From: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org (fegmaniax-digest) To: fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Subject: fegmaniax-digest V12 #1 Reply-To: fegmaniax@smoe.org Sender: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-fegmaniax-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk fegmaniax-digest Thursday, January 2 2003 Volume 12 : Number 001 Today's Subjects: ----------------- yeah [drew ] RE: yeah ["Jason Brown (Echo Services Inc)" ] i lob, you lob, they lob... [drew ] Birthdays/hours ["Rex.Broome" ] faces and names [grutness@surf4nix.com (James Dignan)] Re: LOTR etc [grutness@surf4nix.com (James Dignan)] names, confusion, jules [Sabina Carlson ] Re: LOTR etc [Tom Clark ] Re: names, confusion, jules [Tom Clark ] Re: duh [Tom Clark ] dancing, new years, names, commands [Sabina Carlson ] Re: More movie talk from a guy who doesn't go to movies any more [steve <] Re: More movie talk from a guy who doesn't go to movies any more [Jeffrey] Re: the two towers [Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey ] Re: Birthdays/hours [Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey ] Feels Like 1974 [Glen Uber ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 13:29:39 -0800 (PST) From: drew Subject: yeah > From: "Maximilian Lang" > > Movie? I had always heard that Sheena was a punk rocker. No -- according to Tone-Loc, "Sheena was a man." Do not dismiss his wisdom lightly. > From: The Great Quail > > Which is the main point, to me, where Jackson succeeds brilliantly: he makes > the characters come alive -- they breathe, they have a full range of > emotions, they seem real despite the fantastic setting. Well...I don't agree. I wish this is what he had done, but I don't think he has. This is exactly what I was criticizing with Frodo and especially Sam; Tolkien's version of the characters seems more alive and emotional and real than Jackson's in the case of those two, and I think it's an even race with a lot of the others. There are moments here and there, but there could have been so many more. And Jackson has a head start because he has human actors playing the character, where Tolkien has to do it all in your head. > Jackson put aside the more common "Gollum as Frog" take and focused on > Smiagol as a pathetic *person* destroyed by his weakness for the Ring, This I will agree with to some extent. Apart from the rather lame literalization of the "split personality," I thought Gollum was something to be proud of on every level. I agree that the book supports the MPD but I wish they'd cut the line where Smeagol implies that he's aware of the other personality enough to rejoice at being "free of him." It just felt cheap. > Aragorn falling off a cliff? Hated this. It's not so much a question of "is it authentic?" as "is it cheap stupid Hollywood melodrama?" And the answer to the latter, I am convinced, is yes. It didn't help that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had been on television just a few nights before I went to see TTT. > They were really fascinated by Aragorn, and > were actually quite upset when they thought he had died! Then they were fucking idiots, because anyone who would buy that for a second hasn't been to the movies in decades. > Some wonderful actors > and sets in those Potter movies, true: but that's all they seem, wonderful > actors and sets, rather than wonderful characters and places. That's true, but I'm hard-pressed to blame that on adherence to the source material. - -- drew at stormgreen dot com http://www.stormgreen.com/~drew/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 13:35:35 -0800 From: "Jason Brown (Echo Services Inc)" Subject: RE: yeah From Drew: > > From: "Maximilian Lang" > > Movie? I had always heard that Sheena was a punk rocker. > > No -- according to Tone-Loc, "Sheena was a man." Do not > dismiss his wisdom lightly. But can't Joey and Tone both be right? Is not Sheena a male punk rocker? ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 13:47:11 -0800 (PST) From: drew Subject: i lob, you lob, they lob... > From: "Rex.Broome" > > Possibly I'm the only one (except for my wife), but I really like Astin as > Sam. I like him being a little less of a "crybaby" (Blatzy has something > there), and to me Astin does a good job making him a real "earthy" Hobbit. I really wanted to like him -- I liked the casting a lot -- but I'm sorry, he seems like _more_ of a crybaby in the movie (even though he doesn't actually cry that much) and I don't get enough of the earthiness. I'd remembered him as being somewhat annoying and craven in the book but was surprised on rereading not to see much evidence of that. > Moving Shelob to the 3rd film is a VERY wise move. I had always remembered it as being in the 3rd book to begin with and was surprised to find it at the end of TTT. So while I was eagerly anticipating it, I had this suspicion it would get bumped, and I agree it was the right thing to do. > I agree with that, and I wonder if any of the material that'll be added to > the Two Towers DVD is *more* derived from the book. (It would be nice if > they skipped the release of the early, unextended DVD this time... not > everybody reads the trades and some people are mighty pissed with their > "short" copies.) Yeah, I think I'm just going to have to eat the $20 I spent on mine when I buy the extended version. > There are worse Burton films than "Sleepy Hollow" Planet of the Apes, for instance. The second Batman film was a terrible film with brilliant casting. > From: "Maurer Rose, Inverse Nome" > > True, but I honor my own teenybop crushes enough to feel that almost every > major work should have one slightly girlish-looking boyo with hair to die > for for young girls to glom onto. And whenever possible it should be Jonathan Rhys Meyer. Drool. > And last of all -- Frodo. I couldn't agree with you more, about all of this. - -- drew at stormgreen dot com http://www.stormgreen.com/~drew/ ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 13:55:13 -0800 From: "Rex.Broome" Subject: Birthdays/hours Kay: >>Is there some database somewhere that will tell me obscure rock >>people to add to this hapless list? Sort of. If you use some other site to come up with ONE musical artist with any given birthday (in your case, Edgar Winter), you can look up that guy on the AMG, click the date on the entry, and get a list. Which, since I already did it for Dec. 28, you can find here: http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=4:24:11|PM&sql=DBD12|28 Distressingly, Alex Chilton is on your list AND Ridley's list for the 20th. Poor girl's already been deprived of Patti Smith, but now Chilton, too? What do you know about this one, Jeffff? >>I saw a picture of Nickole Kidman all done up to >>play Virginia Woolfe, she's even got a nose-prothesison on, her hair is >>un-fou-foued and her makeup appears minimal. And you know what--I thought >>she looked really beautiful, better than usual because she looked ... I dont >>know, more sublime maybe;-). So just how insane am I to think that? Nah, I agree. I've loved her as an actress since "To Die For" but she's always been too "pretty-pretty" to be one of my typical screen crushes; I think she looks good as Woolf. All the press she got for the nose was kind of disturbing, though-- "Look, Nicole Kidman is so devoted to her art that she would even go so far as to be made up like dog-ass ugly dead author Gennifer Wolfson!" There was a watercolor of Woolf on the cover of the old copy of "The Waves" that I bought and read in Paris... I thought she looked pretty hot, in a haunted kind of way. Anyways, pretend I didn't say that last part; surely I was talking about Hobbits again. - -Rex ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2003 12:10:09 +1300 From: grutness@surf4nix.com (James Dignan) Subject: faces and names >> Let me once again throw into the name game that in the Northeastern US >> upper-middle and upper classes, using family names as middle(required, >> usually mom's maiden name) and first(encouraged but not manditory)names >> is a class marker. > >It's moving out and being used by the great unwashed these days-- maybe >because it "sounds" high-class? In addition to our own Ridley, among the >younger set I know several Parkers, innumberable Conners, a Cooper or two, a >Porter and at least three Reeses (at least one whom is definitely a >mother's-maiden -name issue; most of the others aren't). > >Old Testament is also big these days-- our friends just had a "Caleb". >Here's the Top 10 US Kids' Names from 3001 (Miranda's birth year)... for >some reason I find this stuff fascinating. Indeed I do know a few young >"Emmy"'s or "Emma"'s for some unknown reason this reminded me about a comment I recall about how you can tell where a battleship comes from (other than the letters before its name). A British ship is usually called something like the HMS Utterly Spiffing, an American one gets a name like the USS J. Arthur Grumbleburper III, and an Aussie one is usually called something like HMAS Widgiemootha Peninsula. New Zealand doesn't have battleships, but its naval ships usually have names like HMNZS Wakanui (translates as "big boat"). >Odd, eh? Here in Hollywood, a lot of people seem to think she's named after >Ridley Scott, but that would be really weird. apparently as of yesterday that's Sir Ridley Scott. Is that an omen? James (who's really in Peoria) PS - Happy belated birthday Mike, and to all the others who've had birthdays recently. James Dignan, Dunedin, New Zealand. =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= .