Here are the movies I watched in 2007, in reverse chronological order, omitting re-watchings and using a loose definition of 'movie' that includes some long features originally aired on television. I've italicized my favorites.

• The Great Escape - I don't remember why I had it in my queue, but I enjoyed it nonetheless
• The Pillow Book
• Sicko - as expected, it fanned my frustration with the U.S. health care system
• Helvetica
• The Battle of Algiers - I rented it to get some idea of what colonial Algeria looked like, as I had a hard time picturing it while reading Camus novels
• How Art Made the World
• Girlhood - geographically close to home
• The Prestige - I felt clever for having foreseen the ending revelation, but I sit on the fence as to whether I agree with reviewers who interpret it as a cheat
• The Story of the Weeping Camel - I loved the ethnographic side of this film
• Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers
• Avalon - Japanese/Polish sci-fi! not a great film, though, IMO
• Children of Men - I saw the latter two thirds of this on a plane en route to Japan in May, and I was interested to see whether the first third explained the infertility premise; I hadn't realized it's a companion piece to Cuarón's Y tu mamá también, which I also watched this year
• Hot Fuzz - recommended by pwinkler; I found the first (low-key) half more entertaining the the second
• Life in the Undergrowth - gotta love David Attenborough
• Wordplay
• The Science of Sleep - I'm a sucker for offbeat romance
• The Fountain- uncharacteristically, I posted about this one
• The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief
• A Map for Saturday - I bought this (since I couldn't rent it), so I can loan it out if you're interested
• Rikyu
• The Breakfast Club - I'd been told I must see it
• Shortbus
• Tokyo-ga - Wim Wenders + Yasujiro Ozu = win
• Y tu mamá también
• Waiting for Guffman
• The Big Blue
• Art School Confidential
• Who Killed the Electric Car?
• Chisholm '72 - Unbought & Unbossed - on the first black woman to run for U.S. president
• Before Sunset
• Before Sunrise
• Ikiru
• The Century of the Self
• A Prairie Home Companion
• The House of Sand - both geographically and dramatically interesting

And here are the anime series I watched in 2007, in regular chronological order, because I like to keep you on your toes:

• Mahoromatic: Automatic Maiden
• Mahoromatic: Something More Beautiful
• Fullmetal Alchemist
• Ergo Proxy
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
• Rumiko Takahashi Anthology

I watched The Fountain on DVD this past weekend. I enjoyed its gorgeousness and its creative twisting together of romance and nondualism. Have any of you seen it? I'd be interested to hear what you think.

One thing that struck me as I was watching it was that all of the the seventeenth-century Spaniards spoke English with a British accent. I'm not sure why I noticed it, because it seems like something I and most audiences wouldn't normally notice—would take for granted, even. Wouldn't it sound odd for them to speak English with an American accent? Or an Australian accent? British English seems to be the English-speaking world's shorthand for 'historical'. I'm guessing that has to do with Britain being the homeland of the language. I think I'd rather have heard seventeenth-century Spanish with English subtitles; I'm a snob that way. I wonder how the accent I take for British in that film sounds to native Britons—is it a sort of cheesy 'movie British' accent (cousin, perhaps, to Basic Faire Accent)?

Along similar lines, I couldn't help but notice the seventeenth-century Mayans in the film did not speak English but rather a Mayan language (with subtitles). Hmmm. A case of exoticism? Or a way to show the linguistic barrier between the Spanish protagonist and the Mayans he encountered?

The sleet we got overnight has made today a snow day from work, although I'd already planned to spend up to the whole day at home waiting for the DSL tech, since today's my scheduled "Telco Date" with Covad (through Speakeasy). So far I'm still in my flannel pajamas, catching up on e-mail and friends' weblogs and disinterestedly reloading my county's real-time snow removal status web site. I'd been planning to go to Speakeasy DC last night, but the twenty-mile drive to the nearest metro station seemed like a bad idea, so I skipped it.

I've been watching a bunch of John Cusack movies lately—I've seen High Fidelity, Better Off Dead, One Crazy Summer, Grosse Pointe Blank, Being John Malkovich (years ago), and Say Anything.

My parents visited last weekend, my dad fixing my house's heat pump and my mom cooking up lasagna and homemade chicken noodle soup, the leftovers of which I'm really enjoying. Without any specific shopping list, we went to IKEA for an hours-long round of "This is so cool!" "What is it?!" Our local IKEA is huge. And I can't resist their lighting department.

I expect I'll be able to attend the Ottawa Linux Symposium this year, though I wouldn't be presenting, so there's a good chance it'd be out of my own pocket (as in previous years) rather than paid for by my employer.

