Dark Chrome Strummer

(I'm writing this in the new Google Chrome browser... just downloaded it and started using it today so it's too early to know what to make of it.)

This past weekend was fun but a bit active. We did the usual weekend stuff: errands, cleaning, etc., but we also got to mix in a few trips w/ Jane to eat out. We also visited my new twin nieces now that they're home from the hospital. Very cute!

We also made it to the movies... we haven't done that in probably two years. I *think* the last movie we saw in the theater was The Lady in the Water which I didn't like too much. This time we did it right. This time we saw Dark Knight and we saw the IMAX version. We saw it at the National Museum of Natural History at a 5:30pm show, and it was sold out. The movie was pretty much everything I had hoped it would be and more (ie, IMAX). Liz and I both really liked it. It was awesome. Did I say we liked it?

So that is the "dark" and "chrome" part of the title. The "strummer" refers to Joe Strummer: The Future Is Unwritten, which I also watched this weekend. (Yes, a bit of movie watching this weekend. It was a long weekend.) I thought this was great, too, but of course in a different way. Being a big Clash fan, and to a lesser degree a fan of Joe Strummer's solo stuff, I was very eager to see this documentary. It certainly didn't disappoint, but it did depict him as a human, faults and all. But I appreciated seeing that aspect of him. I've read books on the Clash and they have implied that he was maybe a hypocrite or maybe even a phony because of the way treated people. But I think we all have our contradictions, and we all have our demons and episodes of bad judgment or maybe you can call it immaturity. But I think the movie showed how he got past that stuff, went through a period of "darkness" as they put it, and then came back. It was a very interesting, funny, and also sad movie about a great musician. I would've liked to have met him.

Coen Bros. at the AFI

OK, the actual Coen Brothers will not be at the AFI in Silver Spring, as far as I know, but the theater is putting on a retrospective of many (all?) of their best movies. 'Course I'll probably never go to any of the showings since I never go to movie theaters. I think the last movie I saw in a theater was ... um ... maybe Lady in the Water? If that's right, that was in 2006.

Anyway, here's the info about the Coen Bros. retrospective.

The Fly

Recently, I re-watched The Fly on HBO. Not the original Vincent Price movie, but the David Cronenberg remake w/ Jeff Goldblum. I've always liked the movie but hadn't seen it in a long time. Funny thing is -- and this is admittedly slightly twisted -- after watching it now as a parent, I looked at it in a different way. So consider this my Halloween-themed post.

In the movie, Seth Brundle becomes merged at a DNA level with a fly, ultimately becoming a human-fly. It's pretty gruesome and frightening, but you feel empathy for Seth. Seth and the fly are sort of combined as a gene splice. So, in my slightly twisted way (see above), I thought of producing a kid as a same sort of gene splice w/ my wife. And obviously I don't think it's gruesome or frightening (well, maybe a *little* frightening), but loosely the same idea.

And I think the movie touches on this when Seth realizes that his unborn child is being carried by girlfriend Veronica. After finding out, he decides that the best way to correct his problem is to horrifically combine himself (plus the fly), Veronica, and his unborn child into one being, in that way mixing up all the DNA together. Which again made me think of what a child is -- a combination of many generations of DNA. But of course, normally a child is it's own entity. Seth even makes the comment that by doing this he would be creating the ultimate family unit (or something to that effect).

Dunno, after writing this out it all sounds more than slightly twisted, but somehow I related this to producing another human and combining DNA with my wife. Horror movies often deal with science-gone-bad, or paranoid technology fantasies that produce terrible results. Same thing w/ The Fly. So I looked at it as a comment on gene splicing and manipulating DNA and how doing something as unnatural as that will only lead to trouble. Let mother nature take care of things in the proper natural way.

In any case, I do like the movie a lot, even though after watching recently I found Jeff Goldblum to be more annoying than I remember him being. He got a lot of praise for that role as I remember. Anyway, that's sort of my disjointed take on The Fly and babies.

Scorsese + Stones = new doc

Joe sent me this trailer for a new Stones documentary filmed by Martin Scorsese called Shine a Light. Sounds and looks like it'll be really cool!