More Katharine McPhee...

The Very Best of Katharine McPhee

Great post here recapping the best performances by Kat on American Idol this year. I've been reading Breath of Fresh Ink since I started scouring the internets for mp3s of the performances, and Chris Evans has a good blog going. Here he's included both his original reviews of the performances and his current thoughts, PLUS, he's got links to video clips of the performances that he's uploaded to YouTube. (Also check out the interview of Kat, Taylor, and Randy Jackson with Ryan Seacrest that was on Larry King Live last week...Chris has video of it all. It's heavier on Kat than Taylor, because she's more outgoing, but hey. That's fine with me. *g*)

I totally agree with his choices for her best performances. These all made me just sink back into my chair and go "wow."

Tags:

• american-idol
• katharine-mcphee

April Reading/Watching Recap

Movies

Broken Flowers
I'd heard some really great things about this film, and perhaps my expectations were raised too high, but I was a little bit disappointed, to be honest. Probably I need to watch it again at some point, because I think I just didn't get it...usually I'm pretty cool with lack of resolution, but this just stopped, and it didn't feel right to me. Maybe it wasn't supposed to. Hence the need to rewatch. I did like a lot of the vignettes, though, and of course Bill Murray is awesome as usual. It was really just the ending that unsettled me. And it was really my expectations more than anything that let me down, so I can't mark it down too much.
Above Average
buy at amazon IMDb

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
I was expecting to be gently amused by this, but it was actually better than I expected. Of course, Alexis Bledel and Amber Tamblyn are among the most talented of the current crop of teenaged actresses--give me them over Hilary Duff and Lindsay Lohan any day of the freakin' week. Anyway. I thought this did a really good job of mixing the four girls' stories together, letting each of them have the spotlight for a while, but not giving any of them too much weight. There were issues here, but they were handled appropriately and not sentimentally. Absolutely one of my favorite recent films aimed at a young audience. And how much do I want to go to Greece now?
Above Average, extra points for being funny without being vulgar and dealing with issues without using anvils, and for pretty, pretty scenery
buy at amazon IMDb

Sophie Scholl: The Last Days
One of the best I've seen this year. (Hey, and it's foreign. Imagine that. *looks pointedly at stoopid Hollywood industry*) It's set in 1943, and focuses on a German brother and sister who spoke out against Hitler and his misguided war efforts and the trial that follows their arrest for treason. It boils with a quiet intensity, and Sophie's faceoffs with the Nazi investigator are as well-done as any courtroom film ever. It's a study in strength of character and faith, and it's as subtle as it is powerful--there is no beating you over the head with the point here. See my longer review (including a tirade about seeing foreign films) here.
Superior, extra points for everything
IMDb

Inside Man
Hey, a Spike Lee movie I didn't end up hating! Of course, with Clive Owen, Denzel Washington, and Jodie Foster, plus a heist storyline, Spike Lee would've had to have worked extra hard to make me dislike it...but I wouldn't put it past him. Anyway, this is one of the most accessible Lee films I've seen, and it really worked quite well. The heist itself was well-done, and the negotiation segments were brilliant. Lee showed just enough to hint at what the underlying plan was without revealing it too soon. I'm always a little disturbed, though, that heist movies always make me want to root for the robbers. Even more so when Clive Owen is involved--I will say his effect on me was a little lessened by the lack of his British accent. Still. Overall, a solid drama, good performances all around, lots of stuff going on, plenty of things to figure out. My only beef is that Clive's speech that opens the film is repeated at the end...the speech where he says he isn't going to repeat himself. Um...okay?
Well Above Average, extra points for calm and collected master thievery
IMDb

Amores Perros
This one requires a rewatch at some point. Not expecting it to be as involved and intricate as it was, I failed to pay proper attention to first half or so...in addition to that, I had to watch it in two pieces due to poor time management on my part. So I got to the end feeling like I had missed a really great film. It's three (or four...see what I mean?) different stories, all about some sort of love, and each involving a dog. (The title is translated in English as "Love's a Bitch," with "bitch" meant to mean both the current, vulgar definition and the original definition as a female dog.) One story concerns a young man in love with his brother's wife, who enters his dog into underworld dog fights to win enough money to leave town, hoping to take the girl he loves away from the brother who beats her. A second follows a famous model who is crippled in an automobile accident, and her dog which gets lost under the floorboard of her not-terribly-well-made apartment. All the stories, in fact, converge on this automobile accident, which is seen several times from several viewpoints. The film overall is gritty, realistic, painful, harsh, emotional, gripping, raw and intricate. Not a film that everyone will enjoy (I didn't even enjoy it so much as appreciate it and want to understand it better), but quite well-executed and uncompromising. Oh, and it supports my theory that Gael Garcia Bernal is in every Mexican film. He is. I swear.
Above Average, extra points for visceral-ness and excellent plotting
buy at amazon IMDb

War of the Worlds
By the time this one came in to the library for me, I was sort of ambivalent about it. This time of year, I'm almost completely indie-minded, and wasn't too excited about big summer blockbusters--add into that my current extreme aversion to Tom Cruise (run away now, Katie!), and I wasn't sure. But it came in to the library, so I had to watch it, right? Anyway, it was actually quite good. I should have remembered Steven Spielberg's impeccable sense of timing, and his storytelling prowess--Spielberg's skill blew away whatever reservations I had about the film. Also, Dakota Fanning is outstanding. Best child actress, maybe ever. Anyway. It gets a little over the top at times, and of course there are predictable parts, but it was an enjoyable ride. It's interesting to see how Spielberg treats the aliens here...there is none of the wonder/curiosity of Close Encounters of the Third Kind or the loveableness of E.T. on display here. They are faceless, evil, hateful, imperturbable villains, and nothing more. Is he just tapping into the paranoia of the original story, or has his view on extra-terrestrial life really changed?
Above Average, extra points for suspenseful timing and great special effects and cinematography, a few points deducted for some formulaic moments
buy at amazon IMDb

Thank You for Smoking
Very, very, very amusing from start to finish, beginning with the clever title sequence. It's so rare for movies to even have title sequences anymore, and this one was really well-designed and appropriate, using old cigarette carton graphics as a starting point. The movie itself is fast-moving, clever, and maybe more good-natured than it intends. It feels like it wants to be more provocative than it is, but it really isn't provocative or offensive at all...it's just an enjoyable poke in the ribs. The main character (Aaron Eckhart) is the charmed spokesman for the Big Tobacco consortium, and he maneuvers his way through the film fending off medical specialists on national TV, conspiring with Hollywood bigwigs to make smoking on-screen cool again, dealing with hot young female reporters (Katie Holmes), and trying to spend time with his son. Some of the best scenes are when he and the rest of the MOD squad meet for lunch every week--that's Merchants Of Death, otherwise known as the the lobbyists for Big Tobacco, Guns, and Alcohol. Again, they may be going for mild shock value here, but it's so over the top that it's amusing. (My favorite part is when they get into an argument over which one of their industries kills the most people.) I really enjoyed the style, too...it's sort of Arrested Development-esque, with a voiceover explaining the backgrounds of various people, including graphics and still shots and sometimes short film clips. It's very cute. Oh, and it also has Maria Bello and William H. Macy in the supporting cast, two people who tend to choose very good projects. This is no exception. It's light, entertaining, subtle, and really well-done. THIS is what comedy films should be like.
Well Above Average, extra points for the title sequence, being intelligent, and being stylistically interesting
IMDb

