Day: December 31, 2005

The movie Adaptation is just meta-meta-meta, and nuts. Sometimes in the best way, but damn. I don’t comprehend where these visions come from, and how the screenwriters and director communicate well enough to create these internal mindscapes as a visual story that hangs together.

I’ve never read The Orchid Thief, the book which is at the heart of the movie (ostensibly). But a movie about screenwriting a movie, adapted from a book? This takes the Hollywood insider nods of Bowfinger to a highbrow, neurotic extreme… and it mostly works!

The cast is high-powered and hard-core: Nicholas Cage, Chris Cooper, Meryl Streep. Cage plays both twin screenwriting brothers, and this is far, far from his role in, say, The Rock. I did get caught up in wondering how they shot the many scenes where both brothers are on-screen at the same time. Also, the nods and direct inclusion of the movie Being John Malkovich (same screenwriters & director) are amusing.

Metacritic score of 83.

Don’t watch this movie for an escape, though — you have to pay too close attention.

(Warning: LazyWeb request)

Solved! See comments. Thank you, Ben.

The format of my post links has changed from

http://www.pencoyd.com/clock/2003/12/12.html#a293

to

http://www.pencoyd.com/clock/2003/12/12/TITLE/

I need to use a regular expression redirect to change my 2.5 years of previous posts to something not broken (and I need a better 404 page, but that’s easier and separate), so I need to change

.html#wildcard

to

/

in the .htaccess file.

That won’t get down to the individual post when I’ve had multiple posts in a day, but it won’t be totally off and broken, as it is now.

I hope to use Webmin (my ISP’s web-based config application) to make the change to the .htaccess file, rather than editing it manually, but I need the right format for the grep.

If this is second nature to any of my readers, I’d welcome a tip.

With this much free time, and the end-of-year flood of Academy Award-wanna-bes, we’ve seen a flood of movies. Thursday night, we caught Good Night, And Good Luck. Instead of the Manchurian Candidate version of McCarthy, we get to see the real McCoy… er, McCarthy, as the CBS News team led by Ed Murrow use the “junior Senator from Wisconsin’s” own words to take him on. Of course, Murrow and team are actors playing roles, which is harder to remember (at times) because of the black-and-white authenticity.

While several reviews and comments highlight the parallels with the current debate over civil liberties vs. national defense concerns, I found the on-screen debate about what the role of journalists should be more relevant. The Murrow and Fred Friendly character debate with their boss about whether it’s OK to take sides, and Murrow (held up as the shining light for fair play in journalism) argues that nothing is objective.

The anachronisms? Smoking. Lots of smoking. Even when on camera! Also, a husband and wife hid their marriage (unsuccessfully) from their colleagues to comply with corporate policy. Those taboos still exist, but are more deftly and honestly handled now, in most circumstances.

David Strathairn, as Murrow, is fantastic, in a very good film. I agree with the Metacritic score of 80.

One preview grabbed attention: Why We Fight, about the continuing place of the military-industrial complex. Instead of McCarthy speeches, we get Eisenhower’s famous warning as the historical hook for an investigation of the current day situation. Opens in late January. On the list.