Owner of PageF30.com.
Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.
Here's a good example of an editorial arguing against plug-in electric cars that may seem like it is making a reasoned argument against them, but in fact misses the mark in quite a few areas. Let's take a look at the argument point by point:
1) Plug-in electrics are inconvenient: a plug-in can only go a few hundred kms before it must be recharged, whereas gasoline-powered cars have a virtually unlimited range as long as you keep on filling it up with gas. This misses the point on two areas: a) it's a bit of a stretch to say that plugging in one's car at home is more inconvenient than filling up at a gas station. It certainly takes longer, but the time spent charging is done when you are at home and are likely busy with other things, so the only inconvenience involved is the effort required to put the plug in - not that big a problem. The issue about range is also solved with a car like the Chevrolet Volt, which uses electricity at first, and eventually switches to a gasoline-powered battery recharger after about 60 km, guaranteeing the same range as a gasoline-powered car. In short, those that expect to drive only up to a few hundred km a day can go with something like Tesla/Think/etc. while those that want a car that can still do a road trip can go with the Chevrolet Volt.
2) Electric cars simply divert the environmental impact: this is a myth that just won't seem to die. Sure, electricity does have to be created from other sources, but even when electricity is produced entirely from coal the environmental impact is much smaller than with gasoline. This is a very important point. Adding to this, electricity does not necessarily need to be made from coal - many countries use hydro (Norway), geothermal (Iceland), nuclear (France), wind (Denmark), and various other sources to make electricity. Also, once cars have moved over to the electricity grid it becomes much easier to change them into completely zero-emissions vehicles, because it only requires a change to the source of electricity, rather than a retooling of the car itself. Finally, since pollution from power plants is usually created outside urban areas (where most people live), the health benefits are enormous. No more breathing in car exhaust when walking down the street.
Finally, one more point: battery technology continues to develop, and with this comes greater and greater range. Tesla's S Sedan will have a range of almost 500 km, which is good enough not only for commuting, but also for a small road trip to one city and back. Add a recharge in the city (let's say you have a business meeting there - go to the city, plug it in, finish the meeting a few hours later, get back in the recharged car and go home) and you can easily make a city 400 km away. Already the only thing you can't do with this car is a marathon road trip. Eventually the range of an electric car will reach such a high level that there will be no reason whatsoever to stick with gasoline. Saying that electric cars aren't the future because they have a limited range is like saying that computers aren't the future (in 1990) because hard drives can only store a few megabytes of data.
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In other news, there's a blog here by the first driver to try out the Mini-E (the electric Mini Cooper). Definitely keep an eye on that. The Mini Cooper is my favourite gasoline-powered car, so if it goes electric then I'll definitely want one of my own.
On May 9th I put up a post about how the Hunt for Gollum had been translated into Sambahsa, but though the subtitles were 95% complete the format was a bit of a mess, with the video cut up into 16 parts, a lot of frozen frames here and there, and an annoying banner ad below for the software used to cut the video into smaller parts.
Two days ago I began to upload a better version of the video, in four parts now instead of sixteen, and with subtitles as an .srt file instead of just using YouTube's annotations feature. As you can see below, the end result is much better, and now you can enjoy the film at the same time as you read the Sambahsa translation.
Edit: Just in case you want to watch the whole movie at once on your own player, I've included the subtitles as a single file below. Just copy this text, paste it into anything (Wordpad for example) and save it as an .srt file, and that will be the subtitles. And to download the movie, just click here and choose whether you want an flv or mp4 file. If your media player doesn't play these files correctly and you can't figure out how to install the codecs then try using GOM Player (that's the only media player I use).
1 00:00:35,940 --> 00:00:42,710 Ye id end ios Trit Aiwios, Medioghehrd eet un land waurct ab Temos
2 00:00:43,920 --> 00:00:50,040 I leuds ios Nordrig eent diaspohrn, i descendants iom Roys myohrsen
3 00:00:50,180 --> 00:00:53,720 Reducti do Marjbans wandernd in wakhschat
4 00:00:57,970 --> 00:01:03,150 Bet Mordors temos sa-spiend uper vasya lands ed sa-gohn megil ed terrible wakyas
5 00:01:03,150 --> 00:01:06,420 ed sa-gohn megil ed terrible wakyas
6 00:01:07,820 --> 00:01:12,160 ob id lusen Maghring hieb resbudt
Ahmadinejad (محمود احمدی نژاد, top left) - you all know him, he wants a second term Rezaei (محسن رضایی, bottom left) - he's a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard, and even more of a hardliner than Ahmadinejad. His role will be to take hardliner votes away from those disappointed in Ahmadinejad. Mousavi (میر حسین موسوی, top right) - the other main contender, he was endorsed by former president Khatami and has reformist tendencies. He was prime minister in the 1980s. Karroubi (محدی کروبی, bottom right) - reformist, and also the only cleric running for office. Says he'll support Mousavi in the second ballot if there is a runoff. It's also possible that he might drop out earlier to support Mousavi.
