big fan

i had no idea exactly how spoiled i was by knoxville's downtown west cinema until i moved -- how many small U.S. cities have an 8-screen theater dedicated to the artsy-indie-foreign films? nonetheless, living less than a mile from the naro here in norfolk is making up for a lot.

it's only one screen, so if you want to see a particular movie you have to mean it... it's probably playing once an evening, and if you wait, even a week, it might not be there anymore. the selections tend to run a bit behind knoxville, which i actually find rather convenient, since i can bug friends for reviews on what upcoming movies will be worth seeing. the theater itself is independent (i.e., no regal or carmike affiliation), it has an old-school balcony and stage to go with that one screen, and they host a lot of special events. the local film critic hosts a summertime series of classic movies, environmental documentaries tend to come with local experts, etc. it's neat.

the series that is quickly growing to be one of my favorite things to do in hampton roads, though, is the firstlook film forum. sunday mornings at 10, show up for brunch, a surprise film that isn't showing in the area yet, and discussion. a few weeks back, i saw the latest francis ford coppola film, tetro... this weekend's selection was big fan, written by a former editor-in-chief for the onion and starring that guy who did remy's voice in ratatouille.

while i've been happy with both selections, if they do choose a bomb, there's ample opportunity to lambast during the discussion. and honestly, the discussion is a lot of what draws me. in college, the tennessee tech honors program had a weekly "mindful movie", attended largely by freshmen who could earn what would've otherwise been work-study credit by being active in honors... idea was to watch a thought-provoking movie and then talk about it. i loved it, kept coming long after i had no need for signed papers proving i'd been there, and eventually chaired the committee that chose movies and moderated discussion for a semester. and i find myself referring to the firstlook film forum as "mindful movies for grownups." except with no feet-draggers who have to be there, just interesting people who like to talk about movies. i'm still feeling a bit too shy to actually ask for one of the microphones and say anything during the discussion -- the old habit of wanting to observe a social milieu for a while before actively participating in it dies hard -- but i find it quite cool.

whereas tetro was a film geek's delight --black and white, with stylized, deliberate lighting that's begging to be analyzed, cinematic references throughout-- big fan is more the sort of thing our old mindful movie committee would've chosen. it takes a "what if" --what if a hardcore football fan were beaten up by his favorite player?-- and runs with it. and by creating what are fairly believable characters and taking them through this plot, by finding a rather nice balance between the funny-sad extreme situation and the uncomfortably close to us (one lady who'd laughed more than most of the audience later explained that it was because the main character's family reminded her of her own... and the sports talk radio mini-celebrities seem a lot closer to home if i think about the lindy community for a couple seconds...), the film opens up all kinds of discussions about identity, violence, celebrity, society in general. it didn't come up in the discussion, but i found my mind wandering to the recent re-controversy over the roman polanski rape case, lest film fans get too superior about relegating celebrity criminals and troubled public reactions to the sports world. it's definitely a movie for a broader audience than those who'd normally flock to "sports" genre pics.

(and... i started writing this on monday, got sidetracked, and it's lunchbreak on thursday. time to hit post whether it's ready for primetime or not.)

en route to camp hollywood...

last chance to update before camp hollywood... and if i'm overwhelmed now with how much has gone on since i last bothered to blog, it won't get better with that. (heh. so when i wrote that, it wasn't really the last chance -- it's now "tomorrow", and i'm stuck in the philly airport for another 3 hours before the 6-hours-later-than-the-original flight to LA that i got stuck with when norfolk's planes weren't getting off the ground this morning. they stuck me in a cab to newport news, where the flights to philly apparently were relatively untroubled. silver lining: maybe, just maybe, for once i'll get something written and hit publish before i can think too hard!)

honestly, the worst of the busy has been over for nearly a month. let's see, vblx was june 19-21... we got access to the new apartment just before that, and had fun hosting a few pennsylvanians in the mostly-empty rooms. jesse was at sea for most of the couple weeks from then until we had to be out, but was around for the final rush. we handed in our keys at the old apartment on june 30... the week leading up to that was somewhat insane. the week after that was also insane, since we had declared we were having a housewarming party on july 10, effectively setting a deadline to unpack. it all got done, more or less. during the moving process, i got to rent a pickup truck -- it's official, dodge ram is not my style, but i did not smash it into anything. i am also almost too wimpy to make half a clothes-dryer moving team -- thank goodness we're on the ground floor this time.

