Pick me up, no. 9247.

Last night, in the wake of the excellent Fedora 14 release, I was feeling a little wistful. In part that’s because Fedora 14 marks the last release where I participated as the Fedora Project Leader or helped with FPL-ish release tasks. I’m confident Jared will do a great job with Fedora 15 and beyond, but I guess it’s a little like watching your kid go off to school for the first time. You’re excited for them, and hopeful about the future, but you also think back to how much fun it was to have your child around the house all the time, and see so many of the experiences they have, in real time.

So anyway, my wife had brought home the new Blu-ray edition of Toy Story 3, which certainly surpassed my expectations in being possibly the best of the three Toy Story movies. Now, if you haven’t seen the film, I’m not going to bother telling you why — just go out and see it now. In fact, if you haven’t seen any of the Toy Story movies, you need to start with the first one and watch all three. I promise you they are just as enjoyable for adults as they are for kids.

Interestingly, digital animation has come so far in the past 15 years that you can easily see the difference between the level of detail in the original Toy Story and what you find in TS3. But the story is what counts in every film — animated ones are no exception. And the people at Pixar are very clear that the story rules, first and foremost, in what they do. Each of the films is a masterpiece of storytelling, from the first frame to the last. Doubtless that’s why they’ve all been incredible box office successes, and have touched the hearts of literally billions of people around the world. See all of them at the first opportunity. Seriously!

So anyhow, we watched TS3 and greatly enjoyed it for the second time (having seen it in 3D in the theater with our kids this past summer). But then I got an extra bonus when I popped in Disc 2 of the set, the disc that includes a bunch of supplements. During the supplements, the filmmakers and crew at Pixar show off a lot of the work that goes into making one of these groundbreaking films. And thanks to the exceptional resolution of the Blu-ray format, you can pick out a lot of detail in the material they show.

Including the fact that the animators were running Fedora on a number of their systems!

This really made me happy, and quickly drove away any residual blues I might have had. What a wonderful thing it was to know that Fedora, in its own way, had something to do with bringing so much joy to so many people, including my own family! It was a really nice way to celebrate our latest Fedora release, and I just wanted to share that with everyone.

Also, I want to congratulate everyone who contributed to this release, and continues to do great work in the Fedora Project — whether it’s easy or difficult, fun or painstaking, lofty or detailed. You help make Fedora a great community, and that in turn has helped Fedora bring joy and freedom to countless people. WAY TO GO!

Hollywood continues to suck as expected.

I’ve noted before in the pages of this blog that I’d be surprised if Warner Brothers didn’t succeed at screwing up Watchmen, the comic book miniseries widely regarded as the best ever created. For good reason, too — it’s heady stuff, layered and mindful of human frailty and foibles, even when the frame is covered by cowl and cape.

Well, today saw the first hint of proof from Cinematical that hack writers and movie execs have been hard at it castrating yet another work of literary renown. WARNING! Spoilers abound. If you haven’t read the book, do not click this link. In fact, don’t read this Wikipedia article either, since it has lots of spoilers too. Just go buy the book and enjoy it — you’ll need to read it a couple times to pick up on some of the subtler ingenuities, and that extra time will help you miss the agonizing screams of disappointed comic-book geeks and producers watching box-office grosses that look like last month’s stock market.

I’d like to think that the people who will bite it for ushering this latest fizzle into fruition are the same ones who require directors to title their opening scene with, say, “London 1608,” followed immediately by the supposedly more ominous pronouncement fading in, “400 years ago.” As if (1) the viewers can’t subtract that well in their heads, and (2) it really matters that we’re talking about 400 years ago, as opposed to 380, or 407 and an odd Wednesday or two. The same people who put annoying voice overs in otherwise great films to feed us information that we’d figure out for ourselves by simply paying attention, if only we could stop that yammering voice over from yanking us out of the movie experience.

Perhaps the reason movie execs do this is because secretly they believe everyone is as stupid as they are, or rather, they can’t believe anyone’s smarter than they are — much the same thing really, now that I think about it. On the other hand, Warner did bring us The Dark Knight this summer, and it boggles the mind to think how that spectacularly satisfying film slipped through the grinding gears of commerce relatively unscathed, or at least no worse for wear. One imagines a secret cadre of ninja execs moving stealthily by night, silently shuffling producers’ notes around so the clueless turn the low-beams of their stunted intellects instead onto fare such as Bevery Hills Chihuahua.

