museless aiming

Films I saw in January 2010

02 Feb 2010 16:06:39 +0100

I may not be able to keep this up every month, but in January I saw 32 (mostly) good films, so I figure I can do a top ten list. There are a few minor spoilers.

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)

02 Feb 2010 20:07:53 +0100

Sometimes my view on a film takes time to coalesce. While I found the experience of watching the Texas Chain Saw Massacre a few weeks ago to be extremely unpleasant, it has stuck in my mind, and the more I think about it, the better I think it is.

Gimme Shelter

01 Jan 2010 14:33:56 +0100

Gimme Shelter is a beautifully edited glimpse of late 60s life. It chronicles the (lack of) planning and execution of the free concert at Altamont in December 1969. The focus is naturally on the Rolling Stones, but it goes beyond the formulaic concert footage that one expects and receives from it.

Films I saw in 2009

01 Jan 2010 00:12:04 +0100

I watched a total of 162 films in 2009. I only saw five that actually came out in 2009. Of those (Watchmen, Broken Embraces, Life During Wartime, District 9, Star Trek) none of them were in the top sixty films I saw during the year.

Amazon EC2

01 Jan 2010 14:49:01 +0100

In an effort to understand what all this cloud computing business was about, I set up an Amazon EC2 account today.

Gang of Four

09 Sep 2009 02:17:17 +0100

Last night I saw Gang of Four perform songs from their 1979 album, Entertainment! I love the album, but the show was even better than I was expecting.

Denon DL-160

09 Sep 2009 01:49:09 +0100

So today, after nineteen long days of waiting, my Denon DL-160 arrived. I spent about two hours installing it, I'm now enjoying the high output of its moving coil.

The Dark Knight -- not that dark

01 Jan 2010 14:54:37 +0100

I finally saw The Dark Knight which had everyone talking a few months ago. To begin with, it's not a good film or a particularly bad film; it's not properly a film at all, rather an action flick along the lines of the later Die Hard films and should be regarded as such, rather than with the inflated value that people I know seem to have assigned to it.

Trust

09 Sep 2008 22:50:46 +0100

Of his 1981 album Trust, Costello writes:

Two french films

07 Jul 2008 23:21:27 +0100

Perhaps it's just having seen its latter incarnations, Stalag 17, The Great Escape, etc., but I found The Grand Illusion greatly overrated. Renoir's mixture of comic and bleak works in Rules of the Game, whose void leaves its audience to ponder society's vacuity. In The Grand Illusion, most of the jokes fall flat, and one is left questioning the point of the film.