Anyway, here's a photo. You might have to squint hard to see him - he was out of range of the flash and I didn't want to spook him.
Oh - here he is again, with a bit of help from Photoshop...
Monday, February 26, 2007
Foxy!
Harrow-on-the-Hill's own foxy fox is outside barking at the moon, or whatever he's barking at. He's been walking around the building for about a half hour making noise. Ginger and Buffy don't seem to care at all. I thought they might be spooked, but they could not care less.
Anyway, here's a photo. You might have to squint hard to see him - he was out of range of the flash and I didn't want to spook him.
Anyway, here's a photo. You might have to squint hard to see him - he was out of range of the flash and I didn't want to spook him.
Thursday, February 22, 2007
RIP, DJ
Way too young to go. DJ was a great defender an a great true point guard. Can't believe he's gone at the age of 52. I expect there will be plenty of praise for the man over the next week, so I'll spare any readers, most of whom probably are not terribly interested in basketball or the Celtics. I assume that DJ will make the Hall of Fame, and he should get in this year, I hope. Not only did he win two championships starting for the Celtics, he always was the Finals MVP when he won a title with Seattle in 1979. I should think that's enough.
Monday, February 19, 2007
Babel
So I saw it on Friday. For the first hour or so I was really quite excited and impressed. Alejandro González Iñárritu does a great job expressing complicated situations with realism and honesty that is quite impressive in its accuracy. Babel is the first film I can think of set in Arab North Africa, and is, along with Syrianna, one of the few films to present a realisitic view of what life is like for Arabs.
If you want to watch the film without spoilers, you might want to stop here.
The film opens in Morocco, though it could as well be Egypt or another Arab land. A goat herder buys a rifle from a neighbor and gives it to his two young sons, telling them that they need to shoot the jackals who have been harrassing the herd. The boys, being immature and irresponsible, start shooting the rifle out of boredom. The older of the two complains that it doesn't have the range that it is supposed to, so the younger, who is a better shot, starts targeting vehicles on the road overlooked by the hills where their herd is grazing.
No, this can't end well. This story line leads to the second story line, featuring Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt as an American couple taking a vacation to "be alone" to try to resolve some marital issues that become clear. After an opening scene involving an argument (or a non-argument, depending on your perspective), they are riding in a bus, with Cate at the window, when a bullet flies in and seriously wounds her in the shoulder. This leads to a panicky situation as the tourists try to find medical care more than an hour's drive from the nearest hospital. With the help of a local, they pull off the road to a small village where a doctor may help.
A third story line features a teenager in Tokyo. I've taken two trips to Tokyo and also found the Tokyo sequences to be very well done. Rinko Kikuchi plays a deaf girl, Chieko, who is fighting serious psychological issues with her father and with puberty that also include her mother's recent death. Her psychological troubles manifest themself in exhibitionism.
A fourth story line concerns two children, a boy and a girl, at home in California, who are waiting for their parents to return from vacation. (Small surprise: the parents are Blanchett and Pitt - no kidding!) The cleaning woman Amelia, played by Adrianna Barazza, tries to find a sitter for the kids so she can go to her son's marriage in Mexico. When she cannot find anybody her solution is to bring the kids with her!
For the early part of the film, the drama is building in the Moroccan sequences, and starting to bud in Tokyo, while the Mexican sequence grows more slowly. This leads to my main complaint with the film: the pacing is off. A half hour of watching Blanchett fight the bullet wound is interesting. It drags on the length of the film so by the time the situation is resolved, I'm just sitting there thinking "Get done with this already, I stopped caring an hour ago." There is a finite amount of drama involved here, and it's stretched too thin.
I never quite cared enough about the two Moroccan boys. One of my peeves with films is when they have children do incredibly stupid things. The implication is that children are somehow too stupid or immature to know better. And yet I remember being a child, and at no point in my childhood did the idea "Hey, let's shoot this rifle at a bus!" be at all in the list of Things I Might Do. I understood why the kids did what they did, but I didn't really feel any empathy for them. The story might have been better if they had simply been terrorists.
As for the Mexican storyline, it became quickly clear that Something Bad would happen as a result of Amelia's decision to bring the kids to her son's wedding. Her driver is her nephew Santiago, who insists that he's not drunk and can drive them back to San Diego even though it's nearly dawn. It's bad enough that he's driving tired and half-drunk, but then he starts to get into ego conflicts with the border guards. Much silliness ensues.
