Tag: Film

Netflixed: Xala

Seth Anderson1 Comment



A high-ranking official loses the respect of the community in Ousmane Sembene’s comedy. Set in a newly independent Senegal, the story centers on influential official El Hadji, who decides to take advantage of the rampant corruption by using government funds to marry his third wife. But on his wedding night, El Hadji discovers he has xala, the curse of impotence. With his virility in question, he tries a number of ridiculous and bizarre cures. [Netflix Xala]

Not sure how I heard of this 1975 film, but it looks interesting.

Roger Ebert wrote of it:

The white members of the local chamber of commerce have been ordered out of office, and now African businessmen take their places. But one of the whites returns to place attache cases in front of each seat. The Africans open the cases and nod solemnly, impressed by the neat stacks of bribe money inside. The old order has been replaced by the new, but it’s business as usual.

So begins “Xala,” the newest and most disturbing film by the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene. His story follows the decline and fall of one of the African businessmen, who sells rice on the black market to finance the addition of a third wife to his family. But in a larger sense, Sembene also is commenting on the failures of African capitalism and on the legacy of corruption inherited from colonial times.

This is new ground for Sembene, who is the best of the handful of African film directors.

[Click to continue Xala :: rogerebert.com :: Reviews]

While Richard Eder of the New York Times wrote:

Dancing and jubilation in the seaside African capital, where coconut-icing skyscrapers loom over the shanties, the trees are gray with dust and the bougainvillea is like a terminal illness.

Africans in bright-colored togas move into the big building in the main square, order out the white men and remove the busts of Napoleon. Next scene: the Africans, in expensive European suits, sit around the table, the white men stand importantly behind as “advisers” and pass them briefcases stuffed with money, the black soldiers push back black crowds and rid the streets of unsightly beggars.

In a way, therefore, Osmane Sembene’s cutting, radiant and hilarious film “Xala,” … is “Animal Farm” applied to Africa independence.

It is part fable and part satire, but it is much more: with the greatest fineness and delicacy, Mr. Sembene, the Senegalese writer and director who made this picture, has set out a portrait of the complex and conflicting mesh of traditions, aspirations and frustrations of a culture knocked askew by colonialism and distorting itself anew while climbing out.

[Click to continue Movie Review – Xala – Film Festival: Cutting, Radiant ‘Xala’ – NYTimes.com]

Netflixed My Man Godfrey

Seth Anderson1 Comment


“My Man Godfrey – Criterion Collection” (Gregory La Cava)

William Powell cracks me up

A high-society scavenger hunt leads to levity when scatterbrained socialite Irene Bullock (Carole Lombard) stumbles upon an erudite vagabond named Godfrey (William Powell) living in the city dump and offers him a position as the Bullocks’ butler. As it happens, the seemingly bankrupt bum is, in fact, the heir of a well-to-do family. While Godfrey sets out to teach the pampered Bullocks a few lessons, Irene conspires to capture his heart. [From My Man Godfrey]

Netflix didn’t ship the Criterion Collection version because this print looks a little faded1, am still anticipating watching this film. I do wish that Netflix indicated whether a film was a Criterion version or not, makes such an enormous difference.

Director Gregory La Cava deftly balances satire, romance, and social comment in this 1936 classic, which echoes Frank Capra in its Depression-era subtext. The Bullocks are a well-heeled, harebrained Manhattan family genetically engineered for screwball collisions: father Alexander (Eugene Pallette, of the foghorn voice and thick-knit eyebrows) is the breadwinner at wit’s end, thanks to his spoiled daughters, the sultry Cornelia (Gail Patrick) and the sweet but scatterbrained Irene (a luminous Carole Lombard), his dizzy and doting wife, Angelica (Alice Brady), and her “protégé,” Italian freeloader Carlo (Mischa Auer). When Irene wins a society scavenger hunt (and atypically trumps her scheming sister) by producing a “lost man,” a seeming tramp named Godfrey (William Powell), all their lives are transformed. With the always suave, effortlessly funny Powell in the title role, this mystery man provides the film’s conscience and its model of decency; the giddy, passionate Lombard holds out its model for triumphant love. In a movie riddled with memorable comic highlights, the real miracle is the unapologetic romanticism that prevails.

