The best time to buy plane tickets: Wednesday from midnight to 1am in the time zone of the airline's home base? Not sure if this is true, but I've heard it from a few people now.
I have to fly in a few hours, and with the current state of airport security procedures, what should be a happy event (traveling) sounds about as pleasant as a weekend getaway to Abu Ghraib. I'm referring just to the portion of my trip that begins and ends at the airport. As always on these security issues, Bruce Schneier is a voice of reason. Greg Palast provides a voice of biting humor on the same issue. Martin Peretz thinks we may have to turn to the procedures used by Israel's El Al airline. You don't have to remove your shoes or your laptop, but El Al puts all its passengers through a short interview before allowing them on the airplane. I can't imagine U.S. airports have the capacity for something like that, but it sounds interesting, like being screened by a Blade Runner.
I'm not going to waste energy fretting about dying in a terrorist attack (airline flight is still much safer than driving, among other forms of travel - PDF), but we're about a year or two away from having to fly practically nude. Airplane travel continues to grow more and more unpleasant, with no solution in sight.
A few months ago, when I was in E. Europe, I was pleased that so many discount airlines had launched in Europe. But now I'm back to wondering at how an entire industry can be so unprofitable while continuing to raise prices for a service that continues to regress in quality. Are the economics of air travel just inherently awful (except for the discounters who depart from the hub-and-spoke model like Southwest, easyJet, Ryanair)? Plane ticket pricing seems to float in a free market, so I'm assuming that airlines don't raise their prices and, in turn, the quality of their service, because these prices are the ones that maximize their profitability, and so this is all the quality they can offer. I'm assuming they're near the optimal intersection of supply and demand with their ticket pricing, but perhaps something else comes into play?
I wonder similar things about other industries. Why do all telecom companies have such shoddy customer service? What about the cable companies? What is it about certain industries that seems to drag down all the participants?
5 tips for being more photogenic.
How to make your own rotoscoped movie (like Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly). This tutorial may sound labor intensive, but it's actually much less labor intensive than the way they animated the two Linklater movies. Unfortunately, the sample output from this tutorial shows that there is no real shortcut (for now) to achieving the psychedelic effects achieved in a movie like Waking LIfe, in which every frame was hand rotoscoped by animators. The slight imperfection in the edges from hand animation give every edge and surface that pulsating movement and life.
Japanese trailer for the two Clint Eastwood WWII movies coming out this fall and winter, The Flags of Our Fathers (October) and Red Sun, Black Sand (December). Both tell the story of the Battle of Iwo Jima, the former from an American perspective, the latter from a Japanese perspective. Flags of Our Fathers focuses on the lives of the six men who raised the American flag, an event immortalized in a Joe Rosenthal photograph, supposedly the most reproduced photograph in history.
Shake Shack fails health inspection, earning 140 violation points from the NYC Department of Health. The average NY restaurant scores a 12, and a score of 28 or lower is required in order to pass the health inspection. Eater has posted the official response from Danny Meyer and company's Union Square Hospitality Group (thx to Anne for the heads up).
I'm in the midst of packing for my move West, and as always it is a depressing affair. It's a fallacy to think that we can live every day as if it were our last (that principle works better over broader stretches of time), but if it were someone's last day, they certainly wouldn't choose to spend it packing.
The cost of shipping my things cross-country seems to bottom out at about $1.00 a pound, so everything I'm considering packing is being assessed for its value-to-weight ratio. The one benefit of moving is that it forces a packrat like me to toss a bunch of stuff that I really don't need anymore. It lightens the load, both on my movers and my soul.
Two magician movies are coming out this fall, The Illusionist (trailer) and The Prestige (trailer). I saw The Illusionist at Sundance, and absent any firsthand data on The Prestige except the trailer, I recommend that if you will only see one magician movie this fall, go see The Prestige. It's almost like that classic statistics question "The Monty Hall Problem." I've only seen what's behind one door, but I'm going to switch and go with the other door now.