The Constant Gardener
There are many good social problem films. There are many good political conspiracy thrillers. There are many good love stories. Once in a while, movies try to tackle more than one of these areas, usually with uneven and unsatisfying results. The Constant Gardner just shot to the top of my 2005 Top Ten list because it manages to encompass all of these disparate things, and do each of them convincingly and appropriately. The things I'd heard about it before seeing it didn't seem to fit together...British husband and wife in Africa, on some sort of diplomatic mission; wife wants to help the African people. Okay, we've got a bleeding heart humanitarian story. But wait, there seems to be a lot of focus on their relationship, maybe it's a love story and the rest is secondary. Except she dies, and apparently there's a big political coverup and conspiracy that he tries to uncover, at peril to his own life. Sounds thrilling--I hope that's the main part! But, see...they're all the main part. Their love for each other, her love for Africa, and the danger that her humanitarian activities put them both into is all bound up together inseparably. The balance between the focus on Justin and Tessa as individuals and the big picture of the AIDS and TB epidemics in Africa, (and the drug companies that want to exploit the continent) is kept beautifully. The story is handled surely, with perfect pacing, excellent acting, and a time-shifting script that brings Tessa to life in a way that a linear script somehow never could have. It could easily devolve into sentimentality, but it doesn't. It could easily turn into a Mission Impossible chase movie, but it doesn't. It clocks in at 2 hours and 10 minutes, and it felt half that long. Now I really want to read the book.
Superior, extra points for having a very big-Hollywood story, but keeping an indie sensibility
buy at amazon IMDb

Proof
Somehow, I was expecting more out of the reteaming of director John Madden and Gwyneth Paltrow. After all, Shakespeare in Love is one my favorite films ever. And Proof has an intriguing premise: a woman deals with the death of her brilliant-but-mad mathematician father, as well as her fear that she shares more in his mental instability than his brilliance. The acting by all the leads (Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, Jake Gyllenhaal) as quite good. It just felt...inconsequential, I think is the word I want. It didn't seem to matter whether or not she had written the groundbreaking mathematical proof of the title or not, or whether her father had really recovered his mental acuity enough to have done it himself before he died. In fact, the film seems to indicate that it doesn't matter, but then why is it so central? Perhaps the point is that she needed to realize that she mattered as a person whether or not she was a brilliant mathematician, but in her mental state, knowing that intellectually wouldn't have made any difference. The film has a lot of very nice moments (the scene where the father, in flashback, thinks he's explaining a new proof but is really speaking nonsense is particularly moving), but overall it's uneven and disappointing.
Average
buy at amazon IMDb

Crash
I don't know what I think about this film. Just so you know. I'm going to throw out some jumbled up thoughts, but as far as a unified response or reaction, I really don't have one. I love ensemble movies, and so I liked it as far as style goes...the seemingly separate stories connected thematically that are also connected tangentially through character relationships and random circumstances. But the plot was heavy-handed and didn't quite ring true to me. I was particularly bothered by the lack of a single noble character. I know the point is that everybody has a racist streak, even those who seem the most fair and egalitarian, like Ryan Phillippe's character. And maybe we need to be reminded of that and not get cocky about the improvement in our interracial relations in our equal-opportunity world. But I wonder if making a film that posits that everybody is a racist whether they know it or not and offers no solution other than a horrible car crash is really helping the situation. It always seems to me that making a big deal out of racism only widens the gap rather than closing it. But then, what do I know? Maybe I'm just terribly naive. As I said, I did like the style, but the ideology is so central to the plot that it's impossible for me to separate my reaction to it from my reaction to the film as a film...usually I do that without too much trouble.
Average, extra points for style, points deducted for heavy-handed ideology
buy at amazon IMDb

Books

Digital Fortress by Dan Brown
Oh, my. Where do I even start? Here's a place: Worst.Novel.Ever. And not in the so-bad-it's-good way, either. Maybe in the so-bad-it's-fun-to-mock way. I was hoping to like it, because even though I disagreed with The Da Vinci Code's theology and historicity, I did enjoy reading it--and Digital Fortress concerns cryptography, which is one of my favorite sub-sub-genres. Now I need to reread DVC to see if I was overlooking huge errors in the writing itself, because Digital Fortress is the worst-written piece of crap I've ever read. How do I mean, exactly? Well...let's just pull out my handy-dandy little notebook, of which I used some six or seven pages just outlining the problems with this book. Laying the background: main character Susan is the head cryptographer at the NSA. She's brilliant. Good thing Brown keeps telling us that, because everything she says or does is idiotic. Her fiance David is a professor of languages, but he's been commissioned by the NSA for a single mission: to head to Spain to recover an encryption key that will break an otherwise unbreakable code, a code which is meant to cripple the NSA and its bohemoth decryption computer, TRANSLATR. He apparently speaks Spanish perfectly, but has to also say everything in English, because Brown gives us both Spanish and English for almost everything he says. Actually, no one "says" anything...they "shrug" or they "intone" or they "spout" or they "frown" or they "muse" or they "sigh". It's positively exhausting. Every chapter or so is a cliffhanger. Except, not, because the cliffhangers are so anvil-obvious that you've anticipated them pages before they happen. Some more issues with Susan's brilliance: she doesn't understand what "who will guard the guardians" means. Granted, she's not a language genius, but still--here's another similar one: The antagonist sends a message saying "Tell the world about TRANSLATR--only the truth will save you now." Susan's response: "The truth about what?" Uh....TRANSLATR? When one of the bigger plot twists occurs, she's shocked speechless--which would be okay, had she not predicted that exact plot twist in an earlier chapter. Her boss talked her out of it, but when it turned out to be right, she's all "Oh my gosh, I can't believe it" instead of "I told you so." Note that all of the events of the story happen within a 24-hour time frame. Oh, and the passwords. You'd think cryptographers would be really good at passwords. Their workstations are protected by a five-character alpha password. That's about the level of security our laundry room has. And the deputy director's private elevator? Five-character alpha password also...and not random, but rather, the name of his head cryptographer. Seriously folks. And I'm not even going into all the issues of technology and cryptography...I'm not well-versed enough in those areas to have picked up all the errors myself, but the people over at Wikipedia have done a nice job, if you want to check that out. It's interesting that Brown took the same general approach to this as to The Da Vinci Code--take an interesting subject, make up a bunch of stuff about it, and then treat it as fact. Forget this and read some Neal Stephenson. His Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon cover a bunch of the same ground, but with infinitely better writing and knowledge. Unless you just feel like mocking the Worst.Novel.Ever.
Dismal
buy at amazon (but really, don't say I didn't tell you)

