Several years ago my sister and I went to the Film Forum to see Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute during a retrospective they were doing of his work. We very specifically went to see The Magic Flute because our mother had shown it to us in our childhood and we remembered really enjoying it. We also felt that it was safe to see from the obnoxious snobby/know-it-all crowd you run into at showings of things like The Seventh Seal.

I should mention at this point that The Magic Flute is an opera. It is filmed as a theatrical event, with Bergman at several points showing you the audience. It’s very different from what most people think of when they think Bergman!, which in my experience are his films like Persona, Wild Strawberries and other very personal dramas.

It was a weekday and the theater was mostly empty, presumably because The Magic Flute is not one of Bergman’s more famous works. When it started up, a small group of people sitting in front of my sister and I seemed to be shocked at what they were seeing. During the intermezzo they got up and left, and one of them was muttering in a very annoyed tone that they “had no idea it was an opera”.

This confused my sister and I, who didn’t really understand how you could wind up at a movie at the Film Forum and not have any idea what you were going to see. I have been wondering about this for years because it just does not compute in my brain. I like to know what I’m getting into when I agree to sit down and not make any noise for a long time.

That brings us to tonight—I work around the corner from the Film Forum and am going to see Robert Bresson’s Lancelot du Lac on Thursday with my mom. I decided to make a trip over there after work to buy tickets in advance just in case. I am not really a big fan of Bresson but I’ve never seen Lancelot and it sounds interesting enough to give it a whirl.

The guy in front of me on line walked up to the ticket counter and said “I want a ticket for the Bresson movie tonight. It’s good, right?” Oh dear. At least tonight’s feature is Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne and not whatever the Bresson equivalent of a musical theater piece would be*.

_{* Probably Lancelot du Lac}

I was asked by a friend to highlight some of the best of the cheap games from the Holiday Sale, so here’s my list. These are only games that I own/have played/etc so it’s not definitive and shouldn’t be taken as such. I just quickly went through the <$5 games list and didn’t put too much thought into it.

• Avadon: The Black Fortress — $5 — Old style CRPG. Fantastic game.
• Arx Fatalis — $3 — Ultima Underworld successor.
• Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII — $1 — For fans of SNES RPGS.
• Children of the Nile: Enhanced Edition — $2.50 — City building game by the remnants of Impressions Games
• Freedom Force and Freedom Force vs the 3rd Reich — $2.50 each — Super hero squad based RPGs by Irrational.
• Gothic II Gold — $5
• Judge Dredd vs Judge Death — $2 — Competent Judge Dredd FPS
• Max Payne 2 — $5
• Nikopol: Secrets of the Immortals — $5 — Adventure game based on Enki Bilal comics.
• Penumbra: Black Plague — $4
• Penumbra: Overture — $5
• Sequence — $2.50 — Rhythm combat RPG

Over the last few weeks Twitter has been rolling out their new interface, removing the Mentions and Retweets columns and replacing them with “@[username]” and activity.

The new “@[username]” column squishes together your mentions with any retweeting or favoriting people have done of your tweets. This is what mine looks like right now:

As you can see you can just turn it back into Ye Olde Mentions tab. Which is good and what most people will probably do if they have a lot of non-mention activity going on there, I think.

Getting rid of the Retweets tab is a small annoyance for myself and other people who have an OCD need to check and see if anything we’ve said has been retweeted. I like keeping it separate from mentions as they’re different, and it’s nice to be able to look them up that way.

Replacing the Retweets tab with the Activity tab is a weird attempt to shoehorn a Google+ or Facebook style newsfeed in there. It’s based around a content discovery concept but because Twitter doesn’t do the same kind of data collection as other sites it comes across as pretty useless.

I can see what they are going for, here, but given the data they have to work with it’s just not very useful.

What’s the point of showing me the things other people have made favorites? What am I getting out of it? What content discovery is happening here? Stepping into Twitter’s shoes, I think that the idea behind this is that person I follow X will favorite a tweet from person I don’t follow Y and so I’ll then follow Y. I think that’s a large jump and is made from an assumption that people are using favorites differently from how they do right now, which in my experience is to bookmark things they want to refer to later.

As for showing me who people I have follow have started following (that’s a tongue-twister), that’s not useful without context of who those people are and what they talk about. Unlike Facebook which is based around adding people you know, Twitter is more about building a community around interests. Twitter, however, doesn’t have a good way to figure out what your interests are and suggest follows based on that so they are guessing (hoping?) that you want to know about how your followees follow.

In addition to that they have stuck the fake Facebook feed on the right hand column where it is even more useless because of the lack of info it reveals:

This is just clutter that most people will filter out along with the rest of the junk they don’t look at over there below the Follows/Followers counts.

The other notable thing about these changes is that they don’t fix the current problems with the web interface. The big things that need a tweak that I can think of are:

1

Making it easier to get to your favorites. There needs to be a link to your favorite tweets on the timeline page if Twitter wants you to use them more. Putting them on your profile only makes them for other people when they are for the user who marked them that way in the first place.

2

Figure out a better way to integrate lists. Right now lists are great for third-party applications but not for the web interface. It takes four clicks from your timeline to add someone to a list because it’s all done through the profile. This process really needs streamlining.

Beyond that, they are a hassle to use in the Web interface. Lists are awesome in third-party apps because you can sticky them to a column. They’re great for not cluttering up your timeline with things you don’t want to see but can easily get to. Being able to sticky a link to just one list on the empty space on the nav bar above the timeline would make them infinitely more useful in Web Twitter.

Twitter wants people to use their Web interface so that they can work towards their goal of monetizing the service (which they’ve already started in the form of promoted Tweets). To do this they need to make going there as appealing as using a third-party application, which these changes do not do. I think that with a few tweaks a lot of the bitching about the Twitter.com interface can be fixed (I won’t say easily because I know from experience how had it can be to apply something other people think is easy to do), but their focus recently has been on the wrong aspects on their service.

Last night I gave Chris a mission: Pick a (non-Fear and Loathing) Criterion off the shelf to watch with dinner. This is a part of the “get off our butts and actually watch the Criterion DVDs and Blu-Rays that we have accumulated” project.

I’ve seen The Seventh Seal several times before, including the DVD release they put out but this was my first time watching the Blu-Ray that I was given as a present last Christmas and Chris’ first time, period. I cannot pretend to give you any worthwhile opinions about the technical details but it looked absolutely gorgeous. As it should, it is a skillfully shot movie. The blacks were deep and brought out the shades of gray.

This film really hits me hard every time I watch it, and even though there are some truly dark moments the humor and joy that shine through when appropriate are genuine and wonderful. The Seventh Seal is the best movie I have ever seen and I’m not sure that anything will ever top it on my list.

My top scenes (no order):

• When the flagellants cross through the town. They are appalling and frightening, and stop the audience the same way they make everyone in the town stop. 
• The scene between Death and Skat. A humorous way to have a very serious conversation.
• When Block goes to the “witch” who is about to be burned at the stake and gives her the herbs to dull her pain.
• Block’s slight smile when Death asks him if he’s ready after he allows Jof, Mia and the toddler to escape.