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I enjoyed this article about Adrian Wilson and his tenure with the Arizona Cardinals.  He was drafted by them seven years ago, and they never had a winning season during that time.

Despite being a standout (with a 66′ standing high jump) who could have gone free agent, he chose to stick it out in Arizona.

[...] Wilson passed on his opportunity to become a free agent after the 2004 season. He re-upped for five more years with the hope that things would somehow get better — and the conviction that they could not get much worse.

“I never downplayed the organization or even talked bad about them,” Wilson says, “because this is somewhere I want to be and somewhere I want to finish my career. It’s all about working and making the team better.”

I’ve always wondered about players that bounce from team to team in search of a ring.  What does that prove?  That you can keep abandoning one team after another until you’re lucky to land at the right one?

I have great respect for players who stick it out at a sub-par team season-after-season in an attempt to win with that team.  For guys like this, it’s not the desintation (the ring), it’s the journey.

I was a little moved by this news story about a ministry in Atlanta where church volunteers care for the feet of the homeless.

Every Monday afternoon for the last year, the Rev. Bob Book and his wife, Holly, have transformed the Church of the Common Ground into a spa for the homeless. They scrub the feet of the city’s forgotten, mirroring the act of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet.

[...] He takes it further with about 35 homeless men and women each week: Five at a time, they get a soak, pumice, nail trim, massage and a fresh pair of socks. Volunteers wearing gloves provide apricot scrub, ointments, air freshener for shoes, nail polish and even insoles.

I love this quote from one of the people helped by the ministry:

“Having my feet (done) gives me a little patience,” Barnes says, “to keep walking.”

My next-door neighbor Eric Merrill took this picture of us on our front porch.  He’s an amazing photographer that has taken pictures of my kids for years — my girls and his girls are often attached at the hip.

My house is full of his shots — they’re a timeline of my children’s lives in a lot of ways. I don’t know how he does it, but he has an amazing ability to capture just the right shot.  He’ll sit quietly at a distance, and capture my kids in tiny, unguarded moments that I didn’t even know existed.

I have pictures from Eric hanging on the walls of my home that somehow represent the sum total of my children at that moment in time.  For example, we have a series of Isabella hanging upstairs that represents everything that child was when she was three-years-old, playing in the backyard.  They are the most definitive representation of that stage of her childhood that Annie and I will ever have.

In a lot of ways, Eric has helped me understand the value of a photograph.  They’re not just chemicals on paper.  They’re moments in time that you’ll otherwise never see again.  They’re often the trigger that unlocks a collection of feelings and memories in your head.  One look at the right photograph can stop you dead in your tracks and send your mind reeling.

To me, they’re worth more than video.  Video gives you too much — it gives you so much sensory stiumulation that you forget the feeling and the larger context of the moment.  When I look at the pictures Eric has taken, I get feelings and memories that go so far beyond what happened in the actual moment the picture was taken.  I extrapolate a lifetime, or a relationship, or a complete history of some episode of my life from that one moment.

Anyway, enough gushing — in the picture above, we have Gabrielle (7)  on the left, then me holding Isabella (4), then Alec (14), then Annie.  We’re sitting on our front porch of our home in Sioux Falls, sometime in Fall 2007.

(As for Eric, he’s takes pictures professionally.  I just get special treatment because I live next door, snowblow his sidewalks, and let my daughters entertain his kids once in a while.)

My pastor just posted a movie recommendation to his Facebook profile about the documentary “Man on Wire.”

In his review, he included this:

PARENT NOTE: There is one unnecessary minute of playful nudity between a man and woman in a hotel room after he successfully crosses from one tower to another. Totally caught us off guard. While not a prude, it served no purpose.

I can relate to this.  I’m not a prude either.  Sex, violence — I’ve seen it, and it doesn’t really phase me.  Indeed, I recognize that it’s sometimes a valid plot device.  But by including it, filmmakers can make their movie or TV show inappropriate for some segments of their potential audience.  Unless it’s done because it relates to or furthers the plot, this has a tendency to annoy me.

