BillSaysThis

Apparently teen opera sensation turned pop star Charlotte Church wants us to know she’s all grown up now and hot (more).

Let me try and make this simple:

• I have not enjoyed any movie directed by Jay Russell
• I have not enjoyed any movie written by Lewis Colick
• Joaquin Phoenix? Okay, Gladiator was cool but that was hardly about him though I have hopes for Walking the Line his upcoming Johnny Cash biopic as long as he doesn’t tr and sing.
• Travolta, okay, he’s done some good shit going back to the beginning though he’s had his share of dogs and recent years have been a bit hit or miss

Ladder 49 is definitely one for Travolta’s miss column. The idea is decent, a look at the career of a brave young firefighter as his life hangs in the balance, but the execution is trite. And Phoenix, maybe it’s his acting skills or voice and face, but he comes off as playing a girl. I don’t mean that in a covert homosexual slap or women belong in the kitchen way but he’s supposed to be playing a man’s man and doesn’t pull it off. Not even close.

I also never felt attached to his character so the life hanging in the balance scenes that were intended to keep me gripped to the seat didn’t. The crumbling, flaming huge building interior where they took place–the film’s big fire–had all the necessary visual appeal but didn’t make sense, I wasn’t given enough information to explain why the fire was playing out as it did.

not recommended

Technorati tags: movies travolta actionflicks

Fernando Meirelles is clearly a filmmaker to be reckoned with, a man completely interested in using movies as a political vehicle. Constant Gardener is his second major work to come to the US and global markets following the celebrated City of God. Assuming he continues to find financial backing and distribution one can only assume Meirelles will continue to tell stories of power abused and sociopathic violence.

Where the earllier movie was the retelling of a true story, Gardener is labelled fiction and based on John Le Carre’s recent novel. Le Carre made his name with Cold War thrillers but with the passing of that age turned his eye to men using similar strategies for personal, rather than political, gain. But with the passing of that age the underlying equivalence of those two pursuits has become quite clear; one has to look no further than the interchangability of employment between the Bush Administration and energy industry corporations. So Meirelles rides this horse to switch from the narrow scale of Rio de Janeiro’s favelas to the global marketplace of pharmaceuticals.

Working again with cinematographer César Charlone, we see terrific use of color, lighting, framing and transitions. Whether through the editing of Claire Simpson or simply being able to position his cameras in favorable places, there are many long panning shots that starkly contrast worse than Rio urban African slums against a modern core where foreign executives corrupt politicians and deaths are written of as inevitable (so might as well make use of them). A sea of rusting tin roofs slide by until, in the space of a frame or two, glass and steel buildings replace them, favored by trees and other greenery absent from the overpopulated ghettos.

The plot is simple enough: the title character, a mid-level Foreign Office functionary played well by Ralph Fiennes, marries human rights activist Rachel Weisz and the couple are sent to Kenya. Almost immediately Weisz is murdered, viciously, but Jeffrey Caine’s script flashes back and forth in time for the first half of the script so that the truth of Weisz’s character and her death is only slowly revealed. From then, once Fiennes returns to London, the story plays out chronologically but secrets are still parceled out parsimoniously. And despite being dead, Weisz is frequently onscreen–Meirelles uses her natural beauty and generous emotions as a means to personalize the film.

Fiennes does a marvelous job, Weisz is terrificly mysterious. Other significant roles are played by Danny Huston, as another British diplomat lost in the levels of machinations which surround him; Pete Postlethwaite (best remembered here as Daniel Day Lewis’s father from In the Name of the Father) as a drug developer looking for redemption in the desolation of a Sudanese refugee camp; Hubert Koundé as a Kenyan doctor conspiring with Weisz; Richard McCabe with a key third act cameo; and, a very different Bill Nighy than we saw and loved in Love, Actually, here taking a small role as an officious, self-serving knighted senior diplomat. There are a number of small parts played by what one can only presume are African locals, most well done, but neither the official site nor IMDB name many. An interesting ommision given the political slant.

