Digenis.org

No time for a real post, so I’ll share a comic I recently laughed over.

I just rediscovered Konstantin Yavorskij’s Akimych and Vladimir Vladimirovich comic strip. It’s published weekly in Bolshoi Gorod magazine and they’ve even got an archive of the strip on their site. Here’s a recent one:

He heh. . .

One of Finland’s redeeming qualities is that they show the Conan O’Brien show on television twice a day here. I haven’t had access to a television all the time, but I’ve still managed to catch a few shows. Man, have I missed Conan.

Of course, being in Finland and watching Conan reminded me of a segment on the show a while back in which he tried to individually insult all the nations of the world and illicit some sort of hate-mail response in the form of postcards. It was called “Conan Hates My Homeland.” A lot of postcards came in from Finland, funnily enough, even before Conan got the chance to insult them.

Thanks to the glorious internet, I’ve found clips of these moments:

First postcard arrives (4.3 mb)
Many more postcards arrive (30 mb) I had to remove the clips from my site.

Watch them quick, because I’ll probably be taking them down from my server in a week or two.

Maybe I’m just a sucker for lame spy movies, but I really enjoyed the Bourne Identity when it came out a few years ago. That type of movie always revives my childhood fantasies of being an international secret agent.

Anyway, I just noticed that Quicktime.com posted the trailer for the Bourne Identity sequel, the Bourne Supremacy. It looks decent to me, at least in comparison to the rest of the movies coming out this summer which are probably pure hyped-up crap.

As I was watching the trailer two scenes in particular caught my eye. At about half way through there is a quick aerial shot of a police car crashing into another vehicle. On the hood of the car I noticed the Russian letters ‘???’ ???????-?????????? ??????). “Interesting,” I thought, “some of it must take place in Russia.” Then, a few seconds later, there was a scene of Jason Bourne walking down a street that looked incredibly familiar to me. I paused the clip, looked closely, and realized that the scene was filmed outside of Frunzenskaya metro station here in Moscow.

Am I wrong? Look, you can even see the arch things above the windows of Mu-Mu restuarant.

The Bourne Supremacy comes out July 23rd in the States, but no release date has been set for Russia at this point. Can’t wait.

I finally saw Lost in Translation last night. Man, was it good.

I’m usually not a fan of Bill Murray films (except for Groundhog Day, which was hillarious), but I have a newfound respect for the guy. And Scarlett Johansson. . . first of all, is she married? Secondly, her performance was excellent.

In the movie, Murray plays an actor in a midlife crisis. His star is fading, his marriage is on the rocks, and he has resorted to doing some TV commercials in Japan. Johansson plays a young American, also unsatisfied in her marriage and with life in general. They happen to be staying at the same hotel in Tokyo and find each other’s company to be just what they need. As someone else summed it up, it’s about two people who ‘meet at the right time, in the wrong place.’

Sofia Coppola directed it. She gives us the Virgin Suicides a few years ago, and follows it up with this. . . It must run in the family.

If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor and give it a watch. It might be out on video in the US already.

Kelly, since you’ve been working like crazy lately and haven’t even had the time to blog, I thought I’d give you a little something to cheer you up. Well, I shouldn’t take all of the credit. . . Andy Serkis had a hand in it as well:

Andy Serkis’ message for Kelly (.mpg, 1.8MB, right-click save as)

(Kelly, by the way, is a HUGE Lord of the Rings fan)

Yep. I met Andy Serkis (aka Gollum/Smeagol from the LOTR trilogy) today at a book signing at Borders. There were easily over 700 people there, but Andy remained cool and personable for at least the first 400 or so (that’s where we were in line). The Borders employees were trying to usher folks past the book signing table quickly, but Serkis was quite sociable and ended up chatting with most all of the folks who came by.







And just because he was such a freaking cool guy, here’s a plug for Andy’s book about the making of Gollum in the LOTR film trilogy:



Gollum: A Behind the Scenes Guide of the Making of Gollum

It was great and definately worth the wait, but I can’t say that it was my favorite movie of the year or anything like that. Peter Jackson’s imagination painted a fabulous picture of the end of an age in Middle Earth. The special effects were again groundbreaking and more than believable; the CGI Gollum and sweeping scenes of the battle at Minas Tirith were my favorites.

On the other hand, the acting left much to be desired. I’ll have to break from the pack and say that I don’t think that ROTK is worthy of all the Oscar buzz it’s generating. Sir Ian McKellen (Gandalf) and Sean Astin (Samwise Gamgee) captured their roles well, but Viggo Mortenson (Aragorn) and Elijah Wood (Frodo) left me unconvinced.

And what was that deal with that one Urak-Hai commander who looked just like Sloth from The Goonies? (Sean Astin was in that flick too, maybe he pulled some strings. . .)

Before ROTK, the theater showed a trailer for an interesting film called The Butterfly Effect. So far, it looks like something in between Vanilla Sky, Donnie Darko, and Eternal Sunshine on the Spotless Mind. Vanilla Sky was based on a Spanish film called Abre Los Ojos, but this film is apparently not based off of the Spanish film of the same bame (El Efecto Mariposa). I may just pardon Ashton Kutcher for all of his stupid movie roles to see this one.

Focus Pictures has released the trailer for Charlie Kaufman?s latest project, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

The first 10 seconds of it reminded me of another movie. Having now seen this preview, I am even more excited to see the whole thing. IMDB says that it?s still in the editing process, and that it will hit theatres in America in mid-March.

If, like myself, you can?t wait that long, be sure to read the screenplay at Being Charlie Kaufman.com.

Even as a huge Tolkien fan, I couldn’t stop laughing when I read this list of ways to improve the latest Lord of the Rings film (via Matthew Henry John Bartlett).

Less than a month, less than a month. . .