Footnotes:
  1. I haven’t started watching, but popped the disk in to check if the scratches were too deep [↩]

Reading Around on May 19th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading May 19th from 19:48 to 22:04:

  • AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED: GQ Features on men.style.com – AND HE SHALL BE JUDGED Former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld has always answered his detractors by claiming that history will one day judge him kindly. But as he waits for that day, a new group of critics—his administration peers—are suddenly speaking out for the first time. What they’re saying? It isn’t pretty
  • O Lucky Man! – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – As one of the film’s songs says: Smile while you’re makin’ it, Laugh while you’re takin’ it, Even though you’re fakin’ it, Nobody’s gonna know. In O Lucky Man!, Travis progresses from coffee salesman (working for Imperial Coffee in the North East of England and Scotland), a victim of torture in a government installation and a medical research subject, under the supervision of Dr Millar (Crowden).
  • Donald Ewen Cameron – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – In addition to LSD, Cameron also experimented with various paralytic drugs, as well as electroconvulsive therapy at 30 to 40 times the normal power. His “driving” experiments consisted of putting subjects into drug-induced coma for months on end (up to three in one case) while playing tape loops of noise or simple repetitive statements. His experiments were typically carried out on patients who had entered the institute for minor problems such as anxiety disorders and post-partum depression, many of whom suffered permanently from his actions. It was during this era that Cameron became known worldwide, serving as the second President of the World Psychiatric Association, as well as president of the American and Canadian psychiatric associations. He was also a member of the Nuremberg medical tribunal a decade earlier, where he accused German medics of things he himself did between 1934–60 or later, though his scientific work during World War II for the OSS has never been a secret.

Netflixed The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Seth Anderson0 comment

New Criterion Collection release of the cult classic, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (IMDb) / Wikipedia / [Netflix]


“The Friends of Eddie Coyle” (Peter Yates)

The gritty 1974 cult classic The Friends of Eddie Coyle, directed by the criminally underrated Peter Yates (Bullitt, Breaking Away), is now available for the first time ever on DVD, in a Criterion special edition. In it, classic Hollywood tough guy Robert Mitchum plays the titular small-time Boston gunrunner, nicknamed Fingers, who’s caught between remaining loyal to his criminal cohorts and turning them in to avoid jail time, and Mitchum does it with a poignant, effortless precision that makes the film’s brutal twists all the more effective. With its evocative sense of time and place, and expert pacing, Eddie Coyle is a brilliant, quintessential work of seventies American cinema.

Kent Jones writes, in part:

Offhanded fatalism is embedded in every word of every exchange, each of which alternates between hide-and-seek games and verbal tugs-of-war. The Friends of Eddie Coyle is an extremely faithful adaptation (in structure, spirit, and flavor) of the first published novel by the Brockton, Massachusetts–born Higgins, whose career as a United States prosecutor and then big-time criminal defense lawyer (his clients included Eldridge Cleaver and G. Gordon Liddy) coincided with his ascendancy as a novelist, and whose dialogue is one of the glories of American literature. “I’m not doing dialogue because I like doing dialogue,” Higgins once said. “The characters are telling you the story. I’m not telling you the story, they’re going to do it. If I do it right, you will get the whole story.” What is remarkable about the film is the extreme degree to which Yates and the producer and writer, Paul Monash, adhere to Higgins’s aesthetic, banking on the contention that if you render the action among the characters as faithfully as possible, their entire moral universe will be revealed.

And so it is. “Look, one of the first things I learned is never to ask a man why he’s in a hurry,” says Robert Mitchum’s Eddie to Steven Keats’s inappropriately relaxed arms salesman, Jackie Brown (guess who’s a fan of this movie), in what might be the film’s most emblematic bit of table talk. “All you got to know is that I told the man he can depend on me because you told me I could depend on you. Now one of us is gonna have a big fat problem. Another thing I’ve learned: if anybody’s gonna have a problem, you’re gonna be the one.” As in every good dialogue-driven film, talk in The Friends of Eddie Coyle equals action. In this case, maneuvering for leverage and self-preservation.

