A haiku for Charlotte

Charlotte with pink hair
Enchantment at its finest
I'm left mesmorized

Lost In Translation

I watched Lost in Translation last night. I'm amazed I did not watch it sooner, since after all it does feature one of my favorite actors - Bill Murray. Before viewing I didn't know anything about this movie other than that it is supposedly one of the best performances, if not THE best, by Bill Murray. The last couple of times I tried Bill out was for The Life Aquatic and Broken Flowers, both of which I found too uninteresting to finish. So I gave Bill a chance to redeem himself on this one.

After popping the DVD I was first introduced to a curvy white butt in pink see-through underwear. Sort of a pleasant surprise. Without opening credits, I had no clue whose butt that was.

After the first 5-10 minutes or so I felt like I was watching Broken Flowers again. It was obviously not the classical wildly funny Bill Murray that I have loved in the past. But it was funny from the get-go with some of Bill's more subtle comedy, which is what Broken Flowers lacked.

And then the "woah" moment hit me. A scene in the elevator had the aforementioned girl in the same elevator as Bill Murray (in which they did not speak to each other). I thought to myself, "is that... Scarlett Johansson"? With a quick lookup on IMDB I quickly verified that was indeed her. As an aside, I consider Scarlett to be the most attractive woman alive after seeing her in Match Point, which was the only movie of hers I had previously seen (outside of about 10 minutes of The Island). But seeing her in Match Point was enough to convince me. But its not just the looks alone. She seemed like a good actress in Match Point, very much unlike other bombshell actresses. This movie would further that opinion... greatly.

So I've been introduced with two characters who don't know each other and the movie goes roughly 30 minutes in without any real interaction between the two. Do I feel cheated? No. It was an extremely nice build-up in which you really were given the opportunity to understand the background, personality, and strife each character is going through without the complication of any relationship they might have. But I knew they would become intertwined at some point. And the result was simply amazing. The relationship between their characters, Bob and Charlotte, was easily the greatest male-female relationship I've ever seen in a movie. And yet it was done with so little dialogue and so little physical contact - the eye contact in the Karoke scene, the conversation in the Sushi bar, the gentle placing of Bob's hand on Charlotte's foot as they both fall asleep. Bob and Charlotte understood each other, looked up to each other, confided in one another, and could communicate with each other with words and possibly just with their expressions alone. All of these things were lacking from the pragmatic relationships that both had with their spouses.

The movie struck a personal chord with me also. The theme of their relationship echoed some of what I've felt too... the longing for a person that understood you without hearing you speak, the hollowness and seeming inescapability of a current relationship. I really felt close to Charlotte, in particular. The character has roughly the same age as I, is a strong willed person, but doesn't know what their role in life is yet and struggles almost every minute with it. Scarlett played that role perfectly, in my opinion. There wasn't a moment in the movie that you weren't convinced she was a brilliant but lost soul.

This one gets 5 out of 5 stars from me!

Facebook will outlast and defeat MySpace

And I say this without even having used facebook as a member (I've only seen others facebook pages).

Facebook will defeat MySpace for two simple reasons:

Facebook just simply looks nicer. It has a clean, easy to read, easy to navigate interface. Myspace on the other hand has horrible navigation, a poor color scheme, a homepage that is rife with advertisements, and plagues user pages with even more ads, most of which are the annoying "draw your attention with flashing colors" ads that have almost given me seizures. As best I can gather, MySpace gets used because that's where everyone else is at. Once the masses get tired of the ads and discover something that is much easier to use and more pleasing to look at, I can't imagine they will stay at MySpace.

Facebook is developer friendly. Facebook have already created a slew of API's for developers to use (see their developers page and have also even open sourced some of their former proprietary in-house code for everyone to benefit from. MySpace? They apparently can't even keep their own developers, supposedly because no single development project can occur without being directly driven by something advertisement based. That looks like a real winner there Tom. What this means is that Facebook will be able to evolve. It will be extensible. Myspace will only see development effort when Rupert Murdoch's media machine wants to launch more ad bombardments at the internet community.