Batman: Year One by Frank Miller
I'm not a comic book person. But I secretly want to be. Comic book people are geeky and obsessive, and I'm geeky and obsessive...just about different things. But things that invite geekiness and obsession intrigue me for that reason alone, and I keep thinking that one of these days I'll get hooked on comics/graphic novels and be able to add that area to my geek quotient. Hasn't happened yet. Graphic novels are a challenge for me to read, believe it or not...my mind just isn't trained to follow the sequence of panes and easily understand what's going on, although I can tell it's getting easier over time. I picked up Batman: Year One from the library after liking Batman Begins so much, and I did really enjoy it. I will tell you that anyone trying to claim that graphic novels aren't art doesn't have a leg to stand on. It's a beautiful work. Now I'm having trouble untangling the story from Batman Begins, but that's probably okay.
Above Average
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Seize the Day by Saul Bellow
Let's see, why did I pick this up? Oh, yeah, it was on various college reading lists and, uh, it's short. :D A day in the life of a man who's at the end of his rope...he's lost his job, has no money, has an ex-wife hounding him for money, his father has money but won't give him any, and he's sunk his last bit of change in the stock market, hoping against hope he'll make a killing. I liked it okay while I was reading it, but the fact that I can only remember the premise and not the ending may not bode well. On the other hand, as I've stated before, conclusions tend to fade from my mind a long time before the processes leading to the conclusions do. I did enjoy the stock market parts, largely because I knew more about it than the character did, due to my dad's interest in it. He kept thinking of things, and I was like, "no, don't do that, that's dumb." Now I'm going to annoy myself by not remembering how it turned out. Oh well.
Average
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade." Thus begins the best opening chapter I've ever read, ever. It goes on to give suggestions about how to best enjoy reading the book, as well as a recap of how you went to bookstore to buy it, and bypassed all the other books lying in wait for you there--Books You Haven't Read, Books You Needn't Read, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong to the Category of Books Read Before Being Written, Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered, Books Made For Other Purposes Than Reading, Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, and many many others. It's delightful. The rest of the book is quite good as well, but it's not quite as wonderful. After this first chapter, If on a winter's night a traveler begins, but just as its story of spies gets interesting, it breaks off...the copy that "you" have bought is defective, and the first 32 pages are repeated over and over. As the story continues, the second-person narrator (The Reader) tries to find the rest of the book (soon in the company of The Other Reader) to finish it, but is repeatedly given different books instead. These books are also interrupted at the crucial moment, and The Reader is returned to his quest. The whole thing is extremely post-modern, very self-referential, and in fact, plays upon a lot of literary theory, especially Reader-Response Theory, and theories involving The Other, which is obvious even from this synopsis. (Also, as you read the intermingled stories that The Reader is given, you'll notice that they each take off from a recognized genre, too...the spy novel, the seedy romance, the memoir, etc.) Calvino is easily one of the most fascinating writers I've discovered recently, and now my quest is to read all of his books.
Well Above Average
buy at amazon

Tags:

• film
• books

Obsession

Hi, I'm Jandy, and I have an obsessive personality. Or something like it. I get incredibly obsessed incredibly easily, and when I get obsessed with something, I go all the way. When I was little, it was horses. I had an imaginary stable. But this wasn't just "oh, sometimes I imagine I have horses." No, I had a registry. Like, a physical notebook that listed all my horses' names, their breed and breeding, their height, their color, their discipline, their temperament...and this was an ongoing thing for years, where the horses got older, and I bred them together, and got new horses that got added to the registry, etc. I still have that book somewhere.

Later, it was figure skating. This was after the 1994 Olympics. I watched it faithfully, learned the names of all the skaters, all the commentators, all the jumps and how to do them (although I can't skate, so I just had to pretend to do them in my living room), kept a spreadsheet keeping track of which skaters were from where and what they'd won, taped and watched every competition for the next two or three years.

On to TV shows, which remain an obsession--to varying degrees depending on the TV show. I can name you pretty much every episode of Buffy right now. Veronica Mars, same thing. I go through phases where all I want to do is watch a specific TV show, whether it be 24 or Lost or Gilmore Girls or Desperate Housewives or whatever. These obsessions tend to be short-lived and don't extend outside of the show itself (i.e., I don't really get a great desire to learn everything about the actors' lives).

Movies are an ongoing one, so I'm not even mentioning it. My love of movies is always bubbling under the surface, but it rarely exhibits itself as an out-and-out obsession.

My current obsession, as you may have guessed based on my last couple of posts, is American Idol, and believe me saying that is incredibly embarrassing. I have spent four years mocking this show specifically and reality TV in general (I still reserve my right to mock other reality shows), and claiming that even this year when I decided to try it out as a concert show, I wouldn't get into the whole competition/voting aspect. Yeah, that lasted all of four or five shows into the competition segment. By that time, I'd caught McPheever and I couldn't turn back.

I spent two or three hours this morning scouring the net for clips of interviews, news of what the Idols are doing next, and trying to talk myself out of wanting to go to the American Idol concert this summer. I dislike the elimination aspect a LOT, and I loved the finale with all the Idols back and performing together and just having fun. Now I really really want to go to the concert. Really really badly. Someone talk me out of this! Or, alternately, agree to go with me.

Yeah, that would work. So how about it? August 13th at Savvis? I'd have to come back from Texas for that, but I'd probably do it. That's how obsession works. Or else September in Austin. For that I'd have to drag my livejournal friend from Houston, though, and a) Houston's a long way from Austin (although she loves Austin and might do it, and b) I'm not sure she'd want to go. But tickets are on sale now, and I'm sure they're going fast, so if I don't decide soon, my decision might get made for me against my will.

In related news, Steven Spielberg wants to meet with Kat! Woohoo! In other, less fun news, her album probably won't be recorded and released for like six months.

Tags:

• american-idol
• television
• obsession

The hell?

What the hell did they have her singing? Taylor's wasn't a much better original song, but Kat's? Kat's was one of the worst pop songs I've ever heard. She did her best with it, but damn. I agree with Randy...she is so much better than that, but that song was crap.

I think I'll rewind and listen to "Over the Rainbow" again.

Tags:

• american-idol
• katharine-mcphee
• television

Red vs Blue

Will American Idol be a Red State vs. Blue State Battle?

Interesting post today on Reality TV Magazine, about how fans are likely split up geographically between Taylor Hicks and Katharine McPhee along the same lines as the 2004 presidential election. I'll leave you to read the post, but basically it boils down to Taylor will get the red states (Southern/Central, conservative, Taylor's home and home to many similar-styled artists) and Katharine will get the blue states (Northeastern/Western, home to the Broadway/Las Vegas-style performers that Katharine resembles). In addition, it points out that their different demeanors are likely to ingratiate them with the same states as their singing styles...Taylor comes across as humble, gentlemanly, polite, and doesn't talk back to the judges when they criticize him (not that they've been doing that a lot lately, even Simon). Katharine, on the other hand, has been attacked by a lot of Elliott, Chris, and Taylor fans for being pushy, over-confident and happy when she gets into the next round (God forbid people be happy for doing well), as well as talking back to the judges, which tends to put off some people, but may in fact help her with the more aggressive Northeastern and Western demographic.

