Archive for February, 2010

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Oh, Canada!

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

After a stunning defeat of the American Men’s Ice Hockey team, home-country Canada has ended the 2010 Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver with a personal best 26 medals, an astonishing 14 of which were gold (plus 7 silver and 5 bronze).

Canada’s 14 gold medals is the most the country has ever won at any Olympics – summer or winter – and tops the 13 golds won by the Soviet Union in 1976 and Norway in 2002 for most golds ever won by ANY country at the Winter Olympic Games.

And now, joining maple syrup, bacon, and a host of Hollywood actors, Canada can proudly add these 2010 gold medal wins to its long list of achievements:

2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver:
Canada’s Gold Medal Wins

  • Men’s Curling
  • Men’s Hockey
  • Men’s Short Track 500m
  • Men’s Short Track 500m Relay
  • Men’s Skeleton
  • Men’s Skiing Moguls
  • Men’s Snowboarding PGS
  • Men’s Speed Skating Team Pursuit
  • Pairs Ice Dance
  • Women’s Bobsled
  • Women’s Hockey
  • Women’s Snowboarding SBX
  • Women’s Ski Cross
  • Women’s Speed Skating 1000m

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Hitchcock by the Numbers

Sunday, February 28th, 2010

Last night a few friends and I journeyed to the Landmark Loew’s Jersey Theatre in Jersey City, just off the Journal Square stop on the PATH train. The Loew’s is a lavish, 80 year old movie palace in the process of being restored after a grassroots campaign saved the theatre from demolition in the mid-80s.  Surviving thanks to the generous efforts of volunteers and the contributions of Friends of the Loew’s, the theatre screens several classic films on the last weekend of every month, as well as hosting various theatre, dance, and musical acts.

Saturday’s early show was Notorious (1946), one of esteemed director Alfred Hitchcock’s most popular films.  Master of thrills and chills, Hitchcock has directed some of the most revered suspense films of all time – from The 39 Steps to Psycho. But how do Hitchcock’s films measure up?

Hitchcock By the Numbers (as of 2/28/10)

Film
Year
Remake
Rotten Tomatoes Rating
IMDB Rating
IMDB Top 250
The Lodger
1927
1932
1944
1953
2009
7.0
7.4
Blackmail
1929
6.7
7.0
Murder!
1930
7.4
6.4
The Man Who Knew Too Much
1934
1956
7.6
6.9
The 39 Steps
1935
1959
1978
2008
8.8
8.0
Secret Agent
1936
7.6
6.7
Sabotage
1936
7.3
7.2
The Lady Vanishes
1938
1950
1979
8.3
8.1
#238
Jamaica Inn
1939
5.5
6.3
Rebecca
1940
1996
8.7
8.4
#96
Suspicion
1941
7.9
7.6
Saboteur
1942
6.7
7.3
Shadow of a Doubt
1943
1958
1991
8.9
8.2
#202
Lifeboat
1944
1993
7.8
8.0
Spellbound
1945
7.4
7.7
Notorious
1946
1992
9.1
8.3
#127
Rope
1948
7.8
8.1
#217
Under Capricorn
1949
5.9
6.1
Stage Fright
1950
7.0
7.0
Strangers on a Train
1951
8.7
8.3
#123
I Confess
1953
7.2
7.2
Dial M for Murder
1954
1981
1998
7.2
8.1
#195
Rear Window
1954
1998
2007
8.8
8.7
#20
To Catch a Thief
1955
8.0
7.5
The Trouble with Harry
1955
7.4
7.2
The Man Who Knew Too Much
1956
7.7
7.5
The Wrong Man
1956
8.2
7.5
Vertigo
1958
1997
8.6
8.6
#40
North by Northwest
1959
9.0
8.6
#32
Psycho
1960
1998
8.9
8.7
#22
The Birds
1963
2011*
7.9
7.9
Marnie
1964
6.8
7.2
Torn Curtain
1966
6.5
6.6
Topaz
1969
6.4
6.2
Frenzy
1972
7.3
7.5

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More Literary Pursuits on the F Train

Friday, February 26th, 2010

What are subway commuters on Manhattan-bound F trains reading these days? Find out here! Would you recommend any of them?

A few highlights (with excerpts from reviews on Amazon):

