Remains of the Day

Think of a trick, any trick...except for that one

When magicians duel in the movies, live hang in the balance. When magicians duel in real life, it's a bit less exciting. Unless, of course, one of these days Eric Walton ends up dying during one of his performances under mysterious circumstances. And Ricky Jay was sitting in the audience, his face revealing no expression. That would be somewhat unsettling, and yet awesome.

Maul

I wanted to hear Anthony Lane reading from his work on this New Yorker Humor Revue page, even if there was no way his out-loud voice could live up to his caustic written voice, but it took me nearly ten minutes to trigger his clip because of the awful interface. I clicked on his name over and over and kept hearing clips from others listed on the page.

Lane comes off as much more self-deprecating and good humored to the ear than he does on the page where he sometimes seems exasperated at having to carve up another movie with his razor sharp pen, much to the delight of his legions of fans. He's one critic many probably prefer to read when he's excoriating something awful, just to see the gleam of the scalpel as it's lifted from the tray. There's a reason one of his reviews is included in this, a humor revue.

Monday

David Remnick profile of post-presidency Bill Clinton in The New Yorker. Clinton is by far the most fascinating president of my lifetime.

UPDATE: Parts 1, 2, and 3 of Clinton's now legendary interview on Fox.

***

Drool. Drool.

***

I've always wondered why the sun made me sneeze, and now I know; photic sneeze reflex.

The condition occurs in 17% to 25% of humans with more common occurrence in Caucasians than other human races. The condition is passed along genetically as an autosomal dominant trait.

***

The September 2006 Stanford Book Salon selection was Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner. It's one of my favorites, and the homepage for the Salon (an online book club) has a transcript of an introduction by Nancy Packer as well as links to a reading group guide to the novel and an interview with Wallace Stegner.

***

The Madden cover jinx strikes again. Spooky how consistently it works its evil eye. Fantasy football players were warned not to pick Alexander with their first round pick this year, and the non-superstitious who ignored the advice are now left scrambling to pick up Maurice Morris.

Ray Lewis is perhaps the only player who avoided the curse when he appeared on the 2005 cover, but since he plays on defense he only affected the small portion of fantasy football players who draft individual defensive players.

There is one logical reason why the curse might exist, and that is simply because a player who is featured on the cover is likely coming off a career year, and most players regress after such seasons. Still, many of the regressions were caused by severe injuries...somewhere the ghost of John Madden is screaming, "Boom!" as he sticks a pin in a Shaun Alexander voodoo doll.

Moo

At long last, Verizon activated DSL at my apartment and I'm back online though it will take me a good week to catch up on e-mails. Actually, wiith seven classes and about 475 boxes to unpack, it may never happen. But I'll try.

***

Moo.com is offering the first 10,000 Flickr Pro users who respond 10 free MiniCards which are like business cards with one of your Flickr photos on one side and text on the other. For non-pro users it's $19.99 for a set of 100, and you can print a different photo on each card if you want.

Finally, I will have 10 business cards to pass out to all the new people I'm meeting here in LA.

***

Audrey sent me a link to this M&M Dark Chcolate product launch movie puzzle online. It's a poster with visual clues for 50 "dark" movies (horror, for example). Good fun, though I'll have to tackle this in earnest some other time when I have a free block of time (which, judging from my courseload, will be sometime in mid 2007).

Dark chocolate M&M's? Sounds tasty to me. I was a dark chocolate Kit Kat addict when those came out, and occasionally I still have to satisfy my cravings by sourcing them through eBay. Because dark chocolate melts at a higher temperature than regular chocolate, it can completely transform a once familiar candy, often in a wonderful way.

***

Cinematographer Style is a movie about, yes, cinematographers, following in the tradition of Visions of Light. Documentaries about filmmaking specialties seem to come in twos, e.g. The Cutting Edge and Edge Codes.com, both documentaries on editing. I was sad that I was unable to catch a screening of Cinematographer Style at the DGA theater in LA tonight. I just love this type of stuff, especially now that I'm in the biz, sort of.

***

Some economists surveyed 3,200 high school seniors and estimated which of two colleges students would choose if they were admitted to both. The resulting matrix is here. Harvard was the one university that won its head to head matchup with every other college in the survey.

If you can't beat'em (or build'em), buy'em

There's an unconfirmed rumor that Fox has purchased YouTube. If true (and it wouldn't be entirely unexpected), then I know one thing: Fox overpaid. Not that YouTube isn't a fantastic site to spend time on, but it's another one of those sites that attracts plenty of people's attention but can't efficiently monetize it.

Links

New David Sedaris piece in The New Yorker this week. Also an interesting article on neuroeconomics.

Harold McGee answers some common questions about kitchen science on Chow.com, like what's the difference between pressed and chopped garlic and is it safe to heat food in plastic in the microwave.

50 Years of Janus Films - a 50 DVD box set. Pre-order before October 24 for $650, actually a bargain at $13 a disc. Drool.

Zyb - a site to back up your cell phone contact info. The service is free and works with over 200 mobile phones. Useful.

BP's Statistical Review of World Energy 2006.

One of my questions to Gothamist was posted to Ask Gothamist, though unfortunately the response didn't go live until I'd already left NYC. Before I left, I did find this useful list of places in NYC to donate goods of all types.

Trailer for Johnny To's next movie, a spaghetti Western transplanted to macau, Fong Juk or Exiled as it's known in English. Oh, I wish I were at the Toronto International Film Festival. Exiled opened there to strong reviews.

Trailer for the next animated feature from Satoshi Kon, Paprika. If I knew how to read Japanese, I could actually tell you something about the movie. Early buzz, though sparse, is good.

I wasn't a huge fan of Tony Jaa's Tom Yum Goong, but it sounds like the condensed version from the Weinsteins, retitled The Protector, is even worse. Oh well, we can shift our hopes onto Ong Bak 2, which Jaa will direct himself.

You've had your six(th)...man to play Bond

After watching the new trailer for the new Casino Royale Bond flick, I'm fairly certain it won't be anything like the 1967 Casino Royale with Peter Fleming, Woody Allen, Urusula Andress, Orson Welles, David Niven, John Huston, William Holden, Deborah Kerr, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and many many more.

No, the latest in this, perhaps the longest running franchise in English movie history(?), features a high stakes poker game ($10 million buy-in), Eva (yum yum) Green, an Aston Martin DBS, a villain with one of those vertical scars across an eye, Montenegro, and a grim-faced Bond. I'm not sure Daniel Craig cracks a smile that entire trailer, and he delivers the trademark Bond "quip after the kill" like he's tossing an Ace of spades on a body in Vietnam. The move from Aston Martin to BMW was perhaps an odd move downstream, but switching from Baccarat to Texas Hold'em is probably a sound marketing decision ("In. All In.").

Otherwise, the longevity can be explained by the elements of Bond that never go out of style: exotic locales, smoking hot women, sexy cars, spycraft, gadgets, and the rush that comes from taking down megalomaniacs intent on bringing down the free world. Bond is every boy's testosterone, distilled into pure cinematic form. The movies also conjure an appealing work environment. 007 is given a wide latitude by his superiors. If he can get the job done, no one really cares if he destroys a bit of public property or fails to answer a few phone calls because he's busy introducing a stone cold fox to his Walter PPK.

Some of my earliest movie memories involve watching early Connery 007 with my dad, whose favorite remains From Russia With Love. I was always sad when ABC would feature a Bond movie on a school night because I couldn't stay up to watch the end.

Happy Labor Day

A thorough explanation of why Chinese is so difficult to learn. I grew up hearing Chinese in the house and even attended some Chinese school, and I found it to be a bear. I never did really learn to write or read cursive Chinese handwriting very well (yes, Chinese has both print and cursive, like English), another item I'd add to this writer's litany of complaints. Just when you think you've memorized a character, someone scrawls it in their own cursive style and it's as if someone took a print character's brush strokes and tied them in butterfly knots. Of course, without cursive, writing Chinese, with its numerous strokes, is like writing English in neat block capital letters...sloooooooooow).

Curse of the Golden Flower, a movie by Zhang Yimou, starring Gong Li and Chow Yun Fat, releases this Christmas season (trailer). Yeah, I hate dandelions, too, but I wouldn't go so far as to call them a curse.

