Leonard Richardson's Blog, page 21
June 1, 2013
May Film Roundup
Fahrenheit 451 (1966): Or, "From Truffaut to True Friend." Because I figured out why the French New Wave keeps not doing it for me. Truffaut et al. keep making films that would be much better as genre films! The lingering, visually striking shots; the stylized dialogue, the existential despair; all hallmarks of science fiction and noir. That's why I thought I would like this stuff. That's why I thought I'd like Shoot the Piano Player. But none of it worked for me, until Fahrenheit 451. From IMDB:
François Truffaut reportedly said that he found science fiction films uninteresting and arbitrary. Because of this, a friend of his told him the story of Ray Bradbury's novel 'Fahrenheit 451'. Immediately afterward, Truffaut wanted to make a film from the novel and subsequently spent years raising the financing.
It was a simple communication problem. "Ze science fiction films, zey are not so good." "Well, have you read this one science fiction book?" "Ze holy shit, it will be my life's work!"
The movie's got issues. Oskar Werner hated Truffaut, and takes it out on us by Nicholas Caging his way through the lead role. Truffaut was so excited about making this movie that he finished the screenplay before becoming fluent in English. But hey, it's a dystopia whose defining feature is a lack of high culture. People are gonna act like robots and talk like poorly-translated subtitles. Fahrenheit 451 captures the school of SF in which sheer desire to tell a story compensates for the lack of literary chops. That means it's nothing like Bradbury, but it ain't bad.
Promised Land (1975): The best thing about seeing movies at the museum, apart from the eclectic selection and the fact that it's usually free for members, is that you don't have to sit through a bunch of ads and trailers. At most, the curator will give a little speech. But the Promised Land showing brought back some of that traditional cinema non-magic, by not being free to members and by having a whole bunch of speeches beforehand, simulating the trailer experience nicely. I will admit it's not every day you get to hear from the consul-general of the Polish consulate in New York.
OK, the movie itself. By the director of Ashes and Diamonds, and having many of the same visual trademarks as that movie, notably "light streaming through windows" and "blood-stained white cloth". There's a lot of blood in this one, actually: industrial accidents, third-degree burns, plutocrat cane-beatings, and old-fashioned fistfights and riots. The movie's engaging the whole way through, and there are a couple scenes that are amazingly clever--I loved the scene in the theater and the scene where the Bartleby-like clerk tells off his boss.
But I was never surprised. It's an adaptation of a nineteenth-century novel, it's a movie about industrialists made in a communist country, and it goes pretty much as I thought it would. No, I was surprised, once. There's one glorious moment when entrepreneur Moryc Welt is so relieved and exhausted from having carried off a con that he breaks the fourth wall. He becomes his actor, Wojciech Pszoniak. Pszoniak looks at the camera and waves excitedly at the audience. A little flash, and then he's back to being Moryc Welt, and the movie is back to being what you thought it was.
Good movie? Sure. Three hours worth of entertainment. Much better than Ashes and Diamonds. But not the transcendent experience I go into these movies hoping for.
A Hard Day's Night (1964): Goofy fun. I was going to say "not much of substance", but the essay that accompanied this screening said that its cinematography was very influential. So, there's your substance.
This movie solidified my opinion that Ringo is the most interesting Beatle. He's the only one in A Hard Day's Night who's willing to create comedy at his own expense. As long as I'm throwing Molotov cocktails: I'm kind of tired of the Beatles' music. I used to like it a lot, I still respect it, but I've been hearing this stuff for twenty years and it's time to take it off heavy rotation. Not A Hard Day's Night's fault, but the scenes where the Beatles are just playing their instruments and people are screaming didn't move me at all. They were just kinda creepy.
Upstream Color (2013): Went to see this at IFC as a date with Sumana but the showing was CANCELLED, so we just had dinner.
Star Trek Into Darkness (2013): I wasn't even going to see this. The buzz was so negative, with J.J. Abrams doing that thing he does, where he reveals something really dumb in a way so vague that you mentally fill in the clever thing he could be doing instead. I'd gone so far as to write off the entire franchise, the way we write off the Roman Republic once Julius Caesar comes along, even though there's still a good five hundred years of consuls and quaestors serving something called "the republic of Rome".
