Tomorrow is Marathon #13 – the Mount Desert Island Marathon in Bar Harbor, Maine.  As part of my pre-marathon tradition, Amy and I relax at a movie the day before.  Today’s was Flash of Genius at the awesome Reel Pizza Cinerama.

Flash of Genius is the story of Robert Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper.  It’s a tragedy in three acts. 

• Act 1: Invention and hopefulness that ends in betrayal.
• Act 2: The hero encounters increasing difficulties, complications, and losses.
• Act 3: Triumph and redemption.

While I’m deeply anti-software-patent, I’m equally pro-inventor.  The Kearns story – at least what I know of it from the great 1993 New Yorker article titled The Flash of Genius – is a complicated and provocative one.  Greg Kinnear is brilliant as Robert Kearns and plays the dedicated and single-minded investor magnificently.

If you are ever in Bar Harbor and like watching movies, definitely have dinner (and a movie) at Reel Pizza Cinerama.  The Manchurian Candidate pizza was a winner.  Now, time to get my head into the marathon.

Wesley Snipes apparently got a three year sentence for tax evasion this week.  At least he’s pretty good at Karate and Kung Fu – I expect that will come in handy if he ends up serving the sentence.  Apparently the message being delivered is "pay your taxes".

Will Herman reminded me that Speed Racer the movie is arriving on the scene on May 9th.  Speed Racer is the cartoon of my childhood.  A few years ago I bought all the episodes on DVD and watched them one after the other one weekend until my head exploded.  I used to be so hot for Trixie and Racer X was like the big brother I never had.  I can’t wait for the movie.  I am so pleased that the Wachowski Brothers created it.

Amy and I went to see 21: The Movie today.  It’s based on the phenomenal book Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions by Ben Mezrich.  I met Ben and had sushi with him a few months ago – he was really psyched about the upcoming movie and the relaunch of the book as 21.  Ben – congrats!

Amy and I had a blast.  One of Amy’s ex-boyfriends had been part of the MIT Blackjack Team (1989-1990) so I’ve heard plenty of stories about it over the years (and vaguely remember it when it was going down.)  MIT is a remarkable place and a fantastic backdrop for a "smart people" morality tale (similar to another one of my favorite movies – Good Will Hunting.)

There were a lot of "MIT inaccuracies" during the movie that resulted in nudges and whispers between me and Amy.  Following are the ones I can remember.

• Ben’s "4.0" average.  MIT is on a 5 point scale – so his 4.0 average is a solid B rather than "perfect."
• The 2.09 competition.  This is really the 2.70 competition.
• Building 4 Hallway.  The door frames are black, not blue (i.e. this isn’t building 4.)
• Pre-Med.  There is no "pre-med" at MIT.
• "A’s".  In the movie, people talked about getting A’s. MIT-ers don’t talk about letter grades – they focus on getting "above class average" which would translate into an A or B.
• MIT Scenes.  With the exception of a few scenes outside the great dome, all of the MIT scenes were somewhere other than MIT (apparently MIT didn’t allow filming on campus.)

One of the treats was seeing Colin Angle (a frat brother and co-founder / CEO of iRobot) in a cameo role give the award at the 2.09 contest near the end of the movie (presumably modeled after Professor Woodie Flowers.)

I’d love to hear any other MIT inaccuracies that anyone notices in the movie.  MIT grads – comment freely.

Amy and I just finished watching Good Night, and Good Luck.  Wow!

We both sort of knew the story of Ed Murrow taking on U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy during McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade while chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.  The movie has motivated me to Kindle a Murrow biography and read it.

The movie was fantastic – Amy and I kept shouting at the TV during it which is always the mark of a successful movie in our house.  David Strathairn was incredible as Murrow and George Clooney did a great job as his counterpart / coproducer Fred Friendly.

One of the awesome things about the United States is that due process matters.  Another is that freedom of speech is a valid construct – and even more so in today’s web saturated universe.  So far in my 42 years on this planet I’ve never been afraid of speaking my mind.  I’ve often been wrong – and will admit it publicly whenever I am – but I love the fact that I can state my thoughts without fear.

