Wednesday, August 30, 2006

More random blogging


We’re leaving for a week on Martha’s Vineyard on Saturday, so no blogging for a week or so. (I’m sure you’ll miss me.) Anyway, before we head out, a few items that I found interesting and that may or may not be of interest to our readers:

1. Mark Kenny is married to my cousin Mary. Amongst his other accomplishments, Mark holds the world record for inverted stair walking (which means walking down stairs really fast on your hands). (No, I'm not joking. Here's the story--with a couple of pics--from CNN when he set the record in 1999.) Anyway, Mark has been nominated for a Relly award on the Regis and Kathy Lee--I mean Kelly--Show. If you happen to be siitting at your desk on Friday morning after 10 AM, please click here and vote for Mark. Mark's category is "Favorite Real Person-Male"--very pithy. (His competition is the Watermelon Smasher, the Chicken Clucker, Kid Stuck on a Tram, and the TV Watching Guy. Seriously.) And you might win a free trip to the show, if you're into that kind of thing.

2. I’ve been meaning to blog a bit about Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma since I finished it a few weeks ago, but haven't had time. It was a truly eye-opening experience. And it’s brillianty written. Highly recommended. In related news, courtesy of The Guardian, the most unethical things you could eat. (From the same author, some thoughts about what the most ethical meal on earth might look like. A bit much, I agree.)

3. Here's a good article on Slate about properly watering your garden.

4. I read Alan Moore's "V for Vendetta" a few weeks ago and we finally watched the film version--with the fetching Natalie Portman--last weekend. I enjoyed the movie--I gave it four stars on Netflix--but can understand why Moore was so pissed. (I'm assuming that Moore was upset with this particular movie rather than the existence of any movie based on his story.) It didn't entirely make sense in certain parts--for one, Evey's motive for macing the cop, and thus saving V, weren't clear to me--and I missed some of the subplots and details that were left out. I understand, of course, as an abstract matter, that you cannot make a movie based on a book without typically cutting things and making some changes to the story. However, some movies pull this off better than others. According to a scale of my own creation that is admitedly completely arbitrary and capricious, I would award "V for Vendetta" a B-. (For comparison's sake, I would award LA Confidential and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy both As. The dreadful "Bonfire of the Vanities" gets a D.) Discuss.

5. We haven't blogged about Bond in a while--not much occassion to until Casino Royale comes out--but Robert Farley of Lawyers, Guns, and Money has some interesting thoughts:
I'm sitting here watching Die Another Day on Spike, and thinking to myself that Brosnan-era Bond really failed to live up to its promise. Of the four films one is genuinely excellent (GoldenEye), one is a solid contribution (Die Another Day, with an outstanding first half and a terrible second half), and two are mediocre to poor. Brosnan was certainly a superior Bond to Dalton, but that's not saying much; it's hard to evaluate Dalton's films as part of the canon because they simply don't feel like James Bond films.

I would rate Moore's tenure marginally higher because of the quality of the first two films, although Roger appeared in some awful clunkers. In any case, the Brosnan era was characterized by exceptionally well crafted opening bits. The title sequences in GoldenEye and Die Another Day are probably the best in the franchise, although the mediocre Tina Turner song detracts from the former. There's nothing really surprising about this, given that so many directors today have gotten their starts in music videos, and that a Bond opening sequence is really just a video with some extra action thrown in.

I still don't know what to think about Daniel Craig.


Raphy makes about a good a case for Dalton as one can imagine--mainly in reference to his resemblence to the literary Bond--but I think I agree with Farley. There's something off about the Dalton movies. Discuss amongst yourselves.

6. From the always reliable Popbitch: "Consecotaleophobia = having the fear of chopsticks." Hmm. Learn something new every day.

See you in a week or so.

Posted by jwb at 4:11 PM   

2 Comments:

Blogger Bram said:

Re: 5 Again, I trot out The Bond Hypothesis. Dalton was underrated and underused, nothing against the rest of the guys.

You're both hitting the key point: the stories are just weak — trapped under the weight of their own history, unwilling to take any chances with the franchise.

Re: 6 Though it feels cinematic, V's a tough story to translate to the big screen. It's so episodic and relies so much on building small plot points. Saw it when it came out, and was pleased with some things that they kept, some things that they adapted well, but overall, underwhelmed. I think it's most telling that now, a few months later, I don't even remember what I liked and didn't.
at 9:06 PM     

Blogger Bram said:

Report on your recommendations from a while back.

The Furst section at the library is, as I mentioned earlier, much smaller than when I first found it. The only paperback available was The World at Night. Got Blind Man of Seville; also Tears of Autumn (was hoping for Old Boys which I remembered reading about; it, like The Omnivore's Dilemma, was out), but it got left behind because it's hardcover.

So how was The World at Night? Dark.* Moving from the idea of the anti-hero, we kind of have the non-hero. Just doing what he can (sometimes), and always just falling short. I think I appreciated it more than I liked it — it's just so well done that whether I enjoyed the story itself is practically immaterial.

The Blind Man of Seville was tough getting into. Enjoyable enough, but I'm not particularly a fan of the stories where the cop himself is kind of the subject of the crime. I think a lack of familiarity with Spainish history and culture were slowing me down, though I thought the whole novel was well put together.


* It could be argued I'm doing this entire post just to write that.
at 7:30 PM     

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