The Wackness: A Quick Review

I'm really lukewarm on "The Wackness", but that's more of an averaged-out reaction than an overall reaction. Parts of it were spot-on excellent, depicting a menagerie of locations and characters that perfectly capture a time and place. But much of it was mired down in the kind of narcissism that doomed "The Ice Storm" and kept me from really connecting with anything in the movie for more than a few scenes at a time. Fire and Ice make lukewarm water, right?

The movie follows Josh, a teen pot dealer, and his friendship with his addict shrink (Ben Kingsley) throughout the summer of 1994. (Is 15 years ago too soon to have a period piece? And did I really graduate from high school 15 years ago?) Josh mostly spends the summer trying to have a relationship with his shrink's step-daughter, and failing in one way or another, while Ben Kingsley slowly tries to flush his life down the toilet. They're an interesting pair, sort of a Harold and Maude for the 90s. Josh takes Sir Ben on a tour of his world, and "hilarity" ensure.

It gets a little tiresome to watch people just be petty and irresponsible for an hour and a half. It's one thing to watch on a Trainspotting kind of scale... here, it just came across as a little boring. I had trouble caring about them. Josh is an interesting character in spots... he's a naive, innocent drug dealer, and a lonely kid yearning for connection. As the shrink, Ben Kingsley is alternately entertaining and alienating, but mostly sad.

I can't quite recommend this flick. It's got something to offer for the right audience... if you suspect you might be in that audience, check it out. Otherwise, I think there are a lot of other movies that offer better versions of the same aspects the movie tries to capture, ranging from "Do the Right Thing" to "Harold & Maude" to "Friday" (if you're looking for the drug comedy this was marketed as).

As a bit of a post-script, this is the third or fourth movie in last few months that I've come into with completely misguided expectations thanks to misleading movie marketing and/or poor Netflix descriptions. The Wackness was described as an indie comedy, and is about anything but. The extent of the comedy is pretty much "Look, Ben Kingsley has a bong!", or maybe the larger "all of life is a joke" style of comedy. This was a comedy in the same way "The Catcher in the Rye" is a comedy. I understand that movie marketers need to do their best to sell a movie, but I've been feeling really misled lately in relying on genre descriptions. Shape up, marketers!

Fetal Pigs: Where's the Drummer?

In the past 10 years or so, I've moved at least seven times. Every move requires me to pack up all of my crap into boxes and shuttle them around. With frequent moves, you end up with some boxes that don't get opened for a few years at a time.

This afternoon, I spent some time cleaning up the basement, and rifled through a few of those boxes. And in one of them, I found a neat old gem... the first "album" I ever recorded, on New Year's Eve 1990.

The band was called Fetal Pigs. It was me and my buddy Mike, who was one of only two or three people I knew who played guitar. We sat next to each other in science class. We'd hang out a lot looking at tablature books, chatting about guitarists and feebly playing. By late 1990, I'd been playing guitar for maybe a year and a half. Mike had been playing about half that time.

Our drummer was a guy named Roland, who was the first guy I legitimately made any music with, ever. Roland and I were the guys in the basement doing air guitar to Def Leppard (and his brother's Depeche Mode albums). We graduated from air guitar to posing with tennis rackets in front of a mirror, and eventually got actual instruments at about the same time. Mike and Roland didn't really know each other if I remember, but by virtue of being the only drummer I knew, Roland was in the band.

Mike had a sleep over for New Years. (This was 8th grade, so not having a big party to go to wasn't overly weird.) Roland couldn't make it. So, we created our Magnum Opus, "Where's The Drummer?" :

I don't remember the exact recording process, but I'm pretty sure it was Mike's tape recorder sitting in the corner of the room. No mics, no drums, no bass, no multi-tracking, just the two of us on vocals and guitar, all live takes. Awesome. The entire album clocks in at about 13 minutes. Note the sticker indicating that this is the "MASTER" recording. I don't know if that means this was actually the tape we recorded on, or whether it's a first generation copy. As a sign of our laziness in obtaining a pristine recording, immediately after the album ends, it bleeds into some random Morning Zoo DJ I'd taped off the radio. I'm pretty sure the stock picture of the drums was from an ad in a guitar magazine.

I don't recall whether we actually did anything with this. I don't know that we made a copy for anyone else, played it for anyone other than our parents, or actually did anything with any of the songs. As I remember it, this was in a complete vacuum.

Notice that little bit of paper sticking out the left side? That's the liner notes:

(My handwriting still looks exactly like that.)

Here's the full page:

But since that's pretty much illegible (it's 18 year old Mac dot matrix), here's the text:

FETAL PIGS - WHERE’S THE DRUMMER?

