She was serious

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In her appearance on Ricky Gervais' Extras a few years back, Kate Winslet bemoaned that "if you do a film about the Holocaust, you’re guaranteed an Oscar". Well, it seems she heeded her own advice to good effect.








In this high-stakes competition for Oscar gold, look for Harvey Weinstein to produce a movie casting a beautiful woman playing a historical Holocaust survivor who overcomes a childhood physical deformity that mars her beauty to become an accomplished violinist whose performances help to overcome racism and elect the first black President of the U.S., but only after being discovered living on the streets homeless, this discovery being made by a down-and-out reporter who's seeking redemption of his own after being ousted from a renowned newspaper for continuing to cry Chicken Little about an impending financial crisis that ultimately comes to pass, at which point the renowned newspaper offers him a job to come back to write, but he turns it down to launch his own website for citizen journalism, because he's seen the light and no longer wants to work for the man, and who's with me? Nobody? Really? No, wait, there's a hand in the air, it's the Holocaust-survivor violinist, not Renee Zellweger as Dorothy Boyd, but perhaps some fresh young face like her, she comes along, and they fall in love, because we want the two telegenic leads to fall in love, and it's good box office if they do, but only after she almost marries her agent, a solid if somewhat dull and straight-laced guy played by, say, James Marsden. Oh, and somehow we need to work in Will Ferrell playing a comic sidekick, maybe the reporter's college buddy who runs an adult website but turns his technical skills to launching and maintaining our reporter's citizen journalism website which will become such a hit that our lead gets a blogger crossover book deal. And to appeal to the kids, we will have an animated pet ferret who can talk and sing (voiced by Jennifer Hudson) and who at one point in the movie does the Beyonce "Single Ladies" dance number which can provide a quick 5 second zing for the movie trailer so people realize it's not entirely a downer of a Holocaust movie, and also because the musical is back, baby!


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Slums to riches

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The best part of the interview below is when Ryan Seacrest asks one of the young kids from the Slumdog cast a question, and he doesn't reply. Another boy standing in the back row explains, "He doesn't speak English."


Ryan Seacrest then asks, "Can one of you translate?"


Another of the actors jumps in, "He doesn't speak English."


The other critical information revealed in this interview is that Freida Pinto is single and hasn't been asked out via her agent despite the movie's popularity. Sadly, I did a search on my iPhone for "Freida Pinto agent" and got zero results.







Complaining about the Oscars is some sort of national pastime, but one that's always exasperated me. If you don't like the Oscars, the movies they nominate, don't watch! The Oscars, like the Hall of Fame in baseball, are voted on by a select and insular group of people, so if your tastes don't align with those voting in each category, it's futile to expect anything to change. Saying you don't like the Oscars doesn't earn you any exclusive indie cred; that bandwagon is full every year and has been for years.


Honor the movies you enjoy by going to see them and telling people you know to see them. I grew up watching the Oscars with my family and have always looked forward to them. It's one of the few events left on TV outside of sporting events that people gather to watch live. I am sad when they show the montage of the recently deceased, excited to hear familiar musical cues from famous scores or see montages of classic movie scenes, and happy when someone I admire wins the golden naked guy statue. Sure, there's plenty of room for improvement in every telecast--what was with the odd acting award presentation process this year?--but there are usually enough fun moments (Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman dancing, Ben Stiller channeling Joaquin Phoenix channeling Ted Kaczynski) to keep me coming back for another dose the next year.


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Ekman on ARod

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I mentioned Paul Ekman and FACS and microexpressions in the post before this, and last week I wrote a tweet wishing that Tim Roth's character from Lie to Me could interview ARod.


Curious, Paul Ekman decided to watch ARod's 2007 interview with Katie Couric, the one in which he denied using performance enhancing drugs, to see if he could detect signs of lying in ARod's face.


Ever modest, Ekman notes that his method is only directional, that absolute certainty is impossible. But he does find some signs of lying.


I suspect what Ekman sees evidence of is what many sports fans have come to dislike about ARod over the years, a sort of phoniness and artificiality that makes both him and Kobe Bryant the most talented but disliked players in sports.


I grew up in Chicago during the Bulls dynasty years, so I'm more than a little biased towards Michael Jordan. But I do wonder sometimes what it is about Jordan that left him more beloved by sports fans, despite various marital and gambling issues. I believe it's because he never came off as a normal person at all, even in his advertisements. He was affable but distant, more a distillation of pure basketball talent and fierce competitiveness. By not having some other human side to betray, he never came off as phony. He just was Michael Jordan, the most competitive man to ever, whether he was lacing up basketball sneakers or golf shoes or dealing a deck of cards.


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Miscellany

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The new tv show Lie to Me is based on the real-life research of Dr. Paul Ekman into facial behaviors, or how muscles of the face reveal underlying psychology through microexpressions that are nearly unconscious or involuntary.


Ekman's system is called the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), and its companion is the Facial Action Coding System Affect Interpretation Dictionary (FACSAID). I first heard of Ekman's work through a Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker titled "The Naked Face".


You can purchase the training system for $260. Maybe it will pay for itself through your weekly poker game?


