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(4) Thu Oct 10 2024 18:28 September Film Roundup:

 * Tokyo Olympiad (1965): An incredible narrative film made from documentary
   footage. I did not think I would enjoy a movie about the Olympics but I saw
   this movie, now I'm a believer. Sumana also watched O Sport, You Are Peace!
   (1981) and 16 Days of Glory (1985) and I watched some of those films as well,
   but there's no comparison in terms of quality. Tokyo Olympiad has a
   continuous focus on the people at the Olympics, especially but not only the
   athletes. Other films document the spectacle to please the IOC and the host
   country; Tokyo Olympics keeps pointing out that all the spectacle is made up
   of individual people doing stuff.
   
   Incidentally, I have a strong memory of my dad taking me to watch Greg
   Louganis compete at the 1984 Olympics, but there's footage of this in 16 Days
   of Glory, and it's happening in the afternoon; I remember it being dark out.
   Maybe we went to the qualifying heats or something?

 * Being Two Isn't Easy (1962): Kon Ichikawa impressed us so much that we
   decided to check out this pre-Tokyo Olympiad dramedy. Not incredible, but
   very enjoyable, especially the wry sense of humor they give the Look Who's
   Talking-esque two-year-old. The parents are believably harried, obaachan is
   both infuriating and sympathetic, and everyone's just doing their best.
 * The Hired Hand (1971): A good, lonesome western from Hollywood's
   all-too-brief "give the director total creative control" period. Dramatizes
   the west with a complete absence of glamor, but without relying too much on
   shock value and violence. (There is a little, but it's not, like,
   Unforgiven.)



Wed Sep 04 2024 23:15 August Film Roundup: Sumana was gone for much of the
month, and you know what that means: lots of movies from the 60s and 70s with
below-average IMDB ratings!

 * Christmas in July (1940): One for the "we can't agree on a title" files. A
   fun screwball comedy with twists you can see coming 1.2 miles away. At this
   point I can say that Preston Sturges movies just give me a good feeling. Not
   because they're warm and fuzzy—they tend to be the opposite—but because they
   posit that the human capability to fuck things up is limited, that we do good
   despite ourselves.
 * Shack Out on 101 (1955): Like Raiders of San Joaquin, a film I chose because
   its title made me nostalgic for my childhood. It's got a fun Cannery Row vibe
   going on, and I didn't even mind the escalation into an action-ish noir
   movie, but my credulity was strained when basically every character in the
   film turned out to be a spy. It was like watching the final ending of Clue.
 * The Swimmer (1968): I had heard of this movie, but suffered from a major
   misapprehension about the plot. I thought this guy literally swims from pool
   to pool, traversing underwater tunnels like in a Mario game. I'm not saying I
   didn't also recognize it as a highbrow metaphor for the human condition, but
   when Burt Lancaster got out of the pool and started walking to the next one I
   was drastically disappointed.
   
   I dunno, it's still OK. I feel like I don't encounter many movies like this,
   movies that are nominally mimetic but operate on a mythic or archetypal
   level. Most likely these movies are still around but I actively avoid them.
   Like, Evil Does Not Exist (2023) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) seem
   like they're going for a similar feel but I have no desire to see either one
   of those movies.

 * The Facts of Life (1960): Maybe Lucille Ball will make Bob Hope seem funny, I
   thought. And... she kinda does? It helps that this isn't a fake-divorce film,
   like you'd have to make to tell this kind of story in the 1950s. It depicts
   real suburban desperation and genuine, Billy Wilder-approved infidelity. I
   never thought I'd see the day, but here's a movie where Bob Hope has some
   actual chemistry with his lead actress.
   
   Overall I didn't think this was great, but the ending was sweet. I guess what
   I'm saying is you take the good, you take the bad, you take them all, and...
   no, wait... sixty years ago we had Ball and Hope, and now... where was I
   going with this?

 * The Bank Shot (1974): Another movie adaptation from my Donald Westlake kick,
   and the best I can say for this is it really shows how the adaptation of a
   good source material can fall short. The Hot Rock (1972) takes a lot of
   liberties with the book, but they're all in the service of making the story
   move fast enough to hit an unusual number of plot beats in a normal-length
   film. The Bank Shot feels like they wanted to do a different movie with the
   same central gimmick. (It's a great gimmick.) The scenes where they execute
   the gimmick are great; the others are lousy and it doesn't help that oom-pah
   circus music is playing during every action scene to tell you it's funny.
   
   The characters are unrecognizable as well (just as well that most of them are
   renamed from the book). The point of the book is that Dortmunder's genius at
   planning and staffing heists is exactly balanced out by his terrible luck. In
   this movie he's a super-criminal abetted by, and going up against, buffoons.
   They moved the setting from Long Island to LA just because it was easier to
   film. Not enjoyable.
   
   What was enjoyable was discovering, while writing this entry, that Donald
   Westlake wrote the screenplay for Cops and Robbers (1973)—a darkly comic
   heist with a great gimmick that's also a good movie.

 * Salt and Pepper (1968): This movie's bad, but it does give a sense of what it
   would be like if they'd started making Austin Powers movies in 1968. In that
   respect it's sort of like Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? from
   1957—contemporaneous proof that the people who lived in a ridiculous part of
   the past were in on the joke. However, most of the actual jokes in this movie
   are not good, and the action scenes are like Austin Powers fight scenes but
   played straight. The best gag is near the beginning when Sammy Davis Jr. does
   the longest-delayed double take I think I've seen in a movie.
 * Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins (1975): Crime and grime, baby. When your
   response to being kidnapped is to just go with the flow, you know it's the
   70s. Less watchable than The Bank Shot but has more indie cred. Looking up
   this movie after watching it, I saw that star Alan Arkin directed Little
   Murders, another "who cares, I'm already dead inside" movie. He also played
   the title character in Simon (1980). The guy had some issues, is what I'm
   insinuating.
 * The Questor Tapes (1974): As soon as I saw "teleplay by Gene Roddenberry" on
   this pilot-cum-made-for-TV-movie, I knew it was only a matter of time before
   Majel Barrett showed up. (It was about 45 seconds.) But what I didn't expect
   was seeing a whole dry run for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Others have
   mentioned that Robert Foxworth's Questor is a prototype of Data, down to
   really specific 1st-season-of-TNG stuff like the "fully functional" gag. What
   I haven't seen others mention is that The Questor Tapes also prototypes the
   Data/Geordi relationship, with Jerry as Questor's friend/maintenance guy.
   
   And man, this movie has Gene Roddenberry humanism sermonizing like nobody's
   business. "An insane creator? Good thing humans don't have an insane creator!
   How horrible that would be!" (Not a direct quote.) I would not watch this if
   it had been picked up as a series, but as a time capsule showing an early
   draft of one of my favorite things, I loved it.
   
   PS: Ol' Gene reuses the Vulcan nerve pinch in this one. It's a low-violence
   way to put your enemies out of action—perfect for network TV!

 * One Cut of the Dead (2017): I enjoyed this, but not as much as I was
   expecting. The recent Japanese mini-trend of long-take movies like this,
   River, Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes, etc. is very heartening. It's a genre
   of film that requires a lot of skill but very little money. However, this one
   was a bit disappointing because the description of the movie you see on IMDB
   and whatnot is actually a description of the movie-within-a-movie (True Fear)
   you see in act 1. There are definitely twists in act 3 that recontextualize
   True Fear, but... there are no actual zombies in this film. Sorry. It's just
   a triumph-of-the-human-spirit kind of thing.
   
   If there was some way to skip act 2 altogether I'd be more sanguine about
   recommending this film. It kind of drags, but you can't just cut it, because
   it's setting up all the character development for act 3.



Sun Aug 11 2024 15:56 July Film Roundup: Pressed for time this month so I'm just
gonna write some quick reviews and head off to resume my apparently busy life.

 * Seven Samurai (1954): I know I said no more Kurosawa films that take place
   before the Meiji Restoration, but I really needed to get out of the house for
   a day, so I saw this at Film Forum. It's good. I'm always apprehensive about
   sitting down for a three-hour movie, but due to selection bias they have a
   pretty good track record. The only super-long movie I've actually bailed out
   on was Reds (1981).
   
   Reading IMDB trivia about the different drafts this screenplay went through
   was comforting to me, as I go through my own creative struggles. Adding the
   wacky peasant-pretending-to-be-a-samurai was a good decision.

 * Slacker (1990): A hell of a movie. Really impressive how it's able to keep
   its conceit going the whole time. Sumana proposed this one and I was
   skeptical, mainly because of the title, but it turns out the movie originally
   had a super-pretentious title and the studio made Richard Linklater change
   it. Speaking of which, that guy really loves his walk-and-talks, huh? Great
   dialogue, stylized but still seeming naturalistic.
   
   Now that I think of it, you could film an X-Files episode entirely running in
   the background of this movie. Many of the characters have a "wacky but
   sinister X-Files side character" feel. I guess that really was the vibe of
   the 90s.
   
   Since Slacker and X-Files now have me in the conspiracy mindset, time for me
   to share one of my patented cinematic conspiracy theories with you. I believe
   Richard Linklater has been secretly working on a film since 1990, with the
   cast and crew sworn to secrecy, to be released only after he dies.

 * Noises Off (1992) - A fun farce with a tacked-on framing device we moviegoers
   probably didn't need. While planning this Film Roundup I kept thinking Steve
   Martin was in this, that's how fun it is. I don't even know what role I was
   mentally casting Steve Martin in. Maybe Christopher Reeve?
   
   Anyway, fun movie, especially if you like the Goes Wrong Show type of chaos.
   Probably not as fun as the original play, but the great thing about movies is
   you can now watch them anytime, without spending thousands of dollars to
   stage a new production.

 * Inside Out 2 (2024) - I dunno. I read an article that framed this movie as
   specifically being about anxiety, and I guess through that lens it's a good
   guide for teens and their parents to get real about important topics. But I
   watched the whole movie, not just the anxiety part, and there's a lot that
   didn't work for me.
   
   Rather than harp on this, I want to present another crackpot cinematic
   theory, this time about an earlier draft of the Inside Out 2 screenplay. I
   believe that the new emotions introduced by Riley's puberty were originally
   intended as warped versions of the original five Inside Out emotions, rather
   than brand new characters. Disgust→Envy, Fear→Embarrassment, Sadness→Ennui,
   Anger→Anxiety. This plan fell apart when it became clear that the warped
   version of Joy could only be Horniness, and nobody wants that.

 * It Happened To Jane (1959): One of the most generic movie titles ever, just
   below It Happened One Night and It. What happened to Jane, you ask?
   Fortunately, there's a song at the beginning of the movie that... no, the
   song explains nothing! Jane falls in love, okay? With young puppy-dog lawyer
   Jack Lemmon, no less. What a catch!
   
   I don't have a way to quantify this, but my gut says that older comedies like
   this have more stuff than modern ones. This movie has detailed technical
   subplots about running a mail-order business, the legal system, small town
   democracy, and railroad freight logistics; on top of the usual rom-com antics
   about mercenary journalists and sex segregation of lobsters. Also a song
   about the Cub Scouts, which has lyrics written by the director and which I
   must assume was included as some sort of residuals scam. I wouldn't say all
   of this comes together in a cohesive whole, but it definitely all happened to
   Jane.

 * Supermarket Woman (1996) - We loved this story of user research and
   continuous incremental improvement. The best film of the month, I think.
   Showing recurring interactions with the same customers over time was a neat
   trick to kind of create recurring guest stars in a movie. Also did a great
   job showing the clash between craftspeople, who want to do the best job
   possible, and people trying to run a damn store, who need to give the people
   what they want at the cheapest price.
   
   Japanese question: the owner of the rival supermarket Discount Demon is
   referred to by the feudal title "daimyo". I am pretty sure this is a joke,
   but what kind of joke is it? Is Discount Demon doing a kind of Medieval Times
   thing, what with the old-timey demon mascot and the military-style
   discipline? Is this guy just really egotistical?
   
   PS: I think the supermarket shootout in Hot Fuzz was inspired by the chase
   scene in Supermarket Woman.

 * A Taxing Woman (1987) - She's back! This is the point where we realized that
   Juzo Itami and Nobuko Miyamoto have a Joel Coen/Frances McDormand type of
   relationship. Not as joyous as Supermarket Woman but a fun crime drama, sort
   of a tax fraud Columbo. We do plan to see all of Itami's films eventually, or
   at least I do.
   
