Sat Jan 11 2020 13:41 Leonard's Excursions 2019: Just a memorandum of some of the unusual travel and fun things I did in 2019.

Early in the year I took my first trip to Chicago, for DPLAFest. I stayed with Beth and we did some fun tourist things, like the Chicago Architecture Center boat tour! Accept no substitutes! Or do, it's probably okay. But the CAC tour was great.

We also hit the Chicago Art Institute, which was a real highlight, since Beth is a fine artist who went there all the time as a kid and talked about her favorite pieces. A few of my favorites which I'll share with you, via the medium of website links rather than my own awkward photos.

• The Artist Looks at Nature by Charles Sheeler. This is the piece hung directly to the right of American Gothic. Beat the lines!
• Cow Relieving Itself by Nicolaes Berchem the Elder. Nuff said.
• Robot by Alexandra Exter. Absolutely incredible, especially considering it's from 1926!
• i\Ω.. by Jacqueline Humphries. The Smooth Unicode of fine art!
• Eviscerated Corpse by Mike Kelley, the work that made my 14-year-old mind stop in its tracks at LACMA and understand contemporary art.

They've also got the old floor of the Chicago Stock Exchange off in a corner! A corner I guess they use for events, since I don't think the Chicago Stock Exchange originally had a grand piano on the floor. Some live music would have really classed up the joint, though, I tell you what.

In May, my sisters came to New York and surprised me with a weekend of tourist activities and a fancy dinner!

For my birthday we planned a getaway in upstate New York at a rented house with a few friends. Allison and I did some stargazing and saw a little bit of a meteor shower. Shout out to Rodgers Book Barn, the perfect mix of "peaceful rural atmosphere" and "huge used bookstore". Thanks to Zack and Pam for driving.

Allison and I went to a Manfred Mohr retrospective at a gallery. Never heard of him before but it was definitely art the two of us can agree on. I really liked his plotter-esque pictures from the 70s and 80s, such as P2400-297d_5225__black. The names of the artworks feel like program filenames; I was expecting a bunch of _final_FINAL.

PS: in June, Sumana and I randomly ate dinner at Copinette, a French restaurant on the former site of Copain, the much fancier French restaurant that Gene Hackman stakes out in The French Connection. You live in New York for a while and these odd coincidences become smaller and less common, but they still happen!

Sat Jan 11 2020 09:53 The Crummy.com Review Of Things 2019, Part Two: Film: Well-covered throughout the year as always; what you're here for (assuming you're here at all) is the top ten!

Most of the movies in this year's top ten come from the 1980s, due in large part to Bill Forsyth's dominance of the scoreboard. Sorry to be the person in the Youtube comments on a rock video saying "Wish I had a time machine! I'd go back to the 80s and relive the same ten-year span over and over until I died! Who's with me? haha!"

1. Wings of Desire (1987)
2. Knives Out (2019)
3. Breaking In (1989)
4. Comfort and Joy (1984)
5. Face/Off (1997)
6. Gregory’s Girl (1980)
7. Working Girl (1988)
8. Puppy Love (1985)
9. Booksmart (2019)
10. Sweet Charity (1969)

On a meta level, I love how almost every year my top film of the year has been one I went into without any particular expectations. Keep the surprises coming, I say.

If you only care about recent movies, here's my top list from 2019:

1. Knives Out (2019)
2. Apollo 11 (2019)
3. Booksmart (2019)
4. Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019)
5. Born Bone Born (2018)

I snuck Apollo 11 in there even though I saw it on January 5th, because it's just that good. As always, I've updated Film Roundup Roundup to include about thirty recommended films that in I either first saw or first reviewed in 2019.

Fri Jan 10 2020 19:37 The Crummy.com Review Of Things 2019, Part One:

Here's our Christmas card photo. I impulsively volunteered to wear the Patience suit for an NYPL photo shoot that I don't think ended up being used for anything? I would not repeat this experience, but I'm glad I did it: I got a taste of what it's like to be the weirdo in Times Square everyone has decided to ignore. So let's start this Review of Things off right, with:

Books

The Crummy.com Books of the Year are the Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirsten. I can't say enough good about these books: how they're fantasy and science fiction at the same time; how tight the integration is between worldbuilding, character development, and plot; and how varied the pacing is. I'm so glad that the Internet has let the books come out of midlist purgatory, find their audience, and give Kirsten a way to finish the series.

Some other notable books I read in 2019:

• Lifelode by Jo Walton (Sumana's recommendation for a Steerswoman readalike)
• The Pigeon Tunnel by John le Carre
• Minitel: Welcome to the Internet by Julien Mailland and Kevin Driscoll
• Sea People: The Puzzle of Polynesia by Christina Thompson
• Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot by Vera Tobin (Of huge interest to writers but not, according to reactions when I talk about it, to anyone else)

I finished volume 3 of Mark Twain's autobiography, as promised. He's the Twainiest! Also, I recently learned about the incredibly sleazy tactic UC Berkeley used to keep copyright on this book until 2047, when it would have otherwise expired in 2003. The best I can say is that, judging from the contents of the autobiography, Twain himself would have approved.

I've been reading Bleak House for most of the year; it's slow going! But not for the reason I expected: there's a whole other subplot in here that I don't find super engaging.

Games

The Crummy.com Game of the Year is "Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead", an open world zombie survival game that's also run as a modern open-source project, with pull requests and code review. Not only is this great for keeping gameplay fresh in these kitchen-sink roguelikes where wealth of detail is really important, it's really good to see on its own. This could be the gaming gateway that gets The Kids interested in software development best practices!

Other fabulous 2019 games I played include "Baba Is You", "Untitled Goose Game", "Dicey Dungeons", and "Super Mario Maker 2".

Writing

I wrote four short stories in 2019: "Meat", "Mandatory Arbitration", "User Error", and "The Scene of the Crime". Three of those stories feature a character who in one of my luckier future timelines becomes my Sherlock Holmes, a character who is remembered long after I and all of my other work have been forgotten. Very positive about this character, is what I'm saying. Really fun to write.

I assembled a NaNoGenMo novel: Linked by Love.

I'm getting much more aggressive this year about placing my fiction, so hopefully we'll see some sales. In terms of novels, there's good news and bad news and for now I'm gonna have to go with a big NO COMMENT.

Bots

I created only one bot this year, Secretly Public Domain, and I made it for a specific activist purpose which is more or less seeing results. As per NYCB passim I had some additional bot ideas, did the fun part of the work, and let the code sit in the programming/2019 folder of my archive.

I decided not to keep Almanac for New Yorkers going in 2020. There's one more year of life in the project, thanks to 1939, and the 1938 almanac for San Francisco, but the project wasn't super popular and 2020 isn't the year. Maybe later.

I do have two "just for fun" bot ideas that I'm gradually seeing through to completion. One of them is going to have to wait until I'm sick or otherwise mentally impaired and have nothing better to do than go through a huge amount of text, but you're gonna love it. And by "you" I mean "Allison".

Wed Jan 01 2020 11:13 December Film Roundup: A pretty highbrow month with some well-done films but not a lot of joy. Thank goodness for the Muppets, that's all I can say.

• Knives Out (2019): The highlight of the month, right off! A really fun film that pulls off the delicate dance of not being a traditional murder mystery that we've all seen before, but also turning out to, yes, be a traditional mystery after all. I'm always there for an eccentric detective, and quite often there for the story of a wealthy family who lost everything.
• Ad Astra (2019): I did not enjoy this movie but it had one perfect science-fictional detail, it dramatized a real-life detail I'd never seen dramatized (astronauts being paranoid about their psych evaluations), and its final message was one I've never seen presented in filmed SF, so in some sense it was good? I appreciate it on an academic level but it didn't move me.

  I kept thinking Natalie Portman was going to be in this, but that's a whole other 2019 space-madness movie, Lucy in the Sky, which has an oof IMDB rating of 4.5.

• The Stranger (1946): Not quite the "together at last" I was hoping for from an Orson Wells/Edward G. Robinson matchup, but definitely a watchable thriller. I enjoyed the small-town machinations—who will bring the ice cream to the tea social?—as well as Robinson playing a cultured character closer to his real-life persona more than the "thriller" bits, but it's all part of the puzzle.
• Muppet Treasure Island (1996): My nephew's introduction to the Muppets! He was enraptured! However, he was also enraptured by Dr. Seuss' The Grinch (2018) when we slapped that up on the TV to keep him busy, so it's tough to exclude the null hypothesis.

  As for myself, it was great to see Tim "the human Muppet" Curry serve up the ham, and I loved the fresh Kermit/Sam relationship where Sam—whose defining characteristic is craven service of power—sees Kermit as "power" rather than a suspicious intruder to be reported on Nextdoor.

  Overall, this adaptation made me want to read the book, whereas The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) makes me feel like I've gotten everything good that the book has to offer. That's an impossibly high bar to expect from a film adaptation, but Christmas Carol meets it.

• Christmas Eve on Sesame Street (1978): Seen at the museum with Rachel, Brett, and nephew. I could lose the ice-skating intro, but what's really nice here is Bert and Ernie's child-logic "Gift of the Magi", and what's really nice is the gentle way Big Bird's Santa obsession is handled. Unlike basically other Santa story I've ever seen, this is a dual-layered story that you can appreciate on its own terms whether or not you Know.

  After seeing this we walked through the museum's Jim Henson exhibit, and nephew (again, no previous Muppet experience) instantly recognized and loved the Big Bird puppet. Although we didn't run the experiment, I don't think he would have reacted the same way to the mo-cap dataset used to map Benedict Cumberbatch onto a CGI Grinch.

• The Irishman (2019): Speaking of mo-cap datasets. Saw this on the big screen (at the museum, again) the way Martin Scorsese intended. It was very enjoyable, though the enjoyment was tempered by the interjections of a film-snobbish audience member during the intro. I came here for a movie; I don't need the live show!

  Anyway, this was a really solid straight-down-the-middle gangster film, but overall I'd rather see a weirdo entry in the genre, like Comfort and Joy.

  I knew going in that The Irishman had a scene that was filmed in a bank in my neighborhood. It's an antique bank building, and I was looking forward to it as a little easter egg. The whole time I expected the old-timey bank scene to show up in the 1960s timeframe, but that scene takes place around the year 2000. My own private plot twist!

• Uncut Gems (2019): The lights went down and the soundtrack let out a big Tangerine Dream BWAAAAAAAM and I thought "oh, shit, this is by the Good Time guys, isn't it?" Yes, it is. This was certainly more fun than Good Time. I expect for a certain type of moviegoer these films are an adrenaline rush like Gravity. For another type of moviegoer these films are way too stressful and you have to walk out. I guess I'm in the middle? I was along for the ride, but I'm probably not going to keep seeing these, assuming I start paying more attention to directors' names.

