Category: Personal

Today’s movie: Household Saints

It was day like many other days, and then I popped Household Saints on from the TiVo playlist. Nancy Savoca starts from a novel by Francine Prose but falls into the “throw strange characters into a bowl” fallacy early on, and from there even decent acting jobs by Tracy Ullman, Vincent D’Onofrio and Lilli Taylor can’t really pull it back over the hedge.

We follow Ullman and D’Onofrio through about 20 years of their lives, about 1949-1970ish, from when they came together because he won her (from her Dad) in a game of Pinochle, their early marriage living with his wacky old country Italian Mom and a stillborn baby, through the desperate childhood and strange death of a second, Jesus-obsessed daughter (Taylor). Though the novel probably spends the necessary verbiage establishing these characters and their reasons, the film never has the time and so I never did understand. D’Onofrio “just loves” Ullman, for instance, and can do no better when his mother asks for such help. Minor props to The Sopranos’ Michael Imperioli for an amusing portrait of an ambitious young lawyer.

Barely recommended

Go Bruce, Yay Warren!

In the Grammy nominations announced today a song that Springsteen collaborated on with Warren Zevon, Disorder In The House from Zevon’s album The Wind, was nominated for Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocal and Best Rock Song. Zevon got two other nominations for his last album: Song of the Year and Best Male Pop Vocal Performance for Keep Me In Your Heart

If morning coffee doesn’t open your eyes…

Off to Costco!

Bad Mickey!

Disney is being too cute for its own good. I just saw the TV ad for Peter Pan, opening Christmas Day here, and it looked interesting so I put the proffered URL in the browser. I wanted to know who’s playing the creepy Captain Hook but instead of getting the expected movie website I was automatically pushed to the generic Disney Pictures site. Which does list a few upcoming releases but not Pan.

Bushinations: A paycheck is a paycheck

I have the nagging impression that Republicans were traditionally the people complaining about the revolving door between government service and private industry. Maybe I’m wrong, though, since (a) Tom Scully, the guy who just finished drafting the Medicare reform bill and getting it passed into law, has resigned and is “weighing five offers” from firms anxious for his insight into how the new law will work and (b) Darleen Druyun, the woman at Department of Defense who oversaw the absurd, overpriced Boeing 100 aircraft lease deal, went right to work at Boeing but then was forced out in an ethical stand by boeing’s board last week.

Security, security, security!

Because the changes never stop and, well, it’s nice to get out of the house with other techies once in a while, we stopped briefly at JupiterMedia’s Wi-Fi Planet Conferences and Expo down at the San Jose Convention Center around lunchtime today. Touring the show floor didn’t take but about 45 or 50 minutes and if we hadn’t run into an old friend from Sun (Hi Sameer!), wouldn’t have even been that long.

Not a great sign of the alleged tech recovery, either judging by numer of booths or attendees. I was mainly reminded of the old real estate agent joke: What are the three most important things in real estate? Location, location, location! Except in this case, for wireless networking, switch the answer to security–at least half the exhibitors, maybe more, were showing products to solve provide protection for such nets. Or equipment to easily set up billable wireless access in places like hotels and stores.

The only vaguely interesting booth for me, besides the free espresso at PCTel, was Intel’s stand demonstrating location-based computing. They have both Java and .NET software bits to help with such applications but I couldn’t find them on the website, maybe I’ll follow up with the SE I spoke with about this.

And not much in the way of booth babes either! Matched the semi-dreary weather quite well.

Morning Sun

  1. Java Studio Creator: Couldn’t the marketing droids have done a little better than this sad choice?
  2. Scott McNealy is always entertaining, even if he isn’t always discrete. Actually, he’s rarely discrete. Today, for instance, speaking to European tech press, he said “If you think telcos are going away, then I would sell your Sun stock.” But with the increasing movement to VoIP, the longterm prospects of Telcos are most definitely in question.

LOL

“I will have my money for my fine and a joint in the other hand,” said outgoing Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien recently–can you imagine the Bushinator telling the world he’ll be enjoying his retirement through a haze?

Today’s movie: The Front

Released in 1976, The Front was one of the first serious–and non-allegorical–attempts by Hollywood to explicitly examine the effects of McCarthyism on its own people. Most of the major creatives involved, including the writer, director and several actors, were themselves victims of the blacklist and are identified as such in the credits. The star, Woody Allen, was not on the list but had an upfront and personal view as a staff writer for Sid Caeser’s TV show at the time.

The story has Allen, a cashier at a Manhattan diner and failed bookie named Howard Prince, approached by childhood pal who’s been put on the list and not able to get work. The pal wants to put Prince’s name on his scripts and have Prince pretend to be a new writer; when the scheme works three more writers join in and produce scripts for Prince. Since these are good writers, the scripts are big hits and Prince attracts the attention of the men who crave the pleasure of crushing others.

Meanwhile, comedian Hecky Brown (portrayed by blacklist victim Zero Mostel) is victimed by the House Unamerican Committee and despite all attempts to cooperate, all protestations that the closest he came to flirting with Communism, were attempts to get in the pants of a comely female activist, cannot clear his name. So Brown is dropped from his role as host of Prince’s show and cannot find work anywhere. No one who could hire him is willing to cross these powerful bullies. Finally, Brown solves his despair by leaving a hotel room via the window.

Only days after Brown’s death Prince is called to appear before the committee himself. Completely apolitical, the faux-writer cannot conceive of how he could come to harm; thinking the Congressmen and their lawyers idiots, he convinces himself that fooling them without really cooperating will be a breeze. Fooling his own inner mensch, though, is not as simple.

As a movie, The Front is a decent drama, a small movie but one with a clear message. The important characters are given depth, the plot and dialog avoids cliches by focusing on the toll of the events, and the acting is strong. Which is not surprising given the time Walter Bernstein had to develop the script and the quality of the actors, especially Mostel as the sad.

The McCarthy era and the Blacklist were a part of American history of which we should be ashamed, but perhaps the source of the problem is something too deeply ingrained in human nature to be changed so quickly. Only a few years after the American public seemed to learn their lesson, Vietnam came along and many Americans were pointing fingers across the divide and calling opponents unamerican.

The ideological divide is still present in America today as an examination of popular blogs will show. Too many times since 9/11 I’ve heard or read people state that one must either support President Bush and his administation’s policies or one is unpatriotic. No one can oppose the war in Iraq, for instance, because our armed forces are on the ground there and opposition would give succor to our enemies. Such statements are sad, very sad, and to my mind completely miss the point of what American freedom means. This is a very timely movie.

Recommended

Lines on a map

Supreme Court Considers Foreign Arrests. Another case where international law comes into play: Does our government, having failed to get cooperation of another nation’s government, have the right to arrest someone for violation of American laws and bring them here to stand trial? Lower courts have said no and thrown out the arrest in question but the Feds are appealing.

Could be important if we ever do capture someone like bin Laden and want to bring him here for trial… yet I’m still thinking that violating national sovereignty could be a slippery slope, especially if we expect other countries to respect ours. Hypothetical case in point: China would like very much to arrest the founder of Falun Gong (Falun Dafa), Li Hongzhi, but last I read he lives in the US. There’s no way we would extradite him, we don’t even recognize what the Chinese government’s accused him of as a crime. But if arrests of the type in question are legitimized by SCOTUS, could we complain if they sent a team in and took Li Hongzhi by force?