PTA and AS and EW

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Went to a screening of Punch Drunk Love two weeks ago at the amazing Cinerama, and who showed up to promote the film but Paul Thomas Anderson (P. T. Anderson to his friends, thank you very much) and Adam Sandler themselves.
Quirky modern romance film. I didn't love it, but I loved lots of its components. Great performances from Adam Sandler, Emily Watson and Philip Seymour Hoffman, three actors I love to watch. I have a dream. In it, I would be able to spend one long day in their company, walking around a city, sightseeing, grabbing lunch and dinner, taking in the sights, shooting the shit. There are many ways to divide up the people in the world, but one of my favorite is to divide people into those I would love to spend a carefree day with, and those who'd drive me nuts or bore me silly after fifteen minutes. Seriously, try this out. Doesn't everyone fall on one side or the other? They do for me.
Adam Sandler is a very natural actor. He is what he is, a nice guy, kinda shy, the odd neighborhood geek, prone to sudden and unexpected outbursts of anger. He was fairly quiet and didn't try to overwhelm the audience with histrionics the way I imagine someone like Jim Carrey would. His character in this film has the same type of personality, and it should answer any who doubt his screen presence. He's the gentle comedian who injects happiness in your soul.
Emily Watson has the same initials as I do. That alone rates high marks in my book. Oh yeah. She's also as brave an actress as there is, a sweet and dedicated professional, and the type of inspiring, nurturing artist friend we all need in our lives. And she has that lovely accent.
Philip Seymour Hoffman is the mad comic genius who says the things you wish you were honest enough to say, and some things you didn't. I don't think I've ever seen him give a bad performance. Have you? He'd do something bold and obnoxious in public that would embarass you while at the same time making you feel like the part of the most interesting group out that day. Certainly the group having the most fun.
P.T. Anderson is the type of self-confident, pretentious, self-important director people love to hate. But he's also a talented, talented director with an exquisite aesthetic sensibility, and I loved the scope of the ambition in his first three movies (Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, and Magnolia). Punch-Drunk Love contains such natural performances, but the plot that frames them is just the opposite. Everything from the strange accident that opens the movie to the fact that Sandler's character Barry discovers a loophole in a frequent flier mile giveaway and buys hundreds of packs of pudding to take advantage of it to the fact that Barry sells novelty bathroom plungers to the idea that he's supposed to have seven sisters...it was such a deliberate setup it was distracting. True, the story of the guy who found the frequent flier mile loophole is a true story, but I would have preferred a more organic story built around the actors' performances. They're wonderful, but they all seem to be pushing out against P.T.A's calculated plot ideas.
Seeing Sandler put the evening over the top, though. Quite a treat. Happy Gilmore, Billy Madison, The Wedding Singer...there's a reason all his movie titles refer to his character in the movie.

Nanowrimo

It's that time of year when writer friends pressure me to sign up for Nanowrimo again. It stands for National Novel Writing Month. Across the globe, hordes of over-eager Eggers wannabees invade coffee houses near you and spend the month of November trying to crank out a 50,000 word (175 page) novel. Last year I started that brutal sprint, and then along came a brutal week of work, and it was as if I turned my head and ran headlong into a street sign and knocked myself unconscious.
The idea is a good one, though. If you want to be a writer, you have to treat it like you would any other job. Spend several hours each day writing. No breaks except those of the bathroom variety. Those who can't hack it aren't writers at heart. I know plenty.
Am I one? I don't know. I suspect if I were one I wouldn't need to enter Nanowrimo to prove anything to myself.
Friends say, "Time to write."
Blinking cursor stares me down.
It doesn't look good.

Mutant

Everyone who saw me after my bike accident and who've seen me in the past day or two are shocked by how quickly my face healed up. I received my fair share of "that must be your mutant power" comments.
Unfortunately, I was also starting to look like Wolverine. I was waiting on a haircut because of my facial wound, and finally last night I couldn't hold out any longer. Two thoughts arose as I sat there at Rudy's watching my hair fall in front of my face. One, is it rude to not make small talk with the person cutting your hair? Does that make their life more interesting, or more painful? I tried to read my snipper. She looked like an alternative chick with no particular interest in hearing anything I had to say. I kept quiet.
Second, why do barbershops still stock their shelves with all these adult magazines? Isn't that a legacy of old school barbershops that only catered to men? I've never seen anyone with the brass tacks to read an issue. And even if you did, is a haircut really the time to be flipping through something like that?

Congrats...

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...to Joannie, Keila, and Emily for completing the Chicago marathon. Studs all around.
Meanwhile, I'm locked in my own personal marathon at work. All my days are melding together in a haze of meetings, e-mail, phone calls, and frantic strategizing. I think I'm at mile 20, but I can't tell. I know I'm close to hitting the wall, but maybe I'm not. I've lost touch with the world. It's just a two way road from the office to my bed and back. I didn't think I had more of these in me after five years, but the new folks on my team have been inspiring in their dedication, and at a certain point in every project you enter a trance where you just lock onto that marker in distance and it's all you think about.
All of you whose e-mails and phone calls have gone unreturned, know that I am alive. My captors have not harmed me and are treating me well. Send pictures of your new kids, dogs, houses, etc. And food.

BMW Films, Part II

The trailer for the first of the new series of 3 BMW Films is online now. Only for people with fat pipes and massive hard drives.
The first set of these shorts were a lot of fun, though likely not nearly as fun as driving a souped-up BMW at Seattle International Raceway. Someday.

New Two Towers trailer

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Already, a present under the Christmas tree. The new trailer depicts all the epic adventure described in the books, brought to life with motion, sound, and imagery only the way movies can do it, and less the terrible poetry of J. R. R. Tolkien.

