Category: Personal

Some films just have a very distinctive sensibility and Brother is one of them. This movie is somewhat of a kind with The Last Seduction in that the lead character has no problem with hardass murder. Written, edited and directed by and starring Takeshi Kitano, Brother is the story of a Yakuza gang leader who is defeated in a gang war and forced to flee to America, where his younger brother already lives as a small time drug dealer. Kitano’s Aniki (Big Brother) takes over his brother’s gang and drives them to become a force in the LA underworld until they become too big and run into a force they can’t defeat by ruthless violence, the Mafia.

Perhaps the culture gap between me and Japan is just too wide, or that this is Kitano’s first attempt at a film largely in English, but overall the movie didn’t work for me. Plot gaps and inexplicable to me behavior occur throughout. The acting was good, especially Omar Epps as the gang member Big Brother bonds with, Susumu Terajima as Kitano’s faithful follower, and Masaya Kato as the rival LA Japanese ganglord Kitano teams up with. This is the kind of movie where characters commit hara-kiri onscreen over public insults and others just shoot their guns without warning and massacre the opposition. Your mileage may vary.

These Playmates and others will be swallowing bugs, jumping off bridges, and doing other amusing things in bikinis on a special Super Bowl halftime edition of the annoying and vile show Fear Factor.

In a largely sucessful attempt at being wacky, Rick Kamla talks to the spirits of some dear departed (Lombardi, Hendrix, Hartman, MLK…) in

Kamla Unfiltered: Altered State of the NFL to get some answers on the NFL. Read the whole thing but I like the coaching comments well down into the article as Kamla has ‘Phil Hartman’ get nasty on Tampa Bay and San Diego. Both teams are still headless.

In other news, John Fox was announced as the new coach of the Panthers yesterday. He immediately named former All-Pro linebacker Jack Del Rio, an All American at USC in his college days who won notice as linebackers coach the last few years at Baltimore, his defensive coordinator.

San Diego seemed headed for ex-Cleveland, Kansas City, and Washington head coach Marty Schottenheimer until he and GM John Butler bumped ugly over the issue of personnel control. Butler has it and Schottenheimer wants it. Marty can afford to be picky, somewhat, since the Redskins are on the hook for $2.5 million a year for the next three years less whatever another team pays him. But he’s getting older and one wonders how marketable he’ll be in 2003 if no job comes together this year.

16 years have passed since we saw Michael Corleone foiled in his attempt to protect his family and get out of “this thing of ours.” The years have been harsh to him, yet he is more powerful and feared than ever at the start of Godfather: Part III. The stakes have escalated as well; Michael’s push for legitimacy has him donating hundreds of millions of dollars to a corrupt Catholic Church in exchange for their golden share in one of the world’s largest real estate companies. But in this morality lesson, evil, no matter how well intentioned, cannot win in the end.

Critics have panned this last episode of the saga mercilessly since it was released in 1990 and I can’t say I disagree with them. Director Coppola, on his DVD commentary track, even seems to disown responsibility and claims studio interference. His casting of daughter Sofia as Corleone daughter Mary was surely his own mistake, even if it was made out of love. I noticed on IMDB that this was essentially her only substantial acting role, although she did write and direct the acclaimed Virgin Suicides in 1999.

Pacino is his usual brilliant self. Keaton is a non-entity onscreen although a recent Pacino biography claimed that the two were near marriage at the time in real life after being off and on lovers for decades. Andy Garcia is just a little too comic book-like as the bastard son of Sonny Corleone.

Not recommended.

This is kind of like daydreaming, only you do it in the shower. And you kind of meander into it, not through any conscious choice or direction. One minute your happily going through the shower routine, wash the hands, wash the face, shampoo the hair…next thing you know you think you’re all done but you don’t remember if you lathered the soap up and down your body. I get lost thinking about some topic of the day or some fantasy woman or things I want/need/ought to do that day. Did I finish everything that was supposed to be washed? I just don’t know. Does this every happen to you?

I can’t find the webpage but yesterday I read a complaint by someone that there aren’t any great female villainous roles. Then I saw 1994’s Last Seduction on the schedule for HBO tonight and said to myself, “Self, don’t you remember that Linda Fiorentino plays an incredibly bad, amoral woman in that flick?” So I watched just to make sure. And sure enough, Self was right. Fiorentino plays a woman who just wants to live the good life in Manhattan and has a sexy enough body and devious enough mind to get Bill Pullman and Peter Berg to do what’s needed for her to get there. Drug deals, welshing on loan sharks, murder, nothing is going to stand in her way.

