Round Up the Usual Suspects

Foreign Exchange Program

2010-10-05T21:20:00.003-04:00

Randomly looking at some old toothpaste:

Seriously. That site is brilliant.

Frescorts

2010-10-05T20:46:00.003-04:00

BBC reports about rentafriend.com and discusses whether it's a good idea or ruining humanity. Clearly this has already been covered by Bryan Fuller.

Now all we need is a hug machine:

I wish I lived in a P.G. Wodehouse book

2010-08-23T11:45:00.003-04:00

Aside from the fact that Hugh Laurie might be there being an adorably dense Wooster, the whole lawyer thing seems an easier gig than in real life:

"But I don't know anything about the law. What shall I say to him?"
"That's all right. I've been studying up a bit. As far as I can gather, this legal advice business is quite simple. Anything that isn't a tort is a misdemeanour. You've simply got to tell old Bennett that in your opinion the whole thing looks jolly like a tort."
"What's the word again?"
"Tort."
"What does it mean?"
"I don't know. Probably nobody knows. But it's a safe card to play. Tort. Don't forget it."
"Tort. Right ho!"

Wodehouse, Three Men and a Maid 150 (A.L. Burt Co. 1922)

I'm such a sucker for Rube

2010-07-15T18:58:00.003-04:00

Is this a Rube Goldberg device or simply an elaborate set of dominoes? It's not really a device, but it's not simply dominoes -- there's some wheel-rolling and pushing-with-air going on. Either way, I kind of like this ad visually, until the end with the monolith phone at the end. Please -- that's so 2001 (as in, A Space Odyssey).

Um, ew.

2010-07-09T17:01:00.002-04:00

Dear British people of the world:

This is why you have a bad reputation for food. How does it have so many good reviews? The continental part of my blood is curdling.

You Are What You Eat

2010-03-24T21:06:00.006-04:00

I just found a cool little website devoted to direct marketing campaigns (as in, direct mail and other direct marketing and consumer-interactive advertising). It's got some cool, creative stuff.

But this one creeped me out a bit -- a Burger King in Brazil that wanted to show how every order is made fresh to order by printing each customer's picture on the sandwich wrapper. I'm not sure I like the idea of a hidden camera at Burger King, even if it is just for an advertising purpose. On the other hand, it would certainly get my attention, and I'd probably even save the wrapper as a souvenir. (I tend to save cool paper objects, especially advertising.)

Census 2010

2010-03-15T23:26:00.002-04:00

I just filled out my Census 2010 form. Don't forget yours! Because participating in constitutional law is awesome.

Rube Goldberg

2010-03-03T01:19:00.002-05:00

Many of you know I love Rube Goldberg devices. This one by OK Go is pretty excellent, though I'm not sure it's as easy to follow as it's supposed to be, and I'm a little suspicious about it being done in one shot rather than two (there's a zoom in that would be perfect for a new camera take, though I only watched the video once so I'm not sure).

Kitchen Chinese

2010-02-26T01:55:00.002-05:00

Kitchen Chinese: A Novel About Food, Family, and Finding Yourself by Ann Mah

I really should have known better. I thought it would be a novel about food -- it's called Kitchen Chinese and was written by a food writer. But it's actually chick lit. Reading the back cover, I realize I should have seen the signs: "Isabelle Lee things she knows everything about Chinese cuisine. . . . Now, in the wake of a career-ending catastrophe, she's ready for a change -- so she takes off for Beijing to stay with her older sister, Claire. . . . . In the midst of her extreme culture shock, and the more she comes to learn about her sister's own secrets, Isabelle can't help but wonder whether coming to China was a mistake -- or an extraordinary chance to find out who she really is." Sister's secrets? Discovering yourself? This could be an interesting, insightful book, but it could also be incredibly cheesy chick lit.

It's the latter.

It's pretty decent as chick lit goes, but chick lit nonetheless. It's predictable, a quick read, and best when it sticks to food and personal revelations rather than dating, broad assertions about the nature of cross-cultural experiences, and sibling rivalries. (I correctly guessed that the writer is an only child simply from the way she wrote about the main character and her sister. It was just too discombobulated a mess of rivalry, grudges, lack of communication, and yet also intuitively knowing what the other needed and thought.)

Ann Wah admirably figures out how to write bilingual dialogue, explaining important phrases but not bogging down comprehension with a dual system. I got a little annoyed that the pinyin had no tones, but that's not Wah's fault, and for most English readers I dare say it's less distracting to get romanizations of Chinese without little lines above each syllable.

Wah also shines when she talks about Chinese food, which actually made me hungry for Chinese street food more than once. And this may be the first book I've ever read that truthfully explains the awkwardness and avoidance that leads to really unacceptable ways of breaking up with someone. As in, I had total empathy for the text messager in the story, even though I still know it's a despicable thing to do.

However, the book felt too autobiographical -- too many details that didn't make sense to put it unless it was just an observation the author personally made and wanted to include. Yet at the same time, the book was too fake. Sometimes the dialogue was awkward because it tried to explain things without making a proper aside (like when the main character's best friend in China explains to her that she rides a bike to work -- gah!! main character would know that already, so it shouldn't be dialogue, but part of the narration). Or the narration sounded weird because it became too colloquial/talky, as when the main character explains that in middle school, "Shannon and I soon became BFFs." Really? "BFFs"?

But the stylistic awkwardness would be forgiven if it weren't for the totally lame love interest plot. I give Wah points for not even trying to pretend that she's come up with something suspenseful -- she makes it painfully obvious who the main character is going to end up with moment she meets him. It's just too too "meet cute" not to end with some ridiculous mushy dialogue at the back of the book. But it did annoy me that the reader is introduced to the romantic interest on page 68, I figured out who he was by page 69, and the main character doesn't figure it out until page 204. I mean, being a little dense is one thing, but if you know a guy named Charlie is going to be at an event that is honoring a guy named Charles who you know works in the SAME OFFICE, don't you think you might, just might, put 2 and 2 together? What works in crappy romantic comedy movies doesn't work quite as well in first person narratives because narrator has to both give all the necessary information and be stupid enough not to know what's going on.

But all in all, Kitchen Chinese was enjoyable enough, especially for its descriptions of China and Chinese food. It's not particularly thought provoking, but it's worth reading over a weekend or on the beach. As long as there's a Chinese restaurant nearby to fulfill your cravings.

Shades of Grey

2010-02-22T18:36:00.004-05:00

Another Lenten season without movies. And so you, dear reader, are going to have to deal with book reviews instead of any movie reviews for the next 40 days. Unless, of course, I review a movie I watched before Ash Wednesday. Which I guess I could do. Hmmm... Well, until I do that:

Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron by Jasper Fforde

OK, I'm not an objective reader here -- Jasper Fforde is my favorite living author -- but this was a lot of fun to read. Not as brilliant as the first few Thursday Next novels, or even the first of the Nursery Crimes, but still I think this series has a ton of potential. It's a zany world of colorblind people, where social caste is based on how much and which color you can see. Also a mildew that is the cause of death for each and every person. Also an antiquated system of marrying for rank, not love. Also Apocryphal people, and highly regulated paint shops, and animals born with bar codes to identify themselves. Jasper Fforde is also one of the few people I can think of who could pull off writing such a funny, comedic book that ends, rather than with a happy couple and Good overcoming Evil, with a sham marriage and deaths of several important characters. And yet I still loved it.

I'm such a pushover for Fforde that I'll give this 4 out of 4 stars, even though I've read better from him, and there were some passages that were a bit stilted (this is by far his most complicated alternate reality yet -- explaining the rules to a colorblind society that can still produce artificial color that everyone can see gets a bit convoluted at times).

Happy Presidents Day

2010-02-15T06:35:00.001-05:00

Happy Presidents Day! (sorry, the Muppets won't let me embed this, but it's worth the link, I promise)

Ultimate Pluto Platter

2010-02-12T18:28:00.002-05:00

Inventor of the Pluto Platter dies:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/02/12/2818587.htm?section=world

To Be Or Not To Be

2010-02-11T18:50:00.002-05:00

Back in high school, one of my friends told me I should watch this movie, but I kept putting it off because the premise seemed strange (see below). I understand why my friend thought I would like To Be of Not To Be: I love Shakespeare. I love 40s comedies. And (until this movie) I particularly like the 40s director Ernst Lubitsch, who directed one of my favorite movies, Ninotchka, as well as The Shop Around the Corner, the sweet little movie on which You've Got Mail was based. So I'm a bit sad to report that To Be or Not To Be actually creeped me out more than entertained me. I don't think it means to be a black comedy, but this is by far one of the darkest I've seen.

Don't get me wrong. The actors are great. Jack Benny is very funny, and Carole Lombard is the definition of a star: luminescent and radiant. But I just couldn't get over the fact of this movie: a 1942 film about the Nazi occupation of Poland. Basically, the story revolves around a Polish theater troupe in Warsaw that gets sucked into high espionage when a star struck young bomber pilot in England accidentally asks a German spy to get a message to the woman he loves -- actress Maria Tura, played by Carole Lombard. The pilot finds out that the spy has information that will destroy the Polish Underground, along with all of the Resistance movement in Eastern Europe. And so he flies back to Poland to intercept the spy. In the process, Maria Tura, her hammish actor husband (played by Jack Benny), and the rest of the troupe go through hijinx galore to save Poland, the Resistance, and their own skins. Jack Benny wears a false beard and losing a mustache out the window of a car, while Carole Lombard seduces no less than three Gestapo officials within the span of 24 hours. There's a comedy routine with a corpse. A bit player dresses up as Hitler with a little mustache and fools about two dozen Gestapo guards into following him and deserting the real Hitler. Seriously, folks??

The hardest part about this movie is that, because it was made in 1942, it couldn't give a conclusive ending. Who knew who was really going to win? Instead, a few good people make it out of mainland Europe and on a plane to England. Not exactly a triumphant ending. I'm sure Lubitsch -- a German-born Jew -- could not have thought that comedy alone could mask the uncomfortable task of making a movie about the Polish occupation while Poland was still occupied. Several times throughout the movie, a bit player in the troupe (played by one of my favorite Lubitsch regulars, Felix Bressart) who dreams one day of playing Shylock in The Merchant of Venice keeps reciting the "If you prick us, do we not bleed?" speech. It's always a poignant speech, and Lubitsch lets its emotional weight come through each time, right before cutting away to more slapstick. It's a strange juxtaposition that echoes the even stranger juxtaposition of the movie itself, which played in theaters along with news reels about the realities of concentration camps and the war in Europe. The thought of this movie being made when the outcome of World War II was still uncertain is flabbergasting to me -- the movie is incredibly brave to treat the Nazis with such derision as well as humor, but also massively strange and unsettling if you didn't know the third act would end out all right, as it were.

In the end, I could never get over the oddity of the movie to actually enjoy it. Slapstick comedies are supposed to be heart-warming, or escapist, or something, not awkward and macabre as this one is. When it's ill-timed, laughter is not the best medicine.

2 stars -- good but falling far short of delightful.

BBC World News

2010-02-09T23:33:00.003-05:00

I've spent a lot of the last few snowed-in days listening to BBC online (through NPR, but I tend to listen early morning and late evening, when things switch to BBC). I feel very informed about Chilean politics and international car recalls now, but this is what tickled me the most: There was a story about Google's new social networking programming, and I cannot tell at all where the reporter was from. What UK accent makes you pronounce "Google" like "Giggle"?

Come Rain or Sleet or Snow

2010-02-09T11:29:00.005-05:00

I saw a UPS truck on my street today. I really really hope they continue to deliver later this week as more snow comes -- 16 pounds of flour and yeast are headed my way from the King Arthur Flour company. White breads and wheat breads are fine, but I'm ready to get my ryes and barleys on. (OK, OK, half a pound of that is chocolate, not flour, but it's for making pain au chocolat, so it still counts as bread ingredients, right?)

In other news, I am officially over the snow. Huge welt on my knee from falling when helping push someone's car out of the ditch around Columbus Circle. Stop driving, people, if you don't know how to drive in snow!

The Only Harp I Ever Wanted to Play

2010-02-09T11:02:00.003-05:00

Sweet sweet harmonica playing, by some young 'uns.

War Reporting for Cowards

2010-02-01T22:20:00.005-05:00

Amazon is selling this book for $3.77 at the moment -- if you are thinking about buying it, now is the time!

It's hard to imagine less than two weeks of actual war reporting being stretched into a whole book, but Ayres does it quite well, and I only rarely begrudged him my $12 in exchange for a memoir so light on the experience actually, you know, billed in the title. I found myself laughing out loud on the Metro, which is always a good sign for a book.

What's more, I never felt like Ayres was dogmatic in any way. This isn't an anti-war book. It's an anti-Ayres-being-at-the-war book. And it's not a dry political/military history book -- he doesn't spend much time discussing the overall politics and war strategy of the Iraq war (is it too soon for that?)

Best of all, Ayres appears to have real respect for the others who seem so alien to him, especially the Marines with whom he lived for a short time. Ayres says in the acknowledgments, "My own experiences in Iraq are trivial compared with those of the Marines; but warriors are rarely writers (when they are, they win Pulitzers), and I hope that my memoir helps readers understand what these men's daily lives are like." That it did.

(As an added bonus, Ayres' account of his experiences in NYC on 9/11 and the days shortly thereafter exhibit an insight into the emotions of those weeks better than anything I've read in a long time. I found myself contemplating my own perspective of those anthrax-and-terrorist-filled days much more deeply than I have in the last 5-7 years. A beautifully heart-wrenching chapter.)

Frazz

2010-01-31T23:41:00.003-05:00

I am loving today's Frazz:

Preach it, PHD Comics

2010-01-23T12:02:00.006-05:00

I want to see this PHD comic in newswriters' cubicles across the country, along with the ubiquitous Dilbert and Cathy strips: (click on image to go to the original -- and larger -- image)

Eep! It's 2010!

2010-01-21T22:04:00.009-05:00

I can't believe I haven't posted in two months! Time does get away, doesn't it? It's particularly sad because I've watched a bunch of movies and even read a few books in the last couple of months. And if I don't write down my thoughts, there's a chance I'll forget I've even seen something. As happened just this week when I told a coworker I hadn't seen Can't Hardly Wait. No wait. I have. Oh, sure, yeah, I thought it was *really* good -- can't you tell what a lasting impression it made?

So, because I'm lazy, but still feel guilty that I haven't posted yet in 2010, I'll just lift a few of my short Netflix reviews:

The Dress Code (2000): The writers here must have thought quirkiness equals character, so there's a lot of the former and little of the latter. But the actors make up for it and deliver wonderfully nuanced performances that only hint at the depths of the people portrayed. The end felt a little forced, but I didnt care by that point -- I was too charmed by all the actors, from Alex Linz (the little boy) and Stacey Halprin (the mother) to the big name stars. All in all, a nice little story. If you like this movie, I also recommend Saint Ralph. Its in a similar vein, and I liked it much more than this one. 2 stars.

Easy Virtue: Where is the Noel Coward wit? It's there, but it's hidden, and I found myself wanting more brandishing of that wit than faux-20s music and overly staged sets. There were a few really good moments, but they're in the preview. This one barely earns its three stars, but Kristin Scott Thomas bumps it up a notch. She is the one razor sharp character among a pile of dull blades. And without equal blades, a jousting contest is just not that interesting. And to top it all off, I wouldn't actually classify this as "romantic comedy," which is clearly what the studio is going for. Just look at who they cast -- I thought Colin Firth *meant* sappy romantic comedy! Plus, they totally sell the happy-go-lucky side of the movie in the trailer, product description, and even classification for Netflix. (Actually, I don't know if the studio suggests the classification, or if Netflix does that. But whoever did it, it's misleading.) This isn't Oscar Wilde and it isn't An Ideal Husband -- not exactly a happy ending here. 1.5 stars.