-=-.-=-.-=-.- .-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-. -.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= You talk to me as if from a distance =-.-=-. And I reply with impressions chosen from another time -=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=- (Brian Eno - "By this River") ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2003 12:11:25 +1300 From: grutness@surf4nix.com (James Dignan) Subject: Re: LOTR etc >>But he would have to be on the side of good. Bowie >does small roles as an >>assasin & whatnot, >>but I can't see Robyn even cooperating w/ the bad guys. you forget that in Labyrinth (the last movie I saw in 2002, FWIW, at a party last night) Bowie is the main bad guy. As for Bowie making a good Elrond, yes, I can see that, definitely. There may have been problems with it though from a practical viewpoint. Bowie has had bad experiences in movies made in New Zealand in the past and he may have been reluctant to come here for that reason (IIRC, the finance company behind the NZ made movie "Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence" went bankrupt, and quite a number of people involved in the production never got paid. ISTR there were accusations of, shall we say, overenthusiastic creativity in the company's accounts department which resulted in a long legal investigation, too). >Interesting question: other than probably ending up doing "The Hobbit", what >kinda stuff is Peter Jackson gonna do after this? Considering his previous >output, you know. Hard to guess. true. My guess is that the first thing he'll do is take a nice long holiday. And he's got supervision of the new Wellington Film Studios to oversee as well - that's his pet project that the Rings have enabled him to achieve. As to his previous output, is there really that giant a leap stylistically from Heavenly Creatures? In scale, yes, but I think there's been a gradual progression in style rather than giant leaps. He left his el cheapo splatter movies behind years ago. I can think of several movies I'd like to see him try (The Master and Margarita? It's about time someone attempted that one!), but I guess we'll find out in due time. Ah... I'm remembering a science fiction convention I went to several years ago where guest Wes Takahashi [1] said "I can't tell you what we're working on next. But it's VERY big, and we're all excited, honoured, and completely terrified by it. New Zealand movies will never be the same after it - hopefully in a good way!" James (once more down to the beach dear friends...) [1] Although Weta Productions' logo is a weta - a NZ insect a bit like a giant cricket - Wes Takahashi is the We. Ta. behind the company's name. PS - for those of you interested (are there any?) The next large-ish movie to be made in this neck of the planet is a biopic of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig. Believe it or not. A lot of it is to be filmed at the seaside township of Aramoana, twelve miles from here. James Dignan, Dunedin, New Zealand. =-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= .-=-.-=-.-=-.- .-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-. -.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-= You talk to me as if from a distance =-.-=-. And I reply with impressions chosen from another time -=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=-.-=- (Brian Eno - "By this River") ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 18:53:53 -0500 From: Sabina Carlson Subject: names, confusion, jules haha no one has guessed where my name comes from. please forgive me, i was unintentionally deceiving. my name comes not from the title of a movie, but from a character inside a movie. thousand and one apologies for making everyone try and find all the movies with sabina in the title. the contest ends at midnight tonight (that would be east coast american time), so i will tell everyone next year :-) and max was right!! the sheena part is from the ramones song "sheena is a punk rocker" (noooow!). sorry that one did not reference the movie. that is a self given title i use so often and so many people know me by that, so i tend to use it interchangeably or alongside my real name. yeah yay! my turn to make movie reference. since everyone is talking about how elrond