Catching Up

Catching up on various items:

Movies:

Today I watched Peter Jackson's early, silly, low-budget gorefest Bad Taste, and I got a kick out of it. Plenty of gratuitous blood and guts and splatter, but really nothing in that bad taste. (Unlike certain films I could mention -- one of which I do mention below!)

Also, I am now watching Clint Eastwood's Charlie Parker biopic, Bird. I am a big Charlie Parker fan, and I have been meaning to get around to this for years, but I didn't grab the opportunity until today.

More weekend/early-next-week screenings will probably include His Girl Friday, The Asphalt Jungle, Pickup on South Street, Seven Days in May, and A Boy and His Dog. (As you can tell from the first three second and third, I've been feeling kind of Noirish lately.) (Edit: HGF is not Noir, obviously, but I lumped it in as such initially because it's from the era and has crooked cops and pols and fast-talking newspapermen and street-smart newspaperdames. Screwball Noir. End edit.) I've seen all of these before (though not recently) and like them, and I picked them all from the library so I can listen to the director's and/or critics' commentaries on each.

There may be some adjustments to my movie-watching habits, because the other day I signed up for NetFlix. Comments to come as I see how it works out.

Web Stuff:

• MTA's discourse on the Wifebeater.
• Please welcome Logic and Language to the blogroll. (That is, welcome the blog L&L -- I still haven't decided on the logic I want to employ to organize the sidebar.)
• The Blowhards point to this list of the Top 50 Horror Films Ever. I've seen 32 of them, including all of the top 14. The most recent of those 14 that I have viewed was Cannibal Holocaust (#10), which a friend of mine loaned me a few weeks ago. (Note the reviewer's chosen adjectives -- Powerful. Visceral. Disturbing. -- Get it? Visceral?) If the name doesn't immediately either repel you or intrigue you, then you need to read the first and second words of the title again, this time reflecting more closely on their definitions and context. If you want to see some of TBWP's (#14) ancestry, then check this one out. Warning: NSFW (Not Safe for Wussies).
• Kurosawa's Rashomon is one of my favorite films. RaShOmoN the blog has a bunch of cool links and images.
• Here's the Klingon translation of the Sesame Street theme song, via Maximum Verbosity.
• I'm not sure if this EFF article makes me feel better or worse about post-9/11 government intrusion. Excerpt: After receiving hundreds of requests from Americans asking to know what personal information the government has obtained about them, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) told passengers that it "does not have the capability to perform a simple computer-based search" to locate individual records.
• Here's The Blogger's Blog, Blogging the Blogosphere.
• Pete at Perfectly Cromulent on the Arab World's version of The Simpsons.