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.

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Drool. Drool.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 home run battle of 1998 that supposedly saved baseball and thinking that both of them were more artificially enhanced than Joan Rivers.

That short Samantha Bee American Idol-esque video retrospective on al-Zarqawi on The Daily Show last night caused me to laugh water out my nose. "Tonight, his journey ends. Let's take one last look back." It was set to that cheesy pop tune; I'm not sure of the name or artist. I wish the video was online to link to; perhaps it will be in a day or two.
UPDATE I: The tune accompanying shots from al-Zarqawi's terrorist training clip montage, a helpful reader informs me, was Daniel Powter's "Bad Day."
UPDATE II: Here we go, the Samantha Bee clip is in the middle of this clip.

Review: X3, the Last Stand

In X-Men III: The Last Stand, the mutant heroes take on an unexpected foe, the most powerful and destructive force they've ever encountered. Yes, you guessed it: Brett Ratner. The outcome, needless to say, is tragic for the X-Men. I should probably insert a standard spoiler warning here, but can you spoil something that's already rotten? I will give away plot details, but if they should prevent you from seeing the movie, I expect a share of the admissions you'd be saving.

Mike and I had read the comic book as teenage dorks (well, that would describe me; I won't presume to speak for Mike), but the script, by Simon Kinberg (Mr. and Mrs. Smith) and Zak Penn (X2, The Fantastic Four, Elektra), simply picks at established mythology like a picky eater peeling pepperoni off a slice of pizza, leaving round craters of grease in the mozzarella landscape. The two main plotlines are these: (1) a cure is discovered for the mutant X gene, harvested from the young boy Leech, played by the same boy who convinced Nicole Kidman to take a bath with him in Birth (a power worth harvesting in its own right), and (2) Jean Grey returns in the guise of the Phoenix. The U.S. government, wary of the mutants, decide to impose the cure on the mutants, while Magneto (Ian McKellen), again playing the Malcolm X to Charles Xavier's Martin Luther King, Jr., recruits Phoenix to his brotherhood in an effort to kill the young boy and neutralize the cure.

There are a half dozen other plotlines, all treated with about as much attention as the average male devotes to wedding planning. We see a young Angel trying to remove his wings with a Microplane grater (as any experienced cook knows, if a Microplane won't do the trick, then surely the situation is dire). Rogue, still with that ridiculous white streak in her hair, is tempted by the cure, but she's on screen so little as to be a footnote. Numerous new mutants are introduced for no reason other than to show off their powers before they die, including one who throws horns out of his wrists and another who is either a porcupine or a pufferfish but is most certainly superfluous.

Bryan Singer gave the first two X-Men movies a sleek metallic sheen and tapped into the one of the charms of the comic book. Mutants represented every prosecuted minority, but their mutations were, for the most part, highly appealing. The movies extend that visually by casting attractive or at least interesting-looking actors in every part. Rebecca Romijn's slinky and nude blue Mystique gave shape-shifters an erotic female spark. Ian McKellen gave voice, and what a voice it is, to Magneto, playing him as a sort of mischievous hardline aristocrat, one who undoubtedly has accepted that some cruelty to ducks and geese is necessary to cultivate that divine food that is foie gras. When Storm (Halle Berry) invokes her powers, her head tilts back and her eyes go milky white; the expression is that of sexual release.

For a movie with such a large budget, the movie is curiously devoid of awe-inspiring moments. The Dark Phoenix re-appears off-screen. We see water swirling, the camera cuts to Cyclops' reaction, and then we cut back to Jean Grey standing on the shore, sporting an awful wig (a good plot for the next X-Men film would be the fight to discover a cure for the cheap hairpieces the actors are forced to wear). What good are all the special FX budgets if grand appearances can't be visualized? Cyclops dies off-screen; it's not entirely clear why or how, but I chalk it up to lazy plotting, and it reminded me of how in MI:III, Ethan Hunt disappears into an office building and then appears a few minutes later with the Rabbit's Foot. Apparently the interior security consisted of a ferocious Shih Tzu named Ling Ling.

When the movie does reach for the grand visual gesture, it falls short. When Magneto needs to transport his army over to Alcatraz, he doesn't ask Dark Phoenix to fly them over, nor does he think to levitate his army over on a sheet of tin foil. No, Magneto is a man of style, and so he decides to tear off one end of the Golden Gate Bridge and swing that end over to Alcatraz. Overkill, perhaps, but also an opportunity for a visual centerpiece, and yet the shots of the cars on the bridge look artificial, cartoonish. The climactic battle is a mess, a sort of playground brawl that had my head rolling back into my seat, my eyes milking over like Storm's.

The funniest moment in the movie comes from Vinnie Jones's Juggernaut and references this popular and offensive X-men cartoon remix. If only the rest of the movie had been so light on its feet. Universal handed the keys of a goldmine of a franchise to Ratner and he drove it into a tree. Jean Grey and Cyclops are dead, Xavier on life support, and Mystique is merely human. The second week box office grosses tumbled 67%, perhaps reflecting weak word-of-mouth from disappointed first weekend loyalists. The history of franchises that careen off course is not good; they usually don't recover, and if they do, it's usually only after the incoming director is allowed to hit the reset button.

My sister thought it delivered the expected dose of mindless entertainment, but then again, she admitted that during the climactic scene when Wolverine is staggering towards Phoenix, his skin struggling to regenerate itself in the face of the Phoenix's destructive glare, she was wondering (hoping?) that Hugh Jackman's pants would disintegrate.

"I wonder why they didn't?" she said with some disappointment as we walked out of the theater into the parking lot. I added it to the long tally of letdowns for the evening.

Nicole is blowing up

Last year, I caught some of her U.S. Open matches on the outer courts (pics here, here, and here), even chatted with her after a mixed doubles win. That's not going to happen again.

Former Mariner top prospect Ryan Anderson, or the "Little Unit," is now in culinary school and wants to open a steak restaurant.

Drive-in Movies at the Rock (Rockefeller Center) return tonight through Friday evening. Tonight they're showing I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, followed by Air Guitar Nation tomorrow, Once In A Lifetime Thursday, and Kettle of Fish on Friday.

Faith Healer, and my Tony-nominated friend

One of the things I hope to recover when my desktop computer returns is my iCal calendar. I spent a good part of yesterday trying to recall big upcoming events in my life by looking over credit card receipts. To my surprise, I had two tickets to a matinee showing of Brian Friel's Faith Healer this afternoon. Who buys two tickets to a Wednesday matinee?

I spent a futile day trying to find someone to attend an afternoon matinee of serious theater with me, to no avail. Fortunately, a series of glowing reviews, and perhaps the presence of Ralph Fiennes as the lead, had attracted a huge audience this gorgeous afternoon day. I found a taker for my extra ticket in the cancellation queue, a man who handed over a tattered $100 bill with a furtive glance over both shoulders, a gesture that left me feeling like a drug dealer.

Faith Healer is not a conventional play. Rather, it is a series of four monologues or soliloquys. Frank Hardy (Fiennes) delivers the first and last, and in between we hear from Grace Hardy (Cherry Jones) and Teddy (Ian McDiarmid). They each tell stories about the same events, but their recollections differ in revealing ways.

Frank is an Irish faith healer, Grace his wife or mistress, depending on who you believe, and Ted is Frank's manager. They recall a time when they drifted about the Scottish and Welsh countryside staging "performances," as Frank refers to his healing performances.

Frank's healing ability comes and goes. He carries with him a press clipping about one of his triumphs, a time when he healed all ten people who came to him in a Welsh town. Those triumphs surprise even himself, and yet he is haunted by his failures. "I always knew when nothing was going to happen." Frank represents every artist who has prostrated himself at the foot of his Muse in desperation, anger, and incomprehension. For the most part, he paints his past in such grand and overly theatrical prose that one suspects him of artistic vanity and insecurity, but Fiennes manages to flash enough of his self-loathing at the audience to earn its pity.

Grace is both transfixed by Frank's gift and disgusted by his abusive treatment of her. She was a lawyer once but ran off with Frank, drawn to the his magnetism and the allure of the arts. Ted's soliloquy begins the second act and begins with a welcome comic embrace, what with Ian McDiarmid's Cockney accent and ghastly combover.

As the monologues unfold, a sense of dread creeps through the theater. Frank Hardy is a maelstrom into which Grace and Ted have been drawn, and that they are not on stage together augurs badly.

The acting is first-rate. Though I found myself yearning for a close-up shot of some of the actors during their intimate confessions, all three were skilled enough on the stage that their emotions registered with me in row L. Fiennes gives one of the best performances on Broadway by a silver screen star that I've seen in my time in NYC, and I've seen quite a few, and Cherry Jones gives a strong followup to her Tony-winning performance in Doubt. Ian McDiarmid proves that he was no fluke as the best actor in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith.

The play requires the viewer to pay close attention. At times my thoughts wandered into reverie, and I'd struggle to catch up with the narrative sudoku, trying to balance three competing recounts of various events. It's no simple task for my hyperlink-addicted mind to remain focused on a single storyteller for nearly 3 hours, nor was it a cinch for many of the middle-aged to older audience in attendance this night. At times, the play left me yearning to see the three actors on stage together interacting in a more dramatic situation.

And yet, to structure the play any other way would be to undermine one of the play's more haunting messages, and that is the loneliness of human existence. How could three people who cared so deeply for each other offer such varying accounts of events they were the only people to experience? As each of them twists and kneads their memories on stage, they come to seem like, each of them, a ghost, doomed to forever struggle to communicate to each other across scenes, but doomed to forever appear on stage alone. Only the audience hears all of their stories, and yet the task of weaving them together into a single coherent narrative is like trying to visually resolve an optical illusion.

The old woman next to me dozed in and out, occasionally waking with a start before drifting slowly off again. At the end of the play, she proclaimed grumpily, "I didn't understand that."

"I guess you had to be there," I said.

Happy footnote: Along with the regular Playbill, I was given a special Playbill focused on the 2006 Tonys. I'd already heard the good news from Peter, but seeing it in print was still a thrill. Klara had been nominated for a Tony in the category of Best Scenic Design of a Musical for her work on Jersey Boys. I'll be watching and rooting for her on TV on June 11.

From the Tony website:

Prior to Jersey Boys, Klara Zieglerova designed the set for the Broadway revival of Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner's The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. This is her first Tony nomination.

Cover up

A list of exceptional cover songs, complete with MP3 downloads of the originals and the covers, so you can judge for yourself.

If, like me, you love seafood, especially fish, you'll find this updated list of guilt-free fish a handy reference. All these types of seafood are low in contaminants and not overfished. Here's an accompanying article. Put your fork down, your hands up, and back away from the Chilean sea bass.

If you go to the Nacho Libre website and navigate to the Nacho Libre Confessional, you can watch video clips from the set, starring Jack Black. Some of the episode titles of this video podcast include "Prelude to a waxing" and "Montezuma's Revenge." Just seeing Jack Black in costume, with the mustache, acts as sort of a comedic colonic.

Samples of the 6 new Microsoft typefaces.

A super score returns

SoundtrackNet reviews the new Superman Returns soundtrack by John Ottoman and offers sample clips from each track. I don't have high expectations for the movie as a whole, but two aspects of it really excite me. One is that 20 minutes of the movie, mostly action sequences, will be shown in IMAX 3D. The other is hearing some of John Williams' classic Superman cues revived for the big screen.

Use Javascript to add sidenotes to your web page. Awesome. I'll have to implement this since I'm so parenthetical happy.

It's not always better to buy than rent. Chris offers this rule of thumb: For every $100 you spend in rent a month, you’d be better off buying up to $12,500 in property instead. Tim Harford discussed the rent vs. buy decision recently and noted that renting has many hidden benefits.

8 special edition new flavors of M&M's, all with cutesy puns for names like Eat, Drink, & Be Cherry or Orange-U-Glad. I'm a sucker for limited edition candies, but $49.99 for a tin?

The folks behind the book The Wages of Wins: Taking Measure of the Many Myths in Modern Sport apply their metrics to Michael Jordan and confirm the popular opinion: he was the best ever.

SOAP

The first, lo-fi trailer for Snakes on a Plane.

Greasemonkey script to encrypt your GMail using public key encryption.

Farecast is in beta. You tell it where you want to fly and when (U.S. only), and it tells you whether plane ticket prices are likely to rise, stay flat, or go down, giving you another data point in deciding when to buy. Right now, the only two cities from which you can check fares are Boston and Seattle, so it doesn't do me much good, but if you live in one of those two cities and want an invite to play with the beta, drop me a line. I still have a few of my 25 invites left.

Tinseltown tidbits

Teaser site for Spiderman 3 offers one swatch of desktop wallpaper and a screensaver for now.

Mark Burnett and Steven Spielberg team up to produce On the Lot, the American Idol for filmmakers. Winner to get a development deal with Dreamworks.

Vitamins and poison pills

Here are those snazzy opening titles from Thank You For Smoking.

***

Are vitamins really good for you? Well, I guess we can wait to see what happens to Ray Kurzweil. Most of the harmful effects of vitamins seem to arise in studies with high dosages. Should be interesting to see Barry Bonds and Kurzweil in about twenty years.

***

Once solely the domain of Corporate America, poison pills have come to the NFL. The Seahawks inserted a clause in their offer to Vikings receiver Nate Burleson that the contract would become guaranteed if he played five games in the state of Minnesota. So of course the Vikings did not match the offer, not that they would have even without the clause. I'd be surprised if these types of poison pills were allowed to stand. If you're allowed to make up random poison pills, then the entire concept of matching offer sheets is negated. You can make up anything to prevent a team from matching your offer.

***

Ryanair turns a profit by discounting plane tickets heavily and making up for that with fees for most every other flight amenity. It's difficult to ascertain exactly how the airlines turns its profit just from reading the article--it could be primarily a result of a low cost structure rather than gimmicky fees--but you can't argue with their results in a tough industry.

***

The most popular movie in South Korean history is King and the Clown, a movie inevitably compared to Brokeback Mountain for depicting a gay male relationship.

***

I would be remiss if I didn't record here that this was the first year that March Madness was streamed online, for free. This was a well-designed first effort, complete with a Boss Button, which would transform the streaming video window into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with one click.

***

The cost-of-living in NYC is so high, I don't feel quite as guilty as I otherwise would in using the local Barnes and Noble and Sephora as a personal library and medicine cabinet. I still do feel guilty, but on the other hand, there's something of the New York survivor spirit in the frugality of such tactics. I have no idea if those high-falutin moisturizers really reduce aging, shrink pores, and restore a youthful complexion, but $50 for an ounce is probably too high a price to find out with my hard-earned savings.

Yesterday I stopped in B&N to flip through John Dewan's The Fielding Bible, which I do have on order, though from Amazon.com. It attempts to bring defensive evaluations to another level by using data from Baseball Information Solutions.

Instead of just looking at statistics, Dewan and company used video of every batted ball the past several seasons and translated each into a vector composed of direction and velocity. Then they computed which of those balls should have have been turned into an out by a particular fielder. That provided each defensive player with an expected number of outs, and the main statistic in the book is how many plays each player made versus expectation, the plus/minus. The book includes some other statistics for each position to evaluate things such as fielding of bunts for corner infielders and throwing arm for outfielders (the only position not evaluated is catcher).

Some of the book's conclusions align with widely held assumptions. Ichiro is the best right fielder (though the trend is one of decline). Orlando Hudson is probably the best defensive 2B in the game. Manny Ramirez and Adam Dunn are atrocious in left. Torii Hunter is fantastic in CF.

Bill James contributes an entire chapter on Derek Jeter's defense, a much debated topic. After putting Jeter through several different defensive evaluation systems and watching video of Jeter's best and worst plays, James, a noted contrarian, concedes that Jeter's defense is indeed lousy (Adam Everett evaluates as the best shortstop three years running, and it isn't even close). Hey, Jeter counts among his ex-girlfriends Jessica Alba and Adriana Lima; please allow us this one grudging flaw in his game.

At any rate, it's a fun compilation of stats to pore over, the type of book to bring to a ballgame and use to incite heated debates between innings.

42

Lots of exciting finishes in March Madness this year, no doubt. Color me George Mason green and yellow. Just remember, Cinderella may wear a glass slipper, but you still should have her remove them at the door.

More on the Final Four: of the over 3 million entries in ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge, 4 people picked all four teams in the Final Four correctly. About 2/3 of entrants didn't pick a single one of the Final Four teams. I wonder how many of the 284 people who picked George Mason to win it all actually go to or went to the school.

Maybe 42 really is the answer to the secret of the universe?

The proper way to pour ketchup.

Everyone thanks those in our volunteer army who are fighting in Iraq, but if a draft were instituted, everyone would raise bloody hell. During times of peace, signing up for the military seems like a decent deal, but these days, the Army is missing its recruiting numbers despite lowering its standards and raising its cash bonuses. It's one of the ugly truths about the Iraq war: those who fight the war are the ones who don't have more attractive options. The issue is close to my heart because one of my editing class projects was Edet Beltzberg's upcoming documentary on army recruiting. Much of that footage was wrenching to watch.

Eric Haney, one of the founding members of Delta Force, gives a karate chop to the throat of the current Administration for the war on Iraq. I'm almost done reading Inside Delta Force, his account of the founding of Delta Force and his years in service. The book is in the news now because David Mamet used it as inspiration for his new TV show "The Unit" on CBS. The book isn't quite as thrilling as I thought it would be, mainly because Haney can't reveal a lot of classified methods and anecdotes. As for the TV show, I'm not so sure all the actors are cut out to deliver Mamet-ese. I enjoy his dialogue much like I enjoy a bloody chunk of prime grade beef, but in the hands of the wrong cook, even the finest cut of beef can be turned into lunch room salisbury steak. Haney's dismissal of the effectiveness of torture is a damning indictment of the abuses at Abu Ghraib from a different perspective--torture doesn't gain effective intelligence, Jack Bauer notwithstanding.

This might be the coolest bath toy you could buy for your toddler. I wonder if human fear of snakes is innate or arises from reading the Bible or watching movies like Anaconda, a movie which mostly developed my fear of Jon Voight in a ponytail.

Movies from Sundance always seem to be trickling into theaters. Brick was one of the consensus group favorites of our Sundance crew two years ago, though I thought the conceit of setting a film noir in high school lost its novelty appeal by film's end, giving way to a somewhat unsatisfying potboiler ending. Still, it's a gas to hear high school kids spewing hard-boiled dialogue, and what better place to transfer the stock characters of film noir than high school, a time in our lives when most of us were trying on personas in a massive game of social fencing. As compared to most multiplex fare, Brick is joltingly fresh. The movie won the Originality of Vision award at Sundance, and that was the appropriate honor to bestow on that movie.

Thank You For Smoking is the latest of this year's Sundance babies to hit the big screen. Like Brick, the movie sprints out of the blocks with gorgeous opening credits and loses breath by the finish. No one wears sleaze better than Aaron Eckhart, though, and the movie shares his charming cynicism. Until Nick Naylor (Eckhart) loses his nerve, the movie is a pleasant smartass. Rob Lowe and Adam Brody as a CAA agent and his assistant had industry insiders at Sundance crying with laughter. For those who want Eckhart neat, instead of on the rocks, try In the Company of Men, in which he played one of the more memorable characters many people have never heard of.

David Bordwell wants more from contemporary film criticism. More than just opinions or insights, he wants to learn approximately true things about film. Something tells me the two movie blurbs above probably don't meet his standard.

James sent me a link to this amazing single hand of poker between Phil Ivey and Paul Jackson. Whereas many players hide behind sunglasses, Ivey eschews them in favor of his cold, piercing gaze, against which sunglasses might be the only defense against going blind.

Fearless

Something about Chinese and Hong Kong action directors and actors gets lost in the translation to U.S. soil, like Americanized Chinese food. Jet Li is one such victim of the journey across the Pacific Ocean, and so, I would say, has Ronnie Yu (all apologies to fans of Freddy Vs. Jason, Bride of Chucky, and Formula 51, or maybe not).

Thankfully, both Li and Yu decided to make a pilgrimage home to kick it old school with Fearless (official movie site here, where you can find pics and trailers). Yuen Woo Ping choreographs the fight sequences and Jet Li performs them; they are the Balanchine-Farrell of martial arts, and that's certainly the main reason to seek this movie out. Think of it as a chaser after several years of Jet Li's awful U.S. films. In Fearless, Li represents Chinese martial arts and puts it to the test against a variety of styles, from the Thai boxing of Olympic champ Somluck Kamsing to the brute force of 7-foot tall Australian wrestler Nathan Jones (last seen in the disappointing Tom Yum Goong getting tenderized by Tony Jaa).

The story, for what is essentially an action flick, is not terrible. The story is "inspired by" the life of Huo Yuan Jia, founder of the Jing Wu Sports Federation in China. Li plays Yuan Jia as a young, arrogant, and peerless fighter who later finds inner peace after a deep personal tragedy. He returns from a self-imposed exile to become a Chinese hero when he takes on top fighters from around the world to defend his nation's pride. There are bits and pieces of recognizable story arcs from The Last Samurai, Bloodsport, even Top Gun. This movie takes as many liberties with Yuan Jia's life as Hollywood movies take in its biopics, and Yuan Jia's grandson sued the filmmakers for taking such liberties, but I'm not sure how he's going to win that case. If he doesn't, perhaps he can at least convince the filmmakers to cut out a needlessly sentimental ending that reminded me of the end of Gladiator (I'm referring not to the fight scene but to the ghost spirit or whatever that was in the meadow).

Li's fighting style is usually that of impeccable form, but this time Yuen Woo Ping adds some welcome physical force to embody a young Yuan Jia's ruthless ambition. Yu perhaps overuses the slow-motion-segue-into-high-speed-shot technique to fetishize some of Li's highlight-reel strikes, but martial arts fans will be whooping and hollering. Fearless has a high density of fight sequences, my favorite being a night-time sword and fist fight inside a restaurant. The cinematography is first-rate, with that signature super-saturated, red and orange color palette that's so often used to evoke turn-of-the-century China. It has a warm, nostalgic feel.

Somebody's gonna get a hurt real bad.

If you have a region-free DVD player, and most bleeding heart international cinephiles probably do, you can check out Fearless on Region 3 DVD. One additional, and for many, deal-breaking caveat: since the movie hasn't been released in any English speaking countries yet, this DVD does NOT have English subtitles. This is where the story's simplicity helps. Any seasoned moviegoer, even without subtitles, can likely decipher the story's main plot points and structure, and the fight scenes are self-explanatory. If you really want appreciate the nuances of the story, you can invite your closest Mandarin or Cantonese-speaking friend over to watch with you.

And if you dig Fearless, you can rent unofficial sequels Fist of Fury and/or the remake, Fist of Legend. Both follow the Jing Wu Men school after Yuan Jia's death, rumored to be the result of poisoning by a Japanese doctor. Fist of Fury is sometimes called The Chinese Connection and is not to be confused with Fists of Fury, an earlier Bruce Lee movie [1]. It's all rather confusing--just sort it out on IMDb. Fist of Fury, or The Chinese Connection, has Bruce Lee seeking revenge for the poisoning of his teacher, Huo Yuan Jia. Fist of Legend is a remake starring Jet Li, featuring a final fight sequence that many consider to be Jet Li's finest. Yep, it's all choreographed by Yuen Woo Ping. Now that Jet Li has played Huo Yuan Jia, he can be seen in Fist of Legend to be avenging his own murder.

Fist of Legend is available on DVD in the U.S. from Dimension, but it's an awful dub into English, and I can't recommend it. Track down an overseas DVD copy with the original soundtrack.

[1] Fists of Fury is one of the first martial arts movies I remember seeing, one of those dark Chinese revenge stories featuring Bruce Lee taking down The Big Boss. The details are fuzzy to me, but I recall a fair amount of sex and bloody murders, a washed-out cinematography. It has a rawness, a pulpy grimness that has helped it to stick in my mind through the years. There are many editions on DVD; it's worth doing some research to find the most uncut version.

