The Prestidigitator

This is the kind of Christmas music I can get behind.

White Wine In The Sun by Tim Minchin

I really don’t want to contribute to the hyperbole that this debate has already created but I can safely say that this is the finest one hour of debate, one-sided as it is, I’ve seen in a very long time. Two amazingly articulate intellectuals take on Catholicism and religious hypocrisy. To be fair, I do wish that the two proponents of the Catholic church would have been a little more, I don’t know, Christlike instead of pretending that (institutional) child abuse and homophobia are urban myths.

Stephen Fry makes an especially brilliant case against the so called ‘force for good’. Nod along or throw stuff at your computer but this is what good television is all about.

Go watch. Now.

Not that The Daily Show isn’t hilarious, but it gets a lot funnier when Aasif Mandvi shows up.  Here he is gloating about how India got tech support from NASA and the USGS on the Chandrayaan mission.

For every Bobby Jindal, there’s one Aasif Mandvi.

Where would we be without self-deprecation?

I realize that The Daily Show is no place to get my news from but Peter Schiff, who was on recently thinks that the worst is yet to come. Maybe, somebody should listen to him seeing that he was pretty much spot on about the current shitstorm as far back as 2006. To top it off, he thinks the bailouts are a huge mistake and that the “fundamentals” really aren’t all that strong.

“The credit crunch is part of the solution. The problem was all the reckless credit that preceded it. You know, when Barack Obama says that credit is the life blood of the economy — he’s talking about consumer credit — it’s not the life blood – it’s the cancer.”

“Massive inflation — which is what we’re gonna get – we’re just gonna destroy the value of our money.”

Such comfort.

[Read more here.]

Wonderful little video/track by Oren Lavie. 

Tip of the hat to The Mute Oracle.

After months of staring wistfully from outside camera stores, I finally went ahead and bought the Canon Vixia HF10 (uhuh, High Def).  Shooting has been a somewhat humbling experience but I’ll get there. Sooner or later.

Moving files around has been a tad tricky so I thought I’d document (sort of) what I did.

Linux:

If the device doesn’t mount, try ‘dmesg‘

# mkdir /camera
#mount /dev/sdb1 /camera
#cd /camera

MPlayer supports AVCHD (.mts) files, but you’ll need to compile MPlayer (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html) from source.

Windows:

Couldn’t  install the proprietary software that comes with the camera because my netbook doesn’t support the minimumm resolution. So I had to convert the .mts files to .avi.

First, install the AVISynth base and then this (mts_2_xvid.rar) . Unpack the .rar file and copy the .mts files from the camera into the folder and run the batch file _multi_demux_mts_Xvid.bat. That nifty little piece of code compresses the video to .avi and saves it in the same folder.

Trust me, it’s way simpler than it sounds.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror: F W Murnau (1922)

German Expressionism, it is said, rose not because of an artistic revival but because German film makers found it hard to compete with the extravagance of their Hollywood counterparts; so they resorted to symbolism and darker subtexts. F W Murnau’s Nosferatu was one of the earlier expressionist forays into film making and is widely considered a masterpiece. It is not the plot per se that strikes one, but the imagery; beautifully shot in black and white (well, they didn’t really have a choice there) and a genuinely creepy performance by Max Shreck as Count Orlock.

One of the primary reasons I watched the film was thanks to 2000’s Shadow of the Vampire, where Willem Dafoe plays a fictionalized version of Max Shreck. At 78 minutes, the film is quite easy to sit through and for a 1922 silent era film, quite entertaining too.

Say Anything: Cameron Crowe (1989)

If there’s one genre that’s well and truly dead, it’s the romantic comedy genre. What passes off as romance these days is mostly crammed with fart jokes and gratuitous sex. What happened to the days when the hero was an upright, optimistic and by and large ethical gentleman? Say Anything, Cameron Crowe’s (Jerry Maguire) 1989 directorial debut is a surprisingly smart, adequately mushy and thoroughly quotable gem. John Cusack plays (a younger version of a role he would play in High Fidelity) an extremely average, kickboxing enthusiast of a 19 year old grappling with career choices et al when he falls hook, line and sinker for the over achieving Ione Skye. I could say that it’s devoid of cliches but the fact is most later films in the genre have lifted something or the other from this one.

Cameron Crowe’s films have all had amazing soundtracks and this one’s no exception. Add to that a very likable couple, a great scene involving a boom box and some very memorable lines; almost as good as High Fidelity. Almost.

Nobody thinks it will work, do they?
No. You just described every great success story.

Links:

• Scene from Shadow of the Vampire
• Nosferatu: Entire film

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1094249/

Whatever happens in the end, I don’t wanna lose you as my friend.
I promise, I will never be your friend. No matter what. Ever.

I’ve been a huge Wes Anderson fan ever since I saw Rushmore back in college. His visual style is unlike that of any other director what with the use of a thousand props (most of which play no part in the story itself) and more notably, his fascination with blue hues. There are instances where his characters blend in with the environment and there are times when they stand out very vividly. His protagonists always seem a bit quirky and do not think or act in the way normal people do. Bottomline, his films never reflect reality but offer a more colorful and exaggerated version of the real world.

Hotel Chevalier is a 13 minute short film that acts as a prelude to the upcoming The Darjeeling Limited. This film was shown at a few film festivals and is now available through iTunes. It takes place at the eponymous hotel in Paris where Jack (Jason Schwartzman) receives a call from an old flame (Natalie Portman), saying she’ll soon meet him in his room. What follows is their awkward interaction that slowly leads to a romantic rekindling of sorts.

The song “Where Do You Go To” by Peter Sarstedt plays in the background with typical Wes Anderson dialogs aplenty. The sets are reminiscent of Anderson’s earlier films and the slow camera pans across the rooms as Natalie Portman moves across the room fiddling with various objects are brilliant.

I for one, loved the film and can’t wait for The Darjeeling Limited. Reviews be damned.

The new Apple iPOD Nano ad (video link) has an extremely catchy tune. After humming it on trains, at work and in the shower, I decided to find out who the artist was.

The track, 1234 is sung by the beautiful Leslie Feist (the video is quite interesting as well) whose album The Reminder is as good and sometimes even better that the infectious track itself. Very light, breezy music with ample strumming.

On a related note, I finally got around to buying a guitar and christened her/it Cecilia.

I take risks; sometimes patients die. But not taking risks causes more patients to die, so I guess my biggest problem is I’ve been cursed with the ability to do the math.

Dr Gregory House is arguably one of the coolest people on TV (along with the likes of Alan Shore from Boston Legal and Dr Cox from Scrubs). What is it about this cynical, sexist, wisecracking, pill popping, mad genius of a misanthrope that makes him so appealing?

This astonishingly well edited video showcases the man at his finest moments!

[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=0Bh7vnIVPv4]