UPDATE: Back in business. Fuck yeah!
December 16, 2008
Question for the Readership
UPDATE: Back in business. Fuck yeah!
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UPDATE: Back in business. Fuck yeah!
UPDATE: Back in business. Fuck yeah!
46 comments:
Nope, nothin'.
I don't see anything.
Guys, when you say you don't see anything, do you mean you can't access the site at all?!
I can access the site, I just don't see that update.
-Genericcactus
What G. said.
Can access the site, but don't see new content.
By the way: The root-servers for .net say that ns14.datona-1.com and ns15.datona-1.com are responsible for filmfreakcentral.net, and those both say that 74.52.238.50 is the IP for your site.
Aye--that's what they should say. Which makes this all the more perplexing...
Fuckadoodle.
If this is the correct IP, then I'd say it's no DNS problem (I put it manually in my hosts file to make sure it is used).
You're obviously using a virtual host, so maybe Datona borked up the configuration and is serving an old document root?
I am simply blinded to the new stuff, not to the awesomeness that the site before the last update already was.
Well, I think I fixed it. Big thanks to DaveA, that was in fact extremely helpful.
Can see all the updates on my end.
Hallelujah! That's one ulcer on the mend.
Thanks, Jack, all.
Just wanna say this: Eastwood's Gran Torino is fucking amazing.
Remember hearing the rumor that it would be the last Dirty Harry film? I wouldn't be surprised if the old man had started it himself.
I'm a huge Eastwood film, but I found the film purely second-rate. I mean, goodness, just like in "Million Dollar Baby" there's both a priest he rags on and a gold-digging, materialistic family who wants the spoils of a dying person's labor. Oh, and of course Clint's Archie Bunker-like character is eventually won over by the foreign next-door neighbors he's previously been hostile to. Gimme a fucking break. And the central metaphor -- his prized possession: the vintage '70s Gran Torino car that he himself helped build while a Detroit autoworker (you know, in a day and age when manly things were built with INTEGRITY) -- is thuddingly obvious.
I'd rather see a "Dirty Harry" entry with the elderly character handing out parking tickets and unholstering the .44 SuperMag to any offender who challenges him over the odious "Gran Torino".
Whoops! The first sentence should read, "I'm a huge Eastwood FAN..." rather than "I'm a huge Eastwood FILM..."
I can see the update, but the first paragraph of the blog post appears all crossed out.
I agree that the metaphors are outlandishly heavy-handed, Jack--maybe almost as bad as those found in Alison's Rails & Ties--but the fact that the movie seems to go so, so far out of its way to point them out ("Kind of IRONIC that Thao is washing the car that he tried to STEAL, isn't it?"), I just can't take them at face value. These days, Eastwood could play a past-his-prime curmudgeon in his sleep--and he's been making self-reflexive comments about it since around Sudden Impact--but I don't think he's ever laid himself out as someone so obsolete before. Frankly, I don't think Eastwood entirely expected to be making movies fifteen years past Unforgiven--and while he explored the full weight of violence and vengeance there, too, he's never implicated himself in it so deeply.
At first I found the film to be hopelessly atonal (aided in no small part by the uniformly terrible cast, save for John Carroll Lynch and Eastwood himself), but from the moment Walt curls his hand into the shape of a pistol in an act of self-destructive machismo, Eastwood's fucking with us. Playing with our image of him at this late point in his career: a grizzled has-been who's lost his touch, more than content to crib old ideas from himself when he's not trying to cloyingly force some emotion out of us, whether it be sadness or shock or outrage. And yet--simultaneously, paradoxically--we'll always accept him as the big man with the big gun, because, thanks to the long-standing misinterpretation of Dirty Harry, he still represents the rallying cry for vengeance when the chips are down and the world becomes too much to handle. In Gran Torino, he combines the two ideas. He's a man who has seen and done a lot of things in his life, looks back and refuses to apologize for it--the world has passed him by several times over, but now he just wants to leave a positive legacy.
In short, Clint Eastwood does whatever the hell he pleases, and this time he's taken the opportunity to flip off his winter-era critics and anyone who's ever asked him to make Dirty Harry 6.
Please tell me that Ian will be providing his input to the end-of-year Top 10.
Glad I could help, Bill. Now work on that Top 10 of yours!
BTW, Slant's already online and I saw almost none of those. Those guys get more eclectic every year (that doesn't apply to their music selection though, which is simply terrible).
@DaveA: Yeah, Ed's lists always make me feel like a rube, but he does live in the mecca of obscurity; the rest of us have to make do. I *have* seen his #1 pick, though, and if it's any indication, I don't feel so bad about having missed many of the others. No disrespect to Ed, who's a gentleman and a scholar.
@SeattleJeff: It's intentionally crossed out since the site's back in working order.
Whoops! The first sentence should read, "I'm a huge Eastwood FAN..." rather than "I'm a huge Eastwood FILM..."
But that brings up the point: if you were a film, what kind of film would you be? Would you be the July summer blockbuster? the quirky indie movie? Or maybe you really would be a huge Eastwood film from his late period?
Dave: Any music list that contains Why? and Wale (my #1 and #4 albums of the year, for what it's worth) is alright by me, but yeah--this year's crop of top album lists have been really dully uniform.
No real disrespect intended towards Portishead, Fleet Foxes, TV on the Radio, Vampire Weekend, et al. Most of these records just left me lukewarm. (Plenty o' disrespect meant towards Lil Wayne, though--seriously guys, WTF?)
Most telling sign that it was a dull year for music: Slant's (wholly deserving) #1 single of the year is a 2007 holdover.
I haven't looked at the list yet, but the Portishead album: fucking brilliant.
