Billy Joel set to Google Images by someone with too much time on his hands.
Beautifully done story. We were arguing today about how believable the protagonist's descent into insanity was, but so what if there is no clinical syndrome that matches the ballerina's mental disease. The genius was in the screenplay: it was Swan Lake told as a movie about the production of Swan Lake. The doppelgangers, both real and imagined, are every where!
When Hulu stopped playing nice with the Apple, we worried that it was the beginning of the end. And now that there is talk of running the service on a paying basis, we are ending our brief affair with them. SurftheChannel, or there is always TVTorrents.
This has been around for a while, but still compelling in its own way: HSX.com, the Hollywood Stock Exchange. You bet, with fake money, on how much movies will gross at the box office. This has the side effect of keeping you in the know about upcoming flicks.
Portia Di Rossi confirms that she is excited to be Lindsay Bluth again, and says that all the cast is onboard but they just need to schedule some face time to finish up the movie. With cluuub sauce.
NBC is primping Jimmy Fallon to replace Conan O'Brien by giving him a series of webisodes to try out his chops. Memo to NBC: It will take more than a webiseries to make Jimmy Fallon funny.
TV-signoffs.com. We're old enough to remember the Star Spangled Banner at TV station sign-on before early morning cartoons. from BoingBoing.
Andrew O'Hehir, blogging for Beyond the Multiplex at Salon, reports on Trouble the Water:
I shouldn't spoil this movie for you, because I simply can't believe it won't come out of Sundance with a head of steam and a distribution deal in place. Let's just say that Kim Roberts' raw footage from the Ninth Ward captures a tale of thrilling human drama, terrible tragedy and unbelievable heroism among some of merica's most stigmatized and downtrodden people -- and that Kim and Scott's post-Katrina story, as captured by Tessin and Deal, is even more amazing than that. No human being I can imagine could watch "Trouble the Water" and not be overwhelmed by grief and joy, and humbled by one's sudden awareness of one's own prejudices about the lives, passions and dreams of poor people. George W. Bush would weep buckets at this movie. (Maybe Dick Cheney wouldn't, but notice that I limited my target audience to human beings.)
Now that we've settled into our new digs in Beantown, we hit up the Coolidge for a showing of Al Gore's masterpiece (website here). After his appearance on SNL last month, we remembered how much we like the guy, so how could we not see the movie? A documentary about a PowerPoint (excuse, Keynote) presentation is an odd format: We get snippets of Al Gore playing professor alternating with tidbits about why the environment matters to him, which range from the loss of his sister to lung cancer, indirectly attributable to Gore Farms' tobacco to his college science teachers, who pioneered the measurement of atmospheric CO2. What it comes down to, more than the environment or how sexy a PowerBook and Keynote can make statistics, is what a great president Al Gore could have been.
Look at it like this: He lays out his credentials as a gentleman farmer. He shares his universal sense of humor. His accent is unmistakably Southern but refined. His Biblical references (he calls some of his slides a "nature hike through the Book of Revelations") are perfectly tuned to meet the religious requirement without going over the right field foul line. He is the spurned suitor trying his damnedest to prove that living well is the best revenge; he seems to say, "All of this could have been yours, baby, but you went with the grinning loser. Have a nice life!"
This is so awesome we don't have words for it: Live action staging of the Simpson's intro, set to the authentic Simpson's theme music, complete with a couch gag.
This weekend the Boston Globe got its panties all in a wad when Suzanne Ryan found out that only 42.8% of news anchors are men. Seems that in the near future, the news will be spoken in alto and treble tones, not the authoritative tenor of Walter Cronkite. Yeah, so what.
But Ryan's article was ridiculously stupid, with quotes like,
"A lot of young men are encouraged to go into law and medicine, engineering and math," says Coleen Marren, WCVB's news director, who has noticed the trend.Actually, at our conservative-leaning medical school, 55% of the students are women, and men are a minority at our law school across town, too. And we've been told that more engineers than ever are women. Mathematics seems like such a small career field that it can't possibly influence the number of people going into any other field, can it? How many people, men or women, said they wanted to be mathematicians when they were kids? Raise your hands. Thought so.
"In the era of 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' newscasters were macho and fiery. Now they have to be so neutral and unbiased that . . . it doesn't seem manly."Because as anyone who has ever argued politics with a woman knows, women are tame, unopinionated wet rags. ESPECIALLY the red-headed ones.
Among the many curses of DC is the herd of cows that staff the local news shows. Every other city on earth has a handful of hotties to tell you that the Supreme Court is falling apart, a kid got shot twice over his North Face jacket, and other headlines of the day. Not the capital of the free world. We like our news ugly and our reporters uglier.
