Continuing yesterday's theme, I was originally going to pick four purveyors of burgers in New York but after a good five G & Ts tonight, the last one being the Spooner Special (tin and gonic), perhaps it would be more appropriate to choose four bars instead. It amazes me how sometimes, I can drink and drink and drink and not really get very drunk at all, while other times, a glass of wine is enough to crack me. Tonight, Hall played a blinder and served three courses I liked (parma ham and rocket salad, salmon and potatoes (minus the courgettes of doom) and then superb profiteroles. The grad common room was having lighting difficulties (in that there wasn't any) so we had to give up on the idea of post-Hall port in favour of racking up the Bombay Sapphire at the Mitre.
If only we had been in New York; then we might have been able to go to one of the following four establishments for a post-prandial nightcap:
4. Barcelona Bar - 923 8th Avenue, midtown. Some nights, only a dive bar will do and Barcelona has the jukebox (complete with '80s power ballads - hooray for White Snake!), it has the almost infinite variety of shots ("Shot," they sez on their website, "YOUR NEW FAVORITE 4-LETTER WORD"), it has the bizarre mix of seedy and uber-cool customers and it has a convenient, midtown location. I spent a very fun night there, throwing back multiple screaming orgasms and brain haemorrhages, followed by a dangerous participation in karaoke. What larks.
3. The Village Pourhouse - 64 3rd Avenue, East Village. Big and a bit fratty if you pick the wrong night as all of NYU's hoards head on in to the Village Pourhouse for happy hour but this place is quite a pleasant place to hang out with a few friends and a few beers. It's also a "green" bar and does all sorts of recycling and stocks organic beers and wines.
2. The Hudson Bar - 356 W. 58th Street, midtown. The Philippe Starck-designed Hudson Hotel is pretty funky, even by Manhattan standards and the bar, which is daubed with shades of Starck's characteristic lime green by night. The drinks are expensive - even by Manhattan standards - but there is usually a fun crowd and the wine list is good. There are also quieter nooks and crannies in the "library" area, which is perfect for a more intimate one-on-one.
1. Employees Only - 510 Hudson Street, the West Village. You can tell Employees Only is a great bar because this is where the bar staff of NYC's finest establishments go on their nights off. From the outside, it doesn't look much - I would have walked right past it had I not been with a native - but the drinks are fantastic and I had one of the best mojitos I'd tasted outside Cuba, even if it was so strong (combined with half a bottle of red) that it was a miracle I managed to walk the 60 blocks to my hotel room unassisted. It's busy and quite cramped but nicely decorated and populated with the beautiful people of the West Village. An all-round great bar.
Honourable mention: Whiskey Blue, at the W, Lexington, where the cocktails are obscenely strong. I had a pineapple martini (or something) which was enough to knock me out for the rest of the evening but I dangerously followed with a couple of mojitos. I was wrecked in the morning.
29 April 2008
28 April 2008
Five Golden Cremas
Five days to go until NYC, so here are five of my favourite cafés and coffee shops (NYC edition, of course):
5. Au Bon Pain - Exclusive to everywhere. The first time I went to California, I went off in search of Au Bon Pain but to my disappointment, found none. It is, sadly, mainly an East Coast chain and I had to make do with the Coffee Bean and the Tea Leaf for my "convenient, reasonable and ubiquitous" caffeine needs. ABP does just that. The coffee is fine, the bagels, breads, salads and soups are good and not too expensive, and the stores are all over the place, and so a caffeine crisis need never last too long.
4. Mud Coffee - Various locations in the Village, the East Village and SoHo. Downtown? Need coffee? Want a well-brewed cappuccino that you can drink while watching the world go by in Washington Square Park? Keep an eye out for Mud, which has a perma-café (Mud Spot) in the East Village and Mud Trucks, which stop in various downtown locations, distributing coffee to under-caffeinated Manhattanites. Viva la torrefacción!
3. Dean & Deluca - Rockefeller Plaza. I'll be honest: Dean & Deluca's coffee isn't fantastic. The Rockefeller Center isn't even the best branch (the grocery in SoHo is amazing with its gorgeous array of cakes and pastries, sushi, fruit, juices - everything you could want from a gourmet deli and more). However, there is something quintessentially New Yorky to sit in the window at D&D with a cappuccino and a bagel, watching NBC's Today Show being filmed. If you're lucky, you might spot a celebrity; if you're unlucky, you might spot Mariah Carey. Watching New York wake up is a pretty fun experience and if the coffee is at least drinkable, then that's a good start.
2. Jack's Stir Brew - 138 W. 10th Street, in The Village. Jack's was probably the first good indie coffee shop I discovered in NYC - one exceptionally snowy December day when Monsieur E, S and I were exhausted from trekking around the city in the cold and then happened upon this tiny coffee house. Tiny it is - there are about six seats inside - but it feels more cosy than cramped, especially on a winter's afternoon, although it's quite fun people watching on W. 10th Street in the summer. Jack is famous for his stir-brew filter coffee but I don't think I've ever tried it, being more of a cap-a-holic myself but now that I drink filter more often, perhaps I'll try Jack's stir brew this weekend. Jack himself is an actor/coffee shop owner and we got chatting to him the first time we went. He was a really cool guy and had plenty of anecdotes. In fact, every time I've been to Jack's, I've met some really interesting people with good chat. Definitely a place to pick up friends if you're travelling alone. The cappuccinos are good and Jack organises live music nights, which are always fun.
1. Joe, the Art of Coffee - 141 Waverly Place, in the West Village is my favourite location but they also have new locations opening in Grand Central (perfect for Midtown caffeination) and in Chelsea, as well as their stores in the East Village and the Alessi store in SoHo. Not only does Joe actually make a fantastic cappuccino (and this isn't even relative to American cappuccinos generally; an absolute great coffee) and great cakes but the Waverly Place café is an awesome place to hang out - full of artsy, creative, actor-writer-director-waiter types manically typing their latest screenplay into their MacBook Air. The Waverly branch is light and airy and has a few seats outside on the front porch for when the weather's nice. The East Village branch is a bit bigger and generally has easier access to tables but isn't quite so atmospheric. Oh, and did I mention the coffee-themed events they run (what food goes best with coffee? How to brew the perfect cup? How to artistically pour the foam on your cappuccino into a heart, flower or leaf shape?) and the running club organised by the employees? Joe really does have all you could want from a coffee shop: (great) coffee, community and coolness.
5. Au Bon Pain - Exclusive to everywhere. The first time I went to California, I went off in search of Au Bon Pain but to my disappointment, found none. It is, sadly, mainly an East Coast chain and I had to make do with the Coffee Bean and the Tea Leaf for my "convenient, reasonable and ubiquitous" caffeine needs. ABP does just that. The coffee is fine, the bagels, breads, salads and soups are good and not too expensive, and the stores are all over the place, and so a caffeine crisis need never last too long.
4. Mud Coffee - Various locations in the Village, the East Village and SoHo. Downtown? Need coffee? Want a well-brewed cappuccino that you can drink while watching the world go by in Washington Square Park? Keep an eye out for Mud, which has a perma-café (Mud Spot) in the East Village and Mud Trucks, which stop in various downtown locations, distributing coffee to under-caffeinated Manhattanites. Viva la torrefacción!
3. Dean & Deluca - Rockefeller Plaza. I'll be honest: Dean & Deluca's coffee isn't fantastic. The Rockefeller Center isn't even the best branch (the grocery in SoHo is amazing with its gorgeous array of cakes and pastries, sushi, fruit, juices - everything you could want from a gourmet deli and more). However, there is something quintessentially New Yorky to sit in the window at D&D with a cappuccino and a bagel, watching NBC's Today Show being filmed. If you're lucky, you might spot a celebrity; if you're unlucky, you might spot Mariah Carey. Watching New York wake up is a pretty fun experience and if the coffee is at least drinkable, then that's a good start.
2. Jack's Stir Brew - 138 W. 10th Street, in The Village. Jack's was probably the first good indie coffee shop I discovered in NYC - one exceptionally snowy December day when Monsieur E, S and I were exhausted from trekking around the city in the cold and then happened upon this tiny coffee house. Tiny it is - there are about six seats inside - but it feels more cosy than cramped, especially on a winter's afternoon, although it's quite fun people watching on W. 10th Street in the summer. Jack is famous for his stir-brew filter coffee but I don't think I've ever tried it, being more of a cap-a-holic myself but now that I drink filter more often, perhaps I'll try Jack's stir brew this weekend. Jack himself is an actor/coffee shop owner and we got chatting to him the first time we went. He was a really cool guy and had plenty of anecdotes. In fact, every time I've been to Jack's, I've met some really interesting people with good chat. Definitely a place to pick up friends if you're travelling alone. The cappuccinos are good and Jack organises live music nights, which are always fun.
1. Joe, the Art of Coffee - 141 Waverly Place, in the West Village is my favourite location but they also have new locations opening in Grand Central (perfect for Midtown caffeination) and in Chelsea, as well as their stores in the East Village and the Alessi store in SoHo. Not only does Joe actually make a fantastic cappuccino (and this isn't even relative to American cappuccinos generally; an absolute great coffee) and great cakes but the Waverly Place café is an awesome place to hang out - full of artsy, creative, actor-writer-director-waiter types manically typing their latest screenplay into their MacBook Air. The Waverly branch is light and airy and has a few seats outside on the front porch for when the weather's nice. The East Village branch is a bit bigger and generally has easier access to tables but isn't quite so atmospheric. Oh, and did I mention the coffee-themed events they run (what food goes best with coffee? How to brew the perfect cup? How to artistically pour the foam on your cappuccino into a heart, flower or leaf shape?) and the running club organised by the employees? Joe really does have all you could want from a coffee shop: (great) coffee, community and coolness.
22 April 2008
Blue Iris Is Definitely Not the COTY in New Guinea
I guess I must have had my finger on the pulse when I wrote about linguistic relativity and the language of thought on Sunday: Christine Kenneally of The First Word wrote an article in today's NY Times (science section, and all; go, go linguistics) about that very subject, also looking into the popular example of colours.
It's the obvious example, really, for those investigating whether or not the language you speak determines your thoughts and your perceptions of the world, given how visual and evocative colours are and how widely the number and range of terms to describe colours varies cross-linguistically. Let's just say that Pantone would soon tire of picking a COTY in New Guinea, where the Dani language has only two basic colour terms: black (or dark/warm) and white (or light/cool). Even, more familiarly, some dialects of southern Italy don't have colour terms for blue and/or green (this is particularly odd as these dialects then have fewer basic colour terms than the Latin from which they are descended) and so speakers must resort to paraphrases like, "the colour of the sky" or "the colour of the grass."
Kenneally goes on to cite the linguistics undergrad's favourite example of Russian and its two words for what we call in English "blue" (one is a light blue and one a dark) and how people's perceptions of colours are altered in some experiments involving speakers of different languages selecting colours (although the central, focal colours are remarkably consistent from language to language).
It's certainly an interesting read, even if it didn't contain anything really new for me. Even better, the article contained a link entitled, Want to know more?, which points interested readers in the direction of related books (including Steve's latest, The Stuff of Thought, a great book by Ray Jackendoff, Berlin and Kay's original study on basic colour terms (which was always signed out of our faculty library and the University Library) and an interesting book by Stephen Levinson on linguistic relativity and how people's perceptions of space may vary cross-linguistically because of the way time and space are divided up and measured in different languages (I say, "My flowers are in front of the book" but some Native American languages, among others, would require me to say, "My flowers are west of the book"), which is probably a bit hardcore for all but linguists and the most interested laymen.
