After all the westerns and older classics I’ve been watching lately, I decided it was time to catch a film told from a woman’s point of view. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore seemed to fit the bill pretty well.

Starring Ellen Burstyn and directed by Martin Scorsese, the film follows Alice Hyatt as she learns to fend for herself after her husband’s death. Great pains were taken to show Alice’s transformation from a spiritless, cowed housewife with an annoying son and an abusive husband to a firm, compassionate, in-control woman. With an annoying son. A really, really annoying son.

You can’t have everything, I guess.

It’s an interesting metamorphosis. In the beginning, we meet an Alice afraid of her husband, yet defending him to her best friend and mourning him when he dies suddenly. After the funeral Alice makes the drastic decision to move away and try to restart her singing career, with her son Tommy in tow.

Before long Alice starts a relationship with a young Harvey Keitel. Ellen Burstyn’s scenes with Keitel were simply amazing. You know how good he is at the “scary dude” thing? Well, she’s just as good at the “Oh God don’t kill me please don’t kill me” thing. I read somewhere that she had to go cry for an hour when they got done shooting the scene, and I don’t doubt it for a minute. It’s one of the standout scenes in the film.

Before long, Alice moves again and takes a job at a local diner, meeting and falling in love with local rancher David, played by Kris Kristofferson. After about twenty minutes of scenes in and around the diner, I finally realized why it seemed so familiar. The Linda Lavin show Alice was based on Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. I never knew that.

The rest of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore deals with her budding independence, how it works with her relationship with David, and how Tommy’s acting out (and his friendship with Jodie Foster) leads to near disaster.

Another good film, worthy of the praise given it. I’m not surprised; the fact that Martin Scorsese directed Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore is a big tipoff to its quality. The framing of the above shot of Alice and Flo (played by Diane Ladd) on a break and sunning themselves is a perfect example of his artistry.

It’s damn brave to do such an extreme closeup with such inconsequential dialogue. It easily could have come off ho-hum, but Scorsese made a potentially throw-away scene into one of the more important of the film. Here he showed not just the easy friendship between the two ladies, but also Alice’s comfort in her own skin.

It’s a good image. One that people need to see, both then and now. Ellen Burstyn has long been a reliable player, and her ability is evident here. Her Alice, by the end of the film, finally becomes someone we hope to recognize from within our own selves. Never a bad message, but rarely is it told with such elegance.

Remember [cref 134 the other day] when I linked to xkcd and said how funny he is? Yeah, I thought he was awesome before, but today…

Today he moved to awesome raised to the BILLIONTH DEGREE.

My name is Matt. I’m an ex-Marching Band Kid. And that up there? That’s happened to me.

Recently.

You know, The Sting is one of those films that I’ve never given much thought to watching. I always assumed it was a good film, but didn’t feel any motivation to watch it. It came out at an awkward time; when VCRs became popular a decade after the film was released, it was too recent to be considered a classic but too old to be rushed out to the video store shelves.

When I realized that seven months into this thing I still haven’t taken a look at any films from the 1970s, I decided to pull this one out first. Boy am I glad I did. It really is a great movie.

First of all, take a look at the picture above. But for the generation gap, I’d swear Robert Redford and Brad Pitt were brothers. Redford plays the part of Johnny Hooker, a young grifter in the depression-era seedier side of Joliet, Illinois. When his partner leaves, Hooker heads for Chicago where he’s taken under the wing of Henry Gondorff, an older con-artist who hasn’t had a good sting in a long time. Amid crosses, double crosses, and triple crosses, Gondorff manages to lead a band of swindlers in conning mob boss Doyle Lonnegan.

The art direction on The Sting leaves no doubt that we’re in 1936. From the title cards between acts to the drab interior sets and streets lined with winos to the old piano rags of Scott Joplin on the brilliantly sparse soundtrack, we know we’re seeing the underbelly of a world that’s seen better days. And that helps dispel any moral questions before they’re asked and allows us to watch as our heroes make a living by stealing from others. There’s never any doubt that what they’re doing is reasonable and just, especially since they tend to take from other crooks.

Paul Newman’s Gondorff has a couple things going for him. First of all, he’s got those piercing blue eyes and a confidence in his swagger that fits him just so. He also gets all the good lines. Gondorff’s been around the block a few times, and it’s clear that while he may have fallen on hard times, he’s still got what it takes to pull this off. Surrounding himself with a veritable legion of associates in a complex plan, he plays his mark like a fiddle.

