Remains of the Day

Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood

C-Span.org has posted the audio from today's oral argument at the Supreme Court in Ayotte v. Planned Parenthood. Go to the site and find one of the listen links. It's one of the more important abortion cases in recent history so the Supreme Court issued same-day audio recordings for just the 10th time since 2000.

Firefox 1.5

Firefox 1.5 officially released, available at Mozilla's new URL.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve

I showed up in L.A. last night. Like Charles Bronson in Once Upon a Time in the West, my arrival was announced first with the lonely, plaintive wail of a harmonica, and then, a rental car shuttle van exited frame left revealing me, standing curbside at LAX, my cowboy hat tipped 15 degrees south, leaning on my rollaway.

The teaser trailer for Shyamalan's next movie, Lady in the Water. I thought at some point that this was billed as a Splash remake, but that seems unlikely. Cinematography by everyone's favorite punch-drunk DP, Christopher Doyle.

I saw Antonioni's The Passenger at the New York Film Festival a month or so ago. As is my custom these days, I avoided reading anything about the movie beforehand, not even plot synposes, let alone any critic's reviews. Even without any reference points to bias my thinking, that last shot of the movie is recognizable as an instant classic, a recapitulation of the entire movie in one long, unbroken shot. I am curious now as to how it was done. The more of Nicholson's early work I see, the more I think he's earned every on-screen Lakers courtside cameo.

Last week while I was over at James and Angela's for dinner, Angela and I sat through a season 2 Laguna Beach marathon. What I've read is true: Laguna Beach out O.C's The O.C., which at any rate took only three seasons to jump the shark. What caught my eye was the way Laguna Beach is shot and edited: like a narrative. Though it's shot on video, it's shot in 24p on the legendary Panasonic AJ-SDX900 (with an occasional helping hand from the AG-DVX100A), and while video still doesn't look like film, this is about as close as it gets. The multi-camera setups, gamma curves, 24p, and the editing all convince you at times that the show is scripted. The AJ-SDX900 has an MSRP of $25,000, and that might just be cheap.

Speaking of the beach, it's 80 degrees here in Manhattan...Beach. I am thankful already.

An insightful article by James Surowiecki in this week's New Yorker about the differing lengths of the average work week in Europe and America. Because Americans work more, they spend more of their income on services like child care (nannies), housecleaning, and dining out. Europeans have shorter work weeks and more leisure, but this has stunted the growth of their service industry. Send us your poor, your huddled, your French maids, your Swedish au pairs.

From that same issue of The New Yorker, which I read on the plane flight over to L.A., an excerpt from a book review by Louis Menand (one of my favorite New Yorker columnists):

“The twenty-first century,” he suggests, “might yet belong to Europe.” Is this a credible expectation? A lot depends, of course, on what is meant by “belong.” From the provincial American point of view, the most striking change in the status of Europe is that it is no longer the place where Americans with intellectual, artistic, or just “life style” aspirations wish—or even pretend to wish—to be. Once, Europe was where all the new stuff seemed to be coming from. Then, some time in the nineteen-sixties, that stopped. Europe’s great cities are still fascinating to Americans, but the fascination is fundamentally touristic. They’re theme parks. Almost no one thinks that you can’t be a real writer or painter or sophisticated bon vivant unless you spend some time living in one of them. This is not a judgment on the splendors of American civilization; it’s just an observation about European civilization, and it bears on what sort of role in the world Europe will play during the rest of the century.

A bunwarming holiday story: Canon says that copy machine service calls increase 25% during the holidays because so many people photocopy their asses, cracking the glass (literally). In response to the super sizing of America, Canon has increased the thickness of its glass by an extra millimeter. Please, people, if you have to copy your bum, be safe and use a spotter.

To you and yours, a happy Thanksgiving. To crib from Jon Stewart, I hope you celebrate the traditional way: eat with some folks, and then take their land.

Superman reruns, or returns, and so does Johnny Cash, sort of

Hipster shirts for your dog, including a Von Bitch T.

