The Wait Is Over

My wife received an email yesterday from her soon-to-be employers informing her of which city she (and thusly, I) will be working out of.

Atlanta.

A big surprise for us, but a happy one. Staying in the city really simplifies things. No stressful interstate moves, no forward planning to visiting our parents around the holidays, and we know the area. I'll admit there was something attractive about the idea of a "fresh start" in a new city, hanging out again with old friends and all that, but I'm also a little relieved about staying with what's familiar and not having to say goodbye to anyone. So here we'll stay until the company decides my wife's talents would be better put to use in, I don't know, Cleveland.

London: Day Two

On our second day in London my wife and I slept all the way in till 8 a.m. Bleary-eyed I climbed into a shower the size of a roomy coffin, inside of which I was assaulted by both cold tile and a frigid and clingy shower curtain that wrapped itself around me at the slightest provocation. It was like that every morning we were in London. It wasn't the kind of shower in which one lingers.

The first appointment we had that day -- a true British tea service at the British Museum -- wasn't until 3:30 that afternoon, so we had all morning and most of the afternoon to kill. We decided to head towards Knightsbridge to see the famous Harrod's department store. My wife was adamant that we visit Harrod's during our trip, even though I had no particular enthusiasm for it (which is not to say there was ever a chance we weren't going). I figured that once we finished looking at all the high-dollar clothes and perfume and jewelry, we'd get on with the day. But after we stepped inside and I saw for myself how Harrod's differs from all the department stores I've been in, I wasn't in a hurry to leave.

Covering 4.5 acres on 5 massive floors, Harrod's is 158 years old and generally considered one of the premier shopping destination in London. Harrod's prides itself on the notion that you can buy anything you can dream up inside; a stroll through its 5 floors are proof that their motto, "Everything for Everybody Everywhere" is absolutely true. Back in the day, Harrod's embalmed Sigmund Freud, sent herring across the ocean to Alfred Hitchcock, sold an elephant to Ronald Reagan, and once called Oscar Wilde one of its best customers. Harrod's has changed hands a lot of times over its history but is now in the hands of the Fayed family, who've spent buckets of cash to restore Harrod's from its eighties dinge to its former glory. Not necessarily to replicate what it may have looked like in the past, but to make it the destination department store it once was. Model-pretty men and women populate the handbag and cosmetic counters. Clean-cut men in snug uniform suits scan the floor for would-be shoplifters. A bank of escalators called "the Egytian Escalator", decked out like a secret burial chamber for some Egyptian pharaoh, moves shoppers from floor to floor. The Fayeds spent $600 million to build the escalator passage and the surrounding decor and the space is fantastic, more amusement park than department store. Yes, there's a full-bore Waterstone's bookstore inside, a nearly Toys R' Us-sized toy store, all the clothes, pianos, furniture, household appliances and sporting goods you could want, but for me the "grocery store" part of Harrod's is where you truly see Harrod's's dedication to creating a sense of wonder.

In the room marked 'Meats', glass cases lined the walls, each featuring ruler-straight lines of beef, chicken, pork, lamb, duck or pheasant all ready to drop into the frying pan. Protruding from the wall was a fully-functional sushi bar, complete with full-time sushi chef and top-quality fish. The produce, located in an adjacent room, was of farmers' market quality. I looked but couldn't find a bit of rot or wilt anywhere. In the candy and chocolate room was a long line of glass cases stocked full of every conceivable form of marzipan. Everything in the grocery area of Harrod's was displayed and presented in such a way as to visually overwhelm, and it did that very well. Also, the place runs like a clock. Periodically, uniformed employees appeared holding trays filled with just the right number of items to replace what's depleted. Not surprisingly the prices were as sky-high as the quality, more in line with Whole Foods than Kroger, but high prices don't deter some of England's wealthier folks (and London's got lots of them). In one of the grocery rooms I saw an old man sitting in front of a desk while a well-dressed woman in her mid-twenties supervised other workers who were gathering the old man's groceries in cloth bags. The old man was having a spot of tea while all of this was going on. I'm thinking London is probably a very nice place in which to be very very rich. Having had an aristocracy in place for longer than nearly any other part of the world, merchants in London know how to cater to wealth. Anyway. After the craziness of the grocery section of Harrod's, the other four floors were amazing but still anticlimactic. But needless to say I was happy the wife put Harrod's on the itinerary.

Afterwards we took the Tube from the Knightsbridge station to Piccadilly and window shopped to kill some time before our afternoon tea. For those of you who read this now-sporadically updated blog, you know I like me some books. Not so much to read, but mostly to buy and put on my shelf and gaze at and feel smart. So you might imagine my joy to find not just one, but two 6-story bookstores on this road and just a few blocks from one another. I've never been to New York, which I'd imagine would compete for this title, but London is by far the most obviously literate city I've ever been in; these two massive bookstores thriving in such close proximity to one another is evidence of that. The first of these bookstores I went into was another Waterstone's, which is basically the Barnes & Noble of the U.K.. I visited all five stories and saw that one whole level was dedicated to biographies of obscure British celebrities and minor politicians, and another to literary criticism and obscure British poetry. The 6 stories thing didn't seem quite so great after that.

Looking back, I realize I was excited about these bookstores all out of proportion to what was really contained inside, namely a whole lot of very British books. I now understand that the same isolationist prejudice that drives most readers to only pick titles about their own countrymen doing things inside their own country, also helps determine what books I choose to read. If a thoroughly British writer named Sebastian Faulks writes a novel set in 70's London that sends up England during the Thatcher years, it turns out I'm not really too interested. Who knew?

The second 6-story bookstore was a different story (no pun intended). Hatchard's, which opened for business way back in 1797, is the oldest bookstore in London. The interior is done out in dark hardwoods and looks every inch the classic English bookshop, much moreso than the more generic Waterstones. The other thing that distinguished Hatchard's from the Waterstones and WH Smith's I'd been to before, was how many hardcovers were wrapped in a beige fold-in with the word "Signed" printed on the front. According to the Hatchard's catalog, authors come in every other day to do signings. Easily half of the new titles had that tell-tale fold-in, including the British edition of Ian McEwan's latest novel, "On Chesil Beach". This was awesome, but, unfortunately, I had already bought a copy at the Waterstone's at Harrod's. So I bought a signed copy and resolved to head back to Harrod's sometime before we left England to return the first, unsigned copy. By the way, I visited every floor of Hatchard's too.

After that, we headed to the British Museum for our tea. Because the British Museum's main chamber is cavernous, the restaurant, located on the museum's second floor, felt kind of like an open-air cafe. We sat by a bank of windows overlooking a vast library located in the middle of the main chamber, but as it was under renovation, our view was blocked by a black protective screen. The afternoon tea service was good; three finger sandwiches, two scones served with a ton of clotted cream and a ton of jam, and of course the tea, a whole pot of Earl Gray for me. (The wife haqd Chamomile). I don't know tea, so I figured if Earl Gray was good enough for Capt. Picard, it would be good enough for me. And after I put 4 or 5 cubes of sugar in there, it was a lovely beverage. (And here's a picture of me enjoying my Earl Gray.) Afterwards, we walked around the museum for a while, gawking at mummies and obscene fertility sculptures. Now we get back into some pictures. It isn't pretty.

This is me standing beside the British Museum's crown jewel, the famed Rosetta Stone, created in 196 B.C. and discovered by the French in 1799. With a lot of museum pieces, the true value of the piece isn't immediately clear outside of a purely aesthetic perspective. A shard of clay pot that was used in a Sumerian hut, for example, is not obviously valuable to anyone but the anthropologists and archaeologists who specialize in that sort of thing. The Rosetta Stone, however, is accessible to the layperson (like me) as it lets you know why it's important right away. At the top, a passage is written (chiseled really) in Egyptian hieroglyphs, a language that prior to the Rosetta Stone's discovery had not been deciphered. Below the hieroglyphs is the same passage written in demotic Egyptian, and then below both of those is the same passage chiseled in Greek, which was (and is) well-known to scholars. Pretty momentous, eh? Anyway, when we first got to the Rosetta Stone, the whole front of the display-case was crowded with museum-goers taking pictures. Without thinking, I ambled around back where it was less crowded to see what was written on the other side. When I saw only rough rock I felt at first surprised and then kinda stupid. The Rosetta Stone is not, as I'd supposed, like a piece of notebook paper on which you cover both sides with writing.






