Drip drop drip drop

The radiator in the apartment upstairs sprung a leak, so I this week I had to put buckets and towels out to collect the dripping water through my ceiling. What started as a tiny, spherical water stain slowly spread and morphed into a giant, unsightly, urine-colored drip painting. The upstairs tenant was out of town, and the super didn't have a key. All night, I listened to the metronomic plip...plop...plip...plop of drops of water cliff diving into my bucket. I felt like Hitomi from Hideo Nakata's Dark Water (or Jennifer Connelly from the upcoming remake).

Next installment of JibJab: [Bush's] Second Term

John Hollinger picks his NBA All-Stars

Steve Jobs to deliver Commencement speech at Stanford in 2005

Great...my commencement speaker was William Perry

Google plans to offer a tag that will help bloggers to signal the search engine to ignore links in comments, hopefully neutering comment spam

It will also render eliminate the Googlerank value of legitimate comment URLs, but that's a minor side effect in my mind. I despite comment spammers

Autumn Thunder: 40 Years NFL Films Music

A 10 CD box set featuring the martial tunes from NFL Films. Great background music for that Superbowl party with your buddies. All that's missing is narration by Steve Sabol and Harry Kalas

Over holiday break, we watched Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy on DVD

That will surprise no one who knows of me and my unhealthy love for Will Ferrell. Now, Anchorman is by no means a classic or even a good movie (I'm not going to bother reviewing it), but no true devotee of Ferrell's oeuvre would miss it. Without seeing it, I wouldn't understand the subtext and nuance of half the things my brother James says, and now the same can be said for people who speak to me. I do think it's cheesy that the studio forces you to buy a more expensive DVD giftset in order to get the Wake Up, Ron Burgundy supplemental disc that contains Burgundy's other two interviews from the MTV Movie Awards (Burt Reynolds and Jim Caviezel--"Tell me, Jesus, do you ever use your superpowers in games of chance?"). The video of Will and the gang covering Afternoon Delight by Starland Vocal Band (excerpt)...well, let's just say, if you don't think it's good, I will fight you. Anchorman was also geographically relevant to our family vacation, the movie being set in San Diego.

Ron Burgundy: The Germans discovered it in 1904, and they called it "San Diego", which in German means "whale's vagina".

Veronica Corningstone: No, I don't think that is what it means. No, it doesn't mean that.

Ron Burgundy: I don't know. I was just trying to impress you. I don't think anyone knows what it means anymore. The translation was lost hundreds of years ago.

Veronica Corningstone: Doesn't it mean "Saint Diego"?

Ron Burgundy: ...No. No, that isn't it.

Veronica Corningstone: No, I'm pretty sure that's what it means.

Ron Burgundy: Agree to disagree.

To distract free throw shooters of the visiting team at a basketball game, wave your thundersticks in unison, rather than randomly (maybe)

Wacky warning labels and past winners

Warning on can of self-defense pepper spray "May irritate eyes" and a waring on a fireplace log warns "Caution - Risk of Fire"

Could thousands of people have been saved from the tsunami if notified via cell phones or the Internet?

Interesting question that many probably wondered as they watched news videos of people hanging out while waves began to climb higher and higher up the shores, oblivious to the much deadlier waves racing their direction

3 DJs suggest wedding mixes

One of them opened one wedding with "Love Will Tear Us Apart" by Joy Division, I hope as a joke. Dan Finnerty lists "Making Love out of Nothing at All" as the most inappropriate song for a wedding.

Dell CEO Kevin Rollins calls iPod a fad like the Sony Walkman

Rollins needs to rethink his business analogies. The Walkman was one of the most successful consumer products in history, and just because Sony couldn't recognize when portable music players morphed from Discmans to portable MP3 players doesn't mean Apple will make the same mistake

Company creates downloadable cards for reprimanding rude cell phone chatterers

New Yorkers have a simpler method. At the U.S. Open last year, a man took a business call during a semifinal match. When it was clear he didn't plan to either leave the stadium or cut the conversation short, several other fans stood up and shouted at him with a menacing glare, "Hey, shut the f***ing cellphone off!"

....

Apple's Tipping Point

Interesting chart theorizing that Apple has slowly evolved its strategy to now finally aim for mass markets with the iPod Shuffle and Mac Mini. Interesting, though I don't know that the iPod Shuffle is a mass market product. Without a display, it seems to me to be a specialized product. I sure could've used one when training for the marathon, though. I had to switch my first generation iPod back and forth between my right and left hands because it was so heavy. I'd consider getting one to just load new music to play at random while walking or jogging around NYC; I wonder if the mass market feels the same.

Man trades in 275K airline miles and $8,000 for a flight in a MIG jetfighter

I received my copy of Esquire in the mail today, and it has a huge photo of Scarlett Johansson on the cover. Wow. I am, like, kind of a big fan.

The Bulls are fun to watch again

I'm a huge Ben Gordon fan. Not when he was leading UConn over Stanford in the 2003 NCAA's, but now that he's playing for the home team...

Sizing translations for women's clothing at popular retailers

Aishwarya Rai, oft described as the most beautiful woman in the world, has never kissed on screen

Hurlyburly

I saw a preview performance of the David Rabe play Hurlyburly last night at the Acorn Theatre on Theatre Row. I hadn't seen the earlier productions on Broadway or the movie adaptation.

This production, directed by Scott Elliott, had the following cast:

Phil - Bobby Cannavale

Mickey - Josh Hamilton

Eddie - Ethan Hawke

Bonnie - Catherine Kellner

Darlene - Parker Posey

Artie - Wallace Shawn

Donna - Halley Wegryn Gross

The play revolves around the interactions of a couple cocaine-charged Hollywood types living in Los Angeles in the 80's. The play opens with Eddie lying on the sofa in his apartment, ass crack showing through his boxers, when Phil bursts in. From then on, I counted just a few moments when Eddie wasn't smoking dope, snorting cocaine, downing Jack Daniels or beer, or popping ludes or valium.

Phil is an emotional volcano, recently separated from Suzy (he explains after he burst in that he struck her during their latest argument), and you come to understand that their relationship is doomed to be tumultuous because Phil is unstable. He's always either breaking up with Suzy or trying to reconcile. Why is Eddie friends with Phil?

