And to my wife Julie, I wrote it to you in a note in 8th grade and now I can say it in front of a billion people: I love you.

What I really like the most about The Oscars is seeing speaches by the people who never get to be up on stage, in the public eye. I guess it's kind of cool to see Charlize Theron get teary eyed and be ultra proud of her achievement, but the guy who did the sound or designed the costumes also just got recognized and is up there on the same stage. Most of them don't give good speaches, but the ones that do are really special.

Aside from that, my thoughts in brief:

I love The Lord of the Rings but no way does it deserve all 11 of those awards. The weakest were for editing and song. But also on shaky ground were score and screenplay.

Jack Black and Will Farrel were hilarious, but I thought Adrien Brody's mouth spray bit was the funniest moment of the night.

Everyone made fun of Titanic for winning tons of Oscars with no acting awards, yet somehow I don't see LOTR getting the same criticisms.

By the title of the award The Passion of the Christ would be eligible for next year's Foreign Language film (there is not one word of English in it) but it was produced in the US, so it doesn't meet the other primary criteria. Can anyone think of another major movie made in the US all in a foreign language? I can't.

I respect Sean Penn, but I would have loved to see Bill Murray or Johnny Depp get a best actor award this year.

I'm scared for the cheesy headlines in papers tomorrow. "The Lord of the Oscars" and "The Year of the Rings" seem like likely candidates. I figure the "my precious" jokes will be saved for bad editorials and gossip columns, since everyone who accepted an award for LOTR was quite gracious.

My heart is ready, Father... My heart is ready.

I saw The Passion of the Christ Friday night. Before I saw it I read several articles about it, but there were two that really stood out for me. Roger Ebert's review and Orson Scott Card's extended essay are both excellent and highly recommended, but they also tainted the way I watched the film.

I think in the end this is good. Honestly, I really don't know much about the Christian faith. I know the basics (as almost everyone in our society does) but I don't know the details. Both Card and Ebert do, and expressed their knowledge of the details in a way that made sense to this movie. Since they were my guides into the film I don't think it's surprising that the two biggest take away's I had were some of their main points. Simply: it was Christ's purpose on earth to go through the brutal violence in this film and if he's going to sacrifice for the sins of humanity it has to be a real sacrifice, it has to be hard.

Those two points made the brutal violence of this film easier for me. I've explained this to some people who didn't see the movie and they didn't get what I was talking about. I think a lot of that has to do with how well the film does with these points. It really is well made.

There was something else I really noticed too. I'm not a follower of the Christian faith, which requires people to buy into the metaphysical aspects of Jesus' life. But I do watch a lot of science fiction and fantasy movies, which require us to buy into all kinds of fantastic things. So when I watched Passion, I did buy in, but I think only in the context of the film - in much the same way that I buy into the fantasy in The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars when I watch them. That said, I purposefully saw the movie with some Christian friends and we talked about it afterwards. My faith was a subject of the conversation and it has lead me to think about the concept of faith some more. I'm thinking about watching Contact and Signs again - two movies with faith as a central theme.

Lastly, as expected, the line I quoted above really is the inflection point of the movie. Before that it's a little violent and rough, after that it's pure brutality.

We're in London! What should we do? There's the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace... [pause] and no drinking age.

There you go.

Eurotrip was odd. It had the sort of underlying sensitivity that makes the American Pie movies great, but it didn't have their charm. The primary story arc was sort of sweet, but it was filled with ridiculousness - kind of like a bunch of Saturday Night Live skits strung together. There are lots of movies that feel like that, but unlike most this one mostly worked. I think it works in a fragile way though. The whole thing is mostly just a parade of bad stereotypes, so it's easy to offend. And it's mostly low brow humor. The good side is they mostly stay away from gross out humor and keep everything in the realm of uncomfortable or akward situations (there are disturbing things, but it's not focues around body function like a lot of low brow humor is.)

What is a bit suprising is for a movie that is so obviously targeted at teens there is a huge amount of sex and nudity. I guess it's not suprising, but I was taken aback by how blatant it was. This is clearly a movie targetted at late high school boys - many of the scenes really come straight out the psyche of a guy that age. I think that's part of why I laughed more then Wendy. In the end that's probably why I enjoyed it, it was like a cheap trip back in time to those teenage guy years - where the world exists in a completely different way. I want to be really clear that I do not consider this movie a trancendental experience or anything - I'm just rationalizing why I had a good time. Of course, it could also be that I still have the maturity of a high school boy, in the end it's probably a little of both.