Personally, I'm a red-stater politically, but a blue-stater in this case (dare I say, a blue-stater culturally? In some senses, not all), based on the article's division of red and blue...one of the commenters made a case for Katharine as California Republican and Taylor as working-class Democrat which makes some sense, at least based on a more historical view of the two parties rather than a contemporary one. I love Katharine's bluesy Broadway voice, and while I think Taylor is good, I would never listen to him just for the sake of listening to him. I love the fact that Katharine called the judges on their comments about song choice when she didn't even pick the damn song. I love the fact that she interacts with the judges and with Ryan instead of just standing there and taking whatever they dish out. I love the fact that Simon was forced to apologize to her for his undeserved harshness on her rendition of "I Have Nothing." I love the fact that she can forget lyrics and recover so well. I love the fact that she's bubbly and effervescent and enthusiastic and that her emotions play upon her face constantly.

What do I love about Taylor? Well, I love that he's not afraid of looking like an idiot. I love when he hits his high registers. I love when he does quiet songs like "In the Ghetto". I love when he sneaks a thirty-year-old song into the Billboard Top Ten week. That's about it.

I know there are a bunch of Taylor fans here. Interestingly, I think most of them are from the South. Could be Reality TV Magazine is on to something. Or else they're really bored over there are making up stuff to write. Honestly, I would probably be okay with either of them winning at this point. They're both very talented. But Kat's album is the one I will buy (especially if she does an American Songbook-themed one, or ends up on Broadway and there's an Original Cast Recording--that's where I think she would really shine). So I'll be over here texting my little fingers off for her.

Tags:

• american-idol
• katharine-mcphee
• taylor-hicks
• television

An Ode to the Hi-Pointe

Only not really, because I don't do poetry.

When I went to see Brick last week, I was impressed by the film, but I was equally impressed by the theatre-going experience, a topic that increasingly interests me. I don't go to the Hi-Pointe Theatre very often, but I must make more of an effort. Let's start at the beginning.

I bought my ticket at the outdoor ticket booth, which is situated tetween two sets of double doors. The theatre has been around for decades, and they've kept the classic theatre design. After entering the lobby through the curtained doors, I found myself in front of a single concession stand with all the fixin's. It's rare for me to buy theatre food, both because I find it distracting and because it's overpriced, but last week I had an overwhemling desire to get something. But that was a little later.

First, I needed to use the restroom, so I headed up the narrow stairs along the side wall, pausing to appreciate the half-sheets of Humphrey Bogart and the reproduction lobby cards lining the walls. My second favorite theatre in town, the Tivoli (which used to be my first favorite), has a bunch of collage-type posters around the lobby, each of which is themed--one that has thumbnails of classic action films, one with thumbnails of westerns, one with comedies, etc. These are great, and fun to look at, but they're artificial. They call attention to the fact that they are from a by-gone era; that the theatre is consciously styling itself as a "classic" venue. I know the Hi-Pointe is doing the same thing, to some extent, but it feels more real. It feels as though you're plunged back into that era, rather than into a reproduction of it.

The door to the restroom opens into a little sitting room, from which you move into a bathroom that could be right out of the 1950s. It's clean but not sterile (by sterile, I mean impersonal...I don't mean that the place's healthiness is suspect). I wondered going back down the stairs whether or not the theatre ever had a balcony. It certainly could have, but I neglected to ask anyone to find out. Next time.

More curtained doors to enter the single-screen theatre. I'm always surprised by how large it is. I'm used to multiplexes with stadium seating that hold maybe a hundred people, with something like 20-30 rows. This theatre is three times that long, easily. I would love to see it filled up, but doubt that will ever happen anymore. I sat about halfway back, which was perfect. I will admit that sitting nearer the back lessens the experience, simply because of the distance from the screen. However, even without stadium seating, the seats are well-placed enough in relation to the screen that even had someone been sitting directly in front of me, it wouldn't have been much of an issue.

And the seats! Most of the time my legs get all cramped up in movies, and it's a struggle to stay even approximately comfortable. These are older seats, but they are extremely comfortable. They are individual, not bench seats, so the back cradles your body. Granted, you can't lift up the armrests, so they're not good for cuddling, but that's pretty much a non-issue for me.

I was about twenty minutes early, so I had a bit of waiting time in the theatre. No "pre-show countdown" here. No "movie tunes network." No ads. No dumb trivia. In fact, the curtains were drawn across the screen. I don't know that multiplexes even HAVE curtains anymore. Curtains are pretty. They were playing Henry Mancini music. No DJ in between the songs, telling you where you can get the CD. Just the classic, mellow sound. Add in the fact that these tracks are almost universally from 1950s and 1960s films--Breakfast at Tiffany's, Zefferelli's Romeo and Juliet, etc.--and I was totally in the movie zone. (This was the point when I decided to run back to the concession stand.)

Right on time, the curtains pulled back, and here's the best part: they played the old "A Day at the Movies" short from the 1950s, where the two kids show how to be good theatre patrons. Including throwing away your trash! Seriously, folks, throwing away your trash is NOT difficult. I think a lot of the negativity surrounding theatregoing these days comes down to the theatregoers themselves, and their lack of respect for the other theatregoers, the theatre staff, and the film itself. Anyway. That short never fails to put a smile on my face. (Speaking of shorts, anyone with me on wanting to bring shorts back into theatrical presentations? A cartoon here and there? Some of these shorts that get nominated for Oscars that never get seen outside of film festivals? Come on!)

This audience wasn't large, perhaps thirty people at a 2:00pm showing, in a theatre that probably holds ten times that. But they were quite a good audience. They weren't disruptive, didn't talk--I don't really recall noticing them much at all, once the movie started. Everyone seemed just as into the movie as I was. Most of them stayed through the credits. I didn't notice any abandoned popcorn bags or soda cups. Of course, this probably also says something about art-house audiences vs. multiplex audiences.

I walked out of the theatre with renewed faith in the theatre business. The Hi-Pointe is doing it right. I hope they're able to keep it up. (They're owned by the national Landmark Theatre chain, so it's not like they have to be completely self-reliant, which is probably a good thing.) It's is a far cry from the movie palaces of that era, movie palaces like the Fox Theatre used to be, but it's the closest thing remaining in St. Louis. Hollywood and New York still have theatres like that, in Mann's Chinese and Graumann's Egyptian and the Ziegfeld. Someday I'll add them to my theatre-going experiences. Until then, I'm going to the Hi-Pointe as often as possible.

But perhaps it was only a perfect experience for me--I'm curious if these elements would increase or decrease pleasure for other people, especially those who don't share my obsession for Hollywood's Golden Age. Anyone care to comment?

Tags:

• film
• theatres

CW? It's a done deal.

Veronica Mars renewed for a third season. (The announcement is below the Grey's Anatomy interview.)

WOOOOOOOOOTTTT!!!!!

I was fairly confident it would be, but it's nice to have confirmation. Sorry to any Everwood fans out there...I didn't watch it, but I know a lot of people really loved it. Okay, now back to VM. If I weren't at work, I'd be jumping up and down right now.

