Plaidophile

Watching a TV show/ad/movie/whatever and recognizing the majority of the loops used in the soundtrack, especially when they're just stock loops bundled with GarageBand or SoundTrack.

(Tonight's offender: Mythbusters)

Buy 2, Get 1 Free.

I think it would be very compelling, stylistically, to have a movie in which the movie was blatantly a work of fiction while the characters themselves were still in the fiction. What I mean is having the film and sound crew visible, which would allow for scenes shot in a single take but from multiple angles which still get cut together (and there could even be some rough spots around the edges on purpose, like actors breaking and returning into character and so on). Basically, something like the "making of," except the whole movie, and with some additional tropes allowed by this.

In a sense it would be a movie which is about the making of itself, except the story would not be the making of the film - the "window dressing" would eventually fade into the woodwork even though it'd remain visible throughout the whole film.

Are there any movies like this? I'd expect there to be at least one movie which is basically a stage production committed to film in this way, but I can't think of anything even though the concept is familiar.

I think I might want to write a screenplay.

Okay, so, not only do the DTV changeover people keep on making it sound as if rabbit-ears antennas are the signifier you should look for (PROTIP: rabbit-ears antennas work better for DTV than "HDTV" antennas), but ABC has taken to putting a title crawl on the top of the screen warning about the DTV changeover. On the DTV feed, making it a dire warning that is completely unnecessary to the people seeing it. Way to confuse the issue even further, guys.

What the stations should be doing is running different ads on the DTV and analog feeds — on the analog feeds say, "Hey, you're watching this on an analog set, you need a DTV converter box," and on the digital feeds say "Hey, great, you're watching this digitally. Make sure your friends and family are too." Sort of like the dancing IPv6 turtle.

If they really can't do that for some reason (and I'm pretty sure they can, based on how I've seen early DTV broadcasts fail), they could at least use a more meaningful signifier, like "if your TV channels have a dot or dash in them, like 2.0 or 5-1, you are fine, but if not you are still watching on an analog set."

So, many decent Blu-Ray discs are finally around $15. Maybe the format will actually catch on now.

(Of course, I'll just keep on renting them through Netflix.)

Okay, so, we've had modern-day updates of such classic television as Superman, Battlestar Galactica, Bionic Woman, and Doctor Who, where all of them are presented in a slicker-yet-grittier world, with more angst and darkness, in a world with conspiracies upon conspiracies being orchestrated by vengeful and mostly-unseen enemies.

The premise: A distant star goes supernova. A survivor from an ancient alien world crosses the galaxy, trying to find any way possible to survive, not sure if he is alone. He must establish a base of operations somewhere in a desperate attempt to find others of his kind, but through a navigational error he ends up stranded on Earth. Taking refuge with a well-to-do family, he finds himself caught in he middle of a society which is paranoid and intolerant, and must remain hidden so as to avoid the government and those who would profit from his discovery.

His name is Gordon. He is an alien lifeform.

Atonement: What is with modern movies doing nonlinear stuff from multiple points of view? A few movies did this pretty well but this one doesn't. I ended up stopping watching after about half an hour. EMO GURL IS EMO etc.

Michael Clayton: Pretty good, although this one also tries to be nonlinear for the sake of nonlinearity, and didn't really add to the story by doing it. Also I can't help but feel that the title character's reputation is more or less undeserved, seeing as how basically the only good move he makes in the whole movie is (spoiler) playing along with the prosecutors for the OMG TWIST ON A TWIST at the end. Other than that he never really fixes anything (and even that one fix isn't really doing it in the sense that he's supposed to be so incredible at).

In Treatment: This wasn't being shown on the in-flight system; instead, it's a very good HBO series which is available for free download (for now, anyway) on a number of services, including iTunes and Unbox. I only watched the first few episodes but they were quite good. It does have a bit of a theatrical feel to it (as in, it feels like it was adapted from a stage play) and most of the patients seem to show a disturbing lack of self-awareness, but I think that's kind of the point. I'll have to watch more of the show before I decide exactly what the point (if any) is, though.

Martian child - really good. Maybe a little too relatable? I was all teary-eyed. Highly recommended.

Beowulf - had to stop watching after 10 minutes. Deep into the uncanny valley, and all the borderline nudity made me feel strangely uneasy. Supposedly it was better on IMAX but this airplane seat isn't equipped with an IMAX projector.

Bee movie

Okay, I know I'm like two years behind the times, but I finally watched An Inconvenient Truth. Al Gore clearly has an agenda, but that agenda is saving the world so I can't really fault him for that.

Now I can't help but notice all the little things I could do to save a lot of energy. Like turning my computers off when I'm not using them, not always having my PS2 in standby mode since I almost never actually turn it on, completely powering off my stereo instead of just putting it into standby mode, and so on.

