A simple handwave that makes The Matrix tolerable for the scientifically literate

Suppose that controlled fusion power requires real-time control computations which can be much more efficiently implemented in neurological hardware than in silicon.

(That Second Law of Thermodynamics thing was bothering the hell out of you, wasn't it?)

Note that neurological hardware really is exceptionally power-efficient for certain classes of computations. Common estimates of the human brain's power consumption are 20-25 watts; this is roughly the wattage of a Mobile Intel Core i5 processor, which (as far as we know) appears to be a much less powerful computer for many purposes. By contrast Watson runs on 90 IBM Power750 servers, filling ten racks, whose power draw is something like 80 kilowatts. In other words, Watson consumed about four thousand times more power than either of its meat-based competitors.

Here in reality, I think it's unlikely that any fixed class of computations can be efficiently implemented in neurons but not in silicon — see Carver Mead and his academic descendants' work on analog silicon circuits. But positing that such computations may exist seems within the realm of acceptable science-fictional handwaving.

---

UPDATE: Yes this is close to the standard handwave that the humans are being kept as computing devices, not power sources. But I think you need to draw the connection explicitly to power generation; otherwise there's just too much narrative in the film and animated shorts that makes no sense.

UPDATE': Never mind, I just remembered Morpheus's exact wording from the first film's voice over and I don't think it's salvageable. Oh well.

Gross Pointe Blank is a great movie

So I'm watching this again, and I can't believe I ever thought it was merely OK. The skill with which it deftly weaves together irreverent humor, pathos, and even wisdom has rarely been equaled in turn-of-the-century film; maybe Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind comes close, although the latter ultimately takes itself so seriously that it loses some of its dexterity.

A partial list of virtues of GPB:

• The scene where Martin Blank (John Cusack) revisits his old home address to the tune of Guns 'n Roses' Live and Let Die never ceases to be hilarious.
• The awkward tension between Martin and Debi (Minnie Driver) hits this perfect compound of emotional veracity and factual implausibility. No meet-cutes or other boilerplate infrastructure of romantic comedy here; we just get an international hit man coming home to chase down an old ex-girlfriend. Boom, there it is. Deal with it. And yet it feels more real than any number of superficially more "realist" entries in the genre.
• Dan Aykroyd. Hit man. And somehow, against all odds, funny, for maybe the last time ever.
• The degree of care evident in virtually every line of the script is astonishing. The dialogue is as dense and snappy as the best Coen brothers films. Even throwaway lines are frequently exceptional. (Waitress at diner: "...there's Gatsby's 'West Egg' Omelette..."; you might not even notice the line, yet observe how exactly this item, offered by the waitress at Martin's Midwestern (!) hometown diner, echoes the broader themes of the movie. Rather than ordering this, Martin opts for an omelette without filling.)
• Two years before The Sopranos started turning the "emotionally disturbed criminal in a shrink's office" into a cliché, we get a criminal-in-a-shrink's-office setup that's funnier and more plausible than basically anything in The Sopranos' entire run, and also doesn't overstay its welcome.

I could go on and on, but basically, you should just go watch this movie again, with attention.

(However, I will admit that Debi's character, as written, veers close to being the mere projection of Martin's psychological needs, rather than a character in her own right. This is perhaps redeemed by Driver's performance.)

How destructive was Ozymandias's bomb in Watchmen (the movie)?

Attention conservation notice: nitpicky analysis of a detail that you probably don't care about, from some comic book movie.

Finally saw Watchmen on video (missed it in theaters). I noticed something curious about the final explosion. It is clearly centered on Times Square, and produces a perfectly spherical blast; but in a later shot, the Empire State Building is not only standing but largely intact.

From this, we can infer that the explosion's radius of destruction was less than a dozen or so north/south blocks.

View Larger Map

This got me thinking: how big is this explosion, compared to an actual nuclear bomb blast?

