Category Archives: Multimedia

I get out to the movies and watch TV once in a while.

The Ditty Bops

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I hear a new sound that I like on an NPR podcast.

I have a problem. I don’t seem to like much of the new music that’s coming out. I’m becoming my parents, who didn’t like the music I listened to in the 70s and 80s. Now it’s the 00s and I’m stuck in a sound that’s 20 to 30 years old.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve tried listening to the new stuff. Really. I like the rhythms of hip-hop and rap, but I cannot tolerate the lyrics and instrumentals. Half the new “rock” groups sound to me as if they’re singing off key, or just making a lot of noise. None of the new stuff sounds very good to me at all.

But when a new Steely Dan or Pink Floyd or Eric Clapton album comes out, I buy it immediately. It’s what I like. And my iPod is full of the same stuff, along with some “smooth jazz” and a touch of Mozart. And podcasts, of course.

It’s the podcasts that often introduce me to new things. I listen to NPR’s Story of the Day podcast. I enjoy about half the stories. But the ones that I enjoy I really enjoy. Like a recent All Things Considered piece about the Ditty Bops.

The story was kind of weird. It appears that this female duo is touring the country by bicycle, from California to New York. They should be in New York as I write this. But what hooked me was their music. The podcast included bits and pieces from some of their songs. The music was folksy, with good rhythms, interesting instrumentals, and wonderful harmonies. Something new for my iPod, I realized. Something other than more classic rock.

If you’re in the over 30 crowd and are interested in listening to something new, give this podcast a listen. Then go out and get some of The Ditty Bops’ music. You’ll find it in the iTunes music store and on Amazon.com, as well as in the NPR shop.

And if you’re already a Ditty Bops fan, use the Comments link to share your thoughts. I’d like to think that I’m not the only one who likes this kind of music.

A Profile of Bloggers

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An interesting podcast that describes me as a blogger.

There has been a lot — probably too much — said about blogging and bloggers. This Future Tense podcast, which can be found in the Future Tense: July 2006 Archives gets to the heart of the matter. (On that page, search for “Profile of Bloggers.”)

If you’re looking for a good podcast with short episodes about technology issues, I highly recommend Future Tense.

blogging, blogs, podcast

Wordplay

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A book about crossword puzzles?

I used to be a crossword puzzle lover. It wasn’t because I loved words as much as because I had an assignment at my job that gave me lots of free time in the middle of the day. Every day, I’d do the crossword puzzles in Newsday (Long Island’s paper), the Daily News, and the New York Times. When you do three newspaper puzzles a day, five days a week, you start getting good at it. And it starts getting boring. So before that assignment was done — it only lasted about three months — actually started making crossword puzzles. That’s when you know you’ve got it bad.

(A side note here. Around the same time, I used to play Scrabble with a friend of mine’s mother and her friend. They were incredible Scrabble players and I learned a lot from them. I also made a list of and practically memorized all of the acceptable 2- and 3-letter words in the The Official Scrabble Player’s Dictionary. This is the key to winning at Scrabble, as I learned (to their surprise one day). That and having a decent vocabulary, of course.)

Anyway, that assignment ended and I didn’t have time to do crossword puzzles every day. I’d occasionally do them when trapped on an airliner flying across the country, but that was about it.

Time passed. I started listening to Podcasts, including NPR’s Sunday Puzzle, with the New York Times puzzle master, Will Shortz. Will, of course, began plugging an independent film called Wordplay that had just been made about the American Crossword Puzzle Championship. It sounded interesting. Not interesting enough to trek down to an independent theather in Phoenix, mind you, but certainly interesting enough to add to my Netflix queue.

Wordplay: The Official Companion BookWill also started giving away copies of the companion book, Wordplay, as prizes for the Sunday Puzzle winners. The other day, while in a Barnes & Noble bookstore in Flagstaff, I saw the book on the shelf and, on a whim, bought it.

It was a quick read. I learned a lot of things.

First of all, there are a lot of people that are seriously into crossword puzzles. In my crossword puzzle heydays, I was just starting to approach the fringe of how these people live. I’m kind of glad that assignment ended; I don’t think I’d want my life to revolve around crossword puzzles, as the lives of some of these folks do.

Second, did you know that the New York Times crossword puzzle is easiest on Monday, progressing to a higher level of difficulty as the days of the week pass? Saturday’s is the toughest and Sunday’s, although largest, is only about as tough as one from a Wednesday or Thursday.