Money

Out of 5, which was out of bandwidth, is out of hibernation...money.

As always, while Hollywood studios hem and haw and dip thier toes in the HD-DVD pool, their less timid counterparts in the video industry have already dived in, sans swimwear.

Chef sleeps with the fishes. I really expect that sometime in the next few years, Trey Parker and Matt Stone will die within a few hours of each other, under mysterious circumstances. At that same moment, Tom Cruise and/or Mel Gibson will be at their child's baptism.

61 Chinese children were adopted by Americans in 1991. By last year, that number had grown to 7,906.

I was hoping for something like the BMWFilms, but the Pirelli Film "The Call"? Eh, not so much.

Download four MP3s from new It band Band of Horses.

Deep Note

These past few months, I've been staring at a computer screen for so many hours that my vision is starting to go. I find myself wearing my glasses more and more often, and though they are so mild as to be almost cosmetic, it still feels like a defeat. The default font size in Final Cut Pro is tiny, but thus far, I've refused to give in and blow it up. A few times during the day, I go and stare out the window and try to focus on something far off in the distance. Inevitably, my visual target remains blurry, much the way some childhood memories become with each passing year.

***

I try to refrain from political ranting here, but it does amaze me how much our Prez seems to get away with. Even when he's caught in bald-faced lies, even when he's wiretapping us, even when the iconic image of the Iraq war the world over is of a prisoner being tortured, the next day it always seems to be back to normal (V for Vendetta, which I saw last Thursday night at the Lincoln Square IMAX, is more than a bit absurd, but that any of it even has any resonance with the current administration is outrageous). Perhaps there's some sort of political equilibrium point, such that a constant onslaught of negative news tends to diminish each in significance, the way that most people in the world rate themselves as roughly equal in happiness, despite the wide disparity in living conditions.

Well, "incompetent" is at least a start.

***

An alcohol concentration of 60% or higher seems to be the magic number for off-the-shelf hand sanitizers.

***

I know kung fu. Not quite. But sort of.

***

Wake-up calls from Maria Sharapova? Did anyone else try these or was I the only doofus? This supplied some of the motivation I needed on my voyage back from graveyard shift hours to normal hours. Unfortunately these seem to have been discontinued.

***

Tonight I went to the premiere of Lucky Number Slevin at the Ziegfeld Theater. I hadn't seen a movie at the Ziegfeld before; it's gorgeous. The screen isn't as massive as that of Cinerama, but the seats and interior are much more cozy and plush, with a classy old school styling, and the sound system is first rate. Definitely the nicest theater I've visited in NYC, though the Lincoln Square IMAX is impressive as well, more for its technical specifications.

Back to the movie. I saw it at Sundance in January, but what I'd forgotten is that the soundtrack is by J. Ralph, his first effort for the silver screen. He's most well-known from his song "One Million Miles Away," featured in the famous Volkswagen Jetta commercial "Big Day" (Quicktime). You can hear "One Million Miles Away" and other J. Ralph tunes at his website (which allows you to stream most of his tunes) or on his MySpace page (which only streams four of his songs).

His Lucky Number Slevin soundtrack is ear-catching. For some reason, he appears to have something against Amazon.com as the soundtrack is an exclusive to Barnes and Noble. It releases next Tuesday.

As I was seated and waiting for the movie to start, my phone rang. I thought it was Scott, who'd promised to call when he'd made it into the theater, so I immediately picked up and said, "I'm in row F, seat 12."

"Um, I'm looking for Eugene Wei?"

"Yep, I'm in row F, seat 12, I just stood up. You see me waving?"

"Uh, no. Actually, I'm calling from ___, and I wanted to chat with you about your application. I'm a professor there."

"Oh. Oops. Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry."

We went on to have an over-the-phone interview in the theater, while throngs of people milled about socializing and looking for their seats. Thankfully these things never start on time, and everyone was absorbed with scanning the theater for any of the many stars in the movie. My mind was racing and the environment was distracting. Maybe I should have postponed the call. Too late now; I'll be second-guessing myself for a few weeks.

He seemed like a really friendly guy. His specialty was sound, and he'd done lots of work for THX. I told him my favorite THX trailer, other than the original Deep Note (WMV), was the one featuring The Simpsons, the one that ends with Grampa Simpson standing up and shouting, "Turn it up! Turn it up!". I've never been able to find that on DVD, though he said it was out there somewhere. The THX Deep Note is one of my ten favorite sounds in the world. When I hear it, I just stand up and raise my arms in joy, always embarrassing for whoever is with me at the movie theater.

Someday, at the symphony, I'd love it if the orchestra, just before beginning the concert, all joined in to play the THX Deep Note, maybe before playing something like Shostakovich's 5th.

Snakes on a Plane

Finally, some footage from one of the most anticipated movies of the year, Snakes on a Plane. On that same movie clip page, you can submit a song, and if you win the audience vote, your music will be featured in the movie.

All this hubbub over a title and a premise. Well, that, and the presence of one Samuel L. Jackson. The movie was still in pre-production and had already been anointed a certain cult classic. If the movie opens strong, Hollywood will be hard-pressed to resist trying to catch lightning in a bottle, which should lead to some creative movie titles and marketing campaigns in the future. Laugh all you want, but the buzz is real, and it cost little to generate.

The commercial and the not-so-commercial

Antoine Fuqua directs John Malkovich as the Vatican's most powerful exorcist and Naomi Campbell as a dangerous and seductive demon in "The Call", a Pirellifilm, i.e., a high concept commercial for expensive automobile tires. Releases online next Thursday. At the prices Hollywood talent commands, I can't imagine the payback on these Anonymous Content online ad-movies pay back, but I did enjoy their BMW Films so I won't complain. Pirelli concept marketing (if it's deserving of that modifier) is like high-end beer advertising. With their calendars for VIP customers only, and now with their movies, they aim to have the world associate their tires with gorgeous, nude supermodels. I for one, will not question the effectiveness of that tactic.

Then there is Ye Yan, or The Banquet, a loose Chinese adaptation of Hamlet with some martial arts mixed in. When I first heard of the concept, I laughingly suggested Zhang Ziyi as one badass Ophelia. Then the IMDb page went up, and it turns out Zhang Ziyi is in the movie. She plays the Emperess, who I presume to be Gertrude, Hamlet's mother, though that can't be right because Zhang Ziyi still looks like she's 18, albeit someone you're really really thankful is 18. The key word in "loose adaptation" is probably "loose", so a close reading is probably overkill.

Here's a brief Windows Media clip of behind-the-scenes footage, shown at the Berlin Film Fesitval. The quality is such that I suspect it's a bootleg of a bootleg of a bootleg. More info and photos and movie clips are up at this unofficial Banquet movie page. Footage from a recent press conference is here (the page is in Mandarin, but the movie clip links are the four in the box at the top of the page).

Among my dream jobs would be to be Zhang Ziyi's English tutor, while she would reciprocate as my Mandarin teacher; her Chinese is just that good. Occasionally I'd butcher a pronunciation and she'd giggle. Occasionally she'd butcher an English word and I'd chuckle, and then she'd deliver a roundhouse kick to my face.

[Tangent: Listening to both Sarah Silverman and Jon Stewart butcher Zhang Ziyi's name at the Independent Spirit Awards and the Oscars was disheartening. They don't have to get the tones right, but they weren't even in the same province. By the way, I refuse to change the ordering of her name to the Americanized Ziyi Zhang.]

Finally, on this completely random journey through upcoming movies, we come to Drawing Restraint 9, the new film by Matthew Barney with music by his wife Björk. A viewing of the trailer suggests this is the real prize for connoisseurs of the avant-garde.

Drawing Restraint 9 trailer (Quicktime)
Drawing Restraint 9 soundtrack by Bjork
Drawing Restraint 9 official website (still just a Coming Soon sign)

The last movie I saw by Matthew Barney was at Sundance earlier this year. Barney's segment was one of the seven shorts to make up Destricted, an art film about pornography. Art Forum chose it as the best film of 2005, so I had high hopes for a movie that might be both provocative and sexy, especially considering that among the other six directors were Larry Clark, Gaspar Noé, and Sam Taylor Wood.

Well, the movie checked off the box next to provocative. This is where I enter spoiler mode, but it's one time I feel the

Matthew Barney's short, "Hoist," actually one portion of another movie titled De Lama Lmina, features copulation between nature, represented by a naked man, and technology, represented by a massive Caterpillar truck. Why do I say nature? Because the man had a turnip growing out of his a$$ and flowers coming out of his mouth. A high-def camera inserted up into the underbelly of the truck captures the footage of the man pressing his, uh, member up against the truck's lubricated and rotating driveshaft (What is the etymology behind using member to refer to a penis, anyway? Has William Safire already written a column on this?).

This contact between member and driveshaft turns out to please nature man, and things, uh, come to a head, so to speak (apologies in advance for all the childish euphemisms, but I am fearful of what Google's Adsense will pick up on). This is one time I would've been more than happy to lose the added resolution of high-definition video. 15 minutes into Destricted, and already I was covering my eyes and whimpering. The unease of the theater rose as, with every short, the audience realized that these directors aimed to deconstruct pornography, to skewer its mechanical, dehumanizing quality, and to do so without mercy. We had been lured into our seats with candy and lace, only to have a maniacal doctor enter the room and close the doors behind him as he turned on an electrical saw.

Larry Clark's segment, "Impaled," turned out to be the most diverting of the segments. He put out an casting call for a young male to perform in a filmed sex scene with a real porn star, and then he filmed both the casting call interviews and the resulting winner's big fantasy day. Like Dancing with the Stars, but without the stars and without the dancing, or American Idol, with Larry Clark as Simon, Randy, and Paula. The interviews reveal how much these young boys' minds, relationship skills, and ideas on sex have been warped by watching one porno too many.

Sam Taylor Wood's segment, "Death Valley", features a guy strolling alone through the desert of Death Valley, alone. He stops, drops his jeans, and proceeds to have sex with someone he loves, as Woody Allen once put it. For nearly 8 minutes. By the end of the movie, the theater, so restless and uncomfortable you could feel everyone shriveling in their parkas, took to clapping in unison to the guy's own, umm, beat. Please, please, please, the theater urged, just finish your business.

Gaspar Noé's segment, "We f--- alone," is the last one in the movie, and it is like one last thrashing, the cinematic equivalent of that fatality in Mortal Kombat where Sub Zero rips off his opponent's head and pulls out his spine. The entire segment is shot with a lurid red light, but even worse, it's shot with a strobe. It plays for 23 minutes. 23 minutes of strobing red light. 23 of the longest minutes of my life. For nearly all of it, a young man on screen has sex with himself and an inflatable doll. He puts a gun in the dolls mouth, at one point. There was a teddy bear involved at one point, but I don't remember how; I've probably repressed that memory as any trauma patient would. I'm not so sure I wouldn't have been relieved if the strobe had put me into a seizure before the movie's end. At least then I could have saved myself from some of that 23 minutes of torture. When the movie finally ended, I staggered out into the cold night air, feeling as if I had been that inflatable doll in that last segment. Noé, no doubt, would have been pleased, perhaps even gleeful, to see the wrecked audience members walking in circles, drooling in delirium.

Take the darkest, most unsparing after-school special, then put it on the steroid regimen that Barry Bonds was on for about six years, and then arm it with a chainsaw. That's Destricted. The movie is effective, without a doubt, but so is Jack Bauer when he really needs to get info out of a witness, and who wants to be tied up in the chair when Jack brings out the electric nipple clamps? The next morning, when my condo mates came to wake me, I was clawing at my eyes, muttering, "Make it stop, make it stop." Having summoned those images back into my conscious mind, I'm now going to go cleanse my palate by looking at that picture of Zhang Ziyi up above for about half an hour.

I look forward to the recommendations on Amazon.com or IMDb for Destricted:

If you liked this title, we also recommend...

• Salo
• Caligula (Unrated Version)
• Self-flagellation

Tree Hugger

Sony Playstation 3 to launch in November, 2006...this and more news from the PS3 conference. Blu-ray DVD playback, HDMI output, 60GB HDD, full backwards compatibility. No price announced, though.

Set up your Netflix account to default to HD-DVDs. Not sure why they haven't distinguished between HD and Blu-ray, since those are incompatible formats. Not a whole lot of titles on the docket, but you can sign up to be notified when the initial titles release at Amazon's HD DVD store or its Blu-ray DVD store.

Keepvid.com, for preserving those treasured videos from sites like Google Video, YouTube, Vimeo, and others of that ilk.

My sister had to mock up a fake videogame box cover for a class project. Her game was a satire of first person shooters, an eco-terrorism game called Tree Hugger. Yep, that guy who just tossed his empty soda can on the sidewalk is about to be lined up in the crosshairs. Severe? Perhaps. Similar policies in Singapore seem effective. I was taken aback mostly because this is my little sister we're talking about. Yes, we are one crazy family. You can click on the image for a larger view.

You might not be the only one betting on college basketball this week.

Tutorial on simulating tilt-shift photography using Photoshop. So much fun!

Deleted scenes from Star Wars

I hesitate to link to this because it feels like I'd just be speeding its demise, but for all I know these aren't that new anyhow: deleted scenes from Star Wars (Episode IV). Probably of interest only to the hardcore fans, as some of this is just behind the scenes footage.

Based on Gross National Product per capita, what is the 77th richest country in the world, wealthier than India, China, and Bulgaria? EverQuest.

Microsoft's Origami revealed, with a less friendly name of Ultra-Mobile PC. I'd like to see someone wear this on their belt like a cell phone. That is sure to impress the ladies.

The Elements of Typographic Style Applied to the Web.

On the new revelations surrounding Barry Bonds steroid use, which most people suspected since his physical transformation into a human Bobblehead, the claim that most saddens me is that Bonds started juicing to grab the spotlight back from McGwire and Sosa. It's as if the movie Amadeus had been reversed, and Mozart was the one fuming over Salieri. I feel sorry for Bonds, in a way. For such a gifted player, he's always seemed so bitter and angry, arrogant yet insecure. Well, once the book hits the street, it should serve as a truth serum one way or another. Lance Armstrong always sued anyone who made public accusations that he doped. Despite Bonds's alimony payments, I think he could afford to take legal action if the book made false accusations. Meanwhile, I don't know Bud Selig, but I can't help picturing him with a copy of the book on his desk, a blank and shellshocked look on his face, just like President Logan on 24. He'd turn to his Mike Novick equivalent and plead, "Mike, tell me what to do."

Feeling the blahs

The night before the Oscars, I became light-headed, then feverish. During the night, I alternated between feeling like my body was about to burst into flames, and then shivering under every blanket in my apartment. By the time I finally fell asleep, the sun had been up for hours. In about 9 hours, folks were coming over for the Oscars, and if the phone hadn't been so far from my bed I think I would've called it off. I had visions of myself at my Oscars party, suddenly passing out and crashing through a glass coffee table, and then the screen would go dark and cut to the opening credits of House, with the cool theme music by Massive Attack.

Sometime during the night, my radiators stopped working, for no apparent reason. It was about 30 degrees outside when they stopped, and it was about 30 degrees inside my apartment by the time I dozed off.

It felt as if the door buzzer rang the instant I slipped into slumber. It was the FreshDirect delivery guy, dropping off all the groceries I'd ordered to use in preparing my Oscar spread. After putting all the stuff in the fridge, I tried to slip back into bed for one more hour of sleep, but it was done. Once my body sees sunshine, it's tough to force into sleep mode.

Usually, I try to prep food related to the best picture noms, but this year had me stumped. Should I pass out packs of Camels so we could all smoke through the night like Edward Murrow? Pop pills like Johnny Cash? No, that would fail to distinguish this night from any other night out clubbing in NYC. The only food that came to mind were the canned beans from Brokeback Mountain, so I settled on a main of Chicken and White Bean Chili. For this recipe, I had to char eight Anaheim chilies. I'd never even heard of this type of chili before, but fortunately Whole Foods had exactly ten of them left on Saturday afternoon.

While charring half the chilies on my gas stove and the other half in the broiler, my smoke alarm went off. As old as that sucker looks, it puts out an earsplitting, panic-inducing noise, like a robot screaming in agony. I was certain I'd woken up everyone in the entire building, and everyone on my block for that matter. I ran to my windows, but they were sealed for the winter so I couldn't pry them open quickly. I brought my air filter into the kitchen and turned it on high. All to no avail. Finally, looking at that smoke alarm, which, by the way, I couldn't reach because it was fourteen feet off the ground, I saw that it was hard wired into the wall. So I flipped all my circuit breakers, and it the smoke alarm went silent.

It was now that I recalled that the super had once told me I probably shouldn't use the broiler. Now I knew why. I stood there reveling in the silence, then went back to charring the chilies, in total darkness.

On to the Oscars, the show everyone complains about and yet still watches. With everyone bashing the Oscars, I feel sheepish admitting I look forward to the Oscars every year, though some of it has to do with the fact that there's always an Oscar pool on the line. It's the same reason March Madness is so popular. In fact, if no one gambled on March Madness, I wouldn't be surprised it lost over half of its appeal.

I don't know about that billion viewer claim for the Oscars. Who came up with that figure, and how? Even if everyone in the United States watched, and these are folks in the right time zones, that still leaves some three quarters of a billion viewers to backfill. And this year, the number of U.S. viewers looks to have been roughly 39 million. Maybe that billion is not the figure for people watching live.

The red carpet interviews, I concede, are dull. While laying out food, I stopped to listen to one or two of Isaac Mizrahi's interviews on the red carpet. He was so amusing in Unzipped, but he's a terrible red carpet interviewer. He loves the sound of his own voice too much and always seems locked in a battle for attention with his interviewee.

This year's production was one of the shortest I can recall, clocking it at just under three hours and a half, and yet it felt sluggish. Jon Stewart came out nervous in the opening monologue, a few jokes failed to kill, and awkward silence seemed to grab a chokehold. I enjoy Stewart, but this crowd, a subdued one, is vastly different than the fratboy audience on The Daily Show, the one which whoops and hollers every time the Applause sign lights up. On The Daily Show, Stewart can simply show a clip of Bush speaking, then wait while laughter pours in. His material was solid, but the audience's tepid reaction to much of it dampened his mojo and the show's momentum.

The Oscar crowd likes to drive in the center lane, which is why Billy Crystal is such a popular and successful host. You can take your jabs at the arm, but don't leave a bruise, and take too many shots at the folks in the crowd and they will stop laughing with you. The type of humor that works well at the Oscars is not the brand that is Chris Rock or Jon Stewart specialty. The Bjork-Dick Cheney joke was just right. It was political, but only tangentially, and poked fun at the entertainment industry, but only their clothing. Contrast that with, say, the joke about pulling down the giant Oscars statue so democracy could bloom in Hollywood. Or the joke about Scientology, which probably didn't get laughs from John Travolta and company. Johnny Carson was the prototype for the perfect Oscar host, but I can't think of anyone like him out there today.

Stewart's comic timing did hurt himself with a slightly mis-tuned comic timing. When a joke failed to hit, he'd fill in the silence with a follow-on comment, reaching for the bounceback laugh. "I'm a loser," he offered at one point, but the audience didn't bite. At least he tried. David Letterman got panned for his hosting effort, and he's no worse for the wear. Stewart will be fine, and he'll be able to mine his hosting gig for some laughs when he returns to the Daily Show Wednesday. They don't make comedians check all their sharp objects at the door on that show.

My nomination for the perfect host to restore some energy into the Oscars remains Jim Carrey. If they'd just unleash him, he'd be Billy Crystal but with a chance of broadening the appeal of the show to include some younger viewers.

Other thoughts during the evening, tape-delayed by a night so you can TiVo-scroll through all the bad bits I'm going to blame on my illness:

• The opening pre-recorded montage, with intros of past Oscar hosts, had a few duds. The bits with Steve Martin's kids weren't that funny, but the Mel Gibson bit from the set of Apocalypto almost rescued it. Mel may be crazy, but at least he hasn't lost his sense of humor.
• Half of the Oscars production lives and dies with the cutaway shots. When Stewart made a crack about piracy and how many actresses could barely afford enough dress to cover their breasts, the show immediately cut to a pregnant Rachel Weisz. Probably a coincidence, but I was taken aback. Very un-Oscar-like.
• On the other hand, the cutaways to Clooney were priceless. Gil Cates likely had a camera trained on Clooney the entire night, a wise move on his part. With picture in picture technology, shouldn't all viewers have the choice of having one of several stars always open in a subwindow on the television screen? Where was the shot of George Clooney when Three 6 Mafia gave him thanks? Where were the cutaways during their performance of "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp"? There's one person who must enjoy the Oscars every year, and that's the person who sits in a studio and sees the feed from every camera in the theatre. That guy's got some good stories.
• Three 6 Mafia - terrific acceptance speech, which began with them walking to the wrong microphone on stage. That was an undeniably catchy tune. The scene in Hustle & Flow, when that song finally comes together, had me grinning, and, along with "Wings" from Brokeback Mountain, "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" was the most memorable musical number from the year in movies. I wish I had a handle like "Juicy J" or "Crunchy Black." Three 6 gave props to everyone, even Gil Cates. Speaking of which, I want to give a shout out to Clooney here. George baby, you're the daddy. Let's work together, baby.
• Another group that looked like they were having a good time were the four crazy French dudes accepting the Oscar for March of the Penguins. The stuffed penguins they were holding were dressed better than they were; something tells me those guys will be paying some damage fees on those rental tuxes. Two of them weren't wearing bowties, and another's bowtie had gone vertical by the time he spoke. They sounded like they'd had a few bottles of vino prior to arriving. Leave it to the French to know how to live.
• One reason the Oscars always fall short of expectations are the dull thank-you lists that are most acceptance speeches. It always feels a bit political and insidery to thank producers, studios, publicists, and so on and so forth. Not all thank yous are dull, but the bar needs to be higher. A good example was Robert Altman. He noted that he couldn't possibly thank everyone he'd worked with, so he thanked only his doctor, Jodie Kaplan. That woman might be keeping him alive. She meets the bar.
• Robert Altman had a full heart transplant?!? What the hell? How does one keep that under wraps? Amazing. Sadly, the first movie that leaped into my head when he revealed his secret was Untamed Heart. I felt bad for Altman because he'd never won an Oscar for himself prior to this, but people are mistaken when they disparate the Academy Honorary Award as a consolation prize. The Academy may get it wrong in one year on any one award, but it's tough to be wrong when you're honoring someone with a lifetime achievement award. How many people in the audience last night could even hope to win one someday? Nicholson. Maybe Streep. Possibly Spielberg.
• At first, I thought, "How rude, they're playing music and the winner hasn't even begun his/her speech!" Then it became clear that they were playing music to accompany every speech. Not a good idea, and sure to go the way of the "awards presentations in the audience for lesser categories" from last year's broadcast.
• If you hadn't seen Crash and just watched the interpretive dance segment occurring behind Kathleen "Bird" York during the singing of "In the Deep," you'd think Crash was a zombie movie.
• It must be satisfying to win the loudest round of applause during the In Memoriam segment. Someone like Jack Nicholson must sleep well just knowing that someday, when he finally knocks off, he'll be the last one shown in that segment, to rapturous applause.
• When Dolly Parton came on stage to sing "Travelin' Thru", I thought she was introducing The Corpse Bride. It's a cruel industry that won't let its ladies age gracefully. She's 60 for goodness sakes.
• Lots of fake bakes in Hollywood. I can't say I'm a fan of the bronzed look. Some of the women, if they'd been naked and bald, would've resembled life size Oscar statues.
• Not Jennifer Garner, though. She nearly did a face plant, but give her a break, she must still be adjusting to the cantilevering forces brought into play by her post-pregnancy figure.
• All the next-day outfit analysis seems to have scared actors out of taking any sartorial risks, which is too bad. These people are gorgeous and wealthy and successful. At least let us believe, if just for a night, that they might make an occasional fashion misstep like the rest of us. The one time she attended, Bjork was adorable when she was describing in an interview how a friend of hers had made that swan dress. Now we may never have such moments again, and that's a loss for all of us. That said, after Reese won for best actress, it would have been marvelous if Charlize Theron had untied that bow on her dress last night to reveal a hawk. Then Charlize could've whistled, signaling the hawk to fly to the stage to claw Reese on the face and fly off with her statue. No one would be saying anything about Charlize's dress today if she'd done that.
• One fun way to liven your group during an Oscars episode is to compete to shout out the names of all the movies referenced in the Oscar montages as they flash on screen. If you were able to name all the westerns and film noirs, well then you're a true movie buff. Or just old. Or probably both.
• Jack Nicholson can read from the teleprompter and it's still entertaining. Maybe he could just come out as the presenter of every award, each time with a different partner.
• Paul Haggis once was known as the creator of Walker, Texas Ranger. Now he'll be introduced as writer of one best picture winner, director of another. Now that's a Cinderella man.

