The Sporting Life

I went to an Ivy League school. I suppose there are students in Ivies who are willing to put up with subpar athletics, as long as their team does well in the Ivies. Ivy League schools only do well in two sports: hockey and lacrosse. That's because hardly anyone else plays these sports. I also went to a public school, Maryland, and they do better in lacrosse than the Ivy I went to.

Because of my lack of interest in college sports, most likely fueled by most Ivy students lack of interest in their own sports, I feel I have a decent perspective on college sports, at least, distanced enough not to be a raving fan.

Most universities, especially state universities, use the success of their college teams to keep alumni happy. Universities want alumni to donate money. Alumni want to feel a kinship to other alumni, and the way universities have done this is through college sports, especially football and now basketball. You would think that, maybe, education would be the link that alumni share. But, no, it's sports.

Sports are funny. If you talk to someone who avidly follows a team, you'll notice they use the word "we" a lot. "We played badly. We choked at the end. We didn't defend the pass. We had too many turnovers". Well, you didn't play. You watched. You think your cheers turned the tide?

OK, I'm willing to buy that athletes enjoy the cheers of thousands who simply want them to win. You know the old saying that goes "It's not whether you win or lose. It's how you play the game". The reality is "Winning is not everything. It's the only thing". Listen to George Steinbrenner who simply wants his team to win. That's all he cares about. Winning, to him, is everything, and he pays dearly to try to get his team to win.

Teams that win perenially, as they do in big-time college sports, lead to fans who go just to see their teams win. Fans are fickle. I'd rather see a fan who's there good or bad, rooting their teams to win. But fans invest way too much emotion in their teams. They see the success of their team as reflecting on themselves. A successful team somehow makes a person feel good about themselves, because the team is supposed to reflect who they are.

An unsucessful team means the fan is a failure, and the fan, who's invested this emotion, simply wants to criticize the team, because they've invested so much emotion on the team being succesful, that they can't imagine the team, and therefore, by extension, themselves, as failures. This doesn't seem to happen as much with fans of women's sports. Women seem to support other women who try, and can distance themselves emotionally. When their team does bad, they don't think it reflects on them.

I remember going to a Terrapins basketball game. Fans would tell a player not to take a shot, because they weren't talented enough to make the shot. They wanted the team to win. If the Terps were losing, the fans would want to leave, unable to bear watching the team perform less than winning.

I remember once, shortly after 9-11, when sports columnists like Wilbon said that sports were only a game, that it wasn't serious like events that happen to the US. Bullcocky. Sports are taken with far more seriousness than world events. More people know what happened in the NBA finals than what's happening in Iraq. Reality would be far too depressing if we actually cared about what's going on. Another suicide bombing? It happened over there. Americans lose their lives? It's over there. As long as it's over there, it doesn't count. That's the way people look at it.

Only when it became over here, as in 9-11, did anyone care. But sports? The worst thing that happens is a team loses. Or maybe a fight breaks out. A person can root for some other team, and you don't feel particularly upset. I dare say that Democrats feel so much enmity for Republicans (and vice versa), that the only thing close in sports is a Red Sox fan who hates the Yankees. Most people tolerate fans that support other teams, because they can gloat if their team wins.

If anything, fans are passionate about sports. They certaintly are far more passionate about the outcome of a game, than they are in their own jobs, which take, let's face it, work. They're more passionate about their teams than any hobby. If that passion could somehow be translated to something useful, then people could be successful (if success is what they're after). But being a passionate sports fan just requires you to show up, keep up with results, and cheer.

How much else in life is that simple?

How Programming Has Changed

I was just reading a book on programming in Perl. It seems like an odd choice for the author. If you're going to teach a programming language these days, it's probably Java, or if you're more daring, Scheme, or some functional language. To pick a scripting language that has difficult semantics, well, it makes you wonder if the author has tried teaching it in a classroom situation. It's funny how people write programming books geared towards beginners, but may never have taught beginners to see the kinds of mistakes they make.

I've taught beginners, and there's one fact you realize quickly. Not everyone is cut out for programming. More than perhaps anything else, writing a program means dealing with constant failure. It doesn't take much for a program to fail.

Errors tend to fall into two categories. The first is the "dumb error". This is the kind of error you run into when you know what's wrong, but due to a lapse in concentration, you do the wrong thing. For example, recently I was taking a rather silly quiz online. I was supposed to give the correct spelling of tattoo. I picked (out of 4 choices) the spelling: tatoo. I know how to spell tattoo, but in my haste, I picked the wrong one.

There are errors similar to that in programming. You write = instead of ==. You think a function returns a boolean, when it returns an int. You forget string operations in Java don't mutate the string, and so forth.

The other kind of error is due to a lack of understanding. This error can fall in two subcategories. You can either not understand some feature in a language (or misunderstand it), or you can not understand your solution. I suppose there's even a third subcategory, where you know what you want to do, but you're not sure how to express it in the language.

Again, it helps to explain with an analogy. Suppose you're cooking, You are using some appliance, like a food processor. Maybe a food processor can't blend the way a blender does, but you think it can. You wonder why, when you use a food processor, that it can't pulverize properly. This is analogous to not understanding a feature of the language (you don't understand how your appliances work).

On the other hand, you might have a recipe, and you are asked to saute, but you don't know what it means to saute. You understand how to use the appliances fine. Thus, you don't understand cooking terminology.

You can draw analogies from cooking to programming. Cooking involves tools and techniques. Tools include knives, whisks, blenders, mixers, etc. Those tools are similar to the programming language you use. Then, you have recipes and techniques within recipes. Recipes use ingredients prepared by using tools. Similarly, programs are written in programming languages.

Anyway, I was reading this intro programming book on Perl, and I began to realize that the way it teaches programming is not that different from the way it was taught in the 80s. That means, the ideas are 20 years old or more. Programming, being the young discipline that it is, and being technology-driven, has evolved in 20 years. It's not that ideas from the 1980s are bad or even wrong, just inadequate.

To give another analogy. For many years, tennis teachers in the US taught a classic style of tennis that was popular in the 1950s. Players were told to grip racquets using an Eastern grip. They were taught to step into the shots, and be sideways to the net. They were taught to hit their shots flat or with a slight amount of topspin. Well, the game hasn't been played that way for a while. Grips became Western. Wrist shots were used more liberally. Heavy topspin was the name of the game.

A tennis teacher who kept teaching the same thing year after year, would find him or herself teaching techniques that were out of date. Clearly, those techniques weren't bad, but they didn't expose the student to new ways of playing that might make them better.

When people started teaching programming, they used flowcharts. There were other disciplines that used flowcharts, disciplines in engineering, for instance. Since programming was seen as engineering, it made some sense to use flowcharts. Then, it became popular to talk about top-down design. Even today, I'm sure you can find a programming teacher that emphasizes top-down design.

Top-down design basically says take a problem, work out a high-level solution. Then, break that down into smaller and smaller pieces, until the pieces are so small, it's easy to program. Again, an analogy. The problem: to host a dinner for ten of your best friends. The solution: cook a dinner for ten people.

You must then think of a solution with more details. For example, you might decide that the entire dinner is all appetizers. Or you want to make one big dish. Or you might want to be fancy and have soup and appetizers, followed by a main course, followed by a dessert. Do you want paper plates or fine china? Do you want music? Do you want candles? Who does the cooking?

As you can see, the solution depends on what you want. In fact, the questions I'm asking are part of a new idea in teaching programming (it's not that new, but it's pretty new). In the past, people thought of writing self-contained programs. You have a small problem you want to solve. For example, you might want to have several customers opening a bank account, and you want to manage that (give them interest, etc).

In the past, programming teachers made this huge assumption that many weren't aware of. Programmers should write complete programs. That means, programmers should write every line of code. Furthermore, they assumed beginning programmers couldn't write many lines of programs, so they came up with trivial programs to write, that contained maybe 100 lines at most.

To give yet another analogy, suppose you are teaching someone music composition. You might think students aren't patient, so they should only write songs that are, say, 100 notes or so. And they should only use one instrument. And they should only write music in one key. And they should only use 4/4 as their beat. In other words, you simplify a great deal. In the end, the student writes this really simple piece of music, and has simply no idea how to write for multiple instruments, how to deal with different keys, and different time signatures, and so forth.

Has the student really learned how to compose music? Not really. Sure, they have to start somewhere, but it's easy to teach them the bare basics, and ignore the complexities of really writing good music.

The biggest change in programming in the 1990s was twofold. First, there was the switch to object-oriented programming. This really threw programming teachers for a loop (pun intended). Programming teachers were used to teaching functions as the basis of programming. If you think in functions, you seperate the data (which gets passed in as parameters), from the manipulation of the data. However, the data gets "exposed". It's underlying structure is obvious to the programmer, and therefore isn't easily abstracted.

For example, you might have a chessboard. You use a 2D int array to represent the board. Now, every function that manipulates the chessboard works with a 2D int array. What if you wanted to change the int array to some kind of tree structure. The biggest problem is that you don't think of the chessboard as a "board" but as something intrinsic to a programming language: the array.

Object oriented programming languages like Java allow you to create objects that represent the chessboard. You can have the chessboard object tell you what piece is at a certain location, or to make it move a piece, and then check to see if that move is legal. You can have it determine checks, checkmates, castling, and so forth. In other words, you begin to treat the chessboard more like a chessboard.

Object oriented programming begins to combine data with functions to manipulate the data. In particular, each object has a limited set of functions that can manipulate the object. Users use the object by these functions. This provides safeguards. Users only think of the object in terms of what they can do with the object. The underlying data can be hidden away, so that it can be changed if need be.

To teach OO programming, you need to start thinking in terms of objects. What objects do you want? What should these objects do? This was a big change from the way people were used to thinking. When Pascal programmers switched to Java, many of them simply tried writing objects that behaved like functions. They just couldn't think in objects (at least, not without a lot of work).

But OO programming still makes one big assumption. You write your programs in one language.

