The Eagle has Landed
Planetarium is in New York City. It's a crazy feeling.
In other news, is Angelina Jolie adopting too many babies or what?!?!
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Planetarium is in New York City. It's a crazy feeling.
In other news, is Angelina Jolie adopting too many babies or what?!?!
This site may be a bit spotty for the next week, as Planetarium makes its move of the world headquarters from the twin cities to NYC, but there will still be some good links coming during that time, to keep you satiated until it's fully back. And so, in keeping with that assurance, allow us to provide you with a link for a movie that looks like it might actually be really cool- though, possibly in the same silly, modern-day Dune-esque way that The Chronicles of Riddick was cool. Still, either way that's better than most other Hollywood films, including (ugh) The Island, which, really, don't get us started.
Click HERE to see the trailer for Charlize Theron in AEON FLUX!
The trailer is out for Domino, a film based on the real life of British bounty hunter Domino Harvey (who, coincidentally, just passed away a few weeks ago). It might be good, might be bad, but oh look- Christopher Walken's in it, and he looks like he's in full-on crazy mode. So now we have to see it.
New Krugman. Go!
This guy really, really loves America. And he wants to sing about it. This is not for the faint of heart.
Seems Paul Krugman's been reading our "Medium is the Message" posting from earlier- his new piece pretty much completely agees with it. Go!
There's a great interview with Joss Whedon in this month's In Focus magazine, talking about the upcoming movie Serenity, studio timetables, and why there maybe shouldn't have been quite as much incest between Luke and Leia.
In the newest issue of Harper's, editor Lewis Lapham quotes Theodor Adorno in discussing the ways in which facts and sensibility have effectively been discarded in the press in favor of easily digestible news that won't rock the boat:
"Things have come to pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying...The confounding of truth and lies, making it almost impossible to maintain a distinction, and a labor of Sisyphus to hold on to the simplest piece of knowledge...marks the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power." Adorno was talking about the German Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda in the 1930s, but it's clear that he could just as well be talking about right now, when a President's lies, tampering with voting in elections, out-and-out lawbreaking, mean so little that they are displaced on the news cycle by whether or not brad Pitt is fucking Angelina Jolie. Our point, long made on this site, is that what President Bush says or does matters as little as whether Ashlee is lip-synching her concerts; as the Ministry of Propaganda instructed, arguments must be simple and emotional, instinctual rather than intellectual, endlessly repeated until they're true.
- It's conventional wisdom that content trumps form, that what you say is more important than how you say it. That is obviously no longer the case. Theory-heads will argue that the reverse is true, that we now live in a time when form mattters, not content. That the content is almost worthless, only what it's contained in is valuable. But in a time when names take precedence over events (the who, not the what), and the narrative is constructed by images on TV and good camera shots as opposed to the words being spoken (or the soldiers being killed), it's looking to us like the form IS the content. As Lapham says, "Who cares to know whether Rush Limbaugh's truths are truer than Toyota's? Nothing necessarily follows from anything else, and the viewer is free to shop around for a reality matched to taste." And with such logic does a democracy turn into an entertainment center, benevolently managed (we used to call that authoritarianism) by the funhouse employees of the media and the kindly old store owner of the Bush administration.
Okay, this one, despite looking enormously stupid, also looks entertaining for some reason. If you watch the trailer and disagree, let us know. But otherwise, check out the promising nonsense that is Lords of War.
The Times' Sunday magazine has a great article on indie auteur Jim Jarmusch, spanning his career (which includes one of Planetarium's all-time favorites Dead Man, as well as the utterly brilliant Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai) but focusing on his upcoming Bill Murray starrer Broken Flowers, which promises to be, as usual, incredible. Watch the trailer here.
This is what happens when Planetarium takes the weekend off. But it's still great- so Go!