Friday, January 26, 2007

The 50 Most Loathsome People in America 2006

In the early days of jwbblog, I blogged about last year's version of this list. This year's is pretty good too. My favorite is # 16: You. "You're Time magazine's person of the year. So was Hitler."

And I should say that, while I used to be an admirer of Senator McCains, given all his rather shameless (and, it's clear, pointless) sucking up to the President and the Religious Right over the last several years, I think he well deserves his status as the most loathsome person in America.

Posted by jwb at 2:29 PM  · 1 Comments   

Thursday, January 25, 2007

Wanted--really big eggs


Shannon's latest creation is a very cool eight-foot tall eggbeater made out of plywood. See here for more pics of the same show.

Posted by jwb at 11:09 AM  · 0 Comments   

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

She bangs, she bangs

So we went to this very nice event on Saturday evening to raise money for Big Brothers/Big Sisters here in Boston and its environs and you'll never guess who has there. You'll really never guess in a million years (unless you click on that link).

OK, it was Hall and Oates and the Bangles. Yeah, I'm not kidding. Hall and Oates and the Bangles. Hall and Oates was/were great. They played for a surprisingly long time. I should say that Oates is looking a little rough around the edges and might want to consider investing in some moisturizer.
















The biggest surprise of the night was that Susanna Hoffs--who was born in 1959, which, by my calculations, makes her--Holy crap!--47 years old--is still quite fetching. We had to cut out at midnight to go home and see our cute puppy, so we missed most of the Bangles' set. But, as I said, the big takeaways from the night were (1) giving money to charity is a good thing and (2) Susanna Hoffs--still hot.

Posted by jwb at 2:40 PM  · 0 Comments   

Friday, January 19, 2007

Mini-seduction kit, check

Sorry for the lack of posting of late. Things have been kind of nuts. Our next-door neighbor's house burned down last week--not joking, alas--and, after dealing with all the drama (for lack of a better word) from that, we spent a few days over the weekend in Longboat Key, Florida, where the temperature was a balmy 80 degrees, with the lovely and handsome Nick and Amy. When we flew in to not-so-balmy Boston on Tuesday, I almost turned around and got back on the plane--it was 22 degrees. Yikes!

Anyway, here's a photograph of the Gulf of Mexico taken from Nick's dad's boat, Byelaw (which is funny--though not really that funny, actually--if you know that Nick's dad is an overworked Chicago lawyer).


Here is a picture of me driving the boat. (I kid, of course, We all would have died in a firey boat crash if it wasn't for Nick. Apparently, they teach you to drive boats in the Navy. Go figure.)


For no particular reason, here is a picture of Buzzy, who ought to go into the picture business--he's so cute.


In other news, it seems that academia--well, French academia--is now on to the whole James Bond thing. The results, as you might expect, are not pretty.

Posted by jwb at 4:00 PM  · 2 Comments   

Tuesday, January 09, 2007

Amis


It looks like Martin Amis's new novel is out--I previously discussed it here--though the slackers at Amazon haven't sent me my copy yet. So I open the Times this morning and a shiver runs down my spine, and not only because it's about negative 12 degrees here. (I'm exagerating a little here--artisitic license, etc.--but, seriously, it must be 50 degrees colder than it was on Saturday. WTF?) Anyway, Michiko Kakutani is reviewing Amis--this cannot be good. She hates everything. She shredded the new Pynchon--which is brilliant--into a heap of ribbons.

Quell surprise! She loves it.

After his embarrassing 2003 novel, “Yellow Dog” — a book that read like a parody of a Martin Amis novel, featuring gratuitous wordplay and a willfully perverse fascination with the seamy side of modern life — the author has produced what is arguably his most powerful book yet: a novel that subjugates his penchant for postmodern pyrotechnics to the demands of the story at hand, a novel that takes all the knowledge he accumulated in the course of researching “Koba” and transforms it, imaginatively, into the deeply moving story of two brothers who were interned at a slave labor camp in the arctic wastes of the Soviet Union. It is a story about fraternal love and resentment, but more important, it is a story about the emotional consequences of survival, about the connection between public and private betrayals and the human costs of a totalitarian state’s policies of internment.


I agree with most of this. She's right about "Yellow Dog." It was appallingly bad. However, I rather liked "Koba" more than the rest of the world, mainly because some twisted part of my soul enjoys reading about totalitarianism. But then tastes will differ, no?

Posted by jwb at 8:30 AM  · 0 Comments   

Tragicistan

I'd like to briefly note that Momofuku Ando, the inventor of ramen noodles, has moved on to greener pastures. The guy deserved a Nobel Prize. I would have starved to death in my early twenties without ramen noodles.

Posted by jwb at 5:51 AM  · 0 Comments   

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Global warming is a hoax

Yeah, right. It's 72 degrees here in Boston today. WTF?