This is a big lion-looking thing carved out of stone.







I don't really know what to say about this photo. I don't know whom the bust is based on, I'm not even sure if he's Greek, but forget him -- I look like a complete idiot, so I thought I'd include it for a laugh. Or perhaps a stony, disappointed silence. (By the way, the wife has asked me to state that I hiked up my pants for the sake of the photo, and that this is not how I normally dress. I thought this went without saying, but she would rather be safe than sorry.)

After strolling the British Museum and the surrounding neighborhood, we made our way, Tube-wise, towards the West End's Theater District. (I'm not sure if 'Theater District' ought to be capitalized, but I'm doing it anyway.) We had tickets for the 7:30 show of the musical version of "Lord of the Rings" at the Theater Royal Drury Lane. But first: some fish and chips.

It had been nearly 24 hours since I'd last eaten some fried cod and french fries, so we had to address this problem immediately. As the wife had read a travel guide at the Harrod's Waterstones listing the the best fish and chips places in London, she remembered that one of them, a place called Rock 'N Sole, was within walking distance of our theater. We took a place outside on one of six big picnic tables set up on the sidewalk. We joined a lawyerly-looking fellow of, perhaps, Indian descent, and when he left, our food arrived and so did two American girls of roughly college age who sat down beside us. When my wife and I weren't talking, we couldn't help but overhear the two girls blab about a friend of theirs who was making really bad relationship choices. I got the sense that they were in some sorority in America. My wife, who's better at eavesdropping than I am, got a totally different story from their conversation, which just means I've probably got some kind of hearing loss going. In addition to the fish and chips (which were very good), I also had the "mushy peas", which according to the travel books is a traditional English way to eat fish and chips. I was game, so I tried them. Very salty. My palette is pretty unsophisticated, but I couldn't really see how the mushy peas complement either the fish or the chips. Old habits die hard in England, I guess.

And then we were off to the theater. The Theater Royal Drury Lane is a very old theater and was, for a time, considered the most important theater in the world. Oscar Wilde premiered two plays here back in the 1890's. A big plaque on the wall in the lobby of the theater hints at the theater's rich history from when it was first opened after a fire in 1674 and designed by the famed architect Christopher Wren, through all of the owner/creative directors in the theater's multi-century history, all the way to its current owner, "Phantom of the Opera" writer-composer Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Though the plaque made no mention of how many times the theater burned down over the years and was completely rebuilt -- guess it makes it all seem a little less antique.)

"The Lord of the Rings" musical opened for a while in Toronto to mixed reviews. Critics said its running time (3 1/2 hours) was too long, there were too many characters and the songs weren't catchy enough. So they closed the show, reworked it to bring it down to 3 hours, cut a few of the characters and tried to punch up the songs so people might have something to hum on the way out of the theater, and then opened it back up in London on May 9th of this year. The show is a major production. The producers (one of whom is listed as Saul Zaentz, though I doubt he had much to do with it) spent 16 million dollars (or 8 million pounds) to stage the thing, and to my unpracticed eye, the money's all up there on-stage. The whole proscenium is covered in a tangle of leafless tree branches, as well as a few of the balcony seats and a good bit of the ceiling. While the theater fills up, the actors who play the hobbits come out onto the stage to loiter in character, meaning smug and happy. One of the hobbits, maybe it was Pip, sees a firefly (an LED light flicking at the end of a thin hard wire) and the whole gang of hobbits goes crazy for it and work together to capture it. There was a lot of short British actors crawling over theatergoers and improv-ing goofy, slightly embarrassing dialog in the aisle beside us. The whole process is goofy and self-conscious, but overall pretty fun to watch. When the hobbits catch the last of four or five of the LED fireflies, the theater is full, and the lights go out and the production begins.

"Lord of the Rings" is a good show, but exhausting. At every moment, at least a hundred D&P types are running around backstage to make the spectacle on-stage possible, and there can't be any mistakes. If it isn't a massive Balrog puppet or the 10-foot high Shelob the Spider puppet that have to be perfectly manipulated, than it's the rotating stage that can rise, in sections, to what looked like 12 feet high. Instead of getting wrapped up in the story, I found myself more concerned with whether or not they'd pull the thing off. With a few minor hiccups, they did, but it seemed like a close thing at times. For a musical where the stagecraft was the main attraction, the singing and acting was fine, though the actor who played Gollum did well with an aerobic role.
The standout in "Lord of the Rings" was Laura Michelle Kelly who played the Elf Queen Galadriel. Her performance during the scene when Frodo offers her the One Ring was, in my view, more compelling, more authentic than Cate Blanchett's, which is a big deal as Kelly had no special effects to augment her performance. Even with the jaw-dropping spectacle on display through most of the show, Kelly's vocal performance was the absolute highlight.

As I clearly have no interest in keeping this post brief, I will include this one quibble with the show: Gandalf was way too pissed off at Frodo. I thought part of why the film version of "Fellowship of the Ring" was so successful, was because Peter Jackson got Gandalf exactly right. The wizard can be a stern prick at times, but all the hobbits know he still loves them. He's like Jesus that way. In the musical version of "Lord of the Rings" however, Gandalf is all prick all the time. When Gandalf and Frodo reunite in Rivendell, instead of taking a moment to be happy that Frodo didn't die of his Nazgul sword wound, Gandalf bursts into his room and bellows angrily, "Frodo!" and then berates him for some such thing that wasn't even his fault. I think if they'd gotten Gandalf a little closer to right, they might have had a better show. Just saying.

Some hours later, after we'd been lounging in the hotel for a while, we realized we were still hungry. We walked up Craven Road, past our Tube station, and to the nearest Burger King. (There are a lot of Burger Kings in the U.K.) As the BK guy grabbed our drink cups, my wife asked if we could have an extra cup of ice. He smiled and said, "Ice? You two are Americans?"

That's right. In England, we Americans are famous the Isles over for our love of ice. At that moment, I felt a sudden kinship with not only my left-leaning libtard brethren, but with all 300 million Americans -- even the dumb ones who believe in the Rapture and vote for George W Bush no matter which laws he breaks. At the end of the day, no matter what we believe, we all really freakin' like ice in our drinks. Love it, even. It was a patriotic moment for me.

Anyway, we headed back to the hotel, ate cheeseburgers, watched BBC on the telly, and went to sleep.

Stay tuned for Day Three as soon as I recover from the writing of this post.

Happy Fourth of July!

London: Day One

Yeah. It's been nearly a month since I got back from Scotland, but what am I going to do? Not post up a long, boring account of my trip on my blog? Of course not. Personal blogs DEMAND long boring accounts of vacation trips to distant lands, often with little consideration for the interest level of the readers of that blog. Who am I to be different? So I'm a going to get into it. I will try my best to keep this thing short(ish) and mostly sweet. And there will be photos.

Prior to our departure from Hartsfield on Wednesday, May 23rd, I had never really been overseas before. Yes, I was born on the northern part of the boot of Italy and grew from an enormous infant to a monstrous toddler over the course of a year or so, but I don't think this makes me a world traveler. My wife, however, has been around the world with some frequency these last 3 years, and in January of 2004, she stopped for a couple weeks in London. Because she was bunking with a friend there on business, she was mostly on her own during the daylight hours. Though she had a lot of fun zooming across the city on double-decker sightseeing buses and subways, the countryside on luxurious cross-country buses, one crucial element was missing:

Me.

Specifically, my sparkling commentary. Can one truly say they've seen, for example, Stonehenge, if they don't have a gangly, pudgy-faced smart-ass remarking, "It's really just a pile of rocks, isn't it?" in their ear while viewing it? What, you say? Far from enriching your travel experience hearing a steady stream of adolescent editorializing would actually go a long ways toward ruining it? Well, lucky for me, my wife is that peculiar, singular soul who enjoys my brand of relentless sardonic "humor". Even luckier for me, she so enjoys it that for years she's been counting the days until she could return with me to stroll the city of Shakespeare and Dickens just so she could listen to my low-register mumbling voice crack dumb along the way. So when her friends from business school decided to get married at St. Andrews, Scotland at the beginning of June, and my wife's folks agreed to give their daughter a pair of plane tickets to Great Britain, it was if the stars aligned to put my ass in London. And so it came to be.