According to HYDESim, a 25-kiloton nuclear weapon detonated at Times Square would exert just enough overpressure at the Empire State Building site to demolish a concrete skyscraper. For comparison, according to the the carloslabs.com Ground Zero simulator, the "Little Boy" nuclear weapon detonated over Hiroshima sixty-four years ago was 15 kilotons; if detonated over Times Square, it would have blown the windows out of the Empire State Building, but the structure would probably not be knocked down.

So Ozymandias's bombs appear to create a pressure blast about as powerful as that from the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in World War II.

The nuclear weapons possessed by the U.S. and U.S.S.R. in the 1980's were, of course, vastly more destructive, on the order of hundreds of kilotons; and would have been delivered as batches of multiple simultaneous warheads.

Wikimedia Commons image by U.S. Army; source

Now, regarding Ozymandias's bombs, it's possible that radiation killed many people outside the direct blast radius. But there's no indication in the movie that Dr. Manhattan's electromagnetic emissions are harmful to human life. In my opinion, if one takes the movie strictly on its own terms, Ozymandias has been careful to engineer a relatively small mass-destruction event: only on the scale of a small fission bomb.

Of course, step outside of the movie's fiction, and it seems equally likely that director Zach Snyder simply assumed that most viewers would not be too familiar with the geography of New York. So he had Ozymandias set off the bomb in Times Square, because it's instantly recognizable, and then he left the Empire State Building standing so that viewers would recognize it instantly in the aftermath shot.

The other pie in My Blueberry Nights (a correction)

So, I've been slowly working my way through all Wong Kar-Wai movies, and tonight I watched My Blueberry Nights.

It's not a great movie. In many ways it's not even a good movie (although considered purely as a visual artifact, nobody who appreciates film could fail to be seduced). In many ways, it would work better as a long-form music video, and at times that is what it becomes. If you want to read a more considered opinion of the movie, then Dana Stevens's Slate review is reasonably astute. But I'm not posting this to review the movie per se. No, I have more serious business.

I have run across a couple of articles online suggesting that Jeremy (played by Jude Law) is eating a lemon meringue pie while Elizabeth (Norah Jones) is eating her titular blueberry pie. And since nobody appears to have corrected this*, I suppose it falls to me.

Does that look like lemon meringue to you? It is topped with an elegantly browned meringue no doubt, but the base cannot possibly be lemon jelly. No, this is a fruity filling of a more chunky consistency. Although it is definitely a yellow fruit.

Given that this is a Wong Kar-Wai film, the pie in question is clearly a pineapple meringue — Wong's sly, anorakish way of tying Jeremy explicitly to the protagonists of Chungking Express and Fallen Angels (both of which are far superior films, and among my favorite films ever).

Thus endeth the lesson.

---

Oh, all right, one more thing. If you ever get the chance, watch the scene with Chan Marshall (a.k.a. Cat Power) from this movie in a format where you can really see her face.

There's something about her slightly off-kilter line readings — "maybe you're just sen-ti-mental" — that suggests a whole history. You can hear the barbs of old emotions, catching at the rhythms of this character's speech even though she won't say them in words. Of course, who knows, maybe that's just how Chan Marshall talks. Or maybe I'm just reading too much into the awkward performance of an inexperienced actress. But regardless, the readings transcend the clunkily metaphorical lurch of the screenplay's lines here, and I'll remember this scene long after I've forgotten everything else about this movie but the pie.

---

*Note that Stevens herself is careful merely to aver that it is a "meringue" of unspecified provenance. Bravo.

Sarah Palin's career: A concise explanation

As with so many other things, the answer can be found in Bill and Ted.

She was a deeply thoughtless and incoherent woman, but she was briefly the anointed representative of a tribe; and amidst her incoherency, she occasionally uttered the ritual phrases of her tribe; and for these things they blessed her.

(This is the last thing, I hope, I will ever write about this person. But see Dahlia Lithwick's astute Slate piece if you really crave more.)

Quickie video reviews

I've been intermittently sick the past few weeks. Partly as a consequence, I've been spending an unusual amount of time sitting around watching videos, including some that I've seen before. I'll try to extract some value from this lost time by passing on some brief remarks:

Casino Royale

Surprisingly good. Tightly constructed and executed with grace and wit. Additionally, the action is shot with uncommon telegraphic clarity for a modern action movie: if you pay close attention, you will understand where everybody's body is at all times. I received other people's positive reviews with skepticism, but that skepticism was overcome. Note that I don't like other James Bond movies.