Nothing could be further from Higgins’s full-immersion approach to fiction than a collection of prima donna thespians vying for attention; thankfully, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is a true ensemble piece if ever there was one. It’s amazing that a star of Robert Mitchum’s caliber even considered this movie (he was originally offered the role of the bartender); that he integrated himself so fully into the ensemble and the working-class Boston atmosphere is some kind of miracle. Mitchum is on-screen for roughly half of the movie, and never for a moment does he or the filmmakers play the movie star card—no special isolated “moments,” no hammy overplaying or sneaky underplaying. Golden-age Hollywood’s most notorious bad boy arrived in Boston ready for action on every front, as amply chronicled by Grover Lewis in his Rolling Stone profile “The Last Celluloid Desperado.” Apart from the usual shenanigans (think blondes and booze), Mitchum went right to work, getting an “Eddie Coyle haircut” (which might have been executed with a lawn trimmer) and allegedly hanging out with the notorious Whitey Bulger, the prototype for Jack Nicholson’s character in The Departed, and his Winter Hill Gang. Higgins was worried, Mitchum was unfazed. “It’s a two-way street,” he told Lewis, “because the guys Higgins means are associating with a known criminal in talking to me.” Apart from a few slippages here and there, Mitchum mastered the exceptionally difficult Boston accent. More importantly, he found the right loping rhythm, the right level of spiritual exhaustion, the right amount of cloaked malevolence. If Mitchum betrays anything of himself as Eddie, it’s his sense of poetry, which, for roughly three-fourths of his career as an actor, seems to have manifested itself off- and not on-screen. But when he rose to the occasion, he was one of the best actors in movies. Thinks like a poet, acts like a jazz musician, hitting on the perfect melancholy chord progression from his initial appearance and playing quietly dolorous variations right to the end.

[Click to continue reading The Friends of Eddie Coyle:They Were Expendable – From the Current]

Sounds intriguing, consider it added to the queue, maybe the book too…


“The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (John MacRae Books)” (George V. Higgins)

Scorsese Uses Internet to Distribute Restored Films

Seth Anderson0 comment

Awesome news, actually.

Martin Scorsese, as ardent an advocate as there is for serving up film the old-fashioned way, has decided to embrace digital distribution for movies restored by his World Cinema Foundation.

The films that the organization restores every year — often obscure titles like “Dry Summer,” a Turkish picture from 1936 — will now be available online through theauteurs.com, a Web site that calls itself a “virtual cinematheque.”

Many will be free. And a partnership with B-Side Entertainment will soon bring the foundation’s films to Netflix and iTunes.

[Click to continue reading Scorsese Uses Internet to Distribute Restored Films – NYTimes.com]

9 great movies

If I’m not mistaken, The Auteurs is a joint venture with The Criterion Collection.

Four things that were on our minds when we first dreamt the Auteurs: Number one: why can’t you just watch In the Mood for Love in an airport lounge? Number two: why is it so hard to get hold of Antonioni’s complete filmography? Number three: Wouldn’t it be great to instantly send Tati’s Playtime to a friend if you think they need it (there’s nothing like film therapy)? Number Four: why do films on the Internet look just awful? And that was that. We simply couldn’t resist the idea of everyone having their own online film library… your little cinema, anytime, anywhere… after all not everyone can make it to the Cannes Film festival… less if you are a school teacher or you live in Winnipeg (or both)… but that doesn’t mean you can’t recite all of Kubrick’s films in reverse chronological order or that you are not desperate to watch the latest Kitano film that is definitely not going to be released in your local multiplex.

And that’s our point; popular doesn’t always mean good.

Our film library is brimming with visionary films that wouldn’t fill a single cinema in Australia for a week – not even a day… but say you searched the world (all of it), you might just find an audience of a thousand for this rare cinematic treat. And we don’t think a thousand people should be ignored just because they happen to live in different time zones or far away from Australia cinemas… if someone needed to make such a precise film, it means that, someone, somewhere needs to watch it. More importantly… that someone might be you. Or Scorsese (he happens to be a member too…)

[Click to continue reading About The Auteurs]

Reading Around on May 8th through May 11th

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A few interesting links collected May 8th through May 11th:

  • TidBITS Opinion: SFMOMA’s ArtScope Offers New Way To Browse Museum Collections – “The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s ArtScope is a great example of an innovative approach to bringing a museum’s collection to the Web. ArtScope is a visual browsing tool comprised of a thumbnail grid displaying 3,500 works from the SFMOMA’s permanent collection. The grid is zoomable, displaying a lens which can be moved over it to magnify certain areas, enabling users to view hundreds of artworks simultaneously, or just one at a time in close detail.”
  • Death Star & Star Wars Spacecraft Fly Around San Francisco – If you haven’t already seen this…

    “Speaking of great Star Wars videos, Michael Horn made this absolutely amazing video on Current featuring the Death Star and various Star Wars spacecraft flying around San Francisco during Imperial Fleet Week”

  • The Official George W. Bush Presidential Librarium – Completion of the George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas may be stalled indefinitely, due to an apparent lack of funding, public support, and basic legality. Make no mistake, the public’s desire to endlessly relive Bush’s greatest achievements may go unanswered for years to come—and his legacy remain (like America) in limbo.

