the cutting room floor of memory

June Reading/Watching Recap

2006-07-26T20:33:00.000-07:00

Please update your links to my new blog at www.the-frame.com/blog. You'll like it there. It's got a music player, and photos, and, uh, stuff I write. Yeah.

This month, reactions to Thumbsucker, Elizabethtown, Winchester '73, Junebug, A History of Violence, Smiles of a Summer Night, Reading Lolita in Tehran, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and more!

Read more over at my new blog

TV vs Film

2006-07-10T21:08:00.000-07:00

Please update your links to my new blog at www.the-frame.com/blog.

Mark posted briefly a few days ago about finding TV more compelling than movies lately. I don't know whether I agree or not, but it something I've thought about (especially as a film buff who only a few years overcame a prejudiced and condescending view of television), and his post made the wheels of my mind start turning on the subject again.

I tried to come up with a cohesive essay-type thing with a thesis and everything, but it didn't work...it's too large a topic with too many variables and exceptions to deal with so quickly and with so little thought. So here's just some observations. Make of them what you will.

read the rest of the post here

Power hungry

2006-07-09T20:27:00.000-07:00

Please update your links to my new blog at www.theframe.com/blog.

I never think about how dependent I am on electricity until I’m without it. Should’ve known when the traffic lights on Carmen Rd were out that my electricity would be as well. So that eliminated my plan to knock another movie off my 2006 goal list. Also my plan to work on a couple of posts I’ve been writing on and off for the last few days. And my plan to fix some formatting on the Wordpress blog. On the plus side, my computer still had an hour so left of battery power in it, so even though I wasn’t able to get to the internet (because the modem and router both need power), I was able to try out the Microsoft ebook reader software I downloaded a couple of days ago and practice making annotations and stuff.

So then I got hungry. Except I have nothing in my apartment to eat that doesn’t need to be cooked (and by “cooked” I mean “put in the oven e.g. frozen pizza” because I don’t cook), microwaved, toasted, or boiled–all of which require electricity. No, I don’t have bread or cereal or chips, even. I finally found some year-old Girl Scout cookies.

Granted, I could’ve gone out somewhere and found light and food, and I very nearly did, but then I couldn’t be complaining, now could I? Also, I think Barnes & Noble closes early on Sundays, and I’m trying to wean myself off of fast food, and I wanted to get in bed relatively early, which is the one thing that power outages are good for. But eight o’clock was just a little earlier than I was hoping.

Let’s also mention the part where I don’t have a working flashlight. I do have some candles, which I save for occasions such as this. But let me tell you, candles aren’t really all they’re cracked up to be. Sure, they’re fine for the ambient light that gets you to the bathroom when the lights are out. But I don’t know how people didn’t go blind by the age of twenty back before they invented light bulbs. I suppose they didn’t stay up all night and planned their day more by the sun, but still. I wrote this out by candlelight in my notebook, but my notebook has unusually white pages (Moleskines are the best ever), and writing doesn’t require as much visual accuity as reading. As evidenced by the notes I took during Pirates of the Caribbean yesterday. Of course, those aren’t readable. But whatever. I tried to read, and made it through a sentence before I gave up.

Good thing my cellphone was mostly charged up and has an alarm. I need to be up earlier than usual tomorrow, and my clock? Electric and digital, no batteries. But the cellphone alarm has no snooze button. ;)

But on the really good side? The power came back on at 10pm sharp. Almost makes me wonder if they did it on purpose. And of course I was halfway asleep by then. And of course in the process of testing the lights, I’d left the one in the bedroom in the “on” position. So, yeah, wide awake now, so I decided to go ahead and post this, in the fear that my candle-lit handwriting wouldn’t be readable once I was a good night’s sleep away from remembering what I wrote.

Pictures!

2006-07-05T07:51:00.000-07:00

Please update links for my new blog at www.the-frame.com/blog. I'll try to remember to cross post for a while, but I can't guarantee it. Not to mention, you'll want to check out the cool music player I just embedded in the sidebar over there.

We're back from Florida! Here's some photos from our trip (click the picture to go to the appropriate flickr photoset). First a bunch of pictures of the beach, including some showing the restoration efforts still going on since Hurricane Ivan flattened the place.

And then a bunch more of my adorable cousins (well, technically, their dad is my cousin...I forget how the relationship details go). My cousin and his wife are from Pensacola, but they moved to Georgia a couple of years ago, so their girls aren't acclimated to the beach and we had to drag them into the water. In this picture, the one on the left is Michaela, the oldest at four and a half. The two on the right, Ema and Ana, are three-year-old twins. And if you click through, you can see a few shots of baby brother Micah and mommy Beth. My hat's off to her for doing an amazing job raising four kids under five. And they're all incredible hams. Just sayin'.

In which I PWN MySQL and php

2006-06-24T06:40:00.000-07:00

Okay, not so much pwn as finally got to do what I wanted. After my rant a few days ago about not being able to find a blogging platform I really liked and/or get Wordpress to install on my own webspace so I could use it, I calmed down and started working through the tutorials and searching help forums, and lo and behold if I didn't get it to work. So now I have a blog hosted on my own site, powered by Wordpress (which I like better than Blogger, so far), so I'm moving over there.

New blog is at http://www.the-frame.com/blog. (The Frame is my film website...let's just hope the blog gets updated more frequently than the rest of it...)

If you use an rss reader, the feed is here.

I was able to port all my posts and comments from here over to there, but I haven't completely gotten everything looking the way I want it. Please let me know if anything looks broken in your browsers.

However, I am writing this from a hotel on the way to Florida, and while most every hotel has wireless internet now, I'm not sure if the condo we're renting will have any sort of internet, so I may not be around for the next week at all. We'll see.

The Aesthetic of the Moment

2006-06-21T13:57:00.000-07:00

To ponder: The majority of independent film as an aesthetic of the "moment." A series of memorable moments more than a cohesive whole. Opposed to mainstream film, in which every moment must serve the main point of the movie, whether it be plot, humor, or action. Generalizations, of course. Needs more thought. (This has been brought to you by Things I Think About While Driving Into Work.)

May Reading/Watching Recap

2006-06-16T19:55:00.000-07:00

Movies

Rize
This is the non-school-sponsored, street-born, hip-hop-inspired, LA-based version of Mad Hot Ballroom. Instead of middle-school mostly underprivileged kids learning ballroom dancing at their schools and going to city-wide championships, these are teenaged underprivileged kids freestyle dancing in an effort to control something in their lives and let out their frustration and aggression in a way not related to gangs and drugs. Rize documents these real kids and their community mentors, mostly Tommy the Clown, who is credited with starting the whole movement with his "clown-dancing"--basically he's a children's entertainer who incorporates hip-hop rhythms and dancing into his entertainment routines. He's gathered a whole group of younger kids around him, helping him entertain and more importantly perhaps, keeping them off the streets. Later, the documentary moves onto the "krump," a style that evolved from clown-dancing, but is more visceral and more aggressive. It's an interesting subject, and one that I didn't know anything about, and it's great to see some grass-roots community movements that are keeping kids out of the ubiquitous gangs, but overall there's not enough material here for a feature-length film.
Above Average, extra points for interesting subject, points deducted for repetitiousness
buy at amazon | imdb

The Greatest Game Ever Played
This would have been the boys' choice when my cousin, his wife, and their friend and I had a movie night while they were visiting. It's sort of a compromise between their sports fanaticism and mine and Beth's, uh, lack of sports fanaticism. It was actually on my "see sometime when I run out of other stuff to see" list, because I do tend to like underdog stories, especially ones with historical background. Of course, once I saw it was directed by Bill Paxton, I was all set for the mocking. :) Overall, it wasn't bad...the class distinction between those who can play golf and those who can only carry golf clubs was interesting, and one that I hadn't really though much about. I mean, even know, golf is sort of a rich-person's game, just because golf clubs are expensive, and membership to country clubs is expensive, etc., but the idea that a poor kid couldn't play the game was...yeah. And the British vs. American sentiments were interesting, too. Paxton totally got overexcited about directing, though. The thing where he followed the golf ball with the camera as it's hurtling through the air was cool the first time, but by the seventh or eighth time it got really old.
Average, extra points for underdog story, because I'm a total sucker for them, points deducted for directorial indulgence
buy at amazon | imdb

Brick
There are many reasons I loved this film. One of them is the theatre-going experience I had going to see it. But the film itself was also very, very good. The main character is a high school student who is something of an outsider (though it's unclear why at the beginning...synopses of the film say it's because he's too smart for everyone else, but while he is smart, I don't know that the film credits his outsider status to his intelligence). When his ex-girlfriend calls him with a strange message about a "brick" and a "pin", and then disappears, he is drawn into the underbelly of the para-school drug ring. While it may not look like traditional noir, or even neo-noir, it definitely has the same sort of feel. It's gritty, it's harsh, it's complex, it's seedy, it's got it's own language style, it's got corruption, it's even got a femme fatale. It was a little difficult to follow, especially because the dialogue goes so quickly and is often muttered, but the attention it demands is well worthwhile.
Superior, extra points for evoking noir sensibilities without being annoyingly overt
preorder at amazon |imdb

Salaam Namaste
Omigosh, they kissed! In a Bollywood film! No, you don't understand, this doesn't happen. There's no kissing in Bollywood films. Wow. I'm not sure what I think about that. I always, like, want them to kiss (because people who love each other collapsing into a hug instead of a kiss seems odd to my westernized sensibilities), but when they actually did, it was sort of weird. Anyway. Other than that, this was a pretty routine Indian film...the two main characters start off hating each other after he doesn't show up to an interview on her radio show, and she thinks he's a careless jerk and he thinks she's an uptight prig. Of course, all that soon changes when they decide they might love each other and move in together (in separate rooms) to see if they can stand being around each other all the time. Then the kissing starts. Overall, it's a less manic than a lot of Bollywood (thinking especially of the Shah Rukh Kahn oevre), which is refreshing. The hospital scene at the end is ludicrously out of place with its slapstick sillyness which gets old about two minutes into the fifteen minute segment. Other than that, it's quite enjoyable, but nothing super-special.
Average
buy at amazon |imdb

Capote
I'm of mixed feelings. Part of me knows that I should've liked this a lot better than I did. Part of me thinks I need to rewatch and pay better attention. Part of me doesn't care. Part of me wants to read In Cold Blood and then rewatch. My only exposure to Capote prior to this has been the film of Breakfast at Tiffany's. I do think that Philip Seymour Hoffman did an incredible job, but then he always does, in whatever part he's in, so that wasn't really that revelatory for me. I also found the juxtoposition between the jail cell interviews and Capote's society parties interesting, but I would need a rewatch to make that interestingness mean something more. It was a well-acted, well-made film, but I just didn't care about it that much. It did make me want to read In Cold Blood a lot more, though, so there's that.
Above Average, extra points for Philip Seymour Hoffman's extraordinary performance
buy at amazon |imdb