Tian Mi Mi (a.k.a. Comrades: Almost a Love Story)

My quest to watch every Maggie Cheung film continues. This film is, also, surprisingly good, and I plan to write a lengthier post on it Real Soon Now. English subtitled videos of this film are difficult to obtain, but if you can get your hands on it, you should give it a watch.

Duo Luo Tian Shi (a.k.a. Fallen Angels)

Still one of my favorite films ever. I actually like it better than Chungking Express or In the Mood For Love, Wong's two best-known-stateside films. The memory of this film's visual potency is pretty much indelible, but I had forgotten how kinky and how silly this movie is. And the final shot still slays me; it may be one of the most miraculous moments in all of cinema.

The Lady Eve

Vastly overrated. It's watchable enough to hold your attention for 90-odd minutes, but it's neither especially funny nor especially romantic. It also has not aged well; to take one random example, Pike's reaction to Eve's "confession" of her non-virginhood just doesn't resonate anymore, and without this tension there is simply no potential energy to be released by laughter. On the other hand, Barbara Stanwyck does have nice legs.

Friday Night Lights (first season & half of second season)

Not the sort of show I usually watch, but I put this on my Netflix streaming queue based on recommendations from various quarters (e.g. Yglesias). And it's not bad, at first. Small-town life is sufficiently foreign to me that there's a voyeuristic, almost anthropological charm to watching this carefully textured depiction of it. On reflection, however, every other virtue seems balanced by a significant flaw: the sports scenes are well-executed, but highly predictable; the actors' body language and line delivery are uncommonly naturalistic for television, but the dialogue itself is frequently preachy or contrived; the characters and their interpersonal relationships are layered and well-drawn, but the writers cannot resist the temptation to tie up most conflicts with a neat bow within 1 to 3 episodes. Given this mixed bag of fundamentals, much hangs on the execution of particular episodes or character arcs. On balance, I found the first season enjoyable enough to bear its flaws; by contrast, the second season goes precipitously downhill in many ways, and I've mostly been playing it in the background while I putter around on my laptop.

Batman Begins

Significantly worse than my memory from seeing it in the theater. The movie comes apart badly after Wayne returns to Gotham. The League of Shadows plot feels wildly implausible*, and the stagey "urban chaos" scenes in the Narrows feel too theatrical and insufficiently cinematic. Also, the writing throughout leans too heavily on awkward verbatim callbacks (repetitions of lines said earlier in the movie). On the other hand, Katie Holmes is nowhere near as bad as is popularly remembered; the problem is that she's turning in a merely adequate performance in a movie populated by Christian Bale and Gary Oldman. (*Of course, all comic book movie plots are implausible in some sense, but what I'm saying is that it feels implausible — that is, it strikes a tonally false note, and I'm not sure exactly why. Maybe it's because I'll suspend disbelief for a hokey magical ninja cult boasting (perhaps falsely) about thousand-year-old conspiracies in the alternate-universe Tibetan mountains, but I can't do the same in the context of Manhattan/Chicago Gotham.)

The Dark Knight

Better than my memory from seeing it in the theater. I recall thinking that the Two-Face transformation seemed abrupt and ridiculous, but on rewatching, it holds together somewhat better. Dent's vigilantism begins with straightforward acts of revenge, which seems psychologically plausible, and proceeds to total derangement only by degrees. It's not completely successful, but it doesn't ruin the movie. (However, the coin gimmick remains silly.) In retrospect, Heath Ledger's performance has been overpraised, but it is compelling; listen to how he uses his voice. Finally, the action set pieces remain spectacular.