As the midgame of our presidential election reaches a climax, this is powerful stuff to consider.  Marc Andreessen wrote a superb post last week titled An hour and a half with Barack Obama.  I’ve been supporting Obama in the primaries (even though I’m Independent – my party affiliation is "unaffiliated".) Marc’s post totally nails why I’m supporting Obama.  Regardless of who you support, it feels great that it’s acceptable in this country to write (and watch) what we think.

To Mark Cuban, Todd Wagner, and Jeff Skoll and their respective colleagues who produced the movie – nicely done!

After seeing Borat last weekend, Warren and I were debating which scenes were real and which scenes were faked.  Warren apparently stayed up late researching it, but if he’d waited a week he could have read the Slate story titled What’s real in “Borat”?  The reactions of the people involved to the Slate reporter are fascinating.

Amy and I went to The Departed last night.  I’ve got some general movie fatigue these days because everything seems to suck, be a remake of Top Gun, or just be dull.  However, The Departed was incredible and it just blew us away.

Jack Nicholson may be my favorite male actor of all time.  Leonardo DiCaprio is finally coming into his own now that he’s an adult.  Matt Damon finally had a role where he needed to act – and he did a great job.  While it’s weird watching Martin Sheen be anything other than Jeb Bartlett, he also shined even when he was splattering.  Vera Farmiga had the best line of the movie when she said to DiCaprio “your vulnerability is really freaking me out.”  And Marky Mark Wahlberg continued to bend my mind with his range. 

Scorsese made sure there was plenty of gratutious violence, but for a Boston-based corrupt cop movie, it was believable.  Having lived in Boston for 12 years, it’s such a delight to watch it in a movie rather than live there.

About an hour into Superman Returns, Amy leaned over to me and whispered “The Matrix wrecked everything.”  I yawned about 20 times during this two hours and thirty four minutes of this movie – it’s was as boring an “action/adventure” movie as I’ve seen in a while.  We are in movie hell this summer up in Homer – we walked out of Nacho Libre after 20 minutes and stumbled through the disappointing Click.  So far, only Cars has been satisfying.  When is The Matrix IV coming out?

Technorati Tags: movies, superman

I haven’t been out to see a movie in a while (I don’t know why – Amy and I love movies at the theater.)  Last night we saw Thank You For Smoking.  It was brilliant.

I thought the Christopher Buckley book Thank You for Smoking was an absolute riot when it came out.  The movie is based on the book and does a superb job of telling the same story while updating it a little.  Aaron Eckhart was phenomenal as the main character (a cigarette lobbyist) and William H. Macy continues to be the sleeper actor of the universe for his portrayal of the Vermont senator who wants to put poison labels on cigarettes.

The one liners were awesome.  Following are a few better ones to give you a taste.

• Michael Jordan plays ball. Charlie Manson kills people. I talk.
• My other interviews have pinned you as a mass murderer, blood sucker, pimp, profiteer and my personal favorite, yuppie mephistopheles.
• My job requires a certain . . . moral flexibility.
• You know the guy who can pick up any girl? I’m him on crack.
• Don’t forget, I’m his father, you’re just the guy who fucks his mom.
• We don’t sell Tic Tacs, we sell cigarettes. And they’re cool, available, and *addictive*. The job is almost done for us.

At 92 minutes in length, it also nicely broke the mold of movies that are 25 minutes too long.

Amy’s making me watch March of the Penguins.  So far, it’s been about these totally bizarre looking birds that can’t fly and have chosen to live in the Antarctic.  It’s cold, windy, dark, cold, cold, dark, cold, and windy.  There’s lots of walking to the same place to get food – oh – it’s 70 miles away, they don’t have cars, and they don’t walk especially well.  There’s been a short romantic section that’s cute, followed by more cold, eventually some eggs, which occasionally break when they are transferred from mom to dad (since mom has to go get food again – yes – 70 miles away).  Eventually the eggs hatch and the babies are born, but the mom’s are away getting food (and some of them are getting eaten by seals.)  Did I say that it’s cold? The moms get back minutes before the babies starve, feed them, but then send the starving dads away to go get food (yup – 70 miles away.)  Oh – some of the babies freeze to death (it’s cold), the mom’s get devastated (especially since they have to tell the dad, assuming the dad survives the seals), and try to kidnap other babies (unsuccessfully.)  Seagulls make a special guest appearance and eat some of the babies.  Over the next few months, the moms and dads keep alternating going to the grocery store (70 miles away) to get food, although the grocery store (the ocean) gets closer as winter draws to a close and the ice melts.  Once summer arrives (in November!) and the babies turn into teenagers, the parents get divorced and the cycle begins again.

