Archive for June, 2007

About A Boy

by Glenn Vance on June 22, 2007 in Movie Reviews with No comments
about_a_boy

About a Boy, based on the novel by Nick Hornby, is really about two boys, Will (Hugh Grant), a thir­ty­ish sex­ist unem­ployed lout who lives off of song roy­al­ties from his father, and Mar­cus (Nicholas Holt), a twelve-year-old just try­ing to make it through school help his depressed mother Fiona (Toni Col­lette) be happy. Will, who has no job, wan­ders through life know­ing that he’s the coolest per­son in the world. Are nor­mal peo­ple with­out jobs able to live in fab­u­lous apart­ments, drive Audis, and eat out at expen­sive restau­rants? As he might say, not bloody well likely. Will lives off of the prof­its of “Santa’s Super Sleigh”, a Christ­mas song writ­ten by his father decades pre­vi­ous. Will men­tions that his father strug­gled for years to cre­ate another hit, but that all he was remem­bered for was a Christ­mas song. I got the feel­ing that Will was envi­ous of his father, since at the rate Will’s going, at least his father is remembered.

Will stum­bles across the notion that after dat­ing fab­u­lous women for years, that in the end they all want com­mit­ment from him, some­thing that he’s not freely will­ing to give to them. But divorced women with chil­dren just want to date, and if they have to dump you, it’s their child, or their ex-husband, or “it’s not you, it’s me”. How could any­one have missed this untapped font of non-commitment?

He begins attend­ing SPAT, Sin­gle Par­ents Alone Together, and meets a young widow who is friends with Fiona, who’s the mother of Mar­cus, who was also in a film with Kevin Bacon (just kid­ding). After an out­ing to the park with a heavy loaf of bread and liv­ing through a rather hor­ren­dous sit­u­a­tion later the same evening, Mar­cus wants Will to date Fiona so he can “help her be happy again”. Will doesn’t want to help any­one be happy but himself.

Star­ring:
Hugh Grant, Nicholas Hoult, Rachel Weisz, Toni Col­lette
Directed By:
Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz
Release Date:
May 17, 2002
MPAA Rat­ing:
PG-13 for brief strong lan­guage and some the­matic ele­ments.
Dis­trib­u­tors:
Uni­ver­sal Pic­tures Dis­tri­b­u­tion
3.5 Stars

A dance begins between Will and Mar­cus, with both attempt­ing to make the other a bet­ter per­son. They nat­u­rally suc­ceed (this is Hol­ly­wood, remem­ber), but not in the cutesy Freddy Prinze Jr. way that it could. Will tries to help Mar­cus be cool, and Mar­cus tries to help Will not get trapped in lies. It all, for the most part, works out fairly well.

Hugh Grant bites into the mus­cles of his char­ac­ter and tears them out by the sinews. I think Grant, who was so sweet and nice in Four Wed­dings and a Funeral and Not­ting Hill, has been wait­ing for years to play a role that’s like­able, but not that like­able. He’s rude, dull, arro­gant and pompous, and Grant bull­dozes his squeaky impres­sion. I think he’s employ­ing a lit­tle method act­ing in this film, since deep down inside all men wouldn’t mind the life that Will leads, given the chance.

Nicholas Holt does a pretty good job of stand­ing up to Grant, but unlike the book, his char­ac­ter is a lit­tle more recessed than Grant’s. Mar­cus could whine, but he doesn’t. Bul­lies pick on him, his mother cries all of the time, he sings “Killing Me Softly” out loud in class by acci­dent, but he attempts to take it in stride, know­ing that one day when he gets to Uni­ver­sity that he’ll be bet­ter. I was impressed with his per­for­mance, and his char­ac­ter is well rounded com­pared to other screen teens.

