caleb walker

month-end catch-up

End of the month and I'm beginning my last post for NaBloPoMo at 11:30pm.

Tomorrow it's back to the office, back to the routine. I'm kind of looking forward to that.

Last night we had dinner with a bunch of friends, including the owners of a B&B in the Finger Lakes region of New York. I could listen all night to Michele tell stories about their life up there: her Amish neighbors, the horses (imagine six enormous work horses running loose down the road), ducks, cats, the birds. Michele is one of the few people I can count on to read this thing on a regular basis.

Tonight we watched all three DVDs we had sitting on the tv stand. A few minutes into Manhattan I said, "I wish our tv was bigger." The whole movie is shot in gorgeous black and white. (Here's the opening scene. It's in Spanish because the English versions I found were all in the wrong aspect ratio; they're squished.)

And that pretty much does it for NaBlo 08. I can't keep this up all year long so you'll just have to check back again in a few days. (Or do the RSS thing. It's a life-changing technology.) Thanks for reading.

close call

Geez, I almost forgot to post today. Here's some nice stuff I came across recently:

• The End, a set of photos of final movie shots. (Here's my favorite.)
• Splitter, a well-executed, unusual game.
• Some hard-to-parse sentences.

nablopomo post #25: a lame one

The Regent Square movie theater re-opened yesterday after a week off. I guess they were entitled to a break after the Three Rivers Film Festival. Today we went to see My Kid Could Paint That, a documentary about a four-year-old girl who paints abstract-expressionist paintings. Or does she? We're never told one way or another, but regardless, it still upsets my stomach to recall how the media and the gallery own treated her and her family.

Then we had dinner at the house of a friend who, we learned, had never heard Meat Loaf's Bat Out of Hell until this year when someone gave her Bat out of Hell: Live with the Melbourne Symphony. Wow. Bombastic Rock made even more bombastic. Awesome. Next on the stereo was Tom Waits. Even more awesomer. KR and our friend did yoga positions on the floor. We ate ice cream and pretzels for dessert. A good time was had by all.

eighteen

I've used up all the posts I started a week ago. They got me this far in NaBloPoMo, but left me idea-less tonight at dinnertime. We had limited time to eat since we were going to the 7:00 show of The Manual of Love at the Three Rivers Film Festival (it had me laughing out loud through the whole thing), so KR had baked potatoes in the oven and we ate them with cottage cheese, one of the most colorless meals possible.

So at the dinner table I was beginning to worry about tonight's post when KR, out of the blue, reminded me that our 18th anniversary is approaching. I noticed that our marriage is almost old enough to drive. She said, "All this time and we're still not off our learner's permit," and we laughed together for several minutes. Hey, come on now - someday you'll think that's funny.

psychopath

My friend Susan posted her movie on YouTube.

She's remarkable, Susan is. She was a classmate a couple summers ago in two Iowa Summer Writing Festival classes, one on voice, one on the "dramatic gesture." Her contributions to class were funny, violent, and slightly disturbing. Great, great stuff.

I knew her as a writer, but a while ago she told me she was shooting a short-short movie based on a flash fiction piece of hers. Here it is: "Psycopath." Read her blog, where she documents her discovery process, learning how to make a movie by making a movie.

the sicko effect

Here is a remarkable story about something that happened at a showing of Sicko in Dallas, Texas. (I haven't seen it yet.) Read the story here. It's short but powerful. Here's an excerpt:

Sicko started; the stereotypical Texas guy sat down behind me and never stopped talking. He talked through the entire movie... The first ten to twenty minutes of the film he spent badmouthing Moore to his wife and snorting in disgust whenever MM went into one of his trademark monologues. But as the movie wore on his protestations became quieter, less enthusiastic. Somewhere along the way, maybe at the half way point, right before my ears, Sicko changed this man’s mind. By the forty-five minute mark, he, along with the rest of the audience, were breaking into spontaneous applause. He stopped pooh-poohing the movie and started shouting out “hell yeah!” at the screen. It was as if the whole world had been flipped upside down. This is Texas, where people support the president and voting democratic is something only done by the terrorists.

making psychopath

My friend Susan, who I met at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival a couple years ago, is blogging the process of filming of her first movie, Psychopath. It's based on a piece of her own flash fiction. Amateur filmmakers, take note.

netflix recommendation

I've seen half of the "greatest foreign films of all times" judged by The Guardian, and they're all good.

I'm a little disappointed, though, that no Iranian films made the list. The White Balloon and Children of Heaven should have made it to the top twenty. And The Mirror should have made the list somewhere.

Check those out. I'm serious.

best movies of 2006

I haven't seen many 2006 movies. But here are my picks for best movies I've seen in '06.

Best 2006 movie seen: Little Miss Sunshine
Best movie rented in 2006: Junebug
Pleasant surprises: Transamerica, Cirque Du Soleil: The Fire Within (a behind-the-scenes miniseries), Murderball
Movies we rewatched: A Christmas Story, The Red Violin
TV series rented (with comments): Six Feet Under (later seasons lost the spark, but it all came back in the last three minutes of the finale), Carnivale (a disappointment; we gave up on it), Deadwood (effing great), Weeds (not so great, but we made it through season 1), The French Chef with Julia Child (fun vintage stuff), Huff (tiresome, but Oliver Platt is terrific), Firefly (just watched the first two episodes and we love it)

recommendations

Yesterday I finished reading Gilead. It was recommended by my writing teacher this summer, who studied with and still worships the author, Marilynne Robinson.

It was such a gentle book, written as a letter from an elderly man with a bad heart to his seven-year-old son. It begins as the father, Reverend John Ames, writes about his "begats," his father and grandfather, both clergymen. Just as it seems the book will be nothing more than family stories—entertaining stories, yes—a plot creeps in. A stranger comes to town midway through his writing.

Tonight KR and I watched An Inconvenient Truth. Too much Al, I thought. It is, you must know by now, an expanded version of Al Gore's lecture on global warming. I found too many distractions from his main point. His presentation was very slick and I kept wondering what software he used (on his PowerBook!) to create the show. I also wanted a closer look at his graphs and charts. And there was too much Al. Too much footage of him walking around the old family farm, telling us about his family. Despite these weakeners, it remained a powerful film about what could be the thing that brings this whole party to an end.

The movie's website has on it a Carbon Calculator that figures out the amount of CO2 you generate (approximately, I guess). I scored 3.1, or "Much smaller than average." Mainly because I only drive my car about 1000 miles or so a year.