Both have two word titles in the form of article noun. Both center around dark, smoldering magicians: Ed Norton in The Illusionist, Christina Bale in The Prestige. Both feature a hot babe: Jessica Biel in The Illusionist, Scarlett JohanSSon in The Prestige. The magic in The Illusionist is never really explained (though there is a twist that is made clear). From the trailer, the magic in The Prestige may not be explainable at all.
The Illusionist looks good, like a sepia-toned postcard from turn-of-the-century Vienna. Prague makes for a fetching backdrop, as always, and I'm a sucker for scores by Philip Glass. But the romance at the heart of this romantic thriller, between Biel and Norton, feels flat. The movie needs to break free of the familiar conventions of this genre (yes, there is a sneering villain of a prince with a menacing mustache, played by Rufus Sewell, to antagonize our hero Norton, the mere son of a cabinetmaker), like Houdini escaping padlocked chains in a tank of water, but the movie puts forth only a mild effort to do so. A good magic trick leaves the audience dying to know how it was done, but when The Illusionist finally trotted out the great reveal, I'd lost interest.
The character of greatest appeal is Paul Giamatti's police inspector Uhl, half aspiring but bumbling magician, half obsessive detective. The way he almost gargles his lines in his throat before he delivers them and the way he mouths his pipe as he deliberates gives the audience a sympathetic character with some depth to hang its hat on.
As for The Prestige, I know little. The director is Christopher Nolan, which is a checkmark in its favor, and I'm generally a fan of any movie where Christian Bale plays someone who might just be crazy.
Nikon announced their latest digital SLR, the D80, which will be available in September 2006. 10.2 Megapixel, 3fps, 2.5" LCD, will retail for $999.95 without a lens. Throw in another $300 and you get a very useful kit lens, an AF-S DX 18-135mm F3.5 - F5.6G ED. This SLR looks to be the successor to the D70s. Unlike the D70/D70s, the D80 will be compatible with a vertical grip/battery pack, the MD-80. Just reading the specs, this camera looks pretty sweet, and it may eat into sales of the D200 which costs $700 more. The only bummer from my perspective is that they've shifted to using SD and SDHC cards instead of Compact Flash, so D70, D200, and D2 series Nikon users who grab a D80 will have to purchase yet another set of memory cards.
This review of fans is timely considering the heat wave that has swept across the U.S. this summer. The winner? The Bionaire Metal Tower Fan.
Congratulations to an old colleague of mine who has left Amazon to return to NY (very odd for me to read this on the front page of Amazon.com on my Amazon Plog). Rob was an early addition to the Amazon.com DVD & Video team, and I had a lot of fun working with him and chatting about movies. Perhaps we'll pass each other somewhere over the Midwest as he comes East and I head West.
These are a few of his favorite things. We have very similar tastes.
Cool video of James Randi helping Johnny Carson to stump famed psychic and spoon-bender Uri Geller. Here's a clip where Randi exposes how one faith healer "heals."
Ghost Hunters is a TV show on the Sci-Fi channel in which two plumbers moonlight as TAPS (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) who investigate paranormal disturbances with a skeptical eye. In most cases, the paranormal activity can be explained after some on-site sleuthing. Sometimes, though, they can't explain the phenomena, though I can't point to which episodes those are because I've never seen the show.
The holy grail of video game graphics is ray tracing, and it may not be more than a few years off.
Michael Moore is working on a documentary called Sicko about the American health care crisis, but he's running into a problem. Every time he appears on scene to film a family's struggle against health care injustice, the family is suddenly given health care. It's Moore's version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.
David Wain is shooting The Ten, a series of ten stories, one for each of the ten commandments. The cast includes Jessica Alba, Adam Brody, Rob Corddry, Bradley Cooper, Famke Janssen, Gretchen Mol, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, Paul Rudd, Liev Schreiber, and Ron Silver, among others. Wain is probably most known for directing Wet Hot American Summer, so expect a remake of The Decalogue. If Wain needs to reduce his cast for budget reasons, it's not a stretch to think of a way for Jessica Alba to cause me to violate all ten commandments.