Excellent script by Steve Barancik, whose only other credited script is for the upcoming Samuel Jackson thriller “No Good Deed” also features a manipulative female lead (the also slender, small breasted, sexy Milla Jovovich). Good pacing and direction from John Dahl, he really gets performances from the leads as well as Bill Nunn and J.T. Walsh. Much better than anything Dahl’s done since, unfortunately. But this one is highly recommended.

Check it out! Ev has delivered a key feature for the new verison of Blogger, a new version of the BlogThis! bookmarklet. Not only does it support the title field but the edit window is now resizable and provides access to all the little tools of the main Blogger client. Love it!

While the actual coronation appears to be coming tomorrow, John Fox is in Charlotte today for final meetings before being named the Panthers new coach. This is a good choice for the team, Fox has done excellent work for the Giants as defensive coordinator since 1997. What I wonder is why they chose him over Ravens defensive coordinator Marvin Lewis. The two coaches have very similar backgrounds and ages and both are expected to make solid head coaches. ESPN should do a behind the scenes special one year with cameras at some of these interviews to let us know what goes on.

In other news, former Giants fullback Maurice Carthon (from the 1986 and ’90 Super Bowl teams) was named offensive coordinator of the Detroit Lions today, moving up from the running backs coaching slot. Hard to believe Carthon has been coaching for eight years already. The Lions also added former Vikings OC Sherm Lewis as a special assistant; after the season the Lions just had, can’t blame them for wanting as much brainpower as possible focused on that side of the ball. Don’t forget that Lion HC Marty Mornhinweg’s background is also on the go side.

Speaking of offensive, the Cowboys sure need help and rumors have them offering the OC job to former Bengals/Jets coach Bruce Coslet. Some guys just aren’t meant to be head coaches even though they really look the part, and Coslet is one of them. A great offensive mind but never really got all the pieces of the head job put together. Star player-wise, the ‘Boys have an aging but still juiced Emmit Smith and confusion at quarterback: Rookie Quincy Carter was named the starter and spent much of the year on the injury list, Anthony Wright seemed to fizzle after starting a few games, Ryan Leaf didn’t impress in his third stop and looks like the stop for a cup of coffee is over, and latest news is the team is offering Chad Hutchinson a multi-year contract with a $2 million signing bonus. Hutchinson was a big time college QB at Stanford but has spent the last four years as a pitcher in the St. Louis Cardinals minor league system and has been disabled twice in the past two years with elbow trouble.

Writing in the Slasdot thread The End of Cyber BS, wunderhorn1 posts an amazing update of the Gil Scott-Heron song poem, morphing the lyrics to catch the happenings of our time. Worth reading.

Can you imagine this 620 (that’s right, six hundred twenty) carat diamond called the Sefadu on your or your fiance/wife’s finger? It’s only the world’s largest, so by most any definition, you would win that game.

Ev’s mention of a dream today reminds me that I wanted to write up my own dream from my last sleep. Of course, several hours later, the details are beginning to slip away but.. I was in college, I think as a student again, and a group of 15 or 20 of us were taken hostage. Our keepers were quite brutal and harsh although I was fortunate (it was my dream, right?) to escape most of their anger. Towards the end, though, one of the bad men was focusing on a woman close to me, emotionally close, though not anyone I recognized from waking life, and I put myself in between them. The man spoke quite angrily to me, pushed a gun in my face and asked if I wanted to move. I didn’t. He slapped me in the face with the gun and the woman jumped to me.

All of a sudden there was chaos, I heard gun shots and screaming. A rescue attempt. I jumped at the man who was menacing us, landing my head square in his stomach and knocking the wind out of him. We were near a door and I grabbed the woman’s hand and we raced out. Didn’t stop running for about five minutes when I was about to keel over. Some police came over to us and then I woke up. Didn’t even stick around to find out how grateful the woman might have been.

On the one hand we have a monster like Mike Tyson. On the other, a shy, retiring (but less so all the time, more power to him) guy like Noah Grey. Never would they occur together in a single thought except that while surfing this morning to Jim McCormick’s article about Tyson and his absurd rant to a sportswriter I saw a comment posted by Noah. For someone who has barely left his room in years, until quite recently, Noah has empowered thousands of folks to find their own public voices using his GreyMatter content management system at no cost.