On a prior version of this site, I posted about a TV movie called “The Librarian: Quest for the Spear” with Noah Wylie.  I had just watched it on primetime TV with my (then) 10-year-old when I wrote this:

[...] towards the end, there was a scene that annoyed me. Flynn Carson (Noah Wylie) and his good-looking companion Nicole (Sonya Walger), had been through a harrowing adventure. Wylie’s character is in a hotel room when champagne arrives via room service. His protests that he didn’t order it are silenced when Nicole appears at the door to the bathroom in a silky nightgown. Cut to the morning, and Flynn wakes up in bed wearing nothing but a sheet.

[...] This really bothers me. TNT ruined a nice family movie with this scene, and for what? Nothing. It added exactly zero to the plot.

I got frustrated for this same reason with “Jerry McGuire,” of all films.  The movie was a wonderful story, and it’s one that I would have loved to watch with my mother.  She was a single Mom, just like Renee Zellweger’s character, and I think should would have really enjoyed it…oh, except for the part with Kelly Preston yelling “Never stop f*cking me!!” while Tom Cruise does just that.

That scene stuck out for me.  Why include it?  What benefit does it serve?  Did it alter the characterization at all?  Not that I could tell.  If there was some story value to be gleaned from it, could it be injected some other way, perhaps?  By including that scene, they made sure I couldn’t watch the film with my mother, which sucks.

I’m not saying that you can never have nudity in a film, but just make sure it has some relevant purpose to the plot.  Don’t just toss it in for giggles.

Here’s a great story about how Porsche rocked the financial world and made an absolute fortune on VW stock.  If this was as meticulously planned as the story contends, it’s one of the most brilliant financial moves of this generation.

For three years, Porsche kept accumulating VW stock without telling anyone how much it owned. Every time it purchased more, the amount of free-floating VW stock would decrease, driving the stock price up slightly; your basic supply and demand at work. Eventually the share price became high enough that, to outside observers, it wouldn’t have made any sense for Porsche to buy Volkswagen. It would simply have cost too much.

To explain what happened next, I’m going to first tell you about a financial maneuver called shorting.

Dr. Ferdinand Porsche and I share the same birthday — September 3.  It’s not a coincidence.

(Note: This post was originally made in October 2004 to an earlier incarnation of this site.  It was good enough to recover from the Internet Archive and re-post.)

(Another note: I sent the original URL to this post to Ebert at his AnswerMan email at the Chicago Tribune.  I got a response within about 30 minutes, that said something to the effect of “Wow, you must be a really big fan — RE.”  This is the second email I’ve gotten from Ebert, believe it or not.  I discuss the other one at the end of this post.)

I’ve loved Roger Ebert’s movie reviews for years. He writes the best long-form review in the business, even though that form at is falling out of favor. You see a lot of short-form reviews (a la Leonard Maltin), but Ebert essentially writes an essay on each film.

Ebert’s reviews are so good that I tend to read them more after I’ve seen a film. They help me understand the film much better. Often, I’ll read them both before and after.

I especially like Ebert when he tears a film apart. He’s exceptionally eloquent, and he can light into a film like no one else in print. My buddy Joe sent me a link this week to a film Ebert ripped up: I Heart Huckabees:

The movie is like an infernal machine that consumes all of the energy it generates, saving the last watt of current to turn itself off. It functions perfectly within its constraints, but it leaves the viewer out of the loop. This may be the first movie that can exist without an audience between the projector and the screen. It falls in its own forest, and hears itself.

Surprisingly, he gave the film two stars (out of four), which isn’t that bad. Now, while this bit flows nicely, it lacks the viciousness that has characterized past victims. Obviously Joe has been sheltered from past rants, and needs to be introduced to the dark side of Roger Ebert…

We’ll start with an easy target – perhaps the most reviled film of the last five years, Battlefield Earth:

“Battlefield Earth” is like taking a bus trip with someone who has needed a bath for a long time. It’s not merely bad; it’s unpleasant in a hostile way […]

Some movies run off the rails. This one is like the train crash in “The Fugitive.” I watched it in mounting gloom, realizing I was witnessing something historic, a film that for decades to come will be the punch line of jokes about bad movies.

Oh, that’s good stuff. Here’a another good one, though it’s not a review. After Cannes last year, Ebert got into a war of words with Vincent Gallo, director of The Brown Bunny. Ebert said:

I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny.

Gallo countered with a snide comment about Ebert’s weight, to which Ebert replied:

It is true that I am fat. But one day I shall be thin, and he will still be the director of The Brown Bunny.

