Girl Detective

In the Twin Cities, Northwest Airlines has a lock on the market. This often means decent prices, sometimes means awful prices (my family always gripes; they urge me to move to the hub city of a better airline), but doesn’t leave us much choice. It does, though, allow for nonstop flights almost anywhere, a bonus when traveling with kids. My NWA experiences have been better than not, but this recent piece at Freakonomics has me concerned about upcoming travel.

Edward Copeland creates a top 100 list of his own that I find much better than AFI’s. (Link thanks to A List of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago.) While Copeland’s list does include the Coen brothers’ Miller’s Crossing, I still found some of my favorite films missing. I feel a list of my own percolating, though I’m not sure if I have the stamina or follow through to come up with 100.

The New York Times joins the book weeding discussion. There are some good suggestions, but I have a few others.

1. Give away your books in the easiest way you can. I take mine to Half Price Books. If they want them, they give me money. If they don’t, they recycle them. Selling, sending, giving some books here and others there is a fine idea. But it’s going to take more time and effort just to rid yourself of something you’re done with already.

2. Most used books won’t bring much, if any money. Why? Because if you don’t want them, chances are others won’t, either. Don’t argue with the person at the used book store. They are not living in a mansion on the profits from your National Geographics.

Weeding books now, and not missing them later, are wonderful things.

For Fathers Day, I got G. Grod a chimney starter for the charcoal grill our neighbor kindly gave to us. Since I’d never used a chimney starter, and all recipes said they took 20 to 30 minutes to ready the briquettes, I figured I should start prepping before G. Grod got home from work, or we’d be eating past Drake and Guppy’s bedtimes.

I had this lovely, rose-tinged picture in my head that Guppy would play quietly in the backyard, while I got Drake to help with the briquettes, and then both would be well away by the time any fire was involved.

I can be such a moron.

First, I didn’t realize the grill was full of ash. Both Drake and Guppy were fascinated by this. I tried to involve Drake in the cleanup, but while my attention was diverted, Guppy rushed in, grabbed a handful of ash, and stuffed it in his mouth.

Unwilling to abandon my mission, I started throwing balls across the yard to get Guppy to chase them. Yes, like Seth Rogen did in Knocked Up, I was playing fetch with my child.

Drake loves numbers, so I asked him to help me count out the briquettes. He so enjoyed throwing them into the starter, though, that he quickly lost count. Further, when he discovered that his hands were blackened by the charcoal (”Cool!) he rubbed his arms and legs with briquettes. I did finally manage to get the starter filled, and keep Drake and Guppy away while I lit it. I then hustled them both inside.

I snapped at Drake not to touch anything till we got to the shower to wash him off. No surprise, there were little black handprints all the way to the bathroom. I did get him clean eventually.

By the time G. Grod arrived, the briquettes were ready to go. He looked at me in disbelief.

“I didn’t expect you to start it till I got here.”

Somehow, I was not able to summon any pride in the accomplishment.

“We’re never grilling again,” I spit out, to his amusement.

One of many insights from my recent vacation:

There will ALWAYS be too much to do.

Choose not to. Instead, be. Spend a day a week (why not Sunday?) trying NOT to do tasks. Instead, read, rest, nap, play, think, laugh, love.

The to-do stuff will be there on Monday, and I’ll be more willing to wade into the fray if I’ve given myself a break.

(With a nod of thanks to M. at Mental Multivitamin, who often expresses this sentiment in different ways.)

Yes, I know you have that joke elsewhere, too.

There are lots of road closings for construction in the Twin Cities area this weekend and beyond, so plan your routes in advance. (Thanks to Jim Walsh for the heads up.)

There’s a kerfuffle about the AFI’s updated list of the 100 Best American Movies. Like all lists, it is a tool to foment discussion, not to define tastes. I’ve written before about the stupidity of lists, and the propensity of we bloggers (us bloggers?) to get our undies in a twist

I don’t agree with Roger Ebert about Fargo. I’ve only seen it once, and since I live in the mocked MN, I should see it again, but I remember it as prohibitively violent for my medium-delicate sensibilities.

That the Coen Brothers are not represented is the thing to me: O Brother Where Art Thou, Miller’s Crossing, and their first, Blood Simple, all impressed me greatly. Where are other of my favorite directors, like John Sayles, and Terence Malick? Added later: Michael Mann? Steven Soderburgh?

It’s not a great list; I think it confuses popularity or cultural relevance with greatness. Also, I’m interested in how many women were on the voting panel. This seems a very guy-oriented list. Yes, like literature guys have had the power, so the best-ofs will be weighted in their favor, but there are women making good movies. I agree with Carrie Rickey about Clueless, which I found surprisingly substantive.