This is what's changing about programming. Java was supposed to be cool because not only did you get a garbage collected language, you also got this tremendously huge library. Programmers were no longer going to write much of their own code from complete scratch. They were going to use objects others had written, and since the libraries are standard, they could expect other programmers to have the same library.

But people are realizing that one language may not be enough. For example, you may want to use a database, but you may not necessarily want to use a Java database. Or you may need to install a webserver (at least you can use Java based servers, such as Tomcat). Even if you do use one language, people are using canned tools. For example, suppose you want to play music or you want to display charts. You use other people's fully developed programs and combine it with yours.

This is good and bad. In programming, it's great to use other people's solutions. The only problem is that other people's solutions aren't static. They keep changing too. Most people who suggest you use other people's solutions, have you install their software. This can be problematic over time.

In fact, this trend of using other software to solve your problems has a huge drawback. Within 5 years, the solution is likely to fail. It works now, but assumes software doesn't change or that the people who distribute software don't change it. Except due to the fact we sell software, it does change---all the time. So, in 5 years, you're lucky if you can find the software. If it breaks, you don't know why. When you piece together software that isn't standard (for example, not using Java libraries), you're running the risk it won't work in the long term.

The advantage is that you can create sophisticated solutions that work now.

The real challenge with using libraries and other software is learning they exist, and making them part of your programming lexicon. Suppose you want to use a database. Which one do you pick? What are the criteria? If I master one database and its installation and quirks, am I really prepared to learn a second one? Better solutions might exist, but now I have to learn how they work! And this isn't enlightening learning. Everyone wants to do things their own way, rather than develop a standard.

I fear that as powerful as software has become, the commercialization of software is killing software. Once upon a time, people wrote utilities for Unix. Some, like make, were not very good. There were obvious things to fix in make. Yet, it persisted and persisted (though several flavors of make arose too). More or less the make used in Unix now is about the same as it was 20 years ago. Can the same be said of some database? Or Java? Many of those didn't exist 20 years ago.

The increasing evolution of software is, I argue, a bad thing, because people trying to run the software must now scavenge for the pieces, and hope they all fit together. Even when you say you're using Java, you need to specify the platform, and the version. People used to say, with Java, write once, use anywhere. Well, that's not strictly true. Java keeps coming out with tweaks to the language. Some of that is good, as it fixes bugs. Some of it is just new, and may create new bugs.

In the end, as programming changes, we don't know how best to teach it anymore. People go out and see that the skills they came out with aren't enough to cope with the programming world as they see it now. Worse still, smart people, teachers and professors, are often displaced from the working programmer's world, and therefore, are slow to respond to changes, since they teach, rather than learn the new skills of the workplace.

The workplace now demands use of version control and continuous build and a build process and good IDEs, and so on and so forth. Each of these technologies requires many hours to master, and is likely to change in 5 years time. How will the industry attract new people when these changes aren't always for the better (after all, it keeps changing!). I suspect, at some point, people are going to laugh at the way we did programming now. It produced solutions, but solutions that are the kludgiest of patches. They were elegant in some fashion, but not good enough to stand the test of time.

Programming teachers want to believe that what they teach doesn't have to change. Programming is a technology, and uses technology, so it's always changing. This is not calligraphy or art, where the basis seems to stay the same, for at least decades, if not centuries at a time.

Why PL folks need to work in systems

In the technology world, I have a dream. I have a dream that when I install software, it simply works. And if it fails to work, it explains why it fails, and then, it fixes itself, and it simply works.

How many times have you downloaded something, and had to spend hours or days, trying to figure out why the installation failed? Why is this kind of machismo looked so favorably among software engineers? It's a badge of honor to be able to install software that has little to no documentation, that depends on crap like DLLs and obscure patches, and obscure drivers, with arcane invocations to get things to work.

The solution? Programming languages researchers need to rescue us from this mess.

PL researchers learned to formalize languages. This has lead to a world that programmers understand. More or less, if you follow the rules, you can get a program to compile and run, and if it fails, more or less, you know why. It ain't perfect, not by a long shot. If it fails, it doesn't really tell you why, except cursorily.

Yet, PL folks stay confined to their sandboxed world. I'm sorry, but software runs on a system, and there's no formalism governing the OS they run on. If good languages are math, good OSes are complete hacks jerry-rigged by people who, through brute force, just made it work. Ask them if they have proofs or a formalism, and they will laugh.

One possible solution, were performance not a total issue, is the browser. If a browser could provide a generic environment that's the same on any machine, then you'd go to a website and use the software, and there'd be no installation, and so forth. But browsers can run like a dog, well, a three-legged dog with constipation, as dogs actually run quite quickly.

I ask the PL folks of the world to save us from the horrendousness of software installation. It's about time.

Aces High

From 1982 to about 1992, I watched tennis avidly. You must have cable if you want to do that. The major networks would rather put on golf, which I also enjoy, than tennis. Tennis, unlike team sports, is personality driven. This is challenging because players are out there to win, not to entertain, and some players simply don't have the kind of personality that makes them notable.

Furthermore, American audiences (except for true tennis fans) want to see Americans play. When they hear of Rafael Nadal or even Roger Federer, they pine for the days of McEnroe, Borg, and Connors.

After 1996, I rarely had cable, and so I rarely watched or even followed tennis. Tennis, to be honest, for the most part, is tedious to watch. Occasionally, you see the drama of a good player collapsing, or perhaps two good players playing great shots.

Recently, I watched the finals of the French Open. Mary Pierce was in the final. Anyone who's followed tennis knows her story. She had an overbearing American father, who pressured her to play. She always seemed in such distress. Finally, when her mother separated from her dad, a huge albatross seemed lifted from her shoulders, and she played well.

Except for one thing. Pierce lacks the mental toughness to play well day-in and day-out. When she's on her game, she can beat anyone. When she's off, she can lose to anyone. Against, Henin-Hardenne, she was simply off. It made the finals almost unwatchable. You'd like to say this is not typical, but it's pretty common in women's tennis.

In men's tennis, the men know how to keep the ball in play. They'll stretch the points longer and wait for mistakes. This isn't exciting either, but it shows more skill than simply attacking the ball and missing.

Maybe when I get cable again, I'll try to watch tennis once more. I used to know the players, and with the Internet, and sporting websites like ESPN's, I could find out results from every major tournament, something that was quite challenging if you only had a local paper. The Internet has really made following all sorts of sports much more fulfulling.

I'll watch basketball, or football, or even baseball (but only playoffs, since the rest of the season is unwatchable), but I just don't know enough of the rules. I can't tell when they foul, or travel, or whatever in basketball. I can barely tell the strategies they use. Still, I watch, I follow results, I know personalities. I can hold my own in a sports conversation.

I once suggested to my roommate that there should be the equivalent of, say, a Good Eats by Alton Brown to teach the game of football to the masses. I'd be willing to do it too. Would Food Network go for such a wacky idea?

Green Acres

I'm in the middle of watching Pillow Book. I've seen several of Peter Greenaway's films: Drowning by Numbers, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, Her Lover, Prospero's Books, 8 1/2 Women, and The Pillow Book. Of the films he's made that I want to see: Tulse Luper Suitcases (three parts), Baby of Macon, and The Falls. I saw part of The Draughtsman Contract.

Most people wouldn't watch Greenaway at all if were not for nudity. Greenaway uses, in most of his films, the most casual use of nudity. Often, nudity is not meant to be alluring, nor sexy, and often, it's male nudity. He has had some moderately famous actors shed clothes in his films, the most notable being Helen Mirren, in Cook, Ewan McGregor in Pillow Book, and Ralph Fiennesin Baby of Macon.

Greenaway often cares very little about a strong plot or characters. He tends to like disruption in order. He's fascinated by art and literature, more so than the film medium he uses.

I decided to watch Pillow Book again. For those who want to see Ewan in the buff, this is the film (though certainly, he's never been too hesitant to show off his manhood--see Young Adam, Trainspotting, Velvet Goldmine for a few examples.

Of all the films I remember from Greenaway, Pillow Book is the one that has the closest thing to a coherent plot, and characters that you can somewhat care about. The story begins with Nagiko, as a child. Her father is a writer, and on each birthday, he inks, on her face, an incantation about the creation of man (or woman), then on the back, he inscribes that if God likes his creation, he brings it to life by signing his name.

Nagiko's father, however, doesn't get published without sexual favors that he must do for his publisher. His daughter, who also aspires to be a writer, wishes to take revenge. She eventually decides to seduce Jerome (played by Ewan McGregor), who is the publisher's current lover.

If the film is about anything, it's the love of both literature and sexuality. The Pillow Book refers to a book written by a Japanese woman also named Nagiko, who made lists, loved literature, and loved men. The current day Nagiko also loves calligraphy and men in particular, seeking the perfect combination. This is something of theme for Greenaway, who also appreciates art, literature, and sexuality or love.

A Greenaway film is visually lush. The plot is, well, convenient, as it drives the story forward, but Greenaway is just as interested in putting images of beauty on the screen, whether it be calligraphy or song or literature. In this film, he puts images within images, lyrics of songs written in calligraphy, and most notably, the use of calligraphy on the body, thus making the most literal combination of literature and sexuality. Few, if any, directors think like Greenaway who fancies himself an artist, a painter, a poet, more than he thinks of himself as a director.

Greenaway is fascinated by lists, by numbers, by patterns. Often, he's just as interested in this, as he is in the storyline. The story often has some lurid elements, but it's set very formally.

In Pillow Book, there is a story of revenge, as well as Jerome's mad love for Nagiko. The characters aren't particularly deep. Even as Jerome's mother tries to flesh out his past, and his interest in Asia, he's a very thin character, and Nagiko herself is also thin. She is mostly about her revenge and her desire for art and love.

You get the sense that Greenaway is making a commentary about art itself, though these stories, that the average person doesn't care about art the way they should, the way the characters do, and the way he does. This is mostly seen from Nagiko's husband, who uses archery to shoot at Nagiko's books, tries to restrict the number of books she owns, and eventually burns books. He is seen as a complete simpleton when it comes to art, and Nagiko will have nothing of him.