The sequel to Signs: Mel Gibson's Signs (of Anti-Semitism). It's tough not to think of this whole Mel Gibson debacle and think "Apocalypto."
Wondering who to pick as your fantasy football kicker? Neil Rackers. (YouTube clip, reminiscent of the Ronaldinho commercial).
Perhaps she is the Mark Fidrych of blondes, who burned too brightly, too soon, only to fizzle out at 25.
Wal-Mart pulls out of Germany (thx to Derek for the pointer). Though Wal-Mart international is still the fastest growing segment of the behemoth of a retailer, it has learned that it's formula needs to be customized for specific markets.
In Germany, Wal-Mart stopped requiring sales clerks to smile at customers — a practice that some male shoppers interpreted as flirting — and scrapped the morning Wal-Mart chant by staff members.
Wal-Mart’s German experience also taught it to use local management. The company initially installed American executives, who had little feel for what German consumers wanted.
“They tried to sell packaged meat when Germans like to buy meat from the butcher,” Mr. Poschmann said.
Some of Wal-Mart’s missteps — selling golf clubs in Brazil, where the game is unfamiliar, or ice skates in Mexico — are so frequently mentioned, they have become the stuff of urban legend. But even more subtle differences in shopping habits have tripped up the company.
In Korea, Wal-Mart’s stores originally had taller racks than those of local rivals, forcing shoppers to use ladders or stretch for items on high shelves. Wal-Mart’s utilitarian design — ceilings with exposed pipes — put off shoppers used to the decorated ceilings in E-Mart stores.
Beyond the ambience, Wal-Mart’s shoes-to-sausage product line does not suit the shopping habits of many non-American shoppers. They prefer daily outings to a variety of local stores that specialize in groceries, drugs or household goods, rather than shopping once a week at Wal-Mart.
“They have stacks of goods in boxes,” said Lee Jin Sook, 46, a housewife sitting on a subway in Seoul. “That may be good for some American housewives who drive out in their own cars.” But Koreans, she said, prefer smaller packages: “Why would you buy a box of shampoo bottles?”
Wal-Mart is also not the low-price leader in many international markets.
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A preview of Mac OS X Leopard. Spaces will be useful for my multi-tasking work style, though I'm not sure I need anything to encourage my hyperlink-fueled attention-deficit disorder. And also from WWDC, the Mac Pro, which sounds like a worthy successor to the Powermac G5.
***
Magnum in Motion features multimedia essays from Magnum photographers. Here is one example, on the Tour de France, with some gorgeous black and white photos of France.
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Forgot to post this last last week, when Ken pointed it out to me, but the FDA finally approved Mexoryl for use in the US. Mexoryl is the magic ingredient owned by L'Oréal that has made L'Oréal's international sunscreens more effective than US sunscreens at blocking short UVA waves. US residents went to great lengths to get their hands on L'Oréal sunscreens, from purchasing it from online Canadian pharmacies to paying three to four times the retail price to obtain it from certain Upper East Side drugstores in Manhattan.
The first L'Oréal product containing Mexoryl to be sold in the US will be Anthelios SX, a daily moisturizing cream. Look for it this fall. As noted previously here, you can also go with Neutrogena's new Ultra Sheer Dry-Touch Sunblock or Age Shield Sunblock.
Usually, when a majority of critics embrace a comedy starring a funny guy I worship, that's a bad sign. It's usually a sign that someone has sold out and watered down the product. The trailer didn't seem that funny to me, and for a chunk of Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, as 17 year old boys in the theater around me snickered and guffawed, I wondered if Will Ferrell and company were suffering from overuse. NASCAR is such an obvious target, and this movie makes all the obvious if loving jabs at the expense of the sport.
