CJC.org

Quick Facts:
Prep Time: 0 hr 10 min
Cooking Time: 0 hr 30 min

Nutrition Facts:
Calories: 191
Fat: .61 gm
Carbohydrates: 8 gm
Protein: 29.46 gm
Cholesterol: 0 mg
Sodium: .57 mg

Healthy Heart:
Recreate the taste of the Mediterranean with this very easy-to-make fish casserole.

Ingredients:
4 sand dab fillets-large
2 red onions-small
1/2 cup vegetable stock
4 tbsp dry red wine
1 garlic clove-crushed
2 zucchini-sliced
1 yellow bell pepper-seeded and sliced
14 oz chopped tomatoes (canned)
1 tbsp fresh thyme-chopped
salt and pepper to taste

Cooking Instructions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350degrees. Skin the sand dab filets with a sharp knife by laying them skin down. Holding the tail end, push the knife between the skin and flesh in a sawing motion. Hold the knife at an angle with the blade towards the skin.
2. Cut each onion into eight wedges. Put into a heavy based saucepan with the stock.
3. Cover and simmer for 5 minutes. Uncover and continue to cook, stirring occasionally,until the stock has reduced entirely.
4. Add the wine and garlic clove to the pan and continue to cook until the onions are soft.
5. Add the zucchini, yellow pepper, tomatoes and thyme and season to taste. Simmer for 3 minutes. Spoon the sauce into a large casserole.
6. Fold each filet in half and place on top of the sauce.
7. cover and cook in the preheated oven for15-20 minutes until the fish is opaque and cooked.

I can see it now: a strong-chinned, chisel-faced hero, saying, “Mayor, you should cancel the Times Square celebrations; there’s a bomb, and we don’t know where it is.” The mayor, in archetypal fashion, replies, “No, the city’s economy depends on all these tourists. It’s too big to cancel.” “But mayor!” And so on, in the way that warnings about man-eating shark eruptions and angry volcano attacks get ignored for tourist-ridden Go To the Beach Day or See the Forest Week, and I’m not going to even bring up the killer bees movies and Smell The Flowers Day. After much to-ing and fro-ing, the nuke turns out to be hidden in the ball itself, and the hero keeps it from reaching the bottom by sticking one of those foam “2000” hat things in between it and the trigger at the base. You know, there’s even a natural countdown and scenes of a jubilant, unaware crowd to intersplice and juxtapose with the hero’s desperate struggle to wrest the non-conductive foam hat thing off the terrorist leader in the de rigueur mano-a-mano struggle atop 1 Times Square. It’s perfect. I’m surprised NBC hasn’t done it yet. All we got to whet our collective appetite in the apocalyptic these past few months was that movie where the strong-chinned, chisel-faced hero defuses the nuclear power plant’s Y2K problems with some duct tape and jumper cables (that’s him running on the bridge, after he’s set up the jumper cables with the duct tape) (I missed the beginning of that movie to watch X-Files, so I’m not sure if any warning was issued to the Dense Authority Figure).
So, before it all goes up in smoke or flames or Rapture, let me say that I’ve been busy. My email output, whether it be movie reviews or deranged, unmeticulously typed thinking that’s shot out into the aether, has been nada, or near nada. You may count this as a blessing, I suppose.

Basically, there was assorted work-related chaos, most of it centered around switching jobs. If you haven’t heard, I’ve left RIA, where I had been for about a year-and-a-half, the longest I’d been with a company since leaving Newgate in ’97 and entering the wolly world of Net companies. I’m now at Random Walk, a Java consultancy specializing in the financial sector (anyone who knows Java can send in resumes to me; I’ll happily and crassly take the referral bounty).

This switch happened at the end of August. For weeks before that, there was chaos at RIA, as I had to document everything I know. For weeks afterwards, I was cleaning up some things that happened after I left RIA, and settling in at RW, trying to recover all that systems administration stuff I used to know but haven’t used in years, and trying to learn many new things. Busy, busy, busy.

I’ve half-jokingly noted that a lot of tech people don’t really take many vacations while on the job. Most of our “vacations” are the gaps between leaving one job and starting the next; we can be ironicly literal and use the euphenism, “I’m in between jobs.” I didn’t quite have much free time this time around. (Come to think of it, the last time, when I started at RIA, I had just moved into my apartment, and spent much time roaming through the furniture showrooms downtown, trying to put more in the living room than a futon and a TV. That, and mopping.) I left RIA when they were moving their web servers from a colocation in Minnesota to a new one in Texas. Actually, I had put off leaving by close to six weeks because I had expected them to finish by late July, but our little D-Day kept being pushed back because of weird, stupid problems that the QA people kept on running into. They actually pulled the trigger for real the day right after my last official day. I still had my pager with me — they made me hold on to it — and was still paged at 3AM to fix an Oracle problem that happened during the move. I also spent the next few days, days I wanted to spend resting before starting at RW, on the phone trying to help on a performance problem they ran into when real customers started to come on line Monday morning. (Yes, I’m kvetching about nothing, and I realize that what I do is better than digging ditches for twelve hours a day, which is probably what my peasant ancestors had to do.) I think there were a couple of 3AM wakeups somewhere in there while they were fiddling with settings, but my memory if fuzzy.