The poker game is an amazing showcase of close-quarters comedy. Newman’s just stellar, making the whole situation so deliciously uncomfortable. Then as the stakes get higher and higher, the comedy slowly fades while the drama is turned up to eleven. George Roy Hill won an Academy Award for directing The Sting, and quite deservedly. I’m leaving out buckets and buckets of plot because I don’t have room for all of it, but the film never felt too weighed down by the number of plotlines or players.

Speaking of the number of players, this film is a prime example of pitch-perfect casting. There are so many recognizable faces, but there’s no stunt casting. Each actor suits his part perfectly. Ray Walston is the only choice for a race announcer. No one else (nevermind The Sting II) could play Lonnegan the way Robert Shaw did. Eileen Brennan was a fabulous choice for the sultry vixen, bringing a guarded femininity to this otherwise masculine cast.

The Sting is definitely a film I’ll be watching again. I do wish I’d been able to rent a better print. The one I got was a messy full-screen DVD from 1998. I’m seeing reports that the film may have been shown in 4:3 in a conscious decision to make it look like old movie, but then I see that newer restored HD versions of the film are made in 1.85:1.

Hrm. I’ll have to find out which one’s true before I watch it again.

Season 3, Mr. Lisa Goes to Washington

Season 9, The City Of New York Vs. Homer Simpson

I’m not quite sure what to say about Shaun Tan’s The Arrival. It’s an exceptional book, but I have neither the education nor the vocabulary to put it into words. Not that that’s ever stopped me before.

Let’s start with a summary. The book follows a man (nameless) as he leaves home to prepare a new home for his wife and daughter (also nameless). We follow the man as he boards a ship and travels across the ocean into his new home. When he gets there, he’s surprised by a stunning development.

The astonishingly creative twist here is that everything in this new place is vaguely familiar, but different enough to cause problems. Not just different to the man, but different to the reader. The food he eats, the shape of the houses, the birds, the clock on the wall; everything’s different, right down to the eating utensils.

The book is wordless, told completely in images. Tan goes so far as to invent a new written language for the street signs, and except for spelling his name once never offers a translation. But even though we can’t peek into the man’s words, we know with such intimacy what the man is feeling.

By denying the reader the simple tool of language, Tan forces us to put ourselves in the man’s position. And by giving us an unfamiliar world, he makes us figure out with the man how to eat the fruit that replaces bread and how to navigate the streets with a map in a foreign language that neither of us understand. Tan does a wonderful job of it, making each page its own little story.

I really don’t know what else to say about The Arrival. It was published in 2006 in the author’s native Australia, where he’s apparently fairly successful, as well he should be. I don’t usually prod people into buying anything on the blog, but please consider getting this one. You should also visit ShaunTan.net and read his comments on the book.

(Please note that for this post I have limited myself to a few of the illustrations that Tan has made available on his site. See New York Magazine for preview images that are considerably larger.)

I’ve been meaning to write about the issue of online privacy, but other things keep stopping me from doing it. So in the interest of getting it out there, I’m re-posting a slightly edited comment of mine from August on somebody else’s blog:

I think we’re going to have to redefine the word ‘privacy’ in the very near future. The fact that future employers could do a thirty second Google search for my name and come up with something to be offended by doesn’t mean that they should be allowed to. We’ve drawn those lines in the sand before, and I think we’re going to have to again.

For example, if I were applying for a job, the person doing the hiring could come to my neighborhood, knock on all my neighbors’ doors, and ask questions about my personal life. They could peek in my windows at night to see what I’m watching on television or to see if I walk around in my underwear. They could sort through my mail looking for incriminating correspondence or a political perspective that doesn’t match their own. They could follow me to dinner with friends and listen in on our conversation to see if I have anything negative to say about anybody, or to see how I tip the waitress, or to see if I use a lot of swears.

In each case, they could do these things, but as a society we’ve decided that it’s generally unacceptable. Maybe it’s time that we expanded the definition again.

I worried about this and used a screen name for a long time, but after I was online for a few years, it started to feel like I was hiding something, like I was embarrassed or ashamed of what I was saying or doing. I also felt like I was shortchanging the people I was interacting with online, some of whom I know better than many of my offline friends.

I finally came to the point where I just decided that if an employer (and there are other applications for this) doesn’t want me because he found a three-year-old post on a forum while digging for dirt, he’s probably right that I shouldn’t be working for him.

Randall Munroe of the often-brilliant xkcd.com hit it from another angle when he posted this:

So that about says it, right? I do know some of this is just beating my head against a wall. But darn it, I refuse to censor myself completely because of what someone might think at some undetermined date in the future.

What do you think? Comments are open.