I’ve seen just one of these, you?

“United 93,” which unflinchingly depicts the hijacked 9/11 flight that crashed into a Pennsylvania field, was chosen Monday as best picture of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle.

Written and directed by Paul Greengrass and featuring a cast of unknowns to give it an authentic, documentary-style feel, the film painstakingly recreates the events of that morning. It culminates with passengers bursting into the cockpit and wrestling their attackers for control of the jet, which ultimately plummets nose-first into the ground.

Forest Whitaker and Helen Mirren continue to solidify their positions as Oscar front-runners — each won the top acting prize from the New York critics, Whitaker for his thunderous portrayal of Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland” and Helen Mirren for her withering take on Queen Elizabeth II in “The Queen.” Both have received the same awards in recent days from the National Board of Review of Motion Pictures, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Online.

Supporting-actor awards went to Jackie Earle Haley for his haunting turn as a sex offender in “Little Children” and Jennifer Hudson, who is emerging as an awards favorite for her showstopping performance in “Dreamgirls.” She received the same honor Sunday from the New York Film Critics Online and won a breakthrough-performance award last week from the National Board of Review.

Martin Scorsese was the group’s choice for best director for his Boston mob epic “The Departed.”

AP via The Envelope.com

Elsewhere, New Yorker critics David Denby and Anthony Lane offer their lists of memorable 2006 films.

Two Christmases

Atrios (Duncan Black) offers a point of view. What do you think?

Look, it’s very simple. There are two Christmas holidays. One is the secular holiday, decreed by the federal government to be a national holiday, which is celebrated and marked with festive displays of trees, lights, fat guys with beards, and elves, along with lots of shopping and the giving of gifts. The other holiday involves a celebration of the birth of the Messiah, and is celebrated with religious rituals and displays of nativity scenes and other religious imagery.

Public displays of secular Christmas imagery? fine.

Public displays of religious Christmas imagery? less fine.

Christmas trees in airports? fine.
Baby Jesus scenes in airports? less fine.

Why?

Arizona State University has hired Dennis Erickson as its new head football coach. Does this look like a ticket to success to you? If he’d moved around much more he’d need his own UPS tracking code.

1982-1985    Idaho
1986    Wyoming
1987-1988    Washington State
1989-1994    Miami
1995-1998    Seattle Seahawks
1999-2002    Oregon State
2003-2004    San Francisco 49ers
2005    Did not coach
2006    Idaho

Happiness Is as Happiness Does

CNN: Do most people know when they’re happy?

[Harvard psychology professor Daniel] Gilbert: We know people are very bad at remembering how happy they were. They’re very poor at predicting how happy they’ll be. They aren’t even good at saying how happy they are in general. One thing people can tell you is how happy they are at the moment you ask them that question.

CNN: Why are we so bad at predicting whether we’ll be happy in a certain situation?

Gilbert: We’re very poor at predicting our future happiness for two sets of reasons. The first is, we have a lot of bad theories about happiness. Our culture and our genes give us disinformation about the sources of happiness. Even if you try to set these aside, it turns out just using our imaginations to project ourselves into the future — close your eyes and say what would it be like to win a gold medal, to move to Cleveland, to be an architect — imagination fails us in some very predictable and systematic ways.

CNN: How do culture and genes lead us astray?

Gilbert: You know all human behaviors are the product of two things: Genes and culture. The interplay between these two, genes and culture, are both self-perpetuating systems. They are systems that want to survive, and the way they survive is getting us to do things for them. For example, our genes require that we reproduce. Our culture requires that we consume goods and services. So both our genes and culture conspire to lead us to believe that things like, oh, having children or getting rich will make us very happy. But the data from economics and psychology are abundantly clear. Having children tends to create a small negative effect on people’s happiness and having money has a very little relationship to people’s happiness, so both of these are bad theories about the kinds of things that will bring us happiness in the future.

There’s a little bit more at CNN.com.

Key point for the gift-giving season: “One mistake that people seem to make is if they invest in durable goods when some studies suggest they’d be happier if they invested money in experiences.”

Celebrity Interview

No, I’m sorry, it’s not with Britney Spears or Angelina Jolie. This interview is with Melinda Gates:

In excerpts from a wide-ranging interview, Mrs. Gates talks about juggling responsibilities for her young family and the foundation’s management of its global health program, brainstorming with her famous husband and stepping out of her previously unseen internal work for the foundation and into the public arena.

C’etait un Rendezvous

If you missed this when NewMexiKen posted it a year ago, check it out. I downloaded the video and watch it every once in awhile.

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.

Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.

Now, thanks to the miracle of the Internets, you can watch it in your browser.

This footage is really rather incredible; more exciting than typical movie car chases because you see the view from the car the entire time.

Here’s a link. The film has the car noise, which isn’t to be missed, but be aware.

Source for information and link: Jerry Kindall: C’etait un Rendezvous.

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site (Tennessee)

… was re-designated on this date in 1962. It had been a national monument since 1935.

The Andrew Johnson National Historic Site honors the life of the 17th President. Andrew Johnson’s presidency, 1865-1869, illustrates the United States Constitution at work following President Lincoln’s assassination and during attempts to reunify a nation torn by civil war. His presidency shaped the future of the United States and his influences continue today.

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site

December 11th is the birthday

… of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Nobel Prize winner (for Literature in 1970) is 88.

… of Rita Moreno. The Oscar winner — supporting actress for Anita in West Side Story — is 75.

