h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

This is one of my favorite films. It came out in 1983 and was one of David Bowie's earlier staring roles. (He was in The Hunger released the same year.) The film tells the story of a battle of wills between a Japanese P.O.W. camp commandant (Ryûichi Sakamoto) and an English soldier (Bowie) he believes may be a devil sent to test him. Tom Conti plays Colonel Lawrence who speaks fluent Japanese and finds himself at the center of this battle.

This film is also a clash of West and East with its filmmakers and cast. This was director Nagisa Ôshima's first English language production. The comparison of the English cast's reserved and stoic acting style to the broad style of the Japanese cast helps to accentuate the internal clash of the film's story. Sakamoto especially is over the top in his actions and his makeup. Roger Ebert found this to be a major fault of the film, but I feel it adds to the conflict of culture and spirit. The pairing of two iconoclastic pop stars was a bit of stunt casting that mostly worked out quite well.

The film explores death and brutality without being gory, something modern films would have a hard time accomplishing. (Although, to be fair, it's sometimes not hard to see the actors pulling their punches and kicks.)

What really makes this film one of my favorites is the soundtrack by Sakamoto. It not only his first acting role, it was also his first chance to score a film. (He later went on to work on The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky.) It's a beautiful sound track that feels alien to both western and Asian audiences. He played with the idea of christmas bells in the main theme but used the Balinese gamelan to add an otherworldly feel to it. His background in Japanese electronic pop set against the WWII Pacific period also adds to the unbalanced nature of the film. This soundtrack introduced Sakamoto to the rest of the world and made him one of Japan's most famous musicians.

While I've listened to the soundtrack repeatedly over the years, this was the first time I'd watched the film in maybe 20 years. I was glad to see that it holds together well.

Interesting flick...

Funny, quite funny in places...

But, I also found it very disturbing, as one should. When it comes to dark comedies, it doesn't get much darker than one about suicide bombers. The most disturbing line is when the lead is with his family and his son says proudly with a smile, "You'll be in heaven before your head hits the ceiling."
That was just a bit too "real".

I might watch this one again.

That's Chris Morris for you. If there are any punches to be pulled he'll studiously look the other way and go in full steam ahead. Once you accept that, it's a pretty good film.

Yea, I loved In The Loop. I want to watch that one a few more times just to memorize some of Malcolm's searing insults. There were some good ones in Four Lions as well but the were often half in Urdu.

Looks like someone's stolen our business model and your thread title http://www.flixbrewhouse.com/

It's in Round Rock btw.

Imitation blah blah flattery....


There's something called Star Cinema Grill in the NASA area (also Conroe and Missouri City) that is a cheap knock off of the Alamo. I haven't been because they stick to mainstream movies and offer the same in beer. I haven't heard anyone recommend it. I'd check it out if they carried a movie I thought was worth seeing.
http://www.starcinemagrill.net/index.html

This place opened up a few months ago too http://violetcrowncinema.com/

There have been rumours about an onsite brewery at one of our future branches. Nothing yet though. I'd in there faster than a rat up a drainpipe if it came about

Pirate Radio (AKA The Boat That Rocked) is a sweet little fairy tale of a film about a pirate radio boat in the North Sea in 1966. It has a great ensemble cast of familiar faces. Quite a bit of light hearted fun. Of course it's got a great soundtrack although several of the songs were anachronistic. Actually, looking through IMDb's list of goofs, there are quite a few anachronisms and errors to look for. Anyway, it's fun.

Oh, fair warning... Nick Frost gets nearly naked in it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1131729/

Oh, and you know how usually the deleted scenes are better off remaining so? Well, there's actually some pretty funny full scenes here, mostly comedy sketches that weren't moving the plot forward.

Well, ain't that a ... http://blog.netflix.com/2011/07/netflix-introduces-new-plans-and.html

Netflix has decided to pretty much antagonize all their most avid customers. Come September (and immediately for new costumers), Netflix will basically not offer a single DVD + Streaming plan. If a customer wants both, they'll have to pay the price of two separate plans (at $8 each). I mostly watch DVDs and BluRays (they haven't mentioned if I'll still be paying an extras surcharge for BR, but I'm guessing I will).

The biggest issue is that not all of their movies are available in both formats, disc and streaming. I'm suspecting they're anticipating most customers to move over to streaming only rather than pay what amounts to a 60% increase. However, I watch a lot of hard to find films; art-house, foreign, documentary, etc. I just don't see them transferring their entire library over to streaming very soon. Besides that, while streaming is convenient it eliminates all the extras that I sometimes find worthwhile. Also, there aren't any subtitle options for streaming videos. I like subtitles especially when I watch British films and TV shows (and especially the ones with the thicker accents). Of course, the other thing hitting me with this is that many discs I get are now RENTAL MARKET ONLY, meaning they've deleted all the extras. So, which choice is right for me? I'm getting the short end of the stick no matter what.