Sad to say, the trip did not begin well. Don't get me wrong. There wasn't much to dislike about my 3 weeks in Great Britain, it was all in all a blast, but what little there to dislike all happened that first day, and a lot of it had to do with Air France. No one likes a guy belly-achin' about a bad plane ride, so I won't spend a lot of time doing it here, but I will say that my aisle seat became a middle seat plum in the middle of the plane between my wife and a big-sitting guy who looked quite a bit like the depressive novelist Russell Banks. The temperature, which on most flights runs from pleasantly cool to blanket-worthy chilly, was a zesty 80 degrees on this flight, the perfect temperature to induce not only a delightful sheen on the dryest of brows, but the spicy natural odors of one's plane-mates. Viva la France! I won't get into the surprisingly hands-off attitude of the flight crew towards the distribution of drinks and snacks, or their off-putting customer service style of overplayed but obviously pretend concern for the passengers' well-being during the 10-hour or so flight, but you get the idea. So, exhausted from lack of sleep (I can't sleep on planes), and keyed up from suppressing a claustrophobic freak-out for 10-11 hours or so, we landed at Airport de Kafka, otherwise known as Charles de Gaulle. As my wife tells it, Charles de Gaulle has been under construction for about 48 years? And from the looks of things, I'd say they're nearly halfway through.

It was bright and sunny in Paris. And also stiflingly hot. And worse than that, very very smelly. The bus the airport uses to cart off-loaded passengers from one terminal to all others was un-air conditioned, the terminal from which we boarded our connecting flight to London was un-air conditioned, and all drinks for sale in that terminal were un-air conditioned with nary an ice cube in sight. Yes, these tired observations place me squarely into the Spoiled Whiny American category of international travelers, especially given the fact I'd been informed of the silent European distaste for all things unduly cold before we left the States, but the lack of relief from the unbearable weather was still jarring. In the face of temps soaring into the nineties and blessed with the technology to chill both one's beverages and one's air, the French and the English's surrender to intolerably hot weather was baffling.

After we cleared Customs in London, we took the Heathrow Express into London's Paddington Station. The structure was beautiful and grand in an airy, practical way. Distant, soot-stained ceilings rose 50 feet into the air, old Victorian brick columns appeared here and there around the edges, (also soot-stained from the coal-burning engines that still pull in and out of the station). This station and others like it stood as backgrounds for arrivals and departures of soldiers going off to and returning from World War II. That is if they weren't bombed to smithereens during the Blitz. So, wide-eyed and loaded down with 3 bags over my inward-curving shoulders and one big suitcase rolling behind me, I walked through the cavernous station following my wife towards the street and our hotel.

While standing on the street corner just outside Paddington station waiting for the light to change to WALK, I watched the native Britons stream past us to cross the street and experienced a quiet and completely nonsensical thrill. "These people are all British," I thought to myself, awed. I listened to them talking, picking out snatches of conversation spoken in genuine British accents as opposed to the fakey mongrelized version of a British accent I do too often. We must have looked lost because a nice British woman came up to us and asked if we needed directions. As it just so happened, we did! Smiling and polite, (and in a lilting British accent mixed with something else) she directed us towards our hotel which was in the exact opposite direction of the way we'd been going. (Coincidentally, not long after we checked into our hotel and headed out, we saw the same woman again walking past and we said hello like old friends who'd been living in that part of London for years.)

If I haven't said before, let me say it now: it was hot in London. I don't know what the exact temperature was because I can't do the conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit, but it was damn hot. I'd been sweating for going on 24 hours (and, as I hadn't yet slept, miserably aware of every salty drip) and was looking forward to the blessed kiss of some A/C and an icy shower soon after. However, there was no A/C in the lobby, no A/C in the coffin-sized elevator up to the 5th floor, and no A/C in our cramped but clean hotel room. Lack of sleep made all of this seem disastrous, but when viewed in hindsight, the heat and the dearth of ice was an entirely survivable inconvenience. I'm writing here, so obviously I survived it. In my defense, though, I didn't know then that the hot weather would end the following day, or that many if not most buildings in London do indeed have air-conditioning. But I know that in those hours post-arrival and pre-sleep, I was a sullen, unhappy bore. Eventually, I recovered.

So after an icy restorative shower, the wife and I headed back to Paddington station to get on the famous London Tube. More on the city's public transportation system later, right now I want to get right to the London Eye and some photos.


Towering there just behind my smiling face is London's newest landmark, the British Airways London Eye. Though it looks like a ferris wheel, it differs in a few important ways. Riders of the London Eye do not ride in the usual leg-dangling metal benches familiar to all state fair and carnival visitors. Riders of the London Eye go around in roomy capsules. The Eye is officially called an "observation wheel". There is no sensation of movement. Throughout the ride, you are as stationary as you would be on the observation deck of any tall building. And, unlike your typical ferris wheel, the Eye does not spin with any speed. In fact, it rotates only once every half hour. And for the price of admission, that's exactly how long you get to be in a capsule.

Even before we left Atlanta for England, I was already a little scared of the Eye. I was only made completely aware of my own fear of heights one day years ago down at the Santa Monica pier. My wife and I walked down the pier fully expecting to get on and ride the wheel all around like regular folks. We even bought tickets (which, if I remember right, were not as cheap as I'd imagined). But when I stood at the base of the ferris wheel and looked up at the dangling, peeling-paint iron swings whipping past and then shooting up heedless into the sky, I couldn't do it. More than that; I believe it would have been impossible for me to voluntarily place myself into one of those swing-benches. So with that distant day in mind, I approached the Eye worried the same base fear would reassert itself and make a little girl of me. And, to make things a little worse, tickets to ride the Eye (already pre-purchased) were quite a bit more than the Santa Monica ferris wheel. So, once again, both my masculinity and a bit of cash were on the line. But after camping at a table in an outdoor eating area at the base and drinking some coolish bottled drinks, I mustered my courage, slapped both cheeks to wake myself up, and climbed aboard.


Happily,the Eye really is an "observation wheel" and resembles a ferris wheel only from a cursory glance at its exterior. The only slightly vertiginous moments came as I stepped a little too close to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looked out over London. The photo to the left was taken during the first half of our revolution, looking up at the capsules preceding ours. The Eye moves so slowly that, even looking out at any one particular point on the cityscape, it is not immediately clear the capsule's moving at all. A couple times I was sure we'd stopped entirely. I took a bunch of digital photos while we were up on this thing. My wife watched the city sink beneath and then lift above us from the comfort of a long bench that runs through the middle of the capsule. Most of the photos I took suffer from the camera's proclivity to focus on the glass rather than the world outside the glass, but I got a number of shots that, if not particularly straight or interesting, are at least in focus and feature recognizable London landmarks.

Like this photo, for example. Here you can see Big Ben to the left and Parliament to the right. All of this was famously blown up in both the graphic novel "V for Vendetta" and the film adaptation of the same name. Yes, as I am more a student of cheap pop culture than of history, these are the images that come to mind when taking in the great historical landmarks. Oh well. I'd have to say that taking the Eye up 400 or so feet into the air over the city is a pretty good way to get acquainted with London for first-time visitors like me. You can see all the obvious sightseeing destinations in a half-hour floating capsule ride, and get an idea from high above of which old buildings warrant a close-up viewing or perhaps even a tour.

This oblong building in the distance here is called by Londoners "the Gherkin". Its full title, given to it by its designer, is "the Erotic Gherkin". No one at all, according to our Jack the Ripper tour guide, calls it that. Whatever its goofy name, it's a striking building, and adds a bit of much-needed modernity to London's skyline, which I thought was surprisingly lacking in that regard.

Anyway, we did the half-hour revolution, and here are a few more of the photos I took on the way round.






More Big Ben.













A high view of the Thames at high tide.










