From the Keyboard of Zachary Wagner

Peter Bogdanovich is an interesting case in self sabotage. He made 3 very big movies at the beginning of the 70s with high commercial and audience success, and then spent the rest of his life trying to recapture that greatness. Still, he had a preternatural knowledge of film that in my opinion only was beaten by Martin Scorsese. He truly understood movies and entertainment. Which is why I find it so interesting that The Last Picture Show is such a down movie.

The movie is black and white and set in the sleepy town of Anarene, TX. The few people who live in the town seem to either be children or elders. The film centers around several people, but Sonny (Timothy Bottoms) would most likely be considered the main character. Sonny doesn't seem to want much from the world, but to be able to eat burgers, lose his virginity and make a little money. His best friend, Duane, played by Jeff Bridges mostly wants sex from his long time girlfriend, Jacy, in a great performance by Cybill Sheppard.

It's important to note that the production of this movie was where Bogdanovich met Sheppard whom he would later leave his wife to be with. Retroactively, this is viewed as the beginning of his downfall because Polly Platt served as someone who could focus and distill his creative output working as a sounding board and his editor. Once they split she did not work with him again.

I could recount the plot of this movie but I'm not sure it really matters. We see the seniors of Anarene High go through their last year of high school and deal a little with life afterwards. There is a frank depiction of sexuality that was most likely shocking when it came out and still gives a bit of whiplash. Honestly, the most remarkable thing about this movie is that everything feels so naturalistic. I think Bridges and Sheppard were a bit older than their characters, but Bottoms looks all of 17 in most of this movie.

I'd be remiss to neglect mentioning that Cloris Leachman and Ellen Burstyn are incredible in their roles.

Anarene seems like such a brutal quiet small town. The men go from youth into working in the oil fields and women fall into domesticity. Everything seems like a slow motion death.

Position

See it, but maybe with a stiff drink.

I have to confess that I have seen some of this movie. I saw the Final Cut in a theater back in 2007. Except…I fell asleep. I present that not as a statement about the quality of the movie. I’ve fallen asleep during an embarrassing amount of movies. I offer this up just to explain why it’s on my Top 100 Movie quest. I made a promise to myself that if I can’t describe most of the plot in detail, I have to watch it.

Blade Runner is a very influential movie. The art direction has inspired countless movies and an entire aesthetic, Cyberpunk. As such, it's very hard to review it objectively. Additionally, this is a film notorious for having multiple cuts. I think there is somewhere in the neighborhood of five possible cuts you can watch on home video. I tried to keep things pure (so I thought) by only watching the theatrical cut to try to emulate how it would feel to see it in 1982.

What a mistake.

The narration is terrible. I could see it having charm to make this more of a Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade story, but the narration (which it seems was added at the request of the studio) is overlong, too “explain-y” and doesn't really fit.

Blade Runner is about a future (although I guess it's technically the past now) where lifelike androids have been created and are used for dangerous or undesirable work. The problem is that several of these androids have become sentient and no longer want to do work, but want to experience what life has to offer. Special police officers known as “Blade Runners” track down rogue androids and decommission them. Harrison Ford is one of those Blade Runners and is considered one of the best.

The structure of the movie plays very similar to a noir detective movie. It seems at odds at times with the science fiction trappings of the story (something I imagine the studio wanted to focus on more) and the existential questions that several characters muse on at times, which can make it a bit hard to watch.

All in all, this is a landmark piece of cinema and should be watched.

Position

See It but probably a non-theatrical cut

I run several containers in my home lab and the missing piece to my puzzle has been backups. That is to say I have no backup strategy. In my spare time, I've been working out how to backup the container storage and I feel pretty satisfied with my current solution.

Prerequisites

I keep all my container persistent data in a folder on my host machine in the format of /docker/{service-name} so /docker/caddy for instance. Therefore, only this folder should be backed up as it's the hardest to recreate.

Some of my containers use SQLLite or other databases. Copying the persistent data while the container is running could cause corruption. So, stopping and starting the container is necessary.

Finally, I want maximum flexibility so I want to be able to just copy the data in the filesystem.

rclone

Rclone is an application that allows you to mount cloud storage as a logical drive and perform I/O operations against it. Since I am a Microsoft 365 subscriber, I chose to use OneDrive.

Flask Server

I wanted to have a container that would perform actions based on either RESTful command or cronjobs. So I created flask-cron-server which will spin up a Flask server at port 2128. The

From there I was able to create server.py. This is the file that runs the Flask server and is executed on container startup:

It reads in a JSON file called /app/config/containers.json that defines all the containers along with the folder that should be archived and where that archive should be stored.

The call to backup is executed in a separate thread and a 202 Accepted response is sent to the caller to let them know that the command was received, but it is unknown how long it will take.