So Crash won best picture. I discussed my feelings on the movie last year. The movie has an emotional power in many of its vignettes, and some of the cuts are quite clever, but intellectually the movie felt so facile on the issue of racism that it failed to achieve a best picture type of transcendence in my mind. A movie about racism should draw blood, but Crash felt more like a comforting massage, an anti-racism message that had been spiked with sugar to to go down smoothly rather than to stick in the throat the way a breakthrough social message movie might. Perhaps it's a geographic issue. L.A.'s unique geographical layout and racial history may be adding a layer of local resonance that those of us who've never lived there can't appreciate.

Brokeback Mountain, my pick for best picture among the five nominees, manages to seize your heart without tearing open your chest to massage it by hand. It works at you from the inside out, and by movie's end you understand why Heath Ledger chokes the life out of every word, because his story isn't "that gay cowboy" story. No, as it turns out, we'd heard this tale before.

There's a brief cutaway during Brokeback Mountain. Those who've seen the movie will know which one I refer to, and so I can discuss it relatively spoiler-free. Still, skip the next stretch if you haven't seen the movie and haven't read the short story.

The cutaway in the movie leaves much up to the audience's mind. Did what happened in the cutaway truly happen? Is it a cutaway to a Ennis's imagination, or is it the work of an omniscient narrator, so to speak? I checked back in the short story by Annie Proulx to see how she handled it.

In the short story, Ennis hears the news from Lureen. She tells the story of how it happened. But Ennis disagrees.

"No, he [Ennis] thought, they got him with the tire iron."

Later, when Ennis is speaking to Jack's parents, Jack's father says to Ennis, "He had some half-baked idea the two a you was goin a move up here, build a log cabin, and help me run this ranch and bring it up. Then this spring he's got anaother one's goin a come up here with him and build a place and help run the ranch, some ranch neighbor a his from down in Texas. He's going a split up with his wife and come back here. So he says. But like most a Jack's ideas it never come to pass."

The next line refers to Ennis's thoughts: "So now he knew it had been the tire iron."

So I suspect the movie cutaway is meant to reflect Ennis's belief as to how it went down, as in the short story. We don't ever know the truth, and by that point in the movie it doesn't matter, because one way or another, they'd already broken both Ennis and Jack.

The movie that most moved me last year, however, was not nominated for any Oscars. It wasn't even made for theaters originally, but for TV, which may have disqualified it from the Best Foreign Film category. The movie is La Meglio gioventù, or The Best of Youth. The miniseries aired in four episodes in Italy, and in the U.S. it is split into two DVDs of three hours a piece. Everyone will mention the length of this movie when recommending it to you, but for good reason. We balk at the thought of sitting through six hours of any form of entertainment. But at the end of The Best of Youth, I felt the sorrow one feels after turning the final page on a long but beloved novel. If NBC's coverage of the city of Turin and Italy itself during this year's Winter Olympics left you dissatisfied, and even if it didn't, please do devote six hours of your life to The Best of Youth.

I leave this year's Oscars with this question: Is it really hard out there for a pimp? This sounds like a job for Steven Levitt.

And the winner is...

...Wendy, for best performance in my Oscar pool. Out of 21 major categories, she missed only 3, nailing all 8 major categories and one of the three short categories, scoring 37 in my modified scoring system, which assigns 2 pts per feature length film category and 1 pt each for the three shorts categories. A dominating performance. She e-mailed me just the day before to note that she always won her Oscar pool, and then her entry was the last to show up in my pool and the last one standing. She was like Babe Ruth pointing out to center field before the home run. Please step up here and post your acceptance speech, Wendy. Unlike the Academy, we won't put a time limit on you, nor will we play distracting music while you type. We want to learn your secrets.

Of the folks who attached an entry fee to their ballots, though, yours truly eeked out a win by 2 pts over Eleanor, 30 - 28. I thought about sending you the moolah, Wendy, but as you know, it's hard out here for a pimp.

And the losers are...

The annual Razzies were announced, and the big winner, as it were, was the Jenny McCarthy flick Dirty Love. Ironically, it screened at Sundance in January 2005, which just goes to show...umm...hey! Look at her chest!

TGIF Movie Quiz Part 2

Here's the second half of the movies quiz posted last Friday (thanks to FreshArrival for the link). This one's easier than the other one, which everyone seemed to top out on at 26/30, though part 2 has one that has me totally stumped.

Here are some answers for last weeks' puzzles' most common stumpers (in white ink, so run your cursor over the titles to find out what they are, though if you're still working on last week's puzzle then you shouldn't read on).

#4 was The Legend of 1900. Tough one unless you're familiar with the oeuvre of Tim Roth, or unless you were such a huge fan of Cinema Paradiso that you sought out Giusepe Tornatore's other work. #9 was Zatoichi. Yes, Takeshi Kitano has just gone medieval on that guy in the photo. It's a bizarre remake with Kitano's take on the famous blind swordsman. Not surprisingly, his rendition is cruel and violent, with buckets of CGI blood spraying across the screen. Still, it has its moments, including moments of random choreography between actor movements and the soundtrack, like when some farmers swing hoes into the ground in a mesmerizing rhythm.

Most everyone seemed to know #18, which is a pleasant surprise. Who knew Cube had such a big following? Maybe they were hooked by the opening clip. Ouch.

#23 is Charlie's Angels, and #24 is Equilibrium. I saw the latter on a bootleg DVD from China. It's an unoriginal sci-fi flick with kung-fu, a la The Matrix. You can almost write the voiceover for this movie's trailer: "In a world without feeling, without art....one man...will rise up...and restore hope to mankind." The one creative bit was that the hero, played by Christian Bale, has these handgun cartridge reloaders built into his sleeves, perhaps an homage to Travis Bickle. To reload, he just releases the old cartridge, twirls his handguns so they face the ground, and a new cartridge ejects from his sleeve into the guns.

In the scene pictured, Christian Bale has just been apprehended by a police squad. He proceeds to go Neo on them, neutralizing them in a perfunctory ballet of guns and martial arts with all the stoicism and efficiency of a top cuber restoring Rubik to its state of order.

Oscar picks

Though some categories are locks, picking the winners this year seems much tougher than last year. It's not too late for you to enter my Oscar pool, if just for fun, and those of you who have already now know my picks.

You can find the full list of nominees here.

Best picture: Brokeback Mountain

Best director: Ang Lee

Best actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman

Many have tabbed Heath Ledger as the likely runner-up, but I suspect Joaquin Phoenix is likelier to upset. Voters will want to see Ledger do it again, to put more distance between new gay cowboy Heath and old 10 Things I Hate About You Heath.

Best actress: Reese Witherspoon

It ain't me babe. Oh, wait, it is!

Best supporting actress: Rachel Weisz

Amy Adams performance is the one I remember, but hardly anyone saw Junebug. Their loss.

Best supporting actor: George Clooney

Tough category to pick with Paul Giamatti, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Matt Dillon all with equally vocal supporters. I'm just as curious as everyone else, though I'm going with George because everybody loves George. Except David Russell.

Best animated film: Wallace & Gromit: Curse of the Were-Rabbit

I missed Howl's Moving Castle while it was in theaters, and based on box office figures so did many other people. Nick Park has a perfect Academy Awards record. Though I love claymation and Wallace & Gromit, Curse of the Were-Rabbit didn't leave me giddy. Much of the humor felt flat to me, and I preferred Corpse Bride. I doubt enough voters felt the same way. In a larger pool, I'd probably go with Corpse Bride just as a contrarian bet.

Best foreign film: Sophie Scholl - The Last Days

Didn't see any of these. Doesn't seem like anyone is talking about Joyeux Noel or La Bestia nel cuore (Don't Tell). Sophie Scholl - The Last Days, Paradise Now, and Tsotsi - they all seem equally likely to win.

Best documentary: Murderball

In most cases, I believe in the law of overwhelming box office. That is, if only one movie in a category did any significant box office, it's likely to win simply because more voters saw it than any of its competitors. That would point to a March of the Penguins cakewalk. But Murderball is the better documentary.

The winner here should've been Grizzly Man, yes, and Herzog also had White Diamond.

Best original screenplay: Crash

Best adapted screenplay: Brokeback Mountain

Art direction: Memoirs of a Geisha

Though Kong has a warm, retro look, my guess is that all that CGI will handicap it in this category. I haven't seen Memoirs of a Geisha, but judging by the trailer and word-of-mouth, its bright palette and swishing silks will catch voters' eyes.

Cinematography: Memoirs of a Geisha

Again, just a guess since I've not seen the movie. Brokeback Mountain has the wide open landscapes, but Memoirs of a Geisha has those choreographed performances, with their dramatic lighting.

Film editing: Crash

After having taken an editing class, I've realized that this category is impossible to judge fairly. Only the editors and perhaps the directors have any idea what the editors had to work with to produce the final product everyone else sees on screen. I think it was Walter Murch who once said of himself and the other four nominees for the Oscars in this category that none of them was the best editor, that it was probably some editor who had transformed a terrible movie into something watchable that deserved the Oscar.

Minus that, most voters choose their favorite movie (under the premise, and a good one, that the editing had a lot to do with the movie's quality) or the movie with the most apparent editing. For most voters that will be the same movie this year, Crash, with its interwoven storylines. If The Constant Gardener were also a best pic nom, this would be a tougher choice, because it has an even more complex structure, with its leaps back and forth in time.

Michael Kahn is the big name in this category, but that universally disliked love scene montage in Munich will do him in.

Sound mixing: Walk the Line

I really enjoyed the alien human-evaporating ray beam's sound in War of the Worlds, but that's probably not a nice thing to write out loud. Sequences like the prison scene, with the clapping of the prisoners muffled but audible through the prison walls, will guide Walk the Line to the gold, bald, naked statue here.

Sound editing: King Kong

Original score: Memoirs of a Geisha

For a movie I didn't see and that was heaped with scorn, Memoirs sure is nabbing a lot of Oscars on my ballot. I'm probably wrong on at least one of these Geisha picks, but I have no idea which one. John Williams' BAFTA earns him my nod here. Gustavo Santaolalla's score for Brokeback Mountain is perhaps the most well-known, just because of all the Brokeback trailer knockoffs, but it's also much shorter than the work of the other composers, which I think might hurt him.

I really enjoyed John Williams elegiac score for Munich and Dario Marianelli's classically romantic score for Pride and Prejudice, also.

Original song: "In the Deep" from Crash

Will they perform all the nominees this year, and if so, who will sing "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp"? Let me make clear that I'm all in favor of an de-funked, operatic rendition from Josh Groban, with Sting in the background uttering "whoop that trick" as a faint harmonic echo.

It's between the other two songs, "Travelin' Thru" and "In the Deep". It's a toss-up. I'll go with the song from the Best Pic contender.

Costume design: Memoirs of a Geisha

Colleen Atwood is the most decorated entrant in this category, and colorful kimonos are difficult to match as visual candy.

Makeup: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

Another category where bold and apparent wins out over subtle, so Cinderella Man definitely won't win. I didn't see The Chronicles of Narnia, but I suspect it offers enough animal creature makeup to offer a credible alternative to Revenge of the Sith. No one in the Academy seems to want to vote for the Star Wars movies.

Visual effects: King Kong

War of the Worlds actually had more seamless visual effects than King Kong, which featured shots like the "running with the bulls except with dinosaurs" that seemed so clearly CGI. Spielberg is peerless at making his visual effects mesh with real life. And yet, many people disliked War of the Worlds and seemed breathless at King Kong, and the sequence on the Empire State Building is cool. Kong was also more dense with visual effects than any other movie I saw this year.

Best animated short: 9

For the first time, I actually saw all the animated short nominees at a screening at the Academy Theater in NYC. My favorite of the group was The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, but I'm guessing folks will go with 9. Tim Burton is going to produce director Shane Acker's feature-length version of that short, which follows a rag doll locked in a duel to the death with a giant mechanical creature in a dystopic wasteland.

Best documentary short: The Life of Kevin Carter

I didn't see any of these, so this is a guess based on some other awards it has claimed.

Best live action short: Síðasti bærinn í dalnum

I saw all these at the same screening as the animated shorts. None of them wowed me, and several were too predictable, especially Our Time Is Up (though it did feature Hurley from Lost) and Ausreisser (The Runaway). The two that weren't were Six Shooter and, at its conclusion, Síðasti bærinn í dalnum, which is pronounced, um, like it's spelled. The latter is more serious in tone, so I'm going with the Icelandic short.

TGIF Movie Quiz

No Invisibles, just a plain still photo movie identification quiz. A lot of gimmes, but a few triple toe loop difficulty elements.

It may just be my imagination

New trailer for Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly. Rotoscoping animation is cool. I'd kill to get my hands on a copy of Rotoshop.

A word from our sponsors

I stuck a few Adsense text links in the right column. I tried to keep ads off of this page, but in the past half year I've been hit with a lot of traffic overage fees, about $5 a month, and I've always wanted to run this site wallet-neutral. In the past my Amazon associates rev has covered enough of my hosting fees that I didn't bother with ads. I have two suspicions about the Adsense text links. One is that they'll need to be more prominent than they are now to generate much revenue, if any, and the second is that my blog content may not be topically constrained enough to generate many relevant Adsense links (Google offers tools to test the latter, and a few trials haven't turned out much). But for the time being, I'll keep them subtle and minimal, and if one strikes your fancy, do click through and help a brother out. At any rate, when I finally get around to the site redesign I keep putting on the back burner, I'll figure out what to do with them.

Even bobsledders use steroids. That strikes me as really odd. If you're one of the guys in back, isn't your primary skill to sit?

NBC is not covering the Olympics live, and that's a problem in this day and age. A quick peek at ESPN or any major news site online or on TV and you can't help but find out who all the winners are going to be later that evening. I have no idea why they aren't doing live broadcasts on NBC. On the East Coast, NBC replays its primetime coverage from something like 12:30am to 5:00am, for no apparent reason. Why not a live broadcast and then a primetime replay? Even NBCOlympics.com's online video clips are delayed in order to not ruin things for the network. The tail's wagging the dog.

I had a friend in town on Sunday, and at dinner she said that I'd never guess what her favorite new TV show was. I said Grey's Anatomy. I was right. It wasn't difficult since every girl I know watches that show. It's the new Sex in the City, complete with Ellen Pompeo providing Carrie-esque voiceovers. Their big push to grab onto the coattails of the Super Bowl worked, though, as many guys who had the game on were forced to watch the show with the ladies afterwards (like me). An artillery shell in the gut? Are you kidding me? What a McGuffin.

Two movie soundtracks I enjoyed recently: Syriana and Mysterious Skin.

Lost in translation

All the plot summaries I've read for The Beat That My Heart Skipped refer to Tom's piano teacher as a Chinese virtuoso. She's clearly Vietnamese, and she speaks nothing but Vietnamese to Tom. In real life, she's Vietnamese. I'm confused why she had to be from China.

That aside, the movie, a remake, is worth seeing for Romain Duris's performance as Tom, a goon who chases poor families out of apartment complexes so he can buy and resell the properties for a profit. One night he runs into his mother's former music manager. She was a gifted pianist, and the old man invites Tom, who once impressed with his own piano playing, to audition sometime.

In this opportunity to rekindle his love of music, Tom sees a potential way out of his distasteful lifestyle, a way to escape the fate of his father, who involved him in real estate scams in the first place. Tom begins taking lessons from the "Chinese" concert pianist noted above, even though she doesn't understand French and he doesn't understand Vietnamese. I've encountered similar language difficulties trying to order takeout on occasion, but food and music are international languages.

Duris's Tom is volatile and restless, a caged animal. His thin frame is a live wire, and his intensity compresses his face into a frown. He resembles a pissed-off French Adam Brody dealing with drug withdrawal. Everywhere he goes on screen, the eye follows.

A Bug's Death

This parasitic wasp story is the hot story on the web, and it is indeed fascinating and lurid.

Speaking of bugs, yesterday I had to grab a quick dinner before running out to give a short talk, so I stopped at Republic in Union Square for the first time. Two bites into my noodle soup, a ladybug floated up to the top. I know they're supposed to be good luck and all, but not when their corpses are bobbing up and down in my broth. A surprised waiter took the bowl and had a chat with another waiter nearby about where it might have come from, all within earshot of me, the horrified customer. Turns out the ladybugs come from the bathroom. I got out of there before my mind could dwell on how the ladybug had journeyed from bathroom to kitchen.

Cute, when they're not in your soup

The Maria Antoinette trailer in HD.

Make sure to patch your Firefox.

Yet more Brokeback remix action. Where's Frodo and Sam? Aragorn and Legolas? Agent Smith giving a lapdance to Morpheus in The Matrix?

Throttled?

Though Netflix was sued for throttling the releases to super heavy customers, I still think they practice some form of damage control from their "best" customers. The original settlement was a month of allowing all customers to rent 4 DVDs per month at the 3 DVD per month rate, but if they failed to cancel after a month, they'd be charged for the 4 DVD per month rate. It was a terrible settlement for customers, and the last I heard, some judge called them on it and reopened the case.

Usually, if I mail back a movie, it takes a day to get to Netflix, and then a day for the next movie to come back to me, so if I mail a movie back on Monday, I receive a new one Wednesday. Last week I mailed back one movie on Tuesday and two movies on Thursday, and I still haven't received any in return. To add insult to injury, Netflix mailed me a survey asking me on Feb 4 asking if I'd received the movie on Feb 6 or Feb 7.

If Netflix is still throttling its heaviest renting customers, then I'd be really disappointed. That's such a short-sighted business move. The loss of goodwill from the customers that most appreciate your service is bound to cost them more than the cost of fulfilling a few extra DVDs a month.

***

Even the Chinese (or maybe especially the Chinese) are not happy with the decision to cast Chinese actresses as Japanese geishas in Memoirs of a Geisha. So the Chinese government simply canceled the movie's release. Of course, this matters little since everyone in the country will watch it on $1 bootleg DVDs anyway.

***

It's high time someone on the Internet came up with this: build your own Oscar pool. Or you can join mine.

***

Stream the new Beth Orton CD, Comfort of Strangers, if you can. On my Mac, only Safari among my browsers could digest the AOL player.

***

Cat Power and concert tours, they just haven't proved to be a good match. The streak continues.

Sundance Part II

A few more pics in my 2006 Sundance set on Flickr.

***

Immediately upon entering any of the Park City venues, I quickly scan the theater and read the situation like a quarterback trying to read the Cover 2. Which seats are open, and which are filled? What size groups are moving down which aisles, and what section of the theater will they head to? Which rows, based on where the ushers are positioned and which seats are filled, are the Reserved rows (this is like reading the stance and position of the safety)? Which side of the theater is the microphone located, indicating where the directors and stars will take Q&A and which entrance they're likely to walk in?

***

The snow on the slopes this year was fabulous. It snowed at least every other day, and so the slopes were covered with fresh powder. Utah snow, for some metereological reason unknown to me, is the most perfect ski powder. Perhaps its the aridity, or the altitude (Park City's elevation falls just shy of 7,000 ft.), or some combination thereof. Regardless, the powder is fluffy and forgiving.

The other joy of snowboarding during Sundance is the emptiness of the resorts. The pumped up lodging rates during the festival drive most skiiers to other slopes for the week. On Tuesday, after Jason and Jamie had left and before my second half companions had arrived, I went boarding at Park City resort. For three straight runs, I didn't see a single other person, and I rode up the lift by myself each time, feeling a bit guilty each time I greeted the guy working the lift, as if I was the only reason he had to come to work that day to stand around in the cold.

***

After the screening of Thank You For Smoking, Jason mentioned that the cut during the Katie Holmes-Aaron Eckhart sex scene was awkward. I must have been dozing off, because I couldn't even remember what scene he was referring to.

Sharp eye, that Jason. During Q&A, director Jason Reitman apologized and said we'd missed a chunk of that scene because of an error during the reel change.

The story didn't die there, however. A rumor quickly spread that Tom Cruise had ordered the love scene to be cut so as to maintain his wife's modesty. Park City is a tiny town, and with the density of festival goers during Sundance, rumors spread like a virus in an airplane cabin. Reitman promised the scene would be back in the theatrical cut, so perhaps it was a ploy on the part of Reitman and his distributors, rather than Cruise, to get fest-goers to see the movie one more time.

Bwahaha

Everytime I go back and read some of his jokes (which I do often during meal breaks), I laugh and cackle like a lunatic, then I end up misty-eyed, because Mitch Hedberg is dead.

Quickly becoming the most spoofed trailer of all time, Brokeback Mountain's spawns another.

Sundance Part II

A few more pics in my 2006 Sundance set on Flickr.

***

Immediately upon entering any of the Park City venues, I quickly scan the theater and read the situation like a quarterback trying to read the Cover 2. Which seats are open, and which are filled? What size groups are moving down which aisles, and what section of the theater will they head to? Which rows, based on where the ushers are positioned and which seats are filled, are the Reserved rows (this is like reading the stance and position of the safety)? Which side of the theater is the microphone located, indicating where the directors and stars will take Q&A and which entrance they're likely to walk in?

***

The snow on the slopes this year was fabulous. It snowed at least every other day, and so the slopes were covered with fresh powder. Utah snow, for some metereological reason unknown to me, is the most perfect ski powder. Perhaps its the aridity, or the altitude (Park City's elevation falls just shy of 7,000 ft.), or some combination thereof. Regardless, the powder is fluffy and forgiving.

The other joy of snowboarding during Sundance is the emptiness of the resorts. The pumped up lodging rates during the festival drive most skiiers to other slopes for the week. On Tuesday, after Jason and Jamie had left and before my second half companions had arrived, I went boarding at Park City resort. For three straight runs, I didn't see a single other person, and I rode up the lift by myself each time, feeling a bit guilty each time I greeted the guy working the lift, as if I was the only reason he had to come to work that day to stand around in the cold.

***

After the screening of Thank You For Smoking, Jason mentioned that the cut during the Katie Holmes-Aaron Eckhart sex scene was awkward. I must have been dozing off, because I couldn't even remember what scene he was referring to.

Sharp eye, that Jason. During Q&A, director Jason Reitman apologized and said we'd missed a chunk of that scene because of an error during the reel change.

The story didn't die there, however. A rumor quickly spread that Tom Cruise had ordered the love scene to be cut so as to maintain his wife's modesty. Park City is a tiny town, and with the density of festival goers during Sundance, rumors spread like a virus in an airplane cabin. Reitman promised the scene would be back in the theatrical cut, so perhaps it was a ploy on the part of Reitman and his distributors, rather than Cruise, to get fest-goers to see the movie one more time.

Academy Award Noms

The Academy Award nominees were announced this morning. I have not seen Brokeback Mountain yet, but I'm guessing it's a heavy favorite for Best Picture, only because the other four nominees in the category all have some flaw that journalists can fixate on. Other heavy favorites: Ang Lee, Reese Witherspoon, and Philip Seymour Hoffman (in a two-horse race with Heath Ledger, at least based on what I've read about Ledger's performance). I'd guess Paul Giamatti nabs the supporting actor Oscar, also, though I have yet to see two of the movies in that category.

