DNS migration taking place now. In the near future use nbruinooge at gmail dot com to get a hold of me.

UPDATE: Well, that was less painful than it could have been.  Normal email is working fine again.

Another year gone by now, now with two kids in the clan: even less theatergoing time than before. In previous years I’ve used that as an excuse not to talk about the Oscars, but where’s the fun in that? This year’s game: see if you can pick out which movies I’m talking about but haven’t actually seen!

The Nominees

Leading Actor

Forest Whitaker (The Last King of Scotland) is an easy win for this category, and reasonably well-deserved. Props to the Academy for giving Ryan Gosling the nod for a brilliant performance in a film that some might have seen as too hot to touch. And it’s delightful to see Leo nominated for his brilliant work in . . . Blood Diamond?! WTF! Give the man credit for his masterful performance in The Departed, where, as my buddy Nate pointed out, he had to show that he was tough enough to fool Jack Nicholson and his thugs while simultaneously channeling to us, the audience, that he is scared utterly shitless, all the time.

Supporting Actor

Eddie Murphy, nice to see you back in some sort of form, dude, but still: overrated. I am prepared to see The Departed a third time solely in order to watch Mark Wahlberg in it again. But Alan Arkin must ultimately get the nod here for playing the crass, heroin-snorting grandfather and somehow, through this, achieving the sublime.

Leading Actress

Can we just give it to Helen Mirren and get on with our lives? I swear, the British could make a movie about bread pudding and as long as their was some dignified elder actor headlining it, we’d still drool. Kate Winslet is the truly deserving one in this lineup, though overall I remain angry that Little Children got made into a film, thereby making it even more awkward for at-home dads at the playground than it already was.

Supporting Actress

Two fine performances from Babel get the nod here, which is nice, but we can still give this one to Jennifer Hudson for the Famous Film Moment of the Year. We know that moment will get overhyped on Oscar Night; let’s just hope it’s not over-over-hyped.

Animated Feature Film

Cars. C’mon.

Directing

The man is so long overdue it’s not even funny anymore, people. Quit screwing around and do your duty. If Eastwood gets it for Letters From Iwo Jima it won’t be the end of the world because, hey, he’s freakin’ Clint Eastwood. But if Frears sneaks this one away I am going to punch my TV screen, I swear.

Best Picture

If The Queen wins, see above. So nice, so very nice, to see Little Miss Sunshine make it to the short list, though decades of Oscar tradition dictate that the spunky little film gets nominated but doesn’t actually win. But now I’m torn, because as much as there is to like about The Departed, it is a flawed film. A ten word review might read: “Everybody dying doesn’t make it Shakespeare, dude. And the rat?!” The way out of this dilemma: give Scorcese Director and give Eastwood B.P.

Best Screenplay (Adapted)

Children of Men, no contest. So-so novel becomes an astonishingly good film.

Best Screenplay (Original)

Little Miss Sunshine has a superb ensemble cast and it would be a delight to see it win B.P., but I won’t be torn up if it’s doesn’t win Screenplay. Similarly, Pan’s Labyrinth has some fantastic visuals and had darn better win Best Foreign Film, but doesn’t absolutely need to win here. That leaves The Queen — kidding! I guess it leaves Babel, really, but it’s always side awarding an Oscar via process of elimination. So we’ll leave this one open.

Driving past Pittsburgh, I came across 91.3 WYEP, and heard, in the space of an hour or so, The Flaming Lips, Cassandra Wilson, Elvis Costello, The Housemartins (?!), and the Shins. Plus a bunch of artists I had never heard before but were really cool. Oh, and it’s a public radio station, so there were no commercials and they had NPR news on the hour and half-hour.

My question is, why the heck does Pittsburgh get a cool radio station like that, when D.C. is a radio wasteland? Unless I’ve missed something that’s come along in the last few years — if so, please tell me! As far as I know we got nothing much when it comes to eclectic/indie tastes like that, and one of our two public radio stations (WETA) just dropped their strong lineup of BBC/local news shows and went back to all-classical, all-the-time.  Sigh.

It was down to the wire, but I managed to see the two films I was determined not to miss while in Michigan: Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. There’s been some buzz about these two Mexican directors, each with what is undoubtedly their masterpiece thus far, and both films lived up to the hype.

