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Here's the Roman philosopher and politician Cicero on intelligent design, c. 44 BC: Consider again the harmony, unanimity, and unbroken affinity in nature; this will surely compel one and all to express agreement with my case? How could the earth at one time blossom, but then in turn become rigidly barren? How could the approach and departure of the sun at the summer and winter solstices be signalled by a spontaneous transformation in so much of nature? How could the sea-tides and the confined waters in the straits be affected by the rising and setting of the moon? Or the diverse courses of the stars be maintained in the single rotation of the entire heavens? What is certain is that these processes could not take place through harmonious activity in all parts of the universe, unless they were embraced by a single divine, all-pervading, spiritual force. 1 Understanding how the tides could "be affected by the rising and setting of the moon" was a particular problem in western science until Read More...
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Did this year seem a little cinematically emaciated? Regardless, here are my takes on the Big Five from worst to best: Atonement Ian McEwan's Atonement is a wonderful novel. From the opening paragraphs, the character of budding novelist Briony Tallis is a true marvel. Through a vivid imagination deeper than her understanding, Briony makes a serious mistake with catastrophic consequences, and for which she spends the rest of the novel (or, let's say, the entire novel, if you know what I mean) atoning. Turning this novel into a movie of thwarted love is moronic. This is a film that never should have been made. Michael Clayton Sure I enjoyed it while I was watching it, but it left me as soon as I exited the theater. Even while watching, I wondered: Why is one murder done so skillfully so that no trace can be found, while the next murder attempt involves a very showy car bomb? A well-made trifle. No Country for Old Men I didn't read the Cormac McCarthy novel this was based on, but I have to Read More...
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The ubiquitous Helvetica typeface is 50 years old this year and currently being celebrated in the documentary Helvetica by Gary Hustwit. We caught it this evening at the IFC Center on 6th Avenue (you know — the site of the old Waverly Theater). I enjoyed the movie immensely. It's even laugh-out-loud funny in spots, and I think anyone with even the slightest interest in typography and graphics design will get a kick out of it. (Check the web site for details.) Helvetica was invented at the Haas type foundry in Switzerland. The original name was Neue Haas Grotesk but that was changed to a word derived from the Latin name for Switzerland. Over the 1960s, Helvetica took the advertising world by storm and was instrumental in modernizing corporate logos and advertisements. It eventually became the default font for much corporate lettering and government signage. Helvetica the documentary takes us on little tours of major cities around the world, showing us how the typeface has blanketed Read More...
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When I first saw The Seventh Seal (1957) and The Virgin Spring (1960) I think what impressed me most was how much I believed that I was seeing the Middle Ages much like it actually was. This is not a popular era for setting films, but it proved ideal for Ingmar Bergman's mix of bleakness and hope. In The Seventh Seal , a knight returning home from the crusades (Max von Sydow in his late 20s) encounters a land devasted by the Plague, and the figure of Death in human form. The knight hopes to delay his fate by challenging Death to a game of chess. Although we rather guess the outcome, we are also buoyed by the comparatively joyful future life of a young couple, Jof and Mia, and their baby boy, traveling with a group of itinerant performers. I have long loved the simplicity of the plot of The Virgin Spring , which was based on an ancient Swedish ballad. Bergman set the movie in a period during which Christianity was being adopted in Sweden, but pagan beliefs still had strong roots, and although Read More...
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We drove into the city yesterday, and while Deirdre was engaged in a meeting, I went to the Angelika to see Paprika , the new film from Satoshi Kon, the director of Perfect Blue , the extraordinary and moving Millennium Actress , and Tokyo Godfathers , which is now on my must-see list. The title character Paprika is a psychotherapist of sorts who uses a device called the DC-Mini to share dreams with her patients. At the beginning of the film she is participating in the dreams of a police detective who is trying to solve a murder. Paprika is also the alter-ego of sorts of Dr. Chiba, the co-developer of the DC-Mini. Dr. Chiba soon discovers that several of the devices have been stolen, and that the "terrorists" who have stolen them are now projecting themselves into other people's dreams, and that the detritus of these dreams has been assembled into a grotesque parade of furniture, appliances, and dolls of all sorts. I am probably making the plot sound more linear and rational than it actually Read More...