Despite this havoc and the documentation project, most of my time at RIA was very sedate. Once set up and rationalized, Oracle sort of runs on its own, with me checking the logs and rejigging something now and then; no one was poking at it that hard. Yes, developers would come by with their problems, but most of these could be taken care of with, “well you do this” and fifteen minutes of time. True, there was the pager I had to carry everywhere, with relatively frequent weekend pages. True, there were the days when I had to get up at 3AM, and for some months this would happen almost weekly, until we finally finished patching everything we could think of. All the odd hours and the surgically implanted pager were par for the course in this industry. But for a given workday, I might spend a couple of hours actually doing work, and most of the rest of the day sitting there. This was perhaps the golden age of my email output to all of you: I just had time on my hand, coupled with boredom.

This was not a bad thing, given the circumstances. The first couple of months of 1998 were taken up with the move to Riverside Drive, and the sundry things that go with that, like buying furniture so I wouldn’t have to sit on the floor. (I exaggerate, but only slightly.) The remainder of the year was consumed by illness and the Near Death Experience. A year of not doing stenuous things was helpful.

But, a year on, it got annoying. I actually had planned to start looking for a new job after the large colocation move project was finished, and perhaps switch maybe around now. What happened was that in midsummer, I got a phone call from a friend wondering if I might be interested in a DBA/SA job at Random Walk. It was basically perfect: I had wanted to do more SA work at RIA, to keep whatever unix skills I had from getting totally dull, but there never seemed to be much opportunity, given that there were two full-time sysadmins there. Thompson, after all, is a huge company, and RIA is but a small part: roles are relatively well defined, and it’s not obvious how you’d move from a DBA position and do something more interesting. RW also had more fascinating projects, and I’m learning things once again: at RIA, the online group’s sole purpose was to support the Checkpoint website. At least from my perspective, there wasn’t a bottomless ocean of knowledge and subtle ramifications that could be explored over years. It had started to get dry.

So, despite incentives to stay through the duration of the move, I picked a day that I thought would be reasonably after the change died down, so I could leave after the chaos died down. Of course the move didn’t happen as scheduled for a number of reasons, but I had set a date, and I was more or less gone when I’d said I’d be (except for the conference calls and pages in the first week). RIA wasn’t a bad thing — I was there for a long while after all — and it was necessary at the time.

One of the neat things that I’m still amused by is that I don’t have to wear a pager at Random Walk. We’re a development house, and don’t have production web sites that have to be up 24x7x365, with dark hours when things could be bounced defined as 2AM to 6AM. No tether compelling me to think about setting the pager to vibrate when I go to a movie and changing it back to pierce-veils-of-sleep-audible when I get home so I won’t miss a late night page. I tell of my lack of pager and how my dreams are no longer haunted by its unearthly, Lovecraftian trilling to other sysadmins, and there’s always a startled expression on their faces.

Besides workplace matters, I haven’t been up to that much, in retrospect. Most of what I’ve read consists of the New York Times, the Economist and a handful of other periodicals, not to mention the online magazines. Bookwise? A bunch of computer books, mostly, a little bit of trashy science fiction (“Island In The Sea Of Time”, fun read: Nantucket goes through a wormhole and pops up in 1250 BC), a little Truman Capote, a big chunk of Daniel Boorstin, maybe some Stephen Ambrose. That pop science “Code Book” and one about the Spanish Flu pandemic are mixed in somewhere. I may or may not have reread the Odyssey this year: it might have been last year. I’m sure there are other things, but it’s hard to recall them sitting in front of the computer. If you were to wave a given book off my shelves at me, I’d be able to tell you, but not right now. Maybe my brain has gotten fuzzier with age.

I did go on a free-Shakespeare-in-various-parks binge, so at least I can say I didn’t waste the whole summer watching Jerry Springer and playing Quake. The Shakespeares were Richard III, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night and Macbeth, the last of which was up at Ft. Tryon park on the tip of Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson valley on a nice summer evening. Of all of these, I liked the Gorilla Rep’s Twelfth Night the best. Macbeth, despite the setting, wasn’t that interesting.

I didn’t really travel this year, but, then, that doesn’t make this year particularly different from most other years — that lack of vacation time except between jobs again. The furthest I went was to Dallas, for work, as part of the preparation for moving the RIA servers there from Minnesota (these are unix boxes, I didn’t have to be physically present to actually work on the machines). I went to talk about Oracle to the half-dozen Sybase DBAs they have down there. Bizarrely, I’ve been to the Dallas area once before, for an Earthweb training trip, and the RIA offices down there are more or less the next couple of streets over from the place I was before. Basically, I’ve been to Texas a couple of times in my adult life, and haven’t seen much beyond that same damn suburb of Dallas and the DFW airport. I did go up to the exotic locale of Rochester, NY, for a wedding: that was the other noteworthy trip this year, though, arguably, I didn’t leave New York State beyond taking the Interstate through Pennsylvania to get there. Saw a Great Lake. Saw Binghampton on the way; what an awful place. Saw the Corning Glass Musuem, too; it was half-closed because of construction; but there was a guy there making a goblet. Oh, in terms of going to bizarre locales this year, I did serve jury duty, and see the insides of the Criminal Court building. That was probably the strangest place.

I did basketball classes this year. This is mildly laughable, since I hadn’t touched a basketball since high school for the phys ed requirement. I did have a theory for dribbling the ball — fingertips not palms, loosen the wrist — but the practice left something to be desired, especially when the coach had us dribble in between our legs: one near miss convinced me this wasn’t something I should try at home. After two sets of classes, I have a decent appreciation of how a basketball team is supposed to work and can get an outside jump shot in often enough to give me at least one moment of glory a game. I still can’t dribble confiently, though, and my layups don’t go in, i.e., I have no inside game to speak of. Interestingly, Random Walk is in a corporate basketball league. I haven’t had a chance to play with the company, as the games tended to conflict with class, but we’ll see if anyone knows what the hell I’m saying when I yell out “downscreen, downscreen!”