WARZ SUCK — they just do... (dedicated to Saddam Hussein)
JIMI IS GOD — Mike’s true hero (dedicated to Mr. Hendrix)
EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORN — as recorded by Poison
BATTLING AXES FROM HELL — a brief moment of inspiration (very brief)
WHERE’S THE DRUMMER — a basic explanation of the album (a joke, nothing more)
ALL CHICKENS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL — our instrumental anthem (sounds better live!)

Fetal Pigs are:

John Argentiero — lead vocals, lead guitar
Mike Palys — lead & backing vocals, rhythm guitar
Roland Lo — drums

John uses Yamaha Electric Guitars, Washburn Acoustics, Marshall amplifiers, and Dunlop picks.
Mike uses B.C. Rich Electric Guitars, Gianinni Acoustics, Marshall amplifiers, and his favorite translucent purple pick
Roland uses Pearl drums, Zildjian cymbals and whatever sticks he can get his hands on.

If you are interested in playing bass in an up and coming young band give us a call (we can supply bass)!

This EP was written, recorded, and mixed during a twelve hour period between December 31, 1990 — January 1, 1991

Roland was absent at the recording of this EP because he wasn’t sleeping over at Mike’s house on New Year Eve.

Coming soon - FETAL PIGS II: Afterbirth

Some notes on the above:

• The EP is recorded on both sides of a cassette, same stuff on both sides. By weird coincidence, if you flip the tape after the last song, it's almost exactly at the start of the same song on the other side. Bad ass.
• I have guitar solos in most of these songs. They are all exactly the same.
• I was lead guitarist on this effort, but Mike lapped my skill set pretty quickly after this. I believe he went to sleepaway guitar camp, and came back with a lot more technique than I had. Realistically, I never got a whole lot better than what you hear on the tape, I just got nicer equipment. And I switched mostly to bass for the rest of my high school bands.
• In "Jimi is God", I attempt to play a brief guitar solo with my teeth. I had braces at the time. At one point, the string get caught in my braces, very audibly. This is the coolest record I have of anything from my youth.
• Every Rose has it's Thorn was completely my idea. Mike hated Poison. I still play that song in my band. I don't actually play the solo that much better.
• I still love my manically spastic solos on "Battling Axes from Hell". I suspect that with an actual amp, they would have sounded better. Mike's solos are the slower, jazzier ones. Mine are the one's that sound like someone who had too much caffeine.
• The "Sounds Better Live!" tagline for "All Chickens Are Not Created Equal" is a bit of a lie. Fetal Pigs never played live. In fact, I'm not entirely convinced we ever played this in practice. (Nor am I sure we ever actually practiced as a full band.)
• "All Chickens Are Not Created Equal" is really just a bizarre series of overlapping unrelated riffs in different keys played on top of one another. It's instrumental and, in retrospect, a complete waste of tape.
• With the exception of the opening riff in "All Chickens Are Not Created Equal", I'm reasonably sure Mike wrote all of the music and most of the lyrics.
• "Fetal Pigs II: Afterbirth" never actually came out. (Though, I did write some cheesy metal under the moniker Ultradeath using the Fetal Pigs : Afterbirth album name. The listing is still up here, but the file is long gone.)
• We never got a bassist. Roland left the band shortly after this, and was replaced by Dave Mathison, who was probably the only guy Mike knew that played drums. (Band politics in 8th and 9th grade were weird.) Fetal Pigs lasted another few years, mostly as a cover band. I don't think any of these songs were ever played again.
• Re: the equipment list, this was something we saw in all of our metal albums, and it never occurred to me that these rock stars were naming their equipment because they had promotional deals with the companies. We were just naming them because they were the only instruments we had and we thought they were cool. (Though as Mike progressed into more serious guitar work, he was later mortified by his B.C. Rich Warlock.)
• On the equipment topic, most of the acoustic guitar is my 12-string Washburn. All of the amps are single-channel practice amp, and sound painful. My guitar was my yellow Yamaha, which I still have today.

So, those were good times. Fetal Pigs continued to exist as a minor entity until I started playing with Undertow in 10th grade. Mike and I went to different high schools and were heading in different musical directions, and the band and friendship drifted apart. I consider Undertow (more on them at a future date) my first "real" band, since we actually played live shows. But this tape is a really cool document of my first musical experiments. Good stuff.

And since I KNOW you're longing to hear it, here you go. After writing about it, I decided I needed to have a copy for the kids. This is just a walkman into my PC, so the noise level is horrible, but deal with it. (Especially on the opening of Every Rose...)