   Old video game watch: there's some classic (I must assume) MSX non-game
   software on display in the love hotel, but the real prize is the scene where
   Itakura sees the villain's son playing Super Mario Bros. on the family
   Famicom computer. There's no generic Atari beeps or disinclination to show
   anything but the back of the TV, the way there would be in an American movie
   of the period. It's shot very naturally, and when Itakura takes over, she's
   realistically good at the game!
   
   Capcom released a visual novel of A Taxing Woman for Famicom, making this the
   only movie I'm aware of that had a video game adaptation published on a game
   system also seen in use in the movie. This probably happens all the time now,
   but the closest I can come to another example is the Wii adaptation of Iron
   Man (2008). Tony Stark has a Wii in his modernist house, but you don't ever
   see him flinging around the Wiimote playing Twilight Princess.

 * My Cousin Vinny (1992): This film is often praised by those in the legal
   profession. I guess that makes sense because there's no villain, the things
   happening in the courtroom are all things that happen in real courtrooms, and
   it flatters the legal mind by depicting the justice system as actually
   seeking justice. Unfortunately, as a non-lawyer, I must say there is a huge
   problem with this movie, and it's the titular Vinny.
   
   I mean, do you want this guy as your lawyer? I seriously thought the
   second-act twist was that oops, Vinny actually isn't a lawyer. He failed the
   bar again, he's been lying to his family for months, and now he's in over his
   head. There's a recurring cycle early in the movie where Vinny gets
   humiliated in court, over and over again, seemingly learning nothing. Not
   only does it feel like he didn't go to law school, it feels like he's never
   seen a courtroom drama. If you cut all but one of these cycles, and skipped
   quickly to the part where he starts interviewing witnesses, I'd be a lot more
   sympathetic to the movie.

 * The Art of War (2000): Sumana saw this in the theater, way back when, and
   remembered it as being full of bad computer stuff. But like with Antitrust
   (2001), the perspective of years shows that the computer stuff, though hardly
   prophetic, isn't that bad. When it is bad, it's because the filmmakers came
   up with a bunch of roundabout hacker/spy crap instead of, I dunno, figuring
   out how to dramatize the use of PGP. It's pretty simple, guys: just show a
   "Decrypting..." status bar.
   
   The Wesley Snipes action is fun, and this film has the same outsized
   impression of the UN's influence that you find in much earlier films like A
   Global Affair (1964). I don't think I recommend this, exactly, but you could
   do worse.
   
   One of the first films that needs to manufacture a cell phone malfunction for
   the plot to work out.



(1) Sat Jul 27 2024 13:10 When does The Phantom Tollbooth take place?: I just
read The Annotated Phantom Tollbooth, with annotations by Leonard S. Marcus. The
annotations were excellent regarding earlier drafts of the manuscript, and the
correspondence between Norton Juster and Jules Feiffer. But some of the
annotations brought in scholarly analysis of the book's concepts, and I thought
a lot of those fell flat compared to the gold standard of annotated children's
books, Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice.

However, a couple things I noticed as I reread the book with those annotations
put me in the mood to answer a specific high-concept question: when does this
story take place, exactly? I did come up with an exact answer: though published
in 1961, The Phantom Tollbooth begins on Tuesday, April 11, 1967. But getting
there requires several leaps of logic. I think these leaps make sense, but I
also don't think the story was designed to support this kind of analysis.
Certainly Norton Juster didn't plan this, since the answer relies on societal
trends that played out after the book was published. But here we go:

How to interpret background assumptions?

Several of the inferences I'm going to make depend on an assumed geographic or
cultural background. The Lands Beyond is, well, beyond, but it's an extremely
American sort of fantasy world. Everyone speaks English, all the puns are in
English, all the spellings are American, and Dictionopolis only recognizes the
26 characters of the Latin alphabet. Two characters in chapter 16 refer to
American currency ("ten dollars apiece", "dollars or cents").

Specifically, I argue that the Lands Beyond are a New York tri-state area
fantasy world, mainly because of the titular tollbooth. I grew up in Los
Angeles, land of freeways, and when I first read this book as a child, a
"tollbooth" seemed as weird and magical as a talking dodecohedron.

For this analysis I will assume that Milo lives in or near New York City, both
for Doyleist reasons (that's where Norton Juster lived when he wrote the book)
and Watsonian reasons (Milo lives in an apartment building with at least eight
stories and knows what a turnpike tollbooth is). The background assumptions of
the Lands Beyond are the midcentury East Coast American assumptions Milo will
recognize; there's no Watsonian reason given for this but it seems indisputable.
In the 1969 film, Milo lives in San Francisco, but that's only one of the
problems with that movie.

What year?

Next, let's establish the year The Phantom Tollbooth takes place. In the absence
of any internal cues, we tend to assume a book is set in the year the book came
out: 1961 in this case. This assumption worked until I hit chapter 16, where I
ran into a big problem: the average boy, of "ten dollars apiece" fame, who is
the .58 in his 2.58-children household.

In 1961, worldwide fertility was 4.58 children per woman, and fertility in the
United States was 3.52 children. The baby boom was winding down, and the Pill
had been approved by the FDA the previous year, but no matter how you map
"average fertility" to "size of family," I don't see how you get 2.58.

Norton Juster was 32 years old in 1961, and I think this bit, which reifies
averages, is based on things he heard long before, at the start of the baby
boom. Especially since the average child also says "A few years ago I was just
.42". This is the detail that makes me very confident Juster wasn't meticulously
piecing all of this stuff together so someone could figure it out 60 years
later. Nonetheless, I press on, because I'm having fun.

As I see it we have two options. We can say The Phantom Tollbooth takes place in
the future—say, 1967, when the US fertility rate was 2.52; or we can say it
takes place much earlier than 1961: right after World War II, on the upswing of
the baby boom. I really don't see how that second option can work, since the
average child says "each family also has an average of 1.3 automobiles." I
didn't look up the statistics for, say, 1947, but that sounds like 1950s-level
prosperity at least. (On top of all the other things that would no doubt become
anachronistic if this story took place in the 1940s.)

So I'm saying The Phantom Tollbooth takes place in 1967, six years in the future
relative to when the book came out.

Where does this leave the statement "A few years ago I was just .42", if "a few
years ago" refers to the 1940s? Well, this kid is an average, not an individual.
He doesn't age; he waxes and wanes. In the 1940s he was .42, and by 1973 he, or
one of his siblings, will disappear altogether.

What date?

The Phantom Tollbooth takes place in spring, based on this quote from the final
chapter, when Milo returns to the real world from the Lands Beyond:

> The tips of the trees held pale, young buds and the leaves were a rich deep
> green... there were... caterpillars to watch as they strolled through the
> garden.

Milo goes to school on the day he finds the Tollbooth. After school he spends
several subjective weeks in the Lands Beyond, but he returns to the real world
the evening of the day he left. He then goes to school the next day. So Milo
leaves for the Lands Beyond during the school year, and not on a Friday,
Saturday, or Sunday.

For the rest of this, I'm relying on what happens to Milo Inside the Lands
Beyond. This is tricky because of the fairy-logic time dilation, not to mention
that an entire week passes without notice in chapter 11. But I argue that we can
nail it down using only clues before the missing week.

In the Doldrums, Milo learns that "smiling is permitted only on alternate
Thursdays." This is right after he enters the Lands Beyond, so I think it's fair
to assume this is happening on the same day he left. If it's a Thursday on the
day you go past the Tollbooth, it seems like a reasonable assumption that it's
still Thursday on the other side. But if Milo had left on a Thursday, this rule
would have required clarification—"this isn't one of the Thursdays you can
smile." So he probably didn't leave on a Thursday. (If you don't find this
convincing: we don't need this clue to narrow it down, but my final answer is
consistent with this analysis.)

Now it gets a little more complicated. I'm going to argue that the events of
chapters 1-10, basically the first half of the book, happen in a single
subjective day. This encompasses a ton of activity (another reason why I think
Juster didn't meticulously plan out the timeline), but here's a summary of what
happens in between all the clever conversations:

Milo arrives in the Lands Beyond while the sun is shining. He drives to
Dictionopolis, gets thrown in the dungeon, hears some stories from the Which,
then immediately escapes the dungeon to be greeted by "a shaft of brilliant
sunshine"—so it's still daytime. There's a royal banquet and then Milo drives
out of Dictionopolis. At this point (chapter 9) it is "late afternoon." They
stop for the night, Milo watches Chroma conduct the sunset, and then falls
asleep.

So we have a lot of driving while the sun is out, a meal, more driving, and then
watching the sunset. All, I would argue, over the course of a single day. You
can argue that's too much to cram into a single day after school, and I agree,
but the first half of the book has a pretty tight perspective on Milo's
activities, and we only see him eat one meal and sleep once.

Now here's the important part: the sunrise the next day is scheduled for 5:23
AM. If it's the spring of 1967, this means the only day Milo can have entered
the Lands Beyond is Tuesday, April 11. (Remember, the implicit assumptions of
the Lands Beyond are calibrated for Milo's tri-state area self, which is why I'm
using NYC as the location from which the time of sunrise is calculated.)

So, there's our answer: The Phantom Tollbooth begins on Tuesday, April 11, 1967.
A spring day during the school year that's not a Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or
Sunday.

Beyond that point things are less reliable, because of the week that's lost in
chapter 11, but fortunately I only found one more clue that needs to be slotted
in. In chapter 12 the Soundkeeper says her vault is open to the public "only on
Mondays from two to four", with the strong implication that this is not Monday.
But this looks like it happens on Milo's second day in the Lands Beyond (apart
from the missing week), which would be Wednesday the... 19th, I guess. So that's
consistent with an April 11 start date.

In Conclusions

I've said a couple times before but I'll repeat: I don't think The Phantom
Tollbooth was meant to hold up to this kind of analysis. Here's another example:
in chapter 18, Tock says they've been traveling for "days", and then we read
this:

> "Weeks," corrected the bug, flopping into a deep comfortable armchair, for it
> did seem that way to him.

The narrator clearly thinks "weeks" is an exaggeration, and I think that's
correct, if you don't count the missing week from chapter 11 as an actual week.
Looking at the map, and seeing how much happened on Milo's first day in the
Lands Beyond, I think they could have made it to the Castle in the Air in 6-7
days, depending on how long they spent on time-sinks like swimming back from
Conclusions and doing tasks for the Terrible Trivium. (They spent at least 21
hours in the grasp of the Trivium, by the way. I remember counting this up when
I was a kid, so I've always been like this.)

After the return of Rhyme and Reason, there are three days of feasting, and then
Milo heads back to the real world. At the beginning of chapter 20, "it suddenly
occurred to Milo that he must have been gone for several weeks." But that's the
same idea that was treated as a silly exaggeration just three days earlier, in
chapter 18! In actual fact, Milo was gone for (lets say) 17 days by the
calendar, and ten subjective days, since the missing week passed in a few
seconds.

So... the timeline here is not exactly intended to snap together like a Lego
set, is what I'm saying. But I am very happy that there seems to be a unique
date where The Phantom Tollbooth began, even if Norton Juster didn't plan it
that way and couldn't have anticipated that the question would ever have an
answer.

Wed Jul 10 2024 10:50 June Film Roundup: A little late this month since
everything sucks and Sumana and I have been watching a lot of TV shows instead
of movies. But that just means you'll get a big Television Spotlight at the end
of this post.

 * The Big Lebowski (1998): Possibly the first time I've ever seen a movie in a
   theater where everyone in the theater had seen the movie before. Since this
   was my seventh viewing of The Big Lebowski, I decided to do something
   different by sitting way up in front and focusing on small background
   details. Here's what I noticed that I hadn't noticed before:
   * The last thing Jeffrey Lebowski does in the movie is hit a dog.
   * On the porch of the unit opposite the Dude's apartment there's a huge pile
     of shoes. Shoe-free household, I guess. Was it set up as part of set
     dressing or is that just the situation of whoever actually lived there?
   * The Dude's landlord seems like a Prop 13 guy who inherited the apartment
     complex and is able to live his LA artist lifestyle on the irregular
     proceeds of the rent.
   * In the scene on the beach near the end, you can see someone just walking
     around on the cliff up above, unaware that they've become an extra in
     Leonard's favorite movie of all time.
 * The Long Goodbye (1973): Why not, while Lebowski is fresh in my mind? This
   started out as a lot of fun but made the mistake of really caring about the
   plot and the mystery. I loved the early adventure to find cat food, Marlowe
   giving a pep talk to the hood assigned to trail him, but lost interest when
   he started taking his job seriously. Not bad for my first Robert Altman film,
   though.
 * The War Between Men and Women (1974): Jack Lemmon plays James Thurber, if
   Thurber was Lemmon's age in 1974. (He was actually 80 and had been dead for
   13 years.) Thurber's brand of quippy sexism is on its way out in 1974, but it
   still kinda works. The animated scenes distinguish this a bit from the
   average Women's Lib-era sex comedy, but otherwise I wasn't enthralled.
 * Streets of Fire (1984): A goofy, over the top attempt to create a big movie
   musical that the kids will like, but it was made by baby boomers whose idea
   of cool is stuck in the James Dean era. There's just not enough punk rock in
   this; in particular it's much less cool than The Warriors, directed by the
   same director (Walter Hill) four years earlier. However, Streets of Fire is
   so wacky and off the wall that Sumana and I had a great time watching it.
   It's a classic good bad movie: a bizarre idea competently made and greenlight
   because hey, who knows what will be a hit?
   