At this point I lost patience with the film. I was expecting a bit more from this film than Mouthing Off at Authority Figure. It's not that I doubt that the resulting situation could happen, but it's more that I figure that Amelia deserves the mess she gets into. The kids don't, but that's not the point.
The Japanese story is not quite as disappointing. In fact, it nearly redeems the film by itself. But on the whole, I thought the film was going to be about something, and it turns out to simply be a recitation of a number of possible events, with little compelling interest to the story to justify its length at 142 minutes. What is happening? The film is so realistic as to lose any impact. I know people make horrible mistakes, and sometimes other people pay the price for their mistakes. Is that all this film has to offer? With the title of the film, I thought it would explore in greater depth the issues of communication and language and cultural barriers. But after a promising start along those lines, it just stopped developing that theme.
At this point, I wouldn't want Babel to win Best Picture at the Oscars, though I think it's the frontrunner. The other contenders are The Queen, which couldn't hold my attention on a transAtlantic flight (a bad sign), The Departed, which I liked a lot but suffered a bit on reflection, and Letters from Iwo Jima and Little Miss Sunshine, neither of which I've seen and neither of which I think will win. I think it's down to The Departed or Babel.
I think I liked Volver, Children of Men, and Little Children more than Babel. I don't quite understand why Volver is not nominated for Best Non-English Film. Well, I do understand that apparently politics plays a role. In spite of having made a number of tremendous films, Almodovar never gets nominated by the Spanish film society to represent Spain at the Oscars, so he never gets his films nominated at all. He did win a writing Oscar for Talk to Her.
Hmm...Oscars are this weekend and I think I will try to see at least one more contender before the awards are announced.
If you want to watch the film without spoilers, you might want to stop here.
The film opens in Morocco, though it could as well be Egypt or another Arab land. A goat herder buys a rifle from a neighbor and gives it to his two young sons, telling them that they need to shoot the jackals who have been harrassing the herd. The boys, being immature and irresponsible, start shooting the rifle out of boredom. The older of the two complains that it doesn't have the range that it is supposed to, so the younger, who is a better shot, starts targeting vehicles on the road overlooked by the hills where their herd is grazing.
No, this can't end well. This story line leads to the second story line, featuring Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt as an American couple taking a vacation to "be alone" to try to resolve some marital issues that become clear. After an opening scene involving an argument (or a non-argument, depending on your perspective), they are riding in a bus, with Cate at the window, when a bullet flies in and seriously wounds her in the shoulder. This leads to a panicky situation as the tourists try to find medical care more than an hour's drive from the nearest hospital. With the help of a local, they pull off the road to a small village where a doctor may help.
A third story line features a teenager in Tokyo. I've taken two trips to Tokyo and also found the Tokyo sequences to be very well done. Rinko Kikuchi plays a deaf girl, Chieko, who is fighting serious psychological issues with her father and with puberty that also include her mother's recent death. Her psychological troubles manifest themself in exhibitionism.
A fourth story line concerns two children, a boy and a girl, at home in California, who are waiting for their parents to return from vacation. (Small surprise: the parents are Blanchett and Pitt - no kidding!) The cleaning woman Amelia, played by Adrianna Barazza, tries to find a sitter for the kids so she can go to her son's marriage in Mexico. When she cannot find anybody her solution is to bring the kids with her!
For the early part of the film, the drama is building in the Moroccan sequences, and starting to bud in Tokyo, while the Mexican sequence grows more slowly. This leads to my main complaint with the film: the pacing is off. A half hour of watching Blanchett fight the bullet wound is interesting. It drags on the length of the film so by the time the situation is resolved, I'm just sitting there thinking "Get done with this already, I stopped caring an hour ago." There is a finite amount of drama involved here, and it's stretched too thin.
I never quite cared enough about the two Moroccan boys. One of my peeves with films is when they have children do incredibly stupid things. The implication is that children are somehow too stupid or immature to know better. And yet I remember being a child, and at no point in my childhood did the idea "Hey, let's shoot this rifle at a bus!" be at all in the list of Things I Might Do. I understood why the kids did what they did, but I didn't really feel any empathy for them. The story might have been better if they had simply been terrorists.
