Remains of the Day

Always be cobbling

Always
Be
Cobbling
(thanks James)

If they just sent in Alec Baldwin, the city could have averted this transit strike.

By the numbers

Just for giggles and kicks, and out of curiosity, I asked Alex Ross, one of the New Yorker's music critics, for his favorite symphonies by number. So for each number from 1 through 9, which composer's symphony of that number was his favorite? He responded with the following:

No. 1: Nielsen [1]
No. 2: Stravinsky (Symphony of Psalms)
No. 3: Beethoven (Lutoslawski close runner-up)
No. 4: Shostakovich
No. 5: Sibelius
No. 6: Vaughan Williams
No. 7: Mahler
No. 8: Dvorak
No. 9: Schubert [2]

That's a great list that includes five symphonies I have yet to hear. If I have time later this week I'll try and link to some great recordings of each.

Ross has a great weblog for music fans, especially classical music buffs, called The Rest Is Noise. Here's Ross's best of the year in music lists. Here's another Best of 2005 list, courtesy of Ross's fellow New Yorker music critic Sasha Frère-Jønes. And, while I'm at it, Pitchfork's Top 50 Albums of 2005.

[1] Bruckner wrote a Symphony No. 0, the "Nullte". It was published posthumously and was likely actually the second symphony Bruckner wrote, though he shelved it.
[2] Beyond No. 9, only a few composers are left in the running (Shostakovich through No. 15, and Mozart and Haydn beyond that).

WhatTheFont?

I haven't tested this, but it sounds cool. Upload an image of some text to identify the font.

Artists and poets do it better. Or at least more. Yes, confusions of causality and whatnot. I suspect actors like Colin Farrell and Waren Beatty were classified as artists, skewing the data set.

Some new Google Extensions for Firefox: Google Safe Browsing (phish repellent), and Blogger Web Comments.

Sneak listen to John Williams score for Munich. As a fan of the oboe, I fancy #8, "Avner and Daphna."

This American Life downloads via a Greasemonkey script.

The Chronic of Narnia Rap from SNL (takes a long time to load, but worth it, and the fact that you have to vouch for an SNL clip link is itself a comment on the sad state of affairs over there).

The Word

James Surowiecki calls a foul on the U.S. patent system. Also in this week's New Yorker, a short story by Nabokov: "The Word".

Time magazine's Persons of the Year: Bill and Melinda Gates and Bono.

SwarmSketch: collective art on the web.

Beck's video for "Hell Yes" features all four working Sony QRIO robots performing a fan dance (see the video by going to Beck.com > Videos > "Hell Yes"). Domo arigato, mister robotos. Since Beck loves performing the robot when he performs, I thought the robots might accompany him in that. Robots performing the robot...guess I'll have to wait until I have a QRIO of my own to pull that off.

Year of the stache

This has been a great year for the mustache. There was Liev Schreiber's in the latest Broadway production of Glengarry Glen Ross. Schreiber was the best thing in an uneven production, and he won a Tony.

Tony Leung sported one in 2046, and it got him into Zhang Ziyi's qipao.

Jake Plummer grew one in honor of his fallen teammate Pat Tillman, and in the process has had the best season of his career, leading the Broncos to the playoffs.

Gonzaga's Adam Morrison deserves extra credit. Not only is he sporting a mad stache, he's got the hair to match, a bit of Billy Crudup circa Almost Famous. How's it working out for Morrison? He's just leading the nation in scoring.

LeBron? Yep. In fact, it's quite possible he's been sporting a mustache since he was 8, which might explain his precocity. Either that, or one of these days he'll just come out and admit he's 34, which is also quite possible.

I'm not taking any chances. If I start now, I may have a mustache in place by this time next year.

Giddyup

Oh, thank goodness, the Bears finally put Rex Grossman in at quarterback. Finally, a QB with some accuracy. Yes, Kyle Orton has been the QB as the Bears have put up a winning record, but that's mostly because of their defense, O-line, and RB's. It's amazing how much halo credit fans, broadcasters, and journalists have been willing to grant Orton even though he seems like he can't hit the broadside of a barn most days.

