Musical distractions

One of my favorite tracks on my iPod right now is “All Around” from the new Jel album, “Soft Money”. As it turns out, Jel’s official website has made this track available to download for free.

Got your headphones ready? jel-allaround.mp3 [4.6MB]

Man, that’s addictive. By the way, that’s Steffi Böhm of Ms. John Soda doing the vocals. If you dig this stuff, you’ll probably like Lali Puna as well [Flash, sound].

Ooh, tangent: you can hear the wonderful title track of Lali Puna’s “Faking the Books” during this fun slideshow of their Japan tour [more Flash].

Jel probably fits into the category of “instrumental hip-hop”. For more in the genre, take a look at RJD2.

As for the Jel album itself: “All Around” is outstanding, but the rest of the tracks don’t quite stack up (some may disagree with me on this one). Still, it’s definitely worth a listen.

2005 in Review: Movies

Better late than never, I guess.
My top 20 DVD rentals, festival screenings and theatrical releases of 2005:

• Beyond Our Ken (Hong Kong 2004)
• The Boys of Baraka (USA 2005)
• Broken Wings (Israel 2002)
• Brothers (Denmark 2004)
• City of God (Brazil/France/USA 2002)
• Comrades: Almost a Love Story (Hong Kong 1996)
• Czech Dream (Czech Republic 2004)
• Duck Season (Mexico 2004)
• Hana & Alice (Japan 2004)
• The Holy Girl (Argentina/Italy/Netherlands/Spain 2004)
• Ikiru (Japan 1952)
• Infernal Affairs (Hong Kong 2002)
• Linda Linda Linda (Japan 2005)
• Maria Full of Grace (USA/Colombia 2004)
• Millennium Mambo (Taiwan/France 2001)
• Shake Hands with the Devil (Canada 2004)
• Tempus Fugit (Spain 2003)
• To Live (China/Hong Kong 1994)
• 20:30:40 (Taiwan 2004)
• The Twighlight Samurai (Japan 2002)
• Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit (UK 2005)

Great new music

Here are some recent CD purchases that I am enjoying.
All are highly recommended. Take a listen.

• Devics: Push the Heart
  Reviews: Metacritic (68/100)

• B. Fleischmann: Welcome Tourist
  Reviews: Pitchfork (6.8/10) | TMT (4/5)

• His Name Is Alive: Detrola
  Reviews: Metacritic (75/100)

• Milosh: Meme
  

• Mogwai: Mr. Beast
  Reviews: Metacritic (76/100)

• My Little Airport: 只因當時太緊張
  Reviews: TMT (4/5)

• Erlend Øye: Unrest
  Reviews: Metacritic (74/100)

• Polmo Polpo: Kiss Me Again and Again
  Reviews: Almost Cool (8/10)

• Proem: Socially Inept
  

• Ulrich Schnauss: Far Away Trains Passing By
  Reviews: Pitchfork (6.9/10) | TMT (4.5/5)

So you want to learn Japanese?

As if learning the language wasn’t hard enough, Japanese classes in America tend to attract the kind of student who makes you wish that a large comet would strike the earth. There are a few basic type of students that you’ll always find yourself running into. These include The Anime Freak, The Know It All, and the Deer Caught In Headlights.

This essay is hilarious.

United.com hates my computer

The United Airlines web site in general drives me nuts. The navigation is terrible, pages load slowly, and I can never find the flights I want. But this latest problem takes the cake: the entire site just doesn’t work, period. Well, sometimes it works. It’s a little complicated.

I’ve run into this problem again and again over the past couple weeks. Yesterday afternoon, for example, whenever I would try to log in with my Mileage Plus number and password, Safari would complain “cannot connect to server”. But the weird thing is that it was only my computer. On Richa’s computer the site worked fine. Why would only my computer fail to connect to this one particular web site? Switching to Firefox didn’t help. Restarting didn’t help. It made absolutely no sense.

Last night after some experimenting I discovered the cause. Safari would not connect to the server www.ua2go.com. Running “host” on the command line reveals a DNS problem. The host name resolves to two different IP addresses seemingly at random:

% host www.ua2go.com
www.ua2go.com has address 209.87.112.41
% host www.ua2go.com
www.ua2go.com has address 209.87.113.93


So when my browser tries to connect to www.ua2go.com, it looks for the corresponding numerical address and gets one of these two at random. Thanks to some caching by the operating system and web browser itself, this numerical address then sticks around for a while.

