Category: Movies

Subject to revision

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Two more nails in the HD-DVD coffin. I hope this means I can get Children Of Men and Battlestar Galactica on Blu-Ray soon.

.:.

Speaking of movies, it’s time I face the fact that I’m not going to get through my must-see-in-2007 list any time soon. So, with that, here are my top* movies of 2007:

  1. There Will Be Blood
  2. Once
  3. No Country For Old Men
  4. Juno
  5. Zodiac
  6. Eastern Promises
  7. Starting Out In The Evening
  8. This Is England
  9. The Lookout
  10. Gone, Baby, Gone

There’s a second tier of films that I really liked as well, but I didn’t try to rank them. It’s pretty hard to compare 300 or Superbad to No End In Sight.

  • 300
  • 3:10 To Yuma
  • Black Book
  • Black Snake Moan
  • The Bourne Ultimatum
  • The Kingdom
  • No End In Sight
  • Sicko
  • Sunshine
  • Superbad

I thought the three most overrated films of the year were (in no particular order) Knocked Up, Atonement and Letters From Iwo Jima. The most disappointing by far was Spider-Man 3, especially considering Spider-Man 2 was probably the best superhero movie ever made.

* keep in mind that I didn’t see Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, I’m Not There, Michael Clayton, 4 Months 3 Weeks And 2 Days, Lars & The Real Girl, The Savages, The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford, Away From Her, Inland Empire, Iraq In Fragments, Ratatouille or We Own The Night.

[tags]best movies of 2007, hd-dvd, blu-ray[/tags]

Hooray for schadenfreude!

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Today started off pretty crappy. Annoying, puking cats. Broken PVR. Lack of sleep. 2.5 hour meeting. It didn’t get much better either. Bad lunch. Headache. Frustrating day at work. I finally got home excited to watch the Canadiens game (in English for once!) only to find that Sportsnet was blacking the game out* in Toronto. Oh, and more cat puke. Argh.

However, just a few minutes ago events transpired to make my day, despite it having only a few hours of life left: after watching Montreal beat Ottawa 4-3 I flipped over to TSN where I saw…Florida 8, Toronto 0.

If my heart has cockles, they just got warm.

* I’ve never understood the whole local blackout thing. Or rather, I understand why it’s done, but I don’t understand why fans haven’t demanded an end to the archaic practice.

.:.

It’s pretty obvious to me now that music, once the most significant art form in my life, has diminished in importance. I’m still a big fan, but I simply don’t consume as much of it as I used to. In 2003 I bought 64 CDs. In each of the following three years I bought about 40 (some time in 2006, though, it became downloads and not CDs), but in 2007 I bought only 20. That’s still a lot for most people, but it corresponds to a decreased interest in seeking out new music, attending concerts (I go to maybe one a year now), reading music reviews, etc.

Movies, clearly, are my new crack. I was unable to watch as many as I would’ve liked in 2007, but in December I made up for it by watching 26. A friend of mine recently pointed out she probably hasn’t seen that many movies in her entire life. I watched 144 films (watched for the first time, that is…I don’t count re-watches) in 2006, and this year I plan to take a week’s vacation to watch 30 films at the film festival. That’s a lot of time and money spent on films.

I guess old obsessions don’t die, they just shift mediums.

[tags]canadiens, senators, panthers, leafs, music obsession, film obsession[/tags]

"Devour the moose!"

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

While Nellie and her mom were out yesterday I watched a documentary called The Heart Of The Game (imdb | rotten tomatoes) about a Seattle high school girls basketball team. While the entire team was followed for several years, the main focus was on the coach (a college tax professor) and Darnellia Russell, a star guard who goes through a pretty huge roller coaster ride over the course of the film. Recommended, especially if you like sports, and basketball in particular.

.:.

Last week the Toronto District School Board voted to approve the creation of one or more “afro-centric” schools, to focus on black students. Premier Dalton McGuinty clearly isn’t a fan of this decision, but I don’t see how the provincial government can take an official position like that when Ontario still has an entire Catholic school board.

I’m really torn about this. In an ideal world something like this wouldn’t be necessary; black kids, white kid, kids of any ethnicity or background would be treated equally in the existing school system. However, given the high dropout rate among black kids, it’s obvious that something’s broken and needs fixing. Whether or not it’s the right answer to open an afro-centric school, at least the school board is acknowledging that something needs to happen. I don’t buy all the panicked murmuring about this being segregation; while it’s not ideal, no one’s forcing black kids to stay away from white schools.

So, the question becomes whether the school(s) will work. Will dropout rates for black kids at these schools be lower than at traditional schools? If so, I guess most people would see that as success, but it’d be hard to judge; would these schools have more or less public funding than traditional schools? More or less private funding? Better teachers? More motivated students? It’s hard to conduct a reasonable test when it’s not apples to apples.

But let’s say all the external factors were the same and dropout rates at these schools fell below the average. Let’s say the dropout rate at afro-centric schools fell below the overall dropout rate for students of all races, but only black students were allowed to attend. We’d then have segregation of a new kind, and all the complicated debates that go along with it (see affirmative action). Then again, economic segregation already exists today because of the private school system, so I guess this is nothing new.

One problem at a time, I guess. It’ll be interesting to see how this progresses, and how successfully it is…if that can even be measured.

[tags]the heart of the game, afro-centric schools, toronto district school board[/tags]

"The blues is when you love someone don't love you"

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

.:.

Last night was a great Toronto night…lots of snow, a (relatively) quiet downtown and some comfort food after a trying week. We took Nellie’s mom to Smokeless Joe which, despite the fairly empty streets, was packed to the ceiling. We finally got three seats together and put down some pasta and some beer before hitting the wall. We’d all had a long day so we just came home and watched some TV (The Wire…so good!!) before crashing.