Downfall
Watching this in such close proximity to Sophie Scholl was great, and invited comparisons, even though the films really aren't very much alike, apart from setting. Downfall chronicles the last few weeks in Hitler's Berlin bunker before the Allied forces swept into the city in 1945, largely told through the eyes of Hitler's youthful private secretary, Traudl (interviews with her from the late '90s frame the film). It's pretty bleak stuff, unbelievable and heartbreaking to watch. It's difficult to comprehend the amount of control Hitler had over his staff, even when he was clearly insane and delusional about his ability to win the war with undersupplied and often almost nonexistent armies. And when Goebbels brought his whole family (including children from ages 2-12) into the bunker, prefering them all to be killed rather than surrender or fall into enemy hands...it's just beyond my ability to form words. It's not a fun movie to watch, but it's really really powerful. And having just seen Sophie Scholl, the comment from Traudl in an interview at the end really brought it home--she escaped from the bunker and from Berlin, and later rationalized her work for the Third Reich by pointing to her youth and ignorance about the concentration camps and the Nazi atrocities--yet, she realized that she should have known when she found out about Sophie Scholl's story. Traudl was the exact same age as Sophie. In 1943, when Traudlt was recruited as Hitler's secretary, Sophie was executed for speaking out against Hitler and his regime. Watch both these films together. It won't be a light-hearted evening of film, but it will be a very memorable one.
Superior, extra points for being a damn good film in every area of production
buy at amazon |imdb

November
Note to self: When watching time-shifting, complex, psychological, illusory films, PAY ATTENTION. It'll save time rewatching. Although, I'm glad I did need to rewatch this one, because even had I been paying attention the first time, I doubt I would've caught everything that I did the second time (when I had at least a vague idea of what was happening). I probably still haven't caught everything there is to catch. At first it appears to be a simple crime drama: On November 7, a woman, Sophie, waits in her car while her boyfriend Hugh enters a convenience store to pick up some snacks; when the store is robbed, he is killed, and she must deal with her grief. But the style is odd and disjointed. The opening credits are intercut with out-of-focus, high-contrast flashes of shots. Sophie is a photographer, and also teaches photography at a local school. When a photograph of the convenience store exterior, taken the night of the robbery, shows up in one of her students’ slideshows (though they all deny any knowledge of it), she takes it to the police, hoping that they’ll be able to discover the identity of the robber/shooter, who fled the scene and was never caught. Shockingly, it turns out that Sophie herself took the photo. The first part of the story begins to fall apart at the seams, and soon it breaks completely, dissolving into a series of abstract colors and lights and finally darkness. Then we start back over again on November 7th. The story repeats, but with differences. This will happen one more time, as section titles tell us that Sophie is moving from “denial” though “despair” and into “acceptance.” The parallels and repeated elements between the three sections are many, and clever. Sophie's classes seem to be filler, but there's one key scene where she is discussing "negative space" with her class, and how what's really important is what's left out of the shot, not what's in it. And that's really the point here--the key to figuring out what's going on in November is figuring out what we're not seeing. And I'll leave you with that. :) (And a warning that it is very experimental in style, and is perhaps a case of style over substance, so if you're not a fan of ambiguity, you might want to skip this one. But I enjoyed it quite a lot once I kept my mind on it.)
Above Average, extra points for stylistic skill and the post-modern narrative
buy at amazon |imdb

Brokeback Mountain
I didn't really care for it that much. And no, it wasn't because the material was distasteful to me. I have seen movies and tv shows that focus on gay/lesbian relationships that I liked very much, but this wasn't one of them. It just felt so self-important, like it was trying so hard to portray something completely new, the Great Tragic Love Story That Couldn't Be Told Until Now. I'm sorry, but this story isn't new. The story of two people who love each other but are kept apart by society's mores is as old as society and stories themselves...the fact that it happened to be two men in this case didn't make it any more evocative or innovative for me, and the characterization wasn't strong enough to elevate Jack and Ennis to Tragic Couple, even had they been Jack and Elizabeth instead. (I've seen people raving about the characters and actors, and I wonder if I saw a different movie, because I didn't feel like the relationship was built in a believable way at all.)Perhaps I just wasn't in the right mood to see it, but none of it rang true to me. Then again, if the film were really as well-done as I had been led to expect, it would've drawn me into the right mood. It was pretty, sure, but pretty only goes so far. Especially when I was getting really close to tearing my hair out if the same four bars of music played one more time. (Seriously, those four bars were lovely, but over and over and over and over and over...) Brokeback goes in the "overrated" category.
Average
buy at amazon |imdb

Open City
This is the film that really kicked off the Italian Neo-Realism movement in the 1940s, so of course, I have to give it props for that automatically, because I love Italian Neo-Realism. (I have heard that Luchino Visconti's Ossessione, made two years earlier but not released in the US until later, may be a candidate for proto-Neo-Realism as well...that one's on my watch-this-year list as well, so we'll we.) Historically, the film is quite interesting...it was filmed on whatever scraps of film that director Roberto Rossellini (later to be notorious as the man who came between Ingrid Bergman and Hollywood, and the father of Isabella Rossellini) was able to scrounge up in war-torn Italy as the fascist regime was breaking down. The main characters are underground freedom fighters, hiding for their lives from the German police. As far as the film itself goes, it has aged somewhat...the acting doesn't seem natural, and it's a bit stagey. Still, there are scenes of absolute brilliance that will tear into your heart. I feel like a traitor to film buff-dom saying this, but if you're not already an afficionado of Italian Neo-Realism, see La Strada or Nights of Cabiria or The Bicycle Thief before you see Open City. This is a great film, but it's going to seem antiquated to a lot of modern eyes.
Above Average
buy at amazon |imdb

Red Eye
Yo, expectations are important, y'all. I wasn't expecting much out of this, just figured what the heck, I'll give it a try. And it's not really that great, but I was sort of expecting it to suck, or if not suck, I was at least expecting it to be more horror-y than it was, which would lead me to not like it. It ended up being pretty entertaining, though. Cillian Murphy is creepy, muchly so, but the movie is much more a routine suspense thriller than anything horror-related (Wes Craven's involvement threw me off). And it's refreshingly unpretentious...it knows it's not the best movie ever, and it's content to be mildly enjoyable while it's on the screen, and forgettable once the credits have rolled. Compare to Flightplan, which could've been quite a good movie, but tried too hard to be a good movie. Red Eye ain't no classic, and you'll find yourself anticipating things, especially near the end, but if you've got a couple of hours to waste, it's not a bad option.
Average
buy at amazon |imdb

Fever Pitch
When my cousin Kevin and his wife Beth were here in April, Beth told me I had to see Fever Pitch, which is her current favorite movie, because it reminds her of Kevin. Kevin is a die-hard Cardinals fan, and we always go see a game when he's in town. He's not quite the fanatic that Jimmy Fallon is in Fever Pitch, but the resemblence is there. As a film, it's a cute romantic comedy, nothing that special, but not bad either. Drew Barrymore and I have a love-hate relationship, in which she often annoys me, but I tend to like her movies anyway. And Jimmy Fallon amuses me greatly, so that didn't hurt. It was definitely a good Sunday-afternoon film...nice and laid-back, enjoyable but not demanding.
Average
buy at amazon |imdb

Way Down East
Note to self²: Do not attempt to watch silent films while also doing other things. You will miss stuff and have to watch bits over. You'd think I would know this by now, but no. I continue to try to multitask at inopportune times. First thing to notice: D.W. Griffith is the original message-picture director. His innovations in narrative and editing technique will forever make him the father of American narrative cinema, but subtle he ain't. The point of Way Down East is that there should be one man for one woman, which I agree with, but title card after title card about it gets old, even when you're forgetting to read them half the time. Second thing to notice: Editing for time was not apparently that important a concept, and the film is VERY LONG. The upshot is that Anna, a country girl, goes to visit wealthy city-dwelling relatives to try to get money to support herself and her mother. While there, she is seduced by a Bad Man, who pretends to marry her, only to leave her flat and pregnant a few months later. Back then, that was very NOT COOL, and basically, Anna's continued existence depends on no one finding out about her indiscretion. The near-final scene, in which a bereft Anna staggers her way onto the increasingly unstable ice on a melting river, is justly famous as one of Griffith's most developed "last-minute rescue" sequences. It's scenes like this that remind one of why Griffith is so well-respected. And Lillian Gish as Anna shows why she is still considered one of the finest actresses of early cinema. Sure, a lot of silent movie acting is over the top, and Gish is as well in many scenes, but there are moments here where she can put an incredible amount of pathos into a scene without "acting" at all. She's a legend for good reason. Overall, good film to show off Griffith's style and Gish's acting, routine story, and not terribly accessible for those not used to silent film. (I count myself among them, incidentally...I can appreciate the innovations going on, and I love Keaton and Chaplin, but I have to work to enjoy most silent film.)
Average in pure filmic terms, Above Average in terms of film history
buy at amazon |imdb

Books

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Three editions later, and I've finally gotten to the point where I can say I've read The Canterbury Tales. The first edition I had was neat in that it had both the Middle English and a translation, so I could work on learning to read the original. But the translation wasn't in verse, which annoyed me. And it was only a selection of the tales, and I wanted to read them ALL. So at first I thought I'll just read the excluded tales on bibliomania.com or something, but the language turned out to be more of a barrier than I'd anticipated without having a translation in easy reach. So I bought a verse translation, which turned out to be very good. But, true confession time, it was still missing two of the tales. But the translator included fairly detailed descriptions of what happened in the tales, so I feel justified in saying I have, at this point, digested The Canterbury Tales as fully as I'm going to until I read it in Middle English eventually. Uh. I don't really know what to say about them, really. I guess the thing that surprised me the most is how bawdy some of them are...I knew that by reputation, but I was still a little shocked. And also, it was interesting seeing Chaucer critique a lot of the same ecclesiastical abuses that Martin Luther would later point out during the Reformation.
(Also, how do I rate something that's such an unabashed classic? I mean, it's impossible to separate it from its historical significance, its literary impact, etc.)
Well Above Average, extra points for still having the capacity to surprise despite being 600 years old
buy at amazon

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Well, I was totally right to switch to this from Ulysses. That would've just been Too.Much.Joyce for me right now, I think. I'm more ambivalent than I expected to be...I really liked the way he showed Stephen's growing maturity through the writing style, from the nearly-infant "moocows" of the first chapter to the highflown rhetoric of the end. Usually I have no trouble with stream of conciousness, but for some reason I struggled to keep up once I got to about the halfway point. I think it was because I'm used to first-person stream of conciousness, and the third-person narration kept throwing me off. It was also hard to concentrate on it...it's not like he was using hard words or anything, but it just felt really dense (took me much longer to read a page than normal). Anyway. I now understand why English majors have a love-hate relationship with Joyce. And I have yet to tackle his really difficult stuff! Well, I have a class next fall in 20th Century British Lit, so I'll probably get to read more then.
Above Average, extra points for verbal virtuosity, points deducted for, uh, lack of engagement (which may be my own inadequacy)
buy at amazon

Tags:

film
books

48 Hour Film Festival, cont.

2006-06-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

That was another great theatre-going experience to mark down in my book. The Tivoli was PACKED OUT. I got there just before seven (when the show was supposed to start, but it didn't get started until 7:15), and there were people lined up outside, not able to get in because it was sold out. Wow. All to watch a bunch of ten-to-fifteen-minute-long shorts that amateur filmmakers wrote, shot, and edited in one weekend. Of course, given that they were all made here, each filmmaker probably only had to get twenty or so of his friends to show up to fill up the place. Still. It was great to see that kind of support for the filmmaking community. In total, 48 teams set out on the project, and 40 of them completed their films on time (the rest are shown, but not in competition). Those films were split up between four, I think, different screenings. Each audience member got a ballot to vote for their three favorite films in the grouping, and the votes will be counted and a "best of" will screen next Thursday. I sort of want to go, but I probably won't. Especially since I didn't get a ticket while I was there tonight, and it's probably sold out already.