Greenaway loves the juxtaposition of beauty and ugliness, in this case, of art and of revenge. There's the scene of Ewan with calligraphy over his body, and the business suit wearing Japanese who transcribe the words onto paper. It is the contrast of art and business. Of art and sex.

There have been two Greenaway films set partly in Japan: Pillow Book and 8 1/2 Women. I think Greenaway likes the stark contrast of Asian to Western art, the formality in the society, the masks people hide. He uses imagery familiar to Kurosawa fans, that echo Noh theater. In particular, he seems to admire the reverence of calligraphy, as well as Eastern views of sensuality.

Language also appears to be important. Vivian Wu, a Chinese, plays Nagiko, a Japanese. Throughout the film, she speaks Japanese or Chinese or English. Greenaway clearly knows that she speaks a multitude of languages, and even works it into the story. He tells of her leaving Japan for Hong Kong, learning Chinese, as she learned from her Chinese mother, then going back to Japan. In the meanwhile, she narrates in a British English though she claims to want to learn to speak like an American. Jerome is a translator who can speak several languages.

I wonder what the meaning of language is to Greenaway. Clearly, he's fascinated by cultural differences, and seems to have some grasp of the culture and art, even as he puts his unique spin on the presentation.

There are some that hate Greenaway, who see him using nudity because that's the only way people will watch his films. His disdain for traditional crowd-pleasing elements. Even so, Pillow Book, for a Greenaway film, has a discernible plot, but it is that, the visual feast he presents, that ultimately provide the Greenaway experience. He tries to present multiple stimulations to the senses, and is perhaps unique in the way he does it.

Upcoming Movies

The last film I was looking forward to watching was Mysterious Skin, and it was a stunner. I doubt the ones I want to watch will match its intensity and sensitivity. Even so, not every film I see has to be great of even good.

These are the films I'm looking forward to seeing:

• War of the Worlds I know. It's Tom Cruise. Can we stand to see him in yet another Spielberg movie? Of all the brat pack members, Cruise is the one who's managing his career best. Actors like Drew Barrymore and others are realizing if they want to have good roles, they need to have a marketing engine behind it. Cruise works with great directors, and builds movies around him. The only one that's close to him, and it's not that close, is Johnny Depp. Both have attractive men, but have found roles that are better than those that depend on paparazzi qualities.
  
  Even if Spielberg isn't always successful with his films, there's no denying the man has talent, and that science fiction films often play to his strengths.
  
• Serenity Joss Whedon is a good writer. He writes intriguing dialogue that's a lot smarter than the average screenwriter. Penning the series Firefly upon which this film is based, the one weakness in the film may be its acting. The characters are interesting, but there's no standout among them. It's like watching Star Trek (either series) when the cast went to the big screen. Unlike Star Trek, there's hope that the writing is good for the writer of Buffy and Angel.
  
• Brokeback Mountain Ang Lee has made very good films, but not any (in my opinion) great films. His version of Incredible Hulk was lambasted as much as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was lauded. This tells the story of two cowboys who fall in love in the West. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger, there's a question about how much risk either actor will take to play these roles.
  
  A friend thinks its possible that the result may be much like The Color Purple where the lesbian aspects were excised to make a film more palatable to red state America (though to be fair, Spielberg seems to find dealing with sexuality very challenging, and tends to avoid it).
  
• Tropical Malady I've yet to see any film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul, clearly the most talented director from Thailand, and perhaps the most talented in Southeast Asia. Whenever Mike D'Angelo puts a film in his top 10 list, I pay attention. This one is number 1 on his list from 2004.
  
• Dallas 362 Number 3 in the 2003 top ten list of Mike D'Angelo. It might make it to the theaters this year, just as Mysterious Skin took 2 years before it was released.
  
• Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. There have been three Wallace and Gromit films, each lasting about half an hour. Only one was brilliant: The Wrong Trousers. A Close Shave was technically brilliant, but the storyline was weak. This is a full-featured length film. I hope there's a good story line. This is where Pixar shines. It's all about story. Still, it's amazing what they can do with plasticine.
  
• The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe CS Lewis didn't write that many novels, but this was one of the few. From the special effects team that brought you the Lord of the Rings trilogy come the children's fantasy brought to life. Still, there's something scary about selling a film based on its special effects team.
  
• King Kong Peter Jackson cranks out another film. Can he follow up the hugely successful Lord of the Rings trilogy with Jack Black, Adrien Brody, Naomi Watts, and Jamie Bell playing the human roles against Kong (played by Andy Serkis who's getting a reputation as a CGi actor).

Of the films on the list, the top two I want to see are Tropical Malady and Brokeback Mountain.

I'll probably end up seeing Fantastic Four, but it looks bad. Or, at least, average. I'm sure there are a few other good films I haven't heard of that should make this list as the release dates come closer.

Safe

There's a scene, very late in Mysterious Skin, that feels so right that even the blow-by-blow account, which feels somehow unsatisfying, can't mask the power of what simply works.

Until the end, like some Bizarro version of Sleepless In Seattle (and I shudder to make the comparison), Neil played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and Brian played by Brady Corbet, finally meet, and they meet on Christmas. Brian has waited a life time to find out the answers to the questions that have plagued him since he was 8 years old.

He wants to know why he blacked out for 5 hours. He wants to know why he had a bloody nose. He wants to know why he wet his bed. He's convinced that aliens abducted him. We, too, are waiting to find out the answer with Brian, and Araki holds this until the last ten minutes of the film. There is a remarkable maturity to allow Brian's character to be more than his obsession. His budding friendship with Eric, who introduces him to music he's never heard, who cares enough to get him a present (a sweater jacket!).

Rather than simply have Neil explain what happens, they break into a house. This is the house where it began. Where Brian no longer remember what happens to him. Araki uses setting to explain what happened. It is that sense of place, as Brian begins to recall what his mind supressed all those years. It is an awakening for Neil too. The house no longer belongs to coach, but the room looks the same, the kitchen cabinets look the same, the couch is about the right place. Does Neil really need to tell Brian what happens? Does he need to bring him closure? Perhaps not.

But if he's going to do it, there's no other way to do it, to give the full impact of what's going on than to be in the middle of where it happened. This is perhaps the single most riveting scene. Even beyond the American Beauty like cereal scene that is the focus of Neil's recollection of his time with Coach.

Araki leaves this scene at the moment when Brian fully realizes what happened to him, and to his life, and yet, without any sense of what will happen to Brian, or Neil, or how they'll live their lives from that point onward. It's at the point where Araki can't and shouldn't provide us more answers. Does Brian finally live his life, and maybe establish a relationship with Eric? Or Neil? Or even Avalyn? Does Neil finally reach meaning in his life?

We don't know. Araki leaves us much as he leaves Brian, knowing the truth, but not knowing what to do with it.

Wu Cares

I've had friends who love ketchup. Whenever they get fries, they get a prodigious amount of ketchup, until the result is akin to potato-tomato soup. I've always wondered why they do this. If fries are so tasty, why use ketchup. The answer is? Fries aren't always so tasty. They're greasy and icky, at times. Ketchup, on the other hand, has a level of consistency. Even when fries suck, you can add ketchup and make it taste better. So, are fries any good, if you always need ketchup to make it taste better? I wonder.

Last night (now June 20), at the E Street, they had a sneak preview of Saving Face. Ostensibly, this is a film about Asian American lesbians. Already, it's hitting two genres of films. Most gay/lesbian films are romantic comedies, or coming-of-age films, or somewhere on the light end of the spectrum.

Asian American films (not to be confused with period costume dramas from China, or even the period 60s and 70s Hong Kog of Wong Kar-Wai) are often about the Asian American experience. Almost always, it's about family, the conservative parents who still want to live life as in the old country, and the youth, who are embarrassed by their parents, while living life as members of the adopted society. It's also hard to avoid weddings in Asian fare. You see it in The Wedding Banquet (filmed by Ang Lee when he was making films in Taiwan, but really an Asian-American film). There's a wedding in Bend it Like Beckam. There's one here as well.

The real problem with gay films is that the relationship is almost always, pardon the pun, played straight. This is the story of Wil (short for, OMG, Wilhemena? Surely, even Asian parents wouldn't do this to their kids) and Vivian (though, the movie does get one fact right--if there's a suitable obscure American name, they'll find it for their kids). Unlike most films about gay love, neither the two leads are completely new to the situation. Still, that doesn't make the experience resonate any deeper.

Since the main story is often taken straight, with characters and their relationships being on the bland end, there is a need to either have strong minor characters, or a second plot. The second plot, minorly outlandish, is what's added. In the story, Wil's mother played by Joan Chen (dressed up to look rather motherly, rather than ravishing), is a single mother, who's husband may be dead or divorced (can't recall which), who is pregnant, in her 40s.

The story is a modern Scarlet Letter. Mom won't tell anyone who the father is, and her own father is so humiliated by the thought of an unwed daughter, he's ready to disown her. Meanwhile, Wil has been keeping a secret from her mother (not much of one, since her mother "knows" the truth, but denies it). Here are two stories about a daughter's shame to her mother. When Wil finally tells her mother (who has moved in to live with her after being disowned) that she's gay, her mother can't deal with it.

We in the audience can't believe this is happening, because her mother is in possibly a worse bind than Wil, and yet this is perhaps more true to life.

Saving Face suffers from a trite relationship and a screwball situation, and covers it with unusually canny observations about Asian American life. Even though this film is Asian American (set in Flushing NY), it's practically a foreign film when it comes to subtitles. More than half the dialogue is in Chinese.

There are small observations about Asian American life that seem right. Asian parents tend to be ambitious for their children. So, Wil's a doctor, and a talented one at that. Vivian is a dancer, and a talented one at that. Vivian's dad is a doctor, and wants her daughter to do ballet in Paris, while Vivian wants to do modern dance. Vivian is the confident artist type (which isn't so unusual for Asian Americans, even if many of them are doctors and engineers), while Wil is the shy, but determined doctor.

