I haven't seen any of the movies, but I'm DVR-ing the show and will dip in from time to time. You can talk about it here and I might say something now and then.
AllenS: Jenn Sterger (the woman) was hired because of some sexy pictures of her in Sports Illustrated mag, that Brent Musberger thought would be a good matchup for the male dominated football sports sceen. Jenn and Brent are just as much at fault here. I'm thinking of sending the woman a picture of my penis also. Could I borrow the fish bowl lens?...
Meade: It's a fish eye lens. Fish eye. It's for taking shots of massive objects or scenes which a normal lens can't take all in. A fish bowl lens would be for taking shots of tiny things. Like Brett Favre's... ability to make good judgments.
AllenS: Ok, ok. Can I borrow the lens that makes stuff look bigger?
But, in fact, the fisheye works really well to make something look large if you get the camera lens right up at it. Lots of other stuff is including in the picture, arrayed all around and looking comparatively small. Frankly — and this is not an offer to AllenS — it would be really interesting to take pictures of naked men and get the extreme closeup on the genitalia with a well-composed and interesting background. I went looking through my old posts with the "fisheye" tag to find some that prove my point.
The second picture here of the fisheye dog makes this point very well. Get right up to the nose. The scenery in the background isn't as interesting as I'd want for my proposed compositions, but you can see how tiny Meade looks in the background (when in fact he was quite close by). Here's another photograph that illustrates the point, albeit with the female body:
That's from the Khmer Dynasty room at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. Here's the effect of the lens looking at the room from the other side:
Here's some male and female nudity, to be fair:
That's the Museum of Natural History — not Brett and Jenn. You may recognize that couple from the movie "Election" — which is a great cautionary tale about the inadvisability of cheating on... many things (including your spouse).
And then — searching through the fisheye pictures — I found something that was extremely important to me: the purple tree, which had this.
Here's the CNN home page a 11:46 p.m. EST, on the day that Congress repealed the odious old Clinton-era legislation:
So, a woman has a baby. That's the main thing. Secondarily, there's North Korea. And "Dont miss" the fact that C.S. Lewis is still popular, there's a lot of Christmas trash, and geeks are "cooler than nerds." In the fine print, the DADT repeal is listed under "Latest news," after a "moderate" earthquake in Indonesia and before the fact that it's been cold in Europe.
1. There were several points in this movie where, if I didn't know it was a true story, I would have turned it off. It's incredibly melodramatic. But if it's true, it's not incredible. It's credible.
2. I loathe movies about children in danger, both because I don't enjoy seeing children suffer and because I don't want to watch an actress ham it up pretending to be a mother who is agonizing over her suffering child. But I shielded myself from knowing what the story was going to be because I was told — by my son Chris — that the movie contained the greatest acting performance of the last decade and once I decide I will see a movie, I avoid reading anything about the plot.
3. I'd never seen an Angelina Jolie movie before. Looking at the list of movies she's made, I can see why. Although she seems like the biggest movie star in the world, she hasn't made many movies, and they aren't very good. She's done genres that I don't much follow (anymore). For example, she did one of the voices in "Kung Fu Panda." When I think of "Kung Fu Panda," I think of the Joshua Ferris short story "The Dinner Party":
“They just got their dates wrong, is all,” he said, “and tomorrow, when they call, they’ll tell you how sorry they are. They had to turn their phones off during the late showing of ‘Kung Fu Panda’ or something.”
“So they went to see ‘Kung Fu Panda’ tonight,” she said.
“Or something like it.”
“And they turned their phones off so they wouldn’t ring during ‘Kung Fu Panda.’ ”
“Or,” he said. “Or.” He put his finger up. They were standing near the bedroom doorway. There was dim light coming from the dark room and he was suddenly irrationally afraid, as he had been as a child, that if anyone stepped inside, if she stepped inside, she would plummet to the center of the earth. He lowered his finger. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think they went to see ‘Kung Fu Panda.’ ”
One wouldn't see "Kung Fu Panda."
4. Jolie emotes. That's for sure. It's what's called for and she does it. She goes all out and does it. She's the female Jack Nicholson. And this movie has a good dose of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" in it. Now, take your medication. Or we'll give you an electroshock treatment. "Changeling" also made me think about another great Jack Nicholson movie, "Chinatown." Lots of L.A., lots of corruption.
5. Did Jolie out-act Kate Winslet? Winslet won the Oscar that year — for "The Reader." "The Reader" is also a melodrama, but it presents itself in less of a melodramatic style. Although "The Reader" is set in the Holocaust, the character is fictional, and her story is presented in a more dignified Oscar-worthy vehicle.
6. Quite oddly, there is a scene in "Changeling" in which the main character is listening to the Oscars presentation on the radio and rooting for her favorite movie to win. The movie is "It Happened One Night," and Jolie's character expresses her fondness for Claudette Colbert, who won an Oscar for her role. "It Happened One Night" swept the top 5 categories at the Oscars, and it wasn't until "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" that another movie swept the Oscars. I wondered what Clint Eastwood thought he was saying to the Academy by putting that Oscars scene in "Changeling." I don't think he was kissing their ass trying to get Oscars. Maybe it was a way to say Oscars are amusement for the people and they don't really matter to me anymore. But it would be pretty funny for Jolie to win an Oscar for a role where we'd have a clip of her in character getting excited about an Oscar win. It would be cute. Maybe she got some votes from Academy members who liked that.
