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Kirsten vs. The Internet

The Albany Times-Union reports that appointed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (formerly of Greenport) is siding with Hollywood and music industry lobby groups over, well, pretty much everyone else when it comes to internet censorship. The PIPA and SOPA bills in Congress have inspired numerous sites (from Wikipedia to Boing Boing to Reddit) to go "dark" for the day. More than a passive supporter, Gillibrand actually co-sponsored PIPA in the Senate.

As if to illustrate what such censorship might be like, a reader reports that comments about these bills were being erased from Gillibrand's Facebook page, though now it appears they are coming too fast and furious for monitors to keep up with.

Public outcry has already caused some initial supporters, such as hosting provider Go Daddy, to withdraw support from these measures (which would help rich entertainment businesses eke out a modest improvement in profit, at the expense of free speech). A former attorney for Big Tobacco, Gillibrand has a history of changing her noxious positions if there is enough pressure: she formerly opposed gay marriage, and held anti-immigrant positions such as making English the "official" U.S. language.

But such pressure has rarely come from Hudson Valley Democrats, who have tended to value their personal access to a "local" politician over their own political principles. Will Columbia County Dems hold Kirsten's feet to the fire on this huge issue?

At this link Google has an action page for speaking out to Congress.

Hudson on screen

A trailer for The Man at the Counter, an independent short film shot largely at The Cascades in Hudson, can be viewed by clicking here. It's about “a young boy who spends the summer working at a coffee shop in a small town.” The project was funded in part via Kickstarter, which has a short video about the making of the film here.

Skip the movie and run

Critics who’ve been raving about Midnight in Paris surely must have taken a bit too much absinthe. Woody Allen’s latest is total schlock—and not in a some fun, campy, or otherwise knowing way.

A variation on the same time-traveling gag is repeated over and over again throughout the film: Salvador Dali/Henri Matisse/F. Scott Fitzgerald, oh my god, I so admire your work! If you only remember the names of a couple of writers and artists from your schooldays, but want to feel smart when you recognize Hemingway or Picasso, this movie is for you. (And don’t worry: If you don’t recognize them, Allen will make sure to hit you over the head several times with their names.) Midnight in Paris is tailor-made for those who have never been to France, but have a poster of the Eiffel Tower on their wall anyway.

Meanwhile, Owen Wilson (who’s usually very watchable) is the most transparent yet miscast Allen surrogate yet. His every line was written with the 35-year-old Allen in mind, but it’s a miserable fit. It’s just embarrassing to watch the great Woody go through this routine: “I can't play the lead anymore, so I’ll make someone play me. Badly.”

And every ten minutes Allen has to remind you that the theme of this movie is capital-N Nostalgia. This isn’t some postmodern breaking of the show-don't-tell-rule. This isn’t a Godard conceit. It’s just lazy filmmaking, which never gets past the thematizing stage. It’s “about” nostalgia to the same extent that Desperate Housewives is about matrimony. It never goes beyond announcing and repeating its theme—like some Broadway musical which keeps reminding you that you’re seeing a Broadway musical in every number, because it has nothing else to say.

Corny doesn’t begin to describe this sub-middlebrow mess. I’m a big Woody Allen fan, and I almost never leave movies, but my friend and I got up and left after the first excruciatingly-stilted 70 minutes. Every one of those minutes made my life both shorter, and poorer.

Match Point? Now there's a great, late Allen film. This one, c’est une perte de temps.

Horsing around

Mary Stuart Masterson’s The Cake Eaters is said to be showing tonight at 7 pm at Hudson’s Iron Horse bar—one of the locations that Masterson used during her 2006 shoot. It’s a leisurely, understated and thoughtful drama about three romantic relationships among the members of two intertwined Upstate families.

When I saw The Cake Eaters at the Green Mountain Film Festival back in 2008, the film was still looking for a distributor according to screenwriter Jayce Bartok, who was staying at the same Montpelier B&B. During the screening, I jotted down the following list of identifiable local locations:

• Cedar Park Cemetery, Hudson
• Iron Horse, Hudson
• Main Street, Catskill
• Middle Ground Flats, Hudson River

Greene County residents will no doubt spot a lot more, since most of the shooting took place on that side of the River, though the filmmakers bunked at the increasingly run-down St. Charles Hotel during their stay.

“The Horse” is one of the more popular movie locations in the Hudson Valley, having been included in Paul Newman’s Nobody’s Fool and several indie films. A few local residents appear in Cake’s credits, such as Otto Stockmeier (who like the Coen Brothers is a Simon’s Rock grad and is now making movies of his own).

Those under the age of 20 know this once-obscure but now frequently-Netflixed film because one of its stars, Kristen Stewart, later went on to fame in the wildly-popular Twilight vampire movies. She here plays a teenager living with a debilitating neurological disorder, making it something of a curiosity to Stewart completists. Her newfound popularity is reflected in the cheezed-out new DVD cover design (below, right) which is much less appealing than the original (at left).

A capital recommendation

From Michael Moore's most recent movie, "Capitalism: A Love Story," a proposal made by FDR one year before his death...