November, 19, 2005 archives

it’s time for the $10 holiday sale at threadless. go forth and spend.

the los angeles downtown news explains how mickey champion ended up performing at little pedro’s every week. going to one of her performances is one of those things on my to-do list that never gets done.

artificial intelligence: ai is no 2001: a space odyssey or e.t. the extra-terrestrial or close encounters of the third kind, but does blend in elements of all of them. it’s beautiful, but it goes on way too long.

i think there are two extremes that can be reached by a story that two brilliant filmmakers have been working on for a very long time: it can be tight, spare, and tell its essential story without a lot of fat. or it can end up too long, too over-thought, and have too many ideas. ai falls too far towards the latter.

saved! is a teen comedy set in a religious (born-again) high school. it does a pretty remarkable job of threading the needle of being funny without being too broad or focusing on easy targets.

for the soundtrack (over the opening and closing credits), mandy moore does a cover of “god only knows” by the beach boys, but it falls far short of the original.

jena malone really does look like mary-louise parker’s daughter, too. and on the commentary with mandy moore, it is funny how often she says “gosh” and “totally.”

there’s 69 pictures in my set of photos from the doo dah parade, culled from the 287 pictures i shot.

i ended up shooting everything with my new zoom lens, which was a lot of fun. it was a little frustrating having to shoot around the heads of the people in front of me, and the cameraman from channel 7 was really annoying at the beginning of the parade (but he eventually moved elsewhere and stopped getting in my shots).

the shot above is my favorite, but i’m also happy i was able to capture a fire breather in the act, this creepy clown, the briquette girls, the raelian ufo, this crazy giant-wheeled bicycle contraption, and this juggler with the humboldt state university marching lumberjacks.

next year, i’ll have to remember sunblock (ouch), and get there a little earlier to stake out a better position. or bring a step ladder, and just stand up behind the crowd.