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The teaser trailer for Superman Returns came out last Thursday evening, attached to the latest Harry Potter movie. The few glimpses imply a remake of the Richard Donner Superman--we have the John Williams score, the same Jor-El voice, the same uniform and hairstyle, the same improbably penthouse apt. for Lois Lane on a journalist's salary, the same unknown actor donning the red underwear--but then I clicked on story and realized it really is supposed to be a return of sorts. Where did he go? The trailer didn't excite me enough to care.

How is it that Jor-El can continue to speak to Superman about present events. Is he like Obi-Wan Kenobi, part of the Force in some way? If that is so, and I were Clark, I'd definitely have him record my answering machine message. Marlon Brando as Jor-El: "Whom do you seek? [long pause] I jest. My one and only son, Kal-El, whom you know as Clark, is not present. But I have sent him to you, because you are a people of promise, a people who need merely a light to guide you, and so, if you should deign to leave your name and whereabouts, I shall send him to you, my one and only son, my [beep]"

***

Perhaps this is the real reason for the war in Iraq: to capture a new market for Fox's The Simpsons, or Al Shamshoon as it's translated in the Middle East. Homer is now Omar, and in deference to the Koran, forbidden items such as Duff's beer and bacon have been replaced. [Thx Arya]

***

The Movies101 selection last Wednesday was Walk the Line. When the title was announced, the woman behind me squealed with delight and kicked me in the back of my head. I was less than sanguine, not because of the sharp blow from her pointed heels, but because biopics, let alone those about musical luminaries, are not my cup of tea.

Prof. Brown prefaced the movie with a long disclaimer absolving the filmmakers of any blame for any liberties they took with Cash's life. He believes that in condensing a life into two hours, it's not only acceptable but necessary to abbreviate and remix a person's life so that it tells a good story (his primary requirement for a movie).

I agree that movies that have to condense a lot of material--biopics, adaptions of long novels--have to convey the spirit of a person without rehashing their entire lives. But to me that's not an excuse for gross simplification or omission. Many people watching biopics become so tied up in the illusion that they believe that what's depicted on screen is how that person actually was; that's a lot of responsibility. Most often, biopics seem to cross the boundaries of acceptable artistic license by cleaning up the protagonist and by sullying the antagonist. Hollywood believes we want our heros to sport a core of decency below any cinematic soot our enemies unambiguously dark, with black hat and sinister mustache translated into the appropriate time period.

I'm actually not an expert on Johnny Cash's life, so I can't comment on this movie's accuracy in depicting his life, or his spirit. Contrary to what many are saying, Joaquin Phoenix does not sound like Johnny Cash (who does, really?), but he channels the spirit of the music, sending his voice down into the earth, and that's what matters. Reese Witherspoon sparkles. I know nothing of June Carter, but if Witherspoon isn't channeling her spirit, then whoever she's playing is still fascinating. Both Phoenix and Witherspoon are shoo-ins for Best Actor/Actress Oscar nominations: these are the right types of roles, the right types of performances.

I'm less gung-ho about the movie itself. It still has the fairy-tale quality of a biopic, even if it covers some dark territory (though nothing dark enough to match the grit of Cash's music itself). If anyone ever does a biography of my life, I hope it's Hollywood, because then I know that I'll come off well.

***

When I was growing up, my mother used bajiao (eight feet), or the star anise, to make beef stew. I never could appreciate the flavor, only because every time I bit into one of those eight-legged stars while eating my mouth would be assaulted by that bitter licorice taste.

So it's a bit ironic to me that star anise is now one of the most coveted spices in the world because it provides the shikimic acid at the heart of Tamiflu.

***

The most popular recommendation I received for my cold (and thank you all for the unsolicited plugs for your favorite remedies) was Airborne. It's a preventative measure, to be taken as soon as you feel a cold coming on. It's a pill that combines lots of popular cold cures, from zinc and echinacea to vitamins C, E, and A. It's an aggregation strategy product, like putting lotion in Kleenex, or combining teeth whitening and tartar control substances in toothpaste.

