Edie & Roxy

Keeping up with a baby is a full-time gig. Just ask my two-year-old, who always seems to have her hands full making sure that baby Roxy doesn't play with things she shouldn't play with. Or taking toys that she is allowed to play with out of her hands. Or placing toys in front of her just so she can take them away two seconds later. 

They say at this age the older kid has a hard time with the creeping realization that the little one isn't just another temporary houseguest. Edie takes the attitude of a small-town sheriff, with the baby something like a teenage hot-rodder who's rolled into town for repairs. Edie won't cross the line into outright brutality. She sees it as her job to behave in a sufficiently harassing manner so the young troublemaker doesn't get any ideas about staying put for a spell.

Michael Phelps

THE SPIRIT

So, Frank Miller has made what appears to be a horrible movie of Will Eisner's The Spirit. 

Since Will Eisner and Frank Miller were my two favorite cartoonists as a lad, I'm not sure how I'm supposed to feel about this. On the one hand, nobody needs to prove their Eisner-fan stripes less than Frank Miller does. I wouldn't even know who Will Eisner was if not for Miller. This is a guy who used to take up space in his top-tier Marvel book to plug a strip that had been defunct for 30 years. It's just disappointing that he appears to have made a movie that's less about the Spirit comic than about Frank Miller's late-period preoccupation with boobs, blood and bad dialogue. Like practically everything he's done post-1980's, the trailer leaves me scratching my head; it seems like a bad parody, and I can't tell if he's joking or not.

I should have known it might turn out like this after having read Eisner/Miller, the book-length cross-interview that Dark Horse published a few years back. In parts you just had the sense that the two of them were on separate wavelengths. Like the following passage where Miller is about to talk about Sin City: Family Values.

EISNER: The book I'm working on right now is about a family that immigrates from Eastern Europe in the 1930's and struggles to make a living in the garment district while keeping their traditions alive.

MILLER: Oh yeah, my book deals with a lot of the same themes. These two hot chicks get it on with each other and then go around shooting everybody with uzis.

Okay, I might not have exactly transcribed that word for word, but it's not far off.

Black Monday

Inspired by a photo I pulled off CNN.com.

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)

I finally caught this on DVD. (I don't get out that much. A trip to the video store is a big event around my house.)

I had heard that the movie is great up until the ending, which I heard described as confusing and pointless. I can understand the confusion, because the movie fakes you out. It's pretending to be a certain kind of film that you've seen a million times. The kind that only flirts with existential dread. When Tommy Lee Jones showed up early on, I actually said to my wife, "Oh, it's Tommy Lee Jones, everything's going to be all right now". Which is exactly what I was supposed to think.

Like the motorist pulled over by the police cruiser in an early scene, you respond automatically to certain signals that reassure you that a safety net is in place. But the safety net hasn't held, and the tent around you is on fire. The film leaves you standing, slack-jawed and dull-eyed like cattle, watching the bolt aimed at your brain but failing to understand its purpose until it's too late.

Galveston

Faith and Edie playing in the rain at my in-laws' beach house, Galveston Island, TX, April 2007.

Madame President

DAY ONE: What the hell were they thinking nominating this woman? She's clearly insane. I guess it's over for McCain.

DAY TWO: Oh, I get it, she's the kind of insane that's great on television. Well, hopefully the Democrats won't play into the Republicans' hands on this one.

DAY THREE: We're dead.

Little known fact

Little known fact about me: my kisses can now heal pinched fingers, skinned knees, and insect bites of all kinds.

Olbermann

MSNBC removes Olbermann and Matthews from election coverage.

Why does this annoy me. It's just this nagging feeling that the other side would never do this. Try telling Fox to muzzle their top people because they're coming off a little too partisan.

Apparently it was a necessary thing to do, because some people organized an anti-NBC chant at the RNC. I mean, a chant. Something that you should stop being intimidated of after about the fourth grade.

What is it about Democrats that they feel they have to just go and stuff themselves in the locker voluntarily?

The Dark Knight

"A vision of the failure of our idealism before the inexorable tide of entropy... a Sartrean paranoia of no hope for escape, no possibly of exit... the dreamlife of mice in their sterile maze that is this sprawling microcosm of all of the miseries and suffering of the world."


"The failure of reason is the great bogey of this modern day... The dam's broken and you can't put the water back; and though it's not obviously an allegory for them, suddenly the film functions as stark reflection of our anxieties that we might be too late to save the planet, too uncertain of the terms to win the war."


"Midway through, I realized that the picture was genuinely upsetting me, that I was actually terrified by the places it was allowing its Joker to go. This Joker isn't carnival sideshow, he's not Jack Nicholson crazy--this Joker is cross-the-street crazy. The glittering beauty of it is that the character is scary because his madness is born of sadness and possibility."

-All quotes from Walter Chaw, filmfreakcentral.net