Wanted, in the rear view mirror

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It's taken me many days after seeing Wanted at last week's opening night gala at the LA Film Festival to jot down my thoughts here, and that probably says enough. It wasn't fun enough to spur me to rave about it immediately, but to pick on Timur Bekmambetov's latest movie for thin to little character development or logic seems as insightful as grousing over the poor gas mileage in a Hummer. But still...


I saw Night Watch at the Tribeca Film Festival a couple years back, and I entered that movie and left that movie feeling the same things I felt going into and coming out of Wanted:


Going in: "Ooh, that looks like fun!"


Coming out: "Ehh."


Bekmambetov's specialty might be termed visual rococo. What might be simple and direct becomes, in Bekmambetov's hands, overelaborate and extravagant. There's a place for a director like that in this ever-escalating war for the summer blockbuster to end all summer blockbusters. In a movie about assassins, for example, it's not enough to have men in trenchcoats flying in slow motion across the screen, a handgun blazing in each hand, doves soaring out towards the sky like refugees from a magician's dressing room. John Woo has covered that ground, and then some.


Fanboys are always looking for new visual excess in their summer fare, and Bekmambetov and the screenwriters pull out a few new tricks. Bullets curve as shooters whip their guns with a lateral motion, almost like tennis rackets or frisbees, as they fire. Not one kill occurs in real time. The frame rate ramps from molasses-like slow motion to hyper speed, and back again, all the better to showcase bullets tearing through flesh and exploding fireworks of blood.


There's no doubting his visual ambition, but if only someone could bridle it towards the service of directed storytelling. I'd like to spoil the story for you, but that would imply that one existed. If the premise is tough to swallow even when explained in the arresting baritone of Morgan Freeman, that's a sign not to try. I'll only note that it involves binary code and weaving and an ancient league of assassins called The Fraternity and...oh, forget it. Did you know Angelina Jolie rises out of a hot tub in the nude? Not animated Angelina Jolie, either, like in Beowulf.


Jolie playing a foxy assassin named, well, Fox. Fortunately. She has few lines but spends much of the movie with the hint of what on most mortals would be called a smirk playing at the edge of her world class lips, but in her case it's either a hint of bemused delight at the wilting power of her sexuality on the men around her or some variation of the smile on the Mona Lisa. Watching her stride across the screen is like watching a tiger pacing or listening to the low growl of Italian sports car engine purring in first gear.


Perhaps it's fruitless to think a summer action movie can excel at engaging both the teenage groin and the adult brain, but then again, Angelina Jolie can go from sex symbol to human rights ambassador with one flight in her private jet. As Brad Pitt can attest, sometimes you can have it all.


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Girl Talk - Feed the Animals

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[via Uncrate] Girl Talk has a new album out. Like all the cool kids are doing, Girl Talk lets you name your own price for 320Kbps MP3s. Pay more and you get more, like an option for FLAC files at $5 and an actual packaged CD at $10 (packaged CDs! how quaint and retro!).


His previous album, Night Ripper, was one long mashup of all sorts of popular tunes into one long danceable French bread loaf, and I suspect his new album is similar.



iPhone 3G pricing

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Much has been made about the fact that the new iPhone 3G, while having a retail price much lower than the original iPhone ($199 versus $599 for the original iPhone or $399 price for the current equivalent model), has a monthly data plan rate much higher (I pay $20 a month now for unlimited data and 200 text messages, and the equivalent plan on the new 3G will cost $35 a month).


But the truth is, if Apple's goal is to drive up the volume of unit sales, this pricing scheme is great. People hear $199 and that's what they fixate on, not on the monthly bill which will chip away at their wallet over many months. Lowering the retail price of the handset while jacking up the monthly fees is smart pricing strategy.


I personally haven't decided whether to upgrade to the new model, but I have no doubt that millions of first-time buyers will find the new handset pricing just the reason to jump in. Apple set fire to the Motorola house and shattered some windows at the Blackberry mansion, and now, with this new pricing, they've returned with gasoline and a bazooka.


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Encounters at the End of the World

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On Saturday night, I saw Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World at the LA Film Festival (the end credits dedicate the movie to Roger Ebert). Whether you enjoy Herzog's movies, especially his documentaries, depends quite a bit on whether you appreciate his world view. To steal some words from Bogdanovich, you see a Herzog movie, you know "who the devil made it."


This, his latest documentary, is a meandering account of Herzog's journey to Antarctica to understand what type of person goes down to the end of the world. Given a grant by the National Science Foundation, Herzog warned that he would not be going down to shoot another movie about "cute, furry penguins" but instead was curious about, among other issues, why men domesticated horses while he had yet to see a chimp or monkey riding a goat. Or something like that. It's not surprising, Herzog's attraction to people who'd choose to live and work in the extreme conditions of Antarctica. Give me your bold, your insane, your ambitious, and your bizarre, those living on the edge: that has always been Herzog's fascination.