Wil's mother is always trying to set her up with some guy (and you find out why later), but even that's not so unusual in Asian society. Saving Face is good at realizing details of life as an Asian American, and yet, despite the paucity of the Asian American films in the mainstream, they tend to tread the same ground. I'd really like to see Indian Americans in a predominantly black neighborhood (which itself isn't so uncommon), because at least I'd see something I haven't seen before.

Asian American films need to reach beyond the stories of families, or at least, the ones we commonly see. Generation gap stories are common for Asian American films, but are hardly seen for any other ethnic group in the US. I understand there's something intriguing about clinging to an old culture while living in a new one, but there are other stories ot tell, too.

Saving Face has far less to say about lesbian relationships. Unlike other gay/lesbian films (well, i've mostly seen gay films), there's no other gay characters in the film (at least, not overtly so. It's possible that some of Wil's friends are gay, but it's never explicitly said). Even Beautiful Thing eventually works its way to some gay hangout. Vivian's mother is seen as being foward thinking as she doesn't seem to mind Vivian's preferences (though her mother is never seen on screen).

Gay films seem to have a difficult time with long-standing relations. After all, many fall the romantic comedy arc of boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy breaks up with girl, and boy reunites with girl, where you can replace boy and girl with whatever permutation you want.

It's so much more innocent to deal with relationships as they are about to start, and give you the sense of happily ever after at the end, than it is to deal with the relationship in mid-stride. The writer is often feeling out the characters and their interactions, which is much easier than trying to figure out an established relationship.

If Wu seems to have a talent, it is in the light comedic touches of the film, which make it funny, without being totally embarassing. Wu doesn't have the crowd-pleasing instincts of Gurinder Suha, who at least makes her family trouble more realistic (the sister getting married is actually common among Indian families). Wu does resort to a few cliches. How many weddings must there be? How many times must a wedding be interrupted just as vows come.

And, how often must there be a breakup at an airport? At the time you're watching it, you may not care that this is like the twentieth time you've seen a scene at the airport, or the hundredth wedding that's going to be broken up. And yet, it shows a sign of laziness to reuse these plot points over and again.

Genre films, such as gay and lesbian romances, have a hard time rising to great films because they rely so much on using familiar ideas. Usually, if a film is partly successful, it's because they make observations that are particular to their audience. There's many funny lines in the film, and it's nice to see Asian Americans and it's nice that it's about lesbians and single mothers. It observes traditional Asian values (boo!) with non-traditional situations (unwed mother, lesbian daughter).

I left enjoying the lightness of touch, I liked the characters in the film. I recognized some of what the characters were going through, and the observations of Asian American life. However, in hindsight, is the whole film good when it is the observations and the humor that make it worth watching rather its central story. There's no subtext or anything clever like that. Somehow, I think it's not enough. Even though I want to see more Asian American fare, I also want to see directors stretch themselves more creatively too.

Lost Boys

Read no further if you don't want spoilers galore for Mysterious Skin.

The trailer for Mysterious Skin offers very little hint to the subject matter at hand. It seems to be about a teenager living in Kansas, who is missing five hours of his life. He remembers, as a little boy, that there were periods where he blacked out. The only thing he remembers is another little boy, and that becomes his link to the events that occurred ten years before.

I've seen two films by Gregg Araki: The Living End, about two gay friends, both with HIV, angry at the world, and The Doom Generation about two people, a male and a female, who pick up a third, and the ensuing road trip. These two films showed the indie roots of Araki. The storytelling was not clean nor polished, and ran more on emotional highs and lows than on a good story.

I haven't seen two of his other more well-noted films: Splendor and Nowhere, nor have I seen Totally F***ed Up. Mysterious Skin is his most assured film of the three. Based on a novel by Scott Heim, which opens up with the hook "The summer I was eight years old, five hours disappeared from my life", Araki tells the lives of four teens, in particular, paying attention to Neil and Brian, but also to Wendy and Eric.

Brian opens up the story, trying to recall what happened to his life, when he was about 8 years old. He's had problems relating to anyone, and comes across as a shy, nerdy kid. Once we see Neil's story, we know what has happened. Neil is the son of single mother, and plays baseball, because his mom's boyfriend doesn't want to pay for daycare. His athletic prowess makes him the star of the team, and his looks also make him a favorite of the coach.

Yes, this is a film about pedophilia. However, unlike most films (of which there are very few) about the subject, this one is from the vantage point of the children, after they've grown up. Coach has that Marlboro man look, with a moustache. He hangs out with Neil, and since Neil's mom seems to be frustrated with her own life, as she tries to find a man in her life, she's unaware of what Neil does. She's not shown to be completely irresponsible, and she does love her son. Yet, she's unaware of what he does for a living (hustle johns).

To take the coach completely out of the modern day is simply a great idea. Everyone believes the impact of pedophilia is most strongly felt with the victims, and the two victims: Neil and Brian feel the impact of an event that occurred ten years earlier, yet, both take a different route. Neil, who remembers the events of the day, is a gay hustler. He picks guys up at a playground, while his childhood friend Wendy looks on.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt takes on a challenging role, where he must play someone who's looking for something that he can't reclaim. He remembers when he was the only thing that mattered to coach, when he felt, at least to an 8 year old, true love. Everything since then has been an attempt to reconnect with his past, from his like of men with moustaches, to taking money from them, because Coach used to give him money when he did favors for him. His life as a prostitute is as much about reliving his youth as it is making money.

That life, as has been portrayed in other similar films, is not without its dangers, from abusive men to men with disease, Neil's life is transient. The only ones that care about him are his best friend Wendy and Eric, who's also gay, and has a thing for Neil.

Neil and Brian have left separate lives, until Brian seeks answers to the questions in his life. His answers come through Avalyn, who Brian sees on a show about alien abduction. Thinking she is a kindred spirit, he visits her. She's a bit of an invalid, with her one crutch, and almost sees Brian as someone who might share more than stories of abduction. Avalyn helps him to seek out the other boy in his dream.

At this point, Neil leaves Hutchinson, Kansas, and heads to New York where his friend Wendy now lives. He does in New York what he's always done, which is to meet men. Wendy warned Eric that Neil has no heart, and has instead, a bottomless pit, and it's all because he seeks something that he lost as a child. In the meanwhile, as Brian finally locates Neil's home (he only knows him as N. McCormack), he befriends Eric.

Now Eric looks a bit like Boy George. Eric has a streak of blond in his hair, and wears like seven earrings. Yet, Brian's mother is more concerned about the alien girl, Avalyn, then she is about gay Eric. Even so, Eric and Brian's relation is platonic (much as Eric and Neil's relation). Eric sends postcards to Neil telling him about this strange boy who thinks they were abducted by aliens.

If there's a small misstep in the film it's the end sequence. At some point, Brian must meet Neil, and must find the truth. Yet, as cathartic as this is for Brian, it doesn't work nearly as well for Neil. Brian doesn't seem to be the answer to his problems, though he can now point to this event in both their lives that they are both dealing with.

Araki puts his camera close up, showing actors in tight close-ups. The actors sound a bit Southern for Kansas, but that's something I can overlook. Levitt plays a tough role. He's nude in several scenes, and has to deal with many men that are less than savory. However, more challenging than that, he plays a character who is a bottomless pit, who has a tough time expressing his love, even as those around him do love him. Often, Wendy and Neil's mom make him promise to do something, and often he can't say he'll promise. He shakes his head, but can't utter the words.

There are even small bits that Levitt conveys, particularly, with wearing low-rise jeans and possibly going commando, that shows the kind of seduction he's subtly trying to convey to others.

Brian, played by Brady Corbet, is also very good, as the shy kid looking for answers. If you look photos of Corbet as he really looks, he's actually quite good looking. He looks like a better looking McCauley Culkin (though the comparisons are perhaps not fair given how creepy people think Culkin looks). It speaks to Corbet's acting to lose himself in this role.

The two kids playing the younger Brian and Neil are reasonably uncanny in their similarities to their older counterparts, even if you can tell that these are child actors, who end up overacting a bit.

Araki avoids making the parents too stereotypical. Brian's mom is more stereotypical, but she makes fun of Brian's obsession with alien life. Even so, she lets him believe what she wants, without relying on histrionics. Neil's mom, played by Elisabeth Shue, seems a bit young to be a mom, but I think that's intentional. Her life is a bit messed up, and yet she and Neil share a reasonably solid relationship. Araki hints there's possibly more to the relationship. In one scene, near the end, she cuddles up close to him, and in another, she walks into the men's room, but neither she nor he seem to care.

This is a difficult film for all involved, telling the story of the aftermath of a pedophile, and yet it's a far more effective way to tell this story. It's a touching story, with no real answers. Particularly brilliant is the closing location. While I found the use of explaining all that happened by Neil a bit heavyhanded, the fact that they break into the house that Coach used to live, and go visit the places that Brian and Neil shared as children is unbelievably powerful, and is an idea that's rarely exploited in films.

Brady and Joseph are to be commended for dealing with this subject matter. I go to films to see the edges of society. Cinematically, Araki films this much like Sam Mender filmed American Beauty. There is a dream like quality in the way scenes from the early 80s are filmed. It is structurally less complex than Beauty, but rawer in its emotions and subject matter.

It's the best movie I've seen on the topic, and perhaps the first or second best film I've seen this year (up with 3-iron).

This Land Is My Land

We shall overcome
We shall overcome
We shall overcome some day

Oh deep in my heart
I do believe
We shall overcome some day

I can't say that I'm a George Romero afficianado. I don't mean this in a negative way. It's just that I haven't bothered to catch up with Romero's zombie movies over the years. He's directed three previous zombie movies spanning four decades: Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead. In fact, he's directed quite a few other films including one about O.J. Simpson (Juice on the Loose), with its dramatically ironic title (the film was made in the 70s).