I haven't seen any of the Foreign Language Film nominees. That's the first time I can remember that happening since I started watching The Oscars. Well, the announcements always provide another way to prioritize my moviegoing and Netflix to-do's for the next month.

It's unlikely to be something they'll risk doing in real time, but I'd love to see Jon Stewart showing replay footage from the evening, the same way he opens the Daily Show each night. With much of it, no commentary will be necessary.

Sundance

Here are a few of my pics from Sundance, where I've been since Friday. This is my third straight pilgrimage to Sundance for my birthday (yes, sometime this weekend my odometer turned another notch, damn it all to hell), and navigating the fest now feels like secondhand nature.

I'll try to post a few more pics later this week, but that depends on whether or not I can clear some space off of the hard drive on my now ancient laptop. Everytime I try to open one of my RAW image files, my computer clicks and whirs and coughs like an old smoker.

Highest wattage celebrity about town: Jennifer Aniston. Jason saw her the first day, and I caught a glimpse of her yesterday (or was it the day before? it's all a sleepless blur) emerging from one of the celeb giveaway stores, and a nanosecond later she was consumed by a mob of people with cameras.

Biggest movie acquisition: Fox Searchlight bought Little Miss Sunshine for $10.5 million and 10% of gross. Biggest Sundance deal ever, and a sweet deal for the creators who had put up a hefty $9 million to get the movie made. Beyond that, no movie has emerged as the clearcut gem of the festival yet, though studios tend to judge the festival on pics of commercial appeal, and there does appear to have been a dearth of movies fitting that description. Most of the ones I saw which seemed destined for commercial success (Thank You For Smoking, Lucky Number Slevin, The Descent) already have U.S. distributors.

Most fun movie screening: Last night I attended a midnight screening of Neil Marshall's The Descent at The Egyptian Theatre. Last year I saw Oldboy, Three Extremes, and Wolf Creek at this Park City at Midnight series, so that gives you an idea of the type of fare showcased in this series. The movie is already out on Feast should come out later this year, caught up as it was in the Weinsteins spinoff from Miramax.

Favorite movie thus far: No single movie has been the revelation that, say, Pulp Fiction was back in the day, but probably the movie that contained some of the most enjoyable and enjoyable micro-moments was the latest by Michel Gondry, The Science of Sleep, starring Gael Garcia Bernal. Rumor has it that Warner Independent snatched the movie up just a half hour after the World Premiere. It won't have the mass commercial appeal of Gondry's previous movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (the movie is destined to split audiences: just look at its early ratings on IMDb), but Gondry still captures the child-like quality in all of us better than almost anyone, and his depiction of male insecurities about women is dead-on in a way that could only come from someone who has lived with them much of his life. The movie feels autobiographical in many ways, and Gondry revealed that all the dreams in the movie are ones he has had. Gael Garcia Bernal, besides seeming like a really pleasant and mischievous guy, proves himself to be a gifted comic actor, and he had to wrestle with French and English in addition to Spanish throughout the movie.

My favorite brush with celebrity: If you walk up and down Main St. enough, or if you attend enough movies, you can't help but satisfy run into someone famous. While waiting in line for the Weinsteins party really late one evening, just as the clock passed midnight and ushered in my birthday, Scarlett Johansson (accompanying Josh Hartnett) walked past me. Yes, my embarrassing crush on her, dating back to the days before she became a sex symbol, is common knowledge, and so my birthday was a good one, even though I could no longer feel my feet.

Always look on the bright side

Brian came all the way up from Philadelphia today to go see The Odd Couple with me. I'm not a big musical guy, but among the things I wanted to do in NYC before I left was to see a live show starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. Even though chances are that Matthew Broderick will look exactly the same for the next twenty years, the same cannot be said for Nathan Lane. For tonight's show, I had second row seats, dead center.

We grabbed dinner beforehand at Fatty Crab, the new and much buzzed-about Malaysian restaurant in the Meatpacking District. It's one of those tiny NYC restaurants where weaving between the tables and all the people standing inside waiting for a table requires holding your hands over your head like you're dancing to hip hop, shimmying sideways, and wriggling your hips like a hula hoop dancer. It's an entire restaurant of two-person tables, so arriving with an Allen Iverson-sized posse is unwise.

To avoid some of the restaurant's usual claustrophobia, we arrived at 6pm, about a half hour before the dinner rush. The menu is manageable, just a few pages, and the food is meant to be eaten family style, with dishes arriving in random order, whenever the kitchen happens to knock them out.

The first of our dishes to arrive was the Fatty Duck, a plate befitting its name, much like characters in Chinese karate movies. Take, for example, Zu: Warriors from Magic Mountain. In this movie, one of the characters is an old man with huge, superpowered eyebrows. His name? Long Brows. Take almost any Chinese martial arts movie where the hero has an overweight sidekick, and 8 times out of 10 the sidekick's name will be translated as Fatty or Piggy or Porky. The Jet Li/Tsui Hark classic Once Upon a Time in China has one character named Porky, another named Buck Teeth Soh. Their appearances, I assume, are vivid in your mind.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that the Fatty Duck consists of four pieces of duck, each topped with a healthy, juicy layer of fat. Brian and I attacked this dish with forks, then chopsticks. Then we conceded and grabbed it with our hands, and the waiter nodded his approval. Spicy, sweet, salty, awesome.

Second place in the race from kitchen to dinner table were the Heritage Foods Slow-Cooked Pork Ribs. I'm a huge fan of braised meats in general, especially when eating out because I'm too impatient to spend the time braising at home, and if you take braised meats home as leftovers, they taste just as good or better the next day. These ribs, coated in a sweet sauce, were so soft they melted in our mouths like butter. By the time we finished, the two of us looked like two-year olds after consuming a bucket of ice cream with our bare hands. I shudder to think of the carnage had we ordered the signature dish of Chili Crab.

Once our Nasi Lemak arrived (coconut rice, chicken curry, slow poached egg), we realized we'd over-ordered by just a bit, a sentiment confirmed a minute later when a steak/noodle/clam/chili pepper dish (whose name escapes me now) arrived to complete our order. There is a wine list, but this is food to be enjoyed with beer, and we washed our meal down with a Hitachino Classic, a sort of IPA.

This is food that's survived the journey across the Pacific. I cringe at the words Pan-Asian or Asian fusion, and all the Jean-Georges Asian fusion restaurants have been disappointments, massively over-priced for food whose roots lie in cheap street-side food stands, but this isn't a remix, it's a faithful rendition of flavorful Malaysian cuisine, with all its intense flavors. It will cost you a whole lot less than a meal at a Jean-Georges Asian joint like Spice Market and leave your taste buds a whole lot happier. The best news is that it's open until 4am from Thursdays through Saturdays, making it another addition to my list of really late night weekend food oases. Add Fatty Duck to the Beef Marrow and Oxtail Marmalade at Blue Ribbon Restaurant as two of the most pleasing and decadent ways to counteract (or top off, depending on how you view it) a weekend drinking buzz.

After cleaning our hands with turpentine in the bathroom, we hopped a cab up to the Brooke Atkinson Theater. The show was set to start in 15 minutes, and already a long line had formed. A man was passing out flyers to everyone in line, and then he pressed one into mine, and it took me a minute to digest the news. The show had been cancelled because Nathan Lane had laryngitis. I was crestfallen and felt like a failed host, but Brian took it well considering he'd travelled all the way from Philly for one night. He suggested a movie instead. As we walked away from the theater, a ticket broker materialized out of the shadows, like an ambulance chasing attorney at the scene of a traffic accident.

"How about seeing Spamalot instead?" he said, leering through a mouth in which every other tooth appeared to have never grown back, or perhaps he'd pawned them off to someone coming out of a dentist's office. "Show starts in five minutes."

I responded with my best poker face, as if I'd hit a set on the flop and was contemplating a fold. But inside, I knew this was the lucky break we needed. I hadn't seen Spamalot yet, it won the Tony for Best Musical in 2005, and it was among the more difficult shows to score tickets to. Brian was a huge Monty Python fan, knew nothing of the show, and had watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail "a thousand times." The ticket broker interpreted my frown as skepticism and produced a business card as proof of his legitimacy. It read "Tix R Us".

A few moments later, each of us $50 lighter, Brian and I were sprinting through the usual Times Square sidewalk traffic down to 44th St. Dashing up three flights of stairs, we sat down just as the lights went down, our $50 having bought us seats in the second to last row in the theater, a thin pole about seven rows up bisecting our view (though the theater was cozy and we were in the center).

At first I thought the entire show would be a literal rehash of the movie on stage. It began that way, and I was worried that we'd paid $50 to watch what we could've watched at my apartment for free. To my relief, the musical does branch away from the movie to generate some parallel identities, for example as a post-modern spoof of musicals themselves (one of the songs is titled "The Song That Goes Like This" and begins: "Once in every show, there comes a song that goes like this. It starts off soft and low, and ends up with a kiss. Oh where, is, the song, that goes, like this."). And, as the lady working the cashbar told us with breathless excitement at intermission, a portion of the French guard skit was improvised every night. Even she, having seen the show countless times, had no idea what was coming.

This is somewhat of a spoiler, but if it's the same gimmick every night, it may be worth knowing ahead of time if you can choose your premium seat, but the Holy Grail ended up being located below seat D101 in the Orchestra. I don't know if it's always seat D101. From our nosebleed seats, we couldn't see who occupied the lucky seat, but apparently it was not an attractive woman, because the cast member who went to bring the lucky audience member on stage said he'd have to choose a surrogate and ended up bringing what appeared to us to be a hot young woman named Elizabeth Riley on stage. She was presented with a trophy and a Polaroid of her standing with the cast. So, if you're a really attractive young woman and can obtain seats in the general vicinity of seat D101, or seat D101 itself, you stand a better than average chance of ending up a part of the show.

The reenactments of famous skits from the movie didn't do much for me, but some of the musical numbers were both funny and catchy. The Lady of the Lake in Act I is a tickle (Lauren Kennedy). The cast members probably have the best time of anyone in the theater, but the audience is a close second. It's a musical I'm putting on the recommended list for out-of-towners, so many of whom deem a musical an essential part of a successful New York visit.

So The Odd Couple had been cancelled. Hey, as one song in Spamalot urged, "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life." It was hilarious when all the crucified folk in Life of Brian were singing it to Jesus, and it was sage advice for me on this night. Brian and I were whistling that little ditty the whole subway ride home.

Apple of my eye

Oh, new MacBook Pro, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways (starting with $2,499 of them). Will you be my Valentine?

The Webcomics Examiner's Best Webcomics of 2005.

Anthony Lane looks back on the year in movies.

Download the Mac beta for Adobe Labs (formerly Macromedia) new application Lightroom, a competitor to Apple's Aperture. For many people who just need an application for photo retouching and processing, either Lightroom or Aperture is likely a better choice than Photoshop, which has always been bewildering in its complexity to newbies (I say "likely" because I've yet to try Aperture or Lightroom, though I'm downloading the latter now; I wish Apple offered a tryout copy of Aperture).

The pre-beta version of Filmloop is available for download. This is photo-sharing software that pushes pics in a slideshow to other people's desktops. Apple today announced that iPhoto in iLife 06 will include a feature called Photocasting, which allows users to push iPhoto albums to other iPhoto users through .Mac. I'm surprised Flickr hasn't released something similar (Flickr allows you to publish your photos as an RSS feed, but that doesn't pass the grandma ease-of-use test). If I ran the show at Flickr, I'd have a lot of people focused on cranking out an app like Filmloop ASAP. This all reminds of PointCast, the first popular push software for the web. It went kaput, but everything old is new again. For Christmas I wanted to get my parents one of those digital picture frames that could display pictures all of their kids would upload. I did some research on the Ceiva service, and it turned out to be a massive disappointment, with outrageous annual subscription fees. So I got them something else, with the hopes that I could just find a way for all the kids to publish photos to their desktop instead. And without even a request to the Lazyweb, my wishes are nearly answered.

IMDb plot summary for Roberto Benigni's next movie Tiger and the Snow, to be released in 2006 in the U.S.: "A love-struck Italian poet is stuck in Iraq at the onset of an American invasion." I'm all for the resilience of the comedy and the human spirit in the face of tragedy, but jeepers creepers.

The humane way to kill a lobster, a short article dedicated to David Foster Wallace as a response to his essay "Consider the Lobster," an article originally written for Gourmet and which provides the title for his latest essay collection. Besides being humane, that is just an impressive move with which to show off your chef's knife.

If you want a copy of Flash Gordon by Mike Hodges on DVD, you can find it on Amazon Canada. I saw this on television in Taiwan in 1982 during a family trip, and it's one of the earliest movies I saw that left specific scenes impressed in my memory. In one scene, some sort of competition, Flash and someone else take turns sticking their hands in holes in this giant mound of dirt. I forget what happened if you chose poorly; some creature chewed off your hand? In another, Flash and his adversary wrestle on a moving circular floor with spikes that would emerge intermittently. If you fell off the side off the floor, you fell to your death, I believe. Finally, at the movie's conclusion, Max von Sydow's Ming the Merciless is impaled by the spike on the nosecone of a spaceship, a fitting end for the criminal in a cheesy, kinky, quintessentially 80's movie. I wonder why this DVD is out of print in the U.S.; I'd like to see it again.

God, I wish I knew how to quit you!

2 Stars, 1 Slot

Because we're guys, my brothers and I are constantly bantering around movie lines. The quote du jour, useful in so many situations: "God, I wish I knew how to quit you!" Actually, you can just use the quote by itself, in any context, and it will crack us up 90% of the time. We haven't even seen Brokeback Mountain yet, though we have seen Brokeback Goldmine, and I've read the short story by Annie Proulx.

Did you see Reggie Bush on his touchdown run last night (rhetorical question)? The man accelerates like a sportbike. Awesome. Too bad USC didn't put him in at linebacker to shadow Vince Young, who ran all over USC like it was a Pop Warner game. That's the thing about college football (or even high school football): you can just put the ball in the hands of your best player by putting him at QB and letting him run with the ball on every other play, and it will usually work. My high school football team played against Donovan McNabb in the high school playoffs once, and that game reminded me of watching Young run all over USC last night. Young looked like he was bigger than every USC defender past the defensive line anyway. That camera shot from behind Young, standing triumphant and pointing his hands like six-shooters as a blizzard of multi-colored confetti rained down on him, was a beauty.

Jon Stewart to host the Oscars

News bit here. The Chris Rock experiment ends after just one year. Hosting the Oscars is probably the most unimportant but highly scrutinized hosting gig in the world.

Stewart typically focuses on politics, so I'm curious to see him turn his wit on Hollywood. Amidst all the tearful speeches and white-clenched knuckles around gold statues, a host who's willing to poke fun at the biz to balance out the extravagance of the whole affair is a really good thing. Stewart seems to fit the bill.

Trailer park

If you're a member of Netflix and a friend and I haven't added you to my Netflix friends list, drop me a note. I enjoy the quizzes about my friends' tastes.

***

Trailer (high def or std) for Mel Gibson's next directorial effort, Apocalypto, about the end of the Mayan civilization. Wow, I'm speechless. I really don't have anything to say about that.

***

I love when David Letterman gets serious. I wish I'd seen this segment, in which Letterman landed a few body blows on Bill O'Reilly (YouTube video clip). Letterman even displays a stronger grasp of logic than O'Reilly, who tries to exonerate the CIA's intelligence failure on Iraq by saying MI-6, Putin's intelligence agency, and the intelligence of Mubarak's agency in Egypt all made the same errors.

Letterman: "Well then that makes it all right?"

***

Jet Li's next and perhaps final martial arts movie: Fearless. Trailer under the Media link (click on Media and then click on the Trailer link below the Story button). His run of American movies was a disaster (as were those of most of the Hong Kong and China action stars and directors who sought out Hollywood), but when teamed with Chinese directors and focused on martial arts period pieces, his batting average is quite good. Ronny Yu and Yuen Wo Ping...I'm going to go see this.

Every year, I hear a rumor that Jet Li is going to retire and become a monk. I'm okay with that, as long as a band of evil martial artists attack his monastery, forcing him to come out of retirement to whup their butts. And, oh yeah, as long as movie cameras are rolling to capture every ass-kicking moment. If that happens, then I'm totally cool with that.

***

Teaser for Michael Mann's Miami Vice feature film starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. I'm not sure I wanted my fond memories of the television show to be tainted by a revisit with new actors (Farrell's Fu Manchu doesn't feel right, and "You understand the meaning of the word verboten? As in badness is happening right now." really doesn't go down easy), but I've not passed up a Michael Mann simmering testosterone hotpot in the past and I probably won't start now.

Back when I was in the fifth and sixth grade, sneaking over to a friend's house to watch an ep of Miami Vice was one of the great illicit joys in life. Yes, I led a sheltered youth.

Back from holiday break

They say writing is a muscle (and I believe it), and if so, mine is weak and out-of-shape after a holiday break with no writing, minimal time online, and wave after wave of consumption of various holiday foodstuff. Come to think of it, I'm just flab all over. Much of the popularity of New Year's fitness resolutions can be explained by timing, New Years coming directly after typically the most protracted and gluttonous of American holidays.

Just as with going to the gym, every day I don't write adds to the output I feel I need to generate the next time I do write. After a while it feels impossible to make up for all the lost time. The only way to get rolling again is a little chunk at a time.

***

Do people still eat geese, or is it an anachronism from Dickens' novels and a time before people learned to appreciate other fowl? I never hear of anyone eating a Christmas goose anymore. Is it not good, or is it just too much hassle to farm-raise geese to make it a grocery store staple? Geese don't seem to be endangered. I see them everywhere.

***

The BT Technology Timeline - BT has a futurology department, and they've built this interactive timeline that runs out to 2051 (which probably covers the remainder of my life expectancy). My first thought on seeing this was that some lucky SOB's job is to sit around and predict the future. The second was that even the most advanced futurologist has no clue when the Cubs will finally win a World Series.

Lots of fun to play with, though there's little in the way of supporting evidence. A cursory kicking of the tires spilled these nuggets (my notes in parentheses):

• Androids will make up 10% of the population in 2015 (ensuring that already awkward blind dates will begin with the administration of the Voight-Kampff test)
• The world's population will peak at 10 billion in 2039 (you think finding an apartment in Manhattan is tough today)
• Virus crosses over from machine to human in 2025 (because some eager SOB forgot to do the Voight-Kampff test before jumping into the sack)
• Rise of a global machine dictator - date unknown (Skynet?)
• Robot superior to humans in 2030 or so (well, we still have 25 years to enjoy our supremacy)
• Creation of The Matrix in 2030 (related to the prediction above?)
• Fully telepathic communication in 2049
• Brain downloads in 2049 (shortly thereafter, someone will write a plug-in to allow direct sending of brain logs to all the major weblog software packages; confusion will reign as the term blog is re-appropriated to refer to brain-logs)

Arthur C. Clarke: "...any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic..."

***

Some guys TiVo'd the previous night's Texas Lotto drawing and then bought their buddy a matching ticket that day. Then they set up a camcorder, played the drawing while their buddy was there, and put the video up on Google Video. I hope they take their buddy out for dinner or something. That's just cruel.

At any rate, it's just an example of a type of humor which seems to be at the peak of its popularity: laughing at the person in the dark, the person who is being honest and genuine. It's the modern ironic mode of expression as entertainment.

Punk'd. The Ali G Show. All those reality television shows in which contestants are kept in the dark as to the real premise of the show, like My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiance. Even The Colbert Report, at times.

I hope this mode of humor hit its saturation point in 2005. There's a mean-spiritedness at its core that isn't that funny and is only tolerable in small doses, a level it has long since surpassed in mass media.

***

While searching for a copy of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner on DVD, I stumbled across Nostalgia Family Video, a site which carries just such hard-to-find movies on DVD. The aforementioned DVD is just one of many gems in their catalog.

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

Happy Thanksgiving Eve

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

Stream the new Ryan Adams album, 29.

***

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

"That is not an arrow," he says.

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

"There is no ship," he says.

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

More online cinematic commercials

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

Kairo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hornets, Mechanical Turks, and swords, oh my

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

How to defend against Teen Wolf.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The trailer for King Kong...

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

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

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

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

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

Silly Billy

Panasonic launched a blog called Def Perception to discuss its HDV 24p camcorder the AG-HVX200 and high def filmmaking in general. To request a free instructional DVD on the AG-HVX200 (for U.S. customers only), go here. B&H is pre-selling a kit with the AG-HVX200 and two 8GB P2 cards for $10K.

Wednesday is the day when Michelin releases its New York restaurant star ratings, with the release party that evening at the Guggenheim. Who will receive the coveted three-star ratings? Early favorites include Per Se and Alaine Ducasse. As a way of going long Per Se, I snagged a reservation for mid-November.

Yesterday, I attended a Halloween party with my nephew Ryan, looking as adorable as ever in his deluxe Thomas the Tank Engine costume. The parents association that sponsored the party hired a clown to perform, and I was so busy chasing Ryan with my camcorder that Anita had to point out that the clown was none other than David Friedman, from the Andrew Jarecki documentary Capturing the Friedmans. David was one of Jarecki's original subjects since the documentary began as one about birthday clowns. David seems to have shaken off any stigma from his father's pedophilia conviction and continues to work as the clown magician Silly Billy. Only in NY.

Ken reminded me that Cool Hunting linked to this collage of cassette tapes, many of which the two of us used to purchase by the dozens to dub our music. So many of these images still seem as vividly familiar as if they were sitting on my shelves now. Ah, those days when a metal cassette tape was like gold.

Apps for doing this on a Windows PC have long been available, but now Mac users can treat a GMail account as a hard drive using gDisk.

My old roommate Scott, in an aside, guessed that I'd heard of a movie titled Snakes on a Plane, starring Samuel L. Jackson. Well, I hadn't, so I looked up the plot summary: On board a flight over the Pacific Ocean, an assassin, bent on killing a passenger who's a witness in protective custody, let loose a crate full of deadly snakes. Well, a title doesn't get too much more literal than that, and though it's not due out until 2006, it's already inspired a long and often chuckle-worthy thread of over 100 proposed sequels.

A list of John Peel's most treasured 7-inch singles. The White Stripes are big winners, with an amazing 10 spots on the list.

James forwarded me this little easter egg video of Yoda breakdancing, from the Star Wars, Episode III - Revenge of the Sith DVD, releasing tomorrow.

In Cold Blood, and thoughts on some movies where context matters

I saw Capote at the New York Film Festival, and one of my thoughts on leaving the theater was that I had to read In Cold Blood. I started to print the article version out of The Complete New Yorker that night but fell asleep as my printer seemed to be shooting for overtime pay (it's a flaw with the file format used by The Complete New Yorker).

I could've saved myself some trouble. The New Yorker reprinted part 1 of the 4-part series from 1965. Part I is here, and even without advertisements takes up 40 pages. The version from The Complete New Yorker can only be printed with original ads, and let me tell you, the 1965 version of The New Yorker had a hell of a lot more ads than the 2005 version.

The movie still makes sense without any foreknowledge of Truman Capote or without having read In Cold Blood. Philip Seymour Hoffman is some sort of actor savant, and he pulls off what is a challenging task in portraying Capote. This is one case where the character's voice and mannerisms are critical to the story, to understanding Capote's reception in Holcomb, Kansas, where he goes to research the murder of a wealthy family by Perry Smith and Richard Hickock. His rendition will recall Capote, who was a sui generis, but the challenge is to transcend physical and vocal verisimilitude. Hoffman has to show us the gears of the machinery in his head as he grapples between the fame he can taste and his moral integrity. After all, he's a writer, and if writer's didn't write, they wouldn't be nearly as interesting as characters. It's difficult to imagine anyone surpassing Hoffman's performance here, but if anyone has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

But without having read In Cold Blood or heard the story around its writing, I was left skeptical of Clifton Collins Jr.'s withdrawn, introspective interpretation of Perry Smith. I didn't understand why this murder, more than others, caught Capote's eye. Moreover, a great deal of Capote's exploitation of Smith, especially, is in the pages of In Cold Blood itself. Much of Capote's psychological journey in this movie takes place in the mind, and though it's no substitute for being Capote, having the "non-fiction novel" in your mind will deepen one's appreciation of Capote's guilt. As it stands, you'll see the dots that connect to the film's on-screen epitaph which tells us that Capote never finished another book after In Cold Blood. But between those dots is a lot of white space.

