Somebody on Twitter mentioned that “the Canucks game just got way more interesting”, so I visited TEAM 1040′s website to listen to the end of the game (it’s a pay-per-view game, so there’s no regular TV broadcast. I’m happy to pay for a game occasionally, but not when it’s Phoenix.). TEAM 1040 is running a web poll at the moment, asking “Who is the hottest Canuck?”. Check out the results:
For those readers who are not hockey fans, Daniel and Henrik Sedin are identical twins. They look like this:
Though he looks about 15, I’d say Raymond deserves the lead. Here he is sandwiched between Rebecca and Alanah (the photo is by John):
I’m an occasional listener to Stephen Fry’s excellent podcasts, and reader of his blog. I’ve always admired Fry. He’s a Renaissance man–a consummate orator, a great essayist, a skilled actor and he’s got one of the largest functional vocabularies I’ve ever heard. He brings a joyful curiosity and wit to every project on which he works.
One recent project is Stephen Fry in America. It’s a six-part BBC series in which Fry visits every one of the US’s fifty states. All six parts were scheduled in one day over the Christmas break, and I recorded them all. They’re quite enjoyable–it’s always entertaining to see the familiar through a foreigner’s eyes. I’m also learning the odd fact about US geography and history. They’re lightweight fare, but they’re beautifully shot and Fry makes a charismatic host. Here’s a promo:
In writing this post, I was reminded of two other projects involving Stephen Fry. He hosts a very British game show called QI, which stands for ‘Quite Interesting’. To call it a game show is a bit generous, as it’s really just a framework for five funny people to be funny. Here’s an example:
Fry was also involved in Last Chance to See, following in the footsteps of Douglas Adams’s best book of the same name. He accompanies Mark Carwardine, Douglas’s co-author, to re-visit six critically endangered species around the globe. My favourite, by far, is the kakapo. Here’s an enormously funny moment from Fry and Carwardine’s encounter with one of these very odd birds:
In theatre school, one of my profs always said that “directing is 70% casting”. If you cast skilled, compelling performers, they’re going to make you look good. If you cast poorly, then you’re already behind the eight ball before you begin rehearsals.
Lately I’ve been thinking of writing an article (or maybe just starting a wiki page so that I can gather opinions) about what good acting is. I think we often say “oh, he’s a great actor” without really understanding what we mean.
In thinking about that article, I’m also interested in the relationship between a film’s director and its cast. This week I saw Invictus, Clint Eastwood’s new film about Nelson Mandela’s role in South Africa’s improbable run at the 1995 World Cup of Rugby. Simply put, it’s not a very good movie. The screenplay is simplistic in its approach to the complexities of a newly post-Apartheid South Africa, and Eastwood gets the pacing all wrong. He was, to my mind, simply the wrong director to make this film.
I bring up Invictus because Eastwood sometimes casts untrained or under-qualified actors in smaller roles in his films. This was the case with Gran Torino, and there are some examples in this film as well. Eastwood may also not be a particularly good director of actors (working with actors, I gather, is only one of the many, many things a film director does). In both films, I found the non-actors incredibly distracting. I can’t understand Eastwood’s decision, as the non-actors are glaringly obvious and, to my mind, detract from his films.
Acting Like a Frozen Fish
Here’s another example of a director’s impact on an actor’s performance. I recently saw New Moon (the newest Twilight movie) and Adventureland. Both are 2009 movies starring Kristen Stewart.
After seeing New Moon, the consensus was that (among many other faults) the performances were all dismal. Ms. Stewart swims through the murky film like a frozen fish, an unresponsive vortex that sucks the energy out of every scene she’s in (and this is a film without much energy to spare).
However, having seen Kristen Stewart in Adventureland (and also Panic Room, come to think of it) I see that she’s capable of more. She’s no Cate Blanchett, but those films indicated that she was at least a competent, watchable performer. So what gives?
I blame Chris Weitz, the director of New Moon and the rest of the production team. New Moon is an awful movie, beginning to end, and I must assume that extends to Mr. Weitz’s work with the actors.