  One cool thing about Uncut Gems is that it's set in 2012 because the plot hinges on real-world events from that year, but if you live in NYC it's pretty easy to see it was filmed recently. Scorsese would have spent millions digitally erasing the LinkNYC kiosks and changing the ads on taxis, but the Safdie brothers are more chill. It's not important to the film!

Mon Dec 30 2019 12:43 Olipy3: Right under my self-imposed deadline I've reached my 2019 goal of porting olipy and botfriend to Python 3. Enjoy it! I sure am.

Mon Dec 23 2019 17:04 Cassini metadata: This year I spent some time doing the pleasant part of botmaking (ideation, data gathering) without the boring part (handling dozens of edge cases, signing up for accounts). One of the bots I never completed was "Cassini GIFs".

All the photos taken by the Cassini probe are online, and each photo has associated metadata. By looking for photos taken by the same instrument at evenly spaced times, you can find frames that would look good as an animation. Here's a nice example: a "movie" of Saturn's moon Dione taken on November 1, 2011:

It was really fun to make these animations that probably only a few people before me had seen. And the fun doesn't need to stop at Saturn: the SETI Project's OPUS3 has aggregated imagery from across NASA's outer planet missions.

The bad news for anyone else who wants to try this out is that the Cassini data is huge. You can download individual frames pretty easily, but the metadata is bundled in enormous tarballs and stored in an ad hoc 1990s file format. To provide a booster seat for the future, I converted the metadata into NDJSON format and put it up as cassini-metadata. Here's one more GIF to whet your interest: Saturn's rings on July 15, 2014:

Fri Dec 20 2019 21:58 Openly Public Domain: I was showing Secretly Public Domain to my brother-in-law and noticed that Hathi Trust has marked a lot of the books as public domain! In Hathi parlance, Books that used to be "Limited (search only)" have been made "Full view" (though this is geofenced within the US). You can read the whole book, download a PDF, etc.

This is probably the visible result of the work described in "It's No Secret - Millions of Books Are Openly in the Public Domain", the first known blog post to cast shade on one of my bots with its title. I knew Hathi had done a few books as a test, and now it's really ramped up!

Now we're at the point where thirteen of the last twenty books my bot posted are already "Full view". And notably, the computer-history book I mentioned in the Vice story, The compatible time-sharing system: a programmer's guide., is also "Full view"! Way to go.

(1) Wed Dec 18 2019 11:45 Only g62 Kids Will Remember These Five Moments: Doing a little year-end cleanup in preparation for a big announcement. Back in February I sold a flash piece to Daily Science Fiction: "Only g62 Kids Will Remember These Five Moments". I think it's pretty good. Don't like it? All I have to say is: "OK, g61er."

Sun Dec 08 2019 21:09 November Film Roundup:

• Torn Curtain (1966): A fun late Hitchcock except I expected an extra double-cross that never came. This is a pattern for me, and I think I'm just used to post-Hitchcock movies where there's one more twist. Our two main characters are engaged, and the POV doesn't strongly stick with one or the other—each has scenes where the other isn't present—which limits the possibilities for double-crossing. It's a shame as an extra twist could have taken it into North by Northwest territory for me.

  Weird detail probably caused by incoherent 1960s sexism: Julie Andrews's character is some kind of space scientist, like her fiancé, but she's treated like his secretary, down to the level of how much she's expected to know about his project: not nothing, as would happen if she worked on a different project altogether, but not so much that the East Germans can get the information from her instead of Paul Newman's character.

  I originally wrote the two main characters are "married", because the film starts with them in bed together, but that's Alfie, always pushing the boundaries of film. Whether it's flushing a toilet or implying that people who are almost married are having sex, he's giving a big "shove off, mate" to the squares!

• Bamboozled (2000): This is the most difficult-to-watch movie I've ever seen. I don't value "difficult to watch" per se so this isn't going on my best-of list, but I will put it next to Face/Off on the "so bad it's good" shelf: Bamboozled is bad and good simultaneously and for the same reasons.

  A while back I said that you can't make social change by making a movie, but Bamboozled seems to show it's possible, if the society you're trying to change is Hollywood. The same crossed wire that leads filmmakers to romanticize 'the movies' makes them susceptible to arguments delivered via movie—arguments that will not affect the moviegoing public as a whole. Bamboozled is pointing out a lot of problems with Hollywood, most of which are structural, but there is one simple thing that even a lowly bring-me-coffee screenwriter can take to heart: blackface gags are evil and you need to stop it.

  Roger Ebert's review of Bamboozled notices the film's systemic critique but says the blackface bit is so offensive as to obscure it. I agree with this, but in 2000, mainstream Hollywood movies were still doing actual blackface gags! A year ago I was shocked to see one in O Brother, Where Art Thou?. I admit the first time I saw that film, it didn't register, just like it it didn't seem to with Ebert.

  After seeing Bamboozled I went looking on IMDB, as well as Screen It ("Movie Reviews for Parents"), and it looks like after an O Brother-esque bit in Zoolander (2001), Hollywood blackface gags died out. This surely would have happened eventually, but I'm gonna argue that Bamboozled is the reason they stopped when they did. Movies with systemic critiques are not uncommon: Bamboozled is unusual in that it got some results.

  Of course, artists are always pushing the boundaries, and the easiest way to address a topic that becomes taboo is to slather on a layer of indirection or irony. So we do see Jack Black play a character who angers his neighbors with a blackface act in Be Kind, Rewind (2008). We see Robert Downey Jr. play a character who goes way too deep into Method acting in Tropic Thunder (also 2008) and apparently some damn thing or other is going on in The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassas (2009). But that seems to be about it.

  In these post-Bamboozled cases, real people are making a movie in which a fictional character makes the bad decision to wear blackface. (That's the joke.) Then the real people are saying "That wasn't me, it was the dummy!" to soften the blow.

  Pre-Bamboozled, the blackface itself was generally not the joke. It was a way of creating a fictional construct, a kind of ventriloquist dummy, that could be used in other jokes. See Silver Streak in last month's Roundup for an example. Bamboozled is saying, over and over with no subtlety, that it is an act of real-world evil to create that ventriloquist dummy, and that any jokes you might have it tell are drawing from a well of evil, not from your comedic genius. So just don't build the evil ventriloquist dummy.

  This is why I'm saying so-bad-it's good. To succeed artistically, Bamboozled has to be a bad movie. If it was somehow good, it would enact the nightmare scenario it depicts. As it is, I think there were a bunch of scripts in the early 2000s where a white producer read a draft and said "uh, hey, did you see Bamboozled (2000)?" and long story short, there was a rewrite. Around 2008, Hollywood figured out a workaround: have a fictional character build the evil ventriloquist dummy, just one of many bad decisions a fictional character might take. But it didn't get a lot of traction.

• Ocean's Eleven (1960): Watched as a fluffy palate cleanser after Bamboozled but of course there had to be an O Brother, Where Art Thou? style blackface gag in this movie. Ugggh! Otherwise it was okay. Cesar Romero was a nice surprise. I expected everything would be super stylish, but it's more like the ambient stylishness of 1960 was higher. Frank and Sammy look cool even when they're just hanging out in the rec room.

  However, why not watch a stylish 1960 movie that's also really funny, like The Apartment? Oh, look, there's Shirley Maclaine, showing up for a cameo in this movie while filming The Apartment. I'm not saying people should always watch The Apartment instead of watching this, because you gotta have variety, but... maybe the Soderbergh remake is better.

• The Whole Town's Talking (1935): Previously seen in 2012 with a big theater crowd, now seen in the living room with Sumana. There were some great bits but the big, nearly continuous laughs I had in 2012 weren't there. What's the difference? On top of obvious stuff like "laughter is contagious", I think a big part of it is Edward G. Robinson using his face and body language to do the type of physical comedy that's funnier on the big screen: rapid switches between menacing and milquetoast.
• Working Girl (1988): A 1980s corporate comedy a la Big Business, but less purely comedic and with an interesting, realistic business plot. Big recommendation.

  Every major character in this movie has a big beefcake/cheesecake scene. Sometimes it's played for laughs: Harrison Ford's changing shirts in his office and all the Wall Street secretaries are looking through the plate glass window like "aww yeah." The public demands tasteful skin!

• Monsieur Verdoux (1947): I'm not a huge fan of Chaplin's films mainly because they're so sentimental, so I figured I'd like his oddball serial killer comedy. And it's pretty good! Except, stop me if you've heard this one, after a crashingly cynical final scene it goes on for like five more minutes and gets a little sentimental for my taste. Overall, a good mixture of tension and comedy that put me in mind of all those Ealing movies where Alec Guinness plays a genteel criminal.
• We went to a Sesame Street Lost and Found event at the museum, but we were sworn to secrecy about the forbidden clips that were screened at the event, which saves me the trouble of having to write it up.
• Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019): Incredible documentary about a person who seems really difficult to be close to, told mainly by her surviving staff—sort of like Filmworker. Soon to be supplemented by the amazing collection of data Marion Stokes spent so much of her life on. I know the feeling: sometimes you get an idea and you gotta run with it and it consumes your whole life.

  Content warning: this film includes harrowing recorded-live TV footage of 9/11, which is how I ended up seeing the second plane hit the tower after 18 years of successfully not seeing that footage.

• Kung Fu League (2018): This had some really good comic bits, especially the Batman '66-style relationship between Huo Yuanjia and Chen Zhen. It was also really refreshing how quickly the members of the titular Kung Fu League figured out they'd been transported into the 21st century, and accepted it, allowing the movie to continue.

  Unfortunately, nearly every character not in the League was tiresome. If they'd spent ten more minutes running around the movie set (great Blazing Saddles bit here) or figuring out how McDonalds works, that would have been ten fewer minutes spent with the tiresome characters.

  While doing research for this post I discovered a big conceptual problem with the nerd wish-fulfillment in this movie. While watching the movie I saw the formation of the League as a magical time-travel thing that brought real historical figures forward in time. But when writing this Roundup I learned that Chen Zhen is a fictional character. I'd assumed that Kwok-Kwan Chan in Kung Fu League was playing Chen Zhen as a parody of Bruce Lee's Chen Zhen from Fist of Fury, but he's playing the fictional character Chen Zhen come to life.

  Huo Yuanjia was a real historical figure, but within Kung Fu League he's the Batman to the fictional Chen Zhen's Robin: another Fist of Fury reference. And he and Wong Fei-hung (real person) are rivals for the heart of Thirteenth Aunt (fictional character from Once Upon a Time In China). So I give up on the time travel idea, and figure the magical event at the center of this movie actually calls forth Last Action Hero-style versions of these fictional/fictionalized legends from the Shared Cinematic Universe they all inhabit.