I've never taken anything that's helped me to stave off a cold. If I feel the symptoms developing, the cold always follows. Some medications have helped me to combat the symptoms of a cold. Still, I'm willing to give anything a try, so I've added some Airborne to my medicine cabinet for a test next time.

***

I decided to shelve the turducken idea for Thanksgiving. In the end, it just sounded too gimmicky. Here's another aggregation product, but in the end the idea of combining the flavors of those three meats just didn't sound intriguing enough to drop $100.

A different product has caught my eye: the 72 oz. steak. As illustrated in an episode of The Simpsons and in John Candy's The Great Outdoors, attempting to devour an enormous slab of red meat in one sitting is a time-honored American tradition. Among the interesting trivia of this long-standing contest:

Frank Pastore, a professional pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds, ate the complete steak dinner in a record that still stands today of just 9½ minutes back in May of 1987.

He failed to make the team in Spring Training and was out of baseball that same year.

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Stream the new Ryan Adams album, 29.

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Sometimes when I listen to Bush and his Administration speaking about the war in Iraq, I'm reminded of the concluding scenes of Aguirre, the Wrath of God, when some of Aguirre's companions sit on the raft, driven mad by illness and hunger. Meanwhile, one by one they succumb to the arrows from near invisible enemy, Indians hiding in the forest to either side. An arrow pierces a man's leg.

"That is not an arrow," he says.

He sees the carcass of a ship, sitting high up in a tree.

"There is no ship," he says.

It's a beautiful sequence, because Herzog does not show most of the attacks. Aguirre simply finds one body after another, a poisonous arrow in the neck. Aguirre holds his daughter, and then the camera tilts down, and we see an arrow in her chest.

Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking

A recent loss of someone dear to our family rang like an echo of 1998. For many nights, it hung in my head like something faint, like the high pitched whine of old tube televisions. The grief that arises from the loss of someone close to you seems indomitable. When people write that they've "overcome grief" or "moved on", it sounds as if they've wrestled it into submission, or left it behind.

For me, the grief was something I couldn't turn away from for a long time. Finally I realized that I had to throw it on my back and carry it with me. Only then could I carry on. So while we can't see it, we've hardly left it behind. We feel its weight on our back and accept that we'll carry it with us until the end of our days.

One night I grabbed the NYTimes Magazine on my way to catch the subway (I hate sitting idle on the train), and during the ride I read an excerpt from The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion.

Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life. Virtually everyone who has ever experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves."

Much of what she wrote felt fresh, familiar, and true. I went out and purchased a copy of the book the next day; it didn't surprise me at all that the book was in such high demand from those who had lost a loved one. In the weeks to follow, the press mentions for the book, especially in New York media, were ubiquitous.

It has won all sorts of acclaim, most notably the 2005 non-fiction National Book Award, and deservedly so. The book has an added layer of pathos because Didion's daughter Quintana died after the book's publication. It's a classic.

More online cinematic commercials

Anonymous Content, purveyor of flashy commercials and music videos, has an online commercial on tap. Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) directs The Call for Pirelli, releasing online in March 2006. Looks from that teaser to be some good vs. evil Biblical tale, but whatever the story, let's hope that like their calendars it involves lots of hot models. Those always convince me that I should be mounting Pirelli tires on my Ferrari instead of Goodyear or Michelin.

tick tock tick tock

I'm puzzled, really, at how I could have caught this stubborn cold when my human contact in the past week has been so minimal. My nose is so raw it hurts to breathe. I'm fairly certain that the truth behind Rudolph's red nose was that he caught a cold up at the North Pole. That or he was a coke addict.

When people say, oh, yeah, that cold has been going around, it sounds as if we're all sharing the same cold. How likely is that? Maybe we all caught it from Kevin Bacon? Paris Hilton? How many different colds are going around in one city? Which one is popular among Eastern European models right now? If I'm going to be sick, at least let me be sick in the most stylish way.