Linguistics seems to be on a bit of a headline-grabbing roll, at the moment; I guess that's what happens when all these scientist types start taking an interest...
It's the obvious example, really, for those investigating whether or not the language you speak determines your thoughts and your perceptions of the world, given how visual and evocative colours are and how widely the number and range of terms to describe colours varies cross-linguistically. Let's just say that Pantone would soon tire of picking a COTY in New Guinea, where the Dani language has only two basic colour terms: black (or dark/warm) and white (or light/cool). Even, more familiarly, some dialects of southern Italy don't have colour terms for blue and/or green (this is particularly odd as these dialects then have fewer basic colour terms than the Latin from which they are descended) and so speakers must resort to paraphrases like, "the colour of the sky" or "the colour of the grass."
Kenneally goes on to cite the linguistics undergrad's favourite example of Russian and its two words for what we call in English "blue" (one is a light blue and one a dark) and how people's perceptions of colours are altered in some experiments involving speakers of different languages selecting colours (although the central, focal colours are remarkably consistent from language to language).
It's certainly an interesting read, even if it didn't contain anything really new for me. Even better, the article contained a link entitled, Want to know more?, which points interested readers in the direction of related books (including Steve's latest, The Stuff of Thought, a great book by Ray Jackendoff, Berlin and Kay's original study on basic colour terms (which was always signed out of our faculty library and the University Library) and an interesting book by Stephen Levinson on linguistic relativity and how people's perceptions of space may vary cross-linguistically because of the way time and space are divided up and measured in different languages (I say, "My flowers are in front of the book" but some Native American languages, among others, would require me to say, "My flowers are west of the book"), which is probably a bit hardcore for all but linguists and the most interested laymen.
Linguistics seems to be on a bit of a headline-grabbing roll, at the moment; I guess that's what happens when all these scientist types start taking an interest...
20 April 2008
HIGNFY Once More
I'm beginning to think I am going to have to strike "N/A" from the TV shows section of my Facebook profile. It's all iPlayer's fault, though; I went to see if the new episode of Mad Men was available online yet and while it wasn't (I was an hour too early), I did spot that a new series of Have I Got News for You had started and so of course, I had to watch episode one.
I used to watch HIGNFY every week - after Dawson's Creek finished, it was the only show I watched every week but because The Ex was a big fan too, there was always someone to remind me to watch it each week. I watched the series in autumn 2006 as my housemates all watched the show then, but since then, I've only seen about one episode, as I've either been out on a Friday night or have been at home but have forgotten about HIGNFY.
I first got into HIGNFY well over ten years ago and watched it religiously throughout my teenage years. I'm sure that I am so cynical and/or apathetic towards politics purely because the vast majority of the input into my political education was the sharp, sardonic banter of Ian Hislop and Paul Merton (I had a huge crush on the latter, many years ago, which bizarrely only ended after I discovered he wasn't gay...). The chemistry between the two of them has always been great but it was best of all when Angus Deayton still hosted the programme, rather than this prolonged period of interregnum, with one guest host after another. They're all OK - I quite like Jack Dee (this week's guest host) and his deadpan humour, for example, but it's just not the same without Angus. He was the one who held it all together and contributed so much to the show's success and while Paul's wit is still strikingly and brilliantly fast and while Ian's biting cynicism is still great, without Angus there, it all just feels rather empty. He was the face of HIGNFY - the figurehead - and while the guest hosts range from pretty good (Jack Dee, Alexander Armstrong) to the dire (Charlotte Church), HIGNFY is just another thing that will never be the same in the absence of its leader.
Still, having not seen the programme for months, I did laugh - out loud, even - quite vigorously and often. It's great to see such a quality, well-respected publication as Onion World getting some attention, even if not everyone is quite so appreciative of the missing words round as I am.
My real problem with TV, of course, is not the shows themselves but having to watch them on the terms of the networks rather than on my own. Even in my O.C. and Dawson's Creek days, I tended the watch the programmes on DVD most of the time so that I could choose when to watch each episode. iPlayer is perfect, meanwhile, as it means that amnesiac old moi doesn't have to miss out on a show she loves just because she (occasionally) has better plans for a Friday night. As I dig deeper into the annals of iPlayer, I can see that it could be dangerous - I have now spotted Waking the Dead, another show I used to like, not least because I used to really fancy Trevor Eve, for some reason. It's really no wonder that 70% (?) of the UK's internet usage is from people watching programmes on iPlayer (so The Ex says, anyway).
Who needs a TV, eh? Gossip Girl, The Tudors, Mad Men, HIGNFY, Waking the Dead... Jeez, sounds like I'm well on the way towards addiction already.
I used to watch HIGNFY every week - after Dawson's Creek finished, it was the only show I watched every week but because The Ex was a big fan too, there was always someone to remind me to watch it each week. I watched the series in autumn 2006 as my housemates all watched the show then, but since then, I've only seen about one episode, as I've either been out on a Friday night or have been at home but have forgotten about HIGNFY.
I first got into HIGNFY well over ten years ago and watched it religiously throughout my teenage years. I'm sure that I am so cynical and/or apathetic towards politics purely because the vast majority of the input into my political education was the sharp, sardonic banter of Ian Hislop and Paul Merton (I had a huge crush on the latter, many years ago, which bizarrely only ended after I discovered he wasn't gay...). The chemistry between the two of them has always been great but it was best of all when Angus Deayton still hosted the programme, rather than this prolonged period of interregnum, with one guest host after another. They're all OK - I quite like Jack Dee (this week's guest host) and his deadpan humour, for example, but it's just not the same without Angus. He was the one who held it all together and contributed so much to the show's success and while Paul's wit is still strikingly and brilliantly fast and while Ian's biting cynicism is still great, without Angus there, it all just feels rather empty. He was the face of HIGNFY - the figurehead - and while the guest hosts range from pretty good (Jack Dee, Alexander Armstrong) to the dire (Charlotte Church), HIGNFY is just another thing that will never be the same in the absence of its leader.
Still, having not seen the programme for months, I did laugh - out loud, even - quite vigorously and often. It's great to see such a quality, well-respected publication as Onion World getting some attention, even if not everyone is quite so appreciative of the missing words round as I am.
My real problem with TV, of course, is not the shows themselves but having to watch them on the terms of the networks rather than on my own. Even in my O.C. and Dawson's Creek days, I tended the watch the programmes on DVD most of the time so that I could choose when to watch each episode. iPlayer is perfect, meanwhile, as it means that amnesiac old moi doesn't have to miss out on a show she loves just because she (occasionally) has better plans for a Friday night. As I dig deeper into the annals of iPlayer, I can see that it could be dangerous - I have now spotted Waking the Dead, another show I used to like, not least because I used to really fancy Trevor Eve, for some reason. It's really no wonder that 70% (?) of the UK's internet usage is from people watching programmes on iPlayer (so The Ex says, anyway).
Who needs a TV, eh? Gossip Girl, The Tudors, Mad Men, HIGNFY, Waking the Dead... Jeez, sounds like I'm well on the way towards addiction already.
Very Queer Games Indeed
I first came across Michael Haneke a couple of years ago, when, as prez of the modern languages society at my college, selecting which arty, foreign films we went to see at the Arts cinema was my prerogative, and so there was a certain bias towards the Francophone end of the spectrum and Caché sounded interesting enough, so along we went. Interesting it was and provocative too as a perfect little Parisian couple find themselves stalked and terrorised as someone leaves a series of CCTV tapes containing footage of their lives and which could possibly expose a secret from the past that would blow open their whole perfect existence. It was definitely a film about which one had to think extensively and indeed, my fellow linguists and I spent a good few hours afterwards debating whether or not there was a point to the film or whether it was just too clever by half.
Oh, also, Haneke likes the names of the perfect-couple protagonists of his films to be variants of Ann and George: in Caché, they are Anne and Georges, in the Austrian, 1997 original Funny Games, they are Anna and Georg, and now in this shot-by-shot, U.S. remake of Funny Games, their names are Ann and George. Perhaps, then, the moral of these cautionary tales is that if you are called Anne/Ann/Anna, you shouldn't marry someone named Georges/Georg/George, or it definitely won't end well. If only it were that simple!
Funny Games U.S. opens with Ann and George playing a game - fancy that! They are driving off on vacation in their Range Rover, complete with boat trailing behind and cute, blonde son (Georgie) and dog in the back. Their favourite game is for one of them to play a random piece of classical music
and for the other to name the composer and the title. Ann and George are real exciting. It all gets a bit sinister, though, because suddenly, the not quite so sublime sounds of Slipknot (or equivalent) blasts out over the speakers; from the incongruently placid, contented smiles on the faces of the family, it's unlikely they are hearing the same choons as the audience, and this is the first clue that the director might be playing some more funny games with the audience as the movie progresses. The movie's title and credits are then plastered over the screen in (blood) red as the death-metal continues to blare. It isn't the last time music or noise is used to clever effect, either.
Eventually, the family arrives at their perfect, lakeside cabin, having first greeted their friends at the next door house, from the bottom of the driveway. The neighbours are acting rather strangely and seem bizarrely unenthusiastic about the game of golf they have agreed to play with AnnandGeorge the following day. Most odd. Odder still is when male neighbour comes over shortly to help AnnandGeorge get their boat onto the lake. With him he brings Paul (a very, creepy Michael Pitt), who is dressed like a tennis boy from the Hamptons and is, curiously, wearing white gloves. He is staying with neighbour-people for a few days - his dad is an associate of neighbour-man's, Paul claims. There is also some confusion as to when Paul arrived as he and neighbour-man don't seem to be able to get their stories straight. Yes, Paul is very creepy indeed (I think it may actually just be Michael Pitt, given that he made me feel uncomfortable as Henry in Dawson's Creek and as Matthew in The Dreamers).
While George and Georgie are setting up the boat, Ann gets to work in the kitchen. She chats to her friend on her cell and is just about to put the steaks on when the doorbell rings. It is Peter, kitted out in the same tennis whites and white gloves as Paul. He wants some eggs for neighbour lady. He is very polite but, as with Paul, something about him is very off. Ann gives him the eggs and gets back to dinner but - oh noes! - he drops the eggs in the hallway. He is very - overly - apologetic and Ann, less enthusiastically this time, gets him some new eggs. Not before he knocks her cell into the sink, which is full of water. Ann is starting to get irritated now and tries to usher him out but suddenly, he is making an awful lot of fuss about those eggs. She sends him packing and off he goes. But then he's back! With Paul. Ann's dog attacked him, apparently, so he's going to need some more eggs. At this point, Ann is starting to get really freaked out but Paul changes the subject and asks if he can try out the great golf clubs he sees in the hall. Eventually, she agrees, warily, hoping they'll just leave once Paul has finished.
Nope. As Paul and Peter (whom Paul sometimes calls Tom) become even more demanding over the eggs, they get all defensive when Ann finally loses her temper and tries to usher them out. In comes hubby to save the day - except he assumes Ann's being silly too and apologises to Paul and Peter. Ann stomps off to sulk and we're almost at the point of unreliable-narrator-marital-breakdown but it's only then that Paul starts to say some things that make George realise that maybe his wife wasn't being so silly after all. When the boys won't leave, George slaps Paul round the face. Error. Paul pounds George to the floor with the golf club, thus beginning the bizarre hostage situation.
