Erkki

I'm planning to get to Renoir sometime soon. Did see Rules of the Game this year and liked it a lot! I found a really interesting film and on an interesting service: https://www.festivalscope.com/all/film/lions The service seems to mainly let you see festival films online, although I haven't yet fully understood how they pick them. It says that it used to be a service for pros, but recently branched out to offer something for everyone, and there's still a separate thing for pros. Some movies on it are free, like Lions. I think I didn't even have to enter my credit card info, just made an account. There are also some interesting shorts by Flatform (I've only seen the one with the Italian town). Other movies cost something to watch, I've seen prices like 2€. I wanted to try out the service for a longer movie and randomly picked Lions. There were some technical issues like visible compression artifacts, a couple of interruptions where it showed a loading animation... but on the whole it mostly worked for HD streaming. The movie Lions itself is pretty amazing... it's kind of like a Tarkovsky movie in many ways, for example in the way it removes the genre from a genre movie... or at least it seemed to me that way (it's kind of like a horror movie, but not really). And the way it plays with long tracking shots and nature, including wind and rain, also reminds me of Tarkovsky. It doesn't quite measure up to any actual Tarkovsky movies, but is still rather impressive. The movie basically has a group of young people moving through a forest and the purpose is not very clear. It gets creepy at times. Definitely worth a watch IMHO and as I mentioned it's free, so give it a shot if it sounds interesting (I don't know, maybe they show different movies in different countries, though).

Didn't see a thread about this (except for the one about the episode). I got really addicted to the game last week. It's the first Civilization game I've played properly (started playing IV last year but for some reason didn't get very far). I'm now doing my best to not play it too much, because it's really hard to stop playing once I've started a game. "just one more turn" is really effective. One thing that is bugging me is how long the games are. I have a general feeling of annoyance about games that take a lot of time lately, as I get older and have less and less time to play games. Even a Quick game with a small map (4 civs) can take an entire day. I heard "5 hours", I think in an Edge article, but I don't see how anyone would complete a game with Normal pace in 5 hours. Wars in late game amplify this by playing stupidly repeating animations for things such as bomber attacks. Made me turn off the animations, but then the other battles become a bit less fun to watch. Generally, a lot of time, esp. during wars, is spent waiting for your next turn. Maybe I should play on the slowest pace just that I don't get the illusion that I *could* complete a game in one or two evenings.

Giddy up! Giddy up!

What does the goose say?

Very disappointed in Warcraft. I was hoping for something good, because of Duncan Jones, but this is just ticking the box "Warcraft movie" in some executive's todo list while trying to not appear totally incompetent. It's not even worth seeing once, I walked out of the cinema in the middle.

There's definitely some truth in that. But why not pay a cleaner instead of paying the bar premium?

Post Count of Monte Cristo

Looks really good!

New Fear of Men is likable. Moonface & Siinai also good so far. Excited about upcoming Bat for Lashes and Angel Olsen and Beck.

I got myself a longboard and started using it for part of the daily commute. I'm too afraid to ride it among pedestrians or cars, especially with the narrow and poor quality sidewalks we tend to have in Tallinn, so I have to carry it a short way, from/to bus/train, but on the way home I'm taking the train to where the town's best light traffic road starts, and it goes right past the block where my house is (on the 4th kilometer). It's mostly downhill, so I can get some exciting/scary speeds! I'm so happy I randomly had this idea to start doing this last week -- should have thought of this before. But actually I guess the necessary factors didn't converge that long ago -- I've lived here for 4 years, the road was built 3 years ago, I believe, and the new trains were put in motion 2-3 years ago. Still, should have taken me less time to connect the dots! The only problem is that my soles are sometimes hurting alot after half a kilometer or so of riding. I guess it's because I'm overweight or the plantar fasciitis I have/had, I'm hoping with proper stretching and some practice it will go away. Also thankfully the road has benches for resting about every half a kilometer so I can take it easy. I was happy to manage 2km without stopping today, although the pain after that was a bit more than usual.

