Freezing rain has hit the Austin area, although just a light misting of it, plus a dusting of snow. The sidewalks were already slick when I walked my dog, and I saw cars starting to slip and slide.
I don’t think I’ll be driving anywhere for, oh, at least the next 12-14 hours…
You may have noticed that I bought a lot of books last year. Since I’m getting ready to do another “this is what I bought recently” post, I thought I would do a recap of my most significant acquisitions in 2010. These may be significant for being important, valuable, cool, beautiful, hard to find, or some combination therefore. As usual, all of these are Fine/Fine copies unless otherwise listed. Ala George Locke’s Spectrum of Fantasy volumes, I’m listing where I got them and how much I paid, plus occasional notes on the books (with links if I’ve already described them before).
H. G. Wells: The World of Williams Cissold, three volume set of the first edition, signed by Wells
The limitation page, with H. G. Wells' signature
I’m seeing some forecasts that it will hit 12°F today (it’s 16°F now). It would be a good day to stay in and stay warm.
Naturally, I have to go in to work…
Lots of interesting tidbits here. I knew the film was relatively low-budget by Hollywood standards, but I didn’t know it was only $2 million. Personally, I’d rather have 100 Winter’s Bones than one Avatar, but I’m not running a Hollywood studio…
Sorry, couldn’t resist. But this is actually a pretty interesting profile about how Phil Collins is really, really tired of being Phil Collins.
As a Peter Gabriel-era Genesis fan, my personal opinions of Mr. Collins are, um, conflicted. Even as late as Duke, Collins-era Genesis were still producing great albums, but after that each each album they put out was worse than the last. Collins’ solo output was mixed: some decent songs (“In the Air Tonight”, “Take Me Home”) mixed with wimpy schlock.
The article mentions criticism of Collins from the guitarist of Oasis being the thing that first damaged his reputation, but here in the states, Oasis was just another Brit band that never broke particularly big. (Personally I think Collins should have respond with a video of him lying in a giant pit full of money. “What’s that, Noel? Sorry, I can’t hear you with all these hundred pound notes clogging my ears.”)
I think the things that really turned public opinion against Collins (at least more so than any pop musician past their natural expiration date) were his taking the Concord to appear in both versions of Live Aid (what was the point), and the simultaneous one-two punch of Patrick Bateman’s oleaginous declarations of his virtues in American Psycho, and his appearance in the “Timmy 2000” episode of South Park within the same week in April of 2000.
Plus, anyone doing songs for Disney movies automatically earns the “lame” tag. It’s just the way the world works.
I do find it interesting that he’s a serious collector of Alamo relics and memorabilia. I mean, who would have thought? Although Phil Phillip, I hate to tell you, but those mystical “orbs” in your Alamo pictures aren’t paranormal energies, they’re dust specks catching the flash. It’s a pretty well-known natural phenomena. Sorry.
It’s always dangerous to assume that any fictional work accurately reflects reality, be it movie, TV show, or novel. But some works come a lot closer than others.
HBO’s The Wire rings truer to me than most, not primarily because of the gritty, noir depiction of urban crime and a dysfunctional, overworked police department, but because they accord very closely with creator David Simon’s excellent non-fiction work from which they draw, Homicide: A Year in the Killing Streets (also the basis of the NBC TV show) and (with Edward Burns) The Corner.
Well, here’s Simon delivering a righteous smackdown to Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III over his assertion that the show was a “smear that will take decades to overcome”:
Others might reasonably argue, however, that it is not 60 hours of “The Wire” that will require decades for our city to overcome, as the commissioner claims. A more lingering problem might be two decades of bad performance by a police agency more obsessed with statistics than substance, with appeasing political leadership rather than seriously addressing the roots of city violence, with shifting blame rather than taking responsibility. That is the police department we depicted in “The Wire,” give or take our depiction of some conscientious officers and supervisors. And that is an accurate depiction of the Baltimore department for much of the last 20 years, from the late 1980s, when cocaine hit and the drug corners blossomed, until recently, when Mr. O’Malley became governor and the pressure to clear those corners without regard to legality and to make crime disappear on paper finally gave way to some normalcy and, perhaps, some police work.
And here’s a former Baltimore police officer backing him up on it: “As a former Baltimore police officer for 11 years, I can attest to the fact that much of what appears in the HBO series “The Wire” is a very accurate depiction of reality both on the street and within the Baltimore Police Department.”
As for the greater issue of why Baltimore crime remains stubbornly high, why the drug problem remains so intractable (I’m in the “legalize it, regulate it, and tax it” camp), and why the “broken window” policing Mayor Rudy Guiliani used to bring down New York’s historically high crime rates has not (could not? can’t?) be used in Baltimore is a topic far beyond the scope of this blog (and my own expertise, formidable as it may (or may not) be).
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Written by Michael Bacall and Edgar Wright (based on the graphic novel by Bryan Lee O’Malley)
Directed by Edgar Wright
Starring Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Ellen Wong, Jason Schwartzman, Chris Evans, Brie Larson, Brandon Routh, Alison Pill, Mark Webber, Johnny Simmons, Anna Kendrick, Aubrey Plaza
I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World recently, and enjoyed what I thought I would enjoy about it, and was slightly less annoyed than I thought I would be annoyed by.
