1999

Olen viime aikoina tullut siihen tulokseen, että 1999 oli kaikkien aikojen paras elokuvavuosi. Tässä listaa vuoden omasta mielestäni poikkeuksellisen mahtavasta sadosta sekalaisessa järjestyksessä:

• The Matrix
• Fight Club
• 10 Things I Hate About You
• American Beauty
• Austin Powers – The Spy Who Shagged Me
• The Blair Witch Project
• Boys Don't Cry
• Being John Malkovitch
• Eyes Wide Shut
• Magnolia
• Office Space
• Sixth Sense
• South Park: Bigger Longer & Uncut
• Stuart Little
• Pitkä kuuma kesä
• The Green Mile
• The Boondock Saints
• Toy Story 2

Dear Motion Picture Industry

There is this film I would like to see called Food, Inc. All of the Internet is abuzz over it with bloggers recommending it to each other. I would like to take them up on this recommendation.

But I can't, because the global capitalist machine has decided that I don't really need to. According to the IMDB, the film is not even in theatrical circulation anywhere but Hong Kong, USA, Canada and Singapore (as of time of writing).

Food, Inc. was first released at a film festival in Toronto, Canada on September 7, 2008. In July of the following year, there are no screenings in Europe at all. The DVD isn't going to be released until November 2009, according to Amazon. That is more than a year after the initial release! I bet it's just going to be just the North American print with region code restrictions to try to keep people from ordering it overseas.

Dear Motion Picture Industry, why do you insist on sucking so hard? I try to play along with this stuff because I want to reward makers of interesting films by throwing money at them. I want to do the right thing. All this crap you keep pulling just makes it pretty damn hard.

This is 2009! We have global economy with efficient cargo transit systems which enable us to buy stuff from abroad and have it shipped anywhere. Even that is a little dated because there is also the Internet which allows nearly instant circulation of digital representations of stuff such as "movies" and "money". Considering this incredible infrastructure exists, why am I sitting here in front of my computer trying to exchange some of my money to some of your content, only to find it impossible? Why do you so spectacularly fail to engage me and my fellow non-North Americans as consumers?

Oh well. Like in any of life's disappointments, I try to look at the bright side: there's always BitTorrent. (The DVD will probably be leaked before November, and hey, maybe the powers that be who control what gets screened in Finnish cinemas might decide to pick up Food, Inc.)

Star Trek

< A> Might go see it on thursday
< B> saw a short trailer/teaser thing on TV
     and it was basically just more Kirk
     acting like a juvenile delinquent
< A> Well, they got that characterisation
     right then
< B> I dunno, Kirk always seemed pretty
     levelheaded to me
< A> I never got that impression from him at
     all
< A> being all gung ho and womanizing
< B> he was a military guy who liked his
     women, but I didn't see him going around
     picking fights if he could avoid them
< B> I'm just not sure how a James Dean
     character suddenly turns out to be a
     starship captain
< A> I do admit my perception maybe skewed
     cause most of TOS consisted of Kirk
     punching his problems as opposed to TNG
     where they technobabbled them away
< B> "oh awesome, here's some dude with issues
     riding a motorcycle and picking bar
     fights. yo. wanna captain our new top of
     the line science/warship?" - starfleet
< A> It was a more barbaric time
< B> "we considered a couple of astronauts,
     couple scientists, couple naval officers
     ... they just weren't cool enough. this
     is a cool people ship."