Transcendence was just generally disappointing. Somehow I thought Pfister would be a better director. Thematically it's not saying anything near as deep or original as it seems to think it is. Even if you see it and like it, there's other movies in theaters now that you'd probably like way better. The 18% on RT doesn't surprise me.

I enjoy RT for what it is. It gives you a very rough idea of what a movie's critical reception has been. IOW, 18% doesn't mean a movie is absolutely shit. It means the group of critics whose reviews have been aggregated thought, on average, that the movie wasn't very good. (I always make sure to scroll down to see how many reviews have been aggregated and who those reviewers are. Sometimes with newer movies, indies, or certain documentaries there isn't many reviews at all. So a movie will have 99% or something, but you drill down and see that's based only on one review by Peter Travers and two reviews by rhesus monkeys.)

Me too. Shameless is well done. There must be a dozen main-ish characters on that show, each with their own storylines, and the show juggles it all beautifully without it seeming at all muddled.

Funny episode. The movie sure does move like molasses.

It really would make a good musical. The fact that one main character is from the 50s and the other from the 90s seems like something a lyricist could get a lot of mileage out of: he's singing in the style of Buddy Holly, whereas she's singing in the style of Alanis Morissette. Or whoever. Something like that.

Welcome. What are you doing your dissertation on?

I saw it twice. Rummy seems to think he checkmated Errol Morris, but it was more like a stalemate. The man is impervious to evidence.

That's a big part of what the film is about--evidence. It's also about language. Rumsfeld, like many good equivocators, is a master of semantic trickery, palpably proud of his ability to abuse language.

In THE FOG OF WAR Morris was fascinated by McNamara's conflictedness--RM was an old man who was willing to own up to some of his mistakes but unwilling to face the full gravity of those mistakes--but here Morris is fascinated by this man's ability to deny reality at all costs.

When Morris does nail him on certain things (for example, DM says the administration never implied a link between Saddam and bin Laden, but the evidence shows otherwise), Rumsfeld just shrugs it off. Fascinating and infuriating all at once.

I propose that from now on all grievances must be expressed in rhyming couplets.

mkeithddc: People keep bringing up the formatting because it's unusual. If you're going to format your writing in an so irregular a fashion, people are going to bring it up. It's the typographical equivalent of skipping every third step as you walk. You have the absolute right to skip instead of walking normally. At the same time, you should expect that a lot of people you meet will ask "Hey, by the way, what's with the skipping?" That's just how the world works.

Just returned from the screening. Glazer did a brief Q&A afterward. He's boring. His movie is damn good.

It's a fresh take on the old aliens-come-to-Earth-to-harvest-humans-for-whatever-reason story. What most impressed me was how it sidesteps the tropes and even the tone we might expect from alien movies. It's very much doing its own thing.

Like 2001, UTS leaves out certain details from the novel. This makes the narrative of the film more mysterious in a way that works. If we knew why, for example, Johannson's character is doing what she's doing, it's not as interesting. The actual reason given in the novel is straightforward and, actually, kind of dumb. In reference to this, Glazer said "the question is more interesting than the answer," and on this point he's right.

The visuals are unforgettable. Johansson is outstanding. The music and sound design, also outstanding. It's a little slow in spots, but it's good hard sci-fi. If that's your bag, this is not one to skip.

The Social Network would have gotten my vote. What killed me about The King's Speech's win is that I thought nearly every other film nominated was better. Toy Story 3--better. Winter's Bone--better. Even The Kids Are All Right, which I didn't love, I thought was better. And the kicker is that I liked The King's Speech. Saw it again recently and liked it a lot.

The Social Network was such a deft portrait of where we were and what we were as a culture in the aughts. It was so well done at every level. It's been a few years now, and you don't really hear people bringing up The King's Speech very much. People still talk about The Social Network.

P.T. Anderson seems to like taking the broad strokes of a story and spinning it into his own little thing. BOOGIE NIGHTS is loosely based on John Holmes' story, but the film isn't a biopic. THE MASTER, too, is loosely inspired by L. Rob Hubbard and Scientology, but the actual movie isn't trying to tell that story. THERE WILL BE BLOOD is like that. It doesn't adapt "Oil!" so much as it rewrites it.

It's not porn. But it's definitely not for kids. I'm not sure I'm old enough to see some of the stuff in that film.

Yeah, I remember the nuns teaching us that at my Catholic elementary school. Mary's parents had original sin, but she was conceived without it because God wiped it away so it wouldn't be passed on to her. Thus she had no original sin to pass onto Jesus, so he was free of OS too. I think church doctrine says that John the Baptist was actually conceived with OS but had it wiped away by God sometime in the third trimester, so the guy who would baptize Jesus would be someone born without OS. OS gets passed on like genes. Sister Donna had a flow chart.

What's striking about Ridley's screenplay is that he doesn't embellish the book. Northup was a real person who wrote down what happened to him. The film attempts to dramatize his experiences in a mostly unadorned way. That constant sense of dread and looming threat is present in the book.

The slaver didn't want his slave speaking to Pitt's character because slaves weren't supposed to have conversations. They were supposed to work. Slaves often ran away or were smuggled into freedom by abolitionist white people (or by other slaves). The slaver in that scene had good reasons to not want Solomon conversing too freely with some free-spirited Canadian guy who's probably an abolitionist. They suspected Solomon was learned. Those were the slaves they needed to keep an extra close eye on. That field overseer's job was to make sure the slaves did their work and nothing else.