This tendency to destroy the edges, to simplify to the least common denominator, is why I much prefer movies with original screenplays — after all, with all those grasping hands in the way, looking to make their mark on a film, it’s very rare for cinematic departures to deliver on the spirit of books. Adaptations suffer the curse of having to distill a high volume of information not designed for the art form of cinema; original work has the freedom to play instead to film’s strengths. There are, of course, some notable exceptions.

Now, having said that, Eleya and I just watched Sydney Pollack’s masterful 1969 film They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, based on Horace McCoy’s Depression-era short novel (which I have read but, for some reason in the past couple of years, have been inexplicably attributing to Cormac McCarthy). If anything, the film version is more intensely disturbing than the novel, while fully delivering on its despondent tone. There’s a clear connection drawn between the story’s sense of hopelessness and inevitability and the widespread view at the time of the USA hurtling into apocalypse. That despair and the spectacle of the dance marathon contestants being prodded and run like cattle to the point of exhaustion and madness haven’t lost their punch in the intervening 40 years. Jane Fonda is a bit shrill as the brittle Gloria; in my estimation, Bonnie Bedelia stole the show as an pregnant, ignorant, and ultimately hopeful Everywife. Highly recommended.

We also saw the altogether underwhelming M. Night Shyamalan thriller The Happening. Shyamalan draws the viewer in with his customarily deliberate pacing, and even delivers on a few “oh ****!” moments hinted at in the trailers. But there aren’t many surprises to be had in this wannabe eco-thriller, and ultimately the film crumbles under the weight of too much bad writing (Outrun the wind? Seriously?) and a lead couple — Mark Wahlberg and indie fave Zooey Deschanel — with absolutely zero chemistry. If Lady in the Water was too close to the otherwise talented writer/director’s heart to succeed by building, one up-close stroke at a time, a painting that makes perfect sense when viewed from afar, then Happening fails by throwing away the brush and palette altogether, and simply going for outright shock value measured in on-screen deaths. The DVD documentary showing the crew smugly congratulating each other on their “hard R” status is particularly disaffecting given that the most effective moments in the film are often very much diminished by the literal rigor of gore. Not recommended.

Who watches the watchmen?

In front of “The Dark Knight” last night was a teaser trailer for “Watchmen.” To quote another geeky staple, “I have a bad feeling about this.” The Smashing Pumpkins music didn’t rattle me — very often there’s temp track music used for teasers to drum up a certain kind of audience, and this is something to which the “300″ crowd would probably respond fairly well. The visuals look stunning, especially in that they seem to be extremely faithful to the original book, as worked well in “Sin City” and “300.” But I have grave misgivings about the screenplay after reading articles like this one.

The 1989 script by Sam Hamm — who, among other atrocities, was responsible for that year’s “Batman” script — was laughably bad. But David Hayter’s 2003 version was everything Hamm’s wasn’t: smart, sly, and ultimately moving like the original book. Some elements had to be condensed to fit a movie running time, of course. (I always wanted to see “Watchmen” done as a HBO miniseries, but I think the production costs would be prohibitive.) But the sensibility of the book was there in every page.

But if Alex Tse’s work is as bad as it’s made out to be in that article, I can only hope that the rewrites have eliminated the problem. It’s very possible that Tse attached the unnecessary chaff to distract clueless studio executives (is there another kind?), with the filmmakers fully intending to simply ignore or excise that material later, with the material being unharmed in the process. I’m pretty sure having to do that kind of double-dealing is fairly common in the moviemaking industry.

But it’s a slim spot on which to pin one’s hopes for a decent film, especially given the excessive use of slo-mo fight scenes I saw. I would like to see a more mature look at the story in a later trailer, emphasizing the mystery of the Comedian’s death and the troubled lives of the latter-day masked vigilantes, subtly weaving in the “Nostalgia” ads that were so effective in the book. Also troubling is the March release, meaning the studio could be hedging its bets to bury “Watchmen” if the executives in their limited imaginations can’t figure out a way to sell it. I do hear, though, that the studio is already looking at a greatly expanded DVD edition of the film, which might do it justice in the same manner as Ridley Scott’s “Kingdom of Heaven” benefited from its longer cut.

So all I’m saying is, the teaser looks visually impressive, but don’t get your hopes up too much at this point.

Notes on a weekend.

It was a nice weekend even though it was blisteringly hot. Saturday my wife took my daughter out for haircuts and some shopping, so I stayed at home with Trouble (we should probably just get around to changing my son’s name legally) and we played a bit. I also checked to see how his reading is coming along, and at age 4.5 he’s doing about as well as we could possibly hope. He trips a bit on words like “casually” but generally he can read even things he’s never seen before at a decent speed.

