MISCELLANEOUS

"Perhaps real wisdom lies in not seeking answers at all. Any answer we find will not be true for long. An answer is a place where we can fall asleep as life moves past us to its next question. After all these years, I have begun to wonder if the secret of living well is not in having all the answers, but in pursuing unanswerable questions in good company." Rachel Naomi Remen

Seven Habits of Highly Successful People
1. Skiing
2. Yachting
3. Snorkeling
4. Golf
5. Polo
6. Dinner parties
7. Shopping

MOVIES

The Squid and the Whale: Divorce and its effect on children is a topic movies have worked to death. Writer- director Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming, Mr. Jealousy) discovers it fresh and with fierce insight and feeling in a movie where even the laughs cut to the bone. Baumbach sets the film in Brooklyn's Park Slope, where he lived in the 1980s during and after the breakup of his own parents, former film critic Georgia Brown and novelist Jonathan Baumbach. In the film, Jeff Daniels plays Bernard, the academic dad in career crisis, with the vividly scrappy Laura Linney as Joan, the wife whose writing is just beginning to be recognized. Jesse Eisenberg, so good in Roger Dodger, amazes again as sixteen-year-old Walt, Baumbach's surrogate. And Owen Kline -- son of actors Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates -- is a marvel as Frank, a twelve-year-old for whom jerking off has become a vocation. The boys react in different ways to their overachieving parents, especially when Mom screws the tennis pro (William Baldwin), and Dad's student (Anna Paquin) moves in with him. At school, Walt passes off Pink Floyd's "Hey You" as his own, and Frank finds ever-more-intriguing places to dispose of his jism. All the performances are flawless, but Daniels' portrait of a man trying helplessly to break out of the cocoon of his own self-regard is a finely tuned tour de force and his shining hour onscreen. Without jerking tears or reducing the acid content of his wit, Baumbach's humane movie gets under your skin.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: Jim Carrey’s hangdog charm was never put to better use than in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Although director Michel Gondry and writer/meta-fabulist Charlie Kaufman don’t give him much to do except pine soulfully for his daffy girlfriend Clementine (Kate Winslet, also working miracles with a character who’s Cute and Quirky and nothing more), they come the closest to evoking the hazy shade of winter caused by the intersect of dreams, longing, and terror than any filmaker since Luis Bunuel did with Belle De Jour and, better, the exquisite prankster of The Discreet Charm of The Bourgeoisie. Director Michel Gondry grounds this exquisite nonsense in a cast of pranksters that understands how to unearth the surreal in the quotidian: Mark Ruffalo’s uber-nerd, Tom Wilkinson’s exasperated pathos, and Kirsten Dunst’s stoner shenanigans. Best of all, the otherworldliness of Kaufman/Gondry’s conceit is best exemplified by Elijah Wood’s eyes, whose opaque blue nothingness suggest desires he’s not willing to articulate—until the film’s devastating denouement.

In the Mood for Love: A husband suspects his wife of having an affair. The woman living next door to him suspects her husband of the same. Observing that their spouses are away on “business” during precisely the same periods of time, the cuckolded husband and his neighbor meet to discuss the apparent situation, role-play as the adulterous pair and, in the process, fall in love with each other. This, in a nut-shell, is the plot of In the Mood for Love, but it doesn’t so much as hint at why Wong Kar-wai’s film is one of the new millennium’s finest. It’s Wong’s meticulous attention to detail—from hypnotic slow-motion rhyming shots set to Nat King Cole to the cut and fabric of a dress and the print of wallpaper—that elevates potentially turgid melodramatic material to the heart-wrenching level of tragedy.

You Can Count On Me: The brother-sister relationship has never fared all that well in movies. Put loosely, the brother, commonly reduced to a kind of Sonny Corleone guardian figure, seldom gets to know the sister outside of his knuckleheaded attempts to police her sexuality, while the sister (see Punch-Drunk Love) generally comes off as either weak or as a meddlesome harpy. You Can Count on Me made up for that in 2000, offering an unfailingly sensitive, funny, and deft portrayal of two siblings, Sammy (Laura Linney) and Terry (Mark Ruffalo), who are orphaned as children and left to grope their way through adulthood without the benefit of an exemplar. The cast (including a superbly melancholic Rory Culkin) is extraordinary, and the writing and direction by playwright Kenneth Lonergan dodges cliché with consummate skill.

