the tweney review

Only a few days late here.

She was born in the Midwest in 1933, when her dad earned $12 a week and movies cost a dime. It was the Depression, but she didn’t know it. …

My mother used to sit in the den of our house in the San Fernando Valley chain-smoking Kents and reading the L.A. Times. …

When I was a little kid growing up in Queens, N.Y., my mother spent a half hour a day standing on her head. …

In November 1972, my mother bit the nose off Richard Nixon. …

These and a dozen other Mother’s Day stories, by SF Chronicle staff writers, make for some damn good reading.

According to the editors of Analog, circa 1984.

Lee H. Pappas: Star Raiders Commander Level: Star Commander Class I, no shields used the entire game, 54 Zylons destroyed. April 20th, 1984. That’s it, that’s all.

Twenty years from now, will people be laughing about Mobile just as much as we are laughing at Analog? God, I hope not. But I suspect they might be.

Entertaining toys for anyone who might be contemplating a new child in the near future (and I know a few of you):

Baby Name Wizard’s Name Voyager is an amazingly entertaining Java app that lets you see how the popularity of various first names has changed over the decades. When I first found out about this site, I — and three other officemates — spent a good 20 minutes just playing with it, throwing different names out at each other.

And Behind the Name provides decent etymologies and information on those names.

A few years ago I was working on a story about copyright law for a magazine. For a factoid in that story, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what proportion of the film industry’s revenues come from theater showings vs. video rentals. I wasn’t ever able to find a definitive answer, although it was pretty clear that video rentals have surpassed theater revenues for at least a decade. The point is significant, because when videotape technology first hit the consumer market, the movie industry freaked out — Jack Valenti, president of the MPAA, famously compared videotapes to the Boston Strangler, because of their ability to copy movies — and yet here they are, twenty years later, making serious buckets of money from the technology they opposed.

Well, thanks to a guy named Edward Jay Epstein, there’s a nice chart showing where the money comes from. In 2003, theater ticket sales were $7.48 billion and video/DVD revenues $18.9 billion — more than twice as much. That’s some serious change. (via BoingBoing)

It’s not often that people who love and want to preserve wild land and wild species get to enjoy unmitigated good news. Every battle won is only a temporary win, while battles lost are permanent failures. Today’s wildlife preserve might be tomorrow’s oil field, but a housing development is never going to turn back into a habitat.

That’s why I’ve been savoring last week’s announcement (with video) that ivory-billed woodpeckers have been seen, heard, and videotaped in the eastern Arkansas swamps. The last time anyone saw one, for sure, was in 1944 — which means the bird has been gone, and thought extinct, for longer than most of us have been alive. And then, suddenly, there it is, winging around in a remote swamp. The news seems so unexpected and so incredible that I’ve had trouble believing it–much as my great-grandmother doubted the moon landing, figuring that it was all a Hollywood stage production–and, strangely, the pictures that get beamed back every week from Cassini seem more real to me even now.

There’s no telling how many ivory-bills there are left, and the awful thing may be that that the bird could still disappear, for a second time, and this time forever. But for now, at least, the bird–a huge, beautiful woodpecker with a wingspan of 30 inches–is back.

I wonder if it has to take time-outs when it malfunctions?

Japan Today - News - Sony’s Qrio robot attending nursery school in California

While the children were at first apprehensive about Qrio, they now dance with it and help it get up when it falls. “The children think of Qrio as a feeble younger brother,” researcher Fumihide Tanaka said.

Robert Rodriguez’s inspiring 1995 book, Rebel Without A Crew, makes a convincing case that anyone can make movies–all you need is chutzpah, a few friends, and the ability to previsualize the entire movie in your head, so you can do everything in one or two takes and edit it together in a few weeks by yourself. It’s a surprisingly great read, and even when he’s going on about all the successes that rained down on his head after Columbia picked up El Mariachi in 1992, he’s still engaging and mostly likeable.

So I finally decided to watch El Mariachi this weekend. Short version: Knowing that it was shot and edited for $7,000 adds a lot to one’s enjoyment of the movie; it looks like it cost at least $50,000, as KJ put it. It’s clearly a brilliant debut, but it has rough edges and it drags in parts (strange, for a movie that is paced so quickly, jumping from shot to shot every few seconds). The DVD is terrible–it’s cropped in too closely, so it’s always cutting off extreme closeups at the actors’ upper lips, so you can’t see their mouths. (We spent half the movie wondering if this was just some crazy camera technique Rodriguez invented — the ultra-extreme closeup?) The colors are muted and muddy, which is a shame, since one of the added features shows clips from Rodriguez’s original videotape, and it’s a lot clearer and brighter than the DVD’s main feature. But the story shines through, it’s a lot of fun to watch, and Rodriguez has some commentary that is actually instructive for people interested in making movies. His “ten minute film school” is filled with practical tips and shows a bit of how the movie was made, and the disc also includes the short film he made before Mariachi, “Bedhead.” The flip side of the DVD includes Rodriguez’s later sequel, Desperado, starring Antonio Banderas. As for Mariachi, it’s good to see a brilliant filmmaker at work before the studio has polished all the burrs off; it makes the movie seem more real, more human, and more achievable. Now, where’s my camcorder? Desperado / El Mariachi DVD: B