Side note: Donny's band plays a great song called "Scotty doesn't know" that reappears throughout the movie. On the way out Wendy noted that Matt Damon looked good all punked out (playing Donny.) I thought she was full of it but ended up losing the bet - it is in fact Matt Damon doing a very off cameo role.

America is a free society which limits the role of government in the lives of our citizens. This commitment of freedom, however, does not require the redefinition of one of our most basic social institutions. Our government should respect every person and protect the institution of marriage.

There is no contradiction between these responsibilities.

- President George W. Bush

Cue Jon Stewart style "Whaaaaaa." I continue to not get how conservatives can talk about limiting the role of government in our lives and still support the social positions they support. In reality shouldn't the line be more like limiting the role of government in our lives as long as you want to live your life like us.

I understand that people don't believe gay marriage should happen. I get that there are actually some reasonable arguements for this position. None that I buy - but if you're curious Orson Scott Card, one of my favorite authors, makes some here. A federal constitutional amendment just seems ludicrous to me. The permanence of it is stunning, and if we're going to talk about the government's role in our private lives - making a constitutional amendment that is about our personal relationships doesn't really seem to fit with the rest of the rhetoric.

Ug, I like that we have conservatives. I really do. It provides our society with a buffer to social change that is valuable. Social change can't happen too quickly, and some things the left comes up with for social change are bad ideas that get stalled for long enough that everyone realizes they're bad ideas. But the constitution is a big deal and not to be taken lightly. There are lots of positions I support, but I almost never support constitutional amendments for them. I remember multiple times in the voting booth staring at propositions thinking "I'd vote for this if it wasn't a constitutional amendment."

I'll be deeply dissapointed if we pass a constitutional amendment solely to create a federal definition of marriage, that's not what the constitution is for.

Not a night goes by, I don't dream of wandering.

My little format of putting a quote up on the top of posts makes sense when I'm commenting on movies or other entertainment, but gets a little tough when I go off on tangents (like I'm about to.) But I have some music on in the background and just as I was thinking about it that appropriate lyric came up.

I'm not sure why, but I've been getting all nostalgic over the last few weeks. I think it has a lot to do with moving. When I moved I ended up looking through all this stuff I've kept around and remembering people I used to know - but have lost touch with now. I really appreciate our modern world where we can go all over the place and move to different and new places. But there's a casualty there too - we don't have the same stable communities humanity has traditionally had. There are all kinds of people I used to know that I may very well never see again. There's something tragic about that.

On the other hand the advance of technology has done great things for allowing us to stay in touch. Granted, people didn't used to move around as much as we do now - but when they left they were typically gone for good, never to be seen or heard from again (think two hundred years ago when people set out for the America's from Europe as an example.) But today we have airplanes, and cheap cross country telephone rates, and email, and the ultimate in finding lost friends: Google.

So I just did the ultimate in the freakshow world of googling people (I love it when we turn nouns into verbs.) I was thinking about friends from High School who I had aboslutely no idea where they are these days. So I decided to google a couple of them. Here I am with my yearbook out, looking up names. I found some, didn't find others. It was fun, and the whole excercise actually has me looking forward to my High School reunion - 10 years in sneaking up fast.

But is all of this really something healthy. Yeah, it would be cool to find an old friend that lives near me now, that's a sustainable friendship. But I have a hard enough time keeping up with friends who are flung all over everywhere as it is. Do I need to add more on? If I could devote my life to travelling and maintaining firendships that would be great. Modern technology allows us to do amazing things, just this weekend I flew to San Jose for a friend's party - I was in and out in 15 hours and the whole trip was a piece of cake. But while I was there seeing old friends it just reminded me that I need to go down for longer, see more people.

In the end I don't want the friends I now keep up with from college to turn into those friends from high school that have become lost to me. I'd rather go the other way and get some of those old friends back. But at a certain point you just have to live your life in the present - if I'm going away all the time to keep up with old friends what happens to my new friends here in Seattle? I guess it's a balancing act we all need to work on.

Almost makes me wish for the old days, with a stable community where people mostly stay put. But not really; I've enjoyed living in three states, and meeting all of the great people that comes along with it. Something makes me think that one static community would get old for me, I'd want to break out. I could be that guy that goes off and is never seen or heard from again. And that would certainly be worse then where I'm at today.

