Learning Strategies

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Labels: books, Dorchester, food, life, linguistics, math, model railroads, movies, teaching and learning, technology, travel, Weston

Last night’s New Year’s Eve festivities included watching Juno, which neither Barbara nor I had seen before, even though it was released over a year ago. On the basis of reviews and personal recommendations, I had expected to like this movie. It exceeded my expectations.

I’m sure everybody knows the plot by this point, but I’ll still stay away from spoilers in these brief comments. My major observation is that all of the actors were entirely convincing in their portrayals of various teens and adults, most notably Ellen Page as Juno, who kept reminding me of various Weston students of mine. No students in particular, I hasten to add — just different generic students at different points. J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney were much more genuine than the parents in the typical movie about teenagers, although I kept being distracted because I knew I had seen Simmons before but couldn’t remember where (I’m not good at actors). When I looked him up, I discovered that he plays Dr. Skoda, who appears off and on as the consulting psychiatrist in Law and Order; the temperaments of the two characters are almost identical, thus reinforcing the distraction. Also, Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman were effective (if a bit creepy) in their roles as the soon-to-be adoptive parents.

Early in 2008 there was some chatter about whether Juno glamorizes and therefore encourages teenager pregnancy. Frankly, I don’t see it. Admittedly, Juno isn’t portrayed as a bad kid, as the right-wingers would prefer; she doesn’t suffer much for her mistake, and her friends and family are all accepting of her. But that doesn’t mean that the movie glamorizes pregnancy, and since Juno immediately decides to have the baby adopted, it shouldn’t encourage the standard worry among adults that a girl will want to get pregnant in order to have a baby who will love her. In fact, since neither Juno nor her family is dysfunctional, what we have here is simply a straightforward tale of how a normal (if rather counterculture) teenager grows up and interacts with adults and with other kids. It’s well worth seeing, just for the quality of the acting if nothing else — but it’s also worth seeing because it’s such a refreshing and captivating story.

I’ll have to ask my student who recently moved to Weston from Minnesota about St. Cloud, where the adoptive parents live in the movie. The director portrays it as a lot like Weston.

Addendum at 8:10 PM:
I wrote the above earlier in the day. But now I’ve just finished watching the first Greater Boston of the year on WGBH, a retrospective of 2008. Emily Rooney’s guest Dan Kelly (identified just as “attorney”) made the following remarks in connection with the supposed but unproved pregnancy pact among girls at Gloucester High School:

The message of all this is not that more birth control is the answer. The message is that Time Magazine picked up on the bandwagon of sensationalizing teen pregnancy, and that bandwagon is out there because of Britney Spears’ sister pronouncing how wonderful it is to be a teen and to be pregnant... The Juno movie, the Juno effect. The Juno movie in a lot of ways was a great movie from my perspective because it showed the dignity of a human life before it’s born. It’s a pro-life movie and it sends a wonderful message to kids. But it also is a movie that glorifies teen pregnancy to some extent. To say that there will not be that many side-effects, that you can get through it, that it is not such a colossally terrible thing, and it also glorifies in some respects teen sex, although I think the message of that movie is that teens are not prepared to have sex and should not be having sex.

This analysis is just plain wrong. The movie doesn’t glorify teen pregnancy, and it doesn’t send a message. It’s not a political document. It’s a story, a work of art, which presents a group of characters and deals with the internal and external conflicts of the main one, just as stories usually do.

Labels: movies, Weston

I mentioned two days ago that I was going to watch N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős, a documentary that had been enthusiastically recommended to me by my former student, Kelly Mathislife. She writes that N is a Number is the “best movie ever” — although she does admit to a slight bias since Erdős is her hero.

So now I’ve watched it, with help from Netflix, which coincidentally delivered the DVD on Erdős’s birthday! This really was a genuine coincidence, since I had put it in my queue a couple of months ago with no idea when it would rise to #1. Anyway, Kelly knows that I certainly intend no disrespect toward her when I point out that of course she was exaggerating; N is a Number isn’t quite the “best movie ever.” It isn’t even even the best documentary ever. But it’s definitely a well-made, captivating documentary that should be watched by every math teacher, math student, and mathematician. It becomes totally clear that Erdős meets Paul Graham’s criteria that I discussed two days ago: absolute honesty and caring obsessively about his work.