Presented for the first time since 1991, Fetal Pigs' Where the Drummer. In Mono.

For some reason, the streaming thing isn't working for these, so click to hear them.

WARZ SUCK — 2:14

JIMI IS GOD — 0:34

EVERY ROSE HAS ITS THORN — 4:01

BATTLING AXES FROM HELL — 1:04

WHERE’S THE DRUMMER — 0:55

ALL CHICKENS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL — 4:04

Some Additional Thoughts on Watchmen

NOTE: If you haven't seen and read Watchmen, this post will be of limited or no interest at all, and it contains Spoilers for both. If you intend to see or read Watchmen, bookmark this for later. Also, Giant Squid.

So, I finally finished re-reading the Watchmen graphic novel and have seen the movie twice. One of my first thoughts is that anyone who has any complaints about the film's deviations from the source material (from a plot / inclusion perspective) has incredibly unrealistic expectations. With the exception of the ending (more in a minute), this is one of the most faithful adaptations of a novel I've ever seen that still managed to work as a standalone movie. Some adaptations (the first two Harry Potter movies for example) stick so doggedly to the source material that the film suffers greatly... novels and cinema are different mediums, and what works in one wouldn't work in another. On the whole, Zack Synder did an awesome job, much better than I would have expected after seeing "300".

The Watchmen novel would have been an unwatchable five-hour movie with no momentum had they filmed it totally faithfully. For the sake of momentum, things have to be dropped. Major drops were minimal... the whole Tales of the Black Freighter story (which has been made as a separate movie), Hollis Mason's death, a lot of chatting at the news stands and more Dr. Manhattan on Mars. A few other minor encounters. And it's easy to see how adding those in would have pushed the running time past three hours, again killing the momentum. (And we may get a chance to find out. Most of that stuff was filmed and will be out on DVD.)

I do think some of the tonal changes / additions were a little much... As Abstract Citizen pointed out, the action-y fight scenes dilute the idea that the Watchmen (other then Dr. Manhattan) are just normal folks in peak physical condition, not actual superheroes. That created a bit of a disconnect. And the sex scene felt hyper cheesy. But both of those additions make the movie more accessible to the casual fan. (Anyone longing for a "normal guy" super-hero can go watch Billy Zane in "The Phantom" and tell me how much fun that was.)

As for the ending... at the risk of sounding heretical, the movie's ending was better. The Giant Squid was weird and cool, but it really comes out of nowhere and doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The explanation of how the squid "works" is just kinda weak: The process of teleporting the creature kills it, and the cloned implantation of a psychic's brain sends an amplified death wave out, killing half the city and driving millions more insane. Ok then. Cool in context, but admittedly a little bit of a stetch. (Awesome visuals though.) The movie's choice to frame Dr. Manhattan as the source of Earth's potential destruction allows for more connection with the characters, a more closed circle and a more "feasible" future. The guys over at Chud put it well:

In the book? Veidt creates world peace by tricking the world into believing in aliens. The introduction of this "other" creates an new sense to togetherness that puts all differences aside.

In the movie? Veidt creates world peace by tricking the world into believing in GOD. An old testament kind of God. The watching, wrathful, Sodom and Gomorrah destroying type of God.

To me, that's a more affecting ending. The world already understands and fears Dr. Manhattan. The Giant Squid... well, it's a giant squid that wiped out New York. It's a little more abstract than the God Figure living among you for the past few decades turning on the world.

Both the Watchmen movie and novel are stand-alone artifacts. (I suspect it might be difficult to go into the movie completely cold, but I'm not sure.) I enjoyed them both equally and in different ways. And importantly, I'm glad they both exist.

Geekish Enthusiasm

For the most part, I find memoirs pretty boring and self-serving. Or narcissistic and solipsistic. I don't enjoy them. But one of the first sets of memoirs I ever remember reading were Richard Feynman's two books of anecdotes, "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!" and "What Do You Care What Other People Think?"

Feynman has a natural curiosity and directness that I find completely fascinating and endearing. There's a particular bit of an anecdote of his that sticks with me quite a bit, from his time at Princeton. It's popped up a few times lately in relation to random bits of Das Binky's life.

In the great big dining hall with stained-glass windows, where we always ate, in our steadily deteriorating academic gowns, Dean Eisenhart would begin each dinner by saying grace in Latin. After dinner he would often get up and make some announcements. One night Dr. Eisenhart got up and said, "Two weeks from now, a professor of psychology is coming to give a talk about hypnosis. Now, this professor thought it would be much better if we had a real demonstration of hypnosis instead of just talking about it. Therefore he would like some people to volunteer to be hypnotized.

