Eddie Muller lists his Top 25 Noir Films, and I have a lot of watching to do.
I have seen Sunset Boulevard, number 3 on his list, though, and I love his take:
To those who think this isn’t noir: Man uses woman. Woman uses man. Queasy sex. Betrayal. Madness. Gunshots. He’s face down in the pool he always wanted. Case closed.
Eddie Muller lists his Top 25 Noir Films, and I have a lot of watching to do.
I have seen Sunset Boulevard, number 3 on his list, though, and I love his take:
To those who think this isn’t noir: Man uses woman. Woman uses man. Queasy sex. Betrayal. Madness. Gunshots. He’s face down in the pool he always wanted. Case closed.
I knew I was going to see Ratatouille (Rat-a-too-ee) — in theaters June 29 — but after seeing the 9-minute preview I’m definitely going.
I knew I was going to see Ratatouille (Rat-a-too-ee) — in theaters June 29 — but after seeing the 9-minute preview I’m definitely going.
I only just now found out about Grayson, a 2004 fan film made by a guy named John Fiorella to show off his filmmaking abilities.
The film presents a world after the golden age of superheroes. Batman has been murdered, and Dick Grayson takes up the mantle of Robin once more to track down the killers.
Watch the video. Fiorella manages a lot with no budget.
In Satire busts a hump, Patrick Goldstein praises Morissette’s recent video:
Dressing herself Fergie-style, with baubles and bling, surrounded by black-clad male dancers, Morissette retained the original’s visual sluttiness but replaced the Peas’ thumping rhythm track with a pensive solo piano. By removing the intoxicating bass line and clearly enunciating the crass lyrics, she gave the song’s sexpot swagger a new tone of sadness and desperation while simultaneously parodying her own artistic tendencies toward self-absorbed angst.
(I’ve blogged on the video before.)
In Satire busts a hump, Patrick Goldstein praises Morissette’s recent video:
Dressing herself Fergie-style, with baubles and bling, surrounded by black-clad male dancers, Morissette retained the original’s visual sluttiness but replaced the Peas’ thumping rhythm track with a pensive solo piano. By removing the intoxicating bass line and clearly enunciating the crass lyrics, she gave the song’s sexpot swagger a new tone of sadness and desperation while simultaneously parodying her own artistic tendencies toward self-absorbed angst.
(I’ve blogged on the video before.)
I enjoyed reading Adam Tolkien on The Children of Hurin:
I was brought up in France, and although my grandfather died when I was very young, his work was always very much in evidence at home. My father, Christopher, the third of J.R.R. Tolkien’s four children, according to his father’s explicit wishes, has devoted himself to the publishing of my grandfather’s massive archive of material ever since he began work on the “Silmarillion” papers in 1974. Ideally suited as he was through his 25 years of experience as a professor of Anglo-Saxon in Oxford, his work has always been that of the most rigorous editorial discipline. I have always been impressed by his ability to preserve his father’s original writings as far as possible while applying the deft skill of an editor to make his volumes readable and not simply a catalogue of unpublished texts, something I was to learn first-hand when I undertook the daunting task of translating the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth for Christian Bourgois, the French Tolkien publisher. With these books, complete with Christopher’s notes, as well as being able to discover some otherwise completely unknown tales, readers could begin to understand the way the author worked, and see how he would write and rewrite, often revisiting the same stories and passages after many years, keen to refine and improve his vast mythology, as well as to accommodate into his earlier writing the fruits of his later invention and to create a complete and seamless mythology, a saga spanning thousands of years.
I enjoyed reading Adam Tolkien on The Children of Hurin:
I was brought up in France, and although my grandfather died when I was very young, his work was always very much in evidence at home. My father, Christopher, the third of J.R.R. Tolkien’s four children, according to his father’s explicit wishes, has devoted himself to the publishing of my grandfather’s massive archive of material ever since he began work on the “Silmarillion” papers in 1974. Ideally suited as he was through his 25 years of experience as a professor of Anglo-Saxon in Oxford, his work has always been that of the most rigorous editorial discipline. I have always been impressed by his ability to preserve his father’s original writings as far as possible while applying the deft skill of an editor to make his volumes readable and not simply a catalogue of unpublished texts, something I was to learn first-hand when I undertook the daunting task of translating the first two volumes of The History of Middle-earth for Christian Bourgois, the French Tolkien publisher. With these books, complete with Christopher’s notes, as well as being able to discover some otherwise completely unknown tales, readers could begin to understand the way the author worked, and see how he would write and rewrite, often revisiting the same stories and passages after many years, keen to refine and improve his vast mythology, as well as to accommodate into his earlier writing the fruits of his later invention and to create a complete and seamless mythology, a saga spanning thousands of years.
The BBC says that boxing’s biggest fight is with mixed martial arts (MMA), better known as ultimate fighting:
Boxing legend Barry McGuigan called it “dirty” and “undignified”, but statistics suggest it is safer than boxing.Ultimate Fighting Championship is coming to Britain — and British boxing is rattled.