Toni Col­lette plays Fiona as she was writ­ten in the novel; one of the most hor­ren­dous vegan hip­pies that you’ve ever seen with pol­ish and style. This is a far cry from the what could have been cliché poor-but-still-has-her-dignity sin­gle mom that she played in The Sixth Sense so well. Short hair, Army sur­plus clothes, hat knit­ted in Peru, she oozes hip­pie. She cares about Mar­cus more than any­thing, but depres­sion usu­ally wins out in her bat­tle to care for him. It’s heart wrench­ing to watch.

Lastly, Rachel Weisz plays the object of Will’s affec­tion and the vic­tim of his lies. I haven’t seen any of The Mummy films, but I saw her in Enemy at the Gates, and she seemed lit­tle more than win­dow dress­ing in that film. Unfor­tu­nately, she’s sort of used as win­dow dress­ing here too. If this were a Bog­art film from the 1940’s, she’d be “The Skirt”.

I liked this film a lot and laughed out loud many times when the audi­ence was silent. I felt kind of weird doing that, but it seemed like a pri­vate joke remem­bered fondly between friends who’ve known each other a very long time.

Processed Cheese

by Glenn Vance on June 22, 2007 in History with No comments
James-L.-Kraft

Processed cheese, Amer­i­can cheese, what­ever you call it, is the dol­lar store of cheeses. Sure, it tastes good on a grilled cheese or on top of a burger, but it’s the chicken nugget of cheese.

Processed cheese, accord­ing to the FDA, is a “food prod­uct” made from reg­u­lar cheese and some­times other unfer­mented dairy ingre­di­ents, plus emul­si­fiers, extra salt, and food col­or­ings. It was devel­oped as a way of staving off the usual per­isha­bil­ity that all foods have. Processed cheese has the capa­bil­ity to last almost indefinitely.

Wal­ter Ger­ber was the first per­son to invent processed cheese in 1911 in Thun, Switzer­land, but James L. Kraft (of Kraft Foods), see­ing that the cheese hadn’t been patented, applied for an Amer­i­can patent in 1916. In 1917 he sup­plied to the US Armed forces the first batch of Kraft canned cheese for sol­diers fight­ing in Europe dur­ing World War I. In addi­tion, the Kraft Com­pany also devel­oped a process for pro­duc­ing sliced processed cheese and a machine that indi­vid­u­ally wrapped slices of cheese.1

  1. The info for this post came from Kraft’s web­site and from Wikipedia [↩]

Adaptation

by Glenn Vance on June 21, 2007 in Movie Reviews with No comments
adaptation

1. INT. STUDY. 8:15 A.M.

Ama­teur Film critic GLENN VANCE is sit­ting in his study on a Sat­ur­day morn­ing attempt­ing to fig­ure out what to say about the hilar­i­ous and out­landishly bizarre movie, ADAPTATION, he and his wife saw yes­ter­day evening. The dif­fi­culty of his task is evi­dent on his face because the film was about so many dis­com­bob­u­lated things that it’s hard to describe it with­out ram­bling. If he could just find the one word that would bring it all together, make every­thing clearer to him and the roughly 10 devoted read­ers of his web­site, it would be per­fect. The one word that when the film is bro­ken down to its basic ele­ments could sum it up.…

2. INT. STUDY. 1 HOUR, 55 MINUTES LATER.

We see a blank com­puter screen. The cur­sor blinks like a metronome.

With Adap­ta­tion, the new film from the writer/director duo of Char­lie Kauf­man and Spike Jonze, this is not easy. At its most basic level it’s about a screen­writer attempt­ing to adapt a book, “The Orchid Thief”, into a screen­play about a man who steals orchids from the swamps of Florida, how­ever it’s also about the author of the book, her rela­tion­ship with the orchid thief him­self, and both of their rela­tion­ships to the screen­play writer. Throw into the mix a film jumps back­ward and for­ward in time and it’s dif­fi­cult to find the one per­fect word that best describes the film, but IRONY is a good place to start.

Star­ring:
Nico­las Cage, Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, Tilda Swin­ton, Brian Cox
Directed By:
Spike Jonze
Release Date:
Decem­ber 6th, 2002
MPAA Rat­ing:
R for lan­guage, sex­u­al­ity, some drug use and vio­lent images.
Dis­trib­u­tors:
Sony Pic­tures Releas­ing
2.5 Stars

But more about that in a moment.