    All hope is not lost. We at Origen & Golan Architects are proud to unveil the plans for the George W. Bush Presidential Librarium! Themed attractions provide more entertainment than a library, and more accurately represent Bush’s remarkable legacy—start by exploring The Stax, Supreme Food Court, Book BBQ, and the ever-popular Golden Parachutes. We ask for your support in promoting the Librarium among your colleagues. We cannot blink.

Amazon’s top 100 Jazz albums of all time

Flip HD footage of Haymarket

Seth Anderson0 comment

Because I feel as if I am underutilizing the potential fun of owning the Flip HD video camera, I am going to make a concerted effort to shoot more footage with the device. Viewer beware. My first attempt was pretty Cinéma vérité indie film bullshit – I need to drink less coffee perhaps, or invest in a tripod. I actually have a Flip HD tripod, but wasn’t able to use it because I was just leaning out of my window.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3DFiYclsPw

The footage was simply shot out of my office window. Less anarchists and police than in prior years – in fact, quite a lot less. Some years the street by the Haymarket Riot Memorial statue is blocked off, and a stage is erected. This year, the performers and speakers were shunted onto the sidewalk. I am pleased that nobody was run over by a car, as there was some portions of the crowd that lingered in the street.

Same video hosted on Flickr: wonder if there is any difference in the conversion codex?

The clip quickly thrown together in the current iMovie application, and audio provided by Wire1

Oh, used a handful of images taken also from my office window using my Nikon D80 with a 200 mm (digital) lens.

Footnotes:
  1. Field Day for the Sundays – from Pink Flag [↩]

David Simon and Ed Burns Working on a Haymarket Riot piece

Seth Anderson3 Comments

As an aside to the main thrust of the Bill Moyers David Simon interview, Mr. Simon notes that Ed Burns1 is working on a Haymarket Riot piece. Oh please, please, please do this!! And please, please, please, I want to work on the set!. Actually, Richard Linklater was supposedly working on a Haymarket Riot film too, perhaps they could collaborate. Or share research, whatever, as long as I can help in some way with either project.

Haymarket Riot memorial, old version.

DAVID SIMON:

But I look at what’s happened with unions and I think– Ed Burns says all the time that he wants to do a piece on the Haymarket.

BILL MOYERS: The Haymarket strike.

DAVID SIMON: Yes. That– the bombing, and that critical moment when American labor was pushed so much to the starving point that they were willing to fight. And I actually think that’s the only time when change is possible. When people are actually threatened to the core, and enough people are threatened to the core that they just won’t take it anymore. And that’s– those are the pivotal moments in American history, I think, when actually something does happen.

You know, they were– in Haymarket, they were fighting for the 40-hour work week. You know? So, it wasn’t– it sounds radical at the time, but it’s basically a dignity of life issue. And you look at things like that. You look at the anti-Vietnam War effort, in this country which, you know, you had to threaten middle class kids with a draft and with military service in an unpopular war for people to rise up and demand the end to an unpopular war. I mean, it didn’t happen without that. So, on some level, as long as they placate enough people. As long as they throw enough scraps from the table that enough people get a little bit to eat, I just don’t see a change coming.

[From Bill Moyers Journal . Transcripts | PBS]

Haymarket Riot Memorial

Footnotes:
  1. David Simon’s long time writing partner [↩]

Reading Around on April 14th

swanksalot0 comment

Some additional reading April 14th from 14:44 to 18:08:

Netflix Queue is a battleground for some couples

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Some couples have different tastes in films, and thus cannot agree on what should be next on the Netflix queue.

Netflix Cracked

Michael Wilson writes:

For many couples, the queue — the computer list of which films will arrive next in the mail, after those at home are returned — is as important as everything else that spouses and other varieties of significant others share, from pet names to closet space to the bathroom. For some, this is fine. For others, the queue is the new toilet seat that somebody left up.

Back to that disc at the Marino residence, dug in like an old grudge.