On Saturday, UFC lands at Manchester’s MEN Arena, and 16,000 people, including Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand and Girls Aloud, will be there to welcome it.
Across the Atlantic, it’s already big news. UFC, the leading brand within the sport of mixed martial arts, outsold boxing on the box twice over in 2006 and has just finalised a deal with HBO, the traditional home of boxing in America.
UFC champions Randy Couture and Chuck Liddell are household names, which is more than you can say for Floyd Mayweather, arguably boxing’s biggest talent.
And it has even caught the imagination of the A-list, with a host of Hollywood stars — and Paris Hilton — regulars at UFC shows.
$78 million of red ink? That’s how much money Sahara lost, according to some highly confidential documents that have come out:
An interesting bit of legal trivia:
The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act prohibits U.S. companies from paying any foreign official to secure an “improper advantage” or influence a decision. The act permits small “grease” or facilitation payments for routine services such as the provision of visas, licenses and permits.The “local bribes” probably would fall under the “grease” exemption because of the routine nature of the payments, said Alexandra Wrage, president of TRACE, an anti-bribery business association in Annapolis, Md.
Duncan Watts asks, Is Justin Timberlake a Product of Cumulative Advantage?:
The reason is that when people tend to like what other people like, differences in popularity are subject to what is called “cumulative advantage,” or the “rich get richer” effect. This means that if one object happens to be slightly more popular than another at just the right point, it will tend to become more popular still. As a result, even tiny, random fluctuations can blow up, generating potentially enormous long-run differences among even indistinguishable competitors — a phenomenon that is similar in some ways to the famous “butterfly effect” from chaos theory. Thus, if history were to be somehow rerun many times, seemingly identical universes with the same set of competitors and the same overall market tastes would quickly generate different winners: Madonna would have been popular in this world, but in some other version of history, she would be a nobody, and someone we have never heard of would be in her place.
He tested this online:
In our study, published last year in Science, more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab, and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw only the names of the songs and bands, while others also saw how many times the songs had been downloaded by previous participants. This second group — in what we called the “social influence” condition — was further split into eight parallel “worlds” such that participants could see the prior downloads of people only in their own world. We didn’t manipulate any of these rankings — all the artists in all the worlds started out identically, with zero downloads — but because the different worlds were kept separate, they subsequently evolved independently of one another.
[...]
In all the social-influence worlds, the most popular songs were much more popular (and the least popular songs were less popular) than in the independent condition. At the same time, however, the particular songs that became hits were different in different worlds, just as cumulative-advantage theory would predict. Introducing social influence into human decision making, in other words, didn’t just make the hits bigger; it also made them more unpredictable.
Christina Ricci gears up for “Speed Racer”:
Christina Ricci is joining Matrix creators Larry and Andy Wachowski’s live-action adaptation of the 1960s cartoon Speed Racer.Emile Hirsch, Susan Sarandon and John Goodman already have boarded the high-octane Warner Bros. project, which is based on the anime series created by Tatsuo Yoshida for Japanese audiences and later imported to the U.S.
Culture Flows Through English Channels, according to Rüdiger Wischenbart:
Worldwide, he said, between 50 percent and 60 percent of all translations of books originate from English originals. It’s sometimes higher: 70 percent of all books translated into Serbian, for instance, have English originals. In return, only 3 percent to 6 percent of all worldwide book translations are from foreign languages into English. English speakers, it seems, are talking a lot but listening very little. If this were the airline industry, we’d be talking about the kind of world where you can’t fly from Moscow to Berlin without changing in London.Non-Anglo cultures are also listening less and less to each other, more and more to us. “In 2005,” Wischenbart reported, “a mere 9.4 percent of all translations into German came from French originals…. Yet, this still brings French comfortably to second place in the overall translation statistics in Germany, as compared to 2.7 percent for Italian (number 3), or Dutch (2.5 percent, number 4) or Spanish (2.3 percent, number 5). Sixty-two percent of all translations were of English originals. All other languages and cultural in-roads seem like peanuts in comparison, and no politically well-intentioned process will ever mend this imbalance…. Centrifugal forces are working against globalization, resulting in culturally fragmented islands and regions, with few cohesive lines in between.”
Aside from sharing some of the same stars, Howard Hawks’ Red River bears little resemblance to his later Rio Bravo — which I discussed recently — except that politics were almost an issue even in this earlier film:
There was some concern that John Wayne and Montgomery Clift would not get along since they were diametrically opposed on most political issues, and both were outspoken on their views. According to legend they agreed not to discuss politics and the shooting went smoothly.
An amusing bit of trivia:
Texas Longhorn cattle had been nearly extinct as a breed for about 50 years when this film was made. Only a few dozen animals were available. In the herd scenes most of the cattle are Hereford crosses with the precious Longhorns prominently placed in crucial scenes.
Another bit of trivia:
Filmed in 1946 but held for release for two years, in part due to legal problems with Howard Hughes, who claimed it was similar to his The Outlaw (1943).