--@--


Chase Jarvis offers 5 tips for shooting better pictures with your iPhone. He also recommends two apps for the iPhone, CameraBag ($2.99) and Pano ($2.99), both of which I use and enjoy.


I put the prices there because I know some people don't like to pay for any apps, but if there's one thing I urge people to do this year it's to pay for things that provide value, even if they're things you can obtain illegally for free. Whether it's software or music or movies, with the Internet it's easier than ever to reward people directly for work you appreciate. When apps for the iPhone cost less than a Vietnamese Banh Mi sandwich, there's really no excuse. Do the right thing, fight the recession, reward people who do great work that improves your life.


Two other iPhone photography apps that I recommend: Photogene ($2.99) and QuadCamera ($1.99). The iPhone camera is not going to win any prizes for picture quality, but the use of these apps should improve your snaps noticeably. Your Facebook and Flickr friends thank you in advance.


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Speaking of iPhone apps, I've reached the nine page, 144 app limit. I don't use all the apps all the time, so it's not a problem to delete a few, but the limit seems somewhat arbitrary, and at some point in the near future I can see having more than 144 apps that I'd use semi-regularly, or at least often enough that I wouldn't want to have to be deleting and installing apps all the time.


Paging through nine pages of apps doesn't exactly play to the iPhone's interface strengths (some ability to group apps or nest them in folder would be handy) but it's certainly not unusable.


--@--


Amazon's Universal wishlist feature allows you to add products from other websites. Not sure when this launched, but it's an idea I recall being bandied about at Amazon many years ago.


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Metacritic compiles top 10 lists from movie critics across the land (they need to fix their HTML header as it still reads 2007 Film Critic Top Ten Lists in my browser tab). I'm still waiting for their year-end compilation graphic that assimilates all these top ten lists into a master best-of list. I'm not sure if they're producing it again this year, but I hope they do.


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Yuja Wang, and my return to vinyl

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Last Thursday I heard 21 year old Chinese piano prodigy Yuja Wang play Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto with the LA Philharmonic conducted by Charles Dutoit.


I'd never heard this piece, nor had I heard much about Wang. She emerged from the wings in a fire engine red strapless dress, but the outfit was the flashiest part of her performance. She's all business on the piano, and she was as impressive a pianist as I've heard in a long time. From my seats along the first violin side of the concert hall, I could only see her back, but it was clear her fingers were flying all over the keyboard from one end to another, and her long, slender, but toned arms pulled a huge sound from the belly of the instrument. Technical mastery, a command of musical phrasing, she showcased it all, and the crowd gave her a standing ovation.


The program concluded with Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherezade, one of the first classical pieces I remember my father playing for me when I was young, one of the first orchestral pieces to imprint itself in my memory. I can't think of many pieces more evocative, of another time, another land, and a timeless mythological tale. In so many movie scores I hear the musical lineage of Scheherazade and picture thick, crimson curtains sliding open to reveal a Technicolor panorama unfolding on screen.


As a side note, I've bought a turntable and am going back to vinyl. Cue obvious mid-life crisis/aging jokes, but for music I really love, CDs don't offer quite the sound I want (don't even start in on MP3s), and the selection in the SACD market is poor to nonexistent. I loved playing my dad's LPs when I was a kid, I love the big album cover art, and I love that crackle when the needle drops onto the vinyl: it generates a timeless Pavlovian anticipation.


Let me know if you have any recommendations as to good stores to buy vinyl, either online or in the LA area.


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The nanny tax

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Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler writes about the tax trouble of appointees Geithner, Daschle, and Killifer (sounds a bit like Santa's reindeer as referred to in Munich or something):



I am more than willing to grant that not every nominee deserves to be appointed to rule over me. But I'm also worried about the incentives we are producing by applying tougher standards. Knocking out the caught cheaters won't make all the DC people honest or virtuous. The long run effect is to select for people who have known -- from the very beginning -- that they seek power and who are willing to pay money to the taxman to keep that option alive. We are selecting for people who are very good at covering up their misdeeds. We're selecting for honest people too. There's lots of posturing on this issue, but I'm not sure whether the net effect of the crackdown is positive, once you take all these selection effects into account. There's something to be said for selecting people who are relatively bad at cover-ups.



I think Daschle and Geithner's offenses are egregious. They can afford to hire a tax guy, and if they claim to have misinterpreted the tax code they're lying. The public already believes that their Congressmen operate under a separate set of standards when it comes to taxes, and this won't help.


But for Killifer, withdrawal may be excessive. I have never heard of any person who pays taxes on their nanny, politician or otherwise. In fact, if the government wants to increase its income, they should crack down on the illegal nanny trade. Half the parents we all know would be slapped with fines, which might force some of them to downgrade their strollers from designer all-wheel drive offroad models to something more pedestrian, like the plastic-wheeled polyester-hammocked contraptions that passed for strollers when I was in diapers.


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Feedback loops

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The one advantage of running a Super Bowl ad in this day and age is the availability of near instantaneous feedback through the internet.


Text messages, tweets, e-mails, and phone calls started rolling in as soon as our ad aired on Sunday.


