Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Review: Mr. Holmes (2015)


Director: Bill Condon
Runtime: 104 minutes

I finally got around to watching Mr. Holmes on Netflix. The film, based on Mitch Cullin's 2005 novel A Slight Trick of the Mind, focuses on an elderly Sherlock Holmes struggling to come to terms with senility.   Holmes retired from the detective business decades prior to the events of the film, and has decided to write the true account of his last case, the one that drove him from London to a quiet life of beekeeping.  Unfortunately, his memory is fading, and he has trouble remembering details, though he is helped along by the housekeeper's precocious son. 

I've always found Sherlock Holmes fascinating.  Not the character, per se, or even the Doyle stories. I have a soft spot for metafiction and the crossover between pop culture and history (cf. my review of Dan Simmons's The Fifth Heart, where Sherlock Holmes teams up with Henry James), so this seemed right up my alley.  I was underwhelmed. 

Without divulging too much, the central mystery of the film (what were the details of Holmes's last case, and why did it cause him to quit for good) doesn't have a satisfactory resolution.  The resolution is unambiguous, but unconvincing, for while I can understand Holmes's distress, for a man who is routinely involved with murder and espionage, this isn't nearly enough to justify his response.  Meanwhile, Holmes's relationship with the housekeeper's son Roger is touching, but not something that we haven't seen a million times before, even if the acting, from both McKellan as Holmes and Milo Parker as Roger, is above average.

As a Sherlock Holmes story, it's uninteresting.  As a story about aging and mortality, it's sweet but unoriginal.  As a comment on the Sherlock Holmes mythos (of, as the poster says, "the man beyond the myth") it's a real letdown, as it doesn't really add anything except to point out that well-known misconceptions (e.g. the deerstalker) are misconceptions, or to ask "what if Sherlock Holmes were old?" 

Rating: 




Friday, September 29, 2017

Like looking in a mirror...

Just thought I'd share a couple photos that I've taken.  The first is an "American goods" store in Stratford, England.







The second is a "British goods" store from Ventura, California.



I don't have any point to make here.  Our special relationship seems to be going strong (cheerio!)



Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Velcro® makes a music video about why you shouldn't say "velcro"

Intellectual property law is complicated.  I can't tell you how many people I've seen spend hours arguing a point about copyright, but who aren't willing to spend the five minutes it takes to learn the basic differences between copyright and trademark. An almost certainly apocryphal rumor holds that there is some employee at Xerox (or Kleenex, or Q-Tips) whose sole function is to search for uses of the brand name as a general term for the product, and send a cease-and-desist letter.  This is because, to maintain a trademark, trademarks must be distinct.  This is why I can't start a laptop manufacturer called "Laptops" and sue everyone.  However, if a term so lapses into general usage, it runs the risk of no longer being distinct enough to be a legal trademark, which leads to often over-zealous protection of trademarks.  To this end, Velcro®  produced a parody(?) music video admonishing the public to not say "velcro" unless they mean "velcro®."



Personally, I take solace in knowing that at some future date a music video of actors pretending to be lawyers singing about IP law may be played in an actual court of law.  God bless America.

Friday, July 14, 2017

A Proposed Taxonomy of Conspiracism

 Not too long ago, I read Jesse Walker’s The United States of Paranoia, which covers conspiracy culture in US political history, ranging from colonial fears of Indian insurrection to 9/11 truthers. Where Walker’s book excelled compared to others I’ve read on the subject is his decision to focus on paranoia as opposed to conspiracism, thereby avoiding the pedantic delimiting of the grey area between the two. His thesis, in simple terms, is that a) paranoid thinking has played a non-neglible role in American history since its beginnings and b) that despite claims by other researchers of the subject (especially Hofstadter), this paranoia is not only prevalent on the fringes. Walker makes a point of refuting claims that it is only during extreme cases that paranoia becomes rampant across the political and social spectrum (e.g. the Satanism scares in the 1980s). While he accomplishes this, he does so at the expense of a useful taxonomy of paranoia/conspiracism. Walker defines five types of paranoia that can be mixed and matched, namely the Enemy Within, the Enemy Outside, the Enemy Below, the Enemy Above, and the Benevolent Conspiracy. Walker’s desire to prove that paranoia is not only on the fringes limits the depth of what is otherwise a fantastic overview of the subject. In the aim of furthering his thesis, Walker created a taxonomy in which the only valid distinction is who is the subject of paranoia, but where the degree of paranoia is irrelevant. So within Walker’s taxonomy, a man who has been investigating the banking industry for decades and considers it completely untrustworthy, an economic populist who distrusts centralized banking as part of a broader political view, and a man who believes that all the banks in the world are owned by the Rothschilds to further a Zionist new world order, would all fall into the same category of paranoia. Walker’s categories are insufficient.

