Thought

It occurred to me this morning that what is necessary in a consumer--impulsiveness--is the opposite of what is required to succeed in life--self-control.

So we are bombarded with messages--on billboards, television, the internet--to treat ourselves, to consume, to give in to our desires, and that is the world we swim in. Yet to succeed in school, at work, in our marriages, we must do the opposite. We must control our desires--we must delay our gratification. We don't see many TV ads for delayed gratification.

What I'm reading

Lingering, an article from n+1 magazine about online culture.

HA!

Obama Drastically Scales Back Goals For America After Visiting Denny's

Funny stuff

Every week the New Yorker runs a humor piece called "Shouts and Murmurs," and often I fail to see the humor. However, the most recent one made me laugh out loud many times. This one starts as many do, with an excerpt from a real article:

To learn more about the biochemistry of addiction, scientists in Australia dropped liquefied freebase cocaine on bees’ backs, so it entered the circulatory system and brain.
The scientists found that bees react much like humans do: cocaine alters their judgment, stimulates their behavior and makes them exaggeratedly enthusiastic about things that might not otherwise excite them.
—The Times.

Oh, my God, get over here . . . hurry . . . come on come on come on. Taste this nectar, taste it, taste it. . . . Slurp. . . . Is that not, is that not the best fucking thing you’ve ever had? Like nectar of the fucking Gods! It’s like the greatest hits of nectar. A double-album greatest hits, like those red and blue Beatles records where they’re looking down at us off a balcony but they have facial hair in one of them.....

Read the rest here.

A Great Movie Online for Free

One of the funniest documentaries I have ever seen, Off the Charts: The Song-Poem Cycle, is not available in its entirety on youtube.

In the back of magazines like Writer's Digest, songwriters advertise that, for a fee, they will turn your poem into a song.

The poems, the songs, and the people themselves are too complexly weird to be described--they must be experienced.

It's less than an hour long, and will stick with you longer than most movies you've seen. Trust me.

Find the film here.

Losing the War

I just read the most amazing piece. It's called "Losing the War" by Lee Sandlin, and it was published in an anthology called "The New Kings of Nonfiction."

The piece is ostensibly about World War II, and how the reality of its horror and its banality has been lost to our generation. It is one of the best essays I have ever read. What it's really about, though, is much harder to grasp.

Most of us don't know much about the war, but even if you do, you might find this fascinating. For instance, here is his description of the "battle" of Midway. It's a long excerpt, but totally worth reading.

There was a battle soon after Pearl Harbor that may, better than any other, define just what was so strange about the war. Unlike most of the war's battles, it was contained within a narrow enough area that it can be visualized clearly, yet its consequences were so large and mysterious that they rippled throughout the entire world for years afterward. It happens that no American reporters were around to witness it directly, but it has been amply documented even so. From survivors' accounts, and from a small library of academic and military histories, ranging in scope and style from Walter Lord's epic Miracle at Midway to John Keegan's brilliant tactical analysis in The Price of Admiralty: The Evolution of Naval Warfare, it's possible to work out with some precision just what happened in the open waters of the Pacific off Midway Island at 10:25 AM local time on June 4, 1942.

In the months after Pearl Harbor the driving aim of Japanese strategy was to capture a string of islands running the length of the western Pacific and fortify them against an American counterattack. This defensive perimeter would set the boundaries of their new empire -- or, as they called it, the "Greater Asia Coprosperity Sphere." Midway Island, the westernmost of the Hawaiian Islands, was one of the last links they needed to complete the chain. They sent an enormous fleet, the heart of the Japanese navy, to do the job: four enormous aircraft carriers, together with a whole galaxy of escort ships. On June 4 the attack force arrived at Midway, where they found a smaller American fleet waiting for them.

Or so the history-book version normally runs. But the sailors on board the Japanese fleet saw things differently. They didn't meet any American ships on June 4. That day, as on all the other days of their voyage, they saw nothing from horizon to horizon but the immensity of the Pacific. Somewhere beyond the horizon line, shortly after dawn, Japanese pilots from the carriers had discovered the presence of the American fleet, but for the Japanese sailors, the only indications of anything unusual that morning were two brief flyovers by American fighter squadrons. Both had made ineffectual attacks and flown off again. Coming on toward 10:30 AM, with no further sign of enemy activity anywhere near, the commanders ordered the crews on the aircraft carriers to prepare for the final assault on the island, which wasn't yet visible on the horizon.