But with every Will Ferrell movie, there are quotes I can recycle for years and years to my sisters' annoyance, and this movie contains more than a handful, including many that were obscured by the laughter of the packed house. Sascha Baron Cohen is magnifique as "Formula Un" racer Jean Girard, the racing footage is surprisingly good (like ice hockey, I suspect NASCAR is several magnitudes more exciting when watched live instead of on television), and Amy Adams is a scene stealer yet again.
SUSAN (Amy Adams) to RICKY BOBBY'S DAD (Gary Cole):
"Hi, I'm Susan. I'm his lady. I painted the cougar on his car."
[beat]
"We had sex."
RICKY BOBBY'S DAD:
"I wish I was there for that."
My appreciation for movies like Anchorman - The Legend Of Ron Burgundy and other frat pack flicks seems to rise over time. I suspect it has to do with how they're filmed. As the outtakes reveal, Ferrell and company shoot dozens of different jokes for every scene and then sift through all the material to stitch together the best comedic exchanges in post-production (half the jokes and shots in the trailer didn't even make the final movie; they probably have enough material to do an entirely different version of the entire movie, much of which we're certain to see on the DVD). The choppy editing is perhaps an inevitable product of the shooting style. A lot of cuts in this movie are obvious leaps to different takes, and not only do characters jump around on screen, but conversations have a Frankensteinian rhythm to them. They throw everything at the wall in these productions, and they stitch together anything that sticks.
The first time watching a movie like this, some of the jokes work, some don't. By the second or third or fourth viewing, my mind just filters out the jokes that don't work, while seeing Ferrell deliver a ridiculous joke with absolute commitment for the tenth time seems to magnify its power.
Will Ferrell's comedic talents work best when he's in a movie or sketch. His genius is remaining absolutely in character, no matter how absurd the situation. When he's being interviewed on a talk show or on the red carpet, he's never quite as funny. Like Phil Hartman, he's funniest when he's in character, which happens to be all the time when he's on camera. Outside a fictional setting, his commitment can seem forced, as when he guest-hosted for Letterman. Ferrell has throttled any semblance of self for the comedic benefit of the rest of us, bless his soul.
[By the way, the reverse is true, too: real-life people rarely seem as charismatic when put in front of the camera. All the real-life NASCAR drivers in Talladega Nights? Dull. The same with any real-life television broadcaster who appears in a movie, something that happens with alarming frequency these days. Off the top of my head, I can think of only a few sports stars who were funny on camera. Kareem in Airplane, maybe Brett Favre in There's Something More About Mary because his acting was so bad it became a spoof of itself. "Oh Mary, I've missed you so much."]
Not surprisingly, Ferrell's funniest characters are those who take themselves too seriously to begin with. Of those, few are funnier than pairs figure skaters, especially in that moment when, just before the music starts, they get into character in a melodramatic pose. I look forward to seeing Ferrell and Jon Heder when they bring that moment to life in Blades of Glory.
"Are we gonna get it on?! Cuz I am harder than a diamond in a snow storm!"
A gallon of milk on Amazon.com inspires hundreds of customer reviews. Ships from Gristedes in New York. I priced out what it would cost to ship to me here in NYC, and it came out to $30.24, with expedited shipping, which I highly recommend for milk.
Toyota about to pass GM to become the world's largest automaker, though they've been fighting some quality issues recently. I remember when our family first purchased a Toyota Cressida, it might as well have been a Bentley to us. We later participated in the Camry tsunami.
Domaines Ott and French rosé wines are the new hot summer drink. What I find most surprising from this article, though, is that Alex Kapranos, lead singer of Franz Ferdinand, is a food columnist for The Guardian, and Jay McInerney is wine columnist for House & Garden.
"My other vehicle is a Gulfstream." I just enjoy that article's title. Private air travel is tough on the environment because of the outrageous fuel consumption, so I always try to airpool when I take my jet to Aspen or Jackson Hole, cuz that's how I roll. Okay, that's not true. I've only flown in a private jet once, and that trip confirmed that private jets is heaven compared to the human cattle call that is commercial air travel.