Crocodile hunter, felled by a stingray. Stung through the heart by a stingray...brutal. I guess it should be obvious from their names, but I didn't realize stingrays were that dangerous. Earlier this year, on a dive trip down in the Turks and Caicos islands, Dave and I fed stingrays just off the beach with some fish our guides had brought along for that purpose. We were soon overrun with stingrays, and one ran up my back and bit me. I popped out of the water, and Dave said the ray had drawn blood. Shortly thereafter, two lemon sharks wandered over, and I hustled out of the ocean.

Get your bootleg Van Goghs and Da Vincis: a city in China is the world's leading producer of reproductions of famous paintings. It doesn't surprise me one bit.

A computer program named WebCrow defeated dozens of human competitors in a crossword puzzle competition. Humans managed to defeat the program in two Italian crosswords featuring lots of puns and political clues.

That green lump that resembles playdough, the one they dump on your platter of sushi? That's not wasabi. Real, fresh wasabi is rarely served at sushi restaurants, but whenever a sushi restaurant offers it I'll request it. Real wasabi is not as hot as the faux stuff, but it's better for you. Unfortunately, the real deal costs a fortune.

Michael Apted's next in his Up documentary series is about to release. He interviewed many children at age 7 about their lives and dreams for 7 Up, and since then, he's gone back to check up on them every 7 years (each doc in the series is named after the age of the characters, so 14 Up, 21 Up, and so on). This next installment will be 49 Up. All the previous installments are on DVD.

The new Sunday Night Football theme (MP3) is by none other than John Williams.

Four words no man wants to hear: bleeding in the scrotum. It's been that kind of year for the Cubs.

HiveLive is a site that allows you to post and share files and information among public or private hives, or groups of people.

The Statistical Review of World Energy 2006, by British Petroleum, including historical data series in Excel format.

You got the touch! Feel, feel, feel, feel, feel...feel my heat!

The Agent

New Yorker issues have a tendency of piling up around my place when I travel or when I'm busy as I can never bring myself to toss them out. Sometimes that can seem like a tactical error, as in times like these when I'm moving and have to lug about 275 pounds of unread back issues to the recycling bins in the basement.

But lying on my bare mattress now (all the sheets, pillows, just about everything is packed in boxes), I'm glad I saved the July 10/17 issue from last month. In it was an article titled "The Agent," (PDF) an excerpt adapted from Lawrence Wright's new nonfiction book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Though I'm exhausted from days of packing, the article, which I just finished reading at three in the morning, stunned me, introducing two characters and a story that will break your heart with how close we came to anticipating and perhaps stopping 9/11. We had all the puzzle pieces to assemble a picture of Al-Qaeda terrorists in our midst, but they were held by different U.S. intelligence agencies, and we couldn't assemble them into a picture of looming terror because of self-imposed bureaucratic walls that kept the CIA and FBI from sharing information. Our intelligence agencies, with their silly infighting, failed us.

Two charismatic characters are at the center of this story. Ali Soufan is the Agent, a Lebanese-American Muslim FBI agent whose Arabic language skills and tenacity made him one of our nation's leading assets in the fight against Al Qaeda. John O'Neill was the head of the F.B.I.'s National Security Division, figures more prominently in The Looming Tower, but also appears in "The Agent."

Soufan is the hero of "The Agent." O'Neill put in charge of investigating the bombing of the U.S.S.. cole in Aden, Yemen, in October, 2000. Soufan's investigation unearthed tracks that led back to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The CIA, in the meantime, learned of an Al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia and learned of two Al-Qaeda operatives, Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Mihdhar had a U.S. Visa. The CIA did not inform the FBI about the two of them, and so they slipped into the U.S. unnoticed. The CIA does not have authority to operate within the U.S., so once Mihdhar and Hazmi were on U.S. soil, they were the province of the FBI, or would have been, had the CIA alerted the FBI to their presence.

In June of 2001, Ali Soufan sat in a meeting with CIA colleagues and was shown photos from the secret meeting in Malaysia. Among those in the pictures were Mihdhar and Hazmi, but Soufan did not know of them yet, and the CIA shared little except to see if the FBI knew of them. Another photo of the Malaysia meeting, displaying an Al Qaeda jihadi named Khallad, was not shown. Soufan and his team had a huge file on Khallad, who they suspected of being one of the masterminds of the U.S.S. Cole bombing. Had the CIA shown Soufan that photo, he could have connected the dots.

On August 27th, 2001, Nawaf al-Hazmi and his brother Salem purchased airplane tickets for American Flight 77 on Travelocity.com. Mihdhar also purchased a ticket for that flight online. They did not bother disguising their names, as they were not on the FBI terrorist watchlist.

Twenty months after their arrival in Los Angeles, on September 11, 2001, Mihdhar and Hazmi went to Washington Dulles International Airport. Hazmi set off the metal detector at the airport and was hand-screened, and Hazmi and Mihdhar were both flagged for an additional security screening at the gate, but both passed and boarded American Flight 77. One hour into the flight, the hijacked Boeing 757 crashed into the Pentagon, killing all 64 on the flight and 125 people in the building.

Immediately after 9/11, Soufan was told to find out who had perpetrated the hijackings. On September 12, 2001, he was handed an envelope with full details of the meeting in Malaysia. When Soufan realized that the CIA had known that Mihdhar and Hazmi, two of the hijackers, had been living in the United States for 20 months, "he ran into the bathroom and threw up." Wright notes: "Soufan's disillusionment with the government was so profound that he eventually quite the bureau; in 2005, he became director of international operations for Giuliani Security and Safety, a company founded by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York."

John O'Neill is an even greater tragic figure in the story of 9/11. His story is almost too unbelievable to be true. Perhaps no one in the FBI was more obsessed with the rising threat of Al Qaeda, but on August 22, 2001, O'Neill left the FBI after it was reported that his briefcase containing sensitive documents was stolen during an FBI conference in Florida. Though it was later found and though it was determined that none of the confidential material had been compromised, his career at the FBI was ruined.

O'Neill left to take a job as the head of security at The World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, just after American Airlines flight 11 flew into the north tower, John O'Neill received a call from his son who could see the smoke through a train window. O'Neill told his son he was fine and that he was going to assess the damage. After United Flight 175 hit the south tower, O'Neill called his girlfriend Valerie james, distraught. Yet later, at 9:25am, O'Neill called another woman he had been close to, Anne DiBattista, saying he was okay.

"The connection was good at the beginning," she recalled. "He was safe and outside. He said he was O.K. I said, 'Are you sure you're out of the building?' He told me he loved me. I knew he was going to go back in."

Another FBI agent, Wesley Wong, ran into O'Neill outside the north tower. She last saw him headed towards the south tower.

On September 28, 2001, O'Neill's body was found in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Wright reports:

...a thousand mourner gathered at St. Nicholas to say farewell. Many of them were agents and policemen and members of foreign intelligence services who had followed O'Neill into the war against terrorism long before it became a rallying cry for the nation. The hierarchy of the F.B.I attended, including the now retired director Louis Freeh. Richard Clarke, who says that he had not shed a tear since September 11th, suddenly broke down when the bagpipes played and the casket passed by.

For some reason, perhaps because I've come to adore New York City, I can't stop reading about 9/11. I've read the The 9/11 Commission Report in text form, and I'll probably reread it in its graphic adaptation. 9/11 and the events that led up to that day continue to haunt me, and Lawrence Wright's account The Looming Tower, which I've just begun, promises to be the best account to date. I'm not doing justice to his reporting here, so delve into "The Agent" if you want a sampling. Soufan is a fascinating character in many ways, particularly in his interrogation techniques, which demonstrate that torture is hardly the only way to extract information from suspects (torture has long been known to yield unreliable info). Soufan engages his subjects, demonstrates his knowledge and understanding of them and their cultural background, and uses his intelligence to checkmate them.

In the stories of Soufan, O'Neill, and bin Laden, there is a Syriana/Munich-style tragedy to be made. In fact, with its story of thwarted investigations and global conspiracies, it's the 9/11 movie I would have expected Oliver Stone to make, though from what I've heard his World Trade Center movie is a great departure for him.

Here is an online only interview with Lawrence Wright which came out at the same time as "The Agent." Here's a comprehensive list of Wright's articles for The New Yorker, including many on Al Qaeda. PBS Frontline came out with a documentary on O'Neill called "The Man Who Knew" and it's available online (Real Player and Windows Media).

