May, 5, 2003 archives

this weekend i watched star wars: episode i - the phantom menace and patton, two films i had never seen before. (yes, i waited this long to see the phantom menace.)

watching the phantom menace, i was reminded how much i love the star wars universe despite the numerous flaws and shortcomings manifested in all of the movies. my biggest gripe with this movie would be that the characters simply bob along, being carried along by a current of events that they seem to take very little interest in controlling. and in contrast with something like down and out in the magic kingdom, the quasi-future (yes, it is long, long ago) of the star wars universe just doesn't follow from our present. in particular, the idea of a robot army with a centralized control center is just super lame. (i’m surprised anakin didn't pull out a tibook and upload a virus to the central computer.)

another thing i found particularly obnoxious was the way the battle scenes were staged. it just seemed positively revolutionary-era with two forces coming at each other in a valley between two ridges. patton certainly had more interesting and believable battle scenes, even without the aid of ilm trickery.

i really enjoyed patton. i’m not much of a military history buff, but he’s clearly a fascinating character, and would probably be a great person to read more about if you wanted to go down the path of being a military history buff because of his deep interest in the subject. it’s interesting how the movie focuses so closely on patton and his actions during the second world war without any real insight into his life outside of the war, except to suggest that he has none.

it was also nice to have all the references to the film i’ve encountered over time get linked with the actual scenes from the movie. Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book! has to be one of the best lines ever.

all that said, the phantom menace was a fun film, especially if you accept it as a film for kids, which is clearly how it was intended. the visual design is pretty stunning, of course. even though i found the battle droids annoyingly anachronistic, i really loved the character design.

the integration of apple's music store with itunes is fantastic. giving things a spin, i've bought three albums (elvis presley's elvis ’56, massive attack's blue lines, and morcheeba's charango) and one single (johnny cash's cover of nine inch nail's "hurt" from american iv - the man comes around).

i bought the johnny cash single after hearing the song in the opening scene of last night's boston public. the original is great, but cash's cover is incredible. i had to do a little bit of digging with google to figure out what the song was, and who did the cover. it would have been a great example of the sort of shop-from-your-television service that has been speculated about for years.

so far, i still have more of an album mindset than getting excited about buying singles. there's a small amount of irony in having bought a full elvis presley album, given how singles-oriented the music industry was during that period of his career. but with 22 songs, the whole album for $9.99 was a better deal than individual songs for 99¢.

i'm impressed with apple's music service. it will be nice to see the catalog fill out, and i'd really like to see the price come down a bit. (but given the convenience compared to hitting a music store that sells used discs, the price really isn't bad at all.)

here's something apple really needs to add to the service: letting you buy music for someone else. that would be so much cooler than an amazon wishlist.

wagner james au's salon review of masters of doom, a biography of the founders of id software, is in that fine tradition of reviews that largely uses the book as a pretext for exploring the topic on its own. the book comes off as something like a late-’90s dotcom puff piece, whereas james is much more critical of id's real impact outside of the hardcore gamer community.

reportedly doom iii features less of the huge-horde-of-creatures battles for which id games are known. it will be interesting to see if that's really happens, and how well it works.

i remember when the original doom came out, and crippled some machines on our campus network. the first version used ipx broadcast messaging for its networking support, and that caused enough network traffic to overwhelm slower machines on the same network segment. needless to say, they got that sorted out in the next release.

(oh, you'll probably need to jump through hoops to read the full review. i decided to spring for a salon premium account a while ago.)

in a bit, i start my trek to lax on the way to budapest. viszontlátásra! (if there's any wifi at heathrow, maybe i'll try to blog from there.)