I get all excited: There's no question but that I've got to find out about hypnosis. This is going to he terrific!

Dean Eisenhart went on to say that it would be good if three or four people would volunteer so that the hypnotist could try them out first to see which ones would be able to be hypnotized, so he'd like to urge very much that we apply for this. (He's wasting all this time, for God's sake!)

Eisenhart was down at one end of the hall, and I was way down at the other end, in the back. There were hundreds of guys there. I knew that everybody was going to want to do this, and I was terrified that he wouldn't see me because I was so far back. I just had to get in on this demonstration!

Finally Eisenhart said, "And so I would like to ask if there are going to be any volunteers . . ."

I raised my hand and shot out of my seat, screaming as loud as I could, to make sure that he would hear me: "MEEEEEEEEEEE!"

He heard me all right, because there wasn't another soul. My voice reverberated throughout the hall--it was very embarrassing. Eisenhart's immediate reaction was, "Yes, of course, I knew you would volunteer, Mr. Feynman, but I was wondering if there would be anybody else."

Lately, I feeling like that guy A LOT. Which is fun in it's own way, but come on, people... catch the fever! (And read Feynman. And come see Fountains of Wayne or Louis CK with me.)

Huh?

L: "Daddy, I love going to school because it's so much fun and we get to play with the teacher and recess and art and library time and we have play stations and I like the MagnaCorner where there's lots of cool magnetic stuff to play with and I made a chicken but it wasn't hard for me because I'm really smart and when I grow up I don't want to get married because I'd be really embarrassed with all of those people looking at me and I really liked the spaghetti we had for dinner can we have the leftovers tomorrow?"

Daddy: "Umm, Yes."

Defining Maturity?

This evening, we were sitting around watching Reading Rainbow. It's a new addition to the Tivo regimen, and one of the few live-action kid shows in the rotation.

L was looking particularly engaged by an animal-related episode.

Daddy: L, you like this show?
L: Yeah, Dad. I'm starting to like boring shows.

At first, I thought this was a nice bit of biting sarcasm. But then she went on to explain that when she was younger, she would have found the show really boring, but her tastes had evolved such that she enjoyed it.

I figure NPR can't be far behind.

In another kid-related bit of fun, Ms. Das Binky is out of town for a few days in Chicago. I was home from work today with DD, who had a bit of a fever. We took advantage and did some shopping. One of our stops was Costco.

DD got really excited about going to Costco. And while Costco is awesome, it's not the response I expected from a three-year old. When I asked why, she said "We'll see Mommy!"

So, then we had to have a discussion about the idea that Chicago and Costco, while sharing common first and last letters, were in fact separate places. She looked a little crestfallen, but rebounded nicely when Wall-E was showing on 25 separate LCD TVs.

Happy Go Lucky: A Quick Review

Several bad signs for any movie:

• Ten minutes into the movie, I want to punch the female lead in the face. Repeatedly.
• 40 minutes into the movie, I look at the running time on the DVD player and yell "JESUS CHRIST, WE'VE BEEN WATCHING THIS MOVIE FOR 40 MINUTES AND NOTHING HAS HAPPENED YET!"
• Eighty minutes into the movie, I want to punch the female lead in the face again. Harder.
• One Hundred minutes in, you realize that the genre listed here is "comedy" but you have yet to so much as crack a smile.
  
• You realize the most sympathetic character in the movie was the violent, racist one.
  

Well, that was Happy Go Lucky for me.

I'm a big Mike Leigh fan. I've seen and enjoyed most of his movies, and I love the naturalistic way he works. His movies tend to be more character driven than plot driven. Unfortunately, I hated most of the characters in Happy Go Lucky.

Sally Hawkins (who has been universally praised for her role, and won the Golden Globe) plays Poppy, a freakishly peppy and optimistic twit of a primary school teacher. Poppy just wanders through life trying to infect people with her joyful outlook. That's the plot. Her worldview comes across more like a minor form of mental retardation, and in fact it took me 20 or 30 minutes to decide that the character wasn't autistic or something.

It isn't much of a stretch to say that nothing actually happens in the movie. The main plot streams are "Poppy dates a guy", "Poppy takes driving lessons", "Poppy take dance lessons" and "Poppy chats with a homeless guy". A lot of the scenes are unrelated. Almost none of the characters actually change. The entire movie is Poppy going about her life, more or less unaffected by anything she sees. Now, I'm fine with plotless movies... I count Before Sunrise among my favorites, and nothing happens there. But the key was that I liked the characters. I couldn't stand Poppy.

