from an associated press article a few days ago:

A founder of the country band Sugarland is suing the two current members of the popular group for $1.5 million.

According to a lawsuit filed late last month in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, Kristen Hall was to get a cut of the group’s profits even after she left in 2005 for a solo career. The lawsuit says Hall, who founded the band in 2002, has an agreement with Jennifer Nettles and Kristian Bush to equally share profits and losses.

Hall says in the lawsuit that she has been excluded from the group’s profits since she left.

this somehow seems un-kristen-like to me, but i suppose she’s entitled to the money if they promised it to her. does this mean that she should continue to share in profits only from work when she was with the band, or that she should get a share of the profit for work that sugarland did after she left? i can’t say that it makes sense to get money for work you haven’t performed, so to speak, but if that’s what they agreed on then give her the money.

i hope she has that in writing.

via daring fireball, roger ebert says goodbye [to the old] and hello [to the new]. wonderfully written, with a moving comment section.

more often than not (especially as i get older) my criteria for going to an actual movie theater to see a movie is: “is it something i must see on the big screen?”

“trumbo” the movie opened this past weekend. i saw the play several times, starting from workshop performances. kirk’s former boss at the westside is the director. and yet we’ve debated whether to go see it in a theater or wait for it to come out on dvd, because it’s a “netflix” movie.

on the other hand, i went to see “speed racer” in the theater. even paid extra to see it in imax. why? it’s something that you want to see writ large, on an enormous screen. the visuals are an attraction to me, and are often the defining factor.

the problem with that, as i forget each time i see a movie on that basis, is that the buzz only lasts so long; with some the buzz lasts longer than with others, but it always wanes. speed racer was stunning for the first fifteen minutes or so, and then i was completely inured to its visual charms. even the monkey couldn’t save the movie for me.

and i love monkeys. oh do i love monkeys.

which brings me to wall-e, which i saw last night. definitely a movie to see on a big screen.

but, for probably the first time ever, the buzz lasted for the whole movie. wall-e is an all-time classic movie if there ever was one. in retrospect, i think i now know what people felt at the turn of the last century, when they saw their first movie. it’s that arresting, that engaging, that challenging, and that different.

because there’s no dialogue for the first 1/3 of the movie or so, and large stretches of movie after that without dialogue as well, the filmmakers had to rely on the visuals to propel the story forward. wall-e the robot is buster keaton, directed by preston sturges. wall-e is gene kelly, directed by vincente minnelli. wall-e is marlon brando, directed by orson welles.

it’s easily in the top ten of movies i have seen thus far in my life. it’s that good. little did i know when i linked to the movie’s viral website months ago that i’d like it so much.

» versions of “gypsy” i have seen/heard prior to last night:

— the rosalind russell movie version
— the bette midler tv version
— the bernadette peters broadway version
— the ethel merman broadway cast recording
— the genesius theatre version in kirk’s boyhood home of reading, pa

kirk could add:

— the tyne daly broadway version
— the betty buckley and debbie gibson version at paper mill playhouse

i don’t think he saw angela lansbury as mama rose, but he can correct me if i’m wrong.

at any rate, to say we had “gypsy” burnout would be an understatement. we really didn’t want to see it this past spring at genesius, but kirk knew people in the cast and we had season tickets, so we went and it was good. even though patti lupone was getting raves in the latest broadway incarnation, we just decided to take a pass.

we were sung out, louise.

but then we saw the tonys, and she performed, and she won a tony, and boyd gaines won the tony as herbie, and laura benanti won the tony as louise, and they were all wonderful and we got chills and so forth, so we looked at each other and said “ok, get the tickets”. so we did, and got a decent deal, and went last night. house was packed — a good audience that we didn’t have to shush. amazingly, i think some of them were unfamiliar with the musical; there were lots of audible gasps when baby june took off at the end of act one.

we really enjoyed ourselves. the staging was good — there was a tattered proscenium onstage which symbolically lifted at the end, making it a “play within a play”. i especially loved the interplay between herbie and louise. the actors gave that relationship an added depth i’d never seen. june was alternately manically perky when “onstage” and bitterly cynical when “offstage” — great job. the most world-weary and ancient electra i’ve ever seen — hysterically funny.

and patti lupone was indeed a marvel. force of nature. complete presence. all the adjectives. two standing ovations — at the end of “rose’s turn” and at the end of the play.

even if you think you never want to see this warhorse (“gypsy”, not patti lupone!) on stage again, it’s worth the money.