MIT OpenCourseWare

How cool! MIT OpenCourseWare promises to publish almost all of MIT's course materials online for students around the world. Their beta site is up featuring a few courses from each of their schools. I few like a student browsing the course catalog at the beginning of a quarter again.
So, fellow students...which classes are you taking this quarter? I'm thinking of a refresher in linguistics through Introduction to Linguistics, Logistical and Transportation Planning Methods (traffic interests me), Problems of Philosophy (I've never taken any philosophy), and Electricity and Magnetism (physics is fun). I feel like a freshman, taking all these intro courses.
Hopefully other universities will follow MIT's lead, and I can't wait to see them expand their course offerings over the next several years. What's interesting about MIT's approach is that, one, it's free, and two, they haven't built in any interactivity to their site yet. It's just a list of the syllabus, class notes, required reading, homework assignments, and exams. What you miss is the class lectures, interaction with a professor and fellow students, and drunken frat parties. But for those of us who're past our school days, it sure beats paying a massive tuition and having to drive to class.
Now the only problem is that I don't have any of the books or required reading material, so I may have to stick with the lecture notes. Maybe I still have some of these texts on my bookshelf from my school days, or maybe I'll have to pick them up used on Amazon.com Marketplace. Okay, did anyone finish their assignment on the Ontological argument yet? Can I get some help here?

In a world without laughter

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The trailer for Comedian cracks me up. I love that guy who does the voice-overs for movie trailers. I wish I had his voice--it's kind of Robert Stack. I'd be such a hit at every party.

I'm fairly certain I'll find you

Watching the TV commercial for The Four Feathers, a movie I'll see because it's directed by Shekhar Kaphur, who directed the immensely entertaining Elizabeth. The only thing that trips me up is that the trailer contains a clip of Heath Ledger stating emphatically, "I will find him." (emphasis on "will").
Anyone seasoned moviegoer knows that the line "I will find _____" will forever be associated with Daniel Day Lewis who uttered the line in Last of the Mohicans. It's supposed to be a serious moment in the film, but somehow that line got so much play in the trailer that audiences everywhere OD'd on the gravitas. I don't know a single movie buff who doesn't crack himself up from rehearsing, "Just stay alive. I will find you!"

Unworthy of the Hamptons

What was that dress Carrie was wearing at the wedding in the season finale of SITC? Looked like a shower cap. Sarah Jessica Parker is a terrible dresser in real life, and sometimes it carries over into the show.
I think the show is losing steam. This season was dull. As Keith Olbermann said, "Too much city, not enough sex." Or something like that. The plot structure is a bit tired.

Unzipped

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Had the team over to watch Unzipped today. Great little documentary about a few months in the life of Isaac Mizrahi. We watched it on my old laserdisc version, and given that my laserdisc player is getting a bit creaky, I decided to check online to see if the movie was on DVD. I had checked a few months back and had only found a VHS copy. On Buena Vista's website they list an ISBN and UPC for a region 1 DVD for Unzipped, so I went to Amazon to check again.
In the DVD store, I punched in the string Unzipped, and up popped...this.
Oops.
Then I spent another half hour trying to track down the name of the song played at the start of the movie and at the beginning of the fashion show at the end of the movie. You'd think with the Internet it would be a cinch. Not so. The soundtrack isn't listed for sale anywhere. I guess there wasn't one. The one song that's listed as being a single from the film, Happy Sad by Pizzicato Five, isn't the song I was looking for. IMDb didn't have a soundtrack listing. Google didn't turn up anything.
So I actually had to stick the laserdisc back in the player, fast foward to the end credits, then pause when the song listings came up. I think I've found the song, but now I have to figure out who recorded it. The song is You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) but I can't tell if the version in the movie is the one by Sandra Bernhard (listed under singles on this discography) or this version by Byron Stingily available from Amazon.com. I've never heard anything by Byron Stingily, but I'm guessing it has to be that one since the product description describes him as having a "falsetto." No one would mistake Sandra Bernhard for having a falsetto, but then again, she's listed as the performer in the movie credits.
And Limewire doesn't list either version for download. Man, what's a brother supposed to do?

Stands for Big Missing Picture

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Didn't realize that .bmp files, which most websites seem to use for their photos, don't show up in the Mac version of IE. I think I realized this once before, when browsing my own website from my Mac, but I always forget. Must be because sites don't want their pictures easily copied and used on other sites, but it's kind of a pain. When I save pictures on my Windows PC, many are in BMP format. If I don't bother converting them into JPGs then Mac browsers just see a bunch of empty spaces on my site.

Downloadable surround sound

This is pretty cool. You can download a Dolby Digital or DTS file to your computer, burn it to a CD-R as an audio CD, and play it in surround sound on your home theater. Of course, you need a surround sound set-up in your home. II'll give it a try tonight.

Ah! There it is!

Who says electronic equipment doesn't need breaking in. After a week of usage and endless tinkering, and after I finally got my DVD player back from the shop with the upgrade to a progressive scan processor, the picture on my new TV is now finally officially gorgeous. It's a combination of things--feeding it a pristing progressive 480p signal from my Proceed's new PVP card, and the sharp, bright picture from the TV's three 7" CRTs. No more scan lines, bold and beautiful colors with neutral skin tones, a smooth and soft film-like picture as opposed to the harsh video-like picture of most televisions.
What's more, my DVD player can take any video signal from my receiver and de-interlace it before feeding it to my TV as 480p. The TV has the ability to de-interlace as well, but my DVD player does a much better job of doing so. I could sit here and watch movies on it all day (which is pretty much what I've been doing most evenings this weekend).
Any day now I should get my receiver back with its upgraded DSP circuitry and support for higher resolution audio. Can't wait. It may be enough to warrant purchasing an SACD player. Some people buy a house and then decide what room they might use to put a home theater. If/when I start house-hunting, I'll be the first person to look for a house that will fit around my home theater, because the next major upgrade to my home theater is a perfectly symmetrical rectangular room with harder floors and walls with particular reflective qualities.
Yes, I know, I shouldn't derive so much pleasure from material goods, but the quest for audio/video perfection is no different for me than a runner's quest for the perfect race, or a photographer's yearning for that perfect shot. You're never done, and you're having fun the whole way through.
It's time to revive movie night. I have a schedule in mind already. And a format, adopted from Flicks at Stanford. Every movie night begins with a short, and then the main feature. And relevant food, if possible.