To make a long story short: one of these numerical addresses points to the correct server. The other address is wrong (perhaps an old server United migrated away from a few weeks back). By luck of the draw, my computer had referenced the bad address, cached it, and could not connect. Richa’s computer got the good address.

It’s hard to tell who is at fault here. As much as I’d like to blame United, I’m guessing it’s Comcast, my ISP. Comcast in fact has a history of DNS problems. A quick call to Comcast went nowhere: the rep actually tried to blame Apple for the DNS issue (“we don’t really know how to support Macs”, he said).

Arrrgh.

I guess I’ll just manually set the correct IP address in my /etc/hosts file and be done with it.

Sundance buys the Kabuki

This looks promising: Sundance Cinemas buys the Kabuki 8 theatres. The Kabuki here in San Francisco does an excellent job of hosting the major annual film festivals, including SFIFF and SFIAAFF. The acquisition by Sundance should bring even more independent films and events to San Francisco, plus give a nice renovation to the somewhat dull Japantown complex. Sounds good to me.

I picked up this story from SF360.org, a new site launched last month to promote film and media events in the Bay Area. It’s worth checking out. The feature articles are nicely written, and several interesting RSS feeds are available.

Millennium Mambo region 2 PAL

Something unexpected arrived in the mail today: the French release of Millennium Mambo, delivered from Amazon.fr two weeks early. Millennium Mambo was one of my favorite Netflix rentals last year. It’s directed by Hou Hsiao Hsien, who also directed Cafe Lumiere, another personal favorite that was shown during SFIAAFF2006.

Unfortunately the picture quality of the U.S. DVD release is very poor, so bad that it almost ruined my viewing experience. I decided to go with the French version after reading this comprehensive side by side comparison.

Today I am happy to report that the region 2 PAL disc works flawlessly in my new Oppo DVD player. Not only does the Oppo bypass the region restriction, but it successfully converts the PAL image to my NTSC display. And the picture quality is nothing short of amazing.

Count me as a very satisfied customer. :-D

SFIAAFF 2006 in review

I mentioned this in my previous post, but let me say it again: the 2006 San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival (SFIAAFF) was fantastic. This is quickly becoming my favorite festival primarily because of the excellent programming. The events this year seemed larger, flashier, and better organized; the movies, on the whole, were excellent.

I’ve written up some quick reviews on the feature length screenings I attended. But first, here’s an explanation of the rating system:

• ★ – Terrible.
• ★★ – Bad, but has some saving graces.
• ★★★ – Entertaining.
• ★★★★ – Worth buying the DVD.
• ★★★★★ – An all-time favorite.

And without further ado, the reviews:

Linda Linda Linda
This is a true crowd pleaser, and was my favorite screening of the festival. The deadpan humor is great, direction and photography are top notch, and the music will be stuck in your head for weeks. It’s not perfect: the acting from the young supporting cast is a little uneven, and the pacing of the first half hour is awkward. Still, this movie is easy to recommend and stands up well to multiple viewings. Please, someone release an English-subtitled DVD! ★★★★/5

Cafe Lumiere
How can such a simple movie be so compelling? You could argue that nothing really happens: we see long takes of trains, mundane activities, and more trains, usually from the perspective of a stationary camera. Yet somehow we become attached to the characters, and the movie as a whole is both relaxing and deeply satisfying. The sights and sounds of modern life in Tokyo are beautifully captured. Surprisingly, a domestic DVD release is already available. ★★★★/5

Grain In Ear
This is a very bleak, minimal movie (almost no dialogue), but captivating. It’s emotionally powerful without seeming overtly manipulative, the photography is amazing, and the ending sequence is especially haunting. Refreshing bits of humor are sprinkled in for good measure. Some of the plot devices are a tad gimmicky, but I’ll let that slide. A unique and enjoyable experience, despite the depressing subject matter. ★★★★/5

Letter From An Unknown Woman
I really want to love this movie. The photography is stunning and the acting is solid. But despite the eye candy and a very strong start, there simply isn’t enough of a story to keep it interesting. Nor do I like the omnipresent narrator explaining the character’s motivations. Can we just let the pretty pictures speak for themselves? ★★★/5

Be With Me
This was the only big disappointment of the festival. I’ll give the director some points for originality: in one story arc, he avoids spoken dialog and substitutes close-ups of text messages on mobile phones, interspersed with obnoxious pop songs. In another, he combines fictional characters with documentary. But the end result simply doesn’t work as a movie. This is “challenging” cinema, to put it nicely. ★★/5

Also check out Richa’s reviews of the festival for an alternate take. I think we agreed for the most part.