The amusing postscript of this is that Gallo re-edited the film and re-released it earlier this year. Ebert reviewed it again, and this time gave it three stars:

But then a funny thing happened. Gallo went back into the editing room and cut 26 minutes of his 118-minute film, or almost a fourth of the running time. And in the process he transformed it.

That’s a big step forward from:

The audience was loud and scornful in its dislike for the movie; hundreds walked out, and many of those who remained only stayed because they wanted to boo. Imagine, I wrote, a film so unendurably boring that when the hero changes into a clean shirt, there is applause.

But we digress. Let’s jump back into Ebert’s reviews with a quote from the review of Tom Greene’s 2001 masterpiece, Freddy Got Fingered:

This movie doesn’t scrape the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t the bottom of the barrel. This movie isn’t below the bottom of the barrel. This movie doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence with barrels.

And how about She’s Out of Control, a 1989 vehicle starring Tony Danza:

What planet did the makers of this film come from? What assumptions do they have about the purpose and quality of life? I ask because “She’s Out of Control” is simultaneously so bizarre and so banal that it’s a first: the first movie fabricated entirely from sitcom cliches and plastic lifestyles, without reference to any known plane of reality.

Here’s the opening to his review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre from last year:

The new version of “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” is a contemptible film: Vile, ugly and brutal. There is not a shred of a reason to see it.

He gets downright offended at Tomcats:

If the details are gross, the movie’s overall tone is even more offensive. All sex comedies have scenes in which characters are embarrassed, but I can’t remember one in which women are so consistently and venomously humiliated, as if they were some kind of hateful plague.

Those are pretty good, but cheap, because these films aren’t expected to be high-brow. What I like even more is when he shreds films that are trying very hard, but which Ebert hates anyway. How about The Life of David Gale, a film in which the director and three stars have been nominated for a total of eight Oscars over the years, winning two:

The direction is by the British director Alan Parker, who at one point had never made a movie I wholly disapproved of. Now has he ever. […] this movie is about as corrupt, intellectually bankrupt and morally dishonest as it could possibly be without David Gale actually hiring himself out as a joker at the court of Saddam Hussein. […]

The last shot made me want to throw something at the screen–maybe Spacey and Parker.

But, you will never beat his review North, a film supposed to be a warm, family-oriented comedy about a kid who “divorces” his parents and goes looking for new ones. This deserves entry into the pantheon of film reviews.

I have no idea why Rob Reiner, or anyone else, wanted to make this story into a movie, and close examination of the film itself is no help. “North” is one of the most unpleasant, contrived, artificial, cloying experiences I’ve had at the movies. To call it manipulative would be inaccurate; it has an ambition to manipulate, but fails. […]

I hated this movie. Hated hated hated hated hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.

That second paragraph even inspired a book by Ebert: I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie, which is an anthology of reviews of the worst films he’s ever seen. (Perhaps surprisingly, I have not read it, probably because I would self-destruct from laughter.)

If these quotes have whet your appetite, head off to Ebert’s site. Advanced search will let you search by number of stars. Set it to return films between zero and one-half stars, and strap yourself in.

(Small final note: I got an email from Ebert once. I noticed one week that he had given out some great ratings. I don’t remember the week, but he reviewed five films and the lowest rating was three stars. I sent him an email about it and he responded two weeks later with:

Those are, collectively, a batch of pretty good films. –RE

Greatest email I’ve ever received.)

Ben pointed out that the SNL will Paul Rudd was running again tonight.  It was a good episode — Rudd’s monologue was excellent, Beyonce had two great musical numbers, and Justin Timberlake did this hysterical bit on Weekend Update.

Hulu embedding rules.

This video is one that I’ve been watching every few months for the last couple years.  It’s a series of clips from the World Rally Championship (WRC) set to “In the End” by Linkin Park.

Even if you’re not a big motorsports fan, it’s worth watching to understand the savage beauty of this sport.  It captures the perfect mix of the excitement, brutality, skill, and heartbreak of rally racing.  The ending with the solo piano and the trail of dust racing across the desert almost chokes me up.

I maintain that rally car drivers are the best pure drivers in all of motorsports, and I present this video as evidence.  They run triple-digit speeds on dirt (or worse), sometimes for days on end.  No manicured track surface, no pitstops, no turn sequence they can get used to lap after lap.  These guys put every other racing style to shame.