Chinese editing style

Watching What Time is it There, the most recent movie by Tsai Ming Liang, and got to wondering why it is that so many directors from the Taiwan New Wave use such long takes without cutting while the Average American film can't go more than a few seconds without jumping to a new shot; it can't just be the influence of MTV and the fact that so many American directors got their start directing commercials...or can it? Maybe the American movie industry got its hands on so many toys and big budgets early on and fell in love with them and their endless possibilities, or maybe the Chinese camera eye is simply more patient, less intrusive; this might be seen as a very Chinese New Wave type of blog, with long, uninterrupted sentences, continuous flowing thoughts.
Tsai Ming Liang films also don't really have much action or even a soundtrack, which, along with the motionless camera shots, give the viewer a sense of quiet.

Shimano XTR 2003

MTB fans everywhere await the new Shimano XTR components with bated breath. This will be the third generation of these legendary top-of-the-line MTB component set.
Two things catch my eye. The new disc brakes weigh only 557 grams in front. That's not much more than the XTR V-brakes at 484 grams. The new XTR disc brakes are reputed to be the best disc brakes on the market, with significantly more stopping power. This probably is the end of linear pull on MTB bikes. I'll need to upgrade!
Also, the shifters have taken a page from the road bike world and reduced shifting down to one lever. To move from one chainring to the other, you flick the brake lever up or down. Same for the rear derailleur. It's a pretty radical shift (pun intended) and will surely draw a lot of polarized opinion.
Other than that, there are the requisite weight savings almost across the board. Can't wait to test some of this stuff out.

Good interview mind teaser

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How many traffic signals in Manhattan?

Heaven

Finally, that trailer for Heaven, the movie I mentioned in an earlier post.

The Kid Stays in the Picture

Engrossing documentary about a fascinating ego. I see a story like this and it scratches an itch I can't reach because I'm wearing a cast.
The movie leads with a quote: "There are three sides to each story. My side, your side and the truth. And no one is lying. Memories shared serve each one differently."
And so Robert Evans gives advance notice that he'll be narrating his side of the story, and that's fine. He knows it will be biased, but honestly so. Frankly, it's loads more entertaining because it is his point of view. Who doesn't want to hear directly from a guy who produced The Godfather, Marathon Man, Love Story, and Rosemary's Baby; married Ali Macgraw, then lost her to Steve McQueen; got caught in a cocaine sting by the DEA; was a suspect in the murder of an associate; committed himself to a mental hospital for fear he'd kill himself; and all the while, bedded most every gorgeous model and actress in Hollywood?

Back in black

My car is finally back from the shop. Man, I missed it. Days when things don't work out, when you get behind the wheel, it's great to know that everything works exactly the way you want it to when you put your foot down and turn the steering wheel.
At the same time, I read an article in The New Yorker about traffic, and how it's getting steadily worse all across the country. So I think, perhaps I'll take public transportation.
But yesterday, some kid hijacked a bus in Seattle, drove it at insane speeds down a local city street, demolishing a few cars, sending a few people to the hospital, finally crashing on a sidewalk just down the street from my house. Ironically, without knowing what had happened, I was hitching a ride back home from Amy and we were discussing a bus accident in Seattle many years earlier. Then, the bus in question was the one I usually took home. Some guy shot the driver, shot himself, and the bus ran across a few lanes on the Aurora bridge, smashed through the side rail, and plummeted head first down through a few floors of an apartment down below.
So maybe I'll bike? No, the office won't let me bring my bike up to my office. I've had three bikes stolen in my life, I'm not going through that heartache again. All offices should allow employees to bring bikes up to their office. Ours allows dogs but not bikes. Hmm.

Valuable real estate

Today, across the country, lots of readers receive their weekly copy of The New Yorker by mail. First thing you do with a magazine like The New Yorker is flip to the table of contents. It used to always be on the first page after the cover, on the backside (which is the left page if you have the magazine laid open). Now it's occasionally one or two pages in, after a few ads. Not as good as the old days, but not quite as bad as Vanity Fair or GQ where you spend ten minutes searching for a table of contents amidst ten or twenty pages of pouty models sporting clothes they look terribly bored to be wearing.
Anyway, next to the table of contents, in the left-hand gutter, is always a vertical pillar of adspace. Usually, it's for a book. Today's featured book? You Are Not a Stranger Here. The first rave review excerpt reads:
"A genuinely heartbreaking work of staggering genius."
Obviously an appeal to the hundreds of thousands of readers of Dave Eggers book of that title.
The next review? By Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections:
"A wonderful rarity: an old-fashioned young storyteller with something urgent and fresh and fiercely intelligent to say."
An appeal to the millions of readers of Franzen's novel.
Intrigued, I visited Amazon to check out the book. Only then did I find out, after reading a few customer reviews, that it was a collection of short stories, not a novel. Not just that, it was the #9 best seller in the bookstore.
Had to be the New Yorker ad. I've never even heard of that book. Makes me thing that was a darn good ad, and that the table of contents page in The New Yorker is one damn valuable piece of real estate. It's pretty hard to navigate the New Yorker without checking out the table of contents, one of the best in any magazine. Because people use it, and because it's very spare (author, page, title, subtitle, and a one-line fragment about the subject of the article), the ad space next to it jumps out at thousands of readers every Thursday.
If I ever publish a book, I'll know I've made it if my publisher buys that ad space.
A collection of short stories in the top 10! That never happens.

Jaguar, iPod

Jaguar: faster, definitely, than OS X 10.1.5; still good-looking; stable; great developer tools; overpriced, because lots of the bundled apps are available for free from Apple already, especially overpriced if you already bought an earlier version of OS X.
iPod: beautifully functional; great asset for creative professionals, because the proper soundtrack for life is always at hand; not good for jogging or working out, because it's a hard drive, and those are inherently delicate.