Spike Jonze, who directed the mind-blowing Being John Malkovich, here jumps feet-first into his sopho­more effort like a para­trooper on D-Day morn­ing and expands upon the odd visual world that he cre­ated with his pre­vi­ous fea­ture. His favorite accom­plice, Char­lie Kauf­man, the screen­writer of Being John Malkovich, mines his own fears, faults and self-loathing to cre­ate a level of inner para­noia rarely seen since Ver­tigo. Kaufman’s script is as fer­tile as the Ten­nessee val­ley, which lit­er­ally cov­ers the entire his­tory of Earth from The Begin­ning to now and how screen­writer Char­lie fits into it. Nicholas Cage plays Char­lie Kauf­man and Charlie’s (fic­ti­tious) twin brother Don­ald. Char­lie has lit­tle self con­fi­dence and is intro­verted while Don­ald is extro­verted to a fault and crass. Cage, who lately has slummed in such films as Windtalk­ers and Gone in Sixty Sec­onds, finally retreats back to ‘Thes­pian Nicholas Cage’, the Cage of Leav­ing Las Vegas, Moon­struck and Rais­ing Ari­zona. He’s so good here that it’s a true joy to see him actu­ally act­ing rather than just star­ring in a film. He is excel­lent as the fat bald­ing fright­ened Kauf­man and has already gar­nered a Golden Globe nom­i­na­tion for the role. Hope­fully this won’t be a fluke.

The film is fun and inter­est­ing and engag­ing; you actu­ally care about these three lit­tle peo­ple. You really do care, a rar­ity in this mod­ern world of dis­pos­able cel­lu­loid. You care about the book’s author and her sham mar­riage and you care about Kauf­man as he sweats bul­lets over a pos­si­ble sopho­more slump on his hands. Chris Cooper’s thief has such a pas­sion for plants that you amaze at the fact that he’s only stud­ied them for sev­eral years, not his entire life. The laughs in the film come out of the dia­logue like machine gun bul­lets belch­ing from an AK-47, but most of the laughs come from the IRONY of the sit­u­a­tions, not cheap one-liners. The casual film­goer (the lovers of such films as Gone in Sixty Sec­onds) will prob­a­bly not real­ize that most of the third act of the film is played out for laughs rather than pathos and for that one could fault Jonze’s some­times arro­gant direc­tion. Kaufman’s screen­play (the real one, not the film-within-a-film one) tries hard to show that Char­lie doesn’t want to fall back on stan­dard clichés like car chases, gun fights, buddy-film clichés and the like but in the end can’t decide how to end the film. Jonze unfor­tu­nately doesn’t remind his audi­ence that these con­ven­tions are all an in-joke and I ended up laugh­ing at the chase through the Florida swamp with three other peo­ple in the the­ater while the rest sat in rapt atten­tion at the “sad­ness” that was unfold­ing on the screen. Jonze is good with the irony here, but he for­gets to let the audi­ence in on the joke. Ironic, no?

July 4, 1999 in Washington, D.C.

by Glenn Vance on June 21, 2007 in History with No comments
Washington-Monument

We thought it would be pretty cool to go to Wash­ing­ton, D.C. for the Fourth of July, 1999. As you know it was the turn of the mil­len­nium (yes, I know that Jan. 1, 2001, was the actual turn of the mil­len­nium, so don’t write me about that) and they were going to have an amaz­ing fire­works dis­play. We’d also hit var­i­ous Smith­son­ian build­ings and try to get to the Cap­i­tal Build­ing too. Fun for all.

Kim’s cousin Karen lived a cou­ple hours south of D.C. in north­ern Vir­ginia, so in late June we flew up there to visit for a cou­ple of days. We would rent a car and drive into D.C. on the Fourth and too­dle around. I thought we was pre­pared, but noth­ing pre­pared us for the heat and humidity.