Dear Bob Ross Incorporated:

While I understand that you believe you are protecting your interests, constantly removing all clips of The Joy Of Painting from YouTube does you a great disservice.

Bob Ross was a great painter with a great message, and his television show is incredibly uplifting. However, his fairly eccentric demeanor has attracted quite a bit of parody, much of which is infantile and mean-spirited. As a result, by having the actual Joy Of Painting clips removed from YouTube, all that remains are the terrible parodies, many of which present themselves as being legitimate clips of the real show.

I thoroughly enjoy watching The Joy Of Painting in reruns on my local PBS affiliate, but when I try to explain what is so incredible about his show, friends immediately turn to YouTube, and only see the parodies, and get the impression that The Joy Of Painting is some sort of bizarre, sophomoric humor show, or that Bob Ross was a foul-mouthed drunkard who spent much of his time stoned.

I do appreciate the need to protect the copyright of entire episodes, but I hope that you will reconsider your policy of aggressively removing fair-use clips of the show from Internet video sharing sites.

Okay, so I'm trying to watch Lost because everyone's all HEY ITS REALLY GOOD and stuff (yes I know I'm late getting into it) but ABC has decided, in their infinite wisdom, to do non-stop trivia popups through the whole show. They are very dumb (e.g., when a character refers to something that happened in the present, it says, "We now know this is a flash-forward") and very obnoxious and distracting. Who the hell thought this was a good idea?

So, one of the things that's often portrayed in the mass media is that after two consenting adults of the opposite sex sleep together, the next day they are wearing each others' clothes. Is there some sociological basis for this standard indicator (akin to running water in a sink), or do people actually do that, or what?

The obvious guess would be that it's more that if the woman stays over, she needs fresh clothing, and the man's clothing will generally be larger (and thus fit), but in a lot of things it seems that the man ends up wearing the woman's underwear afterwards. Is that supposed to just be a humorous commentary on the cliché that has itself become a cliché?

I finally saw the 2005 version tonight. It's cool how close to the book they stuck while managing to update the characters and music for today. It's a little disappointing how the CG was already dated-looking even for 2005 though. Also, the "dark brooding past" that they grafted onto the Wonka character was a bit weird and felt out-of-place, though I guess they needed that last 15 minutes. I'm also surprised at how well Johnny Depp pulled off the "zany weird manchild" thing without actually becoming annoying.

And apparently, the squirrel scene used real trained squirrels!

"[The Parthenon] is a 20,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and worse, it's a puzzle without any instructions." As opposed to all those jigsaw puzzles which come with detailed assembly directions?

So, when I was a kid, my parents loved I Love Lucy but I never really understood what was so great about it. So when TiVo started recording it as a suggestion I decided to watch it, and... wow, it's actually pretty funny stuff.

Is this another sign that I'm a grownup now? I guess there's worse ways to come to realize that than by laughing at an old sitcom.

So I just watched the MWSF keynote, and out of sheer boredom I decided to watch the Randy Newman performance at the end. What the hell?! Did the Steve actually approve that first song, where basically he ranted about how America might be bad but Europeans like Nero, Caligula, Hitler and Stalin were worse so we're not really that evil, and added some thinly-veiled racist comments about having "a brother" and "two tight-assed Italians" in the supreme court?

Not to mention that the "song" was so musically-similar to "You've Got A Friend In Me," the song he played immediately afterwards. That didn't really help his image, considering he's been parodied so many times as having basically written only one song.

Not as shitty as I was expecting!

Not to be confused with the educational film Flatland: The Movie, Flatland: The Film is an excellent movie.

There's a few minor problems with it, but as far as amateur, independent, feature-length productions go, it was extremely good. The story has been updated for a modern audience, and the sense of humor has been retained, with a few nice twists (such as the way the narrator is conveyed, as wry interstitial title cards).

Of course, there are still several factual errors with what can and can't happen in two dimensions and how it relates to the third (for example, there's nothing to prevent light from bouncing, and a Flatlander would also experience perspective), but those were in the original novel and fairly important to the story.

So, I bought my PS3 several months ago, and immediately filled out the "get 5 free Blu-Ray movies" promotion. Tonight I finally received them (although to be fair, a lot of the delay was because I had them shipped to my sister's apartment, and she didn't ever tell me they arrived and just gave them to me when I was over there tonight for a different reason).

I don't remember all five of my selections, but two of them were replaced with The Guardian and Happy Feet (there was an apologetic note about this). Considering that the only three movies I actually remember selecting (and cared about) came through, and that Happy Feet is probably a step up from whichever one it replaced, I guess I can't be too sad about that.

(The three I actually remembered selecting were Corpse Bride, Stir of Echoes, and The Last Waltz — and really, I only actually cared about getting Corpse Bride.)