BillSaysThis

What the heck – why not jump on the rolling boulder matt.griffith started…

I would never come up with a phrase like:

“Once Jack springs into action, Mr. Affleck, whose slack features convey the clueless petulance of a superannuated frat boy bluffing his way into the big leagues, loses his grip.”

From today’s NY Times review of The Sum of All Fears, Terrorism That’s All Too Real.

Tivo can be a great and wonderful toy, no doubt. But it can also be a pain in the ass. I set the machine to record this morning’s opening World Cup match and instead of changing the channel to 38 for ESPN2, the piece of crap changed it to 3. Sometimes it drops off the last number for some unknown reason. And yes, I already made the aluminum foil fort over the IR receivers. So I miss a huge match, with Senegal upsetting France 1-0. I set up a Season Pass for the World Cup matches and let’s just say this better not happen again because I can’t be staying up all night to watch. Damn!

Agent Smith, General Zod, and Leonard Shelby turn the conventions of the road movie upside down all across the Australian desert on a lavender bus in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Priscilla, of course, is the bus. The stars are Hugo Weaving (Smith), Terence Stamp (Zod),and Guy Pearce (Shelby) and they play a trio of drag queens who fix up an old bus in order to drive from Sydney to Alice Springs to perform their act at a casino theater run by Weaving’s lesbian wife.

Amazingly, the movie is even funnier than it sounds. For example, at one point they get lost on a shortcut out in the middle of nowhere–after all way back in 1993, when this movie was made, civilian GPS wasn’t available, was it?–and are rescued by a roving band of Aboriginals. To say thanks, they get out their full kit and perform. Then there is the late in life romance between Stamp and their auto mechanic, Bob. And I knew I’d seen the actor playing Bob before, Bill Hunter. Turns out he played Muriel’s sleazy politician father in that other 1994 Australian hit comedy, Muriel’s Wedding.

Acting is all about submerging the actor in the role and bringing the character to life, right? Well after seeing The Adventures of Priscilla, I have to say that Hugo Weaving is a terrific actor, just on the range of roles he’s pulled off. The drag queen here, Agent Smith in The Matrix, and Elrond (the Elven King) in Fellowship of the Ring. Someone needs to explain to me why he isn’t getting more big roles. Maybe after the Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions films come out next year he’ll get busy.

Heartily Recommended

Sad but in a funny way – one of the reasons behind Blogger communication woes.

The Blogger API server continues to be offline, causing this site’s Book Review and Springsteen pages to be non-functional at this time. Pyra is not responding to email or newsgroup postings on this topic. User frustration is mounting. Myself, I set up MovableType 2.11 yesterday and unless there is some serious improvement from Blogger services quickly, you may see me finally give up and leave. Which would be a shame after all this time, well over a year now, that I have been an enthhusiastic user and supporter. Ev, are you listening? Why can’t we get so much as a simple status message/response?

Update, 5:30 PST: Ev posted a message to the newsgroup explaining many of the difficulties, including why he hasn’t posted answers to the numerous problems. We need to have a chat with some folks at Yahoo! Groups, it seems, when a group owner can’t even post to his own group.

Update, 6:30 PST: The API server is back online and so all pages should be working.

Ethan and Joel Coen have made 10 movies together over the last 18 years, sharing writing, directing, and producing chores, even editing most of them under the screen name Roderick Jaynes. All of them, without exception, have been odd, outside the mainstream. Lots of visual quirks and extremely stylish cinematography. Most recently, The Man Who Wasn’t There and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the award-winning Fargo, the comic Raising Arizona. 1984’s Blood Simple was their first effort, written while Joel worked as an editor on Sam (Spider-Man) Raimi’s cult classic Evil Dead.

The story in Blood Simple is basic, mostly a framework on which to hang dialog and visuals, a cheating wife, a suspicious husband, a sleazy private eye, and the boyfriend. The story isn’t important and it mainly develops that people all too easily misunderstand based on assumptions they ought not have made. Frances McDormand, who married Joel Coen shortly after this film was made, is the cheating wife, very young, blonde and pretty, but with that unique combination of mouth and eyes that always seem older than she is. This was her first (credited) movie role though she has starred in many of the Coen films and won the Best Actress Oscar for her work in Fargo.