Paul and Peter are, as The Guardian (I think) said, pleasantly psychotic. Or is that psychotically pleasant? Like AnnandGeorge, they like to play games. Real funny games. Games like "If you can recite this prayer backwards, you get to choose whether you or your husband is killed first and also whether it is by gun or by knife?" Yeah, these guys are a barrel of laughs. And yet, the worse their torture of the family becomes, the politer it seems Paul and Peter are. They never forget their pleases and their thank yous and they are always so terribly nice as they inflict massive pain onto their captives.
I tried not to read anything about this film as I know that I spent all of Caché (and hours afterwards) trying to work out why. What was the point to the terrorising of this seemingly nice family? What did they ever do? If only there was some reason for this harassment, it wouldn't be so bad - we could rationalise it, process it, move on from it and get over it. The same thing happened in Funny Games. Paul and Peter certainly aren't your stereotypical psychos and if only there were some explanation - if George had slept with Paul's mom, thus breaking up his parents' marriage, for example - it wouldn't be quite so frustrating.
This is precisely the point, however, and Haneke plays with the audience almost as much as Paul and Peter play with their captives. Ann wants to know why, at one stage, and Paul duly obliges, insisting that Peter tell them why. He then makes up a series of fake "explanations" as to why they were doing this (messed up childhood, drug abuse, bored little rich kids), which are then dismissed almost as soon as they are told. For the audience, it almost doesn't matter whether or not AnnandGeorge live or die - either outcome can still provide a satisfying ending - so much as why it all happened. Why them. Why then.
Haneke is almost irritatingly self-aware, here, and practically chides the audience for this desire for rationalisation, as he has Paul talk to the camera, from time to time, commenting on the unfolding of events and on the audience's own desires here. Despairing, Ann asks Paul why he doesn't just kill them. "You shouldn't forget the importance of entertainment," Paul replies smoothly, with a big grin on his face. Indeed - why didn't the director/writer just decide to have Paul and Peter kill their captives within minutes of meeting them? That's hardly good cinema, is it? Where's the entertainment in that?
Of course, the only thing more frustrating than not being able to piece together the puzzle is the fact that the pieces one has might not fit together at all - there might not even be a puzzle. And of course, it is the very desire for increasing violence in films and for this violence to be explained away to us that Haneke is criticising here and looking for a more satisfying explanation for the behaviour of Paul and Peter might not be any use here.
The tension is well-constructed, Pitt is, as I said, a bloody good psychopath and Naomi Watts put in a good performance as Ann (Tim Robbins didn't have much to do other than squirm in pain and hobble around, as George) and I didn't embarrass myself by jumping too many times. I'm just not massively convinced that Haneke's justification for leaving so many loose ends is enough to justify the lack of viewer satisfaction; it was still a good film, though.
Oh, also, Haneke likes the names of the perfect-couple protagonists of his films to be variants of Ann and George: in Caché, they are Anne and Georges, in the Austrian, 1997 original Funny Games, they are Anna and Georg, and now in this shot-by-shot, U.S. remake of Funny Games, their names are Ann and George. Perhaps, then, the moral of these cautionary tales is that if you are called Anne/Ann/Anna, you shouldn't marry someone named Georges/Georg/George, or it definitely won't end well. If only it were that simple!
Funny Games U.S. opens with Ann and George playing a game - fancy that! They are driving off on vacation in their Range Rover, complete with boat trailing behind and cute, blonde son (Georgie) and dog in the back. Their favourite game is for one of them to play a random piece of classical music
and for the other to name the composer and the title. Ann and George are real exciting. It all gets a bit sinister, though, because suddenly, the not quite so sublime sounds of Slipknot (or equivalent) blasts out over the speakers; from the incongruently placid, contented smiles on the faces of the family, it's unlikely they are hearing the same choons as the audience, and this is the first clue that the director might be playing some more funny games with the audience as the movie progresses. The movie's title and credits are then plastered over the screen in (blood) red as the death-metal continues to blare. It isn't the last time music or noise is used to clever effect, either.
Eventually, the family arrives at their perfect, lakeside cabin, having first greeted their friends at the next door house, from the bottom of the driveway. The neighbours are acting rather strangely and seem bizarrely unenthusiastic about the game of golf they have agreed to play with AnnandGeorge the following day. Most odd. Odder still is when male neighbour comes over shortly to help AnnandGeorge get their boat onto the lake. With him he brings Paul (a very, creepy Michael Pitt), who is dressed like a tennis boy from the Hamptons and is, curiously, wearing white gloves. He is staying with neighbour-people for a few days - his dad is an associate of neighbour-man's, Paul claims. There is also some confusion as to when Paul arrived as he and neighbour-man don't seem to be able to get their stories straight. Yes, Paul is very creepy indeed (I think it may actually just be Michael Pitt, given that he made me feel uncomfortable as Henry in Dawson's Creek and as Matthew in The Dreamers).
While George and Georgie are setting up the boat, Ann gets to work in the kitchen. She chats to her friend on her cell and is just about to put the steaks on when the doorbell rings. It is Peter, kitted out in the same tennis whites and white gloves as Paul. He wants some eggs for neighbour lady. He is very polite but, as with Paul, something about him is very off. Ann gives him the eggs and gets back to dinner but - oh noes! - he drops the eggs in the hallway. He is very - overly - apologetic and Ann, less enthusiastically this time, gets him some new eggs. Not before he knocks her cell into the sink, which is full of water. Ann is starting to get irritated now and tries to usher him out but suddenly, he is making an awful lot of fuss about those eggs. She sends him packing and off he goes. But then he's back! With Paul. Ann's dog attacked him, apparently, so he's going to need some more eggs. At this point, Ann is starting to get really freaked out but Paul changes the subject and asks if he can try out the great golf clubs he sees in the hall. Eventually, she agrees, warily, hoping they'll just leave once Paul has finished.
Nope. As Paul and Peter (whom Paul sometimes calls Tom) become even more demanding over the eggs, they get all defensive when Ann finally loses her temper and tries to usher them out. In comes hubby to save the day - except he assumes Ann's being silly too and apologises to Paul and Peter. Ann stomps off to sulk and we're almost at the point of unreliable-narrator-marital-breakdown but it's only then that Paul starts to say some things that make George realise that maybe his wife wasn't being so silly after all. When the boys won't leave, George slaps Paul round the face. Error. Paul pounds George to the floor with the golf club, thus beginning the bizarre hostage situation.
Paul and Peter are, as The Guardian (I think) said, pleasantly psychotic. Or is that psychotically pleasant? Like AnnandGeorge, they like to play games. Real funny games. Games like "If you can recite this prayer backwards, you get to choose whether you or your husband is killed first and also whether it is by gun or by knife?" Yeah, these guys are a barrel of laughs. And yet, the worse their torture of the family becomes, the politer it seems Paul and Peter are. They never forget their pleases and their thank yous and they are always so terribly nice as they inflict massive pain onto their captives.
I tried not to read anything about this film as I know that I spent all of Caché (and hours afterwards) trying to work out why. What was the point to the terrorising of this seemingly nice family? What did they ever do? If only there was some reason for this harassment, it wouldn't be so bad - we could rationalise it, process it, move on from it and get over it. The same thing happened in Funny Games. Paul and Peter certainly aren't your stereotypical psychos and if only there were some explanation - if George had slept with Paul's mom, thus breaking up his parents' marriage, for example - it wouldn't be quite so frustrating.
This is precisely the point, however, and Haneke plays with the audience almost as much as Paul and Peter play with their captives. Ann wants to know why, at one stage, and Paul duly obliges, insisting that Peter tell them why. He then makes up a series of fake "explanations" as to why they were doing this (messed up childhood, drug abuse, bored little rich kids), which are then dismissed almost as soon as they are told. For the audience, it almost doesn't matter whether or not AnnandGeorge live or die - either outcome can still provide a satisfying ending - so much as why it all happened. Why them. Why then.
Haneke is almost irritatingly self-aware, here, and practically chides the audience for this desire for rationalisation, as he has Paul talk to the camera, from time to time, commenting on the unfolding of events and on the audience's own desires here. Despairing, Ann asks Paul why he doesn't just kill them. "You shouldn't forget the importance of entertainment," Paul replies smoothly, with a big grin on his face. Indeed - why didn't the director/writer just decide to have Paul and Peter kill their captives within minutes of meeting them? That's hardly good cinema, is it? Where's the entertainment in that?
Of course, the only thing more frustrating than not being able to piece together the puzzle is the fact that the pieces one has might not fit together at all - there might not even be a puzzle. And of course, it is the very desire for increasing violence in films and for this violence to be explained away to us that Haneke is criticising here and looking for a more satisfying explanation for the behaviour of Paul and Peter might not be any use here.
The tension is well-constructed, Pitt is, as I said, a bloody good psychopath and Naomi Watts put in a good performance as Ann (Tim Robbins didn't have much to do other than squirm in pain and hobble around, as George) and I didn't embarrass myself by jumping too many times. I'm just not massively convinced that Haneke's justification for leaving so many loose ends is enough to justify the lack of viewer satisfaction; it was still a good film, though.
19 April 2008
Humpty Dumpty Semantics
Some top chat about packaging earlier today reminded me of one of my own linguistic quirks of my youth. Until only a few years ago, I was convinced that exocets were the thin, tough, slightly rigid, ribbons of plastic that are used to secure parcels (I can't even find a picture on Google because I always had a word to denote them so why bother with a paraphrase?). Obviously, my parents indulged me way too much when I was a child because it was shockingly recently that I discovered that the rest of the world thought it was slightly weird for me to shriek, "Exocets!" on spotting a parcel.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." To some extent, we are all like Humpty, though, and not just when it comes to somehow acquiring a peculiar sense of a word (which is, after all, how semantic change happens - when Malcom Gladwell's Innovators start quirkily referring to parcel packaging stuff as Exocets, it will soon catch on). Concepts have such fuzzy boundaries and overlap so much and tend to be context-dependent even within a particular speaker's idiolect so it's almost a miracle we can communicate given how different words mean such different things to different people. I suppose we can derive some satisfaction through our own ignorance of the fact that the other people might mean something quite different when they say something than we ourselves would have meant had we uttered the same phrase.
Once you start looking at different cultures, it gets even more interesting. I always liked Berlin and Kay's study on colour terms across various languages, in which they found that although languages differ in the number of terms they have for colours (scarlet, burgundy, alizarin, magenta, crimson, etc. vs rosso "red" in Italian), people's perceptions of what the "focal" (prototypical) colour within any group tended to be the same cross-linguistically, so everyone would pick a fire engine red as the "focal" red colour, even if some languages had many other words for red, some had only one ("red") and others still didn't even have a word for the colour. This wanders off into the tricky territory of linguistic relativity, and the relationship between language and thought - whether and how the language we speak affects how we perceive the world or vice-versa. The same applies with other concepts too though - the concept itself is universal but the words used to depict it are applied in diverse ways and not just cross-linguistically but from person to person.
Colour is such a tricksy thing anyway. It frustrates me that I can wear a bracelet that I can see is yellow - it's a beautiful, bright, lemon yellow - and yet someone else will tell me that no, it couldn't be any more green. How can he even say that? It's quite clearly as yellow as can be. I find it odd that someone can perceive something as simple as the colour of a bracelet in such a different way to me. And yet, ultimately, yellow and green are both just interchangeable, fuzzy, poorly-defined colours on a colour chart; it's not as though it really matters that someone should call something "green" when everything about that green screams that it isn't green they are seeing after all but really the similar - yet distinct - yellow...