I'm going through the Hitchcock Masterpiece Collection Blu-Ray... I saw Rope, Saboteur and Shadow of a Doubt so far. The latter reminds me of Night of the Hunter (which I now consider a masterpiece, although I wasn't fully enjoying the whole movie on first viewing), but the characters are a bit annoying with their old-fashioned behaviour. I think I actually had the same problem with Night of the Hunter at first, though, and it really is a very thrilling movie. I also liked Rope for it's compactness, although I might agree with the writer (I think) on one of the extras that the beginning of the movie revealed too much and kind of took away some of the potential suspense. But maybe he was wrong, could be that the movie wouldn't have worked as well if the audience didn't know what they do from the start. Also, the Blu-Ray has the theatrical trailer on it and it's ridiculous how much it reveals -- especially compared to today's trailers, which some complain about.

Woohoo! I just got a longboard and took my first ride and it was awesome! I had the idea today while working and found a cool store that let me borrow one of their demo boards -- the Loaded Dervish. Basically if I take the train home, the best place to ride longboards in town goes from the train station to my house. So I wonder why I didn't have this idea before!? Since I haven't done any sports for more than a year, I'm pretty badly out of shape, and the first ten minutes of trying to ride was excruciatingly painful for my soles. However, I sat down for 5 minutes after that and got through the pain and the rest was almost pure delight! Felt a bit dangerous though, so I might get a helmet and gloves. I'm also now feeling it a bit in my knees so I wonder if as a pretty fat guy at the moment, maybe this isn't actually healthy for me...??? I'll try to ask a doctor tomorrow, but if it should be fine, then I'll definitely be buying one, and will try to make riding it part of my everyday commute!

The Decameron had less penises than I expected after seeing Arabian Nights (of the same trilogy) earlier. But boy does it have bad teeth! Next up: The Canterbury Tales. I hear it has a really large schlong.

Enter the Void overstayed its welcome, but was still pretty impressive.

Andrei Rublev is on Hulu!!!

Sorcerer is amazing, although I still like The Wages of Fear more.

I'll never give up! Half-Life 3 could come out any day now.

What's this StarVR thing? There was a press release about it today about a partnership of IMAX and Starbreeze Studios. It was so long that I didn't bother to read it, but seems like this VR system has a much wider FOV than others. Anyone know how it will compare to HTC Vive overall?

I was just blown away by Onibaba. I had been watching it download for 3 weeks, every day seeing that it had progressed a little bit. I found it through the FilmStruck sizzle reel and while some of the other movies I found through that list are really good, Onibaba seems like a real masterwork in comparison to most. It reminded me of Woman in the Dunes, as both are suspenseful movies about people living in weird cut-off communities. (the movie is in black and white and absolutely gorgeous)

For best comedy of recent years I would personally pick A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, or even Look Who's Back, or Wild Tales, or Frances Ha, but yeah, Mistress America is funny and definitely worth seeing. I recently finished watching The Godfather trilogy and I have to say I like the last one almost as much as the first two, except for the first hour, which felt oddly out of place. Also finished Scenes from a Marriage, which is a great miniseries by Ingmar Bergman about a married couple, with excellent performances from Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. Also watched: Black Girl (1966, which I believe is also being screened now by Janus Films), Eyes Without a Face (1960, not a bad mystery-horror movie), Blood Simple (starting to catch up with Coen brother's work)

Wow the Iggy Pop album is indeed great. Not bad for a 70 year old

I watched World of Tomorrow again, for the third time, and I want to say, maybe this is actually the best movie of 2015. Don Hertzfeldt can really capture things about being a (human) being in the world. I ordered the Blu-Ray http://www.bitterfilms.com/

But actually, I think a thing that we could be worried about (besides AI taking the jobs thing, which I think will be good in the end) is that some kind of trainable dumb-AI based on neural networks or something is put into a situation where it is able to take a lot of decisions for a lot of people in some contexts, in a way that ends up increasing inequality and giving more and more power to those *humans* who control the AI, and also starts to move intelligence to where the money is.

Good article on singularity. https://aeon.co/essays/true-ai-is-both-logically-possible-and-utterly-implausible

I meant rip of a Blu-Ray disc. For film-to-digital, "transfer" seems to be a widely used word.