  Except a) the nerd in this movie is a comics artist, not a filmmaker, b) at the end of the movie the Kung Fu League "goes back" to... being fictional? and c) there's a joke I don't get about Ip Man which is probably really funny but which seems to make it impossible to formulate any coherent explanation at all. Which, I must admit, good job leaving it all on the field, comedically speaking.

Mon Nov 18 2019 19:02 NaNoGenMo 2019: "Linked by Love": This year I'm writing and announcing my NaNoGenMo project before November is over! "Linked by Love" is made from cunningly juxtaposed paragraphs of romance novel back-cover copy. Back-cover copy is some of the hardest stuff for an author to write, and it's basically treated as ephemeral, so it was fun to sort of give it its due in this project.

I originally had a much different book planned, something that would take a single individual on a universe-shifting journey, but it proved very difficult to determine the relationship between the referent of a sentence and the gendered pronouns in the sentence. Gender is very important to romance novels, so instead I let the proper nouns do the work and left the precise relationship between Carlotta_n and Carlotta_n+1 a mystery for the reader to fill in.

(1) Sat Nov 02 2019 13:45 October Film Roundup: I saw a ton of movies this month and there was something fun or interesting in almost all of them! Here's the scoop:

• Puppy Love (1985): A.k.a. "Dou qi xiao shen xian" Sumana and I watched this on a date back in September and I forgot about it, even though it's really fun! It came back to me because Gregory's Girl (see below) is similar in a lot of ways. It's basically a sequence of skits. The skits are funny and cute, with lots of female eristic energy a la Celine and Julie Go Boating. There seemed to be a strong "you had to be there" element: others in the theater were laughing really hard at what appeared to us as random Hong Kong 1980s stuff.

  This movie's pretty obscure, to the point where the best English-language description is on the Metrograph web site announcing the showing we saw. I recommend this film but not sure how you'd go about seeing it.

  BTW films I see at Metrograph are at high risk of being forgotten because I don't see a lot of films there and they don't have a convenient "everything we showed" list I can go through at the end of the month. I remember them eventually though!

• Gregory's Girl (1980): This is the same kind of funny, cute, skit-based high-school romcom as Puppy Love, with one big asterisk: there's a skit early on where a teacher talks about his female students in a really gross way. Fortunately this doesn't become a theme, but it changed the tone of the whole movie.

  I'm not even talking about the boys being gross. Teenage boys are frequently horny and gross, you can get comedy out of that, and although I'm glad this isn't the main goal of Gregory's Girl—it certainly isn't the high point of its comedy—I think they did an okay job with it.

  Because it's so great that so many of the characters in Bill Forsyth movies are good-hearted, the appearance of a creep is more of a bummer than it would be in another movie. Burt Reynolds' character in Breaking In has one moment of creepiness which is earned in a character sense but brings the mood down a bit. Judging from IMDB reviews, my attitude about this doesn't bode well for the 1999 sequel to Gregory's Girl, in which a grown-up Gregory inherits the mantle of the creepy teacher from the original movie! Boo.

  Anyway, the last act of Gregory's Girl is ambiguous in a way I don't associate with romcoms, but I think what happened is that another girl has a crush on Gregory and so gets her friends to basically heist Gregory out of his date with Dorothy. And because he's so easygoing and trusting he doesn't even realize he's been heisted. That's really clever. That's the kind of thing I come to a Forsyth movie to see.

• Gaslight (1944): The ultimate trope namer. I feel like you could have explained gaslighting to, say, Shakespeare, and he would have recognized it, but it took the era of the Big Lie to bring it into consciousness and another 25 years for it to become a term of art. BTW I also feel this way about the card game "Dominion". It could only have been invented in the 21st century, but you could explain it to someone from the 1920s and they'd totally get it (although they'd be annoyed by the sheer number of cards).

  Anyway, the movie. The first half is masterful in setting up the suspense but the back half is... a police procedural? This dude isn't even manipulating the gaslight to mess with his wife; it happens by accident. On the plus side: Angela Lansbury's film debut!

  (TV Tropes claims that Petruchio gaslights Kate in The Taming of the Shrew, and it is a similar form of manipulation, but I don't think he's trying to get her to doubt her own sanity.)

• Beetlejuice (1988): Without a constraint like historical fact (Ed Wood) or a time-consuming filming process (The Nightmare Before Christmas), Tim Burton movies are at risk of heading off into a ball pit of cool but disconnected ideas. This film jumps into the ball pit almost immediately and we get some fun set pieces that make me think this film would have been better as a series of shorts.

  The third act, in particular, has a lot of scars on the screenplay where they cut all the exposition. Of course they still had time for Beetlejuice to set up this goth shotgun wedding with Gregory's Girl-age Lydia—just no time to convince the audience that it would solve any plot problem. It's clear Beetlejuice is exactly the sort of person who would do this, so at least it makes logical sense, but it's less clear why they followed up this movie with a children's cartoon—the main thing I remember about Beetlejuice from my childhood—where Beetlejuice and an aged-down Lydia are best pals. I guess that comes from the same place as the Robocop cartoon.

  Uh, to say a nice thing about this movie: the main villains are redeemed, and one of them is even redeemed before the ending. I've also heard good things about the Indian remake, Beteljuice.

• The Informant! (2009): Up until the end of the opening credits I was assuming this would be like The Conversation, possibly because of Matt Damon's dorky moustache, but I wasn't disappointed to see a much different film set in the 1990s, in an office culture that I got the barest glimpse of tagging along with my father to clients and working my first summer programming jobs. I liked the twists and enjoyed watching Scott Bakula's long-suffering FBI agent. I laughed really hard at "You don't know how to read a lie detector!"

  Sumana had seen this movie already and when I told her I was watching it, provided this Bakula-ready joke: "Archer Daniels Midland is the spot where Captain Archer and Crewman Daniels agreed to meet." Yes, a Crewman Daniels reference every month, that's the Film Roundup promise!

  I see why they had to add the exclamation mark to the end of this movie's name. (The book was just called The Informant.) The exclamation mark shows that the film has a strong comedic element; otherwise it looks like a Robert Ludlum adaptation. This got me to thinking: if you have a film with a question mark in its title, but you also add an exclamation mark, does it cancel out the (totally imaginary) question mark curse?!

  I found about 30 feature films on IMDB that have adjacent question and exclamation marks in their title, but the only ones I recognize are The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies!!? and What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?. So it looks like a reliable signal of a very bad movie.

• My Dinner With Andre (1981) This film hasn't aged well (the subject matter is... very Age of Aquarius) but I was amazed by how natural the dialogue feels. Gave me the vicarious thrill of listening to a smart crackpot present his theories on a topic I don't care about. Maybe his crackpot theories are correct! Who knows? Wallace Shawn was of course the big draw for me, and he doesn't have much to say until the last half-hour, but I was entertained. A production assistance credit for Troma (one of their first credits) was a nice surprise.
• Silver Streak (1976): The disappointing essence of stagflation-era comedy. After a rocky start (primarily caused by movies like this one in heavy rotation on Comedy Central) I've come to appreciate the cinema of the 1970s, but the comedies rarely make me laugh. No matter what they try, I'll never see Gene Wilder as a romantic lead or even a great comic actor. I think I found out about this from a "list of overlooked comedies" and now I'm questioning the judgement of the entire list. Plus, blackface. IMDB trivia: "Richard Pryor was uncomfortable with the scene." No kidding! Oh yeah, Richard Pryor's in this, eventually.
• Hausu (1977): This has a lot of stuff I don't like in horror movies (like... horror...) but it's so over the top and ridiculous I can't stay upset. My favorite scene was at the beginning where the backstory is laid out in a different filmic style. Every Disney animated feature does that now, but it doesn't happen a lot in 1977. And Hausu does it in an unusual way: one character is narrating the backstory, laying down the backbeat for the film-within-a-film we're seeing, but instead of listening to this narration, the other characters are also watching the film-within-a-film and commenting on it, MST3K-style? I guess this is to say that right from the start, Hausu is really weird, moving really fast and demanding a lot of the viewer. Once the blood effects start kicking in I've kinda had my fun.
• The Coca-Cola Kid (1985): I'm gonna put it out there: this, not Mad Max, deserves to be considered the true prequel to The Road Warrior. It was pretty fun, showcasing both the glorious high-tech of the 1980s and steampunk turn-of-the-century low tech. I can't confirm this 100% but this feels like a "low-budget non-American director gets big movie-industry money for the first time" film, a genre I'm becoming interested in after seeing Housekeeping last month.
• Little Caesar (1931): From the golden age of "every screenplay is based on a novel, and we're going to show you a picture of the novel on the title card". Also from the golden age of opening with a Bible quote, perhaps to appease the Hays office. I watched this because I really like Edward G. Robinson in non-gangster roles but I hadn't really seen the gangster roles he's best known for. It's a "great" performance—sixty years later, Robinson's accent still meant "gangster" at my middle school—but I think this movie is now basically obsolete. You got The Godfather series and both versions of Scarface telling this story with better character motivation than "gonna do some crimes, see?"
• Key Largo (1948): "Let's rip off the last scene from Key Largo, Mitchell!" That was going through my head the whole time, so suffice to say I knew how this movie ends. Has aged better than Little Caesar, with some nice noir moments regarding corruption and human weakness. Johnny Rocco has a super-petty speech about how ungrateful are the politicians he buys, which is exactly what I wanted when I went looking for "Edward G. Robinson gangster stuff".
• Re-Animator (1985): Kind of a repeat of my Reservoir Dogs dilemma: I'm not into horror films, but I am a big fan of Jeffrey Combs, who works almost exclusively in horror. I gotta at least watch the movie that started the typecasting, right? For an 80s horror flick you could do a lot worse. Combs met all my expectations: sinister with great comic delivery. The practical effects are goofy, but more "realistic" and less inventive than in Hausu. In further "random unexpected production assistant credits" news, Re-Animator has one for Rick Berman, of all people. Has anyone asked him about this?
• Gaslight (1944): A boring, train-ride-heavy first half sets up a reign of claustrophobic gothic terror in the second. A real thrill to watch. Plus, Angela Lansbury's film debut! Sumana hasn't seen the film but recommends "Just in Spring", a Yuletide fic dealing with the aftermath.

Tue Oct 01 2019 21:13 September Film Roundup: This is not a film, but in September, Sumana and I played Untitled Goose Game and loved it. Check it out. Honk!

• Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid (1982): In movie terms, this is the Crewman Daniels-esque car that Johnny Cash builds in "One Piece at a Time". The Steve Martin/Carl Reiner brand of comedy is able to drive the weirdo car a pretty good way, but I was left a bit disappointed. Like a Mel Brooks film, this is really sentimental about The Movies in a way that probably touches the hearts of those people who go in to work every day to make The Movies. But most of us have different jobs, and the technical achievement here rarely serves the comedy or the plot (in fact the plot serves it, big time). The one genre of joke I think they really nailed is the "noir narrator" joke. Just off the top of my head I can remember two great gags that came out of fooling with the narration.

  As an interesting cross-reference, the mailing list manager Enemies of Carlotta is a reference to this film.

• Steven Universe The Movie (2019): I'm reserving judgement until I see the next season of the TV show because this movie sets up one of my favorite SF conceits -- aliens living alongside humans on Earth, c.f. Constellation Games -- and doesn't do much with it. Wasted opportunity? Not if they go on to spend a large number of ten-minute cartoons exploring the topic! Otherwise... this was a fun kid's movie. I'm not a kid anymore and I know this isn't designed for me, I'm just watching over your metaphorical shoulder.
• Shadow of the Thin Man (1941): At this point we're just watching for the comic relief scenes. Dashiel Hammett doesn't have so much as a "based on an original story by" credit anymore and the mystery bits are pretty dull. Nick and Nora were fun in New York, fun in San Francisco, but in this movie they live in an unnamed split-the-difference city that feels like pure backlot. William Powell's still funny. though.

  The only thing that would convince me to watch the rest of this series is 1) Sumana might want to, 2) eventually a young Dean Stockwell starts playing the kid!

• The Phantom Carriage (1921): A century before The Good Place, there was... this. There's some cool technical wizardry (In its day, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid was hailed as "A new The Phantom Carriage"), and it's always nice to watch a silent film with live accompaniment, but overall I wasn't sold on the melodrama and the moralizing. The museum handout intepreted the whole supernatural element as a metaphor for the main character's alcoholism, and although readings like that generally annoy me, I think it makes a lot of sense here.

  Having to drive Death's carriage for a year seems horrible, what with being endlessly confronted with human frailty and misery, but is it really worse than spending that same year in the Bad Place? One of many worldbuilding questions not considered by this movie, perhaps confirming the "metaphor for alcoholism" theory.

• Comfort and Joy (1984): This was my introduction to Bill Forsyth, who's already one of my favorite directors. I'd never heard of him before this month. Now I've seen three of his films (see below) and am eager to see the rest. His work is really consistent, but he doesn't have a ton of credits and hasn't directed since 1999, which made me suspect an Elaine May "movie jail" situation. Best I can see looking around the web is he just got tired of making movies.

  Getting down to specifics: Comfort and Joy is a light comedy about mob violence where nobody gets hurt. It's all property damage. I'll say two negative things about it: the ending is really slight and although any resemblance is purely coincidental, etc. etc., there was real ice cream mob violence in Glasgow around this time and it's hard not to see this movie making light of it—a criticism that would have less bite if the movie was more satirical and less fluffy. Apart from that, a really good time.

  As in many movies, there's a dream sequence in Comfort and Joy that is shot as though it were actually happening, ending with a smash cut to the sleeper waking up. Unlike most movies that do this, here we've also got a second dream sequence featuring the same characters, in which one of the characters is loudly suspicious that this is a dream, is finally convinced it's not, smash cut—they were right, it was a dream. Pure comedy... I'm gonna say comedy thallium.

• Breaking In (1989): I saw this one with Sumana and it blew us away! Great gags, great performances, a good heart, minor characters get their chance to be funny, awesome Portland locations. Sumana proposed this film as a model for Breaking Bad, and it's very plausible. Unlike a lot of stories of mismatched partners, it's clear here what each party gets out of the relationship, and at the end they both think they've come out ahead. Overall I'd compare this to Big Business—a hilarious but forgotten 80s comedy that's miles ahead of most of the stuff people remember. It's even got some subtle Edgar Wright-style jokes—(Delphine:Carrie::Ernie:Mike):::Shaun:Yvonne. Yes, I had to use parentheses and the rarely seen triple-colon to explain that analogy.
• Housekeeping (1987): This movie was not a laugh-a-minute crime comedy, so I didn't love it as much as Comfort and Joy and Breaking In, but it was solid. I was taken aback by the audacity of flooding the set, something I don't think I've ever seen. Though I imagine most movie ships are sets that can be flooded. Anyway, good mischief—comic and otherwise—in a less comedic universe than the other two Forsyth movies I've seen.

Sun Sep 01 2019 20:40 August Film Roundup: "Our shows" have either ended (Jane the Virgin, satisfying ending IMO) or are on summer break, so in August, Sumana and I ended up watching a lot of movies together.

• Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000): A really fun action movie. Most of the martial arts movies I've seen are either significantly newer or significantly older than this, and after calibrating for that, I think I agree with the givers of prestigious film awards that this is above average for its time period. Not a lot to say beyond that.
• Jupiter Ascending (2015): Bits of this movie have a fun Hitchhiker's Guide vibe but it has a very tight focus on the two things I dislike most in space opera: Chosen One plots and great-house politics. The Wachowskis don't exactly hide their affinity for Chosen One plots, and obviously there's a market for great-house politics. It just feels like a dereliction of duty to use the grand scale of space opera to further explore one of the most heavily-explored societal organization mechanisms. Basically, I wanted this film to take a hard turn at the bees, do some kind of hive mind or something. All I remember from this movie's initial release was people making fun of the bee thing, but the bee thing is great!

  This movie has two adjacent action set pieces where Channing Tatum busts in and stops Mila Kunis from signing some paperwork, so if that's your kink, this is the movie you've been waiting for. However, this movie is probably where you developed that kink, back when you saw it in 2015, and it's probably not going to happen again in modern cinema. Good thing there's deep fakes now!

  PS: Walter John William's The Praxis does a good job of showcasing the dysfunction you'll find in one of those great-house societies, but even then I didn't finish the series.

• Walk, Don't Run (1966): Dateline: 1964! Cary Grant is lured out of retirement by the promise of a free trip to the Tokyo Olympics, all expenses paid. He just has to do some location shoots for his matchmaker role in this bedroom farce movie, and fill in the rest in a studio Stateside. Seems like a prime opportunity to phone it in. I'd phone it in if it was me. But that's just one of the many reasons why I'm not one of the most beloved actors of the twentieth century. Grant turns in a game performance with a lot of physical comedy, and the overall movie's really fun in a 1960s "international cooperation" way.

  But the best part is that pre-Trek George Takei is in this movie! He's only got one scene but it's a pretty good role. I don't think I've ever seen him in a role other than Sulu or George Takei As Himself.

• I Was a Male War Bride (1949): We wanted to see more Cary, and thanks to this movie, our wish was... granted. I missed out on this film in 2013, and I'm pleased to report that it's funny and Cary Grant doesn't try to do a French accent. Easy no-prize explanation: his character speaks really good English which he learned from a Brit, a la Jean-Luc Picard.

  There are two distinct phases to this movie. It starts with the typical Howard Hawks rom-com stuff where the two characters who can't stand each other fall in love. Once Grant's character becomes a Male War Bride, we switch to more "Humor in Uniform" jokes and gender stuff. It's all good fun, and there are some really moving bits near the end.

• Goldeneye (1995): The latest in our "Sumana asks Leonard if he wants to watch a James Bond movie and Leonard says sure" series. This was fun. Again, not much to add. Except: before checking IMDB I assumed Joe Don Baker spent 20 years appearing in Bond movies as Jack Wade, but no, he's in two and we happened to watch both of them.
• Three Kings (1999): This was really powerful, but also a good object lesson in exactly what type of power art has. Four years after this movie came out, we started a stupid, pointless follow-up to the Gulf War, at great human cost. At the time there were, in fact, people saying "didn't anyone see Three Kings (1999)?", but it didn't make a difference on a geopolitical level. Not saying a better movie would have gotten a different outcome. The Great Dictator is a great film and it didn't stop anything. Art works on the level of the individual, and there it does have power, for good and evil. We just don't have the counterfactual of all the individual decisions that were made differently because someone saw a movie.
• It Happened One Night (1934): Okay, back to romcoms. Clark Gable rides the knife-edge between "romantic lead" and "obnoxious jerk" in a way that guarantees lesser actors will spend the next 80+ years trying to surf this wave and falling down on the "obnoxious jerk" side. Really enjoyable to see someone who can pull it off, though. I think the key is in his famous striptease, surely the inspiration for Magic Mike, in which he compels behavior from Claudette Colbert's character not by controlling her body but by aggressively making his own body vulnerable.

  A line from this movie is currently a catchphrase in our house: "Five Gs, or I crab the works!"

• Finally, we borrowed DVDs of the first four Thin Man movies (1934-1941). As of writing we've watched the first three and I don't think the fourth one is going to hold any big surprises, so I'll sum them all up as though they were one movie. The murder-mystery part is pretty bland but we love the dynamic between Nick and Nora, a dynamic you rarely see in romcoms, which focus on the start of a romance. It's not just that they're happily married: it's a collective power fantasy of being in a relationship so secure and with such good communication that you can pull potentially disastrous pranks on each other and team up to take on society at large.

  There's a little of this in It Happened One Night (where it's great), so it doesn't have to rely on a strong preexisting relationship -- it can be one of the building blocks of a relationship. You see a kind of Nick and Nora dynamic between Kim and Jimmy in Better Call Saul, but their relationship isn't actually that strong—an indication that the show's probably not gonna end with a big infodump and everyone tipping back a drinkie.

Fri Aug 09 2019 09:45 Secretly Public Domain: Update: My "Secretly Public Domain" project got a lot of attention, which is great, but it also gave me a lot more work to do and pointed to some things that hadn't been explained very well. I've done that work, and here's an update:

Topline number is 73%

My original estimate was that 80% of pre-1963 books were not renewed. This was based on a couple of inaccurate assumptions, the big one being that I was counting works originally published in a foreign country. Those works might have lapsed into the public domain at some point, but the US copyright has since been restored by treaty. So their renewal status isn't really relevant.

Of the books where renewal status is relevant, here are the most recent statistics:

• 73% have no renewal record at all.
• 19% have a renewal record that's an excellent match.
• 8% are in a grey area. They have one or more renewal records, but none of them are an excellent match. One of them might be legit, or they might all be renewals for totally different books. They need to be checked manually.