Just tonight, our ad ran again on American Idol. I happened to be home when it came on, and as soon as it was over I did a quick search on Twitter for hulu. Eight of the nine newest tweets were about the ad:




Hulu Twitter Search



If you absolutely, positively have to have it right now, then you live in the right age.






The NYTimes created a brilliant interactive graphic depicting Twitter activity during the game, and if you filter on "Talking about ads" and scroll the timeline to the 4th quarter, near the first Arizona Cardinals TD, you see a sea of Hulu across the U.S. map. Looking at that graphic just blows my mind.






[I suspect the timeline is off by a bit as our ad didn't air until after that TD, while the timeline seems to show Hulu activity even before that TD]






According to Social Media, Hulu won the TweetBowl. I didn't even know such a thing existed, but if you can catch a big wave online, you can ride it all the way to shore.






I also feel the slightest tinge of sadness in thinking that after our Super Bowl ad, I may never again work on any creative piece that is seen by that many people.






Except, I hope, Hulu.com (depending on how you define creative).

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Lost and Found and Lost

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Short comic strip on Lost that sums up the seemingly fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants scripting which gives so many viewers a love-hate relationship.


I've long since given up hope for any explanation that ties all the seasons together and that explains all the oddities on the island. I just hope this season doesn't get so bogged down in time travel machinations that it transforms potentially interesting characters into chess pieces. Last season redeemed the show by recalling my empathy for the core characters, but thus far this season I sense reversion to the tactic of mythology misdirection which feels like an artificial way to extend the series.


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This made me cry

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From Sports Guy's running diary of the Super Bowl:



9:26 -- Neil Rackers' PAT makes it 20-14 with 7:33 remaining. So long, Steelers' cover. In other news, congrats to Hulu for landing a Super Bowl ad. My baby's all growns up! My baby's all growns up! I love Hulu. Any video channel that streams complete "White Shadow" and "Miami Vice" episodes is good by me.



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Alec in Huluwood

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Hulu's first TV commercial, the first TV ad I've ever worked on, debuted on the Super Bowl tonight. It's the capper to what must be the most memorable weekend of my life. It feels like I've lived 7 days in this weekend, perhaps because I've gotten a total of 2.5 hours of sleep the whole time.


I'm going to go collapse now in the airport shuttle.







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Warren Buffett on the recession and stimulus package

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As William Goldman said about Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything."


The same is true of the economy and the current recession. As soon as anybody starts talking about how they'd solve our economic problems, I tune out, because honestly, who knows what will solve this?


Still, if there's anyone's opinion that holds any value on this topic, it's Warren Buffett's. Here are his thoughts on Obama and the recession:



Well I think if you think that he can turn things around in a month or three months or six months and there’s going to be some magical transformation since he took office on the 20th that can’t happen and wouldn’t happen. So you don’t want to get into Superman-type expectations. On the other hand, I don’t think there’s anybody better than you could have had; have in the presidency than Barack Obama at this time. He understands economics. He’s a very smart guy. He’s a cool rational-type thinker. He will work with the right kind of people. So you’ve got the right person in the operating room, but it doesn’t mean the patient is going to leave the hospital tomorrow.



When asked whether there should be a stimulus package and tax cuts, Buffett responded:



The answer is nobody knows. The economists don’t know. All you know is you throw everything at it and whether it’s more effective if you’re fighting a fire to be concentrating the water flow on this part or that part. You’re going to use every weapon you have in fighting it. And people, they do not know exactly what the effects are. Economists like to talk about it, but in the end they’ve been very, very wrong and most of them in recent years on this. We don’t know the perfect answers on it. What we do know is to stand by and do nothing is a terrible mistake or to follow Hoover-like policies would be a mistake and we don’t know how effective in the short run we don’t know how effective this will be and how quickly things will right themselves. We do know over time the American machine works wonderfully and it will work wonderfully again.



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Girls hoops team drups special school opponent 100-0

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A Texas girls high school basketball team drubbed an opposing team from a school, Dallas Academy, that specializes in students dealing with learning differences (e.g. dyslexia, dysgraphia). Dallas Academy only has 20 girls total in their school, and some of the eight on the team had never played hoops before.


The Covenant School won 100 to 0. Dallas Academy hasn't won in four seasons.



"I think the bad judgment was in the full-court press and the 3-point shots," said Renee Peloza, whose daughter plays for Dallas Academy. "At some point, they should have backed off."



The Covenant School has apologized and is looking to forfeit the victory now, while Dallas Academy has withdrawn its team from the league for the rest of the season.


What's to say here that most reasonable people wouldn't? Both the apology and withdrawal seem sensible.


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Animal Collective

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Finally got my hands on the new Animal Collective album Merriweather Post Pavilion. Critics have fallen all over themselves to praise it, and now that I've heard it, I can add my acclamation. This is an album that needs to be played loud.


The track that will hook you is "My Girls" and it's currently available at their MySpace page. Don your headphones and crank it up.


The vinyl is backordered already, and I'm anxiously awaiting my copy. What I'd really love is to hear them at Walt Disney Concert Hall, where I saw a similarly big-sounding Grizzly Bear last year.




Merriweather Post Pavilion


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