Capote is one of several movies I've seen recently where an understanding of the context or the history on which the movie is based is necessary to fully appreciate every scene. I've read others who believe that all movies should stand on their own, but that feels like a preference than a rule. Other movies like that: Memories of Murder, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Caché.

Memories of Murder is a Korean serial killer mystery. It wasn't until the on-screen text at the end of the movie that I learned that the movie was based on a true story about serial killings in Korea during the late 1980's. I browsed online to read up on the original case, and only then did some of the seemingly irrelevant scenes and odd tonal shifts begin to make sense. This is a movie, after all, that jump cuts from a nail entering the leg of a policeman deranged with anger and grief to a shot of a beef skewer sizzling on the kitchen grill.

Understood as a scathing social satire and not as your usual serial killer whodunnit, the ambiguous ending and despairing tone make sense. Those in search of the tidy close-ended narrative that is the usual serial killer thriller will be frustrated. The police are so inept it's comical, and then exasperating, but that's the movie's intention. The final shot of the movie, when the main character stares into the camera, and out at the audience, is provocative, but once I had a historical context for the movie, it felt more than clever, it felt like the dismal face of a society's discontent.

Good Night, and Good Luck recounts Edward Murrow's battle against Joseph McCarthy. I wasn't alive for Ed Murrow's heyday at CBS, so I'm only aware of him through brief black-and-white clips, and this movie slots nicely next to those in my memory as it's shot in black-and-white also. Color television hadn't arrived yet, so Clooney's choice is appropriate.

David Straithairn channels Murrow's moral intensity and that voice which managed to be both deadpan and impassioned all at once (hear clips of the real Murrow here). The first time he is about to go on live television in the movie, he's holding a cigarette. I expected him to put it out, but then the cameras began rolling, and Murrow continued to cradle it between his fingers. The same cigarette seems to be in his hand anytime he's on screen; it came as no surprise to hear he died of lung cancer. As the movie unfolds, the cigarette rises in stature; Murrow wields it like a sword of truth.

One of the reasons this movie benefits from a knowledge of its context is that it's shot almost entirely on the lots of CBS, inside the studio where Murrow tapes his show See It Now. Our only glimpses of McCarthy are in archival footage (another good choice by Clooney; rather than have an actor try and portray McCarthy, the ideological boogeyman here, hang him by his own words to remove any suspicion of misrepresentation), and they are brief. The people at CBS are clearly afraid of McCarthy, and that fear is meant to amplify the courage of their decision to go ahead and challenge McCarthy on air anyhow. One character in particular cannot handle the resultant bad press and makes a fateful decision, but this band of reporters feels trapped more because we never see them outside the office. The menace of McCarthy is muted by his lack of presence in the movie.

Those who have read about McCarthy's witch hunt or lived through it can furnish some of the dread he inspired, but the movie, absorbing as it is, feels a few scenes light. An anecdote about a hidden marriage, for example, or Murrow's need to do celebrity interviews with the likes of Liberace add some levity and relate some true episodes, but they don't help to get one's blood flowing the way a movie like this aims to do.

Clooney is a cinephile, and he feels just as strongly in urging the press to use its podium to fight the powers at large. It's no secret how he feels about the current administration, but even if you weren't aware of it, you'd know what his damn point of view is here. Murrow would have applauded that moviemaking motive.

As a sidenote, Murrow's willingness to use his journalistic soapbox to protect the truth from the powers who would suppress it makes him particularly relevant now, when news outlets who strive to be nothing but neutral (CNN) seem to lose out in the ratings war to stations who slant to the right or the left. Rush Limbaugh might claim to be a descendant of Murrow; it's a fine line between reporting the news and being the news.

Michael Haneke's Caché closed the New York Film Festival this year. Without historical context, it is still an engrossing suspense thriller. George (Daniel Auteuil) and Anne (Juliette Binoche) are a married couple haunted by surveillance tapes that constantly appear on their doorstep. The footage shows them during various episodes of their daily life. Who is shooting this footage, how are they obtaining it, and why is it being sent to them?

My first instinct was that Haneke was bringing Big Brother to the French upper middle class, but the movie doesn't go down that road, and I've never thought the French to be particularly haunted by the possibility of Orwellian government surveillance. The movie is more specifically grounded than that, and it is focused on topics relevant to Americans: race and imperialism. In this case, the movie uses misdirection to confront the French with their treatment of Algerians.

Two scenes in the movie leap out. One seems to shock every audience into screams and gasps; it was no different with the audience I saw it with. The other is the final shot of the movie, a puzzling one. My interpretation, and if you're going to see the movie, you should probably skip this next line.........wait.........wait........is that the sons collaborated in the scheme. The newest generation does not share its parents' attitudes, and they wanted to force their parents to confront their suppressed personal demons, to shake them up.

If that sounds a bit contrived, it's no more so than the plot of the movie, but Haneke is a provocateur, and he makes great film festival movies, the type that force the audience to think, to talk outside the theater afterwards. Knowing even a bit about France's long history with Algeria (e.g., see The Battle of Algiers - Criterion Collection) will add a lot to that post-movie conversation on the sidewalk.

Of course, if your only exposure to a topic is through movies and newspapers and books, you're liable to sound like a media parrot. Peter and I caught a late-night screening of Lars Von Trier's Manderlay, the second of his trilogy of American fables. I must confess that though I put in my Netflix queue, Dogville never bubbled to the top before I saw Manderlay.

The story begins with Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard, taking over from Nicole Kidman) and her father happening upon a slave plantation some 70 years after the abolition of slavery. Grace is the naive liberal here, and she stays behind to free the slaves and establish a democracy. Her father (Willem Dafoe), a gangster of some sort, is skeptical of her intentions and her prospects, but leaves behind some of his henchmen to help her out.

The set is bare, as in Dogville. Only portions of buildings and a few props appear on a dark soundstage; this is just slightly more suggestive than the set for Waiting for Godot. This minimalism is both liberating and constricting. At times, it frees your imagination, and if all you watch is Hollywood movies, your imagination may be a bit out of shape. At other times, as when Grace stands outside the bathhouse, it distracts from your ability to empathize with Grace, to imagine what she's picturing. Since you see the male slaves inside, your mind doesn't reach out to try to feel Grace's lust. Instead of feeling palpable, it feels comical.

I've heard that after the poor critical reception to Dancer in the Dark, Von Trier set out to make a series of movies that would show the United States just how the rest of the world viewed us. Taken at face value, it's a worthwhile subject. When I travel, I often ask people I encounter what their impression of the U.S. is. It's revealing, like listening to a recording of your own voice.

The irony is that Von Trier is scared of flying (among a whole handful of other phobias) and has never been to the U.S. It shows here. All the ideas about colonialism, race, naive idealism, and imperialism feel like a compendium of the ideological hostilities that have dominated the political landscape of America these past four or five years. The U.S. occupation of Iraq was cited by Howard as a fortunate coincidence in its parallels to the movie's theme of force-feeding ideologies on people, but I find it to be a hindrance. Because the issue is already so front and center in American media now, Manderlay's sting doesn't feel as sharp.

It may be a problem with the format. A fable with humans situated in such a figurative set tends to generalize the morals. If Von Trier wanted this story to break through to an American audience, a story that teaches these morals through the specific and the literal would be far more effective. Or, perhaps if the characters were animals as in Animal Farm or a Pixar movie, so the moralizing would stand out so distinctly against the medium (of course, von Trier stated in The Five Obstructions that he despises animation).

The cinematic court wouldn't be quite as intriguing without Von Trier. He's the gadfly, the court jester, and the ending of Manderlay offers a clever, dark and comic twist, a final turn of the dagger. I couldn't help but chuckle and wish the movie had more such moments. As sanctimonious as he can be, he's also a contrarian through and through, and I have a soft spot for those. His movies are like fiber in the diet, but if he wants it to reach the broadest possible audience, he should tinker with the package, wrap his movies like gelcaps around bitter medicine.

One last movie where context matters, also one I saw the New York Film Festival: The Hidden Blade by Yôji Yamada. In this case, the context is whether or not you've seen Yamada's 2002 film The Twilight Samurai. Both are based on novels by the same author, and both are so similar that if you've seen one, seeing the other can't help but suffer by comparison. The stories both center around samurais struggling against tradition and class strictures, but having traveled this road with Yamada before diminished the suspense of the protagonist's fate in The Hidden Blade. See at least one or the other, though; they demystify the samurai mythology, and the cinematography is beautiful, like looking out on a Japanese diorama through a pane of glass.

One bit of suspense that remained for me in The Hidden Blade was the mystery of the movie's titular hidden blade, a fabled samurai technique. The movie leads you to believe it might be a red herring, but thankfully, the movie does reveal the technique. It's a move more worthy of a ninja than a samurai, and it's a doozy.

Le Samourai

Le Samourai comes out on DVD this Tuesday!

Not on the bandwagon, or maybe I am

Jason Lee always seems to play a cantankerous sidekick in the movies, which is why his good-natured simpleton in My Name is Earl is such a pleasant surprise. Funny show.

I'm not one of those Cubs fans who wants the White Sox to lose. It's not a zero sum game fore baseball in Chicago, despite how many fans on both sides behave. I'd love to see Chicago with a national champion in its midst again. That's not to say a White Sox World Series victory will mean a fraction of what a Cubs World Series win would mean to me.

I love the version of the Jarhead trailer that is set to Kanye West's "Jesus Walks". It may be just a case of the music carrying the moving images, but when Jamie Foxx says "I...love...this...job" in cadence to the music, that's a beautiful thing. I've been editing army footage in class, and this trailer is driving me nuts because I'm overwhelmed by an inclination to set the footage to Kanye West.

Lincoln Burrows does escape from prison. I was walking back from class last week and he walked past me on the sidewalk. I couldn't place him except as the guy who had to escape from prison on that television show on Fox. How many degrees from fame are you when people recognize you from commercials for a show they've never seen because Fox blitzes all its programs with in-house promos?

Matthew Barney's Cremaster 3 is rearing its head again in NYC.

To absolutely no one's surprise, some of the first content available for the video iPod is adult.

I'm not even sure exactly what Apple's new software Aperture does, and it costs $499, but already I want it. Apple seems to release something I want every other week now. I surrender, just take my Visa.

Life's so hectic right now, and I'm exhausted, so this is all you get, just a few brief thoughts and rabbit droppings.

Item(s) of note

Finally, a New Order DVD compilation worth owning. Item collects all of their music videos (along with two never-before-released clips, one of which is a new video for "Temptation," I think) and the documentary New Order Story which came out in VHS in the 90's. As a bonus, the cover is designed by Peter Saville.

A python tries to swallow an alligator, and then its stomach explodes (thx Karen)

From this week's New Yorker, an article on the state of the graphic novel.

Merck announces that its experimental vaccine Gardasil is 100%, yes, that's right, 100% effective in preventing cervical cancer. Stunning.

15 unresolved claims of unverified animals, from the Loch Ness monster to the Yeti to giant octopuses. As listed by the International Society of Cryptozoology.

A teaser poster for King Kong from the United International Pictures website...

The Shining...remixed

One of our class instructors passed this Quicktime movie along to us. As I'm in editing class right now, it was both hilarious and a testament to the power of editing.

Giant Squid! And the whale

The giant squid has finally been captured on film!

Longtime readers know what a big deal this is for me. Next we need video footage of a giant squid battling a sperm whale. For me, that's the real world equivalent of Godzilla vs. King Kong.

Loosely related, Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale is playing this week at the New York Film Festival. I caught an 8 AM screening of the movie at Sundance in January. It nearly killed me to get up at the crack of dawn to drive in from Salt Lake City, especially because I was the only one of my group left at the fest, but it was worth it.

Baumbach, most known up until now as Wes Anderson's friend and frequent writing partner, based his latest movie on his childhood experience with his divorced parents. Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels play the parents suffering from marital problems, and the movie chronicles the effect of their divorce on their two sons, especially older son Walt (Jesse Eisenberg). As an added treat for New Yorkers, the movie was shot in Brooklyn, where Baumbach grew up.

Baumbach has a similar sense of humor as Anderson, wry and ironic. Lots of tannins, but a hint of fruit in a long finish. In the opening scene, each of the two sons pairs off with a parent for a doubles match. Jeff Daniels tells his son Walt, in a hushed but serious tone, to hit to his mom's backhand because it's her weaker wing. Walt does so, setting up a smash for Jeff Daniels that nearly decapitates Laura Linney. That Daniels celebrates the point sets the tone for the movie--humorous, wistful, and melancholic. The title refers to the squid and the whale at the Museum of Natural History; its significance becomes clear once you see the movie.

As to my fascination with giant squid, I'm not sure how it all started. I loved whales and other giant sea creatures as a boy, as well as 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. I love eating squid, too, though I only acquired a taste for it later in life. Mom made me eat it as a child. I should have listened to her then, not just about the squid, but about keeping up with my piano lessons.

Reviews: Lord of War, Flightplan, A History of Violence

[Yes, it's been a while since I wrote much about any movies here. It's not for lack of seeing movies, as I've probably seen more movies this year than any year in my entire life. But I do love the feedback from readers and the e-mail discussions that arise from them, and people enjoy discussing movies more than any other topic. So here are 3 reviews, with a look back at movies of the summer to follow soon. A lot of people have remarked that there's nothing they want to see in theaters recently, but I think there's more of interest on screens now than there was during summer blockbuster season.]

[SPOILER NOTE: No major spoilers ahead that you can't get from the movie trailer, especially for Flightplan since the heart of the plot is a mystery, but you will encounter some minor plot revelations if you read on. Those who insist on abstinence until seeing a movie in theaters, and I applaud you, should just move on...]

Andrew Niccol movies always center around a clever concept or scenario. They must sound like gold when pitched to a studio exec.

In a futuristic utopia/dystopiad where every baby is genetically engineered to be perfect and those who are not are discriminated against, one of the few remaining natural born babies yearns to do what society has deemed him incapable of achieving (Gattaca).

Truman Burbank lives a normal, happy if unexciting life. But he is not satisfied. Something is not right. Eventually, he discovers that his entire life is a reality show that is being filmed 24/7 and edited for television. Everyone around him is merely an actor, and his home is part of one giant set. He sets out to meet his maker and break out of this made-up universe into the real world (The Truman Show).

A down-and-out producer is seemingly doomed when the star walks off the set of his latest movie. Desperate, he creates a digital actress to take her place. The simulated actress becomes a huge star, but everyone believes she's a real person. Enchanted by his success, the producer can't bring himself to reveal the truth to the world (S1m0ne).

This stuff practically writes itself. Of course, that's also the problem. This stuff does write itself. Even if you haven't seen the movies above, you don't have to strain to anticipate the punch line. After the initial "why didn't I think of that" jolt, those movies unfold exactly as you'd expect.

Niccol's latest movie is about an international arms dealer, and so one would expect several arguments to be made. Arms dealers are immoral social parasites who facilitate global violence. If you peddle arms, you cannot wash your hands clean of innocent blood. The tentacles of the military-industrial complex run deep.

And to some extent, the usual points are made, but the pleasant surprise about Lord of War is that at it delivers its outrage in a measured tone of irony. The movie shakes its head, wags its finger at humanity, and says all the right things, but it's also winking at the audience the whole time.

Lord of War begins with a montage following the life of a bullet, from a brass casing on a conveyor belt, into crates shipped for unknown destinations, out of the crate and into the hands of an African soldier/guerilla, and finally into the barrel of the rifle from which it is fired into the forehead of a young boy wielding a machine gun. [At the official website, click on "Life as a Bullet" to see a non-animated version of this opening series of scenes.]

After watching the movie, I read The New Yorker review, in which David Denby wrote of this sequence: "...by forcing the audience to take the bullet’s flight, he is suggesting that we are complicit both in arms sales (the United States is a leading exporter and in eager enjoyment of movie violence), of which this sequence is a startling and admonitory example."

I read this opening a bit differently, though Denby has confessed many of his sins in public before, and perhaps he has never forgiven himself for arming neighborhood kids on both sides of a snowball fight in his youth. Rather than indict the audience, the opening sequence exonerates the bullet. The bullet rests in the same position on screen in front of us as it's whisked around the world, an inert piece of metal with no say over its own fate. What's disheartening is that the relentless forward motion of the bullet seems to propel both the bullet and the audience towards an unavoidable conclusion. Niccol implies that these arms sales and the human conflicts they supply are natural conditions of life, that nothing can be done to halt them. It sets the tone for the movie: it's highly watchable, lyrical, and thought-provoking, and it doesn't settle for putting the usual suspects on trial.

At the age of 20, Yuri Orlov (Nicolas Cage) intuits the economics of global conflict, and with a businessman's mentality, decides to capitalize on the market opportunity. Orlov, a son of Ukrainian immigrants living in NYC and posing as Jews, ditches his job at his parent's diner and begins selling guns.

He discovers that his lack of a nagging conscience makes him a great salesman to both his customers and himself. He doesn't need to convince himself that the world needs dealers like himself; he truly believes it, and his customers respond to his conviction. Soon he is the go-to guy of despots and leaders the world over, surpassing competitors like Ian Holm who choose to sell only to those whose missions they agree with.

As I am in an editing class now, I paid attention to the work of Zach Staenberg here, and his work keeps the movie's feet earthbound instead of up on the moral high ground. The movie is filled with moments that flirt with sanctimony, but Staenberg never lingers on dead bodies or any other shots that might cause a modern audience to roll its eyes.

The movie doesn't linger on visual punch lines either. Arms dealing is treated in the movie like any other business, leading to a whole host of dark comic images. Early on, Orlov attends an arms dealing trade show, in which leggy models in camoflauge dance on tanks while wielding guns like canes in a cabaret. Before you have time to dwell on the image, the movie has cut away. The pace of the humorous beats is relentless, but modern audiences who've grown up in the age of The Simpsons will find it familiar and comforting. It's one of the few movies I've seen in recent years that has the comic pace of a half hour sitcom.

All the other characters help to situate Orlov's conscience. His wife Ava (Bridget Moynahan), morally-conscious arms dealer Simeon Weisz (Ian Holm), his bum of a younger brother Vitaly (Jared Leto), an Interpol agent (Ethan Hawke), and an African dictator and frequent customer Andre Baptiste Sr. (Eamonn Walker). It's no surprise that the most compelling of these is the most ruthless one, Baptiste. The others are only of moderate interest; their fates feel prescribed. The faceless and shadowy figure of an American general, one who uses Orlov as a middleman, also feels like a movie cliche, but his screen time is limited.

Nicolas Cage mutes his performance by about 3 decibels here to match the measured sensibility of the movie. He's always had the hangdog face of someone who's always sad when he's happy, and a bit happy when he's sad, like an earnest clown, and it's perfect here. Those around Orlov try to force him to confront the moral outrage of his line of work, but he refuses to engage, even if his eyes say differently. He always brings the conversation back to the mundane, and his words have an appealing if morally bankrupt common sense:

The first and most important rule of gun-running is, never get shot with your own merchandise.

I sell to leftists, and I sell to rightists. I even sell to pacifists, but they're not usually repeat customers.

Back then, I didn't sell to Osama Bin Laden. Not because of moral reasons, but because he was always bouncing checks.

The movie doesn't offer any solutions to the business of arms deals, let alone the violence in the world. Orlov never feels more true to himself than when he's trying to close a deal, but his face reveals his anguish. He's the guilty bystander.

In one scene, Orlov wanders in a daze around an African guerilla camp, disoriented by having done lines of cocaine mixed with gunpowder. He stumbles into two soldiers, one of whom tries to gun him down in anger. When the gun jams, Orlov offers to take a look at it, to see if he can help fix it.

In another scene, Orlov outlines the virtues of a 9mm handgun to Baptiste. When Baptiste subsequently picks up the gun and shoots a security guard through the head for flirting with a girl, Orlov leaps to his feat and screams in dismay, "Why'd you do that?"

Baptiste, shocked at Orlov's impudence, points the gun at Orlov and prepares to pull the trigger.

Orlov continues, both out of self-preservation and honesty, "Now it's a used gun! How am I going to sell a used gun?!"

[Footnote: It's an odd coincidence, or perhaps it's another ironic wink, that in real-life, the most well-known Yuri Orlov is a famous nuclear physicist and Soviet dissident, not a gun dealer.]

***

For most of the suspense thriller Flightplan, the audience is in Kyle Pratt's (Jodie Foster) shoes. Her husband recently died from a fall from a tall building, and she and her 6 year old daughter Julia and bringing his body back home to NYC from Berlin. They happen to be flying on the new E474 jumbo jet, whose engines Pratt helped to design. Early in the flight, Pratt falls asleep for a moment, and when she wakes, her daugher has gone missing. No one on the plane seems to have seen her even board the plane, and everyone looks at Pratt as if she might be delusional from grief.

Jodie Foster externalizes the strength and fear of an anxious mother like no one else can. With the control of a world-class gymnast, she can cause her large blue eyes to quiver and fill with tears. I've missed Jodie Foster, last seen in a surprising cameo in A Very Long Engagement. As a leading actress, she fills injects a sense of gravity and heft, even when it's not provided by the script. And in this case, it's not, though Foster manages to keep us engrossed. Is she imagining things? Didn't we see her daughter on screen, or were we merely seeing hallucinations from Foster's mind? With their shoulder shrugs and blank expressions, every passenger and crew member seems like a suspect.

The critical moment in the movie, the one where it depressurizes, so to speak, is the one when the movie finally pulls us away from Jodie Foster's perspective, and, in doing so, reveals the solution to the mystery. I won't reveal anything except to say that it is both preposterous and mundane. No one in the theater gasped in shock at what was behind the curtain, as they did at the end of The Sixth Sense. It was all down to the runway from there.

The movie suffers from another comparison, one that will haunt movies for years: 9/11. All airplane terror scenarios offered up by movies such as Flightplan and the recent Red Eye will forever pale alongside the story behind the airplane hijackings of Sept 11.

***

Like Road to Perdition, A History of Violence is adapted from a short graphic novel (I love titles that arise from stock phrases, like this one, or like Tobias Wolff's short story The Night In Question). Tom Stall runs a diner in a small town, leading a quiet life with his pretty wife Edie (Maria Bello) and their two children, Jack and Sarah. Though on the surface all seems idyllic, we know that danger is on its way because we've met two sinister drifters in the opening scene.

We also feel a sense of foreboding because director David Cronenberg and his editor and cinematographer ratchet up the dread in the first part of the movie notch by notch, letting shots linger while the Howard Shore score lurks and trembles ominously in the background. The opening shot is quiet, a medium full-shot that holds on the two men, checking out of a hotel. We sense their blood is cold in their laconic movements. Their faces have long ago ceased to register any human warmth. No music plays at all, the shot is almost silent.

When one of the men goes to check out, he asks his partner Billy to pull the car up. He complies, starting the engine and driving up about fifteen feet, evoking a nervous giggle from the audience. It's the first of many comic moments that Cronenberg inserts to release a bit of the tension. He's like a hot-air balloon pilot, wielding humor and suspense with an anesthesiologist's precision precision to keep the audience floating between laughter and apprehension. At the same time we laugh at the irony of pulling the car up, we're holding our breath awaiting a gunshot from inside the hotel lobby.

Meanwhile, Jack, a shy and somewhat dweebish teenager, encounters his own problems at school. At gym class, Jack catches a flyball off the bat of the school bully Jared to end the game, causing said bully and his usual posse of toughies (arms folded across the chest, nodding slowly with sneers on their face) to antagonize Jack all over town. It's an absurd moment. After Jared hits the flyball, he flips his bat away like Barry Bonds and starts his home run trot, yet the flyball doesn't cause Jack to have to move an inch to catch it out in rightfield. Jared obviously doesn't play much baseball. His reaction of anger is so exaggerated that the audience burst into laughter.