Orton may be a good NFL QB someday--he keeps his cool and avoids drastic mistakes most weeks--but the pro game is still a bit fast for him. He telegraphs his passes with his eyes, and he throws balls where no one, whether on offense or defense, can catch them (also, that beard is just wrong). It takes nearly every college QB at least a year to adjust to the speed and complexity of the pro game, and Orton is no exception. Orton's fortunate to have had lots of hands-on experience this year, but if Grossman is healthy he should be given the chance. He's had several years to study the pro game, even if a lot of it has been from the sidelines.

Grossman has been hurt for most of his time as a pro, and so people call him brittle as if he's Mr. Glass. His first injury was an ACL tear, which was a fluke, and his second was an ankle injury, which I never saw. Anyhow, having weak bones, as one journalist accused Grossman of, is an actual medical condition which can be tested for. Worse comes to worse, if Grossman goes down again, Orton gets back in with some game experience under his belt, and Orton supporters are happy.

With Grossman at QB, the Bears become an even more dangerous opponent, especially coming out of the weaker NFC. If the Bears can win out, they'll have a bye in the first round of the playoffs and a home game in round two. I don't think there's another team in the NFC that the Bears feel like they can't beat, including Seattle on the road.

Anyhow, I get ahead of myself, but it's just been so long since Chicago's had a team with the potential of going to the Superbowl that the whole city is giddy. Alan and I call each other after every big play, like Mike Green blowing up Michael Jenkins.

As an aside, there's no more beautiful sight to a Bears fan than the sight of the players' breath in the sub-zero Chicago air.

Artwalk

Ken visited this weekend, and, as usual when this walking encyclopedia of art is in town, we tried to take in some of the exhibitions that interested him. Our first stop was the Neue Galerie which owns and is currently exhibiting the largest collection of Egon Schiele works in the world. Schiele's portraits and nudes are really arresting. The portraits are intimate, as if he caught the subject letting down their guard and then drew them the instant they reacted to being discovered. The female nudes exhibit a shamelessness that seems very modern in retrospect, their legs spread or splayed at all sorts of obtuse angles like turn of the century porn stars.

I suspect Schiele's work was a huge influence on Peter Chung's Aeon Flux visual style as well as on Frank Miller in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. Miller's Joker in that book resembles a Schiele.

Incidentally, the wait for the museum cafe, Cafe Sabarsky, was almost an hour. If you've a hankering for Viennese food...

Our next visit was to the Marian Goodman Gallery, currently exhibiting paintings from 2001-2005 by Gerhard Richter, renowned for being the the most expensive living artist, at least in auction. We were told that most Richters sell for several million in auction, with even letter-sized prints fetching $800,000. Most of the exhibition showcases his Abstraktes, not my favorite of his works, but at the last room of the exhibition are four of his Silikat pictures, massive grey paintings based on photographs of molecular structures. As such, they straddle the line between abstraction and representation, like all of his photo-based paintings. Any of his Silikats would make a fabulous desktop wallpaper.

Richter made many paintings based on photographs. Only two were on display here. One was Mustang Squadron (1964) which sold for $462,000, and the other, Waldhaus (2004), looked like a picture of a country home nestled among the trees, shot out the window of a moving car. I wasn't in New York for his 2002 MOMA exhibition, the one that traveled to Art Institute in Chicago, SF MOMA, and the Hirshhorn in D.C. Someday I hope to see his Iceberg in Fog in person.

Our final destination on the Artwalk was the James Cohan Gallery in Chelsea, currently exhibiting a Bill Viola exhibition. At some hours, it's nearly impossible to hail a cab, so by the time we arrived, we did not have enough time to watch the hour long video piece The Darker Side of Dawn, which depicts an oak tree against a sunrise and sunset. The most beautiful piece was Night Journey, a slow reverse zoom which begins with a few candles and then zooms back to reveal a woman lighting several dozens of candles. Other works including a slow-motion high-def video of a man and woman's hands under running water, a man and woman submerging their face in water and holding their breaths for as long as possible, and two lovers entwined below the surface of a darkened pool of water, thrashing, gasping for breath, and finally sinking into the darkness until they disappeared. Inspired by Elizabeth Berkley and and Kyle MacLachlan in Showgirls? Artists don't kiss and tell.