- What'd you get?
- Who knows, but lets just say my mother won't get a bumper sticker this year.

Thirteen is a scary movie to watch. It feels unbelievable, but I know at least one young woman who went down this path. And the whole thing was written by a 14 year old (co-star Nikki Reed, she plays Evie.) In the commentary they say "we kind of realized that the real stuff 12 year old, 13 and 14 year old girls are going through is much more interesting then anything we could make up." This can't be the reality of most young teens, but I'm sure they're out there.

It gets scary by the end as we realize that there are real, permanent damages that happen to these girls' lives. While I was glad the movie ended (it was hard to watch) - I kind of wanted to see more. I want to see how a young girl come back to real life from the surreal, unmaintainable, nose dive they go through here. I want to believe it's possible, but I have no idea what the path from point A to point B looks like. But for the girl I know dealing with it now I have to believe it's possible.

My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, Commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true emperor, Marcus Aurelius. Father to a murdered son, husband to a murdered wife. And I will have my vengeance, in this life or the next.

That's my favorite scene in Gladiator. It's a good movie, but it still doesn't sit with my that it picked up a best picture Oscar. Sure, it's good - but was it really the best movie of 2000? Couldn't be do better?

That said I don't feel as aprehensive about Crowe winning best actor for the movie. He really did a great job, with a lot of good facial acting. But Juaquin Phoenix is just over the top as a bad guy. I went over and read Gladiator's abridged script half expecting all of Juaquin's lines to be "I just want them to love me!" But Rob didn't pick up on that theme and went a different way with his script.

By way of various blogs I found a great site for showing which states you've visited:




It's clear that I'm a west coast kid. One of these days I'm going to have to actually go East of the Mississippi and take a tour. Plus there's the glaring hole in continuity that is North Dakota.

No actual Europeans were harmed in the making of this film.

Is it wrong that I'm looking forward to Eurotrip and The Girl Next Door? I know they're low brow, but there's something about the nothing is sacred, will try absolutely anything to get laugh, comedies. It's really quite sad that I look forward to these, somehow Hollywood has figured out how to make us laugh harder at low brow humor then genuinly good humor. I guess I look forward to these because I typically end up laughing really, really hard - and that feels good.

Eurotrip is a bit sketchy, and I'm not so sure about it. But The Girl Next Door looks much more promising, and Guy tells me he was on the Fox lot recently and everyone there is just raving about it. Appartently the test screenings have been through the roof. They're having a sneak preview this Friday night (I'm sure it's not a coincidence that that's opening day for Eurotrip either...) which I can't make, but I expect to get a group together for opening night in a few weeks.

I'd rather eat rat poison then watch this guy play guitar on the beach at three in the morning.

I finished Anything Else and I really have mixed feelings about it. The Woody Allen dialog is great, with the previously mentioned flood of quotable lines. But the characters are ridiculous. They're even more over the top than in many woody Allen films. I just wanted to reach into the movie, grab them and shake vigorously. The real problem is there was no one I wanted to root for. Jason Biggs' character, the protagonist, had me going for a while - but then lost me with all the immense amounts of crap he put up with in his relationships.

I guess that's kind of what the movie is about, how he almost needs all this crap in his life and is incapable of getting rid of it. But that didn't interest me - and in the end if you're watching a character and dialog movie and stop caring about the characters there's big trouble. It's important to note that this is different then a movie like The Rules of Attraction which is also without a character to root for, but that was much more of a exercise in style. With those you can get away with reprehensible characters.

On the bright side I continue to be impressed with Jason Biggs. He pulled off Woody Allen dialog flawlessly - complete with the nervous and broken speaking style.

[Her] I've had a crush on you since we met, couldn't you tell - the way I was ignoring you?
[Him] There was something compelling about your apathy.

I watched the first half of Anything Else tonight. I'll likely write more after I watch the rest, but I've been really struck by memorable dialog moments so far. Normally I end up with one or two quotes from movies that stick with me, so far I've run into six. The others:

I couldn't decide who's Nihilistic pessimism would make you happier.

There must be a million women out there who would find it exciting to get in bed with you. Well, maybe not a million but I'm sure you can find one if you get her drunk enough.

There is truly a paucity of viritical talent in the world.

Have you ever dialed 911? It's like trying to get a mortgage.

He's still not convinced that the slaughter of six million Jews is enough to atisfy the Anti-Semitic impulses of the majority of the world.

