Category: Personal

Kenneth Branagh came blasting out of England in the ’80s, promising to be the next Olivier. One of the ways he chose to use his new-found clout is to bring versions of all of Shakespeare’s works to the screen. From 1993, Much Ado About Nothing is one of the comedies and probably one of my favorite movies ever.

Branagh, who wrote adaptation and directed, plays Benedick, a nobleman in the service of Don Pedro (Denzel Washington). Pedro and his men visit Seigneur Leonato, the Governor of Messina, and his family; in his party are his brother John (an evil Keanu Reeves) and Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard), a young, sweet, naive boy who is in love with Leonato’s daughter Hero (an enchanting Kate Beckinsale). Benedick is matched with Leonato’s niece, Beatrice, played by an amazing Emma Thompson.

The key plots are: Claudio and Hero’s love match, which John keeps trying to sabotage and Benedick and Beatrice’s pairing, a match that Don Pedro and Leonato conspire to arrange despite the sharp, antagonistic attitudes of the married in real life couple. The characters have complex relationships and with only eight major roles almost all are well developed, Hero and Don Pedro the main exceptions. Michael Keaton, in a minor turn, is a great Dogberry.

Beyond the sophisticated humor and terrific acting, Branagh as director has brought a beautiful, radiant vision of the Italian countryside on screen. Almost as if he had the lighting crew put a second Sun in the sky–which is something one of the digital FX houses might be able to do today but not a dozen years ago.

absolutely recommended

Angelina Jolie is less than a year older than Colin Farrell, so can you explain to me how she’ll be playing his mother in Oliver Stone’s Alexander?

The 4400 ended its initial run tonight with a pretty snappy ending; when USA Network brings the show back for more, either as a weekly series or another limited run event, lots of cool possibilities.

• Happiness
• Amusing
• Ridiculous
• Ugly
• Scary

Coming on DVD Oct. 20: No Quarter: Jimmy Page & Robert Plant Unledded, the 1994 ‘reunion’ effort that recast a bunch of classic Zep and added three originals, mostly broadcast on MTV. The original CD and VHS versions each sold over a million copies and I expect this followup to last year’s How the West Was Won CD/DVD, from the same production team, will do quite well too.

Specifically, in response to the vote this past week and these Letters to the Editor in today’s Times:

Many reject the comparison but, as a married Caucasian heterosexual, the civil rights campaigns of 40 years ago perfectly resonate with the efforts to expand marriage to all today. Indeed, the recent vote in Missouri is an excellent example: Had a similar poll been take there in 1964, or 1954, does anyone doubt that non-White citizens would have been denied what reforms they sought?

Further, I find odd the continuing focus by the self-described pro traditional marriage forces on allowing homosexuals and lesbians into the club. If the needs of successful one man/one woman marriages are to be embodied in our laws and even Constitutions, why are such enemies as adultery and premarital sex not part of their legal agenda? The ultimate source of their position on this matter, the Bible, certainly explicitly condemns those acts as well but I wonder how well these supporters would fare on those grounds.

Pissing on Asimov’s grave, or why I’m not seeing I, Robot [sort of via jennett.radio]

From 1963, husband and wife Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward play New Yorkers on an awkward collision in Paris in a lightweight comedy called A New Kind of Love. Written and directed by Melville Shavelson, Newman is a newspaper columnist sent to Paris as his boss’s idea of punishment (for sleeping with the boss’s wife!) and Woodward is in the city with her department store owner boss and co-worker to see the new designer lines. Woodward, though, has sworn off men and love after one bad relationship; the film’s challenge is to put them together and the mechanism is having her, in a wig and fake Eastern European accent, pretend to be a hooker who Newman, a man who has sex with every other attractive woman he meets, only hires to tell him Schehezerade-like tales. They’ve all done better.

not recommended

Warning: This is a grilled cheese post! Lately my right knee has not been doing so well after visits to the gym. First the doctor said to take a gym vacation, take two Aleve twice a day and put on the occasional ice pack. Did that, went back to the gym and no real change. Went back to the doctor, who sent me to an othopedic specialist. He prescribed a month of physical theraphy plus two Aleve twice a day as long as I’m in therapy.

I went for the first treatment today. Nice place, convenient location. Everybody working there is very young, which is definitely another sign I’m older than I imagine myself to be. First the therapist did some testing and measurement–first time I’ve seen a protractor used in quite some time–and then sent me off to her aide for stretching.

You wouldn’t think stretching could make me feel so creaky, but then you’d be wrong. Since you’re all smarter than that, you probably were smirking behind my back, which isn’t very nice but that is expected. The aide probably did understand the discomfort without me saying anything since he offered an ice pack after we were done. A big ice pack with my legs elevated, that felt very nice.

The therapist also noticed I have a flat (“pronated”) right foot and suggested this is playing a part in my knee’s travails. So when I exercise, and I am allowed to go back to the gym, I have to concentrate on keeping the pressure on the outside of my foot. The first part of my stretching for this visit was a five minute warmup on a stationary bike, and I had to constantly remind myself of this, remembering is not easy.

Now I have to do this stretching every day for a month, in addition to the workouts. And find a pair of cheap, yet uncomfortable, orthotics. Swell but as long as I get rid of the knee ache okay.

Today’s Nelsonian ha-ha

Use Word Count: 1 891 104 711 3 29776 9 54 90 894 739

To translate, if you don’t care to go through the game, hover your cursor above this space. [via RandsInRepose]

A lot of the crap surrounding the Google IPO confuses me. I think Brin and Page’s not just shareholders first operating plan is fine, even an understandable attempt at running a corporation in a different and potentially better way. But the distinctly negative way the company is talking to potential investors and treating them is still strange. Clearly there are plenty of people willing to invest on the specified terms but every time I turn around some bit of news comes out to make the concept even worse. Got to admit that I’m not at all interested in getting in on the IPO.

