Manchurian Candidate is one of my all time favorite films, so I’ve been equal parts dreading and looking forward to the remake that opened last night.

From the first 10 minutes of the film I could tell this it was going to be good, but I had no idea how good. Now, I’m not saying this is as good as the originalhow could it be without Frank Sinatra’s amazing performancebut this is an amazing film and a worthy remake.

It is also hyper-politically charged. Don’t want to ruin it for you but the tightly-woven story takes place on a masterfully created, yet disturbing, world filled US-based suicide bombings and Halliburton-style companies gone wild.

In other words this is what will happenin the mind of the director at leastif Bush stays in office another four years.

Turns out that Fahrenheit 911 isn’t the biggest anti-Bush film of the seasonthis film is. If any film is going to convince people that we’re on the wrong path this one will.

For me this is the must see film of the summer. Four stars, hands down one of the best films I’ve seen.

For those of you not paying attention out there, Craigslist is going to go paid in about 24 hours. (well, it’s been paid in San Fran fro jobs for a while, but more a couple of more locations are going paid).

Sad in some ways, but exciting in others. Craigs and his crew fight all day long to make the site valuable and I’m psyched to see them make some money from it.

Of course, I’m also counting the days till someone does freecraigslist.com.

Update: As Craig himself says below, they are still 99.99% free just paid in NY, LA and SF jobs. Of course, that makes it 100% paid to me.

Visited Lake Tahoe this week one of the most beutiful places I’ve ever been. Some photos follow

Jason driving Mark kicking it.

Mark’s got skillz.

…. Jason does not.

Amy takes it all in.

The lady of the lake.

Doesn’t even look real huh?!

Am I crazy or does it take like 20 tries to do one technorati search? Everyone is talking about how technorati is this amazing company, but I don’t get it. Their server(s) never work and their service is the same as Feedster, plus Google and Yahoo will have this service on their massive infrastructure in about 2-3 months.

What is the value of technorati?

Comments?

Great lineup for this panel: Chris Tolles from Topix.net, Mark Pincus from Tribe, Craig Newmark of Craigslist and Sean Bonner who is doing Metblogs.com.

Mena discussed the licensing fiasco that went down with Moveable Type a couple of months ago. She discussed the personal attack on her and the VCs, and said she they moved the discussion to the people who wanted to pay, and she solicited feedback as to what people wanted in pay product.

Barak didn’t say much, but the two seemed to be on good terms.

She says the big mistake they made was springing the changes on pricing on their customers. She said the biggest injustice was that they didn’t consult their users, and she joked how they were no longer the underdogs and were not just evil like Microsoft (big laugh). She said they didn’t think the responses would be so nasty, and that they made a decision to leave trackbacks on and just deal with all the flames.

Barak, the new CEO, says that being open as a company is hard and painful, but he thinks it is necessary.

HeathRowBot transcript: http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2004/07/23/business_tra

I’m at the Berkeley campus right now for the Blogon Conference right now. The guys from http://channel9.msdn.com/.

Channel 9 is an inside look at Microsoft, and it is named after Channel 9 onthe airlines where customers (aka passengers) can listen in to the cockpit of the airplane.

L-R, Robert Scoble, Microsoft Corporation; Jeff Sandquist, Microsoft Corporation; Lenn Pryor, Microsoft Corporation.

HeathRowBot transcript: http://blog.fastcompany.com/archives/2004/07/23/business_tra

What is the best way to work on an Excel file together over the Internet? Anyone know? One is a Windows XP machine the other is Windows 2000 Pro.

Any ideas?!?!

I’m working on a story about Howard Stern tape traders.

What’s the best place to find Howard Stern show torrents? Post in comments below.

I just had an amazing experience I visited my old firm’s website, www.venturereporter.net, and saw that they had updated the logo to say Dow Jones Venture Reporter.

Man that made me feel good to think that a brand that I started and built (along with a team of great folks including Brian, Gordon, Jamie, CJ, Ryan, Mikkel, Keith, Tom, Karol, Ken, etc.) was now part of Dow Jones and they were proud enough to put their logo with itman that makes me feel great!

So, if you want venture capital news go buy a gold pass from my brother Jamie who still works there (that makes me feel great too, that many of the origional team are working over there still): jamie.calacanis <at> dowjones.com.