Mickey is Eddie's roommate, a smug, cynical, and saracastic slickster who receives most of the plays most comical lines (I can only imagine the zest with which Kevin Spacey played Mickey in the movie) and wardrobe (Josh Hamilton sports a porn star mustache and is constantly changing from one Miami Vice inspired outfit into another). Mickey seems to care about little but enjoys skewering all around him. Artie is a producer of some sort who drops in at one point with Donna, a stray he found in an elevator. He leaves her for Eddie and his buddies as a sexual "care package."

Most of them have artificial relationships with each other, but they don't care. At one point, Eddie asks Mickey after one stinging barb, "What kind of friendship is this?"

Mickey responds with a shrug: "Adequate."

At another point, Bonnie, a dancer and mother of one who the guys all know to be loose, is thrown out of her own car by Phil. She comes back to Eddie's apartment and laments, "This town is just mean." She seems oblivious to the fact that these guys, some of so-called chums, trade her about as a sexual asset, much as they swap Donna. Eddie is barely listening as he tries to center his own thoughts: "We're all just background in each other's lives."

The play is about 3 hours long, not including intermission, and nearly all of it is filled to the margins with rapid dialogue. At times, it lost me, as manic and drug-addled as it was. Over the course of three hours, though, I came to understand Eddie to be the one sensitive romantic of the group. He is smitten with a "dynamite" girl named Darlene, and he believes, for once, that he may have found true love. But when they finally connect, they speak the usual lines of romantic dialogue with a forced tone that exposes the superficial nature of their feelings. Deep underneath all the dense layers of circular dialogue are the remains of caring people, but years of drug abuse and cynical dealings have all but obliterated them.

I'm a huge Parker Posey fan, and she brought a wonderful physical comedy to her line readings. Hawke is suited to the role of Eddie, channeling that role's hyper sensitivity. He wants to care about others, but more than that he cares what others think of him. When Phil comes to lament his latest argument with Suzy, Eddie is all ears until he discovers that Suzy claimed to hate Eddie as well. He is stunned and instantly pre-occupied with why Suzy would dislike him.

There aren't any bad seats at the cozy Acorn Theatre. From my seat in the fifth row, I was at stage level, and I felt as if I was sitting on the stage. I left the theater nearly high myself from all the faux marijuana fumes from Eddie's pipe, and I could see clearly that one of the LPs in Eddie's collection was Technique by New Order. Ethan Hawke and Parker Posey looked like giants, and I felt as if I could reach out and pull Wallace Shawn's ridiculous hairpiece off. At some point, I'll grow accustomed to seeing such recognizable actors up close, but for now it's still a delight.

By play's end, I was exhausted, my ears having been talked off by all these vampires. I almost reached out and tapped Eddie on the shoulder to ask him for a hit on his bong.

P.S.: I noticed while looking at Parker Posey's IMDb page that she was in Blade: Trinity. Huh?

Crumbs

The Face Analyzer purports to determine your personal characteristics from your portrait

The description of the methodology leaves a whole lot to be desired, but it's worth a few chuckles around the water cooler on a slow day. The results seem erratic. they tagged Bill Gates as a 10.0 out of 10.0 for income but Paris Hilton at just a 3.9 for promiscuity. No, I did not upload my photo yet

An avalanche of new products from Apple announced at MacWorld

Too many cool things to list, and most of the coolest is on the software side, in my opinion. Includes HD support across the iLife and Final Cut Express apps. Multi-way video and audio iChat. Being a Mac user is a hell of a lot more fun than being a Windows user. Microsoft has a ton of great ideas and smart technologists, but their product life cycles are much too long (their margin of error is provided by their massive installed base). Meanwhile, Apple seems to issue new hardware every 4 months, productivity app upgrades every half year, and operating system upgrades every year (take the Tiger tour; how many big cats are left?)

iCal calendars to subscribe to (e.g. U.S. holidays, sports schedules, movie openings)

Now that I don't have a Windows computer anymore, I use iCal to manage my schedule and to-do list. Now that Macs are available for $499, maybe some more of you will switch over as well and find these of use

Ciphire Mail is a free e-mail encryption client

Yo, folks I e-mail regularly: let me know if you download this, too, so our trivial e-mail conversations will be secured from the eyes of the prying world

The USPS Cycling team is now Team Discovery Channel

Strange to see Lance in the new uniform. He still hasn't decided if he's going to ride the Tour de France this year. Nervous TDF bike tour operators wait in suspense.

Six Apart's comprehensive guide to stopping comment spam

Since I get hit with this crap almost daily, I plan to implement these steps in the next week or so

The website of the girl from Fox's reality TV show "Who's Your Daddy"

Included is a letter clarifying some issues surrounding the show. I never watched it, but that didn't hinder my enjoyment of the letter. Supposedly the show was originally titled Reunited, or so she was told.

Robot makers are confident they can win the World Cup by 2050

An Acehnese man swept out to sea by the tsunami survives for two weeks

He ate coconuts for 12 days, clung to a log, climbed in a damaged wooden boat, and finally cobbled together a raft from floating debris. In the wake of all the tragedy, good to read a story of survival. A real life Cast Away. He's the third Indonesian rescued from open sea since the tsunami. The others include a pregnant woman who clung to a palm tree for five days and man who spent eight days aboard an uprooted tree.

Search for illicit weapons in Iraq ends

Just for the record, they didn't have any when we sent in the troops

Malcolm Gladwell and James Surowiecki, two New Yorker giants, discuss their books Blink and The Wisdom of Crowds at Slate

I read the latter and enjoyed it, and am awaiting my Amazon shipment of the former

Stephanie Zacharek, David Edelstein, A.O. Scott, Charles Taylor, and Armond White discuss the year in movies at Slate

Bare Bones Software makes its text editor TextWrangler 2.0 free

Good for them, and good for us

Mr. Blackwell issues his annual worst dressed list

Nicollette Sheridan is the worst of the worst, joined by Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, Courtney Love, Serena Williams, Britney Spears, Paula Abdul, Meryl Streep, Anna Nicole Smith, and the Simpson sisters. Best dressed include Nicole Kidman, Natalie Portman, Barbara Walters, Kate Winslet, Annette Bening, Oprah Winfrey, Scarlett Johansson, Gwen Stefani, Jennifer Garner, and Teri Hatcher

SmartDeck, a new intelligent cassette adapter for the iPod

Allows you to use your cassette player buttons in your car to control your iPod. Simple, and brilliant

For you lazy people: gargling with Listerine is not as good as flossing

But by all means, keep gargling. Halitosis stinks

So does B.O., so wear Federline, the new scent by Britney Spears

On set

I volunteered to help out on an NYU student film shoot. Before the holidays, I worked with the production designer to tweak the space a bit and purchase props. The past week I've spent most of my time on location during the shoot, doing a little of everything.