Fantasy Island

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Off to the San Juans for a weekend of R&R at Juli's family condos. Honey!
Toni's tying the knot tonight, and I've volunteered to be wedding photographer. Hmm, this should be interesting. Kinda wish I had the Nikon 85mm AF portrait lens, but gadget lust is a never-ending hunger. At some point, there's just the craft. I've been perusing the Joe Buissink site for inspiration.

Long haul

Good luck to my coworkers running Hood to Coast today. They're crazy, of course, and it's fantastic. The corporate weekend warrior is an easy target, but what's wrong with a desk jockey who makes the most of time outside the office to combat the ravages of time? It's a beautiful thing. It's a fine line between laid back and lazy.

A movie lover's fall

This summer's movies have not been all that exciting, but the fall brings hope...
At long last, Disney is bringing out the American release of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. Disney and Miyazaki is a good pairing; he is Japan's premier animator and purveyor of wonder. The Quicktime trailer is gorgeous.
I have it on DVD, but I've been waiting until my receiver returns to watch it. Can't can't can't can't wait.
Another can't miss event for film buffs everywhere: the digitally restored Metropolis (Quicktime trailer). I really hope it comes to Seattle. It inspired a Japanese animated film which fell far short of the original. Fritz Lang was a mad genius.
Moving on, we have the last in Godfrey Reggio's great "Qatsi" trilogy, Naqoyqatsi, with another sure-to-be-wonderful score by Philip Glass, arrives October 18. Naqoyqatsi is "life at war," while his previous two, which arrive on DVD in mid September, were life out of balance (Koyaanisqatsi) and life in transformation (Powaqqatsi).
How about a film from Werner Herzog, with a score by Hans Zimmer? That is the promising creative force behind Invincible. Also stars the always sharp Tim Roth. I didn't even realize Herzog was still making movies. Amazing. His Nosferatu and Aguirre: The Wrath of God are movie hall-of-famers.
Of course there's Punch-Drunk Love, Heaven by Tom Tykwer and starring Cate Blanchett (first of the Heaven, Hell, Purgatory trilogy originally planned by Krzysztof Kielowski, Bubba Ho-Tep (Bruce Campbell plays an aging Elvis who battles mummies!!!) and way off in the distance, The Two Towers, which I'm just about to finish reading again, and Gangs of New York. It's not a historic lineup, but it contains enough nuggets to keep it from being a dismal second half.

X2

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New trailer for X-Men 2 (X2). They had the good taste to use music from Holst's The Planets (name that planet smart readers).

What?!?

Tamyra was eliminated instead of Nikki on American Idol tonight. What the hell?! Nikki barely qualifies to be Tamyra's backup singer.
None of the singers are amazing, but the weekly drama to see who the fickle public eliminates is intriguing. At this point, my money's on Kelly. Justin is a ham whose voice is thin, and Nikki's just not a very good singer, and I'm not sure what kind of look she's going for, but it's not good. How she survives every week is the great mystery of the summer.

Tube job

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End of an era. My faithful Pioneer 1009W has moved next door with Scott, and a new Pioneer 720HD has moved in to serve as my faithful entertainment companion. Man, I loved that 1009W. After it was calibrated, it just put out an awesome movie picture. The 720HD has a ways to go to achieve that. It needs breaking in and lots of calibration. But it can handle progressive scan and high-def signals, and it was high time for me to join that world. Now I just need my receiver back and I'll be ready to begin hosting movie nights all over again.

PunchDrunkLove

When Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Hard Eight, Magnolia) said he was making a movie starring Adam Sandler, it seemed like the kind of brash declaration he'd absolutely follow up on. After all, what greater challenge for an acclaimed director than taking an actor that everyone considers a low-brow comedian and directing him to critical acclaim? Sounded exactly like something PTA would try. Well, now there's proof.
The trailer(s) are out. Click on Punch, Drunk, and Love to see each of the three. Can't wait for this movie!

Sight and Sound Top Ten Movies of All Time

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The results are in. Sight and Sound polls critics and movie directors themselves, so these are the "experts" picks, for whatever that's worth.
Across the director and critics lists, the films I haven't seen are all the ones not yet on DVD: La Regle du Jeu (Renoir), Tokyo Story (Ozu), Sunrise (Murnau). In particular, I really want to see Sunrise, a silent film, but it's only available on VHS. I think there's a laserdisc version, and I may have to track that down once my receiver is back from the shop.
Lists like these will always invite a lot of debate, but for those who haven't seen these films, you can't really go wrong with any of them.
Sidenote: Safe to say Transporter won't be making any future Sight and Sound lists. Trailer looks fun, though. One of the unfortunate byproducts of China's takeover of Hong Kong was the outflow of all the talent from the HK movie industry. Fortunately, perhaps because of this outflow, we're seeing that HK influence in cinema of other countries, especially the US. When that influence is perverted, you get crap like Romeo Must Die. The Transporter, directed by HK vet Cory Yuen, looks like a lighthearted, mindless romp that doesn't take itself all that seriously.

Perhaps the closet?

In Seattle, if you want to do something in your garage--start a garage band, edit a film in your garage, paint in your garage--you actually have to be fairly well-off since space is tight and most homes don't have garages. So in a way, the economics here undermine the rags-to-riches nature of the garage artist myth.

