Posts by matt

If you’d written off the movie Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow after seeing the trailer, dust off your interest and read this preview, from the NYT Magazine. Not only does the movie sound excellent, the article’s a blast, too:

For [Kerry Conran, creator of Sky Captain], the question, as he put it, was ”Could you be ambitious and make a film of some scope without ever leaving your room?” And so 10 years ago, Kerry Conran went into a room in his apartment to make a movie. In some ways, he is just now beginning to come out of it.

At first, he was a mystery. Word of ”Sky Captain” began to spread around the Internet only after Conran finished primary shooting in London last spring — extraordinarily late for the Internet, which often seems invented specifically to track movies with giant robots in them. Even then, no one knew who Kerry Conran was. Google couldn’t touch him. He was so undocumented in the world of Hollywood that I briefly wondered, when I began pursuing him, if perhaps he was just a front for his producer and partner and mentor Jon Avnet, who is well known for producing ”Risky Business” and directing ”Fried Green Tomatoes” but who is not so well known for retro-science-fiction summertime blockbusters, and who unlike Conran seems to have been photographed at least once in his life. I don’t think Conran would mind that I doubted his existence. In fact, for a long time, that was the plan.

Conran created the entire universe of the movie using computers. I mean, I guess it’s not that rare in the age of Pixar, but the live actors involved (including Gwyneth, Jude, and Angelina) worked in front of blue screens the entire time. That seems big, somehow.

They can do anything here. When one of Paltrow’s arms was cut out from a shot, they copied the other one, flipped it and pasted it back in. Since all the lighting was being done on the computer, they could paint the frame with light and noirish shadows, erase it all and then start again.

We forget sometimes what a ridiculously amazing speaker Bill Clinton could be. If the man didn’t have so many serious character flaws, despite the fact that his Presidency’s successes, whatever they were, have been mostly frittered away and his failures amplified, I’d seriously consider handing the dictator-for-life baton over, just on the strength of his speeches. No other politician can do that to me. I hate it when politicians speak. Their words are so cheap. But his are so wonderful. Bleh. Just read the incredible speech. (Via MY.)

Salon is opening up a new bureau in Washington, D.C., under the direction of Sidney Blumenthal:

“The country wants and needs unintimidated news,” says Blumenthal. “The Bush administration has put enormous political pressure on the press not to probe its radical policies and their consequences. Salon intends to be fearless.” Under Blumenthal’s leadership, Salon’s new Washington bureau will produce a flow of revealing stories about the Bush administration and the election.

How are they planning to penetrate the famously secretive White House? I mean, come on, this is Salon. It’s being run by the former press secretary of Bill Clinton. And they’ve clearly stated their intention to air President Bush’s dirty laundry. Any “senior administration official” caught talking to them will be disembowled, lightly seasoned, and fed to Karl Rove for brunch.

Maybe they’re hoping to find more people like this former Pentagonian.* Maybe Sidney Blumenthal will discover what Dana Milbank could not. At any rate, they must think they’re going to get something. I’m interested.

Also — dude. A new Salon bureau? But isn’t Salon dead?

Maybe I’ll fire off an e-mail to my buddy Sid and get to the bottom of it.

Read more…

The old Lingua Franca is dead. Long live the new Lingua Franca. The two have nothing to do with each other, to be sure. The old Lingua Franca was a magazine about academia. The new LF is an Australian radio show about language, and it’s phenomenal. To wit, a defense of the art of euphemism:

As you mature and leave behind childish things, it’s important to learn how not to say what you mean. For a start, saying what you mean presupposes that you actually know what you mean (increasingly unlikely as you grow older, particularly when you reach your ‘golden years’ as we all say). Apart from that, it’s quite simply dangerous. As any ape knows, sending a clear signal about what you mean can get you killed in no time at all. Not having language, apes groom each other instead as a way of saying, ‘I’m on your side, I think you’re wonderful; here, let me just get that tick out of your hair, and you know, if there’s the odd baboon cutlet going around when you’ve finished eating, do toss it my way, if it’s not too much trouble.’ If you’re very, very nice to an alpha male chimpanzee, he might even let you fondle his scrotum.

Not all the episodes have full transcripts or recordings, but many do. Do go and have a look around the site.

I’m grooving on these frequent, article-length, well-reported Campaign Desk articles. This one’s particularly interesting.

Political blogs are mostly written by men, it turns out. While this is hardly news to me, it’s odd how rarely I’ve stopped to think about it. Tara McKelvey and Garance Frank-Ruta represent over at TAPPED, but otherwise, I don’t read any female political bloggers on a regular basis. So now I just feel vaguely unsettled. Besides Wonkette!, where are the female-written political blogs?

Note that despite women’s absence from the political blogosphere, even in the Campaign Desk article Kathleen Hall Jamieson continues her unchallenged hegemony over the realm of Random Sources, commenting on everything from women’s thoughts on the rodeo to the impact of talk radio.

How can you not love the Beeb?

Any interest in hearing Ravi Shankar speak? How about Andy Warhol? Gandhi? Nabokov? Woolf? Yeats?

Take your pick.

(Via E-Media Tidbits.)

Wow. Johnny Depp as Jesus. That’s brilliant!! I already feel ministered to.

Who else would make a good Jesus?

• Viggo Mortensen … I mean, he basically just played Jesus three times already, right?
• Sean Penn … This would be interesting. Crazy psycho supermasculine Jesus with an astonishing soft side.
• Julianne Moore … She can play anything.

The strangest book review appears in The Washington Post for Jayson Blair’s new book, Burning Down My Master’s House. Maybe one-fourth of it actually reviews the book, half of it is nanny-nanny-boo-boo WaPo vs. NYT one-upsmanship, and another fourth is a pretty unenlightening psychoanalysis of Jayson Blair.

The review starts with a shot of bitter scorn at the NYT — “Newspapers and television stations across the nation follow its lead,” the author writes. “This state of affairs, in a nation that sees itself as the capital of free markets, is appalling, but it is the reality of the news business.” Later in that paragraph, the author says, “We shouldn’t dismiss [Blair’s] allegations just because the people currently running The New York Times tell us to (as they recently did in a news article on their own pages).” Their own pages!!

The very next sentence pats the WaPo on the back for breaking the Jayson Blair story. And I mean, that clearly had to come at some point in this story, but it seems like a bit of a cheap shot right here. The rest of the review is spent making the case on the one hand for trusting Jayson Blair’s words whenever he casts the NYT in the worst possible light, and on the other hand for not trusting Jayson Blair’s words at all when it comes to his account of his feelings and motivations.

Maybe the weirdest part is that this book review has gotten probably the most play any review ever will on the WaPo website. I understand there’s a rivalry here, but is it supposed to be this obvious?

From The New Yorker, here’s a “pro-family” argument I can get behind.

Have you, like me, been baffled by the constant references to John Edwards as “Breck girl”? It’s probably something from before my time. Anyway, these are the Breck girls: