There Will Be Blood

Yesterday afternoon, Watoosa and I went to see There Will Be Blood. I quite liked it, and I think it's worthy of a Best Picture nomination, although I would prefer No Country for Old Men. Watoosa would choose Juno, I think (I did enjoy that one, but I'd still give the big one to the Coens).

There Will Be Blood features a spectacular performance by Daniel Day-Lewis as the protagonist, Daniel Plainview. Day-Lewis uses an American accent reminiscent of John Huston or Jack Palance. It doesn't sound like the accent of a rough-and-tumble prospector turned oil man, but I think that adds to the character's mystique. I spent the entire film trying to figure him out. Is he a villain? Is he simply a hard-working businessman? Is he succumbing to his obsession? Just what is he up to? Only at the end does an answer begin to emerge, although I'm still trying to make sense of the character even now.

The film naturally invites comparisons to Citizen Kane. Both films chronicle the life of men who rise to prominence and wealth and ultimately suffer from it. Watching their protagonists develop, even to the point of tragedy, is what makes them compelling. But There Will Be Blood also features a foil to the Plainview character: a local faith healer named Eli Sunday, who eventually becomes a famous radio preacher in Los Angeles. These two characters could easily be seen as embodiments of the American century: a business tycoon and a celebrity revivalist preacher. But if they were nothing more than types, this movie would have been a lot less interesting.

The film also uses music to remarkable effect--some have likened it to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. And there are lots of shots that are beautifully composed; we especially loved the scenes of the Central California countryside.

I think it gets a bit out of hand toward the last 20 minutes or so (although it allows Day-Lewis to go completely nuts), but it's definitely worth seeing.

Maine Barbecue (No, That's Not a Typo)

After succumbing to a raging, pregnancy-fueled craving for barbecue on Friday, Watoosa did some research and found a local place that was supposed to be pretty good: Beale Street Barbecue. We tried it out yesterday, and we were quite impressed.

Their basic sauce is tomato-based, so it resembles the kind you'd get in the mid-South. It has a delicious, vegetablish savoriness, and just enough heat to make it interesting without producing rivers of sweat from my scalp (not that it takes much to do that). They also have a habanero-fueled sauce, if you want some agonizing pain with your meal.

That basic sauce gets served with many kinds of meat: pulled pork, chicken, pulled brisket, and sausages. I got some pork and brisket, and while the former was quite good, the latter was fantastic. It comes served on a hunk of tasty jalipeno cornbread.

They also serve pork ribs. Friends and neighbors, I'm here to tell you...those ribs are amazing. They are smoked and seasoned with a dry rub, and the meat is so tender that a light breeze would pull it right off the bone. I put a little sauce on a few ribs, but Watoosa and I both decided they were even better with just the rub.

I wouldn't say it's the best barbecue ever, but we wouldn't be embarassed to take our Southern friends there. If there hadn't been several inches of snow on the ground with temps in the 20s, and if our waitress hadn't sounded like an extra from Good Will Hunting, I could almost have fooled myself into thinking I was in Memphis.

I say "almost," because the menu features lots of non-BBQ items, like crab cakes, burritos, pasta and salad. And people ordered them! At the table next to ours, as I was devouring those magnificent ribs, I noticed that none of the three diners ordered barbecue. And one of them--a petulant whelp of a teenager, I'm sure--ate only a salad with some chicken tossed on top. I didn't know whether to condemn them or grieve for them. Alas, they forfeited culinary riches for a bowl of pottage (or a salad and a couple burgers, to be more exact).

Chillin' Like a Villain

See that big goose egg in the bottom left of the image? That was last night's low. Or is it tonight's? No matter. It's been cold here the past couple days. Farther inland they've been having a windchill advisory, but it seems to have missed us.

After we moved out here, we'd tell people how excited we were to be living in Maine. Since they knew we'd moved here from California and that we grew up in the South, they warned us, "You'll be changing your tune once winter comes and you're digging your car out of the snow."

My insistence that we actually love cold weather was usually met with skepticism. And when I'd respond by pointing out that Southerners are naturally tough and that's why it was a scientific fact that Johnny Reb could whoop ten Billy Yanks in the War between the States and don't you even try to deny it or we'll rise up again and give you Federalists another shellackin'...well, that's usually been met with stares of puzzlement and disbelief.

But I'm happy to report that we're now about halfway through the winter, and Watoosa and I both love it. We've had an unusually large amount of snow this season (several feet, in fact) and lots of days below freezing. The snow does tend to make things a bit messy, but I still get a charge out of watching it fall and cover everything. The drive to campus (and the view of Sebago Lake and the White Mountains) is especially beautiful after a good snowstorm. Digging the cars out hasn't been a problem except for one night, and even then I was able to use a neighbor's snowblower, which was actually fun (I'm going to have to get one when we get a driveway). And I take an almost perverse pleasure in seeing how low the temps can get; I'm hoping for a day when the highs stay in the single digits, just to say I saw it.

So all the doubters can rest assured. Old Man Winter can keep on trying to freeze us out, but we're not going anywhere. Mother Nature can do her very worst, and we'll take it with a smile.

Unless we lose power. Then we're screwed.

Forever in Peace May They Wave

I've always had a thing for flags. As I child, I would sometimes pull out the "F" volume of our encyclopedia set (The New Book of Knowledge, which was for some reason stored in my room) and look at a color spread of all the world's flags. I got extra excited when a school assignment required us to construct flags. Yes, I was a total geek.

So I was especially jazzed about finding this site today: a ranking of all the world's flags in terms of aesthetic value. Some of the comments are pretty funny, such as Libya's choice of a plain green rectangle ("Did you even try?"), Mauritius four-bar monstrosity ("'Hey, lots of countries have a tricolour, why don't we have a quadcolour?' Big mistake."), and Zimbabwe ("Features a hawk sitting on a toilet.").

The grading methodology is here. There are bonus points for simplicity and good colors, and flags lose points for bad colors, the use of maps, and resemblance to corporate logos. Especially damning is the penalty for "Makes me nauseous."

The United States gets a C+, which is about what I'd give it. I've never really taken to it, in part because of the proportion of the size and shape of the blue field to the whole rectangle, and because of all those stars.

The United Kingdom is one of my favorite flags, but it gets only a B on this list, having points docked for being "too busy." I don't think it's too busy at all. I like especially that it incorporates the flags of England, Scotland, and Ireland (it's the cross of St. George, imposed on the cross of St. Patrick, all imposed on the cross of St. Andrew). Of course, that means that Wales gets left out--tough luck to the Welsh for living in a principality rather than a kingdom.

Another one of my favorite flags was the Confederate battle flag, aka the Stars and Bars. Unfortunately, it's now forever tainted with racism and redneckery, but it's a fine looking flag.

Just Think of the Occupational Hazards

Here's a job I'd never want to have, regardless of the salary: public restroom reviewer. The NY Times apparently has one, who's posted a review here of an automated toilet in Madison Square Park.

I've heard about these automated toilets before, and it sounded like a pretty great deal; since they are self-flushing and self-cleaning, they avoid the absolute worst thing about public restrooms, at least those devoted to males: for some reason, men seem to abandon all influences of civilization and decency once they enter, and prefer to leave their offerings right there in the bowl for the next guy to witness. I've long been baffled by this, since it's clearly a negative-sum game--we all suffer when even a few of us refuse to flush, and yet it's so easy to avoid that outcome. I can't believe that all these men don't flush their toilets at home, so why not just take the 0.5 seconds and hit that lever? If you're grossed out by touching it, use your foot (like I do).

Luckily, I've been blessed with a bladder of steel, so I can quite comfortably delay taking care of business until I can do so with a home court advantage, so to speak. But I have longed for a technological fix to this particular shortcoming of human nature.

It looks like I'll have to wait a little longer, though, because it looks like these automated units have two shortcomings that I don't see myself getting past. First, you're given only three 16-inch strips of toilet paper. Granted, that's typically enough to get the job done, but what do you do in those extreme cases? You can't just wait for the thing to reset, because the entire room gets cleaned after every use. Are you supposed to zip up, exit, and tell whomever's waiting outside that you that you want another ride?

Second, there is dampness everywhere. And I do mean everywhere. Part of the point of having a guaranteed bathroom is that you don't get your trousers infected by fluid on the floor. And there's nothing worse than the sensation of sitting down on the toilet seat and feeling moisture. You pray to the gods above that it's just clean toilet water that splashed up there after the last flush.

These units cost $100,000, so they may be slow to catch on. But hopefully they'll get a couple design improvements before they do. In the meantime, I'm forced to put up with the great unwashed.

OD on Austen

Some of you may be interested in this little nugget: PBS's Masterpiece Theater, plans to air adaptations of all of the works of Jane Austen. Plus, they're including a dramatic portrayal of her life, and no, it's not the one with Anne Hathaway. Rather it's titled Miss Austen Regrets, and it stars Olivia Williams (she was Miss Cross in Rushmore), who should be a bit more believable than Hathaway. I think some of the adaptations are new, but there is at least one classic: the BBC's production of Pride & Prejudice, which stars Jennifer Ehle and Colin "You might as well call me Darcy" Firth.