Some of his pieces were projected on walls or screens, while some other HD videos were shown on plasmas oriented vertically. Along with my desire for Richter wallpapers, I'd love to have some Bill Viola screensavers, but I suspect either would cost an arm and a leg. Actually, my arm and my leg probably wouldn't be enough, sad to say, though for that price I might be able to procure a few PAL videotapes.

Some excerpts from Viola's pieces can be seen in this Quicktime video at the Getty website. The Viola exhibit at the James Cohan Gallery ends Dec. 22.

Bleaghh

Monday, at the gym, I felt nauseous on the treadmill. I stumbled home, then spent the next 24 hours curled up with a water bucket nearby, hovering on the edge of puking my guts out. I disobeyed two of Anthony Bourdain's precepts from Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly: I ordered seafood on Sunday, and that seafood was in the form of mussels from a chef I did not know personally. Never again. On a positive note, my calorie count was quite low that day.

NBA to create a searchable database of all its video footage. We'll all be able to spin our own highlight reels, depending on how well the footage is indexed.

Before you visit MoMA in NYC, grab some audio tours or podcasts for your iPod. For example, grab an MP3 Acoustiguide about the latest special exhibition, Pixar: 20 Years of Animation. MoMA even encourages you to create your own audio tours of your favorite works of art there, for others to enjoy, complete with images from MoMA's online collection. I'm sure some good ones have been created already; it's on my to-do list now, too.

Microsoft's inability to manufacture more Xbox 360's for their holiday season launch is a huge misstep. They finally got release position on Sony, then failed to press their advantage. Even Steve Ballmer's kids don't have one.

You can buy extensions for your powerstrip to avoid the annoying loss of an extra outlet to a bulky transformer, or you can just purchase a next generation powerstrip like the PowerSquid.

Paris by night, a gorgeous nighttime panoramic shot of the City of Lights (1.8MB file). More visual foie gras here. Damn I miss Paris. [via Me-Fi]

Trailer for Mission Impossible 3, or M:I:3, I guess. No director ever has ever had to utter the words: "With more intensity, Mr. Cruise."

One of those strange ways the world has ceded some privacy online is through WeddingChannel. Every wedding I've attended the past several years has posted all its registries online for the world to discover through a simple name search on bride or groom. You can even look up old registries, as for Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau, or those of some ex you're still stalking, to see if they're tying the knot, and if so, what sort of cookware they'll be using in the home they're making with someone else. Fun way to kill a few minutes.

Every release of Firefox justifies a revisit of the most useful Firefox Extensions. SessionSaver is the most useful to me because of the sheer number of tabs I have open at once, and NoScript makes web surfing a much more serene experience, but it's the aggregation of all of my extensions that make Firefox my browser of choice.

First full-length trailer for The Da Vinci Code. There's nothing subtle about this trailer, which basically is the equivalent of a freaky albino monk coming to your front door and dragging you kicking and screaming to the movie theater to turn over your $10.50.

ITSM

All the cool kids (web dorks) will be cranking out iTunes signatures today, thanks to Jason Freeman. iTSM cranks out a representative montage of song clips from your iTunes library based on criteria you select, like play count or rating. C'est chouette, hein? Makes a great "name as many tunes in this as possible" contest clip generator.

Background on the relationship between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and how Tolkien convinced Lewis to switch to only using initials for his first name. Wait--I meant how Tolkien was instrumental in converting Lewis to Christianity, their friendship, and their eventual falling out. Sounds like fodder for a movie, with Anthony Hopkins reprising his role as Lewis and Ian McKellen as Tolkien.

The trailer for Sofia Coppola's Mario-Antoinette is out. Set to "Age of Consent," from the best New Order album, Power, Corruption, & Lies. The musical choice feels SCoppola-esque, non? When Sarah Flack came to speak to our class, she mentioned that she was in the midst of editing it, and we all thought, "I wish I was Sarah Flack." And I added, "I bet she has health insurance."

