England at its Best

Helen Mirren apparently went commando at the Oscars... now that's class. Despite certain American pop icons like J-Lo and Jessica Simpson showing up on TV with dresses with necklines that plunge to their abdomen and leave them practically topless, a 61-year old British actress in a tasteful dress just showed them how to get into the tabloids. I'm always amused by the old guard of British actresses still towering over the film world like voracious tyrannosaurs because whenever their names come up, it's not long before somebody mentions that sex scene with Malcom MacDowell, Theresa Ann Savoy, and Helen Mirren that's intercut with explicit girl on girl action in Caligula, or for Dame Judi Dench, appearing in A Midsummer Night's Dream in nothing but green body paint. Seriously, ask a question in a film forum about Shakespeare in Love, within six posts you'll get “Mmmmm... naked green Judi Dench.”

Also this week, Arsenal's Abou Diaby (who really has a fantastic name) kicked England Captain John Terry in the head during the League Cup final. The thing that's funny about that the player who came away injured from that clash is Abou Diaby hurt his foot on the pile of rocks that serves John Terry as a thinking machine. Chelsea's first team did carry the day against the youth and reserves team Arsenal plays in the Mickey Mouse Cup, in a typical pyrrhic Chelski victory. I would think Roman Abramovich would be more embarrassed than pleased at seeing his champagne and caviar team have to come from behind after a 17-year old kid scored on them, before getting into a brawl with a bunch of teenagers. We do have people like this in America... we call them the Indiana Pacers. Now if only Didier Drogba would follow in the footsteps of Ron Artest and take some time off during the season to promote his rap album, I'd be all set.

Mavericks 91 - 65 Timberwolves

Kevin McHale's got a fever... and the only prescription is more shooting guards! It was no surprise this team couldn't hang with the Mavericks, but there was a time it was exciting to see the Timberwolves take on much better teams. These days there generally isn't a single match-up I can look forward to in any game they play, other than whenever the Wolves take a couple guards off the floor and let Craig Smith come out to play. When I watched a 6'13" power forward-* take a 20' jump shot and looked up at the stats board to see the team was shooting 30% from the field... that kind of game-plan meant they weren't even trying. 35.7% from behind the line, 28.4% from in front of it, who are they, Gonzaga? I expected them to get pummeled, but I've never been so bored with the Wolves as I am this year. Garnett won't go near the basket anymore, and the rookies, Craig Smith and Randy Foye, are about the only players who look like they've got some sort of elementary grasp of strategy. It's not even wait 'til next year, since it will be another season before Garnett can opt out of his contract, and I don't now how long before they clear out all the other seven year deals McHale signed or they can use another draft pick before he trades it away, and it's hard to imagine Wittman is going to coach them up and get more out of the underachievers the team is stuck with, or the cornucopia of shooting guards.

Most of all it's just boring because when I started following the wolves I used to be able to divine some sort of order in the chaos of a Wolves game, for instance I could easily tell who was playing what position and see some traces of a plan to their offense and defense, even if both were failing... they lost 26 straight games to the Sonics in the mid-90s, but you could see how they Sonics beat them. Now it's just a muddled mess, my mind wanders, and I don't even have any sense of the game without checking the scoreboard. Their quality opponents seem to sleepwalk through it all too like the Mavs did tonight, and the losing teams in total disarray run around like chickens with their heads cut off and still manage to be competitive. The refs didn't do us any favors either, when after a series of about five questionable calls for the Mavs in less than a minute of play, I looked up at the scoreboard and the Mavs were up by over 20 points and the Wolves were shooting 30%... Dirk Nowitzki really doesn't need that much help to beat the Wolves, it's not like he plays for Duke or something-**. I don't mind watching a loss, but I do demand an actual game, not a bunch of guys screwing around in a gym and pretending to keep score.

*-Kevin Garnett is, according to his former coach, 7'1" in his stocking feet, but insists on being listed as 6'11" because he wants to be seen as versatile, and not just a big man. He is an insanely versatile athlete, but pretending to be shorter really is about trying to keep people from questioning why he won't go to the basket. When he did play like an aggressive 7-footer, he won an MVP trophy (and should have won two). For years before that, he was content to shoot admittedly unstoppable fade-aways, and spent an entire summer working on his three point shot. This was a great complement to Tom Gugliotta about 10 years ago... but now both he and our only center like to shoot from 18+ feet for a losing team. Craig Smith's teardrops
are the only thing dropping in the paint for the Wolves this year... and that is actually a basketball shot, he's not excessively weepy.

**-I haven't watched the NCAA tournament since the flurry of phantom fouls in the second half of the 2001 Duke-Maryland semi-final, and good riddance. If the winner is decided by TV ratings, I'd rather watch the women, because competitive game + sweaty women >>> 2-hour commercial for Starter apparel with a pass to the next round for the best seller. Seriously, even Wimbledon finally admitted athletes in skirts playing competitive tennis is more fun than watching some Swiss cattle rustler rocket balls into a green wall past some bewildered asshole in white shorts and coughed up some prize money.

The women saved SNL, and nobody told me?

I never thought Saturday Night Live would recover from the nadir it hit in the 90s, because as opposed to previous rough spots, the flaws were more structural than cyclical. But now in my opinion it's truly funny again. And the thing I find remarkable is that it's almost entirely because the women. I don't think I could say about any previous cast that I tuned in just to see the female cast, but with the exception of Darrell Hammond, nobody comes close to Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, and Kristen Wiig. SNL had a long-standing reputation for being a tough place for women, but it feels to me like the over the years I've watched it off and on that there was evidence of opening up a female-driven perspective... but maybe there are just a lot more humorous references to menstruation. That shift may have resulted from Tina Fey's tenure running the writers' room, but hopefully it continues despite her leaving to do 30 Rock.