Floyd Landis's B-sample came back positive, so his team Phonak fired him. Now USA Cycling and the US Anti-Doping Agency will prepare a case against him while Landis and his team prepare his defense. It will be months before we hear a verdict, though the court of public and media opinion works has already issued theirs. On the "Top Ten Landis Excuses" piece on David Letterman, number nine was "Who can resist Balco's delicious 'spicy chipotle' flavor." Landis posted a statement on his weblog yesterday and a response to the B-sample positive test today.
The pilot for Aaron Sorkin's new TV show Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip leaked onto YouTube this week, then was promptly pulled. So I can just link to this 6 minute promo (begins with a riff on Network, beats up on NBC's own SNL, and makes a joke about Sorkin's coke habit) and 30 second trailer. Anyhow, this is all an excuse to tell a short story about my apartment hunt in L.A. At the first apartment I went to visit in Santa Monica, a bald guy named Evan answered the door. He looked really familiar, like someone I'd seen on TV or in a movie, but I just couldn't place him. So I didn't say anything. He showed me his apartment and was really generous with his time, explaining the neighborhood and its nearby attractions. He mentioned that he'd done the New York to LA move also, and that I should keep an open mind to LA (I'm in depression over leaving NY for LA right now). He never mentioned his work, but after I left his apartment, and as I was filling out an application, I realized who he was. Evan played Charlotte's flame Harry Goldenblatt on Sex and the City, the role for which he's most known, and he'll be in the pilot of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I didn't end up taking his apartment because I got a roommate and needed more space, but it seemed appropriate that he be one of the first people I met in LA.
Google announces "All Our N-gram are Belong to You," which I think is pretty generous of them.
Finally, I have air conditioning in my apartment again, and all is good again. A handy phrase to learn, one I learned from my sister, who is a lawyer, is "warrant of habitability."
Trailer for the upcoming Tenacious D movie The Pick of Destiny.
I found Rainier cherries for $2 a pound in Chinatown. They're my favorite, the queen of cherries, but seemingly not as widely known here on the East coast. Some people I've spoken to here think they're discolored Bing cherries.
Sometimes, mainstream media is late to cover topics, like the NYTimes here on HDR photography.
YouTube has the selection lead, and that has led it to a huge lead in the online video clip library space. It did the smart thing and went with a video format that almost anyone on any platform can play, and that is Flash video (.flv files).
But here's the thing: Flash video looks like crap. It is the Ford Escort of video formats. On many YouTube videos I feel like I'm trying to watch a 12-inch black-and-white television through the wrong end of binoculars. If you were to start a competitor to YouTube, and it would be silly to do so at this point, one thing you could do to win my allegiance is to use Quicktime as your default codec. Doesn't have to be HD. It doesn't even have to be another company; YouTube could offer Quicktime as the Lexus to its own Toyota.
If I want to watch a blank white screen with no sound (oh, how modern), I want to see it in quality.
A few movies I caught at Sundance in January hit theaters this week.
For those who enjoy the narrow but uncomplicated communal thrill of a good horror flick, The Descent delivers. Every bit of marketing for the movie, from the poster to the trailer to pictures and advance reviews, diminishes the fun. Don't read or look at any of it. The less you know about the movie, the greater the rush. Just grab some fellow horror movie fans and wear blinders until the lights go down. Do know, however, that the movie includes some attractive girls who, like Buffy, aren't afraid to muss their hair when push comes to shove.
I knew little to nothing about the movie when I caught it at Sundance. It played at midnight at the Egyptian Theatre, however, always an omen of disturbing fare. Past movies I've caught at that series include Wolf Creek, Three Extremes, and Oldboy. I walked in sleep-deprived, drowsy, and half-frozen by the Park City winter. I walked out of the theater with palms sweating and heart racing.
