Bruner Blog
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- 7/27/2002
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Movies
Have been remiss in blogging on films I've seen recently. Can't claim them as a biz expense for taxes if I don't review them, so here's a quick catch-up:
- Men in Black II - to hell with everyone who panned this film, I thought it was great, the only summer blockbuster I've enjoyed so far. My friend and I were laughing about it again the next day, and we howled throughout the film. Laura Flynn Bolye was excellent as the evil space monster threatening earth, and even if Will Smith was a bit over the top, he's earned the right and the film delivered lots of laughs. Tommy Lee Jones was excellent as always, and the effects were superb. Cameos by the likes of Michael Jackson and Martha Stewart as alien imposters were great. If you liked the first one, go see it while it's still in the theaters.
- Sunshine State - Very good film by director/writer John Sayles (Men with Guns and Lone Star) with a great cast, including Agela Bassett (who over-acts a bit), Edie Falco (an excellent performance), Timothy Hutton and many others. Reminiscent of Short Cuts in its stringing together several overlapping narratives of many characters. Set on a Florida island with a history of a prominent black middle class, the story revolves around two women (Bassett and Falco) facing their pasts in the face of a massive real estate development project. Beautifully acted, filmed and edited, it's slow and rewarding.
- Until the End of the World - Ugh. Adi brought this 1991 Wim Wenders film home on video the other night. She loved it -- her whole Euro art thing -- but I found it really hard to stick with. Starring William Hurt, Solveig Dommartin (also in Wenders's 1987 masterpiece Wings of Desire) and Max von Sydow (who is also in Minority Report) and a cast of many more (including, I see on IMDB, uncredited cameos I missed by Tom Waits and David Byrne). The photography and editing were beautiful, but the tortured plot just left me in the dust: woman crashes into bank robbers, carries their stash to Paris for a 30% cut, meets Hurt, a mysterious hitchhiker who steals a small bit of her loot and she becomes obsessed, following him around the world (Tokyo, San Francisco, Paris and 12 other cities on four continents), in a nonsensical cat-and-mouse chase that includes her ex-boyfriend, a detective, a bounty hunter and others. Then the second half of the film is set in the Australian desert with a team of aboriginal scientists helping Hurt's maniacal father, von Sydow, with his neuro-computer lab to let his blind wife see and, later, after her death, to record people's dreams (driving them mad)... Visually very stimulating, and amazing all-star soundtrack, but it was impossible to take seriously. Maybe it makes more sense in the five-hour director's cut, but Adi will be watching that without me.
- Minority Report - Eh. I'd rate it a B-. The effects were cool and the basic premise was vaguely interesting, but my Tom Cruise aversion remains intact, and the plot was just too stupid to be tolerated. I have something like a three-strike policy for plot holes before my suspension of disbelief collapses. There were so many, I'll just name a few: with no weapons, he beats up 10 cops with jet packs and a wide assortment of futuristic pain inflicting devices and makes a clean getaway; immediately afterwards, he beats up 10 feds, including doing battle in the midst of a robotic car manufacturing plant, and no factory employee is anywhere to be seen to stop the dangerous assembly process the two are battling through before Cruise is pinned under the front seat that a robotic arm slams down on top of him and a bed of spikes, yet Cruise then sits up in the car (an extremely cool ride, I'll confess; a Lexus) and finds it fully fueled with keys in the ignition so that he could just drive off and make a clean getaway; he continues to drive this very conspicous car throughout the rest of the movie, and no one in this Big Brother landscape can track it?; retinal scans are everywhere, and his eyeballs are the most sought after, yet they continue to grant him unfettered access to his own top-secret agency (even after they're torn out of his head); three crack-baby psychics are going to police all crime in the entire U.S., if the evildoers would prevail... I liked Spielberg's vision of 2054, with its sarcastic comment on the horrific future of advertising (yet ironically all the annoying 3D ad holograms are illustrated by product placement from a long list of 20th Century brands), and all the super high-tech jive was cool, but it was just too silly. Oh, also, once you understand what a "minority report" is according to the film's convoluted logic, Cruise's case doesn't even turn out to be one, so why'd they call the movie that?
- Borne Identity - Big disappointment. I'm a fan of this kind of spy/psychological thriller genre, but the really good ones (Conspiracy Theory, Enemy of the State, The Conversation, The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Third Man) are few and far between, and this definitely is not one of them. So many plot problems, where to begin? In the first five minutes, Matt Damon is dragged out of the ocean by a fishing boat, and while he's passed out the ship's captain (?) digs two bullets out of his back (with no anesthesia), which have only just broken the skin and are removed with tweasers, and out of curiousity (?) the captain also pries out a microchip embedded under the skin on Damon's hip. Damon, who has amnesia, is content to hang out on the ship for two weeks (no one thought he could use some real medical attention after being shot and half-drowned?). And on and on, it just gets more implausible as it goes.
- Coming Attractions: I Spy
- My friend and I saw this coming attraction (due out in the fall) for this comedy based on the old Bill Cosby TV series starring Eddie Murphy and Owen Wilson (who was quite good in The Royal Tenenbaums). If the trailer was anything to go by (and they are obvously often not), it looks hilarious. True, Murphy has his string of flops, but he's also proven his brilliance with films like 48 Hrs., The Nutty Professor and the excellent Bowfinger, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt. Best of all, it's set in my beloved Budapest!
- 7/27/2002
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New York City Fucking Rocks!
To quote Nick at Miki's wild-ass 4th of July party, "I love New York!" Ever since Adi and I moved to Manhattan three years ago, we have had a great time socially. I've twice before lived in cities where I've been fortunate to belong to a giant gang of friends: at college in Missoula, MT (shout out to Team Rasta!) and in Budapest in the early '90s. In between Bp and NY, however, was a four-year dead zone known as San Francisco in the dot-com heyday. Feh! I'm having soooo much more fun here, even before Sept. 11, but since then we've only been partying harder, like we're dancing to the Devil's fiddle.