That was when a squadron of American dive-bombers came out of the clouds overhead. They'd got lost earlier that morning and were trying to make their way back to base. In the empty ocean below they spotted a fading wake -- one of the Japanese escort ships had been diverted from the convoy to drop a depth charge on a suspected American submarine. The squadron followed it just to see where it might lead. A few minutes later they cleared a cloud deck and discovered themselves directly above the single largest "target of opportunity," as the military saying goes, that any American bomber had ever been offered.

When we try to imagine what happened next we're likely to get an image out of Star Wars -- daring attack planes, as graceful as swallows, darting among the ponderously churning cannons of some behemoth of a Death Star. But the sci-fi trappings of Star Wars disguise an archaic and sluggish idea of battle. What happened instead was this: the American squadron commander gave the order to attack, the planes came hurtling down from around 12,000 feet and released their bombs, and then they pulled out of their dives and were gone. That was all. Most of the Japanese sailors didn't even see them.

The aircraft carriers were in a frenzy just then. Dozens of planes were being refueled and rearmed on the hangar decks, and elevators were raising them to the flight decks, where other planes were already revving up for takeoff. The noise was deafening, and the warning sirens were inaudible. Only the sudden, shattering bass thunder of the big guns going off underneath the bedlam alerted the sailors that anything was wrong. That was when they looked up. By then the planes were already soaring out of sight, and the black blobs of the bombs were already descending from the brilliant sky in a languorous glide.

One bomb fell on the flight deck of the Akagi, the flagship of the fleet, and exploded amidships near the elevator. The concussion wave of the blast roared through the open shaft to the hangar deck below, where it detonated a stack of torpedoes. The explosion that followed was so powerful it ruptured the flight deck; a fireball flashed like a volcano through the blast crater and swallowed up the midsection of the ship. Sailors were killed instantly by the fierce heat, by hydrostatic shock from the concussion wave, by flying shards of steel; they were hurled overboard unconscious and drowned. The sailors in the engine room were killed by flames drawn through the ventilating system. Two hundred died in all. Then came more explosions rumbling up from below decks as the fuel reserves ignited. That was when the captain, still frozen in shock and disbelief, collected his wits sufficiently to recognize that the ship had to be abandoned.

Meanwhile another carrier, the Kaga, was hit by a bomb that exploded directly on the hangar deck. The deck was strewn with live artillery shells, and open fuel lines snaked everywhere. Within seconds, explosions were going off in cascading chain reactions, and uncontrollable fuel fires were breaking out all along the length of the ship. Eight hundred sailors died. On the flight deck a fuel truck exploded and began shooting wide fans of ignited fuel in all directions; the captain and the rest of the senior officers, watching in horror from the bridge, were caught in the spray, and they all burned to death.

Less than five minutes had passed since the American planes had first appeared overhead. The Akagi and the Kaga were breaking up. Billowing columns of smoke towered above the horizon line. These attracted another American bomber squadron, which immediately launched an attack on a third aircraft carrier, the Soryu. These bombs were less effective -- they set off fuel fires all over the ship, but the desperate crew managed to get them under control. Still, the Soryu was so badly damaged it was helpless. Shortly afterward it was targeted by an American submarine (the same one the escort ship had earlier tried to drop a depth charge on). American subs in those days were a byword for military ineffectiveness; they were notorious for their faulty and unpredictable torpedoes. But the crew of this particular sub had a large stationary target to fire at point-blank. The Soryu was blasted apart by repeated direct hits. Seven hundred sailors died.

The last of the carriers, the Hiryu, managed to escape untouched, but later that afternoon it was located and attacked by another flight of American bombers. One bomb set off an explosion so strong it blew the elevator assembly into the bridge. More than 400 died, and the crippled ship had to be scuttled a few hours later to keep it from being captured.

Now there was nothing left of the Japanese attack force except a scattering of escort ships and the planes still in the air. The pilots were the final casualties of the battle; with the aircraft carriers gone, and with Midway still in American hands, they had nowhere to land. They were doomed to circle helplessly above the sinking debris, the floating bodies, and the burning oil slicks until their fuel ran out.