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less." To some extent, we are all like Humpty, though, and not just when it comes to somehow acquiring a peculiar sense of a word (which is, after all, how semantic change happens - when Malcom Gladwell's Innovators start quirkily referring to parcel packaging stuff as Exocets, it will soon catch on). Concepts have such fuzzy boundaries and overlap so much and tend to be context-dependent even within a particular speaker's idiolect so it's almost a miracle we can communicate given how different words mean such different things to different people. I suppose we can derive some satisfaction through our own ignorance of the fact that the other people might mean something quite different when they say something than we ourselves would have meant had we uttered the same phrase.
Once you start looking at different cultures, it gets even more interesting. I always liked Berlin and Kay's study on colour terms across various languages, in which they found that although languages differ in the number of terms they have for colours (scarlet, burgundy, alizarin, magenta, crimson, etc. vs rosso "red" in Italian), people's perceptions of what the "focal" (prototypical) colour within any group tended to be the same cross-linguistically, so everyone would pick a fire engine red as the "focal" red colour, even if some languages had many other words for red, some had only one ("red") and others still didn't even have a word for the colour. This wanders off into the tricky territory of linguistic relativity, and the relationship between language and thought - whether and how the language we speak affects how we perceive the world or vice-versa. The same applies with other concepts too though - the concept itself is universal but the words used to depict it are applied in diverse ways and not just cross-linguistically but from person to person.
Colour is such a tricksy thing anyway. It frustrates me that I can wear a bracelet that I can see is yellow - it's a beautiful, bright, lemon yellow - and yet someone else will tell me that no, it couldn't be any more green. How can he even say that? It's quite clearly as yellow as can be. I find it odd that someone can perceive something as simple as the colour of a bracelet in such a different way to me. And yet, ultimately, yellow and green are both just interchangeable, fuzzy, poorly-defined colours on a colour chart; it's not as though it really matters that someone should call something "green" when everything about that green screams that it isn't green they are seeing after all but really the similar - yet distinct - yellow...
Return of the Reeves
Ah, it's nice to spend a Friday night with Keanu. Every girl should get to spend Friday night with Keanu; well, I should, anyway, even if his choice of venue (skanky multiplex attached to shopping centre) left a lot to be desired, as did the company (there were about 15 people in the huge screen, eight of which were some extended family of chavs who spent the entire film talking loudly and who were sitting right in front of me). Beggars can't be choosers, I guess, and I have been spoiled by the Arts cinema with its clientèle who go to the cinema for the movies and with its absence of "witty" Orange-sponsored "we're telling you to turn off your phone but in a fun way" notices that used to be funny on a first airing but are now wearing way too thin.
Anyway, as expected, Street Kings wasn't exactly film of the year. Keanu was playing against type (well, as much as he ever plays anything; the character of Tom Ludlow, at least, was not a clear-cut hero, at any rate - no Jack Traven, certainly) as a bad cop turned good or maybe a good cop turned bad - the movie messily mashes up the definitions of good and bad, anyway, even if its moral is way too simplistic and hardly groundbreaking. The movie doesn't open well for Keanu - within the first five minutes, he vomits the second he gets out of bed, he swigs one of those minibar-sized vodkas while driving and then gets the shit kicked out of him by some Koreans, thanks to some incredibly racist comments about Asians (ironic given he's a quarter Chinese or something) - but is he just playing a part?
What follows is a needlessly convoluted and largely predictable but ultimately quite entertaining tale of double-crossing and triple-crossing, shooting, senseless violence, betrayal and who-should-I-trust? dilemmas. Keanu gets implicated in the shooting of a cop and sets out to prove his innocence, except that given that guilt and innocence are relative and subjective in this dirty world of the LAPD, what matters more than whether you committed a crime is whether the evidence shows you committed the crime. He doesn't sit around moping about what will happen if his plans go awry and he ends up in jail because he has given up on himself and on life (hence drinking at the wheel) and indeed, we get 40 seconds of back-story to "explain" why he is the way he is (wife died of a blood clot while she was with another guy who left her outside a hospital). This isn't really very satisfying and there's not anything in the way of character development but this doesn't matter too much as it's all about the action. Oh, and the shots of Keanu looking hot (yes, even post-vomiting and post-being attacked and even while acting like a bit of a tool to pretty much everyone, including the hot, Latina girlfriend).
Still, at least pitting Keanu against a cast filled with rappers and homies meant that he wasn't exactly outshadowed by his co-stars, although Hugh Laurie did pretty well as Cap'n LAPD. A lot of the script was clearly cut in favour of scenes involving Keanu looking confused and disorientated and trying to work out what crazy nightmare he was having (cf The Matrix, A Scanner Darkly, Bill and Ted...he sure is talented when it comes to acting like he doesn't know what's going on). Not that I'm complaining, of course.
It's a good thing I was distracted by Keanu, as, according to the BBFC "the film also contains some strong sex references, including comments about ‘blowjobs’ and ‘pussy’, plus some references to hard drugs and the sight, but not use of, both heroin and various pills" not to mention all the "scenes of bloody violence" (bold in original). At least there were no thematic elements, this time; those really get to me. Surely, The Matrix must have been busted for thematic elements. The Lame House, on the other hand, got reprimanded for "mild language and accident scene" - is "mild language" a euphemism for "incredibly weak dialogue and obscenely ridiculous plot and/or sense of the space-time continuum"? Equally "accident scene" is a little vague - there's a bit of a difference between accidentally forgetting to buy the coffee and accidentally dying in a horrific way à la Final Destination (or maybe not, if you are me).
Either way, Street Kings still counts as another film in my quest to conquer cinema in 2008, which is going swimmingly (as is my attempt to stop biting my nails; so far, so good) and besides, it's not just me who doesn't really care how mediocre (or worse) Keanu's films are - his very presence on the cast list is enough to keep us buying the cinema tickets.
Anyway, as expected, Street Kings wasn't exactly film of the year. Keanu was playing against type (well, as much as he ever plays anything; the character of Tom Ludlow, at least, was not a clear-cut hero, at any rate - no Jack Traven, certainly) as a bad cop turned good or maybe a good cop turned bad - the movie messily mashes up the definitions of good and bad, anyway, even if its moral is way too simplistic and hardly groundbreaking. The movie doesn't open well for Keanu - within the first five minutes, he vomits the second he gets out of bed, he swigs one of those minibar-sized vodkas while driving and then gets the shit kicked out of him by some Koreans, thanks to some incredibly racist comments about Asians (ironic given he's a quarter Chinese or something) - but is he just playing a part?
What follows is a needlessly convoluted and largely predictable but ultimately quite entertaining tale of double-crossing and triple-crossing, shooting, senseless violence, betrayal and who-should-I-trust? dilemmas. Keanu gets implicated in the shooting of a cop and sets out to prove his innocence, except that given that guilt and innocence are relative and subjective in this dirty world of the LAPD, what matters more than whether you committed a crime is whether the evidence shows you committed the crime. He doesn't sit around moping about what will happen if his plans go awry and he ends up in jail because he has given up on himself and on life (hence drinking at the wheel) and indeed, we get 40 seconds of back-story to "explain" why he is the way he is (wife died of a blood clot while she was with another guy who left her outside a hospital). This isn't really very satisfying and there's not anything in the way of character development but this doesn't matter too much as it's all about the action. Oh, and the shots of Keanu looking hot (yes, even post-vomiting and post-being attacked and even while acting like a bit of a tool to pretty much everyone, including the hot, Latina girlfriend).
Still, at least pitting Keanu against a cast filled with rappers and homies meant that he wasn't exactly outshadowed by his co-stars, although Hugh Laurie did pretty well as Cap'n LAPD. A lot of the script was clearly cut in favour of scenes involving Keanu looking confused and disorientated and trying to work out what crazy nightmare he was having (cf The Matrix, A Scanner Darkly, Bill and Ted...he sure is talented when it comes to acting like he doesn't know what's going on). Not that I'm complaining, of course.
It's a good thing I was distracted by Keanu, as, according to the BBFC "the film also contains some strong sex references, including comments about ‘blowjobs’ and ‘pussy’, plus some references to hard drugs and the sight, but not use of, both heroin and various pills" not to mention all the "scenes of bloody violence" (bold in original). At least there were no thematic elements, this time; those really get to me. Surely, The Matrix must have been busted for thematic elements. The Lame House, on the other hand, got reprimanded for "mild language and accident scene" - is "mild language" a euphemism for "incredibly weak dialogue and obscenely ridiculous plot and/or sense of the space-time continuum"? Equally "accident scene" is a little vague - there's a bit of a difference between accidentally forgetting to buy the coffee and accidentally dying in a horrific way à la Final Destination (or maybe not, if you are me).
Either way, Street Kings still counts as another film in my quest to conquer cinema in 2008, which is going swimmingly (as is my attempt to stop biting my nails; so far, so good) and besides, it's not just me who doesn't really care how mediocre (or worse) Keanu's films are - his very presence on the cast list is enough to keep us buying the cinema tickets.
13 April 2008
Not Just Moi
There was an article after my own heart in yesterday's Grauniad, in which the writer pondered what it is about Keanu that makes people adore him (other than the fact that he was "great looking. I mean great looking") even though the films in which he stars are consistently mediocre, at best, and he hasn't been in anything outstanding since The Matrix and that "his last film of any consequence was A Scanner Darkly, a cartoon" (which I actually thought was pretty good, Dick fan that I am). Sez Joe Queenan:
A long, long time ago, those of us who love Keanu Reeves decided that no matter how many dismal movies like Johnny Mnemonic he made, and no matter how inept his acting in A Walk In The Clouds, and no matter how inappropriate his casting in Much Ado About Nothing and Bram Stoker's Dracula, we would never stop being thrilled when news of an exciting new Keanu project was announced. There was something about Keanu Reeves that we liked, and nothing could ever change that.
He then goes on to compare Keanu to other actors whom the audience will always love, no matter how dire the films in which they star: Sean Connery, Gene Hackman and Christopher Walken, for example. I can't remember when I became a fan - I know that I was fairly ambivalent about him when The Matrix came out and was strangely into his against-type-cast role of Cate Blanchett's abusive husband in The Gift, and then was massively keen to go to see Something's Gotta Give just because I knew he was in it, stocking up, in the meantime, on his back catalogue in DVD (Dangerous Liaisons, Speed, MOPI, Point Break, Much Ado, even Bill and Ted!). 2006 was a good summer - a double dose of Keanu in A Scanner Darkly and the truly dire Lake House.
Since then, it's all been a bit quiet on the Keanu front, so I'm glad to discover he has a new film out on Friday - Street Kings (James Ellroy adaptation in which it's unclear whether or not he's a good cop or a bad cop); I know, I call myself a fan and then don't find out that I could have been gearing myself up for a new film of his for months now. As it is, I guess I'll have to drop all plans on Friday night to go and see the film. Still, as Quenan wrote:
This week, his new film Street Kings will be released, and those of us who love him will be out there in force to see it. We hope it will be good, but if it is not we will not hold it against him. We never have before; why start now?
A long, long time ago, those of us who love Keanu Reeves decided that no matter how many dismal movies like Johnny Mnemonic he made, and no matter how inept his acting in A Walk In The Clouds, and no matter how inappropriate his casting in Much Ado About Nothing and Bram Stoker's Dracula, we would never stop being thrilled when news of an exciting new Keanu project was announced. There was something about Keanu Reeves that we liked, and nothing could ever change that.
He then goes on to compare Keanu to other actors whom the audience will always love, no matter how dire the films in which they star: Sean Connery, Gene Hackman and Christopher Walken, for example. I can't remember when I became a fan - I know that I was fairly ambivalent about him when The Matrix came out and was strangely into his against-type-cast role of Cate Blanchett's abusive husband in The Gift, and then was massively keen to go to see Something's Gotta Give just because I knew he was in it, stocking up, in the meantime, on his back catalogue in DVD (Dangerous Liaisons, Speed, MOPI, Point Break, Much Ado, even Bill and Ted!). 2006 was a good summer - a double dose of Keanu in A Scanner Darkly and the truly dire Lake House.