I've thankfully overcome my blithe dismissal of Austen's books, and so I no longer turn my nose up at dramatized versions of them, although the BBC P&P is still the best (thank the lords of Kobol that PBS didn't use the Keira Knightley version, or Watoosa would have gone into a fit of rage). We'll see how the new ones turn out.

There is a webpage for the series here. Since it's PBS, the website doesn't really tell you that much. I hope Masterpiece Theater still uses that same theme music from when I was a kid. I knew when those trumpets started playing that it was time for my parents to watch grown-up TV and for me to go to bed.

Bonus funny story: a few years ago, I gave Watoosa a DVD copy of P&P. She was elated, and she insisted we watch it immediately. It's pretty long, so we split it up over two evenings. During the night after we finished it, I awoke to hear her talking in her sleep. With as much vitriol as I've ever heard come from her lips, she said, "Oh that Mr. Collins...I HATE HIM SO MUCH!"

UPDATE: Imagine my embarassment on realizing I used the coarse, lowbrow Americanized spelling "theater" instead of "theatre." A thousand pardons.

UPDATE 2: Masterpiece Theatre intro theme is here, although it's warbly and quiet and doesn't kick in until the 1:10 mark. On the plus side, it also features that weird Moogish WGBH Boston promo that used to be all over PBS in the 1980s.

UPDATE 3: Mousterpiece Theater intro is here.

UPDATE 4: Monsterpiece Theatre episode is here. Is it me, or does Cookie Monster say "Good Sex Joke" at 00:19?

No Movie for Loud Men

The latest Coen brothers' feature, No Country for Old Men, is getting a lot of awards buzz, and I think it's well deserved. I really liked it in the theater, and the more I thought about it afterwards, the more I retroactively enjoyed it. Today, I read this article that explains part of why the film is so effective: it's the way the Coens use sound, or rather, silence.

Here's its description of the most memorable scene:

"There is at least one sequence in “No Country for Old Men” that could be termed Hitchcockian in its virtuosic deployment of sound. Holed up in a hotel room, Mr. Brolin’s character awaits the arrival of his pursuer, Chigurh. He hears a distant noise (meant to be the scrape of a chair, Mr. Berkey said). He calls the lobby. The rings are audible through the handset and, faintly, from downstairs. No one answers. Footsteps pad down the hall. The beeps of Chigurh’s tracking device increase in frequency. Then there is a series of soft squeaks — only when the sliver of light under the door vanishes is it clear that a light bulb has been carefully unscrewed."

The reference to Hitchcock is apt. I knew exactly what was going to happen in this scene, and yet I was still completely on the edge of my seat. Another good comparison is 2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick builds the tension to an amazing degree scenes in which the astronauts are maneuvering outside their ship, by using utter silence or limiting the sound to the astronauts' breathing and a slight hissing of the air system. It seems to last forever, and it underscores the coldness and emptiness of space, which reminds the viewer (although subtly) of the danger they're witnessing. Similarly, he focuses for an uncomfortably long amount of time on the readout monitors on the hibernation pods, when HAL is slowly killing the astronauts inside, and all you hear is a persistent, manic beeping. It's one of the creepiest things I've ever seen in a movie. You can get a feel for it here, but it loses something on the small screen.

Hitchcock's Strong Suit

I'm not sure exactly how serious to take it, but I enjoyed reading this essay about my favorite Alfred Hitchcock film, North by Northwest.

The author's thesis is given in the first sentence: "North by Northwest isn't a film about what happens to Cary Grant, it's about what happens to his suit."

He addresses something that has always bothered me about that film--Cary Grant goes so long without showering, and yet Eva Marie Saint doesn't seemed put off at all until they're in her hotel room in Chicago (and even then she's just putting up a front to protect him). Granted, it is Cary Grant. But after all that running around, fleeing malevolent aircraft, getting nearly roasted by an exploding fuel truck, etc., when he does get a chance to bathe, he passes up the opportunity. Surely, he had to be reeking to high heaven.

But the article also points out something I hadn't thought of before: just how magnificent the suit looks, despite all the abuse it takes. Clearly, there's some Hollywood magic involved, here.

One other thing that has always bothered me about this film is its title--what does it have to do with the story? The characters move almost exactly due west, not north by northwest. Someone once suggested to me that it refers to the direction that the villains plan to go as they make their exit from the United States. But since they're leaving from Rapid City, South Dakota, that would mean they were heading to...where, exactly? I have a hard time believing that superspy James Mason would be heading to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.