But Sumana saw it, and wanted to talk about it, so I saw it with Beth. And... it exceeded my low expectations! Since you can't make a Star Trek movie these days unless it's a ripoff of The Wrath of Khan, it makes sense to literally remake The Wrath of Khan. In fact, at this point my review of the 2009 movie and my notes on Khan envy suffice to say most of what I want to say about Star Trek Into Darkness. It's pretty much the same movie as Star Trek, the difference being that I'm not going to put up with it any more. Rip off The Wrath of Khan once, shame on you. Rip off The Wrath of Khan twice, shame on me.
And 2009-era Leonard, we gotta talk about plots not making sense. I've written a novel since then and I now see that there are different levels of making sense. On a technical level, the Genesis device is nonsense, but thematically it's perfect. Genesis has enormous creative potential, but when Khan learns about it, all he sees is a weapon. Khan thinks he should rule humanity, but he doesn't know what humanity is for.
On the other hand, red matter, or the "red matter" deus ex machina in this movie... who the hell cares? It's a special effect. It has whatever properties are necessary to drive the plot forward. Nobody's gonna say "I sure wish they'd do something that revisits that issue."
And that's the difference between good Star Trek and crap Star Trek. The closest this movie came to good Trek was Scotty's rejection of the militarization of Starfleet. Yes, Scotty is the film's moral center, and that's the only thing about this movie that is truly great.
You know what? I'm changing the holy film rankings. Don't try to stop me! I'm doing this for all our sakes. The best Star Trek movie is now The Voyage Home, the one about using social engineering to clear up a big misunderstanding. The second-best Star Trek movie is now The Undiscovered Country, the one about confronting your prejudice and making peace with your enemies. The Wrath of Khan is now only the third-best Star Trek movie. Do you hear me? The third-best! AH HA HA HA H
PS: Amitabh Bachchan for Khan.
Arrested Development (2013): Not gonna make a habit of mentioning TV show-like things in these roundups, but c'mon, it's Arrested Development. Season 4 had the feeling of a "darker, grittier" reboot. I enjoyed watching the puzzle unfold, but was it really a comedy? It wasn't that much funnier than, say, Breaking Bad. Well, who's to say what's a "comedy"? It was really well done. Needs some editing though.
May 14, 2013
Beautiful Soup 4.2.0
Here are the release notes. The main new features are a much more capable CSS selector engine, and a diagnostics module that should help with tech support.
May 1, 2013
Story Bundle
including Jordan Mechner's "The Making of Prince of Persia and a Ralph Baer memoir which--just guessing here--is probably enjoyably cranky.
And for people who discover Constellation Games based on this bundle, this is my occasional notification that there are tons of free extras: four bonus stories, in-character Twitter feeds, and an episode guide with commentary.
Side note: the bundle was assembled by Simon Carless, who is the reason I wrote Constellation Games in the first place.
April Film Roundup
The General (1926): This is one of the best movies I've ever seen. It's so well put together. The movie is basically two chase scenes, and each chase scene is made entirely of inventive Jackie Chan-style action gags. People in the theater were cheering, which I've never experienced before, and laughing to an extent not heard since The Whole Town's Talking. The General has all the good things Chaplin put into his films, but none of the treacly sentimentality. The one bit of sentimentality is deflated by its co-occurance with the one bit of corny dated-looking special effects.
No surprise, then, that this was Keaton's Ishtar: a way-too-expensive flop that cost him his creative control. You can Watch The General on the Internet Archive, but as always with silent film the problem is finding an appropriate soundtrack. We heard an amazing live soundtrack performed by Viola Dana, and they have a CD available, but the CD only has "selections". So maybe try Stravinsky's "Chamber Works", as suggested by a comment on this page? I bet some peppy chiptunes would also work.
Die Hard (1988): Not one of the best movies I've ever seen. It deserves a lot of credit as the pinnacle of the 80s action movie, but at this point I've seen some action movies from the 70s, and it feels like movie execs saw Die Hard and said "well, we found it!" and the genre never advanced again. Not really Die Hard's fault, but it's hard not to be bitter.
For improvisational comedy-violence, The General is better. Not just my idiosyncratic opinion! The General's IMDB rating is 8.4, versus Die Hard's 8.3, and at the high end of the distribution, 0.1 IMDB star is worth a lot.
Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928): A big disappointment after The General. Buster Keaton has lost his creative control, and it shows. The film lacks a through-line (unlike The General, which was literally on rails), and promises a "snobs vs. slobs" rivalry that never gets going. Partially redeemed by great stunts. This, too, can be seen on the Internet Archive.
