David Gessel
Jennifer’s Body
We saw Jennifer’s Body at TIFF09. It is a fun fright fest, I mean how can you go wrong with a super hot high school girl turned human-flesh eating demon who seduces boys and then rips them to shreds. Plus, as a bonus, there is the hottest lesbian kiss in mainstream media between Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried.
Alas, while Jennifer’s body (the physical corpus) is very much worth of the general public’s lust, there’s no gratuitous nudity, not even a single breast, despite many opportunities. There’s a single distant shot of Fox swimming naked across a lake, but otherwise more about the blood than the boobies.
In the end, the omission of fleeting nudity is forgivable as the two stars more than make up for it with a light-hearted and funny screen presence and some very sexy moments. It was an entirely enjoyable experience. And it was nice to see Ash.
Das weiße Band
I saw The White Ribbon at the Telluride Film Festival. It’s a well crafted film about some very problematic children in Germany just before the first world war.
The movie is intended to in some way illuminate a fertile ground that permits fascism to later grow. While I found the characters interesting and the cinematography particularly beautiful in some scenes, I did not find anything in the story that seemed to suggest that these people were atypically prepared to turn fascist.
The premise seems to be that the children have committed some particularly brutal and random crimes (stringing a wire in the path of a horse and breaking the shoulder of the rider, tying another child up and caning him, tying yet another up and possibly blinding him) and that these “punishments” were “visited” on the children of sinners (except the first, visited on the sinner himself or perhaps on his horse), as justified in a letter left with the last.
That children would commit atrocious acts of brutality is hardly unique and certainly insufficient as an explanation for the rise of the Nazi party. Further, the parent’s “sins” are not particularly shocking, though the doctor isn’t overwhelmingly sympathetic despite having a particularly funny sex scene.
It is a well-constructed character study, if a bit slow; a story of some complex and dramatic events, if lacking a strong conclusion; but not for me a revelatory view of the foundations of fascism.
Red Riding 1974, 1980, 1983
I saw Red Riding at the Telluride Film Festival. It is a three part story of a corrupt police force in Yorkshire over three different eras, each marked by murders. As the series goes on, the weight of the unsolved crimes accumulates until it reaches a breaking point in the third, 1983.
Each movie was done by a different director, and the first, 1974, was the best. It had the strongest story line and the best acting. Andrew Garfield as a reporter was particularly good. 1980, about the yorkshire ripper, seemed to stand somewhat apart from the trilogy, though it did advance certain aspects of the story of police corruption. The last, 1983, brought the trilogy to a satisfying conclusion and was certainly a powerful bit of storytelling, but I found it somewhat burdened by flashback references to the earlier movies that proved a little confusing given the complex story line.
The series was well received at Telluride and many people thought it was one of the best in the festival. I enjoyed it very much, though I was glad I watched the whole series through in one sitting.
Logicmail send via gmail
Tonight probably wasn’t the best night to try to configure logicmail to send via gmail. I went through every permutation then found out that gmail is flaking out tonight. Go Cloud Computing. Brilliant idea to trust your business to the cloud. Anyway, I did get LogicMail to work. It isn’t the fastest way to get your mail, but it connects via IMAP to my home server to read (never a problem) which means the client is synchronized with Mulberry (running on 3 computers) and Roundcube webmail and whatever else.
I also sync to gmail using procmail on my server to forward selected messages to my gmail account. Google’s mobile mail clients are great, by gmail does not work as an imap client and so reply/read status doesn’t get updated on my server, which is the canonical reference. I can remember for a quick reply, but I forget when I’m using my blackberry in some extended way and then when I get to a real client I sometimes double answer, which can be embarrassing…
LogicMail still has problems with certain TLS authentication schemes, which I use on my server, and so I can’t seem to send through my own SMTP, but thankfully gmail lets me send through theirs with the only penalty being the Return-Path: <youraccount@gmail.com> header.
I used:
Server: smtp.gmail.com
Use Secure Connection: SSL
Port: 465
Authentication: LOGIN
Username: youraccount@gmail.com
Password: *********
(don't use MDS proxy)
A week of tweets: 2009-08-30
- Driving to boston from phl. Long drives are not my thing, such a waste of time. But hey, nj rest stops, yay… #
- NJ’s no self-pump rule cost us about 30 minutes wait. Should have filled up in PA. Don’t hit the NJ turnpike without enough gas to get out #
- Check out 25 Aug edition of BBC Global News. (iTunes). Michael Shuer (sp?) Is shockingly honest. #
- near 34.010573, -118.484423 http://tinyurl.com/nzx37o back in santa monica http://twitpic.com/fed1r #
- near 34.00654, -118.491813 http://tinyurl.com/nr7f5u canadians on the beach http://twitpic.com/fenmk #
- LAX-SFO today, got on the 2:50, yay. Finally home after 4 countries, 8 flights, 7 rental cars, 2 trains, and a taxi. #
- Going to Cato’s ale house. #
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Rental Infiniti M35x
I got a very nice M35x upgrade from Hertz in LA this visit. It was one of the better rental cars I’ve had and a nice conclusion to 7 rentals in a row. The car is fast, comfortable, and quiet. The stereo sounded very good, there was in-dash GPS, refrigerated seats (!), and some other good features.
