You will be assimilated-- in a sexy dance number

From the first moment I saw 1776, I have been in love with musicals. It was as if reality could involve people spontaneously break out into choreographed song and dance routines. As if our world were too big to be as mundane as we live it. Naturally, I had to see a film adaptation of Nine. And naturally I began to compare it to the stage version.

It was irksome to discover favorite songs truncated or left out entirely. It was bizarre to find only eight women, and I believe it was mentioned* that the child was eight and a half.** With all this in mind, I think it’s obvious: this movie is not an adaptation of the stage performance at all. Rather, it’s the best film adaptation yet of the book Tristram Shandy.

To start with, they’re both gratuitously about sex while straight-facedly claiming to be about anything else.*** Shandy claims that the story is about his own life, but can’t seem to advance the plot all the way to the moment of his birth. Nine is supposed to be about a Great Artist’s struggles to make a movie, but instead gets stuck talking about his childhood. The life and struggles for both protagonists are set when they are too young to exert much– if any– influence over that path.

Those are pretty surface level events, however. Structurally, they both do things with the format that are simply not done. For Shandy, this means creating space within the book to jump between time periods– often these jumps happen within a page. The phrase “winding the clock” came to be very dirty over the decade in which it Shandy was published. The book itself, however, wound revolved around a certain set of events, which didn’t quite climax with the birth of the author. See how I said that again, but slightly dirtier? That’s how the book goes. Rather than being a book about a subject, in many ways it’s a book about the act of… being a book.

Nine plays with the structure of film. Remember what I said yesterday about film not being capable of showing the interior life of a subject? Well, that was a thumping lie. What Nine does brilliantly is use music to illustrate the thoughts of the subjects. Contini is not literally sitting with his mother, he is imagining what that conversation might be like. His thoughts are not life-like, but rather larger than life. Musical.

Contini states that it is his ambition to get ideas out of his head and onto the screen with as little “talking about it” as possible. This is a musical based on a play based on a movie about making a musical. It is about the very structure of ideas itself. In that, it is a very worth adaptation of Stern’s masterwork.

*I could be wrong about this, my date noted it and I did not.
**This would, of course, be a reference to the original film 8 1/2 on which the stage production of Nine is based.
*** Wait a minute, you’re asking, is Nine any good? I’ll cover that in a footnote****
****Nine was a musical involving half-naked ladies singing how much they want to get laid. That’s going to be enjoyable pretty much no matter what.

Stardock has come out with a new game. It’s called Political Machine

It’s a turn based resource management game where the object is to win the US presidency. You do this by pandering to the public, begging for money, and giving speeches. It is a surprisingly fun game for one built around electoral math.

You get to build and control a bobble head-like avatar in a bunch of different scenarios. Wanna win the Election of 1860 and prevent the civil war? Go forth! The election of 2008 is the main feature, and there are a couple others. I’ve been fighting the ’08 battle as me, slagging the evil Republican U.S. Grant. Not the real grant who knew that fighting terrorists was a police job. The fake Grant who wants to rape our environment. Also, he hates the economy. At least, that’s what I’m telling people…

The only real criticism I can offer is that it’s not always clear what buttons do. Why should I want to take out an attack ad vs one lauding my own stances. What do some of the icons mean? Why can’t I put together a web machine to pull in money automatically? I may be able to mod some of these things into the game

It’s US$20, so even if you only get a few hours of entertainment out of it, it’s a better bet than a movie. I highly recommend the game. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Grant has just gained 6pts in 3 weeks and pulled even with me. Should I go after independents? Or try to win over my base? We’ll see…

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In Russia, Coca-Cola uses this logo. Inside, enjoy the same create taste. Experience the world at mycoke.com

Am I alone in thinking it should read:

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In Russia, Coca-Cola logo uses YOU!

(click for larger)

So Urban Dictionary to the rescue!. Which was helpful, but not as helpful as it might have been.

So I turned to Youtube to really figure it out.

Human knowledge at your fingertips. Hitchhikers guide indeed…

Seriously, my cat (Janus) loves to attack the printer. I’ve actually taken to unplugging it so as to keep him from inadvertently printing stuff.