Peak conditions

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Gladwell wrote an interesting review in this week's New Yorker of a book about the deadly Chicago heat wave of 1995. Anyone from Chicago knows the summers are hot and humid, but that summer, a confluence of rare conditions caused 739 deaths in the span of a week.
One of the points he makes is that politicians and social structures shouldn't be judged on how they perform under normal conditions, but how they perform under peak conditions. Chicago's systems failed when the heat wave hit its peak. Local power company transformers burned out, leaving tens of thousands without air conditioning. City hospitals failed to call upon help from the suburbs quickly enough, leaving a shortage of ambulances throughout the downtown area. Some hospitals closed their emergency rooms because of overflow. Under peak conditions, Chicago's infrastructure failed the elderly of the city, and more died in that week than died in the TWA Flight 800 crash or the Oklahoma City bombing, though you don't hear nearly as much about the Chicago incident.
What interests me is the idea of judging people under peak conditions. For example, your friends might be happy to help you out from time to time, but then you become an alcoholic, and they head for the woods. Your spouse vows to be by your side through thick and thin, but as soon as you lose your job, you're on your own. You're reasonably happy with some people on your team, then a big crunch hits and you need them to work overtime on a weekend to nail a deadline, and they grumble or beg out. Chris Webber is acknowledged to be an immensely talented power forward, but come the end of playoff games, he's at the top of the key, back to the basket, waiting to hand the ball off to someone else to take the shot.
There's something to be said for judging all people that way, including ourselves.

Don't Look Now

Everyone has one strange movie that just plain terrifies them. For me, that movie is Don't Look Now, and it's finally coming to DVD. Everyone talks about the "really sexy for the time" romp in bed between Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie (director Nicolas Roeg did a very clever thing and spliced together alternating scenes from their lovemaking with scenes of them dressing later that evening for dinner--it's one of the more memorable uses of montage in movie history). But all I remember is...well, I won't ruin it for you. It's a great film, and it scares me. Something about the cinematography, the plot, the acting. Very few people seem to have seen it, and more should.
By the way, DVD lovers need to crack open the piggy bank (not the small one, the big one). Band of Brothers, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Extended Edition), The Simpsons Second Season Box Set, Grease...that's not even mentioning some other DVDs which reasonable people might consider must own, like Spiderman, Monsters Inc., Amelie. There are people who don't own a single DVD, don't own a DVD player, never watch movies more than once. I've long since stopped trying to understand them or judge them. The gulf is there, and we stand on opposite sides.
After all, it's so easy to judge.

Spoiler spoiler alert

Love The New Yorker, but if you don't enjoy reading movie reviews which give away key plot points, Anthony Lane and David Denby are reviewers you want to read AFTER you've seen the film. Lane's review of Signs casually reveals the secret about the entire film. Granted, Shyamalan (pronounced SHAH-mah-lahn) films are tough to review without drawing attention to the mysteries at the core of the story, but Denby and Lane don't even pretend to care if you want spoiler warnings.

In this corner, wearing the hockey mask...

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Hollywood's new infatuation: pitting two popular villains or heroes against each other. Among Hollywood's upcoming projects:
Alien vs. Predator
Batman vs. Superman
Freddy vs. Jason
Michael Buffer must be wetting his pants (BTW, if you want to be jealous and spiteful towards anyone, is any target more deserving than Buffer? Has anyone in the history of man accomplished more with less? At least Anna Nicole Smith had to shack up with some 90 year old grandpa to earn her millions and her TV show).
What's sad about this all is that since the foes are of such high profile, you know that neither side will really triumph. No one's going to die off here. It's not as if the creative brians favor one side or the other, and it's especially true if the rivals are represented by different studios. When the Japanese made a film of the Godzilla versus King Kong, the two fought to something of a draw. There's an American cut in which King Kong comes off as the victor after tossing Godzilla around by his tail like a limp noodle, but the Japanese cut tips the scales in favor of Godzilla a bit more.
In any case, it's possible to make an interesting film in which two protagonists battle to a draw, but in these cases it's unlikely. At any rate, give me Tom Wolfe versus John Updike, or Tom Wolfe versus John Updike, Norman Mailer, and John Irving. Or Kasparov vs. Karpov. Ali vs. Frazier. Any battle involving two arrogant egos the size of Manhattan. Competition is spicy, and life is otherwise bland.

Blog Family Tree

A post for those of you with weblogs: a new site called Blogtree has been set up to allow bloggers to register their blogs and specify which blog(s) inspired their creation. Most webblogs are inspired by people who read someone else's webblog and decide they want one, too. I registered and cited my parent blog, Bean's Koraku.

Converging technologies

The National Science Foundation and the Department of Commerce collaborated on a 405 page report titled "Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Science." Interesting interesting stuff, and best of all it's posted online for free. Nutrition for the geek in you.

Michael Specter

You know you're loyal to a magazine or newspaper when you start to know the names of the regular contributors. I always mention Malcolm Gladwell from The New Yorker (most known for his book The Tipping Point). Michael Specter has a website that looks just like Gladwell's, along with an archive of all his articles for The New Yorker. Specter writes in a different style than Gladwell but covers similarly diverse topics and phenomena. Among his interesting recent work are a piece on Lance Armstrong and an examination of the reliability (or lack thereof) of fingerprints.

New trailer for The Ring

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The American adaptation of the Japanese horror classic--Quicktime trailer in high res. I have a hard time believing this adaption will match the original in creepiness, but it does star the talented Naomi Watts. If it's successful, prepare for a wave of adaptations because there's an entire library of good, low-budget Japanese horror films for Hollywood to mine (and ruin).

For the love of *&^$%#

Okay, it's the 21st century. Can someone please invent a vending machine that dispenses the item you selected successfully 100% of the time? You reach in your pocket, miraculously cobble together a half pound of nickels and dimes that just adds up perfectly to the cost of a bag of pretzels or chips or cookies, and then you press the button and the metal coils turn, and your bag is pushed forward from with a mechanical whir, and then....it hovers there in space, like a bag of Doritos trying to commit suicide by jumping from the 8th story of its vending apartment.
I'm not sure what burns me more, not getting my chips or the thought of someone else getting two bags of chips. I want a tax deduction.