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Sometime in the middle of the first season of The Tudors we added A Man for All Seasons to our movie queue. This is the “classic” account of the confrontation between Sir Thomas More and Henry VIII, and won Academy Awards for best picture of 1966, best director (Fred Zinnemann), best adapted screenplay (Robert Bolt, from his play), and best actor (Paul Scofield as More). We watched it a couple nights ago. It's quite a wonderful movie. A gigantic and pasty Orson Welles has some early scenes as Cardinal Wolsey, Robert Shaw has one vibrant and tumultuous scene as Henry VIII, Wendy (“I'm a good girl I am”) Hiller played Thomas More's wife, and Susannah York played his daughter. The young John Hurt is almost unrecognizable in a pivotal role as court weasel, and who else could do a cameo of Anne Boleyn but Vanessa Redgrave? At one point I felt that this portrayal of the battle between principles and political expediency was really about the growing public opposition to the war in Vietnam. But Read More...
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Actress Betty Hutton — who was born in 1921 and died this past Monday — made a bunch of movies in the 1940s that have long since drifted into obscurity. One big exception is The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek from 1944. In The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek , Betty Hutton plays Trudy Kockenlocker, who goes out dancing and partying with some soldiers about to ship out, and comes home the next morning... well, confused. She can't quite remember all the details but she thinks she got married, and perhaps the lucky soldier's name was Ratzkywatzky. Or maybe not. Whether she actually got married or not, she is definitely pregnant. If this sounds like inappropriate subject matter for a Hollywood movie from the early 40's, that's correct, and if it were a drama, it would never have been made. But The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek is a very, very silly comedy, and one of seven masterpieces written and directed by Preston Sturges between 1940 and 1944, a run that also includes The Lady Eve and Sullivan’s Read More...
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Much has happened between the time Deirdre and I added An Inconvenient Truth to our Netflix queue and the day it bubbled up to the top: The President managed to squeak out the words "global climate change" in his State of the Union address. (But the highly-touted energy initiatives were mysteriously absent.) The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report that interpreted the data very conservatively but still managed to draw ominous conclusions. Christopher C. Horner, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming , showed up on The Daily Show (video here ) and came off as a complete loon. Michael Crichton appeared on the Charlie Rose Show and said such things as "I absolutely believe that warming is occurring, humans are involved, and it`s going to continue for the next 100 years." (Transcript available here .) A well-nourished Al Gore showed up at the Academy Awards, and soon thereafter was the victim of a slick smear campaign that nonetheless managed Read More...
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I have mixed feelings about the Academy Awards. I have no problem with calling attention to noteworthy movies released during the year, and it's good to see a bunch of fine movies — The Queen , Babel , Children of Men , Volver , Notes on a Scandal , and Little Children , for example — being recognized in the various categories. But then it comes time to pick just one movie or person from every category, and that's what drives me crazy (along with all the glitz and tacky production values, of course). Is there really such a thing as a "Best Actress" when the nominees are Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Meryl Streep, and Kate Winslet? I've seen all five movies involved in this award, and it seems just plain arbitrary to pick one at the expense of all the others. Of the nominees for Foreign-Language Film, I've seen four (all except After the Wedding ). While these four movies have some similarities — all take place in the past and all have strong political content Read More...
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Probably most moviegoers have noticed that some of the more interesting films in recent years have been made by directors who come from Spanish-speaking countries, some of whom feel quite comfortable also directing movies in English. Although this trend has been evident for a few years, the difference right now is that there are four such movies currently in the theaters (at least in New York City). Babel is the third collaboration between Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu and novelist Guillermo Arriaga. Like their previous films — the extraordinary Amores perros (2000) and 21 Grams (2003) — Babel weaves together several disparate stories, but much more ambitiously than the previous films. This time the stories span the world, from Morroco to California to Mexico to Tokyo. What I find so interesting is that there are no bad characters in this movie, but just a few flawed decisions that cause the world to rock out of kilter. Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón achieved Read More...