If there were the equivalent of typefaces for voices, I'd pay an unbelievably high number for that of Herzog. Of course, it's not just his thick German accent but also his severe and often dour outlook on the world that combine to form one of the more distinctive voices in film. In one scene, as a linguistics expert speaks on screen, the audio fades out and Herzog's voiceover comes in over the image of that man speaking. Herzog muses that during the time that he listened to the man speaking, some three languages likely died out in the world. Another time, as a woman speaks on screen, the audio fades out, and Herzog chimes on: "Her story went on forever."


Much of the humor of the movie is in such directorial asides. On landing at Antarctica, his first stop is Camp McMurdo, of which he notes "contained abominations such as an aerobics classes and yoga studio."


When he does visit a small colony of penguins, his attention is drawn, naturally, towards the same odd behavior he seeks out in men. He asks the local naturalist who has been studying the penguins if he has noticed any signs of derangement in the penguins. Confused, the naturalist notes that he hasn't seen any penguins bashing their heads against the rocks. But Herzog has the last laugh as he spots one penguin heading off in the wrong direction, towards the mountains, and towards certain gloom, a point Herzog makes with a tone of utter satisfaction.


At movie's end, when Herzog seizes on a message of impending environmental doom and the extinction of humanity, it's almost so conventional as to be surprising. But the real unifying theme is a common quality in all the people he encounters there. They are all dreamers, but the type who've gone as far away from the rest of civilization as they can, and when they can go no further, they find themselves together, at the South Pole.


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The itch, oh, the itch

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Atul Gawande writes in this week's New Yorker about the science behind itching. Timely, for me, as my leg, encased in the cast for several weeks now, has started to itch with a vengeance. Any area of my leg that can be reached by a disassembled wire coat hanger has been explored, but there are areas that are not reachable in this tight cast.


Is it preferable to the pain I felt earlier? Perhaps, for relief can be had, however briefly, by scratching. But I'm reminded of this Montaigne quote from the article:



Scratching is one of the sweetest gratifications of nature, and as ready at hand as any, But repentance follows too annoyingly close at its heels.



Many a moment at work or at home, I attempt random mental exercises designed to distract myself from the itching, but meditation backfires. It clears the mind and leaves nothing but an blinding spotlight on the itching.


Two Thursdays ago, I visited the doctor to have my cast reset again. This time, Carl, the male nurse who specialized in the business of adjusting and replacing the casts of patients at this orthopedic office at UCLA, was going to try to bring my foot up to a neutral 90 degree angle with my leg. My foot was about 20 degrees off. If he could get me to 90 degrees, I'd wear this cast for an entire month before my shift to a soft boot. If he couldn't get me to 90 degrees, I'd have to visit again in two weeks for another recasting.


The previous recasting was excruciating. This time my foot was so close to neutral already that I hoped for an easier go of it. To keep myself in a positive frame of mind, I tried engaging Carl in cheerful small talk as he sawed off my cast. I asked him about the history of Achilles tendon repairs, trying to give him opportunities to share his expertise.


Dear reader, you will either be filled with a joyous schadenfreude or consumed with empathic terror when I tell you that it was to no avail. When Carl placed a board on my foot and then leaned against it with all of his 300 pound weight to pry my foot up, I experienced what I am near certain was the most violent, unbearable pain of my life. I screamed and nearly flew off of the table on which I lay on my belly. It felt as if my Achilles tendon tore again.


For those who don't know what that feels like, the closest analogy I can summon is that if you were trying to do the splits but could not because you were not flexible enough, and Shaquille O'Neal came along and jumped onto your shoulders and caused you to drop into the full split position with a sudden tearing of your groin and leg muscles, that comes close to simulating the pain I felt as Carl threw his weight into that board again and again.


Carl, who had seemed mildly pleasant during small talk, reverted to the unsympathetic brute I'd come to know my previous visit. As I grunted in pain, he grunted in mockery and chided me, "Stop squirming away."


So once again, I had to call on friends to drive me home as the pain was unbearable. This time around, Carl warned me that with these last twenty degrees, I'd experience not only several days of pain but occasional muscle spasms.


"If I were you," he cautioned, "I'd take my pain meds regularly, and I don't recommend missing a cycle."


Before heading home, and even once there, I popped Vicodin like they were breath mints. This cured none of the pain but left me with an overpowering nausea that caused me to throw up in the afternoon.


