Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

The Bourne Supremacy: the review

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Short version: I really enjoyed this flick. Check it out.

Slightly longer version: Excellent action flick with some great action sequences, tho’ if you are allergic to hand-held cam you may need to skip the movie entirely, because shaky cam and flash editing is much in evidence here.

Extremely long version: Matt Damon is back as Jason Bourne, the amnesiac rogue CIA agent. He’s off in Goa, India, with his adoring girlfriend Franka Potente, having bad dreams about something he might have done in his previous life and keeping himself in very, very good shape. Then his old life shows up with a vengeance and Bourne has to get back to doing what he does best to find out what’s going on.

Assassination using only a magazine. A foot chase through the U-Bahn. An amazing car chase through Moscow (no damn CGI here).

The best thing, in my view, is that this movie is confident enough in itself to put things in there and let the viewer figure them out. You get flashes of things Bourne sees and unlike most movies, that’s all you’re going to get: either you noticed it and can put it together with later events, or you’re going to wonder what the hell just happened. (My favorite: Bourne checking the U-Bahn schedules. Hint: he’s not simply wondering when the next train is going to arrive.)

And, as Darin pointed out as we left: you definitely get a sense of place in this movie: this movie was filmed on location in India and Berlin and Moscow and you can tell. Prague is not doubling as all European cities here. Matt Damon running at top speed on the beach at Goa: you can feel the humid air.

The shaky cam cinematography did grate on me after while (say, the first five minutes), but it does give an immediacy to the proceedings I’m not sure the usual dolly-tracking system would have given.

Darin and I have been seeing a lot more movies recently, and this is one that I definitely recommend.

Bill Kirks the Computer

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Last night I listened to Bill Clinton’s speech at the Democratic National Convention as I entered receipts and payments due into Quicken. It was a damn good speech, as many others have noted. But there’s one aspect of it that I thought was brilliant that no one else has pointed out (I’ve slightly edited down the New York Times’s transcript):

PRESIDENT CLINTON: …For the first time when America was on a war footing in our whole history, they gave two huge tax cuts, nearly half of which went to the top 1 percent of us.

(Chuckles.) Now I’m in that group for the first time in my life. (Applause.) And you might remember that when I was in office, on occasion, the Republicans were kind of mean to me. (Laughter.) But soon as I got out and made money, I began part of the most important group in the world to them…

Now, look at the choices they made, choices they believed in. They chose to protect my tax cut at all costs, while withholding promised funding for the Leave No Child Behind Act, leaving 2.1 million children behind. (Cheers, applause.) They chose to protect my tax cut while cutting 140,000 unemployed workers out of their job- training programs, 100,000 working families out of their child-care assistance, and worst of all, while cutting 300,000 poor children out of their after-school programs when we know it keeps them off the streets, out of trouble, in school learning, going to college and having a good life! (Cheers, applause.)

They chose, they chose to protect my tax cut while dramatically raising the out-of-pocket costs of health care to our veterans, and while weakening or reversing very important environmental measures that Al Gore and I put into place, everything from clean air to the protection of our forests…

Now, if you like these choices and you agree with them, you should vote to return them to the White House and the Congress. (Boos.) If not, take a look at John Kerry, John Edwards and the Democrats.

And all I could think of was the thousands of Republican ‘bots listening who were confronted with the logical conundrum of “Tax cuts good…but Bill Clinton benefitted. Tax cuts good…Bill Clinton bad. Keep tax cuts…help Bill Clinton? End tax cuts…no! no! Error! Error!”

And their tiny little heads explode.

How to catch a lion

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Yes! I’m still a nerd! I found How To Catch A Lion hilarious:

The Bolzano-Weierstraﾟ method

Divide the desert by a line running from north to south. The lion is then either in the eastern or in the western part. Let’s assume it is in the eastern part. Divide this part by a line running from east to west. The lion is either in the northern or in the southern part. Let’s assume it is in the northern part. We can continue this process arbitrarily and thereby constructing with each step an increasingly narrow fence around the selected area. The diameter of the chosen partitions converges to zero so that the lion is caged into a fence of arbitrarily small diameter.

(Via Darby, who picked the Schrödinger’s Lion method.)