Things are beginning to look up, though. The local NBC station now has one Lindsay Czarniak doing sports on weekends and filling in for the regular nobodies every once in a while. And yes, we know that web page says she has been here since June, but we just saw her for the first time the other night.
Sore from kicking themselves for passing on Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, Disney is bringing Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia to the masses, starting with The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. Seems that after the success of Harry Potter, the studios can't find more British children's lit fast enough--but Lewis's Christian Indoctrination for Children could cause problems for Disney:
In fact, there are some Hollywood observers who seem to believe that there is a good reason Lewis is among the last of the classic children's authors to be adapted for the movies, and that in taking on Narnia, Disney has backed itself into a corner. If the studio plays down the Christian aspect of the story, it risks criticism from the religious right, the argument goes; if it is too upfront about the religious references, on the other hand, that could be toxic at the box office. Disney, which is producing "Narnia" with Walden Media, the "family friendly" entertainment company owned by the politically conservative financier Philip Anschutz, is hedging its bets and has, for example, already issued two separate soundtrack albums, one featuring Christian music and musicians and another with pop and rock tunes.Well, they can release two soundtracks, but we don't see how the Righteous Christian Forces of Aslan and the Immoral And Ultimately False Popular Culture can both win The Good Fight. Maybe they filmed two endings, one to show in red states and one for the blue states?
As Johnny Cash fans, there was never any doubt that we were going to see Walk the Line. And no matter how slow it felt at times or however unfairly it may portray Vivian Cash, we were going to like it, so there is no point in us telling you how good it was.
We are going to tell you, though, that Reese Witherspoon steals the show. Witherspoon is, of course, a hot country girl with considerable wits; she inhabits June Carter--another hot country girl with considerable wits--to the point of taking over Carter completely. When Carter and Cash meet backstage on the first Sun tour, she gets the bows and ribbons on her comically American-as-apple-pie dress tangling in Cash's guitar strings. As the MC is warming up the crowd for her, she calls out to the audience, from behind the curtain, "Jus' a sec. Ah'm jus' tanglud up in thu stran'gs a' Johnny Cash's get-tar," as if her backstage delay is part of the act, and then whispers to Cash, "Don't worry. Ah can keep this funny for at least two menuts." We don't know if that was Carter's humor or Witherspoons. ...the intertwining of these two beauties in this one character reminds us of a buxom blonde college girl from Tennessee who called Dolly Parton her childhood idol... Oh, and did we tell you Witherspoon does her own vocals? Her voice isn't exactly June Carter's, but Carter wasn't the world's greatest singer, so there is no loss there. And at least she sings better than Joaquin Phoenix.
Previous Post: Joaquin Phoenix is Johnny Cash
Apparently, FOX doesn't have any patience for good TV. This fall, they moved their money-making, award-winning powerhouse Malcolm in the Middle (which we never really watched anyway) to Friday nights, which is like smothering grandma with a pillow.
Now, they are putting Arrested Development on hold. What will they be replacing it with, you might ask. Cops? Close. Try Prison Break reruns.
We watched Good Night, and Good Luck this weekend and gladly report that it was enjoyed by all. George Clooney's work has been hit or miss, so we were naturally skeptical. What's more, we were reluctant to shell out $10 for a civics lesson from Ed Murrow.
It is a civics lesson, of course: Murrow's reporting was responsible for reigning in Sen. Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunt, and we should all remember that an aggressive, adversarial news media is one of democracy's few protections against demagoguery. That being said, most people likely to see the movie are liberals who feel this way already, so Murrow's ghost will preach to the choir. The movie seems to know this; when the CBS team is cutting together clips of McCarthy's grandstanding, they remark that by reporting on him with only his own words, they will only further endear him to everyone who loves him and further disgust everyone who hates him.
As an aside, compare Ann Coulter's keynote, at the Ronald Reagan Black Tie and Blue Jeans barbeque, that she "was never a big fan of the First Amendment," which met with applause and prompted Republicans to describe her speech as "hard hitting, but sometimes the truth hurts." Not only does this make our point beautifully, but also demonstrates that not a damn thing has changed in 50 years.
David Strathairn obviously enjoyed playing Murrow, and who wouldn't? He gets to repeat Murrow's brilliant if obvious editorial: "...dissent is not disloyalty; accusation is not proof; conviction depends on evidence and due process of law; and finally, as defenders of freedom abroad, the United States cannot desert it at home." Last week, Jack Schafer at Slate wondered what the New York Times could do to save itself. There is your answer.
Movie web site / Trailer from Apple