Credits

The "Secretly Public Domain" bot was a publicity stunt to draw attention to the machine-readable registration records. It worked great, but it also drew attention to me, the person doing the publicity stunt, even though I had basically nothing to do with the original work. For the record, here are the people who actually did the work. The project inside NYPL was run by Sean Redmond, Greg Cram, and Josh Hadro (now of IIIF). The work of making the copyright records machine-readable was done by Data Conversion Laboratory.

Buried treasure

Most of the books whose copyright wasn't renewed are really obscure titles, but without looking very hard I found a very well-known science fiction novel that has no renewal record. I'm not mentioning the name as an incentive to get people to look at the data themselves. It's probably not the only well-known work whose copyright wasn't renewed.

How to make your own list

My original estimate of 80% was based on the quick and dirty script I used to write the Mastodon bot. To fix the "foreign works" problem and to produce a dataset that would stand up to scrutiny, I published a Python library specifically for handling this data. It's got business logic for making determinations like "was this book published in a foreign country" and "how well does this renewal record match this registration record". You run the scripts and at the end you have a bunch of JSON files with consolidated data. If you think there are bad assumptions, you can change the business logic and run the scripts again.

How to see the data

There were a number of requests for this data in a tabular form. I totally understand where this is coming from, and it's certainly the easiest way to get into the data, but it's tricky, because converting the JSON to tabular data destroys information that would be useful for taking the next step (see below).

So, I've done the best I can. I added a script to the end of my Python workflow which generates three huge tab-separated files, and I put those files in the cce-spreadsheets project. This should be good for getting an overview of which books were renewed, which weren't, and which are foreign publications.

What's next?

Discovering that a book published in 1950 is in the public domain, doesn't make a free digitized version of that book automatically appear. Somebody has to do the work. At this point we go from fast data processing to really slow research and digitization work. You or I can now make a near-complete list of unrenewed books in a few minutes, but that list just represents an enormous to-do list for someone.

There are basically three "someones" who might step up here: Project Gutenberg, Hathi Trust, and Internet Archive.

Project Gutenberg

As I mentioned earlier, Project Gutenberg digitized the copyright renewal records some time ago, and they use them all the time. They have a section of their Copyright How-To explaining how to check whether a particular title was renewed, and whether the renewal matters. There are other steps to clear a pre-1963 work: you have to verify that the author lived in the US at the time, stuff like that. The newly digitized registration records can help with some of this, and my data processing script that combines registration and renewal can help with more of it, but there's still some manual work you have to do for each book.

Once that work is done, Project Gutenberg volunteers will locate a copy of the book, scan it, and OCR it (assuming there's no existing scan). Then they'll proofread it and put out HTML and plain-text editions. As you can imagine, this process takes a really long time, but the result is a clean, accurate copy of the book that can be read on its own or reused in other projects. The catch is that somebody has to care enough about a specific book to go through all this trouble.

Hathi Trust

Hathi Trust already has scans of a lot of these 1924-1963 books. They just don't make these scans available to the public, because as far as they know, all these books are still under copyright. If they were convinced otherwise, they'd open up the scans—they opened up almost all of their 1923 stuff this January when the 95-year copyright term finally expired. So we have to make a case for opening up these books.

Earlier, NYPL took the highest-circulating 1924-1963 books in our research collection and checked to see which ones lacked a renewal record. We sent the list to Hathi Trust, and they did their own verification and opened up some of the books: The Americans in Santo Domingo from 1928 is an example. Once Hathi opens up a scan, it's available to the public. It also becomes possible for Gutenberg et al. to turn the raw scan into something more readable.

In the near future, people at NYPL (not me) will be talking to people at Hathi Trust about what kind of evidence is necessary, in general, to convince them that the copyright on a 1924-1963 book has lapsed. Then we'll be able to give them a list of all the books where we can find that kind of evidence. There'll still be a verification process on the Hathi Trust side -- at the very least, they have to go through the book and make sure it doesn't contain unauthorized reprints from other books -- but it should streamline things quite a bit.

Internet Archive

Internet Archive is a wild card here. They scan a lot of books, and I could see them treating the "unrenewed" list as a big list of additional books to scan, but it would be a new undertaking. Making unrenewed works available is something Project Gutenberg volunteers do already, and it's something that Hathi Trust could do relatively easily, but with Internet Archive it's more the sort of thing they'd do.

Data problems

That 8% of grey area, where it's not clear whether or not a book was renewed, points to the general difficulty of meshing together two sets of public records published across half a century and digitized by different people. The grey area represents a lot of manual work that has to be done, and of course there's always the fear that a book that seems to be free and clear actually isn't: the title page says "printed in Canada", or the smoking-gun copyright renewal didn't show up because its ID number was typed wrong.

There's going to be a lot of manual work in the process of clearing these books, but there's no reason to wait until everything's perfect to get started. My preference is to cast a very wide net, try to find any renewal that might possibly be related to a registration, and make the grey area as big as possible. We know that a majority of 1924-1963 books will always come up "no renewal", because there are way more registrations than renewals. We can deal with those and then take a closer look at the grey area.

Other media

A couple of people asked whether it was possible to do this for other media. The good news is that there are volumes of the Catalog of Copyright Entries for:

• "Books, Pamphlets, Serials, and Contributions to Periodicals"
• "Periodicals"
• "Drama and Works Prepared for Oral Delivery"
• "Music"
• "Maps and Atlases"
• "Works of Art; Reproductions of Works of Art; Scientific and Technical Drawings; Photographic Works; Prints and Pictoral Illustrations"
• "Commercial Prints and Labels"
• "Motion Pictures and Filmstrips"

All of these books have scans hosted at the Internet Archive. You can get an overview by looking at Penn's index of the CCE from a specific year, let's say 1960.

As far as I know--and I do know about one big exception--the rules here are the same as for books. If something wasn't registered, or the registration wasn't renewed, then the copyright on a work first published in the US 1924-1963 has lapsed.

Now, the bad news. We have scans of the Catalog of Copyright Entries, but the only bits where both the registration and renewals are machine-readable is "Part 1 Class A". That's the "Books" part of "Books, Pamphlets, Serials, and Contributions to Periodicals", and it represents only about 30% of the total.

If you want to see whether there's a renewal record for a fishing map of Kansas, or a magazine article, or a cool retro ad, or a classic film noir, or a vintage restaurant placemat, it is quite possible, but it's a huge pain. And you can forget about running the numbers on all the movies or all the restaurant placemats. We don't have a good picture of what's in there.

The situation is this way because the Catalog of Copyright Entries is huge, and digitizing it is boring/expensive. Up to this point, book nerds are the only nerds who've put in the time and money to make "their" part of the CCE machine-readable. NYPL has plans to give this same treatment to the entire CCE, but the crucial part of the plan where we have money to pay someone to do this is currently missing; it's a matter for fundraising.

The second piece of bad news regards music. When we in 2019 think about "music", we think of sound recordings. When the CCE thinks about "music", it's thinking about the underlying composition—basically the stuff that would go on the sheet music. Until 1972 there was no federal-level copyright on sound recordings, and the result is that music copyrights are a bigger mess than other types of copyright. I do not want to get into territory I don't understand, but suffice to say that for a vinyl record to be in the public domain, it's necessary but not sufficient that the copyright on the underlying composition have expired. So the CCE can only help so much.

(1) Sun Aug 04 2019 20:41 July Film Roundup:

• Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018): You know I like an arthouse film now and again. I'm glad they tried something different, but I wasn't really feeling this one. I did like the 3D section, but it probably doesn't make sense unless you sit through the first half. The second half felt like an escape room, which is pretty cool, but the first half was the random, disconnected clues written on scraps of paper which you need to assemble to solve the escape room.
• Bathtubs Over Broadway (2018): Recommended by good ol' Pat Rafferty, this documentary is both a survey of a forgotten art form, and the story of a snarky person who discovers sincerity. I was hoping for a lot more in-depth on the survey, but I liked Steve Young's term of "comedy poisoning" for diagnosing his own snark. Really fun overall.
• Any Number Can Win (1963): A.k.a. Melody en sous-sol, a.k.a. The Caper That Sank, a.k.a. Never Steal Anything Wet (just kidding). This had really fun heist planning and aftermath, but the heist itself, a dialogue-light bit clearly inspired by Rififi, was a little dull, and the romance subplot was a snoozefest. I much prefered the noir opening, where the aging heistmaster gets out of prison only to discover that Modernism has consumed the world and Jacques Tati is filming Playtime in his home town. Had a real Reginald Perrin vibe.
• The Burglars (1971): A.k.a. Le Casse. This movie starts with a huge nerd-out as the titular burglars invade a beautiful 1960s mansion and crack the safe with a specialized piece of equipment that, e.g. uses Scantron-like cards to program a key-cutting machine. Includes long sequences where Jean-Paul Belmondo is looking stuff up in the service manual, a manual which is either the most detailed prop in the entire movie, written in good manual English, or... this is a real piece of equipment with a real service manual? I guess they gotta make safe keys somehow. I would love to know more about this machine!

  Also, as long as I'm focusing on details most people don't care about, in the granary office at the end of this movie there's a hatrack which strongly resembles what Duchamp's Hat Rack would look like if it were actually a readymade.

  Often I focus on these little things because the rest of the movie was boring, but although the heist that opens The Burglars is the best part of the movie, there's a ton of good stuff here. There's a cool car chase, good stunts, excellent cat-and-mouse between Belmondo and Omar Sharif. The fashions and design are swinging '60s throughout. Bad parts: the ending is pretty weak, there's a doesthegoldfishdie.com moment near the beginning, and an ugly scene where Belmondo's character slaps a woman around and it's played for laughs—unnecessary and really hard to stomach.

• The Bishop's Wife (1947): It's no Wings of Desire, but it covers some of the same ground. The minor characters are fun. Cary Grant's character is the ultimate service top, and it's wonderful to watch him be oblivious to society's rules about who does things for whom. One of these gags is reprised twice in a way that reminded me of Billy Wilder. IMDB says uncredited writing credit for... Billy Wilder! Trivia says he was just called in to redo a couple scenes, though. You can tell he didn't have full rein over the screenplay because the characters fulfill their dreams.

(15) Mon Jul 22 2019 08:39 Secretly Public Domain: "Fun facts" are, sadly, often less than fun. But here's a genuinely fun fact: most books published in the US before 1964 are in the public domain! Back then, you had to send in a form to get a second 28-year copyright term, and most people didn't bother.

This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s. Those stories were published in issues of magazines that didn't send in the renewal form. But up til now this hasn't been a big factor, because 1) the big publishers generally made sure to send in their renewals, and 2) it's been impossible to check renewal status in bulk.