9 minutes

I think I read this in a Sports Guy mailbag column, and it came to mind this morning. I've been getting up at 5:30 am every morning this week--I'm still on French time. My alarm goes off at 6 am, and I hit the snooze button.
9 minute later, the alarm is back on. Some ensemble morning talk show hosts babbling on with energy and enthusiasm that is superhuman considering the time of day. Inevitably, once a week, the host has to chew out a caller who's dying to hear himself live, "Please turn off the radio, Bob." Where was I? Oh yeah. 9 minutes. Why are all alarm clock snoozes set at 9 minutes? Someone has to tell me. Is there some scientific axiom that 9 minutes is just enough time for you to pass out again, but not deeply enough to achieve REM sleep? Maybe one company in the world has a monopoly on making the snooze chip for alarm clocks globally, and they're too stingy to change their production process to accomodate alternate snooze intervals.
I should have tried it with the hotel alarm clocks in France. They still measure time in minutes, but maybe the metric system means you have to multiply the 9 minutes by 1.67 or something like that so their snoozes are 15 minutes. Actually, they probably have 30 minute snooze increments considering dinner out in Europe lasts about 4 hours. How can you have faith in the European economy if they don't understand that the more people you cycle through a restaurant, the more money you make?
The damn Air France air baggage handlers were on strike in Paris when I flew over for my Tour de France camp, so my bags were stranded there for days as I flew on to Marseilles. Then on the way home, the KLM pilots were on strike so I was stranded a day in Amsterdam. They have laws limiting work weeks to 35 hours in France, and they still strike. And they complain about Lance Armstrong, an American, winning their race year after year. They should stop striking and get to work.

Chicago

RealOne trailer for the new movie adaptation of the musical Chicago. Click on the link that reads "haute resolution" for the high-res version, or "moyenne resolution" for you lower bandwidth users. Catherine Zeta Jones is barely recognizable in costume. Of course, so was Michael Douglas when she fell for him (there's no other explanation), and then BAM! He stops using makeup and ages 50 years on her in a day. Yikes, that must have been a tough morning when she woke up to that. Talk about scary morning faces.

Airline security in Europe

European airports do their carry-on baggage security x-ray screening at each gate, rather than en masse before you enter the terminal. It's a superior system. Costs more because you have to buy more of those x-ray machines and hire more security staff, but it means less time in line for passengers, and if there's a security breach or delay, only a subset of passengers is affected.

Schizo TIVO

My hacked Tivo device (it has two giant hard drives patched into it for 305 hours of recording time) has some algorithm for selecting random programs to record as suggested viewing. I think it's supposed to be based on other programs I've instructed it to record, but the algorithm isn't very good. Much to my horror, one of the shows it selected was Nash Bridges.

Entertainment news

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Hard to believe the fall is just around the corner, with football and Fall TV. I arrived back to Seattle from France and it felt like summer was just beginning. Then the second day back it was about 55 degrees and rainy.
The season premiere of of the second season of 24 has been set on Oct. 29, a Tuesday, at 9pm. The entire first episode will be commercial free. Maybe we'll see Jack Bauer have to use the bathroom during that episode.
Sarah Michelle Gellar likely won't sign on for season eight of Buffy, so next season's it. Good long run for Joss Whedon.
Baz Luhrman has thrown his hat into the Alexander the Great ring. He's now competing with Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese, and Mel Gibson to be first to market with a biopic on Big Al. Very strange how everyone in Hollywood is always converging on the same ideas. I can guarantee that if there are four movies on Alexander the Great, not all four will succeed.

Stupid Stupid Stupid Human!

Aaaaaaaaaaaa! So I lug my camera and my big 80-200mm lens over to France for the Tour. The last time I used my camera, I was at a wedding, and it was dark, so I decided to shoot my 400 speed black and white film at 800 and then push process it later. Well, being the idiot I am, I didn't bother checking the rating when I loaded new film in France during the Tour. I shot two rolls of Provia 100F at 800 speed and the slides all came out predictably underexposed. Noonan!
I think it's partially Nikon's fault for not flashing an alert or resetting the speed when a new roll of film is loaded. Damn!
Fortunately, my one good shot of Lance was shot on 400 speed film. Everyone in the camp was so impressed watching me with my giant lens, lens hood, and monopod, running back and forth across the street to get angles on the incoming cyclists. They're going to have a good laugh at this one.

Best of the streaming music services

Listen.com's Rhapsody online music subscription service is supposedly the best out there. Their musical catalog is impressive, and you can play an unlimited number of tracks each month, but you're limited to burning ten tracks a month. That means most of your music listening still has to occur at your computer. Not my preferred mode of listening to music.
Pressplay finally unveiled unlimited downloads and streams for $14.95 per month.
All these services are inching their way towards usefulness, which makes it somewhat more palatable that the file-sharing services online are crippled. Still, lots of problems remain. The quality of downloaded streams is not CD quality, only 128kbps for Pressplay, for example, and streams are just at 96kbps for customers with the fastest online connections. That's weak, and insufficient for music like classical or jazz which counts lots of audiophiles among its audience.
These services try as hard as possible to not tread on the turf of CD sales, and that's their downfall.

Three's the charm...or maybe not

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Saw a screening of Signs, the new M. Night Shyamalan film. Didn't find it to be as good as his previous two movies, The Sixth Sense or Unbreakable. The trademark suspense and mystery is there, but it doesn't pay off.
There's a fine line between inspiring a sense of wonder and coming off as hokey. Signs was the latter for me. Also, he's got to stop casting himself in all his movies--he's not that great an actor, and he can afford to hire some real acting talent. Get over yourself, M. Night. You're a good director, so stay behind the camera.

Spirited Away on DVD


Hayao Miyazaki's latest is out on region 3 DVD and region 2 DVD now!