Surprisingly, Definitely, Maybe is not bad

This past Friday I was, er, persuaded to see Definitely, Maybe. I won't endorse it as a good movie but I will say that it significantly exceeded my expectations. Maybe that says more about my expectations than about the movie, but I'll go out on a limb here and say it's not bad. ("I've had this thing as a 'triple sell', and I am upgrading it right here, right now. I think this thing could even go as high as a — 'don't buy'!") If you are in a social situation where you must see one of several recent chick flicks, this is the one to see.

One nice touch was the careful attention to both local color and period detail. The movie is set in New York City in the 1990s, and to me it captured something authentic about that time and place, although in retrospect I find it hard to say exactly what. Call it the accumulation of small details, tugging at long-dormant memories, a barbed net trawling through dark waters teeming with silent fish.

Or maybe I've just been gulled by nostalgia. Whatever. I liked it.

There are some other virtues as well. First, the characters are well-written, well-cast, and well-acted, and therefore the romantic chemistry both works when it needs to, and goes wrong when called for. Second, the plot is, for the romantic comedy genre, atypically unpredictable and grounded. Third, there are some genuine laughs to be had.

Finally, in such a thoroughly Hollywood movie, it's a pleasant surprise to see character arcs where relationship to work appears as more than a shallow gesture or plot device. The lead character Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) moves to New York to work on Bill Clinton's 1992 Presidential campaign, and later becomes a political consultant. The evolution of Will's relationship to his career in politics is deftly threaded through the movie and (again, going out on a bit of a limb here) deepens his character in a way that romantic comedies usually do not even bother to attempt. Likewise, two out of the three female leads make career decisions, at different points in the movie, that mark a significant revelation or development w.r.t. their characters.

Romantic comedies typically use career and dedication thereof as window dressing. The only struggle that matters is the struggle to couple. Where career appears, it's usually an inverse MacGuffin: a meaningless object that only matters insofar as it obstructs romantic progress in the second act.

But most people spend at least a third of their adult lives working; the choice of how to spend one's time, energy, and talent is one of the most important life choices one makes. And in one's twenties and early thirties (the typical age of romantic comedy protagonists), one's relationship to work looms particularly large. Work reflects one's ideals and values. In life, work and character are deeply intertwined. I don't want to overstate Definitely, Maybe's case here, because it's not wholly successful, but the fact that it attempts to weave career and character together, with some limited success, seems to me a point in its favor.

Now for the bad. Major weaknesses of the movie include (a) far too much screen time spent on the cloyingly sentimental father/daughter storytelling framing device; (b) far too little development of the Emily character (Elizabeth Banks); (c) the lead never seems quite as devastated by love gone wrong as is called for; and (d) the final scene succumbs to Hollywood's allergy to ambiguity and irresolution, and thereby disappoints when it could have been really good and true.

These are significant flaws, and ultimately this movie can't stand up to the really great modern romantic comedies like Annie Hall or When Harry Met Sally. But, as I've said, it's not bad.

("We had it as a 'don't buy'. Let's bump it up to 'risky'!").

What's your encore? Do you, like, anally rape my mother while pouring sugar in my gas tank?

...the illuminating aspect of the source of this expostulation being that Dante, after suffering nonstop abuse from Randal up to the point of the outburst, remains his steadfast buddy for the remainder of the film.

The relationship to the conversation related in this post of Ezra Klein's is left an exercise for the reader.

I told him I knew _____ when I was young at summer camp

Attention conservation notice: I post this primarily to elevate the PageRank of the blog post linked herein.

So, when I was an awkward young man (ha! was?!... I suppose I'm less young than I used to be) I went to NJ Governor's School of the Arts (i.e., Art Nerd Camp) in creative writing.

This week DK, a friend whom I met there, sends me her pictures of Kal Penn, a.k.a. Kumar, who was there that same year.

I must have met him once or twice, but my memories of that time are dim; I barely remember all the writers, let alone the theater kids. Still, I can safely say that if my guidance counselor had not urged me to apply to Art Nerd Camp that year, my life would have been very different. Let nobody say that guidance counselors do no good in the world.

On a slightly related note, when I was at POPL 2006 in Charleston, SC, I took a break one night from revising my workshop talk slides to grab a burrito at a local chain. The girl behind the cash register told me I look just like that guy from Harold and Kumar. Granted, I was not wearing my stylin' headgear, but even without it I think the resemblance is, shall we say, distant at best. The conclusion I drew was that they don't get too many of them Orientals in these parts.