Two Brothers and a Bride: I was surprised how much I liked this movie. Basically, it's about two brothers who run a farm who go to Russia to find a wife to take care of them after their mother dies. David Arquette and Tim Blake Nelson star, along with Emily Mortimer as a journalist in Russia who starts following them around for her documentary on mail-order brides. Given the premise, it could have come out very preachy ("Bad human-trafficking-type business!") or misogynistic ("Ha-ha! Look at the funny desperate Russian women, or the silly feminists!") or make cruel fun of two farm boys ("Wow they are such hicks, and stupid, too, for being unable to take care of themselves without their mother"). Instead, it is a small but lovable movie that refuses to condemn any of the characters, even as it does recognize the ridiculous in almost all of them. Plus, you get the pleasure of very good performances by Mortimer, Arquette, and Nelson. Not a must-see, but a nice change of pace from your typical meet-cute romcoms. 2 stars.

Books coming to life

2009-11-23T00:47:00.003-05:00

I only wish I could embed this in the book I'm writing. Since I can't, I'll put it here.

via boingboing

Decline and Fall of Western Civilization

2009-11-02T23:05:00.005-05:00

Let's play a little game. I'm calling it "Decline and Fall." The goal is to list ever-declining versions of the same work of art, generally movies and plays and the like. The goal is to start with the best version and work your way down. For instance:

Taming of the Shrew (the play),
Taming of the Shrew (Elizabeth Taylor version),
10 Things I Hate About You,
10 Things I Hate About You (the TV show)
(Note: A shining beacon that all it not lost: Taming of the Shrew in the BBC remake Shakespeare Retold.)

My Fair Lady,
Pygmalion (the myth),
Pygmalion (the play),
She's All That

Freaky Friday (2003),
Wish Upon A Star,
Vice Versa,
Freaky Friday (1976),
Freaky Friday (1995),
It's a Boy Girl Thing

Apparently I'm called a NaNo?

2009-11-01T15:01:00.003-05:00

In an effort to be more proactive about having slightly masochistic hobbies, I am attempting to write a novel this month as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). 50,000 words in 30 days. Wish me luck.

On forced smiling and severed feet

2009-10-29T19:32:00.002-04:00

Smiling, language stereotypes, and a Ren & Stimpy reference:
Random discussion about whether languages that make you smile more also make you happier and a
hat that stabs you when you don't smile

Meanwhile, this sounds like something out of a TV crime drama or a mystery novel (via boingboing, obv):
Seventh Severed Foot Found in BC

Halloween with Wishbone

2009-10-05T23:02:00.003-04:00

It's October, and I'm feeling nostalgic, so have some Legend of Sleepy Hollows, Wishbone style: Link.

Boy I wish there were more Wishbone on DVD.

Quick Round Up

2009-10-04T22:00:00.014-04:00

I've seen some movies recently. (Please refrain from expressing your shock.) Here are one (or so) sentence reviews for a few of them:

Blindsight: Documentary about blind Nepali kids climbing up part of Mt. Everest, in which I found the editing strange, the German blind teacher annoying as hell, but the story nonetheless compelling. 2 stars.

Julie and Julia: One movie trying to tell two foodie stories but failing to tell either one completely and vaguely disappointing because of it. Worth watching once, though, because Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci are awesome as Julia Child and her husband. 2 stars.

He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not: The "twist" in this movie is utterly ruined if you've heard anything about this movie, or even seen the trailer, so I guess it's not really a twist, but nonetheless it's still stupefyingly predictable. It is fun to see Audrey Tatou as crazy and obsessed, at least. 2 stars.

Criminal: Poor man's Matchstick Men (and probably poor man's Nine Queens, on which Criminal is based, but which I have not seen). Worth it only if you absolutely must watch everything with John C. Reilly or Maggie Gyllenhaal. 1.5 stars

Emma (the 1972 BBC version): Couldn't even get through the first episode. I really don't like Jane Austen as much as I think I should. 1 star.

Norma Rae: Classic unionization story, which deserves its reputation as a classic. Sally Field is great, and frankly I loved the costuming, too -- poor factory workers during a hot summer actually look like it (sweat stains and all). 4 stars.

Seducing Dr. Lewis: Kind of silly but charming Quebecois movie about a small town that needs to convince a doctor to move to town in order to get a factory agree to build there. They decide to trick a doctor into thinking their town is more cosmopolitan than it is, and hilarity ensues. Though it's definitely hilarity of the Quebecois variety. 3 stars.

XKCD goodness

2009-09-09T18:51:00.002-04:00

The only change I would make to this xkcd comic: the percentage has got to be higher, at least if you count Punnett squares they make silently in their heads. At least if my friends and I are any indication.

Seven Deadly Sins

2009-09-05T00:39:00.003-04:00

Someone at Kansas State just mapped the seven deadly sins in the US (measured by statistics like STD rates for lust and thefts for envy). Apparently my new home in Washington DC has got them all covered.
Link to wired.com

Cadillac Records

2009-08-30T22:18:00.003-04:00

Verbatim from my short Netflix review (except for a change from a 5 star scale to my 4 star one here):

The history of Chicago blues deserves an amazing movie -- Muddy Waters, Etta James, Little Walter, Chuck Berry, Howling Wolf, and many others who aren't even mentioned in this movie led the dramatic lives that only bluesmen seem to live, and at the same time changed music, Chicago, and race relations forever.

Unfortunately this movie isn't amazing. It's entertaining enough, and the star-studded cast all have incredible talent, both in acting and in making music (which all the actors do on screen rather than dubbing it in). But the script tries to cram too much in at a time and ends up failing to do justice to these men and women's lives. This movie is too scattershot, with too many characters in the ensemble given too little screen time to explain their presence. If you don't already know who Howling Wolf is, for example, this movie won't really tell you. If you don't already know of him, his character is like an inside reference that you just don't get. At the same time, the movie is too generalized and too historically inaccurate to satisfy real blues fans. And if you know the songs being sung, they are off by just enough to drive you crazy (especially, for me, the Etta James songs, no matter how talented Beyonce is).

I was so ready to adore this movie, because I adore Chicago Blues. Instead, all I can say is that it inspired me to listen to my old CDs with Etta James, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, and all the rest, and made me want to read a real biography of the Chess family. That's enough to warrant a very solid two stars, but I'm so sad I can't give it more.

Prayer for my professor

2009-08-18T00:20:00.004-04:00

Over the past few weeks, I had forgotten to check some of the blogs I used to frequent. Not many blog posts can make me cry, but this one did. But not for the obvious reason (at least, not solely for that reason). It's just that Professor Stuntz's wisdom and strength are just so overwhelming to me that I have no other response. His amazing faith is such a reflection of God's work in him that, even with all the pain Professor Stuntz has had to endure, I find myself admiring him more than pitying him. In some (I feel somewhat perverse) way, just witnessing a tiny, infinitesimal part of Professor Stuntz's experience has blessed and humbled me. I pray for his family's peace and comfort in all of this, and that his journey (wherever it leads) will bring him even closer to the Lord.

Yes! I wasn't hallucinating this

2009-08-15T23:58:00.003-04:00

You know how you have vague memories, vague enough that you can't remember identifying information such that your friends don't think you're crazy, but vivid enough that you're absolutely sure your memory is real? I get that a lot with things I watched as a kid. For about a dozen years I was haunted by a memory of a terrifying movie (at least to my 4 year old self) with flashing lights and a cartoon kid who was lost and trying to get home but didn't get help from the things that were giving him grammar lessons when he asked questions. Then finally I realized what it was, thanks to a high school friend unwittingly recommending to me the original source material: The Phantom Tollbooth. Then my sister and I both swore we saw a version of Alice in Wonderland that no one had ever heard of, until I was finally able to find it on eBay.

Tonight I got to fill in another puzzle piece of my childhood movie experience. I was browsing allposters.com, which I do relatively frequently, actually. And found this, the first evidence that the strange Russian Tom Sawyer/Huckleberry Finn mix with no subtitles that we accidentally rented from the neighborhood video store (it was in the wrong box, so we were never 100% positive that it was Huck Finn, but my dad was pretty sure) actually exists.

That boy looks familiar, so I'm pretty sure it's the one. Mystery (partially) solved. Still not sure if it's this version or not, but I'm guessing it is.

Dexter: Just Blood

2009-07-29T01:45:00.006-04:00

Showtime’s dark drama Dexter (don’t blame me for the alliteration – after all, the show is based on a book called “Darkly Dreaming Dexter”) is about a forensics expert who’s also a serial killer. But wait! He’s a moral serial killer who only kills bad guys, so he still qualifies to be the center of a whole television show.

I had heard this line explaining Dexter so many times from people saying the show was excellent over the last couple years, and frankly I was a bit turned off by this summary of the premise. A serial killer anti-hero seems like such a gimmick: we’ve seen anti-heroes abound in critically acclaimed television recently – think Dr. House, Tony Soprano, Malcolm Reynolds (from Firefly), and even Jack Bauer breaking all those laws. A gimmicky serial killer show doesn’t interest me much as a concept. Who needs another crime drama? And serial killers are so Other that they’re not that psychologically interesting to me, unlike those other anti-heroes.

But I finally caved – partly because Dexter is on Instant Watch on Netflix and mostly because my sister started watching it. My sister being intrigued by a show is a good indicator that I will be, too, whether I initially like to admit it or not (see, e.g., Firefly & Doctor Who). So I watched the first episode, and then the whole first season.

Dexter, as both a show and a character, troubles me. They trouble me so much that this is a snapshot from my computer camera as I watched the second episode:

This show certainly trades in its share of blood and gore, and those who like that part of crime shows (or, say, liked the Angel of Death scene in Silence of the Lambs) will be satiated. I, on the other hand, don’t particularly like it. I’m either creeped out, or – more likely – disappointingly unmoved by fake gore because I keep thinking, “Hmm, I wonder what the techs used to mix that blood.” The sneer of disgust in the above snapshot isn’t me being grossed out by a murder scene, actually. It’s me watching the credits and thinking about the show in general. And yet I watched it, because I kept clinging to the theory that this show is more than it seems. I still think so, even though I’m not totally convinced.

(By the way, I also don’t find the show that funny, as many people on Netflix say. Yes, the sister has her moments and Dexter has some pretty dry jokes, but this isn’t a dramedy or a macabre black comedy about a serial killer (which has been done to perfection in Keeping Mum, a delightful movie I highly recommend). It’s a cruel little show that keeps your attention with a weird twist on the anti-hero trope and a bunch of blood.)

On the one hand, Dexter as a main character seems like a clever ruse by an inept writer who was tired of hearing that his characters weren’t lifelike or human enough. Creating a “loveable monster,” which is how Dexter is billed on the books and the DVD blurb, seems an easy out. A guy who has no human emotion is supposed to be an unconvincing character, right? This is no offense to the author Jeff Linsday. I haven’t actually read the books so I don’t know if they’re any good. But it certainly seems like a cop out.

The show also seems to cop out with respect to the larger themes it engages. Other shows about unlikable characters grapple with mortality, morality, and religion by creating equally articulate but oppositely opinioned supporting characters (one of the reasons I like House so much). Dexter, on the other hand, just starts from the premise that some people deserve to die; the only grappling comes with the question, “Yeah, but does that mean it’s OK for a serial killer to kill them?”

By creating a non-human main character – less human even than anthropomorphized animals and aliens in other shows – Dexter is no longer a human we have to condone or condemn. Instead he becomes a symbol of rightful anger and bloody justice. He is an outlet for viewers, who believe in the death penalty in overwhelming numbers, who hear about killers going free on legal technicalities (and who may remember O.J. Simpson), who live vicariously through the righteous vengeance of television characters. But vengeance isn’t ours, even in made-up books and television, and I find myself extremely reluctant to relate to Dexter or “root” for him as so many fans claim to do. The show ultimately rests the likeability of its main characters in an assumption about the inner cruelty of the viewers, and this conceit is what disturbs me the most about the series. That the show is popular seems to indicate that many people agree with this conceit, which is what disturbs me the most about the viewers of this show.

On the other hand, maybe the show and its viewers are more nuanced than that. The plots and overall arc of the first season are compelling and downright good storytelling. The multi-episode arc involving another mysterious serial killer is good (and I don't want to spoil it), even if parts of it are pretty predictable (as in, I figured out who it was the first scene he/she was in, even though there was no positive identification for several more episodes.) The actors are good, too, and some of the side stories of intra-office politics are delightfully raw and nuanced. Many of the side characters inspire empathy as well, such as a painfully honest cop who is separated from his wife because he told her about the one time he cheated on her.

Better still, even though the show revolves around a character who describes himself as neither human nor monster, Dexter does become slightly more human throughout the first series, once the premise is firmly established that he’s not. This might be because it’s impossible to create an interesting character with no emotions, but I like to think that the show is trying to break down what we think it means to be human.

If you look at it this way, the show raises questions it never discusses. In a way, this is more skillful than the shows I love (like House) that hit you with a Big Issue 2x4 whenever an interesting ethical or philosophical tension arises. And the questions raised by Dexter are both important and complex: If we fake intimacy, is it still intimate? What are the limits of anti-Kantian ethics in terms of preventing harm to others? Do we feel more compassion for Dexter because he’s a foster child with hints at a horrible past, and if we do, why? Can we really mitigate the evil of serial killing by saying, “Oh, but you had a bad childhood”? And that raises the question of the whole premise: can we really mitigate the evil of serial killing by saying, “Oh, but you killed the bad guys, at least”? Why is Dexter the serial killer our hero, but Ice Truck Killer the serial killer our villain, when they are so clearly linked? Ultimately, how can we say someone is irreversibly good or bad? And what do we do about it if we can make such a determination?

That a television show can raise so many questions, especially about what it reveals about the people who watch and like the show and the main character, reveals some hidden mastery. I’d like to think so, at least. And so who am I to judge my fellow viewers who may be thinking on this level, too, rather than simply using Dexter as an outlet for bloody justice or merely blood?

So, even though I started with that grimace, I did end up entertained by some good storytelling and intrigued by some interesting questions. All in all, 3 stars.

Some M&Ms are better for you

2009-07-28T12:24:00.008-04:00

You may have thought that M&Ms were all the same -- reds are really no different from greens or blues or whatever. Just a silly artificial coating that most certainly does NOT prevent them from melting in your mouth instead of your hand. But science tells us otherwise: the dye from blue M&Ms (and blue gatorade) can reduce spinal injury in mice (and turn them blue). Pretty cool, huh?

Summer break is over

2009-07-26T16:39:00.004-04:00

Since I start work again in a week, I'm going to write off the last two months as summer vacation from my blog (and, frankly, facebook, and most other forms of communication). And now I'm back. With this non-media posting. Oh well -- I guess it takes a while to get back in the swing of things:

Someone is suing Denny's to force them to label the sodium contents of their food. While I'm generally all for information, I think a lawsuit is the wrong way to get it. Over at The Atlantic website, Marion Nestle says that this is about consumer choice -- you can add salt at the table to low-sodium food, but you get no choice if the food is high sodium. Umm... no. Consumer choice is deciding whether to go to Denny's at all. If you can't tell that fast food is salty without being given sodium mg information, you've got health problems a lawsuit isn't going to fix. So go to Denny's, or not. Ask them to publish ingredient information on the threat of not buying their food otherwise. But don't sue, man. It's just going aggravate the lives of my fellow law clerks.

PHD is a brilliant comic strip

2009-05-21T10:34:00.006-04:00

(click on image for larger version)
For real. And it applies to pretty much any real research.

Sherlock Holmes

2009-05-19T22:20:00.003-04:00

It's been a long time since I read any Arthur Conan Doyle, I know, but I don't remember Sherlock Holmes being quite so much of an action hero (though I am glad that it looks like they've kept him a bit crazy and possibly even kept the drug addiction)

Big numbers visualization

2009-05-16T14:06:00.003-04:00

Check out this video's visualization of what President Obama's pledge to cut $100 million dollars meant in relation to the rest of the budget. (Yes, he's now pledging 17 billion. There's another video about that on this guy's Youtube page, but it's not as visually helpful to me.)

More Unusually Smart David Mitchell

2009-05-07T18:04:00.007-04:00

For your procrastinating pleasure:
Peep Show is now on Hulu. More David Mitchell greatness. Plus that other guy who hangs around him. :)

Unusually Smart David Mitchell

2009-05-02T20:21:00.005-04:00

I absolutely love David Mitchell -- something about smart British funny guys I guess. Anyway, I found this to be particularly topical given the number of end-of-year black tie events I've had to go to recently. Geez, guys have it easy. The dress code is even named after how easy it is for them.

