http://gothamist.com/2014/04/30/mta_unamused_by_lord_of_the_rings_s.php
As you no doubt know, Lord Aragorn will at last be crowned King of Gondor tomorrow. However, the MTA of New York is unamused at the potential traffic disruption from giant eagles…
Growing up in New York meant the secondary channels – WNEW, WOR, WPIX – often ran the same features often enough you came to expect them and knew the films from their frequent advertisements. It’s where I first met Walter Mitty, as portrayed by Danny Kaye in the 1947 adaptation of the James Thurber short story which first appeared in the New Yorker on March 18, 1939. The influential tale is among the most anthologized short stories of the last century and is said to have inspired a young artist named Harvey Kurtzman. As a youngster, I loved the idea of an adult who had these amazing fantasies, meaning when I grew up I could continue to enjoy the fantasies I was imagining rather than doing schoolwork. The movie was fairly faithful to the story while allowing Kaye’s everyman to also sing and pater his way through some sequences, making the character permanently linked to the performer.
Satire and humor authors are often overlooked when examining the great writers of an era and Thurber, beloved as he was, lacked the prestige of Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and other contemporaries. As a result, his works have been largely forgotten and are rarely taught outside of universities. It’s therefore interesting to note that it took nearly 20 years for a remake of this film and story to reach theaters. The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, the current edition, had a lengthy gestation period over rights agreements and a variety of high profile directors (Steven Spielberg, Gore Verbinski) coming and going. Originally conceived as a vehicle for Jim Carrey, it could have been an interesting updating. When Spielberg got to it, he instructed his writers to go back to the source material, a piece of advice I wish had been maintained by screenwriter Steve Conrad.
The remake, which opened to middling notices and so-so box office at Christmastime, is now out on Blu-ray and it’s got such incredible potential that it is ultimately a disappointment. Mitty is now an employee at Life, the venerable picture magazine that was about to go from print to digital and the vital negative needed for the ultimate cover image has gone missing. As a result, Mitty is propelled to search it out, using other negatives from photographer Sean O’Connell (Sean Penn) as a guide. Along the way, this average guy facing redundancy has a series of spectacular adventures that fuel his overactive imagination.
Thurber’s Mitty imagined the love of his life, who in the Kaye version (played by Virgina Mayo), intruded on his fantasies and took him on his first “real” adventure, winding up with her. Here, it is Cheryl Melhoff (Kristen Wiig), a fellow staffer facing unemployment who has been the object of his desire. From the get-go you know they will wind up together undercutting some of the emotional journey.
Where Kaye’s Mitty wanted to be a fighter pilot, lawyer, and surgeon, here Ben Stiller’s Mitty is now an explorer, heading for Greenland and tasting rea life rather than looking at the images in Life (get it?). He’s a likeable enough character and you do find yourself rooting for him, but this does not feel like Thurber and the social satire is entirely absent, robbing the film of its chance to be special instead of merely commercial.
The video transfer to Blu-ray is just fine as is the sound. There are a handful of superfluous Deleted, Alternate and Extended Scenes (15:45); The History of Walter Mitty (3:39), which briefly gives Thurber his due; The Look of Life (5:01); That’s a Shark! (5:57), which has Iceland standing in for Greenland; The Music of Walter Mitty (4:01); Icelandic Adventure (3:26); Nordic Casting (3:51); Titles of Walter Mitty (2:49), a look at title designer Kyle Cooper’s playful opening; Sights and Sounds of Production (5:11); Pre-Viz (4:15); “Stay Alive” by Jose Gonzales (4:22); and, Theatrical Trailer (1:55).
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, 1859
The other day two grandmothers, Mindy and Lynette, were visiting their beloved grandchild Meyer Manual. After playing and cooing and aahing and watching Alixandra attempt to feed him mashed bananas, 99% of which ended up on his bib and his chin and my elbow and just about everywhere but in his mouth, Lynette said she had to split. As she was leaving, she said to me, “I love your columns. You’re such a good writer.” (Be that as it may.) I said, “I don’t know where it comes from, I never had any formal training.” Lynette laughed, and said, “Well, I had formal training, and I can’t write like that.”
Well, I don’t know how good a writer I am; I always think I could be a gazillion-million times better. But that’s not the point of this column. This is…
I left soon afterwards, and as I was driving home in my car, listening to All Things Considered on WNYC-FM (my local NPR station), coincidentally the segment was about writing. Well, not writing exactly, but about great sentences.
The editors of the magazine American Scholar have compiled a list of their ten best sentences in fiction and non-fiction; as associate editor Margaret Foster explained, “It came about as a result of ‘water cooler’ talk around the office. We’re sometimes struck by a beautiful sentence or maybe a lousy sentence, and we’ll just say, ‘Hey, listen to this,’” Her choice, she went on to say, is the last line of Toni Morrison’s [[[Sula]]]:
It was a fine cry — loud and long — but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.