A day later, I was on a plane to Chicago for a wedding. Thankfully, the leg spasms left me after one night. However, I do not recommend flying coach when recovering from an Achilles rupture. Actually, I don't recommend flying coach in general, it is one level above traveling as cargo, and I mean that literally, as your luggage is beneath you in the plane's belly. It may be that there is more leg room in the cargo hold, and more than once I thought of asking if that was a possibility.


As for right at this moment, why am I up at 2 in the morning the night before the work week begins? Because of an itch I can't reach in my cast. I was going to note that this should be an add-on circle to Hell, but it turns out it's already earned a spot there.



Itching is a most peculiar and diabolical sensation. The definition offered by the German physician Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660 has yet to be improved upon: An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Itch has been ranked, by scientific and artistic observers alike, among the most distressing physical sensations one can experience. In Dante’s Inferno, falsifiers were punished by “the burning rage / of fierce itching that nothing could relieve

An age old question

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What happens when an ambidextrous pitcher faces a switch-hitter? Confusion.



Things got a tad dizzying when designated hitter Ralph Henriquez, who had taken his on-deck circle swings as a lefty, entered the batter's box from the right side.


Venditte put his specially made glove (it has six fingers, two webs and fits on both hands) on his left hand, and got ready to pitch right-handed.


Henriquez then changed his mind and switched sides of the plate, because a batter sees the ball sooner when it is thrown by a pitcher using the opposite hand.


So Venditte shifted his glove to the other hand.


Then it happened again.


And again.


And again.


Apparently unsure of how the rules handle such an oddity, the umpires didn't stop the cat-and-mouse game until Venditte walked toward the plate and said something while pointing at Henriquez.


Umpires and both managers huddled and the umps decided the batter and pitcher can both change sides one time per at-bat, and that the batter must declare first.


The ruling favored the pitcher, since he gets to declare last.



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Lost in Translation

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We're launching a summer event at Hulu. Every weekday through mid-August, we're going to add something great to the site. We add videos everyday, but for this event we've gone out and pushed for some extra special content. We have an RSS feed for this event for you RSSegetarians.


First up? Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation. Enjoy!






By the way, isn't it only a matter of time before some scenes of Scarlett Johansson in this movie are mashed-up with footage of Barack Obama? Seems like Obama Girl's got some competition.


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Unaccustomed Earth

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These days, I don't have as much time to read as I'd like. It's mostly a few stolen moments each night before passing out. So for me to finish a piece of fiction means it has to surpass great obstacles, namely my physical fatigue and attention-deficit disorder.


I enjoyed Jhumpa Lahiri's Pulitzer winning short story collection Interpreter of Maladies, missed her follow-up novel The Namesake (and now if I ever read it all my mind will be fixated on the image of Kumar as the lead character, damn you Hollywood movie trailers), but picked up her latest collection of semi-linked short stories, Unaccustomed Earth.


It is superb. It is about the Indian-American experience, but it is also about the Asian-American experience, and about the American experience. Like the best of books, it is both specific and universal.



Unaccustomed Earth


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The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report

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Full episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report are now available on Hulu.


Because I always seem to be at the office these days when these two shows air, and because I heart Stewart and Colbert in ways some States would consider illegal, it's a happy day for me. Yes, it's the 21st century and my news coverage of choice comes from two satires. Don't be scared. It may not look the way you thought it would, but this is progress.


Here's Stewart on McCain's speech from last Wednesday, the day of the final Democratic primary. Whereas Obama gave a rousing speech to thousands of screaming fans, McCain...well, I'll let Jon take you through it.






And here are the most recent episodes of the two shows, from last night.










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Bluetooth headsets

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With a new law banning cell phone use while driving unless you're using a headset going into effect in California shortly, and with renewed suspicions of the dangers of cell phone radiation on the brain, it's time for me to take the plunge and purchase a Bluetooth headset. I had one early model a few years ago but lost it.


I hate the look of Bluetooth headsets in the ear, they look like props from some bad sci-fi movie, but they're more attractive than being thrown through your own windshield or having a tumor growing out the side of your head.


There are nearly 800 results in Amazon's wireless accessory store if you search "bluetooth headset." So tell me, dear readers, what headset do you recommend?


I think in maybe 10 years I'll short a bunch of cell phone manufacturer stocks as a hedge against brain cancer.


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Remains of last weekend

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I had my leg cast swapped out last week. When I walked into the office, the nurse who admitted me took one look at my leg and recoiled in shock.


"What the hell kind of angle is your foot set at?" he asked. My foot was pointed straight down, like a ballet dancer on point.


"I don't know! I woke up from surgery and my foot was set that way," I said, suddenly concerned.