In the Bedroom: Given the film’s subject matter (a middle-aged couple losing their son to an act of violence), I find it miraculous that director Todd Field never resorts to sappy melodramatic techniques. Field approaches the grief in understated natural tones, providing an air of authenticity to the brilliant performances. In the Bedroom never falls victim to the more hackneyed indie clichés: no character sinks to heavy-handed monologues and the director rarely forces lofty poetic language into common situations. The misery emerges subtly, replacing garish theatrics with a far more honest realism. Much of the film remains impartial in its observations, and instead of forcing out an awkward conclusion; the end strikes a peculiarly ambiguous note. Has justice been served? Or are our protagonists no better than the anonymous evil they sought to eradicate from their lives?

Wallace and Gromit: Were-Rabbit -- If Jessica Alba can have a successful movie career, why can’t plasticine? Both are delicately molded, pliably expressive, and, after a while, surprisingly warm to the touch. Ms. Alba, however, may lack the emotional range, the fire in the belly, that would enable her to master the role of Wallace. For the uninitiated, Wallace is a clumping, hairless, dough-hued single white male of indeterminate age. His accent, like his moral outlook on life, places him in Yorkshire, England. Onscreen, Wallace looms large, yet in reality he is a plasticine maquette, no more than a foot tall. He would pop quite snugly into the pocket of Jessica Alba’s jeans. How he would like it in there is another matter.

Wallace lives with Gromit, an intellectually gifted dog who compensates for his want of a mouth—normally a useful accoutrement—by cultivating vast reserves of long-suffering nobility. He waits on Wallace, yet he stands as the culminating figure in a fine tradition of servants who outstrip their masters. Jeeves would claim this mutt as a kindred spirit, as would Sancho Panza. Gromit’s moods are best charted through his shelf-like brow, which can droop in dismayed fatigue, pucker with anxiety, or harden into a disapproving frown. King Kong was similarly endowed.

Man and hound alike are the invention of Nick Park, the British sovereign of stop-motion animation. If my sums add up, Park is statistically the most highly prized filmmaker in the world. He has made three short films starring Wallace and Gromit, all of which were nominated for best short animated film at the Academy Awards. The first of them, “A Grand Day Out” (1989), failed to win, although the actual winner was another Nick Park project, the wondrous “Creature Comforts.” Both of his next pictures, “The Wrong Trousers” (1993) and “A Close Shave” (1995), proved victorious on the night. It is, I suppose, conceivable that the duo’s latest jape, a full-length feature entitled “Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit,” five years in the making, might not secure another Oscar, but any such failure will raise calls for a congressional inquiry.

The plot brims with Euripidean horror. Somebody, or something, is stealing and consuming garden vegetables, and it is up to Wallace and Gromit (now operating as a limited company, Anti-Pesto, for all your vermin-removal needs) to track down and neutralize the culprits. They capture a throng of delinquent rabbits, and Wallace—whose aspirations tend to exceed his grasp—tries to brainwash them, with a view to erasing their herbivorous desires. The plan backfires, and the outcome is a ravening mutant bunny the size of a polar bear. This endangers everything, not least Wallace’s burgeoning love for Lady Tottington, the local grandee, and Gromit’s even deeper love for the bomb-shaped melon that he has cultivated in the greenhouse, and upon which he likes to bestow a lonely caress.

The fact that the movie’s climax, with Gromit piloting a bulbous airplane, so closely resembles the end of “A Close Shave” is neither a coincidence nor a fault. If anything, it strengthens my conviction that what Park has done is resurrect not just the spirit but, as it were, the bodily science of early comedy. Like Chuck Jones, and, further back, like Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, Park is unafraid of the formulaic—of bops on the head, of the unattainable beloved, of gadgetry gone awry—because he sees what beauty there can be in minor, elaborate variations on a basic theme. He knows that, when we call a stunt death-defying, that means lifeenhancing; the breakneck is funny because everything in sight gets broken except the hero’s neck.