If only labs were really like this . . .

2009-04-23T22:20:00.004-04:00

What do you get when you mix The Village People with a bio and chem research supplier?
A very weird music video:

(thanks, L. you made my evening.)

Pseudo-Science drives me nuts

2009-04-17T17:51:00.002-04:00

Hilarious commentary by Sarah Haskins on stupid skin care commercials using "sciency" words and pictures to sell things:

(yes, it's from February, but I just started going through archives)

Japan reminding me of France, for the first and only time

2009-04-15T22:53:00.003-04:00

This story about young urban Japanese men and women getting jobs in agriculture reminds me of an excellent French film about a young woman who does the same: The Girl from Paris (more meaningfully called "Une hirondelle a fait le printemps" in French, which means "A swallow [the bird] made the spring"). Definitely worth a watch

Brilliant Frivolity

2009-04-08T00:29:00.003-04:00

Sometimes silly, delightful little cream puffs of fiction are so silly and delightful as to be brilliant. For some reason, this genre has been my focus of the last week, starting with reading Something New (aka Something Fresh), the first Blandings Castle book by P.G. Wodehouse, the absolute master of all things silly and delightful.

Then I found Rings on her Fingers, which is quite like The Lady Eve -- Henry Fonda getting duped by a beautiful con artist who ends up falling in love with him. This got me thinking of Preston Sturges (as Lady Eve is one of his), so I rented Easy Living, an early Preston Sturges movie that somehow I had missed until now even though Jean Arthur stars. Perhaps in another mood I would not have thought it so wonderful, but I have decided I am quite fond of it. Screwball comedy is film's answer to P.G. Wodehouse and humorists of his ilk.

And now I am back to P.G. Wodehouse. Damn you Google Books and your full pdf texts of books out of copyright. I shall now go start reading A Damsel in Distress, forsaking much needed sleep.

Ghost Town

2009-03-23T19:04:00.004-04:00

Most of the time, if I say the first twenty minutes of a film were the best, and it all went downhill from there, I mean that the movie was bad. Not so here. Ghost Town started at such a high point that downhill is still pretty good. The first twenty minutes are some of the funniest I have ever seen – somehow even the opening credits of dental equipment were funny to me. (Why are plaster teeth molds funny? Not sure, but they are.) Those first twenty minutes confirm for me that Ricky Gervais may be the funniest man alive. His plays a misanthropic dentist, who seems to like his profession because it means he can stuff people’s mouths with cotton when he’s tired of listening to them. Any introvert will cringe with recognition at his desire to avoid human contact to the point of being rude. (Really, who hasn’t let those elevator doors close so you don’t have to ride with someone?)

Basically, Gervais’s character, Bertram Pincus, can see dead people because he “dies” for seven minutes during a routine colonoscopy. His discovery of this ability, and the reason for it, are truly brilliant, and Kristen Wiig (of SNL) has never been as hilarious as she is playing the surgeon who operated on him. Greg Kinnear plays Frank Herlihy, one of these ghosts, and he somehow hits a perfect note of charming and sleazy. Frank claims to have unfinished business that consists of breaking up his widow’s impending marriage, and annoys Bertram until he agrees to help. Of course, in so doing, Bertram ends up falling in love with the wife (Tea Leoni).

Thus begins the second part of the story, which is slightly less funny than the first part. Pincus cracks jokes with the widow, and Gervais is a genuinely good joke teller. He’s funny, but it’s no longer as heartbreakingly hilarious. Misanthropic avoidance of people was better than cracking jokes about how funny Chinese names are.

The third and last part of the movie is the weakest, but it’s still satisfactory. In the end, you have to get rid of some of these ghosts, which means Bertram Pincus must eventually crack and be a passably good guy. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – I actually did want his character to grow, unlike Roger Ebert – the movie just folds and ties up loose ends. This leads to some saccharin moments, and the main “revelation” of the movie about the nature of ghosts isn’t actually that spectacular. But since we do hope for a happy ending, which is a hard note to hit in a story about dead people and misanthropes, the fact that it didn’t come off as totally unpalatable is pretty impressive.

But if you don’t like the sugary ending, and find yourself missing the brilliant acidity of Bertram Pincus before he had a change of heart, I suggest you do what I did: after watching, just go back and watch those first twenty minutes again.

His Girl Friday

2009-03-20T12:08:00.003-04:00

Best movie not under an original copyright. Plus, it's Howard Hawks, Cary Grant, Rosalind Russell, and one of best fast-talking dames in the history of film. And now it's available for free online. Thank you, Hulu.

I Read Books! Bartleby the Scrivener

2009-02-08T22:16:00.004-05:00

This semester I'm taking a class called Law and Literature. Our first assignment was Billy Budd and Bartleby the Scrivener, both written by Herman Melville. Somehow I've never become a Melville fan, even though I love nautical stories and maritime history (and have read most of David Cordingly's books on the subject, which I highly recommend). Maybe it's the fact that the stories move so slowly, or that they are so allegorical as to become uninteresting to me. Anyway, here are the thoughts I wrote for our first assignment:

When I read these stories, I was home for vacation. My father asked me what “Bartleby the Scrivener” was about. “Well, it’s about a copy clerk in a law office who does nothing, but his boss feels awkward and doesn’t fire him, and then the clerk dies,” I replied.

Perhaps I was being too harsh in describing the story so simplistically, but I found the story quite dull and Bartleby unsympathetic. The narrator went out of his way to say that Bartleby was irreproachably honest and decent, but I was unconvinced. The narrator claimed to be irritated and repulsed by Bartleby because he was a lost soul and pity was no longer helpful, but I think my dislike of Bartleby came from a different source – what, though, was hard to determine.

Perhaps I am just not as curious about Bartleby as the Lawyer was. I did not wonder where Bartleby came from or what his story was – I just wondered what was the point. And a paragraph at the end did not serve to satisfy or even whet my appetite. So . . . Bartleby was a dead letter personified? He was dead inside? He was just extremely dissatisfied with his job? Perhaps I’m not smart enough to get it, but that still doesn’t make me care about a character so impassive and unchangeable.

The Lawyer attempted to be charitable towards his employee, and refused to fire him. Me, I felt no such charity: Bartleby didn’t seem infirm or so aged that he required compassion. Rather, he seemed to require a good shaking to get him to do something – anything! – for his own good. I felt like calling the police to remove him from the office might serve the same purpose as slapping someone who is being hysterical (Do people really do this? It make sense to me, but I’ve only seen it in the movies.).

Perhaps it is my youth that makes me so unfeeling towards copyist, while the Lawyer’s age gives him wisdom to see Bartleby as “the victim of innate and incurable disorder.” Or perhaps it is my all too American urge (encouraged by Harvard Law School) to value productivity above all else that gives me no pity for Bartleby, no inclination to cry out about the man and his symbolism for all humanity. The Lawyer himself is unambitious and has created “the cool tranquility of a snug retreat.” Even in my envy for that sort of life, I feel slight aversion to the Lawyer in his own complacency. How much further beyond aversion, then, do Bartleby and his inaction inspire? (And how much does it prove my point about American compulsion to productivity when Microsoft Word doesn’t recognize the word “unambitious?”)

My hope is that I would not be so unfeeling towards a real person – that I would feel some sort of compassion towards and interest in a real-life Bartleby. I hope that my disdain for Bartleby is for him as a character in a story. My movie-trained sensibilities were frustrated by a story that revolves around an immovable person. The other clerks were no exemplars of Puritan work ethic, but they interested and amused me because they did things. The Lawyer was unambitious, but I still respected him for his introspection and desire to do something, even if he decided on something so ridiculous as moving his offices in order to avoid his own clerk. Bartleby, on the other hand, was like a passive rock, and I felt that, like a rock, he didn’t warrant twenty pages of narration.

The Band's Visit

2009-01-06T12:43:00.004-05:00

The Band's Visit begins with intertitles that say: "An Egyptian Police Band got lost in Israel overnight. . . . It was not very important." I'm not sure if this was an attempt to lower expectations, but it certainly did explain what this movie is about. It's a small movie. A microcosm that doesn't concern itself with the outside world. It's not about international politics, even though it could be given the mixture of Arabic and Hebrew and English that the movie contends with. It's not a grand love story or an action-packed spy story. And therein lies its beauty -- by not trying to do too much, the movie excels in what it does do.

There's not much more to the plot than that first sentence. It's about a group of Eygyptian policemen who end up in the middle of nowhere in Israel and have to spend the night because they can't get the next train until the morning. And there are no hotels, so they spend the night with a restaurant owner and her friends. Their lives change because of the night, but not too much, and they affect the lives of the Israeli townspeople they meet, but not too much.

This setup allows for some lovely character exploration, and the actors here are quite frankly amazing: normal, nuanced, full of pathos but not pathetic, and funny. In other words, they'd never make it in Hollywood (also, they're just not good looking enough). Basically all I want to do in this review is related different scenes -- how the very conservative, reserved leader of the police band spends the evening "out on the town" with a free-spirited and direct Israeli woman. Neither of them changes, and they don't become friends, but by the end of the movie he poignantly sees the other person as an opportunity missed -- someone who might have changed his life if only he had been a different person. Then there's the group of men who spend the night at the house of a young married man, and the men end up singing American jazz songs together. The youngest band member decides to hang out with a young Israeli man and helps him pick up a girl in what is my new favorite scene in any movie ever. It's just so funny without using any words. Trust me, it's worth seeing the whole movie just for that moment.

I'm at a loss to sum up the movie. I feel I can't really do it justice by describing it, so I will end with a paraphrase of a bit of dialogue that I think the writers meant to sum up the movie for themselves. One of the band members plays the clarinet, and starting composing a concerto but only has a few melancholic bars written. He plays them several times in the movie, but he says he never finished it because he didn't know how it ended and he got sidetracked by life. In this scene, he is sitting next to the crib of his host's baby. The band member sings the melody to the baby, and the host says, "Maybe this is how you concerto ends. Not with a symphonic crash and triumphant finish, but with with a baby in a crib in a simple room with no decorations on the walls." Sometimes the small bare film is more beautiful than the most ornate and complex movie one could come up with.

3.5 stars

Pushing Daisies (as promised)

2008-12-23T11:34:00.005-05:00

OK, I promised an explanation of why I love Pushing Daisies. Now that the series is cancelled (only three more episodes to go!), it seems sad to write about it, but since I've been spending the last few days trying to convince my sister how amazing the show is, here I go:

The main premise of Pushing Daisies is a bit confusing, and I'm sure it was its demise. Ned is a pie maker who can raise the dead with his touch -- this includes people, animals, and plants. If he touches it again, though, it dies. Plus, if he raises something from the dead for more than one minute, something else of equal "value" dies (e.g., a person for a person, or a plant for a plant). The words make it sound hokey and stupid, but the result is much more magical.

The first magical thing is that Ned's girlfriend is someone he raised from the dead. This means he can never touch her. My sister hates this, but I think it's amazing. First of all, it's very old fashioned. I'm reminded of the censorship days of movies and television, when love stories had to be chaste even if sexually charged -- Ned and Charlotte (aka Chuck) even sleep in separate twin beds with a nightstand in between like all the sitcom couples of old.

Also, I'm pretty sure all romance is about not getting what you want. If you never get it, it's a tragedy. If you get delayed gratification, it's a comedy. Pushing Daisies pushes this definition and creates a tragicomedic relationship. Boy gets girl in once sense, but in another he doesn't (and never will).

The second magical thing is that death becomes malleable. One of my main gripes with modernity is we care so much about death -- we're so afraid of it. Maybe this is just my youth talking, but I'm not sure why we are so scared. Shows with death tend to try to drive this home, making death as sad and overwhelming and ugly as our society perceives it to be (see, e.g., House, every cop show ever, every mob show, even Six Feet Under). Pushing Daisies doesn't make light of death, but it isn't afraid of it, either. People die horrible deaths, but it's never gruesome. And since people can come back to life, but the story doesn't have time for them to go into shock or horror about being dead, it's nice to see characters who don't have a problem with being dead, either. (This reminds me of other Bryan Fuller shows, such as Dead Like Me, which was also brilliant).

The third magical thing is Kristin Chenoweth. She's just amazing -- a funny little spitfire who would be the grounding normal character of the series, if she weren't so quirky herself. In fact, all of the characters are quirky. It's a bit forced at times, but it's nice to know that people don't fit into neat categories -- the hardboiled detective also knits and makes pop-up books, and the shut-in aunts are former synchronized swimmers.

Finally, I love the production design of the show -- I absolutely love the costumes, which tend to be all over the place from 40s to 70s, but always are amazing. I love the visual jokes (Chenoweth's character is named Olive, and she recently got a rain slicker with olives on it, and Emerson Cod the detective's slicker had fish on it). And I love the myriad movie visual references, especially since they are so Hitchcock-heavy (The Birds, Vertigo, Psycho and Suspicion have all been copied. I'm really hoping for the key scene from Notorious before the end of the series, but that may be asking for too much).

Sure, there are faults with the show. The strange premise is often bent or broken -- some things come alive and others don't, but there's no real rhyme or reason to it (dead leaves but not wood? dead fruit but not other baking supplies?). There are a couple of camera and editing problems -- a visual joke involving a one-eyed aunt in the pilot episode was done backwards, and it drives me nuts every time I see it.

But its faults are easily forgotten when weighed against the fact that there's really nothing else like it. For people who like movies and old-fashioned TV more than reality TV or procedural dramas, this is a wonderful show. Plus, Lee Pace is hot.

The Windy City is mighty purty

2008-12-09T18:17:00.004-05:00

OK, this isn't really movie or television related, but to me it is entertaining. I don't know what it is about Illinois, but I don't get angry at corruption there, just amused. I find the Daleys, Al Capone & the rest of the Chicago Outfit, "vote early vote often," and even Governor Blagojevich strangely loveable. Maybe it's because even in corruption, Chicago & Illinois are misfits (how bad do you have to be to be ostracized by the Five Families??). Maybe it's because I watch too many old gangster movies. Maybe it's because the corruption there is always so ridiculously outrageous (What makes a governor think he can get away with a "corruption crime spree?" And let's not even talk about Chicago city aldermen, or 3 others of the last 7 governors.) Or maybe it's just that I love Chicago so much that even its state can do no wrong. So even while on one level I'm very sad about Governor Blagojevich, and apalled by what he did, it doesn't make me love Illinois any less.

Wallace and Gromit Are Back

2008-12-04T00:05:00.002-05:00

So very excited that the boys are back. Official site and less official video

My new obsession

2008-11-13T19:48:00.003-05:00

Pushing Daisies is my new obsession. I found it last week and immediately fell in love. I've ordered Season 1 on DVD and watched all of this season so far at least 3 times each.

More about why I love the show to follow.

Wallace and Gromit!!

2008-08-17T12:18:00.006-04:00

I love Wallace and Gromit for several reasons:

The patience involved in claymation always amazes me.
Cheese!!
Rube Goldberg devices in all their delightful frivolity

And so I'm super happy with Hulu right now for adding Cracking Contraptions to their lineup. Now if only they could get A Close Shave. . . .

Harvie Krumpet online

2008-08-02T23:36:00.005-04:00

Don't know how long this will be up (it's on the Youtube screening room), but it's worth checking out. Harvie Krumpet on Youtube:

Movie Analogy

2008-08-01T17:35:00.002-04:00

These imposed sartorial standards in China remind me of, of course, the ridiculous hoop skirts on Siamese women in this movie.

I Procrastinate (And So Can You!)

2008-07-17T22:09:00.002-04:00

Gosh this seems like the story of my life some days. I really need to figure out how to get things done and not overcommit. Oh, and also just go ahead and do things I don't want to do (ahem! that phone call!) From the Prelinger Archives:

The Women

2008-07-15T21:50:00.005-04:00

If you don't know anything about the movie The Women, at some point you will feel there's something off about it. Something strange; something forced. I'm not quite sure when you'll realize it, but it'll happen. You see, there are 130 speaking roles in the movie, and who knows how many people on screen. The movie is set in homes, and department stores, and spas, and other semi-public places and yet it seems that half the population has been deleted from the screen. Not a single man or boy appears on screen during the whole film.