The one interesting character / thread in the movie to me was her driving instructor, an angry, repressed guy who probably reads a lot of Ayn Rand. Though he wasn't a likable character, he had an intensity that drove the scenes he was in.

Since I saw Happy Go Lucky a few weeks back, I've read a whole battery of other reviews from professional critics I respect, and they all loved it. I can't remember having such a wide disconnect with so many of these folks on any film. It's obvious we watched the same movie, and to some degree the success of the movie hinged on whether or not you bought into Poppy.

I didn't.

I have no idea whether or not to recommend this movie to anyone. I might be the lone shithead dissing the movie, and you might very well enjoy it. If so, I'd be interested to hear why. But from my end, I've already wasted enough thought on it for now.

WI FilmFest Day Four: Paper or Plastic and Chef's Special

Paper or Plastic: This is a documentary about the National Grocery Bagger's Competition held every year in Las Vegas, and the quests of eight people trying to become the best bagger in the country. But really, it's a movie about the drive some people have to be the best at whatever they do, no matter how ludicrous it is. And it was awesome.

If you saw Spellbound, the documentary that came out five or six years ago about the young contestants in the Scripps National Spelling Bee, then you know the template for this movie. We meet the contestants and follow them on their trip. The movie is only peripherally about grocery bagging, which is a little odd to say given that about half the screen time is devoted to watch people bag. (And some of them are preternaturally fast... more than one performance brought applause from the audience.)

This is a great little festival movie that I really hope finds a wider audience. I gave it a 5/5, and it was my 2nd favorite film in the festival. Check out the trailer here, and look for it if it comes around your area.

Chef's Special: Ah, a nice conventional gay Spanish sex comedy about cooking. Just like mom used to make. Actually, joking aside, this was the most conventional movie I saw in the whole festival. Take out the gay element (or more to the point, accept the gay element as something that is no longer edgy in and of itself), set it in English, and you could find this in an American Multiplex. It was a well done, funny flick with characters I liked.

Basic plot: Gay chef Maxi runs a high-stress restaurant, and has his world turned upside down when his ex-wife dies and leaves him with his two children. Meanwhile, he and his (female) co-worker have their sites set on the same guy. Much hilarity ensues.

Solid movie, lots of laughs, worth a look. 4/5.

WI FilmFest Day Three: Eldorado, Sparrow, Ghajini

Eldorado: The Belgian Road Trip movie is an under-appreciated genre. Possibly. I'm not sure, I've never seen one before. And Belgium isn't that big a country, so a road trip movie seems improbable. But here it is.

I get the impression that if David Lynch and Mike Leigh made a movie together (in French) this would be it. The story follows a guy who finds another guy robbing his house, and through an odd set of circumstances they end up road tripping across Belgium together. It was pretty engaging, but I couldn't decide whether it was being weird for weird's sake, or trying to "say something" a lot of the time, and I found that offputting. If the director was trying to say anything, I can't decide what it was. It held my interest, but not enough to really recommend it.

The acting was gangbusters though. You spend most of the movie watching these two guys in a car, and they hold your interest. Cool beans. I gave it a 3/5, though a whole lot of folks walking out were giving it 5 stars. Worth a Netflix.

Sparrow - This was the prettiest movie I saw at the film festival, which was unexpected given that it's a Chinese movie about a gang of pickpockets. This had a sort of muted John Woo vibe: In the same way Woo turns gun fights into ballet, director Johnnie To makes an almost Bob Fosse-ish jazz dance out of the art of pickpocketing. The plot is entertaining, but almost incidental to the visuals. It's all about seduction and deception and the beauty within each of them.

It also a wonderful dedication to the art of smoking. I'm not a smoker, but I can't think of director other than David Lynch who so fetishizes the art of smoking. Smoke is more than an effect in this movie, it's character. As someone who finds the act of smoking fairly nasty, I was surprised at how engaging it came across in this movie.

The finale, a pickpocketing orgy in the rain beneath umbrellas in slow motion featuring dozens of thugs, was one of the most beautiful crime sequences I've ever seen. Loads of fun. In the end, I gave this one a 4/5. The plot didn't quite support the imagery, but I had a blast. I've already added a half dozen other films by Johnnie To to my Netflix queue.

Ghajini - Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the highest grossing Bollywood movie of all time, a 3-hour long reinterpretation of Memento with the requisite Bollywood pop numbers sprinkled throughout. (And a 90 minute love story kinda wedged in the middle.) It was an absolute blast.