Erdős, who died 12 years ago at age 83, was one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th Century and certainly the most prolific; he is best known for his peripatetic life style, having had no fixed abode and collaborating extensively with hundreds of other mathematicians wherever he traveled. The movie is successful at vividly letting the viewer know the kind of person Erdős was, portraying him in person and through the eyes of his collaborators. Fortunately the filmmakers were willing to use subtitles extensively, since the accents of various Hungarian mathematicians (and others) could get in the way of ready understanding, even though almost everyone in the documentary was speaking English. As a math teacher, I thought there was a bit too much of an emphasis on anecdotes, but that’s a small cavil; I use anecdotes myself in similar ways, and I recognize that it’s the best way for the film to appeal to a general audience, who wouldn’t want to watch or listen to lots of mathematics.

I want to quote a couple of snippets out of N is a Number. One comes from Ron Graham — another Graham! but no relation to the aforementioned Paul Graham, as far as I know — who has a major role in the movie:

When mathematics appears in print, it’s theorem, proof, theorem, proof, but when we’re doing math it’s a completely different thing. It’s three or four people sitting around with cups of coffee, a pad of paper, throwing ideas back and forth, making a lot of conjectures, most of which turn out to be completely false.

That’s what should happen from time to time in our math classes, but it almost never does, even at Weston, except in last year’s Friday-afternoon optional after-school math get-togethers.

The other snippet comes from Erdős himself:

We’re trying to read the pages of The Book. We don’t create mathematics, we’re just trying to read the pages of The Book.

How Platonist can you get? This is clearly the right attitude toward the mathematical endeavor!

Labels: math, movies, teaching and learning, Weston

As I was reading Paul Graham’s essay, “Some Heroes,” it struck me that I’ve never liked being asked who my heroes are. In his second and fourth paragraphs, Graham reflects on the question itself:

I’m not claiming this is a list of the n most admirable people. Who could make such a list, even if they wanted to?

...

When I thought about what it meant to call someone a hero, it meant I’d decide what to do by asking what they’d do in the same situation. That’s a stricter standard than admiration.

I had never thought of that criterion before, but perhaps it would unstick me. Then I thought of the statement from one of my former students that Paul Erdős is her hero. [Brief aside: it’s tough to get the correct diacritic over that o. The natural tendency is to try for an unlaut — Erdös — especially since umlauts are relatively easy in HTML. But in Hungarian the diacritic looks like a double acute accent rather than an umlaut, producing a character with Unicode ID 0151. Thus you want “&#” followed by “x0151;” in HTML. End of aside.] So I wondered whether Erdős would fit the description in Graham’s next paragraph:

After I made the list, I looked to see if there was a pattern, and there was, a very clear one. Everyone on the list had two qualities: they cared almost excessively about their work, and they were absolutely honest. By honest I don’t mean trustworthy so much as that they never pander: they never say or do something because that’s what the audience wants. They are all fundamentally subversive for this reason, though they conceal it to varying degrees.

More on Erdős after I watch the movie about him. But note that Graham’s characterization is not a definition of “hero”; it’s simply a comment on two of their properties. Graham’s twelve heroes are Jack Lambert, Kenneth Clark, Larry Mihalko, Leonardo da Vinci, Robert Morris, P.G. Wodehouse, Alexander Calder, Jane Austen, John McCarthy, the Spitfire, Steve Jobs, and Isaac Newton. Could I make a similar list (though surely not duplicating any of Graham’s)?

I don’t think so.

But it did make me think about the issue. Which people have influenced me to such an extent that I would consider them to be my heroes? Would I really “decide what to do by asking what they’d do in the same situation”? Would my list consist of people who “cared almost excessively about their work” and “were absolutely honest”?

I suppose Isaac Asimov, Socrates, Charles Darwin, and Bertrand Russell would come to mind first. And maybe Johann Sebastian Bach. And probably Martin Gardner and Noam Chomsky. And it’s a cliché to put one’s mother and father on such a list, but it’s a cliché for a reason, so I will do that as well. And shouldn’t Shakespeare and Ibsen be on the list? And perhaps James Joyce? Well, that’s twelve, but I’m not convinced. This bears more thought...

Labels: books, life, math, movies, teaching and learning

Two and a half years ago I wrote a brief negative review of Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions, by Ben Mezrich. I suggested that the account seemed to be fictional (even though it claims to be non-fiction) and that it “alternates between melodrama and tedium.”