Tai Chi Zero (2012): Zany anti-colonialist steampunk kung fu movie that annotates events with video game-style infographics and otherwise breaks the fourth wall all the time. It's kind of China's Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, and judging from online reviews it's just as divisive. We liked it a lot. (I also liked Scott Pilgrim.) It's got big problems, notably the acting, which is very stiff. But most of the actors were chosen for their martial arts ability, and martial arts are happening about seventy percent of the time. The only time the fourth-wall-breaking got out of control was a scene at the beginning of the third act, which blends together "we're planning this heist" shots and hypothetical "this is what it will look like when you carry out the heist" shots, and then starts mixing in "this is how the heist actually went down" shots! It took about thirty seconds before I realized that I was now watching the actual heist.
Sometimes the problems made me enjoy the movie more! The awkward English scenes gave me an experience similar to what I imagine a Mandarin speaker feels watching a Mandarin scene in an American movie. There's a steampunk tank with an English instruction manual, which was supposedly written by Brits but which reads exactly like the instruction manuals that come with Chinese-manufactured kitchen appliances. I thought the villain was a more complex character than he actually was, because I assumed that if everyone derides a character as a wimp, that makes him the underdog and you're supposed to have some sympathy for him. But no, apparently not in this movie.
Oh, and you know how they say "there ought to be a law?" Well, the special effects supervisor for Tai Chi Zero is credited as "A Law". So now there is A Law!
But I gotta tell you that this is not a standalone movie. It could have been, but about three minutes from the end it turns into The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, introduces a whole bunch of new characters, sets up a sequel and leaves you hanging.
Tai Chi Hero (2012): Fortunately, the sequel is playing in Times Square right now, so we went and saw it the next day. Aaaand... we were very disappointed. If you liked all the steampunk and fourth-wall-breaking from the first movie, then too bad, because there's no steampunk until the second act and no fourth-wall-breaking until the third. (The steampunk, when it finally happens, is still great.) On the other hand, if you hated all that nerd shit from the first movie, you'll love the by-the-numbers soap opera they replaced it with.
On top of everything else, the title of this movie retroactively makes the title of the previous movie dumb. I can't believe they got Peter Stormare to... wait, he was in Armageddon, never mind.
April 27, 2013
Board Game Dadaist Improvements
April 18, 2013
In Search of the Beautiful Soup Double-Dippers
If anyone knows how to convince everyone to use PyPI, I'd appreciate the knowledge. But it's not a big deal right now, and it gives me some visibility into how people are using Beautiful Soup. Visibility which I will share with you.
Yesterday, the 17th, the Beautiful Soup 4.1.3 tarball was downloaded 2223 times. It is by far the most popular thing on crummy.com. The second most popular thing is the Beautiful Soup 3.2.1 tarball, which was downloaded 381 times. The vast majority of the downloads were from installation scripts: distribute or setuptools.
1516 distinct IP addresses were responsible for the 2223 downloads of 4.1.3. I wrote a script to find out how many IP addresses downloaded Beautiful Soup more than once. The results:
Downloads from a single IP
Number of times this happened
551
351
151
131
111
52
412
343
2453
11001
Naturally my attention was drawn to the outliers at the top of the table. I investigated them individually.
The IP address responsible for 55 downloads is a software company of the sort that might be deploying to a bunch of computers behind a proxy. The 35 is an individual on a cable modem who, judging from their other traces on the Internet, is deploying to a bunch of computers using Puppet. The 15, the 13, and the 11 are all from Travis CI, a continuous integration service.
One of the two 5s was an Amazon EC2 instance. Five of the twelve 4s were Amazon EC2 instances. Thirty-seven of the forty-three 3s were Amazon EC2 instances. And 395 of the 453 double-dippers were Amazon EC2 instances. Something's clearly going on with EC2. (There was also one download from within Amazon corporate, among other BigCo downloaders.)
I hypothesized that the overall majority of duplicate requests are from Amazon EC2 instances being wiped and redeployed. To test this hypothesis I went through all the double-dippers and calculated the time between the first request and the second. My results are in this scatter plot. Each point on the plot represents an IP address that downloaded Beautiful Soup twice yesterday.