I'm torn. On the one hand, if it's the same cold everyone has been catching, then at least I know it's not fatal. A cold I can live with. Any flu associated with an animal--bad news. On the other hand, everyone feels a little possessive of their illnesses in a Larry David narcissistic kind of way.

On a positive note, I've been sampling the 2004 vintage of Vicks 44D. Very full-bodied, with a strong cherry bouquet leading into a musky finish. Tastes like port and goes wonderfully with leftover Halloween candy.

***

A lot of the hooks in Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor sounded really familiar, like the ticking clock at the start of "Hung Up". Turns out her producer was Jacques Lu Cont, the British DJ behind some popular remixes of songs like Gwen Stefani's "What You Waiting For" (where I first heard that ticking clock) and The Killers' "Mr. Brightside."

***

Today Microsoft released its backward compatibility list for the XBox 360. The list includes about 200 games right now. To play them you'll need to install a software emulator from XBox Live, by burning a CD-ROM of files from xbox.com, or by paying to have a CD shipped to you. Original Xbox game will be upscaled to 720p and 1080i.

It all seems like a hassle for the casual gamer--this Q&A with an XBox VP on this topic stretches on for nearly 4 pages. Not ideal as a marketing message.

***

The first chapter of Nicole Richie's new book, whose title is irrelevant. It's as awful as you'd imagine, some of the most laughable fiction ever committed to print, but what I'm curious about is whether generations past have had to endure the same celeb-lit piffle. Did Plato lament when youngsters bypassed The Republic in favor of Confessions of a Teenage Eunuch by Anorexales?

Every book finds its audience, though, and Nicole has hers. When asked if the character of Simone Westlake was based on Paris Hilton ("Simone was leggy and tall, though no one knows exactly how tall because she'd never been seen out of pumps since puberty ... not even in her night-vision skin flicks, filmed strictly for private use, of course.") Nicole responded: ""It's not her. I've come across many people in my life that are like that."

Haven't we all.

***

James Surowiecki writes about the at times symbiotic relationship between the government and the tobacco industry in this week's New Yorker. This quote intrigued me:

The industry now spends more than half a billion dollars a year in legal fees, and billions of dollars a year in settlements. In strict monetary terms, the settlement with the states might seem like a bad deal for the tobacco companies. Research by W. Kip Viscusi, a Harvard economist (and frequent pro-tobacco witness), suggests that if you take into account tobacco taxes and the higher mortality rates of smokers, which reduce the government’s Social Security and Medicare payments, smoking actually saves the public money.

***

Our family is preparing a traditional Thanksgiving dinner this year, but I'd like to supplement it with an alternative main course. I've yet to try a fried turkey, a turducken, or a quaducant. The preparation of a fried turkey sounds downright intimidating. It involves several gallons of peanut oil, a hot tub, and a flamethrower wielded by ninjas. I doubt we'll be having that unless someone prepares it for us off-site. Preparing a turducken yourself also sounds like a chore--lots of deboning, preparing, assembling, sewing. Substitute people for fowl and you'd have Thanksgiving at Buffalo Bill's from Silence of the Lambs.

"It rubs the gravy on its skin."

"Please, why can't we have turkey like every other family?"

"Put the effing gravy on your skin!"

You can purchase a pre-assembled turducken, but they're not cheap. Those of you who've tried one: does the integration of the chicken, duck, and turkey actually lead to a whole that's greater than the sum of its parts? Would I get all the same benefits if I prepared a chicken, duck, and turkey separately, then had a relative spotting me so that I could shove one forkful of each meat into my mouth simultaneously?

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Google Analytics, a free tool to help websites to optimize their traffic. Not surprisingly, it integrates tightly with AdWords.

Kairo

A little of this and that as I lie here on my deathbed, hacking and wheezing from what I really hope is not avian flu...