@jer: Well, it's not completely terrible (although I said that, but hey, a little provocation here and there...). I just find it strange that guys with such an elaborate taste in movies fall for the most usual stuff when it comes to music. And a Best-Of-2008 with 25(!!!) albums? I have a hard time finding three.
But then again, I already wrote around here that I really liked Cloverfield, so maybe I should get a taste in movies before I bitch at Slant's music collection... ;-)
Berandor, I'd be any kind of film as long as it's good.
CLoverfield rocks ass, Dave. No apologies necessary.
Just back from Benjamin Button and this is my question. Why did Fincher feel like he needed to remake Forrest Gump?
Kyle: I'm still making my way through awards season, so the answer to that question is up in the air for the time being--but thanks for the vote of confidence.
Ian: No problem -- who isn't? I realize that there are likely some obstacles -- namely, seniority -- that might prevent your choices from joining those of Chambers and Chaw, but I find your criticism so coherently and compellingly articulated (and, to be perfectly honest, many of your ideas, if intellectually stronger, so akin to mine) that, regardless of whether your favorites of 2008 appear on FFC's authoritative list, I hope that your top choices will be available somewhere.
It's just that your little graf about Gran Torino just sent me over the top, and I hope that others recognize the extent to which you've -- and I mean no offense to any of FFC's writers -- reinvigorated the place.
Regarding "Benjamin Button", it's interesting to note that Rex Reed has named it the year's best film after having named the previous Pitt/Fincher collaboration, "Fight Club", the worst of its year.
I'm actually just surprised to note that Reed is still ambulatory. I got his book of celeb interviews (Keaton to Travolta or something?) at a library sale the other day for four bits and, y'know what, I need a shower. A good, long, brillo-scrub of a shower.
Hot.
I know what book you mean and have long considered it what I call a "piggybank book"? What's that? Well, it's a stupefyingly-awful book that stays on the shelves forever and forever so that you'd have no worry whatsoever about leaving your savings in between the pages with the full confidence that nobody would even take a single glance through the rancid thing.
In his '70s review book, John Simon had no qualms over calling out Reed as an abysmal critic even though they more or less liked and disliked the same films. In all fairness, though, Reed's review book from the early '70s is actually much better than his interview one.
Just a heads-up that Walt's review of SEVEN POUNDS went online this morning - http://filmfreakcentral.net/screenreviews/sevenpounds.htm
It's 8 1/2 pounds. The weight of the oscar statuette, that is.
Wait... so what you're saying is that Will Smith kills himself so that his organs can go to the seven others?
No, let me rephrase. Please don't tell me that Will Smith kills himself so that his organs can to go the seven others.
So instead of one emotional climax you get seven? Witness how Will's heart makes Rosario healthy! See how Woody sees! and so on?
Thank you for watching that movie so that I can avoid it even more than I already planned to.
Technically, Ang Lee's Hulk would be the second-most recent picture to feature allegorical jellyfish of doom. There's probably a connection to be analyzed there, but that would mean watching Seven Pounds after Mr. Chaw already went through the difficulty of doing that for us.
Is that right? I don't remember jellyfish in Hulk!
Wow.
Just keep getting older.
Saw The Spirit this morning, too, and let's just say one of my lists is going to have to make some room.
OK, I'm perfectly willing to come off as an idiot here, but while watching "Seven Pounds" (and this is only because I didn't have to pay for it) I thought the title was in reference to Shakespeare's "The Merchant of Venice" where a pound of flesh was given as atonement for a sin. So being the sacrificer and due to a past ill action, Smith's character metaphysically gave a pound to each of the seven people he helped.
Just sticks and stones, please, if this is an outlandish reading on my part.
No - that's my read, too:
which, given her condition, seems like an invitation for Ben to add another pound to his levy of flesh.
I'm just being an asshole about the Oscar thing.
For my money, the best sentence of the year:
"A classic in the bizarre sub-genre of Super Duper Magic Negro-as-martyr, Seven Pounds joins such wonderful pills as The Green Mile in propagating the strange notion that in order to restore order in a world in which he's murdered a minivan full of white people, America's second-favourite black guy needs to turn himself into an organ buffet."
Did you really expect different from The Spirit?
Unless you mean the Top10 list, because that would surprise me greatly.
LOL @ Walter's long, brillo-scrub, hot shower. Reed is an easy target, we know, but sometimes it is necessary to get into the mind of the enemy.
Saw "Seven Pounds" last night, and I figured Walter would exact pounds of flesh for this one. I bought it, thought, only for the Dawson character (frankly this may not have anything to do with this movie, per se). Smith was ok, with some pretty good acting even if he never found his character's heart (pun intended). I believe the film would have worked toward the art it aspired if it was just about the Smith and Dawson characters, with the "IRS agent" still fulfilling his mission in the end. I don't see the premise of this film as depressing and rightly panned (I wish I could be so noble). But as Walter said it picked the wrong timing to suck (at how it goes about it's storytelling).
From W.C. The Spirit review:
that asshole Alan Moore
If by "asshole" you mean "best human being currently drawing breath," then I concur.
I thought the teaser trailer for "The Spirit" looked like a "Grindhouse" fake trailer without the sense of irony-thanks for confirming my worst fears and preventing me from wasting money on finding out for myself Walter!
For those who have seen Synecdoche, New York - life imitates art: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7799708.stm
Also seeking reasoning for Walter's declaration that Alan Moore is an asshole. Dude seems to get attacked over not taking to any adaptation of his work to film - given the shoddy treatment of League and From Hell, I can't blame him - and the fact that he's attacked his own awful-but-celebrated garbage The Killing Joke puts him in my favor.
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