I also tuned my wife’s old autoharp — which has been sitting in various closets since we moved in together close to 20 years ago — so my daughter could use it. In actuality it probably badly needs new strings, but those generally cost upward of $60 and I have yet to see if Evie will keep up with it. They’re kind of limited, but very easy to play, and there’s a huge number of songs that are within reach with just a handful of chords. She seemed pretty psyched about it, but she’s much more into reading, writing, and making crafts.

I worked a little on a revamp of the Fedora release notes to try and get them building with publican. However, I ran into some pretty thorny problems because publican doesn’t seem to do things with XML in an XML-ish way. Instead, it relies on a lot of awk and sed commands to query or change the XML during the validation, translation, and build processes.

I remember several years ago when I was one of the people working on the Fedora documentation tool chain, that I had initially tried doing a lot of work this same way. The downfall in that methodology is it makes assumptions about the way the input document is physically formatted, which is a huge fail when it comes to XML (as I later learned, slowly and painfully). It also makes life very hard for people who want to use your tools on their pre-existing documents. Instead, there are a large variety of ways to do these same things programmatically using XSLT. Your input document is “understood” as a set of data nodes, and can be queried, manipulated, and output in ways that are sensible.

In any case, I was pretty disappointed, and although I was initially very enthusiastic about getting our Fedora docs working using this toolchain, I’m a little less so now. I’ll probably see if I can’t pull out some specific problems and file them as bugs. That means I should probably publish a git repository of the document on which I’m working, as a sort of test for the toolchain. Hopefully I’ll get some time for that this week.

Saturday night I stayed up a bit and watched Le scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), which was simply superb. The lead, Mathieu Amalric, was great, but the actor who most surprised me was Max von Sydow as his father — phenomenal performance.

On Sunday morning Evie and I went out for some more bike riding practice. There were a couple of near-spills, but nothing too traumatic, other than the usual whining because she couldn’t immediately do it perfectly. I think it’s just a matter of a few more practices and she’ll be confident enough to start turning. By lunchtime, it was practically too hot to be out, but nevertheless I was running alongside her down the street as she went. We finished up covered with sweat, and went in to get cleaned up and have lunch.

Last night, Eleya and I watched another great film — El Orfanato (The Orphanage). It’s a Spanish language film that purports to be a horror movie, but only in the same sense as The Sixth Sense. Notably, it was produced by Guillermo del Toro, who seems to be racking up quite the résumé of tragedic horror fantasies featuring children. Well worth seeing.

Glory day.

Yesterday was a pretty good day for me, dad-wise. I took Evie to see “Wall-E,” which, as has been noted everywhere, was completely charming and wonderful. In other words, pretty much de rigeur for the wonderful folks at Pixar.

In the evening I carted her over to the Y, because their site has a great view of the fireworks happening at the nearby park, without all the attendant parking problems. Well, actually it was pretty darn crowded, but we got there very late. As a result we came to a stop alongside some already parked cars, which turned out to be a great choice.

The fireworks were loud and actually very good! Evie had a great time seeing her first “live” fireworks, and we both appreciated the loud explosions and the many interesting shapes. (I love the cubes and have been googling around trying to find out how they’re made, but I’m nearing the end of my desire to be at the keyboard today on a holiday weekend — links appreciated.)

After the fireworks ended we were able to pile back in the van and get back home in a matter of minutes. Then the wife and I unwound with a cocktail and another 40 minutes of catchup on Lost S3. Exciting day, no. But fulfilling, yes.

Master of the fantastic.

I read with great sadness that visual effects legend Stan Winston just passed away at the far too young age of 62. If you can name an amazing moment in visual effects in the movies, chances are he was either involved, did it before, or did something that showed it was possible. What a loss to cinema, the untimely death of this particular wizard.

Jeffty is five.

Cinematical reviews a portrait of one of the only writers to come out of the science fiction genre who will matter in a hundred years — Harlan Ellison, in a biopic called Dreams With Sharp Teeth. Go HE!

I met Harlan once at a book-signing and, determined not to raise his legendary ire with any controversial comments, I simply told him, absolutely truthfully, “You’ve made me laugh and cry more than any other writer whose work I’ve read.” For a moment he was actually taken aback, but graciously and somewhat sotto voce he said, “That’s one of the nicest compliments anyone’s ever paid me.”

The impish Harlan did eventually reclaim control of the host body, but in the meantime it was nice to give back a little of the joy I’d had from reading his work. I challenge you to read “The Deathbird” without a sniffle, or “The 3 Most Important Things in Life” without a snicker. By the way, he shares a birthday with my wife, so a belated happy 74th to ya, Harlan.