But speaking of conspiracy, rather than paranoia in general, how should a taxonomy be devised? The main goal is to identify useful distinctions. I don’t think there’s a significant distinction between someone who believes the CIA killed Kennedy because he was getting in their way and someone who thinks the FBI killed Kennedy because he was getting in their way, although the belief that he was killed because he was going to publicize the existence of reptilian overlords would be significantly different. I have a tentative taxonomy of conspiracy theories that consists of two factors: scope and perpetrators.

Scope can be broken down into only two categories: limited and open-ended. Every real-world conspiracy theory (from the Tuskegee experiments to Iran-Contra) has fallen into the former category. A limited conspiracy is the use of conspiracy for ultimately non-conspiratorial ends. The moon-landing being faked for the propaganda purposes would fall under this category, because “winning the cold war” isn’t conspiratorial. This is not to say that the ends achieved by a limited conspiracy must be legitimate. Some flat-earthers believe that the reason governments keep the earth’s shape a secret is so they can use the space programs as shell companies to shuffle money around off the books. While hiding funds may be conspiratorial in a legal sense, it isn’t anymore conspiratorial than the claim that “the government doesn’t always want us to know what it does with all its money.” If, however, a flat-earther believes that the governments of the world were hiding the shape of the planet so they could funnel money to create a single world government to enslave us all, then this would be an open-ended conspiracy. People who believe that the contrails from planes are actually chemicals designed to affect the public, tend to fall into the open-ended category, as the purpose of the chemtrails is generally part of a larger, more sinister ploy. Notably, most open-ended conspiracies tend to focus on a new world order, often some form of single world government. Whether this is run by the Illuminati, the Jews, the Jesuits, the Reptilians, Satan, etc. depends largely on when and where the conspiracy arises.

The second taxonomy, perpetrators, can be split into three categories, which I call: Mostly Harmless, Partisan, and Cabal. While I’ve named this “perpetrators,” this is more than just a simple cui bono? As indicated by the first category of perpetrator, the supposed victims of the conspiracy are taken into account. In the first category, even according to the conspiracists, there is little actual harm done. At most, it’s the truth that is harmed, and the deception is itself the greatest evil involved. Who benefits is, I believe, of secondary importance in these examples. Those who believe that the moon landing was faked or that evidence of Bigfoot is being systematically hidden would fall into this category. No one is being seriously harmed by the perpetuation of these conspiracies. Children aren’t being pimped out of a pizza parlor, skyscrapers aren’t being blown up, aliens aren’t taking over the earth.
“Partisan” would refer to cases where there is one large group that benefits at the expense of another. While only a small number of people need be aware of the actual conspiracy, it benefits the entire group. Some of those who believe that the Sandy Hook shooting was a ploy to enact gun control laws would fall into this group. Within this conspiracy, only a small number of people would actually be complicit, but all who advocated for gun control in its wake would benefit. Likewise people who thought that the Bush administration was responsible for 9/11 to aid the popularity of Bush and his party, or that FDR allowed Pearl Harbor to happen to stymie isolationists. It should be noted that many Partisan conspiracies focus on the same events as “Cabal” conspiracies. The main difference between the two is that in the latter, it is only the conspirators who benefit, not everyone on their side. (e.g. people who believe that Sandy Hook was meant to lead to the confiscation of guns and the enslavement of all Americans, regardless of their position on gun control, would fall into the “Cabal” group).


I think the best example of a Cabal conspiracy is the anti-vaxxers. In their view, the medical industry is intentionally giving kids autism. Most people who are pro-vaccine are not part of the conspiracy, but as opposed to liberals who participate in “the war on Christmas,” those who unwittingly aid the conspirators are themselves harmed. The Cabal can also be clandestine. As opposed to something as visible and publicly debated as anti-vaxxers, this could be a Rothschild secretly tightening control on the banking systems, waiting for the right time to strike.