Morgan Freeman is magnificent as the narrator.  Lots of death.  Some happiness.  Beautiful photos.  And – according to Amy, “the babies are really cute.”

Think back to 1992.  “It’s the economy, stupid!”  Amy and I watched The War Room tonight, the brilliant documentary of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and the organization behind it, spearheaded by James Carville and George Stephanopoulos.  Carville’s quote was actually “the economy, stupid” and was part of a haiku that Carville came up with.

Change vs. more of the same
The economy, stupid
Don’t forget health care.

Carville is an absolute genius and unbelievably entertaining as a special bonus feature.  I’d team up with that dude any day just for the laughs.  Stephanopoulos reminded me of Sam Seaborn which – it turns out – was intentional.

Amy and I saw Serenity yesterday, along with $10m worth of other people.  We loved it.  This morning, while I was running over the Brooklyn Bridge with Matt Blumberg, I asked him what he thought of it (he saw it yesterday also).  He was unambiguous – he didn’t like it.  I probed a little, found out he hadn’t seen the TV series (amazing show, but cancelled after a dozen episodes or so) and it was clear that he didn’t understand a lot of the movie.

It’s a fantastic movie.  However, I’m going to guess that you have to at least be familiar with the backstory to get it.  And – like other movies that evolved out of TV shows (e.g. The X-Files) I’ll bet that you have to love and have befriended the characters already to understand all the jokes, bantering, and double entredres.  If you haven’t seen the TV show, but want to see the movie, spend some time on the Firefly Wiki getting up to speed (c’mon – you’ve got to love a TV show that has its own wiki.)  Or – try the fan blog if you want to keep up real time with the chatter.  Or – go hardcore and watch the TV show Firefly on DVD in four days like Amy and I did.

Yes – Joss Whedon is a genius.  Jayne caused me to fall out of my chair when he said – referring to River – “she’s starting to damage my calm.”

Ah – we’re back in the land of 24 screen movie theaters so our Friday night movie is no longer limited to two choices.  However, almost all the movies out right now are crap (you know you are in trouble when the #1 movie last weekend was The 40–Year-Old Virgin) so we decided to give Transporter 2 a try. 

We loved the original Transporter – it was definitely a sleeper and Jason Statham was – well – the British Vin Diesel.  Frank (Jason) and his rules are back, the evil bad girl is super hot (although a horrifyingly bad shot), and the eastern European villain-scientists are bad news, but doofuses.  The action / adventure / car chases / shoot–em-ups are great and – with the exception of a few scenes – I managed to suspend my disbelief for the better part of 90 minutes. 

It’s not as good as the first one, but it took my mind off cancer, New Orleans, and other bad things for a couple of hours.

It’s Friday and our new movie choices appeared this morning at our little theater down the block.  Tonight we went to the 8:30 showing of Wedding Crashers – remarkably the theater was completely full for the first time this summer (we were the oldest people there – I think all the teenagers in town showed up.)

Now – I’ll basically do anything I can to avoid going to a wedding (Amy and I eloped), even ones I’m invited to – so it was with some trepidation that I agreed to go to a movie with the word wedding in the title.  Amy tricked me into seeing it by saying that there were venture capitalists in the movie so I had to go see it (yes – Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn pose as VCs in one scene – very very scary.)

Wilson was – as usual – cute, cuddly, warm, funny, and confused.  Vaughn was hilarious.  I’ve always loved this 6’5” dude, but he was absolutely at the top of his game in this movie.  Maple syrup has several good moments, as do eye drops, sappy pickup lines, a very twisted virgin / first time / psycho girl theme that sucks in Vaughn, stage 5 clingers, “a little place on the shore,” plaid pants, the “touch” football game, a quail hunt (and other assorted WASP icons), and the uncontested scariest man in film – Christopher Walken – as dad.  Will Ferrell – who nauseates me – had a few funny moments with his mother (and – if I treated my mom that way – she’d simply kill me.)

Well worth two hours of your life.

Hysterical – John Travolta looks damn good as a bunny.  Uma Thurman – not so good.  Hat tip to David Beisel.