Varied and sundry that has crossed my path recently...
I had a chance to see Gomorrah, a slice of life gangster story from Italy. Except that description doesn't really do it justice; Gomorrah is relentlessly downbeat and thoroughly unromantic. The thugs in the film are low level worker-bees for the organization, trapped in dreary and scary lives that are almost always cut short by gunfire. They may quote the Pacino Scarface, but none of these guys are actually living that life. Actually, by the end of the movie, very few of the characters are "living" at all. Roger Ebert has a perceptive review at his site, check it out at
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090225/REVIEWS/902259991
There's a new CD format of sorts, mostly available in Japan. SHM CD, or "Super High Material", is supposed to use a super-duper clear poly-whatever that allows regular CD players to better read the ones and zeroes on the disc, resulting in better sound. I don't have a mega-pricey sound system and I'm half deaf from a misspent youth (and adulthood) playing the drums and listening to loud music, but to these ears some of the CDs do sound better than traditional pressings. However, how much of that is because of SHM and how much is because of subtle new mixing, I dunno. I won't be replacing my CD collection with (expensive!) SHM discs anytime soon, but I am a sucker for "technological advances" like this...