I probably won’t take the next set of classes. The first set went through without a hitch, but for a while during the second set I was jamming a finger a week. This wasn’t a big deal until my right index finger — the mouse button finger — got clobbered over and over again. I feel my livelihood depends on part on my ability to type and point and click. Losing even more flexibility on that finger may consign me to digging ditches.

The highlights of basketball this year was playing outdoors in the crappy courts in Tompkins Square Park with friends and occassionally people wandering by (we’re not worthy of the good courts, I think). You know: sun, the outdoor air, the heat exhaustion. There were also episodes at Battery Park City and once at the courts at West 4th Street, really early before anyone good got there. The most annoying moments were in there, too, especially this paunchy middle-aged guy (we’ll call him “Hollywood” for his mirrored sunglasses and haircut) was on my team, and kept on yelling for the rest of us to do stuff, while he didn’t do much to work up a sweat. This was one way to lose 11-3 repeatedly. The worst parts were the occassional physical accidents, like my jammed fingers and running full speed while not realizing that the teammate yelling “Pick! Pick!” was talking to me. Ouch. The guy setting the pick was about my height but outweighed me by 20 pounds in solid muscle: I more or less bounced off him like a fifty cent SuperBall. It wasn’t that bad all in all, though. No obviously broken bones, no concussions, no dislocations.

I didn’t stop doing the gym thing while basketball was going on, as most of my exercising is informed by fear of death — I started going to the gym last year after getting out of the hospital. Through all this, I’ve inadvertently lost about 20 pounds during the year: I vaguely recall weighing up to 185 in blubber sometime at the beginning of the year, but I’m now bouncing between 160 and 165 in non-performing muscle and blubber. I say inadvertent because weight loss was not a goal, more a side-effect of exercise and a liver friendlier diet: considerably less fat, more carbohydrates, much green stuff. Take that, you quack Atkins diet! (I was watching a coworker pick away at her sandwich at a recent company lunch. Eat the meat, slathered in mayo, leave the bread and lettuce. I was tempted to do a *cough*Atkins*cough*kidney failure*cough* but didn’t.)

While I may not be the embodiment of health — a scarred liver has implications — I’m well. More than a year’s worth of blood tests have shown the interesting numbers going to normal ranges and staying there. The most recent tests had one of the numbers (AST) slightly higher than normal, but I think it’s a spurious result: it can go up from a number of reasons, including exercise. And, anyway, we can’t expect perfection. I’ll just keep it in mind for the next regular tests in six months. Best of all, I’m now producing antibodies to a particular hepatitis antigen that indicates how active the HBV is, meaning that the virus is dormant, and will probably stay dormant. HBeAg- and HBeAb+ is actually the goal of gruelling interferon treatment, and I seem to have gotten there on my own. (It happens to a few percent of chronic HBV cases each year, and the hepatitis flare last year might have been related.) The biggest real negative event, healthwise, was my root canal, and that was more or less painless, the worst part being waiting three weeks to get a permanent cap.

And before I seal myself in my bunker with enough canned beans, toilet paper and propane to last to the fourth millennium, watching for the Rapture on MessiahCam, let me say: I have this memory of when I was much, much younger, and trying to calculate how old I’d be when 2000 came around. I don’t recall if I got the number right, as I hadn’t mastered arithmetic, or something like that. This may or may not be ironic, as I did get somewhat better at math, but has since seen most of my skills fade away with burnout and disuse. In any case, what I have I accomplished now that I’m thirty, besides hiding from everyone on my birthday a few months ago?

Firstly, “Twin Falls Idaho” goes for the too cute punning movie title, sort of along the lines of “Good Will Hunting” being side-swiped by a certain David Lynch TV series. Once we get over this fact, groaning if necessary, we have a neat little indie movie with a certain Lynchian spirit of the ordinary grotesque; I don’t think the title’s allusion to “Twin Peaks” is coincidental. Ignore it’s occassional obviousness, like we see in the title: the film is worth seeing.

The basic plot of the film involves an archetypal hooker with a heart of gold, named Penny in this case, going to a seedy hotel to meet her next john. This john isn’t Richard Gere, come to rescue her from her troubles; this john turns out to be the conjoined Falls twins. Freaky.

Certainly Penny thought so, as she panics and leaves as they’re in the bathroom politely getting her a glass of water. Realizing her purse was left in the room, she sheepishly goes back to claim it, and finds that the twins are busy having a quiet birthday celebration for themselves. With this sad scene, we begin the strange friendship that turns into a love story between Penny and Blake, the stronger of the twins.

Here and there, the “twins” and “pairs” images and puns are a little strong and unnecessary. Yes, we get the picture: the twins are a particular entity, and separation would destroy them. Perhaps the most heavy-handed image is when the twins are in public, drying to reach their hotel room during daylight: they sit down, exhausted with their flight, and a crowd gathers around them to take pictures of this spectacle of Siamese twins. Yes, the bars represent how zoo-like the scene is, and how the twins are treated by most of us as animals, not humans. We get it.

Along with the love story, a love story in which the two lovers can never be alone, the film develops the twisted family relationship of the twins. Their mother abandoned them; they are brothers that can never be apart; and so on. The notion of solitude and the unending lack thereof is, of course, a central theme. The movie is primarily a series of quiet conversations between the twins and Penny — the twins themselves speak to each other in whispers — exploring these ideas. The set-piece exception is a Halloween party Penny takes them to: the twins are simply “in costume” there, and can move around in the open without stares. There, of course, is another of the heavy-handed images, where another pair of costumed Siamese “twins” get fed up with each other and split up.

