Foreign Films and me
The PAL converting DVD player that I bought and which may or may not be in violation of 17 USC 1201 arrived last weekend. I used it watch Fistful of Dynamite in the way that the director intended: restored to include scenes with quotes from Mao and some guy pissing on some ants, titled as Duck You Sucker, and dubbed into English. Some of the scenes with faster or more continuous movement had a spot where the film seemed to jerk, which I guess is because of the conversion. Assuming that the conversion chip uses the same framerate conversion method I had planned to use in http://wiki.burdell.org/wiki/PAL_to_NTSC, the thing’s going to have to clone a frame eventually. It’s not bad enough to be irksome, so I win, Europe. Maybe now I should try finding out what other exclusive works they offer so I can justify having bought a new DVD player for the sake of one movie.
As for the movie itself, it was a lot different than what I expected. Sergio Leone, through the symbolism of Once Upon a Time in the West, had declared this movie frontier dead by the time he made Fistful of Dynamite, and, though it was still another movie set in the West (well, western Mexico), it had a much different tone. Conflicts were set on a societal level instead of a personal one, and it had a sometimes more comic feel to it than the Clint Eastwood movies, when the humor wasn’t overshadowed by class warfare and revolution. Wikipedia says that it was also a criticism of the “Zapata Western” of the early seventies, which I can see, and of Jean-Luc Goddard, which I think someone just made up. Regardless, the fact that someone can relate such a baseless statement to this movie is good enough for me (blah blah, je suis disaffected).
In other news, some dudes in England tried to mail a hamster. The thing I find interesting about this article is not so much the story itself, but its digression into competing mail services for England. How many competing services can England support? Looking at a map, I’d estimate that the island is about 600 miles or so from tip to toe. The CIA World Factbook describes it as “slightly smaller than Oregon”, which is a state. I don’t know what sorts of shortcomings people face with the Royal (hehe! monarchy) Mail, but I’m pretty sure that if your package is that important, you could just take a weekend and drive it over.