Look for the new and improved HotaineNet at:
I may move some of this content over there, I may just start from scratch, I may do nothing at all! But new posts to this blog will stop in ay event, and hopefully new ones will start appearing there soon.
In the past two days I’ve seen two movies. On Saturday afternoon I caught a showing of “Black Swan”, which I’ve wanted to see for a while. I can’t say I’m a fan of ballet although I might be; I’ve never actually seen one so it’s difficult to judge. Regardless of the ballet content it boasted of having been directed by Darren Aronofsky, so I suspected I’d enjoy it as much as I have most of his other work. Sure enough, I was entranced by what was happening on the screen and the two hours seemed to last but a few minutes. The best way I could sum it up in a few words would be to say that it’s like “Fight Club” meets Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” meets the ultra-competitive world of ballet.
For the past 14 years (wow, time flies!) I've worked professionally in the arena of educational software. The vast majority of that work has been focused on helping kids with reading difficulties overcome those issues (things like dyslexia, ADHD, low vision,etc.). I really love what I do for a lot of reasons, including the fact that I get to work with some really interesting technologies. But the thing that's kept me going all this time, the thing that makes me get up in the morning and want to go to work, is knowing that I'm helping some kids have a better life. In years past (for example, when I was a kid in school...) a lot of these kids would have been preordained into a life of illiteracy, which comes saddled with an incredible amount of stigma, struggle, and even implications for how likely they are to spend significant parts of their life in jail. Literacy changes lives, it gives people the ability to explore new ideas and learn anything they care to. Coming from the socio-economic level I do, and I suspect most people reading this do, it's hard to imagine what a life of illiteracy is really like. Consider yourself very lucky if you fall into this group.
Last night I saw Sting perform with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. This was the second time I'd seen him live, and come to think of it the first was just about a year ago. That first show was much more "traditional" Sting, him with his band mostly performing the classic Police and Sting songs you'd expect. The show last night was amazing for a lot of reasons, and I was impressed with how well the songs lent themselves to the full orchestra treatment. Sting mentioned at one point that the struggle with this tour was finding songs that would work well in that type of setting, and it was interesting for him because he had to really dig back through the archives. He even played at least one song that he said was written years ago but had never been released, and he dug it out now specifically because it lent itself well to this performance. And that started me thinking about a thought I had recently.
I recently mentioned to a friend that I'd "accidentally" ordered a few new movies from Amazon. This inevitably led down the path of talking about my ridiculously-sized DVD and Blu-Ray collection, and ultimately towards one of my dirty little secrets: I haven't watched approximately 25% of the discs I own. Why do I continue to buy them if I haven't even watched a good chunk of the hundreds I already own? I've no idea, other than I can't help thinking that maybe, just maybe, someday I might find myself cooped up due to a snow storm and have no books to read (the horror!). And now I can rest easily knowing that I am in fact prepared to survive roughly 40 days and 40 nights of a catastrophic failure of the internet, printed material, television, and the United States Postal Service (whose sole reason for existence is, in my opinion, the delivery of those little red envelopes from Netflix) to provide for my complete entertainment needs during an event that would require me to be home for such a duration. Whew, that's a relief!
Copyright © 2010 by Michael Gorman. All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or redistributed in any form without the express written permission of the author.
Last weekend I walked down Commonwealth Avenue in the Back Bay, and it got me thinking about a few things. The most obvious was that I hadn't actually walked down Commonwealth Avenue in quite a long time, and it's actually a very pleasant place to walk. There's a nice little park-like strip for pedestrians up the middle of the road, making it a little bit insulated from the traffic and road noise while still giving you the feeling that you're in the city. There are also some interesting statues along this walkway, some of which I'd never even stopped to look at before. This time I made it a point to stop and look at each one, realizing how myopic I'd been about this particular area of the city.
Today was the first day since the beginning of this new Summer season that I managed to make it to a beach. I hadn't realized when I set out this morning that it was probably the first time I'd been to a beach with my daughter in two years (I'm pretty sure now that we never made it last year, and no, pools don't count). I realize now that was a huge mistake, both because it's a very easy thing to do with a child, and also a beach is just about the single most exciting thing a 6-year-old can apparently imagine, aside perhaps from a trip to Disney World.
Guy Ritchie sucks. There, I said it. His movies always come across as the film equivalent of a comic book, and I don’t mean that as a compliment at all. They feel slapped together from pieces left on the cutting-room floor of better films. The action is the star, but you can’t fucking see half of it because between the shaky-cam nonsense, the jarring slow-motion fist-hitting-person cuts, and the equally jarring snap-back-into-regular-speed cuts you have no idea what the hell is happening in most of the action scenes. I understand the argument that it makes the viewer feel like they’re actually part of the action, engaged in the fight, lost in the confusion of the moment, yes, fine, I understand. But I’m trying to watch a movie here, and I want to see what’s going on damnit! If I wanted to be in the middle of a fight I’d walk up to Madonna and say “Guy Ritchie claims he left you because you have a penis. Please don’t punch me because I’m just the messenger.”
I mentioned in my last screed that I had been woefully neglecting my movie-watching duties in 2009. 2010 has started off with me grinding my way through Stephen King’s latest 1,100-page arm-buster (“Under the Dome”) mostly to the continued detriment of my movie and TV watching, but I have managed to get in not one but two films at the theater so far this year. The first of those two was “Leap Year”.