Lowe leaving The West Wing


Rob Lowe is leaving The West Wing over a salary dispute. It's so hard to tell what the details are in a case like this. It's certainly possible he didn't push for a raise but was characterized as doing so through an intentional media leak. All I care is that Lowe's Sam Seaborn will be no more early in 2003. That's a shame.
I'm as strong a proponent as there that the director and writer are the key determinants of the quality of TV shows and movies, but that's mostly because they have the ability to court first-rate acting talent. In television, where an actor will play the same character for hour after hour, year after year, it's harder to replace them and maintain the same feel. The X-Files wasn't the same when Duchovny and Anderson left, and much of the quality difference in the Bond films was due to Connery versus some of his weaker successors.
Having now seen the first season and bits of season two, I can notice a dropoff in quality this season. Not the actors fault. The writing is inconsistent. Sam doesn't play as large a role now, but while he wasn't an Emmy nominee like many of the other actors, his was the emotional everyman at the heart of the ensemble cast. It won't be easy maintaining the quality of that show through seven seasons, but it will pass the 80 episode mark (or whatever the number is which marks economic megasuccess for TV shows--I think it's eighty, the point at which you can capture massive syndication fees). Let's hope they can work something out.

Sunday is HBO

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Season premiere of Sex in the City Sunday, and a new season of The Sopranos Sept. 15. The former is a way to lure women to your place, and the latter is the perfect lead-in to guys Sunday Poker night, $5-$10 Texas Hold'em.

17 miles, 3000 feet to Paradise

"I become a happier man each time I suffer."
Lance Armstrong said that when discussing why he cycles. Sounds like just another pithy sports quote, but anyone who cycles consistently for a few years knows exactly what he means. I would clarify Lance's quote by saying that a cyclist is only happy when he's worked hard enough that he can suffer even more than normal.
It's not just the early season, out-of-shape-after-a-winter-of-sitting-on-your-ass, suffering that cyclists enjoy. It's after you've trained a whole season and are in good enough shape so that you can increase your exertion and raise the ceiling on your suffering...that's joy.
Yesterday I drove out to Rainier with my bike stuffed in my back seat (it actually does fit, with tires removed, even with my top up). It's a fairly long drive, and I listened to grave, dramatic movie soundtracks the whole way to psyche myself up for the climb to Paradise, which sits at about 5,200 to 5,300 feet above sea level. Most of the way out there, the skies were gray, heavy with gloom, but somewhere on highway 7 I saw a solitary patch of blue sky. Soon, bright sun was shining down everywhere as if it had been awaiting me at the park.
Pulled into a campground just inside Nisqually, unloaded my bike, put the tires back on, pumped them up, and set off for Paradise. My altimeter read 2,310. I had no idea how long the climb was, and I didn't really care. I was excited at the prospect of a true, long, torturous climb after spending all season riding the tiny hills in Seattle. This was a Tour-worthy climb, noble suffering.
Also, the last time I rode to Paradise was in RAMROD last year, and that time I had ridden a flat tire in to the rest stop just above this campground and had suffered the whole way up to the top. It seemed like everyone passed me on that climb, and memories of that painful ascent had become a mental block. I had to conquer my demons, just as Lance had to overcome a mental hurdle on the Col de Joux Plane, where he bonked in 2000, in this year's Dauphine Libere.
No need to recount the whole ride. What is there to say about mountain climbs on a road bike? You strain in a low gear almost the whole way up, plodding along at around 9 to 10mph, dripping sweat, for about two hours, sliding around on your saddle all the time to try and work different leg muscles. Great fun, believe me, even though I know you don't. Beautiful views off the cliffs at the side of the road.
I didn't exactly fly up to Paradise, but man it's satisfying to reach the top. I sat on a picnic bench and stretched out. A young Muslim girl of about three or four years old stared at me in my strange biking outfit as if I was some alien. Looked at my bike computer and my watch. I'd climbed 3000 feet over 17 miles of paved road.
The drive home was great. Put the top down, cranked the heat up on high, cranked some less dramatic, happy pop music up even higher, and sang at the top of my lungs with the sun warming my neck and the wind mussing up my hair. Zipping in and out of traffic at 100mph, my bike in back, that's heaven. If I'd taken a random exit by mistake and headed off East into the open roads, I wouldn't have given a damn where I was going. Would have kept driving until I ran out of gas, then pulled my bike out and started riding.

VR Seattle

Sang and I hosted a going away BBQ for Jenny and Adam today. If the two of them should miss Seattle, they can always see some of it on the web at VR Seattle.
Here's the tunnel I go through just about every time I go for a bike ride, the I-90 tunnel which opens up on Sam Smith park. I've gone through it countless times, so I know the slight downward slope and the cool breeze to expect when heading through the tunnel East, with fresh legs, clicking up to the big chainring, the sound of my chain jumping up and clicking into place reverberating through the tunnel with a satisfying mechanical echo.
Here's a view of the I-90 bridge which I cross once I'm through the tunnel. I hate the bridge. It's about a mile and a half of windy, noisy, dusty, bumpy pain. When riders pass you on the bridge you can't hear them approaching. I hate being passed on the bridge. Coming west on the bridge is more enjoyable. The first two thirds are downhill and you can easily hold speeds in the low twenties. Then it ends with a nice gradual ascent which gets your heart rate going. That's the spot to overtake other riders if you have any pop left in your legs.

Dancing up the mountains

I think the reason I continue to bike, even though it's often long, dull, and a pain in the ass, is that I want to be able to dance up the mountains. Riders who spin their pedals lightly and just float up the mountains, overcoming gravity and their own body weight, ride through adversity in such a pure and simple way. It's a grace I seek in my own life, to be challenged, to put down the hammer, and dispel all obstacles with exertion and joy. Everything feels like a burden now, and only energy, positive thinking, and discipline can carry me through it all.

The Ring

AICN linked to the first trailer for the American remake of the Japanese film, The Ring. Wouldn't you know it? The trailer is Japanese.
A really, really fun horror flick, but the trailer seems to confirm that it won't seek to be original in any way. Just borrow everything possible from the Japanese film, including the video footage, the sound effects in the trailer, and insert Naomi Watts. Vanilla Sky, La Femme Nikita, when was the last time an American remake bettered the foreign source material?

