News & notes, weekly trailers, and my year-long attempt to read nothing but classic novels.
Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 10:45PM I could not be more excited for my students' web series to premiere on December 13! To whet your appetite, feast your eyes on their trailer and the emerging website: www.pledgetheseries.com
Web Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:18PM I know, I know. This shouldn't be good. On paper, it's sounded like I've heard Red Riding Hood was. Pretty dismal. And I'm not even on the anti-Kristen Stewart bandwagon. Go back and watch her in The Safety of Objects or Panic Room or Into the Wild, and tell me I'm wrong.
It's just... this whole revisionist fairy tale thing was old from the get-go. I couldn't remember what movie I'd seen the afternoon after watching the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp Alice in Wonderland, as delightfully mad as that hatter was.
All that said, I can't help being intrigued by this. How about you:
Sunday, November 13, 2011 at 5:23PM This is making the rounds. Gorgeous:
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space | Fly Over | Nasa, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Web Sunday, November 6, 2011 at 1:02PM ...and what they say about the movies they're meant to advertise:
1. Tiny People On the Beach, Giant Heads in the Clouds
These movies are always sappy dramas. Do not allow you to be mislead by the trailer or calibre of the people involved into thinking otherwise. The protagonist/his little brother/father and/or love interest is very likely to end up dead. You probably should keep your tissues handy because you'll cry tears of sorrow, tears of joy, tears because you just wasted 13 dollars on this movie. This sort of poster is inevitably used for anything that involves Nicholas Sparks.
(h/t @ebertchicago)
Movies Saturday, October 29, 2011 at 11:17AM Two things give me hope for this latest installment in a series I could never quite find a way to love. First, it's directed by Brad Bird (The Incredibles); and second, it looks like they're actually a team, not just Tom Cruise running and running and running by himself.
That was an incredibly disappointing moment for me in the first movie -- when his team is killed within the first sequence. One of the joys of the show and the concept, besides the 7/8 theme music, is the teamwork aspect. Looks like it could be back here:
Sunday, October 23, 2011 at 4:09PM This one could go either way, but I'm intrigued. Rare to see a mockumentary that isn't just after laughs:
Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 11:18AM 
First day of principle photography on PLEDGE, my students' Web Series. So proud. (Follow @tobinaddington for more pics in the next few weeks!)
Thursday, October 6, 2011 at 1:46PM Despite the unfortunate title, this looks like more than just a vehicle for another great, surprising Michelle Williams performance. It could be a good story and a solid film:
Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 3:39PM Clearly not based on the Kate Chopin novel. Looks like it could be a winner -- nothing like a period boys' boarding school to get the chills started. Plus, Imelda Staunton freaking rocks:
Friday, August 19, 2011 at 3:14PM With apologies to Polanksi-haters, this looks pretty awesome:
Saturday, August 13, 2011 at 3:39PM Here's a fun Slate piece, collecting anecdotes from well-known writers about the classics they can't take.
New York Times book critic Dwight Garner on one of mine, Don Quixote:
In the margins I'll write, "He's the world's first great food writer," underlining a passage on Page One in which he goes on about pigeon, tripe, and salted beef and mutton. Genius! Here's the man who popularized the phrase "the proof's in the pudding"! The momentum slowly fades; the blood drains from my face; was that a news alert on my iPhone? I'm asleep on the couch, deeply ashamed but contentedly drooling, by Page 37.
Classic Reads, Web Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 11:45AM Can't help myself. Just saw this on the web and it looks incredible. Directed by Ralph Fiennes, no less:
Monday, August 8, 2011 at 1:44PM Soderbergh goes scary. And from the writer of The Informant!, which I loved (along with the Brooklyn audience I saw it with, though I realize that's a minority opinion).
Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 1:53PM Next up from director George Clooney. Anybody else hope the "dirt" they have isn't a sex scandal?
Saturday, July 30, 2011 at 8:23AM 
Only 134 pages (that's twenty-eight chapters) into the novel does Melville give us our first glimpse of Captain Ahab. He's been teasing us all along, deftly using the old trick of allowing us (through Ishmael) to hear about him through various and sometimes conflicting, but always a bit dark and strange, points of view.
