BilmBlog500

Maybe the Borders web site would have more customers if it came with a Mute button?

So Dec. 5 was the day when Merrill Lynch and Bank of America shareholders voted on BofA's purchase of Merrill.  I had a vested interest in this.  For my bar mitzvah I'd gotten 2 shares of Merrill Lynch, and with dividend reinvestment over the years I'd accumulated a few dozen shares that a year or two ago were actually worth something and by today really not very much.  And I consider myself lucky because I'm ending up with a much better deal than if I'd gotten two shares of  Lehman Bros. I'm not happy with the management of Merrill.  E. Stanley O'Neal has watched whatever stock he had drop in value just like the rest of us, but he made salary and bonus in the tens of millons of dollars for years of profits under his watch that have all but disappeared in a sea of black ink and write-offs.   But here's the thing.  You know how many directors of Merrill Lynch showed up at the stockholder meeting where the vote took place?  According to this article from B...

Once upon a time... back before the day of the video cassette recorded, and now of DVD, crossing over milestones used to be considered a very nifty thing in the film business, with real bragging rights attached to going over 100M or the like in your US or global box office.  Nowadays... (a) some of those milestones are much more easily attained just because of inflation, so getting to 100M doesn't mean what it did in 1980. (b) foreign box office has become so much bigger that more and more films are getting to very big figures for global box office  (c)  the video business is so much bigger that the studios care more about the best date to maximize the video revenue than dragging out an extra $592,982 or even $2,592,982 in theatrical box office revenue. So I've been watching the global box office in Variety for The Dark Knight, which has slowly crept over $990,000,000 and getting every so close to the billion mark, but almost certainly coming just a little too short of it.  The...

OK, so it's been 4 weeks since my last post, and I'm not happy about that, but... B usiness comes first, and November kind of got to be one of those months. Shortly after my last post I headed down to DC to spend some quality time with Brandon Sanderson .  Brandon and I have spent fall quality time in DC for each of the last 3 years, and I've got to say it's pretty amazing to see how things have been coming along for Brandon over that time.  In years past we pretty much spent our time doing drive-by visits to bookstores to sign shelf stock and say "hello."  This was somewhat helpful in 2006, and it was possible to see Brandon's market share in DC increase in 2007 for the ELANTRIS and MISTBORN paperbacks, almost certainly as a direct result of those efforts.  In 2007, we visited just after the announcement of Brandon's work on the Wheel of Time series, and we had press releases to hand out.  We handed out enough that we had to stop at the Fed Ex Kinko...

There's nothing quite like reading a good newspaper the day after an election, and I was excited just anticipating the special election section that I hoped would still be part of my NY Times on Wednesday.  And there it was, or was it?  15 pages full of news.  A long article on the Obama campaign, analysis and results and pictures.  Reading galore that occupied me the entire way on an evening walk into Manhattan.  And then I could attack the Washington Post on my Kindle.  But where was the four page regional wrap-up of every single state's results?  Will those show up in tomorrow's paper when all of the results are actually in, or are they gone forever as being too yesterday's news that we've all long since found on the internet if we really really wanted to see it? But then again, there was nothing quite like having a broadband connection on election eve to follow the results in ways I never could have imagined 10 or 20 years ago.  Go to nytimes.com and there's...

August and September were very busy months for me; I managed to squeeze in several movies in August but September I saw only 2, which is amazingly low for me.  Many years ago when I had more leisure I saw around 120 movies a year, and even now I still average close to 2 per week.  2 per month, though, yikes!  And those I went to because I was able to see free screenings courtesy of Variety Screening Series and Museum of the Moving Image.  And of those 2, I wish I hadn't wasted my time at Blindness.  Sadly, Frozen River and Traitor are two movies I wish I'd seen that came and went before I could get to see.  But as I've slowly dug out from underneath I've been able to balance movies and work and some forward progress in my reading pile for work with several movies. Ghost Town, seen at the Regal Kaufman Astoria, aud. #8, 1 slithy toad. Eagle Eye, also at the Kaufman, #4, 3 slithy toads. Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist at the AMC Empire, aud #18, 1 toad. Religulou...

Seen Monday evening   September 29, 2008 at the Landmark Sunshine, Auditorium #1, 3 Slithy Toads I was so quick to post negatively about the first film I saw in this year's Variety Screening Series that I should have been much quicker to enthuse about Jonathan Demme's "Rachel Getting Married."  But better late than never. Jonathan Demme's had a very uneven career as a director, from the excellent and energetic Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense and film adaptation of Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia, on to Married to the Mob and Something Wild (not bad, though others love more than I), continuing to The Silence of the Lambs and the excellent Philadelphia to The Truth About Charlie remake (which I love more than others) to a remake of The Manchurian Candidate (which needed better tighter editing; even scene seemed to last a beat too long making it rather a chore) and now to Rachel Getting Married, which I think might be up there with Philadelphia ...