For EC2 instances, the median time between requests is 11 hours and 45 minutes. So EC2 instances are being automatically redeployed twice a day. For non-EC2 instances, the median time between requests is 51 minutes, and the modal time is about zero. Those people set up a dev environment, discover that something doesn't work, and try it again from scratch.
April 1, 2013
March Film Roundup
Which is to say that I skipped most of the museum's highly avant-garde March offerings. I also got this book I have to work on. So not many movies in this roundup. Let's-a go:
Fallen Angel (1945): Decent noir with a fake mystery and an interesting twist at the end (in terms of which characters got what they wanted and how, not in terms of plot). John Carradine appeared as a classic comedic noir conman, but he had to appear in twenty other movies, so he left after the first reel, much to Fallen Angel's detriment.
Turns out
a noir film is my popcorn movie. I'll go see any number of them but I'm not expecting great things from them. PS: there is no popcorn allowed in the museum theater.
Horse Feathers (1932): Still really funny, but this is the first viewing where I noticed that the Marx Brothers' general disrespect for society encompasses a lot of misogny. It's not just Harpo chasing the choir girls. In fact, Groucho's the worst. It doesn't help that there's no Margaret Dumont here to take up the flag of society and fight back. But Chico filling bottles in the speakeasy will never get old.
Ikiru (1952): Watched on Hulu during the free Kurosawa weekend. Highly recommended. A little heavy-handed at the beginning, but it really started paying off when the main character died. (Not a spoiler.) At that point I saw a masterful display of one of the most difficult and most important things that fiction can bring to our attention: the mechanics by which we all construct narratives for our lives in which we're the good guy making good things happen.
Bonus: everyone referred to Takashi Shimura's character as "Kacho", deepening my belief that Game Center CX is a workplace satire in the vein of Ikiru.
Wreck-it Ralph (2012): I'm not sure who gave Disney the idea that it's okay to use other people's intellectual property in their movies, but it gives good results. Wreck-it Ralph is a by-the-numbers Disney narrative, but the fact that it's a movie about arcade games and their by-the-numbers narratives leaves quite a bit of room for subversion and criticism, in service of the larger goal of feel-good entertainment. As with Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, I thought the original characters were a lot more interesting than the famous cameos, to the extent that I continually wished the famous cameos would butt out and let the original characters get on with it.
(The worst cameo was Sonic the Hedgehog's infodumpy PSA near the beginning. Awful! But! What if it was a sly reference to those dumb PSAs at the end of the old Sonic cartoons? Does an obscure reference deserve respect even when deployed as a cheesy infodump? OH THE DILEMMA)
The museum showed this in 3D, and I was apprehensive about the extra D. I can report that it neither caused me headaches nor made me want to see all movies in 3D from this point on.
2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967): The French New Wave eludes me again. There's one great scene in this, in which the conspiratorially-whispering narrator (Godard himself) deconstructs the subject-object distinction to the extent that he loses the ability to make directorial decisions, and lets the camera linger on some trees for a while. There's a few other good bits, and lots of Ballardian imagery. Makes me want to watch Alphaville even more. But... eh. Eh, I say!
March 26, 2013
From an interview with Ken Liu, recent Hugo/Nebula/WFA wi...
I went to law school, started a new job, and kind of gave up on writing for a while due to a supreme act of stupidity. I wrote this one story that I really loved, but no one would buy it. Instead of writing more stories and subbing them, as those wiser than I was would have told me, I obsessively revised it and sent it back out, over and over, until I eventually gave up, concluding that I was never going to be published again.And then, in 2009, Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson bought that story, "Single-Bit Error," for their anthology, Thoughtcrime Experiments. The premise of the anthology was, in the editors' words, "to find mind-breakingly good science fiction/fantasy stories that other editors had rejected, and release them into the commons for readers to enjoy."
I can't tell you how much that sale meant to me. The fact that someone liked that story after years of rejections made me realize that I just had to find the one editor, the one reader who got my story, and it was enough. Instead of trying to divine what some mythical ur-editor or "the market" wanted, I felt free, after that experience, to just try to tell stories that I wanted to see told and not worry so much about selling or not selling. I got back into writing—and amazingly, my stories began to sell.
Case closed, I'd say.