I haven’t read Sula, but even without knowing the context of the sentence, I agree that it is beautiful. It could be describing the wail of a mother who has lost her child, the ghostly unending cry of six million Jews exterminated by the Nazis in World War II, or the devastating misery of a population in a world gone to apocalyptic madness. It captures an emotional resonance that echoes of unforgettable pain, unforgivable brutality, and undying loss.
It’s hard to say what makes an unforgettable sentence. I agree with Ms. Foster, who said, “…in the end, very subjective,” she says. “I mean, who are we to say what the best sentence in The Great Gatsby is?”
By the way, Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, which many consider the Great American Novel, made the list with this sentence:
“Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
It’s not “See Spot run”, is it?
But even Fitzgerald started someplace.
I don’t know if diagramming a sentence is still taught in elementary school English classes anymore, but I remember it as a continuing homework assignment back when I was a student at P.S. 29 on Staten Island, New York. It began with simple sentences and progressively became more difficult with our increasing comprehension of grammatical structure. It looked like this, using the simple sentence from above:
Actually, that’s not such a simple sentence, “run” is a shortened present participle (don’t ask!), and the grammatically correct sentence should read, “Did you Spot running?”
So let’s pick another, simpler sentence. How about…
I | love | comics
…in which the diagram above indicates the “form” of a sentence. The “I” is the object, “love” is the verb, and “comics” is the subject.
But how do you get from a simple, three-word sentence to something like Fitzgerald’s last sentence [[[The Great Gatsby]]], or to William Faulkner’s [[[Absalom! Absalom!]]] or James Joyce’s [[[Ulysses]]] without your editor throwing you out on your ass with a copy of E.B. White’s The Element of Style following your bruised butt?
It’s the same answer as that old joke: “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice.”
Or is it? Maybe it’s something else—a mastery of the language, or talent, or maybe it’s something intangible.
Call it a mystery, call it a gift from God or the Goddess or the Universe or even call it The Force…
Whatever it is that allows some to grace us with words that form sentences that speak truth to us and stay in our heads forever and ever—It’s magic.
Photo by gualtiero 
Well, my friends, here we are, home after a weekend of adventure down south in horse country.
That’s a lie.
We intended to spend the weekend in Lexington, Kentucky, but we never got there. Friday/travel day, we got up at the crack of eight a.m., which for us is pretty early, and arrived at the Westchester airfield on time. The line in front of U.S. Air’s counter seemed unusually long and, after a fidgety while, we were facing an airline employee and learning the reason for the long wait: the flight had been cancelled and no other flights to our destination would be leaving that day. The best the very accommodating agent could do would require us to drive through New York traffic to another airport, change planes somewhere in the journey, and arrive in Lexington after the con had closed. We didn’t know about travel the following day, but assuming it was possible, we wouldn’t arrive until the con was, in all likelihood, mostly history. So I made one of those snap decisions we often regret and cancelled the whole trip. Then I spent much of the ensuing three days wishing I’d pushed harder, tried harder, mostly to assuage my conscience. I hate not doing what I’ve said I’ll do – would I have succeeded in politics? – and I felt I owed the Kentuckians something, which is a long story not to be told here.
So, instead of enjoying the bluegrass turf, we came home and eventually did a movies-on-demand viewing of Veronica Mars. I used to call Veronica’s television show a guilty pleasure. But why guilty? It was, in retrospect. a perfectly acceptable mass entertainment, maybe a cut or two above most of its kind. I didn’t miss the explosions or car chases – there were none – and the violence was well-choreographed, but fairly mild, and not overused. The plot was multi-layered and reasonably complex, but again, is this something we want to complain about? The ending left the sequel door wide open, but hey – this is the twenty first century media and am I not contemplating a sequel to my grocery list? (Bet there’ll be one, too.)
Which brings us to today. March 17. St. Patrick’s Day. Our annual bacchanalia. The first bacchanalia was begun in early history to honor the god bacchus. Our version is, as I type, being celebrated about 25 miles to the south, in Manhattan, among many other places, and presumably exists to honor a Christian saint named Patrick who allegedly evicted the snakes from Ireland, though a skeptic might say that the snakes symbolized the so-called pagans. That might include some of you, but not to worry: you almost certainly don’t live in fifth-century Ireland.
If you live in twenty first century Manhattan, well…maybe being a pagan is the least of your worries.
Closing them on my desktop so you can open them on yours. Here we go:
I am tired, not of arguing in favour of equality, diversity and tolerance, but of having to explain, over and over and over again, why such arguments are still necessary, only to have my evidence casually dismissed by someone too oblivious to realise that their dismissal of the problem is itself a textbook example of the fucking problem. I am tired of being mocked by hypocrites who think that a single lazy counterexample is sufficient to debunk the fifteen detailed examples they demanded I produce before they’d even accept my point as a hypothetical, let alone valid, argument…. In short, I’m tired of being a female geek.