“I had ‘English Patient’ for more than six months,” Mr. Marino confessed. “It was an insane amount of time.” He recalled starting the same discussion with his wife, night after night, as they flipped among the five DVDs from their Netflix subscription. “Do you want to watch this? Do you want to watch this? Do you want to watch ‘English Patient?’ ”

“No,” was the response he got.

[Click to continue reading Netflix Is the New Relationship Battleground – NYTimes.com]

We have a simpler solution, one not mentioned in the article: have two DVD players! My taste in movies runs more along the lines of a film-school dropout1, lots of Criterion Collection films, classic noir, Werner Herzog, etc., while her taste is decidedly less eclectic. She will sometimes watch a classic film with me, but often would rather watch a television drama instead, or a contemporary comedy. Luckily our place is big enough that we can each watch a television at the same time with minimal fuss.

Teeth

Portable DVD players are cheap, and many households have laptops. Why would this be such an insurmountable problem for couples? There is the issue of receiving Netflix films, and not wanting to watch them for a while, for whatever reason. I just watched Le Cercle Rouge [Netflix]2, after having the disc in my possession for nearly a month. The term for this phenomena is Notflix, I think.

Also, The English Patient SUCKS! Mr. Marino didn’t miss anything by not watching it. What a horrible movie3

Footnotes:
  1. which is one of my self-chosen epithets, perhaps in homage to the phrase, “Beauty School Dropout, ” from Grease. Bonus points, since it is sorta true: I took several film classes as an undergrad, but decided to graduate before changing my major, again. [↩]
  2. a great film, glad I finally viewed it, perhaps to write something about it, or not, as my film review frequency has totally slackened [↩]
  3. sorry, sis, I know you like it [↩]

Reading Around on March 28th through March 29th

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A few interesting links collected March 28th through March 29th:

  • The Washington Independent » After the Laughter, Grim GOP Numbers – While reporters hooted at the comically simplistic charts and lack of details in the House Republican leadership’s budget plan, the green eyeshade types at Citizen’s for Tax Justice crunched the numbers (PDF). They conclude that a quarter of all households, most of them poor, would pay more taxes under the GOP plan, while the richest one percent would pay $100,000 less.

  • TidBITS Media Creation: iMovie ’09 8.0.1 Update Brings More than Just Bug Fixes – “I understand that Apple isn’t creating its products for writers, and it can (and does) change features whenever it wants. The updates here are great for iMovie users. But since the development teams must keep internal lists of what’s changed anyway, is it really so hard to spend an hour and turn those into useful release notes?”

    Amen to that. Maybe make a preference toggled in Software Update: terse details as the default, but have the ability to set a preference and get more detailed release notes. Please Apple, it shouldn’t be so difficult to say what’s new.

  • Mady Comfort – Biography – Mady (or Mattie) Comfort was a jazz and lounge singer, dancer, and model. She was married to bassist Joe Comfort, who worked with Lionel Hampton and Nat King Cole, and who played on many of the Frank Sinatra/Nelson Riddle Capitol recordings. Gene Santoro, in his biography of Charlie Mingus (Myself When I Am Real), says that she was also a girlfriend of Duke Ellington, and that she is the “Satin Doll” about whom Ellington, Strayhorn, and Mercer wrote the song “Satin Doll.”

    Also sang the hell out of a Nat King Cole song, I’d Rather Have The Blues (aka Blues From A Kiss Me Deadly) in the 1956 noir film, “Kiss Me Deadly”“. Whoa.

Reading Around on February 24th through February 25th

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A few interesting links collected February 24th through February 25th:

  • Obsidian Wings: In the only news worth hearing today ….. – It seems that Michael Cera has finally agreed to do an Arrested Development movie.The comment thread at the Onion’s AV Club is worth reading just to relive some of the classic lines from the show, like “I’m afraid I shot the wad on the dry run and now I’ve got a bit of a mess on my hands”; “She’s not that Mexican, mom, she’s *my* Mexican…and she’s Columbian or something”; and “I was the world’s first analyst/therapist [business card reads: ‘Analrapist’].”

