Author: greg

White House:: Happy Days, State Dept:: Joanie Loves Cha-Chi

This is so beyond jumping the shark. At least the shark was jumped on the main show.
Colin Powell singing YMCA in Jakarta (he was the construction worker.) is the political equivalent of a bitter, aging Erin Moran, who–realizing her series isn’t going to be renewed, and without even a glint of hope for a Charles in Charge of her own–just pushes through the script and tries to get through the week so she can cash her check and suck it up her nose. [via waxy]

So We’re Rebuilding the WTC After All

Christopher Hawthorne nails this weekend’s Pataki Day Celebration, aka the groundbreaking for the Freedom Tower.

This is what it has come to at Ground Zero: A premature, election-year press conference held on Independence Day to celebrate the start of construction on a building called the Freedom Tower, which is designed to be precisely 1,776 feet tall and to rise next door to a vaguely conceived but lavishly outfitted museum called the Freedom Center. Who says patriotism is dead?

Even though it’s not designed, funding is uncertain, there are no tenants, and market demand is less than zero, Pataki’s pushing the tower forward out of some mix of ambition and political narrative desperation. “All this is looking more and more like the process that brought us the original Twin Towers in the late 1960s and early ’70s.”
Related: Hawthorne nails the WTC Memorial competition

More Dependent Shorts: gettyimages

The trend continues. Gettyimages teamed with RES and others to have seven directors make 30-60 second shorts on about The Big Idea (whatever that is). The catch: they were to use Getty’s own bank of 70,000+ images and clips.
By default, collage, compositing, and digital manipulation rule. Making a film from pre-existing images refracts so many layers of intentionality, it makes my head spin. Marc Wilkins’ explanation of his own short, To Long For, could apply to working from the imagebank itself: “The film starts with pictures waiting for something — not doing anything, not moving and not acting; just searching, waiting.”

the big idea, tsujikawa koichiro, image:gettyimages.com

There are no accidents. Or, rather, if any accidents happen, they’re buried deep in the production process and within the prescribed boundaries of the corporate source. The closest anyone comes is Koichiro Tsujikawa, whose initial conceptual approach, to make “a collage of images that come up when I search related keywords,” turned out to be too broad. Eyes is a seductively manipulated kaleidoscope of his search results for just one word.
If it’s going to be collage, then, how about a John Cageian level of randomness? What if you determined which digital bits and clips to use by throwing the I Ching or some other arbitrary randomizing system at the database? Such a film would be about the imagebank itself. You could call it The Better Idea. [via coudal]

Well, that explains ‘Esther’

The Guardian asked a bunch of brainy Brits what the ‘most hated movies of all time’ are. I say, who knows, especially if you don’t see them all? But there are some very funny answers.
Showgirls (a So Bad It’s Good movie, actually) gets multiple mentions, but Battlefield Earth gets none. Neither does Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil, of that pirate movie that sunk Renny Harlan. Castaway Island Cutthroat Island [which, Deborah protests, is “a perfect pirate film.” And since it was only the biggest moneyloser ever, it was probably only “most hated” by studio accountants. Duly noted.] Citizen Kane‘s in there, though, which is entertaining, but too “bad-boy” an answer, even if it were true.
Leave it to Julie Burchill to come up with the right answer, though: of Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away, starring his wife, Burchill says, “If I was responsible for something this bad, I’d change my name, too.” Mazel Tov.

Ono, Jishu Eiga, Kore-eda

still from Danchizake, dir. Ono Satoshi, image: midnighteye.comI met Satoshi Ono in New York, when his excellent DV doc, Danchizake (Homemade Sake), played at MoMA’s Documentary Fortnight Dec. 2002. Danchizake is an elliptical, self-effacing, yet powerful story of the filmmaker’s own family and the emotional rifts caused by years of economic hardship. Midnight Eye reviewed it in the Spring of 2001.
In the latest issue, ME does a roundup of jishu eiga, selfmade films, a burgeoning genre in which Ono is cited as a leading practitioner. [His 2003 short, Good Morning Yokohama, just screened in Dallas at the Asian Film Festival.]
ME also includes a technique-heavy interview with Japan’s most successful documentary-style filmmaker, Hirokazu Kore-eda. I’ve admired Kore-eda’s work since seeing the quiet, beautiful small-footprint Maboroshi at New Directors/New Films almost ten years ago. And After Life is one of my favorite films ever.
Now, with the coming release of his fourth feature Nobody Knows (#3, Always, wasn’t distributed in the US), Kore-eda seems ready for a change: he’s making a jidai geki (costume drama) for Shochiku. “To be natural doesn’t automatically mean to be real,” he says. “So far I’ve tried to use naturalism to search for reality, but now I will try total fiction to search for that reality.” [via greencine, of course]

Yeah, good thing you got a transcript

I heard Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff barking on WBUR last night about how the shifty Michael Moore has not released a transcript of Farenheit 9/11, the easier to dispute the points he makes in the film.
[Is irony really, truly dead after all, that so many of the tortillas being flung at F9/11 from the right-field bleachers are because Moore “makes inaccurate insinuations from unrelated facts and dishonestly leads people to jump to conclusions that are otherwise unsupported?” Matthew Continetti, the Weekly Standard water carrier on On Point kept making that argument, and I’m like, what veep-in’ Vice President have you been listening to the last three years?
As I see it, the only possible vindication worse than Michael Moore’s is Graydon Carter’s, my glass-house-livin’ slavishly administration-supportin’ friends.]
Anyway, waxy and daily.greencine.com point out that Drew at Script-o-rama has found and documented self-serving inaccuracies and bias in the transcript used by many Moore critics, including Isikoff. I certainly feel better when I say it: go factcheck yourself.