The films were of varying quality, of course. Each one was a different genre--drawn by the team out of a hat at the beginning of the project. Each team had to include a specific character (a bank manager), a specific prop (a shopping bag), and a specific line of dialogue ("Is that all I am to you?") in their film. Some of them came up with really interesting twists on that...like the team whose bank manager worked at a sperm bank. Most of the films had interesting storylines. The downfall of the less impressive films, I think, was sound. Sound is hard, yo. Which is why I always hated working with sound, and why I chose to emulate silent film in my biggest film project in school. ;)

What was really great, though, was how much the audience was into it. Again, partly because they were watching their films, or their friends' films, on a big screen in a big theatre, with a big audience, which is cool in and of itself. But everyone pretty much enjoyed all the films. There was more laughter and applause and hoots and hollers than I've ever heard at a theatre. That made it even more enjoyable. I just looked at the website for the project (www.48hourfilm.com), hoping to find a list of film titles to jog my memory, but they don't have them listed yet. They do have last year's listed, so hopefully after the screenings and competition are complete, they will.

Overall, great experience. Thanks, MK, for letting me know about it. (She doesn't even read this, but what the hey.) I will definitely be looking out for this sort of thing in the future. Actually, I imagine they have more stuff like this in Austin than they do here. Will have to check that out.

Tags:

film

McPheever Rises

2006-06-15T20:03:00.000-07:00

You can hear Katharine McPhee's first single and B-side here. It's not really released for another couple of weeks, but I guess Kiss radio is special. Anyway, I point it out because the recording is actually so much better than I was expecting it to be. "Over the Rainbow" has replaced "My Destiny" as the main single, which is a great change, with "My Destiny" now the B-side instead of "Think," which is already available on the AI S5 Encores CD. I didn't think she could top her "Over the Rainbow" performances on the show, especially after hearing her sing the song many times on various radio and TV shows since, but it's amazingly good on the recording. It was obviously recorded before she started losing her voice towards the end of the show (her first couple of post-show performances on the radio and TV sounded painful, almost, but she seemed to be recovering by her appearance on The Early Show last week). She's been singing it too fast on her media appearances, I suppose due to time constraints, but she lets it linger on the recording, and it's delicious.

And, get this. Even "My Destiny" sounds a lot better. Sure, it's still got insipid lyrics, and it's still overly bubble-gummy, but compared to what we heard on the show, this is way better. As in, actually listenable. In an interview Kat mentioned that they'd had to drop the key a half-step to accomodate the fact that she was losing her voice and running on cortisone and adrenaline the night of the finale, and that it sounded better on the recording. She wasn't just making that up...her voice is in better shape here, and the key really does make a difference in the tone of the song. But I hope she gets better-written songs from here on out.

Incidentally, Taylor is People Magazine's Most Eligible Bachelor as of tomorrow's issue. In case you're interested.

Tags:

Commerical Fun

2006-06-14T16:36:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I love commercials. This one had me falling off the couch.

The best part is when the voice over guy comes on and lists "crime deterrent" among the phone's features with a totally straight expression.

And this one's not funny, but it's one of my favorite recent commercials. Okay, it's mostly because I like that I've seen almost all of the films Kate Winslet is describing. And I like her accent. I=shallow.

If companies would make good, entertaining commercials all the time--commercials that people want to upload to YouTube and add to their favorites list and rewatch multiple times--they wouldn't have so much of a problem with people fast-forwarding through the commercials on their DVRs. Advertisers, RIAA and MPAA: Quit putting so much effort into stopping people from using your content illegally (or not at all, in the case of ads) and redirect some of your efforts into making quality content.

Tags:

video
funny

48 Hour Film Project

2006-06-14T16:09:00.000-07:00

I know some of y'all are into independent film. If you're free tomorrow night, the 48 Hour Film Project is showing a festival of the films submitted last year. Basically, the project gives aspiring filmmakers 48 hours to write, cast, shoot and edit a film, which is then shown as part of the traveling festival, and I think there's also a competition for the best film submitted.

The Shields' and Keane's cousin Mike submitted a film to it, and it's showing at 7pm tomorrow night at the Tivoli Theatre in University City. I know a few people who are going, so if you wanna support the independent film scene, come join us.

Tags:

film
stlouis

Rant

2006-06-13T20:28:00.000-07:00

Why is there never ONE application that does everything I want it to do? I've been trying out different blogging platforms, just to see what's out there. And now I'm satisfied with none of them.

Blogger - I love the ability to easily customize the template. I struggle with the CSS a little, but I understand generally how it works and I can play around with it enough to finally get stuff to do what I want it to. BUT, no tags/categories. How Google hasn't introduced them yet, I can't imagine...even if they insist on calling them "labels" ala gmail and GoogleReader, that's fine. (Note: I've got tags right now because someone came up with a workaround that uses del.icio.us, which works in a way, but is certainly not ideal.) Also, I'm not crazy about way comments are done (e-mailing me when I post a comment on my own post is not really helpful...however, e-mailing me when someone responds to a comment I made on someone else's post would be...this is partially a problem of me being used to the Livejournal threaded comments world).

Livejournal - As indicated above, I like the way LJ does comments. It's easy to carry on full conversations, and multiple ones off each post, because they're threaded. Also, comments in response to either my posts or comments are e-mailed to me, and I can even respond to comments from the e-mail notification without needed to go to the site. BUT, LJ is community-oriented, which is good sometimes, but not always. The "friends" concept is good, if people are really your friends, but because of the atmosphere of friendship, it makes it odd to read people's journals if you don't know them, or for people you don't know to be reading yours. Also, the atmosphere is very casual and, well, a journal is different from a blog. It just is.

Wordpress - I REALLY like a lot about Wordpress. I like the interface, I like the categories, I like the widgets. In fact, I would totally go with Wordpress, BUT you can't customize the layout AT ALL. Unless you download the open source php documents and install them on your own server and run it like that. Which I was like, okay, I'll try that. Because I need customization. Except I don't know php. (I've got a tutorial book which I am about ten pages in on, and doing okay aside from the fact that the MySQL database I set up won't connect. Or something. I don't even know, because I don't know databases.) So I thought, well, there's documentation on how to install it, that'll walk me through how to get it up and running. Right? Wrong. Because, well, it's written for people who already know how to get it up and running, apparently. *whoosh* over my head. ("open up the config file and plug in your database connection details"--first I need a tutorial on how to set up a database! I started one, on my host dreamhost.com, but it's blank and I don't know how to do anything else to it, and when I tried to upload the php files to it, it said they were all written wrong or something. Dreamhost also assumes that if I'm setting up a database I must know how to handcode in SQL.)

So here's the deal. There is no single consumer product that does everything I want to do. (This is not just true for blogging platforms, incidentally, but also for film sites, book sites, mapping sites, etc.) It seems they are either aimed at complete non-geeks who don't even realize that the sites could have more functionality, or at total geeks who can handcode their own mashups without a hitch. Being a half-geek is a total drag. All I want from a blogging platform: templates to start from, but which are fully customizable without knowing how to handcode php; tags/categories; better comment management; and one I forgot to deal with earlier, a way to lock content down from unauthorized viewers (lj does this quite well, and I think Wordpress also has a password function, but Blogger, I think, does not).

I know I keep saying I'm going to learn php and SQL and all this stuff, but I'm not sure book-learning is going to cut it here, and I'm not really in a place where I can take off work to take classes in it or anything like that. Someday, though, in the indeterminate future, I will know how to do this stuff, and I will mashup my own web applications that will do exactly what I want to do, because I already know what I want them to do, I just can't make it happen. Until then, I'll just sit over here and whine. And be glad that my coworkers all think I have mad computer skillz because I can set up their printer drivers and make their Excel spreadsheets look pretty.

(Dislaimer - I have not tried Typepad because it isn't free, and I'm not sure I'm committed enough yet to pay for blogging...I do pay for my lj account, but that's more for community-based features and perks than the platform itself. It's the user icons, man. They're addicting. Anyway. If anyone has used Typepad, I'd be interested to know if it's worthwhile...I may try their free trial sometime when I have a bunch of time to play with it.)

Tags:

technology

More Katharine McPhee...

2006-05-29T15:42:00.000-07:00

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:

April Reading/Watching Recap

2006-05-28T15:44:00.000-07:00

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
buy at amazon

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
buy at amazon

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

2006-05-27T11:48:00.000-07:00

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:

The hell?

2006-05-23T18:23:00.000-07:00

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:

Red vs Blue

2006-05-23T15:42:00.000-07:00

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:

An Ode to the Hi-Pointe

2006-05-19T21:18:00.000-07:00

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:

CW? It's a done deal.

2006-05-17T06:37:00.000-07:00

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:

Test Some More

2006-05-17T05:36:00.000-07:00

Yet another test.

Tags:

test
tags

This is only a test...

2006-05-16T21:48:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-05-16T13:53:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-15T18:37:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-14T20:52:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-10T07:18:00.000-07:00

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:

March 2006 Retrospective

2006-05-06T21:00:00.000-07:00

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

2006-05-01T17:01:00.000-07:00

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:

Stop the World...I Want to Get Off

2006-04-28T12:15:00.000-07:00

I'm resenting work so much right now. Not so much my actual work, but just the fact of work. There's always a low level of job-related discontent bubbling within me, but knowing that I'm going back to school this fall is making it exponentially worse. Especially now that I've got my class schedule set and a lease signed for my apartment. I've mentally quit my current job and having to physically come in and work is annoying the crap out of me.

