Super busy at work this week, plus I'm working the nights so I can shuttle The Prince to school most mornings, and when I get time I'm working on my animated-film story (which is nicely coming along), so no blogging of late as you can see.
I am voraciously ripping through a novel during my commute, however, and even though I'm not finished, I feel compelled to recommend Cormac McCarthy's The Road.
Even though it's won the Pulitzer and the 2006 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction AND was one of Oprah's Book Club selections, I'm sure my recommendation will make a difference and get Mr. McCarthy some well-deserved recognition [/smirk]. This is a brutal read, gripping and poetic. Read it now.
UPDATE: I've just finished and I feel like I've taken a 2x4 to the gut. Heart-breaking.
I'm going to keep it simple this week and just recommend one thing that I like: The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. I finally watched this on DVD and to say it is involving and entertaining is an understatement. I'll tell you straight that this documentary works just as well as the good-for-society docs that win major awards do. I found it as compelling and full of insight into American society as Roger & Me and The Thin Blue Line, films I've respected as great contemporary documentaries.
What I'm curious to see is the approach the in-the-works feature version of this story will take. One of the virtues of the doc is how it depicts the extraordinary measures a handful of people actually took against a perceived outsider. If these same measures are taken by characters we know to be portrayed by actors, I wonder if they'd have the same impact. I'd be curious to see the screenplay (currently being penned by actor/writer Michael Bacall).
The accuracy of the doc (as it always seems to happen) is being questioned as people in the film are coming out to tell their own sides, but you can't discount the central conflict between these two gamers with different personalities: one wants to be the king of Donkey Kong, the other wants to remain king of the insular world of gamernerds he's ruled for 25 years.
I'm no social crusader, I'm certain I'm capable of casual social insensitivity through ignorance, but as a person of Irish descent, this time of year gives me a small amount of dread as I know from experience that I'll see or hear something that makes me upset. Last Friday, I got an e-mail from my company wishing everyone a happy "St. Paddy's Day".
To be fair, I didn't know how derogatory a term 'paddy' can be until I saw Tony Slattery constantly deriding Stephen Rea in The Crying Game by referring to him as 'Paddy' rather than his name. Sure, it's a nickname for Patrick, but it was used primarily by folks looking to demean Irish immigrants as lower-class, uneducated and socially undesirable, both by the British and by Americans. It's how the paddy wagon got its name as these vehicles were usually manned by Irish police officers performing one of the only duties people of their kind were deemed worthy to perform. Certainly the term 'paddy' has lost a good deal of impact since those days, but it is still a term some people are at best uncomfortable with hearing in reference to their countrymen, and certainly their patron saint. Toss that word in the same trash bin as kraut, wop and the n-word where it belongs.
If you want to refer to St. Patrick, refer to him as St. Patrick. He's the only saint most people can name anyway, give the guy some credit.
I'll leave you with a song I first heard about ten years ago. Ashley MacIsaac is a Canadian of Scottish descent who plays traditional Celtic fiddle in contemporary musical settings. When I heard "Sleepy Maggie" the first time, I had to call the radio station to ask what the hell they'd just played, the arrangement was that jarring. The album it's on now goes into rotation on my iPod this time of year.
Liking this poster a lot. Seeing Karen Allen on a movie poster again is a gas.
Seeing Watchmen on the big screen will be sort of a cheat, I think, as the intended and most effective venue for this story are the pages of a comic book. However, that doesn't mean I'm not eager as all hell to check it out when it finally arrives a year from now.
I haven't seen any films that Amy Adams has been in, and that includes every movie on her IMDB page, but I did see her performing at the Oscars and then on this past weekend's Saturday Night Live, and that girl is pretty talented. My mark of a good SNL host is when a sketch seems like only they could pull it off, and everything she did seemed like only she could pull it off.
I haven't been working on the newlywed comedy for the past week, but I expect to get some work in daily over the next two weeks and beyond. What I have been doing is working on an idea for a kid's movie, specifically an idea for a CG-animated movie. What's funny to me about it is that it's based on the same old German genre silent I based Brother's Keeper on, it's just a different and updated take on the material. It's all very loose now, but it would have the relationship between a kid and a surrogate parent at its heart, the idea of accepting someone as family even though they are not related by blood. There's an additional wrinkle that will be the hook, I'll share that later as it takes shape.
What inspired me to try writing a kid's movie (aside from the bombardment of kid's movies I get at home) is that I'll be taking a trip to Disney next month for a Pixar-related event, and I wondered for a moment if Pixar folk will be attending. If I can wrestle a treatment out to bring along, I'd at least be prepared to pitch someone. It's a huge long shot, but it wouldn't hurt to have it in my pocket just in case.