As anyone who's worked on a set will tell you, it's not that exciting, unless perhaps you're the director or you're applying body paint to Rebecca Romijn. Most of the time, everyone's standing around, and then suddenly it will be interrupted by a flurry of activity, and then everyone's milling around again for a while.

The days on this film shoot were long, at least 12 hours a day. I was an extra warm body (officially the art director), and was employed as such. One morning I found myself running around NYC trying to assemble a complete Santa suit from the detritus that remained of the Xmas section in all the costume stores. It's tough to keep your composure when you're asking one of the costume store workers where to find a Santa wig and beard and the Goth-themed worker with pale face, black lipstick, and a mohawk just stares at you and shrugs with indifference. 90% of your store revenue comes in one month of the year you unhelpful freak!

Sometimes I stood in for the lead actor and actress when the director blocked out shots. I was an extra in one shot. For an exterior night shot, I had to water down the street (standard technique so the water reflects street lights, otherwise the street just looks like a sea of black on screen). A family friend of the director got cold feet at the last minute and wouldn't let us take water from her sink. That might have been a good thing, considering we had only three buckets and she lived on the eighth floor of a walkup. We ended up splurging on eight gallons of water from a local grocer.

During lunch break one day, we played charades. Every answer was a movie title, but not like you'd imagine a normal game of charades. This was charades with film nuts. In one case, we got the clues that the movie title was two words, and the first word rhymed with rooster. From that, someone correctly guessed Brewster McCloud. Brewster McCloud.

On our one day of exterior shooting, the temperature was in the 30's. Fortunately, the rain failed to make call time that morning. I lost feeling in my toes by the end of the day, but by that point, I was beginning to feel the rhythm of filmmaking, and I was beginning to enjoy myself. On set, there are few meetings and little of the monotony that can seep into office work. It's not all fun and games, but it's closer to that than most jobs.

We could only afford to rent one generator, and supposedly it put out 27 amps, but we discovered otherwise. It felt as if we were Gary Sinise in Apollo 13, figuring out the maximum amount of power we could draw while still having enough juice to achieve re-entry through Earth's atmosphere. We cycled through tradeoffs. You can have the coffee maker or the hot water machine, but not both. You can one space heater, but it will cost you one light in the alleyway shot. What about two heaters at the lowest setting and one light? One heater on low and the hot water machine?

People always stop out of curiosity when they see a crew gathered around film lights on the street. What are you shooting, people would ask. Once, I told a lady we were shooting a few minor scenes from War of the Worlds. She didn't know what that was, so perhaps she'll be looking for that setting when that blockbuster hits screens this summer.

One day involved a montage of sex scenes. I felt like Ricky Jay during the Mark Wahlberg-Julianne Moore sex scene in Boogie Nights. It's true what they say--simulating sex in front of a camera and crew is not all that romantic, unless you're used to performing in front of a group of other people. I had to run into one scene to strew some more underwear around the floor while the actors stood there partially clothed, mid-coitus. I avoided all eye contact.

Everyone was professional about it, and we defused the situation with humor. The combination of the clinical and the vulgar in some of the direction was very odd.

"Continuity question. _____, were you wearing that watch when ____ was humping you over the bathtub?"

"_____, can you increase the horizontal displacement of your thrusting?"

"Whoa, we need to adjust the lighting. Your moonshine is going to overexpose the film."

I was impressed by the communal spirit of the cast and crew. Most everyone on set was a student, a mix of first, second, and third years. Everyone was pitching in to help the director finish his movie, and I didn't sense any competitiveness subverting the shoot. Most everyone was friendly (you might imagine film school students to be film snobs or aesthetes, but this group didn't exude that vibe), and I learned a lot chatting with various people during breaks in the day.

In the last hour of our exterior shoot, at some 2 a.m. in the morning in a dark alleyway in the West Village, we had just finished the last shot when the assistant director called for silence. We needed to record thirty seconds of street noise. The sound guy called speed, and we all stood in silence, heads bowed, nothing but the golden neon hues of street lamps reflected off puddles to leave halos in our hair. New York City is almost always a cacophony of noise, but for that thirty seconds, we heard nothing but the low hum of the city, like the sound of the ocean in the distance, or perhaps the sound of subway trains coursing through the veins of the city below our feet.

[silence]

That's a wrap.

L'eclisse

L'eclisse by Antonioni comes out on DVD in March of this year. Good things!

On the subject of Antonioni, how come Red Desert hasn't been re-issued on DVD yet? Used copies are going for $200 to $500! For all the years the DVD format has been around, the long tail is still surprisingly thin. We have some eighty seven versions of the Evil Dead movies on DVD, but not an in-print copy of Red Desert?