One of my favorite music videos of all time is Gondry's video for "Like a Rolling Stone" by the Stones. This short article discusses the making-of, and the video is part of the awesome DVD Director's Series, Vol. 3 - The Work of Director Michel Gondry. There's still controversy over who invented the image-warping virtual cinematography effect, but anecdotally it's most often referred to in reference to The Matrix effect or the Gap swing dancing ad (Quicktime). Nowadays, the effect is used in lots of ads--the Really Bend it Like Beckham title sequence is cool (one of the lower links on that page). Someday maybe they'll release a version of this interpolation software for use on your computer at home, and then the world will be flooded with hundreds of frozen time snowboard jump Quicktime movies.

Girls on Aslan! Kong with Ann Bust! SFW.

Error message from my most recent Google Search:

We're sorry...

... but we can't process your request right now. A computer virus or spyware application is sending us automated requests, and it appears that your computer or network has been infected.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your computer is free of viruses and other spurious software.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google

What that's all about?

Review: King Kong

[SPOILER PREFACE: Because this is a remake of such a well-known movie, I will refer to major plot points, but none that I consider to be revelations to anyone familiar with the King Kong story. Jackson remakes the 1933 version but makes some changes in the process. I try not to reveal any major changes that I consider to be surprises. Of course, if you don't know the King Kong story or want to see the movie without any critical preface, then click or scroll away to your next destination. There really is no such thing as a completely spoiler-free review.]

Peter Jackson's has long spoken of how important the 1933 King Kong was in driving him towards a career in film, and so his remake is a loving tribute, all the way through the last words of the credits, a dedication to the creative team behind the original, from Merian Cooper to Fay Wray to everyone in between. As I tried to stay warm while standing on the sidewalk yesterday, I wondered just how faithful Jackson would be the original. Can you really make the necessary improvements on someone else's work of art, especially when it had such an influence on you?

King Kong, both the 1933 and 1976 version, are noteworthy in my moviegoing history as well. The 1976 version was the first movie I ever saw in a movie theater, in Salt Lake City. My parents couldn't afford a babysitter, so they took me with them. When those helicopters shot Kong off of the World Trade Center, I cried like a baby. Actually, I was a baby. I was two.

I can't remember the exact year I saw the 1933 version, but it was magic. Like many boys, I loved dinosaurs and stop-motion animation, which seemed like childhood toys come to life in a way we could otherwise only conjure in our imaginations. King Kong was really the feature film birth of stop-motion animation, and even today it has a magical fake-real duality that computer-generated effects can't duplicate. The shots of King Kong groping for Jack Driscoll over the side of the cliff still gives me a jolt of joy.

However, some things in the 1933 version couldn't be updated through merely improved special effects and a budget over 400 times larger than the original (which was shot for $500K, still a princely sum in those days). As much as I love the 1933 version, the story is hokey and the acting campy, and that's being generous ("Holy mackerel, what a show!" exclaims Denham upon seeing the natives performing a dance to Kong). Jackson wasn't working from source material on par with Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. On the other hand, his adaption of that book couldn't have been any more successful. My concern wasn't with the movie's ability to recoup the investment or to earn massive box office over the holiday season. Of that I had little doubt. I had a different checklist of hopes in my mind under the lights of the marquee of the Times Square Loews. For example, could he infuse the thrilling adventure with some dramatic depth? Could he give Kong a real personality? When would I regain feeling in my feet?

Jackson checked a lot of items off of that list, certainly enough to consider the movie a success as a rousing Christmas crowd-pleaser, and at the movie's center is a breathtaking action sequence. A few items remain problematic. Some seem fixable, and others might have to wait for the next remake of King Kong, which at this rate should arrive in 2041 or so.

As we sat in the theater (for the world premiere, the movie played on 38 different screens in Times Square, split between the Loews and AMC on 42nd St.) waiting for the movie to begin, what sounded like James Newton Howard's score for the movie played over the sound system. It would have been a nice touch to have Overture displayed on the screen as in the 1933 version.

The story from the 1933 King Kong has the thematic weight of a fairy tale, encapsulated in Carl Denham's famous concluding line: "It was beauty killed the beast" or in the quote appearing at the start of the movie:

"And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead."

Kong also serves as foil to the ruthless film director Carl Denham, though the jabs at the entertainment business are more prickly than sharp. Kong also functions as Christ-like figure in some ways, worshipped by the Skull Island natives, crucified by Denham on a structure of wood and chains of "chrome steel," chains he snaps like Samson, but he's more a general martyr than a specific reference to any religious figure.