In my opinion Amy Poehler is the new star of the show, the way John Belushi, Dana Carvey, and Will Ferrell were in previous eras, because she owns every sketch she's in. When she came onto Weekend Update replacing Jimmy Fallon-*, that may have been the beginning of the return to its previous glory. I would even say the most outstanding thing about Seth Meyers is his rapport with Amy Poehler in their sketches together and on Weekend Update, and the two of them are hilarious together. The recurring characters “The Couple Who Should be Divorced” would have gotten old a long time ago if it wasn't for the flare with which Amy and Seth just tear into each other, first with the insults and then the public make-up sex. And that isn't the only sketch I've greeted with a bit of a grimace only to be won over by Amy Poehler's antics. And I won't ever see Avril Lavigne anywhere, in any context, without picturing Amy Poehler in a tie yelling “I wear black tampons because I'm a punk!”

Maya Rudolph has had for a long time a whole stable of impressions and characters that form the basis of a lot of sketches, but the person I'm really impressed with at present is Kristen Wiig. She's only been on a short while but the richness of some of the impressions she's done makes her possibly the equivalent to the role Phil Hartman and Darrell Hammond have played on the show: the Man of a Thousand Faces, because she smoothly slides into every sketch. For the 50% of my readership that are grand connoisseurs of the work of Drew Barrymore, her impression captures Mlle Barrymore's speaking style so perfectly that after a single line I found myself thinking “Wow, I never realized Drew Barrymore talks like that.” I also think she's about the most attractive women to ever appear on SNL, but I'm sure that has nothing to do with my affection for her.

*-Getting so into your own performance that you laugh at all your own jokes worked better for Dennis Miller. Probably because Dennis Miller also immersed himself in eating shit when a joke flopped, and he didn't do Jimmy Fallon's thing of turning to the audience to laugh at his own sketches like his own version of The Gary Shandling Show, a Pirandellian sitcom which was apparently seen by nobody but me.

Doctor Hugh?

I don't know how serious the rumors were that there was serious consideration of Hugh Grant joining Doctor Who as Christopher (don't call me Ian) Eccleston's replacement, but it's an interesting idea. He did once play the Doctor for about a minute in “The Curse of the Fatal Death”, and he has the wit and sincerity to perhaps create his own style of the alien charm that is the character. This might have been a good idea for him too, since he's faced for a long time the problem of being typecast into the same type of character in an endless stream of romantic comedies, after helming the flagship of the genre, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and he did just do a movie with the queen of the RomCom section at the video store (if not the box office), Drew Barrymore. He himself has commented on the difficulty of finding a fresh take on the guy from 4W+1F when he's asked to play him for the seventeenth time. I could be forgetting something, but the last time I remember seeing him do something else besides feckless charm in a RomCom was a small part in The Remains of the Day, and that was going on 15 years ago. I suppose his character from About a Boy was enough of a selfish bastard to avoid that trap, and in Love, Actually he was essentially playing Tony Blair, and not the guy from Notting Hill, again. The other nice thing would have been that with Hugh Grant as the lead, Doctor Who would have gotten more mindshare in America, and we might have gotten more of it over here a little quicker. As it is, David Tennant has been great as the new Doctor, with a perfect mix of solemnity and humor, but I can't help wondering about the road not taken.

Top 10 Candidates to Replace Chief Illiniwek and the Fighting Illini as the University of Illinois mascot:

10. The Poorly Conceptualized Parade Floats (never letting this one go, PJ)

9. The Frenchy's Cream-filled Baguettes

8. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne Buckets

7. The Stove Pipe Hats (it's up to the Land of Lincoln to bring back that fashion trend)

6. The Gophers (No way that's taken, right? What?!)

5. The Pandas (the hooligans can bring bamboo sticks to beat the other team with)

4. The River Queens (selling the naming rights to the River Queen in E. Dubuque could fund half the theater department)

3. The Uncovered Manholes (show the North Side some love, if you know what I mean)

2. The University of Illinois Fighting Escaped Prisoners (they already have the orange jumpsuits)

1. Honor Abraham Lincoln's legacy by acknowledging that the whole shape of the state with the Mississippi River coming off the end just looks like a Giant Penis Urinating on the Confederacy.

The 2007 Oscar Shorts... most of them, anyways

The 2007 Oscar nominated shorts turned out to be a fantastic way to spend an evening, and I really wish they could get these distributed a little more widely, so more people would be exposed to them. Some of the animated shorts from major studios find their way onto DVDs, at least.

The live action shorts were all pretty humorous, a nice change of pace from last year's musings on death and tragedy, and the supermarket. Most of them can't be done justice without spoilers, and their individual quirks lose something in description, but here's my shot at convincing anybody else they're worth checking out. “Eramos Pocos” is an amusing piece about a man whose wife leaves him, leading him to collect her mother from a nursing home and trick her into cooking and cleaning up after him and his son, while claiming his wife is just “er, away on a trip,” perhaps making him appreciate the true meaning of family for the first time through what turns out to be a fairly odd set of circumstances. “Helmer & Son” is a cute story about a man called to a nursing home where his father has locked himself in the closet and won't come out. Trying to coax their father out of the closet brings out a lot of the undercurrents in the family relationships, and draws out a long-awaited confrontation. I thought “Helmer & Son” was hilarious, watching this man try to deal with a surreal situation, while everybody acts like he's the one with the problem. “The Saviour” has to be the most controversial, and the one I'd least like to spoil, dealing with religion, adultery, and gullibility in the suburbs, and what people need to believe to make sense of it all, and definitely well worth seeing. If not for “West Bank Story”, I would think it was an easy favorite for the Oscar.