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I felt honored when the editors of MSDN Magazine asked me to write the {End Bracket} page for the February issue. This is the page where technical writers face the difficult challenge of writing 800 words of coherent prose without one line of programming code , and my attempt — under the title "Let My People Code" — has now appeared online here . Looking back over it, it seems as convoluted as an episode of Law & Order: SVU . It starts out in Hollywood in the 1920s and ends up with a plea for hand-coded XAML. In the process, you learn at least one thing you didn't know about me, which is that I'm a fan of screwball comedy, a genre of film that flourished in the mid 1930s to early 1940s. As examples of screwball comedy, I knew I'd mention It Happened One Night (1934) and Bringing Up Baby (1938) because everybody's seen these movies a hundred times and knows what they're like. I am actually not a big fan of It Happened One Night but I will look askance at anyone who denies Read More...
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“Nashville” is about the insanity of a fundamentalist culture in which practically the whole population has been turned into groupies. — Pauline Kael Yesterday I discussed Robert Altman's Nashville a bit. The web site of The New Yorker magazine has posted Pauline Kael's 1975 article on Nashville , written after she had just seen a rough cut about 3 months before the movie's release. Read More...
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Released in the middle of 1975, Nashville is perched midway between the twin national tragedies of the Vietnam War and the Watergate Scandal, and the optimism of the forthcoming American Bicentennial. The movie takes place over several days in Nashville, Tennessee, and just about everybody is either a country music star, or a struggling musician, or a devout fan. The movie is filled with original music, most of it composed by the actors themselves, some of it wildly satirical, some of it deeply touching, but none of it superfluous, and all of it contributing to the characterization and narrative. At times Nashville seems like a disorganized collage, as if its 24 equally credited (and equally paid) stars were simply dumped in their scenes and told to make the best of it. Yet, the more times I see this movie, the more I am impressed most of all by its dramatic structure, partially imposed (I'm sure) by the screenplay by Joan Tewkesbury, but also by Robert Altman's uncanny ability to draw Read More...
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I am pleased to report that we are making a little bit of progress with my list of "must-see" movies . Helen Mirren doesn't exactly have goddess status in our household, but she comes pretty close. We saw her in the wonderful Elizabeth I when it was on American TV earlier this year, and we just recently caught up with Prime Suspect 6 on DVD. Of course, Prime Suspect 7 premieres on American TV tonight, and we're very excited about that. But Helen Mirren is not the only reason to see The Queen , in which she portrays the second of England's queens named Elizabeth. The movie begins when Tony Blair became Prime Minister in May 1997 and then skips ahead to the death of Princess Diana later that year. The movie mainly concerns the reluctance of the royal family to leave Balmoral (their estate in Scotland) to come down to London to participate in the public mourning. Almost everyone else believes they must do this, and yet they can only be gently persuaded rather than ordered. I found The Queen Read More...
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Imagine that you are the proprietor of a small store. A man enters and begins asking questions. From his accent and fractured English, you assume he's a visitor from a foreign land. You are hospitable and courteous to this man, and attempt to make him feel at ease. You answer his questions with patience and tolerance. At some point, the conversation takes an awkward turn. The visitor to your shop says something blatantly sexist or anti-Semitic. Perhaps he insults your family, or breaks something in your store. If at first you don't react, the offensive behavior escalates. At what point does your tolerance break down, either deliberately or inadvertently? Oh, did I forget to mention that you're on camera during this entire encounter, and that you have already signed a release form under the impression that your visitor is a journalist from Kazakhstan making a documentary about America? Congratulations. You have now become part of the cast of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Read More...
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