Ultimately the story moves in this direction. In the film’s last act, Francis, the weaker twin, falls mortally ill, and it becomes clear that the twins will have to undergo their own separation. The split is final: Francis won’t survive the operation. The dreamy sequence showing this works well, far better than any of the other more obvious symbols the film tosses at us. I feel that it’s the climax of the film, though there is a nice, bucolic coda that follows, tying up the lose ends.

Overall, despite my harping on the film’s occasional heavy-handedness, I liked the film. Certainly it’s different from the usual, action-laden summer flick. Further, the twins are each fully realized individuals, nothing like stock evil-twin-good-twins or angry-at-world-misfits from Central Screenwriting. Real people. And the pace is slow: it allows you to savor the characters the Polish brothers have created here, the appreciate the strangeness of the situation.

Not a pro-lawyer movie.

The main points:

1) To get one of those apartments that overlook the Park, you either have to be the Devil, or be in Satan’s immediate employ.

2) The scene that most amazes New Yorkers is when Keanu Reeves goes off to confront Satan at the end of the film. He walks onto 57th Street, near First Avenue. 57th Street is empty: you see nothing all the way to the Hudson. My reaction: “Damn, those are great special effects.”

All in all, not a bad film. The basic plot is this: Keanu, a hot shot lawyer in Gainesville, FL, is hired by a big NYC law firm. He’s treated like a prince, like an heir apparent. There’s the fab apartment, vast amounts of money, rubbing shoulders with the Great and Good of the land (Sen. D’Amato does a cameo; that he’s in league with Satan is unsurprising), etc. He’s assigned a big case: a wealthy real estate magnate is suspected of killing wife and kids. He’s able to get an acquittal, despite seriously believing that the man’s guilty. During the course of these events, his young wife is isolated in the huge apartment, and she starts seeing weird things all over the place. Weird dreams ensue, demons appear in mirrors, and so on.

I actually liked this film a lot. The previews and the commercials make it seem hokey, but it’s pulled off well. I also have a large bias against Keanu being anything other than Ted (which, btw, was on TBS a couple of weeks ago), but, unlike in, say, Johnny Mnemonic, he didn’t suck. I suppose this was the first step in the road to redemption, that eventually leads to The Matrix. I watch “Buffy The Vampire Slayer” in part for its idea of personifying high school trauma in the form of vampires. I suppose I can only appreciate this attempt to make literal the idea of a defense lawyer selling his soul to get a guilty client off.

One very nice touch: when Keanu’s first in NYC (the city, by the way, is in the “whore of Babylon” mode in the film), he’s taken by Al Pacino to the roof of the building (the office decor actually looks like a well-lit Quake room, which merely means I’ve played too much Quake). They bargain for his employment while strolling along the edge. This, I suppose, is a reference to the part when Satan tempts Christ in the desert, the part when they go up on the mountaintop and Satan offers up the dominion of the world. Keanu, of course, accepts. (This may be one flaw with the film: Keanu accepts too readily; there’s some moral choice, but we don’t feel it viscerally. Keanu doesn’t really fall, he just sort of drifts down there.)

Actually, in a further divergence, I had a flashback to high school English class, where, I think, we talked about Graham Greene or Sommerset Maughin (sp?). One of them extended the parable of Satan tempting Christ with a final offer by Satan: “Go up on the cross, wear a crown of thorns, and you will become the savior of mankind.” If I recall, the passage goes on with Christ accepting, and Satan laughing until his sides hurt, knowing all the wars and destruction that will be committed in the name of god. I’d like to read a similar thread in this movie. At the end, Al Pacino has grand plans for Keanu. One can read the sin of vanity into this, and the film’s very neat ending.

There’s a moment in “The Blair Witch Project” when I had to think of the Brady Bunch. Perhaps I’d been primed by the main characters singing the Gilligan’s Island theme as they go off into the woods, but there’s a moment evocative of Bobby picking up the tikki doll in the Hawaii episodes. Bad stuff is going to happen, though maybe not with anyone losing it on a surf board.

Despite this, “Blair Witch” does generally go against the standard horror movie cliches. No deadly glitter of steel reflecting off a knife or axe, no false scares when the rattling in the woods turns out to be a bunny, no real shocks when the false scares turns into the lull before the storm. The movie’s frights work through the ominous buildup of information, and suggestive noises in the night. Little gore is used, and what gore we do see is ambiguous. The creepiest Lovecraft stories I’ve read works similarly: much time is spent telling the dark history of this quiet house in, say, Providence, and only then do we venture inside.

“Blair Witch”, however, and despite the hype, really isn’t the scariest movie ever made. Or at least I didn’t find it that way. Maybe I couldn’t suspend disbelief sufficiently — I kept thinking that this was a problem that could have been solved with a GPS unit, a pair night vision goggles and some clue — and, yes, there are creepy moments with the barely audible children’s voices and the grove full of wood figures, and the quick vision in the cellar for some reason sticks in my mind, but I’ve seen scarier X-Files. Hell, the “Return to the Cathedral” and “Bonehoard” levels in the computer game “Thief” were creepier, at least until I figured out that my fire arrows work really well against the undead. Other people have used “Blair Witches” techniques of creepiness, and have done it better. I still think “The Shining” is the scariest movie I’ve seen. Give me the two dead girls and redrum any day.