Since then, it's all been a bit quiet on the Keanu front, so I'm glad to discover he has a new film out on Friday - Street Kings (James Ellroy adaptation in which it's unclear whether or not he's a good cop or a bad cop); I know, I call myself a fan and then don't find out that I could have been gearing myself up for a new film of his for months now. As it is, I guess I'll have to drop all plans on Friday night to go and see the film. Still, as Quenan wrote:
This week, his new film Street Kings will be released, and those of us who love him will be out there in force to see it. We hope it will be good, but if it is not we will not hold it against him. We never have before; why start now?
A Day in the Life
I had a fun day in London Town yesterday, despite the best efforts of the weather to piss me off as much as possible. I had brought kit for all occasions (hat, scarf, gloves, brolly, sunglasses), all of which was used. It was really quite mad walking along Carnaby Street, feeling quite hot one minute and squinting in the sunlight, only to have to dive into a shop (so tough) the next minute because it was hailing.
Eventually, the rain was so torrential, we had to stop for lunch at Fernandez & Wells, one of my favourite coffee shop/cafés, in Soho. We were lucky to get a seat (given that we weren't the only ones to have the same idea) in the window, which provided some entertainment as pedestrians were forced to leap out of the way, in an amusing manner, every time a car drove past through the huge puddles that had formed. Schadenfreude... Further entertainment was provided by the couple sitting next to us, of whom the man was clearly a casting director and was talking about the difficulty of casting someone to play Maggie Thatcher (indeed, there is such a movie planned so maybe it wasn't complete bullshit). The café is run by Aussies and they make really good coffee but as I'd already had an espresso at home, a cap on the train and a cap at the breakfasterie we went to in Marylebone, I decided to have a cup of mint tea (I know!) instead, which was pretty refreshing. I also had a "Free-Range English Cooked Ham, Montgomery's Cheddar and Piccalilli (optional)" ciabatta (without the Piccalilli, of course), which was good, albeit far too filling for moi.
I didn't really want to do any shopping (I know!), possibly thanks to the imminence of New York, even though there were some nice things in Banana Republic, which will be massively cheaper when I'm in New York. S wanted a man bag, so we idly wandered in and out of various purveyors of metrosexual men's gear, trying to avoid the rain as much as possible. We then had a few hours to spare before dinner and as we were eating in High Street Ken, we decided to go to the Natural History Museum. Obviously, the place was rammed, given that it was four-thirty on a Saturday, but we entertained ourselves well enough with the fun, interactive exhibits like "dinosaur or no dinosaur" where I'm proud to say that we both beat a seven-year-old and an eleven-year-old.
We then went on rather a long walk in not quite the right direction. I was following S, because - thanks to force of habit - any navigational ability I may ever have shuts down completely when I'm with him. Trouble was, he didn't know where we were going (I had sent him a link to the restau but I guess he assumed I'd be head of nav on that one; error). This wasn't a massive problem as we hopped on a RouteMaster bus and jumped off at the Royal Albert Hall.
We ate dinner at Byron. The restaurant is right on Ken High Street, although perhaps just the wrong side of the Tube station to catch the eye of the majority of shoppers. Still, the restaurant itself is really nicely done out, with white tables, turquoise and green seats, and with chairs at the bar of the central, open-plan kitchen for lone diners and booths at the back for groups. We arrived at seven and the place was pretty quiet as most of the family groups were leaving and the dinner crowd proper were filtering in; this meant we got a seat by the window for maximum people-watching.
Byron specialises in burgers - and by specialises, I mean that if you don't like a burger (or the chicken/vegetarian equivalent), you're pretty much out of luck, although there are a few salad options too; the restau's motto is, "Great beef, great buns, no bull," which pretty much sums it up. S and I both went for a Byron burger (with dry cure bacon, cheddar and Byron BBQ sauce), although I was tempted by a Skinny burger (with a small salad instead of the bun) given that I never eat the bun (I'd rather save stomach space for the meat) and intrigued by the Mini Classic (three mini-burgers). We were also asked how we would like the burgers cooked, which I thought was illegal in the UK, but I didn't complain as I do like my burgers juicily medium rare.
And indeed, a juicily medium-rare burger with properly mature, melted cheddar and bacon that was cooked just the right amount was exactly what I got. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it was one of the best burgers I've ever had outside the US (Mr Bartley's Burger Cottage in Boston and the Corner Bistro and Lever House in NYC still lead the overall league table of Bex's Best Burgers). The fries weren't so great - too anaemic for my tastes and - worse - they came pre-seasoned with pepper, which I wasn't too impressed with. Still, it's a lot easier to get decent chips than to get a decent burger, especially in England, so I was willing to let them off for crimes against the potato. By the time we left, it was about nine (I had wanted a chocolate brownie for pudding so badly but was far too full by that point), the place was rammed and people were queueing for tables; not bad for a place that's only been open a few months. The location is not the best from my point of view, as I generally tend to base myself around Marylebone, Soho and Covent Garden, but a burger this good is worth a Tube ride - in my books, anyway.
Later, we hopped on the tube for a drink at the Coal Hole, although I was really far too tired and just wanted to get home. For once, the timing worked perfectly at King's Cross and I hopped on the 11.08 train, hoping that it was faster than the 11.15. It was and I collapsed into a seat about two seconds after the doors shut, falling soundly asleep until we got to Nowheresville.
Eventually, the rain was so torrential, we had to stop for lunch at Fernandez & Wells, one of my favourite coffee shop/cafés, in Soho. We were lucky to get a seat (given that we weren't the only ones to have the same idea) in the window, which provided some entertainment as pedestrians were forced to leap out of the way, in an amusing manner, every time a car drove past through the huge puddles that had formed. Schadenfreude... Further entertainment was provided by the couple sitting next to us, of whom the man was clearly a casting director and was talking about the difficulty of casting someone to play Maggie Thatcher (indeed, there is such a movie planned so maybe it wasn't complete bullshit). The café is run by Aussies and they make really good coffee but as I'd already had an espresso at home, a cap on the train and a cap at the breakfasterie we went to in Marylebone, I decided to have a cup of mint tea (I know!) instead, which was pretty refreshing. I also had a "Free-Range English Cooked Ham, Montgomery's Cheddar and Piccalilli (optional)" ciabatta (without the Piccalilli, of course), which was good, albeit far too filling for moi.
I didn't really want to do any shopping (I know!), possibly thanks to the imminence of New York, even though there were some nice things in Banana Republic, which will be massively cheaper when I'm in New York. S wanted a man bag, so we idly wandered in and out of various purveyors of metrosexual men's gear, trying to avoid the rain as much as possible. We then had a few hours to spare before dinner and as we were eating in High Street Ken, we decided to go to the Natural History Museum. Obviously, the place was rammed, given that it was four-thirty on a Saturday, but we entertained ourselves well enough with the fun, interactive exhibits like "dinosaur or no dinosaur" where I'm proud to say that we both beat a seven-year-old and an eleven-year-old.
We then went on rather a long walk in not quite the right direction. I was following S, because - thanks to force of habit - any navigational ability I may ever have shuts down completely when I'm with him. Trouble was, he didn't know where we were going (I had sent him a link to the restau but I guess he assumed I'd be head of nav on that one; error). This wasn't a massive problem as we hopped on a RouteMaster bus and jumped off at the Royal Albert Hall.
We ate dinner at Byron. The restaurant is right on Ken High Street, although perhaps just the wrong side of the Tube station to catch the eye of the majority of shoppers. Still, the restaurant itself is really nicely done out, with white tables, turquoise and green seats, and with chairs at the bar of the central, open-plan kitchen for lone diners and booths at the back for groups. We arrived at seven and the place was pretty quiet as most of the family groups were leaving and the dinner crowd proper were filtering in; this meant we got a seat by the window for maximum people-watching.
Byron specialises in burgers - and by specialises, I mean that if you don't like a burger (or the chicken/vegetarian equivalent), you're pretty much out of luck, although there are a few salad options too; the restau's motto is, "Great beef, great buns, no bull," which pretty much sums it up. S and I both went for a Byron burger (with dry cure bacon, cheddar and Byron BBQ sauce), although I was tempted by a Skinny burger (with a small salad instead of the bun) given that I never eat the bun (I'd rather save stomach space for the meat) and intrigued by the Mini Classic (three mini-burgers). We were also asked how we would like the burgers cooked, which I thought was illegal in the UK, but I didn't complain as I do like my burgers juicily medium rare.
And indeed, a juicily medium-rare burger with properly mature, melted cheddar and bacon that was cooked just the right amount was exactly what I got. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that it was one of the best burgers I've ever had outside the US (Mr Bartley's Burger Cottage in Boston and the Corner Bistro and Lever House in NYC still lead the overall league table of Bex's Best Burgers). The fries weren't so great - too anaemic for my tastes and - worse - they came pre-seasoned with pepper, which I wasn't too impressed with. Still, it's a lot easier to get decent chips than to get a decent burger, especially in England, so I was willing to let them off for crimes against the potato. By the time we left, it was about nine (I had wanted a chocolate brownie for pudding so badly but was far too full by that point), the place was rammed and people were queueing for tables; not bad for a place that's only been open a few months. The location is not the best from my point of view, as I generally tend to base myself around Marylebone, Soho and Covent Garden, but a burger this good is worth a Tube ride - in my books, anyway.
Later, we hopped on the tube for a drink at the Coal Hole, although I was really far too tired and just wanted to get home. For once, the timing worked perfectly at King's Cross and I hopped on the 11.08 train, hoping that it was faster than the 11.15. It was and I collapsed into a seat about two seconds after the doors shut, falling soundly asleep until we got to Nowheresville.
11 April 2008
35 Down, 75 to Go
An article in The Telegraph this week lists the 110 best books to create the perfect library. I read a lot but I usually prefer books that are a bit quirkier than your average NYT bestseller and I don't like very much pre-20th century writing; well, maybe it's more accurate to say that I am a modern lass at heart and don't really go for all the swooning and ankle-flashing of the 19th century.
Anyway, as such, I wasn't expecting to have read very many of the top 110 books from this list, so almost one third isn't such bad going. Still, all three of the Italian books on the list that I have read were read as part of my degree; one of the French ones (Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is one of my favourite novels and the other (À la recherche...) is one I have read but didn't really enjoy or take in properly: I read it to have read it.
Inevitably, such a list can't hope to be comprehensive. What about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Margaret Atwood? Julian Barnes? Jilly Cooper?! No, seriously, as I look at my bookshelves, which contain a combination of my all-times favourites and "books I have read recently, some of which I quite enjoyed, others of which, I am glad to have finished," and I'm not sure that any of them would make it onto one of these lists (apart from Dante and Choderlos de Laclos, which are already on the list).
Maybe if there were a science/non-fiction-other-than-history section in this library, Steven Pinker would make the cut (I would hope so). Perhaps Bill Bryson would make it into a travel section with The Lost Continent; Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow would definitely be in the "magical realism of the 20th century" section, Polo by Jilly Cooper would be top of the "bonk-busters involving handsome cads, horses and feisty Argentines" section; and The Dreamers would be featured in the "incestuous twins who have a really messed up relationship with each other and an American guy in Paris in soixante-huit" category.