You need nerves of steel.

What the realtors call “foot traffic” — visitors to our house, presumably with purchasing intent — has picked up significantly in the past few weeks. In the last two weeks, we’ve had about a half-dozen visits. The feedback from the agents, where they tell you everything about your house that sucks so you can feel ashamed every time someone new comes by, has actually been extremely positive. Most of the agents don’t have anything to say except, “Beautiful house!”, which makes me wonder why none of their clients seem willing to actually follow through with an actual offer.

To make matters a little more tense, the house we really like in New Hampshire, and which has been on the market for quite a while now, just dropped its price significantly, increasing the pressure for us to sell if we actually want to buy that one in particular. This part of the process is somewhat like playing chicken, and everyone just stepped on the gas pedal a little harder. I almost wish we hadn’t seen that house back in February, which would lower my stress level somewhat.

If you know anyone looking for a house in Virginia (commuting to DC from here is not a big deal), you’ll let me know, right?

After last week’s release I took the weekend mostly off from sitting in front of the computer. I finished a book (The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldemann), played some music, picked up a few new threads, got a shave and a haircut (two bits!), and tried not to retreat to the office in the face of deadly cute wielded by my two rugrats.

Eleya and I watched Hitchcock’s 1942 flick Saboteur last night. I didn’t think much of the actors but the story wasn’t bad. The screenplay was authored in part by Dorothy Parker, but from what I could hear, it could have used a little more of her touch. Despite the strikes against it, the movie turned out to be quite good and really tense in spots. I also finished watching Gangs of New York, which Eleya picked up a few weeks ago on super-huge sale somewhere. I’d seen it a few years ago, but was reminded how excellent it was in every respect. And the closing shot of the modern New York skyline in 2001 retained every bit of its power and melancholy.

OK, break’s over — onward!

Capsules.

Rendition: Even great actors like Meryl Streep can’t save a hack, one-sided script with no room for the audience to mull over the moral and political questions it should have asked. Wishes it was In the Valley of Elah; waste of time.

Margot at the Wedding: Superb character study piece, but will try the patience of those who either don’t do a lot of indie, or aren’t related to a therapist. Tends to navel-gaze; use sparingly.

Se, Jie (Lust, Caution): Made up for both of the others, living up to the Ang Lee tradition — that is, the film equivalent of fine, dark chocolate. Explicit content means don’t invite parents to a viewing; stately, measured, and sublime.

Real life continues unabated.

This weekend was as good a time as any to take a step back from work for a bit, so I might as well wrap up some non-Fedora things I’ve been doing lately — less accomplishments than enjoyments, really.

I got some reading done for pleasure, including one of Alan Moore’s latest latest works. Eleya and I also sadly bade farewell to our favorite regular comic that came to a glorious and touching end this past month, Y: The Last Man. Apparently some group of Hollywood-based mental midgets is trying to make this into a film; let’s all hope no one at that particular meeting is high enough to actually greenlight it. Need I mention LXG? I didn’t think so.

I also saw a couple of good movies with family members — Enchanted with my daughter, an irresistibly sweet movie about making your own happy ending, and (violent mood swing!) In the Valley of Elah with my wife, a moving and bitter elegy about the cost of war that, stacked up with No Country for Old Men, probably had Daniel Day-Lewis wondering if he should bother writing notes for an Oscar acceptance speech in the face of these towering performances from Tommy Lee Jones.

Evie turned seven on Thursday, and among other gifts we got our little shutterbug a 7MP camera of her very own. That’s turned out to be a mixed blessing, as she is always sneaking up to take pictures when one is not looking one’s best, such as on Easter weekend, lazing on the couch with a three-day growth of whiskers reading all sorts of mind-rotting comic books. But this is the pain one must suffer when trying to raise the next P. T. Anderson.

We also showed the house once this weekend — disappointed it wasn’t more — and, to allow for future showings without the carpets sporting tufts of dog hair the size of guinea pigs, got the dog an appointment at the groomer down the street. We had a nice family stroll to pick her up on Friday, with delightful springlike weather that it seems is going to return for most of next week. That should make it easy for me to start taking some lunchtime walks of my own, to get away from the computer for long enough to burn a few calories.

Time to sign off; Eleya and I are going to suck the marrow from the last of the weekend’s bones by watching Rendition, a heartwarming tale about — oh, wait, that’s not it at all. Nope, more high drama, tears, and deep social meaning, and nary an explosion to be seen, I’m betting. TTFN.