malvasia bianca

What are good formats to use for purchasing and storing music and movies? I remember a time in the past where it was possible to pretend that Ogg Vorbis was a reasonable choice for many of your audio needs; that is, unfortunately, no longer the case. Desirable qualities for a format, in no particular order: [...]

I can report that Animaniacs holds up quite well. Miranda approves, too.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from Whisper of the Heart. It’s a Studio Ghibli film, which is obviously a big plus. On the other hand, it’s not by Miyazaki or Takahata, and it somehow sort of shares a character or two with The Cat Returns, which isn’t the biggest recommendation. All in all, I [...]

The Cat Returns isn’t one of my favorite movies. I’m happy for Miranda to watch it, and I won’t normally leave the room just because she has it on, but Studio Ghibli has produced much better stuff. The theme song, however, I totally love. (Miranda and Liesl agree with this.) Very catchy in a rather [...]

Apparently there was only one AIDS death in Santa Clara county in 2004. A ways to go still, but that’s real progress. We just finished watching the version of Angels in America that HBO did a couple of years ago; fabulous.

Anybody have any good Japanese pop recommendations? I suspect that there’s music to be found there that I would enjoy, but I don’t have any good routes in. So far, I’m dipping my toes in based on video games and movies, which is fine, as far as it goes. From the former, “Everlasting Love” continues [...]

One thing I forgot to mention about Broadway Melody of 1940: I liked the way they showed the differences in ability between Johnny (Fred Astaire’s character) and King (George Murphy’s character). Right at the start, they’re dancing together; to my untrained eye, there weren’t obvious differences in the quality of their dancing. (I’ll watch it [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Now that Miranda’s bed time has moved up (since she no longer takes naps at 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 [...]

We went to see The Gay Divorcee on Wednesday. (The Stanford Theatre is showing a bunch of Fred Astaire / 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 [...]