Making a marriage work always gets difficult sooner or later, and once the hard stuff starts in there’s no going back to breezy and easy. At times summoning the strength and patience and discipline you need to get through the rough patches can be exhausting, and certainly draining. There are always farts and potholes and speed bumps along the way, and sometimes worse. I’ve been there; it’s work. Which is why I never bought all that malarkey about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward being a more or less perfect couple.
Hollywood Elsewhere is now definitely covered as far as complimentary copies of Paul Newman: A Life are concerned. And these three don’t include the first copy I got, which I left on a bus.
I know Wes Anderson‘s Fantastic Mr. Fox (20th Century Fox, 11.13.) has been testing in the New York area because I was invited to a New Jersey showing several weeks ago. I tried to RSVP on the up-and-up with my own name, but they said no-go because I wasn’t from the right age group. In any case another showing of this animated stop-motion film happened yesterday and some guy who…like, allegedly attended has passed along a vaguely written impression to Nathaniel Rogers of The Film Experience.
“A beautiful union of filmmaker and material,” the guy said. “You can sense the love and reverence [Anderson has] for the Roald Dahl story while at the same time putting his stylistic stamp as a filmmaker all over it, without one overwhelming the other. It felt just like a Wes Anderson movie, only animated. Same title/caption font, hip soundtrack (though the only song i specifically remember is ‘I Get Around’ by the Beach Boys), slo-mo dance sequence.
“Only about 60-70% of the animation was completed, but i loved the look of it. I’d describe it as akin to James and the Giant Peach meets a diorama.”
The Wikipedia facts are these: (a) Joe Roth and Revolution Studios bought the film rights to Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2004; (b) Anderson signed on as director with Henry Selick, who worked with Anderson on The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, as animation director; (c) Anderson signed on because Roald Dahl is one of his heroes; (d) In adapting the novel, the story the novel covers would amount to the second act of the film ; (e) Anderson added new scenes to serve for the film’s beginning and end; (f) Selick left the project to work on the Neil Gaiman story Coraline in early 2006, and was replaced by Mark Gustafson; (g) Fox Animation Studios became the project’s home in October 2006 after Revolution folded.[10]
Wolfram Alpha, the name of a new super search engine that will debut later this month, doesn’t sound like a software application. It sounds like a New Age spiritual cult led by a German cyborg. It could be a kind of horror film directed by the ghost of Fritz Lang.
Plus “Wolfram” — the last name of the software’s creator, Stephen Wolfram — is a little hard to pronounce. Anyone with a smidgen of marketing sense would know that teenage and 20somethings are going to regard it askance. It’s a PhD dweeb name. New applications need a name that the dumbest guy in the room is cool with. They need to call it something like Vox or Drill or Vortex or Booby — a name that sounds like a rock band or a sound system.
No specific date has been given for the Wolfram Alpha launch, but it’s being described as an engine that will give you straight, specific intelligent answers instead of the usual catch-as-catch-can Google response when you ask any specific question, allegedly “in a way that the web has never managed before.”
The Independent‘s Andrew Johnsonwrote yesterday that Wolfram Alpha “will take the first step towards what many consider to be the internet’s Holy Grail – a global store of information that understands and responds to ordinary language in the same way a person does.
Wolfram “introduced the system at Harvard University last week. Although the system is still new, it has already produced massive interest and excitement among technology pundits and internet watchers. Computer experts believe the new search engine will be an evolutionary leap in the development of the internet.
“Nova Spivack, an internet and computer expert, said that Wolfram Alpha could prove just as important as Google. ‘It is really impressive and significant,’ he wrote. ‘In fact it may be as important for the web (and the world) as Google, but for a different purpose.
“Tom Simpson, of the blog Convergenceofeverything.com, said: ‘What are the wider implications exactly? A new paradigm for using computers and the web? Probably. Emerging artificial intelligence and a step towards a self-organizing internet? Possibly…I think this could be big.'”
