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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
Praise for Daily Blah:
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Daily Blah for... Sunday, March 26, 2006
Dog Day Inside Man
To see Spike Lee's latest joint, the big-budget bank heist flick Inside Man (watch the trailer), on the strength of a friend's enthusiasm and this gushing review in the WaPo, which described it as a new Dog Day Afternoon. That was, of course, red meat to any card-carrying owner of Dog Day Afternoon. There's nothing quite like settling in for a couple of hours of intense tension as bank robber and hostage negotiator play a game of psychological chess.
So does Denzel Washington + Clive Owen = Al Pacino? Well, kind of. Owen is scarily smooth as the robber who knows everything, never looses his temper, and deftly dehumanizes his hostages. Washington is equally smooth as the highly professional Kojak-hatted negotiator. It's like they're trying to out-smooth each other. We're worlds away from Pacino's accidental hostage-taker, exploding into hot Italian flashes of rage, not knowing what to do next, and screaming "Attica!" at the police. No one in Inside Man is an amateur. No one doesn't know what to do next. Everyone conducts themselves with admirable professional aplomb. You don't believe the graft charges wanly thrown at Washington's character early in the script, not for a second.
It's the first sign of script trouble. At its core, this is an amazingly original story about a hostage situation that dismantles itself so completely, the police are left without a suspect, a motive or a weapon, and are left to muse whether a crime has even been committed. Brilliant. I'd pay good money to see that part of the movie again. Unfortunately, there's a lot of extraneous nonsense about the elderly WASPy bank owner, Christopher Plummer, being a war profiteer who secretly traded with the Nazis. The chief purpose of this twist seems to be to introduce Jodi Foster's character, and the chief purpose of Jodi Foster's character is to act so smooth as to make Washington and Owen look like piles of broken glass. Suddenly there's a third player in the psychological chess game, and it becomes a movie about everyone playing everyone else.
Too much, too much, too much. Why does big budget always equate to too much script, too many characters, too many audio-visual calories? Movies like this offer American-sized portions, but you don't get to just consume the good bits and take the rest home in a doggy bag. You have to consume all of it, and the paradoxical result is you forget most of it after the credits roll (sorry, Spike). The films that really stick with you are more spare, more psychological -- in other words, more Dog Day Afternoon.
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