I can only hope that reports of Mike D’Angelo’s death are, once again, greatly exaggerated. Even if they come from Mike D’Angelo himself.
Not movie-related, but kinda fascinating, I’d think, for content geeks of any stripe: A Usenet-based team of music obsessives — known, apparently, as The Whitburn Project — has been not only working on creating a huge (illegal) archive of post-1890 pop songs, but also maintaining a huge spreadsheet database of song data, including song length, BPM, label, and more. Andy Baio (Waxy.org) is running the numbers. Today, Baio charts average song duration over time, but promises more to come.
Zhang Ziyi appears in a Mercedes commercial. In China.
Check out this slideshow: Liberty City vs. New York City. What’s especially interesting is, at low resolution, it’s sometimes hard to tell the live-action shots from the videogame grabs.