New Michel Gondry music video for The White Stripes "Denial Twist" (Quicktime), featuring Conan O'Brien? If you believe music videos are primarily a conceptual art form, then Gondry is the reigning master. To get your own Director's Label DVD from here on out, you really need to direct a White Stripes and/or Bjork music video.

Fun e-mail thread b/t Mark Cuban and The Sports Guy. Simmons got in a few jabs I'm sure everyone wanted to level against Cuban, but the Mavs owner largely resisted the bait. Would that more sports journalism exchanges were so candid (or any type of media interviews, for that matter).

In Movies101 tonight, they screened the new movie version of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley. It got me thinking that I should start growing out my mutton chops and working on my English accent now if I want to be Mr. Darcy for Halloween next year. The mutton chops was apparently to that period what the mullet was to the 80's. If Jason Priestley could do a British accent, he'd still be working now.

For someone who enjoys being surprised, the teaser trailer for Darren Aranofsky's The Fountain provides just the right amount of information. Which is to say very little. Even that web page is nothing but white sans serif text on black.

The trailer for Steven Spielberg's Munich, based on a screenplay by Tony Kushner based on a Vengeance : The True Story of an Israeli Counter-Terrorist Team, by George Jonas, is from a more traditional school of Hollywood marketing and gives away too much. Still, I couldn't resist watching it because Janusz Kaminski's cinematography is so damn beautiful.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Pulse finally comes out in American theaters this Friday (well, at least in LA and NY), nearly half a decade after it first released in Japan. Miramax bought the rights, contemplated an American remake, and basically sat on the picture for years. Being a big fan of Kurosawa's movies, I rented a DVD copy from Scarecrow Video in Seattle in late 2001. The DVD's legality was suspect, as was its quality, but that added to the thrill, like finding some rare concert bootleg on cassette tape and having to rent a tape player just to listen to it. I watched it one night, home alone, and experienced several outbreaks of horripilation, which does not mean I soiled myself, though I almost did that, too. I enjoy a good cinematic scare, but somewhere along the line, monster/serial killer/slasher movies became formulaic and lost that ability to surprise, and thus to scare. Sure, if something hideous pops out on the screen to a percussive jolt, I'll startle, but I'll also bleed if you punch me in the nose. Pulse works at a subtler level and infuses the audience with visceral unease, a rare experience at the movies these days (If Pulse doesn't come to your town, plenty of DVD copies can be found on eBay).

Werner Herzog, now there's an always interesting filmmaker, whose Grizzly Man was one of the better movies I saw this past year. His next movie seems no less unique: The Wild Blue Yonder, a science-fiction fantasy.

The new Madonna album, Confessions on a Dance Floor, has leaked out onto the web. At last check, the Megaupload link was still active, though I'd be shocked if Warner Brothers wasn't busy cranking the winch on a giant cannon to line up the link in its sights. Thou shalt not steal, but if you've pre-ordered the album and can't wait for Tuesday, it's really damn catchy and danceable. [yay for Stereogum]

Crass

I received an e-mail ad (read: spam) from Snapfish plugging their new partner, HomeMovie.com. The top portion of the ad is below.

Now I try to avoid sanctimony here as much as possible, but that ad strikes me as extremely distasteful, especially in a time when a lot of people are trying to recover from some cataclysmic hurricanes and earthquakes. After having lost a home in a natural disaster, the loss of some home videos is not top of mind, and trying to capitalize on such associations to push a commercial service is insensitive. Furthermore, placing the photo of that young child at the lower right of that ad, just after "destroy a lifetime of memories," implies that in not preserving your videos with HomeMovie.com or similar services, you're somehow putting your own child at risk.

I'd be amazed if this passed through more than one level of signoff.

Tailwind

Jason and all the major ladies in his life--mother, wife, daughters, mother-in-law--visited this weekend for his sophomore effort in the NYC marathon. Just like old times, the first time we met up this weekend was early in the morning, after a night of little sleep. He arrived Thursday night, slept a few hours. I was up late Thursday night editing, slept about two hours, and the two of us met up at a diner for a 7:30am breakfast looking like extras from a George Romero movie.