Posted by jwb at 10:05 AM  · 0 Comments   

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

Shannon is having a show II


Shannon and her fellow collectivists (she's in an artists' collective--get it? I just slay myself sometimes.) are having a show. If you happen to find yourself in Rochester, Michigan, between January 13 and February 25, check it out. Click here if you'd like more info.

Posted by jwb at 10:40 AM  · 0 Comments   

Tuesday, January 02, 2007

Another Casino Royale Post


Yes, we finally saw it--—on Saturday night. And I guess my overall reaction is that it was, to borrow a phrase from Jeff Spicoli, "totally awesome." I have to admit that it was a tad long (though I never glanced at my watch), but I loved it and just about everything about it. Dave of Dave's Long Box ranked it second amongst all the Bond movies and that seems about right to me. (More on Dave's rankings of the Bond movies later.) The story was great. The actors aquitted themselves with distinction. Just enough cool cars and hot chicks for most Bond geeks. The fight scenes are less cartoonish and more (for lack of a better word) realistic than in some of the other movies. (They're realistic, I suppose, in the same way the Bourne movies are--which is not very, but very cool.)

I also like the fact that they eschewed most of the campy elements (e.g., the gadgets, the sinister pussy cats, etc.) that Mike Myers skewered so effectively in the Austin Powers movies. They seem to be aiming for a Bond that's more faithful to the books--—dark, cold-blooded with a soupcon of humanity.

Daniel Craig is amazing and, unless they screw it up in future movies, will probably rank as the second best Bond after Connery. Unlike many Bond geeks, I was never especially worried about his suitability for the role (he'’s great in Layer Cake, which is Bondian in parts but, of course, not Bond), but he came ready to play.

The very hot Eva Green is also great as Vesper. It's regrettable that they killed her off, but I suppose Bond can't have a gilfriend (much less a wife) and, I assume, he'll be plenty pissed off at the beginning of the next one. I also quite like Mads Mikkelson's Le Chiffre, though he perhaps wasn't quite megalomaniacal enough to be a continuing presence in the series (like, say, Blofeld, who lasted through six--—or seven, if we count Never Say Never Again, the remake of Thunderball with geezer Connery--of the movies). I trust they'll give the great actor Jeffrey Wright more to do as Felix in the next movie. I had some doubts about Judy Dench as M in the Brosnan movies, but really liked her here.

I have a few small nits to pick, but I'’ll leave those for another day. Overall, two thumbs way, way, way up. Can't wait for Bond 22.

Posted by jwb at 6:05 PM  · 2 Comments   

Movies


Twas a big weekend for movies here at jwbblog. I’ll comment on Saturday night’s activities in a separate post—though they were big, and I mean really BIG.

On Friday night, we watched The Black Dahlia. I’ve commented on this movie elsewhere several times. If you recall those earlier posts, you won’t be surprised that I was expecting it to be horrendous. Well, while I wouldn’t say it was a truly good movie, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit. If memory serves, the major reviewers slammed Hartnett. However, I thought he was pretty good and put in easily the best performance among the three leads—Hartnett, Aaron Eckhart, and Scarjo. I’ve really liked Scarjo in some other movies—Lost in Translation and Match Point among them—but she was awful. Perhaps having seen her so much on the gossip blogs, I didn't buy her in a non-contemporary role. More generally, she just seemed way out of her depth. (She also had absolutely no chemistry with Hartnett, which seems odd since I gather that they’re shagging in real life.) I also like Eckhart—he’s great in Thank You for Smoking—but he wasn’t convincing as Lee Blanchard. Blanchard’s most distinctive trait is what we might call an anger management problem; and I can see why Eckhart might have looked good on paper. But I chuckled more than once when Eckhart was stomping around. He just didn’t do it for me. Hillary Swank is good as Madeline. So I’d give it a thumb slightly up. Not exactly good but worth renting.

(A brief word about Ellroy: If I didn’t know better, I’d think that he would be very disappointed. However, having seen him talk about his work several times, I know that he thinks Hollywood is a cesspool and the fact that one brilliant interpretation of his work—that would be Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential—managed to survive the system is more than most writers can hope for.)

On Monday night, we watched The Devil Wears Prada and it’s great—hilariously funny in parts. Go rent it now. Meryl Streep is brilliant—dry as dust as a lightly fictionalized version of Anna Wintour of Vogue. She deserves an Oscar nomination, if not an Oscar. Anne Hathaway is also really good in the lead. Two thumbs up.

While I’m on the topic, I bought Jenn a copy of Talladega Nights to celebrate the war on Christmas—she loves Will Ferrell (as do I). To be honest, I was kind of disappointed. It had some funny moments but my overall response was, “Eh.” It was also surprisingly dark in spots. I didn’t find the storyline about the relationship with his father funny at all—though I was raised by wolves, so perhaps I’m a little sensitive about these things.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Any movie suggestions, dear readers?

Posted by jwb at 5:00 PM  · 1 Comments