I've seen a handful of Bollywood films before, but never in a packed theater. Great experience. The differences in the sensibilities of American and Indian audiences are a little more muted here than in others I've seen, limited mostly to fashion decisions that strike us as laughable and the rather abrupt transitions into song. But the epic nature of the flick led to a lot of amusing melodrama, the kind of stuff that fell out of vogue in the US in the 1950s or so. The female love interest isn't just good, she's "I just saved a trainful of orphans from getting sold into slavery" good. The bad guy isn't just bad, he's "I'm going to kill everyone who's ever opposed me, just in case" bad. And he has a comic bellowing laugh. Etc. But there's still enough grey area to keep everything interesting.

There's no question the movie was a bit cheesy, though that's more of an indictment of the genre than the movie itself. Ghajini was an exhilarating, entertaining experience, probably the most fun I had at any movie in the festival. I gave it a 5/5, and may be interested in catching it again on video.

WI FilmFest Day Two: Food Inc & JCVD

Food Inc - Remember the Omnivore's Dilemma? Well, now you don't have to read it. They effectively made a movie of it. Other than a few new-ish sequences, Food Inc. follows the same topics, individuals and themes as the book, minus Pollan's structure. But like any movie based on a book, it really has to short sell the content in order to keep the running time reasonable. The Omnivore's Dilemma deserves a 16-part Kens Burns-esque documentary; a 90 minute movie just can't convey the weight of the book. More importantly, without the detailed discussion provided in the book, the movie comes across as railing against an international conspiracy designed to kill us. Part of the strength of The Omnivore's Dilemma is that it's NOT a book aimed at radicals. Food Inc takes more of a revolutionary tone, and I think it suffers for it. (And as much as I hate to review a movie in which every sentence of the review references a book that it's not even technically based on, I think it's very difficult not to do so, and I'm lazy.)

That said, it was an engaging and important movie, and I'd recommend to anyone thinking about getting more into the question of "What the hell are we eating?" I gave it a 4/5.

JCVD: This was a weird concept. The movie is effectively a riff on Dog Day Afternoon (one of my favorite movies from my favorite decade of cinema), minus the gay subplot and starring Jean Claude Van Damme (playing a version of himself) as one of the hostages. In French. (It's even got one of the robbers wearing John Cazale's horrible coiff.) Beyond that, there's not a whole lot else you need to know; much like "Snakes on a Plane", you can be pretty sure you know whether or not you'll enjoy it based on the pitch.

I really dug it. It's surprisingly smart in it's execution, and Van Damme pulls off the gig with aplomb. It's a fun, reasonably escapist flick, and a perfect midnight movie. I gave it a 4/5, though it's truly more of a 3.5 than a 4. A real good time.

Looking for an app...

While I'm on the iPhone topic, here's something I'm looking for, but can't find yet.

Now, the iPhone has a GPS functionality. What I would love is an app that can detect when I'm in certain locations and adjust the ringer volume accordingly, especially in relation to the time.

For instance, I'd love to be able to indicate on a map where my job is, and tell it that when I'm there, put the phone on vibrate. Same deal with a movie theater. Why do I need to silence my phone, why can't I just tell it "This is a movie theater... whenever I go there, be quiet." (I'm not talking about the app knowing that it's a movie theater already, I'd have to tell it what was what.)

On a slightly more complicated bent, when I'm at home, I'd like the ringer to be super-loud (since I might be anywhere in the house when someone calls), except when I'm asleep. So I'd like to tell the phone, "At my house, between 7 am and 10:30 pm, ring loud, but from 10:30 pm to 7 am, ring quietly."

If anyone knows whether this exists, let me know. My searches for "location aware ringer iphone" and such have come back without much useful results. I don't know enough about the way things work in the background with the iPhone to know if this is even possible. But I'd love to have that functionality.

Quick Thoughts on the iPhone

On Friday, we got iPhones. Yippee!

Last week, I wrote about some of our iPhone concerns, mostly around conversion.

Here are my quick hit thoughts after using it for a weekend. A lot of my concerns aren't actually iPhone-related, but related to services employed by the iPhone, specifically Google. You'll see...

• Service at the Apple Store was amazingly quick. We were in and out with working, activated iPhones in about 35 minutes. Pre-registration helped.
  
• Getting contacts into the phone has been a headache. Our initial goal was to use our GMail contacts. Unfortunately, syncing with GMail means that you can't use GMail's groups, only their "All Contacts" group. Fine for me (I keep my list trim), but K has hundreds of people in there. We found a workaround, but it involves exporting to a vCal file (which loses people's profile pictures), importing into Outlook and Sync'ing the phone with Outlook instead. Pain in the ass. My impression is that this is easier on Mac, but that doesn't help me. An application to port K's existing Palm contacts to the iPhone would have relieved a lot of headaches. (Instead, I has to export her Palm stuff to Gmail, which was no walk in the park, and then to Outlook. I probably could have done Palm straight to Outlook, but we didn't know that was going to be our solution.)
  
