#2,077: Gone Girl

This week, the reviews are pretty low on critical thinking. I'd apologize for that, but I'm too thoroughly employed to do anything about anything at the moment.

Devil in a Blue Dress - ★★★½☆
A fun companion to a recent run of movie club movies that included LA Confidential, The Long Goodbye, and Changeling. Good movie. Bad title. Makes me want to start a letterboxd list called "We were SURE this was gonna be a franchise!"

The Drop - ★★★½☆
Went into this one cold. It's pretty good! Pleasantly surprised to see it's written by Dennis Lehane. My favorite thing about Hardy and Rapace are that I don't really know what they look like yet, so I don't have to spend the first twenty minutes of the movie waiting for the character to take over in my head from the big star. (Ahem, Devil in a Blue Dress, ahem.) Movies like this are tough to give a score though, because while I liked it, have no real complaints, and would recommend this movie to YOU, I don't think I will ever want to see it again.

L.A. Confidential - ★★★½☆
I think all I knew about this movie was the clip shown on the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Vice Presidential Command Performance Academy of Robots' Choice Awards Preview Special, so I thought it was going to be a lot of boring standing around and saying cryptic things with Kim Basinger, who turns out to be in this movie about as much as Danny DiVito is in the poster.

Instead, I liked La Confidentiál, and that I'm glad it was made in the 90s so that it didn't turn out to be Gangster Squad, which I have not seen but I'm willing to assume puts more emphasis on speed ramping the camera than an intriguing plot. I look forward to seeing that movie in 2029 and coming back to write about how wrong I turned out to be.

Gone Girl - ★★★★★
My experience with this movie is similar to Inception, in that I liked it, I'm glad I saw it very close to release day, and I dread most of the inevitable internet conversation to follow.

I didn't know anything about Gone Girl until a week or two ago when my twitter feed started to bubble over with equal excitement for the director, Fincher, and the editing system used, Adobe Premiere. That's probably because of how much I've cut down on reading movie news blogs. If the result of that choice is movies like these popping up out of nowhere and being great, then it was an excellent choice.

Relatively Prime, Series 2!

My friend Sam is the world's foremost mathematical podcaster. He's done math news shows, math chat shows, mathematician interview shows, a show about cult movies that might not have all that much math in it really, and perhaps most notably a lovely and lively series of math radio documentaries called RELATIVELY PRIME.

Well, it turns out that Samuel wants to do more math podcasting. Sam is a math guy in a much bigger way than he's a video guy, but I'm a video guy, so he asked me to shoot his kickstarter video. I did want to help him, but what I didn't want to do was go to Wisconsin, so we made a cartoon instead.

Sam says he likes this video and I hope everyone else on the internet does too, so that he can raise all that money he needs. You can help him out by visiting his kickstarter today. And everyday.

#2,073: The Unbelievers

American Psycho - ★★★☆☆
I hadn't seen this for at least a decade. I'm not sure there's a lot more to it than I remembered, or than people love to write about on their blogs every now and then. Christian Bale has excellent elocution. His diction and intonation are what I suspect people really like about this movie, if all people who like things about this movie are me.

Lilo & Stitch - ★★★★★
Man, this is just great. The way some people feel about Glengarry Glen Ross and The Aviator, I think I could go on about Lilo & Stitch. Lots of great lines and moments. A sense of things going on outside of the frame. A little darker or odder than I think you'd think a potential 'Disney Classic' might be. I missed this movie.

Justice League: The New Frontier - ★★½☆☆
Watched on the suggestion of a friend who considers this (and the books it's based on) to be the definitive version of the JLA. While it is a really solid take on the origin of the team and some of its members, it's still yet another origin story, and one I'm tired of hearing.

The Unbelievers - ★★☆☆☆
I see what the subjects of this movie are trying to say, but I don't see what this movie is trying to say. The movie doesn't make a case for atheism; if anything, it makes a case that Krauss and Dawkins need a vacation. I thought we might be getting a LET AMERICA LAUGH type doc, showing them dealing with people they met on tour, but it's not that. It's more like a video yearbook of the fact that there was a tour; a sales pitch video for their speaking agents to use.

Don't miss the credits, which contain a trailer's worth of footage from a more interesting documentary.

MPU Live: Taking Obsequiousness to New Unplumbed Depths

I'm ever-so-briefly mentioned in this month's Mac Power Users Live with two tips on presentations.

The first, as covered in my Nintendo e3 post, is to remind you turn off your system noises and so forth before a presentation.

The second, as a stand-up, I encourage you to take a pause instead of um-ing and ah-ing on stage. A brief pause is always shorter than you think it is, and almost always looks deliberate.

Media Monday

- Hoplite - ★★★★☆
Technically, I have won this game, but there's a lot of challenges and achievements and stuff so it doesn't feel beaten. It will live on in my iPad. I'm pretty sure this isn't "roguelike." Which is good. For me.

- Star Wars: Cantina - ★★☆☆☆
I've been cleaning out my phone, cluttered with unused and unloved apps. This was a little diner dash-type game with Star Wars-themed patrons. The whole thing's like half an hour long, and hasn't yet been updated for iOS 6. Anyway, it's been deleted now.

- Tomb Raider - ★★★★☆
My first Tomb Raider game ever, thanks to PS+. This one is basically Uncharted. Often I have this joke (or not-joke) where I feel like maybe I'm not the good guy in a game where I'm slaughtering a film crew's worth of people, but Lara seemed like a total maniac in this thing. If you play it for stealth, she's killing possibly helpful people without ever talking to them, but since she appeared to me as a bloodthirsty monster, and maybe an unreliable narrator, I took no opportunity for stealth. 87% collection.