Martin Luther King Day is a holiday I last celebrated in grade school. At the two jobs I've had since my undergrad days, we only received six or seven official days off per year, the Christian Anglo-Saxon holidays. No Chinese New Years, no Yom Kippur. A month of for Ramadan, I agree, would have been excessive, but MLK Day seems like it deserves to be honored more widely in the U.S., race being such a central part of American history and identity.
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
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?
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
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 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?
Back from an awesome holiday vacation, as usual, and this first week back is just crazy. I'm working on a film shoot, and the whole crew has been working 12 hours shifts starting early every morning in order to try and finish a 2nd year student's short film before equipment is due back to the school. Today we shot a whole series of sex scenes. Hmmm, awkward (and not just because you all now think I'm working as a grip on a porno). Tomorrow, another 12 hour day. I'm so tired I can barely sit up straight for more than five minutes at a time without nodding off like Grandpa Simpson.
I didn't jump online much over break, and I'm buried in e-mails and unpublished thoughts of the year past and the year to come, but I did notice that A&E is airing an MI-5 marathon tomorrow (Sat, Jan. 8). I highly, highly recommend the show. Just set your TiVo to record every episode being aired tomorrow (Seasons 1 and 2 and the first episode of Season 3); you won't regret it. My only regret is that I'm publishing this recommendation so late.
If for some reason you miss it, Season 1 and 2 are out on DVD Jan. 11 (Season 1 has been out for a while). I haven't much of Alias, but I'd put MI-5 up against any American suspense drama on television.
Belated happy new year everyone!
[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.
Jason's hobby/fun site CelebSafari was featured as Yahoo's Dec. 21 pick of the day (you'll have to scroll down to it; no permalinks or anchors). One line in the description reads "Can you spot the supermodel in this trio?" and links to this photo taken at Sundance last year.
I'll give you a hint: I'm not the supermodel. You might think that caption would sting a bit, but I got to hang out with a supermodel, so I'm really not too sore over the whole thing.
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
I caught the Scissor Sisters at the Hammerstein Ballroom on Sunday evening, after another great home-cooked meal by Angela (coq au vin, a classic French dish). When I emerged from the cab in front of the concert hall, it was snowing. Or hailing. Or someone was pouring bags of salt out of an apartment overhead. And it was really cold.
Through a few hops of the social network, I ended up attending the concert with Chris and her friends. I had met Chris once or twice in Seattle, but in typical New York big city small world fashion, we ended up attending a concert together and catching up over beers afterwards. Six degrees barely covers six short city blocks in NYC.
DJ Sammy Jo (the Scissor Sister's personal DJ) and VHS or Beta opened. I really dug DJ Sammy Jo, who has a catchy, danceable pop sensibility. VHS or Beta sounded like the Cure, but more punk. The Scissor Sisters were crazy. They love New York, where they as a band were born, and New York loves them back. They once opened for VHS or Beta, and now the tables were turned.
After the concert, the temperature had dropped even further, into the low teens, and a light coat of snow dusted the streets, like powdered frosting on a chocolate donut. We shivered our way to the nearest pub, and after that, sprinted to subway stops to disperse across the city back to our respective holes.
My apartment was an ice chest, and it still is. I have really tall windows lining the entire side of apartment facing the street, and they might as well be screens so much cold air seeps through. I tried a ceramic space heater and promptly popped the fuse. Looks like it's time to layer, and I now look forward to the sunshine of southern California with genuine longing.
Cool little adventure cam for recording sporting events from a 1st-person perspective
AllofMP3.com to double its rates Jan 15, 2005
This, coming on top of the MTA fare hike in NYC, means my cost-of-living in 2005 is already increasing, and I haven't even finished with 2004
On your honeymoon, why not treat your wife to a breast enlargement and botox at the same time?
Gamer spends $26,500 on a virtual land in computer role-playing game
"Earlier this year economists calculated that these massively multi-player online role-playing games (MMORPGs) have a gross economic impact equivalent to the GDP of the African nation of Namibia"
I finally watched the finale of The Apprentice stashed on my DVR. Really long, and not too suspenseful; everyone knew Kelly would win. If you're one of the final two contestants and Trump sends George along to follow you instead of Carolyn, you're screwed. The most interesting moment came when Trumps COO Matthew Calamari (like the appetizer?) stood up to advise Trump on which contestant to choose and choked up under the pressure of the moment, stuttering incoherently for a bit before Regis mercifully sat him back down. I really wanted Trump to fire Calamari on the spot, it would have been awesome, but alas, the show concluded conventionally.
The Monday night football game is on in the background. Late in the 2nd quarter, New England has gone into an innovative defense: they have no down lineman, only a series of linebackers standing a few feet from the line of scrimmage. Some rush, others drop back into coverage. Not the 4-3 or the 3-4; call it the 0-7. So far, it's held. Of course, the offense is being played by Miami, this year it's conceivable you could play without any defensemen at all and still stop the Dolphins.
If Michael Lewis had written Moneyball about a football team, it would have to be the New England Patriots. They don't overspend on stars, and their coach Bill Belichick is known for reading work by economists.
UPDATE: Hey, the Remains of the Day front page jinx struck again. The Pats choked away a late 11 point lead and lost 29-28 to the lowly Dolphins.
This site is defaced!!!Just lovely. Comment spam, graffiti, defacers--someone needs to invent some roach traps or rat poison for our digital homes.
NeverEverNoSanity WebWorm generation 15.
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.