Jason sounded resigned to trying to just equal his time from last year because a hectic work schedule had cut into his daily runs, but I felt he'd improve. He'd lost a ton of weight since last year and weighed about what I weigh now, and he's much taller than I am. Endurance athletes often look drawn and malnourished before their best performances, like the way Lance Armstrong looked every time the Tour rolled around. Jason had also done more super long runs, some five 22-milers, and based on my limited training experience, those are the most critical marathon training runs. The lack of the occasional midweek run leading up to the race would allow his body to rest for the big day.

On race morning, as Jason was running through Brooklyn and Queens, the Kilar clan and I were fighting our own race to get up to the Bronx. I have great empathy for mothers who have to ride on subways with child and stroller. Many stations have no entrances other than stairways, and I saw one woman just pick up an entire stroller, with child and sundry childcare items in it, and just hump it down four flights of stairs. That may be why you don't see many obese NYC kids; at an early age, their parents force them out of the stroller to walk.

A record 2.5 million people watched this NYC Marathon, the largest crowd ever to watch a marathon. The 4 and 6 trains were packed, and we found ourselves squeezed out of a packed train or two. We finally learned to go all the way to the back car. The distribution of people across an entire NY Metro subway train resembles a mesa, with steep dropoffs at the front and back. Switching from the 6 uptown to the 4 uptown at 59th St. required a two mile descent down a staircase, putting us about a story or two above the ninth circle of Hell. Jamie's mother had the back of the stroller, I had the front, and we both got a good bicep/shoulder burn.

We popped out at 138th St. in the Bronx, right alongside the course between miles 20 and 21, at around 12:15 pm. Our immediate concern was whether or not we'd missed him already. That would have been awful, for both Jason and us. I tried to spot a pace runner but saw none. I asked a spectator who looked like a serious marathoner what pace the runners passing us were on. He said they were probably on a 2:40 marathon, so I felt better.

Still, after half an hour, I started to have doubts, so I called Karen and woke her up on the West coast to log in to the marathon website to look up Jason's splits. The website was slow and crashed her browser, so she had to fire it up again. While on the phone, I looked down the road and saw a guy in a black tank top with JASON written across the front. Jamie spotted him and started waving, and I sprinted out to the street to snap a few photos.

As he passed, he pointed at his Garmin sports watch with a look of surprise on his face. He flashed a thumbs up and looked to be in good spirits. What did it mean when he pointed at his watch, we wondered as we rode the subway to the finish line.

Once there, we found out. He finished with a time of 3:21, shaving over twenty minutes off of his time from last year. Unbelievable. We just sat near the family reunion area and soaked in the triumph of the moment. As we rested and Sadie carbo loaded, Jason and I discussed what might have been responsible for his dramatic improvement. Less weight. More marathon experience and miles in his legs. More long runs in his training. A bit more mid-week rest leading up to race day.

But in retrospect, I like to think that something psychological played a role. People who are excited about what they do are running downhill in the game of life.

Jason and Sadie at the finish line (Click on the photo for more pics)

Hornets, Mechanical Turks, and swords, oh my

If you absolutely can't wait to see Tom Yum Goong in American theaters, you can pre-order the VCD. The quality will be terrible, though, so I recommend making the soup instead and waiting for the movie to arrive on the big screen.

How to defend against Teen Wolf.

Once a year, Popular Science publishes a list of the Worst Jobs in Science. This year's list included a link to this bizarre video clip (MPEG) of a ballerina dancing around a NASA robot which resembles a giant, umm, unmanned vehicle. Yeah.

Red square: keep away, if you can. [This and the next two links via Me-Fi]

A condensed jpeg of Ground Zero from straight overhead, a short while after 9/11. The not condensed version of the photo. Meanwhile, with scant media buzz, construction on the new World Trade Center began two days ago.

