Amy the documentary

The other day I watched Amy, a documentary on Amy Winehouse. It was a very compelling film. Interestingly, instead of using talking heads to describe events, it showed video footage - both amateur and professional - and used voiceovers from each person to tell her story.

Her story was so sad. At 9, her dad left and since she was a daddy's girl, she was devastated. She never really developed good coping skills; she drank and smoked weed and was bulimic. When she had writer's block, she drank heavily.  She was an incredibly talented singer and songwriter but she really wasn't ready for what happens when a musical act becomes big. There were the exhausting tours, singing the same songs in the same ways over and over again and there was the paparazzi. The film shows just how awful they were - she couldn't leave the house without being followed and photographed.  

Seeing the difference between the fun, beautiful, engaging girl that she was and the slow, out-of-it, used up person she became drove home just how far she had fallen. The documentary is very powerful, and if you're at all interested in her life it's definitely worth watching. 

I don't love you anymore, Netflix

I loved Netflix since it was first available on the PS3. I could watch movie after movie after documentary after movie - no wonder I thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread. 

Sadly, things have changed. Apparently Netflix tests user interfaces (UI) all the time, so at any given moment a subscriber might be faced with a new UI. Yesterday we were switched from this regular UI:

Netflix's old UI. See the nice menus on the left? You didn't
have to use them, but they sure are handy for people like me
who like to browse through titles.

to using this test UI:

The test Netflix UI we've been given. There are no menus
and navigation is very difficult. It's harder to use than
Rogers On Demand.

In the old UI, I navigated through a menu system to find the genre of movie I wanted to see and then I'd browse through those titles. The titles in a genre were arranged in rows of five and I'd scroll up and down through the rows. If the cursor paused on one of the titles, the description would show up below. This UI was easy to use and fairly intuitive.

There's no menu system in the test UI. I scroll down through the rows to find the genre I want and then I scroll sideways to find a title. Pausing on a title brings up the description in the right -hand third of the screen. Some of the genres have 250 titles in them and I just don't have the patience to scroll through them. Plus at least one other genre is shown above or below the one that I'm looking at, cluttering up the screen.

I know that some people would like this new UI but I don't: I find it harder to navigate through the titles and I have a very hard time browsing to find something to watch. The end result is that I'm not watching anything on netflix and that leaves me feeling unhappy. I like watching movies and I used to like watching them on netflix.

Of course I called them today to tell them that I was very unhappy about this because I'm vocal about things I don't like. I told them that if the menu system doesn't change back we'll cancel the service. I can't justify paying every month for a service that is almost impossible for me to use. Since this is a test they should be able to switch the UI back to the old one or one of the two others being tested.

I love the idea of netflix and the fact that I can watch so much stuff. But if I can't find stuff to watch because they're messing with the UI, it's not the great product I thought it was. If you're ok with being a guinea pig for netflix, you don't care about a product's ease-of-use, and you like watching movies streamed through your PS3, netflix on the PS3 might be the product for you. 

Being lazy

We got our couch yesterday! I haven't taken pictures of it yet but I will so that you can see it. Now that we have the sofa in the great room, we're realizing that we're going to need even more furniture than the two chairs that are on their way. We'll need to get some furniture to fill out the other half of the great room and we'll need to get tables and lamps and plants and stuff in there to fill out the room.

We also need to get that great room painted. Right now there isn't much in the way of furniture in there but as we get more it'll be harder to paint the room. We're trying to build ourselves up to doing it this coming weekend, maybe.

I've been watching a fair bit of Netflix lately, mostly because there aren't many shows on that I don't watch with Ian. I like to watch a bit of tv while surfing the interweb before I get started on chores for the house.

The other day, for example, I watched High Tension, a compelling French thriller about two friends who go to one's family farmhouse to study for exams when all of a sudden a serial killer appears. Most of the film was in English and might have been dubbed but it was still very good. There's some blood and gore but this movie is more than just that. It's well worth watching.

I also like documentaries. Yesterday I watched Gay Sex in the 70s, a documentary interviewing people about what life was like in the gay community in New York City between the Stonewall riots in 1969 and the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in 1981. Those twelve years came after decades of repression and shame and so were a period of joy and celebration... and sex. Lots of sex.

I found this documentary very poignant because the time period - just twelve years - was the beginning, middle, and end of an era. The 70s were an era unto themselves for many but for gay men it was an unprecedented time of fellowship, brotherhood, and sex. Everyone interviewed remembered that decade very fondly and had a great time... at least until their friends started to die from AIDS. I very much enjoyed this documentary and highly recommend it if you're interested in this kind of recent history. There is a lot of nudity and sex and some drug use in it, of course, so be prepared for that.

Today I watched Modify, a documentary about the body modification culture. The people who created different extreme modification techniques and others who have done extreme modification to themselves (or others - several plastic surgeons and teeth modification people are included) are interviewed about different aspects of this culture.

We aren't just talking about tattoos here, although tattoos are part of it; there's scarification, implants, branding, teeth changes, hanging from hooks implanted into the skin, and sexual organ modifications. I find body modification to be quite interesting and hearing about why people do the things they do is fascinating. It's obviously a deeply personal choice and I realize that it isn't for everyone, but this documentary helps understand why each person featured has chosen to modify their bodies in the way they did.