The setup (for those of you who didn’t watch a single film in theaters for the first half of 2010; the trailers were pretty ubiquitous) is that schluby Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera, about which there shall be much more anon) splits time between sharing a tiny efficiency with his gay friend and playing bass with his band, Sex Bomb Omb, before he meets Ramona (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the girl of his dreams, and has to fight her seven evil exes to win her affections. Actually, Pilgrim doesn’t seem quite as schluby as the trailer makes him out to be, because he previously dated a hot girl named Envy (Brie Larson) who’s now a pop superstar, and when the movie opens, he’s just started dating a 17-year old Chinese schoolgirl “with the uniform and everything” (Ellen Wong). I should point out that his schoolgirl girlfriend is cute as a button, and looks absolutely nothing like Korean model Hwang Mi Hee in the following picture:
Scott Pilgrim's 17-year old Chinese schoolgirl girlfriend looks absolutely nothing like this
Hmmmm….where was I? Oh yeah. She looks nothing like that. Anyway, Pilgrim soon throws her over for Ramona, whose evil exes come out of the woodwork to fight him in flat-out-impossible video game battles in real life. All of it is good, over-the-top fun. If you’ve ever watched a Coyote-Roadrunner cartoon and gone “Hey, wait a minute, there’s no way he could have survived that long a drop,” well then, this movie isn’t for you. I’ve never read the graphic novel it’s based on, but I’m guessing it’s very true to it.
All the evil ex fights are filled with amusing and completely insane action. The best is probably the fight with Envy’s bassist (Brandon Routh), which is not only high on the splat-fu, but also combines the absurdity of veganism giving you supernatural powers with the even more amusing absurdity of Vegan Police stripping away those same powers (“Chicken isn’t vegan?”).
The movie has a lot going for it. Edgar Wright is a hell of a director. Hot Fuzz is one of the funniest (and most underrated) movies of the last ten years, and he’s a master at keeping the action moving along at a steady clip. That aesthetic serves him well in a movie designed for Generation Twitch, in which almost every aspect of the characters “real” life has been speed up and Nintendofied. Also, although I didn’t grow up Nintendo, I’ve played enough video games that the antirealism of it (when Pilgrim dispatches an evil ex, coins rain to the floor; when he gets in a particularly good blow, a voice announces “Combo!”) was amusing rather than annoying. And the acting is almost uniformly excellent. Except…except…
(sigh)
Except for the Michael Cera Problem.
There are many actors in Hollywood with a broad range of characters. Michael Cera is not one of them. While he was fine in Superbad, he wasn’t any better than McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) or the fat kid (Jonah Hill), and while he was also fine in Juno, he was probably the weakest link in an otherwise exceptionally strong cast. After watching both, I got the distinct impression that Cera’s range extended from teenage awkwardness to awkward teenageness. “Do you…want an actor…who can…pause………awkwardly?” He does the awkward pause thing even more frequently than Topher Grace does his “slight pause before the…eyerolling delivery” thing, and it’s considerably more annoying. There’s no reason he should have become this generation’s Hollywood go-to guy for male teenager leads over the likes of, say, Zombieland‘s Jesse Eisenberg, who looks a little bit like him. (Then again, since The Social Network is a serious Oscar contender and Scott Pilgrim wasn’t quite the hit the studio was hoping for, we all know who got the better end of that decision…)
In Juno he had a supporting role, but here he’s the center of the film. Fortunately, the nature of the film tends to accentuate his strengths and (generally) mask his weaknesses. You don’t notice his flatness of range nearly as much when everything around him is exploding. But he’s still the weakest actor here, except…
Except that his love interest, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, is if anything even flatter. Maybe this was a conscious decision on Edgar’s part, given the source material and the film’s overriding aesthetic. Maybe Ramona’s anime-hair colors are suppose to indicate that she’s every bit as useless and ornamental as the Princess in Donkey Kong. She’s a goal with a backstory, not a person.
So, can you enjoy Scott Pilgrim vs. the World if the actors playing the two central characters aren’t that great? I did. Your mileage may vary.
If you can buy into the cartoonish nature of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, this is quite an enjoyable movie (though nowhere near as good as Hot Fuzz). If you’ve ever mastered the art of mashing six controller buttons at the same time to rip off an opponent’s head, this is the movie for you.
Oscar nominations are out, and Winter’s Bone (which I reviewed here) is, as predicted and hoped, one of the ten Best Picture nominees. Also as predicted, Jennifer Lawrence received a Best Actress nomination, and John Hawkes received a Best Supporting Actor nomination.
And if you haven’t seen it already, by all means do. It’s an astonishingly good film and a very worthy nominee.
Keeping with our previous automotive theme, here’s yesterday’s look at the car of tomorrow:
Although some might find this video’s view of the fairer sex just a wee bit antiquated…