Some more good movies I’ve recently (re-)watched:
American Hardcore
Choyonghan kajok
Bijitâ Q
Katakuri-ke no kôfuku
Herz aus Glas
Tideland
Setting Orange, Confusion 44, 3173 YOLD
Instead of watching TV, do yourself a favor and watch some good movies. Here are a few recommendations:
Life in Loops
A Scanner Darkly
Donnie Darko
2046
Bin-Jip
Samaria
Kin-Dza-Dza
Seom
Shortbus
Jisatsu saakuru
Sweetmorn, Discord 68, 3173 YOLD
Today I’ve been to the cinema for the first time in quite a while and watched Babel by Alejandro González Iñárritu of Amores perros and 21 Grams fame. Once again Iñárritu’s unexcited story telling is a welcome change from the fancy camera work and editing which got so popular in the last few years and serves the – sometimes a little too predictable – story well. The acting ranges between solid and excellent, and I especially liked the performance of Rinko Kikuchi who excels in the role of disturbed teenager Chieko.
Setting Orange, Chaos 35, 3173 YOLD
I just finished watching Rounders about half an hour ago, which is a really nice Poker movie and quite entertaining in general. Although the plot is a little too predictable at times, the great cast including Matt Damon, Edward Norton, John Turturro and John Malkovich more than makes up for it. The soundtrack was pretty cool too, so I decided to also order it along with a DVD of The Cincinnati Kid.
For additional Poker entertainment season 3 of High Stakes Poker started not too long ago and the first three episodes have been pretty good, although I’m already quite fed up by Mike Matusow’s constant babbling. I’m just not that happy with the player selection for the current season, since Phil Ivey and Gus Hansen are missing and I’d also love to see one of my personal favorites, Chris Esfandiari. Nonetheless I find HSP a lot more entertaining than NBC’s Poker After Dark, which had a great start when Phil Hellmuth was going ballistic in the very first episode.
I also found a really interesting thread on the 2+2 forums, where “Nate.” took on the challenge in turning $5 into $1000 in less than a week on PokerStars. I really wonder if the $5 Stars recently transferred to my account – I’ve only been playing Party and FullTilt lately – should be treated as a sign to try the same? 
Oh, and for the title of this post: It’s a quote from Rounders, and it’s as true as it gets.
Setting Orange, Chaos 35, 3173 YOLD
Movie:
It’s October, which means that movie enthusiasts in Vienna can watch loads of good movies at the Vienna International Film Festival (Viennale):. This year I unfortunately only have time to watch 2 movies, whereas normally it’s around 5-8… Yesterday evening we’ve been watching Alian and tomorrow we will see Hong yan.
So what’s there to say about Alian? It’s a movie by young Chinese director Wei Xueqi, which portraits two young couples in Guandong’s Perl River delta. He chose to go for a Dogma like style, only using a DV hand-camera, no make-up and no artificial lighting. All the directors were amateurs and quite a lot of the dialogues were improvised. All this adds together to the feeling of watching a documentary, which summons an image of modern China which is pretty congruent with my experiences from living there for a year. And that’s probably the main reason why one should go and watch Alian, despite the not really enthralling plot: it draws a good image of the people who don’t really profit from recent economic developments in China, namely rural workers who come to the booming cities in search for a better life, and who, more often than not, won’t find it. After the movie there was a little Q&A session with the director, which wasn’t bad, but also not overly interesting, especially since the translator seemed a little nervous, which led to some strange translations in both directions.
Podcast:
Most of you probably know writer Cory Doctorow from BoingBoing. If you are a fan of his fiction, you may be delighted to hear that Cory now has finished the first 9 episodes of his new podcast, where he reads the story ‘After the Siege’, which he wrote in chunks of 2-5000 words on long-haul flight segments. I’ve listened to the first 3 readings after I came home from the cinema yesterday, but unfortunately at 2:something a.m. my body decided to surrender to sleep, while my mind actually would have loved to hear more of Cory’s story. Go check it out, it’s pretty interesting as far as I’ve heard it!
Article:
Today I’ve read an article called ‘What business can learn from Open Source’ by Paul Graham which spb posted to the alt@gentoo.org alias in a recent discussion. I’m pretty sure though that this article has been around for quite some time now and I should probably have read it long ago, but better late than never. I think it’s a pretty good read, and judging from previous work experience it contains a lot of truth, especially on the “faking to be busy” part.
Recently BoingBoing had an article on the first international conference on netporn criticism. They quoted Mark Dery’s keynote, where I read this paragraph that really got me thinking:
Can we be far from the future foretold by J.G. Ballard, where car-crash enthusiasts get off on vehicular manslaughter and fans of Space Age snuff thrill to footage of astronauts being roasted alive during re-entry? In the introduction to his 1974 novel Crash, Ballard wondered if the android numbness induced by media bombardment – the “demise of feeling” – would open the door to “all our most real and tender pleasures – in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena…for…our…perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game.”