Ed Yourdan is a respected thinker on the process of software development and has been for several decades. His company Yourdan, Inc. practically launched the software methodology business and most of the bright shining stars back in the ’70s. However there are some people who wouldn’t mind seeing him shut up, I guess, and those folks will find amusement by looking at his weblog in this way (click here and after the page loads hit your home key). Note that this may only work in Internet Explorer. By the way, I like Ed, always have.

The Wayback Machine is a very cool effort to essentially archive every bit of information possessed by the human race, starting with anything that’s ever been published on the web. In an interview with project head Brewster Kahle, we find out that they have over 100 terabytes of information already stored (which is five times the Library of Congress) and have written their own operating system overlay (called P2) that trivializes the effort required for writing parallel processing applications. Some very ambitious goals and very useful insights into tech in this interview. The non-profit project has also moved on to start archiving movies and cooperate with other researchers too. One of the neat things about the Wayback Machine is that you can get at old versions of a specific page, such as my homepage as it was on May 19, 2001–damn was it ugly!

Happy Birthday Byron

Tonight we had the third meeting of the Weblogger Interest Group here in Mountain View, first at Dana St. Roasting Company (thanks, Nick) and then over beers at the Tied House. About 20 people turned out and we had a nice discussion about personal versus professional conflict in what one writes in a weblog. While I don’t work just now, I am aware that future employers or clients may come and look at the archives. Good thing I don’t say fuck a lot. Or shit.

The big event tonight was a demo of the new Blogger Pro from Pyra Labs (aka Ev Williams), which is launching this week. I was definitely impressed with what I saw and will be coughing up the $35 as soon as he opens the PayPal door. Some of my favorite of the new features were draft/publish to the future posts (that is, write something now but hold off publishing until I say so or until some specific time), titles for posts, use of lightly loaded servers, publish to email, and (coming soon, not in the first release) RSS generation. Amusingly, I did not notice a new Blogger Pro icon but hopefully this will be remedied quickly.

Not surprisingly after claiming he would not be outbid, Jim Irsay is a happy man today after Dungy accepted his offer to coach Indianapolis. Can he pull off a St. Louis-like defensive turnaround and get a healthy Edgarrin James back? Those are the two keys to making the playoffs next year after the Colts didn’t even come close this season. Dungy will retain offensive coordinator Tom Moore, which is going to make the triplets (Manning, Harrison, and James) happy.

Liverpool at Manchester United: Lovely 1-0

Amazing match, all defense with many challenges by Man United until Murphy took a lovely leading pass from Gerrard at 84:20 and just got his toe on the ball to push it around a defender and over goalkeeper Barthez for the score. Just a beautiful play! The Manchester home crowd at Old Trafford was loud and partisan throughout. But the Reds beat their rivals for the fifth consecutive time and rose above the murk of recent results that had them falling from first in the Premiership to fifth. Danny Murphy has been on the edge lately but put in a fine showing with the game’s only goal. Next up is a tough away FA Cup match at Arsenal, who sit one point behind Liverpool in the league table, on Sunday.

AOL files antitrust suit against Microsoft

Everbody and their brother will be blogging and commenting on this lawsuit over the coming minutes, weeks, years. Key thing to note is that this is the other half of the Department of Justice case, the private half. After all, the DOJ is alleging that MS caused damages to citizens and other companies and the court has agreed with them (at this point, the only remaining question is the remedy). There is also a consumer-level class action suit against MS which was almost settled with a big donation to schools but the judge realized the settlement was a poorly-disguised attempt by Gates and Co. to take over one of the few market segments they don’t yet control and rejected it. Now AOL TW, as the successor to Netscape, is filing suit and I expect others to follow. This whole mess is far fom over. If the solution was simply money Microsoft would settle in a heartbeat with the almost $40 billion cash they hold but of course all the plaintiffss want behavioural remedies, which Gates can’t stomach. Expect to be reading about this for years and years.

Tonight’s movie: Gone in 60 Seconds

Vroom vroom! Fast cars, a sexy woman, and some inexplicable explosions generate the heat in Gone in 60 Seconds. Nicholas Cage plays a reformed auto thief who gets pulled back in against his will (how else can we be sympathetic?) when his younger brother (slimy Giovanni Ribisi) gets in a mess with a psychopathic Englishman (Christopher Eccleston). Robert Duvall plays his also-retired mentor, Angelina Jolie is his pissed off but still, under it all, in love girlfriend, and Ving Rhames is a cop who can never catch Cage even when he has him under a gun. This moronic movie can be enjoyed if you ignore the script and just drool over all the classic sports cars that get ripped off.