Now they’ve gone and made a movie of it, 21. The plot outline on IMDb asserts that the movie is a “fact-based story,” But Drake Bennett’s article about it in the Boston Globe has this comment on the original book:

Bringing Down the House is not a work of “nonfiction” in any meaningful sense of the word. Instead of describing events as they happened, Mezrich appears to have worked more as a collage artist, drawing some facts from interviews, inventing certain others, and then recombining these into novel scenes that didn’t happen and characters who never lived. The result is a crowd-pleasing story, eagerly marketed by his publishers as true — but which several of the students who participated say is embellished beyond recognition.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but the Globe article certainly makes me skeptical. Read the article, not the book.

Labels: books, math, movies

In yesterday’s post, I recommended watching the movie of Mozart and the Whale before reading the book. And then I got to thinking about whether this was the natural order: after all, in most cases a movie is written after the book on which it is baed, so why shouldn’t it also be watched afterwards?

In standard mathematical fashion, let’s see whether we can abstract from the concrete example of one movie/book pairing to the more general case. What happens with other such pairs? Sometimes the order doesn’t matter. And often I read a book as soon as it comes out and then have to wait for the movie, so the order is imposed artificially. What are the consequences of reading the book first? On the plus side, you have the freedom to visualize characters and scenes as you wish, and you can learn the necessary background that might be omitted from the movie. On the minus side, the movie is usually a disappointment, precisely because it can’t possibly capture everything in the book. Furthermore, my own view is that surprises and plot twists in a movie are more effective when one hasn’t read the book first. There are surely exceptions, but on the whole I come down on the side of always reading a book after seeing the movie wherever possible.

Labels: books, movies

On February 20 I reviewed Mozart and the Whale: An Asperger’s Love Story. After seeing and enjoying this fascinating movie, I decided to read the autobiography on which it was based. (Can I still call it an autobiography when it was “written” by two people, both Jerry Newport and Mary Newport? Not to mention Johnny Dodd, a writer for People who served as ghostwriter and who is duly credited?) I highly recommend reading this book — after you see the movie. Not surprisingly, the movie had to leave out lots and lots of material, and occasionally had to take artistic license, but it doesn’t actually contradict anything in the book, either in fact or in tone. The major difference is...well, I don’t want to reveal any spoilers, so let’s just say that the Newports’ relationship and Mary’s psyche turn out to be much more complicated than portrayed in the film. Again, no surprises there.

The only real problem with the book is that the first-person point of view changes without warning from section to section. Presumably Dodd interviewed the Newports extensively and fashioned the narrative out of their information with an attempt to capture their separate voices. But apparently he isn’t skilled enough to succeed at this endeavor, since it’s often impossible to tell who’s speaking except from external clues (like mentioning the spouse). Of course this makes me wonder whether he is actually capturing the voice of either Newport; probably what’s coming across is Dodd’s voice.

Labels: books, movies, teaching and learning

Mozart and the Whale: An Asperger’s Love Story? I was initially skeptical — definitely intrigued, but still skeptical. The premise sounded too sentimental. It was going to be a chick flick, I figured. It was going to be what my friend Meryl calls “heartwarming,” it was going to be mushy. But it turned out to be none of those things (except, perhaps, heartwarming).

The subtitle correctly prepares the viewer to expect two protagonists with Asperger’s Syndrome. But almost all the other characters as well were living with Asperger’s (or other forms of autism). And what I definitely hadn’t realized was that the movie is a semi-documentary, a fictionalized account of the lives of two real people: Jerry Newport and Mary Meinel-Newport. But even before I learned that, I knew that I had to see this movie, since some of my students have Asperger’s and since one of my ten favorite books is The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. Definitely go see Mozart and the Whale for an unforgettable experience that is truly sympathetic without being at all sentimentalized!

What makes this a successful movie is the melding of the demands of fiction with the demands of a documentary. To meet the former, Norwegian director Petter Naess has emphasized a strongly traditional story arc with well-developed characters and plausible conflicts. To meet the latter, the film sets its diverse but self-aware characters firmly in the real world, with jobs and homes and even friends. The diversity is especially important, at least from my point of view. Over my career I’ve taught over a dozen students with Asperger’s, and I’ve worked with more than a few in the software industry; they all defy stereotypes, since no two are alike. The only aspect of the movie that rang a false note to my math-teacher’s mind was the inappropriate male-female ratio. In Mozart and the Whale almost half of those with Asperger’s are female, whereas in reality only 20–25% are. But Barbara reminds me that the movie does not show a random sample, but only those who volunteered to participate in a group; even among people with Asperger’s, society surely pushes females to be more sociable and more willing to participate in groups. (I’m dimly convinced that this is somehow related to the issues I discussed yesterday in my post about girls and math, but I haven’t yet worked out just how.)