Part of it is that the job isn't challenging me, it isn't in an area that interests me greatly, and overall, it simply isn't the right job for me longterm. (I do love the people I work with, though, which goes a long way toward keeping me content.) But a lot it is just that I am a very selfish person and I resent that fact that I have to give eight hours of my day (more like 9.5 by the time you include drive time) to this company, instead of spending them doing things I want to do for myself. And that they're the best, most alert, most mentally acute hours of the day...I think of more things that I want to write about, that I want to research, that I want to learn to do, between 9am and noon than any other time of the day. By the time I get through the afternoon at work, fight the traffic to get home, and fix myself something to eat, I'm too tired to do any of the things that I was so excited about in the morning, but couldn't do because I was at work.

Working a second-shift job wouldn't help, though, I don't think...I don't want to give up my evenings, either. Evenings are when TV shows are on, they're when my online friends get online, they're when my RL friends are free to go to movies or hang out and play Xbox.

I know, I know. Welcome to The Real World, to Adulthood, to Having Responsibilities. You know what? You can have it. I like my fake world in which I have the freedom to work when I want to work, as long as the work gets done by whatever necessary deadline. The freedom to work an hour here, an hour there, and do whatever in between. (I know jobs like this exist, but they always seem to involve a lot of self-marketing and stuff that I hate even more than being tied to a desk 8 hours a day.) I don't really have a short attention span, but I do like to shift between interests a lot, and that's something I haven't been able to do anywhere but school. I LOVED undergrad because I could go from a class in psychology straight to one in art history, then jump over to Old Testament, and down to biology. I actually didn't like biology that much, but I did like the variety it added to my life. People don't always understand that when I say I'm bored, it's really because I'm missing that variety, not because I don't have enough to occupy my time.

I'm a little afraid that grad school won't be as great as I'm hoping it is, because it's more focused and I won't have as much opportunity to take classes outside my discipline. (This was a major factor in the decision to only pursue an M.A., not a Ph.D.--as much as I love English literature, I don't know that I can see myself spending five or six or seven years studying it and only it.) I'm also afraid that grad school is only a delaying mechanism, and that two years from now, I'm going to be exactly where I am now, with the same discontentment and resentment.

But I'm going to cross that bridge when I come to it.

Blogger needs tags.

Tags:

A whole new world

2006-04-25T22:03:00.000-07:00

Italo Calvino - If on a Winter's Night a Traveler:

I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell or who know may already have told on some other occasion, a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime, where you can move in all directions, as in space, always finding stories that cannot be told until other stories are told first, and so, setting out from any moment or place you encounter always the same density of material to be told. - p.109

Right before I wrote this passage down, I flipped through the little notebook where I write down particularly resonant passages from whatever I'm reading, and the one just before this one is from Virginia Woolf: "When one so exposes [the genius and integrity of a great novel] and sees it come to life, one exclaims in rapture, 'But this is what I have always felt and known and desired!'" That's somewhat how I feel about the Calvino quote. I've been thinking a lot lately about what it is that draws me to certain books (or movies, even--throughout this post when I write "read," I also mean "watch a movie" or "watch a TV show"). A few people I know have recently stopped watching Lost because not much is happening...this was particuarly leveled at the recent Hurley-cenric episode, which the person I was speaking with thought was superfluous, because essentially nothing happened to advance the plot. I, on the other hand, really enjoyed the Hurley episode, and am more interested in Lost right now that I have been for a while. (I'll admit that part of my love for it was the resemblence it bore to "Normal Again," one of my favorite Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, in which Buffy gets injected with a drug which makes her think she's actually in a mental institution, and the whole vampire slaying thing and all her friends, her entire world in fact, are hallucinations...and the episode leaves the possibility open that the mental institution reality is actually the correct one.)

Back to the point. The Calvino passage points a little bit to why that I liked the Hurley episode despite the fact that, admittedly, the plot wasn't furthered really at all. I've known for a long time that I don't read primarily for the event...in fact, I care so little for the actual outcome of novels that I can reread mysteries because I will completely forget who committed the crime. I read more for the characters, but even that's not completely it. Then I thought, well, maybe I read for the world that the author creates. This is much closer to the truth, and explains why I enjoy books like Jasper Fforde's Tuesday Next series so much, despite the undistinguished characters and gaping plotholes. Yet it isn't a sense of "place" that I want, because as C.S. Lewis points out in An Experiment in Criticism, some books that I quite enjoy, like The Three Musketeers have almost no sense of place. We know it's set in the court of France and a little bit in England only because the narrator tells us so, not because the physical setting invades the prose, as does Crime and Punishment's Petersburg or Faulkner's South.

But Calvino has just nailed pretty much on the head what most makes me enjoy a book (or movie or TV show): the sense that the characters and the world have many more stories that they could tell. The world of Lost will always be rich because there is more to it than just the island; there's more to find out than just what happens next in real time; there are all the back stories of each character and how they intersect (or do they intersect? Are the stories we see reliable?), there are the stories of The Others, who they are and were and what they want, the story of the island itself and the Dharma Initiative. I don't want to rush along the main plotline, because I want to hear as many of these other stories as I can, and yet always know that there are even more that I will never hear. I want to find out what happens to the survivors, but ultimately I like the process of finding out more than actually finding out. (Back to the rereading mysteries thing: I love the detecting work and the process of solving the mystery, but the resolution is almost always a letdown.)

Lord of the Rings is perhaps the best example of a detailed world. Even without knowing that Tolkein actually did create and write dozens of other stories and histories of Middle Earth that aren't told in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the books carry a weightiness that can only be attributed to the density of available stories that may or may not ever be told. That richness is, more than anything else, what will completely entrall me. For the exact opposite of this, try something like Dan Brown's Digital Fortress, which I read this month and has taken its place at the pinnacle of a pantheon I like to call "Worst.Books.Ever." More on this in my month-end recap, which I'll post sometime this year. (March's is almost finished, I swear!) Digital Fortress has characters which interact only with each other. There are no characters introduced AT ALL which are not integral to the plot. The main character mentions several times that she and her fiance were planning to go on a vacation on the Smoky Mountains until work got in the way, but you don't get any sense that the Smoky Mountains exist outside of her mentioning them--you don't even feel like she really wants to go there, because she is so focused on her job and the plot at hand that there's no room in her character for anything else. It's a sterile environment, with static and confined characters. There are other stories hinted at occasionally...the lawbreaking hacker life of one of the cryptographers, the youth of a bitter young Japanese programmer...but they are only brought up for their immediate relevance to the main plot, and then dropped completely. There's no sense that anything else ever happened to these people other than what we are told in the book. Not good for me. Not good at all.

Give me depth, give me breadth, give me complexity, give me density, give me imagination, give me richness, give me possibility.

Tags:

books

There's a somebody I'm longing to see...

2006-04-18T20:04:00.000-07:00

American Idol was made for me tonight. I love the classics, yes I do. And this group seems amazingly adept at them. Even Chris did a fine job with "What a Wonderful World" (one of my favorite songs)...I was concerned about his being able to find a song that fit him.

But I am having so much love for Katharine right now. She's been my favorite mostly from the beginning (with Lisa, Paris, and Chris being close behind...Elliott has crept up to be my second favorite now), and she continues to wow me even when I'm expecting her to be awesome. I want to buy her CD now. Seriously. I'll be driving in the car and think "I want to listen to some Katharine McPhee."

Not much else going on. My parents and I are going down to Waco Thursday through Sunday to check out apartments, meet with professors, etc. I'm really looking forward to not working for a couple of days. Working is overrated. Okay, maybe it's not. But still. Banks have a good many holidays, which spoil you for March and April, which don't have ANY.

Tags:

Sophie Scholl

2006-04-11T09:52:00.000-07:00

Movie recommendation:

Sophie Scholl: The Last Days

My parents and I went to see this last Saturday, and we all came away very impressed. Sophie Scholl was a 21-year-old student in Munich in the early 1940s, and she and her brother were arrested in 1943 for distributing leaflets that detailed the failure of the Nazi army on the Russian front and the inability of Germany to win the war due to Hitler's poor leadership. A large portion of the movie is taken up with Sophie's interrogation by a Nazi police investigator, and even though it's basically the two of them talking, it's absolutely riveting. Sophie's strength of character and steadfastness in her beliefs stymie the otherwise formidable investigator, and by the end it's clear that although they will always be on opposite sides of the Nazi question, he has gained a grudging respect for her.

Julia Jentsch is incredible as Sophie, imbuing her with a quiet intensity that carries the movie along. The film itself is full of this quiet intensity...it hits all the necessary points, but doesn't belabour any of them. There are no anvils here. It's made clear that Sophie is a Christian, and she prays several times throughout the film. She knows the Nazis are perpetuating heinous acts against humanity, against the Jews in particular, and she doesn't shy away from telling the investigator exactly what she thinks about that. But it's also clear that her problems with Hitler are not only humanitarian, but also political...this girl is no bleeding heart, but clear-headed and able to see that Hitler is bad not only for Jews and other "undesirables", but for Germany itself and the German people in general. This is a point of view that I don't think has been terribly well-represented, certainly not in film.

The film is German with subtitles, but don't let that scare you away. I know a lot of people who avoid foreign films like the plague, and I don't understand why. a) American films are foreign in most of the world, and yet most of the world watches them. Why not reciprocate, see what they have to offer us in return? It's the easiest way to experience another culture. b) You don't avoid reading The Three Musketeers or Crime and Punishment because they weren't written in English, and you don't think of them as weird second-class citizens because they weren't written by Americans; why is film any different? c) It's an excellent bet that a foreign film seen in the US is going to be good. Why? Because we only import like 5% of any given country's film output. Guess which 5% they're going to send us? This is why movie critics often seem to like foreign films...they're sending us their Schindler's Lists and their American Beautys. They're not sending us their Madea's Family Reunions and their BloodRaynes. So forget this silly foreign-film aversion and go see some.

Start with Sophie Scholl. It's playing at Plaza Frontenac right now, but they don't keep them for more than a few weeks, so hurry. It's not rated, but there's nothing objectionable in it for children, though they might get antsy because it is a rather talky film.

Tags:

film

February Round-Up

2006-03-28T20:22:00.000-08:00

This year I've been posting short run-downs of what I've read and watched each month over at my LJ. Thought I'd post them here, too. Because I can. Mwahahahaha. Anyway. The LJ people have the advantage of the LJ-cut, which keeps posts from being so long, because it puts long stuff behind a link. I have found no such blogspot-cut, so anyone reading here must suffer. (Actually, that would be shortened to BS-cut, wouldn't it? Which could actually be accurate much of the time...) Or I suppose I could just link to my LJ entry, but where would be the fun in that?

Without further ado, movies I watched and books I read in February. Oh, disclaimer: These are not reviews, they are reactions.