What else? Consider this an open thread.
After nearly forty years of reel independence, Troma Video’s Lloyd Kaufman is still going strong, back on the big screen with RETURN TO NUKE ’EM HIGH Volume 1 (set to be released in NY and LA on January 10th) and a tribute at New York’s Museum Of Modern Art on the 9th. Lloyd takes us back to how Troma began. the hassles of being and independent studio and how he has embraced the new forms of video in a big way. Plus Zack Snyder finds his WONDER WOMAN, and The X-Men plan an APOCALYPSE.
THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark will end its Broadway run on January 4, with expected losses of $60 million, the biggest loss ever in Broadway history. New York Magazine has a breakdown on the show’s costs, both financial:
$1,300,000: Weekly production budget
$2,940,000: Gross for the week of December 25, 2011, the highest one-week take for any show ever
$621,960: Gross for the last week in September 2013
and human (five people with major injuries, including one person who required amputation).
Most disturbing to me: they spent more money on props and puppets for the show than Spider-Man co-creator Steve Ditko has ever seen from the creation of Spider-Man.
Tickets are available now, heavily discounted if you know where to look and are willing to brave Christmastime crowds in Times Square.
Did you catch the premiere of The CW‘s TOMORROW PEOPLE? WE take you backstage with the cast and creators to talk about where the series will be headed over the next few weeks, plus we preview some of the cool secrets coming up at New York ComicCon.
THE POINT covers it 24/7! Take us ANYWHERE! The Point Radio App is now in the iTunes App store – and it’s FREE! Just search under “pop culture The Point”. The Point Radio – 24 hours a day of pop culture fun for FREE. GO HERE and LISTEN FREE on any computer or on any other mobile device with the Tune In Radio app – and follow us on Twitter @ThePointRadio.
I don’t know about where you live, but where I live, it’s Comic-Con everywhere. I’m not just talking about the crowds of people from out of town, the ones who don’t know how to walk down an aisle (or street) in a way that allows for the existence of other pedestrians.
I’m talking about the outfits.
The way I figure, it all started out at Disneyland. First, and from the beginning, it was a place where seemingly mature adults would wear hats that made them look like giant mice. More recently, they have this deal where little girls can spend the day in princess outfits. A little girl arrives in shorts and a t-shirt, complains for a while and gets to change into royal gear. She spends the day on rides, in her gown, and then changes back to her civvies when it’s time to go home.
Once we’ve seen people in formal wear on roller-coasters (and before 6 PM!), what else is there shock us? The geek have inherited the earth.
We control the eyeballs that Hollywood most wants. Look at the fall television line-up. I think most of the new shows have an element of the fantastic, whether it involves witches or zombies or believing Robin Williams could have fathered Buffy, the Vampire Slayer.
I don’t particularly want to dress up in a costume. I mean, I wore a uniform in boarding school for four years, so every day, when I get dressed, and I get to choose my own outfits from clothes that weren’t selected by Episcopalians, it feels like a costume. I just went shopping for a dress to wear to a formal event next month, when I will be in costume as a responsible adult, maybe even one with a little skin in the game. That’s enough fantasy for me, thanks.
Cosplay is everywhere, and it’s not just for kids anymore. It’s not even just for nerds anymore. There are reality shows starring cosplayers. There are major Internet arguments about who is and who isn’t the real deal.
So cosplay has gone mainstream. Maybe no one is going down the street dressed like Wonder Woman, but the stuff designers are offering for sale are just as unrealistic. Actually, I take that back. I think Seventh Avenue (the New York fashion industry) and the magazines that rely on Seventh Avenue would go bankrupt if women were encouraged to find our inner Amazon.
Still, at least in New York, people walk down the streets in all kinds of outfits. I’m not surprised that Fox had trouble attracting attention to one of their new shows if this was how they thought they would get attention. A headless horseman? As long as he isn’t wearing a backpack, he’d get no attention at all.
SATURDAY: Marc Alan Fishman
SUNDAY: John Ostrander
From Nashville to New York, events are planned throughout the country for International Cosplay Day on August 24, 2013.
According to Google Trends, searches for “cosplay” on Google are at an all-time high in 2013 while searching on YouTube has remained consistently high since 2009.
In celebration of the upcoming holiday, here are some recent cosplay videos available on YouTube:
San Diego Comic Con – I Just Want To Be A SuperHero – Cosplay Music Video
10 Extraordinary Cosplayers w/James and Oliver Phelps (aka The Weasley Twins)
See the full videos at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbpi6ZahtOH4vPrhnbbn8w1hScFfSoyCu
Love Cosplay! Anime Expo Music Video
Columns / Glenn Hauman / News
Stephen Colbert, we have your writer for “The Chronicles of Amber”!
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