How does the toughness get established? Not by the fill — that’s the letters and black boxes in the grid. By the clues. Straightforward, “dictionary definition” clues are easiest. Clues that rely on puns or wordplay are the toughest. That’s Will Shortz’s job — he doesn’t create the puzzles, but he edits them for difficulty.

Good puzzles have themes that are carried out throughout the puzzle. The more theme words or phrases throughout the puzzle, the better that puzzle is. And if theme words and phrases are puns or wordplays on the theme, all the better.

I also learned that crossword puzzles are often created by computer (a sad state of affairs) but that some expert puzzle makers can create a good crossword in a few hours. One puzzle maker actually created an entire puzzle in less than an hour during the competition, based on a theme provided by the audience.

The book includes about 50 puzzles. Some are the contestants’ favorites — you know a person is serious when he can tell you his favorite puzzle by name or date — and others are puzzles used in the competition. I left the book at my place at Howard Mesa so I could fiddle with the puzzles in the evening before I go to bed.

If you like crossword puzzles and are interested in the creation and completion processes, I highly recommend the book.

Now I can’t wait for the movie to come out on DVD so I can watch it.

Three Movie Reviews

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I see Cars, Superman Returns, and Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest.

I’m not normally a big movie-goer. My taste in movies limits me to comedies (but not chick flicks or National Lampoon humor or slapstick), mysteries, science fiction (but not horror), adventure (think Indiana Jones), and animation. I don’t go for drama and I hate movies that make me cry. I also don’t like movies with disturbing scenes, since they tend to keep me up at night.

So, as you can imagine, I don’t go to the movies very often.

But over the past two weeks, I’ve actually seen three movies. Here are my capsule reviews.

Cars

CarsPixar has done it again. That’s quite clear. They’ve made a movie that can appeal to people of all ages, with the incredible animation they do so well. They’ve created a world in which the “people” are really cars, fork lifts, tractors, and helicopters — in other words, motorized vehicles. And they’ve managed to make these cartoon creations act, with facial expressions and other body language that conveys emotion.

The movie is about a rookie race car with an attitude problem who gets stuck in an off-the-beaten-path town. While performing some community service jobs, he gets a few eye-opening and life-changing experiences that make him a better…well, car.

Parts of the movie really hit home. The town of Radiator Springs used to be a booming Route 66 town — until the Interstate came in and the traffic stopped driving through. The town is dried up and dying. It reminds me a little of Wickenburg, which bases part of its economy on the “Drive Thru” traffic between Phoenix and Las Vegas. In the movie, however, the town’s people learn what it means to be a destination — a lesson I really wish the Wickenburg Chamber of Commerce would learn.

The other thing that hit home was the idea of driving for the pleasure of driving. Not speeding from point A to point B to get there as fast as possible. But driving along scenic roads and taking in the sights, guiding the car on curving roads through mountains and valleys. As a person who prefers back roads to freeways, I could really identify with that. But, in a way, I guess I’m glad most people prefer the freeways. It leaves those glorious back roads wide open for folks like me.

Classic scene from the movie: tractor tipping.

Superman Returns

SupermanIt’s a Superman movie. I can’t say much more about it.

Superman has been away for five years and he comes back. The people in Metropolis — especially on the Daily Planet staff — are pretty stupid. Clark Kent comes back to work and Superman shows up the same day and nobody makes the connection. (Yeah, I know. It’s the movies.)

Lex Luthor’s scheme to manufacture real estate creates an unstable and unattractive land mass off the coast of the U.S. Superman has to stop him before the land mass crowds out the rest of the world. Helping him are Lois Lane, her significant other (who happens to be boss Perry White’s nephew), and her five-year-old son. I won’t spoil it for you; I shouldn’t have to.

The movie was too long.

Classic line from the movie, spoken by Lex Luthor’s girl: “Hey, weren’t there two of those?”

Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man’s Chest

Pirates of the Carribean 2I read a few reviews for this flick before I went to see it. They all seemed to go on and on about how the special effects made the acting secondary. Perhaps I’m so accustomed to special effects that I just didn’t notice them. It wasn’t as if they weren’t there, though.

The plot: Will and Elizabeth are arrested by a representative of the East India Company who agrees to release Will if he brings back Captain Jack Sparrow’s compass. He tracks down Sparrow, who tricks him into boarding the Flying Dutchman, which is captained by Davey Jones and crewed by a bunch of cursed men who have definitely spent too much time under water. There’s a key and a chest and a still beating (yet bodyless) heart. I won’t spoil it for you.