“Binta y la Gran Idea” is a film set in Senegal that's really about two ideas, one big and one little, that Binta and her father have to make the world a little better. Binta and her schoolmates put on a play to put pressure on her very traditional uncle to let his daughter go to school, like her cousin Binta, and maybe change one life for the better. Her father sees how sometimes people miss the point of progress and comes up with his own big idea, and with Binta's help, tries to take it to the government. The scene where Binta's father has a friend show off his new watch that sounds an alarm every day at noon is classic, because his friend so taken with the technology (“It's Swiss!”), but Binta's father can only wonder, what happens at noon? His big idea about how to handle the influx of progress and take what's good from old and new is pretty funny, and “Binta y la Gran Idea” is a pretty neat film.

For me though, the best film out of all of them was “West Bank Story”, about two competing falafel stands in the West Bank, the Jewish-run Kosher King and the Arab-run Hummus Hut. The bitter competition between the two restaurants mirrors the larger conflict in generally ridiculous ways, and I burst out laughing at the first shot of the film, which is several Arab men doing a tough guy strut down the street snapping their fingers in an obvious homage to the Sharks and Jets. The whole film continues as a parody of West Side Story, with some pretty hilarious musical numbers. My favorite line was when this film's Juliet goes out chasing after a customer shouting that he forgot his package of hummus, only to be detained by Israeli soldiers who think she said she's got a package from Hamas. Standing in front of the soldiers in a hideous restaurant uniform with a kabob skewer through the hat, she asks “Do I look like a suicide bomber? You think I'd be caught dead in this?” More than any of the other films, I hope “West Bank Story” gets exhibited to a wider audience, because it's about the best straight comedy I've seen in ages, and maybe its Oscar win will do that.

Several of the animated shorts had me laughing so hard I couldn't breathe, and while it's true I have been told I'm easily amused, I still think the films deserve the credit. I always thought the Scrat did more in five minutes to promote the Ice Age franchise than the rest of the movies combined, and “No Time For Nuts” is some of his best work. The Scrat stumbles on a strangely acorn-shaped time machine buried in the snow, and after darting about it in circles sniffing it over, he pushes a button and zaps his nut away, and what follows is the Scrat's chase through time after his nut. “Maestro” shows a singer warming in front of his dressing room mirror with the assistance of a robot arm in a pretty odd style, where the viewer's perspective rotates around the scene. The animation is tremendous in its three dimensional detail, down to showing the reflections in the singer's eyes, and the film is amusing, but it was the kicker at the end that made me laugh out loud.

I could have done without “The Little Matchgirl”, which is a competent but uninspiring retelling of the grim fairy tale done in a traditional two dimensional style, and I suspect it owes its Oscar nomination to nostalgia over the old Disney cartoons, but who knows. One of the shorts not nominated for an Oscar, “The Wraith of Cobble Hill”, is another inclusion that shows off a different style of animation, which I found interesting but ultimately uninspiring. “Lifted” is an almost purely visual short about an alien abduction with training wheels, as a gelatinous teenage alien takes his equivalent of a driver's test. It's Pixar's inclusion, to be released in conjunction with Ratatouille next year, and I'm sure that helped it get to Oscar night, even though it is quite funny.

Of the other shorts not nominated for Oscars, I was blown away by the technical detail of “One Rat Short”, the star-crossed romance of a street rat and a lab rat. An alley rat out on a rainy rooftop catches a whiff of a bag of cheetos blowing around in the wind, and chases it into an exhaust vent, only to accidentally stumble into a lab full of bar-coded rats in cages being experimented on by an automated system with a sinister glowing red eye. He finds a dainty white lab rat with big, watery blue eyes he sinks into, smitten immediately, and tries to take her away from it all. Like “Maestro”, it's a great visual use of what animation can do, moving in three dimensions in incredible detail, since there's no limitations of sets or crew and equipment.

Definitely at the other end of the spectrum in both tone and style, “Guide Dog” is a brief cartoon with a colored-pencil drawing sort of look about a dog applying for a position as a guide dog for the blind. Just watching the dog run through his whole repertoire in the job interview, showing vigilance, ferocious defense of his charge, enthusiasm, etc. all the while spraying saliva as he bounces up and down on his chair is hilarious. When he actually starts his assignments, he has the most ridiculous set of awful circumstances befall his charges, no matter how hard he tries to protect them. I couldn't believe how funny “Guide Dog” is, and I only wish I could find Plympton's other film with the same protagonist, “Guard Dog” (which apparently did get an Oscar nomination). Also absolutely laugh out loud hilarious in a much more low-key manner is “The Passenger”, this film about a kid out on an eerie, stormy day, walking home with his nose buried in a scary book also titled “The Passenger”. He gets on a bus, and engrossed in his book doesn't notice he's the only one on the bus other than this strange looking fish in a plastic bag on the seat next to him. The mood is somewhat creepy, so the kid puts on some headphones and puts on some groovy tunes to take the edge off, to disastrous results. It's also incredibly funny, with such a cool sense of its own style that I really wonder how it didn't make the cut for an Oscar.

The capper to the exhibition was “Gentleman's Duel”, which featured competing 18^th century French and English aristocrats each seeking to charm the same woman, and gradually completely losing sight of her in their attempts to one-up each other. Finally, a challenge is made, and they agree to a duel... with giant steampunk robots. France vs. Britain is always an amusing clash of cultures to watch, and this is a cute little film crammed with sex and poodles, so of course I loved it. And I definitely could see myself being clumsy enough to follow in the footsteps of the Englishman who begins his seduction with “My darling, your grace is matched only by your boobies. I m-mean your beauty!”

Unfortunately “The Danish Poet”, this year's Oscar winner, wasn't included in the Magnolia Pictures' collection that I saw, so I can't comment on it. I also never got around to hitting the documentary shorts, which were showing once a day at an obscure theater, not really getting the star treatment. But I do hope more people see some of the great shorts that get nominated for Oscars and occasionally released on DVD, because there's some great stuff in there... every single one of the live action shorts was a much better film than Babel.

