Rumour has it that a film director has finally managed to deliver a decent big screen adaptation of an Alan Moore comic book. James Wolcott has been to see V for Vendetta:

If it seems as if I’m darting around V for Vendetta rather than zeroing in on what I liked/didn’t like, grading the performances, and pointing-out-subtle-details-to-prove-how-observant-I-am, it’s because I don’t want to give away too much of the movie, leaving that job to A. O. Scott and his fellow divulgers. To say that I found the domino montage as thrilling a coup de cinema as I’ve seen since DePalma first displayed his slashing mastery of crosscutting is to sound cryptic, but to be unelliptical I’d have to explain too much and wreck your fun. And make no mistake V for Vendetta is fun, dangerous fun, percussive with brutality and laced with ironic ambiguity and satirical slapstick (a Benny Hill homage, no less!). But gives the movie its rebel power is the moral seriousnessthat drives the action, emotion, and allegory. That’s what I didn’t expect from the Wachowski brothers (The Matrix), this angry, summoning Tom Paine moral dispatch that puts our pundits, politicians, and cable news hosts to shame. V for Vendetta instills force into the very essence of four-letter words like hate, love, and (especially) fear, and releases that force like a fist. Off come the masks, and the faces are revealed.

Sounds promising.

Then there's Adi Tantimedh's favourable review at Comic Book Resources:

The performances by the actors are impeccable. I thought Natalie Portman’s accent started out too posh and awkward, but she eased into it as the movie progressed. The scene where she finally breaks down is the most difficult scene any actress could ever be given and it’s here that Portman shows the true depth of her talent and craft, being every bit as wrenching as the book. And it’s always fun to watch renowned British character actors chew the scenery as if it was a lavish banquet, and dependable actors like Tim Pigott-Smith, John Hurt and Rupert Graves are well-cast in supporting roles. Stephen Fry has a sad dignity as a sympathetic TV talkshow host harboring secrets of his own, who becomes inspired by V to take some action, and pays the ultimate price. Hugo Weaving is perfect as the verbose and theatrical V, relishing language as he trips complex Shakespearean speeches off his tongue, acting behing a mask through the entire movie, and his face is never shown.

Could it be…?

[James Wolcott review via rc3.org; Comic Book Resources review via FinderWolf, posting at Barbelith Underground]

How Andrew Brown became a Terrorism Statistic.

Read the liner notes on this pirated copy of Guess Who, last year's Ashton Kutcher-Bernie Mac remake of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. Talk about truth in advertising…

[Yes, it's yet another link to Japundit. What can I say: the site just happens to have had a couple of posts that I deemed link-worthy in the last week.]

The Microsoft iPod packaging parody: it's funny because it's oh so true.

(NB: link is to streaming video. Here's a screenshot of one side of the end result, for the benefit of dial-up users.)

[Edited to amend link to the video after the original was taken down. jr 2 March 2006]

[Via Daring Fireball]

The Things I Will Not Do When I Direct a Shakespeare Production, On Stage or Film. Quite, quite wonderful:

[...]

18. I will not forget that although he's a wonderful character, there are other people in the Henry IV plays besides Falstaff.

[...]

53. Actors should be told that these are characters interacting with each other, not people reciting lines. They should be hurt if they forget that.

[...]

71. People playing human (non-elf/fairy/spirit) characters will not be made to wear costumes that sparkle unless there is a good reason for it.

[...]

92. I will not project a PowerPoint slideshow onto a large screen above and behind the actors, ever, for any reason, no matter what.

[...]

255. Casting a black Desdemona alongside a black Othello is kind of missing the point a bit.

[...]

The comments at the related MetaFilter thread (also started by Stu of feeling listless fame) are good fun. For example:

No role in the Shakespearean canon is best played as an Elvis impersonator.

[Via feeling listless]

Stuff from a TV preacher.

Scary. And funny. And then scary all over again.

[Via Betsy Devine]

Warning Signs for the Web. Nice.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]

Another day, another Japanese winter festival featuring snow sculptures: Otaru's Snow Gleaming Festival. Judging by the photos, it's on a smaller, more intimate scale than Sapporo's. Still pretty spectacular at night, by the look of things.

