No, really.
I forgot – while we were sailing out of the harbor -I saw the USS Kitty Hawk. It docked in Sydney yesterday for 5 days.
Picked up the Herald today, and the front page is dominated by both the Kitty Hawk and the fact that high winds shut down the city’s entire train system (apparently a gust peeled off part of a train on Harbour Bridge). Yes – so I was not exaggerating about the gales we’re having here. I also like the letters page way of covering the story:
“An overseas visitor to Sydney happens upon a large crowd gazing at the harbour. Not seeing anything unusual, he approaches a local and asks: “What is everyone looking at?” Local: “That ship there.” Visitor: “But it’s just a ship.” Local: “Yes, but it’s a really big one.” Visitor wonders what passes for entertainment in Sydney when no big ships are around.”
Other fantastic articles include a column on what the house elves in Harry Potter reveal about modern economics (no, really), Australia just made the world’s first deep-sea marine reserve network, and a study microphoned a couple of hundred people and found that both men and women speak about 16,000 words a day.
I can’t decide if I want to do the Sydney tower. I like towers, but it seems really pricey just to see Sydney from up in the air.
The Aussie reinvention of Macbeth (taking place in Melbourne) got a good review from NYTimes. Also, Company is in Sydney. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have Raul Esparza, who had been favored for the Tony this year. That, and I’m going to the opera, so I can’t really go see a musical, too, even if it is by Sondheim.
Simpsons’ news (from EW): Sen. Ted Kennedy doesn’t hold a grudge against The Simpsons for satirizing him for the past 18 years as Springfield’s sleazy Mayor Joe Quimby (pictured). He’s even lent his vocal support to Springfield, Mass.’s bid to become the official Springfield that will host the premiere of The Simpsons Movie later this month. You can watch the Senator deliver his Quimby-esque pronunciation of the word “chow-dah” in the city’s five-minute promotional video (as well as the video entries of 13 other Springfields) in the official contest page at USA Today‘s website. Vote early and often, as they used to say. (Contest here: http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/simpsons-contest.htm)
What movies of my lifetime have had a real cultural impact: http://popwatch.ew.com/popwatch/2007/07/25-influential-.html#more
I’ve met a bunch of people in town for Live Earth. I think the Sydney line up is kind of blah (although hearing Toni Collette would be cool). Also – wasn’t the idea to have 7 concerts – one on each continent? Doesn’t London/Hamburg and Shanghai/Tokyo (and no antarctica) kind of make that not work? Seriously – I could have sworn that was the deal.
Did you know the town motto of Colma is, “Its great to be alive in Colma”. No, really. (For those not from the bay area – Colma is the city that tests your lung power as a child – it is nearly wall to wall cemeteries.
I also really like this headline, “Harry Potter won’t die, will he?” Why yes, it is CNN, as I suspected.
I love John Krasinski on Conan: http://youtube.com/watch?v=fQlJgocY-Es
And (FINALLY!) the NYTimes review of Joshua (its up to an 88% cream of the crop on rottentomatoes without the NYTimes):
Uneasily straddling age groups and genres, “Joshua” is a highly effective family drama cloaked in the stale tropes of the demon-seed thriller. This could be a brilliant marketing strategy (two demographics for the price of one) or the accidental consequence of trusting a generic idea to an unusually thoughtful and restrained director (George Ratliff, who also wrote the script, with David Gilbert). Either way, there is so much on screen to enjoy that the movie’s endgame flight into excess is disappointing but not disastrous.
Buffing its tacky premise to an industrial-strength gloss, “Joshua” zeroes in on the privileged marriage of Brad and Abby Cairn (Sam Rockwell and Vera Farmiga), whose plush New York City apartment boasts a grand piano and a Central Park view. The piano is for their 9-year-old son, Joshua (Jacob Kogan), a musical prodigy and a joyless child with televangelist-perfect hair and an unhealthy interest in embalming. Favoring preppie outfits and ramrod posture, Joshua is as polished and robotic — and as lethal to old ladies and small animals — as his cinematic forebears, like Rhoda in “The Bad Seed” and Henry in “The Good Son,” though neither, to my recollection, ever broke from ghoulish pursuits long enough to master Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 12.
The arrival of a new baby with the lungs of an opera singer intensifies Joshua’s weirdness and triggers Abby’s barely latent depression. As the family structure begins to buckle, Mr. Ratliff adopts a tone that’s plangent rather than jolting. With each passing day of her screaming newborn’s life, Abby’s face grows a little more crumpled and her hair increasingly wild. Her luxurious home, like the cavernous apartment in “Rosemary’s Baby,” becomes a hostile space, echoing with the mysterious scufflings of unseen neighbors. And, in the hands of the Belgian cinematographer Benoît Debie, the light from the windows is worthy of the Rapture and the glow from the refrigerator is downright unearthly.
In this coldly elegant setting, evil manifests without the aid of the usual retro-gothic signifiers like the inverted crucifix or the malevolent nanny. Instead the sinister is an elusive presence, as much a part of the mise-en-scène as the baby’s crib, to which Joshua is developing an eerie attraction. But for Abby, trapped in her gleaming prison with not one but two disagreeable children, the more immediate horror is motherhood itself.
For all its surface glamour and mainstream ambitions “Joshua” taps into something dark and guilty about being a parent, acknowledging that innocence is not necessarily every child’s default position. “You don’t have to love me,” Joshua tells his stunned father, admitting — in a way the adult cannot — that some children are intrinsically unlovable. Because of this attention to naturalism, the movie digs deeper than its predecessors to unearth truths that few parents care to face. (Witness the storm of outrage when the writer Ayelet Waldman confessed, in a 2005 essay and later on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” to loving her husband more than her children.)
Poised self-consciously between art and entertainment, “Joshua” offers imaginative staging and some superb performances. Celia Weston is all clenched teeth and frozen hair as Joshua’s aggressively Christian grandmother, while Dallas Roberts brings so much charisma to the minor role of an empathetic uncle, you wish he were around more often.
But it’s Sam Rockwell’s spectacular turn as the harried paterfamilias that simultaneously binds the film and pushes its boundaries. Whether coddling his character’s doped-up wife or reaching out to his wacky son, Mr. Rockwell is never less than convincing as a stressed-out dad whose life is slowly disintegrating. The story might get away from him, but his grip on that character never falters.
Music: Do you wanna touch – Joan Jett, jump – madonna
Tags: Travel
jwdmeow
Actually a team of US scientists is going to jam at the South Pole. Not kidding. And there are more than 7 concerts going on. But each continent will be represented.