I’m heartbroken. I wanted to watch Mrs. Chan and Mr. Chow forever, dancing back and forth in slow motion, captured in the timeless rhythm of Wong Kar Wai’s directing. Despite the titles which fix the story in Hong Kong: 1962 and Singapore: 1963 and Cambodia: 1966 — despite them, there’s no chronology to it. There are panes of glass layered one on top of another, and you peer through them murkily, making out the outline of a fruitless love affair. ...

Eric Rudolph has made his statement (original). Read it carefully; understand what lies behind it. Look past the claim that he’s only upset about abortion. He asserts that he only kills government agents because they defend abortion; recognize that a few paragraphs later he’s talking about his plans to kill government agents investigating the bombing of a gay club. Take note of his hatred for the Olympics. Consider his xenophobia. Most people who say things like “Practiced by consenting adults within the confines of their own private lives, homosexuality is not a threat to society” are not going to go out and bomb nightclubs. But that kind of language provides easy cover for the fanatics who do. Or, more commonly, for the fanatics who beat people up for wearing buttons with a pink triangle on them. Most people who say things like “The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior” aren’t going to go out and plot a murder (original). However, that kind of language provides cover — and encouragement — for people who do want judges dead. ...

Hallo, Eschaton readers! Thanks for dropping by, hope you find the carpets to your liking, and so on. I’m writing more about culture and film these days than I used to, because I’m fairly burned out on politics, but you’ll still find the occasional political post if you happen to stick around. Also: hope you like Asian cinema. Hm. Back then, I was not so subtly making the point that Eric Rudolph was a terrorist and wondering why Fox News would forgive those who supported him. The point still holds. I’m pretty gratified to see CNN calling it like it is today: ...

I’m trying out Brad Choate’s cool new anti-spam plugin (original). If you have trouble commenting or sending a trackback, please drop me a line. If you’re reading this on Livejournal, ignore it.

Damn it. No more Boston Legal this year (original). Sure, I can understand the decision, but I’m very sad about it.

Pros: Drew Barrymore, Red Sox, Nick Hornsby. Cons: Jimmy Fallon. So that was a pretty easy call. Alas, Fallon did not rise to the honorable occasion of working on a Red Sox movie. Thus, I got about what I expected out of Fever Pitch — a light, airy romantic comedy with some Red Sox bits that made me mist up. It’s got most of the spirit of being a Boston fan about right. There’s a Boston Dirt Dogs T-shirt, they knew it was important to make a big deal about Ted Williams at the 1999 All Star Game, and so on. There’s a jarring scene where Fallon’s “summer family” of season ticket holders get all anxious about the Curse of the Bambino, though, which pissed me off something fierce. The Curse is a mythical publicity tool that mostly sells Dan Shaughnessy books. Perpetuating it at this stage of the game is hackneyed and lazy. ...

The Independent Film Festival 2005 is coming: April 21st through April 24th. Tight schedule. Just about all the narrative movies look good, and I hear great things about the documentary Murderball (original). I’m also intrigued by The Fall of Fujimori (original). OK, let’s rough out a schedule, here… Friday 5:15 PM, Somerville: Abel Raises Cain (work permitting) 8 PM, Somerville: Blackballed (Rob Corddry stars) 10:30, Brattle: The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things Saturday 2 PM, Coolidge: Spew: The World of Competitive Debate (original) ...

To my disappointment, the Boston Underground Film Festival’s copy of Able Edwards (original) was flawed or scratched or something and they were only able to show the first fifteen minutes of the movie. It was a keen enough fifteen minutes, though. I could have sworn I’d written about this movie before, but I can’t find the post in the archives. Able Edwards is a thinly veiled Walt Disney (Mickey Mouse becomes Perry Panda) who is cloned after an ecological disaster in order to revitalize Disney. Er, revitalize Edwards Corporation. According to other reviews, the cloned Edwards suffers an identity crisis of some sort. Regrettably, we didn’t get that far. ...

Mitt Romney still isn’t going to be the Republican Presidential nominee in 2008. I know he’s the trendy choice, but barring a significant shift in the party, he doesn’t stand a chance of getting past the primaries. He’s got to tack too far to the left in order to effectively govern in Massachusetts, and that’s On the way into work this morning, I heard a commercial from Mitt about stem cell research (original). This is a very topical issue in Massachusetts right now; our House and Senate just passed bills concerning this research which explicitly allow both embryonic stem cell research and something called “ somatic cell nuclear transfer.” ...

Wow (original). See, if you mix Google Maps and Craigslist, there’s a lot of data out there, see. Also: wow.