This was the Battle of Midway. As John Keegan writes, it was "the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare." Its consequences were instant, permanent and devastating. It gutted Japan's navy and broke its strategy for the Pacific war. The Japanese would never complete their perimeter around their new empire; instead they were thrown back on the defensive, against an increasingly large and better-organized American force, which grew surgingly confident after its spectacular victory. After Midway, as the Japanese scrambled to rebuild their shattered fleet, the Americans went on the attack. In August 1942 they began landing a marine force on the small island of Guadalcanal (it's in the Solomons, near New Guinea) and inexorably forced a breach in the perimeter in the southern Pacific. From there American forces began fanning out into the outer reaches of the empire, cutting supply lines and isolating the strongest garrisons. From Midway till the end of the war the Japanese didn't win a single substantial engagement against the Americans. They had "lost the initiative," as the bland military saying goes, and they never got it back.

But it seems somehow paltry and wrong to call what happened at Midway a "battle." It had nothing to do with battles the way they were pictured in the popular imagination. There were no last-gasp gestures of transcendent heroism, no brilliant counterstrategies that saved the day. It was more like an industrial accident. It was a clash not between armies, but between TNT and ignited petroleum and drop-forged steel. The thousands who died there weren't warriors but bystanders -- the workers at the factory who happened to draw the shift when the boiler exploded.

Find the entire essay here.

Algorithms (not Al Gore Rhythms)

I was reading a book about behavioral psychology, and it mentioned that, when we enter a store, studies show we tend to turn right, no matter what we are looking for. I thought that was a weird human tic, but it made me think that, at a grocery store, the shorter lines are probably on the left, since most people go right instinctively. They walk down the aisle, turn right, and get in line.

So, I determined that, from now on, I will always go to the shortest line on the left. It's an algorithm I will follow. It made me start to think of other algorithms people follow. Brands are interesting algorithms. We tend to pick a brand we like (of shoes, of cars, of soft drinks, you name it) and stick with it. It makes the sometimes overwhelming decisions much easier to make. Confronted with too many choices? Go for the algorithm. I did it just yesterday, when confronted with the decision of where to take our vehicle to get it worked on. One was a national chain and the other was a local business. One of my algorithms is always go local. Right or wrong, it makes decisions easier.

It reminded me of a great algorithm that "The Sopranos" carried through an entire season, repeated often. It said, "more is lost through indecision than through bad decision." So, the algorithm basically said, just make a decision, and stop worrying about which is best. It may not always lead to the best outcome, but it prevents a person from being paralyzed due to overanalysis.

I'd be interested to hear anybody else's algorithms.

How is it solved?

I'm reading an article about poker in the most recent New Yorker magazine, and I came across a statement that seems like it can't be true.

It says: "Games for which a flawless strategy is known are said to be solved. Tic-tac-toe is solved: blackjack is solved; checkers is solved. Chess is not solved, and poker is not, either. Solutions theoretically exist; they are simply too intricate, so far, to be comprehended. Among mathematicians, chess is regarded as a game of perfect information, because nothing is hidden. If its ideal strategy were discovered, there would no longer be any reason to play it--no move could be made for which the responses was not already identified. Poker is a game of imperfect information, since so much is concealed."

So, my question is: in what way is blackjack solved? Isn't the dealer's hole card concealed? Am I missing something?

You can read the abstract of the article here. You must be a subscriber to read the entire thing.

Davis Foster Wallace

When David Foster Wallace killed himself last September, it depressed me more than I thought it would. His books, especially his nonfiction, were unlike any other. He could juxtapose the concrete with the abstract in a way that showed his incredible erudition and his powers of observation. One of my favorite books is his "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again," the title story of which I first read in Harper's Magazine and caused spasms of tears and laughter. In short, I really loved the guy's writing.

Since his death, there has been a mini-Renaissance of appreciation for him. A recent New Yorker article wrote about his life and final days, and alongside the article, the mag published an excerpt from his unfinished novel. The excerpt was a little tedious, but hey, it was unfinished. But the article reminded me why I loved the guy:

His goal had been to show readers how to live a fulfilled, meaningful life. “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being,” he once said. Good writing should help readers to “become less alone inside.” Wallace’s desire to write “morally passionate, passionately moral fiction,” as he put it in a 1996 essay on Dostoyevsky, presented him with a number of problems. For one thing, he did not feel comfortable with any of the dominant literary styles. He could not be a realist. The approach was “too familiar and anesthetic,” he once explained. Anything comforting put him on guard. “It seems important to find ways of reminding ourselves that most ‘familiarity’ is meditated and delusive,” he said in a long 1991 interview with Larry McCaffery, an English professor at San Diego State. The default for Wallace would have been irony—the prevailing tone of his generation. But, as Wallace saw it, irony could critique but it couldn’t nourish or redeem. He told McCaffery, “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?”

