Scraped & Painted; A Few Things I Watched This Week

So I finished getting the west side of the house scraped yesterday while The ♥G♥ painted the stand-uppy part of the east side. Then today, she did the touch-up on the south side while I painted the laddery part of the east side. This leaves the painting of the west side yet to do, and then in five years it'll be time for a call to the vinyl-siding salesman, because I am not going through all this bullshit again. (Also, I've been waiting two months for something like this to happen, but no luck.)

Don't believe a word this man says.

In other news, I watched a couple of interesting things this week:

• Newsfront, an Australian film about newsreel cameramen and the emergence of television, the great usurper. Pretty good film, though quite sentimental for "the way things were" as opposed to the way things develop when freely allowed to. Kind of reminds me of "that's not how it was in my day" people and the way they feel about the now-usurped television news and entertainment of today.
• Protocols of Zion, in which filmmaker Mark Levin looks into the origins and propagation of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories of the sort that end up blaming the Jews for 9/11, the corruption of Western culture, this'n'that having to do with the economy, etc. One humorous point raised by a commentator in the extras: Levin was able to get an extended interview with both the head of a skinhead compound in West Virginia and also with a white separatist radio host in Missouri, but he was not able to talk on camera with Larry David, Rob Reiner, or Norman Lear. Open question for Mr. Levin: Why, oh why, did you only feature Will Eisner in the extras, and not in the body of the film?
• William Klein's Messiah. This was my favorite of the bunch. It was Handel's Messiah (two hours' worth of it) performed mostly by professional musicians, but also by prison inmates, a gay & lesbian chorus, the Dallas Police Choir, and others. The most striking thing was the imagery assembled by Klein for most of the music -- very Koyaanisqatsiesque. (Although, I don't think the theme here was really "life out of balance." I'll have to watch it again. Or maybe watch one right after the other.) If the term above means anything to you, then you absolutely want to see this film. If not, you might want to pass. Klein photography here, more here, profile here, another profile here.