- Instead of cutting Oscar winners’ speeches (and thereby any hope for spontaneity the whole ceremony might have), maybe they should start with some of the endless montages and interpretive dance numbers. Why not, instead of cutting the part that’s ostensibly what they whole evening is about, stop doubling the number of films being nominated?
- How to Succeed as an Ayn Rand Character
- Please Rob Me. As Waxy.org noted, this is “only dangerous if someone knows where you live” (or if they can extrapolate from other online information about you). But I know I’m a little hesitant to post that I’m away when the house is unattended.
- School used student laptop webcams to spy on them at school and home. Yikes! [via]
- And finally, A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything. [via]
movies
Wednesday various
- I think I’m going to make a movie called Vaguely Historical People Killing Things and Shouting at Each Other.
- You know, Jeff VanderMeer is probably right: “in another 40 years lots of folks are gonna be laughing at lots of stuff we think works just fine now.”
- John Seavey makes the argument that Heroes is actually the best Watchmen adaptation ever. Yeah, I’m just not seeing it.
- “French celebrity philosopher” (how’s that for a title!) Bernard-Henri Lévy has come under fire recently for quoting a philosopher who never existed. [via]
- And finally, I didn’t watch this year’s Super Bowl, not even for the ads nor the stirring triumph of the New Orleans Saints. So I luckily missed this Dodge advertisement, though I got a general vibe from the internets that there was sexism aplenty that evening. The internets, they did not lie. So it’s nice to see someone parody the ad so skillfully, simply by reversing the genders.
Tuesday various
- An inspiring profile of Roger Ebert and his struggles with losing his voice (and food, drink, strength) to cancer and how his life has changed since then. [via]
- Apparently, we were once this close to Israeli President Albert Einstein.
- Oh man, why did no one tell me yesterday was International Grover Appreciation Day?
- I think there’s an argument to be made that new and valuable art can emerge from appropriation, but wholesale lifting of entire pages without acknowledgment is still plagiarism and, therefore, still wrong. That much seems pretty clear-cut to me. [via]
- And finally, if I’d know this was what the Olympics was like — “Try to imagine Pegasus mating with a unicorn and the creature that they birth….I somehow tame it and ride it into the sky in the clouds and sunshine and rainbows. That’s what it feels like.” — I’d have been watching from the beginning.
President’s Day
I was home today for the holiday, which basically just made it nice extended weekend. I worked on a couple of small projects, including (unexpectedly) a short piece of fiction I’ve had brewing recently. As I noted on Twitter recently, I think the character I’m writing about is some kind of strange Britney Spears/Hillary Duff/Scarlett Johansson amalgam. I’m not yet convinced whether that’s a good thing or not, but I nice it’s an amusing enough little piece so far. We’ll see where it goes.
Meanwhile, I tried and failed to watch Goodbye, Mr. Chips this afternoon. I’m a big fan of Peter O’Toole — Lawrence of Arabia is one of my favorite movies — but the movie really just wasn’t working for me. I may give it another shot, but I think more likely I’m going to return it to Netflix, having watched less than an hour of the film. I really have to agree with Roger Ebert, who wrote, “there’s not a really first-rate song in the show.” (And he gave it four stars!)
Anyway, it’s back to work tomorrow, so now I’m off to bed. Goodnight!
Tuesday various
- The headline reads, Vegetative state patients can respond to questions. This seems significantly more scientific than some other recent stories in this area. [via]
- All I can really say to this argument — and to James Cameron’s own insistence that his actors were snubbed in the Oscar nominations — is that hey, if you want sci-fi films to be nominated more often, make better sci-fi films. Avatar an important movie (and so are Up and District 9 to some extent), but Avatar is not a particularly good movie. That’s just my opinion, but I think it’s a defensible opinion and one easily shared by members of the Academy. Maybe these movies aren’t being snubbed out of some lingering genre bias; maybe they’re just genuinely not as good.
There’s maybe some bias against computer-assisted performances like you’ll find in Avatar, but as Mark Evanier writes:
There may be a solid argument that in Avatar, Sigourney Weaver is “acting” her role just as certainly as she acts any roles she plays. But you can’t argue that when we see her performance, we’re only looking at the work of Ms. Weaver with the guidance of Mr. Cameron. There are a lot of other people making that character like that…enough to make it feel inappropriate for an award that honors individual achievement. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong. But I think that’s how it is.
- Word to the wise: don’t look at porn while at work. And definitely don’t look at porn while your office computer is on live television. [via]
- I have to say, I really loved this Previously On Lost 2: Lost In Five Minutes video. Huge props for actually covering all the big moments of the past five years — though also huge spoilers if you’ve never seen the show. [via]
- And finally, speaking of Lost, Todd VanDerWerff (who might just be my favorite television critic at the moment) explains why, while it’s okay for a show to have a plan, it’s usually better for them to work around it:
Could you plan out a TV show to the extent that some Lost fans seem to want the series to be planned out? As a matter of fact, you could, but it almost always ends up being a lesser series. Look, for example, at ABC’s big Lost replacement hopeful FlashForward, now off the air until March in hopes that absence will make viewers’ hearts grow fonder. The series’ creators—David S. Goyer and Brannon Braga—entered the series with a hard and fast plan for where all of the plot points would lead and for where all of the characters would go. This was one of the things that made the show so attractive to networks, who’d been burned by serials that often seemed to have no idea where they were going before. In practice, though, it’s been woefully terrible. The plot, confined by the fact that it knows exactly where it’s going and what all of the characters are going to do, can’t make any of the organic evolutions that any TV series needs to make to be successful. Everyone’s trapped and hemmed in by a plan that has no wiggle room. (A similar thing happened to the vaunted ’90s sci-fi series Babylon 5, though unplanned and uncontrollable events there forced enough of a sense of organic evolution onto that series that it had a little breathing room.)