Review: 2046

2046 is the third in a trilogy by Wong Kar Wai, and it contains references to its predecessors, Days of Being Wild and In The Mood for Love. Tony Leung plays Mo Wan Chow, who we first saw in the last scene of Days of Being Wild, preparing to carry on in the footsteps of a lothario played by Leslie Cheung. In In The Mood for Love, Mo Wan Chow and his neighbor's wife Su Li-zhen, played by Maggie Cheung, flirt with romance but never indulge their mutual attraction, even though their spouses are having an affair.
The experience seems to break him, and in 2046 we find Mo Wan Chow has returned to his womanizing ways, his heart scarred by the memory of Su Li-zhen. And if you're going to dabble on the rebound, one can do worse than bed the likes of Gong Li and Ziyi Zhang (apparently Zhang has decided to order her name in the Western tradition of first-middle-last name instead of the more Chinese last-first-middle sequencing; I doubt American audiences felt distanced by her previous ordering, but I'll respect her wishes because she's a doll).
Fans of Wong Kar Wai will realize that further plot summary is mostly futile. 2046's meandering, spiralling, and sometimes shapeless narrative. It's not surprising considering that WKW shoots without a script. That also means his shoots take years. 2046 took nearly five years to shoot, and Ziyi Zhang has joked she'd love to do another movie but can't afford to take so long off. The advantage of his shooting style is that his movies feel fluid, organic, and improvisational, like jazz. Linear time collapses altogether.
2046 contains other WKW signature qualities. The lush, voluptuous cinematography by Christopher Doyle which renders the movie screen like some sort of lurid colored tapestry (though it's rumored Doyle and WKW had a falling out during the shoot and have parted ways). The languid tempo set to the gentle, swaying rhythms of Latin music. The tight quarters, a symbol of the character's attempts to compartmentalize their feelings and memories, to no avail (WKW and Doyle's organic/Eastern philosophy of filmmaking eschews, for the most parts, constructed sets, so many shots are framed tight and narrow and feel almost voyeuristic). The muted languor Tony Leung. WKW is a master at evoking mood, not through plot, but through these elements of his distinctive style.
What is missing, and what makes the film so frustrating, is those moments when a WKW movie seems to be running in circles, quiet moments when suddenly a character's guard seems to drop away and his or her soul spills onto the screen. Leung has always been the foremost WKW interpreter because his natural expression is one of a cool surface, almost cryptic, and what emotions he does display seep out of him like the happiness out of the corner of Mona Lisa's smile. His character seems to be trapped in this movie, though, unable to move forward towards 2046, unable to move on from his past, haunted as he is by memory. 2046 feels like an echo of pain; it reverberates at times with surpassing beauty and sadness, but it fails to resolve.
Much of the screen time is occupied by Ziyi Zhang and Faye Wong. Maggie Cheung appears only briefly, in flashbacks, and Gong Li has a minor part. If the ratio of screen time among these two pairs had been reversed, the movie might have had a richer emotional life. Cheung and Li have a gift for turning their fragility inside out that Zhang and Wong's striking young faces can't match.
We all have our story of the one that got away, and for Mo Wan Chow is destined to chase after her for life. The repetition drags on a few beats too long at times, leaving several dead spots. Still, it's tempting to wallow in the misery, especially when it's filmed so beautifully. Sitting next to the chatty drunk at the neighborhood bar, the one who won't stop pattering on about the woman who got away, can be maddening, but empathy for his plight keeps us seated at the barstool long enough for one drink too many, the drunk being our only companion in our existential loneliness.
P.S.: Supposedly WKW is on tap to direct The Lady from Shanghai starring Nicole Kidman, the hardest working lady in Hollywood, and also to direct a movie about Bruce Lee, also starring Leung. WKW also directed 1 of 3 short films from Eros, due to release in the US in April 2005.

Review: Million Dollar Baby

[No definitive spoilers, but to discuss this movie, I have to hint at elements of the plot, and so sticklers for seeing a movie without any foreknowledge, and I generally include myself in that class, may wish to stay clear. I don't reveal any more than any other review of this movie, but just a friendly warning.]

The problem with Million Dollar Baby, and the reason I didn't feel a single tear at the end, or even my eyes watering, was that it over-sentimentalizes when it doesn't need to. In a boxing movie with tough/soft voice-overs (I recall one description of Hilary Swank's upbringing that read something like: "She grew up in Missouri in a small town somewhere between nowhere and goodbye"), another heaping teaspoon of sugar is unnecessary.

The character Danger, an awkward, gawky beanpole who speaks like Sean Penn in I Am Sam, is one character I would have axed. Morgan Freeman's voiceover describes Danger as "all heart," but he grated on me like Jar Jar Binks. His over-acting pricks like a bur, and he doesn't illustrate anything other to represent courage against another boxer Shawrelle's cowardice. Both are cartoonish in their extremity of character. Hilary Swank's family also felt to me like caricatures of heartless white trailer trash.

Another needless exaggeration in this movie concerns a momentous fight late in the movie. The extent of foul play and the lousiness of the officiating is beyond that in a WWE event, and it's difficult to stomach. It feels like a missed opportunity to highlight the contrast between the cruel oppression of society (Maggie scrapes together funds waiting tables) and the regulated violence in the ring. Boxing has always been one of the most lyrical of sports, where a man can choose to confront his enemies head on, and so to see that order collapse drains the moment of some pathos.

It's a shame because the boxing is more realistic than that of any other boxing movie I've seen, and the characters Frankie Dunn (Eastwood) and Maggie Fitzgerald (Swank) are two of the most likeable characters in movies this year. Hilary Swank's performance is pitch perfect. Her unique face, angular cheekbones and wide eyes, is both tomboyish and feminine, and it conceals nothing. She is well-suited to playing earnest, honest characters. There is no guile in Maggie Fitzgerald, and it's clear to the audience how she melts Frankie Dunn's heart and convinces him to train her. Dunn has an estranged daughter who returns the letters he writes to her weekly (I suspect this type of persistence only occurs in the movies), but even if that storyline weren't present you'd understand why Eastwood would respond to Maggie's courage and desire. She's the most endearing character I saw on screen this year.

Eastwood plays the role he's perfected in his later years, that of the guy with a tough exterior but a soft center. We've watched him on screen for nearly his entire career, much of it playing the toughie, so we feel a greater affection for this new persona; it feels as if he's earned it over many decades. I could have sat in the theater watching Swank and Eastwood on screen together for hour after hour.

The movie looks gorgeous, with deep, lush blacks contrasting with the fluorescent, almost garish lighting of boxing rings and hospital hallways. Many characters seem to materialize out of shadows, legs first, the face last, as if emerging from their own secrets and inner longings.

Million Dollar Baby was written by Paul Haggis and adapted from stories in Rope Burns : Stories From the Corner, a collection by F.X. Toole.

P.S.

Can't link directly to it, so I'll just copy and paste from IMDb News: Golden Globe-winning comic Ricky Gervais has fulfilled his lifetime's ambition - he is writing an episode of The Simpsons. The British Office star will also voice a character in the popular animation show, which will be made next year, although he is keeping the episode's plot a secret.

