PlasticBoy

NYTimes top 10 lists in music, film, and TV. Get them before they slip into the archives.

The Globe has 100 movie rental picks. Golden Globe nominations came out this week, some are out on DVD.

Welcome to the new PlasticBoy. I’m now managing the site with some custom PHP code instead of Blogger. The major change for you: comments! I haven’t tested this with many browser/OS combos so post your bugs here (or mail me if you can’t get posting to work).

This map of Springfield is awesome. I want a framed print-out.

Fellowship was even better than I expected, and I was expecting a lot. Sure, I have my gripes, but they seem like nitpicking in retrospect. Here are a few notes:

• Everybody calls Sauron by name. In the book, few people are unwilling to say “Sauron” for fear of attracting his attention. Why would you change that?
• If directors are going to do arrows-in-flight shots, they should really look at some videos of arrows in flight first. It looks much cooler than anything I’ve seen in a movie.
• Why do fantasy movie archers always have to hold their bows sideways? It’s just silly.
• Showing Sauron in full armor wasn’t so bad and it seems like a nice compromise with just having Gandalf or Elrond tell the Isildur story with no visual.
• The fight scenes were great but it’s too bad they succumbed to the trend towards jumpy, close-up camera work so it’s hard to tell what’s going on. I guess maybe that’s necessary when you’re working CG into fight scenes.
• I like how they beefed up Arwen as a character, she is practically non-existent in the book.
• I enjoyed everything from the Balrog on even more because it seemed more faithful to the book. I think that bodes well for the rest of the series.

And the Village Voice review desrves its own link just for this quote: “How much fun it would have been to see a real desecration of Tolkien that periodized the trilogy’s cosmic adventures by having them played out inside the brain of some acid-ripped hippie—the Fellowship leaving the snug communes of northern Vermont on a perilous mission to cast the ‘ring of power’ into the boiler of some fetid East Village basement.”

I have tickets to Fellowship tonight and I think I’m going to enjoy it. I’ve read a variety of reviews, good and bad. It sounds like minor things will annoy me (apparently they show Sauron in the opening scene) but it will be pretty great overall.

Science musings: In search of universe’s point.
“The biggest problem in the world today is not that the universe might not have a point, but that too many people think they know what the point is.”

The 2001 selections for the National Film Registry were announced today. Woohoo for The Thin Blue Line. Lots of good ideas for my Netflix queue here.

MyVideoGames have published their last article and will be closing down in February. Too bad, it’s a great site.

NPR had an excellent segment on The Lord of the Rings(mostly the book, not the movie) this morning.

Hey, I think I got my blogging mojo back!

The Economist: “The key fact is this: Saudi Arabia has enormous reserves of oil that can be extracted at very low cost. Regardless of western policies, its oil will flow on to the market and, in effect, set the world price. This makes ‘dependence’ on Saudi Arabia an inescapable reality for years to come.”

The Breeders announce a new album due in February. Only nine years in the making.

So, Red Hat is cracking down on cheap CD sites and telling them that they can no longer put the name “Red Hat” on CDs containing Red Hat Linux. I think these sites should get together and come up with a code name for Red Hat Linux like “BoneHead Linux” or “Bob Young is a Greedy Bastard Linux”. I understand evhead’s point that commercial software companies need to protect their trademarks and the reputation of their products but the game changes when you’re selling a GPLed product. CDs with Red Hat Linux on them are riddled with references to Red Hat. I can tell my CDs have Red Hat on them because the first line of the README file says “Red Hat Linux/Intel 7.1 (Seawolf)”. If writing Red Hat on the CD is a trademark violation, then so is distributing an unlabelled CD with that README file on it. If Red Hat says that I can’t redistribute Red Hat Linux in its current form, then that’s a violation of the GPL. I certainly hope Red Hat comes to its senses and I certainly hope the next version of the GPL addresses this issue explicitly.