The control dash is a bit over the top. The radio/temp/GPS control panel is via a big knob in a near horizontal format that made it fairly difficult to find the controls one wanted while driving, probably my only complaint.
It has a fairly nice back-up camera feature that projects overlay graphics to guide backing up and made parking a lot easier once one got the hang of mapping the camera to motion.
Oddly, the car had a feature I couldn’t figure out – a Compact Flash card slot. It is unusual not to have a USB interface, which seems more general than something media specific like a CF slot. I didn’t have a CF card to test, but I’d think it is either a way to add data to the GPS or media for the radio.
A week of tweets: 2009-08-23
- near 37.218878, -7.442649 http://tinyurl.com/mvx6dr cherry picker soccer match http://twitpic.com/e4war #
- near 37.340166, -6.711883 http://tinyurl.com/pjrran spain… #
- near 37.366906, -6.216173 http://tinyurl.com/ocxcro. Just passed an 11mw solar tower. The beams of light look like guy wires in the sun. #
- Nice dinner last night at El Bulli. Early flight today through Lisbon to BLQ, a night at home in italy, then Rome, IAD, etc. #
- Back in italy. A little rain moing through to cool things off. #
- On the way to rome. Almost… Stopping at a friend of carolyn’s first, then on to a friend of a friend’s for the night… #
- near 42.423472, 12.548427 http://tinyurl.com/m5txha at the art monistary. #
- At home with the parents in swarthmore… #
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La Petrognola Chestnut Beer
Yellow Fiat Panda
We had some amusing rental cars in Italy. First and last a Ford Focus that was quite competent, had enough room, and handled quite well. Then we went to Portugal and rented a car to drive to Spain. Perhaps because Spain and Portugal still have some hard feelings, it is absurdly expensive to rent a car in one country and return it in the neighboring company. It would cost less to pay someone to push the car back.
So we were given a “Spanish car” in Lisbon, a Toyota Yaris with a really pronounced fuel delivery problem at anything above 1/2 throttle which had the car juddering and barely making it up hills. Hertz sent out the mechanic who asked if we had the AC on (yes, it was 40 out) and then said it was normal. I told him it felt like it was running on 3 cylinders and he said that was right, it had 3 cylinders. Now we’ve rented a couple of Yarii before, and they make it up the mountain in Italy fine with the AC on, and would easily have climbed the hills of Lisbon, but they wouldn’t take it back and besides even if they wanted to there simply wasn’t another car available in Iberia. So we got a reservation from EuropeCar and called Hertz and were told we could drop the sick Yaris off at LIS.
But when we got there, that wasn’t the case – apparently Hertz Spain would charge Hertz Portugal €25,000 if they accepted it. As we made it clear we wouldn’t be driving it away, there was suddenly another Spanish car at the Hertz downtown office.
We drove downtown where they were super nice and promptly produced another of the same competent Ford’s we had in Italy with one minor variation – the driver’s side mirror had been destroyed by the car wash just before we got there. So they gave us a nice Portuguese Renault Laguna III with the key card ignition system. It worked great and was a fine car to drive with a useful 6 speed manual transmission.
It got us to SVQ without any problems and we could even keep up with our friends in their Mercedes C230 with the strange transmission that switched into “limp home mode” immediately. Yes, the car rental adventure was not ours alone, their car, a high end rental Mercedes was flawed as well. They asked “why does the car redline at 150? Is that bad?” It took a little work to be sure there wasn’t a button or feature being missed (like some manual shift override), but no… it was a “feature” not a bug, and was to remind the driver to get to a service station before the transmission fell out of the car. It made it to Spain and back in 2nd.
When we got back to BLQ our Focus was touring around Florence, so we picked up the cheerful Yellow Fiat Panda. Pandas are great little (little) cars. They handle surprisingly well, have surprising pickup and, like the tardis, are bigger inside than outside. Even so, a panda can’t really hold more than two people and their normal travel luggage, and three is a tight squeeze even if one is only 80% full size. But we all packed in and zipped back home suddenly noticing that the yellow panda must be the year’s most popular car.
Finally we returned the Panda, got our Focus, and drove to Rome with three adults, one awfully tall 12 year old, and a lot of luggage in relative comfort and in good time.
Innovations in Child Management
Modeled after the forward-thinking Safe Haven Program in Nebraska where you can drop off unwanted children rather than having an abortion up to age 16, in Portugal you take your kids for a long walk on a short parapet at the local castle.
