Battles with Integrity

The winner of the Audience Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival was Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for Superman. This film is a documentary following the stories of five families across the country as they try to find the best schools and opportunities they can for their children. The film discusses some of the challenges our nation faces as we continue to let schools fail, and hopefully brings some ideas for fixing the problem. The film does feature Jeffrey Canada's work in Harlem, which holds some promise, for sure.

Waiting for Superman is not out yet; apparently still waiting on a distributor. Nonetheless, They released the trailer yesterday. You can find it here.



If you want to share your reactions to the trailer, feel free to do so here. I'd love to hear from you.

Ok, the weekend is nearly done. It's been full, eventful and fun. Friday, many good folk saw the Golden Compass with us, after even more good folk met with us for pre-movie hangouts and food and company and fellowship and Zombie Fluxx.

Thanks to cat_herder, steluch, rissymonster, nietzche_gal (& beau), pandakun, sylphslider, darkcryst, miriammiriam! Much fun. Again! Again!

Saturday morning I went over to help jenderqueer move house. Got to see Johnny (surprise! small world!!) and met other very nice people. Lots of house was packed into a truck. After the half-day of moving (many hands, light work!), ca_snowflake, and I shopped for the SFSI cotillion, and drove to the SouthEastern corner of San Francisco county to a cute condo where many good people ate, drank & danced the night away. We got home... late.

This morning, I awoke to Johnny's phone call at darned early 0818. I was able to go from zero to fully-dressed-and-out-the-door in four minutes. We went to Jay's place (via Starbucks) to finish moving packed the rest into the truck. Met another excellent person. Drove to the new place (OMG House Lust!, aka wee bit o' envy). Helped transport wonderful things and wonderful people. Then there was moving, unloading, unpacking, lunch, cuddling, chocolate, more house-move-type-working, and then home. I'm tired. Very tired.

I'm also excited to go to sylphslider's birthday dinner tonight... in an hour or so!!, so it's all very, very good. I think, considering the four-point-something hours of sleep I got, after dinner, some bed will be well appreciated.

Tomorrow is the last day of instruction of my very first semester at Berkeley. Two more lectures, and then final^12-17, final^12-18, final^12-20. Note to self: Need to determine final schedule for spring, for each of the classes I'm already signed on for. Oops, my participle is dangling.

Finaly... link potpourri, as promised. Hopefully I'll find out tomorrow why it's not pronounced obseenity.

I, a gamer, will not buy stuff for myself before the holidays!

The quote above is advice for gammers in SANDY'S SOAPBOX #127: HOW TO BUY GIFTS FOR GAMERS. Useful advice to friends of gamers, as well.

The Onion has an interesting take on the US claim that Kidnapping British People is Legal





Also, from Onion Radio: White Castle Plundered by Turkish Raiders

Oh, and at last, this is especially for nietzche_gal, but most anyone can enjoy it.

Later guys. I'm loopy from lack of sleep, but I still have much love for y'all.

rmjwell posted a brilliant idea on his journal, about what if X person had written Y book? For example, what if Miss Manners' Guide to Excrutiatingly Correct Behavior were written by Dorothy Parker? or what if The Handmaid's Tale had been written by Harlan Ellison?

Much madness ensued. It got me to thinking, what about movies? What if had Y directed Z? For starters, I'll provide a few, but I really want y'all to chime in with your own twisted ideas:

A Clockwork Orange, as directed by Rob Reiner
Cocoon, as directed by Clive Barker
My Dinner With Andre, as directed by Kevin Smith
Fiddler on the Roof, as directed by Mel Gibson
Schindler's List, as directed by Mel Brooks
V for Vendetta, as directed by Ron Howard
Amelie, as directed by the Wachowski Brothers

Ok, I've done enough damage. Now it's your turn.

(p.s. finally, a post worthy of the Dr. Tran icon!)

So, I walked into my FLGS (Engdame, btw) with tasty birthday gift cards buring a hole in my pocket (thank you to jenderqueer and LA&B!), looking to see what I might find.

( I'm a geek. )

This morning when I was logging in to LJ, I noticed that the LJ opening page had the following:

The most popular interests on LiveJournal are:
music movies reading writing friends

I thought, that's silly, why would anyone list these as interests. Sure, everyone likes movies and music, and friends, and most people on LJ are self-selected readers and writers. Why not be more specific. Then curious, I looked at my own interests list and saw that I had indeed noted music, movies, reading, writing, & friends. I have removed these. Please note that this does not mean that I am no longer interested in music, movies, reading, writing, or friends. I still like all of these things. I onyl hope that music, movies, reading, writing, and friends don't take it personally, but I'm running out of space in my interests list, what with all the many things I have to tell you about my uniqueness through a list of (up to 150) nouns that are important to me, I haven't space in my interest list for things that really should be a given.

I am so totally taking this too seriously. ;)

~B

Most studios have a spotty track record. For every Dreamworks film like Madagascar, Amistad, Gladiator, American Beauty, or Chicken Run there are two movies like Road Trip, A.I, The Mexican, Biker Boyz, Chris Rock's political thriller Head of State, Father of the Pride (with an animated Siegfried & Roy!), and the Chumscrubber.

Others have equally uneven film libraries Miramax can put out films like Kinsey, The Virgin Suicides and Don Juan DeMarco while also producing movies like Buddy (the one about the gorilla), Jeepers Creepers and it's estimable sequal.

For all of you who wonder about how Pixar Animation can consistently come up with amazing films, the folks at Shortpacked! may have some theories.