It's where I talk to myself. Gaming, politics, and links I don't want to forget about.
Whoops, I forgot to natter on about Bend It Like Beckham. Well, let me fix that.
It’s a cute little romantic comedy about a cute Sikh lass who wants nothing more than to become a football player. (It’s British, so not the NFL.) There’s love, there’s an improbably attractive football coach, and there’s a remarkably sexy best pal. Family concerns get in the way of our heroine’s needs but all is resolved in the end. I’d call it a sterling example of the genre and recommend it.
My brother’s tres hip internationally acclaimed (really!) design group, Release1 (warning: Flash site, but it’s cool, and it’s my family, so don’t complain), opened the McDonald’s Project tonight. I just got back. Awesome opening — the place was packed, quite literally. There was a line of people outside waiting for people to leave, cause the gallery was over capacity. It’s down at the Berwick Research Project, in Boston, and runs through next weekend. It’ll be in New York in August.
It’s cool stuff. The intention is not culturejamming, although there’s a bit of that — it’s a light-hearted look at ways to use the McDonald’s brand. I’d recommend going on down and taking a look if you’re in Boston.
Rules of Attraction rocked; thought you’d like to know.
Nah, really. It’s glossy and terribly calculated, but it’s also stark and unflinching, and I like that in a movie. The plot isn’t exactly much but you wouldn’t complain if it was a romance with this little plot. Think of this as the anti-romance. Come to think of it, pair it off with The Talented Mr. Ripley and maybe Igby Goes Down and you’ve got yourself a nice thematic trilogy.
Basically: three students at Bennington College (I mean Camden College, not really based on Bennington, really) have varying degrees of unrequited love slash lust for one another, and matters proceed poorly because what do college students know about healthy relationships? The students are played by the cream of the WB teen drama crop, and they do a surprisingly good job. The roles are the kinds of roles you expect to see Ryan Phillipe playing, except these guys do it better and with real energy. Some of the directorial tricks fall flat, but some are perfect. (That energy thing again.) Watch for the split screen.
For the trainspotters, I will note that a) the real Bennington does not have a cheap Burning Man ripoff party, and b) the real Dress To Get Laid party wasn’t that wild the one time I made it up there. Then again, I’d have been one of the sneered at Ivy League interlopers, so maybe I missed the real fun. But that’s not the point, really; Rules takes place in the hyperreal. Inhale.
I watched a couple of episodes of CSI over the weekend. Wow. Now, that’s what I call a cop show for the new millenium.
It’s really one of the most overinflated things I’ve ever seen on television. Every single image is saturated with color, usually blues; the cast is shot so as to be both gritty and polished at the same time. It is, in fact, a pretty good embodiment of Vegas. The show doesn’t take place on the strip, but the design ethos is still very Vegasesque.
The dialogue, likewise, is as stylized as it comes. “There is no room for subjectivity in this department.” “We’re just a bunch of kids that are getting paid to work on puzzles. Sometimes there’s a piece that’s missing; sometimes, we solve it in one night.” “People leave us clues, Nick. They speak to us clues in thousands of different ways. It’s our job to make sure we’ve heard everything they’ve said.” All utterly deadpan. These guys talk in Capital Letters, cause they do a Very Important Job.
The terrifying thing is, I kind of liked it. Kind of. I mean, it’s a total Bruckheimer production in all ways, but if you just pretend that it takes place in a hyperreal Morrisonian world it’s pretty entertaining. The science is OK, even though no police department in the country has as much gear as these guys, and the mysteries are generally cute.
Come to think of it, it’s almost the television equivalent of those old Gardener Fox Flash stories. The ones with the science facts in every issue. Not altogether surprising, since Barry Allen was after all a police scientist. Going with the Morrison theme, one might well remember that those Flash facts were one of the things Morrison loved about Flash, and were in fact one of the reasons he did a 12 issue run on the book. So there you have it: Flash, the very first CSI.
Camelot: The Very Secret Diaries, in the fine tradition of those other Very Secret Diaries, takes the piss out of Arthur. Not really as good as Cassie Clare’s work, but amusing nonetheless. I’m sure the Very Secret Diaries of Sherlock Holmes will show up next.
Watson will kill him if he tries anything.
Landmark Theaters is rolling out digital projectors in all their theaters. In Boston, this means the Kendall Square Cinema; in San Francisco, it means the Embarcadero, the Bridge, the Lumiere, and the Aquarius in Palo Alto. Biggest indie cinema chain ever. This has huge implications for independent film (good ones), which John Tynes explains better than I.
If you happened to read Global Frequency this week, you might be interested to hear that Le Parkour is not something Warren Ellis made up — it’s a real little urban subculture, originating in France but spreading to England, Russia, and no doubt other places.
If you didn’t read Global Frequency, Le Parkour is a sort of extreme athletic activity that involves doing incredibly foolhardy things on rooftops without a net. If you’ve seen those Nike commercials, that’s Le Parkour. And of course Luc Besson’s gotten his hands into it. Cool looking stuff.
The Dixie Chicks are still #1 on the country charts, but Home took a dive on the Amazon rankings lately. Wide Open Spaces and Fly both dropped back down from the dizzying sales heights generated by the controversy, but then trended back up again just as Home was diving. Meanwhile, Rolling Stone pointed out that there really wasn’t all that much boycotting, and Rosanne Cash is appalled. By the media, not by the Chicks.
However, what everyone really wants to know: are they any good? Um… OK. Wide Open Spaces really was not anywhere near anything I want to hear, and while I’m not a country fan I did try and give it a fair shake. Lots of preprocessed strings, gloss, and so on. Nice close harmonies but man, if I want good close harmonies I can find ‘em someplace with some genuine feeling.
Being diligent, I loaded Home into my CD player for the drive back into work the next day. And, surprise, not actually half-bad. It’s not my favorite kind of music, but the production was stripped down and free of gooey studio backing the Chicks were a lot more palatable. From the lyrics sheet, they wrote some of the songs themselves, which is at least a start. Not recommended per se, but I wouldn’t leap through a plate glass window to avoid it either.
A while back I noted the Pattern Recognition annotation effort. t.rev pointed out that it sucked so far. It continues to be more criticism than annotation, but you know, it’s the kind of thing obsessives like me read. And it’s done, except for the Themes section.
E! Online has this to say about Polanski’s Oscar: “Only in Hollywood can Roman Polanski be a convicted felon and an Oscar winner.” True enough, since — as far as I know — Hollywood is the only place they give out Oscars. It would be difficult to be any kind of an Oscar winner in, say, Des Moines.