Four Hours of Oscar

Another Oscar night is over, and this year they managed to keep things clicking and give out an award every 11 minutes. (Although that is just an average, early on it went much longer between awards.) The problem is that while some of the usual Oscar filler was interesting, at least the first couple times, after the first couple hours I just wanted to know if Martin Scorsese was going to get robbed a fourth time. Like the dancers who formed silhouettes were pretty impressive, and at least one of the many montages was good (Michael Mann's America), but once you hit that fourth hour they're like hold music: it doesn't matter how much you like the song, it's just an automated voice telling you "Your call is important to us". On the positive side, there was nothing so terrible as the interpretive tap-dance homages to Saving Private Ryan and La Vita E Bella that were practically offensive.

Some of the big favorites got their well deserved rewards, like Helen Mirren, Forest Whitaker, and Martin Scorsese, and The Depahted for Best Picture and for William Monahan's screenplay. About the only upset I cared about was Pan's Labyrinth taking home awards but losing the foreign film award to The Lives of Others, although that is the only award where you're required to see all the nominees before submitting a ballot, so it tends to hold up a bit better... I couldn't believe Amelie lost to a Bosnian movie about opposing soldiers stuck in a trench with a third guy stuck on a land mine, it turned out No Man's Land was just a truly fantastic black comedy in the spirit of Dr. Strangelove, so there's something to be said for actually seeing the movies before voting.

The idea that the big cash-grab Norbit may have cost Eddie Murphy an Oscar was fairly amusing, especially in light of his comments at the Golden Globes, where he raved about how he had basically done the movie for free only because Bill Condon told him he'd get an award for it. Maybe he already blew through all his Axel Foley money, but I can't help a certain smug schadenfreude when a successful person chases even more commercial success and gets it, but still falls flat on their face when their greed makes them miss more meaningful opportunities. It's like Meg Ryan, she had to do just a few more romantic comedies to put a few more bucks in the bank before the big 4-0. Just to be fair, while writing this I took a look back at her filmography, and I was surprised to be reminded that there are a fair number of dramatic films over the course of her career, but she kept following the Ben Affleck model of doing a safe movie to counterbalance every risk she took, and consequently any credit she gets for Proof of Life is undermined by making sure it was closely followed by Kate & Leopold. Cut out a couple of her less successful romantic comedies and the third time around with Tom Hanks, maybe occasionally take a small part in a good movie, and I wonder if she'd have gotten scripts better than In the Cut for her last gasp "I'll get plastic surgery and drop my pants" attempt at keeping her career alive. And so it is with Eddie Murphy, if he'd held off on fucking Norbit for a few months, doors might have opened for a guy who hasn't done anything but bathroom humor family entertainment in a decade (I blocked out Pluto Nash), but I guess he wanted the cash.

I did enjoy the gags with Al Gore about the possibility of launching his presidential run at the Oscars, almost as much as I enjoyed seeing that POS Babel go home with a consolation prize, and as many Oscars as Pirates of the Caribbean. How that got a best picture nomination over Little Children or The Last King of Scotland, to give a couple alternatives, I'll never know. Rinko Kikuchi can pick a movie up on her shoulders, but she can only carry it so far. There were no outstanding original songs, or animated films, and of course the only animated short I didn't see was "The Danish Poet", which won. And a lot of winners of course had to make passive-aggressive protests against the request not to read lists of names on an international TV broadcast, setting down their Oscars on the floor so they could pull out their little folded pieces of paper to start reading... the reason there's no podium is so you can't settle in and start rummaging around in your pockets and purses for wadded up pieces of paper, dummies. But the best moment was when the announcers cemented how stupid and intrusive their little factoids were by bringing up the Japanese film Infernal Affairs William Monahan used as the basis for his Depahted screenplay, because despite their best attempts, Japan does not in fact include Hong Kong.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy

I made the unfortunate mistake of crashing at my parents' house last night, because I had some things to do there and I figured it was better than driving back home down an icy road next to a river in the middle of a blizzard. Of course I didn't realize until I got set to leave that there was an accumulated foot and a half of snowfall and it was still snowing, and Mr. Plow seems to have abandoned me. Scrape my asphalt, indeed. So I found whatever scraps of freeze-dessicated leftovers there were in the fridge, and built a fire, because it looks like I'm here until spring. If I didn't have the ghostly bartender to talk to, I think I'd go nuts.

This did give me a chance to download and burn an Internet Freedom Disk, which is the somewhat pretentious nom de guerre some slashdot contributor came up with for linux live CDs, thinking as only a geek can that this would make them more appealing to the unwashed masses. My IFD... god, that acronym sounds like it should either explode or go up somebody's vagina, or possibly both if it's a Friday night in East Dubuque. Okay, putting that thought aside, my IFD was an Ubuntu distro that I downloaded from a UofM computer science department website. Actually speaking of names, I've got to hand it to the people who figured the best way to popularize their work was to give it a sexy name like Ubuntu... featuring the Gnome desktop environment. Not "gnome", but "guh-nome", just to be more up it's own ass.

Now that I've obsessed over the superficial, I have to say I was kind of surprised by how well it worked. Well, on the second try, anyways, since my goofy CD drive didn't seem to be reading the disc the first time and it took forever to load. It also occurs to me that I haven't quite gotten around to mentioning what the hell an Internet Freedom Disk is: it's a CD that can boot your computer straight into a linux OS (in this case Ubuntu) without installing anything on the hard drive, running entirely in RAM and disappearing again when you turn the computer off. The only thing I used it for other than poking around was to see if I could use the web, other than the lack of a wireless connection. I should have tried to print something as well, and cover all the emergency basics in case Windows blows up on me someday, but sadly I'm not that smart. I think it would be totally cool to get this working on a thumb drive so I could save some things to it, and basically have my own portable parasitic desktop that I could run by plugging it into other people's computers, but all the guides I can find to doing this say how ridiculously easy it is and then list seven homebrew utilities to reformat the file system and reverse the polarity of the neutron flow, so no dice.