Obama's upcoming speech in Cairo - not specifically related to the Iranian election, but coming just a bit over a week before the election in Iran it'll be interesting to see what sort of effect it will have. The more well-received it is, the easier it'll be on candidates promising change and not a confrontational attitude with the rest of the world (=not Ahmadinejad). Even Rezaei is running on a more conciliatory approach.
Rezaei gives details of his nuclear plan - would involve the formation of a consortium that would allay concerns while letting Iran continue developing nuclear energy
Here's a piece of news that hasn't been receiving much attention but is quite interesting; it's about a Romanian team called ARCA that competed for the Ansari X Prize in 2004. Since then Google has come out with its own prize (Google Lunar X Prize), offering $20-$30 million for a team capable of sending a craft to the surface of the Moon, moving at least 500 metres and then beaming images back from the surface. This team has an interesting proposal: first they will send a balloon up to an altitude of 18 kilometres, after which a rocket will send the craft into low-Earth orbit, after which the lunar craft will separate and make its way to the Moon and then land using its ball-like shape and some rockets to slow its descent as well.
Whether it succeeds or not, the data gathered from a balloon-based launching platform will be interesting, as this has been proposed by many others as well. CU Spaceflight for example is aiming for this as well.
That's the theme of this issue's cover story for E Magazine. Perhaps the one silver lining to the real estate market crash and all the foreclosures that followed is the possibility of a rethinking of just how big houses really need to be. After about a decade in Asia (Japan + Korea) in fact, large North American houses have started to look a little bit creepy, to be honest. Friends of mine have started buying houses back home (Calgary) and more often than not a number of rooms simply go unused, especially in the basement area. I once knew a Korean family that had moved to Calgary and was renting a whole house to themselves, but they had no idea what to do with a house that size and more than half of the rooms plus the entire basement were completely empty (this was a family of four).
As for the politics behind smaller houses, I think there's a lot of common ground on both sides of the political spectrum. One side can argue that smaller houses are great because of the benefit to the environment / ease in creating public transportation, while the other can like them for their national security benefits (less energy use = less money flowing out to countries that sponsor terrorism), so it's win-win. You'll notice for example that during the last election there was a large push towards more nuclear power from the GOP side, and guess which country exports the most nuclear power? Yep, France. Basically, during the campaign both sides were making the argument that the US should be more like France.
I do find some of the houses people live in to be a tad too small though, as simply going small doesn't mean you should relegate yourself to something even smaller than a one-bedroom apartment (unless you really like that size). A certain size is necessary if you want to eventually own pets or start a family for example. One design I particularly like are the "maisonettes" in Japan that are about 46 sq. metres (500 square feet), spread over two floors. They resemble brownstone houses in a way, except that the design isn't as nice (to be honest). In semi-rural Japan a place this size can be rented for only $500-$600 a month.
As for whether there is a real increase of people buying small houses as opposed to just a slight increase (you'll notice the article doesn't cite too many numbers supporting a real change to smaller houses), we'll just have to see. Perhaps fivethirtyeight.com would be willing to crunch some numbers for us.
Ahmadinejad (محمود احمدی نژاد, top left) - you all know him, he wants a second term Rezaei (محسن رضایی, bottom left) - he's a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard, and even more of a hardliner than Ahmadinejad. His role will be to take hardliner votes away from those disappointed in Ahmadinejad. Mousavi (میر حسین موسوی, top right) - the other main contender, he was endorsed by former president Khatami and has reformist tendencies. He was prime minister in the 1980s. Karroubi (محدی کروبی, bottom right) - reformist, and also the only cleric running for office. Says he'll support Mousavi in the second ballot if there is a runoff. It's also possible that he might drop out earlier to support Mousavi.
Mousavi intends to find end to US economic sanctions. By the way, think just how much easier it is to make a statement like this in the present climate compared to when Cheney and Rumsfeld were in power. Now it's possible to say something like this without being challenged too hard on it, but with a different president (let's say McCain with his "bomb bomb Iran" joke and "gates of hell" statement) the suggestion would have been laughable. At the same time the Obama administration is wise to not suggest anything too concrete before the election is over as that would then become the issue, and it's best to simply watch the election to gauge the mood of the country first, after which real negotiations can start.