Finally, the whole thing is driven by a simple JSON

[
    {
        "container_name": "caddy",
        "source_folder": "/source/caddy",
        "destination_folder": "/destination/caddy",
        "retention_days": 7
    },
    {
        "container_name": "freshrss",
        "source_folder": "/source/freshrss",
        "destination_folder": "/destination/freshrss",
        "retention_days": 7
    },
    {
        "container_name": "guacamole",
        "source_folder": "/source/guacamole",
        "destination_folder": "/destination/guacamole",
        "retention_days": 7
    },
    {
        "container_name": "mosquitto",
        "source_folder": "/source/mosquitto",
        "destination_folder": "/destination/mosquitto",
        "retention_days": 7
    },
    {
        "container_name": "ps5-mqtt",
        "source_folder": "/source/ps5-mqtt",
        "destination_folder": "/destination/ps5-mqtt",
        "retention_days": 7
    },
    {
        "container_name": "slash",
        "source_folder": "/source/slash",
        "destination_folder": "/destination/slash",
        "retention_days": 7
    },
    {
        "container_name": "write-freely",
        "source_folder": "/source/writefreely",
        "destination_folder": "/destination/writefreely",
        "retention_days": 7
    },
    {
        "container_name": "homeassistant",
        "source_folder": "/source/ha",
        "destination_folder": "/destination/ha",
        "retention_days": 14
    }
]

Docker Container

The final step was to create the Docker container and stack

services:
  container-backup:
    image: zackwag/flask-container-backup:latest
    container_name: container-backup
    restart: unless-stopped
    ports:
      - 2128:2128
    volumes:
      - /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro
      - /docker/container-backup/config:/app/config
      - /docker:/source
      - onedrive-backup:/destination
    environment:
      - PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1
      - TZ=America/New_York
volumes:
  onedrive-backup:
    driver: rclone
    driver_opts:
      remote: onedrive:backup
      allow_other: "true"
      vfs-cache-mode: writes
networks: {}

I'm in the timezone of New York, so you will need to change it to where you live.

Also, I made sure to include /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock:ro so that I could start and stop containers.

Finally, I followed the directions for Docker Volume Plugin . This allowed me to create the volume onedrive-backup that points to the /backup folder in OneDrive. `

Calling Backups

Now that the container is running I can simply call

curl -X POST [IP ADDRESS]:2128/backup

to backup all the containers specified in containers.json or just

curl -X POST {IP ADDRESS}:2128/backup/{container name}

To backup a specific container specified in containers.json.

I have setup automations that daily in Home Assistant, that call the main /backup endpoint to kick off backups.

I am trying to watch all 100 of the movies on the AFI 100 Years...100 Movies List list. I had attempted to do this previously but only ended up watching number 99, Ben Hur. I got stopped by entry 98, which I want to write about today, Yankee Doodle Dandy.

I don't know how to put this delicately: I did not enjoy this movie.

It's a biopic, so it falls into the various trappings of biopics: Someone has an “ah-ha moment” and does what they are most remembered for, someone does something and it's overshadowed by history etc.

The movie is about the Life of George M. Cohan, who was affectionately known as The Father of Broadway. It tracks his life from being born on the Fourth of July to receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor privately in the Oval Office from FDR personally (?). He receives the award after recounting his life to FDR and to us the audience.

A pretty big deal is made about the fact that he was born on the Fourth of July and is patriotic because many of his shows were about patriotism, so I think it's important to contextualize that this movie was released in 1942. With America's participation in World War II in full swing this probably seemed to be a pretty important picture at the time.

The problem is, biopics of entertainers are not important. Or rather, they have a very short shelf life. I can only imagine trying to explain to someone in 2086 the importance of Ray Charles via the movie Ray.

I enjoyed some of the vaudeville jokes. It was interesting to see James Cagney doing dancing and singing (well before Hugh Jackman). The plot moves a lot more once Cohan is in his 20s (something I feel can be said for a lot of biopics). And, Cohan wrote a few good songs. I will note that my favorite of his, “Over There” is pretty simplistic.

Simply put, without context this choice on the list is baffling. I suppose this movie is to bridge the gap between theater that came before and movies after.

Regardless, I am glad to cross it off, but I don't think I will ever think of this movie again.

Postion

Skip it

I remember in When Harry Met Sally, Billy Crystal is shocked to find out that Meg Ryan skips ahead and reads the ending of the book first. Her rationale is that if the world would come to an end she’d like to know rather than waiting.

I find myself often in this position when watching movies or tv shows. I need to know the ending or twist or important information.

I personally think spoiler culture is a bit out-of-control. Most of it can be traced back to Psycho. Prior to that movie it was actually not uncommon for people to arrive to a movie late or spoil an ending.

There is power in knowing and withholding information. But I also think it can be a crutch. It’s almost cliche at this point, the idea that Jaws is effective because the shark is not shown often. Monsters in the darkness are scary. But I think there is a point of diminishing return when the light is never shown.

I feel like I’m meandering a bit. I guess my point is I prefer to skip to the end. It feels like the world is ending more and more every day.