reminds them of dave bowie, doesn't jule in "diva" remind anyone of a cross between michael j. fox and robbie robertson? just wondering as for LOTR, i thought it was decently done. yes it wasn't perfect, and the whole aragorn falling off cliff part was pointless beyond belief, but i thought the whole slinker/stinker gollum scene was really well done and made up for it. well, sorry just had to add my opinion in the whole LOTR discussion... i was feeling left out :-) i just got a book on celtic meditations and lesons! score! peace, love, unity sabina sheena ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 17:25:23 -0800 From: Tom Clark Subject: Re: LOTR etc on 12/31/02 3:11 PM, James Dignan at grutness@surf4nix.com wrote: > PS - for those of you interested (are there any?) The next large-ish movie > to be made in this neck of the planet is a biopic of Sylvia Plath and Ted > Hughes, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig. Believe it or not. A lot > of it is to be filmed at the seaside township of Aramoana, twelve miles > from here. I catch a lot of shit for saying this, but ANYTHING with "Gwyney" is worth seeing. Happy New Year everyone! - -tc ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 17:37:02 -0800 From: Tom Clark Subject: Re: names, confusion, jules on 12/31/02 3:53 PM, Sabina Carlson at sheenaramona@comcast.net wrote: > my name comes not from the title of a movie, but from a character inside a > movie. Here's my guess: Lena Olin in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" Tonight I will be "certainly Clicquot", but cruel. - -tc ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 17:41:16 -0800 From: Tom Clark Subject: Re: duh on 12/31/02 5:37 PM, some idiot at tclark@mac.com wrote: > > Tonight I will be "certainly Clicquot", but cruel. > Yeah, make that NOT cruel. Starting a bit too early, - -tc ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 21:04:07 -0500 From: Sabina Carlson Subject: dancing, new years, names, commands alrighty, everyone, i just listened to "wax doll" from globe of frogs and spent the entire time randomly dancing to it in a state of pure bliss. so now, i order all fegs to put on "wax doll" or some other robyn song that makes you happy and dance to it in your bedroom, your living room, on your kitchen table, wherever!!! just do it, and be happy! that's one of the reasons music, or robyn hitchcock, is here. enjoy and have yourselves a happy hitchcock western new year! peace, love, unity, and dancing sabina sheena ps: tom clark won the contest! my name is from "the unbearable lightness of being", the character sabina played by lena olin. good job! *round of applause* "she snuffs you out like silk, and pours you out like milk" you should all know where that one comes from! :-) ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 18:35:15 -0800 From: Eb Subject: an Eblist, gleaned from AllMusic Arguably, the least likely acts to record "Auld Lang Syne"...who actually did: 15. Duke Ellington 14. Kenny G 13. The Drifters 12. Billy Joel 11. David Grisman 10. John Fahey 9. Esquivel 8. Mike Oldfield 7. Jose Feliciano 6. Roger McGuinn 5. The Beach Boys 4. Jimi Hendrix 3. Big Country 2. UK Subs 1. David Peel Eb ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2002 21:20:40 -0600 From: steve Subject: Re: More movie talk from a guy who doesn't go to movies any more On Tuesday, December 31, 2002, at 12:59 PM, Rex.Broome wrote: > Interesting question: other than probably ending up doing "The > Hobbit", what > kinda stuff is Peter Jackson gonna do after this? Considering his > previous > output, you know. Hard to guess. New Line just got the rights to His Dark Materials and Tom Stoppard is reported to be working on the screenplays. I wouldn't be surprised if they mentioned this to Jackson. After spending seven years on LOTR, who knows if he'd be up for another big project so soon. - - Steve __________ People have a stereotype about what animation is, and don't recognize the possibilities. Hayao Miyazaki's "Spirited Away" had the most remarkable command of narrative I've seen in a very, very long time. This is just the best-told movie story of the year, enormously inventive and satisfying and meticulous. To me, it completely revivifies the value of real narrative in a movie. - Scott Rudin, producer of "The Hours" ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2003 11:22:38 -0600 From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: More movie talk from a guy who doesn't go to movies any more Quoting "Rex.Broome" : > Jeffrey FF: > >>I mean, c'mon - who's ever actually *met* anyone who'd admit to