Michel Gondry visits the SOHO Apple Store

Tuesday night, Michel Gondry visits the SOHO Apple Store at 7pm:

indieWIRE Presents: “The Science of Sleep” Filmmaker, Michel Gondry

Join indieWIRE editor Eugene Hernandez for a special moderated discussion exploring the innovative work of filmmaker Michel Gondry. Michel will discuss his narrative, documentary, and music video work, including his upcoming film, ”The Science of Sleep,” which releases in theaters September 2006.
August 29th, 7:00 p.m.

Four movies stood out for me at Sundance in January: The Science of Sleep, Little Miss Sunshine, Half Nelson, and In Between Days. The latter isn't the type of movie that will see theatrical distribution, unfortunately, because of its challenging style, but because of that it's the type of movie I most appreciate catching at a film festival. Little Miss Sunshine is out now and has the broadest commercial potential. The studio is staggering its release across the country, and it's well worth catching when it arrives in your local movie theater. Half Nelson and The Science of Sleep aren't going to be massive mainstream hits, but they're both deserving of your time. Gondry's film is a bit unstructured and chaotic, but it's his most personal work. Half Nelson was my first real exposure to Ryan Gosling, and he's very good, as is young Shareeka Epps, his co-star.

Corddry leaves TDS, I leave NYC

I spent the entire weekend packing. I want to shoot myself. Before I go dark for my cross-country move, a few links from my final bit of housecleaning here.

I complained just the other week about the quality of YouTube videos. Stage6 is a YouTube knockoff, but using DivX encoding, so the video quality is much much better (for example, or another). Its selection is so miniscule it's laughable when compared to that of YouTube, but I look forward to the day when we surfers can have both selection and quality in online video aggregators. There's no reason we can't right now.

Speaking of YouTube, I'm Really, Really, Really Excited! Every hot new online community crowns its stars, and Bree (lonelygirl15) is YouTube's. I'm reminded of the mystery video footage which generated a cult-like following in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

Rob Corddry's has spread his wings and flown the Daily Show coop. Last Thursday was his last episode, and he follows in the footsteps of Colbert and Carell as Daily Show stars who sought greener pastures. The Daily Show is the Oakland A's of comedic television, launching talented funnymen but unable to retain their services once they achieve stardom. Except for Jon Stewart, of course. He's The Daily Show's Billy Beane, I guess.

I always wondered if the movie Sideways sank sales of merlot, and a brief scan of some older articles on the web seems to indicate only a mild effect, if any. But pinot noir sales got a boost. I'd been a fan of pinot noir for a few years before the movie came out, but the movie spurred a boost in production that has flooded the market with pinots that lack the earthy taste of the terroir that I loved. Many pinots now taste like syrahs, and it seems as if you have to spend upwards of $25 to $30 a bottle before you find a decent pinot.

Two researchers claim to have solved the "cocktail party problem," or how to separate one recorded voice from a group of other voices and sounds.

Tony Jaa's The Protector (I guess The Weinsteins weren't too impressed by its original title, Tom Yum Goong) is a huge letdown, especially after Ong Bak, but you wouldn't know it from the trailer, which features Jaa depositing his elbow and knees in a variety of unfortunate stuntmen.

Majority of "To Cross Street Push Button" buttons in NYC are placebos. I've long suspected that most "Close Door" buttons in elevators are also dummies, also.

A postmodern prank

Live rattlesnakes released in theater during screening of Snakes on a Plane.

"That to me is very scary," herpetological association representative Tom Whiting said. "I would hate to be watching a movie about snakes and have a rattlesnake bite me."

I'll go out on a limb here and say that the reporter didn't need to call a herpetologist (zoologist specializing in reptiles) to invest that quote with credibility.

Moving pictures

5 tips for being more photogenic.

How to make your own rotoscoped movie (like Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly). This tutorial may sound labor intensive, but it's actually much less labor intensive than the way they animated the two Linklater movies. Unfortunately, the sample output from this tutorial shows that there is no real shortcut (for now) to achieving the psychedelic effects achieved in a movie like Waking LIfe, in which every frame was hand rotoscoped by animators. The slight imperfection in the edges from hand animation give every edge and surface that pulsating movement and life.

Japanese trailer for the two Clint Eastwood WWII movies coming out this fall and winter, The Flags of Our Fathers (October) and Red Sun, Black Sand (December). Both tell the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima, the former from an American perspective, the latter from a Japanese perspective. Flags of Our Fathers focuses on the lives of the six men who raised the American flag, an event immortalized in a Joe Rosenthal photograph, supposedly the most reproduced photograph in history.

Magician movies

Two magician movies are coming out this fall, The Illusionist (trailer) and The Prestige (trailer). I saw The Illusionist at Sundance, and absent any firsthand data on The Prestige except the trailer, I recommend that if you will only see one magician movie this fall, go see The Prestige. It's almost like that classic statistics question "The Monty Hall Problem." I've only seen what's behind one door, but I'm going to switch and go with the other door now.

Both have two word titles in the form of article noun. Both center around dark, smoldering magicians: Ed Norton in The Illusionist, Christina Bale in The Prestige. Both feature a hot babe: Jessica Biel in The Illusionist, Scarlett JohanSSon in The Prestige. The magic in The Illusionist is never really explained (though there is a twist that is made clear). From the trailer, the magic in The Prestige may not be explainable at all.

The Illusionist looks good, like a sepia-toned postcard from turn-of-the-century Vienna. Prague makes for a fetching backdrop, as always, and I'm a sucker for scores by Philip Glass. But the romance at the heart of this romantic thriller, between Biel and Norton, feels flat. The movie needs to break free of the familiar conventions of this genre (yes, there is a sneering villain of a prince with a menacing mustache, played by Rufus Sewell, to antagonize our hero Norton, the mere son of a cabinetmaker), like Houdini escaping padlocked chains in a tank of water, but the movie puts forth only a mild effort to do so. A good magic trick leaves the audience dying to know how it was done, but when The Illusionist finally trotted out the great reveal, I'd lost interest.

The character of greatest appeal is Paul Giamatti's police inspector Uhl, half aspiring but bumbling magician, half obsessive detective. The way he almost gargles his lines in his throat before he delivers them and the way he mouths his pipe as he deliberates gives the audience a sympathetic character with some depth to hang its hat on.

As for The Prestige, I know little. The director is Christopher Nolan, which is a checkmark in its favor, and I'm generally a fan of any movie where Christian Bale plays someone who might just be crazy.

Debris

The holy grail of video game graphics is ray tracing, and it may not be more than a few years off.

Michael Moore is working on a documentary called Sicko about the American health care crisis, but he's running into a problem. Every time he appears on scene to film a family's struggle against health care injustice, the family is suddenly given health care. It's Moore's version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

David Wain is shooting The Ten, a series of ten stories, one for each of the ten commandments. The cast includes Jessica Alba, Adam Brody, Rob Corddry, Bradley Cooper, Famke Janssen, Gretchen Mol, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Paul Rudd, Liev Schreiber, and Ron Silver, among others. Wain is probably most known for directing Wet Hot American Summer, so expect a remake of The Decalogue. If Wain needs to reduce his cast for budget reasons, it's not a stretch to think of a way for Jessica Alba to cause me to violate all ten commandments.

The sequel to Signs: Mel Gibson's Signs (of Anti-Semitism). It's tough not to think of this whole Mel Gibson debacle and think "Apocalypto."

Wondering who to pick as your fantasy football kicker? Neil Rackers. (YouTube clip, reminiscent of the Ronaldinho commercial).

Perhaps she is the Mark Fidrych of blondes, who burned too brightly, too soon, only to fizzle out at 25.

Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby

Usually, when a majority of critics embrace a comedy starring a funny guy I worship, that's a bad sign. It's usually a sign that someone has sold out and watered down the product. The trailer didn't seem that funny to me, and for a chunk of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, as 17 year old boys in the theater around me snickered and guffawed, I wondered if Will Ferrell and company were suffering from overuse. NASCAR is such an obvious target, and this movie makes all the obvious if loving jabs at the expense of the sport.