MOVIES

Aguirre, the Wrath of God
Interesting. I really didn't know what to expect from this, my first Herzog film. I knew only that he was a well-known director, almost as well known for his eccentricity as for his films. I was prepared for slow-moving, and that's a good thing. Herzog really takes his time, from the very opening shots of a caravan of Conquistadors arduously crossing the Andes mountains, exploring Peru under Pizarro. This could either be very boring or indicative of the strain underwent by these early explorers. Or both. Anyway. The movie is really about obsession and megalomania, as Pizarro's second-in-command takes a smaller force on down the Amazon river once the going gets too rough for the entire crew to continue. Soon a battle of the wills begins, as the nobleman in charge wants to turn back and rejoin Pizarro (this after one raft is destroyed), while the maniacal soldier refuses to listen and mutinies, wanting the gold of El Dorado and possession of the empire of South America. Meanwhile, the natives are picking people off with arrows, sickness runs rampant, and the food is getting scarce. It's a tour-de-force for Klaus Kinski, as the soldier who ends up king of all he surveys, but is it a victory? Glad I watched it, but not one I'd necessarily come back to, except possibly if studying Herzog.

Good Night and Good Luck
With the combination of B&W photography and a story set in the McCarthy era, this interested me since I first saw the trailer months ago. And I wasn't really disappointed. It's very timely politically, of course, and I'm not 100% sure I follow along with all the parallels the creators are clearly trying to make with today's political situation, but a call for dialogue such as this is not amiss. All the acting is great...I particularly enjoyed the supporting turns by Robert Downey, Jr. and Patricia Clarkson. It's a talky movie, and not much action. I was actually rather surprised that it was nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars...I'm sure it's because of the current political milieu. The film is very good, but it's small...very unobtrusive. Not like Oscar's usual fare.

Caché (Hidden)
Can I first say that this was worth seeing in theatres just to hear people's reactions at the end? "What the hell?" "I was gypped!" Hee. And really, it's not difficult to understand such reactions. Caché is very odd little film. The story, such as it is, is that Daniel Autiuel and Juliette Binoche start receiving mysterious videotapes of the exterior of their apartment, taken from across the street. The shot of their apartment from across the street is returned to time and time again, and often for minutes at a time. The pace is often excruciatingly slow, obviously on purpose, as the shot usually turns out to be the video itself as the couple play it over in their apartment, agonizing over who has sent it to them and why. Many other things come into play, as well. From stuff I've read since seeing it, it is apparently helpful to have some knowledge of French/Algerian relations (Algeria used to be a French colony, there were some riots in the 1950s or something, I don't really know much about it myself), but the fact that I still overall enjoyed the film, despite getting rather stiff while sitting through it, merely points out that Caché works on a number of different levels. Postmodern, it is, quite. :)

Pickpocket
I must admit that after seeing Caché earlier in the day, and knowing director Robert Bresson's reputation for taking his time, I was a little apprehensive at going to see a second slowly-placed French film in the same day. But it was only playing at the local film series this one night, and I'm so glad I went. It's an early Bresson, and it's excellent. A Crime and Punishment-esque story, a young man tries picking pockets one day for the hell of it, finds he enjoys it and ends up joining a crew of thieves, learning the techniques, and finally playing cat-and-mouse with a police inspector. He even has Raskolnikov's ideas about some people being above the law, except he's not murdering people, only picking their pockets. It's got a noirish feel, too, in the New Wave tradition of imitating American post-war films...a double feature of this with Godard's Breathless would be awesome.

Sahara
Okay, Matthew McConaughey and Steve Zahn and Penelope Cruz and some other people are running around in the desert looking for...something...treasure, or proof that the government is poisoning people, or something. I couldn't concentrate on it at all. It was some combination of not putting the computer down (which is symptomatic of a crap movie, incidentally), disliking Matthew McConaughey intensely, and a general malaise about recent dumb action/treasure-hunting movies. *shrug*

Body Heat
This has been on my list for a while as an important neo-noir film, and while I'm glad I watched it, it falls so far short of noir, it's almost funny. It's basically Double Indemnity but with an eighties-vibe. Of course, I have anti-'80s bias, as everyone who knows me knows, so I might not even be qualified to speak about Body Heat. The beginning was pretty meh, what with the repetitive music (John Barry! Come on, man, you can so do better than this) that threatened to competely overwhelm the dialogue, such as it was, the overexposed lighting (I think they were going for the sort of light/dark contrast that you get in black and white, but it just doesn't work in color, and it looked terrible), the dialogue that was trying for that Billy Wilder-esque edge that never quite came off. I knew going into it that there were Double Indemnity similarities, but I didn't realize they were this strong. If you're going to watch a noirish wife-and-lawyer-plot-to-kill-husband-with-plenty-of-plot-twists-and-turns, just watch the original. Both Kathleen Turner and William Hurt do a really good acting job, and the plot itself is good. The style just didn't connect with me at all...which, as I've said, may reveal more about my anti-80s bias than anything else...I checked out some IMDb reviews after writing the first part of this reaction, and they're almost overwhemlingly positive, and most think the film hasn't aged at all. I disagree. The music is very '80s-pretending-to-be-'40s-by-way-of-the-'60s, the cinematography is dated...I don't feel it was a waste of time to watch, or anything, and I enjoyed the second half a good deal. But it has dated, and it doesn't compare to real noir like Double Indemnity, or to the best neo-noir like L.A. Confidential. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Grave of the Fireflies
Every time I watch an anime film, I have to put myself in "anime mindset." You know, where you accept the overblown facial expressions and exaggerated voice acting as stylistic choices and proceed to enjoy the movie as it is. Every time I want to really like one not just as an anime film, but just as a film. Finally, I found one that is not just a great anime, but is a great film, full stop. For once the animation is understated, as is the voice acting. The story is simple (two Japanese children are orphaned by air raids in WWII and make their own way in the unwelcoming world as best they can, for as long as they can), and truly moving. Swear to God, I cried for the last half. I completely forgot I was watching animation. Everything--animation, voices, music--works together to make this one of the most beautiful, most heartbreaking films I've ever seen. It really doesn't take a stand on the war as such, but merely portrays the effect that war has on innocents, no matter what country they're from or who the aggressors happen to be.

In a Lonely Place
Remember last month when I watched caveated my enjoyment of both Night and the City and The Big Heat by recommending that you put yourself in a 1950s mindset before watching them, or run the risk of finding them stylistically dated? No such caveat is needed with In a Lonely Place. This has been on my list literally forEVER. Back since the days my best friend and I were total Humphrey Bogart fangirls. In other words, ten years or so. Why I never watched it before this, I couldn't say...clearly my life would have been more complete if I had watched it earlier. Okay, veering into hyperbole. But the point is, this film is better than I ever expected it to be, better than most films noires, better than most classic films, and better than most current films. The acting is perfect, and in fact makes the term "acting" seem almost irrelevant. Bogart isn't "acting" here...he is BEING Dix Steele. And it takes quite an actress to hold her own on the screen with Bogart, but Gloria Grahame does that and more...she becomes the center of the film, almost, the character we care about, the one we identify with. The story, basically, Bogart is the last person seen with a young girl before she is murdered, and thus is a likely suspect. His neighbor Grahame turns out to be his alibi, and soon, she is his inspiration (he is an all-but-washed-up Hollywood screenwriter) and his possible savior from his life of loneliness and despair. And the wonderful thing is that while you'd think that finding out who killed the young girl would be the focus of a film like this, it isn't...the murder is horribly important, but it's important because of the effect it has on Bogart, on Grahame, and on them as a couple. The entire thing is raw, it's visceral, it grabs your attention and won't let go. It is certainly the best film I've seen this year, and probably in a lot longer. And it has not dated one little bit.

BOOKS

The Abolition of Man
Wow, it's only February and I've already resorted to grabbing a short book and reading it quickly in order to come closer to meeting my reading goals. Usually I save that until November. I took it as a sign that I was being over-ambitious and knocked my goal from four books a month to three. Apparently, that's not very many to some people on my flist, but that's pretty near the top edge of my average. I don't know how you people find so much time for reading. Anyway. I had been wanting to read this since I went on a short Lewis kick back while I was trying to write my statement of purpose. I was over that phase by the time I actually read it. *shrug* It's basically three essays put together that deal with the loss of objective truth in the modern world, specifically the loss of objective morality as revealed in what he calls "The Way." In his terminology for these essays, this doesn't mean narrowly Taoism or even Christianity (which was called "The Way" in its early stages), but is meant to indicate any sort of moral standards that have been passed down by some tradition, be it Christianity or Buddhism or Confucianism or Zoroastrianism. Basically, the things that parents traditionally teach their children about right and wrong. It's an interesting book, and makes some very good points, I think. However, I do think that one is more likely to accept his conclusions if one already agrees with him; others may feel he's taking a slippery slope argument.

The Time Traveler's Wife
I'm nuts about anything to do with time travel, so I thought I'd at least enjoy this one; plus it felt so good to hold. Yes, yes...I totally judge books by their covers. :) The story follows a man, Henry, who time-travels without any control of it to different times and places, usually within his own lifespan, but not always. Mostly it concerns Henry's relationship with his wife Claire, who he first meets when he is 28 and she is 20--but she already knows him, because he has time-traveled back into her childhood many times. They take turns narrating, and the style is really amazing...I found myself taking notes and making timelines to fit in when everything happens and try to figure out what was happening at other points in Henry's life. Audrey Niffenegger thought the entire thing out extremely well, and it had me turning back and forth constantly, remembering hints in earlier chapters that related to what was happening currently. It sort of ended up being style over substance, but I still enjoyed it, because I'm a style whore. Anyway. A movie version is in the works, and I'm curious to know how they'll manage the disjointed timeline...but Brad Pitt is playing Henry, and I can't really see him in the role. We'll see.

Tags:

film
books

Trailer Roundup

2006-03-24T19:55:00.000-08:00

I try to keep up with watching movie trailers over at apple.com, partly because I enjoy seeing movie trailers (seriously, I cry if I get to the theatre too late to see the trailers), and partly because I like to make my movie-going decisions based on actual footage as well as word-of-mouth. Granted, the actual footage is chosen by marketing gurus whose goal in life is to make me want to see the film, but still. One you've seen enough of them, you can pretty much pick the good from the bad from the enjoyable from the excruciating.

So without further ado, my current list of must-sees, on-the-fences, and what-the-hell-where-they-thinkings. (These aren't all the trailers that are up...just the ones that struck me.)

Top of the list:

Tristram Shandy - playing now
I'm already pretty sure I'm going to love this film, so it better not disappoint me. Basically, Tristram Shandy is an 18th century novel which is often hailed as the first postmodern novel (despite the fact that it was written three hundred years before postmodernism was developed as a concept) because of its style, and it's generally believed to be unfilmable. Not to be put off, Michael Winterbottom decided to make a film of it, but he's doing it as a film-within-a-film, and the story also includes the perils and pitfalls of trying to adapt Tristram Shandy to the screen. This is a concept which pretty much cannot lose with me.