Up through the 1970s, the Library of Congress published a huge series of books listing all the registrations and the renewals. All these tomes have been scanned -- Internet Archive has the registration books—but only the renewal information was machine-readable. Checking renewal status for a given book was a tedious job, involving flipping back and forth between a bunch of books in a federal depository library or, more recently, a bunch of browser tabs. Checking the status for all books was impossible, because the list of registrations was not machine-readable.

But! A recent NYPL project has paid for the already-digitized registration records to be marked up as XML. (I was not involved, BTW, apart from saying "yes, this would work" four years ago.) Now for anything that's unambiguously a "book", we have a parseable record of its pre-1964 interactions with the Copyright Office: the initial registration and any potential renewal.

The two datasets are in different formats, but a little elbow grease will mesh them up. It turns out that eighty percent of 1924-1963 books never had their copyright renewed. More importantly, with a couple caveats about foreign publication and such, we now know which 80%.

This was announced back in May, but I don't think it got the attention it deserved. This is a really big deal, so I had no choice but to create a bot. Here's Secretly Public Domain, which highlights unrenewed works that have already been scanned for Hathi Trust. This only represents 10% of the 80%, but it's the ten percent most likely to be interesting, and these books have the easiest path towards being available online.

August 9 update: topline number is closer to 73%, next steps for the public domain books, and how to get the data on your own computer.

Sun Jul 21 2019 12:16 Beautiful Soup 4.8.0: I'm getting back into the swing of putting up a NYCB post when I complete a project. Yesterday I published a feature release of Beautiful Soup, 4.8.0. This release makes it easy to make fine-grained customizations to the input mechanism (the TreeBuilder class) and the output mechanism (the Formatter class).

This makes it easy to do things like change the rules about which attributes are treated as multi-value attributes. If you don't like how Beautiful Soup parses class into a list of CSS classes, this is the release for you. It's not a huge release, but this project's now fifteen years old so I'm relieved at how stable it's been.

Speaking of CSS, although this is a feature release, it's a little smaller than the 4.7.0 release I put out at the end of 2018. That one took out the lackluster implementation of CSS selectors, based on Simon Willison's "soupselect" project from the early 2010s. I replaced it with a dependency on Isaac Muse's SoupSieve project, which has a nearly complete CSS selector implementation. The old implementation was a common cause of complaints, but—like the HTML5 parsing algorithm—it's not something I have a strong interest in and I'm happy to give the whole job to an external dependency.

There was a period of about a year in 2017-2018 when I wasn't interested in doing Beautiful Soup work, but Tidelift changed that. Tidelift gathers subscription money from companies that rely on free software, and distributes the money to the developers in exchange for a level of support that I find sustainable.

Nobody builds an entire product around Beautiful Soup (or at least nobody will admit do doing this), but thousands of people have used Beautiful Soup to save time at their day jobs. Bundling Beautiful Soup together with bigger projects like Flask and numpy is a solution that works really well for me.

Mon Jul 01 2019 21:22 June Film Roundup:

• Booksmart (2019): We were pre-sold on this by the screenplay credit for Sarah Haskins, who did a hilarious regular segment called "Target Women" about ten years ago. Booksmart is really funny, but it's also got a dramatic arc that you don't see very often. I'll go into more detail at the end of this review, but I do think you should see this movie and that it's more fun to see this character arc happen than to read about it.

  This film reminded us of Brick, another very stylish movie that shows high school through the subjective experience of the students. Maybe you don't think this movie is stylish, but it totally is: every character has a carefully maintained self-image that's within their budget and the movie's budget. It's just that most of the characters are also huge dorks.

  Judging from the street address, one of the party houses is just down the block from one of the places I lived in LA as a kid. The neighborhood really has changed.

  OK, here's what I mean about the character arc. At first it seems like Booksmart has cookie-cutter high school movie villains. Then it turns out that no, this is like Clueless and there is no villain. Then, no, this is like Inside Out and the protagonist is the villain. Then, no, there really was no villain, these are all just teenagers making teenager mistakes.

• Face/Off (1997): Sometimes people say a movie is "so bad it's good". I've said it myself, and I generally mean a bad movie was also entertaining. Face/Off is more complicated: it's a movie that's bad and good simultaneously and for the same reasons. Casting the oddest actors of '90s Hollywood in both lead roles? Seems like a bad idea! But Face/Off turns it into an advantage by making Travolta and Cage effectively play each other's stock characters. Whenever either one of them is on screen (the entire movie, effectively), you get the ACTING power of both.

  Face/Off doesn't just do a good job of recreating a bad movie—Mars Attacks! tried that, and the resulting movie was simply bad. It mixes up the ingredients of a bad movie in an inventive way, creating something special. Like a Five Obstructions kind of deal.

• Born Bone Born (2018): That's the correct English name of this movie and I have the ticket stub to prove it. IMDB has the wrong title (Bone Born Bone). The name sure is confusing, though the ending sorta gives you a mnemonic. It's not a literal translation, which means they could have eliminated all possibility of confusion with a super-verbose title like "Mom Died, But We'll See Her Again At The Family Reunion? Two Worlds Meet On Okinawa!"

  Anyhow, this is a really excellent family dramedy that got much bigger theater laughs than a family dramedy usually does. It's got fun characters, great timing, and it does a good job of putting the audience in the anxious ready-to-laugh state with its up-front treatment of death.

• Set It Off (1996): This had been on my list for a while and it was nice to see it on the big screen with Sumana. I came in expecting an Oceans-style heist, but I got a quality modern noir. The Thelma and Louise-esque authority figure is a little more bearable than in Thelma and Louise, but who goes to these movies to watch the cop?

Addendum: After last month's The Bit Player experiment, I've found that Film Roundup is the best place to list interesting films that I can't put on a wishlist because they're not yet products you can wishlist. This month's entry: Dance with Me, the tragedy (?) of a woman who's cursed to live in a musical. It's showing at the Japan Cuts festival later this month, but I was slow on the draw and all the tickets sold out. We'll see it later... and I'll see you later!

(2) Sat Jun 01 2019 11:07 May Film Roundup: Missed a chance to see Claude Shannon doc The Bit Player (2018) at the museum, just making a note of it here so I remember to see it later if and when it becomes available online. Here are the movies I did see in May, often to my detriment:

• Spaced Invaders (1990): One evening I had a drink when I maybe should not have had a drink, and I decided to rent a movie whose trailer I had seen on television when I was a kid. For about two weeks in 1990 I really wanted to see Spaced Invaders, but trekking to Bakersfield to see a movie that no other family member wanted to see? The movie might as well have been showing on Mars (where, ironically, it was banned).

  It's a shame because I would have liked this movie in 1990, but its time has passed. It's watchable, they really tried, it has some fun miniature effects and set design and a really good Uhura costume, but it's not funny or scary or surprising. Around the 70 minute mark I abruptly started wanting them to wrap it up. That's also when the alcohol wore off, so the booze was probably contributing a lot to my enjoyment. That said, there are a few things to like about this movie:

  1. It's better than Mars Attacks! (1996), on a much lower budget. Although most people don't like Mars Attacks! I imagine this is a minority opinion. I'll stick with it because I think I hate Mars Attacks! more than average. I mean, Mars Attacks! has Jack Nicholson, Spaced Invaders has an alien doing a Jack Nicholson impression. I ask you: which is funnier?
  2. Pretty sure this is the only movie I've ever seen where a military unit has a political officer. I'm also pretty sure it happened by accident because they were ripping off something else, but I'll take it.
  3. The kid in the duck costume is funny; I liked the actor's delivery.
• What We Left Behind: Looking Back at Deep Space Nine (2018): DS9 fans need to see this, non-fans don't care. It's predetermined! Sumana and I are huge fans so we had to see it on the big screen as part of a Fathom Event. Certain bits of this movie (remastering a big space battle in HD) went right past us, although according to IMDB trivia (aka the opinion of someone on the Internet) this whole movie is a ploy "to convince CBS to remaster DS9 in High Definition." That seems like the sort of stunt fans pulled to try to get Nintendo to release Earthbound on Wii Virtual Console, so I'm skeptical. Although Earthbound eventually did happen, so maybe.

  Overall this was a great time. Best parts of this were the interviews with actors and producers. In particular, Nana Visitor and Andrew Robinson are great. Speaking as a writer... we don't necessarily work well live. We need time to find the best version. The day where the DS9 writing staff breaks an imaginary season 8 provided representative footage. Some really good ideas and discussion, some good starts that would need refinement after day one, and some end-of-BSG specials—bad ideas that probably can't be fixed precisely because you think they're great. It worked as a behind-the-scenes, but I found it very awkward.

• Aliens (1986): I was really skeptical that some space marines were going to be able to deal with a whole bunch of xenomorphs when the whole point of Alien is that a single one is unstoppable. But Aliens is in a different genre, plus the marines have heavy firepower where the truckers were trying to kill an alien with a mop and a Leatherman. And in the end, they weren't in fact able to "deal with" anything, so it checks out. Alien is a better movie because it did the worldbuilding, but this was fun, and a more even film overall. Paul Rieser a nice surprise.

  In my Alien review I made fun of Ridley Scott for an IMDB trivia item saying he'd envisioned the xenomorph peeping on Ripley voyeuristically, but in Aliens trivia I learn: "Sigourney Weaver asked that in the film her character should... have sex with the alien". That's also a bad idea, but at least it's not Porky's bad. Keep it in the subtext, folks.

• The Sting (1973): Scott Joplin is buried in St. Michael's Cemetery in Queens, and every year the cemetery hosts a concert in his honor. I really like this sort of tradition, but Burns Night is the only other example I can think of.

  Anyway, Sumana had recently gotten into Joplin, so we went to this year's concert and had a good time. Upon returning home I proposed that we rent The Sting, the film that anachronistically contributed to the Joplin revival of the 1970s. Thus, our watching experience—and my actual review—began.

  This was a fun ride full of heisty Hamlet cliches and few surprises. Having read a book on old-timey cons I knew how these things go, but Sumana, who AFAIK has not read a book on old-timey cons, also immediately figured out the climactic twist as soon as it was introduced. But it's fun to see the classic cons put into action without actually losing all your money.

• Five on the Black Hand Side (1973): Sometimes I hear about an interesting obscure movie playing at Film Forum or such, and I can't make the showing so I file away the movie for a later rental. This was such a movie, a fun domestic comedy based on a play. Classic low-budget 1970s fare, but not something you need to pay to see on the big screen.

  This movie was shot in L.A., not far from my old neighborhood, but the play clearly takes place in N.Y.C., in what I think is an example of sticking too closely to the original script. But playwright Charlie L. Russell also wrote the screenplay, so he had his chance. Unless they didn't tell him where they were going to shoot? I dunno, feels like there might be a story there.

