a thaumaturgical compendium

Here are some movies I’ve seen, and what I thought of them. The short version: it’s been a good year for action flicks, and some of the films released over the last few weeks have been top notch.

• Babel

Critics: Unpredictable and complex.
Me: Had its moments, could be edited into a decent film. Too bad it wasn’t. What’s with the Golden Globe nods?

• Borat: CLOAFMBGNOK

Critics: Base, but endlessly amusing.
Me: Not! One note, and not a particularly great one. Amusing in places, but easily forgettable.

• Cars

Critics: Makes NASCAR cute.
Me: Would love to like this, but didn’t. Boring.

• Casino Royale

Critics: Best Bond since Thunderball.
Me: Best Bond ever. And thank god for fight scenes that look reasonably real, mated with “le parkour” that stretches belief. Ditch the Texas Holdem’.

• Children of Men

Critics: “...may be something of a bummer, but its the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters.” – Manohla Dargis, New York Times
Me: This is one of those pieces of fiction that really allows for us to more easily see reality. It’s hard to see the treatment of refugees here and not be reminded of our own xenophobia, and the acceptance of authoritarianism as part of our everyday existence. But more importantly, this is a really well shot, engaging chase film.

• Clerks II

Critics: As good, and as bad, as the original.
Me: This is like a lot of the action movies on this list: but the dialog is the action sequence. Some of these are really good, and some are not so great. The plot is just there as a conveyance for the dialog. Same can be said of the characters. Still a fun movie to watch, but not Chasing Amy.

• Crank

Critics: Mindless entertainment.
Me: But delivers well. Had low expectations for this one, and was pleasantly surprised. Great action B-movie.

• Curse of the Golden Flower

Critics: Not sure whether this is intended to be taken seriously—but probably not
Me: Beautiful looking, and the story was nearly there, but not quite.

• The Departed

Critics: Best Scorsese since Goodfellas.
Me: Nicely put-together little crime story. Feels a little too rote in places, but charming nonetheless.

• The Devil Wears Prada

Critics: Sharp and funny.
Me: Soulless and superficial—satire failed to come through. Guess you had to have read the book.

• District B13

Critics: Adrenaline rush, though it doesn’t make sense.
Me: Excellent heart-in-your throat action flick.

• Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift

Critics: Random races chained together: blah.
Me: Random races chained together. OK. Needed less dialogue, and there wasn’t much as it was.

• Fearless

Critics: Corny, predictable, but well done.
Me: Outstanding: Jet Li at his best. Not the perfect MA film, but right up there.

• Grizzly Man

Critics: “A brilliant portrait of adventure, activism, obsession and potential madness that ranks among helmer Werner Herzog’s strongest work.” – Scott Foundas, and he’s not alone.
Me: Just grizzly. Not watchable, despite the bears. Herzog should do Hasselhoff next.

• The Illusionist

Critics: Pleasant, but not too deep.
Me: Liked how it fit together. A little claustrophobic in places, but good storytelling. Giamatti is excellent, as is Norton.

• An Inconvenient Truth

Critics: Amazingly powerful talk.
Me: Wow. Only wish I could put together something this engaging in my own talks. Just excellent, and well captured on film.

• The Lake House

Critics: Way too much disbelief in need of suspending.
Me: See Nacho Libre. (No, not literally.)

• Little Miss Sunshine

Critics: Sweet and scrappy little film.
Me: Really funny and heartbreaking at the same time. Maybe the best of the year.

• Lucky Number Slevin

Critics: Too smart for its own good and not very believable.
Me: Thought this came together really well. Hard-boiled in the reflexive sort of way. Charming.

• Marie Antoinette

Critics: They walked out at Cannes, US critics were kinder.
Me: You’re only as good as your last film. What’s with the sneakers? What a waste of a set.

• Mission Impossible III

Critics: Highly improbable.
Me: Why are you doing that. It doesn’t make sense. Quit it.

• My Super Ex-Girlfriend

Critics: Uma is hot, but film is formulaic.
Me: Uma is hot, at least it’s better than Superman Returns.

• Nacho Libre

Critics: Campy, but not in a good way.
Me: Bad enough to not watch on an airplane.

• Nanny McPhee

Critics: Mixed reviews: some said it was too “mechanical.”
Me: Surely no Lemony Snicket but a nice little film.

• Pan’s Labyrinth

Critics: “t’s not only one of the great fantasy pictures but one of the great end-of-childhood elegies.” -Stephanie Zacharek, Salon
Me: Really very good film. I approve. Shows that the worst horrors are not in our imaginations. Though I never though fauns were quite so into hierarchies and rules.

• Pirates of the Caribbean: DMC

Critics: As good as the first one.
Me: Not.

• The Prestige

Critics: Absorbing and twisty.
Me: What twist? Can you telegraph it any more(?). Not Nolan’s best, I think. It had a few moments, but I’m ready for the next Batman. Second best 19th century magician rivals movie this year. Worth it to see Bowie as Tesla, though.

• The Protector

Critics: “The elephants featured in The Protector have more personality than the star, which is a real problem.” – Jeff Vice
Me: If you are already a Jaa fan, or if you don’t know Jaa, but liked Jet Li, Jackie Chan, or Bruce Lee, this is the movie to see. Not much plot, but does a great job at connecting some virtuosi fight scenes.

• Pursuit of Happyness

Critics: Earnest but unremarkable.
Me: Wanted to like this film, and it had some moments. Big fan of Smith, but it was pretty saccharine and easily forgettable.

• The Queen

Critics: Adored it.
Me: Thought it was slow and boring, though the acting was good, and the composition was good, and the Corgis were cute, it wasn’t enough to get me interested.

• A Scanner Darkly

Critics: True to Dick.
Me: Made me motion sick. Less than good.

