Cheshire Crossing #2 is available on-line.
I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark during the holiday (I refuse to buy the box set for one movie, so took advantage of an opportunity to borrow a copy).
In the scene where Dr. Jones is explaining Tanis to Army Intelligence, there are physics problems on the blackboard. It appears to be a trajectory problem of some sort - the leading term is the height displacement of a projectile given its initial vertical velocity, but there's some sort of correction. Can anybody identify it?
Finally got to see this. Good film - I'm not convinced it belongs in IMDB's top 250 (#248 as I write this), but quite fine.
A good performance by Bowie, although I did expect the movie to put a bit more emphasis on Telsa bizarre compulsions. Though when I check Wikipedia, they don't seem to get much mention either, so maybe I'm imagining things.
I've something of a problem with what appears to be an obvious plot hole; when Angier first uses Telsa's machine, he suddenly has all the pieces he needs to crack Borden's version of the Transported Man... and doesn't? OK, so he's an inferior illusionist and an idiot. I can live with that.
But the illusion with the goldfish bowl was a wonderful choice to illustrate Borden's skills.
Executive summary: go see it.
spoilers
I read this film described as James Bond: Year One, which should help set expectations for anyone familiar with the notion of the retelling of an origin story. So Craig is playing a version of Bond who hasn't yet lived the life of a 00. At that level, the performance sort of works - you can almost see this character becoming the Bond played by Connery. Maybe.
The performance owes a lot to Robert Shaw, I think.
He doesn't have all the trappings of sophistication; would those really come after he had spent time running around being assigned to kill people? I'm not sure that I buy that notion.
There's also a bit much "James Bond, World's Greatest Detective" going on.
Eva Green, enh. Like most Bond girls, were she in my bed I would bring her crackers, but I'm not sure that she really brought more to the table than Carey Lowell did, or perhaps a combination of Rosamund Pike and Lowell.
Mikkelsen was excellent, though the part really didn't give him as much to work with as he deserved (assuming, of course, that they didn't deliberately leave a lot of his work on the cutting room floor).
Wow - Hollywood figures out that you can have a straight flush in poker that doesn't include the ace! I'm so impressed. That said, it didn't appear to me to be particularly good no limit holdem. Also, Bond loses track of the real objective of the game; that may have been a deliberate choice by the screen writer, but if so they should have drawn more attention to it.
From the end of the poker game on, the movie was a bit weak. Good car chase, as it were, and the final scene between Bond and Le Chiffre was well played. But the pacing was very off, and the explanations for the resolution really didn't hold together (drawing from another problem space altogether "if you have to explain it, it is already wrong").
Where does it rank? #2 behind Golden Eye as non-Connery films go, though I think it was a lot closer to cracking the top three than Brosnan managed.
Yeah, so I'm late to the party. I've been working my way through the archives....
#162. It probably doesn't stand up on its own, but in sequence this was beautiful. BWAH HAHAHHAHAH
Trying to keep up with election night from here was something of a challenge. I'm 9 hours ahead of the east coast, which means the results are coming in the middle of my work day. Furthermore, I'm having trouble keeping the cast straight, since I've been away for four months ("which of those two is the good guy again?").
Now, am I having trouble counting on things, or does Democratic control of the Senate hinge on Lieberman staying bought? That's a bet I don't think I'll have any trouble laying off. What can the democrats offer that the republicans cannot offer two months sooner?
I like the gains made by the Dems in the house, and I'll stand up and clap for the grassroots, but I keep looking at the total and wondering what the American people are thinking? That things aren't going to handbasket? That things are going to handbasket, so we should throw out all the bums except my guy?
"If only he'd knock over a bank or something. By God, then we'd have him."
The world is better today than yesterday, but yesterday it was worse than I knew.
Ah, Rumsfeld resigns. Says the cynic Bush thinks this will push the election results off of page one?