Quick movie notes

Saw a rash of movies last weekend with SL and AM...

• Collateral: Michael Mann brings us another slickly glittering, trashy thriller that nevertheless manages to surprise with bursts of lyricism. Also, great soundtrack. p.s. My brief experience with Los Angeles nurtured no love for that city in my heart, but Mann makes it look gorgeous, mysterious, compelling, even to this jaded expat New Yorker. Quite a trick.
• Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow: Pretty visuals. Snappy dialogue. Acceptably entertaining story, which faithfully replicates the plotting of an old-fashioned pulpy comic book. Absolutely featherweight, with not an ounce of pretention to be anything else, and therefore unobjectionable in itself; however, I suspect that the movie's success augurs the rather odious prospect that writer/director Kerry Conran will be given free rein to produce a string of even more comic-book-geeky, obsessively detailed, and thoroughly empty reconstructions of his fantasies. One movie of this sort is harmless fun. Ten movies of this sort, without a single idea or even a genuine emotion among their pretty little heads, would be a colossal waste of animators' talent and labor.
• Also caught the tail end of Seattle's first annual Independent South Asian Film Festival:
  • Autumn's Final Country: a deeply affecting documentary, shot in bare-bones style, in the format of four 15-minute face-to-face interviews with South Asian women. The women directly address the camera and matter-of-factly tell their stories of displacement, violence, abduction, slavery, etc. in Kashmir.
  • Above film was preceded by the short Battle for Blue Gold, a no-budget 20-minute short about how Coca-Cola's Indian subsidiary is illegally polluting and draining a local village's water supply. I found this film interesting but ultimately frustrating, as the budget limitations prevented the filmmaker from doing much research beyond interviewing the village women. The BBC and others have covered this issue in greater detail.
  • Indian Cowboy: the festival's closer. Most festivals reserve the closing spot for a film that's expected to be a big draw, to send the festival out with a bang. So it's probably understandable that they chose a rather conventional romantic comedy feature that allegedly sends up Bollywood conventions. (All the hipsters know that Bollywood movies are fun! It was in Ghost World!) Unfortunately, Indian Cowboy sucks. It's probably one of the worst movies I've seen this year, which is saying rather a lot, since I watch a lot of movies. Boring, interminable, predictable plot, triter-than-trite dialogue, sloppy pacing, lackadaisical and confused character development. Gaaaagh.
  • Above was preceded by Portrait of an American Hostess, a low-budget short that, although rather obvious at times, still had effective moments, plus a generally deft feel for character that was sorely lacking in the feature that followed it.

zbigvision (late-night channel surfing)

You see some strange stuff when you're up all night channel surfing whilst jet-lagged. WLIW-21 was playing an excerpt from Zbig Vision's The Orchestra, specifically the segment called "Stairway to Lenin", which is set to Ravel's Bolero. Truly a trip. Recommended, though I doubt there's any way you will ever have a chance to see it.

UPDATE: Holy shit, it appears that Greencine has all three Zbig Vision DVDs: Media, Steps, and The Orchestra. Kudos to them.

Intolerable Cruelty

Saw Intolerable Cruelty last night with SL. I can't figure out why the reviews have been so mixed; I think it's the Coens' second funniest movie (after, of course, the insuperable Big Lebowski), and probably the funniest movie I've seen, period, since Adaptation.

The Coens have toned down their distinctive style quite a bit, and yet this movie's getting mediocre reviews from the same critics who used to complain about their allegedly stupid stylistic tics. How conventionally does a movie have to be shot before it makes these people happy?

And I don't understand --- indeed, I have never understood --- the chorus of perennial complaints that the Coens indulge in too much reflexive irony, i.e. they ask us to laugh at their characters, rather than with them. Maybe it's a generational thing? To me (and, I suspect, virtually everyone who's roughly my age --- I've literally never spoken to anyone in their 20's who doesn't like Lebowski), there's no bright shining line between irony and sincerity; the two bleed into each other like yin and yang. So what if you're giggling throughout Miles Massey's Faustian confrontation with his boss Herb Myerson? So what if you guffaw when Walter flubs the disposal of Donny's ashes? Does the laughter really subtract from the pathos, or does it sharpen it?