Anyway, as such, I wasn't expecting to have read very many of the top 110 books from this list, so almost one third isn't such bad going. Still, all three of the Italian books on the list that I have read were read as part of my degree; one of the French ones (Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is one of my favourite novels and the other (À la recherche...) is one I have read but didn't really enjoy or take in properly: I read it to have read it.
Inevitably, such a list can't hope to be comprehensive. What about Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde? Margaret Atwood? Julian Barnes? Jilly Cooper?! No, seriously, as I look at my bookshelves, which contain a combination of my all-times favourites and "books I have read recently, some of which I quite enjoyed, others of which, I am glad to have finished," and I'm not sure that any of them would make it onto one of these lists (apart from Dante and Choderlos de Laclos, which are already on the list).
Maybe if there were a science/non-fiction-other-than-history section in this library, Steven Pinker would make the cut (I would hope so). Perhaps Bill Bryson would make it into a travel section with The Lost Continent; Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow would definitely be in the "magical realism of the 20th century" section, Polo by Jilly Cooper would be top of the "bonk-busters involving handsome cads, horses and feisty Argentines" section; and The Dreamers would be featured in the "incestuous twins who have a really messed up relationship with each other and an American guy in Paris in soixante-huit" category.
My library, in effect, would not be best categorised in the Dewey Decimal System, on account of the eclectic nature of its contents, so I make do by dividing it into fiction and non-, and then alphabetising each section. Oh, I do like to alphabetise!
Here are the books from The Telegraph's list that I have read (a couple of these, I literally read but didn't really take in the meaning of the words; others, I read a while ago and the details are a bit fuzzy; a very few, I have ready many, many times; the majority, I have read once and liked well enough):
Classics
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Poetry
Sonnets (Shakespeare)
The Divine Comedy (Dante)
The Waste Land (Eliot)
Collected Poems (Hughes)
Literary Fiction
Portrait of a Lady (James)
À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
The Human Stain (Roth)
Romantic Fiction
Rebecca (Du Maurier)
Le Morte d'Arthur (Malory)
Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Choderlos de Laclos)
Gone with the Wind (Mitchell)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Hardy)
Children's Books
Swallows and Amazons (Ransome)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis)
Babar (de Brunhoff)
The Railway Children (Nesbit)
Winnie the Pooh (Milne)
Harry Potter (Rowling)
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
Treasure Island (Stevenson)
Sci-Fi
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Brave New World (Huxley)
1984 (Orwell)
The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
Crime
The Talented Mr Ripley (Highsmith)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Le Carré)
Books That Changed the World
The Prince (Machiavelli)
On the Origin of Species (Darwin)
Books That Changed Your World
The Tipping Point (Gladwell)
Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Truss)
Schott's Original Miscellany (Schott)
Lives
If This Is a Man (Levi)
Here are the books from The Telegraph's list that I have read (a couple of these, I literally read but didn't really take in the meaning of the words; others, I read a while ago and the details are a bit fuzzy; a very few, I have ready many, many times; the majority, I have read once and liked well enough):
Classics
Madame Bovary (Flaubert)
Poetry
Sonnets (Shakespeare)
The Divine Comedy (Dante)
The Waste Land (Eliot)
Collected Poems (Hughes)
Literary Fiction
Portrait of a Lady (James)
À la recherche du temps perdu (Proust)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Hemingway)
The Human Stain (Roth)
Romantic Fiction
Rebecca (Du Maurier)
Le Morte d'Arthur (Malory)
Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Choderlos de Laclos)
Gone with the Wind (Mitchell)
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Hardy)
Children's Books
Swallows and Amazons (Ransome)
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (Lewis)
Babar (de Brunhoff)
The Railway Children (Nesbit)
Winnie the Pooh (Milne)
Harry Potter (Rowling)
The Wind in the Willows (Grahame)
Treasure Island (Stevenson)
Sci-Fi
Frankenstein (Shelley)
Brave New World (Huxley)
1984 (Orwell)
The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham)
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Dick)
Crime
The Talented Mr Ripley (Highsmith)
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (Le Carré)
Books That Changed the World
The Prince (Machiavelli)
On the Origin of Species (Darwin)
Books That Changed Your World
The Tipping Point (Gladwell)
Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Truss)
Schott's Original Miscellany (Schott)
Lives
If This Is a Man (Levi)
09 April 2008
...Nor Can You Always Get What You Want, Except When You Can
It had been a while (about a year, I think, for Babel) since I had been to the crappy, Nowheresville shopping centre that contains the non-arts cinema in town. I hadn't exactly missed the place - The Arts is a much nicer experience all round, not least because it does crêpes and class in equal measures (actually, it does crêpes better but they do have a French chef, so this isn't a bad thing). We used to avoid the place when possible, except when a film was on one of the big screens and even then, it was a pain because there is no assigned seating - like the time we went to see The Matrix Reloaded and were sitting in the back row, the aircon was broken and it was obscenely hot. The things we do for Keanu (who is currently ballsing up the remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, I hear, and ruining Christmas to boot, given it's out two weeks before)...
So, what tempted me over to the multiplex? Well, 21, actually, which tells the "inspired by a true story - kind of, with a stretch of the imagination" of a bunch of MIT students, led by rogue maths professor, Kevin Spacey, who hit Vegas with their awesome Rain Man skills to become card counters who win big but have big oh-noes when bitter, soon-to-be-replaced-by-a-biometric-computer casino "loss preventer," Morpheus (I mean, Cole Williams) starts getting suspicious.
This is explains the ubiquity of recent blog posts explaining how the Monty Hall problem works; I first read about it on Predictably Irrational, where you can play along but the Tierney Lab blog on the NY Times blogs has covered it more extensively.
21 doesn't really have anything to do with this problem, other than the fact that it - like card-counting - is a way that maths can be fun and can be useful in the real world! Kevin Spacey is Micky Rosa, who is a most unrealistic maths professor given that a) he's pretty outgoing and funny, b) he relates the topics he is teaching to the real world and c) he talks about a quiz show in class. Spotting that Ben Campbell is one smart student, he gets Ben to play along in an imaginary round of the Monty Hall problem (three doors, one with a car behind, the other two with goats, the host knows where the car is. Contestant picks a door. Host opens one of the others to reveal a goat and then offers contestant the chance to switch - should she?), and of course Ben succeeds and explains why in suitably geschliegen language. Oh, and Ben also got 97% in his senior year "variable change" course at MIT, just in case you think Prof Spacey is just going on Ben's ability to do well in a quiz show!
If Micky Rosa isn't a very convincing maths professor, then Jim Sturgess doesn't portray a very convincing geek in Ben Campbell. He's too attractive, for a start (in a way reminiscent of Green Eyes, and his voice sounds the same as GE's too, although Sturgess is English so the accent must have been faked). He's also way too confident for someone who isn't supposed to be terribly self-confident - the actor appears far more comfortable later on when Ben comes out of his shell. When we meet Ben, he's chatting with some Harvard prof about his application to Harvard Med School and also for this really prestigious scholarship worth $300,000, for which 76 people apply for one place. Ben's very clever, we learn, but also very geeky and his only extra-curric involves building a self-driving car with his friends, Geekier and Geekiest. Harvard Prof tells him he has to dazzle, and as Ben has no dough for med school (and nor, apparently, does any form of financial aid appear to exist to allow gifted geeks like our hero to attend Harvard regardless of their financial situation - most odd), dazzling is the only solution.
But Ben has fun! He, G-er and G-est go out for beers on his 21st birthday with his Mom and they watch the frat boys socialise with real live girls. Mom tells Benji he's working too hard what with school and the self-driving car and his job at a tailor's shop in Cambridge. Ben's like, "you're right, Mom, but I gotta dazzle." Then, in the library one day, some arrogant, preppy bastard approaches him and commands that Ben follow him. Because he is all beta and geeky, he agrees. Sure enough Prepster leads him to a dark room where Prof Spacey is dealing some cards with Jill, the object of Ben's affections (and the "prettiest girl at MIT" - nice neg, Ben!), and some other kids. They want him to join their card-counting team and fly out to Vegas with them each weekend to make more money than he'd ever dreamed of (Hahvahd Med School! Oooh! And Hot Babe alert...overload....overload...aborting!). It's easy to count cards, they tell him, and he's clearly borderline autistic and so will be great at it. He considers but then says no.
Then, Hot Babe 9.467 shows up at the tailor's and tries to twist Ben's arm. She strokes his ego and tries to tempt him with her tales of the fun they all have and also by putting a tie on him; he's not convinced, although we know he will join in the end. HB9.467 is played by Kate Bosworth, who annoys me. Her voice was surprisingly deep in the film; I always assume that she sounds like a bimbo because I saw her on Jonathan Ross a couple of years back and she was a frickin' idiot and couldn't even answer the simplest of questions. Her IMDb bio suggests she's pretty smart but she's more famous for her heterochromia and her on-off relationship with Legolas. The heterochromia must cause problems when you're trying to dress up as different people in different casinos but no one seems to pick up on this.
So, welcome to the team, Ben, and off they fly to Vegas! It's a bit overwhelming at first. The students play as a team with the girls (whom Prof Spacey doesn't trust to be the Big Players) and an Asian guy sitting at tables, quietly counting and placing small bets, while Prepster and Ben are the Big Players, who pick up the agreed body language cues from the others to determine how well a particular table is doing. They also have a special code where certain words represent the numbers from one to whatever so that the non-big-players can indicate the Count to the Big Players (e.g. sweet = 16; "Oh, gosh, this drink's too sweet!").
So, they do well. They do great! Ben's a star and Prepster doesn't like it; he used to be the shit but now Ben's stealing his thunder and making him look bad. Also, Ben's still having problems kiss-closing HB9.467, although they're bonding well, but otherwise, things are good and when he returns to the dorm, he hides a big wodge of cash behind a loose panel in his ceiling. Also, Mom tries to give him a cheque for $68k but Ben feels guilty because he made $20k that weekend so lies and tells her he won The Only Scholarship/Financial Aid at HMS.
It's all a bit boring back at MIT and he can't be bothered with the self-driving car much, any more, though he and G-er and G-est go out to a bar that probably should have been the Miracle of Science. They start rating girls out of ten, to three decimal places and discuss whether or not they previously agreed to round up. Then in walks HB9.467 and she's surrounded by jocks; Ben surprises G-er and G-est by going right over to her and buying her a drink, clearing away the jocks. They bond over fathers on the T but then - oh noes! - Ben moves in for the kiss-close and gets burned big-time
Nor is Ben's new lifestyle all it's cracked up to be, of course, and the money soon starts to have an effect on Ben's wants, needs, actions and desires. Big money corrupts. Obviously, Prof Spacey isn't exactly the perfect, fatherly mentor, either, as Ben soon learns. Worse, Morpheus and his "loss prevention" colleagues, desperately trying to prove to casino bosses that they can't be replaced by computers that can scan biometric information, are closing in on the MIT men (and women). Ben is oblivious, though! He loves the disguises, the thrills, the gals...it's a fun life, if you can get it, but does HB9.467 really want the slick, confident, winner he has become or does she really want the self-conscious but incredibly clever geek who was actually pretty interesting and funny and sweet and whom she fell for? And has Ben lost his sense of what is important and what shouldn't be prioritised?
Well, 21 isn't the greatest film I've seen all year but it was pretty entertaining, nonetheless - it always catches me unawares when I go to the cinema and actually laugh; not out loud, in this case, but there were some good lines. The acting was OK and the script was decent enough. Visually, it was as glitzy and impressive as most other movies set in and around casinos, the snow in Hahvahd Yahd starkly contrasting with the happy punters frolicking in one of the hotel pools in Vegas. The soundtrack was quite good too, with You Can't Always Get What You Want playing out over the credits (although in the case of this film, it was more a case of "you can't always get what you want but only because you've lost sight of what you really want somewhere along the way").