I'm sort of a closet gamer. Seeing as I'm not 24 years old anymore, I don't experience overnight runs through Super Metroid anymore, but I've got my trusty Nintendo DS for my daily commute (and at least Brain Age 2 tells me I'm mentally 24 years old...Wait, that's good, right?).
When I talk about gaming with people in their twenties, though, their gaming experience is so much different than mine. Before I was 12, video games meant going to the local department store's basement arcade, between the escalator and the barber shop. Once the Atari 2600 came out for the '77 holiday season, all that changed (and the local department store closed a few years later, but probably not because I wasn't feeding quarters to Battle Tank). Trips to the malls that were opening up all around featured mandatory arcade visits, and the gap between arcade gaming and home gaming was wide. Those arcades are gone now that you can rock out Gears of War on your HDTV on your couch, and couch-based gaming is what these younger guys grew up with for the most part.
Now that I've been investigating which Blu-Ray player I want to get later in the year, I haven't been able to ignore the possibility that the Sony PS3 is the best way to go. Much has been made of the fact that the Blu-Ray player standard function profile wasn't nailed down before production began, a perceived weakness the HD-DVD camp was happy to trumpet loudly. Updating the profile should be no problem if you've got the player connected to the internet, but most players didn't have an ethernet connection. The PS3 has had that connection and has already updated to the current profile with the final profile expected by summer. Even with newer standalone players coming, most tech sites agree the PS3 is the best option for Blu-Ray in the home.
But probably not my home. The only game console that appeals to me is the Wii, and that's because it seems like a console the whole family can enjoy, even my non-gamer wife with the secret passion for Centipede and Ms. Pacman (sorry honey, but the first step to recovery is admitting the addiction). After that, I'd have to consider the XBox 360, mainly because some friends have been streaming HD programming through theirs from their computers, a practice that has me completely envious.
Of all these options, none of the popular games appeal that much to me (well, maybe Halo), so again the idea of a console for gaming seems superfluous. Games don't seem to have the charm they'd had back at the outset of home gaming. Warlords was a great multi-player game that pretty much ruled the 2600 at my house. Adventure looks like a third-grader's extra-credit project now, but chasing an ampersand dragon with a sword that looked like an arrow was loads of fun. There was one game for the Nintendo, an import from Japan that was mislabeled as 'Mario Baby' in the video store I managed years ago, that could not be resisted once sampled. This game was always out on rental once word got around the staff, and eventually a delinquent customer kited off with it. I've since found out that it was actually called "Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa". Have a look.
I'm a little late to the party, but since I'm re-installing "Stuff I Like" at the beginning of the week, I'm playing a little catch-up.
After seeing Jonah Hill presenting at the Oscars, I finally Netflixed Superbad. I'd enjoyed Knocked Up and have been trying to watch The 40 Year Old Virgin going on forever (every time we record it on cable, we never get around to watching it), so although I know Judd Apatow is the flavor right now, I haven't immersed myself in his work. The cool thing about Superbad is its melding of the heart Apatow and crew showed in Knocked Up with the best parts of the high-school comedies I loved from the 80's. It's like John Hughes cast Farmer Ted as Samantha and told him to keep it real.
Jon Stewart's comment on classic spectacle meeting modern tech.
I haven't seen the film yet, but I've been listening to the Once soundtrack for a few weeks and it's superb, even out of context. I think once I see the film and know how the songs fit the story, I'll be able to see why everyone seems to be in love with Once.
Three Academy Awards for The Bourne Ultimatum. Well deserved for that rare franchise that just keeps getting better.
The last thing I liked about the Oscars this year? The concern over the low ratings. I don't think it's an issue with the show as much as it is with the process the Academy Awards have adopted over the last several years. The campaigns that studios are able to wage are creating an atmosphere where the nominations are not terribly surprising and the winners are all but anointed (in the public's eye) before the statuettes are even handed out. Promoting a movie once the nominations are out is one thing, but pimping a film as award-worthy to the industry to get an early jump should be frowned upon. Nominations should come from the membership without influence from the studios. Once nominated, promote on an equal-time model. Parity in promoting nominees would mean a big studio couldn't overwhelm the efforts an independent makes in trying to get voters to recognize their nominees, or that the race is decided by whomever yells the loudest and soonest. So Variety makes a little less money, so what.
It might not hurt to make a good movie that has such appeal as to be popular while you're at it. The fact that No Country For Old Men hasn't made a profit is criminal, but the idea that the industry seems to have (as reflected by releases over the last four or five years) that popular movies should be dumb and great movies don't make money is a crock. Some movie is going to come out soon and smash that idea to pieces. The public is waiting not-so-patiently to see that movie.
