Media from here to there

Night at the Museum II: Battle for the Smithsonian - Haven't even seen the first one, though I kind of want to now.

We were in the Museum of Natural History checking what was playing on their IMAX screen and saw that they were playing Night at the Museum 2, so for $12.50 each (a bit pricey, but it's IMAX, it's Washington, it's vacation) we grabbed a couple of tickets for Monday night.

Our screening - the 7pm show - was nearly full, with just a few single seats scattered throughout the auditorium, and the screen was massive. If you've not been to a true IMAX screen - not the stupid quasi-IMAX at National Amusement theaters - it's three stories high and slightly curved toward the audience at the edges. This makes for a nearly immersive experience, particularly for the people at the center of the drastically sloped theater seating.

I was a bit worried, initially, that the movie would not occupy the entirety of the screen as I'd seen The Matrix in a similar setting a few years back and gotten a regular-sized movie on a screen that was 1/2 empty. No disappointment here, however, as the image stretched from side to side leaving only small bars at the top and bottom to retain the original aspect ratio.

Initially, the film was a bit slow with the necessary updating of where the characters had been since the first film ended - something I was actually appreciative of as I had no background on where they had been during the first film. About half an hour in, however, the action got rolling along and maintained a manageably frantic pace throughout the rest of the film.

The museum characters from the first film are being shipped up and are to be archived in the Smithsonian's near-endless underground archives (which don't exist, as the Smithsonian's accompanying pamphlet pointed out) where they will be without the magic tablet that allows them to come alive. Said table accidentally comes with the characters, however, allowing history's worst museum subjects (Chicago gangsters, Mongol hordes, evil Egyptian pharaohs, Darth Vader, Oscar the Grouch) to come to life and threaten the good museum subjects and eventually The WORLD.

Hank Azaria, master of a million voices, gives a marvelous turn as the lisping, fey long-dead evil pharaoh (check a clip here) who never quite manages to be menacing but drives the entire story with his hilarious performance.

Azaria and Amy Adams - as Amelia Earhart - are the real gems the movie. The rest of the cast - Ben Stiller, Owen Wilson, Robin Williams, a massively disguised Christopher Guest, Bill Hader - are all solid supporters, but this movie belongs to Adams and Azaria, and the movie is hilarious, loads of fun, lots of out loud laughs. It's probably not one that will age into an old favorite for most folks, but it's not one to avoid in the least.

---

Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk didn't change my thinking about Palahniuk in the least. Some of his works (Fight Club, Diary, Haunted, Rant) are among my favorite books that I've ever read. Others (Lullaby, Choke, and now Pygmy) are works with a few interesting bits but that simply don't work for me.

The titular Pygmy is a foreign exchange student from - according to Wikipedia - his totalitarian homeland (a mash-up of North Korea, Cuba, Communist-era China, and Nazi-era Germany) who has been sent on a terrorist mission to do significant damage to the United States.

In the course of the novel, we are often beaten over the head with the confusion between the "evil" of Pygmy and his plan and the overly-obvious decadence and immorality of his American host family - a daughter who drugs her parents and steals from her father's work, a mother who engages in sex parties in the basement, a father who is seems hollowly religious, a son who is stupidly immature. All of these are largely nameless characters referred to in Pygmy's broken English as Pig Dog Brother, Cat Sister, Cow Father, and Chicken Mother.

This use of broken English that makes the novel difficult to understand at first, perhaps intentionally introducing the reader to the novel the way that a foreign exchange student would find himself in a land whose language he has previously spoken only in classes. In the course of the novel, the broken English becomes more understandable but not because of a change in the writing, rather simply because the rhythm - with its lack of articles, its constant reflections on how to kill the characters in Pygmy's world, repetition of chemical elements, and other linguistic tics - becomes more familiar.

In the end, the conclusion felt too obvious, as though Palahniuk were leading us down a road hoping that we would expect a turn and then surprising us by not allowing the road to turn. In the end, the lack of a turn left me cold as though any drama, any conclusion, any rising action were simply left behind as the build was too slow, too deliberate.

For a book that didn't work for me, I did find a number of moments where I chuckled nearly out loud on the train. Palahniuk's gift with words is a natural talent that comes through even in this, one of his weaker works.

---

Up is another Pixar gem.

As has been written in other places, the first ten or so minutes of Up - the set up and background - are note perfect and whitheringly emotional. The wordless exposition of our main character's backstory should be used in every film class to show what can be done without a word of dialogue to communicate every possible bit of meaning and emotion and humanity. This is a time-capsule-worthy sequence.

The rest of the film's ninety minutes is not nearly as note perfect, but it is still very good. This is not, however, Pixar's finest, but it is still a very good film, one that is as emotionally affecting as anything else that I have seen this year.

What it is also not, however, is a children's film. This is a film exploring some very mature themes - loss, love, chasing and knowing when to abandon a dream, abandonment - in beautifully moving ways. Yes, there are jokes and laughs to be had throughout the film, most of which come from the villain's pack of dogs with their Cone of Shame, broken voice collars, Greek hierarchy, and Star Wars dogfight quotes.

The characters are relateable and entirely human; the plot is clear and linear with enough drama; the emotions and themes are deep and clear and true. The film is imperfect, but Pixar's imperfect is still an amazingly high bar.

Freakonomics was a gift from The Best Man. He'd read the book and thought I'd enjoy it.

The book is a recapping of Steven Levitt, an economist who is admittedly bad at economics and bad at math. By his own admission, he can't predict the stock market, can't explain why inflation is bad, and generally has no interest in macroeconomics.

What he can do - and do marvelously - is explore interesting questions using relevant statistics. In this book, he and his co-author, New York writer Stephen Dubner, explore a dozen very interesting questions and whether conventional wisdom seems to be true about these questions.

They explore the reasons behind the drop in crime statistics in the 1990s, cheating in sumo wrestling, cheating on high stakes tests in Chicago, why crack dealers still live with their mothers, whether giving a child a 'black' name hurts their economic outlook, what matters in parenting, and a half dozen other questions. In each case, Levitt and various paper co-authors have exhaustively researched the questions and come to some very surprising conclusions.

Most of the quantitative and exhaustive research is left to the book's extensive footnotes as the chapters are devoted to presenting the arguments and the general patterns found in surprisingly clear and concise prose. Within the endnotes - and 'extras' found at the rear of this expanded edition - are significantly more detailed analyses along with references to the original research - all of which Levitt co-authored.

The book has three glaring flaws in its construction, however. First, nearly every question and its conclusion is summed up in the introductory chapter. Where each chapter takes twenty or so pages to define the question, search for appropriate data, and come to conclusion, the introductory chapter presents the question and quick data summary in a paragraph or two, meaning that every chapter is begun with the reader largely already knowing the chapter's outcome.

Secondly, the various chapters are not held together in any way. There is - as the introductory chapter admits - no central theme, no major tenant to this book. Because of that, the chapters read as a series of separate articles, extensive and interesting blog posts but not a coherent whole of a book.

Thirdly, the chapters are written as though reporting on research conducted by separate researchers. The test cites each study's co-author but doesn't acknowledge Levitt's co-authorship other than in the footnotes. Perhaps Levitt's involvement in each study was to be understood as he is partially the subject of the book, but I didn't realize until skimming the endnotes that Levitt was the co-author of all the articles and research cited.

The chapters are excellent and compelling reads. I might suggest taking them in as individual doses, however, rather than in one full sitting.