At first I was confused but after a few minutes realized that This Boy’s Life isn’t A Bronx Tale even though they both came out in 1993 and co-star De Niro– for some reason I though DiCaprio, who is in today’s flick, also played De Niro’s son in the other but he doesn’t. Lillo Brancato was the actor in A Bronx Tale.

Simple plot here, set in the late ’50s: Single mom and her teen son move around a bunch looking for opportunity and wind up in Seattle where somehow she meets a car mechanic who lives in a tiny town several hours drive away. They date a bunch and he’s just so charming, nice to her friends, friendly to her son. Meanwhile the boy’s getting in trouble time after time.

Solution? Boy moves up to live with the mechanic, who has three teenage children of his own (though we never learn where the mother is or went), and get straightened out. If the trial goes well, the adults will marry. They do and, of course, the mechanic is not quite so nice and charming. To sum up: he keeps telling the boy that “I’ll either cure you or kill you.”

Given that this film is based on the autobiography (best seller, written years later) of the son, DiCaprio’s character, I can’t say the story isn’t realistic. But like so many movies based on true stories, it isn’t great either. De Niro is terrific, Barkin and DiCaprio aren’t bad and that’s the best I can say for it.

not recommended

David Coursey: A Dozen Things Outlook Doesn’t Do–but Should

I only really agree with #1 on his list. Anyway there are some annoying bugs that need fixing first. Do you use the space bar to read messages in the preview window? I do, and the way Outlook sometimes loses its place and skips to the next message can be really frustrating when I’m in the middle of a long email.

Second, being able to read all messages as plain text is nice but why can’t it remember when I’ve told it to read specific messages as HTML with graphics shown? Third, the junk mail filter should give an option to block a sender’s domain rather than just a single address. Fourth, threaded conversations. Okay, the last three are new features, not bugs, I suppose, not on your list but not features I can buy or download from other vendors like RSS, Plaxo and so forth that are mentioned.

Wonder if the Domino’s folks considered charging $6 a pie in their new promotion…

Scary, don’t you think?

Sure, Bruce, go out on tour with R.E.M. in support of Kerry/Edwards, for sure I approve. Play your heart out, raise large sums of money and educate people about the need to vote, and to vote Bush out. But none of these shows, in fact none of the Vote for Change shows at all, are in the Bay Area. Sometimes living in a nearly pure Blue state sucks, doesn’t it?

Later… Springsteen penned an OpEd essay for the NY Times today.

August J. Pollak: Just So We’re Clear, a very clear web cartoon on the real B/C re-election strategy

Hard to pass up a movie with Elena Eleniak and another hottie (Julie Du Page), late on a Sunday night with nothing much else on, and TiVo often knows what I like, so I watched Betrayal (issued on DVD and cable as Lady Jayne: Killer). Sadly, Eleniak never so much as took off her shirt and Du Page only got down to her panties and bra once, early on.

This is certainly a ‘B movie’ and the kind of film that makes you wonder about the business judgement of film company executives; in any case, director Mark Lester has certainly made a career out of such decisions. Here we have a basic plot: mafia hitwoman (Du Page) has the chance to grab a briefcase holding $1 million, she does but somehow hooks up with Eleniak and teen son for a road trip to Texas, the mafioso and a corrupt cop find where they’ve headed and the day is saved, sort of, when FBI agent James Remar makes his play.

not recommended

<SF history lesson>Most science fiction–explicitly including the fantasy-based subsets/sister genres–revolves around one or two scientific concepts that don’t exist in the present or violate some known physical law. Faster than light travel is perhaps the most common example of the latter while non-human intelligences are good examples of the former. In the first decades of SF, say until just after WWII, most of the concepts were so new that more complex literary aspects such as, oh, plot and character development were secondary or irrelevant. Think Doc Smith and the Lensmen series.

Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Kornbluth, and Bester were leaders of the first major evolution in the field, looking not just at technical innovation but at how those innovations might impact society and individuals. How does a galactic empire manage tens of thousands of worlds to which it communicates only slowly and sporadically? Where do religion and advertising fit in a world of science? And, of course, many other such questions.

Finally science fiction reached a level of development, beginning with the British New Wave, where technology became the secondary factor and just a different setting for exploring the human heart and its interactions. Though not all authors have made the jump, or at least some haven’t bothered, content to put some pet personal idea on display.</SF history lesson>

James Hogan struggled, coming not long after the New Wavers, with this change. Thrice Upon a Time, a very early novel of his first published in 1980, shows clear signs of it. Large tracts of the book are little more than expositions of scientific discussion, on the nature of time and the universe–he even includes an illustration of how one of his characters has come to perceive this. All of the characters are tissue-thin except Murdoch Ross, our protagonist, and even he only becomes more interesting around the midpoint of the story.

I can almost see Hogan getting all excited one night at the dinner table, trying to explain his theory about time, based on some then-unexplained result of an (unmentioned in the book) science experiment that could possibly give rise to a method of communicating with the past. Then thinking, in the wake of Three Mile Island and other incidents, what if something with a nuclear reactor went seriously wrong? Here’s my story hook to tell about my time machine!

In the end Thrice is somewhat interesting because his ideas are interesting but the literature (literary?) aspects of the book never really do come together. Long peaens to the beauty of Scottish countryside and a romantic subplot aside, in the end Hogan never really finds a way to do more than ask the biggest question of all posed by a time machine that can change the past: Who has the right to decide what changes will be made?

not recommended