Shaun of the Dead [imdb.com] is an amazingly funny take on the lighter side of reanimated corpses rising up to kill the living. Simon Pegg (Shaun), who shares writing credits with director Edgar Wright, does an amazing job of playing the new to the job hero, with spot on (yay Britain!) comic backup by Nick Frost (Ed). The movie, as the title suggests, is a running spoof on the zombie genre, especially George Romero’s Day/Dawn/Night… Living/Land of the Dead series. Really, can you go wrong making a romantic comedy zombie spoof? The answer is no. Now make the whole thing British and then you are cooking with grease.

So to make this review short and sweet without giving too much away. Shaun is a try-hard bumbler that stands up for his fat slacker friend Ed. His girlfriend is on the verge of dumping him because he is not exciting enough. Shaun works a crap job and does the best he can but can never seem to satisfy his flat mate, girlfriend, girlfriend’s two snooty flat mates, or his hated stepfather. Long story short zombies start taking over and Shaun gets to show his true grit. In classic British style the humor relies heavily on sight gags, which are done with a certain flair and timing that I have not seen any time in recent memory. Its not like the standard American series of funny quotes comedy. After leaving it is hard to describe what was so funny about the movie. It is the little things, the camera winding, and the little slip in the convenience store. If you watch the movie you’ll understand.

This movie is definitely high on my list of comedies. I reccomend it to anyone who has gotten a little tired of the same old Ben Stiller movie.

PS: You might be asking yourself, “Andy why you haven’t seen anything that really stinks? Do you have the uncanny talent to only go see quality flicks?”… well no worries I am sure I will get suckered into seeing something or listening to something that is total crap, but as far as movies go I just don’t have the funds to see much unless I really want to go.

For those of you waiting with baited breath (no one huh?) I am going this afternoon to see “Shaun of the Dead.” It looks like it is going to be pure gold, pure British gold. I will get you all a review by tonight or tomorrow (more like tomorrow).

ALSO!!!! This afternoon and tonight I HAVE TWO RADIO SHOWS. 1:00-3:30 and 10:00 - 11:30 at WBOR 91.1 FM listen online here

At 1:30-3:00 is the innagural “Nutz and Pintao Eurasian Variety Show” and then at 10:00 its just me (maybe a few guest DJ’s).

So there’s yer music and movies

Despite the amazing 9.7 rating garnered by The Arcade Fire’s “Funeral,” their first LP, at Pitchfork, the album is not in the heavenly range ascribed to it. It is however, a solid first LP. It has enough of a sweet taste that on the first listen you are drawn in and then once you hear the words through the multilayered sound it holds you right there. There is enough complexity to be interesting without being overwrought or pretentious. That in my humble opinion, is the hallmark of every good album.

Now, the hallmark of a great album is the ability to capture something (a feeling, a time, a place, whatever) and crystallize it. A band must condense some kind of meaning out of the back of our collective subconcious and pour it out into album form. This, they have done. There is a certain quality of the special poignancy that sadness in youth has, and the coldness of our departure from that irreplacable realm. The nice part is that The Arcade Fire does this without the teenage angst that is so often the hallmark of music about the departure from youth. They paint the “neighborhood” motif throughout the album in a mature and frankly, enjoyable way. Win Butler and Regine Chassagne are able to focus their emotion in a way that doesn’t come off as lame or whiny, and more incredibly the music is so very good.

The opener “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)” lays it all out. Not only does it capture the sadness of the more bitter parts of childhood, but the sentiment is something that most of us can relate to. The parents are crying in the next room and the thought is to tunnel directly to the young girlfriend’s window. Of course it is much more elegantly put in the song. Then you have “Neighborhood #3 (Power Out),” which focuses much more on the confusion of growing up. Then out of nowhere Haiti hits us with a dark and haunting picture of the ancestral home of Chassagne, where her parents are from. You can almost imagine a you Chassagne sitting on the parents lap being told these dark stories about their native home, filling her with a strange respect and wonder that we all have for the homes we left to come to where we are now.

