Linked List: April 11, 2008

Friday, 11 April 2008

‘There Will Be Blood’ Two-Disc Special Edition ★

Simply the best new movie I’ve seen in years. You can also save a few bucks and get the Cheapskate Edition instead.

One of Hitchcock’s gifts to cinema was the insight that the key to building suspense is to let the audience know something the characters do not. With its title alone, There Will Be Blood accomplishes this before the film even starts. There’s an ominous dread hanging over even seemingly innocuous scenes that wouldn’t be there if the film were titled, say, Oil! (which was the name of the Upton Sinclair novel from which it was loosely adapted by Paul Thomas Anderson).

iPhone Headphone Adapter Roundup ★

Dan Frakes surveys the field of adaptors that let you use headphones with standard-size jacks with an iPhone.

The Macalope: ‘The Problem With Windows’ ★

The Macalope has some fun with Gartner’s recent analysis that the growing complexity of Windows is causing Microsoft’s Windows business to suffer.

Drobo ★

My thanks to Data Robotics for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. They bill Drobo as “the most advanced storage device known to man or robot-kind” — at least from a consumer perspective, that’s exactly right. It’s a USB 2 device that is expandable with up to four hard drive bays; you just stick drives in the bays and the Drobo handles the rest. Data gets replicated across physical drives. In short, Drobo offers affordable, reliable, expandable storage and is incredibly easy to use and understand.

For more info, check out Macworld’s 4.5-mouse review and Andy Ihnatko’s review for the Chicago Sun-Times. Use the coupon code “FIREBALL” and save $50.

Defective Yeti: The ‘Lost’ Script Style ★

Matthew Baldwin on the profanity-laden scripts for “Lost”:

J.J. Abrams (the series creator) established this style in the pilot with phrases like “HE SCREAMS BLOODYFUCKINGMURDER” and “this guy is a Class-A prickfuck” (wha-?!). Since then it appears to have become part of the show’s template. Most Lost scripts read as if the writer has just hit his thumb with a hammer.

See also: Baldwin’s The Perverse Appeal of Lost.