This is a not-so-clear shot of the London Eye employees checking our capsule for bombs or somesuch with the use of mirrors affixed to the ends of sticks. Terrorism, or the fear of it anyway, is everywhere.














And here I am with Darth Vader. There was a Star Wars exhibit in a building adjacent to the Eye and different Englanders came out dressed as characters from both the original films and the prequels. Some goofy-looking "Padawan learners" who came out after Darth made his exit.
















In the foreground: me wife. In the background: the London Eye in full.














After we stepped off the Eye and met Darth Vader, we walked across the bridge to Big Ben. This is me on the bridge.











And here I am at a cafe just a block to two down the street from our hotel, about to dig into my first official English meal of fish and chips. The fish and chips pictured here were okay, but far from the best I had while in England and Scotland.

Anyway, that was day one in England. I don't expect each day to warrant all this verbiage, so future postings will be more brief (hopefully).

All right, this entry is long enough. Stay tuned for Day Two.

Hie Thyself to the Multiplex!

I've just seen a midnight showing of "1408". If you have time this weekend, go see this film. As with most movies I really like, I don't want to say too much about it and run the risk of lessening its impact. For example, if I say "1408" is, at times, terrifying, you may steel yourself against it, so I won't say that... because it's not. Or something. I'm feeling an urge to engage in some hyperbole here, but as it is 2:38 a.m. and I'm rarely at my most cogent at this hour, I'll spare myself any potential embarrassment. But if you've got a few extra dollars, I do recommend you check out a screening of this film before Monday. It is good, and it doesn't deserve to be beaten by the likes of "Fantastic Four 2" on its opening weekend.

In other news, still packing up the damn place. Nearly done. Swung by the liquor store on the way to the movies and grabbed up some more free boxes. They're the perfect size for the odds and ends we haven't yet packed. The movers come Sunday. Anyway, see "1408".

About Commenting

Hola guys. So we're busy packing up now. We still don't know exactly where we're headed, but we do know that we have a certain amount of money with which to move, and we get to keep whatever we don't spend. So we're packing up our apartment now.

Anyway, you may have noticed that there is no way to comment on the blog right now. This is temporary and will change likely on August 1st. By that time I will have finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, as will hopefully any other serious devotees of the series, and will thus be immune to any additional spoilers broadcast by certain (ahem) unnamed persons.

All right. Back to packing.

Oh God He's At It Again. This Time It's Books

Blogger has added a new feature that lets you post up images into the blog's header with ease. I've taken advantage of it, as you can see, in the stupidest way possible. An uncropped, unfinished drawing of what appears to be a total dullard now greets all comers to the Inanities. While I was away, my PC crapped out on me, so I haven't yet moved Photoshop CS from my busted PC to my still-working laptop (on which I'm composing this blog entry). But if I had access to Photoshop, this image would be cropped. But until I get access to it, this image will remain in its goofy, uncropped state. (Or until I get tired of it and ax it altogether). I actually think though that this drawing I did on Photoshop last month is kind of fitting. No offense to any of you, of course, but he kind of looks like he ought to be reading this blog.

Anyway, as you may have guessed, I'm back from my trip to the British Isles. Got back about a week ago and since then I've been dealing with uncooperative computers. Those issues are all resolved now, or mostly resolved (see above), and now we look ahead to the big move out of Atlanta. We have to be out of our apartment in 9 days, and we still don't know a.) what city we're going to, or b.) what or how the new employer plans to subsidize our relocation. We're hoping for a telephone call of enlightenment sometime today. I don't mean to give the impression that we are 9 days away from homelessness. The wife and I will be staying one county up with her parents until she goes away for training. But as to where we'll be at the beginning of September and the foreseeable future following, we do not know. Good times.

Enough of that. My plan was to come back, get on the 'puter, and blog about my trip right away. The 7th of this month is what I think I'd promised. A week later, I'm still not prepared to do that. The photos we took are off the camera but loaded onto my wife's calculator-sized laptop, and I won't use that because if I so much as rest my gigantor hand on it, I'll break it. So, seeing how I want to supplement my exciting travelogue with photos and those photos are not, this moment, available to me, I can provide no travelogue today. But I will do something far more boring instead. I'll tell you about the books I read while I was traveling the world! Whoo! And for those who are already clicking on other websites, take care and check back for an exhaustive description of my England trip. Here we go:

1.) The Raw Shark Texts. A Brit named Steven Hall wrote this novel which someone billed as "Memento meets Jaws". Unfortunately, this summation is accurate, and it's just as bad as that weird mish-mash of stories and genres would suggest. The story's about a twenty-something named Eric Sanderson who wakes up in his apartment one day with no memory of who he is. He finds a note nearby, addressed to him (he assumes), penned by someone calling himself "the First Eric Sanderson." In the first 20 pages, he goes to see a shrink the First Eric Sanderson tells him to visit, reads about 200 instructive notes written by the First Eric Sanderson meant to gently ease him into understanding the terrifying predicament that is his life, and he is then attacked, in his living room, by a "conceptual shark." My copy of the "Raw Shark Texts" was a library book. I've already turned it in so I can't, as I'd like, include passages from the book, but take my word for it: as difficult a time as you're no doubt having trying to imagine in your head what a "conceptual shark" looks like, the author of the novel is able to lend absolutely zero assistance. Instead of sitting down and trying as hard as he can to make the unimaginable imaginable, Hall just adds a lot of clever but bullshit modifiers to the word 'shark' to sell his story. Add in a ridiculous, shoehorned love story, a penchant for writing novels like an amateur screenwriter who's just got his hands on Robert McKee's "Story", and you've got a novel with problems. If only those were his worst sins. The end of "Raw Shark Texts" follows, in many instances beat for beat, the last 30-40 minutes of "Jaws". Seriously. So much so, that I knew what was going to happen to the characters 75 pages away from the last page because I recognized which character was Brody, which Quint, which Hooper. As I read, I held out hope for Hall. "This whole sequence is going to just be a riff on 'Jaws', he's not going to just keep ripping it off, is he?" But he does. After finishing the book, I was more than a little mystified as to mainstream publishing's well-documented excitement surrounding its release. Less mystified, though, as to why it's been termed a "disappointment" in the few months since it came out. I doubt there was very much positive word of mouth because it is not very good. That is not to say that Hall didn't have an interesting premise -- he did. I likely wouldn't have picked it up off the New Fiction shelf at the library if it didn't. He even manages to include some legitimately mind-expanding passages in his novel -- ways of thinking I'd never encountered or seen put into writing with such precision. But the goofy, screenwriter-wannabe missteps he makes the rest of the time overpower the story. I hope he has better luck next time out of the box.

2.) For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. This collection of short stories was written by Nathan Englander. He did the Iowa Writer's Workshop, his stories have appeared in Story magazine and The New Yorker, and his new novel, "The Ministry of Special Cases", has been getting rapturous reviews from everyone who reads it. Since I didn't want to plunk down $25 for an un-discounted hardcover of the new book, I picked up his first book instead. In one a wealthy, WASPy gentile decides, while sitting in the back of a cab, that he is Jewish. His transformation from Polo shirt and penny loafer wearing prep into an Orthodox Jew (right down to the little black box some penitents wear at the Wailing Wall) is meant to be hilarious, and though it is funny at times, mostly it is just sad, as are most of these stories. Englander's reputation as a masterful short story writer is well-deserved. His tone is pitch perfect for each story, the epiphanies subtle and well-managed, the themes clearly drawn and if creative writing teachers held this book up to their students to say "this is how you write short stories", I would have no problem with that. Though, as with most serious, so-called "literary" fiction, I feel I'm only half-getting the stories. And by that I mean I understand them on one, maybe two of several levels the authors were writing on. I think in the case of this particular book, some of my ignorance might be corrected if I'd either a.) retained what little Sunday School instruction I got, or b.) pick up the Bible and just suck it up and read the damn thing. In all of these stories Englander is much concerned with Jews and Jewishness, and the Old Testament Biblical allusions were a flyin'. Anyway, good reviews are much more boring than bad, so I'll just end with that.

