There are many movies with fine casts that fail because the script was mauled somewhere along the way. Friends with Benefits pulls off the rarer "this would have been a much better film if they had better actors as the leads."
I didn't look at the Netflix description, and so didn't recognize the leads. I spent the first half of the movie thinking that the male lead was a bastard crossing of Matt Morrison and Neil Patrick Harris who spent a lot of time in the gym, then finally gave up and looked at the IMDB. Oh, so that's what the agent of the introduction of "wardrobe malfunction" into the English lexicon looks like at 30. Sarahmac bested me by honestly asking who Justin Timberlake was. Touché. In any case, he has little on-screen charisma and we liked the guy who was awful as Green Lantern better.
Once we identified Mila Kunis, well, she's a slightly different story. We liked her in Black Swan; she's not actually a bad actress, so this is more a problem of her not being right for this part. We need someone with more NYC cred, but I'm blanking on anyone in the right age range. Maybe Blake Lively, or maybe I'm just wishing she weren't also in the awful Green Lantern movie.
(backdated to 12/8 when this was mostly written, but finally posted on 1/24/2012)
Thursday, December 8, 2011
Sunday, December 4, 2011
Cutting the land line
Wireless service at our house is now good enough** that we moved to a family cell phone plan and cut the land line, a little more than 10 years after we initially planned on doing this, but discovering that cell phone service was terrible here. So I made the call to Vonage this morning, and they took it surprisingly well, only trying to sell me on keeping my number (no, thank you, everyone who needs to know our new number either has it or knows how to reach us via e-mail, and we're happy to ditch all the junk calls***).
Vonage, in turn, had replaced Verizon and Opex back in 2005 (separate local and long-distance carriers? oh, my!), once we were sure that Adelphia's (now Comcast) cable internet connection wouldn't cut out so often that using VoIP as our sole phone service would be untenable. The great thing about Vonage, from a data collection standpoint, is that it has been easy to collect all calls placed *and received* for the last 6 years****. I only have long-distance placed calls from Opex prior to then. Nothing from our Evanston days with MCI (aside from an angry letter contesting their charging of "peak" rate minutes for the entirety of calls that began at 6:56pm), and just the billed amounts from grad school (because we all want to relive the few $200 phone bills from that year Sarahmac was in France, when only students in the engineering school had e-mail -- most of the time we snail-mailed each other letters. We still have those. I don't remember the phone calls, except for a lot of protracted silences and sighing at $1/minute; still better than dialing a 1-900 number, I suppose).
** though I use Google Voice to dial in to conference calls at work. Their audio quality is better than Vonage's was, and free for now.
*** places that I do business with now get my Google Voice number. I'm actually going to enjoy putting junk callers in my spam filter.
**** I hope to have something to say about analyzing that data, but need to anonymize the numbers first. Even then, I'm worried what the call patterns would show about when we're home and when we're not. Another good thing about cell phones.
Vonage, in turn, had replaced Verizon and Opex back in 2005 (separate local and long-distance carriers? oh, my!), once we were sure that Adelphia's (now Comcast) cable internet connection wouldn't cut out so often that using VoIP as our sole phone service would be untenable. The great thing about Vonage, from a data collection standpoint, is that it has been easy to collect all calls placed *and received* for the last 6 years****. I only have long-distance placed calls from Opex prior to then. Nothing from our Evanston days with MCI (aside from an angry letter contesting their charging of "peak" rate minutes for the entirety of calls that began at 6:56pm), and just the billed amounts from grad school (because we all want to relive the few $200 phone bills from that year Sarahmac was in France, when only students in the engineering school had e-mail -- most of the time we snail-mailed each other letters. We still have those. I don't remember the phone calls, except for a lot of protracted silences and sighing at $1/minute; still better than dialing a 1-900 number, I suppose).
** though I use Google Voice to dial in to conference calls at work. Their audio quality is better than Vonage's was, and free for now.
*** places that I do business with now get my Google Voice number. I'm actually going to enjoy putting junk callers in my spam filter.
**** I hope to have something to say about analyzing that data, but need to anonymize the numbers first. Even then, I'm worried what the call patterns would show about when we're home and when we're not. Another good thing about cell phones.
Saturday, November 26, 2011
The Mote in God's Eye; Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle; 1974
How I hate the 60's and 70's mainstream SF androcentric gender politics. There are some direct attempts to criticize the strict gender roles of the Second Empire of Man, but the actual writing of the only female character betrays these efforts**. Lady Sally Fowler is a competent, if well-connected***, anthropologist who does useful work for the expedition to the Mote, but whose ultimate purpose is "to keep Blaine active. When he does not brood, he is good officer." Cordelia Naismith, we need you!
This is otherwise one of the better 70's Nebula finalists that didn't actually win the award.
** the wikipedia entry notes that Heinlein gave them extensive advice; never a good sign for the female characters.
*** being well-connected is acknowledged as a "sin", both against Lady Sally's credentials as a xenobiologist and Lord Rod Blaine's credentials as a naval captain. Rod is able to expiate these sins beyond all reasonable doubt, but there remains a shadow over Sally's accomplishments.
This is otherwise one of the better 70's Nebula finalists that didn't actually win the award.