March 4, 2013
February Film Roundup
Roots (1977): I'd never seen Roots. We watched it so we could reasonably go to a reunion interview at the museum featuring Levar Burton, Louis Gossett Jr., Leslie Uggams, and Ben Vereen. Here's Sumana's take. Non-surprise: Roots is really good! I have only one complaint: it was disconcerting to see Levar Burton abruptly replaced by John Amos in a "nine years later" flash-forward, since we now know that age cannot change the essential Levar Burton-ness of Levar Burton.
My other complaint was going to be that some (not all) of the villains were one-dimensional villains defined entirely by their hatred for the main characters. I'm actually okay with this in certain kinds of pieces, and Roots definitely qualifies, so my criticism was going to be somewhat muted. But then something magical happened that cancelled my criticism altogether.
You see, in a decision that probably made sense to whichever ABC exec was trying to backpedal from having greenlit Roots in the first place, it was decided to cast "television's most likeable white actors" in the roles of the villains, to sort of tone it down a little. At least that's what it said in the little mini-documentary on Roots that they showed before the reunion interview. If an actor's natural "likeability" tones down the evil of their character, that means they're not a very good actor, so it's a good thing that the whole "likeability" thing was a bust.
But then! The most despicable villain of the entire show, the final boss of Roots, the very face of evil, was played by genial, honey-voiced Burl Ives. Amazing! It was like watching Burl Ives play Saruman. I don't think that's what they were going for, but it was great. And I can confirm that Roots as a whole deserves all the praise given to it over the years. Ben Vereen, in particular, is amazing.
Killer of Sheep (1979): A sad movie about a man so beat-down by the grim meathook future that he can't appreciate the odd moments of grace when they pop up. It's always been tough for me to stay engaged in a movie that has no through-line, but after the first half of Celine and Julie Go Boating I've learned to treat it as the dramatic equivalent of sketch comedy. And although this movie is not a comedy, its brand of existential despair gives it something in common with sketch comedy, so it wasn't as much of a mismatch as you might think.
Metropolis (1927): The first of several movies we saw on Hulu when they made their Criterion movies free to watch over the course of a weekend. I'd seen it before; Sumana had not. My current opinion is an amplified version of my old, uninformed opinion. As a story, Metropolis is terrible, but if you treat it as an opera it's a pretty good opera, with lots of awesome stuff to look at. And the robot's wink is one of my favorite film shots ever.
Modern Times (1936): Sumana has zero tolerance for protagonists whose incompetence is supposed to be endearing. Since endearing incompetence is the Little Tramp character's stock in trade, I probably should have anticipated her reaction to Modern Times. I wouldn't say I have zero tolerance for such protagonists, but I don't have a lot, and it really dampened the mood of the movie. Bright moments include the feeding-machine scene, the Tramp getting high on coke, and the one line of silent-film dialogue that redeems his incompetence (paraphrased): "I'll do whatever it takes to get you a home, even if I have to work for it!"
Diabolique (1955): The cream of Criterion Weekend, an exciting thriller that Hitchcock wanted to direct but Henri-Georges Clouzot got there first. So the authors of the novel on which Diabolique was based wrote another novel with a similar twist but which was probably a lot worse, because that novel became Vertigo. I guess back then you couldn't just write a screenplay, you had to try it out as a novel first.
While watching this movie we noticed that it's effectively a Columbo episode. A little while later we watched the movie that serves as the pilot episode of Columbo, and there were quite a few similarities to Diabolique! Coincidence? I really don't know. The play that introduced the Columbo character premiered in 1960.
Bonus: Hulu kept interrupting the movies with commercials, creating the bizarre experience of watching subtitled French films on a local TV station in 1993. They've clearly got an algorithm for determining how many commercials they can cram in before people stop watching, because near the end of Diabolique the commercial breaks started coming once every six minutes. It's so suspenseful, they know no one's going to tune out.
It was the same three or four commercials the whole weekend, and one of the commercials included the perfect iambic-tetrameter line "In every segment we compete," which we mashed up with Sydney Smith's Answer to an Invitation to Dine at Fishmongers Hall.
In every segment we compete
The monsters of the deep to eat
Shoot the Piano Player (1960): Hulu called this "Truffault's most playful film", and I misinterpreted this statement as implying that the movie would be a comedy. It is not a comedy, but it's not bad. I dunno about this whole French New Wave thing, though. I just don't know.