We know at that moment that both Tom and his son Jack will both have to confront their own antagonists, that Jack will be a foil for his father. The movie has the feel of a Western, so we know that the two criminals will stroll into Tom's bar for a showdown. Tom prevails and becomes a local hero, but the publicity from the local media attract three unwelcome visitors to town, led by Ed Harris with a creepy makeup job and a bad eye. These men claim Tom is not who he purports to be, that his ability to kill is no coincidence. Soon not just his wife and kids but even the town sheriff are wondering just who Tom is.

There's a moment in the movie, a simple change of a character's accent, that reveals the truth we've suspected. As with many of the finest moments in the movie, it's delicate but unmistakable, a quiet thrill. The subtlety has the audience leaning forward into each moment.

The scenes of violence are shot and edited in real-time, which is not to say they aren't breathtaking in pace. No slow-mo or stuttering frames or jump cuts, but the swift editing gives the violence the feeling of an explosion, as if violence is a primal impulse or instinct hardwired into the human condition. The creators are fully in control of the story at all moments, and their virtuosity is impressive to behold.

But for a Cronenberg movie, and for all the violence, A History of Violence is not as provocative as so many reviews would have you believe. As with Road to Perdition, the movie feels a bit slight, like pulp fiction dressed in a tuxedo, or a novella on steroids. The contrived nature of the story elements and of many of the characters undermines the movie's credibility as a fable of America, or violence.

The character of Tom Small is the type you only find in pulp. He's a rural Jason Bourne, and though Viggo Mortensen lends humanity to all his roles (perhaps it's because he's a cultured guy in real life, painting, writing poetry, exfoliating, arranging flowers, composing ballads on his lute), the character lost me at "Hello, I'm a low-key farmer, but at the first sign of violence I can transform into a lean, mean, killing machine."

Another well-known actor appears at the end of the movie and offers a tickle of a performance, but again it's the type of artful performance that distanced me from any grand messages about violence and humanity. Only Edie and Jack feel like people I know.

And perhaps that's for the best. I've always suspected my local dry cleaner of possessing a dark past. One day I might complain that she'd missed a stain on one of my dress shirts, only to have her fly over the counter to deliver a flying kick to my cranium before removing my eyeball with a sewing needle.

***

Is there any movie that Ebert doesn't like anymore? In middle age, his critical thumb has discovered Viagra. This week, there are more stars on his homepage than on an American flag. His reviews from early in his career contain so much fantastic work that it's a bit disheartening for me to see his critical carving knife dulled with use. Whereas Pauline Kael seemed to like fewer and fewer movies as she aged, Ebert seems to laud more and more. Perhaps he's caught a case of the softies from his vapid on-screen partner Richard Roeper.

It's also a problem with reducing movies to thumbs up, thumbs down, or 1 through 4 stars, or any sort of rating system, one reason I gave up using the star system here. The Siskel and Ebert television show has turned Ebert into a populist arbitrator for movies, and he can never go back now. Our enjoyment of every movie is different, and a star rating is too reductionist in isolation. It's one reason Ebert has had to spend so much time in recent years trying to get people to read his reviews to make sense of some of his ratings; to many people, he's all thumbs (in fairness to him, he still writes full-length reviews of all movies he screens).

Across thousands of people, an objective measure like that has some use, and in our time-constrained life, many people simply scan soundbites or critics recommendations for a quick yay nay. We've come to expect movie reviews in our magazines and newspapers on the week a movie opens, to help us decide what to see, and so critics orient their reviews to that market. If you can reduce your opinion to a soundbite, it might be picked up and included in the print ad for the movie.

A site like Metacritic, which attempts to translate all movie reviews into a 100 point scale, is amusing as a very rough survey of the overall critical response to a movie, but Metacritic weights all reviews differently in coming up with their aggregate score, so anyone who reads too much into the exact overall number, whether it's an 88 or an 86, a 72 or a 75, is reading both a precision and an accuracy that just isn't there. Read an Anthony Lane review and ask ten people where it rests on a 100 point scale, and you'll likely get ten different numbers.

At the end of the day, the only review that matters is the one that matches your own opinion of the movie. Usually that's your own review, but not always. Some reviewers can verbalize your response to a movie, break down how and why you felt a certain way about something. That's why people go back and read Pauline Kael's reviews after they've seen a movie.

$900 phones, $200 crayons, and a $1.50 sponge

Pre-order the Nokia 8801 from Neiman Marcus for $899(!?!). It's a gorgeous handset, but that price is absurd. Cell phones don't seem to have advanced much in a long time, other than getting skinnier. Still only a half megapixel digital camera in this one. All I want is a cell phone with a slim profile, half-decent digital camera, quad-band capability so I can use it all over the world, the ability to send text messages and photos, and a simple-to-use on-screen interface. I'm not sure I've seen the phone yet that combines all these features. Why are handset mfrs focused on all sorts of other useless features?

We watched The Cutting Edge - The Magic of Movie Editing in class. Very similar in content to Edge Codes.com: The Art of Motion Picture Editing, which we saw the previous week. I prefer the former, and it has the added benefit of being on DVD now.

Yes, Barneys Baby New York has just what that newborn needs, a $200 crayon set. Or you can go with the classic Crayola box of 64 for $5.49, and it comes with a built-in sharpener, too.

When you stay with someone and they give you towels, do you really have to have a hand towel and washcloth?

Watch a webcast of an operation before you undergo one.

The coolest household cleaning product since the Swiffer is the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. Just soak the sponge in water, and proceed to clean bathroom and kitchen surfaces with a bit of light scrubbing. I have no idea how it works, but I suspect dark arts. Whatever, my stovetop is clean, and that's all that matters.

A great interview with Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew in which he presents an incisive view of China's future on the global stage, among other topics.

So can I get another bag of pretzels?

Tha JetBlue story is a fascinating one because the passengers on board were watching live coverage of their ordeal on the DirecTV feed in their seat-back televisions. It was almost the opposite of the situation in New Orleans, where the trapped citizens were in the dark as to what was happening, even as reporters roamed among them, piping their story out to the rest of the world.

In general, I think it's best for the pilot to share as much information as possible to explain turbulence, or delays, or problems of any sort. Keeping people in the dark is one of the oldest tools in the storyteller's handbook for how to keep them in suspense, but that's not what you want with a plane full of jumpy, bug-eyed passengers.

However, television news coverage is often guilty of sensationalizing late-breaking stories, and from what I've read, passengers were watching uninformed television commentators presenting all sorts of horrific scenarios, none of which were the likely outcome in what aviation experts have described as a standard emergency landing.

So does this help or hurt JetBlue business? In cases like these, it seems as if the airplane model usually takes the brunt of the blame. In this case it's the Airbus A320. Reporters have quickly combed government records and found that 7 Airbus A320's have had landing gear problems (though I have not yet read what the denominator in that equation should be, or how the resulting percentage would compare to that of other aircrafts; is 7 good or bad? Who knows). But I suspect that the impact to the airline affected, or the airplane manufacturer, is brief and minimal.

Either people are really logical and able to do the math to realize that air travel is really safe, or they fly because comparable alternatives are lacking, or some combination of the above. I have certain aircraft types I prefer over others because of the seating arrangement and leg room, but it's rare when I have two flights of comparable price that allow me to choose a specific type of plane.

On a somewhat related note, I'm curious about the answer to the disappearance of Jodie Foster's daughter in Flightplan (7-minute sneak peek at the official site). It's a trailer with an intriguing hook. Everyone I've talked to reacts with surprise when I mention my curiosity, and I suppose they're right in anticipating a mundane explanation. I've never heard of the director, either, and his resume doesn't inspire confidence.

The main problem, though, is that the moviegoing public is well-versed in Hollywood thriller formulas. It's not easy to surprise anyone if you stick to the playbook. The trailer gives away enough that it's highly likely that Foster's daughter was on the flight, that someone snatched her daughter for some reason related to her participation in the design of the airplane (that info will certainly aid her in her search), and that she is reunited with her daughter by movie's end.

Of course, Hitchcock often gave away the gig early in the movie, as in Dial M for Murder, yet still managed to craft an engrossing movie. It's not always what you tell, but how you tell it. I enjoy watching Jodie Foster and Peter Saarsgard on screen, and probably will sometime this weekend.

On the Marc Jacobs

On the Marc Jacobs homepage, you can click a link to watch the video of his 2006 Collection runway show, which opened with the Penn State Nittany Lions marching band playing "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Never have so many band dorks shared the stage with so many babes. Fashion shows are inherently ridiculous, so twists like this one or the nude runway show at the end of Altman's Ready to Wear are to be expected. Still, I'd leap at the chance to see a fashion show in person if I could score tickets. Who wouldn't?

***

Among the 25 new MacArthur Fellows receiving $500,000 genius grants this year is Edet Belzberg. We will be editing her newest project, which isn't even listed at IMDb yet, in the second half of our class. She's most known for her first feature-length documentary Children Underground, which is now at the top of my Netflix queue. So exciting!

***

Smashing Pumpkins lead singer Billy Corgan fielded questions about the Chicago Cubs in the Chicago Tribune Sports page. Being a creative type, he chose to ignore the Shift key.

I can't even talk or think about the Cubs anymore, this season has been such a disappointment. I haven't watched one of their games since I left for China.

***

Stream the new Elizabethtown soundtrack at MySpace. I've never once touched my MySpace page, but it's MySpace has carved out a nice little niche for themselves in the crowded social community software space with their music content.

***

As NYC waits to see which of its restaurants will be crowned with three stars in the first Michelin Guide in North America, or even which 500 will merit mention at all (pre-order the Michelin Guide to New York City 2006 from Amazon.com for 32% off; it ships on Nov 4, 2005), it's useful to review what three stars from Michelin mean. According to Michelin, three stars denote "exceptional cuisine, worth a special journey, where diners eat extremely well, sometimes superbly. The wine list features generally outstanding vintages, and the surroundings and service are part of this unique experience, which is priced accordingly."

I tried using a Michelin Guide once, but it wasn't nearly as useful as I'd hoped, in part because my French was rusty, but also because the guides don't actually provide much description of each listing. Fortunately, the web community will be sure to blog the 3-star winner(s) to death.

Michelin's inspectors have been paying anonymous visits to 1,200 NYC restaurants since February. During this time, I have been tempted, on more than one occasion, to stroll into some of NYC's finest restaurant with a Moleskine notebook and Mont Blanc pen, wearing some stylish metal frame glasses and sporting a French accent. I'd look all about me like a tourist entering a cathedral in Europe, and after the first bite or two of each dish, I'd jot notes in my notebook.

You laugh, but simply bringing my camera into a restaurant and snapping photos of my dishes before eating them has led to no shortage of free dishes, compliments of the kitchen, and face-to-face meetings with the head chef.

***

Epicurious lists ten restaurant trends they hate. Personally, the most exasperating thing about the NYC dining scene is the impossibility of getting a seat at any half-decent place. If you have to make a reservation weeks in advance, any meal starts to seem like an ordeal, placing undue pressure on the experience. One is bound to be disappointed in some way. It's less the scarcity of reservation slots as it is the dearth of walk-in availability that disappoints me.

I enjoy being able to stroll into a neighborhood joint to enjoy a spontaneous bite, to feel like I can run into a friend on the street and be enjoying an unplanned but delightful meal together just a few moments later.

***

Google WiFi service to launch shortly?

***

Which animal kills more people in the U.S. than any other?

Ripple and Roll

On the way to see Arcade Fire at Central Park Summerstage tonight, I strolled past Sean Connery. I was tempted to intone, in my best Gert Fröbe cackle, "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die." But Connery was looking wearied by age, and if he did pass away in the next week or so, how awful would I have felt?

Arcade Fire put on a great show. Their music is anthemic, hyper-infused with emotion, so seeing them with a choir of rabid fans is like attending a fire and brimstone sermon with some true believers. You can't help but hum, clap, wave, and head bop to their tunes. It helps that the band members look like they're having such a good time on stage. The drummers ran around in a frenzy, banging on everything with their drumsticks (one of them nearly ran through the back curtain and fell off the stage). The lead singer tried to punch a hole through the stage with his mic stand.

For their encore, Arcade Fire brought surprise guest David Bowie on stage. He was looking dapper in a white suit and matching fedora. They accompanied him on one of his old tunes, then he played guitar and sang a bit of "Wake Up". He participated in the same way earlier this week at a Fashion Week party (I linked to a recording of that yesterday), but seeing him live was still a bonus. There may have been a CD released in the past year to year and a half that I loved more than Funeral, but if there was, it's not top of mind.

On my way into the concert, a security guard told me my zoom lens was too long. No sexual innuendos, she was being literal. She gave me two choices, dump my zoom lens somewhere and pick it up after the concert, or hand over my digital camera battery. Since I had nowhere to stash my zoom lens, I neutered my SLR and handed over the battery, which she then proceeded to stick down her pants. I guess she ran out of pockets. So I wasn't able to snap any pics of Arcade Fire's stage antics, though I did end up with a very wary battery at the end of the concert.

I started my editing intensive class at The Edit Center this week. It has lived up to the "intensive" advanced billing, but I'm loving every hour. Along with improving my Final Cut Pro editing skills by leaps and bounds, I've gained a newfound appreciation for movie editors and how much impact they have on the final product you see on the big screen. Like book editors, their best work is largely transparent to audiences, most of the credit going to the director or actors, just as no all credit for books goes to the author. The only time you notice an editor is when they've missed something.

Our class field trips are mostly outings to see movies, and that's a type of field trip I can appreciate. We hit the Lower East Side to see Edge Codes.com, a movie that, like The Cutting Edge (not the D.B. Sweeney/Moira Kelley hockey/figure skating flick), does for movie editors what Visions of Light did for cinematographers. Andrew Mondshein (editor, The Sixth Sense) and Christopher Tellefsen (editor, Gummo, Kids), interviewed in the movie, attended the screening and fielded questions.

Mondshein spoke of how the first few times they screened The Sixth Sense for audiences, the theatre erupted in whispers and confusion when Bruce Willis's ring hit the floor at the end of the movie. So he added in the flashbacks, to Haley Joel Osment saying "They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're dead." To Willis's encounters with live people, like his wife at the restaurant. Mondshein threw in just enough so audiences could connect the dots, appreciate the "Aha!", and return to enjoying the movie's conclusion.

Tomorrow's technology today: fusion and nanotechnology, in consumable goods form

Banana Nutrament has an MP3 of David Bowie and Arcade Fire singing "Wake Up" together. Bowie vocals on one of my favorite songs of the last year...cool. I'm going to see Arcade Fire on Central Park Summerstage Thursday evening. It will be my first Central Park concert.

How efficient is the Red Cross? Is there a better charity to donate to when crises like Hurricane Katrina strike? It's the most linked to charity for donating to the Hurricane Katrina relief effort, but someone expressed reservations about how efficiently the Red Cross channeled those funds to aiding victims. I don't know the answer, but I found this evaluation in which the Red Cross online earned a four star rating (out of four). Not sure how objective or accurate this evaluation is, though I was hoping more knowledgeable folks had already done the legwork on this. The president and CEO, Marsha Evans, does indeed make a really generous salary ($450K a year, according to this site), though overall program expenses seem reasonable at around 5.6% of revenues.

The new iPod Nano is cool (the ROKR is not), most people agree, but while I love my iPod(s), I really hope the quality control on this new edition is better than that on previous editions. I don't know anyone who's purchased an iPod who hasn't had to bring it in for repairs at some point. Ironically, my most reliable is my first one, the first generation iPod. My other iPod, the Shuffle, is temperamental, like a crazy girlfriend.

Stream the new Sigur Ros CD Takk

Yet another Godfather novel on tap for next year. Sounds like this one weaves the Corleone saga with the Kennedy assassination.

Xbox 360 has a launch date: Nov. 22

Gillette unveils yet another razor, the successor to the Mach 3: Fusion. This baby has an enhanced indicator lubristrip, 5 blades, and a precision trimmer blade for side burns and shaping your goatee.

Heather Havrilesky rates the fall television comedies. Those that rate well on her scale are Ricky Gervais's HBO series "Extras," Chris Rock's UPN series "Everybody Hates Chris," and, to a lesser degree, NBC's "My Name is Earl" and Fox's "Kitchen Confidential." "Extras" premieres Sunday, Sept 25, at 10:30pm. That's the one I'll be tuning into for sure, along with every other fanatical devotee of "The Office."

Red Sox outfielder Gape Kapler ruptures his Achilles tendon running around second base after a teammate hit a home run

Canon jumps into the HDV camcorder fray this week with the XL H1. It will cost $8999 and ship in November. Cool looking camcorder, but surprisingly, Canon won't offer 24P or 720P recording, only 1080i in HDV mode. Whether or not they believe 24P is useful or not, it's clear many users do, and the user is king. Panasonic will offer that in their HVX200, and they'll take market share because of it.

The valiant

"Cowards die many times before their deaths,
The valiant never taste of death but once."

Caesar, from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (Act II, Scene ii, 32-37)

I saw Denzel Washington play Brutus in a production of Julius Caesar earlier this year. From my seats in the far left of the orchestra, I missed a lot of lines spoken away from me. Many of Marcus Aurelius's lines were incomprehensible, and the setting was lost in time: in some scenes soldiers carried machine guns and walked through metal detectors, but in others they seemed as if they were in ancient Rome. Not my favorite production, and not my favorite Shakespeare play, but the quote above cuts to the heart of things.

Now we have HBO's miniseries Rome. After the first three episodes, the show has done just enough to hold my attention, but my blood isn't boiling the way I'd expected it to, what with all the spicy intrigue that made up ancient Rome. The story is told from the perspective of lesser (and I presume fictional) characters who brush up against more well-known figures such as Caesar, Mark Antony, Cato, and Brutus, a crucial decision, and the wrong one. This is one instance where I'd rather follow the brighter lights of ancient Italian history. How the story might take legends and bring them down from the heavens and humanize them, that's what interests me. This interpretation of Rome is like a miniseries about the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the 90's, but focused on the stories of Bobby Hansen, Luc Longley, and the ball boy.

March of the lemmings

Wolfram Tones: Create music based on Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Download them as ring tones if you like. Many of them do sound like ring tones, actually. It reminds me of GarageBand with a random music generator. Not stuff I'd listen to all the time, but it's interesting to click on the various music genre buttons to see how much it resembles what you think of as country or r&b or classical. Someday perhaps there will be a Computer Idol competition. On a somewhat related note, the ideas in A New Kind of Science (NKS) seem to have relevance to the current evolution vs. intelligent design debate. NKS is online, so you can read, for example, this chapter: "Intelligence in the Universe."

The UCI, cycling's governing body, exonerates Lance Armstrong of doping charges and criticizes the accusers. L'Equipe to respond saturday. One thing is certain; this whole bitter fight is no help to the sport, as doping has once again, as in 1998.

Derek and Ken were in town for Labor Day Weekend. I always learn something when I spend time with those guys. One of my learnings this past weekend was that lemmings do not commit mass suicide. It's a myth perpetuated by a Disney documentary in which the filmmakers ran lemmings off of the side of a cliff to create the myth of their suicidal tendencies. Looks like that Disney documentary is available from Amazon.com on VHS. I'm not sure how the lemming myth took hold of me, but I suspect it was Gary Larson and his Far Side comics. I remember one depicted a whole flock of lemmings headed for the edge of a cliff to jump into the ocean, but one is shown wearing an inner tube with a sly grin. Another showed a family of lemmings in a car, headed off on vacation. The mother and father lemming sit in the front seat while two lemming children are in back. The mother is shown shouting at the kids, "Hey! I told you kids to knock it off back there!... or so help me I'll just take this car and drive it off the first cliff I come to!" I miss The Far Side. Larson went out on top.

Meet the F**kers (Windows Media), a Daily Show video clip that provides some satiric catharsis for any anger you might feel towards the Bush administration for their slow reactions to Hurricane Katrina. I hadn't seen the footage of Mike Myers' reaction to Kanye West's outburst until watching this clip, or Michael Brown's disastrous interviews, or the Larry King interview with Celine Dion. Memorable.

Colin Powell regrets his statements to the United Nations in February of 2003. I was aboard a ferry from the north island of New Zealand to the south island when he gave his testimony, and I watched it on CNN. Little did I know it would be downhill from there for someone who seemingly everyone thought would make a perfect presidential candidate.

I'm going to join Bill Simmons on the Bears bandwagon. Really good young defense, and if Kyle Orton surprises (and sometimes new starting QBs do) then perhaps they can win a bunch of low-scoring rumbles. It all depends on what that offense looks like after they take off the bandages.

Vincent Cerf is the new "Chief Internet evangelist" at Google. I look forward to hearing about this Internet thing. It sounds cool. As an aside, based on my years of working in the Internet biz, anyone who has "evangelist" in their job title has a cushy job.

The Nokia 8800 is one gorgeous cell phone. Though China isn't listed as one of the countries where you can buy one, I saw them in several stores in Beijing and Shanghai. The slider resistance is firm but silky smooth. I held it, fondled it, drooled over it, but left my credit card sheathed. $800, which is roughly what they were charging, is a lot to pay for technological sex appeal.

$ > time

Hurricane Katrina rips hole in Superdome roof
It sounds like something out of The Day After Tomorrow.

Money is more valuable than time
This according to a paper presented at the 2005 World Congress of the Econometric Society. The researchers found that people were much more generous with their time than their money.

A transcript of Lance Armstrong's appearance on Larry King Live
I still haven't read an account of what happened that makes it clear exactly what was tested, how it was verified, etc. All this medical testing jargon is just confusing. It's shocking how eager Tour director Jean-Marie Leblanc is to sully the image of his event's most famous and most recent champion. Can you imagine David Stern leaping at the opportunity to publicly lambaste one of the NBA's star players? The Tour was already going to need a lift next year with Lance gone, and this is hardly the best way for Leblanc or L'Equipe to promote next year's race.

More and more couples are streaming music from iPods instead of hiring DJs for their weddings
One couple is cited as saying that they didn't think the DJ would have music from their favorite bands, like the Postal Service and the Shins. They then note that neither they nor their wedding guests are big dancers, which explains a lot.

Marat Safin drops out of the U.S. Open with a knee injury
Thus removing one of the few players with enough game to beat Federer. Safin is replaced by Bjorn Phau of Germany, who is not among those aforementioned players. Actually, on hard courts, maybe Safin is the only guy who could have stopped Federer.

An interview with Cameron Crowe about Elizabethtown
I am intensely curious about the already famous telephone conversation from this movie. Crowe mentions that Kirsten Dunst's character makes Orlando Bloom's character a "mixmap" - a map with musical cues. Very cool, like amateur museum podcasts, in a way. I can see posting a musical mixmap as a podcast to someone in another city. More from Crowe on Dunst:

And she's a huge music fan. I play music during takes and she's the first person I've worked with who'll go, "Um, I don't like that song." The camera will be rollin' and I'll play "Trouble Man" by Marvin Gaye, and she'll go, "Turn that Marvin Gaye music off! Put on some Rilo Kiley."

She stays up all night and downloads music from LimeWire. She needs to be arrested.

During the summer TV lull, I set my PVR to tape Six Feet Under so I could finally see what the hubbub was about. From what I'd read, I'd be catching the show after it had jumped the shark, and that might explain my cool reaction. Watching the first half of this last season was like listening to one's parents arguing; really shrill and overwrought. The show also relies too heavily on confrontations with ghosts and spirits, something The Sopranos deals in occasionally as well. That's always felt like a dramatic crutch to me, a way to cover ideas that can't otherwise be conveyed by acting and dialogue between real people. I can understand how fans of the show would stick it out through every last episode, though. I was the same way with The X-Files, a show that lurched on for several seasons after it had careened off the tracks.