"Man oh man," he said, shaking his head. "That's the most severe angle I've ever seen."


The guy who was responsible for recasting me looked like Milton from Office Space but about 200 pounds heavier. He had an exasperated "seen-it-all" weariness about him, as if he wished this train of patients with ruptured Achilles would stop appearing in his office but knew that it wouldn't. He looked at me and shook his head, and I felt judged, guilty of some hubris that had led me to this sorry state.


To remove the cast, he pulled out a small handheld circular saw and made two cuts from top to bottom on either side of my leg. The saw blade protruded about an inch, and my cast looked to be about an inch thick, so when Milton put saw to cast I strained as hard as possible to push my leg as far away from the blade as possible. I was terrified, and my leg cowered against the opposite side of the cast. Milton didn't seem concerned and pulled the blade straight down with an almost bored nonchalance.


He pried the cast off, and for the first time in weeks, I saw my leg. There was a four inch wound running up the back of my leg from my heel, stitched together with black thread in a cross-hatched pattern.


The surgeon came in, took a look, said the wound looked to be healing fine, and left. Milton asked him about the crazy angle of my foot, but he replied that my wound was healing and that was the important thing.


Milton had my lie on my belly, and then he rubbed some local anesthesia on my wound. Just as I started to feel it burn, he began (I think) removing my stitches. It felt as if someone was putting a soldering iron to my ankle, and I bit my arm to stomach the searing pain.


Then it came time to pry my foot up partway towards the normal 90 degree angle that feet are at when you stand normally. There was only one problem: after two weeks of being pointed down, my foot did not want to come back up. Milton asked me to try pulling it up myself, but despite urgent messages from my brain, my foot did not move.


I couldn't see Milton over my shoulder, but I pictured the slightest of grins on his lips as he grabbed my foot and a board of some sort and pried my foot up.


I let out a grunt as a violent pain shot up my leg. He continued to pry, I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. If someone had walked in on us, it would've looked like a UFC fight, with Milton trying to break my foot to get me to tap out.


I didn't submit, but Milton did notice that I was in pain.


"You think this hurts? I just pulled your foot up like 20 degrees. Next time I'm pulling it up the rest of the way, like 40 degrees. You better take some painkillers before you come in." And then he cackled maniacally: "Bwahahahahaha!"


Okay, he didn't cackle. But after seeing the beautiful nurses in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, I can't lie, the walrusian Milton was a bit of a letdown.


I hobbled out of Milton's torture chamber with a new, slim cast on my leg but in enormous pain. I sat in the waiting room and immediately inhaled two Vicodin, which I hadn't touched in a week and a half.


The best thing to come out of this office visit was obtaining my doc's signature on a form authorizing me for a temporary handicapped parking placard. I mailed that off to the California DMV as soon as I got back to the office.


Milton, we will meet again soon, but I will be bringing my two friends, Percocet and Vicodin.


***


Amputees sometimes experience phantom limb. There's an analogous videogame sensation. Whenever I hear a song from Rock Band on the radio, I feel a phantom guitar in my hands and see green, blue, yellow, red, and orange notes dropping from the sky.


***


After trashing his teammates in the preseason, Kobe Bryant goes and says he stayed with the Lakers because he tweaked his leadership to instill his teammates with his DNA. Arrogant, yes, but also maybe not the best thing to say given his, uh, personal history, both past and present.


***


Yes, the Lakers have Zen master Phil Jackson as coach, but let's not forget that Doc Rivers has the Celtics shouting "Ubuntu!" coming out of every huddle. Open source operating system? That seems pretty zen to me.


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Sometimes it feels like the web is too big. Look at this list of sites of "Top 60 music websites that deliver the greatest free music."


60 sites! I'd be more than happy with, say, 10, but to be honest I probably use maybe 3.


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Now that I'm on crutches, and now that a temporary handicapped permit is on its way to me in the mail, I flash dirty looks at any non-handicapped person I catch coming out of the handicapped stall in the bathroom.


If I hadn't had to pee so badly after the Indiana Jones screening that morning it opened, I would've stayed around until I caught whoever had occupied the handicapped stall at the Hollywood Arclight.


Speaking of the new Indiana Jones movie, I've read a lot of fans of the new Indy movie who dismiss anyone who didn't like the movie as elitist. Sorry, but those people are wrong.


I don't care if you did like the movie, but don't tell me about summer popcorn flicks. Raiders of the Lost Ark was a great summer popcorn flick. This latest Indy flick...cost me three hours and $11.


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This is old, but still worth posting. Chris Matthews obliterates a right-wing lunatic on TV. One of Matthews' finer moments.