The movie was long and when it was over, I was left strangely unfulfilled. In fact, I didn’t even realize it was over until the credits started to roll.

This morning, I realized what it was: a setup for Pirates 3. Just like Back to the Future 2 was a setup for Back to the Future 3. Oddly, however, it doesn’t leave me anxious to see the next installment. Instead, it leaves me kind of ticked off.

One More Thing

I saw two out of these three movies in Wickenburg’s own Saguaro Theater. This theater, which I believe is in a landmark building, is what I call a “one-plex” — just one movie under the roof. The movie plays once a day during the week (at around 7 PM) and 3 or 4 times a day on weekends. The screen is big, the sound system is fine, and the seats are in pretty decent shape, despite the fact that they were purchased used from another theater about four years ago. Although the theater is seldom very crowded, last night it was more than half full — a big deal here in town.

The closest multiplex to Wickenburg is about 40 miles away — thank heaven! — so more often than not, I wait to see a movie I want to see right here in town, with the big screen, the local advertising slides, and the fresh popcorn.

The big multiplexes are killing off the little theaters one by one, making it impossible for today’s kids to experience movies the way we (or at least I) did. Entertainment is big business and, as usual, theater owners are motivated by profit. But Brian, who owns the Saguaro Theater, seems more interested in preserving the theater than sucking money out of it. For that, I thank him every time I see him.

If you have a small theater in your town, help keep it alive by attending movies there and buying some popcorn or Skittles or Bon-bons to munch on. Consider yourself a preservationist, helping to save part of the past for the future.

The DaVinci Code — The Movie

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Worse than the book?

That’s what the review on Slate said: the movie was worse than the book. I didn’t believe it.

Silly me.

I also poo-pooed Mike’s cousin Ricky, who didn’t want to see the movie because it had only gotten 1-1/2 stars. (I don’t know where he saw that rating.) It couldn’t be that bad, I argued. I’d seen a positive review just that morning on a network news show in our hotel room.

Ricky was stuck with us — he missed his flight on Sunday morning and called us to rescue him from the airport. We dragged him to dim sum in Fort Lee and around New York’s SoHo and south Village — which he seemed to enjoy — and then to the Battery Park Regency 11 Theater for the movie.

A few weird things about this particular theater. First of all, it’s on the 5th (or so) floor of the building. You buy your ticket at street level, then proceed up a series of escalators, one of which takes you at least two floors up. The escalators run along the east side of the building where windows look out — right at Ground Zero. (More on that in another post.)

The movie was boring. It seemed to follow the book pretty closely — I read the book about two years ago, so I don’t remember it perfectly well. What’s weird about the movie is that the book is so widely read that you’d expect everyone in the theater to know the punchline — that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, who bore his child after the crucifixion. Yet that punchline wasn’t delivered until more than halfway through the movie. I guess it makes sense because it was probably delivered halfway through the book, too. But when the information was presented in the movie, I felt like saying, “Yeah, and…?” As if there should be more. But there wasn’t.

I think Tom Hanks’s acting capabilities were completely wasted on this movie. There wasn’t much real acting to do. Just deliver the same lines that were in the book — poor dialog to begin with. There was an awful lot of tell rather than show. In the scenes in Teabing’s house, it appeared that Hanks’s character already knew much of what Teabing told Sophie — if that was the case, why didn’t he just tell her before? Of course, this is a book complaint — not a movie complaint — because the movie followed the book. I guess if you make a movie that closely follows a bad book, you’ll end up with a bad movie.

The guy who played Teabing — who also played the bad guy in at least one X-Men movie — did a much better acting job. But I think that’s because his character wasn’t flat and lifeless like the other characters in the book.

Flashbacks were distracting and overused, especially the historic ones. It was like watching a History Channel documentary. You know the kind. Where they get actors to re-enact scenes from history?

I left the movie feeling as if I’d gained nothing from the experience of seeing it.

Ricky said the movie’s music was overpowering. He said that was a sign of a bad movie. I liked the soundtrack, but agree that it sometimes did more work than it should have.

But I wasn’t impressed with the movie at all. It was just a visual representation of what was in the book. And since what was in the book wasn’t anything that needed to be visualized, the movie wasn’t anything special.

Did you see The DaVinci Code? What did you think? Use the Comments link to share your thoughts. I’d be interested in reading what other people who read the book and saw the movie have to say.