So. UPN is rerunning Season 2 over the summer, starting TONIGHT at 9/8 central (my bad, I was reading posts from yesterday and didn't connect the timing). I personally don't like starting shows in the middle, but it can be done, especially if you're not obsessive like me. ;) Go ahead and give it a try tonight, if you want. The S1 DVDs are available, as well, if you'd rather start at the beginning. I hear Target has them on sale for $22.99 (which is about 60% off normal price, and about 40% of amazon.com's current price), but I haven't been able to locate a set yet. I believe the library system has them as well. And if you're in St. Louis, I have a set of DVDs burned off TV that I can lend you (of season 1, not season 2). And S2 comes out on DVD in August, which is still a month or so before S3 will start. So there are options both for obsessives and start-in-the-middlers.

If you choose to watch the S2 reruns over the summer and want to get an overview of S1, my friend Cindy has written up a brief synopsis of the season here. Be aware, she does completely spoil the mystery in S1, but she leaves a lot of spoiler space before she does, in case you decide while reading the synopsis that you really don't want to know. (Of course, if you watch Season 2, you'll find out anyway.)

Note that I was mistaken about the timing of the rerun...it's not tonight (Wednesday), it was last night. So you can start watching next week with episode two, but do note that 2x02 was one of the worst episodes of the entire series, so if you do start with that one, DO NOT JUDGE the show by it! Please! (On the other hand, if you watch it and like it, just think how awesome the rest of the show is!)


Now, if I can just keep Katharine McPhee on American Idol after tonight, this will be a completely and unbeatably great day. Yes indeed.

Tags:

• veronica-mars
• squee

Test Some More

Yet another test.

Tags:

• test
• tags

This is only a test...

Testing tag script. Again.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming. Except that it's 11:50pm, and there's nothing on.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled infomercial.

Tags:

• tags
• test

Is it a full moon?

Okay, today at work I have had:

A late return claim (the check was deposited in AUGUST, and banks only have like 10 days to return something...not NINE MONTHS), which was sent to us the wrong way in the first place, and the person at the other bank has no idea what to do with it...and neither do I, since I haven't done a late return claim for like six months because they're rare and usually the senior clerk does them, but she's on vacation.

A check that was written for $400.00 but encoded as $4000.00, which was more than the customer had in their account, so it hit the "insufficient funds" report, which means Bookkeeping gets it, which means I get to do the adjustment instead of the normal person who handles encoding errors.

A "raw" return item, which is an item that we have to return (because our customer's account is closed in this case, and thus we can't pay the item), but we can't tell which bank deposited the item, so we have to handle it through the Federal Reserve system.

Normally, I might get one of these things a month. If that. I think in the year that I've been doing adustments, I've had three raw items, four encoding errors on return items, and maybe two late return claims. All three in one day? Unprecedented. Not to mention the late return is going to be very ugly, because it was messed up before we even got it. Normally I spend maybe ten-fifteen minutes a day on return adjustments. Return adjustments are twice as confusing as normal ones. Me = not happy camper.

(Only forty minutes and I can leave...only forty minutes and I can leave...and watch American Idol...and House...TV makes everything seem better...)

Tags:

• work

New Layout 2.0

Wow, CSS can do transparency! I never would've guessed. But I thought, I'll google "CSS transparency", and there was the code, just like that. So now the layout at least works in different sized browsers and monitors. Much more elegant solution, code-wise. Now I just need to figure out if there's a way to make the corners of the transparent boxes rounded.

Ah well. A little at a time, a little at a time.

Tags:

• layout

New Layout

I got bored of the old one. So I made a new, Greek-isle themed one. I clearly need to learn CSS a LOT better to really customize layouts, though. I tried for a few hours to figure out how to put a box in the sidebar so that the navigation links would show up against the background. No luck. I finally had to incorporate it into the graphic, which I think is sort of tacky. But Photoshop obeys me a whole lot more than CSS does.

Overall, though, I like being able to edit the entire template the way you can here. If I knew CSS for real, instead of just jacking around with it, I could customize the heck out of this. Livejournal is fully customizable, too, in theory, but its customization controls are intimidating. And I just took a Wordpress blog for a test run, and it has no customization at all; you just have to pick from the predefined templates, which is a total rip.

Now, if I could just have threaded comments like Livejournal, plus customizable templates like Blogger, plus tags/categories like Wordpress (LJ has tags, too, but Wordpress implements them better), I would be a happy blogger. Why Blogger doesn't have tags/categories, at least, I don't understand at all. The threaded comments I can do without, but I NEED TAGS.


edit: And upon pulling up this page on my computer at work, I found out why adding the lighter boxes to the graphic doesn't work...what fits properly on my widescreen monitor does not fit on the standard monitor at work. I know that's an issue whenever I make something on my home computer, and I tried to compensate for it in the layout I chose in the first place. And heaven forbid someone should have their browser set to be non-full-screen, which messes it up even more. (I rarely have my browser full-screen at work.) Grrr. The bottom is even worse. On my home monitor, the words are only about an inch across the graphic at the bottom, not ALL THE WAY ACROSS IT. Back to the drawing board tonight, I guess. *sigh*

Tags:

• layout

Best Show on TV

Okay, people I know in real life need to watch Veronica Mars. Because last night's season finale? Amazing. And I want to talk to people about it so badly it hurts. I mean, I'm talking with online people, which is cool, and I watched it with some online-friends-turned-real-life-friends, but when I get obsessed about stuff, I want to share it with everybody I know, and I know exactly two people at church who watch it.

Mark, did you see it last night?

Anyway. It's the best show currently on TV (yes, better than Lost, better than 24), and the best show ever since Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you know me, you'll know that's saying a lot. It's extremely well-written, has amazing actors, better continuity even that Buffy, it's a great mix of comedy and drama and mystery. It doesn't quite have the depth of Buffy, but then, very few shows do, and at the risk of losing my Buffy fandom cred, I have to say that I think Veronica Mars is more consistently good that Buffy was (except Buffy season 3, perhaps).

The basic season one premise is this: Veronica Mars is a high school junior in Neptune, CA, home of rich and famous movie stars, software magnates, etc. And also people like Veronica, the daughter of the former Sheriff, who is now barely making ends meet as a private detective (Veronica helps him, which is the impetus for a lot of the plots). See, Keith Mars was well-loved and respected as the Sheriff, Veronica hung out with the exclusive '09er crowd (kids from the high-rent 90909 zip code) and dated Duncan Kane, son of software millionaire Jake Kane. Until Veronica's best friend Lilly Kane (Duncan's sister) was murdered, and Keith believed that her father Jake Kane was responsible. When another man confessed to the murder, clearing Jake's name, Keith was run out of office, Duncan broke up with Veronica, Veronica's mom left town, and Veronica pretty much becomes a complete outsider. There's also the little incident where she was roofied at a party and woke up not remembering who raped her. Sure, it's pretty mature stuff for a teenage show...which is why it's not just a teenage show.

The thing that Veronica Mars does better than any show outside of the Buffy/Angel/Firefly-verse is balance individual episode plotlines with the overall season arc, and on into multiple season arcs. 24 does a great job with long arcs, but each individual episode is meaningless without the context of the others. Most crime shows (CSI, NCIS, Numb3rs, Without a Trace), very good individual episode plots, but it's only superficially important to watch them in order...most of them are complete standalone eps, and it takes all of five minutes to figure out the interpersonal relationships necessary to enjoy the episode. Lost does a better job of balancing individual episodes with season and show-long arcs, but even it focuses more on the bigger arcs than the individual episodes. Veronica Mars can make completely self-contained episodes that have a beginning, a middle, an end, and a theme (which usually plays off the clever puns in the episode title). But the theme almost ALWAYS ties in to the season long arc; to Lilly's murder or Veronica's rape in the case of season one. Season two has about twice as many plot threads, but we won't go into them all here. It's a masterpiece of plot development.