I will not put the cliche slander of the “emo” label to this album, but there are some striking Bright Eye’s strains, especially in “Crown of Love.” However the key difference here is that nothing is immature, nothing is whiny, and that is what makes this album so good. They sell hard on their emotions, really putting it all in the ring, but do so with a little more grace than a lot of their “emo” counterparts. Cynicism seems to have become a hallmark of our music culture. We are always skeptikal of emotion, weary of bleeding heart pop ballads (and probably rightly so), so it is wonderful to have an album like this come shining through the clouds, no matter how grey the light that shines.

Now I said earlier that the album is great. I stand by that, I would recommend this one to more than just the music nerd consortium that I call friends. The album drags you into it and it does crystallize a kind of indescribable feeling related to youth and growing up, making it a great album in my opinion. However don’t go into this expecting it to be a 9.7 (just a mere 0.3 away from 10.0’s llike London Calling - The Clash and Marquee Moon - Television). What it fails to do is be novel. It is different but it doesn’t have that certain essence that seperates the great Buddha from a mere Bodhisattva. (YES! ending on religious reference… go religion 390)

3:00AM is far too early to wake up for the day. I’m off to Michigan for the weekend … graduate chemistry talks, wine, dine and general merriment in Ann Arbor with my dad. Back for the MNC on Monday … BE THERE.

Google is currently putting up billboards that read:

{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com

Luckily for us, this is a ridiculously simple problem to solve. Assuming Net::DNS (or libnet-dns-perl),

#!/usr/bin/perl
use Net::DNS;
my $resolver = Net::DNS::Resolver->new;
my $e = '27182818284590452353602'
.'874713526624977572470936999595'
.'749669676277240766303535475945'
.'713821785251664274274663919320'
.'030599218174135966290435729003'
.'342952605956307381323286279434'
.'907632338298807531952510190115'
.'738341879307021540891499348841'
.'67509244761460668';
foreach (0 .. length $e) {
  my $n = substr $e, $_, 10
  my $q = $resolver->search("$n.com");
    if ($q) {
      print $n, "n";
    last;
    }
}

The answer? 7427466391.com. I’ll let you all solve the second problem on your own (which is equally simple).

UPDATE: This solution was posted on Slashdot an hour or so after I found it. If you know Mathematica well, check this out:

en = N[[ExponentialE], 1000];
Table[x = (Floor[en*(10^k)*10^10] -
  Floor[en*(10^k)]*10^10);
If[PrimeQ[x], {k, x}, {k, 0}], {k, 0, 100}]

In the post punk world there are definite winners and losers. Too often we see bands devolving into postmodern primordial ooze, abandoning their roots, and casting everything to the wind only to find themselves stuck in the doldrums of obscurity and art house malaise (those are the losers for the Bob Hammonds out there). Stellastar (thank god) does not slip into that category. They create a fusion of all of your post 80’s early grunge era favorites and make it into a thick liquid soup that is wasy on the ears and heavy on the gut. They pay some pretty blatant homage to their influences (read New York City, The Pixies, Lou Reed, Suede, Morphine, Britain, Pulp, etc. here), but I am not thoroughly convinced that it is a bad thing. I won’t say that when I listen to “Jenny” I am not really thinking “Common People” by Pulp (hell they even end the album with “Pulp Song” which is definitely a page from the book of Jarvis Cocker) and “My Coco” does start out like a watered down “I Bleed,” a classic Pixies duet. However, it never goes too far. They never reach the point of ripping off their influences. Also, they are good. If they were worse then maybe I would have more of a problem with it.

Stellastar’s debut self titled album is glorious. It sort of rises and falls, vacillating between depression and hard edged happiness. There is the sort of rapid, manic hopefulness of “My Coco” followed up by the driven, whimsy of “No Weather,” only to fall back into the anxious wondering of “Homeland” and the confused, love-sick of the untitled track 9.

Stellastar is definitely a band that wears its heart and influences on the sleeve. But they take it one step further. They have taken what’s been done and dug it out a little rougher and deeper than before, smoothing some of the sounds out and honing some of the edges. The combination of front man Shawn Christensen’s intense, breathy voice, hauntigly accentuated by the female vocals of bassist Amanda Tannen is wonderful to hear. They don’t hold anything back, giving you Loou Reed, Morphine, The Pixies, Pulp, and even a little bit of earlier Sonic Youth all mashed into some kind of ellectric sandpaper taffy for the ears. So barring a sophomore slump I am definitely jazzed to hear more.