34 seconds back

Lance lost more time to Galdeano today and is now 8th, 34 seconds back. Lance's wheel got tangled with a teammates' tire in a crash near the finish line.
Nothing he can't make up later, but it adds some drama to this year's Tour.

Vin Diesel as Hannibal?

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Stumbled on this article. Even if you don't read French, you can probably interpret that Revolution Studios has acquired the rights to adapt Ross Leckie's novel about Hannibal into a film, and they want Vin Diesel to play Hannibal (not Lecter, but the one who rode the elephants over the Alps to attack Rome). What a strange casting choice. For some reason I always pictured Hannibal as more cerebral. Vin Diesel, with his gravelly voice, shaved head, and stocky frame just strikes me as a stylized meathead.

Cycling, soccer

As to whether soccer and cycling will gain in popularity in America? Doubtful. Not when football, baseball, and basketball are on TV year round, their athletes competing on the field and acting in commercials and movies, splashed on magazine covers. Cycling is expensive and painful. Soccer isn't expensive, but it just doesn't mesmerize America's attention except when it takes the world stage. Same with cycling. Can the average American name an MLS soccer team? Can any of them name a bike race other than the Tour de France?

Flick

Flick is the term for knocking a cyclist off his bike at high speeds. I got that from an article on Lance Armstrong in the latest New Yorker. Good profile of Lance and intro to the sport, so if you've never read anything about him or cycling, I recommend it while it's posted for free this next week. The New Yorker tends to post a few articles from each issue for about a week.
This morning I got up later than usual for my daily cruise around Mercer. Was supposed to call Jesse at 6am, but talk radio on the alarm didn't penetrate my sleepy head until 6:30. In this last crunch to train before I head off to France, my mileage is up, and when that happens, I need more sleep. I haven't been getting it, and getting up in the mornings is excruciating.
Usually I ride counter-clockwise around the outside of the island. It's a few miles longer as a ride, the fun windy portion doesn't come until the end of the ride, and most importantly, it's easier to spot cars pulling out of driveways because the driveways on the right slope up to the street and are not as enshrouded in trees and shrubs. Running behind, as soon as I made it across I-90 I decided to go clockwise instead.
Most of the early ride I was trying to wake myself up and get a rhythm on the bike. In the morning it takes me longer to get loose, so it's hard to feel fast and fluid on the bike. About two-thirds of the way through the ride, on the West side of the island, I accelerated down a short hill and was coasting at about 25 mph when a dark green (was it blue, black?) SUV pulled out of a driveway on the right. I had just glanced down at my bike computer for a second and when I looked up the car was about ten yards in front of me.
When I was in grade school, living in Palatine, I used to ride my 10 speed around the block over and over. One day I was looking down at my tires and not at the road ahead and ran into the back of a neighbor's car parked out on the street, in front of that neighbor's house. That neighbor happened to be sitting on his porch. A middle-aged guy, he was none too happy. He called for his wife and came over and barked at me ("Why don't you watch where you're going?! I just bought that car!" and so on and so forth). Later they visited my parents to ask for payment for a broken taillight.
Maybe I was thinking about that traumatic event from my childhood this morning because I nailed my brakes and swerved hard to the right. Of course, I don't have anti-lock brakes on my bike and at 25mph my tires locked up and skidded. The front of my bike dropped into a ditch by the side of the road and stopped, while my body continued on and over the top. My left foot popped out of my pedals, my right foot still locked in. I stepped down on my left leg to try and avoid falling on my bike and hyperextended it as it landed in a muddy hole. I continued to rotate forward and put my right hand down to brace my fall and bent my wrist back hard on the driveway.
Everything was two points of sharp pain: left knee, right wrist. Then relief when I noticed my bike looked unharmed. Then a burst of joy at being alive. Then momentary panic: what if I had broken my wrist or reinjured my left knee? One week from my trip to France, that would be unacceptable. With adrenaline pumping hard through me, I couldn't gauge the seriousness of my injuries. Everything felt okay, but I wasn't sure.
The SUV had long since disappeared. Some harried worker rushing of to work, no doubt oblivious to my plight. I waited by the roadside for a bit and a few cars drove by, but I didn't flag any of them down. I wasn't sure what I'd say to them if I did. On my own. So I climbed back on my bike, wiped the gravel and mud and blood off my wrist and legs, and set off for home. No doubt watching the Tour helped inspire me. Every year some Tour rider goes down in a crash and gets up covered in blood, bike partially mangled, collarbone or wrist broken, and a huge bloody abrasion on the outside of his thigh from skin dragged across pavement at 30mph. And somehow he staggers in on his bike. Sometimes they recover to go on and finish the Tour. Most times they drop out the next day or fail to finish in a fast enough time to make the cut. Cyclists, with body fat in the low single digits, are much more susceptible to sickness than the average person.
In stage two of this year's Tour, Thor Hushovd of Credite Agricole joined two other cyclists in a long breakaway attempt. In the middle of the stage he had to stop with severe leg cramps. They continued to plague him throughout the stage. Long after everyone else had finished, he was out on the road, a mechanic massaging his cramping leg while he fought back tears. Somehow he made it home, cheered on all the way by a sympathetic crowd.
Compared to those guys, my plight was nowhere near as dire. But I did have a problem in that I'm not as strong as those guys, either. With one leg and one arm, I was dangerously off balance on my bike and could barely hold a straight line. On the uphills, I couldn't get out of the saddle so I had to muscle up in a low gear, gently resting my right hand on the top of my handlebars.
Typing is somewhat painful, so to sum up: X-rays negative, wrist ain't broken, leg is hyperextended but still functional, and I hope to regain enough strength in both to be able to climb at full strength up the Pyrenees and Alps in a week. There will be plenty of fans at the side of the road, waiting to cheer on the pros, and they'll likely spare some for me, too.
Every cyclist who logs enough miles will have a near-miss to report, and almost all will have one bike accident to recount over beers. Now I have mine.