I have to say, after a week of corporate finance, it did me some good to sit in cozy little Joe’s with my wife, drink a good beer, have some good food, chat with the excellent staff and listen to Leadbelly on the stereo. My recharging has continued today; with the snow now stopped we had some breakfast at Over Easy and I now have the place to myself as Nellie and NellieMom have gone to see Dirty Dancing. Me, I’ll be staying home and watching the Canadiens game on TV…oh, right about now.

.:.

United 93 has been playing on TMN lately, and I’ve watched bits and pieces of it over the past couple of weeks. I thought the film was unsettling and brilliant when I saw it, and thought it was one of the best of 2006, but I simply cannot watch it again. It’s too hard on me. Every time I watch it, even just a few scenes, my guts twist into a knot. It’s probably the most physical reaction I’ve ever had to a film, and it happens every time I see it. I want to watch it — Paul Greengrass is a master at that sort of emotional recreation — but I get apprehensive just thinking about it.

I guess I’ll just have to lot it from a distance.

[tags]berczy park, smokeless joe, leadbelly, united 93[/tags]

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Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

A review of Meet The Spartans in Slate contains what may be the best line of the year so far:

This was the worst movie I’ve ever seen, so bad that I hesitate to label it a “movie” and thus reflect shame upon the entire medium of film. [Directors] Friedberg and Seltzer do not practice the same craft as P.T. Anderson, David Cronenberg, Michael Bay, Kevin Costner, the Zucker Brothers, the Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, any dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip, or a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it.

.:.

Well, this is certainly an Afghanistan worth fighting for:

Last week, a court in Balkh province sentenced Perwiz Kambakhsh, 23, to death for distributing articles downloaded from the Internet that were said to question the Koran and the role of women in Islam.

[via Torontoist]

.:.

Every time we come here for a course a few of us have a tradition on Thursday. Because we can’t bear the thought of another meal here, we order pizza, drink a few beers and relax a bit before heading off to study for tomorrow’s exam. As such the evening has become known as Pizza Thursday.

Pizza Thursday will commence a few hours from now, and we’ll be about 86% of the way through our week*. However, as we sit and enjoy our pie we’ll also just happen to be about 86% of the way through the entire program. Usually Pizza Thursday signals the turning of the final corner of each week we spend here; tonight, though, it signals the rounding of the final corner of the entire four years. After tomorrow morning’s exam we really will be in the home stretch…provided we don’t stumble in that final turn.

Wish me luck.

*I have a javascript that tells me these numbers, obviously, lest you think I’m sitting down and calculating it each time I post something. That’d be silly.

[tags]meet the spartans, afghanistan, mba[/tags]

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Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Canada’s oldest bookstore, The Book Room in Halifax, is closing. I don’t have any particular problem with it closing, I just thought it was cool that the oldest bookstore in Canada was in Halifax.

.:.

Today was challenging at times but things started to gel a bit toward the end. I’m going to have to do some work tonight; need to catch up and prepare some study materials. I still have some work work that I want to do but I don’t think I can spare the time. I don’t want to mess up this exam; it’s much too late in the game to mess up now.

.:.

I finally finished the Naomi Klein book this week. It drifted toward the end — I think the entire section on Israel was a little too micro to carry the same weight as earlier sections — but it was still a very interesting companion piece to this MBA I’m doing. It’s not as if Friedman worship flares up often, but there’ve been some discussions that in class that’ve sounded eerily similar to some neo-liberal scripture.

I think next I might read Incendiary by Chris Cleave (amazon | indigo). I didn’t realize it’d been made into a movie, so I’d like to read it before that comes out.

[tags]halifax, the book room, mba, naomi klein, shock doctrine, incendiary, chris cleave[/tags]

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Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Granted, the competition was Rambo, but what does it say about our society that Meet The Spartans won the weekend at the box office? The movie has a 5% rating, fer chrissakes.

.:.

Today wasn’t so bad. The prof is pretty good at explaining things and I haven’t gotten lost yet, but I think it’s only gonna get tougher and I have to be careful not to drift off for a few minutes or I’ll be lost. I’ll have to stay on my toes this week.

[tags]meet the spartans, rambo, mba[/tags]

"I can't keep doing this on my own with these…people."

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

Nellie and I went to see two movies in a row today:

I had incredibly high expectations for There Will Be Blood (imdb | rotten tomatoes), but it still paid off. I think as the film sinks in over the next few days I’ll get even more from it, but even at first glance it’s huge and chilling and epic and staggering. Daniel Day-Lewis, once again, proves himself a mad genius. At no time in any of his movies do I think of him in any of his other roles. Paul Dano and the other actors kept up, but Day-Lewis was on the screen for virtually every second of the film and swept it along. You may not like this movie, but if you can’t recognize it for the classic piece of filmmaking that it is, maybe you should stick to reality TV.

Cloverfield (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was a completely different animal: a beastie-thriller, but done with a little more flair than we’ve come to expect. The handicam viewpoint was a useful little device, and kept the film from lapsing into the usual cliches (hey look, a spunky scientist finds a way to save the day!), focusing instead on showing the mass confusion of such an event. A pretty decent escapist flick. Oh, and Jessica Lucas: girlfriend du jour.

.:.

Absurdity piled on absurdity: the FCC is going to fine ABC $1.4 million because they showed buttocks on the air. Five years ago.

[tags]there will be blood, cloverfield, jessica lucas, fcc, nypd blue[/tags]