Sadly, I’m going to agree with the Freakonomics blog. I think chosing Paul Giamatti as the actor to portray John Adams is distracting because of his past roles. Still a brilliant choice in TV programming.

Documentary on a Clockwork Orange on GoogleVideo

This is an incredible movie, and it’s sad that it’s basically not shown or recognized anywhere. Searching “Off the Rails” won’t show this film until the second page, and it’s an amazing piece of work.

14 Months, 10,000km, Moscow to Beijing by Pedal power.
A 52 minute film. Winner of the Grants Film Festival 2002 (Austria).

“Waist deep in a melting pool of snow, feet slipping on the icy bottom, the bikes sinking further, we pushed on. Around us the mist lowered as darkness descended upon the Taiga forest. “No, go back, its pointless!” Villagers had cried seeing us ride by. We were coming to realise the wisdom of their words. The road had become a series of swimming-pool size puddles that were growing as the two metres of snow continued to melt. Ahead, five, ten, twenty kilometres of pushing, trudging? We didn’t know…”

It was March, the beginning of Spring in the northwest corner of Russia. Struggling to make 6km a day, Tim Cope & Chris Hatherly, both 20 year-old Australians had embarked on an epic journey across Russia, Siberia, Mongolia, and Northern China, finishing in Tiananmen square, Bejing.

This film, shot and narrated by Tim Cope & Chris Hatherly will take you into the minds of the adventurers, the contrasting landscapes of the Gobi desert and Siberia, and the homes of hundreds of local people. It documents their extraordinary adventure across a continent to Beijing and accompanies their book about the same journey.

Tim Cope Journeys: Off the Rails - DVD

The instructions here get you most of the way. You can fix the error of “unable to open channel” on wminput by specifying the hardware address on the command line as shown from the hcitool scan output:
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#hcitool scan

#wminput 00:19:1D:A8:44:AB

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Used as a mouse via pointing against IR sensor bar is pretty painful. I think you’d do better with the control keys instead - but haven’t gotten that for yet myself. I plan ultimately to use it as a remote for xbmc linux.

A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the “Doomsday Clock” – which charts the USA’s tension with the Soviet Union – is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion – a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers – Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity…but who is watching the watchmen?

The film based on the graphic novel is being directed by Zack Snyder (300) and produced by Lawrence Gordon (Die Hard), Lloyd Levin (United 93) and Deborah Snyder (300), with Herbert W. Gains serving as executive producer.

Playing the film’s core group of “masks,” the masked adventurers at the center of the story, are Malin Akerman (upcoming The Heartbreak Kid) as Laurie Juspeczyk, aka Silk Spectre; Billy Crudup (The Good Shepherd) as Jon Osterman, aka Dr. Manhattan; Matthew Goode (Match Point) as Adrian Veidt, aka Ozymandias; Jackie Earle Haley (Little Children) as Walter Kovacs, aka Rorschach; Jeffrey Dean Morgan (TV’s Grey’s Anatomy) as Edward Blake, aka the Comedian; and Patrick Wilson (Little Children) as Dan Dreiberg, aka Nite Owl.

Watchmen was originally published by DC comics as a 12-comic book series between 1986 and 1987, before subsequently being collected into a trade paperback. It is the only graphic novel to win the prestigious Hugo Award or to be named among Time magazine’s “100 Best English Language Novels from 1923 to the Present.”

Watchmen

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I’m really psyched about this movie.

heh, and look what the internets found me.

I watched Good Copy Bad Copyover the weekend - it was a considerably enlightening and enjoyable video. Also, I must be one of the few people to never see this.

Known to its legions of fans simply as P-Funk, Parliament Funkadelic has had a profound impact on the development of contemporary music, aesthetics and culture. PARLIAMENT FUNKADELIC: One Nation Under a Groove chronicles the unique alchemy of the musical influences that fed into the band’s singular approach to music, documenting P-Funk’s continuing influence on today’s artists and musicians and featuring an in-depth look at the musical and entrepreneurial mastermind of its leader George Clinton.

PARLIAMENT FUNKADELIC

Warner Bros. Follows the Yellow Brick Road - Slice of Scifi

A new take on the various L. Frank Baum books from which “The Wizard of Oz” tale was born will be explored by Warner Bros., according to Variety. Baum created a total of 15 stories that surround the Oz legacy.

Village Roadshow Pictures will team up with Warner Bros. by taking an idea hatched by Spawn creator Todd McFarlane and screenwriter Josh Olson. The former will produce while the latter will create a script.

This has been a project in the works for quite some time but now it can go full steam ahead since Warner purchased the rights to “Oz” from Ted Turner.

“McFarlane has a vision of Oz that is a dark, edgy and muscular PG-13, without a singing Munchkin in sight,” wrote journalist Michael Fleming. “That was clear with a toy line he launched several years ago that featured a buxom Dorothy and Toto re-imagined as an over-sized snarling warthog.

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I read a lot of them as a kid - I’d love to see them come back in some sort of alice like cgi.

Threat Level - Wired Blogs

Arlington County’s top prosecutor, Richard E. Trodden, tells THREAT LEVEL he was pressured by Regal Entertainment Group, the world’s largest movie exhibitor, to prosecute a 19-year-old Virginia woman for filming 20 seconds of Transformers.

“What they were saying, ‘Could you get her to admit that it wasn’t right.’ They wanted to make sure the message gets out,” Trodden said in a telephone interview Wednesday. “This was kind of trying to address the concerns of the theater people, and the fact that it was not an outrageous crime.”

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Irish actors set for Mars remake
Irish actors Jason O’Mara and Colm Meaney have been lined up to play the lead roles in the US version of hit BBC drama Life on Mars.

Meaney is reported to be in talks to star as detective Gene Hunt, played by Philip Glenister in the BBC version.

Life on Mars is a great BBC show, I’m glad they’re setting up for a US version - hope they can make it without ruining it.