Time Out’s Centenary Top 100 is my favorite film list; I wish they would’ve updated this one. I buy the Time Out film guide annually, and I check the Time Out online site for reviews of current movies.

Jon Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle is getting rid of books, (link thanks to Pages Turned) and feels the same way about John Burdett’s Bangkok 8 and Bangkok Tattoo as I do:

“Bangkok Tattoo” by John Burdett. Here’s an interesting phenomenon. I thought Burdett’s previous book, “Bangkok 8,” was just wonderful. I was eager to read his second book. It’s exactly like the first book, only not as good. It’s like seeing a magic show twice in one night — you know what to look for, and it begins to feel like a cheat. But hell: One good book is more than I’ve ever written.

Unlike Carroll, though, I haven’t got rid of BT. I’ve written before about the difficulty of weeding. A few questions help me:

1. Am I likely to read it again?
2. Am I likely to refer to it again? (This learned after giving away my Hegel and Heidegger texts. D’oh.)
3. Is it out of print, difficult to find used, or not at the library?

If I answer yes to any of those, the book stays. I’ve made mistakes over the years (I’m currently wishing I hadn’t given away my copy of Bharati Mukhergee’s The Holder of the World) yet I can count on my fingers the number of deacquisitions I’ve regretted, in contrast to the gazillion I am glad to be rid of.

#20 in my 2007 book challenge was the 1474-page A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth.

But I too hate long books: the better, the worse. If they’re bad, they merely make me pant with the effort of holding them up for a few minutes. But if they’re good, I turn into a social moron for days, refusing to go out of my room, scowling and growling at interruptions, ignoring weddings and funerals, and making enemies out of friends. I still bear the scars of Middlemarch. (p. 1371-2)

My friend Thalia recommended A Suitable Boy to me to me at least a decade ago; it was so huge that I couldn’t work up the gumption even to buy it. But since Thalia was instrumental in helping me realize a recent three-week vacation (more on this, soon), I figured it was past time to honor her recommendation.

A Suitable Boy centers on a number several families and their criss-crossing lives. It’s set in post-Gandhi India. Family ties, and the tension between the Muslim and Hindu citizens of the newly independent country are two of the many themes that structure this complex, enriching and satisfying novel. I not only enjoyed the experience of reading ASB, but I also learned a great deal about a critical juncture in India’s history.

I also acquired an appreciation for the practice of bringing only one very long book on vacation. It allowed me a deep, focused reading experience and helped to situate me in a simple, relaxing, few-decisions-to-make, one-thing-at-a-time groove. All my reading life, I’ve fretted over what and how much reading material to bring on trips. I did the one-big-book-for-vacation thing once before, with Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon, and had a similarly joyous reading experience. It takes some care, and some trust in the recommender, to choose the book. But it’s low risk, since bookstores, and other book sources (like informal resort libraries, personal collections, or other reading vacationers who are happy to pass on their just-read items) are often at hand. For my next trip, I’m considering Middlemarch, Mansfield Park, Bleak House and Anna Karenina.

#45 in my 2007 movie challenge was Sabrina, part of the Audrey Hepburn Collection that my husband G. Grod got me for Mothers Day, to balance out the other box set. Sabrina is a classic Cinderella tale, with a Parisian transformation, and a handsome “prince” who doesn’t recognize the chauffeur’s daughter who’s been pining after him for years. Holden is delightful as the playboy brother, Bogart is funny, and charming enough to pull off the May/December pairing with Hepburn’s radiant Sabrina. Cary Grant was originally cast in the Bogart role; it would have made an interestingly different film given the variance in the actors’ looks. Only the pre-Paris Sabrina clothes are by Edith Head. Hepburn chose Givenchy to design her character’s transformed look. The role helped to make her a star; the wardrobe made her an icon. (These details are from the documentary DVD extra, more here.)

June 16 was the five year anniversary of Girl Detective. I have a new look, a new bio, updated copyright, and the most recent version of WordPress. I’ve also opened comments again. Apparently, I thought I’d have all of these soon after last year’s anniversary. Better late than never.

2006
2005
2004
2003
The Beginning

I am thankful that no deaths or incidents are listed, but this recall is discouraging. How many toys that are labeled non-toxic may actually (perhaps accidentally) have lead paint? These toy trains are in the home of nearly every child I know. (Link via the Freakonomics Blog.)