FASB approves rule requiring companies to expense stock options
Makes sense. Won't change affected companies at all, but sometimes perception is reality, so their stock prices may take some temporary hits.
Time's Person of the Year 2004: George W. Bush
A Xmas pop culture icon: the Christmas Story leg lamp, shipped in a crate marked fra-gi-lee
Smart drugs: steroids for brains?
Side effects may include enhanced memory
The O.C. Chrismukkah Yarmuclaus - festive fashion for Jew and Gentile alike
Too bad they're sold out and won't ship until Jan 17, 2005
Video of the Honda ASIMO robot walking and running
It looks like the robot is sprinting towards an outhouse while in danger of pooping its pants
Le Viaduc de Millau is freaking gorgeous
It's the highest bridge in the world. I wonder if people are allowed to bike across it.
Apple and Motorola to collaborate on a cellphone
That will certainly help me to resist the siren call of the Moto Razr V3, which I really don't need.
Study links sleep with weight loss
Just remember, the next time I'm sleeping in, I'm actually working out, in a way. So good when happy things correlate.
Another posthumous 2Pac album
Okay, this is really getting creepy. Has anyone been as prolific from the grave?
I'm still catching up from the weekend. Last week, TiVo stepped up efforts to crack down on "misuse" of it's brand name. It's probably a futile effort. Customers own a company's brand to a greater extent than most companies realize, and enforcing grammatical use of your brand name is not going to alter their perceptions. The best thing TiVo can do is to focus on what it does control, namely its pricing, feature set, etc. It's quite sad that a company of its stature doesn't recognize that. TiVo still has the best interface of any DVR on the market (I'm stuck with a lousy Time Warner Cable High Def DVR interface that sometimes makes me cry), but I have severe misgivings about the company's future given how many other companies are simply integrating TiVo-like (oops) similar functionality into other products, e.g. set-top boxes. Meanwhile, TiVo seems to be focused on innovation on behalf of advertisers and networks instead of end users, completely the wrong way to innovate when you're a consumer products company.
EPIC 2014
All fairly familiar but interesting until the name Googlezon is brought up. That's just ridiculous.
Thomas Bartlett offers up his top 10 albums, singles, and 25 free downloads of 2004.
Did anyone else notice the Evanescence debacle at the Billboard Music awards last week? Eric and Christina caught it on television while I was out searching for poker chips in Whistler village, but it was replayed when I returned to our ski lodge. Amy Lee performed My Immortal live, with an orchestra backing her. To make life easy, she sang in a lower key, and the orchestra played accordingly. At the end, however, when the band joined in, they were playing in the normal key. Cacaphony ensued. Amy Lee couldn't stop shaking her head, struggling to hear the right key, and at song's end, she just looked at her band, shook her head, and said, "Wow." How does something like that happen?
Last Thursday, Eric and Christina took me to The End's Deck the Hall Ball, a concert sponsored by Seattle's 107.7 and held at Key Arena. The lineup read like a list of bands that would appear on the soundtrack of The O.C., or Zach Braff's Garden State followup soundtrack. The bands playing at the concert, in order of appearance (ascending order of popularity, I suspect), were the following:
Snow Patrol
Keane
The Shins
The Killers
Franz Ferdinand
Modest Mouse
Here's a set list for each band, along with iTunes links to each song
Each band was limited to about 40 minutes, which was fine for many of the bands who only had one CD or about 40 minutes worth of material anyhow. Christina and I missed all except the last two songs by Snow Patrol. We were downtown and planned to take the monorail over to Seattle Center, only to discover it wasn't running. Unlike NYC, there is no subway system, and the one bus that could have taken us there waited while we sprinted nearly two blocks to catch it, and then it shut its doors and left us in the dust just as we reached it.
Keane turned out to be three people. A lead singer, a keyboardist, and a drummer. No bass?! Not on this night, though the keyboardist had what appeared to be a Mac laptop sitting next to him, its screen flipped open and illuminated. Maybe the bass player was being piped in via some audio chat software. They didn't seem like rock stars, the lead singer being as friendly as he was. Some pretty emo-Britpop or whatever it's called, though the lead singers vocals were pumped out at too high a level.
The Shins sounded great.
The Killers are a blast to watch live. They've embraced their inner rock star, and "Somebody Told Me" is a great single. Sure, it all sounds vaguely reminiscent of stuff from The Cure, New Order, and a dozen other bands, but if we held every band to the standard of an original sound, we'd all be curmedgeonly rockists.
Franz Ferdinand look like a bunch of guys who used to get beat up in high school, except they all wear hip suits with skinny ties, so at least they were hip ahead of their time. Really catchy guitar riffs. I'm terrible with musical genres. Someone told me they qualify as post-pop. I have no idea what that means, but I picture a pop lying in bed, smoking a cigarette.
Modest Mouse was extremely subdued. Between the first several songs, not a word was uttered. Sasquatch, the Seattle Sonics mascot, joined the band for one song to play the tambourine. Or perhaps I'd just inhaled too much secondhand pot. A large flock of people left halfway through their set, either out of exhaustion or boredom, or both.
I've been getting crushed by comment spam the past week or so. Several hundred a day. Really, really aggravating, even though cleaning it up usually requires just a few keystrokes and mouse clicks. It just feels like you've been digitally violated.
Guess it's time to upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type. BTW, I know two rights don't make a wrong, but if someone were to hang a few comment spammers by their thumbs, well, I wouldn't rush to help them down.