I suspect, if anything, most people haven't seen a Romero film because the subject matter, zombies, is a turn-off. For non-horror fans, it's just another horror movie. For horror fans, it doesn't offer the same visceral thrills as a Freddie or a Jason (or a Freddy vs. Jason). Romero's zombies have never been too quick. They amble along in their half-drunken stupor, and yet seem to outrace most people who would rather not share the same zipcode.

Land of the Dead succeeds because it's more than a zombie movie, as perhaps many zombie movies are. The zombies are not just zombies, but stand for the downtrodden of society, looking to overcome their untouchability.

Zombie movies always feel like their set in the present, and yet, Land really borrows a lot from science fiction films, especially, post-apocalyptic films like Mad Max. However, where Mad Max (itself a part of a cult triology), is set in a near future, where fuel is valuable, and society has degraded to survivors in a harsh world, Romero uses this zombified world as a crucible of class struggle.

Unlike the zombies of 28 Days Later, which make zombies out to be vicious animals, similar to wolves, and therefore something to be feared, Romero understands his zombies stand in for the "dead" in our society, and perhaps Shaun of the Dead also understand this. The dead are those who don't think, who go about their business, and yes, let pretty fireworks distract them.

I wish I could remember the quote of the film, where Dennis Hopper says something like "In a land where the dead are now alive, the xxx ceases to have any meaning", but what is xxx? I'm sure someone will remind me.

Fiddler's Green is a skyscraper now run by Dennis Hopper, and he's in charge of a enclave where the rich of the world can live segregated from the zombies. They drink, and wear suits, blissfully unaware of the world outside. The poor, on the other hand, must fend for themselves, and are not much above zombies, which eventually becomes the point. Where the poor depend on the rich to make a living, and desire upward mobility, the zombies too have discovered they want more.

Lead by Martin Luther zombie, they're ready to lay siege on Fiddler's Green.

To contrast again with 28 Days Later, where the survivors take a more realistic view of their situation (they must survive), Romero's zombie world is about trying to live a quality of life despite what the zombies have done. When wealth is suddenly scarce, those who have it will keep it, and try to block out the misery. This creates a "life goes on" attitude among the denizens of this world.

Since zombies don't make good actors (although here, you can tell, without words, what the zombies want), the storyline of zombie movies has to be strong enough to carry it. Thus, the plot is never an us-vs-zombies. In this case, it's as much about Cholo (played by seldom seen John Leguizamo) doing the dirty work for Hopper, in the hopes of getting his own place at the Green, and discovering that he's not the "right kind of person". He steals Dead Reckoning, a military RV used in zombie raids. Romero is nothing if not clever in realizing that giving a vehicle a name (based on ship terminology at that) gives it personality (much as Millenium Falcon is its own character).

The story is then about Riley, who like Cholo, is among the downtrodden, who goes out on zombie missions, but is ready to leave it all, and head out to Canada to live away from the city, and the zombies, doing one last favor for Kaufman (Hopper) by trying to take out Cholo, who plans his revenge on Kaufman if he isn't paid. You'd think, in a world of zombies, money doesn't make sense, but this is a film as much about class differences as anything, and money is always involved in classism.

Riley takes on two others: Charlie, who himself looks like a zombie (no one much mentions this except Charlie), but, as you discover later on, was a burn victim, and Slack, who is first seen in a cage match with two zombies, and bets-a-plenty, before Riley comes to the rescue.

It's the human details of the many characters that end up driving a good zombie movie. While zombies tend to feast on humans, they are seen like wolves. They're out there somewhere, but we have the guns, and can shoot them. They're not dangerous unless they somehow could get organized. Somehow. In the end, their purpose in life is very similar to the downtrodden. That if they ever get organized, they can kick out the wealthy.

It's funny how Land is not a particularly intense movie. You don't feel the squalor, the threat, the fear as much. And yet, it's fascinating precisely because it's not a horror flick, but a microcosm of a class society, that the ultimate response to a threat like zombies is the desire to be wealthy, and to hide from the zombies. Riley is the character we are meant to care about, and his solution is to leave everything, realizing class struggle is futile.

Give me a six-pack missile launching armored RV, and I will head to the wilderness to live the simple life. If anything, Land reminds me of the ending of Ender's Game, the science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card. The world, formerly divided into political factions, are now united under Peter Wiggin, who plans to reform society, post bugger-fight. However, a few stalwart individuals, including Ender and Val take a ship with a bunch of passengers out to the unknown, to live a new life, away from Earth. Romero doesn't present a particularly original vision, but he does elevate a zombie movie to more than a zombie movie, which is, perhaps what he's always done.

In the end, Riley sees his promised land. It's no longer a better life in the post-Kaufman society. It's a quite life in Canada (Hopper utters the lines of not negotiating with terrorists), and sees a kin in the zombies who are also seeking a life better than the ones they have known.

(There is one small touch I find interesting. Throughout the film, fireworks are sent to the sky, which distract the zombies, and yet they are referred to as sky flowers which is similar to the Japanese phrase, Hana-bi, which I believe, means fire-flowers.)

Tony and more

There's something funny on the Tony Kornheiser show almost every day. Today, they're talking about the runaway bride. To be honest, I have not followed this, and barely know what's going on. Wait, let me Google it.

OK, I'm back. Some woman named Jennifer Wilbanks, scheduled to marry her fiance, faked her own abduction and sexual assault, and was apparently trying to find an old flame. Not only did she want to be out of the marriage, she wanted to meet someone else. This has been in the tabloids for weeks, and frankly, I don't care.

But, Tony Kornheiser talks about these "fat woman with jewelry in Cleveland Park" who you can go to get new age healing or some such. Now, apparently, he brought this topic up on more than one occasion, so Andy Polley says "Why do you keep bringing this up? Did they take some money from you? Are you upset?" (I'm paraphrasing---Tony likes to make fun of people, and so it's funny when someone calls him on it and says he's ranting because something personal happened to him).

Well, it was funny hearing it live.

Guess you had to be there.

On Wil Wheaton's page, perhaps the geekiest celebrity that anyone's heard of had a t-shirt with this bit of SQL:

> SELECT * FROM users WHERE clue > 0
0 rows returned.

For those of you who aren't geek credentialed (which should be no one), this is a query saying "get all the users who have a clue". 0 rows returned means there were no users with a clue.

Basically, you can think of databases as one big Excel spreadsheet. Each row of the spreadsheet refers to one unit of data. This might be a person's name and salary and say the number of years.

A database "table" (which is basically a spreadsheet) can have a large number of entries. So, databases typically allow you to ask questions, or in database lingo, queries. These allow you to select certain rows, for example, all employees who've worked more than 5 years and have salaries greater than 10,000 dollars.

Anyway, the point isn't how clever the T-shirt is, because it's kind of this derogatory geek humor that you find that make fun of non-geeks, it's that freakin' Wil Wheaton knows enough SQL to wear and appreciate a shirt like this. Now, what other actor with credentials can say this?

Wil Wheaton rocks! (Now stop getting weepy about the cat, Wil!)

Roger and Me

I love reading movie reviews. Especially, well-written movie reviews. A movie reviewer has a limited amount of space to convey their thoughts, and so if the review is any good, it must draw you into the argument very quickly.

Often, you think of a review as a review. It tells you what the movie is about (the dreaded summary), then tells you why it was good or why it was bad (though some manage never to do this). Occasionally, the review strays far from the film itself. I remember a review by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who has a deep understanding of film history. He was reviewing a documentary about Ayn Rand.

Now, I've never read Ayn Rand. The little I know about her may be incorrect. I believe she thought that the world should be ruled by elites, those intelligent enough to do the job right, and the rest of society, well, screw 'em all. This kind of philosophy certainly has its appeal. Those who are intelligent and yet find themselves surrounded by morons, some of whom control their lives, wonder privately and sometimes aloud, why this is, and wish for a world where they make decisions.

This philosophy apparently appealed to Rosenbaum when he was young, and yet he is a liberal, and eventually grew out of this belief, and therefore, with that backdrop, he can now give his opinion of the film, which really is his opinion of Ayn Rand, even if the film and his thoughts on the woman are distinct.

Eventually, the review reveals more about the reviewer than the movie. I don't mind this. If moviegoers have complaints about film critics, it's that they make these pronouncements about movies as if they knew everything. Of course, what they write is an opinion. It's just a punchier way of writing if you make your opinion sound authoritative. When a reviewer shows his or her biases, or talks about themselves, it begins to remind you that these are people doing the reviews. Sure, they've seen ten times (or more!) the movies you've seen, and they're probably far more capable of writing than you are. Even so, it is their opinion and not yours.

I began reading reviews, probably as an undergraduate, when I would visit the Cornell bookstore. I would read Ebert's reviews. At the time, it was the only convenient way I could many reviews, since this was nearly 20 years ago, and prior to the advent of the web. Ebert has a to-the-point style that I would call Hemingway-esque if I read more Hemingway and could definitively compare Ebert's style to Hemingway.

For a long time, Ebert and Siskel (although, it was titled Siskel and Ebert) hosted a movie review show. Originally, it was on PBS, and Siskel had a moustache. Later on, they left PBS and had "At the Movies" and finally "Siskel and Ebert". They were the most famous movie critic duo, which would make you think that both of them were equally "good" as critics.

This wasn't the case. While Ebert is considered the lead critic at the Chicago Sun-Times, Siskel was not the lead at the Tribune (I believe it was Mike Wilmington). And where Roger Ebert was a film buff who loved to watch films, old and new, Siskel treated the job like a job. His spare time did not involve watching movies or studying its history. Siskel would just as soon watch a basketball game. His favorite film was Saturday Night Live because, as Ebert notes, the lead, played by John Travolta, had the kind of life that Siskel wanted.

Siskel died in 1999 at the age of 53 from a brain tumor, and despite lacking the kind of pedigree of film criticism like Ebert or Pauline Kael, his influence was large enough that a film center was built in his name, and good films often make its way there.