  • The Godfather Wars | vanityfair.com – “In preparation for The Godfather, Lettieri took Brando to his relative’s house in New Jersey for a family dinner, “to get the flavor,” says Lettieri’s ex-wife, Jan. In addition, “Francis had sent a lot of tapes from the Kefauver Committee hearings, so Brando had been hearing how these real Mafia dons talked,” remembers Fred Roos. Soon Brando had the voice of Don Corleone. “Powerful people don’t need to shout,” he later explained.” … “What do you think this is, the army, where you shoot ’em a mile away? You gotta get up close, like this—and bada-bing! You blow their brains all over your nice Ivy League suit.” Bada-bing became a mantra for mobsters and aspiring mobsters. More recently, it served as the name of Tony Soprano’s strip club in The Sopranos. “‘Bada-bing? Bada-boom?’ I said that, didn’t I? Or did I just say ‘bada-bing’?” asks Caan. “It just came out of my mouth—I don’t know from where.”

Reading Around on February 19th

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A few interesting links collected February 17th through February 19th:

  • CBS Falsely Portrays Stanford as Democratic Scandal – But as Public Citizen, Huffington Post, ABC News and Talking Points Memo all reported, Stanford and his Stanford Financial Group PAC contributed to politicians and political action committees of both parties (including $448,000 in soft money contributions from 2000 to 2001 alone) to advance his agenda of banking and money-laundering deregulation. Many others journeyed on Stanford's junkets to Antigua and elsewhere, prompting TPM to brand his company "a travel agent for Congress." (TPM has a slide show of one of those of Stanford getaways.)

    As it turns out, the list of Stanford beneficiaries is long – and bipartisan.

  • Remembering Gene – Roger Ebert's Journal – Gene died ten years ago on February 20, 1999. He is in my mind almost every day. I don't want to rehearse the old stories about how we had a love/hate relationship, and how we dealt with television, and how we were both so scared the first time we went on Johnny Carson that, backstage, we couldn't think of the name of a single movie, although that story is absolutely true. Those stories have been told. I want to write about our friendship. The public image was that we were in a state of permanent feud, but nothing we felt had anything to do with image. We both knew the buttons to push on the other one, and we both made little effort to hide our feelings, warm or cold. In 1977 we were on a talk show with Buddy Rogers, once Mary Pickford's husband, and he said, "You guys have a sibling rivalry, but you both think you're the older brother."
  • TidBITS iPod & iPhone: iPhone to Add Location Logging? – Could the iPhone soon be able to track your location in the background as you walk around? A hint that such a capability is in the works at Apple comes from a programmer friend who spent some time spelunking around inside iPhoto '09, which shows traces of being able to associate such GPS log data with photos.
  • Daily Kos: Chocolate Covered Cotton – billmon – The fatal innovation…was the rise of so-called collateralized obligations, in which the payment streams from supposedly uniform pools of assets (say, for example, 30-year fixed prime mortgages issued in the first six months of 2006 to California borrowers) could be sliced and diced into different securities (known as tranches) each with different payment characteristics.

    This began as a tool for managing (or speculating on) changes in interest rates, which are a particular problem for mortgage lenders, since homeowners usually have the right to repay (i.e. refinance) their loan when rates fall, forcing lenders to put the money back out on the street at the new, lower rates. This means mortgage-backed securities can go down in value when rates fall as well as when they rise. By shielding some tranches from prepayments (in other words, by directing them to other tranches) the favored tranches are made less volatile and thus can be sold at a higher price and a lower yield.

  • An old habit dies… hard. « chuck.goolsbee.org – "I stumbled across a likely little application that seems to fit the bill: Gyazmail. It has a very flexible UI that allows me to make it behave very Eudora-like when I want it to. It has very good search, rules, and filters. It can import all my old mail(!)

    I’m test driving it at the moment and liking it so far. Switched my work mail to it late last week, and my personal mail is still coming over one account at a time. So far so good. If you regularly contact me via email be patient while I work through this transition period."

    I'm still using Eudora on three of our most used Macs (since 1995 probably -only 14 years), but the writing is on the wall. Have to check out Gyazmail.

  • Hands on: Drop.io's private, easy file sharing with a twist – Ars Technica – Sharing information online is getting more complex than it sometimes should be. If you want to share pictures, files, plain ideas, or even faxes with friends or businesses, you can try the old e-mail standby, but you may end up joining a social network, agree to a dense privacy policy, and then track down an app made by who-knows-who to get the job done. Even starting a simple blog usually involves more time than most users can afford‚ and more features than they'll ever need. Drop.io is an intriguing, but simple, new service that is part wiki, part file sharing, and part personal secretary, with an emphasis on privacy and ubiquitous access, requiring no signup or account activation.