Besides background and creepy noises, the other major part of this movie is watching the lost hikers freak out as they slowly realize that they’re lost and that there’s something in the woods with them. I admire how well done this was. There’s genuine fear in their faces at points. The film’s publicity campaign stresses how much of this was ad libbed, with actors put out in the woods with relatively minimal instructions, and the directors and crew trying to scare the hell out of them in the middle of night. “Method directing”.

There’s an interesting article in Salon about the film makers [1]. Basically, the author accuses the film makers of violating the relationship between them and their actors, fundamentally not trusting them to act. The purpose of this, apparently, was to make everything “real”. The film makers decry standard film making for that art’s ingenious fakery. Ironically, the signature scene in the film, when Heather is looking into the video camera and weepingly apologizes to everyone, must have been a scene that was relatively scripted, compared to the strategy of rousing up the actors, disorientating them and forcing them to run through the woods.

It’s also ironic, then, that the publicity surrounding this movie is constructed as it is. This campaign is all wonderful fakery, aimed at obliterating the line between reality and fiction. Partially to invoke the backstory, so necessary to the film’s creepiness, in the lobby of the Angelika, where I saw the movie, are a number of nice vitrines illustrating the film’s background, including a museum-like write up of the Blair Witch legend, the film canisters for the missing hikers’ backpacks, and so on. We won’t mention the websites (though this article does [2]) (Snopes has provided a short deconstruction of the “facts” of the piece [3].) They purposely blur the film’s background into our hazy memory of childhood ghost stories: I had thought “Blair Witch” had something to do with the actual legend, centered on New Jersey or Pennsylvania or such (I was probably mixing the Bell Witch [4] with the Jersey Devil [5]). True, it’s in the spirit of the “mockumentary”, but I don’t believe anyone else, not “Spinal Tap”, not “Dadetown”, has gone to such an extent.

I’m reminded of the excellent book, “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders” [6], which describes Los Angeles’s Museum of Jurassic Technology [7], a sort of piece of performance art dedicated to evoking the delicate, momentary weightlessness of wonder: wonder whether that exhibit is real, and wonder that it could possibly be real. “The Blair Witch Project” doesn’t go much into wonder, however, and doesn’t venture that far into fright.

[1] http://www.salonmag.com/ent/movies/feature/1999/07/14/blair_essay/index.html
[2] http://www.salonmag.com/tech/feature/1999/07/16/blair_marketing/index.html
[3] http://snopes.simplenet.com/horrors/ghosts/blair.htm
[4] http://www.ghosts.org/bell.html
[5] http://www.serve.com/shadows/jd.htm
[6] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679764895/o/qid=931978762/sr=8-4/002-7638729-7343234
[7] http://www.mjt.org/index.html

OK, I’m finally getting around to write about this movie, which I saw this past weekend. From a business point of view, it’s a little disappointing that the show wasn’t sold out. I suppose that simply reflects how South Park has a certain audience, and this audience has probably gone and seen it on opening weekend, and not the subsequent weekend like me.

The film is truly epic. Most TV shows that go on to become films have a problem expanding out of their 30-minute time slots into something larger, leaving numerous soft spots. Witness the Beavis and Butthead movie, any number of Saturday Night Live derived films, the revivals of certain series from the 1970s. “South Park” succeeds where others have failed: not only does it make the transition from small screen to big, it does it in grand, brilliant fashion, spanning the universe from the deepest pits of Hell to the, uh, celestial spheres of heaven. It’s funny throughout: the number of minutes you spend not chuckling or laughing out loud can be counted on your fingers. Granted, this is mostly gross out humor and the amusement of seeing third graders curse floridly, and it’s just damn funny. Yes, we’ve known all along that South Park is a raw-for-TV show with a even more raw R-rated movie inside waiting to break out, but seeing Cartman let loose, a sort of apotheosis of Eric, is a wonder in itself. It’s what we’ve been waiting for.

“South Park” even has a point to make, particularly relevant after the Littleton, CO, shootings, where everything remotely connected to the media or computer gaming industry was blamed for the violence of two disturbed individuals. This is not a simple, potty-mouthed movie, but a sharp bit of social commentary as well. A stand is taken, and I leave it to the movie to make its argument.

One nice thing about this transition from small to big screen is that they don’t try to drag out every peripheral character that’s ever been on the show. Yes, Damien Son of Satan is in the background, as is Jesus and, I think, Pip, but they have no speaking roles. It’s like any other SP episode where they have to show a crowd shot: the whole town’s there, but no talking. I winced a few times during, say, one of the Star Trek movies where Ensign Bob who appeared in a few episodes back in season 5 and 6 had to get his two lines in. When a TV series makes it to film, it generally tries to hard to be golly gee about the whole thing. SP doesn’t.

Not that there aren’t references to South Parks Past and the other epics of the Parker/Stone ouvre. Kenny dies in the hospital after having a baked potato put in his chest, an apparent reference to the main song [1] of “Cannibal: The Musical” [2]. And the whole Brian Boitano thing is baffling only if you haven’t seen the animated short that started it all, “The Spirit of Christmas” [3].

For that matter, one of the things little remarked upon about this movie is the fact that it’s a musical, complete with sophisticated production numbers and a wonderful part towards the end when the main songs of the movie are interwoven into a four-way medley. Broadway shows are parodied — Les Mis was skewered — as well as Disney animated films — Satan as the Little Mermaid. This shouldn’t be surprising giving the large musical content of the weekly show, as well as previous Parker-Stone efforts like “Cannibal” (all singing, all dancing, all flesh-eating).

So, how would Brian Boitano end this review?