Josh Greenman proposes new punctuation: the sarcasm point

It looks like ¡

Mash-ups of the Beastie Boys and the Beatles: The Beastles

Sin City trailer

Robert Rodriguez has managed to remain faithful to the look of the comic book, and, umm, Jessica Alba, umm, yeah

The New World trailer

Hey, another Terence Malick-directed movie. The opening music and video had me wondering if I was watching The Thin Red Line again

Why does all the cool stuff come out in Asia first?

betterPropaganda's staff picks for top downloads of the year

Good site for legal MP3 downloads

Brian Whitman of MIT's Media Lab fed Christmas classics into his program Eigenradio, which extracts the most important frequencies and beats from music, to create the conceptual album A Singular Christmas

Review: The Aviator, Kinsey

In Martin Scorsese's The Aviator, Howard Hughes springs from his mother's bath fully formed, like Athena from Zeus's head. His mother teaches him to spell "quarantine" and instructs him of the dangers of typhoid, cholera, and other diseases carried by the colored folks. He's born out of this moment, a fully-formed neurotic, and this moment serves to explain all the eccentricities he displays throughout the rest of the movie. Or does it?

The scene reminds me of the flashback scenes in Ray, or the childhood scenes in Kinsey, these moments that are supposed to be the sources of the adult we face in the rest of the movie. These moments almost always feel like biopic cliches, but I'm not sure Scorsese's heart is in that early scene enough to make it so. For one thing, it's such a short, odd introduction, with strangely incestuous overtones, that it seems barely adequate to explain why Hughes grew more and more neurotic about germs as he aged.

The screenplay, Scorsese, and Dicaprio play Hughes as a series of emotional peaks, one dramatic explosion after another. In every scene, he's spending himself into greater debt, flying planes higher and faster, shouting at one of his minions to tail someone, chasing one gorgeous woman after another. The energy, and the occasional flashes of humor, are palpable. It's a feverish, manic electricity that I always associate with Scorsese movies, that seemed to arise from the pavement of New York streets at night in Taxi Driver, or Mean Streets. Or, if you ever watch an interview with the man, from Scorsese himself.

Dicaprio is a first-rate actor. Tabloids document his crazy offscreen life, but onscreen he submerges himself in every role without a hint of ego. All Hughes' mental energy and worries seem to concentrate in the constant furrow between Dicaprio's eyebrows. Only two things play against Dicaprio, and they're related. One is his role in Titanic. If you could rewrite his career and remove that role from his resume, it might help to remove the second peculiarity about him, and that is his youthful countenance. I can't help thinking that Dicaprio will look like he's in his early twenties for decades, until one day he'll suddenly look like he's sixty. His Howard Hughes looks so young and wispy, especially standing next to Cate Blanchett's Katharine Hepburn (Blanchett's portrayal of the famous actress and her unforgettable manners of speech is a gas, almost worth the price of admission by itself).

The movie hints at some quality of Hughes that attracts endearment from women as diverse as Katharine Hepburn and Ava Gardner (besides his money). Is it the single-minded devotion he brings to aeronautics? Perhaps. There's a wonderful moment early in the movie, when he turns all his attention and charm on a cigarette girl, as if she's one of his airplane models. And he purchases some tabloid photos of Hepburn and Spencer Tracy even after she leaves Hughes. But he seems much more charming to his key personnel, especially his financial manager Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) and his chief aeronautical engineer Glenn Odekirk. They tear at their hair every time Hughes pushes them further, but you sense they love to be stretched to heights they never imagined they'd reach with their own limited visions.

The movie fails to help the audience understand Hughes inside out, and perhaps that's an unrealistic aspiration for biopics. Movies that strive to make historical figures coherent always take liberties with the truths of their life (e.g. A Beautiful Mind, Ray). People are just too complex to summarize neatly in two hours, and it's entirely understandable that someone like Hughes, who went crazy at the end of his life, would be even more difficult to dissect than others. It's one reason many people consider the best biopic to be 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, which almost seems cubist. If a biopic captures the spirit of a person on screen, I'd consider it a success, even if the person's actions lack a graspable internal logic. The Aviator is more true to that ideal for biopics than most. The way each scene encapsulates some major dramatic action on the part of Hughes is done to abbreviate his life in favor of evoking his accomplishments and energy.

And of course, Scorsese remains one director whose movies I'll always see. His camera, always in quest of a revealing psychological shot or pan, never fails to fascinate. And he's a movie lover to an extreme; in one scene, he depicts a Hughes' dinner side of peas colored blue because that's how they would've looked in old two-strip Technicolor. I don't think he's capable of making a "studio" film, even if he tried. It's just not in his nature. The elderly couples on either side of me walked out before the movie concluded. Perhaps they were expecting the usual uplifting Hollywood biopic. When you see a Scorsese movie, you know who the hell made it.

Kinsey is a martyr to our diversity (mostly sexual; at one point in the movie his wife finds him sitting in the bathroom, his blood dripping down on the white tile). In that way, he seems uniquely an American hero. Laura Linney and Liam Neeson are exceptional, perfectly cast for a movie in which they portray a couple that is more open-minded than can be expected, even of liberal intellectuals. Their faces, unconventionally handsome, are portraits of emotional generosity and strength. Recall Linney forgiving Sean Penn at the end of Mystic River. Peter Saarsgard is always intriguing. Saarsgard's face, especially his eyes, are simultaneously sleepy and alive.

My favorite parts of Kinsey revolve around Kinsey and his assistants' method of interviewing subjects on their sexual habits. To make subjects feel comfortable discussing such private, intimate moments of their life, Kinsey teaches his assistants a highly non-judgmental, neutral, and even friendly style of questioning. After the 2004 election, when everyone was judging everyone else (even those who held themselves above the fray were judging the judgers, as I'm doing now), the extreme openness of Kinsey, his wife, and his assistants feels like an intellectual rejuvenation.

Not surprisingly, I wasn't as fond of the screenplay's attempt to tie Kinsey's life's research to his relationship to his father. The flashbacks to his youth and the over-the-top portrayal of Kinsey's father by John Lithgow are unnecessary. The interviews with some college couples and even his own sexual difficulties with his wife are enough to establish that America was a sexual cloister in which Kinsey's sexual studies seem even more revolutionary than they would today.