His magnum opus is "Infinite Jest," a medicine ball of a book, 1000 pages, all heavily endnoted. From what I understand, reading it requires the patience of a Talmudic scholar. But every description also makes it sound really cool. I may never get to the book, but I will listen to this Slate podcast of a roundtable discussion of people who HAVE read the book.

Revolutionary Road Book Club at The New Yorker

The New Yorker has a book club based on Revolutionary Road going on right now. The magazine's staff is posting a series of blog posts about the book, and we are invited to join in.

Since some of you just finished the book with us in our book club, I thought you might be interested. Find the discussion here.

Best movies of 2008, the definitive list

From Metacritic.com

The films receiving Best Picture awards and #1 movie of the year rankings from publications, critics, and organizations tracked by Metacritic in 2008 are (with number of wins in parentheses):

WALL-E (14.5)
Slumdog Millionaire (12.5)
Milk(6)
The Dark Knight (6)
A Christmas Tale (5)
Rachel Getting Married (4)
Synecdoche, New York (3)
Waltz with Bashir (3)
Wendy and Lucy (3)
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2)
Frozen River (2)
The Wrestler (2)
The Visitor (2)
Happy-Go-Lucky (2)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (1)
Iron Man (1)
Frost Nixon (1)
Gran Torino (1)
Ballast (1)
Man on Wire (1)
Tell No One (1)
4 Month, 3 Days and 2 Weeks (1)
Defiance (1)
Let the Right One In (1)
The Fall (1)
Young@Heart (1)
Revolutionary Road (1)
Encounters at the End of the World (1)
Flight of the Red Balloon (1)
Still Life (0.5)

Question

In the last day I have read two passing references to the "late" David Foster Wallace, who died on September 12 of last year.

How long does a person have to be dead in order to no longer be referred to that way?

Ostentation

Leon Wieseltier's review of Martin Amis's book, "The Second Plane," contains a sentence that symbolizes how I feel about the relationship between style and substance. In it, Wieseltier criticizes Amis for his showy style:

When he [Amis] describes the second plane on its way to the south tower as “sharking in low over the Statue of Liberty,” the ingenuity of the image is an interruption of attention, an ostentatious metaphorical digression from the enormity that it is preparing to reveal, an invitation to behold the prose and not the plane.

I disagree somewhat with this, in that I think "sharking" give a metaphorical perspective that asks us to reexamine the iconic image of the second plane, and the metaphor is apt. However, in general, I agree with the sentiment. A much better example of showy prose comes from the National-Book-Award nominated "The Zero," a novel about the 9/11 clean-up. Similes and metaphors pile up, and those tropes, far from expanding our understanding when we examine them, become distractions. For instance, these sentences describe the crew at Ground Zero reacting to a work stoppage:

In line, the guys edged forward and peered around one another like kids waiting for recess, trying to see why the buckets had stopped. Their boots crackled on the surface of the debris, tiny shifts like the warm pack on a deep snowfall. (49)

These similes in consecutive sentences do not increase our understanding. In fact, they're distracting, mostly because they are not apt. The kids at recess metaphor is just plain wrong. Kids waiting for recess are really eager to go to something fun, and they wait impatiently for freedom. Guys working at Ground Zero might be confused, wondering why the buckets have stopped, but they're not like kids at recess.

Instead of using the "kids at recess" simile, the author could have used one akin to "like schoolchildren during a fire drill." This simile is more apt in that: (1) something disagreeable (school) has been interrupted; (2) the kids are wondering why it's been interrupted; (3) they're afraid something bad may have happened, but they also know it's probably nothing; (4) in a weird way, they kind of want to get back to it. In all of these ways, the workers are like the schoolchildren; thus, it's an apt simile.

I think Weiseltier is asking for precise writing that does not obscure meaning, but that carries meaning while augmenting it as well. He does not value prose that calls attention to itself--the kind of prose that gets books nominated for awards...the kind of prose that invites us to behold the description, not what is being described. In that way, I agree with him.