Ebert wrote a review of The Longest Yard, the remake of the Burt Reynolds movie, starring Adam Sandler. The problem? Between the time he saw the film and wrote the review, he went to Cannes, the premiere film festival in all the world.

Before he left, Ebert enjoyed the film. It was a good, solid effort, and he could give it a marginal thumbs-up. After ten days of watching numerous films, some aspiring to greatness, Ebert had a change of heart. The Longest Yard is basically an Adam Sandler vehicle. It has no aspirations to be a great film. It will win no Oscars. It will not be on anyone's top ten list. It isn't even a spectacular failure from a brilliant director. It is pedestrian.

And yet, Ebert was pained to change his mind. When he writes reviews, he writes it as he sees it, as he feels it. A positive review may have as much to do with what he ate, whether he's sick or not, and certainly with what films he's seen before and after. As with many events in life, how you evaluate something depends on the conditions surrounding it. It's Ebert's job to rate these films, and to compare one against the next.

But Ebert has seen literally thousands of movies, and there's no possible way for him to keep an ordering in his head of all those films. There's no reason he has to either. And while we seem to value the strength of an unwavering opinion, such steadfastness is often folly. People change their minds, and sometimes with good reason. So if Roger Ebert feels one week that The Longest Yard is a good, if not great movie, and another week decides it's a weak effort, then let him. You've changed your mind on lesser things.

Besides, in the end, it's just his opinion. Not yours.

Resistance is Futile

If you ask modern day tennis players what accomplishment, outside of winning a Grand Slam, will never be achieved, they'd probably point to Borg's 3 year run from 1978 to 1980 winning the French Open and Wimbledon back to back to back.

To understand the enormority of this task, consider that no man since then has won the French and Wimbledon back to back. Several women have accomplished the feat, but that's mostly because the top 3 women are often so dominant, it doesn't matter what surface they play on. Steffi Graf was never much of a serve and volleyer, yet won Wimbledon seven times, hitting bullet shots from the baseline.

In men's tennis, you win the French by slugging it out from the baseline, and Wimbledon by serving and volleying. Occasionally, as with Connors or Borg, you can Wimbledon from the backcourt. Two players have come close to winning the French playing serve and volley (McEnroe and Edberg), and the Frenchman, Yannick Noah did win the French playing serve and volley.

The feat is all the more remarkable because the French is as slow a surface as you can play on, and Wimbledon is as fast a surface. The styles needed to master both are hard to master. Sampras never well on the French, and more often than not, played horribly on clay.

To be fair, Borg came onto the scene at a lucky point in history. In the mid to late 70s, the top grass players were already fading. Laver, Rosewall, Emerson, all these players were either in the twilight of their careers or had long since retired. Australians were not to produce a top player until Patrick Rafter, and at the time, John Alexander was their best player.

Until McEnroe started to play well (which coincided with Borg's downfall), the top serve and volleyers were deficient in one way or another. Most big servers weren't great volleyers. Roscoe Tanner could serve and serve, but he was an adequate volleyer, and not much of a baseliner. In those days, a good serve and volleyer often lacked the dazzling backcourt play of a current player.

Outside of Connors, Borg was the dominant baseliner of his era. And he had one thing that Connors didn't have: a big first serve. At the time, he could serve as well as anyone not named Roscoe Tanner. And, he played well when he had to. Unheralded Victor Amaya nearly took Borg out in an early round. He nearly took a two break lead in the fourth set, being down two sets to one, before hitting a second serve ace, and winning in five.

Borg came back against Edmonson (also Australian), Vijay Amritraj, his buddy Vitas Gerulaitis, and of course, the 1980 final against McEnroe that went to an epic 18-16 tiebreak in the fourth (which Borg lost!) before he won 8-6 in the fifth. An adequate volleyer, Borg did well enough with a dump volley to keep opponents honest.

The one Grand Slam that eluded Borg was the US Open. Twice he lost to McEnroe, and also to Connors. His best chance may have been in 1979. Borg did not reach the final at all that year. However, he lost to Roscoe Tanner at night. Had he won that match, he would have played his buddy Vitas, who he never lost to during his entire career, despite the fact that Vitas was a top ten player, and then would have met McEnroe, who was still not ready from prime time.

It wasn't meant to be. After losing to McEnroe at Wimbledon and the US Open in 1981, Borg essentially retired. He left the game for several months. When told he'd have to qualify on his return (something they'd never do today), Borg left the game, never to really return.

Borg would, alas, lose to today's player. Players serve harder (at least 30 mph harder), hit harder, and are physically bigger than Borg. Technology has made all that possible. Still, there was something elegant, something classic about this stoic Swede, who reintroduced topspin to the game, who took a game suited to mastery of clay, and somehow, through determination and luck, won five consecutive Wimbledons, three of them paired with the French. In today's world of specialized play where only Spaniards and Argentinians seem to win the French, this feat may never be accomplished again. Never is a long time---too long. When it happens again, Borg may smile, as he so rarely did on court, and think back on the time when he was king of clay and grass.

Male Call

Have you watched beer commercials in the last few years? Lately, they've all been about ordinary Joe beer drinker who'll do anything to get beer---American beer at that, which tends to be bland, and not too interesting, but good enough for cheap intoxication, if that's what you're after.

Joe beer drinker is not particularly handsome, and in many ways, a stand-in for the average looking male. Yet, beer commercials often allow him his fantasies of meeting some impossibly beautiful bombshell. The Brits do this better than anyone else, especially with comedy. Rarely do plain Janes get to meet the hunks that will sweep them off their feet. Perhaps the most recent counterexample of a plain Jane film is Bridget Jones.

But the point is that men are often seeking to impress women. With the new millenium, old stodgy ideas of what a "real" man is have given way to newer ideas. Once upon a time, men worked at business, while their wives cleaned house, cooked meals, and tended after children. While this hasn't exactly disappeared, it's no longer seen at the protypical relationship.

In particular, there's a new gay-vague, metrosexual sensibility as straight men have decided that they don't need to avoid the kitchen, and that, perhaps, for the busy woman, there's nothing sexier than a man that can cook.

I tread this path because of a series of events that lead me to the dark side: in this case, a bookstore. Let me rewind events back a bit to recount the humble origins of this blog entry. The AFI theater has been hosing SilverDocs, which is a week long exhibition of documentaries. Once upon a time, you had to live in New York and pay close attention to the film scene to see documentaries.

Ever since Michael Moore made it not only hip to show documentaries, but profitable, documentaries have been seen in a brighter light. The AFI Silver theater, in Silver Spring, hosts SilverDocs, where somewhere on the order of 50 documentaries are shown. Now that it's possible to reach a wider audience, documentaries have become more crowd pleasing than ever. One of the top shorts shown at this year's documentary is about Spencer Tunick, the photographer who convinces average people to shed clothes, and lay in large numbers in streets, on beaches, whereever, to create art. This is not sensual art, as it is not about sexuality, even if it does contain nudity.

But that was not the documentary I was going to watch (mostly because I didn't even know it was showing).

Instead, I was going to watch The Aristocrats, which to my regret, isn't about snooty cats. I was planning to watch the film on the advice of my roommate Dave, who said it was about one of the most offensive jokes ever, as told by several comedians. It must be a good documentary indeed to hear the same joke told perhaps a dozen times. As I was driving to the AFI, I missed the wrong exit, and wandered to the point that I was going to be there just a touch late.

The path I take is exit 30 onto Colesville Road, then left on Georgia, then left again on Wayne and park in the Wayne Ave Garage. Just before the left to Georgia, I pass the AFI, and see a line of people stretching beyond the length of the theater. This would be all the more impressive were I at the Uptown (and I was, back when Episode 1 first premiered), where such a line would mean at least a hundred people.

At the AFI, wrappring around the corner is maybe forty or fifty people. Still, given it was a documentary, I could hardly believe this was the line. In fact, I had assumed it was a line for some other, better known documentary. As I wended my way downstairs, across several restaurants, past the Asian Bistro, and to the Panera, I ended up talking to an elderly woman (well, compared to me!), and asked her why the line.

She said everyone was queueing up for The Aristocrats. Imagine that! I told her I was surprised the line was that long. She concurred. She hadn't expected it either.

Then a tall gentleman came around the corner to inform us that the film was sold out, and no tickets were available, but if we wanted some more tickets for the next day's worth of documentaries, to please talk to the man at the box office. I decided to do what I shouldn't do, which is eat.

I went to the nearby Asian Bistro where I ordered a sushi and sashimi platter. As far as I can tell, the difference between the two is sushi is raw fish served over a nugget of rice, while sashimi is just raw fish. Asian Bistro does not have the kind of wide choices of sushi as a better sushi place, but then there's no other sushi place nearby. I was intrigued by the large numbers of African Americans at the place, although, to be fair, many of them weren't trying the sushi. That would be more interesting. I'm curious whether the trends toward international fare are hitting ethnic groups all over. From my observations, I'd say yes (I always found it fascinating that the local Latinos and Latinas often frequented the pho stores, partly because they were just next door).

I also indulged in a mixed drink, the Singapore Sling. The previous night, I had been with a coworker and former student in what was ostensibly a bachelor party. No, it wasn't of the stripper variety. Instead, it was a trip to a mostly steak place called Houston's, followed by a night of games at Dave and Buster's. I had five mixed drinks that night. A martini (dirty), some gin drink, a mai tai (which tasted like alcholic life savers--ick), and two mango sangrias (tasty!). The bachelor was mostly subsisting on rum and cokes. I desperately need a list of the genders of various mixed drinks. I want to have the gayest drink ever, but I have no idea waht it is.

Anyway, due to that incident of liver pounding, I wanted to get a book on mixed drinks. As it happens, I was near Borders. So I indulged by purchasing three books. One on mixed drinks. One was a list of Chinese ingredients (plus a few recipes), and the other was a Food Network book called Young and Hungry by some fellow named Dave Lieberman.