RC2 Corp. Recalls Various Thomas & Friendsâ„¢ Wooden Railway Toys Due to Lead Poisoning Hazard

From “How Many Ways Can You Spell V1@gra?” by Brian Hayes at American Scientist (link via Arts & Letters Daily):

At the deepest level, spam is a social and economic phenomenon rather than a technological one. The senders and the intended recipients are people, not computers. Nevertheless, there’s the potential for some interesting computation in the making of the stuff, and even moreso in the defenses that help keep it in check. Cre@tive spe11ing is part of this story, and so is the automated production of meaningless drivel. On the defensive side, tools from statistics, pattern analysis and machine intelligence have been brought to bear. Twenty years ago, who could have guessed that the most widely deployed application of computational linguistics and computational learning theory would be fending off nuisance e-mail?

The spam filters on my private email address are great. Those on Gmail are pretty good. Email I send to friends who have Hotmail are periodically bounced back, presumably because their filters are too touchy. I stopped allowing comments here because the noise/signal ratio was too high; I was spending far more time deleting spam than I was responding to comments.

Hayes’s article made me wonder, as I have many times before: to what circle of Dantean hell will spam creators be consigned?

#44 in my 2007 movie challenge was Pretty in Pink, part of the “Too Cool for School” John Hughes box set that my husband got me for Mothers Day. I’d had an inexplicable craving to watch the Hughes movies again, but I worried that Pretty in Pink wouldn’t have aged gracefully. I was pleasantly surprised.

Yes, the dazzling array of “volcanic ensembles” shows 80’s teen fashion in all its painful glory, but the story is a timeless one. Ringwald plays Andi, a senior in high school whose mother ran away a few years before. She lives with her shiftless but loving father on the wrong side of the literal tracks. Her best friend is Duckie, played by Jon Cryer, whose obsession with fashion is exceeded only by his unrequited love for Andi. Andrew McCarthy is “richie” Blane (Duckie: “That’s not a name! It’s a major appliance!”) who develops a crush on Andi, and tries to assure her that their Cinderella story will work. James Spader plays the deliciously nasty Steph, who tries to shame Blane out of dating Andi. The tension centers on whether Blane and Andi will go to the prom. Surprisingly, this conflict is not as superficial as it sounds. The ending does a pretty good job of having it both ways. Andi goes to the dance alone, where she meets Duckie, who redeems his movie-long annoyingness by telling her Blane came alone, and urging her to go with Blane when he tries to apologize. Blane and Andi make out in the parking lot to OMD, and, I assume, live happily ever after.

The story works because Ringwald is believable and like-able as the outcast girl who is scared to hope things might get better. Cryer is hilarious, and his lip-syncing to “Try a Little Tenderness” still has the power to wow me. Annie Potts is sympathetic as Andi’s older, weirder friend Iona, and McCarthy does a good job being the cute nice boy who’s “not like the others.”

One of the extras on the “Everything’s Duckie” edition of the DVD is an extended explanation that borders on apologia for why they changed the original ending, in which Andi and Duckie danced together. Test audiences didn’t like it, and neither did Ringwald, who felt affection for, but not chemistry with, Cryer’s Duckie. The cast got called back six months later to reshoot. McCarthy was in a play for which he’d shaved his head and lost weight. That’s why the cute boy is suddenly not as cute in the final scene. It’s not that he’s been pining for Andi, it’s that he’s gaunt and wearing a bad wig.

I can understand why many people, especially those who root for underdogs, believe that Duckie should have been the boy at the end. I agree with Ringwald, though. They didn’t have spark, and it’s a Cinderella story. The poor, nice girl needs to end up with the cute, nice, rich boy. Otherwise the message is an uncomfortable “stick to your own class, babe,” which would have made for a much darker movie, like John Sayles’s 1982 Baby It’s You.

I was sad to see, though, that Andi’s transformation of Iona’s “dreamy” prom dress was still as ugly and unbecoming as I remembered. The Duckie/Blane argument may go on forever, but I’ve never met anyone who liked the dress at the end better than the original.

I did my fair share of griping about the third (and now final) season of Veronica Mars, so I don’t want to be a hypocrite. Yet the final six episodes of the season/series were a welcome and entertaining reminder of why I started watching this show. (To be precise, though, I think I watched because my friend The Big Brain told me to).

The third season meandered and squandered excellent secondary characters, like Wallace, Mac, Dick, and Piz. It killed off two of the funniest ones, Sheriff Lamb and Dean O’Dell. These absences were all the more strange because season three also saw a lessened presence for star Kristen Bell. After two seasons of appearing in almost every scene, Bell needed a break. Unfortunately, she was like gravity for the show. When she was offscreen, the story and characters spun out of control. Additionally, season three was divided in two in case it was canceled midseason (it wasn’t), and took a long hiatus after Veronica solved the second long story mystery, the dean’s death. Many viewers didn’t return when VM resumed six weeks later. I nearly didn’t, but again, my friend The Big Brain told me to watch, and I’m glad he did.