[1] http://www.wedgieworld.com/cannibal/shpadoinkle2.html
[2] http://us.imdb.com/Reviews/167/16750
[3] http://us.imdb.com/Title?0122264

“Run Lola Run” (“Lola Rennt”) is the neat little high-energy German film playing in art houses right now. The movie has many pluses, mainly having to do with its energy content and some funny sequences, as well as some neat visual tricks, but it’s somewhat less than it first appears.

The film is apparently about how contingency affects and effects the courses of our lives. The basic plot is that Lola’s boyfriend Manni needs, in 20 minutes, to come up with 100,000 marks he owes a violent gangster, or else he’s dead. She rushes out to save him by coming up with the money, running across Berlin. The same events unfold three times, each time a little different because, apparently, of the circumstances of an encounter she has with a dog on the way down the stairs. Events unfold differently not just for her but also for various people she bumps into along the way. It’s the idea of the butterfly effect on human histories.

“Run Lola Run” is full of energy: there are the running scenes of the title as she races from place to place, all accompanied by a good techno soundtrack. There are few pauses. The only ones of length are the interludes between iterations, where the love between Lola and Manni is fleshed out. The movie also has a nice sense of humor, with how several of the random encounters play out. The cartoons were neat, too, and I got to find out how little I remember from my college German classes. But the heart of the movie is about alternative histories.

One trick that’s received notice is the alternate histories of the people Lola bumps into on her run. Yes, the point of such divergent histories arising from whether they’re bumped into or narrowly avoided is the notion that we’re all connected by webs of contingency. A momentary delay because we missed the walk light may hurl our lives off in entirely different paths. Yes, but only in the case of spectacular accidents, both bad (hit by bus) or good (chance first encounter with the love of your life). (I’m under the impression “Sliding Doors” plays thoroughly with this idea of the split second contingency, though I haven’t seen the movie. I believe there was also a Kieslowski film about missing a train along these lines.) Generally, the momentum of lives are sufficient so that their trajectories will not be upset by whether someone brushes by you on the sidewalk or clears you by a good foot. These little episodes lack any compelling sense of causality and exist in a flash-lit vacuum of the filmmaker’s imaging. Why does the guy on the bike start shooting drugs instead of just saying no, and why would the permutations of his trivial encounter with Lola send him down one path and not the other? The philosophical point about connectedness contained in the film has the lightweight feel of what a bright, young college student spins out in a late night conversation over beer and cigarettes: the apparent heft of the point dissipates in the light of day.

There’s Lola’s particular situation, where the causal elements that determine how each iteration turns out is given more play. This is more satisfying to watch, but I feel it’s less about little contingent circumstances affecting how events unfold, and more about how Lola “solves” the puzzle pieces to make events unfold in the best possible way (for her). The caught-in-temporal-loop episodes from Star Trek do this sort of thing routinely: a certain sequence of actions have to be undertaken before the whole thing is solved, and the Enterprise escapes into next week. And, of course, there’s “Groundhog Day”.

In some sense, Lola is a less aware version of the Bill Murray character. She knows that events have turned out wrong, and she “corrects” them by force of will and the use of a “play over” button. The interludes between the iterations that show her love of Manni give reason for her using her will in this manner. In a sense, there’s no contingency at all: we know Lola is going to succeed in saving Manni and herself.

Because of our current heat wave and my not wanting to really run the AC in my apartment — it only affects the bedroom, so having a climate controlled living room TV session would require heroic efforts on the part of my two little fans and severe damage to my Con Ed bill — I went to the local 2nd run movie house this Saturday. Choices: “Twin Dragons” or “Shakespeare in Love”. Not wanting to see a bad Jackie Chan, I saw “Shakespeare”. About 30 minutes into the showing, I was kicking myself for not seeing it when it first came out

The fanciful conceit is that Shakespeare is going through a severe case of writer’s block. Called on to produce a comedy with at least some pirates and a dog, he starts “Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate’s Daughter” but doesn’t get very far. Things start clicking when he meets Viola De Lesseps. The comedy is transformed into the tragedy “Romeo and Juliet”. This new play reflects and is reflected by Will and Viola’s brief affair: scenes are borrowed from Shakespeare’s courtship of the lady; she disguises herself as a man and acts as Romeo in the production; passages from the draft inspire their lovemaking. The film is very good at visually entwining the play and the affair, intercutting between rehearsals scenes and bedroom scenes.

There’s, of course, trouble, or else “Romeo and Juliet” may well have ended up as a comedy with a dog in it. Fundamentally, Viola is the prize in a marriage alliance. Her wealthy merchant family intends to marry her off to destitute nobility to secure a title for themselves. The nobleman in question, of course, is a bastard (figuratively) more interested in cash and dowry than in the anachronistically feminist Viola, who goes to great lengths to break the taboo of women as actors; young boys had played the women’s roles. It’s for the love of poetry and prose and the stage that she dons the wig and mustache and binds her breasts.

The film’s writers, Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard (Stoppard having that high-brow cachet going for him), laced their script with scholarly Elizabethan references. I know a couple of them mainly because I’ve read reviews on the film a while ago — the boy fascinated with stabbings is apparently a playwright from the period who specializes in gore, the George Romero of his day. The disguise of Viola as a boy is in the long tradition of Shakespearean women dressing up as young men, with “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night” as prime examples. There’s also the Superman/Clark Kent eyeglasses-as-disguise thing going: Shakespeare doesn’t recognize Viola, even though her boy disguise is ridiculously thin. This happens often in his plays. I’m sure other reviews can fill in on these touches.