It's not Shakespeare, but Jackson's version does a better job developing the theme than the original. A couple things help. First, the movie is three hours seven minutes long, almost twice as long as the original. Jackson spends much more time in the first third of the movie, in New York City, setting up the journey to Skull Island. Naomi Watts is a superior dramatic actor to Fay Wray, and the gap in acting ability between 2005 Kong and his predecessor is equally large. To be fair, the original Kong had the dopey face of a simple, tempestuous child of an incestuous relationship, while the updated Kong is aided in large part by the addition of an iris and a pupil in each eye. New Kong feels like a grownup male who still a good woman to teach him how to use silverware and to communicate his feelings. His eye-of-Sauron-sized orange-black eyeballs express more in a few frames than the black-on-white eyeballs of the original Kong did in an entire movie. The new Kong, like Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, was modeled in part on the actions of Andy Serkis, and as before, the process works. Kong is just as facially expressive as Gollum, and that 10 foot mug, combined with the realism of his gorilla-like movements, contribute to the most emotionally complex Kong yet.

Naomi Watts has some evocative eyes of her own, and they're just one reason she's perfectly cast as Ann Darrow, the good-hearted, down-on-her-luck performer. When Watts opens her baby blues wide, few faces can match hers for vulnerability, disappointment, and sorrow. It's one reason she was so moving in roles like the ones in Mulholland Drive and Ellie Parker. That hint of emotional fragility renders her beauty approachable, and so if a giant gorilla was able to discern a vulnerable heart in a human female, Watts is as likely a choice as any. And, fans will be glad to hear, her screams are as piercing as those of the best of them.

Both beauty and beast need every bit of that acting talent to convince the audience that a giant gorilla and a 5'5" woman could fall in love. In the 1933 film, Fay Wray never warmed to the original alpha male, issuing glass-cracking screams every time Kong laid a hand on her. The 1976 version added an almost cockamamie romance between Jessica Lange and the giant ape, but that dose of sugar was endearing and heightened the poignancy of his eventual demise. Jackson sides with the 1976 remake in the Darrow-Kong relationship. Darrow finds in Kong the only male that never lets her down, one both sensitive and fierce. They share two extended scenes of alone time, one on Skull Island, one in Manhattan, and both are magical and hokey all at once. I'm as prone as anyone to rolling my eyes at the first hint of mawkish sentimentality, and though I won't reveal what occurs in these two scenes, thankfully they're closer in spirit to Dian Fossey picking lice out of a gorilla's hair than Kong and Darrow sucking on the same spaghetti strand at an Italian restaurant, or Darrow and Kong running down the beach hand in hand, the late afternoon tide lapping at their feet. Celebrity marriages rarely last, but had the paprazzi and machine-gun-toting biplanes simply let this couple be, I would've given them even odds of a happy union, and that's about as loving a relationship as I can recall between a human and a digital character in the movies.

At one point, I thought I spied another giant gorilla skeleton on Skull Island. Kong is the last of the giant gorillas, and his scars imply he's an older, lonely one, perhaps even a widower. Perhaps this movie can be added to a long list of autumn in new york romances, the older man with the younger woman, a simian companion to Lost in Translation.

Jack Black has some memorable eyes himself, or perhaps it's his eyebrows? He was an interesting casting choice. I love Jack Black, but his eyebrows work against him here. As the unscrupulous director Carl Denham, Black wields that trademark arched eyebrow that italicizes everything he says and that bug-eyed intensity that wins you over with its hyperbole. His Denham feels more like a rascal than a fiend, and in part it's because you can't help liking Jack Black even when he's a raving lunatic, as in High Fidelity, for example.

Jackson's remix adds some additional layers of plot. A trope comparing their journey to Skull Island to Marlow's journey up the Congo feels too loose and undeveloped. Jamie Bell plays a young shiphand who is reading a copy of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. During a key dramatic moment, he says to his mentor Hayes (Evan Parke): "This isn't an adventure story, is it?" (He's referring, of course, to the book in his hands and their expedition to Skull Island).

Hayes replies, in a basso profundo with halting gravitas, "No, my friend, it isn't." I had to chuckle at that.