We're used to seeing movies with mostly or only men. I don't remember any women in The Great Escape, or any in Platoon. No wait, there were some mothers in the village in Platoon. It's hard to just take women out of village scenes after all, even if they're just for show.

And that's my problem with The Women -- unlike war movies, where the lack of women is actually an issue, and represents a loss to the men, this movie just deletes men as if they don't matter. This sounds like an extreme tactic to be all about women, to be a proto-feminist movie about the issues and foibles and world of "women only." But actually, the whole movie is about the crazy competition that women have with each other in order to get men. Like a No Boys Allowed sign outside a bunch of grade school girls' secret hideout where they gossip about boys, The Women is, as its DVD case proudly proclaims, all about men. Apparently, the lives of these women revolve completely around men -- whose husband is having an affair, which rich bachelor can be hooked into being a woman's next husband after Reno, and on and on.

Now let's be fair about this: there are few movies with the star power of the Women. Made in that glorious year of Hollywood, 1939, it's got so many excellent actresses that there were problems with billing and who got to have the biggest names on screen. Apparently Norma Shearer had written into her contract that no one's name could be bigger than hers in the title credits (except for a leading man's), but damned it Joan Crawford wasn't getting at least as good. So they both got huge lettering, and Rosalind Russell had to be content with smaller letters and just stealing the show with her portrayal of the completely over-the-top gossip Sylvia Fowler. There's also Paulette Goddard (Mrs. Charlie Chaplin), Joan Fontaine (who was in Hitchcock's Rebecca) and Mary Boland (who you probably have never heard of, but she's brilliant as the worldly but silly, "in love with being in love" Countess DeLave).

And it's also a comedy of manners, sort of a female version of Oscar Wilde, spearing gossipers and the scheming ways of rich housewives (remind you of any reality TV these days?). I love these sorts of comedies, and I love those women lighting up the screen. So why didn't I like this movie?

It's not just about the No Men on Screen gimmick. It makes sense for a play, and I applaud the idea of seeing if it would work, even if it's a bit forced. But -- can I even allow my feminist self to say it? --- these women need men. Without men on screen to actually fight for or even fight over, all of the women's catty tactics towards each other just play out in a vacuum, and I could never really care about who got the guy in the end. Without men, you could never see these women be sexy and smart and winsome; they're just fighting with each other. Without men anywhere to be found, their world seems impossibly small and trivial. Where is the outside world? Where are the working classes on the streets of Manhattan (both men and women) where this movie supposedly takes place?

I often love the women in movies made around this time. The dames, the sidekicks, the gamines -- they might all exist before the glorious sexual revolution of the 1970s, but those women had it figured out. They knew how to fight to be equal with men but still be women. Think of Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday just one year later -- a fast-talking reporter who can give and good as she gets from Cary Grant. Think of Katharine Hepburn in Woman of the Year, playing a brilliant, high-powered political columnist. Think of Barbara Stanwyck in basically anything she did. For goodness' sakes, even think of Vivian Leigh in that movie made the same year as the Women. Instead of being a smart, funny movie about smart, funny (if also conniving) women, The Women ends up just making the women small and ugly -- even if their names were big up there on the screen.

Wanted

2008-07-15T11:23:00.005-04:00

This is for John Mark.

Imagine a group of twenty-something men -- men of my generation -- in a room together talking about their favorite things. Video games, a hot chick in leather (but not too much), stuff blowing up.

Then imagine this group of men put all of their favorite things in a movie. Sound of Music, I assure you, it would not be.

Instead, you'd get what is called a summer blockbuster movie. And if one of the men in that hypothetical room vaguely remembers Greek mythology from high school, you'd get the movie Wanted. The only way to describe it is an excess -- and I do mean excess -- of all things a post-adolescent boy would consider "badass." It's got Angelina Jolie shooting things, Morgan Freeman being the wise godlike figure, and a Fight Club set-up with the main character (played by James McAvoy, who really can do better) living a zombie-like existence until he is rescued to a group of elite fighters who spend about as much screen time beating each other up as training as killing targets. Plus, most of the shots work perfectly as a video game set up. What more could a boy want? A Rocky reference or two? Oh, they are there, too (mmm . . . meat on hooks . . .). Oh, and throw in a little bit of the Matrix for good measure -- those special effects were cool, right? And everyone's mind was blown by the whole existential "There is no spoon" discussion. Might as well throw in some fate/pre-determination stuff here, too.

It is a movie that revels in excess, and this can be entertaining, but only if you've already got a high tolerance for that sort of thing. The combination of influences was a merry jumble, if somewhat overwhelming, and I must admit I enjoyed the unselfconscious stupidity of throwing all those movie and pseudo-philosophical references into a grab bag of ideas and visuals. However, if you, like me, are not used to playing Grand Theft Auto for hours on end, sitting through so many fight scenes with frenetic editing and pounding hard rock soundtrack becomes a little numbing to the senses. I'd say I liked about half of the movie and for the rest worried about an impending headache.

My friend's favorite part of the movie was when our "hero" -- I really hate calling him that -- hits someone with a keyboard. Keys fly off (as well as a tooth), and they magically align into two angry words I won't type here, but suffice it to say that the second one was "you."

This effect was clever, and somewhat funny, but I think it works a lot better in its original comic book (or is it "graphic novel"?) form. I haven't read any of the original source, but I suspect a form that uses the written word doesn't have as much trouble having to explain if the words spelled out in a picture are actually spelled out in that picture's world. When a superhero hits the villain with a POW! written in a starburst, I've never thought about where that starburst came from. But when a bullet said the word "Goodbye" in this movie, I was distracted from the moment by the nagging question, "Is that actually written there? Does it appear magically, or was it already on the bullet when it was loaded, therefore not having any specific significance in this situation?" Some parts of the comic book medium just don't work as well in a movie.

I suppose I could summarize the plot a bit, but it doesn't really matter. James McAvoy is a sadsack temp who discovers his father was part of an elite group of assassins called the Fraternity. He gets recruited, nominally to kill the man who killed his father, and quickly learns how to fight, get bloody, and curve bullets. Apparently the Fraternity has a couple of magical items in its possession. First, a magical loom's threads tell the Fraternity who should be killed (imagine the Fraternity to the be the Three Fates with guns). Second, magical paraffin wax baths serve the useful plot device of helping the assassins recover from their rough-and-tumble ways.

James McAvoy's character quickly becomes as badass as the rest of the gang, and then surpasses them in badassness when he discovers a secret of the Fraternity and decides to Do What Is Right -- which involves a lot of blowing stuff up. In fact, one of his old jackass friends, after being beaten up by him, intones in an awed voice that the friend he once took advantage of is now "the man." You can almost hear the voices of those young men writing the script bowing down to the awesomeness of the character they have just created.

Unfortunately no one has told those young writers that trying really hard to be badass doesn't actually make someone badass. You have to be a little cooler, a little more sleek, a little more aloof. I can't believe I'm about to say this, but give me Keanu and the half-baked mysticism of the Matrix any day.

1.5 stars

Doctor Who & Science Fiction

2008-06-30T17:33:00.006-04:00

Recently I read a blog post about science fiction and how it's not very popular among women. one of Professor Somin's assertions caught my eye:

Casual empiricism suggests that most people with a strong interest in science fiction or fantasy literature developed that interest very as children or teenagers. I think it's very difficult to persuade an adult to take an interest in these genres if they never had previously.

Empirics aside, it must be noted that adults are not immutable in their interests. I have always avoided science fiction by and large. What little science fiction and fantasy I read comes dangerously close to being what I will call "literary fiction" -- fiction about books, history, etc. (but not historical fiction). Jasper Fforde novels are the prime example here. A couple Terry Pratchett novels are as deep I wade into science fiction. I've also always disdained of science fiction television. I pretty much can't stand any of the Star Treks, although I do like the original in small doses for its kitsch value.
So it surprises me greatly to tell you that my new TV obsession is the revived series of Doctor Who. I've thought about it quite a bit in the past couple weeks, as I've been devouring the first three seasons and part of the fourth, and I think I know why:

In the end, science fiction isn't really a description of the type of storytelling you're going to get. It's like "westerns" -- all you know is the location of the plot, not anything about it. The problem in the genre occurs when an author thinks that said location matters more than the rest of the story. When westerns are just cowboy and Indian shoot-em-ups, when science fiction devolves into monotone repetition of fanciful pseudo-science, then the genre is in real trouble. But if you dig beneath the surface, the new Doctor Who is really just an action comedy that happens to have made-up places and people. Star Trek is just a soap opera with the same (I know I'm going to get killed for saying that, but there it is -- all the episodes I've seen are so *serious*!). I like Doctor Who because though it caters to the obsessive sci-fi geeks who live for finding patterns hidden in the episodes, many of the story lines are basically just ghost stories littered with strange jokes. The quirky humor is everywhere: take even the fact that the doctor's space ship isn't some cool, sleek, "boys' toy" but rather a blue police box because the spaceship's cloaking device got stuck. There's plenty of sci-fi standbys like teleporting, but in the end the science doesn't matter as much as the plots and stories: the only two repeating "gadgets" are a blank piece of "psychic" paper and a "sonic" screwdriver.
And the use of historical plots as well as outer space plots makes the thing more like that "literary" fiction I like -- I geeked out a little bit when they visited Shakespeare and the Doctor quoted Dylan Thomas to the Bard but then told him he couldn't use it because it was "someone else's." My other favorite episode from that season (3) takes place in 1913.

So, maybe if we're all concerned about making science fiction attractive to girls as well as boys, maybe writers should take a hint from Doctor Who, which reaches about a broad an audience of British children as it can possible get. Or maybe that's just a commentary about British television and the forced ubiquity of the BBC.

Priceless

2008-06-22T13:54:00.002-04:00

Another mini-review:

I came to this movie to watch Audrey Tatou, who I enjoyed so much in Amelie, and to relive Breakfast at Tiffany's, a brilliant and beautiful movie of which this is a loose adaptation. In the end, though, Ms. Tatou suffers from a script and direction that to some extent reduced her to a mannequin for all the expensive labels draped over her body. The best scenes are closeups of her, where she is actually allowed to act and remind of us her gamine quality rather than being forced to strut about in a manner very much like the women in Sex and the City. However, this movie still has wit and charm, and the minor characters are all perfect caricatures (especially the dog owners at the beginning of the movie). Most importantly, I absolutely fell in love with Gad Elmaleh, whose fumbling and awkwardness is subtle enough to reveal both charm and intelligence. I've read (but not yet seen) that he is even better in the Valet, but this was plenty good for me.

Spartacus: mini-review

2008-06-22T13:52:00.003-04:00

OK, I've got lots of work still to do this weekend, but something's better than nothing, right? Here's my review from Netflix:

Spartacus is NOT your typical Kubrick in terms of lasting takeaway message -- the nihilism and despair that linger in Clockwork Orange, 2001, and Dr. Strangelove just don't exist here. It is, however, typical Kubrick insofar as it is masterful. There is not an actor in this film that I did not admire more after watching Spartacus -- they all give amazing performances, which is pretty easy, I suppose, if you have such amazing material. This would be worth a spot in your queue just to watch the famous "I am Spartacus!" scene, but it's really oh so much more. It's got layers and layers here, with certain parts of the characters' lives (I'm thinking especially Tony Curtis here) obfuscated because of the Censor Board. But that only makes it better -- you have to actually be thinking and caring about these characters to understand why they do what they do. And it's well worth the effort.

Sorry for the inconvenience

2008-06-16T16:04:00.002-04:00

I know I've been away forever -- sorry! I've been having computer problems, and of course there were finals and vacation and starting a summer job in there, too. In any case, I've been making my way through some movies in the past few weeks, and I hope to add some new reviews soon. To give an idea of some reviews in the hopper, I'm having to take the summer to rewatch some AFI movies. As many of you know, after college I made it a point to watch every movie on the AFI 100 Years . . . 100 Movies list, which was made in 1998. Well, in 2007, the American Film Institute decided to update that list, knocking off 23 films and replacing them with 23 other films. 1/5 of the movies were incorrectly put on the list??? And only 4 films from 1997 to 2006 were added, so we're talking some serious revisions. Anyway, I'm watching those movies added to the list that I haven't already seen (and thanking my lucky stars for film class in college, without which I wouldn't have seen some of the harder-to-find films).

Exam Elixir

2008-05-03T20:41:00.004-04:00

As it's study season here at school, I found this short instructional/propaganda film extremely apropos. From the goodness that is the Prelinger Archives at archive.org.

Smart People

2008-04-28T00:22:00.002-04:00

Smart People fits into the mass-audience pseudo-indie film category that some of the most popular movies of the past few years (Juno, Napoleon Dynamite) come from. But with over-exposure comes being over-done. This is a passably enjoyable film, exhibiting both the best and the worst of the genre.
On one hand, all the actors (except SJP, who mostly just looks like she's mixing Family Stone with SATC and hoping that'll pass as acting) inhabit their characters incredibly, revealing their fear and vulnerability under the hard exteriors that come with being "smart" and "successful." I really loved the poignancy of Ellen Page's character -- a high school girl whose desire to live up to her father has sapped her of her childhood. Dennis Quaid, as lonely, over-compensating misanthropic professor, is also amazing.
Unfortunately, the great performing suffered from a script at times too obvious ("We're smart people; we'll figure it out" is a bit of a 2x4, no?) and direction too blatant (a brilliant bit with Thomas Haden Church's character posting signs on telephone poles is almost ruined by calling too much attention to the gag). And, the story has too many haphazard events unnecessary to the resolution of the film (I'm thinking mostly of the son's girlfriend, the recommendation letter, and the pregnancy).
In the end, though I enjoyed it, I wish the movie had lived up to its name and been a little more, well, smart.

2.5 stars.

Play Misty For Me

2008-04-17T21:42:00.005-04:00

Clint Eastwood is my mother's favorite actor, and so, in honor of the approaching holiday in her honor, I watched Clint's directorial debut. (OK, well, I didn't really watch it for that reason, but I did watch it in large part because I grew up with my mother gushing over the man.) I must confess horror movies don't generally do it for me. With the exception of Hitchcock and his disciples, I can never really get into them. I don't particularly like gore -- it either grosses me out, or just as often looks way too fake for me to do anything other than stare at it with an amateur director/critic's eye and just be unimpressed. And the whole idea of being scared or "thrilled" rarely works differently -- the only movie that has come even close to freaking me out since I was 16 and started watching R rated movies was The Shining. Everything else just seems too contrived for me. It's so formulaic that there's no horror involved -- you know exactly who's going to die or get hurt and when, and that just takes all the fun out of it. It's not like romcom, where the formula supports the genre; horror is supposed to surprise and startle you, but if it's so obviously working off something as predictable as sewing patter, well, I'm not sold.

So maybe I'm not the best person to review this piece with a favorable eye, but while I thought the movie was decent, my main comment is that Play Misty For Me has become a period piece -- everything about it is steeped in the early 70s, which is fun to watch but even more distracting to the idea of a thriller. Even the suspense seems dated: a quaint idea based on the premise that someone would meet a woman, slowly realize she is suicidal and has psychotic episodes, and then proceed to do nothing about it until all sorts of havoc has been wreaked. However, if you can get over the things that date this movie, it's quite enjoyable: the actors are all young and passionate (I mean that in all senses of the word) and the plot makes for a simple vehicle for them to chew scenery and revel in 1970s California, which is shot quite beautifully (red woods, ocean, and cliffs abound). The direction is sometimes predictable (lots of shots that seem omniscient and then you realize they are point of view shots, for example), but it is worthy enough to foreshadow the much better work that Clint directed later, from Unforgiven to Mystic River to Million Dollar Baby.

The Aviator

2008-04-01T10:44:00.008-04:00

Confession: I am not a Martin Scorsese fan. Raging Bull was fine, but I definitely wouldn't rate it as the fourth best American movie ever. But eventually the perpetual hype got to me, and I put The Aviator in my DVD player with great anticipation. A three-hour long movie (170 minutes, to be exact) that got rave reviews has to be riveting, right?