    Upon visiting Drop.io—pronounced as a seamless single word: "drop-ee-o"—the site presents a basic elevator pitch about its services and a short form with which to get started uploading files.

  • Fat Tire Ale Downed Near Load Of Burgers – A Good Beer Blog – Motorists on Interstate 15 were impeded by a piles of hamburgers after a truck spilled a load of the patties, blocking the northbound lanes for four hours. The driver of a tractor-trailer carrying 40,000 pounds of hamburger patties dozed off around 5 a.m., said Utah Highway Patrol trooper Cameron Roden. The truck driver's rig drifted to the left side of the freeway near 2300 North and crashed into a wall and an overhead sign, which ripped open his trailer, spilling hamburger over the north and southbound lanes of the interstate…A second truck spill east of Morgan caused minor delays. Before 7:30 a.m., a truck was heading westbound on Interstate 84 about a half-mile east of Morgan… The truck slipped off to the left, hit a guardrail, and flipped over on its side. The impact split the truck open, spilling Fat Tire Beer being shipped from Colorado, Roden said.
  • The Associated Press: Chimp owner begs police in 911 call to stop attack – Police said that the chimp was agitated earlier Monday and that Herold had given him the anti-anxiety drug Xanax in some tea. Police said the drug had not been prescribed for the 14-year-old chimp.

    In humans, Xanax can cause memory loss, lack of coordination, reduced sex drive and other side effects. It can also lead to aggression in people who were unstable to begin with, said Dr. Emil Coccaro, chief of psychiatry at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

    "Xanax could have made him worse," if human studies are any indication, Coccaro said.

  • Facebook | Home – Over the past few days, we have received a lot of feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised. For more information, visit the Facebook Blog.

    If you want to share your thoughts on what should be in the new terms, check out our group Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities.

  • Big Tuna – Chicago — Anthony 'Big Tuna' Accardo, reputed crime syndicate figure, and his wife are shown as they arrive at the St. Vincent Ferrer Church in suburban River Forest to attend wedding of their son Anthony Jr, who was married to the former Janet Hawley, 1961 Miss Utah. Many top gangland bosses and other underworld figures attended the wedding under the watchful eye of law enforcement agencies
  • Home | Recovery.gov – Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going. There are going to be a few different ways to search for information. The money is being distributed by Federal agencies, and soon you'll be able to see where it's going — to which states, to which congressional districts, even to which Federal contractors. As soon as we are able to, we'll display that information visually in maps, charts, and graphics.
  • George Will: Liberated From the Burden of Fact-Checking | The Loom | Discover Magazine – In an opinion piece by George Will published on February 15, 2009 in the Washington Post, George Will states “According to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.”

    We do not know where George Will is getting his information, but our data shows that on February 15, 1979, global sea ice area was 16.79 million sq. km and on February 15, 2009, global sea ice area was 15.45 million sq. km. Therefore, global sea ice levels are 1.34 million sq. km less in February 2009 than in February 1979. This decrease in sea ice area is roughly equal to the area of Texas, California, and Oklahoma combined.

    It is disturbing that the Washington Post would publish such information without first checking the facts.

  • Wonk Room » George Will Believes In Recycling – Will’s numerous distortions and outright falsehoods have been well documented by Joe Romm, Nate Silver, Zachary Roth, Brad Plumer, Erza Klein, David Roberts, James Hrynyshyn, Rick Piltz, Steve Benen, Mark Kleiman, and others. They recognized that George Will is recycling already rebutted claims from the lunatic fringe, and offer the excellent suggestion that Washington Post editors should require some minimum level of fact-checking.

    But I haven’t seen anyone comment that Will is also recycling his own work, republishing an extended passage from a 2006 column — which Think Progress debunked — almost word for word. Take a look:

Joseph Losey’s Boom!

Seth Anderson3 Comments

Elizabeth Taylor's Hat in Boom

With a reputation like this, of course I want to see the film now:

Joseph Losey’s Boom! (1968) is one of the most famously criticized and misunderstood films from the late sixties. Its original $3.9 million dollar budget seemed to have ballooned into 10 million by the time shooting stopped and the money was mainly used to pay the million dollar salaries of the film’s two main stars (Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), dress Elizabeth Taylor in her amazing Tiziani costumes (many designed by Karl Lagerfeld) and Bulgari jewelery, build a fabulous set and keep the Bloody Marys’ and champagne flowing from dawn to dusk. Critics by and large despised Boom! and many viewers walked out of the theater before the film had ended utterly perplexed by what they had just seen.