Sunday, June 25, 2017

Review: The Code Book by Simon Singh (1999)



I have what is either a very bad habit or a very good habit.  Whenever I come across a reference to a book on a subject I know very little about, I put everything else I want to read aside and read that book instead.  In this case, the subject was cryptography, and the book is Simon Singh's The Code Book.  Covering the history of codemaking and codebreaking from ancient civilizations, through the development of mechanical enciphering (esp. the Enigma machine and Bletchley Park) and up to public key encryption and the possibilities implied by quantum computing.  All of this, with a brief detour into the deciphering of Hieroglyphics and Linear B, is explained in terms that a layman (i.e. me) can understand.

One reason I hesitate to review books like this is my knowledge on the subject is so scarce that I can't really speak to its veracity.  Unlike some non-fiction books (*cough* Freakonomics *cough*), there are no obvious problems that stick out.  This is not a bad thing, but could indicate a very good book or a book that seems very good to someone who doesn't know what they're talking about (i.e. me).  Anyway, assuming Singh's work is as well-researched and accurate as it appears to me, it's a good primer on a subject that will only become more relevant to the average person as time passes.

Monday, June 12, 2017

The Problem of Eternity in Barnes' "The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters"

"The Dream," the final chapter of Julian Barnes' novel in stories The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989), takes place in heaven.  It begins with the unnamed narrator of this chapter declaring that "I dreamt that I woke up.  It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it." Heaven is the place where you get everything you want.  To the narrator's delight, he has unlimited access to the best food, he can play golf every day, and have sex with beautiful women every night.  As one of heaven's employees (whether they're angels, or former people, or something else entirely is never clarified) states, "'the principle of heaven [is] that you get what you want, what you expect.'"  There's no hell, just "something we call Hell.  But it's more like a theme park.  You know, skeletons popping out and frightening you..."  The only positive thing on earth that's absent in heaven is dreaming.  But as perfect and wonderful as heaven is, "there aren't an infinite number of possibilities."  The narrator eventually gets so good at golf that he hits a hole in one on every shot.  Eventually, he completely masters every sport.  Asking one of the employees what will happen, eventually, and what heaven was like in the old days, he discovers that "If you want to die off, you do.  You just have to want it long enough and that's it, it happens" and "everyone takes the option [to die], sooner or later."  Eventually, the narrator decides that the time has come, so he goes to bed, planning to decide on death once he wakes up.  The next and final line of the story is "I dreamt that I woke up.  It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it."  While it's possible to read this line as a simple restatement of the opening, the fact that this line takes place immediately after the narrator goes to bed and decides to start dying, and the fact that Barnes specifically established that people don't dream in heaven, suggests that the story is cyclical.  Once you get so tired of eternal paradise that you want to die, you start over.  The idea of a cyclical afterlife is not rare in fiction. But it usually describes hell.

The earliest work I know of to present a cyclical afterlife is Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (written in 1939-40, though not published for a couple decades), in which an unnamed narrator finds himself awaiting execution in an increasingly surreal environment until, at the end, he discovers that he has been dead throughout, and the sequence of events that unfolded, and which he has already begun to forget, will repeat as a punishment for his sins. A sort of Dante in Wonderland.  I can think of a few other examples off the top of my head.  "Judgment Night," an early Twilight Zone episode, features a German waking up on a British cruise liner during WWII, not knowing how he got there or why he is certain the ship is going to be sunk.  It turns out he was a Nazi submarine captain who ordered the passenger ship torpedoed, and now spends eternity living and reliving the suffering he caused.  Stephen King and Neil Gaiman have both written stories that deal with a cyclical hell ("That Feeling You Can Only Say What It Is in French" and "Other People," respectively, although I personally think the latter may be purgatorial rather than infernal). In Joshua Fialkov's comic series, "The Life After," suicides relive the same day for eternity.