Unfortunately, the other option for a 170 minute movie is that it's overblown with its own importance. Granted, it fits well with the subject matter here -- it appears that Howard Hughes was a pretty self-important man -- but Mr. Scorsese seems to forget that a movie is still a movie no matter how long, and it would have been nice to feel like there was a reason for my watching rather than seeing a scattershot of events that happen to be roughly true.

For those of you who may have missed it, The Aviator outlines the life of Howard Hughes, the great filmmaker and aviator, from the late 1920s to the 1940s. (Howard Hughes produced Hell's Angels, Scarface, The Outlaw, and a slew of films noir in the '50s, and set multiple air-speed records during his lifetime.) I'm not quite sure why the timeframe of the movie was chosen -- after a brief prologue of a scene of Hughes as a child, it jumps straight to the production of Hell's Angels, which wasn't Hughes' first movie. And it stops after he successfully tests the Hercules, a huge aircraft that spent him years to make, but before he took control of RKO, or severed his relationship with his longtime assistant Noah Dietrich, or founded the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Maybe this would make sense if we assume that everyone knows about Howard Hughes's story and his descent into madness in his later years, but let's not assume that a movie-going public that is mostly teenagers knows about a rich and crazy guy who died in the 70s.

As for the movie itself, the best part about the movie was that it was star-studded as Howard Hughes' apparently was: big names played bit parts for the chance to be in a Scorsese film, and it was fun to watch Gwen Stephani, Jude Law, Ian Holmes, Alan Alda, and a bunch of others in fairly small roles. Leonardo DiCaprio does a good job playing a part with almost no guidance from the script as to a story arc. Now, I know people's lives don't necessarily have climaxes and turning points and drama to their days, but if you're consolidating a life (or part of a life) to a few hours, you've got to have a reason for what you see and what you dont. Now, I don't mean that I need to know why Hughes went mad, for example, but hinting that it was a childhood thing but not exploring that just frustrated me, and to have character after character march in and out of his life isn't helpful to understanding his life. Similarly, Cate Blanchett does a passable job as Katharine Hepburn, but her role seemed more about imitation than acting -- the problem with playing a person that spent a lot of the time on film herself. In the end, I felt like the movie was less a story than an observation/impersonation, which seems a waste of time and talent to me. Even documentaries are supposed to be edited to have a direction to the story it tells, but this was just sprawling and pointless even though it was larger-than-life and impressive to watch. Maybe that was the point: that Howard Hughes' life was jam-packed with action, danger, risky business moves, Hollywood stars, and paranoia, but in the end didn't have much direction or purpose. But if that was the point, I'd rather read a biography that really explores the whole life and wonders why his life was both so amazing and so screwed up. Just watching some random, disparate parts of a man's life for three hours was about double the time I was willing to spend. Note to future Scorseses: Editing something to make it shorter generally makes it better, not worse.

2 stars

Sense and Sensibility

2008-03-26T16:10:00.006-04:00

In honor of my friends who are having a Jane Austen marathon as I post this:

With unfortunate frequency I find myself frustrated at the lack of new movies. I don’t mean there aren’t new releases every week, but rather that they seem to be simple repackaging of the same stories over and over. Now, I know that there are only 36 situations in stories , but at least the story should look new at first gloss, right? Instead, I seem to see constant remakes and sequels of older movies, comic books, novels, even biographies – all of which were better the first time around. Just think of the big movies of summer 2007: Spiderman 3 (a sequel of a comic book adaptation); 28 Weeks Later (sequel); Shrek the Third (sequel of a pop culture/fairy tale mashup); Pirates of the Caribbean, At World’s End (sequel); Ocean’s Thirteen (sequel of a remake). We got another Die Hard movie, and another Harry Potter adaptation. Hairspray was a movie version of a stage production. Even the Simpsons movie was basically just a full-length version of a 22-minute regular episode. Of course, there were a couple new movies (like the brilliant Ratatouille), but adaptations and sequels seem to have taken over the big screen.

I understand the business reasoning behind such endeavors – it takes less work to get people to come to a movie they already know. I mean, Harry Potter movies practically sell themselves just by the title. Even ostensibly new movies get sold as “from the makers of . . .” and even Ratatouille got billed by its connections to prior successes with the Pixar label.

But every once in a long while a beautiful adaptation comes along, making me succumb to old stories. Surprisingly enough, three of my favorite adaptations come from Jane Austen: Clueless (an adaptation of Emma), Pride and Prejudice (not the A&E version, the Keira Knightly version, believe it or not), and the 1995 Sense and Sensibility, adapted by Emma Thompson. My plea to the writers of the many many adaptations to come, if producers remain as risk-averse as they have been lately: learn from Ms. Thompson and Ang Lee, the director (yes, of Brokeback Mountain fame).

The key to a wonderful adaptation is to figure out the essence of the story without feeling burdened by it. A two hour movie is basically equivalent to a novella in length – you just aren’t going to be able to have the plot and character development of a full novel. Don’t even try. The only times it’s ever worked is the A&E Pride and Prejudice marathon and Ken Branagh’s endless uncut four-hour Hamlet. I must admit that though I love Jane Austen stories, the prose gets incredibly cumbersome, which is perhaps why adaptations of her work tend to fare relatively well. No movie is going to take twenty minutes analyzing the quality of the garden hedges, so let’s just cut that wholesale.

Second, feel free to add scenes, but only if you can understand the material enough to be seemless. Apparently, many people have written Emma Thompson or told her that they loved that she kept their favorite part of the book in the movie – a scene about the little girl Margaret being coaxed out of hiding by Elinor and Mr. Ferras pretending to not know any geography. But this scene isn’t in the book. It just fits so well that people thought it was.

Third, remember your medium! My favorite part about the movie is that it’s so clearly a movie. Ang Lee does amazing things with his shots, covering in seconds what takes pages and pages in a book. I’ve seen the movie many times, and every time give a little shudder of delight with the abrupt cutting between Elinor and Mr. Ferras when they are awkwardly talking in the stables. Those cuts make the scene hilarious in a way that even the best comedic adaptation couldn’t do on its own. Mr. Lee also uses the English landscape to set the tone of a scene in a way that would make Ms. Austen proud – one scene, for example, brilliantly uses a long interior shot allows the audience to see the wind rustling the cloaks by the door to create a sense of expectation and foreboding.

Fourth, casting casting casting. The cast in Sense and Sensibility is basically perfect. Costume dramas are hard to cast, as the horrible miscasting of Keanu Reeves in another Emma Thompson movie makes clear. You have to get people who are comfortable with language, and who make sense for the parts. If there’s every a place to typecast, this is it, and Sense and Sensibility does so with a loveable but inept Hugh Grant as Mr. Ferras (does he ever play any other part) and Alan Rickman as the kind but brooding Colonel Brandon. Kate Winslet plays young and impetuous Marianne well, which probably was less playing and more just being a nineteen-year old who lied about her age to get the part. If the original source uses physical attributes to display character traits, by all means do so in your casting here, as the rotund and ridiculous Mrs. Jennings (played by Elizabeth Spriggs) and the haughty and pointy-nosed Fanny Dashwood (Harriet Walter) exhibit.

All in all, this adapation is everything an adaptation should be – great story that’s made into an equally great movie, with a brilliant cast (some of whom got their big breaks here) and a brilliant script and brilliant director. 4 stars.

The Skulls

2008-03-20T02:02:00.004-04:00

I went ahead and watched The Skulls, which I posted in its entirety just a couple entries ago. I had watched it a few times in high school as one of those trashy movies you put on in the background during a sleepover, so it brings back fond memories for me, even though I couldn't remember the plot at all. In fact, I could only remember two things about the movie before watching it: that at one point the main character says "Hell yes!" instead of "Hell yeah!" which was the topic of conversation during one of these sleepovers, and that there were a couple beautiful scenes, by which I mean the visuals (aka people) are beautiful, not that they are written beautifully or anything.

My review, then, is colored by the movie sending me back to high school, so please cut me some slack when I say I enjoyed it. It is the movie equivalent of one of those mystery/thriller novels you buy for summer reading: sleek, cleverly crafted and terribly fun, even if it's not "highbrow" fare. Joshua Jackson and Paul Walker are sexy and assured in their roles as two very different undergrads at Yale -- the working class boy and the rich legacy boy -- who both become members of a secret society. The working class boy (Jackson) is the main character, of course, and the one with the ethical convictions, of course, even if those convictions waiver for a while in the face of the riches and opportunity that come with being part of the elite Skulls. When his best friend dies while trying to write a newspaper story on secret societies, Working Class Boy calls on the help of Trusty Female Sidekick/Love Interest to help free him from the clutches of his new pal, Legacy Boy, and the rest of the powerful members of the Skulls. The plot is moderately well developed (even though it's trite and the end feels slapped together at best), and Leslie Bibb does a wonderful job as the only female role of any substance and the only character who seems to have normal human reactions -- like screaming in fear -- to the things going on around her. There are some fun lines and slick moves on the part of the main characters, even beyond that "Hell yes!" scene. So while there are very few interesting characters for a conspiracy-theory story, and while the characters sometimes become caricatures, and even while Paul Walker can't shake being too stiff at times, it's enjoyable enough to pull it out of being a complete mess.

2 Stars

The Jerk

2008-03-19T01:28:00.004-04:00

I just watched my first full length movie on hulu and would first like to mention that this service and the others like it aren't going to kill the DVD any time soon. Even with my high speed internet in a college town, the picture stopped pretty often to "buffer" itself, and of course the resolution was no match for the full screen of my beautiful 15" apple computer. But most importantly, when you have to create a login to watch an R rated movie like The Jerk, you sort of expect it not to be a censored version of the movie. One of the most pervasive jokes in the movie is a dog named S***head, but in this movie his name was dubbed to Stupid. This completely changes the joke, and though it might not be extremely funny in my opinion the original way, it certainly doesn't hold up to repetition when it's just Stupid.

Given this movie's cult classic status (see, e.g., episode 14 here), I was actually a bit worried to watch it. I expected not to like it very much, because most of the time my humor isn't the same as a 12 year old boy's. And while I love the SNL spawn of Blues Brothers [music in link], I don't buy into the idea that all SNL touches is gold.

Thank goodness it was just a rehash of a lot of Steve Martin stand-up routines that I already knew and loved, like Cat Juggling, which is on the marvelous record A Wild and Crazy Guy. Like some of the best comedies, the plot seemed a loose connect-the-dots between gags and jokes for the starts of the show, a formula that worked well for a standup comedian like Steve Martin. With some great lines ("You know, you can tell so much about a person from the way they live. Just looking around here I can tell ... you're a genuinely dirty person," "That guy gypped me; he put daisy stems on my roses!" and yes, I'll even give you "He HATES these CANS!" ), Martin really carries the movie to a loveable place, and somehow even the incongruity of Bernadette Peters in such a slapstick movie seems part of the joke rather than a factor working against it. And, really, who wouldn't laugh at those juggled cats?

Then again, it was kind of a rehash of routines I already knew, like his bit about what happens to a guy when he tries to ask a girl out (frankly, I like the stand-up version better). It's a good movie if you've never heard it before, and a decent one if you have, but even with a running time of 1:35 some of the jokes feel tired by the end.

I can't say I love this movie, at least my first time around. Although it does seem obvious to me how it would get better the more times you see it, just waiting for the next of your favorite oh-so-quotable lines to come around.

2.5 stars

P.S. A little research revealed that the cable-edited version I saw did include some scenes not in the original, like the Tilt-a-Whirl scene (which I felt went on too long) and the cracked leather airplane seat conversation (brilliant). Don't know if that changes anything, but for any aficionados I may have offended with this review, maybe that's the difference. Well, that and all that buffering.

Intellectual Property Update

2008-03-17T00:26:00.004-04:00

Last week, a great website finally went out of beta testing: hulu.com. There, in a completely legal medium, I can watch tv shows and movies for free. I can even post them on websites, email them to people, or share them in other sites (like myspace or facebook) with customized start and end times. They have limited commercials through them, but so far seem less annoying that the studios' own websites for tv shows (although it still annoys me that it doesn't archive all the episodes for some shows, like Psych). And yes, the movie selection is pretty crappy so far. But let's give some props to network executives who do something other than whine about piracy, and instead work to serve consumers in a way that the extreme lack of quality control in the world of piracy is worth it.

And, besides, some of the movies and TV shows are good. Take, for example, Sideways or The Usual Suspects or Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Or, for less high class fare (but more likely something you decide to watch on a whim, which is what streaming access is for, right?) you can try out some guilty pleasure-type movies, like The Skulls. Yes, I'm embedding it. Because I can.

ANTM

2008-03-16T21:07:00.003-04:00

Sometimes TV creates the best parody of TV. See now a pretty close representation of the essence of America's Next Top Model, from the brilliance of Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders:

Bull Durham

2008-03-15T11:42:00.005-04:00

I finally got around to watching Bull Durham last week. I think I put it off for two reasons: 1) it's supposed to be an amazing movie and 2) it's about a place and a team I grew up watching. The mixture of the two just couldn't live up to expectations, I thought. And that famous speech that's supposed to be so amazing ("I believe in . . .") I had seen as a clip and it wasn't that impressive.

Well, that speech still doesn't move me the way it apparently does everyone else. But all the rest of my worries were thoroughly dispelled. Susan Sarandon is the heart of this movie, and she controls both the plot and the screen. Next to Vivian Leigh in Gone with the Wind, this is certainly the best southern woman role -- may be the best female role period -- in the movies (yes, even including Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor roles). She's smart, powerful, experienced, wise, silly, conflicted, and searching all at once, and it's a joy to watch Sarandon swim around in the depths of her character.

And then there's Tim Robbins, who is so much funnier as the talented but naive rookie than I ever realized he could be, since I mostly know him from The Shawshank Redemption and Mystic River. He's great in a totally different way from either Susan Sarandon or Kevin Costner (who is probably the most predictable and boring character of the three: the wise but frustrated older player -- but Costner does it well, as we all know he can from all those other sports movies he's been in).

Then, there's the plot. I won't go through the plot here, since it's classic enough that plenty of others have done it thoroughly. But I hadn't known before I watched the movie that it was written and directed and produced by men who had actually been minor league baseball players, so there's a fidelity to reality that I hadn't expected. I mean, authenticity isn't exactly what makes sports movies popular. People watch sports movies for the same reason they watch sports: to see their guy win. The only other "authentic" sports movie I can think of is Bad News Bears, which I don't actually like that much for some reason or another. But here, sports isn't about a team winning or losing, it's about a bunch of guys trying to make money and getting girls and prolonging adolescence as much as possible. Though I've never known a minor league baseball player, it seems to me that would be pretty spot on.

Finally, there's Durham. Thank goodness they did it on location. Those dingy brick building, the clay that's practically in the air, the potholes in the roads on the outskirts of Durham -- these details make me homesick, believe it or not, but also lend credence to the size of the characters' world -- the idea of the major leagues does seem like a paradise when you're working in rundown towns with working class spectators, and not too many of them at that. Sounds depressing, but the movies that affect me the most tend to be those that realize that the big dreams of ordinary people are important and inspiring and engrossing, at least to the people who live them.

4 stars.

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

2007-12-17T11:56:00.000-05:00

As many of you know, i become unbearable at Christmastime. I hope that it's a loveable kind of unbearable, but even if it's not, I guess that's the price everyone has to pay for knowing me. While everyone else is (apparently) thinking about committing suicide from Thanksgiving to New Year, I'm trying to bake a roomful of cookies, drink my weight in cocoa, and spend as much time staring at fires or snow falling or -- best of all -- Christmas movies.

And so, in that spirit, I think it's time to review one or two holiday movies before the end of the year. I'll be back in North Carolina as of tomorrow morning (and I have a final this afternoon), but I plan to not let even the 12.8 kbps speed of the internet back home prevent me from being both annoyingly excited about Christmas coming and annoyingly opinionated.