Now, I've never heard of the man in my life until last night. Is he related to Joseph or Nancy? Who knows? I bought the book because it seemed to have cool recipes that's simple and tres gay, two qualities I look for in a cookbook. Of course, I needed more information. (Batman symbol spins). Off to the bat browser!

After some more investigation, I discovered Senor Lieberman (I must lean how to put that curly accent over the o) has a new cooking series on Food Network, and more than that, he has his own website, www.davecooks.net. So, I visited the website. I don't know what I was expecting. Something simple like Alton Brown's site, I thought....

Which brings me back to my first point. Men want to impress women. If they can find some angle, some new way of impressing women, be it singing rock songs, writing poetry, or simply having enough bling to choke a horse, they'll do it.

Dave Lieberman has taken his kosher libido, splashed it up on a webpage, opened shop, and said, ladies, please let me make something spicy for you, and I'm talking about food! And he is--he is. But ladies, it's about subtext (ah, this was the word I was so desperately looking for earlier today). You go to the webpage, expecting to see a few recipes and some shilling for products a la Emeril.

Instead, you see davelieberman centered in a dark blue background. Oh I must click on the name. Whatever will it lead me to? I tell you what it leads to.

There's a popup, and cool jazzy music begins to play. Some Sade wannabe begins to sing sultry tunes. If my browser could serve me champagne and light candles, it would do so now. Am I learning how to cook, or is this webpage trying to proposition me? All of a sudden, I think "Dave" is gonna do a Kobe on me. What match.com horror site have I landed on?

So, as a good citizen, I'm issuing a PSA to all those moms who are ready to marry off their kitchen-phobic daughters to a good Jewish boy like Dave ("he can cook, dahling!"). Slap on the wrist! Beware! Heat in the food translates to heat in the loins! Lieberman is a loverman. Don't let those shy "cooking is so romantic" whispers convince you that he isn't ready to get his groove on! Protect your daughters!

Of course, I make this rant in complete jealousy. How the hell didn't I think of this first? All I had to do was host a cooking show at Cornell, make my pitch to Food Network, and I would be the center of attention. And why thet hell isn't Java coding sexier than cooking?

Sigh, I think I need to make something with pine nuts and arugula.

Critical Mass

When you were first starting to listen to popular music (if you ever did such a thing---perhaps you still enjoy strains of Chopin or Stravinksky), did you listen the the top 10? Maybe you had an older brother or sister or music afficianado buddies who steered you to more obscure treats. But maybe you were listening to Mariah Carey or Backstreet Boys, before someone said take a listen to Arcade Fire, or The Shins, or Punjabi MC, or the husky Portuguese croonings of Cape Verde's Cesaria Evora.

Music is usually the first entertainment medium that we begin to stray from pop dictates. It's not hard to see why. Turn on the radio station, and listen for an hour. The same seven songs play over and over and over. And over. To be forced to listen to some song that has a catchy hook hundreds of times over a months kills any coolness that the song has. It becomes saturated in the brains. We're more receptive to any music off the beaten path, if only to make Whitney Houston shut up.
(Cuz eye-ee-eye will alwayz punch yoo-HOO-ooo!)

And there's so much to listen to. Once upon a time, which really amounts to the 80s, white folks listened "white" music (U2 and the like) and black folks listened to "black" music (Sugar Hill Gang), and the twain didn't meet that often. This is, of course, a historical fiction, but I knew plenty of white folks who found rap to be filled with talentless people who couldn't even sing, having to rap out words over other people's songs ("Can't Touch This!"). They'd rather listen to their Axl Rose and Metallica, thank you.

But the 90s changed that. Post-grunge listeners are more likely to listen to rap as they are to ska maiden, Gwen Stefani. My buddies who are white, are often listening to Outkast and Enimem as they are likely to listen to Coldplay or Sarah McLachlan. I mean, I just saw a group I had never heard of (Black Eyed Peas) on a Best Buy ad, and now I'm intrigued!

I can't say I listen and appreciate music the way most people do. They fill their Ipods with music that spans many a genre, with groups that I know I haven't heard of. I dabble in this music and that, and let my breathern pick stuff I should listen to. I know, I know. It's not pure. I should listen to what I listen to, and enjoy it because I want to enjoy it. But c'mon, be serious. Listening to music is almost as much about social pressure as anything. Remember when your friend made fun of you for listening to Britney (but, but, she is talented!), and introduced you to Sharon Jones (or Norah Jones for that matter). And you thought, "hey, that is good", and then your buddies took you to the 9:30 club so you could hear local bands likes Dismemberment Plan (before they got dismembered).

Food is probably the second entertainment where maybe you pushed yourself out of the safe confines of burgers and chicken mcnuggets. Want tandoori chicken? Or lemongrass beef? Or a hot bowl of pho or udon? Want injera? Or jerk chicken? Or pad thai? With so many good international restaurants out there, you can have Indian, Thai, Carribean, Burmese, Ethiopian, or any number of cuisines. You don't have to settle for that chicken from Popeye's.

When sushi became the hit of Silicon Valley culture, allowing programmers to show off their newfound bling, and their taste for something out of the ordinary, the rest of the US benefitted. When Japanese was the new Chinese, and Thai the new Japanese, and Indian, the new Thai, we were given a whirlwind tour of Asia through its cuisine, so that ordering a samosa became as easy as ordering fries ("so long and come again").

But the one area of resistance to the new, the untried are movies. OK, so most of us don't read what food critics have to say, and many more of us don't even know book critics exist. We all know about movie critics. Be it Roger Ebert, or Gene Shalit, or Leonard Maltin, or Manohla Dargis, the average moviegoers disdains the critics. Critics have to write sharp reviews. They can't preface every review with IMO, because it makes for weak writing. And they hate movies we seem to love.

No where was this as evident as during Chris Rock's segment during this year's Oscars where he goes to the Magic Johnson theaters to interview various patrons, all of them African American. Not a one of them had seen any of the five nominees, whereas all of them had seen White Chicks (even Albert Brooks!). It was hard to tell what Rock was saying. Perhaps the films that get nominated aren't what America, particular what black America watches.

Even though most intelligent people (for some definitions of intelligent) value their ability to make up their own minds, when it comes to picking films, intelligent people often rely on critics while the average Joanne relies on film trailers. What's so wrong with listening to critics? If you were to buy wine or buy electronic goods, you might defer to an expert. Why is it so hard to defer to an expert with films? They say hundreds of films a year, and you might see 10 or 20.

For a long time, I'd read movie reviews on the Internet. Whether it was Scott Renshaw, James Berardinelli, or my favorite, Mike D'Angelo, I loved to read reviews. Going to the movies, well, that was expensive, and I didn't want to make the effort to locate the films and watch them. This made me a bit of an oddball, but for my money, reviews are some of the best short essays that are in public consumption.

I've long thought about writing reviews for movies, and now that I see a lot more movies (thank you Landmark! thank you AFI! thank you netflix!), I can actually do it.

Except.

Except it's hard to write reviews. Most people can't write reviews. They don't remember enough from the movie to write anything. They leave the film with a sense that it was cool, or that it was boring, or that it stunk, but when pressed to give details, they can't tell you. It takes a certain kind of person who pays attention and yes, even takes notes, while watching a movie to write a review.

The easiest review, and therefore the least useful, is the review that basically summarizes the film. There's no reason for you to summarize the film. I want to go see it. I want to be surprised. Stop summarizing! And yet when I write my own reviews I can't help but summarize. It's so much easier to summarize than to tell you what I think of the film.

This is why I believe in the mostly spoilerless review, and why I think I have a good way to learn how to write movie reviews. Here's how you do it. First, I want you to assume your audience has seen the film, possibly several times. Don't summarize the film. They've seen it. Next, restrict yourself to 50 words. Finally, tell me did you like it or not, and if you liked it, why, and if you didn't why not? By not summarizing, by being brief and to the point (unlike me), you will learn how to write film criticism.

Here are some useful questions to answer when writing a review. What's the meaning of the movie's title? Who did a good job acting? Who did a bad job acting? If you were to change something about the movie, what would it be? What part made no sense to you? Did the movie start well and end badly, or vice versa? Who were the good guys? Who were the bad guys? What genre is the film (romantic comedy, thriller)? How was the music? How was the movie direction? How was the pacing? OK, fine, summarize the film.

If you can identify what the movie did well, and what it did badly, you are beginning to be a critic. And remember, the audience you are writing to isn't those who might or might not watch the film, it's to those who've seen it. If you keep that in mind, you'll write far more insightful reviews, and avoid the crutch of summarization.

Food Prawn

Once upon a time, cookbooks only contained recipes. The big problem with recipes is you can't see the result (or taste them). This problem is especially problematic for ethnic (now, international) food. People just want to know what a dish looks like, even if tasting it, or trouble-shooting it is often beyond what a cookbook can do.

My favorite kinds of cookbooks are those by Cooks Illustrated, such as The Best Recipe. Cooks Illustrated looks like one of those fancy cooking magazines that you can get at a well-stocked bookstore, but it's not. As high-brow as it looks, this magazine mostly contains recipes of traditional American fare. Turkey, corned beef, pot pies, key lime pies---all of these are typical recipes you'd find in the magazine.

What Cooks Illustrated does differently from nearly every other publication is its approach in presenting recipes. This is a magazine written as if an inventor or an engineer had switched professions and decided to cook. A recipe is never presented as a recipe. Instead, you're given a baseline recipe that's not quite right, and the many trials-and-errors the author makes in search of making the "perfect" dish. The author often knows what they are looking for, in terms of taste, ease of preparation, and so forth, and take a McGyver-like approach to the solution.

The big problem with most cookbooks is they fail to tell you why a recipe works. What happens if you add more of this, or less of that, or substitute one ingredient for another. What quality are you looking for? Recipes are really shorthand. Few cookbooks explain how to find good ingredients. They don't tell you what to do if you can't find this ingredient or that.

