Ignorance and Taste: Catching Up on Links

How ignorant are you? Cinemarati recently asked its readers:
“What’s your big, embarrassing, Never-Seen-It movie?”
To help you out, you can use this tool to track your viewing history against the Internet Movie Database’s “top 250” list. (My list.) My guilty admission is that I’ve yet to see Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu (The Rules of the Game) despite its reputation.

At Slate, rather than mocking people for movies they haven’t seen, Sam Anderson judges his friends by what they want to see. What does your Netflix queue say about you?

Slate also asks: How accurately can we predict what music you will like based on what you do like?

To the surprise of no one, the long-awaited DVD release of the original Star Wars trilogy in its theatrical presentation has drawn some harsh reactions:
“There’s absolutely no reason Lucas can’t do better.”
But did he want to? It seems obvious to me that Lucas wants the public to shut the fuck up about the changes he made to the movies, and toward that end he’s released the unmodified theatrical versions. He wants people to realize that not all the alterations have been evil — sound-mix improvements, special-effects cleanups, etc. He gave fans what they asked for, and now they want more? The reality is that they want some hybrid between the original versions and the current “special editions”; they want the technical improvements but no content changes. But that’s not what they demanded.

Although I’m a regular NPR listener, I didn’t realize that it was offering some shows in its concert series as free downloads. Last month’s Sleater-Kinney performance sounded sloppy and uninspired to me, but the Neko Case showcase from April captures her gift well. The live versions of these songs aren’t much different from studio cuts, but they show that her powerful instrument doesn’t rely on multiple takes. The woman sings her heart out. The only downside to the presentation is that the entire concert is posted as a single file. Fortunately, So Much Silence has posted the show song-by-song in three posts. (But you miss the R. Kelly banter.)

Hey! More live public-radio Neko (plus Cat Power), with files provided by Kwaya Na Kisser.

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