7. Like "The Reader," "Changeling" has a scene that depicts
a hanging and uses a closeup of the hanged person's dangling feet — or is it just the shoes on the floor in "The Reader"? I forget.
(Mouse over Highlight to reveal spoiler.)(I think that's the first time I've used HTML that way.)
8. If you like red lipstick, this is the ultimate red lipstick movie. You've got, first of all, Angelina Jolie's famous, immense lips, and then you've got red red lipstick — of the historically accurate matte texture. And it looks like it was put on amateurishly by the character.
9. You like cloche hats? You will see cloche hats. Angelina Jolie's character seems to require a cloche hat — and gloves. (I couldn't figure out how she avoided getting red lipstick all over her gloves.) This is the ultimate cloche hat movie. What does the cloche hat mean? It speaks of the character's vulnerability and need for armor, which makes it
especially painful for us to see her without its protection when she's thrown into the psycho hospital.
11. Jolie calls Clint Eastwood "very much the ideal man":
Maybe it's generational, but I think we could use more of it. People look up to him. He is absolutely who he is. He doesn't apologize to anybody. He has very, very strong, decisive opinions and is very gracious as a man, as a friend and somebody on set as a director, too.
She tags on the wifely niceness — "Brad knows that he's my ideal man" — but, reading that, I hear the emphasis on "my." Brad may be her ideal man, but Eastwood is the ideal man.
Oh! I went to 11. I thought it would be hard to get to 10. Ha. I guess I enjoyed that movie. Maybe I'll watch it again with somebody who hasn't seen it before. Back in the 80s, we used to love showing "The Terminator" to people who hadn't seen it yet. All the surprises would be new again. Last week, I was flipping channels and came to rest on "From Dusk to Dawn," which had just started. I'd seen it before, but Meade hadn't. Great vicarious fun for me.
If you've seen "Avatar," please comment on whether the 3-D effects are working properly for you. I haven't seen it, but my 26-year-old son Chris has seen it (in the IMAX version). He iChats:
just trying to look at the 3d and get it to look right was pretty much the entire experience of it...
it never reaches the point of looking like reality, and looks less real than 2d...
the main thing is, nothing in the extreme foreground ever looked in focus...
the only way things ever looked like they popped out of the screen would be if i focused on something that seemed to be in the middle ground, and things could pop out that i wasn't looking directly at...
i don't think 3d ever looks like the true 3-dimensions of the real world, i think at best it looks like a very big hologram...
The 55 mice used in the University of South Florida study had been bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease....
When the mice were tested again after two months, those who were given the caffeine performed much better on tests measuring their memory and thinking skills and performed as well as mice of the same age without dementia.
Those drinking plain water continued to do poorly on the tests.
I am part of Warner Bros PR and I am reaching to leading blogs like yours in hopes of gaining your support for a some really powerful and empowering new series on our sister company’s network TNT.
Hmm... yeah? Empowering?
We are thrilled to announce the season premiere of SAVING GRACE with HOLLY HUNTER and the all-new medical drama HAWTHORNE with JADA PINKETT SMITH.
So by empowering, you mean, women? Presumably, because I'm a woman and I have a blog, my blog is empowering. I suppose if I eat a sandwich, it empowers me. Is this supposed to boost my self-esteem? Because it doesn't. The implication is that I'm not operating at full speed and needed some outside source of power.
In yesterday's post about Adam Lambert, Christopher Althouse Cohen wrote:
Well, he certainly played the gay card well. He didn't acknowledge it but put out plenty of hints on YouTube prior to the show, refused to answer questions about his sexuality after the show was over just long enough to be "in the closet" and therefore able to stage a big coming out thing, used coming out as a way to get the best magazine cover you could possibly get, and somehow managed to negotiate a deal where that very magazine cover would make no mention of his coming out in the article and would appear to just be about how "wild" he is as a performer. On the show, he got all the credit for being out without having to deal with any of the consequences, and now he gets the big cover but gets the appearance of it not being about his coming out. He is quite media savvy and played the game for maximum attention.
Oh, I do like that he acknowledges in the article that he's fat. Bad skin isn't quite as much of a revelation, and people can forgive bad skin, but people act like he's hot when he's quite out of shape and can't possibly look good naked. But props to him for admitting it.
Some people act "outraged" that he changed Johnny Cash's version. Well, I can't remember any other time someone acted like it was disrespectful to the original artist for an AI contestant to do a drastically reworked version of a song in a totally different style than the original. David Cook's Billie Jean performance was praised. Jennifer Hudson did a gospel version of Imagine and no one said anything. People may have not liked Kristy Lee Cook's country version of Eight Days A Week, but no one acted like she disrespected The Beatles. So why the fuss about this one? Perhaps because he's homosexualizing a country song by a masculine country star. Is it the cultural clash between the traditional South and a flamboyantly gay singer that people find so jarring? It might be. If the same people saw a video of Jeff Buckley (who was presumably heterosexual) doing the same version of Ring of Fire, would they be so shocked by it?
She was just sworn in as Secretary of State. Transcribed by my son Chris — who loves Hillary. He opines that the audience must have thought of Monica Lewinsky and adds "Bill looked red, but he always looks red."
She also said this about Biden: "As Joe laughingly referenced, neither one of us thought that we would be standing here together doing what we are now doing together. Life has a funny way of unfolding and politics is even stranger."
