This is not a scene from Children of Men.
This is not a still from Alfonso Cuaron’s bleak, glorious Children of Men.
This is England yesterday. Photos in the Guardian.
London’s burning.
Archive for August, 2011
The smartest most emotionally-involving Hollywood movie of the summer
is about an ape. Doesn’t seem like much of a compliment, but please take it. In a season clogged with superheroes, we pick the chimpanzee Caesar.
And the best performer of blockbuster season isn’t even onscreen. It’s Andy Serkis, who honed his motion-capture skills as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, as Caesar the super-smart ape. When Caesar goes to the redwoods for the first time we feel his exhilaration. Freedom! Then his confusion: Am I a pet?
Excellent job by director Rupert Wyatt, cinematographer Andrew Lesnie, the visual effects army of Weta, and the stuntmen.
Like all the recent superhero movies, The Rise of the Planet of the Apes is an origins story: Planet of the Apes from the POV of the apes. We don’t know anyone in the audience who was rooting for the humans. Although James Franco as Caesar’s daddy is lovely, even more adorable than when his arm was wedged between rocks.
Franco’s scientist is the latest in a long line of smart characters doing stupid things, but writers Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver show how his research methods have been short-circuited by emotional attachments.
This is a movie makes you want to cry, “Take your stinking paws off me you damn dirty human!” (They kept the original line in, by the way. The timing of the movie is interesting: a friend just pointed out that London (Tottenham) is burning and New York (the financial market) is sinking.)
Here’s the Planet of the Apes musical from The Simpsons, featuring the priceless lyric: “I hate every ape I see/From Chimpan-A to Chimpan-Zee. . .”
Dotty
The invitation said, “Wear dots.” The Swatch Interactive Billboard at Greenbelt 5 was done up in dots.
The food followed the dot theme.
The Weekly LitWit Challenge 6.6: Let’s hear from the villains is Extended.
Daniel Day-Lewis as Daniel Plainview, hero and villain of There Will Be Blood.
We have no winner for LitWit Challenge 6.6 so we are extending the deadline to Sunday, 14 August 2011 at 11.59 pm.
Some useful tips:
1. The title is “Let’s hear it from the villains.” The piece should be written from the POV of the villain. It is not about you.
2. We do not need a summary of the book or movie. Nor do we need the villain to introduce herself/himself. The trick is to drop enough clues so we can identify the speaker.
3. Think of it as Method Writing. Put yourself in the mind of the villain. Consider the alien in Alien. “This species, though puny, makes an excellent incubator…”
Ay caramba! Society magazine readers will implode!
Spanish duchess gives away fortune in order to marry civil servant.
She is one of the richest women in Spain, owns a dozen castles whose walls are hung with works by Goya, Velázquez and Titian and is a distant relative of King James II, Winston Churchill and Diana, Princess of Wales. Now, however, the 18th Duchess of Alba is giving away her immense personal fortune in order to be free to marry a minor civil servant.
According to Guinness World Records, Maria del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva, born in Madrid’s Palacio de Lira, has more titles than any noble on earth, being a duchess seven times over, a countess 22 times and a marquesa 24. As head of the 539-year-old House of Alba, her privileges include not having to kneel before the pope and the right to ride on horseback into Seville cathedral.
But the children of the duchess, 85, have until now blocked her plans to marry Alfonso Díez, 24 years her junior. The duchess and Díez, a civil servant in the department of social security who also runs a PR business, have been close friends for a number of years…
Itching, scratching, squirming
In Dante’s Inferno falsifiers are condemned to itch for all eternity. Illustration by Gustave Doré.
Read the case of the woman who scratched an itch through her scalp all the way to her brain by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker. Thank you Boing Boing.
Itching is a most peculiar and diabolical sensation. The definition offered by the German physician Samuel Hafenreffer in 1660 has yet to be improved upon: An unpleasant sensation that provokes the desire to scratch. Itch has been ranked, by scientific and artistic observers alike, among the most distressing physical sensations one can experience. In Dante’s Inferno, falsifiers were punished by “the burning rage / of fierce itching that nothing could relieve”:
The way their nails scraped down upon the scabs
Was like a knife scraping off scales from carp. . . .
“O you there tearing at your mail of scabs
And even turning your fingers into pincers,”
My guide began addressing one of them,
“Tell us are there Italians among the souls
Down in this hole and I’ll pray that your nails
Will last you in this task eternally.”
Though scratching can provide momentary relief, it often makes the itching worse. Dermatologists call this the itch-scratch cycle. Scientists believe that itch, and the accompanying scratch reflex, evolved in order to protect us from insects and clinging plant toxins—from such dangers as malaria, yellow fever, and dengue, transmitted by mosquitoes; from tularemia, river blindness, and sleeping sickness, transmitted by flies; from typhus-bearing lice, plague-bearing fleas, and poisonous spiders. The theory goes a long way toward explaining why itch is so exquisitely tuned. You can spend all day without noticing the feel of your shirt collar on your neck, and yet a single stray thread poking out, or a louse’s fine legs brushing by, can set you scratching furiously…
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