Thank You for Smoking - playing now
I intended to write this one off as a probably stupid comedy that satirized things that don't really need to be satirized (like the tobacco industry), but the trailer had me laughing all the way through it, every time I watched it. I don't know that I'm really expecting it to be *good*, but I can't help but feel that it will highly amuse me, and sometimes, that's all you really need. Plus, it has Katie Holmes, and I still like here even though I think her judgement in men is terrible.

V for Vendetta - playing now
Dude, Natalie Portman! Also, the story looks interesting. I haven't read the graphic novel, because I don't really read graphic novels or comic books, but I want to see this. Plus, the poster ad campaign is awesome.

Inside Man - 3/24/06
My jury's a little bit out on this one, because I love heist films, and I generally trust the project choices of Jodie Foster and Denzel Washington, plus I have a huuuuuge crush on Clive Owen, but I have yet to see a Spike Lee movie that I liked. So I'm somehow sure that he'll find a way to mess this up for me, despite the cast being awesome and how much I love heist films. But reviews would seem to indicate that this is, indeed a purely enjoyable flick, with no Lee-esque hidden agenda, so I'm there.

Lonesome Jim - 3/24/06
This looks rather Garden State-ish, which bodes well for my enjoyment of it. There's something very pleasing about the trailer. Ooh! I know what it is! There's no sappy voice-over guy! Okay, see, I may have to see it just to support the lack of sappy trailer voice-over guy.

L'Enfant - 3/24/06
French films are so awesome. Even the trailers for French films are so much better than trailers for American films. Again, no voiceover, which helps immensely. I vote for an all-out ban on trailer voice-over guy. What do you say? Oh, right, the film. A petty thief sells his infant son on the black market without his girlfriend's knowledge. That's about where the trailer leaves it, and I have to know how it turns out!

Brick - 3/31/06
The more I watch this trailer, the more I'm intrigued by it. It looks twisty, dark, noirish, edgy...and I'm totally there for all of those things. Plus Sundance cred, whatever that's worth.

Lucky Number Slevin - 4/7/06
It's about time for a good non-serious action film, don't you think? Of course you can never tell from trailers whether these are actually going to be good, but the trailer's good, and that's a place to start. Niiice action cast, good music, and the design of the credits all bode for at least an enjoyable way to kill two hours.

Stick It - 4/21/06
Guilty pleasure movie alert! You'd expect me to ridicule this, and usually I would, but dude! It's from the same people that made "Bring It On," which is the best guilty pleasure movie ever. So I'm guility there.

Mission: Impossible III - 5/5/06
I know, I know, Tom Cruise ban. But! Mission Impossible! (Yes, I'm one of those people who actually liked M:I-2...) I'm sorry, I have to go see it. I'll ban Tom Cruise again after this, I promise.

X-Men: The Last Stand - 5/26/06
I saw the first two, I can't quit now. :)

Cars - 6/9/06
Not terribly impressed with the first few trailers, but it is Pixar. And Pixar has a history of having trailers that don't impress me for movies that become my favorites. Pixar wins at life. So I'm there. And the newest trailer is better.

A Scanner Darkly - 7/7/06
My #1 most anticipated movie this year. I've been waiting for it through two release date changes (January to March to July), and it better not get pushed back again! It looks gorgeous, the storyline is intriguingly ambiguous...it's going to be like Waking Life mixed with Minority Report, with a dash of The Matrix, and I can't think of a more cool combination that that.

Pirates of the Caribbean 2 - 7/7/06
Duh.

Little Miss Sunshine - 7/28/06
Quirky in the good way! Really nice cast, off-beat characters, script seems good so far--and dude, the teenaged son decided not to speak anymore because of Friedrich Nietszche. Now, why that would be, I don't know. But it's totally awesome, and I need to see it.

The Fountain - release date unknown
Ooh! It's either time travel, or maybe multiple interconnected stories, or...something. But I love both of those, so yay! And Rachel Weisz, who I also like. Plus, Darren Arnofsky is directing, and he's always a trip.

A few I'm less sure about, but still interested:

Friends With Money - 4/7/06
It's totally a cast thing here...I wouldn't give the story a second look, but I have a strange soft spot for Jennifer Aniston, despite her tendency to be in chick flicks (a genre I disdain). Throw in Frances McDormand, Joan Cusack and Catherine Keener, and you've got an extremely well-rounded chick cast. Now, if only Maggie Gyllenhall were in it! (see below)

The Promise - 5/5/06
This has been on the distributor run-around for a while now, and it's good to see that Warner Independent picked it up. They're winning my respect more and more recently, and I'm looking forward to seeing this martial arts/fantasy. Looks like it's in the vein of Crouching Tiger, with perhaps even more fantasy.

Alpha Dog - 5/12/06
Amanda Seyfried! aka Lilly Kane on Veronica Mars, the best TV show currently on the air. Well, she was last year. She's not in it this season. But still. And yes, VM alumni are totally enough of a good reason to see a film, especially one which appears to have any other interesting qualities at all, and this one does. (Of course, it's the type of interesting that could turn out to be really crap, but oh well. That's what we TV fans put up with following our stars around.)

The Da Vinci Code - 5/19/06
I know, I know. But I gotta see it. It's like a cultural must. Even though Tom Hanks is horribly miscast (and horribly coiffeured) and I dislike Ron Howard films. Even though the book is a heap of crap. On the other hand, Audrey Tautou is amazing. Anyone else think Dan Brown paid Leigh and Baigent to sue him for copyright violation just to get more publicity for the film?

Click - 6/23/06
See, this has a potentially interesting story...main character gets a remote control that controls life, so he can pause, fast-forward, rewind, etc, his actual life. The downside: the main character is Adam Sandler, and every time I see an Adam Sandler movie I remember that I virtually never like Adam Sandler movies and I promise myself that I won't see the next one. Then the next one has a potentially interesting story, and I see it, and it's terrible. But I keep hoping he'll pull a Jim Carrey/Truman Show, and do something really surprising and great. I'm an optimist.

Superman Returns - 6/30/06
Superman is my least favorite of the major superheros, so I'm not all about seeing his return to the screen, but I do like the visual style they've got going on. Faux-1930s is my favorite!

Lady in the Water - 7/21/06
New M. Night Shyamalan is tempting, for sure, even though I was among those who didn't care for The Village at all. The teaser for this is maddeningly vague, but it does have Paul Giamatti, and I have never seen him either turn in a bad performance or appear in a bad film, so that raises my hopes.

Trust the Man - 8/18/06
Okay, I admit, this probably wouldn't be on the list at all if Maggie Gyllenhaal weren't in it. But I would sit and watch her read her laundry list for two hours. She's that good. (I've heard she's kind of a diva in real life, but she's an amazing actress and picks good projects.)

Apocalypto - Summer 2006
Truly, this trailer would not have interested me in this film at all, so it's pretty much just Mel Gibson's name that's leading me to consider it at this point. And the fact that the Mayan civilization does interest me to some degree. We'll keep it at a maybe at least until the full trailer is released.

Marie Antoinette - Fall 2006
I'm a little concerned with Kirsten Dunst's ability to pull of Marie Antoinette. I like Kirsten, but her range is, shall we say, limited. In the right part (Bring It On, Dick, The Cat's Meow, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), she's awesome; but in the wrong (Spiderman, Spiderman 2, Mona Lisa Smile), not so much. This doesn't seem like the right part for her, but the film is by Sofia Coppola, and I rather trust Sofia to pull out good performances. So I'm staying on the fence for now.

And the dreck, just because it's fun:

Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector - 3/24/06
Oh. My. Gosh. Who greenlights this crap? The studio didn't screen the film for critics (that makes sixteen or so this year that haven't screened for critics, a record number already, and it's only March!), and it's not hard to see why. You can tell it's crap from the trailer, and the worst part is, people will probably go see it, and Hollywood will then make more crap, which people will go see... Sometimes I think people should have to take an intelligence test before they're allowed to spend their hard-earned cash going to see movies.

RV - 4/28/06
Haven't we had enough of bathroom-joke-filled "family" movies with stars (Robin Williams) who have proven themselves to be better than this sort of thing?

See No Evil - 5/19/06
Okay. I'll start by not seeing this film. Oh, how I love it when film titles deconstruct themselves.

Open Season - 9/29/05
I'm not entirely convinced this one is dreck, but I felt the need to vent about it. The teaser trailer was quite amusing, and somewhat promising--after years of being hunted, the forest animals turn the tables on the hunters, Robin Hood style (that's Errol Flynn's Robin Hood, when all the Merrie Men swing down from the trees and capture Sir Guy's entourage, of course). Then the actual trailer came out, and somehow in between, the entire story changed and became one of touchy-feely friendship between a bear and a deer. Note to animators: NOT ALL KIDS' MOVIES HAVE TO BE TOUCHY-FEELY FRIENDSHIP STORIES! Take a look at Wallace and Gromit, which I watched last night, and which was awesome. The number of animated features has been spiking over the last few years, but by and large the quality is going down the drain.

Tags:

SQUEEEEE Baylor SQUEEEEEEE

2006-03-21T16:11:00.000-08:00

I have other posts in various stages of writing and thinking, but this one deserves its own:

I GOT IN TO BAYLOR!!!

No assistantship or funding, but I'm crossing that bridge when I get to it. Right now, after two previous years of applying to grad school and not getting accepted, I'm just ecstatic that I actually got in somewhere, and not just somewhere, but my top choice.

Now, do I take it immediately, or do I wait and see if I get funding from the other schools? Or do I want to go to Baylor enough more (which I sort of do) that I'd rather work my butt off to go there than to go to the other places? What's the protocol here? I don't have the official acceptance from the school yet, just the e-mail acceptance from the program director, so I guess I could wait until I get that, but I feel like I ought to acknowledge his e-mail in some way... I'm so green at all of this!

Green, but excited.

Tags:

school
squee

Brain dump

2006-03-13T20:38:00.000-08:00

Sunday School thoughts: I'm incredibly hard to offend, so I tend not to think about causing offense in others. So if I ever, you know, offend you, let me know. Because I probably won't think about it unless you do. In my egocentrism I assume that people will react to things the way I would, and often that's just not true. Of course, everybody should react just like I would. ;) Just kidding.

Programming thoughts: *smacks MySQL* When I follow the directions just like it says in the book and type in the code just like it is in the book, it's supposed to work, dang it. After a few hours of fiddling, I finally got Apache set up properly (after rolling back a version), but the test code to make sure PHP is connecting to MySQL properly isn't working. (I've had this issue with JavaScript tutorials, too.) Grrr. How am I supposed to learn if even copying code by rote doesn't work, much less making up my own?