It's not very often you can find Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking his native German, as not only has he lived in the US for a long time, but he also governs a state there and thus rarely takes questions in German from the press. For fans or students of German though each video of him talking in German is pretty interesting, since it's always a bit of a trip to see the person you've only seen speaking English before suddenly chatting away in a completely different language, and to realize that oh yeah, that's the language he grew up speaking. Here are a few videos of him speaking German that I've found. Let me know where others can be found and I'll add them here.
A collection of interviews from the 80s (and maybe early 90s):
On a show in 1989 in Austria showing off his muscles:
As governor (only 24 seconds):
This one has the same interview in the first video but with subtitles, so even better. Arnold starts 20 seconds in.
Eight-minute documentary about his bodybuilding career with him speaking:
Of course the Canadian press is concentrating almost entirely on the Canadian astronaut, whereas the Russian press is more measured (I think; I can't confirm that they all have this tone). As for the Belgian press...yep, more like the Canadian article. Perhaps others can confirm this but perhaps "Russian goes to space!" just doesn't pack that much excitement anymore.
Anyway, six on the station now, and that makes it easier to carry out some real science now. In addition to that there's the possibility of more interesting human interaction, which can sometimes draw a lot of attention. Maybe one crew member can offer the other prune juice for the first time. Or maybe they could play poker. Or maybe one can remark to another how his company's bonding rituals often involve a lot of talking, and dancing, and crying.
Ahmadinejad (محمود احمدی نژاد, top left) - you all know him, he wants a second term Rezaei (محسن رضایی, bottom left) - he's a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard, and even more of a hardliner than Ahmadinejad. His role will be to take hardliner votes away from those disappointed in Ahmadinejad. Mousavi (میر حسین موسوی, top right) - the other main contender, he was endorsed by former president Khatami and has reformist tendencies. He was prime minister in the 1980s. Karroubi (محدی کروبی, bottom right) - reformist, and also the only cleric running for office. Says he'll support Mousavi in the second ballot if there is a runoff. It's also possible that he might drop out earlier to support Mousavi.
First of all, let's see if there's a change in Twitter traffic for the four. The number given here is the amount of time it takes for a search on the candidate's surname to fill up three pages of search results. Parenthesis shows the time from the day before.
Mousavi: 6 hours (9 hours) Ahmadinejad: 8 hours (12 hours) Karroubi: 9 hours (11 hours) Rezaei: slightly over a day (no change)
So Twitter traffic for the first three is up, and no change for Rezaei.
One unresolved issue for quite some time had been whether other stars could have planets, since until the 1990s the only example of a star with a planetary system had been our own, and without a larger sample size it would be impossible to know for sure whether other stars really had planets, or whether the majority of them were bereft of them and simply existed by themselves.
Fast-forward to 2009 and we know of over 300 extrasolar planets, but more than that, now we know that planets can exist around extremely lightweight stars as well (another link here). Thanks to this planet called VB 10b that has been discovered orbiting a star barely large enough to be called one - an M dwarf called VB 10. What's important about this though is that M dwarfs are the most common stars out there, making up over 75% of all main sequence stars, and now we're sure that even the smallest of these stars can have fairly large planets.
VB 10 is one-twelfth the mass of the Sun, and for comparison the famous red dwarf Gliese 581 (the one with all the super-Earth planets) is one-third the mass of the Sun, so this one is only a quarter the mass of even the red dwarf Gliese 581.
As for the planet itself, it's six times the mass of Jupiter, so one percent the mass of the star it orbits. Though it's located at about the same distance as Mercury (around this star that's already beyond the habitability zone) its high mass means that it has quite a bit of internal heating and thus isn't cold.
Yesterday there was a piece of news in German here that went something like this:
The German Transrapid will drive in Iran in the future. According to information from the ARD radio station in Istanbul the Munich Engineering Office, the Iranian Ministry for Traffic and Transportation and the Governor of Mashad have gone into an agreement for a high-speed line in Iran. The distance between the two is 860 kilometres and at the moment takes two days by bus and nine hours by conventional train, but with the Transrapid line it would take between 2.5 and 3 hours. Mashad is the home of a major Shiite shrine, one with 15 million pilgrims per year.
