The Fountain

I recently watched The Fountain (2006). The experience was beautiful and moving, and the film is intellectually dense, despite reviews stating the opposite. It is a truly awe-inspiring SF film that I look forward to revisiting every so often during my own mortal existence. The Wikipedia entry on it is full of interesting stuff. The score by Clint Mansell and company is equally haunting and deeply touching, and has received numerous spins already. This has joined the group of my all-time favorite scores.

I also watched Grindhouse (2007) in the theatre with a friend. Rodriguez's flick was a lot of laughs, though obviously not for the squeamish, and the fake trailers that followed were amazing. Tarantino's piece started with a slower set and was more ambitious. Parts of it worked brilliantly but it seemed more flawed, on the whole, than his other films. As I was watching these movies, I couldn't help but catch a few references to other films, whether in camera shots (Reservoir Dogs), movie posters (Scary Movie 4) or names of products (Big Kahuna Burgers). IMDB provides an extensive reference of these movie connections. Speaking of which, I'll soon be watching Vanishing Point (1971). Will Machete actually get made by Rodriguez, as promised by various sources? One can only hope! Again, the wikiarticle is well worth your time.

Nine Inch Nail's Year Zero (2007) is amazing. The promotional scheme for it has to be one of the most involved, complex, spine-tinglingly paranoid launches ever devised for a piece of music. And the thing is, the album lives up to this promotional scheme, and is perhaps even amplified by it. Go out and buy it. Even if it means not being in compliance with the United States Bureau of Morality.

I rewrote a story this weekend and submitted it to an online digest. From now on, the idea is to submit at least one story to one magazine every weekend.

Today while grocery shopping I realized that if I live 70 more years (to the age of 97) and, throughout that time, I continue to go grocery shopping an average of once per week, I will complete this task a total of 3640 times. This is somewhat depressing but, considering the rate of change of technology, I'll safely speculate that by the year 2077 grocery shopping will be sufficiently different from what it is today to not make the proposition as dreary as it sounds. Maybe we'll all be living inside one big supermarket by then, and I'll be able to get out of bed and simply shuffle over to the right aisle. That is, assuming that we still eat and sleep.