Former Washington Post pop music critic David Segal laments the the loss of spontaneity in modern rock concerts

James Surowiecki weighs in on tipping in light of Thomas Keller's decision to abolish tipping at Per Se, replacing it with a fixed service charge

A tid and a bit

It's not often that I get to share equal billing with Ray Allen

This year's New York Film Festival lineup
Me thinks I must attend a few of these

Just a dollop of sour cream

Another HD Gallery clip from Apple, a trailer for the upcoming movie from Terry Gilliam, The Brothers Grimm, starring Matt Damon and Heath Ledger (Quicktime 7 required)
Hadn't heard of this movie, but it looks like fun, despite the hokey special effects.

Trailer for Tsui Hark's Seven Swords
A distinctively un-HD clip

Steven Levitt's papers are now available for download for those who want to go into his Freakonomics topics in more depth
Scroll down the page to find the links to downloadable PDFs.

The Pixies are recording their first studio album in 14 years
Cool.

Pop star or porn star?

The longest final table in history is over: Joseph Hachem wins the World Series of Poker
Yeah, I don't know who he is either.

Needles in haystacks

Back from Washington, DC, arriving to a snowstorm-sized pile of links in my newsreader...

The World Series of Poker's main event is down to just 12 players
Just one pro remains, Mike "The Mouth" Matusow, in 8th place (profile of Matusow in the NYTimes). Phil Ivey, one of the last big names, finished in 20th place, while last year's champ, Greg Raymer, finished 25th. Kate Hudson's brother Oliver earned the dubious honor of being the first player to be knocked out of the tourney, and on his very first hand. He had a pair of 10's, raised pre-flop, and Sam Farha called. The flop came A-A-10, and both guys found all their money in the center of the table. Farha had A-10 and left Hudson almost famous, befitting Kate's brother.

Esquire Magazine's Sexiest Woman Alive will be revealed in the November issue, but the clues give it away: Jessica Biel

Matthew Barney and Björk collaborate on a film which debuts at a museum in Japan
From the article, a summary of the movie titled Drawing Restraint 9: "Björk and Barney arrive as guests on board the ship. During a storm, they marry each other in a mysterious ceremony, morph into whales and then swim off towards the Antarctic. In this dream-like story, nothing is really narrated." Yep, that sounds like a Barney/Björk movie. Björk also revealed that "she and Barney plan to sell their New York home and live on a houseboat." That also sounds like something they'd do.

UCLA grad student plays Russian roulette as performance art, terrifying his classmates
Huge hubbub ensues, including possible legal action and the retirement of two professors known for controversial performance art of their own, but in the end all returned to normal and the student received an A-minus for the course.

Simpsons-Family Guy feud
This is sure to end with Homer gunned down in front of Kwik-E-Mart by Stewie Griffin.

Mansquito! Attack of the Sabretooth! Dog Soldiers!

At the Tour de France, Bobby Julich is riding elliptically-shaped chainrings
These chainrings change the effective gear ratio as you pedal. In this case, Julich's O.Symetric Harmonic chainrings maximize the gear ratio when pedals are horizontal, when you can theoretically apply the most effective perpendicular force to the pedals. Then the gear ratio decreases for the bringing the pedal across the top and bottom of the pedal stroke. Shimano once made a similar pedal but abandoned it because it's so tricky to integrate with the front derailleur (the chain is moving up and down through the derailleur cage).

Morgan Freeman buys a pop-a-shot machine
Since Freeman narrates every other movie out there these days, this is timely. And funny.

Countdown of features in the upcoming Movable Type 3.2

The bizarre and sometimes disturbing world of bioart

Everything, and I mean everything, you ever wanted to know about the male hug
Mine is a hug-happy family.

Trump tries on some bad idea jeans

Review: Marathon, Princess Raccoon, Mindgame

I grabbed Scott to see the Korean movie Marathon last last Sunday night as some inspiration for his upcoming attempt at an Ironman. The last several Korean movies I've seen have been excessively disturbing, with graphic violence and sex a magnitude of order higher than anything in American movies. Though I have nothing against such movies, I wasn't in the mood for that Sunday night. Marathon's description portrayed it as a feel good movie, and though I've been fooled by such for Korean movies in the past, thank goodness this one wasn't kidding.

Based on a true story, Marathon was the top-grossing movie in Korea this year. Cho Won is an autistic young boy. Like other autistic children, he has problems relating to other people, including his younger brother and parents. Fortunately for Cho Won, his mother (Mi-suk Kim) is strong and loving, with the type of patience only a mother could have. When we jump forward and see Cho Won at age twenty, his mother is still caring for him, though her husband lives elsewhere, perhaps driven away by his wife's all-consuming interest in her Cho Won, or perhaps just unable to summon the same patience and energy needed to raise such a child.

Cho Won's mother has found an outlet for him in running. He's good at it and places in 10K's in his special classification. She decides to find him coaching so that he can train to run a marathon. When a former Boston Marathon winner is assigned 200 hours of community service at a school for autistic children for a DUI, Cho Won's mother senses and opening and asks him to coach her son as a way to work off some of his community service obligation. The coach's best days are behind him, and he lives from one beer to the next in a slovenly apartment. I'm going to take a wild guess and say that Jung-wook translates as Morris Buttermaker.

Autistic children display a very limited range of emotions, and as such they serve in movies as mirrors through which we see the nature of the people around them, their problems and natures, as in Rain Man. Do people try and take advantage of them? Do they try and care for them? How do they handle the autistic child's inability to show gratitude or love? Autistic children interpret everything literally, and some comedy ensues in the failure of the coach to understand that about Cho Won.

Does Cho Won actually enjoy running? No one is certain. When asked if he likes running or not, Cho Won says he likes it. But phrase the question a different way and he'll say he doesn't. Can Cho Won even run a marathon safely if he doesn't learn how to pace himself? The story of Cho Won is mostly a story of his mother and how she struggles to best raise Cho Won. Does she want him to run a marathon because it's what she wants? Is he only a puppet for her own dreams? Whenever she lets her attention wander for just a moment, Cho Won seems to get himself into trouble, yet at other times she's accused of clinging to him too tightly or ordering him around simply to make her own life easy. It's a complex role, and Mi-Suk Kim plays it from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other with genuine heart.

The movie builds to somewhat of an expected ending, but the road there twists in surprising ways. The climax of the movie stays with Cho Won all through a race, the only sequence in the movie where its emotion seemed forced. Since Cho Won is autistic, it's not clear that all the flashbacks and thoughts shown on screen could actually be his, and we can't empathize with an autistic character the way we'd empathize with the other characters. It's one of the few times where I wanted more cutaways to the mother, brother, and coach during a climactic sports scene.

But it's a minor quibble with a touching story, one that resonated with me even more when the on screen epilogue noted that Cho Won's character was based on a real-life autistic Korean boy who ran a marathon in 2002. His time, just over 2:57, is still a record of some sort (the details elude me). As The Sports Guy often writes, it was mighty dusty in that theater.

***

Princess Raccoon (official Japanese site) is an operetta by Seijun Suzuki, whose Tokyo Drifter was a stylish post-modern gangster movie in which the lead character whistles his own theme song. Suzuki is nothing if not unique; when you see one of his movies, you knew who the hell directed it. That applies even more so to Princess Raccoon, so odd a merger of operetta, costume dramas, animation, film, and commercials that it's utterly incomprehensible. I'd summarize the plot but I'm sure I'd be doing the movie an injustice even if I happened by chance to be accurate. Still, for reference's sake: a vain king seeks to kill his son, the prince Amechiyo, when a prophet envisions that soon Amechiyo will surpass the King in beauty. Fortunately, Princess Raccoon (Zhang Ziyi) has eyes for the prince and protects him with some magic.

Some of the visual cuts and transitions are kind of brilliant, and the very mannered performances, much like those of singers in an opera, are so different from those in almost all other movies that they provide a type of cognitive dissonance that one hopes to find at a film festival. Much of the movie is a comedy of the absurd. On the other hand, the story is both too simple in its overall structure and too unintelligible in its detail to hold a viewer's interest for nearly two hours. I was glad I didn't bring someone with me to sit through the movie; this one should be rated D, for daring audiences only. Some plotless movies speak to the subconscous with their surreality; this one's simply a Tokyo drifter. At one point a golden magic frog appears on screen and starts speaking. If you can get your hands on one, I recommend trying to smoke it before watching Princess Raccoon.

***

Even if you don't smoke some golden frog, though, you'll feel like you did while watching Mind Game, a remarkable animated feature film from Japan (trailer). Recent Japanese animation has been a letdown. Appleseed had an insufferably banal plot while Steamboy offered one-dimensional characters, long a bane of anime.

Mind Game has a hero with a soul and a personality in Nishi, and the wide-ranging animation styles on display are not just for show; each style reinforces the character's feelings or the scene's mood in a synergistic way that reminded me of well-drawn manga. On average, though, the animation is less Ghost in the Shell and more The Triplets of Belleville on acid.

Nishi has been in love with his childhood friend Myon as long as he can remember. Since he met her when she was but a child, we can presume he loves her for more than the outrageously ample bosom she sprouts by the time we meet them in their early twenties. Nishi is shy and neurotic, though, so passive he can't express his true feelings for her, and now she's engaged to marry another guy. The three of them meet up with Myon's father in a diner to catch up over a meal when suddenly two members of the Japanese mafia drop by in search of the owner. The tension in the diner escalates, and one thing leads to another, culminating with Nishi in heaven, conversing with God. Nishi wants a second chance at life, a second chance to tell Myon how he feels. He feels so strongly he outraces divine creatures to return to the world and change his fate.

And then the movie really takes a turn for the bizarre. What seems like a straightforward story transforms into almost a religious or metaphysical fable in the second half, the plotline involving the gangsters discarded like a dream. If I sound vague it's only because I don't want to ruin the story; the unexpected turns are part of the movie's joy.

***

The New York Asian Film Festival feels like an underground movie festival. The bad:

• The Anthology Film Archives Theatre, where the first half of the festival screened, is a dump of a movie theatre. The projection is too dark, the seats are uncomfortable, and the air conditioning barely works.
• The popcorn at ImaginAsian Theater, where the second half of the festival screened, feels and tastes like salty packing peanuts.
• A Venn diagram of nerdy film geeks who attend the NY Asian Film Festival and people who don't shower daily would show two circles sharing a lot of area.

The good:

• Good movie selections, on a whole.
• The ImaginAsian Theatre serves Asian snacks and drinks like Pocky and Guava Juice. Mmmm, guava juice.
• They don't show the festival's promotional commercial before every movie.
• At each screening they raffle off a few prizes before the movie starts. I won lousy DVD and $2 of Jet Li postcards, but who am I to turn a cold shoulder on a gift horse?
• One of the festival's promoters introduces the movies with breathless enthusiasm, somewhat of a welcome change from the usual dull speech from some film festival promoter explaining exactly why you should enjoy the movie you're about to see.

Google Earth

Google Earth, an interface to the world's geography.
[Sniff] Not available for the Mac.

Hollywood plans a remake of Don't Look Now
The original is one of the creepier movies I've ever seen, but most people who've heard of it know it only for the brilliant time-jumping lovemaking scene between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie. Don't wait for the remake; just watch the original.

In the latest round of man vs. machine in chess, it's the machines by a huge margin
I enjoy reading the articles by the Brits summarizing the matches. Much like their countrymen in the golf broadcasting booths, the English have a knack for pulling off the colorful metaphor. In golf, instead of hitting into the water, a golfer's golf ball plummets into a watery grave. Instead of being badly beaten by the machine, Michael Adams "was cut down by the monster machine with one ruthless thrust."

Disney and Dolby Labs to roll out new digital 3-D digital projection systems
Chicken Little, a cartoon, will be the first to try the new tech on for size.

Wimbledon.org has a feature called Shot Tracker that displays animated views of each shot in a match for featured matches
Sadly, the website does not have any feature allowing for animated 3-D views of Maria Sharapova. The statistical summaries of each match are quite impressive. I've never seen tennis coaches charting tennis matches the way baseball scouts chart opposing pitchers in baseball. I wonder if it's because they can grab all the info from technologies like Shot Tracker after the fact.

Maverick Remote-Check Wireless Thermometer allows you to multi-task while bbq'ing
Nifty. Too bad I live in NYC and can't grill. Here's the product page.

Salon.com looks into Scientology so the curious don't have to risk their own lives doing so
Parts 1 and 2 of the 4-part series are up. Tom Cruise is rumored to have reached the OT-VII level, one of the highest echelons of Scientology (OT standing for Operating Thetan). Supposedly at this level one gains the skills to master one's universe. Mock him and Scientology at your own peril. BTW, the term "clear" has now gained a few new meanings for me: (1) a steroid-like cream and (2) an optimum individual who has had engrams removed from the reactive mind. Hmm, not so clear anymore.

The latest Six Feet Under soundtrack has some intriguing exclusive tracks
Including one by Arcade Fire and one by Interpol. I don't appreciate albums like this that try and force the buyer to purchase an album for the few exclusive tracks they don't already own. The Apple Store only allows you to get the Arcade Fire and Interpol tracks if you purchase the entire album. Sorry, no thanks.

Paris is the leading candidate for the Olympics in 2012, just ahead of London and Madrid
New York is second to last, just ahead of Moscow, this all according to Gamesbids.com's BidIndex

Corrales-Castillo, or King Kong vs TRex? Yes please.

Corrales-Castillo II? Oh yeah.
I finally tracked down the torrent and downloaded a video of their first fight. Unbelievable. Just an epic fight.

Here's that new King Kong trailer
The link goes straight to the Kong-sized version. Trying to navigate from the main site through the trailer link just sent me to the Volkswagen site. Very annoying. I'm looking forward to seeing the Kong vs. TRex fight. I was two years old when the John Guillermin version of King Kong came out. It was the first movie I ever cried at. I was sad that the big monkey got killed.

Oodles of pixels

How many megapixels is your digital camera? Try 4 billion.
The gallery zooms in on tiny portions of the master image to show you just how much detail the camera can capture. Let's turn this on Nicole Kidman's face and see if she has any pores.

An opera composed by Tan Dun, with libretto by Ha Jin, directed by Zhang Yimou, and sung by Placido Domingo
Coming to The Met Dec. 21, 2006.

I applied for David Letterman tix online, submitting three free days off my calendar. Only a day later, I got a phone call from the box office. I had to answer a trivia question and two guaranteed tickets would be mine. I haven't watched Dave much recently, so I flubbed an easy question and missed out on seeing Tom Cruise on Letterman.

Elizabethtown trailer and music video

10 seconds from Peter Jackson's upcoming King Kong movie. The teaser trailer airs on the NBC networks tonight.

Chicago Police try to combat prostitution through public embarrassment, posting photos of solicitors online (via Freakonomics)

If I'm Hermes, I work quickly to cut off the Oprah PR disaster. Free purses for everyone in the studio audience! On the other hand, perhaps Oprah is the only one on set of her shows who can afford to shop there regularly.

James told me to tape the World Poker Tour Saturday, and I did. Scanned it last night to watch Doyle Brunson destroy Lee Watkinson heads up at the final table. A thing of beauty.

Trailer for videogame Alan Wake

Videogames and movies continue to converge in style and marketing

@&*#!

How much cussing is there in Deadwood? A lot (audio, not for @#$%&*-ing sensitive ears).

Since Michael Lewis published Moneyball, have major league front offices corrected for the undervaluation of on base percentage (OBP)? These professors suggest they have, due in part to the ascent of some members of the Oakland A's front office to General Manager positions elsewhere. Valuation of OBP took a huge jump up in 2004, leaping above the valuation of slugging percentage (SLG) for the first time.

New York Metro profile of Jean-Georges

Upcoming videogames: The Warriors, and The Godfather
Videogames borrow from movies, movies borrow from videogames. Paramount is big on derivative stories: Aeon Flux, War of the Worlds, The Honeymooners, The Manchurian Candidate, The Bad News Bears. Related: an e-comic adaptation of H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (with art by D'Israeli).

Godzilla Final Wars

I saw Godzilla Final Wars at the New York Asian Film Festival yesterday evening (video clips here). Of all the movies at the festival, this was the first to sell out. The Godzilla following remains strong. Fans of Godzilla and campy movies will eat this up, much as yesterday's groupies did. Every time Godzilla belted out his trademark roar, the audience erupted in kind.

At some point in the future, suddenly all of Godzilla's past monster foes appear all over the world and start razing cities. The Earth Defense Force tries to fight back, but they are helpless, especially when the monsters are discovered to be in the control of aliens called Xiliens. It looks grim for Planet Earth, but the most dangerous weapon the Earth has ever known remains frozen in ice at the South Pole...GODZILLA!!!

The camp knows no bounds. This is the "man in rubber suit destroying mini models of famous landmarks and cities" school of Godzilla movies. Some characters speak in Japanese with English subtitles; Captain Gordon (Don Frye), who provides the most memorable of the movie's intentionally histrionic performance, speaks in English with Japanese subtitles. Everyone understands everyone else perfectly. Apparently they can see the subtitles also. Characters toss the term "monster" about as if it is a scientific term.

Before the movie began, festival promoters gave away prizes to those who could answer obscure Godzilla trivia. These were truly some hardcore fans, able to selectively recall which monsters appeared in which of the three different Godzilla movie series. This lizard is right up there with Zatoichi in Japanese cinematic productivity.

I am unfamiliar with all of Godzilla's foes, but among the ones to make an appearance in this movie are an armadillo, a spider, Rodan (who appears to be a descendant of a pterodactyl), what appears to be a giant Gremlin with Mad Cow Disease named King Caesar (sp?), a flying ant, the three-headed mutant offspring of Hydra, and Gigan (a cross between a lizard, a wooly mammoth, Cyclops, and a chainsaw). Also appearing are Mothra (yes, a giant moth) and what looked like a baby Godzilla; did the big guy father an illegitimate child somewhere along the way? Godzilla junkies got more of a kick out of each of these monster's appearances than I did, though even a novice like myself could revel in the paradox that is the movie's realistic yet completely unrealistic look. It's similar to the child-like joy of seeing stop motion animation, like seeing one's childhood toy fantasies enacted on a larger scale. Combined with lots of sake and a sushi dinner, Godzilla Final Wars could make for a fun night out.

The movie's score is by Keith Emerson of Emerson, Lake, & Palmer. Ryuhei Kitamura (Versus, Azumi, Alive) directs.

Fe Fi Fo Fum, here's the Yes review of an Englishman

Anthony Lane reviews Yes, a movie spoken in verse, in verse

“Darling, ‘Yes’ is playing. We could go
And skip the ‘O.C.’ rerun. Shall we?” “No.”

More Commencement speech stuff: Barack Obama's Commencement speech at Knox College (via TNR) and the audio of Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement speech (via Carpe Aqua)

Trailer for Peter Jackson's King Kong to hit television June 27th

Are you a precog? Take these tests of your psychic abilities.

Want good seats to a hot concert? Good luck.
In a city like NY, one might think the sheer wealth of cultural offerings would counteract this phenomenon, but getting tickets to anything here in NYC, even a reservation to a popular restaurant, is a challenge.

Paris, je t'aime: a movie loveletter to Paris, with a huge roster of directors focusing on one arrondissement each

Via AICN, the poster for Cameron Crowe's next and highly-anticipated (at least by me) movie, Elizabethtown, starring Orlando Bloom and Kirsten Dunst:

Come out and get your whuppin, Charlie

New teaser trailer for the next Tony Jaa flick Tom-Yum-Goong
Part of a Thai food trilogy?

War of the Worlds tix available for pre-order (Movietickets.com, Fandango, AOL Moviefone)
Internet exclusive 5th trailer available at the official site if you log in

World Series of Pokerbots
Most of the competitors acknowledged testing their programs by running them on PartyPoker, against that site's rules. I don't see why a computer program can't someday soon be competitive at the World Series of Poker. A computer's inability to read his or her opponent can be offset by a massive amount of recall on opponents' previous hands, and a computer's playing speed can be varied with complete randomness. At the highest levels, most players say that opponents mask their tells very well, for the most part. Still, I do suspect that the best players have an intuition about his or her opponents that may be almost subconscious (or simply something they cannot verbalize), and a computer also can't easily tell when his or her opponent is getting flustered and how to press the advantage. I'd be interested in seeing an amateur like myself playing with a computer partner against a world-class player.

No. 1 on David Letterman's top 10 list of "Things Overheard During the Michael Jackson Verdict" last night: "Another case of a white guy getting preferential treatment."

Cutting Edge 2?!

Did anyone watch Evander Holyfield on Dancing with the Stars this week, dancing the Jive in a fluorescent yellow dress shirt? Oh, sweet mercy. He was awesomely bad, and he scored 13 out of 30, by far the lowest score of the night. I laughed and cried, and this is one of those times when that the simultaneity of those two acts made perfect sense. As the judges heaped harsh criticism upon him, I felt two things. One, pity. This poor former heavyweight boxer, despite competing against amateurs like Stacy's Mom (Rachel Hunter) and J. Peterman (that dude from Seinfeld, I have no idea what his real name is), was thoroughly outclassed. You take thousands of punches over the years and lose one earlobe to Mike Tyson's mouth and see how nimble you are on your feet. And, as Holyfield's face fell, that false smile fading into a grim and bitter stare of humiliation, I felt fear, for the judges, for his partner. At the end of the show, they just toss a couple out right then and there, unlike American Idol in which elimination is delayed by a day. It was too late for me to call in and register my vote to try and keep Evander on the show, and he was eliminated. He was the only reason I watched the show for the first time this week, and now they went and tossed him out, the best part of this show. To further push their luck, they actually forced the losing couple out onto the floor for a final dance. Evander was pissed, and he looked none too happy to have to prance around the floor one last time after his dismal evening. I expected him at any moment to toss his partner aside and go after the judges a la Ron Artest. "Come out and get your whupping, Charlie!" This was a great television moment cut too short. Really, does anyone care who the best dancing C-lister in show business is? Bring back Evander. I've always had a soft spot for Evander, even though he's fathered something like thirty children. The man got robbed in the Olympics in 84' and his just due tonight. It should have been the reverse.

Conquer the heat, and you become...a legend

The day the air conditioning died. That would be last Sunday, sometime in the afternoon. When I returned to my apartment that evening and opened the door, a blast of warm heat enveloped me. I do really badly with heat when I'm trying to sleep. Psychologically I can cope, but my body has the cooling system of an Apple Powerbook. That is to say, it sucks. I opened up the air conditioning unit, one that looks to have been manufactured about the time that A/C was invented, or the wheel, whichever came first, and discovered a filter so crusted with dirt that it had simply frozen solid. I immediately began thawing it out by turning the unit off, but it wouldn't help much until morning because no stores were open to replace the filter at that late hour anyhow.

I tried opening the windows but the humidity outside was so high that it overwhelmed any cooling effect from the night air. I lay on my sofa, but the suede-like fabric didn't breathe, so I lay on the living room floor, trying to lay as still as possible in the hopes that my body's screen saver would turn on. No such luck. My skin began to overheat, degree by degree. My entire body burned as if combusting with fever. Any hopes of sleeping that night would be futile. Despair and madness awaited.

Suddenly, from the depths of my mental inventory, out of the mental fog of my steaming brain, a blurred image arose, as if something dark and solid were rising out of a swimming pool. Excalibur? No, it was round, in motion. A fan! I sprinted to my bedroom closet to retrieve an old IKEA fan I had brought with me from Seattle. I'd bought it for just a few bucks from a damaged goods section of the South Seattle IKEA, and treasured it for its antique metallic look, quite a contrast from the bland and minimalist Scandinavian look of most IKEA furniture. It lay in a box high in my closet. I jumped and tugged at it, and it nearly split my head in two falling down upon me. I held it high above my head, cackling with glee. Soon, I'd be as cool as Jake Gittes in this summer heat. Bwahahahah! It's alive!

Only it wasn't. I plugged it in and flipped the switch, and...