• We also wanted to Sync our calendars to Google Calendar, which worked ok... but there's a limitation of five calendars. Google Calendar doesn't use labels for some stupid reason... if you want to have events for "Kids", "Medical", "Travel", etc., they want you to create a separate calendar for each and just display them all as needed. But the iPhone (or rather Google via the iPhone) won't let you display more than five at a time. Annoying.
• Setting up the calendar and contact syncs w/ Google uses the Exchange AutoSync feature. (But Gmail doesn't...) So does my work mail. Unfortunately (and this is a limitation of AutoSync rather than the iPhone), you can only have one Exchange Account going at a time. So, I can choose between either my personal calendars and contacts, or my work mail and calendar. I chose the former.
• There's very little documentation about how to use iTunes with two iPhones. Do my wife and I use the same iTunes Store account? Is there anything we need to worry about with synching two phones to the same PC, along with two other iPods? And I haven't found too much about how to deal with multiple PCs and iTunes. So I'm taking it slow on that front.
• I've certainly been messing around quite a bit and using the phone more than I will when I'm set up, but the battery seems to run down awful quick. I'm getting into the habit of leaving it plugged in whenever I'm not using it to get around this. I picked up an extra charge cable for work, and we'll probably want to pick up more chargers for home.
• We decided to buy our first round of accessories at the Apple Store for convenience (case for K, car chargers, screen protectors), and the markup was INSANE. For the next round, eBay, here I come.
• Gmail works pretty well, but still fetches email rather than having it pushed. Now, I'm on a 15-minute refresh there, so it's not a big deal, but still a bit annoying.
• I'm sure I'll learn it better soon, but my thumbs feel too big on the keyboard.
  

All that said, it's pretty cool. I needed money on Saturday night, wasn't sure where the nearest ATM was, so I downloaded an app for free that picked up my location via the GPS and told me where the nearest one was. Even gave me directions. I was driving back home for lunch on Sunday, felt like getting some steamed dumplings, so I launched the voice-activated Google Search for the local Chinese place, had it dial the number for me, and the dumplings were ready when I got there. That's awesome.

I think it'll take the better part of the week until we're really "at home" with it, but I'm digging it so far. Looking forward to exploring more.

Adventures in Parenting: Not Eveything in Nature is Happy

Last weekend, we were watching the excellent "Blue Planet" series on DVD with the kids. If you haven't seen it, it's an excellent documentary series full of rare ocean shots and beautiful cinematography. A nice educational opportunity, we figured, for the kids.

Like all kids, ours love animal documentaries. Show them some baby goats for 20 minutes, and they're happy. Baby sea turtles in high definition, and they go wild. For the most part, we stick to shows on Discovery Kids, stuff with perky hosts, mostly in zoos, where all of the animals are nice to each other.

Which meant that poor Lucy was entirely unprepared for the sequence described here by the cameraman who shot it.

Orcas are pretty brutal hunters. (Or to use less pejorative terms, Wikipedia describes them as "versatile and opportunistic predators.") In an extended Blue Planet sequence, a pod of about 15 killers whales surrounds a Grey Whale and her calf. The Grey Whales try to flee, but the immature calf can't do much on it own yet. The Orcas stay in pursuit for more than six hours, wearing the Grey Whales down and trying to separate the mother and calf by forcing themselves between them. Obviously, the whale calf is defenseless. Exhausted, the mother and calf are eventually separated, and the Orcas go to work on the calf while keeping the mother at bay. They repeated jump on top of the calf, forcing it under to drown, while taking nips at the calf's body and fins. Eventually, the calf is killed amidst a red sea, and the mother, who carried the calf for 13 months in utero, continues her migration alone. In the final shot, we see that the Orcas have only eaten the calf's jaw and tongue, leaving the rest to rot in the ocean. It's a gut-wrenching sequence highlighting the order of things in the natural kingdom.

It's also a little goddamn heavy for a five-year old.

By the time we really realized where the scene was going. Lucy was glued to the TV with a look of muted terror. At that point, we should have just turned it off, but for whatever reason we didn't. The scene ended, and we all sat quietly and watched as we moved on to some dolphins hunting some anchovies or something. And she was quiet for a while.

That night at bedtime, she mentioned something about the whales, and we talked about it, but it was obvious she had some other questions, and that the scene had really stuck with her. We tried to engage her more, but she was done for now.