being > a > >>rock critic? > > Some of us have. But probably just because it's harder to pretend to be > a > teenage girl in person. (Not that anyone around here is doing that!) I have, in fact, written as a rock critic. But, as Pete Townshend said, sometimes I don't even know myself... > -Rex, a 63-year old black woman from Florida Which probably makes you the only Buchanan voter on the list... Aside from our trans-IDL members, I believe I'm making the first Feg post of the new year - so a happy one I wish to you and yours! ..Jeff J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html :: sex, drugs, revolt, Eskimos, atheism ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2003 11:30:28 -0600 From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: the two towers Quoting Steve Talkowski : > Our work (while I was at > Blue Sky) on the CG cockroaches for "Joe's Apartment" Of course, quality of the CGI notwithstanding, no one actually saw that movie. Not if they knew what was good for them anyway. > heh, that's Tony De Peltrie, whose creator went on to form the 3d > "killer app of it's time", Softimage. (Mainly due to it's inclusion of > the first workable IK (inverse kinematics) solution, thus empowering us > animators not to have to reverse animate leg hierarchies with forward > kinematics). And we all know how bad having to reverse-animate leg hierarchies with forward kinematics sucks, don't we - especially those of us who celebrated too heartily last night! > > But overall, something's not right. This really is an interesting question...why is it that most viewers can tell whether Gollum (or whomever) is CGI or a guy w/lots of makeup? > My personal theory is it's > > something > > textural, something about light on skin that they haven't got down > > yet. Something like that...CGI thingies seem to glow in a way that real things don't - I know that on the screen (as Andy Partridge might say) "we're all light," but somehow CGI things look more like light and less like mass reflecting light. But as Steve says, some of that might be down to directors' preferences. (Oh, btw: my wife's family got the DVD of _Ice Age_ for xmas, and we watched some of the extras over there, including the "Bunny" short - that one in particular was very fine. Nice work!) ..Jeff J e f f r e y N o r m a n The Architectural Dance Society www.uwm.edu/~jenor/ADS.html :: we make everything you need, and you need everything we make ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2003 11:39:05 -0600 From: Jeffrey with 2 Fs Jeffrey Subject: Re: Birthdays/hours Quoting "Rex.Broome" : > Kay: > >>Is there some database somewhere that will tell me obscure rock > >>people to add to this hapless list? > > Sort of. If you use some other site to come up with ONE musical artist > with > any given birthday (in your case, Edgar Winter), you can look up that > guy on > the AMG, click the date on the entry, and get a list. Which, since I > already did it for Dec. 28, you can find here: > http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&uid=4:24:11|PM&sql=DBD12|28 > > Distressingly, Alex Chilton is on your list AND Ridley's list for the > 20th. > Poor girl's already been deprived of Patti Smith, but now Chilton, > too? > What do you know about this one, Jeffff? Despite the impression perhaps given by that lengthy list of birthday sharers, I'm not really an expert on whose birthdays are when ;) A couple of people gave me those lists in celebrating my birthday, and I didn't bother to confirm any of them (thus my repeating the apparent error on Patti Smith). But are you saying that some source listed Alex Chilton as the 20th? Hadn't seen that one... ------------------------------ Date: Wed, 1 Jan 2003 21:25:12 -0800 From: Glen Uber Subject: Feels Like 1974 Sorry if this has been posted already (I'm currently in digest mode). I saw a link to this article from Fark and it reminded me just how in tune with things Robyn is. ============== Our quality of life peaked in 1974. It's all downhill now We will pay the price for believing the world has infinite resources George Monbiot Tuesday December 31, 2002 The Guardian With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve. As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards. The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion. The rest of the article can be found here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,866785,00.html Cheers! - -g- "Turn up your nose at red heads? What ignorance! I pity your lack of taste." - -- Mark Twain ------------------------------ End of fegmaniax-digest V12 #1 ******************************