malvasia bianca

A while ago, I went looking for Cole Porter DVD’s; unfortunately, there wasn’t much available. (For all I know, not that many of his musicals ever made it on film.) I ended up with a five-movie box set, which sounded good until I started actually watching them.

High Society is actually pretty good; I should watch it again. Kiss Me Kate is a wonderful musical; I might enjoy the movie version if I weren’t aware that it’s horribly gutted. (Fortunately, this version is available.) Neither Silk Stockings not Les Girls did much for me.

I put off watching Broadway Melody of 1940 for a long time; I’m suspicious of any movie whose title makes me think that they churn out one every year. But we finally got around to it yesterday, and it’s a lot of fun! Classic Fred Astaire black and white dancing. I’d heard almost all the songs before, but there’s a reason for that. (Though I don’t understand the popularity of Begin the Beguine.) Eleanor Powell is pleasant enough. I’ve seen better stories before, certainly, but I’ve seen worse as well.

Fortunately, there’s more Fred Astaire available on DVD now; I should work through that boxed set next…

(I should insert a rant here about how all stage performances of all time, or at least going forward, should be available for viewing, but I’m not up for it right now.)

The rhyming bit near the start of The Princess Bride is a nice throwaway touch.

We went to see Howl’s Moving Castle last weekend. Actually, Liesl and I went the weekend before that, to make sure it was okay for Miranda; we decided that it probably was, though we checked first with Miranda to make sure.

We all enjoyed it, though I don’t think it will end up as one of my favorite Miyazaki movies. One thing that struck me: while I have nothing against love stories, they’re all about falling in love instead of loving people. I don’t have any plans to ever do the former again. while the latter is a huge aspect of my life. And while the move had its love story aspects, they were muted, and even explicitly questioned at the end. Instead, the relationship aspects of the movie focused on building a family, something very dear to my heart. And quite a family it was, too: I really like the “collection of misfits banding together” trope, families as a group of people who have made an active choice to stay together. (This was something I really liked about the third volume of the Kushiel trilogy, too.)

On a related note, we watched Shrek 2 on DVD this weekend. It has a little bit of the “actively chosen family” theme in it. But it’s also about two people reaffirming that they are very much in love; I for one cried at the end of it. Again, Kushiel does this, in the second volume instead.

The A’s are continuing to do pleasantly well: they haven’t gone on a huge win streak or anything, but they’re winning almost every series these days. I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by Bobby Crosby’s return; call me a pessimist, but even though he was rookie of the year last year, he only batted .239 last year, and sophomore slumps are far from rare, so I wasn’t expecting much from him this year. But his line this season is .313/.370/.507, which is great.

I’m still not thrilled about the Tim Hudson trade, but the Mark Mulder trade is turning out nicely so far: Mulder has an ERA of 4.27 (in the NL), while Danny Haren has settled down after an iffy start with an ERA of 3.98. Keeping Barry Zito still doesn’t look too good, but the younger arms seem to be living up to their billing. I have a hard time imagining we’ll make the playoffs this year, but as rebuilding years go, not too bad.

And Julio Franco, not content to rest on his laurels, followed up his two-steal game with a two-homer game. Doubtless inspired by his example, the Indians are doing great; I doubt they’ll catch the White Sox, but a wildcard berth isn’t completely out of the question.

The computer’s memory problems seem to have settled down: I’m not convinced that everything is right, but it’s stopped crashing now that I’m only using one DIMM. (And 256 MB seems to be right on the borderline of where swapping starts happening, so I’ve ordered a 512 MB DIMM.) But now I’m having networking problems, which I’m not sure are my fault. Sometimes my internet connection temporarily disappears, which might be the fault of the computer, the ethernet cable, the cable modem, or something else, and I have no clue as to which of those it is. “Something else” isn’t completely crazy: I got assigned IP addresses a couple of times last week that makes me think that one of my neighbors is running a misconfigured DHCP server. If the problems continue, maybe I’ll bring in a laptop and ethernet cable from work to try to eliminate some of the variables.

Incidentally, one more thing about Nausicaa: in the comic books, the big bugs are called “Ohmu”, while in the movie their name is pronounced “Om”. Is “ohmu” how Om (as in Om mani padme hum) gets transliterated into Japanese? I would believe that. Also, is there any significant difference between the new edition of the comic books and the older, four-volume edition? Nothing leaps out to me (other than the color of the ink), but I haven’t compared them carefully.

We watched Nausicaa for the first time a week or two ago. At first, I wasn’t too impressed: even before watching it, I’d already half made up my mind that I wouldn’t like it as much as Miyazaki’s other movies, because of comparisons with other works of his: the manga version of Nausicaa is much more elaborate than the movie, and Miyazaki had revisited environmental themes in other, later movies (Castle in the Sky, I should watch that one again, and Princess Mononoke). So I figured it would be a sort of journeyman work with interesting ideas that ultimately didn’t get their due.