Review: Ocean's Twelve

Christina's group at Microsoft hosted a company morale event this morning. Those with corporate experience recognize that as renting out a movie theater and paying for the popcorn and admissions. The twist in this case was that they actually rented a multiplex, so we had our pick of movies playing there. We all opted, of course, for Ocean's Twelve.
The tagline is that "twelve is the new eleven," but you get the feeling that no one wanted to make the new eleven. After all, the heist film is its own Hollywood genre, and Soderbergh and company checked that off their list last time. How to bring something fresh to the oeuvre, keep Warner Bros happy, and get the studio to foot the bill while the stars hang out at Clooney's villa at Lake Como? That's a master caper in and of itself.
Ocean's Twelve is a post-modern heist movie. What it isn't interested in is presenting another of those airtight heists that stands up under a fastidious audience, scrutinizing every frame for implausibilities. Right from the start, Soderbergh makes this clear. Terry Benedict finds Tess (Julia Roberts) and then proceeds to visit every member of Ocean's 11, all over the world. Apparently none of them were considerate enough to call each other to warn each other that Benedict is coming, but it allows Andy Garcia the opportunity to drop in on each of them unawares and for us to see their reactions.
One of the most endearing elements of Ocean's 11 was how it embraced its star power and used it unabashedly. George Clooney is a charming movie star, and he essentially plays one on screen (okay, he's a thief, but he's a thief that looks and speaks and acts like George Clooney). We didn't want Cary Grant to play a cowboy, we wanted him to play Cary Grant, and we don't want George Clooney in a batsuit, we want to see his face. Brad Pitt in designer suits? Casey Affleck playing...okay, he's Casey Affleck, as usual. The whole time I was watching Ocean's 11, I couldn't stop thinking of how much fun all those actors had working on the movie together.
Ocean's Twelve just blurs that line between actor and role even further, and in one amusing plot twist, nearly erases it altogether. Clooney and Pitt still finish each other's lines and speak in hip, and everyone looks good in their wardrobes. The movie winks at us in offering a gang of thieves that looks like this, but we're winking back: do you want your policemen to look like Paul Giamatti or Catherine Zeta Jones? Is that a mug shot of George Clooney?
Clooney accuses another character of violating Rule No. 1, and this movie seems to violate Rule No. 1 of heist movies, which is to show everything on screen. You can try and outwit the movie using onscreen clues, but don't waste your time. Just enjoy the company, admire the clothing, and take in the European scenery. Ocean's Twelve is an expensive, star-studded indie film. It may not be what heist aficionados expected, but I bet the poker nights at Clooney's place in Lake Como were a hell of a lot more fun than your regular Sunday night game. In fact, if they have footage of some of those (I saw someone in the movie running around with a Canon XL1 or XL2, documenting proceedings), they could issue that as Ocean's Thirteen.

Klein, Cartier-Bresson, Rutgers, and Macchio

I went New York holiday sightseeing Saturday with a friend. We went by Rockefeller to purchase a Christmas ornament at the Swarovski booth. I could have sworn the Christmas tree at Rockefeller was much taller in years past. Perhaps I've just grown taller?
Our next stop was the Met. One of the exhibits we visited was the compact photography exhibit "Few Are Chosen: Street Photography and the Book, 1936-1966". It's not a large collection, but it contains work from my favorite photographer, William Klein, and a few of my other favorites, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank. They had old, old copies of the books Life is good & good for you by Klein and The Americans by Frank behind glass cases, but not a copy of Cartier-Bresson's The Decisive Moment, an out-of-print book I'd love to own. The image to the left is perhaps Cartier-Bresson's most famous, "Behind Saint-Lazare station, Paris, France, 1932."
After a Xmas-tree ornament-hanging party Saturday night, James and Angela took me to Blue 9 Burger in the East Village. Good burger, often referred to as the NYC equivalent of In & Out, but not quite that good. A burger with a bit of grease or fat? That's okay, much better than a dried out patty. I always feel guilty eating burgers with Angela because she orders them without the meat; it's the anti-Atkins burger. I'm not sure what you call that. The man behind the counter said, "Oh, you want grilled cheese."
Sunday, I took the train out to New Jersey to meet up with Scott and Ruby and their golfing buddies for a round at the Rutgers course. We lucked out with a sunny day after the previous day had nearly brought snow. I haven't golfed since the end of September, which just means that I hadn't grooved my already ugly stroke. The first nine holes, I felt like a beginner to the game. I could barely remember how to grip my clubs, and I shot a 55, one of my ugliest nine holes in years. Then I shot a 39 on the back nine, maybe my lowest nine hole score ever (from holes 10-18 I went triple bogey, par, par, par, par, par, bogey, bogey, birdie) and actually had a ten or eleven foot putt for eagle on the 18th, a par five I reached in two. What a schizophrenic round.
It was my first round of golf since moving to NYC, and I now have a sense for what's involved: a long train ride out of Manhattan, with clubs in tow. Not the easiest thing in the world, but doable. I need to get in my rounds with Rob before he becomes a father (of twins, no less!). I know enough new parents to know what that means for one's free time.
Yesterday night, I went with friends to see It's Karate Kid! The Musical. With tickets costing $15 and set in Teatro La Tea in a community center on a somewhat sketchy street on the lower East side, I was fairly certain as I walked in that I wouldn't be seeing Sarah Brightman as Ali. And yes, at least a third of the audience were friends of the cast. This buyer be warned.
Now, Karate Kid is a movie that could be adapted almost straight up and serve as a comedy. It's a much-adored cult classic (at last check, a new first print of the DVD was selling for $99.99 on Amazon). I even remember seeing it in theaters with Tim Rush and his parents back when parents had to take my friends and I out to see movies. But this adaptation chose to dial the spoof up to 11. Almost every character in the musical was gay except Ali and Mrs. Larusso, who was bisexual. Picture Mr. Miyagi as a black drag queen, and his magic hand-rubbing-chiropractic-magic-move administered while seated on the back of a moaning Daniel Larusso and you'll have a good sense of what type of play this was. Don't bring your child if you don't want to be answering "What does [insert sexual obscenity] mean?" all night. The entire show is built on a conceit that doesn't hold up from start to finish (and I never picked up on any latent homosexual overtones in the movie; Top Gun, sure, but Karate Kid seemed fairly asexual to me), and the dance moves and music don't even attempt to aspire to Balanchine or Gilbert and Sullivan. The dialogue and lyrics were often difficult to make out as speakers fired the songs out in all directions in a somewhat echoey room. But the show has its moments. My personal favorite was "Miyagi's Lament," a rap tune that I'd love to get on tape.
The funniest moment, though, came when Scott told us at intermission that the actor playing Johnny Lawrence was the same guy that Scott had just beaten up at a restaurant a short while ago. Supposedly this guy and his friend were being extremely rude to Scott and his date, and so Scott had gone out to the sidewalk and chucked this guy into a car. In Scott's version of the story, the actor was the big guy, and his friend was a short bald guy.
After the second act of the show, Scott was certain this was the guy. So I looked up his bio in the program, and it turns out that this actor had most recently directed and starred in several Saturday cartoons for Fox, the Kids WB, and PBS, and was gay. When I'd first heard the story of Scott's altercation I was picturing the big guy as Vin Diesel, and it turns out he was a gay drama student. I'm going to blame the lighting--trendy New York restaurants are dark, so dark you can't tell if you're drinking red wine or tap water, beating up a bouncer, or one of the Queer Eye for the Straight Guy Fab Five.