Shakespeare’s phrases are woven so thoroughly into the fabric of our language that we’re surprised when we look through Bartlett’s and find that many of the common sayings and clever quotes that we toss off come from Shakespeare. One wonders how Shakespeare must have looked brand new. One wonders how the first audience to see “Romeo and Juliet” may have reacted. This film should get bonus credits for evoking these bits of wonderings.

After days-long shipping delays because of an apparently mislabled package (someone checked off “Bulk”, not “Priority”; yes, it’s only a few days, but Internet shoppers have a peculiar impatience; I like to think I’m on the more reasonable part of the spectrum, though, since I didn’t go flame the mail order company), I finally got the Kubrick DVDs I ordered. I watched The Shining last night. Yes, I had sworn never to watch this movie after dark ever again, but, like in one of those archetypal Hollywood redemption sequences, I steeled myself with some ice cream and got on the proverbial horse again. Surprisingly, while creeped out, I came through this experience with flying colors: the two dead girls only cause one major shudder. Same with “redrum”.

I actually saw the movie before reading the Stephen King novel, which I got around to doing this winter. The novel itself is so-so — I think IT is his best work, followed closely by two of the novellas of Four Seasons, though I haven’t read many of his early books — without a single certifiable scare, all presented in writing that fails to flow. Perhaps the novel never built up steam (pardon the pun) because I had seen the movie first, and I kept seeing how this book differed from Kubrick’s vision, even though the book does have a certain priority.

I can see why Stephen King fans would complain about the Kubrick film. Yes, the basic plot is there, but missing are all of the detailed King touches, the rich descriptions of the characters. The book’s Jack, for instance, is more real, a man struggling with his temper and alcoholism. The movie’s Jack, while magnificent as he loses his mind, evokes little sympathy. He’s a cipher, not betraying much real humanity at the beginning to illustrate how far he’s fallen by the end. And there are the missing supernatural fireworks that King provides with, say, the hedge animals that is nowhere to be found in the film. (In this case, I think Kubrick’s use of the two dead girls is far creepier than what would seem to be standard horror movie living hedge animals, though. It adds more texture to Danny’s horror; the Overlook will kill children casually.) But the movie is Kubrick’s particular vision, not really King’s. These are separate arts. (I haven’t seen the recent King-approved mini-series, so I won’t comment on it.)

And how is Kubrick’s movie? I’ve seen it once before, and piecemeal several times afterwards. Before my most recent viewing, The Shining is pretty much the scariest movie I’ve ever seen. Even after this current viewing, it’s still god awful creepy, even though I know everything that’s coming. (No, I haven’t seen The Blair Witch Project yet.) As noted, there’s a certain lack of character development with Jack compared to the novel, so our sympathies don’t lie with him. He comes across as either a blank slate or an asshole. Shelly Duvall’s Wendy does evoke sympathies, as does Danny. Everyone’s acting was excellent, and Nicholson deserves every praise for his insane Jack. The sequences before he picks up the axe at the end are the best, though.

In terms of the scary bits, the two dead girls are fantastic. Not twins, but dressed identically to give a creepy dissonance. Equally effective is Danny/Tony’s “redrum”, especially the urgent “redrum” before Wendy sees the real meaning in the mirror. The woman of Room 237 is so-so, but the real horror of that sequence lay in extending the moment longer than one would have thought. The music, in particular, is used effectively. I suppose no horror movie would be scary without good, creepy music, but The Shining’s use of music and sound is pretty much perfect. Sound, disturbing sound, permeates the hotel. It’s the evil aura of the place made perceptible to the audience.

>From a DVD perspective, this disc is only average. Clearly, it’s a rush job to get out the product before Eyes Wide Shut. There is a nice “Making of The Shining” documentary which shows a nice slice of life of film production. It was all a set, not a hotel Kubrick occupied for months. The sound is acceptable for a film of this vintage. You really don’t need Dolby Digital 5.1 to invoke creepiness, given the quality of the soundtrack. The picture quality, though, is disappointing. It looks like they took a dusty old copy of the film and transfered it to DVD. You can see film defects as you watch the movie. Nothing so obvious as a hair, but the movie shows it age. There should have been a restoration job.

Oh, there’s a nice collection of essays on The Shining, as a movie, at this URL:

http://www.mindbuilder.com/mkraft/shining/index.html

I’m not sure about the thrust of the main essay regarding the fate of Native Americans and the Overlook, though. Some of the text is there, but I find it tenuous. It sounds like an overzealous freshman in his first lit class. It’s apparently a column for the San Francisco Examiner, so I suppose the author couldn’t really elaborate on his thesis, given word count constraints.

The basic story of “Good Will Hunting” is that of a Boston townie, a 20-year-old blue collar guy too cutely named Will Hunting (or is the movie too cutely titled?), who, while sweeping the corridors of MIT, happens to solve graduate-level math problems when no one is looking. He’s apparently better than the MIT professors, including the resident Fields Medalist (read: Nobel Prize in mathematics). He plays a sort of mathematician’s elf, who builds intricate and subtle theorems at night.

Will Hunting is not an idiot-savant. He’s actually an autodidact who happens to be brilliant at sciences, at math in particular. He also has an asshole personality, you know, the type that’s been made heroic in movies over the years. The young brilliant rebel thing, who has social problems and a long rap sheet.

He’s eventually discovered by the Fields Medalist, and, in a deal with the court to get Will out of jail time for assaulting a cop, the MIT professor takes him under his wing. They’ll solve math problems together. Our prodigy also has to seek counsoling. The counsoling psychiatrist turns out to be Robin Williams, in a role somewhat reminiscent of the Oliver Sacks one in “Awakenings” and the Fisher King in that Holy Grail movie. Williams is good in this, by the way.