• Scoop

Critics: Doesn’t really come together.
Me: Amazingly forgettable; I almost forgot to include it here.

• Stranger Than Fiction

Critics: Mostly positive, some say it is over-self-important.
Me: Was worried because it was so over-advertised, but really liked this a lot. Wish they had gone with the “French ending” (by cutting the last 5-10 minutes) and there were some more interesting ways they could have taken the ending without lopping it off. But it was very good.

• Superman Returns

Critics: As good as Spiderman 2 and Batman Begins.
Me: Wish he hadn’t.

• Thank you for smoking

Critics: Smart satire.
Me: Agreed.

• Who Killed the Electric Car?

Critics: Exciting story of the auto industry.
Me: Feels unbalanced in places, but still tells an undertold story very well.

• X-Men: The Last Stand

Critics: Talky. Overkill. Flashy.
Me: It’s really OK, if this is the last one, after-credits epilogue notwithstanding.

• V for Vendetta

Critics: Beautiful nonsense.
Me: The visuals really are striking, and it is an entertaining film. Not the best, but looking forward to seeing it again.

• Volver

Critics: “You do not want to miss this one.” – Peter Travers, Rolling Stone
Me: I like Almodovar’s other films, but really enjoyed this one especially. Never thought much of Cruz until this movie.

I love this music video. I only wish real life information visualization was this fun. I wonder if there were toolsets they used to produce this, or if it was all original animation…

This looks like a fun conference: Graphic and Visual Representations of Evidence and Inference in Legal Settings. For reasons that shouldn’t be all that hard to figure out, over the last couple of years I have been increasingly interested in the way lawyers assemble and understand information. Especially with complex litigation, the amount of information that needs to be organized and sorted is enormous, and often is coordinated with large numbers of people, with little overlap of experience or knowledge, being paid a great deal more than the average wage. It is, in short, the ideal environment for effective knowledge management tools. And of course, there are a number of companies that provide support for them, but there are also enormous opportunities for helping lawyers come to terms with large amounts of data quickly, and be able to transmit this information to a jury and others.

I actually interviewed with a company that consults in this area, and was surprised by the shallowness of their thinking in the area. Attorneys are willing to go to experts, but it seems that a fair number of the people who consult in these areas (jury consulting, graphic communication & visualization, and supporting evidence collection and organization), while certainly providing a service, could be doing so much more.

That’s not really what this conference is about, but I’m interested to see what is happening on the research side of things. Luckily this conference, on the 28th and 29th of January, is free to the public here in New York at Cardozo Law School.

(I’m sure someone deserves a hat tip here, but I don’t remember how I found it!)

Thanks for all of your comments on… my comments. I got about a dozen comments and they were all great. I implemented the following:

1. Create content that sucks. That way, you aren’t a good target. (I thought I was already doing that, but will redouble my efforts.)

2. Block a set of IPs recommended by Dreamhost. This kind of sucks. I sure don’t want to block all of Poland, India, and China (where 90% of my attacks are coming from), but I’ve set up htaccess with a blocklist, and will continue to do check periodically for serious offenders.

3. Someone pointed me to some ways of using mod_security to limit who has access to the comment post script. Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to do this (if it’s possible at all) on my shared server at Dreamhost.

4. Move the scripts from the default names. This is probably the most obvious one, and should have been done a long time ago.

5. CAPTCHA. I don’t know why Dreamhost suggested this, but I’ve done it. I had initially planned to do a “real” CAPTCHA, but I like Eszter’s approach much better. We’ll see how that works out.

Please let me know if you have any trouble commenting.

Oh, and Booo, Dreamhost Support for cutting off my comments and then not replying to my emails… Given that Wordpress is a one-click install on Dreamhost, you would think they would set up their Wordpress with some of these things already lined up.

When my hosting runs up, I’m going to set up a server at home instead.

Checking out movies for tomorrow, and run across Fandango’s description of The Tiger and the Snow, the Benigni film that has been getting lukewarm (at best) reviews. What’s it about, I wondered. Aparently, the lead’s girlfriend is suffering from a terminal cerebral enema. There could be worse ailments, I suppose.

Looks like a Japanese team has filmed a live, tiny (24 foot) giant squid on the surface near Ogasawara. Well, live until they caught it, that is. So, they’re on the side of the boat saying how pretty it is—why not cut it free. I guess I know why not, because we don’t usually find these things live, and being able to dissect it while it is newly killed probably provides a lot of insights that the ones washed up on the beach do not. Nonetheless, it seems a bit of a shame.

On the plus side, they suggest that they may be able to find more now that they know somewhere they hang out. (They took still images of a giant squid in this area two years ago.) It would be great to get film of these giant creatures in their native habitat. Of course, the idea that giant sea creatures live near a secret nuclear weapons site in the ocean off the shore of Japan hints at a particular brand of B-movie.

I have never liked the phrase “Happy Holidays.” It just sounds so insipidly commercial. This year I caved (damn Wal-Mart!) and put Merry Christmas on our cards, but that doesn’t really hit it right either. I actually like holidays. Sure Christmas isn’t quite as fun as Halloween, but what if I want to enjoy the season without being a grinchy atheist? Just because I am non-religious doesn’t mean I don’t dig a good story, like the virgin birth or the Nutcracker, and I am willing to overcome my agoraphobia for a celebratory gathering that provides some indication of the goodness of humans.

Of course, festivus is appealing—perhaps even more so because of the neighborhood I live in. But it’s too much work. So, from next year forward, I will greet people with “Festive Yule!” (Festivule?) I’m happy to see that there is some historical justification for this, at least in some parts of Scandinavia. And despite the embrace of Yule by the neopagans and wiccans in the US, I think I can steal it for myself and fellow atheists / theosophical pragmatists. The celebration commences forthwith.