Here are some quick reviews of what I’ve been watching.  Annie and I are back on Netflix (hooked it up through Alec’s XBox, even), and we’ve really managed to give the service a workout in the last couple months.

I’ll try to do this once a month.

Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me (1998)
A documentary by Tessa Blake, with whom I spent some time in Canada at a conference.  It’s a look at her father, who has had five wives, and his experiences as a Texas oil baron.  Touching at times, and the ending has a message about how much we’ll compartmentalize aspects we don’t like about the people we love.

Rent (2005)
This was…okay.  I wanted to like it much more than I did.  There were a couple great musical numbers (“La Vie Boheme” was wonderful), but it was little depressing, and, in the end, I couldn’t pick out a clear message.  I was left wondering, so what?  I’m willing to bet the play is much better. (The traveling version came through Sioux Falls a couple years ago — I should have gone.)

American Gangster (2007)
Denzel Washington has a perfect role as a drug lord in early 70s New York. Russell Crowe isn’t bad either as the cop chasing him.  But, in the end, it was standard cops and robbers fare.  Nothing special.

The Great Debaters (2007)
I liked this one.  It’s the story of the debate team from Wiley College in the 1930s.  Denzel was commanding as hell (when is he not?), and on top of the inspirational story, it gives you a scary look into the lives of black people in the South during the Depression.  The lynching scene is harrowing.

The Constant Gardener (2005)
Really good film.  Nice, tight thriller shot in beautiful Africa.  I love a good, solid conspiracy theory.  A bit confusing on the way, but it all makes sense in the end.  Rachel Weisz was great, and earned every bit of that Oscar.

Syriana (2005)
Probably the most confusing film I’ve ever seen.  I defy anyone to understand it on first viewing.  There are about six overlapping plots (Roger Ebert calls this “hyperlink cinema“), and it took me an hour’s worth of research after it was over until I had even the barest grasp of what happened.  (In the future, I may want to skip any movie that requires a Flash-enabled flowchart in order to explain it.) In the end, it was worth it.  You don’t watch Syriana as much as you conquer it.  It’s the kind of film you think about for days afterward, both for the intricacy of the story, and for the scene where George Clooney gets his fingernails ripped out. Can’t unsee that.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005)
Enthralling documentary about the Enron disaster.  What a trainwreck that company was — they were doing five or six different illegal things, any one of which would have destroyed them.  Compelling look inside the biggest financial disaster until…well, the current one.

Then She Found Me (2007)
Understated film with Helen Hunt about a woman who gets abandoned by her husband, contacted by her birth mother, and is trying to find love and have a baby at whatever cost.  Good, but it meandered quite a bit.  The ending is very sweet.  A bit harder edge that your run-of-the-mill romantic comedy, and has Matthew Broderick playing against type as an immature ass.

Helvetica (2007)
Great documentary about a font.  I reviewed it in-depth over at Gadgetopia.

Mondovino (2004)
A documentary about wine which has been accused (rightfully) of tremendous bias.  The filmmaker really pushes the point that the globalization and “corporatization” of wine is ruining the industry.  He vilifies people like wine critic Robert Parker and the Mondavi family.  The “I’ll ram my point-of-view down your throat” tone got old, but still a good look into the high-end wine business.

Word Wars (2005)
Wonderful documentary about high-stakes Scrabble players.  These guys live, eat, and breathe Scrabble.  It follows four players in the nine month run-up to the 2003 National Championships.  I absolutely loved this film.  The payoff in the end almost made me cry.

Small Town Gay Bar (2006)
An interesting documentary about gay bars in small towns in Southern Mississippi.  The gay people in these towns really have no outlet other than these little roadhouses.  Given that there’s no gay culture or community whatsoever where they live (there’s often outright hostility, in fact), they spend their entire weeks waiting to go to these bars on the weekends.  The bars are the only place they can let their guard down.

Only You (1992)
The very definition of light romantic comedy.  This is a gem of a film with a likable cast, beautiful locations, a breezy plot, and not one hint of a larger point.  It’s pure escapist romance, set on the coast of Italy, including the beauty that is Positano.  This movie will leave you with nothing but a huge smile.

Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
Hugh Grant is awesome — one of the most instantly likeable actors working today.  This is the film that made him a star, and it’s worth every minute.  Both hilariously funny and tear-jerking at times, though I’m sad that Hugh didn’t end up with who I wanted him to in the end.