Have any of you watched the Up series of documentaries following the lives of various Brits born in the late 1950s? Having gotten into the series last year, I just watched the latest installment, 49 Up, which finds the "kids" settling into midlife, physically and psychologically. The series initially focused on the varying class statuses of the children, and while that issue is still explored in these later years, more moving are the participants' philosophical waxings—their senses of the meaning of life. Neil in particular is such an amazing person; he seems to have faced existential struggles that few people choose to confront.

I've emphasized ones I particularly recommend. Many of the others are good, too.

• Party Girl
  
• Winged Migration
  
• Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room
  
• Real Genius (2nd viewing) - geek classic
  
• Three Days of the Condor
  
• Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion
  
• I Heart Huckabees
  
• Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance
  
• The Hours
  
• Metropolis - the 1927 original
  
• Maria Full of Grace
  
• Night Watch - too gorey for me
  
• V for Vendetta
  
• I Shot Andy Warhol (2nd viewing)
  
• Howl's Moving Castle
  
• Death on the Nile - an Agatha Christie murder mystery
  
• The Day After Trinity - documentary about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the establishment of Los Alamos, and the development of the atomic bomb
  
• Memoirs of a Geisha - so popular I don't think I need to recommend it
  
• Gross Pointe Blank
  
• Grizzly Man
  
• Fa yeung nin wa / In the Mood for Love
  
• Grey Gardens
  
• X-Men: The Last Stand
  
• Last Holiday - good enough for a long plane ride
  
• The Boys of Baraka
  
• Shattered Glass
  
• The Insider
  
• A Scanner Darkly
  
• The Girl in the Café - an understated romantic character/political drama
  
• Naqoyqatsi
  
• The Hours, again
  
• La Planète Sauvage, rescored to experimental music
  
• Immortel - disappointing
  
• Fire
  
• Wings of Desire
  
• Kikujiro
  
• Thank You for Smoking
  
• Say Anything
  
• Control Room - documentary about Al Jazeera
  
• L'Enfant - a "slice-of-miserable-life drama" set in the outskirts of Liège
  
• Tokyo Monogatari / Tokyo Story
  
• Ohayou / Good Morning
  
• Floating Weeds
  
• Early Summer
  
• Kintaro Walks Japan
  
• Late Spring
  

I took the Japanese Language Proficiency Test on Sunday. It's hard for me to sum up my experience of it; some questions were easy for me, and others were incomprehensible. A passing score would be 60%, and when the results come back in March, I'll be pleasantly surprised if I pass. I have a feeling I'll probably take the exam again next year, and I'll have a better idea about what things I need to work on.

Winter has settled in around here, and I'm trying to keep from getting a cold (I got my flu shot). I skipped a swimming lesson last night because I wasn't feeling that great. Yes, a swimming lesson—not for the sake of swimming, but for the sake of getting comfortable underwater so I can safely exit an accidentally overturned kayak. The class instructors are about half my age, but they seem competent enough. While the rest of the class—none of whom hesitate to plunge their heads underwater—perfects their strokes, I do my own remedial thing, practicing exhaling underwater as calmly as I can.

In movie-watching, I've been on a Yasujiro Ozu kick lately. I like his style of telling stories by showing ordinary people engaged in their daily routines in a contemporary setting. I don't care so much for Kurosawa-style historical melodrama.

I'm trying to figure out whether I want to spend the money and vacation days to go on a group trip to Kyoto next year. It looks like so much fun, at a level of "guidedness" that sounds convenient but not overbearing. It's just that it wouldn't be the trip with rebelzero to visit Tokyoite twonkie that we have in mind to undertake sometime in the next few years, and in some sense resources spent on one trip would mean less for the other.

Events I am going to in the next few months: annacon over New Year's, ShmooCon in March, and hopefully a weekend sea kayaking skills clinic in April (by which time I may have succumbed to the urge to get my own kayak).

Apropos of nothing, some sites I've started reading recently:

• xkcd, "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language"
  
• Damn Interesting, a site that has kept me up way past bedtime
  
• Pink Tentacle: art, technology (and high weirdness) from Japan
  

I've set up my amateur radio equipment a couple times lately in anticipation of AO-51 satellite passes. Once was at a party—yay for geek parties! :) We got good reception and heard people chatting nearly continuously. I think we heard someone tell someone else they'd heard him make a contact with the ISS recently. I hadn't really prepared to make a contact, though, since I forgot what grid square we were in, I wasn't sure if I had the CTCSS tone set right for uplink, and I generally wasn't familiar with what to say in making contacts via amateur radio satellite.