** the wikipedia entry notes that Heinlein gave them extensive advice; never a good sign for the female characters.
*** being well-connected is acknowledged as a "sin", both against Lady Sally's credentials as a xenobiologist and Lord Rod Blaine's credentials as a naval captain. Rod is able to expiate these sins beyond all reasonable doubt, but there remains a shadow over Sally's accomplishments.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Super 8 (2011)
I don't trust Spielberg anymore, so when his name was heavily attached to Super 8, I didn't even want to watch it. However, JJ Abrams directed, and after the Star Trek reboot, he's got a lot of credit with us. So we warily put it on the netflix queue, and finally watched it.
==spoilers==
It opens with a beautifully simple bit of storytelling, showing us a sign outside an area of heavy industry that proudly proclaims no accidents in ~740 days. Then an employee starts to take down the numbers. We cut to a boy sitting alone on a swingset on a snow-covered yard, while the wake is being held inside the house. The muted conversation between two adults reveals it's his mother who has died.
This is great. We're hooked. We're ready for more.
Four months later, school lets out, and the boy is helping his friend, an aspiring filmmaker, complete his entry for a competition. The group of kids are well-developed caricatures. All is good (especially Elle Fanning, who is playing a 15-year-old while 12 herself). While they're out shooting a scene by a train station at night, a truck purposefully drives onto the tracks and crashes into a passing train, which derails. And derails. And derails, so unbelievably ridiculously spectacularly that it derails all enjoyment of the film for a couple minutes, but eventually we get back to the kids, who now have a mystery on their hands... but mostly they're still just trying to shoot their Super 8 film for the contest.
With Spielberg's name attached to the film, you'll never have guessed this, but... there was an alien in the train. Unlike E.T., the gubbamint got to this one first, and they held it captive and did tests on it and generally pissed it off for 20 years, but now it's escaped and running loose in the American Heartland. Also unlike E.T., it captures innocent bystanders and eats them, at least until "our hero" shares his memory of his mom dying to let it know that "Bad things happen... but you can still live." Mmm-kay, thanks, but I don't see how that suddenly turns Alien into E.T. I'm certainly not going to be staring up in wonder as it leaves, like this is Close Encounters or something.
The whole last 30-40 minutes is a mess, really. I assume the filmmakers want the alien to be a misunderstood monster, like Kong, or Mighty Joe Young, or Frankenstein, but there's no time to get to know this creature on a personal level, so it's impossible to sympathize with it, beyond a general sorrow that it's been held captive for so long.
As the credits roll, we see the film the kids made... and sadly, it's ultimately more satisfying than Super 8. Boo. I'd rather have had the Star Trek sequel sooner. Honestly, this was the worst film we've seen since we Green Lantern hit the top of our queue last week (that was far worse).
==spoilers==
It opens with a beautifully simple bit of storytelling, showing us a sign outside an area of heavy industry that proudly proclaims no accidents in ~740 days. Then an employee starts to take down the numbers. We cut to a boy sitting alone on a swingset on a snow-covered yard, while the wake is being held inside the house. The muted conversation between two adults reveals it's his mother who has died.
This is great. We're hooked. We're ready for more.
Four months later, school lets out, and the boy is helping his friend, an aspiring filmmaker, complete his entry for a competition. The group of kids are well-developed caricatures. All is good (especially Elle Fanning, who is playing a 15-year-old while 12 herself). While they're out shooting a scene by a train station at night, a truck purposefully drives onto the tracks and crashes into a passing train, which derails. And derails. And derails, so unbelievably ridiculously spectacularly that it derails all enjoyment of the film for a couple minutes, but eventually we get back to the kids, who now have a mystery on their hands... but mostly they're still just trying to shoot their Super 8 film for the contest.
With Spielberg's name attached to the film, you'll never have guessed this, but... there was an alien in the train. Unlike E.T., the gubbamint got to this one first, and they held it captive and did tests on it and generally pissed it off for 20 years, but now it's escaped and running loose in the American Heartland. Also unlike E.T., it captures innocent bystanders and eats them, at least until "our hero" shares his memory of his mom dying to let it know that "Bad things happen... but you can still live." Mmm-kay, thanks, but I don't see how that suddenly turns Alien into E.T. I'm certainly not going to be staring up in wonder as it leaves, like this is Close Encounters or something.
The whole last 30-40 minutes is a mess, really. I assume the filmmakers want the alien to be a misunderstood monster, like Kong, or Mighty Joe Young, or Frankenstein, but there's no time to get to know this creature on a personal level, so it's impossible to sympathize with it, beyond a general sorrow that it's been held captive for so long.
As the credits roll, we see the film the kids made... and sadly, it's ultimately more satisfying than Super 8. Boo. I'd rather have had the Star Trek sequel sooner. Honestly, this was the worst film we've seen since we Green Lantern hit the top of our queue last week (that was far worse).
Wednesday, November 23, 2011
Google search killed the bookmarks toolbar
- A number of them simply didn't link to anything anymore.
- A bunch of them are to sites and information that is trivial to get to with a Google search.
- There are a very few that I'm considering keeping because they represent something that I might need but would have difficulty remembering the correct keywords to find with a Google search.
And, there are a few that deserve a little retrospective before they go.
(approx 1997-98?) What every new grad student should know. I assume Sarah found this while at NWU. I certainly didn't have it at Duke; maybe I would have finished the PhD if I'd figured out some of this stuff sooner.
(approx 1998) Duncan House. We got our wedding rings from Duncan House. Back in '98, he was still on the U.S. Pacific coast and presumably dreaming of one day moving to the Isle of Skye. He still does beautiful work, though the skyrocketing price of gold probably means that we'll be looking at the Cuchulain rings in silver.
Best.
Vacation.
Ever.
We did this the summer we moved to Vermont.
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