But with every Will Ferrell movie, there are quotes I can recycle for years and years to my sisters' annoyance, and this movie contains more than a handful, including many that were obscured by the laughter of the packed house. Sascha Baron Cohen is magnifique as "Formula Un" racer Jean Girard, the racing footage is surprisingly good (like ice hockey, I suspect NASCAR is several magnitudes more exciting when watched live instead of on television), and Amy Adams is a scene stealer yet again.

SUSAN (Amy Adams) to RICKY BOBBY'S DAD (Gary Cole):
"Hi, I'm Susan. I'm his lady. I painted the cougar on his car."
[beat]
"We had sex."

RICKY BOBBY'S DAD:
"I wish I was there for that."

My appreciation for movies like Anchorman - The Legend Of Ron Burgundy and other frat pack flicks seems to rise over time. I suspect it has to do with how they're filmed. As the outtakes reveal, Ferrell and company shoot dozens of different jokes for every scene and then sift through all the material to stitch together the best comedic exchanges in post-production (half the jokes and shots in the trailer didn't even make the final movie; they probably have enough material to do an entirely different version of the entire movie, much of which we're certain to see on the DVD). The choppy editing is perhaps an inevitable product of the shooting style. A lot of cuts in this movie are obvious leaps to different takes, and not only do characters jump around on screen, but conversations have a Frankensteinian rhythm to them. They throw everything at the wall in these productions, and they stitch together anything that sticks.

The first time watching a movie like this, some of the jokes work, some don't. By the second or third or fourth viewing, my mind just filters out the jokes that don't work, while seeing Ferrell deliver a ridiculous joke with absolute commitment for the tenth time seems to magnify its power.

Will Ferrell's comedic talents work best when he's in a movie or sketch. His genius is remaining absolutely in character, no matter how absurd the situation. When he's being interviewed on a talk show or on the red carpet, he's never quite as funny. Like Phil Hartman, he's funniest when he's in character, which happens to be all the time when he's on camera. Outside a fictional setting, his commitment can seem forced, as when he guest-hosted for Letterman. Ferrell has throttled any semblance of self for the comedic benefit of the rest of us, bless his soul.

[By the way, the reverse is true, too: real-life people rarely seem as charismatic when put in front of the camera. All the real-life NASCAR drivers in Talladega Nights? Dull. The same with any real-life television broadcaster who appears in a movie, something that happens with alarming frequency these days. Off the top of my head, I can think of only a few sports stars who were funny on camera. Kareem in Airplane, maybe Brett Favre in There's Something More About Mary because his acting was so bad it became a spoof of itself. "Oh Mary, I've missed you so much."]

Not surprisingly, Ferrell's funniest characters are those who take themselves too seriously to begin with. Of those, few are funnier than pairs figure skaters, especially in that moment when, just before the music starts, they get into character in a melodramatic pose. I look forward to seeing Ferrell and Jon Heder when they bring that moment to life in Blades of Glory.

"Are we gonna get it on?! Cuz I am harder than a diamond in a snow storm!"

A/C, Tenacious D, Rainier C

Finally, I have air conditioning in my apartment again, and all is good again. A handy phrase to learn, one I learned from my sister, who is a lawyer, is "warrant of habitability."

Trailer for the upcoming Tenacious D movie The Pick of Destiny.

I found Rainier cherries for $2 a pound in Chinatown. They're my favorite, the queen of cherries, but seemingly not as widely known here on the East coast. Some people I've spoken to here think they're discolored Bing cherries.

Sometimes, mainstream media is late to cover topics, like the NYTimes here on HDR photography.

Lowest common denominator

YouTube has the selection lead, and that has led it to a huge lead in the online video clip library space. It did the smart thing and went with a video format that almost anyone on any platform can play, and that is Flash video (.flv files).

But here's the thing: Flash video looks like crap. It is the Ford Escort of video formats. On many YouTube videos I feel like I'm trying to watch a 12-inch black-and-white television through the wrong end of binoculars. If you were to start a competitor to YouTube, and it would be silly to do so at this point, one thing you could do to win my allegiance is to use Quicktime as your default codec. Doesn't have to be HD. It doesn't even have to be another company; YouTube could offer Quicktime as the Lexus to its own Toyota.

If I want to watch a blank white screen with no sound (oh, how modern), I want to see it in quality.

A couple Sundance babies

A few movies I caught at Sundance in January hit theaters this week.

For those who enjoy the narrow but uncomplicated communal thrill of a good horror flick, The Descent delivers. Every bit of marketing for the movie, from the poster to the trailer to pictures and advance reviews, diminishes the fun. Don't read or look at any of it. The less you know about the movie, the greater the rush. Just grab some fellow horror movie fans and wear blinders until the lights go down. Do know, however, that the movie includes some attractive girls who, like Buffy, aren't afraid to muss their hair when push comes to shove.

I knew little to nothing about the movie when I caught it at Sundance. It played at midnight at the Egyptian Theatre, however, always an omen of disturbing fare. Past movies I've caught at that series include Wolf Creek, Three Extremes, and Oldboy. I walked in sleep-deprived, drowsy, and half-frozen by the Park City winter. I walked out of the theater with palms sweating and heart racing.

There was some controversy after the screening because the ending of the cut we saw at Sundance differed from the ending of the original that showed in the UK. Whenever something like this happens, horror fans lament that studios water down movies for American audiences because of their preference for happy endings. Director Neil Marshall said that was not the case, that he had always wanted to try two different endings. I believed him, and at any rate, the American ending works just fine. You could, in fact, interpret them the same way if you wanted, and at any rate, I'm sure the special edition DVD will include both. You can also look up a description of the UK ending in IMDb's news forums after the fact, as I did after Sundance.

In a somewhat disappointing lineup of movies at Sundance this year, Quinceañera was the big winner, capturing both the audience and jury award for narrative film. It is a movie with a strong sense of place, set in Echo Park, a Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles that is a layer cake of conflict between the generations, classes, and sexes.

A girl prepares the traditional celebration of her 15th birthday, her Quinceañera, but when she discovers she's pregnant, her strict and traditional father reacts as you'd predict. She and her friend's brother Carlos, also a pariah from his own family because of his sexuality, find refuge at their great uncle Tomas's house.

This feels like a Sundance movie to me. The writer, director, and actors were all unknown to me. It is not a genre film, and though so many pieces of the story are familiar, the movie moves with an organic energy. I did not anticipate Tomas becoming the wheel on which the movie pivots back on itself. The film has a warm spirit and no desire to shock or awe, a rarity in these times. Though it sometimes feels rough around the edges and never lifted me out of my seat, Quinceañerais the right movie for the type of person who wants a movie at the far opposite spectrum from The Descent.

Write my lips

IBM's ViaVoice Toolkit for Animation, when it's finally perfected, will vastly simplify the process of synchronizing an animated character's mouth with speech. If you have IBM ViaVoice R10 for Windows, you can download the toolkit.

Someday, this will revolutionize Conan O'Brien's "lip-synched interviews with famous people" segments, as well as spawn hundreds of amateur Pixar-like shorts on YouTube.

No curse words? What the @$#!*?

You can send a little ad message in Sam Jackson's voice via cell phone or e-mail to one of your friends from the official website for Snakes on a Plane. You have to choose from a few dropdowns to produce a canned message, though the engine can pronounce some common names to give the message a bit of a personal touch (including Eugene, hallelujah).

Too bad that even for an R-rated movie, they didn't remove the censor muzzle from Samuel L. If so, I'd be sending one of these to my landlord right now for not having fixed my air conditioner yet. It would be the next best thing to sending Jules himself over to pay a visit and collect my briefcase full of freon.

"The path of the righteous man..."

The black box that is the Netflix similarity score

Note: I'm no statistics major, so if I'm completely missing the boat here, I hope some of you stats geeks will correct me.

Netflix's Friends page changed sometime in the past few days, perhaps over the weekend. I noticed it yesterday. The most curious new feature is that all of my friends are given a % similarity score relative to me. For example, under Robert's name, I see: 86% similarity to you.

My inclination was at once to believe that Robert had pretty decent taste, but perusing the similarity scores of my friends, I found some of them to be somewhat odd. Of all my friends, Eleanor ranked lowest in similarity to me, at 54%. I may not be a fan of Grey's Anatomy, but anecdotally, that seemed low to me.

