, hand held the whole way. 8 Mile didn't do that. At all. When the end credits started rolling I was left with a "that's it?" feeling, and I think what happened there is I got so used to the pushpushpush that the sudden... nothing didn't feel right.

I mean, it makes sense, being a biography of sorts, life just isn't so kind as to wrap up all the loose ends for people. But it still felt a bit... rough, I guess.

As for Alice (who is a character in 8 Mile, I laughed when the name showed up), there is that lull I mentioned, just a slight ebb in the right direction. Which is a nice alternative to the pushiness. It lets you rest and listen, not needing to provide to the story, or fill anything in. It feels like a story tale (which it is, so kudos there Mr. Carroll and Mr. Burton), and plays like one.

In a way that is almost disappointing though, in comparison. It doesn't give you any hand hold to grab onto and wish it were all real. From the very moment we reach the engagement party everything takes on a varnish of fakeness that is hard to get over. The story is being told to you, and that is that. A large wall of "It's not real folks!" surrounds the whole movie, keeping you firmly here, and them firmly there.

Which kinda sucks.

(Though I wouldn't want to deal with that frumious Bandersnatch, no matter how cute it is.)

So there you have it. Some late night (Early morning, actually) ramblings about symbolism through video pacing. Have fun with that.

A $25 computer?

Not quite.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation seems set on bringing one of my favourite movies to life. And thankfully not the previously mentioned eXistenZ.

No, they're going the way of The First $20 Million is Always the Hardest. In that movie they are trying to make the PC $99, a computer that costs less than a hundred dollars to make. Now, if that seems kinda familiar, you might want to remember the One Laptop Per Child company, the one making a full-on laptop and selling them near-cost for $100 to impoverished children?

Yeah, this is kinda like that.

The Raspberry Pi is a computer that costs approximately $25 and is hoped to be used to teach computer programming to children. The little thing has no monitor or keyboard, but instead has two ports, an HDMI and a USB: One to plug in an HDMI capable TV or monitor, the other to attach a USB keyboard. (Is it bad to feel old that I remember the keyboards that used headphone-esque jacks?)

The little stick then allows you to boot up Ubuntu or another open-source OS.

Anyway, I'm not a very computer-y person. If it isn't working I can give some suggestions to how to fix it, but the jargon that surrounds the field goes way over my head. So instead of just lyring the specs, I'll just link you to a few places that have more info, in case you are on of the more savvy among us:

Slashdot

Geek

And of course, the previously linked foundation website, Raspberry Pi.

So what does this mean? Hopefully it will help bring about change in the computer world, much like the One Laptop per Child did, and unobfuscate the way the computer is built and functions. Hopefully it will bring more power to the young and trodden upon in places that are in desperate need of change.

If nothing else, hopefully it'll help bring about some more savvy people, and create a trend for lower cost, high function machines in this world.

Vanilla Sky

I don't want this to become a movie blog... but it kinda is.

However that's what I've been doing, so it's what I'm writing about. (A lot of contractions in that sentence.)

I watched Vanilla Sky Friday night. Another from that list of more mind-blowing than Inception.

And I'd say, eh, not so much. It was a good movie, interesting, confusing as hell at times, but the base concept wasn't any more mind-blowing than Inception really.

Spoilers ahoy:

Guy dies, is frozen cryogenically, is stuck in a lucid dream (though these people don't seem to understand that part of a lucid dream is that you know you are dreaming...) and gets fucked up in his head before choosing to wake up.

Of course, not so straight forward. It isn't until the last scene that any of it really makes sense.

Good movie, I'd give it 4.5/5 It lost half a point for being just a bit too confusing at times. Kinda left me bored because of it.

Movies, Movies, Movies

So I've been watching movies. A lot of them.

I tried to watch Sweeny Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street again, but the only version I could find was in French. Fuck French.

That's when I went on to eXistenZ. Then I watched The Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. Which was an interesting concept, but kind sucked...

I watched Mrs. Doubtfire again yesterday, and I found a great example of being "in lesbians" with someone, as Scott Pilgrim put forth. The mother, Miranda, dislikes Daniel and the way he acts, but loves Mrs. Doubtfire for the things she does. But Mrs. Doubtfire is Daniel, just a different side of him. So while she may not be in love with Daniel, she is certainly in lesbians with her.

I don't know, it made more sense at the time.

I just finished watching Matilda for maybe the millionth time. I love that movie so much. But I can probably mark it as the beginning of my teacher obsession. Who wouldn't want to meet Ms. Honey?

Alas, the teacher thing will probably never pan out for me, (though I can hope~) but it is heartwarming to watch. Roald Dahl is an amazing mind.

eXistenZ

Mindfuck in a movie, basically. I found out about it through Stumble, I got hit to another blog with a list of movies "more mindblowing than Inception" and he was right!

(I've been trying to work my way through the list, but I've skipped Primer as I can't find an in-sync version to watch, Revolver as I didn't feel like it and Memento because I've seen it recently)

I watched eXistenZ last night and when the movie ended I quite literally let out a hearty laugh and a "Woah! Fuck that was awesome!" Those who know me know that my use of expletives, while not rare, is limited. This was a perfect occasion.

Following a game designer and her sexual interest (though the way she was acted it seemed everyone/thing was her sexual interest) the movie takes you in and out and around many levels of a game world. Like Inception, except I actually enjoyed it. Inception I found too straight forward and, eh, kinda hard to suspend my disbelief. eXistenZ had me believing it could really happen, that people could get so engrossed in their video games that they could lose sight of reality -- big time!

I have to say that there are some... odd gadgets, the whole movie seems to be laced with sexuality to the point where even the game controllers (pods) seem like organs meant to be fondled. Plus a gun made out of mutated reptile bones.

Anyway. Good movie, really kept me thinking through it. The layers were engaging, the characters were so-so, but the ideas behind it all? Superb.

EDUCATION

Have some documentaries, I don't feel like writing anything witty, I'm learning about dogfighting in the EU:

Documentaries this a-way!

-- Some of them appear to be down.