The Miracle of Teh Intarweebs
Posted on September 4, 2006 Posted by John Scalzi 22 Comments
This is how it is: Somewhere on my desk is the DVD of the film Lucky Number Slevin, which I am writing up a review of now (verdict: eh, Tanantino-ish. What ya gonna do). I need to remind myself of the DVD extras, but my desk is a mess and dragging out the DVD would require digging. So I go online and find the listing of the DVD extras because going online and getting the information is easier than looking for it on my desk.
Honestly, shoot me now.
Oooh boy. I don’t know how to feel about that. Pathetic or not?
What I do know is I’d probably do the same thing.
I think it says more about your habbits of organization than it does the miracles of the intarweb.
How’s this for a one-up — I’ve used teh interwebs for the correct name and/or title of a book that I could see from my desk but couldn’t quite read the spine of well enough to fully trust, simply because I lacked the energy to, you know, get out of my chair to check. Sad.
From Joel Spolsky:
We’ve got a ton of books in the Fog Creek library, in no particular order, and it’s gotten to the point where it’s actually easier to order a new copy of a book from Amazon than to find a book we already have!
I’ve heard so many films described as being “Tanantino-ish,” I hope you’ll find a way around that.
Anyway I didn’t find anything in the movie particularly Tarantiono-ish.
Actually, I wallow in the phrase in the review. I thought the dialog and the framing style were all very much in that idiom. There are, of course, worse things. It it’s rather better than, say, Killing Zoe.
Oh. Well. If it’s better than that cinematic masterpiece, I must race right out and rent it.
Given the state your desk is often in, this probably was a better use of your time. ;)
Yesterday I went to DirectTV’s website to see what time a baseball game was going to be on rather than standing up and walking around the coffee table to grab the remote and hit the ‘guide’ button. Yeah, I’ve got a problem.
The movie isn’t fresh on my mind, so I’m having trouble recalling the details.
I can agree with you about the dialogue, and a lot of the content — like mobsters dragging a guy from city block to city block wearing only a towel — was Tarantino-ish I suppose. Also the scene where the Jewish mob boss pulls a sawed off shotgun out from under his desk — that stark contrast between normal life and criminal life.
I disagree about the framing though. Tarantino’s adventurous when it comes to his style of shooting, so he’s covered a lot of angles, and for this reason a lot of directors get compared to him when they’re trying to mix things up a little. For some people, Tarantino-ish is almost synonymous with “unique” or “creative,” and if I were a director, that’d get on my nerves fast.
And Tarantino’s popular, so his style is going to be popularized. He’s lost his side-stream status in my mind. Sooner or later, Tarantino-ish will just be another vaguary. It’ll mean as much to people as ‘Spielbergian,’ if that had ever been a real phrase.
You can probably get away with it for another article though.
At first, I skimmed this post, and got impression that you couldn’t find the DVD you were supposed to watch, which was somewhere on your desk. So you just went online, managed to find a downloadable version, and watched it that way.
Between my just-waking-up logic and pictures I’ve seen of your desk, this seemed viable.
Lars:
“You can probably get away with it for another article though.”
And I did!
Ironically, the person who isn’t doing “Spielbergian” stuff so much anymore is Spielberg himself.
Well, maybe The Terminal.
…yeah, that’s almost as bad as the time I used Amazon’s “look inside” deal because I didn’t feel like flipping to the front of a book that was sitting in my lap.
Good times.
I habitually search my personal technical book database to find out whether I own a book, rather than turning around to look in my office book shelves.
I eagerly look forward to the day when, upon misplacing my keys, I can simply google them.
Google in 20 Years.
If I may offer a lurker’s opinion, Lucky Number Slevin was one of those movies which must have sounded great at some cocktail party with neurons saturated in THC, ethanol, and mild hallucinogens: “Let’s have a Jewish mob and a Black mob duke it out like the Montagues and Capulets, and we’ll cast Morgan Freeman as the stoic Black boss and the austere Ben Kingsley as the Jewish one. Oh, and for suspense, we’ll have Bruce Willis come in and kick some major arse.”
Lucy Liu of course is smiling in on the conversation, eyes twinkling, and the guy whose idea this was says to her, unable to resist her charms, “My dear, you can be in the film too.”
Personally, I thought the idea was great, but completely flawed in execution. The movie had a claustrophobic feel, which, if intentional, only served to make me feel very uncomfortable. I kept feeling that the tension was one notch too low, and when all was revealed at the end, well, I just didn’t care anymore, plastic bags or not.
But, your mileage may vary.
Bang. *g*
But won’t you still have to find the actual DVD to watch these special features for your review?
Jon:
I watch them but unless they are particularly special, I usually don’t do more than list them. By and large most DVDs come with the standard issue suite of “commentary, alternate/deleted scenes and ‘making of'” featurette, and I don’t really have the space to note them all. If a feature is truly notable I’ll mention it; for example, Final Destination 3 had a feature that lets you kill off cast members at your whim. That was worth noting. In the case of Slevin I needed to make sure I wasn’t missing anything off the special features menu.
My favorite interweb moment: checking weather.com, rather than looking out the window, to see if it’s raining before heading out for lunch…
I think we have the makings of the next generation of Jerry Seinfeld…
Damn, Karen Miller beat me to it. Oh, well . . .
Bang.
Your desk is a MESS?
How’d that happen?
Adding to the confessions…
Ordering pizza for delivery via the internet. From my laptop, when I was in the kitchen.
sigh…