Hero is the most expensive film ever produced in China, has been a phenomenal success there, has already been out for two years, and is now finally being presented by Miramax in the US. The film is excellent the locational and cinematic beauty are stunning. The use of color is unlike any movie I have yet seen. For nothing more than that this movie is worth the watch.

That being said this movie is very much hit or miss. In that respect it falls into the same vein as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon (Ang Lees tragic epic produced in 2000), you either love it or are left wondering what it is that you are missing. This is probably because most people go into the film looking for a Kill Billesque kung-fu epic with a twisting powerful plot. So if you haven’t seen it yet… well don’t be expecting that.

What Hero really is is an art piece. The cinematography is stunning but it doesn’t have the forced feeling of a lot of art films. The incredible imagery seems to flow easily from a fairly simple story. The story is told through a series of flash-backs reminiscent of Kurosawa’s “Rashoman.” It is about four assasins and their quest to kill the Qin clan emporer. There is some convloution to the tale but that seems to be more a delivery vehicle for more minutes of mind numbing eye heroin than anyhting else.

The film reads like a fairy tale (albeit one of the dark Brother’s Grimm ones, not the fluffy Barney-fried ones where bad things are nicely resolved all the time). The substance isn’t necessarily in the story itself, but in the images conjured, and feeling evoked by the fairly simple story. This film is a myth, a legend. It is a celluloid embodiment of the Chinese heroic ideal, nothing too complex, but the tragic simplicity of the cost of honor, duty, and peace. This is not the complex multilayered storytelling that is expected in the art cinema world. It is a simpler moral lesson portrayed with staggering beauty and a near supernatural expression of human combat.

The fighting itself is absolutely amazing. It is well choreographed, well balanced, interesting, and most of all color coded. The visuals are awash in the subtext of Chinese ways of understanding the world. The acting is especially well done. Nothing seems hammy, or forced, as this type of film seems prone toward. The character of the emporer (played by Daoming Chen) is acted fantastically. Just watching his face tick is a peasure in and of itself. The range that is played by Tony Leung Chiu Wai (Broken Sword) and Maggie Cheung (Flying Snow) is impressive. Also Ziyi Zhang has a more minor role as Moon, but I am glad they added her because she is a total hottie and every movie needs at least one.

So the long and short of it is. The movie is not the best thing ever to come out of China, but it is beautiful. It has Ziyi Zhang (hottie) and gorgeously choreographed fight scenes. That is enough to propel it from “ewwww Chinese cinema!?” to “oooh I like.” A solid movie well worth the trip to the theater.

In an effort to put more entries on this page, make it interesting, throw my opinion into the vast well that is internet opinion I am going to start doing short reviews for music and movies. Nothing fancy but hopefully worthwhile. This will start as soon as I get back from seeing “Hero” tonight.

I think the way that this will work will be the title of the album or movie a link to “The All Music Guide” or the “Internet Movie Database” depending. Then a whort review written by me, and maybe a couple other reviews by other people… who knows?

Also after chilling with Costa last night I have come to the conclusion that I will have to really get the word out about vdov.net because he doesn’t have any free time in between his bouts of quasi-informed (ok we will say informed) prattle with Mort (the play) about Bach, Mozart, and the state of quantum computing. So in conclusion if you are reading this TELL SOMEONE ELSE TO START READING IT (if you want and if you are a Bowdoin student then there may be an updated party list put up here w/ password so you will always know where to be… a possible upcoming feature).

As seen here, European-led scientists may have taken the first confirmed picture of a world beyond our solar system. While other extrasolar planets are known, their existence has only been detected indirectly. Take a look!

As seen today on Slashdot, this is a very interesting look at the estimation ability (or, well, let’s say stupidity) of the average person. Questions range from the year of the start of the English Civil war, to the date of the first woman to fly in space. Check out the first part here (specific questions). The second part is here (overall quiz scores).

VDOV.NET (and all associated services) will be down from 9-10pm EST tonight, September 1, 2004. When brought back up, you’ll all be happy to know that poor old Smashy will be sporting a new gigE card.

UPDATE: Downtime over, but unfortunately we’re not blazin’ away at gigabit speeds quite yet. A few, let’s say, unexpected suprises prevented me from moving VDOV.NET to the new interface. In the next couple of days, I’ll switch it over to the new card.