Because Katie Couric is Not the Center of Everyone's Universe

A Theory

David Cross.....in 30 seconds, tell us why "Arrested Development" was cancelled:



Too bad that theory is wrong. Some shows are just too good; they will never get a mass audience like that "2 1/2 Men" garbage. Look at "30 Rock". In its second season, in which it won about every award it could win, it was not even in the top 100 rated shows. Yes, you read that correctly. It wasn't in the top 100.

It's not Fox's fault that "Arrested Development" didn't get ratings. It's the audience's. It brings to mind a great quotation from my hero, H. L. Mencken: "No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public."

Here we go again

In response to Obama's talk of stimulus packages, Fox News's new hobbyhorse is the assertion that Roosevelt's deficit spending prolonged the Great Depression.

Not true.

As Newsweek's Daniel Gross reports, "One would be very hard-pressed to find a serious professional historian who believes that the New Deal prolonged the Depression."

Find the article here.

Groundhog Day gets its due

I consider Groundhog Day a classic movie (I have its movie poster on my TV room wall), and most people to whom I say that look at me like I'm crazy. However, author and professor Stanley Fish agrees with me, and he summarizes my reasons eloquently. He put Groundhog Day in his top ten American movies of all time. It's great to see this movie getting the due I've always thought it deserves.

Groundhog Day (1993), directed by Harold Ramis. Another Pygmalion story, but this time the material the sculptor works on is himself. Phil Connors (Bill Murray) is a jaded, dyspeptic, arrogant, cynical and obnoxious TV weatherman who on Feb. 2 finds himself covering the emergence of the groundhog in Puxatawney, Pa. When he wakes up the next morning, he finds that it is not the next morning, but Groundhog Day all over again and all over again and all over again. (His own spring will be late.)

His responses to being trapped eternally in the same day include disbelief, despair, excess and hedonism before he settles down to make the best of the situation, which, it turns out, means making the best of himself — a self-help project that takes forever, but forever is what he has. (It is as if he were at once the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future and the object of their tutelary attention.). By bits and pieces, fits and starts, he makes himself into the most popular fellow in town and wins the love of his producer, the beautiful Rita (a perfectly cast Andie MacDowell). The miracle is that as the movie becomes more serious, it becomes funnier. The comedy and the philosophy (how shall one live?) do not sit side by side, but inhabit each other in a unity that is incredibly satisfying. This is a “feel-good” movie in at least two senses of the word “good.”

See the other nine movies here.

Religulous online

FYI, the full Bill Maher documentary "Religulous" can be found on the Google video site, either for streaming or for download to an iPod. I watched it last night. It has its moments, but it gets a little bogged down at the end. It's good for some great laughs, though.

The link can be found here.

Most common words on my blog

I found a site called Wordle that will look at a webpage and count the words, making the most common ones bigger. Here is the result. Click on it to see it in full size.

Best Movies of the Year (sort of)

This is a list of the best movies I watched this year. That does not mean these films were released in 2008; it just means I saw them for the first time in 2008. Obviously I had a hard time narrowing the list down, so I created a criterion in my head. I asked myself, "What movies I watched this year am I most eager to watch again?" Here's the list, with a link to each movie's page at Rotten Tomatoes, and its "freshness" score in parentheses...

1. Synecdoche, New York: (rated 63% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes) I was explaining to someone that this movie is the opposite of what most classically created dramas are. A classical drama is not over, as Chekov once famously said, until the gun hanging over the mantel in the first act is fired in the third. That is to say, everything connects in the plot, nothing is extraneous, and everything is sort of symmetrical. SNY is the opposite. It has "guns" hanging in hidden corners in every scene. Sometimes they get fired, sometimes they turn into other guns, sometimes they're not real guns. Confusing, I know, but this film deals in possibilities, shooting out ideas that might not ever go anywhere, so it ends up being an untidy mess that embodies essentially what it means to grow old. It is a hard movie to like, especially as you watch it, because it induces so many cringes, but it tried to say something difficult and true.

Another way I explained it to a student is this: There are three types of movies. The first, and by far the most common, is one that shows the world as we wish it were. These are movies with unrealistic heroes, implausibly coincidental love stories--pure escapism. The second is one that shows the way the world is--gritty reality like "Traffic" and "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days." These movies serve a sort of social purpose, like the realist's novels at the turn of the last century. The last type, and my favorite type, is the one that shows the way we fear the world might be. Dystopian. Depressing. Empty. Movies like "Requiem for a Dream" and "Welcome to the Dollhouse." These movies are rare, because they are hard to watch. I don't know why, but I love them, and SNY might be the best of this type of movie. Writer-director Charlie Kaufman plumbed the depths of his fears and neuroses, and made a movie that dared us to tell ourselves we are not like him.

2. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: (93%) I saw this movie at the Magic Lantern with my friend Mark, and I loved it so much I couldn't wait to watch it again on DVD with my family. It is the best kind of inspirational movie. The inspiration is real, and it is earned. It does not tell us that "life is what you make it"--that's something for the Hallmark channel to tell us. It tells us that "when life makes you a shit sandwich, you don't have to choke on it when you eat it." That's true inspiration in my book. It tells the story of a lout who has a stroke and wakes up to find he can only move his left eye. After self pity and anger, he takes pains to learn a type of Morse code to dictate messages and, eventually, a book. It's based on a true story, and the inspiration, though not complete, is earned.

3. Lawrence of Arabia: (98%)This movie is almost four hours long, so I can be somewhat forgiven if it took me so long to finally watch it. I figured that I had to take my medicine and watch this "classic" (defined by Mark Twain as a work that everybody praises and nobody reads [or in this case, watches]), and was suprised by how clear and compelling the story is. The highlight of the film, though, is the beautiful cinematography. It might be the best visual film in history, and it's fun to watch too.

4. The Visitor: (92%) A student of mine suggested this film to me, and it sounded pretty cheesy. But something in the way he insistently said I needed to watch it made me look it up on Netflix. In an odd coincidence, the first thing that came up on the screen was a recommendation that I watch..."The Visitor". Then I saw it was directed by the same guy who directed "The Station Agent," a great movie, so I moved it to the top of my queue. The story of a college professor who learns to feel again almost tips over to melodrama at times, but the savvy editing and the masterful performance by Richard Jenkins make this a complex film with emotional depth.

5. 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days: (97%) The story itself is pretty simple--a Romanian woman tries to get an abortion--but the complexity of the characters, and the boldness of the filmmaking, elevate this movie. The director has learned from Jim Jarmusch how to hold a shot for a long time, but he has done Jim one better: while the camera lingers, characters change, grow and, in one memorable shot, almost go insane. Like all the movies listed above, this is one I need to see again to get its full genius.

6. Lake of Fire: (94%) It's a coincidence that this film, like the last one, is about abortion, but this one is a documentary. It is shot in silvery black and white by the director of "American History X," and it tries to clearly illuminate both sides of the abortion debate. It shows wackos, but it also shows families of slain abortion doctors. Just when viewers think that abortion is a matter of choice, it shows a tiny arm in a steel pail as a doctor cleans up after an abortion. The final 20 minutes, following a woman from the time she enters an abortion clinic until she leaves, is some of the most compelling cinema in history. It's hard to watch, but it should be required viewing for anyone who thinks they have this debate figured out.

7. The Celebration: (91%) This film is odd and vibrant and funny and ultimately sad, but it is one of the most interesting films to come out of the Dogme 95 movement. It was one of those films Karyn and I started late at night, thinking we'd watch an hour, go to bed, then finish later, but the film was so good we had to finish (to the detriment of a good night's sleep). BTW, the last movie to do that to us was Zodiac.

8. The Darjeeling Limited: (67%) I have been unimpressed by every Wes Anderson movie except Rushmore and Tenenbaums, but this movie was the real deal. It was beautifully shot, as are all Anderson movies, but this time the story about three brothers on a quest to find their mother had heart.

9. Eat Drink Man Woman: (95%) Ang Lee has become such a great director, I had to go back to find this movie he directed in his native tongue, Chinese. It was a delightful and lighthearted film about a father and his three daughters. Touching and sweet, the film also sported some of the most wonderful scenes of eating and cooking in the history of cinema. If the opening scene doesn't make you hungry, you just ate.

10. King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters: (97%) I didn't appreciate this film the first time I saw it, but I showed it again for my film class, and I came to appreciate the oldschool good guy/bad guy storyline. Rarely in a documentary will you find a villian like Billy Mitchell or a hero like Steve Wiebe. It's as much fun as a movie can be.

Pleasant Surprises: Movies I liked more than I expected to.
In Bruges (81%)
Ghost Town (84%)
Once (97%)
Sweeney Todd (86%)