   I think you could have made a big movie musical enjoyed by kids in 1984, but
   the kids in question would have been theater kids, right? Not the punks. This
   movie and Pennies From Heaven (1981) are off the mark with their fixation on
   recreating a time in the past when musicals had mass appeal. You need modern
   sleaze and transgression, a la Rocky Horror Picture Show.
   
   I made a bet that at some point in the movie a street would be literally lit
   on fire. Reader, I won that bet. There's also a classic "make this character
   a woman but change nothing else about the screenplay" character here, a la
   Ellen Ripley, which creates a sadly compelling female character by 1984 movie
   standards.

 * Bullet for a Badman (1964): I don't have much to say about this generic 60s
   western. I remember that the location sites are beautiful, and the horses do
   a lot of good stunt work, falling over when their riders are shot and
   whatnot. I mean, I hope that's stunt work.

And here is the promised Television Spotlight:

 * Franklin (2024): I think me and Sumana might be the only people who have ever
   watched this. It seems like an Apple TV honeypot designed solely to collect
   award nominations. I do recommend it if you're a major Franklinhead, as it's
   full of snappy quips. Probably way too slow and ponderous for the general
   public. We both thought Thibault de Montalembert was outstanding as the Comte
   de Vergennes.
 * Star Trek: Discovery (2017-2024): Time to bid adieu to the weird eldest child
   of the rapidly-closing Stream Trek era. Unlike Star Trek: Picard, Discovery
   had tons of great episodes and a really good season. Unfortunately, it was
   season 3, four years ago. Season 5 was all right, so I'm not super
   disappointed, but only because my expectations have been well lowered by this
   point.
   
   I haven't looked into this in detail, but I have to assume there was major
   turmoil behind the scenes at Discovery, since the showrunner kept changing
   early on and the show kept lurching in different creative directions,
   occasionally doing things like casually spinning off a much better Star Trek
   series. But Discovery never lost sight of its pole star: the belief that
   Michael Burnham is the most important person in history and has to save the
   universe all by herself once a year. Honorable mention to the way Star Trek's
   traditional countdown-to-everything-blowing-up timers would inexplicably
   pause for minutes at a time so that everyone could have their character beat,
   though they did tone that down in the final season.
   
   My biggest Discovery regret is that Michelle Yeoh and Jason Isaacs spent so
   much time playing contemptible Mirror Universe characters that we barely or
   never got to see their (presumably) heroic, Star Trek-y Prime Universe
   equivalents. Doing a show that doesn't focus on the captain was a bold
   experiment but it left a void at the core of the show that took a really long
   time for Michael and Saru to grow to fill... by becoming captains.
   
   Oh yeah, Saru! One of my favorite Trek characters, period. Especially in the
   early seasons, he was a believable and sensitive portrayal of a sentient prey
   animal. And... yeah, I like most of the other characters (not you, Burnham's
   various love interests) but Saru is the standout here. The secondary cast was
   neglected from the start and it feels like they never recovered. I love the
   eventual Chekhov-Sulu bromance between Owosekun and Detmer but it was such a
   long road, getting from there to here.

 * The Prisoner (1967): I believe "hot mess" would be an appropriate term. This
   is so stylish and has tons of good ideas, many of which remain quotable 55
   years later, but the impetus for the series in the first place—Patrick
   McGoohan's weariness of being typecast in spy shit—also drives it over the
   cliff at the end, with the last few episodes willing to put complete nonsense
   onscreen as long as the cliches of the spy genre are averted or mocked. We
   enjoyed seeing the titular Prisoner become more and more adept at using his
   environment, manipulating the Village and its government to his advantage.
   Definitely worth a watch.
   
   I've mentioned before Dave Hutchinson's "Fractured Europe" series of books
   and how they have a MEGA TWIST which, now that I think on it, seems strongly
   inspired by the setting of The Prisoner. This makes me feel a little better
   about my inevitable theft and adaptation of Hutchinson's twist.



Mon Jun 10 2024 15:38 My PyCon US 2024 talk: I've put up a transcript of the
talk I gave at the PyCon US Maintainers Summit last month, about the lessons I
learned while being the solo maintainer of Beautiful Soup, over 20 years and
through two periods of professional burnout:

How to maintain a popular Python library for most of your life without with
burning out

The quick takeaway is that strong boundaries are important: both the software
boundaries provided by published APIs and packaging dependencies, and the
decision as to where your volunteer open source work ends and the rest of your
life begins. I have some suggestions for the ways the two interact, and an
anecdote about how we mentally rewrite our memories of our struggles to make
ourselves more active participants. If you're the maintainer of an open source
project, I recommend checking it out!

Wed Jun 05 2024 22:11 May Film Roundup:

 * Rollerball (1975): The film that dares to showcase the dangers of relying on
   centralized archives for cultural memory. LOCKSS, people!
   
   If the megacorps really wanted to turn their bloodthirsty audience against
   Rollerball, they should have gotten Jonathan to take a knee during the
   corporate anthem.
   
   I do have more than jokes, let me check my notes. Oh yeah, I was spellbound
   by the bits of this movie that are just people setting up the arena for a
   fictional sport (e.g. the first few minutes). Unlike most fictional sports,
   Rollerball has consistent rules that make perfect sense. The Rollerball
   scenes are shot like a sporting event, not a feature film—it reminds me of
   footage of stock car races and the like. The only reason Rollerball isn't
   played in real life is that the creator refused to sell the rights to people
   who didn't get that it's a satire, you dolt, on the "sickness and insanity of
   contact sports and their allure." All of that's pretty unique, even if the
   film is a little slow.

 * Mr. Thank You (1936): A.k.a. 有りがたうさん, which I can now read and understand
   thanks to my progress learning Japanese. This movie dares to combine
   lighthearted fun with the darkness that pervades the human experience, which
   is what you'd expect from an honest slice-of-life movie made in
   Depression-era Japan. It's enjoyable...? Like, it really is very enjoyable,
   but there also all these time bombs ticking in the background. Wikipedia says
   "Mr. Thank You marries the daughter to save her from her fate," but that's
   not the impression I got at all.
   
   This is filmed on the Izu Peninsula, where Laid-Back Camp also takes place,
   eighty years later. Both have shots of cars driving on the same seaside
   cliffs. I've seen lots of old movies filmed in vanished versions of places
   I've lived, New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles, but I've never been
   conscious of so much difference in the way life has changed than when I
   compare Mr. Thank You and Laid-Back Camp.

 * A Star Athlete (1937): In the runup to war, Hiroshi Shimizu has now gone into
   making full-fledged if half-hearted propaganda movies. There's a sequence in
   this movie that's apparently very impressive for cinematographers. They can
   have it, I say. I knew it was coming, I've seen a few movies, and I couldn't
   even tell you where it started or ended. A couple jokey town-vs.gown bits,
   and then we're back to the half-hearted propaganda. The scene at the end
   where the con artists think they're being hunted down by the students they
   cheated is a funny sequence.
 * Some Like It Hot (1939): Watched solely for the title. Between this and The
   Ghost Breakers (1940), Bob Hope has a tremendous knack for almost starring in
   great movies. This one's nothing special, but it does show the frantic Tinpan
   Alley hustling behind those elegant club floor shows you see in 1930s movies.
 * A Thousand Clowns (1965): At last, the true story of Balatro can be told.
   Really enjoyable, and inspirational if you're in that mood. The montages are
   like a capitalist version of Man With A Movie Camera. Other actors can't
   really share the same space with the overly charming lead.
   
   Jake Berendes sampled a couple of lines from this movie for his song "What Is
   The Mind", notably the absurd "I'll have a hamburger and a flashlight." I
   just about jumped out of my seat when that line happened, I tell you. Also it
   took me a while to figure out it was one of Jake's songs, because originally
   I thought I was thinking of "Where Is My Mind?" by The Pixies. I'm not a big
   Pixies fan, is what I'm saying.
   
   The kid in this movie is like a young Robert de Niro. As in, if De Niro was a
   child actor in 1965.

 * Repo Man (1984): "Ordinary fuckin' people. I hate 'em." This has a lot of
   first-movie problems, but I can see why it's a cult classic. A ton of weird
   stuff happens, the filmmakers get a lot of cool images on the screen, but all
   of the jokes and commentary are at the approximate level of a Frank Zappa
   song (which, I admit, I used to be super into). I thought it was cheesy, but
   I ended up missing the cheese when it turned into an action movie.
   
   I grew up with those Ralphs generic brand products (you see an updated
   version of the design in the opening scene of The Big Lebowski), so I had
   trouble distinguishing between the items that signified frugality and the
   ones intended to be satirical. Also, what kind of liquor store stocks so many
   grocery products? Anyway, I don't think I'm going to join the cult, but it
   was a fun movie.

 * Bobbie Joe and the Outlaw (1976): Yeah, yeah, everybody wants to make their
   low budget post-Bonnie and Clyde nihilistic road trip shootout movie. The
   only mystery about this one is how they got Linda Carter to not only star in
   this movie, but show her boobs. That sold a few tickets, you bet. I guess the
   movie was released just as Carter's career took off—she doesn't have top
   billing on the movie poster.
   
   There are a couple really good scenes in here, or at least scenes with
   eloquent dialogue, but they're disconnected from the rest of the story. I
   think the screenwriter had a few little pearls of genius that he stuffed into
   the screenplay because otherwise they'd never see film. Smart move, in my
   opinion. The editor couldn't cut them because the movie's only 89 minutes
   long as it is.

 * The Kremlin Letter (1970): I thought this was going to be a serious thriller,
   and it sort of was, but I was misled by some goofy James Bond shit near the
   beginning, then further misled by a scene where the boss spy yelled at the
   new recruit: "You think this is going to be like your fancy spy college? Here
   on the streets it's nothing but goofy James Bond shit all day long!" It got a
   little more Le Carré-y after that. All in all, a decent popcorn thriller.
   
   Actually I just looked up the release year to put at the beginning of this
   entry, and it's a very good spy thriller for 1970. I've revised my opinion
   upwards at the very last moment. What a thrill ride!

 * Heathers (1988): Gonna rain on the parade of this all-time classic, or at
   least the second half of the parade, after the big bands have come by and
   it's just the Shriners and the Boy Scouts marching past. The first half of
   this movie is amazing. I loved the snappy dialogue, the psychological
   manipulation, the bleak view of humanity. Then the second set of killings
   happened and, like Repo Man before it, it changed from something special into
   an action movie; in this case a slow-paced thriller about stopping a serial
   killer before he strikes again.
   
   Basically, we had a very girly murder comedy, and then a guy ran away with it
   and it became all about the guy and his emotional needs. To me the
   through-line of Heathers is encapsulated in the line "I've cut off Heather
   Chandler's head and Heather Duke's head has sprouted back in its place." You
   can't change a social structure by replacing the people who enforce it. I
   think if (say) Tina Fey had written the Heathers screenplay, it would have
   stayed on that track.
   
   Incidentally, I decided to watch Heathers because one of the beta readers for
   The Constellation Speedrun referred to one character in the book as "such a
   believable boyfriend-in-Heathers skeeze" and I had no idea what she was
   talking about. Now I understand!



Sat May 04 2024 11:27 April Film Roundup: Quite a few films this month despite
work and two out-of-town trips: to Ohio to see the solar eclipse (spectacular!)
and upstate to Storm King to see modernist sculpture too big to fit in a gallery
(big!). I can recommend Arlene Schechet's Girl Group sculptures mentioned in
this recent NYT article. The exhibit hadn't opened yet, but you can't exactly
hide art at Storm King.

