Read books.

We all have a long, imaginary shelf of masterpieces we have not read. For years I was embarrassed by my ignorance of War and Peace, and Tolstoy's massive novel had sat on the shelf, glaring at me. Not until the mid-80s, when I passed a lovely spring on the Amalfi Coast of Italy in a tiny rented house, did I find myself ready to tackle it. I would rise at dawn (we had two babies then) and take my coffee to the terrace. There was a grove of lemon trees behind me, and I could look all the way down the coast from Amalfi to Salerno, the sunlight on the sea like scattered coins. I was absorbed for two months in that astonishing novel, making my first acquaintance with Pierre, Natasha, Bolkonsky, and the rest of Petersburg society. Forever I will associate that story with that place, and that time in my life.

I doubt you'll ever find yourself associating a YouTube video with a place and time in your life.

A Traveler's Library

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, the 33-year-old director of The Lives of Others, is an imposing man with an even more imposing head of curly hair. "I hope you'll tell your readers to see my film," he said, imposingly. He also had to know my take on the (to his mind) unjust success of Pan's Labyrinth at the American box office. The Lives of Others goes up against Pan's Labyrinth in the Best Foreign Language Film category at the Academy Awards on Sunday, February 25.

An Interview with Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck

Choose from a wide variety ...

El Laberinto del Fauno - undated, unspecified draft script by Guillermo del Toro (in Spanish) Pan's Labyrinth - English translation of undated, unspecified draft script by Guillermo del Toro - hosted by: Pan's Labyrinth - in pdf format

"Pan's Labyrinth" is the story of a young girl who travels with her pregnant mother to live with her mother's new husband in a rural area up North in Spain, 1944, after Franco's victory. The girl lives in an imaginary world of her own creation and faces the real world with much chagrin. Post-war Fascist repression is at its height in rural Spain and the girl must come to terms with that through a fable of her own.

Miami Vice - September 22, 2004 First Draft script by Michael Mann (based on "Miami Vice" created by Anthony Yerkovich)

See also, from Harper's Index (from the January issue, not yet online):

Annual budget of Miami's police department, expressed as a percentage of the production cost of the film "Miami Vice": 83

SimplyScripts - Downloadable Movie Scripts, Screenplays and Transcripts

Ms. Garner and Mr. Olyphant could pass as younger siblings of Julia Roberts and Johnny Depp, and you get the sense that the movie is a test of their romantic star magnetism.

If Ms. Garner blends spunk and eternal girlishness in about the same proportion as Ms. Roberts, her screen wattage is about 40 to Ms. Roberts’s 100.

Ouch.

NYT Review of 'Catch and Release'

Gold star.

HBO: The Wire

Take this, D2X and your eight frames per second!

Since abandoning modern cameras about a decade ago, he has worked exclusively with pinhole cameras and, his current preference, their room-size equivalents. He typically constructs them himself out of wood. Like the German artist Vera Lutter, who may be the most famous practitioner in this medium today, he is drawn to the monumental. Unlike Ms. Lutter, who favors industrial subjects, he prefers landmarks set under wide, open, romantic skies worthy of Ansel Adams, whom he credits as an early influence.

The last photo in the set, "Shanghai, 2004", is the best.

This month he is directing his panoramic lensless cameras at California landmarks: the Hollywood sign, then the San Francisco skyline, Golden Gate Park and the Donner Pass.

Standing in the Dark, Catching the Light

“He was so authentic, in a way that a lot of us had never experienced,” Mr. Burns said. “You wanted to be like him. You wanted to tell the truth. You’d go out to take pictures with him, and we all saw the same things he did, and then we’d come back, and he’d put up his prints, and you’d put up yours, and you were devastated.”

He added, still seeming to wince all these years later at the memory: “Sometimes you’d do some work you thought was really great, and you’d show it to him, and he’d stand there for a while and then say, ‘Well ...’ And it was like, ‘Oh God.’ That was all it took. That ‘well.’ You knew you hadn’t done it.”

The Still-Life Mentor to a Filmmaking Generation

It was a neighborhood place in a low-rent neighborhood that happened to house artists and derelicts side by side, inspiring some hard-nosed art. During her set Ms. Smith described CBGB as “this place that Hilly so generously offered to us to create new ideas, to fail, to make mistakes, to reach new heights.”

It was no surprise that real estate values finally caught up with CBGB. The wonder was that so much came out of one decrepit bar, and that CBGB lasted as long as it did.

Check out the accompanying slide show and videos.

CBGB Closes and Rock Fans Mourn

The book fairly crackles with brio. Yet reading it can feel a little like watching a Michael Moore movie.

Ugh. Skip it. And is it just me, or does anyone else find those Colbert interview segments less than useless? Neither the Woz segment nor the Dawkins segment was worth the time.

% Night comes around, and the kids sit around the fire.

Terri: I'm so hungry I could eat at Arby's!
Lisa: Oh my gosh!
Nelson: That *is* hungry.
Lisa: *Really* hungry...

-- "Das Bus"

Next you'll find Dawkins guesting on an episode of South Park.

Now as a special treat courtesy of our friends at the Meat Council, please help yourself to this tripe.

Rod: "But who brings baby storks?
Ned: There's no such thing as storks! It's all God!

...

"Tim, this controversy _could_ put more meat in the seats."
Lovejoy: "I'll be a white Al Sharpton!"

The God Delusion, By Richard Dawkins

The film will carry you deep inside Mr. Gould’s musical mind: an awesome place to be, and not always a comfortable one.

"I detest audiences. Not in their individual segments but en masse, I detest audiences. I think they are a force of evil."

See also:

DANTE: You hate people.
RANDAL: But I love gatherings. Isn't it ironic?

Back to the new Gould film:

The most astonishing moment comes when Mr. Gould fluently wends his way through the climactic section of the unfinished final fugue from Bach’s “Art of Fugue,” spouting thematic analysis and quoting Albert Schweitzer as he goes.

Now reread the beginning of Gödel, Escher, Bach.

To give an idea of how extraordinary a six-part fugue is, in the entire Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach, containing forty-eight Preludes and Fugues, only two have as many as five parts, and nowhere is there a six-part fugue! One could probably liken the task of improvising a six-part fugue to the playing of sixty simultaneous games of chess, and winning them all. To improvise an eight-part fugue is really beyond human capability.

...

The six-part fugue [in the Musical Offering] is one of Bach's most complex creations, and its theme is, of course, the Royal Theme. ... To write a decent fugue of even two voices based on it would not be easy for the average musician!

...

All in all, the Musical Offering represents one of Bach's supreme accomplishments in counterpoint. It is itself one large intellectual fugue, in which many ideas and forms have been woven together, and in which playful double meanings and subtle allusions are commonplace. And it is a very beautiful creation of the human intellect which we can appreciate forever.

Glenn Gould Films - Report