As for the Mexican storyline, it became quickly clear that Something Bad would happen as a result of Amelia's decision to bring the kids to her son's wedding. Her driver is her nephew Santiago, who insists that he's not drunk and can drive them back to San Diego even though it's nearly dawn. It's bad enough that he's driving tired and half-drunk, but then he starts to get into ego conflicts with the border guards. Much silliness ensues.
At this point I lost patience with the film. I was expecting a bit more from this film than Mouthing Off at Authority Figure. It's not that I doubt that the resulting situation could happen, but it's more that I figure that Amelia deserves the mess she gets into. The kids don't, but that's not the point.
The Japanese story is not quite as disappointing. In fact, it nearly redeems the film by itself. But on the whole, I thought the film was going to be about something, and it turns out to simply be a recitation of a number of possible events, with little compelling interest to the story to justify its length at 142 minutes. What is happening? The film is so realistic as to lose any impact. I know people make horrible mistakes, and sometimes other people pay the price for their mistakes. Is that all this film has to offer? With the title of the film, I thought it would explore in greater depth the issues of communication and language and cultural barriers. But after a promising start along those lines, it just stopped developing that theme.
At this point, I wouldn't want Babel to win Best Picture at the Oscars, though I think it's the frontrunner. The other contenders are The Queen, which couldn't hold my attention on a transAtlantic flight (a bad sign), The Departed, which I liked a lot but suffered a bit on reflection, and Letters from Iwo Jima and Little Miss Sunshine, neither of which I've seen and neither of which I think will win. I think it's down to The Departed or Babel.
I think I liked Volver, Children of Men, and Little Children more than Babel. I don't quite understand why Volver is not nominated for Best Non-English Film. Well, I do understand that apparently politics plays a role. In spite of having made a number of tremendous films, Almodovar never gets nominated by the Spanish film society to represent Spain at the Oscars, so he never gets his films nominated at all. He did win a writing Oscar for Talk to Her.
Hmm...Oscars are this weekend and I think I will try to see at least one more contender before the awards are announced.
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
I'm also Spartacus!
Spartacus! Spartacus!
Shakespeare’s Sister has announced that she is bowing out of the Edwards campaign.
I'm joining in with the legions of bloggers who are upset with the right-wing lunatics who undermine civilized debate at every turn. We are showing our solidarity with Melissa by supporting her blog.
Shakespeare’s Sister has announced that she is bowing out of the Edwards campaign.
I'm joining in with the legions of bloggers who are upset with the right-wing lunatics who undermine civilized debate at every turn. We are showing our solidarity with Melissa by supporting her blog.
Monday, February 12, 2007
The Last King of Scotland
Babel didn't have any convenient starting times, so I saw The Last King of Scotland instead. Curiously, it seems that the only major award it is nominated for is Best Actor (Forest Whitaker), but on the other hand, he's been winning this award a lot - at the BAFTAs, Golden Globes, and various Critics' groups.
Forest Whitaker was great, and James McAvoy was great as the Scottish doctor/fly on the wall. His character is not only entirely fictional, but he's a bit unrealistic in terms of what he gets himself into. But of course without his recklessness, there would be no story here.
Whitaker is nearly perfect as Idi Amin. I doubt I could see another performance this year that equals it. Also, it's been common in recent years for actors to be rewarded for real-life characters - Truman Capote and Ray Charles in the last two years. I think Whitaker does a better job than either. The role is perfect for his abilities and takes a good advantage of his race and physical stature. I had long thought of Whitaker as a talented supporting actor, and first glimpsed the depth of his talent in The Crying Game. It seems weird that it's taken this long for him to find the right role. Ultimately I think he has loads more talent than Jamie Foxx, and I would even go so far as to say he has a smidgen more talent than Denzel Washington. That would put him up near Samuel L. Jackson at the top of the list of African-American actors today. Jackson, of course, remains unrecognized by Oscar in spite of brilliant performances in Jungle Fever and Pulp Fiction.
But I digress.
Whitaker conveys the combination of charm, paranoia, insecurity and rage that was Idi Amin. He captures all of them brilliantly, and gives us an idea of the kind of pathology that it takes to be a sadistic dictator. We see this personality rise to the top far too often in life, unfortunately.