The contract says that the German side will invest 6.7 euros, which will be paid back by Iran over 20 to 30 years. The new Transrapid line will be the longest stretch of this high-speed railway, and will take five to six years to execute the project.
Great! Except that Thyssenkrupp and Siemens say they're unaware of any contract with Iran for the Transrapid. No idea what's really going on here but keep an eye on the search term Transrapid to see if things are a bit clearer in the next day or two.
In more certain Mashhad news though, the city will have a subway system soon, as it's due to start in 2009 or 2010.
Read more...
Usually TED videos are extremely good, but this one pointed out yesterday on Auxlang strikes me as a bit odd / lazy. Take a look at the video:
Fads don't actually last that long, and English doesn't owe its success as a language due to this but rather due to geopolitical reasons. The idea of English as an international language has actually been around for quite some time, and it's easy to find examples of articles claiming this even in the early 20th century when French was still quite strong. China may still be taking in English as a fad, but in the rest of East Asia this stage has passed and a harder reality has set in: a certain knowledge of English is necessary to get ahead, but true fluency is hard to achieve, and life without fluent English is pretty comfortable as well.
One other thing to take note of is the fact that English textbooks and learning methods are a huge business, and it's in the interest of those that have written these books to market English as the key to a new international self and success in life. Covers for these textbooks almost always look the same:
There's nothing wrong with marketing English in this way; it's a business and it only makes sense to market one's product. But at the same time there's no reason to conclude that English is about to become the world's second language due to large participation at these events alone.
For some numbers on why English is not going to become the world's second language, see this post of mine from last year. The short answer (and this is the conclusion of the British Council as well) is that it will remain at the top for at least 50 years (no other language is even close to taking its place), but the final victory will still elude English, and other languages will continue to strengthen themselves and remain worth learning. The competitive advantage that a functional knowledge of English gives will vanish, and only by knowing another language in addition to this will one be able to stand out. A linguistic deadlock will emerge, and that's where IAL advocates may be able to make their case again, and hopefully be listened to this time.
Ahmadinejad (top left) - you all know him, he wants a second term Rezaei (bottom left) - he's a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard, and even more of a hardliner than Ahmadinejad. His role will be to take hardliner votes away from those disappointed in Ahmadinejad. Mousavi (top right) - the other main contender, he was endorsed by former president Khatami and has reformist tendencies. He was prime minister in the 1980s. Karroubi (bottom right) - reformist, and also the only cleric running for office. Says he'll support Mousavi in the second ballot if there is a runoff. It's also possible that he might drop out earlier to support Mousavi.
First of all, some stats. Yesterday's post noted that internet users in Iran have grown to 23 million from 7.5 million last election, and mobile phone usage has naturally grown as well. According to this site, mobile phone ownership has increased from 40% in 2005 (last election) to 65% in 2007, so maybe around 75% right now.
We can also use Google Trends to gauge the online interest in each candidate. Here they are matched up against each other - note that this is for searches in Persian; the English names have been added by me.
You can see that Mousavi is well ahead of the others in terms of online interest, Ahmadinejad and Karroubi are nearly equal (and don't forget Ahmadinejad gets a lot of free publicity simply for being president), while Rezai is down there at the bottom.
Another way to gauge the online interest in the four candidates is to check their Twitter traffic. An easy way to do this is to check to see how long it takes each candidate to fill up x number of pages of search terms on Twitter. Let's see how long it takes each one to fill up three pages.
Mousavi: 9 hours Ahmadinejad: 12 hours Karroubi: 11 hours Rezaei: slightly over a day
Huffington Post - Rezaei open to talks with the West on Iran's nuclear program, calls Obama's election victory a significant change in American policy towards Iran, says Ahmadinejad's questioning of the Holocaust "not useful" for Iran's standing on the world stage
Nice! A Soyuz blasted off today to carry the extra three astronauts to the station, and naturally each of these countries is excited about their own astronaut that will be joining the crew. Here's the article from CTV in Canada for example.
The presence of six people on the station at the same time will be interesting, as it may give us a few clues about how many people are needed to create the human interaction we find so fascinating. I've recently come to think that one of the main reasons the average person has little interest in space is because we don't know anything about the people up there, and the reason we don't know anything about the people up there is that there's so little interesting interaction between them.
It'll also be interesting to see how happy the three currently residing there will be by the new crew, since the isolation they have in space is complete and total, and the arrival of three people is like...well, I suppose it would be like doubling the size of your family.