You’ll have to see the movie to find out where the title comes from.

Labels: movies, teaching and learning

I wasn’t completely convinced that I wanted to watch Ratatouille, but it seemed like a good choice for light entertainment over winter vacation. And indeed it was. Don’t let the fact that it’s a Disney animation make you think that it’s only for children; there’s plenty in it for adults. Indeed, it’s hard to see how younger children are going to understand much of what’s going on. But of course that’s often the case in works that are aimed simultaneously at kids and adults. By now you know the premise behind Ratatouille, so I won’t repeat it. Suffice it to say that Pixar has outdone itself in the quality of the animation, reveling in the hundreds of individually distinct rats that move with convincing verisimilitude. The actors provide convincing voices, making the rats sympathetic without sappy anthropomorphism.

The attitudes toward French cuisine are also convincing. We have the snooty food critic who desperately wants to write a negative review but in the end is too honest to do so. (The French may be corrupt in other regards, but not about food.) We have the recently deceased chef who demeaned his profession by placing his name on popularized frozen foods (sound familiar?) and by writing a book (in English, of course) called Anyone Can Cook. OK, that seems to contradict my claim about French attitudes toward cooking, except that it explains why Gousteau (hmmm...) is dead and why his book is in English. And, of course, we have our hero, the rat Rémy, who knows the importance of every herb and of correct presentation. He can even turn a humble peasant dish (ratatouille, of course) into a gourmet success.

So go out and rent the DVD. It’s not just for kids.

Labels: food, movies

How can a Woody Allen movie be so boring? I just couldn’t make myself care about any of the characters in Match Point. There was no wit, no humor — in a Woody Allen movie of all things! Maybe I shouldn’t judge, since I gave up about half way through, but I just couldn’t stay interested enough to watch the rest of it. Ebert makes this comparison:

Match Point, which deserves to be ranked with Allen’s Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and Everyone Says I Love You, has a terrible fascination that lasts all the way through. We can see a little way ahead, we can anticipate some of the mistakes and hazards, but the movie is too clever for us, too cynical.

I guess it’s too bad that I didn’t watch the whole thing, but the first half sure didn’t seem to be to be in the same league as Annie Hall or Manhattan.

Labels: movies

Delayed post (originally written 8/24):

Sigh. The movie of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix turned out to be a disappointing mess. I had carefully avoided all reviews beforehand, but maybe they would have warned me. Usually I read Ebert before choosing to see a movie, but of course there’s no choice in the case of Harry Potter; I knew I was going to see it anyway.

Actually, now that I read Roger Ebert’s review, I am convinced that he missed the main flaw in the film. Ebert focused on the unexpectedly dark tone, but that wasn’t what bothered me. Without discussing it with each other, Meredith and I independently reached the same conclusion: of course a huge amount had to be omitted in order to transform a long novel into a film, but so much was chopped out that the plot became completely incoherent. As a result, no one’s motivation was clear. Maybe the filmmakers assumed that everyone has read the book anyway, but that’s no way to make a movie. It needs to stand on its own, and this one didn’t. Stephanie Zacharek of Salon Magazine calls it “perfectly satisfying.” Feh. I’m looking forward to a better job of #6 and #7.

Labels: movies

Some Like it Hot-buttered, by Jeffrey Cohen, is an amusing and well-written mystery about popcorn. Well, no...though the title correctly suggests popcorn and old movie comedies, the popcorn is actually quite peripheral — merely a vehicle for delivering poison to the victim. The novel is about one Elliot Freed, who renovates an old movie theatre in New Jersey to turn it into a venue for old comedies. Don’t expect noir, don’t expect a police procedural, don’t expect a serious mystery at all. But do expect to have fun with a bunch of interesting characters. Freed’s movie theatre is appropriately named Comedy Tonight, and that’s what Cohen’s novel provides as well. I’m ready to read his other books.

Labels: books, movies

How nerdy can you get? A movie about typography? About a font??? (Well, actually, it’s a typeface, but the ubiquity of Windows and Macs has trained people to call typefaces “fonts”; I’m sure I’ll slip up and do so here.) Helvetica is an absolutely wonderful but very geeky movie with a rather limited audience. Graphic designers, computer aficionados, and those of us who care about the appearance of type will all love this documentary. If you’re not in any of those three groups, go see it anyway. You’ll learn something. You might even enjoy it!