This did sell me on the possibility of plugging a linux machine into my TV to play around with it a bit. I have no idea why this doesn't take off a bit more as a cheaper option, since getting some basic tasks going through firefox and openoffice was pretty easy without having seen any form of linux before. For environments where all that's needed is an appliance that can write a paper and open a web page, I would think this would be indistinguishable from the alternatives: a pirated copy of XP, an old copy of Windows 98 that MS isn't supporting anymore, and the like. About the only thing I can think of that I don't know if I could run on Ubuntu was the port of the original Legend of Zelda I like to play. Well, that and my favorite usenet program only runs on windows, which would at least temporarily interfere with my steady supply of free pr0n. Obviously a deal-breaker... fuck off, Tux!

Since I'm still snowed in, this will be the first of many half-finished blog posts I can catch up on in the next few hours until I hear a St. Bernard scratching at the door. But for the time being I'll be locked up in here with the creepy twins. Come blog with us... come blog with us, forever...

Bobcats 100 - 95 Timberwolves

How do you lose to the Bobcats? Seriously, how do you blow a 15 point lead against the Bobcats? The Bobcats were trailing for almost three full quarters before they took the lead back with four minutes to go. How does a 38% shooter with a shitty teenage mustache go 10-19 from the field and 4-7 from behind the three point line to rally his team to a 4th quarter victory? Early in the game watching Adam Morrison try to create his own shot against Kevin Garnett was just embarrassing for him, late in the game watching him rattle off shot after shot was even more embarrassing for the Wolves. It was an off night for Foye and Davis, but Mike James did score more than enough to make up for Foye's production at point guard, so it really comes down to an underwhelming performance by the rest of the guards at dealing with freaking Morrison, who singlehandedly tied the output of Davis, Hassell, McCants, and Jaric.

I wonder if the turning point wasn't when Mad Dog went down, obviously hurt badly, crying in pain and holding his knee. This is the guy who they used to send in as a doorstop against Shaquille O'Neal, and he'd give up six inches and god knows how many pounds but still not give up ground, so when he went down like that screaming, it was obviously not a booboo. KG immediately turned around and signaled for the trainer, who sat in his chair. KG had to call the guy over multiple times and audibly tell him to hurry it up, but the only person who got up to help was Craig Smith. Which may be part of the reason why "I Like Craig" shirts are selling well. Madsen had to be helped off the court without putting any weight on his leg, by the guys on the coaching staff who apparently aren't paying close enough attention to the game to have heard the whistle and thump when Madsen was fouled and hit the floor like a sack of potatoes. I can't think that was a great morale-building moment for the players they were supposed to be motivating, and maybe Madsen's lunatic enthusiasm and willingness to hit people would have changed the character of the Wolves' defense in the fourth quarter.

The funny thing is I felt ill enough tonight that I considered leaving after the third quarter, since I figured the game was in the bag, but I thought I'd be a real fan and stick it out, and they rewarded me by sticking their fingers down their throats. Now I'll have to hear about Morrison's rally from a certain Chicago banker who's a huge fan of Gonzaga basketball (this week).

WTF is going on at DQ?

It's been well below zero recently, and yet the DQ on Lake street was open today, with people standing around outside waiting to order ice cream. What the hell, how is it they planned ahead and hired staff to make ice cream in February? And what's with the idiots (including me) who stop for ice cream when it hits 30 degrees? While I was waiting for my misty freeze and marveling at the crazy weather, I did ask the guy behind the window what he thought of global warming and he told me, "IT SUCKS!!!" (Which was a lot funnier if you're the type of person who repeatedly drives to Baldwin, WI for basically no reason.)

Caché Americain, or “Oh, hell no!”

I just read that Ron Howard is set to direct a remake of Caché. There's something just horrifying about this, and I wasn't even all that huge a fan of the original film, but ironically for the same reason a Ron Howard remake bothers me so much. Caché didn't grab me because I never penetrated the enigma at the heart of the film, and I never came to any understanding of what it all meant... it's impenetrably mysterious but absolutely gripping all the way to the ambiguous conclusion. That's why a remake goes beyond just being a bad movie, which I can ignore, and to the point of actually being offensive. A highly commercialized Ron Howard version is going to have to take any subtlety or ambiguity out of the film and present a very clear yet non-controversial theme, and this has two problems. The first is that there are distinct political undertones to Caché which I'd hate to see lost in the interest of universal appeal. But while any translation would have to make some changes, what really annoys me is that when the film is inevitably dumbed down there's something really sad in seeing a piece of art supplanted and indelibly linked to something to pass time on an airplane, where the original film will become just the source material for Opie's magnum opus, like an early draft. It feels like we renamed checkers “American chess”. And this just how irrationally upset I got hearing about the possibility, I can't imagine how much I'd have to overreact if I actually saw it.

R.I.P. Incandescent Light Bulbs, 1880-2007

Sometimes I think it's the environmentalism that brings out the most stubborn departure from logic and capacity for empathy in people, more so than the other great mysteries of life: religion, sport, and how much those French cartoons I used to watch as a kid gave me this smoky, sinuous image of women like a burning willow tree and seared it into my brain like a cattle prod cradled against a milky white breast-- so yes, it's the environment that really does the screwing with the train of thought, or with track by... how we perceive things. So what brought this on was a couple slashdot stories about light bulbs: first one about how Walmart is planning on carrying only compact fluorescents in the future, because they're much more attractive from an inventory standpoint and selling one beats selling seven incandescents, and the other about a bill in the California Assembly to ban incandescent lightbulbs.