Having praised Gardener for five paragraphs, let me take some space to point out a few flaws as well. Chief among them are a lack of focus on who Meirelles and Le Carre want to hold up for blame and odd bits of information tossed in uselessly that, if true (for the movie), would have certainly meant different choices would have been made by the characters. Most significantly among the latter is the revelation, perhaps 75% of the way in, that Weisz’s character was fabulously wealthy but had never revealed this to her husband nor used this wealth in obvious ways to further her cause or help the people she showed such care about.

The lack of a single, well-fleshed out villain is the worst sin though and almost destroys the film’s political value; in reality, no doubt all the types depicted here share responsibility but this is only 120 minutes and also not a documentary. From a plot perspective the fictional pharmaceutical company is the worst offender among the conspirators but is only briefly represented onscreen by a single executive, and Meirelles allows this man to offer contrition after falling from grace (his offering, by the way, is another throwaway bit not used again). The main government connection, Nighy’s Sir Bernard, has dialog in only three or four scenes and his local counterpart, the Minister of Health, even fewer.

In a novel this is much less of a problem because of the substantial larger space. The movie, though, is clearly a sales proposition: multinational corporations are using corrupt politicians to achieve profit goals without concern to the human cost because, after all, that’s not a debit on the ledger. To make the sale, Meirelles should have collapsed the novel’s cast so that viewers would come out of the theater angry at one or two easily identifiable real world correspondents to his villains but instead wastes energy across too many bad people to list here. Hopefully he’ll understand this for the next production.

recommended

The US Men’s team put a wallop on Mexico tonight, scoring twice in five minutes early in the sceond half to win 2-0 and become the first team from CONCACAF to qualify for next summer’s World Cup Finals. Steve Ralston clean up a rebound when Oswaldo Sanchez couldn’t control Oguchi Onyewu’s header and then DaMarcus Beasley drove a leftfooted shot across the face of the goal and into the top far corner where Sanchez simply had no chance.

After cooking a tasty roasted corn soup (because TS1 is recovering from a little oral surgery), I watched the tape-delayed cablecast of the FC Dallas – Earthquakes match. Again a scoreless first half with my team dominating but unable to breakthrough and again two quick goals shortly into the second half, a header from Cerritos and a tricky bottom corner blast from strike partner Moreno, leading to a 2-0 win.

Other than increasing their lead over Dallas to 11 points (Galaxy remain nine back until tomorrow’s result is known), no specific milestone with the triumph but I thought this effort was an exemplar of San Jose’s unsung, barely noticed emergence as the quality team of the season. FSN color man Ray Hudson could hardly get enough superlatives out of his charming British mouth about Eddie Robinson’s ability to shut down Eddie Johnson and turn the takeaway into a pinpoint 60 yard pass or Ricardo Clark’s silky smooth defending in front of the back four or… well, you get the drift. Hudson basically went ga-ga over the while team.

Technorati tags: soccer usfootball worldcup mls

I don’t find myself reading too many longer how-to pieces on marketing, I find they’re generally too abstract, too out of sync with my way of thinking regardless of which is right/better or, because marketing is not a core part of my work, too disconnected from what I do. (Of course, as soon as I wrote the last part of that sentence I recognized how wrong it is but will leave it as a lesson for others to learn from.) For quite some time I’ve been reading blog posts praising Seth Godin as one of the seminal new thinkers in marketing but still, for one of these three reasons, not read anything by him longer than a blog post.

Then an hour ago I saw a pointer to KnockKnock, a free, short ebook by Godin and thought I’d take a stab on a slow Saturday afternoon. Not only did I finish reading it in an hour (not that hard since it’s a 41 page PDF with several pages taken up by ads for other publications by him, some large graphics and similarly skimmed matter), I tagged it to RawSugar, sent an email to a co-worker insisting he read it and write this blog post.

Godin’s writing, I’m sorry to be so late in recognizing, is accessible, practical and insightful. If I were in his line of work, he’d be my Bruce Springsteen or Willie Mays–or maybe decide to find a new career. Thankfully I do something different and can just appreciate the style and learn the lessons.