Some other hokey elements from the 1933 movie remain, but fans of the original may find themselves more and more forgiving of those as the movie progresses as it becomes clear that Jackson is quoting many of them in tribute. Some scenes, camera shots, and character movements are almost exact duplicates of their 1933 inspirations: Darrow and Denham's meeting at the apple stand, the pan up the giant marquee in Manhattan announcing Kong as the eighth wonder of the world, the way Kong opens and shuts the T-Rex's limp and broken jaw like a handyman testing a broken hinge, or the way Kong fingers the bloody bullet holes in his chest after the first assault by the biplane squadron.

Other remnants of the 1933 movie I could have done without. The savage natives of Skull Island return, though this time the ship's most noble crew member is black. Nevertheless, critics of the worldview of the 1933 movie will have some of the same issues to work with here. The natives of Skull Island revere Kong; the visitors from New York treat him as a marketable commodity. Only Darrow connects with Kong. The other carryover from 1933 that could have been excised is Charlie, the Chinese cook with the Fu Manchu, coolie outfit, and broken English accent circa Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. He always made me cringe. He returns here in a bit part, as a random deckhand, Choy.

Of course, what most people will want to see are the special effects, and this movie is filled with them, even more than The Lord of the Rings. With a budget of over $200 million, King Kong is at the bleeding edge of CGI and reveals the current capabilities and limitations of the technology. Some shots, most notably the brontosaurus stampede that's shown in the trailer, clearly look like green screen. The humans in the foreground are set off from the dinos in a way that resembles an old school matte. Some of it is due to the sharpness of the humans and the softness of the background dinos, but the lighting seems to be a larger issue. I'm not sure how that problem will be solved, but it's still a challenge that remains. I suspect that sequence is the most technically challenging in the movie because everything is in motion, the brontosaurus, the humans, the foliage, and the rock formations.

In several long shots, characters or vehicles moving in the distance seem to stutter. I noticed it in one shot when an army jeep with a gun loaded on back turns a corner under the subway tracks, in pursuit of Kong. Also, in another shot, when one of the Skull Island natives pole vaults for the first time (you'll understand when you see it), the motion looks a bit odd.

The hair on Kong is beautiful--CGI can handle individual hairs rippling in the wind. Rough skin textures, as on Kong or the dinosaurs, remain less than photo-realistic. Glossy or reflective surfaces, like the exoskeletons of insects, seem easier to render. One centipede (an insect that really grosses me out) gave me a case of the willies. Jackson's remake of the lost spider pit sequence is not crucial to the story, but it provides a chance to show off a massive and impressive special effects sequence. Supposedly the original was excised from the 1933 film after causing audience members to vomit, and even if that's an myth, it makes for a great story. Jackson and team recreate Manhattan, and the view of the city from the sky, from atop the Empire State Building, are beautiful, like a digital watercolor.

All this technical detail is less relevant to the story's impact than something I'm curious about. Modern audiences, well-versed in CGI, are more discerning of its flaws, but at the same time are well-practiced in using their imagination to bridge the gap. This tangential discussion arises only from my own interest in CGI and its capabilities. Hopefully on the DVD or in interviews, Jackson will reveal his own thoughts. He was fairly candid in assessing what he liked and didn't like about the SFX in The Lord of the Rings trilogy in those DVD commentaries.

The central action sequence, the one everyone will be discussing, is the famous confrontation between Kong and the T-Rex. To paraphrase Teri Hatcher in Seinfeld, it looks real, and it's spectacular (Jackson adds a twist, one I won't reveal here, but one that ratchets up the fun quotient over the original). It's one of those action sequences which just keeps elevating the insanity, long after you think it has reached a climax. When it finally concluded, the entire audience erupted in cheers and applause. Like many boys, I love dinosaurs, so I was in heaven. Instant classic.

Another moment that took my breath away was the shot of Kong's fall from the Empire State Building. The camera shot is gorgeous, a combination pan-and-rotate camera move that induced just a hint of vertigo. The only way to pull off a camera shot like that would be to fly over a city with a movie camera mounted on an aircraft, shoot over a miniature, or create it digitally. The latter is proving to be the most cost-efficient and controllable choice for big-budget action movies. For action fans, one of the most enjoyable results of these advances is some of the complex shots directors can pull off now. The opening shot from Episode III, which plunges the viewer into the chaotic air battle, is one example. Some early unbroken shots in King Kong pan around the ship as it spins and bounces off of rocky outcroppings off the coast of Skull Island. Video games have long allowed for more three-dimensional reedom of perspective, but movies are catching up now that so many sets are digital.

