Friday, August 8, 2008

One of the "holy grails" of film have been found

I am so in awe that I can barely type. I've always loved Fritz Lang's Metropolis. Its influence on science fiction, cinema, and our culture, just can't be overestimated. It just hasn't been seen intact since 1927. The first showings of Metropolis were a critical and financial disaster, so Paramount cut almost a quarter of the movie (including most of the plot). The removed original footage was assumed lost. Experts debated what was even on the footage until details about the German language cards were found in the mid-90s.

Yesterday, ZEITmagazin announced that that was wrong. A copy of almost the entire movie was found in Argentina. It's a second or third-generation copy, and damaged, but it can be viewed, and we can see the story. Even better, the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Foundation is dedicated to bring ing the new footage out to the public!

Time to break out my Kino copy of the last restoration, to tide me over until 2010 or whenever they get this version restored.

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

I hate home improvement activities

The house has been fixed up (with the exception of the kitchen phone line... oops) for around a year now. That's left the garage. The person door was rotting, the original Masonite car door was giving up the ghost, and the eaves had enough water damage to need some repair. A month or so ago, we went to Home Depot and buy a new garage door and new person door. I installed the person door myself, but the garage door was too much; they were going to have to do that themselves.

Last Thursday, Milady gets a phone call that the door is in, and will be ready to install Tuesday. OK, no problem. We spent all Saturday rearranging the garage, and pulling my old rustbucket (i.e. the Ford 1950 F-1) out onto the patio.

Tuesday rolls around, and Milady gets a call: not only is the garage door not there, it was never there. It seems that the garage door was backordered because the garage door opener was backordered. The lady who called said she'd get estimate on when the garage door open er would be available, and call us back.

Today, I had to call in and leave a message for their expeditor to see why we didn't have the promised door. I also mentioned my concerns about the lack of professionalism and a lack of confidence that they could deliver contractual obligations. Unfortunately, the expeditor didn't mention anything about those concerns when she called me back, and just said that they'd try to have the doors in by next Thursday.

This is where I need prayer for patience. :( I put a call into their manager, but of course they're in a meeting. (They're ALWAYS in a meeting.) If the manager can't assure me that they'll actually deliver the door in a reasonable amount of time, and possibly offer a discount for the month's delay, then I'm stuck going to another vendor.

Now I just need to plan fixing the eaves. Looks like I'm taking a week off in late October for that....