3.) Arthur & George. Another book written by a Brit. Written by Julian Barnes, this novel was shortlisted for the Booker prize in England a couple years back. Set primarily at the beginning of the 20th century, "Arthur & George" tells the story of George Edalji, a half-Scottish, half-Indian man living in the English countryside who becomes the object of an unjustified criminal prosecution. To the rescue comes the rich and wealthy Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes. Spurred to action by a letter from George's father, a Vicar, Doyle uses his position and wealth to clear Edalji's name. Though Arthur and George don't meet until page 293 (the book is 501 pages long), the meeting still manages to feel perfectly timed. Barnes is so deft at not only conjuring the imagined personalities of these real-life men with clear attention to the true details of their actual lives, but also to recreating the world they inhabited. The effect of this careful work is that their first meeting in the lobby of the Grand Hotel is actually thrilling and, in the end, not at all predictable. Because the characters in this novel, even the non-famous ones, behave like people and not as characters in a novel, unexpected moments do sometimes arise in the story that intentionally move the reader away from easy judgments and moralistic pronouncements. For instance, after Doyle has begun his investigation into the crimes George is alleged to have committed, he interviews the bigoted chief of police (or the British equivalent) that managed the original investigation. Far from depicting the systematic and satisfying destruction of the Chief's (Anson's) irrational and dangerous beliefs on race at the hands of a Holmes-like Doyle, Barnes instead casts Anson in the Sherlock Holmes role and Arthur Conan Doyle in the exasperated and befuddled Watson role as Anson calmly and condescendingly instructs Doyle on both the particulars of the case and the sad truths about the nature of truth. After that conversation, I figured that none of my assumptions were safe, and even began to doubt the innocence of George. I have to say that my reading of the story was in no way helped by this suspense, so, if you do plan to read this book, let me tell you this: George didn't do it. Knowing this may help you later on. Anyway, an engrossing, beautifully-written, fast-moving read. I highly recommend it.

4.) The Interpretation of Murder. So we go from brilliant to terrible. This is the book I read while flying back to the States. This means that, along with "Raw Shark Texts" I sandwiched my UK trip by reading two bad books while flying over the Atlantic. This is by far the worst of the two and a particularly egregious instance of an author completely failing to deliver on a fantastic premise. This, from a single page preceding the novel.

"In 1909, Sigmund Freud... made his one and only visit to the United States. Despite the great success of this visit, Freud always spoke, in later years, as if some trauma had befallen him in the United States. He called Americans 'savages' and blamed his sojourn there for physical ailments that afflicted him well before 1909. Freud's biographers have long puzzled over the mystery, speculating whether some unknown event in America could have led to his otherwise inexplicable reaction."

To me, this is a great premise. What terrible thing happened to Sigmund Freud when he visited New York at the height of its Gilded Age? Just as with "Raw Shark Texts", the author got a big advance for a first novel, and the publishers put a lot of their selling power to bear to get this into bookstores in a big way. I opened the book expecting something on the order of Caleb Carr's "The Alienist", which was also about psychology, serial killers, New York and true life historical figures. Instead I got 529 pages of true dreck. Though Rubenfeld may have mastered many a discipline in his life (his author bio, located on the inside cover, lists his many accomplishments in both drama and law), he can not count "Writing a Good Book" as one of them. This is one of the worst books I've ever read, and I've read a few. Here is a brief list of his transgressions: He starts his novel in the first person voice of one character and then, in the next section when describing things the other character cannot have witnessed, blithely switches to third person voice. The "great trauma" Freud was supposed to have suffered, the one Rubenfeld alludes to in his one-paragraph preface, turns out to be neither great nor particularly traumatic. He uses movie-like catchphrases. For instance, after the main character is nearly drowned in the Hudson river, he emerges alive, and reunites with a fellow psychiatrist. When the main character is asked what he's been up to, he says, "Just trying to keep my head above water, really." If that's not enough, the novel was boring, the characters all lifeless puppets, and the solution to the murders was, if not completely implausible, than at least intolerably dull. The only vaguely interesting thing about this book was the interplay between Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, who traveled with him and whom Freud considered the heir to his methodology. But even that Rubenfeld manages to caricature so cartoonishly that Freud comes off as the all-knowing, all-seeing mind reader, and Jung the hedonistic, deluded, mentally ill ass-hole whom Freud insensibly coddles. The only thing more opaque than the plot or the inner workings of the minds of the characters is how much praise this book received! My copy is riddled with adulation. "Spectacular ... fiendishly clever", says the Spectator. "Unusually intelligent", so says the Times. The Sunday Telegraph weighs in with, "Rubenfeld writes beautifully." The Independent: "A dazzling novel." Entertainment Weekly calls "Interpretation", "an expertly crafted novel." I don't know if they read a different book or didn't read it at all, because none of this has any bearing on the contents of "Interpretation of Murder".

All right. I'm through. More soon.

Declaration of Intent to Hiatus

Hola, readers.

I wanted to post up briefly to let you know that, owing to a stint of traveling I'll be doing (to PA and then England -- weddings), the Inanities will go dark for 3 weeks. I'll resume posting on this blog on or shortly after the 7th of June. I'll let you know how everything went.

Until June.

The Wife Has Gradumagated!

And, just like that, two years of business school is over and my wife has graduated with honors.

The graduation ceremonies happened this morning and she is now officially done.

Last week she accepted her first post-M.B.A. job and it has been determined that we will be moving, though to where we don't yet know. Her training starts in July, which will take her to Sunnyvale, California and then to Dehli, India, and the job itself begins in August, which is when we'll probably be moving. So pretty exciting. Having listened to a bunch of speeches aimed at "looking back" over the last couple days, I don't feel at all inclined towards retrospection, so you don't have to worry on that score. Maybe as the move-out date draws closer. Anyway, I wanted to let you folks know -- I'll keep you posted.

But hey! In movie news, I saw "28 Weeks Later" over the weekend. Excellent stuff. It's not as good as the original, but it's a strong bit of work. The scares aren't cheap, the suspense is expertly done, and the premise is designed to put the screws to the characters in the cruelest (read: most entertaining) way possible. Good times.

Some other very brief reviews.

1.) "Happy Feet": Wtf?

2.) "The Holiday": Sheer embarrassment all the way through. "Bewitched"-level embarrassment.

And I've got "Little Children" and "A Good Year" on tap. I'm hoping they do better than the last pair of DVDs.

"Spider Man 3" and "Eragon". Both Sink Beneath the "Average" Mark, but One Buries the Needle

6:20 a.m. is too early to be blogging.

My allergies, which I'm thinking are related to grass, are the worst of my life and they've woken me out of a sound sleep. I've never really had them before, and the fact that they've developed at a time when I'd always thought I'd go through my life immune to pollen in all its forms is pretty depressing. It's just another bit of evidence that, sometime in the unknowable future, even more unpleasant afflictions and maladies are likely to develop. In other words, my prolific nostrils and red, irritated eyes are additional proof I am not invincible. Whether you want to know or not, I'll tell you that the roof of my mouth feels like the thinnest of membranes. Up till this past week, I always thought that just above the roof of my mouth were layers and layers of impenetrable skull meat. But now I realize that a series of strenuous tongue-pokes could puncture that membrane and allow me to probe the interior of my skull, whether with my tongue or a finger, in no time flat. Yeah, it's gross, but it's my blog, so I'll bore you with whatever I want.

Anyway, onto movie reviews. [Beware: Below Thar Be Spoilers.]

1.) Spider Man 3. There's a point late in "Spider Man 3" when it becomes clear that Sam Raimi has made a less-than-great film and that there's no hope of saving it. The moment happens in an alleyway in which Sandman (Thomas Haden Church, or Lowell from "Wings") is fighting Venom (Topher Grace, or Eric Foreman from "That 70's Show"). Who knows why they're fighting, they just are. It's what people in costumes do. They quit fighting for a minute at which point the black Venom-suit skin tendrilizes away from Topher's face and Topher suggests that, as neither of them alone can kill "the spider" alone, that they should team up and do it. Lowell thinks about it a second, and then, reluctantly, sadly, agrees. The scene was lazy, expository, implausible, wildly coincidental (among many many wild coincidences that punctuate the movie), and served solely to move the plot forward. The scene implied that this unwieldy monster-budgeted behemoth called "Spider Man 3" had really and truly gotten away from Sam Raimi. If this shitty, throwaway scene was the best way Raimi and his screenwriters could think of to set up the ridiculous, overlong finale, then all hope was lost.