A few days later, she brought this home from school, a product of some free time drawing.
That's the mommy whale on the top, crying. The two creatures at the bottom are killer whales, replete with sharp teeth and laughing... "He he". The red on the bottom is the blood of the baby whale.

And I've got no idea what to make of it.

She was obviously affected by the sequence, but I can't decide if she was affected in a "Wow, that's something I've never seen before" surface sense or "My god, the world is horrible and I've lost my innocence" kind of way. More likely somewhere in between.

But it got K and I thinking a bit more about the random ways in which we either mold or warp our kids, and how these learning experiences seem to come out of nowhere. Which isn't a new insight, but landing in the middle of one is still a surprise. At almost 6 years old, Lucy is just getting to the age where she is really thinking about things. Three-year old DD saw the same sequence, but it didn't have nearly the same effect. For her I think it was "those big whales on TV killed the other whale. Can I watch Little Einsteins?", but Lucy (again, speculating) was able to translate the same sequence into a larger context of "wow, parents can't always protect their kids, and the world can be cruel. In a sense, we are all alone. Can I watch Waiting for Godot?" (As you can see, we project on our kids a bit.)

So, in the short term, we're trying to engage her a little and talk about what the sequence means. In the long term, we're going to try and pay a little more attention to where the remote is when the DVD player is on.

An Emerging Tidbit from My Sordid Past

From 1996 to 1997, I was the co-chair of the student-run movie theater at the University of Maryland. The theater was called the Hoff and it was my home away from home. I did most of the movie selection, and also worked there as a projectionist. It was a great time. We were programming during the height of the 90's indie heyday, and grew business for the theater quite a bit. It was a good time.

This week, the Hoff was back in the news. My successors decided to bring some hard core porn to the theater, in the form of the pirate-themed "Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge." Classy. The Maryland State Senate was peeved enough that they passed a quickie bill stipulating that any educational institution showing XXX movies would get state funding pulled. Doubly Classy.

We never quite went that far in our programming, but the article did name-check one of our more popular events, the double-feature of Showgirls and Striptease elegantly titled "Take It Off At the Hoff." It's nice to see I have a legacy. (We also planned the Cannibal Festival, featuring Alive, Silence of the Lambs and Cannibal: The Musical, but it never got off the ground. And we spent an evening hollowing out coconuts for a special showing of Monty Python & The Holy Grail.)

Without getting into the issue of whether or not it's appropriate for a state college-run theater to be showing hard core porn, I think the state senate's reaction is out of line. There are dozens of other far more pressing issues relating to the college that the state could intervene on... this is just stupid.

But it's good to see the Hoff in the news and still stickin' it to the man. [Pun semi-intended.]

WI FilmFest Day One: Anvil & Not Quite Hollywood

Fun slate of films for Day 1!

Anvil!: The Story of Anvil follows the ongoing exploits of a metal band who had a brief moment of fame in the 1980s then mostly disappeared. They've been on a never-ending comeback since. Without hyperbole, it's one of the best documentaries I've seen in years. Funny, affecting, disarming and surprisingly inspirational. Slightly derivative of Spinal Tap except that it's all real. (In a Q&A after the film, the editor pointed out that the reason it's so Spinal Tap-ish is that Spinal Tap absolutely NAILED metal.) In a post for later, I want to compare this movie to Mike Leigh's Happy Go Lucky, which had surprising thematic / character similarities. Though it was a critical darling, I thought Happy Go Lucky completely failed, while Anvil completely succeeded, and I want to think a little more on why. (Maybe the metal?)

Anvil comes out in theaters in a few weeks (limited at first, with some cities featuring the "Anvil Experience" where the band plays after the movie), and I can't recommend it enough, whether or not you're into metal. I gave it a 5/5

The second feature was a lighter flick called "Not Quite Hollywood", a documentary exploring the world of 1970's & 1980's Australian exploitation movies. It's a genre I'm only mildly familar with beyond Mad Max. Evidenly, Australia has almost no film industry in the 1960s, and the exploded onto the scene in the 70's with an orgy of sex, violence, martial arts films, etc. This movie is a love letter to them, and features interviews with a lot of the key actors, actresses, directors, producers and film critics, along with uber-fan Quentin Tarantino. The highlight though is the bizarrely condensed presentation of the most titillating, violent and ludicrous scenes from a decade worth of films known primarily for being titillating, violent and ludicrous. It was a blast. I don't know that I'm going to need to hunt down many of these for viewing, despite Tarantino's enthusiastic recommendations, but it was a really fun flick. Worth catching on Netflix, assuming you can handle the excess. I gave it a 3/5.

2 down, 7 to go. Not enough sleep...