Plus, comparisons to old classics like The Lady Eve and Trouble in Paradise remind me of those Baby Boomers who are perpetually going on about how Bob Dylan's the greatest bard of the century and all the rock music today just can't ever measure up. Hey, guys and gals, maybe there's actually something a little different going on here? Granted, not completely different, but at least something worth judging on its own terms?

And, finally: George Clooney is awesome. Can any other living actor so effectively combine leading-man charisma with dead-on comic timing and an unwavering willingness to be vulnerable or silly or just plain dumb? If he were a little less incredible, straight men the world over would have to hate him for being so perfect. As it is, I can only admire him for being even better than perfect.

Notes on Kill Bill

Saw Kill Bill last night with SL and J (coincidentally, it looks like MS did too). The advance buzz has mostly been about the excessively gory, relentless, and conscience-free violence, which I did find annoying and cheap --- in a culture where a murderous robot can be elected governor, it doesn't take much imagination or courage to make a movie that merely depicts even more trivialized violence --- but I thought the real failure was that the action simply wasn't shot that well. Yes, I know this seems like a ridiculous assertion, given Tarantino's obvious visual fluency in general, but bear with me.

Tarantino shares the misapprehension, disappointingly common among American blockbuster directors, that the point of cinematic action is its result: he's quite careful to convey that the table gets knocked over and smashed up, or that so-and-so's body part gets hacked off, or that the blood gets splattered against the walls. But he fails to portray effectively the motion of the human body, which, for me, is what it's all about. Action is a form of dance. Well-executed action has a certain rude grace, and for me it's only satisfying when the film captures that grace visually.

It's instructive to compare the fight scenes in Tarantino's film with those in The Matrix or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Of course, those other movies had quite different aesthetic aims, but all three share the same choreographer; and the Wachowski brothers and Ang Lee were both, in their own ways, vastly better at showing you the action than Tarantino. When Morpheus and the Agent are fighting on top of the 18-wheeler, you never doubt for a moment exactly how the Agent knocks Morpheus over the side. You grasp every instant, every block and punch and reversal, and you can appreciate the impact of each individual motion. Likewise with Jen Wu and Shu Lien's first fight, following the rooftop chase sequence; this fight was additionally masterful because the specific motions of the fight/dance were actually an embodiment of the differences between their characters. Swashbuckling, romantic rebel Jen Wu repeatedly tries to take flight, and is pulled back to earth by Shu Lien, whose misguided attachment to tradition later dooms her own love. Compare these to Kill Bill's climactic showdown between O-Ren Ishii and Black Mamba: the swords clash (you can't tell how they clash; you see steel flashing and you hear the clang, but you don't know what's really going on); Uma Thurman falls; Uma gets up; the swords clash again; Lucy Liu gets scalped; game over. The difference between Ang Lee and Tarantino is like the difference between a comedy with genuinely funny, sharply-written dialogue, and one where the dialogue makes no sense but you know it's supposed to be funny because of the laugh track.

In short, Tarantino's movie depicts not so much action itself as the idea of action. Tarantino makes all the right manneristic cinematic gestures associated with action, and he positively relishes the gory result of action, but ironically he doesn't have much sensibility for the action itself. He's better at showing gushing blood than bodies in motion.

Now, all that said, Kill Bill wasn't exactly a bad movie. The music was great, and the film's packed with visual style. There's a cool anime sequence, in which the action's actually quite effectively conveyed (which is ironic, since there's much less motion in this sequence than in, say, the big swordfight in the club). But in a movie with so little of dialogue or character, the action's all there is; and if that's not spectacular, then the movie can't really be entirely satisfying.