50 Animals in Casts: fabulous.

My favourite picture on that page doesn't appear to involve any casts at all. Though I reckon the cat will probably end up in a cast if the dog gets hold of it.

[Via meish dot org]

Japundit has a post about the enormous ice sculptures that form the centrepiece of Sapporo's annual snow festival.

There are more photographs of items from last year's festival at Yokohama Living, including one sculpture of some familiar characters who we're used to seeing modeled in clay, not ice.

Sometimes one trip to the salad bar is all you need.

[Via rebecca's pocket]

A double helping from Cute Overload: Dude, I have HAD IT!, and Freckles + Smile.

Earthquake drills at Ueno Zoo in Tokyo look like a lot of fun.

[Via Tokyo Times]

Emma Brockes interviewed David Attenborough for last Monday's Guardian. Here he is on the latest BBC natural history extravaganza, Planet Earth:

He was not, this time, involved in the actual filming and a good job too, he says; he wouldn't have had the "pertinacity" to nail the snow leopard. "With my luck, the thing would be just about to pounce and the goat or the antelope would go behind a ridge and you'd hear a terrific squeal and that would be it."

Hanging around for weeks in the hope of securing a high-risk money shot – "for example, with the polar bear, I mean you're sitting there and you're having a fag or a cup of tea or something and then, bloody hell, she's out! and you've missed it" – this is not Attenborough's forte. His strength, he says, is in what comes afterwards, the slow "assembling" of a narrative. "The jigsaw is forming and it all joins up and it makes sense and at the end of it people have understood that what you were on about was the" – he pauses for a moment and looks ignited – "was the roots of social behaviour among wasps. And what's more, they would have thought it was interesting."

The man's almost 80 and he's as good at his job – and, equally importantly, as enthusiastic – as ever. Goodness knows that the BBC are going to do when he retires: other people can spend time in the wild finding the wildlife and shooting the pictures, but putting someone like Alan Titchmarsh in front of the camera just isn't going to cut it.

I see that Fametracker shares my high opinion of George Clooney.

Anna on the Winter Olympics:

How to commentate on the Winter Olympics – a beginner's guide

[...]

Speed-skating

How you can tell it's speed-skating: Speed-skating involves a bunch of genderless clones who look like a cross between the Missing Link and Captain America. Their inconceivably long arms swinging like the pendulum on Big Ben, they whizz around an ice rink at speeds unknown to humanity (or at least unknown since my 8th birthday party, when someone tied Mandy to the back of the Zamboni with a piece of elastic and watched her try to get away).

If you find yourself trying to commentate on couples sitting at small tables and talking intensely until a bell rings and they all move, then you're trying to commentate on speed-DATING. This is wrong. Change channel.

[...]

[Via feeling listless]

Podcasting, by J R Hartley.

[Via Chocolate and Vodka]

The Onion: Betty Friedan Honored With Second-Class Postage Stamp.

[Via Blog of a Bookslut]

Michael Bérubé is a very wicked man.

[Via Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal]

Users of iTunes on the Mac might like to take a look at Daniel A Shockley's TuneTags, a freeware program which allows you to add tags to your music rather than overloading the 'Genre' field with half a dozen meanings. TuneTags comes with a fairly lengthy list of predefined tags (e.g. CoverSong, CultFavorite, FemaleGroup, MemoriesChildhood) but I'm sure that anyone who sees a need for this program will quickly come up with half a dozen new ones within about thirty minutes of using it. (I did.)

TuneTags stores the tags in the Comments field for each track, so it's simplicity itself to set up a Smart Playlist that searches for all tracks where the Comment contains 'CoverSong' and the Genre is Pop. Of course, if you're already making use of the Comments field on individual tracks you may have to be careful choosing your tag names, but that's a small price to pay for the extra flexibility in searching your library.

At the moment TuneTags is only a version 0.90 beta so it does crash occasionally, but it seems to be saving data as it goes so it's no problem to fire it up again and get right back to tagging. The main drawback of the program is that it isn't actually integrated with iTunes, so you end up swapping back and forth between two different windows. Like Lindsay Marshall, I can't understand why Apple didn't add this functionality to iTunes ages ago. Until Apple see sense, TuneTags will do the job quite nicely.

[Via Bifurcated Rivets]