Although I was intrigued from the get-go, when I started watching the DVD I was initially reserved in my enthusiasm, because the first half hour or so of Helvetica is a paean to that particular typeface, which I don’t much like. (Note the rarity of it in this blog, though I do offer a small concession by putting my headings in Helvetica.) I was worried that the rest of the film would continue in its unvarnished one-sidedness, hitting the viewer over the head with the claim that the ubiquity of Helvetica is due to the fact that it’s the solution to all font problems, the font that can be used everywhere. But fortunately it turned out that there was a healthy balance of opinion, including quite a number of articulate remarks by designers who refuse to see Helvetica as the be-all and end-all, ranging from sensible traditionalists to off-the-wall grunge fans.

Of course the issue isn’t really which font you prefer. (Some people even like Comic Sans, after all.) The real issue is whether you want typography to say something or whether you want it to be transparent. That question is explored well in Helvetica, though the bias is still quite clearly in favor of Helvetica in particular and transparency in general. I suppose my position is somewhere in between: I don’t want typography to disappear from consciousness altogether, but I certainly do want it to help the content shine through.

Labels: movies, teaching and learning, technology

The first time I saw De-Lovely, the 2004 biography of Cole Porter starring Kevin Kline and Ashley Judd, I thought it was an interesting but not particularly impressive movie. At least, unlike the 1946 movie about Porter (Cary Grant’s Night and Day, which presented him as straight), De-Lovely was reasonably accurate and had no trouble dealing with the fact that Porter was gay and yet married to a woman.

So far, so good. A pleasant but inconsequential movie, with some irresistible Cole Porter songs ably sung by Kevin Kline. And then came the day that Barbara and I saw the Sara & Gerald Murphy exhibit at Williams College, where we realized that the Murphys and their sons had played a major part in the life of Cole Porter — but we hadn’t remembered them from De-Lovely. Time to see that movie again, right?

The were two results to seeing it again. The minor one was that we found (not surprisingly) that there were indeed a great many appearances by the Murphys in the movie. If we had known who they were, we would have paid attention to them. (There’s a moral there somewhere.) But the major result was that we realized that this was a far better movie than we had originally thought. Maybe it was simply the effect of seeing it for the second time, maybe it was the focus caused by the fact that we had something to look for — whatever it was, De-Lovely had changed from a competent movie to a first-rate one. Of course it was still the same movie, but not in our perception. Everything held together well, the songs were perfectly integrated into the biography, we understood Cole Porter far better than we had done earlier, and even the performances were better than they were the first time around. So now I highly recommend De-Lovely, but perhaps some advanced preparation would help.

Labels: movies

As I reported in my post of April 19, Weston High School’s spring musical this year is My Favorite Year. Yesterday’s opening-night performance was thoroughly enjoyable, with some surprising casting and some unusually strong performances. Joav Birjiniuk, Laura Caso, Todd Elfman, Quinton Kappel, and Natalie Birren were all memorable in their portrayals of an interesting array of show-business types. I find it particularly intriguing when an obviously Jewish actor manages to be convincing in portraying an obviously Gentile character and then an obviously non-Jewish actress is equally convincing playing a Jewish mother.

Labels: movies, Weston

I finally watched My Favorite Year, in anticipation of Weston High School’s production of the musical version of this classic 1982 film. A slightly disguised roman à clef about Mel Brooks, Sid Caesar, and Errol Flynn, this movie manages to be both funny and touching. You can rent it from Netflix, as I did. It’s worth watching!

Labels: movies, Weston

As I reported yesterday, part of Weston High School’s Earth Day observances was a screening of An Inconvenient Truth. This event was attended by everyone — students and teachers alike. (Almost everyone, actually. A few kids skipped out, and some stayed home.) By and large I was quite impressed with the students’ attentiveness; the usual teenage cynicism and restlessness didn’t keep them from watching quietly, even when Al Gore was being especially geeky. Not that there’s anything wrong with being geeky. The audience’s attention flagged only after the film was over, when they had to sit through a brief slide show that presented statistics from a survey of ways in which students do or don’t protect the environment.

Anyhow, I found An Inconvenient Truth an extremely compelling documentary, both as a film and as a piece of educational propaganda. Duarte Design’s visual representations of statistics were especially well done, being crisp, vivid, and devoid of chart clutter. Edward Tufte was probably pleased — relatively speaking, since Tufte makes compelling arguments against PowerPoint that carry over in part to Keynote, which is what Gore uses. But, for the techies among my readers, here are some observations about Keynote from designer Ted Boda:

Al Gore’s presentation was in fact using Apple’s Keynote presentation software (the same software Steve Jobs presents from) and did so for a number of reasons. As a designer for the presentation Keynote was the first choice to help create such an engaging presentation.