I used to watch David Let­ter­man and hear him com­plain that the ther­mo­stat got up to 92 degrees that day in New York City and I’d just shake my head. “How can these peo­ple not sur­vive 92 freak­ing degree heat? I’m a Texan! We deal with 192 degree heat every sum­mer!” My father told me that the heat there was dif­fer­ent; I scoffed. Texas heat is ter­ri­ble. I scoffed too soon, I think.

We drove to the Pen­ta­gon City mall (right across from the Pen­ta­gon, no less) and took the Metro blue line from there. The D.C. Metro is amaz­ing — clean, com­fort­able and quiet, it’s the com­plete antithe­sis to the New York City sub­way as I would find out a cou­ple years later. Nobody has­sling you, peo­ple not feign­ing sleep so peo­ple wouldn’t bother them, none of that, only quiet and clean. The Metro is the way all sub­way trains should be.

We stopped at the Smith­son­ian stop and climbed out of the under­ground and got hit by a hot blast of wind. Very hot wind, and it felt like you were swim­ming there was so much humid­ity. Instantly our clothes started stick­ing to us and the back­pack we’d brought with us caused my back to ooze sweat. It was not a good sign.

Kim had never been to the Lin­coln Memo­r­ial so we trekked down past the Wash­ing­ton Mon­u­ment (which was closed) and walked past the reflect­ing pool. As we walked past, Tito Puente was play­ing at a band shell near the Mon­u­ment, a crowd gath­ered around. I’d for­got­ten how big the reflect­ing pool actu­ally was and it seemed like we walked for­ever. We finally got there, out of breath and red in the face and saw Lin­coln. Took some pic­tures, went past the Viet­nam wall and saw the Korean War memo­r­ial and then grabbed a tram to Arling­ton National Ceme­tery. Yes, there are Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War vet­er­ans and pres­i­dents buried there, but I was there to see the grave of Lee Mar­vin, who had served in the Marine Corps dur­ing World War II. We went and asked at the visitor’s cen­ter where he was located and after a lit­tle search­ing found him. He has a very sim­ple white mar­ble head­stone, very much unlike his neigh­bor, pro­fes­sional boxer Joe “The Brown Bomber” Louis, who had vol­un­teered for the Army, even after an amaz­ing career he’d already had. We went to the Tombs of the Unknowns and then headed back to the tram.

We hit the Air and Space Museum at that point and then started to stake out our turf. The Mall was crowded already with thou­sands of peo­ple and it was prob­a­bly 6 hours before the fire­works would begin. We’d been hot and mis­er­able most of the time we were there, but it was begin­ning to get to me. I was start­ing to say things like, “Let’s just go back to the car, I can’t take it any­more,” and other whinyisms, but Kim, the trooper she is, said that we hadn’t come all that way to give up. So we found an office build­ing that had an open lobby and camped out in the air con­di­tion­ing for sev­eral hours. It was heavenly.

When the fire­works started many hours later, we were just east of 14th Street. Right across the street was a huge line of port-a-potties, with a line of peo­ple wait­ing to go them stretch­ing sev­eral hun­dred feet. With the amount of sweat­ing Kim and I had been doing we couldn’t see how any­body would even need to pee in this heat.

The fire­works were amaz­ing, like noth­ing I’d ever seen before or since. I would think that that much ord­nance was not even expelled on D-Day. The sky was full of rock­ets, light and sound. We were so close to the actual launch site that the boom­ing of each rocket was almost simul­ta­ne­ous with its explo­sion. It was pretty incredible.

After­wards, we headed back to the Metro stop, along with about 10,000 peo­ple. The heat had been bad, but cram 10,000 peo­ple together try­ing to go down a flight of stairs and you learn a new def­i­n­i­tion of hideous. It was claus­tro­pho­bia inducing.

Despite the dis­com­fort, we’d had a great time. Lots of fun. Every­one should go to D.C. for at least one Fourth of July.

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