Anyway, gasp as Films are Rounded Up before your eyes:

 * Much Ado About Nothing (1993): Staging a Shakespeare play as a movie? I don't
   think that's ever been done before. A fun production that really plays up the
   hedonism. Lots of 90s butt-focused nudity, is what I'm saying. Denzel
   Washington is as likeable as ever. Pre-Speed Keanu Reeves is well cast as one
   of those Shakespeare villains who keeps monologuing about his own villainry.
 * The Fastest Gun Alive (1956): I have a confession to make: sometimes I don't
   pay 100% attention to the black-and-white Westerns I review. They're so
   stereotypical that I can put them on in the background, play a game on the
   Steam Deck, and just tune in for the interesting bits.
   
   Well, an interesting bit happened pretty quickly in The Fastest Gun Alive—a
   classic puppy-kick scene, but well executed—and I started paying full
   attention and never stopped. This is really good! It plays like a noir drama,
   with its exploration of human weakness, but it's not a noir with Western
   trappings: it's specifically focused on the interaction between masculinity
   and firearms, which is as Western as it gets.
   
   It took me a while to figure all of this out, because The Fastest Gun Alive
   is also the kind of movie that's padded with an unnecessary tap-dance number.
   So for a while I was baffled by this movie that seemed to be veering back and
   forth between Double Indemnity and Oklahoma!. (IMDB trivia: "Glenn Ford at
   first demanded that Russ Tamblyn's choreography not be included in the film.
   But at the premiere, the audience noticed that the choreography, performed by
   Russ Tamblyn, was written into the credits. They asked why there was no
   choreography in the movie and the studio eventually put it back." Easier than
   re-filming the credits, I guess!)
   
   Glenn Ford does a very good sort of Martin Freeman everyman in the lead, but
   the quality of the underlying story probably comes from the chemistry between
   noir director Russell Rouse and screenwriter Frank D. Gilroy.

 * I'm All Right, Jack (1959): Another surprisingly good movie made from less
   than inspiring parts: in this case, the slightly bawdy postwar British
   comedy. What starts out with a goofy series of pre-Monty Python "job hunt"
   sketches becomes a relatively biting satire of labo[u]r, management, and the
   bargaining table where they meet. I find Peter Sellers a bit hit-and-miss,
   but he's great as the shop steward.
   
   Like Dentist on the Job, I only found out after watching this that it's a
   sequel and we're supposed to remember the characters from the previous movie
   instead of just reading the stereotypes (which totally worked). I assumed
   that "as you know, Bob, you served in the war with these unbearable secondary
   characters" was a common enough plot device not to need a whole other movie
   backing it up. And although those secondary characters can get pretty
   unbearable, they each get a scene in I'm All Right, Jack that humanizes them
   and makes them more sympathetic—something American comedies generally don't
   bother with.

 * What Did You Do In The War, Daddy? (1966): According to Wikipedia, "The title
   of the film came to [Blake] Edwards when he was asked the question by his son
   Geoffrey." I don't know why he didn't go on to make a movie about the Coast
   Guard, but instead we got this. It's all right. I like how the Italian
   villagers are completely done with the war despite seemingly being unaffected
   by its ravages.
   
   This film is kind of America's version of The Corporal and the Others (1965),
   in that we've all agreed the Nazis were the real bad guys in WWII and what
   side everyone else was on (the Hungarians, the Italians) isn't really
   relevant. Once the Germans show up this does lose a bit of the farce and
   become a more typical war movie. Or maybe the farce moves up a level of
   abstraction: one fun thing about the last act of this movie is the ridiculous
   extreme to which it takes the old "knock out the enemy and wear their
   uniform" gag.

 * Hundreds of Beavers (2022): This movie is just insane. It's like Guy Maddin
   made a feature-length live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, and I mean that
   completely literally. There's one breathtaking moment where it plays with a
   classic Buster Keaton gag (you know the one) and immediately follows it up
   with a postmodern twist on the exact same gag. Brilliant.
   
   Nonstop sight gags for two hours straight does get a little exhausting, but I
   noticed a couple of tricks that the film uses to structure your attention.
   The unifying concept of the middle of the film is the trapline (Wikipedia: "a
   route along which a trapper sets traps for their quarry"). One common trick I
   use in SF worldbuilding is to introduce a simplified version of an idea and
   gradually make it more and more complex. Hundreds of Beavers does the
   opposite: it shows a trapline that is way too complicated for either the
   protagonist or the audience to understand; then destroys it, replaces it with
   a much simpler trapline, and then starts gradually making it more complex,
   illustrating each complication with helpful video game-style graphics.
   
   The different types of trap on the trapline also provide structure to the
   gags in the middle of the film. As the trapper moves around and around the
   route, you sort of check in with each gag, so it's not just a formless mess
   of laughs... the way the first 30 minutes of this movie is. Maybe the first
   bit should be treated like an animated short shown before the movie proper,
   with a break in between for a reel change.
   
   Weird, funny, surprising, and different from almost any other movie (by which
   I mean, exactly like the funny parts of Guy Maddin's movies). A big
   recommendation from me.



Wed Apr 03 2024 12:47 March Film Roundup:

 * Mimang (2023): I went into this knowing it was inspired by the Before series,
   and would have been a little bit disappointed were it not for the discussion
   afterwards with the director, where he explained that for him it's less about
   the changes in the characters over time, and more about the changes in the
   streets they're walking on.
   
   There's some of what I call "Cornetto trilogy foreshadowing" at the
   beginning, but it foreshadows the way the film is shot and edited, rather
   than the plot. (The director brought this up in the discussion afterwards, so
   for once it's not just me spouting off on something I think I noticed.)

 * The Hot Rock (1972): I've been reading 20th-century heist novels as research
   for a novel idea, and here's a movie based on such a novel (by Donald
   Westlake), which I read right after finishing the novel. I think it does a
   great job of taking the exciting cinematic set pieces from the novel, while
   not even trying to capture the more cerebral humor the novel gets from its
   wry omniscient narrator. Great fun, big recommendation. Another novel in the
   same heist-comedy series was made into a movie (What's the Worst That Could
   Happen?), but not until 2001. That one doesn't seem very good or faithful to
   the book at all; the common fate of novel adaptations in the blockbuster era
   when not every movie was based on a novel.
   
   Other 20th-century crime authors I've been trying out, BTW: Kyril Bonfiglioli
   (hilarious!), Dick Francis (meh).

 * Assignment K (1968): Amazing European location shots and some fun spycraft
   liven up a by-the-numbers espionage thriller. The agent's cover story (buyer
   for a toy company) is more interesting than his secret missions. I really
   wanted to see more about the challenges of onshoring manufacturing!
 * Raiders of San Joaquin (1943): A forgettable Western that I've already
   forgotten most of. I chose it out of some idea that it might take place in
   the San Joaquin Valley, but it's actually San Joaquin County, up by Stockton.
   Of course it's actually whatever random place in California Universal filmed
   their westerns, pretending to be Stockton.
 * Something Wild (1986): A PSA for middle-aged guys on not getting mixed up
   with Manic Pixie Dream Girls. Not quite like any other movie I've seen, which
   is its own kind of recommendation: until the last bit, I really had no idea
   what was going to happen next. This movie also effectively pulls one of my
   favorite dramatic tricks: A is trying to hide something really
   horrible/bizarre from B and you think there's going to be tense moments; but
   then it turns out B already knows and is cool with it, or at least resigned.
   
   Overall a real comedic surprise from a director I associate with Philadelphia
   and Silence of the Lambs.
   
   This movie has more arcade games than any movie I can think of that doesn't
   actually feature a video arcade. It's 1986, the peak year for arcade games
   being in (and outside!) every random convenience store and gas station. A
   period piece set in 1986 would make sure to feature classics like Ms. Pac-Man
   and Defender, but only a movie shot in real 1986 convenience stores would
   showcase Yie Ar Kung-Fu.
   
   (In case you weren't there, as I recall the outdoor arcade games were usually
   chained to something; you couldn't just pull up with a pickup truck after
   hours and steal them.)



Thu Mar 21 2024 20:32 Tapes And Transcripts Are Available!: I've updated The
Schickele Mix Online Fan Archive with... transcripts! All of the 130-ish
episodes archived by fans now include transcripts of Peter Schickele's wisdom
and silliness, cross-referenced to the corresponding timestamps on the Internet
Archive. Here's a random example: the transcript of Episode 84, "Clarinet Plus".

Some of these transcripts were created by running Whisper on my computer; others
I created by paying someone else to run Whisper on their more powerful computer.
Now that I've put it all up, one transcript per page, it doesn't seem that
impressive, but it's a solid [runs script] 63.80 hours of transcribed text;
that's after all the music was filtered out.

I've also updated the dataset with some previously missing information, thanks
to Reddit user kiyyik. Remember, if you've got any Schickele Mix recordings,
I'll take 'em!

Although the .srt files available for download are the originals as they came
out of my/someone else's Whisper process, I wrote some code to tidy up the
transcripts for the HTML views. Apart from cleaning up common hallucinations
such as transcribing orchestral music as "¶¶" or "Thank you.", I caught and
corrected forty different ways to misspell Peter Schickele's name. Here they
are:

 1.  Chicelet
 2.  Chick-Alee
 3.  Chick-fil-A
 4.  Chickalay
 5.  Chickaly
 6.  Chickelet
 7.  Chickley
 8.  Chickly
 9.  Chik-fil-A
 10. Cicholet
 11. Schiccoli
 12. Schick-Alee
 13. Schickel
 14. Schickeli
 15. Schickelman
 16. Schickely
 17. Schickley
 18. Schickli
 19. Schickly
 20. Schiekely
 21. Shicabley
 22. Shickeley
 23. Shickely
 24. Shickily
 25. Shickley
 26. Shickly
 27. Shiggly
 28. Shigley
 29. Shikali
 30. Shikely
 31. Shikily
 32. Shikley
 33. Shikoli
 34. Shikolik
 35. Shinkley
 36. Sickily
 37. Sickle-ee
 38. Sickley
 39. Sickly
 40. Sickely

Who could forget Captain Picard taking on the Shikolik?

(2) Sun Mar 03 2024 11:55 February Film Roundup:

 * Dentist on the Job (1961): Dull black-and-white Carry On-style comedy is
   livened up somewhat in the last act, where the lads hijack Britain's first
   satellite launch. That was entertaining.
   
   I thought the setup was somewhat preposterous, and upon reflection, it is
   exceedingly preposterous. But afterwards I discovered this is a sequel to
   Dentist in the Chair (1960), so I'm a little less weirded out by the casual
   "I'm trying to find a sinecure for these two incompetent dentists who are
   best friends with a thief" setup in the opening scenes. Those characters have
   already had a whole movie to set their dynamic, and we're just shoehorning
   them in to this one.

 * Moving Violation (1976): A movie full of car chases and carefully arranged
   stunts. I can't decide if it's a terrible or great idea to show a long shot
   demonstrating how unlikely it is that Car A would randomly hit Car B, but it
   was a cool shot.
   
   Kay Lenz reminds me of my sister Susanna, and Eddie Albert has another great
   role (cf. The Heartbreak Kid) that I really didn't expect from "the Green
   Acres guy." Of course, Fred MacMurray is best known for being in a dull
   sitcom, but he was great in noir and western roles. Actors take the jobs they
   can get, is what I'm saying.

 * Dance With Me (2019): One thing I haven't mentioned on this blog is that I've
   started learning Japanese as a hobby. In support of this, Sumana suggested we
   watch some Japanese media to help me practice reading hiragana and katakana,
   which explains the rest of this Film Roundup. First up: a film I wanted to
   watch at the Japan Cuts festival in 2019, missed my chance, and then couldn't
   find this movie for years. It was worth the wait--a funny setup that goes in
   really weird directions instead of becoming repetitive. Big recommendation.
 * River (2023): Dance With Me was good, but this is the best film we saw this
   month, by far: a time loop movie where each loop is shot in a single
   continuous take. Highly character-driven, but with a bonkers twist so you
   don't leave the theater thinking you accidentally saw an arthouse movie.
 * Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes (2021): Turns out there's a boom of Japanese
   time loop movies right now, so we watched a couple more. This is a precursor
   to River, made by pretty much all of the same people, and with the same long
   takes of people going up or down stairs. It's kind of a simpler,
   easier-to-understand version of Primer (2004), but setup took way too long,
   with seemingly scene after scene involving new characters being introduced to
   the conceit of the movie. Compared to River where pretty much everyone's on
   board by the third loop.
 * Mondays: See You 'This' Week! (2022): Office comedy as time loop movie.
   Pretty fun but it passes up some obvious critiques about office work... or
   sets it up and leaves you to finish the critique yourself, but in my
   experience most movies ain't that subtle. Like, the advertising agency in
   this movie is coming up with a campaign for a carbonated miso soup
   tablet--the sort of obviously unsuitable product you'd see in a filmed SNL
   skit.
   