I Married A Witch (1942): This was a comedy, and it was terrible. You know how sometimes a movie gets into Criterion more because it's representative of a genre than because it's good? I suspect that happened here. This is the perfect "stupid black-and-white non-musical comedy." After a decent opening it went downhill fast, and by mutual agreement Sumana and I skipped the middle 45 minutes of this 77-minute movie. Fortunately, this movie ends with a witch stealing a gubernatorial election through brainwashing and magical vote fraud! Stupendous! But please don't take that as an endorsement of the movie as a whole. I Married A Witch has an IMDB rating of 7.1, a rating that rightfully belongs to Ishtar.
Foreign Correspondent (1940): Hitchcock's propaganda thriller. I was definitely caught up in it but I don't have a lot to say about it in the cold light of day. Some of the twists were not that surprising, others were good examples of Hitchcock thinking outside the cinematic box. E.g. most of the main characters get on a passenger plane to America and you're in the middle of some piddling drama that pits Group A against Group B, but then the real twist happens which is the plane is shot down by a German submarine!
The Great Dictator (1940): I rewatched this after Sumana went to sleep, in an effort to get one more free Criterion movie out of Hulu. I remember really liking The Great Dictator and I wanted to bring my recently honed film-watching skills to bear on it. And it's... uneven. Chaplin's tramp-like character is as genially incompetent as ever, and his author-mouthpiece speech at the end, which expresses a lot of nice sentiments, makes no sense in terms of plot and does nothing to fulfil the incredibly tense dramatic situation that the rest of the movie has been building up. (Compare the speech at the end of Foreign Correspondent, in which Hitchcock puts away all his cinematic tricks and gimmicks and simply begs the American audience for help.) So I guess I have zero tolerance for sappy melodrama in comedies, especially comedies about horrible wars.
But when Chaplin plays Hitler it's amazing. This is the portrayal I can imagine getting under the dictator's skin. "Adenoid Hynkel" is a petty, insecure, puffed-up, blustering asshole, the opposite of Chaplin's tramp, a man whose legendary incompetence threatens to ruin the world. You can tell that Chaplin wasn't aware of how evil Hitler really was (or else you can understand why he claimed he hadn't been aware). Even though this is the most scathing satirical portrayal of Hitler I've ever seen--and well-timed to boot--you'd always feel bad for even deploying satire as a weapon instead of buying more government bonds.
Emma Mae (1976): Kind of an unintentional pun on "MMA" there. Director Jamaa Fanaka tried to make a funny action film for a black audience, only to see it dubbed "blaxploitation" and released on DVD as "Black Sister's Revenge". Well, it's a very fun movie, but if you're expecting "Black Sister's Revenge" you're gonna be disappointed.
IMDB trivia says Fanaka was a fan of Billy Wilder, and it shows in this story of a country girl who comes to L.A. to live with her aunt and uncle. The plot, the action and the comedy are all driven by Emma Mae's tendency to take the most direct approach to any problem. A guy calls Emma Mae a hick, so she hits him. Her boyfriend gets arrested, so she starts a car wash to raise money to pay his bail. Someone else thinks a car wash is a dumb idea, so Emma Mae hits her. The Man shuts down her car wash, so Emma Mae robs a bank. And so on.
Jerri Hayes, who played Emma Mae, came to the showing and said that before Fanaka died last year, they'd been talking about doing a sequel to Emma Mae. That would have been really fun to see.
J.S.A.: Joint Security Area (2000): March bonus! I don't have the stomach for Oldboy, so I'm skipping most of the Chan-wook Park festival, but I figured I could handle a thriller about the Korean DMZ. I mean, the worst that can happen is nuclear war. And it was pretty good! I was analyzing the movie while watching it (occupational hazard) and thinking how its use of symbolism and callbacks was corny and heavy-handed, but then the very last shot of the movie tied together two earlier scenes, which initially seemed to be nothing but comic relief, into the movie as a whole. Tied it all together in a way that made those scenes transcend comic relief to create something moving. The very last shot changed my opinion of the movie from "pretty good" to "very good". I didn't think that stuff happened in real life.
My attempt to explain this experience to Sumana revealed that this is very much a "you had to be there" thing, but if you have the chance to be there, I think you should take it. I'm not gonna say there's no disturbing violence in this movie, but it's no Oldboy.
February 28, 2013
Ragtime Synchronicity
"Bugs," said Krakowski. "In-tell-i-gence gathering devices. The
Constellation loves recording things. Now they're going to record
every conversation anyone ever has."
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