  Godfrey Cambridge (previous Film Roundup appearances: Bye Bye Braverman, Cotton Comes to Harlem) is in one brief scene at the start of this movie, and not only is he given major billing, but in his one scene he rear-ends some other guy's car and the first thing the other guy says is "Hey, you're Godfrey Cambridge!" A true star.

• Blankman (1994): Another movie I wanted to see as a kid. I rented this one sober and maybe that was a mistake, because it's pretty bad. The best I can say is there are some fun "wacky gadget" practical effects and homages to Batman '66. Everything else is awful. I won't enumerate it all because I chose to see this movie, knowing it was probably bad, so I have no cause to act outraged. Curiosity: SATISFIED.

Mon May 06 2019 07:54 April Film Roundup: It's been an action-packed April, as I watched the biggest blockbusters of 22, 28, and 48 years ago!

• Tomorrow Never Dies (1997): Not a big Bond fan—I've now seen three movies and read one of the novels—but another member of my household enjoys the action set pieces, and these action set pieces were pretty good. I liked how Michelle Yeoh randomly went in and out of scenes before showing up permanently, implying a whole other movie going on in the background. Yeah, it was fun.

  According to IMDB trivia this title changed from Tomorrow Never Lies because of a typo. The producers adjusted their monocles and said 'I say, this plucky typo has the right idea!'. I think that's emblematic of how little care the Bond franchise takes with its titles. If they don't care, why should I?

• Thelma and Louise (1991): I usually enjoy movies where the problems start small and escalate out of control, so this was a good time. Really good pacing: the breaks in the action let you breathe but they're also setting up the next escalation. As in Mad Max: Fury Road, the episodic 'road trip' format maps well onto a chase.

  I watched this with a friend who was really confident they knew what happens at the end but who was surprised! So I got a nice surprise-by-proxy.

• The French Connection (1971): This movie really puts the 'procedural' in 'police procedural'. Lots of waiting, and running around on crowded sidewalks. I'm not complaining; this is some classic crime-and-grime. Plus, there's a chase scene between car and subway train! But the thing I want to tell you about is the song near the beginning of the film.

  This blog post has the movie clip plus a live version of the song that's easier to follow. It's called "Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon", it was written by Jimmy Webb (of "MacArthur Park" fame) and originally sung in 1969 by Thelma Houston in a version that starts out pretty nice but turns way-too-clever in a way that's distracting. Maybe that's why it wasn't a big hit. But the Three Degrees rehabilitate it, speed it up and put a lot of energy and joy into it.

  I think this song appears in The French Connection solely to set up a dramatic contrast between space-age optimism and the moral rot of the "real world". But this song is the best thing about the movie! It's almost fifty years later and we've been making gritty cop movies nonstop, some of them are pretty good, but we haven't done much that goes on the same shelf as "Everybody Gets to Go to the Moon".

Sun Apr 07 2019 17:26 March Film Roundup: Just finished some rewrites for a novel, so... time to do more writing! At least you get to see this stuff right away!

• Heaven Can Wait (1978): I saw this a couple months ago but forgot to review it. I remembered it when Sumana mentioned the admiral in Mary Poppins who fires a cannon from the top of his house every day. The millionaire in this movie has his servants fire a cannon every day! Is this a common thing? Is this why rich peoples' houses are spaced so far apart? Or maybe there was one obnoxious dude in Beverly Hills who did this and a lot of movies from the 60s and 70s are mocking him.

  Moving on to the film itself: Elaine May's screenplay is really funny and misanthropic, except the last act, which seems written by someone who's a lot less funny and doesn't hate humanity at all. Thus, I left the theater disappointed and in a mood to forget that I'd ever seen this movie. There is a character in the last act who randomly drops dead just so the plot can work out, and I admit that is both funny and misanthropic, but not the kind I want to support with my ticket purchase. But up to, I'm gonna say, the 100 minute mark (the length of a normal, sensible movie), Heaven Can Wait is a great comedy.

• Captain Marvel (2019): Another month, another Marvel movie. I really liked seeing 90s LA—a little bit of home! And I know just enough about Marvel canon (from reading She-Hulk) to appreciate the little twist. Downsides: although this is a space opera Marvel movie it focuses entirely on the parts of that toolkit I don't care about: the galactic empires with their huge cities and clashing militaries. Are these the same people who dragged down Guardians of the Galaxy? (Answer after checking wiki: they are one such group of people. Geez.) Bring back garbage planet! (In fairness, there is a garbage planet here: the Earth.)

  Near the end, when the villain... well, he's not 'the' villain, he's pretty minor, sort of an Assistant Undersecretary for Villainry, but real annoying. He's trying to taunt Carol into hand-to-hand combat, clearly setting up an Indiana Jones moment where she bypasses the fight scene by zapping him with her superpowers. The taunting goes on for a while, and before long I was pounding my fists on the theater armrests quietly chanting "Zap! Zap! Zap!" She does zap him eventually and it's cathartic. Anyway, I offer "Zap! Zap! Zap!" as an all-purpose attempt to fast-forward a narrative to its inevitable conclusion. Hasn't worked yet, though.

• Wings of Desire (1987): I was skeptical about this one, and saw it for two reasons: 1) Sumana wanted to see it, 2) Peter Falk. I'm glad I saw it. It's moving, humane, thought-provoking, beautifully shot, Peter Falk is a perfect choice. I don't have a lot to say because (as I feared) this film doesn't have a whole lot of plot. But I loved it anyhow; that's how good this is.
• Some Like It Hot (1959): This was my third viewing, the first on the big screen, and just to get it out of the way, this movie is funny as heck. Okay? That's a given. Top tier comedy. Big recommendation.

  Now, I want to discuss two other facets of this movie: one good and one bad. The good is that this movie shows a character discovering their queerness and struggling to understand it, and the attitude of this 1959 Hollywood movie is total acceptance. I won't presume to try to fit Jack Lemmon's character's journey into modern categories, but it's clearly different from what Tony Curtis's character goes through, and Some Like It Hot is 100% sympathetic to it. The last time I saw this, I hadn't seen enough other old movies to realize how unusual this is.

  The bad: the gangsters. Compared to the rest of the movie, the gangster plot is sloppy and lazy. The gangsters provide the thanatos that you want in a Wilder movie, but it's not well integrated. Just feels like a bunch of stereotypes and coincidences and references to other movies now forgotten. I'd like to see an edit that loses the gangsters after the speakeasy scene, but I don't know if you could do it without new footage.

• Us (2019): This had a ton of cool ideas, but I'm feeling some regression to the mean after the all-around fave Get Out. This was less science-fictional and more like a normal horror movie, with all the fridge logic that implies. I admit I don't watch a lot of normal horror movies so I don't know whether certain things are innovative here. Like, I have the feeling that a lot of horror movies take place over one night and end with the sunrise. Whereas in this movie, when the sun comes up it's just an act break and a change to a different horror subgenre. There's also some Edgar Wright type stuff where horror is filmed as though it were comedy; that's probably pretty common? Overall this was decent, but my "seeing it live in a theater" experience was nowhere near what I got out of Get Out.

Thu Feb 28 2019 23:39 February Film Roundup:

• Black Panther (2018): It's a superhero movie, but with a difference: Wakanda is great! As usual, I have a limited interest in the people solving their problems with fight scenes. But I totally want to see the effect on the MCU of Wakanda stepping onto the world stage! When Iron Man shows up, we know it's a one-off. We're not going to have everyone flying around in suits. But Wakanda is a full scale science-fictional invasion of a world like our own, the sort of thing for which I longed in Thor: Ragnarok. I definitely want to see this.

  But apparently everyone dies in Infinity War, so it won't happen and I watched this movie for nothing? Man, no wonder it got snubbed for Best Picture. You think they're going to make a sequel to Green Book where an alien kills everyone?

• The Wandering Earth (2019): a.k.a. "Liu Lang Di Qiu". Finally, we've found it: a good version of Armageddon. Could this be the one that heals the wound? It's got the scope: the plotline of the first half of the movie is repeated four thousand times across the planet, but we only see the struggles of one group. It's got the visuals, solving a common problem of 'realistic' science fiction by turning Earth into both an alien planet and a dingy space station. It's mostly stupid, as befits a blockbuster, but really clever in a few places. You may think that Deep Impact is the good version of Armageddon, but as someone who recently saw part of Deep Impact while getting a haircut, I say nay.

  Downsides: the action scenes are way too long and I found them hard to read for similar reasons to Armageddon. Like Interstellar, this movie continually reminds you of the better movies it's ripping off, and in fact it's the same movies, plus Gravity. Special caution to doesthewhaledie.com premium subscribers: there's a dead whale in this, but it's been dead for a really long time. Like, are we upset by a whale fossil? There's got to be some limit, right?

  Old video game watch: the black market guy is playing Contra on a Famiclone. Yes, even in post-apocalyptic deep space, the 80s classics never die. Also, Zhou Qian has eight Zelda heart stickers on the chest of her spacesuit. It's never explained, but talking it out with Sarah afterwards, I speculated that it's like the kill marks on your fighter plane, except Zhou Qian hates killing, so they're tally marks of the lives she's saved.

• The Net (1995): Like Antitrust, this movie has a bad technical rep. Sumana and I saw it because of this bad rep, in search of cheesy fun. (Here's her review.) But apart from the McGuffins, it's not too bad. The basic point is totally accurate; in fact the movie now seems prescient in some ways.

  The McGuffins are real nonsense, though, and the film has some ghost jokes, a la Clueless. Sandra Bullock's character buys pizza and plane tickets online and we were like "hmm, yes, an interface such as that would have required Javascript, which wasn't around yet" instead of "damn, what a NERD!"

  Overall, this was the expected cheesy fun, and it reminded us of The Parallax View (1974), a much better thriller that's also a better metaphor for the destructive power of the Internet.

• Sweet Charity (1969): This month's pleasant surprise. A cynical musical, but not nihilistic like Pennies From Heaven, with snappy Neil Simon banter. It's pretty long, but set pieces keep it moving, and outside of the first scene there's no real villain.

  The choreography is incredible, all designed to point out how ludicrous the human body is. The "Big Spender" number looks like something Bertolt Brecht or Fritz Lang would do. One of them Weimar guys. I guess it makes sense since Bob Fosse would go on to do Cabaret in 1972.

  Sumana and I were disappointed by the ending, which the best thing you can say about is it's faithful to the musical and not the cop-out alternate ending that was filmed in case of studio interference. While playing our frequent game of "fix the bad media thing" (most recently deployed on a terrible Star Trek: Discovery episode) Sumana came up with a much better ending: bring back Ricardo Montalban's character, not to swoop in and provide replacement romance but to pull Oscar aside for a man-to-man. It's the sixties, brother, Women's Lib is on the way, and Oscar needs to get over his hang-ups and just marry the girl.

