Capital F, E, little L, LA, TIO

I going to try and make sense of the madness.

I got up this morning and read some more of the Making Of Star Wars book. It's a great, compelling read and I'm getting towards the end of it but I think after this I need to have a bit of a rest from Star Wars. I've crossed over to the dark side that is overkill I think.

I went for my walk this morning - this I got in about a full 30 minutes because I got up a little earlier because I went to bed a little earlier than usual.

Today on my iPod through the day I listened to The Police from a few weeks ago in Anaheim / Orange County, then in Berkely from 1977 then the Horden Pavillion from 1980 (btw, this was a Triple J broadcast!). I also listened to Slash doing the Godfather theme from a Guns 'N' Roses concert (which he played at Calder raceway) and a podcast of Get This with Tony Martin - this was ok on Kamal's recommendation but I'm not fussed about listening to more. The contrast between The Police shows was not as great as I thought it would be, but the earlier performances were more compelling none the less - they played furiously in the earlier shows as though they had something to prove (which I guess they did) and the recent show smacked of pretentious rearrangement as though Sting was exerting his solo influence over Stewart and Andy - I'll still go though. I also watched a Henry Rollins Show with Don Cheadle (he spoke about his Miles Davis biopic!) and Rufus Wainwright, Paul Rudd on the Daily Show promoting Knocked Up and started to watch the last few Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip.

At work it wasn't much of a work day. It was very quiet. I had enough to do so I had something for the timesheet but not much. I decided to get Crowded House tickets.

After thinking about it this morning I tried to find out how to convert that Prince press conference RM to another video file and may have found something on the net to do it here or here. I then stupidly realised that WinAVI Converter can convert RM to WMV - so I'm doing that right now as we speak (or type as the case may be!).

I also put together this morning a list of query dvd's and then researched them through the course of the day. According to Video Watchdog, the definitive version of Army Of Darkness is now Hong Kong. DVD Compare seems to confirm this. A strong recommendation from the Video Watchdogs I just read is Quai des Orfèvres which is another film from Henri-Georges Clouzot who also made Les Diaboliques. A few that I've wanted to see for a while are: Targets which Webflicks has, but without the extras; Winter Kills, which has a very nice R1 Special Edition; Squirm and Bordello Of Blood.

I had a souvlaki which was an absolute mess. It went nuclear on me.

Another thing I wanted to sort out today was those Ryan Adams lyrics and some how collate them all from the Answering Bell website into one long text list. After a couple of false starts, finally had the brain wave to download all the HTM using Free Download Manager - this took a couple of go's as the nearly 800 list seemed to crash, so I had to break it up. Once that was done I tried to PDF it all. Unfortunately, because all the backgrounds were black and the text was white, it just rendered everything as white backgrounds so the text disappeared. I tried to reconfig but it wouldn't budge. Then tried to use the old MS Access tool and guess what? It worked. So left that running over night.

When I got home tonight I had a problem. My bins were not out the front. I looked up and down the street to no avail. Called Dad. Then panicked because of that gate open, chair moved incident from earlier in the week. Then I found them just on the other side of the road. Talk about a paranoid kid!

Was quite impressed how scary the film Black Christmas was without ever resorting to gore. Four years before Halloween, it seems to be the first major North American slasher film. Sure it borrows liberally from Italian horror movies in its lighting and mood, but has a more convincing young American attitude that the Italian films can't possibly achieve. Its major assets are its director, Bob Clark, who seemed to be obsessed with Christmas in all its facets and its young cast including Margot Kidder and Olivia Hussey. Genre stalwarts such as Keir Dullea and John Saxon gave able support. Clark in particular gives the film a great subjective wide view of the film landscape which is impressive for two major reasons: 1. as I mentioned the film pre-dates Halloween by a few years which used exactly the same technique! and 2. unlike Halloween which was anamorphic, Clark only has a 1.66:1 view to contend with - he pulls it off admirably (although there is conjuncture on IMDB as to what the correct OAR should be) . There is a terrific use of windows and mirrors and the telephone plays an incredibly important ongoing role in the phone (they even have a scene in an old telephone exchange) - along with this is the excellent use of sound - from the telephone ringing to the sound of high heels. I couldn't quite work out why it had an R rating, although some of the obscene phone calls get quite sleazy. Unlike most slasher films this film has an ambigiuous ending and the killer is never revealed. Some dislike this, but I found it the only logical ending possible. In fact my mind started to wander at some point that it was actually the Olivia Hussey character who was the killer! The film was remade in 2006.


Black Christmas Wikipedia Page

I ended the day typing up this blog entry and I started to rip my Pearl Jam Live At The Gorge cd's.

The other from this week generally was that I've spent an obscene amount of money and can't really justify it all!