lukegilman.com : High on the Hog Blog

Purveyor of Idle Observation

Dilbert: April 26, 2007

Dilbert: April 26, 2007

A cinematographer I worked with in Boston turned me on to this film in 1998. I borrowed his crappy VHS version that I had to pinky-swear I would bring back to the set the next morning. I watched it on 13″ TV/VCR combo, but it couldn’t have been any more arresting. I’ve spent more time than I want to admit trying to get a good viewable copy to share with other people, including a PAL version from Britain and a bittorrent copy with no subtitles.

Finally, a honest-to-goodness legitimate US DVD copy is available, released last week on the Criterion Collection (wikipedia).

When he was just twenty-nine years old, Mathieu Kassovitz took the international film world by storm with La haine (Hate), a gritty, unsettling, and visually explosive look at the racial and cultural volatility in modern-day France, specifically in the low-income banlieue districts on Paris’s outskirts. Aimlessly whiling away their days in the concrete environs of their dead-end suburbia, Vinz (Vincent Cassel), Hubert (Hubert Koundé), and Saïd (Saïd Taghmaoui)—a Jew, an African, and an Arab—give human faces to France’s immigrant populations, their bristling resentment at their social marginalization slowly simmering until they reach a climactic boiling point. A work of tough beauty, La haine is a landmark of contemporary French cinema and a gripping reflection of its country’s ongoing identity crisis.

It’s hard to believe it’s twelve years old. Two thumbs way, way up.

Never look a gift moose in the mouth. Thanks Dad.

Metro: Drunk man rides horse into bank

when he left the pub he realised he was too drunk to ride all the way home – and because it was cold, he decided to use his bank card to open up a nearby bank foyer and take himself and Sammy inside to sleep it off.

And then there’s the kind of line that I would live for if I were a journalist…

…bank staff were less than impressed when they arrived and had to clean up after the horse, who had left a deposit of his own on the foyer floor.

The Blackberry 8800 released today from T-mobile. It should be at my house tomorrow.

Great idea.

If you’ve had the sinking suspicion you’ve been forgetting something, fear not young tax delinquent, Tax Returns Are Due April 17 This Year. Just in case you don’t believe me, get it straight from the horse’s um… mouth.

So says the Men’s Journal. 25 Best American Beers. Isn’t that a little like winning the NIT?

We Made This. Recent Highlights: Letterhead: Booze and Robots, Raw Shark Texts

You’ll see a good many tears in the beers in College Station tonight. Houston Chronicle, reaction in the blog comments.