EINY Quote of the day:

“There seems to be a misapprehension that you can’t drink water from a closed bottle with a cap on it. You can.”

Metropolitan Transportation Authority chairman Peter S. Kalikow on new NYC subway rules.

As many as one in every 100 people in the UK is an illegal immigrant, according to a new government estimate.

Times Online. Rubbish!

Vote Juanzo! An enterprising blogger and reader of the Kent and Sussex Courier has cunningly photoshopped a baby to produce Juanzo—a delightful little boy with a rare disease known as Wolf’s Syndrome.

Juanzo is now a contestant in the Kent and Sussex Courier’s Baby of the Year competition which runs until July 15 (see below). If you would like to help Juanzo win, you can order a copy of the newspaper with the voting form attached here. First prize is a bronze cast of the baby’s foot. (Via McG.)

Research work over the past couple of days has taken me through back copies of some of America’s most renowned magazines. On my travels I came across some adverts that I thought were too good to keep to myself. Top of the list is this advert for Good Housekeeping magazine from the mid 1980s.

Now, is it me, or do women 18 to 34 look a hell of a lot happier than women 18 to 44? (I think the less that’s said about women 18 to 54 the better.) Do women with children under 18 seem a lot happier than working women? And are educated women the only ones to wear glasses?

It seems that in 1984 Metro-Suburban women were attractive in a Princess Di kind of way. High-income women would eat you alive. And women who owned residences $80,000 plus (a little-known social group) were fond of tying sweaters around their neck and then running onto a tennis court.

In fact, I think it’s safe to say that in 1984 if you were a woman aged 18 to 34, who owned your own home (preferably worth over $80,00) and were married. You were happy.

If you were aged 18 to 44, Metro-Suburban, had children under 18, and were educated, you were middling.

And god help you if you were 18 to 54 and worked.

And what about the other adverts you cry! Well how’s this for a portable computer?

And the less that’s said about this cell phone the better! Ooh 55 mins talk time! (Come to think of it, it doesn’t look much better than most phones you get in the US today.)

A quick-thinking UK photographer called Mr Jaded overheard this couple on a bus in London, so he took a couple of surreptitious photos and then added speech bubbles. What a clever idea. Via Wired. (Thanks to Macboy.)

It seems like Russia hasn’t changed much since I was last there in 2000. According to Niall Ferguson in the Daily Telegraph:

Average male life expectancy at birth is below 60, roughly the same as in Bangladesh. A 20-year-old Russian man has a less than 50/50 chance of reaching the age of 65.

This has much to do with the round-the-clock consumption of fags and booze – the typical St Petersburg man walks around with a bottle of beer and a cigarette in one hand the way a Londoner carries his mobile phone – not to mention an attitude to road safety apparently inspired by the Mad Max films. It also reflects the long-term effects of the planned economy on the Russian environment and the near-collapse of the healthcare system.

Exacerbating the demographic effects of increased mortality has been a steep decline in the fertility rate, from 2.19 births per woman in the mid-1980s to a nadir of 1.17 in 1999. Because of these trends, the United Nations projects that Russia’s population will decline from 146 million in 2000 to 101 million in 2050. By that time the population of Egypt will be larger.

Thankfully he ends on a positive note—although I will believe it when I see it:

Any British visitor to Russia instantly recognises the symptoms of post-imperial trauma. The place has the feel of the 1970s, right down to the terrible clothes, teeth and hairdos. Yet those who wrote off Britain in the 1970s overstated our decline. The same mistake was made by a British journalist last week who compared Russia with Africa.

This is not, despite the old Cold War joke, “Upper Volta with missiles”. There may be no going back to the USSR. But it is much too early to consign Putin’s Russia to what Soviet propaganda used to call the dustbin of history.

Anguswit reports from the Rev Billy Graham’s roadshow with Holy Shit!

(The offensive protesters pictured below are from the Westboro Baptist Church.)

I love film. But I never had much of a passion for film reviews until I moved to New York and found Mike D’Angelo. D’Angelo was the sole reason I started reading Time Out New York, and the sole reason I have rarely picked it up since he left the magazine last year.

Not remotely anti-Semitic, but utterly anti-dramatic, Mel Gibson’s unprecedentedly bloody portrait of Jesus of Nazareth’s final day on earth arrives on a wave of pointless controversy that threatens to engulf the larger truth about the movie: that it has virtually nothing to offer anybody who doesn’t already believe that its hero died for their sins.
The Passion of The Christ, Time Out, NY, Mike D’Angelo

I definitely would not call myself a film expert but any ex-housemate would testify how picky I can be in a video store or at the cinema. I don’t care how much hype there is, if I don’t like it, I won’t watch it. Hence the concluding parts to the Matrix and LOTR trilogies passed me by after disappointing sequels. I’d rather take a chance on earth-shatteringly depressing films like Love Liza, than coast through a “must-see” film that leaves little or no impression on me at the end.

Of all the filmmakers currently working, perhaps only Von Trier has both the courage to employ such a baldly theatrical conceit and the skill to transform it into something triumphantly cinematic. Simple, magical, ferocious and visionary, Dogville makes most other recent movies—even the handful of really good ones—seem anemic by comparison. Its formal audacity is matched only by its metaphorical potency. Better still, it’s just a humdinger of a yarn, exacting and relentless; at a few minutes shy of three hours, it feels shorter than movies less than half its length. Narrated with amused detachment by John Hurt, possessor of the most magnificent voice in Hollywood since the death of Orson Welles, the story unfolds with the economy and inevitability of one of Grimm’s fairy tales, though I can’t recall the brothers devoting an entire narrative to the systematic plucking of the fairy’s wings.
Dogville, Time Out, NY, Mike D’Angelo

So, imagine how thrilled I was to find a critic who I could not only trust, but also one who could encapsulate the best and worst in a movie with a nifty turn of phrase. And imagine how happy I was to discover not only that Mike has his own website, his own weblog, and that he is currently reviewing films online at Nerve.com, but also that he lives somewhere nearby. So, if you’re out there Mike. Thanks a bunch. And keep on writing!

Near the end of Scott Caan’s improbably electrifying directorial debut, the main character, Rusty (Shawn Hatosy), sits talking to his mother, Mary (Kelly Lynch), about some impending upheavals in their lives — her sudden engagement to her psychiatrist boyfriend, his desire to return to Texas and pursue a career as a rodeo cowboy. It’s a fairly straightforward heart-to-heart, sharply written and beautifully acted but still potentially something of a Hallmark moment. As mother and son converse in the foreground, however, quiet magic unfolds in the background, out of focus: About halfway through the scene, Mary’s fiancé, Bob (Jeff Goldblum), who’s been doing double duty as Rusty’s shrink, wanders out to greet them, but stops dead upon sensing that he’s about to intrude upon The Big Talk. He watches briefly from afar, then turns and beats a hasty, positively giddy retreat — all of this conveyed solely via Goldblum’s gangly body language. Tender and goofy, it’s the kind of detail that most novice filmmakers would underline with a close-up or a focus pull; Caan simply lets it happen, and has the confidence never to refer to it again.
From D’Angelo’s latest review, of Dallas 362, at Nerve.com Screening Room