I didn't hate "Spider Man 3", and I don't think it's a terrible movie, but considering the two fantastic films that came before, this second sequel is a big disappointment. The thing we were all worried about going in to the movie, namely that Raimi had crammed too many villains and subplots into this thing a la "Batman Forever", turned out to be exactly right. With hindsight being what it is, I think had the screenwriters taken out the entire Sandman sub-plot and focused on the Eddie Brock/Venom storyline, "SP3" might have been in a league with the brilliant "Spider Man 2". But even then I'm not so sure success would have been assured. Raimi's masterly understanding of the subject and tone of these films faltered a few times in this movie, but never so egregiously as during the jazz club scene, an adjunct of the Venom plot-line. As I watched Peter Parker express the depths of his dark side through jaunty "mean" dancing, I remember thinking, "This is pretty weird." But since it was Raimi, I figured he had everything well in hand; he'd pull it out. But just a few seconds later I understood. Raimi or no, the scene was just bad. And so was quite a bit of what came after.

Though there were a lot of fun sequences in the movie (OK, a few), overall "SP3" just felt muddled and rudderless. A disappointment.

2.) Eragon. The true badness of this movie is not at all apparent in the trailers cut for this movie. From a viewing of "Eragon"'s trailers, the film looks like a fairly low-rent dragon movie for the 12-13-year old male set, but not any kind of cinematic travesty. There are warning signs, sure. The appearance of not just Jeremy Irons, but also John Malkovich, adherents to the I'll Be In Anything school of acting, made me suspect true and depthless badness, but the fantastic dragon effects threw me off the scent. (They are good.) The movie is a testament to the trailer cutters' skills. "Eragon" is abysmal. It is a no-rent dragon movie for kids. The novel on which "Eragon" was based was written by then-16-year old Christoper Paolini, and that's exactly how it plays -- like a 16-year old wrote it. It was as if Paolini had only ever seen "Star Wars", had only ever read a novelization of Lucas's screenplay for "Star Wars", and then decided to write a new version of "Star Wars", except his version would have the same characters but with different names, dragons, and he'd stretch out the story over 3 or more books. The film ends with little to no resolution of the larger plot: for example, Malkovich plays the evil king in "Eragon", and the film ends without our Skywalkerian hero having anything to do with him. I don't want to write any more on this, so I'll just put it simply: the movie's crap.

Wow. I spent about 2 hours writing this post. Crazy.

Anyway. Enjoy your Wednesday.

Glorious "Golden Compass" One-Sheet For Your Thursday Night Enjoyment

After seeing the first bit of footage New Line released, I was feeling that maybe Chris Weitz (the screenwriter and director) was taking the film in a different direction than I'd envisioned while reading the book. This one-sheet, released today, which features the polar bear Iorek Byrnison in all his beary greatness, makes me think Weitz really does get these books. Could be a great movie.

NBCC Stages a Rally in Atlanta, "Night at the Museum" was Worse Than I Anticipated, and Another Drawing From the Archives

Tomorrow at 10 a.m. in front of the Atlanta Journal & Constitution building in downtown Atlanta, the National Book Critics Circle is holding a "read-in". The AJC's book editor, Teresa Weaver, was recently fired because the paper was essentially eliminating original book reporting, deciding to rely instead on wire reports and the reporting of larger newspapers. I agree with the NBCC. This is no good. The few times I pick up that awful newspaper and found something worthwhile, it was usually some bit of original AJC book reporting edited by Weaver. So for a few minutes there, I was thinking, "I should just go down there. Show my support. What the hell else have I got to do tomorrow morning?"

On the other hand, I don't read the Atlanta Journal and Constitution. I don't think it's a very good newspaper. Even if they reinstall Weaver and renew their commitment to book reviews and author profiles and whatever else, I have no intention of buying a subscription. So, with all that said, wouldn't it be less than forthright on my part to go down there and quietly demand (via "read-in") the AJC reallocate their resources to a robust book section when I don't do any business with the AJC and have no plans to do so in the future? It just feels hypocritical.

The point is moot anyhow. The wife reminds me we have someone who saw our ad on Craig's List coming by to look at some stuff tomorrow at 11 a.m.

Anyway. I rented "Night at the Museum" the other night, mostly to see what the hubbub was all about. This movie's about 99.8% for kids. I know most of you already knew that, but I was expecting a slightly more favorable ratio. Goofy, pointless, not fun, and the kid who plays Ben Stiller's son reminded me less of an actual kid than the creepy "children" in "The Polar Express". "Night at the Museum"'s $250 million domestic gross is even more staggering now that I've seen exactly what everyone went to see during the 2006 holiday season.

And finally, I was looking through my "artwork" folder, and realized a drawing I'm proud of hadn't ever made it up onto the blog. A quick search of this blog for the word "Wright" confirmed my suspicion. So here it is:


















I drew this as a gift for my father Christmas before last. Thought it came out pretty well.

That's all I got for today.

A Woman Named Kristin Calls and Insists I Asked Her Out at The Grocery Store

So, something weird happened to me last night. The phone rang at 7:43 p.m.. Privacy director listed "Private Name, Private Number". Usually, I ignore calls like this, but against my better judgment, I answered.

Me: "Hello?"

Woman: "Hello, may I speak to Brian?"

Me: "This is he."

Woman: (pause)

Me: "Who's this?"

Woman: (laughingly, as if we know each other well) "This is Kristin." (A trashy southern accent.)

Me: (pause, as I wrack my brain for Kristins I've known. I come up with nothing.) "Kristin who?"

Woman: (as though I'm being dense) "Kristin!"

Me: "Are you sure you have the right number?"

Woman: "This is Brian, right?"

Me: "Yes, but..."

Woman: "We met the other day. You gave me your number, said we should go out some time."

Me: "Uh..."

Woman: "Honey, is this a bad time?" (in the background, a small child is saying, "Mommy.")

Me: "What's my last name?"

Woman: "Hon, do you want me to call another time?"

Me: "No, no. I have no idea who you are, and you're not saying."

Woman: "We met the other day."

Me: "Where at?"

Woman: "At the grocery store."

Me: "Which one?"

Woman: "Kroger."

Me: "Which Kroger?"

Woman: "Oh, I don't remember, the one down in Decatur. Sweetie, if I called at a bad time, I can call back..." (again, the child in the background says, "Mommy.")

Me: "Oh no, don't call here again."

Woman: "Honey, I'll just call back."

Me: (yelling) "No! Do not call back here again!"

I hang up.

Now, that's just a rough transcript from memory. Reading over it, it comes across as shorter than it actually was.

As you can probably tell, I was very freaked out by this conversation. By the end, my heart was racing and I was shaking a little. I think what was most strange about the conversation was how goddamn certain she was that she knew me. Even though I hadn't been inside a Kroger since early last week (which would have been a stretch to include in her vague "the other day" time frame), and even though I was pretty sure I would have remembered something like giving a woman named Kristin my number (or any woman for that matter), her casual certitude made me question my own hold on reality. "Did I hit on some redneck woman at the grocery store and give her my number?" I wondered. It didn't sound like me (to which the wife agreed when I told her about it), but her certainty was, at least during our brief chat, compelling evidence that I was in fact a cheating bastard. Clearly, it doesn't take much to make me doubt my sanity.

After I settled down and remembered I haven't ever tried to start up an affair, much less one in the fruits and vegetables section of my local grocery store, the question became what had Kristin been after? How had she gotten my name and address? The phone book was the simple answer to this question, as my name, number and address are listed there for all the world to see. So what was she doing? Running her finger down the Yellow Pages and calling random Metro Atlanta men by alphabetical order? And all just so she could try and convince them she'd caught their eye at the grocery store in whichever city they lived?