Sword swallowers actually do swallow swords, though the swords rarely reach the stomach. I saw a sword swallower in China put a long fluorescent light down his throat, and then they turned off the house lights and he turned on the lamp, and we could see the light through the skin of his throat. Now there's a great opener the next time you want to start a conversation with an attractive stranger at a bar.

One of the last projects I heard about when I left Amazon.com and its Web Services team looks to have launched, sort of: The Mechanical Turk. It allows software developers to add human intelligence to their programs, because there are still many things humans do better than computers. A devious use might be to have humans interpret captchas for your automated ticket hoarding program. A less nefarious use might be to help an AIBO interpret human facial expressions or tone of voice. What incentive do you have to help out a computer program with tasks like these? Cash. Reminds me a bit of that marketplace for human talents in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age.

Curbed's Eater publishes the complete list of 507 restaurants in the New York Michelin Guide.

Thrilling if gruesome video (Windows Media File) of a couple dozen giant hornets massacring a colony of some 30,000 honey bees in order to plunder the honey and larvae. By massacre I mean they just use their jaws to bite the bees in half, one after the other. Sheesh. I tried to trace the movie back to its original poster, but gave up after about ten or so hops, so I'll credit J-Walk, who published some great references on Microsoft Excel and who maintains a prolific weblog.

This week's Out of 5 is a good one: They Got It Right the First Time - Great Songs Better Known Via Inferior Covers

The trailer for King Kong...

...released today on the Internet. If you are so blessed with a Mac with the proper muscle, you can also watch it in high-def which is just sexy as all get out. Looking at in HD, the Kong and the dinosaurs still looks artificial, to me, in texture. It's stunning animation, but it doesn't look photo-realistic.

That doesn't bother me quite as much since the first two King Kong movies (the stop-motion original and the Jeff Bridges/Jessica Lange cover) both had a realistic looking Kong, both in their own ways. I have yet to see a digitally animated character that I really believed was there--it's a chasm that SFX folks have yet to cross, though it certainly doesn't mean that movies with heavy doses of digital landscapes and characters can't be

That challenge demonstrates that working with physical models and robotics still can achieve a realism that animation cannot match yet. The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park remain a gold standard for real-looking dinos, mostly because Spielberg used massive robotic dinosaurs for much of the shoot. Spielberg is hands-down the best director at making the unreal look real, at blending the artificial seamlessly into the real.

The 1976 King Kong holds a special spot in my heart because it was one of the first movies my parents took me to see. I was just three at the time, but when they shot King Kong and toppled him from the building, I cried. That will be the test of the realism of the newest 7-story gorilla to play this role: how badly will we feel when the biplanes blast him off of the Empire State Building?

Footnote: Peter Jackson's Production Diaries will ship on DVD the day before King Kong releases in theaters. If you've been following KongisKing.net, you need not purchase this DVD. Still, this seems like a first, the release of the making-of-featurette on DVD before the actual movie has made it into theaters, and this is no 10 minute short. The production diaries spans two DVDs by themselves.

Results of the Michelin Guide to NY 2006

Here's the press release announcing highlights of the first ever Michelin Red Guide 2006 New York City. Highlights:

Three star restaurants

• Alain Ducasse
• Jean-Georges
• Le Bernardin
• Per Se

Two star restaurants

• Bouley
• Daniel
• Danube
• Masa

One star restaurants

• Annisa
• Aureole
• Babbo
• BLT Fish
• Cafe Boulud
• Cafe Gray
• Craft
• Cru
• Etats-Unis
• Fiamma Osteria
• Fleur de Sel
• Gotham Bar and Grill
• Gramercy Tavern
• JoJo
• Jewel Bako
• La Goulue
• Lever House
• Lo Scalco
• March
• Nobu
• Oceana
• Peter Luger
• Picholine
• Saul
• Scalini Fedeli
• Spotted Pig
• The Modern
• Veritas
• Vong
• Wallse
• WD-50

The Michelin Guide chose to acknowledge the existence of 507 other restaurants by listing them in the guide. The NYTimes captures the mixed reactions of some New York chefs.