Note though that six isn't the largest number of people on the station at any time - when the Space Shuttle arrives the number always swells for a while, but then was always followed by a change of the crew and then a return to a crew of three. Next month Endeavour will launch with a crew of seven to the station, so that will be thirteen people up there at the same time. With that mission we'll have:
Gennady, Michael, Koichi, Frank, Roman, Robert, Mark, Douglas, Christopher, Julie, David, and Thomas - all up in the station at the same time.
Something to keep in mind when reading articles about how warp drive is impossible; let's not forget that in the late 19th century there was also a great divergence of opinion over whether flying machines were possible either. An article from a professor in Popular Science Monthly in 1887 confidently concludes that flying machines just can't exist.
THE PROBLEM OF A FLYING MACHINE. -- We must admit that a bird is an incomparable model of a flying machine. No machine that we may hope to devise, for the same weight of machine, fuel, and directing brain, is half so effective. An yet, this machine, thus perfected through infinite ages by a ruthless process of natural selection, reaches its limit of weight at about fifty pounds! I said, "weight of machine, fuel, and directing brain." Here is another prodigious advantage of the natural over the artificial machine. The flying animal is its own engineer, the flying machine must carry its engineer. The directing engineer in the former (the brain) is perhaps an ounce, in the latter it is one hundred and fifty pounds. The limit of the flying animal is fifty pounds. The smallest possible weight of a flying machine, with its necessary fuel and engineer, even without freight or passengers, could not be less than three or four hundred pounds.
Now, to complete the argument, put these three indisputable facts together: 1. There is a low limit of weight, certainly not much beyond fifty pounds, beyond which it is impossible for an animal to fly. Nature has reached this limit, and with her utmost effort has failed to pass it. 2. The animal machine is far more effective than any we may hope to make; therefore the limit of the weight of a successful flying machine can not be more than fifty pounds. 3. The weight of any machine constructed for flying, including fuel and engineer, can not be less than three or four hundred pounds. Is it not demonstrated that a true flying machine, self-raising, self-sustaining, self-propelling, is physically impossible? -- Prof. Joseph Le Conte, Popular Science Monthly.
Without a single example of a mechanical flying machine to contradict this it actually looks like a pretty solid argument at the time. The counter-argument could be made that eventually humans would find ways to become more efficient than animals, but at the time that would sound similar to the idea of FLT travel today - sure it may be theoretically possible, but when will we reach that level of sophistication, if ever?
This is not to say that any theory on new propulsion is therefore possible, but it's good to remember this example of some pretty impressive scientific minds having reached the conclusion that even simple mechanical flight was a sheer impossibility akin to perpetual motion. Those that have decided today that propulsions x, y or z are sheer impossibilities would be well served by taking a second look at their calculations to make sure that nothing has been left out in order to not become another Professor Joseph Le Conte.
Read more...
Some countries have a very distinctive shape that makes them extremely easy to remember. This one for example:
That's obviously Japan.
Australia looks like a leaping dolphin, so that's easy too. Iraq is a triangle, Turkey is a long rectangle, Italy looks like a boot. What about Iran though? Iran looks like this:
Doesn't look like anything, does it?
Not so fast: Iran does resemble something. A sleeping cat.
All you have to do is take that cat's hips and move them ever so slightly down so that his head is higher than them, and you have a spitting image of Iran.
There are now only seventeen days left until election day in Iran and the main election campaign is well underway, so there's a lot to write about.
Quick intro to the four candidates:
Ahmadinejad (top left) - you all know him, he wants a second term Rezaei (bottom left) - he's a former commander of the Revolutionary Guard, and even more of a hardliner than Ahmadinejad. His role will be to take hardliner votes away from those disappointed in Ahmadinejad. Mousavi (top right) - the other main contender, he was endorsed by former president Khatami and has reformist tendencies. He was prime minister in the 1980s. Karroubi (bottom right) - reformist, and also the only cleric running for office. Says he'll support Mousavi in the second ballot if there is a runoff. It's also possible that he might drop out earlier to support Mousavi.
The first big news was the restoration of Facebook a day after being blocked. Ahmadinejad was put on the defensive after it was blocked over whether he had a role in it; he denied that, and a day later (or two days?) Facebook was back up. Looks like a blunder, since it accomplished nothing except to rile up online supporters.
This article also mentions the obvious, that an election in Iran could bring an end to the stalemate between it and the US. It makes sense that the Obama administration has been waiting on any major changes in policy towards Iran given that the election was only four months after that in the US, and not only could any sudden moves completely shake up the election, but a new president could suddenly cancel previous agreements. Better to wait and see.
