Taking Father Home

A City in Flux
By JEANNETTE CATSOULIS
Published: September 19, 2008

“Taking Father Home,” the debut feature of the Chinese director Ying Liang, is a poetic study of resolve and revenge. It is also a stunning introduction to a rare new talent.

When 17-year-old Xu Yun (Xu Yun) learns that his village in Sichuan Province is being replaced by a government industrial zone, he sets out to fetch the wayward father who abandoned him six years earlier. Armed with only a vague address and a pair of placid geese in lieu of cash, Yun heads for the big city of Zigong and a closure he may not even know he needs. More

Happy Birthday!

Happy birthday, benveniste.

Appaloosa (2008)

Gunman Meets Widow. Trouble Starts.
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: September 19, 2008

There are some recent movie westerns — “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” was last year’s notable example — that self-consciously address the mythology of the Old West, using the familiar features of the genre to map new territory on the borderland between history and legend. Like the expensive, prestigious A-westerns of the postwar era, these movies explicitly take up big questions about national identity, historical memory and the nature of justice.

Other films, meanwhile (like last year’s remake of “3:10 to Yuma”), try to recapture the lean, tense storytelling style of the old B-westerns. Those pictures, staples of the American moviegoer’s diet in the middle decades of the last century, approached the grand themes more modestly and obliquely, embedding them in deceptively simple yarns about men, horses and guns.

With its studiously picturesque wide-screen compositions and its stately, sober pacing, Ed Harris’s “Appaloosa,” based on a novel by Robert B. Parker, seems at first to aspire to the A-list. Thankfully, though, its gestures toward grandiosity are superficial and few. More

Ghost Town (2008)

His Task: Help Strangers Die Happily Ever After
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: September 19, 2008

A misanthropic dentist, a roguish ghost and a zany Egyptologist: as these unlikely companions scamper around Manhattan in the buoyant comedy “Ghost Town,” they resurrect the spirits of classic movie curmudgeons like W. C. Fields and such romantic comedians as Cary Grant and Carole Lombard in Woody Allen territory. More

Palm

Palm desktop does not support 64-bit Windows Vista. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that's part of the reason I spent all morning trying to synchronize the Centro with Outlook.

9/19/08

Pushing da seasons.

oops

I didn't reseat the video card. Sigh.

waay

Waay pushing da season

pho bo

Well with a little broth

McSame on how to lower the cost of health care...

Here’s what McCain has to say about the wonders of market-based health reform:

Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.

Shamelessly Stolen from Krugman