I searched the site to see if there was an explanation of how this similarity score was calculated, but I couldn't find anything, not even an explanation of how to interpret the score. If the score is 54%, does that mean that if we both watched a movie, there's a 54% chance we'd both rate the movie exactly the same? Or does that mean that 46% of the time, one of us would like the movie and the other person would dislike the movie? Or something else entirely?

If you click on the similarity score, the site displays a list of all movies you've seen in common with that friend and how you each rated the movie. Thankfully, the overlapping data between Eleanor and I was only 38 movies, so I put our ratings into a spreadsheet. Of those 38, Eleanor hadn't rated 8 of the movies yet, so I dumped those out of the data and looked at the remaining 30.

Of those, we had the exact same rating for 19 of the movies. So of the 30 movies we'd both seen, we had the same rating for 63.3% of them (Netflix allows you to rate a movie on a 5 point scale, from 1 through 5 stars). Of all the movies we'd seen in common, including those Eleanor had not yet rated, we had the exact same score for 50% of them.

Of the 11 movies we differed on, Eleanor gave 1 additional star on 8 of them, I gave 1 additional star on 2 movies and 2 additional stars on 1 movie. At any rate, that information didn't help me to understand the 54% similarity score. On the 30 movies we'd both rated, Eleanor's mean rating was 3.53 stars, mine was 3.40 stars, and the mean of the difference between our ratings on the movies was .13.

Netflix assigns a textual description to each of its 5 star rankings:

• 1 star equals "You hated it"
• 2 stars equals "You didn't like it"
• 3 stars equals "You liked it"
• 4 stars equals "You really liked it"
• 5 stars equals "You loved it"

By that system, a rating of 1 or 2 stars was a negative review, and 3 stars up equated to a positive review. If Eleanor and I differed on our ratings but both assigned a movie a negative or positive review, then in my mind our ratings were not as different as if one of us had assigned the movie a negative review while the other assigned it a positive review.

Of the 11 movies we differed on, in only 3 cases did one of us assign a positive review when the other assigned a negative review. So of 30 movies we'd seen, we had both given the movie a thumbs up or thumbs down in 27 of them, or 90% of the movies we'd both rated. This rendered the 54% similarity score even more peculiar to me.

I looked up some collaborative filtering papers online, and it seemed that the Pearson linear correlation coefficient and cosine similarity were two popular methods for calculating user or item similarity in collaborative filtering online. I couldn't do cosine similarity in Excel (at least not easily), but Excel did offer a formula for calculating the Pearson coefficient of two arrays, so I calculated that for Eleanor and my ratings. Our Pearson coefficient was .564 (correlation coefficients range from -1 to 1). Close, but it didn't match up to the 54% similarity score.

I decided to look at relative similarity scores to see if they meant more. Audrey had a 75% similarity score to me according to Netflix, so by any number of measures, we should be more similar in our movie tastes than Eleanor. But a quick look at the facts didn't support that.

Of the 103 movies Audrey and I both rated, we had the same rating on 38 of them, or 36.9%. Audrey's average rating was 3.75, while mine was 3.36, and the average of the difference of our ratings was .39. Our Pearson coefficient was .454, or lower than the Pearson coefficient between Eleanor and me.

I don't expect Netflix to reveal its methodology for calculating similarity scores. Most companies are protective of their personalization algorithms. Even if I knew how Netflix calculated its similarity scores, I'm not sure it's much more than a minor curiosity. If you knew some people were similar to me in our film ratings, the way that would help me on a movie site is to use those people's ratings to predict which other movies I'd rate highly. Netflix probably already does that. If Netflix explained how the figure was calculated, or even how to interpret the figure, it might be more meaningful.

Having used the personalization features of lots of sites, I find the most useful personalization feature to be item similarities, e.g. Amazon's "Customers who bought this item also bought" feature. Attempts to use similar people to predict my tastes has always yielded mediocre results. I haven't encountered any sites that have really cracked that nut, and that's not surprising. There's no accounting for taste, especially those of creatures as complex as human beings.

Still, if someone out there can explain the similarity scores, drop me an e-mail (commenting doesn't work right now; my e-mail address is on my homepage). I'm curious.

UPDATE: Eleanor wrote to tell me that I show up as 85% similar to her in her Friends page, even though she's only 54% similar to me in my Friends page. Audrey says I show up as 80% similar to her on her end, or 5% lower than she shows up on my end. I'm guessing that even movies we haven't rated must factor into the similarity equation.

Okay, one more trailer, for The Departed

The Departed is Martin Scorsese's adaptation of Infernal Affairs, the first chapter in my favorite Hong Kong cops and robbers trilogy. Here's the trailer for the American remake, here's the trailer for the original.

The Hong Kong original included a star-studded cast, and Scorsese's version is no less loaded. Here's the key, as far as I can tell from the trailer:
Andy Lau --> Matt Damon
Tony Leung (Chiu Wai) --> Leonardo DiCaprio
Eric Tsang --> Jack Nicholson
Anthony Wong --> Martin Sheen

That's not even mentioning Mark Wahlberg, Alec Baldwin, and Ray Winstone, who are in the cast, and Robert De Niro, who was in the cast but had to drop out. It's good to be Marty.

You can find the DVD box set for the original Hong Kong Infernal Affairs trilogy at various Asian DVD sites (you will likely need a region-free DVD player) and even eBay (which includes many non-region-encoded copies). I would urge caution on eBay DVDs that seem too cheap to be true. Many are just mass copies of low quality, and many of my old eBay DVDs of Asian movies no longer play properly. If you want what amounts to a disposable play-once copy, go to eBay. If you want a copy for your collection, spend a bit more for a high quality version.

One more trailer

The one for Children of Men, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore. If you use music by Sigur Ros in your trailer, you're cheating, but it's an effective one.

Spike Lee's documentary When the Levees Broke will premiere in New Orleans. Tickets will be free and available via Ticketmaster.

Friday movie quiz, part III

The third in a series of movie quizzes is online. The other two were mentioned here previously. 28 frames, each from a different movie. As always, a mix of the really easy and the ridiculously obscure.

Thanks to some of my uber-movie-geek pals for the answers to 7, 8, 15, and 25. Answers below in white text (run your cursor across them to see them):
1. Cube
2. Citizen Kane
3. Casablanca
4. Casanova
5. Titan AE
6. Groundhog Day
7. Bloodrayne
8. The Street Fighter
9. Dogma
10. Raiders of the Lost Ark
11. To Kill a Mockingbird
12. Life of Brian
13. Platoon
14. Dog Day Afternoon
15. Taxi
16. Heat
17. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
18. The Insider
19. Total Recall
20. Tom Yum Goong
21. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
22. Wag the Dog
23. Bulletproof Monk
24. No Man’s Land
25. Kopps
26. Y Tu Mama Tambien
27. Phone Booth
28. Scary Movie 2
What really used to impress me was a feature on IMDb in which people would write in with the vaguest descriptions of some scene they had stuck in their head.

"I remember a man walking down a hall, the lights flickering, and then a drop of water lands on his head." Or something like that. 9 times out of 10, one of the IMDb'ers could identify the movie. Amazing recall.

Nowadays, I think that letter column has been retired, but it appears that users are helping each other out with such questions on the IMDb message board I Need to Know.

Trailer park

Black Dahlia, starring Josh Hartnett, Scarlett Johansson, Aaron Eckhart, Hilary Swank, and Mia Kirshner. I'm a big De Palma fan, so I'm looking forward to this.

Babel (in HD), starring Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett, Gael Garcia Bernal, and Kôji Yakusho (Kiyoshi Kurosawa's leading man of choice), and directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Interesting cast.

To terrorize or not to terrorize

Two Tuesdays ago, I attended the NY premiere of the opera "Grendel." Elliot Goldenthal was the composer, and his partner Julie Taymor (seemingly most well-known for Broadway's musical "The Lion King" and for directing Titus and Frida and for her acclaimed production of Die Zauberflöte at the Met last year...my review of that here) was director, co-librettist, and puppet designer. George Tsypin, who collaborated with Taymor on Die Zauberflöte, reunited with her as set designer.