I have found the whole co-evolving arms race between the card counters and the casino owners quite interesting since I saw a documentary on the MIT card counters on Horizon a few years ago, and of course, there's a lot more out there on the subject. Whether 21 did a good enough job of putting off poor students from trying the card-counting scheme is another matter - the casinos were more than happy to let the producers shoot the movie in their casinos (no such thing as bad publicity) and it was good to see the Hard Rock again, after its last appearance in The O.C.
Who wouldn't be tempted by all that money and all that glamour? HB9.467 liked the fact that in Vegas, you could be whoever you wanted to be (rather like Ryan in The O.C.) - the buzz must have been her motivation given that the clothes she wore back in Cambridge were really quite hideous compared to her Vegas attire, but that was probably just to emphasise the massive excitement and mystique of the double life. Of course, she's still pretty - not to mention more real - when she plays her MIT alter-ego. One other mystery was that the competition for which Ben, G-er and G-est were creating their self-driving car was called something like a "2 09" event. The only immediate things thrown up by Google was 2:09 Events, which can't be right, and a robot from Robocop, the ED-209, which is possible if too tenuous; perhaps this is just another maths joke I'm missing. Shame.
So, what tempted me over to the multiplex? Well, 21, actually, which tells the "inspired by a true story - kind of, with a stretch of the imagination" of a bunch of MIT students, led by rogue maths professor, Kevin Spacey, who hit Vegas with their awesome Rain Man skills to become card counters who win big but have big oh-noes when bitter, soon-to-be-replaced-by-a-biometric-computer casino "loss preventer," Morpheus (I mean, Cole Williams) starts getting suspicious.
This is explains the ubiquity of recent blog posts explaining how the Monty Hall problem works; I first read about it on Predictably Irrational, where you can play along but the Tierney Lab blog on the NY Times blogs has covered it more extensively.
21 doesn't really have anything to do with this problem, other than the fact that it - like card-counting - is a way that maths can be fun and can be useful in the real world! Kevin Spacey is Micky Rosa, who is a most unrealistic maths professor given that a) he's pretty outgoing and funny, b) he relates the topics he is teaching to the real world and c) he talks about a quiz show in class. Spotting that Ben Campbell is one smart student, he gets Ben to play along in an imaginary round of the Monty Hall problem (three doors, one with a car behind, the other two with goats, the host knows where the car is. Contestant picks a door. Host opens one of the others to reveal a goat and then offers contestant the chance to switch - should she?), and of course Ben succeeds and explains why in suitably geschliegen language. Oh, and Ben also got 97% in his senior year "variable change" course at MIT, just in case you think Prof Spacey is just going on Ben's ability to do well in a quiz show!
If Micky Rosa isn't a very convincing maths professor, then Jim Sturgess doesn't portray a very convincing geek in Ben Campbell. He's too attractive, for a start (in a way reminiscent of Green Eyes, and his voice sounds the same as GE's too, although Sturgess is English so the accent must have been faked). He's also way too confident for someone who isn't supposed to be terribly self-confident - the actor appears far more comfortable later on when Ben comes out of his shell. When we meet Ben, he's chatting with some Harvard prof about his application to Harvard Med School and also for this really prestigious scholarship worth $300,000, for which 76 people apply for one place. Ben's very clever, we learn, but also very geeky and his only extra-curric involves building a self-driving car with his friends, Geekier and Geekiest. Harvard Prof tells him he has to dazzle, and as Ben has no dough for med school (and nor, apparently, does any form of financial aid appear to exist to allow gifted geeks like our hero to attend Harvard regardless of their financial situation - most odd), dazzling is the only solution.
But Ben has fun! He, G-er and G-est go out for beers on his 21st birthday with his Mom and they watch the frat boys socialise with real live girls. Mom tells Benji he's working too hard what with school and the self-driving car and his job at a tailor's shop in Cambridge. Ben's like, "you're right, Mom, but I gotta dazzle." Then, in the library one day, some arrogant, preppy bastard approaches him and commands that Ben follow him. Because he is all beta and geeky, he agrees. Sure enough Prepster leads him to a dark room where Prof Spacey is dealing some cards with Jill, the object of Ben's affections (and the "prettiest girl at MIT" - nice neg, Ben!), and some other kids. They want him to join their card-counting team and fly out to Vegas with them each weekend to make more money than he'd ever dreamed of (Hahvahd Med School! Oooh! And Hot Babe alert...overload....overload...aborting!). It's easy to count cards, they tell him, and he's clearly borderline autistic and so will be great at it. He considers but then says no.
Then, Hot Babe 9.467 shows up at the tailor's and tries to twist Ben's arm. She strokes his ego and tries to tempt him with her tales of the fun they all have and also by putting a tie on him; he's not convinced, although we know he will join in the end. HB9.467 is played by Kate Bosworth, who annoys me. Her voice was surprisingly deep in the film; I always assume that she sounds like a bimbo because I saw her on Jonathan Ross a couple of years back and she was a frickin' idiot and couldn't even answer the simplest of questions. Her IMDb bio suggests she's pretty smart but she's more famous for her heterochromia and her on-off relationship with Legolas. The heterochromia must cause problems when you're trying to dress up as different people in different casinos but no one seems to pick up on this.
So, welcome to the team, Ben, and off they fly to Vegas! It's a bit overwhelming at first. The students play as a team with the girls (whom Prof Spacey doesn't trust to be the Big Players) and an Asian guy sitting at tables, quietly counting and placing small bets, while Prepster and Ben are the Big Players, who pick up the agreed body language cues from the others to determine how well a particular table is doing. They also have a special code where certain words represent the numbers from one to whatever so that the non-big-players can indicate the Count to the Big Players (e.g. sweet = 16; "Oh, gosh, this drink's too sweet!").
So, they do well. They do great! Ben's a star and Prepster doesn't like it; he used to be the shit but now Ben's stealing his thunder and making him look bad. Also, Ben's still having problems kiss-closing HB9.467, although they're bonding well, but otherwise, things are good and when he returns to the dorm, he hides a big wodge of cash behind a loose panel in his ceiling. Also, Mom tries to give him a cheque for $68k but Ben feels guilty because he made $20k that weekend so lies and tells her he won The Only Scholarship/Financial Aid at HMS.
It's all a bit boring back at MIT and he can't be bothered with the self-driving car much, any more, though he and G-er and G-est go out to a bar that probably should have been the Miracle of Science. They start rating girls out of ten, to three decimal places and discuss whether or not they previously agreed to round up. Then in walks HB9.467 and she's surrounded by jocks; Ben surprises G-er and G-est by going right over to her and buying her a drink, clearing away the jocks. They bond over fathers on the T but then - oh noes! - Ben moves in for the kiss-close and gets burned big-time
Nor is Ben's new lifestyle all it's cracked up to be, of course, and the money soon starts to have an effect on Ben's wants, needs, actions and desires. Big money corrupts. Obviously, Prof Spacey isn't exactly the perfect, fatherly mentor, either, as Ben soon learns. Worse, Morpheus and his "loss prevention" colleagues, desperately trying to prove to casino bosses that they can't be replaced by computers that can scan biometric information, are closing in on the MIT men (and women). Ben is oblivious, though! He loves the disguises, the thrills, the gals...it's a fun life, if you can get it, but does HB9.467 really want the slick, confident, winner he has become or does she really want the self-conscious but incredibly clever geek who was actually pretty interesting and funny and sweet and whom she fell for? And has Ben lost his sense of what is important and what shouldn't be prioritised?
Well, 21 isn't the greatest film I've seen all year but it was pretty entertaining, nonetheless - it always catches me unawares when I go to the cinema and actually laugh; not out loud, in this case, but there were some good lines. The acting was OK and the script was decent enough. Visually, it was as glitzy and impressive as most other movies set in and around casinos, the snow in Hahvahd Yahd starkly contrasting with the happy punters frolicking in one of the hotel pools in Vegas. The soundtrack was quite good too, with You Can't Always Get What You Want playing out over the credits (although in the case of this film, it was more a case of "you can't always get what you want but only because you've lost sight of what you really want somewhere along the way").
I have found the whole co-evolving arms race between the card counters and the casino owners quite interesting since I saw a documentary on the MIT card counters on Horizon a few years ago, and of course, there's a lot more out there on the subject. Whether 21 did a good enough job of putting off poor students from trying the card-counting scheme is another matter - the casinos were more than happy to let the producers shoot the movie in their casinos (no such thing as bad publicity) and it was good to see the Hard Rock again, after its last appearance in The O.C.
Who wouldn't be tempted by all that money and all that glamour? HB9.467 liked the fact that in Vegas, you could be whoever you wanted to be (rather like Ryan in The O.C.) - the buzz must have been her motivation given that the clothes she wore back in Cambridge were really quite hideous compared to her Vegas attire, but that was probably just to emphasise the massive excitement and mystique of the double life. Of course, she's still pretty - not to mention more real - when she plays her MIT alter-ego. One other mystery was that the competition for which Ben, G-er and G-est were creating their self-driving car was called something like a "2 09" event. The only immediate things thrown up by Google was 2:09 Events, which can't be right, and a robot from Robocop, the ED-209, which is possible if too tenuous; perhaps this is just another maths joke I'm missing. Shame.
05 April 2008
How to Be Uncomfortable
After almost a whole week of pretensions of spring, the crap weather was back with a vengeance today. My suede boots did valiantly but they are five years old and not very well tended so by the time I made it through the pouring, sleety rain to the cinema, my feet were both soaking and freezing. For reasons known only to the management, the Arts cinema, while a pretty decent establishment in many respects, insists on rubbing in the fact that they have a very efficient air conditioning system. In England. In winter (OK, spring; same difference). The weather was wet enough that I abandoned style in favour of some semblance of waterproofing and wore my cagoule with a hoodie underneath, although I forgot to put a scarf on before leaving the house. As such, I was frozen sitting in my seat this afternoon - even my gloves didn't help as they were rather damp too.
Ordinarily, this wouldn't have been so bad but I went to see The Orphanage, in which former orphan Laura returns to reopen the orphanage she inhabited as a kid, as an orphanage for disabled children, only for things to go awry. It's a horror film (although it is more psychologically than visually horrifying) with lots of things that go bump in the night and the fact that I was already bracing my body against the chill only made me all the jumpier. I've never had a problem with graphic horror scenes and I'd never walk out of a film that was psychologically harrowing but I am - and have always been - very jumpy, which I blame on my brother, who used to hide in dark corners in our house and jump out at me. Still, I was impressed at my self control (especially compared to the girl sitting next to me, who kept shrieking) until my CrackBerry, which was in the pouch of my hoodie, started vibrating at a particularly tense moment and I did let out a bit of a gasp.
I've always been rather masochistic when it comes to jump-worthy films, though, as I know that they make me really tense and agitated and yet I still insist on watching them. Take Final Destination, which I saw the night before flying to the States (always reassuring to watch a film the night before flying in whch a boy dreams the night before flying that his plane blows up, only to realise the following day that the plane really is going to blow up). Or its sequel, Final Destination 2, which I watched in a tiny, almost deserted cinema in Paris on a lone-wolf trip to the city. These films involve characters who "cheat" death only to find that there is no cheating death, and they slowly get bumped off by the most innocuous of household objects. Having watched the film, I then walked back to my hotel, all alone and absolutely convinced that the random chandelier-like light in my (otherwise rather modest) hotel room was going to fall off and land on my head in the night or that I would get electrocuted by my alarm clock. It gets worse when I rewatch these films and know how the characters are going to die and that somehow makes me even jumpier.
