Top of the B-List
Brooke and I watched the AFI 100 Years, 100 Songs special on television last night. No real surprises, but I did learn something. I’d always assumed that “New York, New York” was an older song, from the ’40s or ’50s, but it was actually written for Martin Scorsese’s musical flop of the same name in 1977! Yeah, right in the middle of the punk explosion! I was gobsmacked.
In the same vein, where was the Ramones’ “Rock ‘n Roll High School”?
The New York Times has published a list of what they consider the best thousand films ever made. Never mind the audacity. How many have you seen? As of this moment, I’ve seen 224, but there are at least half a dozen that I’ll be seeing in the next month or so. Still, that’s less than a quarter of them!
Winged Migration (2001) is less a documentary than a visual poem about the beauty of flight. The film follows several species of migratory birds (ducks, geese, cranes, swans) on their flights and the experience is one of actually flying with the birds. It’s quite amazing, but would be more powerful as an IMAX film. If you have a big TV, rent it right away. Otherwise, wait for it to be on a large screen near you.
I also watched the “making-of” documentary (at 53 minutes, it’s almost as long as the 90 minute feature), and it kind of wrecks the illusion to find out that the birds are more akin to actors in a film than subjects in a documentary. That’s all I’ll say.
Rating: 8/10
Dateline Hollywood: “Non-hipster denied entrance to ‘Lost in Translation'”
This site is hilarious. It’s like The Onion but without all that serious political satire that makes my head hurt. I especially like the fact that they have a “printer-friendly” and a “printer-antagonistic” version of each article. Somebody at Dateline Hollywood really knows their CSS stuff! (via boingboing)
Almost more impressive than the upcoming 9-disc special edition of The Alien Quadrilogy is the exhaustive (and as of this writing, not yet completed) review over on The Digital Bits.