By far the strangest thing so far is watching Jason Biggs doing Woody Allen dialog. He's pulls it off spectacularly, sounding just like Allen. The really weird times are when they're both on screen talking to each other, two Allens is really one too many in any conversation.

I've got a bad feeling about this.

Lucas has finaly decided to release the Star Wars trilogy on DVD. The press release on their site says they'll be in our hands on September 21st. There's a little bit of howling among Star Wars faithful (also called geeks - I'm one too) since they'll be releasing the special edition version of the movies. These are the ones Lucas re-released in 1997 with updates effects and some extra scenes. For the most part I don't mind the new additions, with one glaring exception.

Like just about everyone else I continue to be dissapointed that they made Gredo shoot first in the cantina scene in the first movie. This significantly changes the dynamic of that scene and changes the Han Solo character. Dissapointment in this change even made it into a movie, Kevin Smith slipped a line about it into Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back.

But in the end I'll buy it anyway, as the Star Wars trilogy is one of the few remaining reasons I have any movies on tape.

Guess who's going to pay off President Bush's $1 trillion deficit?

MoveOn.org sponsored a contest recently asking for people to submit a 30 second anti-Bush issue ad. They got thousands of entries and you can watch the finalists at the contest website: Bush in 30 Seconds. By far the best is the Child's Pay ad by Charlie Fisher. It was the winner and MoveOn.org has been running it on national tv. I saw it last night on CNN during primary election coverage and they even tried to play it during the Superbowl. But CBS rejected it, claiming it would be too controversial. I'll leave the political arguements for another time and just say it's the best political ad I can remember seeing. You should watch it.

Yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time - stupid voice over guy.

Here's a conversation that happened today between me and my roommate Wendy:

Wendy: Wait, are you fast forwarding through the game and just watching the commercials.
Me: Yeah, mostly.
Wendy: That's awesome.

This actually worked out to be a great strategy. The first half of the Superbowl was pretty slow, but the commercials are always better in the first half. So I watched all the commercials and not much of the game until it picked up in the end of the second quarter. But then the commercials always suck in the second half (or at least aren't up to Superbowl standards) so I skipped most of the commercials in the second half and watched most of the game. I love Tivo.

In the end Budweiser had lots of great commercials that were very entertaining. My favorite may have been the Chlydsdale tryouts, but there were many other good ones too. Pepsi had one or two fun ones, and even IBM/Linux had a good one with Ali (I thought they were going to do something with Eminem for a while, but they didn't.) The AOL commercials were cute, but as a computer nerd things like "TopSpeed" technology annoy me - there really aren't a lot of good technical solutions for artificially speeding up your internet connection. Unless you're actually pushing more bits to the client you just have to fake it, which only gives artificial speed gains in select cases. (OK, my nerd rant is over.) But my favorite commercial far and away was the MasterCard commercial with Homer Simpson. Of course, it's not too hard to get me to like something with The Simpsons in it.

Lastly, the halftime show was ridiculous as always. But what was with Justin Timberlake pulling Janet Jackson's breast cup off at the end. I know it comes just after the line: "cause I gotta have you naked by the end of this song" but isn't this family entertainment. And it was like the camera's knew it was coming and only slightly approved. They cut away immediately - so what's the point. I don't think it adds to the performance, it's just cheap shock value stuff...

Update: It turns out that the baring of the breast was unintentional - or at least that's what all parties involved are saying. Janet certainly looked suprised, but that could have been part of the act. I figured it was planned because her nipple was covered with some small metal disk. But they say now that's a piercing guard for Janet. In my favorite quote Justin Timberlake appologizes and calls it a "wardrobe malfunction."

Que quiere se en vida

Since the Superbowl's excesses just turn me off I'm TiVo'ing it and I'll watch bits and pieces of it with some commercials later. Instead this afternoon I watched Once Upon A Time In Mexico. I really enjoy El Mariachi and Desperado and this is a sequel to those, but doesn't have the same flair. There is some good in it (not the least of which is Johnny Depp - who I'm thrilled got an academy award nomination for Pirates of the Carribean) but it's just too violent and disconnected for the good parts of it to catch up. I thought for a bit that I was getting soft as I got squeemish during some of the ultra-violent scenes, but on reflection I don't think that's the case. I think it's more that the movie didn't either need or support that violence. It was excess, and there wasn't used in a way that justified it. It felt like some twisted special effects and creative minds trying to come up with outrageous things to do.

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