Link fondue

In this week's New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell writes on the danger of relying too much on modern visualization technology, especially mammography. I was intrigued to learn that the U.S. Air Force made zero definite Scud kills in the first Gulf War, despite spending million of dollars on a device called the LANTIRN navigation and targeting pod.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration now provides the National Digital Forecast Database weather information in XML format, for free.
The hot new getaway--Libya.
According to PNC Bank, over the twelve days of Christmas, the goods and services given to you by your true love were probably purchased offline, not over the Internet, and those 12 drummers drumming might have come from India.
A Kosher credit card that won't work on the Sabbath. I wonder, do you have to be Jewish to apply, or can gentiles play, as with JDate.
Netflix Friends, a service by which Netflix members can recommend movies directly to each other, is getting some blog-play. So frustrating that so many sites have developed all sorts of recommendation services, yet none of them connect. I've rated hundreds of movies on Netflix, Amazon, IMDb, here on my website, but none of those connect. Someday, we'll have a standardized way to represent our opinions on movies in XML, and all these networks will link up via web services, and I'll actually have interest in signing up to use all these new services.
BTW, though I've grown disillusioned with numerical ratings for movies, I do enjoy looking at the demographic breakdowns of IMDb's movie rankings. For example, Alexander's most popular ratings, on a scale of 1 to 10, are 1 and 10. And nearly 70% of the votes for You Got Served are 1's; that might be the least user-acclaimed movie of 2004. Oh wait, no, the most user-panned movie of 2004 is Daniel - Der Zauberer, a German movie whose plot summary on IMDB reads: "Evil assassins want to kill Daniel Kublbock, the third runner up for the German Idols."
Odd tidbits

"If you're a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac."

By and large, law enforcement personnel in American end up sending impounded Macs needing data recovery to the acknowledged North American Mac experts: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Evidently the Mounties have built up a knowledge and technique for Mac forensics that is second to none.

By the time they find out if cell phone EMF is bad for human health, it will be too late for those of us first generation guinea pigs. I just hope later generations appreciate the courage and sacrifice it took for us to plow forward in the face of such mortal uncertainty.
Footage from a tiny camera mounted to the back of an eagle
So that's what it looks like to fly like an eagle.
I'm not sure when this came out. Inspired by BMWFilms, Mercedes Benz made its own online shortmercials, including this one, The Porter. It doesn't seem possible that it would be about what it sounds like, but yes, it's about a hotel parking valet and includes this scintillating line: "I am no spy. I am no thief. I park cars." Sure, no one may take their Mercedes on car chases, as in BMWFilms, but to show a CLS just driving down the street and in and out of parking garages at about 30mph is far from pulse-pounding. Mercedes first short, Lucky Star, featured Michael Mann directing Benicio Del Toro, was at least hammy ("We're on you like white on rice") and humorous, in a cornball way (it's a faux trailer for a movie about a really lucky guy, which Del Toro is in real life, don't you think?). You'll have to scour the web using Google to find a copy--perhaps Mann and Del Toro ordered Mercedes to pull it.

Review: Show Me Love

Show Me Love (its original Swedish title being Fucking Åmål) is a cult favorite. At least, I think it is. I don't remember how I heard of it, but it was in my Netflix queue, and it floated to the top and landed in my hands, like a warmed plate out the top of the stack at the front of a buffet line. Somehow, I lost the Netflix sleeve for the movie, so I put it in last night without the faintest idea what it was about. The tag line--Jag ska aldrig mer bli ihop med nån. Jag ska bli celibat--remained opaque to me, though I must admit, my Swedish is quite rusty.
The movie didn't begin with any menu, it just began playing, the video not anamorphic but some grainy letterbox confined inside a 4:3 box, all shot in over-saturated DV, the audio an unimpressive Dolby mix that sounded almost mono. Was this a student film I'd ordered by mistake?
Well, whoever recommended the movie to me was right. It's a gem, and not because of the plot I'll summarize thusly: a Swedish teenage lesbian love story. Okay, maybe that's too summary. Agnes, a social outcast, is gay and in love with Elin, the high school class vixen, who's beautiful and bored out of her mind living in the dull Swedish suburb of, well, fucking Åmål (I guess I knew some Swedish after all). Strange circumstances bring them together, but will their puppy love survive the cruel and intense pressures of conformity at school and home?
The movie is rough around the edges, and under too much scrutiny or extrapolation much of it doesn't hold up (how much of teenage and high school life ever does?), but within its boundaries it's a rush of the maddening, obsessive angst and compulsions of teenage emotional life, trying to find its balance. Listening to Alexandra Dahlström curse and scream in Swedish, you realize that undirected teenage anger is a universal language. There's a moment, a kiss, that is set up beautifully, and the payoff registers like an adrenalin spike. The movie has a sly wit: it includes a literal coming out of the closet (a water closet, that is). And even the subplots and intersecting lives of peripheral characters are painful reminders of various archetypal stories of high school drama. This movie doesn't seem especially eager to solicit our sympathies for anyone in the movie, and thus any that it does manage to elicit feels earned.
The actors, teenagers themselves, especially the two leads, are very natural, and the lewd DV cinematography contributes to the pseudo-documentary feel. There's a good chance this is the first and last Swedish teenage lesbian love story I'll ever see on film, and if so, I'll have fond memories of the genre, like having your first and only taste of gelato in Florence.