Pained Observer

Critics who don’t buy this also don’t buy this [via bloggy]
I guess if the Observer isn’t going to have art critics whose recommendations ever make sense, at least they can have critics whose pans are consistent signals of worthwhile shows.

Pained Observer

Critics who don’t buy this also don’t buy this [via bloggy]
I guess if the Observer isn’t going to have art critics whose recommendations ever make sense, at least they can have critics whose pans are consistent signals of worthwhile shows.

Jocelyn Bell, the woman who discovered pulsars

After discovering an inexplicable pulsing signal (a “sniggling quarter inch” blip that showed up for 5 min/day) in her PhD radio astronomy data (thousands of feet of paper charts) at Cambridge, Jocelyn Bell and her adviser Tony Hewish, wondered if it was a stellar phenomenon or some man-made interference. If the signal was indeed real, its source was unknown to science at that time. They took to calling it “little green men.”

There was a meeting just beofre Christmas 1967 which I stumbled upon. I went down to Tony’s office to ask him something and unusually, the door was shut. I knocked and a voice said, “Come in.” I stuck my head around the door and Tony said “Ah, Jocelyn, come in and shut the door.” So I went in and shut the door. It was a discussion between Tony Hewish (my supervisor), Martin Ryle (the head of the Group), and probably John Shakshaft (one of the other senior members of the Group). The discussion was along the lines of “how do we publish this result?”

Then the night before leaving for Christmas break, Bell locked herself in the lab, pored over her data, and found another signal in another part of the sky, confirming that the signal was not caused by human interference.

I went off on holiday and came back to the lab wearing an engagement ring. That was the stupidest thing I ever did. In those days, married women did not work…My appearance wearing an engagement ring signalled that I was exiting from professional life. Incidentally, it is interesting to notice that people were much more willing to congratulate me on my engagement than congratulate me on making a major astrophysical discover. Society felt that in getting engaged I was doing the right thing for a young woman. In discovering pulsars, I wasn’t…

In 1968, Ryle called Nature and told them to “hold the presses.” “Observation of a Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source,” listed Bell and Hewish and two other colleagues as authors, although current citations differ on who was lead author.
What IS certain, however, is that Ryle and Hewish were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974, Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars.” Although some argue differently, Bell is widely thought to have been robbed of a Nobel Prize. She is currently Dean of Science at the University of Bath.
Bell’s fascinating first-hand account of the discovery was reprinted in the June 2004 issue of Status: A Report on Women in Astronomy, which is published by the American Astronomical Society [PDF only].
In her telling, the N-word never comes up, even indirectly, but it looms large as day-to-day details of the players’ actions and theories build up. The excerpts above are about as close as Bell comes to explaining why she thinks she didn’t share the Nobel.
The only woman to win a Nobel Prize for Physics was Marie Curie in 1903, for discovering radiation. (She won again for Chemistry in 1911, for discovering radium.)

Jocelyn Bell, the woman who discovered pulsars

After discovering an inexplicable pulsing signal (a “sniggling quarter inch” blip that showed up for 5 min/day) in her PhD radio astronomy data (thousands of feet of paper charts) at Cambridge, Jocelyn Bell and her adviser Tony Hewish, wondered if it was a stellar phenomenon or some man-made interference. If the signal was indeed real, its source was unknown to science at that time. They took to calling it “little green men.”

There was a meeting just beofre Christmas 1967 which I stumbled upon. I went down to Tony’s office to ask him something and unusually, the door was shut. I knocked and a voice said, “Come in.” I stuck my head around the door and Tony said “Ah, Jocelyn, come in and shut the door.” So I went in and shut the door. It was a discussion between Tony Hewish (my supervisor), Martin Ryle (the head of the Group), and probably John Shakshaft (one of the other senior members of the Group). The discussion was along the lines of “how do we publish this result?”

Then the night before leaving for Christmas break, Bell locked herself in the lab, pored over her data, and found another signal in another part of the sky, confirming that the signal was not caused by human interference.

I went off on holiday and came back to the lab wearing an engagement ring. That was the stupidest thing I ever did. In those days, married women did not work…My appearance wearing an engagement ring signalled that I was exiting from professional life. Incidentally, it is interesting to notice that people were much more willing to congratulate me on my engagement than congratulate me on making a major astrophysical discover. Society felt that in getting engaged I was doing the right thing for a young woman. In discovering pulsars, I wasn’t…

In 1968, Ryle called Nature and told them to “hold the presses.” “Observation of a Rapidly Pulsating Radio Source,” listed Bell and Hewish and two other colleagues as authors, although current citations differ on who was lead author.
What IS certain, however, is that Ryle and Hewish were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974, Hewish for his decisive role in the discovery of pulsars.” Although some argue differently, Bell is widely thought to have been robbed of a Nobel Prize. She is currently Dean of Science at the University of Bath.
Bell’s fascinating first-hand account of the discovery was reprinted in the June 2004 issue of Status: A Report on Women in Astronomy, which is published by the American Astronomical Society [PDF only].
In her telling, the N-word never comes up, even indirectly, but it looms large as day-to-day details of the players’ actions and theories build up. The excerpts above are about as close as Bell comes to explaining why she thinks she didn’t share the Nobel.
The only woman to win a Nobel Prize for Physics was Marie Curie in 1903, for discovering radiation. (She won again for Chemistry in 1911, for discovering radium.)