And when I started watching it, my opinions started to solidify: the animation is pretty basic compared to his later work, and the idea of forests and insects evolving in order to clean the world for humans makes me roll my eyes. But somehow, by the end of the movie, I found myself really enjoying it. And Miranda has watched it twice since then, and I’ve been perfectly happy to be in the room with it on.

I think what’s going on is that I’m a sucker for big picture mysticism, driven by charismatic leaders. (Not by any means all charismatic leaders, but Nausicaa certainly qualifies for me.) Castle in the Sky, if memory serves me well, had some neat ideas and pleasant characters, but was lacking on those fronts; Princess Mononoke did better, but wasn’t as simplistically optimistic as Nausicaa. (Optimistic probably isn’t the right word, but I’m not thinking of a better substitute right now.) Don’t get me wrong, I don’t advocate simplistic works in general, but sometimes they have a certain purity which can tweak me in happy spots.

All things considered, I’d probably rather be watching Princess Mononoke, but it was a pleasant surprise given the way my opinions towards Nausicaa had begun. Good thing, too, given that Miranda is way too young for Mononoke, and right now wants to watch Nausicaa every few days.

We recently watched The Cat Returns. One of only two non-Miyazaki Studio Ghibli movies that I’ve watched, the other being Grave of the Fireflies. And the two couldn’t be more different: the latter is very good, but very, very depressing; I honestly have no idea when I’ll be up for watching it again.

Anyways, The Cat Returns was fun, but hardly a masterpiece. Rather slight, which can be fine, but the word “cool” is way overused in the movie. I quite liked the designs of the city and castle; Miyazaki’s locations are wonderful, and you can see some of that in this movie, too.

Miranda’s watched it several times; it’s pleasant enough to have on in the house, so I’m not complaining.

We just watched Tokyo Godfathers; very good. About three homeless people who find an abandoned baby, and try to track down its mother and learn why she abandoned it; good characters, good plot, good visuals, pleasantly bizarre.

Hmm: that wasn’t much of a discussion of the movie, was it? The problem is, I’m really not very good at talking about movies. I could give a plot description, but I’m not sure what the point of doing so would be. I’d rather have something a bit more insightful to say, or at least something a bit more analytical. I don’t claim to be god’s gift to video game criticism, but at least I can blather along about the things for paragraphs; not so with movies. I’ve seen a reasonable number of movies (perhaps not so many in recent years, but then again the movies I’ve seen I’ve seen over and over again, which should mean something); I guess the point is that I spend more time thinking about the design of video games as I play them. And, for that matter, I spend lots of time reading video game web sites, so I’m much more exposed to video game criticism than movie criticism. (What are good movie web sites? Also, what are good music web sites?) So I should think more as I watch movies, and not be afraid to write about them, I guess; with practice, I’ll have more to say.

Fortunately, I should have more movie-watching time soon. For years, we’d basically only been able to watch movies that Miranda could watch. But once she started school, we moved her bed time up (or really, gave her a bed time different from ours at all), giving us time that we could watch TV by ourselves. Unfortunately, at about the same time, we bought our disco duro, and we kind of overdosed on Iron Chef and Good Eats. But recently we’ve moved her bed time still earlier, and a significant portion of the Good Eats episodes are ones we’ve seen recently, so we’re plowing through our backlog of recordings.

(The thing I miss most about Boston: the Brattle. Also, why, in my first paragraph, did I not mention that it was either Japanese or animated? I guess I didn’t want to overemphasize either of those facts, given the brevity of the paragraph: I wasn’t up for a comparison of it with anime, or for that matter non-Japanese animation (The Triplets of Belleville; I guess I didn’t talk about that when I first watched it? Maybe I wasn’t blogging yet).)

Liesl’s dad gave Miranda a copy of Mary Poppins for Christmas. And it’s great! I was starting to suspect that I might be a Julie Andrews fan, but now I’m sure of it (and should really go out and watch other movies of hers). I had no idea how good Dick van Dyke was, though, and for that matter I’d never considered the possibility that he might have been young once.

The other big surprise is the songs. I was, of course, aware of some of them: “A Spoonful of Sugar,” “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, “Let’s Go Fly a Kite”, “Chim Chim Cher-ee”. (I’m honestly not sure if I would have identified the source of the last two, though.) But they’re singing all the time in the movie: looking through the list of scenes, there are 13 songs in the movie! It’s a long movie for a kid’s movie, but that’s still one every 10 minutes or so. And they songs are all at least pleasant; there’s a reason why I was aware of the ones I mentioned above, but the others are far from shabby, and Miranda and I quite enjoy dancing around to “Step in Time”.

And it has a good story, good politics, and I really like the way the Dick van Dyke character (and his mix of jobs) are presented. Good thing I have a daughter with a grandfather with good taste in movies!