This was an adaptation of the novel by John Gardner that retells the story of Beowulf from the monster Grendel's perspective. I've not read the novel, but if the Goldenthal-Taymor adaptation was faithful, then both transform Grendel from a mindless beast into a Hamlet-esque brooder, an introverted philosopher wearied by the weight of his own thoughts. As with the revisionist musical Wicked, the opera traces his monstrous soul to mistreatment at the hands of cruel children in his youth because of his physical appearance.

I enjoy opera, but most are a bit long for me. It would be a lie to say I've survived all three hours of any German opera without my eyes and ears and mind wandering around the theater more than a few times. "Grendel," an English (of the new and Old variety) opera, is no exception, but a few things helped to focus my attention. Taymor/Tsypin always provide a dazzling palette for the eyes, and by the oohs and aahs of the opening night crowd, that might be enough in and of itself to earn a checkmark. Tsypin's main contribution is a gigantic, rotating wall with a pivoting cutout in the center that swings back and forth like a drawbridge. Taymor's puppets include those with her trademark geometric grandeur, including a massive dragon head. Constance Hoffman's costumes supply a pleasing contrast to the puppets, some of the other monsters in Grendel's cave looking like some first grader's terrifying crayon scrawls come to life.

I enjoy me some Taymor puppets dancing around Tsypin sets as much as the next guy, but the music is what stays with you. Goldenthal is most known to me for his film score work, and "Grendel" reminded me at moments of a Stravinsky-influenced film score. Much of the vocal line given to Grendel (hard-working bass Eric Owens, looking from my cheap seats like a man in a slate-colored body cast) reverberated past me, literally and figuratively, and I had to read the notes to the opera to catch all the nuances of the story.

At times, the opera includes a bit of welcome post-modern humor. I recall one scene, or perhaps it was the first act, ending with Grendel shouting, "Bullshit!" His first line upon appearing on stage: "And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war."

At the opera's conclusion, the crowd gave an enthusiastic ovation, and the snippets of conversation I heard in the mass exodus all concerned Taymor's puppets, Hoffman's costumes, and Tsypin's monolithic wall.

"Just beautiful, wasn't it?"

"Oh, it was just so gorgeous. Just wonderful to look at."

I won't go so far as to refer to "Grendel" as "The Lion King" for adults or with loftier aspirations, but sometimes I think you could set Taymor puppets on a Tsypin set to music from a CD and people would turn out eagerly, so visually starved are opera fans.

One benefit of attending opera (and theater) is that it's one of the few remaining social outings that makes me feel young, the average age of the audience at the Met skewing into another generation. One of the countless reasons I'm so depressed to be leaving NYC is that the Met's upcoming season includes more than one show I'd love to see: Anthony Minghella's interpretation of "Madame Butterfly," Tan Dun's "The First Emperor" starring Placido Domingo (with help on the libretto from novelist Ha Jin and some production assistance from Zhang Yimou), and Franco Zeffirelli's production of "La Boheme."

The Hobbit

Every time Dan spotted a poster for Lady in the Water this weekend (and this is NYC, so that would be every two blocks or so), he'd shout, "Frodo! Frodo!"

Opening shots

Jim Emerson is compiling a list of the most famous opening shots in movies. You can read some reader and Emerson nominations on his blog. If you're a movie buff, you can try your hand at Emerson's opening shot quizzes one and two (the answers are here and here, respectively). The second quiz is much much easier than the first and is a good test of your classic movie familiarity quotient.

I look forward to the companion piece, Parting Shots. Famous pening and closing shots are like opening and closing lines in books. Good ones condense the essence of the entire work into very little.

Last year I saw Antonioni's The Passenger at the New York Film Festival, just prior to its re-release on DVD. It contains what would be one of the top 5 spots on my list of best parting shots. In one, long, unbroken shot of some seven minutes, Antonioni reprises the entire movie. The shot is mysterious from a literal perspective: what happens, and how did they shoot it?

But it is also symbolically elegant. As the camera escapes through the "prison" bars of the room, we revisit reporter David Locke's (Jack Nicholson) escape into another man's identity, that of a dead gun-runner. But as the camera glides towards freedom, it is pulled back around and re-enters the hotel, bringing us back into the room. Some things you just can't escape, and one can read that final shot in numerous ways. It is pregnant with meaning.

The new DVD release contains a 126 minute version of the film, longer than the 118 minute version on an earlier MGM cut. Antonioni has described an even longer cut of two hours and a half that he prefers, but that may never see the light of day.

Chuck Klosterman on SOAP

Chuck Klosterman writes in Esquire about the potential downside to Snakes on a Plane. I don't think it's as tragic as he makes it out to be. Hollywood already cranks out cookie cutter movies all the time, chasing after past successes as if buying last week's winning lottery number will improve one's chance of winning the next lottery. If Snakes on a Plane is a commercial success, we'll probably get an awful sequel or two regardless of whether or not the first was any good, but that's no different than plenty of other film franchises. Hell, we're about to get another Rocky movie in which an aging Sylvester Stallone goes up against Antonio Tarver. Snakes on a Plane is just business as usual, albeit with a new trigger, that being the plain yet descriptive title.

Or perhaps it's more than the title. The novelty of that wore off for me a while ago. I think the magic ingredient here is the promised presence of the foul-mouthed, indignant Samuel L. Jackson persona. If, in SOAP, he suddenly screams, "Yes, they deserve to die and I HOPE THEY BURN IN HELL!" then you'll see entire theaters erupt in applause.

It must be fantastic being able to entertain people by ranting and raving and cussing like a sailor. I wish I had that power. Then, when a waiter angered me, I could just scream at them and yet bring them some small measure of joy to them at the same time.

A Scanner Darkly

[SPOILER ALERT: Contains a spoiler or two, especially if you have not read the book, though the movie isn't really plot-twist-driven. It's not as if I'm going to reveal that Rosebud was a sled or that he's a ghost or anything of that magnitude.]

Wednesday night, I attended a preview screening of A Scanner Darkly at the Lincoln Center. After the movie, Robert Downey Jr. and Richard Linklater were to host a discussion about the movie.

Lingering jetlag zonked me out in the afternoon, and by the time I awoke from a long, long nap and rushed up to Lincoln Center on the subway, I was late for the event. Fortunately, these things never start on time, and I found a decent seat on the aisle. Ethan Hawks was directly ahead of me, two rows up. While catching my breath, I felt someone hovering over me in the aisle. I looked up and it was Keanu Reeves, chatting with someone who knew Rory Cochrane, one of the other actors in the movie.

I've heard Keanu speak a handful of times in person now, and he is an enigma with that awed surfer voice wrapping itself around such a wide range of ideas. I caught snippets, "So he can read Proust and Goethe in the original languages? That's fantastic." Seems like a nice guy.

Linklater was caught on an airplane so he missed the introduction which Robert Downey Jr. and Reeves provided instead. Downey Jr. is a huge talent, with boundless supplies of charisma, and the two of them warmed up the crowd with some improvised comic banter.

I have read some Philip K. Dick, but not A Scanner Darkly, so I can't comment on the faithfulness of the adaptation, but some of the guests addressed the issue in Q&A.

Notes from the Q&A, with guests Richard Linklater, Robert Downey Jr., Keanu Reeves, Jonathan Lethem, and PKD's daughter Isa:

