Ars Technica re-reviews the original iPod. Bottom line: “if you still have one of these original ones lying around, find a FireWire cable and plug it in. You might be surprised at how well it still works.”
Also, the industrial design of the first-gen iPod is still amazing.
A waltz called “Last Leaf” — with Mr. Richards joining on vocals — celebrates the image of a lone leaf clinging to a tree: “The autumn took the rest but they won’t take me,” Mr. Waits sings. It’s tempting to hear it as a manifesto of stubborn persistence, but Mr. Waits shrugged that off.
“It was a tree, and there was one leaf left on the tree, and I wondered: ‘Wow, if you can make it through winter, you may be here until next year. Wouldn’t that be great, if you were just the only guy that hung on?’ ” he said. “I guess you could say everything’s a metaphor for everything else, but sometimes it’s just what it is. It’s just what it’s about — about a tree.”
I think part of the reason people reacted so badly to Alien 3 (quite apart from the fact the final release got mangled by the studio) was because the tone of the film was so dramatically different to the other two movies. A penal planet populated by rapists, murderers and thieves is a tough sell.
But before Fincher came in, Alien 3 was set on ‘a religious colony that had escaped the earth and inhabited an abandoned commercial facility deep in space’ who ‘had adopted a Medieval way of life, without electricity or modern technology’.
Now, that would have been a much tougher sell.
Regardless of how you feel about Alien 3 it’s hard to look at these concept drawings and not feel sad about what could have been.
There’s a technique to a good car chase. A craft. When it’s done right, you’re watching people working on the edge of control. Regardless of whether the baby-carriage shot is real or staged, the shot immediately after – of Gene Hackman’s car ploughing through the garbage and almost hitting the camera – is real.