There are certainly reasonable criticisms of this being a typical California "Our only tool is a hammer to hit ourselves in the head with" approach, where they specify a single, crudely drawn solution and then implementation of all the details and any secondary effects are handled by magic fairies (110% of the budget will be spend on education, other states will sells us cheap power, all cars will run on sunshine, hail Caesar). There are a lot of reasons not to use CFLs that each individually apply to a small number of people, like those sensitive to flicker, artists and museums, or people making movies (although that's all done in Mumbai and Bucharest now), or more generally anybody with a really small light fixture or a dimmer. Now that I've taken my cheap shots at California I can acknowledge that this bill is probably procedural, and serves the actually useful purpose of opening up a discussion as to how California should push conservation.

What kills me though is some of the really strained objections. Like the argument that CFLs would create a class system based on lighting by which only the rich could afford to have quality lighting in their homes, because the bulbs that cover a broad range of the lighting spectrum are expensive. That isn't totally out of left field, but I think the people who can't finance a light bulb have worse problems than the quality of their light fixtures... I don't think the cold, harsh light is going to ruin the effect of that Van Gogh they have hanging on the wall. I also particularly like those who question of cost savings on virtually any energy efficient device by noting that the old, inefficient device kicks out so much heat they can save a penny a month on natural gas. If you think a fucking light bulb is the most efficient way to heat your house, maybe you should just open your refrigerator at night in the summer to save on the expense of purchasing and powering a night light, since the fridge light is always on anyways, right? I did have a girlfriend who left her electric oven on all night so she could save on her heating bill, but at least she was doing it because she could stick her landlord with the electric bill (and the curiously high fire insurance premium). But really, may favorite objection is those people who note that CFLs don't work if you have really bad wiring. Which again is one of those mote in your neighbor's eye kind of issues, if you have electrical wiring so bad you can't run a light bulb off of it, and you don't think this is a problem so long as you can find some incandescent bulb that will flicker along with the fluctuating current and burning smells coming from behind the walls.

What causes the stubborn desire to find a crack in the CFL plan and widen it by any hyperbole necessary is obviously the fact that environmentalism is ultimately a lifestyle critique. I'm lazy, so I don't fix the drafts from my windows and run the heat too high to compensate, but I do like to pat myself on the back whenever I take the bus (instead of walking, because I'm lazy) for supporting mass transit. And it is that lazy hedonism that prevents me from doing any of the things I can do, from thinking ahead so I can waste less. And meanwhile the eye of my internal environmental conscience wanders over my apartment and my lifestyle with the same disapproving gaze as my mother... neither one of them is saying anything, but you know now that you mention it, they both do think like I'd feel a whole lot better and healthier if only I'd clean up my kitchen / Mother Earth / whatever. Actually, in light of that particular metaphor, it's ironic that I keep killing my mother's plants every time I go over to water them.

I'd just like to remind the two people who might actually read this, I've caught up on reviewing every movie I've seen in the past year at Rotten Tomatoes. All of that is over at startthe#$@%ingmovie.com, and there's a permanent link over on the right side of this page as well. I just post the highlights here, and occasionally the lowlights. I see so many bad movies, I figure I may be able to save somebody some pain.

Up next are Little Miss Sunshine and Water.

Little Children, cocks and bulls, and Venus with a Pot Noodle

I truly think Little Children may be the most underrated film of the year. It's a story about the world of stay-at-home parents who meet at a suburban playground, and the extra-marital affairs and social intrigue that take place over the course of the summer, under the specter of child molester who has returned to the neighborhood. Kate Winslet is one of the five women nominated for seemingly every best actress award this year, for her performance as Sarah, a young mother feeling trapped in her house with her daughter, desperate for any brief escape. Patrick Wilson is Brad, a father whose emasculating wife sends him to the library to study for the bar exam every night, while instead he sits on a bench watches kids doing skateboard tricks. Jackie Earle Haley also got an Oscar nomination for playing Ronnie the child molester, whose sinister presence looms over the neighborhood from the fliers with his picture posted on every available surface.


I had no idea what to expect going in, but Little Children completely grabbed me with the frustrations of Sarah and Brad in the tiny, petty universe in which they find themselves trapped, and Jackie Earle Haley's presence as the simultaneously creepy and pathetic Ronnie and his persecution by a deranged local cop was surprisingly engrossing. It's a fascinating story about adults trying to live out juvenile fantasy, particularly in the case of Brad, dubbed “The Prom King” by the local mothers, joins a football team to moonlight as the star quarterback with Sarah as his adoring groupie. Eventually it all has to end, and this makes for a great drama. The film also makes use of an omniscient narrator, which I usually despise, but in this case it provides another perspective on the dramatic events of the film: the narrator's dramatic voice-over commentary, while completely serious in its insights into the characters, is absolutely hilarious. This over the top dramatic device ironically allows the misadventures of Brad and Sarah to be as much comedy as they are drama. And I loved every frame of it. Although I do think it's weird that every time I see Patrick Wilson in a film there's castration and child molestation involved...