And the continuity! Oh, the continuity. And I don't only mean the arcs. I mean little things. Like in 1x11, two girls turn out to be switched at birth. Their families are different socal strata, so they don't interact hardly at all on the show. Then, in 2x20 (a full YEAR later), they share an elevator and have the exact same eye-rolling reactions to their elevator mates. Again. In 1x15, there's a kid who makes a videotape that helps Veronica out on an investigation. We don't see him again until 2x21 (again, some 13 months later), when he turns out to be a pivotal part of the season two mystery because of some other videos he was involved with. Again. In 1x21, there's a plot involving a snobby mean girl who spits in people's drinks. In 2x20, this girl hands a drink to one of Veronica's friends, and Veronica takes it from her saying, "You really don't want to drink that." There are A TON of examples like this. This show knows its audience, and plays up to it. It's freaking awesome.

And the finale yesterday proved that ANY episode can be reopened, ANY mystery we thought was closed can be reopened, ANYTHING can happen, but not because they've just decided to change what happened earlier Alias-style (oh, but she didn't really die; see, we were going to have her just die, but then we decided we wanted her to come back so we wrote this whole elaborate explanation of how she didn't really die); no, this was planned. If you look back at all the episodes up until now, you can tell that the big plot twists in the season two finale were at least allowed for even back in season one. It's incredible.

And I haven't even dicussed the way that actors Kristen Bell and Jason Dohring can make you laugh or cry with the slightest movement of their eyes or lips. The amazing supporting cast that makes you remember and care about even the characters that only appear in a handful of episodes. Season two struggled a little bit with balancing the stories of all the characters, but it redeemed itself by the end. The dialogue, which is the height of cleverness and sometimes audacity. The evershifting relationships...the characters that are so well-developed that you'd know them if they popped up in your coffeeshop...the incredible cinematography, which makes it almost impossible to resist making fanart from the gorgeous shots in every single episode...the integration of film noir stylings with teenage sensibilities. I simply cannot talk about this show enough.

I can't wait to see what they'll do with season three. So when it comes on in September, give it a try. (Notice how I'm saying "when", even though it hasn't technically been renewed yet...it's on UPN right now, and with the upcoming UPN/WB merger into the CW, things are a little up in the air until next week. But I have faith.) And come borrow the S1 DVDs from me over the summer.

Tags:

• veronica-mars
• television

March 2006 Retrospective

I'm a month behind again! Hey, I've been putting more effort into watching and reading than writing. (No, really. I've been busting through my goals pretty well this year. I'm practicing for grad school, when I hear I'll have half as much time to do twice as much work. We'll see.)

Also, some day I'm going to write about something other than movies and books. Really. I promise.

Reactions, not reviews, blah blah blah jaffacakes.

Movies

Millions
When I first started watching this, I was like, "whoa, this is sort of weird." Then I picked up the case and noticed that it was directed by Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Trainspotting), and then the weirdness all made sense. The story is relatively simple: Damian, a young idealistic boy in Manchester, finds a duffel bag with thousands of pound notes in the field behind his family's new house, and thinks it's a gift from God. He shows the money to his brother, who wants to spend it on themselves, but our young idealist (who has visions of saints) wants to give it to the poor. A worthy goal, but as he starts handing wheelbarrowfulls of money out to the neighbors, the charity representative at his school, and even welcomes the creepy guy who shows up at his improvised fort in the field, suspicions rise. Adding to the pressure is the fact that in the story, the UK is about to make the switch from pounds to euros, and the children's millions are soon going to be worthless. Now, this could be a really routine family film, asking what's really important in life, money or family, bringing out all sorts of ethical questions about whether they should keep the money, report it to the police, give it to the poor, etc. But in Danny Boyle's hands it's not routine at all...it's also not really a family film. It's extremely fantastic in presentation, with Damian's visions of saints and flights of fancy. The manner in which he discovers how the money really came to be in the field (the robbery of a train on a nearby track) is more punk-action style than anything else. It's a really hard film to describe, and even now I'm not sure I'd say I thought it was really good. It was certainly not what I expected, and it kept me interested and fascinated all the way through, so I suppose there's that. And there's a joy of watching Alex Etel as Damian...he's really brilliant.
Above Average, extra points for visual originality and child acting

Million Dollar Baby
Two movies in a row with "million" in the title! And two movies in a row I'm sort of ambivalent about! Whee! I loved the first part of this...very classic and old-fashioned. It's easy to see why the Academy liked it enough to award it Best Picture. It has heart, it has spirit, it has a good story, and three highly talented actors. I don't know how I feel about the end, though. I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen it, so I can't say much more. I can't really think of any other way to have ended it that I would've liked better, so I guess I shouldn't complain. Overall, extremely well done, so I'm in the clear to say it's quite a good movie. I'm just not entirely sure I liked it. Except the first part, which I thought was great.
Above Average, extra points for old-fashioned filmmaking, points deducted for unsatisfying ending

Alexander
I should've known I'd find an Oliver Stone movie to be a boring piece of pointlessness. I'm trying to remember when I decided I disliked Oliver Stone, but I can't. Most of his more-revered movies (Platoon, Born on the Fourth of July) I haven't seen yet, so I'll have to look through my lists and see what of his I have seen. Okay, just looked, and it's weird. The only thing I know I've seen is JFK, and I liked that one. No idea where my dislike of Oliver Stone comes from, but it's there. Maybe it was in anticipation of seeing Alexander. Anyway. Alexander just has such an undeserved air of importance and heaviness, much more so than the film can handle. It's overblown, overproduced, miscast, uneven, uninteresting, and just generally not very good. And so freaking gory just for the sake of being gory. Not at all worthwhile.
Well Below Average, points deducted for not even giving me anything to work with in terms of adding or subtracting points

Equilibrium
In an indeterminate future, it has been decided that the reason for all the world's problems with war and violence are caused by the fact that people have emotions...so it is decided to eradicate all emotion, through removing things that elicit emotion--books, music, photographs, heirlooms, families. The main character is an elite policeman, commissioned to enforce the ban on emotion and seek out and destroy members of an underground resistance. One day, however, he neglects to take the mandatory dose of emotion suppressents, and he become susceptible to the very emotion he has sworn to uproot. Soon he is working with the resistance to take down the faceless, all-controlling dictator running the metropolis. Basically, take The Matrix, cross it with Minority Report, and throw in a dash of Metropolis. It's nowhere near the quality of any of these films--the effects are extremely cool, but the invincibleness of the main character gets old after a while. You're never worried whether or not he's going to make it, as you are worried for Neo. There's no tension between whether or not the system has good qualities, as there is with the Pre-Crime system. Still, it's not half-bad, for a couple of hours of viewing pleasure.
Average, extra points for cool sci-fi effects, points deducted for sterility