TV network thoughts: *smacks CBS* Just when I was all grateful that CBS replayed The Unit pilot, since I missed it the first time, it gets started late due to basketball and preempted for a weather alert. Sometimes being a TV addict just isn't worth it.

Oscar thoughts: I'm amused by Brokeback fan reactions to the Oscar loss. Firstly, that it matters that much. I mean, the Oscars have been an accurate standard of film excellence since...never. They're high-profile, yes, but I don't know anyone who actually thinks they mean anything as far as choosing the actual best films of the year. (BBM fans should be glad that they won the Golden Globe, which I think is more trustworthy.) I haven't seen either BBM or Crash, so I probably shouldn't say this next thing, but I'm going to anyway. Secondly, as if BBM isn't as much a politically-charged Oscar choice as Crash. The choice between BBM and Crash was never a question of which film is better--just which political animal the Academy voters were willing to back. Not that the nominees this year weren't pretty much all political choices. This whole Oscar race was just depressing from a movie standpoint, because all it came down to was homophobia vs. racism vs. McCarthyism vs. terrorism.

Research/Film-Crit thoughts: Because I should be writing about In a Lonely Place and Nicholas Ray right now instead of blogging. I'd forgotten how much I loved researching things until I started seriously writing again. I haven't done research since my Arthurian lit class last spring. Then I started writing about In a Lonely Place (which, incidentally, is an amazing film; get it from the library sometime if you get the chance), and realized that I didn't know very much about Nicholas Ray except that he had also directed Rebel Without a Cause, and thought I should find out more. Turns out he was a favorite of the Cahiers du Cinema critics, which puts him pretty high in my estimation because those Cahiers critics were pretty smart. Anyway, I spent a total of five or six hours across two days reading Cahiers articles about him and other stuff, as well as the BFI Classics book on In a Lonely Place (which are also highly recommended--a complete set needs to go on my wishlist), and looking up contemporary reviews on microfilm at the WashU library. I *heart* the WashU library. I think I could live there. Went home happier than I have for ages. But what I found the most interesting was comparing the pre-Cahiers reviews--that is, the ones from American newspapers and magazines from the original release of the film in 1950--with later perspectives on the film. The contemporary American reviews are either negative--Time said it took forever to make its point, and once it finally wrapped up the ending, the audience would be too turned off by the main characters to care--or casually positive--The NYTimes liked it, but in a very star-driven, formulaic genre sort of way...much like people today enjoy a film like Mr. and Mrs. Smith. (Part of it is that In a Lonely Place is ahead of its time in some ways...that Time critic obviously missed several of the ambiguities that today's viewers would pick up on immediately; also there are things about the making of the film, such as that Ray changed the ending from the original screenplay, that weren't known to the original reviewers.) You can count Pauline Kael in with them, too, even though her review is later--she felt it was hollow and unsatisfying. In a side note, I do not understand why people think so highly of Kael. I find her reviews condescending, negative, unredeeming, and usually, missing-of-the-point. But that's by-the-by. Most interestingly, the NYTimes gives almost sole credit for everything in the film to the screenwriter. I'm so used to credit for nearly everything in film going to the director that it shocked me. But really, in 1950, the auteur theory, giving credit for a film to the director, didn't exist. Directors were considered craftsmen, not artists. It was Cahiers, writing about people exactly like Nicholas Ray, who created the cult of the director that has gotten a little out of hand now, but the auteur theory is still very helpful. Almost all reviews of In a Lonely Place now speak about Ray, and how the film fits into his oevre. It really makes one wonder which films would be remembered now if Cahiers hadn't existed. I never really thought about it before, but a study of film criticism itself would be fascinating. I'm sure other people have done a lot of work in this area already, because it's really sort of obvious, but comparing and contrasting reactions to films when they're first released vs. reactions from years later is very illuminating. What's really fascinating is thinking about what films that are coming out now will be remembered fifty years from now. Will it be the ones that are critically acclaimed upon release? What new theories will move criticism in different directions? Is it possible that another complete shift of perspective will take place, as it did when Cahiers started enthusiastically applauding post-war American genre films and their directors? I'm getting tingly just thinking about it.

Work thoughts: Two of my coworkers were out sick today, the two that sit closest to me. I love my coworkers, but it was really nice to have the peace and quiet. I need a job where I just sit in my own little world and don't have to interact with other people at all. It occurs to me...this could be...research! Heh. Except with research, you eventually have to publish your findings, and I don't have a burning desire to publish and come up with new ideas or new perspectives. I just want to learn it all. Too bad no one will pay me for just internalizing information.

Tags:

iTunes

2006-03-13T20:33:00.000-08:00

Mark liked the version of this that I posted on my livejournal better, so I copied that one over here. He's right, this one is more "me". I was tired last night when I wrote the shorter one; plus I'm not totally comfortable here yet. My persona on LJ is pretty well-defined, but it's still sorting itself out here.

Okay, I've now checked out the iTunes downloadable TV shows (Desperate Housewives ep my DVR missed). *shakes head in disappointment* iTunes!! Come on!! What are you doing, offering this horrendous file quality? Here I was expecting pristine prints, all set to watch HD-quality entertainment on my PC, because that's what I expect from a service I generally respect, like iTunes, and I get files that look like tenth-generation VHS copies with some nice pixelization added into the mix. The hell? Why would I pay for this crap? Well, I did this time because I wasn't expecting it to be crap, but I don't know that I will again. Why is iTunes doing this? I mean, their market has grown up with DVD/digital cable/satellite/HD, and we've come to expect that sort of quality. And it's not impossible...I tried out one of MovieLink's downloadable movie rentals, and it was surprisingly high quality. Very impressive.

I don't know what they're thinking. The torrents I've downloaded are twice this quality. If the industry wants to reduce illegal downloading, they've got to step up to the plate and offer something worth buying. This isn't it. Granted, I suppose if you're dl'ing it for your iPod, the quality is probably good enough (anyone want to verify this? I don't have a video iPod to test it...), but in that case, they should offer multiple versions, like they have multiple versions of movie trailers. Because these files are almost impossible to watch on my computer screen, and forget about hooking up the computer to my TV and trying to watch them.

Tags:

itunes
tv2.0

Reasons Today Rocked

2006-03-11T22:10:00.000-08:00

Reasons today rocked:

Hot wings at Culpeppers

As a related item, eating lunch outside for the first time this year

Walking in Forest Park, in an area I don't usually go to (I'm a Grand Basin junkie, but I thought I'd check out some of the other park areas)

Getting an article I'm writing for a webzine about half-finished (major breakthrough, as I've been procrastinating through research for a week and a half)

Being highly amused by a couple trying to unload a very heavy motorcycle off the back of their pickup--their "ramp" (aka a two-by-four) kept falling off

Belle and Sebastian CD on the way home

The rain not starting until after I got home, and after dark

Catching up on 24, House, and How I Met Your Mother

Finding a book that I think will finally help me understand PHP and MySQL...maybe

Finding an FTP extension for Firefox that seems to work better than the Dreamweaver one, which has been crashing DW constantly lately

Beating a boss level on XIII that's kept me stuck for a few weeks (I won't let myself buy any more games until I finish this one--my "stuck in the middle of" stack is getting astronomical)

So, yeah. Successful day. Tomorrow: church, sheperding groups fellowship, delving past installing PHP into actually using it, and possibly the last four eps of Arrested Development, which I've been saving, but really, it may be time to let go.

Tags:

squee

AI Top Twelve Results

2006-03-09T17:30:00.000-08:00

Okay, I know I'm not going to like the American Idol results show this week. I like seven of the eight girls (I don't care for Kinnik, and I just saw before I backed my DVR up to the beginning that she's off, as I knew she would be). And I like five or six of the guys, but I'm by no means sure that the ones I like will be the ones that stay. I think the other girl off will be either Kellie or Melissa. Kellie was an early favorite of mine, and I still like her, but I don't think she's got the voice to keep up with the top three or four. Melissa has been growing on me every week, so now I'd be sorry to see her go as well. And I was fairly sure Ayla was going to make it into the top twelve, but this week's song was really weak, so I don't know anymore. I agree with Simon on her...I like her somewhat, and last week she was very good, but she's almost too perfect. If that makes sense. There's no thrill.

On the guys side, I *heart* Kevin Covais. Especially when he does Josh Groban songs. Chills. Up. And. Down. My. Spine. But my coworker hates him, so if there are many in America like her, I fear for my Kevin. If I were voting off, I'd probably vote off Bucky and...geez. Either Ace or Gedeon. I like Gedeon's singing, but his video clips where he's talking are annoying me to death. Overenunciate much? And I liked Ace at first, but the last two weeks have just been...meh. And he's kinda smarmy. As in, there's part of me that says, yes, he's hot in a way, especially his eyes, but there's a much larger part of me that wouldn't let him touch me, ever.

Now. Back to the beginning of the show. I love DVR.

Tags:

American Idol...

2006-02-27T21:42:00.000-08:00

Speaking of the removal of the high-low distinction in art...

Figured I should put my American Idol predictions in here before any more of it airs, so if I'm right, it will be on record from pretty much the beginning. (I swear, I picked Carrie Underwood out of the auditions. But it's not written down anywhere, so I can't prove it.)

Based purely on the auditions, my pick this year would be Paris Bennett. And she's still a definite top three contender. But after the first set of performances, I'm leaning towards Lisa Tucker. She really wowed me. I think Katherine McPhee has the best natural singing voice of all of them, but I don't think she's going to be able to sell the songs like Lisa can. On the boys' side, I dunno. There are four or five guys I think can go right to the end, but when it comes down to it, I think Lisa's better than all of them.

So there it is. My prediction. Lisa Tucker for American Idol 2006. (Even though I probably wouldn't buy her record, because she's not my style of music...I'd be much more likely to buy Katharine's or David Radford's--who I know won't make it too much further; he's on borrowed time already.)

There. My American Idol addiction is outed. I can't wait until tomorrow night. I've avoided watching it at all for four years, and now, it's hitting hard, man.

Tags:

Off-the-cuff Postmodernism

2006-02-27T21:05:00.000-08:00

Call me crazy, but I didn't even notice that Pastor Meyers had gone overtime the past two Sunday evenings. That's because he was talking about postmodernism as part of the Cultural Discernment series. First off, I love all the Cultural Discernment evenings. Secondly, things that smack of philosophy and media and pop-culture, especially all mashed together, pretty much tops my list of Interesting Things I Want To Hear More About. Thirdly, postmodernism itself especially interests me, and I was glad to hear such a clear and non-judgmental presentation of it. I thought he did a really good job of pointing out the good things about postmodernism and the critiques it has made against modernism, as well as point out places where postmodernism itself goes to far, or in a misleading direction. He's posted this week's presentation on his blog, in case you weren't there Sunday night.