   Good news for Leonard's Japanese reading practice, but bad news for any
   gaijin trying to watch this movie: there is so much on-screen Japanese text
   in this one that subtitles weren't enough to follow the story. When it was
   just corporate emails and text messages, it was usually clear from context
   what was happening, but once we started getting "we're in a time loop"
   Powerpoint presentations and Ken Burns pans over pages of manga, Sumana and I
   were pausing a lot and making heavy use of Google Lens.
   
   The only other movie I can think of that's so text-heavy was Shin Godzilla
   (2016) and there the details of the text, like all human efforts to thwart
   Godzilla, turned out not to matter. Also, as I recall there was an English
   translation layer superimposed over the Japanese text, like what you see in
   subtitled anime, so if you read quick enough you could catch it all.

Speaking of which, the Television Spotlight this month shines on Laid-Back Camp,
a relaxing anime series that Sumana and I both enjoyed watching, and she didn't
mind me constantly pausing to sound out signs or text messages. Fun and calming,
with lots of katakana on the signs so I felt like I'd figured out what they were
saying once I decoded the sounds.

BTW there's another movie I regret missing in the 2019 Japan Cuts festival:
Samurai Shifters, the nerdy samurai librarian story, which I still haven't found
anywhere. Just putting that here for my own future reference.

Sat Feb 03 2024 12:30 January Film Roundup:

 * Future '38 (2016): A very divisive film according to user reviews, but Sumana
   and I both loved the screwball comedy banter, the old-timey sci-fi slang, and
   the fact that it seems to have been filmed over by the Trader Joe's in Long
   Island City. It's kind of the perfect Film Roundup movie, because it combines
   the aesthetics of old comedies and low-budget SF.
 * Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number! (1966): Another Midcentury Modern sex comedy
   with no sex. Bob Hope is actually properly cast in this one, as a middle-aged
   father who's tempted... to bring leftover fried chicken to a hungry starlet.
   He should just cheat on his wife with his housekeeper Phyllis Diller, like a
   normal 1960s real estate broker.
   
   Even dull movies like this usually have a couple interesting bits, and I
   think Diller is the interesting bit here—I'd never seen her act before and
   she's got a lot of what I think of as "Kate McKinnon energy."
   
   Oh yeah, here's another thing: a while ago I mentioned that there's a span of
   decades where Hollywood movies don't seem to have car chases. Well, they
   definitely do by 1966. This is one of those comedies that ends with a wacky
   car chase that I find boring (see also: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to
   the Forum). You do get to see Bob Hope hijack a cop car, which I thought I'd
   only be able to see in the alternate universe of The Man in the High Castle.
   
   Something must have happened in the early 60s to make car chases safer or
   cheaper to film. Maybe a technological advancement, maybe a streamlined
   permitting system, maybe the formation of the Stuntmen's Association in 1961.
   Maybe it was simply a lost technique rediscovered so they could film It's a
   Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). I don't know. Someone's got to have a
   master's thesis on this, I'm just going by what I see in the movies.

 * The Corporal and the Others (1965): a.k.a.. "A tizedes meg a többiek". As the
   author of Situation Normal, the story spoke to me: people trying to opt out
   of a war take refuge in a seemingly abandoned place that quickly becomes a
   hotspot; farce ensures. Not as much of The Good Soldier Schweik as I perhaps
   stereotypically expected from an Eastern European war comedy, but it was a
   good time overall.
   
   I imagine Hungary in 1965 was a tetchy place to make a WWII movie, and the
   balancing act here is quite noticeable: the Nazis are portrayed as monstrous
   buffoons and the regular Hungarian army isn't that much better, while the
   advancing Soviets (Hungary's nominal enemy) are mainly represented by one
   hapless draftee. I think this works in the movie's favor as a comedy, driving
   home the fact that nobody is going to help these desertees, they've got to
   help each other. This enthusiastic IMDB user review gives some historical
   context.

 * Bad Day in Black Rock (1955): This film promises unity of time and doesn't
   quite deliver, although I guess the "bad day" could be the one that Spencer
   Tracy has arrived to investigate. This was a decent drama that had much less
   "classic Western" than I expected based on the description. But it had way
   more "Asteroid City" than I expected based on the description, which was a
   pleasant surprise.
 * With Six You Get Eggroll (1968): For some reason I thought this rom-com came
   out in 1978 and I kept thinking "this is really outdated, it could have been
   made ten years earlier." The joke's on me! This was all right; I liked the
   role-reversal, with the parents escaping to the drive-in to get away from
   their judgmental children. George Carlin's first film role is as the waiter!
   Some good banter between the leads, and unlike modern rom-coms it doesn't end
   when they get married. Unfortunately, the comedy does end (in both senses)
   with a big car chase that's not very funny.
 * Mr. Majestyk (1974): Like watching First Blood, if Rambo was my grandpa
   Dalton. This guy just wants to get his crop in, and he's going to fuck up the
   whole crime syndicate to do it. The Elmore Leonard screenplay elevates it
   above the usual 1970s action fare, I think.
   
   Includes a great, messy scene where a bunch of watermelons are shot up, like
   The Untouchables meets Double Dare. Also includes a good, exciting car chase
   scene. Maybe they just shouldn't be in comedies?

 * Decision At Sundown (1957): A strangely bloodless title. "I'm gonna need a
   decision by sundown, Tex." This movie's one big seige/hostage situation and
   maybe if I'd been in more of a Dog Day Afternoon mood I would have liked it
   more. But probably not, judging from the amazingly dull final line. ("I'll
   tell you one thing, none of us will ever forget the day that Bart Allison
   spent in Sundown.") It's the kind of bad line that now sounds like it came
   out of an LLM. In fact, while writing this review I asked Rob Dubbin's LLM to
   come up with a better final line, and it just didn't give me any output,
   silently admitting defeat. Richard Deacon provides some welcome comic relief.
 * The Wrong Arm of the Law (1963): A good concept, I always like a good
   cinematic police/criminal team-up, but only intermittently fun to watch. I
   hesitate to mention this since this isn't a Hollywood picture and I don't
   know where it fits my theory, but... this 1963 comedy ends with a big car
   chase that's not very funny.
 * The Long Good Friday (1980): Loved it. A better, non-comedy version of The
   Wrong Arm of the Law. The classic tale of a criminal whose life is spiraling
   out of control and doesn't see that he's facing threats that are way above
   his level. Before seeing this movie, I didn't know Bob Hoskins was British,
   because I'd only seen him play characters with perfect American accents;
   here, he perfectly straddles the line between genial and thuggish, which is
   where you want your movie crime bosses. A young Helen Mirren has a couple of
   intense scenes.
 * Simon (1980): A Woody Allen movie with no Woody Allen; Alan Arkin plays the
   part instead. Unfortunately, Woody passed on this one for a reason: the film
   is a mess. But it's a mess full of the aesthetic I love: Modernist buildings,
   creepy think tanks, scientists who dress like Carl Sagan, the Space Shuttle
   back when it was an untested and mysterious spacecraft. All that good stuff.
   The rest of the film? Well, there are some jokes, and Wallace Shawn's in it.
   
   The Indian scientist in this film is credited as simply "Jayant." There is an
   Indian actor who acted under the name Jayant, but he died in 1975. This is
   Nikil Jayant, an actual scientist who ended up playing an evil scientist in a
   movie about evil scientists. He was at Bell Labs at the time, and I have to
   assume Marshall Brickman met him there while researching the film.
   
   Apart from Simon (1980), Dr. Jayant is known for his work on data
   compression. Here's an IEEE paper from him from around the time of Simon, a
   paper that apparently came with a vinyl record so you could hear the
   examples! This guy's a triple threat!

 * The Lawnmower Man (1992): Speaking of sci-fi messes. What I didn't know until
   just before I saw this film is that it's not a normal Hollywood production;
   it's a low-budget movie made by a VR booster to get the public psyched up
   about VR. As a creative work, it's a B-movie that unexpectedly made it big.
   As a piece of cinema, it's kind of an industry propaganda film, like Hats Off
   To Soup or Telephones: When You Need To Talk To Someone But They're In
   Another Town. Go in with this knowledge, and the movie makes sense. It's not
   as boostery as Hats Off To Soup, because the director also cares about
   telling a story, but that's why the VR segments are the way they are.
   
   Do I recommend this film? Not really, no. The goofy CGI isn't funny out of
   context, and the contextual matter is too slow and predictable to be
   interesting on its own. However, there is some nice-looking old tech, and if
   you can get over the "cheese" factor and the "total nonsense" factor, there
   are still some chills to be found in the scenes where human beings are
   transformed into human-shaped collections of POV-Ray balls. Also, young Dean
   Norris was a nice surprise.



(1) Wed Jan 31 2024 14:12 Schickele Mix Archive: To commemorate the recent
passing of composer Peter Schickele (R.I.P.), I've created The Schickele Mix
Online Fan Archive. This site presents all of the extant information online
about Schickele's amazing music-education radio show Schickele Mix, which
stopped airing in 2007 and has been in copyright clearance hell ever since—an
inevitable but undeserved fate.

I've scraped the now-defunct official Perl CGI that gave out Schickele Mix
listings, and reformatted the listings with links to archived recordings of all
the episodes that have been saved by fans. About 130 of about 180 episodes total
have been archived, thanks entirely to two people, both of whom show up in this
Reddit thread to take credit. Thanks, Frodo_Picard and gattgun, from a grateful
world.

All this metadata is now available as a big JSON file (so no one else has to
download those old listings from the Wayback Machine and rewrite my scraping
code), and I also created a podcast RSS feed that lets you experience Schickele
Mix in its haphazard original broadcast order. (This is different from the
benofsky.com Schickele Mix podcast mainly in that it includes the gattgun
archive, not just the Frodo_Picard archive.)

I've got one more big piece of this project planned, but this is enough to tell
the world, I think. The web page makes it clear which episodes of Schickele Mix
are still missing fan-archive recordings. If you think you might have one of the
missing episodes on an old cassette tape or something, please email me at
leonardr@segfault.org.

(1) Sat Jan 20 2024 18:25 The 2023 Crummy Review of Things, Part 2: Books and
Games: OK, I've finished looking over my records and I'm ready to do book and
game recommendations. As often happens, the Crummy.com Review of Things will
proceed in fits and starts this year, but I'll eventually get it all done. I've
discovered that this is now how I keep track of the passage of my life, rather
than blogging the things I do right as I do them like a normal person.

The Crummy.com Book of the Year 2023 is Happy Snak, because it's the only book I
wanted to do its own blog post about. Other good books I read in 2023 include
Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World by
Thomas P. Hughes, and the conceptually very similar The Backroom Boys: The
Secret Return of the British Boffin, by Francis Spufford.

The Crummy.com Game of the Year is Mr. Sun's Hatbox by solo developer Kenny Sun,
which sets roguelike combinatorics in a platforming environment with a slapstick
style to create a comedic, customizable Spelunky-style experience. Other games I
really enjoyed include: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Mosa Lina,
Factorio and Void Scrappers.

Finally, Sumana and I added a few new games to our irregular daily rotation:

 * Diffle, a Wordlelike that, apparently, fits with the way we think about
   words.
 * Connections from the NYT.
 * Metazooa, Metaflora, and Birdle, games of cladistics.

Next up: something else!

Sat Jan 20 2024 11:32 Happy Snak: While making a list of books I read in 2023 I
realized there was one book that I wanted to give its own post: Happy Snak by
Nicole Kimberling, published in 2018. I was recommended this book by, I believe,
Liz Henry, who said that she recommends Happy Snak and Constellation Games as a
package deal, since anyone who likes one will like the other. As the author of
Constellation Games, I had to test this hypothesis.

Well, I can tell you that Happy Snak is a lot of fun, and definitely has a
similar feeling to Constellation Games. It's got weird aliens, cultural exchange
focused on low culture, and a snarky main character whose reaction to first
contact is to start a business—all things I love reading and writing. It gave me
a fun "You're probably wondering how I got into this situation" feeling, so
check it out!

Mon Jan 01 2024 14:27 The Crummy.com Review of Things, Part 1: Film: 2024
already, eh? Well, I'll do the easy part. I've updated Film Roundup Roundup with
the best 25 films I saw in 2023. Actually 27, since I'm counting the entire
Before trilogy as one entry. After 10 years of Film Roundup, there are nearly
300 movies in my "recommended" list. Amazing!