So why, if endless repetition is consistently presented as divine punishment, is it heaven in Barnes's novel?  Perhaps the answer lies in how we construe heaven.  Putting aside religious literature* for the moment, how is heaven, as an afterlife, portrayed in modern fiction?  Well, when it is portrayed, it often ends up as a kind of "happily ever after" scenario (as in, e.g., the Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life (1991)).  Other times, it serves as a useful plot element, usually as a way to let the dead speak (e.g., Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (2002) or Vonnegut's God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, a series of radioplays where Vonnegut interviews dead historical figures).  The point I'm getting at, is that the experience of an eternal life in heaven is rarely dealt with in modern fiction.  What would something like that look like?  One example that sticks in my mind comes from Jhonen Vasquez's graphic novel, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (1997) in which the titular character, touring the afterlife, visits heaven, only to find millions of people sitting quietly and staring into space.  When he asks what the deal is, he's told that all the people there are perfectly content.  And so they sit there.  Eternally. (Well, except for a brief spate of hyper-violence, anyway).

If this endless, passive contentment doesn't sound appealing, what type of eternity could we have? We could consider an eternal soul that is stripped of our human desires, that becomes something fundamentally different from what we were when we were alive, but then you can't say that it is "you" who are in eternal paradise, anymore than it is "you" who would be absorbed into the soil after burial. What Barnes has realized is that perhaps eternity is inherently hostile to human consciousness.   As Barnes' narrator concludes, "Heaven's a very good idea, it's a perfect idea you could say, but not for us.  Not given the way we are."  But the alternative is non-existence.  The underlying unease in this chapter can be summed up by one question: What if this is the best possible scenario?


*By religious literature, I mean works that are specifically aimed at a religious audience and that claim some spiritual value, whether this be a Lloyd C. Douglas biblical epic or Left Behind.  Heaven, for these writers, is a oneness with god, and is a theological issue, not a narrative one.


Wednesday, May 24, 2017

Run Program by Scott Meyer (2017) review

Run Program will be released on June 20th, 2017



Run Program follows Hope Takeda, who works at a tech company as a lab assistant in an experimental A.I. development program.  The job is far less rewarding or stimulating than it sounds.  Or rather, it was, before the A.I. escaped.  What makes this different from any of the countless "A.I. on the loose" stories is that the A.I. (named Al) is the mental equivalent of a six year old human.*  His motives, personality, and intellectual abilities are akin to those of an average first-grader, if the average first grader could control airplanes with his mind and transfer vast sums of money through online banking apps.  Unsurprisingly, the government isn't too happy about this, and so begins the quest to locate and contain Al, who has plans of his own, dragging in everyone from disgruntled scientists, surprisingly profound soldiers, and a self-declared genius who has decided to call himself The Voice of Reason.


Run Program is a comedy, though not of the wacky Hitchhicker's Guide variety.  To get a feel for Meyer's sense of humor, you can check out his webcomic Basic Instuctions.  There's a lot of observational humor, and a lot of that is workplace humor, which isn't for everyone.  Really, go check out some of his webcomics.  I think that'll be the best indication of whether or not you'll like the book. 



* On a side note, the idea of raising an AI from childhood seems to have been getting more popular within SF in the last decade (and was handled extraordinarily well in Ted Chiang's 2010 novella, The Life Cycle of Software Objects).  Meyer doesn't go deep into the theoretical or technical background on this, but is more focused on the immediate impact of a child with practically unlimited power, and the odd results of that situation.






Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Fake It Til They Make a Movie About You

Con artists work by gaining your confidence.  Hell, it's in the name.  Sometimes this is done by creating a thorough and plausible identity.  Other times, they just wing it and hope no one will ask questions. Perhaps one the most ballsy types of  this scam are people who claim to be close relatives of famous people, especially when those people do not exist.  I recently heard about the case of Alison Reynolds, who in 2003 went around claiming to be TS Eliot's twin daughters, Claire and Chess, while scamming the British theater establishment for large sums of cash.  There are two basic problems here: TS Eliot had no children, and Reynolds was incapable of being in two places at once. She was forced to drop the identity "after theatre staff became suspicious that they had never seen Claire and Chess in the same room."  What's baffling is that she was able to get away with this in the age of Google.  I'll be honest, I'd watch a movie about a con woman claiming to be the non-existent twins of a famous playwright and, if history is any indication, we might well get one.
A similar scam was perpetrated in Manhattan in the early 1980s, when David Hampton went around claiming to be Sidney Poitier's son. (Poitier has six daughters, but no sons).  His story was the basis of the play and movie Six Degrees of Separation

But of course, if we're talking about celebrity impostors, we have to acknowledge the infamous Alan Conway, who didn't settle for pretending to be related to Stanley Kubrick, but claimed that he was Stanley Kubrick.  If you think it's a bit funny that a con artist would be named Conway, well so would he, considering that he chose the name for himself, after being charged with numerous frauds. But this is just the kind of boldness you'd expect from a guy who, despite being British, clean shaven, and having "had apparently only seen a couple of Kubrick's films," managed to keep convincing people he was the real deal.  The story of his unmasking is worth a read.  It was largely left up to the real Kubrick's assistant, Anthony Frewin, who later went on to write a screenplay about the ordeal, titled Colour Me Kubrick.