So what if the conversation had gone a different way? What if I'd been the kind of guy looking to score some "alone time" with a random trailer park single mother? What would have happened to me when Kristin and I finally went "out"? Would it have been her and two hillbilly thugs waiting behind trailer #14 ready to drive me and my bank card around to a bunch of ATMs? Would they figure I might not say anything given the circumstances surrounding my kidnapping, thus leaving their crime unreported and them free to run the same scam again? I'm not sure. Though it's possible that Kristin's out-of-the-blue evening call was just a weird prank or maybe the wishful delusions of a mentally ill woman, I think it was likely some kind of scam. Any of you have any theories?

Anyway, you heard it here first. The weirdest, most ineffectual telephone scam you can imagine may be coming to a city near you! Watch for it! But don't hang up like I did! See where it leads!

Also: for more fun telephone hijinx from the Inanities Archives, click here and here.

Back at You on the Last Day of April

So I get home yesterday from my weekend-long house and dog and cat-sitting stint up in Oxford to find my bathroom and part of my bedroom flooded.

Sometime since I left the house on Friday, the toilet overflowed. As our bedroom was unlivable, we went up to the in-laws and spent last night there. Today, our apartment management called up their carpet cleaning people to clean the affected carpets, which has now been done. As of this moment, we await a big fan to help dry the bewetted area. Since we put in our 60-day notice of our "intent to vacate" a week ago, I think the management at J.S. is less inclined to be prompt in their dealings with us.

Anyway, saw a few movies over the weekend.

1.) "The Good Shepherd". Very good. Eric Roth wrote a complex and brilliantly-written script and De Niro, who directed it, turns it into some serious, must-see filmmaking.

2.) "Rocky Balboa". As cries for sympathy for a once-beloved character long past his prime go, this one's surprisingly easy to take. Stallone wrote and directed this unambitious final installment of the Rocky "saga", and it mostly succeeds in its modest, aw-shucks kind of way.

3.) "Deja Vu". From the scathing reviews of this film that accompanied its release last year, I was expecting a flashy but thoroughly awful movie. It's flashy all right (it is directed by Tony Scott), but it's not awful. Actually, I thought it was pretty good, at least as far as crazy Bruckheimer-produced action movies go. Maybe it just goes to show most movies live or die based on expectations. Had I been expecting greatness, I would have been disappointed. But since I was on the look-out for total crap, this movie came out very well. Once you accept the more fantastical elements of its sci-fi premise, which I did without too much difficulty, the plot flows forward logically and Denzel manages to hold the whole thing together. Time travel's hard, and screenwriters Rossio and Marsilii manage its complexities just fine. Good, goofy times.

Isn't "Spider Man 3" this weekend? I'm stoked in theory, but really I'm just glad there's something fun and almost assuredly good (did I just jinx it?) to see at the movies.

Hot Fuzz Makes One's Aces Smokin'

Is it Monday again? I feel like every other day it's "24" night. Well, I hope everyone had a good weekend. Mine was good. Saw "Hot Fuzz" on Friday, went up to Oxford to celebrate my grandmother's 80th birthday, watched "The Bourne Identity" in my folks' new, totally-awesome but still-in-progress home theater, then on Sunday I watched "Smokin' Aces" on DVD.

"Hot Fuzz" wasn't bad, but it wasn't nearly as fun as "Shaun of the Dead". "Hot Fuzz" is intended as a parody of over-the-top eighties action movies, specifically, the buddy cop movie, and it succeeds well enough at that, but setting such a parody in the English countryside sounds funnier on paper than it is in practice. Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg (who played Shaun in "Shaun of the Dead" and plays the hero, Nicholas Angel, in this one) wrote a smart screenplay that sends up the excesses of action directors like Bay and Scott (of the Tony variety), sometimes brilliantly. One instance, early on in the film, occurs when Angel hauls an assortment of small-town troublemaking kids into the police station. The mugshot montage that follows is a dead-on parody of Tony Scott's overblown, degraded, hyper-frenetic montages from "Man on Fire", right down to the ominous guitar strums. Very funny. There are a couple other really great moments in the movie, but "Hot Fuzz"'s high notes are usually drowned out by a kind of cheery ploddingness courtesy of a script that too often defers to formula. I'm sure some less-than-good elements of the film were intended as high-concept satire of the movies Wright and Co. clearly love, but come off simply as a tired retread of what's come before. By the end, I was so weary of all the frenetic cutting and satirical montages, all I wanted was an actual scene without a scrim of irony placed over it. All in all, though, "Fuzz" gets by on its good intentions and charm and a few good jokes, but works only as a forgettable diversion.

"Smokin' Aces", on the other hand, has got way bigger problems. "Smokin' Aces", director Joe Carnahan's long-awaited sophomore effort to "Narc", hardly proclaims the arrival of a new film visionary that "Narc" portended. It's a big misfire and it would deserve total dismissal if there weren't something there, beneath all the flash and meaningless style, that hints at how very close to worthwhile this movie could have been. I don't know if the "Aces" script needed a second or third draft to make it work, or if Carnahan needs another film or two to hit his stride and figure out what he's trying to say, but throughout the movie his potential as a filmmaker is there, clearly visible, and part of the reason "Aces" is such a disappointment is that his material never rises to the level of his talent.

The A-plot's simple enough. A federal witness, Buddy "Aces" Israel, has been targeted by the mob for assassination because of all the baddies he'll implicate. The mob puts out a one million dollar contract on Israel, which then attracts a motley assortment of hit men to kill Israel in his penthouse suite in Lake Tahoe. A.O. Scott said about Robert Rodriguez recently in his review of "Grindhouse", that Rodriguez's "energy . . . often outstrips his taste." I think the same can be said for Carnahan, much to the film's detriment. Here's a good example.

[Spoiler ahead.]

Ben Affleck, Peter Berg and Martin Henderson are bail bondsmen who want to bring Israel in. We meet them in a bar while Affleck rattles off some exposition. They are interesting characters. Their rich histories are briefly alluded to and I wanted to learn more about them. Another trio of characters, a group of inarticulate berserkers who get off on killing indiscriminately, are hired to kill Israel. After the 20 minutes of exposition has been dispensed with, we find Affleck, Berg and Henderson standing in a parking lot beside their car preparing to start their Israel-getting operation. The berserker characters drive past and out of frame, their percussive music booming. After a moment, they reverse back into frame and mow down the three bail bondsmen. It is audacious and, admittedly, counts as one of the best laughs in the movie. (There are few.) The berserkers linger for a while, and then move on. The fact that the flashy but ultimately uninteresting berserker characters survive, while the comparatively complex bail bondsmen characters are unceremoniously slaughtered, says a lot about Carnahan's aims with this film. He would rather see these three grunting thugs (who, owing to their implausibility as characters, have no stories to tell), emerge screaming from an elevator with chainsaws and shotguns, than he would like to follow three actual characters (and real actors) interact with the world he's created, speaks volumes about Carnahan's judgment as a screenwriter. After the cheap laughs derived from the senselessness of the bondsmens' demise fade away, a disappointed boredom sets in, and never really goes away.

[Spoilers finito.]

If his only sin were style over substance, that would be one thing, but Carnahan can't find a way to make "Smokin' Aces" make a lick of sense. Besides being wildly implausible, much of the story is incomprehensible, not to mention stupid. If "Aces" had been a big flashy dumbshit movie about a bunch of hitmen going after one guy in Lake Tahoe, cool. That was the movie I wanted to see. But then Carnahan adds in his own bullshit FBI/Mob subplot "twist, ostensibly to give the film some weight, and this subplot, along with his own countless missteps, help sink the movie. Particularly terrible, the end of the film purports to be a quiet counterpoint to all the bombast that's preceded it, but because of this ridiculous subplot, the operatics of the film's last moments are completely phony, the emotion Carnahan wants us to feel (the swelling score rising helpfully) entirely unearned. "Boondock Saints" is a good film to compare "Aces" to. Both films deal in cheap nihilism, are stylistically violent, are overblown, make no sense, eschew substance for the "cool shot", and both are terrible. What's different is that Carnhan's skills as a director are exponentially better than "Boondock" director Troy Duffy's. He's just poorly served by his skills as a screenwriter. Time to tell that agent to start looking for new material, Joe.