At the movie's end, as Jack Black's Denham approaches the body of the fallen Kong, I realized that he was going to utter the same closing line as in the original, and I found myself wishing he wouldn't. It doesn't feel right in tone. But given Jackson's adoration of the original, I also couldn't imagine him ending the movie any other way.

This is hearty, holiday season comfort fare. Hollywood marketing has trained us to expect several categories on the cinematic holiday menu every year, as traditional as Thanksgiving turkey and hot cocoa. One of the entrees is always the mega budget action spectacle, escapist entertainment. It's the porterhouse of the holiday movie season. By virtue of Jackson's success with The Lord of the Rings, he's earned the freedom from studios to turn out three hour movies, and this movie already feels like a director's cut, with several scenes that feels like they would have been deleted scenes if the director lacked the stature of Jackson. I don't know about you, but at least once a holiday season, I like to let myself go and indulge in a meal with all the fat and trimmings and extra gravy. Now it's time for some salad.

***

A few other random notes:

• See the movie in a theater with a premium surround system setup. The movie has several scenes that make use of the surround and rear speakers. When Kong emerges from the forest for the first time, the camera locks on Darrow's face as she looks out in horror, and behind you, the sound of leaves rustling and tree branches snapping announce the entrance of the big guy, like the first bars of Enter Sandman or Hell's Bells when Mariano Rivera or Trevor Hoffman trot in out of the bullpen. The 360 degree sound mix in the biplane attack is good fun, too.
• James Newton Howard had only two and a half months to birth the score as a last minute replacement for Howard Shore. In its quieter moments, which aren't many, it's evocative, but it doesn't feel uniquely Howard. I can usually retain key melodic themes after leaving the theater (for example from Howard's fantastic score for Unbreakable), but not in this case. Three longer sample clips can be streamed here.
• The movie contains some intense moments. I'm not one to give parent advisories. My parents brought me to see the 1976 King Kong when I was 2 years old, and I saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers with my dad at a drive-in in 1979 or 1980, leaving me scared for several months. But if you bring your young children, be prepared to put a hand over their eyes during the spider pit sequence or when the Skull Island natives go wild.
• I thought I spied Godzilla in one of the Skull Island rock formations, a glimpse of a head poking out of the ocean.

Brokeback Mountain

The New Yorker pulled the Annie Proulx short story "Brokeback Mountain" out of its archive in advance of the movie's release in NY and LA this Friday. I've long thought that short stories are the literary genre most suitable for adaptation to film. Both forms contain a similar dramatic density. In a short story, with fewer pages to work with than a novel, a writer needs to choose details and words with great care.

Based on passing conversations, I suspect the movie will clean up among younger women. From that perspective, the movie was smartly cast. For the rest of the world, the movie's being billed as an arthouse romance, a universal love story, anything but a gay cowboy movie ("gay cowboy" being the media's favorite two word moniker for describing the movie's premise, despite the studio's efforts to not show any funny business between Ledger and Gyllenhall in all the marketing, from the trailer on down).

An article in Newsweek contained the tidbit that the poster for Brokeback Mountain was inspired by the one for Titanic.

X3

Phoenix! Brings back happy memories, even if the movie goes off and does its own thing, as the previous two have.

The best new board games of 2005 [at TMN]

Some suspicious (insider?) large bets at Sportsbook.com likely reveal who will win SI's Sportsperson of the Year and Time's Person of the Year [don't follow the link if you don't want the spoilers; via Marginal Revolution]. I don't think the Time's Person of the Year winner is much of a surprise, though.

The Dave Chappelle Show, minus Dave Chappelle. Chappelle stressed out? Can't that man afford all the ganja he can smoke now? Just kidding, man, we want you back. I tried desperately to get chosen to be in the audience during the filming of Block Party when I first moved to NY, but to no avail.

Yippee

All day long, I've been giggling like a schoolgirl...