John Getz (yeah, I asked who he was too) gets his biggest part here as the boyfriend. Maybe its his gritty voice but in this film he shows a massive lack of emotional range, which works fine here but is probably less than advantageous in getting other parts. M. Emmet Walsh is the conniving, backstabbing private eye, a terrific character actor who’s made over 75 films in the last 30+ years. Dan Hedaya is the husband, another career character actor who mostly plays a sleaze; typical of his roles, on the comic side, was as Bette Midler’s ex-husband Morty in The First Wives Club. There are very few other roles in this movie, only a couple of which have lines, none of which matter.

Blood Simple can be viewed as the blueprint for almost all of the Coen brother films: tight, confusing plot with strong but (until lately) not big name actors playing odd, offbeat characters, lots of strong but often misdirecting visuals, and, whether comedy or drama, a nearly hallucinatory atmosphere.

Recommended

What to do? What to do! The TV season may be over but you wouldn’t know it to look at the schedule for this coming Sunday night at 9:00. For starters, the season finale of Six Feet Under. After being turned off by the first few episodes of the first season, I started watching and now it’s good, really good. TNT has an original movie starring Patrick Stewart, King of Texas, which fortunately will be repeating numerous times; don’t you want to see Captain Picard play Shakespeare as a Texas rancher?. The Tonys are on too but I don’t really care, do you?

Here’s the dilemma: ABC is premiering The Hamptons and Fox Looking for Love: Bachelorettes in Alaska. How can I miss out on such intense, dramatic reality programming? Just because I think Survivor sucks, Fear Factor farts, and Temptation Island blows.

With Tivo I can record only one show at a time and I can watch another on the other set. What’s a poor boy to do? Actually, I think I’ll just be watching Six Feet Under. Reality shows can bite my shorts, to paraphrase another Sunday night TV hero.

Serious programming note: At 10 make sure to watch the new HBO series The Wire which Matt Roush says is even better than Six Feet Under. Another David Simon (Homicide, The Corner) Baltimore cops and criminals show.

One tries to be tolerant of different points of view, certainly.One understands that not everyone see the world as one does. You say tomato, I say evolution. But one does expect certain standards to be consistent across Western democracies. But then one finds out he can be wrong, very wrong, in holding such a belief. Wrong and very sad.

Because Michel Houellebecq said Islam is “the most stupid of all religions” in an interview, the French writer faces a blasphemy trial out of the 17th century. Four French Muslim organizations have brought criminal charges of racism against Houellebecq. I have no understanding of French law, to be sure, but how do you get a statement about a religion to squeeze into a charge of racism? And–again, I know this is France, not America–but don’t they have freedom of speech there? Houellebecq has gotten so many threats against his person and his family for his statements and writings that he has said he will never write again.

In the discussion of this article at MetaFilter, one poster suggests that if a similar comment had been made substituting Judaism for Islam the reaction would be quite different. I suggest to him that such comments are made quite frequently in, for example, the Arab news media, where recent articles claim that Israeli Jews kidnap and kill Palestinean babies to get blood for use in baking bread. And that the Mossad is responsible for the 9/11 atrocities.

I have previously posted about Houellebecq and his notoriety. I still look forward to reading his coming novel. And remain convinced that France has fallen into a rut, no, make that a hole, from which it will be very difficult to climb out. Expect to see increasing levels of violence from Islamic residents/citizens, not only against Jews and writers, but against the general population. Sad, very sad.

Ahmed Zimran/Ed Gilmartin – Microsoft’s cash hoard: It’s better to be a star than a cow

Working together, local, state, and federal politicians led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, environmental groups (Sierra Club, Save the Bay), private foundations, and Cargill Corporation have made a deal to purchase over 16,500 acres of southern bay coastal lands (for $100 million, from Cargill) and restore them over the next 20 to 40 years to something close to their original state as tidal marshes. This is a very major positive development; we’re talking about several pieces of wetlands that total an area approximately the size of Manhattan.