Peter O'Toole apparently was a bit disgruntled at receiving a lifetime achievement Oscar, because he said he considers himself very much still in the game, and while Venus may not be his most inspiring work to date, it does prove his point. I really the idea explored in Venus that all the great iconic images of the female form in art all began with a live model who belched and drooled in her sleep like the rest of us. Jodie Whittaker's first appearance as inspiration slurping up a pot noodle captures this perfectly. Peter O'Toole plays Maurice, an aged actor who becomes obsessed with his friend's great-niece Jessie, a pretty low-class young woman whose exasperated family tried to shuffle her off to her ancient great-uncle Ian. The vapid Jessie wolfs down chips while proclaiming her aims at a modeling career, but Maurice's slightly creepy obsession makes him the first person to see something truly transcendently wonderful in her, including her own mother. Leslie Phillips, and Richard Griffiths round out Maurice's circle of friends of fussy and crude old men, and Vanessa Redgrave is great as his ex-wife. Venus really does get into my favorite thing about the world, the moments of shocking beauty that emerge when you find the right angle to view them from, and the way even a complete chav like Jessie is no less a woman for it, with all that implies.

Finally, Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story, was Michael Winterbottom's attempt at filming the supposedly unfilmable post-modern novel, so necessarily it stars Steve Coogan as the director and star of another attempt to film the novel. It moves smoothly from actual scenes from the novel, moving past the cameras of the film within a film to follow the actors into the chaos surrounding the film production, concluding in the screening room where a disappointed cast and crew are underwhelmed by Steve Coogan's film. Completely bizarre, obviously, but very funny in a literary nerd sort of way. And it's nice to see Gillian Anderson again and know she survived the X-Files. I just caught it because of its BAFTA nomination, but I was certainly glad I did.

This just in: people are stupid

I was again marveling at the stupidity of people today, when I encountered that persistent failure of synapses to close that plagues people who sneak food into theatres.  It doesn't seem to matter what kind of theatre it is, whether it's a movie, a college art history lecture, or whatever, just so long as its dark and quiet, so every noise is magnified.  People who sneak in food for some reason love two things:  crunchy chips in crinkly foil bags, and soda in aluminum cans.  It never crosses their minds at the store that they're buying the loudest goddamned food on earth short of brining in a live lobster and dropping it screaming into a boiling pot in the seat next to them.  The film Babel's Japan subplot has scenes immersed in the perspective of a deaf girl, that are almost perfectly silent... which is probably not the time to slowly pop the top on your soda can.  Why is it the people who can't go two hours without snacks can't ever bring an egg salad sandwich?  If you need to chew with your mouth open, try bringing some softer foods you can gum down, for god's sake.

I would probably have dismissed the stupid snackers if it wasn't for the fact that when I got home, I had about my 4th "Breaking News" email from CNN.com about fucking Anna Nicole Smith.  I thought the first one, dumbass freak with big tits found dead (something like that anyways), really covered that story in all the detail I was looking for.  If I needed to know more, I would have been perfectly happy to seek that information out on my own.  But now I can rest easy because I've just been assured there is no indication of foul play.  I'm not kidding, I think I've had as many emails from CNN about Anna Nicole Smith as I have about Osama bin Laden in the last five years, and I'm convinced, the people who demand that CNN do more hard-hitting stories about unintelligible blonde gold-diggers that can be used as a flotation device are also the ones making nachos with a blowtorch in the back of movie theatres.

(And yes, my pretentious use of the anglophilic spelling "theatre" is also a sign that people are stupid.)

Bruegger's Bagels secret driver of US inflation?

I popped in to buy a couple of bagels at Bruegger's today, and I seriously thought I must have been overcharged, so I had to ask the price of bagels. I had a serious old man moment when the cashier told me they were up to 89 cents, but I avoided the temptation to make a grumpy "In my day bagels cost 39 cents!" speech, but I did feel really old for living long enough to have inflation cause me sticker shock. On a bagel.

Then something from my years of training in economics kicked in, and I realized, the US rate of inflation is nowhere near enough to cause that. In fact, over the past 11-12 years, Bruegger's bagels outpaced inflation by 5%. There may be perfectly logical causes, like a particular vulnerability to rising real estate and labor costs, I still say they're ripping me off with their overpriced bagels, damnit, and I think it's this and not the gaping current account deficit that's eroding the value of the US dollar. And of course now I feel old again because I'm obsessing over the price of bagels. I blame Brueggers. Now get off my lawn.

Colts 29 - 17 Bears

Really not that thrilling a game, with a predictable result given the limitations of the Bears offense and their play late in the game. Even the commercials were fairly uninspiring, like they knew nobody was watching outside the greater Ft. Wayne metro area this year. On the bright side, at least there'll be no poorly constructed green and yellow float careening through downtown Chicago mowing down Bears fans, unlike when the White Sox won the World Series.

Children of Men

I really felt overwhelmed by Children of Men, I really did, and I was amazed on reflection to realize it's really down to one technical factor that raises a good dystopian thriller into something transcendent. Much of the film is shot in incredibly long, fluid takes following Theo Faron (Clive Owen), often as he moves through a variety of locations. Because Theo's world is so large and fluid and I was never shown the seams, it felt incredibly real. At several points Theo passes by or eavesdrops on the rest of the cast as he walks into earshot of conversations, so there is a definite sense that the world around him continues without him, like the of the reverse Truman Show(1). The cumulative effect is to make Theo and his world, and everyone in it, seem so real that I was completely absorbed into the story, to the point of feeling the crawling grief of Theo's world, and feel the warm spark when he glimpses something brighter. The exploding coffeeshop clip from the opening used to promote the film packs this surprising punch because the long, intimate shot of Theo captures so well his feeling of “I was just there.”

The themes of the film when presented in that manner take on a greater significance, and they take on a range of issues, from the obvious authoritarianism and xenophobia, to a more general malaise of despair in a culture that sees no future for itself, to the fleeting nature of the transcendent, unifying moments we experience as a culture. The general premise of the film is that no children have been born in the world in 18 years, without any explanation, and the looming extinction of the human race has created a climate of overwhelming depression. When the first pregnancy is introduced into this world in almost two decades, the effect is briefly overwhelming on those around the mother, before politics set in and protecting her becomes secondary to exploiting her. In particular there's an image in this film of soldiers kneeling penitently before the child before resuming fighting in an Iraq-like wrecked urban landscape, which evoked the fleeting effects of both Christ and 9/11 of turning our focus to something higher than our usual squabbles ourselves, before both were exploited.

