U2 -“No line on the horizon”
I had trouble downloading an iTunes TV show. To test the function, I needed to download some music. The new U2 was placed prominent on the virtual storefront. I bought it and was surprised how good it is. For a band that has been in this game for over 20 years, the new album feels fresh. The are a surprising number of good songs to listen to. These guys are serious to remain the last Megaband in the world.
A Feature that you don’t have in your car
Mr. Gibbs (Obama’s press secretary) said, the president was particularly impressed by the many phones inside the presidential limousine. “He thinks the coolest thing about this,” Mr. Gibbs said, “is that you can pick up the phone and say, ‘I need to reach so and so,’ and a minute later, the phone rings and they are on the line.”
The election killed my personal life!
I think Megan McCain was a good girl blogging from the campaign trail for her father to give the McCain campaign a youthful voice. But now it is time for her to grow up and hook up with a Marxist to spice things up a bit for a while. After all, has socialism arrived in America via Wall Street.
Looking for Mr. Far Right
by Meghan McCain
Somewhere in between college and the election, I started allowing politics to dictate the kind of men I date. And the worst part is, it’s not just Obama supporters who turn me off—it’s often my father’s.
The election killed my personal life.
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The Reader
The slim book on which the film is based is a wonderful read. Knowing the book makes the film much less exciting. The first hour feels very slow, particularly because book felt brisk. In the second hour the drama receives a jumpstart and you forget that you are sitting on perhaps a not so comfortable seat in the movie house. I read the book in one evening and savored the experience. After two hours watching The Reader I felt drained. A story nourished by the background of German society’s difficulty to come to terms with what Germans did between 1933 to 1945 was turned in the film into a story about how individual lives are messed up by experiences during childhood and youth. That story we have heard a million of times. Commercially the film benefitted from being made by Hollywood.
Slumdog Millionaire
Last time I looked, India had the second largest film industry in the world. Yet very seldom a Bollywood movie reaches the eyes of a western audience. The genius behind Slumdog Millionaire is to make Western filmmakers translate a Indian based-story into a western film format. In the process, a magnificent film has arrived on American shores that will be a strong contender for the Oscars. The film is a fairy tale for adults with great dramatic and romantic force. Its wonderful story gives you a glimpse of India—with all its contradictions—that most Americans and Europeans would have never seen. The film covers a 25-year period in the life of Jamal and his slightly older brother Salim who grow up in the slums and later are pulled apart because of differences in personalities and circumstances. Emotionally the first part of the film reminded me of Cinema Paradiso, the second part of teenage delinquency epics, and the final part of modern game show and reality-show culture. On top of it, a Romeo & Julia story holds the film together and makes it appealing for a mass audience. I did not know anything about the film before seeing it. I selected it over the new Clint Eastwood film Gran Torina simply because I wanted to see pictures of India. What a lucky choice: Slumdog Millionaire effortlessly made it onto my list of favorite films of all time.
Tarnation
In my junior or senior year I formulated this motto: I want to turn my life into a work of art. What I had in mind was something like this: Rather than turning out work that could be construed as art I wanted to make sure that my life as a whole was esthetically compelling. Given the gifts and option available to me, I wanted to mold my life into something could compete with what is widely considered a compelling work of art. Jonathan Caouette, in his stunning autobiographical documentary Tarnation, turns his life into a work of spectacular art. But watching the film I realized that when I hatched my plan I conceived it as way to live forward. Caouette looks backward at age 30 and tries to make sense of his strange family life by construction an autobiography using only photos, super 8, answering machine messages, and video snippets that he collected since he was eleven years old.
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Frost-Nixon: The TV Interview
Even if you have already seen the 1976 film All the President’s Men with Dustin Hofmann and Robert Redford playing the two Washington Post journalists (Woodward and Berstein) who exposed the Watergate scandal or the 1994 BBC documentary Watergate: Third Rate Burglary, this 1977 interview of a British journalist with Richard Nixon about Watergate is a fascinating 75-minute documentary. Initially, Nixon’s arguments that he did not commit a criminal act reminded me of Bill Clinton’s parsing of language when he was asked in a courtroom whether he had sex with Monica Lewinsky. But later in the interview Frost pushes Nixon into the corner where Nixon let’s down his guard and makes some amazing declarations.
New Euro Language
The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as ‘Euro-English’.
In the first year, ‘s’ will replace the soft ‘c’. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard ‘c’ will be dropped in favour of ‘k’. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome ‘ph’ will be replaced with ‘f’. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 2nd and 3rd years , publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where! more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent ‘e’ in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing ‘th’ with ‘z’ and ‘w’ with ‘v’.
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary ‘o’ kan be dropd from vords kontaining ‘ou’ and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey fuking vunted in ze forst plas.
Continue ReadingDoubt
A psychologically pleasing story offers you some resolution at the end. John Patrick Shanley, the writer and director of Doubt, denies you this pleasure. He errs on the side of wanting to teach you too much. He wants you to be in doubt at the end of the film and this means never revealing what really happened. The film takes place in a catholic school in the Bronx in the 1960s. The head nun (Meryl Streep) suspects that the school’s priest (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is abusing his position of power. She harbors no doubt and uses all her political skill to get the priest to resign. In the end, after the priest is gone, she admits to her confidant that she is in doubt but we never find out if the priest did anything wrong. If you are someone who already knows that we never can be absolutely sure, the movie will not give you much.
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