Netflix has had a nice long run up to become the dominating company in the rental business and now it looks like they've decided that they don't need to try so hard to keep the customers happy.

I just picked up that email too My plan is going to jump from $9.99 a month to $15.98 if I decide I want DVDs and streaming. $6.00 a month might not sound like month, but Netflix isn't my only monthly outgoing, of course. Just at a time when so many people are tightening their belts Netflix puts up all their prices! And by no small amount.

Nice.

I haven't seen my email yet, I learned about it from Reddit.

I suppose I could go for it and justify it by allowing for the money I've saved by ditching Vonage and changing my mobile plan, but that don't make it right, y'know?

I'm pretty sure my new rate for both will be $18 since I have the BluRay surcharge... I'll have to give this some thought. I used to pay about $16/month when I got two discs at a time so it won't be that much of a jump from my old costs, but I just find it such a slap in the face.

Of course, I'm sure a lot of this is coming from the big companies as Netflix's has a lot of contracts ending soon.


What's going to really suck is as more people switch to streaming, many ISPs are starting to put data caps on their customers. They currently are getting away with this by pointing out that very few of their customers exceed these limits, just the hard-core gamers and torrenters. But that's for now. In a year or so I wouldn't be surprised if a significant percentage of their customers start hitting and exceeding those caps. Remember that sweet little deal Comcast-NBC merger?

Just changed my plan to two DVDs unlimited times a month. I'll ditch the streaming until I can see that more of the films I want to watch are on instant watch. It's still cheaper than one DVD and unlimited streaming.

I think I'll just bite the bullet and eat the extra fees. I'll be at 1 dvd/brd at a time and streaming.
1 disc at a time would probably be enough for me but sometimes there is just nothing on TV. One thing that is really getting on my nerves lately is more often than not I get a RENTAL version BluRay disc. It's not so much that these have all the extras and commentaries stripped off. I can understand that. It's that it has unskippable ads for 15 minutes before the movie. And they're not just previews (mostly for unrelated films I have no desire to watch). The worst are the ads for BluRay. Hey, idiots! I'm watching a BluRay disc so I obviously don't need to be sold on BluRay.

Anyways, I don't really blame Netflix for this price jump. They could have handled it better, of course. But they're pretty much caught between the content providers and the customers.

This comic makes a point.

http://fc01.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2011/201/0/2/netflix_problems_by_findchaos-d412xl3.png

Yep. Only one thing more unpleasant than the movie business, and that's the music business.

We're owned. Each and everyone of us. This world belongs to the very deep pockets. They own our governments. They own our media. They own us.

Inside Job tells the story of the financial collapse of 2008. It explains the derivatives and CDOs, the housing bubble, etc. But what it boils down to is deregulation. For the past three decades there has been a systematic destruction of the laws, agencies and personnel that were put in place following the Great Depression to prevent precisely this sort of thing. They removed the restrictions that separated banking institutions from investment institutions. That was big. Banks were now able to gamble their customers money. Then they increased the leverage limits, the amount of actual money they had vs. the amount of debt they could back with it. Then they kept weakening the regulators by repealing laws and defunding the regulatory offices.

We allowed robber barons back. We allowed them to convince us that deregulation was good (or at least convince those in our governments that it was). The financial industries now fund the largest sector of lobbyists in the world. In the US, they fund 5 lobbyists for each individual member of Congress. They fund the campaigns of our elected officials. They write the drafts of our laws. They also teach the next generation of economists. Many of the major university economics departments are headed by people sitting on the boards of companies like Goldman Sachs.

And it's not getting any better. The Obama administration is doing very little to change things. They did manage to pass the law that creates the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, but it still doesn't have an administrator (Elizabeth Warren designed it but the republicans have made it abundantly clear that they'd never confirm her nor anyone else that Obama appoints) nor is it funded. Most of Obama's economic advisers are people from companies that created the current crises. They made billions while the world economy cratered. They should have been prosecuted but instead they were given bonuses and put in charge under a new administration.


And there's nothing we can do about it. They're in control. They pay for all the candidates in our elections. They now write our laws. While most of the public has seen their standard of living stagnate or plummet, the richest are earning more than ever. The greater the divide, the greater their control over our economy.

In the upcoming elections the only options I see is Obama retains office and continues the current level of lax regulation or the republicans win and we see even greater deregulation.

Then what?

I watched this when I was a kid on Saturday nights on the USA cable network in its early years (early 80's). It was part of "Night Flight" following "Radio 1999"(music videos). Night Flight was a two hour block of strange. It featured weird cartoons, short films, documentaries, comedians and other oddities. They would often show cult films like Fantastic Planet, Reefer Madness or Kentucky Fried Movie.

Fantastic Planet was one I particularly liked just for the completely alien vibe it has. It was so different from anything I knew.