On Lost in Translation

Saw LiT last night, with SL and others. If you follow film at all, you've probably heard all about it by now, so I'll just write that, frankly, I don't see the big deal. It's a good movie, sure, but I've seen plenty of better movies in the past twelve months. The film's pacing and narrative drive seemed not only slow (I have no problem with slow movies; see the links in the previous sentence) but lazy. Many reviewers have found ways to excuse this quality, but I find their assessments dubious. Take, for example, Salon's Stephanie Zecharek:

The picture's muted intensity isn't just a vague mood -- it's a subtle but very specific type of narrative drive. Coppola (who also wrote the screenplay) is a stealth dramatist: Instead of unfolding in precise pleats, her movies unfurl like bolts of silk. There are no handy place markers between scenes to help us tick off how many minutes are likely to pass between this or that point of conflict and the denouement. Revelations don't click into position; they swoop down, seemingly from nowhere, and settle in quietly, like a bird coming to roost.

To some people, this is a maddeningly diffuse type of filmmaking, but I'd argue that Coppola's precision is simply the sort that's measured in sine waves, not milliseconds.

That's pretty much all bull, but the last sentence is especially vacuous --- Zecharek's straining for a metaphor whose vagueness underscores the very point she's trying to refute: namely, that the movie's fat and fuzzy around the edges.

A film about messy, vague feelings does not itself need to be messy and vague. Steven Soderbergh would have pared this movie down to its sharp and devastating bone, and given you a boatload more visual pleasure to boot. One might hesitate, at first, to compare Sofia Coppola's second film with the best works of an accomplished master like Soderbergh. But with critics like Zecharek and Roger Ebert (among many others) calling this movie an instant classic, it seems only fair to ask the question: how does it stack up against great movies that received similar, or even lesser praise? And the answer, when considered dispassionately, is that it suffers by the comparison.

It's better simply to say that Lost in Translation's a good movie, of the sort that, absent the present groupthink hype, would normally make a splash on the festival circuit and fade away gracefully. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson are both terrific, as usual. Plus I'm a sucker for picturesque nighttime cityscapes, and the Tokyo presented here fills the screen admirably. The film offers many pleasures, but those pleasures are muted and diffuse, like the film itself.

Anything Else

Saw Anything Else last night with SL, AM, and TM. I've seen most of the features Woody Allen's made in the past eight years (except: [1], [2], [3]), and this is the best --- which perhaps isn't saying much, so let me give it higher praise: it's genuinely funny, and although it's vastly inferior to his two late-70's masterpieces, it echoes them with a certain satisfying symmetry.

Unfortunately, the movie wasn't marketed properly, and hence has been a disaster at the box office. It didn't help that many of the reviews have been mysteriously vicious, which I will attribute to some kind of hype-driven critical groupthink: these days it's just not cool to have any opinion about Allen movies, besides "Oh, yeah, well, he's really lost his touch, hasn't he? Oh, and there's his embarrassing personal life."

On Soderbergh's Solaris

While I'm killing time, I'll mention that I recently rented S. Soderbergh's adaptation of Solaris through my GreenCine account. And: it's fantastic. Ironically, Soderbergh got a big science fiction picture budget and used it to make an exceedingly tight, reflective character drama reminiscent of his breakout picture, Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1987).

It also uses, to powerful effect, one of the great Dylan Thomas poems. Now I want to run out and buy a book of Thomas poetry.

Avoid Masked and Anonymous at all costs...

Saw Dylan's new movie tonight with TM and AM. It was really awful. Trust me, you do not want to see this movie. I like all different kinds of film, including surrealist film and plotless character studies and quirky indie films and even action movies or thrillers. I can appreciate them all on their own level. But this movie doesn't work on any level; it consists entirely of one-dimensional characters staggering from scene to scene spouting stilted, pseudo-profound aphorisms at each other while Bob Dylan squints at them. It was tragic to see so many truly fine actors struggling valiantly to inject some life into this movie. Even TM, who is a big Dylan fan, thought the movie sucked.

As amazing as this sounds, the nearly-9-minute BMW commercial that ran before the movie (in lieu of trailers) was better than the movie itself. The commercial wasn't very good, either.