And as long as I'm messing around with this spreadsheet, here's a top ten of the
films I first saw in 2023:

 1.  Before Sunrise/Before Sunset/Before Midnight (1995/2003/2013)
 2.  Godzilla Minus One (2023)
 3.  When Harry Met Sally (1989)
 4.  Polite Society (2023)
 5.  Barbie (2023)
 6.  Oppenheimer (2023)
 7.  The French Dispatch (2021)
 8.  Eat Drink Man Woman (1994)
 9.  What's So Bad About Feeling Good? (1968)
 10. The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic (2021)
 11. Asteroid City (2023)



Sun Dec 31 2023 14:48 December Film Roundup: Happy new year! While doing some
end-of-year housekeeping I discovered a pretty large number of movies I'd seen
this year but not reviewed in Film Roundup. The downside is that I generally
forgot these movies because they're not very good. Anyway, here we are! Let's
start 2024 with a (probably) clean slate:

 * Danger Flight (1939): I can barely remember this movie but I know we watched
   it and I anti-recommend it highly enough that the details don't matter much.
   It was trying to bring a wartime level of airborne action-movie excitement to
   a world that was not yet at war. So the plane is a mail plane, and the
   threats are bad weather and hoodlums.
   
   Maybe this was even a serial pasted together into a feature? I don't remember
   and won't look it up, but it had that feeling.

 * Goverment Girl (1943): This one wasn't great either but it gives an
   interesting glimpse into the extreme housing shortages of wartime Washington.
   
   There's a car chase sequence in this film that was actually filmed on the
   streets of D.C., and while watching it I was struck by how rarely I've seen
   such a thing in Code-era movie. It's not technically impossible; Buster
   Keaton was filming car chases in the 1920s. But I feel like from the
   invention of talkies until 196x, car chases were done in the studio with rear
   projection and are thus not very exciting. In fact, I think the only reason
   they filmed this one on location is that it's a motorcycle, not a car, so
   rear projection wouldn't work.

 * Visit to a Small Planet (1960): "Maybe a science fiction theme will make
   dorky Jerry Lewis comedy more bearable," I thought. Oh, what an innocent fool
   was I! It's bad. I remember some alien/beatnik interactions that were kinda
   funny. Oh, and the moment in the nearby screenshot had a great Jerry Lewis
   delivery.
 * The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947): This film does not have the courage
   of its convictions. After a few fun fantasy sequences a la the original
   source material, Walter Mitty is quickly thrown into a world of real thrills
   and excitement and excuses for Danny Kaye patter songs. At that point it
   turns into a fish-out-of-water scenario, like North by Northwest or
   something. When Walter Mitty is about a fish who wishes he was out of water
   and never will be. James Thurber hated this movie, but presumably not enough
   to tear up his big check from Samuel Goldwyn. I merely found it a bit dull,
   and got no check from Goldwyn whatsoever.

OK, now for the movies I saw this month:

 * Before Sunset (2004) and Before Midnight (2013): Excellent continuation and
   conclusion to the trilogy. The naturalistic, conversational style continues.
   Before Sunset perfectly captures the long lingering when you really need to
   go, but you're with the one you want to be with. Good stuff.
 * Luv (1967): The Elaine May/Jack Lemmon/Peter Falk collaboration we needed to
   heal our nation. Pretty sure nothing bad happened after 1967, but there's
   still time. From the period when Broadway plays were routinely turned into
   movies, this has very heavy "play" marks on it and it's not exactly a great
   comedy, but we were in the mood for dark madcap humor and this delivered.
   
   The neurotic late-60s Neil Simon-ness of the characters in this movie brought
   to mind the elevator scene from Sweet Charity (1969). That scene is a lot
   funnier than anything in Luv, but it was nice to be reminded of it.

 * The Philadelphia Story (1940): Can you be more specific? I thought I was
   going to see Rocky. I'm going to go against the moviegoer grain here and say
   this was just okay. So much sitcom-style misunderstanding! Admittedly this
   movie predates sitcoms, but at this point I'm tired of it. Just communicate,
   people! I'm pretty sure I fell asleep for about 10 minutes and missed
   nothing.
   
   Yeah, good thing Film Roundup isn't one of the inputs into the Rotten
   Tomatoes aggregator, or this review would spoil its 100% rating and I'd have
   the hardcore Storyheads coming after me.

 * Scrooged (1988): I finally understand why people my age claim Die Hard (1988)
   as a Christmas movie; because otherwise they'd have to watch Scrooged every
   year. A decent concept with great practical effects becomes disappointingly
   random due to countless script rewrites, self-indulgence, and Bill Murray's
   insistence on improvising important bits. Sure, that speech at the end is an
   impressive feat, but we have large language models now, so the burden of
   rattling off vague sentiments can now be lifted from humanity's shoulders.
   Elaine May had an uncredited writing pass on this movie; they should had just
   filmed whatever she wrote.
 * The Boy and the Heron (2023): This may be the most controversial sentiment
   I've shared on Film Roundup, but this movie is not good. It's the kind of
   thing you make when you're so famous and important that you bypass an
   agonizing but essential part of the creative process: having someone else
   look at your draft and tell you that there's really good stuff in here but
   it's too big and sloppy, and you need to figure out what story you want to
   tell and focus on that.
   
   The good movie inside this one is something self-critical with evil Totoroid
   parakeets, something about the juggernaut Miyazaki has created, the immortal
   images in his films and the limits of art's ability to change the world. But
   that new idea doesn't show up for a long time and it's in there with so much
   more typical stuff, that I wasn't feeling it at all.
   
   There's the very slight chance that this is awesome in Japanese and a bum
   translation screwed everything up, but reviews of this movie sound like
   people trying to convince themselves that a bad movie is good.

 * Our Hospitality (1923): This (now public domain!) film apparently invented
   the idea of clogging up a hilarious short with a bunch of dramatic plot
   elements to pad it out to feature length. Yes, Buster Keaton's innovations
   have always been a double-edged sword. The stunts are great as always, and
   the parts where Buster's running in and out of the house like a deadly game
   of freezetag are quite funny, so overall I do recommend this one. I mean, the
   "padding" takes it to 73 minutes, it's not that bad.
 * Cup of Cheer (2020): This film is a mess. But we enjoyed finally seeing a
   Christmas romance parody that swings for the hard R rating, especially given
   its Zucker and Zucker-like insistence on playing everything straight. But
   it's a mess. It feels like much of the screenplay was improvised and typed up
   without polishing. Really funny moments sit side-by-side with obvious
   clunkers and entire subplots that aren't funny and don't add anything.
   
   If you read IMDB reviews you'll see the movie's natural audience have been
   turned off by all the swearing and filthy dialogue, and you'd think this
   would drag down its rating beyond what it should be, but a 5.5 is exactly
   what Cup of Cheer deserves.

 * Oppenheimer (2023): I was engaged for three hours despite already knowing the
   story, so objectively speaking I have to count this movie as a success.
   Creatively, the most interesting part for me was the junction between the
   second and third acts, right after the Trinity test. Oppenheimer sees his
   world-historical importance slipping out of his fingers, never to return,
   until he's just a schmoe like the rest of us. The key scene IMO was the one
   where the A-bombs are loaded into trucks and the trucks drive out of Los
   Alamos and the camera doesn't follow them.

This month, Television Spotlight focuses on Taskmaster, a show that combines the
collegiality of British panel shows with the sadism of Japanese game shows.
We're slowly going through the show, we're on series 9 or something,
occasionally re-meeting someone we recognize from the small and incestuous world
of British comedy. You were in Footlights, eh? Interesting, interesting.

We've also started going through the international spinoffs, notably Kongen
Befaler, the Norwegian edition. Kongen Befaler contestants are all notably more
handy than their British counterparts, possibly because Norway has universal
compulsory military service. Update: This is not true, I misread an ambiguous
document. Only about 10% of Norwegians actually undergo military training.
However, according to Norwegian Wikipedia, Calle Hellevang-Larsen, one of the
handier participants, is "a trained marine telegrapher from the Norwegian Navy."

Mon Dec 04 2023 08:36 November Film Roundup: It's been one of those months where
the Roundup is scrambling to catch up with the Films, so let's make this quick
before I watch another movie!

 * Miss Congeniality (2000): 2000? Seriously? I would have guessed earlier. I
   forgot to mention this one, which I watched with my uncle Leonard last month.
   I never thought of this before but Sandra Bullock is one of those actors who
   seems to choose roles with an eye towards living cool Hollywood fantasies.
   She's an astronaut, a hacker, she gets to drive a bus real fast... In this
   movie, she gets to fire a gun and undergo the Mousy Girl Makeover, all while
   complaining about beauty standards.
   
   Have you, Film Roundup reader, watched a movie before? You will be able to
   see who the villain is pretty quickly. Tragically, not a skill they teach at
   Quantico. An enjoyable flick.

 * You've Got Mail (1998): We've seen enough Nora Ephron screenplays now that
   her go-to tactics are becoming visible. In my review of 1993's Sleepless in
   Seattle I projected that movies' technologically mediated rom-com world into
   the future, where mobile apps flash thousands of faces at you until they find
   the one that triggers the "love at first sight" rom-com spark. You've Got
   Mail can be seen as the groundbreaking experiment that disproves this model
   of the rom-com spark.
   
   With the introduction of dial-up online services into the rom-com-verse,
   You've Got Mail presents two characters who fell in love online but dislike
   each other IRL. They encounter each other several times without triggering
   the spark or showing any awareness of it. This, Ephron concludes, is because
   the spark requires a connection to be made between personalities, not
   persons. The masks we wear in public make our true selves invisible to each
   other, and it's only in AOL chat rooms that we can truly be known.
   
   Oh, something about the movie itself? It was fun, but a better ending would
   have had Kathleen falling out with Joe, then founding amazon.com to destroy
   his stippled brick-and-mortar empire.

 * That Thing You Do! (1996): Like the previous movie, this is part of our
   traditional celebration of Hanksgiving, and we watch it every November 2023.
   I remember seeing the end of this movie on a VCR stand in high school, which
   spoiled the ending, but maybe that's a good thing. My viewing partner (Lady
   S— of G— Manor) was afraid the whole time that this was a movie where the
   evil record industry guy screws over the up-and-coming band. I tried to
   reassure her, but to no effect. Anyway, a fun way to bathe in someone else's
   nostalgia, if you go in knowing there's no real villain.
   
   In the closing credits they play some of the hundreds of songs called "That
   Thing You Do" that were submitted for consideration as the fictional band's
   hit song. Possibly the largest number of songs ever written with the same
   title. At the time, I remember hearing that They Might Be Giants was one of
   the auditioners, and thinking that this represented a rather forlorn hope due
   to TMBG's rather distinctive style.
   
   I assumed that sometime between 1996 and now, this song had made it onto some
   compilation album that I'd missed, but looking it up just now I see that that
   is not the case! Maybe because they signed over the rights when they
   submitted the song or something. It lingered unheard until 2021, when the
   TMBG "That Thing You Do" was leaked onto YouTube. I've heard it now and...
   they tried, but Tom Hanks (who surely made this decision personally) was
   right to go with Adam Schlesinger's version.

 * Eat Drink Man Woman (1994): A fun movie, an early entry in the "multiple
   rom-coms going at once" subgenre that I saw later in Love In Space. The
   scenes in the big restaurant kitchen blew me away, especially that first long
   shot, which felt like a scene from a thriller. There was even some classic
   DOS laptop gaming action and Microsoft Paint 3.1. I must deduct a fraction of
   a point for not originating the "Sir, this is a Wendy's" joke. Harsh, I know,
   but those are the rules. Of course, it cancels out, since all movies ever
   made suffer the same penalty.
 * A Global Affair (1964): Did you know that Bob Hope was a data scientist
   responsible for drafting the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the
   Child? Or at least, his character in this movie was, and we all know there's
   no real daylight between Bob Hope and the character he plays in his movies.
   In this one he's pushed into caring for an abandoned baby who's... the
   Messiah? The Antichrist? I dunno, the postwar internationalism of this movie
   forms a real Rorschach test when placed in a modern political context.
   
   The marketing for this gender swap of The Lady Is Willing (not to mention the
   name of the movie) presents Bob as lecherous and vaguely Jack Nicholson-ish
   as delegations of ladies make eyes at him. But the actual movie, like all
   1960s sex movies, shows him as nothing but put-upon and upset by the
   attentions of these international dames. They're seriously interfering with
   his golf game and his regression analysis!
   