You have been forewarned

Procrastinating, and proving I'm not a snob

2007-12-10T00:45:00.000-05:00

I have no problem admitting that in certain things (e.g., cheese, balsamic vinegar, novels) I'm a bit of a snob. But I have been accused recently of being a movie snob, and I'm not willing to accept this. Yes, I watch a lot of old movies, but this doesn't make me a snob; it makes me diverse. So, just so you know, this is a list (illustrative, not exhaustive) of non-snobby movies I love -- some with no shame and some with just a little:

Back to the Future
Dirty Dancing
Ghostbusters
Gone in 60 Seconds
Hackers
Independence Day
Karate Kid
Minority Report
Office Space
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Shanghai Noon
Zoolander

So there.

Can Jack Black redeem himself from Nacho Libre?

2007-10-22T18:24:00.000-04:00

I hope this upcoming movie is good. The thing that makes me the most excited about it right now is its website. See if you can figure out which movies are spoofed in the layout (one of them I can't figure out yet). To see a different layout, click "You Name It, We Shoot It" in the top left corner.

Palm Beach Story

2007-10-12T13:06:00.000-04:00

Well, it's been forever since I posted, but I'm finally back into the swing of things and have actually seen a few movies recently, rather than just spending my time catching up on work and old episodes of House, M.D. This week, I actually managed to make it to a great movie theater, The Brattle Theater here in Cambridge. The Brattle doesn't play as many old movies as I'd like (although I'd highly recommend Evil Dead 2, playing on Halloween!) but it's a nice little indie place. And over the past few weeks, they've had a series that has made up for their usual lack of old movies. They even played a Buster Keaton film. And I got to see a Preston Sturges film that I'd never even heard of: The Palm Beach Story.

Basically, all you have to know about the plot is this: it's ridiculous and far-fetched. The characters are absurd, and some of them don't make any sense at all. And overall, the movie is excellent.

The movie begins with a married couple, Tom (Joel McCrea) and Gerry (Claudette Colbert), who love each other but have no money. Gerry decides to leave Tom to try to get them the money they need by capitalizing on her looks. And, if you grew up ever watching the cartoon cat and mouse namesakes of this pair, you can guess what happens next: Tom follows Gerry, and escapades abound. Gerry snags an extremely earnest and extremely rich man, and Tom accidentally gets snagged by the rich man's man-crazy sister. In the end, though, everyone settles down happily through some unabashedly stupid plot twists ("That's a whole other plot entirely" says Tom when a couple of twins pop into the story to save the day.)

In the grand tradition of screwball comedy, though, nothing needs to make sense, because everyone is having too much fun. There are some unexpected hilarious lines ("That's one of the tragedies of this life - that the men who are most in need of a beating up are always enormous."), and some similarly unexpectedly amusing (and amusingly-named) characters, like the Weinie King and the Ale and Quail Club, which is comprised of a bunch of rich millionaires who like to get drunk, sing, and hunt, no matter the circumstances. The only bad thing about this movie is that I've now had "A-Hunting We Will Go" in my head for the past couple days....

An incredibly fun 3 Stars.

Keeping Mum

2007-07-26T05:52:00.001-04:00

Keeping Mum follows a country vicar and his family, an archetype the British apparently find ripe for comedy. In the grand tradition of British Comedies about Vicars, the film is chock full of eccentric characters, and there are passing jokes about flower committees and country church politics, as well as making puns and other small lingual jokes that make you either love watching BBC sitcoms or not. (The town is called Little Wallop, for example, and the family portrayed is the Goodfellows.) What distinguishes this movie from the rest is its light handling of dark subject matter. Insanity, murder, adultery, and voyeurism -- along with normal family tensions -- are all included, but they are treated with wit and humor (and never make the film very graphic, either sexually or violently). The R rating comes from the number of greusome subjects and the frank way in which the characters engage in such behavior. This is not the Censor Board era, where you might miss the references if you don't know what's going on, but visually at least things are left to the imagination, which I appreciate.

While dark in subject, the film is actually quite deft in its handling of the subjects, and the characters who would be abonimable in real life somehow manage to be loveable. This is where a star cast really comes in handy, and the talent recruited here prove they are up for the task. Rowan Atkinson's recent work has completely redeemed himself from his Mr. Bean days, and here he remains in my good graces. As the vicar Walter Goodfellow he is clueless in a manner only vaugely reminiscent of his more famous character, and he introduces a sensitive and humanity that keep this film from becoming entirely about its crazy plot points and instead grounded firmly in the characters and their relationships to one another. In the film, Walter is struggling with mediocre sermons and neglects his wife Gloria, played with equal loveability by Kristin Scott Thomas. Gloria is just starting an affair with her golf pro (played to smarmy perfection by Patrick Swayze - yes Patrick Swayze - who seems wonderfully out of place in a small British comedy), their teenage daughter is acting out by having promiscious relationships with "bad boys," and their son is being bullied at school.

Enter Grace (Maggie Smith), a housekeeper who is an unassuming, gracious, maternal, quiet -- in a word, perfect -- older woman. She quietly starts up-ending the Goodfellows' lives, and gently reminds them what it means to be a family. Perfect little happy story, with only one monkeywrench thrown in: Grace has recently been released from a mental institution for calmly murdering her husband and his lover, an event we see at the very beginning of the story. Ms. Smith plays this insanity with understated aplomb, which matches the whole movie's tone perfectly.

The wonderful thing about the "insanity plot twist" is that it isn't a twist: the audience knows about this little problem from the very beginning of the movie, even before meeting the Goodfellow family, so the humor genuinely comes from the earnest acting combined with morbid situations that Grace brings with her in addition to perfect housekeeping, rather than from any shock value. The best part of the comedy simply comes from the strangeness of an insane killer bringing sanity and peace to a household, and though the joke lasts for the whole movie, that one note sustains quite well because of the cast. Even though the situations are over-the-top, the actors never are, making the film's world incredibly easy to believe, which makes the whole thing even funnier.

3 lbs

2007-07-19T02:42:00.000-04:00

3lbs, the television show named after the three-pound organ that is the human brain, aspired to be complex, intriguing, and provoking. Achieving such a goal should have come naturally; the show revolves around two world-class brain surgeons and one neurologist and the cases they encounter. Instead, it got cancelled in the US after 3 weeks, leaving five more episodes unaired. But, being in Bangladesh, I get to see all of them on the Hallmark channel, and I've seen four so far.

In a House-like format, each episode involves a case or two that include bizarre, medical-mystery-meets-medical-journalism symptoms and results. Of the episodes I've seen, each case highlights the enigma of the brain -- is it "wires in a box," as one character claims, or is the human brain (or the human pysche) more elusive than that?

The most natural tension of neuroscience is, of course, what makes us human, which is mirrored nicely in the science/religion dichotomy that crops up quite frequently in the first few episodes of the first season. This could make for a fascinating, unspoken dialogue in the series, a tension that keeps the subject of the show relevant and thought-provoking, rather than simply the fodder to give the characters something to do in addition to their more trite interpersonal interactions.

Instead, 3 lbs makes that dialogue spoken between the characters, which is somewhat necessary to explain the science and philosophy, but makes every character a little too much like "Exposition Boy!". The show tries too hard to be both scientific and poetic, and ends up failing at both. The science goes by fast, but not fast enough to think that these people know what they're talking about, and also not fast enough for me miss the fact that some of the science sounds surprisingly suspect. And in an attempt to be mystical and poetic about the brain, the show's creators establish bizarre visual tropes in each episode to represent the mental effects of the brain damage at issue in the show. The special effects are generally surreal or dada-ist (my favorite so far has been the hanging lights in the hospital corridors acutally being upside-down dandelions that have gone to seed), but they disappear too quickly for the audience to be able to process them or figure out how they fit into the reality of the show. Most annoyingly, it's often unclear who "sees" these visual effects -- sometimes they are clearly the experience of the patient, but often they seem to be created by the mind's eye of the cynical doctor (played by Stanley Tucci).

With these problem, 3lbs fails to be a stellar show. However, the three main actors prop up the show enough to keep it decent. Stanley Tucci plays the star surgeon, a brilliant but cynical, Dr. House-like character who doesn't like people that much except as brains to tinker with. Indira Varma plays the neurologist, who's much more new age-y and loves patients and people (think Dr. Cameron in House), and Mark Feuerstein plays the new guy who is Tucci's sidekick and is supposed to represent the wise and happy medium. All three actors are likeable, and try their best to overcome the cheesy, formulaic plots and interactions with "unsolved scientific questions." I for one am certainly willing to put up with a certain amount of plot stupidity for Stanley Tucci and Mark Feuerstein, though for completely different reasons. One's an amazing actor, and the other, well, is just fun to watch, if you know what I mean.... In the end, though, with better medical dramas on television (especially House, M.D., which has practically the same formula and characters) it's not surprising this show got cancelled so fast.

1.5 stars

Babette's Feast

2007-07-05T06:38:00.001-04:00

Ask almost anyone what his favorite food is, and it's unlikely you'll get the same response as if you had asked what the best meal is he's ever had. Once in a very long while, however, intellect and emotion converge, and "good" food corresponds with "favorite" food. With me, though, this convergence happens almost exclusively in food that is exquisite because it is simple but perfectly executed with just the right ingerdients: a fresh loaf of ciabatta (five ingredients, but it’s all about time and kneading), chocolate mousse (four, but the egg whites must be folded the exact right amount), green beans with just a bit of salt and olive oil (OK, there’s no real technique there. The beans and olive oil just have to be high quality.).

Movies work the same way. There are some incredibly good movies I've seen that will never be my favorite movies because they are just too heavy (or too long, or too bloody – the analogy still works in each case). Meanwhile, some of my favorite movies are definitely the film equivalent of empty calories, predictable comfort food, or dishes that you love simply because they bring back good memories. And then there’s that rare movie that can both be counted as a favorite and an artistic accomplishment.

Babette’s Feast is one of those rare movies. Like those special foods, it succeeds precisely because it is simple in its aspirations, but meticulous in its details. The story was written by Danish author Isek Dinesen and first published in the 1950s in the Ladies Home Journal. The title character is Babette Hertsard, a French refugee in the 1800s who finds herself in a remote fishing village on the coast of Denmark. The village is simple, humble, and devoutly religious, and Babette becomes the servant and cook for two elderly sisters whose father founded the devout religious sect the village people follow. Babette’s only tie to her French (read: more worldly) past is a yearly lottery ticket. One day she wins that lottery, and decides to thank the sisters for the past fourteen years by cooking them and their congregation an elaborate meal.

The 1987 Danish film benefits from its humble and succinct beginnings. Because the movie primarily revolves around the preparation of a single meal, there is no rush to just move through the plot, and instead the film can linger over the visual details and delve into the characters’ nuances and intriguing pasts. The plot quietly progresses, and before you realize it, there is a final satisfying twist that I didn’t predict only because I was enjoying the movie too much. The cinematography savors both the food and the countryside, and the result is beautiful. The juxtaposition of the sumptuous meal and the ascetic village enriches the portrayal of each, and gives the film most of its depth and texture. Better still, in the end this juxtaposition seems to melt away, leaving the viewer to realize that Babette’s loving and extensive preparation bears more similarity to religious devotion than one might realize; eucharistic undertones develop, and the woman anointing Jesus with expensive perfume comes to mind.

While the meal portrayed in Babette’s Feast may be elaborate and extensive, the movie itself is exactly like my favorite foods: complex in its simplicity and made of really good ingredients. Also like most of my favorite foods, the enjoyment of Babette’s Feast is not without labor. With food, you have to invest time and technique; with Babette’s Feast you have to sit through a slow beginning and read subtitles. But it’s well worth it.

Harvie Krumpet

2007-06-07T02:06:00.000-04:00

An unlucky little clay man, Harvie Krumpet, and the movie to which he donates his name, represents the best that storytelling has to offer. First of all, this movie is funny. From the slightly random fact that Harvie’s real name is Harvek Milos Krumpetzki to the downright ridiculous events of his unfortunate life, Harvie’s life epitomizes simple humor. And Geoffrey Rush, who the filmmakers rightly claim is the Godfather of Australian Film, expertly narrates the tale with just the right balance of sincerity and irony to make every scene even funnier.

Second, the story is poignant. Harvie is born desperately poor. Then he becomes a refugee to Australia during World War II. He had Tourette’s syndrome, gets struck by lightening, loses a testicle (I forget how – I haven’t seen the movie in four years), and eventually gets Alzheimer’s. And yet, Harvie remains simple and optimistic. A perfect example of enjoying the simplest pleasures of life even in the face of a life others might regret or complain about, Harvie plods along in his life, armed with a book of Fakts (another source of funny lines) and unending good nature. He gets married, adopts and raises a thalidomide baby, works for animal rights and even in his old age become a nudist. (And let's just say that this being claymation makes this a lot more funny than if this were a live action short.)

Last, this story is airtight. At only 23 minutes, this movie chronicles Harvie’s whole life, from birth to death, and somehow seems to get plenty of story in. Not a line is wasted, and every detail – visual or otherwise – is there for a reason. It’s enough to make me angry that it’s almost impossible to find a place that shows or sells movie shorts (there appears to have been no American DVD release). But if Harvie Krumpet didn’t complain about his life, I suppose I can’t complain too much. After all, I caught this short almost by accident back when I lived in Chicago, so really my luck is much, much better than Harvie’s.

The Pursuit of Happyness

2007-06-06T04:49:00.000-04:00

I watched The Pursuit of Happyness on an airplane from Newark to Heathrow this week, so it was probably not exactly the best experience to evaluate the movie, especially as it was on for about an hour before they stopped it (the entertainment had started because we were stuck on the plane for many hours before we actually took off). So I kind of watched the movie in two parts, which definitely breaks the flow of the narrative.

That being said, I think this was an excellent, if slightly trite, movie. It’s pretty much your powerful Hollywood drama, complete with a big star and a cute kid. In the movie, Will Smith plays a man struggling to get by in San Francisco in the year 1981. He’s a salesman of some obscure medical device, which basically means his job is to constantly be rejected as he tries to sell all the devices he invested in. Then his wife leaves him, leaving him a broke and single dad to his four-year-old son, Christopher, played by Will Smith's real-life son Jaden. (That casting certainly makes the father-son bond convincing, a huge benefit for a movie that's main danger is becoming too schmaltzy.)

Enter your favorite “overcome adversity” soundtrack. Will Smith’s character, named Chris Smith, is only a high school graduate, but he's also something of a math whiz. To prove this point, there’s a few fun scenes involving the “latest hot new toy” – a Rubik’s cube, which is one of the few things that solidly grounds the story to a date. So Smith applies to a stock brokerage internship to try to work his way out of his shoestring lifestyle.

Oh yes. It’s an unpaid internship. So, he has to be a single parent, a salesman of an unsaleable product, AND an intern in a highly competitive program. And pretty quickly, make that a homeless single parent.

If I have to worry about spoiling the plot for you, you haven’t paid enough attention. Did you notice that this is movie with Will Smith, the man who has saved us all from aliens multiple times? And that there’s a cute kid involved? Through all the hardship, all the juggling, all the immense pressure of trying to succeed, our hero finally does, and I was surprised to see how much I actually cared, given the fact that the outcome was never really in question.

My favorite part about this movie, though, isn’t the inspiring story, though that makes it worth the watch. What pushes this movie into the above average category is how unconventionally it gives the audience cues with which to understand and invest in the story. It does this in two ways. First, the first-person narration, which some might consider a crutch, is actually used quite effectively here by providing short comic relief or philosophic consideration, so necessary for making a drama not seem too didactic, without actually having to break the story. The narration also helps keep the audience aware of when the story is about to turn; every once in a while, Smith narrates the beginning of a scene saying, “This part of my life is called Being Stupid,” or “This part of my life is called Running.”

Second, the obscure medical device (a bone density scanner or something like that) also really helps the narrative. At first, I thought it to be just a strange and slightly annoying way of making Chris Smith unemployed but unable to get unemployment checks. But each device is very expensive, and so each one, and its sale, represents a significant if unreliable economic buoy for Smith and his son. About two-thirds of the way through the movie, the mere image of the nondescript off-white, sewing-machine-sized device had become a visual representation of the elusive monetary security that drives the whole movie. Very cool to use something that initially seems pointless and boring to the advantage of the story. (If I were still in college, and a film major, I would definitely write a paper about what that device achieves in the movie.)

