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(COOLLIST) Is This Turning Into a Movie Review List?

Greets, y'all.  Goodwill and cheer from Austin, where I sit in a cube,
looking at a much-too-big screen while Moby's _Everything Is Wrong_
plays in the workstation CD player, hitting my ears with the intensity
of $1.99 bud earphones.

The CD is amazingly good.  It's techno, but not repetitive.  The
opening track, "Hymn", in one of the most beautiful instrumentals I've
every heard.  "Everytime You Touch Me", is so body-moving that I
couldn't help waving one hand in the air while the other typed away.
Considering that I was using Emacs at the time, you know how difficult
that can be. [1]

Last night I went with a new friend (Hi, Cath!) to see a preview of _I
Shot Andy Warhol_, a semi-documentary starring Lili Taylor and an
actor who looks like Mark McKinney from Kids in the Hall.  Martha
Plimpton also makes a few appearances (you may remember her as the
"big name actress" in _My Life Is In Turnaround_, the movie that
metamorphed into the not-quite-good FOX series Too Something).

The movie is about 1967-era Andy Warhol, his studio--The Factory, and
the people around him, most notably SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men)
founder Valerie Salanis.  The movie's pointlessness seems to echo the
empty lives of the people there.  They were style incarnate, save
Valerie who gives up style for a deranged substance that leads her to
shoot the artist Warhol because of an imagined conspiracy.

There is little comedy.  What is there seems unintentional and
uncomfortable.  The movie reeks of tragedy, but it is a ignoble
tragedy born of unsympathetic people.  Only a few minor characters
come off as likable, primarily Candy Darling, the oh-so-fem
transvestite that pulls Valerie into Warhol's circle.

If you are fascinated by this era and these people, then see the film.
I am not, and therefore I didn't like the film.  It lacked coherency.
It never proposed a thesis to prove or disprove.  It just existed,
which might be acceptable in a Warholian type of way, but doesn't
fulfill any of my cultural needs.

On the Blick-o-matic scale of -4 to +4, it gets a -2. [2]

Finally, on a mailing-list-technical level, I'm about to reorganize
the archives on yak.net.  The URL http://www.yak.net/coollist/ will
get you to a page where you can view separate indices for volume 0
(1995) and volume 1 (1996).  I thought the lists were getting too
long.  I'm doing this in such a way so that links to specific articles
shouldn't break, as I know Webcrawler and Alta Vista, at least, have
tendrils into my writings.  Do a search on "Moonpools + Caterpillars"
for one example.

[1] EMACS == Excessive Meta Alt Control Shift.  You can do it one
    handed, but it goes so much quicker when you use every shift-like
    key available.  Emacs is also a major contributor to Carpal-Tunnel
    Syndrome among AI researchers.  It even makes you talk with a
    Lisp.

[2] Recent movie ratings are at http://www.yak.net/combee/lists.html
-- 
Ben Combee, CAD Software Developer, cryptography fan, WWW guru
Motorola > MIMS > MSPG > CTSD > Advanced ICs > Austin Design Center > CAD
E-mail: combee@sso-austin.sps.mot.com   Phone: (512) 891-7141
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