From A.O. Scott:

The formula is simple: two people, a few instruments, 88 minutes and not a single false note.

From Ken Turan:

Do you believe in magic? Do you think small can be beautiful? Are you looking for a little film you can make your own, an enchanting, unpretentious blend of music and romance you can watch forever? If you do, "Once" is about to come into your life and make it whole.

I really enjoyed this film. I saw it on the art house circuit and figured that would be it. But last weekend it was part of the preview package at a regular AMC theater, so I guess it's getting wider distribution after all. (Right now it's at Tara in ATL, but only through Thursday.)

Once (2006)

Increasingly, the national conversational agenda is being set not by costly dramatic films with stars like Gregory Peck and Julia Roberts but by low-budget documentaries starring portly, middle-aged men.

... people who will not pay to see documentaries are being locked out of important national debates.

If you are looking for a worthy documentary, check out Iraq in Fragments. You can rent it today; it goes on sale next month.

I can't handle the inconvenient truth

William Gibson's sci-fi classic, Neuromancer, will be a $70M "indie" feature film. The producer is Peter Hoffman. The director is Joseph Kahn ("Torque"). (This does not bode well.) According to IMDB, the project is currently slated for a 2009 release.

Reinvent Your iTunes & Digital Music - Play & Share Online

You can upload your music. Upload your iTunes and My Music folder to the Web.

Say "iPod". Designed to be iPod friendly, easily fill up your iPod from the Web (and any PC) with your favorite music.

The "S" word - share. Don't spend hours on P2P sites and worry about viruses. Safely share music and playlists.

Lala.com: A place to grow your music

"This morning, somebody called and said, 'Is it really free?' Yes it's really free," said cofounder Jacqueline Taylor. "Some people can't believe it."

... He was free to be less than perfect, which is more interesting than perfect.

Free music? Priceless.

A gothic fairy tale set against the postwar repression of Franco's Spain.

This film was previously recommended here at MemeStreams [script] during its theatrical release. MemeStreams was hardly alone in giving the film, now available on DVD, effusive praise:

a haunting mixture of horror, history and fantasy that works simultaneously on every level ... a brilliant work of the imagination ... utterly unforgettable ... visually stunning ... intense, searing, beautiful, terrifying ... marvelous, rich, daring ... transcendent ... a tour de force of cautionary zeal, humanism and magic ... [it goes on and on.]

Anthony Lane concluded:

It is, I suspect, a film to return to, like a country waiting to be explored: a maze of dead ends and new life.

Have you returned yet?

Pan's Labyrinth

Gold Star for "Away From Her" [2], the debut film from Canada's Sarah Polley ("Go"). See it in your local theater today. (In ATL it's playing at Tara.) At the New Yorker, watch a clip (not the trailer).

Here's David Denby from earlier this month:

The fading of memory, the anguish of losing the contours and the colors of the physical world, the mixture of loyalty and selfishness in the elderly—these are not subjects you would expect a young filmmaker to understand or even to take much interest in. Yet “Away from Her,” based on the Alice Munro story “The Bear Came Over the Mountain” (first published in this magazine in 1999), was written and directed by Sarah Polley, a Canadian actress who is still in her twenties. The movie, Polley’s feature début, is a small-scale triumph that could herald a great career.

The week before, Anthony Lane wrote briefly, but memorably:

If Penélope Cruz or Jennifer Lopez sees this movie, she may just give up and become a librarian.

A.O. Scott liked it, too:

I can’t remember the last time the movies yielded up a love story so painful, so tender and so true.

The Chicago Tribune hails:

Bergmanesque and beautiful, set in a wintry landscape fitfully lit by one woman's flickering awareness and one man's long-term, stubborn love, "Away from Her" is one of the most remarkable and moving love stories the movies have recently given us.

In a press interview, Polley laments:

"It's sad to think there was a time when people lined up around the block to see Bergman movies… and how unimaginable that is now."

Perhaps, but here's to hoping that a few people will line up for her movie.

Away from Her, by Alice Munro (and Sarah Polley)

Zizek's most recent film, The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, was presented at the Independent Film Festival of Boston in 2007. (I mentioned it in the 15 April NYT Sampler.)

Publishers Weekly Starred Review. A Lacanian-Hegelian philosopher and pop culture critic who divides his time between America and Slovenia, Zizek is one of the few living writers to combine theoretical rigor with compulsive readability, and his new volume provides perhaps the clearest elaboration of his theoretical framework thus far. Expatiating on such subjects as ,Heidegger, neuroscience, the war on terror and The Matrix, he seeks to rehabilitate dialectical materialism by replacing the popular "yin-yang" interpretation (the struggle between opposites that ultimately form a whole) with a theory of the "gap which separates the One from itself." One example is a tribe whose two subgroups draw mutually exclusive plans of their village: their deadlock "implies a hidden reference to a constant... an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole." Discussing Abu Ghraib and pedophilia in the Catholic Church, Zizek explores how an ideological edifice is sustained by underground transgressions: "Law can be sustained only by a sovereign power which reserves for itself the right... to suspend the rule of law(s) on behalf of the Law itself." Based on his interpretation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he envisions a society in which public law would no longer sustain itself through its own obscene breach. This challenging book takes us on a roller-coaster ride whose every loop is a Mobius strip.

About the film, IFF Boston said:

World-renowned philosopher and psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek examines the work of Alfred Hitchcock, David Lynch, Andrei Tarkovsky, Charlie Chaplin and others, concluding that "Cinema is the ultimate pervert art...It doesn't give you what you desire, it tells you how to desire."

You can read the book's introduction:

A Spanish art historian uncovered the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture: Kandinsky and Klee, as well Bunuel and Dali, were the inspiration behind a series of secret cells and torture centers built in Barcelona in 1938, the work of a French anarchist,Alphonse Laurencic (a Slovene family name!), who invented a form of "psychotechnic" torture: he created his so-called "colored cells" as a contribution to the fight against Francofs forces. The cells were as inspired by ideas of geometric abstraction and surrealism as they were by avant-garde art theories on the psychological properties of colors. Beds were placed at a 20-degree angle, making them near-impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6-foot-by-3-foot cells were strewn with bricks and other geometric blocks to prevent the prisoners from walking backward and forward.The only option left to them was staring at the walls, which were curved and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight lines, and spirals which utilized tricks of color, perspective, and scale to cause mental confusion and distress. Lighting effects gave the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving. Laurencic preferred to use the color green because, according to his theory of the psychological effects of various colors, it produced melancholy and sadness.

The Parallax View, by Slavoj Zizek

Jared Tarbell was the creator/curator of the Gallery of Computation. Levitated is his new home.

Levitated.net contains visual poetry and science fun narrated in an object oriented graphic environment.

The sketches and applications generated as a byproduct of research are provided online as open source Flash modules.

These pages are attempting to fasten a usable structure around a continually evolving computational ecology, so that it may be observed and enjoyed by participants of the network.

Levitated | the Exploration of Computation

Escape the rat race.

This site has been extensively enhanced since it first made news here last year. It is worth checking out again.

ashes and snow