Batman Begins one sheet

Teaser poster for Batman Begins, which comes some 13 years after Batman Returns, except it's a prequel, from when Batman looked like Christian Bale, later letting himself go a bit to evolve into Michael Keaton, who worked out a bit to become Val Kilmer, and finally aged gracefully into George Clooney. I'll tab his Adam West phase as his decline into middle age--he should have stuck with the more flattering dark suit instead of the light blue, which made him look fat.

Noir

They're filming bits of War of the Worlds (two dudes named Spielberg and Cruise are working on it) in Brooklyn and NJ.
Weblog of a casino cheat
Even if you don't live in NYC, this list of essential American film noir from the Film Forum is really cool. I caught Mildred Pierce there--good good good.
When trends gain enough momentum to go mainstream, that's when Microsoft jumps in
Giambi brothers admit to having used steroids while in the major leagues
The clouds around Barry Bonds darken, but until he's proven guilty, he's innocent. I think that's how it works in this country. Personally, I'm not convinced that steroids actually help a baseball player. In football, yes, but baseball? I read a convincing case from a baseball-crazed physicist who argued that steroids wouldn't aid a hitter. Since only stories about good hitters or successful players using steroids make the news, the public may have an unjustified bias towards thinking steroids are helpful. What of all the lousy players (Jeremy Giambi being one) and minor leaguers who never make it who used steroids? Sosa and Bonds could hit tape-measure home runs even when they were skinny. Perhaps steroids helps to stave off the effects of aging, allowing guys like Bonds to retain their skills later into their careers.
GQ's 100 funniest jokes of all time

Tough beats

I like Annie Duke. Not only does she have a great poker name, she doesn't sit at the poker table with a poker face all the time. It's the same reason I enjoy watching Phil Hellmuth, even though he's a cocky SOB. His running monologues at the table are awesome. Watching Annie take down Phil in the 2004 Tournament of Champions (ESPN2 will be replaying it for months, I'm sure) was good theater, and I really wish I could get a tape of Phil's tirade when Tobey Maguire drew a four of a kind to beat Phil's full house. When she showed him the 9 but not the K after he showed her his K (the flop had K and 9 among them), his reaction was awesome. "You played a pair of 9s? That's so reckless."
Notified in advance by Jason Kottke, I set my Tivo to tape Ken Jennings' defeat on Jeopardy today. He lost to a woman named Nancy, who I liked because she had just returned from China where she'd adopted a little Chinese girl. Jennings would have won if he had nailed both his Double Jeopardy questions in round two, but he missed both of them, and that cost him about $10,000. He went into Final Jeopardy with $14,400 to Nancy's $10,000 (the third contestant, some college student, ended up in the red and didn't even make it to the final round). The Final Jeopardy answer was: "Most of this company's 70,000 seasonal white collar employees only work 4 months a year." I personally didn't know, and neither did Ken, but Nancy knew it was "H&R Block" and placed a bet of $4,401, which, if Ken had bet nothing, would have given her a $1 victory. When his answer came out wrong ("Fed Ex") Nancy gasped and put her hands to her mouth, the crowd gasped, and then they stood to give Ken a standing ovation.
Sundance announces its 2005 lineup of movies
Giddyup! Jason and I had so much fun there last year that we've planned a return trip.

Some of that new extended ROTK footage...

...from the forthcoming DVD is here, including a humorous cameo by Peter Jackson himself. Boo yah. Seems like Christopher Lee is still bitter that his last scenes were cut from the theatrical release.
The Boston Red Sox named Sports Illustrated's Sportsmen of the Year

Aliens of the Deep

Aliens of the Deep looks really cool (click on the trailer link). I wish more good material came out in IMAX 3D. I also wonder why, with all this expensive underwater exploration gear, we haven't seen footage of a live giant squid.
How do movie theater chains decide which movie trailers run before which movies, and when?

Like this and like that

The sequel to Popular Science's list of the Worst Jobs in Science, which amused me last year
Christo and Jeanne-Claude are going to wrap Central Park
In a world where the costs of prescription drugs and health insurance are rising, one procedure has bucked the trend: laser eye surgery. In fact, it has decreased in price. How can that be?
Howl's Moving Castle, Hayao Miyazaki's latest animated film, set a Japanese box office record with $15 million in its opening weekend. I can't read Japanese, but you can guess what most of the links are by hovering over them with your cursor and reading the link name in English in the browser status bar. Studio Ghibli's online site hosts an extended preview (Quicktime).
Football Outsiders will produce Pro Football Prospectus 2005
That's good news, as the team at Football Project put out by far the weakest of the three Prospectus books.
Java-powered Monkeys trying to write Shakespeare
While I watched the simulation run, the record was the first 22 letters of Cymbeline. [From an article in the NYTimes about computer programs that can write fiction]
V-Girl
A 3G virtual girlfriend, supposedly driven by artificial intelligence. She'll send you text messages asking "Do I look fat on your cell phone VGA screen?" and throw a hissy fit if you take a discreet camera phone pic of some hottie wandering by.
Mint Lifestyle
For just $12,000 a year, and with just 200 members in every city, this luxury personal concierge service will set up just about whatever your filthy rich little heart desires. Examples on their site include:
"I want a Porsche GT Coupe. Can you get me to the top of the list?"
"I would like to have dinner with President Clinton. Can you make it happen?"
"Can you put the kids on the G5 and send them down to Cabo?"
"There's a really beautiful Miro on display at Christie's. Do you think I could borrow it for the evening?"
"I think Wynton Marsalis is fabulous. Do you think he could play at a small dinner party I'm planning?"
UpSnap.com
Like Google SMS, except you can simply reply to a template they send to you so you don't have to remember any numbers. For those of us who can't afford Mint Lifestyle, I guess we could try sending "Porsche GT Coupe 212" as a test message and cross our fingers.
The DNA of Literature
I've been reading some of the archived Paris Review interviews, which they've announced they'll be putting online for free over the coming months. Some are already posted. I've always been a huge fan of the Paris Review interviews of writers at work, and they seem even more relevant now that I'm back to writing regularly. A quote from Faulkner's interview (PDF):

Maybe every novelist wants to write poetry first, finds he can't, and then tries the short story, which is the most demanding form after poetry. And, failng at that, only then does he take up novel writing.

The current issue contains an interview with Tobias Wolff. You'll have to buy a copy to read it in its entirety, but it's worth it for those who are interested in writing as a way of life.