When I saw Children of Men it was a snowy afternoon in Holland and I was the only person in the theater. (Spoilers of the won’t-spoil-the-movie-unless-you’re-really-picky-about-spoilers sort incoming.) The dystopian future presented will no doubt draw all sorts of comparisons to Blade Runner, but the world of Children of Men is much much closer to our own. As with Cuaron’s Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, I had a sense leaving the theater that there was a whole elaborate system of color symbolism and other subtle visual clues that I was picking up on only slightly. The whole movie is incredibly intense, but when (OK, maybe the spoilers are a little more spoiler-y, but still nothing that you wouldn’t have already heard if you’re seen/read any of the buzz) Theo (Clive Owen’s character) has to help deliver a baby and then shepherd said baby and her mother through the hell of a disintegrating detainment camp for illegal immigrants, I completely broke down. As in, I was in tears, or near tears, for the last forty minutes or so. No doubt a big part of that is just me having a six week old baby, and therefore responding to Baby Is In Danger storytelling at a visceral level. And Cuaron should be given all due credit for his amazing filmmaking — only when reading about it afterward did I realize that, yes, the whole apartment building scene toward the end was one long, long shot. But I also wonder if being along in the theater didn’t also free me up somehow to respond to what I was seeing emotionally, and physically. It was also shocking how, post-Abu Ghraib, the simple act of getting a hood put over your head can be. Seeing it happen to one of the characters just before the camera pans off was like a punch in the gut.

But hey, even if you don’t have enough of whatever parental horomone makes you weepy at the drop of the hat, you should still see this movie. I haven’t seen very many of them the past couple of years, but this one is easily the best I’ve seen in that time. Go see go see.

I was actually looking forward to seeing Pan’s Labyrinth even more, and maybe because my expectations were so high, I enjoyed it a little less. Del Toro’s horror film instincts are still very much in play here, and while it made for a gripping movie I occasionally found it a bit much. And let’s face it, I wanted to see it because it involved a girl encountering a faun, not because it was a tragic story about the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, though it’s ultimately the former that provides the countermelody to the latter, and not the other way around. It is not a fantasy movie — its fantastic elements reside pretty conclusively in the imagination of the protagonist and the “could it be real?” moments don’t add up to much. These facts may make it a little different from the film I was expecting or would have liked to see, but that’s not to say they aren’t exactly what Del Toro had in mind. Like Children of Men, Pan’s Labyrinth is a tightly-constructed gem.

Both directors are going to be able to write their own tickets after this. If I could write them, though, I’d put them to work on a couple of the future Chronicles of Narnia pictures, doing work that’s true to the spirit of the books but darker and with a bit more of an edge — something that’d make ol’ Jack cringe, but maybe not if he had been born fifty years later. Del Toro should definitely do The Silver Chair, with all those giants and underground monsters — and Puddleglum, oh, Puddleglum! Cuaron could make fine work of Dawn Treader or maybe A Horse and His Boy.

Google is going to conquer the Internet.  It has already largely conquered me.  I use the Google personal page for my homepage, Google Reader for an rss reader, Google desktop for search, scratch pad, and to-do.  Google Calendar is the only calendar I use now, online or off.  I find myself using Google Docs a fair amount.  I belong to a couple Google Groups.  I will shortly be using Gmail with my regular email address, too, via Google Apps.

But the whole Internet — how is that going to work?  For an excellent writeup on that, see this “I, Cringely” essay.  Via Slashdot, though be warned that the summary there bears little resemblance to the actual article, which is more of a “here’s how Google is thinking very big and very long-term” and not “here’s how Google is bent on world domination.”

Check out this Spiegel Online article about the current state of Liberia and Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s first year in office.  She’s the first elected female head of state in Africa, and you can see a cult of personality developing around her reminiscent of any number of male dictators who were extremely popular before their rotten cores showed, at which point they were thoroughly entrenched.  If she were a man I’d be highly cynical right now, giving her administration a few years before it falls into the same pattern as so many others.  But maybe she’ll be different.

Charles Taylor remains in the Hague.  His trial begins in April.  Meanwhile his son, former head of the atrocious Anti-Terrorism Unit during the war, is under arrest here in the U.S.  Chuckie is an American citizen and is the first person to be arrested under a 1994 law that makes it illegal to commit torture abroad.  A conviction there would not only be justice for Chuckie, but would provide some legal traction against the weak-minded scoundrels who refuse to close the door on torture as an instrument of U.S. policy.