All in all, if you want a quality uplifting drama, of which there seems to be very few these days, this is definitely worth a look. 3.5 stars.

Mr. Deeds Goes To Town

2007-05-17T16:06:00.000-04:00

There is such a thing as too much of a good thing.

Call me a sap, but there’s something about starry-eyed idealism mixed with screwball comedy that makes me a sucker for so many movies directed by the great Frank Capra: It’s a Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, You Can’t Take it With You, It Happened One Night, Arsenic and Old Lace and even Meet John Doe. With this kind of background love of a director’s work, I eagerly anticipating watching Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, another Frank Capra film.

The plot is ripe for Caprian dramatics. Made in the middle of the Great Depression, the movie weaves its fantasy around the issues of the times: Mr. Deeds, an unassuming small town man played by Gary Cooper, inherits an absurdly large fortune, and goes to New York to figure out what to do with his money. He falls for an undercover female reporter who writes stories making fun of him until she (of course) falls for him, too. He then meets a desperate and poor farmer, and Mr. Deeds decides he wants to spend his money to fund farms for thousands of poor and homeless families. This abrupt and altruistic decision causes the moneygrubbers surrounding Mr. Deeds to claim that he is insane and his fortune should be taken away from him, and the movie culminates in a sanity hearing where all characters can make their rousing speeches to the judge and the movie audience.

Such trite plots usually provide Capra an excellent platform on which to direct feel-good movies that amount to character studies of the American Everyman. Like Mr. Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Deeds is supposed to represent the noble average American, and represents the resilience of such Men through the Great Depression. The movie even won Capra Best Director in the 1936 Academy Awards, which I think can only be a testament to the era's sentimentality to such a message, because, frankly, the movie itself wasn't that good.

I really wanted to like Mr. Deeds and his movie, but the movie just didn’t age well. Mr. Deeds comes off more as a spoiled brute who punches people and silently sulks, rather than an unspoiled individualist who stands up and speaks out against corruption. What’s more, he also rotates between naïve country bumpkin and hardnosed businessman just about every five minutes. While Gary Cooper can carry both Mr. Deeds personas with aplomb, the rapid switches are almost too much to take, creating an almost dizzying affect for a modern audience. Mr. Deeds goes from sympathetic listener one moment to domineering authoritarian kicking the speaker out the door the next moment. We go from a goofy-looking Gary Cooper easily duped by Jean Arthur’s female reporter to scowling Cooper sucker punching a bunch of elite poets. What’s going on here? This is the ideal American? I certainly hope not.

In sum, this movie was a mixure of saccharin and soap-boxing combined with ridiculous characters. Now, that would generally describe any Frank Capra movie, but in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, each element was so extreme that even I couldn't stand it.

PoMo Commercial

2007-05-08T13:29:00.000-04:00

Generally I'm sooo post postmodernism. But every once in a while, I'm thankful for it, like when I found this beer commercial that makes fun of the major premise of beer commercials:

Molson Ad

Disturbing Ad

2007-04-30T08:30:00.000-04:00

Continuing with my posts about commercials (wow, YouTube is awesome):

Some commercials are random to the point of being disturbing. Ikea has a whole lot of these ads, like the following one. I wonder, though, if this worked very well for them; all the current Ikea ads I see on TV are significantly, uh, happier.

Ikea Commercial

Is there plagarism in art?

2007-04-24T16:38:00.000-04:00

In academic writing, you have to make sure you credit your sources, even when you're doing it with permission. So I'm always confused when I see a remake that doesn't flag the fact that it's not actually an original.

Case in point? No Reservations, with Catherine Zeta-Jones and Aaron Eckhart, is coming out this summer, but nowhere on their website or trailer is the fact that it is simply a remake of the excellent German film Bella Martha. From the trailer, the new movie looks like it's going to be practically a scene-by-scene remake, too: just different actors and a different language.

I hope that at least they don't screw it up -- the original was delicate, precise, and nuanced (like Martha, in a way). I can see the Americanization pushing too hard and being too corny, too sugary, too-- well, overseasoned. Sorry, I couldn't resist using food metaphors.

Kids and Ads

2007-04-23T15:15:00.000-04:00

Continuing a series in advertising, here are my two favorite ads involving kids, although they're basically opposite in effect.

Stratos (Norwegian commercial)

Zazoo (Belgian commerical)

Another Ad

2007-04-21T22:38:00.000-04:00

OK, this one isn't a strange commercial, but I like it because I'm a movie geek. I count 9 movie references (and I've seen them all). Not bad for a 60 second ad. See comment for the list of the movies.

JC Penney Ad

Random Ads

2007-04-21T13:22:00.000-04:00

Some ads are hilarious just because they're totally strange. As a tribute to the late-night brainstorming of ad executives, here are some of my new favorites:

Starburst Commercial

Shout Commercial

Folger Commercial

Le dîner de cons

2007-04-16T17:46:00.000-04:00

About half-way through watching Le Dîner de Cons (translated to The Dinner Game) last week, I realized it really should be a play. And, after a little research, I found it was originally written for the stage in 1993. I'm glad I found this out, and I wish I had seen it on the stage rather than as a film. The story is definitely better suited to the stage - not much happens, and it's mostly an exercise in self-reflection. It's a nice little movie, but it is just that: little. It never grows out of its self-imposed four walls.

The international title of the movie doesn’t do the title justice. A literal translation reveals much more: The Idiot Dinner. The entire plot revolves around a French intellectual and the “idiot” he has picked up to take with him as a sort of trophy to a weekly dinner where the man who brings the biggest idiot wins a prize. This competition is done with exactly the malice and superiority the previous sentence suggests (as opposed, for example, to the scatterbrained but charming Carole Lombard bringing a homeless man to a dinner as a scavenger hunt item in My Man Godfrey). But, instead of going to the dinner, the intellectual pulls his back and is confined to his apartment when his guest comes to be taken to dinner. As the movie progresses, the “idiot” Francois becomes the intellectual Pierre’s only line of defense against a litany of troubles in his apartment: his wife leaving him, an overeager girlfriend wanting to come over as soon as she hears the news, a tax auditor coming to Pierre’s too-well-furnished apartment. Through it all, Francois tries to help and constantly makes things worse. It’s funny in a painful way to see it all unfold – I found it to be much the same humor as watching I Love Lucy episodes, but without the goodheartedness or assurance that in the end Ricky’s going to come home and make it all better.

Jacques Villeret, as the prize idiot Francois, possesses a perfect combination of pathos and grating characteristics. Francois is a civil servant (working for the French IRS, basically), and in is free time makes models or architectural and engineering feats out of matchsticks. His hobby consumes him, which is why the intellectual Pierre, played by Thierry Lhermitte, decides to take him to the dinner. But always lurking underneath Villeret’s Francois is a man you know actually cares about people and desperately wants to fit in, even though he is clearly incapable of it. As I watched the film, I found myself torn between hating Pierre for taking advantage of such a helpless and hapless guy and hating Francois for being so darn dense.

In true French film style, the end doesn’t leave the audience comfortable and satisfied. Is it OK to think people are stupid? What makes someone an idiot – is it being nice, or self-important? Is being a jerk or an idiot part of a coping mechanism? The movie never takes a definitive stance, preferring instead to leave no moral and no way of knowing if any of the characters have learned anything from the events of the evening. Much more like real life, perhaps, but in a story involving an Idiot Dinner, I’m hoping we’re not striving for life-like realism.

2 out of 4 stars

Maxed Out

2007-03-15T00:13:00.000-04:00

This evening I went to free screening of the new documentary Maxed Out. (I love being a student. The director James Scurlock came to answer questions, as did Professor Warren, who was interviewed in the film.) It’s a movie about a fascinating and timely topic: consumer debt in America. The median American household currently spends 107% of their yearly income. Which pretty much everyone would agree isn’t sustainable. So what is it about our culture, our society – our credit card and mortgage market? – that gets us in this predicament? And what can we do about it? This film only partially addresses each idea, but it’s a big problem with a lot of players, so one can’t really expect more from a single 87-minute documentary.

Maxed Out is a documentary of the Fast Food Nation and Fahrenheit 9/11 family: relatively entertaining, a bit over-simplistic (I wish there had been a bit more data, and dates), and really best at snide comments. I kind of wish that a documentary maker would remember that he has the audience for about an hour and half – he doesn’t have to make his jokes by media footage intercut with silent text poking fun at politicians’ soundbites. It just seems like a cheap shot to make fun of politicians, especially when you don’t have to and the topic is big enough not to be partisan anyway. Also, when intercut text is the documentary maker’s version of a comedian’s one-liner, its passivity and lack of voice makes it feel like it has less integrity to me.

But this is a quarrel with the style of documentary that has become popular, and there’s probably nothing I can do about that. Within the framework of this style, the documentary is satisfactorily put together. There’s a bunch of footage, some of it really funny, some of it heartbreaking, some of it maddening. There are some great juxtapositions of a 1960 instructional video about credit and current credit card advertisements, and some pretty great stock footage that is used to make points by putting the analogies interviewees make on the screen, including one a zealous and enthusiastic collector makes comparing himself to a pirate whose job is to “push someone out on the plank as far as they can go, so then they will do anything to come back.” He said it to explain why he likes his job, but the image was just so appalling that when an old silent film scene of a pirate sword fight flashed on the screen, it was both sad and hilarious.

Perhaps it’s not saying much to say that the film was actually compelling even with its stylistic faults. I mean, how can it not be compelling? This documentary really makes you realize that debt in this country isn’t happening just at the margins of our society. Nor is debt exclusively the result of “spend money to make money” “Flip that House” TLC-show spending. It’s happening to middle class families and their kids in college. It’s happening to servicemen who were deployed for much longer than their savings and mortgages could stand. It’s happening to the poor, too, and the disenfranchised, and the mentally disabled, and the elderly, and the sick. If you aren’t aware of the scope of the issue, this movie is really worth it. But even if you do know, from academic reading or an anecdote, it’s heartbreaking to hear some of these stories from real people. A few of the stories are truly tragedies, and to see the ripple effect of bankruptcy and bad credit, sometimes to the point of death, is just... let’s just say that I was actually crying at one point.

At times, Maxed Out strays from its didactic message (“Consumer Financial Products Companies Are Exploiting America, and We’re Letting Them”), which makes the film a bit scattered. Originally, it was supposed to be a movie about consumer culture in America, and you can tell he just didn’t have the heart to lose his favorite footage. There’s a prologue and epilogue section that are far too long and don’t really mesh with the rest of the film’s story about debt, except debt’s tenuous connection to our ideas about the rich and famous (Robin Leach is even interviewed). Mr. Scurlock also included a few random scenes that seem to try to paint other entities with the same brush as the banks who charge astronomical interest rates and fees, such as a single throwaway scene of a preacher talking about tithing. I think he was trying to say that megachurches talking about tithing are like bank collectors who demand payments from people who can’t afford them. But to give the director the benefit of the doubt, there’s no explanation why that scene is in there, no connection to the rest of the film. It’s just there, like a remnant of the original “consumer culture” film idea that was just never cut. But if Mr. Scurlock is trying to imply with that scene what I think he’s implying, he’s just wrong. Which is sad, because so much of the rest of his film is solid and compelling, and now I have to go to sleep at night wondering, “Why, oh why, do we allow and even support what amounts to nothing less than predatory (and sometimes deceitful) usury?” Maxed Out can't answer that question, but it’ll certainly make you want to ask the question until someone does reply.

The Gun Seller

2007-03-08T10:32:00.001-05:00

I don’t usually review books, but since I gave up television for Lent this year, I haven’t watched any DVDs recently. However, earlier this week I really needed a break from law school work, and so I read a novel. What a quaint idea, I know.

The book, The Gun Seller, was itself pretty quaint. The first novel by actor Hugh Laurie, it was pretty clearly influenced by the writing of P.G. Wodehouse (which is actually why I picked up the book in the first place). The book is filled with delightfully pointless sidenotes by the narrator, in the style of Bertie Wooster. For example:

She turned towards me and narrowed her eyes. If you know what I mean by that. Narrowed them horizontally, not vertically. I suppose one should say she shortened her eyes, but nobody ever does.

There are a couple jokes that don’t quite translate to the American ear, the most prominent one being a misunderstanding about a character’s name -- Murdah, not Murder, which, instead of making me have to rethink the spelling of the character’s name, made me have to rethink the pronunciation of Murder. But for the most part Mr Laurie successfully creates a deft and amusing narrating voice, which I loved.

However, the book didn’t rest on just being quaint. Instead our verbally deft narrator is set in the middle of a complicated spy novel. Characters come and go, and their dialogue often doesn’t keep clear their relationships to each other. The book itself is split into two parts, with each part feeling like a completely separate story because the main ensemble cast completely changes, other than the narrator. And if you were confused the first time you watched Mission Impossible, the plot is going to run away from you more than a couple times. My attempt to summarize will hopelessly leave out important plot points, but here goes: Thomas Lang, the narrator, is asked to kill a rich American. He refuses and decides to warn the American, but in doing so accidentally gets involved in a multinational plot to sell weapons to rogue nations, specifically by creating terrorism in order to swat it down. (Think Gulf War newsreels as marketing campaigns.) Lang gets recruited to help destroy the conspiracy, then recruited to be part of it by infiltrating and setting up the terrorist group. And along the way, he falls in love a couple times. Even with first-person narration, it’s difficult to keep track of who is deceiving whom and for what purposes.

The book works best if you’re the sort of person who loves both the TV show Jeeves and Wooster and 24. If not, there will be parts of the novel that feel slow or pointless or confusing. But if you somehow feel you’ve always wanted to read an American spy thriller and a British class comedy at the same time, this may be the only book that can fulfill your need.

Sorry, Wrong Number

2007-02-20T00:06:00.000-05:00

After the Great Depression and a second World War, our relatively young and optimistic country was realizing (and attempting to comprehend) humanity’s great potential for evil and immorality, bigotry and fear. And so, American culture in the 40s and 50s finally created a major art form to reflect the fear, ambivalence and cruelty we seemed to find in the world: film noir.

Now maybe that’s an over simplification of film noir’s roots and purpose, but whatever its origins, film noir is understood to be melodramatic, suspenseful and ultimately unhappy renditions of “gritty” or “hard-boiled” characters. Morals in film noir are often ambiguous, and the “good guys” rarely own white cowboy hats. In attempting to explore the genre, I recently watched “Sorry, Wrong Number,” the 1948 movie starring Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster.

Based on a 1943 radio play, “Sorry, Wrong Number” stars Barbara Stanwyck as a spoiled but invalid heiress named Leona who overhears a telephone conversation about a murder planned to take place at 11:15 that night. Through the course of several telephone conversations and flashbacks (which sometimes occur within each other), Leona becomes convinced that she is the intended murder victim.

Now, if this were, say, a Hitchcock film rather than film noir, there might be a lot that could be done with this premise. Instead, it’s a pretty straightforward story about a spoiled, domineering woman and the desperate husband who hates her. There are no plot twists or surprises – even with flashbacks within flashbacks, the story unfolds almost uneventfully. It’s a decent example of film noir; both Stanwyck and Lancaster, as Leona’s husband, convincingly play selfish and desperate people. But they have very little to play with: there are really no interesting character foils or plot twists, as in Double Indemnity, a film noir classic that far better utilizes Ms. Stanwyck’s talent and toughness. Here, the characters don’t even get to do much – much of the “action” takes place in phone booths or Leona’s bedroom – much less actually tangle with moral ambiguity, thwarted plans, or clashes between strong characters.

The most fun thing about the movie is actually what makes it a mediocre movie, even for film noir: the story’s radio play roots. The original play was about a third of the length of this movie (even though the film clocks in at only 89 minutes), which means a lot of the story seems to simply be spinning its wheels until the dramatic finish. The last ten minutes definitely transform the movie into a nail-biter, and make you almost forget how slow the rest of the movie was. But not quite.