The world loves Wallace and Gromit. (In Japan, Park is on the brink of acquiring divine status.) This is not a small thing; the history of cinema is, in a sense, the epidemiology of mass appeal, and ever since Charlie Chaplin filmmakers have striven to re-create the contagion of his allure. More by instinct than by calculation, Park has followed Chaplin both in his fondness for the homely—for our staying inside with a pet and a hot drink—and in his zest for the perilous unknown. Wallace is equipped in the British style of the nineteen-fifties, with teapot, toaster, sleeveless sweater, and tie; the new film expands to show a whole town built on the same lines, complete with dependable bobby, silly vicar, and a posh house to whose chatelaine everyone defers. The setup is as feudal and contented as Wodehouse’s Blandings, and what Tony Blair must think of it heaven knows, for it represents all that his history-scorning administration has sought to wipe away, or, at any rate, to forget. Yet, at the same time, Wallace fancies himself as forward-looking, his mission being to bust crime and construct the machinery of the future; the dénouement of “A Close Shave,” though packed with bleating sheep, was also an adoring gesture toward “Terminator.” There is something for everybody here: an unholy mixture of Philip Larkin and Bruce Wayne.

Does “Curse of the Were-Rabbit” maintain the pace? It does, although that pace is so unflagging that, strangely enough, it veers closer to outright panic than its short predecessors did. Wallace and Gromit have almost no time in which merely to sit around, and that is when we envy them most. Again, the parallel is with silent films. Purists will insist that the best of Park is to be found in “The Wrong Trousers,” just as Chaplin’s “One a.m.” and Keaton’s “One Week”—note the simplicity of the titles—achieve an ideal distillation that is denied to, say, “City Lights.” Still, the new film displays all of Park’s virtues, down to the cheesy puns in which he specializes (some of them, for the first time, veined with blue), and to the cheese on which Wallace prefers to dine. Children will revere the result, and adults will permit themselves a childish pleasure in the streamlined gags—and, incidentally, in the absence of children from the screen. How consoling it is, once again, to hear Wallace’s wobbly cry, resigned to the onset of chaos, “Everything’s under control.” That is always a lie, and we always want to believe it.

Talk To Her: Our lone entry from Writer/Director Pedro Almodovar (All About My Mother, Live Flesh) is, as is common in much great art, simultaneously crushing, heartening, and beautiful. The story of two wildly different men whose lives become linked by comatose love interests sounds more like the subject of an ill-fated WB sitcom than a great film, but Talk To Her’s rich characters and unrelenting tenderness far outstrip its premise. Javier Aguirresarobe’s magnificent yet unobtrusive cinematography frames two world-class performances by male leads Javier Camara and Dario Grandinetti. Camara, as slow-witted Benigno, shines brightest; his portrayal so deft as to not only infatuate the viewer with innocent warmth but also foreshadow ruinous weaknesses. Benigno’s personality, conduct, and impact on other major characters drive Talk To Her’s narrative, and the result is immensely stirring without sacrificing an ounce of complexity. A true masterpiece.

The Royal Tenenbaums: The Royal Tenenbaums is of another world. It might as well begin with the phrase “A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...” Instead, we get a glorious eight-minute prologue that outlines the many wonders—the exceptional skills, the special interests, the well-earned fame—of the once great Tenenbaum family, a clan so utterly precious and impressive that they become instantly enchanting and entirely unreal. That’s the ingenious hook, and then, just as suddenly, to the soaring strains of “Hey Jude” our narrator ties up the sequence and kicks us in the balls: “Virtually all memory of the brilliance of the young Tenenbaums had been erased by two decades of betrayal, failure, and disaster.” As if conflicted, or manic, the movie shoots off in two sharply different directions. In finely honed Wes Anderson fashion, its quirky, stylized tone, pace, look, and sound rockets straight ahead at warp speed. Meanwhile, its story—a tender tale of family, forgiveness, lost ambition, and stubborn renewal—imbues the movie, scene by scene with ever more genuine pathos. Though no less peculiar or animated, what began as a cartoon has become a deeply felt human tale. What began on another planet, ends right here at home.







from The New Yorker:

Daniel Lippman spent the summer at his parents’ house, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, balancing light proofreading duties at the community newspaper with the more demoralizing demands of a grocery-store clerkship. Daniel is fifteen. He had just finished his freshman year at Hotchkiss. Like many boys his age, Daniel has an Internet habit his parents don’t really understand. He interviews mid-level Bush Administration bureaucrats.

Daniel is the lone regular on Ask the White House, a forum on the White House’s Web site. Once or twice a week, the site features a different Cabinet member, deputy assistant, or undersecretary—Daniel refers to them as “the policy setters.” Each one answers a dozen questions submitted by ordinary citizens. The entire conversation then spools out beside his or her federal head shot. A September 11, 2003, exchange between a German man and Andrew Card went like this: German man: “I just wanted to say: God bless America! Today on 09.11 and forever!” Card: “Yes!!!!!!!!! Thank you!”

