#1,820: The House on Skull Mountain

Sometimes old posts get stuck in draft form because they need more thought and revision.  I have no idea why capsule movie reviews don’t get published.  These seem to be from December 2011.

-Hugo - Great 3D, and identifiably Scorsese, from the first shot, a long tracking through the station. Weird script though; characters exclaiming stuff in the same room instead of listening or talking to each other. Also, hints of a hated trope: Can’t Spit It Out.  That is, if one character would just speak up when they’re a) in trouble and b) in no danger as a result of just using their words, so much trouble could be avoided, and so easily.

- J. Edgar - A perfectly good telling of the story of J. Edgar Hoover.  If you’ve ever seen or read anything about him before, you’ve probably got the story down already.  Saw it in the theater with a bunch of chatty audience.  But they were a few guys in their 60s, so nobody had anything to say to them.

- The Lie - This seems like something that would be sold as a drama, but actually: pretty funny. Dark, and funny. Jess Weixler is great. Especially her reaction to her husband’s terrible rock song.

- Real Life - Albert Brooks on reality TV.  Really good. I love the nonsense presented as good science and sociology.

And of course:

- The House on Skull Mountain - a mostly black  version of Dark and Stormy Night, or any other meeting for the reading of will in a spooky old house.  Above all else, this was a movie that lives right on up to its title:

This is the very next shot:

Original Article

Monkeying with the blog

Spent the evening trying to make the blog look a little better.  Preparing a theme all on my own isn’t something I wanted to do, so there’s a struggle to find a theme that looks okay and is maybe kind of obscure enough to look original.  A lot of the stuff that popped up early in the googles is just awful.  I don’t want a big billboard for the theme designing company with a little square for my words.

There’s a thing where you play with a mass market tool / toy for a while, like Garageband, and then you’ve heard all the good loops, so you notice them in things other people make.  And now I see where a lot of the site designs for dreadful SEO-gobbling linkbait sites come from.

Anyhow, I found something that looked okay, and ended up digging around in the code for a few hours anyway to make it a negative version of the main site, snip out some broken javascript, and to add some rules to fix the links in the sidebar here. The Tron Legacy soundtrack made this feel like a much more sophisticated project than it was.

The google reader box is gone, since it’s dead.  There’s a new page with accurate information on ordering a copy of The Dialysis, in case anyone’s been in need of an update to the 2004 info page.  It contains the forbidden secrets and unstoppable techniques of our ISBN!

Also, if all goes according to plan, posts found here at http://notArt.org/log will now be duplicated over at http://notArtist.tumblr.com for people who like to tumblr.

If you actually look at the site on the site and have a suggestion, let me know.  I don’t think I’m quite finished, but apparently it was time to change things up.

Original Article

Better Radio →

This is a sketch comedy podcast I make with one Russell Anderson, and a bunch of other people who come in and do terrific work.  I like it; I think it’s good.

http://notArt.org →

This is my primary, oldest, original website, the real hub to everything else.  It often contains scraps of projects done sometime in the past ten years.