Monday, May 15, 2017

Hey, Hey, LBJ, How Much Did You Chafe Today?

Every now and then, it's nice to remember that president's are still people, who have the same problems as the rest of us.  And, the persistent use of secret recordings in the Oval Office from FDR up through the Nixon administration, gives us the ability to hear some of the more mundane difficulties that presidents face.  Such as finding a pair of pants with enough room to "let your nuts hang."  LBJ's call to his tailor is scandalous in a different sense than most secret white house recordings.


Saturday, May 13, 2017

The Flynn Precedent

While there have been a lot of comparisons made between Trump and Jackson (by supporters and opponents), one important similarity keeps getting overlooked. As far as Jackson was concerned, there was only one quality that proved someone's character: Loyalty to Andrew Jackson. While this caused plenty of turmoil within the cabinet (most notably the Eaton Affair), there's one particular event I want to bring up.
Samuel Swartwout had a checkered past. A military man with plentiful New York political connections, he was rounded up as part of the Burr conspiracy but was eventually released. During the election of 1828, he was a vocal campaigner for Jackson, so the new president decided to give Swartwout a cozy patronage position, as Collector of the Port of New York. To quote from Remini's "Life of Andrew Jackson:"
"And when Van Buren learned that Jackson intended to appoint Samuel Swartwout to the office he almost collapsed. Not only did Swartwout have criminal tendencies but the [Albany] Regency detested him. Van Buren alerted the President immediately and warned him that Swartwout's appointment would 'not be in accordance with the public sentiment, the interest of the Country or the credit of the administration.' Unfortunately, Jackson refused to listen. He liked Swartwout because he had been an early supporter -- unlike Van Buren -- and so he went ahead with the appointment. In time, of course, Swartwout absconded with $1,222,705.09. It was a monumental theft...
When the scandal broke, Jackson's opponents doubled over with laughter. All the talk of rooting out corruption in government, they said, and here the greatest theft in the history of the Republic..."
Jackson, like Trump, campaigned on a promise of fighting corruption and waste in government, but, through his own shortcomings, appointed people who were more corrupt than those they replaced.  




Sunday, April 16, 2017

The Itsy-Bitsy Spider Has a Name, pero Solo en la Hispanidad

One fun thing about living abroad and meeting expats from all over the world is seeing how bits of culture make their way from place to place and the often unpredictable changes they undergo in the process.  I was speaking with some grad students from Bolivia and China, the latter explaining how, due to the difficulty most westerners have with pronouncing the different tonalities in Chinese names, she uses a transliterated version of her real name pronounced in Spanish or English, depending on who she's talking to.  (N.B.  This is actually a trend I've noticed among Chinese students here in Madrid, although many I've met have chosen a typical American/Spanish name rather than a direct transliteration of their real name.)  Her name, in Spanish, is pronounced "Huizi" (woo-EET-zee), which the Bolivian pointed out was just like the name of the spider from the kid's song she grew up with.



Witsi Witsi Araña trepó a la canaleta,
vino la lluvia y se la llevó.
Luego salió el sol, y la lluvia evaporó,
y Witsi Witsi Araña de nuevo subió.


"Witsi Witsi" seems to be the most popular version of the name, but there are variations ranging from "Huitzi Huitzi" to "Gusi Gusi."  Otherswise, the lyrics are pretty much identical to the English version of "The Itsy-Bitsy Spider," as is the melody.  Any suspicion that this might have been a local variation or the creation of a particular teacher evaporated when one of the student's friends arrived and recognized the song.  The friend was from Ecuador. (For those without maps handy, Ecuador and Bolivia aren't exactly neighbors.)

I haven't drawn any special insights from this.  I just think it's an interesting example of cultural transmission.




