Quest for Metal

I'm very hard on heavy metal bands. There is certainly a sense that I know what I like and any band that dares to climb to metal's vaulted ceiling had better have the right stuff. In the past couple of weeks, I've been listening to a number of bands, and I have four disappointments and one great success.

( Disappointment #1: Dragonlord )

( Disappointment #2: Visions of Atlantis )

( Disappointment #3: Skylark )

( Disappointment #4: Scar Symmetry )

( Success: Flowing Tears )

Mission Impossible 3

So, the lovelies desirae and max_kaneru and I all went to go see Mission Impossible III, the third installment in the movie franchise based on the late sixties series.

I loved the TV series. It was unrelentingly cool. The characters could go anywhere and do anything. And MI:3 takes us back to those days when our team got dropped into the grinder and managed to get back out, often with MacGyver-like improvisation. In MI:3, agent Ethan Hunt has retired to teaching and is about to get married when he learns the first graduate of his class is in deep trouble, and things snowball from there to meeting our psychovillain arms dealer, a man who's obviously read the Evil Overlords List. The film has far fewer plotholes than MI:2 and you can even ignore the I ♥ XENU tattoo on Tom's forehead for most of the film. Just kidding about that last bit.

There's an obvious disconnect in the editing of the film; the first scene was supposed to be the first caper, where Hunt pulls out a long needle, looks at the subject of his rescue operation (and by extension, directly into the camera) and says, "This is adrenaline. You're gonna feel it." That got edited into the second caper, where its impact is mis-timed.

And the film is exactly that: adrenaline you're gonna feel. The combat action scenes are all filmed in a powerfully edited hand-held camera style, all choppy cuts and visually overwhelming slides of chiaroscuro black and white. Fast and confusing, at one level it is infuriating the intellectual "what's happening? I should know what's happening!" part of your brain, but at the same time it is jabbing its thumb on the "fear! pain! fight or flee!" circuits of your brain. This is all about what chaos is really like: you don't know what's going on, you just know something bad is happening, and the more bad it is, the less you know. Paced expertly, the film is all about the adrenaline it manages to dump into your bloodstream. If you're into that kind of film, this film will have you buzzing like a junky for at least an hour afterward.

The actors all do their jobs admirably, especially Maggie Q, Ving Rhames, and Lawrence Fishburn, the sets are gorgeous and the music unobtrusive. It's the editors and cameramen who really deserve the kudos for this film, though: it's an assault on your nervous system manufactured by men who understand exactly how that should be done.

Small announcement: Ruby R0XXORS.

Ruby is officially cool. Even without Rails, I can totally see how this language could become addictive fast. I barely speak the language and am desperately thumbing through the nutshell book at warp speed and I manage to write a better, faster, and more secure version of Narrator, this one obeying the principle of "configuration, not integration!", in less than half an hour.

That's totally cool. The only question remaining is simple: does the lack of an interim on-disk format cause a performance hit compared to the python version?