I couldn't agree more with Nick (who I must point out has followed me from Budapest first to SF and now NYC) when he slags SF as a soulless backwater. No offense to my friends who do still live there, but I never went for that town. And neither Adi nor I ever really had what you could call a "gang" of friends there -- a bunch of individuals and couples who gradually got to know each other through us, but no sense of a posse.
The NYC posse Adi and I are a now a part of is something to behold. Parties nearly every night of the week. For example, I'll never live it down that I missed Gogol Bordello last Saturday (read Nick, Peter or Elizabeth raves). On Wednesday, Ildi got folks together for the Philharmonic in the park. Then last night... I'd like to think this photo about says it all:
What started out at Nick's fabu new Soho loft as a big NYC blogger welcome to the Notorious M.E.G. (Jason, come visit, you'll love it!), ended past 2am some funky dive on E. Houston (Rosi?) after passing in between thru the painfully chic GenArt party (a few thousand would-be glitterati), the venue for the photo above (no idea who the flanking freaks are, just the three in the middle). We were all on the guest list thanks to Pearl, who's brilliant short film "Great Balls of Fire" was screened at the event.
At the end of the night, looking around the half-drunk group (to be generous) sprawled on the broken-down couches of the dark bar, it dawned on that this was an exceptional group of people. Earlier in the night I had told Meg that almost every one of dozen friends I had visited a few months ago in SF were unemployed and desperate for work. It struck me then, looking at one of these NYers -- Cameron (the hottest Cam on the Net by popular vote), Anil (who remained deliberately vague in his irony about the blog-groupie comment), Elizabeth, Pearl, Joan, Ildi, Sapna, Caroline, the other Nick (and anyone else I'm blanking on) -- none of them had "normal" jobs (duh, we're in a bar at 2am on a school night), with the possible exception of Anil (who doesn't have to show up for work before noon). But none of them were complaining, either. There were all getting by somehow, a bunch of slack-happy freelancer beautiful bohemian freaks, to a person. They were also a microcosm for our extended group of 50+ folks who all regularly hang around together, made up of a motley collection of Gen Expats, Magyars, film makers, journalists, netrepreneurs, artists and, most recently, bloggers (since the welcome social impact of Mr. Denton's arrival to town, a mere 2 months ago (seems so much longer!)). Whatever it is that unites this group, I'm glad for it and will raise a beer to it at my next opportunity.
Nick, I hear, is doing something again tonight, but I'm going to have to pass, needing one night to recuperate and plan our birthday dance party for Adi and Miki tomorrow night...
Cameron, stay!
- 7/26/2002
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GabyD.com
Shout out to Gaby D, with her own rap-MC-styling domain and everything.
- 7/24/2002
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Blogs and Sex
Congratulations to Anil, for celebrating three years of blogging the other day. I'm surpirsed, however, that he credits one of the benefits of the medium as helping him get laid. Not only do I not want to imagine what type of groupies blogs attract, I thought John Hiler made a convincing case recently that blogs and sex don't mix.
I should be so lucky. My wife apparently stopped reading my blog weeks ago (how sad is that?). Haven't noticed whether that's produced dividends or losses in the bedroom...
- 7/24/2002
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Investing in Stocks vs. Beer
Can't attest that this is absolutely accurate, but it sounds about right:
If you had bought $1000.00 worth of Nortel stock one year ago,it would
now be worth $49.00.
With Enron, you would have $16.50 of the original $1000.00.
With WorldCom, you would have less than $5.00 left.
If you bought $1000.00 worth of Budweiser (the beer, not the stock) one year
ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the 10 cent deposit, you
would have $214.00.
Based on the above, my current investment advice is to drink heavily and
recycle.
The only problem with this logic is that even on the beer you're losing money, just less than on those stock picks, and meanwhile according to those calculations, that's roughly a six-pack of Bud a day, which means you'd be a fat alcoholic, to boot.
[Via Haas]
- 7/24/2002
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I Am Buff
Brace yourself: this is perhaps the most self-indulgent and dullest post to make its way to the Bruner Blog to date, but I must proclaim to the world that I just did seven pull ups, which is the most in several years. I also kicked Heidee's ass last night biking on all the hills in Central Park (true, she's a girl, but she was a bike messenger for a year), and I could probably do the same to Kevin (not necessarily true, but since he doesn't read the blog, I'll dis him regardless). Adi is not yet willing to concede that I'm no longer fat, but her standards are impossible. Q's loss. Of course, I'm still no match for Warren, who reportedly biked seven fast laps (~45 miles) in the park yesterday at the height of the 90+-degree heat, but that's his problem.
- 7/24/2002
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Schmooze With Booze or Lose
I didn't end up attending the Blog Meetup event last week that I had been hyping (due to client deadline stuff), but from what I hear, I didn't miss much. Apparently, the low turn out (~30 folks for the downtown NYC event) was made worse by the fact that the blogger bonding took place in a coffee shop -- i.e., no alcohol. How insane. You think it's just a coincidence that "schmooze" and "booze" rhyme? (Well, maybe it is, but a handy coincidence at that.)
Meetup may want to take a cue from WebMasterWorld (an excellent community news blog focused on tech in general and search engines in particular). The publisher recently announced its annual conference will take place at a London pub.
UPDATE: A friend writes of the Meetup event:
the coffee shop sold beer, so technically there *was* alcohol, but no one was partaking, because who gets drunk at a coffee shop? (when's the last time you got wasted at Cosi?)
- 7/24/2002
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