So Cold Case just ... stopped. Apparently they ran season 7, it
didn't exactly light up the world, and they cancelled without any
further shows, so there's no end-of-series finale - it just kinda
grinds to a halt with a bunch of stuff left up in the
air. Disappointing. To be honest, the last season actually felt
like they were driving towards a series finale, so I was a bit
surprised when it didn't show up.
July 27
Ah, so much better. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Conduct
is another excellent delivery from Guy Ritchie with all the
trademark grim humour you'd expect. It's based loosely on
a true story, I presume because the true story is a little too
dull to use by itself - possibly even too short to make a
decent feature film.
Had my recurring round of "let's fight with zwave". At least now I
know how to reliably make the Popp TRVs come back from the dead,
but I have an Aeotec TRV which seems happy to report its condition
and temperature, but won't say a word about the state of the
battery and seems disinclined to respond to reconfiguration
requests, either. I have no idea.
July 26
Ugh, another stinker. All the best bits of Infinite
were in the trailer, and it was a short trailer. I chose to
interpret Mark Wahlberg's sarcastic attitude/delivery as a
reflection on what his movie career has come to, rather than an
in-character thing.
July 21
Trying to rip a DVD wherein I need to capture the chapters as
individual files, but doing so in such a way as to make this
repeatable for other titles without having to manually handle all
of them...
July 20
We had an Internet Celebrity (early Web era) in the house.
July 19
The Golden Child
has aged remarkably well. There's one questionable joke that's a
throwaway at the end of a scene, there's a totally necessary to
the plot dousing of clothing with water so it becomes sheer,
and there's a dubious bit of ground around consent, but for the
most part it's pretty damned good. Not dissimilar to last week's
80's movie in as much as the ostensible sidekick is more of a hero
than the lead, although it's less emphasised here. Sure, the
stop-motion demon is a bit hokey, but the stop-motion Pepsi Can
definitely makes up for it.
July 13
I don't think I've watched Big Trouble In Little China
since I bought the DVD, and I'm not even sure why I bought the
DVD; maybe it was on sale somewhere? Anyway, goofy movie, cheesy
effects, more ham than a pork buffet. Subversive in as much as a
the All-American meathead isn't actually the hero, the short asian
guy is, although apparently the studio couldn't quite grasp this
concept and asked for the bizarre opening scene which more or
less explicitly tells you who the hero is.
July 12
Babylon:
what the hell did I just watch, and can I undo somehow? I have no
idea what this was trying to be but it mostly seems to be a waste
of three hours with the odd laugh and the occasional bit of good
music.
July 7
Virgin Media decided I didn't need at least some of my Internet
access today; it seemed from casual inspection to possibly be
Cloudflare-connected sites, but I also lost the ability to connect
to my home network from the outside, which was mildly
annoying. Maybe it's time I finally set up some sort of
firewall/NAT-climbining VPN.
Revised assessment of DVD tools:
mplayer recognises 9 subtitle streams in this disc, but only
copies one of them, and strips all the language tags from the
output.
ffpeg can't cope with this disc at all, turning a
2-hour movie into a 5-minute track. But at least it detects all
the subtitle streams...
I can reproduce the ffmpeg behaviour in
mplayer by using dvdnav://1 instead of
dvd://1 which should tell me something except
I've no idea what.
It's possible that I may get better results from
mencoder or also from just giving up on this disc entirely.
July 6
Making use of the DVD Archive! We watched Johnny Mnemonic
(the Japanese edit, for that is what I own) and I forgot that
there are a few bits of unsubtitled Japanese dialogue in it, but
nothing you couldn't figure out from context or that necessarily
affected the storyline. I have the Japanese edit because I read an
interview with Gibson some time after I'd seen some other
(international? American?) edit and thought it wasn't bad; in the
interview, Gibson talked about the push-pull with the studio and
how the end result was a Sony movie, not a William Gibson movie,
and how the Japanese edit was the closest to what he intended. I
don't know, at this point, what the actual differences were, but I
immediately popped open Amazon Japan and ordered the movie. What I
like about this movie is that for me, at least, it really captures
what Gibson wrote about the Matrix (no, not the Watchowski one) in
visual format without losing much, or anything in the process. The
intercuts between Johnny wearing his goofy datagloves and visor
(check Dina Meyer, in character or not, mocking the gloves), and
the VR view, really gels with the whole "cyberdeck cowboy" routine
in the Sprawl stories. I particularly liked how the act of hacking
something, or even pulling data from something, was characterised
by physical movements, some of which seemed to almost map directly
to bits from random Gibson stories. Pulling in the bridge from All
Tomorrow's Parties et. al as the home of the LoTeks is a bold
move, but it works; Dolph Lundgren's preacher character, not so
much. (I have no idea what that was about.) Overall this is still
a bit of a rough movie, but I do like it.
July 5
Busy week at work, so further investigation of Dealing With
Awkward DVDs was limited, but I've got this far:
mplayer -dumpstream can rip things that ffmpeg
can't. That's annoying.
mplayer -dumpstream either has no useful controls
over what it dumps, or has terrible documentation, or both. That's
annoying.
mplayer -dumpstream appears to only dump one of the
subtitle streams orffprobe is lying to me. I
actually suspect the latter. Both of those are
annoying.
ffmpeg -metadata does not seem to be able to tag the
subtitle streams with a language. It tags the audio streams just
fine. That is, you guessed it, annoying.
Changing Lanes
was ok. I recall seeing the trailers for this, possibly in the
cinema, but it took me more than 20 years to actually get around
to watching it. Ben Affleck's change of heart seems... somewhat
contrived, and William Hurt is... I don't know what William Hurt
is even doing in this movie.