» dinner before the show at bocca:

no silly, not the sandwich shop. the italian restaurant in gramercy. very nice experience. we had the prix fixe: for me, pomodori (fresh tomatoes, sliced onions, avocados, olive oil), trota (trout with roasted bell pepper salad and grilled potatoes), and frutta e zabaione (strawberries and bananas served with sabayon); for kirk, polpettine (veal meatballs served with melted truffle, pecorino cheese and veal jus), straccetti (pan seared oregano flavored shredded filet mignon served with roasted cherry tomatoes and wild rocket pesto), and the aforementioned frutta e zabaione. i had a glass of white, he had a glass of red. espresso after dessert (please don’t have your coffee with your dessert, says the food snob. so tacky!) we skipped the bread in deference to kirk, but it looked great from across the room.

everything was incredibly delicious because they did a great job of the one thing i love to see in restaurant food — each dish was just a few extremely high quality ingredients chosen and combined simply and well. not fussy, not cluttered, very clean yet surprisingly complex. good job.

they have a nice drinks menu as well and seem to get an after-work one-drink crowd; kirk started with a really yummy basil-infused gimlet.

total bill with tax and tip was $145 — a splurge for us but worth it.

» weekend update:

we’re going to reading for the second weekend in a row.

last weekend we went, borrowed kirk’s father’s truck and went camping at hickory run state park. we’d planned to hike a lot and be all active, but we lucked into choosing one of only eight campsites that were on the park’s babbling brook (out of 300+ campsites; what were the odds?). so we sat by said babbling brook and read, thursday through saturday. left early saturday afternoon due to impending thunderstorms and saw a production of “the women” in ephrata, pennsylvania. very fun.

this weekend, we’re taking an old steam train with kirk’s parents. it runs from somewhere to jim thorpe, pennsylvania and basically takes the whole day doing it. sounds like a relaxing time — looking forward to it.

next weekend, kirk makes the third consecutive trip to reading for sweeney todd auditions. i think my reading visit streak will end at two.

this is a must-watch video clip — ellen hands john mccain his head on a plate, logic-wise.

here’s my favorite part:

“Blacks and women did not have the right to vote. I mean, women just got the right to vote in 1920. Blacks didn’t have the right to vote until 1870. And it just feels like there is this old way of thinking that we are not all the same. We are all the same people, all of us. You’re no different than I am. Our love is the same. To me — to me, what it feels like — just, you know, I will speak for myself — it feels — when someone says, ‘You can have a contract, and you’ll still have insurance, and you’ll get all that,’ it sounds to me like saying, ‘Well, you can sit there; you just can’t sit there.’ That’s what it sounds like to me. It feels like — it doesn’t feel inclusive…It feels — it feels isolated. It feels like we are not — you know, we aren’t owed the same things and the same wording.”

and the end of the clip is wonderful as well. go ellen…you rock. i don’t want a frigging contract either.

kirk and i have an hdtv, but it’s an older model and doesn’t have a built-in tuner. it’s just a monitor. so without paying for cable, we’ve never been able to get a television signal. no cable, no signal, no tv. and since we dropped cable about a year ago, the only things we’ve used the tv for was netflix rentals and playing with the wii.

with the upcoming broadcast conversion from analog to digital, the government is providing $40 coupons to buy a converter box. my tv doesn’t have a tuner, so i wasn’t sure if it would work or not. what the hell, right? so i sent off for my $40 coupon, and used it to buy the converter box. total price was $60, so my net cost was $20. i bought an indoor amplified antenna as well, for $40, so total out of pocket expense was about $60, or half the price of one month of cable.

hooked it all up last night. i figured if it didn’t work, i’d take it all back. no harm, no foul.

wow.