In 2004, Daniel visited Ask the White House for the first time, soliciting from the deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget a rundown of recent cuts. That July, he asked Neil Armstrong if it was possible to send a man to Mars: “In your mind, could it work out, practically?” After his first successes, he made printouts and showed them to his parents, a psychiatrist and a garden writer. But these days, he said, when he sits down to dinner, “I’ll usually just say, ‘Oh, yeah. I asked the secretary of something-or-something something today.’ ”

After pressing Alberto Gonzales on the Patriot Act on April 12th, Daniel conversed with White House officials thirteen more times this summer. In addition to civil servants in Defense and the Small Business Administration, Daniel has chatted with the national-security adviser, Steve Hadley; the Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff; and the retired Reds shortstop Barry Larkin, the Presidential Tee Ball Commissioner. In an interview with Ambassador Rob Portman, the United States Trade Representative, Daniel asked how a proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement would protect workers’ rights. “And will cafta-dr create more U.S. jobs in the end?”

“Good trade agreements are win-win,” Portman wrote in a long and deftly non-specific response. He encouraged Daniel to get involved in public service.

Daniel has honed his approach carefully. “You can’t just ask a question that’s overtly political, but you don’t want to ask a softball question,” he said. His signature lead-in is “I am a 15 year old very interested in politics and the like.” He has also perfected a strategy that could be described as the Lippman Reverse: teasing a bias in his setup, then blow-darting the bureaucrat from the opposite direction. “Hi Mr. Secretary,” he wrote to Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. “My great-grandfather invented an oil drill bit back in the early 1900s and was a pioneer in the oil fields of Spindletop, TX and a co-founder of Texaco.” (This is true.) “My question is what is the Energy Dept. doing to ward off climate change?”

With school starting, Daniel may have less time for Ask the White House, though he’d love to have a crack at President Bush, to revisit the question of weapons of mass destruction. “If I was going to get a truly truthful answer from the President, I’d ask him if that’s what our intelligence said, or if he manipulated or cherry-picked it,” he said. He’d also like to have this Katrina business clarified.

POLICE

Who's that guy in the police lineup?

In 1988, Barry Gibbs was convicted of murdering a prostitute. Just two weeks ago, that conviction was thrown out when the eyewitness who fingered Gibbs said the police lineup was rigged. Where do officers find people for a lineup?

In jail. The investigating detective typically plucks lineup fodder—known as "fillers," "dummies," or "known innocents"—from the in-house lockup. Most states require at least four fillers to be in a lineup. To have a positive identification stand up in court, the suspect can't be the only person in the lineup who matches any distinctive characteristics that the witness remembers. If an eyewitness recalls that the culprit had John Kerry-style hair, then a detective has to find fillers with Kerry coifs, not just four older white guys.

Sometimes cops can't find all the fillers they need in jail—there's a limited supply of inmates, and some are either too dangerous to deal with or just don't want to cooperate. In such instances, a detective might look for stand-ins in the county or central city jail; he also might pull in other cops, office workers, or sometimes even people on the street. For example, if Manhattan cops find someone on the street with the right look, they will pay him or her $10 to participate in a lineup.

There are two types of police lineups: investigatory and confirmatory. For an investigatory lineup, in which the detective susses out whether he's got the right man, the stand-ins usually get rounded up in about an hour—it's difficult to hold a suspect who hasn't been arrested for much longer. Police might take more care and more time to assemble a confirmatory lineup, in which a witness is called in to verify the identity of someone who's already been arrested.

Even the most thorough detective often has to settle for fillers who share only the suspect's broadest characteristics, like race and height. Perhaps that's why it's common to find that convictions overturned based on new evidence (such as DNA) rested on live lineup identifications.

Some criminal-justice experts and the U.S. Department of Justice now recommend using digital photo spreads. For one, it's easier to find fillers with specific features by using thousands of booking photographs. Most American police departments choose six photos and arrange them in two rows of three—what's called the "six pack." Canadian police typically use 12 photos in each virtual lineup.

But some jurisdictions, like New York City, still require that a live lineup be used for an eyewitness identification to be admissible in court. A few police departments have tried to improve their lineup methodology by hiring outside consultants to pull fillers rather than detectives, who are often overworked and poorly trained in lineup design.