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Saturday, July 13, 2002 |
The Road to Perdition
I saw The Road to Perdition this evening. The acting by Hanks and Newman was really great. And it was good to see a gangster movie that departed from most of the standard tropes of gangster movies; as Sam Mendes states in this New York Times interview, actions in this movie do have consequences, indeed that's the theme of the movie. Still, the direction felt overwrought to me; Mendes was really pounding things home.
Mendes: I think that the most often used muscle by actors sometimes these days is, "O.K., how am I going to make this line feel like a human being might actually say it?"
Good point, and the maturity of the dialog and excellence of the acting, was the strength of the movie.
11:49:27 PM Permalink
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The Supposed Liberal Media
Recommended is this excellent article in the Democratic Underground on "statistics" supposedly confirming that there's a "liberal" bias in the media. In short, it's a crock. And the numbers the right uses to supposedly buttress its claims of bias are baloney.
6:54:50 PM Permalink
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25 Million Orphas
Whistling Past the Global Graveyard [New York Times: International News]
This is one of the scariest paragraphs I've read in a long time:
Soon, average life expectancy will dip below 40 years in 10 African countries. Twenty-five million children will be orphaned worldwide by the disease by the end of the decade. In Russia, H.I.V. infection has increased 15-fold in three years. In China, 17 percent of the population has yet to hear of AIDS, even as the disease takes off there in earnest.
It's really hard to imagine the impact social impace of 25 million orphans (so far) in Africa. What kind of breeding ground for social unrest, terrorism, aggression is this all creating?
5:11:32 PM Permalink
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Houses of the Future of the Past
From Bruce Sterling, this page at MIT's House_n site, this page of links to past visions of what the house of the future would look like. Interestingly, a lot of the links are broken. Notably missing is the page at http://www.microsoft.com/mshome, "a home stage set built in NYC highlighting many of Microsfot's existing or soon-to-be products." I wonder why it's gone? There are also an awful lot of deep links (such as http://builder.hw.net/monthly/1997/dec/hotf/index.htx) which now redirect to top-level links (http://www.bhg.com/). In this case, after a few minutes of looking around the site, even using the search engine, I couldn't find the "Blueprint 2000" article or anything that looked like it. So, Better Homes & Gardens lost this reader, most likely for good.
The coolest link I got from that page to the a site on Googie Architecture. You might not know the term, but I bet you'll recognize it when you see it.
12:24:23 PM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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