I can be biased by the fact that I love a few of the actors in this film, and Clive Owen and Julianne Moore both do well, as does Chiwetel Ejiofor in a supporting role that needed the depth of feeling he brings to it. Michael Caine, however, who is having a very good year, steals a lot of his scenes playing an John Lennon-inspired aged hippie. So my response may have been exceptional, but the only other film I've seen this year that moved me as much as Children of Men was The Depahted.

1 - Technically that would be the real world, but I suppose I was referring to the way that The Truman Show was about constructing an obviously fake, idealized world that let people escape their own lives and carefully protected its audience through panning away from Truman's sex life, letting imagination substitute where our romantic ideals get... sticky. Truman being a real person makes him an anchor to ease the suspension of disbelief even though the parameters of Truman's world are laid out as fake, and Children of Men does the opposite. Alfonso Cuaron makes the world around his actors seem real, and ties it into our own through careful references to media imagery from Abu Ghraib, The Green Zone, and Guantanamo, to give a few, and to some of our most profound real and fictional nightmares through references to Orwell, Auschwitz, and others. So Cuaron has Clive Owen's stomping around in the world I brought into the theater but lured me in with a premise that keeps the story at a safe distance (global infertility, decades into the future).

The Devil Wears Prada

I was really excited about The Devil Wears Prada, because when award nominations started coming out I basically hadn't seen any of the top rated female performances of last year. Overall I have to admit to being a little disappointed. It's well made, and it's great to see a well-made, enjoyable film of a female experience, which being grumpy and critical I rarely do.

So The Devil Wears Prada was certainly stylish and funny enough to charm me. Meryl Streep is excellent, and I positively adored Anne Hathaway's character. Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci put in delightful supporting performances, and the four of them do make it a film well worth seeing, and earn the film all its props.
My complaint is that the story of Andy Sachs' rude introduction to, seduction by, and rejection of the fashion world is such a well-worn story, it's hard not to know where it's all going within the first fifteen minutes, and when this started to sink in, I found it hard to maintain interest in the second half.

I suppose my real problem is it doesn't feel like it has a lot to say about this meme, about fashion or powerful women, or even Andy Sachs, outside of a few tantalizing moments, like when Sachs first dares to snort a bit at how far up their own asses the fashionistas she works with are. Miranda Priestly (Streep) breaks down everything she wears in terms of its relation to high fashion and how Sachs is using her fashion choices to present an image of herself, and completely punctures the air of superiority surrounding Sachs' view of herself, by reminding her that we cannot live outside our culture, and that culture includes Runway Magazine. I wish it had gone further along this line, and had showed a real transformation for Sachs, since her wardrobe throughout the film is a barometer for changes in her character. Instead she goes from dressing in the dark to runway model and back to dressing in the dark... by the end, she's back to where she started and her wardrobe more than anything tells us that.

There were other threads that could have been the basis for this to be a great movie, but ultimately The Devil Wears Prada is only a good movie, albeit full of great actors in smashing outfits.

Annoying Soccer Update

Michel Platini wins UEFA election

This is actually a big deal, since Platini campaigned by courting the smaller European countries, and promised to reform the Champions League. In Platini's vision, nobody will have more than three entrants (currently the top three countries get four and England once got five), and he wants more champions of smaller countries to be in the big show. This could signal a philosophical shift from pursuing big money markets to developing the game in smaller markets, depending on how much influence Platini really has. Personally I wish they'd just go ahead and merge a few small leagues in the Benelux and the Alps, but that's just me.

Ronaldo returning to Milano

Now that he can't run for more than 20 minutes a game, Real Madrid is shipping out former galactico Ronaldo, to AC Milan. Since he had all those injury plagued years at Inter, some Italians are saying he'll need to fortify his home. He'll also be reunited with former Inter teammate Clarence Seedorf, who was rumored to have played a part in Ronaldo's transfer to Real Madrid, because he was (allegedly) doing Ronaldo's hot wife, ex-model and pro soccer player Milene Domingues. Since then, Ronaldo has moved on and apparently had an entire bus full of hookers delivered to a party he was hosting in Madrid. If he can get in shape and come on as a supersub for Milan, he could still be pretty useful in getting Milan into next year's Champions League. I think he may be the last of the galactico era buys to leave Madrid, now that Zidane, Figo, Beckham, and Michael Owen are all gone.

Ridiculous lead by Inter

On the topic of Italian football, what is going on with Inter's ridiculous lead? They're up 11 points on Roma, 18 on Palermo, and there's a staggering 27 point difference between first and fourth place. I know this was supposed to be their year with Juventus relegated and most of the other seven sisters having points docked for rigging the league, but yikes, I guess they'll win a scudetto for once. I'm still rooting for Il Piccolo Principe and Roma.

Arsenal v Chelsea, Feb 25th, Cardiff

Arsenal will play Chelsea in the final of the Carling Cup, kind of a Mickey Mouse event, but it does give automatic qualification to Europe next year. This is a bigger deal for Arsenal than for Chelsea, since Arsenal could really use the safety net, given the importance of European revenue to finance their stadium debt. Arsenal have traditionally played younger players from the reserves in the Carling Cup, and after the kids saw off Tottenham Hotspur in the semi-finals, Arsene Wenger announced that the players who got them this far will get to finish the job and play in the final in Cardiff. If Chelsea's free agent stars were to lose to a youth team from Arsenal's academy, this would really be a stunning embarrassment for Chelsea, and certain front-runners in the financial world might have to reconsider their loyalties.

That is all.