looking back through my calendar, it strikes me that this weekend will be my first major out-of-town trip since going on a quick whirlwind to see the parents memorial day weekend. that's unusual. and fine. i've been enjoying settling into my new neighborhood.

the most major lifestyle difference: bicycling to work instead of 3 hours a day on the bus. i love it. i've been really lucky with cooperative weather so far, so i'm not entirely sure what my rain plan is... the bus, i guess, if it gets so bad a poncho won't help? it's a bit under 3 miles each way through some of the prettiest parts of norfolk. i can sleep in until almost 8 if i need to and get to work on time. (i don't really unless i've been out dancing ridiculously late, because i love the luxury of getting enough sleep and still being able to have an hour to eat breakfast and get a few things done.) there's a grocery store on the way home, among other shops, so i don't have to lean quite as heavily on jesse for our household errand running. heck, there's even an art-house cinema (probably the biggest thing i've missed from knoxville besides the friends there...) between home and work. my friend mark and i have been catching their series of "classics with mal," where the longtime local film critic shows a classic film and then rambles for 30 or 40 minutes about everyone he's ever interviewed who's at all connected to the film. i'm a fan of the story-telling -- it's a neat mix of cinema and local history... a certain boyfriend, who was available to go for the magnificent seven, didn't enjoy the after-lecture, though, and i can totally understand and release him from the obligation to stick around with me if he comes back.

my other big project lately has been working towards being able to run the virginia beach half-marathon in early september. i'm only dancing one to two nights a week most of the time, so it's a good time to do it without too much danger to the knees. i'm up to a PAINFULLY SLOW 8.5 miles for my long run. and a little apprehensive about missing it this weekend... maybe i'll rearrange things to go tuesday or wednesday night. i was going to hoping my shoes and run in cali, but i ran out of space in my bag and decided i wouldn't likely do it anyway. now that it's getting close to fall, the virginia summer's finally warmed up to what i think of as summer -- 90s and humid. after discovering that a little dehydration melts my brain to a disturbing degree the previous week, i took water and ran after dark on sunday. jesse wasn't around to check my conversational dexterity, but i think it was better. (conversation was the main place where i was obviously impaired after running... for example, i remember struggling to tell jesse about a story i'd recently heard on the radio about khrushchev's first trip to the US; i had to resort to calling him "the soviet shoe-banging guy?" because i couldn't remember the words "khrushchev" or even "premier" or "after stalin.")

'k, with 2 hours here to go in the airport... time to switch from rambling on to wandering around for a bit.

netflix instant play in ubuntu

(it's geeky. i warned you. but you can make fun of me for regularly destroying operating systems. and there's windows involved, but it's free for now...)

ok, so a while back, i installed ubuntu and realized AFTER damaging the windows partition that i didn't have my vista cd anymore.

honestly, i mostly don't really miss it. i've adjusted to amarok instead of itunes, star office instead of microsoft office... there's a free replacement program for almost everything. the one thing i hadn't gotten working, though, was netflix instant play movies. i missed it. i didn't miss it enough to justify the trouble it took to get it, but, er, once i get an idea in my head i can be a little stubborn.

when lifehacker came out with instructions for getting a windows 7 beta key, i went ahead and downloaded a copy.

then i installed virtualbox on ubuntu. and screwed up bigtime -- it needs your user account added to the group "virtualboxusers". instead of sudoing up and editing the /etc/group file directly, i tried to use a graphic group control tool. not sure what went wrong, but it cleared the /etc/group file of everything but the new group... resulting in a daemonic mess where most of the computer services didn't have access to necessary files and i didn't have access to admin powers and... well, let's just say it wasn't working so well. after a while booted into single-user mode with help from a fresh install's /etc/root file sneakernetted over from jesse's computer, i got back a lot of the basics... but couldn't get the networking to work. since the internet is my main source for all aid, i eventually got frustrated, backed everything up, and reinstalled ubuntu. total geek-fu failure, lesson learned, don't mess with that file unless you know what you're doing. but i have a nice, clean install now.

and set up virtual box again. and installed windows 7 on it. and it worked!

except the networking didn't. various blogs eventually pointed me to the fact that the virtualbox i'd gotten by apt-get install was not, in fact, the latest version. go to the webpage. install version 2.1.0. give windows the new, improved virtual network connection. and voila!

and... trying to run a netflix instant play movie in the windows media-based internet explorer player bluescreens my box. which is much less annoying than a traditional bluescreen, i have to admit -- unlike with a real laptop crash, i can go play/research on the internet while i wait for things to get back to normal. after tinkering and giving windows more hard drive space and more memory, i decide that the player's probably just not compatible with the beta internet explorer yet.

so i install firefox. and then netflix's silverlight player. and EVERYTHING WORKS! well, kinda herky-jerkily. but ramping the virtual box's base memory up to 1200 MB (which is more than virtualbox thought was a good idea given my modest laptop, but oh well) mostly fixes that... the audio gets smoother after a little tinkering with settings. it's good enough that i watched the first half hour or so of persepolis despite it being well past my bedtime by the time i got things working last night.

so, happy camper. i'll be happier if/when netflix gets things worked out with the DRM folks to support instant play for linux, but for now i have a ridiculous setup that more or less does the trick.

the personals

if you happen to be sort of beginnerish at mandarin chinese but wanting to practice listening, you can't do much better than the movie the personals (征婚启事). in it, a young doctor places a personal ad looking for a husband, and the bulk of the movie consists of the meetings that result -- lots and lots of "getting to know you" speech, precisely the topics where i have some vocabulary.

the boyfriend is incommunicado for work from work from yesterday morning to tomorrow evening, so i've been spending more quality time than usual with my netflix queue. this one was actually up on their instant viewing list -- since i have no tv and watch everything on my laptop anyhow, that's a super-nice feature.

because i'm five

i was too busy packing to fully participate in the kung fu fest at tyler's last night, but i took a break to see forbidden kingdom with everyone.

on the way out, i noticed that i totally had the little-kid-on-too-much-power-rangers urge to go try out a roundhouse kick on anything in sight.

i resisted.

fun movie, if you like that sort of thing (i do!), but i wish they'd spoken more mandarin -- i can pick out just enough words here and there to really enjoy trying to match up subtitles to audio.

plato clock

continuing to milk my cold for all it's worth by avoiding anything vaguely resembling physical activity, i'm spending the afternoon watching a french new wave film, ascenseur pour l'échafaud. however, every time the camera goes into the office set, i keep getting fixated on the groovy clock the protagonist keeps on his desk. actually, it seems like the characters all do too -- they keep picking it up, turning it in their hands, etc. bingo, finally found it: it's a plato clock, aka a flip leaf clock or a ticket clock. and as far as i can tell, they stopped being produced around 1910 and the antique ones are pricey. bah. here's hoping for a cheap reproduction sometime soon... not that i need a desk clock, but it's pretty.

'twas the night before christmas...

since we couldn't actually go to new york city last night (boyfriend's working again today), we did our best with albany. first, to sub in for ice skating at the rockefeller center, home of the really big christmas tree, we attempted ice skating in the empire state plaza, home of the huge egg, seen as it appeared in september, along with the reflecting pool that is currently a skating rink.

don't you wish your city had an egg?

skate rentals were closed, so alas, it was but an attempt. instead, we wandered around the plaza a bit, played on a frozen-over snow bank, and took some scary photos of ourselves.

merry xmas... really, we don't eat small children

initially, i accused jesse of doing something very strange to my camera's exposure settings (for he has professional photographer skillz and very easily could have), but when i turned around, the sky was actually that color.

then, instead of a broadway musical, we went to see the one musical playing in albany -- sweeney todd, the movie. as dark as you could want for a christmas eve. and i was sitting next to one of very few audience members who hadn't heard a story synopsis before buying a ticket, there was the extra fun of surprise reactions.

here's a link to the 1846 penny dreadful text, thanks to robin who posted it a couple weeks ago; i dug it out when we got back to jesse's.