When (American) TV actors utter the phrase “What are you doing here?”, as I must have heard dozens of times lately, they nearly always emphasize doing — and I nearly always think it would make more sense to emphasize either here or you; if the question were provoked by your doing rather than your presence, the asker would omit here.

Am I taking the phrase too literally? How do you say it?

In the movie Avatar, one of the floating mountains has a waterfall, at which my suspension of disbelief groaned: there’s not enough rain catchment area, and obviously there can’t be a spring.

But now I thought of a possibility. There wasn’t any sign that the waterfall flows continuously. So maybe the mountain has a concavity (however shallow), which spills over when something – such as a steady wind from one direction – tips it.

When Jeff Riggenbach said that Butt-Head is smarter than Beavis, I told him about this bit (the relevant part begins at 1:30). I say Butt-Head is more worldly but Beavis is more imaginative.

Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life came back to life in July, after 15 months dormant. That doesn’t happen every day!

Gotta agree with Greg Egan:

Sometime in the next twenty years or so, the technology that enabled Avatar will become cheap enough to risk employing alongside a moderately intelligent script.

It is mighty pretty, though. Among the details, I particularly liked the hemispheric virtual displays in the control room: that sort of thing has been done before, of course, but stereoscopy makes it much more effective.

For objects very near to the viewpoint, the frame rate seemed to me to suffer; though (from what I read of the process) each eye gets 24 frames per second, same as standard movies. So I wonder what caused that effect.

Meanwhile, I continue to use Netflix. ( . . more . . )

What have I watched lately …

The Lives of Others (2006). Liked it.

The Philadelphia Story (1940). Didn’t like it as much the second time.

Second Chorus (1940) – Astaire without Rogers. Forgettable.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937). Good.

Red Dwarf: Back to Earth (2009). So-so. Had I not seen Blade Runner recently it would have whizzed over my head.

King Kong (1933). Good.

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Bette Davis, as Elizabeth Tudor, has the most peculiar body language; I wonder whether it’s intended to convey old age.

Strange Cargo (1940) is a thrilling escape from Devil’s Island. But wait, contrived circumstances have put a woman among the escapees, so it’s a romance. But wait, one of them is Jesus Christ in plainclothes. The result is a muddle.

The Thief of Bagdad (1940). Good.

The Great Dictator (1940). Good, though the climactic speech is a bit ironic to a libertarian:

You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power. Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will!

The false god of statism goes by many names, and one of them is Democracy. We have a better chance of making this life free and beautiful if we refrain from uniting or fighting (or sacrificing, don’t forget sacrificing) behind the next charismatic opportunist. —By the way, why does a Jewish barber spontaneously quote from “the seventeenth chapter of Saint Luke”?

Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941), Hitchcock’s only screwball comedy. The script has its due quota of gags, and there’s nothing wrong with the cast, yet I find the result less funny than some of his thrillers. The rhythm is somehow off.

Patrick Henry said in 1775:

It is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren, till she transforms us into beasts.

Was he aware that he conflated two episodes of the Odyssey?