At the Jim Bridger: Stories, Ron Carlson
At the Jim Bridger In this taut, focused collection, veteran short story writer Carlson captures the ordinary occurrences that define our lives. Sharing graceful, unadorned prose and elegant metaphors, the nine stories and two brief sketches collected here portray characters at moments when the solid ground of reality slips out from under them. High school figures prominently: for Carlson, the teenage years offer the perfect transitional moments, when minor incidents are writ large. (from Publishers Weekly)
Dead as a Doornail, Charlaine Harris
Dead as a Doornail Harris’s rousing fifth Sookie Stackhouse fantasy-mystery (after 2004’s Dead to the World) pits vampires, were-creatures, shifters and one fairy godmother against a sniper with an apparent aversion to nonhumans. If trying to discover who’s behind the shootings isn’t enough, the telepathic cocktail waitress from Bon Temps, La., has to cope with a few other [sexy and supernatural] distractions. (from Publishers Weekly)
The Lazarus Project, Aleksandar Hemon
The Lazarus Project As fears of the anarchist movement roil 1908 Chicago, the chief of police guns down Lazarus Averbuch, an eastern European immigrant Jew who showed up at the chief’s doorstep to deliver a note. Almost a century later, Bosnian-American writer Vladimir Brik begins working on a book about Lazarus that ends up being more a journey into [the past] than a fact-finding mission. Hemon’s prose underscores his piercing wit, and there’s outrage enough to chip away at even the hardest of hearts. (from Publishers Weekly)
A Maiden’s Grave, Jeffery Deaver
A Maiden's Grave In rural Kansas, an act of kindness launches a nightmare when Mrs. Harstrawn, along with hearing-impaired apprentice teacher Melanie Charrol, stops her busload of deaf schoolgirls at a car wreck, only to be taken hostage by [three] stone-cold killers who’ve just escaped from prison. Heartbreakingly real characters keep the wildly swerving plot from going off-track, even during the multiple-whammy twists that bring the novel, Deaver’s best to date, to its spectacular finish. (from Publishers Weekly)
Mysteries of Pittsburgh: A Novel, Michael Chabon
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh This is a book about the first summer after college, an improbable time, dizzying [with] promised freedom, a time of bright hope for the future, when many of us decide who we will or will not be. It’s also the kind of story that in lesser hands would make for a pretty dull book. But Chabon pulls all the tragic beauty and confusion from it. In the end, your left with a book stunning in its insight, so full of empathy that in many ways I feel it is better than its more polished brethren. (from an Amazon Reviewer)
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
One Hundred Years of Solitude The story follows 100 years in the life of Macondo, a village founded by José Arcadio Buendía and occupied by descendants all sporting variations on their progenitor’s name: his sons and grandsons. Then there are the women–the two Úrsulas, a handful of Remedios, Fernanda, and Pilar–who struggle to remain grounded even as their menfolk build castles in the air. If it is possible for a novel to be highly comic and deeply tragic at the same time, then One Hundred Years of Solitude does the trick. (from Amazon.com)
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, Alan Bradley
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie It’s the beginning of a lazy summer in 1950 at the sleepy English village of Bishop’s Lacey. Up at the great house of Buckshaw, aspiring chemist Flavia de Luce passes the time tinkering in the laboratory she’s inherited from her deceased mother and an eccentric great uncle. When Flavia discovers a murdered stranger outside her bedroom window early one morning, she decides to solve the crime herself, much to the chagrin of the local authorities. (from Amazon.com)
Then We Came to the End: A Novel, Joshua Ferris
Then We Came to the End In this wildly funny debut from former ad man Ferris, a group of copywriters and designers at a Chicago ad agency face layoffs at the end of the ’90s boom. Ferris has the downward-spiraling office down cold, and his use of the narrative “we” brilliantly conveys the collective fear, pettiness, idiocy and also humanity of high-level office drones as anxiety rises to a fever pitch. (from Publishers Weekly)
Three Cups of Tea, Greg Mortenson
Three Cups of Tea Some failures lead to phenomenal successes, and this American’s unsuccessful attempt to climb K2, the world’s second tallest mountain, is one of them. Dangerously ill when he finished his climb in 1993, Mortenson was sheltered for seven weeks by the small Pakistani village of Korphe; in return, he promised to build the impoverished town’s first school, a project that grew into the Central Asia Institute, which has since constructed more than 50 schools across rural Pakistan and Afghanistan. (from Publishers Weekly)
The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion
The Year of Magical Thinking The author chronicles the year following the death of her husband, fellow writer John Gregory Dunne, while the couple’s only daughter lay unconscious in a nearby hospital. Dunne’s death propelled Didion into a state she calls “magical thinking.” “We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss,” she writes. “We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes.” (from Publishers Weekly)

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Top 5 Olympic Bummers

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

As I’ve mentioned before, I love watching Olympians achieve their life-long dreams of winning a medal (or at least performing their very best), as they are cheered on by ecstatic crowds and their fellow countrymen.  Significantly less fun is watching these athletes lose, their hopes dashed and dreams shattered, as they mourn the loss of what could have been. 

There’s been a lot of dream shattering at the Olympics these days.  Here are my top five “that sucks!” moments.

Enjoy?

1. Dutch Sven Kramer, favorite to win the 10,000 m Speed Skating gold, follows his coach’s directions and ends up skating in the wrong lane. He is disqualified.

2. A nasty crash for German Bobsledding favorites, Cathleen Martini and Remy Logsch, ejects Logsch from the bobsled at 90 mph, and the pair is disqualified.

3. The South Korean women’s 3000 m Speed Skating relay team celebrates their win, only to be disqualified for a skate bump with the Chinese team who are given the gold.

4. After American Lindsey Vonn falls, her teammate, defending Olympic champion Julia Mancuso, is forced to start her Giant Slalom run over again. By the time she runs again, the track conditions have worsened and she loses the phenomenal speed of her first attempt, placing 18th.

5. Substitute Speed Skater German Patrick Beckert loses his chance to race for a gold when he misses the call informing him that a spot in the 1000m race had opened up and the other alternates were not available.

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Top 5 Olympic Highlights

Wednesday, February 24th, 2010

When it’s an icy February and I’m curled up on the couch in the warmth of my living room, nothing beats watching world-class athletes achieve their dream of winning Olympic gold in the most important sporting event that doesn’t take place in the summer.

My top five favorite moments from the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics (so far):

1. American Evan Lysacek skates his freestyle long program, setting the bar for the men who followed, and ending the night with the Men’s Figure Skating gold medal, the first U.S. man to win the gold since Brian Boitano in 1988.

2. After a superb first run on the Snowboarding Men’s Halfpipe, American Shaun White knows the gold is his when he wows the audience on his second run with his signature move called the Double McTwist 1260.

3. After nearly two decades of competing together, married couple Hongbo Zhao and Xue Shen finally clench the Olympic gold medal for Pairs Figure Skating – China’s first figure skating gold.

4. An enthusiastic and patriotic crowd sings the Canadian national anthem along with Canadian Ice Dancers Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir as their country’s flag is raised over the medal podium.

5. American Lindsey Vonn goes nuts celebrating her gold medal win in Ladies’ Downhill Alpine Skiing.

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