In any case, the movie annoyed the hell out of me until we began the psychiatric sessions and the meat of the story, mainly because this story of the unrecognized genius solving math problems that professional mathematicians can’t do is an old urban legend, derived from the true story of how George Dantzig came up with the simplex method as a grad student in Berkeley. It was also doing the math in an annoying way, even though I haven’t really touched the subject in many, many years. Complex proofs apparently can be stated on a single blackboard panel, deep theorems and their proofs, beyond the understanding of a Fields Medalist, can be described on a single sheet of loose leaf, and so on. Movies, to be effective, have to make you suspend belief, and, sometimes, little things will shatter this suspension for some people. For New Yorkers, a scene of characters walking instantly from Zabar’s to the Met will do this. For me, in the first part of this film, it was this reference to the urban legend, because I know how badly the legend is phrased, and because I dropped out of math grad school with my inferior parietal lobe somewhat worse for wear. [1]

Actually, another thing I find interesting is the movie’s portrayal of intellectuals. This falls back to the old American distrust of intellectuals — the two most prominent ones in the film, the somewhat effete, scarf-wearing Fields Medalist and this Harvard history grad student in some bar hitting on Minnie Driver — are both thoroughly trounced, both subtly and obviously, by the Southie Will Hunting. He’s better than them, morally, intellectually, physically. As said, it pushes those buttons in the American psyche. As a side note, one of my math professors wore a scarf just like the Field Medalist’s, but he was French, and, as an American, I just classified that habit as a French thing.

Anyway, after this first part was out of the way, I actually liked the film a lot. The interactions between Robin Williams and the boy are well written, well acted. The same between the boy and his love interest. It’s good movie making. The general story is what you’d expect in this sort of situation — redemption, forgiveness, and so on until a tear-filled catharsis followed by going after the girl — but the film handles it well. It’s a good movie, highly recommended.

One nice thing, showing the screenwriters’ Harvard heritage: the neat, non-explicit Bostonisms, mainly the ubiquitous presence of Dunkin’ Donut coffee cups and Au Bon Pain. The townies also have a strong Boston accent which I actually find harder to understand than, say, Minnie Driver’s British accent, and they talk about the Red Sox like it’s an old-time religion.

While math is not the primary focus of the film, I found the way it was used interesting, though perhaps not unexpected. Basically, we see only a dense wall of symbols and notation, a veritable foreign language without a Rosetta Stone for the audience, followed by a QED. For all intents and purposes, Will Hunting could have been writing in Sanskrit with little difference. Math, however, can inspire the fear of god in people, while Sanskrit probably doesn’t.

So, with the various genius movies in the past few years, the majority have been with music (“Shine”, “Amadeus”, and maybe one or two others), chess (“Searching for Bobby Fisher”), and just general genius (“Little Man Tate”). As said, there’s surprisingly not a single math genius in there (with the possible exception of “Relativity”, the Richard Feynman film, though that had more to do with Feynman and his wife, and not Feynman’s brilliant physics), despite math’s higher intimidation factor, its particular mysteriousness. The only other thing I remember that used a math genius was the Tom Stoppard play, “Arcadia” (and it was used evocatively).

But this isn’t that relevant. The movie, in the end, is about a troubled youth that just happens to be a prodigy. It’s that genre, rather than the genius genre. Well, geniuses, I think, tend to be depicted as troubled in one way or another, and the movies tend to focus on them reconciling these troubles, so that doesn’t say much — I’m not sure if there is a “genius” genre. Except for “Amadeus”, actually, which was about a lesser light reacting to genius. Now, that was a good film. Actually, same for “Arcadia”, the Stoppard play, which is about other people’s reaction to genius. Actually, I’m not sure what my point is here. Ignore me.

I recently finished a little book on Fermat’s Last Theorem. That book, far more than this film, almost made me pull down my old Herstein’s “Topics in Algebra” from my bookshelf (Lang’s “Algebra” is too intimidating). There’s a vague desire to see Galois Theory again, in the old, very particular sense of “see”. But this is perhaps just nostalgia, brought on by the book’s chatter on fields and abelian groups.

[1] That’s the substance of the UL that seems to be based on George Dantzig :

A professor talks about “impossible” math problems in class, and puts a few up on the board as examples. Undergrad gets into class late, thinks the problems on the board is homework, goes home, complains that they were really hard but solves them.

The moral of the UL is the usual one about not thinking things are “impossible”, and that sometimes the student is smarter than the teacher. There’s a positive thinking thing going on, as well as the Biblical one, the “from the mouths of babes” thing.

The real story about Dantzig is that he was a grad student — and so a different kettle of fish altogether — and the professor was putting some open problems on the board. Open problems are very different from “impossible” problems.

Actually (falling into math folklore), there’s a legend apparently told by Dantzig that I heard second or third hand from professors. It’s a von Neumann story, actually, and perhaps belongs in that subgenre. This is after Dantzig got his PhD, and is doing postdoc work at Princeton. Von Neumann is there, and Dantzig goes up to him to describe the simplex method. So Dantzig is up at the board, writing things down, and after a really short amount of time (the length apparently decreases with each retelling by Dantzig), von Neumann gets up and says, “oh, that”, sits Dantzig down, and proceeds to describe a number of implications of the method. The moral is that von Neumann, after working on game theory for all those years, basically had the ideas of the simplex method swimming around the back of his head, not quite formalized. A simpler moral: von Neumann is god.

Update: Fixed my horrible sin of misspelling Dantzig’s name, as per the comment below.