As a result, every day Ishmael climbs onto the deck, he glances back toward Ahab's quarters, never seeing the man until...
It was one of those less lowering, but still grey and gloomy enough mornings of the transition, when with a fair wind the ship was rushing through the water with a vindictive sort of leaping and melancholy rapidity, that as I mounted to the deck at the call of the forenoon watch, so soon as I leveled my glance towards the taffrail, foreboding shivers ran over me. Reality outran apprehention; Captain Ahab stood upon his quarter-deck.
Reading, or listening, your heart stops for a moment. At last. He's here.
Now forgive me a long quotation, but I think this introduction is worth the wait:
There seemed no sign of common bodily illness about him, nor of the recovery from any. He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them, or taking away one particle from their compacted aged robustness. His whole high, broad form, seemed made of solid bronze, and shaped in an unalterable mould, like Cellini's cast Perseus. Threading its way out from among his grey hairs, and continuing right down one side of his tawny scorched face and neck, till it disappeared in his clothing, you saw a slender rod-like mark, lividly whitish. It resembled that perpendicular seam sometimes made in the straight, lofty trunk of a great tree, when the upper lightning tearingly darts down it, and without wrenching a single twig, peels and grooves out the bark from top to bottom, ere running off into the soil, leaving the tree still greenly alive, but branded. Whether that mark was born with him, or whether it was the scar left by some desperate wound, no one could certainly say. By some tacit consent, throughout the voyage little or no allusion was made to it, especially by the mates.
It's not many details, but they are so beautifully and precisely sketched, filled with both allusions and alliterations, that you seem to get a sense of his soul as well as his body. This marked man.
Now, how much of that I'm bringing to the text, given that I do know where the story is heading, I can't say. But after hearing this passage, I went to my hard copy and re-read it twice.
Moby-Dick in Classic Reads Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 10:49AM What would we do without Jon Stewart?
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| GOP - Special Victims Unit | ||||
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Web Tuesday, July 26, 2011 at 11:08AM 
More than 4 hours (and 20-some chapters) into Moby-Dick, and Ishmael is finally setting sail on the Pequod.
Whew.
Still no Ahab appearance, but Melville has done a remarkable job building him up prior to our first actual sighting -- the ship owners, the "loon" Elijah, former crew members -- and I can't wait.
It's one of the things that worked so well with the Ishmael/Queequag relationship. We heard a lot about Queequag, out hunting heads and all, prior to actually meeting him. And then when Ishamel actually came face to face, he 
pretended to sleep for what must've been pages and pages, too terrified of the "savage" to alert him to his (Ishmael's) presence.
The next thing you know, they're fast companions.
Okay, not fast as is speed, but rather thick as in thieves.
Anyway, hoping to "meet" Ahab in the coming minutes/pages.
Incidentally, I thought last night that I was a quarter to a third of the way through the book, when I hit chapter 15. Turns out that puts me a third of the way through the FIRST THIRD of the book, which runs to 137 chapters.
So. Settling in. Enjoying it, but settling in!
Moby-Dick in Classic Reads Monday, July 25, 2011 at 5:28PM 
I feel a little bad about this, but I'm going to "read" Moby-Dick via an Audible audiobook.
Events have conspired to make it physically painful to read comfortably for the forthcoming weeks (and maybe months), so I'm going to attack the biggest book on my list and enjoy it as a performance.
It will be a different experience, to be sure, but the actor giving the narration is great (Anthony Heald), and I think I'm getting the jokes and certainly learning alot about period whaling.
It took a while to settle into the rhythm of the prose, the slow, methodical, highly-described scenes. But I think I'm adjusting. Not that I have much choice, having been stranded as I am. (See? Sea voyage jokes already...!)
The Ishamel/Queequag relationship developes beautifully and is a delight to experience.
It's going to be a L O N G book. That's quite clear. It's probably good I'm experiencing it this way. Wonder if I'd've made it doing it on paper.... (Not completely sure I'll be able to do it this way! But as I say, not much choice...)
Moby-Dick in Classic Reads 