it all works brilliantly. not only do i have television, but the converter box has widescreen capability, so the digital picture fills in the entire widescreen. it’s not true hd, but the resolution is just fine — comparable to watching a dvd, probably. and the indoor amplified antenna pulls in 21 stations. some you’ll never watch — there’s one channel that’s just a cam set up in times square, some spanish-language stuff, and what-not, but for a one-time $60 payment i can now watch the networks and other local stations. and there’s great sound coming from my stereo and a great digital picture on my hdtv.

i’m still not going to watch that much tv — i like not knowing who flunked the lie detector when asked questions about their wife, or if i’m smarter than a fifth grader, or whatever. but i can watch the news, and keep up with the election, and whatnot, and that’s a good thing.

thanks, government. you got it right this time.

jonny greenwood for “there will be blood”?

um, no.

i know. let’s give the oscar to the most cloying and obvious score in recent memory.

honestly. i didn’t think much of atonement. the young girl (saorise ronan) was phenomenal, but the movie itself was badly in need of some editing. i nearly fell asleep while they wandered endlessly around france during world war ii.

but the thing that kept me awake was the score, because every time i started to nod off, there would be that goddamn tap tap tap on the typewriter sprinkled throughout the score, supposedly strategically. this to me is an idea that sounds like it arose in a committee, and should have been rejected. “hey, she’s a writer. what sound can we use symbolically in the score to show she’s a writer?”

can we get more obvious? this is oscar-worthy brilliantly divergent and original thinking?

it’s as if voters purposely picked the worst score, in protest. maybe they did.

all i know is that someday, jonny greenwood is going to be a even more critically acclaimed composer in musical genres other than rock. perhaps he’ll win that oscar someday, for another film.

my advice to him?

don’t waste your time scoring any more hollywood films. they don’t deserve you.

no not women’s breasts, you boob. i mean twin peaks, the tv show.

kirk is a huge fan of the series, which i missed the first time around. but we’re both big david lynch fans, so i got him the dvd box set at amazon.com. the first season has been available in the u.s. for quite a while, but the second season just came out via this “definitive gold box set”. he had vhs tapes of some of the episodes, but it’s nice to have a complete set all in one place, with everything remastered and modernized and such.

i think i may have watched an episode or two when it was first on, but i think i missed a show or two and then got lost and lost interest. but it’s ideal to have this box set. we’ve been watching a couple of episodes a night, and have gotten through the first [short] season.

i love the pace. it’s so slow and drawn out, which adds to the overall spooky effect. when i was younger and less patient, i probably would have merely thought that this pace was boring — but it’s anything but. and the characters are so interesting. my favorite is audrey, played by sherilynn fenn. what a terrific actress she is.

i never thought i’d care who killed laura palmer, but now i can’t wait to get home each evening to watch the show. if you’ve never seen it, put it in your netflix queue. if you have, time to rediscover it with the benefits of age and experience.

of course, maybe you shouldn’t listen to me. i loved inland empire too, and it made perfect sense to me.

the new yorker’s alex ross writes intelligently and movingly about “popcorn superhet receiver” and jonny greenwood’s score for “there will be blood”.

it’s a subject i’ve been droning on about a lot lately.

if you haven’t seen the movie to hear the score in context, at least buy the soundtrack.

trust me. both are incredible.

jonny greenwood’s score for “there will be blood”, which i discussed in my previous post, has been disqualified from consideration for an oscar this year.

when the nominations came out this morning and he wasn’t on the list, i assumed that he had just been overlooked for his amazing work, which was in my estimation not just the best score of the year, but one of the most effective film scores in my memory.

turns out that apparently people voted for him, as he was included on the academy’s reminder sheets that were mailed to voters over the past few weeks. but because his score included previously used music — some in the public domain, some from his own “popcorn superhet receiver” — the score was declared ineligible just a few days ago, and all the votes for the score were ignored. too late, of course, for any appeal.

boy is this crap. i’d be hopping mad if my vote was wasted because the academy couldn’t get their act together to make a timely ruling.

and i’m furious for jonny greenwood, whose amazing work deserved better treatment.

as did he.