Booger nights (11/10/98)
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I saw this the other day [in fact on Nietzsche’s birthday], and thought it very impressive, though the educated eye can detect areas that need either more work or less. Everything looks as it were too simple or too fractal. No doubt you have heard the dictum, that physics is simple in the limits of very few and very many degrees of freedom, and that what’s difficult lies in between. Similarly, visual reality lies somewhere in between the realms of the geometrically primitive and the self-similar. — Or something like that. In any case my eye is tired of both texture-mapping and perfectly reflective shiny things with sharp shadows. — And what about wave optics? diffraction around edges? a real shadow [like real life] is blurry. — But: it was clever to get Woody and Sharon, the product placements cracked me up, and it’s the first time in years I’ve heard Stallone’s voice without cringing. — Not
Lady and the Tramp by any means, but it didn’t suck. — An amazing number of nerds in the credits. — Check it out.
____________Mann and Supermann (10/7/98)