Nothing.

What? It can't be! Nooooooo!

I took a screwdriver and opened up the bottom of the fan, but in my desperation I couldn't think straight, couldn't decipher the monkey wrench in the gears. I fell to the ground weeping, a defeated man (okay, it was more moaning than weeping, but the latter registers my inner turmoil with greater clarity).

I turned off my stereo amplifiers, computer, A/V receiver, cable box, DVD player, anything that gave off the slightest bit of heat. Then I took a cold shower, as cold as I could bear, and plopped back down on my living room floor to stare at the ceiling to ponder a mystery: how long until exhaustion would overcome my discomfort from the heat and bring sleep? The answer? A few hours. I fell asleep to the first light of dawn, that midnight blue that always heralds the coming daybreak.

But that was a darker time, one I've since resolved by replacing my A/C filter. Today was a happier day as I prepared for the arrival of family for a long visit. Some things that made me happy today:

• Some Stanford alumni organized an alum screening of Saving Face and a Q&A with director Alice Wu afterwards. Her story of getting the movie made was like an existence proof that what I'm trying to do is possible. She left a tech job in Seattle (program management at Microsoft) to move to NY to pursue a filmmaking career, giving herself five years to make a feature film. Without going to film school, she still managed to shepherd a work to the big screen, just meeting her own five year deadline when acquaintances of acquaintances of friends lined up financing and put her in the director's seat.
• Saw the midnight screening of Batman Begins with the usual opening night crazies, and what I enjoyed most about the movie was the score by Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard. It's more atmostpheric and less iconic than Danny Elfman's score for the original Burton Batman movies, but it pulses with dark energy and compliments the movie the way a finely tailored shirt meshes with a suit. Soundtrack.net has a track by track walk-through along with 30 second samples (better than the 30 second samples available at the iTunes Music Store).
• Soundtrack.net also has a walk-through of the War of the Worlds score by John Williams. I have not listened to it, but the review notes that the score is "very' modern...with plenty of dissonance and atonal material." This gives me hope that it will equal the quality of his score to A.I., one of his best.
• Christian Bale makes a good Batman. I've always been a fan, from as far back as his Empire of the Sun days, but with his edgy work in American Psycho and astonishing physical transformation in The Machinist, he revealed a brooding, glowering persona that pointed at the obsessive anger and torturous guilt that lies at the heart of his Batman. Okay, I was going to try to keep this going like Patrick Bateman discussing one of the eighties bands in American Psycho, but it's too late, I'm too tired, and I can't come up with anything more.
• I enjoyed the new Batman movie. It's not without its flaws. It doesn't conjure up any iconic images as with the first Elfman Batman movie, and for a two-and-a-half-hour movie there are several moments that feel truncated or rushed. And some of the action sequences or fights share the same problem as Cinderella Man; they're framed too tight to distinguish what's happening. It's a common flaw of American action movies, the tight framing making acting as shorthand to speed up the action without speeding up the film, but it all just comes out a mess on screen. I much prefer the Asian kung-fu cinematographer's trick of framing with a longer shot but speeding up the film, allowing you to see the fight choreography. All that said, the movie succeeds at explaining the origin of Batman, his personality and mission, in a way that's dramatically exciting and satisfying, with the slow, patient simmer that's required for the best bolognese sauces. That's not an easy task when everyone in the theater knows roughly how it happens. The best parts of the movies are not the action sequences with the villains but the ones when Bale isn't wearing a mask. More later--I hope to see it with my brother-in-law Mike in IMAX on Thursday.
• Cubs win 14-0! They'll be in NYC this weekend playing at Yankees Stadium. Now that they're back in the wild card hunt, I'm looking forward to the games again.
• At the Batman screening they showed the latest Charlie and the Chocolate Factory trailer and all the fanboys went crazy. Some things about seeing a movie opening night with the drooling fanboys are annoying, like having to go early to battle for a seat, but the energy of an opening night screening can't be matched, and all the whooping and hollering turns a night at the movies into an event.

Best man speeches

Bawdy best-man speeches given by the actual best man on earth at the time
I hate to generalize based on such a small sample size, but based on all the weddings I've been to, the Best Man speech is humorous, poking fun at the groom and leaving the room in stitches. With a bit of alcohol, there's always a chance that something inappropriate might be said. The Maid of Honor's speech is sentimental and weepy, leaving the entire room uncomfortably silent, a few girls dabbing at their eyes while the guys look at the floor wishing it would end.

Phil Jackson returns to coach the Los Angeles Lakers

Asafa Powell of Jamaica breaks the world record in the men's 100 meter dash
He ran it in 9.77 seconds to beat Tim Montgomery's disputed (b/c of doping suspicions) record of 9.78.

The magic sunscreen that's still illegal in the U.S.
Mexoryl is not FDA-approved, but it blocks UVA light better than any ingredients in sunscreens in the U.S. Bootleg it from drugstores on the Upper East Side or from Canadian pharmacy websites.

Discovery Channel goes 1-2-3 in final stage of Tour de France tune-up race
George Hincapie, Yaroslav Popovych, and Lance Armstrong take places 1 through 3, respectively, in the final stage of the Dauphiné Libéré. Armstrong finishes fourth overall, behind unknown Inigo Landaluze, who was the only rider on his team to finish the race, and Santiago Botero and Levi Leipheimer. Vino finished fifth. Should be a really competitive Tour de France. I recall that OLN TV had much more coverage of cycling leading up to the Tour last year. Much to my disappointment, cycling television coverage has been sparse this year outside of the Giro d'Italia.

The New York Asian Film Festival 2005 has a sweet lineup of movies

Michael Jackson to change his lifestyle
"Michael Jackson's lawyer said today that the singer will no longer share his bed with young boys."

Rockefeller Center hosts free Drive-In Movies from tonight through Saturday evening at 9pm each night. Seating begins at 6pm.
The lineup this year is documentary-heavy:
June 14th - “Rize” - David LaChapelle's documentary about krumping, a style of dancing from the L.A. ghettoes. Saw and enjoyed this at the Tribeca Film Festival.
June 15th - “The Baxter” - Michael Showalter romantic comedy set in Brooklyn.
June 16th – “All We Are Saying” - Rosanna Arquette's star-studded documentary on the state of the music business.
June 17th – “Show Business” - documentary about the brutal Broadway production business.

Who's so vain?

What do you call a book that is not a novel and not a collection of short stories but something in between?

5 movies Alex wishes people would stop quoting

Usually I find those anti-piracy ad spots to be annoying and self-righteous; that said, I would've liked to have seen this one.

Who was Carly Simon singing about in "You're So Vain"?
NBC Sports president Dick Ebersol paid $50,000 for the answer at a charity auction.

Teaser trailer for Revolver, the new Guy Ritchie flick starring his bud Jason Stratham
Guns, gangsters, goons, gambling, Guy Ritchie.

***

Early reviews of Batman Begins are positive
Ebert calls it the only Batman movie he's liked thus far, though I'm not sure I'll trust him on this series if he didn't like the original Burton Batman. I watched the 10 minute Batman Begins preview during the season finale of Smallville, and it seemed decent, but Christian Bale's Batman voice was very strange, almost choked. Okay, what does it matter? Mike and I are going to see it in IMAX the day he gets into NYC.

***

Did anyone see the Federer-Nadal semifinal? I wasn't even sure when it was on television. I'm not a huge fan of clay court tennis, but that would've been something to see. I tried to set my DVR to grab it, but instead it grabbed the other semifinal which I had no interest in. Nadal is one of the quickest players I've ever seen, and he hits with a filthy amount of top spin, especially off the forehand side. Good to see Safin and Nadal pushing Federer in the first two slams this year. The French Open isn't the most interesting tournament to watch on television, but Paris in early June? It might be the best Grand Slam to watch in person. I'll have to see it in person some year.

***

I'm sad that the Phoenix Suns got knocked out of the NBA playoffs. They were the only storyline sustaining my tepid interest in the NBA playoffs. Amare Stoudemire is a freak. I could watch him and Nash running the screen and roll all game long. Stoudemire is so quick, his arms so long, and his vertical so explosive that he always seems to get the basket, no matter who's guarding him and how much space they give him. If you had to pick one player from the NBA to play with you in a 2 on 2 game, I'm not sure you'd take anyone besides Amare.

The Suns play the type of basketball that's fun to watch on television. Otherwise, NBA basketball is dull as can be. The officiating doesn't help; it's awful, even to the naked eye of the average fan. I went to a Bulls-Sonics game in Chicago earlier this year with Mike, and the game set a record for most fouls ever in a single game at the United Center, over 70 of them. Every ten seconds it seemed like a whistle blew. Just brutal.

***

So much for the spring. Summer is upon NYC, and I'm sweating. My old and cranky air conditioner is a raspy SOB. Let's hope it holds out.

Reviews: Crash, Cinderella Man

Crash has little nutritional content, but it tastes really good. It's the cinematic equivalent of a Pop-Tart (which I consider an ingenious breakfast food, for the record).

The movie's take on racism is facile--everyone is both racist and tolerant, and situations can make sinners and saints of us all--and the movie's structure echoes the theme: every character has an episode that reveals a vicious racism and another that displays their humanity or tolerance. It's as if the movie has nothing new to say on the topic of racism so it chooses to focus its energy on how it has to say what is has to say. In that, the movie is hypnotic and absorbing.

The movie is a series of vignettes, linked together with seamless and often clever transitions. At times you think you're following one episode, and then suddenly, with one cut, you're inside another. The textures of each episode are so similar that by the end of the movie the stitching of the fabric is almost invisible. Many of the individual scenes have an undeniable power, and they're staged and acted with an operatic intensity. Each of them winds up the tension so high that their resolutions prove emotionally cathartic. One after the other they pound headlong into the audience; watching is like riding an emotional bronco.

I missed the opening speech by Don Cheadle, but it's in the trailer, the metaphor that people crash into each other just to feel something. It's a concept that only makes sense in L.A., given its vast horizontal expanses and the numbing hours its citizens spend crawling through its arterial highways (in NYC, everyone is piled into each other, crashing into each other in subways and sidewalks. These interlocking multi-threaded movies would seem to make more sense in NY, yet Magnolia, Crash, and Short Cuts are all set in Los Angeles). The metaphor has a certain aesthetic beauty, but it's also a stretch. The movie tosses the characters together using plot coincidences that force them to confront their prejudice and compassion; it's doubtful many of them would have sought out such situations on their own.

Crash may not add much to the country's discourse on racism, but its emotional power is formidable. Million Dollar Baby, another Haggis screenplay, had similar strengths and flaws. At times, Eastwood and Swank were hijacked in the service of some grand ideas that wasn't as engaging as their characters. I left both movies feeling the same way, with my heart thumping and my brain shrugging.

Cinderella Man, unlike Crash, is based on a true and uplifting story that should speak for itself, but it arrives with its own baggage. The movie doesn't shy away from embracing its identity as a Ron Howard/Brian Grazer Oscar-seeking biopic. I struggled mightily to combat the feeling that every scene, every line of dialogue, and every note of the score was carefully crafted in the hopes of snaring a gold statue at the Academy Awards in 2006. Perhaps Jim Braddock (Russell Crowe) and his wife Mae (Renee Zellwegger) really were a perfect, flawless, decent couple. From the very little I've read, Braddock's story is indeed an amazing one. Still, the movie suffers from an odd variant of Michael Moore syndrome; rather than focus all its energy on tearing down its subjects, this movie does cartwheels and handstands in an effort to fit its protagonists for sainthood.

Russell Crowe tries to fight off the deification. I'm with Chris Rock; Crowe's your man for the period piece. He individualizes Braddock, particularly in a scene when he has to go, literally with hat in hand, to beg for money at a club filled with well-to-do boxing promoters who knew him when he was a promising young fighter. It's a moving scene, and Crowe soft plays it so as not to over sentimentalize it. Crowe's face is always a war among a frown, an intense gaze, and a reluctant smile, perfect for the down but defiant Braddock.

A movie needs its villains, though, and this movie has two of them. One is the Great Depression. Braddock is supposed to represent the hopes of nation beaten down by economic oppression, but his connection with the other people of his time is given only passing coverage. He's given a friendship with a union organizer named Mike Wilson that feels like a plot appendage intended to link Braddock to social issues of the times.

The other villain is boxer Max Baer (Craig Bierko). To the detriment of Braddock's cause, Bierko's Baer is more goofy than menacing. Bierko is not all that fierce in physique. We're told he killed two of his previous opponents by detaching their brains from their skulls, but his physique fails to live up to the legend. Bierko is tall and lanky, and in a fist fight my money would be on Crowe, no questions asked. I never once felt Crowe was in any danger in the ring against Bierko, whose signature expression of intimidation is a crazy bug-eyed stare. Anthony Lane refers to Bierko's Baer as a homicidal dandy, not exactly the type of branding any boxer would aspire to. He's not just a dangerous hitter, we're shown, but a crass womanizer. He makes a pass at Mae, she responds by tossing her drink in his face with her mousy scrunchy face (yes, to my dismay, we're given the plucky, mousy Renee Zellwegger in this movie). The fighters Braddock defeats prior to fighting Baer are such clumsy galoots that they rob Braddock's comeback of its improbability.

The boxing itself is more realistic than that in the Rocky movies, in which the two fighters don't block but simply bash each other's heads in with an intensity that would drop any human being in about five seconds and kill any mortal inside of a minute. However, much of the boxing is framed so tightly that it's tough to see what's going on. It's a camera trick intended to amplify the perceived intensity and speed of the punches, but it always bothers me in any scenes of combat. In the best of Asian martial arts movie, the fighting is framed for maximum clarity. You see the moves clearly, and they still astound.

Another misstep, one this movie shares with a similar movie in Seabiscuit, is that the movie cuts back and forth from the final fight to shots of Zellwegger and the Braddock kids and family friends listening to the fight on a radio. During every scene with Zellwegger and her kids, the radio announcer screams and shouts about some critical action in the ring, and we agonize over the action we're missing, as if the television set suddenly changed to the Food Network just before the season ending climax of our favorite television show. In Seabiscuit, the final race is interrupted by dry narration over still photos.

Paul Giamatti's portrayal of Braddock's trainer Joe Gould is a treat, especially with the memory of his depressed alcoholic from Sideways lingering in the air like the stench of liquor. Seeing Giamatti's Gould giving Braddock's pep talks before the fights is precious irony. It's as if Giamatti turned his life around in rehab.

Maybe a movie doesn't need real villains. This is an inspirational story of good people, and its lack of cynicism and its willingness to wear its hear on its sleeve are jolting and even heartwarming, especially in contrast to the predominant voices of our time. Me, I like my soup spicier and my Cinderella stories with a couple evil stepsisters, but as a dessert, Cinderella Man cleanses the palate.

Review: Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith

[Spoilers embedded]

The challenge for George Lucas in Revenge of the Sith (ROTS) was clear. This was the episode in which Anakin coverted to the dark side and became Darth Vader, shifting the balance of power in the galaxy (universe?) from the Jedi to the Sith Lords. For the tragedy to be as moving as possible, the audience has to like Anakin and feel sympathy for him, to pull for him to overcome his hubris even though they know his fate. The formula for an effective Greek tragedy hasn't changed much since Aristotle defined it in Poetics.

ROTS includes several explanations for Anakin's conversion. Are they convincing? To a degree, but the movie contains few moments that soar or stick in the heart compared to Episodes IV-VI. It's a tragedy in form, but the screenplay and staging submit to the dark side of catering to action and digital effects excess instead of focusing on dialogue and character. Compare that to The Empire Strikes Back, still the best of the six Star Wars movies, which contains at least a dozen moving scenes that I know by heart (e.g. Han Solo cutting open a Tan-Tan and stuffing Luke inside, Yoda lifting the X-wing out of the swamp, Han Solo frozen in carbonite ("I love you." "I know."), Vader confronting Luke, Vader revealing himself as Luke's father, Leia hearing Luke's call and turning around the Millenium Falcon to rescue him...I could go on and on).

The following are all emphasized at one point or another as forces that push Anakin to the Dark Side:

• Poor management and people skills on the part of the Jedi council. Anakin goes home to his wife Padme every day and complains about the Jedi Council. What married couple hasn't had to listen to each other grumble at the dinner table about office politics and inept managers? The frustration of Anakin at not being promoted to Master Jedi and the reluctance of the elder Jedi to promote an ambitious and talented but hotheaded youngster feels true to life. Similar anguish can be found in any corporation in the world, and this very personal political tale is much more interesting and well told, to me, than the larger democracy/dictatorship storyline which runs through Episodes I, II, and III (the details of the operations of the Republic and the Senate are never sketched out in enough detail to really pass judgment on the political plotline). Office politics is alive and well in the twenty...well, whatever century it is that this story takes place.The Jedi Council, in particular Obi-Wan, must sense Anakin's displeasure, but they do a poor job managing his expectations. Anakin has grown into a light saber prodigy and offed a Sith Lord in Count Dooku. If you're the Jedi Council, you should really do a better job grooming him for succession. This storyline works for me.
• Palpatine. Ian McDiarmid's Supreme Chancellor Palpatine is a much better judge of human character, in particular Anakin, than the Jedi, and he's the paternal Iago that manipulates Anakin with a sinister but alluring stream of empathetic rhetoric. McDiarmid is the acting star of ROTS the way Harrison Ford was in Eps IV-VI. During the opera scene, and at other times, McDiarmid chews his lines slowly, as if trying to juice an orange with his lips. Palpatine augments Anakin's insecurity by making Anakin his representative on the Jedi council, knowing that the Council won't promote Anakin to Jedi master. Palpatine is like Drew Rosenhaus encouraging Terrell Owens to hold out for a bigger contract from the Eagles this year, or a headhunter jumping on a disgruntled executive recently passed over for a coveted promotion.
• Fear over Padme's death. This didn't work for me, and I was disappointed that it's framed as the most important reason for Anakin's conversion. Anakin has premonitions of Padme's death. How he sees into the future I have no idea, though both Episode II and III hint that the Dark Side brings with it the ability to see into the future while also shrouding one's true motives. Palpatine senses this and hints that he knows some way to conquer death using The Dark Side, a trick inherited from Darth Plagius. He implies that if he dies, the secret dies with him, dooming Padme to certain death. Palpatine never explains how to do this in much detail, though, and after he and Anakin off Mace Windu, Palpatine changes his story and says, effectively, "Oh, did I saw I knew how to use the Dark Side to cheat death and save Padme? Well, I don't really know how to do it, but I'm sure together we can figure it out." It's like the bait and switch from some used car salesman, and Anakin doesn't flinch. At that point, any normal person would have doubts about Palpatine's ability to cheat old age, let alone death, especially since he'd just been transformed into looking like the love child of Nosferatu and Gollum. This is supposed to be the reason that Anakin becomes Darth Vader, one of the most famous movie villains of all time? "Noooooooooo!" This storyline is also undermined by the unbelievable romance between Padme and Anakin who have no chemistry whatsoever throughout Episodes I through III. The balcony scene in this movie is awful beyond comprehension.
• The inhuman code of the Jedi. The tagline for Episode II: "A Jedi Shall Not Know Anger. Nor Hatred. Nor Love." One of the more interesting aspects of Episode III is the way it undermines our faith in the Jedi Council and their adherence to monk-like denial of all that is human. Their Buddhist philosophy of detachment is so stringent that it's easy to understand why Anakin would listen to the Emperor. When Anakin goes to Yoda with his dreams of Padme's death, Yoda simply councils him to let go and accept the loss of loved ones. This advice fails to sway Anakin, and who can blame him? It sounds like a bunch of inhuman mumbo jumbo. And why can't Jedis have wives or husbands? The movies certainly hint that Jedi powers are passed down genetically, so if Jedis don't marry, how are all those youngling Jedis created? Is there some elite Jedi sperm bank somewhere? There are female Jedis--why can't male and female Jedis marry? In Episode II, when Padme falls out of the spaceship onto the desert, Anakin asks that they turn back to pick her up. Obi-Wan refuses and screams, "You'll be expelled from the Jedi order! Come to your senses!" I half expected Anakin to shout, "Dude, you come to your senses! It will take us ten seconds to swing around and pick her up!" The script stretches the code of the Jedi to unreasonable lengths to explain Anakin's defection.
• Jealousy over Obi-Wan and his relationship with Padme - this thread isn't developed, but it has a lot of potential. Obi-Wan shows up in Anakin's visions of Padme's death, and at one point, just after Padme admits that Obi-Wan came by, Anakin bristles, asking, "What did he want?" There's a hint of jealousy--perhaps Obi-Wan is having an affair (either emotional or physical) with his wife? I could certainly buy that as a powerful enough reason why Anakin would turn against his master, and they play off it a bit when Obi-Wan shows up on Mustafar in Padme's ship. Anakin believes Padme brought Obi-Wan and that his old master turned Padme against him. However, this thread is never developed much beyond these few shadowy hints.

All this wouldn't matter if the key moment of the movie, when Anakin attacks Mace Windu and then submits to the Emperor, worked. The build-up to the confrontation is one of the more suitably ominous sequences of the movie. Anakin is at the Jedi temple looking out the window, knowing Mace Windu and a few other Jedi are on their way over to arrest Palpatine. Meanwhile, Padme looks out the window, and the John Williams score offers an ominous but hushed pulse. "Are you threatening me, Master Jedi?" spits Palpatine with venom, and he flies at the Jedi like an attacking serpent. Fast forward to Anakin lopping off Windu's arm and the Emperor Palpatine launching Windu about a mile out the window like a t-shirt shot out of one of those sporting event t-shirt cannons. The battle has left the Emperor hideous and deformed (one of the most astonishing transformations for the worse of a political leader's complexion since Viktor Yuschenko) and suddenly Anakin seems defeated. A few moments later he's a stone cold killer, on his way to the Jedi Council to slaughter dozens of young children, with no hesitation. It feels too sudden for me after all of his wavering during the movie. I don't buy it.

Before their last confrontation, Obi-Wan and Anakin part as friends. Anakin apologizes for being moody and difficult, Obi-Wan praises him as a brother and a great Jedi. Does enough happen between that and their next fight to turn them into ruthless opponents? I don't buy it, especially when Obi-Wan leaves Anakin burnt and suffering at the edge of the lava. Obi-Wan would have put Anakin out of his misery, either out of mercy or a desire to finish his mission, or both.

What if, instead, Anakin wasn't worried about Padme's death? Instead, the Emperor tells Anakin the Jedi are planning a secret revolt in an attempt to seize power for themselves. The Jedi fuel Anakin's suspicions because they don't include him as a Master, don't include him in their reindeer games. Then Anakin comes upon Mace Windu attacking The Emperor, confirming the Emperor's suspicions. Believing he's defending The Republic, he kills Mace Windu. The Emperor then gives Anakin command of clone armies to arrest the other Jedi, at the same time planting the seed that Obi-Wan has been secretly turning Padme against him. Fueled by jealousy and rage, Anakin and his clones take out all the other Jedi. After Anakin is defeated by Obi-Wan, Palpatine rescues him and reveals himself as the Sith Lord. Anakin is told that in his rage he killed Padme. He is horrified and in both physical and emotional agony but also blames Obi-Wan for having contributed to his murder of Padme. Palpatine promises not only peace for the Empire but to help Padme cheat death somehow. Anakin is appalled by what he's done, believing all along that he'd been fighting on the side of right, and submits to Palpatine in the hope of bringing back Padme. There's a seed of a stronger tragedy mixed in amidst all the storylines in Episode III, but it lies just out of reach.

That's not to say the Anakin of ROTS isn't a huge improvement over the Anakin of Episode I and II. Still, it's difficult to shake the memory of the awful child actor in Episode I and the brat that is Episode II Anakin. There's not enough movie in Episode III to rescue young Anakin as a truly sympathetic tragic figure for the audience.

Some other scenes don't pay off the way they should or could. In perhaps a nod to Lucas's friend Francis Ford Coppola, this episode includes a Godfather-like mont