There is an interesting alternative hypothesis, though. It stems from the apparent lack of description Ms. Stewart’s character receives in the novels:
First off, the author creates a main character which is an empty shell. Her appearance isn’t described in detail; that way, any female can slip into it and easily fantasize about being this person. I read 400 pages of that book and barely had any idea of what the main character looked like; as far as I was concerned she was a giant Lego brick. Appearance aside, her personality is portrayed as insecure, fumbling, and awkward – a combination anyone who ever went through puberty can relate to. By creating this “empty shell,” the character becomes less of a person and more of something a female reader can put on and wear. Because I forgot her name (I think it was Barbara or Brando or something like that), I’m going to refer to her as “Pants” from here on out.
Perhaps the filmmakers are trying to extend this blank slate to the movies? What do you think?
In the past, I’ve complained about a film and television trope that I call “can you clean that up a little?” It’s the moment in crime dramas and thrillers when, back at the lab, some nerdy technician spouts technical gobbledygook and uses some fancy version of Photoshop to improbably improve the quality of some grainy security footage.
Today Andy pointed out this great montage of these moments, created by this person:
As regular readers know, I’m working on the TckTckTck campaign, fighting for a fair, ambitious and binding deal on climate change in Copenhagen. We’re in the second, final week of negotiations and things are heating up. This past weekend, the campaign organized a third global day of action. It featured over 3000 events–candlelight vigils, marches, protests and so forth–in countries from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe. The previous two days, by Avaaz on September 21 and 350.org on October 24, were similar in scale.
Ineachcase, there’s been a video hastily produced that seeks to document the day and further inspire the climate change movement. Together, they tell the story of global climate action over the past six months, and look pretty slick doing it.
Project Honey Pot is a side project by Unspam Technologies, and “gathers statistics on Internet robots and the spammers who sometimes use them to steal email addresses”. As I understand it, they work with website publishers to serve up fake, unique email addresses on web pages. Spammers’ bots discover these email addresses and start directing spam email at them. When they do, the project gathers information about when and from where the spam originated.
Apparently they then “work with law enforcement authorities to track down and prosecute spammers”. If they do, they ought to put some success stories on their website. I see value in the data collection, but I’d see more value in fewer spammers in the wild.
The message…was a United States Internal Revenue Service (IRS) phishing scam. The spam email was sent by a bot running on a compromised machine in India (122.167.68.1). The spamtrap address to which the message was sent was originally harvested on November 4, 2007 by a particularly nasty harvester (74.53.249.34) that is responsible for 53,022,293 other spam messages that have been received by Project Honey Pot.
They’ve published a bunch of statistics about the data they collect. A few highlights:
Monday is the busiest day of the week for email spam, while Saturday is the quietest.
Malicious bots have increased at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 378% since Project Honey Pot started.
It takes the average spammer 2 and a half weeks from when they first harvest your email address to when they send you your first spam message, but that’s twice as fast as they were five years ago.
I’ve said this before, but, thanks to Gmail, my email spam problem has nearly disappeared in the past couple of years.
Each year, each of the Georgia Straight’s music critics writes a list of their top ten favourite albums of the year. I usually skim these lists, and I’m overjoyed if I recognize more than three or four bands. This year, in my ongoing battle against total musical fossilization, I decided to examine the list in some detail, and to listen to any band that I thought might strike my fancy.
I ended up with four new bands that I liked. They are:
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart – How can you not like a band with a name like that? Like a lot of the bands I checked out, they seem to be influenced by the music of the eighties.
Mirah – Her full name is Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, so it’s no wonder that she shortened it. Straight reviewer Mike Usinger writes “Think Cat Power before she started making music for Yaletown dinner parties.” Ouch, I kind of like Cat Power.
Pink Mountaintops – Wikipedia calls them a “shoegaze psychedelic rock band from Vancouver”. They’re a kind of side project featuring many of the same musicians in Black Mountain.
Lightning Dust – This band specifically identifies themselves as being from ‘East Van’ on their MySpace page. It turns out they’re another side project of some of the musicians in the aforementioned Black Mountain. They’re my favourite of the four bands I’ve listed here.
I was pleased to recognize a few more of the bands on the list than I usually do. Of those bands, I’d recommend The Hidden Cameras, M. Ward and The Low Anthem.