But it is fun to watch the movie realizing that almost the entire story could be heard instead of watched. Heavy narration and extensive use of radio play-type sound effects make the whole movie seem more like an opportunity to watch a radio play, which is actually pretty exciting since the radio play is an art form rarely encountered by modern American audiences (although if you are fascinated by this movie/radio play, I highly suggest you find some radio plays online to listen to. Many are public domain because of poor copyrighting, and BBC radio still airs new plays in its regular programming). But if you’re looking for a high quality example of film noir, Barbara Stanwyck, or Burt Lancaster, you’ll have to look elsewhere.

2 Stars.

The Death of Movie Genres, #1

2007-02-17T22:23:00.000-05:00

I know, I know, this was aired for Valentine's Day. But it's a really fascinating piece about how our culture's "enlightened" relation to romantic love has created yet another casualty: The Romantic Comedy.

Maybe this is why I love old movies: they are untainted by our modern views of sex and love, and can create stories without their tongues in cheek, which leaves them free to do other things (And by "other things," of course I mean "be witty."). Ah for the days of main characters being able to be smart, funny, *and* earnest -- Katharine Hepburn, Barbara Stanwyck, and even Doris Day come to mind for the ladies. Men could also keep their wits and still be funny: think Cary Grant, Jimmy Stewart, and Jack Lemmon. These days, I think the best you can do is two out of three. If you're smart and funny, you can't take anything seriously, but if you're funny and earnest, you can't be very smart.

Being a geek has its benefits: I'm easily amused

2007-01-31T22:59:00.000-05:00

Stranger Than Fiction

2006-11-26T23:27:00.000-05:00

People who know me best know that I've never grown out of the "What Do I Want To Be When I Grow Up?" stage of childhood. And, like the stereotypical child, I often change my mind based on what new and fun encounter I've had. In the past year and a half, I've wanted to be the following: an architect, a professor, a writer, a missionary, a third-world developer (specifically in public health), an entrepreneur, a cinematographer, a journalist, a pastry chef, and a Lego enthusiast (OK, maybe that last thing doesn't count as a job, but it certainly seems to take up a lot of time). And, of course, a lawyer. Some of those I can probably be at once (like, lawyer + writer + professor), but some are harder to fit together.

Basically, though, the common thread of all of these things is that something sparks my imagination. My father used to always have to remind my big sister that imitation was a form of flattery whenever I copied my big sister in what she did when we were little. But I still have the same tendency, and it *is* perhaps the highest praise I can give to something to say that I left wanting to do that thing for a living.

With that preface, I came out of the movie Stranger Than Fiction this weekend and wanted to be a novelist. When I come out of incredible plays, I want to be a director or actress. When I come out of exceptional movies, I want to writer screenplays or be a film editor. Stranger Than Fiction had neither of these effects on me, because in fact it wasn't an exceptional movie. It had a lot of flaws: an inability to commit (the cardinal sin of dramatic arts), and in general an intellectual feel that never quite expanded beyond the cerebral, and an aesthetic that was sometimes confusing. There were lots of wonderful details in the movie that were almost hidden - the quote around a bakery store's exterior, a throwaway background quote about the novelist's religious beliefs, fleeting visual references to books and authors throughout. If you do go see the movie, try to keep alert for these things, even as you get bombarded with silly animations of maps and calculations.

But at the same time, the movie *did* inspire me. Its premise is quite smart and intriguing. Artists create worlds and characters in order to manipulate them into something beautiful - but what if that beauty were actually destructive? It doesn't matter when they are just bits of printed words on paper, but as most artists and writers know, they often seem more separate from one's own creation. In a word, they seem more real. And so, what do you do then? Sacrifce them to the story and the beatury of Art, or do we recognize a purpose of Art other than to illuminate its own beauty? All these thoughts and more poured out of my head as I left the theater, feeling a little empty by the wishy-washy ending of the movie. The movie is about a novelist (or perhaps, more acurately, a tragedian), played by Emma Thompson, and the hero of her new novel who is, inexplicably, real. But - and here is the catch- the hero finds out that he is a character destined to die when he begins to hear the narration of the story in his head. So now he has to figure out what is going to happen to him, and if and how he can save his own life. Throw in a little romantic sideplot with Maggie Gyllenhaal (who is, by the way, delightful as a Harvard Law School student drop-out turned baker. yay!), and you've got pretty much all the important plot points down. Will Ferrell, as the bland anti-hero Harold Crick, seems a bit awkward containing his manic persona to play such a subdued and insecure character, but he does quite well. And we know there is more life bursting to get out from underneath his monotone and bewildered expression, which is important to win over the audience and make us care about his fate. Dustin Hoffman, as the literature professor Harold seeks out for guidance, has apparently perfected the likable but callous (and somewhat phoned-in) performance. See I [Heart] Huckabees and, (oh horror) Meet the Fockers for examples.

The film's biggest problem, however, is the same as Emma Thompson's character's: the ending. How do you end a film about a book character who is real? Unfortunately, you've only got two choices: tragedy and comedy. In the first you kill off Harold Crick, as Emma Thompson's character originally intended. And really, what movie with Will Ferrell as the main character is going to end with such a dramatic and terrible note? In the second, though, you destroy all the build-up of the movie, and end up with a bland cop-out. Or at least, it feels like a cop-out if you can't explain why it makes more sense - for the *story* - for Harold Crick to live. At the end of the day, this movie *is* fiction, and just saying, "oh, you shouldn't kill people" doesn't seem like enough. The script in Stranger Than Fiction makes some half-hearted and cursory attempts to explain a decision of comedy over tragedy, but they aren't explained well or even taken very seriously. Which leaves the film somewhat abrupt in its ending, with me sitting through the credits trying to figure out if there was a better ending out there than the one the film seemingly painted its way into.

All the film's weakness, though, I forgive, not because I think the movie is great, or even necessarily one that i would recommend to any movie goer (think: if you liked I [Heart] Huckabees, you'll probably like this, too). But I forgive the weaknesses of Stranger Than Fiction because I came out of that movie theater with a heightened awareness of the world around me and its beauty, and also a renewed conviction that I wanted to write about it. I came home and sat down in front of my computer and opened up an old story I started about a year ago and started working on it some more. Some new characters came out onto the page, ones I didn't know and didn't expect to meet. But I like them, these new characters of mine. And now, with Strange Than Fiction in the back of my head, I hope they survive the story.

Studio 60

2006-09-18T23:56:00.000-04:00

When I was in elementary school, my dad told me that the most important day of my academic life was the first day of kindergarten. It's their first impression of you, he said. If you have a good first day, anything worse will just be a bad day. If you have a bad first day, good behavior will just be a pleasant surprise. While his summary of the past 17 years of my life might have been an overstatement, certainly it is true that you should always try to start off with a bang. You've got to have a great hook to keep people interested.

How disappointing, then, that Aaron Sorkin's new series, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, started off ...well, I'm not sure how they did it, but it started both slow and confusingly fast. We're introduced to characters, and then they're fired, seemingly to never come again (at least not in this episode or in anything I could find online). Some characters are fictional, but Felicity Huffman pops in briefly to play Felicity Huffman. The camera moves around a lot, but not in that smooth, hand-holding technique of the West Wing. Instead, we're given a lot of cuts and spinning around characters before we really get a chance to look at them. At the same time, it's almost boring because the plot line is directly taken from the 1976 movie "Network". The similarities are recognized by the script, but that doesn't forgive a pilot episode for having a lengthy, preachy monologue before we're ten minutes into the series.

But, mercifully, after the first segment, the show hits its stride. Little wonder that the actors who finally carry the script off are West Wing veterans Bradley Whitford and Matthew Perry. They understand that, for better of worse, Aaron Sorkin's dialogue requires a certain level of musicality -- Sorkin is a writer who loves writing, and his characters have to love language, too. Whitford and Perry's introduction into the episode also signal a shift from the Network-based plot, and the last third of the show felt eerily similar to certain episodes in West Wing or Sports Night ("What if she's for real?" is actually a line of Whitford's). From the introduction of those two characters, the rest of the episode seemed to fly by. The jokes got better, the dialogue got smarter, and I no longer felt like I was watching a cheap TV rip-off of a 70s movie that I didn't really like anyway.

It'll be intriguing to see where the show goes from here. I love Sorkin's writing, and once Schlamme calmed down from some impressive camera gymanstics in the first segment, the show found a great pace. And there's a lot of material that the Studio 60 team obviously is going to cover. The pilot introduced religious bigotry, cocaine addiction, and media self-censorship, and Sorkin is probably one of the few television writers who can address those issues without being too patronizing or didactic. I just hope he doesn't get carried away with his issues (as some of the weaker episodes of Sports Night did), and that he keeps the characters smart, inspired, and inspiring. That hope for intelligent television is, after all, what we like about Sorkin and why we tuned in tonight at all.

TMNT

2006-09-08T18:22:00.000-04:00

For one reason or another, there was a lot of normal childhood that I missed out on. For example, I didn't grow up watching cartoons on Saturday, or watching Nickelodeon most afternoons. It took me until college to see a Brat Pack movie or a single episode of SNL. That said, I did get some pop culture of the late 80s/early 90s. And, I might argue sentimentally, I got the best part. And now I get to relive it. Totally awesome, dude.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

2006-07-20T11:36:00.000-04:00

I’ll admit it: I read movie critics’ reviews to decide whether to watch movies, especially A. O. Scott of the New York Times. So when he, along with seemingly every critic with a word processor, fell in love with Miranda July’s first feature film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, I was ready to like it. In fact, I was eager to like it – so much so that I sat through the entire movie struggling to figure out what, exactly, it was that I was supposed to like.

Miranda July, who wrote, directed, and starred in the film, is first and foremost a performance artist, and to a large degree her debut film valiantly and stubbornly refuses to comply with the conventions of feature films, instead relying on her own background to create the world of film. This creates some very magical moments, all underscored by Mike Andrews’ beautifully simple and whimsical soundtrack. Certain scenes are more like poems than scenes in a movie: a walk down a street becomes a metaphor for a couple’s relationship, a ten year old girl uses her bedroom ceiling as the blank page to blueprint her future kitchen, and a man tries to hide a framed print of a bird – a relic of his unhappy past – by wedging it into a tree.

Unfortunately, these moments do not come together with the charm that they individually suggest. While I am all for films creating worlds and storytelling paces that are not “realistic,” films (and, indeed, all art) requires some real connection between the audience and the characters or plot. The loose story noncommittally wanders between small plots involving an amateur performance artist, a shoe salesman, and their family and friends, but we never really get to see any story long enough to really understand it. Worse still, we cannot care about characters so utterly removed from humanity that they have none of the same worries and fears as normal human beings. In the world of Me and You and Everyone We Know, people do not worry about conversations with strangers or being too forward when first meeting someone. They do not worry about a child who obsessively buys kitchen and home supplies for her hope chest. They do not worry about the fact that sexually explicit messages taped to a window facing a bus stop might be read by more than the two teenage girls for whom the messages are intended. Somehow, in this world, everyone is unconcerned for the safety and health of a man who pours lighter fluid on his hand and ignites it in front of his sons. Nor does anyone seems to notice or be disturbed by a seven year old boy who wanders into an online chat room and ends up having multiple conversations I will not describe here. Instead, all of these incidents are supposed to be somehow endearing and indicative of inherent worth.

Instead of exploring her characters, Ms. July relies on the crutch that too many modern artists lean on: being different without deciding why it matters to be different. Instead, her work seems to proclaim that just being different makes it Important. Most critics seem to have fallen victim to this ploy, falling in love with this movie for no other reason than the fact that Ms. July uses a non-linear plot and doesn’t focus on character or plot or, indeed, much of anything. After all the critical attention this tactic acquired, a conscientious viewer might, like me, try to like the film because it claims to be Artistically Important.

And yet, I could never focus on the artistic techniques and merits of the film because I was too distracted by the fact that I didn’t care at all about the movie or the people it portrayed. Who cares if a film is artistically different if it doesn’t use those qualities to convey something more powerful: a message, a story, or maybe even a character’s revelation or two? The same critics who pan a blockbuster action film for not developing plot or character even if that film created new innovations in pyrotechnics or computer animation should have turned in a similar complaint for this film: all technique, but for no reason.

Me and You and Everyone We Know feels more like something you should be watching as an installation at your local museum, sitting on a large hard bench and pondering not only the film but the paint splotch helpfully named “Untitled No. 4” next to it. It is a noble idea to remind us not to pigeonhole the medium of film any more than we do the medium of paint or print. However, without any other purpose that breaking filmic conventions, this film ends up being more something the critics tell you you’re supposed to appreciate than something you can actually enjoy.

1 out of 4 stars (do I have to give it any stars?)

Movie Review: Stolen

2006-07-05T16:50:00.000-04:00

My relationship with rain fluctuates quite a bit. Sometimes it's glorious to walk through; sometimes it's just annoying to get wet. Sometimes I feel cooped up being inside; sometimes I love looking out the window at the raindrops, or curling up with a book or movie. Currently, though, I'm pretty happy with rain. It's summer rain, first of all, so it's warm and therefore less of a pain to walk through. And second of all, it's allowed me to duck in to a couple movie theaters recently and see some good flicks on the big screen. Yesterday's movie at E Street Cinema was one you may not have heard of, but if you get a chance, you might want to check it out.

Stolen is a documentary about the 1990 art theft that took place at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum, wherein two unknown thieves posed as Boston police officers entered the museum, tied up the guards, and proceeded to steal thirteen works of art, among them three Rembrandts, five Degas, and a Vermeer. But Stolen is also a documentary about Isabella Stewart Gardner herself, her art collection, and its acquisition. And though the film is only 82 minutes, it also has its share of con artists, conspiracy theorists, art detectives, and art-obsessed writers. And a bit of a ghost story. And some international politics. In order to keep all these elements organized, the viewer is subjected to many interjected chapter titles, which are annoying and ruin almost all sense of pacing.

To the film's credit, however, all these disparate elements somehow come together to create a single story, even though it's hard to say what that story is. One could make the argument that it is just about the theft, and all the background about museum and the thirteen stolen pieces, especially Vermeer's The Concert, just illuminate just what what stolen and why it is important. Presumably, this is what the film's creator, Rebecca Dreyfus, wants this film to be about: the trailer, the website, and even the film's title lend themselves to this reading of the myriad of topics she raises in her film.

But almost as easily, the exact same film could have been named Isabella's Museum. There is a lot of focus on the aura of this little museum in Boston, to which the theft has certainly contributed: because of the structure of Ms. Gardner's will in 1924, the museum's collection may not be altered, so the walls simply remain empty where the stolen pieces used to hang. The woman behind the museum and how she acquired the pieces is at least as interesting as the theft that occured there, and we learn about both in parallel.

My opinion, though, is that Stolen is really about how art can capture the soul, the imagination, and perhaps even the common sense and sanity of those who dedicate their lives to it. In just 82 minutes, it is hard to understand how so many people have had their part of their lives consumed by the art involved in the theft. And yet every single person onscreen is overcome, either by the artwork itself or the mystery that surrounds it: a Boston reporter claims to have "lost" a year to the search for the masterpieces, a Vermeer biographer and a couple novelists nearly break down just talking about the theft of The Concert, and in a letter Isabella Stewart Gardner compares her art collecting to taking morphine or being alcoholic. A renowned art detective is dedicated to recovering these pieces even though he has skin cancer and is past retirement age, and becomes perhaps too confident that he can recover at least some of the artwork. Another detective stops talking on the record for safety reasons. And perhaps most intriguing are the museum attendant and the former art thief who find themselves involved in this story, each obsessed in his own way.

Even the film itself seems a result of this preoccupation with the museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner, and that single Vermeer that was stolen along with 12 other pieces of priceless art. Ms. Dreyfus saw the The Concert as a little girl, and her film now studies -- pores over, really -- the image of that painting, hinting at Ms. Dreyfus's own obsession. And for those in the audience who do not share a passion for 17th century art or 19th century Bostonian museum creators or 20th century art theft, it is the obsession itself -- not the object of obsession -- that captivates one's attention.

2.5 out of 4 stars

Best Commerical Ever

2006-06-14T15:33:00.000-04:00

And by best, I mean weirdest.

Rube Goldberg

2006-06-14T15:21:00.000-04:00

Many of you know I love Rube Goldberg devices. And even though there isn't a Wallace and Gromit movie coming out soon, I feel compelled to share with you.