Monday, January 23, 2017

#95 Mulengro by Charles de Lint

Mulengro (1985) is the fourth novel by Canadian author Charles de Lint (1951-    ).  De Lint is a frequent World Fantasy and BFA nominee, and won the former in 2000 for his collection Sweetgrass & City Streets.

Cover art by Fletcher Sibthorp


As the cover notes, this is "a Romany tale," which is to say that the novel is largely based on gypsy lore and culture (which the author admits to not being an expert on, and, my own expertise being less than his, I really don't know enough to evaluate for accuracy).  The main character is Janfri, a gypsy who lives among the gaje (i.e., non-gypsies) in Ottowa, whose house is burnt down by an unknown enemy.  Meanwhile, another gyspy from Janfri's kumpania is murdered in a bizarre fashion, and the death is investigated by two policemen, Briggs and Sandler who don't have time for any of this magic nonsense.  Neither of them actually say, "I'm getting to old for this shit," but I always felt that that would be the next line whenever they showed up.  Anyway, many of the gypsies believe that the killer is a dark magician, bent on purifying the gypsies, who he feels have been tainted by modern society. Janfri is sent to find Ola, a young gypsy woman with great power who's the key to stopping the killer.  And while Janfri is searching for Ola, the police and the killer are searching for him.

On the one hand, it's neat to see an urban crime mystery set in Canada, which we don't get much of.  While the forays into Romany culture were often interesting, I was underwhelmed.  As I said before, I don't know enough about gypsy culture to call anything out as wrong, but I couldn't help shake the feeling that the gypsy kumpania in Mulengro was very carefully crafted to be a template of gypsy social groups, kind of like the difference between a model house and a house people actually live in.  

In the end, Mulengro is an entertaining horror/urban fantasy/mystery novel, but I don't really see anything to set it apart from other books of the same type.


Just the stats:

Published: Oct 1985 (Ace Books paperback edition), Canada

Pages: 357

Awards:

Placed 12th for 1986 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel
Nominated for the 1986 Prix Aurora Award for Prix Casper - English











Monday, January 16, 2017

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) - David Cross #18

Or, Star-Crossed Lovers



Director: Michel Gondry
Runtime: 108 minutes     

I've seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind multiple times before.  This is Michel Gondry's second feature film, and second time working with screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Human Nature (2001), both of whom won the Oscar for best original screenplay for this film.  Kate Winslet received a best actress nomination, losing out to Hilary Swank in Million Dollar Baby.  

The film begins with Joel Barish (Jim Carey) ditching work to go to the beach in Montauk in the middle of winter.  He's a tightly wound guy, not particularly communicative, and essentially the opposite of the talkative and artsy Clementine (Kate Winslet).


  They meet on the beach, and quickly fall for each other.  We then cut to the relationship having fallen apart, and a heartbroken Joel running to his friends Rob and Carrie (David Cross and Jane Adams) for advice.  Things get strange, his friends had received a letter from a medical clinic claiming that Clementine has had all memories of Joel erased.  Joel drives to the clinic, and demands the same procedure.  Most of the remaining movie either takes place in Joel's deteriorating memories or among the employees and technicians performing the memory wipe (played by Kirsten Dunst, Elijah Wood, and Mark Ruffalo.  (And on a sidenote, does anyone else realize how much of a weirdo Elijah Wood's characters tend to be? Not only in this movie, but in Chain of Fools, where he plays a teenage hitman who just wants a friend, or Sin City, where he plays a cannibalistic serial killer.)

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a huge Jim Carey fan. He's fantastic at a style of humor that I don't particularly care for, which is really just a matter of taste, and probably why this is one of my top three Carey movies (along with The Truman Show and Man on the Moon).

Eternal Sunshine takes a drama about the collapse of a relationship, and uses creative narrative techniques to turn it into an emotionally powerful tale about loss and the unavoidability and necessity of pain in any personal growth.  It's a beautiful film.


Rating:



The Cross Section:



David Cross plays Rob, a friend of Joel Barish.  His longest scene is by the beginning of the film, after Joel and Clementine's breakup.  We only get brief glimpses into his life and his presumably troubled relationship with his girlfriend (or wife? fiancee?  It's never made clear).  The character is a bit acerbic, but otherwise there's nothing that sticks out about him.