• The first PKD novel Linklater ever read was Valis.
• After Waking Life and post 9/11, Linklater was searching for another use for the rotoscoping, and this PKD novel just felt timely.
• Though they used the same software as for Waking Life, they were able to generate more detail this time. Linklater noted that what they did was not pure rotoscoping; he refers to their process as interpolated rotoscoping.
• They use style sheets to maintain some consistency. As Linklater put it, style sheets told the animators, "This is how you draw Keanu's beard. This is how you draw Winona's..." [when he paused here, the crowd laughed, because Winona is topless, albeit in animated form, in some of the movie] "...jaw."
• Keanu was the one person on the set who had his nose in the book the whole time (Downey Jr. did not read the novel).
• Linklater wrote and rewrote as they went along, always trying to maintain the spirit of the book. Someone, I think it was Lethem, mentioned that when PKD first saw Blade Runner, he said that the movie was okay, but he wished that someone would make a movie that honored the ideas in his books. Lethem felt that A Scanner Darkly is the most faithful PKD adaptation ever, the only movie that honors the ambiguity and indeterminacy of PKD's work.
• Jonathan Lethem, a PKD expert, was consulted upon before production to help the cast and crew to understand PKD's vision.
• A Scanner Darkly is the most autobiographical of PKD's novels, a cautionary tale. PKD was addicted to amphetamines and saw many loved ones submit to drug addictions of one form or another. "If it wasn't for drugs, our dad would still be writing," said Isa. She found the end dedications to be the most moving part of the film because she knew the people referenced.
• With an $8 million budget, Linklater had to get Isa and the rest of PKD's family to agree to a lower option fee.
• Linklater screened the movie for Radiohead, and they liked it, so they allowed some of their music to be used in the soundtrack, including a single from Thom Yorke's new solo album The Eraser to run over the end credits.
• Downey Jr., jokingly, I think, on Linklater, "He's a monster. I know you're thinking he's such a nice guy, softspoken, sitting here, but he works you like a rib. 'You want lunch?! This is for PKD! His daughter is sitting right there!'"
• The biggest change they made in the movie versus the book is a twist in which Winona Ryder emerges from the second scramble suit, worn by Fred's superior on the force. It was an added twist, but one Linklater and others felt was still faithful to the spirit of the novel.
• Where did the title A Scanner Darkly come from? Isa thought it was from Biblical scripture, while Linklater thought it might refer back to the Bergman film (I assume he meant Through a Glass Darkly.
• The look of the movie was intended to be that of a graphic novel.
• Linklater never thought to do a live action version of the movie. "Someone could pull that off," said Linklater, "but I couldn't."
• Lethem liked the use of animation because "animation gives a more seamless division between reality and hallucination." Prose can do that better than most any medium. Photography is too literal. Animation helps moving pictures to capture language's potential for metaphor.
• A lot of famous faces were used as models for images on the scramble suits, including PKD. Something to play around with once the DVD comes out.
• The advantage of rotoscoping was that they could stick things in the scene that could just be ignored during animation, like microphones. It allowed Linklater and crew to focus on the scene as a whole while ignoring random details about getting the shot perfect, things which often consume so much time on set.
• The shoot itself, a 25 day shoot, went smoothly. Once they shifted to animation, they hit some snags. It took longer than expected to finish.

This is about as far from a popcorn movie as you'll find in theaters this summer, a departure since most PKD novels have been transformed into sci-fi action flicks. The movie is challenging in a way that other PKD film adaptations have not been. In making the central character an addict whose personality has been splintered by drug use, and in nesting one conspiracy inside another in a Russian doll of dark forces (government, pharma, the police, among others), Linklater and company have left the movie bereft of any easy emotional handle for the audience, no one character to identify with. The dialogue-to-action ratio might frustrate the average filmgoer. On the other hand, this movie stands as a testament to the idea that Hollywood can turn out animation for adults, animation about ideas.

If you've ever sat around listening to the seemingly meaningless babble of a group of stoned buddies, you have a sense of what it feels like to listen to watch much of this movie. It's occasionally hilarious, especially the verbal parrying between Downey Jr. and Woody Harrelson, but often maddening and obtuse. The rotoscoping is effective at heightening the sense of reality's dissolution. Every moment on screen looks the same, whether it's a hallucination, a flashback, video on a surveillance screen, or reality. You can't tell one from the other. On the other hand, I occasionally wished I could see Downey Jr.'s character in live action. His face operates on a frequency that rotoscoping can't capture.

So finally, a most faithful PKD adaptation to the silver screen. PKD fans will rejoice, but the studio, I'm guessing, may not when box office receipts come in. I, for one, am glad we don't have another PKD story pillaged for an action dud like Paycheck.

Swimmin' with Dylan

Download the instrumental version of "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley, as well as "Nel Cimitero di Tucson," the spaghetti western track Danger Mouse sampled for Crazy. Something to tide us over while we wait for Paris Hilton's cover.

True height measures the effective height of a basketball player. Good news! Tyrus Thomas measures out as nearly a 7-footer in true height. I'm pumped up for the Bulls upcoming season, though it will still be ugly on offense.

Shina Tsukamoto's horror film novella Haze on Region 2 DVD.

Soundtrack.net has a sneak preview of James Newton Howard's score for Lady in the Water. Oddly enough, the soundtrack includes a bunch of Bob Dylan covers.

Wired Magazine has a profile of banned Tour de France technology. Most are just bikes that fall under the UCI minimum weight limit, though, and for a recreational cyclist that's nothing to get excited about. A few ounces here or there isn't going to turn the average club cyclist into a champ, and trying to descend a long, steep mountain on a featherweight bike is terrifying.

A long-standing conspiracy theory holds that the moon landing was staged, perhaps by Stanley Kubrick. The moon hoax is so popular that NASA had to address it.

Clemens-Liriano

On tap for tonight: Roger Clemens vs. Francisco Liriano, aging vs. young gunslinger.

The trailer for Borat.

Stream clips from Thom Yorke's upcoming album The Eraser, which releases July 11 in the US.

The White Sox are a good team, but Ozzie Guillen is a punk. Someone put a pacifier in his mouth. Can we get Jack Nicholson to order the code red? Of course, his efforts to defend his use of a homosexual slur have the entertainment value of a car accident:

[Guillen] also said that he has gay friends, goes to WNBA games, went to the Madonna concert and plans to attend the Gay Games in Chicago.

WNBA games and a Madonna concert! Gay friends! Pin a rainbow medal on him. Of course, no one really likes Jay Mariotti, either, so this is either a win-win or a lose-lose situation, I can't tell which.

Doubt, the movie

After the performance of Neil Labute's Some Girl(s) at the Lucille Lortel Theatre last night, John Patrick Shanley came on-stage for a talkback (fancy word for mini-interview and Q&A) with one of the MCC Theater's resident playwrights. I didn't realize Shanley had won the lifetime triple crown: an Oscar for best screenplay Moonstruck, a Tony and a Pulitzer, both for Doubt. He also wrote and directed Joe Versus the Volcano. Shanley mentioned that just yesterday, he closed a deal to adapt and direct Doubt as a movie.

"People who are utterly certain are vulnerable to a brand of foolishness that people who maintain a level of doubt are not," Shanley has said. It's clear that he was referring in part to a certain sitting President, especially as compared to said President's most recent electoral opponent who was crucified for changing his mind about the Iraq war.

Shaken, not stirred

Apple has lowered the price of Shake, its video compositing and effects software, from $2,999 to $499. It's most well-known for being used for some of the effects in The Lord of the Rings - The Return of the King. Very cool.

Mixed nuts

"Happy Mornings" is a commercial for Folgers, though it's difficult to see how.

The winner of Bruce Schneier's Movie-Plot Threat Contest involves the destruction of Grand Coulee Dam, triggering a chain reaction that knocks out the rest of the dams on the Columbia River and leaves the West Coast without power for months, taking down the U.S. economy in the process.

Well, if the terrorists do go after Hoover Dam, perhaps our best hope is to send in the Transformers, who are already doing work at Hoover Dam. On that note, is this test footage of Optimus Prime from the new Transformers movie?

As for terrorist plots, the one that's scaring New Yorkers right now is the aborted plot to gas NY subways (as described by Ron Suskind in his new book The One Percent Doctrine, excerpted in the latest issue of Time).

Not new, but still cool music video: man juggles in time to Fatboy Slim's "That Old Pair of Jeans" (thx Ken). That's one of the two new tracks on Fatboy Slim's greatest hits album Why Try Harder, releasing tomorrow.

The new Apple "I'm a Mac" ads are clever and funny. But are they all that effective in moving Windows users over to Macs, or do they just preach to the converted? I'm with Stevenson, I think it's the latter.

Raising children doesn't make one happy. In fact, when children finally leave the next, parents experience an uptick in happiness. So writes Daniel Gilbert in an essay for Time. But, he notes, that capacity for humans to sacrifice for the good of their children is why we have holidays like Father's Day. At his weblog, Gilbert includes footnotes for those interested in delving more deeply into the research cited. Gilbert is the author of Stumbling on Happiness, a fascinating book I've just started reading this past week.

At Winged Foot this weekend, a score of 5 over par won the U.S. Open. That's not entirely surprising as the U.S. Open always has the toughest setup of the four golf majors. As long as the course is equally tough for everyone, the final score relative to par doesn't matter. But Matthew Rudy of GolfDigest.com feels this year's setup rewarded robotic play, with little decision-making required, and punished the world's true best players. Ron Sirak of Golf World disagrees.