(Incidentally, Miranda has recently been asking to watch a DVD of The Marriage of Figaro. I really do think she could have a good career in musical theater ahead of her, if she so choses…)

Ever since we went to see a musical version of A Little Princess, I’ve been on a Frances Hodgson Burnett reading kick. I never read any of her books when I was a kid, but now that I’m giving them a try, I really like the ones I’ve read four so far (A Little Princess, The Secret Garden, The Lost Prince, and Little Lord Fauntleroy). They all follow a similar formula: the main character is a child (10 years old or a little younger?), of excellent character whom almost everybody (adult and child) adores, at least one significant change of fortune (with family, in particular removal from parents, typically playing a key role), everything turns out all right in the end for the main character as well as one follower who has been uplifted by contact with said character. Not a bad formula for children’s books, and quite well executed in all her books I’ve read.

It looks like several of her books are available via Project Gutenberg, for all you etext fans out there.

Other things I’ve enjoyed recently:

1. The Incredibles. I’m not sure if it or Monsters, Inc. is my favorite Pixar movie, but I had a great time. A bit much for Miranda, though she was brave through it.
2. Philadelphia Chickens. They are indeed remarkable cows. And remarkable aardvarks. And on and on…

When talking about the new DVD/DVR, I forgot to mention one advance: improvements in random access. DVDs aren’t better than video tapes just because they look better: they’re better because you don’t have to rewind them, you can jump to any scene (once you get past the annoying ads at the beginning), because they look good when paused. Similarly, this DVR is better than a VCR because you can delete shows in any order, and because it has buttons to let you jump forward or backwards by 30 seconds, making it easy to skip commercials. We pretty much never use the fast forward / rewind buttons on it.

Having said that, improvements are possible. For example, when browsing through the saved programs, it gives you 5 different options for sorting them, but none of them are what we want, namely reverse chronological order. (I have a hard time believing that wanting to watch the oldest shows first makes us some sort of freaks.) Also, they divided the saved shows up into screens, but there’s no way to scroll a page at a time instead of a screen at a time.

We went to Top Hat last week. Very good: quite similar to The Gay Divorcee, but everything about it is a little better. More songs, better songs, better dance sequences, the plot makes a bit more sense, and I really like the wife of Edward Everett Horton’s character. (Played by Helen Broderick, apparently; never heard of her.)

I’m very glad the Yankees signed Jaret Wright for too much money (not that money matters to the Yankees). Last year was obviously a combination of fluke / Leo Mazzone; that deal’s going to look pretty stupid six months from now, never mind three years from now.

Now that Miranda’s bed time has moved up (since she no longer takes naps a daycare), we’ve finally been able to watch movies not suitable for 5-year-olds. We usually can’t finish a whole movie in a single night, and most evenings we watch various Food Network programs that we’ve recorded instead of movies, but at least we finally get to watch movies some of the time.

The most striking one we’ve seen recently is The Singing Detective. Which isn’t actually a movie: it’s a BBC TV series, and is quite unlike anything else I’ve seen. Skin disease, alternation between fantasy and reality, hallucinations, music (frequently at inappropriate times, though not so inappropriate as in some movies). For the first two or three (out of six) episodes, I didn’t really know what to think, but it all comes together quite nicely at the end.

So why do DVD’s feel compelled to include extras after extras? Books never include extras; CD’s include a little booklet, but it’s hardly the same thing. Personally, I basically never look at the extras of DVDs - why would I want to do that instead of, say, watching the movie? (Or watching a different movie.) I guess it matters to people who are big fans of the movie in question, though, and it’s a relatively low-cost addition (at least compared to the cost of making the movie itself…)

We went to see The Gay Divorcee on Wednesday. (The Stanford Theatre is showing a bunch of Fred Astair / Ginger Rogers movies over the next couple of months.) I’d forgotten that old movies are in a 4:3 aspect ratio, or something close to that - not nearly as horizontal as modern movies. A couple of nice songs and some nice dancing, but I was hoping for more. And the Continental sequence really was over the top - not as bad as, say, a dream sequence from a Gene Kelly movie, but still…

We’re going table-shopping this weekend - now that there are three of us and we have friends with kids, our little round table just isn’t quite up to the chore. We looked at various options today, and found four reasonable options, but all had their flaws - not having a leaf, being more expensive than we wanted, needing a bit more care than is ideal, or in a style that didn’t thrill one of us. I’m sure we’ll buy one of them, but I’m still not sure which. I am glad that we finally got around to going to my namesake store, Carlton Arts and Design in downtown Mountain View - I’ve walked past it dozens of times without going in, not being very interested in the stuff in front (large porcelain vases), but there’s some pretty neat stuff in there. Miranda loved all the chests with their little drawers, there was a very simple vase that I liked a lot, if I were a sake drinker at home I would certainly buy one of their sake sets, and there were some quite nice tables. On the expensive side, but they were better constructed than the others we were considering, so we may well end up getting one of them.