I'm not really celebrating anything today, but I wanted to say that I'm pretty sad that Harold Pinter died. He had a good run, though.

I watched the documentary Hearts of Darkness about the making of Apocalypse Now. It's fascinating. I'd always heard that the production was plagued with problems, but I didn't know how many of those problems were of Coppola's own making, and how bad things had gotten.

I also watched the documentary that came with the 30th anniversary edition of the documentary, about Coppola making Youth Without Youth. The pairing of the two films gives a strange insight-over-time view of his ideas and methods. I haven't seen the movie, but I've added it to my Netflix queue.

I had no idea this existed until I was out clothes shopping today and heard this at the mall:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2P49MNDyf_Q

After looking it up once I got home, I discovered this also exists:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBKIngrCgqg

I like the first one better just because it sounds more like an actual Cocteau Twins song (and I do love the Cocteau Twins) but both are just, well, hilarious.

There's a slightly expanded trailer for the Watchmen movie available here.

Apart from being a fanboy about a movie that hasn't been released yet, I'm just working for the next month and a half or so. Looking forward to starting up the writing again once I'm done.

I'm also in the market for a new PC since the video card on my desktop machine had the fan melt off of it. That was fun. Thinking about picking up an Intel Core 2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and a TB HD. It would be a pretty significant upgrade; I still need to figure out what video card I want. Anyway.

I typically don't like superheroes at all, so having a post that talks about nothing else is a little different.

( Batman Begins/Dark Knight spoilers )

I watched the first few episodes of Heroes the other day to see if it was any good, but I thought it was mostly five characters in search of a plot. I'm going to give it a few more episodes to see if it gets better, but I'm curious if anyone watches it regularly and can tell me if it does. I thought the writing was surprisingly not good and figured ordinary people with superhuman abilities would be a shoe in for an addicting show, but so far I'm not feeling it.

I can't quite wrap my mind around Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, paying his respects at Solzhenitsyn's funeral. What a strange idea.

I love the Watchmen graphic novel to death, and while I have high, high hopes for the movie (yep, I'm a total idiot and I should be shot) the trailer did absolutely nothing for me. I don't get it. The story is really good and there are a lot of ways to use it to sell the movie, and they make it look like a really generic action movie. I mean, sure, it's pretty, but I don't think it would have sold me on seeing the movie if I didn't know what it was all about. It's probably just a teaser, I'm thinking? I dunno.

Anyway, it's available here if you haven't seen it.

Update! Okay, upon further review, the shot of the Comedian smiling after he just roasted someone with a flamethrower is kind of bad ass. It's growing on me.

If anyone loves Kubrick's The Shining (the mini-series doesn't exist to me) as much as I do this is pretty cool.

Sometimes I think Random Joe Knucklehead is the best thing about Wikipedia.

By the way, if you missed the Wimbledon men's finals today, you missed out. For serious.

( spoilers! )

So Kimbo Slice beat Thompson, but didn't look very good doing it. I was hoping he would dominate the scrubs and get a chance against a real opponent at some point, but I'm not sure after that fight. His ground skills didn't look super, but his real problem is stamina. He was complaining after the match about going to the ground and getting back up repeatedly and he certainly looked tired during the fight. If he could improve his stamina without reducing his strength, he'll be a contender, but I suspect he has to do it in a hurry because everyone he fights from this point on is going to take him to the ground immediately, which means long matches because he can't just knock people out in 30 seconds down there.