Boom! was an uneven European art film masquerading as a mainstream Hollywood movie and the general public just wasn’t interested. They wanted to see Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in more easily defined roles such as “tenacious slut” (Taylor) or “troubled saint” (Burton), and they longed for simpler drama with a basic narrative that was easy to follow. But by 1968 both Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had grown weary of the typical roles Hollywood was offering them and they wanted to make more challenging films together. Boom! would turn out to be one of the most challenging films that the actors ever worked on. But it would also receive the worst reviews of their careers and mark what many consider to be the decline of one of Hollywood’s most glamorous couples. A shared addiction to alcohol and Taylor’s growing reliance on prescription drugs was starting to take its toll on the two actors and their very public marriage. The couple’s wealth, fame and glamorous lifestyle made Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton appear larger than life and at first glance unusual film projects like Doctor Faustus (1967) and Boom! appeared to be self-indulgent vanity projects made without much thought for the general movie-going audiences that had helped make them famous. Resentment seemed to be growing between the popular actors and their adoring fans. And critics were eager to take a swipe at Hollywood’s roy

Boom! was based on one of Tennessee Williams’ least accessible and most esoteric plays called The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore (originally published in 1963) [Google books] and Williams was also responsible for the film’s script. After two failed Broadway runs of the play Universal Studios still thought they could turn The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore into a hit film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Both actors had appeared in financially successful film versions of other Tennessee Williams’ plays individually including, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Richard Brooks; 1956), Suddenly Last Summer (Joseph L. Mankiewicz; 1959) and The Night of the Iguana (John Huston; 1964) so Universal assumed the couple could turn The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore into a hit with their double star power.

[Click to continue reading C I N E B E A T S :: Joseph Losey’s Boom! (1968) :: March :: 2008]

Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, Netflix does not have Boom! for rental, meaning it was never released on DVD. Perhaps ripe for a Criterion Collection release? There is a Bittorrent (AVI) for the tech savvy

One four minute scene on YouTube

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu7cje8nNXo

Elizabeth Taylor's Boom! Hat

[via Metafilter]

Netflixed Religulous

Seth Anderson0 comment


“Religulous” (Larry Charles)

Haven’t actually seen this yet…


Politically provocative talk show host Bill Maher skewers the current state of organized religion in this documentary that derives its title from a blend of the words “religion” and “ridiculous.” Making stops in Jerusalem, the Vatican and other holy destinations, Maher travels the world to talk to believers from a variety of faiths to find out why they’re so sure their religion is right — and why they’re so certain others are wrong. [Netflix: Religulous]

Bill Maher can sometimes be clever, when he isn’t being cruel and pretending to be ironic. However, there are few targets as juicy as humanity’s strange love affair with deities. Am looking forward to viewing this film – we had meant to see it in a theatre, but just never quite made it.

IMDb tidbit:

The film used the fake working title “A Spiritual Journey” in order to obtain interviews with religious leaders. They did not know that Bill Maher was involved in the film until he arrived for the interviews.

per Roger Ebert:

I’m going to try to review Bill Maher’s “Religulous” without getting into religion. Is that OK with everybody? Good. I don’t want to fan the flames of a holy war. The movie is about organized religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, TV evangelism and even Scientology, with detours into pagan cults and ancient Egypt. Bill Maher, host, writer and debater, believes they are all crazy. He fears they could lead us prayerfully into mutual nuclear doom. He doesn’t get around to Hinduism or Buddhism, but he probably doesn’t approve of them, either.

This review is going to depend on one of my own deeply held beliefs: It’s not what the movie is about, it’s how it’s about it. This movie is about Bill Maher’s opinion of religion. He’s very smart, quick and funny, and I found the movie entertaining, although sometimes he’s a little mean to his targets. He visits holy places in Italy, Israel, Great Britain, Florida, Missouri and Utah, and talks with adherents of the religions he finds there, and others.

Or maybe “talks with” is not quite the right phrase. It’s more that he lines them up and shoots them down. He interrupts, talks over, slaps on subtitles, edits in movie and TV clips, and doesn’t play fair.

Even better.