Some bad news about the Bimbo Box — on the way to Michigan last week, the timing belt crapped out as we were pulling into our hotel.  So the next day found me spending seven hours getting to the garage and dealing with updates and waiting while they fixed it.  Things have been smooth since, thankfully.

The Pepboys where the BB was getting fixed was in the middle of a parking lot wasteland in Youngstown, Ohio.  There was a mall nearby, and behind and to the left and right of the mall were more strip malls and Home Depots and Kmarts and other stores, all with their own huge parking lots.   (Ooo, it just occured to me — here’s a Google Maps link with satellite view.)  It was as depressing an expanse of retail drear as I could imagine, and I walked around and through it in the drizzling rain because I had already read the book and the magazine I had brought and I had nothing better to do.

And then, rounding the corner by the Hobby Lobby, I saw them up ahead: on my right, a Borders.  On my left, a Chipotle.  I was saved.  It’s a shame that the retail sprawl exhibits such awful urban planning, but we live in a world where you can find awesome burritos and a store with lots of books and comfy chairs to read them in in freakin’ Youngstown, Ohio.  You have to admit, that’s pretty cool.

Via cdj in his new blog, I learn that George R.R. Martin’s Fire and Ice series is making its way to HBO.

This is superb news because it means that I no longer feel obligated to actually read the books. I started the first book once and put it down for too long, so that when I picked it up again I had lost all the plot threads, yada yada. I’ve always meant to burn through them, not doubting their quality on the basis of so many positive reviews from friends. But now — now, as people will, when the series airs, begin the process of discussing book vs. TV versions, society at large will need That Guy Who Saw the Series But Never Read the Books. And I will be that guy.

I accept, nay, embrace this responsibility.

Welcome to Polytropos’ new digs, over at wordpress.com. Why? Short version: my hosting provider started crapping out big time, and in considering what to do I realized that I am not, at this point in my life, the guy who likes to have his own server space to play with and configure, but rather the guy who wants it to be easy. So rather than migrate to another full-service hosting provider, I’m using wordpress.com and Gmail, though I will be keeping the domain name, so in hopefully not too much time the old url will point faithfully to this blog, and the old email address will work just fine.

So don’t go changing your bookmarks just yet, but in the meantime, you can use this url for the blog and use nbruinooge at gmail dot com to get a hold of me if the usual email bounces. You will need to update the rss feed, though.

Comments should be working again.

Don’t worry, the header image is going to be replaced by something appropriately Polytropian — thanks in advance to Ed!

Older pages are going to be a sea of broken links and unformatted Textile formatting. I’ll try to fix the posts that still get some intermittent traffic.

Oh, and in the spirit of wanting things to be easy, I should confess that I have iPhone lust and also very badly want a Macbook Pro. I am prepared to publically apologize for my years of PC advocacy if the Mac fairy will bring me these things.

“The bimbo box” — Hiro Protagonist’s derisive term for the family minivan in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. I can remember reading that book for the first time, in 1993, and savoring that feeling of dissing those minivan drivers, “[poking] along, random, indecisive, looking at each passing franchise’s driveway like they don’t know if it’s a promise or a threat.” If someone had asked I might have sworn never to own a minivan even before the term “bimbo box” came along; with the added weight of that appellation it would have been a no-brainer.

Stephenson didn’t predict the SUV, though. And by comparison, the minivan doesn’t look quite so bad. It may be staid and a little suburban, sure, but at least it’s not superfluously all-terrain and prone to flippage. SUV drivers may actually think that they look cool, whereas the minivan drivers labor under no such illusion. Their choice is utilitarian, and, as such, is considerably less egregious, as far as gas-guzzling behemoths go.

My point is that, in the greater scheme of things, minivans aren’t that bad any more, right? Right?

Do you see where this is going?

Yes, it’s true, the new Polytroposmobile is a 2000 Toyota Sienna. Seats seven. Teal, or Caribbean Green or something. It was three weeks of loading and unloading with two kids, and contemplating a drive to Michigan with the same (to say nothing of the dimensions of the Sit ‘n’ Stand stroller), that made the choice an obvious one. Sometimes there’s just that deal that comes on down Craigslist and you’d be stupid not to take it, y’know?

At some point in the past this decision might have still been a little traumatic for me, but three years of diapers ‘n’ Dora have long since stripped all the hipness from my system. I am close to achieving a Zen-like state of peace with respect to our purchase — a process that will be helped along by a custom bumper sticker of some sort, though I haven’t exactly decided what it’s going to say yet.