Primer
Now this one I had to watch twice. Seriously. In between the two viewings, I scoured the internet for information about the film, and one review I read described it just about right: (not direct quote) Most movies about time travel either ignore the science necessary for time travel machines or make up outlandish but lay-person-comprehensible theories explaining how it is possible. In Primer, the science is central, and the science isn't explained. There is no one involved in the time travel experiment who wasn't intimately familiar with the necessary scientific ingredients, so watching the film feels something like being thrust into a conversation between post-doctoral scientists. It's heady stuff, and yet fascinating. One would fear that it would end up sounding like a jargon-filled thesis or something, but it doesn't...it feels real, not forced, as are so many movies and TV shows that have to introduce a novice character to explain everything to so that the audience has someone to identify with as they learn the ropes. Watching Primer is like jumping in to the deep end when you can't swim. The intricacy is astounding, as the plot folds back on itself multiple times, and the narration is given much like the science--as if the audience should already know who is speaking to us and the basics of how the story plays out. It's a movie that refuses to compromise an inch, and assumes its audience is intelligent enough to enjoy the attempt to figure it out. Honestly, it was refreshing in its complexity and its complete lack of condescension. Do I completely understand it even yet? No. But I'd rather be challenged by a movie that assumes I'm smarter than I am than condescended to by a movie that assumes I have the brain of a pea, like most Hollywood offerings do.
Well Above Average, extra points for expecting an intelligent audience

Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Note to Disney, Fox, Dreamworks, and every other studio who attempts to make animated/kids movies (except Pixar, who gets nothing but my undying love): THIS is how you make a family film. You start with a story that doesn't necessarily turn on a life lesson, and can't be summed up by trite little maxims. If you want, you can include some things like this, such as "getting rid of pesky, garden-killing rabbits in a humane way is better than shooting them all," but don't beat it over the head...in fact, you may want to gently lampoon the bleeding-heart animal lovers even while you agree with their position. Basing the story on well-known horror legends is a little risky, but as long as you keep the balance between homage and reworking, you'll be fine. Keeping the emphasis on character is a good idea, too. Humor is a good thing, of course, and if you can manage to make both the kids AND adults laugh, you've got a winner. In fact, this last is possibly the most important thing. It's not horribly difficult to please either kids or adults...pleasing both, while keeping the film agreeable for parents to let their kids watch, is much more difficult. Oh, and this especially directed to the movie-in-joke-laden Madagascar: References to other movies are awesome; I love them. They're my favorite. But subtle is better. Wallace and Gromit smacks in twice the references as you did, and they're beautiful...obvious to film freaks, but they won't be noticable at all to people who don't recognize them, as opposed to your "darn them all to heck!" Planet of the Apes scene recreation. It's one thing if the viewer knows Planet of the Apes, but if not, it doesn't fit and is more of a distraction than anything else. In short, Wallace and Gromit films rule, other kids movies drool!
Superior, extra points for British humour, claymation with more expression than many real-life actors, and tongue-in-cheek subtlety

Paths of Glory
Ahem. I did get one classic in this month. Only one. Pretty pathetic. Still, it's a Kubrick classic! So that makes it count for like, two average classic films, right? Okay, seriously, though. Paths of Glory is early Kubrick...1957, which puts it after The Killing (which is awesome, BTW, I highly recommend it) but before almost any of his other classics. And it's good, as I expected, but it wasn't wow. It's about equal parts war film and courtroom drama, as an upper commander in the French army during WWI orders his unit to make a suicidal dash across no man's land to try to take out a German pillbox. After the attack inevitably fails, the commander finds three soldiers to bring up on charges of cowardice, claiming that they had disobeyed the attack order and retreated, thus undermining the morale of the rest of the unit. The second half deals with the mockery of a trial that follows, as the captain of the unit defends his men against the trumped up charges. It's a good study of WWI and the total disconnect between it and the way wars were fought before WWI (the wars the upper commander was trying to emulate)...the pitched battle with its "glorious" charges just doesn't work in the face of machine guns. And the trial was strikingly similar to the mockeries put on by the Nazis and the Soviets as pretenses to a justice system that they no longer adhere to. Beyond those two points of interest, though, I wasn't as awed as I'd hoped to be.
Above Average, extra points for courtroom outbursts and historical perspectives

Bewitched
The concept was cutesy to start with...Will Ferrell as an actor set to play Darrin in a TV series remake of the classic sitcom "Bewitched," only lo-and-behold, his unknown costar turns out to be perfect for the part because she actually is a witch. But it gets worse. Not only is she a witch, but she has an aunt who bungles her spells. And a too-smooth-for-his-own-good warlock father. And the actress who plays Endora on the new show? Also a witch. And Nicole Kidman plays the whole thing in her breathy-dumb-blonde style. Not her best style, let me tell you. Ultimately, it takes a gimmick with enough substance for about fifteen minutes and stretches it beyond the breaking point. The original show is on DVD now. I recommend you get that instead.
Below Average, points deducted for saccharine poisoning

Walk the Line
I'm not really familiar with Johnny Cash or his music, but with all the accolades this has been getting, I had relatively high expectations. I wasn't disappointed. Both Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon did excellent jobs in their parts--Reese especially surprised me (yes, even after she won the Oscar; you know I don't put much store in those), since I'm used to her in Legally Blonde/Election-type roles. And they can both sing! Even better. It was maybe a tad overlong, but I was enjoying the experience so much that I didn't care.
Well Above Average, extra points for actors who sing

Ice Age 2: The Meltdown
They totally need to give the squirrel his own movie. See, the squirrel bits are classic Looney Tunes-style sight gag humor. Cartoons have done nothing in the last fifty years that tops the pure hilarity of Looney Tunes, and maybe recapturing some of that would be good for modern kids movies. The rest of Ice Age 2 is relatively routine, though the story asks for some pretty outrageous stretches of the imagination (in the first movie, they were at the beginning of the ice age, and now the ice age is ending? But that's millions of years! But they're the same characters! Not to mention, even beyond the whole mammoth-thinking-she's-a-possum thing, possums are not that energetic. Trust me. They should have designated them ferrets or something). Generally, it was more than passable for a family outing. And the squirrel wins at life.
Average, extra points for Looney Tunes imitations

Books

BFI Film Classics: In a Lonely Place by Dana Polen
I read this because I was in the midst of writing an article about In a Lonely Place (you may remember how much I raved about it after I watched it for the first time last month), and the BFI Film Classics books are such excellent resources, I couldn't pass up at least seeing what it had to say. You may consider this a review of the entire BFI series, really...they are written by various well-known film scholars (some better known than others...a few that stand out are Peter Wollen on Singin' in the Rain and Laura Mulvey on Citizen Kane) and sometimes other writers, like Salman Rushdie on The Wizard of Oz. Because of the use of different writers, each book has a different tone, which is refreshing. But they all do a great job of looking at a film from a number of perspectives. Dana Polen, a film professor at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, considers In a Lonely Place as a work by Nicholas Ray (auteurist perspective) and places it within Ray's oevre, introducing a lot of Ray's biographical background as he does so. He also considers In a Lonely Place as a melodrama and as film noir (genre studies perspective), as well as bringing a bit of psychological theory to the film. Not to mention all the anecdotes and insights about the film's stars Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, and their interpersonal relationship with Nicholas Ray. All in all, a very informative and interesting 80-page read. I do recommend the entire series, as well, if you're interested at all in film. BFI now also puts out a "Contemporary Film" series, and a series looking at television shows.
Above Average