I am a little concerned about my own enjoyment of "postmodern" things, sometimes, though. Largely movies, because that's where a lot of my free time goes. It seems like most of the current movies I love are postmodern in some way, and that the things I like about them are the postmodern things. Films that encourage multiple interpretations and deny that any one interpretation is "correct" or could possibly explain everything in the film (I recently saw Caché, so that's the one I'm thinking about right now, but there are many--ooh, Mulholland Drive). Films that embrace ambiguity. I have a friend who hates ambiguous endings, and I love them, so every time we watch a film, almost, we have this argument. But here's what concerns me at times: I believe in a God who is sovereign, who is not random, who is not subjective. I believe in a book which He wrote which is authoritative and not open to any old interpretation Joe Crackpot can come up with. (I do believe there is interpretative room in the Bible, because it is story-based...but it also has elements which cannot be interpreted away. Or you know, shouldn't be interpreted away.) I believe we are living in a narrative which has a beginning, a middle, and will someday come to an end which is not ambiguous. In another sense, I suppose, the new heavens and new earth go on and do not end, but still. My point is that we're not going to get to the last judgement and be wondering how many different ways we can interpret it, and try to figure out our own endings to the story, any of which are equally valid. So why am I drawn to narratives in film and novel that are built this way? And should I fight it? Does ambiguity fit into the Christian worldview in a way I don't understand yet? Or does my very love for these postmodern interpretative games leave me susceptible to cultural brainwashing?

Other postmodern things I love that don't give me quite the worldview headache: films and TV shows that are self-referential, or build themselves out of pop-culture references (Arrested Development, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kill Bill, Shaun of the Dead--which I didn't like that much, but that was because of the zombies...ugh--even Shakespeare in Love). Films that are aggressively self-aware, and constantly call the audience's attention to the technique of the film itself, instead of to the story within the film (Run Lola Run, Tristram Shandy, which isn't out here yet, but I'm going to see it opening day, believe me). And, as Jeff mentioned many times, the mixing of high and low culture...movies like Moulin Rouge which mix the high art opera stories of Puccini and Offenbach with the pop-rock stylings of Madonna, Marilyn Monroe, Elton John, Queen, Fatboy Slim, Nat King Cole, and Nirvana, among others. (I still make a high art/low art distinction, though...scripted TV like 24 and Veronica Mars and Lost and BtVS is high art, and reality TV like Temptation Island is low art. *nods* Oh, and any movie built around former SNL cast members who are not Will Ferrell, also low art. But perhaps I am biased. *shrug*)

I'm still a little unsure on all the terminology, especially when I tried to relate it to narrative art forms (books and film) instead of pictoral art and architecture. Even with the modernist definitions, I have some questions. It sounded like modernist art was focused on "form over function"--the traditional use of art, representation, was replaced with an interest in manipulating form. And yet, I tend to think of "form over function" as a postmodern thing, too. Especially taking something like Run Lola Run...the story is basically "girl's boyfriend gets in a bad drug deal, needs cash, she tries to get it before he does something stupid like knock over a convenience store or gets killed by the drug dealers." A story you could tell in twenty minutes. In fact, it is told in twenty minutes. But it's told three times, with different outcomes, and the thing that makes the story interesting is not the content, but the way the content is presented...whiplash pans, off-kilter shots, split screen narrative, the little flashes of the futures of tangential characters, and my favorite device, the animated TV show that we see as Lola dashes down the stairs that BECOMES Lola dashing down the stairs...reality becomes animated television which becomes reality again. I was going to try to make a distinction between modernism "playing with form" and postmodernism "playing with content," but I don't think it really works. Especially since the concept of "form AS function" is so central to filmmaking and criticism. Also, to what extent is the modernist tendency to move away from representational art based on the development of photography in the late 19th century, which removed the need for artists to represent the physical world, and which is coincident with the rise of impressionism?

Going along with that, would things like non-linear narratives be considered modern or postmodern? Is playing with narrative structure a type of modernist "playing with form" like modernist art? Writers who pioneered non-linear narratives, like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, are modernist, but they're considered forerunners of postmodernism. What do you do with novels like Tristram Shandy, which has been called postmodern, but was written in the 18th century? I realize that I'm trying to force strict definitions and systems on a philosophical movement that explicitly defies such categorization. Perhaps postmodernism appeals to me precisely because it pulls me out of the modernist mindset I know I often have...at least I have that one personality type that needs to be able to categorize things--the system builder. And one plot point that I absolutely adore in movies but I haven't seen explicitly mentioned by Jeff or the other cursory reading I've done googling around, is the blurring/questioning of reality. I suppose that would fall under not taking anything for granted and questioning what one is told, which would be postmodern, and Jeff did mention that. This again would be one of the things that seems potentially unChristian to me...I mean, how far are we allowed to question reality? But pretty much any film that does this becomes a favorite with me: The Matrix (which in the third movie, even subverts the reality that the first one thought it had unmasked), eXistenZ, The 13th Floor, Adaptation...all awesome movies that play along the edges of what is reality, and how can we know if what we think is real really is? Many examples of this in literature, too...Borges' libraries, Eco's cults, Pynchon's postal system--worlds that come into being only after they're imagined. Sends shivers up and down my spine just thinking about it.

Am I closer to understanding postmodernism? Maybe. Am I more comfortable with my enjoyment of it? A little. But those two little aspects--the blurring of reality and the encouragement of multiple interpretations--still niggle at me a bit.

Here's hoping for more next week! Or, you know, sometime.

Tags:

In defense of ice dancing

2006-02-20T21:58:00.000-08:00

This afternoon, I watched the ice dancing original dance from last night, and I've once again decided that ice dancing is my favorite of the four disciplines to watch. I decide this pretty much every Olympics, but then I forget and think I like pairs the best. But I only like pairs second best. And here's why: the best pair skaters are the ones who can do all the big tricks and everything, but also are able to connect them together with innovative and artistic choreography, and really interpret the music they're using. Unfortunately, many pairs skaters get away with having amazing tricks and connect-the-tricks choreography, and can still win the competition, because the focus is on the tricks. Which means, for the viewer, that you have perhaps three or five points in the program where you go "oh my gosh, they're going to fall and kill themselves", which is exciting and creates feelings of relief and euphoria when they don't fall and kill themselves. The rest of the time, however, you're stuck going "when are they going to jump/lift/throw/death spiral again?" (Obviously, this doesn't apply to the very best pairs teams...the Russians continue to be the best largely because they do NOT rely entirely on the tricks, but put just as much effort into the artistry and choreography as landing the next biggest jump. The Chinese skaters, though--very strong on all the technical elements, but give the impression that the program would be exactly the same done to any other piece of music or no music at all...the choreography is only there to rest between technical elements.)

With ice dancing, on the other hand, although they do have required elements which are now more important than ever due to the new scoring system, the emphasis is on the choreography, the innovation, and the flow all the way through the program, not just for the few seconds of spins and lifts. Therefore, in most cases, the entire program is much more fun to watch, much more expressive, and much more interesting, because if ice dancers ever simply connect-the-required-elements, they do not make it to the Olympic level of competition.

Tracy made a good point last night about the new scoring forcing the dancers to up the ante on athleticism, and you could definitely tell in the programs...the number of falls was incredible for ice dancing. But the point is, the difficulty is in the footwork, the closeness of the partners to each other when they're skating, the intricacy of the lifts, and the sheer speed with which they're doing most of this...the difficulty is in actual skating, not aerial tricks. Belbin and Agosto were simply breathtaking. Notice how the commentaters didn't hardly even speak during their program? I couldn't even breathe. So solid, so fast, so many steps, and everything so perfect. My fingers are crossed for them in the free dance tonight. They're so good, and they were so nearly not here at all. Plus, Tanith is like the best name ever. It sounds both classic and new, very soft and yet strong. The only downside is the "th" at the end could come across as a lisp, but at the same time, it's such an unusual ending that it's attractive. It's going on my baby name list.

I wrote the above earlier today, and then read this article in Slate Magazine, which just made me mad. Sometimes I wonder why I continue to look at Slate articles, because they usually make me mad, but then I remember that it's because they make me mad and force me to respond to them (at least in my head) and sort out my thoughts about WHY they make me mad, which makes me think. Anyway. Article starts of with groaning at the fact of ice dancing, continues on to ridicule and enjoyment of Marie-France Dubreuil's fall which sent her to the hospital and kept the team out of the free dance tonight (although the author sort of apologizes for that), and goes on the lampoon the entire discipline as being silly, non-athletic, and unriveting. Why is it, then, that after three or four of the men skated in the men's singles competition, I only half-watched the rest, except for the Americans and Victor Plashenko, and yet I haven't been able to take my eyes off the dancers? Last time I checked, that would fall within the definiton of "riveted." Am I weird? Do I lack some taken-for-granted ability to become easily bored by pure artistry that is less adulterated by showy tricks than the other disciplines? It certainly isn't that I hope to see some good falls.

(Please don't get me wrong and think that I don't like the other disciplines...I do, greatly. I love seeing skaters do amazing jumps and I love pairs pushing the envelope on throw quads, and I love the huge, flying lifts. I love it all. I just feel like ice dancing gets unjustly ignored and maligned, and I had to step in and defend the most artistic, least plagued by the bad side of competition, sport still being performed at the Olympics. Especially since I think these dancers have shown that it does require athletic ability, and it is difficult and demanding...requiring much more than "basic coordination, mediocre rhythm, a terrible outfit, and a cheerleader grin," as stated in the article above.)

However, I have to grant Slate credit for this article, which highlights a lot of the problems I have with the new scoring system. I'm not willing to say it's a bad thing altogether, because after all, if we're going to keep treating figure skating as a sport, there has to be at least an attempt at less subjective scoring (and I have a vested interest in keeping it a sport, because it's the only reason I watch the Olympics, and I like watching the Olympics). But when the system rewards failed attempts at harder elements and penalizes flawless executions of easier elements, there's still tweaking to be done. Hopefully the skating association will figure this out and hammer at it some more.

Okay, now back to the Free Dance.

Tags:

First Post

2006-02-20T20:07:00.000-08:00

So this is where all the cool kids are hanging out. I've had an internet prescence for several years, largely on Livejournal. But that's always been more of an internet-community-fandom-based journal; most of my friends over there I met over the internet through our mutual love for the TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Veronica Mars. I'm keeping that journal for that sort of thing, and to keep up with the good friends I have there, but I'm not completely ready for my internet life and my real life to collide. Hence, new blog for ~~stalking~~ keeping up with RL friends.

I'm fascinated by internet community, and it'll be interesting to see how this blog turns out compared to my journal. I've never perpetuated an internet persona that's different than my RL personality, so I'm not anticipating any disconnect like that...but which types of posts will I end up posting in which place? Will the content overlap greatly? Will the tone and thrust be different? Livejournal fosters a sense of community in a way that blogspot doesn't...how will that affect what and how I post? More importantly, will I be able to keep up with both? ;)