Bodacious

That Peyton Manning commercial for Mastercard makes me cringe. In it, Peyton seeks the autograph of a grocery store clerk and feigns ecstasy when a hardware store employee tosses him his apron. Having a multi-millionaire athlete satirize the anonymity of the common man? Priceless.

***

Sportscenter aired a segment on Bodacious, one of the most feared rodeo bulls of all time. The footage of him bucking cowboys off of his back like rag dolls was awesome (and I don't mean that in the modern sense of mega-cool). Here's a short homage to Bodacious which includes the key highlights from his life, including his conquest of famed bull-rider Tuff Hedeman. Bodacious broke every bone in Hedeman's face, and the next time the two were to meet, Tuff climbed off when they opened the gates, essentially waving the white flag.

How did bull-riding start? What cowboy thought to himself, "Hey, let's put an electric prod to that bull's testicles and then see how long I can hang on its back before it either tosses me and tramples me or headbutts me in the face, cracking my skull like a coconut?" Someone on the prarie was smoking some serious peyote.

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One of the first things I do upon arriving in Southern California is to hit In-N-Out, home of America's most beloved burger. I'm embarrassed to admit, though, that it wasn't until this most recent visit for Thanksgiving that I heard of and sampled something off of their secret menu.

I went for a burger Animal Style, and my receipt actually read "ANIMAL STYLE". A burger prepared thus contains a layer of sauteed onions embedded in the melted cheese. I enjoyed it, though it unleashed hell on my digestive system. James tried getting his fries Animal Style; it didn't really work. All you could taste were the onions.

***

Over Thanksgiving break, our family was discussing what book should serve as the next nominee in our unofficial family book club. Every so often, one book gets passed from one kid to the other until all the siblings have read it. Given our diverse tastes, it takes a special book to make the rounds; fiction novels seem to be the most palatable across the board. The first book to complete our circuit was Atonement, and currently crossing home plate is The Time Traveler's Wife.

One book that came up just a few kids short was The Life of Pi. It was originally to be adapted for the silver screen by M. Night Shyamalan. Now it's in the hands of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I was intrigued to see the Shyamalan version. The book has, in its own way, a big twist of an ending. When I heard Shyamalan was directing, I could already picture how he'd reveal the twist in a Keyser Soze-like moment.

I would have preferred Shyamalan direct, if for no other reason than that Jeunet's sensibility doesn't mesh with mine. Regardless, I want to see the movie to see how Jeunet interprets the book, and he will have fun with the fantasy imagery. I'm always surprised at how many people interpret the book in vastly different ways--the ending seems to strongly favor one interpretation of all the events that came before. The book accompanied me for a week through New Zealand in 2003 after I picked it up from a Borders in Auckland. I'd like to flip through it again to refresh my recollection of the details, but my copy seems to have disappeared.

On the bright side, with Jeunet on board, we're spared the possibility that Shyamalan might have cast himself as the lead.

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Michel Gondry's next movie, The Science of Sleep, sounds interesting, and joy of joys, it will be at Sundance!

Ticket packages for the first half of Sundance sold out in a day this year. I had a lottery time on day two and got shut out. If you have enough friends also entering the lottery, you can pool resources, but the festival is outgrowing its capacity. Every year its popularity rises some more, and every year the scrum for tickets and accommodations becomes that much more onerous.

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Thank goodness, we can finally sleep at night: Congress is looking into the "deeply flawed" BCS system. Hey, I'm a guy, I like sports, but it's ridiculous that our elected officials spend time investigating sports issues like steroids in baseball and the college football post-season format.

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I'm always a big fan of Filmoculous's list of year-end lists. Here's his compilation for 2005. Among them is the short-list for Time's Person of the Year. My money's on either Mother Nature or The Google Guys.

First white

It's not as if I haven't seen it before, but I still experience a childlike flash of wonder when I see winter's first snow dusting the city, as I did this morning when I walked down to try and grab my Sunday Times from the lobby. Now it feels as if winter has officially begun.

As a sidenote, damn you anonymous newspaper thief who keeps taking my weekend paper. One of these days I'll catch you in the act, and won't you be sorry when I show you how I roll, yo, the Chicago way.