There was some controversy after the screening because the ending of the cut we saw at Sundance differed from the ending of the original that showed in the UK. Whenever something like this happens, horror fans lament that studios water down movies for American audiences because of their preference for happy endings. Director Neil Marshall said that was not the case, that he had always wanted to try two different endings. I believed him, and at any rate, the American ending works just fine. You could, in fact, interpret them the same way if you wanted, and at any rate, I'm sure the special edition DVD will include both. You can also look up a description of the UK ending in IMDb's news forums after the fact, as I did after Sundance.
In a somewhat disappointing lineup of movies at Sundance this year, Quinceañera was the big winner, capturing both the audience and jury award for narrative film. It is a movie with a strong sense of place, set in Echo Park, a Latino neighborhood in Los Angeles that is a layer cake of conflict between the generations, classes, and sexes.
A girl prepares the traditional celebration of her 15th birthday, her Quinceañera, but when she discovers she's pregnant, her strict and traditional father reacts as you'd predict. She and her friend's brother Carlos, also a pariah from his own family because of his sexuality, find refuge at their great uncle Tomas's house.
This feels like a Sundance movie to me. The writer, director, and actors were all unknown to me. It is not a genre film, and though so many pieces of the story are familiar, the movie moves with an organic energy. I did not anticipate Tomas becoming the wheel on which the movie pivots back on itself. The film has a warm spirit and no desire to shock or awe, a rarity in these times. Though it sometimes feels rough around the edges and never lifted me out of my seat, Quinceañerais the right movie for the type of person who wants a movie at the far opposite spectrum from The Descent.
IBM's ViaVoice Toolkit for Animation, when it's finally perfected, will vastly simplify the process of synchronizing an animated character's mouth with speech. If you have IBM ViaVoice R10 for Windows, you can download the toolkit.
Someday, this will revolutionize Conan O'Brien's "lip-synched interviews with famous people" segments, as well as spawn hundreds of amateur Pixar-like shorts on YouTube.
You can send a little ad message in Sam Jackson's voice via cell phone or e-mail to one of your friends from the official website for Snakes on a Plane. You have to choose from a few dropdowns to produce a canned message, though the engine can pronounce some common names to give the message a bit of a personal touch (including Eugene, hallelujah).
Too bad that even for an R-rated movie, they didn't remove the censor muzzle from Samuel L. If so, I'd be sending one of these to my landlord right now for not having fixed my air conditioner yet. It would be the next best thing to sending Jules himself over to pay a visit and collect my briefcase full of freon.
"The path of the righteous man..."
It's been about 100 degrees in Manhattan the past two days. Sometime yesterday morning, my air conditioner lost its will and started spewing out hot air. Welcome to hell.
I thought it was a temporary failure, so I turned it off to let it rest and went to the gym in the late afternoon. The air conditioning at the gym is solid, but after a half hour on the treadmill, I was sweating buckets. The only time I can recall sweating more was on my bike ride up Mont Ventoux in 2002, when a literal waterfall of sweat formed on my nose.
In the locker room, I returned my towel to the laundry bin, the towel so soaking wet it was as if I'd dropped it in the hot tub. Outside, the pavement was disgorging all the heat it had soaked up from the sun during the day. I felt like the city was trying to sweat me out of its pores.
Back home, I stood in front of my air conditioner, muttered a little prayer under my breath, and turned it on. For a few seconds, cold air emerged, but the chill began diminishing at a steady rate. I hopped in the shower and took turned the water to the coldest setting and sat under it for as long as I could bear. It's probably not healthy to expose one's body to such extreme temperature swings, but I felt like I was overheating.
As soon as I got out of the shower, I started sweating again. I haven't stopped sweating since. My super still hasn't shown up. Last night I had to crash on my brother's sofa. I may try to sneak into Sephora tonight with a sleeping bag and crash behind the cosmetics counter. It feels like the North Pole in there.
Every now and then, something happens and my air conditioner works again for about a minute. Those moments remind me of those occasional euphoric highs, when for some reason one's internal chemistry aligns in a perfect eclipse of any anxiety or sorrow.
I think it was on a day with heat like today's that violence erupted in Do The Right Thing, or that Merusault shoots that guy on the beach in The Stranger.