United 93

In a year devoid of memorable movies so far, here, then, is the early favorite for Best Picture. United 93 is a movie that exists solely within that moment, unfolding in near real time on the morning of September 11, 2001, like a short story written in the present tense. The movie begins with the terrorists praying and ends with flight United 93 plunging into the earth. The political context is left out, most characters are not given names, and the camera never pulls back to permit a lead actor to primp for Best Actor by delivering a speech to the swelling chords of a momentous soundtrack.

But for everyone who was lived through that day, such context is not necessary. The movie has the gravitational pull of a historical supernova, pulling from our memories every fact about that fateful morning. The suspense is Hitchcockian but in a unique way. The context we as the audience have and which the characters on-screen lack is that of real-life history. When Air Traffic Control fails to get a response from American Airlines flight 77, we know what has happened, but the air traffic controllers on screen remain calm. When the first plane disappears completely off of the radar over Manhattan, the people at air traffic control don't know where the plane has gone, even after they see smoke billowing from the North Tower. We remember, for a brief moment, a time when the idea of what had happened seemed so improbable as to be incomprehensible, and we understand their inability to put two and two together.

The choice to shoot almost entirely handheld and to use no well-known actors is, of course, the right one, preserving the movie's documentary feel. Fiction feels inadequate in the face of an event like 9/11, which is one reason September 11 was so disappointing (the best of the shorts, incidentally, was the one that simply remixed video and audio from 9/11 itself). Many of the characters are played by themselves, and when the credits roll and you see so many names in the cast listed as "As Herself" or "As Himself," your mind jumps back to moments in the movie, and you know that the tears were real. Contrast that with Oliver Stone's upcoming World Trade Center, which will star known actors like Nicolas Cage, Maria Bello, Maggie Gyllenhaal. It may very well be a fantastic movie, but what those recognizable faces add is a layer of abstraction.

As with The Bourne Supremacy, Paul Greengrass's previous film, the editing seems to keep tempo to the pace of the characters' hearts and minds. Or is it the other way around? At one point, while watching The Bourne Supremacy, I kept count of the number of edits during action sequences. They came at the rate of about one per second and put you in Bourne's head, the thousands of quick decisions his mind was churning through. United 93 has an editing pace just as frantic, mirroring the bewildered panic of our nation that morning and the tempo of my heart rate for most of the movie.

And yet, despite all this skill, fiction still feels inadequate to the task of resolving 9/11. At best, the movie can stir up the immediacy of that day, rouse us from our day-to-day stupor to leave us alone with our memories of that day, but it presents no solutions and is so tasteful in its choices as to be almost neutral. It is a riveting chronicle before which other horror movies seem meaningless, but as the daily news reminds us, we've yet to come close to resolving the conflict revealed to so much of the world that day. It's not "too soon" to make a movie about 9/11, as some NY filmgoers shouted during trailers for this movie, but it may be that only time, and not art, can bring closure to the tragedy of 9/11.

Google Browser Stync

Bill Gates to transition out of full-time role at Microsoft in July 2008.

Google Browser Sync--umm, not show ready. It disabled my SessionSaver add-on, and now I lose my tabs whenever I close out of Firefox. I thought Google Browser Sync was supposed to preserve your browser tabs, but it just plain doesn't work. Sometimes it asks me if I want to reopen some tabs from my previous session, but they're never the tabs I had open when I closed out of Firefox. I was excited when I first heard about Google Browser Sync, but after a few days of use, I'm going to remove it. There was a time when every Google release was a pleasant surprise, but the bar has been lowered.

And speaking of tab preservation, why isn't that functionality just built into Firefox and Safari?

Superman Returns tix are available online now from sites like Fandango. I recommend seeing it in IMAX 3D, if there's such a theater near you.

No whammy indeed.

An estimated 16% of FEMA funds for Hurricane Katrina victims was misspent. Con men used false identities to obtain assistance checks to spend on anything from sex-change operations, Girls Gone Wild videos, vacations, and season tickets to the New Orleans Saints. Yes, some of that FEMA money went to waste. I'm referring, of course, to the person who purchased the Saints' season tickets.

In tribute of Father's Day, Nike is airing a commercial Sunday featuring Tiger Woods and his father. You can watch it online now.

Be careful when you get a haircut during World Cup. I was a barber shop getting a haircut when Peter Crouch scored for England today, and the guy cutting my hair was so excited he nearly gave me the Michael Madsen Reservoir Dogs special with his clippers.

Every time I see Dwayne Wade go by a defender to finish at the hoop, I wonder what Michael Jordan would have done in this "no hand check" era. Goodness gracious.

Can't Mark Cuban hire a copy editor for his blog? Isn't he a billionaire?

This modern art anecdote reminds me of the piece of modern art that was thrown out by the janitor at a museum because he thought it was trash. The artist couldn't have been more pleased with the outcome.

He Poos Clouds

Listen to clips from the new album from Final Fantasy He Poos Clouds, featuring vocals from Arcade Fire's violinist Owen Pallett over a string quartet. Pallett is an unabashed nerd--son of two entomologists, he scored a videogame at the age of twelve and two operas by the age of twenty-one--and this album is an attempt to modernize each of the eight Dungeons & Dragons schools of magic. Yep.

iToors sounds cool in concept--Podcasts for travelers to various cities--though the content on the site is still skimpy. For now there are podcasts for Paris, Prague, London, Glasgow, and Santa Monica(?!). The site also has a search engine for suggesting books, movies, and music to accompany a trip to each city, though again the cupboards are still quite bare. I'll withhold judgment until I hear their NYC podcasts, releasing sometime this next month. In general, though, I think the podcast market for travelers is underserved right now, especially having just returned from a month long trip in which my iPod was a permanent fixture. No podcast can replace a seasoned guide who can answer questions that pop into your head as you stroll around town, but a podcast is sure to be cheaper.

Handy list of useful Mac OS X freeware.

The Flock web browser beta is now available. It's a Mozilla-based browser with built-in features to simplify common web activities like bookmarking, blogging, newsreading, and photo-browsing.

Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times, which I saw the NYFF in 2005, is playing in a few theaters around the country. The movie comprises three shorts, each starring Shu Qi and Chang Chen as lovers, in 1966, 1911, and 2005. Though the overall movie is uneven (the second segment was a bit inert), the first segment, "A Time For Love," is romantic, gorgeous, and unforgettable. The movie's trailer is here (Quicktime). You can get a flavor of Hou's tranquil lyricism from his commercial for Air France also (click "Voir les films TV" and then "Le Ponton"), a commercial I saw more than a few times while traveling through E. Europe.

A glitzy annual benefit to sponsor breast cancer research is titled What A Pair! We may not have found the cure yet, but there's no shortage of cringe-inducing puns.

Revisiting 2 Nov 2004

Reserve your pair of Blu Fom sneakers commemorating Core77's eleventh anniversary. A collaboration between Fila and Core77, the limited run of 300 sneakers is available from Core77.

Google Sketchup is now available for Mac OS X. Google Earth Release 4 is now in beta.

Did Bush steal the 2004 election? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks so. Cat Power, after her concert Friday night, told the audience to go out and read this article. Farhad Manjoo of Salon thinks Kennedy is off base. Then Kennedy and Manjoo traded another series of verbal parries.

Brushed chrome kitchen appliances are so yesterday. Give me a cast-iron range (really, because I can't afford it).

Looks like Sutton Foster is finally getting her own domain name to replace the Geocities page that was the top Google result for her name. She deserves the upgrade, Geocities being the trailer park of the Internet. I saw her in The Drowsy Chaperone Sunday and in Thoroughly Modern Millie a few years back. She's a charmer, and her story is the stuff of movies: unknown pulled out of the chorus to play the lead.

Tonight, his journey ends

Tuesday morning, parts of Spiderman 3 were shot in Manhattan at the Broadhurst Theater (slideshow).

Deadspin has an anonymous source that claims that one of the people named in Jason Grimsley's affidavit as a person who referred him to an amphetamine source is Chris Mihlfeld who happens to be Albert Pujols' personal trainer. No one wants to find out that Pujols was on any illegal substance. It's bad enough thinking back to the Sosa-McGwire