… of Tom Hayden. Royal Oak’s most famous native, co-founder of Students for a Democratic Society and Jane Fonda’s one-time husband is 67.

… of John Kerry. He’s 63.

… of Brenda Lee. She’s Rockin’ Around the Christmas Holiday Tree this year at age 62.

… of Terri Garr. The Oscar nominee (supporting actress for Tootsie) is 58.

Indiana entered the Union on this date in 1816, the 19th state.

The Equality State

On December 10, 1869, John Campbell, Governor of the Wyoming Territory, approved the first law in U.S. history explicitly granting women the right to vote. Commemorated in later years as Wyoming Day, the event was one of many firsts for women achieved in the Equality State.

On November 5, 1889, Wyoming voters approved the first constitution in the world granting full voting rights to women. Wyoming voters again made history in 1924 when they elected Nellie Taylor Ross as the first woman governor in the United States.

Library of Congress

Homecoming

NewMexiKen favorite Charles Pierce is back where he belongs with Eric Alterman.

I rise again to present, by way of a relevant comparison, my argument that my colleagues in the sportswriting business do their jobs better than most members of the elite political media. Last year, Bud Selig appointed former senator George Mitchell to run the in-house investigation of what is perceived to be the problem with performance-enhancing drugs in baseball. Almost immediately, the choice came under criticism that centered on the fact that Mitchell’s probe would not have any real power to compel testimony or documents, and that Mitchell himself had been tied into several major-league baseball franchises — most notably, the Boston Red Sox — and, finally, on the very simple grounds that any in-house investigation started out in Credibility Gap given major-league baseball’s inability to police itself.

I don’t agree with a lot of these criticisms, but they have some merit, and the fact that they were mustered so widely and so quickly stands in stark contrast to the reverential coverage of the Iraq Study Group and its hunt for the pony in the pile. For example where was the instant and withering contempt from our courtier political press over the presence on the ISG of a useless old vampire like Edwin Meese, who started his career calling for detention camps to be set up to house student demonstrators at Berkeley, and ended it, two steps ahead of the law, by giving the Iran-Contra crowd just enough time to shred what they needed to shred? And, anyway, what in the name of Christ’s sweet strawberry preserves does Edwin Meese know about Iraq? Why not just hire him to re-wire the space shuttle and design the new levees in Louisiana while he’s at it? County commissioners go to jail for putting their idiot nephews on county road crews, but, on the bloodiest question of the past 30 years, supposedly educated people wait with their tongues hanging out for a viable solution to emerge from what appears to be the Petrified Forest, and nobody points out the absurdity that’s sitting right there, listening to its arteries harden.

What Would You Do with a Brain If You Had One?

Chick #1: I gotta read this book for class, and I don’t want to.

Chick #2: Oh, I hate that [stuff]. I hate having to read [stuff] I hate.

Chick #1: I know I don’t want to read it. I don’t get the book, I don’t understand it — it’s stupid

Chick #2: What book you gotta read?

Chick #1: I don’t know, its called, like, Increasin’ Your Brain Power or something.

–E train

Overheard in New York

Maybe words and stuff wouldn’t be so intimidating if she’d grown up playing with the Leonardo da Vinci Action Figure. “Each figure comes with a paintbrush, an easel, a frame and some of his art and sketches to display.” (Via FunctionalAmbivalent, whose readers appear to have already bought this item out.)

Or spent more time in intellectually challenging activities like Reindeer Arm Wrestling. (Via dangerousmeta!.)

Roll Over Tchaikovsky

And tell Beethoven some news of your own. They do “The Nutcracker Ballet” in Albuquerque just fine, too.

Having ventured out to see and hear Nutcracker on the Rocks last weekend, tonight NewMexiKen took in the real thing presented by the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra and the New Mexico Ballet Company. Bravo!

When, just before the overture, a tiny little girl in front of me was asked if this was her first “Nutcracker,” I had to marvel because, well, it was my first “Nutcracker,” too. (Unless you count the dancing hippos in Walt Disney’s Fantasia.) And it was really wonderful; like the two boys near me (age seven or eight and nine or ten) I sat engrossed.

While it’s hard to fault James Brown or The Stones as heard in “Nutcracker on the Rocks,” a live orchestra playing Tchaikovsky’s masterful music is really beyond marvelous. I also have to laugh because in no way do I feel capable of commenting on dance, yet after two performances in one calendar week I began to notice things. The prima ballerina, Angelie Renay Melzer as the Sugar Plum Fairy tonight, taught me how it’s done. While there were many excellent dancers, and many athletic ones, she was the dancer who brought the music and the dance into one. Just sublime.

Life offers so many moments of beauty and pleasure if we just give them a chance.

December 9th is the birthday

… of Kirk Douglas. The three-time Oscar nominee is 90. NewMexiKen’s favorite Douglas performance is in Lonely Are the Brave. “Filmed on location in New Mexico, Lonely are the Brave was adapted by Dalton Trumbo from Edward Abbey’s novel Brave Cowboy.”

… of Judi Dench. The five-time Oscar nominee, one-time winner, is 72.

… of Beau Bridges. Jeff’s big brother is 65. No Oscars for Beau, but he has three wins from 10 Emmy nominations.

… of Tom Kite. He’s 57.

… of John Malkovich. The two-time Oscar nominee is 53.

… of Felicity Huffman. Last year’s Oscar nominee is 44.