   In general I'm detecting an awkward changing of the guard in the 1960s, as
   Danny Kaye and Bob Hope hang on to roles that should have gone to Jerry Lewis
   and Jack Lemmon. At least Cary Grant had the good sense not to be in Man's
   Favorite Sport?. Hope is sixty years old in this movie, and he looks great
   for sixty, but by this time definitely seems more the "confirmed" kind of
   bachelor than the "swinging" kind.
   
   PS: This movie's full of random UN factoids, some of which still apply. I
   didn't know that the UN headquarters is an extraterritorial exclave and not
   part of the United States or any other country. I'm pretty sure it's just
   that and Antarctica.

 * Polite Society (2023): Loved this movie in a very particular way: this is the
   closest I've seen to a movie that captures the cinema-junkie fun of the
   Cornetto Trilogy movies. It starts out a slice-of-life movie full of
   references to genre movies, and then weird things start happening and it
   turns out to be a real live genre movie. Lots of fun. Sumana and I were also
   reminded of Sorry to Bother You (2018) in the specific way this one
   escalates.
 * The Talk of the Town (1942): The kind of title you only use when you're
   desperate. They came up with twelve possible titles for this movie, and most
   of them were generic and dull, with The Talk of the Town being the dullest of
   all. The worst part is that The Talk of the Town was registered to Universal
   at the time, and Columbia had to trade away Sin Town (a better title!) to use
   it. So presumably this movie was originally going to be called The Talk of
   the Town.
   
   This raises so many questions, some of which might be answered in my review
   of the bizarrely-named Upstream (1927), which lifts the curtain on a lost
   world of preregistered movie titles. But one question we may never see the
   answer to is: did Universal say "Send us whatever title you want, but it has
   to have 'Town' in the name. We're doing a picture about a town, by gum, and
   we can't lose that! Sin Town? Sure, we'll throw some sin in there."?
   
   The movie itself certainly isn't dull, although it is somewhat dilg. Yes, my
   favorite pastime as the drama unfurled was making jokes about a character's
   unusual name. "Wow, Cary Grant is a real DILG." "He likes his borscht with a
   lot of dilg." "His favorite Babylon 5 alien species is the Dilgar." Sorry, I
   just had to get my dilgs in. Dilg is a very uncommon name but not unheard of:
   for example, Peter Dilg of Long Island "has one of the largest private
   collections in the country of windup phonographs and gramophones."
   
   Anyway, the movie's fine. The best parts are Grant and Ronald Colman going at
   it like Socrates and Thrasymachus.

 * Miss Grant Takes Richmond (1949): We really enjoyed this Lucille Ball YIMBY
   comedy. I wasn't really expecting to, because my preexisting opinion about
   Lucille Ball was that she was a really good producer but her comedy hasn't
   aged well. After watching this movie, I think she's fine, and what hasn't
   aged well is the sitcom format.
   
   See, in Miss Grant Takes Richmond, Ball's character is a clumsy ditz who gets
   in over her head, sort of like her character in I Love Lucy. If this was a
   sitcom, "clumsy ditz" would be the extent of her character development. Since
   this is a movie, we get to see her discover that being a clumsy ditz doesn't
   preclude you being really good at other things, like customer service and
   managing real estate developments. It's a more satisfying ending. Also,
   there's some great slapstick in this film which I don't think would have been
   allowed on television at the time.

 * Godzilla Minus One (2023): This is very good, one of the best Godzilla
   movies, not least because of its refusal to zoom out from its focus on a few
   people who are having very bad days. Godzilla only shows up four times! This
   decision frustrated me while I was watching the movie, since I liked the
   grand (if incompetent) sweep of 2016's Shin Godzilla. But in retrospect it
   keeps the stakes at human scale in a movie about a very big thing (Godzilla).
   
   This focus on the individual does mean the movie tips into cornball melodrama
   at a couple points, but maybe it's just a matter of degree. Maybe some people
   don't like seeing any level of human emotion in the hapless people who flee
   from Godzilla by running away in the same direction he's walking in, without
   really considering the possibilities of alleyways or crossstreets. (Not
   saying those are guaranteed safe, but give it a try, folks!) Maybe those
   people are at a 1, and people who really loved all the corny personal drama
   in this movie are at a 10, and I'm, let's say, at an 8.
   
   Overall, I have to say I left the theater totally mystified and overwhelmed
   by Godzilla's invincibility.



(2) Thu Nov 30 2023 15:42 Whew!: Today, on the last day of NaNoWriMo 2023, I
have met my (very) longstanding goal and finished a (very) rough draft of The
Constellation Speedrun. Finally complete at 150,285 words.

When writing the final scene, I also came up with a brilliant game idea: a
robot-programming game in which the programming language used by the robots is
procedurally generated on every run.

Wed Nov 22 2023 14:45 The Hallucinating Detective: I've put up my 2023 NaNoGenMo
project, The Hallucinating Detective. A simulated murder mystery environment is
used to coax a variety of large language models into playing detective. Which
models will have the guts to actually investigate the mystery, rather than
continually saying "Hey, I'm just a text generator, don't ask me!"?

Surprisingly, the answer is—primarily—models trained on something other than
English prose. Of the twenty-four stories in The Hallucinating Detective, I
think the most interesting is "The Adventure of the Rapid-Fire Squirrel". The
rift-coder model, trained on Python and Javascript repositories and programming
problems, starts off thinking that figuring out whodunit is as simple as writing
a solve function, but then starts interrogating suspects and exploring the
imaginary crime scene. Many of the other models can't get past asking the
suspects why they just said whatever (randomly selected) thing they just said.

I tried to vary up the prose styles in the prompts, from hard-boiled to comedic,
but rarely did a model pick up on the request. I will say that
em_german_mistral—a model presumably trained on and designed to output German
text—not only produced very good English, but picked up that Sherlock Holmes
could be a character in a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery: see "Sherlock Holmes
and the Draining Pen Affair".

Finally, I want to highlight a beautiful, melancholy poem I discovered in the
random Project Gutenberg selections that drive the dialogue in The Hallucinating
Detective: "To His Brother Hsing-Chien, Who was in Tung-Ch'uan", written in the
year 815 by Bai Juyi.

> You are parted from me by six thousand leagues;
> In another world, under another sky.
> Of ten letters, nine do not reach;
> What can I do to open my sad face?
> Thirsty men often dream of drink;
> Hungry men often dream of food.
> Since Spring came, where do my dreams lodge?
> Ere my eyes are closed, I have travelled to Tung-ch'uan.



Thu Nov 02 2023 16:09 October Film Roundup:

 * His Excellency (1952): This film seems a bit spiteful with its "fine, YOU run
   the colonies, ya lousy working class" attitude. It's also not very funny. An
   Ealing disappointment.
 * The Admirable Crichton (1957): Another class-conscious comedy of manners,
   less realistic but funnier than His Excellency. There's an act break in this
   movie where British people decide to upend class conventions because the
   alternative is certain death, and I gotta say, that act break is doing a lot
   of work.
 * When Harry Met Sally (1989): Sumana and I both loved this canonical rom-com,
   from the serially foiled meet-cutes to the heartwarming ending. Carrie Fisher
   is a hoot in a supporting role and really sells her comedy; she does
   something tiny like dog-ear a corner of an index card and I crack up.
 * Contact (1997): This is a good movie but I thought it was way too slow.
   Robert Zemeckis probably would have paced it a little faster if the very
   famous and beloved screenwriters hadn't been so heavily involved. As it is,
   it ends up at two-and-a-half hours. Who has time for that? Movies should be
   90 minutes long!
   
   I dunno, it's probably fine. The early scenes in Arecibo and at the VLA are
   the ones that could most easily be cut, and those were quite fun. Lots of
   driving up in Jeeps like this is Jurassic Park. Contact also really shoved in
   my face how heavily Hollywood movies use old family photos as a narrative
   device. I knew about this before, of course, but now I can't let it pass by.
   My mind always fixes on it. However, I've watched a grand total of two movies
   since then, so maybe it'll fade.

 * The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023): I watched this on an airplane, which is
   realistically the only way I was gonna see it, but the tiny screen foiled the
   main reason I wanted to see this movie, which was to catch all the little
   background references. But after skimming a few "We Found Every Easter Egg In
   The Super Mario Bros. Movie And Put A Bunch of Ads On The Page" websites, I
   don't think I missed very much. I did like the Mario Kart 64 speedrunning
   reference and the doomer Luma.
   
   Unfortunately this movie has a running time of 92 minutes, which is way too
   short for on a boring plane ride, so I also watched...

 * Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023): Yes, two and a half hours of
   nonsensical action. The perfect length for a movie. The opening set piece was
   great. The artifact was great. Evil Werner von Braun was great...ly evil. The
   ending was great. Not the very end, that sucked, but the ending Indy thought
   he was getting before the final fake-out. In between: nonsensical action as
   the miles slipped away beneath my feet.



(2) Mon Oct 02 2023 13:18 September Film Roundup: A few years ago I praised a
company I have little positive to say about, Amazon, for keeping alive the
tradition of video rental in a video-on-demand world. The medium of film has an
enormous midlist and backlist that is culturally important but apparently has
has no economic value. The video store used to be the cineaste's low-cost ticket
to this endless backlog. Now I'm here to praise another company I have little
positive to say about, Fox, for upping the ante by acquiring Tubi.

Tubi has monetized thousands of classic films by giving them the cable TV
treatment. Occasional commercials for DoorDash will interrupt your viewing of
that 1971 sex comedy, but you can watch a ton of obscure and sometimes good!
movies whenever you want, without doing something tacky like resorting to piracy
or spending money. I think just about everything we saw this month, we saw on
Tubi. Big recommendation if it's available in your area.

 * Moulin Rouge! (2001): If you were 15 years too young for Phantom, your ride
   has arrived. After watching it I said "I bet Rachel loved that one." One text
   later, here's Rachel's review: "I was obsessed with that film when it came
   out. It's the same old story though (La Boheme, Rent)." Nailed it!
   
   I liked the fast-paced bits and thought the rest was boring. But apparently
   moviegoers in 2001 just weren't ready for a feature film cut like a music
   video, and there was some Rite of Spring-like unrest at the Cannes premiere.
   
   When Nicole Kidman gave her first tiny cough, Sumana and I just looked at
   each other. Nothing needed to be said; this chick is doomed! Susanna (who
   also saw the movie recently) said she had to explain that to her kids.
   
   While I'm here... the quote from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in this movie
   reminded me that when I was in college I saw "Here we are now, entertain us,"
   verbatim, in a book from the 1960s about hosting parties, which I bought from
   Goodwill. (Ie. "Your guests will arrive and immediately expect your
   attention, with an attitude of 'here we are now, entertain us.'") I've never
   been able to find that quote or that book again; it's not the kind of book
   that gets held in university libraries, which is how old books get into Hathi
   Trust or Google Books. But I remember it jumping out at me, and I've always
   wondered if it was independent invention, or if Kurt Cobain also saw that
   book and swiped the line, the way he took the title of the song from the
   graffiti Kathleen Hanna wrote on his bedroom wall.

 * Phfft! (1954): Even Dreamworks Entertainment wouldn't dare name a movie after
   a fart noise today, but Columbia Pictures boldly went forward into the
   Flatulent Fifties. (A well-known nickname for the decade, which is now
   forgotten, but likely to be revived in a mere 27 years!) Jack Lemmon and Judy
   Holliday were pretty fun as the temporarily divorced couple, but Kim Novak
   really stole the show with her horny weirdo character. This movie also
   features a timely warning about dames:
   
   

 * It Should Happen To You (1954): Judy Holliday and Jack Lemmon... together at
   first! In the story of a woman who just wants a totally random thing and
   won't take no for an answer. This was the highlight of the month, because of
   its oddball premise and the chemistry between the leads, which is stronger
   than it would be in Phfft! since they're not playing divorced. Judy Holliday
   is a powerhouse and it's a huge loss that she died so young.
   
   In retrospect it is not surprising that the part of Gladys Glover was
   originally written for Danny Kaye. Gladys is way more stubborn than your
   average 1950s female lead would be. The traditional "taming of the shrew"
   section, where the ambitious woman learns to get with the program and settle
   down, is completely earned for once, because Gladys's ambitions are goofy and
   she has realized them, far past the point where they brought her any
   happiness.
   
   It Should Happen To You includes one of the best negotiation scenes I've seen
   in a movie:
   
   > "Now, what I had in mind was this: that we share the sign. Then we'd all be
   > happy."
   > "I'm happy now!"
   
   Gotta remember that one.