“Over the past 150 years nearly 95 percent of San Francisco Bay’s historic tidal wetlands have been destroyed by diking, draining, and filling-in of these extremely productive habitats, resulting in wildlife losses, water quality reductions, and decreased natural flood control. Many remaining wetlands continue to be threatened by pollutant runoff and diverted freshwater flows,” according to a recent Save The Bay press release.

Private foundations, including the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund, will put up $35 million of the purchase price. The State of California, using money from recent bond issues and other previously legislated dollars, will put up $57 million; the Feds are putting in $8 million. No mention of where the money to perform the restoration work–estimates run from $200 million up to $1 billion–will come from.

Gary Suson posted an amazing photo essay on 9/11 starting with the events of the first few minutes and continuing through the clean up. I got to this 11 year old’s handwritten note and just broke down again. I can’t even look at all the pictures, the emotion is so overwhelming. I couldn’t watch the HBO documentary Sunday night either. [via garret and the NY Times]

What’s particularly scary about Thieves Steal Homeowners’ Identities and Their Equity is that you don’t know about the crime until after its happened, too late to do any good. I think. But if someone fraudulently sells or mortgages your house, how can you be held responsible? By responsible, in the case of a fraudulent sale, I mean wouldn’t the transaction simply be reversed and title restored?

Short summary: a ring of identity thieves in Michigan went beyond just stealing people’s social security numbers and such to set up fake credit cards or similar. They actually found elderly people who own homes free and clear and either took out big mortgages or sold the home (to another identity thief). An unusually cooperative team of police, FBI, prosecutors, and bankers uncovered the details, then arrested and charged the criminals.

Because Friends is a successful TV show, the six stars get to make movies. David Schwimmer got to make The Pallbearer and somehow convinced not only Gwynneth Paltrow but also Barbara Hershey and Carol Kane to sign on. He gets to sleep with Gwynneth and Barbara. And while he’s still living at home with Mommy and unable to get a job yet. I mean, can you imagine a schlub like Schwimmer sleeping with such women? I can’t but that’s the magic of Hollywood I guess. Do I have to say it? Not recommended

Has it been a year since Shrek came out?

That’s the story after searching through NBA.com for historical information and not finding it. Specifically we were looking for a listing of previous champions and not only was there no accessible list, I couldn’t find anything about previous seasons there. ESPN has the last two seasons but no overall data. Yahoo! Sports came up snakeyes. The Sporting News website won’t even come up for me. Oddly, even using some reasonable search terms I couldn’t find the info via Google. Suckage!

Build your own PVR – Let Your PC Turbocharge Your TV

John Lim’s HOWTO on Optimizing PHP with tips and methodologies

Jimmy Breslin has written about New York for nearly 50 years now, mainly in newspaper columns and occasionally in novels as well. His most famous novel was a comic tale of mobsters, “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight,” that was funny and entertaining. I came across “World Without End, Amen” in a second hand shop for $1.50 and figured I’d check it out. The problem is that Breslin has no story here, no real plot, he just follows a drunken Irish New York beat cop through some troubles and then onto a trip to the Old Country. Which is really a completely separate story that Breslin mainly uses as a showcase to display how terrible conditions are for Catholics in Northern Ireland, or at least how bad they were 30-odd years ago when the novel came out. He goes nowhere plotwise and even the most significant event takes place offstage. Not recommended

1988 Australia, a drunken backup singer finds herself unemployed and stranded in a backwater town where she runs across her daughter in Gillian Anderson’s High Tide. Judy Davis, who’s also done some work over here (last year she got an Emmy nomination for playing Judy Garland on Showtime), stars as the women who has to come to terms with her cowardice. Anderson has also directed some notable films–My Beautiful Career, Little Women, and last year’s Charlotte Gray–but this one doesn’t do much. The ending especially is a disappointment. Not recommended