Living Digitally

Review of "No Country For Old Men"

See it? Yes, but first understand what you're getting into (keep reading).

I don't know how movie trailers are made, but I envision a bunch of marketing types in suits sitting in a boardroom brainstorming on how a movie should be pitched to audiences. After a bunch of whiteboarding and a few lattes, guys half their age wearing tee shirts and headphones go off to their Macs to make the vision a reality. There are a few iterations until the suits are happy at which point the trailer gets shipped off. The end result is often a work of art in and of itself, even though it most likely has very little to do with the movie it's supposed to be advertising. Trailers, after all, are marketing material designed to sell a movie. They are not designed to help viewers pick movies that are right for them. The purpose of trailer is to convince as many people as possible to see a movie as quickly as possible before word can spread about how crappy the movie actually is.

(If you have any doubts about the ability of a trailer to misrepresent a movie, just watch the preview for this wonderfully inspirational family film called Shining.)

My point is that No Country For Old Men is an excellent movie that, as its hart, is almost nothing like its trailer suggests. So misleading are the previews, in fact, that at least two people in the theater actually booed the ending. I admit to being somewhat confused by how the story ended myself (think Sopranos), however by the time I got to my car, it had sunk in enough that I thought I understood it. By the time I got home, I really liked it. And by the time I finished explaining the movie to my wife, I loved it and already wanted to watch it again.

I'll start with the easy points. The writing is great. The dialog is simultaneously fun, colorful, and eerie. The monologue at the beginning masterfully written and delivered by Tommy Lee Jones. And the acting and characters are, without exception, nearly flawless.

Now for the plot (don't worry -- no spoilers yet). No Country For Old Men is essentially about a drug deal that somehow goes south, a man who mistakenly comes across the money (Llewelyn Moss), and the attempt of a psychopathic killer (Anton Chigurh) to hunt him down. On the periphery, you have an old Texas Sheriff (Tom Bell) who is more trying to make sense of the violence than actually solve the case, and a combination hit man and bounty hunter (Carson Wells) who is hired to intervene. But don't confuse the plot with the meaning. As far as I can tell, there are no real heroes in No Country. There is no crescendo which builds up to a climax from which the good guys triumphantly walk away. In fact, I'm not entirely sure there are really any good guys. There is only misdirection and unpredictability, which I believe are the primary themes of the movie.

Hey, Google: It's time to launch Gmail already!

Did you realize that Gmail is still in beta? Have you noticed that you still have a limited number Gmail invites? Huh?

You can call an application "beta" all you want, but when thousands of people (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) depend on it on a daily basis, it's no longer beta. Gmail has been launched by consensus which means it's time for Google to tighten it up.

Rather than continuing to add features, I would much rather see Google bulletproof the features they already have and officially launch it so I can stop dealing with issues like these:

• A surprising number of errors. Yesterday, the attachment scanner wasn't working. Today, clicking emails in my inbox is sometimes a NO-OP. I often have to click send several times to actually get an email to send. These are basic operations, no?
• Since the recent update, only my Gmail contacts auto-complete in the "to" field. I don't know if this is a bug, or if this is designed to make me try to convince all my non-Gmail contacts to switch to Gmail, but it's extremely annoying, and it's not how it used to work.
• If you have Gmail configured for multiple accounts, and your reply to a message that wasn't sent to your Gmail account, the new message always defaults to being from your Gmail account rather than the account the email was sent to.

None of this is to say that I don't like Gmail. Quite the contrary, in fact. I switched to Gmail after years of using Yahoo! Mail, and I've never looked back. And their new IMAP support was just what I needed to make getting mail on my iPhone bearable. However, whether Google likes it or not, Gmail is no longer in beta. So as we say in the software industry, lock it down, bake it, and ship it!

Update: Thanks, Soheil, for pointing out that Google has addressed the third point about the from address. That just made my day!

Review of "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" by Cory Doctorow

Read it: Yes

I wanted to read a book by Cory Doctorow for two reasons:

1. I like Boing Boing, and since Cory is a Boing Boing editor, I figured I'd like a book written by someone who writes for Boing Boing.
2. Cory releases all his books under a Creative Commons license and makes them available for free in a variety of formats which I think is very cool. Ironically, I actually bought the book in order to support the idea of giving books away for free. Hmm.

Anyway, I picked Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (which I will refer to from here on out as Someone) from his canon of five books for no other reason than I thought it had the most intriguing name, and the most compelling cover art.

I'll warn you right from the beginning that if you're not an open-minded reader, don't bother with this review, or this book. Save yourself the time. Someone is so unique that I'm not even sure what genre it fits in to other than fiction. Science Fiction? Fantasy? Cyberpunk? Yes.

I'm not into spoiling plots, but just to give you some idea of what you're getting into by reading this book, Someone is about a man who will answer to any name which begins with the letter "A". He seems to be most commonly called Alan, so we'll go with that. Alan's father is a mountain, and his mother is a washing machine. Literally. And his brothers are Russian nesting dolls, a clairvoyant, and a psychopath. Alan's neighbor has wings which she's so committed to hiding from the world that she has her sadistic boyfriend saw them off on a regular basis.

The book follows two paths:

1. Alan's unconventional childhood growing up in a cave.
2. Alan's present day struggle to restore an old house, deal with the return of his psychopathic brother who is supposed to be dead, blanket a bohemian neighborhood in Toronto with free WiFi, and come to terms with his depressed winged neighbor.

I want to say that Someone is an unconventional book, but it's not so much the book or the writing style that is unconventional as it is the plot and the characters. In fact, that's what struck me most about this novel (and what I liked best about it): the plot and the characters are completely bizarre, however Doctorow treats it all with a great deal of literary care and respect. I've read strange books before where the author seemed to revel in the oddity of his work, adopting a writing style as unconventional as his subject matter. Doctorow, on the other hand, takes this world he's created extremely seriously and writes about it passionately, almost as though he's unaware of how strange it is.

Someone is certainly not for everyone, but I found myself entirely immersed in Doctorow's world, and able to take it every bit as seriously as Doctorow himself.