The last six episodes were standalones. While the weekly mysteries weren’t that strong, the cast interactions were as good as ever. Veronica finally got a nice boy in Piz (though my friend Rock Hack thinks they did a bad job of making him Indie Rock Boy), told an annoying Logan to go to hell, and in general was her sassy, smart, kick-ass, girl-detective self for the remainder of the season/series. The second to last episode had Paul Rudd in an excellent turn as a has-been rocker, and the last episode finished with a dark, sexual storyline that harked back to season one. I choose to view the repetition of certain story elements (secret society, viral digital spread of a sex video, Veronica tracking down the guy who messed with her) as homages to great stories from season one, rather than rehashes of same.

During season three, I griped. In retrospect, I think the loss of focus felt like fingerprints from the interference of VM’s new network, the CW. I was reminded of the permanent downshift in quality that took place when Buffy the Vampire Slayer switched networks.

In the end, Veronica Mars, the character and the series, finished strong. The creators did a good job of ending in a way that gave closure, while leaving the door open. Creator Rob Thomas had an interesting idea for the fall. Rather than start with fall of the following school year, he suggested they jump ahead four years to Veronica in training as a government operative. Sadly, the CW decided to shut the door on both ideas.

Veronica Mars was never a ratings winner. As Nathan Alderman noted at TeeVee, though, it lasted three seasons, when it could have been canceled immediately. Season one still stands as one of the best, cohesive television seasons I’ve seen. While seasons two and three never attained that former glory, they still featured one of the most clever heroines on television. Veronica was a teenage, noir, girl detective. She was a strong, unique character, and I’m going to miss her come the fall.

#43 in my 2007 movie challenge was Network, which at 30+, is pleasingly timeless. It’s funny, sharp, and bitter, with great performances (all Oscar-nominated, or -winning) by Dunaway, Finch, and Holden. Finch died before nominations were announced, then won posthumously for Best Actor.

Network made me realize how much over the last three decades has been influenced by it: Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night and Studio 60, Good Night and Good Luck, Broadcast News. Those are the ones that came to mind immediately; there are many more. As is often the case, the famous line from the movie is not a direct quote. Finch says, “I’m AS mad as hell, and I’m not going to take THIS anymore!: (Emphasis mine.) The people who parrot him, though, misquote him with the more familiar “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” An 18-year-old Tim Robbins made his uncredited film debut in two scenes, the more notable of which is the last one.

#42 in my movie challenge for the year was The Prestige, the magic movie from last year that starred Michael Caine, Christian Bale, Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johanson. Dark and moody like Nolan’s Batman Begins, The Prestige also doesn’t stick strictly to reality. Bale is very good, Jackman is less so, and Johanson is forgettable. The story is told in three separate time lines that meld into one by the end. As in Nolan’s Memento, the non-linear storytelling is surprisingly not difficult (I can’t quite bring myself to say “easy”) to follow. Even though my husband and I saw aspects of the reveal well in advance, the ending still gave me pause, and threw its illumination back on previous scenes, once the movie was done. The Prestige FAQ at imdb.com has a good summary of these.

#41 in my 2007 movie challenge, Ocean’s Thirteen is, like Eleven, a fun, escapist, romp. Twelve was so badly reviewed I didn’t bother to see it. The sprawling cast features great vignettes from everyone, though Pacino and Ellen Barkin are underutilized, and somewhat flat. But the duo of Clooney and Pitt oozes the kind of cool that characterized Sinatra’s original.

#40 in my movie challenge for the year was Dreamgirls. Imbalanced. Pretty to look at and sporadically fun to watch. The two actors whose characters are most compelling are Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy. When the focus is on Beyonce and Jamie Foxx, the 2-hour-plus movie drags. Some of the musical numbers are good, especially the early Motown-inspired ones. Hudson’s wows in “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” and Beyonce finally shows some spark in “Listen”, but other songs were so dull I got up to do laundry, and didn’t bother to pause the DVD. Beyonce dressed and made up as Diana Ross was worth seeing, but would’ve worked just as well as a magazine spread. The image didn’t translate to character, and did nothing to engage me in the story, and little to move it forward.

#39 in my 2007 movie challenge, Music and Lyrics, was an antidote to the bitterness of #38. M&L is predictable and rather thin, but Grant does a credible job playing a has-been pop star (a thinly veiled analog to Andrew Ridgeley of Wham!) while Barrymore does her usual ditzy/charming schtick. By the end, though, the sweetness between the two of them, and the humorous spectacle of the Britney-esque pop star for whom they’re writing a song, won me over. Further, the catchy, retro-80’s pop music was crafted by Fountains of Wayne’s Adam Schlesinger, whose obvious affection for the music is easy to appreciate. The music video, and the pop-up version at the end, are hilarious sendups.