Ticket Box

I'm back from seeing Steven Soderbergh's Full Frontal, and how hard it made me laugh! Maybe it's the movie's self-satisfied attitude what made critics to pan this film, because it has a certain feeling of "inside baseball" to it: you need to be a Soderbergh fan to really get it.

Case in point: a brief appearance by Terence Stamp occuring inside a plane. One of the films' main characters looks around the cabin and his eyes land on Mr. Stamp, who is seated between the window and another passenger and says "I've been away for a long time." Do you know where that's from? There. Now you know if Full Frontal is for you. There's also a scene at a bar that quotes from Out of Sight, and this is an even more obscure joke because there's no Geroge Clooney or Jennifer Lopez in sight.

Soderbergh may have worked too hard to be innovative here (a movie within a movie? this movie's "reality" is another movie? grainy video?), but, to me at least, this is him back in full form. He worked his butt out of what could have become a vicious circle: Ocean's Eleven? It felt like he was digging back into the Out of Sight bag of tricks. An enjoyable night out, but somewhat derivative. No, Full Frontal is the real deal.

One final aside: this movie has one of the cleverest bits of casting I've been aware of lately. David Duchovny appears in this film playing a film producer who gets his kicks from autoerotic asphyxiation. Know why this is clever? There. Now you know you're no X-Phile.

Continuing with the "unknowingly syndicated" controversy, here's an idea: Radio (the software used here at Salon blogs) has a feature called "stories" which, according to the documentation, allows you to "post your longer thoughts, articles and pictures." These stories are not added to the RSS feed; only the posts on the weblog itself are. Now, considering these two features of the software, you could write a story and fix the layout whatever way you want. Then, you can add a post to your weblog pointing to that story. This way, you can still syndicate your weblog through RSS, and wouldn't have to worry about whoever is repurposing it on their websites, because they would link back to your story, driving traffic to your own log. A simple solution to stop someone else from "stealing" your content while at the same time spreading the word about what you are doing.

Last week, following a link provided by Scott Rosenberg on his entry about old CD-ROMs, I made an eerie discovery.

Rodney Greenblat		Jude Law
Separated at birth?