The second time I made sure I was prepared with those first two items, at least. But I heard nothing at all. WTF? True, I was standing more or less directly under some neighborhood power lines, but could they really cause that much interference? That's the only theory I had until I realized, several days later, that the satellite had been operating in a different downlink mode than I'd been expecting—specifically, S-band instead of UHF. I'd been relying on my python scripts to highlight "good" passes, where "good" for this satellite includes downlink_mode != OFF, essentially, when it really should be downlink_mode == UHF instead.

On Friday night I went out with brian_252, elwing2000, and her bf Chris for Mongolian barbeque in Chinatown and then to see Night Watch. It's probably a good movie, but the grisly violence made it hard for me to watch.

I've been doing a bunch of tea ceremony group things lately, since I was appointed recording secretary for this year. We have an entire year of activities planned out, including tea ceremonies and workshops. Our next big event will be Children's Day tea ceremony in May. Unfortunately, I don't think it will be open to the public, or I'd invite yinz^* to come. Well, I'm happy to demonstrate Japanese tea ceremony for anyone who's interested; it was fun at the last annacon. Now if only I had a couple of tatami mats… ::want want want::

^* What has the world come to when this word has a wikipedia entry?!

I've italicized the names of some of the movies I particularly recommend and that you may not be familiar with:

• Shogun (actually a TV miniseries)
• Ocean's 11 (saw for second time)
• Amelie (saw for third and fourth times)
• The Last Samurai
• Perfect Blue
• Ghost in the Shell II: Innocence (second time)
• The Bourne Supremacy
• Kaze no tani no Naushika
• The Day After Tomorrow
• China: A Century of Revolution
• Cat Soup
• Russian Ark
• Key Largo
• The Thing Called Love
• Sengoku 1549 (in Japan)
• Ocean's Twelve
• Spellbound
• Primer
• Sideways
• Better Living Through Circuitry
• Garden State
• Adaptation
• Real Genius
• The Incredibles
• The Meaning of Life
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
• D.E.B.S.
• Hotel Rwanda
• Porco Rosso
• A Brilliant Madness: American Experience
• The Cat Returns
• March of the Penguins
• Solaris
• Snatch
• Bend it Like Beckham
• Pirates of the Caribbean
• Scarface
• Run Lola Run
• 24 Hour Party People
• A Very Long Engagement
• The Motorcycle Diaries
• Everything is Illuminated
• Serenity
• La Femme Nikita
• The Hole
• Wallace and Grommit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit
• Family Guy Presents: Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story
• Kontroll
• Breakfast at Tiffany's
• Born into Brothels
• The Machinist
• The Dreamers
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
• Europa Europa
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
• Twelve Monkeys (for second time)
• City of God

I saw Breakfast at Tiffany's the other day, for the first time. It sure was different from the Audrey Hepburn movies I was already familiar with, Roman Holiday and Charade. No happy-go-lucky girl here; instead, Audrey plays a troubled call girl. I thought it was an okay movie. Charming, even, when you're not cringing at the "Japanese" landlord or—at least if you're me—rolling your eyes at the schmaltzy soundtrack.

Now, I really liked the (a?) theme of the movie, the question of whether people belong to each other. Which has to do with why I hated the ending. ( Spoilers ahead… )

Cesco Trattoria was the site of Saturday's dinner with rebelzero. The weather was just on the chilly side of pleasant, which is to say, a welcome change from the hot, sunny weather we experienced around here last week. Perfect for Tuscan dining al fresco. Our waiter brought an amuse-bouche that I couldn't name but that included zucchini and other stuff in an eggy, layered sort of form; I didn't care for it so much. Our wine was a delicious Allegrini '99, if I recall. My salad was the highlight of my meal: arugula on one side of the plate, slabs of warm goat cheese on top of croutons on the other side, and everything drizzled with a balsamic reduction. Sooooo good. My main course was something new to me: ossobuco—specifically, braised veal ossobuco in gremolata sauce with saffron angel hair. The flavors were very mild in comparison with my salad. The veal was very tender, of course, but it's not something I'd go out of my way to order again.

There was no time for lingering before we dashed off to see Everything is Illuminated, which was just released here. It “tells the story of a young man's quest to find the woman who saved his grandfather in a small Ukrainian town that was wiped off the map by the Nazi invasion.” It's an awesome movie, and not only because it co-stars the lead singer of rebelzero's favorite band, although that does help. I think anyone who enjoys absurdist humor—and that's most of the people I know—would love it.