Month: March 2002 (Page 2 of 5)

Cliffs Notes II

Movies from 2001 better than any of the Best Picture nominees, except for LOTR:

Series 7
Mulholland Drive
Vanilla Sky
Ghost World
Princess and the Warrior
The Royal Tenenbaums

I guess this wasn’t such a bad year for movies after all. Too bad the Academy can’t see beyond the standard homogenized Hollywood fare (again, except for LOTR, the exception that proves the rule).

Adam’s Oscar Cliffs Notes

The good: Halle Berry, Randy Newman
The bad: Jennifer Connelly, Best Picture and Director to “Beautiful Mind,” Gywneth Paltrow’s chest.

More (much more) tomorrow.

Arthur has moved give love:get love, and Tuesday has a new design for hey man, who ate my pizza? Stop by and tell them I sent you. Blogspot is down as I write this (what a shocker), so you may have to come back to Tuesday’s site later. Interesting, because Arthur used to be on Blogspot too, but just moved after the latest outage.

I hate to repeat myself, but why is hosting such a difficult task? Keep the computers running, and have at least some decent customer service, and you’re a hero. Not many heroes out there.

So new Arthur Andersen apologist Paul Volcker says if the federal government dismisses the indictment against the document-shredding accountants, and caps its liability from the Enron scandal, they’ll clean up their act – everyone will get religion and start dedicating themselves to ethics and clean business practices.

Yeah, that’ll happen.

It infuriates me that Volcker is basically saying, don’t punish us for what we’ve done, and we’ll do all these wonderful reforms that we’d have to do anyway if we’re going to stay alive. What major concessions. Sounds like the kid who promises to clean his room right now to avoid being grounded for not cleaning it.

To add insult to injury, Andersen is also staging employee rallies, where the future unemployed can trot out their cute kids for the sympathy vote. “My dad needs his job.” Nice. When you start using the kids, for me the “Pure Evil” needle goes straight up to 11.

I say let them crash and burn, and we’re all the better for it.

Our big worry in Wisconsin right now is Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), which causes deer to waste away and die before the hunters can shoot them. (!) Emergency hunting permits are being issued so authorities can ascertain how widespread this problem is. Hunters can keep the deer meat – assuming they’d want to. And people in public wooded areas are being urged to wear blaze orange while the investigatory hunt is on.

We live in weird times.

“After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing as wanting. I know it is not logical — but it is frequently so.”
-Mr. Spock

I changed the weblog tagline to something else, but I love this quote so much that I just had to repeat it here.

Heard on NPR today a discussion of Book Magazine’s “100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900.” When the program first came on the radio, I immediately thought, Ignatius Reilly from “A Confederacy of Dunces.”

He made the list – No. 17.

They had callers “nominate” characters, and then the magazine editor told if that person made the list and why. I was so pleased when someone called in to nominate Ignatius. While I’ve known people who have hated the book (there doesn’t seem to be any middle ground), it’s one of the few books that can make me laugh out loud. Highly recommended.

I was a little embarrassed at how many books I hadn’t read, and the rather large number of characters on the list I hadn’t even heard of.

Who are your most memorable characters?

I’ve finally figured out why Jodie Foster will never be a great actress.

Keep in mind, I love Jodie. She’s intense and compelling and smart, and “Silence of the Lambs” was incredible. But the same things that make her interesting to watch are why she’s limited. She can’t relax. Her face always has that “my mind is racing 14 steps ahead” look, no matter what character she plays. When she smiles, it’s an intense smile, not a smile of pleasure.

A perfect example of this quality is in “Sommersby,” which I caught a little of on cable TV last night. Jodie did her best to play a rather ordinary Civil War wife caught up in a strange case of mistaken identity. But her intense little chin and her intense little nose and her laser-eyed look kept giving her away. She’s no more an average Civil War wife than she is a cantaloupe.

Relax, Jodie. Take up yoga or something.

But her intensity should serve her well in the upcoming “Panic Room,” where she struggles to defend her home and daughter from marauding robbers. Now there’s good casting. I can’t wait.

At a matinee of “Ice Age” today with Dave and Susan, saw the new Episode II trailer for the first time. Unfortunately, it didn’t quiet any of my fears about the movie, which is just two months from release. This one was all explosions and flying and jumping and stuff being thrown at your head. I understand that the movie should be exciting and interesting, and a Star Wars movie should make an effort to show you things you would never see otherwise. But this was just too much. There’s such a thing as trying too hard, shouting “Look at me! Like me! Aren’t I cool?”

Memo to George Lucas: “Star Wars – Starfighter” is a video game. “Star Wars” is a movie. The difference is crucial, and I think you may have forgotten it.

Finally watched the Rosie O’Donnell interview with Diane Sawyer, since in this market it was bumped to 2:35 a.m. (!) today because of high school basketball. I was surprised at how much I liked it, and liked her. Mostly I liked that the piece was much more about parenting, and less about Rosie herself. And when she did take center stage, she was forceful, truthful and funny. She showed a tremendous amount of common sense, something that is both lacking in the general populace and a major component of good parenting. It was sort of the anti-Heche interview.

What I didn’t like about the show was how they spent so much time debunking the idea that gay parents result in gay children. To me this is like saying, in whispered tones, “If his parents are architects, that means he might turn out to be one too!” Diane Sawyer was unfortunately trying to play both sides, advocating for gay parents while at the same time giving in to the idea that gay people are somehow less.

There’s the media for you. 🙂