When you have talks between ministers from Angola and East Timor they're conducted in Portuguese, so that's what this article is about (though it's written in French). Here's what it says:
The official delegations of Angola and East Timor, led by their respective prime ministers, Antónia Paulo Kassoma and Xanama Gusmão, began Tuesday in the afternoon, with the talks aimed at strengthening cooperation between the two countries.
...
Arriving last Sunday for a working visit of six days, the Timorese chief executive left a wreath of flowers Tuesday at the monument of the former Angolan President Agostinho Neto in Independence Place in Luanda, before being received by President José Eduardo dos Santos.
According to the program, Xanana Gusmão, also the Minister of Defence of his country, will participate over the 27th and 28th of May in the 11th meeting of Defence Ministers of Portuguese Language Countries (CPLP).
Every once in a while you'll find a movie on Rotten Tomatoes that is so far removed from the rating it has received it's not even funny. Before Sunrise for example has a 100% rating for example, and its sequel Before Sunset has almost the same, coming in at 94%. The problem with Before Sunset is best summed up in this review:
The experiences they talk about are like so many sound-bites; they haven't internalized the wisdom that the words suggest.
Because of that the characters come out flat, and the movie feels like little more than two characters being made to explain a few basic concepts on life and philosophy that those making the movie deemed to be important. This review is also right on target.
At the same time there are a number of extremely good movies that deserve a much better rating than they've received, and one of them is The Weather Man, a 2005 piece starring Nicolas Cage. The interesting thing about Nicolas Cage is that the bad movies he stars in are overrated and vice versa for the good movies he stars in, either through reviews or box office results ($37 million for Matchstick Men vs. $173 million for National Treasure). The Weather Man got even less than Matchstick Men with $12 million, which is a shame as it is one of the best movies put out that year.
The problem with the people that reviewed the film is that strangely enough they seemed to find it depressing. Comments like "I'm pretty sure it doesn't get more depressing than this", "A bleak, messy midlife crisis drama as unsure of itself as a weather forecast", "As much fun as standing outside in a blizzard for two hours without a coat", and so on. Very puzzling.
This reminds me a bit of this speech by Neil DeGrasse Tyson on the immensity of the cosmos and how the realization of this makes some people feel depressed (!), while those who truly understand what the cosmos is feel the opposite way - they feel large, part of something much bigger and much older than themselves, the end result of billions and billions of years of creation. If that doesn't make you feel large then I don't know what will.
The other quote it reminds me of is this one by Anthony DeMello:
You've got to drop something. You've got to drop illusions. You don't have to add anything in order to be happy; you've got to drop something. Life is easy, life is delightful. It's only hard on your illusions, your ambitions, your greed, your cravings.
So that seems to be the reaction of those that found The Weather Man to be a depressing film. They were expecting a film where the main character ends up falling madly in love with a French girl on the train, everybody is healthy and cheery, an old man comes to teach the main character to use The Force, who knows. But what they got was a movie about dealing with life exactly the way it is with no holds barred, and perhaps this was a bit of a shock. I don't want to spoil the ending but suffice to say it leaves you with a really great sort of sublime feeling afterward.
Also don't pay any attention to those that say the character of David Spritz is an uninteresting, unlikable one. It's actually quite the opposite. The main character is played so well that you feel like you've known him for years instead of less than two hours - as this review puts it, even his name tells you something important about what sort of person he is.
The other reason for the low reviews may have been the audacity of a director who made Pirates of the Caribbean attempting to make something this meaningful afterwards. As this review puts it:
Artistically, this may be Gore Verbinski's best film -- certainly it's his most ambitious and daring. And that in itself works against it in a twisted way with many film snobs crying out, "How dare this commercial filmmaker presume to tackle something weighty?" After this, they conclude that it's not weighty at all, thereby proving the wisdom of their ire over the very idea that the man who made Pirates of the Caribbean should so overstep his bounds. Personally, I'm reasonably convinced that this same film could have been signed by Alexander Payne and it would be proclaimed a masterpiece. (I am less convinced that Payne could have made a movie this good, but that's a separate issue.)
Due to the lack of commercial success for the film it's very likely that many of those reading this post will have never even heard about the film. If that's you then know that you're missing out. Not everyone seems to get the movie but those that do swear by it, and so do I. The best way to sum up the movie would be this comment from the first page on its Rotten Tomatoes page: There is, after the cloud cover burns off, a tantalizing sense of vitality and life.Read more...
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