Breach (2007) and Hollywoodland (2006)

Sarahmac and I may be the only people who watched these movies simply to get our Caroline Dhavernas fix**.  Even better, by the time they percolated up to the top of the queue, we had forgotten why they were in the queue, so "discovering" that she was in the movies made us all the happier.

Breach is actually a pretty good little film with a solid story and performances all around.  My only, fairly minor, complaint is that they seem to have overstated Hanssen's cunning for dramatic effect; reading his wikipedia entry gives the impression that upper management's lack of ability to follow up on reported suspicions had more to do with Hanssen's success at avoiding detection than his own brilliance.

Hollywoodland has good performances, but suffers from a lack of people we can root for (aside from Caroline, but her character leaves a scene, and the movie, about halfway through).  Initially we kinda like George Reeves and Toni Mannix, but he gets jaded and surly over his lack of "real" acting roles and she gets creepily possessive.  The story of Louis Simo's personal life never manages to mesh with the noir mystery.

Now we're waiting for netflix to pick up Mars et Avril (which doesn't look particularly promising, but better than Passchendaele)...



** Wonderfalls was our first, and probably greatest, experience with the netflix recommendation engine, early in 2006, and we recently went back to rewatch the series, and it was just as much fun six years later.  I've found that I really like these short-lived, completed series because there's much less time investment*** than waiting... and waiting... for the next season of Game of Thrones, or even getting on the Buffy train for seven seasons.

*** especially once the series goes south.  It seems rare for a series to maintain quality for more than 2-4 seasons

Ahead full impulse

Oh, yeah, we're looking forward to seeing this, too...

The reality is that the entire movie could be Benedict Cumberbatch running around in a trench coat and giving a voice over and I'd watch.  But it will be SO MUCH MORE.

A couple more thoughts:

• From the trailer, I assumed that Alice Eve is playing a young Carol Marcus, but Sarahmac took one look and declared her Elizabeth Dehner based on the haircut.  It's so eerily similar that I hope she's right.
  
• What's most fun about Khan (or, whoever the villain is in this movie, nudge, nudge, wink-wink) is that, when played and written properly, he's a smart villain.  We want the villain to have qualities we admire, we want him to have tricks up his sleeve, we want to have moments where we can't help but "accidentally" root for them.  What we want, over and over, is the original Die Hard experience of an action flick with a brain.  And, given that Cumberbatch does a good Alan Rickman, is that really too much to expect?

7 seconds or LA-LA

I had wanted to wait for Nash to come off the DL before saying something about Mike D'Antoni coaching the Lakers, but that seems a while off, so before the iron goes completely cold...

In the first article I read about the firing of Mike Brown and hiring of D'Antoni, it said that Mike Brown was trying to run the Princeton offense -- with a team that had 2 bigs (one of whom needs to be near the basket in order to be effective**) and no one (except Nash) in the projected starting 5 who could shoot the 3***.  WAT.  These are not guys who can effectively run the Princeton offense (with, I think, the exception of Pau Gasol, who is IMO an ideal big man to put at the top of the key).

Even if D'Antoni runs the "right" offense with this team, I think it will be extremely difficult for him to overcome the following problems:

1. Howard has been worse than ever at the free throw line, and
2. This Lakers team is not very deep (just look at the bench's +/- numbers to see that they're regularly being outperformed by opponent benches).

** To be extremely generous to Brown, he apparently (see last paragraph in this section) made the decision before the Howard trade... but then again, it was also before they had Nash.

*** Kobe is a career .337 shooter on 3's.  That's not even in the top-250 all-time, and lower than 6th man's Antawn Jamison's career .346 %.  He's horrible for a shooting guard, but we have a perception that he's "not bad" because he's made some 3's in big games.  Artest is a career .341 on 3's.  

By contrast, Vince Carter (currently of the Mavericks) is the 50th best active player at .3738.  R

Three Lives; Gertrude Stein; 1909

The dust jacket** states:

"Simple material, but written with a directness that gives it immense force.  In fact, that simplicity and directness, both in style and technique, are what make the book."

This might be one of the most accurate statements I've ever seen in a dust jacket.  Unfortunately, what's missing is a plot, so this is one of those books that should be read as a writer's workshop exercise, and not as literature of leisure.  While I admire Stein's style and technique, there's no story here, so I stopped on page 70 (of 279).

** of the 1933 The New Classics, New Directions*** edition.

*** no, not this New Directions

Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, Before..?

Before Sunrise made it on to our queue for reasons I no longer remember, and is that rarity in which Netflix predicted we would like it ever-so-slightly more than the average Netflixer.  It's a nice little film**, perhaps more special for us because at the time the film is set, the characters are roughly our age, and it was a time when I probably should have gone to spend a long weekend in Vienna with Sarah while she was in France on a Rotary scholarship.  

Still, I would be torn about giving it 4 stars if it weren't for Before Sunset, which is a little sliver of a film (it has a running time of 80 minutes, but 4 minutes are credits; it clocks in like a classic Disney animated movie) that tracks in real time a wonderfully bittersweet exploration of their relationship 9 years after the events of the first movie.  The two movies need each other; the first is a little rough with the lack of polish of youth, while the second shows a mastery of production that comes with full 30-something adulthood while retaining the vigor of youth.

It was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay, because the characters are "adapted" from the previous film.  That seems a rather arbitrary way to classify it, when the script is entirely new.  I haven't seen Sideways, so I can't comment on the choice of winner, but I definitely liked the script better than Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which won Best Original Screenplay (though neither were as good as the Incredibles).

I'm actually looking forward to Before Midnight, if not with same anticipation as the Hobbit.  This is a good feeling.

** I don't quite believe that Hawke's character is both so full of hope that he can convince a stranger to spend the day with him in Vienna, and also so deeply cynical.  I think they're trying to paint him as a romantic with a cynical streak (perhaps as a defense mechanism), and they almost-but-not-quite pull this off.