If you're at all interested in body modifications, you should definitely see this documentary. Note that it does show modification procedures in progress and sex organ modifications so some of it is not for the faint-of-heart; be prepared for that.

After watching these three shows, I do have to wonder what movie and documentary suggestions Netflix will have for us. The suggestions will be unusual, I suspect. :)

Too much packing?

I didn't think it was possible to do too much packing, but I was wrong. I was packing up the sewing room and making such great progress that I didn't want to stop. You know now it is when you're completely engrossed in something and everything is coming together and you just want to keep going? That's what it was like. Except that I should have stopped long before I did because I ended up exhausting myself. By the end I was trembling, I was so tired. Packing is hard work!

Even with this huge effort, the sewing room is still not completely packed up. Sigh. There isn't so much left, at least compared to what I've already packed. There are a couple of boxes in-progress and there are some piles of stuff that have been sorted but not packed. So much of this process has been about sorting and organizing; the packing is really secondary.

Since I was so exhausted from packing, we stayed home tonight and explored our new netflix subscription on the Playstation network. It is awesome - there are so many movies and shows and they stream directly to the PS3. It's way, way, way better than the Rogers On Demand service because it's faster, with a better user interface, a more interesting and complete selection, and selections for the user based on their selected preferences and ratings. If you have a PS3 and you love movies, get netflix for it.

We ended up watching Between the Folds, an amazing and beautiful documentary on folding paper... it included the most incredible, amazing origami sculptures made out of a single (sometimes very large) piece of paper. One artist has made 3-D origami people... they're so cool! Another models his designs mathematically... because it's all math underneath, isn't it? I can't deny that we were intrigued because there's a strong mathematical background to taking something from a flat sheet of paper to a three-dimensional object. We gasped at how beautiful the different creations were. It's a beautiful and intriguing documentary, and if you get a chance, watch it.

Saturday night tv

I never thought of myself as the kind of person who would watch CNBC - I'm so staunchly Canadian - and yet I ended up watching it this evening. I rather like their American Greed show, which describes how various people have stolen money from people who entrusted it to them. It's a bit heavy-handed and over-the-top, painting the villains as greedy and evil and the people who lost their money as hapless losers who got in over their head and didn't know any better. The reality is probably a big more gray than their black-and-white portrayal.

I also watched their documentary House of Cards which describes the events leading up to the real estate crash starting from the 9-11 attacks, when the US economy was stalling and Alan Greenspan lowered interest rates. This, in combination with the changes some banks were making to allow anyone to get a mortgage caused problems. The show implied but didn't state that George Bush and his administration were partly to blame because he was on tv saying that he wanted everyone in America to buy a house, whether they could afford to do it or not. It was an interesting show.

As I write this, I'm watching Elizabeth, which I haven't seen. I was admiring the guy (Joseph Fiennes) who plays Robert Dudley; it's the same guy who played William Shakespeare in Shakespeare in Love. I thought he was quite a dashing character in both movies and that he had done a fine job of acting. And then I realized that it's the same fellow who played the lead character of Mark Benford in FlashForward - where he was painfully wooden and generally an awful actor. I think a costume drama is more his style than something contemporary. or maybe he's better in movies.

Speaking of movies, I'm enjoying Elizabeth very much and highly recommend it. I also watched Rosemary's Baby and Silent Hill the other day and quite enjoyed those. Silent Hill was a sort of interesting horror movie; it's not great, but it's worth seeing if you're watching tv. Rosemary's Baby is a spine-tingler that holds up even though it was made 35 years ago. It's definitely worth seeing if you've never seen it before.

An interesting documentary

I watched the most interesting documentary today on Rogers On Demand. It was a talk given about the effectiveness of cancer screening in the general population.

People tend to think that if cancer is found earlier, it can be treated earlier and the person will live longer. So we screen to find early-stage cancers and treat any that are found. The thing is, while people are living longer with their cancer, statistically they aren't living any longer than they would have if their cancer had been found when it showed symptoms. People whose cancers are found using early screening techniques are living the same length of time as if they'd never been screened at all.

The person giving the talk discusses why this is true and the biases that are part of this thinking, as well as some of the harm that general screening actually does. People think of general screening as helping but statistically, it's not actually helping at all. And yet when organizations suggest changing the screening guidelines to not screen everyone, people howl. We all want out mammograms and PSA tests no matter what because we've been conditioned to think that more screening is better.

I think that someday, more screening will be better but that this is not true right now. At the moment, scientists don't really understand how cancer works. They know how a bit about how it grows but they don't know which cancerous cells will mutate back into non-cancerous cells, or which cancerous cells are never going to spread away from the site. So they treat everything that they find whether the treatment is actually needed or not, causing some people to be overtreated. Overtreating cancer might possibly be better than waiting and watching or not treating it... but if the treatment doesn't affect how long the person lives, is it actually better? I don't know.

This talk definitely gave me a lot of food for thought and I recommend it. It can be a bit dry at times but it's still interesting. if you don't have Rogers On Demand or don't want to access the service, you can find the talk online here.