Well that was weird. I was just typing something when the screen went blank and an message saying my computer had been locked popped up. I didn’t actually do anything to cause the lock-down, and I have my own password to log back in, but I’m going to take this as a sign that I should not be here after five on a Friday evening. Now if my boss would just get off the phone…
Day: April 2, 2004
As any casual reader of my short film reviews can probably tell, I like Roger Ebert. I don’t always agree with his reviews, but they’re usually intelligent, and I can usually understand why I disagree with him. Which is really apropos of nothing except that I read his reviews every week (well, some of them). And sometimes I find something in them that I like. Like for instance:
From his review of “The Ladykillers”:
“The little old lady is named Marva Munson, and she is played by Irma P. Hall in the one completely successful comic performance in the movie. Yes, she’s a caricature, too…[b]ut her character is exaggerated from a recognizable human base, while the others are comic strip oddities.”
From his review of “Walking Tall”:
“The role is played by Johnny Knoxville, famous for ‘Jackass,’ who is, in fact, completely convincing and probably has a legitimate movie career ahead of him and doesn’t have to stuff his underpants with dead chickens and hang upside down over alligator ponds any more.”
Of course, this last bit fails to take into account something that even I, who have seen maybe only half a minute of “Jackass”, could tell you: Johnny Knoxville probalby likes stuffing his underpants with dead chickens and hanging upside down over alligator ponds. As A. O. Scott wrote in his review of “Jackass: the Movie”, Knoxville’s exploits “suggest that this small tribe of young white men is motivated by extreme boredom and a playful, quasi-erotic sadomasochistic camaraderie.” But that, I suppose, is neither here nor there.
Can you tell yet that I’m bored?
You know, it seems pretty simple to me: either Condoleeza Rice is lying about all the briefings she says she didn’t receive or the terrorism information she says she didn’t have — or she really didn’t have this information, in which case she’s not a very good National Security Advisor. Because plenty of other people apparently had this information, including the Clinton administration, Richard Clarke, and some of Rice’s own deputies. It seems like it’s just a question of deception or incompetence, although it’s possible it’s a mixture of both.