It used to be that if you didn't live in a large metropolitan area, and knew where the specialty food stores were, you had little chance of making a dish. For example, it's exceedingly difficult, outside of major cities to get ingredients for Indian recipes. What's helped budding cooks everywhere is what's helped everyone everywhere: the Internet. With e-commerce, you can often mail-order ingredients and expect to get them in some reasonable amount of time. It also helps that ingredients needed for international cuisine are now making it even to the most rural of areas.

Cooks Illustrated doesn't really help you on that front. They do, on the other hand, question why recipes are the way they are, and believe in the kitchen as chemistry lab, where you test out ideas, and make notes. In the process of explaining their failures, they encourage the average person to also experiment, and question recipes, and really, that's what people should do.

Of course, many of us lack the time to do this, and so we trust recipes, or better yet, Cooks Illustrated to explain their trials. Really, more cookbooks should avoid the "religious" approach of "just have faith in the recipe" and take a more scientific approach to food.

Speaking of science and food, I wonder if Alton Brown would be possible if Cooks Illustrated had not existed? I think it's possible. Cooks Illustrated has never been too heavy on food science. An occasional food scientist is consulted to explain why certain foods do what they do, but it's mostly up to the author to make 20, 30, even 40 different versions, like some modern Edisonian epicurean.

Alton Brown was not the first food scientist. He is perhaps the first food scientist superstar. Star of his own show, Good Eats, he isn't so much interested in providing recipes (although he does some of that), as he is in telling you how food works. Why souffles fall, how to make a great pancakes or coffee or cheesecake. He's the foodie equivalent of Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and his show is very influenced by Nye, even if it's (fortunately) far less grating (pun intended) than Nye.

But I digress.

I wanted to talk about pictures in cookbooks. In the last ten years or so, cookbooks with great food photographs have proliferated. Most food photographs share something I find mildly annoying. They are taken using macro lenses. These lenses were often used to take close up photos of tiny flowers or bees near flowers. They have an extremely small depth of field, which is the distance where the subject of a photo is in focus. A flower can be in good focus, but the blades of grass behind it blurry. This draws attention to the subject of interest while blurring the background.

Somehow, like the macarena, this caught among food photographers, so much so that nearly every food photographer takes pictures of their dish using macro lens. When photographed in this manner, the center of the dish can be in sharp focus, while the back of the dish (yes, the back) is out of focus, blurred for heightened artistic effect. Dishes are lovingly photographed and presented, until a phrase entered the foodie lexicon.

Food porn.

Food porn is the photographing of food that increases, for lack of a better phrase, their sex appeal. My roommate, Dave, says Donna Hay is the queen of food porn. Her books not only contain great, simple recipes, but fantastic photos of those dishes.

It is funny to refer to photos from cookbooks as porn, and I began to think about its use. Porn, when applied to food photographs, is seen as a funny, mildly lewd way of describing great photos of food. And yet, were the same care taken with photos of unclothed models, we'd have something that probably wouldn't even qualify as porn.

In fact, the definition of porn is somewhat vague. Generally, people agree that photos of unclothed people don't usually qualify as porn. This is one reason that topless women from African pygmie tribes could adorn the pages of National Geographic, which, if we were using the definition of "food porn" as porn (ie., high quality pix), then National Geographic would be the epitome of its own "food porn".

According to online defintions, porn requires some degree of sexual arousement. But what is the boundary? Certainly, photos of self or mutual gratification generally count as porn. But what about pictures of beautiful people. Abercrombie and Fitch show sexy post-teens enjoying some outdoor activity sans clothing. There's no sex shown, but sexiness is what these photos are selling. Do they qualify as porn. What if these individuals were reading books, or looking sufficiently bored?
These are often very high quality photos taken by photographers with talent.

Is their attractiveness part of what makes it porn? If they were the overweight husband with a balding pate, a moustache, and hair on both sides (think Aqua Teen Hunger Force) and a rotund woman with large bosoms and a larger bottom, would that qualify as porn? Certainly, if we simply say, the photographic depiction of female or male genitalia (ah, you have to love these near-euphemisms that allow me to sound sophisticated while referring to someone's pee-pee) is porn, then the criteria is somewhat simple.

And yet--yet, for every rule, you can break it. I had heard in New York City, a few years back, strip joints were no longer able to provide the full monty, at least, without attracting the local constabulary (gawd, you have to love the Intenet for allowing me to find a word like constabulary). The strippers, suitably constrained, had to rely on what writers have always had to rely on---imagination. They suggest, they tease, they give you all but the visual climax (as it were). Would photographs like that constitute porn?

Clearly, I don't have the answers. But, I think the answer is that porn, like art, is up to the eye of the beholder, and food porn, is in a different category. It is not the equivalent of "porn" (at least as I see it), in the food world. The name is a bawdy sophistication showing that a snob doesn't have to be prudish. Food photos are a kind of anthropomorphism (not exactly, but it's close to what I mean).

As a leetist snob, I'll explain anthropomorphism. This is the attribution of human qualities to non-humans. For example, you might say "my cat is sad" or "the computer is thinking". Being sad or thinking are qualities we generally attribute to humans and are not necessarily those that cats or computers have. In this sense, "food porn" is attributing a quality
(namely sexiness) to food that is normally attributed to humans. However, while "porn" is seen as somewhat derogatory, "food porn" is thought of as funny in reference to highly skilled photos meant to shows dishes at their best, enticing, yes, the viewer. But it's all done, yes, tastefully.

Oh, I suppose I should explain the title of the article, though it certainly pains me to do so. In order to avoid using the word "porn", many Internet denizens started using "pron", which I'm sure was simply a misspelling, which perhaps some sad individual thought was the correct spelling of "porn" and became a running joke. The geek among us (I mean, the g33k among us) have even gone so far as to replace the "o" with zero, and thus provided us with the l33t spelling, "pr0n".

I imagine the word "pron" sounds like prawn.

And now you know.

And knowing is half the battle.

Calendar Guys

Zero Day is one of two films I know that is based on the killings at Columbine. The other is Gus Van Sant's Elephant.

Van Sant is quite a bit more well-known than Ben Coccio, the director of Zero Day. Van Sant's filmography includes: My Own Private Idaho, Good Will Hunting, Gerry, and To Die For. He's directed films that are idiosyncratic, and those that could have been directed by anyone. Van Sant has even done a shot-by-shot recreation of Psycho with Vincent Vaughn playing the Anthony Perkins role.

Elephant takes a cool, clinical look at the lives of several students attending school on the day that kids will be killed. We don't know them that well. We just see idle banter. It is, in some ways, an exercise in formality. A scene in the hallway is filmed from three students' perspective.

There are non-naturalistic touches, such as John's drunken dad driving his son to school, and his bland reaction to the school under siege. The three girls who go to puke after lunch. Van Sant has no answers to why the two kids did what they did, only that they did it.

While Elephant spends more time on the students at the school, and comparatively little time with the killers Zero Day spends all of its time with the two teens who are planning to kill their classmates when the temperature reaches zero degrees (thus, the title).

Zero Day is filmed as a video diary, which means it's handheld, and for me, nausea-inducing. For ten years, or so, handheld films were a director's way of showing urgency, giving it the feel of a home video, hinting at the kind of unrest in the lives of those being filmed. In some films, it feels the camera is being handled by an epileptic, and it can be rather nauseous to deal with that.

I've been interested in Columbine-like films, because I'm curious what filmmakers think about the cause of violence, especially, among middle-class kids. If middle-class America fosters a myth, it's the myth that they live good, clean lives where children are well-behaved and well-meaning. It's not the inner city. It's not the impoverished South. Why would teens that seem to have it all behave so anti-socially?

Zero Day doesn't really answer these questions. In fact, were it not about two kids who have made a pact to shoot their classmates, it would be easy to see this as a story about typical teens. In fact, Zero Day, to me, works far better as a naturalistic film about teens. The kind of banter and dialog feel a lot more real than the standard teen fare.

As I watch Zero Day, I ask myself, why do these kids want to kill? They don't seem particularly hateful. They get along well enough with their parents. In fact, as an interesting piece of casting, the real-life parents of Andre Keuck, who plays Andre Kriegman, the ostensible leader of Andre and Calvin, play his parents in the film. It's interesting because his dad is German, so you get that accent. It's so rare to show children of immigrants, especially European immigrants.

Both Zero Day and Elephant don't want to give easy answers to the reasons behind teen killers. They don't want to talk about abusive parents, or depressed children. This isn't, for example, Bus 174, which posits that the reason a street kid takes over a bus is because of the deplorable living conditions for street children, where Brazilian society lets them be abused, until one day, they crack, realizing there's no reason to live the way they live.

If anything, Calvin, who plays the follower of Andre, has a life. He has a girlfriend who seems to like him, and he likes her. He never tells her the secret plan, and it's not clear why Calvin is willing to give up his life. In the periphery, you see a few people who might be so irritating that these two teens would want to take revenge, but really, they aren't the kind of bullies that would be stereotypical, kicking dirt, laughing. If anything, Andre and Calvin are reasonably well-adjusted.

Ultimately, neither Zero Day nor Elephant provide the answers we want or expect. Elephant makes the incident into a formal exercise, telling the same story from different viewpoints, trying to get at the different lives that are suddenly shattered by one horrific incident. Lives, to be fair, are indeed different, as perceived by the individuals, and yet, we often fail to see our lives until something threatens to take it away. Van Sant keeps a clinical distance, even as his camera follows over the shoulders of students as they wander hallways.

His view of high school is oddly distorted, with a small number of students in a huge high school, and the odd way they run, as gunfire is shot.

Coccio, on the other hand, presents the story of two teens, who tell us their plan to deal with the people who taunt them, and yet, outside of these desires, they live life pretty much like other teens in their school. There's no particular reason that they should do this, and yet they do.

Perhaps to make a film of this sort, to push it beyond a movie of the week weepie, clear answers aren't possible. If we get our answers (they are depressed, they are made fun of), then we can avoid the blame, and place it on their shoulders. Yet, such instincts make it difficult for such films to be cathartic in any way.