  Don't sleep on the elevator scene. Pure comedy niobium!

• Funny Face (1957): I don't know what Discovery's computer sees in this one. It starts off fun with a couple good numbers, but rapidly becomes dull. The idea that Audrey Hepburn isn't model material because of her "funny face" is ludicrous. Also the funniness of her face is strictly of the "you had to be there" variety, and that whole concept is grafted on from a different musical. But not grafted in a cool way, like in Face/Off. Seriously engaging with continental philosophy would have made the film interesting, but that didn't happen--Empathicalism here is the humanities equivalent of the computer in The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes.

  The final blow: the poster for this movie says "Presented in a real new dimension in motion picture entertainment". Are they trying to trick people into thinking this is a 3D movie? Cause it's not. Although there is a scene where someone throws spools of cloth at the camera, a classic "gratuitous 3D" technique.

Mon Feb 18 2019 12:00 The Art of Python: For a couple years Sumana has been mixing up the tech conference experience by adding aspects of performance and dramaturgy to her talks (see e.g. Python Grab Bag and Code Review, Forwards and Back). Now she's scaling it up by running an arts festival at this year's PyCon North America: "The Art of Python". You can submit proposals until the end of the month — music, dramatic performance, visual art, and so on.

I would love to see this became a regular feature of technical conferences. Many aspects of programming can't be expressed in traditional talks (xkcd does a lot of this), and it's also just fun to talk about programming in ways other than lectures—I like to do it in fiction, for instance. If you're interested, check out the CFP!

Sat Feb 02 2019 18:41 January Film Roundup: Howdy-doo. I've completed my collection of Coen Brothers movies and I'm ready to pass judgement on the oeuvre as a whole. Also saw some disappointing Bollywood epics with Sumana. Let's get started!

• Raising Arizona (1987): This one's on the 'goofy' side, and it's fun. IMDB trivia says this was made to be as different from Blood Simple as possible, and those two movies do span the early Coen dramatic range.

  I initially assumed that Gale and Evelle were a gay couple and was disappointed when it turned out they were brothers.

• Barton Fink (1991): I saw this in, like 1998, and then I saw it again with Sumana in July 2012, just before I started Film Roundup as a regular series. So I almost Film Rounduped it last time, but not quite. A little frustrating. But Barton Fink is a great arthouse movie, and it's fun to watch up to three times. The first time you're going in cold. The second time you know the trajectory and you catch all the foreshadowing and symbolism on the way. The third time you know what you're going to catch and there's a kind of second-order pleasure in seeing it all come together.

  Don't get me wrong: I'd rather be watching it for the second time or even the first. But Barton Fink remains a real pleasure. The Buscemi/Goodman/Turturro triumvirate is in full flower, and it's great.

• Inside Llewyn Davis (2013): I love the period-ness but I can't stand the main character. Like if the Dude just complained in the bowling alley instead of trying to get his rug back. This guy's got a bunch of friends he doesn't deserve and he mistreats 'em all, but not in an innovative way, just regular entitled jerkiness. And I'm not into the music. This is a movie that shows you the ending first because that's the only part with any action, and doesn't even make it clear it's a flash-forward—seems like a decision made in the editing room.

  John Goodman as Roland Turner steals what little of the show he's in. A weird side note: Turner's henchman is named Johnny Five, an anachronistic, irrelevant reference to another movie that I don't think even Thomas Pynchon would try. It's just inexplicable. If I'm ever at a Q&A with the Coens I should make this my Q.

• A Serious Man (2009): The project finale! Another period piece, more enjoyable overall than Llewyn Davis. Takes a while to get going and the main character is another sad sack, but at least he's trying. Or maybe it's not even that he's "trying" but that bad things really are happening to him.
• Main Hoon Na (2004): a.k.a. "I'm Always Here." A Bollywood classic that blatantly mixes Tom Clancy-type thriller and goofy college romcom. It... is okay, but if I'm going to sit through a three-hour movie I want more than "okay". Sumana and I had more fun riffing than watching the movie itself. There is a really good part during the closing credits, where the crew gets to be on-camera goofing off. The producer signs a big novelty check, etc.

  Fun, spoileriffic fact: the main villain in this movie dies the same way as the main villain in Raising Arizona.

• Manikarnika: The Queen of Jansi (2019): This movie's got an undercurrent of Hindu nationalism that's kind of disturbing. Sort of reminded me of Ken (1964), but it's a live grenade instead of a museum piece. The action scenes are not all that was promised; we expected more aunties with swords. Also the British accents were all over the place, which was very distracting. During the movie I thought they'd cast a group of Eastern European backpackers as the British officers. But from what I can tell, those parts went to American and Australian actors living in India. Not that my British accent is great. I'm not volunteering.

  ---

  And now, the conclusion. For the first time in Film Roundup history I'm giving rough numeric scores to movies, just so I can compare my overall opinion of the Coens' works against the IMDB consensus:

  

  Survey says the Coens consistently produce above-average work but had a slight dip in the 2000s. What I learned from this project is how much value I put on the 1990s Coens in particular. The six movies from 1991 (Barton Fink) to 2001 (The Man Who Wasn't There) are my favorites by far, and include some of my favorite movies of all time. But apart from that ten-year stretch they're not really making movies for me. I don't think these movies are "bad" necessarily, but I like specific things and there was a magical period where the Coens were really into those same things.

  For the record, here's my ranking, with my faves at the top:

  1. The Big Lebowski (1998)
  2. Fargo (1996)
  3. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
  4. Barton Fink (1991)
  5. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)
  6. Blood Simple (1984)
  7. O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000)
  8. Hail, Caesar! (2016)
  9. Raising Arizona (1987)
  10. Intolerable Cruelty (2003)
  11. No Country For Old Men (2007)
  12. Burn After Reading (2008)
  13. The Ladykillers (2004)
  14. A Serious Man (2009)
  15. Miller’s Crossing (1990)
  16. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)
  17. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013)
  18. True Grit (2010)

  Some miscellaneous notes on the films as a whole:

  • There's a stock character who I really like whenever they show up: the highly eloquent, super-polite character. Buster Scruggs, Professor Dorr, Ulysses Everett McGill, Charlie Meadows and Maude Lebowski to some extent. Maybe there's a character like that in The Hudsucker Proxy, it's been a while. Most of the time this character is a villain, but Troy Nelson is my favorite thing about Inside Llewyn Davis—just a really nice square with his head screwed on straight. Which I guess makes him the villain in that topsy-turvy movie.
  • In the moral calculus of Coen Brothers movies, the worst thing you can do is leave someone to die. It doesn't come up every single movie, but I believe there's a consistent pattern. This is how you find out Buster Scruggs is a bad guy. Llewelyn Moss leaves someone to die in No Country for Old Men and it's the only thing that makes him feel bad in the whole movie. The only non-self-centered thing Llewyn Davis does in his whole movie is check on Roland Turner when he ODs. Arguably "leaving someone to die" is what kicks off all the problems in A Serious Man, if you're determined to make the prologue have something to do with the movie.

    In real life, actively killing someone is worse then leaving them to die, but in Coen movies homicide doesn't usually have a moral dimension—it's the "shit" in "shit happens". Most of the body count is accidental, or else caused by Bad People like Anton Chigurh, characters who we know won't have any moral growth. The morality play happens afterwards, in how the survivors deal with it. The leaving-for-dead scenario is a good way to give big dilemmas to characters who would never realistically kill someone.

Sun Jan 20 2019 10:05 The Crummy.com Review of Things 2018, Part Two: Again, taking this post as an opportunity to discuss some things that maybe should have had their own entries, but let's take what we can get, huh?

Audio - Two recently discovered podcasts are worth your time. Farm to Taber, which focuses on the nuts and bolts of sustainable agriculture, and Gimme That Star Trek.

There are a ton of Star Trek podcasts that go episode-by-episode, but who has the time? In fact, I record an episode-by-episode Star Trek podcast and don't even release it, that's how much respect I have for your time. (If you do have the time, try Treks and the City.) "Gimme That Star Trek" mainly talks about the larger themes of Trek and ancillary material like the comics. Try "Is Starfleet Military?" and see if it grabs you.

Games - The Crummy.com Game of the Year is "Slay the Spire", which delivers my favorite part of roguelikes—emergent properties coming from random combinations of a large set of items. Honorable mention to "Dead Cells", which doesn't have much combo going on but is a fun feat of procedural generation.

I got a Switch in 2018 and haven't done anything super unusual with it but I have had a good time with the first-party games, especially "Breath of the Wild". I know I swore off Zelda games but the huge open world and side quests of Breath of the Wild made it easy to swallow the main arc, where a kid goes to four dungeons. "Nintendo games are fun" is an accurate but boring thing to say, so I'll say it but not dwell on it.

On my phone, I had a great time playing a game called Freeways, which I think will appeal to people who like Mini Metro. To me the darkness, the lonely desert, the directions identified only by highway numbers, brings back the nighttime Central California landscape I drove as a teenager. Honorable mention to Holedown. Dishonorable mention to another game that I won't name, which is a really good game but turns into gacha hell if you dare try to complete the main storyline.

Personal accomplishments - I finished a draft of Mine but it needs some serious work and I don't want to think about it right now, so moving on... I started putting my short fiction out there again and sold a story! ("Only g62 Kids Will Remember These Five Moments" from back in 2016.) Presumably will be published this year. Wrote five stories in 2018: "The Blanket Thief", "Why You Deserved to Die", "The Universe Pump", "The Wheel of Chores", and "The Procedure Sign". Got a good feeling about three of those, at least.

I'm coming up on the five-year mark of the Library Simplified project. It's an uphill battle, and 2018 didn't bring the breakthroughs I was hoping for, but we are making progress and there's no technical reason why this thing can't work, so I'm still hopeful.

The year in bots: I was mainly focused on other things, but I was inspired by the Internet Archive's holdings and API to create four new bots: Junk Mail Bot, Yorebooks, Podcast Roulette, and Almanac for New Yorkers, which premièred on January 1.

"Almanac for New Yorkers" is a replaying of an "urban almanac" for 1938 by the Federal Writers' Project. Advice on when to plant soybeans is replaced by info on what's playing at Carnegie Hall, and it's all written with that dry midcentury American wit that is better-known today from the WWII Army field guides these people would be writing in a couple years. There are two more of these -- 1939 for New York and 1938 for San Francisco -- so if the Almanac proves popular this year, I'll queue up another chunk for 2020.

Okay, I think that covers everything. If not... I'll just write another blog post! See you around!