1. Esoteric Rabbit Films is by Matthew Clayfield, an Australian film student, and often includes short videos he’s made.
2. GoddessDawn is a wisecracking, horny, bleed on the page woman out DC way
3. Stephen O’Grady is an open source analyst with RedMonk; for him open source extends to their work product, much of which is posted and discussed on their wiki and his blog
4. Guy Tavor is new to blogging, he’s an Israeli and our product manager
5. The Early Days of a Better Nation is from Scottish SF novelist Ken Macleod but here he writes more about politics, including the politics of SF and publishing, from a socialist perspective.

David Weinberger, co-author of the seminal ClueTrain Manifesto, spoke with our CEO today and had some very nice words to say in his blog afterwords: “You can think of RawSugar as a searchable del.icio.us with automagic, hierarchical clustering.“

TechCrunch also wrote good things about us after a quick exploration of RawSugar a few days ago.

Can’t get enough of these good mentions. Scoble was first, really, but now the ball’s rolling!

I felt very odd seeing Michael’s name on the #10 Newcastle jersey this morning. When he left Anfield for Madrid last summer I was sad and unhappy but, hey, we won the Champions League and he seemed to be having a moderately successful first year. Mostly off the bench but he still scored 16 goals for Los Galacticos; with Raul and Figo not getting any younger this season should have been a chance for Michael to shine.

But Luxemburgo and the executives felt otherwise and grabbed the brilliant young Brazilian Robhino. Can’t blame them for buying the next coming of Pele. That they bought a second young striker, Juan Baptista from Seville, made it clear that Owen hadn’t made the necessary impression. For a time reports that Louis Figo would go to Liverpool or Juventus had me thinking that he still had a chance.

The last weeks showed the minds at the Berneabeau decided otherwise. Where would Owen end up? All four of the top EPL sides were interested, according to the rumors, plus Newcastle, Everton and even his old boss Houllier over at Lyon (flush with cash from the huge sale of Essien to Chelsea). One by one teams dropped out or were deemed unacceptable by the England striker. Finally it seemed like he would return to the Reds or take a one year loan to Magpies; he insisted a permanent move to the latter wasn’t of interest.

Money talks and in the end the huge GBP17M or so dangled by chairmen Freddy Shepherd to Real Madrid and a presumably similar payday for the player, along with the realization that Liverpool just wasn’t going to come anywhere close to these numbers, were too much to resist. And so hours ago, over 20,000 Newcastle supporters turned out to see Michael put pen to paper and shake hands with new strike partner Alan Shearer and manager Graham Souness.

Has to be a good deal for his new club, they’ve gone four full games now without scoring a single goal and taken only one point of the 12 placing them 19th in the league table. Also reminds me of Landon’s move to Galaxy and the reception he’s gotten from Spartan Stadium crowds the two times he’s been here since.

I sure hope FoxSoccer schedules the match where Newcastle travel to Liverpool this season for live viewing!

Unbelievable, just totally sad. The flooding, death, destruction and dislocation in Louisiana and Mississippi is so immense that one can hardly grasp it. Plenty of news sites and bloggers getting out the details but I need to put out my sympathy and condolences.

Poynter has a list of vetted charities gearing up to respond. Vivian and I donated today’s take home pay to the American Red Cross. We hope anyone reading this can do the same to the ARC or any reputable group.

Of all the memes that have bounced around the web, Friday Fives and book lists, how about making this the next and most useful: Donate today’s take home pay!

Our engineers are so cool. Not only did they throw together RSS feeds–though by throw I mean seriously engineer–we now also have the ability to import from del.icio.us (the file produced by http://del.icio.us/api/posts/all). This is an important feature because, for now, a lot of people who could take advantage of RawSugar’s capabilities have substantial sets of tagged pages there; providing a two step import means their collections can start with all previous work reused. A big win, for sure.

Compare for yourself: I set up a clean RawSugar collection into which I imported all my del.icio.us links. Navigate through both and see the difference in your experience finding information and specific pages. You can have the same, no charge.

My nephew Jake, three months old and already cuter than me!

