I’m Not Here — I was incredibly dissapointed when Casey announced that this film was not actually a documentary before I had been able to see it.  In my mind, I thought it had already ruined it.  Now that I’ve seen it, I think it made it better.  The most interesting parts of this movie were not found in the voyeuristic self-destruction of a person (as it would have been if I believed it were real) but instead in the act of the spotlight being turned on the media and the consumers of “celebrity culture.”  The character of Joaquin Phoenix seems equally interesting as it’s impossible to try and figure out where he and his character overlap.  Is P Diddy real?  If not, give him an oscar because this is the best acting the “rapper” has ever done.  Other things worth noting: Ben Stiller being actually funny (briefly) and the way that people standing near Phoenix can’t help but get into his musical performances.  9/10

The Town — I should have just re-watched Heat.  I do think that Ben Affleck is a better director than I want him to be — but seriously, where did he find this terrible script?  It lost 6 of my 10 points in the last 5 minutes of the film.  Honestly one of the worst endings I’ve ever experienced.  Watch the movie until it starts to get corny and then turn it off before you smash your TV.  4/10

A Russian chimpanzee has been sent to rehab by zookeepers to cure the smoking and beer-drinking habits he has picked up, a popular daily reported on Friday. [...]

“The beer and cigarettes were ruining him. He would pester passers-by for booze,” the Komsomolskaya Pravda paper said.

Link (via New Shelton Wet/Dry)

Gurguen recruited five women in their early twenties (all natural brunettes) to stand, one at a time, by the side of a road popular with hitchhikers in France. Their job was to try to get motorists to pull over. Each woman was equipped with three wigs, blond, brunette, and black, which she was instructed to rotate every time forty cars had passed. When a car stopped, she (and two independent observers) kept a record of what color wig she was wearing and whether the driver was male or female.

Drivers prefer blondes, it turns out. Blond hair, compared with brown or black hair, inspired a statistically larger proportion of drivers to stop and offer assistance (18% for blondes vs 14% and 13% for brunettes and women with black hair respectively). Interestingly, this was true only of male drivers. Female drivers, who stopped less frequently for hitchhikers, showed no hair color bias.

From Love, Sex, Attraction… and Science

There is only one spot on the planet where grains will grow despite sub-arctic sunlight.

It is where the warm waters of the Gulf Stream wash ashore. The Baltic is the only place on earth where ocean currents keep it warm enough to grow grain despite dim sunlight.

When the inhabitants of this region switched to grain about 6 KYA, they suddenly got insufficient vitamin D to survive. They had stopped eating mostly meat and fish in a place where sunlight was too dim to produce vitamin D in normally pigmented skin.

And so they adapted by retaining into adulthood the infantile trait of extreme paleness. Blonde hair and blue eyes were other infantile traits that were just swept along accidentally.

From Google Knol, Why Are Europeans White

Jack White > Jimmy Page > The Edge

Documentaries With Conflict > Those Without (which is why this one is an interesting failure.)

Also not sure why they chose The Edge — his style is without doubt different than the other two, but during the jam session he just looks lost.   Jack White astounds.

Rating: 5/10

This one has me conflicted.  It’s beautiful.  It’s stark.  It’s well acted by a cast of Alabama locals that basically improvised the script.  The hand-held cameras do an unbelievable job of masking how much work must have gone into every shot.  It’s sad.  It’s so sad that it hits me RIGHT THERE.

Add up all of those and you’ll get a movie that I’ll love.  A movie that I’ll rave about and tell you to watch.  A movie I’ll sit through again just because the Blu-Ray copy looks so DAMN good for an indie film.

And then I’ll tell you that I won’t recommend this movie to you.  That I found myself just a little too bored for too much of this film.  Curious of where it was going but finding myself uncaring about where it could have ended up.  I didn’t predict any endings.  I didn’t call out any characters as “changed” or “fixed” or “better.”  I just watched it.  And it ended.  And that was that.  I went about my day much like the characters must have.  And therein lies the problem: it was just too much like real life.  Sure, Ebert loved it.  Sure, critics raved about it.  Sure, it wasn’t at all about MY life…  but it was about real life and the way we all spend so much time finding ways to struggle.  And, in the end, it was so beautiful, and so sad, and so “life-like” that I just wanted to get back to life.  Take from that what you will.

Ballast, 2009

5/10 (but as close to a perfect 5/10 as you will ever find.)

Nothing too crazy above… But…. the real shocker?

Peg!

The eco-pawprint of a pet dog is twice that of a 4.6-litre Land Cruiser driven 10,000 kilometres a year, researchers have found.

“If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around,” Brenda Vale said.

“A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don’t worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact … is comparable.”

In a study published in New Scientist, they calculated a medium dog eats 164 kilograms of meat and 95kg of cereals every year. It takes 43.3 square metres of land to produce 1kg of chicken a year. This means it takes 0.84 hectares to feed Fido.

They compared this with the footprint of a Toyota Land Cruiser, driven 10,000km a year, which uses 55.1 gigajoules (the energy used to build and fuel it). One hectare of land can produce 135 gigajoules a year, which means the vehicle’s eco-footprint is 0.41ha – less than half of the dog’s.

They found cats have an eco-footprint of 0.15ha – slightly less than a Volkswagen Golf. Hamsters have a footprint of 0.014ha – keeping two of them is equivalent to owning a plasma TV.

Via The Dominion Post

Photo by Christopher Griffith for Esquire Mag

Quote by David Chang for NYT Grubstreet (Via Olivia Via FB)