This strangely reminded me of a lot of stuff I have read during the last year. For one there’s Michel Houellebecq’s “Les Particules élémentaires” (English: “The Elementary Particles”, German: “Elementarteilchen”), where somewhere in the middle of the book a character (David di Meola) gets introduced, who has sex and violence mixed up in the most shocking ways one can imagine. This is presented as a logical and inevitable process, which is the consequence of the destruction of old moral values in the 50ies, 60ies and 70ies: Once this liberation gave people the freedom to satisfy all their sexual needs, they went on to satisfy their more basic and gruel phantasies. And suddenly, Charles Manson isn’t a shocking counterpoint to the Hippie movement, but its logical consequence…
Reading how Houellebecq describes the content of the snuff videos the aforementioned character produces, one instinctly also has to think about Pasolini’s Salo. Shortly after the first pictures of Abu Graibh surfaced, I read a commentary that compared the aesthetics of those pictures to the one which can be found in Pasolini’s movie (if only I could find that link again). And when you now think about how this whole incident was covered in the media, don’t you also have a feeling that there was a strange urge to go into the most unpleasant details and show as much gruel photos as possible? Sometimes I’m almost convinced that TV news have become a convenient way to sublimely satisfy the darker parts of our own desires.
And then, when I read some texts about critical theory, I found this paragraph about how we as a society are constantly trying to rationalize things in order to get rid of old myths, a process in which enlightenment itself becomes the ultimate myth. This dialectic between overcoming old structures only to rebuild them in what we perceive as more rational, really makes me wonder if we as a society are only doing this in order to find explanations that allow us to follow the desires of our more primitive selves in a way that makes more sense in contemporary society. Do we even want to evolve? Or are we only looking for excuses for not doing so?
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and welcome to another issue of “citizen428’s random tidbits”!
Some days ago I’ve watched a really great documentary called Skinhead Attitude by Daniel Schweizer. I especially recommend this movie to all people who merely associate Skinheads with stupid right-wing Boneheads, and know nothing about the history of the movement which already lasts for more than 40 years.
Skinhead Attitude outlines 40 years of the skinhead movement, from its origins in Jamaica to its current manifestation in present day Britain. By following Karole, a modern skinhead girl with a traditional and anti-racist attitude, the film powerfully draws a portrait of an often maligned group. Concentrating on the left-wing rather than the usual right-wing extremists who are often so readily associated with skinheads, the film describes the transformation and radicalisation of this subculture of youth. Including interviews and music from Bad Manners, Sham 69 and The Oppressed, Skinhead Attitude is a revealing and comprehensive look at a misinterpreted and misunderstood subculture. (Link).
As Ska music is one of the cornerstones of Skinhead culture, this movie also sports a pretty cool soundtrack and has some nice live sequences of bands like Bad Manners, The Oppressed or Los Fastidios. Finally here’s some suggested reading for people who want to know more about this fascinating subculture: Wikipedia:Skinhead, Wikipedia:Ska, Wikipedia:Oi!, Wikipedia:SHARP, Wikipedia:Anti-Fascist Action, No Retreat: The Secret War Between Britain’s Anti-Fascists and the Far Right (we’ve met co-author Steve Titzey at this year’s Mondiali Anti Razzisti in Montecchio).
As recent surveys have shown I haven’t blogged in over two month. That’s quite a long time even for my standards, and I have no one to blame for this lack of communications besides myself (believe me, I really tried to find a scapegoat).
True, my dear old laptop is still broken, but there’s my trustworthy Athlon 650 desktop that currently serves as my main computer. For all of you who wonder what I’ve been up to lately, here’s a short overview of what I spent my time on over the last few weeks.
Ok, I was lying. No Vogon poetry here, just some nice things I’ve learned about today, when I had a nice chat with two long-time friends of mine:
A Sin City movie I haven’t even heard about up until now. Shame on me…
An animated Star Wars series called ““Clone Wars”:http://www.starwars.com/clonewars/” which I didn’t know before.
There’s a 47 minutes long independent Stars Wars fan film called ““Star Wars Revelations”:http://www.panicstruckpro.com/revelations/”. It looks incredible and is totally free! I’ll post a review here as soon as I’ve downloaded and watched it.
RUSTBOY, an absolutely stunning looking animated short film project. The creator Brian Taylor tries to achieve professional quality with affordable home software instead of expensive 3d modelling and rendering software.
Note to self: spend more time on the web again, you’re missing out on good stuff!
