While in Austin this weekend I watched a few movies and read a comic. Let’s take a look. But before we do I think I need to make a statement about the movies, books and &c. that I talk about on my blog.

If you’ve been reading my this page for any amount of time you’ve probably noticed that I pretty much like everything I talk about on here. I’m always recommending something,  talking about how much I enjoyed something, or demanding you read something, or whatever. This might make it seem like I like just about everything and that you should ignore any suggestions I make because hey what’s the point if I like everything, right? Well, that’s not really true. The fact of the matter is I’m kind of an asshole about the things I like. I’m legendarily picky and kind of a snob when it comes to things like books and movies and music. The reason why I’m so generally positive on this site is because, well, I pretty much only write about the things I like. It would be really easy for me to primarily write about all stuff I hate, but someone else I know is already doing that and doing a better job than I could anyways. So while I’m sure to bitch about things from time to time usually when I’m going to talk about entertainment in one way or the other, it’s going to be positive. Anyways.

Happy Times by Yimou Zhang. Zhang is a pretty well known director nowadays for movies like House of Flying Daggers, Hero, and Curse of the Golden Flower. While I’m a pretty big fan of these, his best movie (that I’ve seen) is Raise the Red Lantern - a film so far away from kung-fuing and swording and daggering and flipping that the only way you could even start to guess that it’s the same director is the incredible (albeit much more subtle than his more recent stuff) cinematography. When I heard he made a comedy movie about eight years ago I knew it had to be the next on my list for me to see. The story starts out being pretty funny, but by the time it ends it’s much closer to sad than amusing. Describing it as bittersweet is probably overstating its sweetness, but it is there. It’s a good little movie and I’m glad I watched it.

Lake of Fire is a documentary about abortion by Tony Kaye (American History X). The movie is long – about two and a half hours – and NOT for the squeamish. Both sides of the issue are covered with a few mediating voices in between. It’s fair, disturbing, enlightening, and not easy to forget. If you’re undecided on the issue I recommend it. If you’re already solid on one side or the other I highly recommend it. It didn’t change where I stand on the issue, but it made me think a lot about it.

I read Good-Bye, Chunky Rice by Craig Thompson. It’s a sad comic about moving on in your life even when you’re not sure where you’re moving on to or exactly why you’re doing it. It’s about friends and the impact people have on each other before and after they’re out of each other’s lives and how there really is no such thing as “out of each other’s lives.” To make this a short review, the book is striking and brilliant and haunting, but in a non creepy way.

At the end of the weekend I realized that pretty much everything I read and watched was, at least to an extent, fairly depressing. If you decide to go after any of this stuff, I suggest spreading it out a bit.

Also of interest, Derrick pointed out to me that Google just announced a new web browser called Google Chrome. It sounds pretty promising, as outlined in this comic by Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics fame. Who knows if the final product is going to be any good, but I’ll be right there to mess around with it as soon as the beta comes out.

UPDATE: The beta for Google Chrome was just released and I’ve got to say… it’s pretty sweet. It’s faster, the interface is nice and logical and everything feels really open. There are some weird things about it and I do miss a few of my Firefox plug-ins, but hopefully with time people will make versions of those for Chrome. Check it out. I’ll have to play with it more before I decide if I’m switching permanitely, but so far it’s looking good. If you try it out let me know what you think.

Also not of interest, for some reason every time I write “each other” I want to write “eachother” like it’s one long word. It’s annoying and if you search the archives I’d be shocked if you didn’t find more than a few examples of this misspelling. Maybe someday the powers that be will decide that English should evolve (laterally in this case) and “eachother” is how the word(s) is/are to be written, but not now. Not today.