Saturday, January 09, 2010

To everything there is a season dept.

Impressed by Mariah Carey's unsmiling performance as a social worker in Precious, I asked Ereck as we left the theater, "NOW can we see Glitter?" (Answer: Yes.)

Thursday, January 07, 2010

The last roundup

Terry Gilliam's The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is a fitting swansong for Heath Ledger. Read my review.

Sunday, January 03, 2010

Dialog

K: Do you like [Paul Simon's] Graceland?
E: I think I did, but --
K: -- it came to seem hopelessly bourgeois?
E: Yes.
K: That's why I like it.

Saturday, January 02, 2010

Good word

"Tom Carson got [Gina] Arnold's goat when he pointed out, in the wake of 1986's putatively progressive Lifes Rich Pageant, what seems undeniable -- that R.E.M.'s 'tendentious appeals to a cloudily glorious past' and 'wishful confusion of cultural might-have-beens with historical truth' were 'the emotional syntax of Reaganism, pure and simple.' Not that R.E.M. were Reaganites, of course (you knew that, right?) -- just that they didn't escape Reaganism's cultural climate. Fans of both band and pol shared the habit of closing their rapidly moving eyes and wishing stuff would go away, not to mention a disdain for the moral weaklings on the other side of the fence."

-- Robert Christgau

Friday, January 01, 2010

Pensée

Something struck me last night as I watched Hannah Montana: The Movie, a Walt Disney Pictures picture. There are two scenes involving carnival rides. On the one hand that seems very Disney, since Disney is all about rides. On the other hand, Walt Disney conceived his theme parks as an orderly, controlled alternative to old-style amusement parks and their carnival rides.

Sunday, December 20, 2009

Those are still the days

I gave up, wiped the hard drive and installed Windows XP. Now Office 97 will run like a champ. Microsoft plans to stop supporting Windows XP on April 8, 2014. See you in '14, Bill Gates!

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Those were the days

I have a new computer. The operating system it runs is Windows 7 Home Premium. So far, so good, except that I'm an old Windows XP hand, and I've long used certain applications that don't seem to work so well in 7. For example: Office 97. Yes, my copy of the productivity suite is several versions out of date, these days, but I like it well enough and haven't had a good reason to upgrade. Until now.

Much has changed since '97, I suppose. On the other hand, much has not.