Concern

Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man really does manage to suck, in spite of itself. The butchered editing manages to utterly fail to bring together interesting interviews, and interesting performances of interesting songs, a feat that’s probably hard to do deliberately. Ignoring that, the film is pretty good, but just a tape of the performances, and then a separate tape of the interviews with Cohen and other musicians would have been just as good. The final U2+Cohen performance, while a good rendition of Tower of Song, fails to bring any climax to the feature, probably because it really looks lip-synced, and not a live performance.

Also, the sound in the theater kept cutting out, which is, you know, bad for a concert film.

I drove my new car to work today, for the first time. This is a 37-mile haul from Santa Cruz, over the notorious highway 17, then up state route 85 into Sunnyvale. My first impressions follow.

• The clutch is nice; it doesn’t feel too hard, and it’s not squishy. It’s really comfortable to use in traffic.
• The car feels more comfortable at a higher RPM than my old car; most gears felt right between 2000-2500 RPM, on this it’s more like 2500-3000. I was trying to keep my same shifting pattern per RPM, but in most gears that feels too low. I found myself getting up to fifth at only about 60 mph.
• Gas mileage. The display can be configured to display the mileage you’re getting on the current trip, and going to work (very light traffic) I got 31 mpg. Coming home (stop-and-go on 85; pretty clear on 17) I got 27. I think I’ll hit my goal of not needing to fill up twice a week
• It’s a really quiet engine.
• The interior is roomy, and the leather seats are great.
• The suspension feels a bit stiffer. Our crappy California highways had me bouncing a little.
• The brakes are a little sticky, but it is brand new.
• I can’t seem to get the Sirius radio to activate.
• I drove lightly today, because I need to break the car in, but I did push it a little to see how the turbo does. That’s awesome; accelerating is pretty great.

A Scanner Darkly

This is good. It’s really faithful to the novel, and here that faithfulness pays off; I also really enjoyed the performances, especially Robert Downey Jr., which pretty much every review will say the same. The animation is nice, but felt more cartoonish than Waking Life did — I suppose that’s because the latter had many different, more painterly styles, while this film was animated by professional animators. I think a lot of the charm of the Rotoshop stuff came from individual style, and thus here it’s flatter, more uniform, and ultimately less interesting.

Clerks II

This was kind of awesome. I loved Clerks., and this doesn’t live up to that, but it’s still really fun. It manages to present raunchy, sick comedy without getting too stupid, which is a rare feat.

Miami Vice

I’ve become kind of a fan of Michael Mann; I thought Collateral was really good, and Heat was incredible. Vice ranks third in that list, but it’s still good. The film is mostly amazingly shot — with the exception of a lot of night shots, which are all film grain (maybe that’s intentional, because that style kind of highlights the danger happening in the dark) — but the story and acting only evoke a solid B.

Superman Returns

I liked this movie. Maybe for no other reason than how it captured really well the feeling of the Christopher Reeve movies. There are some dumb moments, yeah, but it isn’t Superman 3-dumb.

Donnie Darko

I finally got to see this, and it’s pretty good. It’s a much simpler story than I’d expected, but well set up and nicely executed.

Shattered Glass

This is great. It’s a simple story about Stephen Glass, an associate editor for the New Republic, who fabricated many of the stories he wrote for the magazine. It’s simple, and well-acted; and surprisingly, Darth Vader plays Glass, and does a fine job of it.

I went to this. I’d like to go to more of these, but it’s a bit out of my way to go to San Francisco. I think I saw _____ ____ ________ there, who I had _ ______ _____ _____ __. But I’m not sure if it was ___.

But, this was the first time that I drove myself into the city. This seems somehow significant, because I haven’t liked driving that much in the past, and I’m really I was really afraid of driving around a big city like that. I also recently drove myself all the way out to _______; I went out there, and managed __ _____ __ ___________ ___. That was weird, but significant, that I managed to drive myself all the way out there, and ___ __ ___ ___ _____ __ ___ ____ _______, ______ __ ____ two hours later.