A final thought: Gillian Anderson completely disappeared in this film. I realize she doesn't have natural red hair, but somehow she came and went without me recognizing that it was her. Not that she wasn't noticeable - I thought the address playing Sarah Merrit did a great job, I just didn't realize it was her. So I guess she's not typecast anymore. :)
Forest Whitaker was great, and James McAvoy was great as the Scottish doctor/fly on the wall. His character is not only entirely fictional, but he's a bit unrealistic in terms of what he gets himself into. But of course without his recklessness, there would be no story here.
Whitaker is nearly perfect as Idi Amin. I doubt I could see another performance this year that equals it. Also, it's been common in recent years for actors to be rewarded for real-life characters - Truman Capote and Ray Charles in the last two years. I think Whitaker does a better job than either. The role is perfect for his abilities and takes a good advantage of his race and physical stature. I had long thought of Whitaker as a talented supporting actor, and first glimpsed the depth of his talent in The Crying Game. It seems weird that it's taken this long for him to find the right role. Ultimately I think he has loads more talent than Jamie Foxx, and I would even go so far as to say he has a smidgen more talent than Denzel Washington. That would put him up near Samuel L. Jackson at the top of the list of African-American actors today. Jackson, of course, remains unrecognized by Oscar in spite of brilliant performances in Jungle Fever and Pulp Fiction.
But I digress.
Whitaker conveys the combination of charm, paranoia, insecurity and rage that was Idi Amin. He captures all of them brilliantly, and gives us an idea of the kind of pathology that it takes to be a sadistic dictator. We see this personality rise to the top far too often in life, unfortunately.
A final thought: Gillian Anderson completely disappeared in this film. I realize she doesn't have natural red hair, but somehow she came and went without me recognizing that it was her. Not that she wasn't noticeable - I thought the address playing Sarah Merrit did a great job, I just didn't realize it was her. So I guess she's not typecast anymore. :)
Duke unranked!
They've dropped out of the hoop rankings.
Of course, UConn is in much worse shape. Right now they're the bottom seed (#12) for the Big East tournament, which would pretty much rule out the NCAAs.
Of course, UConn is in much worse shape. Right now they're the bottom seed (#12) for the Big East tournament, which would pretty much rule out the NCAAs.
Sunday, February 11, 2007
film season
Watching the BAFTAs, thinking on all the movies that I want to see soon. Tried to see Blood Diamond tonight, but it was sold out. And that's not on the top of the list.
Let's see...
Babel
The Last King of Scotland
Blood Diamond
Pan's Labyrinth
Dreamgirls
less important - on the DVD queue
Little Miss Sunshine
The Devil Wears Prada
The Queen
Venus
Notes on a Scandal
The Pursuit of Happyness
I think I'll see Babel tomorrow.
Let's see...
Babel
The Last King of Scotland
Blood Diamond
Pan's Labyrinth
Dreamgirls
less important - on the DVD queue
Little Miss Sunshine
The Devil Wears Prada
The Queen
Venus
Notes on a Scandal
The Pursuit of Happyness
I think I'll see Babel tomorrow.
Thursday, February 08, 2007
do what to do what to do what to do?
OK, so we're back on target, just like the X-wing pilots at the Death Star.
Topic of the day: work.
Work bores me. I need new work. I need work that is sexier. Need to reach the masses of the world and shine my enlightenment on them.
Or something like that.
The key here is The Mission.
What is The Mission? Well, we'll be coming to that in the next few weeks. It is easier for me to say what the mission is not than what it is. But I think I'm going to have to lay out a Mission Statement , Jerry Maguire-style, to get the engine running a bit.
Topic of the day: work.
Work bores me. I need new work. I need work that is sexier. Need to reach the masses of the world and shine my enlightenment on them.
Or something like that.
The key here is The Mission.
What is The Mission? Well, we'll be coming to that in the next few weeks. It is easier for me to say what the mission is not than what it is. But I think I'm going to have to lay out a Mission Statement , Jerry Maguire-style, to get the engine running a bit.
Friday, February 02, 2007
Super Bowl in London
Party at the Walkabout.
I'm in.
There's nothing more American than seeing the Super Bowl at an Australian-themed bar in London, is there?
I'm in.
There's nothing more American than seeing the Super Bowl at an Australian-themed bar in London, is there?
Thursday, February 01, 2007
My brilliant plan for my future happiness and world peace
Step 1) get a better plan
(It's an old joke, I know.)
(It's an old joke, I know.)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)