I signed up, sounds like a cool trip, have you?

Jerry Kindall is doing something I’ve wanted to do for years, permanent beard removal using, in his case, Candela GentleLase laser process. Takes a few trips to the doctor to cover the entire face, since only actively growing follicles are killed each session, though the result is what I want: to never shave again! Cool.

I see Kurt Loder and Sujin yammering away from Miami, Billie Joe Armstrong looking wasted on stage, while thinking about Katrina about to pound down on the general vicinity of New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain. Karl, I can’t join your prayers but I understand the urge; maybe we should post donation amounts to challenge other bloggers to match or beat it. Chris, I hope you and Lisa are staying dry and out of the main path of devestation!

National Weather Service: MOST OF THE AREA WILL BE UNINHABITABLE FOR WEEKS...PERHAPS LONGER.

Dr. Jeff Masters, meteorologist at the Weather Channel: “I put the odds of New Orleans getting its levees breached and the city submerged at about 70%.”

One of the to-dos on my site redesign was to allow readers with JavaScript-enabled browsers to read book and movie reviews in place while allowing those without to click straight through to the blog archive page with the review. Win-win. Got that one last week.

However, what about readers with JavaScript turned on who want a real URL where they can come back and read the review again, directly? All the way down the food chain where the review gets pulled out of the Blogger database I don’t know that I have access to the necessary information. Maybe yes, maybe no, but too hard to drill in through OPC (other people’s code) and figure it out. So added a new page, singlepost.php, which calls into the same retrieval function as the review pages and gets (a ha!) the post text AND the post (book or movie) title. Et voila, to be fancy about it.

Still a few more edges to sand down but the finish line for this rev of the site is coming into view.

OMG: Maria Sharapova: Titillating?, musn’t allow a photo to show a nipple bulge!

Back in the ’70s teen chick rockers the Runaways almost pushed it over the top but, sadly all too common in the history of rock and roll, fell apart in a frenzy of intramural ego battles, drugs and external manipulation. Of all the members only Joan Jett really went on to realize her ambition and commercial success with Lita Ford managing a few hits. Edgeplay is a documentary made by Victory Tischler-Blue, better known as bass player #2 Vicki Blue, that takes an honest look back in surprising detail at what happened from the inside out.

The two biggest drawbacks are that Jett wouldn’t participate and is heard only a few times on contemporaneous interview tapes and the other women, though clearly at times in physical proximity, never talk with each other (other than Blue’s questions) in responce to sometimes startling revelations. Lesser evils are a general lack of performance footage and Runaways music as well as very strange interspersed comments from the very strange Svengali who put the group together, Kim Fowley.

On the plus side, putting Edgeplay into the watchable column, the women are forthright in discussing the incidents and emotions which after all happened when they were between 14 and 20 years old. Drummer Sandy West tells us that during those years she was doing drugs and men to the point that after the band dissolved she was forced to become a mule and collector for dealers to support her habits, breaking down doors gun in hand. Original bassist Jackie Fox confirms longstanding rumors of a suicide attempt that sent her home early.

Lita Ford, still the hardbodied gorgeous blonde I remember from her late ’80s/early ’90s videos, comes across as less honest or perhaps simply remembers events from her own self-esteem supporting POV. I think the film’s biggest miss is a conversation/confrontation between Ford and lead singer Cherie Currie, the second to leave after one too many feuds with the guitarist.

recommended, barely

Only two significant football matches this weekend. Liverpool went down to Monaco yesterday to meet CSKA Moscow in the European Supercup and came home as the third club to win this trophy three times. Tonight Earthquakes hosted “Anakin” Donovan and his Galaxy for the second time since LD punked out in Germany and for the second time took all three points.

Silverware is silverware and a team can never build too many display cases, I say, and closer to home the win means the team that I nearly gave up for dead two months ago has taken a lead of eight and none points over 2nd place FC Dallas and 3rd place Galaxy respectively. Still early days in England but props to the Reds for coming out strong with dominant performances on all three Champions League qualifying rounds, not giving up a goal in the first two EPL games, as well as this latest triumph. Props to San Jose for not giving in to injury woes, taking advantage of rough patches by their rivals and establishing a lead that should see them through to a top seed in the playoffs at least until the Finals.