Anyway, its effect on my nerves aside, I liked The Orphanage, not least because it gave my Spanish a good workout, although I wouldn't have coped without the subtitles. The basic premise is that soon after Laura and her fair-weather husband Carlos and their adopted, HIV-positive son move into the orphanage, spooooooky things start happening and then - oh noes! - the son disappears, and we get into real unreliable narrator territory (always a favourite plot device of mine) as Laura becomes increasingly unstable and batty, so much so that FWH Carlos is so scared of the house that he wants to leave. Laura says that he can leave but she ain't going nowhere (for two days, anyway). So he leaves! He leaves the house that was creeping him out so much he couldn't bear to stay another day... As I said, fair-weather husband, because for the rest of the movie, he's actually a pretty nice guy - a good husband and a loving father.
It is a horror film but it's also quite a touching, emotional and well-told tale and the depth of the love that Laura and Carlos feel for their son is quite powerful. The relationship between the three of them (particularly between Laura and Carlos, and between Laura and her son) is really at the centre of the movie, with the ghost story parts of it being a convenient way of advancing the plot. It is reminiscent of The Others, of course, which I really disliked (although if my memory serves me well, I was multitasking when I watched the film so I may not have got it and instead relied on the fact that I didn't like Nicole Kidman's character).
The Orphanage also scored points from me for not wandering into silly territory, as in the case of The Descent, which was shaping up to be a really good psychological thriller of some gals who go on a caving trip, only for disaster to strike (this is what happens when women go off without male supervision!). Also, one of the characters was sleeping with the husband of the protagonist before husband and kid were killed in a vicious car crash a week earlier, so there were some great examples of cattiness being overcome by a need to pull together in the face of adversity. Fine. Then along comes some particularly vicious (and man-eating) Gollum-like creature that happens to have been inhabiting the very same cave system in which the women are trapped. The way The Orphanage ends is also very similar to the ending of The Descent, although the films don't have much more in common.
Finally, does it always have to be the woman who's the wacky, irrational, "the ghosties did it" type character while serious, rational doctor (AKA FWH Carlos) almost has a fit when Laura suggests they get in a medium and then again when Laura starts to believe the show that the medium and her cronies put on? I'm sure there are examples of films in which it's the daddy who goes slightly loopy (although believes there is some conspiracy/supernatural presence at play) because of the disappearance/illness/death of his son, while the calm, rational mommy (and the docs) become increasingly concerned that daddy is losing the plot - I just can't think of any. Is this just due to the maternal bond, which is, stereotypically, stronger and so has more effect on the mental state of the mother? Certainly, there are plenty of example of films where the male character believes there is a conspiracy and his wife doesn't believe him - until it's (almost) too late; that ever-present, unreliable narrator...
Ordinarily, this wouldn't have been so bad but I went to see The Orphanage, in which former orphan Laura returns to reopen the orphanage she inhabited as a kid, as an orphanage for disabled children, only for things to go awry. It's a horror film (although it is more psychologically than visually horrifying) with lots of things that go bump in the night and the fact that I was already bracing my body against the chill only made me all the jumpier. I've never had a problem with graphic horror scenes and I'd never walk out of a film that was psychologically harrowing but I am - and have always been - very jumpy, which I blame on my brother, who used to hide in dark corners in our house and jump out at me. Still, I was impressed at my self control (especially compared to the girl sitting next to me, who kept shrieking) until my CrackBerry, which was in the pouch of my hoodie, started vibrating at a particularly tense moment and I did let out a bit of a gasp.
I've always been rather masochistic when it comes to jump-worthy films, though, as I know that they make me really tense and agitated and yet I still insist on watching them. Take Final Destination, which I saw the night before flying to the States (always reassuring to watch a film the night before flying in whch a boy dreams the night before flying that his plane blows up, only to realise the following day that the plane really is going to blow up). Or its sequel, Final Destination 2, which I watched in a tiny, almost deserted cinema in Paris on a lone-wolf trip to the city. These films involve characters who "cheat" death only to find that there is no cheating death, and they slowly get bumped off by the most innocuous of household objects. Having watched the film, I then walked back to my hotel, all alone and absolutely convinced that the random chandelier-like light in my (otherwise rather modest) hotel room was going to fall off and land on my head in the night or that I would get electrocuted by my alarm clock. It gets worse when I rewatch these films and know how the characters are going to die and that somehow makes me even jumpier.
Anyway, its effect on my nerves aside, I liked The Orphanage, not least because it gave my Spanish a good workout, although I wouldn't have coped without the subtitles. The basic premise is that soon after Laura and her fair-weather husband Carlos and their adopted, HIV-positive son move into the orphanage, spooooooky things start happening and then - oh noes! - the son disappears, and we get into real unreliable narrator territory (always a favourite plot device of mine) as Laura becomes increasingly unstable and batty, so much so that FWH Carlos is so scared of the house that he wants to leave. Laura says that he can leave but she ain't going nowhere (for two days, anyway). So he leaves! He leaves the house that was creeping him out so much he couldn't bear to stay another day... As I said, fair-weather husband, because for the rest of the movie, he's actually a pretty nice guy - a good husband and a loving father.
It is a horror film but it's also quite a touching, emotional and well-told tale and the depth of the love that Laura and Carlos feel for their son is quite powerful. The relationship between the three of them (particularly between Laura and Carlos, and between Laura and her son) is really at the centre of the movie, with the ghost story parts of it being a convenient way of advancing the plot. It is reminiscent of The Others, of course, which I really disliked (although if my memory serves me well, I was multitasking when I watched the film so I may not have got it and instead relied on the fact that I didn't like Nicole Kidman's character).
The Orphanage also scored points from me for not wandering into silly territory, as in the case of The Descent, which was shaping up to be a really good psychological thriller of some gals who go on a caving trip, only for disaster to strike (this is what happens when women go off without male supervision!). Also, one of the characters was sleeping with the husband of the protagonist before husband and kid were killed in a vicious car crash a week earlier, so there were some great examples of cattiness being overcome by a need to pull together in the face of adversity. Fine. Then along comes some particularly vicious (and man-eating) Gollum-like creature that happens to have been inhabiting the very same cave system in which the women are trapped. The way The Orphanage ends is also very similar to the ending of The Descent, although the films don't have much more in common.
Finally, does it always have to be the woman who's the wacky, irrational, "the ghosties did it" type character while serious, rational doctor (AKA FWH Carlos) almost has a fit when Laura suggests they get in a medium and then again when Laura starts to believe the show that the medium and her cronies put on? I'm sure there are examples of films in which it's the daddy who goes slightly loopy (although believes there is some conspiracy/supernatural presence at play) because of the disappearance/illness/death of his son, while the calm, rational mommy (and the docs) become increasingly concerned that daddy is losing the plot - I just can't think of any. Is this just due to the maternal bond, which is, stereotypically, stronger and so has more effect on the mental state of the mother? Certainly, there are plenty of example of films where the male character believes there is a conspiracy and his wife doesn't believe him - until it's (almost) too late; that ever-present, unreliable narrator...
03 April 2008
The Cruellest Month...
...although at least at the end of it, I will be rewarded with a trip to NYC and yes, I am counting down the days now, as I am skipping the country one month today. It's so lame that I am already scouring Gridskipper for possible new bars, restaurants, museums and other hangouts, even though I know I'll end up revisiting old favourites. Take this week's new and noted for NYC, from Gridskipper:
New York
• Ago: Tuscan-inspired restaurant — which also has locations in Vegas, Palm Beach and L.A. — has opened in Tribeca's Greenwich Hotel.
• Artichoke: A new East Village pizza joint, which opened last week, is already drawing comparisons to Brooklyn's legendary Di Fara.
• Dunderdon: Swedish label for utilitarian fashions opens a flagship store in Soho.
• Greenwich Grill: New Tribeca restaurant serves Mediterranean cuisine with Japanese influences.
• Greenwich Hotel: Robert DeNiro's long-awaited Tribeca hotel — 88 unique rooms, including 13 suites and a 2,500 square foot penthouse — opened yesterday.
• Joe: Popular West Village coffee shop opens a new branch in Chelsea.
I'm quite tempted by the pizza place but most excited to hear that a new branch of Joe (the best coffee in Manhattan - possibly even in the States, not that that's saying very much) has opened in Chelsea, which isn't exactly my main hangout but as I usually stay in Midtown and shop downtown, Chelsea is a convenient stop-off point for a cup of joe. Better still, the Joe website notes that they are planning to open a branch in Grand Central soon, which will be great - just a few blocks from the area I usually stay.
Aside from that, there are plenty of new shops for me to check out, and I'm hoping to see a little more of Brooklyn this time, as long as our resident tour guide, the brother's California Girl friend (who works in an office above the junction of Houston and Broadway - I am pretty damn jealous of this!), is in town. Before long, I may have to get a new Moleskine - I wouldn't start from scratch but would only transfer those establishments most worthy of repeat visits. Then again, I still have a couple of sections of my City Guide that I haven't labelled yet, so maybe I'll have to have Bars Too or Coffee, Etc. II.
Either way, I'm already very excited and hoping that the nightmare of T5 is sorted by the time I fly. I think I'll be carrying on, if possible - the last thing I want is for Bloody Awful to send my suitcase to Sri Lanka or somewhere; then I'd have to go and buy lots of clothes to replace those that had been lost... Oh, wait...
New York
• Ago: Tuscan-inspired restaurant — which also has locations in Vegas, Palm Beach and L.A. — has opened in Tribeca's Greenwich Hotel.
• Artichoke: A new East Village pizza joint, which opened last week, is already drawing comparisons to Brooklyn's legendary Di Fara.
• Dunderdon: Swedish label for utilitarian fashions opens a flagship store in Soho.
• Greenwich Grill: New Tribeca restaurant serves Mediterranean cuisine with Japanese influences.
• Greenwich Hotel: Robert DeNiro's long-awaited Tribeca hotel — 88 unique rooms, including 13 suites and a 2,500 square foot penthouse — opened yesterday.
• Joe: Popular West Village coffee shop opens a new branch in Chelsea.
I'm quite tempted by the pizza place but most excited to hear that a new branch of Joe (the best coffee in Manhattan - possibly even in the States, not that that's saying very much) has opened in Chelsea, which isn't exactly my main hangout but as I usually stay in Midtown and shop downtown, Chelsea is a convenient stop-off point for a cup of joe. Better still, the Joe website notes that they are planning to open a branch in Grand Central soon, which will be great - just a few blocks from the area I usually stay.
Aside from that, there are plenty of new shops for me to check out, and I'm hoping to see a little more of Brooklyn this time, as long as our resident tour guide, the brother's California Girl friend (who works in an office above the junction of Houston and Broadway - I am pretty damn jealous of this!), is in town. Before long, I may have to get a new Moleskine - I wouldn't start from scratch but would only transfer those establishments most worthy of repeat visits. Then again, I still have a couple of sections of my City Guide that I haven't labelled yet, so maybe I'll have to have Bars Too or Coffee, Etc. II.
Either way, I'm already very excited and hoping that the nightmare of T5 is sorted by the time I fly. I think I'll be carrying on, if possible - the last thing I want is for Bloody Awful to send my suitcase to Sri Lanka or somewhere; then I'd have to go and buy lots of clothes to replace those that had been lost... Oh, wait...