Haunting the Web Since 1999
Update: “There’s a time dilation effect where time scales in the inside world about 50 times faster than it does in our world. So even though it’s been 20 years since Kevin disappeared, that’s been almost 1000 years in the computer.” Director Joseph Kosinski walks us through the teaser, shot-by-shot.
“Within 40 small craters, one to nine miles wide, they estimated 600 million metric tons of water. Perhaps most notably, ‘It has to be relatively pure,’ said Paul Spudis, the principal investigator for the instrument that made the discovery.“
By way of a friend, scientists find more evidence of lots of water on the moon. “That is significant, because the ice in these craters could be easily tapped by future lunar explorers — not just for drinking water, but also broken apart into oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel.” Hmm. Maybe it’s time to start thinking of ways to get up there…
Congrats to the 2010 Oscar winners, which I got…mostly right. The back-to-back Best Director and Best Picture wins for Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker were a nice surprise, particularly given all the grief the film’s been getting lately. (I was also kinda glad to see The Secret in Their Eyes upset the Best Foreign Film category, given that I didn’t much care for The White Ribbon. As for Sandra Bullock…well, ok. I’m still not seeing The Blind Side.
Five movies this past weekend and I didn’t catch this one (although I did see the fun Tron: Legacy teaser): With Sam Rockwell’s Justin Hammer making an appearance, here’s the second trailer for Jon Favreau’s Iron Man 2. This is only two months away? Wow, that was fast.
Well, David Lynch…not so much. (I presume the reviewer was thinking of Twin Peaks, but there really aren’t very many Lynchian flourishes here — There’s no Roy Orbison, red lights, flaring matches, or dream logic to be had.) But Terribly Happy definitely wears its Coenesque heart on its sleeve, paying brief homage to three of the Coens’ oeuvre in the first three minutes. The movie begins exactly like No Country for Old Men — a grizzled voiceover talking about crime and the olden ways, over shots of the strangely forbidding Danish countryside. We are then warned, a la Fargo, that this is based on True Events. (In fact, it’s from a novel by Erling Jepsen — Before that, provenance unclear.) And, then we cut to behind a police car on a long stretch of highway, one that pretty quickly conjures reveries of Raising Arizona.
Of all the Coens’ output, tho’, Terribly Happy ultimately feels most like Blood Simple — a sordid tale of small-town crime, seedy bars, and village ne’er-do-wells. (See also: great small-bore, character-driven crime flicks like One False Move and A Simple Plan.) This is not to say that Terribly Happy is derivative, because it isn’t. Rather, the film feels like it tips its hat to its influences before setting off on its own quite unique story. (In fact, Happy seemed unique even tho’ this is the third fish-out-of-water crime story I’ve seen in a row, and despite its reliance on the tried-and-true “new cop in an old village” tradition that includes Hot Fuzz, The Wicker Man, the aforementioned Peaks, and any number of old-school Westerns.)
If it seems like I’m just comparing Terribly Happy to other movies rather than talking about the film itself…well, best not to give away too much. But, in brief: Robert (Jakob Cedergren) is a Copenhagen cop who had a little bit of a breakdown, and has subsequently been dispatched to the sticks to rehabilitate his name. In the tiny hamlet where he ends up, people say “Mojn” like Hawaiians use “Aloha.” The village elders play cards all night long, short-handed. A local woman (Lene Maria Christensen) keeps showing up at the station with new injuries. The entire town seems deeply frightened of her husband Jorgen (Kim Bodnia). A strange little girl (Mathilde Maack) insists on wheeling her squeaky baby carriage around at all hours of the night. And people keep disappearing…
So, yes, there’s something rotten in the State of Denmark — more than a few things actually. And, as you might expect, it is Robert’s task to get to the bottom of it all. But in the Danish lowlands, the bottom can be treacherous, and our White Hat here is, well, not entirely stable, particularly after a beer or six. In fact, he’s the type of fellow who might just draw on his own kitty-cat, especially when it also starts saying “Mojn” back at him. (And, really, can you blame him? It’s only a short step there to “I can haz…“)
Sure, there are a few tells along the way — the last five minutes are telegraphed pretty much from the start. Still, Terribly Happy definitely takes a few jags I was not expecting, and the journey is the reward regardless. It doesn’t have the artsy ambition of The White Ribbon (and I have yet to see the well-regarded A Prophet), but nonetheless, Terribly Happy is my favorite non-English-language film of the year so far. It is, simply put, a solid crime story, well-told. (And if you get a chance, check it out before the inevitable American remake.)
Oh, word. It’s hard to overstate my satisfaction…but let’s hope the cake is real this time (and the Companion Cube isn’t ticked.)
Much has been said of the Muppets of yore…In the venerable tradition of “I still think of you, Jim Henson,” a pious Kermit the Frog gets more than he bargained for as the Muppets are mashed up with The Wicker Man (and I mean the creepy-great 1973 original, not the godawful Neil LaBute-Nicholas Cage stinker.)
Word abounds that the Tron: Legacy trailer will be popping up very shortly on the petticoats of Tim Burton’s Alice, but no sign of it yet.
