Just a quick note to let everyone know I’ve added a new album to my long-neglected photo gallery. This one contains pictures from a trip I took to Germany last fall. I’ve actually been working on this album for quite a while, scanning and adding photos a few at a time, so some of you may have already seen some of these shots. Even so, the album is finally in its finished form with captions and descriptions, so I invite everyone to go check it out.
CNN is reporting this morning that the official title of the next (and presumably final) Star Wars movie will be Revenge of the Sith. Representatives of Lucasfilm made the announcement at this weekend’s massive gathering of comic book and science fiction fans in San Diego, Comic-Con International, where the crowd’s response was reported to be generally positive. My own response? I’m not sure yet. I sorta like it and I sorta hate it, which I guess is fitting because that’s been my reaction to the Star Wars prequels in general.
Given the huge amount of behind-the-scenes material now available to even the most casual movie fans in the form of DVD supplements and cable-TV programming, it saddens me to note how little of it pays tribute to film music. Music is one of the most underappreciated elements of quality filmmaking; while everyone oohs and ahhs over the latest visual spectacle to emerge from the special effects shops, only the most hard-core cinephile gives any thought at all to a movie’s score.
Due to my relatively clumsy HTML coding skills and inattention to fine details, the previous entry went public with a couple of errors, one of which no doubt left my readers wondering just what the hell photographs of the CBS Studios lot had to do with drunken friends. I’ve tracked down the bug and restored the missing block of text, which describes about a fun little game my friend Cheno told me about. If you are so inclined, go back and skim the entry for the link.
Also, as long as I was in a tinkering mood anyway, I’ve added a long overdue copyright notice and my e-mail address to the site. I have a couple of other things I’d like to do as well, but I’m not sure if this is the day to do them…
Well, it’s Friday afternoon, and if you’re at all like me, you’re just watching the clock in the corner of your desktop and waiting for Mr. Slate to pull that little pteranodon’s tail feathers for the last time this week. Under these circumstances, it’s a fair bet that you won’t be too interested in reading anything too heavy, so in place of the usual pedantic rantings and meandering attempts at criticism, I’ll offer up a selection of the fun stuff I’ve encountered during my recent surfing.
“This is an important day,” the teacher said. “Do you know why, Virginia?”
Virginia shook her pretty little bleach-blonde head and the teacher sighed.
“Today is important, Virginia, because thirty-five years ago on this date, human beings did something that previous generations had not thought possible: they walked on the Moon.”
[Ed. note: Fair warning: this entry is a long one, and it involves a fair amount of rambling. I’ll eventually get to Spidey 2, but it’s going to take a while, so please bear with me. Or don’t. After all, it’s your surfing time. Who am I to tell you how to spend your time?]
There are four things you should know about me before I voice my opinions on the summer’s biggest film so far, Spider-Man 2:
This irritates me something fierce. Four years ago, a theater student at the University of Utah, Christina Axson-Flynn, raised a stink because she thought it was unreasonable for her professors to expect her to swear when the script she was performing from required it. When Axson-Flynn (who is Mormon) couldn’t convince her professors to see her point-of-view, she did what every American is apparently required to do at least once in their lives and filed a lawsuit, alleging that the U. is biased against Mormons.
There’s another one of those big personality surveys making the rounds on the ‘net this morning, 100 questions about your cultural preferences called the “Teachout Cultural Concurrence Index.” This survey originated on a blog belonging to a Manhattan music and drama critic named Terry Teachout. Given TeachoutÂ’s credentials, it’s not too surprising that some of the items on this survey are a bit, well, hoity-toity, and not really the sort of thing that would appeal to a non-New York intellectual. (That’s a roundabout way of saying that I, like fellow blogger Kevin Drum, didn’t know enough about many of the choices to have any preference. I hang my head in shame at my apparent Philistinism.) However, Teachout does state that his blog is about “all the arts, high, medium, and low,” and, true to that declaration, his survey has plenty of the lower-brow stuff that I can relate to. Besides, I like taking these things. And therefore I offer the following window into my tastes, or lack thereof:
This is one of those days when I have a lot of things I’d like to blog about and little time to do any of them justice, so I apologize in advance for throwing out a bunch of unconnected (and unedited) nuggets: