Movies

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was released the year I was born. It's still an interesting movie, even if it is a historical curiousity. The performances are all solid, the dialogue fresh, and some of the characters surprising--such as the aged Monsignor who takes the situation matter-of-factly and is one of the couple's strongest defenders. Worth seeing. (The answer to the title question, by the way, is "His parents.")

The Last Laugh is an early Murnau silent movie. It's easy to see why it was so extraordinarily influential. The camera work really is clever, and little like it had ever been seen before. The story is poignant, conveyed through some subtle and effective acting. It's also not very interesting, though, unless you have a passion for film history. Alas, I can't recommend it.

A few days ago I went to post my Dersu Uzala review on GreenCine, and found the following language in their review guidelines: "All submitted reviews become the property of GreenCine. We reserve the right to edit and/or amend submitted reviews."

I don't think so. I started a thread in their forum, pointing out that this language would make it illegal for me to even post one of my own reviews on my own web site, and got a couple of people agreeing with me and a couple of people arguing that I should shut up and be grateful GreenCine was letting me post reviews at all. A GreenCine representative weighed in eventually and said that they were reconsidering that language and would probably eventually go with a Creative Commons license or something similar, which is not bad. I'm still not posting any reviews until they get that language fixed, though.

Hands

I'm going in for surgery again next month, this time on the left hand. I made sure the doctor knows this is my writing hand, and he watched me write, so he knows how I use a pen. This operation seems riskier than the one on my right hand, which was a fairly predictable fusion of three joints. He'll be lengthening some tendons so I can straighten out my fingers, fusing the base of my thumb, fusing one finger, and taking a piece of bone out of another so he can straighten it out. (He said the risk of that procedure was that it "might not heal". That sounds like a risk, all right.)

I will probably get my hand out of a cast right before World Fantasy Convention, but that's not quite certain. In any case I should have some interesting scars to display.

Sunday Snippets

I made a second LiveJournal account, stevendjquotes, to set down cool quotes. I'll continue to use this account whenever I have something of my own to say.

This morning I watched Bad Day at Black Rock, a Spencer Tracy movie about a one-armed man who walks into a small town asking questions that nobody wants to answer. It's no big surprise what secret the town has been keeping, or why he wants to know, but the atmosphere of growing menace is well-done suspense and the movie is a pleasure to watch.

This afternoon I saw Paula Vogel's The Mineola Twins, which was a disappointment. There were moments of fine and funny writing, but most of the scenes just didn't work, and the characters seemed to be trying hard to be goofy so you wouldn't notice they weren't real. I stayed for the post-play discussion with Paula Vogel, the director, and Molly Smith (who directed the original production in Alaska), which was kind of interesting, but again, was also not too exciting. On the whole, not as thrilling an afternoon as I'd hoped for.