Apple’s Keynote anti-aliases its fonts and graphics, scales vector objects and supports QuickTime videos easily and without any plug-ins. Duarte used a combination of Keynote’s graphics and graph tools, Illustrator, Photoshop, AfterEffects (for more complex animations) and dropped in numerous videos from different sources to complete his presentation. Some of the videos dropped were up to 1920x1080 (HD), they played and scaled extremely well and was something our team could not even begin to think about doing in PowerPoint.

Thousands of people have commented on the effectiveness and importance of Gore’s message about climate change and the environment, so I want to focus on the presentation of statistics. As a math teacher, I am always interested in multiple representations of mathematical objections — equations, functions, statistics, or whatever — and I am always interested in excellent teaching. Gore has some lessons to teach us here. I can do no better than to quote Garr Reynolds:

Three things stand out about Al Gore’s presentation:

(1) He looks relaxed, like he’s in his realm. It’s a serious issue, and he is serious, yet he’s a pleasure to watch and listen to. Where was this guy in 2000 indeed.

(2) The technology is transparent to the audience, as it should be. He’s got to be the only 50-something politician (former politician?) who can actually use slideware without stinking up the place.

(3) His slide images are photographic imagery of high quality. The design of the visuals are powerful yet complementary and subordinate to Gore and his message (though in many ways, the visuals are the message in this instance; certainly the visuals are crucial to his case).

Labels: life, math, movies, teaching and learning, Weston

So why did I bother watching the movie I, Robot? It’s because I rarely read reviews ahead of time, since reviews too often contain spoilers. But I found this movie poorly done, disrespectful to the memory of my hero Isaac Asimov, and generally offensive. Other than that, it was worth watching.

The first big problem was that this movie is just a pile of cinematic clichés, from the loner cop to the out-of-control robots. The latter reveals the second problem: its faithlessness to Asimov’s memory. Asimov always believed in the rationality of humans and our creations. He carefully crafted his three laws so that robots would never turn on their creators (another movie cliché). Sure, I, Robot and other novels and short stories presented numerous personal and scientific problems that humans and robots had to solve, including a great many in which the three laws at first appeared to be violated, but there was never any fear-mongering. I cringe just to think of how the movie has torn apart Asimov’s view of the world. I’m going to go re-read the books now.

Labels: books, movies, technology

Arsenic and Old Lace is definitely a classic film, so that means I’m supposed to like it — right? I don’t know why I had never seen it before, but I finally got around to it the other day. Unfortunately I was disappointed. Cary Grant was unconvincing in the lead role, and nothing about this movie held my attention very much. The best actors were Grant’s aunts, played by Josephine Hull and Jean Adair. (Maybe I should have heard of them, but I hadn’t.) While screwball comedy has never been one of my favorite genres, I usually like it better than I liked this one. There are some amusing lines, but on the whole I don’t think it’s worth seeing.

Labels: movies

We tried to watch Somersault, acclaimed all over Australia. It looked like it might be of interest to film buffs and to anyone who works with teenagers (or anyone who has a teenager in the family). But neither Barbara nor I could bother finishing it. We both found it uninspiring, routine, and even boring. Maybe we both missed something.

Here are quotations from three respected movie critics. First, from Stephen Holden of the New York Times:

“Somersault,” which the Australian Film Institute garlanded with 13 awards, including best film, director, actor and actress (for Ms. Cornish’s astonishing performance), is a movie about the looks on people’s faces and the disparity between the surface and the roiling chaos beneath. Cool-headed and emotionally distanced from its characters, it trains an X-ray eye on their precarious balancing of civilized and bestial impulses.

And then our own Ty Burr, from the Boston Globe:

'“Somersault,” in other words, is about that time in young people’s lives when they understand that no one can define them but themselves, a prospect that can scare them into noisy compensatory behavior. Heidi has (or thinks she has) one asset, but her needy lust keeps blowing up in her face. Why does being available turn people against her? How can sex promise such closeness only to deny it?

And from Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune:

“Somersault” is a small film, done with limited resources, but it’s impressive — and so is Cornish.

Well, as I say, maybe I missed something. If you see this film and enjoy it, tell me what I missed.

Labels: movies