Until then, Zack Snyder follows up Watchmen with Hugo Weaving and animated owls in the rather meh trailer for Legend of the Guardians. Eh, doubtful…As per the Snyder norm, he lost me with the cruddy frat-rock.
And, for some more encouraging rock ‘n’ roll, Dakota Fanning is all grown up as Cherie Currie to Kristen Stewart’s Joan Jett in the second trailer for Floria Sigismondi’s The Runaways. Hmm, maybe…I can see Michael Shannon being a good bit of fun.
Like Shutter, The Ghost Writer is a highly cinematic thriller in-the-key-of-noir that probably works better as a mood piece than it does in terms of plot. (For that matter, once again we have a cast of ne’er-do-wells at a remote island off the coast of Massachusetts, acting suspiciously under gray, portentous skies.) The film is also, not to put too fine a point on it, a resounding eff-you to Tony Blair. Based on a 2007 book by Robert Harris (Fatherland, Enigma), it clearly sets it sights on the ex-PM for getting-in-deep with Dubya and subsequently greenlighting torture in the UK.
If that makes The Ghost Writer sound heavy or preachy, it isn’t, really. The torture and “Special Relationship” stuff forms the background and connective tissue of this particular 70’s-style conspiracy, yes. But the movie cares less about the details than its does just the existence of a nefarious plot at all. In other words, just like Marathon Man or Three Days of the Condor, most all of the political content here is really just a device to get Ewan MacGregor’s low-key, amiable, and boozy-but-talented “Ghost” slowly and inexorably in over his head…and increasingly having to look over his shoulder.
Here, unlike the last time we saw him, MacGregor’s scribe isn’t looking for “the Story” at first so much as a fat paycheck. So, when the ghostwriter for former British PM Adam Lang (Pierce Brosnan) washes up dead off the coast for America, he — after being talked into it by his unctuous agent (Jon Bernthal) — puts his name in the hat as a well-paid replacement, even though he doesn’t give a whit about politics. And after getting looked over by a gruff Haldeman-ish aide (James Belushi) and an obviously sleazebag lawyer (Timothy Hutton), he somehow, miraculously, ends up with the job.
But, be careful what you wish for: Within an hour of landing the gig, Ewan’s Ghost gets mugged on the street for carrying what appeared to be a copy of the current manuscript. (It was a ringer — Nihilists, dude.) Soon thereafter, he finds himself whisked away to Lang’s Island, where he spends his days with a distracted and often visibly angry ex-PM, the beautiful-but-distant missus (Olivia Williams, who I love, but she’s too young for the part), a sultry top assistant (Kim Cattrall, doing her thing), and more security than you can shake a stick at. And when Lang becomes the center of a huge media maelstrom, on account of revelations that he authorized illegal detentions and torture when he was prime minister, well all of a sudden Ewan’s Ghost finds himself trapped in a very well-oiled and dangerous Machine…
Speaking of ghosts in machines, I’ll concede I was probably more tickled by The Ghost Writer than a lot of people might be, just because this is a movie about my trade. Who knows? Maybe cops, lawyers, and doctors feel like this all the time. Still, his irritating penchant for reading everything out loud notwithstanding, when Ewan was puttering around the island on his bike and/or typing away in his schoolboy sweaters, I confess I felt a twinge of happiness that here was a thriller-type movie where I could actually see myself in the predicament. (Speaking of which, yes, there are a lot of dramatic licenses taken with the job of ghostwriting here, but you’re not going to see me complaining to Newsweek about it. That’s what movies do.)
But, all that being said, I think The Ghost Writer has enough of a sneaky sense of humor to it that it would’ve worked for me even without the j-o-b connection. For example, one running gag throughout is that, as per movies of this type, all sorts of shady operators desperately want their hands on Lang’s manuscript. But, like the vast majority of political memoirs in real life, this ghostwritten Maguffin is so platitudinous and vapid (“My years at Cambridge…”) that Ewan’s character can’t figure out why the hell anybody wants to go near it.
And, while the actual conspiracy here is even more implausible than the last turn in Shutter Island (and, again, doesn’t make much sense given what’s come before in the movie), I chuckled at the sheer screw-you audacity of it — You’ll know what I mean if you see it. So, all in all and despite its occasional goofy turns, I found The Ghost Writer a pretty fun afternoon at the movies. I just wish that one of the film’s other driving conceits — that the world will rise up and demand criminal accountability for Dubya-era torture — didn’t seem quite so far-fetched to me as it does these days.
“In April, the world will celebrate the quinquagenary of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, so it seems a good time to take stock of the silence. Three new books tackle the issue in three different ways. One, an immensely readable investigation of the SETI enterprise (with a surprising conclusion); the second, a technical guide to what we should be looking for and how; and the third, a left-field argument that the alien question has already been answered.“
In New Scientist, Michael Hanlon surveys three new books about the continuing search for alien life, and attempts to grapple with the Fermi paradox.”Today it is rare to meet an astronomer who doesn’t believe that the universe is teeming with life. There is a feeling in the air that light will soon be shed on some of science’s most fundamental questions: is Earth’s biosphere unique? Do other minds ponder the universe?“