Pat's Blog

Run, do NOT walk, to the nearest video store and grab this little gem of a movie. It is a rare, rare classic.

It's about a high school kid trying to figure out what's happened to his old girlfriend who called him again out of the blue asking for help. But what's interesting about it is that it's NOT a "high school/teen angst" movie!  It's actually a completely different genre set against a high school backdrop in a very clever bit of misdirection by some very creative people who are obviously huge film fans.

Trust me on this -- don't read up on it ahead of time, just watch it cold and see if you can figure out what genre they're actually honoring.  If you've spent any time watching movies at all you should figure it out in a few minutes and then you'll really enjoy the rest of the movie -- it's FUN.

Holy cow what a movie.  This may well end up on my list of "perfect films". 

It's a must-see for any movie buff, for sure.  There are three extended-take sequences that are talked about at great length in the movie's Wikipedia article.  All three of them were absolute genius, and no doubt made every single director and cinematographer in Hollywood sit up and take notice.  One of them is a total upstaging of Spielberg's now-famous "minivan shot" in War of the Worlds (where the camera seamlessly passes in and out and all around the minivan while its moving).  It just blows that shot away.  (Do yourself a favor and don't read the above linked article until after you see the shot.  You'll be kicking yourself trying to figure out how they did it, although it's so well done you may not notice it at all.)

I also can't remember the last time a director was brave enough to use Mahler's Kindertotenlieder.  Tough piece of music to mix into a movie, not to mention depressing as hell (the title means "songs on the death of children" -- very appropriate to the film!).  It's one of his greatest works, but you almost never hear it these days. 

Oh, watch for the highly amusing Pink Floyd reference early in the film.  Completely appropriate and totally awesome.  The moment it appeared on the screen I slammed the film to a halt, ran into the other room, and grabbed the album cover to show Roseanne!  

I'm still trying to figure out why they were playing King Crimson's magnum opus at that exact moment.  Both great moments in psychadelic rock, to be sure, but I wondered if there was a hidden connection I wasn't aware of.  I was a huge Floyd fan, but only a minor KC/ELP fan. 

CarbonFund.org has a calculator that lets you punch in a number of variables and calculate the amount of carbon your energy consumption produces over the course of a year.  You can then use that number to purchase carbon offset credits if you wish.

http://carbonfund.org/site/pages/calculator/

Last week with the help of a friend I made some changes to the way the turbocharger on my car (2007 Pontiac Solstice GXP) is managed by the engine computer.  It involved some slicing of rubber tubes and such.  The GXP turbo is really fast -- very little lag even in stock condition.  But there are certain situations where there is a tangible delay while the engine computer checked the pressure in the unit to make sure that it's not going to stall (what jet airplane types call "compressor surge", which is really bad if your compressor is holding 250 passengers aloft at 36,000 feet, but in in an automobile it just means a few seconds with less power).  The practical upshot of the mod is that the turbo is now available much sooner in the throttle's travel.  I can still accelerate without the turbocharger if I want to, just by not pressing down on the pedal as hard, but by having it available sooner it means that the power spools up more quickly, and is also more quickly returned after changing gears.

Fun stuff.  Anyway, here are a couple of pics.  I actually wrote up a full set of instructions and about twenty images for a discussion board for fellow Solstice owners, and if you're really curious you can see that whole thread here. 

My friend Hector pulling off the engine cover:

A shot of the engine with all the relevent parts labelled:

Modern engines sure are complicated, aren't they? 

If you're curious about the graphic on the front page, I made it in Photoshop by mashing-up several pieces of clip art and photos I found around the net.  There are pieces of about five or six different images in there, and there's some tiling going on as well as some color distortion.  Fun stuff.

Here's an earlier one I played around with.  I never could get the background (clouds) quite right:

It's amazing how many concert photos and music-oriented images and clip art there are out on the web. 

Um.  Wow.  Nothing like a well-made foreign film to show you just how repressed and inhibited American cinema is.  Let's just say that the title (which means "And Your Mother Too") has an extra layer of meaning.  Holy Toledo!  The LEAST explicit scene in this movie is the opening shot of the main character and his girlfriend having full-nude intercourse in full view of the camera.  And after you see the last sexual scene in the movie, you'll understand why this movie was not widely released in the US, nor was it submitted to the ratings board for approval.  (No, really?!)

But it's also a gorgeous movie.  Story-wise it's not really a genre I like -- coming-of-age movies are just not my thing.  But for a coming-of-age movie it was different, at least in terms of the setting.  So that was kinda interesting.  It'd be hard not to like these characters. 

The main reason to see this movie, however, is that it was made by Alfonso Cuaron.  He did it in the same style as his most recent film, "Children of Men", and it's not hard to see the similarities.  Both are "road movies", and both feature extensive use of "long shots".  Tambien, of course, had no special effects to speak of, but he makes the shots interesting through a number of really interesting ideas. 

The style is very slick, and I imagine I missed a great deal in this first viewing.  Some of the things I did catch were so subtle that I was pretty sure I missed other things.  Note, for example, the specific positioning of the teddy bear hanging from the rear view mirror as the movie progresses.  There's one shot in particular with that bear in it that was really great.

Definitely worth seeing, even if for no other reason than to see the work of a great film maker at the height of his power.  But in the name of all that is holy, make sure the kids don't sneak into the room!  

George Will:  "We're in the mess, in a way, because Justice Blackmun, when he wrote the opinion in Roe vs. Wade, discovered something constitutionally and morally profound in the fact that the number of months in the gestation of the human infant is nine, and that's divisible by three.  So we wound up with "first trimester," "second trimester," and "third trimester," with different rights of the state and the individual.  Let me ask you a question: What would our constitutional law look like if the number of months in the gestation of a human infant were a prime number?"

Sam Donaldson: "What's a prime number?"

This is a test blog post from Word 2007's new blog posting feature.

What's interesting to me is that they're not just sequels, but 3rd or 4th or 5th (or more) dips.  I'm not sure if that says something about the current state of cinema or not. 

Oceans 13 (really a "3", not a "13"!)
Harry Potter 5
Die Hard 4
Shrek 3
Spider-man 3
Pirates of the Caribbean 3
Rush Hour 3
Bourne Stupid 3

I'll probably put Die Hard 4 and Spider-man 3 on my Netflix list, and of course Harry Potter, but the rest of that stuff sure looks like shrek, er, I mean dreck.  But the movies I'm really looking forward to are the more original titles:

Transformers
Mr. Brooks
Fantastic Four 2 (it's only a "2"!)
Fido
Ratatouille (the new Pixar film)
1408 (new Stephen King)
The Last Legion (I'm a Romaphile, what can I say)
Rescue Dawn (a new film by Werner Herzog -- and it stars Christian Bale!)

It might also be interesting to see what the Wachowski Brothers do with Invasion of the Body Snatchers ("The Invasion", starring Nicole Kidman, due out in August), and of course Speed Racer (but that's next year).