Yesterday’s goals came from or were made by an oddly forgotten man on Rafa Benitez’s bench, Djibrille Cisse, who shrugged off all the talk of a potential return by Michael Owen to score the equalizer in the last 10 minutes of normal time, the go-ahead goal just before the end of the first half of extra time and setting up the last, insurance score in the second half. True that his first should have been called back since he touched it down with a hidden left hand but, as they say, that’s why we have human refs and not machines.The second was a beauty and I missed the third because Tivo doesn’t automagically extend recordings of sports events that run long.

All three goals tonight came from players who used to, recently, play for the other side. SJ opened accounts off a throw in all the way to the goalmouth with a tasty header by Alejandro Moreno on a shoulder to shoulder challenge with LA keeper Kevin Hartman, turncoat Donovan squared 15 minutes later with a blast from 25 yards before anyone was looking for a hot and the winner came from centerback Danny Cailiff, heading in a corner. Other than LD’s goal, the Galaxy were really unable to breakdown the Quakes back line, with Pat Onstadt only called on to make two saves. A very chippy outing, most of the yellows going to LA, and the one given to us on Kelly Gray a bad call though overall we probably deserved one to someone.

Next Saturday San Jose travel to Dallas for a first look at Pizza Hut Park and what could be their new in-state rivals if recent rumors about the franchise question being settled with a move to Houston prove true; the same night the US Men host Mexico in the key showdown for first place in the World Cup qualifying round. Liverpool finally get a rest because in Europe, unlike MLS, CLUBS DO NOT PLAY WHEN THE NATIONAL TEAM DOES, and when they pick up in two weeks it’s right back to the grind of two games each week for three straight weeks: away to early season critical favorites Tottenham and Spain’s Real Betis (opening matchday of the CL group round), Manchester United, away to Birmingham and finishing with consecutive(!) home matches with Chelsea (one EPL and the next CL).

Yay us!

From the Big Guy, AutoHotkey is a (Windows only) scripting tool featuring a very rich language with which one can build anything from the trivial (launch some application with a hot key or mouse gesture, replace awkward key combinations) to the seriously complex (visual AutoHotKey GUI builders). A decent, growing user community is kicking in pre-built scripts and debugging each others’ work.

From my collection on RawSugar:

• Meazure is a (Windows only) program that measures, magnifies and captures the screen by providing a battery of features in a cohesive user interface. Handy utility to finding out the size and color (RBG values of specific pixels, no less) of any screen object and more that I’m too lazy to dig into yet.
• Tiny Tiny RSS is a nicely styled, GPL/open source, server-side RSS aggregator written in PHP and using the latest in Ajax to make the interface simpler than, say, Planet though with a ways to go to match features.
• PHONifier “is an application to make your mobile web life easier. More and more mobile phones have internet access, yet there are very few webdevelopers that really seem to care about the mobile surfer. PHONifier takes care of this by optimizing webpages for mobile phones… On the fly.” GPL open source, coded in PHP. For example, look at BillSaysThis.com through this lens.
• Regex Powertoy is Gordon Mohr’s open source project (requires Java 5 + Javascript in browser), which I saw demoed at BarCamp ’05. Powerful tool for developers who deal with string manipulation and processing in their apps.
  

Articles:

• A detailed, tested .htaccess script based on alternative strategy for dealing with hotlinking with extensive explanations from Tom Sherman, the script’s developer, as well as good Q&A in the comments giving advice on variations.
• Brad Neuberg’s tutorial Saving Session Across Page Loads Without Cookies, On The Client Side is a helpful alternative to server-side sessions and cookies. Brad just posted a new article explaining he’s uncovered a better way for Internet Explorer-specific (v5 and forward) that enables permanent, not just session, information storage using the Persistence behavior. Both are part of his Ajax Tutorials series.

Happy trails, Tech Explorers!