(Also, Andy Garcia's southern accent in this film is so mind-bogglingly awful, that it made me think back and reevaluate his entire career as a film actor, looking for a reason he's worked for so long. Not sure I get it. It is soooo bad. Keanu Reeves in "Dracula" or "Devil's Advocate" bad.)

In other Crane-related news, my brother had some automotive misfortune last week. His truck engine burned up. Click here for a couple photos he took with his cell phone camera.

Links O' Plenty

Just a bunch of links today, so I'll get right into it.

1.) The Funny. Will Ferrell made a short video with his pal Adam McKay that's been blowing up on the internet. Five millions views since it debuted on FunnyorDie.com. In it, a down on his luck Will Ferrell is visited by the landlord who is none too happy with Ferrell's failure to pay his rent. The landlord is played by McKay's 2-year old daughter, Pearl, and though her baby dialogue is subtitled, she isn't just blabbing nonsense. she's actually saying words like, "Pay me now, bitch!" and "I work too hard" and "I'm going to smack you". Anyway, it's funny. Take a look here. And click here for McKay talking about how the clip came to be. And here for some "Pearl the Landlord" attention from People Magazine.

2.) The Illuminating. For you fans of The Colbert Report, TalkingPointsMemo has some very cool backstage footage of Colbert explaining his schtick to Sen. John Kerry before they do the interview. As far as I know, this is the only video that exists of Stephen Colbert explaining his character, the premise of his show, and how guests should handle his character. Very cool. Most of it is a limo interview with Josh Marshall talking to Kerry about his new book on the environment, but if you want to go right to the Colbert part, click here, let the video load, and then adjust the cursor-thingie until the clock reads.0 2:05 or so.

3.) The Impressive. Dave Chappelle performed for about six hours at the Laugh Factory in Hollywood on Sunday night, breaking the record for longest performance at that establishment, breaking Dane Cook's recent nearly four hour performance. If that's the same place I went to see Eddie Griffin ramble through his set, then I'm not sure it's Dane Cook's record Chappelle broke but Griffin's. That performance felt like it had to have been 5 hours. At least.

4.) The Shameful. You remember that so-called Voter I.D. bill Georgia passed a couple years agi? I wrote about it here way back in September of 2005. Intended by racist whites in the Georgia legislature to suppress minority voting in the name of tamping down on voter fraud, the bill passed, but has since been rejected by court after court as unconstitutional. Jurists recognized the law for what it was: a modern day poll tax straight out of the Jim Crow era. Well, one of the revelations coming out of the US Attorney scandal is the degree to which the Bush administration has purged the Justice department of competent professionals and replaced them with Bible-thumping "loyal Bushies", including a lot of folks who graduated from Regent University, Pat Robertson's bottom-tiered Jesus Freak Factory. Monica Goodling, the #3 person at the Justice Department was one of these Regent grads. She also just resigned after pleading the Fifth to avoid testifying before Congress. (According to Regent's website, upwards of 150 Regent graduates work in the Justice Department.) Anyway, the purging of the Bush Justice Department hasn't been relegated to just US Attorneys, but also the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ. Bush and Karl Rove, as obsessed with suppressing minority voting as the Georgia legislature, signed off on Georgia's Voter I.D. bill even though all but one of the career lawyers in the "voting section" of the Civil Rights division of Justice called it what it was and rejected it. Those people were pressured out and replaced.

But the choice quote from the TPM story is this:

"Here's one thing that the Bush political appointees insisted didn't raise any red flags. The sponsor of the bill, Georgia state Rep. Sue Burmeister, told voting section staff that "if there are fewer black voters because of this bill, it will only be because there is less opportunity for fraud," and that "when black voters in her black precincts are not paid to vote, they do not go to the polls.""

Once again I'm reminded of how difficult it can be to be a proud Georgian while we're all saddled with labels like ignorant, redneck and racist. People like Sue Burmeister and all the folks who voted for and supported that bill, are doing their part to make sure Georgians have no chance of escaping those labels in my lifetime. Anyway, there's more background on this facet of the story here. TPM is really doing some fantastic journalism. We need more guys like Josh Marshall to more fully document this poisoning of our Federal government.

4.) The Very Cool. The Pulitzers were announced on Monday, and my man Cormac McCarthy's novel "The Road" won the Pulitzer for Best Fiction. Did you know that the trade paperback is only about $9 at your local chain bookstore? Now that it's won a major award, won't you buy it and read it? It's very good and reads very fast. Then we can talk about it. And then you can watch Oprah's interview with McCarthy on a day to be announced.

5.) The Head-Scratching. Edward Norton has been tapped to play Bruce Banner in the latest Hulk movie. This sounds like it could be a really good idea, but then again, I thought Ang Lee was going to make a great Hulk movie.

Okay. Enough links. Enjoy your day.

Virginia Tech and the Debate on Gun Control

There's a lot to talk about in regards to the Virginia Tech shooting that happened early yesterday, but I want to get into just one aspect of it, namely the political back and forth on gun control.

I caught a few minutes of Rosie O'Donnell on "The View" this morning. She was talking about the shooting, reiterating her support of a near-total ban on guns (though she did say she wasn't for taking guns away from hunters, but I'm not sure where she draws the line exactly). Tonight on Charlie Rose, I listened to Brian Williams reporting via satellite from Virginia Tech, relating a question he asked the President today about where we are on the gun control debate. In essence, he asked if the rights of gun-owners should supercede those of students to a safe and secure learning environment during what, as Williams kept saying, "should be the best years of their lives." Shortly thereafter a Washington Post reporter talked about a lawsuit the gun lobby brought against the Virginia University system not long ago targeting the University's prohibition of all weapons from campus, saying it violated the 2nd amendment rights of teachers and students. An unnamed gun lobbyist went on to say, in light of what happened yesterday, that the incident proved that their lawsuit was right. Had the teachers and students in those classrooms been armed, it never would have gone as far as it did. It seems both Rosie and the unnamed gun lobbyist are living in their own fantasy worlds.

When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold picked their way through the halls of Columbine High School with assault rifles, I thought that was a fairly clear-cut case for the banning of public ownership of automatic machine guns. The siege in North Hollywood not long after made the case more succinctly. What possible reason, after all, would a person need a street sweeper-style machine gun for? Or armor-piercing bullets? For the impending declaration of Martial Law and all of the so-called "jackbooted thugs" marching down Main Street demanding subservience to a New World Order? It seems that many of the most virulent gun-advocates on the right are possessed of a deep-seated paranoia that leads them to advocate really bad policy.

But yesterday's violence was done with two handguns, not assault rifles. Where then is the law-making impulse of government to direct itself? Should we then ban all public ownership of handguns? Maybe we'd do that as well as we've managed to ban all sale of heroin and coke, or alcohol during Prohibition. How long after that would some maniac kill another 33 people with a hunting rifle (didn't that happen once in Texas?). What would our governments decide to do then? Ban all rifles? Maybe I'm being simplistic here, and the only real advocates for wholesale banning of all guns are folks like Rosie O'Donnell and some others on the left, but I'm not quite sure where gun control arguments logically enter into the debate after this most recent violence. The killer bought both of his guns legally, waiting out the 30-day waiting period meant to weed out crime of passion shooters. He was of age and he had no flags on his background. These were clean buys. He was not a citizen, per se, but he was a legal resident, which, as far as I know, confers many of the same rights. Maybe the guv'mint could make a law making it illegal to sell to a non-citizen, but what would that do? Make it more difficult for a non-citizen to buy a gun and go on a rampage? That would do really great at making sure something EXACTLY like this never happened again.

What happened at Virginia Tech yesterday was senseless and isolated. It doesn't seem to be indicative of some larger trend, nor does it illuminate some fixable flaw in the system that can be addressed by our elected officials. Bad as it is, this incident seems like a horrific act of gun violence that defies fresh debate on the pros and cons of gun control. I think there's much more debate to be had about guns -- regulating gun shows, requiring child-proof trigger locks on handguns, etc. -- but yesterday's violence moves the debate forward only minimally.

Anyway. Blah blah blah. More tomorrow.