 * Who's Minding The Mint? (1967): Stupid, stupid movie with the '60s look I
   love. I can't get enough of these beautifully shot, not-that-funny comedies,
   and they all seem to star Jim Hutton; he was also in The Horizontal
   Lieutenant (1962). One good thing I'll say about this movie is: it starts off
   showing Hutton's character committing borderline fraud by exploiting free
   trials of luxury goods (presumably a new innovation at the time), but this is
   portrayed as a harmless, lighthearted it-sticking to the man. Rather than the
   minor character flaw that pulls him, over the course of this movie, deeper
   and deeper into a very serious federal crime.
   
   Perfect riff no one will get: "This was the original Dogecoin rugpull." Wait,
   I can link to the movie on Tubi! Perfect riff is at 1:07:20. You might have
   to endure a DoorDash ad.

 * Man's Favorite Sport? (1964): I've seen sly in-jokes in Rock Hudson movies
   about the star's homosexuality, but this just seems cruel. In Man's Favorite
   Sport? Hudson plays a famous fisherman, a respected author of fishing books
   and model for anglers everywhere, a guy whose claim to fame is his ability to
   reel 'em in like nobody's business... but he's never been fishing and he
   hates fish! Of course, the part was originally written for Cary Grant, so I
   might be reading too much into this.
   
   Oh, yeah, another problem: the part was originally written for Cary Grant,
   but it's 1964. Howard Hawks wanted to do a follow-up to Bringing Up Baby, his
   prior animal-themed screwball comedy. But that was twenty-five years earlier!
   By 1964 everyone was too old and didn't want to do it and it would have made
   no sense, so Howard Hawks got Rock Hudson to do a Cary Grant impression (it's
   terrible) and cast Paula Prentiss in the Katharine Hepburn role (she's all
   right).
   
   Although this is funnier and much more sophisticated than Who's Minding The
   Mint?, it's is ultimately another 1960s sex-comedy train wreck with amazing
   Midcentury Modern set design. Rated F for some cruelty to stunt fish.

 * The Blind Man Who Did Not Want To See Titanic (2021): In a rare occurrence
   for me, I watched this movie without knowing the genre, and was pleasantly
   surprised when what seemed like a slow slice-of-life thing became something
   very different. (I won't go into specifics; read a review if you want.)
   Showcases Leonard's golden rule of garnering audience sympathy: you know what
   your audience is doing right now (watching a movie), so get on their side
   with a character who also likes doing that. This is why everybody sympathizes
   with Myrus in Situation Normal, BTW: he loves reading speculative fiction.
 * It's Trad, Dad! (1962): a.k.a. Ring-A-Ding Rhythm, but who can resist the
   idea of reactionaries revolting against something called "trad"? A remarkable
   document of American soft power immediately before the Beatles
   counterattacked. These Brit kids are totally obsessed with jazz and American
   pop culture. Why? Don't make me tap the sign. [Sign says: IT'S TRAD, DAD!]
   
   The film is a series of skits interrupted by musical numbers, like SNL with
   more music, but the skits are mostly fun and the music's all right. A
   lightweight but entertaining debut for... the guy who'd be directing A Hard
   Day's Night two years later. Sometimes you wonder "whatever happened to
   them?", and sometimes the answer is obvious.
   
   I should mention we came to this movie via its star Helen Shapiro; we heard
   her singing a song on Heardle Decades and really liked her voice. She was so
   big, the Beatles opened for her! Now that's trad, dad!

 * The Lady Is Willing (1942): I have to think this is a misleadingly saucy
   title for a movie designed to juice ticket sales. The movie poster has a
   random baby (BABY COREY) on it, and we all know that babies mean sex—if only
   in a flashback.
   
   Unfortunately, Marlene Dietrich isn't the right actress for this part—it's
   more a Judy Holliday sort of ditz part—and the screenplay's not that funny
   anyway. Its romantic view of how the maternal instinct leads to hilarious
   kidnapping and tender child endangerment hasn't aged well. Admittedly that
   makes this movie sound like Raising Arizona, which would have been a pretty
   cool picture show in 1942, but that wasn't what they were going for.
   
   Fred MacMurray is all right as the Vulcan-like pediatrician who hates kids...
   until he comes into close proximity to BABY COREY! Who could have guessed?

Finally, a Television Spotlight from another online streaming service;
specifically, Freevee and its Emmy-nominated original series Jury Duty. I
started out a reluctant watcher, but was ultimately charmed by the way Ronald,
the patsy in this hyper-orchestrated reality show, keeps showing compassion and
decency even as he's confronted by one weird reality show twist after another.
If not for that anchoring, I would definitely have dropped out. I also
appreciated how the last episode is basically a behind-the-scenes documentary.

Mon Sep 04 2023 11:04 August Film Roundup:

 * 3 Nuts in Search of a Bolt (1964): The traditional film seen a while ago that
   I forgot to round up until Sumana reminded me. A low-budget sex comedy with a
   brilliant premise (illicit timesharing of an expensive psychiatrist), some
   Mamie Van Doren jiggle, and maybe three funny jokes. The sort of film you'd
   see on an R-rated MST3K.
   
   The "three funny jokes" thing makes me think there's a lot of these old
   movies that could be edited down to the length of a TikTok video. It'd be the
   film school equivalent of those one-page summaries of business books so you
   don't have to read the book. "But Leonard," you might say, "that only works
   because those business books only have about one page of real content in the
   first place. It has to be padded into book form because that's how such
   insights are sold in modern society." To you I say: I have some bad news
   about movies.

 * Winny (2023): A decent biopic of a piece of software which IMO lionizes
   developers too much. Maybe that's a side effect of the dramatization because
   the issues are complex, but if any nation's film industry can make "This
   approach to law enforcement would criminalize basic research!" exciting, it
   would be Japan's. Rise to the challenge, I say.
 * Free Guy (2021): I saw this movie and it was pretty fun but I really don't
   have much to say about it because I already said it all in "Dana no Chousen".
   
   Early in the story, Guy obtains an extra pair of magic sunglasses, but
   nothing comes of it and it never gets used. Most scholars see this as
   evidence of editorial fatigue on the part of the redactor as they excised a
   scene from the film—itself a copy of a parable from the Carpenter Scrolls—in
   which Buddy gets his own pair of sunglasses.

 * Barbie (2023): Very clever and fun. Everything from the actors' body language
   to the random and inexplicable plot twists indicate that the director is
   playing with the Barbie franchise the way a child plays with an individual
   Barbie doll. The normal Hollywood movie beats happen, but the film's so
   chaotic that an act break acts as a kind of refresher, like the quiet
   catch-your-breath scene following a chase in an action movie. I do not
   usually laugh out loud (or LOL, as the handy abbreviation puts it) while
   watching movies, but Barbie got me several times.
 * The Band's Visit (2007): Although I scoff at the traditional Hollywood
   three-act structure (and just did) I do prefer movies with a through-line. I
   rarely enjoy the type of film that presents a series of disconnected, nearly
   stochastic skits, but this one was really fun. I think the unity of time on
   display gives it a sort of through-line, and the decision to focus on just a
   couple of the many quirky characters stops it from getting scattershot the
   way Muppet movies are these days. This was made into a stage musical, but I
   think the amount of music here is just right: the bulky instruments are
   basically just big inconvenient pieces of luggage until the final scene.
 * Kittu Puttu (1977): DNF, as they say. This was on a DVD Sumana brought back
   from India and we could not find English subtitles for it anywhere, so Sumana
   tried translating the dialogue for a while, but it wasn't very rewarding so
   we gave up. Supposedly there's a split-screen dual role later on, which could
   provide some gags, or at least cheesy low-budget fun.
 * Starman (1984): John Carpenter tries to deliver a heartwarming rom-com, and
   only reveals the horror movie at the heart of every rom-com. It's like a
   pre-deconstruction of the Hallmark Channel genre, where the new lover and the
   creepy stalker and the dead husband are all the same guy.
   
   I'm always here for a Carl Sagan pastiche and SF that uses the Voyager record
   as a plot element. And I suspect Jeff Bridges' performance here (for which he
   got a Best Actor nomination) was an inspiration for Brent Spiner's portrayal
   of Data. Would I recommend this movie? I dunno, but I always like whenever
   Carpenter tries something different.

 * Impromptu (1991): I reluctantly agreed to watch this Masterpiece Theatre-ass
   movie because Sumana remembered seeing it on Masterpiece Theatre in 1993 and
   enjoyed it. Thirty years later, I have enjoyed it too! It's really funny!
   Hugh Grant is funny and frail; Judy Davis is funny and brassy. I must say
   that this film has one of the clearest examples I've seen of the old adage
   that the difference between a happy ending and a sad ending is when you stop
   telling the story.
 * Badhaai Do (2022): A misleadingly humorous poster led us to expect a more
   comedic rom-com than we got, but this was all right, I thought. Rajkummar Rao
   continues his trend of being one of this household's favorite actors, partly
   because of his insistence on only taking non-generic roles.
 * The Celluloid Closet (1996): Sumana saw that this was leaving Tubi and I
   suggested that we watch it for one reason only: so I could confirm my
   hypothesis that Algie the Miner (1912) is included in the movie but not the
   book the movie is based on. Well, it is, and looking at that old post it
   looks like I'd already confirmed this hypothesis. But, a good overview of
   (among other things) the changing techniques used to circumvent the Hays Code
   and the effects those circumlocutions had on people for whom they were the
   only source of representation seen in movies. Sumana pointed that most of the
   Hays censorship involved approval of scripts, so once the script was
   approved, there was all sorts of nonverbal stuff you could do when filming
   the script to get your point across.
   
   Gore Vidal and Susan Sarandon are a hoot, and Tom Hanks is refreshingly frank
   about the source of his success: "I have never been one to strike fear into
   anyone's hearts when I enter the room." Tell that to Sony CEO Howard
   Stringer, Tom.

Finally, it's a Television Spotlight on Guns & Gulaabs (2023), a crime comedy
that recreates the nostalgic (for Sumana) atmosphere of India of the 90s. Which
is not that different from rural California in the 80s, so I got a bit of the
bittersweet air as well. Gulshan Devaiah is so sinister as the bemulleted
jean-jacket assassin in this, that it was a pleasant surprise when we saw him
later in the month, pursuing Rajkummar Rao once again as the goofy gay lawyer in
Badhaii Do.

The series was a lot of fun and led up to a cool heist, but I don't know about
calling it a comedy. Breaking Bad (clearly a big influence) has a lot of similar
humor to it, but nobody tags that show as "comedy." A lot of what I think was
meant to read as comedy here was actually people making stupid choices, which I
don't find all that funny. You can try and make it funny to lampshade a weak
plot point, but that's not what was happening here.

Mon Aug 21 2023 10:37 How to (Finally) Follow Instructions: Way back in 2012 I
gave a talk about hypermedia and code-on-demand called "How To Follow
Instructions". I've always thought of it as my "lost" talk, one that could have
been as influential as "Justice Will Take Us Millions of Intricate Moves". I've
also convinced myself that this didn't happen because I never put the text of
the talk online. Unlike most of my talks, I didn't write the script ahead of
time, and transcribing it was a huge/expensive job.

But ten years later, Whisper makes it cheap and easy to do basic audio
transcription with a laptop. I've used Whisper to transcribe my talk and edited
it into what it should have been. Some of the talk has aged poorly: the same
underlying technology that transcribes the audio also makes it possible for a
computer to follow some of the human-readable "instructions" I mention in the
talk. But I think it was pretty prescient at describing what was happening in
the world of APIs and where we've gone over the intervening decade.

Wed Aug 02 2023 17:06 Sock breakthrough!: For about four years now I've been
low-key searching for a replacement for my beloved Muji recycled-yarn socks, and
I'm happy to report a breakthrough, thanks to another Japanese retail brand,
Uniqlo. Here's the extremely detailed report:

The closest match I've found to the old Muji recycled-yarn socks are now
Uniqlo's "melange socks"; a mix of cotton (80%), nylon (16%), polyester (3%) and
spandex (1%). They don't feel as heavy as the previous champion (Muji right
angle pile short socks), and I wore them through a recent heat wave with no
problem. They even look like the old Muji socks, with a gradient of yarn colors,
which makes me think they're manufactured with the same process.

Uniqlo melange socks are available as short socks and the misleadingly longer
half socks. They are a little larger than the old Muji versions, which is okay
with me as I always thought the Muji "short socks" were a little too small for
my feet. Apart from that, the only real difference is the cotton-dominant fabric
mix, where the recycled-yarn socks were mostly polyester.

Thanks to Sumana for dragging me into a nearby Uniqlo; otherwise I would not
have found these.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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