Culture Snob If you’re interested in the impending “format war” for the next generation of DVD players and software (movies, music, etc.), Slate has an excellent and easy-to-understand primer.
My two sports loves are the Red Sox (since 1986) and the men’s basketball team at the University of Illinois (my alma mater), and together they pretty much occupy me year-round. When baseball season ends in October, it’s time for college basketball, and when the Final Four is done, opening day of baseball season is upon us.
You could not write this story any better, and if you tried to pass it off as fiction, you’d get buried in rejection slips. The tale of the 2004 Boston Red Sox – who won the World Series (and the team’s first championship since 1918) on October 27 – is among many other things a beautifully constructed narrative.
Social Distortion’s Sex, Love, and Rock ‘n’ Roll
Because I haven’t even posted what I wrote about the World Champion Boston Red Sox – yes, a thank-you card is appropriate for that withholding – I offer you this, which effectively captures my emotional state as it relates to baseball. I’m not quite this bad, but … I do seem reticent to move on.
Frank Black’s Frank Black Francis
Driver-By Truckers’ The Dirty South and A Perfect Circle’s eMOTIVe
Shaun of the Dead, Super Size Me, and Trembling Before G-d
The premise of The Five Obstructions is simple, elegant, and gloriously artificial. A pupil gives his teacher under-any-circumstances-difficult assignments with absurd conditions, and the mentor complies – with no agreed-upon goal beyond the completion of the tasks. Through the assignments, the movie emerges as a portrait of a submissive relationship that’s not at all one-sided.
The subject of Intacto is “luck,” which is not to be confused with the random workings of “chance.” In director/co-writer Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s vividly imagined movie from 2001, luck is a tangible if not quite quantifiable thing that certain gifted people harness, steal, collect, and gamble. That they have nothing to gain from it is something they don’t seem to recognize.
