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Interesting factoid: Alberto Gonzales, nominee for the post of Attorney-General, apparently believes Gavin Newsom, as an elected executive of the government, has the right to take a stand against laws he considers unconstitutional: MR. GONZALES: Senator, I do believe there may come an occasion when the Congress might pass a statute that the president may view as unconstitutional. And that is a position and a view not just of this president, but many, many presidents from both sides of the aisle. ...

For Sean Stewart fans, there’s an eight page comic book (original) featuring Perfect Circle’s DK up on the web. Steve Lieber illustrated it. It’s good.

The hot rumor is that Six Apart is about to buy Live Journal. That strikes me as a fairly bad idea for a number of reasons, mostly technological — if you’re not going to get economies of scale from merging code bases, then you’re setting up Six Apart as a conglomerate, and frankly Six Apart just isn’t big enough to support two completely divergent code bases and/or development teams. But if you do intend to merge the code bases, wow, that’s a can of worms which (IMHO) would bring new feature development to a halt for six months to a year, minimum, on both sides of the fence. ...

I am firmly dedicated to seeing as many 2004 movies as possible before I crank out a best of list, which means that I won’t be doing mine until mid-January. Maybe late January, since the Brattle has that Zhang Ziyi flick I wanna see. However: Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Closer, Life Aquatic, Kinsey, The Incredibles, Gozu, Last Life in the Universe, Zatoichi, Eternal Sunshine, Spider-Man 2, aw crap that’s ten already? This is gonna be tough.

I liked Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events more than I thought I would, for several reasons. First, Jim Carrey played a role which a) allowed him to stretch out and use his immense gift for physical comedy in a way which served the movie, rather than detracting from it. By my count he hasn’t been able to do that since 1997, in Liar Liar, which is a borderline success; really the only time before this that we’ve seen a perfect match of gift and role is The Mask. But in Unfortunate Events, Carrey’s playing an actor and it’s a surrealist world anyhow, which means that his mugging is in perfect tune with what you’d want him to be doing. ...

Ocean’s 12 isn’t really a heist movie, unlike Ocean’s 11. Rather, like the original Rat Pack film, it’s an excuse for a bunch of highly charismatic stars to pal around and crack wise. But hey, they do it really well, so I’ve got no problem with that. Bonus points for the beautiful scenery, Vincent Cassel’s virtuoso martial arts dance, Robbie Coltrane’s gangster, and Catherine Zeta Jones. Then while that’s going on, Soderbergh is making one of his indie films. Ocean’s 12 has all his trademarks: the over-exposed cinematography, jerky time sequences, offbeat camera angles, and so on. He caps it all off with an extended homage to Full Frontal that almost justifies Julia Roberts’ presence in the movie. I got the distinct impression that Soderbergh decided to sneak in his subversive frame-breaking cinematic ideology under the cover of a frothy star vehicle. (See also Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.) Kinda cool.

If you pay attention to the right wing of the political blog world, you’ll perhaps have noticed the argument that the AP “ act[s] as mouthpieces of terrorist organizations.” Why? Because a stringer for the AP took pictures of an election worker being killed in Baghdad. Indeed, the AP is “ participating in murder (original).” Yowza. That sounds really bad. As it happens, Ryan of the Dead Parrot Society is a blogger and a journalist. He has the advantage of a) being level-headed and b) knowing a little bit about news photography. So his takedown is worth reading. My favorite excerpt: ...

Via Patrick: the Pentagon has asked the White House to figure out a way to keep detainees in custody indefinitely without a trial. Note the chain of requests carefully — if the article’s accurate, the Pentagon instigated this. I see three possibilities, only one of which has any silver lining. It could be exactly what it looks like: the Pentagon chipping away at civil liberties. It could be the White House asking the Pentagon to ask them for ideas, so that the White House can claim it was the Pentagon’s idea and they’re horrified — plausible deniability. Or, and I’m not saying this is what’s going on but I think it’s possible, the Pentagon could be sick and tired of holding these guys without trial and they could have done this as a way of forcing the White House’s hand. ...

Cate Blanchett as Katherine Hepburn: great, unrelentingly great, ought to be an easy choice for Best Supporting Actress. Great directing, unsurprisingly. The rest of The Aviator: merely pretty good. The thing is, Leonardo DiCaprio wasn’t up to the role. I still think he’s a decent actor, but he doesn’t have the gravitas necessary to play this part and — like Tom Cruise and his smile — he’s allowed one physical tic to overtake and overshadow his acting. By the end of The Aviator, I badly wanted Scorsese to sneak into DiCaprio’s trailer and inject him with Botox. Anything to get rid of that little crease between his eyes; anything to keep him from substituting a furrowed brow for action. Whether he was portraying concentration, unhappiness, madness, anger, concern, confusion.. it’s all the squint and frown. This was particularly painful when contrasted with Cate Blanchett’s ability to convey a novel by blinking just so. ...

Beyond the cut, the curious will discover a map for the interactive fiction game The Awakening. The map contains spoilers for the puzzles, but not for the story. I found the game to be a moderately effective (if short) piece of horror. There’s essentially one big reveal, and during the course of the game you get closer and closer to it. The scale of the horror remains constant. You’re not constantly discovering that things are worse than you’d imagined; rather, you’re discovering the ways in which they are bad. Which is OK, but it’s no Anchorhead. While it’s based on a Lovecraft story, it’s not really all that Lovecraftian. But it is creepy.