The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
Umberto Eco has spoiled me for academically-inclined thrillers. Not that I ever expect anybody else to be as good as Eco anymore, but I always hope anyway. And really, The Historian isn't bad. It's heaps better than the last entry into this field that I attempted, The Rule of Four (which royally sucked). And it's also Kostova's first novel, and you can sort of tell...a good editor would have helped tremendously. She can't decide completely whether she wants to be about the narrator's father's search for Dracula in the 1930s, or about the narrator's own youth, as her father renews his dangerous studies on vampires. So she includes too much of both. She wants the quiet moments while the narrator enjoys a night by the Mediterranean and contemplates the sky and the ocean to be soothing and thought-provoking. They're merely filler. They don't lead us to a greater knowledge of the narrator or of her world. The search for Dracula is better handled, especially when the father (back in the 1930s) is hopping around Iron Curtain-laden Eastern Europe, in danger not only from the vampire and his minions, but also from the Communist government. Overall, the book had a lot of good things in it, but it was top-heavy. Oh, and the climax? Just a tad on the anti-climactic side. Just so you're warned. I also knew quite a lot about Vlad the Impaler before reading this, so I felt like she went into too much explanation about him...but that might not've been the case for the casual reader. (I considered doing a thesis on vampires at one time, so I spent an entire summer one year reading up about them.)
Average, extra points for mysterious books and Eastern Europe, points deducted for unnecessary rambling

The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Not as amazing as Tender is the Night, but still quite good. Really, I think a lot of it is that Dick and Nicole are somehow more relatable than Anthony and Gloria. Dick and Nicole were tortured by their own uncertainties and their mental instabilities...Anthony and Gloria are spoiled children who refuse to accept that their social class is disappearing and that they might have to *gasp* stop partying and work for a change. Don't get me wrong, I definitely understood their resistance to it, but there were so many times I just wanted to smack them and tell them to grow the hell up. It would have been interesting to read it back when it was written...I kept finding my 21st-century perspective skewing my reation to things (which is rare, actually; I'm usually pretty good at putting myself in the appropriate mindset for what I'm reading). I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more if I hadn't kept comparing it to Tender is the Night as well. There were a few passages that were heavenly, and overall I liked it, but if you only ever read one Fitzgerald, make it Tender is the Night. (Not counting Gatsby...you had to read that in high school anyway.)
Above Average, extra points for Gloria's tirade about historic places as tourist traps

Egil's Saga
For some reason I've been hankering to read some Icelandic sagas...it's the budding medievalist in me, as well as wanting to find out more about the influences on Lord of the Rings. I picked Egil's Saga because, well, it was the first one in the massive "Sagas of the Icelanders" anthology. I don't really feel qualified to write about it, though, before I'm exposed to several more of these tales for comparison's sake. Basically, these sagas are the history/legend of the Norse people (mostly Iceland and Norway), set around 900A.D. For some reason I was expecting more mythology, but though the mythology comes into play a teeny bit (mostly in poetry), it's really about the Vikings and their families running around, feuding and raiding. It was very dense, full of people and place names (and all the people had the same name, almost...usually some variant on "Thor"), a very long time-span covering the life of Egil's father and then all of Egil's life, and mostly dealt with a long-standing feud between Egil and King Harald of Norway. It wasn't the easiest thing I've ever read, but it got to be rewarding by the end. Freakin' violent in places, too. Egil was pretty brutal. (Example: "Then Egil...gouged out one of [Amrod, his enemy]'s eyes with his finger, leaving it hanging on his cheek." Eeeeeewwww!!!) Yet he was also a poet...that was the most interesting thing to me, actually. Even the most battle-hardened warriors were expected to be able to produce some verses at every banquet in favor of the king or earl or whoever happened to be being honored. I definitely want to read more Icelandic stuff, but I may take a break first. ;)
Above Average, extra points for a sophistication of storytelling that I wasn't expecting, points deducted for the apparent lack of Icelandic naming creativity, although I suppose I can't blame that on the anonymous author of this tale

A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf can write more evocativally than almost anyone I've ever read. There. Got that out. This is a piece of freakin' criticism, even, and it's beautiful. It's not pedantic, it's not dry, it's not academic, it's not arrogant. And though I'm not what you might call a feminist, this piece of feminine criticism was needed when it was written, and it has a lot of things to say that are very true. To the extent that women should have the same opportunities, the same tools, the same support, and the same freedom as men to express themselves in writing, perhaps I am something a feminist. Anyway. This is a great read, both the theory and the style. There were whole pages I had to write down in my quote book. I *heart* Virginia Woolf.
Well Above Average, extra points for making me fall in love with language all over again

Tags:

• film
• books

ABC Ramps Up Internet TV

Heck, yeah. Finally some TV studios are getting the point.

ABC launches free online streaming TV shows. [via Gizmodo]

Here's ABC's entry page for streaming episodes. Right now they've got Lost, Desperate Housewives, Alias, and Commander in Chief available. I flipped through a little...looks like they've got all the S5 Alias episodes, the last three Desperate Housewives, and just the latest Lost. I wonder if they'll tend to move toward having them all available, or just the latest one? If it were me, my model would be to have the latest episode available for free streaming for a week, and then charge a fee to watch earlier ones...perhaps $0.99 to stream an episode and $1.99 to download it (without commercials of course). That would keep with the current iTunes/GoogleVideo price point, but also have a cheaper option for one-time viewing.

They do have commercials, but they're much shorter...the video loads in sections, and you can seek back and forth within a section as much as you want. To move to the next section, there's a commercial. The episode I watched had a 30-second Ford commercial between the sections. That's it. One commercial. And it was interactive, with a video, or a photo gallery...in other words, a more interesting commercial experience than TV. Once you get through the commercial, you can then seek anywhere in the video up through that point (i.e., the first section AND the second section). You can also pause the video, and choose from two screen sizes, neither of which is complete full-screen, disappointingly, but since my wireless cable connection couldn't handle the larger size smoothly as it was, perhaps that's not all bad--the screen around the video is very dark, so it's not distracting at all to watch.

Three cheers for ABC for moving in the right direction with internet dispersal of TV. This sort of thing is what's going to counter downloading, not GoogleVideo's $1.99 for a one-day stream, or iTunes' $1.99 for video only worth watching on iPods. TV is free on TV, it should be free on the internet. And honestly, the commercials they have here are appropriate (assuming they're all like the one I saw). They're short, they're interactive, they have a timer so you know how long they last. I have no problem with this.

Currently, it's only available in the U.S. That's gonna be the next hurdle the studios have to figure out. The internet doesn't have geopolitical borders, and content providers have to start recognizing that and modifying how they distibute things accordingly. But yeah. Good on ABC for pushing the envelope further than it's yet been pushed. Who'll be next?

Tags:

• television
• tv2.0